Joy and Josephine (33 page)

‘What do you know about Jo?’ he asked harshly. ‘You’ve got to tell me.’

‘She made me promise not to tell … ’

‘If you don’t,’ he said, tantalized beyond endurance, ‘I’ll kick down this junk and wring the truth out of your scraggy neck.’ Loathing the feel of her skin, he grasped her skeleton wrists and tried to pluck her off him.

Her fingers clung. ‘There was a church,’ she said, and her voice died away.

‘What church? What are you getting at? Miss Loscoe – answer me!’ His voice rose shrill with fear. Her hands and arms were rigid, cold, and clammy as he tried to free himself. He had heard stories about people trapped in the death grip of a corpse.

‘Ellie’s top drawer.’ Her voice was scarcely more than a stirring of the fetid air. ‘Ask Ellie what she’s got in her top drawer.’

The sudden slackening of her grip took him unawares. He staggered, knocking against the crazy pile of furniture. It shifted, toppled, and there came one wild, unearthly yell as the whole edifice crashed over to where Miss Loscoe’s voice had been. Then silence, and the dripping tap.

Mr Abinger fled for his life through the darkling streets, with all the fiends of Hell clawing at his spine.

He slowed down a little in the crowded Portobello Road, where street lamps were coming on, and the market men were lighting their flares. One or two people greeted him, and Bob Norris called out: ‘See you to-night, George?’

He nodded and pushed on through the crowd, panting to be home. Although the shop was closed, the windows were lit, in accordance with Mr Ellison’s lavish policy, but he fumbled with the key as if he were in the dark.

‘Get locked out, George?’ He jumped and spun round as Mrs Lupin laughed and wheezed behind him. He gave her a ghastly grin and mumbled something. Turning the key at last, he slipped inside, shutting the door quickly to silence the buzzer. One of Ellison’s decorators had found it, and fixed it again in its old place, where it haunted George like an unwelcome ghost from better days.

Kitty was in the kitchen and did not hear him pad through the sitting-room and put his head round the bedroom door. Mrs Abinger was lying on her back with her eyes shut, the paper she had been reading going up and down with her chest.

Just like her extravagance to go to sleep with the light on. The automatic thought skimmed the surface of George’s seething brain. Ellie’s top drawer! He crept round the bed, avoiding the board that creaked, and drew it open inch by inch, looking over his shoulder to see if her eyes were still closed. What could she have in here to hide from him? Stockings, gloves, handkerchiefs, hairpins – he fumbled about helplessly, not knowing what he was looking for.

Clumsy at the best of times, his hands were trembling now. He jerked the drawer, and the rattling handles woke Mrs Abinger in a fright. ‘Who’s there?’ She struggled to sit up. ‘George, how you startled me! What are you doing, dear? Do you want a hankie? There’s none of yours in there.’

‘No, Ellie, no, I – ’ He had jumped round guiltily, and stood with his back to the drawer, pale as death and gasping like a fish.

‘Why, whatever’s the matter? You do look in a state.’ She
climbed out of bed and came towards him in a nightgown like a flannel sack. ‘You’ve not been run over or something? Where have you been? I thought you were going to Dot’s.’

‘No, no,’ he said wildly. ‘I haven’t been near the place. I don’t know anything about her.’

‘Well, all right dear.’ She laid a hand on his trembling arm. ‘What are you getting so excited about? You’ll go another time for me, no doubt.’

‘No!’ He shook her off. ‘I’m not going there. I won’t go there.’

‘Are you ill? George, I believe you’re in for a go of something. Come and lay down for a bit. Here – ’ She tried to help him off with his coat but he backed away. ‘Leave me alone,’ he muttered. ‘Go away.’

She thought he had been drinking. ‘Very well,’ she said, in the cold voice she kept for the times when he came back foolish from the Sun. ‘Please go out of my room then. I am going to get dressed for supper.’ She looked in the drawer for her stockings. ‘What have you been up to in here? A nice song there’d be and no mistake, if I turned your things topsy-turvy like this.’

‘Ellie, I must know. I’ve got to know. There’s something in there – don’t shut that drawer – you’ve got to tell me what you’re hiding in there!’

Her heart stopped. ‘I don’t know what you mean,’ she said, with a poor attempt at innocence. ‘Who have you been talking to? Who’s put you up to acting so queer?’

‘Never mind,’ he said, breathing fast. ‘Someone told me. It’s something to do with Jo, something you didn’t want me to know.’ He had pulled the drawer wide open and was searching frantically, throwing her things out on to the bed and the floor.

‘Leave my things alone! How dare you?’ But he had found the screw of tissue paper. Fiddling and muttering, he drew out the crucifix, and held it up, puzzling. ‘Is this what she meant? How did you come by this, Ellie?’

‘Give that to me.’ She grabbed at it and the broken chain broke again, leaving him with the cross while she dangled the chain.

‘There is something wrong.’ He could see that she was very
much upset. ‘Did you buy this for Jo? Is that it?’ He puzzled over the initials on the back of the crucifix. ‘B.C. Those aren’t her initials.’

‘Of course not, you stupid thing. They must have been her mother’s – oh!’ She clapped a hand over her mouth, realizing what she had said.

‘I see,’ he said slowly, nodding his head like a steam hammer. ‘I begin to understand.’ He was getting angry now, and that was clearing his brain. He could deal with this situation. ‘This cross was on Jo when she was a baby, is that it?’ He bent his brow on Mrs Abinger.

‘Well, and if it was,’ she blustered. ‘It doesn’t mean nothing. Just a trinket, I daresay.’

‘That’s why you hid it, I suppose,’ he jeered. ‘It’s a Catholic cross, isn’t it? Ellie, that church where she was found was a Catholic church. You brought me home a Papist brat!’ She might have brought him a rattlesnake.

‘George!’ She spread her short, fat arms to him. ‘It’s not her fault. You can’t hold it against her.’

‘Can’t I?’ he cried. ‘I’ll hold it against the both of you for the rest of your lives. Of all the bastard children in the world, you have to bring me home a – ah, there she is! Let’s see how she likes the sound of this.’

‘No, George – don’t, please. You promised – ’ Mrs Abinger clawed at him, and Jo stood in the doorway, dressed up to the nines, laughing at them.

‘What’s going on?’ she asked. ‘You two old dears having a scrap? You’ve no idea how comical you look. Dad, your tie! And do look at your hair – what there is of it. Mum, really, that nightie! You can’t let the neighbours see you in such awful des-habilly.’ She pulled the curtains together.

Mrs Abinger made an effort. ‘I was just going to get dressed,’ she said brightly. ‘There’s nothing wrong. I don’t know what you mean.’

‘Why’s Dad looking like something out of the cheese, then?’ Jo nodded to where her father stood humped against the dressing-table, swinging his glowering head at her like a bull about to charge.

‘He’s all right. Leave him alone. You go on through to the other room while I get some clothes on. Have you come to supper? That’s nice. Kitty’s making a Cornish pasty.’

Jo made a face. ‘Good thing I’m not staying then, if it’s anything like her last one.’

‘Going out with Norman?’

‘No,’ said Jo casually, sauntering through to the sitting-room, ‘with a man I know. Norman doesn’t
own
me.’

‘Jo, I don’t think you ought, when you’re engaged to Norman.’ Mrs Abinger went barefoot to the door.

‘Well, I’m not, so there. I can do better for myself than that.’

This roused Mr Abinger from brooding wrath to striding fury. Mrs Abinger sat down on the bed with a bump as he pushed past her and made for Jo, who was swinging her legs on the edge of the table.

‘Do you know what you’re saying?’ He stood over her and she cocked her face cheekily up to him.

‘Sure,’ she said, in the little clipped voice she had learned from the girls at the Grand Metropolitan. ‘I know what I’m doing. I’m not going to chuck myself away on someone who can’t give me a better life than you’ve given Mum.’ She nodded at the room. ‘I’m on the up and up, old dear.’ She giggled. ‘I say, Dad, you do look queer. I believe you’re tight.’

She picked up the newspaper and he snatched it from her hands and threw it on the floor. ‘Just you listen to me,’ he said, breathing in snorts through his nose. ‘I’ve been very patient with you, my girl, but you’ve asked for it, and by God, you’re going to get it.’ Mrs Abinger, her voice muffled by the nightdress she was pulling over her head, called out unheeded from the bedroom.

‘Yes,’ he went on, ‘I’m going to tell you a thing or two.’

‘Oh, for God’s sake.’ Jo jumped off the table with a kick of her silken legs. ‘I come here to kindly pay you a visit, and all I get is nag, nag, nag. This place gives me the pip. I’m off.’

Felix was picking her up on the corner of Chepstow Villas. She would go and wait for him there. She swayed among the furniture on her high heels, chucking Kitty under the chin as
she came through with a tray, making her squeal and drop the spoons and forks on the floor.

‘Gives you the pip, does it?’ Her father blundered after her, pushing the furniture behind him like a floundering swimmer. ‘You think you’re too good for us, doiv’t you? Ha, ha.’ He laughed without mirth. ‘Well, that’s very funny, if you only knew who you really are.’

‘What are you talking about?’ Jo turned at the door. ‘I know who we are. Very respectable, no doubt, but this baby is going to be something better.’ She threw a satisfied glance at the mirror and slicked an eyebrow with a wetted finger.

‘I’ll tell you what you are,’ he cried. ‘A common bastard – there!’

‘Dad, you don’t mean you and Mum – ? Why, you old devil, I’d never have thought it of you.’

‘How dare you?’ he thundered at her. ‘You’re no child of ours, that’s what
I
mean. You’re a foundling, abandoned in shame and taken in by the charity of decent folks.’

Kitty, goggling from the floor where she was scrabbling after the spoons, sucked in her lower lip with a gasp. Jo had gone dead white. She stared at her father, standing with his shoulders going up and down, his arms hanging. ‘You’re mad,’ she said slowly. ‘Either mad or drunk. If that’s meant to be a joke, I don’t think much of it.’

‘A joke?’ He clasped his head. ‘I wish it were. It wasn’t any of my idea, make no mistake of that. It was your mother. She would adopt a brat, and a Papist one at that. A ruddy Papist bastard.’

‘Jo! Jo!’ Mrs Abinger scrambled through the room, her dressing-gown thrown on all anyhow, with one fat white shoulder bare. ‘Don’t listen to him. He’s making it up.’

‘Lying won’t help you, Ellie,’ he said. ‘Kitty knows it’s true. I’m not making it up, am I, kitten?’

She fawned at his feet like a lap-dog. ‘No, Abbie,’ she yapped, ‘not according to what you told me. Never mind, Jo. There’s plenty of good people in the world been brought up adopted.’

‘Oh, shut up,’ said Jo, raising her foot as if she would kick her. ‘Mum,’ she turned despairingly to Mrs Abinger, ‘if this is
true, and you never told me, I’ll never forgive you – never.’ She was trembling. She felt as if she were on the edge of an abyss that was crumbling under her feet. Everything she was, all her twenty years of life were tumbling away from her into the blackness leaving her sick and empty and cold with shock.

Seeing how she was taking it, Mrs Abinger plunged desperately on, trying even now to save the situation. ‘It’s not true,’ she gabbled. ‘He don’t know what he’s saying. He’s upset tonight. He’s trying to upset you. It’ll be all right. Never you mind. Don’t go, dear. Why don’t you stay here and rest and we’ll all have a nice little meal together directly. Kitty will go and dish up the pasty.’ But Kitty was not going to miss any of this. She stayed on all-fours, her eyes circular, her mouth a small pink sea anemone.

Mrs Abinger shook her husband’s arm. ‘Come along, George,’ she said, giving him one more chance. ‘Tell Jo you’re sorry; you never meant it.’

‘Ho,’ he said, ‘and I suppose
you
never went to Bolt Bay empty-handed and come back with a pewking kid in your arms. Ho, no.’ His irony was leaden.

‘Where? Bolt Bay. Where did you go? Did you, Mum? Am I really – ? Who am I? Oh God, who am I?’ Jo whirled from one to the other of them, agonized. ‘Mum, make him say it’s not true!’

‘George – ’ Mrs Abinger stepped between them, clutching her dressing-gown like a toga.

It’s true.’ He spoke over her head, culling his words: ‘All this for which you fancy yourself too good; your parents, the life we’ve slaved to give you, the home you scorn – ’ He could not help enjoying himself a little – ‘you’ve a right to none of it. None, none I Your only true possession in the world, my girl, is this.’ He flung out his hand, holding the little cross in his nicotiny fingers. ‘This – the stigma of your birth!’

‘Let me see.’ She grabbed at it. ‘Mine? I don’t understand. It says B.C. Who’s B.C.? Mum – ’

‘No good asking
her,’
said George, folding his lips. ‘She’s ashamed of what she’s done. Old Loscoe could have told you the truth. She knew.’

‘Miss Loscoe!’ Jo turned and ran down the stairs.

Her father called after her, appalled: ‘Don’t go round there! Jo – Jo, don’t go there!’ He half fell down the stairs, but the shop door stood open and the shrilling buzzer drowned his cries. She had gone.

The street lamp outside Miss Loscoe’s was shining into the basement. The first thing that Jo saw was the cat lying dead against the wall, its paws squashed where her father had trodden on it. The next thing she saw was Miss Loscoe lying dead among the toppled furniture, her head staring upside down into the yellow lamplight.

Wild with fear, Jo fled blindly, anywhere, until she ran into the path of a large car, and stumbled to her knees as it skidded away from her with a scream of brakes.

‘Why the hell don’t you look where you’re going?’ Felix got out of the car, angry with fright. ‘Jo! For Christ’s sake – what-ever’s the matter?’