by Marie Joseph
‘You’ll start feeling better after the funeral on Monday,’ Stanley said, then immediately wondered what had made him say such a damn fool thing?
‘If anyone else tells me once more that time will heal I’ll be like Nellie Crawley and spit in their eye,’ his mother had said only the day before. But what else was there to say but platitudes and trite remarks? What did one say to the newly bereaved? Stanley folded the carrier-bag into acceptable masculine folds and tucked it beneath his arm.
‘You’ll be all right till I get back, then?’
Then, as she nodded, he bent his head and kissed her awkwardly on her cheek, knowing that had been quite the wrong thing to do as he saw the rush of tears to her eyes.
‘Grief should bring closeness,’ he told himself as he walked quickly with head bent forward as usual down the street.
‘Everyone can master a grief but he that has it,’ he muttered, then as he crossed the street: ‘Old Shakespeare had the right words for everything – the old rascal didn’t miss a trick.’
‘Everyone can master a grief but he that has it,’ he said again, causing two women who knew him to turn to each other and say how sad it was that what had happened in the Corporation Park to that poor boy’s sister had obviously turned his mind.
‘Talking to himself,’ they told their respective husbands over their Saturday tea of a quarter of tripe – off the seam.
‘I’ll go down town and pick the brooch up for you if you’d like me to,’ Dorothy told her mother. ‘Then you won’t need to worry about me not getting enough exercise. I’ll run all the way down Steep Brow,’ she added with the air of one who is dispensing a great favour.
As usual Phyllis tried hard not to sigh at her younger daughter. They were in the front garden and she was down on her knees on a small cushion kept specially for the purpose. She wore her gardening outfit, an old tweed skirt, a long cardigan and a shady hat, although the sun was no more than a watery trickle of light through low-slung clouds. With hands encased in a pair of leather gauntlet gloves she was planting pansy clumps in a neat and well-ordered row, planting them at equal distances from each other, pulling at their foliage until she felt they were roughly the same size, and patting the earth down around them with neat, precise, little pats. Like the contents of the house itself, her garden was the epitome of order and neatness. As one blue vase on one side of the mantelpiece was flanked by its twin on the other, so the shrubs and flowers in Phyllis’s garden bloomed in matching identical pairs. If a rose bush came into flower at one side of the velvet lawn, then its counterpart came into matching bloom on the other. In their due seasons the tulips marched down the border like well-drilled soldiers, the daffodils grew in evenly spaced precision to uniform heights, and the privet hedge looked as if it had been manufactured and not grown.
‘If she didn’t think it was common she’d have got Philips to clip out a couple of ducks at each side of the gate,’ Dorothy had told Stanley once when they were playing their favourite game of analysing her parents.
‘With identical twin gnomes fishing in matching ponds in the middle of the lawn,’ Stanley had said. ‘It’s a sign of insecurity, you see, Dorothy. Two means more, double means twice the normal.’
‘I see,’ Dorothy had said, not seeing at all.
Sitting back on her heels Phyllis eyed her with resignation.
‘Why you couldn’t have gone with Margaret to the tennis club I don’t know. Gerald’s picking her up there later because he doesn’t want her to walk back through the field way alone.’ She shook her head as if in sorrow. ‘When I was your age I spent every single minute of every single Saturday at the tennis club. I never mooned about doing nothing the way you do.’ She got up from her knees and stared with something akin to distaste at the soil on the tips of her gloved fingers. ‘Well, I suppose you could pick my brooch up for me. Mr Adamson did promise to have it ready today, and I want to wear my grey striped blouse for bridge this evening. It looks nothing without my cameo at the neck.’ She looked down at her arm as if expecting to see one of her leather handbags looped neatly into position. ‘Never mind the money, just tell Mr Adamson to charge it to us. Goodness knows we’ve spent enough money there lately with the engagement presents and the silver knife for cutting the cake, not to mention the crucifixes for the bridesmaids.’ She knelt down again and trimmed off a leaf which had grown out of proportion to the others. ‘It was only the safety chain that needed mending.’ Then, trying hard to sound casual, she said: ‘Where are you going this evening, dear?’
‘I was going to the pictures with Stanley,’ Dorothy told her, feeling that, under the tragic circumstances, lies in that direction would be in bad taste. ‘But he doesn’t feel he should go anywhere until after the funeral.’ She raised her voice in an attempt at bravado. ‘I was going to say that I was going with Mavis and Edna, two girls in my form, but I’ve promised Father I’ll stop telling lies about meeting Stanley.’
Phyllis allowed herself an upwards sideway glance. Her daughter looked very virtuous standing there in her pleated skirt, with the Peter-Pan collar of her white blouse turned down over the collar of her school blazer. Almost as if she were blaming them for her former deceit, Phyllis thought, stabbing furiously into the soil with her index finger.
‘Your father’s going to the funeral on Monday to represent the mill,’ Phyllis said, with the emphasis on the word that counted. ‘Gerald was going with him but he’s stood down to let Mr Sowerbutts go in his place. Margaret says he can’t bear to discuss it. He’s a sensitive young man, you’ve only to look at his face to see that he suffers inwardly. Probably because of his sad beginnings.’
‘My heart bleeds,’ Dorothy said underneath her breath as she walked away down the path, leaving her mother muttering feverishly into a seedling. . . .
She wasn’t, Phyllis decided, going to raise the issue at the moment about this dreadful boy from Inkerman Street. Let them get his poor sister decently buried first, then she’d make Matthew listen. Knowing Dorothy as she was sure she did, it was more than likely that the whole sordid business had tinged the friendship with an aura of glamour. Dramatized it into something brave and wonderful. Made Dorothy feel she must stick by him no matter what. She stood up, dragged the cushion a few feet to the right and knelt down again. Now it seemed that he was refusing to go back to school and talking about giving up his place at university. Mrs Wilkinson had heard it from a friend of a friend. And if he left school, what then?
She probed daintily in the cuttings box as if she were selecting a chocolate cream and being careful not to take a hard one by mistake. At eighteen he was too old to take up an apprenticeship that might give him a trade in his fingers, even if there were any openings at the present time. And with nothing but book learning to offer, academic qualifications not backed up by a degree or any training for one of the professions, he would probably end up signing on at the Labour Exchange. Hanging about outside with his hands in his pockets, just one more statistic in what the papers called the economic graveyard of lost hopes. She knelt back on her heels, proud of herself for remembering the phrase: Matthew would in all probability offer him a job at the mill, knowing Matthew. But it would have to be a job created especially, with a hundred men standing by for every job available.
The town was full of boys who had never worked, the occasional packet of cigarettes and a daily meeting at the billiard halls being the only pleasure in their drab lives. Oh, she read the papers all right, and listened to Matthew when he was up on his soap-box. The very street in which that boy lived — she could not bring herself even to think his name – existed merely because it had been built originally as cottages, well, terraced houses for the mill workers. She stood up and rubbed at an aching knee.
And if this grisly thing hadn’t happened, he would have gone off to university at the end of the summer, and out of sight would surely have meant out of mind. She walked stiff-legged into the house, seeing, in her mind’s eye, a clear picture of herself hav
ing to tell Mrs Wilkinson that Mrs Armstrong was coming to tea. She saw Dorothy helping that boy to carry a basket of washing through the streets; saw her bridge friends sniggering behind their cards. Saw it all, and was depressed beyond measure.
Dorothy was thinking about Stanley so thoroughly that she didn’t see her cousin until they were almost nose to nose.
‘I’ve been playing tennis in the park,’ Beryl told her unnecessarily, swinging her racket with three tennis balls in a green net wound round the handle. ‘Talk about being lovesick. You’re as bad as Gerald, you are.’ She lowered her voice, although the tree-lined road was completely deserted. ‘I swore I wouldn’t tell a living soul, but he’s lost one of the cuff-links Margaret bought him. I was on the landing after lunch, and I saw him searching his room. He was opening drawers and then banging them shut. He was even looking underneath the carpet and feeling with his hand to see if they’d rolled there somehow. I asked him what he was looking for, and he jumped a mile. Then he told me how terrible he felt about losing them with Margaret buying them for him and everything. He said it made him quite sick just thinking about it as they were more precious to him than the King’s crown.’ She sighed. ‘Isn’t that romantic? You won’t tell a living soul about it, will you? I’ve only told you because I think it’s so beautiful.’
‘As if I would,’ Dorothy said, backing away. If she didn’t hurry up the shops would be closed.
But Beryl hadn’t finished. ‘As a matter of fact I saw him in the park just now, walking along a path with his nose nearly touching the ground. But I didn’t let on. He thinks I spy on him, for some reason.’ Her plain face shone with perspiration beneath the wide brim of her school panama. ‘It’s real spooky in the park. There’s a piece of tarpaulin over the place where you know what. Me and Connie – she’s the girl I’ve been playing tennis with, and she beat me again, you might know – we went to look. Isn’t it awful about that girl who got killed having a baby? Mother says . . .’
‘I can’t stop,’ Dorothy said quickly. ‘I’ve got to catch the shops before they shut. See you in church tomorrow morning?’
‘Suppose so,’ Beryl said. ‘And you won’t split about what I’ve just told you? I think you’re beastly rotten about Gerald, if you want to know. He says he trusts me and that when they’re married I can go and stay the night with them sometimes.’ She walked away, the tennis racket banging disconsolately against her fat legs sprouting from white ankle socks, leaving Dorothy feeling, as usual, vaguely ashamed, and with the feeling that she could have been kinder. Cousin Beryl will be making people feel guilty all her life, she reasoned, with a sudden flash of perception.
She blushed and turned her head away as three boys standing on a street corner whistled after her. She could almost bring herself to feel sorry for Gerald Tomlin having to live under Beryl’s constant vigilance.
She was half way down Steep Brow when she suddenly remembered that Gerald had found the cuff-links; that he had been wearing them the night before. At least they had looked like the same. But had they? She remembered standing at the door and waving them off to the dance, Margaret in her garden-swing dress, and Gerald in what her father always called his penguin trappings. She had thought then that the cuff-links appeared to be smaller than the original ones. She stepped off a kerb and stumbled, causing a man at the tram-stop to say ‘whoops-a-daisy’. And if he had found them why was he still searching? And why was he searching in the park?
Her mind raced ahead so that she walked along, seeing nothing of the busy Saturday afternoon crowds, hearing nothing as the trams rumbled by. If Gerald had lost the cuff-links he could have replaced them. He could have gone back to the jeweller’s shop and bought a similar pair. He could have done it to spare Margaret the knowledge that he had lost her present to him. He could have. Of course he could have. She bumped into a pram and was loudly told to look where she was going by the baby’s mother.
But if he’d done that, why was he still searching his room? Lifting the carpet, according to Beryl. And why was he in the park walking along with his head bent? Gerald Tomlin didn’t go for walks in the park. Gerald Tomlin didn’t walk anywhere, the red sports car being almost an extension of himself. Someone called out a ‘hallo’, but she glanced through them, showing no recognition. Yes, the searching beneath the carpet in Gerald’s room could mean that he couldn’t bear to think he had misplaced the original pair on account of their sentimental value. Mother was always saying what a lovely romantic streak Gerald had in him. ‘Not like a northern man with his mind filled with nothing else but beer and football,’ she’d said more than once.
And Margaret herself had said how upset he was at losing the cuff-links. So upset that he wanted it kept a secret. But Gerald had what Mrs Wilkinson’s magazines called ‘charm’. He would, or at least he could have said that he’d lost them and elicited sympathy, not irritation. Gerald Tomlin always managed to come out the hero, usually the suave Ronald Colman type hero, in every story he told against himself. And charming people did tell stories against themselves just to make themselves appear all the more charming. That was another truth about people she had found out for herself, and one she must tell to Stanley when next they met.
‘Tolstoy is the only writer who can hold up a mirror to a man’s soul,’ Stanley had said, and gone on to say that was the kind of writer he would be one day when he was qualified to earn money, to take time off to write.
Dorothy turned into King Edward Street without the faintest recollection of having got there, was surprised to find herself standing outside Mr Adamson’s jeweller’s shop, and stood for a moment staring at the rows of diamond rings in the side window, each one mounted on a velvet pad with the price neatly tabulated underneath. Óne ring costing a hundred and fifty pounds had diamonds as big as peas, and even in her state of mental agitation she found that she was pursing up her lips in a gesture of disbelief.
The door-bell pinged as she went inside, and Mr Adamson’s Saturday lady, a plump treble-chinned girl of about thirty with a black dress stretched tightly over her pouter-pigeon bosom, came forward.
‘Can I help you?’
Dorothy bit her lip and glanced over to the side counter where Mr Adamson was setting out rings on a mat of black velvet, showing them off to an obviously embarrassed young man and an obviously triumphant girl who was insisting on trying on each ring and holding up her hand to the light to check them for sparkle. The jeweller, one of Matthew Bolton’s Rotary friends, was leaning forward, explaining about built-up shoulders and claw settings, smiling like a benevolent Father Christmas on the young couple, and telling them to take their time.
‘Take your time about it,’ he was saying at that very moment. ‘It’s only once.’ Then he laughed and stroked his mutton-chop whiskers. ‘Or at least we hope it’s only once.’
The couple giggled and leaned on each other, and Dorothy spoke, softly to the assistant.
‘I’ll wait for Mr Adamson, if you don’t mind. It’s personal.’
‘As you wish, miss.’
The Saturday lady sniffed with a sideways twitch of nostrils and walked with a rather offended tripping step into a room at the back, where through a small window Dorothy saw her light a cigarette and blow a thin stream of smoke up to the ceiling as if to disconnect herself from the whole matter.
Yes, if Gerald Tomlin had replaced the lost cuff-links for a new pair, it would have still been quite feasible that he would go on searching for the originals. And the normal place, the most likely place, would be his bedroom. Nothing was more annoying than losing something and having no idea where one has lost it. Father was always losing a cuff-link or a collar stud.
‘A place for everything,’ Mother would say, ‘and everything in its place, and no, Matthew, Mrs Wilkinson has not moved them. She dusts round everything, even the lace covers on your tall-boy, as well I know.’
Dorothy stood on one leg and sighed deeply. But if her father couldn’t find what he was looking for in his room, wou
ld he be likely to go searching for it in the park? Walking along the paths with his head bent, searching, pretending he was just out for an afternoon stroll, but in reality searching? Along the side paths, the long, winding paths leading to the duck pond, the place where. . . .
Yes, it had been Beryl’s mention of seeing Gerald in the park that had made the warning bells ring.
Dorothy sat down with a sudden thump on the horse-hair-covered chair placed there for customers with weak legs or hearts. Her own legs felt as if they had started to melt, and her heart was beating with loud and heavy thuds somewhere it had no right to be.
She was getting carried away, as her mother would say. She was as usual allowing her imagination to run off with itself. Even her last school report under General Comments had said that she should try to hold her imagination on a tighter rein.
She took a handkerchief with a bunch of flowers embroidered on one corner out of her blazer pocket and blew her nose on an uncomfortable French knot, and when Mr Adamson spoke to her she jumped as if someone had shot a poisoned arrow into her back.
‘By the left, Dorothy, but you were far away,’ she heard Mr Adamson say. ‘That’s three times I’ve spoken to you, chuck, and you haven’t heard a word.’ His large face beamed concern. ‘Would you like a drink of water, love? You’ve gone right pale and no mistake.’
Dorothy tried a shaky smile.
‘Just thinking, Mr Adamson, that’s all. Honestly, I’m fine.’
The jeweller wasn’t convinced. ‘Hope you’re not sickening for this flu, chuck. There’s a lot of it about. Your auntie was in only a few days back and we had to sit your cousin out at the back on a chair. Green as grass she were. It’s a treacherous month May is; one minute you think it’s springlike, and then the next it’s as parky as the middle of winter.’
‘My cousin Beryl is always sitting outside shops on chairs,’ Dorothy said, and he laughed a surprisingly thin laugh for so big a man.
