Family and Friends. Emma Page
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he seemed to her a man capable of anything, violent action, a sudden release of pent-up forces–even heroism.
‘I hope your sister likes the present.’
‘Yes, I’m sure she will,’ Arnold said abstractedly. He felt the walls of the room begin to advance upon him as they sometimes did in palpitating nightmares even now, more than a quarter of a century after he had turned his head and looked for the last time at those miserable ranks of prison huts.
‘If you’d like to come into the shop—’ Linda walked smoothly and swiftly into the passage and through the arch. ‘The dish is three pounds,’ she said with impersonal pleasantness.
He drew a five-pound note from his wallet and laid it on the polished wood, withdrawing his hand immediately. Another man, Linda thought suddenly, taking the note and ringing up the till, any other man who had just made a pass at her, would have seized the opportunity to touch her fingers. But this man no longer even looked at her.
A sense of his absolute loneliness struck at her, his acceptance of rejection as normal and customary; she was all at once aware of the effort it must have cost him to ask her out. She stood, briefly irresolute, washed over by a flood of compassion. And then she sighed and gave a tiny shake of her head. There was simply no place for him in the pattern of her life.
‘But I’ll take off ten per cent because of the sale,’ she added.
‘Thank you.’ His voice was brisker now, he could breathe more easily in the wider spaces of the shop. He took the change and turned to go.
‘I’ll lock up after you.’ Linda came round from behind the counter and followed him to the door. ‘Good night. And a happy New Year to you.’ Even as she uttered the words she thought he looked like a stranger to happiness or even the notion of it.
‘Thank you,’ he said again. He strode off into the icy evening without a backward glance. No hat, no scarf, his coat blowing back. He drew a long cold breath of freedom, savouring the misty solitude of the streets.
Linda looked after him with a flicker of regret. In the distance the church clock struck the hour, its tones muffled by the heavy air. Six o’clock–and no sign of the charwoman. She drew a long breath of exasperation, closed the door with a firm snap, turned the key and thrust home the bolts.
‘That Mrs Bond!’ she said aloud with irritation. ‘I’d like to wring her neck!’
‘Emily!’ Zena Yorke flung a shout towards the door that stood open between her large bedroom and the long narrow bathroom constructed seventy years ago from a slice chopped off the end of the adjoining dressing room and her husband’s room beyond it.
‘Yes?’ Emily Bond screeched back. She no longer bothered to tack a deferential ‘Madam’ or even ‘Mrs Yorke’ on to her utterances and it was many a long day since she had troubled to interrupt a task in order to trot obediently at Zena’s call and put her head round the door of whatever room the summons had issued from. If Mrs Yorke didn’t like it, Mrs Yorke could blooming well lump it.
Plenty of women in Milbourne only too eager to find a charlady–and to pay better money than Mrs Yorke. Sweeter-tempered women, too. Emily rubbed vigorously at the mirrored front of the medicine cupboard, lost for a moment in a comforting fantasy of those other idealized housewives smiling gratefully at her, proffering steaming beakers of cream-laden coffee.
‘I can see a huge cobweb over the wardrobe,’ Zena yelled from the downy nest of her double bed with its richly-quilted coverlet of rose-pink satin. She ran her eyes over the rest of the room, alerted now for further evidence of slapdash work. She heaved herself up with an effort, scanning the crevices and corners, lighting with a glance of triumph on a curl of grey fluff under the washbasin.
‘You’ll have to do in here before you go. You were supposed to clean this room out yesterday.’ Her voice cracked on a high note. She reached angrily over to the bedside cabinet and snatched a king-size cigarette from a carved wooden box, flicked impatiently at her lighter and flung herself back against the heaped-up pillows.
She closed her eyes, temporarily exhausted by the bellowing, tempted for the hundredth time in a month to give old Emily the sack, but recollecting for the hundredth time that it might be impossible to replace her. The domestic agency in Milbourne had adopted a very wary note in recent years when she had rung up to demand assistance.
There had been a time when they had willingly answered her appeals, supplying her with a stream of helpers, living-in maids, living-out maids, foreign girls, local dailies. None of them had stayed longer than a couple of months. And word had got about among the small band of daily women. Times were growing a good deal less hard and there was no longer any reason for a competent domestic to put up with bouts of bad temper–and wages that were less than handsome.
Throughout the long procession of female feet in and out of the Yorke household, only Emily Bond had remained a constant. Not, Zena reminded herself sharply, that it was any reason actually to spoil the woman.
‘Do you hear me?’ she cried, revived by the cigarette, bored again, in need of the stimulus of a heated exchange. ‘This room’s filthy!’
Mrs Bond insinuated a duster among the bottles and boxes in the cupboard. If your bedroom’s filthy, she said in her mind, pleased with a certain lofty note in her imagined tone, that’s on account of your spending half your days lying about in it pretending to be poorly when there’s nothing wrong with you that a good dose of salts and a month’s starvation wouldn’t cure.
‘It’ll have to wait over,’ she called. ‘I should have been gone to Mrs Fleming’s the best part of an hour ago. I’m off as soon as I’ve done in here.’ She picked up a small brown bottle and studied the label. Sleeping-pills. Mr Yorke’s sleeping-pills. Mrs Yorke bawled at her again but she closed her mind and let the sound bounce off her eardrums.
‘I hear you,’ she said calmly, not having the remotest idea what her highness was on about this time but adding from force of professional habit, ‘I’ve only got one pair of hands,’ a remark she had usefully employed thousands of times in the last fifty-five years.
She put the bottle back on the shelf and gave a final righteous flick of her cloth along the ranks of medicines, scattering the greater part of the dust she had removed a few minutes before. She clicked the cupboard shut.
‘That’ll have to do you for today,’ she said firmly, making her way back into Mrs Yorke’s bedroom and standing for a moment in the doorway like a general surveying the scene of a recent battle.
‘I’m off now.’ She unfastened her apron to show she meant business. ‘Got to look in at Mrs Fleming’s.’
Zena’s restless attention, diverted from cobwebs and fluff, alighted on the notion of Linda Fleming. She had never met the woman, having no reason to go poking her nose into every little upstart draper’s shop in Milbourne but it was in her nature to keep tabs on people, to docket and file away scraps of information.
Her self-indulgent habits had gradually trimmed away the keen edges of her once active existence but her mind still darted about like a ferret, reduced now to nibbling at other more purposeful lives. And she had been connected with the trade since the day she was born; she could hardly escape a stir of curiosity about the newcomer.
‘Quite young, I think you said?’ She stubbed out her cigarette absent-mindedly; she had smoked barely a quarter of it.
‘Who?’ Emily halted, baffled, on her way to the door. ‘Oh, you mean Mrs Fleming. Not much over thirty, I’d say. Pretty too.’
‘Does she go out a lot? Has she got many friends? Men friends, that is,’ Zena added in case Emily missed the point. ‘Is the shop doing well?’
‘It’s early days yet, she hasn’t been in the town but five minutes.’ Emily considered Mrs Fleming’s possibilities, a good-looking young widow