An Awfully Big Adventure - Beryl Bainbridge [1]
‘Get out of my sight,’ he said, and pushing past her strode up the corridor to waylay Rose.
‘I was encouraged,’ she shouted after him. ‘Don’t you forget that!’
He slashed the air with his hook.
‘You don’t want to be too hard on her,’ Rose said. ‘She’s young.’
He followed her through the pass door and across the dark stage into the auditorium. When Rose saw the teddy-bear she picked it up by one ear and walked on with it dangling against the skirt of her black frock.
‘Did you get through to the wife?’ asked Meredith.
‘I did,’ Rose said. ‘She’s coming up on the milk train.’
He climbed the stone steps after her, ducking his head beneath the singing gas mantles until they reached the top floor and the round window overlooking the square. Only the fireman and the rat-catcher came this far.
‘The note,’ he enquired. ‘Did it shed any illumination?’
‘Who can tell?’ she said. ‘Bunny saw fit to put a match to it.’
At this hour the square was empty. The flower-sellers had long since gone home, leaving the orange boxes piled up beside the urinals. Between the jagged buildings the lights of ships jumped like sparks above the river.
They stood in silence, looking down into the darkness as though waiting for a curtain to rise. There was a sudden seep of orange light as the door of Brown’s Café opened and the slattern in the gumboots staggered out to sling washing-up slops into the gutter.
Then the girl appeared from out of the side street and began to run in the direction of the telephone box on the corner. Once she looked back and up at the window as though she knew she was observed. At this distance her face was a pale blur. A man with a white muffler wound about his throat rolled from the black shadows of Ice Warehouse and the girl stopped and spoke to him.
He fumbled in his pockets and handed her something. He was holding a bouquet of flowers in a twist of paper.
‘The Board won’t like it,’ Meredith said. ‘Rushworth is bound to kick up rough.’
‘I’m a match for him,’ said Rose. She was holding the teddy-bear to her sequinned breast, circling with the pad of her finger the cold button of its eye.
‘I don’t suppose,’ Meredith asked her, ‘that we can keep it out of the newspapers.’
‘I could,’ Rose told him, ‘but I won’t. The orphanage has rung twice already. God forgive us, but it’ll be good for business.’
Directly below, where the branches of the lime trees bounced in the wind, sending the lamplight skeetering across the cobblestones, the man in the muffler stood relieving himself within the wrought-iron enclosure of the public urinal, one arm fastidiously raised above his head. They could see his boots, glossy under the street lamp, and that bedraggled fistful of winter daffodils . . .
1
At first it had been Uncle Vernon’s ambition, not Stella’s. He thought he understood her; from the moment she could toddle he had watched her lurching towards the limelight. Stella herself had shown more caution. ‘I’ll not chase moonbeams,’ she told him.
Still, she went along with the idea and for two years, on a Friday after school, she ran down the hill to Hanover Street and rode the lift in Crane Hall, up through the showrooms of polished pianofortes where the blind men fingered scales, until she reached the top floor and Mrs Ackerley whose puckered mouth spat out ‘How now brown cow’ behind the smokescreen of her Russian cigarettes.
She came home and shut herself in her bedroom off the scullery and spouted speeches. She sat at the tea table and dropped her cup to the saucer, spotting the good cloth with tannic acid, wailing that it might be a poison that the Friar Lawrence had administered. When Uncle Vernon shouted at her she said she wasn’t old enough to control either her reflexes or her emotions. She had always had a precise notion of what could be expected of her.
Lily had imagined that the girl was merely learning to speak properly and was dismayed to hear