Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky (56 page)

He spent a few exasperating moments walking and fiddling about in the kitchen, and then threw the door violently open
– he had an extraordinary way of even opening a door as though he was slamming it – and seeing Ella, said ‘Oh –’ That, and naught else, was his greeting to her.

‘Good evening, uncle,’ said Ella. (There was a convention originating many years ago whereby she addressed him as ‘Uncle.’) ‘How are you?’

Ever since she had learned to hate him, she always made a point of being scrupulously, even if a little vindictively, polite to him, so that there might be no blot upon the virgin whiteness of her initial advantage in civilized behaviour.

‘I’m all right, thanks,’ he said. ‘Ain’t you got any light in ’ere?’

Mr. Prosser was not the sort of man who could appreciate the subtleties and charms of the gloaming. He made the comment however, in a fairly good-tempered way, and it was clear that he was in some measure controlling, for the moment, his natural spleen out of respect for the visitor to the household.

‘Yes. It’s dark, isn’t it?’ said Ella. ‘I’ll put it on.’ And she got up to do so.

And with the lighting of the gas, the visit, so far as Ella was concerned, was at an end. Mrs. Prosser, who always did her best to be in any room save the one her husband was in, went out at once to get his tea; and Ella, after trying to make some conversation on the weather, went and pretended to help her. She then brought the tea in herself to him, while her mother lit the gas in the kitchen and got on with some ironing. Thus Ella was left in mid-air with only two alternatives, either to stay and talk with her stepfather, which was practically impossible in view of his conversational stone-walling, or to show her favouritism by joining the other camp in the kitchen. She chose the latter. So chilling and disrupting was the influence of this man, who brought misery upon others not by what he said, but by what he did not say, and the bitter way he did not say it.

The door between the sitting-room and kitchen was left slightly ajar, and as her mother worked, and Ella helped her, they carried on a low-toned, semi-conspiratorial conversation,
like the timorous gurgling of a feeble brook, in painful earshot and under the uncanny influence of an invisible Mr. Prosser drinking at his tea and gnawing at his bread and butter within. Her mother always dropped her tones to this level in such circumstances, and Ella was forced to imitate her.

But at last this brook-like murmur became too much for Mr. Prosser’s nerves, and getting up from his tea, he pointedly and violently slammed the door which divided them.

‘There!’ whispered Mrs. Prosser, staring at Ella, half in horror and faintness at this new provocation she had unwittingly given the monster, and half to signify to Ella that she had not exaggerated his behaviour.

‘You mustn’t mind,’ said Ella, feeling at any rate a certain relief on her own part at this crude insulting act, in that it wiped out any obligation on her part to see or speak to him again until next week. ‘You must treat him as a joke.’

‘But what have I
done
?’ asked Mrs. Prosser.

‘You haven’t done anything. You mustn’t mind,’ said Ella, putting her arm round her mother, who took in her breath sharply, and was obviously beginning to cry, while pretending to go on with her ironing.

‘I never do anything,’ she said, and there came another sob.

‘Come along, mother – you mustn’t cry,’ said Ella, hoping against hope that her mother would get control of herself in time. ‘You mustn’t let him see you’re hurt. Things’ll be all right. You mustn’t let him see you.’

But looking round the wretched kitchen, with its snorting green gas illuminating its never-to-be-righted conglomeration of worn-out clothes and utensils; and seeing her mother, with her Stiff Neck, ironing and trying not to cry; and conscious of the savage presence next door, filling the air with its cruelty and discontent; and looking at the clock and seeing that she would be late for her work if she didn’t look out; and realizing that, whereas she, Ella, was already relieved at the thought that she was clearing out in a few minutes, her ill mother had to stay and suffer it all to-night and every day and night – a wave of resentment swept over Ella, and she herself
succumbed, clenching her fists and saying ‘
Oh
how I wish I could get you away!’

‘Yes,’ said Mrs. Prosser, who had now regained control and was ironing as if nothing had happened. ‘I only wish you could.’ And there was a kind of placid hopelessness and wistfulness about the remark which wrung Ella’s heart.

Always, reflected Ella, when she left her mother it was like this – livid green gas in the window-reflected kitchen, fresh calamity, haste lest she was late for her work, black despair on all sides and nothing decided, nothing advanced, no suggestions or gleam of light for the future.

‘Well, mother,’ she said, ‘I’ve got to go.’ And she started to put on her mackintosh. ‘Things’ll come right, somehow.’

‘Yes, I daresay,’ said Mrs. Prosser, in a more comforted tone, and added, ‘Perhaps you’ll be getting married one of these days.’

Now what exactly, wondered Ella, did she mean to infer by that? Was she harking back, and did she mean that Mr. Eccles might be going to marry her?

‘Yes, perhaps I will,’ she said, doubtfully.

‘You never know,’ pursued her mother. ‘You should certainly be thinking about it.’

Ella saw that this was unmistakable Eccles innuendo, and she took alarm. Was her mother Building? She hoped that she had not said so much that her mother, when alone, would Build. However, there was no time to correct any impression now, and after prompting her mother with a few stern admonitions as to the proper line of defence with fiends in human shape, she gave her her customary ten-shilling note (which was received with a gloomy shamefaced ‘You shouldn’t,’ but unconcealable evidences of heavenly relief) kissed her brusquely to cover up her embarrassment, and left her.

And that was that. She was out again in the pouring rain, glad, yet ashamed of being glad, of having got away from that appalling atmosphere, and grinding round in her head for some means of attack or solution.

Only when she was in the bus taking her back did she recall
Mr. Eccles, and her mother’s innuendoes. She wondered what the gentlemanly Mr. Eccles would think, if he knew he had been described and viewed in the light of prey in a poverty-ridden room down at Pimlico. She was inclined to reprove herself, but reflected that possibly he had discussed her with someone else. It was strange, how quickly two people’s business became public – other people’s business, in fact.

In her gloom and dissatisfaction with life, however, she felt kindly towards Mr. Eccles, remembering his generous entertainment of yesterday. After Pimlico, she could hardly credit that she had ever moved, however briefly, on so riotous a plane. And, indeed, in her loneliness, his apparent affection was not untouching. Putting all personal feeling right aside for a moment – suppose her mother was right and Mr. Eccles was the solution she was seeking? It seemed plausible enough. And if once it was plausible, endless vistas were opened up.

But, of course, it would be unwise to forget that Mr. Eccles held the only vital vote in such schemes for the general welfare. And had she not already decided that she had Put Mr. Eccles Off? Would she ever see him again? No. Probably, if she understood his psychology, he would avoid the pub, henceforth, and run like mad if he ever saw her. And since she had made such an ass of him against those railings, who could blame him? What a fool she had been. Heaven knew what she had gone and lost now. She wished she could see him once more, if only to let him know that she took the Railings all in the day’s work, as it were, and had had no deliberate intention of Putting him Off. Perhaps he would come in this evening. He might, after all.

But ten o’clock that night – the time at which ‘The Midnight Bell,’ after a great deal of noise, barred its doors against its last customers – left Ella’s heart finally barren of any such hope.

‘I
MENDED TWO WIRELESS
sets the term before last,’ said Master Eric, practically out of the blue, his arrogant pleasure in his achievements depriving him of any power to lead into a subject gracefully, ‘which all the other chaps had given up.’

‘Did you now?’ said Ella, possibly with the minutest tinge of sarcasm in her voice. This was next morning – still grey and raining. She had now had three successive mornings of Master Eric’s ‘Helping’ in the bar, and possibly the cloak of love in which she indiscriminatingly, and because he was a ‘kid,’ wrapped Master E., was beginning to wear a little thin in certain patches under his complacent yet nagging friction. Not that she was conscious of this, or would have admitted it to herself if she had been.

‘And one of them belonged to the Science Master,’ pursued Master Eric. ‘That was funny, wasn’t it?’

‘Yes. That was funny.’

‘You wouldn’t have thought that I could have done it when the Science Master couldn’t, would you?’

‘No. You wouldn’t,’ said Ella, secretly thinking either that there was some mistake or that the Science Master hadn’t really tried. But she showed nothing of that.

‘It was quite simple,’ said Master Eric, ‘too.’

‘Was it?’ said Ella, and at this moment Bob, who had been cleaning the brass outside, passed through the bar on his business. In passing through he gave a curious look at the infant, and another curious, and as it were comprehending look at Ella, which she scrupulously refrained from returning. Bob, in his masculinity, took the most extraordinary attitude towards this little boy. Only this morning, earlier, he had made a staggering reference, out of the blue, to ‘that awful little brat,’ and ‘What
do
you mean, Bob?’ Ella had said. But she could not credit that he really meant anything so shocking. Probably, she guessed, it was mere excess of humorous affection which forced him to express himself in so frightful a manner. Nevertheless, the glance which he now gave her in passing through did nothing to support that
plausible and decent theory, and she looked away quickly.

A minute or two later Bob put his head round the inner door, and made her heart stop.

‘Don’t you want that letter of yours, Ella?’ he said. ‘It’s been hanging about all morning.’

‘What letter?’ she said, going pale. Ella hardly ever received a letter, and they always frightened the life out of her. And this morning there were extra reasons for taking alarm. In the first place it had been lying there for three or four hours, a terrifying enough thought in itself for an inexperienced letter-receiver, and in the second place she was filled with a pulsating premonition as to the source from which it had come.

‘I’ll get it,’ said Bob, and did so.

‘Ta,’ said Ella, with as much indifference as she could rally, and looking at the cautious handwriting of the address, she had practically no doubt that her instinct had been correct. The postmark from Chiswick finally confirmed her, and she tore it open.

‘Strange,’ commented Master Eric, ‘that you don’t read your own letters when they’re waiting for you.’

Unlike the good-mannered Bob, who had again vanished, Master Eric had no intention of leaving Ella in privacy with her correspondence, but was clearly going to hang about in as close proximity to her as possible and glean whatever of its contents he could. But Ella ignored him and began hastily to read.

‘178 Mervyn Avenue,

Chiswick, W.4.

‘My dear “Ella,”

‘I write this to say that if the weather is in any way clement to-morrow – unlike this afternoon, when the heavens are surely somewhat reminiscent of the days of the flood! – I shall probably be up in your part of the world, and wondered whether you would care to ‘slip out’ and meet ‘yours truly!’

‘On no account put yourself out. It is not worth turning out in this dreadful weather, and I shall stay indoors myself unless
there is an improvement. But if it is at all decent I shall be in the
Main Hall
(
Entrance Coventry Street
)
of Lyons
’
Corner House at 3.45 p.m. sharp
. I shall not expect you to be there, and will wait five minutes. So decide yourself. I just thought I would make the suggestion as if you were in that part of the world, shopping perhaps, it might be pleasant to have a little tea and a chat. But make no effort as I myself shall not turn out if it continues like this. Au revoir, then, (or do we say
Cheerio!
)

‘Yours v. sincerely,

‘E
RNEST
E
CCLES
.’

‘Is it from a Lover?’ asked Master Eric, who was growing impatient while Ella deciphered this eagerly from beginning to end.

‘Don’t be so cheeky, Eric,’ said Ella putting it back in the envelope with a thousand lines of speculations starting in her head.

‘But the point is,’ said Master Eric, with the same suave impudence, ‘is it?’

‘You run along and mind your own business,’ said Ella. But the truth was, of course, that the child had unwittingly put his finger precisely on the mark.
Was
it from a Lover? Here was the old query up before her again, and what light, if any, was thrown upon it by this missive? None, that she could see. To begin with, it was a peculiarly non-committal and indeed semi-contradictory letter – in that he had not made it quite clear to her, or apparently to himself, as to whether he had asked her out to tea with him or not. The wording, in fact, took away with one hand what it gave with another. He wanted to see her, so far as she could gather, and he did not. She was amused by the way in which he cleverly sent her out shopping towards the end, also by the odd and rather arbitrary way he had chosen the district for her to do her shopping in. In fact he had shown great skill altogether in getting them both into that part of the world purely by accident, so that he did not have to invite her direct, but was merely accommodating her. And what a baffling letter in
other respects! That ‘Ella,’ in inverted commas – what was behind that? Paternal archness? Or boldness tempered by reserve, as much as to say they had not actually plunged over the giddy cliff into affectionate Christian names as yet, but could stand on the edge and play with the prospect. And then what an extraordinary blend of old-fashionedness and clumsy pseudo-modernity in his allusion to ‘the Flood,’ ‘Yours truly,’ and ‘Cheerio!’ At one moment he was an elderly disinterested gentleman afraid of the rain, at the next betraying a kind of forced sprightliness which might be the omen of incalculable developments.