Joy and Josephine (26 page)

It was bad luck on him that the one time he made a true prophecy, he never knew it.

Listening to their arguments, Mrs Abinger admired half-fear-fully how Jo stood up to her father. She herself could never have crossed him like this without arousing his monumental wrath. But Jo could often reduce him. Everything about him seemed smaller and slower these days. He was becoming a woollier, less strenuous man altogether. He spent more time in his chair and might have been nailed to his bed when it was time to get up in the morning. He was not so finicky about his clothes, never won the whist drives or bridge prizes, campaigned less often at the Debating Club and ambled more frequently up to the Sun in Splendour.

In the spring, he went away for a two days’ Fellowship Conference at Clacton. He talked about it for weeks beforehand and
did practically nothing in the shop but manoeuvre it into conversation with customers.

On the morning of his departure, although his train did not leave until the afternoon, he got up later than ever and did not put on an apron, but strutted about the shop, touching things with his fingertips, as if he were already removed from sordid commerce. He was too pleased with himself to notice that Jo was going into a grin when she looked at him, or that Herbert Merriman, who was usually forlorn, was whistling gently between his teeth as he collected groceries, and still whistling when he came back for the next lot.

At the last minute, sensing perhaps that his departure was upsetting nobody, Mr Abinger grew a little stricken and maudlin. Carrying his fibre suitcase, his hat on as straight as if he had used a spirit level, he paused at the street door.

‘Are you sure you can spare me?’ he asked. ‘Can you manage? I’m afraid of you sneaking downstairs, Ellie, to help them out. I won’t have it said that I’ve signed your death warrant.’

‘I’m not done for yet,’ said Mrs Abinger, taking the opportunity of being allowed downstairs to see him off to sort out the custard powders from the blancmanges.

‘I don’t think I ought to,’ he declared nobly.

‘Of course you must,’ said Jo aghast. ‘It’s a bit late to start worrying now when everything’s fixed up, and you know wild horses wouldn’t stop you. Get on Dad, do, or you’ll miss your train.’ It would be terrible if he came back. She winked at the delivery man. ‘Herbie and I’ll get on a treat.’

‘We’ll get on a treat,’ echoed Herbert Merriman. He always sided with Jo and copied what she said. He was in love with her. He had discovered this when she came back from the seaside, suddenly almost grown up through her tears and trouble. She had brought him a toothbrush holder called: ‘Souvenir of Seacombe.’ He never brushed his teeth, but every night he removed his pencil from behind his ear and put it into the toothbrush holder, because she had given it to him and he loved her.

Josephine walked towards her father, as if to urge him out of the door. ‘We’ll get on like a house on fire,’ she said. ‘Herbie’s
going to leave the deliveries till the afternoon so as to help me with the morning customers.’

‘There you are!’ Mr Abinger set down his suitcase to clasp his flat cheeks in despair. ‘I knew it. Flying against me the moment my back is turned. People want their groceries delivered
before
dinner. That’s always been one of my maxims. I go so far as to say that on that I have built my solid family connexion.’ He thumped the counter.

‘Hush, George,’ said Mrs Abinger soothingly. ‘You’re not at the conference yet.’ She put the suitcase into his hand and got him away.

‘Thanks, Mum,’ said Jo. ‘You go on upstairs. It’s time for your rest.’

‘Can’t I just stay and help you down here for a while?’ asked Mrs Abinger wistfully. ‘I see your half-pound rices want making up – ’

‘Upstairs,’
said Jo, pointing. ‘You know what the doctor said.’

When they had got rid of her, Jo turned to Herbert Merriman and drew a great breath.
‘Now!’
she said, and a giggle bubbled up inside her like a spring.

‘Now,’ he echoed, rapture on his white clown’s face with its haunted, triangular eyes and half-moon mouth.

Jo took a quick look up the stairs, ran back to bolt the street door, hung inside the glass notice saying: ‘Closed for Alterations’ and thumbed her nose at Miss Loscoe, who was peering in and shaking the handle.

‘Now that’s just what you don’t want to do,’ said Herbert. ‘Chokin’ off the customers before we’ve even started.’

‘I don’t care if I do choke her off,’ said Jo ‘She doesn’t spend more than a bob a week here. Herbie, you and I are after the big money.’

‘You and I,’ he said. ‘You and I.’ Two days of it.

‘Buck up,’ she said, ‘and don’t be so moony. Get that paint and the brushes and I’ll tell you what we’ll do first.’ She began to boss him about. They were both very happy.

Miss Loscoe watched and waited. She waited for two days,
and when George arrived on the Underground at Notting Hill Gate, she was at the station to meet him.

He thought he was seeing things. The conference’s farewell party had begun in Clacton, continued on the train, and been wound up in the refreshment room at Liverpool Street. Miss Loscoe was wearing a long Paisley coat with what had once been fur round the bottom. On her head was a kind of tarnished turban, which might have sported an aigrette in its 1910 days. She carried a large black beaded bag with a chain handle, and for some reason had put on long amber ear-rings, like drops of congealed machine grease.

As he came out of the lift, stepping as high as if the two inch gap was a chasm, she accosted him. He shut his eyes for a moment, but she was still there when he opened them.

‘Mr Abinger,’ she said, her voice as sharp as her nose, her scandal-mongering eyes darting from side to side, ‘I must speak to you.’

‘How now,’ he said. ‘What is this vision of Oriental splendour?’ He bowed from the waist, and passengers following him out of the lift pushed him aside.

‘I’ll tell you about it on the way home,’ Miss Loscoe said. ‘Come along. There’s no time to lose.’

‘You wish me to escort you.’ His eyebrows rose. Old Loscoe and he had hardly exchanged a civil word in their lives. ‘Delighted, Madam.’ He offered her his arm, but she stepped away. She had not touched a man for years.

‘Come on,
come
on,’ said the lift man wearily. He was tired of passengers on the evening shift who wandered out of his lift in a beery dream and had to be called back for their tickets.
Mi
Abinger went through all his pockets, his face lengthening at the thought that he might have to pay again. Miss Loscoe waited, swinging her beaded bag and tapping a shoe like a yellow canoe.

The passengers waiting to go down in the lift were beginning to get restive, when the lift man said: ‘I suppose you never put it in your hat band, oh
no.’
Mr Abinger removed his hat, discovered with some surprise his ticket adorning it like a sportsman’s pheasant feather, and handed it over grandly as if it were a visiting card.

‘Some people,’ said the lift man. He clanged his gates and was borne asunder, deriding Mr Abinger’s boots as his face passed their level.

Miss Loscoe took George down the hill much faster than he liked. It was only nine o’clock, and he had thought of calling in at the Sun. As he slowed down by the swing door, she said: ‘Come
along
!’ and shook her reticule behind him with a noise like a bag full of curtain rings.

‘What’s the idea?’ he asked. ‘Why am I in custo – custody? What do you want with’ – he hiccupped again, as he jolted off a misjudged kerb – ‘me?’

‘I felt it my duty to warn you,’ she said, gliding just ahead of him on her stick-like legs. ‘There’s things been going on you wouldn’t believe. I’ve never seen anything like it, and Ellie a party to it all, I declare, as if there were no shame in her.’

‘Ellie?’ Mr Abinger was fuddled. ‘Things going on? What on earth are you talking about, woman? I’ve had a tiring journey. I’m in no mood for these riddles.’

‘You’ll see,’ she said, grim-lipped. ‘We’ll catch them red-handed if we hurry.’ He had to trot to keep up with her, his suitcase bumping his legs. Several times he stumbled and swore, and Miss Loscoe began to realize that he was not entirely sober. She, Dot Loscoe, down the Portobello Road with a tipsy man! It was a daring evening for her, and looked like being a rewarding one. She had been waiting for this for two days. That was why she had put on her finery, to celebrate.

The Portobello Road keeps its street lamps dim and far apart, like a raddled courtesan her boudoir lights. In the tricky twilight, Mr. Abinger’s eyes were on his feet, so he did not see the bright haze that gave warning of his home before he could see it round the curve of the road.

Taken unawares, the shock brought him up short on the opposite side of the cross roads.

‘There!’ cried Miss Loscoe, poised with outflung arm, like an ornamental lamp. He stood rooted, sagging at the knees, his head thrust forward and his jaw slack. Now he really was seeing things. He’d got ‘em.
Delirium tremens
could conjure no greater horror than this.

It was after nine o’clock, but the Corner Stores was still in a fairground blaze of light, and doing a roaring trade. Open? It was practically exposed to the four winds of Heaven. Half the stock in the shop must be outside to make a show like this.

The doorway was a bower of ironmongery, hung all about with kettles, saucepans, strainers, ladles, and the old iron fish steamer that had not seen the light of day for years. In front of this, out-works of breakfast cereal and biscuit tins had been built out on to the pavement, and between them ran an improvised counter of crates and cartons piled with every variety of bottle and tin and jar that a grocery store could yield. From what could be seen through the ebb and flow of the crowd, the front of this counter was hung with large notices in bolder, cruder poster lettering than ever was sanctioned in Miss Wym-per’s art class:

You Want It? We’Ve Got It!’

‘Corner Stores for Quality and Courtesy!’

‘Our Rice

Is Nice

Our Spice

Is Twice

As Nice

As Merchandice

At Twice

The Price.’

Against a stack of buckets, almost as high as a man, leaned a blackboard with a deformed pointing hand, ‘REAL ALLY, SALE PRICE 3/11¾. IT’S MURDER.’

The Corner Stores had out-Ellisoned Ellison’s. Moreover, Ellison’s had closed long ago, and the people who were jostling and joking here on the cluttered pavement were their customers, the kind whom Mr Abinger had never wanted, and never got. Improvident women who left their week-end marketing until the last moment; factory girls and floosies; rough women from the Buildings and the railway Dwellings, with grey, snotty children who should have been in bed. Not respectable decently dressed women from the residential neighbourhood, who liked
to shop quietly where they were known, with a list and goods delivered, but all the cheery
hoi polloi
of the Lane, who liked to shop where they could get a halfpenny knocked off the price and a bit of a joke besides.

Not housewives who had their regular order of best Darjeeling every week, and coffee freshly ground, but women who had to be incited to it by war cries on the very plate glass of the windows, in dripping whitewash letters:

‘Why Pay More?

Buy Our Tea

And You Will See

It’s Better Than the Two and Four.’

‘A Kick in Every Kup of Korner Stores Koffee.’

Lights blazed behind the glass as if it was Christmas, as indeed it might be, for all the old tinsel decorations were up, and the window display, instead of Mr Abinger’s symmetrical little constructions of the duller commodities like scouring powder and carpet soap, was a joyous riot of all the most colourful goods in the shop, marked down to cut-throat prices.

The big golden bell, which came out every year, hung in the centre, radiating coloured paper chains like a sun. Every light in the place was on. It streamed out through the open shop door, and from both windows a block of solid white light held off the gathering dark. As if that were not enough, a naphtha flare, begged from one of the barrow boys, was fixed precariously over the counter, and in its leaping light, Jo’s hair was like a burning bush. Beside her was Herbert Merriman, ghastly white from excitement and the garish light of the flare, his hair tufted, his body submerged from neck to heels in one of Mr Abinger’s own aprons!

It was this crowning outrage that gave Mr Abinger back the use of his horror-struck limbs. With a roar, he plunged into the road, scattering the crowd with his swinging suitcase. Half-way across, a hail from above stopped him with a backward jerk of his head.

The sitting-room window was open at the bottom, with the curtains undrawn. The light from within aureoled the untidy grey head of Mrs Abinger who, with her bosom spread on the sill, was leaning beneficently out over the scene like a Ruben’s angel.

Mr Abinger tipped his head farther back to see her from under his hat brim. Word went round the crowd, and they began to draw back, to watch and listen. Jo and Herbert Merriman watched too, motionless as lit figures in a tableau.

As Mr Abinger’s head snapped back, he felt the alcohol reeling through his brain like fumes in a shaken retort. Ferociously, he shook his head to clear it. It was all part of the nightmare that the airy beatitude of the farewell party should turn on him and make the piecing together of words as difficult as if the letters were being shaken up in the kaleidoscope of his brain.

‘Ellie!’ he shouted. ‘Whassa – whassa meaning of this?’

‘Surprise for you, George.’ She beamed down at him. ‘All Jo’s idea. She done it all herself. No – but wait till you hear – ’ as he yammered at her. ‘We’ve taken a week’s money in two days! What do you think of that? We knew you’d be pleased.’

Seduced by Jo’s persuasion, excited by the adventure, her business prudence shakier than of old, she had let herself believe what Jo told her, that George would not mind once he saw the results. It was the dawn of a new era of prosperity, and she smiling over it like the rising sun.

The smile was struck from her face, and she recoiled, knocking her head on the window sash as Mr Abinger let out an animal bellow that made the crowd draw back still farther, their exclamations merging into a drawn-out ‘a-ah!’