My American

by Stella Gibbons

  And Mona, who was afraid of her big calm mother, did as she was told.

  Amy, staring into the purring blue flame of the gas, had not heard a word about Mrs. Culver with her Peggy because she was wondering how she could get Mona out of the room. She wanted some bread and treacle, but did not want to waste bread and treacle on Mona, who got more than enough to eat.

  At that minute a taxi drew up outside and Mona slithered off the table, ran over to the window, and opened it.

  “It’s Dora,” she announced over her shoulder, leaning out into the cold moonlit air. “Coo-eee! Dora, I’m up here with Aime!” she shouted, leaning far out.

  Amy, leaning out beside her, saw Dora look up from her conversation with George the taxi-driver and wave them back impatiently.

  “How’s Mum, Dora?” shrieked Mona.

  Dora shook her head violently at them, still motioning them to go in, said something to George that made him laugh, and ran over the frosted pavement into the house.

  “Heart alive, I hope everything’s going on as well as can be expected,” sighed Mona, drawing in from the window and pushing in one of the five Kirbigrips that held the stiff ridges of her hair. “Come on, Aime, let’s go on down an’ hear the news. My heart, I wonder if I’d better sit up all night in case I’m wanted. …”

  They were hurrying downstairs, prudent Amy having first stayed to turn out the stove and the light.

  “All night, Mona?” she said, skipping down behind Mona’s heavy tread. “Have you ever?”

  “Heart alive, yes, when Mum had Arthur, Dora an’ me never took our clothes off for two solid nights. Dora! Dora! ‘You downstairs? How’s Mum? Where’s Dad?”

  “Do shut up, Mona, you give anyone the sick,” said Dora sharply as they came down into the kitchen. She was combing her hair in front of the glass. “Mum’s going on quite all right and Dad’s down at the bakehouse. Hullo, Aime. Come down to see the fun? You’d better have supper with us. Gosh!” settling a ripple of hair with a last vigorous pinch of her fingers, “I’m hungry. Where’re those kippers? Burned to a cinder, I ’spose, since Intelligence was looking after ’em. Where’s Maurice?”

  “Gone to the pictures. No, they aren’t, so there, see, clever! ’Cos I turned the gas down soon’s you went off,” said Mona triumphantly.

  “Rightee-o. Pop the kettle on, will you, Aime, there’s a dear. You stay and have supper with us, will you? You can eat Mum’s kipper, she won’t want it now, poor old Mum, and Dad says he doesn’t want anything either. What a thing it is to be in love! Here, here, what’s all this? What’re you doing, young Artie? You pop off, back to bed, the sooner the quicker.”

  Unnoticed by the busy females popping on kettles and taking kippers out of the oven, a small figure in pyjamas had crept in and was now sidling towards the table, gazing steadily at the lemon curd.

  He stopped dead and looked up imploringly at his sister.

  “Go on, hop it,” said Dora threateningly, towering over him on long thin legs in pink silk.

  “Where’s Mum?” he inquired, blinking.

  “Gone for a soldier. What’s the matter?” She knelt in front of him. “What woke you up?”

  “Young Mona.” Pointing accusingly and causing a shriek of “Oh, I never!”

  “I on’y looked in to see’f he was all right,” she added.

  “Well, you’ve done it now and no error. Come on, fish-face, you sit next to Aime and she’ll cut you a doorstep, won’t you, Aime? That’s right.”

  She lifted her brother’s lean little body on to a chair and gently worked his arms into the jersey he had wrapped round his shoulders.

  “Will you have some lemon curd on it, Arthur?” murmured Amy, putting the bread and butter on his plate.

  “NOT HALF!” yelled Arthur, bouncing up and down and banging with a spoon. “Not half!”

  “Now, now, that’s enough,” said Dora crisply, setting down the brown teapot. “Eat your doorstep and shut up. Here you are, Aime. With my blessing, and may it make you as happy as it has me. Mona, you don’t want vinegar on that, you’ll give yourself more spots than you’ve got already. All right, all right, it’s your face, not mine. Gosh! I’m starved … clemmed, as Mum says.” She turned to Amy, her mouth full of kipper. “I’d only just got in from Spanish when the balloon went up … not meaning Mum, of course!”

  Mona shrieked with laughter, and after a struggle in which she looked down her long nose and tried to be shocked, Dora joined in. Amy giggled companionably, though not quite understanding what the joke was, and Arthur banged with his spoon. The big clean room rang with cheerful noise.

  It was nice having supper with the Beedings in the kitchen, thought Amy, looking round at the familiar features of the room; the worn brown oilcloth and shiny green walls, the black range stacked with shining silver saucepans, the old gas stove about which Mrs. Beeding was always complaining, and the dresser and draining-board that had been scrubbed until they were bleached white as driftwood. The two things Amy liked best in the kitchen were the red, black and white rag carpet in front of the range, its colours softened by Time and washing, and the red clock ticking loudly on the dresser; they made pretty colours in the clean, rather bare kitchen which was so tidy that, like Mrs. Beeding, it was a bit frightening. But (also like Mrs. Beeding) it was comforting.

  The Beedings only used the kitchen for meals, never to sit in, for it became intolerably hot when baking was going on and as some of the stifling warmth lingered there after the bakehouse furnaces were cold, the kitchen was infested with black beetles. The range, an extravagant and temperamental set-piece, was never used except as a saucepan stand and as a Rowton House for the beetles, who occupied it in spite of the ceaseless war of aggression waged on them by Mrs. Beeding. There was not a speck of dirt for them to enjoy, but there was the delicious fuggy warmth and grains of flour (all the Beedings except Mrs. Beeding agreed that the beetles must live off the flour; what else was there for them to live off? But Mrs. Beeding said they lived off their own nastiness) and so far no campaign had interrupted the perpetual ball-and-supper which the beetles enjoyed on the kitchen floor at nights.

  To-night everybody hurried to get supper finished and rush upstairs before the first slow, brown, misshapen form was sighted afar in some dim corner near the bakehouse passage.

  It is a pity about the beetles; the kitchen’s so nice, thought Amy, drinking her hot sweet tea and gazing slowly round the room over the cup. She felt soothed and sleepy and peaceful, and looked at the others sitting round the table as though they were people in a pleasant dream.

  There was Dora, sitting with her elbows on the table and her usually sharp grey eyes gazing thoughtfully over the top of the cup she was nursing between her hands. She was thin and elegant, with the closest shingle and the shortest skirts in Highbury. To-night she wore a green jumper suit, the waist well defined by a red belt over the hips, and a red choker necklace to match, high up on her throat. Under the table Amy knew that her legs stretched for what seemed to the little girl an immensely long way, covered in thinnest pink silk and ending in shoes of fawn leather. Two ends of yellow hair, thinned to a point, swept out on her cheeks. Her nose was too long and her lips too thin, but she had enormous dash and style, and was sharp as a needle. Boys were rather afraid of her, but she had a “steady” whom she bullied and intended to marry, some day. She was ambitious and took her typisting seriously; she was learning Spanish because much of her firm’s business was with Spain and Dora thought you never knew when a spot of Spanish might not come in handy.

  Amy liked her, in spite of wishing that Dora would not sometimes try to boss her about and teach her to knit (the only occupation Amy really hated with all her heart). Dora was impatiently kind; more than once she had bestowed a lightning shilling on Amy and Mona and shooed them off to the pictures, and she had, in spite of her needle sharpness and bossy ways, the same comfortingly solid feeling about her that her mother had. It was not the comfort that Amy’s own mother ha
d given people, like a pretty picture or a cheerful tune; it was only the comfort of common-sense and decency, but to a child living Amy’s life, any kind of comfort was worth having.

  Then there was Mona … but Amy’s sleepy gaze moved indifferently past Mona, whose face she did not enjoy looking at, and on to young Artie, pop-eyed with sleep, nodding his ginger head over the last of his doorstep. He was a pale little boy of five, spattered with gold freckles, who often had to be hauled out of a fight by his elder brother Maurice. Artie would fight about anything, even to defend the fair fame of Mona when some little boy or girl called her a bad name. He was all over scars of old battles and always rolling down his clothes to show them to shocked females and approving males. Amy thought Artie very brave, but found it difficult to be loving to him, as her mother had told her to be to little children, for love seemed to kind-of roll off him. So she compromised by being extra polite to him. He, unused to such formality and furiously embarrassed by it, never saw her without scowling and silently drawing back his fist as though preparing to punch her in the stomach, but his honour was apparently satisfied by the gesture, for it never developed beyond a gesture, and they got on amiably enough.

  While they were finishing off with plum jam thickly spread on slabs of bread, Mr. Beeding came in silently from the bakehouse, shutting the door of the passage behind him. His round face was pale as tallow and black hollows were scooped under his eyes, which were dull and moved slowly as though he were drugged.

  He was a Welshman, and once could sing true and sweet as the deep notes of an organ, but that had been as a young man, before his trade had begun to kill him. He now had two men working under him and was making a good living; but he could not enjoy the money he earned, because the only night when fresh bread was not demanded by the residents of the crowded Highbury district was Saturday, and if he went out with Mrs. Beeding and the younger ones to the pictures on Saturday evening he usually fell asleep in the peaceful dark, and disturbed people all round him with exhausted heavy snores. Usually he worked eleven hours a night, sometimes longer, in the stifling brick bakehouse with its inner lining of steel, stripped to the waist and wearing only a thin singlet, enduring the ravening thirst which he and his men must not quench with water because this might cause the dreaded “baker’s disease.” A man suffering from those sores on the skin, brought on by the action of water on chemicals used in the flour, is unemployable as a leper. And Mr. Beeding was very fond of a drink; when he was not flung out asleep, motionless as a corpse on the snowy double bed in his wife’s room, he was over in The Chickens having one with his neighbour Mr. Flower or with some others of the boys. He had a nasty little cough, which the drink helped to soothe, and it also helped him to put up with his hernia. Mr. Beeding endured the hernia, the cough, the thirst and the stifling hours spent in the bakehouse in order that the housewives of Highbury might have nice fresh bread in the morning. His wife never said a word about his work or his cough or what he spent at The Chickens, and none of the children mentioned it either. That was their life, and their father’s; and all bakers had the same sort of life, anyway.

  Mr. Beeding smiled faintly but kindly at Amy and sat down at the head of the table.

  “Tea, Dad?” asked Dora.

  He nodded, and she gave him a cup which he drank thirstily.

  “Yer won’t forget the jug o’ tea fer the men, will yer, Dora?”

  “No, Dad. It’s done,” jerking her head at a big blue enamel can in a corner.

  He nodded. “That’s a good girl. Thank yer. Yer mother was just going ter see ter it when she came over bad.”

  They ate in silence for a little while, only interrupted by a shriek from Mona who fancied she sighted a beetle under the range. There was the usual slight depression caused by the presence of Mr. Beeding, looking like a corpse with his yellow-white face and drugged silence, and no one found much to say. Amy began to feel that she would be happier upstairs with The Wolf of Leningrad.

  At last Mr. Beeding got up, and stood for a moment swaying and muttering, “For what we have received may God make us truly thankful for Jesus Christ’s sake Amen,” over the untidy remains of supper. Then he picked up the jug of cold tea (the only liquid the men were allowed to touch while at work) and went back to the bakehouse.

  When they were all filing upstairs to the Lounge, having stacked the washing-up, Amy slipped past Dora as the latter slowly mounted with Artie in her arms, muttering, “Good night, Dora. Thanks ever so for having me to supper,” and ran up the dark stairs to her own kingdom.

  “Aime!” came a faint anguished howl from below. “Aren’t you coming to play Fox and Geese? Aime!”

  “Oh, let the kid alone, can’t you? You know what she is,” came Dora’s voice sharply; then she heard the Lounge door shut.

  All night there were unusual sounds in the house, such as might be caused by people making themselves tea because they had convinced themselves they were unable to sleep for gnawing anxiety and also wanted something to tell their schoolfellows about the next day; once Amy awoke when the front door slammed heavily in the small hours.

  And the next morning, while she was cooking the bacon for breakfast and Tim was shaving and swearing over the scullery sink, Mona rushed up to announce hysterically that Mrs. Beeding had produced a girl weighing seven pounds eight ounces, a perfect little angel with red hair. Born at half-past three that morning.

  “Dolores,” said Mona confidently. “That’s what I’ve got a feeling Mum’ll call that baby. After Dolores Costello. You see.”

  The child, however, was christened Marie Noreen and never called anything by all the Beedings but “Baby”.

  CHAPTER V

  ONE WEEK-END IN April there was a spell (the word is exactly right for the enormous drowsy bubble of sweet air that enclosed all England) of warm weather. Amy was glad to shut up her desk on Friday afternoon, and walk slowly home through the streets where the green leaves were unfurling on garden hedges and trees almost as she watched. There were enormous baskets at the street corners, even in that poor neighbourhood, in which daffodils, narcissus, tulips, wallflowers, freesias and hyacinths were glowing like coloured stars. The air was so warm that people loitered as though it were already summer, under the sunny blue sky where white clouds tinted with gold slowly, slowly glided. There was a feeling everywhere as though something lovely were about to happen.

  The ancient brown bricks of the houses in Highbury Fields were turned to rich dark gold, and delicate tree-shadows fell across the paths at the feet of old men and women, who had crept out to enjoy the good sunshine, lifting their worn faces with closed eyes to the light. There was a great blowing of bubbles and eating of crumbly biscuits among that year’s crop of babies, moored in perambulators under the trees with their tender scalps sternly exposed to the newly-fashionable rays. Amy looked among them for the Beeding Baby, but she was, as usual, moored to her own select length of railing. Yorkshire was afraid of her Catching Something Up the Fields.

  As she turned the corner she saw the shabby perambulator that had served Artie and Mona before him tied to the railings by the side door, with Baby’s red curls shining out of a mass of shawls, and Artie himself in sullen attendance, lounging on a piece of carpet spread on the steps.

  “Hullo, Artie,” said Amy, putting down her attaché case and bending over to say “Giddy-giddy-giddy-giddy,” very quickly to Baby. This was the only thing she ever said to her, and she had learned that from Mona. Baby took no notice. She was sucking the end of the leather strap that fastened her in and her chin was all brown.

  “’Lo, Aime.” Artie drew back his fist and scowled as usual, but he spoke without rancour.

  “Ought she to suck that, do you think, Artie?” said Amy doubtfully, leaning on the pram and gently rocking it. Baby looked so absolutely drunk with satisfaction that even in Amy’s unmaternal heart a faint alarm sounded. Could so much sheer rapture be good for anyone?

  “She likes it, ’n it stops her yellin’,”
said Artie indifferently. His gaze was not on Baby at all, but fixed upon some boys of his own age playing down in the Fields. Amy’s eyes followed his.

  “I’ll mind her, Artie, if you want to go down the Fields and play with Johnny.”

  “Mum said I was to mind her.” Artie darted a glance of pure loathing at Baby.

  “She wouldn’t mind me minding her. You go on. I like sitting here, truly I do.”

  Much Artie cared whether she liked it or not. He shot off without another word or glance, and Amy sat down on the piece of carpet and continued to rock the pram gently to and fro, staring with wide-open eyes, almost golden in that light, at a tree across the road. Baby went on blissfully sucking.

  As Tim Lee came round the corner, his glance was caught by the shabby little picture, and he thought disgustedly, “Brats. …” Highbury was full of them, a noisy reminder of the sort of life that other human beings found so absorbing … there was an unattractive thin chip of a child on his own doorstep, in the gym tunic that was a uniform for the girls of these parts, skinny legs in wrinkled stockings, a scrap of faded bloomers showing, a grubby white beret on the side of her head. About as useful and beautiful as frog-spawn, these brats were, and with just about as much individuality, thought Tim.

  The child turned, and he recognized his own daughter.

  The shock was so great that he had nothing to say for a minute. He stopped in front of the pram, looking down at her in silence, and when at last he answered the “Hullo, Da—Father,” she gave him, peering up at him with eyes half-shut against the sunset, it was in a gentler tone than she had ever heard from him.

  “You shouldn’t sit out here, you know, Amy.”

  “All right, Father. But”—the expression on his face gave her courage to go on—“I was only minding Baby for Artie. Why mustn’t I?”

  “Well. …” He turned away and stared at the groups slowly strolling across the paths under the greening trees; a tall man who wore a shabby well-bred suit with the proper casual air, whose greying gilt hair caught the light under a hat at the right unostentatious angle. He had been going to answer, “Because I’m a gentleman and your grandparents on my side were gentle people too, and so were all our people, as far back as we can trace the family.” But what was the use? The words sounded pompous and absurd even in his own mind, here in the midst of a spring evening’s crowds in Highbury Fields.