The Past and Other Lies (16 page)

Bertha glanced swiftly around but the top deck was full of families and elderly ladies. Then she remembered Mr Booth—Ronnie!—and she smiled to herself.

‘You should be grateful I offered to chaperone you,’ said Jemima, nudging her for a reaction.

‘
Offered!
You’re a nosy parker, Jemima Flaxheed! You just want to stick your nose in where it’s not wanted.’

‘Oh, don’t think I don’t already know all about your Mr Booth,’ said Jemima in a bored voice, and Bertha clenched her jaw and cursed that Judas Iscariot, that viper in her bosom, that Elsie Stephens.

‘He is not
my
Mr Booth, he is an acquaintance,’ she retorted. ‘And he has a Social Conscience,’ she added, as though that clinched it.

‘A social conscience? I’ll bet he wants more than a social conscience from you!’

‘How dare you! Mr Booth is a gentleman.’

‘Sounds very dull.’ Jemima yawned. ‘And I bet you want more than that from him. Poor man, I hope he’s prepared to defend himself.’ She tapped the place on her gloved finger where a ring would go.

‘That says a lot about your gutter mind if that’s what you believe.’ Bertha lifted her nose in the air and sniffed. ‘If I’m going to vote one day, I shall want to know something about the world. I’m not content to live in ignorance. It’s 1924! There’s more to a woman’s life than...than...than serving tea and madeira cake to wealthy American businessmen!’

‘Ha!’ Jemima responded, and a silence fell as both sisters stared out of opposite sides of the tram.

Jemima had worked for the last year in the tearoom at Gossup and Batsch, a large American-style department store just off Regent Street. The store—a six-storey early Victorian monstrosity—had suffered somewhat during the War. It was rumoured to be owned by Jews and since ‘Batsch’ was obviously a Hun name the building had come under sustained attack in those first few excitable weeks in August 1914. Indeed, the windows had been broken so many times they had had to be boarded up. But ‘Batsch’ had miraculously become ‘Batch’ and since the War ended the store had flourished. Lots of young people shopped there because it sold fifty-shilling suits and ready-made dresses of the type you saw in American films at the Globe. And now there was a tearoom on the lower ground floor, so after you had strolled around and wanted to rest your feet, you could have a nice cup of tea and a slice of cake.

A year ago, Bertha had seen a small advertisement in the
Herald
seeking ‘Superior Serving Staff’ and, though she had not considered herself a serving person as such (it was a little too close to domestic service), the idea of working in a smart new tearoom in a glamorous American-style department store just off Regent Street, even if it was owned by Jews, was exciting. More exciting than plugging telephone lines into an exchange and wearing an uncomfortable telephone receiver fastened to your head all day long, ruining your expensive Marcel-wave and giving you a sore ear to boot. She had shown the advertisement to Jemima.

‘What do you think? Does it sound like a good position? Do you think I should apply for it?’

‘Only if serving fat old cats “keps of tay and a slace of Madeira cake” all day long is your grand ambition,’ Jemima had replied scathingly, and while Bertha had spent some days reconsidering and thinking about it a great deal, Jemima had applied, attended an interview and been awarded the position.

Bertha reached out and with her glove wiped a circle in the window so that she could see through the accumulated smoke and grime. The tram passed the cricket ground then creaked to a stop by the isolation hospital, and a stooped elderly man with a stick tried to get on. He could hardly manage the step and the conductor had to reach down and pull him up. As she looked down from the top deck Bertha saw that it wasn’t an old man at all: it was a young man of perhaps twenty-five, his war medals pinned lopsidedly to his chest. She thought again of Mr Booth whom, she presumed, must have been in the last years of the War, though he had said nothing of this and she certainly had not inquired.

Really, she did not know very much at all about Mr Ronnie Booth, she realised, feeling a knot of nerves begin to form in her stomach. It had been all very fine, this planning and waiting and imagining what might be and counting down the days and getting ready and running for the tram. But now that she was here (with her sister!) hurtling along the London streets towards a young man she had met only once and about whom she knew almost nothing and whose intentions towards herself were utterly unknown, it suddenly seemed somewhat reckless.

Somehow the tram was already clanking past Shepherds Bush and fast approaching Kensington. Soon they would be on Bayswater Road and then—

She gulped. Thank God Jemima was here.

What if Mr Booth failed to turn up? She experienced a moment of panic. Well then, she would simply hop back on the first tram home and no one would be any the wiser—if she were here alone. But she wasn’t alone, she was here with her sister.

Damn
you, Elsie Stephens!

She watched the crowds of couples strolling along the pavement enjoying the unexpected September sunshine. So many bodies, so many faces. Suppose she failed to recognise Mr Booth? Their meeting—miraculous though it had seemed at the time—had been fleeting to say the least. And if she hadn’t been late posting that letter, it would never have occurred at all...

There had been a commotion in the post office. Bertha, joining the queue late on Saturday morning with errands to run for her mother and a letter for her great-aunt’s birthday which ought to have been posted three days before, had been in no mood for a commotion.

‘Express letters and other postal packets are sixpence a mile over and above normal charges,’ boomed a resolute male voice, carrying above the restless queue that stretched as far as the doorway.

‘This is a public service and yet you make it accessible only to those that have wealth!’ came the unlikely reply, also a man’s voice, younger and higher pitched, more emotional.

Bertha, and indeed everyone in the queue, craned their necks, but she could see little more than the back and shoulders of a shop-bought grey suit and a shiny auburn head.

‘Not me that makes it accessible or otherwise,’ replied the postmaster in a bored fashion and Bertha recognised him as Mr Lake, who was actually the sub-postmaster and who had often served her in the past. ‘Now, do you want to send this letter or don’t you? I’ve got a lot of customers besides you.’

‘Aye, there’s other folks want to post their letters too!’ grumbled an elderly woman just in front of Bertha amid a growing murmur of discontent.

The shiny auburn head swivelled around and seemed to sense the mounting air of menace behind him. Bertha saw a man in his mid-twenties with pale skin and a large bushy moustache, a narrow face with a strong nose and chin, and rather nice vivid green eyes. She liked that face. It immediately turned away from her and back to the counter.

‘Brother, you are a cog in a capitalist conspiracy that is so vast you cannot even see it!’ he declared angrily, then turned and marched out of the post office, braving the line of damning looks and disappearing around the corner.

Bertha watched him go and felt a little astonished. And a little disappointed.

After purchasing a stamp for the letter and dropping it into the postbox, she stood in the street looking to the left and right as though she were contemplating the next task on her list of errands. When she saw the young man, now with a small bowler hat on his head, sitting on the bench outside Mulligan’s tea shop, it was almost as though she had willed him there. He was fishing in his pocket for something, a coin perhaps, but his fingers emerged instead with a large fob watch at which he frowned. Then he looked up.

Bertha quickly looked away. Around her, people bustled past with market-day urgency, banging against her with their Saturday shopping. A tram trundled to a stop at the kerbside, disgorging a family of small boys and their young nanny. The conductor leaned out calling, ‘Room up top!’ and pulled the bell. A motor car rumbled up behind the tram, its engine spluttering, and tooted its horn impatiently. But all these noises faded into a distant murmur as Bertha stared straight ahead, her heart fluttering very fast in her ribcage, aware that this was An Important Moment.

Something was going to happen that would change her life forever, or if it did not then an opportunity would be gone and it might never present itself again.

“Scuse me, miss, you forgot your change.’

Bertha spun around to see Mr Lake from the post office standing beside her, his green clerk’s visor pushed to the back of his head, an apron tied around his middle and a small collection of coins in the palm of his ink-stained hand.

‘One and ha’penny for a standard letter. You gave me threepence.’ He tipped the change into her hand then jerked his head down in an oddly formal salute, glared at the young man who was still sitting on the bench, and disappeared back into the post office.

Bertha stared at the coins in her hand and, with a sinking sense of despair, realised that if the young man had noticed her at all, he would now think her a silly, flighty girl with not even a rudimentary grasp of arithmetic.

‘Are you alright, miss?’

She froze and stared with even more intensity at the two coins in her hand. He had stood up! Had spoken to her! What ought she to do?

‘Yes, thank you for asking, I’m perfectly alright.’ She managed a glance at him. Had that been too formal? Too dismissive?

Smile. That was what people did; she must smile at him. She turned her head and smiled directly at him (he
did
have such nice vivid green eyes!) and he smiled back.

‘I, er, I’m afraid I made a bit of a fool of myself in there,’ he said then, nodding his head at the door to the post office, and his slight stammer, the tinge of colour to his cheeks, gave her courage—he was shy!—and even though she thought he had indeed made a fool of himself, she rushed to his defence.

‘Oh no! I thought it was marvellous!’ She swallowed. Had that been too much? ‘I mean, I think it’s wonderful when—when people say what they mean. When people believe, really believe strongly in something!’

He took a tentative step towards her, his eyes observing her eagerly. ‘Do you? So few people do...’

‘Oh yes!’ said Bertha, unsure what it was that she was agreeing to and then realising she could think of nothing to follow up with. ‘Oh yes,’ she repeated, less certainly.

‘It’s so refreshing to hear you say so, miss. So many people, young people like us who have seen first-hand the horrors of the world our fathers have created, who ought to be concerned, who ought to be shaping the world we shall some day inherit, are just...apathetic. Too concerned with dances and American films and mass-produced garments from these foreign-owned stores that are squeezing out honest working people...’ He stopped, his face quite red now. ‘Sorry. No manners.’ He snatched off his little bowler hat and ducked his head at her. ‘Booth. Ronald Booth. Ronnie.’

Ronnie. Bertha sighed. She had always liked the name Ronnie. It was friendly, sort of. Familiar.

‘Bertha, Bertha Flaxheed. Miss.’ She flushed at this last word. Was she being too forward?

There was a slight pause, the initial rush of emotion and then the formalities of introductions leaving a gap that for a while appeared too vast to ever be bridged. Bertha skidded from one corner of her mind to another, seeking with increasing desperation a subject, a sentence, a word that would break the silence. There was nothing, her mind was empty.

‘Are you—do you involve yourself in politics, Miss Flaxheed?’

She experienced a rush of relief.

‘Well, Mr Booth, I was saying to my father just the other day how I am twenty-two years old now—’ Dear Lord, she had told him her age! ‘and how in eight years’ time I may find myself in a position to exercise my democratic right and vote for a government and...and how I intend to...to understand, to read, to
know
as much as possible before that time so that when that time comes, I should be able to make the correct choice.’

She had said nothing of the kind to Dad, though now that she thought about it, it was something she felt she might tell him, one day.

‘Bravo!’ exclaimed Mr Booth enthusiastically. ‘If only more of your sex felt the same way, Miss Flaxheed, then we would show them, eh?’

‘Indeed!’ said Bertha, wondering who ‘they’ were and what exactly she might show them.

‘I am a teacher, a teacher of music, at the grammar school and it is fair to say that few, very few indeed of my female pupils take but the slightest interest in the current political climate, or indeed in any political climate.’ He reflected sadly for a moment or two. ‘In fact, they take only the slightest interest in music, it must be said.’

‘Girls are so silly and self-absorbed,’ said Bertha, who had once been one and felt this excused her betrayal of her sex. ‘But I beg you not to lose hope, Mr Booth, for out of every class of silly and self-absorbed girls there will be one who will trouble herself to learn about the world.’

This sounded pompous but she hoped he would ignore this and instead look upon her as the one girl in the class.