She added nothing to this and went over to the cupboard to get the tea things. Mrs Vizzard stood there waiting. It was a strained and awkward moment as, of course, she could not actually ask what it was that Mrs Josser was concealing from her. That would have been unladylike. And what made it so maddening was that Mrs Josser was obviously just as anxious to tell her. Only that would have been unladylike too.
Then she could contain herself no longer.
‘Is… is there anything the matter?’ she asked.
And at the direct question Mrs Josser put down the tea cups that she was holding, and faced round so suddenly that Mrs Vizzard looked up in astonishment.
‘Anything the matter?’ she said after her. ‘Don’t ask me. You’d better ask Mrs Boon. He’s her son.’
‘Mrs Boon?’ Mrs Vizzard repeated. She really was getting somewhere now.
‘That’s what I said,’ Mrs Josser told her. ‘And it’s all I’m going to say. She may tell you herself, or she may not. That’s for her to decide.’
‘Not… not in trouble?’
‘I’ve said my say,’ Mrs Josser declared stoutly. ‘It’s out of my hands now.’
Mrs Vizzard smoothed down the pleated folds of her black dress, and waited.
‘And where is Mrs Boon, pray?’
‘She’s in my sitting‐room,’ Mrs Josser told her. ‘And that’s where Fred is too.’
The kettle had suddenly boiled itself over and was threatening to put the gas out. To conceal her real feelings Mrs Josser snatched it up and made tea violently, pouring in the water as though she were destroying a wasps’ nest. Then she stood back and caught Mrs Vizzard’s eye. The two women understood each other perfectly.
‘I’ll get you some milk,’ Mrs Vizzard told her. ‘Coming back suddenly like this upsets things.’
‘That’s very kind of you, Mrs Vizzard,’ Mrs Josser told her. ‘I’ve put an extra cup out.’
2
Mrs Vizzard was back downstairs in her sitting‐room again. She sat there, clenching and reclenching her hands.
‘The disgrace of it. The utter disgrace of it,’ she was saying. ‘First Connie. And then this. To think that it should have happened from my house. Whatever would poor Mr V. say if he knew?’
And at the thought of the departed Mr Vizzard’s feelings her self‐control left her and she had to search for the handkerchief in her waistband. The fact that she was crying humiliated her: it meant that she could no longer despise Mrs Boon for doing so.
And the fact that it was now after ten o’clock upset her still further. The horrible Percy, it seemed, had ruined everything. Until the moment of the return she had planned to spend the evening quite differently. She had been going to invite Mr Squales to drink cocoa and eat seed‐cake with her. It would have been the fourth time in three weeks that it had happened. And really it was a kindness. He was so much in need of building‐up and nourishing, poor man. But now, thanks to Percy, it was impossible. It is one thing to have a man in one’s room at eight‐thirty in the evening. It is quite another to have him there at ten o’clock at night.
Besides, she was a sight. She couldn’t have allowed anyone to see her looking as she was. That sudden fit of angry tears had left its mark on her. She crossed over to the mirror and peered in. It was only lately that she had taken to studying her face in this way. And she knew everything about herself. Knew everything, and hated those pale eyes and hard, high cheekbones. With a gesture half of disgust, half of weariness, she turned away from the mirror and began removing the pins from her hair. A moment later a stiff plait fell down her back and, jerking it over one shoulder, she started to undo it. The mass of it was greater than seemed possible. The hair must have been wrenched and twisted into its braid. When she drew a brush through it, it spread and expanded, covering her back. Only at the temples was it streaked with grey.
She pondered for a moment whether she should make herself the cup of cocoa that she would have drunk with Mr Squales. All day she had been looking forward to it. But now at this hour and in these circumstances, the stuff seemed sickly and revolting. Even the idea of seed‐cake was unattractive. She would go straight to bed. Perhaps in the morning she would feel better, would be reconciled to the scandal that Percy had drawn down upon Dulcimer Street.
‘Thank God it hasn’t got into the papers,’ she told herself. ‘That’s something I could never have borne.’
She raised her hand to extinguish the light. But as she did so she realised that it was foolish. There was far too much passing through her head for her to be able to sleep. It was useless to attempt it. So, instead, she sat herself upright in the chair beside the table, took up this week’s copy of The Spirit World from the shelf beside the fireplace, and began to read.
‘When those whom we have truly loved depart from us,’ the writer informed her, ‘we are aware of their presence in unexpected ways – in a chance shadow cast upon a sunlit wall, in an eddy of dust in the road before us, in a pool’s ripple, in the fall of an autumn leaf…’ She gazed up from the magazine for a moment. ‘A thief in my house. It’ll never seem clean and wholesome to live in again.’ She shuddered, and read on. ‘From these simple manifestations of an unseen personality, to the hearing of voices and the actual seeing of the visitant spirit garbed for a moment in earthly form, is but a step.’ She looked up again. ‘Of course, he’s guilty,’ she told herself. ‘He’s a wastrel. Anyone could see that, except his mother. He’s nothing but a common car thief. He’ll be sent to prison for years and years, and it’ll be in all the papers.’ She shook herself and tried to concentrate on The Spirit World. She had turned to the advertisements by now. ‘More than a thousand grateful students of my method, Psychic Steps, can testify that with application and patience second sight can be obtained by all,’ she read. ‘My yellow shilling booklets (third edition) have given eyes to the blind…’ Her thoughts were wandering again. ‘If only he could prove himself innocent, it would be all right. There’d be no scandal then. At least nothing that we couldn’t live down. But if they find him guilty, she’ll have to go. I won’t have Mrs Boon living here. It’s all her fault. She ought to have brought him up differently. She…’
It was a knock at the door that interrupted her thoughts. She started. It was nearly midnight and everyone else in the house was asleep by now. Must surely be asleep. Suppose that those three knocks did not belong to anyone of this world at all. Suppose that when she opened the door there were no one standing in the passageway outside. To be blind and not to have been given eyes… she attempted to speak, but her voice sounded faint and unnatural.
‘Who’s there?’ she asked at last. ‘Who is it?’
‘It is a friend,’ the deep voice of Mr Squales answered. ‘I was sleepless and something told me that you were unsleeping too.’
She paused. This was more disastrous than ever. If it had been impossible at eleven o’clock, it was unthinkable now. An unmarried gentleman and a lady in negligée…
‘May I come in?’
Her heart pounded. She realised that what she was doing was madness.
‘Come in,’ she said.
As she rose she became conscious of her hair loose about her shoulders. But Mr Squales himself remained superbly unconcerned. He was dressed in his morning clothes, with the braided black jacket and pale trousers. He had evidently just retied his cravat, which made Mrs Vizzard’s undress seem more mischievous and wanton somehow. She blushed.
But Mr Squales merely crossed over to Mrs Vizzard’s chair as though it already belonged to him, and sat there gazing broodingly downwards at his feet. It was obvious that there was something on his mind. For a moment he raised his head to look in Mrs Vizzard’s direction, and his dark eyes penetrated into her grey ones, and then he looked away again.
‘Would… would you like anything?’ she asked. ‘A cup of cocoa? A piece of cake?’
It seemed the moment that she had been waiting for. But Mr Squales simply shook his head.
‘Not
to‐night,’ he said sadly. ‘Not to‐night, thank you. It would be too painful.’
‘Too painful?’
Mrs Vizzard was staring at him now.
‘I have come to say good‐bye,’ he said sadly. ‘I wrote you a letter because I did not think that I could bear the actual parting. Then I discovered that I could not bear informing you by letter. And so… I am here.’
Mrs Vizzard sat at the corner of the table facing him. She was motionless. Transfixed by what he had just told her.
‘You are going away?’ she said. ‘Why?’
Mr Squales dropped his head deeper on to his waistcoat.
‘I have my reasons,’ he replied, and added after a pause: ‘Personal ones.’
Mrs Vizzard drew in a deep breath.
‘Going away for… for good?’ she asked.
‘Or ill,’ Mr Squales answered. ‘I am seeing you for the last time.’ Mrs Vizzard changed her position. As she leant forward, her hair, her dark thick hair, fell across her outstretched arm.
‘Tell me why,’ she said. ‘We know each other too well to separate like this.’
Mr Squales stroked his cravat with that slender olive hand of his. ‘You’ll not be angry with me?’
Mrs Vizzard shook her head. How could she be angry with this wonderful, distinguished looking creature?
‘I have lived in your house for a quarter of a year,’ he said. ‘You have shown me many kindnesses. I’ve grown to look upon you as my friend. My only friend. There is nothing that I could ever do to repay you. Nothing. But my private affairs have not prospered. I am not wanted by the world. In short, I cannot afford to live anywhere.’
Mrs Vizzard made a sudden movement as though she were going to speak. But Mr Squales stopped her.
‘During the past month,’ he went on, ‘I have pawned everything that I possess. My dressing things gone. My lighter has gone. My ring has gone. My watch had already gone when I came here. Even my dinner‐jacket has gone. Sitting before you at this moment is someone who is destitute.’
Mrs Vizzard sat there watching him. She longed suddenly to throw her arms around him and tell him that she loved him; that she wanted him to stay by her for ever; that she would give him a new dinner‐jacket, a new watch; that without him she would be doubly widowed. But it was the disability of womanhood not to be able to speak first.
‘It… it doesn’t matter,’ was all that she finally trusted herself to say. Mr Squales, however, shook his head.
‘It matters a great deal,’ he said rising. ‘To a gentleman it is the only thing that matters – not to be a burden. Not to take advantage of the more fortunate. In fact, it is why I have come to say good‐bye.’
He crossed over to her and held out his right hand.
‘You will find the rent for my room on my mantelpiece,’ he added. ‘It is complete except for six pence. I am sorry. But that was all the pawnshop gave me. It was for my propelling pencil.’
‘I won’t take it,’ Mrs Vizzard said in a low, half‐throttled voice. ‘It’s yours.’
‘Good‐bye,’ Mr Squales repeated.
Mrs Vizzard turned her face away so that he shouldn’t see that in her eyes were tears.
‘Don’t go away,’ she said.
There was silence after she had spoken. A deep significant silence. And it was Mr Squales who finally broke it.
‘You mean you need me, too?’ he asked.
He was looking down at her sideways as he said it, looking down with what might have been the faintest of smiles playing round the corner of his mouth. But the smile was possibly no more than nervous tension. It had obviously cost him a great deal to make this frank admission of his state.
Mrs Vizzard nodded. She could not trust herself to speak.
And, as she stood there, Mr Squales’ arm went round her. Mrs Vizzard, the widow of Dulcimer Street, the woman who had fought to keep her capital intact, was gathered up against the braided jacket. Her tears were on his cravat and the dark olive hand from which the signet ring was missing was stroking her hair like a lover.
‘If you need me I shall stay,’ he was saying. ‘It was only that I could not ask… .’
The clock on the mantelpiece struck one. One o’clock in the morning. It was a thin, tremulous ping, remarkably different from the full‐throated boom of the Jossers’ clock upstairs. On the table were two empty cocoa cups and a seed‐cake with a wide angle wedge cut out of it.
Mrs Vizzard roused herself. Into the rosy bliss of the present the sordid reality of another way of life was impinging.
‘There’s one thing I wanted to ask you,’ she said softly. ‘It’s about Percy…’
But Mr Squales only kissed her forehead.
‘Don’t let’s talk about Percy,’ he told her. ‘Let’s talk about ourselves.’
3
Even though it was late, there was someone else still awake in Dulcimer Street. And that was Mr Puddy. Awake, but not well. Practically dying in fact. He’d eaten something that had disagreed with him, and he couldn’t move. All that he could do was to groan. As soon as he could get about again, he was going back to the shop that had tried to kill him and he was going to make a row. It was a pretty serious thing to sell something called ‘Home‐Made Farm House Pork Pie’ that should have been labelled ‘Poison.’ Supposing a child or a baby had got hold of it? Indeed, judging from the effect on Mr Puddy, any less experienced eater would simply have been carried off after the first bite of it.
Threaten damages and the Food Inspector – that was what he was going to do when he was strong enough. In the meantime, he could only lie full length on the bed and avoid turning over. There might have been red‐hot pins inside him.
And it was a pity because the pie had certainly looked all right. Very fresh and crusty, with a nice bit of hard‐boiled egg, like a yellow eye, bang in the middle of it.
BOOK THREE
Love in a Basement
Chapter XXXIII
1
Anyone with half an eye could have seen that Doreen’s and Doris’ studio arrangement couldn’t last for ever. And it didn’t. They had just had their first row. And, as it was a big one, it was also their last. They had both known for some time that it was coming. All the same, when it broke, it was out of a clear sky.
The row divided itself neatly into two parts. The first part took place between seven‐fifteen and eight o’clock p.m.: the second roughly two and a half hours later, and finished up about eleven. There had been a slight disagreement at breakfast because Doreen took all the milk – but that affair had entirely blown over. They had ridden down together in the bus afterwards in that almost arm‐in‐arm intimacy that sharing a double seat imposes.
Lunch, too, was perfectly normal and everything passed off quietly until Doreen announced that Mr Perkiss had phoned her up and that she had invited him round that evening. Doris didn’t like Mr Perkiss and told Doreen so. She said that she would go out somewhere, to the flicks probably.
But, now that Doris had made the suggestion, Doreen wouldn’t hear of it. Simply wouldn’t hear of it.
‘Oh you can’t,’ she said hurriedly. ‘You really can’t. Not to‐night. You know how he is about me. He goes absolutely crazy if we’re alone for a moment. I’d never have asked him if I hadn’t been sure you’d be there.’
So it was finally agreed: Doris would be there to protect Doreen from the advances of the passionate Mr Perkiss. And on the way home they went into a delicatessen shop and bought a tin of mushroom soup, some ham and a carton of potato salad with which to help assuage this elderly satyr in a fawn suit. Doreen protested vigorously that it wasn’t right that Doris should pay for anything as Mr Perkiss was her friend, really. But, she pointed out, Mr Perkiss was sure to bring something with him. And as they’d all have some of it, it would come to the same thing in the end, wouldn’t it?
It was while she was laying the table that Doris remarked that she wished she’d thought of it and she’d have invited Bill to come along too
. The remark annoyed Doreen who was in the small cubicle‐like bedroom making up her face. Bill, she pointed out, was her friend, not Doris’. If she had wanted Bill, she was perfectly capable of inviting him herself. Indeed, if it hadn’t been for her, she went on, Doris would never even have met him.
It was because this was true, and because of the obligation that it implied, that Doris resented it so much. She slammed down the butter‐dish that she had been holding and addressed the empty doorway in the corner.
‘Well, anyway he’s more my friend now than he is yours,’ she answered defiantly.
As soon as she had said it, Doreen appeared. She was smoking a cigarette and wearing an old, flowered dressing‐gown. Her face glistened with cold‐cream and her hair was gathered up in a red silk handkerchief. On each cheek a small disc of rouge that had not yet been rubbed in burned fiercely. Altogether, she looked like something large and sticky from the back row of the ballet.
‘Listen, my pet,’ she said. ‘I don’t like little girls who go about stealing other girls’ friends.’
‘I didn’t steal him,’ Doris retorted.
‘Well, that’s all right then,’ Doreen told her, smiling in a deliberate theatrical sort of way through the cold‐cream. ‘It’s only just that I’m warning you.’
Doris turned her back on her and went through into the absurd tiny kitchen. And it might still have been all right if Doreen had left it at that. But instead of going back into her bedroom and doing something constructive with her face, she followed Doris into the kitchen. And even when they were on the best of terms there wasn’t really room for two of them in there at once. And to‐night it seemed simply suffocating.
‘Really, my pet,’ Doreen said, ‘I can’t bear to see you making a fool of yourself like this. If you’ve gone and fallen for Bill in a big way, you’d better watch your step. He just isn’t your type.’
Doris was standing back from Doreen, right up against the little sink as she said it. It was the first time that she had ever found Doreen repulsive. But now everything about her – her shiny, dolled‐up face, the cigarette hanging out of the corner of her mouth, the smeary flowered dressing‐gown, her habit of calling other people her pet – all repelled her.
London Belongs to Me Page 35
