Stories (58 page)

M
aureen Watson was born at 93 Nelson’s Way, N.1, in 1942. She did not remember the war, or rather, when people said “The War,” she thought of Austerity: couponed curtains, traded clothes, the half-pound of butter swapped for the quarter of tea. (Maureen’s parents preferred tea to butter.) Further back, at the roots of her life, she felt a movement of fire and shadow, a leaping and a subsidence of light. She did not know whether this was a memory or a picture she had formed, perhaps from what her parents had told her of the night the bomb fell two streets from Nelson’s Way and they had all stood among piles of smoking rubble for a day and night, watching firemen hose the flames. This feeling was not only of danger, but of fatality, of being helpless before great impersonal forces, and was how she most deeply felt, saw, or thought an early childhood which the social viewer would describe perhaps like this: “Maureen Watson, conceived by chance on an unexpected granted-at-the-last-minute leave, at the height of the worst war in history, infant support of a mother only occasionally upheld (the chances of war deciding) by a husband she had met in a bomb shelter during an air raid: poor baby, born into a historical upheaval which destroyed forty million and might very well have destroyed her.”

As for Maureen, her memories and the reminiscences of her parents made her dismiss the whole business as boring, and nothing to do with her.

It was at her seventh birthday party she first made this clear. She wore a mauve organdy frock with a pink sash, and her
golden hair was in ringlets. One of the mothers said: “This is the first unrationed party dress my Shirley has had. It’s a shame, isn’t it?” And her own mother said: “Well of course these war children don’t know what they’ve missed.” At which Maureen said: “I am not a war child.” “What are you then, love?” said her mother, fondly exchanging glances.

“I’m Maureen,” said Maureen.

“And I’m Shirley,” said Shirley, joining cause.

Shirley Banner was Maureen’s best friend. The Watsons and the Banners were better than the rest of the street. The Watsons lived in an end house, at higher weekly payments. The Banners had a sweets-paper-and-tobacco shop.

Maureen and Shirley remembered (or had they been told?) that once Nelson’s Way was a curved terrace of houses. Then the ground-floor level had broken into shops: a grocer’s, a laundry, a hardware, a baker, a dairy. It seemed as if every second family in the street ran a shop to supply certain defined needs of the other families. What other needs were there? Apparently none, for Maureen’s parents applied for permission to the Council, and the ground floor of their house became a second grocery shop, by way of broken-down walls, new shelves, a deepfreeze. Maureen remembered two small rooms, each with flowered curtains where deep shadows moved and flickered from the two small fires that burned back to back in the centre wall that divided them. These two rooms disappeared in clouds of dust from which sweet-smelling planks of wood stuck out. Strange but friendly men paid her compliments on her golden corkscrews and asked her for kisses, which they did not get. They gave her sips of sweet tea from their canteens (filled twice a day by her mother) and made her bracelets of the spiralling fringes of yellow wood. Then they disappeared. There was the new shop. Maureen’s Shop. Maureen went with her mother to the sign shop to arrange for these two words to be written in yellow paint on a blue ground.

Even without the name, Maureen would have known that the shop was connected with hopes for her future; and that her future was what her mother lived for.

She was pretty. She had always known it. Even where the shadows of fire and dark were, they had played over a pretty baby. “You were such a pretty baby, Maureen.” And at the birthday parties: “Maureen’s growing really pretty, Mrs. Watson.”
But all babies and little girls are pretty, she knew that well enough…. No, it was something more. For Shirley was plump, dark—pretty. Yet their parents’—or rather, their mothers’—talk had made it clear from the start that Shirley was not in the same class as Maureen.

When Maureen was ten, there was an episode of importance. The two mothers were in the room above Maureen’s Shop and they were brushing their little girls’ hair out. Shirley’s mother said: “Maureen could do really well for herself, Mrs. Watson.” And Mrs. Watson nodded, but sighed deeply. The sigh annoyed Maureen, because it contradicted the absolute certainty that she felt (it had been bred into her) about her future. Also because it had to do with the boring era which she remembered, or thought she did, as a tiger-striped movement of fire. Chance: Mrs. Watson’s sigh was like a prayer to the gods of Luck; it was the sigh of a small helpless thing being tossed about by big seas and gales. Maureen made a decision, there and then, that she had nothing in common with the little people who were prepared to be helpless and tossed about. For she was going to be quite different. She was already different. Not only The War but the shadows of war had long gone, except for talk in the newspapers which had nothing to do with her. The shops were full of everything. The Banners’ sweets-tobacco-paper shop had just been done up; and Maureen’s was short of nothing. Maureen and Shirley, two pretty little girls in smart mother-made dresses, were children of plenty, and knew it, because their parents kept saying (apparently they did not care how tedious they were): “These kids don’t lack for anything, do they? They don’t know what it can be like, do they?” This, with the suggestion that they ought to be grateful for not lacking anything, always made the children sulky, and they went off to flirt their full, many-petticoated skirts where the neighbours could see them and pay them compliments.

Eleven years. Twelve years. Already Shirley had subsided into her role of pretty girl’s plainer girl friend, although of course she was not plain at all. Fair girl, dark girl, and Maureen by mysterious birthright was the “pretty one,” and there was no doubt in either of their minds which girl the boys would try first for a date. Yet this balance was by no means as unfair as it seemed. Maureen, parrying and jesting on street-corners, at bus stops, knew she was doing battle for two, because the boys she discarded Shirley got. Shirley got far more boys than she would
have done without Maureen, who, for her part, needed—more, had to have—a foil. Her role demanded one.

They both left school at fifteen, Maureen to work in the shop. She was keeping her eyes open: her mother’s phrase. She wore a slim white overall, pinned her fair curls up, was neat and pretty in her movements. She smiled calmly when customers said: “My word, Mrs. Watson, your Maureen’s turned out, hasn’t she?”

About that time there was a second moment of consciousness. Mrs. Watson was finishing a new dress for Maureen, and the fitting was taking rather long. Maureen fidgeted and her mother said: “Well, it’s your capital, isn’t it? You’ve got to see that, love.” And she added the deep unconscious sigh. Maureen said: “Well don’t go on about it, it’s not very nice, is it?” And what she meant was not that the idea was not very nice but that she had gone beyond needing to be reminded about it; she was feeling the irritated embarrassment of a child when it is reminded to clean its teeth after this habit has become second nature. Mrs. Watson saw and understood this, and sighed again; and this time it was the maternal sigh which means: Oh dear, you are growing up fast! “Oh Mum,” said Maureen, “sometimes you just make me tired, you do really.”

Sixteen. She was managing her capital perfectly. Her assets were a slight delicate prettiness, and a dress sense that must have been a gift from God, or more probably because she had been reading the fashion magazines since practically before consciousness. Shirley had put in six months of beehive hair, pouting scarlet lips, and an air of sullen disdain; but Maureen’s sense of herself was much finer. She modelled herself on film stars, but with an understanding of how far she could go—of what was allowable to Maureen. So the experience of being Bardot, Monroe, or whoever it was, refined her: she took from it an essence, which was learning to be a vehicle for other people’s fantasies. So while Shirley had been a dozen stars, but really been them, in violent temporary transmogrifications, from which she emerged (often enough with a laugh) Shirley—plump, good-natured, and herself—Maureen remained herself through every role, but creating her appearance, like an alter ego, to meet the expression in people’s eyes.

Round about sixteen, another incident: prophetic. Mrs. Watson had a cousin who worked in the dress trade, and this man,
unthought of for many years, was met at a wedding. He commented on Maureen, a vision in white gauze. Mrs. Watson worked secretly on this slender material for some weeks; then wrote to him: Could Maureen be a model? He had only remote connections with the world of expensive clothes and girls, but he dropped in to the shop with frankly personal aims. Maureen in a white wrapper was still pretty, very; but her remote air told this shrewd man that she would certainly not go with him. She was saving herself; he knew that air of self-esteem very well from other exemplars. Such girls do not go out with middleaged cousins, except as a favour or to get something. However, he told Mrs. Watson that Maureen was definitely model material, but that she would have to do something about her voice. (He meant her accent, of course; and so Mrs. Watson understood him.) He left addresses and advice, and Mrs. Watson was in a state of quivering ambitions. She said so to Maureen: “This is your chance, girl. Take it.” What Maureen heard was: “This is my chance.”

Maureen, nothing if not alert for her Big Chance, for which her whole life had prepared her, accepted her mother’s gift of a hundred pounds (she did not thank her; no thanks were due) and actually wrote to the school where she would be taught voice training.

Then she fell into sullen withdrawal, which she understood so little that a week had gone by before she said she must be sick—or something. She was rude to her mother: very rare, this. Her father chided her for it: even rarer. But he spoke in such a way that Maureen understood for the first time that this drive, this push, this family effort to gain her a glamorous future, came from her mother; her father was not implicated. For him, she was a pretty-enough girl, spoiled by a silly woman.

Maureen slowly understood she was not sick, she was growing up. For one thing: if she changed her “voice” so as to be good enough to mix with new people, she would no longer be part of this street, she would no longer be “our Maureen.” What would she be then? Her mother knew: she would marry a duke and be whisked off to Hollywood. Maureen examined her mother’s ideas for her and shrank with humiliation. She was above all no fool, but she had been very foolish. For one thing, when she used her eyes, with the scales of illusion off them, she saw that the million streets of London blossomed with girls
as pretty as she. What, then, had fed the illusion in herself and in other people? What accounted for the special time, the special looks that always greeted her? Why, nothing more than that she, Maureen, because of her mother’s will behind her, had carried herself from childhood as something special, destined for a great future.

Meanwhile (as she clearly saw) she was in 93 Nelson’s Way, serving behind the counter of Maureen’s Shop. (She now wondered what the neighbours had thought—before they got used to it—about her mother’s fondness so terribly displayed.) She was dependent on nothing less than that a duke or a film producer would walk in to buy a quarter of tea and some sliced bread.

Maureen sulked. So her father said. So her mother complained. Maureen was—thinking? Yes. But more, a wrong had been done her, she knew it, and the sulking was more of a protective silence while she grew a scab over a wound.

She emerged demanding that the hundred pounds should be spent on sending her to secretarial school. Her parents complained that she could have learned how to be a secretary for nothing if she had stayed on at school another year. She said: “Yes, but you didn’t have the sense to make me, did you? What did you think—I was going to sell butter like you all my life?” Unfair, on the face of it; but deeply fair, in view of what they had done to her. In their different ways they knew it. (Mr. Watson knew in his heart, for instance, that he should never have allowed his wife to call the shop “Maureen’s.”) Maureen went, then, to secretarial school for a year. Shirley went with her: she had been selling cosmetics in the local branch of a big chain store. To raise the hundred pounds was difficult for Shirley’s parents: the shop had done badly, had been bought by a big firm; her father was an assistant in it. For that matter, it wasn’t all that easy for the Watsons: the hundred pounds was the result of small savings and pinchings over years.

This was the first time Maureen had thought of the word “capital” in connection with money, rather than her own natural assets: it was comparatively easy for the Watsons to raise money, because they had capital: the Banners had no capital. (Mrs. Watson said the Banners had had bad luck.) Maureen strengthened her will; and as a result the two families behaved even more as if the girls would have different futures—or, to put it another way, that while the two sums of a hundred pounds
were the same, the Watsons could be expected to earn more on theirs than the Banners.