Here Be Dragons

by Stella Gibbons

  “That’s very kind of you, Grace. Thank you.”

  They strolled together across the stale, trampled grass where sheets of faded newspaper were lying; between the children, playing busily in the dust. The eyes of the baby, liquid and grey as those of a very young kitten, rested fixedly upon John, and Grace said that he had taken to him; John looked at the two dark faces into whose shining skins the sky seemed to have reflected some of its intense, its almost African, blue; and lingered long enough by the open door of Grace’s house to catch a glimpse at the end of a dimly-lit passage covered in well-polished oilcloth, of a low, glowing red fire. He could catch a soft high babble of voices; a leisured, lazy, cosy feeling floated out from that dimness, alluring as a savoury smell.

  “I wish you’d ask me to tea,” he said.

  “I can’t, John. I’ve got me homework to do, and then there’s our baby to put to bed, our Lily does it most days but this week she’s on night-shift, and then there’s me Guides.”

  “Who is your Lily?”

  “My sister. And Mammy says never to ask anyone to ask you in to theirs without they say it first.”

  “Give Lily my love. Tell her that John Gaunt, the writer, sends her his love. I hope you’ll have a nice time at your Guides. I am a Girl Guide dressed in blue, These are the things I have to do—that’s what you say, isn’t it?—and thank you for telling me where Nerina lives, and thank you for your company, Grace dear. Perhaps we’ll see one another again one day. Good-bye.”

  She said “Bye-bye, John. Be seeing you.” Well, one could not expect everything, even from someone who looked as if she could have been niece to Jupiter in “The Gold Bug”. As he crossed the street and went up the steep, filthy broken steps of the forlorn house where Nerina lived, his head was filled with parrakeets, and sugar cane, and voodoo, and an African waterlily.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  ACT THREE: THE GARDEN IN SURREY AGAIN

  NERINA WAS LYING on the bed looking at those marks on the door.

  It was one of the broad, thick doors found in London whose presence means that a house is very old, and it had the slightly clumsy cast that such doors always have; a disturbing look; a too-old look, if you are someone who likes straight lines and finds comfort in firm, stately controlled proportions. The whole attic, filled with late sunshine, papered in ragged, peeling blue, looked as if it had been built by twisted, evil people.

  The marks were the worst thing. The lock had been taken off the door, leaving a white square, but it had been wrenched off; there were the savage gouges, deep in the wood. Why? She lay still, staring at the marks between eyelids stiff and sore with crying. In fancy she heard the shouts of rage, and feet rushing up the stairs. Then, afterwards, when it was quiet, somebody had taken the lock off the door, tearing it away, muttering while they worked on it in remembered fury, so that someone else should never again be able to lock themselves into the room, and feel safe.

  Nerina had put the broken armchair against the door, but Angie had pushed her way in and sat on the bed, talking, for nearly an hour. She had just gone. The room still smelled of the powder she used, and Nerina could still hear her deep, slurred, old voice saying kind things that made Nerina feel sick.

  Suddenly her calm face twisted. She rolled over on the filthy flock pillow, buried her face in her hands and her dulled yellow hair, and began to cry again. The tears poured down her burning face, onto Chris’s first letter lying beneath her cheek. She was dirty; she had felt too ill to go to the public baths or take her clothes to the laundrette, as usual, yesterday, and besides there was the money … she only had half-a-crown left, now that she had paid Angie a week’s rent in advance, and although it would be all right when she went back to The Primula, they would probably pay her … but she wasn’t sure … Miss Berringer was not generous about money and was very down on slackness. …

  She kissed the letter weakly. It had been all right; for hunger and exhaustion and even dirt had not mattered while Chris was there, but now he had been gone only a week, and it was two years before they would be really together again, safely together and free. Two years.

  He had never been in this room; she could not think, that’s where he used to stand to take off his sweater, here is the mark of his head on the pillow (she would leave a pillow unshaken for days because it bore the impression of his head). There were only his precious painting materials to remind her of him, arranged carefully on a clean piece of sacking in the middle of the black rag that had once been a carpet. Whatever happened to her, those must be waiting for him, complete and unharmed, when he came back.

  She lay still for a while, occasionally giving a hiccoughing sob. There was no abandonment in her crying; it kept some appearance of control and reluctance, like the crying of a well-brought-up child; she would not have been crying at all—she told herself—if only all her will-power and her energy and her sensibleness had not suddenly gone. It was disloyal to Chris to cry. She had been all right up to three days ago. It was Chris going away, and this queer feeling-ill, and having the money stolen.

  Four whole pounds. She moaned again, softly, with a note of exasperation rather than of despair. It was a nice house in the Circus, where she and Chris had had their room; they were nice people in that house, truly, it wasn’t like this dreadful house, but Rosina, in the top front room—she was a dear but she did have men in. One of them must have stolen the money from behind the picture called Excelsior, with that ridiculous St. Bernard rescuing the traveller, which she and Chris had always laughed at, where Nerina had hidden it.

  Four pounds. Oh … h … h … Chris had saved it for her, eating apples and oatmeal; going hungry, so that she might have a little secret hoard to fall back on if anything awful happened. And she had hidden it behind the picture that they had so often laughed at together, and someone had stolen it. She had nothing but half-a-crown in the world, and she was dirty and hungry and feeling ill.

  She was half-kneeling on the broken bed now. The intense gold of fading sunrays stained her scanty petticoat and turned the damp strings of her hair to pallid fire. She was looking straight into the glare beyond the dim, sunken window panes, pressing her lips together to keep back the tears, when there came a sharp rapping on that awful door. Angie!

  “No! No, you can’t come in,” Nerina called, in a tone from which the silvery note had gone. She stared at the door with drowned, dilated eyes, keeping quite still. If she came in again, reeking of scent, with her wrinkled naked neck rising out of that dirty lace blouse … But—

  “It’s John Gaunt, Nerina,” and at the mere sound of a voice she knew, terror and loneliness seemed to lift.

  “Oh yes—John … come in. I’m sorry,” she gasped.

  She was drawing the dirty coverlet up to her chin while she felt beneath the pillow for a tortoiseshell ring, and when he did come in, having given her a moment’s grace, on hearing the fear and the tears in her voice, she had drawn her hair back into its accustomed tassel.

  She knelt on the bed, holding the quilt high in her two hands and looking full at him above its limp folds.

  “Dear Nerina. How glad I am to have found you,” he said, smiling. “I’ve been hunting for you all day, all over Camden Town and Kentish Town and Highgate, and I shouldn’t have found you now if I hadn’t met a delightful little African girl named Grace.”

  He leaned with folded arms against the door, and even as his long graceful body concealed the chisel marks, so his calm expression and gentle voice seemed to cause the tension in the hot, quiet, dirty room to become less, to subside into ordinary unhappiness.

  “Grace Ajuna? Oh yes—Chris painted her. She’s a darling … it’s nice to see you, John.” She tried to give him her sweet masklike smile. “Did—have you just come to see me yourself? Or—I expect they’re wondering what on earth’s happened to me at The Primula, aren’t they?”

  Already she was feeling better. The world was becoming real again. She would not be so afraid of Angie if John could be
here when she came back. …

  “I believe they are rather agitated. But they’ve managed to get in some old person temporarily, I believe. Or so Nell says.” He glanced round the room. “May I sit down?”

  “There’s only the bed, I’m afraid … this is a horrid place; I’m sorry. …”

  “I thought you lived in Landseer Circus?” he said gently, when he was seated at the end of the bed, then, without waiting for her answer, “no, this is a social visit. No one sent me. The fact is, I thought you might be feeling rather low, with Chris in the Army, and would enjoy some company.”

  “It was nice of you.” She glanced restlessly away; then controlled herself, straightening her limbs beneath the quilt, and went on, “but I’m all right really, you know. I’m just missing Chris and feeling rather tired. I was going back to work tomorrow—back to The Primula, that is. I’ve lost my job at Maretti’s.”

  Suddenly she gave an hysterical chuckle.

  “Oh … you know, I thought I was safe for ever, there, but it was the chef.”

  “The one Chris wanted to bash, and Benedict and I restrained him?”

  “Emilio, yes. You knew he always pinches people, and we have to put up with it because the whole place depends on his cooking … I always hated it but I couldn’t say anything … and then Chris went … and somehow I felt much worse about the pinching. I was angry. I belong …” She stopped; the sea-shell pink came slowly up. “So I pushed him. He fell into a pan of batter,” she ended gravely.

  Neither laughed. John smiled faintly and inspected the tip of his shoe; Nerina drew a long quivering sigh.

  “And then our money was stolen,” she said.

  He looked up. “All this in three days?” and she nodded.

  “What a bloody silly place to hide anything,” was his mild comment when the story had been told. “Have you let Chris know?”

  She quietly shook her head.

  “I think you ought to, you know. He’ll be much angrier if he finds out you’ve been having a horrible time without telling him.”

  She reared up her slim, long white neck, looking dignified for all her not-quite-clean petticoat and reddened eyes, and he was filled with admiration. Love must be a powerful agent indeed; he wondered for an instant what it must be like to lie helpless under that spell. …

  “I can manage,” she said. “I expect they’ll have me back at The Primula—Miss Berringer’s always telling me what a good waitress I am—and if they won’t, washing-up jobs are very easy to get. I should have gone job-hunting today, if I hadn’t been feeling rather ill. Most unlike me. Very odd.”

  He had been watching her. Now, with a muttered apology, he leant over and held out his cigarette case.

  “Oh no—thank you.” There was a note of uncontrollable repugnance, and he looked at her for a moment before he put the case away.

  “You know, Nerina …” he was examining a shoelace with a dissatisfied expression, “you must listen carefully to me. Because something has got to be done about you. And—”

  “I can manage, John,” she repeated rather haughtily. “I’m perfectly all right. I know this is an awful room but I shan’t stay here. I only moved into it because I got rather fussed about having our money stolen, and I hadn’t enough for the next week’s rent of our old room. I didn’t want to leave there.” She looked quickly round the attic. “I think it’s horrible here.” Suddenly she gave a violent shudder, “And Angie. …” She looked at him. “Have you seen her?”

  He nodded. “She opened the door to me.”

  “Isn’t she … I think she’s frightening.”

  “Oh, do you? Well, perhaps—to someone like you. She doesn’t frighten me.”

  “Oh, doesn’t she? Why not, John?”

  “Because I could manage her,” he said. “Any man could; she’s like that.”

  “Oh,” Nerina said. She did not seem to be listening. “Well,” looking down at the quilt and smoothing it, “so you see I’m getting out of here just as soon as I can. Tomorrow, I hope. Only …” she began to speak more quickly, “I got rather fussed about everything, the money and missing Chris and feeling rather peculiar, and when I tried to get up … tried … to see if there … go to our old room to see if there was a letter … I couldn’t … sick … so sick … I … can’t even … a letter. …”

  He had moved over to her and was stroking her shoulder as she lay shaking on the bed.

  “There, there, Nino. Do cry, if it makes you feel better. Don’t you like being stroked? Sorry: I’ll hold your hand then, instead. In a brotherly clasp. (You’ve got quite a grip, haven’t you?) You see, Nino darling, something has got to be done about you now. Why you feel peculiar is because you’re going to have a baby.”

  She had been wringing his hand in a sort of distraction. Now she suddenly became still. He did not move, but kept a gentle clasp round the long limp little hand lying in his own, looking down at the yellow head. Presently it jerked feebly; hardly a movement from side to side; just a weak movement implying negation.

  “I think you are, Nino. People are always sick when they’re going to have babies. (I don’t wonder at it. The prospect is enough to make anyone sick.) And your eyes look most odd: just like Harry Miles’s girl’s eyes did when she was going to.” He paused: the head stayed still. “You were thinking it was hunger-sickness, weren’t you? But I’m sure it’s not.”

  Again she slightly moved the tassel of primrose hair.

  “Don’t keep on like some charming little parrot. I say you are. You think, for a moment.”

  Apparently she did, for soon she surprised him by sitting up, and composedly putting a very clean handkerchief to her stained and swollen face.

  “I did think. But I thought … I didn’t think for a minute …”

  He was not certain if that was what the murmur was.

  “I’m sure of it,” he said with his air of authority. “You must go to the doctor tomorrow.”

  “I simply … can’t believe …”

  “You will when you’ve had some dinner. I don’t want to hurry you, because you’ve just had a perfectly horrible shock, but shall we be making a move? We can talk about what you’re going to do while we’re dining.”

  For the next twenty minutes he enjoyed one of those ‘times’, more frequent with him than with most people, when he was completely happy. Nerina was responding to his instructions like an automaton; he moved her from the bed to the washstand with a stained marble top where her comb and brush were arranged; he made her smooth her hair and powder her face; then sent her back to the bed (“—put your feet up. You see, I do know something about it”) to wait while he quickly assembled her possessions.

  All expression had left her small face. She looked completely peaceful and passive, and he moved her round the attic as if it were a chessboard and she the Ivory Queen which she now rather resembled.

  “There,” he said at last. He looked with satisfaction at the two shabby cases, fastened with that thick string which the postal authorities tie round bundles of letters and which postmen drop in the streets as they make their rounds. “Now you wait here for five minutes. I’m going to run these downstairs and soothe down Angie. When I’m ready I’ll call you. And mind you come down at once, Nino dear.”

  He caught up the luggage and swung out of the room, mastery and enjoyment expressed in every movement.

  Left alone, Nerina at once shut her eyes. She did not want to perhaps harm the baby by looking at this ugly, frightening place, and she at once filled her mind’s eye with the image of Chris. She was now certain that she was going to have the baby, but she was so tired that she had no thoughts.

  Presently she heard John’s voice. The strong, commanding sound rang up easily through the house, penetrating the tainted air that lingered in black damp passages and lay thick in quiet rooms muffled with dusty curtains and dirty furniture.

  “Nino! Everything’s ready. Come down, please.”

  It seemed already on its way, th
at voice; moving off; leaving everything in this evil, frightening house behind it.

  “Nino! Come down, please!”

  Obediently, she got up off the bed and went out of the attic and down the stairs without once looking around her or giving a backward glance.

  In the hall, John was standing with Angie, and the cases were being taken out of the front door by a taxi driver. John and Angie moved apart as Nerina came down; it looked as if he had had his arm around her; but Nerina’s mind was still empty of thoughts; and she did not look at the woman after the first sight of her, which she could not avoid. She went straight out of the house and down the steps to the taxi, and when the driver saw her, in her pale shabby coat with her head held high, he first looked surprised, and then he opened the door of the taxi for her, calling her ‘miss’. No-one would ever believe it of Nerina that she was one of the rare ones who will throw away safety and shelter and peace and virginity, and run a knife into their parents, for love; she would always be looked at with respect and called ‘miss’.

  She settled herself into a corner seat, looking ahead at nothing.

  “… know you won’t believe me, to look at it now, but it was exactly that colour,” Angie was saying to John. She patted the dyed frizz of tow on her forehead. “I was as blonde as a chicken. That’s why I took to her … don’t you hurt her! I know your sort, I knew the sort you are the minute I saw you … there, now I’m crying and you’ve made my mascara run. …”

  He got away from her somehow and ran down the steps.

  “Don’t you hope you won’t ever get old?” he said, suddenly, when the taxi had been travelling for some moments, “I’d much rather die at thirty-five than live to be like that. Of course, if one could have clean silver hair and no stomach and be the greatest writer in the world …”

  Nerina smiled vaguely without answering, and he leaned back and was quiet for a little while. He now looked rather cross. Suddenly she turned to him, exclaiming: