The Wardrobe Mistress Page 2
But she’d made an exception last night and now she regretted it. She knew exactly what had happened. It was being in his room. She’d made a fatal error. She’d gone into his wardrobe.
Yes, we know. Ridiculous. Most unwise. Move along, dearie, how mawkish can an old girl get? She hadn’t told Vera, she could imagine what she’d say. She’d told herself she’d get rid of them but it was almost two weeks now and they were all still there, all his suits, shirts, shoes, underwear, everything. So much he had, even despite the years of austerity, the rationing of cloth. What was so very, very destructive was that she could still raise a faint residue of the man if she pressed her nose to a collar or a cuff and it always finished her off. That hair oil – why such almost imperceptible traces of a stale fragrance should summon the essence of a man whose earthly remains had now apparently been reduced to a small heap of ashes and put in a pot she kept under her bed, this she didn’t understand. But all it took was a large gin or sometimes two and she was at them again, oh yes, and oh, she hauled them out, she laid them out as though she were his valet, or his dresser, spread them across the bed all the while in her mind’s eye admiring him as they went out the front door together, or even as he emerged from this same room to ask her if he looked all right. For he was a dandy, old Gricey, he liked a sharp crease and a clean line, he was a Tottenham boy of course but he did enjoy carrying himself like a gent – a proper man of the theatre – and in another second she was on top of them on the bed with the fabric clutched in her fists and her nose buried deep in collars and cuffs, in armpits, in crotches—
Funny, isn’t it, we said, how it’s so often the strong women who give themselves to these tricky men who don’t really seem worth the trouble?
She sat at the kitchen table in her overcoat and cut half a banana into small slices (it wasn’t often you got a banana) and drank her tea. She’d have the other half later. A grey, windy day, very cold already. In five minutes she’d go in and put them back on their hangers, tidy the place up. Like looking in on the scene of an orgy the morning after. The hint of dawn in the sky when the revels have come to an end and the revellers all gone home. That’s depravity, she thought. That’s excess. They wanted her to come to some kind of a benefit performance at the Irving, for Gricey, see his Twelfth Night again. No, she wouldn’t be doing that. She wasn’t up to that.
But she did have to go to work. We see her now as we often did that winter, all in black, coat, gloves, hat, stockings, on her high black ladies’ model Raleigh with a basket fastened to the handlebars and a silver bell, and a reflector on the back mudguard, the lower part of which was painted white. She rode in stately fashion with her back very straight and her eyes on the road ahead. Mile End, Whitechapel, Aldgate, then the City, Holborn to Shaftesbury Avenue then the freewheel down to Piccadilly Circus and a little sweep round the corner to the Beaumont. Her hand signals were meticulous in their precision, the propriety of her dismount a joy to behold.
– Morning, Mrs Grice, murmured one or two tired voices when she walked into the costume shop, the steam irons hissing, sewing machines whirring away. Whirr–pause–whirr–pause, they went. Thunk-a-thunk-a-thunk. The windows were steamed up but they only looked out on a wall, here in the basement at the very bottom of the building. The dawn chorus, she called it. Why was it always so gloomy in here? She’d asked for brighter bulbs, but no, even light was rationed in this dark new world, and sometimes they hardly had any light at all, no wonder they were all going blind, bent over their Singers, hands, eyes, shoulders knackered by the end of the day.
– Morning, ladies. Esther, you finished Miss Conville’s bodice yet?
They were getting ready for a show. Heartbreak House. Lots of corsets and gowns. Steel bones and horsehair, tricky work. Tweed suits, merchant seaman’s kit, and one man in full Arab. And the wigs! But she ran a good shop, best in London, some said.
– Almost there, Mrs Grice.
– Hurry it up, dear, I shall be wanting you on the trousers. Eunice?
– Yes, Mrs Grice.
– That a scrap of fabric I see on the floor?
– Oops, sorry, Mrs Grice.
– Death fabric, that is. Slip on that, bang your head, curtains.
– Yes, Mrs Grice.
She had a little alcove from which she could keep an eye on things. She’d sit at her desk and get her spectacles out of their case to look at the budgets and what-have-you. But today she removes her spectacles almost at once, and instead gazes out across the busy room. She barely sees the toiling women, the heaps of muslin, the shelves spilling out their grommets and needles and buttons and zips, the steam presses, the long table where her draper cuts the patterns. And there’s Esther, foolish young Esther, a clutch of pins between her teeth as she flattens a length of thin black silk on a table, folding it down one side to make a hem then rapidly pinning it. Oh, and Joan sees herself all those years ago at the Watford Palace when she was Esther’s age, working for a wardrobe mistress no less exacting than she is now, and as she hemmed and sewed her mind was elsewhere, as Esther’s is now, yes, for that night, that distant night, she was meeting Gricey Grice, who was playing the lead in the new touring show just come in and he was taking her out for a drink after.
Yes, and later, in the men’s stockroom, in amongst the military uniforms, against the wall, in the dark, the smell of stale sweat and old wool serge strong in their nostrils, and him still with his slap on, she was in his arms, one leg up, clinging to him tight, kissing him with her mouth open and her tongue out and her fingers in his thick wavy chestnut hair all clogged with oil, the pair of them panting, gasping, loudly striving for a more perfect union—
Dear god it was good then to be alive, and heaven itself – how did it go? Heaven itself a quick shag in the men’s stockroom.
– Where you want these, missus?
A youth in shirtsleeves and braces stood in the doorway clutching an armful of trousers. The older women in the room paid no attention but the girls flicked their eyes at him, exchanged glances, and him trying not to grin.
– Those my trousers? Hang them up over there, Jimmy. Esther, get them sorted, will you, dear, soon as you’ve finished you and Eunice can start with the fittings. We’ve got Mangan at twelve and then the Captain. Thank you, Jimmy, you can go now.
– Yes, Mrs Grice.
– Jimmy. You can go now.
Jimmy left. A bit later, as the girls laid out the trousers fetched in from the stockroom, Joan’s mind was again elsewhere. But this time she wasn’t thinking about hot nights in Watford with Gricey, but about that last conversation with Julius, about what was said between the two men before he fell down the back steps into the yard. She wasn’t a woman comfortable with vagueness and imprecision, Joan. She was never one to be satisfied with the misty outline of a thing. It mattered, for it was at her insistence that he’d gone to talk to the bloody man in the first place.
She’d been round there a few days before, in fact, having a cup of tea with Vera in the kitchen when in he came.
– Ah, Joan. Joan, he said, taking his gloves off, and then his wire-framed spectacles, so as to polish them. How are you, my dear?
– Getting by, said Joan.
No smile, of course. It was only Gricey ever got her smile. The teeth, of course. But how calm he was, she thought, how composed, how bloody regal, as he settled at his kitchen table, with his heavy-lidded eyes and his long yellow hands, as though he were a gentleman butcher, or the son of one. Butchers were important men in London then what with the meat ration. Here’s a man might sell you a nice bit of tenderloin out the back of the shop if you treated him right, she thought. He’d produced instead what he called a nice drop of claret from under the sink and offered the women a glass. Where’d he get that then? On the fiddle. On the black. He’d crossed his legs and allowed one beige suede slipper to dangle from a silk-socked foot. The trouser leg had risen above the sock to reveal a hairless white calf. Vera once told her mother that Julius had three
nipples, he’d shown them to her the night of the Doll’s House party. Joan had noticed something else that was strange about this awful man her daughter had married. At times in the late afternoon that winter, with the fading of the day, a faint shimmer of sunlight would seem to gather around his pale blond head. It created a halo, of sorts. As though he wore a crown of light.
But a bloody halo, thought Joan, when the last of the sun came drifting through the kitchen window of the house in Pimlico, the three of them drinking claret, talking for all the world as though nothing had happened, nothing had changed, Gricey was just – elsewhere. Later, when Joan was leaving, Vera reminded her she wanted to see the play again. Joan was reluctant, to say the least of it, but Vera wanted her to come. And what Vera wanted, Vera generally got.
– Esther! Pay attention to what you’re doing, please.
– Yes, Mrs Grice.
Joan was standing in the door of her office, face white as chalk and her eyes like hot coals, red at the rims.
– I don’t know where they find you girls these days. Where do they find you, Esther?
– Don’t know, I’m sure, Mrs Grice.
– Don’t know much, do you, child?
Esther flushed puce, poor thing, and stared at her fingers as she fed thin silk under a flickering needle. Joan went back to her desk, thinking, how am I to find out what he said, the cunt? And poor Gricey – to die in a rage. What kind of a way to go is that? She’d go round and see him again, that Julius Glass, break his bloody windows for him.
2
IT HAD BEEN a bad year anyway. Oh, an awful year, even if it was barely three weeks old. Still not enough to eat, and last summer, that was 1946, of course, the year of the big march, they’d put bread on the ration, and the war already over! Magnificent in victory, oh yes – and bankrupt. Morally magnificent and economically broke. Exhausted. Oh, England. Smog, ruins, drab clothes, bad food, bomb craters and rats. There was work to be had – in demolition. Someone said, some writer whose name we can never remember, that England was made of coal and surrounded by fish so why were we always so cold and hungry? And it’s not to mention the electric going off all the time so the blackouts were worse than in the Blitzkrieg, though at least you didn’t smell gas in the streets like after a bomb when it came up from the broken pipes. No more bloody bombs anyway. But after all that, oh, the endless sacrifices and all the rest – were we rid of the fascists?
We were not. Oh no. The Blackshirts that got banged up during the war under Regulation 18b – sympathy for enemy powers – they were back out on the streets. Joan used to see them on her way home and was glad her parents weren’t alive to witness it. They marched through the East End three abreast, they held public meetings, they papered walls with swastikas, spewing hatred like they’d never been gone, like there hadn’t even been a war, which they’d lost. Of course there was trouble. Fights broke out and people got hurt, hardly surprising. No, these were active fascists, selling their newspapers outside Tube stations, and of course it was worst in the East End, that’s where the Jews lived, Joan being one of them, her father a tailor who’d settled in London end of the last century, from eastern Europe, and raised his family in Stepney. Poverty, overcrowding, violence and political dissent, this is what we knew Stepney for, and Jews. And that’s where the fascists held their meetings. All over the East End in fact, men on platforms with bullhorns shouting for the expulsion of what they now had to call ‘aliens’. Telling us Hitler didn’t go far enough, didn’t finish the job. If you can believe it. In 1946.
The Sunday previous Joan had once again summoned her resolve and gone to see Julius but he was out with Gustl Herzfeld, or Auntie Gustl as some of us knew her, lord knows why. Julius’ house was a thin one with pointed gables and trees in front, late Victorian, built of yellow London brick stained black with coal dust. It was just a few steps from Sutherland Terrace, or what was left of it. It was on the corner of a short block of mews houses, Lupus Mews that was, not far from the Victoria railway yards. But Vera was home, and when they were settled in the kitchen Joan asked her how she was getting on, and that’s when Vera told her she’d moved up to the attic.
– No!
– Oh yes.
They were in the kitchen having a cup of tea, it was the warmest room, of course. Like so many London houses near where the bombs once fell it couldn’t be kept clean, for the soot would pour down the chimney and the carpets weren’t bright and the brasses didn’t shine, and it was dark, so many boards in the windows where the panes were smashed. And draughty. Joan kept her coat on but Vera seemed not to notice the cold. She was in a black sweater that nicely showed off her bosom, and what with her milky skin and long black shiny hair, which she usually wore up, she was turning into really a very lovely young woman, more so every day, that’s what her mother thought, apart from the rings under her eyes. Nice teeth too, unlike some. But yes, she’d moved out of the marital bedroom, and a bit soon for that, thought Joan, though she didn’t say it, of course. Vera nodded, rueful, amused. There was a bathroom up there with a bathtub and a toilet, what else did a girl need?
– You need a proper husband, that’s what you need, said Joan.
Vera looked at her teacup and said quietly that Julius thought she might be having a relapse.
– You think I am?
– No, dear, you’ve lost your father, that’s all. And you need a job. What you up for?
– Not much out there, Mum.
– Not what I heard.
She was highly strung, Vera herself admitted that much. There’d been that touch of hysteria a couple of years ago but she’d been fine for a while now, until she lost her father. Joan felt badly about it. She knew it was all her fault because when Julius phoned her, and told her Gricey had had a heart attack and was in an ambulance on his way to Edward VII, she told him she didn’t want Vera at the hospital, she couldn’t cope with her and Gricey too. So when Vera came home and he told her that her father had had a heart attack and was in Edward VII, of course she wanted to go to him at once. That’s when Julius locked the front door and pleaded with her not to go. So she tried to climb out the window and he stopped her, and that’s when she lost her temper and threw a glass at him and only just missed his head. Joan thought, I should have taught her to throw straight.
Julius was still worried about her, Vera then said, staring at her hands, turning her fingers over to examine her nails, which she’d painted scarlet. Joan said nothing, but oh, this gifted girl of mine, she thought, up in the attic? What would Gricey have said about that? So she offered her the empty room in the flat, the one that used to be her father’s. She felt she had to.
– No, I can’t, said Vera.
– I don’t see why not, love.
– I just can’t. It’s Daddy’s room. Anyway—
– Anyway what?
– I want to live in this house.
That was all she’d say. What sense was her mother to make of it? Presumably she wanted to be near Julius because she loved him. But didn’t she see it as a humiliation?
– Mum, you must understand, she said. He’s my husband.
– Yes, said Joan, I suppose he is that.
– Anyway I want to sleep in the attic.
Just like your dad, Joan thought, rather sleep alone. She was actually relieved. Better this way, she thought. She needed to be by herself in the flat for when he came home.
After they’d had a cup of tea Vera took her mother upstairs and showed her the room. You could hear the trains late at night, she said, the clanking and shunting as the railwaymen uncoupled the wagons. Intimacy could be suffocating, Joan thought, when what a woman wanted was distance from a husband, specially a husband like bloody Julius Glass. There’d never been an intimacy problem for her and Gricey, she then thought, whatever the sleeping arrangements. Oh no, nothing like that.
But upstairs in that tall, thin, ugly yellow house, down the end of a gloomy mews, in an attic, that’s where my daughter wants to live
now? This was her thought. There was an old bathroom up there, with an ancient lavatory with a wooden seat, a deafening flush, wake the house, it would – poor Auntie Gustl – and a bathtub with claw feet and a plughole, the porcelain surround stained ochre. That’s where she washed her smalls now. The water came out rusty from the tap and lukewarm at best for the boiler was in the cellar, a very long way down, and who had the coal for a good hot bath these days? It was a small bathtub and Vera was a big girl. She told her mother it was like getting into a child’s coffin.
– Don’t say that, love.
The last coffin Joan had seen was Gricey’s, of course. Vera laid a hand on her arm and said, Mum, don’t be silly.
– But where do you hang your frocks?
– In here.
There was a door between the beams and when Joan opened it there was only darkness. Vera switched the light on, a single dim bulb hanging off a rafter. It was not much help. This was the attic proper, a narrow slanting space that ran the length of the house under the eaves. Joan stepped in, sniffing, her head bowed. In the gloom she saw piled up cabin trunks and suitcases with shipping labels, and cobwebs glistening in whatever wintry light got in through the dormers, and everywhere dust. There was also a stack of paintings in the back there, stretchered and with a sheet thrown over them. These would be Gustl’s, self-portraits mostly. It wasn’t insulated and the air was chill and a little bad; dead rat somewhere. From nails in the rafters between the roof beams Vera’s frocks rustled slightly on their wooden hangers. Joan was horrified. Had she learned nothing?
– What about the moths, dear? And the damp? There’ll be mould before you know it. And sunlight, oh it’ll bleach the colour out of these things in no time. Oh dear no, you can’t ruin them like this.