Joy and Josephine (38 page)

‘I’ve been on my own, I tell you.’ Jo fumbled for her key.

‘Oh yeah? Come on, be a pal and spill it. I’d do the same for you.’ She wriggled free and ran up the steps. ‘Cheeribye, Les. Same time, same place next week, eh?’

‘Hey!’ said the coat hanger, as Violet followed Jo into the cabbage-haunted hall. ‘Hey!’ he was left calling on the pavement, and Mrs Noakes, who passed the night in a chair by the window because of her asthma and dropsy, chased him away with a string of old-fashioned oaths.

Violet pestered Jo all the way up the stairs, and
sotto voce
in the unlit bedroom while they undressed. Jo could have wept from weariness, and the contrast between this house and bed where she must spend her night, and the flat and bed where Rodney was spending his. The smells of Denbigh Terrace, the dog on the stinking sack in the passage, Uncle Reg’s snores beyond the wall, and the creak of the sagging double bed as Auntie Phyll turned over to quiet the baby, Jo’s own damp and lumpy bed, and above all Vi and her voice and smell were so familiar that she could not believe now that she was really going to escape.

‘I’m Joy Stretton,’ she kept telling herself. ‘Hold on to that. I’m Joy Stretton, and this might be my last night here.’

‘It isn’t as if I didn’t tell you all about when I went to
Abergavenny with Bruce …’ Violet’s whine went on and on. When she was snoring at last, and Jo was falling down a hollow shaft where Mrs Abinger, Matron Tillings, Nurse Loscoe, Rodney, and the night porter at the flat were all saying mad things at once, Daisy started up from behind the curtain.

‘I got your fur stole, Jokie,’ she crowed. ‘I found where you’d hid it. Half a crown you can give me for that.’

‘I’ll hell as like,’ breathed Jo, scarcely knowing whether it were she or the mad voices who spoke.

‘Give you till the end of the week,’ chanted Daisy.

‘Shan’t be here,’ said Jo into the pillow. ‘I’ve got a fur coat, anyway.’ Rodney would give her one. Rodney Stretton. Joy Cope. She hung on the edge of sleep, and her pillow was swans-down and she in a boudoir of beauty. She was rich, she was a lady, she was a Cope. She was asleep.

Rodney would not come with Jo to see her parents. He would do a lot for his niece, but a scene in the Portobello Road was more than he could stand. He would fetch Jo in a car and only come up if necessary, when it was all over.

When Vi had gone to work, and Auntie Phyll was out shopping, Jo collected her belongings from Denbigh Terrace and went round to the Corner Stores. She wished she could sneak up to her mother, but there was no way to the flat except to ping her way into the shop, where heads swivelled, gimlet-eyed, for the Lane’s jungle telegraph had told of her hysterical departure three nights ago, and all Denbigh Terrace knew that her bed had not been slept in since. Mr Abinger looked up and opened his mouth to speak but remembered that he was not speaking to her, and clamped it shut again with a thrust of his lower jaw.

‘And the next please?’ he said ostentatiously to a customer.

Seeing Jo’s suitcase, Kitty Baines scuttled round the counter, and upstairs to lock the door of her bedroom. She came downstairs, putting the key into her pocket.

‘I’m afraid you’ll find Mrs Abinger very poorly,’ she said, meeting Jo on the way up.

‘What have you been doing to her?’

‘I? My gracious, I like that! It’s you that upset her so by
making such a scene the other day. I’ve done my best for her, as I always do, but she takes against resting.’

‘Out of my way,’ said Jo. ‘This case is heavy.’

‘Well, I mustn’t keep you out of your own home, must I?’ said Kitty, happily conscious of the key in her apron pocket, ‘but I do beg of you to have consideration for your mother’s poor old ticker-tock.’ She tapped her own well-cushioned heart, and as Mr Abinger called from the shop, she plopped down the stairs calling: ‘Coming Abbie! I’m coming, I’m coming, though my head is bending low …’

Not much more of this, Jo told herself. Peace and quiet soon, and nothing to get on your nerves. You had only to see Sir Rodney’s face to know that he did not have these annoyances rubbing at him all day long like a stone inside a shoe. One of the blessings of the rich was that they did not live all on top of one another in a tangle of jarring nerves. She had felt that even about the Moores, with their large separate bedrooms and their many corners of retreat, and she, of course, was going to be far richer and grander than the Moores could ever be.

Mrs Abinger was sitting by a small fire with her feet on a stool, waiting patiently for her lunch.

‘Well, Mum.’ Jo felt shamefaced that her mother was so pleased to see her. It did not make it any easier. She stood a little apart as she told her the story of what she had found out and what she meant to do. She would not be weakened by touches or endearments. She would not be dragged back. She was not Jo Abinger, and there was nothing to hold her here. But everything in the room, the wallpaper, the worn leather chairs, the round table at which she had eaten so many meals and chewed so many pencils held her by its timeless familiarity. The stuffiness of the room was part of her life. Most of all, her mother, who had been the same shape for as long as Jo could remember, and grey-haired like this since the holiday at Sea-combe, held her in the bonds of the past.

Not by what she said. Surprisingly, she did not protest, for she had given up the struggle. She had shot her bolt three days ago when the secret was let out. She had tried; she had tried for twenty years, and she had failed. She could do no more.

‘I’ll not hold you back, lovey,’ she said. ‘It’s right for you to have this chance. You deserve it. I was wrong not to give it you before. All along, there’s been this chance that you might be Joy Stretton, but I – ’

‘Might be? But I am, I know I am!’ Jo pounded the antimacassar on her father’s chair. ‘And you must have known it too, from the start. You put the little cross on me deliberately, because you knew the foundling baby was dead. You knew who I was. It wasn’t fair of you, Mum. Why did you do it?’

‘But dear, I didn’t know – ’ began Mrs Abinger and stopped. She looked at Jo in the clothes which Rodney had bought her this morning, her hair burnished and her face made up like porcelain, glowing in the dingy, cramped room like a marigold in a tool shed. She looked at the worn carpet and the dusty curtains and the poor little fern that would not grow – and who could blame it? Then she looked at George and Kitty, who, having listened outside for the last few minutes, had come to stand in the doorway, he glowering and pushing his lips about, she with that falsely unassuming simper, and knew that she had no choice. Jo must be free.

‘Yes,’ she stared longingly at Jo, because she was surrendering her. ‘I did know. You are Joy Stretton. I knew that,’ she lied, ‘when I put the crucifix on you and pretended it had been there all the time.’

‘And may I ask why I was not told?’ Mr Abinger came forward into the room. ‘You’re a deceiving woman, Ellie. Why didn’t you tell me? I didn’t matter, I suppose. Oh no. I’ve only been allowed to sacrifice my whole life to bringing up a daughter who then turns and snaps her fingers at me in my declining years.’

‘Oh,
no,
Abbie,’ chirruped Kitty. ‘There’s life in the old dog yet.’

‘I thought it for the best, George,’ said Mrs Abinger, ignoring her, ‘and it’s for the best now that she should go to Sir Rodney.’ Let Jo be Joy and have her chance. If she remained Jo, George would be harder on her than ever after all this upset. He would never forget she had been born a Roman Catholic.

He wanted her now because he could not have her. He went
on grumbling and prowing about the maze between the furniture, trying to sort out the perplexities, until, mentally and physically giddy, he had to sit down. He put his long head in his hands. He was sure that he was being cheated, if only he could see how.

Now that the decision was made, and Jo began to try to say good-bye, Mrs Abinger cried.

‘Don’t Mum.’ Jo clung to her, and fought her own tears. Kitty watched them dispassionately, like a nurse waiting for an epileptic to come out of a fit.

Jo began to think that she did not want to go. ‘We’ve had some happy times here, haven’t we, Mum? I’m scared, a bit. It’ll all be so new and strange. You’ll come and see me, won’t you?’

‘No, dear, no. I’ll think of you all the time, and perhaps see your pictures in the papers. I’ll be so proud. But I shan’t come burdening you. It wouldn’t be right; Sir Rodney wouldn’t like it.’

‘He wouldn’t mind,’ said Jo, thinking that probably he would. She sat back on her heels, with her hands on her mother’s tree-stump knees. ‘But I’ll come and see you often and often, and I’ll buy you things – clothes, jewellery, a car perhaps. Sir Rodney’s going to give you some money. He said so.’

‘He can keep it,’ said Mrs Abinger, offended. ‘I wouldn’t dream – ’ but George pricked up his ears and brightened.

‘Nonsense, Ellie,’ he said. ‘It’s the least he could do, in my opinion.’ He thought better of the project already. ‘What about lunch, Kitten? That’s what we came up for, wasn’t it, when we found all this hullabaloo and crying women?’

‘I’m not crying.’ Jo got to her feet and caught her breath on a sob, as she heard a car stop outside. ‘That’s him. I’ve got to go. Look, here’s the crucifix; it’s not mine.’ She dropped it into her mother’s lap, and drew away before the embrace could smother and defeat her. ‘Good-bye, Mum. I’ll come back ever such a lot, I promise – ’ She ran out of the room.

On the stairs, she remembered that she had not taken leave of her father, who had been tucking a napkin into his waistcoat and getting out the chutney, but she did not go back.

Mrs Abinger went to the window and saw the balding top of Rodney’s tarnished gold head as he talked to Jo on the pavement. Seen squatly from above, he was not prepossessing, but there was that about his clothes … and the car was enormous. She saw him take a step towards the shop, but Jo shook her head, and pulled him towards the car. Upset as she was, Mrs Abinger could not help being impressed by Jo’s familiarity with a baronet.

Kitty was behind her, smelling of mothballs, as she always did in her winter clothes. ‘You dropped this,’ she said. ‘The little cross. And come back to your chair, dear; you know what your legs are.’

‘Leave me alone.’ Mrs Abinger was watching the Daimler swish its glittering rear round the corner.

‘Don’t you want it then?’ Kitty held the cross against her jersey. ‘It’s real gold. It might make a pretty necklet if one discounted what it’s supposed to represent. Oh, I see,’ she said, as Mrs Abinger turned and snatched it from her. ‘You want to keep it as a memento of Jo, eh?’

‘I don’t need a memento,’ said Mrs Abinger fiercely. ‘You heard what she said. She’ll come back, often and often. I haven’t lost her.’

Joy did not come back very often at first. There was so much to do: clothes to buy, hairdressers and beauty specialists, the reading Rodney made her do each day, piano and elocution lessons, the museums and theatres and concerts by which Rodney, on a carefully graded schedule, gently initiated her into a world which she might once have despised if she had thought about it at all.

Often bewildered and sometimes unwilling, she did what she was told, not only because it was part of the bargain, but because she was astute enough to realize how much she had to learn.

Being Joy Stretton was far more complicated than she had ever dreamed. She sometimes wondered whether she would have taken it on if she had known that being rich involved more than
living in Mayfair and going to parties. Rodney would not let her go to parties yet, nor meet more than a few selected people who would not pry or criticize. He allowed it to get round that his orphaned niece had come to him from abroad, but he did not want her seen before he had finished moulding her.

Nor did he want her to revisit the Portobello Road before she was too trained in her new personality to be in danger of slipping back to the old. He was quite kind. He never bullied her or forbade her point blank, but she knew quite well when he was displeased. He had a cold little way of lengthening his upper lip in an uncompleted sniff, touching the offending topic only with the fingertips of his voice, and withdrawing before Joy could argue or explain.

She hardly ever argued with him. He always seemed to know best, and she was still too nervous of him and unsure of herself to oppose him. So she did what she was told, and watched and listened and learned. She enjoyed her luxury and ease, but she hoped it was not always going to be like this.

Sometimes, cooped up in the flat waiting for Rodney to come home to tea, Joy would bite her nails and feel a prisoner. It was then that she thought of the Grand Metropolitan with its life and bustle, and the risqué remarks, and her giggling bouts with Dorrie that had sometimes lasted off and on all day once some queer customer set them off. It was then that she thought of Norman, who had never answered her confused letter of explanation, and of going to the last house of the pictures, with hundreds of other couples doing the same. Rodney would only let her go to the Curzon cinema, or to some well-reviewed film where the thrill of going in the nine shilling balcony was usually spoilt by his making her come out before the end because the seats gave him cramp.

Rodney was even more dictatorial than Norman, but he was entitled to be, because he had more money, and he knew about everything. He knew about interior decoration, for instance, and she supposed he must be right, but sometimes, wandering about his graceful rooms which seemed to her so much too bare, Joy would get nostalgia for the sitting-room above the Corner Stores yes, even – though she thrust the thought from her in horror –
for the reeking, bickering kitchen at Denbigh Terrace. At least you could go and grab a cup of tea and a hunk of bread and jam whenever you liked, without having to wait until it appeared on a silver tray with bread and butter as thin as the teacups.

Restlessly, she would fling her book down and prowl along the thickly carpeted passage in search of Alexander. Rodney had told her not to do this, but she could not see the reason. It was not even as if he were an ordinary servant. He was an oracle. He looked like a cross between Dean Inge and the Duke of Wellington and spoke more stylishly than even Rodney did or she could ever hope to do.