Swords and Crowns and Rings (45 page)

So almost in a dream he dropped his two shillings in the box at the door and walked past the boys clinging to the area around the entrance as if something would savage them if they moved out of it. They fell silent, gaped, made dumb-show gestures at each other as he passed; but he did not see. He moved to the edge of this masculine enclave and watched the dancers.

Girls! They were everywhere, far more of them than there were youths, hovering around their dowdy mothers seated at the edge of the floor, fluttering about the refreshments table, dancing with young men, with each other, even standing in clusters against the walls, looking eagerly towards the boys. The smell of them was in the air—freshly washed hair, perspiration, powder. Jackie marvelled that he had forgotten so soon. He looked at their dresses, the long flared skirts of that year flapping around their art-silk stockings. Cape sleeves, long diagonal frills, little peplums fluttering over their hips. How beautiful they were, hypnotised by their own movements, floating, dreamy, eyes half-closed, even when clutched by red-faced rustic Frankenstein monsters in stone boots.

A hand touched him. One of the boys, an artless expression clamped on his face, said, ‘You dance, mate?'

Jackie nodded, waiting for the sting.

‘None of us are game to go and ask a sheila for a hop. What about you?'

Jackie looked along the rows of girls, picked out one in a coin-spotted green silk dress, and went straight towards her. She was talking and giggling to her fat mother, and did not look up until he was beside her.

‘May I have the pleasure of the next dance?'

The girl looked up, down. Her face suffused. She whispered, ‘I don't think I will, thank you.'

‘Go on, June! Do you good,' said the fat mother. She smiled at Jackie, open and friendly. The violinist tapped his bow on his music stand and announced the next dance. Jackie took the girl's hand. She did not pull it away; so, speaking a little awkwardly about the music, the floor, the crowd, he led her onto the floor. Just before the music started, he looked up, saw her red face, her lip caught under her top teeth like a little child's. She was embarrassed out of her wits.

He said gently, ‘It's no good, is it?' and released her hand. She almost jumped away from him, fleeing along the wall to the other girls. Jackie, feeling that something should be said to the mother, returned to the fat lady, pulling a regretful face.

‘Never mind, dear. Sit down and talk to me a minute.'

Jackie did so. She said something about silly girls without the sense they were born with. But Jack was remembering the soft cool feel of the girl's hand, her thin fingers lying in his.

‘Like to dance, do you? I'll bet you're light on your feet. I'm that keen on it meself, you wouldn't believe. But nobody ever asks me to dance; I'm too stout. Wouldn't care to, would you?'

He thought she was joking, and smiled.

She chuckled. ‘Think we'd make an exhibition of ourselves, love?'

She had a pretty, satiny face, a wreath of chins, and lively dark eyes. He said, ‘Maybe better not. But thanks.'

He walked away a step or two, then he thought, ‘Blast them all, why not?' and turned around and went back to the fat woman.

‘If you're game, I am,' he said, and took her dimpled hand.

She was a real little butterball, less than five feet high, as rotund as a tank. She floated as lightly as a girl, on tiny feet that bulged over the sides of her shoes. Keeping her eyes shut, she swayed from side to side, saying ‘M'mmmm, m'mmmm' as if he were kissing her.

The pair of them seemed to be down amongst other people's hips. After a while Jackie was aware that, perhaps in amazement, other dancers gave them them right of way; he could hear stifled giggles. His partner said, without opening her eyes, ‘Pay no attention. Let's knock their eyes out.'

Jackie caught a glimpse of his late partner, standing there with some big ginger yob, scarlet-faced, paralysed. He gave her a wink as he glided past. And so, spinning, reversing, fancy-stepping, they whirled right up to the rostrum, stopping under the very bow of the violinist. He nodded approvingly, and repeated the last dozen bars, so that Jackie and the fat woman were able to whirl right back down the hall again, and he landed her, breathless, in her own chair.

There was an outburst of laughter and clapping.

‘Gorgeous,' gasped the fat woman, flapping at her face with a handkerchief. ‘Haven't enjoyed myself so much for years.'

He fetched her a raspberryade from the buffet. The dancers were again circulating, and as he walked around the edge of the floor several people nodded or smiled shyly at him. When he returned to the fat woman he found her daughter standing beside her, on the point of tears, her lip stuck out, muttering, ‘Never live it down...I could have died...making such an Aunt Sally of yourself.'

‘You'll survive, June,' said her mother in a voice both cold and sad.

Jack stood around watching another dance, and then unobtrusively left the hall. He found the truck standing near the pub, and climbed into the cab. He undid the neck of his best blue shirt the wheat cocky's wife had so kindly ironed, took out the studs, and pulled off the collar, folding it carefully. He felt neutral. His emotions were indolent. Had he expected anything else? Not really. Did he care about the girl's reaction? At heart he was indifferent to it. What was the matter then?

‘I'm lonely. But lots of people are lonely. Most people. That fat lady. People like me, though—are we lonelier than others?'

He could feel the melancholy standing there like a grey fog, ready to wash over him. He turned his eyes to the street. Pandemonium was still going on in the Masonic Hall. An old man drove down the middle of the road in a sulky. He was asleep; the reins were looped over his clasped hands.

From a half-lighted side street came a curious trio, a pregnant coursing dog of silvery colour, a portly man in carpet-slippers, and a young woman in a flowered cotton dress. As they came closer, Jackie saw that she was being led by the hand, as if she were a child. She was terribly scarred down one side of her face and neck, and there the hair had grown back in an unnatural, brushlike manner. She chewed serenely.

The man was looking into parked cars. He was delighted to see that the truck was occupied, smiling at Jack in a guileless, merry way. He came to the point at once.

‘Want a girl, mate? Five bob. Say hullo to the gent, Milly.'

The girl said, ‘Hullo, good-looking.' She took the sweet out of her mouth and looked at it with pleasure, saying, ‘It's orange now. It was green before. I like changing balls, but lickerish's me favourite. I go nap on lickerish.'

The man smoothed back her hair. ‘Well, what do you say, mate? She ain't no Rhodes Scholar, but what she ain't got up top she makes up for down below.'

‘Not tonight, thanks,' said Jack. ‘My father'll be coming in a moment.'

‘Think he might...?'

‘Not him,' said Jackie. ‘He's religious.'

The portly man sighed, resigned. ‘Ain't done too well today, and that's a fact. All these flighty sheilas in town for the dance. Undercutting poor Mill. Eh, Mill?'

The girl gave him a smile both half-witted and of striking sweetness.

‘Like a smoke?' The man passed a packet of cigarettes to Jack, settled down for a yarn. The bitch, her silken skin twitching nervously, pressed up for warmth against the girl. The man admitted without pressure that he had been the cause of his daughter's misfortune.

‘Poor Milly, she was cleaning the kitchen stove with polish watered down with spirits, and I came in and flicked a fag end into the tin not knowing. Whoosh, you never saw nudden like it. It was the shock that turned her head, too. She never spoke for four years, just sat there with her tongue poked out. But you're right as rain now, aren't you, Milly love?'

She looked at him with adoration. He took from his pocket a brandyball, picked the fluff and hairs from it, and gave it to her.

‘Yeah,' she said. ‘I take my brain tonic and I'm real good.'

‘And who makes up your brain tonic, Milly pet?'

‘You do, Dad.'

There was on her face a seraphic happiness. She put her scarred cheek against her father's shoulder, snuggling it like a child.

‘Take you home to bed soon, Mill. Good girl.'

To Jack he said, ‘We're leaving town tomorrow. Stinking new sergeant, standover man, not an ounce of reason in him. Said he'd do me for immoral earnings. Said Milly had to be put in care. Did you ever! Milly's staying with her Dad, aren't you, pet? Look, asleep, just like a bubba. Never think she was thirty, would you? Well, come along, Jess.'

He toed the bitch, who leapt up with a yawn of joy. He nodded to Jack, and the three of them vanished into the dark beyond the lamp-post. Jerry appeared, full but good-tempered.

‘You been waiting long, me old Jack.'

‘Just come a few minutes ago,' lied his stepson. The Nun got behind the wheel. ‘Can't feel me leg, so I must be sloshed.'

The drive back to the wheat farm seemed to be interminable. Jackie remembered the look on the mad girl's face, and envied her savagely. Imagine envying that poor mutilated ninny! He tried to feel disgusted, but his own honesty defeated him. Ah, but she was
cherished,
and she knew it.

This intense longing to be cherished came back to Jackie again and again. The light grace, the kindness of the fat lady, vanished from his memory. She was old, a mother,
old.
He remembered only the thin girl's fingers of her daughter. The girl's spotted green dress fluttered interminably through his dreams. He wanted a young woman in his arms, thin quick fingers to caress him, tickle him, tug his hair. Like Cushie, like Maida. He tried to recall Maida's face, but it had become wan and indefinite. And Cushie's face was that of a child.

It wasn't just sex he wanted. There was plenty of that around, even for one not like other men, what with all the girls getting a crust on the streets with the slump. He faced it, he wanted to be loved and treasured, not by Jerry, not by kind fat ladies, but by a soft warm girl of his own age. In bed that night he frantically searched for Maida's face.

‘I can't have forgotten.'

All he could remember were words that described her, eyes a dark grey-blue, long straight hair, a brown mole like a moth between her armpit and left breast, a crooked little toe where the wheelbarrow had run over it. But he couldn't see her any more. It seemed the final deprivation. He fell asleep into a desperate dream of searching, and awoke sobbing: ‘I'm sorry, Maida. Don't go away', and was terrified in case Jerry was awake and had heard.

At the end of the job, Jerry was pleased that he had stood up so well to the work. To have a few quid in his pocket made him feel secure. He spent most of it on repairs to the lorry—a new carburettor, a second-hand spare tyre that was better than his own. Jackie was against this.

‘She's going all right. Better to hang on to the cash till we see how things turn out. We've got no prospects at the moment.'

But Jerry laughed. ‘Ah, don't be a wet blanket. Come on, give us a blow on the mouth-organ.'

To the strains of ‘Pretty Redwing' and ‘Juanita' they ground away south through a greenish-blond landscape, shrunken creeks showing islands of sand, abrupt wooded hills with weathered outcrops like castles. There was an airy dry feeling in the atmosphere. Lightning sometimes flashlighted the west, but there was not a drop of rain to lay the dust. Gradually Jackie began to feel cheerful again.

There was a big unemployed camp at Til Til Flat. They thought they'd put up there for a day, to hear the work rumours. In the dry weather it had a curious carnival air, quite tidy and clean, with tents and tarpaulin lean-tos rigged up amongst the peppertrees, campfires wagging under billies and frying-pans. There must have been forty people there, most on foot. Jerry parked the truck a polite distance from the rest. Children were splashing in the creek downstream, women were rinsing clothes farther downstream still. Jerry found it delightful to hear human voices, smell food cooking.

‘Makes a man feel sorta homesick, though,' he confided to Jack as they rumped around their fire after they'd eaten.

The woman of the family near by, having washed her dishes, came over to them with a lump of brownie wrapped in a clean tea-towel, and introduced herself as Mrs Bead. Having found out their names, where they'd come from, and where they were going and why, and after looking around to see if any of the youngsters were in earshot, she said, ‘You see that little old green van there, with the curtains across the back? Well, there's a villain got a girl in there. His own daughter! She's a bit dippy, poor thing, and all scarred. You never seen such a mess. But him! He's been going around to all the men in the camp taking orders.'

Jerry looked at her, baffled.

Jackie said, ‘Well, what do you know? Milly!'

The woman gave him a suspicious look. But she was embarrassed by him, so directed her conversation to Jerry, talking furiously: ‘Don't you see? He's selling her. Oh, it's dead positive lousy. This is a respectable camp. Me and my hub are going in to town tomorrow to get our dole, and I'm going to tell the constable what's going on, my very word I am!'

‘Don't,' said Jack impulsively. At Mrs Bead's outraged look he said, ‘The girl's happy and well cared for. If the authorities knew they'd put her in a lunatic asylum.'

‘But what about the you know what?' she screamed right-eously.

‘Gosh, I don't know,' said Jack. ‘All I know is that she'd just fret herself to death away from him. Why don't you just let things be, lady?'

‘Let things be! With prostitution going on? There, I've said it, and I don't care. That poor girl! It's my duty as a mother to do something about it. And as for you, you ought to be ashamed. I suppose you've been at her yourself, you horrible little monster.'