The Fancy (21 page)

“You’d better go,” she repeated, opening the door. “The doctor has said he mustn’t get excited, but the least little thing upsets him. He’s been ill, you know. His nerves have been in a terrible state ever since the blitz ; he had a Nervous Breakdown.”

“Yes, of course—a Nervous Breakdown,” said Edward, grasping at the magic words which dignify hysteria into a disease. “Well —good night,” he said. She would want to shut the door before the neighbours heard the noise. There was no need for either of them to mention next Sunday.

“Good night,” she said, sadly. The ranting voice filled the shadows behind her. It was like leaving a sacrifice in the lion’s den. “Are you sure you’ll be all right?” said Edward on the doorstep. “Wouldn’t you like me to get a doctor or—or something?”

“Oh, no!” She gave a little laugh. “There’s nothing to worry about. He’ll be perfectly all right after a good night’s sleep.” She laughed again, nervously, as if she could laugh off the blare from the kitchen which proclaimed how all wrong he was.

Edward could hear it even after the door was shut and he was on his way up Queensdale Road. The tin fence seemed to amplify it and throw it about his ears. But long after he was out of its range, he kept hearing it and mopped imaginary sweat from his forehead and said aloud “Phew!” andMonica Dickensan along wondered how Wendy was getting on.

He seemed to be dogged by noise tonight. When he let himself in at his own front door, an hour later than his usual time, voices came out to meet him from the half-open living-room door. They were arguing about something, and they were eating, too ; he heard the noise of knives and plates and hoped there was something left for him. He thought he would go and wash first, but as his foot was on the bottom stair, Connie called out : “Is that you, Ted? Where on earth have you been?”

“Come in here, my boy!” boomed his father-in-law, “and explain yourself. Counsel for the Prosecution will now cross-examine you!” When he laughed, he said “Ha, ha, ha,” just as it is printed.

Edward went in and stood before them like the little boy in “When Did You Last See Your Father?” which hung over the mantelpiece. They had all suspended eating for a moment to look at him and hear what he had got to say.

“Sorry I’m late, Con,” he said easily. “Fact was, I had to see a man about the Rabbit Club. I didn’t tell you because I didn’t think I’d be long, but he kept me talking hours.” The camera turned once more and the scene came to life. Dorothy’s mouth began to chew again, and Mrs. Munroe’s fork continued its journey to her mouth
and descended, while she digested his information along with the baked cod.

“Oh, that awful Rabbit Club,” said Connie, dismissing it. “He’s mad about it, you know,” she said to her family, like a parent excusing a child,

Mrs. Munroe swallowed, and her face was once more flat between the heavy coils of hair. “You’ll run into trouble with that Club if you don’t look out. You never did have a head for business. Every day you read about somebody starting one of these crackbrained schemes and going bust.”

“The trouble is,” said Mr. Munroe, “you’ve got no capital. Can’t start a club without capital. Why, I remember when I founded our Whist Club——”

“But we
have
got capital,” said Edward. “I told you about Mr. Dexter Bell. He’s willing to advance us anything we need until the subscriptions start coming in.”

“Oh, a Jew, eh?” said Mrs Munroe, to whom anyone connected with finance was a Jew.

“No, he’s not, as a matter of fact,” said Edward, and discovered that Connie was saying it, too. “He’s quite well-to-do, though, I should say, “she continued. “I can’t think why he bothers with this daft little idea of Ted’s and that awful Dick Bennett.”

“Something fishy somewhere,” said her mother, removing a bone.

“Oh, I wouldn’t go so far as to say that,” went on Connie. “He doesn’t seem that sort of person. He’s got his own business—estate agents, didn’t you say, Ted—somewhere in the Bloomsbury district, I believe. Do get on with your fish, Pa. You’re terribly slow, and you’ll only want some more after we’ve all finished.”

“Estate agents, eh?” he said, ignoring her request and beginning to cut his bread into maddening squares. “Must be making a mint of money. I met a chap the other day who told me that every flat that’s let in London now could have been let twice over and then again. The City’s choc full. You’ve only got to go into the restaurants and see the queu;
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“Well, we know that, Pop,” said Dorothy. “We’ve all been to the Tuck-Inn and we’ve all stood in a queue and we all know that when we did get a table there wasn’t anything hot left, because you’ve been talking about it ever since.”

“Well, there wasn’t anything hot, was there?” He turned his slow aggrieved eyes on her. “I had to have Spam and had a thirst all night in consequence that got me out of bed three times to drink out of the jug on the washstand. I can’t see the harm in stating a fact that happens to be true, and there was nothing hot, and I don’t care who asks me, if it was the Prime Minister himself, I should tell him : we stood in a queue for half an hour at Tuck-inn and there was nothing
hot left.” He popped a small square of bread into his mouth and chewed as if it were a mouthful.

“Oh, all right, all right, all
right!
” said Dorothy. “Nobody minds your saying that—it’s just that you keep on and on and on about a thing, till a person could scream.” She opened her eyes very wide and half opened her mouth, but as no scream was forthcoming, she shut it again and went on eating. Dorothy was normally the most placid girl—almost cowlike she had been two years ago, when she planted her unbudging devotion and admiration at the feet of Don Derris, who could not be bothered to avoid marrying her. As a maiden, she had been peaceable in the home and never noticed her father was there. Now that she had come back to it after a year of emancipation with Don and in a condition which her mother described as “So”, her irritability increased with her size.

“Dorothy, dear,” said Mrs. Munroe, and wagged her forefinger.

“Leave him alone, Dorothy,” said Connie, “or he’ll never finish. Ted, your fish is in the oven if you want it, though I don’t know what it’s like by now.”

“Well, my boy,” said Mr. Munroe, as Edward was going out of the door, “how’s the factory?” Edward had once tried to tell them about his new job and the responsibility of it and how he was getting hold of it and working up quite a position for himself in the Inspection Shop, but the wireless had been on at the time and they hadn’t really listened. They’d be surprised, he thought, if they could see him at work, passing judgment on complicated bits of mechanism, like a Solomon. He had never been particularly enthusiastic about his job in the Fitting Shop, and if they thought he still felt like that, never mind. They probably could not understand that you could enjoy your job. Although he knew that if he passed anything faulty, it would go through a lot of hands before it got into the air, there was always the chance that all those hands might miss it, even the A.I.D., whom he was discovering now to be not so omnipotent as he had thought when he was new and callow. But he was not going to embark on an explanation to his family-in-law of the exhilaration involved in telling yourself that on your word alone, perhaps, depended whether an engine might pack up at five thousand feet over the North Sea or bring its fighter pilot safely home time after time.

*

Living in sin might be preferable to marriage, as David, who had tried both, always said, but it was much more complicated. Not that Sheila felt in the least sinful or guilty, but although she was learning many things from David, she had not yet quite achieved his indifference to the rest of the world. After that first Saturday night, when he had come to the flat for dinner and still been there at breakfast time, nothing could have been more natural than that he should move his typewriter and much-labelled bags from his uncomfortable lodgings in Earl’s Court to Sheila’s sixth-floor flat near the British Museum. They had
hardly even discussed it. Sheila was in a state of delirious acquiescence to anything, and if he said it was all right, it was all right.

She had gone down to Earl’s Court one evening to fetch his things, as he was busy. His idea of packing had been to throw in a few books and shoes and then lose interest and go off to the office. Sheila didn” he said. “Itms the factory?”’t mind ; she asked nothing better than to exercise her right to fiddle around among his things. Even his shirt collars gave her a thrill, and intimate things like his tooth-brush and the razor blade he had used that morning affected her strongly. His landlady had manifested herself in the doorway, registering neither approval nor censure as her eyes followed Sheila about the room. The unfortunate nape of Sheila’s neck had begun to give her away as a novice by reddening, but she had brazened it out, she flattered herself, like an old hand.

“I said I was your sister,” she told David afterwards.

He laughed. “You needn’t have bothered, darling. She wouldn’t care. You’ve no idea of the unbridled licence of Earl’s Court. Anyway, it’s no business of hers.”

“Oh, but she believed I was your sister. She even called me Miss Fielding.”

“That pleased you, I bet. Swinley rearing its ugly head again.”

He always said that when she made little gestures of respectability. The night porter was her friend and seemed to approve, but the day porter, who had a glass eye, had taken to giving her searching looks with the other one whenever she went in or out. She was careful always to wear gloves, but Swinley had reared its ugly head and prompted her to suggest that she might have a ring from Woolworths. Nothing had come of that, but he had said, laughing at her, that she could call herself Mrs. Fielding if she liked.

But then it was so complicated with ration books and identity cards. The owners of the flats held a check-up every few months and it was silly to call herself Mrs. Fielding when her identity card said Sheila Blake, single. They might get suspicious and think she was an alien. The rations were an awful nuisance. David was registered at Earl’s Court, and she had to leave the train there on Saturdays and get his rations before going home to get her own. His landlady had registered him with all her friends, who kept rickety little shops in Warwick Road and never had anything but tinned plum jam and cheese in silver paper. She was going to be very efficient and re-register him when the next period started, if she could find out how it was done. She had enough trouble with the milkman, who was as obstructionist as a whole Government Department, and they had had to share her ration of milk for weeks while his landlady was getting all his.

These details, however, were of no importance beside the fact that she was ecstatically happy and that life was more exciting than she had ever imagined in her wildest girlhood dreams. Living with David might be tiring, but it was never dull. He hated making plans, and
would suddenly ring her up
in
the evening as she was cooking their supper and ask her to meet him in some bar in ten minutes’ time as they were going to the theatre and dinner afterwards. With a rueful glance at the wasted kidneys, for which she had spent all her lunch hour searching, she would tear off the becoming overall
in
which she had arranged herself against his homecoming, fly to do things to her face and hair, wail hopelessly in the streets for a taxi and plunge underground, scattering old ladies on the escalator, and arrive breathless at the rendezvous to wait for him for half an hour.

Or, again, when they had planned to go out to dinner, he would come home tired and in a domestic mood and expect to find a full course dinner waiting in the oven. Whenever Sheila went home to Swinley, she surreptitiously rifled the larder for tins of food against these contingencies. But best of all she liked Tuesdays and Thursdays, when he had been working all the night before and slept during the Do give me thean alongday. She liked to come in and find him safely asleep. She would let herself into the flat quietly and, creeping into the bedroom, sit down on the edge of the bed for the joy of having his arms go around her neck simultaneously with his waking. There was a lot to be said for living with a man, in or out of sin.

Her mother had never taught her anything about housekeeping, and it was a great worry to Sheila at first. She wished she could confide in Grace, who was always talking about ‘Managing’, and ask her how one Managed. David would eat all his week’s butter in two days and then be surprised that there was no more, and he was frightfully extravagant with toilet paper and soap. Still, he worked so hard that you couldn’t expect him to bother with silly
little
details ; that was the woman’s job, and Sheila was proud to do it. There was a certain fascination about being ridden by domesticity, and she was beginning to understand why some women never talked of anything else. She cultivated Grace’s company and always travelled home with her.

She would have given anything not to have had to go to work, Apart from the difficulty of sleeping with the alarm under her pillow so as not to wake him and either dressing in total darkness or in the bathroom, his work as Feature Editor of a daily newspaper entailed peculiar hours which left him free sometimes in the middle of the day and hankering for her. He was very naughty about her job, and if he woke in the morning when she was dressing would do everything possible to make her late. She was getting a lot of pink cards that said : ‘
YOU
are helping Hitler! Why are you late clocking in?’ Once, he had actually rung her up at the factory and she had had to take the call in Mr. Gurley’s office, with Mr. Gurley listening. David was telling her to come over faint and come home at once, because he was going to Oxford on a story and she was going with him. He had booked their room and it was going to be fun. It had been terrible having to damp his enthusiasm and confidence that she would come. It was impossible
to try and explain and at the same time give Mr. Gurley the impression that she was dealing with a family crisis, because you were not supposed to be rung up. David never understood that her work at the factory was at all important, nor that in wartime you couldn’t come and go as you pleased. “Let someone else count the … nuts and bolts for a bit,” he said, and she had to jam the receiver hard against her ear so that Mr. Gurley couldn’t hear.