No More Meadows (2 page)

One of them walked past Christine. She narrowed her eyes to see whether, by blurring her focus, she could make him look like an Englishman. Coming towards her he could have been, but going away no Englishman could have owned that small round bottom, each side rising independently as though moved by wires from his shoulders. It was the walk that became so familiar during the war, when G.I.s in short battle-jackets proclaimed by the tilt of their bottoms that they had come over to pull England's chestnuts out of the fire once more.

The two girls in jockey caps finished their roll of film and moved away laughing, because one of them would send the pictures to her father and he would ask visitors: ‘Did you know my Eileen was once photographed with F.D.R.?' and then scatter their astonishment by showing them the picture of the girl and the statue.

A robin hopped on the grass like a marionette. Christine
thought about the Welsh rarebit she was going to seek as soon as the sun reached that waiting cloud, and the American naval officer, who was evidently out for his health, completed his tour of the square and sat down at the end of her bench, breathing deeply through his nose.

‘Would you care for a cigarette?' He had taken one out for himself, and before he lit it he held the packet towards her. If he had been in America he would have slid nearer to her along the bench, but as he was in England he kept his distance. English girls were always either suspecting you of evil designs or being frustrated because you did not have them. It did not occur to him that in Grosvenor Square she might be an American girl. Perhaps it was her shoes.

‘No, thank you. Very much. I don't smoke,' Christine added, to show she was not snubbing him.

He did not notice anything about her except the creamy skin, which English girls got free and American women spent hundreds of dollars vainly seeking.

‘Nice day,' he said, nodding conclusively at Grosvenor Square.

‘Isn't it?' she answered, thinking, as she always did when she talked to Americans, that her voice sounded mincing.

She noticed about him that he had black, rather saturnine eyebrows that needed combing, and a mouth like James Stewart's that looked as if it might be going to blow a little bubble.

The sun went behind the cloud. Christine stood up, thinking of food. Had they talked enough for her to say Good-bye?

He solved that for her by throwing away his match and saying: ‘Good-bye', giving it an extra little sing-song syllable that sounded like a secret smile.

Walking towards Oxford Street, Christine thought: Now Alice would make an adventure out of that. Then she wondered whether that big cameo brooch would do anything for the neck of the blue evening dress, and then she thought: But then if I'd been Alice I'd probably be having lunch with him by now. In the snackbar, opening her book and putting her knife into the still bubbling Welsh rarebit, she was glad that she was not.

Half-past five took a long time to arrive. Some days it was
upon you almost before you had time to turn round. On other days, when you were not so busy, it was a point in eternity, certain as death, but just as remote. In the middle of the afternoon Christine brought out a pile of books that were not selling, and told Miss Burman and Mrs Drew and Alice and Helen to push them on to anyone who vaguely wanted just ‘a novel'.

Mr Parker had made a mistake about these books. He had bought too many of them, against Christine's advice, and when he found they were not selling he had said to her peevishly: ‘What's the matter with all you people? You're letting that
Black Monkey
book hang about too long. You know what I always say – keep the stock rolling. Keep it moving. Make way for the new stuff.' He picked up pens and moved things about on his desk, as if he were playing draughts.

‘We'd have sold it out,' Christine had said, ‘if you hadn't ordered too many copies. I told you not to, but you had to know better.'

Because he was rather old and rather foolish, she often spoke to him as if he were an aged parent or a troublesome child. He did not mind. He had a daughter at home who spoke to him in the same way, and sometimes he thought he liked Christine better than the daughter, because although she bullied him she backed him up when he had committed himself and tried to put right his errors.

Both women often said to him: ‘I told you so.' The daughter would leave him to stew in his own mistakes, but Christine worked to help him out of them. So this afternoon she brought a pile of
Black Monkey
novels out of the storeroom, blew a little dust off them, arranged them at the front of one of the fiction counters and told her assistants to sell them.

The reading public would be surprised to know how often it is sold books it does not want. Because it is allowed to wander round a book department, picking up and putting down and not being bothered unless it asks for help, it thinks it is not subject to the more obvious salesmanship of the other departments. But it is. A good bookseller can get rid of almost any book he has overbought, and Christine was a good bookseller.

By the end of the day she and Miss Burman between them had sold more than a dozen copies of
Black Monkey.
Miss Burman
was also an old hand, well known to regular customers, who liked to call her by name, and responded, when she said: ‘Now this is a book that
you
could appreciate, madam', like lambs to the slaughter.

Beginning to tidy up at five o'clock, Christine heard Helen say to a dithering customer with a neckful of martens: ‘Oh, you
would,
madam. Everybody's reading it. In fact, we've just had to reorder.'

Alice, tossing her pageboy bob around the place, did not sell any copies of
Black Monkey.
She did not try to. Alice was self-engrossed and unco-operative. She would not last long in the book department, but would soon find herself in Art Jewellery, where she would be much more at home.

Going into Mr Parker's office with the special autographed copies of
A Golden Journey to the East,
which he insisted on locking in his safe at night, although it is doubtful whether they would have interested a burglar, Christine said: ‘That Helen. She's coming along nicely. I think she'll be quite valuable to us soon.'

‘She's awfully spotty,' grumbled Mr Parker.

‘It's her age. So was I when I was nineteen.'

‘Were you?' Mr Parker peered at her through the top half of his bi-focals. ‘Come to think of it, so was I. I hated being nineteen.'

Christine tried to picture him with all his hair, and a gawky body with red wrists dangling out of his coat sleeves. He was so hunched now into the acceptance of old age, slow and precise and sparing of his waning vitality, that it was hard to believe his juices had ever run copiously enough to force an overflow in pimples.

‘Well, we got
Black Monkey
moving for you,' she said. ‘It might be almost cleared by the end of the week.'

‘I told you it would,' he said, taking the leather-bound books from her and stooping to fiddle with the combination of his safe. ‘I told you it would sell.'

‘You told me to sell it, you mean. Here, let me.' Although he never changed the combination of his safe, he sometimes had difficulty in finding it. She opened the door and put in the books. There was no money in there, because the takings were delivered
to the chief cashier every day, but there was a mess of papers, a bottle of cheap brandy, and a tumbler.

‘In the war,' Christine said, ‘when I was a nurse, we used to drink the brandy from the medicine cupboard on night duty and fill the bottle up with water, but I don't see why you want to lock up the glass as well.'

‘So I can be sure of finding it,' Mr Parker said.

Outside the office, Helen came up to Christine flat-footed, pushing at her spectacles.

‘I don't know what to do, Miss Cope,' she said earnestly. ‘That man over there has been reading the
Lives of the Saints
for nearly half an hour and he doesn't look as if he'd ever stop.' She looked at her watch, which was a man's watch with an aluminium case and a telescopic band. She did not trust the store clocks, although they were synchronized to Greenwich time.

‘Tell him we're closing in five minutes,' Christine said. ‘He should have read enough of the saints by now to avoid having to buy the book.'

‘But, Miss Cope, you always tell me not to disturb customers when they're looking at books.'

‘Oh, don't be so literal. Get rid of him.' Christine turned away, irritated by Helen's smugness and the way she drew down her mouth at the corners when she was worried.

Helen gave her a hurt look and went towards the customer, massaging her stubby hands, and Christine thought: Oh well, perhaps she's like that because she's plain and has no eyebrows or eyelashes and thinks she'll have to make a success as a career woman, if nothing else.

Actually, however, Helen had a passionate, perspiring young man who thought she was quite beautiful and was going to marry her when he had finished his military training. She did not tell anyone about him in case they asked his name. He was called Steuart Begwater, and it embarrassed her to say this.

At five-thirty the juniors put on the dustcovers, Alice in haste, because she had a date with the new young man in Cooked Foods, Helen sedulous as a priest. They all collected their handbags from the shelf under the humorous books. Miss Burman took out the bag of lemon tarts which she had bought in the
bakery to take home to her mother, who could not get her teeth into anything except Goldwyn's pastry, and looked anxiously in her pot-bellied handbag to see that she had got the receipt.

If you bought anything in the store you had to show the receipt for it as you went past the timekeeper at the staff door, to prove you had not stolen it. This practice had been instituted during the war when all kinds of assistants who were not really Goldwyn's type had to be taken on. It was a source of great effrontery to the old-timers, especially when it was rumoured through the store one day that Mrs Darby in Toys had actually had her handbag searched.

Mr Parker tracked out of his office wearing his overcoat and the turned-down black hat that made him look as if he were the violinist from a German band. The other department managers usually left before closing time, but Mr Parker never did. As it was a trial to him to go down the stairs to the basement and up again to the staff door, the commissionaire kept one of the revolving doors open for him.

‘Good night all,' he said vaguely.' Have a nice weekend.' On his doctor's orders, he did not come in on Saturday mornings. He did not see how they could possibly manage without him, but they did.

‘You look after that cough now,' said Miss Burman, who, from years of mothering her mother, had the instinct to mother Mr Parker too.

Christine went down to the cloakroom with Mrs Drew, who was her friend. Margaret Drew was nice-looking the second or third time you saw her, although at first you did not notice it. She was always strictly neat. Her short black hair was like a glossy elf's cap, her nose never shone, even on a summer working day, and if she broke a shoulder strap she sewed it at once, instead of keeping it pinned for days. She worked in the book department because her husband did not earn enough to keep them both and keep their son at a preparatory school. She hated Goldwyn's and often said so.

She said so tonight as she and Christine walked together to Green Park station. The warmth of the day had gone down in a thin green sunset and people were hurrying, pressing along in a crowd, unconscious of each other, because there was always a
crowd every night and they were thinking only of getting home.

‘I'm fed up,' Margaret said, as they waited to cross Piccadilly. ‘I'm fed with customers who can't make up their minds. I'm fed with old Parker, I'm fed with poor old Burman calling me dear and wanting to have lunch with me, and I'm fed with the idea of going home and cooking liver and bacon for Laurie's supper.

‘I'm also fed,' she said, as the traffic stopped and they moved off the pavement like sheep in a flock, ‘with seeing disgusting unmade beds when I get home, and having to make them.'

‘Why don't you make them before you come out?'

‘Haven't got time. Laurie always wants a hot breakfast, and he insists on me sitting with him while he eats it, and pouring his coffee and buttering his toast, as if I were a leisured wife in a flowered housecoat with nothing to do all day but my nails. He doesn't like me working, and so he clings to these last vestiges of a civilized marriage.'

Christine was surprised. She had been to Margaret's home many times, and admired her husband's constant need of her. He did not even want to go to the corner for cigarettes unless she came too, and at a party he always spent some of the time talking to her, unlike most husbands, who treated their wives as total strangers from a party's beginning to its end. But was being loved then such a bore?

She imagined how it would feel to be going home to a husband instead of to an aunt and a father. You would look forward to getting home, surely. But then Christine did not know the husband she was imagining, which made him exciting. Margaret had known Laurie for twelve years, and Christine had seen her sometimes quite unaware if he touched her.

Christine lived with her father and her Aunt Josephine in an ugly red house, redeemed by ivy, that stood on the edge of Barnes Common. The house had once been a rectory, and looked it. The downstairs rooms were high and large, and upstairs there were a lot of odd – shaped rooms which had once been nurseries for the families of prolific rectors.

It had been cold then with a holy chill, and it was cold now, except in the bathroom, which housed a boiler and a monstrous hot cupboard and was too hot to support life for long.

Christine did not like living in Barnes, which was neither in London nor out of it. She hated the never – ending bus ride down Castelnau, where the once grand houses nursed their shame of conversion into private hotels and apartments. But her father liked to be able to walk out of his front door on to the common and swing his stick among the disheartened gorse bushes. In summer, when he could not walk without stumbling over writhing couples, he would write wordy letters to the local paper, insisting that the common be cleaned up.