Here Be Dragons

by Stella Gibbons

Suddenly she laughed. What a fuss! It wasn’t insanity or theft. She put her hand quickly over Nell’s.

  “It’s all right, dear. I’m awfully surprised. But I’m not cross. (No, I’m not cross. I ought to be, I suppose. But if I tell the truth, I’m not.)” She hesitated, now feeling very conscious of the sunken red face and bitterly drooping mouth opposite. Poor old Marty, always much more conventional than herself … “but I think you owe us an apology, you know,” she ended—‘gravely’, so that he should feel she was ranged at his side, the loyal wife and prudent mother.

  “Oh, I know …” Nell, who was also very conscious of the face, rushed into an account of how it had all happened: the unendurable dullness of Akkro Products, the tempting vision of sixteen pounds a week, the stuffy room, Mr. Riddle, Miss Berringer, the fun of seeing new people all day, and so forth.

  Anna listened, thawing: the face neither moved nor made any comment. But at the end of the speech for the defence, which perhaps gained something in the ears of the jury because it was given in Nell’s usual quick sensible style without any flights, by a piece of great good luck she, Nell, was able to produce what the aunts at Vernon Lodge would have called the comble; a kind of cap or summit which triumphantly topped off everything that she had, though not openly, been pleading for and trying to prove. She produced an evening paper (left, in fact, by a customer, on the popular table-in-the-window at The Primula).

  “Look,” she said, pushing a picture under the face’s dejected nose, “she’s an earl’s cousin.”

  There she was; the Honourable Prudence Field-Marshall-Pepys, looking amused in a frilly apron while dancing rather languid attendance on the customers in a Knightsbridge Espresso bar.

  “You see,” said Nell, nodding, and was taking the paper away when her father slowly put out his hand for it.

  “Yes …” he said, studying the picture through the spectacles which always needed a polish, “so she is. I hadn’t … realized … but that doesn’t mean that I approve … you see, Anna, it was so good of Peggy to get Nell this … job … that was partly what I was thinking of when I … you haven’t left your job with these other people, have you?”

  “Oh, goodness no. If I decide at the end of tomorrow that I don’t like it after all, I needn’t do anything more about it,” very cheerfully. She was glad that he could not see her cast-iron determination to beard Mr. Riddle on Monday.

  This, of course, led to a cry of ‘Working on Sunday?’ which, however, developed no further because poor Martin did not care to pursue the thoughts which any mention of Sunday called up, and he heard in silence her soothing answer that she would go to the seven o’clock, in the church at the end of the road. Nodding, he pulled the paper towards him again and began, after saying something about ‘meeting rough people’ which she again soothed with a murmur, to read it.

  Anna cleared the table round him. (She had fallen into the habit lately of doing this. She found it tiresome, but he did so hate being moved about.)

  “You go off and amuse youself,” she said, in reply to Nell’s offer of help. “I’ll do this. You’ve been busy with tables and things all day.”

  Nell skipped upstairs to her room.

  Could this be all, then? No more going to be said? No thunderings and wonderings, no anticipations of disaster, no reproaches? (As for rough people, had the parents any idea just how rough Gardis was?)

  She felt relieved, but also rather sobered, for the parents’ unexpectedly quiet acceptance of her action had shown her unmistakably that they were no longer the two figures of unshakable authority and importance which had dominated her life for nearly twenty years. Ever since the arrival in London, she had felt that she must take care of them, rather than that they were taking care of her, and now she knew that she was free to manage her own affairs. The idea, which was almost a feeling, was decidedly pleasant.

  As she sat down to begin a long letter to Miss Elizabeth Prideaux, Les Rosiers, Châteaux d’Oex, France, she had a mental picture of Anna and Martin feebly creeping and dozing about downstairs which would have rather surprised them: Anna was just thinking, as she washed up, that if Martin really minded Nell doing this crazy thing she must be stopped: she would have a proper talk with her tomorrow evening, after the novelty had had a chance to wear off a little, and point out all the disadvantages.

  Among the advantages was the possibility of sixteen pounds a week. Anna had to keep telling herself that the sum was utterly fantastic, and that they would not want as much as that even if the child could ever earn it.

  “Give notice? Is that what you said, Miss Sely?”

  “Yes, Mr. Riddle.” Nell’s voice had begun as a squeak but she impatiently pulled it down again; she was only giving notice, wasn’t she? Thousands of people must give notice in London every day.

  “But why? What for? Your work is quite satisfactory.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Riddle.”

  “Then why do you want to leave us? What reason could there possibly be?” Then, before she could bring out the tactful arguments which she had assembled—

  “This is a very nice firm to work for, you know. There are Prospects, if you work hard (Miss Driver will be getting married one day, of course), and you know all about our Pensions Fund and the Canteen. Next year we hope to have a Firm’s Dance. It isn’t what I care about myself, Mrs. Riddle not being fond of dancing and in any case my dancing days being over, but young people like dancing. You like dancing, Miss Sely, don’t you?”

  Nell moved her gaze from his face, which was beginning to unnerve her, to the floor. Was she expected to toil year in and year out with Akkro Products for the reward of one evening’s hopping about during the twelvemonth?

  “Don’t you, Miss Sely?”

  “It isn’t anything to do with the firm, Mr. Riddle.”

  She tried to add something about having been very happy there, but rebelled. Why should she lie to Mr. Riddle? She had disliked every moment of it.

  “Then what … I suppose you want more—er—money?”

  “I do want more money but it isn’t only that. Mr. Riddle, if you could tell me whom I give in my notice to, I could do it this morning. Before lunch.”

  The unmistakable note of yearning brought sharpness to Mr. Riddle’s next words.

  “I see; you’re anxious to be quit of us.” He paused; a disturbing thought had occurred. “Er—it isn’t anything to do with our little argument about the window?”

  “Oh no, Mr. Riddle.”

  “That’s all right, then. Er—would you like me to speak to Mr. Hughes about a small rise? It would be only a small one, of course. I don’t suppose the firm could manage more than two and sixpence a week. But even that mounts up in a year, you know: it would pay for one lunch at the canteen—”

  “It’s kind of you but I would rather leave, truly, Mr. Riddle. My mind is made up.”

  “Is it, indeed?” Some of the almost holy indignation which Mr. Riddle felt at hearing this, from a chit of a girl who had been pushed into a sound job to please a friend of the boss’s, escaped him in the form of a sarcastic intonation. “Well, if your mind is made up, I suppose it’s no use arguing. You had better ask Miss Driver if Mr. Hughes can see you just before one o’clock.”

  This was duly arranged; and the interview turned out to be a very different affair.

  “Sick of it, are you?” said Mr. Hughes cheerfully, lifting a steely blue eye from some papers and fixing her, “well, you can go, my child. You haven’t done too badly here and if you’d wanted to stay on we shouldn’t have said ‘no’, but you realize, of course, that we only took you on in the first place to oblige Lady Fairfax. The job was more or less made for you. So you run along and find something more exciting. What’s it to be? Modelling?”

  “I’m going to be a waitress,” said Nell.

  She wanted to take the careless expression, which yet, she felt sure, concealed some natural annoyance, from his face.

  She succeeded. The look was replaced by surprise,
and admiration, in that order.

  “Are you, by gum? Well, I take off my hat to you. You aren’t afraid of work. But what’s your family think about it? And what on earth do you want to do it for? Dirty, tough, monotonous job.”

  “Sixteen pounds a week, if I’m lucky,” said Nell.

  “Sixteen pounds a week, eh? Executive level. Well, you run along with my blessing, and when you’ve got your job and broken the news to your aunt, I’ll come along and you can give me a cup of tea and God help you if there’s lipstick on the cup.”

  “That would be the kitchen staff’s responsibility, I should think,” Nell said thoughtfully. She fixed him with a determined eye. “May I leave next Friday, please, Mr. Hughes? I really am anxious to get started.” She had no intention of telling him that she had started.

  “You’re supposed to give us a month’s notice, you know.”

  “Couldn’t you possibly make an exception?”

  “All right. I think you’re a completely crazy child but I like your—er—pluck. And I suppose you want it kept dark for a bit, eh?”

  “Yes, please.”

  “Right you are, then: no telling Aunt Peggy until you’re earning sixteen pounds a week. She won’t be any too pleased, I’m prepared to bet. Waitressing …” He shook his head. “I’ve got one like you of my own, just turned eleven, but she’s booked for Sherborne and, we hope, for a university. She’s rather bright. I hope she won’t want to be a waitress.”

  Nell left the Presence feeling not completely comfortable. His tone had been pleasant, but it had not succeeded in hiding his disapproval, perhaps he had not meant it to; and she knew that this was based entirely on snobbery.

  The week passed quickly, in spite of the shadow of Riddlesian disapproval, and at five o’clock on Friday she stepped across the dingy threshold of Thirty-eight Lecouver Street for the last time. She was free. She looked around at the bright, busy, exciting evening and the homeward-bound crowds. A decision to go off without saying anything to the South Sea Islanders had been, rather to her own surprise, reversed by herself at the last moment and she had just escaped after fifteen minutes of amazed questioning, head-shaking, and stories about cousins who had worked for three years without a Sunday off and developed varicose veins, mingled with warm good wishes and promises to drop in for a coffee, threats of demanding tea and pastries free of charge, and wonderings about whether she would have to wear a cap as well as an apron. But loudest and most frequent were the speculations about What Will Your Auntie Say?

  This evening, Nell did not much care. Last Sunday at The Primula had been very exhausting, very stimulating and very amusing, and she had earned, besides her pound in wages, twenty-eight shillings in tips, and nothing now was going to prevent her from working at The Primula. She was to start tomorrow morning, Saturday, at ten o’clock, and when she was fully employed there her free day would be Monday.

  When she opened her last salary packet, under the indulgent eye of the young lady in Weeks’s who was serving her with five more organdi aprons, she found that she had cause for even greater cheerfulness. There, tucked in amongst the green notes, was a great, crisp, black-and-white Gothic beauty; a fiver: “With good wishes and good luck from Gerald Hughes and Akkro Products Limited.”

  Nell was too astounded by this piece of generosity to be touched by it; and in fact Mr. Hughes himself regarded it as an investment rather than a good-luck penny. How blood did tell; here was all the Peggy Fairfax drive coming out in the niece. If he knew anything about people, the Sely child would be running a chain of restaurants in ten years’ time, and that might come in damned useful to the firm—plastic beakers, plates and spoons.

  He also knew enough about people to know that she would remember his tip.

  CHAPTER TEN

  THE STREETS OF SUMMER

  WHEN IN LATER years Nell remembered this summer of her youth, she always saw in memory the hilly winding streets of Hampstead, and sunlight falling through green leaves, and, amidst them, John’s face.

  They would sometimes set out together in the morning, she to begin her day’s toil with the coffees, and he presumably to indulge in those wanderings through London which, he frequently said, were necessary for his work.

  “Nello? Must you ‘hare’ off like that? I’m just coming.”

  He would swoop down from the top flat, wearing some extraordinary collection of clothes—an immaculate striped blazer, blue denim trousers, a gaudy American shirt—give her a quick hug where she waited on the landing, and pull her down the stairs after him, telling her about some party to be held that evening in an attic or cellar which she must attend (she usually waited for him to telephone further details and heard no more about it), or some new friend who was going to revive the art of writing musical comedy in England. Sometimes he would lecture her about being a waitress, saying that she never had a moment to spare for him; that she was necessary to him, like the sights and sounds and smells of London; and that her ‘so-called work’ took up too much of her time; that she was hardly ever there when he wanted her.

  This was sweet to hear, but like most of John’s statements it bore only a tenuous relationship to the facts, which were that she often saved him an evening or a Monday afternoon and never heard a word from him throughout the whole of it.

  “Of course. I didn’t want you then,” was his usual petulant comment when asked casually (Nell’s own temperament, as well as a kind of deer-stalking instinct, prevented her from asking in any other tone) what had kept him or prevented his telephoning? And he would add, “You see, you must be there when I want you, Nello.”

  She was frequently very annoyed with him; impertinent, casual, rather shifty boy. It made no difference to how she felt, nor to their friendship … if it was a friendship.

  She supposed that it was a friendship. They did not speak of their feelings for one another, and she never looked into her heart to see what was there; she only felt a constant longing to be of use to him and to watch him as he moved and laughed and spoke. It was the truest kind of love, the kind which longs to give and to serve; and perhaps the delicate scents of May, wandering that year on the wind down the streets of summer, gave to him as much as she did. She was never to know.

  She did know that sometimes he seemed to need her very badly; she would return home after an exhausting, if satisfying day’s work and, going up to her room, find him sitting sullenly outside her door on the stairs leading up to their flat. Why was she so late? He had been here for hours. He was wretched; she must stay with him.

  Then she would be wrapped in his desperate clasp, his head pushed uncomfortably into her shoulder, and thus they would sit in silence for half an hour, only springing apart as Anna came up the stairs, to see what on earth Nell was up to, and, as the weeks went on, get a foretaste of the day’s gossip from The Primula which Nell would relate, to the reluctant amusement of Martin, over the supper table.

  She did not know what was the cause of the fits of fierce grief which overwhelmed John, although she sensibly explained them to herself as being due to the way he lived; and not having any settled career to take up when he left the Army, and the influence of his peculiar friends, and irregular meals and lack of sleep, and so forth. She thought his way of life shocking; it was everything she herself disliked most—disorderly, planless and uncomfortable, but some instinct prevented her from trying to change him.

  She seemed to know that any attempt to do so would drive him away from her, and so, although she did want to see him orderly and sensible (or told herself that it would be nice if he were), she never lifted a finger to make him so. She heard her mother and his mother and his father condemning his ways and shaking their heads over his future, and outwardly she agreed with them. Inwardly she thought: Leave him alone. Of course he’s a silly ass and he ought to pull himself together, but leave him alone … can’t you?

  In fact, he usually saw to it that his parents, at least, did leave him alone, taking advantage of their preoccupation
with their own problems and careers and keeping as much out of the way as possible.

  “What we’re all hoping is that his National Service will be the making of him,” Lady Fairfax said, one morning when Nell had been working at The Primula for about a month.

  They were standing together by the popular table-in-the-window, the aunt, wearing a smart new striped suit with an immensely long waistless jacket, having swooped in upon the niece to tell her that she ‘definitely approved’ of what Nell was doing. She had known about it for some weeks, as Martin had thought it his duty to write her a long and apologetic letter, but she had not been able to find time, until now, to inspect Nell in the field.

  “Yes …”

  Nell’s tone was vague; her eye was flitting round the room in search of ash-trays needing to be emptied and smears of tea needing to be removed, but she was remembering what had been said to her, in a frantic whisper, under the dense canopy of a maybush in flower on the Heath two days ago—I can’t talk about going into the Army because it makes me feel as if I were choking and stifling and starving all at once … so don’t ever mention it to me again … some of my friends have nearly gone insane or become deserters while they were in it and some of them are devoting their whole lives to undermining it … I can’t even say the word without feeling sick … I’m like those Zulus in Rider Haggard’s books who were so terrified of the king they didn’t dare say his name but called him Elephant-That-Shakes-The-Earth … so now you know, Nello. And don’t ever dare to mention it to me again.

  She shook her head, in reply to a question, and a keen glance, as to whether he had ever talked about going into the Army to her?

  “You wouldn’t tell me if he had,” Lady Fairfax picked up her sea-shell-white gloves. “Young creatures stick together.” She began to move towards the door, her eye roving down the thronged and sunny High Street in search of her car, “and that’s as it should be …”

  “Was everything all right, madam?” Nell asked demurely, following.