Starlight (13 page)

The taxi fare would have come out of his own pocket: he thought he knew human nature well enough, after fifty years of bashing at it, to be sure that Mr Fisher would not steal anything on his way out. A strange old man. Oddly likeable.

The church clock struck the hour, high up in the windy moonlight. St. Thomas’s Eve! Tomorrow would be the shortest day.

At Christmas, Gladys relied upon the arrival of two envelopes from ladies for whom she had formerly worked, and on the morning of the twenty-third she and Annie were awaiting the postman.

‘Sure not to be here till round about eleven and then it’ll be the van,’ observed Gladys, stationed at the bedroom window overlooking the street.

‘Oh I can’t think about nothing else but them moving in. I do think it was too bad not to ’ave let us know – that Peggy – she’s downright unkind.’

‘Well let’s hope they’ll let us have Christmas Day in peace. Sure to, come to that. Whoever heard of anyone moving in on Christmas Day?’

‘You don’t know, Glad,’ Annie said with dismal significance, ‘that sort’ – she meant the sort employed by Thomas Pearson – ‘they don’t work not like ordinary people.’

‘Oh do for pity’s sake cheer up – here’s the van!’

Gladys ended on a joyful scream and ran across the room. She hurried down the stairs, surprising in their pink and grey new carpet after the dinginess of the sisters’ landing, and dashed open the freshly painted front door.

If it had been a white postman, there would have been perhaps friendly exchanges about smartness, come into a fortune, won the Pools, or even ‘about time, too’, concerning the redecorating. But the two letters she almost snatched from a well-kept black hand were delivered without a smile, and intellectual eyes, behind glasses, looked at her gravely. ‘Thanks ever so – just what I wanted!’ she cried, beaming. There was no answering smile but an expression of benevolence replaced the gravity.

Educated student. Doing it for the money. Don’t laugh, might crack something, decided Gladys, toiling up the stairs with the letters. ‘Annie, Annie, it’s all right – they’ve come!’ she began to scream, as she reached the landing. ‘Now we can enjoy ourselves.’

There followed a delightful half hour, while they examined the three pound notes sent by Mrs Harriman and the two sent by Mrs Lysaght, and discussed how they would spend them.

Mrs Lysaght was Mr Geddes’s former parishioner who had moved to Hampstead. It was she who had persuaded Gladys to resume the church-going that Gladys, more from the delightful pressure of living than from indolence or disinclination, had allowed to lapse: and perhaps it was the only contribution towards leaving the world a better place than she found it that Mrs Lysaght had made.

Gladys did not have to leave for work until the afternoon, and she was just, with a pleasant sense of leisure, swathing herself in the cardigans and mufflers fitted to face the piercing wind while she ‘popped round to Joneses’; and debating with Annie whether, in view of their Christmas box, she might not instead go up the Archway in search of some nice bargains in the way of food, when the bedroom door was roughly opened. Gladys screamed. Annie cowered into her wrappings.

‘You Gladys Barnes?’ demanded the dark man who stood there, unsmiling, with a hand on the door.

Gladys, open-mouthed, nodded.

‘Mrs Pearson’s moving in this afternoon,’ he said. ‘The men’ll be here soon. You be here to let them in.’

‘I – I –’ Gladys was trembling so that the words would hardly come, but she found some courage. ‘I can’t, I got to go to work, ’meditely after lunch, they’re expecting me. And it’s the money –’

‘Where do you work?’ he interrupted, flashing a glance, terrifying to both sisters, on Annie, who had ventured to move from the strained position into which fear had flung her. She froze again, and Gladys said:

‘Kyperiou’s, it’s a caff in Archway Road, but please don’t go making trouble there, it’s my job, see, nice people they are –’

‘You do what I say and there won’t be trouble.’

Gladys’s terror was beginning to lessen; because, in her nature, hope and gaiety were always ready to pipe up like two irrepressible little birds. She actually thought,
You can see he’s Peggy’s father
. For she had known, from his first appalling appearance, who this was … the legendary, the horrific, the dreaded rackman in person.

‘It’s the money,’ she said, indignation beginning to struggle out through fear, ‘I was counting on it – must ’ave it. For Christmas.’

He took out a pocket-book bulging with red and green.

‘Here.’ He pulled out a note.

But Gladys now felt actually capable of standing up to the creature; the fact that he was so like his daughter had made her feel him less of a monster.

‘It’s one pound ten it’ll be,’ she said quickly, ‘a pound for the two days, and then there’s the staff box.’

‘I shan’t want you for two days, only for today.’ He crumpled up the note and threw it at her feet. ‘Here – do what I say.’

‘It’s not
right
,’ burst out Gladys, crimsoning. ‘It – it’s not
right
, that’s what it is.’

He shrugged. ‘Ah, perhaps not. A lot of things aren’t, in this world. What you have to remember is
facts
. It’s a
fact
that I own this house, and the one next door, and the row up the street. It’s a
fact
I could turn you out this minute. It’s a
fact
you owe me a month’s rent –’

‘I got it,’ Gladys dared to interrupt, ‘and I got Mr Fisher’s upstairs too – in case you came in unexpected. We was wondering –’

He held out a dark hand, impatiently twitching the fingers.

There followed some bustling and removal of dirty notes and silver from the depths of a handbag which had once been smart. Hesitatingly, her detestation and fear showing on her face, Gladys held them out.

He forced her to advance, step by step, until she had put them on his outstretched palm; flat, insolent, not even cupped to receive them.

He pocketed them and said again, ‘You stay here today,’ and was turning away.

Gladys made an effort that seemed to crack something in her spirit.

‘You thinking of making any changes?’ she blurted: and could hardly believe that the awful question which had been throbbing within her for so many days, had actually sounded out on the air; the question sometimes hinted timidly to Peggy, that Peggy had always ignored, and now put to the rackman himself.

He did not look round. ‘What changes?’ he said, half-way through the door.

‘Rents … and that …’ she faltered.

‘You do what Mrs Pearson wants, you always do what Mrs Pearson wants. Then there won’t be any changes.’ He moved on, not looking round.

‘And the old gentleman – him upstairs,’ she gabbled, daring to follow, ‘he’s ever so old, earns a bit showing off his little dolls – pays regular –’

‘He can stay. But tell him; always do what Mrs Pearson wants. Then there’ll be no “changes”, as you call them.’

He was gone.

As may be imagined, this left the sisters with conversation for the rest of the day, and had not even more interesting events begun to occur almost immediately, the topic would have lasted well into the next week.

Gladys was divided between terror lest her job should be lost to her through this intolerable piece of interference, and overwhelming relief that she had at last asked the cruel question and received reassurance.

Not that you could trust a rackman, of course. But for the time being … And, as she lived from minute to minute, and was acutely uncomfortable whenever facts compelled her to look a few days ahead, she felt that a load of worry had been rolled away.

The note was still lying, crumpled up, on the floor. Her first action was to pounce on it; when you live from minute to minute and are over seventy, with an invalid sister to support, you can’t afford to leave notes lying at your feet, however insolently they may have arrived there.

‘Ten shillins,’ she announced to Annie, who had not uttered a sound since the appearance of their visitor, ‘I’ll go along tomorrow same as usual. Well!’ relishingly, as her spirits soared, ‘I’m glad I’ve seen him close to, they say they mostly never come near the places they buy (like murderers only the opposite), not that he’s much to look at, come to that, those black eyes. I never do trust ’em, very like Peggy, isn’t he, funny, it must be, having a rackman for your dad but I don’t expect she minds, doesn’t notice I expect, very wrapped up in herself she is, I’ve always said so, some man in her history I wouldn’t be surprised, s’pose I may as well go and do the shopping seeing it’s stopped snowing, hope I don’t slip that’s all, could you fancy a bit of boiling bacon, they had some round at Joneses for one and six, not all that fatty, you feeling all right, old dear?’

The last question was accompanied by a dart to the bed, where Annie had suddenly fallen back despairingly among the pillows.

‘Oh Glad! That awful man – in our home!’

‘Cheer up – he didn’t do no harm. There’s always the pleece –’

‘The pleece! Oh Glad! In our home!’

‘Oh shut up do – you give me the sick!’ burst out Gladys, shaking the pillows as if they were Annie herself. ‘It’s all right, isn’t it? We got ten shillins – better than nothing, and he said he ain’t going to make no changes –’

‘In our home! I can’t get over it – ’ow can you take his wicked money?’

‘Money’s money,’ pronounced Gladys with a last jerk of the bedclothes. ‘Couldn’t ’elp meself, could I? S’pose you’d of liked me to chuck it back at him?’

‘Coming into our home and throwing his wicked money at us – money got out of little Nicky and Alexander I shouldn’t wonder. You ’eard anywhere they might of gone?’

The coloured family living farther up the Walk had surprised the sisters by a sudden departure.

‘Not a sound.’ Gladys’s tone was good-humoured again; she welcomed the change of subject. ‘I’ll ask that black what sweeps the road up Churchill Rise, he might know (if he isn’t hiding up in that arch if it starts snowing, I’ll bet that’s where he’ll be, and can you blame him, I often think, if we’re cold what about them), could you fancy a bovvil before I go off?’

On Annie’s giving a weak nod, the subject of Nicky and Alexander’s problematical whereabouts was gone into at length, while Gladys half-filled a kettle from the tap on the landing, set it to boil on the rusty ancient cooker, and opened a new one-ounce bottle of Bovril.

The hours were long for Annie while her sister was at work, and they had been greatly brightened by the daily visits from Nicky and Alexander on their way home from school, invited in by Gladys after many commands, of a truly awesome impressiveness, Not to Touch and Not to Lark About and to Keep Out of That Mrs Simms’s Way, while the pair silently listened; their four jetty eyes had widened and widened until they suggested dark jewels from some remote planet. Annie mourned and missed Nicky and Alexander, doubtless driven out, with their numerous relations, by the rackman.

‘Make it strong, Glad. I feel that weak.’

‘Don’t I always? I hate dish-wash.’

‘You don’t ’ave to tell me. It’s not me gives tea to ’alf the street if they pops in.’ Annie reclined on her rearranged pillows, sighing at intervals, while Gladys spooned out the Bovril with a lavish hand. ‘It’s the shock,’ she added.

Annie was still sipping, and Gladys was about to go out, when her sister exclaimed, ‘Glad! You can’t go. ’E said so.’

Gladys paused, staring, then sniffed.

‘Like his sauce … but I s’pose … well, they’ll be open till eight …’

She began to un-swathe. ‘If they was to come and there wasn’t no-one to let them in and they complained … but I don’t like it, no I don’t, but what can you do? … here, I’ll have a bovvil too, I could do with it.’

The consumption of the Bovril spread over into lunch, for there was so much to talk about.

Gladys minced up the remains of the previous day’s bestend-of-neck (New Zealand) in the clumsy forty-year-old mincer, and, with the addition of two potatoes, well salted and mashed with half a gill of milk left from their breakfast, produced a shepherd’s pie that was just not quite enough for two.

But the Bovril had provided a passable foundation, and, with six staleish brussels sprouts added, there was in fact a lunch.

Gladys could cook. She loved her food, and she had a most un-English talent for making something tasty out of scraps that most women would have thrown away. It is not too much to say that she and Annie would have died years ago from some illness invited by malnutrition if they had not been carefully fed.

‘Quite nice, these sprouts,’ commented Annie, sitting up in bed with her lunch spread out on the old papier mâché tray with its spray of Japanese flowers. ‘When did you get ’em, Glad?’

‘Saturday – or was it Monday? I got a half. Pull the leaves off. Make ’em small, I hate those great lumps of sprouts. These’re all right inside, even if they are old. Like me,’ and Gladys went off into a great cackle, in which Annie more primly joined.

In the midst of their meal, there came a grinding of wheels outside, followed by a great bang on Lily Cottage’s front door.