Authors: Monica Dickens
He was a nuisance. After the bar was shut, he ruined the only peaceful time of the day by sprawling in the parlour telling stories. Joy would go to bed leaving him and her mother at it, and come down in the morning to remove the empty bottles and dirty glasses and pick up the beer bottle that was rolling about in the grate. She did not know if anything was going on between them, but she suspected it, for her mother seemed to be changing slightly, losing her cheeriness, a little belligerent, as if she were defending herself.
Joy did not think that Mr Tissot liked having Chum there, but as he kept the accounts, he knew how much the rent was needed. The receipts of the public house were going down. Chum was always in the bar, making such a noise, holding the floor, playing Mine Host in such an overbearing way that the newspapermen began to find somewhere else to go.
When Joy once asked her mother if Chum were going to stay for ever, Mrs Tissot flared up. ‘And why not? What’s it to do with you?’
‘Well, it spoils things. I don’t think people like him being here all the time.’
‘What do you mean? What are you insinuating?’ When on her dignity, Mrs Tissot could use quite long words without mispronouncing them. ‘Here, Chum,’ she called, as he lounged in, ‘listen to this chit coming the pi over me. This byblow of mine, dictating to me, who gave her a home, who rescued her.’
‘You did
what?’
asked Joy. ‘Considering I gave up everything, everything I’d ever had or wanted to have, to come and look after you – ’
‘Look after me! Ha! That’s a good one. I’m not in my dotage yet, my dewdrop, let me tell you …’ and on and on and on it went. Joy wished she had not said anything.
Mrs Tissot wanted more and more looking after. She was becoming even less help with the business. Between them, Joy and Mr Tissot kept the place going. He showed silent sympathy by moving the empties for her and making vague moves towards taking a tray from her hands, and coming home from his constitutional with a tattered bunch of anemones or a fern heeling over in a pot. Sometimes when she came down in the
morning, she would find that he had swept and tidied the bar for her the night before.
‘No, no,’ he said when she tried to thank him. ‘Please. Never mind.’ He patted her hand.
Sometimes, Joy could not go to the factory because Mrs Tissot would not get up and cook the breakfast. Later, she would deck herself in a grimy satin blouse and go off with Chum instead of serving in the bar at lunch time. Joy was reprimanded by the works manager and had to wriggle out of it by saying she had family trouble at home.
Trouble at home? There certainly was, but she struggled on. She had let herself in for this. She must go through with it. For ever? Who knew? Some day, she supposed she would get used to being Kathleen Tissot, Mrs Tissot’s daughter. What was that song they used to sing years ago in the Lane, hopping over the cracks?
‘Kathleen, Kathleen everywhere
Kathleen over the water.
Kathleen, Kathleen, I declare,
Mrs Tissot’s daughter.’
In her unhappy time at The Lamb, she often thought back to her childhood and the Portobello Road, although she never went there nowadays. It was out of her way now that she did not bicycle to work. She did not want to see Mrs Abinger. She was cross with her for all the complications she had caused by dithering and swithering about who she really was. Had she known all the time she was not really Joy Stretton? She had pretended once that she was positive. Why couldn’t she have stuck to that instead of betraying her to Bridget Tissot? The question of the head injury would never have arisen. Oh, the lies that Abinger woman had told in her time, the trouble she had caused 1
That summer, Mrs Tissot became ill and Joy had to stay away from work to look after her. She had to bear the brunt of Chum alone, and he had the effrontery, with her mother in bed upstairs, to leap on Joy in the parlour. She had the very great pleasure of slapping his face, which is à thing every girl would like to do to one man just once in her life. It felt like walloping raw steak.
When the doctor said she could get up, Mrs Tissot, who was a lazy woman for all her exuberance, claimed to have a relapse, and made Joy wait on her still longer. Her bed grew more foul. Joy would not make it up for her any more, since there was nothing wrong with her, but she would not do it herself. The sheets were stained and reeking; it was full of torn newspapers and old cigarette butts and bits of biscuits, and the cat lived in the tunnel down at the bottom.
I’m going back to work,’ Joy said. ‘You’re all right now. You’ll have to be. There’s a war on.’
‘Do you tell
me
! Will you listen to that now?’ as a doodlebug passed overhead so low that you could hear the rattle of every nut and bolt. Mrs Tissot went under the bedclothes.
‘This is a hell of a life,’ she said, when she emerged in her old black cardigan and searched for her cigarettes somewhere loose in the bed. She had a nasty habit of sending Mr Tissot out with only enough to buy five at a time in little screws of paper. ‘I think we’ll evacumulate ourselves.’
‘Not me,’ said Joy. ‘I’ll stay at the factory.’
‘That’s what you think. You’ll come with your Ma. Perhaps we’ll go back to Wicklow, back to my birthplace, and see your old grandma. She’s eighty, and you ought to see her cottage. How those people live! A mud floor and chickens larking on and off the table. Still, better there than here. Whoops!’ She went under the bedclothes again.
It was the end of everything if Joy had got to go to Ireland now and live in a pigsty, where Mrs Tissot would rapidly, happily, become as dirty as the pigs. Perhaps Joy and Mr Tissot might run away. Would he want to? He still seemed quite content, but you never knew what he was thinking. If only he would talk. It was terrible to have nobody to talk to.
She was coming home one night in the Tube, which was so crowded that there was not even a sixth share of a strap to hang on to. At every station, more and more people pressed in, the
last one barely shoehorned inside the closing doors, until it seemed that the carriage must soon bulge like a fermenting tin of fruit.
Joy was so wedged in that she could only just turn her head to see who was saying: ‘Hullo, Jo!’ behind her. No one except Norman had called her that for years, and this was certainly not Norman’s voice.
It was Wilfred Moore in naval uniform, as tall and thin as his father, looking down at her over people’s heads with a serious, sensible, ugly face, that was saved from ugliness by the big black velvet eyes he had kept from his childhood. In the jammed carriage, they could not get close enough to speak to each other, and when the train stopped at Leicester Square, Wilfred jerked his head towards the door and called: ‘Come on out and talk, if you’re not in a hurry.’
Joy was suppose to be hurrying back to open the bar, but she got out and went with Wilfred to an underground bar where her factory clothes did not matter.
She made him talk about his family. She did not want to talk about herself, because she did not know how much he knew. If, as far as he was concerned, she was still Joy Stretton, there was no need for him to know of her downfall. She would probably never see him again.
They talked about their childhood. Do you remember, do you remember? absorbed in the past, forgetting their drinks, more aware of the hut on Wormwood Scrubs than of the shored up, smoky cellar where they sat.
‘I always liked you,’ Wilfred said, ‘an awful lot, Jo.’
‘So did I you, Wilf, most awfully.’ She realized this now, although at the time he had always been outshone for her by Billy. Presently, in an off-hand way, she asked about Billy. He must have been married now for quite a time, she supposed. Had he any children?’
‘Children?’ said Wilf. ‘Good Lord, he’s not married. Oh, you mean Lisa, I suppose. It seems so long ago I’d almost forgotten. They were talking of getting married at one time, but then the war broke out and he didn’t get home for it after all, and the thing sort of disintegrated. Eventually I suppose the poor girl
got sick of waiting, and I don’t blame her. She’s married some kind of a solid Major now, I believe. Much better for her than Bill. An irresponsible type, my brother.’
‘Perhaps,’ said Joy, ‘but he’s rather nice.’
‘Oh, he’s
nice
all right. He wrote a long letter about seeing you in Malta – long for him, that is. We’d heard about you suddenly becoming one of the upper ten. What an amazing, fairy-tale story, Jo, a complete Cinderella act. We were proud to think we’d known you in your Porto days, and then Bill wrote what an absolute knock-out you were. Still are, if it comes to that.’
‘You don’t have to say that,’ Joy said. ‘I look terrible now, and I know it. I’m not the girl I was.’
‘You’re all right. I say, I wish you’d write to me sometimes, will you? I’ve got to join my ship to-morrow, but let’s meet on my next leave. Do let’s, Jo.’
‘Yes, of course. I think I ought to go now, Wilf. I’ve got a lot to do at home. No, don’t bother to come with me. I can get a train to Russell Square,’ she said without thinking.
‘Russell Square? I thought you lived in Mount Street or somewhere.’
‘I did,’ said Joy blankly, ‘but not now. I might as well tell you. You’ll laugh, but it turned out not to be a Cinderella story, quite the other way about in fact. I’m not Joy Stretton. That was all a mistake. My real mother turned up, and I’m with her now.’
‘Well!’ said Wilfred, not knowing what to say. ‘It must be nice for you to have a real mother.’
‘It isn’t,’ said Joy bitterly. ‘I wish she’d never come. I wish I’d never found out who I was. Oh, Wilf – ’ she turned to him suddenly and clutched his arm, ‘it’s awful. We keep a pub, a beastly little one. She’s got an awful boy friend who’s always there. She’s always drunk. Don’t tell a soul. Promise. It’s not even as if I feel like her daughter. I don’t like her. She’s dirty. I only hope I take after my father, but she won’t even tell me who he was.’
‘He must have been pretty nice,’ said Wilfred slowly.
‘Perhaps he was; I
wish
I knew. I wish I knew what kind of
a girl I am. I’ve been mixed up with so many different people, but you are what you’re born, always, aren’t you? Or do you think your surroundings make you what you are?’
‘A bit of each, I think,’ he said gravely. ‘What you’re born determines what you are at the very centre of yourself, but so deep down that it might not ever come to the surface of your character at all if different influences had swamped it. Say, for instance, you were born to two completely vicious, brutish parents. If you were taken away and brought up from the word go by – well, let’s say the Royal Family for the sake of argument, you wouldn’t grow up much different from Princess Elizabeth. You’d even feel like her. But – and this is where the Blood Will Out part comes in – although your upbringing may have directed, or disguised the original core of your character, it won’t have changed it. In some crisis, something you reacted to with instinct not reason, like terror, or passion, or physical agony, you might easily revert to type and ravage Buckingham Palace.’
‘You mean,’ asked Joy, ‘Outside things don’t ever alter or destroy the real you?’
‘Yes. Tortured prisoners-of-war have found that out – if they kept their reason. What you were when you were an egg, you are till you die, only it may never come to the surface if too many layers of influence go over it.’
‘But look, if you can be influenced, you ought to fit in where-ever you’re brought up. In my different homes, I’ve always sooner or later had an unsettled feeling of not belonging.’
‘Well, of course,’ said Wilfred. ‘Everyone gets that, even in the family they were born to. Look at us. We’re a pretty contented family but we all went through the stage of not knowing what we wanted.’
‘Good Lord,’ said Joy. ‘I never knew that. Your sureness was one of the things I envied most about you.’
‘Oh no, we had the most awful time, with Tess wanting to go as a Missionary to Central Africa; and Billy saying the house was the wrong side of the Park, and picking quarrels about the Navy with my Pa; and I was always wanting to go and starve on my own in a furnished room in Maida Vale. Then, of course,
the minute you have to leave home, you long to come back. It isn’t only you who feels unsettled, Jo. No one ever properly settles down until it’s in a home they’ve made for themselves. It’s like giving a dog a basket, and he’ll go and scratch out a corner for himself in the coalshed. I’d like to get married, only I’ve never yet met anyone, except – I say, Jo dear – ’
Oh no, Wilf,’ Joy said in a flurry. Marry Billy’s brother? That would be too ironical.
‘All right,’ he said, ‘I gather you’re trying to save my face by stopping me saying it. It’s all right, Jo. I didn’t think you would, even to get away from The Lamb. Must you stay there? I wish you wouldn’t. You don’t look a bit well.’
‘That means I look plain.’
‘Be sensible. I’m talking as a doctor. I can see all the evidence of mental and physical strain, with the possibility of a complete breakdown.’
‘Sounds just about like what I feel,’ said Joy. ‘Wilf, when you’re being professional, you get that solemn look you used to get when you were carpentering. You had a special voice for talking about it too, a kind of bluff, clipped voice, like Billy when he had that football craze. You’ve got a special doctor’s voice now.’
‘Well, as a doctor, I’m telling you, you ought to get away.’
‘I can’t. She’s my mother. I’ll have to stick to her.’
‘Are you sure she is? You seem to have been wrong lots of other times about who you were.’
‘Oh yes.’ She told him about the headache and how she had given herself away. ‘I knew at once, when she said she’d dropped her baby on the right side of its head. I’d often wondered why I got the pain on the opposite side to where the picture fell.’
‘But good Lord, woman,’ Wilfred suddenly pounded the little table, making their glasses bounce, ‘haven’t you ever heard of referred pain? It doesn’t prove a thing.’ Joy stared. ‘Your nerves don’t run on tram-lines,’ he said, resuming his rather sententious medical voice. ‘They’re networks, branching off all over the place. So you often get a message of pain from a place where the injury isn’t, but a branch of the nerve from the injury is. That’s
why you get the first appendicitis pain in the middle, and often a spinal pain in your turn.’