The Complete Short Stories (59 page)

Sometimes, on summer
Sunday afternoons Raymond and Lou took their friends for a run in their car,
ending up at a riverside roadhouse. The first time they turned up with Oxford
and Henry they felt defiant; but there were no objections, there was no trouble
at all. Soon the dark pair ceased to be a novelty. Oxford St John took up with
a pretty red-haired bookkeeper, and Henry Pierce, missing his companion, spent
more of his time at the Parkers’ flat. Lou and Raymond had planned to spend
their two weeks’ summer holiday in London. ‘Poor Henry,’ said Lou. ‘He’ll miss
us.

Once you brought him out
he was nor so quiet as you thought at first. Henry was twenty-four, desirous of
knowledge in all fields, shining very much in eyes, skin, teeth, which made him
seem all the more eager. He called out the maternal in Lou, and to some extent
the avuncular in Raymond. Lou used to love him when he read outlines from his
favourite poems which he had copied into an exercise book.

Haste thee, nymph, and bring with thee

Jest and youthful jollity,

Sport that …

Lou would interrupt: ‘You
should say jest, jollity — not yest, yollity.’

‘Jest,’ he said
carefully. ‘And laughter holding both his sides,’ he continued.
‘Laughter
—
hear that, Lou? —
laughter.
That’s what the human race was made for.
Those folks that go round gloomy, Lou, they …’

Lou loved this talk.
Raymond puffed his pipe benignly. After Henry had gone Raymond would say what a
pity it was such an intelligent young fellow had lapsed. For Henry had been
brought up in a Roman Catholic mission. He had, however, abandoned religion. He
was fond of saying, ‘The superstition of today is the science of yesterday.’

‘I can’t allow,’ Raymond
would say, ‘that the Catholic Faith is superstition. I can’t allow that.’

‘He’ll return to the
Church one day’ — this was Lou’s contribution, whether Henry was present or
not. If she said it in front of Henry he would give her an angry look. These
were the only occasions when Henry lost his cheerfulness and grew quiet again.

Raymond and Lou prayed
for Henry, that he might regain his faith. Lou said her rosary three times a
week before the Black Madonna.

‘He’ll miss us when we
go on our holidays.’

Raymond telephoned to
the hotel in London. ‘Have you a single room for a young gentleman accompanying
Mr and Mrs Parker?’ He added, ‘A coloured gentleman.’ To his pleasure a room
was available, and to his relief there was no objection to Henry’s colour.

They enjoyed their
London holiday, but it was somewhat marred by a visit to that widowed sister of
Lou’s to whom she allowed a pound a week towards the rearing of her eight
children. Lou had not seen her sister Elizabeth for nine years.

They went to her one day
towards the end of their holiday. Henry sat at the back of the car beside a
large suitcase stuffed with old clothes for Elizabeth. Raymond at the wheel
kept saying, ‘Poor Elizabeth — eight kids,’ which irritated Lou, though she
kept her peace.

Outside the underground
station at Victoria Park, where they stopped to ask the way, Lou felt a strange
sense of panic. Elizabeth lived in a very downward quarter of Bethnal Green,
and in the past nine years since she had seen her Lou’s memory of the shabby
ground-floor rooms with their peeling walls and bare boards, had made a kinder
nest for itself. Sending off the postal order to her sister each week she had
gradually come to picture the habitation at Bethnal Green in an almost monastic
light; it would be bare but well-scrubbed, spotless, and shining with Brasso
and holy poverty. The floor-boards gleamed. Elizabeth was grey-haired, lined,
but neat. The children were well behaved, sitting down betimes to their broth
in two rows along an almost refectory table. It was not till they had reached
Victoria Park that Lou felt the full force of the fact that everything would be
different from what she had imagined. ‘It may have gone down since I was last
there,’ she said to Raymond who had never visited Elizabeth before.

‘What’s gone down?’

‘Poor Elizabeth’s place.’

Lou had not taken much
notice of Elizabeth’s dull little monthly letters, almost illiterate, for
Elizabeth, as she herself always said, was not much of a scholar.

James is at
another job I hope that’s the finish of the bother I had my blood pressure
there was a Health visitor very nice. Also the assistance they sent my Dinner
all the time and for the kids at home they call it meals on Wheels. I pray to
the Almighty that James is well out of his bother he never lets on at sixteen
their all the same never open his mouth but Gods eyes are not shut. Thanks for
P.O. you will be rewarded your affect sister Elizabeth.

Lou tried to piece
together in her mind the gist of nine years’ such letters. James was the
eldest; she supposed he had been in trouble.

‘I ought to have asked
Elizabeth about young James,’ said Lou. ‘She wrote to me last year that he was
in a bother, there was talk of him being sent away, but I didn’t take it in at
the time, I was busy.’

‘You can’t take
everything on your shoulders,’ said Raymond. ‘You do very well by Elizabeth.’
They had pulled up outside the house where Elizabeth lived on the ground floor.
Lou looked at the chipped paint, the dirty windows and torn grey-white curtains
and was reminded with startling clarity of her hopeless childhood in Liverpool
from which, miraculously, hope had lifted her, and had come true, for the nuns
had got her that job; and she had trained as a nurse among white-painted beds,
and white shining walls, and tiles, hot water everywhere and Dettol without
stint. When she had first married she had wanted all white-painted furniture
that you could wash and liberate from germs; but Raymond had been for oak, he
did not understand the pleasure of hygiene and new enamel paint, for his
upbringing had been orderly, he had been accustomed to a lounge suite and
autumn tints in the front room all his life. And now Lou stood and looked at the
outside of Elizabeth’s place and felt she had gone right back.

On the way back to the hotel Lou chattered
with relief that it was over. ‘Poor Elizabeth, she hasn’t had much of a chance.
I liked little Francis, what did you think of little Francis, Ray?’

Raymond did not like
being called Ray, but he made no objection for he knew that Lou had been under
a strain. Elizabeth had not been very pleasant. She had expressed admiration
for Lou’s hat, bag, gloves and shoes which were all navy blue, but she had used
an accusing tone. The house had been smelly and dirty. ‘I’ll show you round,’
Elizabeth had said in a tone of mock refinement, and they were forced to push
through a dark narrow passage behind her skinny form till they came to the big room
where the children slept. A row of old iron beds each with a tumble of dark
blanket rugs, no sheets. Raymond was indignant at the sight and hoped that Lou
was not feeling upset. He knew very well Elizabeth had a decent living income
from a number of public sources, and was simply a slut, one of those who would
not help themselves.

‘Ever thought of taking a
job, Elizabeth?’ he had said, and immediately realized his stupidity. But
Elizabeth took her advantage. ‘What d’you mean?
I’m
not going to leave
my kids in no nursery.
I’m
not going to send them to no home. What kids
need these days is a good home life and that’s what they get.’ And she added, ‘God’s
eyes are not shut,’ in a tone which was meant for him, Raymond, to get at him
for doing well in life.

Raymond distributed
half-crowns to the younger children and deposited on the table half-crowns for
those who were out playing in the street.

‘Goin’ already?’ said
Elizabeth in her tone of reproach. But she kept eyeing Henry with interest, and
the reproachful tone was more or less a routine affair.

‘You from the States?’
Elizabeth said to Henry.

Henry sat on the edge of
his sticky chair and answered, no, from Jamaica, while Raymond winked at him to
cheer him.

‘During the war there
was a lot of boys like you from the States,’ Elizabeth said, giving him a
sideways look.

Henry held out his hand
to the second youngest child, a girl of seven, and said, ‘Come talk to me.

The child said nothing,
only dipped into the box of sweets which Lou had brought.

‘Come talk,’ said Henry.

Elizabeth laughed. ‘If
she does talk you’ll be sorry you ever asked. She’s got a tongue in her head,
that one. You should hear her cheeking up to the teachers.’ Elizabeth’s bones
jerked with laughter among her loose clothes. There was a lopsided double bed
in the corner, and beside it a table cluttered with mugs, tins, a comb and
brush, a number of hair curlers, a framed photograph of the Sacred Heart, and
also Raymond noticed what he thought erroneously to be a box of contraceptives.
He decided to say nothing to Lou about this; he was quite sure she must have
observed other things which he had not; possibly things of a more distressing
nature.

Lou’s chatter on the way
back to the hotel had a touch of hysteria. ‘Raymond, dear,’ she said in her
most chirpy West End voice, ‘I simply
had
to give the poor dear
all
my
next week’s housekeeping money. We shall have to starve, darling, when we get
home. That’s
simply
what we shall have to do.’

‘OK,’ said Raymond.

‘I ask you,’ Lou
shrieked, ‘what else could I do, what
could
I do?’

‘Nothing at all,’ said
Raymond, ‘but what you’ve done.’

‘My own
sister,
my
dear,’ said Lou; ‘and did you see the way she had her hair bleached? — All
streaky, and she used to have a lovely head of hair.’

‘I wonder if she tries
to raise herself?’ said Raymond. ‘With all those children she could surely get
better accommodation if only she —’

‘That sort,’ said Henry,
leaning forward from the back of the car, never moves. It’s the slum mentality,
man. Take some folks I’ve seen back home —’

‘There’s no comparison,’
Lou snapped suddenly, ‘this is quite a different case.

Raymond glanced at her
in surprise; Henry sat back, offended. Lou was thinking wildly, what a cheek
him
talking like a snob. At least Elizabeth’s white.

Their prayers for the return of faith to
Henry Pierce were so far answered in that he took a tubercular turn which was
followed by a religious one. He was sent off to a sanatorium in Wales with a
promise from Lou and Raymond to visit him before Christmas. Meantime, they
applied themselves to Our Lady for the restoration of Henry’s health.

Oxford St John, whose
love affair with the red-haired girl had come to grief, now frequented their
flat, but he could never quite replace Henry in their affections. Oxford was
older and less refined than Henry. He would stand in front of the glass in
their kitchen and tell himself, ‘Man, you just a big black bugger.’ He kept
referring to himself as black, which of course he was, Lou thought, but it was
not the thing to say. He stood in the doorway with his arms and smile thrown
wide: ‘I am black but comely, O ye daughters of Jerusalem.’ And once, when
Raymond was out, Oxford brought the conversation round to that question of
being black
all over,
which made Lou very uncomfortable and she kept
looking at the clock and dropped stitches in her knitting.

Three times a week when
she went to the black Our Lady with her rosary to ask for the health of Henry
Pierce, she asked also that Oxford St John would get another job in another
town, for she did not like to make objections, telling her feelings to Raymond;
there were no objections to make that you could put your finger on. She could
not very well complain that Oxford was common; Raymond despised snobbery, and
so did she, it was a very delicate question. She was amazed when, within three
weeks, Oxford announced that he was thinking of looking for a job in
Manchester.

Lou said to Raymond, ‘Do
you know, there’s something
in
what they say about the bog-oak statue in
the church.’

‘There may be,’ said
Raymond. ‘People say so.

Lou could not tell him
how she had petitioned the removal of Oxford St John. But when she got a letter
from Henry Pierce to say he was improving, she told Raymond, ‘You see, we asked
for Henry to get back the Faith, and so he did. Now we ask for his recovery and
he’s improving.’

‘He’s having good
treatment at the sanatorium,’ Raymond said. But he added, ‘Of course we’ll have
to keep up the prayers.’ He himself; though not a rosary man, knelt before the
Black Madonna every Saturday evening after Benediction to pray for Henry
Pierce.

Whenever they saw Oxford
he was talking of leaving Whitney Clay. Raymond said, ‘He’s making a big
mistake going to Manchester. A big place can be very lonely. I hope he’ll
change his mind.’

‘He won’t,’ said Lou, so
impressed was she now by the powers of the Black Madonna. She was good and
tired of Oxford St John with his feet up on her cushions, and calling himself a
nigger.

‘We’ll miss him,’ said
Raymond, ‘he’s such a cheery big soul.’

‘We will,’ said Lou. She
was reading the parish magazine, which she seldom did, although she was one of
the voluntary workers who sent them out, addressing hundreds of wrappers every
month. She had vaguely noticed, in previous numbers, various references to the
Black Madonna, how she had granted this or that favour. Lou had heard that
people sometimes came from neighbouring parishes to pray at the Church of the
Sacred Heart because of the statue. Some said they came from all over England,
but whether this was to admire the art-work or to pray, Lou was not sure. She
gave her attention to the article in the parish magazine: