The Past and Other Lies (20 page)

‘How do I look?’ asked Muriel, turning to Jemima and smoothing down her hair, which was a soft chestnut brown—though you wouldn’t know it, thanks to the regulation hairnet. Muriel checked her nails for dirt (but as Mr Gilfroy, the tearoom manager, checked the nails of every girl before she began her shift, it was safe to conclude they were scrubbed clean). Then she checked the line of her stockings and hitched her unbecomingly long black dress up a little to expose a vital extra inch of calf.

Muriel had designs on Mr Oklahoma. Or, rather, Muriel had designs on moving to America. Since her older sister, Evadne, had landed the job at the motion picture studio, her interest in all things American had intensified. Mr Oklahoma, who was unquestionably American and undoubtedly wealthy, had walked into the tearoom at exactly the right moment, and Muriel, who was young enough and pretty enough to keep her East End antecedents temporarily hidden, felt that she was In With a Chance.

Jemima felt that Muriel had about as much chance of marrying the Prince of Wales. In fact, she fancied herself as having more of a chance than Muriel and, though she was too preoccupied with her own affairs to bother too much with a loud, cigar-smelling American, she still made it her business to pass his table surprisingly often and to bring him his change when Muriel was in the kitchen. And she flattered herself that the smiles he bestowed on her were friendlier, more suggestive, than any he bestowed on Muriel.

‘You. Gel. Gel. Yes you.’

One of the old cats was waggling a crooked finger at her and Jemima fixed a surly look on her face and slouched over in the accepted Gossup’s way. She swayed between the crowded cane furniture and pot plants and her somewhat circuitous route took her very close to Mr Oklahoma’s table. He didn’t look up.

Well, perhaps she could catch his eye on her way back. She flounced past, brushing against the table of the young man in the tweed suit and the slightly older lady in the expensive coat as she went by.

‘I’ve told Mr Cannon we ought to concentrate our efforts on the Opposition to lobby on our behalf. We really have very little of what one might call “clout” on our own.’

‘Yes, yes, indeed. You’re right there. Yes, quite right.’

Jemima looked back and was mildly surprised to see the posh lady and Bertha’s funny little man from that dreadful political thing two months back. What were they doing here? Having an assignation? But no, she saw that they were having a dull political discussion and that an assignation was the furthest thing from either of their minds.

‘Gel. Over here. I have been waiting a quarter of an hour for my pot of tea and cake.’

‘It’s just coming,’ Jemima said with her sweetest smile (they usually tipped a penny each).

‘Say, miss! Miss!’

She saw Mr Oklahoma calling her from over his newspaper. He smiled broadly as Jemima sidled over. A half a crown was good, but what if—what if...

‘What is it, sir? Can I get you something special today? Chef says the pastries are fresh out the oven.’

Chef hadn’t said anything of the sort but it was the kind of thing you were encouraged to say. Particularly to wealthy American customers.

‘Well, now,’ he said, lowering his newspaper to the table and settling back in his chair and taking a long, smiling look at her. ‘That’s a mighty fine offer and I believe I’ll have to give it some serious consideration. But in the meantime what I require, young lady, is a telephone. I have a real important overseas call to make.’

A telephone? What did he think this was—the Ritz hotel?

‘I’m terribly sorry, sir, we’ve got Madeira cake and Danish pastries and cupcakes and scones and Chef’s special almond slices but telephones are off today.’

He let out a shout of laughter, throwing his head back and rewarding her with an even bigger smile, and Jemima glowed and prayed Muriel would stay in the kitchen or wherever she was.

‘Okay, honey, why don’t you run along and make up my check’ (he always called it a check when he meant a bill) ‘and I’ll see if there’s some place in this tiny store where a fella can make a call,’ and he winked at her in a way that seemed to suggest vast prairies and gleaming skyscrapers and endless roads. And money. Jemima winked back and sashayed her way to the counter to make up his bill and work out how to slip him her name.

‘Miss Flaxheed!’

Well, now he would know her name. Everyone would.

Mr Gilfroy had emerged from the small manager’s office that was wedged between the counter, the cloakroom and the kitchen and was now summoning her frostily like the Grim Reaper on Judgement Day.

Oh go away, thought Jemima irritably.

‘I’ll just finish making up this—’

‘
Now
, Miss Flaxheed. Get Miss Barmby to finish that.’

Miss Barmby had just emerged from the cloakroom (strictly forbidden during work hours) where she had applied a smear of powder and lipstick (an offence that would normally warrant a stern reprimand) but Mr Gilfroy had gone straight back into his office without even a second glance at Muriel. Jemima glowered at his retreating back, passed the bill to Muriel and followed him into the office.

‘Close the door.’

Jemima closed the door and stood before his oversized Victorian desk. Apart from an inkwell and blotter the desk was empty and, other than serving as an object behind which one could sit, its purpose seemed to be purely decorative. Aside from the desk, the office contained only a bookcase stuffed with thick black ledgers and a rather sick-looking potted palm.

Mr Gilfroy, his brilliantined hair parted like the Red Sea, his moustache so waxed that it looked like a single strand of hair, sat behind the desk, arms straight at his side, regarding Jemima with a stern frown. His thin, wiry frame was encased in a pinstripe suit that he must have been born wearing, so impossible was it to imagine the man without the suit. He ruled the tearoom the way you imagined an NCO ruled a barracks. There were rules, there were regulations, there were transgressions and there was discipline.

There was a high turnover of staff.

It was rumoured he had a wife and two children in Hertfordshire, though no one had ever seen either.

‘Miss Flaxheed,’ he said, thrusting out his chin and fixing her with a severe look. Then, with a glance at the closed office door, he stood up, came over and kissed her passionately on the mouth.

‘Jemima!’ he moaned, his words somewhat smothered by Jemima’s hair and the starched linen headpiece that kept it in place. ‘I’ve missed you! Your smell, your softness, your divine taste. Oh God!’

Aside from this morning’s regulation clocking on and checking of nails, it had in fact been less then twenty-four hours since Mr Gilfroy had last set eyes on her. Jemima stifled a sigh. His response to this enforced separation was gratifying though a little pitiful.

She noted that beneath his pinstripe suit he wore, as usual, a freshly laundered shirt, that he was scrupulously shaved and smelled of the hair oil that made his hair shine in the dimly lit office. Jemima approved of these touches; they were the details that made certain exchanges possible.

Mr Gilfroy’s hand slid down over her buttocks and he pulled her towards him so that her breasts were pushed up against his starched white chest. Jemima turned her head slightly to one side so that his kisses landed on the side of her mouth rather than on her lips.

When she had first started working in the tearoom a year ago, she had sniggered along with the other girls at Gilfroy’s primness. What sort of wife, she had wondered, could endure such a starched, pinstriped and priggish man? A starched, dull, priggish wife presumably, probably tucked away in a semi in Ilford or Epping. (She had since found out it was Rickmansworth and that the wife’s name was Irene, but otherwise her assumptions about Mrs Gilfroy remained unconfirmed.)

But last December, a sudden snowstorm, a store-wide electricity blackout and a twenty-year-old bottle of vintage port that Mr Gilfroy had been saving for his eldest child’s wedding had changed everything. Now Jemima was supremely, triumphantly aware that every starched collar, every lick of hair oil, every stroke of the razor was for her and her alone. When she lined up with the other girls before the start of each shift for the ritual nail check, Gilfroy’s white fingers caressed her palms and stroked the back of her hand in a way that recalled what had happened in his office the evening before, when everyone else had gone home. She was careful to keep her gaze on the floor. Even so, Muriel had proven to have hawk-like eyes.

‘Filthy old goat,’ she’d muttered in an aside after one such caress. ‘’Im with a wife and kids at ’ome too. And he’s old enough to be your father. Disgustin’.’

Jemima had smiled, recognising a note in Muriel’s tone that suggested that had Mr Gilfroy come to her first, it might very well be Muriel herself spending her evenings in this cramped office, Muriel wearing a small silver ring around her neck on a piece of string, Muriel estimating how much Gilfroy took home in his monthly wage packet and how much of it he gave to his wife.

Godfrey Gilfroy. It was rumoured he would be moved Upstairs in a year or two. Senior management, perhaps a directorship in time. And if you wanted to get on, you didn’t need a dull little wife called Irene in Rickmansworth. You needed a lively and stylish young thing, someone who knew how to dress, who said the right things. Someone like Jemima.

‘Silly!’ she admonished him now, playfully. ‘S’only been a day. Honestly, you’ll be wanting to stay here all weekend next and never going off home at all.’ And though this was intended as a hint, a vision of things to come, his reaction was not what she expected.

‘Stop! Please do not go on!’ He let her go abruptly, as though she were on fire, his face taut and pale, and for a moment Jemima felt a flicker of concern. ‘Miss Flaxheed, I’d rather... You must listen. This is precisely the reason that I have asked you here, and during work hours, which would never—I—’

Gilfroy paused and Jemima stared at him, fascinated. She had never seen him so ill at ease.

He took a deep breath and continued. ‘You see something terrible, something quite, quite dreadful has occurred.’

This was it. His wife had found out. She had left him.
He
had left
her
. At last!

‘My wife—’

‘Yes?’

‘My wife has found out about—about this.’ He paused, looked down at his hands that now lay flat on the desk and swallowed loudly in the sudden, crushing silence.

Jemima felt her fingers curl themselves into tight fists. She straightened them out at once so that he wouldn’t see.

‘So stupid,’ he continued with a tight smile. ‘She—my wife. Well, I shan’t go into the sordid details. Suffice to say there was an indiscretion on my part, some laundry, some discolouration...’ He coloured and Jemima stood quite still, breathless. ‘At any rate, there was a confrontation, an accusation you might say, that I was honour-bound—’

‘To leave her!’ blurted out Jemima.

‘To
atone!
’ Mr Gilfroy countered in shocked tones. ‘To
atone
, Miss Flaxheed. I am not one to shirk my responsibilities. So. There it is and I am afraid...’ He took another deep breath. ‘Yes, so very, so
dreadfully
afraid that we must desist at once. There must be no more. It is quite,
quite
out of the question. You understand, of course?’

Jemima did understand, perfectly. He was ending it in favour of his wife, who was small and dull and whose name was Irene. He was choosing
her
and his two daughters and his semi-detached brick house in Rickmansworth over Jemima.

It was inconceivable. Had the wife threatened blackmail?

And was she to go meekly back to being Miss Flaxheed, waitress, whose nails must be checked, whose cash-till calculations must be supervised, whose clocking on must be overseen? Whose future, suddenly, looked uncertain?

Well, she still had her dignity.

‘Will that be all, then, Mr Gilfroy?’ She stared at the calendar on the back wall of the office. It had been sent by a tea supplier and showed a view of an Indian tea plantation.

There was a pause. Gilfroy seemed to hesitate. ‘Yes, yes. That’s all,’ he said and turned away awkwardly, seating himself at his desk, fumbling in a drawer, dismissing her.

Jemima turned and left the tiny office. She stood very still on the other side of the door, breathing quickly, willing herself not to think, but a quick, hot, solitary tear welled up in one eye. She blinked it away furiously as Muriel advanced.

‘Tight bleeder,’ announced Muriel with a scowl, nodding towards the now-vacant table seven. ‘Shot off when me back was turned and only left a shilling.’

So while Jemima had been trapped in that odious little office being pawed and then unceremoniously dumped back in with the dregs, Mr Oklahoma had escaped, and the fact that neither she nor Muriel had really stood any chance whatsoever of catching someone like that only made her all the more humiliated.

‘Will you get this one, Jem? Me stockin’s laddered,’ said Muriel, nodding towards a customer standing expectantly by the cash register.

Jemima didn’t want to get this one, or indeed any one. She didn’t want to be here in this cramped, pot-planted, cane-chaired dungeon surrounded by acid-tongued, dried-up old ladies and wealthy, cigar-smoking foreigners who looked right through her. She didn’t want to be here in this tearoom with a manager who couldn’t take his hands off her one minute then couldn’t look her in the eye the next. A manager who would probably make her pay for his lapse for as long as she continued to work for him.

‘Er, miss. ’Scuse me—can I pay?’

No you can’t. Push off! she thought irritably, but at that moment the office door opened and Mr Gilfroy emerged, chin up, nose very high, hands locked behind his back, a fierce look in his eyes, a look that for the last three months she had been protected from, but that now, suddenly, she knew would seek her out. She scuttled over to the cash register.

‘Pot of tea and a slice of walnut cake, it was,’ said the young man helpfully and Jemima saw that it was him, the man from the park—Mr Booth.

Mr Booth. Mr Ronnie Booth. Music teacher and political agitator. Mr Booth who had been so pleasant, so attentive to her that afternoon. Mr Booth who had seemed to be Bertha’s young man but who, once one had actually met him and talked with him and observed him, had turned out not to be anything of the sort. Mr Booth who, now that you looked at him closely, was a pleasant enough young man, with nice hair and lovely green eyes. Yes, really quite nice eyes and well-dressed—in a schoolteacher sort of way. And now here he was at her cash register, wanting to pay for a pot of tea and a slice of walnut cake. Well.