Joy and Josephine (37 page)

‘No, thank God.’ Rodney took refuge in his arm-chair.

‘I used to like it when I was a kid; they all do, but latterly,’ this was a word she had picked up from a reception clerk at the Grand Metropolitan and used whenever possible, ‘latterly, I’ve hated the very thought of the place, much less live in it. That’s how I
know
I’m Joy Stretton. I’ve always known I was meant for something better than the life I had, like I would, wouldn’t I, if I’d been born into a family like yours? You being a Bart, does that make me a title or anything, or come into it when you die?’

Rodney laughed, fluting at the back of his nose. ‘Sorry, my dear. Even if I did oblige, I’ve got a younger brother with a son.’

‘Well, never mind, Sir Rodney,’ said Joy generously. ‘It’s enough for me to know I’m Joy Stretton, now I’m getting over the shock a bit. What do you think I ought to do now? I’m so tired I don’t think I can do any more. Must I go back to my job? They’ll skin me for playing the mike like this. In any case, did your niece ought to be selling cigs and chocs over the counter? What shall I do?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Rodney nervously. The situation
threatened disruption of his life’s pattern. ‘What am I supposed to do?’ he asked helplessly.

Jo looked helpless too and sat down on a straight-back chair by the wall. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I hadn’t thought. I simply came straight here to tell you that your niece wasn’t dead. I – I thought you’d be so pleased.’ She drooped, looking as forlorn as she felt.

‘But of course I am,’ said Rodney quickly, seeing that he had hurt her. ‘Just a little –
bouleversé,
shall we say? We both need a drink. Brandy this time.’

‘Oh, no.’ Jo waved a hand dully. ‘I don’t want anything more. I’m going in a minute.’

‘Nonsense,’ said Rodney. ‘Medicinal.’ Pouring her drink, he put from him the unworthy thought that this priceless brandy was wasted on her. If what she said were true, if the girl really was a Cope, it was high time she started to drink good brandy. He liked to think that he was the one to initiate her.

Jo did not know how to drink from a brandy glass. He showed her. That made her giggle and he giggled too and it all became rather fun. He liked her. It was ages since he had had someone so young and fresh in the flat. All his friends knew exactly what to do and how to do it wherever they went. They did not need showing. Sometimes he tried to show people how to look at pictures or listen to music. He might show his niece these things, too. She would pay more attention than his friends did; she might make things more fun.

Hang it, he thought, I like her, whoever she is. I like having her here.

The room seemed more friendly. The walls and bookcases and mirrors and his priceless china on the alcove shelves no longer seemed to watch him, as they did sometimes when he was alone, to see what he was going to do, since
they
did not intend to do anything to help his loneliness. The fire in the little gilt grate rustled and ticked as if it were more than just a decorative adjunct to the central heating. Rodney put on another piece of coal and had homely thoughts about making toast. When the domed clock chimed, it was a reminder, not of the slowness of time’s passing, but of its speed.

It was Rodney’s bedtime, and he let it go by. To crown everything, Lady, who loathed strangers, flopped off her cushion and, came to snore and slobber round Jo’s legs, as if she knew she was one of the family.

‘What’s his name?’ Jo asked, bending to pat her.

‘Lady Precious Stream,’ recited Rodney, making it sound very precious indeed.

‘Oh.’ Jo went on stroking the top of the dog’s head until it seemed as though its eyes must pop right out at last.

Rodney did not explain to her now about the play, nor show her the original Chinese prints he had of the scenes. He would reserve that pleasure for another time. For there was going to be another time. He had had an idea.

‘My dear,’ he said, intensely affected by his sacrifice, ‘I’ve a suggestion to make.’

Jo looked up and stopped stroking Lady, who bumped her dripping nose against her stockings to make her go on.

‘If you’re really Joy, which we shall have to prove, I expect, with all manner of tedious litigation, if you’re really my poor sister’s child – and I tell you frankly, my dear, I like to think that you are – why not come and live here with me?’

‘Here?’ Jo was shocked. ‘Alone with you? Why, whatever would people say?’

Rodney made the woodwind noise which was as near as he ever got to a hearty laugh. ‘My dear, I’m old enough to be your father! I’m your uncle, in fact. Anyway, we wouldn’t be here alone. There’s Alexander.’

‘Who’s he when he’s at home?’

‘Alexander?’ It was inconceivable that anyone in London should not know him. ‘He’s my man. You’ll like him.’ But would Alexander like the girl? He was funny about women. He himself had some girl secreted in Hounslow, whom he was understood to visit on his half day. No one had ever seen her and he never spoke of her. When Rodney, morbidly fearful of losing him, tried to probe the future, Alexander would lower from his great saturnine height: ‘Marriage, sir? Have I ever mentioned it?’

‘No, but this girl – isn’t she getting restive?’

‘That is a subject,’ said Alexander coldly, ‘with which I believe I have never bored you. I would appreciate the same consideration from you, Sir Rodney.’

He liked to keep Rodney in his place. He was not in favour of marriage for him either, which biased his opinion of the women who came to the Mount Street flat. Unmarried women were only safe if they were ‘of a type’. They must not be young and virtuous, nor falling off and hungrily questing. He never openly disapproved. With his passion for mystery he did nothing openly; he even opened the front door as if the flat were a speakeasy. He did not voice his mistrust, but he had a threatening way of putting down plates, or of saying: ‘Miss X to dinner? I’ll see what I can do, sir,’ which implied strychnine in the soup, and discouraged Rodney from asking Miss X again.

He might think Jo was a fortune hunter. Rodney always knew when he suspected this, because he would not put out the best glass, nor serve coloured sugar with the coffee, as if to imply that there was nothing here worth angling for.

Yet Alexander was humane and his psychology, as Rodney never tired of boasting, was infallible. He would see Jo for what she was: a sweet, unscheming child to whom life so far had dealt a poorish hand.

He showed her round the flat. Jo had by now abandoned any pretence at blasé gentility and Rodney was touched by her ingenuous enthusiasm. She certainly was stimulating. Every time he passed a clock, he marvelled anew that it was long past his bedtime and still he did not care. No one had ever praised his bathroom like Josephine. When he showed her his bedroom, she could hardly believe, from the size of his bed, that he was not married. He showed her the room that would be hers, and she could not speak, but her tired eyes shone. Rodney could weep that anyone should get so excited about a small room that looked over the roofs and window-whirling mops of the chambermaids at the Connaught Hotel.

‘I should move the bed,’ she said, ‘if you didn’t object. I never fancy the light in my eyes.’ Well, very good. Here she would lie, so. There would her clothes hang. Here, the silver dressingtable set that Rodney would give her.

She wanted to see everything, but he would not allow her as far as Alexander’s domain at the end of the passage. Rodney himself was only allowed in the kitchen or pantry as a favour, if there were game to be inspected, or a wine discussed. It would be a test to see whether Alexander received Jo there. She would not go into his bed-sitting room, of course. No one, not even Ned’s children, had ever been
there,
but if he allowed her into the kitchen, and even – dared one hope? – let her make an omelette on his evening out, she would have arrived.

Rodney began to have audacious visions of not always having to dine out on a Thursday. Jo would wear a delectable apron, and they would have one of those supper snacks advised by
Vague,
and some suitably Bohemian
vin du pays
on the low round table in the drawing-room.

‘Not to-night,’ he heard himself telephoning on a Thursday morning. ‘We pig it
chez nous
on Thursdays. The child looks forward to it all week.’

‘And so do you,’ would tease the faintly jealous voice along the wire.

‘Oh, well.’ The deprecating laugh. ‘Domesticity has its charms. Don’t you find – or don’t you?’

He
wanted
to have her here. It would be as good as being married, without the ties and wearisome demands of marriage. Jo was stimulating, but she was also more malleable than any wife would be, and she was so pretty, and her figure perfect. He saw himself in Bruton Street, supervising her – well, you couldn’t call it a trousseau, but she would have to have everything new, if all her clothes were on a par with the outfit she wore now. Her underclothes were probably appalling. These girls spent all their money on the top layer. Her hair? Mentally, he brought it down and brushed it out and set it in a deceptively simple sheet of copper, just as Raymond would do at his instructions. Her accent? Greater problems of conversion had been tackled. It would be as rewarding as that time he had cleaned off an oleograph and found a Millais underneath. He would fix her as one would restore a picture or convert a tasteless room, to the marvel of all his friends.

Rodney began to see himself as Pygmalion, and liked the idea.

When it was really time at last for her to go, she looked to him for instructions, as she would look, he foresaw, so often in the future. ‘What shall I tell people? How am I going to get away from Mum and Dad? Suppose they won’t give me up? Dad’s funny, and Mum – well, I don’t know what I’m going to say to Mum.’

‘You’re fond of her?’

‘Yes,’ said Jo, caught unawares. ‘At least I was,’ she amended. ‘But knowing how she’s deceived me all these years has made me feel different. She’s got no right to me, after all.’ Thus she tried to smother her conscience and the tugs of old affections that must not drag her back to the Portobello Road. If she was to be Joy Stretton, she must cut herself off from everything she had ever known.

‘We should have to go to Law, I suppose,’ sighed Rodney.

‘Oh no,’ said Jo. ‘I couldn’t face that.’ Norman had imbued her with horror of the Law, and the idea that it was always against you, whether you were plaintiff or defendant.

‘It would be tedious, I grant you. Perhaps we can circumvent that. They’re badly off, you say? Perhaps a little touch of – ’ With upturned palm, he made the traditional gesture of delicately tickling fingers. He had always got everything he wanted with money. Why not this girl?

‘You go home and prepare the ground,’ he said. ‘I’ll sow the seed.’ He came all the way to the ground floor to chaperon her past the night porter, who had a leery mind. Williams must not start thinking things about Jo.

‘See if you can find my niece a taxi,’ Rodney said, and if Williams were not already afflicted with a drooping left eyelid, he might be thought to have winked.

‘I won’t wait, Jo,’ Rodney said, ‘because if I catch a cold, I never throw it off.’

‘You didn’t ought to call me Jo,’ she said in a blurred, sleepy way, bunching her thin coat round her. ‘I’m Joy. Get your tongue round that.’

‘If I do,’ he said, improving the occasion, ‘you must say
Rownd,
like that.’ His lips looked like a cup’s eye view of a
teapot spout. ‘And, er – strictly speaking, you shouldn’t say “didn’t ought”.’

‘Did I say that?’ asked Jo. ‘Pardon me, Sir Rodney, I’m sure. A slip of the tongue.’

‘You’ll have to call me Uncle Rodney, I suppose,’ he said dubiously. ‘And – er – by the way,’ he added, feeling uncomfortable, but he had to start sometime, ‘I usually say “I’m sorry”, not “Pardon me”.’

‘Do you?’ asked Jo. ‘Why?’

‘I honestly don’t know.’ When Rodney was nonplussed, his chin slipped right back into his neck.

‘Well, don’t you worry about it,’ said Jo tolerantly. ‘You run along in, or you’ll be getting chesty.’

Chesty! It sounded like a catarrhal labourer. In the silent, creeping lift, which would have no truck with those rushing chromium boxes in modern flats, Rodney’s heart quailed a little. This was a long and delicate job he had set himself. It was not as if one could return the goods to the shop either, as one did if other possessions did not turn out right.

However, if she had been born a Cope, she must come in the end to look and sound and behave like one. Environment and influence had made her what she was now. Rodney’s environment and influence could make her a Cope again.

A man with a taxing task ahead of him, he left a note for Alexander to call him half an hour later and to give him two eggs and both halves of the grapefruit for breakfast.

Jo made the driver stop at the corner of the street, lest windows should go up at the unfamiliar chug and slam and ting of a taxi in Denbigh Terrace. Could she keep the change out of the money Rodney had given her for the fare? What did she do about money, anyway, if she stopped working? Who would buy her clothes? Would Rodney give her an allowance? She would have a fur coat and some pearls. Half asleep, she stumbled down the Terrace, speculating muzzily on the details of her future.

Violet was kissing a young man under the lamp post. She detached her head but not her body from the hard breathing embrace of what looked like a coat with the hanger left in.
‘Well!’ shrilled Vi, ‘you’ve given Felix a good run for his money, and no mistake. Two nights and two days and not going to work and all. They sent round after you from the hotel. You’re for it.’

‘I don’t care,’ said Jo. ‘I’m chucking the job.’

‘My, my!’ cried Violet, in what she thought was a Mayfair accent. ‘Fancy yourself, don’t you? I wonder you come back at all, if that’s the case. What happened? Couldn’t he take it, dear? You must be hotter stuff than I thought.’

‘Shut up,’ said Jo disgustedly, going up the steps. ‘I haven’t been with Felix.’

‘And not with Norman neither, since he’s been smelling round here like a dog after a bitch. Was it a pick-up?’ Violet, enthralled, detached herself still further, and slapped at a male hand.