The Ballad of Peckham Rye

Chapter 3

‘WHAT d’you mean by different?’ Mavis said.

‘I don’t know. He’s just different. Says funny things. You have to laugh,’ Dixie said.

‘He’s just an ordinary chap,’ Humphrey said. ‘Nice chap. Ordinary.’

But Dixie could see that Humphrey did not mean it. Humphrey knew that Douglas was different. Humphrey had been talking a good deal about Douglas during the past fortnight and how they sat up talking late at Miss Frierne’s.

‘Better fetch him here to tea one night.’ said Dixie’s stepfather. ‘Let’s have a look at him.’

‘He’s too high up in the Office,’ Mavis said.

‘He’s on research,’ Dixie said. ‘He’s brainy, supposed to be. But he’s friendly, I’ll say that.’

‘He’s no snob,’ said Humphrey.

‘He hasn’t got nothing to be a snob about,’ said Dixie.

‘Anything, not nothing.’

‘Anything,’ said Dixie, ‘to be a snob about. He’s no better than us just because he’s twenty-three and got a good job.’

‘But he’s got to do his overtime for nothing,’ Mavis said.

‘He’s the same as what we are,’ Dixie said.

‘You said he was different.’

‘Well, but no better than us. I don’t know why you sit up talking at nights with him.’

Humphrey sat up late in Dougal’s room.

‘My father’s in the same trade. He puts himself down as a fitter. Same job.’

‘It is right and proper,’ Dougal said, ‘that you should be called a refrigerator engineer. It brings lyricism to the concept.’

‘I don’t trouble myself about that,’ Humphrey said. ‘But what you call a job makes a difference to the Unions. My dad doesn’t see that.’

‘Do you like brass bedsteads?’ Dougal said. ‘We had them at home. We used to unscrew the knobs and hide the fag ends inside.’

‘By common law,’ Humphrey said, ‘a trade union has no power to take disciplinary action against its members. By common law a trade union cannot fine, suspend, or expel its members. It can only do so contractually. That is, by its rules.’

‘Quite,’ said Dougal, who was lolling on his brass bed.

‘You can use your imagination,’ Humphrey said. ‘If a member is expelled from a union that operates a closed shop…’

‘Ghastly,’ said Dougal, who was trying to unscrew one of the knobs.

‘But all that won’t concern you much,’ Humphrey said. ‘What you want to know about for your human research is arbitration in trade disputes. There’s the Conciliation Act 1896 and the Industrial Courts Act 1919, but you wouldn’t need to go into those. You might study the Industrial Disputes Order 1951. But you aren’t likely to have a dispute at Meadows, Meade & Grindley. You might have an issue, though.’

‘Is there a difference?’

‘Oh, a vast difference. Sometimes they take it to law to decide whether an issue or a dispute has arisen. It’s been as far as the Court of Appeal. I’ll let you have the books. Issue is whether certain employers should observe certain terms of employment. Dispute is any dispute between employer and employee as to terms of employment or conditions of labour.’

‘Terrific,’ Dougal said. ‘You must have given your mind to it.’

‘I took a course. But you’ll soon get to know what’s what in Industrial Relations.’

‘Fascinating,’ Dougal said. ‘Everything is fascinating. to me, so far. Do you know what I came across the other day? An account of the fair up the road at Camberwell Green.’

‘Fair?’

‘According to Colburn’s Calendar of Amusements 1840,’ Dougal said. He reached for his notebook, leaned on his elbow, heaved his high shoulder and read:

There is here, and only here, to be seen what you can see nowhere else, the lately caught and highly accomplished young mermaid, about whom the continental journals have written so ably. She combs her hair in the manner practised in China, and admires herself in a glass in the manner practised everywhere. She has had the best instructors in every peculiarity of education, and can argue on any given subject, from the most popular way of preserving plums, down to the necessity of a change of Ministers. She plays the harp in the new effectual style prescribed by Mr Bocha, of whom we wished her to take lessons, but, having some mermaiden scruples, she begged to be provided with a less popular master. Being so clever and accomplished, she can’t bear to be contradicted, and lately leaped out of her tub and floored a distinguished fellow of the Royal Zoological Society, who was pleased to be more curious and cunning than she was pleased to think agreeable. She has composed various poems for the periodicals, and airs with variations for the harp and piano, all very popular and pleasing.

Dougal gracefully cast his book aside. ‘How I should like to meet a mermaid!’ he said.

‘Terrific,’ Humphrey said. ‘You make it up?’ he asked. ‘No, I copied it out of an old book in the library. My research. Mendelssohn wrote his ‘Spring Song’ in Ruskin Park. Ruskin lived on Denmark Hill. Mrs Fitzherbert lived in Camberwell Grove. Boadicea committed suicide on Peckham Rye probably where the bowling green is now, I should imagine. But, look here, how would you like to be engaged to marry a mermaid that writes poetry?’

‘Fascinating,’ Humphrey said.

Dougal gazed at him like a succubus whose mouth is its eyes.

Humphrey’s friend, Trevor Lomas, had said Dougal was probably pansy.

‘I don’t think so,’ Humphrey had replied. ‘He’s got a girl somewhere.’

‘Might be versatile.’

‘Could be.’

Dougal said, ‘The boss advised me to mix with everybody in the district, high and low. I should like to mix with that mermaid.’

Dougal put a record on the gramophone he had borrowed from Elaine Kent in the textile factory. It was a Mozart Quartet. He slid the rugs aside with his foot and danced to the music on the bare linoleum, with stricken movements of his hands. He stopped when the record stopped, replaced the rugs, and said, ‘I must get to know some of the youth clubs. Dixie will be a member of a youth club, I expect.’

‘She isn’t,’ Humphrey said rather rapidly.

Dougal opened a bottle of Algerian wine. He took his time, and with a pair of long tweezers fished out a bit of cork that had dropped inside the bottle. He held up the pair of tweezers.

‘I use these,’ he said, ‘to pluck out the hairs which grow inside my nostrils, and which are unsightly. Eventually, I lose the tweezers, then I buy another pair.’

He placed the tweezers on the bed. Humphrey lifted them, examined them, then placed them on the dressing table.

‘Dixie will know,’ Dougal said, ‘about the youth clubs.’

‘No, she won’t. She doesn’t have anything to do with youth clubs. There are classes within classes in Peckham.’

‘Dixie would be upper-working,’ said Dougal. He poured wine into two tumblers and handed one to Humphrey.

‘Well, I’d say middle-class. It’s not a snob business, it’s a question of your type.’

‘Or lower-middle,’ Dougal said.

Humphrey looked vaguely as if Dixie was being insulted. But then he looked pleased. His eyes went narrow, his head lolled on the back of the chair, copying one of Dougal’s habitual poses.

‘Dixie’s saving up,’ he said. ‘It’s all she can think of, saving up to get married. And now what does she say? We can’t go out more than one night a week so that I can save up too.’

‘Avarice,’ Dougal said, ‘must be her fatal flaw. We all have a fatal flaw. If she took sick, how would you feel, would she repel you?’

Dougal had taken Miss Merle Coverdale for a walk across the great sunny common of the Rye on a Saturday afternoon. Merle Coverdale was head of the typing pool at Meadows, Meade & Grindley. She was thirty-seven.

Dougal said, ‘My lonely heart is deluged by melancholy and it feels quite nice.’

‘Someone might hear you talking like that.’

‘You are a terror and a treat,’ Dougal said. ‘You look to me like an Okapi,’ he said.

‘A what?’

‘An Okapi is a rare beast from the Congo. It looks a little like a deer, but it tries to be a giraffe. It has stripes and it stretches its neck as far as possible and its ears are like a donkey’s. It is a little bit of everything. There are only a few in captivity. It is very shy.’

‘Why do you say I’m like it?’

‘Because you’re so shy.’

‘Me shy?’

‘Yes. You haven’t told me about your love affair with Mr Druce. You’re too shy.’

‘Oh, that’s only a friendship. You’ve got it all wrong. What makes you think it’s a love affair? Who told you that?’

‘I’ve got second sight.’

He brought her to the gate of the park and was leading her through it, when she said,

‘This doesn’t lead anywhere. We’ll have to go back the same way.’

‘Yes, it does,’ Dougal said, ‘it leads to One Tree Hill and two cemeteries, the Old and the New. Which would you prefer?’

‘I’m not going into any cemetery,’ she said, standing with legs apart in the gateway as if he might move her by force.

Dougal said, ‘There’s a lovely walk through the New Cemetery. Lots of angels. Beautiful. I’m surprised at you. Are you a free woman or are you a slave?’

She let him take her through the cemetery eventually, and even pointed out to him the tower of the crematorium when it came into sight. Dougal posed like an angel on a grave which had only an insignificant headstone. He posed like an angel-devil, with his hump shoulder and gleaming smile, and his fingers of each hand widespread against the sky. She looked startled. Then she laughed.

‘Enjoying yourself?’ she said.

On the way back along the pastoral streets of trees and across the Rye she told him about her six years as mistress of Mr Druce, about Mr Druce’s wife who never came to the annual dinners and who was a wife in name only.

‘How they bring themselves to go on living together I don’t know,’ she said. ‘There’s no feeling between them. It’s immoral.’

She told Dougal how she had fallen out of love with Mr Druce yet could not discontinue the relationship, she didn’t know why.

‘You’ve got used to him,’ Dougal said.

‘I suppose so.

‘But you feel,’ Dougal said, ‘that you’re living a lie.’

‘I do,’ she said. ‘You’ve put my very thoughts into words.

‘And then,’ she said, ‘he’s got some funny ways with him.’

Dougal slid his eyes to regard her without moving his face. He caught her doing the same thing to him.

‘What funny ways? Come on, tell me,’ Dougal said. ‘There’s no good telling the half and then stopping.’

‘No,’ she said. ‘It wouldn’t be right to discuss Mr Druce with you. He’s your boss and mine, after all.’

‘I haven’t seen him,’ Dougal said, ‘since the day he engaged me. He must have forgotten about me.

‘No, he talked a lot about you. And he sent for you the other day. You were out of the office.’

‘What day was that?’

‘Tuesday. I said you were out on research.’

‘So I was,’ said Dougal. ‘I was out on research.’

‘Nobody gets forgotten at Meadows Meade,’ she said. ‘He’ll want to know about your research in a few weeks’ time.’

Dougal put his long cold hand down the back of her coat. She was short enough for his hand to reach quite a long way. He tickled her.

She wriggled and said, ‘Not in broad daylight, Dougal.’

‘In dark midnight,’ Dougal said, ‘I wouldn’t be able to find my way.’

She laughed from her chest.

‘Tell me,’ Dougal said, ‘what is the choicest of Mr Druce’s little ways?’

‘He’s childish,’ she said. ‘I don’t know why I stick to him. I could have left Meadows Meade many a time. I could have got into a big firm. You don’t think Meadows Meade’s a big firm, do you, by any chance? Because, if you do, let me tell you, Meadows Meade is by comparison very small. Very small’

‘It looks big to me,’ Dougal said. ‘But perhaps it’s the effect of all that glass.’

‘We used to have open-plan,’ she said. ‘So that you could see everyone in the office without the glass, even Mr Druce. But the bosses wanted their privacy back, so we had the glass partitions put up.’

‘I like those wee glass houses,’ Dougal said. ‘When I’m in the office I feel like a tomato getting ripe.’

‘When you’re in the office.’

‘Merle,’ he said, ‘Merle Coverdale, I’m a hard-working fellow. I’ve got to be out and about on my human research.’

They were moving up to the Rye where the buses blazed in the sun. Their walk was nearly over.

‘Oh, we’re soon here,’ she said.

Dougal pointed to a house on the right. ‘There’s a baby’s pram,’ he said, ‘stuck out on a balcony which hasn’t any railings.’

She looked and sure enough there was a pram perched on an open ledge only big enough to hold it, outside a second-floor window. She said, ‘They ought to be prosecuted. There’s a baby in that pram, too.‘

‘No, it’s only a doll,’ Dougal said.

‘How do you know?’

‘I’ve seen it before. The house is a baby-carriage works. The pram is only for show.’

‘Oh, it gave me a fright.’

‘How long have you lived in Peckham?’ he said.

‘Twelve and a half years.’

‘You’ve never noticed the pram before?’

‘No, can’t say I have. Must be new.’

‘From the style of the pram, it can’t be new. In fact the pram has been there for twenty-five years. You see, you simply haven’t noticed it.’

‘I don’t hardly ever come across the Rye. Let’s walk round a bit. Let’s go into the Old English garden.’

‘Tell me more,’ Dougal said, ‘about Mr Druce. Don’t you see him on Saturdays?’

‘Not during the day. I do in the evening.’

‘You’ll be seeing him tonight?’

‘Yes, he comes for supper.

Dougal said, ‘I suppose he’s been doing his garden all day. Is that what he does on Saturdays?’

‘No. As a matter of fact, believe it or not, on Saturday mornings he goes up to the West End to the big shops. He goes up and down in the lifts. He rests in the afternoons. Childish.’

‘He must get some sexual satisfaction out of it.’

‘Don’t be silly,’ she said.

‘A nice jerky lift,’ said Dougal. ‘Not one of the new smooth ones but the kind that go yee-oo at the bottom. ‘And Dougal sprang in the air and dipped with bent knees to illustrate his point, so that two or three people in the Old English garden turned to look at him. ‘It gives me, ‘Dougal said, ‘a sexual sensation just to think of it. I can quite see the attraction these old lifts have for Mr Druce. Yee-oo.’

She said. ‘For God’s sake lower your voice.’ Then she laughed her laugh from the chest, and Dougal pulled that blonde front lock of her otherwise brown hair, while she gave him a hefty push such as she had not done to a man for twenty years.

He walked down Nunhead Lane with her; their ways parted by the prefabs at Costa Road.

‘I’m to go to tea at Dixie’s house tonight,’ he said.

‘I don’t know what you want to do with that lot,’ she said.

‘Of course, I realize you’re head of the typing pool and Dixie’s only a wee typist,’ he said.

‘You’re taking me up wrong.’

‘Let’s go for another walk if it’s nice on Monday morning,’ he said.

‘I’ll be at work on Monday morning. I’ll be down to work, not like you.’

‘Take Monday off, my girl,’ Dougal said. ‘Just take Monday off.’

‘Hallo. Come in. Pleased to see you. There’s your tea, Mavis said.

The family had all had theirs, and Dougal’s tea was, set on the table. Cold ham and tongue and potato salad with bread and butter, followed by fruit cake and tea. Dougal sat down and tucked in while Mavis, Dixie, and Humphrey Place sat round the table. When he had finished eating, Mavis poured the tea and they all sat and drank it.

‘That Miss Coverdale in the pool,’ said Mavis, ‘is working Dixie to death. I think she’s trying to get Dixie out. Ever since Dixie got engaged she’s been horrible to Dixie, hasn’t she, Dixie?’

‘It was quarter to four,’ said Dixie, ‘and she came up with an estimate and said “priority” – just like that -priority. I said, “Excuse me, Miss Coverdale, but I’ve got two priorities already.” She said, “Well, it’s only quarter to four.” “Only,” I said, “only quarter to four. Do you realize how long these estimates take? I’m not going without my tea-break, if that’s what you’re thinking, Miss Coverdale.” She said, “Oh, Dixie, you’re impossible,” and turned away. I jumped up and I said, “Repeat that,” I said. I said-’

‘You should have reported her to Personnel,’ Humphrey said. ‘That was your correct procedure.’

‘A disappointed spinster,’ Mavis said, ‘that’s what she is.’

‘She’s immoral with Mr Druce, a married man, that I know for a fact,’ Dixie said. ‘So she’s covered. You can’t touch her, there’s no point in reporting her to Personnel. It gets you down.’

‘Take Monday off,’ said Dougal. ‘Take Tuesday off as well. Have a holiday.’

‘No, I don’t agree to that,’ Humphrey said. ‘Absenteeism is downright immoral. Give a fair week’s work for a fair week’s pay.’

Dixie’s stepfather, who had been watching the television in the sitting-room and who suddenly felt lonely, put his head round the door.

‘Want a cup of tea, Arthur?’ said Mavis. ‘Meet Mr Douglas. Mr Douglas, Mr Crewe.’

‘Where’s Leslie?’ said Arthur Crewe.

‘Well, he ought to be in. I let him go out,’ Mavis said. ‘Because there’s something going on out the front,’ Arthur said.

They all trooped through to the sitting-room and peered into the falling dusk, where a group of young people in their teens were being questioned by an almost equal number of policemen.

‘The youth club,’ Mavis said.

Dougal immediately went out to investigate. As he opened the street door, young Leslie slid in as if from some concealment; he was breathless.

Dougal returned presently to report that the tyres of a number of cars parked up at the Rye had been slashed. The police were rounding up the teenage suspects. Young Leslie was chewing bubble-gum. Every now and then he pulled a long strand out of his mouth and let it spring back into his mouth.

‘But it seems to me the culprits may have been children,’ Dougal said, ‘as much as these older kids.’

Leslie stopped chewing for an instant and stared back at Dougal in such disgust that he seemed to be looking at Dougal through his nostrils rather than his eyes. Then he resumed his chewing.

Dougal winked at him. The boy stared back.

‘Take that muck out of your mouth, son,’ said his father.

‘You can’t stop him,’ said his mother. ‘He won’t listen to you. Leslie, did you hear what your father said?’

Leslie shifted the gum to the other side of his cheek and left the room.

Dougal looked out of the window at the group who were still being questioned.

‘Two girls there come from Meadows Meade,’ he said. ‘Odette Hill, uptwister, and Lucille rotter, gummer.’

‘Oh, the factory lot are always mixed up in the youth club trouble,’ Mavis said. ‘You don’t want anything to do with that lot.’ As she spoke she moved her hand across her perm, nipping each brown wave in turn between her third and index fingers.

Dougal winked at her and smiled with all his teeth.

Mavis said to Dixie in a whisper, ‘Has he gone?’

‘Yup,’ said Dixie, meaning, yes, her stepfather had gone out for his evening drink.

Mavis went to the sideboard and fetched out a large envelope.

‘Here we are again,’ Dixie said.

‘She always says that,’ Mavis said.

‘Well, Mum, you keep on pulling them out; every new person that comes to the house, out they come.’

Mavis had extracted three large press cuttings from the envelope and handed them to Dougal.

Dixie sighed, looking at Humphrey.

‘Why you two not go on out? Go on out to the pictures,’ Mavis said.

‘We went out last night.’

‘But you didn’t go to the pictures, I bet. Saving and pinching to get married, you’re losing the best time of your life.’

‘That’s what I tell her,’ said Humphrey. ‘That’s what I say.

‘Where’d you go last night?’ Mavis said.

Dixie looked at Humphrey. ‘A walk,’ she said. ‘What you make of these?’ Mavis said to Dougal. The cuttings were dated June 1942. Two of them bore large photographs of Mavis boarding an ocean liner. All announced that she was the first of Peckham’s G.I. brides to depart these shores.

‘You don’t look a day older,’ Dougal said.

‘Oh, go on,’ Dixie said.

‘Not a day,’ said Dougal. ‘Anyone can see your mother’s had a romantic life.’

Dixie took her nail file out of her bag, snapped the bag shut, and started to grate at her nails.

Humphrey bent forward in his chair, one hand on each knee, as if, by affecting intense interest in Mavis’s affair, to compensate for Dixie’s mockery.

‘Well, it was romantic,’ Mavis said, ‘and it wasn’t. It was both. Glub – that was my first husband – Glub was wonderful at first.’ Her voice became progressively American. ‘Made you feel like a queen. He sure was gallant. And romantic, as you say. But then… Dixie came along… everything sorta wenna pieces. We were living a lie,’ Mavis said, ‘and it was becoming sorta immoral to live together, not loving each other.’ She sighed for a space. Then pulling herself together she said, ‘So I come home.’

‘Came home,’ Dixie said.

‘And got a divorce. And then I met Arthur. Old Arthur’s a good sort.’

‘Mum’s had her moments,’ Dixie said. ‘She won’t let you forget that.’

‘More than what you’ll have, if you go on like you do, putting every penny in the bank. Why, at your age I was putting all my wages what I had left over after paying my keep on my back.’

‘My own American dad pays my keep,’ Dixie said.

‘He thinks he do, but it don’t go far.’

‘Does. Doesn’t,’ Dixie said.

‘I better put the kettle on,’ Mavis said.

Dougal said then to Dixie, ‘I didn’t never have no money of my own at your age.’ He heaved his shoulder and glittered his eyes at her, and she did not dare to correct him. But when Humphrey laughed she turned to him and said, ‘What’s the joke?’

‘Dougal here,’ he said, ‘he’s your match.’

Mavis came back and switched on the television to a cabaret. Her husband returned to find Dougal keeping the cabaret company with a dance of his own in the middle of their carpet. Mavis was shrieking with joy. Humphrey was smiling with dosed lips. Dixie sat also with dosed lips, not smiling.

On Saturday mornings, as on Sundays, the gentlemen in Miss Frierne’s establishment were desired to make their own beds. On his return at eleven o’clock on Saturday night Dougal found a note in his room.

Today’s bed was a landlady’s delight. Full marks

in your end-of-term report!

Dougal stuck it up on the mirror of his dressing-table and went downstairs to see if Miss Frierne was still up. He found her in the kitchen, sitting primly up to the table with half a bottle of stout.

‘Any letters for me?’

‘No, Dougal.’

‘There should have been a letter.’

‘Never mind. It might come on Monday.’

‘Tell me some of your stories.’

‘You’ve heard them all, I’m sure.’ He had heard about the footpads on the Rye in the old days; about the nigger minstrels in the street, or rather carriageway as Miss Frierne said it was called then. She sipped her stout and told him once more of her escapade with a girl called Flo, how they had hired a cab at Camberwell Green and gone up to the Elephant for a drink and treated the cabby to twopenn'orth of gin, and returned without anyone at home being the wiser.

‘You must have had some courting days,’ Dougal said. But her narrow old face turned away in disdain at the suggestion, for these were early days in their friendship, and it was a full month before Miss Frierne, one evening when she had finished her nourishing stout with a sigh and got out the gin bottle, told Dougal how the Gordon Highlanders were stationed at Peckham during the first war; how it was a question among the young ladies whether the soldiers wore anything underneath their kilts; how Miss Frierne at the ripe age of twenty-seven went walking with one of the Highlanders up to One Tree Hill; how he turned to her and said, ‘My girl, I know you’re all bloody curious as to what we have beneath the kilt, and I forthwith propose to satisfy your mind on the subject’; how he then took her hand and thrust it under his kilt; and how she then screamed so hard, she had a quinsy for a week.

But in the meantime when Dougal, at the end of his second week at Miss Frierne’s, said, ‘You must have had some courting days,’ she turned her narrow pale face away from him and indicated by various slight movements of her bony body that he had gone too far.

Eventually she said, ‘Did Humphrey come in with you?’

‘No, I left him round at Dixie’s.’

‘I wanted to ask his private advice about something.’

‘Anything I can do? I give rare advice.’

She was still offended. ‘No, thank you. I wish to ask Humphrey privately. Do I hear rain?’

Dougal went to bed and the rain danced on the roof above his head. A key clicked in the front door and Humphrey’s footsteps, climbing carefully, rose to the first landing. Humphrey paused on the landing, a long pause, as if he were resting from some effort. Then Humphrey’s step fumbled up on the second flight. Either he was drunk or carrying a heavy weight, for he staggered at the top, just outside Dougal’s door.

The long cupboard in Dougal’s bedroom gave out a loud tom-tom as the rain beat on the low roof within, and together with this sound was discernible that of Humphrey staggering along the short passage to his own room.

Dougal woke again at the very moment, it seemed, that the rain stopped. And at this very moment a whisper and a giggle came from the direction of his cupboard. He switched on his light and got up. The cupboard was empty. Just as he was going to shut the small door again, there was a slight scuffle. He opened the door, put his head in, and found nothing. He returned to bed and slept.

On Monday morning Dougal got his letter. Jinny had finished with him. He went into the offices of Meadows, Meade & Grindley and typed out some of his notes. Then, at the morning tea-break, he walked over to the long, long factory canteen and asked especially for Odette Hill and Lucille Potter. He was told they were not at work that morning. ‘Taking the day off. Foreman’s mad. Absenteeism makes him mad.’ He had a bun and a cup of tea, then another bun. A bell rang to mark the end of the tea-break. The men disappeared rapidly. A few girls loitered, as on principle, talking with three of the women who served the canteen. Dougal put his head on his arms in full view of these few girls, and wept.

‘What’s the matter with him?’

‘What’s the matter, son?’ said a girl of about sixteen whom Dougal, on looking up, found to be Dawn Waghorn, one of the cone-winders whose movements when winding the cone, as laid down by the Cambridge expert, had seemed to Dougal, when he had been taken round the floors, very appealing. Dougal put down his head and resumed his weeping.

Dawn patted his poor shoulder. He slightly raised his head and shook it sadly from side to side. A woman came round from the canteen bar with a clean-folded oven cloth which she held out to him. ‘Here, dry your eyes before anyone sees you,’ she said.

‘What’s the matter, mate?’ said another girl. She said, ‘Here’s a hanky.’ She was Annette Wren who was in training for seaming. She was giggling most heartlessly.

‘I’ve lost my girl,’ Dougal said, as he blew his nose on the oven cloth.

Elaine Kent, who was well on in her twenties, an experienced controller of process, turned on Annette Wren and told her to shut her mouth, what was there to laugh at?

The two other canteen women came round to Dougal, and he was now surrounded by women. Elaine Kent opened her bag and took out a comb. With it she combed Dougal’s hair as it moved with his head slowly from side to side.

‘You’ll get another girl,’ said one of the canteen women, Milly Lloyd by name.

Annette giggled again. Dawn slapped her face and said, ‘You’re ignorant. Can’t you see he’s handicapped?’

Whereupon Annette burst into tears.

‘Keep your head still,’ said Elaine. ‘How can I comb you if you keep moving your head?’

‘It calms you down, a good comb,’ remarked one of the canteen.

Milly Lloyd was looking for a fresh handkerchief for Annette whose sobs were tending towards the hysterical.

‘How did you lose your girl?’ said Dawn.

‘I’ve got a fatal flaw,’ Dougal said.

Dawn assumed this to be his deformed shoulder, which she now stroked. ‘It’s a shame,’ she said. ‘little no-good bitch I bet she is.’

Suddenly Merle Coverdale appeared at the door in the long distance and started walking towards the group.

‘Office,’ whispered Milly, ‘typing pool,’ and returned behind the canteen bar.

Merle shouted along the length of the canteen as she approached. ‘Tea for Mr Druce, please. He was out. Now he’s come in. He wants some tea.’ Then she saw the group round Dougal. ‘What the hell’s going on?’ she said.

‘Migraine,’ Dougal said sadly. ‘A headache.’

‘You should all be back on the floor,’ Merle said to the girls. ‘There’s going to be trouble.’

‘Who you to talk to us like that?’

‘Who’s she, coming it over us?’

And so Merle could do nothing with them. She said meaningfully to Dougal,

‘I had a headache myself this morning. Came into work late. I went for a brisk walk on the Rye. All by myself.’

‘I dimly recall arranging to meet you there,’ Dougal said. ‘But I was prevented.’

Merle gave him a hostile look and said to the canteen women, ‘What about that tea?’

Milly Lloyd put a cup of tea into Dougal’s hand. Merle walked off, bearing Mr Druce’s tea, moving her neck slightly back and forth as she walked all the long length of the canteen. Annette took a cup of tea and, as she gulped it, tried also to express her rage against the girl who had slapped her. As Dougal sipped his tea, young Dawn stroked his high shoulder and said, never mind, it was a shame, while Elaine combed his hair. It was curly hair but cut quite short. Nevertheless she combed it as if it had been as long as the Laughing Cavalier’s.

Dixie sat with Humphrey, Dougal, and Elaine Kent in Costa’s Café. Dixie yawned. Her eyes were sleepy. The only reason she had denied herself an early night was that Dougal was paying for the supper.

‘I’ve felt tired all day,’ she said. She addressed the men, ignoring Elaine as she had done all evening, because Elaine was factory, even though Elaine was high up in process-control. After a trial period Elaine likewise confined her remarks to the men.

‘Look what’s just come in,’ Elaine said. Tall Trevor Lomas had just come in. He sat at the nearest table, with his head and shoulders turned away from Dougal’s party, and stared out of the window. Trevor Lomas was at this time employed as an electrician by the Borough.

Trevor turned his head sleepily and permitted an eye to rest on Humphrey for a small second. Humphrey said ‘Hallo.’ Trevor did not reply.

Trevor’s girl arrived presently, tall and copper-tinted, with a tight short black skirt and much green eye-shadow. ‘Hi, snake,’ said Trevor. ‘Hi,’ said the girl, and sat down beside him.

Dixie and Elaine stared at the girl as she slid out of her coat and let it fall on the back of her chair. They stared as if by duty, and watched every detail. The girl was aware of this, and seemed to expect it.

Then Trevor pushed back his chair, still seated, so that he half-faced Humphrey’s party. He said to his girl in a loud voice: ‘Got your lace hanky on you, Beauty?’

Beauty did not reply. She was holding up a small mirror, putting on lipstick with care.

‘Because,’ said Trevor, ‘I’m going to cry.’ He took his large white handkerchief out of his top pocket and flourished it before each eye in turn. ‘Going to cry my eyes out, I am,’ said Trevor, ‘because I’ve lost me girl. Hoo, I’ve lost me girl.’

Beauty laughed a great deal. The more she laughed the more noisily did Trevor continue. He laid his head on the table and affected to sob. The girl rocked in her chair, her newly painted lips open wide apart.

Then Dixie started to laugh.

Dougal shoved his chair back and stood up. Elaine jumped up and held his arm.

‘Let be,’ she said.

Humphrey, whom the story of Dougal’s weeping in the canteen had not yet reached, said to Dixie, ‘What’s up?’

Dixie could not tell him for laughing.

‘Let be, mate,’ Elaine said to Dougal.

Dougal said to Trevor, ‘I’ll see you up on the Rye outside the tennis court.’

Elaine walked over to Trevor and gave him a push. ‘Can’t you see he’s deformed?’ she said. ‘Making game of a chap like that, it’s ignorant.’

Dougal, whose deformed shoulder had actually endowed him with a curious speciality in the art of fighting, in that he was able to turn his right wrist at an extraordinary back-hand outward angle and to get a man by the throat as with a claw, did not at that moment boast of the fact.

‘Cripple as I am,’ he merely said, ‘I’ll knock his mean wee sex-starved conceited low and lying L.C.C. electrician’s head off.’

‘Who’s sex-starved?’ Trevor said, standing up.

Two youths who had been sitting by the window moved over the better to see. A Greek in an off-white coat appeared, and pointed to a telephone receiver which stuck out of the wall behind him in the passageway to the dim kitchen.

‘I’ll use that phone,’ he said.

Trevor gave him one of his long sleepy looks. Then he gave one of them to Dougal.

‘Who’s sex-starved?’ he said.

‘You are,’ Dougal said, while counting his money to pay the bill. ‘And I’ll see you on the Rye within the quarter hour.’

Trevor walked out of the café and Beauty hastily wriggled into her coat and tripped out after him. After them both went the Greek, but Trevor’s motor-scooter had just moved off.

‘Hasn’t paid for coffee,’ said the Greek, returning. ‘What name and address he is, please?’

‘No idea,’ Dougal said. ‘I don’t mix with him.’

The Greek turned to Humphrey, ‘I seen you here before with that fellow.’

Humphrey threw half a crown on the table, and, as the four departed, the Greek slammed his glass doors behind them as hard as he judged the glass would stand up to.

The two girls got into Humphrey’s car, but he at first refused to drive them up to the Rye. Dougal stood and argued on the pavement.

Humphrey said, ‘No, not at all. Don’t go. Don’t be a fool, Dougal. Let it pass. He’s ignorant.’

‘All right, I’ll walk,’ Dougal said.

‘I’m going to send Trevor Lomas home,’ Humphrey said. He left Dougal and started up the car and drove off with the girls, Dixie in front and Elaine behind agitating, too late, to be let out.

Dougal arrived at the tennis courts six minutes later. Some seconds before he arrived he had heard a sound as of women screaming.

Between two distant lamp-posts, in their vague oblique light, a group was gathered. Dougal discerned Humphrey and Trevor with a strange youth called Collie who was without a coat and whose shirt was unbuttoned, exposing his chest to the night air. These figures were apparently molesting three further figures who turned out to be Dixie, Elaine, and Beauty, who were screaming. Soon it appeared that the men were no” molesting but restraining them. Dixie had a long-strapped shoulder bag with which she was attempting to lay about her, largely in the direction of Elaine. Elaine, who was at present in the grip of Trevor, managed to dig Beauty’s leg with her steel stiletto heel. Beauty wailed and struggled in Humphrey’s grip.

‘What’s going on?’ Dougal said.

Nobody took any notice of him. He went and hit Trevor in the face. Trevor let go of Elaine so that she fell heavily against Beauty. Meanwhile Trevor hit out at Dougal, who staggered backwards into Humphrey. Beauty wailed louder, and struggled harder. Elaine recovered herself and used her freedom to kick with her stiletto heel at Trevor. Dixie, meanwhile, was attempting to release herself from the grasp of that strange youth, Collie, with the bared chest, by biting the arm that held her. The screams grew louder. Dougal’s eyes were calculating his chance of coming to adequate terms with Trevor Lomas amidst the confusion when a curious thing happened.

The confusion stopped. Elaine started to sing in the same tone as her screaming, joylessly, and as if in continuation of it. The other girls, seeming to take a signal from her, sidled their wails into a song,

‘Sad to say I’m on my way,

I got a little girl in Kingston Town’

meanwhile casting their eyes fitfully over the Rye beyond the trees.

The strange youth let go of Dixie and began to jive with Elaine. In a few seconds everyone except Dougal was singing, performing the twisting jive, merging the motions of the fight into those of the frantic dance. Dougal saw Humphrey’s face as his neck swooped upwards. It was frightened. Dixie’s expression was, with a decided effort, bright. So was Elaine’s. A one-sided smile on the face of the strange boy, and the fact that, as he bent and twisted in the jive, he buttoned up his shirt, made Dougal look round outside the group for the cause of this effect. He saw it immediately. Two policemen were quite close to them now. They must have been observed at a distance of three minutes’ police-pace when Elaine had started to sing and the signal had gone round.

‘What you think this is – a dance hall?’

‘No, constable. No, inspector. Just having a dance with the girls. Just going home, mate.’

‘Well, go home. Get a move on. Out of the park, the lot of you.’

‘It was Dixie,’ said Humphrey to Dougal on the way home, ‘that started the fight. She was over-tired and worked up. She said that tart of Trevor’s was giving her looks. She went up to the girl and said, “Who you looking at?” and then the girl did give her a look. Then Dixie let fly with her handbag. That’s how it all began.’

Rain started to fall as they turned up past the old Quaker cemetery. Nelly Mahone took a green-seeming scarf from a black bag and placed it over her long grey hair. She cried: ‘The meadows are open and the green herbs have appeared, and the hay is gathered out of the mountain. The wicked man fleeth when no man pursueth, but the just, bold as a lion, shall be without dread.’

‘Pleasant evening, though a bit wet,’ Dougal said.

Nelly looked round after him.

Up in his room Dougal poured Algerian wine and remarked as he passed a glass to Humphrey,

‘The cupboards run the whole length of the attic floor.’ Humphrey put the glass on the floor at his feet and looked up at Dougal.

‘There was a noise in the cupboard,’ Dougal said, ‘the night before last. It went creak-oop, creak-oop. I thought it came from my cupboard here, but I think maybe it didn’t. I think maybe it came from your cupboard through the wall. Creak-oop.’ Dougal bent his knees apart, then sprang up in the air. He repeated this several times. ‘Creak-oop,’ he said.

Humphrey said, ‘It’s only on wet Saturday nights when we can’t go up on the Rye.’

‘Isn’t she heavy to carry upstairs?’ Dougal said.

Humphrey looked alarmed. ‘Did it sound as if I was carrying her upstairs?’

‘Yes. Better to let her walk up in her stockinged feet.’

‘No, she did that once. The old woman came out and nearly caught us.’

‘Better to lie in the bed than in the creaky cupboard,’ Dougal said. ‘The chap in the room below will hear it.’

‘No, the old woman came up one night when we were in the bed. We were nearly caught. Dixie had to run and hide in the cupboard.’

Humphrey lifted his glass of wine from the floor by his feet and drank it in one gulp.

‘Don’t worry yourself,’ Dougal said.

‘It’s a worry what to do. All right on fine Saturday nights; we can go up on the Rye and Dixie gets home about half past eleven. But if it starts to rain we come back here. I don’t see why not, I pay for the room. But there’s the difficulty of getting her up, then down again in the morning while the old woman’s at early church. Then she has to pay her brother Leslie five shillings a time to let her in quietly. And she worries about that, does Dixie. She’s a great saver, is Dixie.’

‘It’s a tiring occupation, is saving,’ Dougal said. ‘Dixie’s looking tired.’

‘Yes, as a matter of fact she does lie awake worrying. And there’s no need to worry. Terrible at seventeen. I said, “What you think you’ll be like in ten years’ time?”‘

‘When are you getting married?’ Dougal said.

‘September. Could do before. But Dixie wants a certain sum. She has her mind set to a certain sum. It keeps her awake at night.’

‘I advised her to take Monday morning off,’ Dougal said. ‘Everyone should take Mondays off.’

‘Now I don’t agree to that,’ Humphrey said. ‘It’s immoral. Once you start absenting yourself you lose your self-respect. And you lose the support of your unions; they won’t back you. Of course the typists haven’t got a union. As yet.’

‘No?’ said Dougal.

‘No,’ Humphrey said, ‘but it’s a question of principle.’

Dougal bent his knees apart as before and leapt into the air. ‘Creak-oop, creak-oop,’ he said.

Humphrey laughed deeply with his head thrown back. He stopped when a series of knocks started up from the floor.

‘Chap downstairs,’ Dougal said, ‘knocks on his ceiling – with a broom handle. He doesn’t like my wee dances.’ He performed his antic three times more, shouting, ‘Creak-oop.

Humphrey cast his head back and laughed, so that Dougal could see the whole inside of his mouth.

‘I have a dream at nights,’ Dougal said, pouring the wine, ‘of girls in factories doing a dance with only the movements of their breasts, bottoms, and arms as they sort, stack, pack, check, cone-wind, gum, uptwist, assemble, seam, and set. I see the Devil in the guise of a chap from Cambridge who does motion-study, and he’s the choreographer. He sings a song that goes, “We study in detail the movements requisite for any given task and we work out the simplest pattern of movement involving the least loss of energy and time.” While he sings this song, the girls are waggling and winding, like this -‘ and Dougal waggled his body and wove his arms intricately. ‘Like Indian dancing, you know,’ he said.

‘And,’ said Dougal, ‘of course this choreographer is a projection of me. I was at the University of Edinburgh myself, but in the dream I’m the Devil and Cambridge.’

Humphrey smiled, looked wise, and said, ‘Inhuman’; which three things he sometimes did when slightly at a loss.