Mrs P's Journey

by Sarah Hartley

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  A Lonely Journey

  September 1935

  For a Sunday night I am particularly plagued by the fidgets. The light tweaked my eyes open before five this morning. ‘How can you make do with such thin curtains?’ my sitters chide, and I reply, ‘However should I tell the time without them?’ I sprang from my bed with that early start excitement Tony and I first felt as children when we fought to throw goodness knows what from the nursery into a trunk before being bundled into a car and heading for goodness knows where. ‘A holiday,’ Mama would call it. ‘An adventure,’ Papa would correct her.

  I counted the minutes before the sun rose, leaning on the windowsill and peering down the Horseferry Road. How did that name come about then? Horses could never have pulled passengers across the Thames, since it is too deep by half, so I concluded that there must have been a horse-trader who dispatched horses up- and down-river. My road is a straight one. Easy to draw, no nonsense and no curves, looks the river straight in the eye. Just like Paris. Who ever made Millbank and Whitehall run so wobbly? I shall ask them myself, I thought, when I get there.

  Half-panicked because I sensed the work breeding under my bed, none of which I could finish in the time I had left, I fussed over my scrapbooks of drawings and stories and rifled through my canvases and folios. But my commission won hands down. Fine-tuning the portrait of Lady Ashfield ate up all my efforts. A bright day shouts for knock-out shades – bluebell, hyacinth, marigold and rose. Lord Ashfield will not be able to accuse her features of seeming flat and lifeless now.

  No need to shed my pyjamas as I had a stockpile of tea and bread here. Tricked by Time again. Perhaps I might have been able to distract myself from my canvases were I to save for a wireless. I had no interruptions, or at least I did not interrupt myself until I heard the clock strike four.

  I shall miss my colours. Ever since Alfred showed Tony how to set them out on a palette and he in turn revealed his secret to me, I have never changed the order. Alfred’s professor said it was exactly the same colour scheme as Rubens. From left to right – ivory, black, ultramarine blue, veridian green, flake white, light red, cadmium red or vermilion, yellow ochre, lemon cadmium. For the odd occasion cobalt blue, rose madder and golden ochre are used.

  Washed my brushes twice after tea. Slowly, I turned them over and over under the cold tap at the kitchen sink, squeezing the colour from the sable until their blood ran clear. The last sweet, tinny smell of paints for a while. The palettes and jars streamed tears so I flooded them with water so as not to prolong their life ebbing down the plug-hole. A solemn burial in their cherrywood box and I shoved them away fast under the bed.

  Hiding the canvases required a finer deception. Twenty in all I stacked in the corner, their faces to the wall like naughty children. They felt heavier than usual and no doubt rejected, so as I covered them with an old cotton blanket I promised to be back for them soon.

  I then took a sharp knife to my lead pencils until each one might kill an intruder with a single sharp stab to the eye. Ha! Take that! I wonder I wouldn’t ask a robber if I might draw his likeness first. ‘I do,’ I should say to him, ‘so rarely get the opportunity for new sitters. Would you be so kind . . .’

  Kneeling on the floor I packed my kicked-in satchel. In went the pencils, two new blank notebooks, a compass, a rubber and an apple. Moths tickled in my tummy as the sounds of Junior House trickled back. ‘Do not let them in,’ you say. Don’t worry – I rarely do.

  Mama knocked on my door last night. I would have sobbed were it not a dream. There she stood, her arms outstretched, clad from neck to toe in her favourite bottle-green velvet dress, her hair finger-coiled around her face and her Ascot hat – the brim swooning from pheasant feathers. But a fuzziness buzzed at the hem of her skirts. ‘Mama,’ I cried, ‘where are your feet?’ Indeed, where I might have expected to see her green shoes, there a sulphur-coloured mist swirled. Scooping me up into her arms she hushed me by pecking my forehead with kisses until my breathing rattled less. ‘Why, I have given them to you, my darling, for your journey.’ And with that, wind sucked me down through a trapdoor and I tumbled in my pyjamas on to a silent Edgware Road. ‘Phyllis! Over here!’ On the horizon I could just catch her shrouded form. I began to walk as fast as my body would carry me and then faster still. But as I moved towards Mama, the weaker her voice grew and the more distance swam between us. ‘Phyllis, come to me,’ she sang, until her voice turned into one long monotonous wail. It was the wail of a siren and I ran towards it until my bare feet bled from the sharp gravel.

  I wonder each time if I can fool myself into not recognising the signs as I prepare to leave again. It always starts with my hair. On Friday, I took a walk over Lambeth Bridge to the High Street, for a haircut. ‘Short as you like, sir,’ I ordered Willy Browne, the Yankee barber man. His face, usually circumnavigated by rivulets and creases, broke into a smile. In fifteen minutes he covered Fred Astaire’s new movie Top Hat, Mr Clement – and he pronounced it At-agh-leee’s position as the new head of the Labour Party, and the aching feet of the shipyard men walking from Jarrow to London. Whatever will be left for his other customers?

  The cutting away must be something to do with Papa, I reflected as Willy, pleased that I didn’t want fuss or curls, tucked into my head as if it were a box hedge. The British and Americans thrive on their homing instinct. When abroad, their patriotism is as rampant as swamp fever, and they talk of the old country as if it were the Holy Land.

  I am the proud owner of the fleeing instinct. It is inherited by the immigrant, the Jew, the exile and on top of these in my father’s case – the bankrupt businessman. If Fate was about to hurl the Gross family upon the high seas, then Papa would insist, ‘Fate, hold on if you please for just one minute and spare my children the following items: one thick winter coat, one stout pair of shoes and one short haircut. Disguises,’ Papa would say, ‘are the key to New Beginnings. You see, children, you can become,’ and he would turn his back on Tony and me and then whisk around to display a Cyrano de Bergerac nose, ‘anyone!’ ‘But then Sandor,’ Mama would gently enquire while walking away from him, ‘when can we disguise ourselves from ourselves?’

  A telegram from Papa was delivered this morning. The PS gave my spine a shiver. PS, he wrote: Adolf Hitler has passed the Nuremberg Laws – Jews are now second-class citizens. I can only be grateful that Papa is in America and hail Mary full of grace that Mama insisted on my being Catholic.

  Now I ought to cast out my grey cotton painting trousers, held up by string, and the buttermilk shirt that has had more owners than washes. ‘A fright, a fright, an absolute fright,’ my mother would reel from the threshold as she examined her youngest child perform with a palette. Never mind that she was content to watch Alfred while he was knee-deep in crimson and vermilion oils and bourbon, but her exquisite clothes always stayed out of harm’s way.

  Starch and a hot iron maketh the outfit. I have a Pressing Engagement. That phrase always reminds me to get out of these dog-robbers and to iron something suitable. Tonight, as the shadows suddenly dropped in, somewhere between pressing the shoulder seam and the jacket hem, I meandered into my thoughts. As I pointed the tip of the iron on to the chasms of loch-coloured wool and then let the metal thud down with an industrial shush which crushed the fabric into a serene flatness, I sensed that no one was with me.

  How refreshing, you might think. No. I would rather have been able to report that an infusion of balmy calmness danced around my body to buoy me up before my journey.

  I laid my outfit on the sitter’s stool. The French navy wool suit should do; the skirt is not too long so I shall be able to stride out. Black woollen stockings. I suppose you might call it a uniform of sorts. From my travels in Spain, my memories lie in a tea chest in the hall and from Paris, only my brown leather brogues have survived and I shall buff those up to wear tomorrow.

  I am not running away this time, not walking out or leaving people. I am letting a par
t of me move ahead, to grow. Let’s see if the old Phyllis can catch up.

  There are no stirrings from Henekey’s pub tonight. Everything is holding its breath for the Monday morning stampede. The moon is in full white shock, and if I lean out to the right from my window I can catch it just about on my face. If I was a seer, the sinister face of the moon would mean to me the enemy light in a world war, the light that failed to guide my plane and the sole comforter of my father on his final passage from Italy to Southampton. But for now my nose is tweaked by the breeze; one sniff and the river tells me to expect a fine day tomorrow.

  Excitement woke me at 4 a.m. I lay without light and without sound. Who else will be up now? Just me. No noise from the road below. Then foghorns. Autumn mists clogging the river. Up I get. Up I get. Off I go. On we go. Thoughts: none bad, none good. Apprehension: no time. Mind: ‘neutral’ says the indicator, bordering on ‘happy’. I shivered into the bathroom.

  If I wake in the middle of the night I do not like to catch my face in the glass. There is something wrong about turning to face the changeling that you mutate into under the spell of sleep. It is that sacred time when a body travels and transforms, from good to evil and back again, when the heart beats to the strokes of another world and breathing becomes shallow and sometimes stops. The night is in death throes at four o’clock.

  I turned on the basin taps fast and caught myself. My mouth fell open as if a stranger had thrust a knife into my spine. The glass, blotched black in the corners, gave a funereal silhouette, a death portrait of the sitter and a snapshot. Smile, please. I saw for the first time the little sharp teeth pointed inwards in defeat. I wished my teeth were less timid. Feeble gas lighting gave my shoulders a hunched look and my hair stuck out as uncontrollably as my brainwaves. My eyes sprang up with my smile. Hold it – the mouth has been taught to grin. But it is my eyes, I reflected, that betray me. Behind those infinite blue irises lies an infinite sadness – but that is not what other people see. My fingers began to twitch in anticipation of the day. I ran a hot bath and was out of the house by 5 a.m. sharp.

  ‘You will be arrested for spying, miss.’ Those were the first words spoken to me that morning. Despite two hours on foot up and down eight streets, and now halfway through the shambled buildings on Old Pye Street, the only noises to surface so far had been the coal and scuttle, steam and bath ones hissing forth from basement quarters in Victoria.

  ‘Excuse me, miss, I said—’

  Like shots fired in the mist, when the deep voice hit my ears I had jolted. My right hand, dead in its navy leather glove, quivered on the notepad and my pencil had flinched across the white paper. Damn.

  I twisted round, smiling in anticipation of trouble, to see a young policeman pacing across the cobbles, brandishing a grin, half kindly and half hinting that he might be the sort to give me a good clipping about the ear.

  ‘Might I enquire as to what a young lady such as yourself, miss, is doing out on the streets at this time of the morning when it is customary for only us working folk to be about?’ His large and seemingly uncontrollable mouth had not stopped to draw breath, by which time I calculated I might sneak down a few more house numbers.

  Forty-nine, fifty-one, fifty three . . . ‘I am mapping, sir.’ I did not raise my eyes from the hard granite lines.

  Mapping. He sighed, turned his mouth towards his boots and directed his glance upwards to the gasping gas street-lamp on which I was leaning.

  ‘Why does that sound like meddling to me?’

  Meddling. Now may I tell you there are rare instances in a person’s life when the skies may as well have been rent in two as all the wisdom of Job is bestowed upon them. And this was one such instance. I braced up to my full height but still fixed hard on my amateur map executed with my clumsy hand. I understood at once and felt the surge of anger that had thrown Mama in and out of love with her unjust world. Here was I – a woman, unaccompanied and unarmed, who existed in a society where a woman has no business, unless she is a whore or a char, except for meddling.

  ‘I am a cartographer.’

  Out sprang the words. My voice had strained. ‘Do not ask me to spell it.’ I tugged on my earlobe. The skeletal phrase rattled in the air isolated and irretrievable. Sounded like a true profession to me. Lawyer, doctor, professor, cartographer. But then my mind, always primed to goad, turned on me. For there behind the policeman loomed Papa and Dick and Tony and Uncle Frank and Alfred spitting out, ‘CART-O-GRAPH-ER!’ between howls of laughter. And when their heads weren’t rolled back by the seizure of laughter then they were mopping away tears.

  ‘So where’s your cart then?’ The policeman’s voice rescued me. Wet about the ears he was and he most kindly bought it lock, stock and barrel. No notepad appeared. A good omen for my first day out in the field as it were. It was with good grace that I lent an ear to the patter inherited by every bobby on the beat.

  ‘And who do you work for, miss?’

  ‘Myself, sir.’

  ‘In that case, do you think yourself might give yourself a break of several minutes to pass the time of day with a policeman over a nice cup of tea?’

  I went, of course. Be open to the kindness of strangers, I had learnt that well enough from my time in Paris. And over the years, I in turn would chatter with and befriend anyone. Because sometimes anyone turned out to be someone and then someone turned out to be of great value.

  Constable Peters whistled as he strode into the cramped teahouse on St Ann’s Lane. As his conversation meandered across a spectrum of trivia I read his face. Unmistakable cockney eyes. A cockney cobalt blue, the eyes of a rogue. Twenty-seven. A tint of red in his mink brown hair I put down to Irish roots, which definitely accounted for the saintly catholic surname of Peters.

  ‘You want to draw radials out from a central point like Marble Arch,’ he said, thrusting out a considerable wingspan which sent his helmet spinning off the oak bench to land at the wheels of the tea trolley. His face ruddied as he blustered on, ‘That’s what I’d do all right. Say Edgware, Finchley, Tottenham, Barking, Croydon, Ealing, Harrow and the like.’

  Use your common sense, Papa had warned me in his latest missive. Chin out and best foot forward had been my sole plan, but here was a fine tip and the first step in a practical direction. I drained my cup and stuck out my hand. Constable Peters was pleased he had crossed paths with a ‘female eccentric’, as he would later report to his New Scotland Yard colleagues. Shaking my hand just a little roughly he wished me the very best of very good luck.

  And in truth, what exactly was it that guided me through? What was it that permitted me to shun contact with friends and to abandon the nourishment meted out by my palette and my typewriter? I am not able to reveal that to you even here. Craving the company of others was not an addiction, but my insatiable greed for laying my eyes on something unseen, whether it was a bridge, a feather or a new umbrella, I admit was bigger than my belly. And I was taken in by the history too: Blue Anchor and Bleeding Heart Yards, Hanging Sword Alley and Amen Corner. From the muddiest cobbles and dockside squalor to the soft-shoes and automobiles in Chelsea, I witnessed it. Not that I twittered around on a whimsical foreign visitor’s tour. Let me rest by saying that my two sturdy feet led me into the darkest alleys in those twelve months, and when not a soul heard me beg for help, then I dug deep into the well of perseverance to draw out just enough energy to carry me home.

  Loneliness stalked me after the pubs banged shut for the night, when the huge whale carcasses of buses and trams lay beached in stations and London wound down to a steady pulse. A purpose was, I believed then and still do, set out for me and so I was never left to flounder. This project was all for Papa, for all his hurt, for all his enemies and for every time he told me that I couldn’t, that I wouldn’t and that I should leave business to him.

  I shall not bore you with the countless occasions when I took a side turn off a street and found myself back where I started, or wound up completely lost and had to ask the way. Thos
e first spring months forced my frustration to its very boundary limits as the city cast an alien shadow over hostile and impenetrable buildings that glowered down at me. However dizzied I became by the chaotic fissures of sprawl, my confusion spawned determination to complete the task. Inconsistencies such as names of houses instead of numbers, unnumbered blocks of flats, churches, continuation into side streets, I wrote in my diary on 23 May. I did not falter till 453 plummeted to 35 due to the start of Maida Vale, which ending at 245 plummeted to Kilburn High Road’s number 1. Shoot Up Hill started at 27; Cricklewood Broadway at 1 again and when Edgware Road resumed it did so at 329 instead of 455, thus duplicating 126 numbers – differentiated only by Postal District change from W2 to NW2. In fact, every radial supported its own system or lack of it.

  With the goodness of time my method overcame the urban madness. I had purchased from the Post Office all seventy-two existing 6-inch Ordnance Sheets which covered the London County Council Area and which had not been updated since 1919. On plain white paper of the same size, and centring on Charing Cross, I measured out 1-inch squares to the outer margins and referenced them ABC on the top and bottom. I numbered each square down the sides 1,2,3, and added in the nearest station and bus route and bus numbers. After years of spontaneous brush-strokes with a broad interpretation of colour and shape, here was I struggling to master mathematical exactness and precision.

  The parasites of rolls and scrolls of paper bred avariciously in the warm den that had once been my bedsitter, and each one nestled in its own patch on the floor. When briefly loitering outside a house to jot down markings in the street, I often pictured the interior, perhaps capaciously cool and linear grand or perhaps a moth-eaten tomb of decomposing books. Happy or sad? I would ask as I read their windows. What works of great importance are stirring within your walls? Had anyone, I wondered, ever peeked down from the cosmos to dissect my little ant building and spied me crouched over a maze of lines, squiggles, figures and abbreviations? Spread before me they would have seen the whole capital in my far from neat handwriting. How my sturdy fingers had burned from manoeuvring thousands of individual letters into a Lilliputian space. Nightmares, Mama had led me to believe, ought to feature past lovers returning to haunt their victims, but only the fear of drawing the wrong abbreviations in ink popped up in mine. Should C denote Close, Court or Crescent? M mansions or mews? Then the distinction between Abbey Roads and Streets, Aberdeens, Acacias, Addisons, Adelaides. And that probably said a great deal about my choice of lovers.