Life in Larkspur Road with Cynthia was strikingly different from the way things went in Dulcimer Street.
For a start, everything in the flat was so up‐to‐date and modern. Ted had spent a lot of money on the furniture. From the low couch and the duplicate easy chairs, each with a gold tassel hanging from the front of the arms, to the new looking antique dining‐room suite it was all of one style – 1937, Co‐op. Even the centre light in the bedroom was Co‐op. It was a chromium box made up of orange coloured glass strips. Admittedly some of the pieces had lost their first freshness. One or two of the tassels – there were tassels everywhere in the drawing‐room: on the corner of the cushions, on the edge of the standard lamp shade, on the curtain sash – had been pulled off by Baby, and Cynthia had been too busy to sew them on again. Indeed, considering the shortness of her life, Baby had been responsible for a surprising lot of damage in those four rooms. Every time she pushed her toy‐pram around the dining‐room, the legs of the chairs became a bit more antique looking.
They didn’t use all the rooms, of course, now that Ted wasn’t there. The drawing‐room was kept shut up and the remaining tassels just dangled vacantly for nobody. In the result, the dining‐room came in for heavier and heavier wear. It had passed from Late to Early Tudor in a space of weeks. And, unless the war were over pretty soon, and Baby could have somewhere else to bang about, it would be old Gothic by the time Ted got back to it.
Another difference was in the sound of the place. No. 10 had always been a quiet house – especially after Percy had gone. But Larkspur Road was a racket. It was a kind of sub‐station of the B.B.C. At seven‐thirty when Doris got up, Cynthia would call out to her to turn the set on. And, once on, it played right through the day, even when Cynthia went out shopping with Baby and had forgotten to turn it off. Not that Cynthia listened very much. The set was kept low and talked away and read news and hummed and crooned and saxophoned all by itself in a corner, like a lunatic relation. But if Doris ever turned it off for a moment, Cynthia went over automatically and turned it on again. To Cynthia, the wireless was like the air you breathed. Something that you didn’t notice unless it wasn’t there.
But she was an easy sort of person to live with, quite different from the exacting Doreen. There was, however, one thing that they had in common: in the house Cynthia did practically nothing. She divided her time into two roughly equal parts. The first part she spent in writing to Ted – carefully marking the envelope with the letters S.W. A.L.K. across the back of the envelope to show that it was sealed with love and kisses. And the second part was spent in waiting for his reply. In the intervals, she read papers called Poppy’s Own and Real Life Romances and Film Close‐Ups, sewed new collars and cuffs on to her dresses, and shampooed her hair – her cherished ash‐blonde hair that had brought Ted to his knees.
‘I’ve got to keep myself looking nice for Ted,’ she kept on saying, not as though there were any special point in mentioning it at that moment, but simply as though she were uttering what was uppermost in her mind. In consequence, the house and Baby were neglected.
And, in the face of this neglect, Baby flourished.
But to‐night her emotions didn’t matter. At least, not beside Doris’ they didn’t. She was so excited that she forgot all about herself and Ted. So excited that she could only sit there in her pink quilted dressing‐gown – an idiotically extravagant indulgence on the part of the infatuated Ted – in front of the gas‐fire, and gaze at the telegram that Doris had passed to her.
‘Don’t you feel thrilled?’ she asked.
She was tingling all over as she said it: it was just like a Real Life Romance with Doris’ face on the cover.
‘It’s typical of Bill,’ Doris said slowly.
‘I know.’
Cynthia closed her eyes for a moment and leant back. Invisible organs were playing to her the kind of music that is heard in cinemas.
‘It’s all ever so romantic,’ she added, and bit her lip to show that she meant it.
‘He doesn’t give me long, does he?’ Doris said musingly.
‘And you’ve got to wire him, he says so,’ Cynthia answered. ‘Will your ears be red when you go into the post‐office.’
She was reliving, as she said it, the ecstasy of her own courting. Those last few months before marriage had been charged with everything in sex that is sublime. The flat was just being furnished and the tassels hadn’t yet come off.
‘It’s bound to upset Mother,’ Doris broke in on her. ‘Dad won’t mind. But Mother’ll be awful.’
‘No, she won’t be,’ Cynthia told her. ‘Not with a war on. That makes all the difference. She’ll understand. And just think how you’d feel if he went out there and anything happened to him. Suppose he was…’ She stopped herself abruptly. ‘Killed’ was a word that she couldn’t use until Ted was back safe in her arms again. ‘Wounded,’ she added, as soon as she had recovered from her own little private anxiety.
‘I know,’ said Doris. ‘I’d thought about that.’
Cynthia took a sideways look at her as she spoke. She had never really understood her sister‐in‐law. Not deep down, that is. She seemed so cold and unfeeling, somehow. Not a bit like Ted. Admittedly she’d shared the telegram. And that was something. But she hadn’t cried. Or gone and lain down. Or anything like that. It might have been just an ordinary invitation from the way she was taking it. Then a sudden doubt took possession of her.
‘You are going to, aren’t you?’ she asked anxiously.
‘Yes,’ said Doris slowly. ‘I think I am.’
As she spoke, she picked up the telegram and re‐read it: going overseas, it said. what about getting married at once special licence if necessary wire answer oceans of love bill.
Cynthia was still staring hard at her. She was shocked. ‘I think I am:’ she repeated Doris’ last words. That was no way to talk about love. Then she noticed that Doris was crying. Not much. But still just enough to make everything all right. She realised that she had misjudged her.
All the same, it seemed funny, the idea of any one getting excited over Bill. He just wasn’t that sort. Not like her own compact and shining Ted, for instance.
Now that Doris had told Mrs Josser, it wasn’t Doris’ wedding any longer. It was Mrs Josser’s. And Mrs Josser didn’t believe in hole‐and‐corner affairs. She wanted something in white satin and a veil. And bridesmaids. And a three‐tier cake. Apparently, ever since Doris had been quite a little girl, Mrs Josser had been looking forward to a church – almost a cathedral – wedding for her daughter. Marriage without Mendelssohn seemed to Mrs Josser scarcely to be marriage at all.
And what made it all more difficult was that Bill and Doris had decided on a Registry Office. In disposing of their separate and individual futures, they were brisk and business‐like. And they discussed the whole occasion with a casualness which was appalling. They even spoke of having the wedding at 10 o’clock in the morning – as soon as the place opened, in fact – so that they could have the rest of the day to themselves.
Having been defeated in the matter of the church – and only she, Mrs Josser persisted, knew what the loss meant to her – she was adamant in insisting that Doris should be married from Dulcimer Street. She wasn’t having any nonsense about Doris setting out for the Registry Office, only half done up, from Cynthia’s flat in Larkspur Road.
But, on the whole, Mrs Josser raised very few objections. She detected fatalistically that things had gone too far for her to be able to prevent the calamity altogether. It was merely that she suffered certain misgivings. These misgivings were of two kinds. In the first Mrs Josser saw Bill maimed, blinded, crippled, with Doris, still young, beautiful, marriageable, having to support him. And in the second she saw him as dead, with Doris, as young and beautiful but less marriageable, having to support his children. Either way, it didn’t seem fair on Doris.
‘And what’s he offering her?’ Mrs Josser demanded. ‘Just a change of name, that’s all. She’s got to go on with her job, hasn’t she?’
‘It isn’t Bill’s fault there’s a war on,’ Mr Josser said soothingly. ‘It’s just the way things are.’
‘Ted provided a home for Cynthia, didn’t he?’ Mrs Josser went on. ‘He did the proper thing.’
‘But the war hadn’t begun then,’ Mr Josser replied.
Mrs Josser drew in her lips sharply.
‘He’d have done it, war or no war,’ she answered. ‘He’s like that, our Ted.’
‘Well, Bill isn’t Ted.’
Mr Josser was becoming exasperated by now.
‘And Cynthia isn’t Doris, let me tell you that,’ Mrs Josser responded hotly. ‘Why should she have a flat on her own, with furniture, when Doris…’
But the logic of the argument had thinned and evaporated. Only the argument itself remained. And it had been like this ever since Doris had first broken the news. Mrs Josser was heroically fighting a rearguard action in retreat.