Rosie Hogarth

by Alexander Baron

  “How’s the job going, anyway?” Mr. Wakerell was saying.

  “Oh, not too badly,” said Fred. “As you say, it’s satisfying. Or it would be, if we were able to do all we wanted for the kids instead of just teaching them enough to read the football scores and fill in a pools coupon. We might —” he glanced demonstratively at Jack — “get better results.”

  Jack took no notice. He sat with his head cocked on one side, sheltering behind a rubicund grin that made him look like a ventriloquist’s dummy. The chatter of the women on one side of the room and of the men on the other combined as treble and bass, but made no more sense to him than a background music to his thoughts. September, nineteen thirty-nine: how far away it seemed now! There had been trouble in the Hogarth family that summer, but in the tranquil days at the end of August it was all over. Chris had been ill, brought down at last by the exhaustion and the exposure to all weathers which his political work had entailed: there had been a terrible quarrel, as he lay sick, between him and his wife, who after a few months of marriage had declared herself “fed up with it all.” Kate had reconciled them, had made Chris promise to take a long rest from his activities for his own and his wife’s sake, and had dug down, as she so often did, into the apparently bottomless depths of her savings, to give them enough money to go away for a holiday together — an enterprise which was planned for the end of September. Alf was going with a blowsy girl who played the piano at The Lamb. Kate had surprised them all by going off on her own to Broadstairs to spend — she had told them — a week with some friends of her girlhood. The children, she had pointed out, were old enough to look after themselves, and it was time — no, she did not want Nancy to come and keep her company — for her to have a bit of a change. Everybody had agreed that it was a plucky thing for a woman in her forties to do; she had thoroughly enjoyed herself, and had returned home the evening before war was declared.

  “— Tea’s ready,” announced Joyce, who as usual had been doing all the work. Everybody rose and Jack, feeling drugged and distant after his mental wanderings, followed reluctantly. He ate little. The noise at the tea-table annoyed him. He sat hunched over his plate, chewing like a ruminant cow and rarely looking up, returning brief and sullen replies to the remarks that were addressed to him. He could feel Gwendoline’s contempt and Joyce’s dismay, and his self-consciousness made him all the more surly. Tea over, he followed the others back to the parlour. He tried, for a while, to be more sociable, racking his brain for something to talk about, flashing an occasional panic-stricken glance at the clock to see how the time was passing, and wishing that Joyce, who was still in the scullery washing up, would come back to sit on the arm of his chair.

  Mrs. Wakerell sat in her armchair like a female Buddha, sucking jam-pips from between her teeth and compressing her lips from time to time in a ladylike substitute for a belch. She turned from her conversation with Gwen. “Come here, Jack,” she said.

  Jack rose obediently and stood before her like a small boy summoned by his mother.

  “Button your jacket up,” she commanded. He obeyed.

  “There,” she said to Gwendoline, “it’s not a bad fit, is it?”

  Gwendoline looked him frigidly up and down, like an officer inspecting a soldier on parade. “You won’t let him wear that for the wedding, will you?” she rapped. “That blue is too bright. Too much padding in the shoulders. Trousers too wide in the leg. Turn-ups too big. I don’t know what my family would say if they saw him like that.”

  Joyce had come back into the room. She was staring at Jack, waiting for him to hit back. Jack could manage only a vast, imploring grin and a feeble, “Here —!”

  Joyce sank quietly on to the edge of a chair, her hands clasped in her lap. Her head was bowed. “You know a lot,” she said to Gwendoline in a hostile voice. To Jack, standing helpless, it seemed that she had accepted the decision of the other two women to discuss him in his presence as if he were no more than a dummy.

  “I know what’s common,” replied Gwendoline sharply.

  Jack was in a daze of misery. He did not know at which of the women to look, and when he turned his head the muscles of his neck were stiff. He did not know how to stand, or what to do with his hands, or how to escape from where he stood.

  “Don’t you worry, Gwendoline dear,” Mrs. Wakerell said comfortingly, “Our Jack’s not common. We’ll have him fitted out properly for the wedding. He’s a nice, quiet feller.” She beamed at Jack, and he felt a little quiver of rage inside him. He hated her when she called him “a nice, quiet feller.” He, Jack Agass! — who had — he consoled himself and infuriated himself with memories of the violent adventures in which he had shared. Oh, if these women only knew the things he had done, the things he was capable of doing! They had better look out or he would show them! One day, he would show them! A nice, quiet, feller! His legs trembled. Mrs. Wakerell went on, “Eight pounds a week besides overtime. It’s not every girl who can look forward to marrying that. And he’s got a bank account, and nearly five hundred pounds in it, and he’s given Joyce her own cheque book.”

  Jack waited, and he saw that Joyce, flushed and resentful, was waiting, for the customary command to “run upstairs and fetch it, there’s a dear!” But Mrs. Wakerell reached instead for her handbag. “Here it is,” she said complacently, rummaging and producing it. “See for yourself.”

  Joyce cried, “Mum!”

  “It’s all right, my dear. I took it from your dressing-table yesterday to show Mrs. Balmforth, and I forgot to put it back. I’m sure there’s no harm in that — your own mother!”

  Jack went and sat on the arm of Joyce’s chair. She looked at him despairingly and laid her hot hand on his. Neither of them spoke. Mrs. Wakerell said, “Go and sit on the couch, there’s a good boy, you’ll ruin that armchair with your weight on it like that.”

  Animals obeying their trainers must feel as Jack felt when he slunk across to the couch. Gwendoline moved up with the air of a bus passenger who is being squeezed by a rude interloper, and Jack lowered his body warily into the far corner. There was a little room left between himself and Gwendoline, and he looked eagerly at Joyce, in the hope that she would come over to him. She was not looking his way. She had recovered from the mood of a moment before and was discussing interior decoration with her mother and Gwendoline: their talk was a clash of enthusiastic shrillnesses. Jack felt snubbed, resentful at her for not sharing his social inadequacy. He leaned back in his corner of the couch, his arms lying along the leathern rests, and glared at the ceiling. The more humiliating and difficult the present moment, the easier he found it to escape to the past. He lost his grip on the talk that was going on around him; people and objects became shadows, surfaces and colours moving about without meaning before his eyes. Areas of the brain and nerve centres, performing a sort of rearguard action on behalf of the rest of him, remained alert, enabling him to turn his head towards whoever spoke to him, to smile feebly when required, and to produce a series of remarks which came as meaninglessly to his own ears as the talk of the other people in the room. Thus protected, his real self fled back to nineteen thirty-nine.

  * * *

  ...the evening before the declaration of war: Lamb Street is lying quiet and uneasy in the sunlight: an occasional shout echoes as disturbingly as in a church. The family takes Kate to The Lamb to celebrate her return with a few drinks before supper. The quiet has invaded the saloon bar. Mick has been out of town for days on some unspecified business. Bernie and several of his cronies have already departed to their Territorial regiments. The children have been evacuated and their parents sit in the bar in despondent attitudes, sipping their beer in silence. The door bangs and the clatter of feet disturbs the anxious hush as the Hogarths walk in. Faces are upturned. Subdued ‘good evenings’ are exchanged. A child’s smile flits across Barmy’s tortured face. Kate pauses at the bar and says to him, “It’s been a lonely week for you my pet, hasn’t it? The both of us away? How are you, love, all merry and br
ight?”

  Barmy: “You look happy, Kate.”

  Kate: “Like a young girl.”

  Barmy: “I don’t wonder.”

  Kate: “My poor lamb. Do you hate me for going off like that?”

  Barmy: “I’m glad you’re back.”

  Kate: “Bless you.”

  The family seat themselves at a round table and Barmy brings their drinks. Jack and Alf are talking gloomily about the prospect of being conscripted. Alf suggests ways of keeping out of it. Rose breaks in passionately, calls them a pair of miseries, asks them if they aren’t excited and ends, breathless with indignation, “Oh, if I were a man!” Alf says, “Well, you go and fight then. I’ll stay behind and wear a pinnie. I ain’t proud.” Chris begins, in his bleating voice, to explain why this is a people’s war, for which every man should volunteer. His wife shuts him up, with a gleam of angry tears in her eyes. Alf says, “When Nelson gets his eye back, I’ll volunteer.” Alf and Jack have, after agreeing on how to remain civilian, been driven by some mysterious alchemy of the spirit into an argument about the respective merits of the Tank Corps and the Air Force, which they carry on with schoolboy enthusiasm and violence. Barmy says to Kate, in a frightening voice, “I’d poison ’em all before I let ’em go!”

  Kate: “Don’t say such things.”

  Barmy: “I thought you knew better, Kate. I thought you knew what it does to a man.”

  Kate: “I know what it does to a woman.”

  Barmy: “And you sit there smiling!”

  Kate: “We’ve got enough troubles now, without worrying about those we’ve had and those to come. Now let’s forget it, all of us.”

  Chris: “It’s no use trying to shirk our responsibilities, Mum.”

  Kate: — all her children look up as they hear her cry in a voice that they have never heard before — “Shut up, all of you. I’ve had enough of it for one lifetime, I tell you! God only knows how much longer we shall be together! But I’ve got my children round me now, and I’m not going to think of anything else. Now, all of you, not another word about it, do you hear?” Jack, glancing at her in surprise, is too late to catch the mood: she is serene again. She says, “Aren’t we a silly lot of moos?” The scene is set. Capricious memory has made its selection, posed its subjects. The family will have more good days together, for the end, which is not yet, will be gradual like a decay. More significant things will happen to Jack and around him. He will live through episodes which will seem to him at the time dramatic and unforgettable. But memory will let them all slip from its grasp. It clicks the camera, and this undistinguished tableau is imprinted on the consciousness for ever. Kate, his guardian angel, his more-than-mother, his dream of human perfection to sustain him amid all the ordures and disillusionments of life — Kate sits upright, yet placid and relaxed. Her piled black hair shines beneath the tepid lights. Her gaze is profound with secret knowledge, yet it rests on her family with contentment and repose. Her boys are all bigger than her, but they sit in attitudes of deference, and she seems to rise above them as if they were little children once again. Oh, Kate, Kate, beloved Kate...

  * * *

  And here he was, ten years later, not ten years richer but ten years emptier of heart. Here he was sitting among strangers — yes, they were strangers, like all the rest of the world — unvalued and — he was sure of it — despised. These bouts of memory were like drugs; they left him depressed, physically as well as spiritually. He felt less confidence than ever in face of the people in the room, more distaste for their company. Even Joyce, to whom he might have turned for comfort, ignored him.

  “No,” he heard himself saying. Mrs. Wakerell was in front of him with a bowl of fruit. “No, honest, I’m full up. Honest, full right up I am.” ... Had it been that evening, in that moment, when the link with life snapped? Or had it been that other moment six months later, that other scene which he loved to run through his mind, again and again, like a reel of film? — when the five faces had sped backward past the window of his railway carriage and vanished among a crowd of white faces and waving hands? — when he had settled in his seat, jaunty, alone, with Kate’s sandwiches in his pocket and Rose’s parting kiss still warm on his mouth? — when his heart had been filled with the wild and stifling hopes which that kiss, unaccompanied by any spoken pledge, had aroused? — when jaunty, alone, grinning at his fellow-passengers, he had felt the first chill of terror spreading through him as the train clattered over the points and bore him out into a vast and cruel world? — when childhood and youth and all that was sweet in life vanished in a swirl of white smoke?

  After all, he had assured himself in the months that followed, home was still there to go back to. Too busy to think or to feel, in his new world of marching, shouting, sweating, stabbing at sacks, shooting at dummies, he had glanced at letter after letter, not perceiving that ‘home’ was crumbling away. Alf called up to the Service Corps: Chris trying to join up, being rejected and informed that there was a spot on his lung, working day and night in a war factory, falling ill, working again, falling ill again, creeping back to work, falling ill again and again: Rose scribbling an occasional letter, killing with her indifference the baseless hopes her kiss had aroused, dashing off at last on a madcap impulse and joining the A.T.S.: Nancy in munitions and drafted to the North: and in the end Kate, alone in her house, writing letters to them all. Perhaps they had all looked forward, as he had, to reunion, not realising that the march of life had scattered them for ever. For ever...

  The visitors were leaving. He bade them mechanical goodbyes, coming out of his shell sufficiently to notice how Gwendoline managed to impart even to her handshake — or rather, finger-squeeze — an impression of frigid superciliousness; and how reluctantly Fred — that obedient son whose marriage had been his crowning act of obedience to his mother — quit his father’s side and followed his wife out of the house like a ticket-of-leave man going back to jail.

  It was late in the evening. When the door had closed behind the departing guests Mr. Wakerell yawned, stretched himself and shambled off to the rear of the house, where he could be heard bolting doors and closing windows for the night. Mrs. Wakerell said to Joyce, “What a day, dear! I’m worn out, and that’s a fact. You’ll clear up, won’t you?” — and with a blithe “goodnight” she lumbered up to bed.

  Jack and Joyce, left alone in the parlour, moved about the room without speaking, gathering up cups and saucers, emptying ashtrays, straightening chairs and corners of rugs. Jack felt relieved, but tired and confused as if he had been sleeping in the sunshine. He tried to think of something amiable and conciliatory to say to Joyce, something that would enable them both to laugh away the day’s ordeal; but his brain and tongue were too sluggish.

  Joyce seemed to be absorbed in her own thoughts, heedless of him even when she passed close by, her face downcast and frowning; she gave vent to little flurries of furious energy, thumping and shaking at cushions as if they were naughty children and crashing cups and saucers on to the tray without regard to their fragility. At last, without looking at him, she muttered — as if she were trying to restrain with her teeth the words that some inner force was driving out of her — “You didn’t have much to say for yourself.”

  Jack had almost reached the point of framing a coherent sentence. Joyce’s remark struck into him and sent his carefully-gathered words flying like skittles. While his mind, utterly startled, tried to scrabble the words together, his bottled-up emotions forced another reply out of him, and he heard himself cry, “What about you?”

  “Oh?” Joyce’s voice was thick with humiliation, still unsteady with the battle between rage and restraint. “I suppose I sat like a dummy all day long, staring up at the ceiling with my mouth open? I suppose I showed the family up? I suppose I made my fiancée look like a fool? I suppose I mumbled, “Eh?” and “Yerh” and “Oomm” every time an intelligent remark was addressed to me?”

  Jack, too, tried to keep his voice under control. “And I suppose I let
myself be ordered about like a skivvy? I suppose I let my mum help herself out of my dressing table and flash my cheque book all over the place? Some hopes, I bet!”

  “You’re the one to criticise, I must say!” Joyce’s voice had risen by half an octave. She went on with her work in a stifling silence. For a moment Jack, trying to hold his own feelings in check, hoped that she had regained control of herself. Then she burst out, “A fine object you are to cart about! The answer to a maiden’s prayer, and I don’t think!”

  “Good enough for you, I can tell you! You ain’t exactly a prize packet. You go and look in the mirror if you don’t believe me. When I think of the lovely girls I’ve —” His voice shook. “Strikes me you don’t know when you’re lucky!”

  “Lucky!” Her voice quavered so wildly that he grinned, and enraged her further. “I’ve had men after me that would make you look like two pennorth of old rope!”

  “Yerh! Sing us another one!”

  Joyce’s voice grew shriller and more strained. “And when you find yourself in decent company you might try and act up to it.”

  “Meaning?”

  She did not reply.

  “Meaning I ought to ponce and prance about like that sister-in-law of yours, I suppose? Hold my teacup like this? —” He snatched up a cup and held it by two fingers with grotesque effeminacy. “— And stick my little finger out like this? Ooh, Fred, deah, pawss the sugah, naice weather we’re heving, dewn’t you think? Gah! ’Cher think I am? A bloody lapdog?”

  “I’d be satisfied if you acted like a man, never mind a lapdog.”

  “Man? Me?” He uttered the words as bleats of incredulous dismay. “Here! —” He stood with his mouth open, breathing loudly. “Me?” He almost squealed the word. He tried to think of a fitting reply, but was able only to expel a horrified, “Gaw!” After a pause he said in a dull stubborn, voice, “Well, if you feel like chuckin’ it in —”