The Fancy (24 page)

“What’s wrong with him?” asked her mother, who being a stranger to ill-health always suspected it in others.

“He had a football accident when he was a boy and got T.B. in the bone of his leg. It’s never cleared up. He limps,” she said sadly, more to herself than them, looking into the fire. They seemed to be satisfied. Her father went back to his book and her mother to her letters. Sheila had just decided that she had imagined their suspicions, when her mother, who was a great one for plugging a subject, said : “This man—Fielding or whatever his name is—is he in love with you?”

“Good Lord, no!” Sheila, taken by surprise, brought out the unnatural laugh again, much too loud. “I’ve told you, I hardly know him. I can’t think why you make such a song about him. He’s the most ordinary person—rather dull, really.”

“My dear Sheila,” said her father, in measured tones, “nobody’s making a song about anyone. We were merely taking a polite—and, I think, quite natural—parental interest in any friend of our daughter’s, but you got so excited about it——”

“I didn’t get excited,” began Sheila, crossly.

“Leave her alone, John,” said her mother, “she’s tired.”

“If you ask me, she’s overdoing it at that factory. She’s as pale as a ghost. I’ve half a mind to ask Dr. Lewis to have a look at her tomorrow ; he wouldn’t mind coming round on a Sunday. He might give her a certificate to say she’s got to have three weeks’ rest in the country. That’s what she really needs.”

“I know. I really get very worried about her. If she goes on like this, there’s no knowing what she may let herself in for. She’s got a nasty cough now as it is, and we’ve always got your poor grandfather to think of.” They went on talking about her over her head as if she were not there until Sheila, unable to stand it any longer, burst out : Do give me thean along“What d’you suppose would happen if all the girls who were tired decided to take three weeks’ rest? Who’d make the planes? You don’t seem to realise there’s a War on. What would you think of a soldier who felt tired and took three weeks off to recuperate? And I’m not tired. I never felt better in my life.”

“My darling child,” said her mother, with an indulgent little laugh, “we all know you’re very patriotic and I think it’s
quite
the right spirit, but you mustn’t lose your sense of proportion. I dare say you’re doing quite an important job, and doing it very well, too, I’ve no doubt, though you’ve never explained to me exactly what you do do, but I can’t believe that your being away for three weeks could seriously alter the course of the War one way or the other. You’ve got to consider your health, you know—it’s only fair to others, apart from yourself.”

“Well, what about the other girls?” repeated Sheila, heatedly. “Don’t you think they’re tired? Much tireder than me? You’ve no idea how some of them live—the married ones. They’ve got to get their children dressed and get their husband’s breakfast before they go to work, then they trail around to a day nursery with the kids, rush to the factory, work like stink all day, and miss their lunch probably because they’ve got to do all their shopping. Then in the evening they’ve got to go home and put the children to bed and do the housework and get their husband’s supper, and he probably comes home drunk and beats them,” she added, with a flash of imagination to give colour.

Her mother laughed uncomfortably, and her father said : “Quite the little Communist, aren’t we? You see, dearest child,” he went on, patiently, “it isn’t as if we didn’t know how marvellous some of these people are. We do. We all know that there’s a great deal of suffering and hardship, even today. You, of course, being young, think that you’re the only person to have discovered that there’s anything wrong about it. It’s a phase all young people go through. I did myself.” He laughed in silent reminiscence, studying his nails. “You’ll grow out of it.”

“Well, if everyone knows it’s wrong, why don’t they do something about it, then?” said Sheila sullenly.

“My dear——” again the whispered laugh, “Rome wasn’t built in a day. If you read the papers—I mean the
News
papers, not that tabloid to which you seem so attached—you’d see that some of the greatest brains in England are already applying themselves to the adjustment of post-war social conditions. Good luck to them but they’ve got an uphill struggle. You see, Sheila, what you don’t realise is, apart from the question of whether they
ought
to have better conditions, half these people don’t want them.” He reached to the table at his side and took the stopper out of the whisky decanter.

“Daddy, how can you say such a thing? You’ve got no idea—you don’t know how these people live—you’ve never——” Oh, how she wished she had David here! He would know how to confound her father. She knew what she wanted to say, but could not find the words to say it.

“Far from having no idea, my dear Sheila,” continued her father, unruffled, pouring himself a generous tot of whisky, “I have a very good idea. I’m not speaking idly when I say that some of these people don’t want inconveniencean along better conditions. Take the case of our own city of Birmingham. You know the wonderful great blocks of flats they put up—at enormous cost—in place of some of the worst slums? Well, I’d like you to see those flats now. A pigsty, I might say, but that would give you no idea. I tell you——” He splashed soda into his glass, held it to the light, then splashed in half an inch more, “I tell you, they’ve made a shambles of the place. They’ve done their very best to turn those clean, healthy flats into the replica of the slum dwellings from which they have been unwillingly uprooted.” He cleared his throat and took a sip of whisky, like a public speaker refreshing himself with water at the conclusion of a telling passage.

“Yes,” put in his wife, who had not liked to interrupt him before in his oratory, “give them a bath, they put coals in it. They do, you know.”

Sheila felt suddenly very tired, as tired as her mother imagined she was. She felt, too, that she had let down the people for whom she wanted to speak, by not being able to confound her parents’ ridiculous arguments. But you couldn’t argue with them, because they simply had no idea. “Come the Revolution,” David always said, “no one will be more surprised than the people who find themselves being massacred.”

Mr. Blake seemed to have stopped for the moment, so his wife went on : “You see, darling, what you don’t realise is that it’s not quite the same for you as for these other girls working at the factory. It’s bound to come harder on you.”

“Why?” said Sheila, quite rudely.

“Well, don’t you see, because they’re used to it. They expect to
have to work these dreadful hours. They’d have to do it whether it were peace or war, but it’s different for you. That’s why I worry about your health. You’re not brought up for this kind of life.”

“No?” Sheila turned round on her angrily. “And whose fault is that?”

Her father began to tap his foot. “Sheila, Sheila——” he said, threateningly, “a good, sound argument is all very well, and no one knows better than I do that everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but rudeness to your parents, and especially to your mother, is a thing I cannot and will not tolerate. However, we know you’re tired, so we’ll excuse you tonight, but please don’t spoil our enjoyment of your visits home again—Heaven knows they’re rare enough. You’d better go to bed. Good night, child.” He inclined his face upwards for her kiss. “I’ll come and tuck you up,” said her mother.

As she pulled herself upstairs by the banisters, feeling exactly like the child who had pulled herself up the same stairs to the night nursery in disgrace, Sheila was crying those same, frustrated tears that had run down that child’s grimacing face. The same feeling of being in the wrong, no matter how right you were—they had not lost the power to inspire it nor she to feel it. Only now there was no Nanny hovering in the shadows behind the gate on to the nursery landing, with : “Never mind, my pet, Nanny knows. You didn’t mean it. You come into Nanny’s room and see what she’s got in her tin, and then perhaps she’ll read to you in bed—only don’t you tell a soul, mind.” This conspiracy had been Nanny’s triumph.

Oh, David, David, David—I need you so! How did I ever exist without you?

The next day went smoothly enough until after lunch patent leather handbag p along. Sheila slept heavily, woke to find a cold cup of tea at her side, and was startled out of bed by the breakfast gong. At Swinley Lodge everyone was expected to breakfast downstairs, fully dressed, even on a Sunday. Dressing hurriedly in her cold room with its bulky, old-fashioned furniture, Sheila thought regretfully of Sunday mornings at the flat. It was one of the best times of the week. They would sleep late ; if she woke first, she would lie happily still, watching David until he woke. By stretching out a hand, she could turn on the electric fire, and when she did get up there was no huddling about in a dressing-gown as she was doing this morning. She would throw the papers in at David while she was getting the breakfast, so that by the time she came back to bed with the tray, he would have finished with the serious news.

When they eventually got up, they would spend ages over baths and dressing, wandering about the flat, and often only emerging just in time for late lunch in Soho. That was the way a Sunday morning should be spent, thought Sheila, going downstairs in the country clothes which her mother would insist on steeping in moth balls while
she was away. When she lived at home, it used to be her father’s reproving joke to say : “Good evening,” when she was late for breakfast, but now, as a concession to her hard-working week he indulgently let it pass without comment. She kissed the smooth cold side of his face which he offered and her mother’s well-powdered cheek, and helped herself at the sideboard.

“Kippers, Mummy! Where on earth d’you get them? I haven’t seen one for months in Town.”

“We’ve had quite a lot lately. Mr. Carnegie always keeps me some when he can. And so he should, seeing what wonderful customers we’ve always been.”

“We’ve always paid our bills promptly ; that’s what counts,” said Mr. Blake, extracting a long kipper bone from between his teeth, examining it and placing it in the parallel row of others around his plate.

There were only two Sunday papers at Swinley Lodge. Mr. Blake had one and Mrs. Blake the other. Sheila ate her breakfast, wishing that it were coffee instead of tea, and glanced at the news on the backs of the papers her parents were reading.

“Isn’t it marvellous what the Russians are doing?” she said. “D’you want the last bit of toast, Daddy, or can I have it?”

“No, I’ve finished, thank you, dear. Yes, I must admit I take my hat off to the Bolshies, but don’t forget they could never do a thing if we weren’t diverting the Huns in Africa. People are only too ready to exaggerate Russia’s effort and minimise our own. And don’t make the common mistake of forgetting that they signed a non-aggression pact with Germany. I shall never forgive them that, no matter how many adulatory programmes about that villain Lenin the B.B.C. asks me to listen to.”

“All the same,” said Sheila rashly,” they stopped us losing the war last year. They despise us—at least, they did before we started to attack.”

Her father lowered his paper and removed his pince nez. “My darling child, you talk more nonsense than anyone I’ve ever heard. Who on earth told you that? “David had told her ; she was quoting him verbatim, but she said : “No one told me ; that’s what I think.”

Her father looked at her, laughed silently, then replaced his pince nez and shook his paper into position again.

After breakfast, Mr. Blake took the
Sunday Times
away to his that leaves you to singke bstudy, where he kept his tobacco in the jar he had had at college ; Mrs. Blake dusted the drawing-room, which with two W.V.S. sewing parties a week and suffering blackout and rationing uncomplainingly comprised her war effort ; Sheila helped Mrs. Geek make beds, which the latter did as if she were laying out a corpse. Sheila had the feeling that she would rather have made them alone, but Mrs. Geek had said neither “Yes” nor “No” to her offer, but simply thrown the corner of an
underblanket across to her and gone on tucking in her own side as if Sheila were not there.

“How d’you like the country, Mrs. Geek?” ventured Sheila, when they were making her father’s bed, a job which almost called for precision instruments. The Geeks were evacuees from Rotherhithe.

“It’s all right, I dare say, Miss,” said Mrs. Geek, puffing up a pillow which Sheila had already done. “It’ll serve for the time being.”

“You wouldn’t stay here, then, after the war?”

Mrs. Geek smiled grimly at the mere idea. “I’ll thank you for that other pillow, Miss.”

“Where will you go, then?” pursued Sheila, as they moved over to her mother’s bed. “Back to London?”

“That’s right, Miss. When my boy comes home from the sea.” She made it sound as if he would rise from the deeps, with seaweed hanging around his drowned, bloated face.

“Your boy! I never knew you had a son at sea. What is he—in the Navy?”

“Merchant Service, Miss.” Sheila wished she wouldn’t keep calling her “Miss” and stressing it ironically.

“But how exciting!” she said, folding her mother’s pre-war satin nightgown. “What’s his ship?”

“Ask me no questions Miss,” said Mrs. Geek cagily. “I tell no lies.”

“You must be very proud of him,” continued Sheila, determined to be frindly.

“Yes, Miss,” said Mrs. Geek, implying “If you say so.”

They were putting on her mother’s counterpane now, over the eiderdown instead of under it as Sheila liked. “What’s he like, your son? I’d love to see a photograph.” It didn’t seem possible that the barren-looking Geeks could have borne fruit.

Mrs. Geek mitred the counterpane corner. “Oh,” she said, “he’s not much. He’s never been a good boy. He and Geek didn’t speak for six months after he got us into our trouble.” She walked out of the door, leaving Sheila seething with conjectures about the Geek’s past. It just showed what people missed by never talking to their servants.

Sheila and her parents walked to church in bulky clothes and sensible shoes, and afterwards Major Saunders came to lunch and was jocose at Sheila as if he were in the conspiracy to forget that she had ever gone away from home and grown up.