Joy and Josephine (21 page)

He did not tell his wife, for he had always decried racing before he knew anything about it. She did not know when he lost any of the day’s takings, for what was the use of being good at figures if he could not juggle a little with the accounts? Time enough to tell her when he had made a tidy little sum, which might stop her worrying about the shop’s diminishing turnover.

‘When you’re older, I’ll take you out,’ he told Jo. ‘It does a man no harm to be seen about with a pretty daughter.’

Jo saw that this was one of the times to ask for anything she wanted, like a fountain pen, or half a crown for a botany outing to Oxted.

She put her hand into her tunic pocket, and clutched the folded paper to give her confidence. ‘Dad,’ she said, ‘the Grays are going to the seaside in August, did I tell you? They’re going to Seacombe, by car. They always go to the same hotel.’

‘What of it?’ He raised his eyebrows.

‘Well – I mean, it’ll be nice, won’t it?’

‘Indeed it will,’ said Mrs Abinger, wondering, from Jo’s dimpling, sideways look, what she was up to.

‘I prophesy a wet August,’ said Old Moore Abinger. ‘You always pay for a fine spring, in my experience.’

‘Oh George, but it was fine last spring, and look at the summer we had. The dog days nearly killed me.’

‘I said, in my experience, Ellie. I can’t vouch for yours.’

‘Dad,’ pursued Jo, wishing her mother would keep quiet and not ruffle him just when he was amenable, ‘wouldn’t it be super to go away this summer?’

‘Would it? And what about the shop? Or do you and your mother mean to go away and leave me sweltering here? Thank you very much indeed.’

‘Of course we wouldn’t do that,’ said Mrs Abinger, almost laughing to think of what would happen to the business if they did. ‘I daresay she meant that the Grays have asked her to go with them, is that it, Jo?’ Oh, if only they would take her, she would scrape up the money somehow.

‘Well no.’ Jo looked down and scribbled. ‘Oh, they would, of course, only there wouldn’t be room in their car. I meant all of us go to Seacombe. Oh – ’ in a rush, looking up with the lit face of a visionary, ‘couldn’t we shut the shop, just for a little bit? I’d work all day at helping you when we got back. Mr Gray told me the name of their hotel. Pauline says she can see the sea from her window. They always have the same rooms. It
must
be nice or they wouldn’t keep going there. Oh Dad–Mum – Pauline’s got a red bathing dress. Her dog goes in the sea after sticks, she says. Mr Gray plays in the golfing competition. Mrs Gray bought a little lighthouse filled with all different coloured sand. They have picnics, and catch shrimps, and boil them for tea in a bucket. They – ’

‘Stop, stop!’ Her father put his hands over his ears. ‘For pity’s sake stop telling me about the Grays. It’s not my concern what they do or don’t do with their Augusts. I know what I’m going to do with mine.’

‘I only thought,’ said Jo, watching him, ‘if they can go away, why can’t we? They’re no better than us.’

It was the right line. ‘No more they are,’ he ruminated. ‘No more they are,’ and with this in mind, went off to the Sun in Splendour.

Most of their customers were pleased, for the Abingers’ sake,
when they heard that they must go elsewhere for their groceries in the last two weeks of August. George put a notice on the door, in discreet lettering very different from Ellison’s flamboyant, clamouring blackboards.

‘This store will be closed for two weeks from August 15th.’
It looked well.

‘I shall go to Ellison’s while you’re away,’ said Mrs Lupin, with her hoarse, man’s laugh which made her nearly cough the shop out. ‘Perhaps I’ll never come back to you no more.’

‘Good idea,’ echoed another customer. ‘We shall get a decent bite of something to eat for those two weeks for a change.’ They always liked to have a dig at George.

‘Ellison’s!’ he scoffed. ‘You’ll be crying to come back before you’re done with their short measure and cheap-grade lines.’

They would come back, of course, for Ellie’s sake. Most of the regular customers were only faithful to the Corner Stores because she was their friend. George did not know this.

Miss Loscoe was not pleased. Although she came in barely once a week, she behaved now as if the Corner Stores were the only shop in London. ‘I must say I think it’s a funny way to run a business,’ she grumbled. ‘What are the public supposed to do while you go high day and jaunting off? I don’t know where I’ll go for my charcoal biscuits, and what about my senna tea?’

‘You
ought to go away for a bit, Dot,’ said Mrs Abinger kindly. ‘I’m sure you could do with a change after all your trouble. Why don’t you go to your sister, now that she’s got her own place?’ Nurse Loscoe had retired on her mother’s little bit of legacy, and was living with her memories at King’s Lynn.

‘I don’t fancy that flat part of the world,’ said Miss Loscoe. ‘But don’t worry about me, I beg. I daresay I shall manage while you’re away, even if I do have to go chasing half over London for my needs.’

Mrs Abinger could not help worrying. Miss Loscoe looked terrible. Her share of Mrs Loscoe’s money had not encouraged her to relax her austerity. She couldn’t. She had gone too far.
It was becoming a mania now that she must retain in her body as little food as possible.

At Seacombe, the Abingers had taken rooms in a house called Clarence Lodge, in a side street at right angles to the sea. There had been a lot to do before they left, and Mrs Abinger felt worn out and rather rocky before they even got to Paddington. She hoped she could stand the journey.

She slept, and waking at Taunton, said, in a daze: ‘The last time I was on this line with you, Jo, you were – ’

Luckily Josephine interrupted: ‘But we’ve never been in this train before, Mum. You know that.’

‘Whatever was I saying?’ Mrs Abinger, all in a flurry and bother, straightened her hat and picked up the papers which had slid off the lap of her best black silk.

‘You’re forgetting yourself, Ellie,’ George said. ‘Good thing for you I don’t choose to do the same.’

Mrs Abinger looked quickly at Jo, but she was too excited to notice what they were saying. She looked back at George. She did not trust him, especially in this ill-fitting, almost jaunty holiday mood which he had assumed after they had locked the door this morning on ‘M ZAW TEE TEA’.

He was a bomb that might one day explode and destroy her patiently built structure. Having kept Jo’s secret so long, she was beginning to think that she would never tell her now. The shock might be bad for her nerves. It would never do to upset her just when she was doing so well. What a pity the Copes could not see what a fine job Mrs Abinger had made of their Joy. For of course, no one but Joy Stretton could have become the talented, self-reliant little Miss who was now pressing her pretty nose against the carriage window.

Her self-reliance was another reason for concealment, a selfish one, which Mrs Abinger tried to repudiate. But she could not help thinking that if Jo were so independent now towards what she thought was her real mother, how much farther away might she go if she knew the truth?

Mrs Abinger kept her eye on George, who was looking at her quizzically over the slightly lower collar, which so far was his
only sartorial concession to the holiday. But he had a sea green cloth cap in his bag, and a pair of brindle canvas shoes with black rubber soles. He was going to be emancipated and do the thing in style, since he had given it his blessing. He was convinced by now that the suggestion and the final decision had been entirely his.

As might be expected of the Grays’ holiday choice, Seacombe was a dull place. Most of the visitors were people like the Grays, who went there year after year, because they could not get out of the habit. It had nothing to recommend it, being neither gaily sophisticated nor peacefully picturesque. There was not much to do and very little worth looking at.

Josephine, who had never seen the sea, nor spent a night away from the flat, thought she was in Paradise. It was holiday enough for her mother to see her so delirious, although Mrs Abinger was disappointed that the terraced houses were so grey and ugly, the beach so pebbly and the little harbour spoilt by a coaling wharf and a railway siding, with foul-mouthed lightermen in squashed caps instead of quaint old salts and sou’westers.

Mr Abinger was disappointed to find no pier, no concert pavilion, no slot machines. There were no ice-cream parlours nor rifle ranges, and his initial reconnaissance of the saloon bars revealed that the talk, by which he meant the listening, was as poor as the beer. However, he was still in holiday mood. He ate haddock for breakfast, which he never would at home, cracked a joke with the waitress, and had a long talk afterwards in the garden with an old man in an invalid chair, who could not get away.

By the time he was ready to go out, Josephine had already gone looking for Pauline Gray, so he took Mrs Abinger round the town, criticizing the window displays of the grocers’ shops, pointing out where he would throw out a pier or plant a formal park. Mrs Abinger noticed a nice café where they might go for tea, since teas were extra anyway at Clarence Lodge.

George was wearing his sea-green cap and a knotted instead of a bow tie. He walked too fast for her in his canvas shoes. The sea air seemed to have gone to his head. He bought her
an ice-cream off a barrow, and called ‘Good morning!’ to startled strangers. Finding that his favourite daily paper was a Western edition, he felt a pleasantly travelled man. They sat in deck-chairs on the short concrete promenade, and he treated Mrs Abinger to comical bits about the natives of Plymouth and Torquay.

Mrs Abinger did not want to read or talk or listen. It was enough just to be sitting here in the middle of the morning with nothing whatever to do.

‘I reckon this is just what we needed, George,’ she said, sitting very spread, and easing her feet in her new beach shoes. ‘A real change from London and the shop and everything. We’ve been too long without a holiday. All work and no play, they say, don’t they?’

The sun came out of a cloud, and he tipped his hat forward, in terror of sunstroke. ‘I daresay I have been working too hard, Ellie,’ he conceded. ‘It’s slow death, a one-man business in these days, with everything on one pair of shoulders. Perhaps I ought to take it a bit easier, for when all’s said and done, where would you be if I was to crock up with overwork? I wonder if I should enquire after an assistant …’ He gazed out over the promenade rail, the bigness of the ocean giving him big ideas.

‘I doubt we could afford that, dear,’ Mrs Abinger said. ‘I shall have to try and take a bit off you, to give you more free time, if you feel you need it.’

‘Need it? Of course I need it. I tell you, Ellie, a one-man business is a killing thing, a killing thing.’

He repeated this to Mr Gray, when the families met for a picnic. If Mr Gray was surprised to hear that the business was not quite the multiple store which Jo had implied, he did not show it. He said: ‘I believe you’ solemnly, resting on his heels, his hands hitching up the pockets of his yellowing white flannels, so that they looked even shorter than last year.

Watching her father covertly, Jo was pleased to see that everything was all right. He and Mr Gray, as being the men of the party, were quite bluff together and spoke of ‘the ladies’, wagging their heads. Mr Abinger even added: ‘God bless ‘em,’ and handed Mrs Gray into the car like a courtier. For the picnic, he
had discarded his tie altogether and wore his shirt collar open outside his jacket, his Adam’s apple jumping about like a marble in a lemonade bottle.

Mrs Abinger, who had put off meeting the Grays as long as possible, felt as nervous as she had feared. She had passed a bad night in the so-called double bed, which she had to build out with two chairs to support her overflow. It was going to be a grilling day. She should have worn her old thin dress, instead of her thicker new one. Sitting on the high back seat of the open car, she felt herself already beginning to pour with perspiration. She would be a sight directly. Mrs Gray, with her flat figure in the biscuit-coloured linen dress with linen hat to match, looked quite cool. But Jo was much, much prettier than Pauline. Mrs Abinger held on to that.

They all waited about on the pavement outside the Grays’ flaking Gothic hotel, and Mrs Abinger, sizzling on the hot leather seat like a herring on a griddle, wondered if they were never going to start.

Mr Gray was fussing round his old green Morris tourer as if it were a Rolls-Royce, rubbing it up with bits of rag, looking in the radiator, polishing the windscreen with a chamois leather. At last, a maid in a black dress and muslin apron, very different from the slovenly girl who flung herself among the tables at Clarence Lodge and would as soon spill soup in your lap as not, appeared at the hotel door with a picnic basket.

‘Aha!’ cried Mr Gray. ‘The commissariat department.’ The basket was lashed down to the luggage carrier with as many clove hitches as if the old Morris had been a storm-bound cargo ship. The Abingers’ landlady would not provide sandwiches, so the Grays were supposed to have brought enough lunch for all, but it looked rather a small basket. Mrs Abinger hoped there was going to be enough, for George had made quite a fuss as it was about having lunch out. It would not be deducted from their bill, and he liked the steamed puddings at Clarence Lodge. Mrs Abinger had brought some chocolate in her bag to keep him sweet-tempered.

But he did not really need studying on this holiday as he did at home. He sat in front with Mr Gray, chatting pleasantly,
one elbow flung over the door as casually as if he went in a car every day of his life.

Mrs Abinger tried to make conversation to Mrs Gray. She knew Jo wanted her to be a success, but Pauline’s mother disconcerted her by answering ‘How very interring,’ as if she did not really mean it. Trying to make herself as narrow as possible on the crowded back seat, Mrs Abinger mentioned the weather, which Mrs Gray said was quite kind, but not so kind as last year. She asked if their hotel was comfortable, and Mrs Gray assented, without offering details. You could not ask the Grays questions. It made you feel inquisitive, because they were not sufficiently interested in other families to ask any themselves.