Starlight (6 page)

‘It’ll be a bit lonely for me, Glad. Stuck ’ere all day, not a soul to speak to.’

The van and its load turned the corner and was gone.

‘P’raps he’ll let the downstairs to someone nice, now. Respectable. Not like her. That hair! looked like that Awful Tower in Paris.’ Young Mrs Simms’s hair, in Gladys’s mind, condemned her more than the baby born four months after marriage; the baby at least, Gladys would say, was natural.

Now that the van had driven away, the Walk was quiet except for the little coloured boys, playing some unobtrusive game with marbles on the ridge of concrete outside their front garden, from which the iron railings had been taken to make fighterbombers long, long before they had been born. Occasionally, a passer-by or a car went along the road at the end of the Walk. Gladys stretched, and folded her arms comfortably.

‘Well –’ she was beginning, and Annie was anticipating a favourite observation about the baby and its problematical new frock, when her sister exclaimed – ‘Ullo!’

‘What’s up now?’

‘Young woman, smartish, looks like a foreigner.’ Gladys instantly let the curtain fall and remained rigid behind its concealment, staring.

But it was too late. A dark head was tilted back, dark eyes that had caught the curtain’s movement lazily surveyed the window, the sauntering footsteps slowed to a stop, and a voice called up leisurely:

‘Hullo?’

‘Cheek,’ muttered Gladys, ‘who does she think she is?’

‘Miss Barnes?’ called the voice. ‘I want to see you.’

‘Knows my name,’ hissed Gladys, with a lightning turn to the bed, where Annie was painfully divided between curiosity and some new threat from the rackman and had not quite decided whether to retreat.

‘That’s me,’ announced Gladys, suddenly opening the window and leaning out. ‘What is it that’s wanted, please?’

‘I want to see you. It’s about the house being done up. It belongs to my mother now,’ the girl said. She did not exactly smile: her expression suggested sunlight behind clouds on a close, hushed day.

‘Oh. I’ll come down.’ Gladys shut the window, with trembling limbs and banging heart.

Pausing only long enough to hiss quite a lot of information and comment to the cowering Annie, and to cast a swift glance over the parlour – yes, not too bad – and to dab fiercely at her hair, Gladys marched down the stairs and flung open the front door.

My lady was on the doorstep.

‘Good-morning,’ Gladys said, with meaning. This low calling up out of the street between total strangers would get no encouragement from her.

The concealed smile just broadened, like heat coming through the clouds.

‘Oh … hullo. My name’s Peggy Pearson. My mother wants me to look over the place and see about getting it done up.’

‘Well …’ Gladys began doubtfully, but before she could say any more, Peggy Pearson had stepped inside and was looking indolently about her; up at the plasterwork of the ceiling, the generous proportions of the stairs, the decent squareness of the hall.

‘Very dirty, isn’t it?’ she remarked at length.

Gladys, encouraged by a manner that seemed to show neither greed nor severity, was trying to summon courage to ask the questions never absent, now, from her mind and Annie’s; whether they were also haunting the mysterious tracts of Mr Fisher’s, she could not have said. But, momentarily, indignation at Peggy Pearson’s comment drove the questions from her mind.

‘She’s had a lot of trouble, slaving herself into the grave for him these ten years and all those men, never satisfied, a nice cook she is, up all hours on the Railways and then leaving it all to that Elsie, well, I said, I for one don’t blame you, and expecting to live comferable in her old age no wonder she sold it, always meaning to do it up though I don’t like the smell myself, turns me up, well it would anybody, wouldn’t it, you’d better see her. I don’t know nothing.’

‘That’s all right,’ said Peggy Pearson, still looking round, and Gladys was sure that she had not been listening. ‘What’s upstairs?’

‘My sister’s bedridden,’ said Gladys instantly.

‘All right. I shan’t eat her.’

Gladys led the way upstairs, the questions unasked.

‘It’s quite small,’ said the girl, having glanced into the recent home of the Simmses on the second floor, ‘it
is
dirty. But pretty, really … That your flat?’ glancing up the stairs.

‘It’s two rooms. We share the toilet. There’s no bath,’ said Gladys, raising her voice as she toiled up before the visitor so that Annie, now no doubt in full retreat, might realize the incredible fact that the rackman’s representative would any minute be upon her.

‘Oh, my mother’ll put one in. That little cupboard-place at the back would do. They could put in a new door.’

Plenty of money here, thought Gladys. Talking about putting in baths like you might buy a box of matches.

She opened the living-room door. Sunlight was streaming through the window and the distant fields, beyond the two miles of roofs, looked green as green. Peggy Pearson glanced round indifferently. Then her eye went to the farther room, where, half out of the balaclava, her two coats neatly buttoned and the
Mirror
spread before her, Annie looked up long enough to give a hospitalized smile. Miss Pearson returned it with a casual wave of one gloved hand and, after a glance about the room, turned away.

Gladys’s relief at seeing Annie undemoralized took the form of a slightly more cordial attitude towards their visitor. Tea might provide an interval in which
the questions
could be asked, and she was also anxious to keep the rackman’s daughter – if she was his daughter – from questions about the attic. Mr Fisher wouldn’t be able to stand up to shocks of this kind as stoutly as she, Gladys Barnes, had.

‘How about a cup of tea?’ she asked. ‘After all those stairs?’

‘Not so many,’ Peggy Pearson said. ‘All right.’ She sat down in one of the armchairs and began to take off her gloves. ‘Thanks.’

While she bustled about, Gladys began on the questions. It was no use: she had to know; and Annie and Mr Fisher must be thought of; the answers meant as fearfully much to them as they did to her.

‘Your mother thinking of making many changes here?’ she asked, with her back to the visitor while she elaborately hunted for biscuits which were staring up into her face.

‘Depends what you mean by changes.’ The voice held just a note – so slight that Gladys could wonder if it was there at all – of teasing.

‘Well’ – she suddenly turned to face her, with the biscuits; a bit of a girl, not even the owner, couldn’t be more than in her early twenties, she was not afraid of her, and would show it – ‘Rents, and that. She going to put them up?’ Gladys could find clear speech, when fear and desperation drove her.

Miss Pearson shook a dark head; small, the hair centre-parted and hanging like a nymph’s about small ears. She yawned behind a muscular hand.

‘Not … thinking … me and my sister was wondering … not … eviction?’

Trembling, she spilled some water as she poured it from the kettle into the pot.

The dreaded word was out, and Gladys stood staring, dismayed. Suppose it ‘put the idea into the daughter’s head’ and she suggested it to this unknown ‘mother’ – (could she be the white-swathed ghost in the rackman’s car?) – then she, Gladys would have brought it on them all.

‘My mother said you aren’t to be frightened. Is that mine? Thanks.’ She held out her hand for the cup. For once robbed of words, Gladys stood staring and for a moment did not pass it to her.

‘Who’s frightened?’ she demanded at last. Miss Pearson shrugged. ‘I don’t know. That’s what she said, though. Tell them they aren’t to be frightened.’

‘I’m not frightened. Nothing to be frightened about, far’s I can see.’

‘All right. She just said I was to tell you.’ Peggy Pearson bent her head over her cup and took an indifferent sip.

Gladys carried a cup through to Annie, whose eyes glared up at her with a hundred questions and all of them alarmed.

She had heard every word. Of course they were frightened, all of them, she and Glad and Mr Fisher – with him you couldn’t be certain, but he must be – but it wasn’t nice to hear it said right out. Oh, if the girl would only go away and leave Glad and her to talk it over! Why did Glad have to go and offer her tea? She was always wasting tea on people.
Frightened?

‘All right.’ Miss Pearson stood up, looking round for somewhere in the cluttered room to put down her cup. ‘I’m off. I’ll tell mother and she’ll send someone in.’

‘When’ll that be, then? We got to have some idea – my sister’s bedridden and I go out to work – I can’t go shifting stuff ready for the men and them not coming, I know what they are …’

‘These’ll come. They’re people my father knows. Some time early next week. You can move into those rooms downstairs, if you like, while they’re here, my mother said.’

Gladys stared. High-handed, but after all the girl’s mother did own the place. And was anything going to be done about those two rooms on the ground floor with their ceilings all down? Empty, they’d been, for years.

‘She said
he’d
bought it,’ she muttered.

‘Who said?’ Miss Pearson was pulling on the gloves that matched her suède coat.

‘Jean, she had the flat below us, only moved out this morning, she said she told her –’

‘Who told who? I can’t bother with all this … my father bought the place and he’s given it to my mother and she’s coming to live here and someone’s coming in to do it up and she told me to tell you all you aren’t to be frightened. That’s absolutely all I know. I’ve got to go now. ’Bye.’ She waved, without looking at her, towards Annie.

‘Coming to
live
’ere?’ Gladys repeated eagerly, leading the way across the landing where the tap lacking a washer dripped musically. ‘P’raps the men’ll see to that tap then?’

‘I dare say. Or someone will. My mother doesn’t like irritating noises, her nerves are bad.’

Gladys, inwardly raging to get back and discuss every detail of what had been said with her sister, now took a reckless plunge.

‘There’s a very old gentleman, educated he is, name of Fisher, well, it isn’t always he changes it every month, I mean, that’s his real name but he makes believe, he can do for himself, lives up in the attic, earns a bit showing off fancy dolls, do you think she’d let him stay on? He’s not really what you’d call mental.’

They were on the doorstep now and the door stood open to the bright November morning. This time Peggy Pearson laughed, shortly but outright, showing teeth small, white, and pointed as those of a young fox.

‘I expect so. She likes what you’d call mental people. ’Bye!’

She walked away, leaving Gladys staring after her.

The Reverend Gerald Corliss associated the season of Advent with the scent of violets.

This was the hour before the dawn of the Church’s year, when the end of the nave was in darkness by four o’clock, and Evensong was said under a night sky. To him, it always seemed darker, more patient, and more a time of waiting than the three days following Good Friday.

Born and brought up in the country, he knew well that English violets did not appear until the spring, but the flowers that haunted this season for him were not country ones; they belonged to London, and were sold in bunches made up with an alien leaf; sometimes at street corners, but most often in expensive flower-shops, and their faint scent was blent with that of the London smoke.

He thought of this idea about violets as a weakness in himself, and faced it resignedly. Nevertheless, he always bought a bunch of violets in the first week in December and put them in his room.

It was all petty; the association, the tiny self-indulgence, and the introspection. He did not need telling that, in ‘a world bursting with misery’, he should have felt ashamed; and he was ashamed. He had read somewhere that among the crosses bestowed by God temperament might be included, and the clerical essayist had added, almost casually, that it could be one of the heaviest.

There was no doubt about the nature of Father Gerald Corliss’s cross, and it weighed several ton.

A coffee-party was always held in the church hall at Saint James’s after Evensong in the first week in December. The Vicar, whose cross was not in his temperament, felt that the month was a gloomy one; and with the exhausting business of commercialized Christmas only three weeks away, to say nothing of the gloomier aspects of the Advent message looming over his congregation (although few of them took
that
seriously), he did feel that a little social intercourse sweetened with coffee and biscuits would lighten the atmosphere. On Sunday evening, December the third, therefore, some seventy people had gathered in Saint James’s Parish Hall.

Coffee was being served by three Youth Club members, and two seasoned elderly ladies, both the latter included in Mr Geddes’s list of ‘stand-bys’. These stayed in the background, in the little room fitted with tap and sink, behind the bar with its correct height and curve and its brilliant striped awning. There, scarcely hampered by lack of room and ancient equipment, they washed up and boiled water with the casual speed of some force of Nature.