Female Friends (5 page)

And still Dick, her real father, does not come to take her away. How can he? He is in France, and if he writes to her, care of her mother, who is to say whether the letters arrive at their destination, or whether her mother simply forgets to forward them?

As for Grace, she is not interested in the war. Grace has disowned her parents, those plain and boring people now so fond of Marjorie, the cuckoo in her nest, Grace decides to be a changeling. She sulks, she lounges, she complains. She fails to make her bed; she makes trouble instead. She is artistic, and is proud of it. She draws. She paints. She models. She stares in the mirror, and has hysterics in the moonlight. She makes Chloe her confidante. Chloe, for all her mother is a waitress, is genteel, and clever, and funny, and regards adults—excepting only Gwyneth her mother—as equals and enemies. But she does not betray her opinion, as Grace does. And Edwin and Esther regard Chloe with relief, see her as a civilizing influence on Grace, and welcome her to the house. She appears quiet, polite, deferential, and clean. And she acts as some kind of helpful catalyst on Grace and Marjorie.

In Chloe’s presence, Grace will behave quite civilly towards Marjorie, and even show her some degree of affection.

In the garden, Marjorie learns how to grow Christmas roses, and protect their pale bruised petals from the slugs and the wet.

Grace deigns to grow Brussels sprouts, under her father’s instruction, and wins First Prize in the 1942 school competition.

Chloe, whose home is a clapboard room shared with her mother behind the Rose and Crown, learns how to prune the roses which so aggravate Edwin’s asthma.

And still Helen does not write.

Marjorie works hard at school, and comes top of all her classes, except games, art, music and PT. She inspires pity and admiration both. She gives her sweet ration away, mostly to enemies, sometimes to friends, aniseed ball by peppermint drop, and if she is buying love, poor little thing, so, it is bought.

And still Helen does not come.

N
OW, BRAVER BY FAR,
Marjorie keeps Chloe waiting. Chloe is shown to a table between the kitchen door and the toilets. She asks for a Campari while she waits, and is given a Dubonnet. Chloe does not protest. Chloe understands the dilemma of the waiter, and forgives him. Chloe is in any case automatically on the side of the waiter, and not the diner.

Gwyneth, likewise, doing her bit at the Rose and Crown in those early years of the war, seldom protests.

Gwyneth is not unhappy, although usually exhausted, and always spends the morning of her day off in bed. She rises at six-thirty and seldom goes to bed before midnight, and has one day off a week.

In the mornings, fresh and restored after her heavy sleep. Gwyneth is energetic. She enjoys throwing open the bar windows to let the warm stale air out and the fresh cold air in. She enjoys rubbing away at the beer rings on the tables, and later, when furniture polish runs short, all she says is ‘never mind! What’s wrong with elbow grease!’ and rubs the harder.

Gwyneth even enjoys the admiration of men, so long as there’s a bar between them and her: and since presently there is both an army camp and an airbase within ten miles of Ulden, the Rose and Crown is full of men in uniform, both officers and ranks, admiring her. She has a pretty, gentle face and a full bosom and dainty feet.

Gwyneth objects to nothing, not even clearing up vomit or washing out the WCs on a Sunday morning after a wild Saturday night. These are the droppings of the saviours of her country, after all. Someone has to do it, and when men are drunk, they miss. It is a fact of life.

Gwyneth can cook, and wait at table too, and when Mr and Mrs Leacock decide to do cooked lunches, Gwyneth does so, forgoing her midday break.

Gwyneth charms the customers and is never a source of scandal.

The Leacocks can’t think what they did before Gwyneth was there to help.

They worked harder, actually.

‘Shouldn’t you ask for a raise?’ Chloe once tentatively suggests to her mother, on one of those rare occasions when Gwyneth actually complains in her presence about the tenor and texture of her life. The Leacocks have opened a snack bar in the Cosy Nook, and it is not the extra work it means, but their failure to so much as mention their intention to Gwyneth, which now aggrieves her.

Gwyneth is shocked at the notion of asking for more.

‘If they think I’m worth more they’ll offer it,’ she says. ‘Besides, think how good they’ve been to me. Not many people will take on a mother with child. We’re lucky to have a roof over our heads, Chloe. And there’s a war on, and it’s not fair to think of oneself. I’m just being silly, and it’s the time of the month, that’s all it is. A snack bar in the Cosy Nook would do very well, I’m sure.’

‘Couldn’t you ask the Leacocks to get another girl?’ persists Chloe. ‘You can’t do everything yourself.’

‘It wouldn’t be fair. The girls should be doing warwork. What if some poor airman had to go without a parachute because I was being selfish?’

‘Then couldn’t you leave and get another job?’ asks Chloe, who is tired of wearing dresses made of gingham tablecloths, discarded because of the cigarette holes. Gwyneth dressmakes for Chloe on her afternoons off.

Well, yes, Gwyneth knows it would be sensible, but she is terrified of change. She has the feeling that though here may be bad, the other side of the hill may be a good deal worse, and that in any case patience and suffering will surely be rewarded by God.

He’s shown no sign of it so far, alas.

You might think, indeed, that God has taken a special dislike to Gwyneth. First He kills her father in a mining accident, and her mother of grief. Then He presents her, nice young Welsh girl that she is, living with her Nan and top of the class in Home Economics, with a handsome young miner, David Evans by name, to love and marry.

The Heavenly Hypocrite (Marjorie’s description) smiles on the wedding, sending a blue and perfect day. Only, a month or so later, to fan to a burning flame a talent in her husband that has so far smouldered quite unnoticed, leading him to the conviction that he does not want to die in the pits, but to live in London and paint pictures, and keep the company of artists and writers.

Having led them to London and the Caledonian Road, He then makes Gwyneth pregnant and ill, in spite of her constant chapel-going, and thus renders it impossible for her to work, or David to earn a living other than by house painting. Then He sends bad weather—and since He also started David working in the pits at the age of twelve and weakened his lungs—David develops TB, declining steadily year by year, and is finally taken to the Heavenly Arms when Chloe is five, leaving Gwyneth strictly on her own.

And of the paintings which David did in the sanatorium, all, either from inclination, or from shortage of strength, or time, or canvas, only one measured more than 5˝ X 3˝, and that one was 6˝ X 4˝, and was in any case taken in payment by the landlady for the final week’s rent.

Then Gwyneth, because she has Chloe, and nowhere to go, and no money, and her Nan is dead, has no alternative but to move into the first home which God offers her, sending her as He does David’s friend Pat the Irish Pacifist to love and care for her.

Gwyneth is not unhappy here, with Pat in a caravan on Canvey Island. She can bring up Chloe in peace and fight a never-ending battle against the mud which rises like a tide around the caravan; and wash Patrick’s clothes. And God has ensured that Pat’s sexual energies should be increasingly whittled away by drink and talk, so that her sense of sin of being unfaithful to her husband—for that is what he still is, dry bones that God has made of him—is not too painful.

All the same, when war breaks out, and Pat is interned as a danger to the State, and the caravan is broken up by policemen looking for incriminating evidence, it is something of a relief to find God has decreed she move again.

A clergyman puts her in touch with the Leacocks.

One way and another, now, Gwyneth feels it is better to stay where she is and not provoke God to any further excesses.

Besides, Gwyneth is in love with Mr Leacock.

As for little Chloe, she goes to the village school, sits between Marjorie and Grace, and learns Latin and Greek and the intricacies of the feudal system while men in aeroplanes fight their masters’ battles in the sky above her.

And after school, all going well, if Grace hasn’t quarrelled with her, and if she’s speaking to Marjorie, Chloe will go back to tea at The Poplars, where Esther makes her welcome. It is common knowledge in the village that Gwyneth is exploited, and that Chloe, fatherless, has a hard time. The woman in the sweet shop slips her peppermints and her teachers seldom scold. Chloe has been warmed and comforted and made cosy by misfortunes as far back as she can remember.

After tea Chloe will go back home to the Rose and Crown, and the room in the yard which she shares with her mother. Here, on the small table which fits tightly between the two hard beds. Chloe does her homework. A curtained corner serves as a wardrobe. They have few possessions. Under her mother’s bed are her father’s paintings, safely enclosed in a roll of cartridge paper. The paintings are of the pit-head he so hated and feared, but which might have been a lesser evil than the fogs and chills of London. Perhaps he came to this conclusion before he died, because the paintings, so scrupulously and minutely done, seem to be of some loved and magical scene.

And underneath Chloe’s bed, in a cardboard box, with the family birth, wedding and death certificates, is Gwyneth’s photograph album. Gwyneth as a child, surrounded by parents, cousins, uncles, aunts. What became of them? Chloe does not know, except they are lost and scattered. And the wedding photographs too, on that especially brilliant day, the shadows of the bride and groom sharply etched against the chapel wall.

Chloe studies the photographs carefully, but rarely. She is frightened lest the black and white dots of her father’s photograph will eventually replace her own fragile memory of him. And so they do, of course, in the end.

Chloe knows his fever chart by heart. She keeps the stolen medical card beneath her mattress. His temperature was normal on the day he died, she notes—
TERMINAL
, someone has scrawled upon the card, in red.

Good-bye, father.

At seven, Chloe has supper in the Rose and Crown kitchen with her mother. It is not a lavish meal. Well, there’s a war on. Gwyneth could help herself to pies from the snack bar but is unwilling to take advantage.

After supper, Chloe helps to wash the beer mugs. She is not paid for her work, but as the Leacocks say, it keeps her out of mischief.

And Gwyneth likes to spend this time alone with her daughter: she can instruct her in the ways of the world.

How is Gwyneth to know that the platitudes she offers, culled as they are from dubious sources, magazines, preachers and sentimental drinkers, and often flatly contradicting the truths of her own experience, are usually false and occasionally dangerous? Gwyneth retreats from the truth into ignorance, and finds that the false beliefs and half-truths, interweaving, make a fine supportive pillow for a gentle person against whom God has taken an irrational dislike.

‘Red flannel is warmer than white,’ maintains Gwyneth.

‘Marriages are made in heaven.’

‘Marry in haste, repent in leisure.’

‘Hard work never hurt anyone.’

‘The Lord helps those who help themselves.’

‘See a pin, pick it up, all the day you have good luck.’

‘The good die young.’

‘Never have a bath when you’ve got the curse.’

‘A blow on the breast leads to (whispered) cancer.’

‘The Lord looks after his own.’

‘You can always tell a lady by her shoes.’

And so on. Chloe, polishing glasses, tired and sleepy, listens patiently and tries to make sense of it all. She is a good girl.

Gwyneth, disturbed by the amount of time Chloe is spending at The Poplars, worried in case Chloe is making a nuisance of herself, is emboldened to ask for an extra half-day off so she can spend more time with her daughter. At which Mrs Leacock, that bright, hard-eyed bustling little woman, a devout Catholic, utters a shriek of dismay, calls on Mother Mary, and takes to her bed with a pain in her chest, and for a day or two a cloud comes over Mr Leacock’s kind and ruddy face, while he considers the request. He seems not so much annoyed, as grieved.

Gwyneth is horrified to have caused so much trouble. She withdraws her request, but the Leacocks mull over it for weeks. They seem unable to let the incident go, gnawing at it as if they were starving and had been at last offered a bone.

If the problem is money, Mr Leacock says, Chloe could be allowed to clean the guests’ shoes—there are eight guest bedrooms by now—for two shillings a week.

‘It’s not the money—’ says Gwyneth—

‘If the problem’s tiredness,’ says Mrs Leacock, descending the stairs all of a tremble. ‘I can get hold of some Ministry of Food Orange Juice. They’re selling some off cheap in Stortford—too much preservative so the babies won’t drink it—but perfectly all right for adults. That’ll perk you up.’

So Gwyneth doesn’t get her extra afternoon off. But before Chloe starts work on the shoes each morning, she is given a spoonful of thick orange syrup, tart with sulphuric acid, from the crate Gwyneth now has to find room for under her bed.

One winter morning, groping for Chloe’s mouth in the dark—blackout curtains are tacked over the windows at night—Gwyneth laughs.

‘You have to laugh,’ she says. ‘It’s a funny old life.’

Ha-ha.

So now, when the Portuguese waiter brings a Dubonnet instead of a Campari, in a not very clean glass, Chloe says nothing. She is aware that he especially dislikes women customers, seeing it as a humiliation to have to serve them. She is aware that he is overworked, underpaid, exploited and helpless in a strange land, and that the greatest insult of all is her awareness of these things. And still she sits there.