Joy and Josephine (27 page)

He stood alone in the roadway, trammelled by a Homburg hat, a mackintosh, and a fibre suitcase, but the freedom of the Furies was in his working face. The light of the flare dramatized deep shadows under his nose and tilted cheekbones, and as he lowered his head, his eyeballs glittered like a pantomine demon.

The crowd had melted away from the counter, and he and Jo looked at each other. ‘Well Dad – how d’you like it?’ Her voice began bravely and quavered. She put out a hand to feel for Herbert. ‘Don’t you think we – DAD!’

She screamed at the top of her voice as he charged at the counter, laying about him with the suitcase, scattering tins, crates and boxes, breaking bottles, and felling Herbert Merriman, who had jumped in front of Jo and pushed her out of the way as her father charged. The naphtha flare came crashing down, and in a second, a packing case had gone up in a sheet of flame. All the women were screaming as Mr Abinger, lashing about like a demon in hell, battered and trampled and bellowed among the burning wreckage of Jo’s enterprise, until a rolling tin spread-eagled him backwards into the gutter, his suitcase skidded away, and the women closed in on him like a lynch mob.

The crowd had dispersed, happy with something to talk about for weeks. Miss Loscoe, satisfied, had crawled into her basement, the tarnished turban tottering and the ear-rings swinging crazily as she lolloped her head about in glee. Before she could stop herself, she had eaten wildly of the first food that came to hand, and then rushed in horror for the senna pods, to cancel out her folly.

The fire engine, the crowning sensation of the evening, had clanged up dramatically and gone away sulkily, disappointed to find only the charred remains of smashed packing cases. Mrs Abinger was in bed with a rocketing blood pressure. Herbert Merriman was in the casualty ward of Ducane Road Hospital having stitches put into the cut on his head.

Jo had insisted on going with him, and when they would not let her stay any longer, she walked all the way home, crying along the street through which she had so often run with the Moores to meet the Goldners at the hut on Wormwood Scrubs. By the time she reached home, she had no more tears; only an isolated sob came shuddering up now and again to rend her like a hiccup, and stab at the aching side of her head. Outside the shop, a policeman was taking notes connected with the charge to be made for obstructing the public highway. She stepped over the mess on the pavement and went inside.

The lights were out now. The street lamp outside patterned the floor with the shadow of the gold bell and the paper chains.
In the shadows above, the half emptied shelves were like a gap-toothed mouth. She did not at first see her father hunched on a stool with his elbows on the counter, eating biscuit after biscuit in the ravening aftermath of rage. The crunching of a ginger nut stopped her in fright at the door of the store-room.

‘Who’s there?’ She swung round. ‘Oh – it’s you, Dad. I–’she made a sound that came out more like a sob than a laugh. ‘I thought it was the mice.’

‘Mice,’ he said thickly, through the biscuit, ‘will be all that will come here now.’

‘It’ll be all right, Dad. You’ll see. It won’t make no difference. People will come. They liked it. I had them all coming. They all said it was a good idea.’

‘I don’t want to talk about it,’ he said, because he did not know what to say. He had railed at her so often for harmless things that a major stimulus to wrath found him speechless. ‘You done what you done,’ he said. ‘You flew in the teeth of my expressed wishes. You lost me half my stock and doubtless all my customers. Well, now you see.’ She waited. ‘Now you see,’ he repeated helplessly and sought solace in the biscuit tin.

‘It would have been all right,’ she said, talking to him from the shadows of the inner doorway, ‘if you hadn’t come along and acted so hot. I was doing lovely. I thought you’d be so pleased, and see I was right after all to want to be up to date. All the money we took. I thought you’d be so pleased. We was doing so well and then you come along and spoil it all.’

‘Oh yes,’ he said in his boots. ‘It was my fault, I’ve no doubt. It’s always my fault. I’ve given my life, brain and body to this business, and you, an ignorant kid, come and knock it all from under me.’

He made it sound so pathetic that Jo stepped forward and said sincerely, ‘I’m sorry, Dad, honest. I meant it right. I thought you’d be so pleased – ’

‘Don’t keep
saying
that!’ He raised his head in a sudden flare of temper. Something that he had not noticed before struck him as unusual. What was it? Some noise. … He listened. No. There was silence except for the distant sobbing song of a line
of men and girls tacking home from kerb to kerb down the Portobello Road.

‘There’s something different,’ he said. ‘What is it?’

‘What do you mean, Dad? I don’t hear – ’

‘The door!’ he cried. ‘What have you done to the door?’

‘I hitched it back, that’s all, when we were outside. I’ll lock it.’ She crossed to the open door.

That was the unusual thing. The open door and – silence.

‘What,’ he said, and his voice was slow with menace, ‘what have you done with my buzzer?’

‘That?’ she said lightly. ‘Oh, I took it off. You’re glad of
that
anyway. You were always cursing it and saying you’d have it off. Well, we done it, Herbie and me. It was easy.’

‘You did
what?
Do you know it cost me the best part of five pounds to have that fixed, sixteen – no seventeen years ago? That buzzer was one of the most expensive fittings of the shop. Oh, it’s too much; it’s too much for any man to stand.’ He could have wept. He was quite sober now, but weak. Into the buzzer he crystallized his entire sense of loss. It might have been his first and only love.

‘Well,’ Jo said helplessly. ‘I’m sorry, Dad. I’m sorry. I didn’t know. I thought you’d be so pleased.’

‘I’m never going to try and please him no more,’ she told Herbert. ‘I’m never going to try at anything.’ She had gone to see him on visitors’ day, bearing Mr Abinger’s message that he had got the sack.

The counterpane over him was almost as flat as if the bed were empty. He looked more like a clown than ever, with his face as white as if it were made up with chalk powder, his mouth smiling without his eyes, a tuft of hair sticking straight up above the bandage. He lay flat, with his eyes swivelled round to where Jo sat by the bed. They talked in undertones, and the man in the next bed, who had no visitors, tried to listen.

‘What you going to do then?’ Herbert asked.

‘Oh I’ll go on at the shop. Someone’s got to. I don’t care. I’ll do the work, to make up to Dad because of the money, but I shan’t try with it. I’m finished with ambition and that.’

‘You was always so ambitious,’ he sorrowed.

‘Not any more. I learned my lesson. What you going to do, Herbie?’

‘Stay here for a while, of course. Got to. The grub’s all right, and you’ll come to see me sometimes, Jo! Good bit of luck visiting days is early closing days,’ he said, his face brightening as if it were a miracle, and not especially designed by the hospital to suit the neighbourhood. ‘Then I’m going to me sister’s up North, the one that keeps a paper shop. I can help her with the deliveries – light work and that.’

‘That’s good then, Herbie,’ she said.

‘It’s not,’ he said. ‘It’s bad. I shan’t see you.’

Josephine looked down at her hands without answering. A nurse came to the bed, and she jumped up in awe of her starched authority.

‘I’m afraid you’ll have to go now, dear,’ she nurse said. ‘He’s not allowed to talk too much, and there might be another visitor wanting to see him.’

‘There won’t be,’ Herbert said, but she had gone to the next bed.

‘Good-bye then,’ said Jo.

‘Good-bye,’ said Herbert and they shook hands, his white paw limp in her strong grasp.

When she had gone, the man in the next bed leaned on one elbow, eager for a chat. ‘That your daughter, chum?’ he asked, jerking his head towards the double doors at the end of the ward.

‘Me daughter?’ Herbert smiled. ‘No, chum, that’s my girl.’

Jo did not try and Mr Abinger did not try, and the Corner Stores went rapidly downhill. Many of their old customers had only come to see Ellie, and now that she was nearly always upstairs, there was no point in coming to a shop that was always out of stock of what they wanted, and where Mr Abinger and Josephine, bickering all day long, moved about in a listless, unwilling way as if they did not care whether they sold anything or not. The rats began to leave the sinking ship.

New customers came seldom and did not come again. The
peeling paint outside the grimy doorstep and the spotted windows where bottles and packets faded from prolonged exposure were harbinger of the dissolution within. The floor was dirty, the counter stained, the bacon machine incurably coagulated. Cobwebs obscured the great old mottled canisters on the top shelf, of which Mrs Abinger had been so proud. The back store room galled her every time she passed through. It had never been like that in her day. Sometimes, when she was left alone in the evening, she crept downstairs to tidy up, but it had gone too far, and she could not lift the piles of broken boxes and empties that should have gone to the dustman long ago.

If she mentioned it, Jo would say that she would do it some time; she was too tired or busy now. George would start to cough at the mere idea of straining his chest with heavy work.

They opened late and often closed early, missing the home-bound workers. As soon as he had pulled the blind down the glass door, whose buzzer he had not yet bothered to refix, and had emptied the meagre till partly into the safe and partly into his pocket, Mr Abinger would escape from his depressing place of business.

He had given up the Debating Society because he could not afford the subscription. He had given up the Bridge Club, because losses had to be paid in cash, and he seldom had the cash. He did not have to stop playing bowls, because he was treasurer of the Club.

He escaped to it, as Jo escaped to the cinema. He forgot his troubles as he loitered and pottered in the slow-motion ballet on the green where the balls of five or six matches passed and crisscrossed between the groups of solemn men, each fallen into some attitude of repose. It was balm to his discouraged soul to get his fingers round the great satiny wood and send it bumbling over the billiard-table sward, curving in just where he wanted, to chuckle and chock among its fellows. Balm too were the murmurs of admiration, and the desultory technicalities tossed from one group to the next. Even the women on the benches round about gossiped less strenuously in the infectious peace of this tree-shadowed oasis in one of the nastiest parts of North Kensington.

In Avondale Park he was not a failure, nor was he in the Sun in Splendour, where he was in his element among the loquacious bores who did not mind being listened to if they did not have to listen to anyone else. Nobody in the bar bothered about the state of the other man’s business, and his brother Reg was too happy-go-lucky to wonder how George managed to keep up with his betting losses.

Mrs Abinger, hating to be of so little use, had begged to help with the accounts and the paper work, but George would not let her. She did not understand much about figures, and although she sometimes looked at the books, she did not fully realize the position until she read a letter which he had cast to the floor in fury and forgotten to retrieve. It was a dunning letter from a firm of wholesalers with whom they had dealt for years and should have had good credit.

‘Of course I can pay them,’ he snapped, when she plucked up the courage to tackle him. ‘Things have been a bit tight, but I’ll pay next month.’ He had lately been inveigled into greyhound racing by a bare acquaintance called Spider Knappett. He was banking on Spider’s wonder dog for the big race in October.

‘George,’ said Mrs Abinger, who had never owed money in her life, ‘you must pay. They won’t supply us else, and there’ll be all our fats to whistle for.’

‘Shut up,’ he said. ‘Don’t nag. I’ve got troubles enough without that.’

Ellison’s had their eye on the Corner Stores. Like vultures they waited to pounce on it for their new cooked meats department. Prompted by bulletins from his spies across the road, Mr Ellison pounced too soon. He made George an offer. George refused with umbrage. The wholesalers wrote threatening to withhold supplies. Spider Knappett’s wonder dog came in fourth. The wholesalers wrote again threatening to go to Law, and Mr Abinger paid the bill at last out of the Bowls Club funds.

When the Bowls Club accounts were due for audit, Mr Abinger sat down to write a letter, glancing over his shoulder, unconsciously shielding the paper with his arm although Mrs Abinger was in bed and Jo was downstairs reading an old
newspaper from the wrapping pile instead of tidying up the shop.

It was cold down there, and she could not bring herself to get out the broom, or even to flick a duster at the shelves, but it was too wet to go out, and this was better than the eternal reading or knitting in the sitting-room, which smelled to-night of burned semolina and was chill as well as stuffy, because Mr Abinger’s chair blocked out the small fire.

When he called down to her, she went slowly up the stairs, pushing back her hair. She did not wash it so often now and it shone with grease instead of with electric life. She had not bothered to renew her flowered overalls, but wrapped any old apron round herself. Nothing could alter the shapeliness of her figure, the blueness of her eyes or the delicacy of her pert, square-chinned face, but she looked pale and tired and older than seventeen.

‘What is it now, Dad?’ she asked, with the slight Cockney whine that crept sometimes into her voice.

‘I want you to deliver a letter for me,’ he said.

‘What’s wrong with posting it?’

‘The last post’s gone. It’s urgent.’

‘Well, I can’t. It’s pouring. Make Greg take it tomorrow.’ Gregory was Reg and Phyll Abinger’s youngest child, lent to George for pocket money and to keep him out of mischief. Knowing himself an underpaid errand boy, he did just as he pleased and no more.