“He did it on purpose!” she muttered furiously, tears rushing to her eyes. “It was a horrid, beastly joke. Just the kind of thing a boy would think funny!”
She dashed the coin on the dirty floor.
“Here … here … what’s all this?” demanded the conductor, who had come up unseen behind her. “Throw-in’ money about. What’s the matter with it?”
“Someone gave it me, and I thought it was a shilling,” she muttered, stooping to pick it up.
“Serves you right for not lookin’ at it when they gave it you. Always count your change, always look at a bit of money before you put it in your bag, then you can’t go far wrong. Here, let’s see.”
She held it out, not very near. She did not want him to handle it. Already she felt sure that the American boy had only made a mistake, not been unkind.
But he took it from her and turned it round in his tired-looking, dirty hands.
“Kind of an American coin, that would be,” he said at last. “Who gave it you?”
“A friend,” she said, looking up at him with a polite, steady expression. It was the look she always put on when she was lying. “A lady,” she added, not too hastily.
“Sure it wasn’t a gentleman?” snapped the conductor, suddenly cross. “Now you get off my tram, and quick. Tryin’ to get a ride for nothing, I know your sort. Go on, be off with you, or I’ll fetch the inspector.”
She got up, without hurry, and followed him down the stairs. She would wait for the next tram and take a penny ride to Holloway Arcade and walk the rest of the way.
In a few minutes she was rocking down the hill through the rain that dashed furiously in crystal streaks against the glass. This conductor was all right, he took her penny without a word. She had waited until the first tram had gone so that the cross conductor should not tell any other conductor about it.
She loved riding on top of trams, but now she was so very hungry that the movement made her feel sick. Never mind (she murmured), I’ll soon be home. If only Dad isn’t in.
The coin was again tucked in her glove. Now I shall keep it, she decided, because it won’t be a temptation to spend it. And after all, it was a present. He said so.
She got off the tram at the Holloway Arcade and set out on the walk along Holloway Road to Highbury Fields, where she lived. It was not far, and she walked along so quickly and lightly that she almost ran, the cold rain beating in her face. No one bumped into her—she saw to that—but it was tiring dodging people, and once a car nearly ran her down when she crossed a road. Everyone shouted at her, looking frightened and furious. Her head felt queerer and queerer, but she took no notice of that, and as usual, enjoyed the walk. She took in the golden windows of the shops, the cold winter smell of the celery piled outside a greengrocer’s, the lovely face of Dolores Costello gazing out dreamily from a cinema hoarding. Amy loved walking in London; yet hardly knew that she loved it. She never said she did, or walked when she might ride, but when once she drifted into one of her long walks through the streets she was utterly happy. Unnoticed as a leaf, hands in pockets, she moved lightly along, in a dream, but a dream in which she noticed a thousand funny or frightening or pretty things and people.
At the pub called The Hen and Chickens she crossed over, turned down Corsica Street and left the trams and buses and bright shops behind, went along Calabria-road, then through Baalbec Road into Highbury Place. Here the Fields faced her, their tall trees behind a railing shining silver with the wet.
The Fields are an open space shaped like a half-heart, and surrounded by Highbury Crescent and Highbury Place, two rows of tall, early nineteenth century houses of dark brown brick with elegant details in their fanlights, railings and balconies. There is plenty of life in the Fields, for the National School boys play football there and babies are brought from the poorer streets to sun-bathe and enjoy the bit of green, but the houses have the spell of the past on them.
Amy went down Highbury Walk, where there are two or three quiet little shops, and stopped at one with “D. Beeding, Baker and Confectioner” over it. This was where she lived.
She peered in through the window of the shop before going on to the door at the side, which was ajar. Mrs. Beeding was there, leaning forward over the counter with her hands spread out on the bleached wood and talking to a pretty, dark woman who was just going out carrying a wrapped loaf. Amy slipped in as the woman came out.
“Hullo, Amy … good night, then, Mrs. Flower,” said Mrs. Beeding, sitting down again on a broad chair close to a brightly burning oil stove and starting to knit. “’Ave yer had a nice birthday, luv?”
“Very nice, thank you, Mrs. Beeding. Is Dad in?” She looked intently at Mrs. Beeding.
“He’s oopstairs. It’s all right, luv.” Mrs. Beeding glanced up, nodding calmly. “I’ve got the rent. He gave it to me the minute he come in, and he’s all right, too. You go on oop. Here’s a few cakes for you. Custard tarts, they are, for your birthday.” She nodded towards a paper bag on the counter. “Did yer see the pictures, luv?”
“Yes, thank you, Mrs. Beeding.” Amy picked up the bag, opened it and sniffed delicious hot vanilla from the warm tarts. “Thank you very much for these.”
“And were they pretty?”
“Yes, very pretty.”
“That’s right. Now you run on upstairs, Amy. Mona’ll bring up the letters if there’s any for you. Good night, luv.”
“Good night, Mrs. Beeding, and thank you very much for the tarts.”
The shining cleanliness of the shop, the bright flame of the oil stove, the lightness of the pastries, the calmness of Mrs. Beeding’s pink face and the neatness of her bobbed hair and fat body were all explained the instant that she spoke by her voice. It was a patronizing yet comfortingly competent voice, subduing rebellion almost before it had started, dismissing ghosts, looking Life straight in the eye and asking it what it thought it was up to now, taking obedience, cleanness and self-respect for granted like the daylight. It was the voice of Yorkshire.
Mrs. Beeding was within two months of having her fifth child. She was forty-seven years old, thickly built even when she was not going to have a baby, with straight yellow hair, a firm little mouth and small bright grey eyes. She was not pretty to look at, but she was surprisingly satisfying. She wore a dark blue dress and a large concealing print overall, with a white collar that set off her pink cheeks. Her complexion was her only weakness. She put Stuff on it at night. None of her children knew what the Stuff was. Gran up in Yorkshire had given the recipe to Mum years ago, and Mum made some more Stuff whenever she wanted it. Mona, the younger girl, who had spots, was as sarcastic about Mum and her Stuff as she dared be.
Mrs. Beeding, strong as a horse, was pleased about the new baby, for the youngest boy was now five and the Beedings were beginning to feel the lack of a baby in the house. Dora, who was nineteen and worked as junior typist in a firm of sherry importers in the City, had said at first that it really was the limit, Mum having another at her age; but now even Dora was more pleased than shocked about the baby. The Beedings enjoyed babies.
Amy went slowly up the dark stairs. Her head felt so swimmy that she had to hang on to the banisters to keep herself from falling down while she carefully, without hurry, packed her mouth with custard tart. As soon as she had swallowed one she crammed her mouth again, walking slowly upstairs all the time, past long windows showing the dark brown sky of London’s night, and closed doors whose white handles glimmered in the dimness. The house smelled clean, but stuffy and old. On the top landing as she finished the last tart, she opened the door of the three rooms that were her home.
Her father was dozing over The Star in an armchair by the gas stove, and started awake at the sound of the door opening.
“Hullo, where’ve you been?” he asked, flinging his arms above his head, his long legs out, and the paper all over the floor in a tremendous, savage, prolonged yawn. “I came back specially to take you to the pictures. Want to come?”
??
?Oh, yes, please, Dad!”
“Don’t call me Dad, there’s a dear, good girl.”
“Father, I mean. Sorry. Yes, I would, please, only I’d like my supper first.”
“All right. It’s only … what is it?” glancing down at his bare wrist and then frowning. “Did you notice the shop clock as you came up?”
“It’s half-past five.”
“Plenty of time. We’ll have supper and get to the Majestic (God help us) about seven. What’s on there, d’you know?”
“It’s Beau Geste,” she answered at once, pausing at the door of her room and looking round at him, her face pink and her eyes bright with excitement.
“Not too bad. Get the supper, will you, there’s a good monkey, I’m hungry.” He picked up his paper again.
Amy hurried to change her frock. It was nearly a month since she had been to the pictures. This was certainly being a good birthday! At breakfast he had given her a shilling (of course it had come out of his watch-pawning money, and that was worrying; it meant he had been betting on that dog-racing again, but he would get it out again next Friday when he was paid), and now Beau Geste!
When she came back she wore a teacloth tied firmly round the waist of her dark blue gym tunic and the sleeves of her white blouse were rolled up. She had changed into rubber shoes and brushed her hair, parted in the middle of a high round creamy forehead, and put on a worn but still brilliant silk necktie striped with dark red, pale blue, and rich dark green. Presently her father stopped skimming the paper and sat watching her as she went between the living-room and the tiny kitchen opening off it; a plain, queer little gnome of a girl.
She’s too small for her age, he thought. Wants feeding up. Oh God, I can’t help it. She’ll have to take her chance. Millions of children grow up and get themselves through life. She’s Edie’s responsibility, not mine. I never wanted a child.
One of the horrible waves of misery that burst over him when he thought of his dead wife came on him now, and he got up, because it was not possible to bear it if he sat still, and went into his room and drew the curtains and pulled the quilt over the rumpled bed. He had been asleep all the afternoon.
He was a tall, fair, slim man of thirty-eight, but looking much younger, whose face was so weak and desolate (as though he had not one strong idea or happy thought behind it) that he was hardly attractive any more. But it was plain that ten years ago he had been beautiful, when his curly mouth had laughed instead of looking sulky, before his blue eyes became bloodshot. His profile was still fine and his gilt hair, receding rapidly now from a high forehead, kept its curl.
He had been born a gentleman; and to keep him a gentleman and to fit him to get himself through life, some two thousand pounds had been spent. He now earned six pounds a week as a seller of advertising space on that old-fashioned but modestly prosperous paper for boys, The Prize, and nothing was left to show for the two thousand pounds but this: he was a gentleman still. This fact was a comfort to no one but himself, and not much to him. It helped him to get a job with The Prize, where the quality was valued, but it did not help him to sell advertising space and it made him dislike being called Dad in Amy’s thin, faintly cockney voice.
He always thought about Amy’s voice immediately after a wave of wretchedness had drenched him, and he was thinking about it as he came back into the sitting-room. It’s the people she’s always with, he thought, sitting down again. Nasal little rats at that appalling school, Mona Beeding always in and out of the place … she never hears a decent accent except mine from one year to the next. Oh, well … I can’t help it. Or I suppose I could but I’m — if I’ve got the energy.
Amy had fried the sausages with some bread and put the kettle on and opened a tin of loganberries. Now she would have a nicer supper than she had planned, because, if he had not been in, she would have had to save the sausages for his breakfast. If only nothing awful happened, this would be almost the nicest day since Mother. …
She breathed in, quickly, exactly as though she had bitten on an aching tooth, but continued to pour the boiling water steadily into the teapot. Just for a minute she had forgotten. She went across to the cupboard and got out the milk jug and rinsed it, very carefully and slowly to stop herself from thinking that on her last birthday her mother had been alive.
“You still hang on to that old thing of mine,” said her father, noticing her necktie with some amusement. The colours were those of the rowing club at his old college. “It’s in ribbons.”
“It’s pretty,” she said. “Prettier than ours. The school one, I mean.”
“Christ, so I should hope.”
“The Old Girls is quite pretty. It’s dark brown and light brown and pale yellow.”
“Charming,” he said, yawning and staring at the window with a dreary, bored expression.
“It’s ready,” said Amy, in a few minutes.
They sat down and began to eat.
The room was long and low, with two big windows and a cheap creamy wallpaper. The floor was stained and inadequately covered by three long Persian rugs, their colours almost worn away. The table they sat at was a good piece of late Victorian mahogany, stained with hot plate marks, but the sofa and two swollen armchairs were Early Hire Purchase; and the smaller chairs were imitation ladderbacks, varnished shiny brown like the ugly circular bookshelf beside the gas stove. There was not enough furniture in the room, and the bright orange curtains over the windows increased the desolate, temporary look.
But the pictures had been chosen by someone who had liked them. There was a reproduction of a crowded, brilliant battle scene with much red and blue in it by some Italian master, a branch laden with flowers, birds and snow against a grey sky by a Japanese, and a large coloured print of ladies and gentlemen in Victorian dress skating against a yellow sunset with a bonfire burning.
The house was very quiet. The gas stove hissed and faint cries came up sometimes from the distant streets.
“Well, what was Kenwood House like?” he asked at last, making conversation with an effort.
“Very pretty,” said Amy, her cheeks exactly the colour of a pink cyclamen petal from the hot tea and sausage and good bread and butter. “It’s very big, you know, and there are a lot of famous pictures there.”
“You’re an extraordinary child. What made you want to go off there by youself?”
“They told us about it at school,” she explained, “And Miss Eckeridge, the drawing mistress, said we ought to go and see it.”
“They ought to have got up one of their highly cultural expeditions. More fun for you than going by yourself.”
“P’raps they will next term,” she said, giving him her polite, steady look instead of answering that they had, but that she had purposely not gone with it. He would have paid for her to go if she had asked him, but she hated going to places with a lot of people. She liked the sound of Kenwood House; but had decided to go there alone on her birthday, which was most fortunately a Saturday, and that was exactly what she had done. She hoped he would say no more about it, and he did not.
While they were eating the loganberries Amy began to think about Beau Geste and how lovely it would be. (She always enjoyed only one nice thing at a time, so as to get the best out of it in case something dreadful happened and spoiled it.) Supper was nearly over without a row or him saying anything about her cockney accent, and there would not be much to enjoy on the walk to the cinema, so now she could allow herself to think about Beau Geste.
Nothing could stop them going to it, now, surely; it was nearly seven o’clock and in ten minutes, after she had cleared away, they would go. Nothing … (she went quickly in her mind through all the things that might stop them going) … nothing … Oh, suppose that beastly, horrible old Mr. Porteous is home this week?
It would have surprised Mr. Porteous (known to the Boys as Porty) even more than it would have enraged him to hear himself called horrible, beastly and old, for he was only sixty and saw himself as a rich-natured, generou
s, warm-hearted man in the prime, bringing a leaven of colour and guts into the not-so-good lives of the Highbury boys and the Canonbury boys, and sometimes the Islington and Angel boys. Wherever the boys were, there was Mr. Porteous; old Porty, always up to something, Porty was; make you — laughing, Porty could. Heard Porty’s latest, boys?
The girls of Highbury, Canonbury, Islington and the Angel did not like old Porty at all, but seldom dared to tell their husbands as much. Porty only knew one way of spending money. Rent, doctor, shoes, school fees, food, light, heat … Porty never thought about money in connection with them. He was employed by a small firm which was trying to put a new brand of women’s artificial silk underclothes on the market, having been given the job because, said his employers, he had just the convincing, jolly yet clean sales-talk which would get all the old girls who ran little haberdashery shops in the outer suburbs.
Old Porty, who was unmarried, was sometimes away for a week travelling, and sometimes at home doing the new suburbs like Mill Hill and Edgware; and the chief horror the Highbury girls had to cope with was never knowing which week he would be at home and able to pop in. Amy, like all the other girls whose boys were acquainted with old Porty, did not know whether he was at home this week; and suddenly dreaded that he would pop in and carry off her father before they could get away to the pictures. Her father sometimes called old Porty a filthy fellow, but he always seemed amused to see him.
She began to clear away very quickly, listening tensely for the bell or footsteps on the stairs, while her father lit a cigarette and changed his shoes.
Below in the rainy darkness Old Porty’s car advanced cheerfully towards Highbury Walk.
Mrs. Beeding glanced up from her knitting as it drew up outside the shop, got up without haste (there was plenty of time; he always fiddled with the car), and walked clumsily into the dark passage and quietly shut the door. Then she stood there, listening. Presently the Lee’s bell rang. Mrs. Beeding quickly opened the door and confronted Old Porty. He wore a very light tweed overcoat, a red scarf with horseshoes on it, and his hat on the back of his head.