Starlight (5 page)

She began unwrapping cardigans, scarves and a thick coat from herself, the while glancing distractedly towards a cupboard on which stood a tea canister, with a portrait of Her Majesty on it smiling out across the room. ‘I’m sure you could drink a cup of tea. And you could, couldn’t you, Mr Fisher? Never say no to a cup of tea, do you?’

‘It’s very kind of you but I won’t, thank you,’ said Mr Geddes. ‘I just –’

‘Oh but you must,’ screamed Gladys, scrabbling on a shelf for the milk, ‘can’t let you go without a cup of tea, and you coming all this way, wonder you didn’t get lost –’

‘I will have a cup of tea; thank you,’ observed Mr Fisher, raising his eyes from his study of the carpet.

‘Oh we all know
you
never say no, Annie, we’re out of biscuits again –’

How long this struggle between disinclination and hospitality would have gone on Mr Geddes never knew, for at that moment a woman’s voice called urgently up the stairs – ‘Glad! Quick! ’E’s ’ere – the rackman. In a car!’

Silence fell, and, instantly, every eye was fixed upon Mr Geddes, as if he – the one who had been to college, the one who knew how things worked – would know what to do, while on every face there was an expression of terror. In another moment, the young woman’s eager face appeared at the door.

‘It’s ’im, Glad … ’ere … let’s …’

She pushed without apology past the seated men and, followed by the muttering and trembling Gladys, hurried into the bedroom and over to the window. She cautiously moved aside the curtain. Mr Geddes, forgetting everything but human curiosity, got up and followed, and next was made aware, by a sensation of mothlike pressure and eld, that Mr Fisher was at his side. Even Annie was leaning awkwardly sideways from her bed to stare down.

The street was only a short way below. Its paving, heaved into irregularities by the bombing of twenty years ago, gleamed greasily in the faint light of its one lamp, and, down at the end of the dark, boarded-up, double row of houses they saw the great car, its insolent snout pointing down the Walk as if threatening it.

‘Consul. Does ’imself well,’ breathed Jean Simms. ‘Shuvver, too – see ’im, Glad?’ But no-one answered her.

A man was standing there, hands in his pockets, a little beyond the rays of the lamp, staring up at the cottages. He was stout, and wore a soft hat, and that was all they could see of him.

‘Someone in the car …’ whispered Gladys, and instantly all their eyes turned to it.

They could just distinguish a figure sitting in the back, with head swathed in a voluminous, spirit-like whiteness that might be a scarf.

Transfixed, they stared. His inspection did not last longer than a few minutes but there was something chilling, something impersonal yet intent about it, that was frightening. The chauffeur did not move; the woman-like shape in the back of the car was leaning slightly forward as if to see the house, too, but it also was motionless.

All at once, the picture broke up. The man stirred, and pushed his hat on to the back of his head, and walked back to the car.

He got in beside the white shrouded shape, and the car backed, edging its way into the narrow entrance and then turned the corner and went out of sight.

‘Well,’ Mr Geddes was the first to speak, ‘
he
doesn’t look very alarming, does he?’

His strongest impulse was to take that look off their faces.

The young woman suddenly exclaimed, ‘My God, the kettle, and young Melinda’s in the kitchen,’ and sped away. Annie, emerging from her retreat, said tremulously, ‘What’s ’e like, Glad? I couldn’t make much out. My eyes are ever so bad to-night. I can’t hardly see. Muss be the fog.’

‘’Orrible,’ Gladys said with relish, ‘great fat thing, coming ’ere after dark like that, why couldn’t he come daytime like anybody else? It just shows you.’

‘Probably he was on his way to somewhere else and just stopped by to have a look at his new property,’ said Mr Geddes comfortingly, though he had in fact been disagreeably affected by the little scene, especially by the glimpse of the white muffled figure in the car.

‘That’s ’er,’ said Jean Simms, reappearing with surprising speed and Melinda clamped on to one hip, ‘’is wife.’

‘Is ’e married, then? It said in the paper that sort always has – you-knows,’ said Gladys.

‘He’s married all right. Crazy about her, too. Mrs A. told me. Said ’e’d only bought the ’ouses because she used to live round ’ere.’

‘Jean! I’m ready for my tea,’ shouted a young man’s tired voice up the stairs. Interrupting herself long enough to bawl – ‘Oh shut yer face – give us a minute, can’t you?’ over her shoulder, Mrs Simms went on, ‘Yes. That’s what she told me.
Likes the neighbourhood
– she’s an invalid or sunnick. She can
’ave
the neighbourhood. Night, all,’ and, clutching the staring child, she hurried away.

Mr Geddes had returned to the living-room. Mr Fisher had resumed his seat and his downward contemplation of the carpet. The Vicar thought that he must be going – the easy chair and the evening paper were not for him, this evening – and not a thing had been said yet about the cause of his visit. He cleared his throat and addressed himself decidedly to Gladys, now fussing with the teapot:

‘I understand that this man has bought the house from your old landlady, Miss Barnes, and that she told you he has a bad reputation as a property-owner?’

‘A regular rackman, she said, you might say if ’e’s all that bad why did she let him ’ave it but his money’s as good as anyone’s I s’pose.’

‘What do you suppose will happen now?’ asked Mr Geddes, knowing from experience that it was sometimes necessary to distress people by making them come to the point – and, really, he must not stay a moment longer, he would be late for the Men’s Group as it was: Gerald would have to begin without him; well, that would be excellent experience for the young man, it would teach him that vicars sometimes missed trains or fell down staircases or caught influenza.

‘Gawd knows and He won’t split,’ retorted Gladys, anxiety, alarm, and the duties of hostess causing her to forget whom she was addressing, ‘she said he wanted quire property in this distric’ –’

‘Choir property?’ repeated Mr Geddes, bewildered. He was not the first listener to wish he had an interpreter while Gladys was explaining something. ‘Oh, to acquire property, I see, yes?’

‘She said he hasn’t got no property here yet, all over Islington way, he is, and he wants to make a start here. He’s bought the row, all the ’ouses in the Walk, she said, got them cheap, they did say they was coming down but that was years ago – Annie, when did we hear they was all coming down along here?’

Annie, who had got her tea first and was luxuriously sipping, moved the balaclava in an unhelpful gesture.

A power cut now added to the evening’s excitement. There was much exclamation, and a slow departure on the part of Mr Fisher in search of candles. When the room was once more, if faintly, lit, Mr Geddes said firmly, addressing Gladys:

‘Now I want you to know, Miss Barnes, that if anything really serious happens we at Saint James’s are your friends, and, if things get serious, you can come to us and we will do what we can. Nothing serious has happened yet, has it, now? I know you must all feel shocked and
upset
’ – he included Mr Fisher in what had grown, during the last hour, to have for him the atmosphere of some family party – ‘but nothing has
happened
. And it may not. Always remember that, and keep cheerful.’

‘They’re going to do up the place first thing, Jean said so,’ Annie put in, still swallowing tea, ‘upsetting us. Painting, and that.’

‘But surely …’ Mr Geddes just refrained from an eloquent glance around him, ‘fresh paint, new wallpaper …’

‘Paint. Stinking the place out,’ said Annie, with rustic frankness and Mr Geddes gave it up.

The proverb about angels being able to do no more than their best occurred to him as he made his way down the stairs, escorted by Gladys’s recital of the things that could happen to all at Rose Cottage, beginning with trebling everyone’s rent and ending with eviction.

Mr Fisher lit them down with the candle, which he had crept up to his own domain to fetch.

‘Got thousands of them up there,’ Gladys had whispered during his lengthy absence, ‘doesn’t want the electric. ’Oards them. I don’t let
her
know,’ indicating her invisible sister with a nod, ‘she wouldn’t sleep a wink, afraid of fire. Mind you, the electric don’t go up there. But they could ’ave run a wire, she isn’t so bad, I was telling your curate, except for that Elsie, won’t hear a word for
her
, not a word, and you can’t blame her.’

They were in the hall now, a broad little place, with rich mouldings of smoky plaster roses and clustered leaves banding its ceiling. Mr Fisher was coming slowly down to them, extinguishing his candle as they entered the weak glare of the suddenly restored electric light, and slipping it, still smoking, into his pocket (‘I’m always telling him,’ said Gladys, aside).

Mr Geddes, confused by the cascade of her farewells, was surprised to find, on shutting the front door on them, that the old man was outside it. He had put on a cap and a thick old overcoat of the same colourlessness as all his clothes and wore stout boots with an indescribable air of belonging to the earlier years of the century about them. He now held out his hand to Mr Geddes, under the mocking blind eyes of the mask that hung between the two cottages. A mile away in Archway Road the traffic kept up its dreary roaring; here, there was near darkness, and a silence.

‘Good-night. A privilege, meeting an educated man,’ his remote voice said thinly.

‘Going out … Mr Fisher? It’s not a pleasant night for walking,’ Mr Geddes said, concerned for him, and taking the small hand in a worn thick glove.

‘I makes a habit of walking on the Heath in all weathers. Don’t be afraid for me … The moon will rise at eight o’clock. I always takes a note of when. Our ways don’t lie together, but I ’ope we meet again.’

He drifted away, shuffling past the boarded houses, down to the end of the Walk, and Mr Geddes, feeling dismissed, let him go.

Gladys did not confide her anxieties, in the week that followed, to the Cypriot family in whose café she worked.

Her instinct to tell everybody everything, at length, struggled with her instinct to mistrust all foreigners. Her mistrust was general; and hardly applied to her employers, who were kind enough, called her ‘Glad’, and were lavish with leftovers. She explained her liking for
them
by saying that they were ‘different’.

But – ‘Those dark eyes! I never trust ’em,’ she would usually say, and some dim notion that the rackman was a foreigner linking up with her general mistrust, together with the popular rumour that foreigners were great snappers-up of property, kept her silent.

However, while sluicing water over the linoleum patterned to look like mosaic, she would sometimes pause, and stare pensively down into the pail. The proprietor’s wife, wiping down a table or returning from taking a tray of pastry covered in wisps of coconut to a customer, would drop a ‘What up, Glad? you lost somesing?’ in passing, and Gladys would start awake. Mrs Kyperiou was a peasant, with a peasant’s feelings about work: unless it were siesta-time, you did not stop working, much less stare into your pail, in the middle of washing the floor.

But, although Gladys told them nothing, an occasional sigh or shake of the head which she could not resist, hinted at anxieties.

The Simmses left on Wednesday, their few shiny cheap pieces in a van belonging to a friend, and the two hermaphrodite children, pale and sticky as usual, smilingly riding in the middle of the furniture.

The sisters had a hasty farewell visit from young Mrs Simms, who bestowed on them an ashtray with an Alsatian dog curled round it and the tip of his tail broken off. She was in a great hurry, having delayed this ceremony until a few minutes before the van left, and her farewells were confined to hasty waves and the laying of the ashtray on Annie’s bed.

‘Well, good riddance to bad rubbish,’ observed Gladys, standing at the window and looking down into the street, where the last pieces were being loaded into the van, ‘and
that
can go in the bucket,’ glancing disdainfully at the Alsatian. ‘There’s Nicky and Alexander, Annie. Now why aren’t they at school?’

‘Jean said their baby’s got the measles. S’pose
they’ll
be getting the push any time now,’ Annie said sadly.

The two little Jamaican boys belonged to the one family left in the most habitable of the boarded-up houses. Smiling and numerous, respectable and tidy, they felt themselves lucky to be living in it.

‘Poor little devils,’ said Gladys ominously, not meaning the measles, ‘I pity them.’

‘Oh don’t remind of it, Glad,’ and Annie retreated: she meant the probable eviction of Nicky and Alexander.

‘I like that. ’Oo started on about it?’

It was a morning of thin, fine November air and brilliant sun; every shade of rusty red and faded blue on door or railing glowed through the genial light.

‘Bye-bye! Bye-bye, Melinda, bye-bye, John, bye-bye!’ shrieked Gladys, leaning out of the window to wave. ‘Got a nice morning for it, anyway. I’m not ’alf glad to see the back of her. Get a bit of peace now, p’raps. And that Melinda, spoiled little madam.’