Here Be Dragons

by Stella Gibbons

  “Couldn’t get a lift on a lorry, you see. The police might get on to us. John told you, I reckon.” After a moment’s reflection, Nell understood that he was still thinking over his unsuccessful attempt to walk to Southend.

  No, of course John had not told her. She looked at him (she had not done so for three minutes or more) in some indignation. The police, now. What kind of company was this?

  John, however, seemed to have ears for more than one conversation at once, and also to know (disturbing thought) when one was looking at him. Without turning, he stretched out his hand to her, interrupting for a second his impassioned discussion with Benedict:—

  “… no bearing on it really because like dear little Gardis here Toulouse-Lautrec was only slumming … it’s all right, Nell; no-one’s going to prison; Chris doesn’t want the police to recognize him because he and Nerina ran away together, and they’re both under age … that’s all, it’s bloody parents again … and could get out of it whenever he …”

  The argument continued. Nell heard the major notes roll out once more across the dark roof, and through the heavy night stained by the fires from chemical-burning lamps: eleven. She struggled with a yawn. It was probable, almost certain, that none of these people had to be up at half-past seven to-morrow morning. She wondered if it were ‘done’ to go home when one had had enough? They would probably be surprised that anyone could have enough. John would be offended, anyway.

  Suddenly there fell one of those silences which occur in the liveliest conversation. She was opening her mouth to make some kind of a preliminary murmur about departure when he turned to her.

  “How are you getting on with your distressing job? I’m sure it’s as bad as I said it would be.”

  “It’s very dull,” answered Nell decidedly. They were all looking at her now.

  “Why don’t you walk out?” Gardis said. She was sitting upright on the bed, and had let down her hair again at a whisper from Benedict, lying full length beside her.

  “I can’t.” Since frankness seemed in fashion Nell would be frank; she preferred it, anyway. “We’ve hardly any money. I’ve got to earn some.”

  “Your mother should work. Mine does. She runs a line of beauty-products called Venus Inc. (Should suit my mother. She’s on her fourth husband.)”

  “I don’t think my mother could get a paid job. She does work very hard at home, of course. I don’t know quite … what’s going to happen, actually. Perhaps my father might be able to do something when he’s well again … teaching, my mother thought … but … I’ve got to stick it for the time being, anyway.”

  “What do they pay you?” asked Benedict, and when she told him (having overcome some embarrassment) shook his head.

  “That’s very poor pay, especially as the work’s so dull. You could earn more than that as a waitress. Are your legs and feet strong?”

  “They’d never let me be a waitress!”

  Nell’s exclamation was lost in the laughter. John’s went on longer than the rest and sounded malicious. She looked at him enquiringly. He only continued to laugh silently, and suddenly she remembered that both Benedict and Chris’s ‘woman’ (she had a confused image of someone aged forty-odd with untidy black hair) earned their livings in this way. She coloured, but no-one else was looking conscious.

  “Are they strong?” repeated Benedict.

  “I don’t know. Yes, they are, I think.”

  “He thinks you’d make a successful tart,” said Gardis.

  “His views on that subject have been coloured by someone else’s proficiency, no doubt,” murmured John—but it was only a murmur, and only Nell heard.

  “It is possible to earn sixteen pounds a week at waiting. But of course to earn that you would have to work six days a week, Sundays as well. It can be brutally hard work, too. The scale of pay laid down by the Catering Trades Association isn’t high either. But it’s the tips that bring it up so. In some places the tipping is so good that people pay the proprietor to be taken on the staff,” said Benedict.

  “The parents would never let me,” Nell said flatly, after her imagination had looked at sixteen pounds a week. That was all it saw. Sixteen one-pound notes, very clean and green and fresh.

  “Of course they wouldn’t. It’s honest work (if you care about honesty). It’s amusing. You’d meet crowds of people. You’d get exercise, instead of getting cramp all day in an office. To say nothing of earning more than three times what you do now. But all that doesn’t count. And why? Because being a waitress isn’t a conventional thing for an educated girl to be,” said John.

  “I said that she could earn sixteen pounds a week. I’ve known one or two people who did. But don’t imagine that everyone does. I don’t, for example. My—er—my heart isn’t in my work, so to speak.”

  Benedict did not go on to say what Nerina earned, but a hoarse mumble came from the corner:

  “Nothing like that. Crumbs! I should say not.”

  “I’m sure it would be more interesting than being in an office, anyway,” Nell said, rather primly and politely. The idea was as amusing as it was fantastic, but the sixteen one-pound notes still danced before her fancy, sometimes in a cloud, sometimes in a neat row.

  For the last four days she had paid her fares and bought her bar of chocolate out of a ten-shilling note rather reluctantly parted with by her mother. Some dividends, Nell gathered, were expected next month; until then the Selys must live on the remains of Aunt Peggy’s ten pounds, and meanwhile were on short commons indeed. Mother really is extraordinary since we came to Hampstead, Nell thought; we never did get much to eat, but now if I didn’t insist on having a meal at night we’d get nothing. And she’s hardly begun on straightening the house. I wonder if she’s Breaking Up? This mysterious calamity, which had in their turn overtaken all Anna’s old aunts and various ancient creatures in the different parishes where Martin had ministered, had haunted Nell’s childhood; she had lived in fear at one time, of seeing it appear in her mother and father.

  She decided that she really must go home and said so aloud, although a stomach pleasantly and unfamiliarly distended with coffee and bread and butter made her disinclined to move.

  “… and so I would never be a waiter again. I think the being at people’s beck and call is degrading,” John was saying. “I’m not saying that it degrades some people. But I feel degraded. I would sooner slice bacon or—”

  “You may be perfectly splendid at slicing bacon: as a waiter you were plain godawful,” said Benedict. He turned to Gardis. “He used to argue with the people at his table about the topics of the day. It did me no good with the Italian people I recommended him to, I can assure you.”

  “John. I really must go home,” Nell said urgently.

  “Go home?” turning with an outraged stare. “But it’s early. Let’s go down to the Eldorado. I’ve got to see a man there who’s going to give me a job. Have you any money?”

  “Two shillings.” She looked him in the eye.

  “Oh. I thought we might have a taxi. I’ve been walking all day and I’m tired … Benedict, have you any money?”

  “Not for taxis.”

  “And I must go home too. Fairfax’s Flour is getting all worked up into a dough about my late hours,” said Gardis.

  It was decided after some discussion that they should, at least, all go out somewhere, except Chris, who decided to go home and slouched away. Nell was preparing another speech, as they walked towards the traffic lights in the main road, about having to go home herself, when John exclaimed:

  “Here’s a bus.” Before she could protest, almost before she knew what was happening, she felt her waist gripped and he swung her up onto its platform; it had swooped to a standstill just where they stood. The conductor snarled, the bus glided forward at a terrifyingly increasing pace, and she looked back at the receding figures of Gardis and Benedict, to see them laughing and waving as they got into a taxi.

  “Oh …” she said, disappointed in Benedict’
s firmness of character.

  “Upstairs,” said John, going ahead of her.

  The bus rocked and swayed, careering along at a smooth and dreamlike speed. He made his way down the centre to the front seats, and she followed. They were the only passengers. He looked back to laugh at her, calling, “Who was it called the hansom cab ‘the gondola of London’? The trolleybus is the poor man’s stratocruiser,” and as he slid into the front seat and she came up with him, put out his arm and pulled her close. “There.” He clumsily kissed the side of her face. “Now we’ll have a lovely time.”

  The pale and dark houses soared and fell, soared and fell as they glided by, and the green lamps sprayed out their poisonous soft light into the night—or the lilac ones cast their corpse-colour on the faces of the dark anonymous shapes waiting patiently below. The small round ruby and amber lights winked on, paused, winked off. The yellow globes banded with black winked, winked, winked; maddeningly, to eyes that had been looking at London for any longer than twenty-five years. But of course Nell was not maddened, nor even aware of their winking, for she sat within his arm; she felt its young thin hardness pressed against her shoulders; and smelled, coming from the cheek close against her own, a faint warm scent at once childish and unmistakably masculine. She was both happy and unhappy; because she had an orderly and sensible nature, she did not like the duality of her feelings.

  “It is Dickens’s London still, of course,” he was murmuring, “but it’s Dickens writing science-fiction. It’s more sinister than anything he even imagined because it’s more impersonal … no-one cares. No-one ever did, much, but now they’re more afraid, too … this chap I’m meeting tonight is starting a paper dealing with aquariums, and he wants someone to take photographs for it and go round getting advertisements for it. He does most of it himself but he thinks he may be able to use another man … I must borrow a camera from someone … Toby has one, if I can find him. He doesn’t often go into Eldorado’s but he does go to The Coffee Dish and we’ll go there tomorrow … oh blast. You’re working. Do you terribly mind paying your own fare? I’ve only got one and six. I simply detest asking you.”

  “Then don’t,” said Nell, in trepidation, but forced by her own character to make some sort of a stand.

  “But I must, Nello dear. If I don’t we can’t have any coffee. And at Eldorado’s they’re fussy if you just sit there without ordering anything … the fare’s only fourpence. You said you had two shillings. Can’t you manage on one and eightpence until you’re paid tomorrow?”

  Nell found that she would have to, for she seemed to be in the humiliating position of not being able to tell her Cousin John no. But she decided that next time (if there were a next time, for he was neither predictable nor dependable) she would really be firm.

  When the fares were paid he set himself to entertain her, making her laugh (Nell had scarcely laughed at all during the past week) with stories about the co-educational school he had attended just after the war, where, he said, the girls were all terrible little tarts (“I dislike those free, frank, blithesome girls, I like secretive well-behaved little ones like you, Nello”), and went on, seeing the expression on her face, to explain the ramifications of a word which she had heard Elizabeth Prideaux use, but about which she had never had the courage to enquire. While she listened and laughed, however, there kept recurring a sensation as if there were something pleasant at the back of her mind; something desirable to be done, or secured for herself; and soon she remembered the sixteen clean pound notes.

  “I suppose …” she said, in a pause in his reminiscences, “your mother would be awfully fed up if I ever thought of giving up my job?”

  Best to put it vaguely. She did not trust him, why should she? She suddenly remembered the flat, and the key, and the whole mysterious, rather tiresome, business which, in the novel experiences of the past few days, she had almost forgotten. He might easily tell her aunt that she meant to leave Akkro Products next week.

  “If you mean, ‘would she be shocked if you tried for a waitress’s job’, no, I don’t believe that she would. She’s always telling her horrible little Teenagers Panel to have initiative and leap into life’s battle, and that sort of bull, although I do admit that she puts it rather well. She never sounds Victorian or pi. She is Victorian and pi, of course, because she’s so hardworking and moral, but you would never suspect it … no, I don’t think she would make a fuss. But you don’t want to be a waitress, Nello. You would hate it.”

  Nell, as she followed him quickly down the stairs when the bus stopped, was not so sure about that.

  “My mamma should have got you a more interesting job,” John said, as he armed her across a narrow, thronged street bathed in a dark warm glare of light, and starry with the winking and glittering of advertising slogans, “but of course she isn’t quite in a position to foist her relations on famous people yet. (In a few years she will be—if she stays the course; and I think she will.) It’s the famous people who usually have the interesting jobs to offer. Now don’t talk any more, Nello, because here’s the Eldorado and I’ve got to find this chap.”

  Nell suppressed a denial of having talked, and followed him as he pushed open a door set in a double-fronted shop curtained with dirty net.

  She suppressed a shiver and a yawn. Two chromium sticks on the face of a wooden clock pointed at five to twelve, and the place was dim and quiet and very hot. She thought that it looked dull; there was no movement or laughter among the people sitting at the long tables covered in with glass, and the two waitresses in soiled white coats leaning against the sandwich bar at the far end of the room looked drowsy and dejected. But in a moment she began to notice things that she actively did not like: the ragged clothes, faded almost to purple, of a man at a nearby table whose sleeping head rested on his arms, and who had some disfigurement of his skin that made her turn away her eyes; and the expressions on the faces bending across the tables engaged in low-toned expostulation or argument. She did not like the cigarette butts trodden into the floor nor the trays choked with more butts and little heaps of bitter grey ash: the whole place was drifting and dry with smoke that got into her eyes and her throat.

  “Can’t you see him?” she asked presently, when John had obtained for them two cups of weakish brown fluid, and done a certain amount of peering at distant tables and even questioning of various men, all older than himself, who seemed to resent their interminable arguments and discussions being interrupted.

  “Of course I can’t see him. What an absurd thing to say and bloody irritating too. This is serious. I must have some money or I may have to borrow from my mamma … Tom. I think that was his name. Or Toby. And he always wears a green pullover.”

  “Perhaps he’s late …” she said, struggling with another yawn. Her eyes were stinging painfully with the smoke.

  “He might be … We ought to have come earlier. He only said he might be here. I’ll just go and ask Reg, over in that corner … he may have …”

  Nell watched him as he made his way between the tables, the tall graceful boy with a child’s short delicate nose and a child’s mouth. She wished that they were both walking home up Hampstead High Street. Hampstead people looked odd, perhaps, compared with people in Dorset, but they did not look, or sound, like the people in the Eldorado. Now and then as she sat there she caught a sentence from a nearby table that was spoken in English but for all its comprehensibility might have been spoken in Arabic, and somehow this was vaguely alarming.

  “Any luck?” she asked, when he returned from an earnest five minutes with Reg, who had ginger sideburns and a suspiciously virtuous expression which seemed to be perpetually exclaiming, “Wot, me, guv’nor?”

  “No. And if anyone would have seen him Reg would. He sells nylons in Berwick Market. You must meet him some time. Not now.”

  He looked whiter than usual, and sulky and exhausted.

  “Oh. Don’t you think we’d better go home, then?”

  “Of course not, Nello.
He’s probably upstairs. (This place is a club, you know, and owns the entire house.) I’ll just go and see. I hate to leave you but you’ll be all right. Sit still; pretend to be asleep.” He made his way across the room to the stairs, and again she watched him go.

  He went up them and disappeared. In a few moments she began to dislike being alone. She felt conspicuous. She sat there, wondering if she would be molested. But no-one did molest her. No-one looked at her for longer than it took to sweep over her a bleared, over-bright or sunken eye in search of something more positive, and the next ten minutes taught her something that she was never to forget; she was not the molest-able type … any more, she supposed, than the pale girl sitting at the other side of the room under one of the dim lights, wearing a tweed coat, with straight brown hair falling from under a béret, and irregular features which a kindly observer might have called delicate. She was just wondering if the girl felt as out of things as she looked, when she saw that the far wall was a mirror. She was still looking amused when John came back.

  “He’s probably gone to Jumbo’s. That stays open all night, too. We’ll try there. I’ll just leave a word with Stanley in case he does come in …”

  He went across to the coffee bar and spoke for a moment with the yellow-faced and oily-haired barman, the indefiniteness of whose age was increased by an attire which had pretensions to Bohemian carelessness. When he came back, Nell said:

  “John, I must go home. It must be two o’clock.”

  “Don’t be so bloody silly. It’s only half-past one and I must find this man. I can work for him and collect copy at the same time. You absolutely can’t go home yet, Nello. I want you to be with me. Are you cold? Here—” they were outside now and standing in the dark, silent little street, and he was unwinding the long muffler from about his neck, “—have this. It’s beautifully warm,” he began to wind it round her.

  “I’m not cold, thanks. You have it. You haven’t got a coat—”