Authors: Monica Dickens
‘You seen this, Ellie?’ she asked. ‘Vi brought it home from the waiting-room at the shop. Here, I’ll read it out if you can’t find your specs. This’ll interest you too, young Norman Goldner.
‘“The passenger list of the s.s.
Queen Anne
which sailed from Tilbury yesterday for the Mediterranean included so-and-so and so-and-so and so-and-so, and” – here we were – “Sir Rodney Cope and Miss Joy Stretton.”’
‘There!’ She looked up triumphantly, but Mrs Abinger though gratified at Joy’s fame, wished that Phyll had not read it in front of Norman. He never talked of Joy. His hurt was too deep.
Phyll persisted, not seeing how he fidgeted: ‘Fancy that, Norm. Our Jo going on a Mediterranean cruise! Whoever would have thought it to see her in the old days? Remember how she used to muck about with you round the market, and them games you got up to at the Scrubs? Talk about laugh! She was up to anything, that kid; I always said she’d go wrong or go far.’
‘Oh, yes,’ said Norman fiercely. He got up. ‘Must be getting along, Mrs Abinger. Got some work to do. Cheerio. Thanks for the tea and that.’
‘Well, whatever’s bitten him?’ asked Phyll, when they had heard him clatter down the stairs. ‘Do I smell or something?’ She sniffed at the moulting fur lapels of her coat. ‘Perhaps it is a bit high.’ She flopped into the chair Norman had left and stuck out her long gnarled legs, easing her feet in the man-sized shoes.
‘He doesn’t like to speak of Joy,’ Mrs Abinger said, ‘that’s where it is, poor fellow.’
‘Christ,’ said Phyll, who lacked imagination. ‘Why ever not? Anyone would think the girl was dead.’
‘She is, for him.’ Mrs Abinger raised her bosom in a sigh. ‘Though between you and me, he’d have her back still, if the chance offered. He doesn’t realize, not having seen her, the heights she’s flown to. Just as well he didn’t catch sight of this
book Doris Evans brought me.’ She showed Phyll a copy of the
Tatler,
which opened automatically at a photograph of Joy in a strapless white dress billowing round her as she sat on the stairs at a dance. ‘I wouldn’t have wanted him to see that gentleman sitting with her so possessive. Freddie Rigby they call him; she often speaks of him when she’s here. They’ll be coupling their names soon, no doubt.’
‘Looks as if he stank of money,’ said Phyll, handing back the magazine.
‘Oh yes,’ said Mrs Abinger proudly. ‘His folk are the biscuit people. Rigbys of Oxford, you know.’ Mrs Abinger had become very well up in high life since the newsagent’s wife had been bringing her back numbers of glossy magazines. ‘I’ve no doubt he’s going on this cruise too.’
‘That’ll bring him to the point.’ Phyll wagged her head. ‘It’s the jiggling of the engines, Reg used to tell me, when he had that butchering job with the Union Castle. It does something to a man.’
Freddie Rigby had not gone to the Mediterranean with Joy. It was principally to deflect her from him that Rodney had planned the Whitsun trip.
Joy had had a wonderful winter, with endless parties and plenty of young men, some of them highly suitable. A good marriage was part of Rodney’s plan for her. Bobby Slade might have done, or the eldest son of Sir Harold Wharton, who was painting
everyone’s
portrait nowadays, or the Hinxworth boy, although he would never get near the title with all those brothers. There was an actor too, whom Rodney could have stomached at a pinch, and that legal bird, who was well on the way to being the youngest K.C. of his day.
But of all people, she had to single out a
parvenu,
personable enough in himself, perhaps, in spite of his taste in cars, but whose father had led in a winner at Ascot last year in a black topper, and – yes, my dear, because Noni Torrance had
seen
them – boots.
Joy had met Freddie through her paternal grandmother. Rodney had not heard of Mrs Stretton since the death of her son
Geoffrey and the supposed death of his baby had severed the tenuous link between the two familes. She had appeared on the scene again when she got wind of Joy’s existence, and had taken her, infuriatingly, to her bosom. Rodney feared her influence.
The fact was that his sister Rose had married beneath her. Geoffrey Stretton, who had been at the right school and college, had come under the influence of enough of the right people to pass for all right himself. His mother, however, was appalling; Rodney would never forget her at the wedding. Rose should never have done it. The Copes had been dreadfully upset at the time, and now here was Joy trying to go the same way, picking a not Quite when there were so many Quites to be had.
A kind of
nostalgie de la boue.
Rodney had worked wonders with her; she could go anywhere now without disgracing the Copes. She was chic and intelligent and delightful to look at, prettier than her mother had ever been, but there was that taint in her from her father’s side. It had accepted the un-Copelike circumstances of her past life, and might ruin her future yet.
She saw far too much of Freddie. Although Rodney discouraged and hindered the affair, Mrs Stretton encouraged it with the cynical glee of a procuress and made it easy for them to meet. She welcomed the opportunity of thwarting Rodney, who, she told Jo, gave her the creeping meemies.
She gave the same to Rodney. The sight and sound of her affected his sensibilities like a cinema organ. She was as broad as she was long, wore magenta or emerald green or both together and fur coats like hearth rugs. Her hair was dyed and tonged into rusty sausages, and old paint lay thick in the folds of her cheerful face. She had a whisky voice and a smoker’s cough and the monstrous coarse humanity of the good old music-hall sport.
She came to Victoria to see Joy off, and Freddie Rigby came too, bringing a crowd of the kind of young people Rodney did not care for. When he saw Mrs Stretton charging down the platform like a highly-coloured effigy of the wind Boreas, he got quickly into his carriage with Sheena who, draped in chiaroscuro wimples, had come to see
him
off. At least, she had come to see the train off, for it did not matter who was in it as long as
she could be left on the platform gently waving an elbow length glove, her Burne-Jones neck drooping in the exquisite melancholy of farewell.
The
Queen Anne
called at Malta on the way out, and before she had dropped anchor, a steward brought Rodney a telegram summoning him to a cocktail party at the Sliema club.
Archie Drake! Of all people on earth, just the one he wanted Joy to meet. Archie had been out of circulation for the last six months on a world cruise with his father who, like the family mansion, was crumbling a little. The two ships were going in opposite directions, but Joy and Archie could both be titillated with a small dose of each other and would be all agog to meet again in England.
She was just ripe for someone like Archie Drake. Distance seemed to have weaned her from Freddie. (The wireless operator, who was on Joy’s side, lied to Rodney when he asked if she had sent or received any cables.) She did not seem to be attracted to any of the young men with whom she danced and played deck games in the
Queen Anne.
(Rodney was in bed, and thought Joy was too, while she and a mildly dissolute tennis champion were in the stern of the ship, watching the changeless-ness of the silvered wake.)
Rodney began his propaganda at once. ‘Nice party on to-night, poppet,’ he said, finding her leaning on the rail, dazzling hep self with the yellow blaze of Valletta Harbour in the midday sun.
‘Oh, Uncle Roddie, no. Aren’t we going ashore? There’s plenty of time for parties when we’re at sea.’
‘Not on board, silly child, at the Sliema Club, the best place on the island. It’s Archie Drake, quite one of my dearest friends. He’s a good bit younger than me, of course – one of the most eligible young men in England as a matter of fact; all the girls are after him – but I’ve known his family all my life.’
‘What makes him so eligible?’ Joy asked glumly.
‘Oh, well, don’t you know, he’s charming, good-looking, amusing. Got his Blue at golf and squash, and rides like an angel, they tell me. He’s the heir to a nice little bit of money and a staggering old place in the Cotswolds, mostly sixteenth
century and quite unspoilt. The old banqueting hall has been preserved
in statu quo;
they have a quartet in the musicians’ gallery at dinner.’
‘God,’ said Joy, ‘I’d rather be Scotch and have bagpipes going round with the porridge.’
‘Scots, child.’ He still had to correct her occasionally. ‘Or Scottish. I’ve cabled back to Archie that he must dine with us when he can get away from his guests. The Governor will be there, I expect; Archie always knows everyone wherever he goes. We’ll go ashore when I’ve had my siesta. I can’t face this heat before sundown. I don’t know how you can stand there in that crude glare, and I know you shouldn’t. Your skin will be like tooled leather before you’re thirty, Joy, do you know that? I deprecate the passing of the parasol.’
‘Don’t forget I hardly had any sun for twenty years in the slot of the Porto,’ Joy said, and saw him frown. He never liked to talk about it. ‘Can’t we go ashore as soon as we anchor? I want to see everything.’
‘Archie will take you round to-morrow, I daresay. He’ll know all the places worth seeing. Now to-night, I should wear your white sharkskin dress if I were you, and do your hair á la Tudor page, there’s a good girl, simple and smooth.’ Archie and his father preferred their women, like their horses, sleek and clean-cut. ‘And don’t let me see you in that pearl choker effect. Heaven knows where you – ’
‘Oh look, Uncle Roddie!’ interrupted Joy, with a little shriek that made him wince. ‘There’s a battleship – a cruiser, isn’t it? – and two, no three destroyers!’
‘You’ll see plenty of those,’ he said dryly. ‘Malta being a Naval base.’ He moved, as the ship swung round and moved his patch of shade.
‘There’s lots of them,’ Joy babbled on, ‘and look at all those little boats skittering among them. Oh, I’d like to be in one of those. Uncle Roddie, couldn’t we get one and go and see one of the ships? I’ll go and ask the wireless Johnny which they are. You must know a Captain or an Admiral or someone we could go and see; you always know someone.’
He was flattered, as she meant him to be, but he said: ‘I
doubt it. Anyway, we’re not traipsing round the Fleet this afternoon. It’s much too hot, and you’ll look a wreck by this evening. No, don’t go off now, there’s the lunch gong.’
‘Can’t you wait five minutes while I just go to the wireless cabin? Go and have a drink.’
‘I
don’t want one. It’s Saturday and there’ll be caviare, had you forgotten? We’ll have Vodka with it.’
Joy followed him obediently to the saloon, where they were among the first, as usual. No one but Rodney bothered to be punctual for meals at sea, where time had no significance. She was glad to get his lunch over early, and him packed off to his shaded, fan-cooled cabin. She had her own ideas about the afternoon.
When Rodney, wanting an aspirin, sent a steward to find Joy and learned that she had gone ashore an hour ago with the tennis champion, he was as livid as he would allow himself to be in this heat. The girl was getting out of hand; she would have to be pulled up. He had never, in all their association, stooped to reminding her of what she had been and what he had made her. He sometimes felt like it, but he had his code, the same code that let him make a second loan without reminding the borrower of a first still unpaid. These scruples were wasted on Joy, who had lived for too long under the jungle law of the underprivileged, which could not afford such codes. With her, no weapons were barred; it was just a question of what you could get away with.
He could not rest any longer. He put on buckskin shoes and a Panama hat and went ashore to look for her. Malta in a windless June was unbearably hot. Rodney went round in a pungent taxi to all the best hotels and bars and shops, but of course he did not find Joy, who was nowhere near any of them.
When Rodney got back to the
Queen Anne,
Joy was sitting by herself in the bar, with a drink waiting for him. ‘I thought you’d like one before you change,’ she said seraphically. ‘You don’t deserve it though. You
are
mean, going ashore without me when you said you weren’t going to.’
‘I’ve been looking for you, you hypocrite, and you know it.’ Rodney lowered himself into a chair in a solid lump of sticky
flesh. He hated the feel of himself when he was hot. He was not flushed, because his face never reddened; he was simply melting like a pale candle.
‘I?’ The deep blue of Joy’s eyes was startling when she opened them wide. ‘I haven’t been ashore. You said not to.’
‘A steward told me he’d seen you go off with John Marlow. You know I don’t like his reputation. They say he was disqualified at Aix for getting mixed up in some unsavoury business.’
‘Johnny? My darling uncle, he’s the most innocent thing, far more so than some of your society wolves. I wasn’t with him. Those stewards would say anything sooner than nothing, because they think you’re good for a fat tip. I’ve been browning myself on the sun deck.’
‘I looked for you there.’
I was the other side of a lifeboat, because I hadn’t much on.’ Glibly she lied, not so much because it mattered if Rodney knew she had been round the back streets and cafés with the Casanova of the courts, but because she quite enjoyed lying, and Rodney was temptingly easy to deceive.
On the way to the party, he campaigned a little more for Archie Drake. When she saw him, Joy was surprised to find that the most eligible young man in England really was quite eligible after all.
Archie was tall and muscular with blunt features that had no quirks or oddities. He had a pleasant mellow voice with no maddening catch phrases, and he neither hummed-and-hawed nor prattled. He was quite natural because he was quite sure of himself. His father was a spatter-veined, hook-nosed old soldier with skin that hung in wattles and one glass eye set slightly crooked, so that you were not sure if he were looking at you or not.
He looked a lot at Joy, however, and seemed to like what he saw. Archie agreed with him on this in a quiet, casual way, and Joy did not discourage him, although she knew quite well what Rodney was planning. One might do worse.