London Belongs to Me

by Norman Collins

  Then that mood, too, passed and she was back in her earlier one – the mood of prostrate helplessness. ‘Oh but I love him so. I do. I want to take care of him always. I want to save him from himself. I want those two rooms upstairs so that we can get married.’

  She had shifted the chair in which she was sitting, so as to bring it closer to the fire. And, with the warmth of the blaze playing upon her legs in their neat lisle stockings, she sat gazing emptily into space. Gradually, the space resolved into a wall. Then the wall as gradually became a picture frame and picture. Scarcely aware of how the change had come about, she found it was at the portrait of the late Mr Vizzard that she was staring. He was gazing down at her with a peculiar fixity that was due in part to the conventions of cabinet photography and in part to the expression that had been natural to him. As in life, he seemed perplexed, anxious and gloomily conscious of his own frustration.

  The only difference was that there was a frown there that she had never seen before.

  2

  And then something happened that, at least so far as Mrs Josser was concerned, took her mind off Mrs Boon completely. It was Ted who was responsible. Quiet, steady, reliable Ted who had never given a minute’s trouble to anybody. He received his calling‐up papers.

  There was nothing extraordinary in that. Everyone was getting them. It was the way he was behaving that was quite inexplicable. He just accepted it. With the Co‐op. ready to do everything in its power to apply for his reserve – and conscientious young men like Ted were the very backbone of the business – he expressed the view that if everyone got himself reserved we should lose the war anyway. There was nothing heroic or vainglorious in the attitude. It was simply blunt common sense. Having assured himself that the Co‐op. would make up the difference in his income, he was unbudgeable. Even Cynthia’s tears couldn’t dissuade him. He muttered something about it being his duty, and left it at that. And by then, of course, it was too late to do anything. The Ministry of Labour had got his papers and were working on them.

  What was more, judging by the speed with which the papers came through, they must have been working overtime. It was settled already, in fact. What a month ago had been no more than a vague threat was now right on top of him. He had to go to‐morrow.

  In consequence, there was a lowering of spirits all round. And the weather seemed just right for it. There was fog. Scarcely much more than shadowy drifting skeins of it so far. Merely skeins that hung at the end of streets and gardens like gauze transformations. But it promised to be thick, really thick, later. By six o’clock London would be lost somewhere in the gloom at the bottom of a pit, blacker than its own black‐out.

  Not that the black‐out needed any blackening. It was black enough in all conscience. And gloomy enough. Night in England wasn’t ordinary night any longer. It was the original Egyptian Plague temporarily redescended. It had a sinister, almost solid, quality of its own, this black‐out, so that you felt you had to carve your way through it, scraping and scooping out a passage as you went along. Even frivolous sociable people, restless inveterate gad‐abouts, would stand in the shelter of their own front doorways looking out into the evening where there should have been street‐lamps and the headlights of passing cars and bright interiors of shops and living‐rooms; and seeing nothing in all directions but the same unending ebony blackness, without a crack in it anywhere, they would turn and go back indoors again.

  Thin fingers of the thickening fog had found their way into No. 10 Dulcimer Street, with the result that the Jossers’ gas chandelier seemed to be burning less brightly than usual and the mirror over‐mantel looked as though it had been rubbed over with a damp cloth. But it wasn’t only the fog that made everything seem so dismal. It was the occasion. This was a farewell party they were having. Ted and Cynthia were both there, of course. And, because there was no one with whom to leave Baby, Baby was there as well. Mr Josser was sitting in his favourite chair beside the fireplace. And Mrs Josser and Doris were bringing in the tea.

  At first glance, everything might have seemed to be set for a normal pleasant evening. But, when they drew up round the table, it was obvious that there was something wrong. Nobody said a word. And, now that she had come into the circle of light, you could see that Cynthia had been crying. She was silly, giggling little Cynthia no longer.

  Mr Josser tried his best to introduce a lighter, more carefree sort of atmosphere. But he wasn’t very successful. He contrived to strike a wrong note right in the first bar.

  ‘Better have another cup, Ted,’ he said. ‘You won’t get tea like this in the Army.’

  A faint, rather sickly smile spread across Ted’s face. But there was no smile on Cynthia’s. Even Mrs Josser was shocked by her husband’s callousness.

  ‘You don’t have to go on reminding us, Fred,’ she told him. ‘It’s bad enough as it is, without that.’

  Mr Josser looked across at his son.

  ‘You didn’t mind my little bit of fun, did you?’ he asked.

  He put the question appealingly. But he didn’t in his own heart feel very funny this evening. He kept remembering how he had felt himself back in 1915 when he’d left Mrs Josser with Ted as a baby and Doris not even born then.

  Ted didn’t reply to Mr Josser’s question. He merely shook his head. There was nothing actually surprising in that, however, because Ted had always been the silent sort. But all the same it didn’t serve to make the party any merrier. It only set Cynthia burrowing into her handkerchief again.

  Then Mrs Josser suddenly put her cup down and addressed no one in particular.

  ‘I haven’t said anything before,’ she observed, ‘but I’m going to say it now. I think it’s a downright shame Ted having to go off like this, with the streets still full of fellows only half his age. If they’d known their business at the Co‐op. they’d have made him get himself deferred. He’s essential. That’s what Ted is, essential.’

  ‘That’s what I told him,’ Cynthia said, emerging for a moment. ‘I begged him.’

  ‘If they’d played their cards properly,’ Mrs Josser continued, ‘Ted needn’t have gone for months yet. Perhaps he wouldn’t ever have to go at all.’

  ‘But he wants to go,’ Cynthia said. ‘He told me so.’

  She began crying again as she said it. Really crying, not just wiping her eyes. They all turned to Ted for him to answer the accusation.

  But what could he say? He couldn’t get up and explain that between Dulcimer Street and the Germans there was only a thin red line of tried reliable men like himself. Couldn’t do it, because he wasn’t made that way. All that he could manage was a very halting ‘I didn’t, Cynthie. You know I didn’t.’

  Before Cynthia could reply, Mrs Josser had taken over. She began to blink very rapidly behind her spectacles, and her lower lip quivered. A moment later her head was on Ted’s shoulder and she was crying.

  For the next five minutes Cynthia was completely out of it. It was his mother, his own mother, who told Ted how precious he was, how proud of him they all were, how he was to take care of himself, how he’d be sure to win a medal, how big Baby would have grown by the time he got back, and, how lucky it was he’d had all that training in the Boy Scouts. She was not in the ordinary way a demonstrative woman, Mrs Josser, and she was surprised to find how much better she felt towards the war as a whole after this complete breakdown in public.

  Because Ted was fully occupied, Mr Josser got up and went over to Cynthia.

  ‘It… it won’t seem so bad once he’s actually gone,’ he told her. ‘We’ll look after you.’

  ‘I know you will,’ Cynthia answered, with a gulp.

  She liked her father‐in‐law, and generally he seemed to understand her. It was only on matters connected with Ted that he couldn’t be expected to know how she really felt.

  ‘It’ll be so lonely in the evenings when Ted’s gone,’ Cynthia explained after a pause. ‘So terribly lonely. And I shan’t be able to go out because of Baby. I shall
just be stuck there.’

  Mr Josser put his hand on her shoulder.

  ‘You’d better come round and live with us,’ he told her. ‘We’d make room for you.’

  ‘But I don’t want to leave my home,’ Cynthia answered. ‘I want to keep it like it is all ready for when Ted comes back.’

  At emotional moments like this, Mr Josser was always a bit awkward. He hadn’t got any flow of small talk. He looked from Cynthia to Mrs Josser, and from Mrs Josser to Ted. But he couldn’t find any assistance anywhere.

  It was Doris who saved things.

  ‘I tell you what, Cynthia,’ Doris said. ‘I’ll come round and live with you. You’d like that, wouldn’t you?’

  ‘What’s that?’ said Mrs Josser, turning away from Ted for a moment. ‘I’m going round to live with Cynthia while Ted’s away,’ Doris told her.

  ‘You’re going round to live with Cynthia!’

  Mrs Josser repeated the words, and then stopped herself. She simply didn’t trust herself to go on. It would be bad enough to have Cynthia round in No. 10 Dulcimer Street where she could keep an eye on her for Ted’s sake. But it was something entirely different to have Doris and Cynthia setting up house together somewhere else. Even though she no longer referred to the lamentable experiment with Doreen, she hadn’t forgotten it. Nor had she forgotten that Cynthia had once been an usherette.

  ‘It wouldn’t work,’ she said firmly. ‘You’re neither of you old enough.’ ‘Well, I think it’s a jolly good idea.’

  It was Mr Josser who had spoken. And, having said so much already, there was nothing to do but go on.

  ‘Don’t you think it’s a good idea, Ted?’ he asked. ‘It’d be company for Cynthia, having Doris round there.’

  Ted nodded his head. There was a pause while he seemed to be thinking.

  ‘Fine,’ he said. ‘I couldn’t ask for anything better.’

  And that coming from Ted was a lot. It settled things in fact.

  3

  Ted and Cynthia and Baby were back home again. Back home for the last time. Baby was asleep already. But Ted and Cynthia weren’t asleep. They were just lying there in the big double‐bed together. Her head was on his shoulder and there was a damp patch, warm at first but now chilly, on the arm of his pyjamas where she had been crying.

  ‘Don’t take on so, Cynthia,’ Ted said in a whisper – he had to speak in a whisper because of Baby. ‘I didn’t meant it that way.’

  ‘But I promised,’ Cynthia told him in a small choking voice. ‘I won’t look at another man whilst you’re gone.’

  ‘If I found you going about with another man, I’d kill him,’ Ted told her.

  A shiver ran through Cynthia at the words. They were adorable. This was the way she liked Ted best.

  ‘You’re spoiling everything going on like this,’ she said. ‘You’re frightening me.’

  Ted didn’t answer. Instead, he drew his arm tighter round her. Cynthia snuggled against him.

  ‘Oh, Ted,’ she said. ‘You are silly not trusting me.’

  It was heavenly lying there like that with him jealous, for her sake, of all the other men in London.

  ‘Kiss me, Cynthia,’ he told her.

  They kissed. But Cynthia stopped him.

  ‘You mustn’t, Ted,’ she told him. ‘Think of Baby. She’ll hear.’

  They lay after that without speaking, simply holding each other in an embrace that left Cynthia breathless. When Ted’s arm loosened, she whispered something.

  ‘I’ll think about you all the time,’ she told him. ‘Every hour and every minute. And at nights I’ll just sit looking out of the window at the moon, thinking that it’s shining down on you somewhere.’

  It was, for the moment, the usherette rather than the wife who was speaking. But the two of them were so mingled that even Cynthia did not know where one left off.

  ‘Every night,’ she went on, ‘I’ll look up at the moon and dream about you…’

  But outside the fog had thickened. There wasn’t any moon. London was groping about in the depths by now, and if it was going to be a long war – say two or three years of it – there were bound to be further moonless nights before it was over.

  Chapter LXIX

  1

  Life in Larkspur Road with Cynthia was strikingly different from the way things went in Dulcimer Street.

  For a start, everything in the flat was so up‐to‐date and modern. Ted had spent a lot of money on the furniture. From the low couch and the duplicate easy chairs, each with a gold tassel hanging from the front of the arms, to the new looking antique dining‐room suite it was all of one style – 1937, Co‐op. Even the centre light in the bedroom was Co‐op. It was a chromium box made up of orange coloured glass strips. Admittedly some of the pieces had lost their first freshness. One or two of the tassels – there were tassels everywhere in the drawing‐room: on the corner of the cushions, on the edge of the standard lamp shade, on the curtain sash – had been pulled off by Baby, and Cynthia had been too busy to sew them on again. Indeed, considering the shortness of her life, Baby had been responsible for a surprising lot of damage in those four rooms. Every time she pushed her toy‐pram around the dining‐room, the legs of the chairs became a bit more antique looking.

  They didn’t use all the rooms, of course, now that Ted wasn’t there. The drawing‐room was kept shut up and the remaining tassels just dangled vacantly for nobody. In the result, the dining‐room came in for heavier and heavier wear. It had passed from Late to Early Tudor in a space of weeks. And, unless the war were over pretty soon, and Baby could have somewhere else to bang about, it would be old Gothic by the time Ted got back to it.

  Another difference was in the sound of the place. No. 10 had always been a quiet house – especially after Percy had gone. But Larkspur Road was a racket. It was a kind of sub‐station of the B.B.C. At seven‐thirty when Doris got up, Cynthia would call out to her to turn the set on. And, once on, it played right through the day, even when Cynthia went out shopping with Baby and had forgotten to turn it off. Not that Cynthia listened very much. The set was kept low and talked away and read news and hummed and crooned and saxophoned all by itself in a corner, like a lunatic relation. But if Doris ever turned it off for a moment, Cynthia went over automatically and turned it on again. To Cynthia, the wireless was like the air you breathed. Something that you didn’t notice unless it wasn’t there.

  But she was an easy sort of person to live with, quite different from the exacting Doreen. There was, however, one thing that they had in common: in the house Cynthia did practically nothing. She divided her time into two roughly equal parts. The first part she spent in writing to Ted – carefully marking the envelope with the letters S.W. A.L.K. across the back of the envelope to show that it was sealed with love and kisses. And the second part was spent in waiting for his reply. In the intervals, she read papers called Poppy’s Own and Real Life Romances and Film Close‐Ups, sewed new collars and cuffs on to her dresses, and shampooed her hair – her cherished ash‐blonde hair that had brought Ted to his knees.

  ‘I’ve got to keep myself looking nice for Ted,’ she kept on saying, not as though there were any special point in mentioning it at that moment, but simply as though she were uttering what was uppermost in her mind. In consequence, the house and Baby were neglected.

  And, in the face of this neglect, Baby flourished.

  2

  But to‐night her emotions didn’t matter. At least, not beside Doris’ they didn’t. She was so excited that she forgot all about herself and Ted. So excited that she could only sit there in her pink quilted dressing‐gown – an idiotically extravagant indulgence on the part of the infatuated Ted – in front of the gas‐fire, and gaze at the telegram that Doris had passed to her.

  ‘Don’t you feel thrilled?’ she asked.

  She was tingling all over as she said it: it was just like a Real Life Romance with Doris’ face on the cover.

  ‘It’s typical of Bill,’ Doris s
aid slowly.

  ‘I know.’

  Cynthia closed her eyes for a moment and leant back. Invisible organs were playing to her the kind of music that is heard in cinemas.

  ‘It’s all ever so romantic,’ she added, and bit her lip to show that she meant it.

  ‘He doesn’t give me long, does he?’ Doris said musingly.

  ‘And you’ve got to wire him, he says so,’ Cynthia answered. ‘Will your ears be red when you go into the post‐office.’

  She was reliving, as she said it, the ecstasy of her own courting. Those last few months before marriage had been charged with everything in sex that is sublime. The flat was just being furnished and the tassels hadn’t yet come off.

  ‘It’s bound to upset Mother,’ Doris broke in on her. ‘Dad won’t mind. But Mother’ll be awful.’

  ‘No, she won’t be,’ Cynthia told her. ‘Not with a war on. That makes all the difference. She’ll understand. And just think how you’d feel if he went out there and anything happened to him. Suppose he was…’ She stopped herself abruptly. ‘Killed’ was a word that she couldn’t use until Ted was back safe in her arms again. ‘Wounded,’ she added, as soon as she had recovered from her own little private anxiety.

  ‘I know,’ said Doris. ‘I’d thought about that.’

  Cynthia took a sideways look at her as she spoke. She had never really understood her sister‐in‐law. Not deep down, that is. She seemed so cold and unfeeling, somehow. Not a bit like Ted. Admittedly she’d shared the telegram. And that was something. But she hadn’t cried. Or gone and lain down. Or anything like that. It might have been just an ordinary invitation from the way she was taking it. Then a sudden doubt took possession of her.