‘And how do you know whether he’s my type or not, might I ask?’ Everything about the row was proceeding along perfectly classical lines: Doris had now reached the stage of extreme formality.
As for Doreen, she remained more frankly rude.
‘Because I know you better than he does, my lamb,’ she answered. ‘Or don’t I?’
‘What do you mean by that, pray?’
Doreen smiled her carefully calculated smile again. And she held on to it all the time she was speaking.
‘You surely can’t want me to actually say it,’ she said. ‘You must know.’ She paused. ‘Bill comes from such a different sort of home.’
‘And what’s wrong with my home?’
‘Oh nothing, darling,’ Doreen assured her, still smiling. ‘Nothing. If you can’t see what I mean, I can’t explain it to you. It only just proves what I’m saying.’ She paused again. ‘Not that I mind, of course. I understand.’
‘I think you’re perfectly horrible.’
Doreen came a step nearer. The smile had gone by now.
‘Don’t be rude, cherub,’ she said. ‘That would be so – common.’ She turned her back on Doris as she said it and made her way to the bedroom. She hadn’t meant to have a row with Doris. It had just turned out that way. Her nerves were jangling anyhow: they had been all day. If there were any of Doris’ aspirins left she’d take a couple. Not that aspirins were what she really wanted. They took away the headache but they left you feeling so flat and stupid. It was a drink she needed. But until Mr Perkiss arrived there was only Orange Squash and Lime Juice in the flat.
‘Oh God,’ she remembered suddenly. ‘I’ll have to make it up with Doris before Mr Perkiss arrives. Otherwise it’ll be too awful.’
She was thus quite unprepared for what happened. She hadn’t reached the bedroom by the time Doris caught up with her.
‘If you think I’m common,’ she said. ‘Let me tell you what you are. You’re just a greedy man‐hunter. You’d go after anything. Even after Mr Perkiss. You haven’t got the slightest self‐respect where a man’s concerned. Oh no. You’re not common. Of course not. And let me tell you something else as well. You’re lazy. Bone lazy. You don’t do anything in this flat. If I left it the way you do, you couldn’t have any of your wonderful boy‐friends here, because it would be like a pig‐sty…’
It was at that point that Mr Perkiss arrived. And as Doreen couldn’t possibly see him, it was Doris who had to let him in. She sat him down in the easy chair, gave him the evening paper and left him. It was nearly half an hour before the girls came through to him. And it didn’t make matters any easier that they weren’t on speaking terms. Doreen had spent the first fifteen minutes crying and she still was shaky and on edge.
But Mr Perkiss didn’t notice it. He was too much preoccupied with being delightful. He had brought gin and roses. And he kept referring to them as his little offering. But in his manner of making the presentation he blundered. Instead of simply dumping the things down on the table and then standing well back, he gave them each the presents in person. It was the gin he gave to Doreen, and the roses to Doris.
‘A picture,’ he said, as he watched her holding them. ‘A perfect picture. You belong to each other, you and the roses.’
There was nothing about the remark that need have annoyed Doreen. It was simply Mr Perkiss’ way of talking. And she would much rather have had the gin. But she had only just recovered from a rather violent fit of wanting to commit suicide, and was in a mood when quite little things upset her. At the thought that Mr Perkiss’ compliments were being directed at Doris she was ready to start howling at any moment.
And Mr Perkiss, not conscious that he was being anything other than a very charming success, went on being untactful. He admired Doris’ ear‐rings. Then, not content with that, he told Doreen that, poor dear child, she looked tired. He wished, he said, that he could tear himself away from his office if only for a long week‐end just to take her to the sea somewhere and bring back the colour to her cheeks. He mentioned three times in all that she was looking worn out.
And – or was it only that Doreen was imagining it? – he was paying particular attention to Doris. He gave her his glass of gin‐and‐lime because he said that the glass – they were all odd glasses in the flat – matched her dress. And then, turning smilingly to Doreen, he assured her that it was wicked, absolutely wicked, the way young girls were worked in offices nowadays. The proper place for girls, he said, was out in gardens gathering flowers…
Considering his smallness – he was just a little grasshopper of a man – he made a surprisingly good meal of the mushroom soup and the cold ham. And he talked food as well as ate it. He remembered other delicious meals that he had eaten on the Continent. And the only thing that seemed wrong about them in retrospect was that the girls had not been there to eat them with him. To make up for it he began planning other meals in London. When Doreen said that she adored oysters and didn’t mind what the rest of the meal was like so long as there were oysters, Mr Perkiss promised to take them to Pruniers. Then, not wishing to miss an opportunity of being skittish, he explained that he would take Doris another time, adding that no gentleman in his position could afford to be seen with two pretty girls at the same time. It was another piece of untactfulness, and it hurt Doreen terribly. She saw how right she had been in what she had said. Doris was stealing her boy‐friends, stealing them one after another.
But she tried to pretend that she hadn’t noticed anything. She just fixed a social smile on her face and went on sipping her drink, as though she were enjoying herself.
Then Bill came. They didn’t hear him coming up the iron staircase because he was wearing crêpe rubber shoes. But they heard him all right as soon as he got up on to the veranda. And that was because he fell against one of the little brightly painted tubs that Doreen had placed there. It went careering all over the place with Bill after it.
And apart from arriving at an awkward sort of moment just as the meal was nearly over, Bill was poor company. He was both loving and despondent. His Finals were in the morning and the Examining Board of the Faculty would decide whether he really should be allowed to become a doctor or not. At the moment, he rather feared not. Until half an hour ago he had resolved to spend the evening quietly in his room in an orgy of last‐minute revision. He had decided to check up on everything – the bones of the ear, the nervous system, the symptoms of scarlet fever, the classification of blood groups, the sulphonamide reactions, Materia Medica, morphology, anæsthetics, pathology, midwifery; the whole bag of tricks in fact, five years’ medicine packed into a single desperate evening’s reading. Then, quite suddenly, just as he was getting down to things he had realised that he simply must see Doris. Stopping abruptly in the middle of cardiac stimulants, abuse of, he got up from his chair and came.
It was Mr Perkiss’ gin that helped to revive him. He poured himself out a long solemn drink, and felt better. Under the influence of it he became genial and silly. He began testing everybody’s reflexes, including his own, and was delighted to discover that Doreen was at the top of the list and Mr Perkiss was at the bottom. Bill kept hitting Mr Perkiss’ knee over and over again, but nothing happened. Mr Perkiss had simply no reflexes at all. Perhaps that was why he seemed to dislike the whole experiment.
But what was far worse than Bill’s coltishness was the way he behaved towards Doris. He went across and sat on the arm of her chair, leaving Doreen alone on the divan and Mr Perkiss perched on the coloured wickered Sit Easy that creaked even under his weight. Doreen watched him with tears starting up in her eyes. Somehow Mr Perkiss, absolute darling though he was, looked so small and desiccated beside Bill. And because Doris looked so happy and comfortable and because Doreen herself felt so miserable and out of it, she simply had to say something.
‘Tell Monty about what’s happened to Percy,’ she said. ‘He’s been so interested in him ever since that night he came here.’
Doris shook h
er head.
‘I’ll tell him some other time,’ she replied.
‘Oh but you must,’ Doreen went on. ‘It’s so tremendously exciting. Monty adores crime.’
Mr Perkiss leant forward and raised his little marmoset face, pleadingly.
‘Please, please tell me,’ he said. ‘Such an intriguing young man. I’d never met anyone quite like him before.’
‘Some other time,’ Doris repeated.
It annoyed Doreen that Doris was behaving in this cold off‐hand manner to Mr Perkiss. But it was not surprising. Everything about Doris annoyed Doreen to‐night. And her head was swimming. That was Bill’s fault. She had started drinking all over again when he came. And she had told herself even before then, that it was time for her to stop.
‘What a long time ago it seems since I first met Percy,’ she said. ‘It was over at Kennington.’ She paused. ‘Do you remember, my pet? It was the night the gas went off at supper because your father had forgotten to put a shilling in.’
‘I remember,’ Doris answered. Her voice was dangerously calm and level as she said it.
Doreen continued to lie there, staring up at the ceiling. Then she turned to Mr Perkiss.
‘You’d never have thought it to look at him,’ she went on, ‘but he’s just been arrested for stealing cars. It was in the paper. You wouldn’t have guessed Doris had friends like that, would you?’
Mr Perkiss raised his fair, almost invisible eyebrows.
‘Well, well,’ said Mr Perkiss. ‘How remarkable!’ He leaned across and smiled charmingly at Doris. ‘I shall hear next that you’re a girl‐bandit yourself. Just like the moving pictures.’
As he spoke, he extended the first finger of both hands and gave a genteel imitation of someone firing off two revolvers simultaneously.
But this was just one more piece of untactfulness in the course of this deplorable evening. For it didn’t amuse Doris in the least.
‘I think you’re being perfectly horrible,’ she said. ‘You seem to forget that Percy’s in prison.’
As she said it she saw Percy very plainly. He was in his purple suit and yellow shoes and he was sitting beside her in the Toledo, a foolish dreamy look on his face. He was eating ice‐cream out of one of the little threepenny cups and listening to the organ…
The effect of Doris’ remark was to make Mr Perkiss withdraw sharply into himself like a snail that has had its horns touched. If there was one thing that he couldn’t bear it was for a young lady to think him horrible. He drew in his breath with a small sucking sound, and said nothing.
It was Doreen who replied for him. She threw out a cloud of cigarette smoke and addressed the ceiling.
‘It’s all my fault,’ she said. ‘I ought to have remembered. They meant a lot to each other once.’
She dropped her face a little so that she was regarding Doris out of the corner of her eye.
‘You weren’t actually engaged to him or anything, were you?’ she asked.
Doris sat up very straight.
‘You know I wasn’t. There was never anything like – like that.’ Doreen did not move. She was lying back against the cushions, her arm folded behind her head.
‘I’m so sorry, I quite thought there was,’ she said. ‘You were always talking about him. And then when he dropped in that night everything seemed so natural.’
‘Don’t be silly,’ Doris said.
It was really a very mild little answer. But in Doreen’s state it was disastrous. She had been called silly in front of other people.
‘How was I to know he was just another of your boy‐friends?’ she retorted.
‘I didn’t have any boy‐friends.’ Doris was sitting bolt upright now. Doreen smiled. It began as a sort of prolonged smile. But it became instead a slurred and untidy laugh that, for some reason, she could not stop. The sound of it alarmed her. Could it possibly be, she wondered, that she had really drunk too much of Monty Perkiss’ gin?
‘That isn’t what you told me earlier,’ she said.
Doris got up and came over to her.
‘I didn’t tell you anything,’ she said. ‘I don’t know why but you’re trying to be beastly. I think you’re loathsome.’
Doreen sat up herself abruptly. Her head was swimming.
‘When I want a lesson in manners from you I shall ask for it,’ she answered. ‘Just because your Percy’s been put in prison you needn’t go about trying to get someone else.’
The words as she said them sounded perfectly dreadful. They astonished her. But she hadn’t been able to stop saying them. They were what she had been keeping right at the back of her mind, and suddenly they had just come pouring out. Then, to her further astonishment, she found that she wasn’t saying them to Doris any longer. Doris had left them and gone through into her bedroom. She was left speaking to herself. She got up hurriedly and followed her.
Bill and Mr Perkiss exchanged glances.
‘What a sad affair,’ Mr Perkiss said, shaking his head nervously. ‘I’m afraid our little Doreen isn’t quite herself to‐night.’
Bill didn’t say anything. He went and leant up against the painted window sill on the far wall. He wanted to have a private word with Doris – and then another private word with Doreen afterwards. He was still wondering how he could contrive it, when Doris appeared again. She was carrying a suit‐case – and she went straight past him to the front door, without speaking. As she passed him, Bill saw that she was crying.
‘What’s happening?’ he asked. ‘Where are you going?’
But she didn’t answer. And even if she had answered it would have been difficult to hear her because Doreen was apologising at the top of her voice from the bedroom. She would kill herself, she kept saying, if Doris went.
Mr Perkiss was the only silent one. He remained perched up in the wicker Sit Easy, a frightened look on his face, trying to appear oblivious of the commotion that was going on all round him.
As Doris slammed the front door behind her, Bill snatched up his hat and without saying good‐bye to anyone, jerked the door open again, and followed her.
2
It was late by now; really late. After midnight, in fact. Across the table with all the text‐books lying on it, Bill and Doris sat looking at each other.
‘Feel better?’ Bill was asking.
He had just poured out the last of the beer and had insisted that Doris should drink it. ‘Beer’s best,’ he said. And Doris had drunk it. She didn’t like beer, and she felt a little sick at the moment. But she nodded dutifully.
‘You’ll feel better still in the morning,’ Bill told her.
‘I ought to go now,’ she said slowly.
But Bill wouldn’t hear of it.
‘We’ve had all that out before,’ he said firmly. ‘Can’t go home at this time. Just upset ’em. You have the bed and I’ll take the couch.’ He sat there looking at her for a moment, as though turning something over in his mind and then picked up his cherry pipe in the corner and began filling it.
‘In any case,’ he said, ‘I’ve still got some reading to do.’
On the table the whole unfamiliar theory of modern medicine lay there to be absorbed.
Doris, however, was apparently thinking of something else.
‘Do you think Doreen will be all right?’ Doris asked suddenly. ‘She won’t kill herself or anything?’
Bill looked up again.
‘At this moment,’ he answered, ‘Doreen is probably making Mr Perkiss a very happy man.’
He paused.
‘Like me to go while you get into bed?’ he asked. ‘Have to be a bit quiet because the landlady’s one of the old‐fashioned sort.’
‘That’s all right,’ Doris answered. ‘I’m just going to lie down as I am.’ She kicked her shoes off and stretched herself out on the bed. Then she lay there staring up at the ceiling. It was not a particularly bright and comely ceiling. But Bill’s shadow from the reading‐lamp on the table beside him spread itself over her. It wa
s larger than lifesize, and somehow comforting.
After a while Bill turned to her.
‘Like the light out?’ he asked.
‘When you’re ready,’ she answered.
‘Ready now,’ he told her.
In the darkness the room seemed smaller. And as it contracted it grew more intimate. Through the faint light entering from the window Doris saw Bill arranging the cushions on the couch for a pillow. Then he drew up a chair for his legs. He was very businesslike about it and had the air of a man who had been sleeping on couches all his life.
‘Good‐night,’ he said.
‘Good‐night,’ Doris answered.
They lay there without speaking. One of the churches in Hampstead struck one.
‘Are you still awake?’ Bill asked. ‘I’m awake.’
‘So am I. I’m lonely.’
Chapter XXXIV
As cells go, it was one of the more comfortable ones. There were two chairs as well as a table. And there was a bed in the corner. The bed was two foot six inches wide and six foot long exactly. It was made up on the simple principle of spreading a very thin straw palliasse over a shelf of very thick boards. At the foot of the bed were two rough blankets and a pillow, thin like the mattress, and stuffed with the same creaky straw. Altogether it was the kind of bed to be slept on rather than lingered in.
Over the end of the bed, and so high that even standing on the bed itself you couldn’t look out, was the window. Six massive metal bars like park railings ran up and down across its width and there was a wire mesh stretched across the bars so that birds couldn’t fly in and things couldn’t be thrown out. It was not the bars alone that made the window depressing; it was the thickness of the walls the alcove of the window revealed. If you stopped and thought about it, it wasn’t like being in a room at all. It was like being buried in a solid block of stone.
London Belongs to Me Page 36
