A Day Off

by Storm Jameson

  She roused herself to look at the young woman.

  Her eyes and her mouth were both partly opened. Leaning forward, she laid a hand on her hand. Not dead.

  In the same instant as she thought first that the young woman had snuffed out and then that she had only fainted again she remembered the pound note folded in her stocking. It would be the simplest job in the world to lift back the skirt and take the note. She could be gone when the others came. A trickle of excitement started in her. She moved her arm.

  It was more the thought of tampering with unknown and blindly-striking powers than anything. Money off a dying woman might bring bad luck. She drew her hand back, uneasy in the silence.

  Disgust and disappointment struggled coldly in her. She half stood up, to go, then with a stifled “Ouch!” she slumped back in the chair. Oh for goodness sake what possessed me to walk far in these shoes. She felt gingerly between the back of the shoe and her ankle. I thought as much. Where the skin had broken a patch of stocking the size of a shilling stuck to it. A nice time I shall have getting that off me, she thought. She passed her finger gently round the edge.

  Confused images moved behind her eyes, the green curve of a hill, clouds, a hand holding a cup, the flash from plates tilted to the window of a café. She felt over-full of sun and air.

  The electric light dimmed, glowed red for a moment, and went out, leaving her in blackness. She felt first in her bag, then remembering the loose money in the pocket of the young woman’s coat she groped for it, felt the pocket and the coins and shook them out. Her hand recoiled in the darkness from the other hand. She had seen the slot meter near the door when they came in. Feeling her way to the door she opened it and stood straining her eyes to make out the top of the stairs. In the silence she heard a bed creak in the room across the landing as the sleeper moved in it. The darkness rose in a thick shaft like a jet of dark water through the house from the lowest floor. On each side of the deepest shadow, spreading from it, a diffuse greyness clung to walls and doors. She listened.

  The thought of going became a clear imperative. What use to wait here for the doctor and all that trouble? George’s letter slid, tilted over, vanished. She transferred the coins in her hand to her jacket pocket and took a heavy-soft step forward. In the room behind her the girl made one short sound. A word?

  It was not a loud sound, it was more like a sigh. Only in the darkness it sounded heavy and terrified. As if she now knew that she had been left. She turned and looked back into the room. The silence and the darkness were both absolute.

  Gliding her foot from stair to stair, she reached the passage. Ought I to have shut her door? Too late now. She pulled the front door quickly shut behind her and walked, limping, along the street. Half across Soho Square she paused and looked back. Two men were turning into the street at the farther end. The doctor? no. They walked past the house, coming directly towards her.

  She hurried, forgetting weariness. In Tottenham Court Road she remembered the before-breakfast look of the street. It was now empty, except for a policeman trying the shop doors, and a few night-stragglers. A car, moving quickly, had the polished road to itself. She trudged on, not strutted—drawing with her hours of memories freshly re-lived, and new events fast becoming memories, dead shells sunk in the sand.

  She was purposely not thinking of the young woman. An obscure fear clung to the whole incident, the fear of having offended something or someone by reason of a few coins taken from the young woman’s pocket. Under its skin her mind was busy with the impalpable connections joining her life to the girl’s. Nothing of this showed, except in words and phrases that broke off and floated to the surface. You too. Blindly in darkness. Not yet, not here. Her mind wandered, turned by a deep current. She was walking in this street with Ernst. Shadows without colour or features looked at them in passing; Ernst himself was only a smudged ghost, his face hardly to be made out at this distance. She had expected nothing unless to end her life in that café or that hotel. An old woman I should have been, old Mrs. Groener, she thought, half laughing in half derision. It was the most extraordinary thing that could have happened.

  But nothing joins, she thought confusedly, nothing meets any other thing. God knows I never done anything, knowing it. It’s nature, I suppose. You’d wonder any living soul could be such a soft fool. I’m sure I laugh when I think of myself leaving home that time and then that nasty place in Euston Road I don’t want to think about that and then Ernst and then the War we don’t want to lose you—oh Great strike above, there’s no end to it or only one. But there’s life in the old dog yet. I’m not coming to an end yet, thank you.

  I could of taken that money from her stocking as easy as winking, she thought swiftly. I wouldn’t do a thing like that, it wouldn’t be right.

  The house was as quiet as that other. Climbing the stairs, the worn canvas catching her heels, it was like every other night.

  When she lit the gas the letter was the first thing she saw, thrown a little to one side, so that she had missed it with her foot as she stepped in. Her heart seemed to stop and her blood rushed through her body. She bent down with difficulty. Laying the letter on the bed, unopened, she began to get herself ready for bed. This was a shorter ritual than the morning’s. Sighing with relief she tossed each garment across the chair and reached over for her nightgown. The loosening and falling of her body gave her an exquisite feeling of release. She stood with her legs apart to enjoy the new coolness. Her stained rumpled stockings were flung down with other unwashed garments in a corner between the wall and the cupboard.

  The hand-basin was half full of dirty water. She padded across the landing with it to the sink, but that was to save herself trouble in the morning. She did not wash.

  All this time she was thinking about the letter. She had put off opening it because of some instinct urging her to prolong uncertainty to the last possible moment. Standing to the mirror to spread cream over her face she thought : I don’t look at all excited. I wish I knew without looking what was in it. If it’s to say he’s coming on Saturday I shan’t half laugh. It must be that. If he wasn’t coming why write? I’ll be off-hand at first, then joking with him : where’ve you been? in jail? Or would I better seem different somehow, start when he speaks to me, as if I had something on my mind? He’ll have to coax it out of me.

  If it’s to say he’s done with me. For a second she felt horribly ill, but her fingers continued to rub in the cream without a pause.

  She settled herself in bed and took up the white envelope. Fingermarks on it. Looking inside she drew out a pound note, then quickly the letter. It was very short. It said that for private reasons (that was a favourite saying with him) he couldn’t see her again. He enclosed a pound and would be sending the same every Friday, until she could get settled with something. No claim on him to do it, of course. Just generosity and. Take this in the spirit. Hoped she. With all friendly feelings, George H.

  It was the end. She knew that at once. He might send once more but that would finish it. A frightful spasm of rage shook her. “Generosity,” she said, out loud.

  She pushed note and letter under the pillow and lay down. Her body found and settled into last night’s hollow. She had left the gas burning, and with a reluctant effort she got up, trailed across the room to the bracket and returned to the bed. In the darkness she felt herself pressed heavily by the bedclothes and threw part off. She had a strange feeling, as though she were whirling through blackness. That was because she was tired. She closed her eyes and opened them again at once. But on nothing. The street-lamp had gone off some minutes since and there was now no light of any kind in the room. She sighed deeply.

  Because I can’t give up, she thought. I’ve got to live, haven’t I? Tell me that you with your generosity and your no claims. I might have known how it was without all this time waiting and wondering. Oh God it’s over and this time last year we were where, in Ramsgate, I shan’t ever forget it, if I live to be a hundred, the heat and the dust
and the sea smooth like milk, and then afterwards, no I shan’t forget. All he said then to me and his look. It was like the canal at Staveley when we lay out there, that other, that boy he was: I was young too then I didn’t know, but I remember the water shining and sucking in the darkness and that one lovely light, yes lovely. I ought to have stopped up there instead of rushing off to London like I did. Like a young fool.

  She gave a passing thought to her mother, whom she had not seen since that day. A letter came for her to the Dorset (to inform her shortly and brutally that if she wanted to see her mother alive etc.), but she had left the place then and it was a month before the waiter who knew where she was with Ernst brought it. Then it was too late. Poor mother! She was hard, though. She scalded her arm that night and never called out or woke anyone. I’m not like that. But I’m not done for yet. I’m alive still.

  Half asleep she entered a colourless world peopled only by the dead, those who had died in the flesh and been forgotten and those who like Ernst were neither alive nor dead. She was aware now of two different scenes, in both of which and in the same moment she lived. It did not occur to her that there was anything strange in being at the same time in the dark passage of her mother’s house and in a crowded street. The two existed simultaneously in her mind. At last she was deeply asleep, her tired uneasy mind loosed to all the several circles of being.

  She lies there in the darkness, her mind a meeting-place for every kind of event. A multitude of the quick and the dead exist in it. It is exquisitely poised to make her laugh, cry, speak, exult, suffer, and dream. Exactly as the separate parts of her body are held fast in equilibrium until an instant in a not unguessable future. Turning on her back, she makes a loud strangled noise as she breathes. The pulse in her arm lying on the dirty sheet is one of the stages of a mystery. Look once more and you can see how beautiful she is.

  Poor woman, let her sleep.

  To

  Valentine Dobrée

  without asking leave

  This electronic edition published in 2011 by Bloomsbury Reader

  Bloomsbury Reader is a division of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 50 Bedford Square, London WC1B 3DP

  Copyright © Storm Jameson 1933

  The moral right of author has been asserted

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  ISBN: 9781448200085

  eISBN: 9781448201402

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