Authors: Monica Dickens
When Archie came home on his first leave from the Middle East, Joy got time off from the factory and went down to Astwick Hall. It was a wild February day. The train was unheated, and Joy rode from the station in the open front of a van that had come from the Hall to get hospital supplies.
Most of the Astwick gardeners had gone. Although Mrs Drake still lashed on the few old gaffers who were left, the huge garden was getting out of hand, and the whole place was more cheerless than ever. Hedges were wild and gates were leaning; uncut grass lay sideways in the wind that always blew at Astwick; the van had to squeeze past a tree that had fallen half across the drive, and from the famous old chestnut in front of the house a dead branch was hanging down crookedly like a broken arm.
The family were living now in one of the side wings of the house, but Joy went in at the front door unthinkingly, and found herself in the hospital Ward. Even with forty beds in it, the great hall still dwarfed its occupants. The lights were not yet on although the afternoon was fading, and the rows of white beds under the soaring vault looked like tombs. A few disconsolate figures were sitting wrapped in red blankets round a log fire, which could not possibly heat the whole long ward. From the look of the blue-nosed men in jerseys and mittens and mufflers at this end, Joy’s heart bled for the beds at the far end by the buttery screen, where she herself had shivered in evening dress through so many drawn-out meals.
A nurse with gooseflesh on her bare arms showed Joy which way to go to find Mrs Drake.
‘Are you a patient’s wife?’ she asked. ‘Mrs Drake doesn’t see relations without an appointment, you know.’
‘Lord no,’ said Joy. ‘I’m – I’m a friend of the family. I came in the wrong door, I’m afraid.’
‘Ah well, you’ll find young Mr Drake there,’ said the nurse. ‘Quite an excitement for everyone. He’s just got back from the Middle East.’
‘I know,’ said Joy. She did not say that she was Archie’s fiancée because she did not think she would be for much longer.
They were having tea; just Mrs Drake and the General and Eileen Thom and Archie, in a little round room with a Victorian grate and wallpaper. Archie had not changed. He was a little tougher and thicker, very tanned, his hair shorter; but his face, his voice, the feel of his large solid body and firm hands and the clean smell of kissing him were just the same. He and Joy had never done more than lay their cheeks together if Mrs Drake was in the room. She could quell any passion, certainly such a tiny spark as the feel of Archie aroused in Joy.
‘Heaven to see you, darling,’ said Archie easily. ‘Awfully sorry I didn’t come to meet you, but I’ve got a filthy cold, and the van was going anyway.’
When they had finished tea, Mrs Drake pushed back her chair and twiddled it round so that she blocked the fire from the rest of the room. ‘Joyce,’ she said, ‘you look appalling. What have you been doing to yourself?’
‘I’m sorry,’ said Joy startled. ‘I’m a bit tired. I’ve been on night work at the factory.’
‘Night work!’ said Mrs Drake in a belittling way. ‘I don’t like this factory nonsense. You should have come here and been a nurse. It would have been more the thing. You should have stood by Astwick.’
‘Hear, hear,’ said the General sycophantically, leering at Joy. ‘Rather letting down the side, what?’
‘Oh well, Guv’nor,’ said Archie, taking Joy’s hand. ‘I don’t see that it matters. I don’t mind, if it amuses her.’
‘Amuses me!’ Joy pulled her hand away, annoyed. ‘That’s not why I do it. I do it to try and be some use in the war.’
‘Yes dear, yes, I’m sure you do,’ said Archie maddeningly.
Smug they were. ‘Look here,’ said Joy, ‘I might as well tell you. That’s what I came down for, only it’s difficult to say it. It’s going to be a bit of a shock, I’m afraid.’
She told it tersely, badly. Mrs Drake did not listen in such a
way as to encourage persuasive fluency. For a long time now, long before Mrs Tissot had arrived on the scene, Joy had known at the back of her mind that she probably would not marry Archie in the end. She had put off the decision. She had shrunk from turning him down, because she did not want to hurt him. But now that the decision was being made for her, and she was the one who was being turned down, it was embarrassing and humiliating.
Perhaps Mrs Drake was quite glad to have the excuse about the religion, for she was a large enough character not to be a blind snob. If Archie had really loved a nobody, a girl whose parents kept a public house in Bloomsbury – for Joy pretended she was the legitimate daughter of both the Tissots – she might have stomached the marriage and hoped to mould her. But Archie had never loved Joy any more than she had loved him. They had come together undemandingly, she on the rebound from Billy’s faithlessness, he ripe for a suitable, amiable, decorative wife.
He did not love her enough to defy his mother and lose his inheritance, which was what she threatened if he married a Roman Catholic.
The Drakes, that vigorous old Protestant family, whose ancestors had tortured Edward Campion – their progeny to be Roman Catholic? It was unthinkable. Mrs Drake spun her chair petulantly this way and that in the crowded room. Eileen sat in the background and watched like a bird. The General kept starting to say things and being silenced.
If it was embarrassing for Joy, it was even more so for Archie, for being a nice person and chivalrous, he felt he ought to offer to stick to Joy and be hanged to the family. He did suggest it tentatively when they were alone, and his relief when Joy refused was only too obvious.
Joy did not want to stay the night. She would not even stay to dinner, so Archie forgot his cold and drove her to the station.
‘By the way,’ he said, when they were stamping on the cold platform waiting for the train, ‘I meant to tell you. I had a crazy letter the other day from a man who said he was your guardian. Drunken kind of writing on the back of an old
grocery bill – the whole thing was a scream; I meant to show you. Trying to get money out of me, a kind of feeble blackmail – wouldn’t let me have you, or something. Who on earth was it? Nothing to do with this – er – all this business?’
‘Good Lord no,’ said Joy. ‘I can’t imagine who it was.’
‘Some madman, I suppose. A religious maniac probably. They do these things.’
Joy laughed to herself to think how furious Mr Abinger would have been at that description of himself. How typical of him, if he had to do a thing like that, to miss the bus and do it much too late.
She now settled down into the muddy rut of life at The Lamb. The factory was accommodating. When it was her turn for night work, they let her come late, after the bar was closed. Mrs Tissot was still in good enough shape to officiate at lunchtime. When she was on the day shift, Joy had to get up at an unearthly hour to do the cleaning, wash glasses, put out the empties, and restock the bar before she went to work. When she got home, the bar was already opened and she had to go straight in and take over so that Mrs Tissot could go and cook the supper while she still felt like it.
It was an exhausting life, and an increasingly depressing one. She did not enjoy her work at the factory so much now that she had not the comfortable flat and hot baths to come home to. She felt that she never got properly clean. She felt dingy. Everything about her was dingy. Her mother and stepfather, the house, the bar, the glasses which were always smeary because she could not make the old boiler yield hot water. The street outside which the Corporation cleaners seemed to ignore, the trams in Theobald’s Road, Russell Square station with its lifts swept from end to end by a gale while you waited on the liftman’s pleasure.
The Lamb was in a narrow sloping lane without a pavement, neither a mews nor yet a proper street. At one end there was a greengrocer’s which sold nothing but root vegetables, and a sweet-shop which sold nothing but cigarette papers, lemonade powder, and boiled sweets which had lost their colour through
being too long in the window. Opposite, a condemned workshop made useless novelties at a loss; leaflets were printed in a basement where you could see the head and shoulders of the man working the press with a rowing rhythm as you walked past. On a derelict newspaper shop, a case which had long ago lost its glass still held curling, rain-drenched notices of rooms to let or bicycles for sale or cats found. A boarded-up shop had been saying ‘Apply 116 Bermondsey Road’ for as long as anyone could remember. Three cheesy milk bottles rolled about in the doorway beside a dustbin which the local cats had long ago looted of anything remotely edible.
At the other end of the lane was a row of tall brown houses, leaning a little and sheer as a cliff with no sills or porch or balconies. Three or four families lived in each, Joy knew, but she did not see many people about. Most of the children were evacuated and the others did not play in the street. There was no neighbourliness, no colour or life or fun, as in what she was already beginning to think of as the dear old Portobello Road. There was not even a market unless you went down to Leather Lane where flies swarmed on the fish and on the sickening masses of congealing figs and dates.
The Lamb was not on the way from anywhere to anywhere, so their custom was chiefly local. Mrs Tissot got on well with the patrons, but Joy was too tired by the evening to do more than pull the beer and measure the spirits and read the evening paper when things were slack. It was quite, a cosy little bar, with benches and tables round the walls and two high-backed settles by the fire. This was Mrs Tissot’s pitch, and here she would sit night after night, accepting a drink whenever it was offered, pretending to tell fortunes, flirting a little in a ghoulish, raddled way, all at the top of her voice.
When it was closing time, Joy had to turn her out as insistently as she did the customers. Then she would take a bottle of whisky into the parlour and talk and talk while Joy ate her supper and yawned her head off. When she went to bed, Mrs Tissot often stayed on down there maundering and reminiscing to the cat.
Quite a lot of their customers came across from the newspaper
offices in Gray’s Inn Road. A couple would come in sometimes with papers or photographs to discuss something over a drink, and Joy would crane her ears to hear something that she might read about in the papers to-morrow. She envied the journalists their contact with the world. She felt that she was getting very out of touch, trundling between the factory and The Lamb. She felt that she had nothing to talk about, but the newspaper men liked her, although she was not looking her best these days. Often they told her that she was too good to be behind a bar. She said: ‘Oh yeah? I’ve heard that line before,’ just as if she had been a barmaid all her life.
Rodney would have reproved her a hundred times a day for the things she said. She had dropped into a kind of slurred, careless, classless accent. She picked up a few of her mother’s expressions and used them without bothering. It was a saving of effort to describe something by a cliché, instead of thinking of apt words.
One of the newspaper men who came in regularly was a tall, stout, florid man with a North Country accent and a square head adorned at the corners with tufts of curly brindle hair. He was a cameraman, and he called himself ‘Chum’ Chummerford. ‘All the boys call me Chum.’
The boys did not seem very chummy with him, however. He usually came in by himself, and if some of his colleagues were there when he roared through the door making as much noise as Mrs Tissot, he would greet them heartily, slap a few wincing backs and offer drinks, undaunted by the fact that they usually refused, or if they were badgered into accepting, forgot to stand him one in return.
He was like a bull, with a great hairy body and small mean eyes. Joy did not like him very much, but he liked her. He would knock off his first pint without taking off his objectionable crumpled hat, then spin the hat on to a peg, lean on the bar, cross his great feet, fix her with a blue wall eye like a Welsh collie’s and toying with his second pint, proceed to have a go at her.
Apathetically, Joy sat on her stool, leaning back against the bottles and said Yes and No and Don’t be silly, or managed to
smile thinly at some extravagant story of the notorieties who were his intimates.
One day, after he had gone out with his hat hanging on one ear and the nautical roll he liked to assume, one of his colleagues came up to the bar.
‘You want to watch your step with him, Kath, he said. ‘He’s a no-good guy.’ Most of the newspapermen talked in American.
‘He’s O.K.’ said Joy. ‘He’s just a great ass.’
‘We don’t like him. He makes a heck of a lot of trouble around the camera staff. You know – he picks his jobs, dodges the night calls and the dull stuff. Shoves himself in after someone’s worked some dame for all he’s worth for a shot. Pinches people’s negatives, if he hasn’t got a picture himself. He been trying to make you? You ought to bounce him.’
‘He’s always trying to date me up,’ Joy said. ‘I won’t though. I don’t like him.’
‘Who don’t you like, sweetheart?’ Mrs Tissot came up with her loose evening smile and put an empty glass on the bar. ‘You can’t be finicking in this game, you know. The customer is always right. Ain’t that so, Bobby?’
‘Sure is, Ma,’ he said. All the boys called her Ma. She. did not mind. After nine o’clock, she was just a great big world’s sweetheart. ‘But not that Chummerford,’ said Bobby. ‘You don’t want to let him hang round Kath.’
‘Why so not? Don’t you like him, Kath?’ Joy shook her head. ‘Oh, I do,’ said her mother. ‘I think he’s fun. I’ll have him if you don’t want him. What a scream, you know, pinching my little girl’s boy friends! Talk about taking candy from a kid!’ The taproom was too small and panelled for a laugh like hers. It ricocheted from wall to wall and bounded off the high-backed settles. ‘I’ll have him!’ she screamed.
And have him she did. Quite soon, she told Joy to make ready one of the top bedrooms. Chum was coming as a lodger.
He could not stand upright under the sloping ceiling. From her room below, Joy could sometimes hear him cursing when he hit his head. The tramp of his boots shook the house. He was in and out at all times of the day and night, wanting meals and snacks and drinks out of hours.