“JACKie Agass!”
At the sound of the voice, and of the hasty slap-slap-slap of footsteps coming from behind him, he turned. He felt stifled with surprise and happiness. Mrs. Wakerell, seeing that she had attracted his attention, stopped running and stood panting for a few seconds.
“Jackie Agass,” she said at last, “where d’you think you’re going to?”
Jack was unable to do anything but grin stupidly at her. She had recovered her breath now. “Walking right past like that as if you were a stranger!”
“I was just having a look round,” he croaked. He stared at her in fascinated recognition. He could remember her, in his childhood, as a handsome, matronly woman. He had seen her, during his brief stay in nineteen forty-six, when she was assuming the more massive proportions of middle-age. But now her dimensions were overpowering. Huge bosom, broad hips and bulging legs all tapered down to a small pair of high-heeled shoes above which it seemed impossible that the whole mass of her would maintain its balance when in movement. Her cheeks were rouged, she wore a pair of rimless pince-nez and, to complete the haughty air which in the old days had earned her the title of Queen Lizzie, her dry, bleached hair was piled up high like a pompadour wig. His voice came back to him. “How you keeping?”
“As you see me,” she replied with equanimity. She folded her arms and rested them comfortably across the upper slopes of her bosom. “I have my little aches and pains, but who doesn’t? Where did you pop up from? I thought I was seeing a ghost when you walked by. I knocked at the window but you didn’t hear me. I was just washing, so I couldn’t show myself or come down after you.” She smiled benignly, and said with sudden fondness, “How are you, boy? Seen any of the Hogarths yet? How long you back for?”
I’m back for good,” said Jack, “I hope. I haven’t seen anyone yet. How’s the gov’nor?”
“He’s all right. He’s still working. He’ll be home in a half-hour. Joyce’ll be home, too, any minute. Remember her?”
“Just about.”
“Oh, you won’t recognize her. She’s quite the young lady. Come in and have some dinner with us, Jack.”
“Oh, I dunno.” It was partly out of shyness that he hesitated, partly because he liked to be urged, and reassured that the welcome to which he had looked forward was genuine.
“Oh, come on, Walter’ll never forgive me if I let you go. And I want to hear all about what’s been happening to you. There’s no point in just standing here in the street, is there?”
“I reckon not,” said Jack, “to tell you the truth I’d be very glad to say yes.”
“Well, come on then.” She moved back towards her house, as stately as a towed balloon. Jack walked, humbly and gratefully, at her side.
Chapter Three
In the Wakerells' little kitchen, Jack sat very primly at first, daunted by the furniture which hemmed him in, by the presence of the uncommunicative Mr. Wakerell, by a wary and unrecognizably-grown Joyce, and by the stiff and spotless white tablecloth that brushed his knees.
As the meal proceeded he felt more at ease. It was years, he told Mrs. Wakerell, since he had sat down to such a good feed. What could beat a plate heaped with big and angular potatoes, all baked so stiff and dry that they resisted the fork as if they were coated in brown varnish, with a mountain of cauliflower that oozed the warm water in which it had been boiled, a great plank of Yorkshire pudding and a slice of roast beef? For years, in his military and civilian travels, people had tried to tempt him with foreign delights, but he had always stubbornly maintained that ‘there’s nothing like good old home cooking,’ and here it was. All his shyness fell away from him as he described to his hosts the horrors he had witnessed.
“I went into some place in France once,” he said, “and they asked me if I wanted a bit of fish. Well, I thought, here’s a bit of all right. And when they brought it, guess what, there was all yellow stuff over it, and — here, you won’t believe this — he paused for effect — “they said they’d cooked it in wine!”
“Go on!” said Mrs. Wakerell, incredulous. She paused with her spoon upraised. “Rhubarb plain or with custard?”
“Custard please. And in Italy once, they tried to give us octopus. Octopus soup. With spaghetti and stuff.”
Mrs. Wakerell made a little grimace indicative of well-bred distaste and said, “Oogh!” She consoled him with one of her queenly smiles. “Never mind, you’re home again. You won’t have to put up with any of that muck any more.”
Jack settled back in his chair, letting his cup of tea steam on the table in front of him, feeling replete with food, warmth and the happiness of being among friends. Mrs. Wakerell was talking of her schoolmaster son Fred, of the magnificent fortune he had had in marrying the daughter of a prosperous grocer, and of the glories that she hoped would ensue. Throughout the meal it was Mrs. Wakerell who had done most of the talking. Those of her neigh ours who described her as ‘standoffish’ were unjust to her. She was not a snob; she was friendly with everyone; but she always managed to give the impression that she was bestowing her friendship as a royal favour. The air of benign superiority with which she moved among her acquaintances derived partly from her own origins — her mother had been a lady’s maid among the gentry — partly from pride in her son’s status, and partly because her husband, a warehouse foreman, was the only man in Lamb Street to wear a bowler hat.
Her husband Walter was, for his part, neither her partner in pride nor (as might have been supposed) her meek underling. He was a man of hard-bitten appearance, shorter than his wife but sturdily built, who loped about through life with a perpetual blue-jowled scowl on his face. Jack, who knew him of old, was aware that he was not the misanthrope that his expression suggested, but a man who had withdrawn into himself and who was able to maintain, in a life totally lacking in physical privacy, an inner privacy in which he pondered over a variety of mysteries. Occasionally he would emerge from his reveries to utter some unexpected compliment to his wife or, with his friends, to venture some heavily amiable remark.
Joyce sat across the table, quiet and watchful; one of hose girls who at one glance seem ugly, at the next attractive. She wore a pair of glasses in a frame of pink shell; the sunlight flashed on the lens, hiding her eyes from Jack and at the same time making him feel that he was under intense scrutiny. Her hair was unnaturally fair, the product of childhood bleaching, and hung straight in a long bob. She was twenty-four years old, with a solid, shapely body and with a strong, heavily-boned face like her father’s that matched ill with her hair.
Jack cast a furtive glance at her from time to time; he had a speculative eye for every woman he met these days, for he was in a hurry to settle down. He did not know what to make of her. He could not decide whether or not she attracted him, and he was puzzled by the defensive air that underlay both her silent obedience to her mother and her seeming indifference to him. He tried, out of curiosity and to fulfil his duty as a guest, to draw her into the conversation. “Got any boyfriends, Joycie?” he asked.
Joyce shrugged her shoulders and smiled faintly at the tablecloth.
“Where’s your tongue, my girl?” her mother demanded. “Pawned it to pay for the pictures? And why don’t you take those glasses off when you’re indoors? She don’t need them, really she doesn’t.”
Joyce jerked her head back as if about to make a retort. Twin bolts of light flashed across her glasses. She subsided, and said, “I’m doing the washing up, not going in for a beauty contest. Here,” she added, turning to Jack, “Finish up the cheese and I’ll take the plate.”
“I asked you a question,”Jack persisted.
“And I heard you.”
“Well, have you?”
“Hundreds,” said Joyce, beginning to put the plates together, “didn’t you see the queue as you come up the street?”
“Can’t say I did. Perhaps I need a lend of your glasses.”
“Per’aps you do. Mind your big feet.” She squeezed past him with a pile of pla
tes in her hands. He smiled up at her in the moment that her face was close to his, and was surprised by the sudden blush and the searching, hostile look with which she responded. “Open the door, someone,” she cried quickly, “I haven’t got a spare pair of hands.”
When Joyce had set down the plates in the sink and closed the scullery door, Mrs. Wakerell said, “Our Joyceis a smart girl. She’s got a quick tongue, but that’s because she’s got plenty up here.” She tapped her head. “I don’t say it because I’m her mother — I’m not in the habit of praising my own, but plenty of nice chaps ’d be glad to have her. It’s just that she doesn’t give them any encouragement.” She paused for breath, and went on, “She takes after me there. Many’s the visitor used to come to the house where my mother was in service, and used to say, ‘There’s the real lady of the house.’ They meant me.” She returned, with an effort that showed itself in her voice, to her subject, “That girl’s particular. No larking about at the street corner for her. She’s the kind that waits for Mr. Right to come along.”
Mr. Wakerell had moved his chair nearer to the open window and was filling his pipe. “Broody, that girl,” he grunted, “sits at home moping for want of company, then snaps your head off when you talk to her.”
“All she wants,” Mrs. Wakerell went on serenely, as if she had not heard any interruption, “is the right chap. A nice, steady chap. And you take it from me, it’ll be a lucky man that gets a girl like that.”
Jack began to feel uncomfortable again in the silence that followed.
“I suppose you’ll be looking up the Hogarths,” said Mrs. Wakerell.
“Yes. I heard from Nancy now and again while I was away.”
Mrs. Wakerell leaned from her chair to open the scullery door. She called to Joyce, “Fill the kettle up again, dearie, when you’ve taken the hot water. There’s some hankies under the sink you can wash afterwards.” To her husband she said, “I thought you were going to do some weeding this afternoon.”
“Plenty of time,” said Mr. Wakerell, in a deep voice that was clogged with repletion, “let the grub go down a bit first. Besides, it’ll get cooler out there in an hour or two.”
His wife settled back in her chair, hands in her lap, like a queen on her throne, and turned once more to Jack. “Now, that was a surprise if you like. A big fat lump like her getting married. And well past thirty, too.”
“I don’t know,” said Jack, “you couldn’t ask for a better girl than Nancy. She’s a real winner. And she was only —” he calculated — “she’s only thirty-six now, and she’s been married two years.”
“Two years and three months. It was just after I went up the hospital with my piles. Wonders they did for me. I’ve never had a day’s trouble since. Everything goes through like butter. It was going out to work that gave that girl her chance. And plenty like her. In the war, all this doing your bit in the factories. Still, he’s a nice chap. Hard-working. She was married in a plain, two-piece costume. My advice, that was. ‘White wedding,’ I said, ‘at your age? Don’t ask for trouble, Nancy dear. It’s not as if your dear mother was still alive.’ I dare say if you asked her she’d thank me for that advice today. Not that I ask for thanks. Joycie! —” she raised her voice with disconcerting suddenness — “don’t be stingy with the soap flakes. There’s another box on the dresser.” She reclaimed Jack’s attention with a gracious smile, “No use spoiling the ship, I always say.”
Jack took refuge in a somnolent “Ooerh!” which he uttered with a great stretching of his arms. He hoped she would regard this as a compliment to her cooking. “It gets you, don’t it?”
Mrs. Wakerell pushed a chair forward. “Put your feet up, dear. Our home is yours, you know.”
Mr. Wakerell took advantage of the proffered chair to put his own feet up, and contributed to the conversation the mysterious words, “Nice kiddie.”
“Yes,” his wife resumed, as if she had heard a prompter’s voice, “a lovely little girl they’ve got. It all goes to show, doesn’t it. Her husband’s twice the size of her, big as she is. And ten years older in the bargain. And there they go and have a beautiful kiddie like that, eighteen months old and like a little doll.”
“I know,” said Jack, “Linda Jean. Names they think of nowdays! Nancy sent me a photo.”
“It’s funny,” mused Mrs. Wakerell, “how a family gets scattered. A lovely family like that. It used to be a pleasure to see them all together. And now look at them, all over the place. Ah, well, that’s life.” She shook her head and popped into her mouth a cube of sugar from the bowl on the table. “That family died the night Kate Hogarth died. That bomb was like the crack of doom for the Hogarths. Isn’t it funny? — all in a second — a bang, a cloud of dust — and there’s nothing left of all those years of life — no more house, no more Kate. And no more family, either — look what happened. Within a twelvemonth poor Chris was dead of the consumption, and no wonder, if you’ll excuse me speaking plainly, with that Italian wife of his sucking the life out of him. And Alf marrying that slut from The Lamb.” She crunched the sugar vigorously between her teeth. “And Rosie!”
She fell silent, her head inclined and her eyes full of thought. The heavy breathing of three people was the only sound in the little room, but in Jack’s ears it seemed to be drowned by multiplying echoes of Mrs. Wakerell’s last words.
“It’s funny —” she was speaking again, and he looked up as if from a disturbed sleep — “I always thought it might have come to something between you two.”
He heard his own voice, gruff and reluctant. “What two?”
“You and Rosie.”
“No.” At moments like this his tongue seemed to be swollen to twice its normal size, and — what with the difficulty of controlling his breath — it was hard to speak articulately. “I don’t suppose either of us ever give it a thought. More like brother and sister us two, I reckon.”
He marvelled at the calm words that he heard coming from his own lips. “After all, we were brought up together.”
“Ah, well,” Mrs. Wakerell sighed, “I’m too romantic. Always been my trouble. And I mean to say, you can’t blame me, can you? Jack and Jill wasn’t in it with you two. From children.”
Her placid words pricked and prodded at his thoughts. “Till she married that other chap in the war. Now, that was a surprise, if you like. You could have knocked me down with a feather when she brought him home. I said — it was in this very room, Walter was here, he’ll tell you — I said, ‘Well, she might have done better than that. Skinny ha’porth like that,’ I said, ‘he wouldn’t fill one leg of Jack Agass’s trousers. Well,’ I said, ‘of course, he might have money,’ but no, she said, when I asked her, not a farthing. It was a quiet wedding. You didn’t come up for it, did you?”
“No. I couldn’t get leave.”
“Oh, well, I thought you could for these things. Anyway, she didn’t stick him for long, did she; what did she leave him for?”
“I don’t know. She didn’t tell me.”
“And then, the next thing you know, along comes the next surprise. There she is, living in a fancy flat, and someone we all know paying the rent.”
“I know. I heard about it.”
“And,” she added bitterly, reaching for another piece of sugar, “him not the only one she’s seen about with, by all accounts.”
Jack rose, and said, “I got to be going. Don’t want to keep you talking all the afternoon.”
“Don’t be silly,” Mrs. Wakerell scoffed, “you don’t want to run off now. Joyce is just making tea. You’ve nowhere special to go, have you?”
“Not in particular.”
“Well, sit down and have a rest after your dinner. You might as well make a day of it now you’re here.”
“You can come down The Lamb with us this evening,” put in Mr. Wakerell, who up till now had shown all the signs of falling asleep, “Everyone’ll be glad to see you.”
Jack grinned, and sat down awkwardly. His panic was subsidi
ng. He was glad that it had failed to drive him from this hospitable house. He felt that he had taken the first step on the road back to the old life. “Suits me.” He hesitated, frowned at the backs of his hands, and after a little while spoke again. “I suppose that’s all straight up?”
“All what, dear?”
“About Rosie.”
“It’s as true as we’re sitting here. Jack, it’s a judgement, I tell you, the way these things come out. Always. Didn’t you know how it got out? Cyril Owers — you remember Cyril, from Number Eighteen? — working in the very estate office? He saw the lease of the flat with his own eyes. Said he’d swear to it in a court of law. Signed, ‘Henry Joseph Monaghan,’ bold as brass. And some people say there isn’t a power at work!”
Jack sat looking at his hands.
You’re nodding off, dearie,” said Mrs. Wakerell, “Why don’t you have a lay down. Walter, you too. Take him in the front room. Go on, Jack, you’re not shy, are you? You can take your shoes off in there and stretch out on the sofa.”
In the front parlour Jack took off his jacket and shoes, unbuttoned his collar and lay down on the sofa, while his host stretched himself out in an armchair. Outside the world sparkled with the brilliance of May. Pale leaves rustled. Quick footsteps and the laughter of girls could be heard. Every sound had a glassy, fragile quality. Jack turned his back on the brightness that pressed in at the bay windows. The air was heavy from lack of ventilation, dust swirled in the shafts of sunlight, the cracked leatherette of the sofa against his cheek smelt of the sweat of generations, but this was what he had dreamed of for years, and all the beauties of sky and springtime could not tempt him from this room. He was drowsy with food and warmth, and immensely content. The pleasure of repose was familiar, but the pleasure of feeling at home was a delicious novelty of which not only the mind but even the body seemed gloriously aware. He enjoyed the approach of sleep, yet struggled against it to prolong the pleasure. As he lay, outside of time, in the dark caverns of half-awareness, he heard feminine movements and feminine voices close by — their proximity, in these domestic surroundings, a fresh delight. He opened his eyes painfully, to see the door just closing softly. He could still hear the voices coming from the hallway, Joyce’s raised in remonstrance, her mother’s complacent and relentless. “Well, dearie, there’s one thing you may come to be grateful for. He doesn’t snore.” He grinned, unalarmed, and fell asleep.
Rosie Hogarth Page 3
