Rosie Hogarth

by Alexander Baron

  They sprawled for an hour, not moving, in each other’s arms. Lovers of another class are able to use words as a means of communication. Jack and Joyce had not the gift of words. Their only communion was in this prolonged and passive embrace, when their bodies learned to know each other. A heavy sigh from Jack in the shadows, unexplained, a private little laugh from Joyce; these were the only clues, to be thought over later but never discussed, that each could find to the other’s secret personality.

  Joyce was lying back, passionately content once more, with her mouth fastened over Jack’s, noticing the single rhythm of their breathing, as if it were she who was filling and emptying his lungs. They did not speak. In these moments of extreme intimacy each was liberated from the other, enabled to escape from the other into a private world of dream. To Joyce, the animate weight on her arms lost its identity. Jack was forgotten, and with him all the impulses of half-heartedness, shame and contempt that at some other times she could not help feeling towards him. It was no particular man whom she was clasping; merely a man, whom she could invest with any identity that pleased her. The room had become dark but she could still see Jack clearly, for the darkness was transparent, a glassy indoor twilight in which every object in the room was violently outlined. His face, near to her, looked sharp and strong. The lamplight through the gap in the curtains caught the smooth shine over his cheekbones and made his eyes glitter in the dark, endowing him with an appearance of strength and ferocity that he did not possess by daylight.

  The flow of reverie that lulled her was disturbed. His weight on her seemed to have increased. His breathing was out of time with hers. Unformulated questions struggled in her mind. The face close to hers was hostile. Panic clawed icily at her insides and was gone. There were pulse-beats all over her body. She wanted to weep wildly, to stroke his head, to die. She was a human sacrifice to the stranger who held her. Yet even now she could not prevent herself from recording other sensations. The uneven springs of the sofa nudged her back as if in derision. His hair, gleaming with its varnish of brilliantine, would not rumple and stuck out in ridiculous black spikes that sprang stiffly beneath her touch. She was offended by the sickly scent of the brilliantine and by the odour of kitchen soap that clung to his skin. She could even see, while her spirit was stifling in his embrace, white specks of dandruff on his shirt collar.

  What impulse of protest seized her body, or where it came from, she never knew. She repulsed him with a force that was not naturally hers, and felt as if someone else had wrenched him, against her will, from her arms. A second later she was overcome with regret. She could feel her heart thumping. She wanted to pull him down upon her and put an end to her misery. She longed for him to overwhelm her with male rage.

  He said, in a broken voice, “Well, that’s that, eh?”

  She was silent. He said, “End of a perfect day.”

  She had the sensation of weeping inwardly. She searched her mind for words of remorse. She wanted to beg his forgiveness. There were no words. She shrugged her shoulders.

  “I only wanted my rights,” he muttered.

  She tried to tell him, with an imploring look, that she was his for the taking. His face was averted. He said sullenly, “I suppose you’re afraid.”

  She made a harsh sound in her throat, swallowed, and whispered, “Why afraid?”

  He had not understood. He added, “Of getting lumbered, eh?”

  “Lumbered?” Her voice, interrupted by the hint of a sob, was almost inaudible. Her hands refused to move towards him. “Oh, no.”

  He looked at her. The expectant brightness that returned to her eyes in the darkness, the tentative move of her shoulders towards him, told him nothing. She saw only uncomprehension in his eyes. He said, smothered, “I suppose you’re right. It just took me, that’s all. You know.” He hovered, embarrassed. “Been hard day, all that walking. Get to bed early, I reckon, eh? Tired. Best thing.” He said goodnight and kissed her. The kiss left no taste. She did not stir. She could not even summon the flood of tears that might relieve her grief and tell him what her lips could not. She heard his puzzled and shuffling step and the soft click of the door closing behind him. She sat for a little while with bowed head, wrenching her fingers together in her lap. Then she cast herself face downward on the cushions, shaken by tearless, unrelieving sobs: at her cowardice, at the uncontrollable transience of her emotions, and at the realisation that she — a woman of twenty-five — didn’t know what to do for the best.

  Chapter Five

  Jack walked into the workshop next morning too depressed to notice the unnatural solemnity of the “Good-morning’ with which his workmates addressed him in chorus, or the fidgeting gravity with which they watched him go to his bench. He returned an empty “Mornin’ ” and reached to take his overalls from their peg. He pulled; there was resistance; before his mind had awakened he pulled again, impatiently, and there was the sound of tearing. He stopped and found that the legs of the overalls had been tacked to the wall.

  The others were restraining their laughter until he should break into loud and bitter complaint. Denying them the satisfaction he sighed and said, as if to himself, “Ah, well, some people got their goolies where their brains ought to be.”

  Foiled, they tried to save face with a clamour of affability. “Lovely weekend,” said Sam. He was five years younger than Jack, small and squat with an oversize face that was topped by a mop of dirty yellow hair and covered with numerous red knobbles of which his nose was the largest. “Talk about summer everlasting! I reckon we’ll get an ’ell of a winter to make up for it.”

  The two boys, Leo and the fifteen-year-old Tich, broke into deafening and simultaneous judgments on the latest achievements of the Arsenal and the Harringay Racers.

  Sam asked Jack, “ ’Ad it in, this weekend?” His tone was one of polite enquiry: the question was one he might address, out of courtesy, to any friend.

  “I did,” said Leo ferociously. Leo was seventeen. “Smashin’ cob. Parliament Hill Fields. Wanted half-a-crown. I pinned her bloody ears back.”

  “Here,” Sam said to Jack, “what’s up with you, tosh? You’ve gorn as red as a monkey’s arse.”

  “Mind your own,” Jack grunted, pulling his overalls on.

  “Well I was only asking a civil question.”

  “All right, nob. Have a heart. The joke’s over. I want to think.”

  Sam moved away to his bench, showing his willingness to desist. Leo said, “He’s takin’ up Yogo. I seen it on the tele. He’s gonna stand on his head an’ attain Nirvana.”

  “All right, Leo,” Sam said, “leave the bloke alone and give us ’and with this shelving, or you’ll be the one that gets stood on his head.”

  Leo was lanky, with a predatory stoop. People who heard him for the first time were startled at the depth of his cracked, malicious voice. His black hair was plastered down and his face was of an extreme pallor which gave a frightening hint not of weakness but of a sort of fungoid hardihood. His eyes, close-set, small and brilliant, were horribly knowing. He twisted his mouth into an enormous sidelong snarl, said, “Smarrerwitchoo,” struck a fighting attitude, added, “Take on the pair of yer. Alan Ladd. John Garfield. That’s me. See me wi’ my ol’ muscle expander every morning! I’ll slay yer! Give yer the ol’ onetwo!”— and went obediently back to his work.

  Tich, who stood scarcely bench-high, and who looked like a rosy-cheeked little cherub in frayed long trousers, helped to pull the dust sheets from the mahogany counter which it was Jack’s task to finish. It was a beautiful piece of work, designed for one corner of a tobacconist’s shop. Jack, whose work on it had been a labour of love, looked on it as a poem of flawless curves and imperceptible joints. Whenever he had an object like this to make, something for which he was personally responsible, his work would cease to be a resented drudgery, the days would fly past, he would quit unwillingly in the evenings or even readily consent to put in overtime. His pride in it was tinged with a heaviness of heart, for
after today, when he had finished smoothing it off, the polishers would come for it. His beloved child would have gone out into the world and he would have to join Sam and Leo in the detestable task of turning out innumerable yards of shelving and cutting it up into required lengths.

  He began working on the counter, enjoying the even, experienced rhythm into which his body lapsed, the pleasant stress on his muscles and the relief of focusing his mind wholly on a single, uncomplicated object. At work, with the flight of time accelerated, and the warm air cosily laden with the smells of sawdust and boiling glue, he was able to rock all the unneeded part of himself to sleep. The burden of yesterday’s failure slipped from him. He forgot the loss of painfully-acquired confidence with which the repulse had left him, the recriminations he had heaped on himself for his inability to master Joyce, and the despondency he had felt at what he took to be the proof of her coldness. Even the name of Rose, which for the last two weeks had been sounding like a bell through the confusion of his thoughts, grew faint.

  The morning slipped by. He was surprised to realise, when Tich came round for the tea money, that the time for the mid-morning break was at hand. Leo’s voice, as ceaseless and irritant as the nagging of a circular saw, had been droning in the background of his consciousness; now he became aware of it. “Wotcha gonna do when you lose your job, mate? Sell bootlaces or push a barrel organ?”

  “Eh? You talking to me?”

  “I ain’t talking to Gandhi, mate.”

  “What you talking about, lose my job?”

  “Slack times, mate.” Leo’s face was twisted into an expression of ferocious relish. “Read the papers, mate. Prices goin’ up. Less money to spend. Less shops to fit. Less jobs for us. Bash! Crash! Fini la guerre! Give ’im ’is cards!”

  “Give who his cards?”

  “You, mate, you. Look in the mirror and say howdo to a mug.”

  “Me? Why me?”

  “Last on, first orf. That’s logic, ain’ it? We’ve all been here longer than you. You’ll be the first to go.”

  “Go ’way! You’re dreaming!”

  “Oho, I’m dreaming, he says. You ask the guv’nor how he’s fixed for orders. Here —” he called the attention of the others with a derisive gesture at Jack — “who’s dreaming round here? Who’s getting wed with his head in the clouds? Me or ol’ Jack Fishcakes?”

  Sam hooted with laughter and shouted, “Give ’im ’is cards!”

  Tich, from the door, squeaked, “Give ’im ’is cards!”

  “If you had the sense to read a proper newspaper,” Leo went on mercilessly, “’stead of readin’ up the rapes in the ol’ Pictorial, you’d have some idea what was going on. Budgets. Scares. Slumps. Speeches. All sorts. A proper muckup, I can tell you.”

  “Well,” Jack said — miserably, for, although he had been able throughout the dreamy heat of the summer to ignore the world in the rush of his own life, the unread headlines had gathered about his consciousness like black bogeymen prying for admission, “I don’t see what you got to laugh about.”

  The others roared and screeched with laughter. They had started without any particular malice. It was their custom, from day to day, to relieve the tedium of work by baiting one or another in their midst. If Jack had responded with spirit they would have left him alone, perhaps turned on Tich. But his lethargic resentment only provoked them further. Moreover, the subject that had now arisen was one on which their inner fears were as deep as his. They could, by hounding him, create in themselves the transient illusion that they were exempt. They yelled in chorus, “Give ’im ’is cards!”

  Tich came in with four cups of tea on a tray. He served the others and brought the remaining cup to Jack. Jack took the cup. He stared at his workmates, who were standing in subdued attitudes, in one of those strange, sudden silences that seem pregnant with uproar. Oppressed by a wondering half-suspicion, he poured the contents of the cup down his throat in a single long swallow. “Here!” he exclaimed, “Sugar boat gone down or something? Tastes like bloody leather, this tea. Here —” he tasted the bitterness in his mouth and looked down into his cup — “what you? —”

  The explosion came. “Oohoo!” Sam danced about, flinging out his arms in ecstasy. “He’s done it! He’s drunk it!” Tich sat on the floor with his arms pressed across his waist, doubled up with mirth, shrieking, “He’s drunk it! Oh, Leo, he’s drunk it! All at one go!”

  “Here, I say —”

  “Get your running pumps ready.” It was Leo, leering with triumph. “You got a gut full of Epsom salts, mate.”

  He felt a leap of fury: at them, and at himself for being stupid and confused instead of confounding them with some unexpected act of retaliation. He restrained himself: he was ashamed of the depths of rage and resentment he might reveal if he lost control. He sighed harshly and turned away from them.

  Throughout the rest of the morning, and after a silent, sullen lunch-hour, he toiled at the counter. The accumulated unhappiness in his life had not been dispelled by his happy summer, but had settled deep within him like a heavy sediment. Stirred up by the trifling events of the morning, this sediment rose to cloud his thoughts. Waves of anger overcame him; against his workmates; against the world which, he persuaded himself, they represented; against himself; and against Joyce. His movements became self-conscious and needle pains of fatigue stabbed his back and shoulders. Under the stress of anger his thoughts became childish. Who did Joyce think she was, denying him, teasing him, laughing at him? Oh, yes, he knew that she laughed at him! It wasn’t as if she was such a catch. He had pretended not to hear when the ’Erbs on the street corner had called, “Flossie Four-Eyes!” after her; but he had heard, and had felt ashamed. All the time, he heard inside him, ‘Rose, Rose, Rose, Rose!’ He could have got something better than Joyce. There was Rose, asking after him, sending him messages through Mick and Nancy, inviting him to see her. He’d been square with Joyce. All these months without a woman. It was as much as a chap could bear. Here he was, working at King’s Cross within a few minutes’ walk of Rose’s flat, coming here to work every day for months, and never once (thus he represented his weakness to himself as strength) had he gone to see her. ‘Oh, Rose, Rose, Rose!’

  And these others, bloody civvies, never suffered in their lives, jeering at him, taking advantage of his patience. He wanted to fight, or to run away; to go berserk, or to bury his head in a warm lap. His workmates, like banderilleros plying their darts, assailed him each time he looked up with the cry, “Give ’im ’is cards!” Now there were all these things Leo had thrown up at him, the things in the newspapers, the besieging calamities he had always stubbornly ignored or shrugged away; the incomprehensible doings of cold-faced strangers, faraway and utterly outside his control, that might (but how, how, how?) blot out even that tiny gleam of hope for a secure and settled life towards which, in war and peace, he had spent his whole adult life trudging. “Give ’im ’is cards,” his workmates jeered, “Give ’im ’is cards!”

  “That’s what you think.” It was late afternoon, and he could stand their goading no longer. Feeling shamed by his silence, the evidence of his obtuseness, he had been trying for some time to think of a suitable remark. Now he produced it. “Even if someone does have to go — which I don’t believe — it won’t be me. For one thing, I’m the best tradesman here. For another —” he looked around him in ponderous triumph — “I’m a bloody ex-serviceman.”

  Sam said, “What’s ’at got to do with it?”

  “Bloody ex-chump,” Leo jeered. “You never knew no better, that’s all. There’s plenty had the brains to keep out. Not ol’ Jack Fishcakes, though.”

  “Why, you little —” Jack swung his hand at Leo. Leo ducked and punched Jack on the nose. Jack went after him. “I’ll slaughter you,” he gasped, “cheeky little bastard you are. I’ll smear the bloody floor with you. I’ll show you what bloody for. I was fighting for you when you was eating bloody bread and drip in the infants’ school.” Leo retreated, cr
ouching pugnaciously behind his clenched fists, pulling fearsome faces, ducking and prancing about as if in a demonstration of shadow-boxing. “Come on, hit me! Come on, give yer a dollar if you can hit me! Whoa, come on, you can do better than that. Middle-age spread, that’s your trouble.” He hit Jack. “Senile decay.” He hit Jack again. “Monkey glands, that’s what you want.” He hit Jack again and pranced easily out of reach. Jack halted, scarlet and breathless.

  Leo began to sing, “Old soldiers neVAH die, neVAH die, neVAH die.” Sam and Tich joined in. “They only fa-a-aade — ay-way.”

  Jack turned on Tich and sent him sprawling across the floor with a mighty clout. Tich began to blubber loudly. Jack stood over the boy, appalled. Then he glared at Leo and Sam and strode out of the workshop into the street.

  He walked up to the main road. At this point, between King’s Cross Station and Caledonian Road, the foot of Pentonville Road forms a bottleneck through which a continuous torrent of traffic pours. Buses on half-a-dozen routes, taxis shooting to and from the station, private cars, heavy goods wagons, swing in and out of the eight thoroughfares which converge in this vicinity, in a chaos which the traffic police control to their own seeming satisfaction but which leaves pedestrians bewildered and, when scurrying across the road, in constant peril of their lives.

  He went into a teashop and sat at a table near the window. He looked out through the plate glass windows, at the snarling, charging herds of traffic and at the hurrying crowds whose white, hostile faces stared in at him. The hideous mingling of noises — voices, pneumatic drills, roar of wheels and engines, freezing scream of gears, clattering crockery, vibrating rumble from the Underground — became unbearable. He sought refuge in memory. The noise lost significance in his ears. His eyes emptied as he looked, beyond the narrow, black-walled street, into the past. He was back in Sicily. He looked out, over a parapet, at an olive grove, at a stretch of vineyards, at a wide sunlit landscape. The sky was vast and blue. Hills rose in the distance, and the great blue shadow of Etna, snowcapped. He was crawling along a shallow ditch. He rejoiced at the burning touch of the sun on his skin. He could hear his heart thumping and feel an icy exhilaration in his blood. His hand pushed through white dust, warm and powder-soft. He was crawling along the ditch, and the sweat was trickling coldly on his body. He dared not lift his head. The buzz of a mosquito was loud in the shimmering silence. A mine exploded in the distance. He crawled on. He lay still, and the exhilaration, fear-fed, raced through his veins as voices came from nearby: German voices, muffled by the heat and by the dust-blanketed earth, German voices from the trench past which he was crawling. He moved one hand silently forward, then a leg, then a lift of his body, then the other arm and the other leg; silently, inch by inch. The voices were relaxed, unsuspecting. He crawled on. The voices grew faint behind him. There was a shadowy bulk above him: his objective. He eased himself up out of the ditch and, lying full length on the ground, picked blackberries from the lower part of the hedge which he had crawled half a mile in broad daylight, through the enemy positions, to reach. His steel helmet lay upsidedown by his side and he filled it. When he had filled it he picked more berries, eating as much as he could, till his chin and fingers were purple-stained. Then the long crawl back, pushing the laden helmet in front of him, past the Germans, across the plain, into the vineyards and, with a crouched, scuttling run, back to the olive grove. He was full of laughter and exultation, drunk with the vanity and madness of youth. He passed the helmet round among the platoon. The men ate berries and passed insulting, admiring remarks. He was Mad Jack Agass. Twenty-four years old. The men around him were his friends. They would follow him anywhere. Among them, he was never inarticulate, his mind was never sluggish. He always had a quick answer. They roared at his jokes. He was a man who knew how to dare.