Mrs. Privett started to go after her, and then stopped. She turned and faced Mr. Privett. Neither of them spoke.
Then Mr. Privett swallowed. There was an audible choke somewhere in the back of his throat.
“You’ve made her cry, Mother,” he said idiotically.
It was a constrained, awkward sort of meal with just the two of them. The toad-in-the-hole—usually one of Mr. Privett’s favourite dishes, with the crust golden-brown like fresh cornflakes and the sausages themselves glistening with a rich amber radiance—was left almost untouched. The rice pudding was simply toyed with. Neither of them did very much talking. There was one point, however, on which they were in complete agreement. Each said emphatically that it would be silly for the other to go upstairs and attempt to reason with Irene while she was in that state. In consequence they sat there dutifully sipping at their tea together and trying to pretend that nothing had happened.
Of the two, Mr. Privett’s emotions were the simpler. He was merely sad and disappointed. But Mrs. Privett’s were more complicated. She was sad for his sake. She knew what his piece of news had meant to him. And she couldn’t forgive Irene for spoiling things. It was like being cruel to ... to, yes, that was it, to a child. Mrs. Privett wanted to throw her arms around her husband and tell him that at least one of his womenfolk still loved him. It was merely her upbringing that prevented her. She had been married for over twenty years and never once had she given any sudden demonstration of affection. She despised women whose emotions were on the surface.
From upstairs there came the sound of a door opening. Mrs. Privett immediately began smoothing out her skirt as though there had been crumbs all over it. Mr. Privett thrust his cup and saucer away from him.
“That’ll be her ladyship,” he said.
Mrs. Privett merely drew in her lips again.
“You leave her to me,” she replied.
“Perhaps she’s coming to say she’s sorry,” Mr. Privett suggested.
But Mrs. Privett was paying no attention to him.
“Ireen!” she called.
“Yes, Mum.”
Irene was half-way down the stairs by now. Going purposefully in the direction of the front door, it seemed.
It was a relief to Mr. Privett that Irene even answered. An absurd fear had suddenly flashed across his mind that Irene was running away, simply bolting from the house without another word to either of them.
“Where are you going?”
“Out, Mum.”
Irene’s voice certainly sounded steady and composed enough. There was no trace there of tantrums or hysterics. A deliberately casual and indifferent note seemed, indeed, to have crept into it. It might have been a chance and unintimate acquaintance whom she was addressing.
“Where to?” Mrs. Privett asked.
The same note of coldness, of aloofness, was in her voice also. It was the kind of voice that staff-managers and personnel superintendents use.
“With Madge. Like I said.”
“Don’t be back la ...”
But the end of Mrs. Privett’s sentence was cut off by another loud explosion. It was the front door this time. The whole house recoiled from the violence of it. Then there was silence. A deep, unnatural silence.
Mrs. Privett got up and began stacking the dishes, piling the half-eaten toad-in-the-hole and the merely pecked-at rice pudding on to the tray along with the teapot and the cups and saucers.
“Why don’t you go and do something with your boat?” she said.
It was at moments like this that Mrs. Privett was glad that her husband had a hobby to take his mind off things. At other times, even the mere recollection of the hobby faintly annoyed her.
One of the extraordinary things about all hobbies is that they should be exclusively male affairs. You don’t find grown women flying model aeroplanes. Or bending over gauge OO trains. Or collecting toy soldiers. Or even sticking-in stamps. Or arranging coins. Openly confronted with her husband’s hobby, there is hardly a woman who does not feel some embarrassment. And when the hobby is open and exhibitionist, like kite-flying or butterfly hunting, the wife tends to keep away from the front door-step when her husband sets forth.
That is the way it was with Mrs. Privett. Model yachts were Mr. Privett’s hobby. And in the whole range of hobbies there is nothing more open and unconcealable than a model yacht. It is bulky. Immediately identifiable. Unfoldable.
There are two schools of thought about transporting large boats through the streets. There is the perambulator school. And the bicycle school. Mere distance or the dimensions of the craft itself has little to do with it. It goes deeper. Rouses the old basic controversy of walking v. cycling. Every Sunday morning there are severe, earnest enthusiasts who live within half a mile or so of the various boat-ponds hitching themselves up into saddles and pedalling off with the boat-trailer lurching along behind them like a gun-carriage. And there are other men, just as severe, just as earnest, trundling a converted perambulator half-way across London.
Mr. Privett had never really been in doubt about the matter. He cycled. In one respect Mrs. Privett was glad about this. It meant that her husband’s shameful passage to his playground was kept as brief as possible. But, in another way she deplored it. Bicycles are awkward things to have in the hall at all times. They take up room. They hurt ankles. They fall over. And a bicycle with a kind of home-made milk float on the back is nothing less than a menace. Mr. Privett’s contraption cut off one whole section of the passage like a barricade. It was the first thing you noticed as you came in. The last thing you bumped against as the front door was opened for you as you went out.
To-night, however, it seemed not to be without its uses. Mrs. Privett felt almost grateful for it.
“Well, why don’t you?” she asked again.
Mr. Privett, however, only shook his head. His mind was turning naturally to his other solace, Mr. Bloot.
“Think I’ll walk round and see if Gus is in,” was all he said.
2
It was fortunate that Mr. Bloot lived so near. Within easy walking distance, that is. Just up to the end of Fewkes Road. Then turn right. And straight on to The Boston where you turn right again and then sharp left. At the outside, fifteen minutes door to door. Or about twelve travelling hard if it’s raining.
Admittedly, it was Mr. Bloot who knew the route even better than Mr. Privett did. That was because it was usually Mr. Bloot who came. Ever since poor Emmie had died, leaving Mr. Bloot a helpless, floundering widower, Mr. and Mrs. Privett had naturally both done what they could for him. It was Mr. Privett who had deliberately set out to prove that there was someone who still loved Mr. Bloot. Wanted him. Needed him. And it was Mr. Privett who had shown that there was someone ready to listen. Mr. Bloot wasn’t the kind of man to be rushed in anything. The recital of the last phase of poor Emmie’s illness always took time. And it was Mrs. Privett who always made him the cup of tea that he needed at the end of it.
As usually happens at times of bereavement, the Privetts had probably piled it on a bit. It might have been Mafeking and not merely loneliness that they had been relieving. They had practically adopted Mr. Bloot.
In a sense, this had been their mistake. After the first month or so, even the most desolate of widowers can usually come to some sort of terms with life. There is, for example, always the wireless. But Mr. Bloot was not a radio fan. Never had been. The B.B.C. was all a bit too restless. Too frisky. Too quick-fire for him. Cinemas weren’t in his line either. The films usually upset him. In the old days when Emmie had liked to go once a week, sitting there contentedly spooning up a tub-ice in the darkness, Mr. Bloot had been forced to shut his eyes because of all the dreadful things that were going on upon the screen. And afterwards, while Emmie was curled up sleeping peacefully, Mr. Bloot would lie, rigid and sweating, thinking of all that violence and cruelty and suffering that he had just been made to pay for.
That left only the public house. But Mr. Bloot was naturally a tea drink
er. And, as public houses don’t sell tea, even The Nag’s Head, the Boston Hotel, the Archway Tavern and all the rest of them couldn’t help. He passed by them, austere and disinterested, hankering after Brooke Bond’s or Lyons’s.
Indeed, if the Privetts hadn’t insisted that Mr. Bloot should come round to Fewkes Road every Sunday, he would have been left entirely high and dry. There were his budgerigars, of course. They had always meant a lot to him, those birds. And never more than since he had become a widower. But even prize budgerigars are not a full-time occupation. And on Sundays after Mr. Bloot had cleaned out their cages, changed the water, put in fresh millet seed, seen that the piece of cuttle-fish bone was firmly in position between the bars, there were still about fifteen hours to go before bedtime.
The first hour was always easy. He spent it in conversation. Budgerigars have to be kept alone if they are to say anything worth listening to. And they respond to attention. They thrive on it. That was just as well because Mr. Bloot was doing more than simply gossip with them. It was speech-training and elocution that he was engaged on. Serious and intensive stuff like “Pretty Billy” and “Kiss me,” said over and over again until his brain was reeling.
On the whole, however, progress was disappointing. No matter how much Mr. Bloot constricted his throat and pursed up his lips he still could not bridge the immense, the yawning gap, between his own deep baritone and their miniature piping treble. At times, the budgerigars didn’t even seem to recognize the incessant rumble as being conversation at all. Even with Mr. Bloot’s face pressed up against the bars and breathing hard over them, they just buried their beaks among their cape feathers and slept.
There was no denying that Mrs. Privett’s hospitality had done a great deal towards preserving Mr. Bloot’s reason. Even his life possibly. But life-saving can be very exhausting. Especially when it has gone on for nearly five years. And, after all, it was Emmie Bloot, not Augustus, who had been Mrs. Privett’s special friend. They had grown up professionally together, the two girls; first in a general draper’s in Brixton and then in Rammell’s itself. Emmie in the dress lengths. And Eileen in the layette and baby clothes. They had become bosom companions. Intimates. Like sisters. There wasn’t a thing that they wouldn’t have done for each other. And, more than once since the bereavement, as she washed up Mr. Bloot’s teacup, Mrs. Privett had reminded herself that it was for Emmie’s sake rather than Augustus’s that she was still doing it.
To-night, however, Mrs. Privett was spared the washing-up. Even spared Mr. Bloot. It was to be exclusively a men’s evening. Just two old friends together, discussing life and its surprises. What’s more, as it was Mr. Bloot’s house, it was Mr. Bloot’s turn to make tea. And after the emotional upset earlier in the evening Mr. Privett felt that he could do with a cup of it.
That was why it was so bleakly disappointing when Mr. Privett got there to find that Mr. Bloot was out. And more than out. Had not even got home, in fact. It gave Mr. Privett a chilly feeling right down his spine to hear this piece of information. Because it confirmed Mr. Privett’s fear that there was something fishy somewhere. Mr. Bloot had been behaving strangely of late. Sometimes he was there. And sometimes he wasn’t. He either came round on Sundays. Or he didn’t. It was as simple and unpredictable as that. And it was the same with going up to the Ponds. No excuses afterwards. No apologies. No explanations. Just absence.
“It doesn’t matter,” said Mr. Privett diffidently, to the landlady who had come down in answer to his knock—a loud one and a sharp double rat-tat, which was the private code between the two friends, “It doesn’t really. I was only just passing. Sorry to have brought you down.”
Chapter Three
1
Even though it was a real failure of a morning—black skies, dark pavements and a wet sticky look to everything—Mr. Rammell was sitting in his car with a kind of private sunshine of his own seeping in through the windows. The fact that he didn’t feel well no longer mattered. He had felt worse yesterday. What really mattered was that he had got a particularly niggling little problem that had irritated him for days—something about soft furnishing discounts—all sorted out in his mind overnight. That was why he was glowing, while the rest of London just steamed.
Mr. Rammell carried this mood of well-being into the office with him. In consequence, everything seemed just right. The peace and calm of the office itself was something straight out of paradise. His desk was exactly as he liked to see it. Clean blotting paper on the pad. Jotter and diary close alongside. Dictaphone on the side-table. Two fountain pens, one for red ink and one for blue-black, stuck out invitingly from their heavy plunger-holder. Even the desk calendar had been set at exactly the right angle so that Mr. Rammell had merely to glance sideways for an instant to make sure that it really was to-day and not yesterday or to-morrow in which he happened to be living.
The flowers on the window table were something else that pleased him. They showed that the floral department had been up early doing some good buying. The flower trade is exclusively a dawn affair. There is very little that is worth having in the petal market after about 7.30 a.m. As it was, the big white vase was filled with the sort of dark red roses that look as if they have been growing in big white vases all their lives. But there was one thing better even than the roses. A glass of hot water with a thin slice of lemon in it had been brought through to him as soon as he sat down. Altogether it was being a perfect heaven of a morning.
And, as usual, he had started work immediately. At this very moment up in the mail room on the floor above there were twelve letter-sorters, presided over by the secretariat supervisor, all slitting open the day’s post. They were part of the 8.00 a.m. shift, and they were working flat out, letter openers flashing like rapiers, removing the contents and pinning the letters, cheques, postal orders, samples for matching, back on to the envelopes in which they had come.
In the retail trade the date of the postmark can be important. It may make all the difference between a happy customer or a closed account. And as soon as the bits and pieces had been safely skewered together, they were pitched into the row of green metal trays marked Counting House, Travel and Tickets, Stock Sizes, Children’s, Hardware, China and Glass, Hairdressing, Toys, Perfumery and Cosmetics, Pianos and Radio, Sports-goods, Model Gowns, Millinery, Furs, Dress Lengths, Furnishing, Groceries, Jewellery, and all the rest of them. There was a whole battery of these trays. And even in their emptiness they represented Rammell’s livelihood. Homes and gardens and seats at the cinema and birthday presents and summer holidays for all the staff depended on getting those trays piled up and overflowing.
But it was the red tray beside each sorter’s left elbow that really counted. The other trays were just so many bottomless tanks being filled up with the steady daily surge. The regular morning flow down the public pipe-line. The fuel that kept the firm going. The red trays were special. Anything that had explosive in it, the least little hint of fire, went straight into one of the red trays. As the red trays were filled, the supervisor emptied them. And, every five minutes or so, the whole collection of them, practically solid dynamite by now, were passed on to Miss Underbill for Mr. Rammell.
They were a particular pet of Mr. Rammell’s, these complaints trays. He didn’t, of course, attend to any of the complaints himself. At least, not at this stage. He wasn’t an extra-department fiddler, a do-everything-myself kind of man. But he always liked to know what the dissatisfied customers were saying. It was the quickest way of keeping his finger on the pulse of the business. Or rather on the pulse of a hundred different businesses.
And there was another advantage to be gained from glancing through the complaints trays. There was his personal stamp “Seen by the Managing Director” that his secretary, Miss Underhill, affixed afterwards. That stamp had a tonic effect on the entire store. It kept other people perpetually on their toes and up to scratch.
Mr. Rammell was more than half-way through the first tray-ful already. The letter that he had
just read was from someone complaining that one of the springs of a new sun-lounge had snapped clean in two the first time anyone had sat on it. The circumstances had evidently been violent and dramatic. And socially shaming into the bargain. According to the evidence, it had been a vicar and a doctor’s wife that the treacherous contrivance had been temporarily supporting. A wicker table with teapot and hot-water jug had been standing immediately in front. Only by the mercy of providence had the vicar escaped a terrible scalding; and, as it was ... there was a great deal more in the same vein. But Mr. Rammell merely jotted down the words “sun lounge,” and reached for the next letter.
He never attempted to keep an exact record of what he read in the complaints tray. There were plenty of other people, hordes of them, analysing, cross-referencing, double-checking everything. And it was enough that he had seen it. It lit a tiny red lamp somewhere in his brain and reminded him that there had been two other complaints about sun lounges last month. Either the buyer didn’t know where to go for sun lounges, or Birmingham had been letting down the buyer. Later on in the morning he would ask Mr. Preece which way round it was.
The next half-dozen letters were nothing. Simply nothing. A china tea-service had arrived in Northwood with the milk jug shattered. The electric motor of a newly delivered washing machine had fused all the lights in a house at Camberley as soon as the contraption had been turned on. Six pairs of stockings had been posted off by Rammell’s all half a size too large despite the fact that the correspondent had most particularly said “fives,” and didn’t Rammell’s assistants ever listen to anything that was said to them? A lady from Cheltenham had been violently ill in the 3.7 from Paddington after eating minced chicken in the Rammell’s restaurant. The assistant with red hair and an offhand manner in model millinery had been “grossly offensive”—Mr. Rammell had long ago noticed that nobody ever used the word “offensive”—to someone who was transferring her account immediately to Harrod’s because she disliked being spoken to by any shopgirl as though she were a common shoplifter. A bottle of perfume purchased last Tuesday had given the customer and her husband a peculiarly violent kind of hay-fever ...
Bond Street Story Page 3
