by Ursula Bloom
But a girl ought to marry, because it was edifying, and set her up socially, even if at times it was a bit embarrassing. To be Mrs. was better than to be Miss; nobody really enjoyed being a Miss. It was quite a different thing if you were one of the famous actresses, calling yourself Miss when everyone knew that really you were a Mrs. If, thought Mrs. Bunce, Miss Marvin had married she would have done a great deal better for herself and would never have been in this hole.
The truth was that nobody had ever asked Miss Marvin. Naturally she would not have confessed to this, it is the sort of horrible truth that a discreet girl prefers to keep up her sleeve.
She said never a word.
All she was saying at this moment was ‘Damn Nancy Palmer’s house. Damn Nancy Palmer for having the nerve to get it. I wish I’d half her courage.’
Life is sometimes commendable for keeping a trump card up its sleeve which it pops down unexpectedly. On the top of this unusual state of revolution in Alice Marvin’s mind, she won a small prize in the pools. It was under five pounds, but it whetted her appetite for more. Feverishly she attacked the forms with renewed vigour, and in her next attempt she won a hundred pounds. Her luck was in, she told herself.
Soon the whole of Brestonbury got news of her win, and elaborated it considerably. Everybody called. The Minister from the chapel, a pompous little man in woollen gloves and a saucer hat, came prinking round to congratulate her. She wouldn’t forget the lads’ outing, would she? The lads, Alice Marvin decided, had never been of much use to her, so why on earth should she contribute to their outing? She said she had not won a fortune and she must have time to think about what she would do with the money, which upset the Minister, who went away remarking that all spinsters were mean.
Mrs. Bunce had already commented that her kitchen stove was unworthy, she would give her eyes for one of the new kind; her present one had worn itself out cooking Alice Marvin’s lunches and suppers, and she thought that if Miss Marvin paid half, it would be a great help. The young man at the grocer’s who had first put her in touch with the pools, chi-iked her and said that a packet of fags was the least she could do, and a bottle of whisky was more like it.
Miss Marvin steeled the kind heart, and dug her toes in. She was damned if she would! A new courage seemed suddenly to be born in her; it was a courage born of rage at Miss Palmer’s efforts, and the stark realisation that forty years and a few months were leaving her high and dry, shipwrecked on the beach of chance.
Where do we go from here? was the question that she now found she was asking herself.
Probably the venture would never have taken place if she had not gone into Manchester to have a tooth stopped!
It was an agonising experience, for she had always been cursed by sensitive teeth which make any visit to the dentist agony. The dentist gave her a very painful injection which he vowed could not possibly hurt, and she emerged again with the tooth stopped, but feeling that there was something uncommonly like a ping-pong ball in the side of her face. There might be nothing to see, but oh, what a lot there was to feel!
She found herself staring into a shop window.
It was the sort of place that she had never seen before, and was called ‘The World is Yours’ Travel Agency. The window, lit by fluorescent lighting, was gay and caught the eye, for it was one of those dim days in Manchester, when although it was not actually raining, it was doing the next best thing, and something of some kind was falling. In the window there were alluring posters of sunlit walls on which multitudinous bougainvillea blossomed profusely in crimson and purple palls. Miss Marvin had no idea what flower it was, of course, thinking it must be some sort of new Virginia creeper, but she realised that it looked very attractive. There was a picture of Pompeii, its dignified ruins wreathed by wisteria in heliotrope clusters; beyond it lay the vista of a sea so blue that it looked like sapphires, and of sands so yellow that they might easily have been topazes glittering in the sunshine. Somehow the pictures struck a new note in her.
She looked again and again, standing there and staring. In the window a couple of pots of azaleas were covered with blossom, whilst a black cat curled itself round under them as though it was significant of the luck with which it could bless her. Even so, it is very dubious if Miss Marvin would ever have gone inside to enquire, but the young man who ran it came outside to look at the prospects for the afternoon.
‘Awful weather!’ he said, and he spoke almost as if he knew her.
She answered, ‘It’s Manchester. It always behaves this way.’
‘Yes, I know it’s Manchester; who would ever stay here when he could go to places like that?’ and he indicated the posters fluorescently lit in the window. Pompeii. The Tivoli Gardens. A few choicely selected fjords. Juan les Pins.
‘But they cost the earth,’ said Miss Marvin.
‘Of course they don’t! You’d be surprised. Come in and have a look-see. It’s going to pour cats and dogs in a minute, been working up for it all day.’ And as if heaven desired to justify his remark, down came the rain, good old Manchester rain, and no doubt about it.
Miss Marvin went inside. It was carpeted in light brown, so thick that it felt like moss, and concealed lighting added to the pictures placed here and there, quite breath-taking in their beauty. Talk about ‘God is Love’ in forget-me-nots neatly framed! It wasn’t in it with Pompeii, even though someone had once told Miss Marvin that when you came to look closer, Pompeii was really awfully rude. The young man indicated a lush armchair also to match the carpet and beside it stood an upright ashtray coquetting on a single post with a globe base, so that it rolled back to the upright when you touched it.
‘Have a cigarette?’ he asked.
‘I don’t smoke, thank you.’
Outside the rain was gathering impetus and teeming down. Miss Marvin had a feeling that the ping-pong ball in her mouth was growing a shade smaller, which was comforting. When it disappeared altogether the pain would possibly begin, which was not a very cheering thought!
The young man came over to her with an armful of brochures. ‘Look at these,’ he said.
For the next hour Miss Marvin was looking at these, her breath literally going out of her body, for she would never have believed that anything could be so utterly beautiful. During this time she had told him about the pools win. Too late she realised that that was perhaps a little silly of her.
Instantly he said, ‘Why not invest it in a holiday de luxe? A hundred would cover everything, and what fun you could have!’
‘Could I?’ she asked.
‘Of course you could! You’d have the time of your life.’
‘Where would I go?’ she asked. She didn’t mean to go, of course, at her age it would be too ridiculous, as she knew. But it was still raining, so she felt that she might as well make the enquiry if only to pass the time.
‘Juan les Pins is glorious at this time of the year. There’s a small place ‒ Cap Rabat ‒ just beyond it; cheaper there, just as much fun, and rather select.
Miss Marvin was torn two ways. The one way was the the method of Lavender Hill, born and bred in her; she thought of life there busily bent on storing up money for the old age which it might never reach. In her parents’ cases, both had died before they could reap the harvest for which their lives had been pruned. They had got nothing out of their years, and they would never get anything out of them now. It would, of course, be wiser to go a bust but busts had never entered into her childhood’s curriculum.
She said that it would be lonely out there.
‘Nonsense!’ said the young man, ‘as though it ever is lonely out there! So much happens, so much that is different. It’s gay and stimulating, and you’d come back a new woman.’
‘It would take too long.’
‘Why, you could go for three weeks. I could arrange everything.’
Miss Marvin remembered Nancy Palmer, who had bought a house, and who had enjoyed ever moment of it.
‘Done!’ said Miss Marvin,
very very foolishly. ‘I shall never be forty again,’ she thought; ‘it’s a nice age, too old to allow yourself to be cheated, yet still just young enough to have the legs to carry you, and the will to enjoy yourself.’
He asked about her passport, and that brought her back to earth with a bounce.
‘I haven’t one, of course,’ she said, and her voice sounded tremulous.
The young man was accustomed to ladies who knew little of the complications of travelling. Being paid on commission, he found it was his duty to know everything, and once a fish got into his net, there was very little chance of getting out again. Business had been bad lately, and here there seemed to be a woman who had money to burn and who only needed a shove in the right direction to persuade her to put a match to it. Undoubtedly she would think Cap Rabat perfect, and enjoy herself watching the world go by, but she’d never join in anything. Poor fool! thought he.
‘There’s a place just down the street; good fellows, do you in twenty minutes, and I’ll lend you an umbrella so that you won’t get wet,’ said he.
It wasn’t entirely true.
Although the photographers had an enormous notice stuck in the shop window stating that they coped in twenty minutes with passport photographs, never in their whole career had they done such a thing. But the notice drew in the unwary, who once they got inside seldom backed out. Miss Marvin was delighted at the prospect.
‘But,’ she said, ‘this is really my second best hat.’ (‘Looks like it, too!’ thought the young man, who was fastidious about women’s clothes. His blonde ‒ the latest, a lady who made immediate commission so eminently necessary ‒ was a one for hats!).
‘They don’t take you in a hat,’ said he.
Within the twinkling of an eye the pair of them were out in the rainy street, where as much dampness seemed to strike up from the greasy pavements as came down on to them. The young man held the umbrella over Miss Marvin most politely. She was impressed, if not embarrassed, by such politeness, and they walked past the nine neighbouring shops and into the passport photographers’ with a bounce. It was an indifferent house, painted red like a fire station.
If Miss Marvin had only had her eyes in her head, it is possible that she would have known that this was the danger signal in her career. ‘Beware!’ shrieked the photographer’s, with its garish paint, but she limply went inside.
‘This is it!’ she told herself.
They went up a flight of ugly stairs, on which the lino had worn so thin that in places it looked like the outside of dirty imported cheese. On the first floor an open door was marked PASSPORTS.
Miss Marvin was set down on a triangular stool, with one of the nastiest and most glaring lights above her, which immediately started her head aching disastrously. The photographer whisked off her hat, not even bothering that it ruffled her hair and made her feel most uncomfortable. He took the photographs quickly enough, then said that she must pay now, and call back tomorrow for the finished articles.
‘But I thought you said it would be twenty minutes?’ she asked. The tooth was beginning to recover. The ping-pong ball had disappeared, and a horrid little nagging pain was starting.
The photographer said that they happened to be very busy at the moment, and couldn’t do it any sooner. Now it seemed that the owner of the umbrella had returned to the shop, which he maintained that he could not possibly leave for long; the result was that the row ‒ if row there was going to be ‒ would have to be a duet. Miss Marvin looked round for him, because he had been so nice, and as he wasn’t there she said no more.
‘Oh dear!’ she murmured furtively and with embarrassment.
The photographer, sucking his teeth hard, ignored her obvious anxiety. She couldn’t have the photos before then, so what? So what, indeed!
Miss Marvin said that like this she wasn’t sure that she wanted them at all; in the end he capitulated with a bad grace; he said that he would send them round to Mr. Swinnerton at the travel agency if she liked.
‘Thanks,’ said Miss Marvin. Leaving it at that she went down to the street again.
In the travel agency a large-busted dowager and her anaemic daughter, as slender as her mother was stout, were conversing about the cost of winters in Egypt. The mother was looking for the sort of cruise where there are lots of rich young men, and fun for ‘my little darling,’ so she said smilingly. ‘My little darling’, obviously sick to death of her mother, stood staring at young Mr. Swinnerton with some doubt.
‘Excuse me one moment,’ said Mr. Swinnerton, and he turned to Miss Marvin, whom he was really beginning to like. ‘Okay?’ he asked.
‘No. They can’t do the photos till tomorrow, but the man said that he would send them over to you.’
‘Oh well, that’s all right. Sometimes they are awfully busy, you know. At this time of year everybody is going abroad, and they all want passport photos. I’ll get the whole thing fixed up, so don’t you worry.’
She went to the door with him whilst the fat dowager and her thin daughter cogitated over Pompeii, and concentrated on bougainvillea, rude ruins and such.
In the doorway Mr. Swinnerton said, ‘You’ll send me the cheque, won’t you? I’ll fix every single thing. It’ll be the holiday of your life. You’ve got all the literature, haven’t you? I’m sure you’ll enjoy yourself.’
‘I’m a bit scared that something will happen.’
He gripped her hand with the nearest thing to affection that Miss Marvin had ever known. ‘Not at all,’ said he, ‘you’ll have fun. That’s more than old United Dairies will have. Bye-bye!’ and back he went.
‘Did I hear aright?’ thought Miss Marvin, hot and tingling with horror.
Through the glass panels of the door that was now closed between them, she could see Mr. Swinnerton perusing pamphlets and advising the full-busted old dowager to whom he had alluded ‒ or hadn’t he? ‒ so disgracefully. Miss Marvin tottered down the street.
Two
EXODUS
It was curious how the news got round Brestonbury. She had no idea that she had told a soul, in fact she was quite sure that she hadn’t. Mrs. Bunce must have been the broadcaster. It is true that when Miss Marvin went off to school next day and Mrs. Bunce was fulfilling that somewhat vague duty of hers which she called ‘tidying up’, she had noticed the catalogues and pamphlets, wondering what on earth they were all about. She looked at them with some dismay. This one was Pompeii. This, Naples, the city of pearl. The Côte d’Azur, land of romance. Magical Menton. Corsica, the land of brigand and of joy. Mrs. Bunce brought out her steel-rimmed glasses and surveyed this strange reading a little more closely. The man who had written the brochures had not done so with the inspiration necessary to appeal to the Methodist mind of Mrs. Bunce. He had applied everything to whet the imagination, and undoubtedly had succeeded admirably. He was a past master in the art of glamorous suggestion.
A typewritten letter lay on top of the pile, and Mrs. Bunce, attributing everything to ‘the age’ which made Miss Marvin not quite responsible ‒ read the letter, as a duty.
‘The World is Yours’ Travel Agency,
16 Pratt Street,
Manchester, 46.
February the 28th.
Miss A. Marvin,
4 Laburnum Avenue,
Brestonbury.
Dear Madam,
With regard to our conversation of yesterday the 27th inst., I have now gone into the matter of your journey to Cap Rabat, and enclose a synopsis of arrangements. I should be glad to receive your cheque for £35, which will include the tickets for the journey, and the deposit required by the Bella Vista hotel. This hotel is not one of the very large kind, but is admirably run, with an excellent cuisine, and entertains a delightful clientele. It does not demand the extremely high prices of the bigger hotel, and is therefore more suitable for the traveller not desirous of dancing and frivolous entertainment, but one who wishes to explore the Riviera at leisure.
The arrangements will be for you to cross on th
e morning boat from Dover, and catch the train for Paris at Calais. We would suggest that you cross Paris to the Gare de Lyon, and take your dinner at the station, or at the Hotel du Palais, where they would also supply you with a bath before starting on the night journey. Everyone speaks English at the hotel, and you would find them very amiable.
The train for Marseilles leaves the Gare de Lyon at nine o’clock; we could arrange a sleeper if you wish, or a couchette, which would be shared with others, but is considerably less expensive. You will arrive at Marseilles at eleven o’clock a.m., and the Ventimille train will be waiting at another platform. You will arrive at Cap Rabat by half past twelve, and the hotel is close to the station.
We should be glad if you would confirm that the above arrangements are satisfactory.
p.p. ‘The World is Yours’ Travel Agency, George Swinnerton.
It was the thought of a couchette that worried Mrs. Bunce considerably. It sounded suggestive, and whatever it was, had to be shared with others. What had happened to Miss Marvin. How much wiser it would have been to give the whole sum to the chapel lads’ outing, than to go off in a couchette with strange gentlemen, as this letter predicted!
Fate sent someone along to comfort Mrs. Bunce. It was the Minister.
The Minister was out walking in his saucer hat, and the woollen gloves which a maiden parishioner had knitted him for Christmas. He carried a large rush bag with which his wife had armed him to fetch her some fish, ‘and don’t let it be sprats again’. Their stipend was in the sprat category.
