GOOD DAUGHTERS Page 14

  On Christmas morning Ben arrived while Mr Fairley and the girls were at chapel. He made himself useful to Judith in the kitchen. She could tell from the unfussy way he set about the small tasks she entrusted to him that he had been used to helping his mother. She wondered whether how was the time to have a talk with him about Lizzie; but it was difficult to know what to say, particularly as she hadn’t liked her.

  Ben, in fact, was thinking how much Judith reminded him of his mother as she had been before hard work and illness wore her down. He went into the hall to put a piece of holly over the mirror. The door of the sitting-room was ajar, and he could see that the fire was alight. He stood in the doorway, observing the flames reflected on the long wall; and the neat preparedness of the room with bowls of nuts and boxes of dates, sugared almonds and Turkish delight upon the side tables, the piano open with music on the rack. The feeling of love and family closeness oppressed and confused him. He thought of Judith with resentment, because life had been so much kinder to her than to his beloved mother. Yet he was half in love with her and jealous of Stanley. He hated Louise, who would come in at any moment and draw the dancing firelight to herself. She, more than any of the others, made him aware of his emotional inexperience.

  He felt an urge to run out of the house and get some space around him. But it was too late even for flight into the garden, because he could hear Stanley and the girls coming up the path. He was drawn into the ceremony of present-giving: at least he had come well prepared for that.

  At dinner even Grandmother Fairley, who sighed over Christmases past, ate heartily and had two helpings of Christmas pudding. Claire, however, maintained an air of tragedy. In the afternoon she shut herself in her room, because she and Maisie had agreed to put aside a time when they thought about each other. She was not, however, proof against the enchantment of charades. This was the one theatrical entertainment permitted in the Fairley household. The dressing-up trunk was brought out and its treasures re-examined; mother-of-pearl fans and painted parasols, lace shawls and little sequin bags, long black taffeta skirts (there was a preponderance of black, as many items had been donated by Grandmother Fairley), white kid gloves which reached above the elbow and had little pearl buttons to draw them tight at the wrist, straw hats decorated with cherries, and a feather boa which had to be handled carefully, because it was moulting so badly.

  Whatever the word chosen, the scenes enacted reflected the spirit of Punch and Judy rather than Christmas, and Claire and Ben were particularly uninhibited in their performances.

  On Boxing Day evening the Fairley children had a party to which the Vaseyelins were invited, together with Guy, and Daphne, Angus and Cecily Drummond.

  ‘Why couldn’t I have Maisie?’ Claire complained to Alice.

  ‘Because if Maisie came you wouldn’t take any notice of Cecily.’

  ‘At least Maisie’s father hasn’t got another woman.’

  ‘It’s the first time we’ve been allowed to have a party on Boxing Day. You mustn’t do anything to spoil it, or we’ll never have another.’

  The party went well. The Drummonds were a great success: Daphne had an instinctive social sense which enabled her to get everything right without making any effort, Cecily was polite and anxious to please, while Angus was adjudged by Louise to be ‘rather sophisticated’. Alice was proud of them. Ben and Jacov engaged in lively conversation on a wide range of subjects, Ben showing off shamelessly and Jacov matching his mental gymnastics without apparent difficulty. Guy, who always experienced a compulsion to adjust his personality to the requirements of the company in which he found himself, watched them with a certain amount of envy. Louise, who had also been watching them, said to Guy, ‘I wouldn’t have expected those two to get on; they are so different.’

  ‘I was thinking they were rather similar. Both a bit clever.’

  ‘Ben talks out of the top of his head.’ She shrugged Ben aside as not worthy of interest. ‘Jacov makes me feel there are things he knows that I don’t know.’

  ‘What sort of things?’

  ‘Dark things.’

  As the party continued, Alice began to feel lonely. Claire had reconciled herself to Maisie’s absence, and she and Cecily were sitting in a corner whispering secrets. Daphne was being mildly provocative to the Vaseyelin twins, and Ben was arguing with Jacov. Louise and Guy were sitting on the rug by the hearth, roasting chestnuts. As Alice watched, he leant forward and poked one chestnut free, then he peeled it and offered it to Louise. She opened her mouth like a soft, downy bird, and he broke off a piece and fed it to her. In the glow of the flames, they looked warm and very happy. Louise said to him, ‘Can you see the gypsy in the fire?’ Alice wondered why Louise always saw a gypsy in the fire. As she watched Louise pointing, and Guy pretending to see – although it was obvious he couldn’t really – she felt an odd pain in her tummy. She looked round the room. There was no one here who was particular to her. She had never hitherto felt this as a loss, but now it began to matter. Katia would not speak to her, because Daphne had been asked to the party and she was now talking to Angus Drummond in a loud, showing-off voice. The sophisticated Angus looked a bit alarmed, which wasn’t surprising since she had bushed her dark gold hair so that she looked heathen as a Hottentot, and her eyes fairly popped out of their sockets in their attempt to rivet his attention.

  Across the room, Alice could see her mother looking at her. The last thing she wanted was for her parents to feel sorry for her because she had been left out. She got up and went out of the room, coughing as if she had a piece of one of the chestnuts she hadn’t been given caught in her throat. She had a drink of water in the kitchen, and then studied herself in the hall mirror. She had parted her hair in the middle and secured it with pink bows, which stuck out like extensions to her ears; a pink velvet band across the top of her head connected the ears and compounded the silly, pantomime effect. Her dress, the pattern for which she herself had chosen, had tucks and pleats in all the wrong places. She returned to the sitting-room, where her absence appeared to have passed unnoticed.

  They were about to play charades. In a surge of self-pity, she thought how all the other girls would enjoy letting themselves go and looking ugly, because they knew inside themselves that they were attractive – even Cecily seemed quite pleased with herself today. Jacov had produced a brown paper bag and was taking something from it; he spoke in his most foreign way, as if he was making a speech, ‘Our contribution to the dressing-up trunk, which you have often so generously shared with us!’ He took out of the bag a peacock-blue shawl studded with ruby and amethyst beads, unpatterned, as though jewelled dust had been blown across it at its making. The thing was quite dazzling in its beauty: whoever conceived it was a foreigner to sober English notions of unpretentious good taste, and it looked strange and exotic in the Fairley’s homely sitting-room. It was obviously old because Alice, who was now sitting on the piano stool close to Jacov, could smell the stale perfume which hung about it – but this only added to its enchantment. It was old because it was the Arabian nights, the desert sky into which God had tossed the stars . . . it was . . . oh, she would think of other things when she wrote about it in her diary at night. Perhaps Louise might let her take it up to her bedroom if she promised not to crumple it. Alice looked at Louise, rosy in the firelight, eyes shining: beyond a doubt, the shawl must be hers.

  Louise looked at the shimmering silk in admiration but, confident that life would bless her, she was neither acquisitive nor competitive, and did not stretch out a hand. Guy, however, looked at the shawl and then at Louise as though it already adorned her; and Alice felt the pang in her stomach again, but sharper this time. She said, ‘It will go with Claire’s hair, won’t it?’ It was one of her few moments of pure spite, and as Claire’s face lit up she got no pleasure from what she had done, and would have spoilt things for Claire, too, had she seen her way to it.

  Then Jacov had one of his unaccountable lapses. It had been noted before that he seemed on
occasions to suffer from a defect of vision, which made him see things quite differently from normal people like the Fairleys and their friends. He had, moreover, the disturbing ability to fracture their clarity and impose on them his own distorted impressions. Now, easily and unselfconsciously, as though performing an act they were all awaiting, he took up the shawl and, turning so that he stood behind her, laid it around Alice’s shoulders. ‘Alice is to be its custodian.’

  Alice sat dumbfounded with the glory of the shining thing about her. Although in fiction she relished the moment when the self- effacing heroine is honoured by the hero to the chagrin of those who judged themselves better qualified to receive his attentions, she now discovered in herself a strong aversion to being thus singled out. It was not something for which her life had prepared her, being a middle child at home and a middling performer at school. Not only was she unwilling to accept this undreamt-of gift, but she rather resented the threat to her middlingness, and felt a need both to question the motives of the giver, and her own worthiness to receive. Jacov must surely know that of all the girls present she was the least suitable, not being the youngest, or the most beautiful, and not having either the style or the confidence to wear such a gorgeous thing. He was making fun of her.

  Yet it was not mockery which most troubled her. It was an unfamiliar, prickly sensation occasioned by the feel of his hands laid on her shoulders; light though the touch was, she was aware of each fingertip, and it seemed as though the gesture as well as the shawl was a gift to her. Alice felt an impulse to sink down beneath this gentle pressure, overwhelmed by so much individual attention.

  Her mother said, breaking the surprised silence, ‘Alice will take care of it. Alice always takes good care of things.’

  They were all going to be kind about it, and she hadn’t earned the kindness. Above all, she hadn’t earned the shawl. If anything, it was a reward for spite and envy! She smoothed it over her wrist. The material was so fine that even the movement of her soft flesh against it produced a slight friction. It was altogether too exquisite for her. She did not know where to look.

  Ben said, looking at Louise, ‘Alice should have the prize; she is a nice, modest girl.’

  Louise said, ‘Alice has a beautiful nature. She’s not one of those people who are always getting at other people.’

  It was so unexpected, so unsuitable and so undeserved . . . Oh, the very un-ness of it! She wanted to run out of the room and hide herself.

  Her mother said, ‘It is most generous of you and your family, Jacov. Alice is so pleased she can’t speak.’

  When the party was over, Alice put the shawl away in a drawer and did not take it out again for many years.

  Chapter Nine

  The New Year did not begin auspiciously. Badger died on the morning of the first of January and the family stood round, weeping, while Stanley Fairley buried him in the plot at the end of the garden where Smut, the black cat, was now buried. ‘He won’t like that,’ Louise said.

  ‘All are reconciled in Heaven,’ her father answered. But he felt melancholy without the dog. It was a grey, smoky day; fog had been forecast. The rag-and-bone man’s raucous cry came to his ears as he returned to the house; and soon he saw him pushing his cart in the company of a man from the chapel who had recently lost his job, a decent fellow now looking sadly defeated. He sat down at his desk, and wondered what was coming to the world. They should bring back Lloyd George, he thought.

  Alice pressed her nose against the pane of her bedroom window, and hoped the fog wouldn’t get bad before she went out in the afternoon. Miss Bellamy was taking a small party of girls to the National Gallery, and afterwards they were invited to her flat for tea. Alice thought of Christmas as ‘the dead of winter’, and was always dismayed to realize with the coming of January that the worst of the winter lay ahead. This year, however, the sense of anticlimax was not quite so hard to bear. Christmas had offered rather too much. As she stood by the window, Alice was looking forward to the outing, not so much for any cultural benefits which might accrue from it, as for the pleasure of being with Katia. Katia could be relied upon to draw so much attention to herself that she provided a screen in whose shelter Alice could once more pursue her own activities in blessed anonymity.

  By noon, the day looked no different from any other dull January day, and Alice was allowed to set out. The afternoon passed pleasantly enough. Alice and Katia giggled at the big women in the Rubens paintings; accustomed to Hollywood standards of beauty, it was difficult to understand what motivated painters in their choice of model. They tried to guess which Gainsborough lady did the bowing for Gainsborough films, and stared puzzled at a portrait by Goya until Alice exclaimed, ‘She’s like you!’ Katia made a vulgar noise. Yet the portrait hinted not so much at a resemblance as a possibility. In contrast with the neatness of many of her schoolmates, Katia seemed rather coarse; but the portrait showed what she might become – a handsome woman, and passionate.

  When they came out of the National Gallery the fog had become dense, and it was not possible to see across Trafalgar Square. Philippa decided they must all go home and come to her flat on another occasion.

  ‘I don’t want to go home,’ Katia said as they walked disconsolately in the direction of Leicester Square. ‘Let’s have tea.’

  Before they reached Lyons Corner House they passed a cinema. The film showing was The Bowery with Wallace Beery and George Raft. The combination of George Raft and the Bowery could surely mean only one thing; here was Alice’s chance to see the America of the gangster era which must pass away now that Prohibition had been repealed. ‘It will be almost historical in a few years’ time,’ she argued.

  ‘I don’t care about history.’ Katia studied the stills, and Alice watched her anxiously. Katia was very particular. She wrote to film stars for photographs, and was usually rewarded. In the evenings, Alice had sometimes waited at the garden gate with Katia to see whether the postman was carrying any large envelopes.

  ‘What do you say,’ Alice had asked recently. ‘To the men, I mean.’

  ‘I told Clark Gable I was sorry for him having to play opposite Carole Lombard and I said I could have done the love scenes better. I sent him a picture of myself.’

  ‘You sent your picture to Clark Gable? I bet he preferred Carole Lombard.’

  ‘She hasn’t got any breasts.’

  ‘You don’t act with your breasts!’

  ‘I act with all of me. If I played opposite Clark Gable, I wouldn’t stand there like a lamp-post when he touched me.’ Katia’s flesh had quivered so violently that Alice had visualized Clark Gable’s hands laid upon places where the Hays Office would never have allowed them to be.

  Katia, who was looking at the stills without enthusiasm, said, ‘Is this the one there was all that fuss about because he ripped her dress?’

  Alice said, ‘Yes.’ She had no idea whether this was true, but it looked the kind of film where anything might happen.

  They had a disagreement, because Katia wanted to sit downstairs. Alice’s mother always insisted on sitting in the circle, and Alice imagined that – quite apart from people eating oranges – something nasty would happen if she sat in the stalls.

  ‘If I’m going to get the tickets, we’re going downstairs,’ Katia said, well aware that the woman in the box office would never admit Alice to an ‘A’ film unaccompanied.

  Alice said, ‘I’ll pay the extra. I had money from Grandma for Christmas.’

  This was a much grander cinema than the one in Falmouth; it had a big, winding staircase on which four or five people could have ascended side by side. Before they reached the top, they could hear the clatter of crockery and the sound of voices; people were having tea in the cinema restaurant which was sited in the lounge adjoining the entrance to the auditorium.

  The lights were on inside, and the usherettes were leaning listlessly against the wall. Alice and Katia sat at the end of a row sufficiently far from the entrance not to be troubled by peop
le coming and going. Soon after they sat down a man came and sat by Alice, which was odd as there were many unoccupied seats. When the lights went down, she felt his fingers on her knee; obviously in the West End the circle was no more free of vice than the stalls. She got up. Katia said, ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘We’re going to move,’ Alice hissed at her.

  ‘I don’t want to move. If I go any further forward, my eyes don’t focus.’

  ‘We’ve got to move.’ Alice began to struggle past her; while they were wrestling, the man got up and walked away.

  ‘You should have stuck a pin in him,’ Katia said when Alice explained.

  Katia concentrated on the screen. Alice closed her eyes and tried to prepare herself for the experience she was about to receive. Soon, she would enter that forbidden world she had glimpsed in trailers. A woman, wearing a backless evening dress with a fox fur slung across her shoulders, would walk through a crowded nightclub, a sad, disdainful expression on her face, and all eyes would turn to follow her, conveying a sense of expectation heightened by an almost unbearable awareness of imminent danger. There would be shots of a man and a woman gazing at each other, and the lowering of eyelids, the twist of a mouth, would speak volumes in a language Alice did not yet understand but desperately wished to learn. And surely in the Bowery there would be tenement blocks with fire escapes where people slept at night because it was too hot indoors; and there would definitely be narrow streets from which a man, walking half in shadow, would emerge at a crossroads, glance nervously from side to side, rush forward – and then, from nowhere, the fast car . . . She had seen it all in trailers, but had never had the opportunity to witness the sequence of events which led to the lowering of the eyelids, the words spoken out of the corner of the mouth, the fleeing figures, the murderously-driven car. It wasn’t the happy endings which made films so appealing to Alice; it was the possibility of things going unimaginably wrong. She felt sick with excitement when the change in the music heralded the arrival of the big picture.