Here Be Dragons

by Stella Gibbons

  A door slammed downstairs (they were having tea in their bedroom) and Anna said, “Bother.”

  “It’s Miss Lister, the old woman who lives in that cottage at the end of the garden,” in answer to an enquiring look. “She came home from hospital this morning and I promised Peggy I would look her up. The door reminded me. I’ll just wash up these few things and go … but it’s a bore.”

  “Who was it that went out?”

  “Just this minute? Margie, I think. She has been flying about all the week, doing something for Charles.”

  “What a lot of people come to the house, Anna … don’t you think that a lot of people do? While you’re out I’m always opening the door to strange-looking young people—”

  “Friends of John’s: yes.”

  “… and Margie, as you call her, is always forgetting her key. She seems …”

  He did not finish the sentence, a habit that was growing on him with the habit of pottering about until past midday in dressing gown and slippers. He thought that the young woman who had, presumably, taken Peggy’s place in Charles Gaunt’s affections seemed rather a nice little thing, but naturally he disapproved of divorce and more naturally he did not wish to admire his sister’s supplanter. And of course it was all rather squalid.

  “I wish she wouldn’t wear those absurd pointed glasses. They make her look like—Mephistopheles—” said Anna, with an uncharacteristic flight of fancy— “and they are such bad style; bright green, and all over imitation jewels. I believe her sight’s as good as mine. In fact she practically admitted to me that it is. Dear, don’t go down to the door if the stairs tire you. Let them knock. They can go away and come back later; they’re mostly young, it won’t kill them.”

  “I don’t mind,” he said vaguely, taking up his book again, “I didn’t mean that. Look in on me when you have seen the old lady, won’t you.”

  “I will.”

  Anna went firmly and heavily down the stairs with her tray. She slapped through the washing up, and then went down the garden to call on Miss Lister.

  The path sloped between clumps of iris and wallflowers and tulips, under the shadows cast by two noble sycamore-trees, and the view went across a street of small grey roofs, rising out of bright green foliage, to an abrupt fall; a drop of hundreds of feet; to a landscape painted in purples, pewters and white: London, spread out below upon its conquered marsh. Anna, as she went, looked at the greening plants which interested her more than a prospect she had known since childhood; then turned her attention to Miss Lister’s home. It must be years, she thought, since the place was properly done up, but it’s a nice little cottage. Absently, without thinking the thoughts of a good housewife, she stared at the grey rags of net at the windows while awaiting an answer to her knock.

  Almost at once it came, in the form of a shout from within; not loud, but having a note as of one encouraging resistance to a siege by Redskins. In a moment the door opened, and revealed as much of Miss Lister as could be seen beneath a colossal marmalade cat. She looked at Anna over the top of his frantically heaving back.

  “Good afternoon. Your knock upset my boy, I’m afraid. He’s terribly nervous.”

  “Miss Lister? How do you do. I’m Mrs. Sely from the house at the top of the garden. I heard from Lady Fairfax that you were coming home today and I wondered if there was anything I could do for you.” Thirty years of being a parson’s wife had not taught Anna to soften her blunt manner.

  “It’s very kind of you but I’m going out myself presently. Just to get a few things before those devils close,” and she crushed her boy tighter against the small bosom of an unfresh blue woollen dress and looked at Anna with some defiance.

  “Do you feel quite up to it? I understood that you are only just out of hospital.”

  “Oh, I suppose you heard that from Lady Fairfax, too.” Miss Lister’s face, which had surprised Anna by its remnants of a marked, if ordinary, prettiness, took on an expression of pondering reserve. “Yes, the ambulance brought me home this morning and I’ve had a lovely rest after lunch and very glad I was to be back again in my own beddy-byes (be quiet, Dandy). So I shall be quite up to a run up to the shops this evening. I want some Tide and a pair of shoelaces—” extending a foot in a worn size-two shoe—“and some Quaker Oats—though those devils at Burnshotts’ hadn’t any yesterday when Mrs. Carter—a very nice woman, not one of us of course but very nice—tried to get me some. She got in everything for me. (There’s one woman in Burnshotts’ who’s a beast. I hope she’ll have left while I’ve been away.) And a small white loaf. (How people can eat brown I don’t know. It would choke me.) Oh, very well, then, go if you want to.” Here she launched the cat into space and it flew up the stairs like a rocket. “Another neighbour has been looking after him for me. It’s very kind of her but it’s made him worse than ever. He hates strangers. Can’t bear them. Takes after me.”

  A smile flashed out, and for an instant Anna had a confused impression of seeing a little girl of ten with grey hair and wearing false teeth and glasses. “I’m an unsociable beast. Always have been. My Daddy used to say, ‘Daisy only wants her own’.”

  “Oh … well, if you’re sure I can’t do anything …”

  “I’m as fit as a fiddle now, thank you, and I’m going to be as cosy as a bug in a rug—if only the nice weather will keep on.”

  “Yes, it’s so nice to see the garden coming on, isn’t it. Er … yes … well, if ever you want anything. Miss Lister, we are only at the top of the path.”

  “I’m perfectly all right, thank you. Good-bye.”

  Miss Lister shut the door upon Anna with some crispness. Then she hurried up the steeply-pitched stairs into a tiny bedroom which might have belonged to a midget with no silly prejudices about dust, and peered over the ragged curtain at her caller’s retreating form.

  “Dreadful old shoes and her hair’s almost as grey as mine. Doesn’t pick her feet up. Slouches. Hope I shan’t ever have to drag up the High Street with her,” muttered Miss Lister. “And what the dickens has it got to do with Lady Fairfax when I come out of hospital? Comes of taking benefits from people. Wish Henry and Margaret had never gone. Not going to like this one. Wish my other boy would come and see me. Must take my darling nurses some chocs. Dandy, Dandy, Dandy. Milkums!”

  CHAPTER SIX

  BOSS’S FRIEND’S RELATION

  “YOUR AUNT PEGGY’S ideas of near-gentry aren’t mine,” said Anna, relating her side of this incident to Nell that evening while they were seated alone at supper. “Miss Lister is nowhere near it; she’s Trade; prosperous Trade I should think, but she has it all over her … there isn’t any more, Nell. You’ve eaten it all. Your appetite has trebled since we came here. Have some bread.”

  “It blows me out.” But she cut herself a thick slice. “Mother,” she went on, cautiously, with only one of the many plans in her head revealing itself by the determined look in her clear eyes, “has Margie told you about the party?”

  “What party?”

  “This party tomorrow night. They’re having some people in for drinks,” said Nell carefully, “because Charles is going on this goodwill trip to the Benelux countries and they want us to go.”

  “I shan’t. It’s too short notice,” Anna said decidedly. “Why couldn’t she let me know sooner?”

  “It is only upstairs, Mother.”

  “Chattering and cocktails … you’ve never been to anything like that, have you? I used to go to them, when I was about your age. (Not at home, of course. Your grandmother detested casual entertaining.) But my friends at L.S.E. used to give that sort of party.”

  She looked at Nell. She did not often do so, although her eyes rested upon her frequently, and she now thought that in spite of the trebled appetite she had not put on any weight, and that she was unbecomingly pale. “Are you still having nothing but chocolate for your lunch?” she demanded.

  “I shall go,” Nell announced, flicking the question aside with a tiny frown. “That’s what
I want to talk to you about, Mother. I’ve worked it all out. And I need some separates.”

  “Some what?”

  “Separates. A top and a skirt. There’s a shop in Oxford Street where I can get a top for less than a pound and a skirt for less than thirty shillings—I’ve seen them for days now and if you could let me have three pounds I could get them in the lunch hour tomorrow and wear them tomorrow night—my pink’s too tight and too short” she ended, quickly and loudly, as Anna opened her lips to speak.

  Anna said, “Oh. Is it?” and then for some minutes said nothing. Nell began collecting cutlery and plates, with some colour in her face.

  Anna was annoyed. The pink had ample darts and a hem. Perhaps it was rather childish in style for someone aged nearly twenty, but nothing looked in worse style than youth overdressed. No ‘top’ or skirt costing so ridiculously little as the sums Nell had mentioned could be anything but bad style (and here Anna, with the unselfconscious pride of the chaste woman who disregards her own beautiful body, straightened her shoulders. Of course a good tailor-made did set one off, but she had never been able to afford good clothes for Nell, whose slightness would not have been set off by tailored lines anyway).

  “You couldn’t have asked at a worse time,” she said. “I don’t get my dividends until the first, and you know how we’re placed, and Hampstead prices are …”

  “I’ll pay you back … later on, Mother.”

  “How, I should like to know? You give me almost everything you earn now. And I don’t like these chocolate lunches—”

  “Perhaps I’ll get a better-paid job later on.” As Nell stacked plates on the lift, which she now sent trundling and rumbling down to the kitchen, she kept her back turned.

  “Oh, later on. Well, I’ll have to see … can’t you manage with the ‘top’, as you call it, alone? You have your grey skirt, and if you buy a pretty jumper …”

  Nell shook her head as she turned round. Her lips were set in a long, pale pink, determined line.

  “Really, Nell. You’re being quite childish. But I suppose you are nearly twenty … if you’re really sure you can’t manage with the top alone I suppose you must have three pounds. (It is very cheap, I must say. But I suppose … never mind). Here, you had better take the money now.”

  That evening Anna was troubled by an uneasy sensation at the back of her mind. Had she been both stingy and unjust?

  Nell, going quickly homewards the next evening with a large parcel from C. & A. Modes under one arm, was thinking that she had had very nearly enough of it.

  By it she meant Akkro Products, Ltd.: the unceasing struggle with Mr. Riddle about ventilation: a struggle which, he had hinted to her, would have been no more than material for brief and awful laughter between himself and Mr. Belwood, a kind of fee-fo-fi-fummish jesting before rebellion was quelled for ever—had she not been the niece of Lady Fairfax, who was a friend of Mr. Hughes, who was Mr. Riddle’s boss.

  When the first small spurt of interest in herself had died down, Akkro Products ceased to notice Nell more than it did anyone else employed there.

  She told herself that she did not care, that she wanted none of Aunt Peggy’s glamour reflected on herself, and if the job had interested her this would have been true.

  But it was so dull! No-one, she thought, could possibly imagine how dull, except someone who had, for five mornings a week during the last three weeks, watched Mr. Riddle cocoon himself into his muffler at three minutes to one every day, and heard the tone in which he replied to her expressed hope that he would have something nice for lunch: I expect it will be sausages as usual.

  The one bright spot amidst the gloom was The Islanders. Nell liked them; she also found them amusing.

  She and they had been exchanging remarks on the shocking mortality among nylons, and disrespectful comments on this here old dripper, as Maureen called the neat device for dispensing soap, for nearly a fortnight. She had detected differences in the collective controlling entity called Mum, Sylvia’s and Maureen’s being ever so nice while Pat’s was ever so nasty, horrible, really; she knew that all Maureen cared for in the world was Dickie Valentine singing ‘The Engagement Waltz’, and that she hurried home from work every night to change into her best clothes and lie on her bed, smoking and thinking about him in the dark. She knew that Sylvia and her boy were practically engaged.

  She had once let the Islanders treat her to lunch at the Rosita Café (hunger, and a real desire not to be what Pat called a toffee-nose, having persuaded her); and here, while the Islanders, having poked disinterestedly at their plates covered in pieces of dry pastry and wet potato, soon pushed them aside in favour of cigarettes, and she had polished off her own plateful down to the last crumb, she heard them discussing another collective entity: ‘’e’; boys; an ever-changing population in the case of Pat, whose pale, degenerate Cockney prettiness and deep red hair were inherited from a Mum born before the days of free orange-juice.

  The boy in Nell’s own life came and went, too: sometimes she met him coming down the stairs as she entered the house at the end of the day, and he stopped to say something puzzling or irritating (“I see you’ve got your béret at the Cresta-run angle, Nello. That’s right. Soon you’ll be able to go without a hat at all”); or, above the lime-trees in the front garden she saw him cross the window as she went out in the morning, looking pale and busy; then he never noticed her. Sometimes on Saturday mornings she saw him, elegant and detached, in the High Street, shopping with Margie. Margie and Charles would ‘dash off’ into the country until Tuesday night, and John would fill the top flat with his friends. But he did not invite her, and she did not know whether the man who was running the paper about aquariums had given him a job or not. She certainly was not going to flatter him by asking.

  She turned out of the High Street, and began to skim down Arkwood Road.

  Something must be done about being at Akkro Products, and done soon. Only that evening, as she hurried thankfully with The Islanders over the threshold of the place—“She makes a pound a day in tips. Straight she does. And she gets three, so that’s nine pound a week. And her lunches. And she works near home so there’s no fares,” Pat had said.

  “My cousin was a waitress last summer. She had a nervous breakdown afterwards. All the running about. It was sawful, she said.”

  “It’s smashing work if you get in a nice caff, though.”

  “I wouldn’t like to do it, though. Would you like to, Nell?”

  “Leave her alone. She’s Dreaming of Thee.”

  “Your auntie wouldn’t let you, would she, Nell?”

  “Don’t see it’s any of her blasted business,” said Pat, a remark with which Nell, although she said nothing, heartily agreed.

  Sixteen pounds a week … A pound a day in tips—and more at holiday times. (Nell had casually drawn what facts she could from Pat while they were walking to the ’bus-stop.)

  But why consider the idea? The parents would never let her.

  Go into another office, with a better salary?

  I’m absolutely fed up with offices and I’m not going into another, if I can help it, ever again, thought Nell.

  She looked up as she came level with the gate of Number Twenty-five, and there were Gardis and Benedict Rouse, sitting on the cracked black-and-white marble lozenges of the steps. Their clothes were elegant, but somehow their personalities had the effect of making the sober Edwardian façade suggest a Home of Rest for Romanies.

  Gardis’s immense skirt of white felt, patterned with scarlet strawberries the size of tennis balls, was spread about her in a cartwheel, and a stole of white felt similarly adorned was round her shoulders. Her sandals, mere twists of scarlet joined to a papery sole, had four-inch heels. The face above Benedict’s dinner-jacket suggested that the afternoon, which, he told Nell, they had spent walking on the Heath, had not been a particularly happy one.

  “Hullo. Still in your good British tweeds, I see, and it’s nearly warm today.” Gardis greete
d Nell with this and a gesture towards her with one foot, “did you ever do any more about being a waitress? All right,” as Nell made a frantic gesture towards the upper window where her mother could be seen gazing out at the apocryphal scrawls made by a passing jet, “she can’t hear. I suppose you didn’t, or kind Auntie would have heard about it.”

  “Are you going to the party?” Nell asked, coming up the steps and moving the parcel under her arm into what she hoped was concealment.

  “We are. Dear little John invited Ben, and Ben brought me along. ’Pears there’s going to be some B.B.C. folks there who might be useful to him. Are you invited too? What’s in that parcel? New frock? Surprise!” and Nell had to make her way into the house past Gardis’s attempts to open the parcel, while refusing her offers, which seemed half-genuine, of helping her to make up her face.

  She was glad to escape. But she had taken the decision to get hold of Benedict at the party and find out from him just how she should set about getting a job as a waitress if at some time in the future, she should want … At least then she would know.

  She stepped into the quiet hall full of evening light and shut the door behind her. There, standing at the top of the stairs, looking down at her, was John.

  “Hullo, Nello darling, I’ve been waiting for you,” he almost whispered as he came running down. “I hope you’re coming to my papa’s party?”

  “Yes. Is Aunt Peggy coming?” She stood stupidly within the circle of his arm while he pushed puppyish kisses into her neck. From the top of the house there floated down authoritative cries and sounds of obedient feet hurrying: last-minute preparations for the entertainment.

  “Of course not. She hates Margie’s guts and Margie hates hers. (Do have some delicacy, Nello.) I say, I’m not going back to Benedict’s room any more. He’s chucked me out because I will talk while he’s working. So I shall be here all the time now.”