Bond Street Story (3 page)

It was her dress that had saved her right shoe from disappearing completely. Taken off hurriedly and simply slung into a chair, the dress had gradually straightened itself out and collapsed limply on to the strip of Axminster. Not that Irene had yet noticed. Or would notice, even when she came to pick it up again. Most of her things seemed to be on the floor when she wanted them.

That was because she was only seventeen. Still living in the full turmoil of adolescence. Life opened out in front of her down a long corridor of chaos and confusion. With Mrs. Privett following silently behind, picking up, smoothing out, putting away. Any drawer that Irene ever went to looked as though someone had been burgling it. And even when the drawers were shut up again, the ends of all sorts of things, stockings, slips, corners of handkerchiefs remained sticking out like book-markers.

At the moment Irene was wearing simply the foundations of dress, the pale pink brassière and pants which she had bought for herself and of which Mrs. Privett had disapproved. She had a good figure. Still only schoolgirlish, of course. Nothing mature or magnificent. But supple and healthy-looking. Against the whiteness of her skin, her hair seemed darker than ever. And it was her hair that was the trouble. A thick lock of it kept falling forward, slanting across the book that she was reading. But that again was Irene's fault. Until a couple of years ago she had worn her hair in two long plaits. It had always been sleek and neat and tidy. Mrs. Privett had warned her what would happen if she allowed it to be slashed about by a hairdresser. But Irene had been determined. She detested long hair she had said. It was ghastly. And now every time she bent forward to read she had to pay the penalty.

The book open on the bed was paper-covered. It was an acting-edition. One of Mr. Samuel French's. Indeed, when you came to look at the room carefully you could see that the whole place was practically a sub-stockroom of Samuel French's. The
wall-bracket bookshelf with the fretwork ends was packed full of the small grey-blue booklets. And even at the back of the dressing-table, amid to-day's harvest of hair brushes and screwed-up handkerchiefs and empty chocolate papers, there were more of the same little volumes. These were wedged in loosely between a pair of elephant book-ends, the rumps of the animals leaning purposefully against Gordon Daviot and Dodie Smith, James Bridie and J. B. Priestley.

The play that Irene was reading at the moment was one of Christopher Fry's. For the whole of the last month she had been going round in a stupefied daze of Fry. She had the taste of his words in her mouth when she woke in the morning. And she kept going back to him for further doses between regular mealtimes. She was at that moment cut off entirely from the rest of life. Suspended somewhere in a coma of medievalism and Mars bar. Even with her mouth full of the sweet chocolaty stuff, she was uttering Mr. Fry's words aloud. They came out as a continuous sticky mumble.

From down below, she heard the front door shut. That meant that her father had come home. She glanced for a moment at her wrist watch. It showed 6.20. And as she looked at it she remembered dimly, as a kind of shadow from the unreal world, that she had promised her mother to do something. Lay the table. Or light the gas. Or turn it out. Or put the kettle on.

The outlines of the shadow were far from clear. A mere blurred impression in her mind. But, in any case, it was probably too late by now. Whatever it was, Mrs. Privett would have seen to it herself.

It was, indeed, only because her mother was dressmaking that Irene had been asked to attend to things at all. When Irene listened, however, there was complete silence in the room beneath her. That in itself showed that everything was all right. If Mrs. Privett had still been working, there would have been the low, intermittent whining of the treadle machine, grinding away like a distant lawn mower. Consoled by the silence, Irene went on reading.

But not for long. It was Mrs. Privett's voice that called her.

“Ireen.”

Irene looked up. The voice somehow did not belong. There was no one in the whole of Mr. Fry's hag-ridden household who was called by that name.

Mrs. Privett called again.

“Ireen. Your dad wants you.”

Irene swung her legs off the bed.

“Coming, Mum.”

It took Irene some time to get dressed. For no particular reason she did not like anything that she had been wearing. And she couldn't find what she wanted to wear instead. Then her hair needed doing. And at the sight of a nail file lying on the dressing-table, she began idly going round her nails, pushing down the quick with the blunt end of the file. It wasn't that she was deliberately keeping her father waiting. Merely that she was distracted. She had been interrupted while she was busy. And her mind was still knee-deep in Mr. Fry's world of words and witches.

“Ireen, can you hear me? Your dad's got something to tell you.”

Mrs. Privett's voice had risen by a semi-tone. It now had a sharp, rasplike edge to it. It probed.

Irene still did not hurry. She went across slowly and opened the door like a sleep walker.

“What's the matter, Mum?” she asked with the purely mechanical part of her mind. “I heard you.”

It struck Irene as soon as she got down to the kitchen that her father was looking unusually pleased about something. He seemed pinker than usual. And it struck Mr. Privett that Irene was looking unusually pretty. She was just the kind of daughter for whom any father would want to do little things.

Mrs. Privett looked across at her husband, and gave a little nod.

“Well, Dad,” she said. “You tell her. It's your news.”

Mr. Privett straightened himself. He wished that Mr. Bloot could have been there. Mr. Bloot would have made the announcement sound so much better. There would have been real dignity and grandeur about it. Coming from him, it would really have sounded like something.

“It's all fixed,” he said smiling. “They're going to write to you. They said so this morning.”

“Who did?”

Mr. Privett opened his eyes wider in astonishment.

“Why Rammell's, of course.”

“What about?”

“About you.”

The smile had almost left Mr. Privett's face by now. He had been looking forward all day to this moment when he got home. And somehow it wasn't turning out as he had expected.

“What do Rammell's want to write to me for?”

Irene had taken a step away from him as she put the question. She was leaning up against the wall by now, her shoulder pushing the hanging calendar crooked. Her head was to one side, and she was frowning. Mr. Privett remembered that she always used to frown like that when she was a little girl. It made him love her still more.

“They want you to go and see them,” he said, chasing up a smile again. “There may be a vacancy coming along. Nothing definite, of course. But this is your opportunity.”

Irene drew herself up sharply. She was standing quite clear of the wall by now.

“I don't want any Rammell vacancy, thank you,” she said. “They can keep it.”

There was silence. Then Mrs. Privett spoke.

“That's no way to speak to your father. And what's wrong with Rammell's I should like to know?”

They were the first words that Mrs. Privett had uttered. And having uttered them, she stood there facing Irene with her mouth drawn in at the corners. The resemblance between mother and daughter was at that moment unusually striking.

“Don't be silly, Mum,” Irene answered. “Nothing's wrong with it. You know I don't mean that. It's simply that I don't want to go there. I've told you so all along.”

“And why not, pray? Isn't it good enough for you?”

Mrs. Privett had been a learner herself in Rammell's when she had first met Mr. Privett. And Rammell's in consequence was a good deal more than a source of living to her. It was life itself. The polished avenues of the counters were sylvan groves where she and Mr. Privett had discreetly done their courting. The whole of that end of Bond Street still glittered in a mist of girlish and romantic memories. And she wasn't going to have her daughter spoiling any of it.

That was why it was so painful, so unthinkably wounding, when Irene answered back. It showed that suddenly the invisible cord between parent and child had snapped completely.

“No, it isn't if you want to know,” was Irene's reply. “It may be good enough for you. It isn't good enough for me. I'm not going to be a shopgirl. I've told you so before, and that's flat. I'm going to be ...”

Irene checked herself. Her lips came together again just the way Mrs. Privett's had done. She had already said all that she intended to say. Had said too much, in fact.

But Mrs. Privett was merciless. She was exactly the same
height as Irene and now she was clearly sparring for an opening.

“Going to be what?” she said bitterly. “An actress, I suppose!”

Irene braced herself. It seemed somehow that this no longer concerned herself alone. The quarrel had ceased to be a mere family row. The smell of persecution was in the air. With martyrdom just round the corner. There in a back kitchen in Kentish Town Irene Privett, aged seventeen, was going to the stake for her convictions. She wished that Mr. Christopher Fry could have been there to see her.

“Well, what if I am?” she demanded. “Is there anything so very terrible in that?”

It was Irene's first open declaration of her intentions. Up to now there had been nothing more serious than school theatricals and the Samuel French acting-editions. But this was the real thing. It was a contest between adults.

Seventeen, however, is a bad age for challenges. Or for being adult. The glands at that age don't always work properly. And the nervous system is notoriously unreliable. The mind, noble and sublime, promises one thing—and the body, feeble and treacherous, does something quite different. At that very moment, Irene conscious of being freer and older and more self-possessed than she had ever been before behaved like a small child. She burst into tears. And because she couldn't stand there like that in front of her parents, she turned her back on them and slammed out of the room banging the door shut after her with the noise of a gun going off.

Mrs. Privett started to go after her, and then stopped. She turned and faced Mr. Privett. Neither of them spoke.

Then Mr. Privett swallowed. There was an audible choke somewhere in the back of his throat.

“You've made her cry, Mother,” he said idiotically.

It was a constrained, awkward sort of meal with just the two of them. The toad-in-the-hole—usually one of Mr. Privett's favourite dishes, with the crust golden-brown like fresh cornflakes and the sausages themselves glistening with a rich amber radiance—was left almost untouched. The rice pudding was simply toyed with. Neither of them did very much talking. There was one point, however, on which they were in complete agreement. Each said emphatically that it would be silly for the other to go upstairs and attempt to reason with Irene while she was in that state. In consequence they sat there dutifully sipping at their tea together and trying to pretend that nothing had happened.

Of the two, Mr. Privett's emotions were the simpler. He was merely sad and disappointed. But Mrs. Privett's were more complicated. She was sad for his sake. She knew what his piece of news had meant to him. And she couldn't forgive Irene for spoiling things. It was like being cruel to ... to, yes, that was it, to a child. Mrs. Privett wanted to throw her arms around her husband and tell him that at least one of his womenfolk still loved him. It was merely her upbringing that prevented her. She had been married for over twenty years and never once had she given any sudden demonstration of affection. She despised women whose emotions were on the surface.

From upstairs there came the sound of a door opening. Mrs. Privett immediately began smoothing out her skirt as though there had been crumbs all over it. Mr. Privett thrust his cup and saucer away from him.

“That'll be her ladyship,” he said.

Mrs. Privett merely drew in her lips again.

“You leave her to me,” she replied.

“Perhaps she's coming to say she's sorry,” Mr. Privett suggested.

But Mrs. Privett was paying no attention to him.

“Ireen!” she called.

“Yes, Mum.”

Irene was half-way down the stairs by now. Going purposefully in the direction of the front door, it seemed.

It was a relief to Mr. Privett that Irene even answered. An absurd fear had suddenly flashed across his mind that Irene was running away, simply bolting from the house without another word to either of them.

“Where are you going?”

“Out, Mum.”

Irene's voice certainly sounded steady and composed enough. There was no trace there of tantrums or hysterics. A deliberately casual and indifferent note seemed, indeed, to have crept into it. It might have been a chance and unintimate acquaintance whom she was addressing.

“Where to?” Mrs. Privett asked.

The same note of coldness, of aloofness, was in her voice also. It was the kind of voice that staff-managers and personnel superintendents use.

“With Madge. Like I said.”

“Don't be back la ...”

But the end of Mrs. Privett's sentence was cut off by another loud explosion. It was the front door this time. The whole
house recoiled from the violence of it. Then there was silence. A deep, unnatural silence.

Mrs. Privett got up and began stacking the dishes, piling the half-eaten toad-in-the-hole and the merely pecked-at rice pudding on to the tray along with the teapot and the cups and saucers.

“Why don't you go and do something with your boat?” she said.

It was at moments like this that Mrs. Privett was glad that her husband had a hobby to take his mind off things. At other times, even the mere recollection of the hobby faintly annoyed her.

One of the extraordinary things about all hobbies is that they should be exclusively male affairs. You don't find grown women flying model aeroplanes. Or bending over gauge OO trains. Or collecting toy soldiers. Or even sticking-in stamps. Or arranging coins. Openly confronted with her husband's hobby, there is hardly a woman who does not feel some embarrassment. And when the hobby is open and exhibitionist, like kite-flying or butterfly hunting, the wife tends to keep away from the front door-step when her husband sets forth.