Here Be Dragons

by Stella Gibbons

  “I’ve got some. That is, I’ve got about ten shillings. Will that be enough?”

  We are friends. We are such close friends that I can offer you money in public, as if you were another girl or I were a man, and it doesn’t matter that you are seeing someone else home or who hears me do it, because we’ve known one another so long and so well. Clever Gardis.

  But John was saying smoothly, holding onto the receiver, listening as he spoke, not looking at anyone:

  “I’ve got a pound. You’re welcome to it, provided that you can let me have it back tomorrow. I need all the money I can collect, just now. … Oh … thank you,” into the receiver. “One will be here in ten minutes,” he said, turning to the room, “and they’ll ring us back when they get another.”

  “Thanks; it’s all right,” Benedict told Gardis, who had got up from the floor and was painting her mouth. She slid her eyes sideways to smile at Robert, who in fact was not entranced by the idea of sharing Gardis’s taxi as far as anywhere.

  “You can have your taxi to yourself,” she said. “I’m walking.”

  “Oh, but … then we can go together. I’ve been trying to say that I live only about twenty minutes away for the last ten minutes.” Robert’s tone was as irritable as Benedict’s had been. “If you want to walk we can go together. Do you mind calling the second one off?” to John.

  Gardis shook her head, smiling as she widened her lips to paint them and thus gave to her face a grotesque twist, but she did not answer. She had just suffered her final defeat of the long embattled day.

  They sat about in silence broken only by John’s elaborately courteous apologies to radiocabs for cancelling the second taxi, and everyone was relieved when they heard one coming along the street below. They trooped down the stairs in silence.

  In the farewells and thanks and expressions of gratitude to John for having arranged the delightful day, Gardis’s slow wandering away, with bent head and hands in her pockets, was not observed. She said good night to no-one, and when Robert turned to look for her, having disengaged himself from the party and recalling after he had made twenty smart paces down the road that he had suggested he should accompany her and feeling that the unwelcome duty must be done, he could not see her.

  He stood still for a moment. The night was warm, and very dark because dawn was at hand, but it was not quite silent; some voices in the distance, filled with a kind of weary bravado, floated over the silent houses and stilly-hanging trees. Robert looked about him; he heard the light step of retreating feet and ran after the sound.

  “Hullo—I’m sorry—” he said, when he caught up with her, “where do you live—Swiss Cottage, isn’t it? That’s rather a walk for you—perhaps we may pick up a taxi. I wish you’d let John—”

  She shook her head. “It’s all right.”

  “Oh, then we go straight down Fitzjohn’s Avenue.”

  “I don’t want you to come.” She whirled round, and her grin startled him. “I told you I didn’t want anybody.”

  “You can’t walk home alone at this time of night. You’ll get—annoyed.” Oh really (as Nell would have said), was the girl a half-wit?

  “Perhaps I like being annoyed—how do you know? Perhaps I’ll pick someone up; a black man. But right now all I want you to do is to go off and leave me alone and stop—and stop running me ragged, can’t you?” She was keeping her face turned away from him. “If you don’t”—in a choked voice, “I’ll yell to the first policeman we meet.”

  This did intimidate Robert: three years in the Navy had not diminished his Englishman’s horror of being involved in a scene, and she looked wild enough, striding along with floating hair and in those clothes, to let him in for anything. His tone was short indeed.

  “Oh all right, but I think you’re very silly and I only hope nothing happens to you. Good night.” And he struck quickly away down Christchurch Hill. Something was plainly the matter with her, but then there probably always was.

  She forgot him at once. She walked on, almost skimming over the dew-wet pavements as if the speed of her motion in some way relieved her inward writhing. The night was all about her, with the unmocking sense of promise, of breathless waiting, that summer nights have, and in the wide silent streets and the city lying below in uneasy sleep she had not one friend. She began to cry as she walked, the little girl alone in the night whose toy had been taken away from her and given to a nicer child.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  “AND WHEN SHE WAS GOOD …”

  “WAS THAT YOUR dad in New End I saw you with the Monday at the paper shop, Nell? He’s a fine lookin’ man. It isn’t ill he’s lookin’ now, no matter how ill he may have been before. And what work does he do, now that he’s better?”

  Mary’s slow lamenting voice made these remarks one morning almost a week later, while she and Nell were busy in the kitchen at The Primula. Tansy had not yet arrived; Miss Berringer was at the table rapidly slicing tomatoes for the luncheon salads.

  Nell had been glad to return to the teashop’s bracing atmosphere after the events—and their continuing effects—of last Monday, but had almost immediately perceived that Mary must have heard something.

  It had begun with vague references to the road where Nell lived; had gone on to the kinds of houses there and thence to Nell’s dear mother and unfortunate lack of brothers and sisters. This brought the campaign up to Thursday evening; now, on Friday morning, Mary was in sight of her objective, which was to hear from Nell the whole story of Nell’s father.

  Nell was irritated by all this. She was ashamed of her own shame about Daddy’s new job and she wanted to put the entire subject, even the off-hand prayer which she had snapped at the Almighty on Monday evening, out of her mind. Blow Mary and her Irish feeling for drama.

  “Yes, that was my father. He had pneumonia two years ago after he’d had a lot of worry about making up his mind to leave the Church, and it took him a long time to recover but he’s quite well again now and he’s verger at a church in Kentish Town; he started last Wednesday.” Nell ended her gabble and quickly but gently set down two clean cups on a tray.

  “Ah, is he indeed, God love him. Lost his faith, did he? Isn’t that a terrible thing to happen to a priest?”

  Nell muttered something, and Mary went on:

  “Is it thim little old gentlemen that shows the seats for you in your churches? (Av course, I’ve never been in a Protestant place; Father Molloy would skin me alive if I was to confess so much as the thought) and a terrible come-down for him, wouldn’t it be? him havin’ been a priest. (Give me over the baking-powder, will you, Nell.) Showin’ the seats to thim that two years gone he was showin’ the way to Hivin to. And your poor mother—takin’ on about it?”

  “Oh do shut up, Mary!” Miss Berringer did not turn round but her tone had a startling note of suddenly snapping nerves. There was silence for a minute. Mary’s face wonderfully expressed majestic indignation, holy innocence, bewilderment, and, underneath it all, gratification that Lady Bottlewasher had for once come off her pedestal.

  “Nell, get those things in, time’s nearly up,” Miss Berringer said, going quickly out of the room. Nell, happening to glance at her as she went by, noticed how thickly rouged this morning were her plumper cheeks; lately she had begun to put on weight and it did not suit her.

  She picked up her tray to carry it into the next room. Miss Berringer darted back, almost knocking into her.

  “Isn’t there something about it’s being ‘better to be a doorkeeper in the house of my God’, Nell?” she said, laughing. “I’ve been feeling like a doorkeeper myself lately—I never want to see a human face again. Never mind—six more weeks of it and then Westward Ho! A month in Cornwall.” She disappeared again.

  Mary was heard muttering in a scandalized tone—“niver wants to see a humin face again, God forgive her,” as Nell went out to the tea-room.

  She was thinking that a holiday would be agreeable for herself.

  It was almost four mo
nths since she had started at The Primula, and although every moment of the time had been enjoyable, the pressure upon feet, memory, attention and temper had been unremitting. She was inclined to be snappy, and to twist herself into knots in the chair when she sat down, and she was not sleeping well. She had almost forty pounds in the Post Office. A month, or even ten days, in Cornwall or anywhere else sounded very desirable, but she was not going to indulge herself; she would spend her holiday, when the tea-shop closed during October, sitting in the late sunlight (if any) on the Heath, and then, perhaps, looking for a job in London with higher wages and tips.

  She would be sorry to leave The Primula, and Tansy and Miss Berringer and Miss Cody and Nerina (whom she liked in spite of the slight pain always associated with her presence) and even Mary, but she meant to have her own tea-shop before she was twenty-three. She was already past twenty, there was no money to be spent on holidays.

  And although she was still happy at The Primula, she was beginning to feel the atmosphere there as less carefree than formerly; only a little less; only because of the slight touch of genuine irritation in Miss Berringer’s manner, and the pensive shade cast upon her fellow-workers by Nerina, drooping as the day of Chris’s going into the Army drew near, but the difference was there. Nell already looked back on the early weeks of summer as the Golden Age.

  But at home the atmosphere was—livelier. It was already so, although her father had been working at Saint Saviour’s for only three days. Someone else had to be got off to a job, besides Nell, and now it was the nominal head of the house, and this was healthy. Like Nell, he got himself off; perhaps the humble nature of the employment made him more willing to slip away almost before Anna was aware that he was going. But she was determined to support and encourage him in every possible way in doing his new work, and she soon learned the hours at which he left on different days, and was there in the hall to say good-bye to him and ‘wave him off’. She did much more; in spite of a distaste for churchgoing and church ceremonies which almost thirty years of being a parson’s wife had only repressed, not cured, she took to going to Saint Saviour’s, resuming the habits which she had thankfully dropped when Martin left the Church.

  She was depressed by the dim Victorian Gothic interior—which John Betjeman might have, for all she cared; the feeble singing irritated her, and she found Mr. Mollison’s manner too pontifical when he was being a parson and too hearty when he was being a fellow-creature. She never ceased to dislike the long walk down through the dreary streets of Kentish Town, and to be irked and bored by the entire business. But, when all this was candidly admitted, there remained the two facts that she was intellectually, if not emotionally and spiritually, convinced of the existence of God, and that it was her duty to support her husband. They were quite enough to send her regularly, if not often, to Saint Saviour’s.

  Nell continued to scurry secretively at intervals into the church at the end of Arkwood Road. She was really too busy nowadays to think much about Faith; Works, of a rather worldly and pleasant kind, had to serve instead.

  Anna also took it upon herself to tell Lady Fairfax about Martin’s new work, proposing herself for tea one afternoon at Odessa Place in order to break the news.

  Tea, said her sister-in-law; she never had tea; but wouldn’t Anna come in for a drink about six?

  When the news had been broken and Lady Fairfax had made her surprised comments, they sat in silence for a moment. The smart dark walls of the drawing-room glowed in the soft light of early evening, and the fragile glass statuettes and chandelier-candlesticks glittered on the mantelshelf.

  “I’m just wondering,” Lady Fairfax said suddenly, “if something couldn’t be got out of this for T.V.”

  “Out of what?”

  Anna, dressed in a fifteen-year-old skirt and a jacket bought, Lady Fairfax surmised, at some Sale of Work, was enjoying a very dry Martini and thinking that she did not dislike Peggy as much as she used to. One might never see eye to eye with her, but it was very possible to respect her, and Anna had also discovered, to her surprise, that Peggy silently acknowledged their mutual dislike and—more surprisingly—found it amusing.

  “His going back into the Church by the vestry door,” she said. “You know, people are interested in religion nowadays. (Of course, they won’t stand for dogma—don’t you call it dogma?—laying down the law, I mean, or anything of that sort.) But look at the huge success Billy Graham had. And there’s Wilfred Pickles. And of course those songs of Johnny Ray’s—though that really is going a bit far … do you think Marty would agree to do something about it?”

  “Good heavens, why should he?” Anna’s tone had the irritating casualness which dismisses the inconceivable. “He hasn’t done anything exciting.”

  “It doesn’t have to be exciting.” (Really, what right had a woman wearing those clothes to look both handsome and clever, but nowadays it was not possible, really to dislike tiresome, highbrow, snobbish Anna.) “Naturally, the story would have to be knocked into shape,” Lady Fairfax said.

  “There isn’t any story.”

  “But of course there is, Anna. His loss of faith—”

  “It wasn’t quite that, you know.”

  “Well—that’s near enough. And then the long months in the wilderness—I know that sounds rather corny,” sharply, as Anna laughed, “but it needn’t necessarily be put in those words, so long as viewers get the idea … and then the gradual return to the Church through the vestry door. Through the Vestry Door! It might make a series. There’s so much feeling about the Church since the Townsend affair. …”

  Anna finished her Martini. It occurred to her that another would be agreeable, but really, if Peggy continued in this style it might be her, Anna’s, duty to refuse another, rather as an Arab would refuse the salt of a host whom he disagreed with or disapproved of.

  “I’m quite sure he wouldn’t hear of it,” was all she said, looking out of the window.

  “He might be able to help someone, Anna,” Lady Fairfax said gravely.

  “By painting his face and showing off to millions of people? Poor old Marty, I doubt it.”

  Lady Fairfax decided to drop the subject. It was a little irritating that Martin had refused to remain completely passive in the backwater into which she had steered him, but perhaps that had been rather a lot to expect; it must have been excruciatingly dull, pottering round the Arkwood Road house on pocket-money supplied by Nell, and Marty was not yet quite sixty. Her feelings towards him warmed. Poor old boy, it was nice that he had found himself a job that he liked, and felt himself capable of doing.

  Her reflections were interrupted by the entrance of Gardis, in outdoor clothes.

  “Dead on time again: are you doing a last-minute reform so that I’ll give you a good reference?” Lady Fairfax got up and took some letters from the mantelpiece. “These came this afternoon; I have scribbled on them what I want said, and will you ring up …”

  “That child looks ill,” Anna observed, when Gardis had left the room.

  “I’m not surprised. She hasn’t been in bed before three in the morning since she got here—except lately; she’s been earlier these last few days; and she’s also stopped wearing those disgusting clothes. I think something must be up. I can’t imagine what, of course; she’s never told me anything and heaven knows I haven’t wanted her to, although I have wondered. … (I’m pretty sure there was something going on with a beard at the Art School. But he’s left.) And just lately she has been different. Of course she’s just a poor little psychopath, and if you knew her background you wouldn’t wonder: I only wonder she isn’t worse. I’m actually rather sorry she’s going home. I never thought I would be. She grows on one, in an odd sort of way. (Of course, she’s fascinating. But then I haven’t much use for fascinators—being one myself and earning my living by it.)”

  Anna did not trouble to smile at this: she glanced at the clock and remarked civilly that she must go.

  After she had seen her out, Lad
y Fairfax ran upstairs, a thing which she only did when raging irritation insisted upon a physical outlet, and burst in upon her secretary.

  “Gardis—drop everything and get on to Harrods (they’ll still just be open). Tell them to send the biggest and best television set they’ve got to Mrs. Martin Sely at Twenty-five Arkwood Road, Hampstead, N.W.3, with a card with my name and my best love. I will not let her get away with this—this smug high-minded attitude about T.V.”

  Gardis looked at her, with amusement in the black eyes ringed with black, and said: “Squared away, Lady F.,” as she began to dial Harrods’ number.

  When her employer had signed her letters and gone, she sat still for a moment, looking down at the immaculate pink nails resting on the pink typewriter.

  She could hear, through the quietness of the room and the luxurious hush cossetting the house, the far-off hellish drone of traffic battling its way homeward to the suburbs. She was struggling with the wish to destroy the harmony in yellow and pink which she had carefully arranged upon herself in clothes and jewels; it was not honest: she felt herself as a walking lie: she had tried, during the past week, ‘to be her age’ and to look as if she were living graciously and possessed an integrated personality, and she hated every minute of it. The pain within her clamoured for expression in outward grime, and her poverty of heart wanted to show itself in rags. She was empty and yearning and raging as an addict kept without his ‘shot’. Yet this passion was not love: it was stronger, and deeper, and—worse.

  And now she had done something … she had been such a fool … after getting herself organized a little, with enormous effort, towards what she supposed that she ought to be … she had spoilt everything … and John, she had asked John for help … and he would go straight to Ben and tell him … she must have been crazy.

  She knew what John was. He could be trusted about as much as she could herself. Only, there had been this awful burning feeling that she must hurt Elizabeth somehow, and there hadn’t seemed any way of getting at her … she had that British-deb manner that wouldn’t show anything even if she were half-killed … and then her going away to Paris for the week-end gave one a kind of chance … to do something … those two had been together almost every minute of the day and a lot of the night too for the past week … oh, it was a case all right, a bad case … and if they hadn’t been together all of the night yet, they soon would … of course, marriage … you could always get someone away … marriage didn’t mean a thing nowadays … but it was this thing that John had done for her … her idea … everything … and now she must wait and wait and wait, without moving, until Ben showed that he knew.