Joy and Josephine (18 page)

Now suddenly, as she stood by the bed, trying to twist a French knot off the counterpane, she shuddered.

‘You didn’t take cold coming home from school, did you?’ asked her mother. ‘You should have worn your woollie.’

‘Oh Mum!’ The sob that had been welling up inside Jo caught in her throat. ‘Oh Mum!’ The sob burst forth, and with it, all her pent up despair, as she rushed at her mother and clung, wailing: ‘I saw Billy Moore just now. He wouldn’t speak to me, ‘cos of what I done. Oh Mum – I wish I hadn’t have done it.’

‘So do I, precious.’ Mrs Abinger sat on the bed and pulled Jo on to her lap. ‘So do I.’ Although they both meant different things, they comforted each other, rocking on the great double
feather bed, mingling their tears as they pressed their faces together.

‘Never mind, love,’ crooned Mrs Abinger. ‘Never mind the Moores. We can get on without them.’ Never mind who Jo was or was not. She was her baby. She wanted nothing else.

‘Never mind,’ she repeated, chanting like a lullaby. ‘We’ll be happy without them, you and I. And Dad,’ she amended, as a cough from the doorway made her look up.

George stood there in his long stiff apron, nodding his heavy head as he did when he was put out. Yet somehow he did not look cross. His eyes looked less prominent, softer, sadder; and his wife smiled at him and wiped her eyes, her other hand clutching Josephine’s woebegone head to her chest.

‘Well, well,’ he said quite mildly. ‘Men must work and women must weep, they say. But if I’m to do all the work and you women are to do all the weeping, another time, Ellie, you might put the kettle on before you start, and oblige.’

When Josephine was twelve, Mrs Abinger’s Aunt Ethel died and left her a little money. George took it for granted that she would spend it on the shop, which badly needed redecorating.

Although they had been married by the registrar, Mr Abinger always behaved as if his wife had promised at the altar with all her worldly goods him to endow. He had long ago appropriated the curly-backed leather armchair which had been her father’s, and when she had sold her cottage piano to make room for his family sideboard, the money had been spent on a Bank Holiday week-end at Hartlepool, where there was a Provision Retailers’ Association rally. When Mrs Abinger drew a prize in the Bridge club Christmas raffle, he had calmly chosen for her, not the turkey, nor the silk stockings, nor the flask of eau de Cologne, but two bottles of whisky, which the doctor had forbidden her to drink.

Giddy fits and unbearable headaches had sent her to the
doctor at last. ‘I’ve got blood pressure,’ she told George. ‘He says I’m to take things easier.’

‘You don’t want to believe all they tell you,’ he said and allowed her to do as much as ever.

‘The doctor dared me to touch alcohol,’ she had said, and soon after that George had come home from the club with a bottle of whisky under each arm.

A glass of it stood at his elbow one evening, as he studied a decorator’s estimate. Josephine was at the cinema with her cousin Violet. Mrs Abinger was washing up the supper things, shifting her weight from one foot to the other, for her legs were troublesome these days. Her hands swelled too in hot water, and Josephine had bought her a mop, but she forgot to use it, and plunged about in the sink with a dishcloth in her old way.

She did most of her thinking at the sink. Washing up, or peeling potatoes and cleaning vegetables was so automatic that it left her mind free to roam beyond the cramped, inconvenient kitchen, where everything was at the wrong height, and you were in your own light standing at the stove, with wet clothes under the low ceiling brushing your hair on washing day. The gas stove had a slight leak somewhere, but the door could not be opened when the hinged chopping shelf was up, and the window was above the sink, where Mrs Abinger’s short arms could not reach to open it after George had banged it down for shaving and gargling. A prolonged cooking spell in this Black Hole of Calcutta was enough to make anyone feel giddy. She had maintained this for a long time before she admitted to giddiness in all kinds of places besides the kitchen.

Take things easier, the doctor had said, probably knowing the advice to be as useless as she did. How could she take things more easily when, even with all the work she put into it, the business was barely holding its own?

Scraping the residue of fried egg and chips off his plate, she thought of what George had said after Jo had gone out.

‘Time that girl had left school,’ he had said, ‘and began to help you in the shop. We need another pair of hands.’

Mrs Abinger had not answered. She went on clearing the table, rather grim about the mouth. No doubt he saw himself
spending more and more time in the armchair up here, or out at the Club or Debating Society, as Josephine took over more and more of his work downstairs. But that was not what Mrs Abinger saw. Jo was not going to waste her youth in a grocer’s shop, weighing out biscuits for people who thought you really cared whether they had Osborne or Oval Rich Tea; struggling with sides of bacon and sacks of soda; sweeping out the shop before daylight and again after dark; shut into the back storeroom on sunny Sundays, fighting the losing battle against confusion. No matter how often you tidied the shelves, by the end of the week, you could scarcely lay your hand on a thing you wanted. George, sooner than look for a tin of custard powder, would rip open a new carton which had not even been checked, take one tin and leave the rest spilling out of the overturned box for someone else to put away.

No, she wanted something better than that for Josephine, but there was no sense in contradicting George yet. Time enough for that when Jo left Mrs Mortimer’s next year. If only she could have stayed a bit longer and learned something that would help her to a good job. But Mrs Mortimer did not keep the older girls. At thirteen, they had learned everything she and her dim whispering daughter could teach them. Jo had learned some ladylike things there, but she did not seem to have nearly as much book-learning as Violet, the pride of Denbigh Terrace, who had just passed from the Council to the senior school.

Her hands in the sink, her eyes looking above it unseeingly at the assortment of scouring agents, some for the sink, some for George’s inside, these thoughts slid about in Mrs Abinger’s brain, until, like balls of mercury, they suddenly coagulated into one of those breath-taking ideas of hers which could not be restrained.

Without stopping to dry her hands, she went straight through to the sitting-room and sat down opposite George at the round table. She had to sit down nowadays when she got excited.

‘George,’ she said, scarlet. ‘I know what I’m going to do with Aunt Ethel’s money.’

‘So do I.’ He tapped the estimate with his long, knobbly finger. ‘But not by this fellow. It’s robbery without violence.’

‘Suppose,’ said Mrs Abinger, breathing hard, ‘we didn’t have the painting done just yet, dear? We’re in a shabby way, I know, but I daresay it doesn’t notice as much as you think. Why don’t you get some paint and just touch up the letters and that, where they’ve faded?’

‘
I
?’ His heavy jaw dropped. His face was a mask of horror.

‘You’re so artistic,’ she said, leaning across the table. ‘You’d quite enjoy it, I’m sure.’

‘I? And have all the customers come and laugh at me perched up out there on a ladder like a monkey on a stick? Thank you very much indeed. Very good for business, I’m sure. We may not have the turnover of some whom I could mention – ’ he glanced behind him as if he could see Ellison’s lively shop taunting him through the wall – ‘but we haven’t quite come to that.’

‘Well then, dear.’ She sat back, leaning away from him like someone about to touch off a charge of dynamite. ‘We shall have to go shabby a bit longer, because I know what I’m going to do with Aunt Ethel’s money. I’m going to send Jo to the High School’

Without looking at her, George picked up the bottle and poured himself out a generous tot of Mrs Abinger’s Christmas whisky. He drank, thumped the glass down on the mossy tablecloth, swallowed with a great plunge of his Adam’s apple, and shook his head like a dog coming out of a pond.

‘Now Ellie,’ he said steadily, ‘don’t get excited. Remember what the doctor said. Much as I dislike,’ he said – and the Debating Society should have heard him now – ‘to damp your maternal enthusiasm, I must forbid this harebrained project categorically. Ca-te-gorically.’

Josephine took to High School like a duck to water; or like any only child with unsatisfied herd instincts.

Mrs Abinger marvelled at her. She herself had been terrified by the vast brick building with its uncurtained windows and acres of worn green oilcloth. There seemed to be far more than two hundred girls. Hordes of them stampeded about like wild bronchos, for the headmistress, who had been a great half-miler
at Newnham, had heard that the Dartmouth cadets ran everywhere and had borrowed the idea.

The headmistress had further shaken Mrs Abinger by wearing an academic gown and by talking very fast and loud in short, sharp rushes. She appeared to be a ‘clever’ woman; all brain and no horse sense. Would she notice if a child were coming up in a rash? Would she send Jo home if her head came on bad? Did she give every girl the same chance, no matter where she came from?

Rising to dismiss Mrs Abinger, the headmistress had said: ‘I hope your girl will do well here. She’ll have to work like smoke. Absolutely. If she’s to catch up with her age group.’

‘I’m sure she’ll be very happy, thank you,’ murmured Mrs Abinger, just preventing herself from adding Madam, for the interview had wobbled the supporting prestige of Aunt Ethel’s money. She felt as if she had been applying for a domestic post somewhat above her status.

‘Happy?’ neighed the headmistress. ‘That’s up to her. Absolutely. If she’s a good mixer. Girls of every class come here. Democracy, that’s the style. She’ll find her level, Mrs Abinger. Absolutely have to. Good day to you. Straight down the corridor. First right and down the stairs.’

Mrs Abinger had crept away, wondering what she had let Jo in for.

Josephine however, read plenty of books about girls’ schools. Primed with them, she sailed off confident in her new uniform, everything marked, her new gym shoes asserting their anaesthetic smell even through her strong new boot bag.

When she found that the books were all wrong, she swallowed her Angela Brazil slang and listened, running about with the other girls, watching and imitating. On her second morning, she appeared at breakfast with her curly chestnut hair not drawn back under a ribbon, but looped over her forehead like a proscenium curtain, caught up at the side by an unsightly great slide of imitation tortoiseshell.

‘What the dickens have you done to your hair?’ asked her father, pouring himself another cup of tea, and not replacing the cosy, because he had finished.

‘Oh,’ said Jo airily, pulling the curtain of hair still lower, ‘it’s for school. All the girls do it that way. Except Christine Bollinger She’s got ever such lovely long yellow hair, Mum, you wouldn’t believe. She used to be able to sit on it, but she cut it off because it got in her way at gym. She’s the youngest in the gym team.’ She spoke with awe.

Christine Bollinger was the first in a succession of heroines whose doings were to be recounted
ad nauseam
in the home. There was Mary Murphy, who had painted a picture of Cape gooseberries, which was to be framed and hung in the junior playroom.

Mr Abinger was still harping on having the shop painted.

‘Mary Murphy could do it as easy as anything, I bet,’ said Jo.

‘And who, pray, might Mary Murphy be?’ asked Mr Abinger. ‘Irish, I suppose. I don’t trust the Irish.’

‘You
know.
I’ve told you about her ever so often. She’s in the Upper Fifth and she can paint anything. Miss Wymper lets her stay in after school for free drawing.’

‘Free painting is what this shop needs,’ said Mr Abinger, smirking at his jest. ‘I don’t know where the money’s to come from with all the outlay we’re put to these days.’ Mrs Abinger went out of the room. She knew he was referring to Jo’s new winter coat and cartwheel velour hat and the blazer which: ‘I must have, Mum. All the other girls do.’ What would he say if he knew that Aunt Ethel’s money was nearly gone, and next year’s fees must come from Mrs Abinger’s savings?

When the vogue for Mary Murphy died, up cropped Eularia Small, who could do all that Lister, Madame Curie, and Pasteur had dreamed of in their wildest flights.

‘Eularia Small did an experiment in chemistry to-day,’ Jo announced before she had even taken off her coat and hat. ‘Miss Patterson says she’ll split the atom yet, if you know what that means.’

‘Anyone called Eularia,’ said Mr Abinger, who had only a hazy idea, ‘ought to be shot.’

‘I think it’s a lovely name. Mum, I wish my name ended with an A. Eularia Small has a special room for chemistry at home.
She’s inventing gunpowder. Mum, can I have a chemistry set for Christmas?’

‘May
I,’ corrected her father. ‘You may not. Doing stinks in a flat this size!’ They had called it Stinks when he was a boy at Grammar school. Girls doing Stinks was unheard of then. He did not approve.

Nor did he approve of Myrtle Gardner, who was captain of cricket. In Josephine’s first summer at the High School, there was a very trying period when Myrtle Gardner was served up for every meal, like a cruet.

When her mother went in to kiss her good night, Jo would sit up with shining eyes, clasping her knees under the bedclothes. ‘D’you know what Myrtle Gardner’s bowling average is so far, Mum?’

Mrs Abinger tried to display intelligent interest. She loved to hear Jo talk about the school with that enthusiasm which no sacrifice would be too great to maintain. To keep that bloom in Jo’s apricot cheeks, that prattling, rapid, schoolgirl voice, so different to the Portobello whine, that eager skipping off in the mornings, and that happy return, bubbling over with choice bits of news, she would gladly spend all her savings – yes, and dip in the capital of the business if necessary.

Mr Abinger did not hold with cricket, which he thought was a time-wasting scheme, cunningly devised by teachers to get out of the lessons for which fees were paid. He did not see what Jo wanted with cricket. It only gave her the wrong ideas.