by Maggie Ford
Quickly she told Mrs Sharp all that had happened. ‘So you see, you were the only one I could think of coming to.’
‘You two should stay ’ere tonight. It’ll be dark soon and yer can’t go all that way back to where you live on a day like this and in the dark. You’ll ’ave no fire to heat up yer rooms and yer can’t go ter be in the cold – not this kind of cold. Yer’ll both catch yer death. I’ll make up the couch and yer can sleep top ter toe, if that’s all right. I’ll keep the fire in all night. It’s orright: I got money enough ter burn a bit of coal. Ronnie brings in good wages nowadays. The girls too. We don’t live too bad these days. Not like when they was kids.’
She chatted on as she pottered about, cutting up the still-warm joint of lamb from their midday Sunday dinner to make sandwiches for the two girls. ‘I’ve got some prunes and custard left over, so yer can ’ave them for yer afters. Sorry, there ain’t no ’taters and greens left over from dinner, but my lot don’t ’alf know ’ow to scoff.’
‘Did Ronnie have dinner with his fiancée’s people?’ Ellie enquired while Dora was in the girl’s bedroom putting her stockings on properly and doing her hair with brash, comb and hairpins that Mrs Jenkins, sensible woman, had thoughtfully put in with the clothes.
Mrs Sharp grimaced. ‘Him? No, he ’ad it ’ere, what he et of it. Had a bust-up with his girl. I think it’s orf fer good now.’ Ellie felt her insides give a leap. ‘What happened?’ she managed to ask calmly.
Again Mrs Sharp pulled a face. ‘Oh, they was always arguing. It’s bin on an’ off fer months. Bit of a la-di-da, she is. Wants ter move to the country, wants ’im ter rent a blooming big ’ouse – more’n he can afford. Wants the bloody moon, I think. And ’im, silly sod, bin puttin’ up with it for months. Too soft, that one. She wants everything ’er way. He don’t ’ave no say in it. Well, I think it’s finally come ter the crunch, and bloody good riddance I say. I didn’t go much on ’er anyway.’
It was hard to speak without her voice trembling. ‘Where is he now?’
‘In the front room. Said he wants ter be left alone. So that’s that for the while. You feeling warmer now, you two?’
‘Yes thank you. And thank you for letting us stay the night,’ Ellie said smoothly; but her heart was singing.
Twenty-Seven
It was marvellous having Dora with her. At last, someone to share her room, a room that had been so lonely. True, it was somewhat cramped, but so it had been when they had lived at home, the two of them having to share the one bed, as they now did. But as the weeks passed, Dora began showing signs of becoming bored.
At first she had been excited at not having Mrs Lowe to restrain her freedom and wanted to go out nearly every other day, Ellie finding herself having to leave her work to take her to see different places. It was almost as if the girl was up from the country and had never seen London before. No one would have taken her for a Londoner born and bred.
‘When I was with Mrs Lowe,’ she told Ellie, ‘we’d always go out in a closed cab straight to one of the bigger department stores or to a small milliner’s or a gown shop, and it would be in, out and straight home. I never saw anything of London, really.’ And, of course, when they had been children they had been too poor to go roaming London and seeing places of interest.
But it couldn’t go on for ever. Sooner or later she had to get down to some serious work. It was then she began to notice how bored Dora was becoming.
‘We never go out anywhere,’ she complained after only three weeks.
‘We go out to sell my paintings.’
‘What’s the point of that? Not many people buy them.’
‘Some do.’ Hearing the sharpness in her tone, Ellie hated herself.
It was difficult to concentrate on painting, with Dora looking over her shoulder or walking aimlessly around the room, staring out of the window and sighing as she gazed down at the street below, blocking the light until Ellie had to tell her to move aside. She knew, too, that Dora felt in the way on the few occasions Felix called in, making her feel foolishly guilty.
He didn’t call all that often, but when he did he was a welcome sight. He’d said he wanted them to remain friends and she went along with that, surprised how quickly her initial infatuation with him had faded. Now he was just a friend, but a very constant one.
He was even able to bring his partner with him now. A short, stocky ginger-haired young man named Jock – not the sort of person she’d have imagined Felix would have shared his life with: maybe someone slightly built and gentle-natured like himself; but she sometimes caught the looks that passed between them and saw what true love and affection lay in those glances.
Dora had no idea and Ellie didn’t enlighten her. Her hard start in life hadn’t included this side of it and she had been living a sheltered life with Doctor and Mrs Lowe. Ellie supposed her own had only opened up since she’d come to live here.
Sometimes she and Dora would go with Felix and Jock to the cafés or whatever small party was going on. One needed to escape the enclosure of four walls and let a little light into the mind.
She felt that, since having painted Felix’s portrait, her zest for this sort of painting was waning, her ideas becoming arid.
With two months gone by she’d heard nothing more from Robert C. Hunnard either, and took it that he had not sold her paintings. Money was running low even though she knew how to be careful with it, and there was little coming in from any other pictures she sold, none of them being what she would have preferred to paint. She worked solely in oils now, good paper for watercolours being expensive. Her worst worry was how to support Dora if things began to get really bad. With that in mind she painted as if her life depended on it, but her soul seemed to have forsaken her. She needed a goal, a certain feeling of anger; but it wasn’t there any more.
Oddly, her fierce resolve to find her father was fading. Funny how time mellowed things, shaved off the harsh corners. If it hadn’t been for her quest to avenge what her father had done to her, she might never have become a painter, might have remained with Bertram Lowe for years – and what then? Even if she had stayed, Michael Deel’s father would never have let them marry. What would have happened to her? Would she have become a painter, hanging out with the sort of people she’d come to know? It was odd how time mapped things out for a person.
Now, what her future was she had no idea except that every so often that old hatred would climb on to her shoulders and poke a hole in her skull to nibble at her mind. Then she would look for the sort of painting she needed to do to evict the ogre from her brain again.
One portrait she’d started working on, which was helping to sustain this odd sensation, was of Dora, showing her as a lost child, fear of the unknown emanating from the oddly positioned eyes, though the mouth – a thin line of a mouth – smiled tremulously but bravely at the world, while, in the dark background, misty faces looked out at her – faces with menace in their dimly distinguished expressions.
‘It’s absolutely horrible!’ Dora burst out when at last she was allowed to see it. ‘That’s not me at all.’
‘It depicts your inner self,’ Ellie tried to explain, but Dora turned away in a huff.
‘All that sitting like a blooming statue and that’s the result. Is that how you see me? The way you’ve painted me makes me feel you don’t even like me.’
‘Of course I like you. I love you. You’re my sister and I love you.’
‘Then why make me look so ugly?’
‘You’re not ugly. You’re pretty. It’s how I see you deep inside: worried about being your own mistress after having been at your employer’s beck and call.’
‘Well, I think it’s horrible. You make me feel that I’m just a blooming nuisance to you, that I’m only in the way.’
‘You’re not in the way, Dora. I enjoy you being here.’
‘And those faces behind me – it’s enough to give anyone nightmares. Who’d want to buy something like that? No wonder you don’t se
ll much!’
It was hopeless trying to explain to her. She was her father’s child, with no depth of imagination.
‘If I am in the way here, perhaps I’d be better going back to work at Doctor Lowe’s,’ she pouted.
‘You are not in the way,’ Ellie told her, the words uttered slowly.
Dora shrugged and let it go at that while steadfastly refusing to even look at the painting, and not at all happy about Ellie taking it to display alongside her pleasanter ones. Ellie let it go at that. It was up to her what she did or did not display. And one day it might hang in Hunnard’s galleries. But that was just a pipe dream. There’d been no sign of him for ages.
* * *
By May she was mildly surprised that Dora had stayed this long with her. She’d expected at any time to have her say she wanted to go back to the Lowes’ whenever some small disagreement or other came up. But time had cut the girl off from them and there was little Dora could have done about it.
No longer was it hard trying to keep the girl’s mind occupied. Finally having succeeded, Ellie couldn’t believe how easily Dora had suddenly begun to mingle with those whom she herself mixed with, enjoying the witty talk and laughter, though any serious discussion went completely over her head.
Lately she had begun trying to copy the flamboyant dress of some of them, starting with haunting second-hand stalls for cheap bright clothes like they did, until Ellie had to stop her.
‘You’re not wearing that!’ she exploded as Dora appeared in a well-worn, shapeless red-and-black skirt and bright, shabby blouse with a low, baggy neckline, ‘wasting hard-earned money on that sort of rubbish.’
Dora pouted. ‘A few bits and pieces – it hardly cost a fortune.’
‘We have to eat, pay the rent, and what’s left, if any, I need to save for a rainy day.’
‘You don’t do all that bad. Those nice paintings sell all right.’
Yes, they did sell – just enough to keep body and soul together. Where was the wealth she had dreamed of, the plan to revenge herself on her father? And where was Hunnard who’d promised to sell her other paintings? He had lost interest – that was the truth. She could forget him.
‘And what’s more,’ she told her angrily, ‘I won’t have you showing yourself up dressed like that. You’re showing every thing!’
‘Other women wear clothes like this. And I’m not showing everything.’
‘Most of that type like to look eccentric. They’re usually no better than hangers-on, not serious painters. Women artists have more interest in their art than in dressing up. And one day someone is going to take you for a prostitute.’
Dora looked shocked, her pout fading, and Ellie’s anger diminished.
‘You’ve not yet turned sixteen, Dora, and I feel responsible for you. No one will think wrong of you if you dress as you’ve always done.’
There seemed to be more women painters than she’d first noticed. It wasn’t just them: women everywhere were looking towards recognition, freedom of expression – to be accepted as having brains. Like those whom the newspapers called suffragettes, shouting the odds from street corners and at protest gatherings; but none flaunted themselves in garish clothing.
They didn’t interest her, but she was heartened to find women like herself taking their art out of the drawing room and into public view. Maybe they had always been there – she just hadn’t noticed. Now, with Dora here for company, she felt more at ease and found it easier to fit in. But she did intend to put her foot down about Dora’s choice of dress.
The girl was beginning to behave a little too grown-up. That was well apparent when she noticed her half-stupefied one evening. Dragging her from the café, she knew instantly what the girl had been imbibing: the man she’d been talking to had been pouring her another glass of green liquid that turned a milky colour as he added a little water to it.
‘How dare you take advantage!’ she shot at him, halting the babble of conversation around them for a moment. ‘She’s not even yet sixteen.’
The man had grinned up at her. ‘Sixteen’s old enough for more than a drop of absinthe. And I wouldn’t mind if—’
What he wouldn’t have minded was cut short by a loud slap around the face.
With a roar he was up, his fist drawn back ready to hit back, whether she was a woman or not. It was Felix who leapt between them and somehow, with a gentle word, brushed away the man’s rage. How he did it Ellie didn’t know, but she felt deeply indebted to him.
If only he’d been different from what he was, she thought as he and Jock elected to help her get a befuddled Dora back home.
‘Don’t you ever touch that stuff again!’ she berated her after the two men had left, having seen them safe and settled. ‘You’ll end up in the gutter.’
‘But everyone drinks it,’ mumbled Dora. ‘Felix does.’
‘He knows what he’s doing,’ she argued. But that wasn’t always true. She’d seen him slumped beside Jock, and not only from absinthe and other concoctions: from the opium that she’d come to realize he was addicted to.
He saw no wrong in it. ‘It’s relaxing,’ he’d told her at one time. ‘Takes away the cruelty of the world for a while, let’s me weather its condemnation.’
She knew what he meant. She too had felt that, her portraits viewed with distaste by those who sought something less worrying.
Talented painter though Felix was, his days as an artist were most likely numbered. It was sad: good-hearted, young and handsome, but for an accident of birth he could have married, become a good father. Instead he was doomed to fade away unnoticed. Did he have a family somewhere? He never spoke about himself. She just hoped that Jock would stand by him through his life. If only…
Ellie sighed as she put Dora to bed to sleep off the absinthe. Why did she fall in love with the wrong people? – thinking she’d found love with the wealthy Michael Deel, weaving dreams of confronting her father as a wealthy woman; falling for Felix, who could never give her the love she’d hoped for.
Then there was Ronnie Sharp. She’d always had a soft spot for him. He’d have been her ideal, but he’d found someone else. When that had fallen apart she’d hoped he’d turn his attention to her, but he hadn’t.
It hurt and it had made her think about him more and more. Some would have said out of sight out of mind, but for her the longer time went on, the more she thought about him. For the last few weeks she’d been popping in to see Mrs Sharp, on a Sunday when she knew he wouldn’t be at work so that there was more chance of finding him there. So far she’d had no luck.
‘Out wiv his mates,’ was his mother’s usual reply to the inevitable question.
‘No, ’e ain’t got a gel at the moment,’ had been the heartening reply to her casual, apparently innocent enquiry a few weeks ago. ‘But he’s got plenty of mates.’
‘So he’s not pining about his engagement breaking up?’
‘No,’ had come the reply. ‘Seems to ’ave got over it orright. I expect he’ll find someone else, given time.’
If only that someone else could be her. She was working at it as hard as she could, but if he was never there, what could she do?
‘Give him my love,’ she told his mother on leaving. She needed to be bold. ‘Tell him I think about him a lot.’ Even that seemed too forward.
It was easy to say to his mother, would have been impossible to his face, but she could only hope he’d take the hint if Mrs Sharp thought to pass it on.
This Sunday she got dressed up as usual, taking Dora with her as usual, not expecting to see him, but living in hopes – though if he had any thought of her, surely he’d have sought her out after the message she had left with his mum. She’d even told her the address where she was staying, but he obviously hadn’t picked up on it. Arriving at Mrs Sharp’s door, her heart leapt to see his bike leaning against the house wall. In fact it was he who opened the door to her knock and, to her delight, he smiled down at her.
‘Wotcher! I was just about
ter go. Only ’ad ter put me coat on.’
‘Oh,’ she said weakly, her expectations flying off into the blue. ‘Did your mother tell you that Dora and I often…’
He seemed to step back mentally from her and she realized that Dora and I must have sounded so stuck-up and affected. Perhaps he felt he wasn’t good enough for her, or that she thought him not good enough for her.
Hurriedly she began again. ‘Me and Dora often come round to see your mum. Old neighbours – that sort of thing.’
Was it her imagination that he suddenly seemed to relax? Now he gave an easy chuckle. ‘She did mention it.’
The statement sounded tongue-in-cheek. Maybe his mother had said more than that, hinting that she was forever asking after him, with all its implications. She felt suddenly foolish. What must he think of her?
‘So where you off to?’ she asked firmly, reverting in part to her old way of speaking, hoping it might help.
‘Meeting a couple of mates of mine in the local.’
Of course! No girlfriend now. ‘Just hoped you might still be here, that’s all,’ she said lamely.
He stepped back from the doorway. ‘Well, I’m still in. Might as well hang on a bit. There’s no set time.’
He was being warm and friendly and now, thoroughly at ease with her, sitting down and telling her all about his work, asking what she was up to, listening intently as she talked about her life, her struggle for money.
‘You’re looking very nice,’ he said appreciatively at one time, but went no further than that. Finally, after half an hour he said, rather reluctantly it seemed, that he had to go or his friends would be wondering where he was.
‘But I might see you here next week,’ he said as he put on his coat and his cap.
Ellie’s heart felt light as a feather as they left. He’d not gone as far as saying he’d like to see her again, much less take her out. All he’d said was that he might see her here next week. Perhaps it was a start.
