IT was actually another fortnight before the grand opening. Dottie realised it would take at least that to have everything ready, and also to lay on the opening itself, which involved inviting ‘the right people’ down from London. I would have thought of none of that, of course; I in my ignorance imagined one simply opened the doors of one’s shop one day and hoped people passing would come in to buy. But Dottie knew all the wrinkles. She not only sent very grand-looking invitations to literally scores of people, in and out of the trade, but spent the better part of the final week up in town, renewing contacts as she called it. I couldn’t resist asking if it were not distasteful to her, having to spend time with the corrupt, over-sophisticated city-society that she despised; she refused to be drawn, however, and simply said, ‘I’ve no principles against using them and their glamour and their money. It’s all they’re fit for, after all—commercial exploitation.’
During the week she was away, I was so shockingly lonely—having given up both my bread-and-butter jobs, I was at home alone all the time—that before two days had passed, I had no alternative but to ring Henry up and beg him to come for a meal. He was very busy—Dottie having left him plenty to do in and around the shop—but he kindly came in for lunch one morning on his way to pick up some stuff from a nearby blacksmith’s. As usual, his quiet presence restored my sense of proportion. I told him about going to America. I hadn’t mentioned this to anybody for months and it had somehow lost some of its tangibility for me—I felt I had to talk about it again to re-solidify it before it turned into a chimera and wafted away.
Henry watched me steadily as I outlined my plan, and then, after chewing his way through three mouthfuls, asked: ‘But what’ll happen about the shop?’
‘I always told Dottie I could only come in on it very temporarily.’
‘But if you go, she’ll be left to run the place all by herself.’
‘What do you mean? She’ll have you.’
Henry drank some beer and said slowly, ‘Well, but not indefinitely.’
Taken aback, I said, ‘Why not? I thought—’
‘Well, you know, I never really thought of this as being—forever.’
This put a very new complexion on things, and I thought about this new prospective hole in Dottie’s business, not to mention personal, future for a while and then asked, ‘Does Dottie know about this?’
‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I’ve told her.’
‘But surely you wouldn’t pull out in less than—a few years, I mean if it’s a success?’
‘I don’t know exactly when I shall pull out.’
‘Will you take your money out as well?’
Henry grinned and said, ‘No, only myself.’
‘Even so … it means so much to her. If we both walked out on her—’
‘Well, you might change your mind. In any case, there’s no reason to talk as if she’d be left entirely alone in the world. She could find a partner—’
‘You were the one who was startled when I said a few minutes ago that I was leaving in the autumn. Why not admit you were counting on me staying, just as I was counting on you?’
He got up from the table and took his beer to the window. His four-square figure looked remarkably solid and masculine, standing there in outline, and in one of those disquieting flashes of disloyalty which I had lately experienced about Toby I compared Toby’s fragile-looking slender body to this stocky silhouette, and felt such a pang of sadness as I did so that I looked away and clenched my teeth. Such moments were quite involuntary, yet I paid for them as if I had willed them. What did they mean? Was I falling out of love with Toby? Had he, wherever he was, fallen out of love with me? I got some abstruse comfort from the unendurable sense of loss this very idea gave me.
‘Look,’ said Henry. ‘Dorothy’s not a baby, though I know she behaves a bit like it sometimes. There’s no real need for either of us to fret about her. She’s taken care of herself through some tough times before this, I imagine, and she can do it again if she has to. It’s just … just that I wouldn’t want to be the one who brought it on her.’ He turned back into the room and sat down by the fire, getting out his pipe. ‘Anyway, she’s been warned—both of us have warned her. There’s not much more we can do, since she decided to go ahead anyway.’
‘And what about the shop itself? Do you think it’ll succeed?’
This time he didn’t answer for a very long time. At last he finished fiddling with the pipe, put it in his mouth and raised himself a little in the chair to get out his matches. His eyes met mine and were rather grim. ‘No,’ he said flatly. ‘I don’t think it stands a dog’s chance.’
I was shattered. And so surprised I didn’t know how to react. I simply stared at him.
‘I’m telling you this,’ he said, ‘because you’ve asked me, and because I think one of you—you, it’ll have to be, since she couldn’t face it and it wouldn’t be fair to make her face it, right from the start—ought to know that—well, it’s a lovely idea, it ought to go, but it won’t. It can’t. Not here—not now. Maybe if she’d agree to rely more on factory goods … but that’d be to take away the whole point of it for her. The way she’s set on doing it … well, these days there aren’t the sources and there isn’t the market for them. Why does she think thatched roofs and hand-carved rocking-horses and patchwork quilts are practically obsolete? Because people don’t want ’em any more, that’s why; they prefer tiles and pedal-cars and candlewick. You can’t revitalise a taste for old things, however beautiful, when it’s been overtaken by a taste for new stuff, however hideous. Oh, here and there, perhaps. But not enough. The hand-made stuff takes too long, it costs too much, there isn’t enough of it. And even if there were, there wouldn’t be enough people who’d want it.’ He mumbled the last of this through his pipe-stem and then settled back, blowing out a long thin stream of aromatic smoke. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I’m afraid as a scheme it’s doomed to failure.’
Utterly bewildered, I could hardly think what to ask first, but settled for the obvious. ‘Then why on earth are you letting her go ahead with it?’
‘Because she wants to so badly. Because it’s damned well worthwhile. Because, at certain times and in certain ways, I’m a ruddy fool.’
He’d said it was preferable to tell me the truth than Dottie; but in fact I found it almost as hard to face. I was sure he was right; I’d suspected it from the start, and besides, when Henry said something, one instinctively believed it. And I felt a bitter disappointment. But I felt even more worried about Dottie, because now I understood very well Henry’s understated anxiety about how she would manage alone. It’s one thing to leave someone with the problems of running a successful enterprise on her hands; but to leave her to face a failure and to pick up the pieces by herself—that’s something different.
‘If you’re right,’ I said, ‘and I still hope to God you’re not, then one or other of us must stay until—well, until the crash. Hell, how appalling to be talking like this before the thing even starts! I do wonder if you shouldn’t have stopped her before she’d got in so deep.’
‘I wonder too, believe me.’
‘You were sure, right from scratch?’
‘Look, I’m not omniscient. How can I be sure? I hope I’m wrong.’
‘And if you’re right, you’ll lose all your money,’ I remembered suddenly.
‘Well … lose it … no. Losing means wasting, getting nothing back. I won’t have it any more, that’s true. But it will have gone on something, and somebody, that matters.’
I let the ‘somebody’ pass, though I got a secret warm pleasure from it. ‘Why is a man like you so keen on something like this—a piece of anachronistic feminine quixotry that most sensible, practical men would just dismiss as pure folly?’
He threw back his head suddenly and roared with laughter. It was a rare and marvellous thing to hear Henry really losing himself in laughter. ‘Anachronistic feminine quixotry!’ he shouted. ‘Oh, that’s great, that is! Yes, indeed. Yes, indeed! That’s exactly what most sensible practical men would call it.’ He leaned over and patted my arm, his eyes full of appreciation and humour. ‘Jane … you’re very good for me.’
‘Well, that’s odd. I always feel it’s the other way round.’
He leant back again and looked at the ceiling, one forefinger resting on each side of his pipe-bowl. ‘You see,’ he said, ‘I’m a reactionary. Not so much politically, but constitutionally. I react away from things. This whole business is in the nature of a strong reaction—that’s the only way I can possibly explain it, even to myself.’
‘A reaction against what?’
‘Well, from two things. One’s private. The other’s what I’ve been busy at for the past twenty years of my life. More than twenty … I was only seventeen when I went into my dad’s business, and I’ve been hard at it ever since until he retired last year—not one moment too soon to suit me, I may say. God knows how I stuck it so long.’
‘What was it?’
He looked at me, his eyes twinkling. ‘Don’t laugh. A shop! Several, as a matter of fact. We built up quite a little chain, mostly in South London. Dad started off with one little store in Dalton, and I started off behind the counter, as delivery boy, van driver, then buyer, branch manager … in the end I was running most of it for Dad. He was a good employer, and the whole thing was a steadily increasing success. When he sold out last year, he cleared something like £75,000 net profit. Of which he generously gave me five. I suppose he was right in a way. He said it was pretty cushy severance-pay, and a good pension by any standards for a chap of my age … I didn’t resent it, or at least I wouldn’t have done if I hadn’t privately known that that £5,000 was paying me for twenty years of soul-destroying work, of which, looking back on it now, I know that I hated every single day.’
‘And yet now you’re putting that money straight back into another shop.’
He nodded. ‘That’s right. But of a very different kind.’
‘What kind did your father have?’
He took the pipe out of his mouth and said succinctly, ‘Junk.’
‘Junk?’
‘Oh, not what you mean—not rags and bottles and old bedsteads, I think I might have quite enjoyed that. I mean real rubbish. Gew-gaws, trash. Tin ash-trays and table-napkin holders, cheap prints of girls with rosebud lips and chiffon dresses lying beside bright blue lakes surrounded by fairies, vases and tea-sets with flowers stamped on them, cutlery that bent and broke, plastic trays, plastic cruets, plastic waste-paper baskets, plastic lampshades, plastic doileys … Of course we had our better lines, too. Front-door chimes, plaster wall-plaques—very pricey, those can be—and a long list of “novelties”, things you hang in the windows of your car to cause accidents, musical cigarette-boxes that go wrong within a week, practical jokes, jewellery embellished by what my Dad cynically called “Irish rhinestones”, artificial flowers, brass nutcrackers shaped like girls’ legs …’
‘Enough!’ I begged. ‘It’s all perfectly clear to me now.’
‘Yes. Well. There you are,’ said Henry. ‘And what made it worse was, Dad gave me a pretty fair education beforehand. Nothing posh of course, he couldn’t afford it then—though no doubt Amanda will go to Eton, or whatever’s the female equivalent—very hot on education, my Dad. Gave me a taste for a bit of quality, and then surrounded me for twenty years with rubbish and never saw anything wrong. Three times I tried to get out, and three times he had heart attacks. Real ones … I never have known quite how he managed it. He always recovered completely as soon as I’d recanted. He’s a clever chap, my Dad is.’
‘I’ve heard of mothers doing that. Never fathers.’
‘It’s got nothing to do with gender. It’s widowed mothers who do it to only sons or daughters, and widowed fathers do it for the same reason.’
‘Loneliness?’
Fear of. Same thing.’ I suddenly thought how Father had gone on the drink after I’d left home pregnant. Was that a species of aborted moral blackmail, which he was too basically decent to actually bring to my attention?
‘You don’t like your father much, I gather,’ I remarked.
‘No, I hardly like him at all. But I love him,’ he said, with a lack of self-consciousness which was surprising. ‘Anyway he’s much nicer since he married Joanna. That’s my step-mother. She’s nearly thirty years younger than him. She’s marvellous and very attractive. Wouldn’t have minded marrying her myself. I even asked her once, but she was utterly honest about it. I had £5,000 and Dad had £70,000.’
‘How can she be marvellous if she’d do a thing like that?’ I asked indignantly. But Henry looked as if I’d disappointed him.
‘Here, don’t you be so silly, Jane! Joanna was 37 when she met Dad. She’d been trying for years and years to make a living on the stage. Security was what she was looking for, and she wasn’t ashamed to admit it. She put it to Dad quite straight—you make me safe and comfortable, she said, and I’ll make you a damned good wife, and even give you a baby if I can. Well, she could and she did, and Dad’s tickled pink. Dad and I, you know, we’d hardly spoken a word except in the way of business to each other for years until recently; but the atmosphere in that house is so happy that it’s a pleasure to go there. I think Joanna’s terrific, so lively and honest and warm, and Dad gets the overspill of my liking for her. We’re quite matey now, him and me. Funny how things happen.’
So it was that in this one conversation I learned more about Henry than in the three previous months. He was still just about the last person I’d ever have expected Dottie to fall for, and yet if she had I could completely sympathise. Sometimes I felt so fond of him myself it was almost like a kind of being in love.
Dottie returned, full of glad tidings. She’d had acceptances from a number of very ‘useful’ people, including the Vogue Shop-Hound, and a whole lot of other magazines, plus a string of ‘names’ which meant nothing to me but which she said had enabled her to set off a chain-reaction—on the strength of the names she had got the magazines interested, and vice-versa, though quite often, she said, she had been sort of buying on margin—mentioning a name to a magazine before she’d secured it, in the hope that the magazine’s ‘yes’ would inveigle the name. It usually worked. The guest-list for the opening was now so lengthy and impressive that I—and Henry too, I think—began to feel a little alarmed.
‘Are you sure they’re not going to get a disappointment when they’ve dragged themselves all the way down here?’ I asked nervously.
Dottie bridled as if I’d stabbed her. ‘Disappointment?’ she echoed. ‘They going to see wares they’ve never seen in all their lives. Anyone who’s disappointed is a mere clod who deserves to have had his journey for nothing.’
‘I hope the entertainment isn’t going to be purely aesthetic,’ said Henry somewhat dryly.
‘Don’t be silly,’ said Dottie.
It turned out she’d engaged one of the best caterers in the West End to do drinks and snacks. Henry blenched when he heard the amount of the estimate, but Dottie swept him aside. ‘Think big,’ she kept saying.
‘Have I any choice?’
‘Leave this to me, now, Henry. I know exactly what I’m about.’
‘You’re about to ruin me,’ he answered, more dryly than ever.
But Dottie had more news, which I must confess was of greater interest to me than anything connected with the shop could possibly have been. She waited to impart it until we were alone in the shop, frantically rearranging the displays to accommodate a last-minute delivery of hand-carved salad bowls and spoons from the old carpenter in Gloucester.
‘I saw Toby,’ she said without preamble.
I was relieved—overjoyed, almost—to feel my blood jump in my head.
‘Oh?’ I said.
‘What “oh”? Have you gone off him?’
‘No. Tell me.’
‘Well, I wondered, because … Actually I made a point of seeking him out. I looked up his new address in your book before I left.’
‘Why didn’t you just ask me for it?’
‘I don’t know quite … some intuitive reluctance. Anyway, I just arrived one evening, and a—a sort of girl answered the door.’
After a long blank moment I found I had just come to a stop, like a motor which seizes up. I had to force myself to ask, ‘What do you mean, a sort of girl?’
‘Well, the sort of girl who looks a bit like a boy. You know, jeans, man’s sweater, short hair, scrubbed-looking features. Very young. Not more than sixteen I shouldn’t think.’
‘Seventeen,’ I said.
‘You know her?’ asked Dottie in surprise.
‘I know of her. Her name’s Whistler, isn’t it?’
‘She was introduced to me as Melissa Lee.’
I nodded. ‘That’s Whistler.’ I felt faint but kept my voice normal with an effort. The blood in my ears was banging curses into my head: ‘You fool, you fool, you god-damned bloody stupid bitch, it serves you right!’ I could hardly hear what Dottie was saying.
‘Toby didn’t seem specially gratified by my visit, which was understandable. He and this hermaphrodite were just sitting down to supper, which she’d evidently cooked …’
‘What was it?’ I asked ludicrously.
‘Steak,’ she replied promptly. ‘Very tough, with baked potatoes slightly burnt. The salad looked good though.’ She reported all this with meticulous care and accuracy, as if unaware of what it was doing to me—yet I knew she wasn’t unaware and I stood leaning against a trestle understanding why Cleopatra murdered the messenger who brought the news about Antony’s marriage.
‘Go on,’ I said.
‘I hadn’t prepared anything, I mean any reason for coming, and I had to think of something feasible quickly, so I told him—of all things—that I’d come because you’d asked me to get John’s address. That was his name, wasn’t it—the black man?’ I nodded. ‘He gave it to me, and then asked me to have a drink. I must say he was very nice. The girl could have sliced my head off. I sat there until everything was cold, making bright chat. I felt that was the least I could do. Eventually she lost her temper and said, “I hope you don’t mind but I’m hungry.” Whereupon she sat down and furiously devoured her meal. I couldn’t help feeling a bit sorry for her. She was almost crying.’
I was almost crying myself but managed to ask, ‘Did she seem to be living there?’
Dottie made a startled movement behind my back and answered, ‘That I couldn’t say. But surely not! She’s hardly dry behind the ears—’
‘Don’t be fooled. She knows it all.’
There was a long silence while I fought a desperate battle to control my feelings and not start having hysterics. Dottie finally came up to my shoulder and asked without touching me, ‘Does it matter that much?’
‘It seems to.’
‘Then you’d better get up to town and do something about it. Only,’ she added, ‘please, love—not till after the opening.’