London Transports

by Maeve Binchy

  She wished she had someone to tell, someone who would congratulate her, someone who would be interested. If Mother was alive…no, of course she couldn’t have told Mother about it, what was she dreaming about? Mother had been interested certainly, but you didn’t tell Mother about having affairs, that wasn’t something people from our stock did, people who were busy holding their heads up with the best of them. And Father, he might have liked the story if it had been about someone else. He used to listen to her tales about other people, and say, “Fancy, aren’t folk strange?” Maggie would treat it lightly, and probably come out with new stories about him, things she hadn’t liked to tell Lisa at the time. And there was nobody in the staff room she could tell, and Bill, well Bill and Angela would just have one of their worried conversations about her. She really had very few friends.

  And that was the one cloud on her new freedom, she realized. That’s what she’d miss, having him for a friend. In a few ways and some of the time, he had at least been a friend.

  Marble Arch

  * * *

  These days she felt that the flower sellers, the men with piles of things that had fallen off lorries, the policemen, and the road sweepers were her friends. She felt they were all part of some kind of club, the only remaining English people in a sea of foreigners. It was a racist kind of thought perhaps, she said to herself, because if you started noticing how many people there were who smelled of garlic, or who wore face veils, or head-dresses, then the next step might be to wish they weren’t there. It would be better not to notice differences at all, to think that everything which walked on two feet was a fellow human.

  Anyway she had no right to be anything but grateful to all the tourists. She reminded herself of this as an Arab thrust a piece of paper at her with an address down the Edgware Road on it, and she pointed him in the right direction. He was going to a chemist’s shop, she noticed. She wondered whether it was for a prescription or to buy boxes of soaps and talcums. Without the Arabs her own business would have folded long ago. She sold handmade handbags in a shop within a shop. They were quite expensive. Young Londoners didn’t have the money young Kuwaitis did.

  Sophie unlocked her little shop and started to hang up the bags. She then got a stool and sat out in the morning sunlight waiting for customers. It was much more expensive to have a street frontage, but it trebled business. She was glad she had such a good head for business. She really needed it because nobody around her seemed to understand the first principles of earning a living. She frowned with the beginnings of a headache, and moved out of the sun. It had been a very late night.

  It hadn’t been night when she finally got to bed, it had been four o’clock in the morning. Eddie had brushed the hair out of his eyes and half raised himself on an elbow as she left, but he was now back in a deep innocent sleep again and here she was sitting with a headache, trying to trap the tourists who came to Marble Arch, trying to keep awake and make a living for Eddie and herself.

  She never thought of herself as earning a living for both of them. That wasn’t the way the words or the ideas fell together. Only sometimes, when she had a headache or when they had talked long and without direction during the night, did she think wistfully how nice it would be if he was the one who got up in the mornings, and she was the one who could raise herself on an elbow and say “Good-bye, love, take it easy.” But that wasn’t really considering an alternative, it was only thinking about things that would never be, like the way you sometimes imagined what it would be like to be a sea gull when you saw one swooping backwards and forwards over a harbour.

  Sophie thought a bit about last night’s discussion. It hadn’t been any different from the ones that had gone before, just longer. Eddie’s dark brown eyes and their long black lashes looked dull with the pain of the world. They had lost all the flash and brilliance they had when he wasn’t talking about the cruelty of the world. Dead they sat on his face as he spoke on bitterly about the producers who were pansies, the agents who were fairies, the script editors who promised the moon, the misguided advice of friends who said, “Well, why don’t you just go to Framlingham or Fraserburgh or some ridiculous place and see what happens?”

  Eddie wasn’t going to just go anywhere. At thirty-seven he was too old now to just go to a stupid group of overexcited students or experimentalists and help them out with their productions. He had been in acting too long, learned too much, was too professional to give in, to sell the past. What had all these years been for if he was going to give in now? What would his love for Sophie mean if he was to allow that painted Jeffrey to feel him up and take him to that queers’ pub as a possession, just in order that he could get a part? No, life was cruel, and rotten, and the good people always lost out, and it was a plot, and you couldn’t fight the system hoping to win, but at least you could try.

  Sophie had never seen life as being cruel and rotten before she met Eddie, but she had always seen it as fairly difficult and tiring. She thought if you worked hard you made money, and then you had leisure time and you enjoyed that. If you were very lucky indeed you worked at something that wasn’t awful, and then you enjoyed both work and leisure. She thought it must be very strange and sad to work in a world where there seemed to be steaming clouds of sexual desire and frustration, mostly homosexual, and that this was governing who got jobs and who played where and who succeeded or who failed.

  It was so different to her own world. She had managed to leave the very dull, very depressing place where they had trained her how to sell cosmetics so well that she firmly believed she could sell lip gloss to men with beards. She had always wanted to be in business for herself but with no capital it looked impossible. Her father hadn’t wanted her to leave the cosmetic people. He thought she should thank her lucky stars day and night for the good luck she had got in life. Her father had never had much luck, there were more weeks when he collected money from welfare than from an employer. Her mother had worked regularly and quietly in a restaurant. She said that her one ambition was that Sophie should never have a job which meant walking and standing, and dealing with dirty plates and difficult customers. She was happy when Sophie was selling nice, fresh, good-smelling oils and paints for people’s faces. She was worried when she seemed to become a person of no account sitting in a little stall shouting her wares to the public.

  Sophie sighed, thinking how little everyone around her knew about business. If she had been her father, she would have kept a steady job; if she had been her mother, she would have demanded to be a cashier in that restaurant, where she could have sat in a little glass box near the door, rather than get varicose veins by walking and standing; if she were Eddie, she would take any acting job anywhere if she wanted to act, or more probably she would decide that if acting didn’t want her among its ranks, she would take some other job and act in her spare time. Really she had made very little impression on anyone, with her own businesslike attitudes. Nobody realized that it wasn’t easy to be organized and disciplined, and to make money. It took a lot of time, and worry, and ate into all those hours you could be sitting around and enjoying yourself. Nobody ever got drawn into her little belief that people might be here on earth to work hard. Nobody but Peggy. Peggy was her one success.

  Peggy had been a mess, and Sophie thought she would always be one, but she was so warm and friendly that you looked through all this bamboo curtain of rubbish and saw a lovely, big, responsive soul inside. Peggy had been to the same school, had done the same useless meaningless course in “business administration.” Well, hardly done it, Peggy had barely attended a class there. She had been in chip shops and coffee shops, and places with plastic tabletops where people ate ice creams and drank fizzy drinks instead of learning business administration or delivering bundles of dresses from the wholesale house to the retail, which was what they were being paid for.

  Peggy had a year of liberty, then came the storm. Her mother couldn’t understand why she wasn’t fitted for a wonderful job, some high business po
st. Gradually the tales of the chip shops emerged, and Peggy left home under the darkest cloud you could find, a cloud of ingratitude.

  Sophie had seen her from time to time. Usually she came to borrow a few pounds. More often than not Sophie got them back. Sometimes she came to grumble. This man had let her down, that man hadn’t told her he was married, the other man had been perfectly nice for a fortnight and then it turned out that all he wanted was to beat her and for her to beat him. She worked in Woollies for a while and was sacked for stealing. She thought that this was unfair. Sophie thought it was also pretty unfair to steal from Woollies, and Peggy only grudgingly agreed.

  She worked for a while in one of the coffee shops of her youth. Sophie always had coffee there just to have a chat. Sometimes she thought it mightn’t be such a good idea. Peggy looked weary, and dirty, and beaten, she seemed to resent Sophie’s smart looks, essential for her trade, and her smart little car, essential for bringing her trade from door to door.

  But still Peggy didn’t have anyone else, and when she was arrested the first time and charged with being drunk and disorderly, Sophie was the one she sent for. She sent for Sophie when she was in hospital, too, suffering, they told her, from malnutrition. Sophie came when she was charged with soliciting, and when she was finally sent to prison on her third charge, it was Sophie who waited for her three weeks later in the little car and drove her back home.

  When Peggy immediately retrieved a bottle of barley wine that she had hidden in the hallway of the depressing house where she lived, Sophie decided she had had enough. Quite enough. There they were sitting in this filthy room, and she was refusing a glass of cloudy, muddy-looking drink with the excuse that it was a bit early in the day. Her old friend Peggy had become a prostitute, a thief, and a near-alcoholic.

  The years of dragging herself up and away and onwards were looking useless, if she could be dragged down again so quickly by Peggy. She lost her temper, and said all this and more.

  “I’m not just dumping you because I’ve become all up-in-the-air,” she shouted eventually. “Stop telling me that I have ideas above myself. I’ve no ideas for God’s sake, I just work bloody hard, and it isn’t easy and everyone around me seems afraid of work or…or sneers at it and at me. So now I’m telling you I’m sick of it, sick, sick, sick. I have no more pity for you. I haven’t any more words, any more ‘Poor things’ to say to you. You can go whatever bloody way you like, I don’t care if I never hear about you again, because every time I hear from you you want something, money, help, someone to take you home from gaol. If you don’t want something at the beginning, you end up wanting something. You drain me, and make me feel weak and feel nothing. So to hell with you Peggy, to hell with you, I’m sick of you.”

  And then it was Sophie not Peggy who cried. Peggy was amazed. Not upset, just amazed.

  The great cool Sophie was sitting there crying, the calm Sophie had shouted. The mask had slipped. Peggy was transfixed. Instead of the list of excuses, explanations, and life’s miseries that normally fell out unasked for, she heard herself say quite calmly:

  “What would you like me to do?”

  “I’d like you to look after yourself for a change and not rely on me to look after you. I’d like you to do something quite extraordinary for you, that’s go out and earn a bloody living like most people in the world.”

  Sophie gathered up her bag and her car keys and banged out of the dirty room in the depressing house, and went off and sold cream that took lines from under your eyes to women who ran small dress shops. In and out of her car she got, dragging display literature, explaining that people who bought dresses would like to have unlined faces to wear with them. She went on and on until the last late-closing shop had closed, then returned to her flat and worked on reports until midnight and went to sleep.

  Next day Peggy was at her door. A tidier Peggy, not drunk, not hung over, not pleading.

  “Can I come with you on your rounds?” she asked simply.

  Sophie was tired. “Yes, if you don’t talk,” she said, and the day was much like any other, except for the vaguely comforting feeling of Peggy sitting silently beside her. They hardly spoke a word to each other until lunchtime. Then Sophie offered her a drink.

  “I’ll have a coffee,” said Peggy.

  During the coffee Peggy had asked intelligent questions about the kind of stores, shops, and boutiques they had been visiting. She wanted to know how much credit they got. Since Peggy couldn’t have had a pound note to her name, Sophie wondered at the drift of the conversation. Surely Peggy couldn’t see herself as a shop owner, even if she were going to pull herself together? But anything was better than the kind of thing Peggy normally talked about, so Sophie answered her sensibly. Sophie was also relieved that no malice seemed to be directed towards her for yesterday’s outburst.

  Peggy came silently in the car with Sophie for about a week, except for the day she had to go and see a probation officer or social worker. She didn’t have any tales to tell about these visits, no theories about how women in such jobs were sadists. Sophie began to feel quite optimistic about her, but didn’t want to rock any boat by saying it was a useless way to spend your days, sitting in someone else’s car. Perhaps Peggy was just desperately lonely, she thought.

  Then Peggy came up with her suggestion. She wondered, would these women in the shops buy handmade bags?

  Sophie’s first thought was that Peggy was planning to steal the bags, but no, she said, she had learned a bit of leather work once, and it turned out she was quite good at it. Would Sophie like to come and see some of it that evening?

  The dirty and untidy bedroom was still untidy, but not with clothes, makeup, and empty barley wine bottles. This time it was with bits of leather and cord. Sophie stood transfixed.

  Because the bags in all sorts of shapes and sizes were beautiful.

  Some of them were soft pinks and blues, others were bold blacks and whites. They were made on a patchwork system, because Peggy had only enough money for scraps, she said. She looked shyly at Sophie, and blushed with pleasure at the evident delight and surprise she saw.

  “I was wondering, could I earn a living selling them?” asked Peggy as timidly as a child. Sophie’s heart was so full of pride and delight and resolution that she hardly trusted herself to speak. This must be the way teachers feel, or nurses when their patients get better, she thought; and they sat down and made plans for Peggy’s new career.

  Things moved very quickly after that; the only problem was that Peggy couldn’t keep up with the demand. One boutique took a dozen, and rang up three days later for three dozen more. Sophie spent a whole Sunday with Peggy working out what they should do. If she were to get someone else to help her, they would have to halve the money. They had already seen the huge markup that shopkeepers put on the bags. It was time to define them as “luxury items,” as “specialist work.” They got labels made with “handcrafted by Peggy Anderson” on them, and they charged three times the price. They got it. And Peggy was in business.

  So great was the business that Sophie decided she would abandon cosmetics for it, and that is why she was sitting in her little stall near Marble Arch. Not all the bags were Peggy’s, no one person could keep up with that demand. But she sold six of Peggy’s a week, and she paid Peggy ten pounds a bag, everyone was happy.

  Now that Sophie had time off from the endless reports, and shop calls, and fights about commission that had made up her working life, she was able to have a social life. This was something she hadn’t seen much of in the hard years of the cosmetic world. But it wasn’t hard to find. There was George, silly, dull, kind George who wanted to marry her six weeks after he met her, and who took her to tennis parties and to drink outside Hooray Henry bars, where everyone talked about the last or the next tennis party, and what car everyone else was driving.

  And then there was Michael, who was kind and dull too. And Fred, who was far from dull, but also very selfish and made no bones about telling her tha
t he would like a wife doing something a little more classy than working as a hawker on Oxford Street. And suddenly one night there was Eddie. At the theatre on a summer evening, when Fred had gone to get the drinks and they had started talking about the play, Eddie had asked if she was an actress, and on impulse she had told him exactly where her little shop was, hoping he would call there. He did, and they drifted into friendship, and an affair that became a real love affair, and then it seemed only right that Eddie should live with her, and now she couldn’t live without Eddie.

  It was for Eddie that she got up early in the mornings because bills were bigger for two. It was for Eddie that she begged Peggy to make more bags, since the Peggy Andersons were the sure-fire sellers. It was for Eddie that she closed the shop for an hour and went off to the Berwick Street market to buy each night’s dinner.

  People told her that she had become nicer since she met Eddie. Her tired mother, whose veins were like knots of rope nowadays, and her sad-eyed father, both said she was more cheerful these days, but they put it down to her feckless life among the traders rather than to any love or warmth that had been added. They still thought her foolish to have thrown up her chances of real money.

  Peggy said she looked marvellous, better than the days when she used to wear all the makeup she was selling. Love was great, said Peggy gloomily, for those lucky enough to find it. But Peggy didn’t seem to like Eddie. She thought he was lazy and that he took too much from Sophie.