Starlight (Vintage Classics) Page 4

  Transfixed, they stared. His inspection did not last longer than a few minutes but there was something chilling, something impersonal yet intent about it, that was frightening. The chauffeur did not move; the woman-like shape in the back of the car was leaning slightly forward as if to see the house, too, but it also was motionless.

  All at once, the picture broke up. The man stirred, and pushed his hat on to the back of his head, and walked back to the car.

  He got in beside the white shrouded shape, and the car backed, edging its way into the narrow entrance and then turned the corner and went out of sight.

  ‘Well,’ Mr Geddes was the first to speak, ‘he doesn’t look very alarming, does he?’

  His strongest impulse was to take that look off their faces.

  The young woman suddenly exclaimed, ‘My God, the kettle, and young Melinda’s in the kitchen,’ and sped away. Annie, emerging from her retreat, said tremulously, ‘What’s ’e like, Glad? I couldn’t make much out. My eyes are ever so bad to-night. I can’t hardly see. Muss be the fog.’

  ‘’Orrible,’ Gladys said with relish, ‘great fat thing, coming ’ere after dark like that, why couldn’t he come daytime like anybody else? It just shows you.’

  ‘Probably he was on his way to somewhere else and just stopped by to have a look at his new property,’ said Mr Geddes comfortingly, though he had in fact been disagreeably affected by the little scene, especially by the glimpse of the white muffled figure in the car.

  ‘That’s ’er,’ said Jean Simms, reappearing with surprising speed and Melinda clamped on to one hip, ‘’is wife.’

  ‘Is ’e married, then? It said in the paper that sort always has – you-knows,’ said Gladys.

  ‘He’s married all right. Crazy about her, too. Mrs A. told me. Said ’e’d only bought the ’ouses because she used to live round ’ere.’

  ‘Jean! I’m ready for my tea,’ shouted a young man’s tired voice up the stairs. Interrupting herself long enough to bawl – ‘Oh shut yer face – give us a minute, can’t you?’ over her shoulder, Mrs Simms went on, ‘Yes. That’s what she told me. Likes the neighbourhood – she’s an invalid or sunnick. She can ’ave the neighbourhood. Night, all,’ and, clutching the staring child, she hurried away.

  Mr Geddes had returned to the living-room. Mr Fisher had resumed his seat and his downward contemplation of the carpet. The Vicar thought that he must be going – the easy chair and the evening paper were not for him, this evening – and not a thing had been said yet about the cause of his visit. He cleared his throat and addressed himself decidedly to Gladys, now fussing with the teapot:

  ‘I understand that this man has bought the house from your old landlady, Miss Barnes, and that she told you he has a bad reputation as a property-owner?’

  ‘A regular rackman, she said, you might say if ’e’s all that bad why did she let him ’ave it but his money’s as good as anyone’s I s’pose.’

  ‘What do you suppose will happen now?’ asked Mr Geddes, knowing from experience that it was sometimes necessary to distress people by making them come to the point – and, really, he must not stay a moment longer, he would be late for the Men’s Group as it was: Gerald would have to begin without him; well, that would be excellent experience for the young man, it would teach him that vicars sometimes missed trains or fell down staircases or caught influenza.

  ‘Gawd knows and He won’t split,’ retorted Gladys, anxiety, alarm, and the duties of hostess causing her to forget whom she was addressing, ‘she said he wanted quire property in this distric’ –’

  ‘Choir property?’ repeated Mr Geddes, bewildered. He was not the first listener to wish he had an interpreter while Gladys was explaining something. ‘Oh, to acquire property, I see, yes?’

  ‘She said he hasn’t got no property here yet, all over Islington way, he is, and he wants to make a start here. He’s bought the row, all the ’ouses in the Walk, she said, got them cheap, they did say they was coming down but that was years ago – Annie, when did we hear they was all coming down along here?’

  Annie, who had got her tea first and was luxuriously sipping, moved the balaclava in an unhelpful gesture.

  A power cut now added to the evening’s excitement. There was much exclamation, and a slow departure on the part of Mr Fisher in search of candles. When the room was once more, if faintly, lit, Mr Geddes said firmly, addressing Gladys:

  ‘Now I want you to know, Miss Barnes, that if anything really serious happens we at Saint James’s are your friends, and, if things get serious, you can come to us and we will do what we can. Nothing serious has happened yet, has it, now? I know you must all feel shocked and upset’ – he included Mr Fisher in what had grown, during the last hour, to have for him the atmosphere of some family party – ‘but nothing has happened. And it may not. Always remember that, and keep cheerful.’

  ‘They’re going to do up the place first thing, Jean said so,’ Annie put in, still swallowing tea, ‘upsetting us. Painting, and that.’

  ‘But surely …’ Mr Geddes just refrained from an eloquent glance around him, ‘fresh paint, new wallpaper …’

  ‘Paint. Stinking the place out,’ said Annie, with rustic frankness and Mr Geddes gave it up.

  The proverb about angels being able to do no more than their best occurred to him as he made his way down the stairs, escorted by Gladys’s recital of the things that could happen to all at Rose Cottage, beginning with trebling everyone’s rent and ending with eviction.

  Mr Fisher lit them down with the candle, which he had crept up to his own domain to fetch.

  ‘Got thousands of them up there,’ Gladys had whispered during his lengthy absence, ‘doesn’t want the electric. ’Oards them. I don’t let her know,’ indicating her invisible sister with a nod, ‘she wouldn’t sleep a wink, afraid of fire. Mind you, the electric don’t go up there. But they could ’ave run a wire, she isn’t so bad, I was telling your curate, except for that Elsie, won’t hear a word for her, not a word, and you can’t blame her.’

  They were in the hall now, a broad little place, with rich mouldings of smoky plaster roses and clustered leaves banding its ceiling. Mr Fisher was coming slowly down to them, extinguishing his candle as they entered the weak glare of the suddenly restored electric light, and slipping it, still smoking, into his pocket (‘I’m always telling him,’ said Gladys, aside).

  Mr Geddes, confused by the cascade of her farewells, was surprised to find, on shutting the front door on them, that the old man was outside it. He had put on a cap and a thick old overcoat of the same colourlessness as all his clothes and wore stout boots with an indescribable air of belonging to the earlier years of the century about them. He now held out his hand to Mr Geddes, under the mocking blind eyes of the mask that hung between the two cottages. A mile away in Archway Road the traffic kept up its dreary roaring; here, there was near darkness, and a silence.

  ‘Good-night. A privilege, meeting an educated man,’ his remote voice said thinly.

  ‘Going out … Mr Fisher? It’s not a pleasant night for walking,’ Mr Geddes said, concerned for him, and taking the small hand in a worn thick glove.

  ‘I makes a habit of walking on the Heath in all weathers. Don’t be afraid for me … The moon will rise at eight o’clock. I always takes a note of when. Our ways don’t lie together, but I ’ope we meet again.’

  He drifted away, shuffling past the boarded houses, down to the end of the Walk, and Mr Geddes, feeling dismissed, let him go.

  5

  Gladys did not confide her anxieties, in the week that followed, to the Cypriot family in whose café she worked.

  Her instinct to tell everybody everything, at length, struggled with her instinct to mistrust all foreigners. Her mistrust was general; and hardly applied to her employers, who were kind enough, called her ‘Glad’, and were lavish with leftovers. She explained her liking for them by saying that they were ‘different’.

  But – ‘Those dark eyes! I never trust ’e
m,’ she would usually say, and some dim notion that the rackman was a foreigner linking up with her general mistrust, together with the popular rumour that foreigners were great snappers-up of property, kept her silent.

  However, while sluicing water over the linoleum patterned to look like mosaic, she would sometimes pause, and stare pensively down into the pail. The proprietor’s wife, wiping down a table or returning from taking a tray of pastry covered in wisps of coconut to a customer, would drop a ‘What up, Glad? you lost somesing?’ in passing, and Gladys would start awake. Mrs Kyperiou was a peasant, with a peasant’s feelings about work: unless it were siesta-time, you did not stop working, much less stare into your pail, in the middle of washing the floor.

  But, although Gladys told them nothing, an occasional sigh or shake of the head which she could not resist, hinted at anxieties.

  The Simmses left on Wednesday, their few shiny cheap pieces in a van belonging to a friend, and the two hermaphrodite children, pale and sticky as usual, smilingly riding in the middle of the furniture.

  The sisters had a hasty farewell visit from young Mrs Simms, who bestowed on them an ashtray with an Alsatian dog curled round it and the tip of his tail broken off. She was in a great hurry, having delayed this ceremony until a few minutes before the van left, and her farewells were confined to hasty waves and the laying of the ashtray on Annie’s bed.

  ‘Well, good riddance to bad rubbish,’ observed Gladys, standing at the window and looking down into the street, where the last pieces were being loaded into the van, ‘and that can go in the bucket,’ glancing disdainfully at the Alsatian. ‘There’s Nicky and Alexander, Annie. Now why aren’t they at school?’

  ‘Jean said their baby’s got the measles. S’pose they’ll be getting the push any time now,’ Annie said sadly.

  The two little Jamaican boys belonged to the one family left in the most habitable of the boarded-up houses. Smiling and numerous, respectable and tidy, they felt themselves lucky to be living in it.

  ‘Poor little devils,’ said Gladys ominously, not meaning the measles, ‘I pity them.’

  ‘Oh don’t remind of it, Glad,’ and Annie retreated: she meant the probable eviction of Nicky and Alexander.

  ‘I like that. ’Oo started on about it?’

  It was a morning of thin, fine November air and brilliant sun; every shade of rusty red and faded blue on door or railing glowed through the genial light.

  ‘Bye-bye! Bye-bye, Melinda, bye-bye, John, bye-bye!’ shrieked Gladys, leaning out of the window to wave. ‘Got a nice morning for it, anyway. I’m not ’alf glad to see the back of her. Get a bit of peace now, p’raps. And that Melinda, spoiled little madam.’

  ‘It’ll be a bit lonely for me, Glad. Stuck ’ere all day, not a soul to speak to.’

  The van and its load turned the corner and was gone.

  ‘P’raps he’ll let the downstairs to someone nice, now. Respectable. Not like her. That hair! looked like that Awful Tower in Paris.’ Young Mrs Simms’s hair, in Gladys’s mind, condemned her more than the baby born four months after marriage; the baby at least, Gladys would say, was natural.

  Now that the van had driven away, the Walk was quiet except for the little coloured boys, playing some unobtrusive game with marbles on the ridge of concrete outside their front garden, from which the iron railings had been taken to make fighterbombers long, long before they had been born. Occasionally, a passer-by or a car went along the road at the end of the Walk. Gladys stretched, and folded her arms comfortably.

  ‘Well –’ she was beginning, and Annie was anticipating a favourite observation about the baby and its problematical new frock, when her sister exclaimed – ‘Ullo!’

  ‘What’s up now?’

  ‘Young woman, smartish, looks like a foreigner.’ Gladys instantly let the curtain fall and remained rigid behind its concealment, staring.

  But it was too late. A dark head was tilted back, dark eyes that had caught the curtain’s movement lazily surveyed the window, the sauntering footsteps slowed to a stop, and a voice called up leisurely:

  ‘Hullo?’

  ‘Cheek,’ muttered Gladys, ‘who does she think she is?’

  ‘Miss Barnes?’ called the voice. ‘I want to see you.’

  ‘Knows my name,’ hissed Gladys, with a lightning turn to the bed, where Annie was painfully divided between curiosity and some new threat from the rackman and had not quite decided whether to retreat.

  ‘That’s me,’ announced Gladys, suddenly opening the window and leaning out. ‘What is it that’s wanted, please?’

  ‘I want to see you. It’s about the house being done up. It belongs to my mother now,’ the girl said. She did not exactly smile: her expression suggested sunlight behind clouds on a close, hushed day.

  ‘Oh. I’ll come down.’ Gladys shut the window, with trembling limbs and banging heart.

  Pausing only long enough to hiss quite a lot of information and comment to the cowering Annie, and to cast a swift glance over the parlour – yes, not too bad – and to dab fiercely at her hair, Gladys marched down the stairs and flung open the front door.

  My lady was on the doorstep.

  ‘Good-morning,’ Gladys said, with meaning. This low calling up out of the street between total strangers would get no encouragement from her.

  The concealed smile just broadened, like heat coming through the clouds.

  ‘Oh … hullo. My name’s Peggy Pearson. My mother wants me to look over the place and see about getting it done up.’

  ‘Well …’ Gladys began doubtfully, but before she could say any more, Peggy Pearson had stepped inside and was looking indolently about her; up at the plasterwork of the ceiling, the generous proportions of the stairs, the decent squareness of the hall.

  ‘Very dirty, isn’t it?’ she remarked at length.

  Gladys, encouraged by a manner that seemed to show neither greed nor severity, was trying to summon courage to ask the questions never absent, now, from her mind and Annie’s; whether they were also haunting the mysterious tracts of Mr Fisher’s, she could not have said. But, momentarily, indignation at Peggy Pearson’s comment drove the questions from her mind.

  ‘She’s had a lot of trouble, slaving herself into the grave for him these ten years and all those men, never satisfied, a nice cook she is, up all hours on the Railways and then leaving it all to that Elsie, well, I said, I for one don’t blame you, and expecting to live comferable in her old age no wonder she sold it, always meaning to do it up though I don’t like the smell myself, turns me up, well it would anybody, wouldn’t it, you’d better see her. I don’t know nothing.’

  ‘That’s all right,’ said Peggy Pearson, still looking round, and Gladys was sure that she had not been listening. ‘What’s upstairs?’

  ‘My sister’s bedridden,’ said Gladys instantly.

  ‘All right. I shan’t eat her.’

  Gladys led the way upstairs, the questions unasked.

  ‘It’s quite small,’ said the girl, having glanced into the recent home of the Simmses on the second floor, ‘it is dirty. But pretty, really … That your flat?’ glancing up the stairs.

  ‘It’s two rooms. We share the toilet. There’s no bath,’ said Gladys, raising her voice as she toiled up before the visitor so that Annie, now no doubt in full retreat, might realize the incredible fact that the rackman’s representative would any minute be upon her.

  ‘Oh, my mother’ll put one in. That little cupboard-place at the back would do. They could put in a new door.’

  Plenty of money here, thought Gladys. Talking about putting in baths like you might buy a box of matches.

  She opened the living-room door. Sunlight was streaming through the window and the distant fields, beyond the two miles of roofs, looked green as green. Peggy Pearson glanced round indifferently. Then her eye went to the farther room, where, half out of the balaclava, her two coats neatly buttoned and the Mirror spread before her, Annie looked up long enough to give a hospitalized smil
e. Miss Pearson returned it with a casual wave of one gloved hand and, after a glance about the room, turned away.

  Gladys’s relief at seeing Annie undemoralized took the form of a slightly more cordial attitude towards their visitor. Tea might provide an interval in which the questions could be asked, and she was also anxious to keep the rackman’s daughter – if she was his daughter – from questions about the attic. Mr Fisher wouldn’t be able to stand up to shocks of this kind as stoutly as she, Gladys Barnes, had.

  ‘How about a cup of tea?’ she asked. ‘After all those stairs?’

  ‘Not so many,’ Peggy Pearson said. ‘All right.’ She sat down in one of the armchairs and began to take off her gloves. ‘Thanks.’

  While she bustled about, Gladys began on the questions. It was no use: she had to know; and Annie and Mr Fisher must be thought of; the answers meant as fearfully much to them as they did to her.

  ‘Your mother thinking of making many changes here?’ she asked, with her back to the visitor while she elaborately hunted for biscuits which were staring up into her face.

  ‘Depends what you mean by changes.’ The voice held just a note – so slight that Gladys could wonder if it was there at all – of teasing.

  ‘Well’ – she suddenly turned to face her, with the biscuits; a bit of a girl, not even the owner, couldn’t be more than in her early twenties, she was not afraid of her, and would show it – ‘Rents, and that. She going to put them up?’ Gladys could find clear speech, when fear and desperation drove her.

  Miss Pearson shook a dark head; small, the hair centre-parted and hanging like a nymph’s about small ears. She yawned behind a muscular hand.

  ‘Not … thinking … me and my sister was wondering … not … eviction?’

  Trembling, she spilled some water as she poured it from the kettle into the pot.

  The dreaded word was out, and Gladys stood staring, dismayed. Suppose it ‘put the idea into the daughter’s head’ and she suggested it to this unknown ‘mother’ – (could she be the white-swathed ghost in the rackman’s car?) – then she, Gladys would have brought it on them all.