by A. L. Barker
“Always? Are you telling me this is what you wanted when we were buying chairs and tables? Or before that, before we were married? When you were still at school? How long is always?”
“As long as I can remember.” To his surprise and anger she put her cheek down with a passionate gesture against the buttoned plastic.
He thought he was having one of those nightmares when anxiety concentrates where there is least cause for it, compensation dreams offering a new bogey, something at least to laugh at in the morning. “But this cost fifty pounds if it cost a penny!”
“Fifty pounds.” She said it as she had the word ‘swizzle’, for amusement only, and let it drop into the plastic dimples beneath her cheek.
“Where did the money come from? What did you pay with?” He found he was bending his head, peering to get between her and the thing. “You didn’t pay, did you? You couldn’t!”
“I didn’t steal it. Or beg, or borrow it.”
He pulled her to her feet, stopped her fawning on the thing. “Did they tell you you’d never miss the repayments? Fifty-two short little weeks at a pound a week—you can miss what you’ve never had. What did they make you sign? Did you even read it?”
“I didn’t think you’d be like this.” It had got through to her that he was being like something, and she came bewildered out of her clouds. “I thought you’d be glad—”
“Tell me what you promised to pay!”
“I didn’t promise.” She drew close, leaned gently against him, soothing with her fingertips his hand that gripped her wrist. “What are you frightened of?”
He had never told her about his fears: they were perpetual, more like a philosophy: one way—and not the best—of getting by. And they weren’t graphic, she wouldn’t see them as fears, only as facts, and dull at that. Even if she could appreciate and share them, he wouldn’t have wanted her to, that would have made two of them.
But now he was pricked into it by the way she touched him, with tender disbelief, and he told her, “I’m frightened of the mortgage, the rates, the coal bills, gas bills, fire insurance, new clothes, sickness—anything that cost anything.”
“But we’re not poor. I do know what that’s like.”
It was a touch on the raw to remind him. The tenement where the Munns lived was still standing, still condemned, and he had seen how she lived with them, in one room. He didn’t need reminding where she got her pallor and her smallness, or that poverty had produced her as a sport against itself. “I’m frightened for you, what else?”
“Is that what it comes down to? There’s only me?”
He didn’t need reminding of that, either. Without her he had nothing to lose and had lost nothing in all the years before he met her. But it was like her to say it, and dwell on it, at a bad moment. “Where did you get the money?”
“No one else was ever frightened for me.” She settled in the crook of his arm, making herself cosy like a child ready for a story. “But you needn’t be frightened of my cocktail bar. It’s bought and paid for with my own money.”
“Your own fifty pounds? That you didn’t know you had? I can remember finding sixpence in my coat lining.”
“Can you?” she said without irony. “I didn’t know I had this either, it came from the insurance.”
“What insurance? Are you telling me you had Joe Munn insured?”
“Joe? It was before Joe, something she did.”
“She?”
“Camilla. Do they call it an endowment? I got enough money to buy what I wanted and I wanted this. It was to be a surprise, did I surprise you?”
Shine the light and scuttle the bogey, something to laugh at in the morning. “I’d rather have known.”
“Would you have made me buy coal?”
“How much was it?”
“I shan’t tell you, at least not now. Later on, when you appreciate my cocktail bar. I spent it all on that.”
“Who paid you the money?”
“The insurance people.”
“What’s their name?”
“I can’t remember.” She moved out of his arm to polish at a smear on the cabinet with the hem of her dress. “I’ve no head for names.”
“She never did much for you, what made her do this?”
“Conscience, I expect.”
“I don’t see her with a conscience.”
“Or without one,” she said matter-of-factly, polishing. “You never saw her at all. She did get funny moods, she used to say Jesus was the thorn in her side.”
“How did the insurance company trace you?”
“Through Jessie Munn.”
“Is that what she came for? To tell you about it?”
“Are you asking all these questions because you don’t believe me?”
“Why shouldn’t I believe you?” He couldn’t stop asking questions. “You wouldn’t lie to me, would you? Anyway, the name of the insurance company will be on the papers.”
“Papers?”
“If I know about insurance you had some to sign.” She had pressed the plastic button and whether it was the tinkling music or the pink and amber lights, or happiness again, she looked fed and softened. “Can I see them?”
“I haven’t got any papers.”
“But you must have—”
“Mr Elmo’s got them. He took the papers back to his office.”
“Elmo?”
“Oh, do you know him?”
“Of course I don’t.”
“He settled it all,” she said, perching on a pin-stool. “He used to look after her money for her. What will you have, whisky on the rocks or a sidecar?” She raised an empty glass, smiled and tasted the rim as if she were toasting him.
It was natural for her to be taken with a thing like this. He would have been once, after he stopped thinking of the curly brass and fairground steam organ as art and music. “Where does he come from, this Elmo?”
“He’s got a business in Ilett.”
“What sort of business?”
“Oh, financial.”
“I never heard of a business that wasn’t.”
“Do you know how to use a shaker?” she said. “You must keep your elbows down, like riding a horse—have you ever ridden a horse?”
*
In the morning Bulow did not laugh. Or smile. He wasn’t easy about the money she had spent or what she had spent it on. In the daylight the thing didn’t even look a hundred per cent. itself. It was cursorily made, there were places where the veneer had run short, some touch-and-go wiring, and a resistance to the eye as if it was slightly out of true. Neither matching nor harmonising with the rest of the furniture, it cracked the room in two. He hoped he might train himself not to notice.
He kept thinking what she could better have done with the money. She could have had a holiday. A fortnight at a nice hotel, breakfast in bed, dinner at eight, would have given her a taste of luxury and been good for her. Or clothes: he would sooner she bought herself a fur coat to keep out the cold than this shark-bellied monstrosity.
It wasn’t his money, he had no right to object how she spent it. He had no right, either, to be disappointed in a high-handed way as if something he suspected of being faulty had been proved to be. This wasn’t a flaw in her, this was her nature—the same one he had married, why he had married—and the other side of it sweetened his living.
*
The Winegarden girl was a problem. She made it a habit to drop into his office in a social way to chat, do up her face and smoke a cigarette. Bulow really minded about the cigarettes. She got through two or three of his a day and broke a budget he had kept to for a year. She wasn’t worth that. In a small way she unnerved him. While she was there he couldn’t think past her, and if he tried to do anything he did it wrong or it need not have been done at all.
She would sit down and reach for a cigarette with a weary intimacy which he found comic at first, then irritating. She did not bother to knock, once he was trying to get through to Mrs Worcest
er when she stolled in.
Getting through to Mrs Worcester was another of his problems. She was the cook, she had come from Eastern Europe when the lights were going out and had kept herself dark ever since. ‘Worcester’ was the nearest anyone could come to pronouncing her real name. She referred to her own country as ‘There’ and passed for a Pole, Czech, Hungarian, White Russian, German Jew, any expendable foreigner.
Whatever the original reason, anonymity was her creed now and she would not identify anyone or anything if she could avoid it. Naming no names and not having much English made communication difficult and she had the edge on everyone because she did not care whether she communicated or not.
“Sit down, Mrs Worcester.”
He might have spoken to a brick wall, and Mrs Worcester did indeed look brickish. In shape she was a squared solid, with a red face and scraped-up hair. Perhaps she was German—Bulow pictured her as a wardress in a concentration camp until he looked at the small mulberry-coloured eyes, shifting with fright and indecision, then he felt the jackboot on his own foot.
“You’re not on trial, you know.”
Was it political, animal, or queer-mindedness, her fear? Most likely it was imagination, something to blame—better to be sought in hate then not sought at all. Or, he thought, she is on the fiddle.
“I’ve got to talk to you about wastage. Personally I don’t care what you put in the bins—no, that’s not true, I don’t like waste either—but I’m not asking you to account for every cabbage leaf. That’s my job. All I’m asking you to do is to relieve my mind. Do you hear?”
“Is all I hear—dustbins.”
“Yesterday they were full of drum-heads.”
Mrs Worcester shrugged. She could convey negation all round with one lift and fall of her shoulders.
“And bread, waste of bread gives me the horrors. The heel of a loaf is the heel of a loaf, but why are quarter loaves, half loaves, in the pig swill?” She stood mum as a rock, only her eyes moved and they were looking everywhere. “I’m the last one to expect people to eat crusts, even with butter, but why not bread pudding? Why not apple charlotte? What about cutting down on bread?”
If he ordered less she would use it at the same rate and by teatime they’d run out—out of bread, mind you, the staff of life—and it would be the canteen mismanager’s fault.
“Take me literally, cut down and you’ll get more slices to the loaf.” Bulow made chopping motions with the side of his hand. “You can do that, can’t you?” She shook her head. “Why not?”
“With new machine perhaps. Not this.”
“What’s the matter with this one?”
“I should know?”
He tried to catch her eye. He knew that if he did he would lose his temper and that would change something. “You know whether it cuts and if it doesn’t you tell me. At once. When did it start giving trouble?”
“Trouble? I did not say trouble. I cut ten, maybe twelve loaves and the machine is packing up.”
“Since when?”
“Two, three weeks.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Is no trouble.”
“I’ve never had co-operation from you, have I? Let me tell you something, this factory isn’t run for your benefit or mine, it’s not a soup kitchen nor a funk hole, it’s a business, the sum of its parts, and flesh or metal they’ve got to work together. All together. In business there are hard names for the soft option—failure to report a defect, mechanical or human, comes under the heading of restrictive practice.”
She didn’t know what he was talking about, or pretended she didn’t. Pidgin English was all she knew after twenty years in the country.
“If you won’t work with me I can’t be answerable. It’ll be your own funeral.”
She looked directly at him; it was as if a wind had dropped and there was no more deflection. “Funeral?”
“Yes, yours.”
“Why?”
“Because I’m not covering up for anyone, I intend to keep my job.”
“Funeral—why do you say funeral?”
“Say carrying the can then, taking the blame, say it any way you like, but I’m not doing it.”
“You see it here?” She put both hands to her face, not so much holding as hiding it, her spread fingers and the butt of one hand covering the mouth. On anyone else it would have looked coy.
Bulow said irritably, “I don’t want to preach across a desk, I’ve got work to do.”
“So then it is near, because to you it does not matter and yet you see it.”
“See what?”
At that moment the Winegarden girl came in. She looked from one to the other of them, Mrs Worcester with her hands over her face and Bulow with his fists on the desk.
“What’s this? A private fight?”
“Yes,” said Bulow, “private.”
Mrs Worcester turned to the door. “Is no fight.”
“Just a minute!”
“I also have work.”
Bulow went round the desk and stood between her and the door. “What am I supposed to have seen?”
“To you it does not matter.”
“I’m the only one it does matter to!”
“No, I am the one. It is my funeral.”
“Well?”
“You see it here.” She put her hand to her cheek.
Bulow wanted to spit on all foreigners. He couldn’t talk to her, she was bloody-minded and mad. She twisted his intentions, he began good-willed and pacific and finished like this and she wanted it so; to her, trouble was an essential grit.
“So I see a coffin and a hearse and two black horses. Pardon me for thinking it was eyes, nose and a mouth, I was being literal. I don’t wear a rabbit’s foot nor read the tea-cups, I had some civilised notion we could talk things over and you might see my point of view and I might see yours—”
“Is trouble,” said Mrs Worcester, “too much talk.”
“A funk hole is all you want. You’re right, there is a funeral in your face, but Hitler didn’t put it there, you were born with it.”
Mrs Worcester stepped past him with a neat sloping-off movement as quick and evasive as the movement of her eyes. He was saying, “I’ve tried to show you sense, all I ask is for us to pull together, but you don’t understand basic English—” when she was gone. He snatched at the door as it drifted to and shouted after her, “There’ll be no sitting on my neck!”
It was vulgar. He regretted raising his voice at the very moment of raising it, people would have heard him all over the shop and this was supposed to be a working relationship. When he saw the Winegarden girl taking it all in he felt savage.
“You shouldn’t have said that about her face.”
“Mind your business!”
“It’s her thing.”
“This is a private office, which means you keep out unless you’re asked in.”
“Everyone has a thing about something, hers is about dying.”
“What?”
“I’m not sure if it’s her heart or her blood,” Miss Winegarden dropped into the armchair, “but she expects to go any time, so naturally she’s touchy. Have you a cigarette?”
“I don’t believe it. She’s hard as nails.”
“She believes it.”
“It’s more of her superstition, it’s the way her mind works!”
“She frightens herself to death fifty times a day.”
“Silly old witch.”
Lifting and stirring the papers on his desk with the tip of her finger, Miss Winegarden unearthed a packet of cigarettes. She turned to him for a light. “You’re not a very nice man.”
He threw the matches into her lap. “Why do you come here if you don’t like my style?”
“Because I can be myself.”
“One skin off the onion.”
“I can relax.” When she lay back the big balls of her breasts rolled under her tight jumper as if they might roll off and need catching. “You’
re safe, you see.”
“Is that what you see?”
“It’s a feeling I have, or let’s say a non-feeling.”
“Making me a saint or something?”
“No.” She blew smoke through her nose. “You can’t claim credit for what you can’t do.”
“I can teach you a lesson, Miss Winegarden.”
“My name’s Deborah.”
“It won’t be rape this time, just fatherly compulsion.” He took the cigarette from her lips and pitched it away.
“What are you going to do?”
“I’d do the same to any brassfaced child.”
“So Mr Dollomore was right.”
“What’s Dollomore to do with it?”
“He told me you were narrow-minded.”
“When did he discuss me with you?”
“His secretary left and I did some letters for him. We got on famously.”
“I can imagine.” He was glad he hadn’t tried smacking her. It couldn’t do her good and it could have done him a lot of harm. It certainly could: thinking about it made him go cold.
“Now there’s a man I couldn’t relax with. I didn’t get my clothes back on for an hour after. In a manner of speaking.”
“What did he say about me?”
She pushed the palms of her hands over her skirt, chasing out a wrinkle. “We were chatting and he asked how I liked it here and who I’d worked for and when I said I’d done letters for you he said you were narrow-minded.”
“What did he mean by that?”
“Sticky and old-fashioned.”
“What else?”
“Nothing else about you. He said something about everyone I mentioned. He said Miss Goman was a fool, a ‘suffered fool’, he said, if you know what that means.” She shrugged. “And George Streetfield he said was a middle-aged Ted.”
Bulow could hear him saying it in the brandy-brown voice he used for his slights.
“He was showing-off, fat old josser,” said Miss Winegarden. “It was him told me about Mrs Worcester. ‘Is that a fact?’ I said, ‘she really could die any minute?’ and he said, ‘It’s not a question of when, but of how often. Have you ever been frightened to death, Miss Thing?’ So I said, ‘The name’s Winegarden—Anglican version—and the answer is I don’t scare easily.’ ‘I should hope not,’ he said, ‘you have so much to lose.’ I knew what he meant, next thing he was going to ask was this an engagement ring, was I in digs and what about being his private secretary, in that order. But he had to take a long-distance call and I came away.”
