The Fancy (19 page)

When they got back to London, Len had wanted to take her out to dinner, so they had gone straight to the West End from the station. They had tried several places, but everywhere was full, Len was for going back and queueing at the Regent Palace, but Kitty had suddenly stopped dead in Leicester Square, put her bag down on the pavement and said : “I’m awfully sorry, Len, but I’m tired. Let’s go home.
Mother will give us something to eat, and after all, she’ll want to see something of you before you go back to Wales tomorrow.” They had had quite an argument, stepping on and off the pavement to avoid being knocked into by people and cars alternately.

When they did get home, Kitty’s mother had worn that look that she had seen on the faces of some of the girls this morning—but only for an instant. The next, she had taken into her arms with a scything movement and was hugging her and rocking from side to side while Len put down the bags and hung up his gas-mask and greatcoat.

It was a good thing they had come home, because it turned out that her mother had been expecting them all the time. There was a fluffy fish pie in the oven, and some trifle left over from the wedding. Mr. and Mrs. Ferguson had already had high tea, as it was his evening on at the Warden’s Post, but Kitty’s mother sat at the table while they ate, watching every mouthful on and off their plates and picking absent-mindedly at the loaf while she plied them with questions. It was a bit awkward after supper. When Mrs. Ferguson was in the kitchen, Len had said to Kitty : “Let’s go upstairs, darling,” but they had not liked to go up to bed together. In the end, Kitty had gone up first, while he said he would just have a smoke and look at the paper. Her mother went up and talked to her while she undressed. Much later, when they were in bed, Kitty had heard her father come home, but instead of coming in to kiss her goodnight, like other Sundays, she heard his shoes creak to a stop outside the door, and after a pause he had tapped softly and said : “Goodnight, Katie. Glad to have you back.”

Kitty put the last pipe back into the box, wiped her hands, and thought of this morning and how odd it had been to wake in the spare-room, that was now called Len and Kitty’s room, and had new rust-coloured curtains and a new rug over the worn patch of carpet by the bed. The note of the alarm had been the same and she had smothered it at once as usual and dozed guiltily for a minute or two. When she did open her eyes, she couldn’t understand at first why she was looking at the brass handle of a dark-brown wardrobe door instead of at the picture of St. Christopher carrying Christ over the stream, which she had had for her Confirmation.

She dressed very quietly, but when she came up to the bed to wake Len to say good-bye, she saw that he had been awake all the time and watching her. He would be gone when she got back tonight. There were so many things she wanted to say, but no time to say them. As it was, he made her very late, and she flew downstairs, cramming a folded piece of bread and butter into her mouth on her way through the kitchen to get her bicycle. It would never do to clock in late this morning ; she could imagine the remarks.

Her mother, with her pigtail hanging down the back of her black quilted dressing-gown, brought her sandwiches out to the gate as usual, bewailing ;
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font-weight: . b“all that good bacon in the oven”. It was so like ordinary
days that it was almost impossible to believe that behind that bow window up there her husband lay in bed, with his uniform folded neatly over the back of a chair and his brushes on the chest of drawers. He was very tidy with his things. His toothpaste and sponge-bag were never in a mess like hers, and after he had shaved, he put everything away in an oilskin bag instead of leaving them soapy and scattered as her father did.

Tonight, when she got back, he would be gone. As she pedalled away into the cold wind, with her lamp going out at each bump and coming on again at the next, he was gone already and she was Miss Ferguson again, too fat in navy blue trousers and a red jersey, with her lunch in greaseproof paper in the basket of her bicycle.

Bob Condor had recently taken to coming up at a quarter to six and asking Edward : “Where are all your girls?”

Edward couldn’t very well say “Washing,” because that was not allowed until five to six. He looked innocently around as if the bench were not empty except for Grace, still checking valves like an automaton, Madeleine re-reading her report to make sure it was right, and Wendy Holt scribbling notes on what she had inspected, because she knew she would never remember until tomorrow. “By the way, Condor,” said Edward craftily, “I’d like to ask your opinion on this rotor. D’you think they can salvage those vanes, or are they too far gone?” Bob could never resist an appeal for his opinion, but even the business of fitting his jeweller’s spy-glass into his eye and calling for emery paper and digging at the rotor with a little steel pick and saying “I’d make them redundant for poshible shalvage,” failed to divert him. Putting down the rotor, he looked at Edward with the spy-glass still in his eye, as if he were trying to see into his brain, and said again, “Where are all your girls?”

“Oh—somewhere about,” said Edward vaguely. “Here’s Madeleine and Grace and Wendy … and here come Sheila and Dinah,” he added, wishing that they were not so blatantly carrying soap and nail brushes.

“Shee here, Ledward,” said Bob, unscrewing the spy-glass, “if you’ve no control over the girls, as apparently you haven’t, you might at least persuade them to go over to wash in ones and twos, and not the whole ruddy bench at a time ; then if the old man or anybody came round, it wouldn’t notice.” Edward agreed and wandered away. With the whole Shop packing up and easing itself towards the moment when the six o’clock bell should send them flying, why did Bob Condor always pick on him? Why not the chalk test girls, who were already winding scarves around their heads and turning out the lights? He suspected that Bob had a down on him because he was well in with Mr. Gurley.

As it was Thursday, Edward was in no particular hurry to get away.
He sauntered over to the coat pegs behind the scuttling crowd and stood unhurriedly winding his scarf round his neck and calling out “Goodnight” to his girls as they rushed by him. Dinah was the first away, half in and half out of her coat, a loaded string bag bumping around her knees. Bill was home early” tonight, and she wanted to get the beds and a semblance of housework done before he came in and tried to do it. Freda was close on her heels. She never wasted time over anything, much less putting on clothes. The collar of her tweed overcoat was turned in and the laces of her brogues untied. She had not combed her hair since this morning, and possibly not since she went to bed last night.

Never mind, blyh“’Night, Eddie!” Sheila ran off, looking clean and pretty in a halo hat. She had taken a long time washing tonight and had come out of the toilet looking quite different from when she went in. She was meeting David in a bar and they were going to be what he called ‘civilized people’ and have dinner somewhere smart to celebrate his having sold a story. Ivy passed Edward without a word on very high heels, her hair tied into a turban and the collar of her hard fur coat turned up round her thin neck. Edward often wondered what she got up to out of working hours and was sure it was no good, whether she were with that drunken swine of a husband or somebody else. She always left the factory and returned to it with a secret, hostile look, as if defying anyone to enquire into her private life.

Kitty had told Edward that her husband would be gone when she got home, but she would have been surprised to know how sad he felt for her as she trotted off in her red scarf and thick gloves, looking like a child sent out to play in the snow.

“Good night, Madeleine!”

“Good night, Edward. Don’t be late in the morning!” That was one of her little jokes. Since Christmas, Madeleine had taken to wearing trousers. With them, she wore a mauve crochet jumper with a butterfly brooch, court shoes with buckles and Louis heels, a dark-green waisted coat with a fur collar and her best black winter hat with the little veil. Paddy, following her out, wondered how she could ever have thought it funny, when now it just made her despair. She was going to go to bed early tonight and make up last night’s sleep. The American Army was all very well, but it had brought with it to London its New York habit of “going on some place else” and never seemed to have heard of going to bed. She would put off her letter to Dicky just one more day, until she could concoct something a bit more inspiring than her last two, which, she recollected Contritely had been too full of complaints to bring cheer to a man in the desert who had only a gallon of water a day to wash, shave, drink and fill his radiator.

Grace and Reenie went off arm-in-arm, looking waistless. “Good night, Edward,” they said and Reenie giggled, because, she didn’t know why, but the name Edward always sounded funny. Grace was pulling
her along, her mind on the Hoover with which her husband had won her undying love shortly after marriage.

Edward was into his Burberry and had lit a pipe to keep him warm on the way home. A skinny labourer in dungarees was running his hand down the light switches and the shop was almost dark before he saw that Wendy Holt had not yet gone home. She was bending over something in a corner under the hanging overalls.

“Not gone yet, Wendy? You’ll miss your bus.”

She looked up, her face pale for an instant and then obscured as the labourer reached the last switch and hopped down from his stepladder. “Oh, I don’t go by bus—there’s not one goes near. I walk. It isn’t very far.”. She bent again to the bundle on the floor, half-kneeling over it, tugging at a cord impatiently.

“What on earth are you playing at?” He felt taller than usual as he stood over her. “Can I help you?”

“Oh, no—it’s all right, really. It’s only these blankets. I bought them at lunch time today and the girl in the shop tied them up so I could carry them, but now the string seems to have slipped.” She tugged again. “I’ll never get them home unless I’ve got something to hold them by.”

“Here, let me do it.”Monica Dickensan along Edward squatted down beside her. She had tied the string tightly around the middle of the blankets, but they were coming unfolded and falling out all over the place. Wendy held his torch while he struggled to undo her knot.

“Oh, thanks
aw
fully,” she said, when he stood up with a moderately wieldy bundle under his arm, and held out her own arms for it.

“I’ll carry it down to the clockhouse for you,” he said, “You shine the torch.” They picked their way round a bench and past a trolley abandoned in the gangway by Charlie and his women when the bell struck. The darkness was full of brooding, metallic shapes. Here and there a gear grinned or a polished shaft gleamed in the light as Wendy’s torch passed over them. Drawn up by the door were the humped, headless torsoes of assembled engines, shrouded in canvas like bodies in a morgue. Hitching up the blankets, Edward held open the little door inside the big door for Wendy and then stepped through himself, backwards, bringing the bundle through after him. The Shop stretched away into vaults of gloom : it might have been a hundred yards long, or limitless. Quiet as a cathedral, but packed from end to end with the potentialities of a noise so great that two men sitting cheek by jowl behind it would have to speak to each other through microphones.

Edward shut the door and joined Wendy out on the track. “It’s lighter out than in,” they both said at once, and then laughed. The gatekeeper in the clockhouse looked at them cynically as they each made their separate ‘ping’ in the silence that ten minutes before had been an orchestra of pings.

“Looks bad,” said the gatekeeper, “comin’ out a quarter of a hour late with blankets over your arm.” Pleased with his joke, he repeated it. “I say, it looks bad coming out a quarter of a hour——”

“Been working overtime,” said Edward, crisply. “Good night!”

“Overtime I don’t think,” said the gatekeeper to the boy who was collecting the cards, as the door swung to behind them. “I say, overtime I don’t think, or you wouldn’t catch ‘em clocking out a minute before the quarter but a minute after, so’s to get the credit for the next quarter. Ah, yes—there’s some funny things goes on in this factory. I’ve seen more than I care to tell about.” What he did tell about was so much that if he had really seen it the factory would have been closed down long ago. His family were all adenoidal from listening open-mouthed to the stories he brought home.

Edward was carrying Wendy’s bundle up the Estate Road. “This is much too heavy for you,” he said. “I can’t think how you managed to get back with it lunch-time.”

“It was a bit of a struggle. I had to keep stopping to hitch it up. I expect you noticed I came in late. I’m awfully sorry.”

“Good Lord, I don’t mind,” he said. “If all the girls were as good timekeepers as you, there wouldn’t be much difficulty. You haven’t had any time out since I’ve been in your Shop, have you?”

“No, I don’t think so.” Wendy never even took the hour off that they were allowed once a week for shopping. It meant missing the overtime bonus, and she couldn’t afford that. When they got to the main road, she said: “I’ll take the blankets now. It was awfully kind of you to carry them.”

“Which way d’you go? Perhaps we go in the same direc;
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“No, we don’t.” She shook her smooth tail of hair. “I turn up to the right and you go straight on, don’t you? I’ve seen you.”

“Well, I’ll walk along with you a bit. I’m not in a hurry. You can’t possibly manage these in the dark ; they’re much too heavy.”

“Oh, yes, I can,” she protested, pulling at the bundle. “Do give me them. I don’t want to make you late : you go on home.”

“Wouldn’t dream of it,” he said, holding the blankets more tightly. The feebleness of her tugging made him feel masterful. “Where do you five?” he asked sternly.

“Queensdale Road, but——”