Westwood

by Stella Gibbons

  She drew her hair behind her ears and gathered the curls at the back of her neck with a black velvet bow. It looked too striking, but it was certainly neat, and it made her seem older and taller. She brushed her hair smoothly on the top and noticed that her mind, usually so full of dreams, actually felt more orderly. She remembered the passage in Keats’s Letters in which he describes his own recipe for calming his wandering thoughts and over-excited nerves; washing his face and hands and re-lacing his shoes and then sitting down to write. She looked up the passage, and stood dreaming over it.

  Her mother called angrily up the stairs:

  ‘Margaret! Put that book away and come down here at once! Reg’ll be here any minute and I want the cloth set and some potatoes done, and he’s sure to want a bath, the boiler’ll want making up. Come along, get a move on, now!’

  Margaret reluctantly returned to the present, put the book back among the many others that crowded her room, and went slowly downstairs.

  ‘Whatever have you done to your hair?’ demanded her mother at once, looking round with a flushed face from the open oven. ‘It makes you look about forty. Is that one of Hilda’s notions?’

  ‘It looks so untidy the other way. How many potatoes shall I do?’

  ‘About ten – he’s sure to be hungry. I should think what was good enough for Miss Lomax at Sunnybrae was good enough for anybody.’

  ‘I don’t want to go looking untidy; it’ll reflect on Miss Lomax, as she recommended me there.’

  ‘Well, you’ve made yourself into a proper school-marm, if that’s any comfort; you only want your horn-rims and the picture will be complete. I think you look a sight, but I’ve given over expecting you to do anything to please me. Margaret, Margaret, do be careful what you’re doing; I only scrubbed that table this morning, and there you go putting a greasy spoon down on it. Can’t you put it on a saucer? There! There’s Reg now!’

  Mrs Steggles was not one of the mothers who lavish all their affection on their sons. She gave Reg a kiss but she also noticed that his great muddy boots were making marks all over her clean linoleum, and she nearly told him so, but controlled herself: once, years ago, she had been an ordinary pleasant girl with a quick temper and a pink complexion, and the ghost of that girl, puzzled and bitterly unhappy, sometimes looked out from her face. She looked out now, and with a real effort Mrs Steggles did not mention the linoleum.

  ‘Hullo, Mum!’ said Reg, grinning and kissing her. ‘Hullo, Margaret, what’ve you done to your hair; you look a proper school-marm. I say, something smells good! I’m starving. Is Dad home yet? Can I have a bath?’

  He winked at his sister, who gave an unwilling smile in response, while unloading himself of his heavy Service respirator and tin hat. ‘Can I have that bath now, Mum? I’ve got a date this evening!’

  ‘Dad’ll want to see you,’ was Mrs Steggles’s only protest as she moved his kit to the side of the hall.

  ‘I shall see him when I come in; I’m not going to be late. A crowd of us are going to the Luna. Like to come, Margie?’

  ‘No, thanks.’

  ‘You surprise me! An old pal of yours is going to be there.’

  ‘Who’s that?’ Mrs Steggles glanced curiously at her son, and then at her daughter’s face.

  ‘Frank Kennett. He’s got a spot of leave, too.’

  ‘How do you know?’ demanded his mother, going to Margaret’s rescue even while she despised her for her stricken look.

  ‘The blonde at the Luna told me. I ‘phoned up to see what was doing there this evening, and she said there’s a dance and Frank and most of the crowd would be along.’

  ‘How thrilling!’ said Margaret sarcastically, and went back into the dining-room to finish laying the table. Her brother stamped upstairs in his heavy boots, whistling, followed by Mrs Steggles.

  The news that Frank Kennett was in the town had set Margaret trembling, and as she arranged the knives and forks her one hope was that she would not accidentally encounter him during the next few days. She had a morbid horror of meeting him. They had never seen one another since that painful scene by the Canal, when she had been so anguished and he so embarrassed and so eager to make her take the situation lightly. She had long ceased to weave romance about him (and with Margaret this meant that she no longer loved him) but she still could not endure to meet him face to face.

  She imagined the Luna Café and Dance Hall as it would be about nine o’clock that evening; full of smoke, and smelling of fried food, and noisy with the wireless music and voices and loud laughter. Before the Second World War it had been a meeting-place for Lukeborough’s rowdier boys and girls with money to spend, and since the war it had become even rowdier, for there were American soldiers, lonely and craving for pleasure, quartered in the neighbourhood and they had soon found the Luna. The place was licensed and was attached to the Luna Cinema, one of a big circuit. Its walls, which were shaded in colour from sickly orange to an arsenical green, were now faded and peeling, and its gilt basketwork chairs were battered and tarnished; all its appointments were depressing as only modernist furnishings which have deteriorated can be; yet at night, when its curtains shut out the black silent streets and the damp silent countryside, and if you were young, the Luna was better than the Naafi or your own home. But Margaret wondered how a boy with Frank’s tastes, as she remembered them, could want to go to the place. To calm herself, she began to think about the school in London where she would shortly be teaching.

  She had not a vocation for teaching, but she was clever and could impart her knowledge to others, and at Sunnybrae she had done so well that, at the end of the year when the headmistress of the school had heard of a vacancy at a private school in London, she had recommended Margaret for the post. She herself had formerly been on the staff of a famous London girls’ school, and her recommendation carried weight. At twenty-three years old, Margaret would have a post on the staff of an old-established and prosperous London school. Had she been ambitious, the future would have seemed full of promise.

  She heard her father’s key in the front door and went out into the hall.

  ‘Hullo, Margaret!’ he said, pleased and surprised, shutting the door after him and turning to give her a kiss. ‘I didn’t think you’d be home yet. Well, so you’ve found a house for us. Are we going to like it?’

  When he was cheerful, which was not often, Jack Steggles had a teasing, laughing note in his voice, but usually he was moody and quiet. It was not a neat, depressed quietness; it matched his wife’s air of suppressed ill-temper and seemed as if it might explode into acute irritation at any moment. He wore his clothes with a carelessness that clung to him from his reporting days, and he seemed to belong to a background of bars and newsrooms rather than to the neat conventional little house in which he lived. He was a handsome sturdy man looking much younger than his years, a very heavy smoker and fond of drink.

  ‘I hope so, Dad. Mr Wilson, Hilda’s father, think’s it’s a bit of luck our getting it,’ answered Margaret.

  ‘How far is it from Fleet Street? That’s all I want to know. Is Reg here yet?’

  ‘Yes, he’s upstairs having a bath. It’s about three-quarters of an hour, I should think.’

  ‘All right; I’ll go and get my slippers and then you can tell me about it.’

  He went upstairs to his bedroom; Mrs Steggles did not encourage people to keep their slippers in the living-rooms.

  Her mother’s confidence in Margaret had been destroyed by the girl’s failure to land a husband at twenty; she had thought her daughter a queer, sulky little thing when she was a child, and had increasingly resented her reserve and artistic tastes. Now, she had an impatient affection for her and was resigned to seeing her settle down into an old maid; but Mr Steggles was clever, in the quick natural way that never earns much money or wins fame, and he not only knew that Margaret ‘had a good head on her shoulders’ but trusted her. It was he who had suggested that she should go to London, combining a visit to the Wilsons wi
th business, and find (if such a thing were possible – the Steggleses all doubted it) a house for them to rent.

  Mrs Wilson had written that of course they would be ever so pleased to have Margaret for a week, but as for the house – well, London was as full as it could be, and Herbert (that was Mr Wilson) is afraid you will be unlucky (Mr Wilson, a minor Civil Servant employed at Mount Pleasant, was always afraid people would be unlucky, and Hilda and Mrs Wilson had a job for life persuading him that the sun did sometimes shine.) So Margaret had gone to London, and there, after four days’ hopeless search, she had been told by Mrs Wilson of the house in Stanley Gardens which an old lady, who had fled into the country to escape bombs, was willing to let.

  At the same time that Margaret’s headmistress had recommended her for the post in London, her father had heard from a friend, a former reporter on the North Bedfordshire Record who had gone to the capital some years ago on the invitation of a newspaper baron who liked to encourage talent from the provinces. The reporter had prospered, and now wrote that there was a forthcoming vacancy at the sub-editorial table of his own London daily, and much talk of getting a man from the provinces to fill it. He saw no reason why Jack Steggles, whom he held in gratitude and affection, should not get the job.

  Mr Steggles did not care much whether he got it or not, for he was without ambition and he knew what he enjoyed and how to get it, and he hoped for nothing more than these pleasures until the day he died. But the pleasures he enjoyed would be equally easy to get in London, and his wife had said that she ‘would not mind’ going to the capital and that it was time that they found a more suitable house: this one was too far from the shops and there was a draught under the front door fit to cut you in half. This meant that she wanted to move. So he allowed his reporter friend to make representations on his behalf, and they were both surprised when he got the job. The many and complicated business arrangements were set in hand as soon as the house was found, and in three weeks the Steggleses would move to London.

  The first part of the evening passed less dully than was usual, for Margaret must give her parents every detail she could remember about the house, and before he went off to the Luna Reg had supper with them, and for nearly an hour there was something resembling ordinary family life about the dining-room table, with Reg saying how good his mother’s cooking tasted after the Army, and making them laugh with his stories of the camp some twenty miles away where he was stationed. But after he had gone, and Margaret had told all that she knew about Number 23 Stanley Gardens, and Mrs Steggles had settled down with some fancy-work and Mr Steggles with the early edition of the London Star which he had brought from the office, the telephone bell rang.

  Mrs Steggles continued to draw her silk evenly through her work and Margaret did not look up from her book: Mr Steggles went out into the hall and shut the door after him. A deeper flush slowly came into his wife’s face as the moments passed and he did not return, and Margaret felt miserably apprehensive. Presently her father half-opened the door, saying heartily, ‘I’ve got to go out, Mabel, don’t wait up for me, I may be late.’ Her mother looked up quickly, her lips pressed tightly together, but he had gone. They heard the front door slam.

  The mother sewed and the daughter read in silence. A great dreariness filled Margaret’s heart. The neat, pretty room, the silence, the upright figure of her mother sitting embroidering, seemed unreal, and she felt she was a prisoner, and must sit there for ever. She was so sorry for her mother! and she could not comfort her because they must pretend that nothing was wrong. Yet she could understand how her father must get away from his home; out and away into something more real, at which she could only guess. Oh, surely, she thought wretchedly, there are homes where the evenings aren’t so miserable as they are here!

  3

  The move to London was as complicated and exhausting as most moves in war-time. On their first night there, as the furniture had not arrived, the Steggleses had to ask hospitality of the Wilsons and Mr Steggles’s reporter friend, who both proved friends indeed; Margaret and her mother going to the Wilsons and Mr Steggles to the reporter’s bachelor flat in Moorgate.

  It was a time of strain for Margaret because of her mother’s awkwardness as a visitor; Mrs Steggles was unsociable and suspicious, and disliked paying visits unless it was to relations, and although Mrs Wilson and Hilda were born hostesses, able to make the shyest people feel at home, they were not successful with her; she determinedly made conversation and was anxious every ten minutes about giving so much trouble. After she had gone, Mr Wilson said that he felt as if she had been with them for three years. Mrs Wilson and Hilda rebuked him (for he was not encouraged to express opinions likely to lessen their social activities) but when alone they agreed that for once Dad was right; Mrs Steggles was not easy to get on with. The two families had only met briefly before this, and had known next to nothing of each other’s lives. Now Mrs Wilson and Hilda understood a number of things which had puzzled them about Margaret.

  So Margaret was greatly relieved, on the evening of their second day in London, to stand for a moment at the window of her own room at the back of the new house and gaze up at the hill, where lights were shining just before blackout time, and to know that all the bedrooms were ready to be slept in, and their new life fairly begun.

  How lustrous, how golden and clear, shone out the evening lights! She rested her hands upon the windowsill and gazed pensively out into the dusk, and thought that before the war they had never looked so beautiful. We had got into the habit of taking them for granted, she thought, and yet a light shining at night is one of the oldest and most beautiful things in human life, and poetry and folk-lore are full of them; the light in the forest that guides the lost traveller to the witch’s hut, and the lamp shining between the trees in The Merchant of Venice, like a good deed in a naughty world, and the Lights of London in all the old novels –.

  ‘Margaret! Have you seen the spoons your Aunt Chrissie gave us anywhere? I believe those wretched men have lost them. What on earth are you doing up there?’ Her mother’s voice, shrill and irritable, came up the stairs.

  ‘I’m just doing the blackout, Mother; I’ll be down in a minute,’ she called, and pulled the curtains across her window.

  If I couldn’t get five minutes to myself sometimes to think of things like that, I’d get as bad as Mother and Reg, and almost everybody else I know, she thought, running downstairs. The only person I’ve ever known who sometimes thought about things in that way was Frank; even Hilda – who’s a darling – never does. I suppose I’m just different, that’s all.

  ‘I seem to remember putting those spoons in a corner of the knife-box,’ she said, going into the kitchen and glancing critically about her.

  ‘You seem to remember! That’s helpful, I must say. Mrs Wilson telephoned while you were round at the shops to see how we were getting on, and said she might look in with Hilda this evening. Why people want to come round and see you on the first night after a move is more than I can make out.’

  ‘She meant it kindly, Mother.’

  ‘I expect your father got something solid for his lunch in town,’ went on Mrs Steggles. ‘What are you having?’

  ‘Oh – bread and cheese – anything,’ said Margaret indifferently, going into the dining-room, where the pictures were still leaning against the walls, to lay the cloth. She was not interested in food, and regarded people as rather low if they were; she herself ate quickly and without comment anything that happened to be provided.

  After supper, to which Mr Steggles did not return, the front-door bell rang and Margaret answered it, as her mother was annoyed and slightly worried by her father’s absence, and did not want to leave the sorting and tidying with which she was working off her feelings.

  Two romantic figures stood there in the starlight, with smiling faces and lace scarves over their heads. Mrs Wilson was as slim as Hilda, and almost as pretty. She had a good deal of innocent coquetry, and carried on running verbal flirta
tions, some of which had been in progress for years, with the better-looking among the tradesmen where she shopped.

  ‘Hullo, Margaret! Why, haven’t you got it looking nice! Are you nearly straight?’ she exclaimed, stepping into the hall and gazing round.

  ‘Looks a bit different from that first evening, doesn’t it?’ said Hilda, unwinding her scarf.

  ‘Mother, here’s Mrs Wilson and Hilda,’ said Margaret, opening the drawing-room door. ‘We aren’t quite straight in here yet,’ she added.

  Mrs Steggles was on her knees in front of a large box by the electric fire, and gave her visitors a brief smile as she got up.

  ‘Good evening. We’re still at it, you see,’ she said.

  ‘Well, it’s a shame to come in, really, and I expect you’re calling us all sorts of names!’ cried Mrs Wilson, tossing the scarf away from her clear pink face, ‘but we really came to see if we could do anything for you – you know, tell you anything about the neighbourhood, and that.’

  ‘Do you want a reliable doctor and a good dentist?’ interrupted Hilda, waving a piece of paper. ‘Dad wrote you down the names and addresses of two – oh, and the chemist’s telephone number in case you wanted some Sloan’s or Aspro. Isn’t he a scream, though!’

  ‘Well, he thought it might be useful,’ explained her mother, laughing too. ‘You know what he is – prevention is better than cure is his motto.’

  ‘I’m sure it was very kind of Mr Wilson,’ said Mrs Steggles reprovingly, taking the paper from Hilda.

  ‘Margaret, will you write down these addresses in the book straightaway, before we forget it. Please sit down, Mrs Wilson, and Hilda; make yourselves comfortable. I’m afraid we’re still in a bit of a muddle in here.’ She moved books and boxes to make room, thinking the while what a mad thing it was to come out in the cold with those bits of lace round their heads.