Our Spoons Came from Woolworths

by Barbara Comyns

  I saw the Town Hall and there was Felix Street. In the lamplight the houses looked so pretty. They all had brightly painted doors of unusual colours. Number Seven had a mauve door. I’d never seen one before, and admired it for a moment, then lifted the beautifully polished knocker and gave a small knock. I became braver and gave a large knock that echoed down the still street. There was the noise of a door shutting and the click of high heels and the door opened. The tall woman who opened the door seemed vaguely familiar. I tried to remember where I’d seen her before.

  I said, ‘I’m sorry to be so late, but could I see Mr Peregrine Narrow?’

  The woman looked surprised. She had a large, flabby, white face and looked rather like a determined oyster. She pulled her purple house-coat to make it meet in front and said, ‘Mr Narrow has gone to bed. If you are a model and wish to see him you had better call in the morning. No! on second thoughts, there is no reason for you to call. He is not using models just now. Good night.’

  She began to close the door, and I cried out, ‘Please don’t shut me out. Tell Mr Narrow it’s Sophia. Tell him I’ve come.’

  The woman’s heavy jaw dropped. She looked kind of scared and began to close the door, but I slipped in before she quite shut it. I heard Peregrine shouting something, and he suddenly appeared wearing a dressing gown, the same one I’d worn when my clothes had got all wet. In his hand he held a tooth-brush all neatly spread with tooth-paste. He said, ‘Good God, Sophia! what are you doing here?’

  I went up to him and took his hand and said, ‘Do be pleased to see me, Peregrine. I’ve come earlier than we expected. Do tell this woman about me. Haven’t you told her anything about me at all?’

  She didn’t seem to like being called a woman, because she said, ‘My dear Perry, please tell this little model or whatever she is to leave the house at once,’ and to my amazement, he said, ‘Yes, of course, dear. Sophia, go home like a sensible girl. I’ll come and see you in the morning, really I will. But please go. You don’t realise how late it is or what a disturbance you are making.’

  It was like a nightmare and he was looking so scared — the tooth-brush in his hand was all shaking. I suddenly realised this horrible old woman was his wife, so I said, ‘Peregrine, is this hideous old person your wife? I suppose you have gone back to her because she is keeping you.’ I was so angry and hurt I would have said a lot more, but the ‘hideous old person’ took me firmly by the shoulders and ordered Peregrine to open the door, which he did without looking at me, and I was put outside rather quickly.

  I stood by the mauve front door for a minute or two. I had ideas of kicking it down and breaking the windows, but most of all, I wanted to smash that beastly woman’s face to a pulp. I guessed Peregrine was having a pretty grim time inside, and was glad. After the anger passed I felt so tired and afraid. There was nowhere to go at all, but I walked away. After a time I found myself by the river. I hadn’t the energy or will-power to jump in. I was burning and freezing cold at the same time, and was glad of the warmth that came from Fanny.

  For a long time I must have wandered about without knowing where I was going, but eventually found myself in Fleet Street. In a dark side-turning, I discovered quite an inviting doorstep and thought I’d better sit there till morning and I could think better. I was shivering so much my teeth made awful clicking noises and the pain in my throat was terribly fierce, so I sat there to wait till the morning came.

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  When the morning came I didn’t know much about it. I could hear Fanny crying. She seemed to be a long way away. I knew she was crying because she was hungry — it was such a long time since she had had a meal. I kept dreaming I was feeding her, then I would wake up with a start and she was still crying. It hurt when I opened my eyes. Once I saw several people looking at me. They came near and tried to see Fanny, but I told them to go away, and went to sleep again. Then someone was shouting loud and touching me. It was a policeman, so I guessed they were going to take me to prison for using their doorstep. I tried to stand up so that I could run away, but I couldn’t. Then I discovered they’d taken Fanny away, so I began to cry. The policeman kept asking me questions, but I couldn’t answer. All I could say was ‘Fanny, Fanny’. So he wrote that down. After a time I seemed to go to sleep again.

  The next thing that happened was, I found myself in a police station. They were very kind and tried to give me a hot drink, but I was too sleepy to drink it. A doctor examined me. I asked for Fanny, but she was gone. Tears kept running down my face all the time, and I felt very strange. I tried to tell them to feed Fanny, but the words wouldn’t come properly. I remember being moved about rather a lot. Then a wonderful feeling of comfort came — I was in bed at last, but my heart was beating so loud it seemed to be in my head. There were screens round the bed; all the same, I could tell it was a hospital.

  Days must have passed. Once they showed me Fanny. They said it was Fanny, but she didn’t look the same. Once there was Charles standing by my bed. He was dressed all in white and his face looked kind; but my throat hurt so much I couldn’t talk.

  One morning they took the screen away, and I was in a large ward with fourteen beds in it. They said I was getting better and gave me some soup in a feeding-cup. I listened to the other women talking and after a day or two discovered we had all got scarlet fever. I asked if I could see Fanny and they said I could when I was stronger. She had had fever, too. The nurses were so good and kind, quite different from the ones in the maternity hospital. It was so peaceful. I felt too tired to think about the past or future, and slept most of the time. Sunday was visiting-day. I rather dreaded it because I didn’t want to be reminded of the existence of a world outside. At three o’clock the visitors all trooped in, wearing white coats and hoods to keep the germs off them. One Sunday when I was recovering, Charles came. He was shy to be dressed in those white robes and had them all open in front and did not wear the hood at all. He seemed to be shy of me, too. I asked him how Sandro was and he said he was very well and happy, and the friends he was staying with were willing to keep him till I left the hospital.

  Then I asked him if he had seen Fanny and he replied that he’d seen her once. He looked kind of queer when he said that, and I felt frightened and had a deep, sinking feeling.

  Tell me, Charles, is she dead?’ I asked.

  And he answered, ‘Yes, she died three days after you came here. They showed her to you just before she died.’

  I felt overcome with sadness. Somehow I’d known she was dead all the time. I’d hardly dared to ask after her in case they told me the truth, and now I knew it and there was no escape. If I hadn’t exposed her to a night on a doorstep she might have had the strength to recover. Poor, beautiful little Fanny! her life had been wasted because of stupidity and poverty. I felt everything was hopeless and dreaded the thought of leaving the hospital and facing the grim and beastly life that was waiting for me. I told Charles to go, and pulled the sheet over my face and prayed to die.

  God must have heard, because two days later I had a relapse and was put in a kind of cage, which they put in my bed and filled with electric light bulbs all burning away. It was so hot. I lay all burning and waiting to die. I took no notice of the kind nurse, or Charles when he came. I couldn’t bear to see him, because he belonged to the frightening life I couldn’t face any more. One day I vaguely knew he was there all day, and wished he would go away. People kept coming round all the time. It began to seem as if I was coming out of myself, as if I was floating above my body. It was quite a nice feeling when I got used to it. Then I thought, ‘Now I’m getting dead and I’ll have to meet God and see Him every day for ever, ever more.’ I could imagine Him a slightly dense, angry old man, with woolly hair, wearing a striped blanket, and I seemed to remember reading in the Bible He had feet made of brass, and I thought of heaven as a comfortless kind of place, where you had no bed or fire, no sun, books, or food; you’d never see the leaves blowing about on the trees, everything would be still,
and Moses would be there, and those terrifying brass feet always. I started to say, ‘Please, God, don’t let me go to heaven. Let me just lie in my grave and have some peace,’ but I realised He wouldn’t approve of that. I’d got to be punished for all my sins, so I said, ‘Please, God, let me go on living and have my punishments now, and when they are over let me have a peaceful grave and no heaven.’

  God must have heard that, too, and I was sorry I had thought Him dense. I began to recover, and every day I was better than the one before. Soon I would have to leave the hospital, but didn’t know where to go and I didn’t care either. Then my brother wrote. He had heard how ill I’d been from Ann, and he said I could stay with him and bring Sandro, too, if I liked. It was a relief to have somewhere to go to. He also sent five pounds, for which I was very grateful. The future seemed to be arranging itself without any trouble on my part, as if it knew how tired I was.

  The last day in hospital all my things had to be baked and my hair washed so that I took no germs away. I was sorry to leave. Charles came to fetch me. He had brought some of my clothes in a suitcase. He said the rest of my things were at Ann’s flat. He had given up the flat at Belsize Square and sold the furniture. He paused after he said this as if he expected me to bemoan the loss of my treasures, but I didn’t care hardly at all. Everything seemed so remote now — the Staffordshire china, and round oak table, and sea-green furniture — all seemed so far away. Outside in a taxi Sandro was waiting engrossed in a comic paper. He seemed delighted to see me and was looking so well, and wearing all new clothes the people he had been staying with must have bought him. Charles took us to Paddington and put us on the Leamington train. He seemed very relieved to get us there and shut the carriage door firmly and talked brightly about the lovely time I would have, living with my brother in the country. He seemed to take it for granted that we were going to stay there permanently. I think that was why he sold the furniture in such a hurry, to make sure that we couldn’t return.

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  My brother and his wife agreed it was hopeless for me to return to Charles, or expect any help from him. They said I must get a post as lady cook-housekeeper somewhere in the country where I could have Sandro with me. I hated the idea of being a cook-housekeeper. They advertised in the Telegraph and Times, and quite a lot of replies came. They showed them to me, but I hadn’t the heart to look at them, so my sister-in-law very kindly answered the most suitable letters. She ignored the ones from widowers who required photographs, and lonely men whose wives had left them. After I’d been there three weeks they told me they had arranged for me to go as cook to a gentleman farmer called Redhead, who lived in Bedfordshire. His wife was an invalid and there were two grown-up daughters.

  Joyce, my sister-in-law, helped me to pack my clothes. I only had summer ones and they were long and arty. She said I had better not wear them unless it was terribly hot, and she bought me a tweed coat and a tweed skirt (they were brown) and two woollen jumpers and a pair of brown lace-up shoes and two spotted overalls — the overalls were the nicest things she bought. Sandro had quite a lot of new clothes Charles’s friends had given him.

  When the day came for us to leave I think they were quite sorry to lose Sandro, who had behaved beautifully all through the visit. They must have found me very heavy going, because at this time I’d become completely dull and lifeless. The only thing that I was in the least interested in was Sandro, and I daren’t love him much in case he died or disappeared.

  I dreaded going to the farm, but when I arrived there it was very much better than I expected. Things one dreads usually are: it’s only the things we look forward to that go all wrong. Mr Redhead was a huge, rather pompous man, with a long tweed jacket. He looked rather like Mr Todd. The daughters were large, too, with very fair hair and rosy cheeks. They were called May and Rose and looked just like those names.

  It was two days before I was introduced to the mother. She was quite different from the rest of the family. May took me to her bedroom, which she never left. It was in a frightful state of untidiness and dirt, and she sat in her four-poster bed looking like a princess. She was tiny and fair and perfectly beautiful. There was a white cockatoo perched on the end of the bed and its droppings were everywhere, and there were great holes all over the floor that it had made with its beak, and there were holes in the bed-clothes, too. They were made by small African mice with long legs that lived in a cage by the bed. She would let them loose in her bed and forget about them, and they would take bits of the blankets to make their nests with. At first she thought I was a guest come to stay until May explained I was the new cook, and she said, ‘How nice to have such a charming cook. I hope you will often come and see me, dear, and perhaps you will sometimes take my poor Poodle for a walk. He is getting a very strange shape from lack of exercise.’ On a chair was a great mat of brown fur, which I’d mistaken for an old fur coat. I looked around the room for more animals, but there were only some love-birds in a cage by the window.

  Mrs Redhead took no interest in the house, which was run by her daughter May, who took the housekeeping very seriously. It was a large, uncomfortable place, full of Victorian furniture. The carpets had great holes in them and no one seemed to care. The only comfortable chairs were always filled with smelly, but nice, spaniels. There was never any hot water and there were only lamps and candles, but the family loved their home and after a time I became fond of it, too.

  I stayed at the farm for three years. I cooked large joints on hot Sunday mornings when I longed to be out in the sun; I preserved fruit and made jam and felt like a squirrel in the autumn when I looked at my full cupboards; I cooked pheasants and soufflés for dinner-parties that I didn’t attend, and made cakes for tea-parties for guests that I saw through the kitchen window; I pressed Rose’s evening frocks when she went to dances, and answered the telephone to make appointments for the girls to go riding with their friends.

  All the days were the same except for one black period when Mrs Redhead died. I used to spend most of my spare time in her room, and she would tell me about her youth and get me to take her old ball frocks out of the huge cupboard, and give me accounts of all that had happened where she wore them. She also had a surprising mania for detective stories. They kept coming from Harrod’s in large parcels. As soon as I finished reading one batch another would arrive — she liked me to read to her out loud, and I pretended to like them, too. Sandro would sit on a little stool and listen and enjoyed them almost as much as she did. They would discuss them together when I finished reading. She was very fond of Sandro and paid for him to attend a rather expensive day-school near. I missed her dreadfully when she died.

  The only other event of importance during those three years was that I received a letter from Charles asking me to divorce him. This letter upset and frightened me at first, but eventually I showed it to Mr Redhead, who had heard some of my story from my sister-in-law. He took me to his family lawyer, who arranged for me to have a Poor Person’s divorce, and except for the fact that I had to appear in court to give evidence, it wasn’t too alarming. As far as I know, Charles hasn’t married again.

  After Mrs Redhead died everything went on the same as before. There wasn’t quite so much work perhaps. I had the old poodle and cockatoo in the kitchen and Rose hung the lovebirds in her bedroom. No one wanted the African mice much so Sandro had them in the end, but I didn’t let them make holes in the blankets. The family paid his school fees now. It was a help to have him out of the way during the busy part of the day, because I couldn’t keep an eye on him all the time and Mr Redhead got annoyed if he went about the farm by himself. He was awfully fussy and always thought Sandro was planning to leave gates open or play on the ricks or let the bull out. Actually, he never attempted to do any of these things. He did once stir the bees up with a stick and got badly stung, but no other harm was done. Still, it was good of him to pay for him to go to school.

  I had a charming bedroom in an older part of the house. Sandro had
a small one leading out of mine. I painted the furniture blue and distempered the walls and it became quite homelike. There were large casement windows. Often in the afternoon I would sit on the window-sill and look out on the fields and woods, and, in the distance, the hills; but if I stayed there long I would find myself thinking too much. I would worry about how the years were flying away and all my youth was going. I was twenty-four when I first came to the Redheads. Now I’d become twenty-seven. I hadn’t a single friend; it was years since I had even been out to tea, or had seen a play or film. Except for Sandro there was nothing to live for. The country was beautiful and peaceful, but I found myself longing for London. I would have given anything to walk down a typical London street made of rather dirty yellow bricks, the houses tall and semi-detached, with a flight of steps going up to the front door, and iron railings with rather straggly privet hedges encaged behind, and every now and then a cat asleep on a window-sill. I could imagine a man passing down the street disturbing the giant pigeons by shouting out the name of an evening paper, and a smell of toast in the air, and at the poorer end of the street, small boys would be making a frightful din on their roller skates. I longed to be queen of my own home with all my treasures around me. I would look out of the window at all the beauty, but it wasn’t what I wanted.

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  There were day-old chicks cheeping away round the boiler; the cat had kittens on the mangle, and it was spring again.

  Rose became engaged to a young man she had met quite recently at a dance and they were going to be married almost immediately, so there was great excitement in the house. Parcels of clothes kept coming and they were all piled up on the spare-room bed. Some were lying half out of their boxes and tissue-paper was scattered everywhere. Then wedding presents started to arrive and were massed about in the drawing-room. The old grand piano was quite weighed down by toast-racks. Eventually one leg broke under the pressure of toast-racks, but perhaps it wasn’t only that that caused the leg to fall off, because it was discovered to have worms and had become quite hollow. There were other presents, too, rather dim etchings and rose bowls and some quite nice coffee- and tea-sets, and quite a lot of grand silver objects. May urged Rose to write and acknowledge all these gifts, but she used to hide in her bedroom and eat bars of chocolate and read Holiday House, which made her cry, so May had to write all the ‘thank-you’ letters eventually. Rose was completely lazy, and if I asked her to bring some vegetables from the kitchen-garden, she would say, ‘Yes, darling Mrs F.! I will bring a whole basketful; just tell me what you want.’ And she would pick up a large shallow basket and perch a green, wide-brimmed hat on her head and disappear down the garden. Sometimes she didn’t appear again; other times she would turn up after about an hour with a few pea-pods and a carrot in the basket, and laughing, would say that was all the vegetables there were in the garden.