“Well, I can’t live here,” said Elisabeth.
“I’ll get you the Corporation,” said the wife. “You’ll be clean and sweet there soon, you’ll see. D’you want some kippers?”
Elisabeth turned the key in Edward’s lock and then stood back for a while on the pavement, watching the electrical shop across the road opening up. A very arthritic old person stood watching her.
“Go on in,” he called. “You’ll be all right. ’Ere, I’ll come in with you,” and like one risen painfully from the dead he slowly crossed the road, cars stopping for him. “Takes me over an hour now to get up in the morning,” he said. “Now watch that bike. The stairs is steep but if I take it slow . . . I’se easing. Now then . . .”
In the kitchen the airer was unoccupied and through a beautiful window, its glazing bars as fine as spars, lay a long, green, tangled garden full of flowers. Upstairs and upstairs again were bedrooms with tipping floors and simple marble fireplaces. Edward’s narrow bed stood like a monk’s pallet in the middle of one room, on a mat. One fine old wardrobe. One upright chair. A decent bathroom led off, and now the higher view showed a row of other gardens on either side. On the other side from the green grass was a small lawn and forest trees blocking out Victoria Station’s engine sheds.
“Don’t you get too far in with her next door that side,” said the electrician. “I don’t mean Florrie with the ankles. I mean t’other side. You all a’right now?”
“Yes. Well. I shan’t be staying. We saw—well—rats.”
“From the river,” he said. “They have to go somewhere. There’s worse than rats. Now, this is a good house and so it should be. We hear it’s two pound a week rent. Mind, it’s all coming down for development soon. Miracle is that not a bomb touched it. All the big stuff came down—Eaton Square and so on—not a window broken here. Artisans’ dwellings, we are. But panelling original pine. I’ll leave you for the moment.”
“Thank you,” she called down after him. “Very much. Could you tell me why you’re called Mozart Electrics?”
“Well, he was here as a boy,” said the arthritic, amazed that the whole world did not know. “One day there’ll be a statue.”
She found her way to the garden and there were fruit bushes and a cucumber frame, and over the fence to the right an old woman with a florid face was watching her.
“Good morning,” she said. “I am Da-lilah Dexter. You may have heard of me. I am an actress but equally concerned with gardening. And I hear that you have just married Edward.”
“How ever—?”
“News flies through eighteenth-century walls. We heard you arrive last night but then you were gone. I suppose he’s off to his Chambers?”
“Yes. We’re just back—”
“From a long honeymoon. It will be hard to adjust. I suggest you come in for hot cocoa and to meet Dexter.”
“I don’t think . . .”
“I will put on the cocoa and leave open the front door.”
“This,” Delilah said, pointing, “is Dexter.”
The house was like the green room of a small theatre, the sitting room apparently immense since the wall opposite the windows (hung with roped-back velvet like proscenium arches) was covered by a gold-framed mirror that reflected an older, softer light than was real. The mirror had a golden flambeau at either side of the frame where fat wax candles had burned to the last inch. The looking-glass reflected a collapsed man in a black suit, his legs stretched out before him on a red velvet chaise longue that lacked a leg. His face was ivory. He waved an exhausted greeting.
“Dexter,” announced his wife, “is also an actor. A fine actor, but in his later years he only plays butlers.”
“How interesting . . .”
“Butlers have been our support for years. Unfortunately the new drama is uninterested in butlers. It is all tramps and working-class women doing the ironing. But still, here and there, Dexter finds a part, or rather directors find a part for him. He’s the ultimate butler. He very much favours the Playhouse where they still tend towards the country-house comedy, and long runs. At present he is in a play where his part ends with Act Two and so he gets home for supper. They let him off the final curtain.”
“I hope always to be let off the final curtain,” said Dexter. “And as I always wear black I need spend no time in the dressing room. I can leave this house and be on stage in nine minutes.”
“But if you fell over in the street?”
Both actors looked at Elisabeth with disdain.
“We are professionals,” said Delilah. “We can dance on a broken leg. If Dexter
should
get late, he could borrow Edward’s bicycle. I’ll top up your cocoa with a little green chartreuse.”
When Elisabeth had opened every window in the house and propped open the front door with the bicycle, she followed Edward’s telephone wire under a cushion and phoned the Westminster Council about the rat. Then she got busy with the labour exchange and went across to Mozart Electrics about a cleaning agency. At the National Provincial Bank on the corner she opened an account and she attacked the gas showrooms to dare them not to replace the geyser. “They’ll not show up for a month,” said Delilah Dexter, but someone came round in an hour and stayed until hot water crept forth. Elisabeth found a saucepan, cleaned out spiders and ate kippers.
“They were very good,” she told the greengrocer’s wife.
“Yes, They’re from Lowestoft. These are Lowestoft kippers—we’ve gone there two weeks’ holiday for twenty-seven years, even in the war. You’ll be all right, they keep. We’ll be back there in a few months and I’ll get you some more. We don’t like change. We’re here.”
Edward, returning uneasily—and late—that evening to the Grosvenor, found no sign of his wife or his luggage. He walked back dispiritedly to Ebury Street to find every light in the house ablaze, every window open and a smell of kippers noticeable as far away as Victoria Station. His wife on his doorstep, arms akimbo in a borrowed overall, was deep in conversation with the fruit shop, and Mr. Dexter was making his way solemnly down the street dressed as a butler.
“The end of Act Two,” said Dexter, raising his bowler hat.
W
ell, yes. There is money,” Edward agreed. “Yes.” (Reluctantly.) “The fees do begin to roll in at last. But I feel we should not be rash.”
“Decorate white throughout,” said Betty. “The electric shop knows a couple of men down the mews. Then the new place, Peter Jones in Sloane Square, it’s reopened. It’s the place for all carpets and curtains. And furniture. Do you think it’s time we had a car?”
“Good God, no!”
“It could stand in the road.”
“It would need lights at night.”
“We could have a wire through the sitting-room window. On a battery. They all do.”
“It’s against the law. It’s carrying a cable across the public highway. One day the whole street will catch fire.”
“The fruit shop van stands outside all the time. By the way, he says he’ll deliver free.”
“Since he’s only next door . . .”
“And Delilah Dexter’s going to help me with the interior decoration.”
“Which one is Delilah Dexter?”
“Married to the singing butler. They know you. Leave it all to me, but I need a bank account of my own. And something to put in it.”
“That,” said Filth, “is, I imagine, usual now.”
Delilah was very decisive when the bank account was in place. The whole house was to be the very purest white, like Lady Diana Cooper’s used to be in the Thirties, though she wasn’t, Delilah found, the purest white herself. Nor was England. “And we’ll have one sitting-room wall in simulated black marble, surrounding the white marble chimney piece. And crimson and silver brocade striped curtains. The sofa and chairs are good—Edward says they came from Lancashire but can’t remember how. They can be loose-covered in pale citron linen. And the carpet should be white. Fitted to the walls. And thick and fluffy.”
“I’m not sure that Edward . . .”
“Oh, and silver candlesticks with black candles on the chimney piece with a tall looking-glass behind them. It happens that I have some silver candlesticks somewhere. We used them in the Scottish Play. Now, let me go ahead.”
“The Chambers want to give us a wedding present,” said Filth three weeks later, standing outside the sitting-room door and wondering whether to remove his shoes. “This white carpet. It’s where we
eat
?”
“Oh, we’ll eat in the kitchen now. It’s beginning to be considered O.K..”
“I’m sorry. I couldn’t eat in a kitchen.”
“It’s not like it used to be. It will be clean.”
“The Chambers,” he said, in his bony stockinged feet, “want to give us an armchair. I told them we have one coming from the East.”
“Dear love,” she said. “We’ll not see that again.”
Filth looked sad.
“What’s wrong?”
“I remember your face when I bought it. Ecstasy.”
“Oh, I was being childish. Look, tell them we want a
black
chair from Woollands of Knightsbridge. I’ve seen it in the window. It has cut-out holes in it like Picasso. It sprawls about. It will add a revolutionary touch.”
When the chair arrived it still had the price tag attached. Twenty-two pounds!
“Crikey,” said Betty. “Your Chambers must like you. We’d better give a party.”
“I never give parties,” said Filth. “They know me.”
“They don’t know me,” she said. “Come on. I’ll make a list. I’ve done coq-au-vin for dinner, all red gravy. It’s in the kitchen.”
“Very well,” said Filth and, later, politely, “Very good.”
“I wasn’t sure about leaving the feet in.”
Filth’s splendid face began slowly to crack into a smile. Regarding her, he began to laugh, a rare and rusty sound.
“Well, I was born in Tiensin,” she said.
“Do you know what you are, Elisabeth Feathers?”
“No?”
“You’re happy. I am making you happy.”
“Yes. I am. You are. Come on. Eat up your feet.”
She thought about it as she cleared up the unconscionable amount of washing-up engendered by the coq-au-vin, as Edward sat in the Picasso chair, his papers for the next day fanning out all around him on the white carpet. Getting down to them on his knees for a moment, he got up covered in white fluff, but said nothing.
“You are happy,” said Delilah next morning over the garden wall as Betty hung out washing. “What are those queer little tabs? Is it a variety of sanitary towel?”
“No, it’s Edward’s bands,” she said. “Barristers’ bands to tie round his neck in Court. They have to be starched every day. He used to have them sent out, which is fine in Hong Kong, but here—he says they are four pence each.”
“Aren’t you going to get a job? Did you ever have one?”
“Yes. Foreign Service once.”
“Oh. Clever, are you?”
“Yes. I am. Very. But I’m having a rest. I can’t help it, Delilah, being clever. Oh, God!” The washing line came down in the flower bed.
“But when the baby comes?”
Betty, scrabbling and disentangling Edward’s under-garments, froze.
“Well? I’m right, am I not? I can always tell. To an actress it is vital.”
Betty sat back on her heels, stared up at the flamboyant trees behind Delilah’s head. Said nothing.
“Do I speak out of turn? Most humble apologies.”
“No, no, Delilah. Not at all.”
At length Betty said, “Yes.”
“There’s a doctor down the road. He’s set up his brass plate except that it is not brass but a piece of cardboard in the window. It is one of these new Indian doctors who are coming over. I believe they’re very good, if you don’t mind them touching you.”
Betty got up and went into the house and stood in thought. She stared at the white carpet.
“That will have to go,” she said.
She looked at the long windows open to the floor and the road below, and wondered if the balcony outside was strong. She smiled and addressed the black candles from the Scottish Play and said, “I thought I couldn’t be happier and I find that I am,” and alone she set off to the doctor.
And that day she walked and dreamed, smiling lovingly at every passer-by, crossing roads when lights were red, touching heads of children. At Buckingham Palace she stood gazing through the railings like a tourist. She crossed to the steps of the monument to Queen Victoria and looked up at the ugly, cross little face. Scores of children! she thought. And madly in love.
In St. James’s Park she leaned on the railing of the bridge and watched the ducks circling busily about and every duck became a celestial duck and the bridge was made of silver, and diamonds were scattered about on the muddy path. The willows swung and sighed over the water. She walked up Birdcage Walk and across Horse Guards Parade, shabby and colourless with wartime sandbags still here and there in sagging heaps. She walked past the door of Number 10 Downing Street that needed a coat of paint, and to the river that rolled deep and fast beside her and would do so long after she was dead. And the baby too.
She walked past the end of Northumberland Avenue, past Cleopatra’s Needle, the flaking dying Savoy Hotel with its medieval-palace cellars. She walked up to the Strand, crossed over into Aldwych, up to the Temple and to Edward.
“Yes?” said the clerk, sharpish. “What name please? Mr. Feathers is in conference.”
“I’m Elisabeth Feathers. Betty Feathers. I’ve come to thank you for the chair.”
A clutch of girls behind massive typewriters all looked up at the same moment and a junior clerk, like Mr. Polly in a stiff collar, dusted a chair and brought it for her.
“We can’t disturb him,” said the clerk. “I’m so sorry. But he won’t be long. Congratulations on joining our Chambers!”
“Well, I’m not a barrister,” she said. “Maybe I will be one day. I feel I could do anything. Oh, and we’re giving a party.” As she spoke and they all sat observing her she knew that she looked beautiful. Happiness makes you beautiful. I am happy and beautiful as an angel . . .