by Tessa Hadley
He hasn’t said a word to his mother about coming here.
All he had in mind was that Ellen would be a useful friend to have. He hasn’t followed this through into any idea of paying court to her or advancing himself in the world that way; he doesn’t like to think about courtship or marrying at all – and he really may be going away to sea soon. His mother wanted him to settle in his job in the office at a local boatyard, where they make the pleasure boats that run up and down the coast. But he’s persuaded her to let him sign up for an indentured apprenticeship with the Prince Line, which runs cargoes across the Atlantic to South America – coal out, grain home – and up the western seaboard of America and Canada. He had to borrow money from his grandmother, for the fifty-pound deposit.
There’s someone coming downstairs now. It’s not the maid – he can still hear her yapping. And he knows that it’s not Mrs Pearson either, because women that age move loudly, rustling their skirts or clearing their throats. James has his back to the stairs, he’s gazing at the hall stand. He refuses to look round. His neck is stiff with the awareness of subtle, furtive movements behind him – a slithering, a creaking. He thinks it must be Ellen, creeping down to take a look at who he is. Let her look, he thinks. It isn’t a bad feeling. He gives himself up to her looking, with straight shoulders.
— Jimmy Mac, someone says in a teasing, gloating voice. — What are you doing here?
Caught out, he spins round to confront whoever it is.
It’s a girl – not Ellen, too dark and too small. She’s grinning, peering out at him from between the banisters, sitting on the stairs as if she’s come shuffling down them on her backside.
It’s Connie Chappell.
Because he can only see one narrow stripe of her face, it has taken him a moment to recognise her – and also because she’s changed. She’s had her hair chopped off and waved. She seems to be wearing some kind of pink silky pyjamas – the last thing he would have expected in this house, and halfway through the morning too. He’s washed through with disapproval like strong, tarry medicine, furious that Connie is here before him, spoiling things. He remembers now hearing that Ellen had taken a shine to Connie, that there was talk of Connie moving in with the Pearsons as some kind of companion to their daughter. He must have disregarded this, because he couldn’t take seriously anything to do with Connie. She isn’t even properly related to Ellen – only through his own family, on his father’s side.
Connie is four years older than James, though she doesn’t look it. When he was a baby, apparently, she used to wheel him in a pram. He believes he can dimly remember being pushed across rough grass, standing up at the front of the pram, holding on to the hood with both hands. Didn’t he go flying out when the pram hit a rock? Anyway, he can’t bear to think about it now, at this moment in the Pearsons’ hall. There had been something consecrated about his mission to this house, as if it might mark a kind of turning point for him – but Connie’s presence has punctured that mystery.
— I came to see Ellen, he says.
— Did you now? And what’s all this about you going away to sea?
She is laughing at him, as if she didn’t believe him. When she stands up, hanging on to the banister rail, she stretches one leg out along it like a dancer, pointing her toes and yawning. He sees that the soles of her bare feet are dirty. She’s like a cat, James thinks. A sloppy little cat. Under the neat-fitting cap of her new hair, her face is intensely familiar – small and precise like a muzzle, freckled and snub-nosed, the brows exclamation points, always slightly raised.
— Come on then, she says. — If you want to see her. Ellen and me are getting dressed upstairs.
— Where’s Mrs Pearson?
— Oh, somewhere about, I expect.
Connie is casually indifferent.
— You can help us decide what to put on. I know – we’ll blindfold you. We’ll blindfold you with a stocking. Then we’re going out to walk round the shops. You can come out with us. Why aren’t you at work – are you on holiday? Did you take a holiday, just to come and see Ellen?
James hates the feeling she knows everything about him. The lace curtains thickly shrouding the window on the stairs suddenly seem stifling – he wants to fight through them, to get to air.
* * *
He has sisters, but they are older than he is and both married now. Even when they were at home, they would never have been dangling around in their nightclothes at eleven in the morning; they would have been at work for hours already, in the kitchen or turning out the lodgers’ rooms, with their sleeves rolled up and coarse aprons tied over their clothes. He has never been anywhere like Ellen Pearson’s bedroom before. Heavy curtains are still pulled across the windows and the beds aren’t made. The air is musky as if the girls have been spraying scent, and there’s a stuffy smell too, from the crumpled sheets and bodies hot from sleep. The water in a basin is scummed with soap. Ellen is standing to look at her reflection where one curtain has been dragged back to let the light in, mirror held up in one hand and a swansdown puff in the other. Motes of her face powder spin in a yellow beam of sunshine. She cries out when James steps into the room, letting the mirror fall on to the thick Turkey carpet, where it doesn’t break. There’s another mirror set in the door of a massive wardrobe, its bevelled edge reflecting darts of light around the papered walls. Ellen is taller and heavier than he remembered, though she is only seventeen, not as old as Connie. Her apricot-coloured wrap is trimmed with lace flounces. As James takes her in, the beam of light is extinguished abruptly, clouds cover the sun outside.
He would never have come up if he’d known it was their bedroom. He was thinking Connie was going to show him into some sort of upstairs drawing room: who knew how they arranged the rooms in a house like this, with so many to spare?
— Jimmy called to see you, says Connie, coming in behind him.
Ellen is blushing; she pleads with her. — But we’re not ready!
— I only came to say goodbye, he says. In his big boots, he’s afraid he’s going to step on one of the silky scarves and dresses and undergarments lying around as if the girls have dropped them wherever they took them off.
There was something significant and teasing in the way that Connie announced him. He wasn’t confident, waiting downstairs, that Ellen would remember who he was. Now the intimation flies at him true as an arrow: she not only remembers him, she likes him. She could not have been expecting him to call – and yet he feels now that he has come because the girls conjured him up, talking about him. He’s certain that they’ve talked about him.
— Ready for what? says Connie. — Anyway, I said we’d blindfold him. That way everything’s decent – he can’t see, he can only guess.
— Goodbye? Ellen asks anxiously. — Why, where are you going?
It’s always the same – although the visits to the Pearson house are his own idea, he feels the girls are drawing him there, as though he were under their spell. After that first time, they insist he comes again, whenever he can: on his afternoons off from work, and on Sundays. When he isn’t with them, he can’t help remembering, though it makes him ashamed, how he sat with his back to the girls in the bedroom while they dressed, sweating in his heavy suit, Connie’s white stocking wrapped twice around his eyes and tied behind his head. Ellen hadn’t wanted to agree to the game; it was typical of Connie’s mischief. He could taste the stale-sweetish trace of her foot’s perspiration in the stocking.
Connie reminds him of the girls at school who fussed over him and derided him when he was a pretty child – girls with hard hands and mocking raucous voices, fat floppy bows in their hair. He prefers to think about his growing familiarity with the heavy furniture in the Pearson house, setting him apart from the other boys in the boatyard as if it already belonged to him. When on Sundays James sometimes crosses paths in the house with Ellen’s father, he’s surprised for a moment, as if Mr Pearson were the usurper in his domain. Mr Pearson – stooped, unsmiling, his face g
rey with ulcer pain – always stops to ask after James’s mother. He probably thinks James is coming there for Connie.
Ellen is better-looking than Connie really – statuesque and slow and kind. Some days her skin looks doughy, with dimples like dirty fingerprints, but on other days James appreciates the golden ringlets against her white shoulders, poignant shadows in the neck of her blouse. She looks like a girl leaning on a classical pillar in a soap advertisement. Beside her, Connie is a little scamp, with her cropped hair and no figure to speak of. Connie wants Ellen to cut her hair too and they discuss it for hours. Ellen daren’t, she’s too afraid of her father. (James learns that Mrs Pearson’s nothing to be afraid of – she’s nervous, with puffy pink skin, and reads novels in her room. James weighs in against Ellen cutting her hair, he’s full of scorn for Connie’s cheap and showy gesture. A woman should have her reserves of hair, to uncoil at some important moment; although, if he tries to imagine the uncoiling, he feels clammy. But he admires Ellen’s qualities, her low voice, her clear pronunciation, her skills at the piano, playing selections from light opera. Not that he knows anything about opera.
He tells his mother that he has called to see Ellen Pearson.
— You never did.
— Guess who I met there?
He realises he’s only raised the subject so that he can use Connie’s name in his mouth and spit it out. She is his enemy, he thinks.
— It was good of the Pearsons to take her in, his mother says. — Poor motherless kid.
Connie’s mother was James’s pa’s cousin Rose; she died of a growth in her inside, after nine children. James can remember his Auntie Rose smoking while she made bread, the long ash on the end of her cigarette falling off into the dough. She was small and skinny like Connie, but very strong – she could knead enough dough at one time to bake eight loaves. — Gives the bread a bit of a flavour, she said to him, as if everything was a joke. The whole tribe of the McIlvanneys are feckless, his mother says.
* * *
The two girls pet James and tease him as if he is a pretty, comical doll. When he takes them out on the street, one on each arm, done up in their bell dresses and tunic suits, their tam-o’-shanters pulled at jaunty angles, everyone looks at them. Sometimes they catch the electric train into Newcastle to walk around. They talk across him, discussing clothes – ‘a blouse of violet georgette with beadwork … a sand-coloured cashmere frock with a tiered chiffon collar … a three-piece outfit in rose and blue tricot-silk’. It’s like listening to the sailors gibbering in their foreign languages. James has to keep squinting and staring ahead – looking out for where they’re going, dodging the trams and broken pavings and bicycles and horse muck – so as not to be drawn into the talk and made ridiculous. He feels as if the girls are water swirling around him while he tries to stand up straight.
There’s a delay with his travelling down to Dartmouth to take up his apprenticeship. He needs another fifty pounds to buy his seagoing outfit. Connie says she doesn’t believe he’s actually going, but he doesn’t deign to show her his signed papers. He sees that Ellen suffers when he talks about how he wants to get away from England and see the world. They take a picnic to Heaton Park and she brings a hamper with compartments for all the food and utensils, blue leather straps with little buckles holding the cups and forks and bottle opener in place. James carries it along proudly. The earth under the trees is springy leaf mould, and flowers seem to hover like a blue mist at the level of his calves. He’s giddy for a moment, wading into the blue, treading down the fleshy stems of the flowers under his boots. The girls can’t believe that he hasn’t heard of bluebells or ever noticed them before. James is teetotal but the two girls drink wine and he’s aware of their two personalities changing and loosening under its influence. They laugh and squeal more loudly, showing off. Connie likes reminding him that she’s a grown-up woman and he’s only a boy; she exchanges sly glances with Ellen and claims there are things he doesn’t understand. They pretend they’re tired, they make him lie down, then they rest their heads against his jacket, one on either side. While they close their eyes he keeps very still, watching the sky above the treetops, the clouds drifting past.
Ellen’s hair seems to give off a faint smell he doesn’t like – it’s naphthalene from mothballs. He can tell she’s not really asleep by the way she holds her head so tense and awkward against his ribs. Connie is mumbling and nuzzling into his breast, dribbling, until he pushes her off and she rolls over with her back to him, in a knot with her knees drawn up. At his Auntie Rose’s, when they were kids, he and his brothers were put to sleep in Connie’s bedroom once or twice. He remembers Connie in her vest and knickers, her skinny knees making a tent under the sheet, remembers her getting out of bed to use the shared chamber pot. He shores up these memories against her now. Something about the sight of the treetops brings back, like a strong stimulus rushing along his veins, things he has put out of his mind – adventures with his gang of mates, yelling and fighting and running, crashing through brambles, pushing on until his heart beat as if it were bursting out of his chest. Now he mustn’t move, with Ellen’s head against him.
After a while Ellen sits up, relieved, and she and James have a cigarette. She finds it funny, the way he smokes nursing the cigarette with the tip in his palm, the end between his thumb and forefinger, drawing the smoke through his fist like the men on the docks. For once, James isn’t afraid that Ellen thinks he’s common. At this moment in the park, for some reason, the docks are something to impress her with – he doesn’t even remind her that he’s not one of those men, that he works in an office.
— You’re smoking it down to the nub, he explains. — So’s not to waste any, and so the foreman can’t see.
Ellen tries it. It makes him laugh to see her bending her blonde head over the cigarette, coughing when the smoke goes up her nose. Then James pretends to smoke the way she does, taking quick puffs, waving the cigarette about with his little finger crooked. He wants to tell her all about himself, his future. He feels how he’s fascinating to her – it’s as if she’s attached to him by some glistening thread which he can tug this way and that, and she’ll turn her head with its coil of heavy hair to attend to whatever he shows her. He’s aware of his own body slim and hard behind the dense cloth of his dark suit. It begins to fascinate him too, this power that belongs to his looks, to his nature. But just then Connie wakes up. There are bits of leaf mould pressed into her cheek. She’s groggy and bleary. She lies looking up at them balefully, as if she’d caught them out. Her mouth is twisted into an expression like a disgusted cat’s. Her teeth are blue from the wine.
He can’t talk properly to Ellen while Connie’s looking.
He’s glad afterwards he didn’t talk about his father. He could have made a fool of himself: his brother Arthur says that Pa got the story out of a book. Connie probably thinks that too. But James has loved the story since he was a little boy. His pa was missing at sea before the war, and when he came back he said he’d been captured by natives in Madagascar, and that they’d made a god of him, dressing him in animal skins and drumming and dancing round him, sacrificing to him. When he escaped he got away with only a monkey and a pocket full of precious stones – their mother has a ruby made into a ring, with a claw setting. His story got into the papers with a photograph of him with the monkey (which he sold later) on his shoulder. James’s mother still keeps the papers in a drawer, though after he came back Pa wasn’t often in the house. She’d had to take in lodgers when they thought he was drowned, so there wasn’t room. No one even told James till weeks afterwards that his father had died – of TB in the poor hospital – so he missed the funeral. Arthur and his mother and sisters knew about it; they didn’t go because they didn’t want to.
— Why would anyone make a god of him? says Arthur with contempt.
— What about the rubies?
— It’s not a ruby, it’s a garnet. One garnet. I expect he won it cheating at cards. Or stole it.
Arthur’s the clever one, apprenticed to a draughtsman. James keeps his mouth shut, he never wants to appear a fool in front of Arthur. But stubbornly he persists in believing that such transformations as happened to his father are possible somewhere. Once he’s out of his apprenticeship, he’ll present himself for examination at the Nellist Nautical School in Newcastle. He wants to become a master mariner, and have a ship of his own. (His timing’s bad. By the time he does get his master’s certificate, trade for the Merchant Navy will have slumped, and English rivers will be choked with tramp steamers requiring long-term berths.)
In the summer the girls go to Whitley Bay for a week, and James joins them there on his day off. He takes tea with them at the Park Hotel, where they have rooms, paid for by Mr Pearson; the ices are served in silver-plate dishes at a glass-topped table in the conservatory, while a trio plays music. Connie spoons hers up demurely, looking as though she’s been doing this all her life. She uses the tongs to pick out sugar lumps for James, as if he were a kid on holiday, until he tells her to leave off. Afterwards they all go up to Ellen’s room because Ellen wants to show James souvenirs of a couple of pals of hers who were killed in the war. The room is crowded and snug, with an armchair covered in pink silk, a pink silk eiderdown, fringed lampshades. Ellen brings out the pals’ photographs and the postcards they wrote, blacked out with ink where they were censored. She even has a lock of hair from one of them, Bunny, which she keeps in a book of poetry he gave her. Ellen’s eyes well up with tears – real tears, so that her nose gets red and her mouth twists into an ugly shape. She has had her hair cut now, and the new style doesn’t suit her heavy head the way it suits Connie’s.
