A Game of Hide and Seek (9 page)

‘I only wondered,' she was now saying. ‘I said to him I was only wondering if the juniors couldn't keep to their own separate tea-money. It's very humiliating, I said, when you come to the end of the week and there's no tea left they've been so extravagant. Perhaps you'd ask them, he said. I'll certainly make enquiries, I said.'

They all sat round, breathing into their tea, elbows on the table, before them a litter of buns in bags, butter in greasy papers, cigarette-stubs in saucers, Miss Lazenby's setting-lotion and comb.

Harriet found her position among these ‘seniors' strange, hardly tenable. The two juniors were, it was true, only fourteen or fifteen, fresh from school, useful only for doing work. Their wages were purely nominal, the manager said, because they were learning the business; but if they had not picked it up within a week at most Miss Brimpton would have found something to say. ‘I was only just wondering about Miss So-and-So,' would be what she would find to say to the manager. ‘Whether she's not perhaps the wrong girl in the wrong job.'

The manager feared Miss Brimpton. She had been in the shop before him. How long before altered according to her mood and to the conversation. She was often cagey about her age, though sometimes alluding to herself in a buoyant unbelieving way as ‘fat and forty'. ‘When you're fat and forty like me,' she would say to Harriet, whom she took under her wing. Another phrase was ‘That would be before your time, dear.' At first assessment, her blue eyes, her peachy, hairy face, her spreading figure, suggested warmth and motherliness. But her mouth was tight, her look sometimes too steady. Her accent was rather fancy and she was a snob of the most usual kind. But she was a figure of mystery, in that no one could believe a word she said. The others did wonder about her. They were all the time wondering about one another.

Harriet's initiative in going to work in a shop had surprised everyone, especially herself. She wondered how she had wrenched herself out of that almost automatic going back and forth between Caroline's and her home, the ennui and impatience she suffered with the children, her mind more than half taken up with her own miseries, her waiting for some mention of Vesey and for the letter which never came. He had dropped so completely out of her life. The days shortened, but only technically. The time it took to live them seemed endless. She began to look, secretly, for another job. What she had found was the best she could hope for. Lilian had not demurred. She felt a little tingling of pride that her daughter had done something for herself. The emotions she had once reserved for when Harriet should be called to the bar or returned to Parliament she now felt to a lesser degree when the girl went off to work in a gown shop for thirty shillings a week. She only hoped that the other girls were of a nice type. When she was young, she had refused to be sheltered, but the women in the Militant Suffrage Movement had been of a very nice type, especially those who, like herself, had gone to prison. The more elegant and ladylike they were, indeed, the more ferociously militant they had seemed. Young Mary Blomfield, for instance, who had called out as she was presented at Court: ‘Your Majesty, please end the shame of women in British Prisons!' The bravery of this, which always made Lilian flush, would have seemed unbecoming to Miss Brimpton, who thought that Royalty should not be troubled or disturbed. She wore pastel shades like Queen Mary and the Duchess of York, and had once peered through the railings of 145 Piccadilly to see the little Princesses in the garden. ‘They have only to be seen to be loved,' she had said. ‘Little cream coats.'

‘How are they different from any other bloody kids?' Miss Lazenby inquired. She swore a great deal in an offhand way. She was always plucking her eyebrows when they had these conversations. She did so whenever she could spare a moment, peering into a smeared mirror, her mouth open. She had scarcely any eyebrows left, only an inflamed expanse, but that was fashionable at the time. Miss Lazenby was rather free and easy with men, but the men were not always themselves in that happy position. She pinned them down, swore at them, drank a great deal at their expense and had good fun describing to her friends their dufferish attempts at lovemaking. ‘Tell us at elevenses,' Miss Brimpton would say cosily as they flicked with feather-dusters the display-cards, the corset dummies. They were always flicking when the manager appeared. (The juniors were usually out buying cheese rolls or matching cottons to cloth.) If his voice held any criticism of their attitude to customers (clients, Miss Brimpton called them), or their handling of goods, they retreated nicely, excluded him from their feminine world, threw tissue-paper over bust bodices – their eyelids so leaden, their look at one another so sinister – that he went back exasperated to his office, or round to a coffee-shop to talk to other men.

Only Miss Lovelace treated him with pity and consideration, and he feared her most of all. Warm, large-bosomed, full of dovelike murmurings, she bridged, and had bridged, for many married men the gulf between mother and wife; she encouraged them in self-pity and was an exciting mixture of paramour and nursery-governess. There was no sort of woman that she had not been at one time or another to somebody. She was extremely compliant and sympathetic, and, unlike Miss Lazenby, exacted nothing. Her success with married men had perhaps deprived her of what she most wanted – a home and children. The long sequence of yielding, of gathering to her, of, finally, renunciation, was only repetitious. She did renounce a great deal and from the best motives. Then the tea-room was a trough of despair on her account. Over their elevenses they turned and tried the well-worn phrases – ‘no other way', ‘painful for all concerned', ‘the sake of the children'.

They felt not only her immediate tragedy; but saw time passing for her. Noble, sad; she was left with only her self-respect, which did not seem to mean as much to her as she had been led to believe. She knitted cobweb shawls for her sister's babies, made the finest layettes – tucked, smocked, gathered; wrapped them in tissue-paper and kept them by her longer than she need. No one could quite see what had gone wrong, unless her warmth were to blame. Her sister had been bleaker, so much more cautious, less generous: was beautifully rewarded for her caution and did not care for her reward.

She and Miss Lazenby gave Harriet a great deal of conflicting advice, but Miss Brimpton's ruled through both. Miss Brimpton bade her turn her back on men; no relationship in which a woman might stand to a man could but debase her: she evoked a procession of downtrodden wives, bullied mothers, cast-off mistresses; the jilted, the enticed, the abandoned; harlots, doormats, birds in gilded cages. Were not men, she asked, all ungenerous or tyrannical or both, peevish, bestial? They were also vain-glorious and ugly. They had, she always ended, hairy legs. There she shuddered. She took up her cup and drank tea slowly, as if rinsing her mouth.

Harriet's virginity they marvelled over a great deal. It seemed a privilege to have it under the same roof. They were always kindly enquiring after it, as if it were a sick relative. It must not be bestowed lightly, they advised. It must not be bestowed at all, Miss Brimpton said. It was a possession, not a state; was positive, not negative.

Harriet listened with fascination. She had never before encountered such cordiality: life had never been so undemanding. Her very mistakes were applauded as disloyalty to the firm. ‘Serve them bloody right,' as Miss Lazenby said.

Their hours were long, so they spared themselves any hard work, filched what time they could; went up to elevenses at ten, were often missing while they cut out from paper-patterns, set their hair, washed stockings, drank tea. Nothing was done in their own time that could be done in the firm's. They were underpaid, so they took what they could; not money in actual coins, but telephone-calls, stamps, boxes of matches, soap. They borrowed clothes from stock; later when these were marked down as soiled, they bought them at the staff-price, a penny in the shilling discount.

Lilian watched her daughter growing day by day more colourful from all the beauty hints Miss Lazenby gave her. Her finger-nails, at first timidly pink, soon grew rosier, her eyelids bluer. Miss Lazenby herself favoured a greenish eyeshadow and a mother-o'-pearl nail-varnish. Her white hands looked like the hands of the dead. The juniors were sent running about all over the town for mascara and eyelash-curlers, pills for reducing, henna rinses. The seniors rarely shopped themselves. One day they all had ice from the fishmongers tied under their chins; the next day, clay was drying stiffly on their faces. They sat round the table and rolled their eyes at one another, but could not speak or smile. The juniors, going downstairs, laughed behind their hands.

‘Did you see where it says about hair on the face?' Miss Brimpton asked them. She was reading Miss Lovelace's
Daily Mirror
. ‘Waxed away,' she read. She put her hand to her fluffy jaw; Miss Lazenby took up her mirror and gave her face an unfriendly look. ‘Even the slightest down can cause embarrassment.'

‘I never felt any embarrassment from mine,' said Miss Lovelace. They all looked in their mirrors.

‘It means other people are embarrassed,' Miss Brimpton said. They were uneasily silent.

‘Would it hurt?' Miss Lazenby asked. ‘How much is it?'

‘Painlessly, magically,' Miss Brimpton read. ‘Price three-and-six.'

‘Send one of the kids round for some,' Miss Lazenby said. ‘We'll do it lunchtime tomorrow. Be a bit of fun if nothing else. Comb my hair out for me, Lovelace, there's an angel.'

But Miss Lovelace had pushed all the cups and newspapers to one end of the table and spread out a blanket for her ironing. She often did odds and ends of washing at the shop, never wore her underclothes more than one day because of the soap-flakes advertisement she had read concerning personal freshness; also liked what she called ‘touches of white' on her dark clothes; so was always rinsing through, damping down, ironing.

‘I'll go down and make an appearance,' Miss Brimpton said. She brushed crumbs off her bosom and sailed away. In the shop, the manager said: ‘I thought you were all lost.' He glanced at his watch.

‘Lost?' she said lightly. ‘Dearie me, no!' She smiled at herself in a mirror, drawing in her chin. ‘What a thing to think!' She laughed, as if he were a fanciful child.

‘Where is Miss Lazenby?'

‘Miss Lazenby? Oh, Miss Lazenby's – upstairs.' She told the truth in such a way that he blushed. ‘She'll be here directly,' Miss Brimpton soothed him.

‘And Miss Lovelace?' he went on doggedly. There was only one W.C. She could not be upstairs at the same time.

‘Miss Lovelace is a little bit off-colour today,' Miss Brimpton said daintily. She took a pencil from the frizz behind her ear and began to mark her stock-book.

The manager walked quickly away. She smiled after him. ‘Run up and tell Miss Lovelace and the others to come down at once,' she said to one of the juniors, who sped away, fists clenched by her ribs, elbows back, as if she were running a race.

Harriet did not offer up Vesey to the others; but she was inclined, from friendliness, to offer up Charles Jephcott. He was a solicitor in Market Swanford and sometimes gave her lifts in his car between there and the village.

He drove his car as he played the piano: with extreme mastery and decision. He scarcely spoke to Harriet, so what she offered to the other girls was mainly innuendo. They did not guess that what she would not tell was what she could not.

Her position in the shop was lifted by her relationship with Charles. He was of a professional class, like Miss Lovelace's Mr Williams from the Midland Bank. He had a fast car and a worldly air. They watched him from windows.

‘Were you pleased with the gladioli?' Miss Lazenby asked Harriet.

‘What gladioli?'

‘The ones Charles bought at Hill's yesterday. I supposed they were for you.'

‘Oh, those!' said Harriet.

The flaw in this affair, they thought, was that he was unmarried. They did not for one moment imagine that he would ever marry Harriet, and as there was no really good excuse (wife, children) to guard her pride when he should presently relinquish her, no reason for renunciation as always there was with Miss Lovelace, they felt that far from heading for tragedy, all that could happen to her was that she would be quite cheaply jilted. Their admiration, however, though expected to be temporary, was genuine for the time-being and was deepened by Julia Jephcott's one day appearing in the shop with a cold chicken for their lunch and a bunch of violets for Harriet. She did not stint her charm to shop-girls (her last smile had always been, tear-laden, for the gallery): but became wonderfully familiar; chided, rallied them, teased. One of her best performances she gave and returned home wonderfully restored and limbered up. Harriet had gradually become a favourite: Julia gave her six pairs of discoloured evening gloves and one of Sir Henry Irving's books signed by him. To amuse her, she poked fun at her son behind his back: she confided, romanticised, recreated her past. Her remarks, slanting, glinting, were often outrageously unjust and irresponsible. Some of her opinions lay tainted in remote corners of Harriet's mind all her life.

‘Where do you go?' Miss Brimpton asked Harriet. ‘I mean when Charles takes you home.'

‘Home,' said Harriet. Because she knew that they regarded this as a lie, it somehow was one.

‘Yes, we know, dear; but beforehand.'

‘I really do go home.' And she laughed with deceiving frankness.

‘In the end, no doubt. But if you'd rather not say. I was only wondering. Lazenby, you have to heat that wax, dear, before we spread it on. I hope you're careful, Harriet. With Charles, I mean. He doesn't start any silly nonsense, I hope. I wasn't aware, Lazenby, that I said anything so startling. What you, personally, allow is a very different matter. At your age. All I wondered was his mother seemed the actressy type . . .'