Goodbye Piccadilly

by Goodbye Piccadilly (retail) (epub)

  The physician saw the smile and was glad that his words had persuaded this sad and tragic little lady to give up the unhealthy notion that she must grieve over a lump of tissue long ago disposed of by the nurse.

  Esther said that she would follow his advice when he said that she should remain in her father’s house with her little girl until she was returned to full health, then she might return to Mere: pick up the threads of her life once more.

  But the threads of her life were not there to be picked up. They were destroyed, burnt away by Lysol, burnt in the domestic boiler. She was horror-stricken at the thought of ever returning to Mere, and London had become a most dreadful place in which Bindon’s body lay in an ignominious grave. In an effort to steel herself to it, time and again she rehearsed in her mind the scene where she with Baby and Kitt and Nursey would arrive at the front door of Mere, mount the steps and enter. Each time the house is a chamber of desolation and emptiness. Every tuft of carpet, every dust mote is as much infused with Bindon as with his absence. She can never go back. Any more than she can remain here.

  No one notices as they walk by, at least if they do they do not take much account of it as Esther, seated beside the water in Kensington Gardens, eats from a box of expensive chocolates. She has prepared well. There are twenty Floris cream-centred chocolates given to her by her father and twenty tablets of salicylic acid she bought on her way here. With each chocolate she eats a tablet. She eats her way through the entire box.

  As she begins to lose consciousness, she thinks of Kitt and how sweet he had looked in his little overall ready for his first day at kindergarten. And Baby… I should never have given her that name…

  It is warm in the sunshine of Kensington Gardens. Passers-by see a lady who has been indulging herself, perhaps secretly, with a box of cream-centre chocolates and then dozing beneath the trees. The box slips from her lap.

  A soldier, on crutches and wearing hospital blue, picks up the box and tries to return it. When she does not respond, he places it upon the seat beside her and in doing so sees that she is clutching a chemist’s box. He understands the signs, having thought of that avenue of escape himself not long ago. Quickly collecting the evidence of the aspirin box, he stops some passers-by and asks for assistance for the lady who appears to have suffered some kind of seizure.

  —

  Nancy Dickenson handed the official postcard back to May Archer.

  ‘I think that’s terrible. Not even an envelope?’

  ‘No. Just as is. Walter Archer, Missing, believed killed. See, they crossed out “in action” – rubbing salt into the wounds. My poor Wally, he was a good boy and they treated him like shit just because he never wanted to kill nobody. When he called men Brothers or Comrades, he meant it. He never wanted to shoot none of them, yet there was some that come and chucked dog-muck at the windows and we had offal in the yard more ’n once. He’d say don’t blame’ em for their ignorance, Mum, one day they’ll see that I’m right.’ She wiped her eyes. She had not cried over Wally, but her nose had run and her eyes had not been dry for all day.

  ‘I know, May, it’s what made me like him better than any man I met. But I’m not going to talk about him as though he’s gone. It does say “believed” killed. We’ve got to hope.’

  ‘I never set much store on hoping things would get better. I taught Wally that. If you want things to get better, I used to tell him, then you damn well got to get out there and do something about it. It’s landed him in trouble a time or two, but it’s the truth, Nance, isn’t it?’

  ‘It’s the truth, May.’

  ‘If it wasn’t then I couldn’t live with myself, because it was me bringing him up like that what made him get into unions and politics.’

  ‘I’ll let you take the credit for making such a good sort of man, but you don’t take any blame for his conscience. He’s a big grown-up man, and he makes up his own mind.’

  ‘He do, Nance, don’t he?’

  ‘There you are, love, you said that as though he was still alive, which he just as likely is. You know your Wally.’ She gave the scraggy old lady a brief hug.

  ‘Right, Nance. I know my Wally, he just as likely will come turning up like a bad penny. I ain’t counting on it, but you’re right. I shan’t give away his good boots or his coat or nothing like that.’

  ‘Nor his books. He’ll never forgive you if he got back and found you’d got rid of his books.’

  The two women comforted one another, each keeping their end up for the other. They had both known enough death and disappointment in life to know not to let it drag you down.

  ‘You’ll come and see me when you start your new job. It’s a long way away up Hampstead.’

  ‘Of course I shall. It’s not really far, a couple of twopenny tram rides.’

  ‘I don’t know why you want to go back into service. You’re your own woman on the trams. I like to see that. It’s one reason I took to you straight away.’

  ‘I just feel that I’ve got to do it. It’s like I’m the only one who can do the job. It’s not like going back as I used to be. I knew the family years ago. The mother died in labour and now the daughter has lost one straight after her husband taking Lysol.’

  ‘That’s a terrible death. I once saw a woman who done that, she was a dreadful mess.’

  ‘This one, the girl – well, woman she is now – she took something: aspirin I think it must have been.’

  ‘I’m glad you ain’t the sort to do nothing stupid like that, Nance. Money people never know how to stand up to things.’

  ‘They don’t usually get that much to stand up to, so they don’t have as many lessons as you and me.’

  ‘What she want you to do?’

  ‘I don’t know, just keep an eye on things according to what the father said. I don’t even know the daughter wants me. I never hardly knew him in the old days, but the wife was the sweetest thing, and so was the daughter then. I’ll have to be off now, May, she’s coming out of the nursing home and the father wants me there when she comes.’

  ‘Be a court case will there? Attempted suicide.’

  ‘Father’s a high-up in the police.’

  ‘Oh well, ’nough said. He’ll hush it up somehow.’

  —

  In Stormont Road, heavy plush curtains were drawn across the windows at the front of Greywell and an old-fashioned black-ribboned laurel wreath hung on the door as though a funeral was about to take place.

  Emily Hewetson accepted her daughter’s kiss and let her chafe her hands affectionately as she sat in the still, silent sitting-room where what Otis thought of as a kind of small shrine containing little mementoes of Max Hewetson had been set up on a table. A photogravure of Max in a wicker bassinet, taken with Martin; another of him holding the scroll of his law degree, and a third as an officer holding his cap in the crook of his arm. A medal ribbon, pocket watch, an army cap and swagger-stick, his own silver cigarette case engraved M.C.H., the silver and coral scent bottle which had been his present to Emily last Christmas, and the impressive thistle table decoration he had given to Martin and Emily as a wedding present – paid for on his mother’s account because he was then still a boy.

  Otis stood before the arrangement and picked up the photogravure of Max in uniform. ‘Oh Ma, poor Max, are these his remains?’ She heard Emily’s sharp snort of irritation but did not turn. To Otis, none of this said anything at all about her uncle, about Hewey Hewetson. What it said was that a baby had been pushed in a bassinet, a stiff-backed and serious-looking young man had once worn cap and gown, and a stiff-backed and pompous-looking older man had been photographed wearing army uniform.

  What would have befitted Otis’s memory of her Uncle Hewey would have been the Tippoo Badminton set and the Bumblepuppy pole he had brought in and set up in the back garden one wonderful summer; the Flexible Flyer toboggan that could swish downhill on the grass of the Heath; the set of nursery-tale magic-lantern slides, or the boxed football game of ‘Kick’ which Ma
had wanted to return to the Army and Navy Stores. But even as she thought of these and the many other surprises with which he had been bounding into the house for as long as she could remember – books, boxes of Little Mary wafers and petit-fours, tickets for plays, ideas for pleasant weekend expeditions – she saw that, without Hew’s enthusiasm and sense of fun, those objects too would have lain there as lifeless as the swagger-stick and portraits.

  ‘How is Pa taking it? Where is he?’

  ‘He has gone to his office, and he is bearing up as one would expect. This same tragedy is visited upon many households at present. It is the supreme sacrifice for one’s country.’

  ‘Mother, I wish that you would not talk like that. It is cloying and insincere. You have made no sacrifice: it is Max who is dead.’

  Emily Hewetson stiffened. ‘Otis, I have put up with much over these last five years. I was against you going to that college, but your father saw no harm. I was shocked when you said that you were going to take a teaching post. I cannot even begin to tell you how it affected me when your father broke the news that he had agreed to your taking rooms in… in… of all places that part of London. Oh, but he would have it that all young ladies of the New Style were idealists and that they must have their opportunities. I have never held with his liberal way of thinking. And I have been proved right: it has been the ruination of you.’

  ‘Oh Ma, please don’t talk such silly and over-dramatic nonsense. I am not ruined.’

  ‘Not ruined? When a daughter describes her own mother as silly?’

  ‘If you will only think of it, Ma, you will realize that I have never said that you were those things – I said that you talk like that, you say them. You are like too many women, utterances pop out of your mouth without the slightest consideration. The drawn curtains, the wreath and black ribbons, this shrine to Max…’

  Scornfully, ‘It’s not a shrine. All these things are tokens of respect because there can be no funeral.’

  ‘Oh Mother! They are to impress the people whom you have probably invited for sherry after the memorial service.’

  ‘Is that what you think?’ Suddenly Emily Hewetson’s composed face crumpled. Tears welled in her eyes, hung there glistening and then trickled into the dip of her eye-sockets where they were absorbed by the dabbing of her ylang-ylang scented handkerchief.

  ‘Do you not know how to be womanly, Otis?’

  At one and the same time, Otis wanted both to shake her mother and to comfort her. She did say silly and shallow things because it was expected, but she said them because to do so was in her nurturing and upbringing.

  Otis suddenly thought of her maternal grandmother on the occasions when she had been taken to visit on her birthdays. Seated on a chaise-longue surrounded by her dozen children, helpless and cosseted, her life given to making as complicated a toilette as was possible before visiting or receiving other, equally cosseted, queen bees. A baby a year for twelve years and a lifetime of fittings, curling tongs, idle gossip and a husband who was seldom in the presence of his children except to oversee that they fitted the moulds of Empire Builder and Empire Builder’s adornment.

  Emily really had never stood a chance of being other than she was.

  Otis realized that her own salvation had been a kindly father with liberal views and a carefree uncle who was close to her own age.

  The sharp retort – And I have no intention of being womanly – that she had been about to make, disintegrated as she knelt down and put her arms about her mother’s knees. ‘I know that my tongue is too sharp, Ma. Things are out before I realize. I am sorry.’

  She looked up to receive her mother’s forgiveness and met Emily’s unguarded gaze. It was snatched away at once, but for that second, Otis saw that her mother’s grief was genuine and deep – much deeper and more affecting than one should expect for a brother-in-law. Otis, rising from her knees, went and sat beside her mother and, putting an arm about her neck, drew her on to her shoulder as though she herself was the mother comforting the child. Amazingly, Emily allowed herself to collapse, and she buried her face in her hands and sobbed silently.

  ‘Oh, my poor, poor Ma. He…’ She cut off what had almost slipped from her mouth about her mother and her uncle.

  With that one glimpse into her mother’s unshuttered mind, suddenly many things came clear. Grains of evidence, assembled from years of childhood observations, behaved like grains of silver nitrate under the action of developing fluid and an image came up.

  Otis had been very young, and Max could not have been much out of boyhood, when she, awake but quiet in her nursery cot, had watched him unfasten Emily’s hair and bury his face in it and Emily had twisted around and, holding his ears, had kissed him tenderly. Then at some other time she had seen him in his shirt-tails in Emily’s boudoir, whereupon, seeing Otis watching from the landing that connected to the nursery, her mother had said that Uncle Max had a nasty boil that needed a plaster. Suddenly she remembered all the many other pats and strokes. One Christmas, when they had all gone carol-singing, Otis had watched by the lantern-light Uncle Hewey’s hand slowly sliding upwards under her ma’s bodice. Otis guessed that they felt that they were safe enough flirting in the presence of a young child, and so they were – until the long processing of the photographic plate was completed by Emily’s grief.

  Emily guessed that she had given herself away to her clever daughter. What mattered? She had loved the boy, and not in the way she ought. The punishment for illicit love has always been that the lovers have no rights to public grief. She had loved him since he was little more than a schoolboy and she a newly-married young woman. She had always been too old for him, but he absolutely denied it, asking what difference the comparative ages of flesh and bone made when sensitivity was ageless.

  He would touch her – she shivered at the thought: Do you feel that, Em? Which is your skin and which is mine? Which is the boy’s and which the woman’s? He was so very youthful and exuberant, yet with such an old head on those young shoulders. There had been times when it had seemed that their positions were reversed, that he was the responsible older one and she in giddy youth.

  Their mild affair harmed no one. The one time when they had almost come to the point of burning their boats and turning the romance into an affaire, was when he had asked her to put a dressing on his back, and it had turned out not to be his back, but his thigh. Although he had still worn his underwear, she had seen that he was no longer a youth, but had abundant body hair and was fully masculine. How for a long minute she had had to restrain her own hands from reaching out to touch him. How fearful it had all been. Yet, how exhilarating. She had felt like an elegant courtesan in a French novel.

  Otis said, ‘He was the kind of man it would be difficult not to love, Ma. Everybody liked him.’

  Without thinking, Emily’s hand went to the locket that rested in the fold of georgette between her breasts.

  Otis, guessing rightly that the locket contained not only Martin’s portrait, but that of Max also, was surprised that she did not feel outrage for her pa, nor anger at those moments of deception. What was outrageous was Max’s death.

  ‘You don’t have to go to the memorial service, Ma. It will be no end of an ordeal.’

  The portcullis on their brief intimacy was lowered. ‘I do have to, Otis. That is the difference between us. You do what pleases you, whilst I do my duty.’

  * * *

  At the memorial service held in the little Wren church in Piccadilly that had, according to Emily, been Max’s favourite place to sit and ponder, Otis watched her mother behaving with perfect poise and graciousness to his friends and colleagues. When it came to the small reception at home, Otis did her duty as daughter of the house and then gathered her things and went quietly out to catch a bus, knowing that if Emily lived to be a hundred they would never again come as close as they had come that afternoon. It was the apogee of their friendship – from that point it could only fall away.

  —

&n
bsp; When Esther Blood opened her eyes after one of the particularly heavy and dreamless slumbers she experienced from time to time since her ‘trouble’, she was again puzzled about time and place. When this happened, she kept her eyes shut and sifted through what evidence she had to discover her present whereabouts. For a brief moment she had thought that she was in the little back room in the cottage at Southsea and that it was morning and she was being aroused by Nancy.

  Then the whole span of the intervening years fell upon her and she uttered a small groan.

  ‘You all right, ma’am?’

  It had been Nancy Dickenson who had placed the cup of tea at her bedside. And then it came back to her that her father had persuaded her to promise that she would take on Nancy to help out whilst Esther was still suffering the effects of her trouble.

  ‘Nancy?’

  ‘Yes, Mrs Blood, ma’am. Nancy Dickenson turned up like a bad sixpence.’

  Esther, who had taken a potion and fallen asleep fully-dressed, sat up and held out her hand. ‘Welcome, Nancy.’

  ‘Thank you, ma’am, I’m glad to be here, though I’m sorry you’ve had such trouble. Here, drink this tea, it’s strong and sweet and it’ll buck you up. I thought you might like to have a bit of a walk out… The master says you haven’t done much walking of late.’

  ‘No. My illness made my legs weak.’ She took the tea and drank some of it.

  ‘All the more reason to take a bit of exercise.’

  ‘When did you come? I get a bit confused at times. I fell asleep and woke up to hear you in the room – I thought we were back at Southsea.’

  ‘I’ve only been here half an hour or so, but there’s no sense in hanging about doing nothing, so I thought I’d see what was what with you.’

  ‘Well, that’s nice of you, Nancy. Do you know where Kitt and Baby are?’