An Awfully Big Adventure - Beryl Bainbridge [13]
She was glad her ears were clean. Every fortnight, on bath night, Lily probed them with a kirby-grip. Uncle Vernon said it was a dangerous thing to do. Stella could be perforated. Squirming, she left off cradling Geoffrey’s head and brought her hand down to separate her stomach from his. It was disgusting really, linking men with babies.
Something with the texture of an orange, peeled and sticky, bumped against her wrist. She couldn’t suppress crying out her distaste, any more than she could help envying Geoffrey his lack of inhibition. On occasions, when visiting the doctor for some minor ailment, she had even felt it immodest to stick out her tongue. She didn’t dare look down in case she glimpsed that object bobbing against her overall.
It’s no use, she thought. I’ll have to practise on someone else. It would be fearful enough to be up against something as dreadful as that belonging to a beloved, let alone attached to a person one despised. Punching Geoffrey in the chest she broke free from his arms and leapt upwards to swipe a cobweb from the ceiling. She was shaking all over and yet she felt much fonder of him now that he’d behaved so rudely. Even his hair looked different, less annoying.
‘I know I give the wrong impression,’ Geoffrey said, when they had finished cleaning the dressing-room. ‘I know you think I’m a snob.’
‘You are,’ she said, ‘but it’s no longer an issue.’ It was the truth. If he had a need to shine it was all right by her. He could spout his foreign words until the cows came home; he wasn’t a stranger any more.
‘I like old George,’ he insisted. ‘Really I do. Trouble is, he stinks.’ And he went downstairs to drape his mittens in front of the coals.
Stella stayed behind, dipping her nose like a pecking hen into the front of her jumper to sniff herself. She hadn’t known George smelled, or rather that the sour whiffs of stale tobacco and unwashed clothing constituted an unacceptable reek. Stink had an awful sound, on a par with putrefaction.
She raised her head and stood there, her hand cupped over her nose to trap the scent of her skin, and all at once she inhaled some forgotten, familiar odour of the past. It wasn’t a bad smell: something between wood smoke and a house left empty. Her lips parted to give it a name but the word got lost before it was uttered, and all that remained was the sweet brilliantine caught on her fingers and her own breath smelling of the liquorice that George had given her.
It was inconvenient, Stella coming home and wanting a bath. As Uncle Vernon pointed out, it was only Wednesday.
‘I don’t care what day it is,’ she said. She was so set on it she was actually grinding her teeth.
It meant paraffin had to be fetched from Cairo Joe’s chandler’s shop next door to the Greek Orthodox church, and then the stove lugged two flights up the stairs and the blanket nailed to the window with tacks. In the alleyway beyond the back wall stood a row of disused stables and a bombed house with the wallpaper hanging in shreds from the chimney-breast, and sometimes women, no better than they ought to be, lured men into the ruined shadows.
‘You’ll freeze,’ Lily threatened, having run upstairs in her coat and hat to lay out the family towel and returned, teeth chattering, like Scott on his way to the Pole.
‘You’re a fool to yourself,’ said Uncle Vernon. He’d put two and two together and come up with Stella’s monthlies. There wasn’t any other reasonable explanation, and anyone with an ounce of sense knew it was courting disaster to get into water at such a time.
Then there was the business of lighting the geyser, never easy on the best of days, let alone unscheduled. A loss of nerve, a miscalculation of timing between the release of the gas and the striking of the match could blow them all into eternity. ‘Can’t it wait until next week?’ he implored, catching his breath on the first landing with the stove in his arms and the loofah, stiff as a smoked kipper, slotted for convenience through the braces of his