Rosie Hogarth

by Alexander Baron

  That was their relationship in those days; yet they were always together. She never used, like the other girls in the street, to flirt with boys at the street corner. Sometimes she held court among her girl friends, but mostly she was content to reign over her sisters and her brothers, of whom she treated Jack as one.

  Sitting in the churchyard, gloating over his hoard of dream pictures, he lingered more and more over those in which she appeared. They were all the more poignant because they revived in him emotions that had since been poisoned; the bitter accumulation of later experience, interposed in his consciousness between the present and these visions, made them all the more beatific. By turning the clock back, they enabled him to lay aside his life’s load of disillusionment; and the more transient and tormenting they were, the more he sought their refuge.

  Older than her by nearly three years, and not of her blood, he had always let her lead him about as if he were a younger brother. She would pull her stockings on in his presence, run into his room half-dressed to borrow a comb; once, after swimming, she had pulled her costume down to the waist and lain back on the grass, luxurious in the sunshine. Wonderstruck but abashed, he had loved her with an oafish innocence.

  He could only remember one period, in all the waxing and waning of their relationship when anything might have come of it. He remembered it, tenderly and incredulously, as ‘that year’. Could there really, he wondered (sitting hunched forward on a churchyard bench with his hands clasped between his knees), have been such a time in his life? ‘That year’ — it must have been — he reckoned backward in time — nineteen thirtyeight, when he was nineteen and Rose just turned seventeen.

  It was the last full year before the war, and before the break-up of the household. That was one reason why he cherished the period so fiercely in memory. Nancy was twenty-five, monstrously fat and resigned — she implied by her aggressive cheerfulness — to spinsterhood. Chris, a year younger, was thin and pale, with hair already receding. He was active in the Labour Party and went about his political duties in all weathers, careless of his cough and answering only with a distracted frown his Estella’s incessant demands that he should think a little less about the human race and a little more about her. Alf was twenty-two, driving a lorry, drinking, and a worry to his mother.

  ‘That year’, for Jack and his generation in Lamb Street, was like the brief season of the butterfly’s splendour. It lived in the memory as a year of fine weather. Almost every scene was lit with mellow sunshine. Boys and girls, banded till now in two hostile tribes, cast off like a cocoon the loutish phase of adolescence, and saw each other as they had become; big, handsome lads who lounged at the corner with the relaxed assurance of manhood, and young women invested with that insolent beauty, at once bold and delicate, that reckless precipitancy of movement and seductive independence of manner that London working-class girls transitorily assume in their late ’teens. Male whistles began to express invitation instead of derision. Courting broke up long-established gangs. This youthful community was agitated by calf-love in the mass: calf-love it was, for, although they were all wise in knowledge, there was little vice among them. They were innocent in spirit if not in mind. (Of course the street, like every street, had its slut — Maisie Keenan, a handsome girl with an overblown body, red hair and a big greedy mouth, who thrived on the impatience of the lustier young men.) It was their full summer of youth, and — as if to warn them that their youth was soon to be cut short — the air that year was alive with crisis. Loudspeakers shouted through open windows into the quiet, broad streets. There was a chill touch in the sunshine, like ice in wine. Few knew what strange intoxicant quickened the blood, but all hearts beat a little faster in that year, that last full year of peace. Or so memory said.

  What incredible excitements had abounded in that year! How carefree and buoyant to have lived in the shelter and security of a family, one’s life enlaced down to the finest strand with others, one’s problems never to be faced alone; to have swooped about the streets on bicycles, streaming off to camp every sunny weekend, leaving a trail of laughter floating on the air; to have sat in cafés till one o’clock in the morning, glorying in argument and good fellowship; to have passed one’s days playing football, going to pictures, dancing, swimming, maddened and uplifted by the torrential energy of youth! All his senses had come to life. The gates had swung open to reveal the crowded and illimitable prospect of living that lay before him. To taste was to enjoy, for no gall of experience yet furred the palate.

  It was his most treasured memory, the keenest joy in the scanty store that his life had yielded him, that he had entered upon all this side by side with Rose. The sympathy and the mutual reliance bred in them by years of puppy play had bound them together in the Spring of that year, and had enabled them to share and to sharpen in each other the first full apprehension of life. They had abandoned all their friends and wandered together, in a dual solitude, night after night. The springtime had quickened the mood that was already in them, plying them with all its mild and subtle intoxicants; the damp fresh breeze leaping upon them out of the trees with sudden sighs, the pale leaves whispering above their heads in the blue dusk, the cool rain timidly touching their faces, the sappy scent that perfumed the vast, quiet nights.

  One night —

  (He invoked this memory one evening when the heatwave, gathering interminably, had reached a point where it seemed charged with climax. The air had become suffocating, and all day long everyone had been waiting, waiting; the thick stillness was like a held breath that must soon burst forth, suddenly and violently. The sky over the churchyard was of a bright saffron hue, with the outlines of buildings stamped against it black and hard. Windows glittered with a terrifying blue light. A dense coolness lay upon the city, muffling every sound. He could feel no wind, but leaves came scuttling past his feet. A few fat raindrops, not falling but flying horizontally, burst against his face. Silently the stone path became riddled with black spots. He relaxed in animal bliss as the cool rivulets ran down his skin. Perhaps it was the rain’s touch which took him back to another night of rain. Never before had he been so entirely transported. He smiled as he dreamed, and the past became so real that his lips moved in a silent repetition of old conversations.)

  One night, in the Spring of ‘that year’, he and Rose took shelter from the rain in the porch of an empty house. They were tired, for it was nearly midnight and they had been walking — neither of them had cared where — since nine o’clock.

  “You haven’t had much to say for yourself,” she said. She had, as usual, been talking all the time and he, as usual, had been content to listen, wondering at the eagerness that never left her voice and looking furtively at her exalted, uplifted face.

  He groped for words. He had nothing to say, but he wished he could prove himself her equal. “Oh, I been thinking.”

  “What about?”

  A pretence of cogitation occupied several seconds. Inside his head, all his thoughts fled and mocked him from beyond his reach. “Things,” he said portentously.

  She saw through him at once. “What things?”

  Trapped and despairing, he shrugged his shoulders.

  “Don’t you —?” — she asked fiercely — “don’t you wonder? Don’t you want to — do things?”

  He sought to protect himself by taking the initiative.

  “What things?”

  “Oh,” she cried, “everything!”

  “What things?”

  “I don’t know,” she wailed. “I don’t know. I wish I knew. There’s so many things to do. All these things people do. In books. On the pictures. Look what you read in the papers. How do you start? Don’t you ever wonder?”

  As usual, she had only mystified him, frightened him a little. “I’m all right. Learning a trade. Got something to look forward to.”

  “Look forward to!” she scoffed.

  “Different with you. You’re a girl. Out o’ one job, into another.” She had started work at
fourteen as an usherette in a cinema, inspired by some vague ambition of becoming an actress. A year later she had become an office messenger, and had gone to evening classes until boredom had lured her back from the stuffy schoolroom to the freedom of the streets. She had worked in a shop and had been dismissed, with threats, for borrowing a beautiful dress from stock. Now she was employed in a cigarette factory. There was nothing unusual in her frequent change of occupation: most of the girls in Lamb Street went from one blind-alley job to another until they married. What distinguished Rose, and puzzled her friends, was the ambition — frustrated and inarticulate though it was — that possessed her. She looked on her present job as a temporary set-back.

  “It’s not just a job,” she said, “it’s how you feel. Don’t you see what I mean? It’s what you are. It’s what you do with every bit of yourself. Look!” She held back her hair with both hands and displayed herself. “What am I going to do with all this?”

  Embarrassment forced an ugly snigger from him, and she said bitterly, “All right, you don’t have to say it!”

  He said, “You can’t half talk!”

  She did not reply, and he spoke again. “I never meant —”

  “Never mind.”

  The silence that followed was expressive of their relationship. All that delighted him was in her, and he looked at her, dumbly and oppressed by incomprehension. The things that enchanted her were in herself, and she leaned against the wall in wondering self-absorption. Yet — and this was the one source of intimacy between them — she seemed to need his presence. Tonight, as always, he served as a mirror in which she could interpret her own secrets. However docile and tender the looks she gave him, she never ceased to be withdrawn. Some instinct made him aware of this, awakening a tremor of bewilderment within his happiness. When he spoke he felt like an intruder; she was too attentive, as if it were not his words she was hearing but some echo of her own so far away that she had to strain to listen.

  She touched his coat and said, “You’re not wet.” He put his arm round her waist and she leaned against him. He passed his lips across her cheek and said, “Your face is wet, though.” She uttered a dark little laugh, with closed lips. It was no sudden flare of courage but a subtle and undetected flowering of their common mood that made him kiss her again. They remained in a relaxed embrace, kissing softly. They were nothing more than a unity of animal warmth, inert together, escaped from life, drained of their disparate longings. Immobile, silent, they formed a single dark bulk in the porch until the chimes of midnight awoke them from their trance.

  They wandered homeward in the powdery rain. What was happening, or why, it was beyond Jack’s power to understand. The death of thought had made possible a momentary, perilous contact between them; their senses fed on each other’s nearness, on the silver shimmer of rain that hung round each street lamp, on the sweet scent of privet and the clean smell of black earth and wet pavement, on the mysterious shine of puddles and black roof slates in the darkness. Once they stopped under a lamppost and stood, a yard apart, half looking at each other for a long time while the rain, intensifying, soaked their clothes.

  They wandered into Lamb Street, still apart and silent, smiling to themselves like a pair of happy conspirators. They passed The Lamb and began to cross the road. Footsteps burst upon them, a little cataract of sound pouring out of the darkness behind them as suddenly as if Mrs. Hogarth, who descended upon them, had shot up through the pavement. They were too overwhelmed by her instantaneous appearance to ask how she had thus materialised — it was only in retrospect that the incident provided Jack with one of those tiny mysteries in which memory abounds — and before they could recover their wits she had berated them for staying out late, swept them into the house, poured hot milk into them and packed them up to their rooms, with instructions to get their wet clothes off before they caught their deaths of pneumonia. When he came face to face with Rose in the morning he knew — against all his hopes — that the contact was broken. The imprint of the previous night was effaced from her expression. In the days that followed she showed no signs of responding to — even of understanding — the clumsy overtures to which he resorted. Soon she had found a new passion which took her away from him. The Spanish civil war was at its height. The people of Lamb Street had become aware that poor folk in Spain were fighting for their lives. Every night Chris and his comrades went round the district collecting food and money, and gifts were heaped on them with sacrificial generosity, in one of those blind and beautiful upsurges of human solidarity that sweep their class from time to time. Rose trundled a barrow joyfully. At every meal she harangued the family, her face ecstatic, about her doings. She wished, she told them ardently, she were a boy so that she could go out there and fight. Jack kept sulkily apart — he would have helped, but it felt too much like hanging at Rose’s heels while she walked out with a rival — and Rose, disdainful, forgot him.

  Jack did not pine. There was, in that incredible year, too powerful a stimulus working in his blood. Maisie Keenan had been pursuing him for some time. He had evaded her while Rose had been at his side but now, alone and filled with the fever of life, he began to notice, uneasily, her abundant charms.

  “Been up the Blue Hall, Jack?” she asked him one day.

  “Not yet.”

  “Lovely picture up there. Our Olive says so. I’m goin’ up there tonight. Come with?”

  “I can’t. We’re playing cricket.”

  “Don’t tell ’em! That’s Thursday night. Go on, why don’t you want to come with me?”

  “Who don’t want to go with you?”

  “You don’t.”

  “I never said nothing o’ the sort.”

  “Well, what about it then.”

  “Oh, all right.”

  “Ooh, lovely. Seven o’clock. Don’t bring no apples. My mum’s got tons.”

  That evening they went to the Blue Hall. Jack sat next to Maisie in the stifling heat with one arm round her waist (there was no point in taking her to the pictures unless he did this) and the other, across his lap, clutching her sweaty hand. Occasionally they unlaced themselves from each other to munch apples or lick ices. When they moved together again, she rested her head on his shoulder, and once she moved his hand up so that it rested on her breast.

  It was still light when they came out. The sky was lucent, and the clouds were dark but glowing from within.

  Maisie said, “Ooh, it’s hot, isn’t it?”

  “Yes.”

  “I feel all sticky, like. Don’t you?”

  “A bit.”

  She giggled. “I dunno why. I’ve got hardly nothing on under my dress. Couldn’t you feel, inside?”

  He replied with an embarrassed grunt.

  “Let’s walk round a bit,” she suggested, “before we go back, eh?”

  “All right.”

  “You don’t sound very keen.”

  “Well, what do you want me to do, cheer?”

  “You needn’t if you don’t want to. I know plenty that would like the chance.”

  “There’s no need to carry on. Let’s walk down the Angel.”

  “No, this way.” She steered him in the opposite direction to that which he had suggested, put her arm through his and leaned on him as they walked. They crossed a road and found themselves — to Jack it was sheer chance, but Maisie’s pressure on his arm had been as firm and purposeful as if she were holding the tiller of a boat — walking into Highbury Fields.

  The open spaces of London in the fine weather present a spectacle that recalls the wilder festivals of pagan antiquity. There is so much love going on, and so publicly, that late-comers have to seek far and wide before they can find a resting place. Each park becomes a vast municipal marriage-bed. This hot summer evening was no exception. Every bench was crowded with couples squirming shamelessly upon each other and the fields were littered with living black heaps as close together as unstacked sheaves in harvest time. Hundreds of other people, driven out of their h
omes by the heat, strolled calmly about the paths or leaned over the railings chatting and smoking as if they were watching the monkeys at the Zoo.

  Maisie’s weight grew heavier on Jack’s left arm. Her clutch grew tighter. He could feel the heat of her body through her thin dress. Her hair brushed across his face.

  He looked stiffly in front of him, and they walked in silence for a while. She said, in an awe-struck voice, “Ain’ it awful?”

  “Ain’t what awful?”

  “You know,” she said confidentially, “all this.”

  Jack glanced furtively around him and looked to his front again. “Oh, I dunno.”

  Again a spell of silence.

  “Hundreds of ’em,” said Maisie.

  “Mmmm.”

  “Fancy all these people doin’ it!”

  Silence.

  “I bet you never dreamed so many people did it.”

  “Did what?” he said desperately.

  “You know!” A terrifying pressure on his arm.

  A little while later — “Jack?”

  “Mmm?”

  “I reckon there’s times when you can’t help it.”

  “Oh, I dunno.”

  Another pause. She whispered, “Jack, I reckon that’s what’s wrong with me.”

  “What you mean?”

  “Well, I can’t help it.”

  He made a vague, interrogative noise.

  “Oh, Jack, I know I’m a bad girl. Every time I’m by myself I swear I’ll never do it again. But whenever I’m with a boy I like —” another pressure on his forearm — “and he’s got his arm round me —” she snuggled closer within his encircling arm — “oh, I dunno,” she wailed, “they can do just what they like with me.”

  They had reached the far gate and they stood swaying in a prolonged push-of-war, looking to passers-by like lovers in an ecstasy. Jack won, and they went lurching out of the gate.

  “Anything they like,” she repeated desperately.

  “ ’s funny,” Jack mused, and stared at the opposite side of the road as if the houses there were a novel and entirely wonderful sight.