My American
Page 8
He forgot Amy for a minute, as he stared into the past, remembering his own carefully-guarded childhood in the privileged air of the ancient University town, with all the riches of culture and tradition slowly opening before his growing mind, supported by the sense of order and responsibility with which his parents had been so particular to imbrue his background. He did not regret that he had thrown culture, tradition, responsibility and order away. He had done what he wanted to do: chosen Edie and the filthy fellows. I regret nothing, he told himself, staring unseeingly at the figures strolling in the golden haze. But he could not ignore the contrast between his daughter’s childhood and his own. What would Edie, who had never let Amy play in the streets, have said about the picture he had seen as he turned the corner just now? What kind of a woman would Amy grow up into, with this background and one of Nature’s filthy fellows for a father?
Amy kept quiet; she regretted asking her question and hoped that if she said nothing more he would go away.
But at last he said, not looking at her, “Come up and help me get some things into a bag, will you, there’s a good monkey. I’ve got to-morrow morning free, and I’m going off with Old Porty for the week-end.”
Amy glanced uncertainly at her charge, but fortunately at that minute Mona came flying up on her way home from school and fell rapturously upon Baby, muttering, “giddy-giddy-giddy-giddy,” so quickly and quietly that only Baby, who took absolutely no notice, could hear what she was saying. Baby was smiling, unheeded, up at Tim.
Suddenly Mona bounced away from the pram as though stung.
“Heart alive, Aime Lee, don’t let her suck that! It’s enough to kill the poor little mite!”
“Artie said it stops her crying.”
“Artie’s barmy. Here, lovey, givey Mona. Narky-narky strap. Bad for Baby.” She knew better than to angle for the strap but twitched it out of Baby’s hand and dropped it over the side of the pram. Baby, stunned, stared up at her sister in silence.
“’N her poor little chin all filthy dirty! You supposed to be minding her, Aime Lee?”
“I just said I would while Artie went down the Fields.” In fact she had offered to mind Baby because from the doorstep she could obtain a new and interesting view of a cut-out named Mabel Purdey who was hopelessly tangled in the lower branches of a tree over the road.
“You’re a nice one to mind a kiddy, you are, I don’t think—letting her poison herself!”
“Come along, Amy, will you.” Tim went impatiently into the house. At the same instant Baby burst into a roar of utter despair.
“Is she all right?” Amy lingered an instant, looking at Baby’s large crimson face.
“’Course she is, you sloppy ha’porth, on’y she doesn’t like it ’cos your Dad’s gone indoors. She likes him. We was only saying so tea-time yesterday, all of us.”
“Well I don’t know why she does, Mona. Because he never takes any notice of her. I don’t believe he even knows what her name is.”
“Oh, babies are funny that way. They just like people or they don’t. Now she hates Artie.”
“I know. He hates her, too.”
“He’s potty. She’s a sweet little honey-bunch, aren’t you—giddy-giddy-giddy-giddy.”
Seeing that Mona would now be responsible, Amy went upstairs to help her father.
He threw the clothes to her from his room, and she neatly caught and fitted them into his once-handsome, shabby old suitcase. There was an unfamiliar holiday feeling in the big bare room full of westering light.
“Where are you going, Dad?”
“The sea somewhere. Cornwall, probably. Ought to be rather good.”
“The paper said this morning the fine weather was going to last.”
“Oh, it did, did it? And what paper was that?”
“The Daily Express.”
“That rag!”
Tim threw across a ball of clean socks. “There-is-only-one-newspaper-and-that-is-The-Times … only I won’t manage a shilling a week for my news. What were you doing, reading that tripe-sheet?”
“I always do.”
“Why, in God’s name?”
“It’s interesting. Mrs. Beeding has it, and she lets me have it after she’s done with it.”
“(Interesting, not interesting, Amy.) What interests you in it?”
“(Int’resting.) Oh … about Russia. I like reading about the Kulaks.” (Though Amy knew Kulaks were a kind of farmer, she could not help thinking of them as an ogre with long teeth, which added a peculiar interest to their doings.)
“So they keep you well up on modern Europe at the Anna Bonner, do they? There, that’s the lot.”
“Will you have tea before you go? There’s a kipper.”
“No, thanks. Porty’ll be here any minute. …”
A horn sounded persistently below.
“… there he is, the old devil. Well——” He turned at the door for a minute, suitcase in hand, and surveyed her as she stood by the table, her arms folded in an elderly way over her chest, her big light eyes looking steadily at him. “Thanks for helping me. You’re a good monkey. Here——” He felt in his pocket and a big silver coin flew glittering towards her. “Buy yourself The Times. You and I haven’t much in common but I can’t have my only daughter reading The Daily Express.”
She caught the coin. It was a half-crown.
“Oh, Da—Father! Thanks ever so!”
“That’s all right. Good-bye. I’ll be back on Monday evening but you can get me at the office on Monday morning if you want me.”
“I don’t expect there’ll be anything. Good-bye, and thanks awfully for this.”
She held up the half-crown in the sunlight, her little face smiling with pleasure, and that was the picture of her he carried away as he ran down the stairs.
Old Porty, fearfully gay in a new light overcoat, was just climbing into the car as Tim came out.
“There you are, cock,” bellowed Porty. “I nearly forgot to post me Littlewood’s.” He nodded towards the pillar-box on the corner. “That would have been a nice start, that would—get half-way to God-knows-wheres-it and find I hadn’t posted me Littlewood’s.”
“I can’t imagine why you bother with that stuff.” Tim was packing himself into the car. “Where’s the kick in it, anyway? Dog-racing is the game for me. No time to get bored; over in a flash.”
“There isn’t any kick; it’s skill, not luck. That’s what I like, my boy; gives you a chance to use your brains.”
“Brains my—never-mind. Do you want me to take the map now or when we get out of London a bit?”
“Later on’ll do; I’ll tell you. Are you right? Off we go, then, and Christ help the Cornish girls.”
The car moved away and was soon lost in the traffic.
Left alone, Amy went over to the window and leaned her elbows on the sill, dreamily looking at the tree-tops covered with new little yellow leaves, and breathing in the sweet air. It was nice to be alone, and to think that she would have a whole two days to do as she liked in without her father at home. She thought about him a little as she leaned there, the sunlight warm on her face and the half-crown safely held in her hand. He had been worse lately, there was no doubt about that. In the last three weeks she had lain awake in the dark night after night, trembling with fear, while he stumbled about getting himself off to bed after an evening with Old Porty and the boys. He had never hit her nor even sworn at her when he was like that, but just the sight of him frightened her; the stupid look in his eyes and his thick careful speech; while the noises he made blundering about alarmed her even more because she could not see just how bad he was. And last week he had gambled away the rent, and Amy had had to explain to Mrs. Beeding and ask her if she would be so kind as to wait until this week for the money. Mrs. Beeding had said yes, but she made it plain that she was disgusted with Amy’s father, and although Amy shared her feelings, this made her feel uncomfortable and ashamed. It had only happened once before, the week of Amy’s birthday. Amy
had hoped very much that it would never happen again; but it had. It was awful to be in debt: her mother had always told her that.
He had also begun to grumble when he handed over the weekly thirty shillings he gave her for their food, saying that it was a great deal of money; and when he was in to meals he ate less and less. Half-way through the meal he would push his plate away half-full, and light a cigarette and sit in silence, his fingers spread over his forehead, with bent head. He was getting thin; Mrs. Beeding had commented on it to Amy. His daughter, patiently searching her mind for a possible explanation of his behaviour during the past three weeks, suddenly remembered that her mother used to laugh and say, “Oh, Tim’s always worse in the spring.”
Satisfied, she nodded to herself and put it down to the spring. When the weather was more settled, perhaps her father would be—as settled as he ever was.
She continued to lean on the window-sill and plan her week-end.
This evening after supper (a fried egg and two bananas and Ka-Ola) she would wash her weekly pair of bloomers, vest, stockings, and two white blouses. Put them in a bowl all night, ready to hang them out in the garden to-morrow. Then wash her hair. Sit by the stove and dry it and read Tom Sawyer. Go to bed. To-morrow she would spend the morning hunting for American books on the secondhand bookstalls in the Charing Cross Road, eat her lunch in the little Gardens tucked away at the side of Whitefield’s Tabernacle in Tottenham Court Road and in the afternoon go to the British Museum and Collect Material for “Pharoah’s Curse: A Tale of Ancient Egypt.”
On Sunday she would start the story.
It would be a very nice week-end—if only Mona didn’t come poking.
Fortunately Mona had been asked to spend the two days with some cousins at Edmonton, so she didn’t come poking and Amy was able to do exactly what she had planned to do … a privilege which many prosperous grown-up people during that fine week-end might have envied her. The clothes and hair washing proceeded calmly and with method. If the clothes were not as snowy as they might have been, if some soap lingered in the hair after washing, that was because the washer had not much strength in her wrists and also because she was planning the bit where Amenophis drugs Rameses with a wheat-cake in the first chapter. Amy did, as best she could, what her mother had told her and taught her to do. She had no one to come behind her and snatch the blouse from the water with a vigorous: “That isn’t half clean yet, childie! Look—all round the collar” ; no one to give a final rinse of lemon juice to her hair. Her standard of grooming, like her standard in ethics, had unconsciously declined since her mother’s death, just as had Tim’s appetite and his conviction that life mattered.
The British Museum is at its most enjoyable on a blazing hot day, when the visitor can step out of the sunny courtyard into the coolness under the portico, where water trickles out of the silver lions’ mouths and even the pigeons running about the mighty bases of the columns are a cool purple grey. Inside, past the pleasant noise of the doors as they continually swing open and shut, there are refreshing spaces of clean stone floor, the great height of sombre walls ending in the dimness of the roof where quiet echoes float about, and, above all, the flat oddly welcoming countenances of two animals seated on either side of the great stone staircase. They are intended for lions, but on the base of their pedestals stand out clearly the words “Amaravati Tope,” so that any frequent visitor to the British Museum cannot possibly think of the two by any other name.
Amy loved the Amaravati Tope. She always went up to them first of all on her visits to the Museum, and stood in front first of one and then the other, staring up at them and thinking—not where they came from or how old they must be or who made them—but simply how nice they were; and it would be more than interesting to know what the carvers of the Amaravati Tope would have thought about this reaction of Amy’s to their work.
All that sunny afternoon she moved slowly round the Egyptian Rooms, staring at necklaces, combs, and chairs so that she could furnish, on paper, a house in the Thebes of three thousand years ago. She had a penny notebook in which she scribbled descriptions, hiding it away whenever she drew near an attendant or when some benevolent grown-up, attracted by her smallness, her pigtail and the notebook, peered kindly over her shoulder to see what she was doing.
“It’s for school. They like us to take an interest,” she said politely more than once to a kindly questioner, and then, as they turned away smiling at the pretty little incident, she made a hideous lightning face at their back.
And at the end of the afternoon she came away from this stone building, filled with beautiful worn stone faces and shapes, feeling dreamy and calm. The presence of stone has a peculiarly soothing touch upon human senses, tranquillizing as the names of granite, marble, porphyry, and slate. It is the least obtrusive of backgrounds; no substance so well displays the fleeting beauty of flowers, nor does such justice to a haunting echo, nor looks so steadily into the face of Time. It is not only because it lasts well that men have always built their temples and tombs of stone.
Going home on the bus to the Holloway Arcade, Amy thought dreamily: I had a lovely time. I got a lot of Material, and I did enjoy my tea with the bun and butter with all those professory-looking men in the tea place and I saw the dear Amaravati Tope. It was all lovely. Oh—Mother! I’d forgotten! I forgot for a whole afternoon!
It was the calming presence of stone that had soothed her grief to sleep.
In the evening after supper she copied out the rough notes she had made at the museum into a fat book labelled “Material,” and went to bed early. Sometimes she woke up frightened on the nights that her father was away, and lay listening to the faint sounds the old house made in its sleep, trying not to think about the Lady Ligeia, trying not to look at the dark shape of the wardrobe against the pallor of the wall, calling frantically in her mind, “Mother! Mother! I’m frightened—I can’t help it,” and then feeling new terror lest something—a shade, a white shape like her mother, should appear.
But on both the nights of this week-end she slept peacefully, awakening slowly and happily in the little quiet room to see all the rich colours of her pictures glowing in the sunlight. Sunday passed pleasantly between spells of ironing and writing The Mummy’s Curse, which was Beginning to Run, as Amy always said to herself when she had a writing fit on. Her stories never stuck, but sometimes she enjoyed writing them more than she did at other times. When the pen flew and her hand ached, when there was nothing real in the world except the white paper before her and the flying tip of the nib, and the picture in her mind that she was describing turned so quickly into words that she could no longer tell at what instant the figures in it became marks on the paper—then the story was Beginning to Run, and unfortunate is the writer who has never tasted such a moment.
The Beedings were used to her ways and left her in peace except for an occasional friendly shriek up the stairs, explaining her taste for solitude to one another by saying that Aime was a great reader, for none of them knew that she was also a great writer.
She went back to school on Monday morning with some of the week-end’s dreamy calm lingering in her mind. She always liked getting back to school on Mondays. It was still sunny weather and the class-rooms were full of chestnut and palm branches in bud.
Second hour was History for Amy’s form on Monday mornings, and they were in Room 6 answering Miss Seager’s amiable questions about the Star Chamber when the door opened and the head of Miss Lathom, the headmistress, looked inquiringly round the room.
Miss Seager stopped with a piece of chalk in mid-air and in her turn gazed inquiringly at Miss Lathom, who, evidently having found the person she wanted among the fifteen pairs of clear eyes fixed upon her, went up to the form mistress and spoke quietly to her for a minute or two.
Miss Seager was nodding—“Of course. Yes, of course, Miss Lathom. Yes, certainly.”
Miss Lathom went out of the room.
Miss Seager put down the chalk on her desk.
Amy, not alarmed because her conscience was clear and she liked Miss Lathom, went out of the room, quietly shutting the door behind her. It was probably about Botany next term.
The headmistress’s room was close to Room 6. She tapped at the door, listened for Miss Lathom’s clear “Come in,” then opened the door and entered.
Miss Lathom was sitting at her desk, where a bowl of fresh primroses stood in the sunlight pouring through the window. She looked up as Amy came in, and took off her glasses.
“There you are, Amy. Come here, dear,” she said and then, as the little girl crossed the carpet and came to a halt opposite her desk, she did a surprising thing. She put out her thin arm in its grey tweed sleeve, and gently drew Amy within its circle until she was resting against her knee, looking down with surprised but unalarmed eyes into Miss Lathom’s lined, pleasant face.
“Now, dear,” the headmistress went on in the same subdued voice, meeting Amy’s gaze steadily with her own, “can you be a brave girl?”
Amy’s inside gave a sickening movement. But her large light eyes still rested steadily on Miss Lathom’s pitying face. She nodded. Her mouth had gone dry.
“Because you must, Amy.” Miss Lathom paused for an instant. “It’s about your father, my dear little girl——” The arm tightened. “He has been in a car accident. The police have just telephoned. I’m afraid it’s very bad news indeed, Amy.”