An Awfully Big Adventure - Beryl Bainbridge [4]
Debating anything with the girl was a lost cause. She constantly played to the gallery. No one was denying she could have had a better start in life, but then she wasn’t unique in that respect and it was no excuse for wringing the last drop of drama out of the smallest incident. Emotions weren’t like washing. There was no call to peg them out for all the world to view.
Mostly her behaviour smacked of manipulation, of opportunism. He’d known people like her in the army, people from working-class backgrounds, who’d read a few books and turned soft. If she had been a boy he’d have taken his belt to her, or at least the back of his hand.
All that costly nonsense of keeping the landing light burning into the small hours. Lily said it was because she remembered that business of the night lights – for God’s sake, the child had been nine months old. He put it down to that poetry she was so fond of, all those rhymes and rhythms, those couplets of melancholy and madness that inflamed her imagination. Nor was he altogether sure she was afraid of the dark. Why, during the blackout, when the whole city was drowned in black ink, she had often gone out into the backyard and stood for an hour at a time, keening under the alderbush. And what about the time he had come home on leave and she had somehow slipped out of the shelter and he and the air-raid warden had found her crouched against the railings of the cemetery, clapping her hands together as the sugar warehouses on the Dock Road burst like paper bags and the sparks snapped like fire crackers against the sky?
She had always been perverse, had always, in regard to little things – things which normal people took in their stride – exhibited a degree of opposition that was downright absurd. He hadn’t forgotten her histrionics following the removal of the half-basin on the landing. She had accused him of mutilating her past, of ripping out her memories. He’d had to bite on his tongue to stop himself from blurting out that in her case this was all to the good. There were worse things than the disappearance of basins. It had brought home to him how unreliable history was, in that the story, by definition, was always one-sided.
Nor would he forgive in a hurry the slap-stick scene resulting from the felling of the alder bush in the dismal back yard, when she had run from the basement door like a madwoman and flung herself between axe and bush. Ma Tang from next door, believing he was murdering the girl, had shied seed potatoes at him from the wash-house roof. Ma Tang’s father, who was put out to roost at dawn with his scant hair done up in a pigtail, had sent his grandson for the police.
The basin had been a liability. More than one lodger, returning late at night and caught short, had utilised it for a purpose not intended. As for the alder bush, a poor sick thing with blighted leaves, it was interfering with the drains. On both occasions, and there had been many others, Stella’s face had betrayed an emotion so inappropriate, assumed an expression of such false sensibility, that it was almost comic. Perhaps it wasn’t entirely assumed; there had been moments when he could have sworn she felt something.
For her part, Lily had tried to wheedle Stella into letting Uncle Vernon accompany her to the theatre. She implied it was no more than his due. If he hadn’t known Rose Lipman’s brother when they were boys growing up rough together in Everton, Stella wouldn’t have got a look-in. And it wasn’t as though he would be intrusive. He was a sensitive man; even that butcher in Hardman Street, who had palmed him off with the horsemeat, had recognised as much. He would just slope off up the road and wait for her, meekly, in Brown’s Café.
‘Meekly,’ Stella had repeated, and given one of her laughs. She’d threatened to lock herself in her room if he insisted on going with her. Her door didn’t boast such a thing as a lock, but her resolution was plain enough. She said she would rather pass up her chance altogether than go hand in hand towards it with Uncle