Lying Together (5 page)

The late chemist was on a corner down a side street, three blocks from the hotel, just where Stephenson Street ended. I'd never been inside. It had two big glass flasks of coloured water in the window, blue and red, lit up from inside and casting queer stripes of colour everywhere. The rest of the shop was dark. I was afraid it was shut, but the door opened when I pushed it, the bell jangling loudly. A man in a white coat stood silently behind the long counter, as if he had been there for ever, waiting for me to arrive. His freckled skin seemed to glow in an eerie manner in the red and blue light. His spectacles were the magnifying kind, and made his eyes look three times as big as normal. I stopped for a moment, not sure what to say. I never liked asking men for sanitary stuff, and would usually wait ages to get a lady assistant – but there was no one else in the shop so I rushed the name out as quickly as I could. ‘A box of Dr White's, please.'

He sighed, casting a glance up at the clock. ‘You leave things until the last minute, don't you, young lady? I close at ten. You've only just caught me. What would you have done if I'd been closed, eh? Eh?' He put his white speckled face close to mine, then drew back and gave a kind of laugh that wasn't really a laugh at all.

I said it wasn't for me, but for ‘somebody at the hotel'. I tried to imply that it was a guest, somebody important – and it seemed to work, because he stopped laughing and produced a box from under the counter. ‘One and three.'

‘Can you wrap it, please?' I wasn't going all the way back advertising Dr White's, even in the dark.

The chemist slowly pulled out a brown paper bag, slipped the box inside it in rather a pointed way and slid it across the counter. I put the two shillings down and he took it, opened the till and, after a few minutes chinking about in the coin box, came up with the change, which he put on the counter with a smack. I stretched to pick it up, not thinking about my skin because the shop was so dark and the man so old – but the next minute he was gripping my wrist. His hand felt horrible and sweaty. My mother had always warned me to be careful of men like this, and there had been one or two at the hotel who had tried to grab me from behind. But now I was on my own in a dark and deserted shop. I couldn't help thinking about the crazy scientist I'd read about in
Her Present Danger
who kidnapped young girls so they could extract the essence of their youth. This man was a chemist; he might know how to do it. ‘Let me go!' I cried, my voice not bold at all, but high and wobbly.

‘Don't be such a silly little blighter! I'm not going to hurt you. I just wanted to take a look at your skin.' He pushed up my cuff and ran his thumb roughly across the raised ridges of my arm, sending white scaly flakes drifting onto the counter.

‘Please,' I said, trying desperately to slip my wrist out of his grasp. But he ignored me, pulled my arm closer, and looked at it over the top of his glasses.

‘You've been scratching, haven't you, naughty girl? I can see – scratch, scratch, scratch.' He looked at me crossly. ‘Don't you ever put anything on it?'

‘Nothing's any good.' I said, more sure of myself now – after all, I'd spent years putting calamine on it, getting myself stiff and powdery to no avail. ‘Ma says it's incurable.'

‘I know
that
,' he said tetchily. ‘I'm a medical man, for heaven's sake. But there are treatments that can tone it down a bit. You're a young girl; you don't want to have to hide away under layers of clothes for the rest of your life. Let me have a proper look. Take your coat off.'

I knew there was nothing that would persuade me to take off as much as a hair-ribbon in front of him, but he still had hold of my wrist. ‘No, thank you,' I said, making another attempt at sounding self-possessed. ‘I'm in a hurry. People are waiting for me at the hotel.'

‘Oh, hoity-toity! Well, it's not my funeral,' he said, suddenly losing interest. ‘Here you are, silly child. If you want to suffer, suffer.' And he released my wrist with a flick of annoyance, as if my scaly arm was something useless he was throwing to the dogs.

I pulled down my cuff, grabbed the Dr White's and the change, and turned tail, almost throwing myself at the shop door. The doorbell jangled madly as I wrenched the handle up and down in a panic, all sorts of wild imaginings surging through my brain. I nearly fainted as I heard the chemist come up behind me. I thought he was about to drug me with chloroform and make me a prisoner in his cellar and no one would ever know. But the door suddenly opened, smooth as silk, and I fell out into the street.

I began to run. I could see some people coming out of a building up ahead. Men and women laughing and talking, but not like people when they come out of a pub. Excited, I thought, but more serious. There was quite a group of them and they spilled over the pavement and into the road. In my panic I headed straight through the middle of them. Someone jostled my arm and the box slipped out of its paper bag onto the pavement. A man bent to pick it up. ‘Sorry about that! We're a fearful lot when we get excited. Here you are.' The speaker rose and looked at me. It was the young man with the lovely skin. His face was even handsomer in the lamplight, his eyes even blacker around the rims. ‘Why,' he said, with a look of such pleasure that my heart battered against my ribs. ‘It's my little waitress! My little waitress who thought a shilling was too much for a tip.' I didn't know what to say as he stood there smiling with the box in his hands. He must have seen what it was, although he gave no sign. I was tremendously excited to see him, of course, and felt relieved to be in the middle of a group of normal people after my fright with the chemist, but I was embarrassed about him standing there with that box on display.

‘I've just been running an errand for a friend,' I explained. ‘Well, not really a friend – someone from the hotel.'

‘Well, don't let us keep you. It must be urgent. You're quite out of breath.' He handed back the box. I realized I was panting hard with fright, and that my hands were shaking so much I couldn't put it back into its bag. The cheap brown paper began to tear as I tried to shove it in.

‘Let me do it.' Another pair of hands came forward. A woman's. Work-worn and sensible, with a silvery wedding ring. A kind face, pale dried skin, as if she had powdered with talc. ‘Jack told us about you, you know. We thought you were rather marvellous, refusing a tip. Jack always overdoes the compensation.'

I was astonished that the young man had discussed such a thing with his friends, and with this woman who I thought for a moment might be his wife, but who looked too old. ‘Oh, it just didn't seem fair,' I replied. ‘I thought maybe he needed it more than me.'

There was a burst of very hearty laughter from the small group around us. I felt very silly and very young. ‘I have to go now,' I said hastily. ‘Miss Jennings is relying on me.'

Jack smiled. ‘Off you go, then,' he said. ‘Sweet dreams,' he added, raising his hat.

I couldn't think of anything else that night – and for every night afterwards – except for the mysterious Jack raising his hat and smiling at me. Each teatime I waited for the sight of him, hoping to see his narrow head bent over that old red book. On my first afternoon off, I even gave up the chance to see Leslie in
It's Love I'm After
so I could walk to the building where I'd seen him. There was a brass plate on the door. It said ‘The Carlton Rooms and Exhibition Hall'. The door was shut and there was no way of telling what went on inside. Mr Reynolds, when I asked him later, said all sorts of things happened there. People hired out rooms, he said. He had himself been to a meeting of the Antiquarian Society there only last week. ‘What's your interest, Elsie?' he said. ‘You should be going out dancing or to the flicks, not bothering about a musty old place like that.' I said I had run into someone I knew there, but didn't know where that person lived to look him up. ‘Ah,' said Mr Reynolds. ‘He'll be doing the looking up himself, if he's got any sense.'

But I knew Jack was never going to look me up. He didn't know who I was, and even if he remembered me kindly, it was simply as a ‘little waitress'. I was too young and too common to interest him in any other way. And of course there was my skin. It was flaring up badly then, spots creeping up my neck and behind my ears. But all the same, on my next day off I was back at the Carlton Rooms, like a moth to a candle. This time the door was open and there was an elderly gent on duty in the lobby. ‘What can I do for you, young lady?' he said in a friendly sort of way when he saw me hovering around. Then he made a lot of fuss getting out a big ledger from behind the desk, and after much turning of pages, checking and re-checking of dates and tracing about with his finger, he finally came to it: ‘Wednesday 19th – Photography Club in the Charles Ramsden Room, Peace Pledge Union in the Main Hall, and Philosophy Society in the library.' I was delighted with myself. Jack was a philosopher just like I'd imagined. I thought that if I waited outside the hall when the Philosophy Club ended the next Wednesday I was sure to see Jack coming out. I worked out a number of excuses as to why I should be there at that particular time, and what I would say to Jack when he saw me; and I imagined how he would offer me his arm and take me back to the hotel and raise his hat and ask when he might see me again. But even though I waited for several Wednesdays, watching all the different people coming out and drifting down the street in twos and threes, Jack never appeared.

I realized that I'd been kidding myself, anyway. No real gentleman who came and ate in the hotel was going to fall in love with a mere waitress. I told myself that I needed to give up my stupid imaginings and concentrate on bettering myself. That's what my mother had hoped for when she sent me off with my cardboard suitcase and one change of clothes to ‘learn how to lay a table and talk ladylike'. She thought I might even get to be a housekeeper at a big house if I was lucky and took my chance when it came. Every letter she wrote ended with the hope that I would ‘get on', and every time I went home for a weekend she'd make sure I hadn't forgotten. ‘Don't be like me, Elsie,' she'd say, rolling out soggy pastry on the kitchen table, all the kids running round, and my sister Peggy trying to keep them in order. ‘Make something of yourself. Don't let a husband and kids drag you down.'

By then I was pretty good at silver service, and I started to learn all the French words on the menu and say them in the proper way. As well as that, I used to hang around in the kitchen in the mornings while Mr Mullan prepared the food. Then, when the customers asked about Hollandaise sauce or Cutlets Reform, I was able to explain what they were straight away. Mr Reeves the manager said I was the best trainee he had come across, and after Mrs Walsh left to look after her sick auntie in Teignmouth, he made me head waitress, even though I was two years younger than Mavis. ‘It's not years that count,' he said. ‘It's what you've got up here.' And he put his finger to his forehead and tapped it knowingly.

Then, six months later, when Winnie left to marry the encyclopedia salesman who'd always come in for a grilled plaice on Fridays, I was put in charge of the cash desk – ‘A position of great trust', said Mr Reeves as he counted out the float in front of me that first day.

Lots of things started to change, then. Of course I'd seen the newsreels with Hitler spouting off in front of all those thousands of Nazis, but I'd always thought he was somebody comical, with his silly moustache and staring eyes. Keith Beddoes used to mimic him in the store-room with a finger under his nose and his arm stuck up in the air as he marched about:
Sieg Heil!
He made Mavis and me laugh. But now people were talking about things getting serious, and other countries getting invaded. Sometimes we had guests with foreign accents in the hotel. ‘Refugees,' explained Mr Reynolds. ‘People who can see the writing on the wall.' And then all of a sudden, with just a week's notice, Miss Jennings left to join the Wrens with her very best friend Miss Carter. ‘War is on the cards, Elsie,' she said, as she gave me a big, and rather sticky, kiss of farewell. ‘Look after yourself, my love, and don't get taken advantage of.' Six months later, Mr Chamberlain was on the radio telling us the terrible news.

Well, half the men at the hotel joined up straight away, and we were so short-staffed that Mr Reeves had to do a lot more work than he was used to. He was always rushing about looking exasperated and never wanted to be asked anything at all, even if you needed something important like keys to the pantry or the linen cupboard. At the same time, everybody in the world seemed to want to come to the hotel for afternoon tea, so we started doing tea dances twice a week in the ballroom – which was a lot of extra work for me and Mavis. All the enlisted men came in to show off their new uniforms, and parents and sweethearts came to say farewell over iced buns and petits fours. Mavis and I would do a bit of a foxtrot with the trays as we swirled in and out. Life was so hectic that I only had time to get up, do my work, and go to bed. I had no time for dreams. Even about Jack.

In fact, the only spare time I had in those days was between breakfast and lunch, when Mrs Willacott was doing the morning coffees. If the weather was fine, I'd go up with Mavis to the little bit of flat roof over the ballroom and sunbathe behind the wall. No one could see us, and I used to take down my thick stockings and let my skin feel the sun. Mavis would look at my scabs with pity as she stretched out her white legs next to my mottled ones.

‘Do they hurt?' she said once, eyeing the shiny red patches on my knees that looked like continents rising from the sea, with a whole lot of separate islands dotted about up and down from my ankles to the top of my legs.

‘Flaming agony,' I said, although this was a lie. It was just that the scabs itched a lot and sometimes I couldn't help scratching. Then the blood would seep through my stockings, even though I wore two thick pairs. I always had to be on the lookout for the stains.