The Stories of Jane Gardam

by Jane Gardam

  He stopped being around after a while. One of the sniggerers heard he’d run off to be a ballet-dancer. Aggie Batt looked madder then, her face more severe. She began to carry a walking-stick and twirl it about. After I was married, my husband sometimes came to join the theatre queue with me—just at first. One day we arrived very early and we saw the poor old bundle, with the walking stick alongside, on the black mac. ‘Good God, what’s that? Who’s that poor old man?’

  ‘Sssh, it’s Aggie Batt.’

  He looked down the queue and said, ‘Looks like a string of winos, but my word! The one at the top!’

  My husband’s full of quips. Once when I was late home from a seven-hour stint of the Henrys he’d put my mail out on the hall-stand re-directed, ‘Not known at this address. Try The National Theatre.’ But he wouldn’t be bothered with jokes about Aggie Batt.

  And why am I writing all this? What is so special about her? After all, she’s dead now. The London theatre is going along perfectly well without her. There has been no obituary and she won’t ever be mentioned in any memoir. She’s not as far as I know ever been referred to in a theatre column or theatre magazine or been interviewed on television. I don’t think she ever heard of television. What was she? An interesting psychiatric subject for discussion: a woman with a Shakespeare fixation. That is all.

  Well, it is not all. I am writing down all that I know now about her because it is not all, and because of the wonderful thing that happened the day she died, and if you don’t believe a word of it, what do I care? Shakespeare’s plots were unbelievable. Larger than life. When people say to me, ‘Oh, I say—another story larger than life’, I say to myself, think of Shakespeare. Think for example of the story of The Winter’s Tale, and I say, ‘Things may be larger than your life but they are not larger than mine.’

  Well, it was to be the first night of what promised to be a marvellous Winter’s Tale. The preview notices had been non-pareils. The agency tickets had been sold out weeks before. We had read already in all the papers of the wonderful, ice-bound Act One and the blooming and blossoming dizzy Spring in store for us in Act Two: the songs and the sheep-shearing, the frolic, then the regeneration, the triumph over wickedness and death at the end. Huge portraits of the players were plastered against the glass sides of the National: pictures of yokels and bears, statues and queens and sages, and Perdita and her princeling—the hopes of the world.

  I decided that to be sure of a seat I must leave home about 5:30 A.M. and drive to London in the car. I didn’t tell anyone at home that I was going so early because there’s opposition nowadays on account of my leg and the time I didn’t see the Sutton roundabout.

  I crept out of the house and it was already light—a warm, Spring morning. All the birds of Tadworth making a racket like Illyria. I stood for a moment thinking how much I love Tadworth. All the birds, and so easy for the theatre. I thought how much more musical suburban birds are than country ones and wondered what the Southwark birds had been like in Shakespeare’s time. Thinking of Shakespeare and Winter’s Tale I went round to our garden at the back to pick Aggie some flowers. There were some lovely primroses and still some nice daffs, though some had gone a bit brown-papery, a few primulas and six little irises. We’ve a nice garden. I put them in a plastic bag with a bit of blue rue we have by the gate and stowed them in the glove compartment and roared off down the drive trying not to look in case any angry heads were sticking out of bedroom windows. My daughter is a light sleeper and not just now my friend. I imagined her furious face. ‘For goodness sake! Adolescent! Immature! Sitting with students!’ and so on. My daughter is in Management Consultancy although I called her Cordelia. She doesn’t understand.

  It was difficult parking the car that morning. Someone had forgotten to take the chain down from across the theatre forecourt and I had to go half-way to Southwark to the carpark where you take a ticket from a sleepy man in a box and the surface is like craters of the moon. It can’t have been worse in Shakespeare’s time. Great puddles. I set off walking back. Ten minutes.

  That can make all the difference from being number twenty and number thirty in the queue. Each person in the queue for tickets sold on day of performance is allowed two tickets. There are only forty tickets altogether unless there are returns, and there are unlikely to be returns for a First Night, so ten minutes can mean defeat.

  So I went pounding along to the National, past the head of the queue where of course lay Aggie Batt, fast asleep, and for some reason feet foremost today, lying at right-angles to the glass wall, her head below the enormous chin of Edward Woodward picked out in purple. Even she wasn’t first in the queue for this performance. There was a man ahead of her leaning against the glass, reading, and then the Yorkshire walk-way boy sitting cross-legged, staring ahead, numbed by the secret music under the ear-muffs. ‘Late,’ I called out, but neither the man nor the boy nor Aggie Batt made any sign. I went to the end of the line and dumped my cushion and blankets and stood out from the wall—we all sit under a wide cement awning which shields us from the rain—very different from the old days, humped in raincoats under umbrellas on little battered stools. I counted back and I was number 45. So I wasn’t going to be lucky.

  However, you never know. Miracles sometimes happen and other hopefuls were still gathering up behind me, thinking likewise. I wrapped myself up and watched the Bridge. I slept a bit I think because it suddenly seemed much lighter and the people round about were beginning to eat things. I drank some coffee from my thermos and wished I’d brought a book. There were huge Germans on either side of me, fast asleep. Nobody to talk to.

  Soon the day-light began to wane again as clouds came over and rain began. Never say die, I thought and felt in my pockets for chocolate—then remembered the flowers I’d left behind in the glove-compartment, way down Pickle-Herring Street. I felt tired and my leg was jumping.

  However—I put my thermos on the cushion to keep my place and set off back past the head of the queue. Aggie Batt had not stirred, neither had the leaning man (what strength of shin!) nor the walk-way boy. ‘Just going to the car,’ I called, but I’m like scenery. They didn’t speak.

  When I came back again with the flowers in the plastic bag I had an idea. I have never had this idea before. I have never asked, for it is not done—to ask someone buying only one ticket near the top of the queue if they’ll buy their allowance of two and sell one back to you. The walk-way never buys more than a single ticket and neither of course does Aggie Batt, but asking her would be out of the question. It would mean sitting next to her through the play and chatting, which I knew she would never countenance. It would be like asking a nun to share her hassock or a fakir to shift over on his mat.

  ‘S’okay,’ said the walk-way boy, lifting off a muff an inch. Little tinny sounds came out, like distant revels. He let it spring back in place and I sat beside him and took out my purse and counted the money. I felt dreadful, breaking the rules, and I said to the standing man, ‘I know him. He’s a very—old friend. I’ve never done this before.’ I looked at Aggie but she was still asleep. Sleeping late. Peaceful. I took the flowers from the bag, bound them round with the elastic band from my sandwiches and the boy and the man watched.

  I laid the flowers on Aggie Batt’s chest for her to find when she woke. The boy paid no attention now but the man continued to watch. ‘It’s because it’s Winter’s Tale,’ I said. ‘It’s her favourite.’ Although he did not speak I knew that he found what I had done acceptable. I also knew that I need say no more and I went back to my place.

  I am a garrulous woman. I suppose by now that’s clear. I cannot help it. It is because I am not confident. I am not even confident about Shakespeare. I only got a Lower Second. I try to justify myself too much. I try to explain my hungry need for Shakespeare by trying to be learned about him—catching on to other people’s stuff about First Folios and textuality and fragmentation and things not being cogent rathe
r than just saying that when I am watching Shakespeare I am happier than at any other time. I knew as I sat down at the end of the queue again that I had no need to justify myself to that man and I felt young again. I felt rather as I had done long ago, when I was eighteen standing in the aisle at the New Theatre, famished, light-headed, looking forward. It was like falling in love.

  Soon the necklaces of lights came on and the rain stopped, leaving big pools about on the concrete. A warm, quite summery breeze blew over us and I may have dropped off because all at once I noticed the welcome 9:45 A.M. signs of life inside the National’s glass wall. The counter of the ticket-office was being dusted and a Hoover was being wheeled away, lights switched on.

  There is a moment in the theatre queue and it is 9:59 A.M. With one accord, like the audience at Messiah with the lift of the baton for the Hallelujah Chorus, everyone rises to his feet. Everyone does a shuffling left turn and stands waiting. Hardly a sound. Then the man inside looks at his watch, comes out from his lair, undoes the bolts and opens the glass doors, and without pause the whole queue begins to flow forward, each person holding six or twelve pounds or a cheque-book like a talisman. The queue marches through and the whole thing is over in less than a quarter of an hour.

  But not this morning, for when I reached the head of the queue, Aggie Batt had not got up. She lay there with her nose as sharp as a pen and the flowers on her chest.

  The queue passed round her of course. As was right. I stayed with her, waiting for the walk-way boy to come with our tickets and when he did, he knelt down by her and took off his ear-muffs and began to undo her jacket and scarves. The leaning man who’d been ahead of her had disappeared—he wasn’t a regular. He’d probably hardly noticed her, deep in his book. The last tail-end of the queue reluctantly stepped round her. A few stood lingering about in the forecourt, looking towards us, before going away.

  I told the boy to find someone quick, to get an ambulance, but he said, ‘No hurry. She’s dead,’ and I felt her face and it was ice-cold. ‘She’s been dead for hours,’ he said. ‘I know. I’m a hospital porter,’ and he went inside, slowly, to find a telephone. ‘You’d think that man would have noticed,’ I said, ‘standing beside her all this time. He was ahead of her. He must have been there when she arrived.’ ‘What man?’ said the boy. ‘There wasn’t any man. She was head of the queue.’

  When the ambulance had taken away what remained of Aggie Batt, and the walk-way boy gone off to get us some coffee, I put my ticket in my purse and went over towards the river. I watched the great procession streaming over the Bridge, swirling along like the water below. The people of Shakespeare’s parish.

  GRACE

  Clockie Gosport had this great diamond in the back of his neck. Under the skin. At the top of the spine. In among all the wires that keep the show on the road. Just on the bone they break when they hang you. Clockie Gosport.

  He was never a one to mention the diamond. Never. Very quiet and modest. A thoughtful man, born over Teesport in a street right on to the pavement, no back door or yard or running water or electric. And clean! Every part of it, including the old man, old Gosport, Clockie’s father, who was made to strip in the passage every night home from the Works and bathe in the tin behind the screen.

  She was a silent woman, Ma Gosport. She held the world together, packing in the lodgers head to tail in the upstairs double, the family all crammed about. She took in both day- and night-shift men, and every hour God gave she was washing and possing and mangling and hanging out bits of sheets. She hung them out courtesy of Mrs. Middleditch and the hook in her wall across the way. All was hygiene.

  And this story went around. ‘Clockie Gosport got a diamond in his neck.’

  ‘Is it true you got a diamond in yer neck, Clockie?’ (He was Clockie because way back someone had said: ‘Like a watch. Watches has bits of diamond in them.’)

  Clockie always smiled. ‘Now how could I have a diamond in me neck? They’d have me head off.’

  That was as a grown man. At school he’d said nothing, just stared. He had these poppy eyes. The other kids said it was the diamond pushing them forwards. ‘Gis yer diamond, Clockie. Come on, yer booger, gis yer diamond.’ They would grab at him and Ma Gosport or the school teacher would wade in and cuff them all about.

  Nobody cuffed Clockie, though. It was tradition. When Clockie had been five or six he’d been cuffed about at home for screaming and it was found to be the meningitis. There’d been silence all down Dunedin Street that night and folks coming and sitting quiet on the step and Old Gosport weeping. And Ma Gosport had been slapping and bashing the sheets in the back and then getting into her things for the walk to the Infirmary. Mrs. Armitage and Mrs. Middleditch had gone with her, the one excited, the other grim. They’d gone in order to support Ma Gosport back after the news, and Ma Gosport had stuck out her chin and never spoke once on the road, the three of them walking abreast in their hats and coats. She gave the women presents later. Mrs. Middleditch she gave a jet brooch of her grandmother’s and Mrs. Armitage she gave a steak pie.

  For Clockie had recovered and, before Ma Gosport left the Infirmary, the doctor had called her in—‘No, just the mother, please’—and had put his arm round her.

  ‘Mrs. Gosport, your boy will get better and he’s a lucky lad. We’re very interested, though, in the foreign body lodged in the neck.’

  ‘It’s a diamond,’ said Ma Gosport.

  The doctor brooded. ‘What exactly do you mean by a diamond, Mrs. Gosport?’

  ‘I don’t know. It just happens sometimes in the family. There comes a bairn with the diamond. It means luck.’

  ‘Have . ⁠. ⁠. ⁠’ the doctor covered his face with his hands and swirled them about, ‘has anybody ever seen it?’

  ‘No. Well, it’s under the skin, isn’t it?’

  ‘We ought to examine it, you know. It is most fascinating.’

  So she let them, but it was long ago before the war when X-rays were feeble, and what with air raids coming and hospitals so busy, Clockie’s diamond went out of folks’ minds.

  Clockie was a poor scholar and slow talking. He never read. He grew very good-looking. Beautiful, really. He began work at the new chemical plant after the war, sweeping a road a mile long. He brushed with men to either side of him, a thin grey line, and every now and then a machine came along that gobbled up the dirt. Then the men stopped, drew on a fag, slung it away, lined up again, swept on. At the end of the mile they knocked off for a can of tea and walked back and started again. It didn’t worry Clockie. It was regular work and you could listen. It was surprising what you heard.

  ‘’Ere, Clockie,’ they said on wet days, ‘how ’bout releasing this diamond and we all get off to Paris?’

  They’d glance at the back of his neck now and then, but it was always covered by the sweat-rag his mother gave him, boiled clean, each morning. They’d not have thought of touching it.

  When he got a girl, though, she wanted to touch it, of course she did. She was Betty Liverton, dumpy little thing, all charm.

  ‘Welsh,’ said his mother. ‘Not to be trusted.’ Betty had her hands round his neck second time out.

  Clockie wasn’t sweeping any more. He’d graduated first to the suction machine and found affinity with all forms of mechanical life. Now he was the feller with the screwdriver round the ethylene plant and everybody shouting for him.

  He’d moved up to the mechanics’ canteen, where Betty Liverton washed the mugs. Short little legs, lovely chest, freckles, soft eyes—she watched him with his curly hair. Big feller, Clockie.

  Then down Ormesby Lane, by the bit of wood and stream that’s not overlooked, they lay down beside the kingcups and put their hands on each other and she screamed.

  ‘What is’t?’ He was undoing her dress.

  ‘Stop it. Dear Lord, it’s true!’

  ‘What’s true?’ His blue pop-eyes were
shining. He wasn’t laying off for long.

  ‘It’s true. In the back of yer neck. The diamond.’

  He pushed her down. (And him thought slow!)

  ‘Get off. I want to see. It’s right on the surface. I could bite it out.’

  ‘Does it bother you, then?’ He took both her wrists in one hand and held them in the grass above her head. She was amazed.

  ‘It doesn’t bother me. I just never could believe it.’

  She forgot the diamond. All she could think of that night in her bed as she played back her deflowering beside Ormesby Beck was that it couldn’t have been his first time.

  ‘Was it yer first time?’ she asked when they were married.

  ‘It come natural,’ said Clockie.

  She became the envy of the street with her sleepy honeymoon looks.

  They got a couple of rooms up the road and Ma Gosport made the best of it, taking in another lodger and then another when Old Gosport went at last, spotless, to his coffin. She never liked Betty Liverton.

  Clockie stayed tranquil, so tranquil that it was a puzzle to some that after the first days of marriage were over and Betty grown brisk there were so quickly two girls and a boy, all the image of their father. It was only image, though. There was not his temperament, not the peace of him. They grew up to be rubbish.

  ‘Well, their mother’s rubbish, isn’t she?’ said Ma Gosport. ‘She got tired of him. There wasn’t a thought between them.’

  Clockie grew quieter still after the kids were flown and Betty went off with Alan Middleditch. ‘That’s Wales for you,’ said Ma Gosport just before she died.