Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris & Mrs. Harris Goes to New York (2 page)

The clever, roguish eyes inspected him carefully for any signs of moral depravity or foreign monkey business. Somewhat to her disappointment he seemed just like any Englishman. Since his approach was polite and harmless, she said cautiously: ‘Ow, so they can speak the Queen’s English over ’ere.’

The Airways man said: ‘Well, ma’am, I ought to. I
am
British. But I think you will find most people over here speak a little English and you can get along. I see you are returning with us on the eleven o’clock plane this evening. Is there any particular place you wish to go now?’

Mrs Harris reflected upon just how much she was prepared to tell a stranger and then replied firmly: ‘I’ll just ’ave a taxi, if it’s all the same to you. I’ve got me ten quid.’

‘Ah, well then,’ the Airways man continued, ‘you’d better have some of it in French money. One pound comes to roughly a thousand francs.’

At the
bureau de change
a few of Mrs Harris’s green pound notes were translated into flimsy, tattered, dirty blue paper with the figure 1000 on them and some greasy aluminium hundred–franc coins.

Mrs Harris was justly indignant. ‘What’s all this,’ she demanded. ‘Call this ’ere stuff money? Them coins feel like duds.’

The Airways man smiled. ‘Well, in a sense they are, but only the Government’s allowed to make them. The French just haven’t caught up with the fact yet. They still pass, though.’ He guided her through the crowd and up the ramp and placed her in a taxi. ‘Where shall I tell him to take you?’

Mrs Harris sat up with her slender back, thin from hard work, ramrod straight, the pink rose pointing due north, her face as calm and composed as that of a duchess. Only the little eyes were dancing with excitement. ‘Tell him to take me to the dress shop of Christian Dior,’ she said.

The Airways man stared at her, refusing the evidence of his ears. ‘I beg your pardon, ma’am?’

‘The dress shop of Dior, you ’eard me!’

The Airways man had heard her all right, but his brain, used to dealing with all kind of emergencies and queer cases, could just not grasp the connexion between a London daily woman, one of that vast army that sallied forth every morning to scrub up the city’s dirt in office and home, and the most exclusive fashion centre in the world, and he still hesitated.

‘Come on then, get on with it,’ commanded Mrs Harris sharply, ‘what’s so strange about a lydy going to buy ’erself a dress in Paris?’

Shaken to the marrow the Airways man spoke to the driver in French: ‘Take madame to the House of Christian Dior in the Avenue Montaigne. If you try to do her out of so much as a sou, I’ll take care you never get back on this rank again.’

As Mrs Harris was driven off he went back inside shaking his head. He felt he had seen everything now.

Riding along in the taxi, her heart pounding with excitement, Mrs Harris’s thoughts went back to London and she hoped that Mrs Butterfield would be able to cope.

Mrs Harris’s list of clients, whilst subject to change without notice – that is to say she might suddenly dismiss one of them, never they her – remained fairly static. There were some to whom she gave several hours every day and others who desired her services only three times a week. She worked ten hours a day, her labours beginning at eight in
the morning and ending at six o’clock in the night with a half-day devoted to certain favoured customers on Saturdays. This schedule she maintained fifty-two weeks in the year. Since there were just so many hours in a day her patrons were limited to some six or eight and she herself restricted the area of her labours to the fashionable sector of Eaton and Belgrave Squares. For once she had arrived in that neighbourhood in the morning she was then able to walk quickly from house to flat to mews.

There was a Major Wallace, her bachelor, whom naturally she spoiled and in whose frequent and changing love affairs she took an avid interest.

She was fond of Mrs Schreiber, the somewhat muddled wife of a Hollywood film representative living in London, for her American warmth and generosity which displayed itself in many ways, but chiefly by her interest in and consideration for Mrs Harris.

She ‘did’ for fashionable Lady Dant, the wife of a wealthy industrial baron, who maintained a flat in London as well as a country manor – Lady Dant was always getting her picture in
The Queen
or
The Tatler
at hunt balls and charity affairs and this made Mrs Harris proud.

There were others, a White Russian Countess Wyszcinska, whom Mrs Harris liked because she was divinely mad, a young married couple, a second son, whose charming flat she loved because there were pretty things in it, Mrs Fford Foulks, a divorcée, who was a valuable mine of gossip as to what the idle rich were up to, and several others, including a little actress, Miss Pamela Penrose, who was struggling to gain recognition from her base in a two-room mews flat.

All of these establishments Mrs Harris looked after quite on her own. Yet in an emergency she could fall back on her friend and
alter ego
Mrs Violet Butterfield, like herself a
widow and a char, and inclined to take the gloomy view of life and affairs wherever there was any choice.

Mrs Butterfield, who was as large and stout as Mrs Harris appeared to be thin and frail, naturally had her own set of clients, fortunately likewise in the same neighbourhood. But they helped one another out with a nice bit of team-work whenever the necessity arose.

If either of them was ill or had pressing business elsewhere, the other would manage to pinch enough time from her clients to make the rounds of the other’s customers sufficiently to keep them quiet and satisfied. Were Mrs Harris to be bedded with some malaise, as rarely happened, she would telephone her clients to advise them of this catastrophe and add: ‘But don’t you worry. Me friend, Mrs Butterfield, will look in on you and I’ll be around again tomorrow,’ and vice versa. Although they were different as night and day in character they were firm, loving, and loyal friends and considered covering one another a part of their duty in life. A friend was a friend and that was that. Mrs Harris’s basement flat was at Number 5 Willis Gardens, Mrs Butterfield lived in Number 7 and rare was the day that they did not meet or visit one another to exchange news or confidences.

The taxi cab crossed a big river, the one Mrs Harris had seen from the air, now grey instead of blue. On the bridge the driver got himself into a violent altercation with another chauffeur. They shouted and screamed at one another. Mrs Harris did not understand the words but guessed at the language and the import and smiled happily to herself. This time her thoughts returned to Miss Pamela Penrose and the fuss she had kicked up when informed of Mrs Harris’s intention to take a day off. Mrs Harris had made it a special point with Mrs Butterfield to see that the aspiring actress was not neglected.

Curiously, for all her shrewdness and judgement of character, Mrs Harris’s favourite of all her clients was Miss Penrose.

The girl, whose real name, as Mrs Harris had gleaned from superficially inspecting letters that occasionally came so addressed, was Enid Suite, lived untidily in a mews flat.

She was a small, smooth blonde with a tight mouth and curiously static eyes that seemed fixed greedily upon but one thing – herself. She had an exquisite figure and clever tiny feet that had never tripped upon the corpses she had climbed over on her way up the ladder of success. There was nothing she would not do to further what she was pleased to call her career which up to that time had included a year or two in the chorus line, some bit parts in a few pictures, and several appearances on television. She was mean, hard, selfish, and ruthless, and her manners were abominable as well.

One would have thought that Mrs Harris would have penetrated the false front of this little beast and abandoned her, for it was so that when something about a client displeased Mrs Harris she simply dropped the key through the letter box and did not return. Like so many of her sisters who did not char for charring’s sake alone, even though it was her living, she also brought a certain warmth to it. She had to like either the person or the person’s home where she worked.

But it was just the fact that Mrs Harris had pierced the front of Miss Snite to a certain extent that made her stick to her, for she understood the fierce, wild, hungry craving of the girl to be something, to be somebody, to lift herself out of the rut of everyday struggle and acquire some of the good things of life for herself.

Before her own extraordinary craving which had brought her to Paris Mrs Harris had not experienced this in herself
though she understood it very well. With her it had not been so much the endeavour to make something of herself as a battle to survive, and in that sense the two of them were not unalike. When Mrs Harris’s husband had died some twenty years past and left her penniless she simply had to make a go of things, her widow’s pension being insufficient.

And then too there was the glamour of the theatre which surrounded Miss Snite, or rather Penrose, as Mrs Harris chose to think of her, and this was irresistible.

Mrs Harris was not impressed by titles, wealth, position, or family, but she was susceptible to the enchantment that enveloped anything or anyone that had to do with the stage, the television, or the flicks.

She had no way of knowing how tenuous and sketchy was Miss Penrose’s connexion with these, that she was not only a bad little girl but a mediocre actress. It was sufficient for Mrs Harris that from time to time her voice was heard on the wireless or she would pass across the television screen wearing an apron and carrying a tray. Mrs Harris respected the lone battle the girl was waging, humoured her, cosseted her, and took from her what she would not from anyone else.

The taxi cab entered a broad street, lined with beautiful buildings, but Mrs Harris had no eye or time for architecture.

‘ ’Ow far is it?’ she shouted at the cab driver who replied, not slowing down one whit, by taking both hands off the steering wheel, waving his arms in the air, turning around and shouting back at her. Mrs Harris, of course, understood not a word, but his smile beneath a walrus moustache was engaging and friendly enough, and so she settled back to endure the ride until she should reach the so-long-coveted destination. She reflected upon the strange series of events that led to her being there.

I
T
had all begun that day several years back when during the course of her duties at Lady Dant’s house, Mrs Harris had opened a wardrobe to tidy it and had come upon the two dresses hanging there. One was a bit of heaven in cream, ivory, lace, and chiffon, the other an explosion in crimson satin and taffeta, adorned with great red bows and a huge red flower. She stood there as though struck dumb, for never in all her life had she seen anything quite as thrilling and beautiful.

Drab and colourless as her existence would seem to have been, Mrs Harris had always felt a craving for beauty and colour which up to this moment had manifested itself in a love for flowers. She had the proverbial green fingers, coupled with no little skill, and plants flourished for her where they would not, quite possibly, for any other.

Outside the windows of her basement flat were two window boxes of geraniums, her favourite flower, and inside, wherever there was room, stood a little pot containing a geranium struggling desperately to conquer its environment,
or a single hyacinth or tulip, bought from a barrow for a hard-earned shilling.

Then, too, the people for whom she worked would sometimes present her with the leavings of their cut flowers which in their wilted state she would take home and try to nurse back to health, and once in a while, particularly in the spring, she would buy herself a little box of pansies, primroses, or anemones. As long as she had flowers, Mrs Harris had no serious complaints concerning the life she led. They were her escape from the sombre stone desert in which she lived. These bright flashes of colour satisfied her. They were something to return to in the evening, something to wake up to in the morning.

But now as she stood before the stunning creations hanging in the wardrobe she found herself face to face with a new kind of beauty - an artificial one created by the hand of man the artist, but aimed directly and cunningly at the heart of woman. In that very instant she fell victim to the artist; at that very moment there was born within her the craving to possess such a garment.

There was no rhyme or reason for it, she would never wear such a creation, there was no place in her life for one. Her reaction was purely feminine. She saw it and she wanted it dreadfully. Something inside her yearned and reached for it as instinctively as an infant in the crib reaches at a bright object. How deeply this craving went, how powerful it was Mrs Harris herself did not even know at that moment. She could only stand there enthralled, rapt, and enchanted, gazing at the dresses, leaning upon her mop, in her music-hall shoes, soiled overall, and wispy hair down about her ears, the classic figure of the cleaning woman.

It was thus that Lady Dant found her when she happened to come in from her waiting room. ‘Oh!’ she exclaimed,
‘my dresses!’ And then noting Mrs Harris’s attitude and the expression on her face said: ‘Do you like them? I haven’t made up my mind yet which one I am going to wear tonight.’