by Paul Gallico
“Rose.”
“Rose what?”
“Just Rose.”
“How long since you’ve eaten, Rose?”
She gave him a straight answer. “I had a cuppa this morning.”
He got up and leaned over the table to help her out of her coat. The bird on his shoulder suddenly began to scream and scold and flap its wings, and then made to fly at the girl’s face. The man reached up and seized it, saying, “Come back here and shut up, you black bastard!” He felt into his side pocket and produced a rubber band therefrom which he twisted three times around its beak, effectively silencing it. He then tossed it over in the direction of an empty coat hanger on the wall and said, “Stay there!” The bird obeyed him, flew, and perched on the wooden peg and regarded them resentfully. “Raffles is inclined to be jealous,” he remarked.
Rose repeated, “Raffles!” And the name brought something to her mind, something she could not at first catch and then did—the poster out in front of the theatre and the grotesque clown. She pointed at the man and said, “You’re—”
“Jackdaw Williams, at your service.”
Rose stared at him without self-consciousness. “But you—”
“—look ever so much better without make-up, I hope you were going to say,” he concluded for her.
Rose smiled and said, “I didn’t recognise you.”
Williams merely nodded and said, “Shall we start off with hot soup? What after that? Would you like eggs? Maybe you want to have something a bit more solid.” He inspected the gravy-stained menu. “There’s roast beef on.” He looked at her and she assented.
He gave the order, and while they waited for the soup to appear he asked, “Where were you going?”
She replied, “To the railway station.”
“To sit up all night, eh?”
“How did you know?”
He regarded her out of the drawn down lids of his eyes. “Well, for one thing,” he replied, “there are no more trains out of here tonight, and for another—I know.”
When the soup came with two slabs of greyish bread, she broke the slices into it and commenced to eat voraciously.
Williams said, “Eat slow, or you’ll chuck it all up later.”
She did slow down somewhat, but said, “Its all right, I’m used to it. I’m hungry.”
He said, “I know. Hungry one day—two days—fill up the next. The stomach can get used to it—”
She stopped and looked at him curiously. “You know?” she asked.
“Yes, I know. I wasn’t always top of the bill.”
Hearing this she suddenly smiled a sunny smile at him, admitting him thus to co-membership in the fraternity of hunger.
During the meat course she stopped savouring the food for a moment to enquire with a forthrightness that was characteristic of her, “When you spoke to me, did you want a girl tonight?”
“Yes,” replied Williams. But it was simply an answer to her question, and he pursued the subject no further. He asked her about herself and she told him a little of the struggle to find and keep a job. He confided that he did the music halls only over the winter. In the summer he was with the circus. His engagement on that particular bill was terminating that night. He bought her a slab of apple tart and two cups of coffee, and then paid the bill. He said to Rose, “You got no place to go tonight, have you?”
“No.”
“Would you like to come home with me?”
“Home?” She was not questioning the nature of his invitation but expressing surprise at his use of the word, whose implications always had such a forceful and saddening effect upon her. How would a variety performer and circus clown playing a week’s stand in a mill town have a home there?
He said, with a kind of half smile, “Supposing we go and have a look at it and then you can decide?”
He collected his overcoat and bird and she followed him out of the door, her curiosity fully aroused and her confidence established. He walked around the corner of the cafe to the parking lot where over to one side, illuminated by the lights from the filling station, stood a van. From its roof extruded a funny crooked chimney, and windows had been cut into its sides. Painted upon it was the face of the clown, the one she had seen on the posters, and in golden strangely shaped letters the words JACKDAW WILLIAMS.
Williams opened the rear door of the van, pulled down a short ladder, climbed up inside, and snapped on an electric light.
Rose looked within. There was an unmade bunk with dirty, crumpled blankets and a home-made sink with dirty dishes in it. Cigarette butts and ashes were about and remnants of food. None of these things shocked or appalled her, for she was used to them. But it was compact, tight, and cosy. The man had called it home.
Williams made no apology for its condition. He did not even bother to straighten out his bunk. On the opposite side was a long locker which he opened, and she saw costumes and gear inside. From it he withdrew another blanket and a soiled pillow which he threw onto the locker, and said, “You can sleep here, if you want to.” He reached down for the suitcase. Rose handed it to him and followed. He pulled the ladder up after her and closed the door, turning the handle from inside, locking it. He was home.
Some time during the night Rose awoke. She heard the man in the bunk opposite stir.
Williams said, “Rose? Are you awake?”
“Yes.”
“I’m cold. Come over here into my bed.”
“Must I?”
“No, you mustn’t. Suit yourself.”
Rose said, “Earlier on when you spoke to me you said you wanted a girl. I told you I wasn’t selling it.”
In the darkness Williams laughed. “I’ll get along,” he said. “I didn’t ask you in for that.” Then he added, “It’s just that I was cold—and lonely.”
The word “lonely” twanged like an arrow and quivered in Rose’s heart. Funny kind of man who lived alone in a wagon with a bird and who understood about hunger and hardship. “I’m cold too,” said Rose.
“Then come over here to me. I’ll warm you.”
“All right,” said Rose. She went over and got into his bed. At first he only held her close, warming her. Later he made use of her. It didn’t seem to matter.
In the morning he made them breakfast out of a dirty coffee pot and greasy frying pan, and they ate it together.
He said, “I’m driving on to Chester. That’s my next stand. I’ve got three days at the Alhambra. You can stay if you like.”
Rose said, “All right.” And that was how she came to remain with him.
When, after his three-day stay in Chester, Williams turned his van south-west to drive to his next engagement, Rose was still with him. At night when he came home after the last show she was waiting up for him. They either went to a nearby cafe for something to eat or Rose would fix him a meal. And when he went to bed sometimes she went with him.
For that matter, nothing was said at all about whether she was to remain with him, or for how long, or be turned out at the next stop; whether or not he liked her or even found her attractive. Williams seemed mainly occupied with his own thoughts and spoke very little. His four performances a day seemed to absorb a good deal of his energy and at night he was tired. Sometimes he made brief, disinterested, and almost absent-minded love to Rose, and sometimes he did not. But at no time did he ever speak any words of affection.
He lived in his wagon like a pig amidst unmade beds, unwashed clothes, pots, pans, and dishes, amidst dust and dirt, his windows grimy, his floors filthy, and the ceiling of the van black with soot from the little paraffin stove he had installed to do his cooking. He lived thus because in many ways he was a pig and enjoyed being like one. Actually, the interior of the van had been cleverly laid out and rebuilt by himself. There was ample room to store Rose’s meagre wardrobe. There was even a kind of a hip bath which one could stand in, and which Williams used on a Saturday night. And the driving seat up forward was not uncomfortable; Rose shared it with him on the
long hauls between towns where he had bookings.
There was little in Williams’ untidy manner of living that Rose had not been accustomed to all her life. He was not ungenerous. He liked to eat well and in Crewe he bought her a warm cloth coat, or rather let her go and pick one out for herself when they passed a window which had a sale of coats all at one price. He made no comment when she returned to the living wagon with one of electric blue colour which set off her fox-coloured hair.
But Rose was wary. She longed for cleanliness, to “get at” things, but she was as cautious as a child tiptoeing through the room of a sleeping parent. She hardly dared more than to wipe out the greasy frying pan with a piece of old newspaper, as she had seen Williams do. She would have liked to have busied herself housekeeping. It was, if one wanted to think of it that way, like a little travelling house with a chimney coming out of the roof. It had a “front room,” bedroom, kitchen, bath, and rear porch, the latter being when the ladder was let down and one could sit on the steps. But it was not her house to keep.
She made little tentative moves timorously, and always with the knowledge that at any time he might dismiss her. She knew no more about him than when she had first met him; whether he was married or single; well off or poor; what his salary was; or even a great deal about his likes and dislikes.
She began by “making up” his bed. There was not much to make—a mattress beneath, a blanket to lie on, a blanket to cover with, and two pillows without cases. But she folded them straight, smoothed them out, and turned them down. If Jackdaw—she was calling him Jackdaw now like everyone else—noticed it, he made no comment. Next, she dared little tidyings which were almost unnoticeable, or if they were noticed Williams continued to ignore them. Then she surreptitiously washed a glass, a cup, the coffee pot, and the frying pan. And during the afternoons at such time when through the winter smog the sun shone palely for an hour or two, she opened the windows and the back door and let air into the place. If Williams was aware that the atmosphere within the living wagon was sweeter, he again did not refer to it.
Thus, as the days grew into weeks, and the weeks approached a month, Rose crept on from one small victory to another. And then one day, in a risk-all, dare-all mood induced by a sale in foodstuffs in the grocer’s which left her with a small surplus, she bought some bits of material that matched the colouring of the outside of the van. She cut and sewed them swiftly into curtains, and that evening they were up and drawn at each side of the windows. One moment her heart leaped at the warmth and the friendliness created by this simple touch, and the next fluttered in anticipated panic at what Jackdaw might say.
He came home that night from the theatre, more than usually tired and irritated. There had been some trouble over returned articles and the police had been called into the argument before the manager had succeeded in satisfying the complainants. He did not seem even to notice the curtains but sat down heavily at the table that Rose had laid out with sandwiches and coffee.
But then the unfamiliar kept intruding itself into his consciousness and he finally looked up and became aware of the decorations, and leaning over the table, felt the material between thumb and forefinger. Then he said, “Christ! Women! Always got to be tarting up a place!”
Rose looked at him, her eyes filled with the agony of the fear that clutched at her. She had known she was going too far. She was so eager to say it before he did, to be the one to leave and at least bring an end to the suspense under which she lived and had been living, that she said, “I’ll go.”
Williams looked at her long through his heavy-lidded eyes and said, “Back to the railway station, eh, and sitting up?”
The stubborn chin, which never seemed to agree with the softness and the innocence of the child’s mouth, came up and she said, “Yes. I’ve done it before.” She looked at the curtains and said, “I’ll take those down and get out.”
Williams said, “Who the hell asked you to? Sit down and shut up. Eat your supper. When I want you to get out I’ll tell you.”
And so the status remained unchanged. But having asserted her courage and independence and been prepared to take the consequences, some of the fear had been drained out of Rose. He had not forbidden her and so the little “tartings-up” continued. The woman’s touch slowly and surely turned the travelling van, the lone male performer’s living wagon from a pigsty to a home.
At the beginning of February, parked in a field on the outskirts of Carlisle, Jackdaw said to Rose, “I’m going to be gone for a week. You can stay if you like. I’ll be back. Look after the place.” He left her enough money for food and essentials, but nothing for extras, and disappeared. She had no idea where he was going or whether she would ever see him again. Yet nothing beyond being turned out by the owner could make her leave the little home she had so laboriously and almost secretly built.
But at the end of a week he returned. He did not tell her, of course, that he had been to visit his wife, but only that the music hall season was over and that they were going to drive the long journey to Chippenham. Rose asked, “What’s there?”
Williams replied, “Sam Marvel’s Circus. Winter quarters. I’m joining up. Picked up the contract at Cranwell.”
Again panic squeezed Rose’s heart that the end had come and that he would surely dismiss her now and she would never again see the cushions she had made, the bright chintz covering for the locker seat, the bedspread, the cloth partitions to screen off and emphasise the various “rooms,” and the gay and silly little bits of china she had added to the cabinet.
“We’ll have about a month to put the show together and rehearse, and then we’ll hit the road,” Jackdaw was saying in, for him, the longest speech she had heard him make since she had joined him. “It’s a lot tougher travelling with the circus. It isn’t like this. It’ll rain the first three weeks we’re out. Mud, mud, mud! Up to your arse in mud. We’ll pull down in mud. Build up in mud. Cold food or no food. Little sleep or no sleep. Wet clothes, wet blankets. Get the show into the ring. Get the show on the road.” And he went on for a good deal more talking about king poles and sidewalls, one- and two-polers and Continental seating, and the hell it all could give one, and a lot of circus jargon about things that Rose did not understand at all. He finished with, “It’s a hard life and sometimes a rotten one. But when the sun shines and you get a packer of a house it ain’t so bad.” Then, looking heavily across at her, he asked, “Want to go along?”
Rose watched him for a moment to see if he had any more to say or conditions to make, but he hadn’t. She replied, “Yes.”
He said, “Okay. Come to bed then. We start early in the morning.”
C H A P T E R
4
The Walters family was scandalised by the advent of Williams and his girl and enjoyed every minute of it, Ma Walters and the girls in particular, since it was a continuing circumstance and therefore a perpetual affront to them.
“Flaunting herself,” was the phrase Ma Walters used most frequently. “The dirty little gutter slut. Dirt, that’s what she is. Not good enough to spit on. And as for him, pushing his harlot in the face of respectable people! If Sam Marvel doesn’t have a word with him, then you ought to, Harry Walters.”
Walters replied, “Oh, shut up, Ma. You don’t have to associate with her.” He agreed with her basically on the subject of Jackdaw Williams bringing his whore along to travel with them—whore was Harry Walters’ favourite word in the circumstances, and he had a way of saying it which sounded almost as though he savoured it—but he was also on the alert to defend himself against having to take any action. Ma was always at him “to be having a word” with someone.
Harry Walters was a harsh and unequivocable tyrant to his own family, but he was a peaceable fellow and not too courageous where outsiders were concerned and a great avoider of trouble.
“Associate with her!” Ma Walters shouted. “Don’t you ever let me hear you say anything like that again. Especially in front of the children!”
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The two girls were exhilarated by the situation, though for different reasons. Angela, the elder, was able to enjoy with greater intensity her virginity—technically, that is to say, since the strenuousness of her profession had long since destroyed the fact—her virtue and her social standing.
Angela made up well in spangles and under the lights, and was an accomplished and exquisite rider, but out of the ring one saw that she had inherited some of her fathers thin angularity and bitterness of mouth, the corners of which were turned perpetually downwards. At twenty-two, no one had yet attempted to assail her virginity. She was good, pure, stainless, righteous, and the seal upon it was Rose wallowing in an unmarried bed with a dirty and lecherous old clown.
Lilian, who was seventeen and had inherited her mothers looks—for Ma Walters had been a handsome woman before obesity overtook her—was enthralled by the wickedness of it all, but particularly by her nearness to it. The excitement consisted of having the horrible example right there before her eyes, and when the thrilling words “harlot,” “whore,” “slut,” “strumpet,” and “tart” were used, one only had to nip around the corner to where Jackdaw Williams’ living wagon was parked to take a snoop in through the open back door or the window to see what one was like.
True, upon occasions when Lilian had been able to carry out such investigations without attracting the attention of her family, the fallen woman had been engaged apparently in exactly the same pursuits as she herself or sister or mother, namely sweeping out the van, or hanging up laundry to dry, or doing some kind of work about the quarters. According to her family, sin was inherent simply in her being there, but Lilian was old enough and smart enough to know that the exciting part was what went on after dark in the cramped confines of the wagon, when Jackdaw Williams and Rose shut the door and put out the light. And this thrilled and excited her. Sometimes during the night ear-splitting screeches from the jackdaw came from the darkened living wagon, and Lilian wondered whether that was when it was all going on, and what it was like.
