The Temptation of Jack Orkney: Collected Stories Volume Two. Doris Lessing
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with the reek from Mrs Fortescue’s room which he could positively smell from where he sat, so strongly did he create it.
Bill must be wrong: she couldn’t possibly be on the game still, who would want an old thing like that?
The family had a meal every night when the shop closed. It was usually about ten thirty when they sat down. Tonight there was some boiled bacon, and baked beans. Fred brought out casually: ‘I saw Mrs Fortescue going off to work when I was out.’ He waited the results of this cheek, this effrontery, watching his parents’ faces. They did not even exchange glances. His mother pushed tinted bronze hair back with a hand that had a stain of grease on it, and said: ‘Poor old girl, I expect she’s pleased about the Act, when you get down to it, in the winter it must have been bad sometimes.’ The words the Act hit Fred’s outraged sense of propriety anew; he had to work them out; thinking that his parents did not even apologize for the years of corruption. Now his father said – his face was inflamed, he must have been taking nips from the glass under the counter – ‘Once or twice, when I saw her on Frith Street before the Act I felt sorry for her. But I suppose she got used to it.’
‘It must be nicer this way,’ said Mrs Danderlea, pushing the crusting remains of the baked beans towards her husband.
He scooped them out of the dish with the edge of his fried bread, and she said: ‘What’s wrong with the spoon?’
‘What’s wrong with the bread,’ he returned, with an unconvincing whisky glare, which she ignored.
‘Where’s her place, then?’ asked Fred, casual, having worked out that she must have one.
‘Over that new club in Parton Street. The rent’s gone up again, so Mr Spencer told me, and there’s the telephone she needs now – well, I don’t know how much you can believe of what he says, but he’s said often enough that without him helping her out she’d do better at almost anything else.’
‘Not a word he says,’ said Mr Danderlea, pushing out his dome of a stomach as he sat back, replete. ‘He told me he was doorman for the Greystock Hotel in Knightsbridge – well, it turns out all this time he’s been doorman for that strip-tease joint along the street from her new place, and that’s where he’s been for years, because it was a night-club before it was strip-tease.’
‘Well, there’s no point in that, is there?’ said Mrs Danderlea, pouring second cups. ‘I mean, why tell fibs about it, I mean everyone knows, don’t they?’
Fred again pushed down protest: that, yes, Mr Spencer (Mrs Fortescue’s ‘regular’, but he had never understood what they had meant by the ugly word before) was right to lie; he wished his parents would lie even now; anything rather than this casual back-and-forth chat about this horror, years old, and right over their heads, part of their lives.
He ducked down his face and shovelled beans into it fast, knowing it was scarlet, and wanting a reason for it.
‘You’ll get heart-burn, gobbling like that,’ said his mother, as he had expected.
‘I’ve got to finish my homework,’ he said, and bolted, shaking his head at the cup of tea she was pushing over at him.
He sat in his room until his parents went to bed, marking off the routine of the house from his new knowledge. After an expected interval Mrs Fortescue came in, he could hear her moving about, taking her time about everything. Water ran, for a long time. He now understood that this sound, water running into and then out of a basin, was something he had heard at this hour all his life. He sat listening with the ashamed, fixed grin on his face. Then his sister came in; he could hear her sharp sigh of relief as she flumped on the bed and bent over to take off her shoes. He nearly called out, ‘Good night, Jane,’ but thought better of it. Yet all through the summer they had whispered and giggled through the partition.
Mr Spencer, Mrs Fortescue’s regular, came up the stairs. He heard their voices together; listened to them as he undressed and went to bed; as he lay wakeful; as he at last went off to sleep.
Next evening he waited until Mrs Fortescue went out, and followed her, careful she didn’t see him. She walked fast and efficient, like a woman on her way to the office. Why then the fur coat, the veil, the make-up? Of course, it was habit, because of all the years on the pavement; for it was a sure thing she didn’t wear that outfit to receive customers in her place. But it turned out that he was wrong. Along the last hundred yards before her door, she slowed her pace, took a couple of quick glances left and right for the police, then looked at a large elderly man coming towards her. This man swung around, joined her, and they went side by side into her doorway, the whole operation so quick, so smooth, that even if there had been a policeman, all he could have seen was a woman meeting someone she had expected to meet.
Fred then went home. Jane had dressed for her evening. He followed her too. She walked fast, not looking at people, her smart new coat flaring jade, emerald, dark-green, as she moved through varying depths of light, her black puffy hair gleaming. She went into the Underground. He followed her down the escalators, and on to the platform, at not much more than arm’s distance, but quite safe because of her self-absorption. She stood on the edge of the platform, staring across the rail at a big advertisement. It was a very large, dark-brown, gleaming revolver holster, with a revolver in it, attached to a belt for bullets; but instead of bullets each loop had a lipstick, in all the pink-orange-scarlet-crimson shades it was possible to imagine lipstick in. Fred stood just behind his sister, and examined her sharp little face examining the advertisement and choosing which lipstick she would buy. She smiled – nothing like the appealing shame-faced smile that was stuck, for ever it seemed, on Fred’s face, but a calm, triumphant smile. The train came streaming in, obscuring the advertisement. The doors slid open, receiving his sister, who did not look around. He stood close against the window, looking at her calm little face, willing her to look at him. But the train rushed her off again, and she would never know he had been there.
He went home, the ferment of his craziness breaking through his lips in an incredulous raw mutter: a revolver, a bloody revolver … His parents were at supper, taking in food, swilling in tea, like pigs, pigs, pigs, he thought, shovelling down his own supper to be rid of it. Then he said, ‘I left a book in the shop, Dad, I want to get it,’ and went down dark stairs through the sickly rising fumes. In a drawer under the till was a revolver which had been there for years, against the day when burglars would break in and Mr (or Mrs) Danderlea would frighten them off with it. Many of Fred’s dreams had been spun around that weapon. But it was broken somewhere in its bleak-gleaming interior. He carefully hid it under his sweater, and went up, to knock on his parents’ door. They were already in bed, a large double bed at which, because of this hideous world he was now a citizen of, he was afraid to look. Two old people, with sagging faces and bulging mottled fleshy shoulders lay side by side, looking at him. ‘I want to leave something for Jane,’ he said, turning his gaze away from them. He laid the revolver on Jane’s pillow, arranging half a dozen lipsticks of various colours as if they were bullets coming out of it.
He went back to the shop. Under the counter stood the bottle of Black and White beside the glass stained sour with his father’s tippling. He made sure the bottle was still half full before turning the lights out and settling down to wait. Not for long. When he heard the key in the lock he set the door open wide so Mrs Fortescue must see him.
‘Why Fred, whatever are you doing?’
‘I noticed Dad left the light on, so I came down.’ Frowning with efficiency, he looked for a place to put the whisky bottle, while he rinsed the dirtied glass. Then casual, struck by a thought, he offered: ‘Like a drink, Mrs Fortescue?’ In the dim light she focussed with difficulty, on the bottle. ‘I never touch the stuff, dear …’ Bending his face down past hers, to adjust a wine bottle, he caught the liquor on her breath, and understood the vagueness of her good nature.
‘Well all right, dear,’ she went on, ‘just a little one to keep you company. You’re like your Dad, you know that?’
‘Is that so?’ He came out of the shop with the bottle under his arm, shutting the door behind him and locking it. The stairs glimmered dark. ‘Many’s