Just below the window was a terrace with chairs and a table set out with a jug and glasses, the jug covered with a plate. Lemonade … she could almost taste it. This was presumably left out for Johnny and any visitors, Hannaford would apply to the kitchen for a glass of water or a cup of tea.
She went out into the hall and along to the back of the house where a glass-panelled door opened on to the short flight of stone steps leading to the terrace – a flight which, like a stream passing through a pond, continued on the far side and down to the lawn.
Taking the plate from the top of the jug, she caught the sharp fragrance of lemons and sugar. After the first deliciously refreshing gulps, she carried her glass to the edge of the terrace. They hadn’t seen her. From here she could no longer see Johnny, but she could hear his voice.
‘… if we can do away with some of these hard edges, create more of a wave … a swirl … I think it will be tremendous. And with the statue placed, what do you think, about here …? Like a Beardsley print …’
Johnny was treading the lip of a volcano and, she was sure, knew he was doing so. What had he just said? A wave … a swirl … a Beardsley print …? Hannaford’s face would have been comical if it hadn’t been for his expression of thunderous insult.
‘Couldn’t say I’m sure.’ The words darted jerkily through almost-closed lips like tickets from a bus-conductor’s machine.
‘I just have this feeling … You know, George? You’re a man with a feeling for growing things, all your years of experience … And you know Mrs Delahay, too, and her tastes, far better than me. I’m a Johnny-come-lately after all!’
Barbara could bear it no longer. She put her glass down on the wall and went down the steps.
‘Hello.’
‘Evening Miss.’
Johnny turned round. He hadn’t known she was there, didn’t quite have time to hide the split-second’s uncertainty as if she’d caught him off guard.
‘Barbara!’
‘Am I interrupting?’
‘Not in the least, I was just explaining some of my ideas to George here.’
‘And what do you make of them?’
She didn’t really need to ask, but whatever else he was George wasn’t a fool. His expression of sullen disgruntlement had been replaced by stony-faced neutrality the moment she appeared.
‘Could work miss. Won’t say otherwise.’
She raised her glass. ‘Can I get you a cold drink?’
‘No thank you Miss, I’ll be off shortly.’
‘I will though.’ Johnny left the wheelbarrow and bounded up the steps, catching her hand as he passed. Her last glimpse of Hannaford, over her shoulder, was of him turning away in disgust, with a look on his face of pure, sulphurous loathing.
The other occasion could not have been more different, nor more unsettling; yet another example of her new position as outsider in her family home. By the middle of August, some of the proposed changes in the garden had been made. They were by no means as radical as Johnny had implied, but there were certainly curves and new, extravagant plants set to romp over walls by the following summer. There were also a couple of romantic, quasi-classical statues that hovered on the borders of good taste, yet Julia expressed herself thrilled with the statues. Barbara was glad she had not been there to observe her father’s first reaction to them. By the time she next saw him – and them all together – he was claiming, straight-faced, to find them ‘rather fine’.
Over the past weeks, the excitement had gone out of her work. The challenge and independence, which had been such a pleasure to her last autumn, had palled. She chafed against being behind her desk, but felt curiously agitated when required to go out of town, as if she were in some way deserting her post. She couldn’t work out why this should be until one afternoon, when she was visiting a dog-breeder in Sussex. Barbara was standing, in the sensible shoes she had bought for such occasions, gazing at a litter of black and yellow Labradors. She was listening to but not hearing her subject’s dissertation on the honing of pedigree, because her mind had flown back to the Regent’s Park garden and to Johnny. He was not working, but playing and doing as he wanted in pleasant surroundings. He was basking in the sunshine and her mother’s approval, being completely at home in her home.
‘… not being too technical?’
The dog-breeder was regarding her with an expression of quizzical apology; she must have been looking quite blank. Politely, Barbara explained that she probably had enough for The Countrywoman’s little piece and the photographer had some delightful pictures, which the readers would love.
On the train back to London, she sat in her corner seat, her face turned resolutely away from her fellow-travellers. She and Johnny had made no arrangement for that evening. There were rarely any arrangements these days, she realised. She knew where he was likely to be. From the station she went straight to the house, Clarice was in the hall.
‘Only Sir Conrad, miss,’ she said, answering Barbara’s question. ‘He’s in the drawing room.’
Barbara glanced at her watch. Six fifteen was early for her father to be back and on his own.
‘Thank you, Clarice, I’ll see myself up.’
He was sitting in the green brocade carriage chair by the window. This was unusual in itself, because she thought of this as her mother’s chair. Julia liked to sit there and watch the world go by: the changing colours of the trees in the park, the lamps being lit on winter afternoons and the sun go down in summer. Next to him, on the windowsill, stood his glass of whisky and next to that a copy of the Times, still folded. He was sitting still, his hands resting on his knees. For that second, she saw her father as an old man.
‘Daddy?’
‘Bar!’ The moment passed. ‘My dear girl. You know your young man isn’t here.’
This wasn’t quite a question. Her father was being tactful, not wishing to imply that she’d been left in the dark, although of course she had been.
‘I do, Clarice told me.’
‘He and your mother have gone to purchase some frippery or other for the garden.’ It was the first time she’d heard him disparage Johnny’s work, however glancingly. ‘They should be back soon, I have no idea what’s keeping them. Would you care for a glass of sherry?’
She accepted and, once he’d handed her the glass, he didn’t return to the carriage chair, but indicated they should sit in their habitual places away from the window. He asked her, with more than usual interest, about her work and what she had been doing. Then listened to her answers with close attention and smiling briefly when she said something amusing.
Barbara thought, he needs diversion, and I am it.
Some fifteen minutes, later Clarice knocked to say Conrad had a telephone caller and on being told the name, he apologised and went to take it in his study. Barbara returned to the window and perched on the sill.
The cab must have only just pulled up, because Johnny was still holding the door, a large bag in his other hand, and her mother emerged like a butterfly from a chrysalis, carrying flowers, holding her pert little hat and laughing. As far as Barbara could see, Johnny was in his gardening clothes: black trousers, worse-for-wear tweed jacket and collarless shirt, with a blue handkerchief knotted round his neck. A woman walking past glanced at them with that sparkle of envy one reserves for beguiling couples.
Barbara watched her mother take money from her bag and give it to Johnny to pay the driver … Watched her dip her face sweetly into the soft, pink and blue flowers as the cab pulled away … Saw her make some smiling remark to Johnny and rest her hand for a second on his shoulder. Saw Johnny … what? What did she see exactly? He had his back to the house but she could tell from the angle of his head, the set of his shoulders, the very displacement of air around him, what the expression was on his face; how he was looking at Julia. She knew because, in the past, he had looked so often at her in that way.
Oh Johnny … My handsome, winsome Johnny … You’re just a tawdry, street Arab making fools
of us all …
‘Aha,’ said her father, putting his head round the door. ‘The great gardeners are back.’
That was nowhere near the end. The summer was too lovely to spoil and Johnny was so happy. If Barbara’s work had lost its lustre the same could not be said of his. Julia invited a stream of friends round to admire his handiwork. She made him a present of a little, eighteenth-century patch-box, with a red and gold enamelled lid, which he’d admired on his first visit to the house.
She thought she would never understand him. He was mercurial, protean: a creature that appeared entirely different, depending on where one was standing. These days she saw less of the wounded, wary Johnny who had so captivated her and even less of the sly charmer she had first met. He was caught up in something else, a mission of his own, and she was only a part of it. Her heart felt as though it were being crushed, pushed down in her chest until it ached and yet she lacked the will to go. She feared that she might lose not just Johnny, but all of them and everything she had.
In the end, the decision was made for her.
The first theft was a small amount of cash from Julia’s handbag. Julia told the story as one against herself, she ‘could never do arithmetic’ and Conrad was always telling her she was ‘a soft touch’ with the fiddle-player on the corner of Primrose Hill. Then there was the silver jam spoon that Clarice couldn’t find and the little, mother-of-pearl key, usage and provenance unknown, that hung on a hook behind the door in the dining room. Johnny searched, sympathised and speculated, but Barbara was certain he’d taken them and the thought made her feel sick and cold. Molly’s words in the park came back to Barbara.
‘He was light-fingered, but he never took anything from us …’
Her family was different. She could scarcely ask him, because she had no proof and she couldn’t even look for the things in his room since she didn’t know where that was. Her father was pensive and poker-faced. In her mother’s eyes, Johnny could do no wrong.
His mistake was in stealing from Clarice. Just like the Gorringes’ house staff, she and Hannaford had no time for him. Barbara suspected that Clarice might even have set a trap by leaving her purse unattended on the kitchen table. He had taken half a cake from the tin and six shillings from her purse. The cake didn’t matter, he ‘helped himself all the time’ according to Clarice, but he had been the only person there for the quarter of an hour during which the cash had disappeared.
Clarice’s righteous wrath and her boldness in confronting her employers was something to behold. She pointed the finger with complete certainty and with that pointing finger she demoted Johnny from Barbara’s young man, her mistress’s favourite, to just another employee and a light-fingered one at that. Johnny smiled in astonishment. Clarice was thanked and told she could go. The drawing room was a little hell of shame and embarrassment, and despair.
Julia wept. Barbara’s father was white with a cold fury. Johnny, feigning furious offence, left the house, banging the front door in Barbara’s face. She ran after him and caught his sleeve. He stopped, not looking at her. There was spittle at the corner of his mouth.
‘Don’t tell me you believe her, that stupid bitch!’
She had scarcely any breath left. ‘I don’t know what to believe, or who!’
‘Me!’ he snarled. ‘You might try believing me, instead of the maid!’
‘I’m sorry, I’m so sorry …’ Why was she apologising? ‘Clarice has been with us such a long time. She’s like one of the family—’
‘Something I could never be.’ He picked her hand off his arm as if it were a burr, an insect. ‘Could I?’
He walked away from her, fast. For years, decades, that remained her most enduring image of Johnny – disappearing, shoulders tight, hands in pockets, coiled against the world.
At one a.m. that night, he beat on the front door of Sussex Court so loudly that Mr Jeffries – from the ground-floor flat and donned in his dressing gown – was already in the hall as she ran down the stairs.
‘What’s all this about? Do you know anything about this?’
‘I may do, I do apologise.’
‘Stand back then while I see who it is.’
Mr Jeffries opened the door a few inches.
‘Who are you? What in God’s name is all the noise about? Do you know what time—?’
‘I know, I’m sorry,’ Johnny shouted over the man’s shoulder, ‘Barbara!’
She had known it would be him and now she could see his white, frantic face through the partially opened door.
‘It’s all right, Mr Jeffries. He’s a friend of mine.’
‘You need to take more care who you make friends with!’
‘Let me in! Please Barbara!’
‘Are you quite sure?’
‘I am Mr Jeffries, there’s nothing to worry about.’
‘If you say so.’
Jeffries, with an air of morose impatience, left the door open and stumped back to his flat, closing his own door with a final threatening glare. Outside it was raining and Johnny was soaked, but the moment he was in her arms Barbara could tell he was weeping. His frailty as always squeezed her heart. But when he spoke his voice was fierce and harsh.
‘Don’t leave me!’
Only twenty-four hours earlier, she could have given him that promise. Now she could only say, ‘Come upstairs. You need to get dry.’
She never asked him about the stealing. She couldn’t bear to give him yet another opportunity to lie to her. When he left that night, she knew that she would never see him again. She thought she might die of the pain.
With Johnny gone, Julia’s humiliation was terrible to see. She could only lick her wounds. It was her father who talked straight to Barbara.
‘The man’s a cheat, Bar. A cheap, common fraud. We’ve all been taken in by an expert. There’s no shame in that, but there would be in letting it happen again. This is where it has to end. You do understand that.’
It was not a rebuke, but an order. She nodded.
‘I thought I was making a joke about his name … You know what it means, Eldridge?’
‘No.’
‘Strange, sinister, not of this world. A bad lot. Look it up, you’ll see I’m right.’
He could see he’d gone too far, as the tears ran down her face. He held her close and kissed her forehead – blessing and absolving her, his child.
Child!
She understood the meaning of a heart ‘turned to stone’. Hers had cracked but not broken. It became a petrified, useless, senseless lump of matter that sat heavy within her. At all sorts of unexpected moments, she could feel Johnny beneath her hand: the texture of the soft hair that curled on his collar; the skin of his cheek; his threadbare work jacket; his cool, calloused hand, with its long fingers.
The stolen things were returned, left one night in a chocolate box on the table on the terrace: the silver spoon, the key, a sad, little handful of mixed change … even the patch box, Julia’s gift.
‘Now we know,’ said Conrad, ‘if we didn’t before.’
Julia couldn’t look at them and her voice was bitter. ‘I’m only surprised he hadn’t sold them.’
Barbara wasn’t surprised. The things in themselves (except for Clarice’s money) were pathetic – hostages not only to fortune but to a dream.
Molly, whom she hadn’t seen in months, met her in a Lyons Corner House and listened expressionless, to the story, smoking cigarette after cigarette.
‘Have you seen him?’ Barbara asked. ‘Have you heard from him at all?’
‘No.’ Molly shook her head. ‘But then I often don’t. He comes and goes. I must say that as time went by I suspected all might not be well.’
‘You warned me.’
‘I did, but I didn’t seriously expect you to heed the warnings. Who would, with Johnny? I didn’t, but then I have my reasons to be eternally grateful to him, as I told you.’
‘If you’re in touch, Molly, will you tell him—?’
‘N
o.’ Molly raised a hand. ‘I’m not going to be your messenger.’
Her tone was matter-of-fact, rather than sharp. Barbara had been cut adrift.
Fifteen
1949
Johnny’s arms were submerged to the elbow in greasy, opaque water, on the surface of which scraps of food floated, some of which had certainly been in people’s mouths. Saliva, he tried not to think about that. The worn soles of his shoes were planted in a slick of the aforementioned grease, plus gravy, custard, slimy strands of fish skin, fat and vegetable matter, and whatever else had slithered from the piles of plates, before they were plunged into the filthy water. His feet were already dank where the moisture had seeped through, though not as bad as they would have been on a Saturday night. Codger, whose thankless and Sisyphean task it was to clean the kitchen during working hours, was mopping over the other side near the chefs. There he could make the most difference and be seen to be doing so. Any attempt to shift the culinary slurry by the sinks was generally accorded a waste of time until service was over.
The water in the sink needed changing, but Johnny was putting it off. If there was one thing worse than the disgusting soup he was delving around in, it was clawing out the slimy debris from the drain hole and transferring it to the nearly-full, galvanised tin bucket on the floor. And then the tap ran so slowly that further towers of plates would build up on the side while you waited. To his left was the rinsing sink, which also needed changing, and beyond that Aldo was on cutlery. Another thing you didn’t want to dwell on was what survived between the tines of forks and on plates that arrived at the tables, with food already covering dried-on scabs of what had been there before. Glasses, the state of which was easily apparent to customers, were washed in a separate corner by Micky and Moira, who wore clean white overalls and wielded special cloths.
The Rose in Winter Page 15
