Authors: Monica Dickens
‘Not I.’ Rodney smiled like a cat. ‘I know a man at the Ministry of Labour. He tells me that there’ll be no difficulty about getting Alexander exempted, should the terrible need arise.’
‘He’s lucky,’ someone said.
‘I suppose so,’ said Rodney modestly, ‘but after all, it’s the least one can do.
Noblesse oblige
… Ah, there you are at last, poppet! I was getting quite worried, seeing that I’d asked you particularly to come home early and entertain my guests.’
‘Sorry everybody.’ Joy greeted the people she knew and was introduced to a strange woman in chain mail and a Brigadier with pale-blue eyes that stared. ‘I’ve been working overtime,’ she, explained.
‘Aha,’ said Rodney. ‘You see before you, ladies and gentlemen, the hub of the war effort. Let’s see that hangnail, poppet. Splendid, it’s healing nicely. Good girl. You’ve been wearing those gloves I gave you.’
‘What,’ Sheena stirred among her clouds of chiffon, ‘do you exactly
make?’
Her slow, low, vibrant tones made mysterious import of everything she said.
‘Oh, this and that,’ said Joy airily. ‘I’m a fitter, you know.’
‘Yes,’ throbbed Sheena, ‘but what do you
fit?’
‘You wouldn’t understand, Sheena dear,’ said Joy. ‘It’s all highly technical.’
‘Ah no, then I wouldn’t.’ Sheena sank back contentedly and became one with the sofa, contemplating her brandy glass as if it were a crystal.
A rather offensive, bright young man called Rollo, who had a habit of simpering on a rising scale when he was about to be bright, like a kettle coming up to the boil, prepared some
question for Joy, who knew by experience that he was going to refute her answer, whatever she said.
‘Ah, there’s Alexander,’ she cried gratefully, as the door opened while Rollo was still on the simmer. ‘Thank goodness; I’m starving. Excuse me, everybody.’
‘But of course, of course.’ They looked indulgently at her tray, so beautifully laid out with spotless cloth and dazzling glass and silver, and even a spray of flowers. Alexander was not above showing off to company. He enquired, as if it were a matter of life or death, whether she wanted French or English mustard, and while he was bending over, doling her the neatest of blobs, she raised her head, and he gave her a look. He was up to something.
When Alexander had withdrawn, Rodney began to boast a little about him. ‘He’s a miracle worker, that fellow. You know how impossible it’s been to get a decent biscuit for love or money …’ He launched into the story which Joy had heard many times, of how his life had been a misery because he could not have Bath Olivers with his morning tea, and when a man’s been accustomed to starting the day with Bath Olivers, his stomach won’t change its habits just to suit the Nazis, but Alexander had found the
one
shop in London who still had them … No, no, it was a secret, not even Rodney knew. He sensed a
soupçon
of underhand dealing, but he did not enquire. So long as Alexander went on producing Bath Olivers, Rodney was in his Heaven; all was right with the world. Joy went on eating, and wondered if it would look rude if she were to read the evening paper.
When the guests had gone, Rodney took his nightcap and leaned back, as was his wont, discussing the party with Joy. It occurred to him that this was almost the
mise-en-scène
of the night when Joy had come to him out of the blue. It was almost the same party, only with Kenneth then, and without that armoured woman and Rollo. A definite acquisition, Rollo. And without Joy, of course. Then, he had brooded on life alone; now he had her, so lovely to look at, and at least to listen to him, even if she did not talk. She sat on a stool at his slippered feet – Rodney liked to change into pumps for the last hour after
guests had gone – and mused into the fire, and murmured at him occasionally in a companionable way. Life was still very good, in spite of the war. Rodney congratulated himself on salvaging the things that mattered.
When Alexander came in to tidy up, Rodney asked him: ‘Seen about the new call-up scare? They’ll get us yet, my boy.’
‘Looks like it, Sir Rodney.’ Alexander stood behind his chair and looked down at him, Joy saw, with speculative gaze.
‘Well, you needn’t worry, my dear chap,’ said Rodney, triumphant, great-hearted, bursting with
noblesse oblige,
‘I’ve been talking to one of the most influential men in the country. He’s going to see that you’re exempted if there’s any nonsense about conscripting you.’
‘No chance of that, Sir Rodney,’ Alexander said. ‘I’ve been to-day to enquire how I stand in their sight. I’m too old, it would appear, even with this extended age limit They won’t bespeak me for any of the Services.’
‘Well, then,’ Rodney slipped down on to the last bone of his spine, his chin sunk into the tucks of the soft evening shirt he had had to adopt since laundries became so obstructionist. ‘There’s nothing to worry about, is there?’
‘I’m not worrying, Sir Rodney,’ said Alexander. ‘I’ve joined the Pioneer Corps.’
At the training school next day, Joy marched into the office, thumped a desk and demanded to be sent to a proper job. ‘I’m not going to fiddle about here for the rest of the war,’ she cried, ‘while other people go out and fight and die, or get shot down perhaps, for want of a bullet I might have been making if I hadn’t been kept fooling here with male and female squares.’
‘On the next desk please,’ said the clerk. ‘Miss Bolsover will see to you.’
Joy repeated her piece, was passed on repeating it doggedly from office to office, down passages and up stairs and finally into the waiting-room while they looked up her file.
She walked out after five minutes and did not go back any more. Abandoning quite a nice overall, her soap and towel, the tools Rodney had bought her and half a crown she had lent
Bettine for cigarettes, she went to the Labour Exchange and got herself a job testing valve springs in a factory at Chiswick.
All she had to do was to put each spring on the scale, pull a lever, check the dial, and throw the spring into one of three baskets marked: ‘O.K.’, ‘Dud’, and ‘Pending Rep’. Spring after spring, all day long, hundreds and thousands of them, they marched behind her eyelids when she went to bed at night. After three days, she could do the job like an automaton, but at least they were springs that were going into something. People like Norman were going to use them; people like Alexander, although from what she gathered in his letters, all he was allowed to use was a shovel.
Her springs were part of the war, and she with them, a happy cog. It was not so much the work that satisfied her as the noise and the smells and the jokes and the casual friendliness of people all working together for something that mattered. At Perivale nothing had mattered. Here, if you slacked off or spent too long in the cloak-room, you were reprimanded, which was how it should be, with the war getting grimmer.
She wore trousers and Government clogs, tied her head up in a scarf and ate largely in the canteen of things like bread pudding and Cornish pasty which she had not tasted since she became Joy Stretton. She bought herself a bicycle because the trains were crowded, rode to work in bicycling clips and felt healthier and happier than she had for a long time. Rodney thought it tactless of her to come home so merry when she was living in his flat under a cloud of disapproval. If she had to ruin her hands for England, he did not see why she could not have continued to sublimate her patriotism at Perivale.
He had a trying time with an official from the training school, who came looking for Joy with a brief case, anxious for his chick, wanting to know whether Rodney were aware that she had deserted her post in a time of national emergency.
‘She’s out. She’s taken a job in a factory making some part of an aeroplane; don’t ask me what, because I don’t think she knows herself,’ Rodney said, wondering if the feller expected to be offered a drink, from the way he looked at the cocktail cabinet, unfortunately left open. (No Alexander now to come in and
shut it and shake up cushions whenever he considered that Rodney could be no longer in the room without it being made re-habitable.)
‘Oh, but,’ said the official in an agony, ‘that’s not the thing. She’s enrolled with us. Look, here’s her file! Employment always goes through the official channels.’
‘Well, it didn’t this time. Never mind, my dear chap.’ Rodney edged him towards the door.
‘But it
must!’
wailed the man. Rodney got rid of him, but he came back next day at a more cunning hour, and Joy had to hide in her bedroom. Rodney heard her creep through to the kitchen and sweated blood lest the man with the brief case should scent her and track her down. It was all very unnerving; as bad as what one heard of the bailiffs, or the Gestapo looking for an escaped prisoner.
When the man had gone and Joy came back with a clumsy sandwich, Rodney said: ‘I wish you hadn’t done this. Look what you put me through. It’s aged me about ten years.’ He looked anxiously in the mirror.
‘Why didn’t you split on me?’ Joy asked.
‘Oh, one has one’s honour, even in an unworthy cause. Oh poppet, your hands! You haven’t washed.’
‘I have,’ said Joy cheerfully. ‘It doesn’t come off.’
Rodney moaned. ‘And I wish you’d change those trousers when you come in,’ he said, wrinkling his nose at her stained slacks.
‘I can’t be bothered. I’m too tired.’
‘Don’t get so near the fire then. You make the whole room reek.’
This drawing-room had never known such a plebeian smell, but then, the whole flat had never known such a life as this. Desperately, Rodney tried to keep up the old standards, clutching at every remaining straw of decent living to stop himself going under. He had acquired a daily maid called Mrs Traill, who had been in good service, but she was not Alexander. It seemed sacrilege to let her into his kitchen.
She would not come before ten o’clock, so although Joy left
Rodney’s breakfast ready for him, he still had to pour milk and coffee from saucepans into pots, a process which he called ‘cooking one’s own breakfast’. When there was an egg for him, he could hardly get himself dressed for the worry of boiling it, but although he stood over it watch in hand, it never turned out like Alexander’s. No one had ever boiled an egg like Alexander.
Hardly a day passed without Rodney saying: ‘I mourn for Alexander. Why, oh why, did he do this to me when it was so unnecessary? Why couldn’t someone else dig sewers – anyone but Alexander? The waste, oh my God, the wicked waste of it.’
Mrs Traill cooked quite well, but she would not do the shopping. It was one of the most pitiful sights of the war, people said, to see Rodney on safari in Harrods, trying to track down a kidney; or with bowler hat and umbrella, Lady on a string in one hand, a shopping bag in the other, queueing up for the hope of a lobster and turning sadly away with plaice. He realized more and more what Alexander had been to him. The delicacies of the world had appeared on his table as if by magic; now he had to hunt them from grocer to grocer, disappointed, rebuffed, sent to the end of the queue, laughed at when he innocently asked for caviare. Alexander’s ultimate betrayal had been to go away without telling Rodney where to get the Bath Olivers. When there was only one left in the tin, Rodney sent him a prepaid telegram, but his detachment had been moved; he never answered.
But Rodney went on, dauntless as a knight seeking the Holy Grail. Civilization must be preserved. He must keep his end up, though his wine merchant halved his order of whisky and Mrs Traill said that if he went on having people to dinner, she was sorry she was sure, but she could not manage. Rodney’s shoemaker could not make him any more pumps; his hosier did not expect to see another silk shirt in this decade. Each day brought some new deprivation, but Rodney struggled on, seeing himself as the tattered, buffeted aristocrat keeping up appearances even in the tumbril that took him to the guillotine.
He kept up the tone of the air raid shelter under the Mount Street flats. The other tenants came down in hair nets and old coats and rolled themselves up on the bunks in eiderdowns. The
night porter took off his collar and shoes at the first note of the siren, but Rodney faced death bolt upright in a deck-chair with a clean handkerchief in the pocket of his dinner jacket. You never knew who might dig you out.
Joy wished that they could go to a more convivial shelter, where there were friendly people chatting and playing cards and singing and handing round tea and buns. In the Mount Street shelter, nobody talked or made friends, and the only things that were handed round were ear plugs and aspirin.
Rodney nearly fainted when she suggested going to Green Park Station. He nearly fainted too when she suggested having high tea at six, although one of his greatest grievances against the Germans was that they sent their bombers at dinner-time. The last relic of civilization was gone when a man could not sit down to his dinner in peace. He thought this was why they did it.
It distressed him to hear Joy talking of high tea and tube shelters. He was terrified that she would get tainted by the factory in spite of the antidote of gracious living which he strove to maintain for her at home. He made her go out with him or play hostess to his friends, although she was dead tired at the end of a day which had begun at six o’clock. She fell asleep all over the place, in restaurants and theatres and even in Lady Bellenger’s drawing-room, and Rodney pushed her gently upright and gave her brandy. He chivvied her to the hairdresser and manicurist on her half day, and measured her ankles to see whether bicycling were thickening them. He owed it to Archie, if not to himself.
Archie had gone to the Middle East. When she thought about him, Joy still considered herself engaged, if only to have someone to talk of at the factory, where most of the girls were married or promised. Rodney made her ask Archie’s permission to work there, and he wrote back: ‘Jolly good, darling. Don’t work too hard.’ He did not seem to mind, and it would have made no difference to Joy if he had.
His mother, however, minded very much. If Joy wanted war work she should have gone to Astwick, where Mrs Drake had turned the Great Hall into one enormous, freezing-cold hospital ward, just as it was in the last war.