Westwood (5 page)

‘She’s very well. No, I don’t think so; she never said anything about it.’

‘If she’s not careful she’ll miss her market; those very popular girls with crowds of boys so often don’t marry; I’ve noticed it.’

‘Mother, she’s only twenty-two!’ exclaimed Margaret, colouring.

‘Oh, yes; I know you think there’s all the time in the world to get married, and Hilda’s the same; but time goes quicker than you girls realize, and you’ll both be twenty-seven before you can turn round. Is it a light house, should you say?’

‘Not quite so light as this because the road isn’t so wide, but it is light. I think you’ll like it, Mother. It’s in a nice road, and the shops are only just round the corner.’

‘Well, that’s something. Is it near the bus for your father?’

‘About five minutes’ walk from a new Underground station.’

‘And how long does it take to get into London?’

‘I found it took me nearly three-quarters of an hour; everything was so crowded.’

‘How did you get on? Did you like the look of your new school? I don’t expect so!’ Mrs Steggles vigorously helped herself to jam.

‘It’s in a neighbourhood that’s gone down a lot, and the school itself is very knocked about; they’ve been evacuated, as I told you, and the school has been used as a British Restaurant. The headmistress, Miss Lathom, seemed quite nice.’

‘Is it far from Stanley Gardens?’

‘About twenty minutes by bus.’

‘Well, it all
sounds
very convenient; we’ll hope it’s as nice as it sounds. Another cup, Margaret?’

‘Yes, please, Mother. How – is Dad all right?’

‘Yes, of course. Why shouldn’t he be?’

Margaret did not answer, and they went on to talk about the house again and to discuss plans for the move in three weeks’ time.

Mrs Steggles was not daunted by the prospect of a move in war-time, for her restless unhappiness found relief in a domestic upheaval, and she enjoyed moves. The Steggleses had had six homes in their twenty-eight years of married life, and each one a solid little provincial house filled with good plain furniture from attic to kitchen; not a series of three-roomed flats sketchily equipped with a few sticks. Mr Steggles earned a comfortable income as Chief Sub-Editor on the
North Bedfordshire Record
, an old-established weekly newspaper, and his particular weakness was not improvidence with money. He indulged his wife’s liking for movement and change. She was an excellent manager and a superlative housewife. There had always been every amenity in those six little houses during the past twenty-eight years except laughter and love. There was not much laughter left in Jack Steggles at the age of fifty-six, and as he went to other women for love, he felt vaguely that Mabel must be allowed her fits of discontent with a perfectly satisfactory
house and her feverish search for a better one, and her purchase of new rugs and curtains to equip it when she found it. She was neither socially nor financially ambitious; he granted her that. She did not nag at him to earn more money or get a more important job. She was only driven by some inward passion for perfection; some deep dissatisfaction that made her scrub and polish and rub and dust and clean until their home, wherever it was, glittered and shone like a museum.

After tea, Margaret unpacked and put her clothes away. She sighed as she looked at her untidy curls in the mirror, and decided that a neater way of wearing them must be found before she joined the staff of the school in London at half-term. A style that had been indulgently over-looked at Sunnybrae School, Lukeborough, where she had had her first post as a teacher, would not do for London. The few members of the staff whom she had encountered on her visit to the Anna Bonner School for Girls had been noticeably neat.

She drew her hair behind her ears and gathered the curls at the back of her neck with a black velvet bow. It looked too striking, but it was certainly neat, and it made her seem older and taller. She brushed her hair smoothly on the top and noticed that her mind, usually so full of dreams, actually felt more orderly. She remembered the passage in Keats’s
Letters
in which he describes his own recipe for calming his wandering thoughts and over-excited nerves; washing his face and hands and re-lacing his shoes and then sitting down to write. She looked up the passage, and stood dreaming over it.

Her mother called angrily up the stairs:

‘Margaret! Put that book away and come down here at once! Reg’ll be here any minute and I want the cloth set and some potatoes done, and he’s sure to want a bath, the boiler’ll want making up. Come along, get a move on, now!’

Margaret reluctantly returned to the present, put the book back among the many others that crowded her room, and went slowly downstairs.

‘Whatever have you done to your hair?’ demanded her mother at once, looking round with a flushed face from the open oven. ‘It makes you look about forty. Is that one of Hilda’s notions?’

‘It looks so untidy the other way. How many potatoes shall I do?’

‘About ten – he’s sure to be hungry. I should think what was good enough for Miss Lomax at Sunnybrae was good enough for anybody.’

‘I don’t want to go looking untidy; it’ll reflect on Miss Lomax, as she recommended me there.’

‘Well, you’ve made yourself into a proper school-marm, if that’s any comfort; you only want your horn-rims and the picture will be complete.
I
think you look a sight, but I’ve given over expecting you to do anything to please me. Margaret,
Margaret
, do be careful what you’re doing; I only scrubbed that table this morning, and there you go putting a greasy spoon down on it. Can’t you put it on a saucer? There! There’s Reg now!’

Mrs Steggles was not one of the mothers who lavish all their affection on their sons. She gave Reg a kiss but she also noticed that his great muddy boots were making marks all over her clean linoleum, and she nearly told him so, but controlled herself: once, years ago, she had been an ordinary pleasant girl with a quick temper and a pink complexion, and the ghost of that girl, puzzled and bitterly unhappy, sometimes looked out from her face. She looked out now, and with a real effort Mrs Steggles did not mention the linoleum.

‘Hullo, Mum!’ said Reg, grinning and kissing her. ‘Hullo, Margaret, what’ve you done to your hair; you look a proper school-marm. I say, something smells good! I’m starving. Is Dad home yet? Can I have a bath?’

He winked at his sister, who gave an unwilling smile in response, while unloading himself of
his heavy Service respirator and tin hat. ‘Can I have that bath now, Mum? I’ve got a date this evening!’

‘Dad’ll want to see you,’ was Mrs Steggles’s only protest as she moved his kit to the side of the hall.

‘I shall see him when I come in; I’m not going to be late. A crowd of us are going to the Luna. Like to come, Margie?’

‘No, thanks.’

‘You surprise me! An old pal of yours is going to be there.’

‘Who’s that?’ Mrs Steggles glanced curiously at her son, and then at her daughter’s face.

‘Frank Kennett. He’s got a spot of leave, too.’

‘How do you know?’ demanded his mother, going to Margaret’s rescue even while she despised her for her stricken look.

‘The blonde at the Luna told me. I ‘phoned up to see what was doing there this evening, and she said there’s a dance and Frank and most of the crowd would be along.’

‘How thrilling!’ said Margaret sarcastically, and went back into the dining-room to finish laying the table. Her brother stamped upstairs in his heavy boots, whistling, followed by Mrs Steggles.

The news that Frank Kennett was in the town had set Margaret trembling, and as she arranged the knives and forks her one hope was that she would not accidentally encounter him during the next few days. She had a morbid horror of meeting him. They had never seen one another since that painful scene by the Canal, when she had been so anguished and he so embarrassed and so eager to make her take the situation lightly. She had long ceased to weave romance about him (and with Margaret this meant that she no longer loved him) but she still could not endure to meet him face to face.

She imagined the Luna Café and Dance Hall as it would be about nine o’clock that evening; full of smoke, and smelling of fried food, and noisy with the wireless music and voices and loud laughter. Before the Second World War it had been a meeting-place for Lukeborough’s rowdier boys and girls with money to spend, and since the war it had become even rowdier, for there were American soldiers, lonely and craving for pleasure, quartered in the neighbourhood and they had soon found the Luna. The place was licensed and was attached to the Luna Cinema, one of a big circuit. Its walls, which were shaded in colour from sickly orange to an arsenical green, were now faded and peeling, and its gilt basketwork chairs were battered and tarnished; all its appointments were depressing as only modernist furnishings which have deteriorated can be; yet at night, when its curtains shut out the black silent streets and the damp silent countryside, and if you were young, the Luna was better than the Naafi or your own home. But Margaret wondered how a boy with Frank’s tastes, as she remembered them, could want to go to the place. To calm herself, she began to think about the school in London where she would shortly be teaching.

She had not a vocation for teaching, but she was clever and could impart her knowledge to others, and at Sunnybrae she had done so well that, at the end of the year when the headmistress of the school had heard of a vacancy at a private school in London, she had recommended Margaret for the post. She herself had formerly been on the staff of a famous London girls’ school, and her recommendation carried weight. At twenty-three years old, Margaret would have a post on the staff of an old-established and prosperous London school. Had she been ambitious, the future would have seemed full of promise.

She heard her father’s key in the front door and went out into the hall.

‘Hullo, Margaret!’ he said, pleased and surprised, shutting the door after him and turning to
give her a kiss. ‘I didn’t think you’d be home yet. Well, so you’ve found a house for us. Are we going to like it?’

When he was cheerful, which was not often, Jack Steggles had a teasing, laughing note in his voice, but usually he was moody and quiet. It was not a neat, depressed quietness; it matched his wife’s air of suppressed ill-temper and seemed as if it might explode into acute irritation at any moment. He wore his clothes with a carelessness that clung to him from his reporting days, and he seemed to belong to a background of bars and newsrooms rather than to the neat conventional little house in which he lived. He was a handsome sturdy man looking much younger than his years, a very heavy smoker and fond of drink.

‘I hope so, Dad. Mr Wilson, Hilda’s father, think’s it’s a bit of luck our getting it,’ answered Margaret.

‘How far is it from Fleet Street? That’s all I want to know. Is Reg here yet?’

‘Yes, he’s upstairs having a bath. It’s about three-quarters of an hour, I should think.’

‘All right; I’ll go and get my slippers and then you can tell me about it.’

He went upstairs to his bedroom; Mrs Steggles did not encourage people to keep their slippers in the living-rooms.

Her mother’s confidence in Margaret had been destroyed by the girl’s failure to land a husband at twenty; she had thought her daughter a queer, sulky little thing when she was a child, and had increasingly resented her reserve and artistic tastes. Now, she had an impatient affection for her and was resigned to seeing her settle down into an old maid; but Mr Steggles was clever, in the quick natural way that never earns much money or wins fame, and he not only knew that Margaret ‘had a good head on her shoulders’ but trusted her. It was he who had suggested that she should go to London, combining a visit to the Wilsons with business, and find (if such a thing were possible – the Steggleses all doubted it) a house for them to rent.

Mrs Wilson had written that of course they would be ever so pleased to have Margaret for a week, but as for the house – well, London was as full as it could be,
and Herbert
(that was Mr Wilson)
is afraid you will be unlucky
(Mr Wilson, a minor Civil Servant employed at Mount Pleasant, was always afraid people would be unlucky, and Hilda and Mrs Wilson had a job for life persuading him that the sun did sometimes shine.) So Margaret had gone to London, and there, after four days’ hopeless search, she had been told by Mrs Wilson of the house in Stanley Gardens which an old lady, who had fled into the country to escape bombs, was willing to let.

At the same time that Margaret’s headmistress had recommended her for the post in London, her father had heard from a friend, a former reporter on the
North Bedfordshire Record
who had gone to the capital some years ago on the invitation of a newspaper baron who liked to encourage talent from the provinces. The reporter had prospered, and now wrote that there was a forthcoming vacancy at the sub-editorial table of his own London daily, and much talk of getting a man from the provinces to fill it. He saw no reason why Jack Steggles, whom he held in gratitude and affection, should not get the job.

Mr Steggles did not care much whether he got it or not, for he was without ambition and he knew what he enjoyed and how to get it, and he hoped for nothing more than these pleasures until the day he died. But the pleasures he enjoyed would be equally easy to get in London, and his wife had said that she ‘would not mind’ going to the capital and that it was time that they found a more suitable house: this one was too far from the shops and there was a draught under the front door fit to cut you in half. This meant that she wanted to move. So he allowed his reporter friend to make representations on his behalf, and they were both surprised when he got the job. The
many and complicated business arrangements were set in hand as soon as the house was found, and in three weeks the Steggleses would move to London.