Hole and Corner (2 page)

She frowned at herself in the glass and wished for the nine hundred and ninety-ninth time that she was very tall, and willowy, and exotic, with red hair and green eyes, or else the sort of pale gold hair which goes with ice-blue eyes … and she wouldn't walk, she would just undulate … and she would either have a very deep husky voice to go with the red hair and green eyes, or the silvery, mellifluous sort which sounds as if it would break if you tried to say ordinary, sordid words with it—words like rent, job, landlady, and lodger.

Her nose wrinkled at her in the glass, and she laughed. If she couldn't willow or look exotic, she had at least managed to get a job, and that was more than some people did. It wasn't a very exciting job—not in the least what she thought she was going to get when she came up to town. If she had been really willowy, she might have been taken on as a mannequin. She thought it would be too marvellous to trail round wearing Paris models—only perhaps you'd get bored with it after a bit, and it would be dreadfully difficult not to laugh when fat old women bought heavenly slinky clothes which they couldn't possibly get into. But if you laughed, it would be all
up
.

Perhaps it was really better to go and read to Mrs Huddleston, and write her letters, and run her errands. And thank heaven she didn't live in, so she had her evenings, even though they were generally as dull as ditchwater. When you live in a village, you think London is going to be very exciting, but when you live there on two pounds a week London is often very dull indeed.

Shirley paid Mrs Camber twenty-five shillings a week for bed and breakfast. Sometimes she paid her something for lunch, and sometimes she didn't have lunch at all, only a cup of tea and a bun, and that left her about fourteen shillings a week for her supper, her laundry, and her bus fares, to say nothing of clothes, shoes, and amusements. It was very difficult to know what to do about bus fares. They ran away with a most frightful lot of money, but if you walked you got hungry and your shoes wore out. Shirley had only been in town six months, but she was already a little scared about the shoe problem. Clothes could be made to last almost indefinitely, but shoes simply wouldn't.

She switched her thoughts firmly away from shoes. This was one of the days Mrs Camber had given her lunch, and it was time to think about going back to Revelston Crescent. If the fog was going to get any worse, it might take longer than usual. She put on a dark grey coat with a black collar, pulled a black beret over her curls, grabbed a pair of gloves, and took another look out of the window. Her room was on the top floor of a house which was rather taller than its neighbours. She looked down at a foreshortened pillar-box, and the pavement, and the street, and the roofs and windows of other houses, and they all swam in the fog like bits of toast in a plate of lentil soup.
Disgusting
. But it was going to be worse before it was better. She banged her door behind her and ran downstairs, quite regardless of the fact that Miss Maltby would probably seize the opportunity of complaining to Mrs Camber about Noise, Total Lack of Consideration, and The Manners of the Present Generation.

Miss Maltby had two rooms on the next floor. To have a bedroom and a sitting-room naturally placed you in a position to complain about someone who only had a bed-sitting-room, and attic at that.

Shirley stopped for a moment on the landing to put out the tip of her tongue at the nearer of Miss Maltby's doors. She had a front room and a back room, and on the other side of the landing there was Jasper Wrenn's room, and the shabbier of the two bathrooms.

She was in the middle of putting out her tongue, when Jasper Wrenn opened his door. As this happened nearly every time she came downstairs, it caused her neither surprise nor embarrassment. She drew in her tongue, turned round with a casual nod, and exclaimed,

“Glory, Jas! What
have
you been doing?”

Mr Wrenn's scowl deepened perceptibly. He was a dark and ferociously untidy young man. His right hand was imbrued to the knuckles in ink. He passed it over an already murky brow and said crossly,

“What have I been doing about what?”

Shirley put out the tip of her tongue again. It really only just showed and went back, but the intention was clear.

“Ink,” she said. “Seas of it. You know—not the multitudinous sort that was encarnadined, but just common or garden black ink all over you like Struwel-Peter—‘Eyes, and nose, and face, and hair. Trousers, pinafores and toys—'”

Jasper removed the hand from his brow and gazed at her.

“I've been writing.”

Shirley giggled.

“I'm so frightfully clever, I guessed that.” She came a little nearer. “Where have you got to in the book? Are they still having nothing to eat? I do wish you'd feed your people. I've got a feeling that they wouldn't make such an awful muck of everything if you'd let them have a proper meal sometimes.”

Jasper ran his inky fingers through his hair. A slightly sheepish expression struggled through the frown.

“As a matter of fact it wasn't the book. It ought to have been, but it wasn't. I got an idea for a poem. It isn't worked out or anything, but it's an idea.” His hand came down from his hair, fished in a gaping pocket, and produced a smeared and crumpled piece of paper. “I could read it to you if you've time.”

Shirley said, “'M—not more than five minutes. Mustn't be late, because I was late yesterday, and she said everything you
can
say then. If she had to think of some more to-day, something might go pop, and then I'd be out of a job. I suppose you know you've got a button just hanging.”

“It doesn't matter.”

“It does. You'll lose it, and then you'll have to buy another. Wait a sec and I'll sew it on while you read me your stuff.”

She ran upstairs with even less regard for Miss Maltby's nerves than she had shown when coming down, and was back in a minute with a threaded needle.

“What does it matter about the button?” said Jasper. He gloomed self-consciously at the smudged sheet in his hand, and added with impatience, “Come in and shut the door.”

Shirley made a very fine Woggy Doodle at Miss Maltby's doors. Then she skipped into the room, left the door ostentatiously open, and said in a reproving voice,

“Jas, I'm surprised at you! Just think what the Maltby would say! I've got a character if you haven't. Now hurry up with the poem, because I'm not going to be late even for you.”

He shrugged a pettish shoulder.

“How can I read anything with the whole house listening?”

Shirley pricked him sharply on the arm with her needle.

“Darling Jas, I shall probably stab you to the heart if you do that again. Nobody's listening, but if they
were
, you ought to be
pleased
. Don't you want to have a public? Come on—get it off your chest!” She bent to the button.

Over her head Mr Wrenn declaimed in tones rendered hoarse by emotion:

“Wake in the night and find

That you are blind.

No left, no right,

No up, no down,

No shape or form—

And there you drown

In a despair

That says ‘
You are not
,'

And, ‘
You never were
.'

Wake in the night and find

That you are blind.

Nothing is real at all,

Nothing is true.

There never was a day,

There is no you.

Wake in the night and find

That you are blind!”

“Glory!” said Shirley. “How
damp
!”

He pulled furiously away from her, and the cotton broke.

“How do you mean
damp
?”

“Now look what you've done! As a matter of fact I'd just finished, so it doesn't matter, except that I might have pricked you to the bone. When people are kindly sewing buttons on for you, you ought to stand still.”

“What do you mean by
damp
? That's what I want to know!”

Shirley wrinkled her nose at him.

“Well, it gave me a sort of creep down the middle of my spine—like getting into a wet bathing-dress.”

Jasper scowled.

“If it gave you a creep, that's what it was meant to do. Why drag in bathing-dresses?”

Shirley gurgled.

“I didn't drag them in—they came. That's the way my mind works—if I don't think of something practical at once it just goes floating up in the air like a balloon, and then I feel giddy.” She darned the needle in behind the revers of her coat and kissed her finger-tips to the frown. “
Some
day the wind will change and you'll get stuck like that. And nobody'll
ever
fall in love with you. Must fly—I'm a wage-slave.” She ran down the remaining stairs and all the way to the end of the street, where she scrambled breathless upon a bus. She was in far too great a hurry to notice that the nearer of Miss Maltby's doors was ajar.

Through the crack Miss Maltby watched her go, her little sharp eyes intent behind scant sandy lashes, her long pale nose quivering slightly at the tip, her thin lips folded in and very tightly compressed. She was a tall, bony woman with a forward stoop and a faint habitual cough which was a constant source of annoyance to Jasper Wrenn, who contended that she could control it if she wanted to and only coughed because she liked the sound of her own voice. It was certainly true that she had made no sound all the time she stood spying through the crack. Not a stitch of Shirley's needle, not a frown of Jasper Wrenn's, not a word of their nonsensical talk had escaped her. She now saw Jasper bang his door, and opined that he had plunged again into inky meditation.

She waited five minutes, then opened her door a little wider, and came furtively out upon the landing, an odd figure in a long old-fashioned dress of black cashmere with a tucked silk front, and a sagging coat of faded purple wool. Long, long ago, when Miss Maltby was young, she may have believed, or someone may have told her, that violet and purple shades were flattering to her hair and to a skin which was now colourless but had perhaps once been fair. The hair must certainly have been bright in those far off days. Even now, brushed thinly back and screwed into a scanty knob, gold gleamed unexpectedly here and there from the prevailing sandy grey.

She looked down over the stairs, and then turned her head sharply as if she expected to find someone behind her.

There was no one there. There might have been no one but herself in all the house. Mr and Mrs Monk who had the drawing-room floor were out all day. They had an antique shop. Miss Pym who had the dining-room and the bedroom behind it was a buyer at Madeline's. At the moment she was in Paris choosing spring models, Mrs Camber in the basement was taking what she described as a bit of a set down, Mabel, the cheerful Salvationist help, was washing up to the hearty strains of
Pull for the Shore, Sailor, pull for the Shore
. To all intents and purposes Miss Maltby had the house to herself. She listened nevertheless for three or four minutes, her head poked forward, the skin straining over her cheek-bones.

At last she drew back, turned round, and went noiselessly upstairs to the top floor. Here she stopped and listened again. Only the higher notes of Mabel's cheerful soprano reached her now, as faint and thin as a bat's cry. Miss Maltby nodded approvingly. Then she opened the door of Shirley's room and went in.

CHAPTER THREE

Shirley would have gone on the top of the bus if it hadn't been foggy. As it was, she squeezed in between a lady with a string shopping-bag whose clothes flowed and billowed over the most astonishingly ample contours and a little man with a billycock hat on the top of his head and longish hair which smelt of moth-ball. At least that is where the smell seemed to be coming from. Perhaps he had just got his hat out of cold storage, or perhaps he really was afraid of getting moth in his hair. It was the sort of hair that looked as if it might get moth in it rather easily. Shirley looked at it, and at the large lady's profusely patterned scarf, and at the contents of her shopping-bag alternately disclosed and hidden by the meshes of coffee-coloured string, all with the deepest interest. She was often dull when she was indoors by herself, and she was continuously bored with Mrs Huddleston, but the streets, the buses, the trains, and the shops were a lively and perpetual source of interest.

She looked out on the fog, and the shop windows, and a poster which said, “American Millionaire Dead.” It seemed funny to think of anyone having millions. She looked at the people opposite, and read all the advertisements. The conductor was a nice young man with a merry eye. There were a lot of nice people in the world, but it was a pity that most of them had so little money. Some of the people who had a lot weren't half so nice. Perhaps Mrs Huddleston would have been nicer if she had been poor and had to do things for herself instead of ordering other people about. Miss Maltby on the other hand was poor, and she was easily the nastiest person Shirley knew.

The bus stopped with a jerk at Acland Road and Shirley jumped off.

Revelston Crescent was the first turning on the right out of Acland Road. A newsboy stood there, thrusting out his papers at the passers-by. Shirley shook her head. She hadn't any coppers to spare, but the poster news was free. She could amuse herself as she went along trying to piece the headlines together like a jigsaw puzzle. This boy's poster was quite a new one, fresh and hot from the press. It said in big letters of staring black:

“Death of William Ambrose Merewether.”

The name did not stir her memory in even the slightest degree. It meant nothing to her except that in a faint, uninterested way she linked it with the other poster she had seen, and supposed that William Ambrose Merewether was the Dead American Millionaire. That the death of this unknown person would affect her, her life, and her safety would have seemed an impossibility, yet at that very moment a train of events had been set in motion which were to change the whole course of her life and endanger all its hopes and prospects.