The Fancy (30 page)

He was sitting reading at the table. Dorothy was in his easy chair, which was the only one in which she could get comfortable and Connie was in hers at the other side of the painted screen in the fireplace. The two women were knitting, the moaning undertow that had come into their voices since Dorothy wore mourning dragging at their conversation.

“Your socks, Edward?” said Connie. “Surely you’ve got plenty to wear. I can’t do them tonight, anyway. I want to get this finished so that we can match it for ribbon tomorrow. You don’t realise what a lot there is to be done if this baby’s not to look neglected, poor little soul.” Dorothy turned on him her look of a reproachful cow.

It had been the same the next time he asked, and finally he had been driven to wearing a holey pair round to Dick’s and pretending the holes had only come that day at work. Mrs. Bennett, flushed and maternal,
had darned them for him while he sat in Dick’s slippers allotting numbers to the Show entries. The plans had reached this advanced stage by now and the Show was less than two weeks off. Entries were coming in excitingly ; Edward never got used to finding a lot of letters in the letter cage when he got home from work. Some quite big people seemed to be taking them seriously and there were several exhibits coming by rail. A lesser judge, a lady called Miss Viloet Seeds, had been engaged to assist Allan Colley. The Victory Hall had been booked and the sticky eartags ordered. Edward had spent seven coupons on a white overall.

There was still plenty to do, and on top of that Canning Kyles was having one of its pep periods. Mr. Gurley’s little window went up and down so often that it seemed to have discovered the secret of perpetual motion. The goaded labourers pushed trolleys at twice the speed and slung bits of engines about with reckless clangs. Old Charlie’s younger female mate grew straddle-legged from staggering under too heavy loads, and the elder one cut the split sleeves out of her overall and wore it like a jerkin over one of her late husband’s flannel shirts.

Charlie had not had a wink of sleep for days ; his nook behind the spring-testing machine was filled now with crankcases which had been inspected so fast that the Fitting Shop was not ready for them. No sooner had the girls signed their names to one report than they were up and away to another bench, tool box under one arm and stool under the other. Things went so fast for Reenie that she found herself writing the report of on enterprisean alonge engine on the card of the next. Freda’s arms were bare to the elbow and she tackled even delicate jobs like a blacksmith and told people that at last they were working one-tenth as hard as the Russian women. Edward scurried about among them like a sheepdog, clearing up muddles, helping Wendy when she got behind, chasing a gearwheel that had been sent for polishing six engines ago and never reappeared.

He was busy all day long as well as most of the evening. He liked his life to be full, because his body took on fresh vitality to meet it. He ate enormously, slept like a log in the narrow spare-room bed and wished the walk to and from work were twice as long. New things kept cropping up. There were letters from manufacturers of patent foods and hutches, friendly letters from secretaries of other Clubs, enquiries from breeders with names well known in the Fancy. He had even been on the telephone to the editor of the local paper about sending along a reporter.

But when he looked at Dorothy, he felt bad about feeling so well. Each evening as he put his key into the lock, he toned himself down to a more suitable pitch for the atmosphere of his house. The baby was due any day now and Mrs. Munroe was practically in residence. She often came round to breakfast—mercifully after he had gone—and was nearly always there when he got home. Sometimes she had parked
Mr. Munroe elsewhere, sometimes he was with her and cumbering some corner while the women droned and planned as if he were not there.

Edward would come in bursting with something to tell and be fidgety all evening for the lack of anyone to tell it to. They were not interested in the Show and he understood that they thought it callous of him to be so wrapped up in it. Dorothy might have been interested. She had asked him once or twice about the Show when they were alone and even went out occasionally to see the rabbits until her mother fetched her in with a warning about the deformities of babies whose mothers got their feet wet. She and Connie watched Dorothy like a hawk. Whenever the sun shone or she enjoyed a meal or the natural self-absorption of her condition made her forget about Don for a while, her mother or sister was on hand to remind her.

One of Mrs. Munroe’s most common remarks was : “Where’s Dorothy? I’m sure she’s crying.” If Dorothy was out of her sight, she would roam the house listening for the sound of tears and once when Dorothy had gone out for a walk on a delicious May morning, her mother had trailed her to make sure she was not heading for the river.

“Why should she?” Edward had asked Connie, with a wave of his hand to the flooded gravel pits beyond the garden, “With the Ponds so close?” He saw at once that his flippancy was a mistake. He gradually adapted himself to the conditions of his home by keeping his full, absorbing day outside it and just being as little trouble as possible inside it. He often stayed out to supper. His rations were probably of more use to Dorothy than his presence. His heart yearned with pity towards her but there seemed to be nothing he could do to help. He was allowed to do nothing for her. He had offered once to take her to the cinema and fancied he saw a gleam of interest in the jelly of her eye but Mrs. Munroe had been so shocked as if he had suggested hot music at a funeral service. What would people think?

The doctor said they might expect Dorothy’s baby on May the 22nd, but Mrs. Munroe knew better. The twenty-second was a Monday, and didn’t the old saying say : “Thursday’s child is full of woe?” He would come on the twenty-fifth.

The main line station for Collis Park was Cleave Hill, some two miles away near the gas works, and thither . She was not sure whether . bDick Bennett drove in a small Ford lorry, “on a wet Sunday morning in May. His job, whose responsibility was making him grip the steering wheel tightly, was to collect the rabbits which had been sent by rail and take them to the Victory Hall in time to be penned and labelled before the show opened at eleven o’clock. Mrs. Bennett’s brother, who was a builder, had hired the van to Dick and Edward at cut prices, any scruples about using the petrol being drowned with several Olds. After the third pint, Dick’s was already a mission of national importance ; he should almost have a label on the windscreen saying “Urgent”.

“My point is this,” said Edward, who had unconsciously picked up some of E. Dexter Bell’s phrases, “rabbit breeding is important in wartime. Am I right?” Dick Bennett nodded, staring into his beer. “The Government encourage it, don’t they?” said Edward truculently, as if someone had contradicted him, “What about all those pamphlets they keep sending out? Well, how are you going to keep up the breeding standards without shows? Answer me that. And if shows are important, it’s presumably important to get the exhibits
to
those shows. Important? It’s a national duty.”

“Oh quite, quite,” said Dick’s brother-in-law. It didn’t matter to him what the van was used for if he happened to have petrol to spare. “What I always say is,” he signalled the barmaid by waggling his little finger, “I always say the harm’s been done by the time the petrol reaches the consumer. The chaps at sea have already risked their lives, so it don’t make a ha’p’orth of difference to them whether the stuff’s used for aeroplanes, rabbit shows or the wife and me to visit her sister over at Croydon.” An argument that was subsequently to get him fined ten pounds after being stopped by a policeman on the Eastbourne Road.

But this had not happened yet and no policeman stopped Dick Bennett as he coasted down Station Hill and into the yard with elaborate hand signals. There were about twenty little boxes and baskets waiting for him, labelled “LIVESTOCK WITH CARE” and Dick gave them so much care that the woman porter who was helping him made two journeys to his one from the platform to the lorry. He had frequently to adjure her to mind what she was about.

“There’s some very valuable stock here, Miss. I’m taking them to the Show.”

She swung a luxury basket from a well-known breeder in Finchley over the tailboard as carelessly as if it had contained a dead cat.

“The Collis Park Rabbit Club, you know,” said Dick. “Fur and Fancy Show.”

“Oh yes,” she said. Rabbits did not interest her, except that she had never been able to eat them from a child ; that was interesting and she told Dick about it as they returned to the platform for the last lot. Before he could get started on his painstaking explanation of the difference between flesh and show stock she had slammed up the tailboard of the lorry and walked off whistling with her cap on the back of her head. Dick pulled himself up into the driver’s seat and let in the clutch with great delicacy.

He drove to the Victory Hall, leaning slightly forward, with his cap worn quite straight on his head and his lips pursed, blowing his horn at stray, early church-goers and stopping dead at every deserted crossroad to look right and left before he crawled across. Whatever Edward thought, Dick was certain that Mr. Bell was right in insisting on a fair sized pen show instead of a potty little table show. The fact
that these big breeders had bothered to send entries by rail justified the daring of the enterprise, which had almost numbed him with worry at first.

The inside of the Victory Hall, still in chaos, brought on some of the numbness again. The hired pens, which came in lengths of six partitions, were stacked anyhow in the middle of the floor. A line of them was only just beginning to take shape along one wall under the hands of two of the Club members, a schoolboy and a little bow-legged man called Simkiss, who bred Chinchillas on his allotment. Edward, in his shirt sleeves with his soft light hair on end, was helping to erect the judging table under the platform at the end of the hall.

“How goes it?” asked Dick.

“Capital, capital,” said Edward abstractedly. “It wants to come up a bit at your end, Mr. Marchmont. We’ll have to put a couple of blocks underneath.”

“At the show they had at Iver,” said Mr. Marchmont, who wore hairy terra-cotta plus-fours and a cap to match, “they didn’t have trestles like this. They had some sort of solid erection. I must say it seemed very satisfactory.”

“Well, I’ve brought the rail stock.” said Dick proudly.

“You’ve brought the—good heavens man, you haven’t left them outside, have you? Here, let’s get them in straightaway. You never know what might happen.”

Edward hurried out, with Dick following in alarm, visualising the entire lorry gone, although he had its ignition key and rotor arm in his pocket.

Gradually the hall took shape. As more Club members arrived, Edward set them to work. Some of them only got underfoot and asked questions and fussed round their own entries. Mr. Marchmont had to keep telling him that the night before the Victory Hall had been full of a Flannel Dance. Dick Bennett, who was the most underfoot of all, was eventually stowed away behind the table where Miss Hemming was checking the entries and issuing the numbered eartags to Mrs. Ledbetter. Miss Hemming was secretarial, with neat clothes and an expensive fountain pen, and Mrs. Ledbetter had large masculine features and wore a navy blue tricorne and a dirty white apron tied round the skirt of her best afternoon marocain. She handled the rabbits like an expert, balancing them in one hand while she stuck the little round labels inside each transparent right ear. She was one of the Club’s most solid members, who bred profitably, in a back garden where her husband would have liked to grow vegetables. As it was, he had to content himself with tomatoes and dwarf beans in window boxes. She had brought him along this morning to help, and he had been given to Mrs. Bennett, who was running a small refreshment bar up on the platform. He was cutting open rolls, while she spread them
and put cheese and beetroot inside, her eyebrows and the front of her hair singed from a slight contretemps with the Primus stove.

At ten o’clock, Miss Hemming put on a small round hat and slipped away to church, leaving Dick happily making lists and collecting entrance fees in a tobacco tin, Edward had changed into his new white overall and had time to look at some of the entries. He inspected the Flemish Giants with concern, going back to Freda’s pen to reassure himself that she was bigger and better. He kept popping outside to scan the road for Allan Colley, who was not due for another hour, and returning to stand in the doorway and look round the hall to see how it would strike him. Would the whole thing seem amateurish after the big shows at which he had judged?

Edward himself was impressed with the scene ; the Show was took a step nearer to her mother,uppa taking shape. The pens were built in a double tier along two walls, the travelling boxes were stacked tidily in a corner, Mr. Simkiss was laying out a table of leaflets and handbooks, and the judging table was covered with sacking and was level at last, although Mr. Marchmont still didn’t like the look of it. Just when there seemed to be some hope of the Show being able to open by eleven o’clock, in walked E. Dexter Bell in a blue flannel chalk-stripe suit with a flower in the buttonhole and announced that the pens must be in the middle of the hall so that people could circulate.

Mr. Marchmont was delighted, because that was how they had them at Iver, and he had said so all along. He told Mr. Bell this, but Mr. Bell was not listening, because having got everybody working like beavers to rearrange the hall, he was unwrapping on Dick’s table the small silver cup which he was presenting for the Best Rabbit in the Show. A girl in a flowered dress, who had brought two Havana Rexes in the basket of her bicycle, hovered by with little cries of admiration.

“Look at the
cup
, Mrs. Ledbetter,” she cried. “Isn’t it smashing?” Mrs. Ledbetter picked up the cup, disclosing that it was lighter than it looked, replaced it on its stand without a word and hurried back to work, her hips working under the tight white apron.