The Past and Other Lies (23 page)

‘Very well then,’ declared Miss Crisp, having received no satisfactory reply—indeed no reply whatsoever. Her bosom rose in majestic indignation. ‘Be warned, Miss Flaxheed, that your conduct is under observation and that any further transgressions on your part shall, indeed
will
, warrant a full disclosure to Mr Littlejohn!’

And with this, Miss Crisp swept away with all the grandeur of the Orient Express pulling out of Victoria station.

Mr Littlejohn.

A shiver ran the length of the switchroom to the furthest end of the hall, where the single shuttered window high in the ceiling looked out over the rooftops of northern Acton. The shiver rippled back up the opposite side of the room and stopped dead at the solid, firmly closed door that led, by means of a corridor, a second door and an outer office, to Mr Littlejohn’s office.

Someone sniggered. It sounded like Nellie. ‘Spiteful old cow,’ murmured someone else, and with such perfect diction that it must have been Fliss Cutler.

‘She wouldn’t dare, Bert,’ hissed Elsie, leaning over and patting Bertha’s hand.

No doubt this was intended as a sign of her solidarity. But Bertha had not forgotten that it was Elsie who had let the cat out of the bag to Jemima a year ago about her meeting with Ronnie.

‘You have a temporary connection now, caller,’ sang Elsie into the transmitter at her mouth.

Mr Littlejohn was controller of West Western Telephone Exchange. Few in the switchroom had ever actually seen him until the occasion—now part of West Western folklore—when a raven had flown in through the solitary window and had, for an hour, flapped and squawked and swooped amid the steel rafters of the switchroom, causing mayhem and terror and the whole of the West Western Exchange had come to a complete halt, leaving all of west London from Shepherds Bush to Ealing incommunicado. Eventually Mr Littlejohn himself—six foot tall with steel-grey hair and brandishing a pistol—had emerged through the solid and usually closed door. A number of shots had been rattled off and the raven disposed of. The solitary window had been shuttered immediately and had remained shuttered ever since.

Bertha had been off sick that day, the result of a nasty head cold contracted after a disappointing picnic at Kew the previous Sunday, and so had missed the one and only exciting event to happen in the switchroom’s history.

Remembering that particular picnic at Kew five months ago—just two weeks, in fact, after Jemima’s wedding to Ronnie—Bertha forgot entirely about the threat of the mythical Mr Littlejohn and the reality of the vitriolic Miss Crisp. Instead, she allowed herself to dwell on the reason for her ‘more than usual mistakes’ that morning.

That reason was Mr Lake, of the post office.

Mr Lake, whose Christian name was Matthew, had appeared unexpectedly at the wedding reception that ghastly Saturday afternoon in March bearing a telegram that had irked Jemima and caused her to summarily dispatch him very shortly afterwards.

Far from being discouraged, Mr Lake had taken up a position outside the church hall from where he could observe the departure of the newlyweds at his leisure. He could also accost the bride’s older and as yet unmarried sister, Bertha.

Leaving the reception hard on the heels of the newly married Mr and Mrs Ronnie Booth as they had boarded a taxicab bound for Paddington Station and thence to Torquay, Bertha had walked straight into him.

‘Oh, beg your pardon,’ mumbled Bertha. Looking up she was surprised to see Mr Lake who, not half an hour earlier, had delivered the telegram.

‘Miss Flaxheed. It
is
Miss Flaxheed, I believe?’ replied Mr Lake, in a way that dared her to contradict him.

Mr Lake’s somewhat conceited and over-familiar manner made Bertha very much want to contradict him. She also had a suspicion that he had lurked about on this street corner so that he could get a last and lingering look at the young bride as she was whisked away on her honeymoon. Bertha bridled.

‘Yes it is. Now please excuse me, I am in a great hurry.’

Bertha was not in a hurry, great or otherwise, but it seemed prudent to give that impression. To substantiate her claim she thrust out an arm and made as if to stride purposefully onwards. But Mr Lake, who was a solid-looking man and tall besides, seemed in no particular hurry to stand aside and her departure was thus thwarted.

‘Perhaps you would care to accompany me on a picnic to Kew one Sunday afternoon, Miss Flaxheed?’ suggested Mr Lake.

This was such an astonishing thing for Mr Lake of the post office who must be well into his thirties, if not older, to say, that for a moment Bertha was dumbfounded.

‘The crocuses are quite delightful, you know, at this time of year and the greenhouses have all manner of orchids in bloom at the moment, from South America and the Asias and other such places, I believe,’ said Mr Lake. ‘Young ladies are partial to flowers in bloom,’ he added, as though he had read this fact somewhere and was determined to make the most of it.

Bertha was unmoved by this appeal to her femininity. She was, however, in a state of acute anxiety over the suggestion from an almost unknown man that she accompany him—alone?—on a picnic. To Kew.

A response was undoubtedly required and, to give herself time, she stepped back a little, the better to view Mr Lake.

He was certainly in his thirties, though perhaps not as close to forty as she had at first assumed. His face was clean-shaven and large, his nose proportionally vast and his neck not much narrower than his face. He wore the uniform of the post office counterman, which was a dark grey serge jacket and trousers, with a wing-collared shirt beneath, and a dark grey felt hat that he was now holding before him in two vast hands. He was easily six foot tall and Bertha experienced just a flicker of nervousness.

But his face was friendly enough, she decided. His eyes, though you couldn’t tell the colour at this time of the evening, nevertheless appeared friendly too. The post office, one supposed, would not employ someone who was not of good character. Besides, when he worked behind the counter he wore a sort of green visor on his head and a bottle-green apron tied around his waist and he used a pair of tweezers to tear off quantities of stamps. She didn’t equate that sort of thing with opium dens and white slave traders.

But why Mr Lake was now standing outside the church hall, accosting her with invitations to picnics at Kew on Sunday remained a mystery.

‘I believe I have an engagement this Sunday,’ she said at length. From this he was to infer that she was a young lady with options, that she was not at all impressed by his unwarranted proposition, and that he should most certainly consider this a refusal.

‘Well then, the following Sunday?’

Bertha turned to look rapidly from left to right to see who was within hailing distance should she need to call for assistance, and—of more immediate concern—who might be observing this exchange between herself, older and unmarried sister of the bride, and an employee of the post office.

But the wedding party had moved on so she turned back to Mr Lake. There were ink stains on the pads of his fingers and around the nails of his right hand, the stains a very faint blue as though he had made every attempt to scrub them clean. The stains and the scrubbing had an oddly comforting effect.

It occurred to Bertha that in two Sundays’ time her younger sister and her younger sister’s new husband would have returned from their honeymoon in Torquay and be living as man and wife in Ronnie’s home. Much to her own surprise Bertha found herself saying, ‘Yes, I believe I have no engagements the following Sunday.’

Accordingly, two Sundays hence, a mild and partly overcast day in early April, she had announced after lunch to her astonished father and her silently knitting mother that she was going to meet Mr Lake from the post office at the District Railway station and that she was going with him by means of a railway train to Kew Gardens, whereupon they would take a stroll in the Palm House and perhaps also the Orangery, and then partake of a light picnic tea prepared for that purpose by Mr Lake, and that she would return in time for supper.

And that is what she did. More or less.

The mild and partly overcast Sunday lunchtime promised to become an unseasonably warm and brilliantly blue-skied afternoon, and as she made her way a little breathlessly, in daringly high court shoes, to the railway station, Bertha was glad she had discarded her Gloria Swanson coat at the last minute. She wore instead her best dress—beige with an irregular hemline that rose almost to the knee on one side—and carried a natty Dorothy bag with tassels in grape that almost matched the aubergine of the second-best cloche hat that Baxter’s Millinery in the high street had to offer.

She would not think about that other time she had rushed to meet a young man on a Sunday afternoon.

It was better not to imagine how things might have been.

This morning Jemima had swept triumphantly into the house, Ronnie following sheepishly in her wake, to announce that they were returned from their honeymoon. Had, in fact, returned some days before but had been so preoccupied with home-making and other sundry marital duties that they had been unable to visit before now. When they had gone (less than an hour after they had arrived), Bertha had made her announcement about meeting Mr Lake.

She turned the corner and there, immediately outside the station booking office, was Mr Lake.

For a moment her courage almost failed her.

He stood, legs slightly apart, hands behind his back in the manner of a soldier standing at ease. He was dressed in a neat dark suit and collar and tie. The only concessions he had made to the Sunday afternoon were the brown shoes in place of his boots and the soft collar in place of the starchy wing collar. On his head was a soft grey hat and she silently thanked God that he had not worn a bowler. He was, when all was said and done, Mr Lake from the post office.

He hailed her with a wave of his hand and a ‘Hullo, Miss Flaxheed!’ and Bertha, alarmed that someone she knew would see her, hurried over to silence him. ‘A beautiful day for a picnic,’ he added loudly, reaching down and picking up a very small wicker picnic hamper.

Ought she to have brought something too? Bertha wondered in sudden horror. Was the arrangement that they would both provide their own picnics and here she was empty-handed so that she would either have to starve or ask to share Mr Lake’s? She decided to say nothing and see what transpired.

‘There’s an east-bound train in three and a half minutes,’ announced Mr Lake, taking a large gold fob watch from his waistcoat pocket and studying it with a satisfied frown.

I’m out with my father, thought Bertha, dismayed.

‘I have taken the liberty of purchasing our tickets,’ said Mr Lake, holding up the two tickets as proof of this liberty.

Bertha followed him onto the east-bound platform where they stood, side by side, close to the platform’s edge, and cast desperately about for something to say. The picnic? No, that was dangerous territory. The weather? Always safe but he had already beaten her to it. The price of the tickets? He might think her grasping and miserly. Or careless and irresponsible. The train was late. There was still time to back out.

But she knew she would not back out; that was the one certainty. The embarrassment of turning and fleeing now, at this stage in the proceedings, would surely outweigh any embarrassment the rest of the afternoon could mete out.

She was here for the duration.

Mr Lake—surely he would ask her to use his Christian name?—pulled out his watch again and gave it a disapproving glance.

‘I understand this station used to be called Mill Hill Park,’ Bertha remarked. ‘I mean, before it was renamed Acton Town,’ she added, lest he should be in any doubt. And surely this was the most idiotic thing she—or indeed anyone—could have said. But really, what did it matter? Here she was, Bertha Flaxheed of Wells Lane, twenty-three years old, operator at the West Western Telephone Exchange, worrying about what Mr Lake of the post office thought of her conversation.

‘Oh? You’re a bit of a train buff, are you?’ replied Mr Lake, turning to her in some surprise and perhaps even approval. ‘I’m a big one for all forms of transportation myself, and communication—it’s the way forward, you know. What attracted me to the postal service in the first place. That and my old father,’ he added as the train arrived. And with this newly established interest in common, they sat in perfect silence the two stops to Turnham Green, changed platforms and caught the Richmond train to Kew Gardens.