“YES, WELL, CAN you start tomorrow?”
Choking back the rest of her imaginary life-story, Milly stared at her prospective employer incredulously. The woman wasn’t even listening! When Milly had first seen the advertisement for a Daily Help, on a board outside a newsagent’s, it had seemed obvious to her that the first thing to do was to think out some plausible sort of past for herself: and so for more than an hour she had loitered in an arcade of deserted slot-machines, concocting this wonderful tale which so cleverly explained just how it was that she happened to have no address, no references, and no employment card. And now here was this woman interrupting her in mid-sentence to offer her the job, just like that! For a moment, Milly felt affronted rather than relieved. All those carefully-plotted details about the invalid father, the requisitioning of the family home, the loss of all her personal papers in the move: and then the death-duties, and the mysterious Family Debts—all, all were wasted! Mrs Graham (for such it seemed was the name of this anxious, thirty-five-ish person who kept glancing at the clock and fidgeting with paper-clips)—Mrs Graham didn’t want to know one thing about any of it! She didn’t want to know Milly’s age, her capabilities, or why she had suddenly dropped into Seacliffe like a visitor from Mars. All she wanted, it seemed, was to clinch the deal before (to judge by her agitated glances) Milly should disappear into thin air with a rattle of ghostly chains, or re-embark in her flying saucer, or whatever. Were Daily Helps really as rare as that? Milly could only suppose that they must be, and her spirits rose a little. It was a long time since she had felt rare.
“Can you start tomorrow?” Mrs Graham repeated, torturing the inoffensive paper-clip with nervous fingers. “You see, my other woman let me down rather badly … not a question of money, it wasn’t that at all. I’m willing to pay thirty-five pence an hour, and lunch as well, she always had a good lunch. And it’s light work, Mrs—er—; nothing heavy, you’ll find it’s a thoroughly labour-saving kitchen, all the equipment and everything, brand new. And a Hoover! With fitments! And there’s the Dustette, you can use it for the shelves and everything, you won’t need to get your hands dirty….”
By this time, Milly had realised who it was who was interviewing whom, and she adjusted her posture accordingly, leaning back a little in the chair on whose extreme edge she had so far been timorously perching. Now, in her newly-relaxed position, she set herself to listening graciously while her victim reeled off, with anxious haste, the variegated delights in store for Milly if she accepted the job. Up-to-date waste-disposal. Non-rub polishes. No scrubbing…. There seemed no point in interrupting, though in fact Milly had already quite decided to take the job. Or, rather, it never occurred to her not to. From the first moment when she began scanning the newsagents’ advertising boards this morning, she had taken it for granted that she would take the very first job that she was offered—if, indeed, she was offered anything at all. Never, in her wildest dreams, had she supposed it would be as easy as this! She, an unknown woman, past forty, with no skills, no qualifications, no references, and wearing a coat still damp from sitting out in it all night! Why, for all this Mrs Graham knew, she might be a murderess….!
*
“You will turn up tomorrow, won’t you?” Mrs Graham was saying anxiously. “So many of the women I’ve seen, they’ve said they’ll come, and then they just don’t turn up! You won’t let me down, will you, Mrs—er—Oh dear, what is your name? I ought to have asked you before.”
Milly was just opening her mouth to answer, when she realised that “Milly”, alone, wasn’t going to be enough. A surname! Quick, quick! She racked her brains to think of something … anything … Oh dear, Mrs Graham must already have noticed her hesitation in answering…!
And indeed, Mrs Graham had: but, as is so common with people in a state of anxiety, she had immediately integrated this new phenomenon into her own special network of worries, and imagined that Milly’s hesitation meant that she was wavering over her decision to take the job.
“You will come tomorrow, won’t you?” she urged, for the second time. “I’m counting on you! I get so tired of people who promise to come and then just disappear! Promise me you won’t do that!”
Gleefully, Milly promised. Disappear! —when by this time tomorrow she could expect to have one pound forty in her pocket and a free lunch inside her? Not likely! Besides, Milly had already done enough disappearing, in the last thirty-six hours, to last her a lifetime.
*
She spent the afternoon in the station cafeteria, where it was warm. She had gone there to steal food, but had found, rather to her surprise, that she couldn’t bring herself to do it. Absurd, really, that a woman capable of the deed she had set her hand to yesterday, should today find herself unable to reach out that same hand just to purloin a two pence bread roll!
If she hadn’t been so hungry, she would have laughed.
Oh, well. So she wouldn’t be able to eat. But there were other bodily pleasures to be enjoyed—pleasures which were now for the first time being fully revealed to her in all their glory: and one of them was sitting down. The sight of a vacant seat in a corner by the radiator filled her with such a passion of longing that she almost fainted with the fear that someone else might get there first! Through trays and trolleys, and all the detritus of Consumer-Man, she battled her way towards the haven of her desires.
At last! Here she was, her head resting against the dark-green décor, and her legs, throbbing with sheer comfort, stretched out in front of her under the table. She felt her eyes closing, but it didn’t matter, no one was going to notice. This was a station, wasn’t it, an outpost of the wonderful, anonymous world she had inhabited yesterday? The world of commuters, where hurrying takes the place of existing—“I hurry, therefore I am!” If you aren’t hurrying, then you aren’t existing, and that makes it quite all right to sit with your eyes closed, your damp coat steaming—you can even snore—for a whole afternoon, and never a glazed eye will swivel in your direction, nor a single, screwed-up consciousness detach itself from its inner speedometer for long enough to wonder who you are and why you are so tired.
People came, they sat down opposite her, they ate their buns, looked at their watches, and went: and still Milly slept on, secure in the knowledge that she didn’t exist. A black cat in the dark: white square on white: what an aeroplane looks like out of sight: you can’t get much safer than that.
For two hours Milly slept like the dead, or like the not-yet born; and when she woke, there was an object in front of her so marvellous that for a second she thought she must have died and gone to Heaven. The object was white, and delicately carved; the edges formed a frieze of fantastic beauty and complexity—no, not a frieze exactly; more like petals, petals of a flower, opening out before her, offering itself, in total, smiling friendship.
Milly blinked. Her vision cleared (for one moment she would have said rather that it dulled), and she found herself gazing hungrily at a broken roll, partially buttered, that someone had left to go to waste on a crumb-strewn plate, only a foot away from her.
Milly was amazed. How could things be so easy? No one could call this stealing! She twitched the plate furtively towards her, and as she bit deep into the broken crust, and felt the soft, feather-whiteness of the bread against her teeth, she murmured a soundless prayer, she knew not to what or whom. Already the sense of revelation was fading: induced by starvation, and lowered blood-sugar, the vision was being systematically blotted out, gleam by evanescent gleam, with every delicious mouthful.
A shame, really, after all this, that she couldn’t manage to finish the roll! After only a few bites, all her ravenous hunger was gone, and she felt quite bloated. She was just about to slip the remainder of the roll into her handbag, to eat later on—for tomorrow’s breakfast, perhaps—when a tray lurched into her field of vision. It swayed for a few seconds in front of her eyes, and then came to rest on the table. The owner of the tray, a middle-aged man with greying hair, settled himself comfortably in the seat opposite Milly, reached first for salt and then for vinegar, and then, having besprinkled his sausage and chips liberally with both, he proceeded to unfold an evening paper, prop it against the vinegar bottle, and thereafter seemed to bury himself in it, ladling forkfuls of chips into his mouth like an automaton.
At first, all that the little scene meant to Milly was that she could now, perhaps, slip the rest of the roll into her handbag unobserved. Surreptitiously, she pulled the handbag into her lap, and opened it in readiness behind the screen of the table: then, just before snatching at the roll, she gave a quick final glance across the table to make sure that her companion was still thoroughly engrossed in his paper.
He was. Why, then, did Milly not seize her chance, grab the piece of roll, and snap her handbag shut on it? Instead, she just sat, staring.
… FOUND IN FLAT was all she could see of the headline, but it was enough: enough to freeze her hovering hand; to drive all thought of food from her shocked consciousness. Vainly she screwed herself this way and that, trying to see the hidden portion of the page: vainly she tried to assure herself that it was too early … too soon … they couldn’t have discovered anything yet.
They could, though. It wasn’t too early at all. This was a London paper. Of course the news could be in it—this was just exactly the length of time you would expect the thing to take, allowing for the snail-like reactions of the inhabitants of that haunted street. Or was it? How long would Mrs Roach, on the floor above, have sat listening inertly to the strange sounds in the basement? How long would it be before her dulled senses became aware that something was amiss? And even after she was aware, how long would it have been before she dragged her bulk out of the ancient fusty chair in which she spent her days, and took herself, slip-slop in her downtrodden slippers, curlers twisted this way and that in her sparse hair, out of the front door and down the gusty street to the telephone box at the corner? For there was no telephone in the house—a deficiency which Gilbert had actually boasted of to Milly, in his gentle old voice, as if it was some rare and expensive luxury. “It’s the only way to get any peace, these days,” he’d said, that day when he took her to his home for the first time: and it was only afterwards, and gradually, that Milly had become aware of what it was that Gilbert meant by “peace”.
How long had it taken her to understand? How long was it before she began to guess what it was that she had let herself in for by marrying Gilbert?
Marrying him had seemed, at the time, the answer to all her problems: and so, in a way, it was, for at that time all her problems had been simply the variegated facets of the same problem: the problem of how to “show” Julian! Show him that “a woman in her forties” is not finished and done for: show him that she, the discarded wife, could still attract, still find herself another man. Show him that what he had thrown away like an outworn glove was a treasure for which other men came begging. Show him, in fact, that she didn’t care that for him and Cora, and for the divorce, and for all the humiliating publicity! Show him that she could still bounce up again, unquenched and unquenchable, ready to start life all over again. And to show him, above all, just what he could do with his alimony!
“I am returning your cheque,” she had written—and the composing of this letter had given her, perhaps, the most exquisite ten minutes of her whole life. It seemed, looking back, that it was just for this ten minutes that she had undertaken the whole thing: had bartered, knowingly, the whole of her future life, with no doubt at all that a lifetime of frustration and boredom was a small price to pay for ten minutes of triumph so perfect and so complete. “I am returning your cheque,” she wrote, “as I no longer have any need of—or indeed any right to—further support from you. You will be pleased to hear that I am getting married next week, and am happier than I have ever been in my life. Gilbert is a widower, just sixty, tall and most distinguished-looking, and has a pleasant home of his own in South London….”
She hadn’t known, of course, at the time of writing, how much of all this was lies: though she had known that some of it was, and she hadn’t cared. She knew, for example, that Gilbert wasn’t sixty, but a good many years older: his stiff gait, his feathering of snow-white hair, and above all his hands, tortoise-slow and spotted with old age—all this had made it quite clear, from the very beginning, that he was deceiving her about his age. But so what? All she had felt at the time was a mild gratitude towards him for taking upon himself the burden of telling the lies, instead of leaving it to her. For, if he had not done it for her, she would, of course, have subtracted the decade herself in boasting about her suitor to Julian.
What she hadn’t known, at that time, was what the “pleasant house in South London” was actually like. But even if she had known—even if she could have seen with her own eyes the boarded-up windows, the peeling, ancient paint, and could have heard the slip-slop of Mrs Roach’s slippers on the stairs—even then, it probably wouldn’t have made any difference. Because at that time she simply didn’t mind what the rest of her life was going to be like, any more than she minded what Gilbert was like. All that mattered was that Julian should think she had made a catch and was living happily ever after. Real life seemed a trivial thing compared with impressing Julian.
And anyway, what the hell? How could life with this harmless old man possibly be worse than hanging on in the awful, well-appointed Kensington flat, pitied by the neighbours, avoided by her and Julian’s former friends? Gilbert at least seemed to value her, in his mumbling, fumbling way. He was courteous and deferential to the point of incomprehensibility, and sometimes paid her stiff, complicated compliments, which she couldn’t but find pleasing, starved as she had been of any words of approval during recent years.
Besides, she supposed, vaguely, that she would grow fond of him as time went on. He seemed to have led a miserable life—nagged by his first wife into a nervous breakdown, swindled out of his proper pension by the now defunct Indian Civil Service: and Milly rather fancied herself in the rôle of little ray of sunshine to brighten his declining years. And if, in the process of brightening someone’s declining years, you can also administer a well-deserved kick in the backside to your ex-husband’s inflated ego—well, what normal woman would hesitate?
Milly wouldn’t, anyway. She promptly married Gilbert at a Brixton registry office, with two deaf old men captured from a nearby bowls club as witnesses: and she straightaway sent Julian a beautifully touched-up photograph of the wedding, with herself smiling a radiant smile that was quite unfeigned (and how should Julian guess that the joy irradiating her features was inspired not by love’s young dream, but by the thought of his and Cora’s faces as they received the news?)
Gilbert hadn’t come out quite so well: he had a vulpine look which she hadn’t noticed in real life, and his smile was glassy, and riddled with false teeth. Still, it wasn’t too bad: at least the lines on his face were blurred and softened, so that he looked, in the picture, as if he really could be only sixty. And he was standing well, too, tall and spare, almost military. You couldn’t say he looked handsome, exactly—and it was a pity that the fluffy whiteness of his hair was so in evidence—but at least he looked distinguished, in a bony, ghosty sort of a way.
*
The man opposite Milly suddenly lowered his newspaper, and it seemed, for one awful moment, that his glance rested on her face for just a little too long. Was her picture already in the paper, then?—that very same wedding photograph, perhaps, with the fixed, bridal smiles, now so eerily inappropriate. Just the sort of ghoulish touch that newspapermen love….
The man’s glance had left Milly’s face now; he looked merely irritable as he twitched over one page after another, folding and re-folding the paper as he searched for some small haven of print on which his flickering interest might rest awhile.
… FOUND IN FLAT … FOUND IN FLAT—twice more the tantalising letters flashed in front of Milly’s eyes, until at last her luck was in, and the front page lay spread out before her in its totality:
STOLEN JEWELS FOUND IN FLAT, she read; and her whole body sagged in an ecstasy of relief.
Nothing to do with her at all! She was reprieved!
Because, whatever they were going to find in that basement flat in South London, it most certainly wasn’t going to be jewels.