The Fancy (40 page)

The machine went on playing. Lou went on darting across in front of them with trays of food and back again to ring up change, the girls from the rope factory scraped back their chairs and clattered out to the accompaniment of mechanical by the time he got home p along tooth-sucking from the group by the gramophone, but no one paid any attention to Sheila and Dinah, sitting engrossed at the counter.

When Sheila got to the part about the night porter Dinah stopped her. “Here, half a minute,” she said, with her eyes starting from her head. “That’s blackmail.”

“I know,” said Sheila impressively, “I’m being blackmailed. I don’t know how much longer I can go on, Di. I can’t possibly afford it.”

“Don’t then. Let him tell your people. They can’t kill you.”

“But I
couldn’t.
You don’t know what they’re like. They’re not like ordinary people in that way. They’d never get over it.”

“They’d cut you off with a shilling, then, so what? Seems to me they wouldn’t be much loss to you.”

“But don’t you see? Once, when I still had David, I wouldn’t have minded so much their knowing. It would have been terrible, of course, even then, but at least I’d have been sort of—sort of proud of being unpopular. But now, they’d probably end up by making me feel ashamed. There’d be all that : ‘Of course, he’s let you down. That’s what happens to girls who cheapen themselves’, and I wouldn’t have a leg to stand on. And I’m not ashamed either. I’d do it again. Isn’t it awful, Di? I believe I’d go back to him if he wanted me.”

“You would hell as like,” said Dinah decisively. “The man’s nothing but a pimp if you ask me. You’re well rid of him,” she went on, ignoring Sheila’s protests. “But this other fellow, this blackmailing swine of a porter, we’ve still got him to settle. My God, darling, you do get yourself mixed up with some men ! I always said you had an unfortunate upbringing. But I’ll fix him. Blackmail, eh? He can’t get away with that.”

“But what can you do? It’s sweet of you, Dinah, but I wouldn’t dream of asking you to lend me any money.”

“Who said anything about money? He’s not getting another cent out of you, my girl, and certainly not out of me. No, I’ll think of something, don’t you worry. Look, we must go back ; we’re hours late already. You leave it to me, I’ll go into a trance over the slipper gears this afternoon and think of something. I’ll tell Bill tonight ; he’ll know what to do. Come on, we’ve got to run.”

Following Dinah’s bare legs across the main road and panting after her down the Estate Road, Sheila felt happier than she had been for weeks with the relief of having unloaded her burden. Dinah had said she would fix it, and Dinah always did anything she promised, from getting you half a yard of tape at lunch-time to finding a man who would sell you a wireless set without swindling you. Her confidence began to infect Sheila, who was surprised to hear herself cheeking the grumbling clock-keeper as they skidded into the clock-house ten minutes late, nearly tore the handle off the clock, and galloped out again past the Ministry of Labour’s poster which everyone was always in too much of a hurry to read :

“Time to go? Well, don’t
rush
out,
It’s not worth getting knocked about.
Jams like this just cause delay,
Shoving simply doesn’t pay.”

“One thing is quite certain,” said Dinah at six o’clock. “You’re not going back to at the other end of the table.ke bthose rooms tonight.” Sheila had confessed in the milk bar to the shaming gloom of Thatcher Street. “Sooner you give them up the better, by the sound of it.”

“But I’ve nowhere else to go! I can’t go back to Kathleen, I told you.”

“You’re coming back to my place tonight at any rate. Buck up and get your coat on and stop standing there like a half wit. I want to get home some time before midnight.”

Dinah and Bill’s flat was small and hot and crowded with furniture and things that Bill had picked up cheap. He was always coming home with bargains : an electric kettle that didn’t fit their voltage, a rug that didn’t match the carpet, a book with twenty pages missing from the middle, a cracked casserole that leaked if you put it into the oven. Dinah accepted all these gifts with suitable enthusiasm, found a corner for them and didn’t let them trouble her. Tonight he had
brought home a patent fire-lighter, which she swore was just the thing

“I’ll find someone to make it work tomorrow,” she said.

“But it worked in the shop.” His nice, pug-jawed face was crestfallen.

“I know, there’s not a thing wrong with it. It only wants adjusting.”

Dinah forgot all about Sunday’s dinner and opened the salmon for supper. Afterwards, Bill got out half a bottle of whisky and the three of them went into a conference about the night porter. Sheila didn’t mind Bill knowing ; he was only like another bit of Dinah. Why couldn’t she and David had been like this? Seeing Dinah and Bill together made their whole relationship, even at its happiest, look like a makeshift. She had thought she was having the best, but it seemed now that she had been nowhere near it. There was a lot more to love than what she had had. Perhaps she hadn’t really been in love at all. If not, then she still had something to look forward to. Sitting round the table with Dinah and Bill and listening to them talk, Sheila began to take heart for the future.

At half-past nine they went out, leaving Sheila alone in the y still met fr

*

Months ago, looking forward to his week’s holiday in September. Edward and Connie had planned to go to his sister’s at Wells. There was nothing much to do there and Connie and Edna did not get on very well, but it made a change. However, when the time came, Mr. Bell could not spare Connie from the office, so Edward went alone.

He would have loved to spend the week at home among his rabbits, for there was a lot of work to be done. He had recently managed to buy a strip of “the Ponds”, the waste land at the bottom of the garden, to accommodate his growing stud and this week would have been a fine opportunity to take down the garden fence and put the wire round his new property and get some more hutches built. He had some articles to write too. The editor of
Backyard Breeding
had not only printed the first ones written at Allan Colley’s suggestion, but had actually asked for more. It seemed that Edward had struck the right note of chatty information for the amateur fancier. Although he had been contributing quite regularly to the magazine for some time, he had not yet got over the dizzy wonder of seeing his name in print. It was not his own name ; he had taken a
nom de plume
, in accordance with the policy of the paper. Remembering the name which he had worn as the hero of his boyhood fancies, he called himself “Cheviot Freemantle”.

The name leaped out at him from the printed page, as it seemed it must do to everyone within range. On Thursdays, he went about all day with
Backyard Breeding
folded back at his article, reading it ostentatiously in buses and cafés in case someone should look over his shoulder and say, “Mm, looks interesting. Wonder who Cheviot Freemantle is.”

But neither Connie nor Edna could be expected to accept the excuse that he could not leave his rabbits. It was not even worth hazarding it, so to Wells he went. Ruth Lipmann, whose interest in the stud grew with its growing prosperity had undertaken to look after the rabbits. When he got home, Edward was going to give her a young quality buck to repay her for her trouble.

Wells was no duller or less dull than it had ever been, but after two days he was already wondering how he was going to last out the rest of the week. His sister Edna was an animated widow who kept a small teashop in a house backing on to the Cathedral green. The rooms above, where she lived with her schoolgirl daughter, and her friend, Miss Pudney, who helped to run the shop, were as bright as herself. She was always going over them with dusters and chamois leathers whenever she had a spare minute. Edward could not remember ever
having seen her sit down except to meals, and even then, she was jumping up the whole time to tweak a curtain or pull a dead flower out of a vase, or to rush dishes out to soak in the sink the moment they were empty.

Edward always had indigestion when he stayed at Edna’s, because almost before you had swallowed your last mouthful, she had cleared the plates and was at the table with a pad and a tin of polish. Ther was delightedpa by nowe was no chance to sit and sip a cup of tea and let your juices work in peace.

All the furniture was so highly polished that things had to stand on little mats to prevent them sliding off, and if you hurried from one room to another, the rugs shot from under your feet and landed you on the base of your spine.

Edna and Miss Pudney were busy in the kitchen and the shop most of the day ; Edward’s niece, Rosamund, who was studying for a scholarship was usually either at school or doing homework, so Edward was left to occupy himself.

He liked the town, but once you had revisited the Palace and the Cathedral and the Close and had marvelled at the quality of the turf on the green and had sat there for a while to savour the atmosphere of arrested tranquillity, there was not much else to do. A girls’ school was evacuated now to the Palace and when you walked round the gardens, you came upon little groups of them studying in niches in the walls. Edward thought he heard some of them laughing at him after he had passed, so he didn’t go into the gardens again.

He went for walks on the little hills towards Bath, but on the third day of his visit, it began to rain and went on raining. He took a bus to Weston-super-Mare and walked out to the end of the pier in a drizzle. Guns were firing far out to sea and he leant on the railing with nothing between him and America and fancied himself the Captain of a Destroyer escorting a convoy, with the wet, salt wind beating on his face.

After a time, he got tired of feeling nautical and went back along the pier to look for tea. All the teashops seemed to be shut or full. After queueing for a quarter of an hour for a seat, he shared a table with a woman whose idea of a suitable four o’clock meal was brown Windsor soup followed by prunes and custard. By the time Edward’s tea and buns arrived, he had only ten minutes left to catch his bus, so he had to bolt them under the censorious gaze of the woman, who had finished her prunes and was removing bits of the skin from behind her teeth with her tongue.

That night, when Edna had finished with the table, Edward got out his notebook and tackled his article on “How to keep damp out of home-made hutches.”

Rosamund sat opposite him doing her mathematics, surrounded by text-books of which a mere glimpse made Edward’s head reel. If she was like that at fourteen, what would she be like by the time she grew up? She was a nice child, though unresponsive to avuncular jocularity. However, Edward persevered with his little jokes, like calling her “The
Brains Trust” and saying : “Good morning. How are the fractions? Not too vulgar, I hope.”

Rosamund’s sums seemed to be coming out. Each time she ruled the neat double lines for the answer, she would clear her throat complacently before passing with confidence to the next. Occasionally, she asked politely : “How are you getting on, Uncle Ted?” and he would say : “Fine, thank you,” although his article would not get on at all. It would not even get started. He was fretting for his rabbits. He kept thinking of little things which he had left out of Ruth Lipmann’s long list of instructions. He kept thinking of his forty square yards of landed properly, with its little mounds of rubbish among the tussocky grass. It was such a waste of time to be here when there was so much to be done. If he could have worked on it all this week, he might have got the place straight and some of the rabbits transferred before the end of the holiday. By the time he got back, the evenings would be drawing in ; it would take him a long time to get it finished now. He was anxious too about that last litter of Butterfly’s that shrugged his shouldersI s.he had left with symptoms of the Snuffles. If only he could be sure that Ruth was keeping them scrupulously isolated. Supposing she were mixing up the feeding bowls. It might be running through the whole stud by the time he got home.

Miss Pudney came up from the kitchen where she and Edna were baking and enquired what he was so studious about, if she might ask. When told, she went into raptures over his cleverness and Edward had to put down his pen and wait until she had finished. She was an eager woman with mild brown eyes and bobbed hair looped across her forehead and secured by a schoolgirl’s slide. She had always been interested in the Press, because her uncle had been a printer on a London newspaper. He had once taken her to see the presses——”Oh, donkey’s years ago, when I was only a kiddie,” and ever since then she had been fascinated by journalism. Had Edward read the new series in one of the Sunday papers dealing with the Life after Death? She herself thought it very fine, but would be gratified to have his opinion, as an expert.

Edward shut his notebook, screwed the top on his fountain pen and was polite to her. Presently Edna came up in her flowered cooking apron and began to plump up cushions and cover the birdcage and generally prepare the room for the night. They all had their Horlicks and a little conversation about the shortage of eggs and cooking fat, and then they went to bed and Miss Pudney played her nightly game of Peep-Bo, by which she contrived to get to the bathroom to brush her teeth without being seen by Edward in her dressing-gown.

In bed, Edward tried once more to get his article going, but it was hopeless. He had even lost track of a humorous phrase he had just coined when Miss Pudney came up from the kitchen. Rather neat, it had been—a parody of the Ministry of Health’s poster : “Coughs and sneezes spread diseases.” What was it? “Draughts and
moisture——” He had thought of a ryhme, but now he could only think of “posture”. It couldn’t be that. “Draughts and moisture——” No it had gone, dispelled by the ensuing conversation. The atmosphere here was not conducive to logical thought and he was too restless to concentrate, irritated by the passing of the precious days, with nothing to show for them. What should he do tomorrow? Take a walk, perhaps, if his brogues were dry, go to the cinema, look in the windows of the curio shops, have tea downstairs in the shop, with Miss Pudney in her cretonne overall waiting on him as if he were the guest of honour? Whatever he did would just be to pass the day—wicked when one’s free time was so precious.