O’Hara had been buttonholed by Babs Osborne. She was reading him parts of a letter from some fellow with a foreign name. ‘Listen to this bit,’ she urged, ‘“
I do not wish to treat you like a good-time girl. Were my feelings not so strong I could not bring myself to say goodbye
.” You can tell the torment he’s in, can’t you? It’s obvious isn’t it, that he still loves me?’
‘Yes,’ said O’Hara. ‘It couldn’t be more obvious.’ He was watching Stella who stood at the fireplace, leaning against the armchair in which Potter now sat holding court. She had black eyebrows despite the colour of her hair, and a little Roman nose.
‘Why can’t he treat me like a good-time girl,’ wailed Babs. ‘It’s better than nothing, isn’t it?’
Stella was feeling decidedly confident. I’ve cut the ropes that bind me to the shore, she thought, and sinking down onto the arm of Meredith’s chair she listened, smiling, to one of the pirates confiding that when he was in town he consulted the same dentist as dear Johnny. He’d once had a drink with him in the Shaftesbury – Johnny, not the dentist – and really, he’d couldn’t have been sweeter. There was no side to him, absolutely none. Of course, there had been lots of other people present. He couldn’t pretend there’d been just the two of them.’
‘Quite,’ said Meredith, and yawned.
Someone put a dance record on the gramophone and presently Desmond Fairchild and Dotty swayed together in a corner of the room. She had bought him a new trilby with the tiniest of blue feathers tucked into the band at the crown. He was clinging to her as though she was his mother, his head resting sleepily on her shoulder, buckling the brim of his hat. Often she glanced across the room to where O’Hara stood with his arm about Babs Osborne.
Bunny brought Meredith a plate of sandwiches; he waved them aside. Stella said she wasn’t hungry either. ‘I can’t eat when I’m with you,’ she told Meredith. ‘I’d be sick. It’s a compliment really.’
‘I’ve known better ones,’ he said. He seemed amused.
‘I don’t want anything to get in the way. Not sausage rolls or cheesy buiscuits or anything. I want to listen.’
‘I’m not sure I’ve got anything to say,’ he said, and closed his eyes, his foot jogging up and down in time to the beat of the dance band on the gramophone. She studied the reflections on the wall as the lights of the Golden Dragon flashed blue and pink across the street.
‘I knew it would be like this,’ she said. ‘I just knew.’ She wasn’t really talking to him; she thought he had dozed off.
He said, ‘This isn’t my room. I live at the back, overlooking the side of the church.’
‘My grandfather played the organ there,’ she told him. ‘When Clara Butt gave song recitals.’ She looked up and saw O’Hara staring at her over Babs Osborne’s heaving shoulders. ‘Miss Osborne is crying again,’ she said, and asked, aggrieved, ‘Why did you stop talking to me? Why didn’t you want me to take notes anymore?’
‘Oh, that,’ Meredith said, opening his eyes. ‘That was Rose, not me. You put the wind up her with that crucifix down your sock. She felt I was an undesirable influence, you coming from Methodist stock.’
She thought she had never seen anything so delicate as his left eyelid quivering above the green ball of his eye, nor anything so vivid as the scarlet spots spattering the bow of his tie. On the wall behind him there was a picture of a stag lowering its antlers on a rocky promontory beneath puffy clouds. She lost concentration for a moment and the stag slipped from its frame and glided along the picture rail.
‘Look,’ she heard him say, ‘I’m sorry if I’ve made you unhappy, but I’m not for you.’
‘Do you mean you think you’re too religious?’ she asked.
‘Something like that,’ he said, and she fell sideways onto his lap and shut her eyes against the whirling room, her cheek stuck to the little glass circle of the monocle balanced on his chest.
She woke in a strange room, facing a dressing-table with a scarf just like Geoffrey’s draped over the mirror. There was a tin ashtray on the bedside table and a framed photograph of two men in bathing costumes, linking arms on a pebbled beach. One of them was Meredith. She jumped up in a panic, terrified at being late home.
Meredith was still in the parlour, and Bunny. They were sitting on either side of a dying fire. Bunny said he would see her home.
‘I don’t need seeing,’ she said. ‘I’m perfectly capable of walking round the corner on my own.’ She was already moving towards the door. She didn’t say goodnight to Meredith. He had upset her although she couldn’t remember in what way.
She had never been out alone at such an hour. The trams had stopped running and the sodium lights burned in the empty streets. She fully expected the basement door to be bolted.
Bunny followed at a discreet distance. He had telephoned Uncle Vernon before midnight to explain that Rose Lipman had insisted on Stella being present at a small celebration given by the Board of Governors.
10
Three days before Christmas Vernon was brushing down the front steps when he saw Meredith crossing the end of the street. He would have ducked inside – he was in his working clothes with not even a stud to his shirt – but Meredith was already calling out a greeting and advancing towards him.
They shook hands. ‘My dear man,’ said Meredith. ‘Not bad news, I hope.’
‘Just the wireless,’ Vernon said, taking a polishing cloth from his pocket and dabbing at his eyes. They listened as from the cellar below came the strains of a deep male voice singing a sentimental ballad. ‘It’s to do with the low notes. They always set me off. I first noticed it in the army when music was compulsory.’
Meredith nodded in sympathy. They both gazed thoughtfully along the wide, grey street lined with blackened houses to where the unfinished transept of the rose-pink cathedral smudged the high white sky. ‘Over the dark still silence,’ quavered Vernon, singing along with the wireless, and was seized with a bout of coughing.
‘That reminds me,’ said Meredith. ‘Is young Stella bronchial by any chance?’
‘She is and she isn’t,’ Vernon said. ‘I mean she’s got the usual amount of congestion, but in her case its aggravated by temperament, if you follow me.’
‘I merely ask because last night she was unable to hold the torch steady. It was just before Peter enters and the night lights blow out. I take it you’ve seen the play?’
‘What night lights?’ asked Vernon.
‘In the nursery scene. Fortunately the coughing didn’t really matter so far as Tinkerbell was concerned . . . the light is supposed to flash erratically . . . but the noise was rather off-putting. Bunny’s put a supply of cough drops in the prompt corner. I just wondered if there was anything radically wrong . . .’
‘There’s nothing wrong with her lungs, if that’s what you mean,’ Vernon said. ‘We’ve had her X-rayed and she’s sound as a bell.’
‘That’s all right then,’ said Meredith.
‘I’d better reimburse you for the sweets,’ Vernon insisted, in a tight unfriendly voice. Clearly something other than the bass notes on the wireless niggled him.
In the end Meredith was forced to accept the threepence thrust into his palm. Taken aback, he mentioned the football match to be fought on New Year’s Day between the Repertory company and the pantomime cast of
Treasure Island
appearing at the Empire.
‘I haven’t got the wind,’ said Vernon. ‘My kicking days are over.’ Meredith explained it was touch-line supporters they were after rather than players. A charabanc would be leaving from Williamson Square at ten o’clock. ‘Do come,’ he urged. ‘It would be lovely to have you with us.’
‘I’ll think about it,’ said Vernon, and he stumped up the steps with his polishing cloth and rubbed vigorously at the lion’s-head knocker of the door.
He waited until Meredith had turned the corner before going downstairs to put on his Sunday overcoat. Though all but one of the travellers had decamped for Christmas, he didn’t care to be seen improperly dressed in the hall. He ran back upstairs to telephone Harcourt.
‘I shouldn’t have insisted on him taking the threepence, should I?’ he said.
‘It depends on his tone of voice,’ said Harcourt. ‘Was he annoyed or genuinely anxious?’
‘You didn’t see her, did you?’ accused Vernon. ‘You never got there . . .’
‘We were given a refund,’ protested Harcourt. ‘I can hardly be blamed if the production was cancelled.’
‘The board of governors have noticed her,’ said Vernon. ‘She’s been singled out.’
‘There you are then. There’s nothing to worry about.’
‘All the same,’ said Vernon. ‘Life has a nasty habit of repeating itself.’ He stood with his shoulder pressed against the wall, his gaze fixed on the fanlight. Just then the boom of the one o’clock gun echoed across the river; the glass flushed crimson as the neon sign flashed above the door. He thought of the flares bursting like orange plums in the soot-black night, illuminating the trucks, the humped tanks, the upflung arms of waking men shielding their eyes from the glare. He said, ‘I may have mentioned I saw service in the desert . . .’
‘Once or twice,’ admitted Harcourt.
‘There was one particular evening when Jerry sent up a barrage of Verey lights. They were trying to find our position.’
‘I remember you telling me,’ Harcourt said.
‘It was different for our Stella. In her case someone was all too willing to abandon her.’
‘I don’t quite follow your gist,’ said Harcourt.
Vernon remained silent for perhaps half a minute. ‘No,’ he said, at last. ‘It’s not easy.’
Just then Lily shouted up from the basement to complain that the kitchen range was smoking again. ‘I blame next door,’ Vernon told Harcourt. ‘They eat different food. It’s bound to affect the chimney.’
‘Would you like me to accompany you?’ Harcourt asked. ‘To the match?’
Vernon was staggered. Never once had his supplier suggested they should meet socially. Over the years they had attended the same victuallers’ functions, and on every occasion Harcourt had kept very much to his own table. He had raised his glass civilly enough in recognition of Vernon’s presence whenever their eyes had met across the floral displays, and he had always been very effusive if they chanced to meet in the queue for the cloakroom or on the pavement outside the State Restaurant, but he had held his distance in mixed company, had never introduced him, for instance, to Mrs Harcourt. Not that she was anything to write home about, in spite of coming from the Wirral.
‘Much obliged for the offer,’ Vernon said, ‘but I shan’t go. The wife’s brother is coming up for the festivities.’
He was cock-a-hoop when he recounted this part of the conversation to Lily. ‘The nerve of it,’ he crowed. ‘Muscling in on a theatrical invitation. It just shows you how pushy the educated classes can be when they smell an advantage.’
He didn’t tell Stella he had been asked to the football match. She too had received an invitation, to a supper dance at Reece’s Grill Room on Christmas Eve. Originally St Ives had intended a foursome consisting of himself and Dotty, Babs Osborne and her elusive foreigner. Incapacitated as he now was and about to go off to stay with his mother in Weston-super-Mare, St Ives had sold the tickets to Desmond Fairchild. The party had since grown and extra tickets had been bought. The company had clubbed together to pay for her and Geoffrey. It was a sort of Christmas present.
‘That was kind, wasn’t it?’ said Lily. ‘I hope you thanked them.’
‘We run errands for them all day long,’ Stella retorted. ‘I don’t have to go overboard with delight.’
‘Is Geoffrey your partner then?’ asked Lily. She was smiling, participating at second hand in the evening to come.
‘No, he isn’t,’ snapped Stella. She wanted Lily to stop talking. It was spoiling things, this building up of expectations.
‘Well, who is?’ said Lily. ‘You’ll need a partner.’
‘It’s not that sort of do. We’re not in couples. Grace Bird is an abandoned wife and Babs’s Stanislaus has jilted her. Not that she accepts it. She keeps ringing him and sending him presents.’
Lily said Babs was a foolish girl. No man liked to be chased. She should buy herself a new frock and set her cap at someone else. That would soon bring this Stan chap running.
‘Why would it?’ asked Stella. ‘If he doesn’t want her?’
‘He doesn’t want her,’ squealed Lily, ‘because he’s got her. He’d soon change his tune if he thought she’d lost interest. They’re all the same. You tell her from me.’
Stella tried to imagine a younger Lily giving Uncle Vernon cause for jealousy. It wasn’t possible. The real Lily sat opposite, her too brightly coloured hair set in stiff waves about her faded face.
‘Hasn’t your Mr Potter got a young lady?’ persisted Lily. ‘It stands to reason a man like that would have a partner.’
‘Shut up,’ Stella shouted. ‘Not everybody needs propping up, you know. Not everybody wants . . .’ and trailed into silence, for Lily’s eyelids were now fluttering, holding back offended tears. Stella jumped up and made a clattering show of stacking the supper plates onto a tray.
Alone in her room, struggling into her ice-cold nightgown, she felt ashamed. It was unjust of her to disregard those thumb-sucking years in which Lily had held her close. In the end everyone expected a return on love, demanded a rebate of gratitude or respect. It was no different from collecting the deposit on lemonade bottles. She should have given Lily a cuddle.
Instead she got into bed. I have my whole life in front of me, she thought. I can’t be hamstrung by sentiment.
Stella had planned to sit next to Meredith at the Christmas Eve party, but Geoffrey got there first. It was her own fault. Not wanting anyone to see her dress from behind – the hem had come undone and she wasn’t wearing stockings – she had hung back as they came through the doors of the Grill Room.
The head waiter made a servile fuss when they arrived and begged permission for a photograph to be taken for publicity purposes. Then Dotty Blundell, who a moment before had drooped under the weight of her leopard-skin coat, flung back her shoulders and lowering her chin gave a peek-a-boo smile. John Harbour, as if looking into a mirror, leaned chummily against Babs Osborne and stared adoringly at the camera. Stella was coughing when the flash bulb went off.