by Marie Joseph
‘I’ll do owt,’ he told the woman at the next house. ‘Odd jobs. Feckling that broken catch on yon gate.’ He nodded through the wrought-iron side gate at a spade left unforgivably outside, standing bolt upright in a mound of compost. ‘Siding your tools away in the shed an’ polishing them up fost.’ Lapsing into broad dialect in his distress, forgetting that the woman staring at him with her hat and coat on all ready to go out wouldn’t understand a word he was saying; taking off his cap for some reason, and standing there with the wind blowing his black hair and bringing tears to his eyes as he tried not to cough.
He’d got into the habit of staying out, only going back to his lodgings when it grew dark. Since being laid off from Kew Gardens three weeks before, he had kept his dismissal a secret from his hard-eyed landlady, determined to find another job before he wrote and told Polly. Knowing that if he told Polly, she would be likely to write straight back telling him to come home.
Thrusting his hands deep in his pockets, he walked aimlessly on. He wouldn’t put it past Polly coming down on the train and fetching him back if she once got wind of the way things were. Harry experienced a fierce and grinding ache for his wife low down in his stomach. Definitely not a weak man, Harry’s strength lay in his gentleness, and if anyone had dared to suggest that his wife was the boss he would have agreed, feeling even more of a man for his admission.
Oh Polly, Polly. . . . They didn’t grow women like her down here. Or at least if they did he’d still to come across one. The little boy in him ached to let the tears inside him spill over, but he deliberately focussed his mind on the effort of placing one foot in front of the other, postponing the time till, alone in his attic room, he could allow himself the luxury of a good old wallow in homesickness.
Practical Polly. She must be missing him, too, but Harry knew she would never let on. And Gatty and Martin. Especially Martin, in his new school uniform, with marbles in his pocket, an embryo schoolteacher if ever there was one.
Away from the big houses now, Harry found himself on the bridge at Kew, with the wind biting through his jacket, freezing his breath till it rattled in his throat with the onset of another bout of coughing. Stopping by the parapet he stared down into the muddy brown water, riffled into creases like the skin on a pot of cocoa. Certificates would be what Martin had to show for any knowledge he acquired. Bits of bloody parchment, framed for good measure, proving that what he’d learned had been put on paper and not stored in his noddle where apparently it made no odds.
He’d best get on his way. The rain falling now was laced with sleet, and soon, if he wasn’t careful, Harry knew he would meet the men going home from work, home to their wives, to sit round a fire listening to the wireless, or even braving the weather to queue for the second house pictures. He looked up as he walked past a cinema announcing a new film star in a picture called ‘Morning Glory’. Katharine Hepburn stared out from her framed photograph with bold eyes and white teeth gleaming. Harry decided he didn’t reckon much of her. Not a patch on his Polly when it came to looks.
Lights were showing in the front windows of houses now. It seemed that folks used their parlours more down here. Street lamps emphasized the driving sleet, and on the corner of Harry’s road, outside the little newsagent’s shop, a poster meshed into its frame shouted headlines proclaiming that the man called Hitler over in Germany had pledged that his fight would be for the peace of the whole world.
The front door of Harry’s lodgings opened on to a square of chipped and weathered crazy paving, fronted by an iron railing. In desperation one Sunday morning he had offered to dig up the edging and plant a row of perennials, anything to keep his hand in.
But Mrs Cook would have none of it. ‘Who’s going to keep it weeded when you’ve gone?’ she’d asked. ‘Not me, that’s for sure. I’ve got enough to do without making more work. It suits me as it is. I can go in the park if I want to stare at flowers.’ Her small eyes had regarded him suspiciously. ‘I’d have thought you had enough of digging through the week, Mr Pilgrim.’
Sighing, Harry turned in at the gate, hanging by its hinges, left perpetually open, barely glancing at the black saloon car drawn up to the kerb. When he heard his name called out he whipped round smartly, thinking at first that he must have imagined it.
‘Mr Pilgrim? Mr Harry Pilgrim?’ The voice was low, a cultured London voice, coming from the wound-down window of the car. ‘I’d like a word with you, if I may.’ Then, as Harry hesitated: ‘Oh, do come round and get in. I’ve been sitting here for at least half an hour watching it rain, and I’m damned if I’ll get out and stand on the pavement talking to you.’
Slowly, cautiously, Harry did as he was bid, taking off his cap and holding it self-consciously on his knees. He was very wet, very cold, and his profile, averted from the curious gaze of the young woman in the passenger seat, spoke to her of his shyness and bewilderment.
‘I’m Harry Pilgrim, aye,’ he said. He turned to face her. ‘But I can’t place you.’ He turned back to stare through the windscreen, remembering his manners. ‘I haven’t had that pleasure, Miss . . . ?’
‘So you think it would be a pleasure, then?’
The voice was teasing, light and controlled. ‘Can’t you guess who I am, Mr Pilgrim? People do say the likeness is a family one. Oh, do look at me properly. I promise I won’t bite.’
Forced now to study the young woman as she’d asked, Harry turned to stare at a heart-shaped face, eyes slanted a little at the corners, a pert nose, and wings of dark hair curving forward, almost touching a mouth clearly outlined in purple lipstick. Or was it the light from the street lamp turning it into that garish shade?
‘Aye,’ he said slowly, ‘there’s something somewhere.’ He shook his head. ‘I know nobody down here, Miss.’ Especially somebody like you, he wanted to add. As beautiful as you, smelling of scent and making fun of me just because you choose to do so.
She was enjoying herself. Harry’s fingers were fidgeting with his cap, his embarrassment obvious. She knew she was being impossible, and half despised herself for it, but the house and the woman who’d said she could sit and wait in the kitchen had appalled her. And now here was a man totally unaware of his own shattering good looks, and that in itself was a novelty. A man so dark there could have been a touch of the Spanish in his ancestry, with soft black hair curling over his forehead and down into the nape of his neck. With an accent of wide-vowelled intonation that spoke to her of moors and wild winds, tempered with a calmness of the spirit. A reserve, too, telling of pride deeply inherent in his make-up. She decided to put him out of his misery.
‘I’m Yvonne Frobisher,’ she told Harry, holding out a hand. ‘Yvonne Craven that was. The black sheep’s sister. I’ve come to thank you for all you did for my brother, and for writing to tell my parents of his death.’ She made no move to take her hand from Harry’s grasp. ‘He broke my parents’ hearts, you know, and they would have come to the funeral if they hadn’t been abroad when your letter came. It lay unopened all these weeks.’
Harry nodded without speaking, then he whispered: ‘Roger was a fine man. I was proud to be considered his friend.’
‘He should have come home.’ Her voice had lost its light bantering tone. ‘The Prodigal Son’s welcome would have been like a mild hello to the one Roger would have got. They never stopped hoping he’d return, you see.’ She gave a little squeeze to Harry’s wet sleeve. ‘So now they want to meet you. Will next Sunday be okay? They’re only half an hour’s train journey away from Baker Street.’
She moved her hand to adjust a stray strand of hair, and Harry saw the wedding ring on her finger. ‘I’ve written the address down and how to get there from the station. It’s on a straight road. You can’t go wrong.’
He took the slip of paper from her, frowning at it in the half light. ‘Will you be there?’ The question seemed to ask itself as he hesitated, shy as a young boy. ‘It’s just that . . . well, I don’t know quite what to tell them. Your brother would have
hated them to know exactly the way things were.’
‘That he died in squalor?’ The close-fitting hat jerked towards the house with gas light filtering from a window through a torn blind. ‘They’d given him up for dead, Harry.’ She smiled. ‘I may call you Harry? Mr Pilgrim sounds too much like that worthy chappie conjured up by John Bunyan growing more sanctimonious with every step he took.’
‘But his progress was more rewarding than mine’s been lately.’ Harry smiled, pleased at his own unexpected wit, then sat silently again, wondering what to say next.
‘You’re a nice man, Harry Pilgrim.’ Roger’s sister smiled too. ‘And yes, I’ll be there. Why not? A day in the country could be just what the doctor would order.’
His hand was on the door handle when she spoke quickly. ‘No point in you going out to Amersham by train. I’ll pick you up at eleven. Okay?’
By the time he was out on the pavement, lifting a hand to wave goodbye, the small black saloon car had drawn away from the kerb, its tail lights like red glowing eyes in the darkness of the late winter afternoon.
Feeling rather foolish, Harry lowered his hand and turned towards the house, going straight into the kitchen to the unlovely sight of Mrs Cook standing at the cooker with the soup ladle at the ready.
— Six —
MANNY GOLDBERG BELIEVED in putting the facts to his employees. It wasn’t going to be easy breaking such depressing news, but it had to be done.
With his workforce gathered round him in a large semi-circle, he began: ‘You don’t need me to tell you how bad business is these days.’ The jowls of his big face drooped like a bloodhound’s as he tried to find the right words. ‘Being in business is a chancy thing at the best of times. You think everything’s going all right, then before you can turn round you’re stockpiled with goods that won’t shift. And because they won’t shift, then where’s the capital to buy new material?’ He closed his eyes to shut out the ring of faces, each one stamped with apprehension, clouded with a creeping fear of what they guessed was coming next. Manny raised his voice slightly. ‘The only protected areas, as far as I can see it, are the Civil Service and local government. They have sustained fewer casualties than most in this never-ending slump.’
‘Tell us the worst, Mr Goldberg. We don’t need no telling about Civil Servants. Sat out the war on their backsides, that jammy lot did.’
Manny nodded at the speaker, his chief cutter, a tiny man with the stooped shoulders of his profession. ‘All right then, Arnold. I won’t beat about the bush. For the time being, for quite a time to come, I’m going to have to put you all on half-time.’
‘An’ half bloody pay,’ a woman in curlers said.
Manny agreed sadly. ‘So if any of you would like your cards, come with me into the office. You can try signing on at the Labour Exchange if you think you’ll be better off.’
The cutter gave a loud snort. ‘What? And get no more than would keep us in shoe leather while we tramp the streets looking for another job? Nay. I for one’ll stop with you, Mr Goldberg, and hope for better things to come. Plaiting sawdust would be easier than finding a job in my line these days. Nay, tha’s been fair to us, so I reckon most of us will want to play fair with thee.’ He looked round at the nodding heads. ‘We’re all of like mind, Mr Goldberg.’
Manny relaxed a little, releasing his breath on a deep sigh of relief. There were sentimental tears behind his eyes, but he blinked them away angrily. Was there, anywhere in the world over, a prouder lot than these northerners?
He’d thought his own race had the prerogative in that line, but now he wasn’t too sure. Watching them going quietly back to their sewing machines with no more than a bleakness of expression to betray their feelings, he marvelled. Was it because their upper lips were stiffer than usual, or had they been knocked down so often in their past history they’d come to expect less than their share of the world’s benefits? What could you do with people like this? In the name of God, what could you ever hope to do?
He turned to look at Polly, determined to shake off his deep lethargy of the spirit. There was no room for muddled thinking, not with his accountant sitting waiting for him back in the office, briefcase stuffed with sheets of figures refusing to balance.
‘Will working mornings suit you all right, Polly?’
Already her bright head was bent to her task, but she looked straight at him in her usual direct way.
‘As a matter of fact, Mr Goldberg, mornings will suit me fine.’ She slotted a belt through its accommodating loops. ‘It means I’ll be home in time for that young lad of mine finishing school. He’s as soft as me pocket, even though he’s eleven. I thought he’d toughen up when his dad went away. You know, be the man of the family and all that, but it hasn’t worked that way. Not entirely.’
‘And the money?’ Manny wanted to ask, but knew he dare not. This lass would starve before she’d let on, he’d bet his last penny on that. He glanced at her shrewdly for a moment. This lass, this bonny lass, as he called her privately, had changed imperceptibly from the golden girl who had bounced into his office to apply for the job as his secretary. The smile was still there, but her eyes had a bruised look about them as if she had slept badly. He hesitated, then walked on, a stocky, thickset man, bowed down with too much responsibility, too many nights lying awake wondering how he could borrow yet more money, seeing as he tossed and turned his stock piling up, and his buyers dwindling to a mere trickle.
Even his southern outlet was closing in on him. Londoners didn’t go for the heavy-weight type of raincoat he produced, preferring something lighter. And up here, the only people with the money to invest in rainwear were making do till things took a turn for the better. Christmas was on the horizon, and after that the hope of spring and summer. Decent shops were closing, one after the other, to be taken over by second-hand clothes dealers, offering to buy old iron, rags and even furniture as a sideline. And lined raincoats were becoming a luxury and not the necessity he had thought they would be when he offered for the mill. All pitfalls even his astute business mind had failed to foresee.
The newspapers said that the worst of the Depression would exhaust itself by 1935 or 1936, giving as a reason for their cautious optimism the signs of improvement in the building trade. Londoners were moving out from the centre of the city, buying houses for twenty-five pounds down and twenty-five shillings a week for the next twelve years. Flimsy houses, built with cheap materials. Manny sighed. Was it possible that he’d gone into the wrong kind of business after all? He shook his big head mournfully from side to side. No, the clothing trade was all he knew about, not bricks and mortar.
Back in his office he dismissed his accountant, took his black overcoat down from its peg, slammed a Homburg hat on his head and told his secretary he was going to keep his ten o’clock appointment at the bank.
‘I’ll walk,’ he said. ‘The fresh air will do me good.’
‘It’s fresh all right, Mr Goldberg,’ she told him, whipping out a letter from her typewriter with a grating sound that set his teeth on edge. ‘It said on the wireless this morning that the sea came right over the front at Blackpool last night. Fog and frost are forecast. It’s turning out to be a bad winter right enough.’
‘So it’s going to be a bad winter? So we have fog and frost to contend with as well as cold hearths and empty bellies? So . . . ?’ Turning into the Boulevard which fronted the railway station, Manny grimly touched the brim of his hat to Queen Victoria staring regally from her elevated position at townsfolk hurrying to catch trains or standing in queues for buses and trams. ‘I wonder what you’d have made of it all, Ma’am?’ he muttered, striding on down past the ornately embellished architecture of the town’s evening paper, the Northern Daily Telegraph.
In the bank at the top of Church Street he sat on a little hard chair, stoutly dignified, holding his black hat on his knees, waiting patiently to be called into the manager’s inner sanctum.
‘So he tells me I’ve come to the end o
f the road?’ Manny’s chin shook. ‘So I go back and tell those brave lasses that even working half-time is only a way of putting off the inevitable?’
And there, as if appearing in a whiff of ectoplasm, was the rosy face of Polly Pilgrim, smiling on him as if he’d done her a favour in giving her afternoons free. A long sigh escaped him. ‘Bridges I haven’t come to I don’t intend to cross,’ he muttered, a kindly man who had only wanted to do his best, then found that even his best wasn’t good enough.
‘Good morning, Mr Goldberg.’
Mr Ormerod, the bank manager, a spare man with tow-coloured hair arranged carefully across his shiny, bald head, came out of his room holding out his hand. With the acute sensitivity of the over-anxious, Manny searched the bland smile for its reasons. Was it a genuine ‘I’m here to help you, Mr Goldberg’? Or was it a smile pinned on merely for politeness, a sort of softener before the blow fell?
There was certainly no warmth in the manager’s grip as they shook hands. Like shaking a piece of salt-fish, Manny decided. He followed through the counter flap into the tiny inner office and sat down in the chair indicated, with the light from a high window full on his troubled face.
The bank manager drew a folder towards him, pushing horn-rimmed spectacles into position on his apology for a nose.
Manny twisted the rim of his hat round and round in his hands. The feet sticking out through the manager’s desk were encased in shiny brown leather, topped by spats in an elegant shade of beige. Manny considered them balefully. Since the end of the war the wearing of spats had virtually disappeared, mainly on account of the cost of the necessary and expensive workmanship, but these spats looked new. With a practised and jaundiced eye, Manny did a quick calculation of the approximate price, subtracted the retailer’s profit, plus the wholesaler’s rake-off, and decided that even raincoats were a much more viable proposition.
