Mrs P's Journey

by Sarah Hartley

  Understand this; it was not out of generosity that he established an English language night-school. Too ashamed and too mean to rent buildings downtown, he set up in the shadowy wooden sheds that ran alongside the Chicago rail and stockyards. Vulnerability – that would be the key to his success this time. Sandor reckoned that new immigrants could easily be parted from what little savings they had to learn the native tongue.

  His classes gained a fine reputation for being effective and fast. How he wanted to shout at his feeble students: their frightened eyes and weak voices only goaded his impatience. But the irritation of Bella’s voice that would chant alongside in his head as he repeated out loud each letter of the alphabet to a class, only made him more determined to succeed. Yet it would be another five years before he would walk, whistling down Wall Street, in the knowledge that his stocks and shares were soaring. His bank had agreed that he was now rich enough to start up a small map publishing corporation. ‘Welcome to Riggs Bank, Mr Gross.’

  Since adding to the annual 5,000 English divorce statistics, Sandor had submerged himself into a black bitterness over the institution of marriage. A prescription of testosterone would cure it, his American doctor believed. ‘Have a little fun,’ he suggested. ‘Meet a nice dame.’

  After Bella, Sandor would never meet another woman with whom he would share the rest of his life. He missed picking out hats or dresses for Bella in Bond Street (for he knew best what clothes suited her), he missed her splendid cooking and watching her put a spoon into the pot and then taste the stew and carefully wash the spoon before tasting it again.

  A restlessness itched at his heart. He could dine on money until he felt sick, but nothing could satisfy his sexual appetite. Why? Even Sandor could not work it out. Of course, there were ladyfriends who hung on his arm when he became rich, and young things who hung on even harder when he became a millionaire, but even they could not stop the girls who came and went in the night.

  He twisted and wrung out his pride, for it had done him little good, and begged Bella to leave Alfred.

  Dear Sandor,

  How dare you suggest I leave my beloved husband. May I remind you that long before I met my darling Alfred, it was your original ridiculous notion to pay me to take a lover in Brighton so that you could divorce ME. When it was I who was grateful for the occasions when I did not bump into one of your girlfriends at the theatre or Claridges. If you care to remember, while I refused such idiocy you agreed to pay me an allowance for the rest of my life. I have not seen one penny.

  Bella.

  Yet each man kills the thing he loves. Those words were darkly printed on the back cover of Phyllis’s book Fleet Street, Fite Street, Queer Street. Who knows whether it referred to her father, her mother or her husband – or all of them? To squash, to strangle, to beat a love to death was certainly applicable to her father, who spilt out his regrets in reams of notes for a play that would never make the stage. Phyllis came across them amongst his things, after his death.

  Sexual morality, Sandor wrote, was about rules made for the impotent, by the impotent. Marriage was a conventional lie, love was nothing more than a weakness which must be rooted out. And of his children: I was pleased to find I felt nothing – nothing at all, at leaving them.

  Phyllis would indeed return to Paris, to study for a degree in Philosophy and Byzantine Art, but not for another two years. After she had disgraced herself at Fécamp, as Bella neatly put it, she made her way to her grandparents’ house in Worthing.

  The bus that dawdled along the south coast from Southampton in those days ran for four hours as it took in the pier at Southsea, the cornfields outside Chichester and the promenade at Bognor Regis before trundling into the seaside town. Worthing is only a few miles from Brighton, and Phyllis felt too close to that terrible school. She began to worry. Was that lady running from the rain Miss Waldron? Could that be the dreaded outline of Cicely Shackleton cycling towards her?

  Any fears tiptoed away when she spotted her grandparents, huddled together at the station. Someone had shrunk them. Someone has shrunk my darling grandparents, Phyllis thought, as Grandfather raised his trilby and Grandmother waved a lace handkerchief, for what seemed like for ever.

  ‘Will you look at her, Father. What a lady she has grown up to be. How like her Mama. And will you look at those fancy French boots . . .’

  No sooner had Phyllis stepped down from the bus than she found herself cocooned in the sing-song babble of her grandparents.

  ‘Phyllis, what news we have for you. The snowdrops are out,’ said Arthur Crowley, as if the five years since they had last seen her had only been five minutes. Nudges from his wife Maria interrupted him.

  ‘Do you fancy an egg for your tea? What about you, Father? And you, Phyllis, do you fancy an egg for your tea? Maybe some malt loaf for afters. What do you say, Father? We have a little room prepared especially, with a desk. She’ll like that, won’t she, Father? She likes to write – just like her Mama. And we have Wellington boots for you, in case the weather doesn’t pick up.’

  For several reasons, Phyllis omitted this time from her memoirs. Firstly, she never truly assuaged the guilt of her burden to these two elderly people, whose passage from South London for a gentle retirement by the sea had begun only six months before. Once awash with all the carryings-on that comes with a home bursting with nine children, finally, the precious few years left of their lives had been set free.

  For her own mother to have dismissed her as a nuisance, surely meant that she was a terrible liability. Phyllis tortured herself with the thought that these good people might pass away at any moment, their deaths precipitated by her unpleasant self.

  She could not help but notice their eyes, cloudy behind thick round wire spectacles, that struggled with the grocer’s bill. The dead blue bottles upturned on the kitchen tiles went unseen and her grandfather, whose hands had once swept across piano keys, now used valiant efforts to hold a fork, such were the terrible effects of his arthritis.

  Whether he closed his ears off to his wife, talking herself through each movement of the teapot and kettle, repeating the same question over and over to him, or whether one really did need to speak up for Grandfather, Phyllis could never decide.

  Grandmother climbed the wooden stairs up to the box room, one at a time.

  ‘Gently does it.’ She opened a door into a tiny apricot room, tucked under the roof of the Victorian villa. Here were the warm petal colours that reminded Phyllis of her bedroom at The Firs, which had been so absent in the hospital-white boarding-school. A cream Persian rug. A rocking chair. Brocade curtains. The small bed with its satin eiderdown had been lovingly made and Phyllis could only imagine how many hours it had taken the squabbling pair to tussle under the eaves with the sheets. Yet for two years she never unpacked.

  ‘Who should I thank for the lovely fire?’ Phyllis asked.

  ‘Grandfather. We let young Lillian go. There are only the two of us now. What use have we for a little maidservant?’

  The few pounds that Phyllis hid in a yellow Chinese silk purse under her pillow had been saved up from her additional chore of cleaning the boarding-school lavatories. The odious task meant nothing to Phyllis. The pleasure from having dix centimes pressed in her palm every week, she knew would have brought a smile to her father. Even if she retched at the stench of urine while scrubbing the porcelain, she would bring out her memory of him peering up from the financial pages of the Daily Telegraph at the breakfast table and wagging his finger. ‘It’s making money that counts.’

  Of course, hundreds of hours spent on her knees in cubicles did not add up to very much at all, but Phyllis would slip a few coins into her grandmother’s Lipton’s tea caddie where she hid the housekeeping money, whenever she realised they had dined on leek soup and fish pie leftovers for at least a week.

  The other reason that Phyllis did not relish this episode in her life was because it dragged her story backwards. Instead of forging ahead, alone against the worl
d (as she saw it), to try her luck and talent in Paris as an artist, with nothing but a warm coat to her name, with one snap of her mother’s fingers she had been reduced to a child once more.

  Without taking a genuine interest in her welfare or future, Bella had reined her daughter in, as if she now had the proof that her youngest child was neither old enough nor wise enough to be trusted to live independently. The nearby convent school, where Phyllis was enrolled by her grandparents, seemed so provincial, so unsophisticated compared to Fécamp, with its pervasive disinfectant odour, its maroon gym-slips and golden ties, the tiny lavatories built for infants, the primary hand paintings pinned around the assembly hall, the name tags stitched in every pair of maroon knickers, the sloppy nursery lunches, the spottiness of the pallid girls who swore by Cuticura soap, and the plainness of the nuns.

  It is unlikely that Phyllis would have been teased there, when she could have tied any one of her classmates up with her string of languages. Who would bully a girl who dressed her hair in a French plait, who had danced the Charleston in Paris, who had tasted champagne and who knew how to prepare lobster? The other pupils still traipsed to church on a Sunday, hand-in-hand with their parents, and considered a day’s walking on the South Downs a treat.

  Although by now Phyllis would have peaked in height at five feet, on her return from France she developed an upright bearing that suggested she was every bit the lady. Phyllis was not in the least bit grand though. Quietly, she pieced together the smatterings of History, English and Religious Education that had scattered after Roedean. On Saturdays, she would stride down at dawn to the fisherman’s huts to help them mend their nets for an extra shilling or two. On Sundays, when the weather shone kindly on the promenade, Phyllis would pitch up her easel and sell her miniature seafront water colours to passers-by. They stood around and stared at the girl who squinted from under her straw hat, back and forth from paper to sea. ‘First paint what made you want to do the scene in the first place,’ Phyllis would advise amateur painters when she was older.

  In breathless waves the green light of the sea appeared without hesitation and her brushes dipped and swirled greens into the water in her jam jar. Twenty minutes. That was all it took for her to complete a miniature. A large oil painting would take up to seven days, but she would not be able to afford oils until she was in her late twenties. Seven or eight water colours would be wrapped and tied in greaseproof paper and sold at a shilling a go. In her heart, Phyllis felt she would have happily given them away, for the pure thrill she got from standing in the fresh air and salty breeze, painting as much as her eyes could manage to see.

  From her father she had inherited the ability to slip in and out of layers of the social strata, a skill which in itself would make her a loner. Those who met both father and daughter remembered them as bright and witty, but where did they truly fit in? Attachments, to her dear Mama, to Jacqueline, to anyone at all, had ended in misery for Phyllis. Like fireflies, her happiness was in the tiny, everyday conversations with strangers that flickered into her day and disappeared without a trace. Even as an older woman, her colleagues can recall her fantastical encounters that for Phyllis, were an ordinary part of her life:

  ‘I was invited to the Philharmonic in New York last night. I’d got into the elevator from my floor at The Westbury, and began talking to the lady and gentleman beside me. It turned out he was the lead violinist and she the lead cellist and by the time we reached the lobby, they had asked me to join them as their guest for that evening’s concert.’

  After two abstemious years in the care of her grandparents, Phyllis successfully passed her Oxford local exams in English, History and Religious Education, and was into her eighteenth year in 1924. Her love of the south coast would stay with her and, like her grandparents before her, Phyllis would eventually turn her back on London, to settle a few miles away in Shoreham-on-Sea.

  Phyllis stayed in Worthing a month longer than she had really intended, so she might tackle the chores her grandparents could no longer manage; scrubbing the front doorstep, boiling rhubarb jam, pegging out the Monday wash. Each night, as she played the piano for them, she knew it might be her last. The stack of colourful postcards that had flapped on the doormat every week from Tony in Paris began to clutter her bedroom mantelpiece. Too many art classes, too many models. My apartment is overflowing with people. James Joyce came for dinner. What news? When are you joining me?

  I want to be in Paris, she thought.

  And to Paris she went.

  Unlike the River Thames, where the water has a certain masculinity, a dull, predictable flatness, the Seine is a thunderous, attention-seeking stretch of water – a female river, inconstant in her flow and ebullient. They say there are sixteen ways to cross her, that she is the life force that splits Paris in two and that every building of note watches over her or is just a spit away. The energy she releases spawns new life, while dragging away the weak ones. In winter, her voice sucks in mothers whose heads are leaden with absinthe, but no one stops to point at a flaccid, lily-limb flailing in the undertow. In summer, her roar soothes to a tone that calls those who want to escape the loneliness of their cold-stone apartments.

  Here, sacks of kittens are drowned, dogs are abandoned and water rats multiply on scraps discarded by the men of les Bouquinistes. Artists sketch hopeless writers sprawled on benches, drowning in scrolls of paper, passed by prostitutes who loiter arm-in-arm or slip off their sandals to paddle.

  Today, the commercial barges and bateaux mouches use the river for their own pleasure. She does not work much now. The lone fishermen who prayed for her to yield them her treasure have all but vanished. Sometimes the whale hulk of Notre Dame for all its white candles cannot match the comfort and protection given by her. She hides lovers, thieves, fugitives and runaways under the lichen-flecked bridges that drip with her damp.

  It was beneath one such bridge, Pont St Michel, that joins Boulevard du Palais on Île de la Cité to Boulevard St Michel in the Latin Quarter, that Phyllis slept for over three weeks. Teenagers hitting the backpacker trail today would have amused her. ‘Thailand! But my dear! They take credit cards and phone cards with them – I took a school trunk with my paints and a clean change of underwear.’

  Only the Unexpected Happens was an apt title for a book of short stories Phyllis published herself in 1985. Indeed, it was predictable that anything Phyllis set out to do or anywhere she went (always with the best intentions), the plan would be kicked to the kerb as suddenly she found herself diverted, distracted or detained. As a child, Phyllis had sensed the white fury, as she called it, that swelled inside her father as he had wrestled with every circumstance and every person under his control. The more Sandor fought with them, the weaker he became if they finally beat him to the ground.

  Phyllis never understood the crippling effects of control or of the resentment that dominated her father. Instead she chose to be fearless, like her mother – to embrace a light-hearted acceptance of what Sandor would have called tragedies, disasters, and misfortune. As with the time when she and Tony (no more than eight years of age) danced on the window-ledge of their Vienna hotel room, much to the horror of passers-by below. Or as with the middle-aged cheese man in Fécamp market who invited the schoolgirl for trips on his lorry during the holidays, so she might get to know the French countryside. She could have ended up dead in a ditch, but she trusted the man who shared his lunch with her. Who knows if she might have come to any harm had her jaunts continued?

  No prayers would pass her lips and God would not come into her life for another thirty years, so it was not faith that kept her buoyant. Phyllis simply had no fear. Of anything.

  So it was to be expected that from the moment her grandparents had blown their last kisses to the little pilgrim off to join the dirt-poor intellectuals on the Left Bank, her journey would not be without incident.

  TONY ON MY WAY. SEE YOU TOMORROW.

  The telegram to her brother did arrive, but Tony was already drawing a
nd painting in Picardy, on an autumn tour with his artist friend, Dick Pearsall.

  Rue des Cannettes. Phyllis had sketched a map of Paris in her head, with especial focus on St Germain des Près, which she drew and redrew on the train ride to Gare du Nord. She walked the narrow slant of Rue des Beaux Arts. There was Tony, opening the door, his deep voice drawing her in, a Gauloise in his hand. A sibling squeeze, a quick ruffle of his dark hair and then his arms flapping as he shoos her up to his room.

  It did not happen. She pulled the rope bell to the navy-blue door. Again and again. Silence. The pigeons on the lattice balcony above were laughing at her. Phyllis perched on her trunk and took out from her satchel a chunk of Dundee cake that Grandmother had wrapped for her journey. Scattering crumbs for the pigeons she watched as a woman across the street closed tight her balcony doors to the autumn evening. Wisps of air started to smell smoky. Of bacon and crispy leaves. She clenched her hands which might well have turned blue, but then everything took on a death shade in that light. The deserted Sunday-night streets allowed Phyllis to hear the bells ringing from the church of St Germain des Près, through eight, nine, ten and eleven o’clock. A gramophone crackled out from the house next door. Laughter from a man and a woman. The clinking of glasses – a romantic dinner, she thought. Tony would be out carousing and would stagger around the corner in a haze of revolutionary conversation, jangling his keys.

  ‘Here is my little sister.’ She reran the harsh words of his greeting when he had met her at the train station. And that had been Christmas.

  Suddenly Phyllis did not want Tony to discover her, the stupid sister. Or to put her up. As quick as she could, she scrambled to her feet and wheeled her squeaking trunk away and off into the darkness.

  Deeds not words. Deeds not words. She whispered the Suffragette motto as she hauled the trunk over cobbles to retrace on foot the route the taxi had taken from Gare du Nord. Left luggage. Her deeds were automatic. Her grasshopper brain jumped ahead. It planned her movements meticulously. Not a second spared for hesitation. Her eyes were dry and alert.