A Pin to See the Peepshow

by F. Tennyson Jesse

  “Alfie …” cried Ruby, “come in. I thought you were going to meet us at Murray’s. Julia, this is my cousin, Alfie Safford. This is Miss Almond, Alfie, and we’ve got to give her a good time this evening.”

  Alfie smiled and shook hands with Mr. Gordon, who was evidently an old friend, and with Julia, and said “Hello, Ma,” to the dresser, who seemed pleased.

  Alfie was, as Ruby naïvely put it, “learning to be an officer.” Until the war he had been in a stockbroker’s office. Ruby was a lovely creature, with dyed red hair, which she wore massed thickly right down to her brows; cow-like brown eyes, and such a full mouth that it seemed almost as deep as it was long—one of those lovely mouths that seem as though they had been put on to the face from the outside. She was absolutely colourless, and had the sense not to use rouge, for her white skin was one of her charms. She had ugly hands, broad in the palm, with short, but very pointed fingers, like talons; and steep little feet that seemed to go straight down into her high-heeled shoes.

  Alfie resembled her somewhat, but his figure was far better than hers. It was possible to imagine Ruby becoming dumpy in another ten years, her bust was already threatening; but Alfie had very long legs, and a flat straight back, and a small Roman head, poised with a curious bird-like effect upon a too-long but round young neck. He had just enough good looks for a uniform to translate them into handsomeness. His hair, not being hennaed, was dark; his eyes, like Ruby’s, were brown, but they were somewhat slanting; and these narrow, slanting eyes gave an exotic look to his small tightly modelled face. On his high cheek-bones the healthy colour lay in a faint tinge of rosy brown. His teeth were very white and even, and Julia, as she saw him laugh, remembered in a life which she had forgotten, she had liked to see a pretty, red-haired girl called Gladys, laugh; for Alfie’s mouth opened square, in just the right shape, as Gladys Pepper’s had done. He had an awareness of his own good looks which added oddly to his charm, because it gave certainty to his glance when it meant to catch yours.

  At once there was between him and Julia that flamy contact which she now knew so well in the casual meetings of the street and of business, but that up till to-night she had always refused to admit to intimacy. Now she let her own eyes answer, though she still pretended unconsciousness of any understanding in her talk.

  Ruby was proud of her cousin, partly because of his charm, and partly because of his uniform, but she was not really interested in him. They had been brought up together in the same Midland town, in a Nonconformist family, as though they had been brother and sister, and each knew exactly when the other was lying.

  Nevertheless, Ruby was pleased when Alfie came round to the stage door, and did not bother to contradict anyone who thought he was interested in her “in that way.” But only last evening he had announced in her dressing-room that he was tired of being used as a whetstone, and did not intend to come round to the theatre any more; that she never introduced him to a pretty girl; that she had managed without him for a good many months, and that now his time for being sent to France was coming within measurable distance, he felt he could jolly well manage without her. Ruby wanted him about; he was the only male of whom Mr. Gordon was not jealous, and an evening spent alone with her “friend” bored her. It had been partly kindness that had made her ask Julia for the evening, partly the sudden realisation that here was a girl who would “do” for Alfie.

  Mr. Gordon, who was the kindest and most amiable of men, danced with Julia once, treading on her toes as he tried to crane his short, thick neck over his shoulder to see what Ruby was up to. After that Julia danced with Alfie. Their steps fitted perfectly, and Julia ceased to worry about what time she would get home; about whether Bobby had had his walk or not, and about what Dad and Mum would say to her to-morrow morning.

  “Do you dance a great deal?” asked Alfie, as he steered her in and out amongst the galloping majors of Murray’s.

  “Hardly at all,” said Julia, realising in one of her gifted moments of inspiration that truth was the best policy. “I’m generally too tired by the end of the evening. I work in a shop, you know. Your cousin comes there for her clothes.” A year ago Julia would have said “costumes” and “Miss Safford.”

  “Do you? I was a clerk in a stockbroker’s office,” said Alfie ingenuously. “I don’t think it’s a bad old war, not yet, anyway.” And he squeezed Julia a little to him in the dance, after the manner of the young men of his particular kind. Julia remained unmoved and rigid; her thick, dark lashes lying upon her cheek. Alfie was young enough and inexperienced enough to think he had made a mistake, which was exactly what Julia had meant him to think. At the end of the evening he asked her rather timidly whether she would come and lunch with him one day soon. Julia shook her head; it was always impossible to say whether you could get off for lunch from l’Etrangère’s, but her refusal presented itself quite differently to young Alfie, who plunged further and asked for dinner and dancing. Julia, who would have jumped at the luncheon invitation had she been free to do so, saw that she had done the right thing, and again seemed doubtful, then yielded. They arranged to meet at what Alfie called “The Troc” on the following Saturday evening.

  Alfie insisted on seeing her home that night, although Julia warned him it was a very long way. They took the District Railway to Stamford Brook Station, crossed the road to Heronscourt Gardens, and strolled slowly past the sleeping little Victorian cottages, then into Love Lane, and so upwards to Two Beresford.

  Julia felt a curious sense of elation as she and Alfie moved together through the quiet little world she knew so well. She had been dancing at Murray’s and she was being seen home by a young man, an officer.

  She had not fallen in love with Alfie. She knew nothing except the message of her own senses, which said that here was an attractive young man, who, in his turn, thought her attractive. And she was aware also of that strange feeling of the possibility of death which had begun to haunt the world, which permeated the air and which added such a zest to life. For behind her were her schooldays, and the times of weeping at the shop, and far remote from her seemed the sordidness of her home. She was Julia, young and vital; the wonderful world, alive with death and disaster, and strange chances, and amazing marriages, and meals at restaurants, and opportunities of every kind, was within her grasp. She would say to Dad and Mum in the morning: “Oh, it was quite all right. An officer saw me home: Ruby Safford’s cousin.”

  Beresford Villas stood up thin and pointed in the moonlight; about them the skeletons of trees stood darkly. Julia put her finger to her lip, and tiptoed with exaggerated caution up the Bridge of Sighs. She slipped her key into the door, and as she pushed it gently open felt a cold, wet nose thrust into her palm. Bobby added to his other virtues that of knowing her footstep, however light it was, and even when accompanied by that of somebody unknown. Alfie, looking suddenly young, shy, and rather charmingly awkward, stood hesitating on the top step. This, he knew, was where he ought to have claimed a kiss in the best man-of-the-world manner, as practised, or at least described, by his fellow clerks. Yet he did nothing of the sort. He stammered a little as he spoke.

  “Next Saturday, then. Can I come here and fetch you?”

  Julia thought for a moment. She realised, even accustomed as she was to them, that neither Dad nor Mum was very attractive, and yet if she were to see more of Alfie he would have to know what her people were like—already she called them “her people” even to herself—whereas a year ago she would have said “her relatives.”

  “All right,” she said. “Come in about seven.”

  “Right oh!” He clutched at her hand; she smiled at him, and gently closed the door. She waited, her fingers fondling Bobby’s head, to hear Alfie’s footsteps fading away down the steps of the Bridge of Sighs.

  Julia and Alfie went out together a good deal during the weeks that followed, and during the greater part of that time Julia told herself lies. For she was f
eeling the first stirrings of physical attraction, and in so far as she had been brought up to acknowledge facts at all, it had been to think them not quite nice.

  Nothing had ever been explained to Julia—not one adolescent yearning, not one pricking of innocent and natural desire. Mrs. Almond, her own body disappointed by the swift and matter-of-fact assaults of her husband, had early in life come to the conclusion that many of her generation came to—that the whole affair was a song and dance about nothing. Vaguely she thought that the gentlemen enjoyed it, and the women did not. Such had been Mrs. Almond’s conclusion, and it did not worry her unduly. When you cooked and washed-up, and “made-over” your old frocks year after year, and coaxed a tired, irritable man into amiability every evening of your life, the failure of certain nerves and pulses to produce a sensation which you did not even know existed, did not affect your daily round or your philosophy of life. The complete failure of the physical relationship had saved Mrs. Almond a lot of trouble. All she had disseminated for Julia’s instruction was a certain atmosphere of negation and disgust, which Julia had perforce absorbed to a certain extent. Naturally passionate, her own pulses told her a different story, but her upbringing made her think that she ought to deny, even to herself and most certainly to Alfie, the acknowledgment of her body’s desires. For she still was not what she would have called “in love” with Alfie, and she thought such stirrings as were hers ought to be accompanied by sentiment. Alfie was too raw for her, whose imagination had been nourished by much novel-reading, to admire whole-heartedly enough for that state called “being in love.” She couldn’t talk books with Alfie, couldn’t make him see what lighted windows at night did to her. She could only laugh and dance with him and feel these odd new sensations when he touched her, even if he but took her hand.

  At first it was easy enough to lie even to herself, and easier to deceive Alfie, when yet his love-making hadn’t gone beyond the stage of holding hands in a cinema. He came up to town whenever, as he humorously expressed it, he could wangle a spot of leave. Alfie was by way of being a funny young man. True, he didn’t make jokes, long and carefully laid like a train of gunpowder, as did Herbert Starling, but the same silly things amused both him and Julia. Something in Julia told her they were silly, and nothing told Alfie, that was the only difference. Sometimes they would get uproarious giggles at a tea-shop because of some fat old lady at a nearby table who struck them as being a “scream”; sometimes they would stick pins in the tyre of some unattended bicycle. Once, when Alfie had wangled a motor-cycle with a sidecar like a sitz bath, they went to tea at a country inn, and changed all the hats hanging in the lobby to the wrong pegs, so that no coat was with the right hat.

  Julia would never have giggled or played practical jokes when out with Marian; on the rare occasions when she had attended a dress show with her and been given tea, she had been as quiet and distinguished as Marian herself, and this she achieved without any difficulty. There was a side of her which responded quite naturally to Marian and her kind, just as there was a side that responded to Ruby and Alfie. And there was something about Alfie … not that he was clever, but some charm, something finer than the ex-clerk who liked to make jokes and hold hands in a cinema; a sort of wistful quality, almost a woodland look that in part he owed to his slanting eyes and his brownness, but that was also the gift of his fated generation. Over him, as over all the lovely boys, there lay the menace of perpetual youth.

  Alfie hadn’t much money, and both he and Julia were simple and unspoiled in their tastes; Murray’s was still an exotic spot for the Rubys of the world rather than for them. To walk together through the parks from George Street—down to Green Park, and then through Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens, down to Shepherd’s Bush, whence a tram took them to Heronscourt Park—then they would fetch Bobby and watch him tear about the green spaces while they sat and talked: this was excitement enough for a long while. Alfie was excited about Julia, and Julia was excited about the drama of her relationship with Alfie.

  Alfie had not been without his adventures. He had earned the right in one or two dismal encounters to consider himself a man. He was Julia’s leader and initiator now. Did he love Julia? Did she love him? That wasn’t the question that very physical young people were asking each other or themselves, at least these two did not. Their progress towards the fields of pleasure was so gradual that in each of them the hypocritical half that was the result of upbringing could pretend to ignore it. Julia, if she had paused to consider, would have recognised the weight of all the prohibitions that had been dinned into her ears since childhood, and which amounted to the fact that love-making was wrong unless you were married, and rather horrid when you were.

  The idyll, if such it could be called, of Julia and Alfie had at least this to be said in its favour—it was purely of the body. The only lies that wrapped it round about—for the beauty of bodies is that they cannot lie—were those of their upbringing, and did not affect the matter long, for Julia’s senses were as yet too unspoiled to succumb to lies.

  This orchestra that was within her, that woke her at night, that started to tune up an hour or two before she met Alfie … she could not have escaped such a demanding music whatever had happened or not happened in the exterior world of accident. But she had happened to chime with a period when accident was happy and easy for such as she … when the sight of a young man in khaki and a girl drew a tolerant smile from a park-keeper or a policeman. There was nothing to control Julia; neither outside authority nor any imposed by her own soul, and she was far too ignorant to know that nature was doing what it chose with her and Alfie. Her uneducated and undisciplined mind had no control over her life.

  What standard of judgment could she have …? She did not know that she would have felt these delicious stirrings, whether she had met Alfie or some other young man, whether there had been a war or not. She had no notion that every healthy young girl suffers from a sort of auto-intoxication. All she knew was that she felt alive as never before, and at the same time, unsatisfied. For the first time the thought of another young human body, alive and strong as her own, would not let her rest.

  The only morality she had been taught was that of respectability and expediency, but there did lurk a certain amount of fear in her mind. One shouldn’t “do things” unless one was safely married. And yet, as Alfie’s caresses progressed she found herself, by a pleasant and warm weakness, unable to resist them.

  Alfie’s strict upbringing had taught him also fear, and he had been encased by far more rigid notions of right and wrong for their own sakes than had Julia. Always at the back of his mind was the feeling that he was doing something which his parents would have known to be wrong. But he and Julia were both entranced by the strange and delicious discovery of pleasure, which neither of them was able to resist.

  Julia did not know enough about her body to realise that she might be doing it as much harm as some people might have thought she was doing her soul. She really only knew that when the time came to meet Alfie she was drawn out of the house, and that his caresses excited her, because always just beyond them lay the hope of some bliss which her body imagined, although her mind was still uninformed as to its actual process. That she was finely attuned to love; that she was squandering the talent with which nature had endowed her, she was blindly unaware. She wasted her gifts without even knowing that they existed. They were two ill-educated children fumbling at ecstasy, wandering blindfold down the loveliest glade of life’s garden; snatching, tasting, feeling, but seeing nothing.

  Usually Julia met Alfie at the corner of Hanover Square. They might go to a cinema, or, as the days grew longer, they would go on the top of a bus to Richmond and wander in the Park, and dine in some little restaurant overlooking the river. Then they would come back and, getting out of the tram at Young’s Corner, wander into the quiet side street and up the dark and secret Love Lane.

  You couldn’t be sure nowadays of having Love Lane
to yourself. Every quiet little side street seemed to hold its silent couple, arms locked round each other, quiet as though with a still ecstasy, or with an even quieter misery. Lovers, thought Julia, who were just getting to know each other, or who were parting on the morrow, the man to go out to that dreadful place called the Front, the very existence of which everyone ignored as much as possible, although it was that which gave the sharp savour to life.

  Julia was at her happiest in an embrace under the quiet sycamores in Love Lane; sometimes so fiercely happy that she wanted nothing more, for it made her afraid. The first time her still unaccustomed body responded completely to Alfie’s caressing hand, and told her of a pleasure that made her feel faint, she was terrified lest this was enough to make her have a baby. It surely couldn’t be possible to feel more, was the way she argued it to herself. Alfie was able to laugh her out of that fear, but he was very tender with her afterwards. He had not realised, so eager was the responses of her pulses, the extent of her ignorance.

  The fear of having a baby, of “getting caught,” as Julia would have phrased it, held her back from going to some hotel with Alfie, although this was an idea which Alfie often turned over in his mind. As a serious proposition it did not occur to Julia—the war was not yet far enough advanced for such things to be a matter of course, and there was no urgent pressure, such as there might have been had Alfie suddenly been ordered to France. She was content to drift along. More and more her parents became to her people who knew nothing, who had never known anything. Mum might complain that she was out far too much, and came in too late at night, but Julia always had an airy, but sufficient answer. She had told them about Ruby, and the stage held a certain glamour for Mr. and Mrs. Almond. They had not the Nonconformist blood which had made the Saffords so angry with Ruby when she first left home for a second-rate touring company. An actress in the West End, even in a tiny part, was quite a personage to the Almonds. It was nice of this Miss Safford to be good to their Julia. Ruby would have been surprised if she had known how often Julia was supposed to be with her. Such a constancy of friendship would have held no place in Ruby’s casual social contacts.