Starlight

  ‘I’m … glad. I really am glad for you, Jean.’

  ‘Ta and all that.’ Mrs Simms looked uneasily away then went on, ‘She’ll be coming round to ’ave a natter with you, she said.’

  ‘I don’t want to see ’er! She’s let us down – swore to me not six months ago – yes, six months it was, just the six months, I remember because I’d been just six months working with Kyperiou’s – swore she wouldn’t never sell the place. Swore it.’

  Mrs Simms shrugged. ‘She’s gettin’ old. Wants to retire to the country – she can ’ave it, for me. Old folks, they’re always changing their minds, Ted’s mum does, she gets me down.’

  Gladys was pressing her lips restlessly together and twisting her hands as if trying to gain courage to ask a question, and at last she almost whispered:

  ‘Jean – tell us, dear – did she say ’oo’s bought it?’

  She waited, her large frightened eyes fixed on the other’s face. Mrs Simms stared back, spite, pity, all her former expressions replaced by a solemn one that made her suddenly look even younger.

  ‘That’s just it, Glad,’ she said, half under her breath, ‘it’s one of these here rackmans. A real bad type.’

  Gladys made a kind of terrified lowing sound, her eyes fixed, wider and wider.

  ‘But he’s got plenty of money. ’Eaps of money, she said, and he offered ’er a good price and his money’s as good as anyone else’s.’ She shrugged again. ‘So she’s sold it. And next door, and all the row’s gone, too, she said.’

  There was a silence. Into it, from the next room, there came faintly a voice calling, ‘Glad! Glad – what’s it all about? Glad!’

  Gladys stirred in her chair. ‘I’ll ’ave to tell her,’ she said fearfully, ‘it’s no use. She’ll ’ave to know … did Mrs Adams say when she’d be round? … not that it’ll do any good, if ’e’s – ’e’s that sort … we’ll be out before you can say Jack Robinson.’

  ‘Oh don’t be so soft, pull yourself together, can’t you?’ Mrs Simms suddenly almost shouted, ‘his kind’s not all that popular nowadays, you go down to the Town Hall and moan a bit, they’ll do something for you – you’re a pensioner and God knows what, aren’t you, I’m damned if I’d take it like you are.’

  ‘You’re young, Jean.’

  It was unanswerable. Mrs Simms shrugged, and put her fingers up to the tower of hair above her peaky white face. She hung for a moment, as if uncertain what to say, then said sharply, ‘We got some ice cream. The kids didn’t want it – care to finish it?’

  ‘Thanks, Jean. Annie would like it, I expect,’ Gladys said dully. Mrs Simms shrugged again, and after another glance at the doughy, downward-gazing face, down which tears were now running, went out of the room.

  In a little while, Gladys forced herself to get out of the chair. She straightened her cardigan, which was a bright turquoise blue and looked as if it had formerly belonged to an even larger wearer than herself, and uselessly fingered her hair, hanging in curls round her face, while staring unseeingly at herself in the dusty looking-glass over the mantelpiece. Then she turned out the light and marched across to the bedroom door.

  ‘Well!’ Annie observed, as it opened and her sister stood there in dramatic silence, ‘what in ’eaven’s name was all that about? I thought you was never coming.’ She peered closer. ‘You been crying?’

  Gladys had intended to be brave. But the sight of the familiar room, with the teapot and loaf on the table and her sister sitting up thin and birdlike in their bed, broke all her bravery down. She gave a great kind of howl, and fell across the shiny blue coverlet, weeping out that Mrs Adams had sold the house to one of those awful rackmans who was going to turn them out into the street. The gas-fire, with that meticulous sense of the fitting sometimes shown by domestic objects assumed to be insentient, chose this moment to go out. Gladys heard its expiring groan, and cried the louder.

  ‘Well,’ said Annie, temporarily stunned by all this, looking down bewildered at her sister’s grey-streaked head, ‘crying won’t ’elp. Do get up, Glad, ’ere, ’ave this – and tell us all about it.’ ‘This’ was a paper handkerchief.

  Some natures find relief in telling, and hearing, all about it, and Gladys’s was one of them. Already, too, her dramatic, colourloving spirit was relishing the drama of their situation … and though it was awful, shocking, terrible, they were not out on the street yet, and Annie, amid her cries of amazement and indignation at the baseness of Mrs Adams, and her shudders at the hints of their new landlord’s nature, managed to remember there was a shilling in a pocket of one of her old coats.

  Under her directions, Gladys first dried her eyes, then hunted, still whimpering, through the row hanging behind their curtain, found the coin, and put it into the meter. Then, as the gas began its heartless but cosy roaring again, another cup of tea was suggested, and made, and in twenty minutes from the breaking of the unbelievable news, the Barnes sisters were discussing it, and trying to work out a plan. The arrival of a saucerful of melting ice cream, delivered safely by a staggering toddler, cheered them further.

  Gladys’s attendance at Saint James’s Church, which was fairly regular, had given her a sense of relying upon ‘God and Jesus Christ’, in the larger problems of their lives. She went to church because one of the ladies for whom she had worked encouraged her to keep up the custom. Annie’s mysterious bed-ridden habits, it was taken for granted, prohibited church-going for her.

  Gladys now began to think that some of ‘them up at the church’ might help.

  ‘They’re educated, Annie. They know what to do. I’ll go round and see someone there first thing to-morrow.’

  ‘You don’t hardly know no-one there, Glad.’ Annie, at first the calmer of the two, was now looking more frightened and desolate than her sister. That’s Glad all over, she was thinking. Creates like anything and properly upsets you and then all up in the air and everything’s going to be lovely, and you can get on with it.

  ‘I do know him. He always shakes hands with me and says “Good-evening, Miss Barnes”,’ Gladys said with some indignation.

  ‘Not to know him intimate, Glad.’

  ‘I don’t want to know him intimate. He’d only be on at me to go up there every day or something. I just want a bit of help.’

  ‘Well if I was you I’d go to the Town ’All. You don’t ’ave to know them.’

  ‘Nor I don’t ’ave to know the Vicar. All I want’s a bit of help. That’s his work, isn’t it? Living for others. Loving thy neighbour.’

  ‘We ain’t his neighbours. You can’t call living up ’ere right on the top of the Archway Road neighbours.’

  ‘Top of the Archway Road! It’s a good mile.’

  ‘That it isn’t. I could walk down there in a few minutes in the old days. I remember –’

  ‘Oh well you always was one for flying along. Couldn’t never keep up with you. All I know is, it takes me a good twenty minutes getting down to Kyperiou’s.’

  ‘You’re stout,’ Annie said flatly.

  Her anxiety and fear would have its outlet, and it flashed out in the comment. If that wasn’t just like Glad – start talking about something important and off she’d go, like some old cow in a field, wandering – but it wasn’t nice to think of your sister as a cow, and Annie inwardly scolded herself.

  ‘I am not!’ Gladys exploded, large eyes indignant and sad behind her glasses, ‘I’m slimming – you know that.’

  ‘Oh yes, you’re always slimming. Show you a doughnut and where’s your slimming then?’

  Gladys suddenly laughed. ‘Can’t say “no”, can I? Don’t let’s ’ave words, Annie.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Glad. I didn’t mean to be spiteful.’

  Annie re-emerged from the balaclava, into which remorse had sent her as a tortoise into its shell.

  ‘Forgiven and forgotten, ducks. Then I’ll go down first thing and ’ave a word with ’im.’

  ‘With ’oo?’ The dartings and short-cuts taken by Gladys’
s mind often left her sister three or four stages behind in what, for want of a better word, must be called their discussions.

  ‘The Vicar, of course,’ impatiently.

  ‘Well I’m sure I don’t know what good ’e can do and if it was me I’d go down to the Town ’All like you say Jean said – the Vicar ain’t supposed to know about the ’ousing problems.’

  ‘It’s all Christianity,’ was Gladys’s final contribution; a cavernous yawn, immediately infecting Annie, warning them both that it was after ten, and they were exhausted with talking and terror and blown out with four cups of tea apiece.

  By mutual though silent consent, they said no more about the threat; awful, to them, as that of any looming hydrogen holocaust. The lengthy preparations for Annie’s going to sleep began: the drawing of water from the tap on the landing, the warming of it, the modest washing, while she slowly and painfully stretched her arms to bathe neck and face, and even managed, at the cost of an actual, though brief, agony, to wash her feet. Nurse came twice a week to bath her but she liked her wash every night.

  She would never allow her sister to help her unless she was too ill – ‘like that time I had the pewmonia’ – to move. A country cleanliness, though overlaid by sixty years of life in London, still chirped feebly in her spirit.

  When she was ready for sleep, the usual exchange took place.

  ‘Glad? Coming?’

  An absent answer from the next room, where already a faint air of festival prevailed; a mouth full of biscuits, a chair drawn nearer to the flaring gas-fire, and Gladys sprawling in it with a copy of that week’s Reveille.

  ‘Shan’t be a sec. Just having a read of “Revel”.’

  ‘That means twelve o’clock,’ her sister observed, ‘wasting the gas.’

  A biscuit-y mutter, then silence.

  ‘Glad! I’m ready.’

  Gladys got up, without a shade of irritation on her face, brushed away quite a lot of crumbs from her chin, and went into the next room and bent over her sister, as she lay, small and muffled in many nightclothes, on her side of the bed.

  ‘’Night, Annie. Don’t you worry, old dear.’

  ‘’Night, Glad.’ They exchanged the brief dry kiss of age.

  ‘Oh, Glad – isn’t it awful, isn’t it awful?’ Annie suddenly wailed, raising herself on her elbow, ‘what shall we do? There ain’t no-body, there ain’t no-body.’

  ‘Then we’ll ’ave to ’elp ourselves, won’t we?’ said Gladys, giving her a second, warmer kiss. ‘Now you go to sleep.’ She gently pressed the trembling body back into the bed.

  Soon there was silence in the darkened room. Gladys sat on, studying the jocular pages of Reveille with eyes that could read perhaps two-thirds of the joke-captions and snippets of information and news.

  But she could not enjoy it, as she usually did, for Jean’s news hung and gloomed at the back of her mind, darkening every picture she looked at and every thought that came into her head. At last (and it was twelve o’clock, as Annie had foretold; the wind was their way and she just heard the bell of Saint Barnabas’s, across the Archway Road, striking the hour) she scattered Reveille all over the floor with a despairing gesture and turned off the light. She had decided nothing, but that she would go to-morrow to see the Vicar.

  3

  Whenever Gladys walked across the small churchyard of Saint James’s towards its hospitably open door, she felt as if she were in the country. There were so many trees about, and the Fields were near at hand.

  The Vicarage was an enormous house, built of dark-grey brick, standing in a large garden beside the church; comfortable, dignified, even secluded. The hell of the traffic pouring ceaselessly up and down the hill was separated from it by only a few yards, but the garden was laid out with the Victorian lavishness in the use of land, and its thick laurels and its bushes of bay whose rich green was dimmed with soot did create a privacy: threatened, perpetually broken by noise, but nevertheless a prevailing privacy.

  Gladys had not reckoned with having to march up to the door of the Vicarage; she had had some vague idea of a chat with the Vicar at the door of the church, where their encounters always took place.

  But she was not intimidated by the house. Before the 1914 war, she had been in service in a mansion in Belsize Park, and again, between the wars, had worked as daily help in two good places in Hampstead, and she knew what the inside of a big house was like.

  But she had not been prepared for the new curate opening the front door.

  Tall and grave, and looking even more severe than at church on the previous evening, he stood, seeming seven feet tall in his long black cassock, and said, ‘Good-morning.’

  And no more. Behind him, cavernous passages and closed doors and high pale arches receded into the dusk lurking in a dark old house on a November morning. A very faint scent of distant coffee did something to relieve the generally forbidding air but, though Gladys’s senses welcomed it, neither by any sudden cheery reference to it from the curate, nor of its own accord, did it approach any nearer.

  Still – ‘good-morning’. Polite, anyway.

  ‘I want to see the Vicar,’ she said, peering up at him through her glasses. These, suddenly to her dismay, grew misty; a blush of embarrassment had come up into her face.

  She must have heard the Vicar’s name over and over again but it had never clung to her memory – where, indeed, there was little room for facts. She always thought of him as the Vicar. But you could not call anyone Vicar when you spoke to them. Not polite. At Belsize House, she had always been called Barnes. Housemaid. Not tall enough for parlourmaid …

  ‘The Vicar is out.’ Pause. Gladys could think of nothing but coffee. The steam slowly dried from her glasses while they stood staring at one another. Then the curate said:

  ‘Perhaps … what did you want to see him about. Er … perhaps I can help you?’

  More likely to frighten me, thought Gladys, with that long face – and he can’t be thirty yet. Give me a nice fat face like Georgie’s, any time.

  ‘Well it’s like this,’ she began, but broke off the comfortable easy beginning to ask doubtfully, ‘When’ll he be back?’

  ‘To luncheon, at one o’clock.’ As he spoke, the church clock struck eleven: Gladys had never been one for early rising unless compelled, and she did not go to the Cypriot café where she worked as cleaner until the afternoon. Sudden despair overcame her, and she was so hungry!

  ‘Oh I can’t never wait all that time,’ she almost wailed, ‘it’s ever so urgent and serious.’

  ‘You had better come in,’ Gerald Corliss said, and stood aside to let her pass.

  ‘I am a parisher.’ The mutter just caught his ear as he strode swirlingly ahead of her down the stone-paved passage.

  ‘What?’ he said, half-turning.

  Manners, thought Gladys, what, indeed. She repeated her avowal in another form. ‘I mean, I go to Church regular. I was there last evening. Eveningsong. I saw you,’ she added, hoping to defrost the atmosphere a little.

  ‘Well, you could hardly avoid that, could you? I was not so fortunate. The congregation, small though it was, just looked to me like so many hats and faces.’

  He led the way into a room that looked like an office, darkened by the shrubs that grew closely about its small ogive window, and seated himself at a large old desk, covered in faded green leather and with many drawers and pigeonholes. He waved her to a hard chair opposite, and she sat down. The scanty light fell full on his bloodless young face as they confronted each other.

  ‘Now.’ He folded thin hands together. ‘What is … the … trouble?’ He sounded as if he were searching for words.

  Gladys replied by starting up in her chair and crying, ‘The milk! The milk!’

  Mr Corliss also started, as well he might.

  ‘The milk?’ he repeated, looking dazed.

  ‘The milk for your coffee. It’s boiled over. I can smell it. We’d better go and see to it.’

  And she bounded away, f
ollowing the reek that led her un hesitatingly down another gloomy stone-paved corridor and through more than one crypto-scullery into a huge mournful cave of a kitchen, where, on an electric cooker of the newest design, a small saucepan was bubbling hysterically in a white froth.

  Gladys, charging across the kitchen, grasped the handle and shrieked. Mr Corliss, gliding rapidly up behind her, took it from her and said, not mildly, as he set it in a place of safety:

  ‘It isn’t hot. They can’t get hot. It’s a patent handle.’

  ‘No more it isn’t. Silly of me,’ said Gladys. She glanced about her. ‘Now, where’s the cups?’

  Mr Corliss, now looking unmistakably irresolute, silently indicated the giant’s dresser, where six of them, among a scanty collection of other china, hung forlorn. Gladys quickly had two down.

  ‘That was … my mistake,’ he said suddenly. ‘I had just put … the saucepan … on when … the doorbell rang.’ The words seemed to come out in sharp little bites.

  ‘Just like me, butting in at the wrong moment,’ his parishioner said sunnily. ‘Sugar? In the cupboard, is it?’ She darted at a Brobdingnagian door.

  In a few minutes the Reverend Gerald Corliss was returning to the Vicar’s study with a laden tray. On it were the coffee pot, two cups and a plate of biscuits. His visitor marched behind with the jug of hot milk.

  This was certainly better, thought Gladys, eating and drinking and looking around her. Cheered you up.

  ‘Go on, aren’t you having any?’ she said gaily, waving a biscuit at the grave figure seated opposite.

  He muttered something and poured out a scant black cupful.

  ‘Can’t think how you can drink it like that and no sugar neither … biscuit … no? Oh come on – treat yourself.’

  Angry colour rose in his face. He felt young, inexperienced; he detested people, he detested the world, he was rotted through with spiritual pride, and it was the deadliest sin on the list, and why had he been cursed with a temperament, background, upbringing and education that made him unable to stomach, even after prayer and concentration, creatures like the fat blowsy woman sitting opposite? God forgive him, he hated her kind and her.