Swords and Crowns and Rings (25 page)

‘Oh, rats!' Claudie flounced off, and shortly afterwards brought breakfast to the table. Cushie discovered that she was starving. Gratefully she ate sausages and fried tomatoes. Claudie gave her a patronising glance.

‘You haven't had morning sickness then,' she observed.

‘Only at first,' admitted Cushie with shy reluctance.

Claudie said proudly, ‘When I fell I was as sick as a dog—Chuck-chuck-chuck all day, all night, for the whole nine months.'

‘You be quiet—you'll turn Dorothy off her feed,' said Iris. ‘You know she can't have anything more to eat today.'

She nodded consolingly to Cushie, and pushed the toast across to her. ‘Because of the anaesthetic, you see. We've fixed up the arrangements for tonight.'

Cushie's hand froze on the butter-knife.

‘God, you're brutal, Iris!' cried Claudie. ‘Now you've gone and scared the poor kid. As though she hasn't enough to put up with, deserted and left to bear the brunt of it all by that young hound.'

‘Jackie isn't a hound,' fired up Cushie. ‘He doesn't even know. Daddy wouldn't let me tell him. Jackie's...' her voice trembled, ‘a good boy.'

Everything Claude did was agile and unexpected. She flew up out of her chair, threw her arms around Cushie, snatched the toast from her hand, cried, ‘You're going to have one of Auntie Claudie's magic pills and spend the day in bed. She's just worn to a thread, Iris, anyone can see that,'

Iris shrugged, lit a cigarette, put a long yellow holder between her teeth. ‘As you like. I'll do the early appointments. What's on?' She began to turn over the pages of a large day-book.

As her aunt insisted on supporting her, the staircase seemed even narrower and more dangerous to Cushie than it had from the front door. They emerged on a landing with two attic rooms opening off it.

‘This is Iris's,' explained Claudie. ‘No, not a word about inconvenience or anything. She's bunking in with me and doesn't mind a scrap.'

Cushie, beyond words, saw a tidy bare room with a steeply sloping roof and a deep dormer window splitting the wall with sunshine. The recurrent hum of traffic came through this window with an agreeably sociable air. Cushie's luggage was lined up against a wall.

She swallowed the tablet and glass of water her aunt offered her, and undressed mechanically. The bed was hard, monkishly narrow.

‘Sleepy-bye now,' cooed Claudie. She pulled the curtains over the window and was but a shadowy figure as she said, ‘The diddy's downstairs, through the kitchen door right at the back.'

She kissed Cushie on the forehead. ‘Don't worry, pet. This time tomorrow you'll be smiling. But I know how you feel. I've been through it. Unfair, that's what it is.'

Half-way through the day Cushie awakened and stumbled downstairs to the lavatory. The house was empty. A note propped up against Auntie Virgie's behind said: ‘At salon. Home at five.
Don't eat or drink a drop.
'

The backyard was minute, the bottom of a brick well. Chili, oozing bricks floored it, a feeble vine struggled up a string suspended from a hook above. The blue sky glared down upon Cushie. The lavatory and a lean-to converted into a laundry formed the end of the yard and, judging by the voices Cushie heard from the lavatory, a back alley ran behind that.

It was all like some bad dream. The very smailness of the house seemed unnatural, as though Cushie had, through some unkind spell, been made huge and lumbering in an ordinary-sized house.

The sleeping pill had made her feel queer, with buzzing ears and dry throat. She crept up the stairs again.

She was still groggy when they took her to the doctor after dark. Iris had hired a car. Afterwards, Cushie could remember seeing little but a bottle of red wine, drawn in electric lights, and a wineglass that jerkily filled, the two of them hovering in the dark.

Coming home, packed in towels, with a dull pain in the pit of her stomach, and a sore arm where needles had pricked it, she mostly remembered Iris cursing as she tried to get the car into gear, and Auntie Claudie, her arm protectively around Cushie, saying, ‘Can't you drive more gently, Iris? We've got a poor sickie girl here.'

Cushie couldn't believe any of it. Had she really been going to have a baby? Whatever it had been, there was no baby now, only blood and wounds. The pain in her abdomen was nothing compared with the ache in her heart. It was all over, that dreamlike time with Jackie. Jackie had vanished somewhere; her life at home, at school, all had gone. She felt that she had climbed to the top of a hundred-foot pole, and there was nowhere left to climb.

Yet her body quickly convalesced. The dumb, suffering thing renewed itself, became hungry, slept. But inside her mind it was different. She felt all to pieces, one moment helplessly agitated, the next precariously calm. Everything that had been stable had proved itself quicksand.

Every day she waited for letters, from her family, Olwyn, even Jackie. It was a week before she realised that he could have no idea of her address, that even Mrs MacNunn wouldn't know. She imagined him tortured with anxiety about her, his mother trying to get Auntie Claudie's address out of her father and failing.

But the old doubt was back; perhaps Jackie wouldn't want to know. The many glacial remarks her mother had made about him, about all men who had tricked foolish girls—ah, they were unforgettable!

Profoundly painful, as well, was her homesickness. She yearned for her mother, even her mother unresponsive or condemnatory. Anything, anything, thought Cushie, as she lay sleepless upon Iris's hard bed.

Saying good-bye to her in the kitchen that early morning, her mother's hair in a thick plait, her blue dressing-gown smelling of Olwyn's inhalant.

‘She was sorry for me...worried...I know she was! She was trying to be brave, for my sake, and Daddy's.'

Isobel's words: ‘Remember, on no account contact your grandmother. She would be horrified; it could kill her. The disgrace...Grandmother belongs to another generation. This burden would be too great. Promise me, Dorothy.'

Then her father's face came before her, as she had seen it at the railway station, somehow pinched, diminished from its usual waxy perfection.

‘He loves me. He doesn't hate me because of all this. He couldn't. He's my father.'

Iris understood something of the girl's emotional disorder. But Claudie tried only to establish a kind of freemasonry with her niece.

‘We've been little devils, and we've paid for it, and now we're going to have a good time, aren't we?' was her theme. Inquisitively she probed for the details of Cushie's love affair, how the mother had found out, what she had said, how it had been kept quiet. But Cushie was unable to speak of it. It was her secret and Jackie's. Give the playfulness, the tenderness, the delight to this woman? To anyone at all? Her sullen silence offended Claudie, who huffed away, feeling rejected.

The external Claudie was a mingled reflection: half was that of a titled lady drunk who had patronised Claudie's first place of employment and, after some theatrics, tried to puncture her throat with the scissors. Claudie, at fifteen, had admired the lady's scratchy fashionable voice, her hand-tossings and toe-pointings, and had imitated them tirelessly until her mother handed her a sharp one over the earhole. But, like a ghost, the lady drunk still twitched, tossed and tensed in Claudie's persona. The other half of Claudie was a film actress's rendition of a gay, reckless madcap, a role which had been highly successful during the Great War.

The real Claudie was, like all the Moys, uncertain and insecure. She was given to tears and depressions and, like Cushie, needed approval and encouragement as others need food and drink.

Rebuffed by her niece, she assumed a brusque attitude: ‘No, Iris, you needn't smile. The quicker she wakes up to men the better for her. Treat them like dirt, that's what she has to learn. Love 'em and leave 'em, with their money in your garter and no regrets.'

‘There's my way for an alternative.' Iris put her arms round her friend, rubbed her nose gently against Claudie's baby forehead. But the other woman pulled away absently, saying, ‘Mind you, Iris, there's a lot of her rotten mother in her. She's a bit stuck-up about her fancy education and all. And under the circs she's got no call to be looking down on
me—
all I've done for her and her little mistake!'

‘For fifteen quid a week,' Iris said dryly.

A beatific smile irradiated Claudie's face. She jiggled a dance step or two. ‘Isn't it peachy?'

Iris never asked questions of Cushie. In spite of her tomboyish speech, she was a housewifely person, seemingly content to sit companionably with Cushie, cleaning silver or darning stockings to the accompaniment of the gramophone.

When Claudie went out in the evenings Iris often expostulated with her, though in a low voice, so that the girl would not hear.

Cushie supposed it was because Claudie so often had a headache the next morning, or was too tired to go to the hairdressing shop until ten or eleven.

Claudie had no qualms about Cushie's overhearing their conversation, and often her sweet, querulous voice would rise: ‘You don't own me, Iris. I've got to have a little fling now and then—goodness knows I'll be pushing up daisies soon enough. Oh, Iris! Stop being jealous, don't be so dippy. I'll do what I damn well like!'

And she would rush down the stairs in a jingle of beads and swish of fringe, saying, ‘Ta-ta, kids. You be good and I'll be careful', sometimes poking out her tongue mockingly at Iris after this enigmatic adieu.

Usually quiet after Claudie's whirlwind departures, Iris now uttered an exclamation of impatience.

‘That Claudie! She'd forget her own head...'

She took a letter from the sideboard. ‘Claudie had this today from your mother. She meant to give it to you to read.'

Cushie was alarmed. ‘Is...is everything all right at home?'

‘Well, no,' said Iris. ‘Your Dad isn't too clever, as a matter of fact. But Claudie said you'd better read the letter for yourself and get the picture.'

The sight of her mother's firm, dainty writing made Cushie tremble. Why hadn't the letter been written to her? ‘My dearest little girl, don't worry about anything any more. We'll forget everything. Daddy and I love you so much...'

But the words were quite different. ‘...regret to have to tell you that Bede has had a little upset in health...chest condition, and must rest for a few weeks. Fortunately, the Bank...'

Cushie rushed down another few lines. ‘If it would be convenient for you to keep Dorothy with you until after Christmas... The financial arrangement would continue as at present.'

‘Would you mind very much?' asked Iris, who was watching the girl's face.

Cushie, sick with disappointment, shook her head.

‘If you liked,' said Iris, ‘you could help in the salon, giving shampoos and so on. It might fill in the time for you.'

She saw the girl read to the end, looking for some affectionate mention of herself, turn over the page, find nothing, quickly make her face blank. That devil of a woman, thought Iris.

Cushie was anxious about her father. Never had she known him miss a single day from the Bank through illness. Her distraught mind fixed on this new trouble almost with eagerness. She wrote her father an extravagantly loving letter, pouring out her sorrow for having worried him, hoping he would soon be better.

‘Please let me come home, Daddy. I could help to look after you,' she pleaded.

She sat up writing it, absorbed, while Iris, neat as a sailor, sewed new straps on Claudie's silk vests, cleaned her own shoes with white spirits, took up a hem an inch.

‘They say skirts will be around our ears before long,' she observed.

‘Could I post this tonight?' asked Cushie, not listening.

Iris folded up her sewing.

‘Yes. If you feel fit enough. I'll walk down to the corner post-box with you.'

A roiling red cloud hung over a nearby factory, and a pungent stink of salt and putridity drifted into the street.

‘Never eat frankfurters,' said Iris. ‘Get that smell, will you? They're just seasoning the dead cats ready for the morning shift to start work on them.'

Scarcely anyone was about. Lights shone under the gables of a house here and there. A crumpled derelict blew up against the sequined backdrop of the city and passed them, singing, exhibiting a mouthful of graveyard teeth.

‘It's just past the church, the pillar-box,' said Iris.

The church was on the corner. From the dormer window in Iris's room Cushie had looked down on its iron-coloured walls, its chained gates and doors, locked like a fortress. Its small yard had not a blade of grass or ivy; it was a church to freeze the heart of Christ.

Yet someone had got over the gate.

In the small porch, where notices in the Welsh language hung, two figures bumped and shuffled.

‘Giss a bit, come on, giss a bit,' blurted a hectoring male voice.

‘Ay might and Ay mightn't,' replied his companion, in an accent of extreme refinement.

Iris grabbed Cushie's arm and hurried her past. Not daring to look at her, Cushie posted her letter, and with bowed heads they retraced their steps past the church. Grunts and titters were still coming from the church doorway.

‘That sounded like...but it couldn't have been,' blundered Cushie when they had regained the small lighted cave of the house.

‘Oh, shut up. Go to bed!' snapped Iris. She was an ugly colour, her freckles ragged and noticeable.

Cushie retreated up the stairs. Her heart walloped; her throat felt dry. That man—Aunt Claudie—they
couldn't
have been, could they? She stood there, her hand over her mouth, and felt the very expression of her mother under the hand, shocked, nauseated.

‘It wasn't like that,' protested Cushie. ‘Jackie and I were never like that.'