Authors: Monica Dickens
The Grand Metropolitan Hotel was in the West End near Piccadilly Circus, and made up in chromium glitter and mass efficiency what perhaps it lacked in tone. The advertisements called it London’s Leading Luxury Hotel, and Jo believed them.
She worked in the cigarette kiosk, just inside the revolving door, next to the news stand and the chemist’s shop. A smart young Jewess called Lorrie Wolffe worked with her. They took turns to come early, then were together during the midday rush, and the early one left after tea while the other stayed on for the
evening. Jo liked her late days, when theatre-goers bought chocolates, and gentlemen bought buttonholes and corsages from her black velvet easel.
Lorrie taught her many things, especially how to talk to men. How to joke boldly with some, and be all fluttery and flattering with others. How to lead them on without committing yourself; how to play up to a lady-killer for several days, and then suddenly shatter him by going haughty and mysterious. Anything was fair when dealing with men, Lorrie said. Her idea of a really good joke was to make a date and not keep it. It tickled her to think of the poor simpleton getting hungrier and thirstier as he waited somewhere with a wilting bouquet. She never went out with her customers, except for an occasional drink with the trustier ones. For all her talk and appearance, she was strictly respectable, and heavily engaged to a boy in the wireless trade, who was going to marry her when his matriarch allowed it.
Lorrie also taught Jo many things about hair and clothes and make-up. Jo only took home just enough of her salary to pay her keep. With the rest, she acquired some black dresses rather tight about the bosom and hips, and a lot of bangles jingling halfway to her elbow. She had her hair shampooed and set every week in curls and swirls. She had silk stockings and high-heeled glacé shoes, and an armoury of cheap cosmetics and perfumes. Her cousin Violet had no scruples about taking her things. Jo, returning home one night had actually met her at Notting Hill Gate going out for the evening in her royal blue silk with the bolero. She and Violet were always quarrelling. Sometimes they did not speak to each other for days, which was awkward, since they shared a room.
Mr Abinger had had to accept the terms under which Mrs Moore saved him from disgrace with the Bowls Club. Recognizing his Waterloo, he let Josephine go to the Grand Metropolitan, and let the Corner Stores go to Mr Ellison, accepting the offer to stay on as manager of the cooked meats department. It was a relief to be free of responsibility, and his pride did not suffer unduly, for he saw few of his old customers. He grew more prolix than ever, to impress the new crowd, who had not yet got his measure.
Mrs Abinger suffered very much, but she could raise no protest. She could do nothing to save the shop, and what right had she to hold Jo back when she could offer her so little? She was glad for her to have this grand position Up West. She had not wanted her to stay for ever behind a grocery counter, but it was hard to reconcile herself to seeing Jo slip farther and farther away. Mr Ellison had allowed the Abingers to stay on in the flat on condition that the young lady assistant lived there too. She had to have Jo’s room, and Jo went to live with Uncle Reg and Aunty Phyll in Denbigh Terrace.
At first, Josephine was too excited about her new job to care very much where she lived. She was quite glad to get away from the flat, with its wretched associations of the last two years, but it was not long before she was regretting it.
Her Auntie Phyll had too many children. Having brought up six in a messy, undisciplined way, she had started all over again with another baby late in life. There had never been a time when that house had not been hung with nappies and cluttered with prams and go-carts, and the washing in the back yard grew with the growing family. Because some of them went out to work, and one was unemployed, and one at school, and one on the night shift, there was always a meal of some sort going on in the kitchen, which was the only sitting-room. The table was never unlaid and the kettle never off the boil, and when she was not feeding the rest of the family, Phyll Abinger was feeding the baby. One would come across her with her blouse undone in any part of the house.
When it was not the family, it was Johnny’s greyhound, or Greg’s rabbits, or young Daisy’s budgerigar. Food, food and the debris of food. The washing up was continuous, and it took two people to bring home the week-end bread on a Saturday.
Jo hated the noise and the dirt and the untidiness and the wireless, which played unheeded all day and half the night, right through the religious services and everything. But when she went round to her mother’s flat for peace, there was Kitty Baines, plump and saucer-eyed and over-anxious to please, doing what she called her ‘crosher work’. She had croshered doileys for the dressing-tables, a tea cloth, a runner for the sideboard,
a bedjacket for Mrs Abinger, and even a green silk tie for Mr Abinger.
She called him Abbie, and had quite won him over with her kittenish ways. She was trying to win over Mrs Abinger too, or rather to supplant her. Pretending solicitude, she tried to keep her ever more inactive. When Josephine went round there to tea after work, Kitty would play the hostess, persuading Mrs Abinger not to get up from her rest, so that she could nod and beck behind the teapot, for which she had croshered a pink cosy with a tassel. It nauseated Jo to see the fatuous smile with which her father handed his cup for more tea, or the ponderous gallantry with which he carried the tray to the kitchen, because Kitty was not supposed to lift weights. He thought her a charming girl, because she listened to his stories, agreed with his opinions, ran to him for advice in the shop, and altogether did and was everything that Jo had not done and not been.
Jo would go through to the bedroom and grumble with her mother about Kitty, who could be heard singing ‘Trees’, while she washed up – another thing that Jo had not often done. Her mother never wanted her to leave, but after the excitement and high life of the hotel, Jo found the flat slow and depressing. She was not sorry to get away, until she turned the corner of Denbigh Terrace, and saw the house half-way down fairly quivering with noise, and overflowing at the window sills and front steps with people and animals.
The bedroom which she shared with Violet was also occupied by the schoolgirl Daisy, curtained off in one corner, but for ever peeping over or under or through holes in the curtain to cheek the older girls. When she was too saucy, Vi would throw something at her. It was always Jo’s book, or Jo’s shoe or hairbrush that she threw, and if it went through the curtain, Daisy would hold it to ransom for sixpence. Violet was going through a torrid phase. When she was not out with some purple-suited youth, she would languish on her bed in cami-knickers, eating marshmallows and painting her toenails blood-red and reading True Love Tales under the tent of greasy black hair, which she now wore hanging forward so that she could only see out of one eye.
In the morning, when Auntie Phyll thumped on their door and bawled, Vi would never get up until the last minute. Then she would fling herself out of bed with a great display of shaved blue leg and push Jo away from the mirror, where she was doing her face with the care expected of a girl on show in the foyer of the Grand Metropolitan. She took a lot of trouble with her appearance now, and did everything the magazines told her was necessary for that personal daintiness so irresistible to men. She rinsed her stockings every night, and washed and ironed her white collars and cuffs, secretly if possible, because if Auntie Phyll saw her with the iron, she would say, ‘While you’re at it, Jokie, just run over these for me,’ and dump a huge bundle of wet baby clothes on her. They all called her Jokie at Denbigh Terrace, and she hated it.
She wished she could live at the hotel. She felt that it was her
milieu.
She might be by birth a ‘Porto’, as the Moores called it, but she had outgrown all that long ago. She would never let herself be dragged back again, as she had been after her brief escape to High School.
When she had been at the hotel a few months, a dark, muscular young man came up one day with a shy and friendly grin. He had nice black hair, oiled into deep waves, but although his tie was bright, his suit was shabby, and Jo, who was beginning to notice these things about men, saw that his shirt cuffs were frayed and his sleeve links not what you would expect of a patron of London’s Leading Luxury Hotel. But you got all sorts here, that was the fun of it. ‘The hub of the cosmopolitan world,’ the staff manager had called it, in his pep talk in the canteen at the beginning of the summer season.
‘My usual please,’ the young man said to Lorrie. She ragged him a little as she handed over the cigarettes, and he seemed rather out of his depth, as if he were a man made for physical rather than verbal sparring.
‘Who was that?’ Jo asked, when he had gone, after giving her a covert look of admiration. I’m sure I’ve seen him before.’
‘You might have,’ Lorrie said without interest. ‘He’s often about. He’s one of the electricians here. Quite a nice boy, but dumb.’
‘What’s his name?’
‘I don’t know – Ron or Don or something. Yes sir? A clove car? You bet.’ She wiggled through the little hatchway under the counter to get the flower from the stand. She liked doing that, because the return journey displayed her bottom to advantage.
Jo was alone in the kiosk the next time that the dark young man came. ‘My usual please,’ he said.
‘And what might that be?’ asked Jo. ‘I haven’t been here as long as the other young lady, you know.’
‘You’ve been here three months,’ he said. ‘I’ve been watching you.’
‘Huh! Sorry you had nothing better to do with your time, I’m sure,’ said Jo, swaying her shoulders a little.
‘Come off it,’ he said. ‘You’re Jo Abinger, aren’t you?’
‘What if I am?’
‘Well, I’m Norman – Norman Goldner. Don’t you remember?’
Because she had outgrown the Portobello Road and everything connected with it, it was a long time before Jo would consent to go out with him. He persisted, dogging the kiosk, until Lorrie began to tease her, and Jo was afraid that he would spoil her chances with the unspecified dream man who she was always expecting to come through the revolving door and make for her like a homing pigeon. She kept sending Norman about his business, but he kept coming back. The severity of the special school had long ago knocked the conceit and bossiness out of him, but he had not endured the long struggle from there to his present position without learning how to stick to his guns in the face of far stiffer opposition than any offered by Jo, who could not help being flattered.
Because she had nothing to do one night, and because Auntie Phyll’s baby had whooping cough, which added steam kettles and infusions of turnips and brown sugar to the turmoil of the kitchen, Jo at last gave in. He was waiting for her when she clocked out at the staff entrance in the alley behind the hotel.
‘Wish I could take you somewhere slap-up like this.’ He laughed nervously, and jerked a thumb at the hotel. ‘But I’m
no millionaire. Got good prospects though,’ he assured her eagerly, lest she should change her mind and slip back inside.
He took her to Lyons Corner House, and they had fish and chips and baked beans and Wonder Ice Cake. He was nervous with the waitress, and Jo had to help him with the order. He cleared his throat so much that she wondered whether he might have caught Arthur’s chronic affliction.
She asked about Arthur, but Norman was reticent. ‘He’s away,’ he said.
‘In a job?’
‘Sort of.’ He was very difficult to talk to. He was nice enough looking; no one would mind being seen out with him. Even handsome, he was, with his shiny hair, white teeth, and square jaw; but his nose was bumpy, as if it had been broken, and his face was rather wooden, like his tongue. She talked about herself, since he seemed content to let her, and it was only when they were having coffee that he thawed enough to tell her anything about himself.
He told her that he had learned electrical engineering at the school, and then won a scholarship to a technical college. He told her that he loved his work, and she lost interest when he began to talk about some new wiring system he had invented for the bread-slicer in the hotel kitchen, and what the Chief had said.
He told her that he had left home and was living in a hostel in Paddington. Although he was no longer the cocky, pugnacious boy, always squaring up for a fight, he had the muscle-conscious movements of a boxer, moving his shoulders under his coat as if to feel their power, pulling back his arms to spread his chest when he leaned back. When he had nothing to do with his hands, he kept them clenched. He told her that he belonged to a club off Edgware Road, and boxed there three nights a week. That and his job and studying to pass an examination which would qualify him for a higher post filled his life.
‘Don’t tell me you haven’t got a girl,’ Jo said.
‘No,’ he said. ‘Honest. Never had the time. I’d like to, though.’ He stared at her. She knew what he meant. Used to the
quick-fire, bold repartee of the cigarette counter sheiks, she thought Norman was terribly slow.
Although she talked to hundreds of men a day, and flirted quite expertly with some of them, she had no real young man of her own. Lorrie was inclined to be superior about her Leonard, and Vi, with a new boy every week, treated Jo like a schoolgirl. She could not help liking Norman. He persevered with her, until gradually she fell into the way of going out with him once a week, then twice a week, then spending her Sundays with him. He got his lunch hour changed so that he could meet her every day in the staff canteen. She took him home to the flat for tea.
Mrs Abinger had been worried at first to think that Jo had dropped back into the degraded company which had caused so much trouble in her childhood, but when she saw Norman, and he was so nice looking and clean and so agreeable to her, she began to be pleased. Like everyone else, she was soon taking it for granted that Jo and Norman Goldner had an understanding.
An understanding. They were walking out, going steady. The Denbigh Terrace family referred to him as Jokie’s boy. Kitty Baines would put her head on one side and the tip of her tongue in the corner of her mouth and ask: ‘How’s the heart throb?’