Grass in Piccadilly

by Noel Streatfeild

  John stood one side of the fireplace, Penny the other. Penny had to tell her story straight; John’s face never moved a muscle, and he said nothing. It was difficult Penny found. Words she could use to Charlotte were impossible to John. She skipped the pact between herself and Bill; such a pact, by John’s code, would be unthinkable and there was no point in offending his taste more than she must. She had to go bald-headed at the story of her American lover. “I was lonely and I met a nice American and slept with him.” Charlotte had perhaps dimly understood that wild hectic time, the living from day to day, the insecurity, the certainty that she and Bill had no future, the lack of sleep, the strain, but not her father. A way of life was a way of life to him, and you lived by it war or peace. He must just think she was without morals, which, by his standard, was true. There could be no extenuating circumstances.

  At the end of the story John stood with his head bent, staring at the log on the fire. He was so long silent that it got on Penny’s nerves. She spoke, not in the quiet monotone in which she had told her story, but in the forced, staccato which she had for so long used to him.

  “Well, that’s that. Pretty, isn’t it?”

  John was appalled. It was a story of irredeemable blackness and it belonged to his daughter. He felt old and ill. Somewhere a voice was crying after the child he had known and loved, “Penny. Oh, Penny!” “A nice American and slept with him.” Horrible! A cheap, apparently loveless, union. The sort of thing that happened in fields and haystacks in the village at home. He had been devoted to Bill, looked upon him almost as a son. His father was an old friend; they were neighbours. He could remember the point-to-point when it first struck him that Penny and Bill were becoming more than friends. Penny was about to ride in the ladies’ race. Bill was fixing something for her, and she spoke. They looked at each other. Just a look, but he had known then. A week or two later Bill’s father had said, “Shouldn’t wonder if there was something between young Penny and Bill.” It had taken the war to bring it to a head; but there had never been any question of Penny looking at any one else. This business about her child. Nasty. He could just have understood her having the child adopted—only just—but to give her away to that Duke woman to cheat Duke into marrying her . . . He did not raise his head. He did not want Penny to see his face.

  “Will she be all right with Duke’s parents?”

  “Yes.”

  “Only spoken to him once. Seemed a decent sort of fellow. You got the child—Jane’s birth certificate?”

  “Yes.”

  “Better give it to me. I’ll see my solicitor, must get advice. Can’t do anything in a hurry. For the child’s sake must keep things as quiet as possible. Don’t want everybody in the house talkin’. Then there’s Duke; may not believe us without evidence; solicitors better handle him, unless, of course, she’s told him.”

  “She won’t.”

  “Ah! May have trouble with her; the solicitor will know.”

  “I’ll get the certificate. I’ll put it on your desk.” Penny lingered a second. She knew what she had done. Hell! The number of people she had hurt. There was nothing she could say. She was shivering from strain and emotion, and there was a mist in her eyes and a lump in her throat. She blundered out of the room.

  Charlotte was waiting to hear the drawing-room door open. She took one look at Penny and knew how things were. Her thoughts were all with John. Poor old thing! She must go to him.

  John had not moved, he still stared at the burning log.

  “That you, Charlotte?” She came to him and put an arm round his shoulder. “Penny’s told you.” She did not speak but increased the pressure of her fingers on his shoulder. Words broke from him as if forced up from some hidden spring deep in his body. “Penny! I can’t understand.”

  Charlotte laid her cheek against his shoulder.

  “Do you have to?” There was a long silence. The clock ticked. The log slipped in the grate. The flames crackled. “One generation can’t judge another, especially we can’t judge Penny’s generation. She was conceived at the end of the first world war. You were in the army. I don’t suppose either of you or Sybil were normal; how could you have been? She grew up without a mother in the uneasy years before this war. Then the war itself . . .” He moved. Her cheek rubbed his shoulder. “I know, dear, but don’t judge. Help.”

  “What about this American? We ought to find him. Perhaps it’s not too late; he might marry her.”

  “No. If Penny had meant him to know about Jane she’d have let him know. Last summer you stood at this window. Penny and Jane were walking up the square. You said, ‘I wish Penny had a child.’” He shifted impatiently, but she did not move her arm nor her cheek. “She has a child. The first thing you’ve got to do is to straighten out this mess, but as well you might think of that. You’ve got a grandchild.”

  * * * * *

  Alfred was cleaning snow off the front steps. He did not mind doing it, though it was not his work, for otherwise Gladys would have had to do it; but he felt generally aggrieved. He wore his coat and woollen gloves, but he was cold. His breath stood on the air as if it were glass. He looked round the square. Grey, silent, buried in snow. Not a bird chirping nor a dog barking. He looked overhead; sky the colour of a wet pavement and an east wind to cut you in half; even without the news on the wireless he would have known more snow was expected, and temperatures would be at or below freezing night and day. What a world! Everybody low spirited. His cockney soul was in revolt at finding himself downed. Bad times should be laughed off, yet somehow he had not a laugh in him. He blamed the house more than the weather. The way they had built these places! Great pipes up on the roof; bound to freeze. The people in the house were no more good than a sick headache. They didn’t take the simplest precautions, not even keeping the plugs in the baths and basins. How they could suppose waste wouldn’t freeze with a howling draught running up the pipe he didn’t know. Couldn’t even do anything about it when the pipes did freeze; not even try boiling water or hang a rug over the cistern. He had got them a bit better trained now; they did light the lamps and night-lights he had put under the pipes, and then what? Off goes everybody on five. The worst flat of the lot to leave empty. People didn’t ought to go away in weather like this, just leaving a key all casual expecting someone else to keep their pipes from freezing. Not that any one could. He was sick and tired of the whole house running to him. “Oh, Mr. Parks, there’s no water coming out of our taps.” “Oh, Mr. Parks, the bath water won’t run away.” He wasn’t a plumber. Just because he’d done a bit of fiddling to Mrs. Dill’s bathroom with the woodwork and that didn’t mean he understood plumbing. No more he hadn’t time, he’d his own work to do. It was a mistake ever letting them know he had a friend who was a plumber. Lady Nettel was a nice lady but he never wanted to hear her say again, “Oh, Mr. Parks, do you think you could get hold of that nice plumber?” Give her and Sir John a surprise if they could hear what the nice plumber said about their house. Alfred chipped some ice off the bottom step and pushed it on to the pavement. His down-heartedness could not be accounted for by frozen pipes and he knew it. For years he had been building for the day when a Labour government would be in power. There was so much he had hoped for, and so much of it was coming true. Rene and Ivy’s children would get a proper chance if they’d the onions to take it. There wouldn’t be class distinction or a ruling class. They’d grow up in a world where everybody started fair and if you had the stuff in you there was nothing to keep you from the top. What got him down was not the government but the workers. Strike, strike, grumble, grouse; how did they think they were to get anything that way? His mates made as much fuss and more about the fuel shortage than any one in this house. There old Sir John sat in his overcoat, looking shocking ill and old these last few days, writing his letters by the light of a candle, without a spot of heat in the room. Not a word of complaint; all he had said when the cuts first started was,
“Parks, would you explain to your wife about switching the electricity off at the mains.” Alfred thought his mates carried on alarming. Stories of standing in a queue outside the Gas Light and Coke Company for a bag of coke, and cutting up this, that and the other. Of course things were bad for everybody, but they were worse for those who lived in big houses. Of course that was foolishness on the part of the owners. If they lived and ate in one small room and kept the windows and doors shut they could be as comfortable—which wasn’t saying much—as he and Gladys were. They hadn’t been educated to it, couldn’t adapt themselves. Alfred viciously swept snow off the pavement into the road. If only Sir John would complain, or break the law. Equality, everybody sharing alike and putting up with the same things, was all right in theory, in practice it upset you. As a good Labour man Alfred wanted to gloat that he, the only real working man in the house, was warmer than anybody else. Instead he felt upset. It was all wrong somehow.

  A scarecrow of a woman came along the square. She had a woollen scarf tied round her head out of which straggled wisps of grey hair. Over-excited, over-bright eyes shone out of a face pinched, blue and hungry. Her clothes were shapeless; she wore layers of jerseys and coats all drooping with age. In her hand she clutched a bag. She smiled at Alfred.

  “Good-morning. I see you have window-boxes. Do you have anything in them for the poor birds? I know food’s scarce but a little bit of fat and some crumbs, and a saucer of fresh water will save millions of tiny lives.”

  Alfred unconsciously registered that this bundle of old clothes had been born a lady. He had seen her before, laying fish heads about for cats and that. He was tolerant of cranks. It took all sorts to make a world, the easiest thing was to humour them.

  “It’s flats, ’m, but my wife sees all the tenants, I’ll ask her to have a word about the birds.”

  “How kind of you. Any little bit of fat, and don’t let them forget the water. I am keeping a little bird table in each of these square gardens.”

  Alfred watched her cross the road and push in through the gap that had been made by jeeps. Bird table! Looked as though she could do with a feed off some sort of table herself. He swept the last of the snow into the road. That looked better. Funny old thing, “fat and don’t forget the water,” but somehow she had done him good. For all her foolishness she was not grumbling, and there was a sort of taking pleasure in what she did about her. He’d hang out a bit of fat somewhere and put out some water. He’d tell Gladys about the old girl, make her laugh, and keep her off that continual gossip about five.

  * * * * *

  Jeremy came up the steps and took out his key and opened the front door. Then he remembered why he was there, and rang Penny’s bell.

  Penny opened the front door. She had so dreaded this interview that she had not slept until four and then only with the help of sleeping tablets. She had been woken by a telephone call before the drug had worked off. She felt heavy, stupid and unfitted to cope. There was nothing about her to suggest these things to Jeremy. He saw Penny well made up, her fair hair shining to her shoulders, wearing a gay pullover and well-cut slacks, smart, sophisticated, heartless. What she said did not help. In her brightest staccato she greeted him as if he had dropped in for a friendly drink.

  “Hallo. Isn’t the weather too revolting? It’s madly cold in my flat. I hope you don’t mind.”

  Jeremy did not answer. He would keep his answers until he was in her flat. Sometimes, since he had seen John’s solicitor, he wondered if he did not hate Penny more than he hated Freda. Freda was an accepted bitch, she never pretended to be much else; but Penny, the good friend who had fixed the flat for them cheap, who showered presents on Freda as well, of course, as on Jane, the girl who conceived this fraud to get herself out of a mess. “Hallo. Isn’t the weather too revolting? It’s madly cold in my flat. I hope you don’t mind.” He’d show her what he minded. She had never thought of him nor of Audrey. He could understand Freda. Dragged up all anyhow she would think anything worth doing to get her own way, but not Penny. Penny had a decent background; anything she did was just pure evil. All these years she had never thought what might have happened between him and Audrey. She knew there had been an Audrey, not her name but that he was going to get engaged, perhaps married, to her on his next leave. If she had to tell the whole story why wait until now? Why wait until Audrey was married? Why wait until he was half-way through the only decent bit of writing he had ever done? He hadn’t written a word in the last fortnight, and she was to blame. Even that she had taken from him.

  Penny lit a cigarette; she did not offer one to Jeremy, she thought he had better say all he had to say in his own way and not have his opening upset by having to refuse one of her cigarettes. Neither of them sat down. He paced over to the window. Penny took far longer than was necessary fiddling with her lighter. He said:

  “When d’you want Jane?”

  “Have you told your family?”

  “No. Your father’s solicitor tells me there’ll have to be these legal doings to put the thing straight. She’s all right where she is. My mother’s fond of her. Must tell the kid something. You better do that, she’s yours.”

  “What’s happened to Freda?”

  “She’s in an hotel, being kept. She thought you’d go on paying to keep everything quiet. She piped down when she knew you’d spilled the beans. I haven’t seen her, of course, but the divorce has been started; there’s no fuss about that, she can’t defend. As you know, my solicitor has seen your father and your solicitor about this custody business; nobody seems to know yet what that’s going to be. I’ll tell my people as soon as you want her back.”

  “I wish your mother wasn’t so fond of her.”

  “Kept her for over four years.” There was nothing he could say which Penny had not thought of. Every waking hour—and they involved half the night hours—she went over the details. She could not answer anything. Her sins lay out for all concerned to see. Jeremy felt that Penny was brazen, lolling there, smoking, ought to be behind bars for what she had done. He wanted to hurt her, to find words to cut through all that veneer, words which she would never forget. Instead a question which he had never stopped asking himself since John’s solicitor had told him the truth burst from him. “Why did you do this to me? Must you have mucked up my life? There must have been a home or somewhere you could have parked the kid.”

  Penny thought backwards to that winter of forty-one. Bill’s telegram. She had to speak, she owed Jeremy that.

  “There was no thought of Bill getting leave, not for months, he’d written that. Then somebody wanted to see him. His telegram came. I went mad. Rushed round everywhere looking for an hotel. The nannie I had didn’t like being in London and wouldn’t go to an hotel without me. I told her she’d damn’ well got to and she gave notice. I didn’t know how long I’d got, Bill might have arrived any minute. I told them at the ambulance station I’d be taking leave as my husband was coming home. I suppose I looked in pretty much of a state. We had to clean the cars. Freda came and helped me with mine. She asked me right out what I was going to do with my baby. I was bloody thankful to talk to anybody—even her. She said she’d take her. Her mother was staying with her.”

  “That’s right. There when I arrived. She’d been a nurse.”

  “So she told me. That was what made it possible.”

  It was more than Jeremy could stand.

  “And she told you about me? The poor, bloody mug coming on leave.”

  “Yes. Look, there’s nothing I can say. I know what I’ve done. If it does you any good curse me, but it won’t help, really, I wish to God it did. I wish there was anything I could do to make up for what I’ve done, but there just isn’t. I think you ought to know, though, it wasn’t like that quite. I didn’t think about you then.” He moved so she hurried on. “Of course I ought to have, but I was desperate. Bill had told me in his letters he’d been faithful as h
ell. I simply couldn’t face him with Jane the moment he arrived. I didn’t think of anything except giving Bill a good time on his leave. I had a hunch, so’d he, we wouldn’t have so many. I thought, in the half-way one did think then, I might be able to tell him . . .”

  “Lot of good that would have done. You’d given the kid to Freda.”

  Penny nodded, groping in her memory for the truth.

  “That’s what it was, really, but it’s not what I thought then. I thought I’d have her back. I knew Freda wouldn’t want her for long.”

  “What did you think I was going to do? Be handed a daughter and then be told she’d been given away?”

  Penny stammered, her control slipping.

  “Of course not. For goodness’ sake be as angry as you like but do try and understand, it’s no good explaining to my father or my stepmother, they weren’t here, but you know what it was like. We didn’t say this will happen to-morrow, or next month, or next year, we did everything by to-day. You didn’t think when you married Freda ‘this is for life,’ you thought you were doing the right thing and that you wouldn’t have to see much of her as you’d always be at sea and perhaps be killed. Not clearly, like that—but in a jumble—if you hadn’t you’d have said, ‘To hell with Freda and the baby. I won’t make either of them happy by marrying somebody who I’ve gone off—especially as I’ve fallen for somebody else—I’ll do the decent, but marriage—no.’”

  Jeremy had not come to see Penny to hear what he might have done. Yet her words caught his mind. They took him, for the first time since he had learned the whole truth, away from self-pity. Was that true? If it had all happened to-day, when what you did was more or less for life, would he have married Freda? He could not be sure. It was so difficult, now he knew the truth, to know what he would have done without knowing it. There was his home. So solid and respectable. All the relations. Everybody had been willing to accept Freda and forget that the baby was supposedly born before the marriage, but how would they have taken his not marrying her? He had nowhere to live then except at home. Would he have faced up to being the black sheep? God alone knew. It was an abortive argument, anyway. Still, it was just sufficiently to the point to make his expression a shade less bitter, his eyes less hard. His tone was ungracious and grudging.