Doves of Venus

by Olivia Manning

  Her chief sensation was fear she might lose her job. If she rang and asked help from someone at the studio, that would prove she really was ill. But how could she let people like Denis, Bertie and Rhoda know she lived in a room where no artist could work, a room as narrow as a slice of bread?

  She thought, at last, of Miss Senior, secretary to Mrs Primrose. Of course, Miss Senior was the one. She had interviewed Ellie for the packaging job, and brought her the news of her advancement to the studio. Miss Senior’s manner was nervous and unpretentious: the thought of it reassured Ellie. Besides, Miss Senior was at the elbow of power. When Mrs Primrose said: ‘Dismiss that girl for malingering’, Miss Senior could say: ‘She really isn’t fit to come to work. I’ve seen her myself.’

  Miss Senior, when Ellie got through to her, seemed surprised and flustered by the call – but, yes, she would come. She would be round about six o’clock with food and aspirins. Meanwhile, had Ellie not better return to bed?

  Ellie slept heavily until late afternoon. She was awakened by the distant ringing of the front-door bell. She switched on her light and looked at her alarm-clock. It was nearly six. That must be Miss Senior ringing below. Mrs Mackie was out, as usual. As Ellie put on her coat, the ringing changed to knocking. She felt a sort of love for Miss Senior that she could persist so, standing in the cold porch, all to help Ellie who had been fool enough to fall ill.

  Ellie sped downstairs, switched the light on in the bare, yellow-brown hall, and opened the door. Then the cold came in like a blow. Outside stood a small boy with a brown paper bag: ‘Name of Parsons? Sign here.’

  Inside the bag were five oranges and a note: ‘I do not think I should risk catching ‘flu’ but these will tide you over. Stay in bed tomorrow if you are no better. I will explain to Mrs Primrose.’

  The last sentence was all Ellie needed. She would survive. She spaced out the oranges so that they would last until Tuesday evening. On Tuesday morning the girl who did the room brought her aspirin and hot milk. During the day of half-sleep she found herself again in the park with Quintin. Together they drifted silently, covering vast areas of green, through a strange and deepening twilight. As the light failed, Quintin’s figure wavered, became less than a shadow . . . She tried to touch him. He was not within reach. She called to him. He disappeared. Seeking him, harassed by glimpses of him that came and went, she passed at last, alone, into a black emptiness of sleep.

  Awaking next morning, clear-headed and hungry, she felt the exhilaration of recovery. After all, Quintin had said that one day they would meet again. And she was well, more or less. Anyway, she was alive. And she was in London, where she had always wanted to be: what was more, she worked in a studio, an artist among artists. She had achieved so much, why should she, in the end, not achieve Quintin, too?

  2

  The day Ellie was sent to ‘Primrose’s’ by the labour exchange, she had entered mistakenly through the main door. That never happened again – but she saw the showrooms. For the first time in her life she saw painted furniture and furniture ornamented with gilded brass: a purple carpet – purple! – silk and velvet curtains of remarkable colours; wall-paper embossed with gold.

  When Miss Senior came seeking her through the alcoves, she found her pulling out the drawers of a writing-desk that was painted yellow outside and pink within. She called reprovingly: ‘Miss Parsons?’ Ellie, swinging round, dazzled and alight, said: ‘Isn’t it all wonderful!’

  ‘What?’ Miss Senior was more bewildered than annoyed by Ellie’s behaviour.

  ‘All these things. I’ve never seen anything like them. How lovely to work here!’

  ‘I’m afraid you won’t work here.’ As though Ellie had trespassed, Miss Senior said: ‘You should have come in by the staff entrance in the mews.’ She took Ellie out to the new, brick factory at the back and interviewed her in the porter’s office. She was given the job without much questioning. No one else had applied for it. When Miss Senior had approved her, she was taken beyond the porter’s room to the office of Mr Daze, the accountant and chief of staff. She was less than a minute with Mr Daze, whom she was to see again only twice in her life.

  When she arrived the following Monday morning, the porter took her down to the factory basement, a chilly area, green-painted, cement-floored, lined with pipes, ventilators, fuse boxes and power switches. Dahlia, whom she was to assist, said: ‘Lucky for them they got hold of you. I wouldn’t have stuck it down here alone another week.’

  Dahlia was a thin girl with a face like a whippet. Her hair, yellow and long, with the texture of hemp, hung over one eye. She was seldom silent. ‘What do they think we are, I’d like to know. I wouldn’t keep a dog down here. No proper lighting, not to speak of, that is, and cold! Why, last winter when the boiler broke down I nearly died. I said to Klixon – that’s the bottom-pincher with the red moustache – I said: “You get me some heat here, or you’ll be packing your own furniture.” He tried to make a joke of it, but I wasn’t having any. “I mean it,” I said, and what do you think he sent down? An oil-stove! Would you believe it? “I’m not standing for that,” I said, “You get that boiler mended double quick, or else . . .”’ She gave her head a threatening twist and fixed her visible eye on Ellie.

  Ellie said automatically: ‘I don’t blame you.’ She had learnt in her mother’s restaurant several idioms of least resistance. They were to serve her now. Dahlia nodded satisfaction.

  At one o’clock Ellie asked where she could eat a midday meal. Dahlia, who lived at home, said she had brought sandwiches, but the Primrose employees were permitted to use the canteen of an electrical works in the mews.

  ‘Do you never go there?’ Ellie asked.

  Dahlia expressed fastidiousness with a gesture: ‘I don’t fancy it.’

  When Ellie returned from her canteen meal, Dahlia said: ‘What’s it like?’

  ‘Jolly good,’ said Ellie, at which Dahlia seemed suddenly resentful that Ellie should be familiar with the canteen and she not. The next day she told Ellie she would go there with her.

  The canteen, large and noisy, smelt of stale food. It was decorated with anti-waste posters, very old and tattered. As Ellie and Dahlia queued for food, Ellie saw Dahlia look about her and distaste appeared on the lean, whippet face. Dahlia’s seeing eye fixed itself on the nearest table, at which four people sat hemmed in by dirty dishes and the tin covers used to keep the food warm.

  Ellie said: ‘The food is all right.’

  Dahlia swallowed in her throat. ‘I never did fancy this place,’ she grumbled. ‘When I told my mum I was coming today, she said “What do you know about their cooking-pots?”’

  The queue moved. At last they were served with food and wandering about among the tables looking for free seats. They seized on two as they were vacated and cleared a place for themselves among the discarded plates. Each had been served with a slice of grey mutton and a ladleful of grey sauce. The mutton took up no more than two inches of plate, which was given a look of plenty by a wedge of dark green cabbage, two mounds of mashed potato and half-a-dozen baked potatoes. Dahlia poked at the baked potatoes and said fretfully: ‘What are these made of? Cardboard?’ She crumpled the paper-thin meat and ate it in one mouthful. ‘I’d rather have a sandwich,’ she said. ‘At least it tastes of something.’

  ‘Then you’d need another meal at night.’

  ‘Don’t you have one?’

  ‘I have tea. They let me make it in my room.’

  ‘That’s big of them.’

  Ellie ate everything, gulping down water at each threat of nausea. This food was part of the challenge of life here. She would not be defeated by it, but she felt some guilt about Dahlia. She said: ‘Yesterday there was cottage pie: it’s easier to swallow.’

  ‘That muck! It gives me flatulence.’

  It was Dahlia, unfortunately, who found in her cabbage a piece of coarse string bag in which cabbages came from market. She held it up to the two women who shared their table. One woman said: ‘
I got a black-beetle once, right in the middle of my fried egg.’

  ‘I got worse than that,’ said the other, ‘but I wouldn’t like to put you off your food.’

  Dahlia lit a cigarette and her ill-temper began to dissolve. When the trolley girl came to clear the dishes and scrape the waste food into a bin, Dahlia, handing over her plate, said: ‘If you didn’t want it, why did you take it?’

  ‘What?’

  Dahlia pointed to the anti-waste poster on the wall.

  ‘Oh, that! Let them make it so you want to eat it, I say.’

  Ellie, who, the day before, had heard the same girl say: ‘Where do you think you are? The Ritz?’, was impressed by Dahlia’s influence in the world to which she belonged. She complained, as Ellie would not dare to complain, and her complaints were accepted or treated as a joke. Ellie wondered if she herself would ever find an environment where everything she did or said was accepted and right. She had reached London – yet she had not moved very far. Shut in all day with Dahlia, she might have been shut in her mother’s restaurant. Dahlia’s company was much like that of her mother’s customers. It imposed the same restrictions and prohibitions. One was supposed to accept the limitations on speech and conduct set by powerful insiders like Dahlia. Ellie had long ago discovered that if she ever made any comment other than ‘That’s right,’ and ‘I don’t blame you,’ she would find she had somehow upset someone. She was determined to escape. She belonged elsewhere.

  Sometimes later when Dahlia had discovered all of Ellie’s background, she said: ‘You’re loopy, you know.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Leaving a good home, and living in a bed-sitter and eating that stuff in the canteen. Whatever made you do it?’

  Ellie smiled, but did not try to explain.

  Dahlia said: ‘I thought at first your mum and dad must be dead, really I did. And then when I asked you and you said your mum was alive and wanted you home, I thought you must be loopy. Why, when I think of all I’ve got – a good supper waiting, and a big fire, and Ty-rone dropping in, and mum putting me to bed with a hot-water bottle if I sniff a bit – why, you’re loopy, that’s what I think.’

  Ellie smiled, knowing that all that was nothing compared to her own freedom to live differently.

  ‘What do you do on Sundays?’

  ‘Nothing much.’

  ‘Well, one Sunday you come and have tea with us at Hammersmith. We always have hot buttered scones and fruit-cake on Sundays.’

  That was Dahlia in a mellow mood. Soon after, her mood hardened and Tyrone, so tenderly mentioned before, became another cause for complaint. ‘That Ty-rone! He’s that soppy! The other night at the Palais a chap came up to me like this:’ she bent forward, waving her backside, on her face a ghastly leer before which she waggled an upraised forefinger. ‘He said: “Hello, Hep-cat, dig that down beat. On your tootsies: I’ll give you a creep.” The nerve! “I’ve brought my partner with me,” I said, very dignified, and I looked at Ty-rone – and what did he do? He just got red in the face and looked the other way, pretending he hadn’t noticed anything. “Why, Ty-rone,” I said, “you make me sick. You’d let that chap steal your girl right under your nose.”’

  ‘And be so rude,’ said Ellie.

  ‘Rude!’ said Dahlia, made indignant by the suggestion anyone dare be rude to her.

  ‘I mean, calling you a “hep-cat”,’ said Ellie.

  Dahlia’s face collapsed in an expression of utter weariness. ‘Don’t you know anything?’ she asked.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Ellie. ‘Do go on. What happened after that?’

  ‘Nothing,’ said Dahlia; but after she had brooded a while, she spoke again: ‘He thinks I’m going to marry him, but I said “You watch your step, Ty-rone. There’s plenty more where you come from.”’

  ‘That’s right,’ said Ellie.

  Then it was Mum who was ‘that fussy’ and Dad who took off his collar and tie as soon as he entered the house: ‘“For God’s sake,” I said to him, “why don’t you take your shirt and vest off, too? Always undressing – what does it look like if I have callers?”’

  Dahlia had been employed at ‘Primrose’s’ for two years. She knew the names and occupations of everyone in the the building. If Ellie singled out a face among those she saw in the canteen or on the stairs, Dahlia would pin down with a word the individual to which it belonged: ‘daft’, ‘shifty’, ‘barmy’, ‘soppy’, ‘cheeky’.

  ‘What about Mrs Primrose?’

  ‘Stuck up.’

  ‘I’d like to see her.’

  ‘You’ll see her soon enough.’

  ‘And Klixon? What do you think of him?’

  ‘Downy!’ Dahlia sniggered. ‘He’s a one,’ she said.

  Ellie felt no surprise at Dahlia’s respect for Klixon, the Staff Manager. She herself was fascinated by his ebullience, fearing that by sheer inability to resist such force of character she might be one day driven to respond to him, or someone like him. How terrible to end up as Mrs Klixon! His habit of touching her waist or patting her backside if he slid round her heightened his aura of danger. He was a tall, large young man who, at their first meeting, had stood with his head thrown back and looked down at Ellie from under his thin, reddish lashes. ‘If you want to know anything, come to me. If you want any help, I’ll see you right.’ He suddenly expanded his mouth in a significant smirk. She was appalled. She said to herself: ‘Please, God, not Mr Klixon.’

  He had the air of an important person who would become more important, but he despised no one’s admiration. His bright blue eyes, glassy as dolls’ eyes, bulged unblinking and expressionless on either side of his scimitar nose: he was always laughing. He could be heard stating loudly ‘Ha, ha, ha!’ from every part of the building. As he went through the upholstery room above, there came down to the basement his ‘Ha, ha, ha! Hello, girls. Ha, ha, ha! A good time being had by all. Ha, ha, ha!’

  Even when he was not talking or laughing he would keep his lips stretched open to show his large, white teeth: but sometimes, when his attention was distracted from himself, his mouth snapped back and shut into a very small pocket, like the mouth of a crab.

  It was odd that, although he was so affable with all of them, the upholstery girls, when they chatted in the cloakroom, usually spoke of him with suspicion, even dislike: and odder that, although they disliked him, they could not cease to speak of him. He was so constantly discussed that the girls did not trouble to name him. Klixon was ‘him’, as though there was not another male in the building.

  ‘Him! He’ll get on all right. He knows all the tricks. But it was the war made him. He was nobody till he got in the Army and turned into an officer and a gent. Don’t ask me how. He’ll own his own place one day, see if he don’t.’

  One of the older women broke in to say: ‘Catch him young, girls. Find yourself the boss’s boss one day.’

  ‘Him! I wouldn’t marry him . . .’

  ‘No fear! Any girl that got him’d earn her keep.’

  Ellie asked Dahlia: ‘Would you marry him?’

  ‘Who?’ Dahlia pretended bewilderment but her cheeks grew red.

  ‘Klixon, of course.’

  ‘Him!’ Dahlia’s voice rose in scorn, then subsided into spurts of laughter. She said: ‘Seeing as how you’re a friend, I’ll tell you something. Klixon waited for me one night in the mews.’

  ‘Did you go out with him?’

  ‘Not likely.’ But again Dahlia’s scorn collapsed in giggles, and after a moment she added mysteriously: ‘Not so’s you’d notice.’

  That was the only time Ellie heard any girl claim that Klixon had made any sure advance to her. She doubted it, yet the claim reduced Klixon’s power. She began to see him as rather ridiculous.

  Some weeks had passed since Dahlia’s mention of tea at Hammersmith, but Ellie had not yet been invited. As her appetite grew keener with the autumn cold, she became haunted by the thought of hot buttered scones and fruit-cake. At the end of the week made notable
by the fact Dahlia had described her as a friend, Ellie diffidently asked her: ‘Do you think I could come to Hammersmith on Sunday?’

  ‘What, you mean to tea? Not this Sunday.’ Dahlia spoke with decision. ‘My young man, Ty-rone, ’s coming in.’

  Ellie had to realise that a young man, even a young man as faulty as Tyrone, was more important than a friend.

  Ellie left one luncheon time behind three people – two men and a girl – who looked and dressed unlike anyone else in the building. Their freedom of manner touched her acutely. Something moved in her as though, on a voyage, she had glimpsed her destination without any certainty of reaching it. When she returned she asked Dahlia about these people.

  ‘Oh, them! They’re the artists.’

  ‘What do they do?’

  ‘They do that stuff.’ Dahlia pointed to a white table on which was painted an urn enclosed by a wreath of flowers.

  ‘What are they like?’ asked Ellie.

  ‘How should I know! They’re artists.’ To Dahlia, it seemed, artists formed a section of the community no normal person would expect to understand.

  ‘Where do they work?’

  ‘Up in the studio; next to the paint-shop.’

  Ellie watched for the artists, gazed after them and avoided being seen by them – all with an anguish of envy, longing to be disclosed as a member of that body which was beyond the range of Dahlia’s criticism. Meanwhile she could not bear that they should observe her in beggary in the basement. She believed so completely in her right to be in the studio, she was certain that sooner or later she must go there. It was as though all the forces of her life were propelling her there, but, in her impatience, she wanted to hasten things. What should she do? Show her portfolio of work to Klixon? Ask Miss Senior to show it to Mrs Primrose? It was while she was considering these moves that Quintin presented himself to her.