The Whicharts

by Noel Streatfeild

  She took the Underground to South Kensington. She found the walk from the station to the flat a weary drag carrying a suitcase, and as she pushed open the front door she thankfully rested it on the stairs. The flat door was open, she could hear voices. As she climbed upwards she recognised Mr. Higgs. He sounded annoyed.

  “I tell you it’s now or never. Either Daisy comes back with me to-night or she never comes into my house again. This trouble has fairly upset the wife, and no wonder, we’ve always been highly thought of in Surbiton.”

  “But Mr. Higgs.” Herbert was speaking. “I gather your objection to Daisy remaining here is that she will be under the same roof as Maimie. I am suggesting that Maimie goes into an hotel to-night, and afterwards into a flat of her own. This scandal would never have occurred if I had had my way. I’ve always been fond of Maimie, months ago I wanted to give her a little place of her own. She’s too high-spirited to be cooped up here. She hasn’t enough to do, that’s how all this business came about. But she wouldn’t have it, said she must stay here, her salary was needed to keep the home together.”

  “Well,” Mr. Higgs’ voice boomed. “I don’t know how that was, for Sunday after Sunday, Mrs. and I have said to Daisy, ‘You and Nannie come and live here, you’re our granddaughter, and here’s your home when you like to come to it.’”

  “And I told you,” Daisy’s voice chipped in, “that I couldn’t. I’d promised Tania we’d all live together.”

  “That’s right,” Maimie was speaking, “and that’s that. Do you want the kid to finish her tour, and find herself with no home?”

  Tania crept down the stairs. She went out of the front door, and round the comer. There she leant against the wall. So that was it. Selfishly she had been tying the others to living in the flat. Nobody wanted it but her. Herbert wanted Maimie. Mr. Higgs wanted Daisy and Nannie. She mustn’t stand in their way any more. But where should she go? And having found a place to go to, how should she convince the others that she had given up the idea of wanting them all to stick together? An enormous lump rose in her throat, it made every muscle ache. It would have helped her to cry. But tears never came easily to her, and she was incapable of crying in the street. She held her throat, it seemed to ache less that way. She must think. How should she explain her sudden arrival? It was impossible to explain that she had thought Maimie would be needing her, for if Maimie was hurt, she wasn’t showing it, you could tell that from her voice. If she told the story of how she had left the Company, what a fool she would feel! Looking back it did seem rather silly now. How annoyed Mr. Higgs and Herbert would be to see her! Such an awkward moment for her to turn up. Thinking of Mr. Higgs gave her an idea. Mr. Higgs was shocked at all that about Maimie in the paper. He wanted to get Daisy right away from it all. Why shouldn’t she pretend to be shocked, pretend to want to get away from it too?

  The argument was still going on as she climbed the stairs once more. This time she walked into the flat. At her sudden arrival they were all silent. Impossible for Mr. Higgs to say: “What I say is, why should Daisy consider Tania? She has her own life to lead—” which was what he had meant to say next. Impossible for Herbert to go on asking Maimie how much longer all their lives were to be upset to suit Tania, when there stood Tania in the doorway. Such a very white-faced Tania, that nobody felt like being unkind. After a pause Maimie said jauntily to hide the general embarrassment:

  “Where have you sprung from?”

  Tania opened her mouth. She was surprised to find that she had lost her voice, for only a whisper came:

  “I’ve come for my things, I’m going away.” Nobody spoke, so she went on, “You see, I read about you in the papers, Maimie, and I was—well, I thought— well, I’m not staying here any more.”

  She turned to go, but Daisy caught hold of her arm.

  “You’re not staying? I do think you’re horrid, Tania. Maimie would have had a flat of her own months and months ago, only she wouldn’t be­ cause she thought you were keen on us all living together.”

  “What are you talkin’ about, Tania?” Nannie broke in. “ Where are you goin’?”

  Tania shuffled her feet. “Now where am I going?” she thought desperately. Rose’s words came to her: “Lock the Bibles away, unless things go very wrong.” Things couldn’t well be more wrong than they were now. “I’m going to my mother,” she whispered.

  Nannie opened her mouth to protest. Her mother might be dead, mightn’t want her. Any­ way, why wasn’t she still on tour? But she swallowed her questions, for— Tania had left the room.

  In her bedroom Tania opened her suitcase and hurriedly stuffed in her Bible and her jeans. She heard a step outside, and saw Maimie’s feet come in at the door. She glued her eyes on the carpet. She knew exactly what Maimie must be thinking of her. She hadn’t the courage to look her in the face.

  “You poor cow,” said Maimie. “Did you really think you’d get away with that stuff on me? I suppose you overheard what those men were saying. As it turns out, this is the best thing that could happen to you. All this hanging around with me and Daisy won’t get you anywhere. You’d never have made a move on your own, but now it’s forced on you. Get out, go and look for that mother of yours. If she’s dead, we’ve got another think coming, but if she’s alive she’s got to help you. You’ll never do a damn bit of good on the stage. If she can’t give you a home, she’ll probably make you an allowance, and then you can fiddle about with machinery till you’re black in the face.” The sudden knowledge that Maimie understood, and didn’t hate her for what she had said, made her coming separation from the only background she knew even more deplorable. She felt she couldn’t stand much more. She picked up her suitcase.

  “Good-bye,” she whispered.

  “Why do you keep whispering?” asked Maimie crossly, who found it aggravatingly pathetic.

  “I can’t help it,” Tania explained. “I’ve suddenly lost my voice.”

  Maimie looked at her shrewdly.

  “You take life too hard, old girl. You simply ask to get hurt. Nothing could be more lousy than what’s happened to me, but I’ll be damned before I’ll let it get me down.”

  Tania turned to go.

  “Keep Nannie and Daisy in the sitting-room,” she pleaded. “I’d rather see myself off, and Nannie will be full of fuss.”

  Maimie nodded. Not for worlds would she have let Tania see that there were tears in her eyes.

  Chapter 19

  ALFY and Mrs. Alfy were having their evening meal; high tea with kippers as a relish.

  “’ark, Alfy,” said Mrs. Alfy, “give over drinkin’ a minute, I want to listen. I thought I ’eard a knock.”

  Alfy obediently “gave over.” Yes, there was a feeble knocking. He crossed to the door. Tania stood on the doorstep. Repressed emotion had stiffened her muscles. Her face felt like a board.

  With a struggle she forced a smile, as still whispering, she explained she had come for her car. “Goin’ out in ’er now?” questioned Alfy in surprise. “Why, you ’aven’t—” he stopped suddenly with his mouth open, for Mrs. Alfy was making terrifying faces at him, intended to show that in her opinion something was wrong, and if so, it was a woman’s job, and that the best thing he could do was to keep his mouth shut.

  Mrs. Alfy pulled a chair up to the fire, and almost forced Tania into it.

  “Well, there now, if we aren’t pleased to see you,” she said comfortably, “and just in time for a nice cupatea.” She poured out a cup of remark able strength. “There, you drink that, for all of it’s May, these nights are that parky, they freeze your marrer.”

  Tania looked drearily at the cup in her hand. She didn’t want it. She felt vaguely sick, but the fire was nice and warm on her legs, and Mrs. Alfy’s chatter had the same soothing effect as listening to Miss Poll. She took a sip of the tea. It seemed to relax her muscles. But as they relaxed, her control weakened. To her
horror she began to cry. Not just a tear or two trickling down her nose, which she might have passed off as a cold, but loud gasping sobs, which shook her whole body, and which she was quite powerless to prevent.

  Alfy stared at her with his mouth open, until his wife asked him severely if he was, or was not going out on that job. Surprised, he enquired, “What job?” whereupon, if looks could have killed, he received one which should have prevented his ever reaching the door, followed by a series of jerks and nods, which meant, even to his mind, unskilled in such semaphorish talk, that in Mrs. Alfy’s opinion the place for him was the street.

  Mrs. Alfy was a woman of tact. She had, as she had always told her husband, “taken a rare fancy” to Tania. She had seen quite a lot of her while she had worked in the garage, enough to realise how reserved the girl was, and how unlike her this unrestrained crying. She said nothing, but quietly piled together the tea things, noting mentally that a good cry would do a power of good. After a time Tania’s sobs grew quieter. Then they stopped. She raised a ravaged and exhausted face.

  “I’m so terribly sorry,” she gasped.

  “Don’t you mind me, dearie. You let me make you a nice fresh cupatea, that cup’s not as ’ot as it was. A good cry never did anyone any ’arm yet. Many’s the time when I’ve felt all-over like, an’ snappin’ at Alfy fit to beat the band, I’ve said to myself, ‘What you need my girl’s a good cry.’ Believe me, or believe me not, down I’ve plumped in that very chair, ’ad me cry out, an’ felt a sight better for it.” While she had been talking she had cut and spread some bread-and-butter. She handed it to Tania. “What time did you ’ave your dinner?”

  Tania thought back to lunch time. Dinner? Had she had any, and if so, where? She remembered coffee and a biscuit with Barbara, but no­ thing more. Sheepishly she explained that she had been travelling and had had no time for real dinner. “So I should say!” Mrs. Alfy pretended to sound cross. “No wonder you look as cheap as a ’errin’ on a Monday, an’ no more voice than a ’ap’orth of chewin’-gum. You ought to be ashamed of yourself, a great girl of your age, no more sense than a baby. You eat that bread-and-butter while I boils you a couple of eggs.”

  Tania would have protested, but she was silenced by an indignant sniff. So she meekly nibbled her bread-and-butter, and found to her amazement that it didn’t make her sick, in fact she felt hungry.

  “Was you thinkin’ of takin’ that car of yours out for a turn?” Mrs. Alfy asked casually, as she put a saucepan on the fire.

  “Not a turn exactly, you see I’m going away to-night.”

  “Oh, where was you garagin’ it?”

  “Well, somewhere on the road. I want to have a look at a map if Alfy will lend me one.”

  “Goin’ far?” questioned Mrs. Alfy even more casually.

  “Cumberland.”

  Mrs. Alfy showed no surprise.

  “Do you like your eggs done ’ard or soft?” she asked.

  The eggs boiled, and placed in two pink and gold egg-cups, with “A Present from Broadstairs” written across them, were put on a tray on Tania’s knees.

  “Now I’ll ’ave to leave you for a minute or two, dearie. I ’ave to go to the ‘Cow and Dragon’ to fetch Alfy’s pint. An’ let me find every scrap of them eggs finished when I come back.”

  In the bar of the ‘Cow and Dragon’ Alfy was having a drink. His wife hurried in, she drew him to one side.

  “Now just you listen ’ere, Alfy Bristowe—” A few minutes later Alfy unwillingly left the bar. He had been given a job requiring tact, a quality which he had been told repeatedly throughout his married life he failed to possess. Anxiously he entered his kitchen, sheepishly he smiled at Tania.

  “’ad a good tea?” he asked mournfully.

  Tania nodded. Her throat still ached too acutely to make talking pleasant. Alfy nervously cleared his throat.

  “Look ’ere, Tania, you said when you come in as ’ow you’d come for your car. Well, mother says­ well, what I meant to say is,” he corrected hurriedly, “as it ain’t ’ere, leastways, not to-night, not till to-morrow morning.”

  “Why, where is it?” Tania’s whisper sounded surprised.

  Shifting in agony from one foot to the other, for an inventive tongue was not one of his gifts, Alfy plunged into his story: .

  “You see, it’s this way. I was tellin’ the men down at the garridge ’ow well your car ran, an’ Nobby—you remember Nobby Clark? ’im with the ginger ’air—’e says to me as ’ow ’e’d like to take ’er out, so I says as ’ow ’e could, as I was sure you wouldn’t mind, an’-well, that’s where she is,” he finished lamely.

  Tania smiled at him forlornly. She was wondering where she would spend the night, she had intended sleeping in her car somewhere on the road. If she had not been so tired and dazed, it: would have struck her how odd it was that Alfy, the most punctilious person with other people’s cars, should have so far changed his spots as to lend out hers. But intent on the problem of where to sleep she noticed nothing. She supposed that as she was not getting her car that night, she ought to be going, perhaps when she got outside she would get an inspiration as to where to sleep. She got to her feet.

  “Good-bye, Alfy, I’ll be round for the car in the morning.” She turned to the door. “Please thank Mrs. Alfy for my tea.” Alfy gazed at her distractedly. This wasn’t what ought to happen. His orders had been to tell her he had lent her car to Nobby. As if he would lend out her car, and anyway Nobby had the influenza. But the point had been that Tania was to be kept for the night, and here she was going before his wife came back. He was spared the worst dressing-down of his life, because Mrs. Alfy ran into Tania on the doorstep.

  “What! Goin’?” she demanded, casting an indignant look at the cringing Alfy.

  Tania explained about her car. Mrs. Alfy turned in apparent rage to Alfy, and told him he ought to be ashamed of himself making free with Tania’s car like that. Tania assured her it was quite all right and again turned to go. But Mrs. Alfy’s stout form was in the doorway.

  “Now look ’ere,” she said, “if you wants to start first thing, the best thing you can do is to sleep ’ere. They can’t be expectin’ you at ’ome as you meant to start to-night. Not ’avin’ your car is Alfy’s fault, so if you don’t mind a sofa, you can sleep ’ere an’ welcome.” Tania was too thankful to protest, so she went on—“An’ Alfy can get ’is map out an’ show you the road. Cumberland she’s goin’ to, Alfy.”

  “Near Carlisle,” Tania amended.

  Alfy turned to a bookshelf and took down a bundle of maps and guides. A gleam of happiness lighted Tania’s eyes. Mrs. Alfy looked at her with approval.

  “That’s right, Alfy,” she said, turning to her husband. “You draw a chair up next to Tania’s an’ you can ’ave a look together.”

  Alfy bent over the map. He traced the road with a dirty finger-nail:

  “Then you get on the Great North Road,” he said.

  Suddenly like frost before the first rays of the sun, Tania’s misery began to melt:

  “Alfy,” she whispered, “what can she do?”

  When Tania had been sent to sleep on the sofa in the parlour, Mrs. Alfy came back into the kitchen. She sat down by the kitchen table, and solemnly shook her head:

  “I don’t like it, Alfy. What’s this goin’ to that Carlisle mean? Is she safe in that car of ’ers? Never been in it, ’as she?”

  “Tania’s safe in any car ever made, seems to understand them like. Funny in a girl.”

  “’ow far is this Carlisle?”

  Alfy studied the map, and made some laborious calculations on the margin:

  “More’n three hundred miles,” he said at last. “An’ ’ow much petrol is that goin’ to use?”

  Alfy, with a much furrowed forehead, and with loud suckings at his pencil, settled down to further calculations. After great labour he announ
ced that in his opinion she would use all of twelve gallons.

  “An’ ’ow much will that cost in money?” Alfy groaned:

  “Oh come off it,” he protested. “Want to give me the ’eadache?”

  “Oh get on with you,” replied his wife firmly, “don’t act so stupid. ’ow are we to know ’ow much money she ought to ’ave, if we don’t know ’ow much she’s goin’ to need?”

  “What’s ’er money got to do with us?”

  “That’s right,” Mrs. Alfy complained, “that’s right. Go on, ask some more silly questions instead of addin’.”

  Gloomily Alfy returned to his calculations, and at last after much suckings and mutterings decided that it would work out as near as a spit to a pound.

  Mrs. Alfy got to her feet, and raked out the ashes.

  “Well now you worked that out, we can go to bed. It passes me ’ow you don’t get cheated down at the garridge, with you so slow at figurin’.”

  Tania spent a miserable night. For one thing, the horsehair sofa in the parlour was far from being an ideal bed. Slippery to start with, it had as well a bad list, only by careful balancing was it possible to prevent yourself from sliding on to the floor. In the ordinary way she would not have minded this in the least, for she could sleep on anything, but to-night she only slept in short snatches, awaking with a start to find herself moaning and crying, and the sudden jump of her awakening invariably pitching her on to the floor. By two o’clock she had decided it wasn’t good enough, so she sat upright, determined to stay awake. Two o’clock in the morning is a bad hour even to the most contented people with a good day both behind and before them. To the unhappy and anxious, it’s terrifying. The thoughts that can at least be kept at arm’s length in the reasonable daylight, in the night hours settle on the mind like vultures on a dead body. Gone for Tania was any pleasure in her car, or excitement at the journey before her, and nothing remained but the stark bleak fact that their home was broken up for ever, and she was the only one who cared. Daisy was sunk irretrievably into the arms of Surbiton, and Maimie into the arms of Herbert. Maimie would of course emerge from Herbert’s arms, but it was impossible to pretend she would ever want to live at home again. Even Nannie was gone. What was to happen to her? Would her mother want her? It was most unlikely. She unpacked her Bible and stared at the flyleaf—“To my baby”—signed “Tania Lissen,” and the address in Cumberland and the date. Nearly seventeen years ago, and in all that time no interest taken in her, no effort made to see her, not even a little money sent to educate her. Maimie was mad to suppose such a mother would want her, or do anything for her. Looked at now the whole idea of the trip to Carlisle appeared fantastic. “I was silly ever to think of it,” she said out loud. She shut the Bible and tossed it back into the empty suitcase. “Then if not to Carlisle, where am I going?” she said to herself, and suddenly she remembered Alfy’s letter—“I have a business propersition to put before you.” Of course that was what she must do, she must talk it over with Alfy. He would probably give her a job in his garage, and he might use her car as a taxi, and if she wasn’t worth wages just at first, perhaps they would keep her and feed her. Then a picture of Maimie came suddenly before her. Maimie had been so keen she should try and find her mother. “Oh Maimie, Maimie,” she whispered. The ache in her throat was coming back worse than ever. She gripped her pyjama coat tightly across her with both hands, there seemed less room to be miserable in it while it was held like that. Sobs shook her, she rolled into a ball and buried her face in the unconsoling horsehair back of the sofa, where somehow she must have become wedged, for she went to sleep.