Mrs P's Journey

by Sarah Hartley

  Mercifully, the body has little memory. No matter the size of the blisters stinging my ankles or the exhaustion burrowing into my calf muscles after an eighteen-hour day, I would greet a new morning with as much confidence and optimism as if it was my birthday. After midnight, if my eyes caved in with fatigue or felt dry from simply looking at too much, then I rubbed Mama’s gold wedding band against my lids. I realise this remedy is as much an old wives’ tale as leaving my shoes upside down underneath my bed at night, but it gave me comfort.

  I was lulled like a baby in a hammock by the reassuring rhythm of routine. The morning ritual was brief and I shot out of the house within thirty minutes. First came a harsh scalding bath if my nose felt icy on waking, or a cool shower if the night had been spent thrashing about for summer air. Assam in a pot, if you please, plus the Delft cup and saucer (chipped but does the job) and a little milk. Since frequenting workers’ cafés for respite, suddenly lemon in my tea no longer suited my surroundings as it had done in Paris.

  ‘A laaaymun?’ a steamed pudding of a waitress had screeched when I had ordered a cup of tea au citron in the Embankment station café. Well, I wasn’t truly English, was I? ‘You want to try a drop of cow’s milk, love.’ At least I entertained all the customers who took the opportunity to look up from their newspapers to gawp at me.

  If condensation kissed the inside of my windows, on went the grey lamb’s-wool cardigan – a donation from the Communist neighbour – my vest and navy woollen stockings. I avoided wearing hats, even in a blizzard (on that occasion I opted for a silk headscarf) for they were liable to hold the water if it rained. This I learnt to my cost after the grey beret I started out with fell limp after a severe April storm and so I donated it to the centuries-old flower lady on Lambeth Bridge. ‘Fine day for a grey beret,’ she would chirrup as I nodded and passed her stall. Her face dimpled into smiles that day when I proffered the battered felt. ‘Take these Michaelmas daisies in return, miss, won’t you?’ How I itched to paint those white flowers.

  Breakfast was never allowed until 7 a.m. after I had two hours and thirty streets under my belt. Not that I needed to do so, but a poached egg on fried bread was a treat. ‘I can’t quite place you, miss,’ said the Greek proprietor of Daphne’s Café in West Hampstead who puffed between tables in a red pinny, gesticulating with a stripy tea-towel in one hand and a row of plates dancing up the other arm. ‘So are you a teacher then, miss, or a governess?’ he asked, stopping to wipe the steam from his spectacles and casting an eye over my notepads. People never quite settle until they can label you; they do not feel comfortable with a stranger, or someone who disrupts a daily pattern. To sweeten me up, the proprietor profiled his regulars.

  ‘He in the corner is the vet from the High Street and he’s been coming here for his bacon butty since 1925. And those two there,’ he nodded towards a brace of schoolgirls in dark green pinafores, ‘they’re my nieces – twins, doin’ their homework.’

  When I volunteered what I was up to, he smiled at me and squeezed my hand. ‘Young lady like you should be at home,’ he said. ‘Gotta husband?’

  ‘Left him in Venice.’

  I am sure he didn’t quite believe me. And I had never said the words before. But there they were. And that was that. Poor Old Dick.

  There was a thrill at moving amongst the different tides of humanity who surfaced in any given twenty-four hours. The noiseless industrial workers seeped out early on, trailed by the cooks, the roadsweepers, the doormen, the laundresses, the newsmen, the milkmen, the undertakers, who without fuss went on their way, treading lightly so as not to wake up the rest of the world. Gentlemen arrived on the scene by eight o’clock, whistling, carrying their light briefcases and starched to the eyebrows. The speed limit for automobiles stood at 30 miles per hour. Off they went with their feminine passengers, slugging along the Brompton Road, depositing their charges outside Harrods. Now the trams and buses began to ooze with small children, housewives and secretaries.

  Wherever I happened to be at around noon, I would seek out a bench in a park and pull out a sandwich from my satchel. A tranquil spot sprang up without fail; like the Garden of Remembrance next to Marylebone Church, or St John’s Square in Clerkenwell. A tightness knuckled down on my chest as I ate; I was never quite able to master the art of relaxing when there was so much work to be done. Like clouds that skitter across the sun, despite my baseline cheery disposition, my mood might slip from melancholic to benevolent to angelic and back again within the course of eighteen hours.

  The mechanical walking took over my body by about six o’clock in the evening. That was when I could look down at my feet moving one in front of the other at quite a lick and know they had a will of their own. In the sweet summer months this was my favourite time. Birdsong mixed with children’s voices, and if I was truly fortunate, with the scent of stocks and sweet peas. My biggest indulgence was to close my eyes for a minute and to keep walking with only my senses to guide me. In the winter months when the chill clung to my winter coat, my breathing slowed, my systems shut down as if in suspended animation and the foggy breath from my nostrils warmed my lips. The tissue-paper skin on my face felt as if it might tear if I smiled, and tears ran in the wind and sunshine. I could barely move my mummified toes, encased in wool and leather. Chilblains and chapped fingers were part of the job.

  Make no mistake, there were things that I loved. Turning the key into my bedsitter after midnight and the kettle calling for my attention. Then the milky warm suds of Pears soap as I wallowed in the bath, rubbing the street out of my stockings. That first rush of air on leaving the house that pinched my nose and face and stole my breath.

  If I had been a fan of cameras I would have wanted one there with me on that September morning when I clambered to the top of Primrose Hill as the sun rose. Below me I watched horses, steaming under the weight of their handsome riders, smartly ascend from Regent’s Park Barracks.

  They would not have known how significant they were to me – the people who threw an extra dollop of sugar into my porridge because they thought I needed feeding up – or Mr Freddie Baxter, the furrier from Mayfair who invited me to the theatre and offered to have someone else complete my journey if I might like to accompany him to Monte Carlo. The Norland nannies in Holland Park who ambled past and let me peek at their little charges and who giggled as if they had nothing other to worry about than the young men who took them every week to the pictures in Kensington. The gravelled faces and battered bodies of those who felt the pull and shove and strain of early morning market trading, who made me feel free and alive.

  But for now I eased my stiff body between the sheets on my little wooden bed. Slowly the scenery in my mind ground to a halt. I did not count the streets completed or those I had left to draw. You see, I just had to keep going until I was finished, however long it took me.

  ‘It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known,’ I puffed before a canopy of sleep spread across my face. It was a rare night when my body, as leaden as a corpse buried at sea, did not list and sway down and down into the deepest depth of sleep.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  From Abberley Mews to Zoffany Street

  WHY?! WHY?! WHY CAN’T YOU EVER DO WHAT I TELL YOU?!!! BAD ENOUGH WHEN YOU DON’T THINK! BUT WORSE WHEN YOU DO! WHAT A DUNCE TO SUGGEST SO ABYSMAL AN ALTERNATIVE! WHAT CUSTOMER’S GOING TO HAVE THE NERVE TO ASK A SHOPKEEPER FOR THE FIRST AND LAST LETTER OF THE ALPHABET! LUDICROUS! HE’D BE LAUGHED OUT OF COURT. WHEREAS ‘OK’ IS ON EVERYBODY’S LIPS. SYNONYMOUS WITH ‘FINE’ INFERRING EXCELLENCE. WITHOUT FAIL YOU’RE TO USE THE ENCLOSED COVER DESIGN I’VE HAD ESPECIALLY DRAWN FOR YOU. AT MY PROMPTING THE ARTIST HAS PLACED THE LETTERING – The OK Street Atlas & Guide to London OVER AN OPEN TOWER BRIDGE, TO SYMBOLISE THAT THE OK OPENS UP LONDON TO THE PURCHASER . . . SO BURY YOUR MALAPROPISM, AND LET THIS BE THE LAST I EVER HEAR OF A-Z!

  The telegram must have stuck fast in her mem
ory, for even many years later, Phyllis could remember every spitting word of it. Yet despite her father’s ferocity, she flatly ignored his instructions and went her own sweet way instead. And for once, it would be the making not of Sandor Gross, but of his daughter.

  Stubbornness, the Gross family trait, had, at last, grown strong in Phyllis, like a thick weed that has pushed up through hard soil. Even though Sandor may have toughed out twenty years in the mapping business, Phyllis knew he was completely wrong about her new map. Wrong about the name, and wrong about the design on the cover. Yet, however strongly she may have felt about resisting her father’s orders, Phyllis was obviously uneasy about her first rebellion. Unlike my mother, she wrote in her notes, I am neither married to my father, nor emotionally, mentally or financially dependent on him.

  What she had failed to recognise is that, like it or not, she would always be emotionally and mentally bound to her father. But Phyllis convinced herself that his forceful attempts to intrude on her career had less impact, because of the distance between them. Now her late mother’s warning seemed pointless.

  ‘Never work for that megalomaniac. He’ll use you as a drudge and then destroy you. You’ll end up a wreck like me. He’s competitive in everything he says and does. Most men resent successful women, but that Hungarian father of yours – he’s the worst of the lot.’

  No one, Phyllis had thought fiercely to herself, cares about getting this map right as much as I do. So much so, that for over a year, her neighbours barely caught sight of Mrs Pearsall, while her friends had tried to entice her away – from what they weren’t quite clear, ‘some sort of street atlas, you say?’ The smart white invitation to dine with Lord and Lady Ashfield (to see your beautiful Pembrokeshire landscape hung) the following Saturday, remained exactly where it was, alone on the mantelpiece, wilting at the edges.

  Nothing wrong with smoked haddock and peas, Phyllis had thought about her alternative Saturday-night supper, although some lively conversation about art would have been preferable to that huge pile of paperwork.

  How many times had she let her eyes fall on the canvases that were stacked, unclaimed against the walls? The grey, wizened face of Chelsea Old Church was hiding among them somewhere. It hadn’t been an especially grand choice as her final painting before starting the A-Z. Indeed, Phyllis had decided its very ordinariness would distract her from the realisation that there would be no other mornings alone with her easel, standing in just one spot, captured by just one subject, for a long, long while.

  The smell, that was what she craved so much now, the sweet smell of the oil paints, those clues to a new work and another life. The temptation to unwrap her palette was as cruel she believed, as it would be for Alfred to catch sight of an unopened bottle of bourbon and not reach for its warm comfort.

  ‘But I am not a dabbler. I cannot start what I cannot finish. So you will all have to wait,’ Phyllis said aloud.

  Unfinished, half-chewed, whimsical projects that had simply not worked out did not exist in the Gross family, and the most despised characteristic of all – becoming bored – had never been an option.

  Unlike her father and mother, it wasn’t the prospect of a golden bank account, wardrobes stuffed with couture clothes or friends who knew the right people, that had enticed Phyllis to compile the A-Z map.

  Phyllis had already marked her own life’s path as empty. A brood of her own would not be travelling alongside her. There would be no little ones whose curly heads fought over their first poster paints and colouring pencils. There would be no birthday presents, no nursery teas, no waiting up for Father Christmas or Just William stories at bedtime. If maternal instincts had ever tugged at her sleeve, then by now, aged thirty, she had shooed them away. Warmth and affection from Phyllis would never be physical. Of course, as a good woman and a tremendously kind one, it could be found in her thoughtfulness. One memory that her nephew, Jean-Pierre Gross, has of his Auntie Phyllis is after she kindly intervened when as a teenager, cycling along Hove sea-front, he had crashed into a parked car and tumbled over the roof, suffering a gash on his chin. Angry at the dent he had left, the driver insisted he sign a paper, confirming that he would pay for damages.

  Phyllis rose to the occasion. She wrote the man a letter, outlining her nephew’s good conduct and ended by saying, ‘I’m not questioning his responsibility, but your humanity.’

  But since she had banished her sentimental and emotional life along with her first husband, she was not the sort of person you would naturally confide in with a problem.

  ‘Just get on with it,’ she’d say. ‘That’s the ticket. On we go.’

  With the humiliation of one failed and unconsummated marriage behind her, and at such a sensitive age, for she was neither fortunate enough to be a grand old lady, nor felt young enough to be whisked into marriage for a second time, she must have come to the conclusion that it was, as an institution, not suited to the Gross family.

  For Phyllis, the stigma of divorce back then in 1936, apart from Wallis Simpson giving it a touch of glamour, made it unmentionable. To be a spinster did evoke more pity, but she certainly thought the freedom of being unattached was worth it. Small restrictions like an arm firmly coiled around her waist and nuisances such as the suffocating noise of someone else’s breathing in the night or the splitting of grocery bills had bothered her in the past, and now were gone for good.

  So what if there weren’t any signs of a dinner service, or Irish linens to show for her eight-year marriage? From her wooden bed to the enamel mugs and rough blue towels from Woolworths, Phyllis had purchased everything in her bedsitter she could lay her eyes on. This is all me, Phyllis had thought when she had first unpacked her belongings.

  Not since she had been a youngster, perhaps eight or nine, tearing around the grounds of The Firs with Tony, knowing that her beloved Mama was writing at her bureau, within skipping distance and there for the hugging, had Phyllis slept so deeply.

  To outsiders, her carefree and nomadic life in Spain with Dick must have sounded enviably Bohemian. Yet it wasn’t until she had stopped, right here in London, that Phyllis had noticed how wearing it had been and how even a sickening routine crept into a rootless life.

  I can forget it all, she thought thankfully.

  Forget how to befriend each new proprietor, charm every donkey-owner and chambermaid, acquaint herself with the temperature of the hot water and how many minutes it took to run a decent bath, to remember not to stub her toe on the unforgiving bedpost, to outsmart the rattling window-pane, to work out the coolest place in each room to take a siesta and how her senses had been immersed in the sharp odour of fly paper barely masked by wood polish – and both overpowered by garlic.

  Now she could hang up her clothes and know that she would not be folding them into a trunk or bag the next day. Thank God! Her shoulders relaxed a little. Her wounds had almost, but not quite healed.

  Pacing back and forth in the darkest pit of her memory, Phyllis was aware that she lacked two vital elements of self-esteem that ought to have been rounded up and handed over to her by her father. Respect and recognition. No matter how far she needed to search for the errant pair, no matter how long the journey, Phyllis was prepared to hunt them down.

  What would Papa admire?

  Vast canvases of her own fantasy paraded through her mind – gigantic ones with broad strokes lashing up strong, abstract forms, or surreal landscapes broken down into jigsaw-puzzle fragments. Yet she knew that no number of lively paintings or brilliant portraits could have prompted the praise from her father that she so longed to hear: ‘Phyllis, what a wonderful imagination. What a good eye you have. My daughter is indeed an artist, you know. You must keep going, Phyllis – for painting is quite obviously your calling.’

  In her own small way, Phyllis took on her father and walked straight into his own territory – map publishing. Confronting what surely was her biggest fear – failure – head on was particularly brave, considering that should she indeed fail a
t producing a map, she would be doing so at the very feet of the man she needed to impress most.

  Strangest of all is that her suitability (like her father before her) for mapping was laughable. You only have to look at her exuberant brush-strokes and quivering line drawings to gauge the sheer speed and spontaneity with which she completed her work. See the fidget, the chatterbox, the wit and wonder how she wrenched her fabulous mind into a confined space, as small as one of the squares she had to draw. Precision, with the exception of her dead accurate eye when it came to painting from life, was not an attribute she either possessed or aspired to. Pinning herself down to the crushingly steady work of mapping must have been torture.

  Her knowledge of how to actually produce a map was unbelievably vague, and her unmethodical mind carried her in such a roundabout way, that what ought to have been a complicated but logical process, came together in a totally haphazard way.

  First, she corresponded with her father by letter in America: I am beginning with the London County Council. For that, I have decided is the correct area to cover.

  You will have to buy a lot of 6" Ordnance Sheets. I’d say about sixty or seventy.

  Where does one get those?