1
Mr. Bloot’s decision to go round to see Hetty was made without any proper planning or forethought. It was simply the compulsive action of an overwrought and desperate man.
Normally, he didn’t ever see Hetty on Wednesdays. That, she told him, was the evening when she washed her hair. And remembering how much of it she had, the occasion had a semi-sacred significance. Sometimes, dreamily, at the moment of dropping off to sleep he had seen himself brushing Hetty’s hair. He could hear the swish that the brush made as it swept through the long clinging tresses. Feel the caress of the hair upon his bare hands. Smell the rich fragrance of the real egg-shampoo ... But such intimacies, he told himself, should be reserved for the final mystery of marriage. Better not think about them. Or he would go mad.
And it wasn’t merely the strain of a long engagement from which he was suffering. It was worse than that. Because he didn’t even know what her intentions towards him really were. For all he could tell she was merely toying with him. That was why he had got to ask her. Put the question point blank. Real take it, or leave it stuff.
He heaved himself up suddenly.
“It’s now or never,” he said. “Ah just can’t go on like this. Not even if she is washing ’er ’air. She ’asn’t got the raht to arsk it of me. Ah’m only ’uman. Ah’m flesh-and-blood, even if Ah am fifty-seven. Ah’m not some sortover monk.”
The fact that he had voiced such feelings, even to himself, showed how keyed-up he was. Not that he looked unduly perturbed as he set out. That may, however, have been merely because the weather had turned chilly, and he was wearing his knitted lining. It was a thick lining with padded sides. And knitted things and passion do not go together. There is something mutually irreconcilable. Also, his overcoat was of a cut that suggested social standing rather than romance. It was dark blue with a black velvet half-collar. A thoroughly distinguished piece of tailoring that had been made for a man only a few inches shorter than Mr. Bloot, it had reached him via a misfit specialist off Shaftesbury Avenue. And it showed its origin most distinctly. Every time Mr. Bloot wore it, he added something of Savile Row and Boodles’s to the local landscape of Kentish Town and Tufnell Park.
It was only his gait that revealed that there was something urgent and imperative about the expedition. And there were no flowers this time. The period for bouquet and blandishment was over. A straight “yes” or “no” coming from the other party was what Mr. Bloot now demanded. And this was a pity. Because full-blooded, high-spirited women like Hetty Florence are often touched and left practically defenceless by some little attention, some small floral tribute. That original bunch of sweet peas and gladioli had very nearly won her the first time. But he was not to know that. Subtlety, particularly subtlety in matters of the heart, formed no part of Mr. Bloot’s make-up. Nor had he ever needed it. Emmie had been demonstrably of the straightforward, no-nonsense school.
The Tufnell Park Road seemed unusually long this evening. And the bus up the Seven Sisters Road unnaturally slow. As he sat in the corner seat looking out anxiously for Tregunter Road, he kept muttering. His temper was up by now. He was angry and morose. “Wash ’er ’air, indeed,” he said aloud as the bus trundled endlessly along. “If she isn’t careful she won’t ’ave no one to wash it for.”
The woman next to him glanced apprehensively towards the well-dressed gentleman who was sitting beside her, and then moved over to the seat opposite. She was disappointed in him. He looked such a reliable, distinguished sort of man. And now she could see that he was just a drunken old reprobate like the rest of them. The words: “Ah’m not a bloody monk. Ah’m a ’uman being like the rest of them” had just reached her from across the gangway. But by then the bus had reached Tregunter Road and Mr. Bloot had got out. Just as well, too. Another mumble from him, and she would have rung the bell so that she could get out herself.
Still inwardly fuming by the time he reached the entrance to Artillery Mansions, Mr. Bloot’s whole nature changed as he mounted the steel stair-treads. He was no longer angry. He was frightened. Frightened and contrite. He was afraid of losing Hetty altogether. Ashamed of the thoughts that he had just been thinking. When he reached the first landing he paused. In the course of climbing the last flight his courage had completely evaporated. He was no longer in any mood for an ultimatum. He was trembling too much for that. The utmost that he could go through with—and then only with an act of supreme self-control—would be to pretend that he had just dropped in. He was even working out in his mind some vague, improbable story about having been to see a man in Harringay about a budgerigar ...
Passing his tongue across his lips because they were dry, he put out his forefinger and gave the bell-push a quick, nervous jab as though the little porcelain button were red hot.
The abrupt ping of the electric bell made Hetty jump violently. She was not washing her hair. Or anything like it. She was wondering whether to play a seven or take another card from the stack. Her cards had been terrible all evening. She was therefore now concentrating really hard. She had already lost twenty-three-and-sixpence.
“You go, Chick,” she said without looking up into the thick blue haze of cigar smoke that was swirling round the room. “It’s only Hutch. He said he’d be here if Daisy’d let him.”
2
It was not merely the presence of Chick that amazed Mr. Bloot. It was his appearance. For it had grown hot in the small front sitting-room. And Chick had been getting down to things. He had taken off his jacket. Nor had he taken the trouble to dress before going to the front door. His waistcoat—it was a fancy one covered all over with fleur-de-lys as though he were the last of the Bourbons—was over the back of his chair. This meant that his braces were showing. And they were like no braces that Mr. Bloot had ever seen before. They had pictures of ladies all over them.
But Mr. Bloot’s surprise was no greater than that of Chick himself. He had expected to see Hutch. And Hutch was only a small man. A small man with a thin pointed wedge of a face resting on a polka-dot bow tie. He was a commission agent. And he carried about with him something of the unmistakable alertness of his profession. Whereas this ponderous, muffled-up mammoth with his umbrella and his velvet half-collar suggested a different kind of world altogether. It was the world of church wardens and temperance leagues and boys’ welfare clubs. Chick immediately felt suspicious. Gripping his cigar firmly between his teeth, he blocked the narrow hall completely.
“Yah?” he asked.
Mr. Bloot did not reply straight away. He was spell-bound, hypnotized by the ladies on Chick’s braces. The thought that perhaps he had blundered, that possibly this was number 25b and not number 23b—there was a duplicate entrance to Artillery Mansions one door farther up the street—flashed into his mind. But one glance over Chick’s shoulder reassured him. There on the corner on the mahogany hat-stand hung Hetty’s magenta rain-cape. There could hardly be two women in one block of flats who would have chosen so rousing, so declamatory a colour. And even above the general odour of cigar smoke he could detect the elusive, penetrating fragrance of the scent that Hetty always used.
“Good evening,” he said in his full, robust-sounding baritone. “Ah wonder if Miss Florence is at home. If so, perhaps Ah might be allowed to ’ave a word with ’er.”
It all sounded civil enough, Chick admitted. But all the same he didn’t like it somehow. There was the additional flavour of debt-collection somewhere in the background. And he wasn’t the kind of man to see a good sort like Hetty shamelessly dunned in the middle of a quiet game of poker. He shook his head firmly.
“You’re unlucky,” he said. “Nothing doing. Oo shall I say called?”
Mr. Bloot felt his whole body go limp. He had been forced to brace himself to come at all. And in the result he was more bewildered than if he had stayed at home. Never a quick thinker he felt the need to play for time.
“It’s not important, thank you,” he said. “Ah’ll call again. She wasn’t erspecting me.”
His voice
was level and steady while he was speaking. But inside him, his heart was hammering. For all he knew the man in front of him might be a burglar. A breaker-in. He tried desperately to memorize his appearance. And he was just turning away, with Chick closing the front door inch by inch on him as he retreated, when suddenly through the half-open door of the sitting-room, he heard Hetty’s voice.
Only it was not like her usual voice. Not soft. And husky. And vibrating. It was a torn, anguished voice. With the authentic note of desperation ringing through it.
“No, you don’t,” she was saying. “That’s all you get out of little me. Try it again, and I’ll start screaming.”
In the ordinary way Mr. Bloot was neither a violent nor impulsive man. Compared with Hetty Florence’s friend, Chick, his reactions were definitely lethargic. But sudden anxiety—above all, anxiety about a loved one—can change a man completely. Make a hero of him.
And Mr. Bloot undeniably had weight on his side. Before Chick knew properly what was happening, he found himself trapped behind the half-opened door as Mr. Bloot forced his way past him. The hall was only two foot nine and for a moment the pressure was terrific. The japanned letter-box on the back of the front door was rammed mercilessly into Chick’s stomach. He was winded.
But only temporarily. Chick had been in tight corners before. In his time, he had emerged many times victorious and unscathed. From a rough-and-tumble in Harringay. A free-for-all in the King’s Cross district. A full open-house down Walthamstow way when a policeman had cut his knuckles open on a razor. Even winded and compressed, he did not doubt that he was more than a match for this sinister, bundled-up figure armed only with an umbrella. But he had never before been up against a real master of umbrella fighting. For Mr. Bloot did not attempt to jab or poke or start hitting out. That would have been disastrous. Instead, finding himself in danger of being attacked from behind, he merely turned round and opened his umbrella.
The barrier was impenetrable. On the one side the spokes caught into the mahogany hat-stand and, on the other, they fixed themselves round the electric light company’s main fuse-box. The frame of the umbrella bent and sprang back again. It groaned. But it held fast. Chick went down on hands and knees and began crawling underneath. But by then Mr. Bloot had reached the sitting-room, and flung the door wide open.
“Don’t nobody move,” he said, in a loud and terrible voice.
He got no farther, however. Because at that instant Chick sprang on him from behind. And it was not an amateur attack. It was low. And classical. And rugger-like. It caught Mr. Bloot just below the knees and sent him pitching. At one moment there were Hetty’s two friends sympathetically contemplating the wretchedness of her last poker hand. And at the next, sixteen stone of muffler and blue overcoat suddenly crashed down on top of them.
By their very nature, card tables are unable to withstand such strains. They tend to sag if one player even so much as rests his chin upon his elbows. And Hetty’s table was by no means a new one. One of the legs was secured by an extra hinge of adhesive tape already. And, in the result, the table offered no resistance at all. Mr. Bloot went straight through it. Cards, glasses, an ashtray full of cigarette-ends and cigar-butts, all went flying.
But Chick wasn’t the only one in the little party to show himself resourceful. There was Sid as well. A bald, fat man, with a wide, expressionless face, he too was experienced in emergencies. Without even getting up from his chair he reached over to the side-table and picked up the lamp that stood upon it. It was quite a small lamp with a pretty flowered shade. But the base was of pottery with a thick rim running all round the bottom. And Sid knew just how to take hold of the lamp—round the narrow fluted neck. That gave him the leverage he wanted. He brought the base down hard on to Mr. Bloot’s head as it went past him.
“O.K., Hetty,” was all he said, and put the remains of the lamp back on to the side-table.
3
Of course, they all had a good laugh about it afterwards. And it was Hetty with that magnificent vitality of hers who led the laughter. It was an absolute scream, she said, thinking that they had been going to murder her, and Gus was a real darling to have come forward the way he did. There had never been anything like it in her life before. And she wouldn’t have missed it for all the tea in China. It was as good as the movies. She went off into more peals of shrill nervous laughter at the memory of it.
Mr. Bloot laughed, too. Laughed more than he had ever laughed before. And louder. He was, in fact, rather surprised at himself for finding everything so funny. But that was probably because of the whisky that he had been given to revive him. Whatever it was, he saw the funny side of it. He fingered the bump on his skull. And laughed. He contemplated the ruins of the card table. And laughed again. He laughed at the ladies on Chick’s braces. Sometimes he laughed simply because everything seemed funny. The only time he stopped laughing was when there was a ring at the bell. But it still wasn’t Hutch—all Hetty’s friends he had noticed had monosyllables instead of names. And that struck him as being funny, too.
The person at the door was the tenant of the flat beneath. And he was in a nasty sort of mood. Full of threats about writing to the landlord if this sort of thing went on. His wife had been alone at the time, he said, and he had come back to find her, head under the bedclothes, terrified. There had been screams and the noise of fighting. He had his wife’s word for it. And now all this drunken laughter. If there was any more of it he would go round to the police station straightaway.
But Hetty handled him all right. She had a marvellous way with difficult customers. Then when Hetty returned, Mr. Bloot started laughing again. Only this time it was about the tenant of the flat below.
The others left shortly after eleven. Con was the last to go. He was the one of whom Mr. Bloot had seen least. Quieter than the others, he seemed. And in a way, superior. He wore a shirt with a stiff collar, and suggested a counting-house clerk who had got himself into rather mixed company. Because there was no denying it, some of Hetty’s friends seemed more than a little beneath her. But that, Mr. Bloot told himself, was only another aspect of this fascinating woman. It was her natural magnetism. And now all that mattered was that he was alone with her. He was still a little dizzy from the force of the blow and the effects of so much whisky. He had, in fact, forgotten why he had come.
But with her beside him, it all came back.
“Marry me, Hetty,” he said. “Please marry me.”
There was something in the tone of voice, in the very simplicity of his proposal, that Hetty found deeply moving. She had received plenty of the other kind. Bold. Hysterical. Sly. Drunken. Salacious. Overwhelming. But never anything so straightforward and direct as this. For some reason, it made her want to cry.
“D’you really want me all that much?” she asked.
And Mr. Bloot, too much overcome to answer, merely nodded.
“But you don’t know anything about me,” she told him.
“Ah love you,” he said simply. “That’s all Ah need to know.”
Hetty’s heart gave a silly, girlish sort of bound as she heard the words. But it was no use pretending. She was not a girl. She was a mature, experienced woman of forty-five.
“I’ve been married before, you know,” she went on.
Mr. Bloot politely brushed the point aside.
“Ah’mer widower meself, m’dear,” he said with a slow, sad smile. “It’s the same for both of us.”
And as he spoke the words he found himself wishing that Emmie had been there to hear. It would have made her feel better about things knowing that he still valued the state of marriage so highly. Emmie had always been a very conventional woman.
“Well, I suppose you might put it that way,” Hetty answered.
There was a pause.
“Then will you?” he asked.
“What’s the hurry?” Hetty asked gently. “Why’s my boy got to know tonight?”
She had linked her arm through his while she was speakin
g and had led him over to the couch. He felt himself enveloped and wrapped up in a great billowy cocoon of feminine softness and fragrance. The old swoony feeling came over him again.
“Because Ah can’t sleep,” he answered, in a low mumble like a man talking in his sleep. “Ah can’t sleep. Ah’ve turned against me food. And Ah’m forgetting things. Ah’ve gone all to pieces because of you, Hetty. Ah can’t go on like this. Ah’m not ...” He checked himself hurriedly. That was just the way things were with him nowadays. His mind kept playing tricks on him. He never knew what silly thing he was going to say next.
But Hetty was in no mood for noticing his sudden pause. She was lying there limply in his arms, her large dark eyes turned towards him.
“Have I really done all that to you?” she asked. “Perhaps I had better marry you. Just to make up for it.”
As she said it she stroked the side of his face with the back of her big white hand.
“You mean you will, Hetty?”
She dropped her eyes for a moment. There was a pause.
“I mean I will, Gus,” she said, at last. And, to her own surprise, she found herself adding: “I’ll try to be a good wife to you.”
The sigh that went up from Mr. Bloot was so deep and long drawn out that for a moment Hetty feared that he had died there in her arms from sheer relief and happiness. But she need not have worried. Because a moment later he sat up again and pulled out his watch.
“Wot time does the last No. 18 go?” he asked.
But Hetty only pulled him down again, and kissed him.
“It’s gone,” she said quietly.
Chapter Seventeen
1
Mr. Bloot’s arrival at Rammell’s next morning was the cause of much comment. For a start, he was late. But that wasn’t Mr. Bloot’s fault. The doctor was entirely to blame. It was not until twenty to nine when the doctor finally got busy in the surgery. He went to work with a needle and surgical catgut and finally fixed a large criss-cross of sticking plaster on top of the wound that Hetty’s ornamental reading lamp had made. Then he told Mr. Bloot to come back again at the end of the week to have the stitches taken out.
Bond Street Story Page 15
