Here Be Dragons

by Stella Gibbons

  It was a place where, as here, a dim light burned. And someone was moving about there; almost silently, yet not creepingly or fumblingly, engaged upon tasks which he, in his part as passive watcher, felt to be both important and eternal. There never was, and never could be, a time when the figure and what it was deftly and silently doing had not been there; and the mild light had always burned, and the small sounds which comforted him had always broken the breathing stillness. And that was where, with what he thought of as my deepest desire, he longed to be, yet something stronger was perpetually driving him out from that place, into the real world, to watch and listen and remember. It was as if he were a mirror, which could feel, and which longed to be empty and quiet, but never could. Yet in the watching and listening and remembering there was also deep and delicate delight …

  He awoke with a start. The old woman was standing by the table, looking down at him.

  “Had a nice little nap?” she repeated.

  “Yes. Sorry.” He did not raise his head from his arms, and the languid eyelids, thick and white with youth, hardly lifted from eyes red with lack of sleep as he smiled at her.

  “I suppose you’ve lost your key again. You ought to hang it on a long string. That’s what I do. In my bag. Never lost it yet.”

  “I will. It’s a good idea.” A great yawn set him shuddering.

  “I suppose you want the couch, as usual.”

  “Yes, please, Auntie Daisy.”

  “Come along, then. Dandy isn’t using his rug tonight … they wouldn’t thank you for knocking them up at the house when your father’s got to make an early start tomorrow, you know.”

  “How do you know he’s making an early start?” he asked, sliding his eyes round towards her without turning his head; he had got up from the table and was leaning forward, resting his hands on it, swaying, drunk with sleep—

  “The milky-maans told me. We’re great pals.” Miss Lister’s shadow, now made more grotesque by the addition of a rug which she had pulled out from under the dresser, was disappearing along a passage accompanied by the candle, and he slowly followed. It was irritating, the way she always knew everything, but so long as she did not talk to people about him—and he knew that she did not—what did it matter? Sometimes it was useful to know somebody who knew everything …

  “There.”

  She put down the candle on a table with a glass top, where a thick film of dust almost concealed the trinkets of blackened silver arranged within, switched on the light, and began to arrange some old cushions on a couch covered with faded chintz. The drawing-room was even smaller than the kitchen, and, because of activities on the part of Dandy and his friends which should have been confined to the garden, it was strongly scented, and the hush of the dead hour before dawn, and neglect, and the past, lay over the walls gleaming softly in an embossed paper of cream and silver. Curtains and chair covers were of a cream-coloured chintz patterned with green leaves, moss-rosebuds and blue bows, and the stained and faded carpet was moss-green. He lay down, in obedience to her gesture, and settled his head luxuriously into the soft dirty cushion, and now he could see once more, as he had seen them very often by different lights and at so many different times, from where he lay, the dusty frills of the china shepherdess pirouetting on the mantelpiece, and the long fall of the withered yellow lace curtain, behind the green velvet one bloomy and furred with dust.

  “My dear drawing-room. All from the old home. Awfully decent of your mother. Only I never get time to see to it. It’s filthy. Often think I ought to have sold everything. But probably I wouldn’t have got much. People are such devils nowadays. There. Take off your shoes. That comfy?” He nodded.

  The air of the room was very cold.

  “Like a bottle?”

  “Oh please. Do you mind putting out the light?”

  “With pleasure. It all saves money. Never use it in the kitchen anyway. But I can’t see in here, I fall over things. There.” Suddenly the glare vanished. “Shan’t be a jiffy.”

  Her shadow dwindled away with the candle-flame.

  The beautiful darkness, just softened by the candle’s faint glow shining back from the kitchen. He stretched himself on the sofa, too short by half a foot for his length, and sighed.

  When she came back he was asleep. She pulled Dandy’s indescribable rug higher about his shoulders and put the bottle at his feet. Then, without another glance at him, she trotted silently away.

  CHAPTER NINE

  TWENTY-TWO AND FOURPENCE

  “MISS SELY, YOU are doing quite well,” Mr. Riddle actually had observed to Nell one afternoon. “You know where you are heading for, don’t you, in about six years? Mr. Hughes’s personal secretary. So keep it up. I am sure that your aunt will be delighted.”

  Dream on, old man. Nell is heading for The Primula café and sixteen pounds a week. She is not looking forward to giving notice, but she succeeds fairly well in keeping that particular fence at the back of her mind.

  On the evening of the very Friday afternoon when Mr. Riddle had poured upon her the unction of his praise, looking competent about nothing and cool in her baggy grey suit, she might have been seen sailing into The Primula teashop.

  Her nightly observations on the way home had shown her a slender form with neatly shingled grey hair moving authoritatively amidst the tables and receiving cash at the desk by the door. If this were the proprietress, she looked approachable, and might be prepared to give a chance to a beginner. Nell would have preferred a livelier place where they slapped the dishes about, but the respectability of The Primula might pacify the parents and her aunt.

  The place was empty but for two lovers, gazing, in one corner, and the slender one, busy in another. Nell, thinking she had better not sit down, waited, and in a moment the lady looked up and saw her. She came across with a bright enquiring expression.

  Nell swallowed. It was the biggest swallow of her lifetime and it was the last. She said coolly: “Good evening. I hope I’m not interrupting at a busy time … but do you want a waitress?”

  She saw the bright expression change. It did not become contemptuous or wary. It became joyful and relieved.

  “Great God Almighty, do we want a waitress?” said the slender one in an impeccable Cheltenham voice lowered to the pitch of Nell’s own. “More than anything else in this blasted world at the moment. How soon can you start? My usual girl has walked out on me without a moment’s notice—this morning—in fact she’s gone off with a G.I. (and I hope the Iron Curtain gets her) after working like an angel for six months. I’m single-handed except for the cook who’s got something unmentionable wrong with her innards and is likely to fold up any minute, my washer-up, and the evening girl. I suppose you’re a student. Have you done this kind of thing before?”

  “No. I’m a typist. But I wanted a change. Office work is so dull. I haven’t any previous experience.”

  Nell did not add I’m afraid, or but I can learn. She neither liked nor disliked the look of the slender one, but she thought that it was easier to deal with a lady. So much, thought Nell, could be taken for granted. (Wherein, as Kipling would have said, she erred.)

  “That doesn’t matter. There’s nothing to learn. You only have to be quick as lightning and as tough as hell. I can’t let you smoke, I’m afraid, while you’re working.”

  “I hardly do smoke, anyway.”

  “Good-o,” said the slender one, pulling a ring up and down a finger stained saffron with nicotine, “well, now, can you be here at ten tomorrow? We open at half past for morning coffees—(Hogwash! How they can, licks me). Where do you live?”

  “Not far—” Nell was beginning cautiously when the slender one interrupted impatiently, “All right, all right, I don’t want to know, it’s only whether you can make it on time in the mornings.”

  “I live in Hampstead.”

  “Oh, jolly good. Well, then—”

  “But I’m in a job now, you see.” In spite of herself Nell’s tone was touched with ag
itation. “I have to be at work on Monday morning as usual. But I’d love to come. Couldn’t you possibly hold it open for me until Monday week?”

  The slender one gave a loud, despairing laugh.

  “I could, I suppose. The weather’s been so foul that we aren’t very busy. But it would mean doing most of the waiting myself and getting my washer-upper to stay longer. (That’s what I was planning to do when you blew in, in fact, just until I got someone else.) But I’d like to have you. (What’s your name? Nice name; I had a collie bitch once named Nell.) And perhaps we could … I can only pay you two pounds fifteen a week, you know. Catering Trades Association won’t let me pay anyone of your age—what are you? Twenty?—any more. But then there are the tips—”

  Nell said that she knew all about the regulation wage and the tips. She could not help adding again that she would like to come.

  “Yes, I can see that. Well … look here, are you working tomorrow at your office? Good-o—” as Nell shook her head, “then how about coming in for the Saturday and the Sunday? I’ll pay you a pound a day and you’ll get your tips and you can see how you like it. All right?”

  “All right,” Nell said. She had no time to think.

  “Splendid. You be here at ten sharp tomorrow morning. Now all you want is a pretty little apron and some flatties—(and do put your hair behind your ears, child, or the customers may complain), and your tips ought to work out at a pound a day if the weather’s fine. Don’t for God’s sake let me down, will you? Oh, and my name’s Muriel Berringer. Miss.”

  “I’ll be there, Miss Berringer. Thank you. Good night.”

  She was out in the street again, with an agitated stomach and two jobs. She marched down the High Street wondering what on earth she was going to say to the parents to explain being absent from home the whole of Saturday and Sunday? Two excursions into the country with two unexpectedly-arrived school friends? Or how about telling the truth and getting it over?

  She compromised by leaving the house at half-past nine on the following morning, murmuring something to Anna about shopping and not being home to lunch. The deception was made easier because Anna had two days ago bestowed on her thirty shillings, telling her that she must buy herself some shoes; her only walking pair would not stand mending again. Presumably her mother thought that she was going off to town to buy them. As she fled down Arkwood Road, intent upon getting to the first draper’s shop in the High Street and spending some of Anna’s gift on ‘a pretty apron’, a derisive wolf-whistle brought her eyes up to the windows of the Gaunts’ flat. There he was, hanging out.

  “How you do ‘hare’ along,” he called. “Where are you going? What’s the matter?” in a surprised tone as Nell made warning faces. “Oh … I understand. Well, I don’t approve, but good luck all the same.”

  How could he have ‘understood’ merely by seeing her make warning faces? Perhaps because his own life was so shady, and peculiar, that it gave him a special instinct for guessing at the shady peculiarities in other people’s, and what a very good thing it would be for young John, thought Nell, if he were at this moment setting out for college or an office or some sensible, regular, useful job.

  Then she seemed to hear a low mocking voice saying, How smug you are, Nello, and as she turned into the door of Weeks’s, her face was pink.

  “Good child. Now go into the kitchen at the back and Mary will show you the trays and everything. I’m tied up here for the moment.”

  Miss Berringer returned to the telephone, and Nell, with the apron in a parcel under her arm, went through a curtained door and down a short dark passage into a low-ceilinged kitchen smelling strongly of coffee, with a view onto an unbeautiful yard. A large, sad-looking woman was sitting at a crowded table with her feet stretched straight out before her, surrounded, it seemed to Nell, by basins of water filled with peeled potatoes, colanders of lettuce, and plates piled with hard-boiled eggs. Another woman was standing by the sink, rinsing cups. As Nell came in they both stopped talking and looked at her.

  “She’ll be the new one,” observed the woman at the table, sighing heartily, “Miss B. said she would be coming. Now Tansy, it’s you that will have to show her everything, for how I will get the strength to get through the day unless I rest myself I do not know. Good-morning, dear,” to Nell.

  “Good morning. Er—are you Mary?”

  “Mary it is, and this is Tansy.”

  Tansy, whose bleached hair and waspish face Nell did not like, came forward wiping red hands upon a damp apron and saying in broadest cockney:

  “I’d better show you where everythink is, not but what you can’t see most of it, stuck under the tables and all over the place, not that it’s my business but you’re likely to fall over it, being new. Well ’ere’s the trays, and there’s what goes on them. Mind and give them a nice wipe over every time they comes down, or you’ll ’ave Lady Bottlewasher creating; very posh we are round ’ere, except where Staff is congcerned and they don’t matter.”

  “Ah now, Tansy, you’ll be frightening her,” Mary sighed. “Do be excusing me from moving my feet, dear,” as Nell, following Tansy on the conducted tour and trying to take in what was being said as well as what she was being shown, stepped carefully over those extended members, “but it’s agony it is to disturb my stomach with the least movement.”

  “And these ’ere’s the biscuits,” went on Tansy, jerking her head in the general direction of a dresser laden with cups, plates and tins, “tuppence each for Bourbongs, wot I buy every blessed day of my life for my Julian in Marks’s at one and two the ’arf. Well, I said to myself … someone don’t arf know ’ow to stick it on. Mary’ll be wanting to get on with ’er lunches so that’s about all.”

  She came to a dead stop, went back to the sink, and resumed her work.

  Nell, who had gathered from her commentary only the vaguest idea of where things were kept, had had to use her eyes, and now began swiftly arranging the trays for morning-coffee drinking, deciding that she could ask Miss Berringer later about prices.

  Tansy finished the last cup, slapped the cloth on the draining-board, and crying, “I’m off. See you two-thirty,” pulled on her coat and vanished through the back door. Mary told Nell that she had gone to do her shopping and get her Julian’s dinner. She continued to offer mild advice and information upon the extravagance and untrustworthiness of Tansy’s character, and the sunlight slowly travelled across the yard until it shone upon the colanders of green lettuce in the kitchen. It was a quarter past ten.

  At this hour, Nell had been accustomed to begin looking at her watch and thinking drearily that it wanted two hours and three quarters to lunch-time. There was an agreeably relaxed feeling in the kitchen.

  Now came a breezy, bustling sensation in the corridor, and Miss Berringer appeared.

  “Biffing along all right? Good-o. Yes, that apron looks very nice; don’t those little organdi things look better than that ghastly plastic, Mary? Now Mary dear, come up and get down to it. You’ve given your stomach or what-have-you a nice long pamper. People will be foaming in here for their lunches before we can turn round. You come with me,” to Nell.

  They went into the restaurant, which had been planned as a parlour for a moderately prosperous family in the reign of Queen Anne, and Miss Berringer showed Nell how to ‘lay up’, or arrange the tables for lunch, leaving three out of the eight small ones bare for the morning coffee-drinkers.

  “There’s only comfortable room for eight,” she confided, “we could take ten, but people would sooner not be cramped, and if they aren’t cramped they’ll come back again. I like to cater for the sort of people who don’t want to be cramped. I could make more money by shoving in those two extra tables, but I won’t. And I don’t like the toiling masses in here, either, so remember to discourage them.”

  The half-hour sounded from the parish church across Hampstead’s steep and crowded roofs. The Primula was on the right side of the High Street for sunlight, and the flowers on the mantelpiece
were fresh.

  “My sister keeps me in flowers,” confided Miss Berringer, “she has three acres of violets and anemones in Cornwall. Put your tips into the begging-bowl here. (I was born in India. My father was Army.) Now here comes your first customer. I’m going to pip off and leave you to it.”

  In a moment, Nell knew why. The old gentleman in shabby overcoat and check muffler had no sooner taken what was obviously his usual seat in the sunniest corner, and fixed her with his eye, than he exclaimed in loud dismay:

  “Where’s Betty?”

  It was the perfect occasion for the Victorian catch-phrase ‘Gone for a soldier’, which the youthful Anna had learned from her aunts’ maids and passed on to the infant Nell, but of course it would not do. “She has left, I’m afraid, and gone abroad,” she replied soothingly.

  “Gone abroad? What d’she want t’do that for, eh? Gone abroad? On holiday, d’y’mean? Of course she’s coming back?”

  “We aren’t quite sure,” Nell carefully avoided giving an impression that she was waiting for his order or becoming impatient, but stood in a relaxed attitude (although relaxing was never easy for Nell) and smiled down into his disappointed old face.

  “You the new girl, eh?” and on hearing that she was, he shook his head. “She was a very nice girl, Betty, an unusually nice girl, you might almost say a fine character. Gone abroad. Well … changes everywhere. Hampstead has changed almost out of recognition. If I hadn’t lived here all my life, first in East Heath Road where I was born, and then during most of my married life in Redington Road, and now at The Pryors, with my brother’s family since my dear wife—where has she gone, abroad?”