The Fancy (41 page)

By the next morning’s post came a bulletin from Ruth Lipmann, which aggravated his homesickness but gave him an idea. He went down to the teashop where Edna, with her head tied in a scarf was dusting the wheel-back chairs, polishing each spoke separately, and turning them up to wipe under the feet.

An important breeder was coming down from the North, Edward told her, to look at his stud. He would have to go back by the noon train. He pretended to think it a great nuisance, and he could see that Edna was annoyed. She kept giving little jerks of her head as she went on dusting, moving from table to table so that Edward had to follow her round the shop.

Almost the only thing Edna and Connie had in common was that they thought nothing of rabbits. Edna could not see how anything connected with rabbits could be important enough to take Edward away before the supper party she had planned for the last day of his visit. It was not going to be anything much, only Mr. and Mrs. Tryer from the hotel opposite and Mr. Bede from the bank with his daughter, and cold salmon salad and one of without looking an alongMiss Pudney’s celebrated apple flans, but it began now to assume tremendous proportions in her mind. It might have been a full dress reception with Gunter’s catering. She passed on to the dresser and began to rub up the dazzling brass candlesticks, moving her lips, but at last Edward managed to make it all right by explaining that there was quite a lot of money involved in the deal, an excuse which Edna, who after her husband’s death had had a brave and bitter struggle against poverty, understood.

She stopped polishing and turning to Edward said: “Well all right then, if you must you must, but I shall be sorry to lose you. It’s been so nice.” She was really very fond of Ted when she stopped to think about it.

Edward felt guilty at first in the train going home, but presently he began to plan what he was going to do in the remaining three days.

When he got home, Connie was in the living-room, entertaining, of all people, E. Dexter Bell’s sister. Miss Bell was sitting upright but at ease in the most comfortable chair. She never lolled or crossed her legs or leaned against furniture or stood with her weight on one foot. If she wanted to relax, she simply maintained her alert posture and
authorised her muscles and nerves to relax, without moving her limbs.

“Whatever are you doing home, Ted?” cried Connie, “I thought you weren’t coming back till Sunday.” She was obviously not pleased to see him, but could not show it too bluntly, in view of the company, which affected even her accent and the pitch of her voice. Ordinarily, she would at least have raised her voice at him, and her reproachful : “I wish you’d have let me know” would have been : “You might at least have let me know. But I suppose that’s too much to expect. Heaven knows I’m used to your being inconsiderate.”

“I thought you knew I was coming back today,” lied Edward blithely, taking advantage of his reprieve. “Didn’t you get my letter?”

Connie shook her head. “The posts these days are a disgrace,” said Miss Bell.

“Oh, do excuse me, Miss Bell,” said Connie, recovering herself from the shock of seeing Edward when she thought she was rid of him for another three days. “I was so surprised to see my husband, I never —This is Miss Bell, Ted, Mr. Bell’s sister, you know.” Edward shook hands.

“Oh, Miss Bell and I are old friends,” he said, so pleased to be home that he almost believed it.

“Yes, indeed,” said Miss Bell. “And how are the rabbits, Mr. Ledward?”

“They’re fine, thank you—at least as far as I know. I’m just going out to see how they’ve got on while I’ve been away. If you’ll excuse me——” He moved towards the door. “I’ll see you again. You’re staying to supper, of course?”

Miss Bell shook her head with a smile that spoke of better plans.

“Miss Bell and I are going to the concert at the Town Hall,” said Connie. “Dorothy will get you something to eat when she comes in.”

“Oh, well, I hope you enjoy yourselves,” said Edward, and hurried out to the garden, taking off his jacket as he went through the hall. There were still a good two hours’ light left.

So it was concerts now, was it? The old girl was coming on in her ideas. Fancy her chumming up with old Bell’s sister! Funny taste. Himself, he wouldn without looking an along’t spend half an hour in the woman’s company from choice. She always made him feel as if he hadn’t shaved.

He stayed out in the garden long after it was too dark to see what he was doing, and coming into the kitchen, happy and hungry, caught Dorothy helping herself to Connie’s jam ration and gave her the fright of her life.

On the Monday morning, Canning Kyles, which had been given over for a week to stock-taking, chugged into motion again and the machines hummed as if they had never been silent. In the Inspection Shop, nobody felt like getting down to work at first. They stood about telling each other what they had done, or sat yawning, trying to work up enough energy to get started and thinking that they had
forgotten how much they disliked the place. You went on holiday and within a few hours you could hardly believe you had ever been doing anything else but what suited you. After a day or two, you could hardly even visualise the Shop, or the faces of your workmates. Then you came back, expecting it all to seem a little unfamiliar : people who look different, or be saying different things. You found that the place and everyone in it was just the same, deadeningly the same, and when you forced yourself to start work, your fingers moved of their own accord and within a very short time, you could not believe that you had ever done anything but sit at a factory bench in a grey overall with the smell of oily metal in your nostrils and creeping into your hair. You had had a holiday—oh, ages ago—but it was as unreal as a dream. This was reality. By lunch-time the holiday might never have been.

Edward, standing at the top of the bench and looking round his girls, tried to imagine what their holidays had been like. He had somehow expected there to be a subtle difference in their looks or behaviour, but there they all were, perched dutifully round the bench as if they had never left it, giving no clue of what they had been up to. It had always fascinated him, the idea of them turning up here day after day, no matter what had happened the night before. Of the private lives of any of them except Wendy, he knew scarcely anything. He only knew that from six at night until seven-thirty in the morning each was an individual, at whose activities he could only guess, but from seven-thirty until six, each turned herself into a cog, subjugating her hopes and troubles and passions to the machine that drove them while they drove it.

He often stood watching them from the end of the bench and tried to imagine what they were like at home. He fancied all sorts of things about them. He supposed he was what you would call a fanciful man—always had been, from a boy. He was very fond of his girls, even quite fond of Ivy, who disliked him undisguisedly. His responsibility for them made them somehow his. They were his collection, brought together from every possible environment to converge within the limits of his supervision. His Fancy, he sometimes called them to himself. They were his Fancy, as important to him in their way as his rabbits.

His eye travelled round the bench. Grace, treating her valves with maternal solicitude. Kitty, next to her, back at work at last and looking, if anything, younger than before she had the baby. She was normally plump and her figure had still not yet returned to normal. The skin of her face was healthy and tight almost to bursting point. She was bursting out of her overall, too, as Edward saw when she raised her arms to hold a flame trap to the light. Len had been home on week-end leave for the last part of her holiday. He was very proud of his son and would play with him shyly for as long as Mrs. Ferguson allowed. She did not believe in picking babies up too much. “Let him lay” was a remark which sprang automatically to her lips whenever anyone approach at lunchtiman alonged the cot.

She had looked after the baby entirely so that Kitty and Len could be out together all day, and had taken him into her own room at night. Kitty thought it was wonderful to be able to combine being married with living at home. Since the baby’s birth, she had relied more and more on her mother. She couldn’t think what she would have done without her encyclopaedic store of infant knowledge. There was so much
to
a baby ; no wonder the mothers at the factory were always asking each other how they managed. Well, they should live at home, like she did. It really worked very well and Len seemed quite happy. He had eaten enormously of her mother’s cooking ; Kitty on her own could never have fed him like that when he came on leave. Chips and Welsh Rarebit were her only dishes which always succeeded. She would have to learn a lot from her mother before the end of the War.

Edward saw her smile to herself as she remembered how Len had tucked into the steak pudding they had had Sunday night. His leave had really been a great success.

Len had gone back to Wiltshire and Air Force cooking wondering if he were really married. He had a son and a wife, certainly ; their photographs were waiting for him above his bunk when he got back to the hut, but although they were inscribed “
Your
loving wife, Kitty”, and “
Your
little son, Victor”, he had an uncomfortable feeling that they were not his at all.

Next to Kitty was Sheila, a little browner, Edward thought, but you could never tell with the make-up girls used. Where had she been? He imagined her going away with her young man ; she was not the sort to spend the holiday quietly at home with her parents.

Then Madeleine, wearing outside her overall the mauve cardigan that signified autumn—who knew what she had been through? Edward always wanted to say something to her, to show that he understood and sympathised. He had prepared countless little speeches, but never got them said.

Next to her, where Paddy used to sit, was Rachel, husky-voiced and full-bosomed, handling gear-wheels fastidiously for fear of breaking her scarlet nails, ready to tremble her ripe lower lip and flood her eyes with tears at the first hint of criticism. Edward allowed his mind to linger on the possibilities of her holiday. You dirty old man, he told himself, and passed across to Freda. Now what on earth did a girl like that do in her spare time? Perhaps she had helped with the harvest. He could imagine her driving a tractor in a man’s shirt and breeches, like those pictures of Landgirls you saw in the papers. Freda, who had spent most of her week in lecture halls or the Tatler Cinema, or arguing with her friend who had recently taken up Federal Union, banged away at a crooked bracket, glad on the whole to be back at work.

Dinah. Ah, Dinah—you couldn’t even guess what was happening to her life because she always looked happy. Perhaps she always was happy, but that did not give Edward much scope for his fancies. Reenie, next to her—would that girl never learn how to use a pair of
pliers? She must have some sort of an existence ; even tadpoles did after all, but for the life of him he could not think what it was.

If he once started to think about Ivy, he could go on for ever. There was no telling what a girl like that might not get up to. He would not be surprised to hear she had committed murder one night and turned up next morning just the same. She always looked shifty ; he didn’t trust her a yard. The men in the factory had a name for girls like Ivy.

Wendy was back at last. She had only said at lunchtiman along“good morning” to him so far and asked politely after his holiday, but although she had not yet mentioned her father, Edward was going to ask after him in a moment. It would not be tactless, because Wendy could not be back to work unless he were better. It was nice to have her sitting there again, sorting the rockers into a pattern on the bench and polishing up the camshaft as diligently as Edna with her brasses. Although she never brought out a comb and mirror as the other girls did, her hair always looked smooth and neat, tucked behind her clean little ears into the slide on the nape of her neck and lying all in one piece on her back, like a pony’s tail. Everyone had clean overalls today, but Wendy’s was always clean and crisp, even on a Saturday. He noticed for the first time today how she had altered it with buttons and tucks and pleats until it was no longer just an industrial covering but something that fitted becomingly her tiny figure. Clever little thing, he thought admiringly. It was a shame to see her small-boned hands, which were so deft at all the feminine things, getting bruised and stained by the uncongenial metal. His own fingers itched to help hers when he saw them working so conscientiously but so inexpertly. She had never really mastered her job ; it was no sort of work for a girl like Wendy.

“For the Lord’s sake, Ted,” said Jack Daniels, the other charge hand, coming up behind him. “Are you deaf or drunk or what? I’ve been yelling at you for the last five minutes, and Charlie’s been whistling on his fingers, but all you do is stand there with your mouth open and your belly stuck out.”

“Sorry, Jack,” said Edward. “I was thinking. About that new salvage scheme, you know. What d’you want?”

“Thinking my foot. D’you realise you’ve passed an engine through, a crash job, without having any of the stuff checked for distortion? The A.I.D. have just found a vane ring that’s buckled like an old bicycle wheel and there’s hell to pay.”

Edward clapped a hand to his forehead. “Oh my God, that was the one we did last thing before the holiday. I was going to have it done when we came back and it went clean out of my head.”

“You’ve properly boxed it this time, old man. Better go over there and think up an excuse. And look here, snap out of it, for Christ’s sake. We’ve got enough trouble to catch up on the target without you piddling around like somebody’s grandmother.”

Edward went sulkily over to where the diabolic Mr. Rutherford was calling people to come and see how the vane ring oscillated when he spun it. It made him furious to fall down on the job, because secretly he thought he was rather a good charge hand.

Wendy’s father was dead. She had found him already bruised with blue when she went in to wash him one morning. She had never seen a dead person and was surprised to find that she was not afraid at all. She felt sad for him, dying all alone, but not shocked. Indeed, he was far less repugnant to her than he had been when be was alive. As she had the bowl of water with her, she washed his face and hands and combed back his thick white hair, buttoned the neck of his pyjamas, turned the pillow and straightened the sheets before going down to tell her mother.