Stories (78 page)

“It must be nicer this way,” said Mrs. Danderlea, pushing the crusting remains of the baked beans towards her husband.

He scooped them out of the dish with the edge of his fried bread, and she said: “What’s wrong with the spoon?”

“What’s wrong with the bread?” he returned, with an unconvincing whisky glare, which she ignored.

“Where’s her place, then?” asked Fred, casual, having worked out that she must have one.

“Over that new club in Panton Street. The rent’s gone up again, so Mr. Spencer told me, and there’s the telephone she needs now—well, I don’t know how much you can believe of what he says, but he’s said often enough that without him helping her out she’d do better at almost anything else.”

“Not a word he says,” said Mr. Danderlea, pushing out his dome of a stomach as he sat back, replete. “He told me he was doorman for the Greystock Hotel in Knightsbridge—well, it turns out all this time he’s been doorman for that strip-tease joint along the street from her new place, and that’s where he’s been for years, because it was a night-club before it was striptease.”

“Well there’s no point in that, is there?” said Mrs. Danderlea, pouring second cups. “I mean, why tell fibs about it, I mean everyone knows, don’t they?”

Fred again pushed down protest: that yes, Mr. Spencer (Mrs. Fortescue’s “regular,” but he had never understood what they had meant by the ugly word before) was right to lie; he wished his parents would lie even now; anything rather than this casual
back-and-forth chat about this horror, years-old, and right over their heads, part of their lives.

He ducked down his face and shovelled beans into it fast, knowing it was scarlet, and wanting a reason for it.

“You’ll get heart-burn, gobbling like that,” said his mother, as he had expected.

“I’ve got to finish my homework,” he said, and bolted, shaking his head at the cup of tea she was pushing over at him.

He sat in his room until his parents went to bed, marking off the routine of the house from his new knowledge. After an expected interval Mrs. Fortescue came in; he could hear her moving about, taking her time about everything. Water ran, for a long time. He now understood that this sound, water running into and then out of a basin, was something he had heard at this hour all his life. He sat listening with the ashamed, fixed grin on his face. Then his sister came in; he could hear her sharp sigh of relief as she flumped on the bed and bent over to take off her shoes. He nearly called out: “Goodnight, Jane,” but thought better of it. Yet all through the summer they had whispered and giggled through the partition.

Mr. Spencer, Mrs. Fortescue’s regular, came up the stairs. He heard their voices together; listened to them as he undressed and went to bed; as he lay wakeful; as he at last went off to sleep.

Next evening he waited until Mrs. Fortescue went out, and followed her, careful she didn’t see him. She walked fast and efficient, like a woman on her way to the office. Why then the fur coat, the veil, the makeup? Of course, it was habit, because of all the years on the pavement; for it was a sure thing she didn’t wear that outfit to receive customers in her place. But it turned out that he was wrong. Along the last hundred yards before her door, she slowed her pace, took a couple of quick glances left and right for the police, then looked at a large elderly man coming towards her. This man swung around, joined her, and they went side by side into her doorway, the whole operation so quick, so smooth, that even if there had been a policeman all he could have seen was a woman meeting someone she had expected to meet.

Fred then went home. Jane had dressed for her evening. He followed her too. She walked fast, not looking at people, her smart new coat flaring jade, emerald, dark green, as she moved
through varying depths of light, her black puffy hair gleaming. She went into the underground. He followed her down the escalators, and onto the platform, at not much more than arm’s distance, but quite safe because of her self-absorption. She stood on the edge of the platform, staring across the rails at a big advertisement. It was a very large, dark brown, gleaming revolver holster, with a revolver in it, attached to a belt for bullets; but instead of bullets each loop had a lipstick, in all the pink-orange-scarlet-crimson shades it was possible to imagine lipstick in. Fred stood just behind his sister, and examined her sharp little face examining the advertisement and choosing which lipstick she would buy. She smiled—nothing like the appealing shamefaced smile that was stuck, for ever, it seemed, on Fred’s face, but a calm, triumphant smile. The train came streaming in, obscuring the advertisement. The doors slid open, receiving his sister, who did not look around. He stood close against the window, looking at her calm little face, willing her to look at him. But the train rushed her off again, and she would never know he had been there.

He went home, the ferment of his craziness breaking through his lips in an incredulous raw mutter: a revolver, a bloody revolver…. His parents were at supper, taking in food, swilling in tea, like pigs, pigs, pigs, he thought, shovelling down his own supper to be rid of it. Then he said: “I left a book in the shop, Dad, I want to get it,” and went down dark stairs through the sickly rising fumes. In a drawer under the till was a revolver which had been there for years, against the day when burglars would break in and Mr. (or Mrs.) Danderlea would frighten them off with it. Many of Fred’s dreams had been spun around that weapon. But it was broken somewhere in its black-gleaming interior. He carefully hid it under his sweater, and went up, to knock on his parents’ door. They were already in bed, a large double bed at which, because of this hideous world he was now a citizen of, he was afraid to look. Two old people, with sagging faces and bulging mottled fleshy shoulders lay side by side, looking at him. “I want to leave something for Jane,” he said, turning his gaze away from them. He laid the revolver on Jane’s pillow, arranging half a dozen lipsticks of various colours as if they were bullets coming out of it.

He went back to the shop. Under the counter stood the bottle of Black & White beside the glass stained sour with his father’s
tippling. He made sure the bottle was still half-full before turning the lights out and settling down to wait. Not for long. When he heard the key in the lock, he set the door open wide so Mrs. Fortescue must see him.

“Why, Fred, whatever are you doing?”

“I noticed Dad left the light on, so I came down.” Frowning with efficiency, he looked for a place to put the whisky bottle, while he rinsed the dirtied glass. Then casual, struck by a thought, he offered: “Like a drink, Mrs. Fortescue?” In the dim light she focussed, with difficulty, on the bottle. “I never touch the stuff, dear….” Bending his face down past hers, to adjust a wine bottle, he caught the liquor on her breath, and understood the vagueness of her good nature.

“Well, all right, dear,” she went on, “just a little one to keep you company. You’re like your dad, you know that?”

“Is that so?” He came out of the shop with the bottle under his arm, shutting the door behind him and locking it. The stairs glimmered dark. “Many’s the time he’s offered me a nip on a cold night, though not when your mother could see.” She added a short triumphant titter, resting her weight on the stair-rail as if testing it.

“Let’s go up,” he said insinuatingly, knowing he would get his way, because it had been so easy this far. He was shocked it was so easy. She should have said: “What are you doing out of bed at this time?” “A boy of your age, drinking, what next!”

She obediently went up ahead of him, pulling herself up.

The small room she went into, vaguely smiling her invitation that he should follow, was crammed with furniture and objects, all of which had the same soft glossiness of her clothes, which she now went to the next room to remove. He sat on an oyster-coloured satin sofa, looked at blueish brocade curtains, a cabinet full of china figures, thick creamy rugs, pink cushions, pink-tinted walls. A table in a corner held photographs. Of her, so he understood, progressing logically back from those he could recognise to those that were inconceivable. The earliest was of a girl with yellow collarbone-length curls, on which perched a top-hat. She wore a spangled bodice, in pink; pink satin pants, long black lace stockings, white gloves, and was roguishly pointing a walking-stick at the audience—at him, Fred. Like a bloody gun, he thought, feeling the shameful derisive grin come onto his face. He heard the door shut behind him, but did not turn,
wondering what he would see: he never had seen her, he realised, without hat, veil, furs. She said, pottering about behind his shoulder: “Yes, that’s me when I was a Gaiety Girl, a nice outfit, wasn’t it?”

“Gaiety Girl?” he said, protesting, and she admitted: “Well, that was before your time, wasn’t it?”

The monstrousness of this second “wasn’t it” made it easy for him to turn and look: she was bending over a cupboard, her back to him. It was a back whose shape was concealed by thick, soft, cherry-red, with a tufted pattern of whirls and waves. She stood up and faced him, displaying, without a trace of consciousness at the horror of the fact, his sister’s dressing-gown. She carried glasses and a jug of water to the central table that was planted in a deep pink rug, and said: “I hope you don’t mind my getting into something comfortable, but we aren’t strangers.” She sat opposite, having pushed the glasses towards him, as a reminder that the bottle was still in his hand. He poured the yellow, smelling liquid, watching her face to see when he must stop. But her face showed nothing, so he filled her tumbler half-full. “Just a splash, dear …” He splashed, and she lifted the glass and held it, in the vague tired way that went with her face, which, now that for the first time in his life he could really look at it, was an old shrunken face, with small black eyes deep in their sockets, and a small mouth pouting out of a tired mesh of lines. This old, rather kind face, at which he tried not to stare, was like a mask held between the cherry-red gown over a body whose shape was slim and young, and the hair, beautifully tinted a tactful silvery-blond and waving softly into the hollows of an ancient neck.

“My sister’s got a dressing-gown like that.”

“It’s pretty, isn’t it? They’ve got them in at Richard’s down the street, I expect she got hers there too, did she?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well, the proof of the pudding’s in the eating, isn’t it?”

At this remark, which reminded him of nothing so much as his parents’ idiotic pattering exchange at supper time, when they were torpid before sleep, he felt the ridiculous smile leave his face. He was full of anger, but no longer of shame.

“Give me a cigarette, dear,” she went on, “I’m too tired to get up.”

“I don’t smoke.”

“If you could reach me my handbag.”

He handed her a large crocodile bag that she had left by the photographs. “I have nice things, don’t I?” she agreed with his unspoken comment on it. “Well, I always say, I always have nice things, whatever else…. I never have anything cheap or nasty, my things are always nice…. Baby Batsby taught me that, never have anything cheap or nasty, he used to say. He used to take me on his yacht, you know, to Cannes and Nice. He was my friend for three years, and he taught me about having beautiful things.”

“Baby Batsby?”

“That was before your time, I expect, but he was in all the papers once, every week of the year. He was a great spender, you know, generous.”

“Is that a fact?”

“I’ve always been lucky that way, my friends were always generous. Take Mr. Spencer, now, he never lets me want for anything; only yesterday he said: Tour curtains are getting a bit passe, I’ll get you some new ones.’ And mark my words, he will, he’s as good as his word.”

He saw that the whisky, coming on top of whatever she’d had earlier, was finishing her off. She sat blinking smeared eyes at him; and her cigarette, secured between thumb and forefinger six inches from her mouth, shed ash on her cherry-red gown. She took a gulp from the glass, and nearly set it down on air; Fred reached forward just in time.

“Mr. Spencer’s a good man, you know,” she told the air about a foot from her unfocussed gaze.

“Is he?”

“We’re just old friends now, you know. We’re both getting on a bit. Not that I don’t let him have a bit of a slap and a tickle sometimes to keep him happy, though I’m not interested, not really.”

Trying to insert the end of the cigarette between her lips, she missed, and jammed the butt against her cheek. She leaned forward and stubbed it out. Sat back—with dignity. Stared at Fred, screwed up her eyes to see him, failed, offered the stranger in her room a social smile.

This smile trembled into a wrinkled pout as she said: “Take Mr. Spencer, now, he’s a good spender, I’d never say he wasn’t, but but but …” She fumbled at the packet of cigarettes and he
hastened to extract one for her and to light it. “But. Yes. Well, he may think I’m past it, but I’m not, and don’t you think it. There’s a good thirty years between us, do you know that?”

“Thirty years,” said Fred politely, his smile now fixed by a cold determined loathing.

“What do you think, dear? He always makes out we’re the same age, now he’s past it, but—well, look at that, then, if you don’t believe me.” She pointed her scarlet-tipped and shaking left hand at the table with the photographs. “Yes, that one, just look at it, it’s only from last summer.” Fred leaned forward and lifted towards him the image of her just indicated which, though she was sitting opposite him in the flesh, must prove her victory over Mr. Spencer. She wore a full-skirted, tightly belted, tightly bodiced striped dress, from which her ageing bare arms hung down by her sides, and her old neck and face rose shameless under the beautiful gleaming hair.

“Well, it stands to reason, doesn’t it,” she said. “Well, what do you think then?”

“When’s Mr. Spencer coming?” he asked.

“I’m not expecting him tonight, he’s working. I admire him, I really do, holding down that job, three, four in the morning sometimes, and it’s no joke, those layabouts you get at those places and it’s always Mr. Spencer who has to fix them up with what they fancy, or get rid of them if they make trouble, and he’s not a big man, and he’s not young any more, I don’t know how he does it. But he’s got tact. Tact. Yes, I often say to him, you’ve got tact, I say, it’ll take a man anywhere.” Her glass was empty, and she was looking at it.