We Five (7 page)

Jane, keeping one eye on the shop window, beheld her brother lying splayed out on the couch with the torn upholstery, which mouldered in a neglected corner of the showroom. It was the couch he was supposed to have slip-covered a month ago, but had not. A few hours earlier, Lyle Higgins had collapsed in a drunken stupor not upon his own bed in the back rooms, but upon this very piece of furniture, which was merchandise, which some future customer would sit upon and expect not to be assaulted by the stench of alcohol or old sick. Jane thought about waking him and sending him to the relative comfort of his bed, but why bother? No matter where he dormez-voused, he'd still fail to open the shop at nine. She didn't know why he even pretended to have an interest in continuing to run the family business when it was all too obvious that all he
really
wanted to do was drink and play cards and sometimes carouse with members of the opposite sex, though it took a little effort on his part to be halfway charming to a lady and Jane knew he was averse to doing anything that required the expense of much effort. Why else had she spent all of the previous afternoon gathering up everything in the shop comprised of the least bit of aluminium for the scrap-metal campaign whilst he slumbered the day away like some hibernating creature in a cave?

Nobody wanted Lyle Higgins. Not any of the women—mostly tarts—whom he happened to meet. Not any of his mates, who weren't so much mates as opportunistic spongers
pretending
to be mates. Not the British Expeditionary Force, whose recruitment office physician said he'd seen few candidates for enlistment with so compromised a liver.

And most certainly not Jane, who had grown weary, since their father's death, of carrying Lyle on the family dole when he could not or would not support himself (let alone his unmarried sister). The two would most surely have lost the shop, which they'd inherited from their dad, were it not for the war effort and its need for dedicated labourers—both men
and
women—in the aeroplane works and Royal Ordnance factories.

No, Jane didn't want Lyle in her life at all. Yet a part of her suspected he could not help being shiftless and by all appearances bereft of any redeeming qualities whatsoever, for there seemed to be something missing from his brain from the start, and how could this be his fault? This was the charitable view that came to Jane every now and then (when she was feeling a little generous). Most days, however, she wanted to take a few of the cartridges she'd packed with gunpowder from the factory in which she worked on the outskirts of London (with her friends Maggie, Carrie, Ruth, and Molly), load them into a compatible machine-gun magazine, and then deliver them
ratta-tat-tat
into her brother in a way that would swiftly and conveniently end his life. Then one of the biggest worries of
her
life would be removed, evaporating in an effervescence of twinkling Walt Disney fairy dust.

Jane had always wanted to be a schoolteacher, but even before her father died, there wasn't money to pay for her education. She loved children and thought she might like to work as an evacuation officer for the London County Council, which relocated East Enders (and their large broods) to less dangerous parts of the country. But before she went into the offices to interview, she had a nightmare in which, during one of her assigned excursions outside of London, her brother fell asleep with a lit fag between his fingers and burnt himself to a crisp. She would have to keep a hand in the running of the shop (and in the running of Lyle) is what she would have to do, and as luck would have it, when the window slammed shut on a position with the Council, the door to factory work swung wide open. It was her friend Ruth who made the case that We Five should assert their independence in service to their country by helping to defeat Hitler, and they could do this by making bullets and bombs.

Lyle might still some day or night fall asleep with a lit Player's cig in hand and burn himself to a crisp, but at least now Jane could preserve what was left of her family's reputation by saying it was a German incendiary bomb what done it.

The phone bell rang.

“Yes?”

“Jane, it's Carrie. I'm at the call box in front of the Boots.”

“What are you doing there? It's six fifteen. We'll never make the factory bus in time.”

“That's why I rang you. You should go on. Go meet Ruth at the stage so at least the two of you can catch the six-thirty. The rest of us will have to go out on the
seven-
thirty.”

“But you'll lose an hour's pay!”

“It won't be the end of the world.”

“What's happened? Is anything the matter?”

“I'll tell you everything when I see you in assembly. In short: Molly's father. Maggie's mother. A marriage proposal. Everything hunky-dory except for Maggie, who has suddenly decided she'd rather be dead than have another soak for a father.”

Jane shook her head. “Ain't
that
a bugger! And with the way things are right now… She really shouldn't say such things.”

“Hurry along, Jane. Or you'll miss the bus.”

Jane thought for a moment. “I'm going to wait and take the stragglers' bus with the three of you.”

“But what about Ruth? She'll be waiting for all of us and I haven't another penny to put into this telephone.”

“
I'll
ring her up. Oh, sometimes I could strangle Maggie—putting herself in the way of everyone's happiness like this.”

“Then you know all about it.”

“I know enough. And I don't agree with any of it.”

“I should go and see if the two have come to blows. Goodbye, Jane. We'll see you later in the morning—
I hope
.”

After ringing off, Jane placed the call to Ruth. However, it was Miss Mobry, the Methodist minister's sister, who picked up the telephone. “Hallo, Miss Mobry. This is Jane Higgins. I wish to speak with Ruth.”

“Oh yes, she's right here. Is anything wrong? Ruth was afraid that—well, last night's air raid—”

“Oh no, Miss Mobry. It isn't that, although a shop not too far from the emporium did take a nasty hit. Thank God no one was hurt. No, this isn't life and death, but it's really quite involved. I'll have to tell you about it some other time.”

“Yes, do, my dear. And you should come to tea. Do you fancy loganberry tarts and seed cake? Who doesn't? Ah, two old maids taking tea together. Is there anything cozier?”

Jane didn't respond. She resented being called an old maid. First: she
wasn't
one. She was only twenty-three and still eminently marriageable. And although she hadn't any prospects at the moment, neither had any of her circle-sisters. Second: “old maid” was such a loathsome designation, especially for an unmarried woman who was not at all content with her present unaffiliated status.

Unlike her friend Ruth.

Ruth had let it be known that she did not plan to marry under any circumstance, that this was her choice, and furthermore, that she had the
right
to make her own choices. Jane respected Ruth, though Ruth always seemed out of step with her sisters.

“Jane?”

“Good morning, Ruth. There's been a hitch. You're to step out and catch the six-thirty and not wait for the rest of us. Maggie and Molly and Carrie are running quite late and won't be able to make it.”

“What about
you
?”

“I've decided to wait for
them.
”

“Then I'll wait as well.”

“Then we shall
all
be late, and how will
that
look?”

“It will simply look as if we've all been detained together. Everyone knows we come to work in a clump, Jane. We are only as punctual as our weakest link allows us to be, and I take it the weak link this morning is Maggie.”

“So you must know a little something about Maggie's mother's big decision.”

“
Know
something? I received quite an earful from Maggie the evening we spent together in the A.R.P shelter. We shouldn't tie up this line into the parsonage; otherwise I'd tell you all about it.”

“Maggie is being quite unfair.”

“Well, of course she is.”

“But you really should nip over to the factory bus kiosk, Ruth. ‘Save yourself!' they always say in the movies.”

“I haven't an overwhelming desire to wait for that bus alone.”

“Why?”

“Must I tell you now? Miss Mobry is flitting in and out of the vestibule with little bits of unnecessary business. I know it's so she can eavesdrop on this conversation.”

“Is this something you don't want her to know about?”

“Only that I shouldn't wish to make her worry,” replied Ruth. “She's a nervous bundle of nerves after the recent raids. She gets so flurried sometimes when she thinks of the Luftwaffe dropping a bomb on our factory. I fancy she thinks she's my mother sometimes, or at the very least a doting gran or aunt. As it so happens, I've always been asked to call her ‘aunt.'”

“Have you met with some trouble, Ruth?”

“It depends on how you define ‘trouble.' I have nothing better to do. I'll come and tell you about it, and free up this instrument for those wishing to burden Mr. Mobry with matters of faith and conscience.”

“Do I detect a bit of cheek in that statement?”

“None at all. I owe everything to Mr. Mobry and his sister. It is only a
small
inconvenience that they still consider me the same woebegone waif who arrived on their doorstep with little more than the clothes on her back.”

Jane laughed. “They'd sing a different song if they ever clapped eyes on you working in the main shed. Dressed to the nines in your mob cap and your greasy brown overall!”

“Would that we could wear those shapeless overalls outside the factory. It might solve that little problem at the bus kiosk.”

“What little problem?”

“I'll see you shortly.”

Ruth left the house at that moment. A scant five minutes later she was standing next to her friend Jane in the showroom of Higgins' Emporium in Balham High Road. The name was Jane's father's idea; he thought it would entice a better breed of clientele for the junk shop (to little avail). The two young women were studying Jane's sleeping brother in the casual and detached manner of two visitors to the zoo observing a slumbering gorilla.

“Sometimes he'll be out like this for hours,” said Jane with indifference. (This wasn't the first time she and Ruth had stood over Lyle, watching him sleep when the rest of London was up and about and being industrious and productive. And lately he'd been even more slumberous than usual, using the nightly air raids that kept him ‘up for all hours' as convenient justification for dozing the entire day away. As if no one but Lyle Higgins was so terribly incommoded by the Blitz.)

Ruth shook her head slowly and evenly—a demonstration of both disgust and empathy: disgust for Jane's brother and empathy for Jane, whose burden it was to contend with such a sibling. “I don't see why you continue to live here. They'll soon be finished with the dormitories near the factory. You really should apply. Since you're a charge-hand now, I'm sure they'll put you at the top of the list.”

“And then what? Move to the dormitory and have the death of this human sloth, what also happens to be my brother, on my conscience for the rest of my days? I'm not lying to you, Ruth, when I say that Lyle shouldn't even eat if it wasn't for me sliding the plate of food in front of him and then nudging him a few times out of his usual fog.”

The two friends sat down at a little table close to the large plate-glass window, purposefully out of sight of Jane's snoring brother. The window, crisscrossed with sticky brown tape, had remained intact after several nearby bombings. (It was kept
un
-blacked out because from sundown to sunup lights in the showroom were never turned on.) Ruth was inspired on a previous visit to recite, with the obvious nod to Rudyard Kipling, “If you can keep your glass when all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on the Nazis, then you'll be one lucky bloke of a shopkeeper, my son—um—
daughter.
”

“Should I put on a pot of tea?” asked Jane. “I haven't any biscuits. All the ones I like have disappeared from the Sainsbury's.”

“I just had my own cuppa; don't go to any trouble. I'm perfectly content sitting here gabbling with you and playing Nosey Parker to all the passersby in the street. I love this block, Jane, I do. Bustling, yes, but still rather quaint. It reminds me of Mrs. Gaskell's Cranford. And this shop—I remember when we were girls—do you remember how tidy your father kept it?”

Jane nodded and smiled. “Not a shilling in the till, but you'd think he was Mr. Selfridge himself, the pride he took in this place.”

“Do you recall how he used to scold us for playing hide-and-seek behind all the old wardrobes and chest-of-drawers?”

Jane nodded. “Those were happy days. Even happier when Mum was alive. Now, you said something was the matter and you must tell me what it is.”

Ruth nodded. She allowed her gaze to lose its focus as she composed her thoughts. “There are several men—
young
men I see in the early morning once, sometimes twice a week, when I'm waiting for the four of you at the kiosk. They go into the pub across the street—almost always at the same time.”

“Cor! What public house opens so early in the morning?”

“Ones like the Fatted Pig that serve men who work through the night. Like those I mean to tell you about. They're part-time fire watchers with the A.F.S. and theirs is the midnight shift. I overhear some of their talk on the way to the pub. Their full-time daylight job is delivering coal for Mr. Matthews. I suppose you know about Mr. Matthews.”