Starlight (2 page)

The other room belonging to the sisters was both living-room and kitchen: the furniture was as battered and the rugs as worn but there was one pretty thing in it: a piano with pleated silk, once green, behind its rosewood rack, and bronze candlesticks blackened with age: in front of the grate were two unbelievably shabby armchairs. Sometimes, Gladys would help Annie to creep out and sit in one: the window in this room looked clear out across the roofs to the Heath and the rampart of Kenwood’s trees, and she could see the Fields, as they called them; ‘up the Fields’.

Outside on ‘their’ landing was a tap above a slate sink, and under it their rubbish bucket and another, empty now, which would later contain coals. A third bucket, handleless, rusty, but neatly lined with newspaper and containing a few branches of wood with their leaves still adhering stood by the other two, but at a distance. The stairs, narrow and hardly covered in a black shrouding of bare, ancient carpet, went down into a dimness faintly haunted by the smell of cats.

There was a family on the ground floor, a young woman and her husband and two children and another coming. Gladys took a great interest in Mr and Mrs Simms, while dismissing all their casual attempts at neighbourliness, and unfailingly describing their inquiries as to her health and welfare as ‘nosiness’. This, however, she confided to her sister alone, keeping up with the Simmses a series of hearty, daily, meaningless exclamations and smiles.

This small house was one of a pair, standing side by side and detached from the others in a row of tall brown brick ones, in a
cul-de-sac
. To get to Rose Walk, a way must be found through a maze of broad roads lit by the baleful glare of lamps that poured down thin orange light, and then along side turnings where the softer glow of the old lamps shone on small hardware stores, and grocery-dairies that still carried the faintest flavour of the little Welsh-owned milk and butter shops that had kept a cow in the yard at the back fifty years ago: drapery shops selling knitting wool and nylon stockings and an occasional gay cotton dress; newsagents with windows full of pornographic paperbacks and cigarettes – and then the street curved unexpectedly and you faced an upward slope paved with big old slabs of stone. Impersonality was given to the scene by a big block of Council flats opposite, and then, as the eye wandered over the dim sheds and slopes of choked, tortured grass and the general desolation of some railway tracks, it was caught by Rose Walk, tucked away on the left.

It was a double row of brown-brick houses, half of them bombed and boarded up, and not a whole window in one. At the end stood these two small stout cottages, painted white; thick little places, solid and secretive, with a bearded, coarsely-moulded face looking mockingly down from the wall exactly where the two were joined. The Barnes sisters lived in the far one of the two. Surprisingly, it had a name; it was called Rose Cottage. The other, equally surprisingly, was Lily Cottage, and had been unoccupied for years; even in these times, it was in such bad repair as to be uninhabitable, and this street was not on the Camden Council’s priority list for demolition.

And all around the pair of cottages, for mile after confused mile, far as the wearied eye could reach, the lights smouldered through the foggy night and the cars crept throbbing along the over-lit roads. The poisoned air stands for thousands of feet above the city: the Wen, the great Wen, that never sleeps.

Just after the church clock had chimed, footsteps ran smartly up the stairs and paused outside the door of the outer room. A woman’s voice called, ‘Anybody home?’ Then someone knocked.

As if suddenly pricked with a pin, Gladys sat upright, frowning, all her good-nature gone, while Annie pulled her coats closer and seemed to retreat within the balaclava. A litany of whispers began.

‘It’s that Jean.’

‘What does she want?’

‘Banging up ’ere. No peace.’

‘Don’t take no notice.’

‘Glad. Glad! It’s me – Jean – are you asleep?’ and more knocking.

‘Better go, I suppose.’ Gladys shuffled into her slippers, which she had discarded in the cosiness of Sunday evening, ‘Won’t get no peace till I do.’

‘Make it sharp, Glad – don’t let ’er come in here, I don’t want no Jeans round me.’

Gladys said, ‘No fear,’ nodded reassuringly, and went out through the dark outer room to the door.

‘’Ullo – what’s up?’ she demanded.

‘Oh there you are, I thought you must be asleep or sunnick.’ Mrs Simms stood in the doorway, the light from the inner room shining dimly on her tower of yellow hair and sharp young face. ‘
She
was round just after tea. Told me to tell you. She’s sold the ’ouse.’

She seemed to launch the sentence into the dusk, without preparation, cruelly.

Gladys actually lurched forwards, as if the words had been a blow on her back, clutching at her cardigan, dragging it round herself. She gave a great gasp, but instantly checked her breath, with a wild backward glance towards the inner room. She shook her head frantically, jerking her thumb towards it, and Mrs Simms significantly nodded. Gladys turned back, blundering across the room, and shut the door, mouthing something reassuring to her sister, then drew the visitor into the living-room, switching on the light. Its weak rays shone on her face, pale as lard, sweaty, fallen with terror.

‘She never ’as, Jean! She can’t ’ave – oh God ’ave mercy, Lord help us, what’ll I do?’

She sank into one of the armchairs and sat there staring wildly up at the young woman. Mrs Simms stood staring back with mixed curiosity and a kind of gloating pity.

‘She ’as, though. Told me herself. Said would I tell you and your sister and Old Mental.’ She nodded, jerking her head at the ceiling.

‘Oh, Jean, isn’t it terrible – oh God, be merciful to Annie and me and that poor old gentleman –’

‘’Ere, who’s a gentleman? Selling dollies round people’s places, he ought to be put away. Well, that’s what she said. All fixed up, it is. She said you’d better go down to the Town ’All about it, the men’ll be coming in any time now to paint the place, she said, and do it up. Not before it was time, neither – Christ, if I’d known the kind of dump Ted was going to land me up in, I’d never ’ave married ’im, baby or no baby.’

At another time this remark, which confirmed, from her own lips, suspicions as to the age of Mrs Simms’s eldest compared with the time she had been married, would have filled Gladys with a detective’s triumph. Now, she merely uttered a kind of moan and said faintly, as if trying to escape the torture of her thoughts:

‘What’ll you do, then – with those two little children – oh, isn’t it awful –’

‘Not to worry about us. We got a Council flat. ’Eard last night. Down Hampstead Road, it is, nearer my work. Move in end of the month. Suits me. Near the shops, plenty of company, I can walk to work – no more one and six a day touch on fares.’

‘I’m … glad. I really am glad for you, Jean.’

‘Ta and all that.’ Mrs Simms looked uneasily away then went on, ‘She’ll be coming round to ’ave a natter with you, she said.’

‘I don’t want to see ’er! She’s let us down – swore to me not six months ago – yes, six months it was, just the six months, I remember because I’d been just six months working with Kyperiou’s – swore she wouldn’t never sell the place.
Swore
it.’

Mrs Simms shrugged. ‘She’s gettin’ old. Wants to retire to the country – she can ’ave it, for me. Old folks, they’re always changing their minds, Ted’s mum does, she gets me down.’

Gladys was pressing her lips restlessly together and twisting her hands as if trying to gain courage to ask a question, and at last she almost whispered:

‘Jean – tell us, dear – did she say ’oo’s bought it?’

She waited, her large frightened eyes fixed on the other’s face. Mrs Simms stared back, spite, pity, all her former expressions replaced by a solemn one that made her suddenly look even younger.

‘That’s just it, Glad,’ she said, half under her breath, ‘it’s one of these here rackmans. A real bad type.’

Gladys made a kind of terrified lowing sound, her eyes fixed, wider and wider.

‘But he’s got plenty of money. ’Eaps of money, she said, and he offered ’er a good price and his money’s as good as anyone else’s.’ She shrugged again. ‘So she’s sold it. And next door, and all the row’s gone, too, she said.’

There was a silence. Into it, from the next room, there came faintly a voice calling, ‘Glad! Glad – what’s it all about? Glad!’

Gladys stirred in her chair. ‘I’ll ’ave to tell her,’ she said fearfully, ‘it’s no use. She’ll ’ave to know … did Mrs Adams say when she’d be round? … not that it’ll do any good, if ’e’s – ’e’s that sort … we’ll be out before you can say Jack Robinson.’

‘Oh don’t be so soft, pull yourself together, can’t you?’ Mrs Simms suddenly almost shouted, ‘his kind’s not all that popular nowadays, you go down to the Town Hall and moan a bit, they’ll do something for you – you’re a pensioner and God knows what, aren’t you, I’m damned if I’d take it like you are.’

‘You’re young, Jean.’

It was unanswerable. Mrs Simms shrugged, and put her fingers up to the tower of hair above her peaky white face. She hung for a moment, as if uncertain what to say, then said sharply, ‘We got some ice cream. The kids didn’t want it – care to finish it?’

‘Thanks, Jean. Annie would like it, I expect,’ Gladys said dully. Mrs Simms shrugged again, and after another glance at the doughy, downward-gazing face, down which tears were now running, went out of the room.

In a little while, Gladys forced herself to get out of the chair. She straightened her cardigan, which was a bright turquoise blue and looked as if it had formerly belonged to an even larger wearer than herself, and uselessly fingered her hair, hanging in curls round her face, while staring unseeingly at herself in the dusty looking-glass over the mantelpiece. Then she turned out the light and marched across to the bedroom door.

‘Well!’ Annie observed, as it opened and her sister stood there in dramatic silence, ‘what in ’eaven’s name was all that about? I thought you was never coming.’ She peered closer. ‘You been crying?’

Gladys had intended to be brave. But the sight of the familiar room, with the teapot and loaf on the table and her sister sitting up thin and birdlike in their bed, broke all her bravery down. She gave a great kind of howl, and fell across the shiny blue coverlet, weeping out that Mrs Adams had sold the house to one of those awful rackmans who was going to turn them out into the street. The gas-fire, with that meticulous sense of the fitting sometimes shown by domestic objects assumed to be insentient, chose this moment to go out. Gladys heard its expiring groan, and cried the louder.

‘Well,’ said Annie, temporarily stunned by all this, looking down bewildered at her sister’s grey-streaked head, ‘crying won’t ’elp. Do get up, Glad, ’ere, ’ave this – and tell us all about it.’ ‘This’ was a paper handkerchief.

Some natures find relief in telling, and hearing, all about it, and Gladys’s was one of them. Already, too, her dramatic, colourloving spirit was relishing the drama of their situation … and though it was awful, shocking, terrible, they were not out on the street yet, and Annie, amid her cries of amazement and indignation at the baseness of Mrs Adams, and her shudders at the hints of their new landlord’s nature, managed to remember there was a shilling in a pocket of one of her old coats.

Under her directions, Gladys first dried her eyes, then hunted, still whimpering, through the row hanging behind their curtain, found the coin, and put it into the meter. Then, as the gas began its heartless but cosy roaring again, another cup of tea was suggested, and made, and in twenty minutes from the breaking of the unbelievable news, the Barnes sisters were discussing it, and trying to work out a plan. The arrival of a saucerful of melting ice cream, delivered safely by a staggering toddler, cheered them further.

Gladys’s attendance at Saint James’s Church, which was fairly regular, had given her a sense of relying upon ‘God and Jesus Christ’, in the larger problems of their lives. She went to church because one of the ladies for whom she had worked encouraged her to keep up the custom. Annie’s mysterious bed-ridden habits, it was taken for granted, prohibited church-going for her.

Gladys now began to think that some of ‘them up at the church’ might help.

‘They’re educated, Annie. They know what to do. I’ll go round and see someone there first thing to-morrow.’

‘You don’t hardly know no-one there, Glad.’ Annie, at first the calmer of the two, was now looking more frightened and desolate than her sister. That’s Glad all over, she was thinking. Creates like anything and properly upsets you and then all up in the air and everything’s going to be lovely, and you can get on with it.

‘I do know him. He always shakes hands with me and says “Good-evening, Miss Barnes”,’ Gladys said with some indignation.

‘Not to know him intimate, Glad.’

‘I don’t want to know him intimate. He’d only be on at me to go up there every day or something. I just want a bit of help.’

‘Well if I was you I’d go to the Town ’All. You don’t ’ave to know them.’

‘Nor I don’t ’ave to know the Vicar. All I want’s a bit of help. That’s his work, isn’t it? Living for others. Loving thy neighbour.’

‘We ain’t his neighbours. You can’t call living up ’ere right on the top of the Archway Road neighbours.’