Swords and Crowns and Rings (27 page)

Cushie took the feather-duster, thankful that now Iris would stop talking. She slid back the flap at the back of the window and carefully began dusting the many exotic objects the little showcase contained. There were two busts of ladies cut off under the bosom, with stiffened muslin swathing the plaster. One wore a short, wavy, chestnut wig, and the other a blond buster-cut with the edges turned forward on the cheeks in cat's whiskers.

But, as though to let more conservative clients know that long hair was still dressed at List and Pauley's, the floor of the window was lavishly scattered with long-toothed tortoiseshell combs, hairpins, nets and boudoir caps, hair-tidies and bristle brushes, and the wall behind tastefully hung with long plaits, switches like horses' tails, small coronets of curls, and little earphones similar to those Aunt Claudie wore. A price card announced: Shingling, 2s.; First Shingle, 3s. 6d.; Water Waving, 1s. 6d.; Bleaching Henna, 15s. 6d.; Permanent Waving, Full Head from £1. 15s.

While she was rearranging the window, Cushie saw her Aunt Claudie almost running up the street, looking frightened. She shot into the shop, fell into a chair.

‘Oh, Iris, you'll never guess! I saw Virgie!'

Their voices rose and fell, and Cushie caught a sentence here and there.

‘Went into the Ladies Lounge. Small port. Before it came saw this huge fat...Couldn't believe my...Drunk as a...Sitting in the corner, hair like a rat's nest. Dress undone down to
here
! Nearly died. Of course I recognised her. But she's...oh, Iris! My own sister. A derelict. Oh, Iris!'

Iris said matter-of-factly, ‘Did she see you?'

‘Oh, God, I hope she didn't. Imagine if she came here!' gasped Claudie, ‘No, I just got up quietly, even before my port came, and went like the wind. Oh, my heart, just feel it, Iris! I think I'm going to have a funny turn.'

‘No, you won't,' said Iris sharply. ‘And keep your voice down. That perm will be arriving any moment. You just go out back and have a cigarette and calm down.'

‘But it was
Virgie
,' squawked Claudie. ‘I always thought she was dead, you know I always did. All these years...and then to see her sunk so low!'

‘Shut up!' hissed Iris. The next customer appeared in the doorway, and Claudie stumbled off behind the curtain. Cushie, dumbfounded, went on dusting. A young workman stared into the window, grinned boldly at her until she looked away in confusion.

Iris went on working composedly, talking pleasantly to the customers, occasionally calling Cushie from the window to fetch dry towels, sweep hair cuttings, brush madam down.

After twenty minutes or so Claudie appeared in her overall, pallid and absent-minded but apparently restored to calm.

Iris said to Cushie, ‘Thanks. You've been a great help. Don't know how I would have managed without you.'

Cushie blushed, pleased.

She knew that Iris and Aunt Claudie did a lot of talking about Virgie. Occasionally at night she heard Claudie's voice rise emotionally: ‘You don't know what Virgie was to me when I was little. And then when she went away—of course I loved her, you stupid thing, more than anyone. And then I hated her, oh, I could have killed her. But I forgave her when I thought she was dead. Well, fifteen years since anyone's heard of her, Iris! We just took it for granted...Oh, shut up yourself, you've got no sympathy, you're hard as nails... And the same to you, with knobs on.'

Cushie was not interested. She just waited for a letter from Jackie. She began to feel well again, more cheerful, though her wounded anger at her mother did not diminish. Her mother knew how anxious she would be about her father, yet wrote her no word of reassurance.

She wrote to her father again, asking for a line on a postcard, if he were well enough, expressing again sorrow at giving him and Mama so much sadness and trouble. ‘I love you, Daddy,' she concluded. ‘I miss you. Don't hate me. I couldn't bear it.'

After many days a letter bearing a Kingsland postmark was delivered. Dizzy with joy, Cushie snatched it from the doormat and flew off to her bedroom. But the envelope was addressed in unfamiliar handwriting. Dreadful fear seized her. Her father was dead. The letter was from the doctor. Her mother was too distraught to write, Olwyn too young. Her heart palpitated. No, no, they would surely have telegraphed Auntie Claudie? It couldn't be that.

She stared in terror at the letter for several minutes before she could bring herself to open it. She looked quickly at the end of the scrawled sheets. Margaret...Margaret who? MacNunn! Mrs MacNunn! Then something had happened to Jackie?

The letter which it had cost Mrs MacNunn so many tears and so much trouble to write was read in a few moments. The girl could not believe it. She thought she had misunderstood. She kept going back to the most horrifying sentences and trying to make something else of them:

Dear Cushie,

Your letter was sent on by them people Jackie worked for at High Valley. I don't know if I done right to open it, but both me and Mr MacNunn thought it might save you sorrow and grieving to hear the news from us.

Jackie got married, we didn't know about it until it was all over. He married a young girl of the family at High Valley, and they have gone away to Dovey River where Jack has a job.

I know this will be a terrible shock to you, you having your trouble and all, though thank the good God that you miscarried. Only good thing in a sad mess. We both feel very ashamed about Jackie. We wouldn't have had it happen for the world. I hope you will find it in your heart to forgive and forget. I hope you will not be hurt too much. Try and forget, dear.

No one will ever know from me or Mr MacNunn what has happened, so do not worry. Sorry about your poor father so ill. It's a cruel world. Don't be too bitter against Jackie, dear. Marrying so sudden, I mean. A good, sweet girl like you will find someone better and more with your own background, and you deserve it, too. It may be all for the best in the end. God keep you and bless you, dear little Cushie. Your sincere friend –

MARGARET MacNUNN
.

Cushie sat still, dazed, until she was aroused by the tidal roar of the five o'clock traffic. She felt stiffened in all her joints. Yet at the same time she was aware that something mysterious had happened to her. She had been a creature in a chrysalis, and now the chrysalis had split up the back, like the seam in an outgrown dress, leaving her exposed, feeble. More than that, different. She did not know in what way. That had yet to be proved.

Jackie married. Jackie gone away to the Dovey River with a girl, his wife. No name, just his wife. Mrs Hanna of Dovey River.

‘I love you, Jackie,' she said aloud, as though that would change things. ‘And you love me, too.'

She remembered the look on his face as he came flying down the platform at Ghinni Junction, looking for her, distraught, frantic. Sharpened by pain, her memory painted in the bruises on his face, the swollen eye. He had been hurt, perhaps by those two men who overhauled him with such ease, and held him as though he were a child.

How long ago was it? It must have been about the time he was married. There was some connection there—those men, his damaged face. But it scarcely mattered now. He was married, gone beyond her reach for ever. So many cruel and corrupt things had happened to her, and now he would never know about them, as she would never know what had really happened to him after he went away to the Dovey River.

When Claudie and Iris came in Cushie saw that they had had a drink or two, for Claudie looked puffed and pale, like a blown-out paper bag, and Iris's voice was a little louder and more precise, her swept-back cheeks faintly reddened. She gave Cushie a shrewd look.

‘Hullo,' she said. ‘You look like something the cat brought in. Didn't get bad news from home, did you?'

To Cushie the women's voices sounded slightly muffled, as though her ears were full of cottonwool. She turned Iris's question over in her mind and after a while replied, ‘I haven't heard from home.'

Claudie gave her a hug. ‘No news is good news! I know, let's all have a little drinkie. Pep us up. Dorothy too, poor little pet, so pale and peaky.'

‘Oh, no you don't,' said Iris. ‘A youngster like that!'

‘Oh, rats,' said Claudie. ‘She had a brandy and water with me a few days ago and it slipped down nicely, didn't it, love? Don't be such a wet blanket, Iris.'

‘Her father would have a fit, you know very well, Claudie,' said Iris. ‘Don't you be a chump, Dorothy.'

‘Yes, I should like a drink, thank you,' said Cushie. She took the glass, sipped it. It tasted filthy, but she kept her face straight in the best Mount Rosa tradition. Little trickles of warmth ran here and there in her body.

‘Let's all have another,' said Claudie, smacking her lips.

Cushie remembered eating dinner, washing up, going up the stairs, hearing a nagging squabble between Claudie and Iris and the sound of a slap. She awoke late at night. There was still an argument going on in her aunt's bedroom. She was now quite sober. Memory brought a recurrence of pain that lapped her from every side. Was it pain or sorrow? Mrs MacNunn had used the word grieving. That was right. She grieved. She was bereaved. She was bereft of everything, love, home, family, future.

She rose and went silently downstairs to get another glass of brandy, stronger this time. After a while she heard the quarrelling in Claudie's room as no more than the altercation of seagulls on a distant beach. A soothing hum in her ears deafened her to the sounds of the city, the faraway rattling of the trams, the trains whistling, a band's loud music. She slept for a little while, and then awoke. She felt that she was flying to pieces, going mad. She sat up in bed and screamed and screamed, unable to stop when Claudie and Iris came running in, when Iris slapped and shook her.

‘What's the matter, what's the matter?' Iris repeated.

‘He got married to someone else,' said Cushie.

The neighbour next door was hammering on the wall. His shouting drowned the girl's voice. Claudie cried, ‘What did she say?'

‘She said he got married to someone else. The boy who put her in the family way, I suppose.'

‘Of course he did. Don't they always? Bastards!' cried Claudie—and she put her head out the window and yelled, ‘I'm going to ring the police and put you in, you pest. How dare you use such language, effing and beeing all over the place, you ought to be ashamed, and in front of respectable women, too, not to mention a young lady visitor.'

Iris pulled her inside the room, closed the window. Cushie lay limply, her eyes unseeing.

‘Do you think she's all right?' asked Claudie anxiously.

‘If you ask me, she's as tight as a tick. And it's your fault. Giving a kid like that brandy. She's probably never had anything stronger than cocoa in her life. Look at her. She's sloshed, I tell you.'

‘Hang on—how'd she come to hear about the boy getting married?'

They looked in the drawer beside the bed. They read Mrs MacNunn's letter with exclamations of compassion.

‘What did she expect? Girls! Mad as rabbits.'

‘Well, were you and I any better at her age?'

‘But Iris, what will I do if she starts to go to pieces like this? I mean, she might have a breakdown, or do away with herself or something, and Bede would blame me.'

‘Write to him then, and tell him to make other arrangements,' said Iris, looking with pity at the sleeping girl.

‘You know that stinker Isobel would read the letter,' said Claudie vexedly, ‘and
she'd
make other arrangements like a shot, and then what about my fifteen smackers?'

‘God, you're a stingy little article. I don't know how I put up with you.'

‘Who said you had to?' snapped Claudie. More cheerfully, she said, ‘Probably it was the grog, as you say.' She returned Mrs MacNunn's letter to the drawer. ‘Men,' she said.

‘Well?' said her friend smilingly. Claudie fended her off.

‘No,' she said. ‘I'm going to bring the big chair in here and keep an eye on her. Suppose she jumped out the window or something? All right you shaking your head, Iris, but she was in a real state. And she is my niece, anyway. My one and only, unless Virgie tripped up. Oh, God, Virgie! The worries I have!'

Iris shrugged, and returned to bed.

Claudie huddled under a rug in the chair. The girl lay like a statue. The cars swished past, each pair of headlights throwing an arm of lemon light over Cushie. Sometimes she looked quite yellow and drawn, so that Claudie amused herself by imagining that each time the traffic illumined her Cushie became older and older, like
SHE
in the moving picture. Thirty, wan and disillusioned, forty-two starting to melt, to run down into folds and flab, like Virgie. Claudie shuddered.

‘I don't want to think about Virgie,' she pleaded with the dark, with her memory. The bad days after her father's death came swarming back, like hornets.

Claudie was four when her father, Pat Moy, was killed, flattened under a cargo sling that broke. She remembered her mother and elder sisters howling, her big brother Bede there, bossy, grown-up, herself crouching in the furthest dark corner under the table with Graham, the baby brother, and Virgie crawling in to sit with them there, to hold them in her arms, saying, ‘It's all right, I'm here.'

Virgie at twelve was a fierce, motherly child, glowering at the world. She had left school, and, too young for factory work by law, she laboured much harder as a boarding-house slavey.

After Pat Moy's death, his wife turned melancholy, sitting all day in the kitchen smoking and crying. The big girls, all in good places, all three courting, were reluctant to come home to look after things. Selfish lumps they were. But, give them their due, their mother had not treated them to much affection. Pat Moy's wife had not cared for her children: she was too much besotted with Pat. The children were the price she had to pay for his love.