Bell Timson

by Marguerite Steen

  She was very generous, too, about introducing me to her friends. Some women would as soon give away the name of their masseuse as of the “little woman” who makes up their gowns from sketches stolen from the big fashion houses. But like most people who are too idle to live, Mrs. Carpenter was very good-natured. If she lost her temper it was over in a minute; she simply could not be bothered to remember. As I became one of her favorites, she was always pressing me to lunch, or to go to a movie, or just out shopping with her. At first I refused these invitations, but then I began to think it might be good policy to accept some of them. She always introduced me to people who came in as “That devil Timmy,” or “Here’s Timmy — the old cow!” which was meant to indicate that I was not just her masseuse but a personal friend.

  I knew that if I was going to move in Mrs. Carpenter’s circle, or even meet her friends occasionally, I must have some clothes; I positively hadn’t a stitch I could have worn at a smart luncheon party. Although I took a lot of care of my things, I was really shabby by now, and I particularly needed a good tailor-made, although I knew that would not show up for much among the sables and minks! I had only one overcoat, too, which had to serve as a mackintosh; I saw Mrs. Carpenter look at it one day, and decided to leave it in the hall in future and go upstairs just in my dress and cardigan. She was quite right; it was not the sort of garment to bring into a room like hers.

  One day just before Christmas I got a parcel, and inside it was a dark brown musquash coat from Mrs. Carpenter! I had never had such a present in my life and I didn’t know whether to keep it or to act proud and send it back. Before the end of that war musquash was to be as common as rabbit; Mrs. Carpenter used to say, ‘If you don’t get rid of that damned coat, Timmy, I’ll tear it off your back!” She wanted to give me a mole, but I would not let her; the musquash was more serviceable and it was a beautiful, rich brown, more like sable than the other fur; I thought when it was beginning to wear shabby it would cut up into a jacket for Kathleen — you see, I quite took it for granted I would be buying fur coats for myself in a few years’ time! — and I had set my heart on a little miniver set for Jo.

  Anyhow, I felt smart enough to go anywhere, with my musquash, a new little hat that only cost a few shillings at Berridge’s, and a pair of gloves with a scarf to match that seemed to find their way accidentally into my bag when I was out shopping. I may say that when I got home and looked at them I took myself up sharply. Now, Bell Timson, I told myself, the time has come for you to give up that game. You are starting out all over again, as a respectable woman; a resolution which I kept. The scarf and gloves were the end of my light-fingered adventures.

  I went over to Egham to see the girls, and I thought Kathleen would have a fit; she was ten now, and mad on clothes. And I let George take me to the Empire one night — and the fur coat gave him such a shock he bought me an orchid to wear on my lapel! They say money attracts money. Dear old George; he would have been the last to look at it that way, but he would certainly never have bought me an orchid to wear on my old tweed overcoat — and quite rightly too.

  We did not go to the Haymakers that night; we went to a rather swell new place that had opened near the bus stop. The lounge was full of officers and their tarts, and everyone was drinking cocktails, which neither of us liked as much as our port; but to be in the fashion George ordered white ladies. I was very noisy, and I could see George was thinking wistfully about the parlor at the Haymakers, but I felt excited with everything. It was an omen of the change coming into our lives.

  Chapter VII

  LET’S FACE IT: that was a good war for me. I had nobody close to me fighting, and although I used to find myself crying over the casualty lists it wasn’t personal; it was just a general sort of sadness for the waste of young lives and the fine lads that ought to have been seeing to the next generation. Not that they did not do their best, in the short time they had. War babies right and left — and they were not confined to the working-class girls either. I heard enough in my new circles about rush weddings and hurried journeys to distant parts of the country and “arrangements” — and worse. I got to know the little pinched, hunted look on the face of a girl who had left her finishing school only a few months before, and the next thing was she was having a “nervous breakdown” somewhere in the North of Scotland. Even one of my own patients got involved in it.

  I went in one morning and found her hysterical.

  “My own Stella, Timmy! What on earth am I to do? Don’t you know anybody ... ?”

  I was always being asked “if I knew anybody,” and of course, in the course of my work, I had picked up an address or two, but I never gave them unless I felt it was desperate. The English law had made that game too dangerous and the methods were too crude; I knew of cases where the shock had done more harm than the operation itself.

  I was even sorrier for those girls than I was for the working girls who “got into trouble,” because, among many of the working classes, although an illegitimate baby is a disgrace, it is lived down in time. If a girl is brave and faces it out she is quite likely to find a man willing to marry her. The days when she had no choice between “carrying a secret to her grave” or putting herself in the river were over, even in 1916, and although there were some miserable old hags who tried to make an unmarried mother’s life unbearable, the feeling of most decent people was all for giving her a chance.

  It was different in the circles I was now moving among. The moral side did not worry them — most of them; but what would the servants think? The butler could not be expected to take messages and the housemaids carry up trays while Miss Betty was having her baby in the best spare room And her marriage chances were gone, because the heir to ancestral acres couldn’t be made to share nurseries with a little by-blow that came of one more cocktail than Miss Betty was used to carrying and missing the last train home. It was not all that way either. From what I saw, I believe there were no more cocktail babies in Betty’s class than there were children conceived in one last heartbroken gesture of generosity to the boys they loved and might never see again: children they would have treasured and cherished, and were forced to give up, either before or after they were born, to the conventions of the society to which they belonged. Those were the girls I was most truly sorry for: the Dance-little-ladies of the last war, who were nothing but the victims of the total breakdown of the old conventional system in which they were brought up and who had neither knowledge nor experience to see them through the conditions of war-mad England.

  And although I sometimes thanked God I had not a son to put into Kitchener’s war machine, I was even more thankful that Kathleen and Jo were too little even to know of the crazy whirl into which other women’s daughters were being carried and on whose edge I now moved — although only as a spectator.

  Mrs. Carpenter’s friends were smart, good-time women whose husbands were connected with the Stock Exchange or the theater in peacetime, and had either got themselves brass hats of sorts or found nice, cushy jobs in armaments. In their absence the wives killed time with wounded officers, boys on leave, and getting up dances, cabaret shows, bridge parties, and fancy fairs for war charities. You might say they wore themselves out in the service of their country; and that was to provide a rich harvest for me.

  I suppose they were a silly, lightheaded set, but they did very little harm. There has to be this element in wartime society, and they were too conscious which side their bread was buttered to let their flirtations carry them away. The boys they kissed and danced with could not buy them the sables and diamonds their husbands kept them in, although they might manage champagne and oysters for a forty-eight-hour “binge.” Many a youth went back to the trenches feeling he had had a whacking good leave, thanks to them, and they set up none of the mean competition with the town girls that had started among the real Smart Set. They actually had some of the characteristics of barmaids, without the barmaids’ wisdom and good sense, and just the same tough streak when it came t
o what they probably did not even think of as their ‘Virtue.”

  Virtue is a funny thing; I’ve never got down to defining it. In my opinion every person’s virtue is a private matter of her own, and trying to fit one person’s virtue to another is as crazy as making a standard suit of clothes that will fit everybody. If it does for one in fifty it is a pure accident, and it will bag or drag on the rest. People are too fond of tying up virtue with sexual morals; I can’t see it has any more to do with them than it has with overeating.

  In less than six months after I met Mrs. Carpenter I had my hands full with women who spent twenty-three out of the twenty-four hours abusing their digestive systems and wearing out their nerves, and expected me to put them right in thirty minutes. I had insomniacs, hysterics, and dipsos, most of whom could have done with a month in a nursing home and would have been better for a few weeks of country life and some healthy outdoor exercise. But no; they weren’t going to let themselves in for the discipline of a cure, they only wanted “relaxing”; most of them would not even stand for a pummeling — as a matter of fact their nerves were in such rotten condition they could not take it. They wanted to lie with their eyes shut, babbling or whining about their love affairs, like women in a hairdresser’s parlor, while I rubbed the backs of their necks or kneaded their shoulder muscles. By the end of the day I used to be sick of the sight of lumps of white female flesh, that ought to have been firm and rosy and resilient and went into dinges as soon as you pressed a finger into it. The awful truth about my own sex hit me between the eyes each time I saw a woman walk in, looking like a Paquin doll, all taut and smart, and, the minute she got her corset and brassiere off, drop into a bladder of fat and broken-down muscle. How they could ever let another woman see them, let alone a man, beat me. They would not diet, or even cut down on their drinking, their sweets, and cigarette smoking; they expected massage to do everything for them, and when I told them it would not they would say, “Oh well, never mind; all I want is something to soothe my nerves.”

  I suppose I had — have — got a special quality of touch; I never thought of my “map,” but it seemed as if I could suck up the pain, or the tension, or whatever it was, with the tips of my fingers. I was now booking eight or even ten cases a day, and working week ends as well, for on Sundays I still had several “real” cases: a hospital matron with a chronic affection of the hip joint, who had been one of Alice’s “specials,” and a young actress who was wearing herself out with eight performances a week and floor shows twice nightly. The work was grueling, but I was as tough as a horse, and I meant to make hay while the sun shone.

  The time had come, at last, for me to look for a house, and you know what it is like, getting a house in wartime. Rents were asked and premiums demanded for jerry-built boxes that would have got you something off Knightsbridge before 1914. I had made up my mind to move up west, for most of my patients now were round Mayfair or Kensington, and the dark streets and Victoria crowded every night with the troop trains made the journey home a great deal of an effort at the end of a hard day’s work; besides, one was always getting caught in zeppelin raids and obliged to spend hours down in the tubes instead of getting back comfortably to one’s own bed.

  I was massaging a friend of Mrs. Carpenter’s one afternoon: a woman I did not much care for, although I could not have told you why. She was always polite and considerate, and she was one of the few in that gang who wanted a real treatment. Mrs. Carpenter had tipped me off to charge her twenty guineas for a course of twelve, which she paid on the nail without a murmur — which surprised me when I got to know her and found out she was a very sharp business woman, always keen on getting value for her money.

  I had just finished with Mrs. Thesiger, on this particular afternoon, and she had just got on her dressing gown and was sipping the hot lemon and water she always had after her treatment, when the telephone rang and she picked it up. I was putting on my gloves, just ready to go, but the transmission was very loud, and I distinctly heard the voice at the other end say, “Carton and Olliver,” which was the name of a firm of house agents in Pimlico to whom I had been once or twice, without, however, finding anything that suited me on their books.

  “Oh, Lord,” Mrs. Thesiger was saying, “I ought to have rung you up before. I told those people they could have the house ... No, not the one at Lancaster Gate; the little one, in Plymouth Street ... Well, I can’t help it if they didn’t let you know. They’ll have to see you about the lease anyhow. And look here: they’re paying me a hundred and forty pounds ... Yes, that’s what I got out of them! I always say you house agents don’t know your business.

  The person at the other end said something, and Mrs. Thesiger laughed derisively.

  “Of course it’s fifty pounds more than it’s worth, but there’s a war on, isn’t there? If people want a thing they’ll pay anything. The man’s been offered a job or something, and if they can’t get a house in town he’ll have to turn it down ... Oh, don’t ask me what it’s about,” said Mrs. Thesiger. “Invalid wife, young family — I don’t know; I’ve got my hundred and forty and if I hadn’t been a mug it might have been more!” I could tell from the way she spoke that she really did feel she had been a mug and that she was vexed about it.

  I knew Plymouth Street; it was one of the little streets of superior working-class houses that lie between Belgrave Square and the King’s Road. Dressmakers and furriers lived there, and the small, flat-faced houses with area railings and steps up to the front doors looked spruce and neat. Something about their nice proportions and the good placing of their windows and doors reminded me of Crowle, although, by comparison, the Plymouth Street houses were very modest and humble, and the old High Street people would have looked on them as slums. I knew Mrs. Thesiger was a crook for asking a hundred and forty pounds a year for one of them, but as it happened she was only a little ahead of her time, for from the time we went there the rents mounted steadily, and now half the doors are painted bright blue or yellow, which shows that people like writers and B.B.C. announcers have got hold of them. Plymouth Street has gone up in the world; but at the time of which I am speaking it was just a respectable little street within reach of a good shopping center.

  By the time she put down the receiver I had made up my mind.

  “I’ll give you a hundred and sixty for your house, Mrs. Thesiger.”

  “What?”

  It took quite a time to persuade her I was serious. I told her I wanted a place nearer my connection, and somewhere to have the girls with me in their holidays. As soon as she realized I was in earnest she began to mumble about the rent being really low for wartime, which made me laugh outright.

  “‘You forget I was here when you were talking to Carton and Olliver! And it means you’re getting your treatments for nothing.”

  That was the way to talk to Mrs. Thesiger; she started to laugh as well.

  “You are an old fox, Timson!” she told me. “But what am I to do about that man — whatever his name was? I did promise it to him ...”

  I looked her straight in the eye. She had very remarkable eyes, dark gray with a ring of thin gold round them. They were shaped like a cats eyes, and just about as trustworthy.

  “Mrs. Thesiger,” I said to her, “you’re a very successful woman — in more ways than one. You aren’t going to tell me that success has come to you by keeping promises when they were against your own interests?”

  Luckily she took it, as I intended her to do, as a compliment. When I left the house I had got a home for Kathleen and Jo and an address that would look solid at the head at my note paper. I had also learned a lot about people like Mrs. Thesiger. I knew her respect for me had mounted, since I had persuaded her to do a mean and disreputable thing, and I knew that there was a class of people among whom honor did not count, and if one meant to get on among them one had to play their game and show oneself smarter at it than they were themselves. And I despised Mrs. Thesiger for breaking her word for the sake of a paltry t
wenty pounds. I would be more expensive than that when it came to my turn.

  I did not tell George how I came by the house in Plymouth Street; I merely mentioned I had got it. He was depressed about my moving so far away, but, like the good, faithful old watchdog he was, he only said that if there was any way he could help he hoped I would let him do it.

  “I’ll soon have to be looking out for another school for Kathleen; she’s getting too old for the Lodge.”

  I was worried about Kathleen again; she was showing signs of being brainy, and, to be honest, I did not know what I would do with a brainy daughter. I meant to have both the girls trained for something, in case they did not marry, but, deep down, I hoped I would keep them with me until they found husbands. I thought Kathleen, who was clever with her pencil, might go in for fashion drawing, and Jo for the domestic. I was really upset when Miss Cleveland told me that I should be looking out for another school for Kathleen that would carry on the type of teaching she had had at the Lodge and give her the sort of higher education everyone seemed to think she should be getting.

  George was looking at me. He said in a puzzled kind of voice, “You know, Bell, you’re altering.”

  “Don’t be silly, George.” But he was dead right. I was toughening up in a way I never expected in my life. You have seen how I was soft and silly over Harry, not even getting my just dues out of him because I did not want to cripple whatever future might lie before him. But I was learning things from those women among whom, now, I spent the greater part of my time. You might think they had not much to teach: that they were stupid, cheap, brassy — and so they were. There was hardly a well-bred specimen among them; most of them were by Money out of Money, except for the few who had made lucky marriages, and these were always a bit on the defensive, anxious not to let it appear that they had not been brought up in the circumstances in which they now found themselves. They were all the Hotel Metropoles and all the flash country clubs and all the Monte Carlos rolled into one, and most of them had not any sort of taste except in their clothes and their houses, which other people decorated for them; and then they generally managed to spoil the effect with too many diamonds and the expensive rubbish they seemed to pick up like jackdaws wherever they went.