Chapter Three

“Come on,” Joyce said, “or we’ll never get there.”

“There’s no rush,” Jack said, “I can’t see any bloody fire.” It was a Saturday morning in mid-July, and he was standing waist-deep in a mob of small boys, his arms slackly extended as if he were wading out to sea. “Anyway, don’t you talk! You kept me waiting long enough!”

At seven o’clock that morning he had been awakened in bed by the sound of Joyce moving about the house with bucket and broom. An hour later, at breakfast time, she had still been busy, greeting him with a smile at once shamed and pleased, and saying, “Oh, look how you’ve caught me,” as he surveyed her dishevelled hair and smudged face. For two hours she had kept him waiting while she finished the housework, listening with passive sullenness to the commands issued by her mother (who sat, as usual, popping lumps of sugar into her mouth and presiding over a never-empty teapot) but setting about the ensuing work with an air of energetic relish. Washed and dressed at last, she had joined him on the doorstep to set out on their shopping expedition, when she had noticed that the knocker was tarnished, and with a “Tss” of impatience she had dashed indoors for cloth and polish and cleaned the knocker before starting out. She had answered his protests with a severe, “Dirty knocker, dirty wife! I won’t have them talking!”

“Where you been?” Jack asked the boys, who had come thundering from nowhere into the sunlit quiet of the street.

“Pictures. Children’s Club. Every Sa’day morning.”

“Club, eh? What they show you? Cowboys?”

Out of the babble, a voice louder than the others. “Yuss. And Superman. An’ tadpoles changin’ into frogs.”

Another voice. “Yuss, Jack, and the man, he comes out on the stage and we all promise to be good.”

Another voice, proudly, “An’ we cut up all the seats.”

Jack fished in his pockets for pennies, displaying a grin of vacuous contentment. The small boys of Lamb Street, a distinct and important grouping in its community, worshipped him as a hero returned, as a man who bore the stamp of action on his hard-hewn red face, and as a philanthropist of insane generosity. He rejoiced in their clamorous adoration; it was another reminder that he was at home.

“Who’d you think you are?” Joyce asked, as he distributed pennies. “Lord Nuffield? You save your money. I’ll show you where to spend it.”

“What?” he scoffed. “On gypsies? You’re always talking about watching the pennies, and when that gypsy comes round yesterday you give her a bob for a measly twopenny bunch of lavender.”

“That’s different. She’d have put a curse on us if I hadn’t.”

“Give us the basket,” he said. They were walking towards Chapel Market.

“It’s all right. You can take it when it’s full.” She slipped her free arm through his.

People often asked Joyce, “Well, dear, how does it feel to be engaged?” She would reply, “Oh, lovely,” but the truth — which surprised her after all her expectations — was that she felt little except a faint astonishment at her own achievement; an achievement of which she looked on Jack, not without warmth and pride, as a sort of human trophy. The more actively the two of them made their preparations for marriage, the more she was excited by the prospect of the home which she needed for her own fulfilment; and the brighter this vision became, the closer she clung to the man who was to be its most essential furnishing. To this grateful recognition of his function she gave the name of love.

She was one of those plain girls whom love makes beautiful. It had given her a new serenity of carriage, and had dispelled the frown of suspicion from her face. She had began to display an assiduous artfulness in the use of cosmetics of which even her mother had not thought her capable. She had relaxed her efforts a little in the enervating atmosphere of the recent heat wave, but Jack’s mysterious bout of half-heartedness had startled her out of her complacency. She was as alert as a huntress once more, and felt rewarded by Jack’s increased attentiveness.

They bought the local newspaper each week to study the ‘Flats to Let’ columns. The serious business of buying a home was still ahead, but they had already embarked upon the exciting hobby of bargain-hunting, and a stock of towels, crockery and household gadgets was beginning to accumulate in Joyce’s bedroom cupboard.

Their future home was the one real link between them. She refused to share his other interests. When he talked of sport, she blinked meanly as if at the mention of a rival. When he read items from the newspaper she said, “Oh, put it away! They only write those papers to make you miserable! Lucky you can’t believe a word they say! What’s my horoscope today?” She was uninterested in the dreams of bettering himself to which he still clung. “You stick to what you’ve got,” she said, “and think yourself lucky to have a steady job.” “But a chap’s got to try and get on,” he protested. “You stay where you are,” she replied, “it’s safer. If you don’t climb up, you can’t fall down.” On the other hand, she would talk joyfully for an hour about an egg-beater, and would let out a wail of annoyance if his attention strayed.

It had been one of the great days of her life when Jack had turned his bank account into a joint one. She had suggested nervously that the Post Office was good enough, but he had insisted on doing it in style. She had added her savings to his, making a total of nearly four hundred pounds, and he had arranged with his bank manager that cheques bearing either of their two signatures would be honoured. The crowning glory came when he gave Joyce a cheque book of her own. A cheque book in Lamb Street was a dazzling rarity. Joyce took it to work and showed it off more proudly than her engagement ring, and Mrs. Wakerell borrowed it to impress the neighbours with Jack’s position in the world. Sometimes at nights Joyce sat on the edge of her bed looking at the cheque book as if it were a picture of her beloved.

Their shared hopes bound her to him more closely than did his awkward love-making and enabled her, in their nightly comas on the couch, to relax in his arms without feeling any of the repulsion that only a little while ago a man’s touch would have induced in her. This repulsion was the result of her previous experiences. Boys had often come after Joyce in her adolescence, but they had always been the blotchy and earnest ones, never the big, audacious lads whom she secretly admired. She had let these suitors take her to films and dances, but shame, and the dreams fostered by the twopenny novelettes she read (‘Some day He’ll come along’) had prevented her from encouraging their timid advances. Despite her mother’s nagging, she had remained unmarried, acquiring a contempt for all the young men who courted her and a shrinking fear of ‘real’ men, as she called those at whom she looked with longing.

When she was twenty-one an episode occurred that robbed her of the last of her confidence. She had met a boy from Chapel Street at a dance, and they had gone out together several times. He was a costermonger, and what she called ‘common’ in his ways, but he had a reckless look, a fine laugh, broad shoulders, and he was earning good money. She worshipped him, and for the first time let herself dream of marriage. One night she hastened to meet him at the Angel. Her impatience impelled her towards the rendezvous a few minutes early, and as she approached their meeting-place she heard two men talking.

“...face like Joe Oxenbold’s mare,” she heard one of them say.

“Garn—!” and she halted, feeling sick as she recognized the other voice coming from the dark shop doorway. “They’re all beauties in the dark. It’s what’s under their skirts I go for, not what keeps their — in’ ears apart.” There was no mistake. It was the voice of the man she was to meet. “It‘s these plain ones are the best. Hard up for it, they are. I can tell you, I’ve had a few. And grateful for it, that’s the best of it —.”

She had fled, and since then she had stayed at home, only going out with other girls, her face set and sulky whenever her mother lectured her about getting married. As time went by she became more lonely, and in consequence more irritable and resentful. Despair and self-pity corroded her looks and made her act pitiably whenever she came face to face with a man. She had grown so fearful of rejection that to protect herself against a fresh hurt she always hastened to be the first to rebuff. On the few occasions when she met a man she liked, she was horrified to find that she could not prevent herself from instinctively lashing out and antagonising him.

Three years of this had been like slow torture. She reminded herself of it whenever she felt downhearted at the comparison between Jack and the men of her dreams. If it had not been for the memory of it, she might have been scared away from Jack by her friend Maureen’s comment, “I don’t think much of him. Looks like a big lump of mutton to me,” — for she was so imbued with the fear of others that she was capable of giving up someone she loved merely because the neighbours sneered at him, or even because she imagined that they might do so behind her back. However, her fear of a return to the misery of solitude overcame these spells of halfheartedness, and whenever doubt awoke in her she repressed it furiously. Her worst moments of panic were followed by moods of extravagant exultancy when she startled Jack with her eagerness.

The market, waiting for the afternoon rush, was like a placid stream disturbed in places by little pools of noise and activity between which the early shoppers drifted. Joyce, hanging on Jack’s arm and steering him between clusters of people, said, “This doesn’t change, does it?”

“Not really,” said Jack. He looked about him as if for something that was eluding him. “I tell you what I do notice. The babies. I mean, it seems like only yesterday I went away. Not to you, like, you were a kid at school then, but it does to me. I tell you, it gives you the wind up the way time flies. Well, I mean, you look at the difference. Pasty faces the babies used to have, always something or other wrong with them. Now look at ’em — bloody little giants, I tell you, they sit up in their prams like bloody royalty going by, and they look at you with their big clear eyes as if they was laughing at you. I reckon they’re born brainy, the babies nowadays.”

“It’s all this orange juice and cod liver oil.”

“And these young mothers, they’re the ones that tickle me.”

“Oh, are they?”

“Gah way! You know what I mean! I mean, I don’t know where they got it from. Proper high-steppers they are, heads up, push their prams as if they was made of gold, talk like ladies, wear smashin’ dresses — I mean, everyone’s hard up, but nobody looks poor any more. Bloody funny I call it.”

“I wish you wouldn’t b— so much,” said Joyce, “I’ve told you before. You’re not in the Army now. Quick!” Something had caught her attention, and she pressed Jack’s arm urgently, “Let’s cross the road.”

Jack, always slow to react, only halted stupidly. “What’s up?” Someone she loathed was bearing down on them, and it was too late to avoid him.

“Bernie Whiteflower!” Jack cried joyously “What you doin’ off work on a Saturday morning?”

“Five days a week,” said Bernie, “no use knockin’ up the old overtime these days. They only take it off you for income tax. Me work for the Government? That’ll be the day.” He grinned at Joyce, “Wotcho, popsy-dooley! Bought the ol’ bed yet?”

Joyce gave him a tight-lipped little nod and looked away. She squeezed Jack’s arm beseechingly, but he lingered, and the two men talked. It sickened Joyce to see them together. Jack had stepped off the pavement and stood before Bernie like a little boy, looking up at him, respectfully attentive, with a silly tentative grin on his face. Bernie towered above them both, his attitude relaxed and indulgent but indicative, like his voice, of command. She was filled with hatred for him. Come away — she tried to say silently to Jack: it was maddening that he did not receive the unspoken message that she was projecting at him with such intensity — Come away, quickly! Can’t you see what a fool you look beside him? Don’t you understand how hard you make it for me to love you? Oh, why can’t you stand up differently? Why can’t you look at him like an equal? Why don’t you answer him confidently and strongly?

She could stand it no longer. “Come on,” she muttered, “we can’t stand all day.”

“In a minute,” said Jack.

“Come on!” It was like a little snarl, and she hauled at him so fiercely, leaning away from him with her head down, that he followed her in a sidelong shamble. “Here!” he cried. He grinned deprecatorily up at Bernie. “Women!” he mumbled, as the gap between them widened. “Be seein’ you, Bern!”

“Ta-ra!” Bernie called. “Look arter yourself. Keep your ’ands on your pockets!” Joyce’s only response was a brief, bitter glare over her shoulder.

“Just having a nice old jaw there,” Jack said in a mild but aggrieved tone, “can’t see what the rush was all about.”

“That hooligan!” she snapped, and walked on in silence, holding his arm tightly and frowning down at the ground. She could still feel Bernie watching them. She knew, without looking round, that his stare was insolent, amused, knowing. She was frantic to get out of his sight, and hurried Jack round the corner. “Here, where we off to now? There’s no shops down here.”

“Never mind,” she said, just keep walking.” After a little pause she tried to explain the impulse. “I came over a bit funny. All those people. The air’s fresher here. No, I’m all right, let’s just walk for a bit.” She wanted to root out of herself the shame she had felt at the comparison between the two men, the terrible little seeds of contempt for Jack that so easily found soil within her and that must not be allowed to sprout.

They were walking in the roadway, in a broad, pleasant thoroughfare whose terraced pavement rose until it was six feet above their heads. On the roadward side the pavement was railed, and on the other side there were older and more ornate railings behind which lay big old houses, with long shaggy lawns and tall trees that spread clouds of foliage over gardens and pavement alike.

A babble from the pavement attracted their attention. A knot of people was gathered ahead of them. The street rang with the sound of running feet as more hastened to join the crowd. Doors were opening on the other side of the street. Coveys of shrieking children burst out of a hundred hiding places. “Here, I say —” said Jack.

A woman came running past them, her face aghast. “She’ll kill herself!” she gasped.

They turned to stare after her when they heard someone else shout, “Call the fire brigade!”

“Where’s the police?” said an angry voice behind them. “Never about when you want ’em.”

“Come on,” a man urged his wife, “or we’ll miss it.”

“What’s up?”Jack asked him. “Dunno,” said the man, and hurried on.

“Ah, look!” Joyce was standing with her head craned back, pointing straight up as if at the sky. She spoke in a squeal of joyous wonderment. “Look, up there, — ah, poor darling!”

The pavement was crammed with people. Boys balanced on the railings. Below, in the roadway, a large crowd was already gathering.

Jack peered up into the green gloom of a big sycamore tree that grew just inside one of the front gardens and leaned across the pavement. “Can’t see nothing.”

“It’s a kitten,” Joyce explained, “oh, a poor darling tiny little pussy.”

People were trying to call the cat down, prowling and meowing round the base of the tree as if they had themselves all suddenly been transformed into enormous and amorous tomcats. A huge builder’s labourer was mewing in a treble key of incredible altitude. An Armoured Corps sergeant stood in a strange devotional attitude, with both arms raised above his head, rubbing his fingertips together and bellowing in a monstrous caterwaul, “Waooow, myooooo, oy, down here, this way, Waaaohw!”

Joyce and Jack heard little conversational groups forming all round them. In some, the main theme was sympathy, “Ah, poor little mite, look at it, half-dead with fright!” In others, indignation was paramount, “They ought to make people look after ’em, that’s what I say, same as dogs, or children. Wouldn’t like to see one of your kids up there, would you?” In others, reminiscence raged, “This is nothing. Remember when Doctor Naidoo’s monkey broke loose? Five days he led ’em a dance up there on the roofs. Helped himself to everything he wanted out of the houses. I saw him one day perched up on a chimney pot waving a pair of bloomers. Who says they’re not human?”

Advisers abounded. One man kept shouting, “Find out its name. You’ll never get it down till you do.”

A woman came running out of a house bearing a frying pan in which were a pair of kippers still sizzling. “My dinner these are,” she announced, holding the frying pan up seductively beneath the cat, “Hey, pussy pussy, here pussy pussy, come down and eat lovely kippers. Pussy pussy pussy pussy!”

“It’s the breeze,” said a man, “he can’t smell ’em.”

“Flap your jacket,” someone shouted, “send the smell up!”

Another voice, “’E’s got the breeze-up already!”

The cat, a little ball of grey fur, glared down from thirty feet above in terror and defiance.

Some boys began to throw stones. Jack shouted, “Here, the poor little bleeder ’ll fall down if you frighten it.” A bald-headed man past whose ear Jack had shouted turned, glowered in mute resentment and returned to his attitude of contemplation. The boys went on throwing stones.

A fresh altercation broke out above. The householder whose garden had been invaded by the crowd was protesting volubly and calling for the police. There were shouts of, “Shut him up!” “Break his windows!” “Put his lights out!” A woman kept screaming, “Heartless brute!” and the householder retreated over his trampled flowerbeds with the bricklayer’s labourer shouting after him.

A bull-terrier arrived and rushed at the tree in one frantic leap after another, barking and growling in a blood-curdling manner. A woman let out an apprehensive wail of, “Oh Gawd!” as if her only baby were at the top of the tree. The boys began to stone the dog. The dog’s owner arrived and dashed in among the boys, laying about him with his leash. For yards around the crowd dissolved into an angry swirl, amid a hubbub of yells, scuffling feet and ferocious barking.

Jack said despairingly, “Here, this is a right turnout. What about the poor old cat?” Nobody took any notice.

Joyce realised, with a sinking heart, that he was not the sort of man who could dominate in a crowd.

More shouting behind them. A six-ton lorry and trailer had come to a standstill in the crowd and the driver was leaning out of the cab exchanging insults with the spectators. A car pulled up behind the lorry and sounded its horn repeatedly, and the noise, already deafening, was augmented by a tremendous and prolonged chorus from the crowd of, “shu-u-u-RUP!”

A voice was still repeating, “Find out ’is name, I tell you!”

“It’s Mrs. Ballard’s Tibbles.”

“No it’s not. Tibbles ’as got a white spot on his nose.”

“Well, so has this one.”

“Garn, you can’t see from here.”

“Who can’t?”

“You can’t.”

“Who says I can’t?”

“I say you can’t.”

“Wanna make something of it?”

“Here!” Jack pulled his jacket off, thrust it into Joyce’s arms, pushed the bald-headed man aside and scrambled up on to the pavement. “Mind out the way,” he shouted, “too much bloody wind and water round here.” Joyce said to herself — her weak and shaken voice had no chance of reaching him — “Your best suit!” and watched, dumbfounded, while Jack made his way into the front garden, climbed the railings and tried to get a foothold on the tree-trunk. He could not get a purchase, and the lowest branch was out of his reach. “Here,” he appealed, “give us a bunk-up, someone.” The bricklayer’s labourer climbed up on to the railings and leaned forward against the tree. “’Ere! Ow! Stuff a duck!” he yelled as Jack scrambled up him and planted both feet on his shoulders. “Take your time, mate! No ’urry! Don’t mind me, I’m only the bloody doormat, I am!” Jack got both hands round the branch and pulled himself up, to the accompaniment of a loud and sarcastic, “Hooray!” from the crowd.

Joyce was dazed with incredulity and pride. She could hardly believe that Jack had left her side, it had all happened so quickly. She could feel her heart fluttering, and she cried, “Oh, Jack! Oh, Jack!” less out of anxiety for him than to draw the crowd’s attention to the fact that she was his companion. He went crashing up through the green tangle, making a lot of noise and little progress. She could see him struggling time and again to free his clothes, his face scarlet with the heat and screwed up with embarrassment each time he halted, baffled, in the crook of a branch. The crowd was divided between approbation and derision. From here and there, a cry arose of, “Go it, mate!” “Good boy!” “That branch on the right!” “No, not that one, it won’t stand your weight!” A group of youths sent up a monotonous chorus of, “Git ON wiv it!” A small boy put his fingers down his throat and warbled, “Oolooloolooloolooloo! I’m Tarzan the Ape Man!” Other people took up the cry, “Go on, Tarzan!” Jack sat on a branch and grinned stupidly down at them. A voice roared, “Chuck us down a coconut, Jacko!” and again, “Take yer shoes orf and ’old on wiv yer toes!” There was a perilous rustling from above as the cat retreated along its branch. Jack appealed to it with conciliatory noises and finger-tip-rubbing. He almost lost his balance, and the crowd sent up a derisive cheer.

A woman said, “Making an exhibition of himself, that’s all he’s doing! Fancy getting up there for a cat! Vermin, that’s all they are. I’d drown the lot.”

Joyce flamed with feminine fury but, obstinately ladylike, she checked herself and ejaculated a loud, “Huh!”

The woman turned on her. “Who you ha-ing at, Lady Love-a-Duck?”

Joyce answered with a demonstrative toss of the head and the withering remark, “Some people!”

“Some people are as good as some other people,” the woman retorted, “some people want to put that in their pipe and smoke it!”

“Huh!”

“Don’t you huh me, or I’ll have your hair down, double quick, I tell you!”

“I can huh if I like.”

“Not at me you can’t!”

“Oh?” Joyce forgot about being a lady and became a woman rampant in defence of her man. “Who’s going to stop me?” she shouted, “You and whose army?”

Somebody shouted, “He’s got it!” Joyce looked up, and saw Jack sitting astride the topmost branch, with the kitten squirming in his right hand. He unbuttoned his shirt and stuffed the kitten inside. She saw him grimace, and he shouted, “Here, he’s christened me!” Laughter and more cheers from the crowd.

He climbed down, his descent even less impressive than the upward journey. When he was half-way down, the crowd began to thin out as those who had been hoping for broken bones drifted, disappointed, back to their houses. There was a subdued babble among the rest and a few claps, but nobody showed much inclination to give Jack a hero’s welcome. The show was over. He dropped to the ground. The bricklayer helped him to his feet.

A voice, “Good boy!”

Another, “Give ’im a peanut!”

Another, “Give ’im a pennorth and sod the expense!”

Another, “Wait till your mum sees you!”

His face was covered with scratches, his clothes torn, his hands filthy. He came limping back to Joyce, and she cried, “Oh, Jack, you are a sight.”

He produced the kitten from inside his wet shirt. “Here he is,” he said, fondling the creature, “pretty little nipper, isn’t he? I reckon we might as well keep him after all that caper.”

The bald-headed man turned round. “Here,” he said, “that’s my cat if you don’t mind!” He lifted the kitten out of Jack’s hands and walked away.

“Well,”Joyce gasped, “Some people!”

Jack’s grin was more shamefaced than ever. He looked as if he wanted to escape from her as well as from the crowd. “Never mind!” she said. She hooked her arm through his and steered him proudly homeward, with the air of one displaying a prize exhibit, through what remained of the crowd.