Here Be Dragons

by Stella Gibbons

  First put to her a strong case, then tire her out with her own anger and resentment, then appeal to her common-sense. He had done it so often in the past, and had so often in the past been rewarded by an unexpected gesture—like the one she had just made, which gave him more even than he had demanded. Ah, he was a psychologist. Why was he wasting his gifts? He thought of The Aftermath and all at once the cigarette tasted bitter.

  “Oh—dears—do forgive me for bawling for you like that,” Peggy, poised at the front door, was saying rapidly to Anna and Nell, “but I’m in the most desperate hurry. (Can’t even stop to see my Marty. Kiss him for me.) I’m letting Charles and Margie have the flat. (Yes, I know … after all I said … but I am. Haven’t time now to tell you why.) You must tell him I said he’s to pay you a pound a week. (Yes, you are to, Anna. It’s ridiculous. He can afford it. Let that little Margie cut down on her costume jewellery—I ran into them at the Wine Amateurs Society’s dinner—and she was in dark green and looked exactly—but exactly—like a Christmas tree. About sixty-five strings of Dior crystals—you know.) So you tell him I said so … about the pound, I mean. Nell, poppet, you absolutely cannot work for Gerald Hughes in ankle socks.”

  “No, Aunt Peggy.” Nell glanced triumphantly at her mother.

  “She has stockings, of course. But we keep them for the really cold weather.”

  “What do you call this?” Lady Fairfax shuddered in the carpetless hall. “What sort of stockings?” she added suspiciously, and, on hearing they also were hand-knitted, shook her head.

  “Won’t do, darlings. The mind boggles. Look,” opening her bag, “here’s a pound. (Oh, don’t be so proud, Nell. Look on it as a sub. on your first week’s salary if you must.) Now you fly out to a nice little shop in the High Street called Gaze’s, and buy yourself some thirty denier nylons. Got that? Thirty denier. Now there’s nothing else, is there?”

  Two pale violet gloves were pressed for a moment against the brow under the dark violet cap while Lady Fairfax shut her eyes.

  “No, that’s all, I think. Nell, telephone Gardis and get her to arrange for you all to come to lunch one day next week—oh, damn; you won’t be able to, of course—well, for drinks one evening about six, then. That really is all, I think. ’Bye, darlings.”

  She ran down the steps and did not pause to wave. They heard her say, “Home, quickly, please Robert,” and saw her fair smiling face turned once more towards them as the car glided away.

  “A black chauffeur,” Anna said, as they shut the door. “Aren’t there any white ones wanting jobs? And why must she say ‘’bye’ like that? It sounds idiotic.”

  “He’s a Jamaican. She gave him the job to set an example because his family was starving. She told me about it last night. Mother, can you get the nylons for me? I don’t want to go out.”

  She was hoping that John would telephone.

  “I don’t want to either, Nell. I really must start on the garden.”

  Nell was quiet for a moment. Then she said:

  “But there’s nothing for lunch, is there?”

  “There’s that piece of cheese. I could make a Welsh rarebit for Daddy and you and I could have milk and bread and jam.”

  “I’d better go,” said Nell, and went upstairs for béret and coat. Supposing he did telephone. Let him find her gone out.

  As she sped down the steps in search of sausages and apples, banishing angry thoughts of him by turning over in her head plans for nourishing and cherishing the parents, a vague disturbance at the upper windows caught her attention. She glanced up, and was in time to see the face of Charles-for-gods-sake, as she now thought of him, looking noble and remote above a fluttering duster. He gave her a cross smile and wave of the lowly object and disappeared. Nell remembered the fish scales: Is this the face that launched a thousand chips? she thought, and went on down the road laughing.

  After all, he was coming to live there now; in the same house. There would be plenty of opportunities to show the silly little boy what she thought of his behaviour. She would be firm but dignified.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  THE OLIVE-COLOURED CANAL

  THE PREMISES OCCUPIED by Akkro Products, Limited, was a tall, thin, ancient house of brown brick, one of a row overlooking, from a side street, the tidy ruins of something called Whitefields Tabernacle, and a little green public garden. The hour was precisely nine o’clock; Nell had just heard it strike from somewhere; a vaguely religious sound tolling quietly through the roar of the traffic of Monday morning. The house did not look as she had expected a place devoted to commerce to look, and she was still slightly shaken from having temporarily parted with her stomach in the new fast lift at Hampstead, and from having counted eight black men (? Jamaicans) on her way from Goodge Street station. But the address corresponded with that on Gardis’s paper. She crossed the road and went in.

  “It’s Mr. Riddle,” said a girl of about her own age seated at a desk behind a wooden barrier marked Enquiries, having heard her name and business. “Upstairs.” She turned back to her papers.

  “I’m to ask for Mr. Riddle, do you mean?”

  “Mr. Riddle. That’s right.”

  “Where do I find him?”

  “Mr. Riddle.” The girl showed signs of impatience. “Up the stairs.”

  Nell was feeling impatient herself. She ran up a flight of dusty stone steps, glancing at closed doors as she went. She met no-one. There was a distant sound of typewriters and a sharpish smell like celluloid or Aunt Peggy’s nail varnish. The windows were unexpectedly clean, revealing the clear blue spring sky. Then she saw a door marked with the pregnant name. She opened it rather quickly and went in.

  “Here, here, we’re very full of energy this morning, aren’t we?” cried a fat man perched on the edge of a desk. “When she’s been here six months she won’t run up the stairs like that, what’s the betting, George?”

  A pair of watery eyes looked across at Nell. Their owner was sitting at the desk. The room was small and rather dark and stiflingly, startlingly hot. A small gas fire, looking as if at any moment it might burst into flames, so red and quivering was it, hissed madly in the black fireplace. There was a strong and triumphant smell of cigarette smoke: very, very old: old: this morning’s—for both gentlemen were smoking, although the seated one was doing so with less abandon than the perched one—and even future, for it was possible to deduce that the room would never, as far as human thought could reach, smell of anything else.

  “Good morning, Miss Sely,” said the elderly one, conveying reproof. “You are a few minutes late but we’ll excuse that as it’s the first morning. I am Mr. Riddle and you will be working for me. This is Mr. Belwood, our Chief Accountant.” (Mr. Belwood made a mock-obsequious inclination of his head and brandished his cigarette.) “The Ladies Cloakroom is on the next landing. Now if you will kindly hang your coat and hat behind the door, we will get to work. That is your desk, in the corner near the window. I suppose, like all young people, you like fresh air.”

  “Yes,” said Nell, and Mr. Riddle gave a faint start. He stared at her, and she saw that the word had been a mistake. I ought to have just smiled, she thought, but honestly, what a fug. Had her tone conveyed possible future rebellion even as his own had conveyed disapproval? It soon became clear that it had.

  “Oh, so you’re a ‘fresh air fiend’ are you?” said Mr. Riddle; not threateningly, not sarcastically, but in the voice of somebody taking up one more burden in a harassed existence; “well, I can’t say that I am. Give me a cosy atmosphere any time. Belwood, I’ve got some work to do.”

  “Lord yes, and I must be blowing.” Mr. Belwood heaved himself off the desk, smiling at Nell. “Lovely person your aunt, Lady Fairfax, isn’t she? My wife raves about her.”

  “She is very kind,” said Nell. She was removing the cover of a typewriter whose newness, gleaming black enamel, and white and scarlet keys did something to restore a confidence in the solvency of Akkro Products (and the regular payment of five pou
nds a week) which their premises, and the seediness of Mr. Riddle, and the blowsiness of Mr. Belwood, had somewhat shaken.

  “Br-r-r! Touch of frost in the air this morning, isn’t there, George?” said Mr. Belwood, adding as he went out, “Cheer up, Miss Sely, the first ten years are the worst.”

  Nell stretched out her legs, in their nylons, under her desk. It was a cautious movement; so might a prisoner in the stocks have tested his powers of extension. She caught sight of her feet; her best black shoes were all wrong, of course, but the nylons undoubtedly made a great difference. She felt more cheerful. Resting her hands on the keys, she looked across expectantly at Mr. Riddle.

  But in spite of Mr. Belwood’s heartening badinage, and the nylons, and various signs of the firm’s prosperity, and even certain hints of a modified approval of her own efforts which presented themselves during what seemed the longest morning of her life, she flew out of Mr. Riddle’s room at one o’clock with a relief which should have warned her of the future. A wailing cry pursued her—“Miss Sely, aren’t you going to try the firm’s lunch? We provide an excellent lunch at the Rosita Café, next door but one, for two shillings—Miss Sely—” But she ignored it, and ran upstairs to the Ladies Cloakroom.

  There she found three thin, pale girls, with hair dressed like South Sea Islanders (Old Style), banging powder puffs against their faces in front of a large, bright mirror. Over the two pink washing basins, the chromium taps which gushed splendidly hot water, the machine providing a fresh paper towel for each arrival, and the device for doling out liquid soap, there hovered a dry, sour, rotting eighteenth-century smell which had lived for two hundred years in the walls and under the floor.

  The three girls looked at her with sly suspicion and alarm, and, after some exploratory preliminaries, warned her not to try the office lunch. It was sawful. They only had it themselves, it appeared, because a collective authority named Mum insisted. Then one of them said in a half-undertone to the others that she supposed she would have her lunch with her auntie at a posh place in Oxford Street, and they all looked at Nell and giggled. Having applied Claregates’s grave politeness to the situation, and seen them reduced to resentful silence, Nell went out to sit in the small green public garden.

  For her lunch, she bought a cheese roll which she ate in the open air. Her offer of four pounds ten shillings a week to her mother had been accepted by Anna without protest, and Nell knew better than to mention the subject to her father. But now that Mr. Riddle had spent ten minutes in explaining to her about deductions for Income Tax and Insurance and so on, she knew that not even by lunching daily for fourpence, a thing which she must get used to, could she give her mother what she had promised. She would give every penny that she could. Later on, when the weather was warmer, she would walk to work and save the fare.

  She sat under the budding trees, watching old men feeding the sparrows with crumbs, and plotting to get back before Mr. Riddle and to open the windows, for it appeared that, although he recommended the canteen lunch to the junior staff, he himself patronized a restaurant at some distance away, from which he sometimes returned a few minutes late. He had told her this while winding himself up in a singularly dismal muffler of darkest grey, very thick, wool, which matched his knitted gloves; not excusing his lateness; merely imparting an impressive fact.

  She had time for a run past the jewellery shops of Tottenham Court Road before she turned her steps again office-wards. Lumps of cheese-roll sitting on her chest did something to lessen her pleasure in the ear-rings made like tiny bowls of fish, or baskets of fruit, or golden bells, and she was shaken by irrepressible hiccoughs while admiring the pink, white and yellow undergarments in the shop windows, but she liked Tottenham Court Road. It was a bright spot in the day’s undeniable drabness, and, if she were questioned that evening about its respectability, she would not mention the black men.

  “Miss Sely this room is quite cold.” Mr. Riddle entered at four minutes past two, to find Nell, looking frail, typing diligently in a breeze that rustled the papers on her desk. “We must have the window closed at once. I cannot stand a draught; a draught is the one thing that gives me a cold, and I’ve had five since the autumn and I don’t want any more.”

  He shut the window with an authoritative slam, relit the stove which Nell had dared to extinguish, and sat down at his desk, and fixed her with a fretful eye.

  Boss’s Pal’s Relation, that was the category Miss Sely was filed under, and, instead of being, like most of them, hopeless, she showed signs of being efficient. She would probably hold down the job, annoying little chit that she was, with nose still pink from the wind that had rushed in through the open window. Mr. Riddle felt in his bones that he had not heard the last of her liking for fresh air, and, with the thought, he was certain that he felt a tickling in his own nose. He brought out his handkerchief and managed to head off a prophetic sneeze.

  “Have they moved in upstairs?” Nell asked her mother casually that evening at supper, her experiences at Akkro Products (Anna referred to them as “your work”) having been briefly related by herself, and the revised arrangements about her contribution to the housekeeping having been heard with some dismay.

  “Margie, as he calls her, arrived about tea-time. He came down to let her in. It’s a good thing they have their own bell; I certainly shouldn’t want to be always answering it for them. As it was—”

  “Oh, John hasn’t come, then?” Nell was bolting bread and margarine with limpid eyes fixed on her mother’s face.

  “I don’t think so, no. I haven’t seen him. As it was, Charles got hold of Daddy this afternoon when Daddy had come down to see the garden, and told him that although there was absolutely no question of their expecting us to take telephone messages for them, they would be ‘most tremendously obliged’ if we would just answer ‘the thing’ whenever it ‘kept on and on and on’, because it might mean a job for him. (Oh, yes, I remember now; John hasn’t come; because Charles said that he would be seeing him later this afternoon and would give him a cheque for me, and John would bring it in later. A month’s rent in advance, he said.) And John was to give me a spare key for the flat, too, in case ‘the thing’ did ‘go on and on and on’. Charles was just ‘dashing’, he said.”

  “They seem to dash a lot,” said Nell, who rather envied them.

  It had been enjoyable to come back to Hampstead; up from the grime and crowds and petrol vapour into the narrow old streets with lively people walking homewards in blue spring twilight under the big, brown, bare old trees, but now the evening stretched before her. He had not telephoned during the last three days. Why should he come tonight? Everybody said that he was so keen on Arkwood Road and the flat: why, then, hadn’t he been near it since Friday? As for keys, the less said about him and keys the better. And Akkro Products was as dull as she had expected.

  He neither came that evening nor telephoned.

  Nell was rather concerned about her own foolishness, for she could not stop going over and over in her mind, at every hour of the day, every word that he had said to her. It was not much consolation that she could no longer remember his face.

  But on Thursday evening, by which time it seemed to her that she had been working for Akkro Products ever since she had been born, and she was beginning to recognize various Hampstead beards and pony tails seen in the cafés on her way home each night, she had stopped to look at Frances Harling’s shop in the High Street, where the jewels in ancient brooches and necklaces gleam with a myriad watery fires. A low voice behind her said, “Hullo. I’ve been waiting for you,” and she turned round and there he was.

  Different clothes, this time; a long pale jacket reaching far below his hips, and darker trousers. He looked very stiff and white about the neck.

  “Were you? Where? I didn’t see you.”

  “Can you come to a party? Benedict’s giving one, and I want you to meet some of my friends.”

  “Well—I must let my mother know. And what about supper? And I h
aven’t … this won’t do for a party, will it?” glancing down at her skirt.

  “You’re always thinking about food, Nello. I’ve seen Aunt Anna and explained. She’s pleased for you to be going to Odessa Place, I think.” He smiled. “As for clothes, you do dress bloody badly of course but then most girls do. You ought to dress like dear little Gardis.”

  “In that awful old jersey and slacks?”

  “I meant when she’s dressed for a party,” coldly. “There’ll be food there, if you’re so ravenous, but don’t expect sandwiches and that sort of bull. Now we’ll walk to Canal Terrace.”

  “Isn’t it at your mother’s house?”

  “Of course not. But I let Aunt Anna think it was, because, if I hadn’t, she might not have let you come.”

  They walked down, through the clear dusk, into London again; through long quiet roads, where the thrush sang among the chimneypots, that gradually became long grey streets where children played on the pavements under the yellow or mauve light of tall cruel lamps. Down here spring was already losing its early freshness, and the air was beginning to fall back into the familiar London weariness. Nell had been glad to leave it, an hour before, but now she walked beside him, checking her pace to his, content to listen to his praise of Gilbert and Sullivan’s operas, and his humming of this or that air when she confessed ignorance of them all.

  So he led her imperceptibly away from the main streets and lights and trolley-buses into the back ways; the short, silent, dimly-lit alleys of little pale houses where plaster was peeling from the walls and lights glimmered faintly behind dull blue or green curtains, and the wireless distantly yet raucously played or sang the same tune from one house to the next. As Nell walked past the ground-floor windows, under old lamps whose faint glow scarcely pierced the still night’s heavy dark, she saw, without seeing, as each mean shallow bay approached, a vase of withered daffodils or a plaster statuette set upon a small round table. But the streets grew dimmer, and soon there were no more lights in the front windows. These people lived in their warm kitchens overlooking the trampled gardens.