GOOD DAUGHTERS Page 4

  Claire said, ‘You’ll never guess what Letty Arnold’s parents gave her for Christmas.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘A pleated skirt.’

  ‘Gosh!’

  They thought about this without envy, surprised at a glimpse of a life so different from their own.

  ‘What colour was it?’

  ‘It was tartan with a big pin.’

  Letty would wear a neat blouse tucked into it and would look attractive because she had a small waist and a flat tummy. At the thought of this, some envy did creep into Alice’s soul.

  ‘Let’s cross over and walk to John Galsworthy’s house,’ she said, brightening as they came to Holland Park Avenue.

  ‘That’s out of our way,’ Claire said. ‘I don’t care about John Galsworthy. I want to get to the Green.’

  Alice approached the Green reluctantly. In Holland Park she was aware of a life that ran along parallel lines to her own and never merged with it. When she was older, she intended to live in one of the elegant houses in Holland Park.

  Outside the cinema facing the Green there was a big poster of a blonde woman, a silver lame strap slipping low on one arm and a man standing behind her, nibbling the exposed shoulder. The woman had large, sad eyes, and appeared not to notice what was going on. Alice was about to look at the stills in the frame when a well-dressed man came up and offered to take them in with him.

  ‘We don’t want to go in, thank you,’ Alice lied primly.

  ‘What about the little one?’ He smiled at Claire. The children could not imagine that anyone would be stupid enough to go with him; he had irregularly spaced teeth and sprayed saliva as he spoke.

  The commissionaire strolled slowly towards them, staring at the man who hurried away. Alice and Claire walked in the direction of the shops, Claire imitating the man and trying to spray Alice’s face. When they came to the teashop she stopped spitting to protest, ‘We can’t, Alice! What would Mummy say?’

  ‘We’re just spending our pocket money, that’s all.’

  ‘I don’t want to spend my pocket money in Lyons.’

  ‘We’ll spend mine. I’ve been saving it.’ Alice pushed open the door. ‘And don’t behave as though you’ve never been in a teashop on your own before.’

  ‘Well, I haven’t. And neither have you.’

  The shop was crowded and most of the tables were occupied. The two children stood awkwardly just inside the door, wondering what to do. The Nippies in their black dresses and crisp white aprons looked very unapproachable. A woman at a nearby table which had two vacant chairs put her handbag on one of the chairs and glared at Alice. Adult disapproval had its usual loosening effect on Alice’s stomach muscles and she was afraid she and Claire would have to make their exit, giggling ignominiously. Then she caught sight of Katia sitting at a table almost hidden by a pillar.

  ‘I thought you might come,’ Katia said. ‘I bagged a place for you.’ There was no chair for Claire. Katia was unconcerned about this; her arrangement had been with Alice, and if Alice liked to lumber herself with her younger sister, that was her look out. The woman at the cash desk, who had big horn-rimmed spectacles, came to Alice’s rescue, smiling like a friendly owl and pointing, ‘You can take that spare chair.’

  Katia was drinking tea. Alice picked up the menu and tried to study it composedly.

  Claire moaned, ‘I want to wee.’

  ‘Don’t be so childish!’ Alice looked at her sister. Claire was sitting awkwardly, one foot hooked around the leg of the chair, giving the impression that at any moment she might overbalance; the frizzy red hair had pushed her school hat to one side and her features were contorted by inane laughter. What an awful little toad Claire was, and what an encumbrance to her own burgeoning maturity. ‘Burgeoning’ was a word which Alice had lately acquired. She liked to think of herself as burgeoning; it gave an acceptable quality to her plumpness. She said to Claire, ‘I shan’t ever come out with you again.’

  ‘I don’t want you to come out with me, so there.’

  Katia poured more tea into her cup and said, ‘You can’t take her anywhere, can you?’

  The Nippy came and Alice ordered two glasses of orange squash and two long iced buns. The Nippy said, ‘I’m only supposed to be serving teas.’ This convulsed Claire. Alice, who did not think she had enough money for two teas, looked at Katia, but Katia had become uncharacteristically abstracted and was staring dreamily towards the window. The cashier came to the rescue again. ‘Don’t be so mean, Doris.’ The Nippy departed with an angry wiggle of her shoulders. In the interval before she returned Alice surreptitiously counted her money and made sure she had enough. As soon as the buns were put before them, Claire took one and proceeded to squash as much as possible of it into her mouth, a game she and her friends had recently devised to enliven the break period.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ Katia said to Alice. ‘My brothers play at which can break wind the loudest.’

  Alice cut a small piece off the end of one bun and held it poised in her fingers. ‘Did you go to the pictures in Germany?’

  ‘I saw Marlene Dietrich in The Blue Angel.’

  ‘Was it good?’

  Claire, not used to being ignored, said, mouth full, ‘I know a poem.’

  ‘It was made years ago and she was plump, not like she is now. They don’t groom them, you know. In French films you can see they’ve got underarm hair. And they go further, of course. It’s not just kissing. They get very worked up and all that.’

  Claire swallowed the last of the bun and inhaled until her whole body swelled up; she had lately been practising saying each verse in one breath.

  ‘The breaking waves dash’d high on a stern and rock-bound coast;

  And the woods against a stormy sky, their giant branches toss’d;

  And the heavy night hung dark, the hills and water o’er,

  When a band of exiles moor’d their bark on the wild New England shore.’

  ‘You get shots of them in bed, too, and they haven’t got anything on. I mean, you don’t see everything, but enough, so that you can tell.’

  Alice sipped her orangeade, trying to visualize how far was enough. As far as the waist?

  ‘Not as the conqueror came they, the true-hearted came;

  Not with the roll of the stirring drum, and the trumpet that sings of fame;

  Not as the flying come, in silence, and in fear;

  They shook the depths of the desert gloom with their hymns of lofty cheer.’

  ‘How can you understand what’s happening?’ Alice asked.

  ‘In England you get sub-titles. But I don’t bother with them, they only tell you what they’re saying and that stuff. You don’t need sub-titles; it’s all there in a Continental film without sub-titles.’

  ‘Amidst the storm they sang; this the stars heard, and the sea,

  And the sounding aisles of the dim woods rang to the anthem of the free . . .’

  ‘We don’t want to hear all of it,’ Alice said.

  People had been coming and going while they were talking. Now the door opened and a tall, shabby man in an old raincoat came in carrying a violin. He had a big head made bigger by a shock of curly white hair, against which his face looked sickly; his eyes were deepset and shadowed. Alice recognized him immediately as the man who played the violin outside the Shepherd’s Bush Empire. He never thanked people when they gave him money – just went on playing as though he had not noticed. As he walked across the room, Katia stared at him so intensely that Alice was not surprised when he turned his head and smiled at her.

  Katia pushed back her chair. ‘Well, so long,’ she said to Alice. ‘I’ll get my tea paid for now, I expect.’

  ‘Katia, you can’t!’ Alice was aghast, and even Claire paused, open-mouthed, as Katia walked towards the man.

  ‘We’ll go,’ Alice said. She went to the desk, followed by Claire declaiming:

  ‘There were two men with hoary hair amidst that pilgrim band;

  Why had th
ey come to wither here, away from their childhood’s land?’

  The cashier said to Alice, ‘Isn’t it lovely? What is it?’

  Claire said, ‘It’s The Pilgrim Fathers by Felicia Hemans.’

  ‘What a clever little girl you are! Your Mummy and Daddy must be very proud of you.’

  Claire looked odiously shy.

  Katia and the man weren’t having much to say to each other; he seemed more interested in the menu than in her. Alice thought she looked unhappy and that it served her right. As she and Claire made their way back to the Green, she wondered whether she should tell the Vaseyelins that Katia had been picked up by a strange man in Lyons. She didn’t think she could do it, particularly as this would put a stop to any future visits to Lyons; but how would she feel if Katia were to disappear?

  ‘There was woman’s fearless eye, lit by her deep love’s truth;

  There was manhood’s brow serenely high, and the fiery heart of youth . . .’

  ‘Oh, shut up!’ Alice shouted. ‘I wish you’d died of diphtheria.’

  ‘Josie Williams’s sister is dying, did you know? Josie said it won’t be long now.’

  A few people were standing in the queue for the sixpenny seats outside the cinema and a Jehovah’s Witness was telling them the days of their wickedness were numbered. In a doorway two grubby urchins stood over an arrangement of shells and old buttons; as they passed, one said, ‘Penny for the grotter,’ and Alice, feeling reckless, gave him two pennies.

  Louise was waiting at the tram terminus. ‘Wherever have you been?’ she demanded. ‘We’ve missed a bus and a tram.’

  ‘We went to Lyons,’ Claire said. ‘It was lovely.’

  She finished the poem on the top of the tram to the amusement of the conductor. Alice looked out of the window. In a sidestreet she could see the lamplighter with his long pole poking at a lamp which had gone out. It was cold, and there was a smell of fog in the air. She felt churned up by her own and others’ guilt. When they got off the tram and were walking towards their home, Louise said, ‘I’ve auditioned for a part with the St Bartholomew’s Dramatic Society. There’s no need to say anything to Mummy and Daddy about it until I know if I’ve got the part.’ It was all too much, and Alice had one of her tummy upsets that night.

  Chapter Three

  On the other side of the party wall to the Fairleys lived an elderly gentleman known to the Fairley girls as ‘the relic’. Mr Ainsworth, who was in his nineties, regarded the Fairleys as people with whom he could have little social contact. He acknowledged their existence by raising his hat to Mrs Fairley and the girls whenever he met them in the street, and by occasionally commenting to Stanley Fairley on events in the world of politics. Mr Ainsworth could recall seeing Mr Disraeli drive up to Gunnersbury Park to be greeted by Baron de Rothschild, and therefore regarded himself as an incontrovertible authority on all matters political. As Mr Fairley entertained the same conceit, without benefit of ever having seen Mr Disraeli, communication between the two men was necessarily brief – though invariably courteous. Mr Ainsworth, a widower, was looked after by a housekeeper. Mrs Peachey, a woman of great refinement, was even more aware of the decline of the neighbourhood than her employer, and it was many months before she could bring herself to walk on the same side of the street as the Fairleys. Mr Fairley said that Mr Ainsworth was a relic of the past, and as such instructive and to be studied with respect – a dictum he did not extend to include Mrs Peachey.

  Mr Ainsworth was, however, part of a tradition out of which the Fairleys had grown. But the family who lived on the detached side of the Fairley property were of quite another kind. The Vaseyelins (or the Vaseline family as they were known locally) had come to Shepherd’s Bush in 1926. Whether at that time there was a Mr Vaseyelin, the Fairleys did not know. Some people in the road said there had been a man in the house for a few years, but it was thought he was a lodger and he had now left. What was certain was that there were four children – one girl and three boys – now ranging from nine to eighteen. Jacov, the eldest, played the man’s role in the household, and the role normally played by the woman in English households fell to Anita, who was possibly an old nurse, a governess, a dependent relative – or an amalgam of all three. Mrs Vaseyelin was a mysterious figure, seldom seen except in the evening, when she would appear wearing a long coat hemmed with fur and a hat with a veil which covered her face, and was knotted at the back of her head. No doubt in the past she had been accustomed to step from the house into her carriage; but if there was one thing which was known about the Vaseyelins, it was that they had no money. Several of the tradespeople were prepared to vouch for that. So, Mrs Vaseyelin, instead of stepping into her carriage, walked to The Askew Arms and took a Number 12 bus. What happened thereafter none of her neighbours knew.

  When Mrs Vaseyelin and her family first arrived in Pratts Farm Road she had left her card at Numbers 25 and 29, but as the recipients had no idea how they were supposed to respond, this had not advanced intercourse between the households. By the time the Fairleys arrived in the autumn of 1929, the Vaseyelins were conditioned to isolation. The advent of three children next door, however, was of considerable interest to the Vaseyelin children. The first day that Stanley Fairley worked in the garden, Jacov Vaseyelin – having concluded from conversations with schoolfellows that cards were no longer exchanged, introduced himself in what he took to be a suitably informal manner.

  ‘I am Jacov Alexei Anton Vaseyelin, sir, your neighbour. If I can be of service to you at any time, please to say.’

  Stanley Fairley looked up in astonishment at the head with its mop of curly black hair affixed, in the manner of a surrealist sculpture, to the brick wall. Mr Fairley was deeply suspicious of surrealism, which he considered decadent. The face did nothing to allay his fears. It was apparently guileless, but it had that anarchic quality which can sometimes go with a certain kind of gentleness: the face of one of those unholy innocents who – seeming not to see the world as others see it – make havoc of the carefully constructed patterns of society. Mr Fairley, while being prepared to fight for intellectual freedom, was not prepared to brook any interference with the rules governing the day-to-day exchanges of his life. He was not a sociable man, and the last thing he wanted when he was working in his garden was to be made aware of neighbours, well-meaning or otherwise. He thanked Jacov Alexei Anton Vaseyelin brusquely, and went about the business of digging up a recalcitrant holly bush. When he swung round to throw down pieces of the uprooted holly, he saw that the head had been removed. Had he been dealing with a man, he would not have reproached himself; as far as he was concerned, the sooner you let the other fellow know the way you like to live your life, the better. But this was a boy, and he had been churlish to him. He stuck the spade in the flowerbed, and approached the wall to make amends. The rest of the unholy innocent was now in view: a thin youth, hunched crescent-shaped on a dilapidated garden seat, disconsolately poking at a hole in the sole of one shoe.

  ‘You wouldn’t have a pair of shears?’ Mr Fairley asked grudgingly. ‘I’ve sent mine to be sharpened.’

  ‘Surely we must have!’ The youth unwound himself with alacrity. He moved lightly and easily, but took a somewhat wayward course towards what was his obvious destination – the garden shed; it was as though it was not natural to him to approach anything directly. Eventually however, by way of a conservatory (where he pressed his face against the window and grimaced at someone within) and what was probably an outside lavatory, he came to the garden shed and, after some desultory rummaging, found a pair of shears on a shelf.

  ‘Hmmm.’ Mr Fairley examined the shears. ‘These don’t get used very often, do they?’

  ‘I am sorry. No use?’

  ‘I expect they might be with a bit of oiling.’

  Later, he told his wife, ‘I’ve spent the afternoon getting their shears into good repair. We really can’t have too much of this kind of thing. We shall have to be careful to keep our distance.’ He looked at her re
proachfully, as though it were she who had borrowed the shears.

  ‘I doubt if they will trouble you now that they’ve introduced themselves.’ Judith guessed that it was her daughters in whom the young Vaseyelins were interested, and in this she proved correct. The back garden of Number 27 began to receive much-needed attention; the front garden, which offered no prospect of communication with the Fairley children, continued to be neglected, the hedge grown so high that it obscured the downstairs windows. In the spring there were frequent exchanges over the garden wall, and by the summer it was impossible not to include the Vaseyelins in Alice’s birthday party. ‘We can’t have a party in the garden and leave them out,’ Judith Fairley said reluctantly. The Vaseyelins were alien, and she did not want the bother of trying to understand them. She was busy enough without that.

  The Vaseyelins arrived at the party stiff and too formally dressed. Nicholas and Boris, who were twins, took up their usual position on the fringe of events, heads dose together, sharing secret observations. Katia, on the other hand, was soon shouting and screaming with the other children. Jacov seemed uncertain whether he belonged with the adults or with the children, and he made a nuisance of himself in the kitchen, offering to carry things and generally getting in Judith’s way. In spite of his willingness, he was unable to complete the simplest task assigned to him effectively, because he allowed himself to become sidetracked into some other well-meaning activity.

  ‘You can’t do two things at once, Jacov,’ Judith told him.

  ‘But you do several things at the same time,’ he pointed out.

  ‘I know which things can be combined.’ She was irritated at the way in which he spoke to her: not insolently, but as though he noted things about her. Her daughters’ friends were not yet old enough to do this, and she was not accustomed to it.