The Eye of Love (3 page)

The child Martha's only embarrassment now was that of riches. The nice shops in Queen's Road—the little house endowed by Mr Gibson stood on the confines of Bayswater and Paddington—competed for attention with shops scarcely nice at all in Praed Street, as did Paddington Station, all steam and bustle, with the rural peace of Kensington Gardens; and even so there were a couple of calls Martha meant to pay first. Actually it took her twenty minutes to reach the end of Alcock Road.

Immediately, there was the grating in the gutter. To anyone who troubled to squat on the curb and use their hands as blinkers, the iron bars of this gradually assumed the appearance of granite columns, ranged like the portico of a temple: a shift of focus advanced the strips of blackness in between, producing a prison-gate. Martha squatted here about ten minutes.

Directly across the road was a letter-box still bearing the monogram VR. To follow the raised curly letters with one's finger, covering every inch without jumping, was an exercise not to be resisted; it also, successfully accomplished, brought good luck for the rest of the day.

Beyond the letter-box beckoned a gate with a brass plate, carelessly cleaned. The smears of metal-polish all round dried white on the green paint in a different pattern each morning. To-day's was rather simple, just a flight of gulls, but Martha hadn't seen it. (As a rule she nipped across as soon as the careless maid went in.)

Three houses from Miss Taylor, chiropodist, if the front door happened to open, one could glimpse within a really remarkable umbrella-stand shaped like an enormous frog; worth hanging about quite a while for.

Martha's time of twenty minutes to the corner was in fact very good going, she could easily make Alcock Road last a whole afternoon. Now she was in a hurry.

Her first object was the Public Library, to which she had no official right of entry. (Children under twelve admitted only in company of an adult.) But her mild and serious contemplation of certain Chinese paintings, bequest of a nineteenth-century missionary, had so endeared her to the Librarian that he never found heart to apply the rules. Martha stumped in with justified confidence and had a good look.

Here was the real thing.

Reluctantly, Martha admitted it. Try as she would, she had never fixed, even among the unlimited possibilities offered by nine square feet of lawn, so satisfactory a balance between height, lesser height, and flat. (She didn't even know that this was what she attempted; she just wanted to get things right.) The bamboo brushed in ink swayed more lightly than the growing bents. The red of the painted azalea was more vivid than the red of the pimpernel—as the tiger on the next scroll was more lifelike than the living cat …

“Tell me what they say to you,” prompted the kind, interested Librarian.

Martha didn't bother to reply. Having seen what she'd come to see, she turned and stumped out again without wasting energy. It was quite a long walk to Mr Punshon's.

Mr Punshon, who mended her own stout shoes and occasionally Dolores' pumps, was like all cobblers a politician: the walls of his narrow establishment were lined with cartoons from Rowlandson to Spy. Martha walked in and had a good look.

“No trade to-night?” enquired her friend humorously.

Martha stood politely on one leg to display a solid heel.

“Good leather,” said Mr Punshon, in self-approval. “Want a dekko at my album?”

Martha hesitated. Mr Punshon's album, into which he pasted all the cartoons he hadn't room for on his walls, was very tempting. (It was bodily an old Burke's Peerage; Mr Punshon greatly enjoyed grangerising it with rude cartoons about the House of Lords.) But though Martha was tempted, her instinct told her she'd already looked at enough; even the contemplation of Mr Punshon's wall-display, after the Chinese paintings, had put a slight overload on eye and memory …

“Thank you very much,” she said, “but I'd rather come back.”

“Any time you like,” said Mr Punshon.

“Good night,” said Martha.

On the pavement outside she paused to consider her next move. What she now needed was relaxation, which to Martha meant using her ears instead of her eyes. Even looking in shop-windows wouldn't have relaxed her. Most fortunately, the little chapel neighbouring her friend's shop advertised a service of Help and Repentance for Hardened Sinners. Martha stumped in, and got a very good place up front.

3

Between the pink curtains no more sunlight penetrated. The sun had set. Exhausted by emotion, Dolores and Mr Gibson still sought to comfort each other.

“I shall be all right, Harry. You mustn't worry about me.”

“How can I help worrying about you?”

“I can easily go back to the shop.”

“Anywhere but that!” cried Mr Gibson.

Amazing, extraordinary power of love! Considering the state of the labour-market, anywhere else indeed, no West End haberdasher was going to look twice at Old Madrid: Mr Gibson was moved by jealousy. He saw his Spanish rose plucked across the counter by another's hand.

“I couldn't stand it, you're too attractive,” said Mr Gibson. He paused, fighting against fate. “There's still half a year of the lease to run …”

“It can be sub-let.”

“Six months would give you time to look about.”

“No,” said Dolores. It was now she who took the high-minded lead, and though too delicate to put the argument into words she had also no need to—so used they were to reading each other's thoughts. Mr Gibson at once knew what she was reminding him of: any money he could lay hands on, for the coming year at least, would be Joyce money: in fact, a dowry.

“If we say toodle-oo, I think it makes a difference,” pleaded Mr Gibson. “I believe anyone would think so.”

“No,” repeated Dolores.

“I always knew I wasn't worthy of you,” groaned Mr Gibson.

“But if my King Hal doesn't want me to go into a shop again, I promise him I won't.”

“You should have been a Queen,” groaned Mr Gibson. “I wouldn't mind a Ladies' Department so much.”

“Just trust me, Harry, that's all I ask.”

“Or a Children's Wear. At least you'll have Martha to be a comfort to you,” cried Mr Gibson.

This was the first time, in some three hours, that either he or Miss Diver had remembered the child Martha; and as though there was now no comfort to be found anywhere, no sooner were the words out of Mr Gibson's mouth than he regretted them. Companionable as she might be in Dolores' sorrow, the child Martha would need to be fed and clothed; and Mr Gibson knew his beloved's resources almost to a shilling. She had a hundred pounds in the Post Office (chiefly because a horse called April the Fifth had won the Derby), ten one-pound notes he'd just put under the pierrot, and in her purse probably some loose change. He'd never been able to give her jewels—only a garnet brooch shaped like a heart, and it was a stroke of luck that garnets were her birth-stone. Together, recklessly, in the first days of their romance, they'd bought the bronze lady, as the most beautiful object they'd either of them ever seen; but even at the time Mr Gibson knew it wasn't a good investment. Now his one consolation was that he'd paid the gas-bill. He had the receipt in his breast-pocket.

As usual following his thought—

“Don't worry, Big Harry,” whispered Dolores. “We'll manage.”

“I'm leaving you too much for any little woman to shoulder.”

“Just don't worry, my darling.”

“How can I help worrying!” cried Mr Gibson uncontrollably.

“How can I help worrying about you!” cried Miss Diver.

The settee creaked again under their embrace, Martha was forgotten, everything was forgotten, except love and despair.

4

All children enjoy charades. Martha, in the little chapel beside the cobbler's, naturally presented herself as a Hardened Sinner. The penitents' bench in any case needed patronage; after a really moving address only Mr Johnson, besides herself, advanced to be saved. Martha happened to know Mr Johnson quite well; he sold matches on the curb in Queen's Road, and when Martha could spare a penny she often patronised him, as a tribute to his extraordinary profile. (No gargoyle was uglier: he had a broken nose that under apish brows twisted east-west-east, and practically no chin. What broke Mr Johnson's nose was a blow with a knuckle-duster in his palmy days as bookie's tout, but on the tray of matches it said “Old Contemptible, Wounded At Mons”.) Martha, unlike most people, enjoyed looking at him, and Mr Johnson appreciated it; kneeling side by side in their prominent positions they exchanged friendly glances.

“Wotcher think
you
're doing 'ere?” muttered Mr Johnson, out of the side of his mouth.

“Repenting,” said Martha rather loudly.

“That's no tone o' voice to repent in,” said Mr Johnson snobbishly. “Pipe down a bit …”

5

Hours passed, evening passed to night, and Miss Diver and Mr Gibson still hadn't stirred: as though to move at all was to initiate the act of parting. Mostly they were silent; only now and again some specially poignant memory was too precious not to voice.

“Do you remember the first time you gave me oysters, Harry?”

“You looked like a little girl taking medicine.”

“You said, ‘Now I know why they call the world an oyster. At last I've found my pearl.'”

“You made a poet of me,” said Mr Gibson.

Fortunately it was quite a warm night. They weren't unbearably cold.

“Remember the first time we went to the Derby?” breathed Mr Gibson. “When you wouldn't take the gypsy's warning?”

“Against a tall handsome stranger? When there you were? What I'd have lost if I had!” breathed back Dolores. “My Big Harry, my King Hal!”

It wasn't too uncomfortable, on the settee. Presently indeed, shortly after midnight, Miss Diver fell asleep; and then at last Mr Gibson gently extricated himself, and took her in his arms, and carried her upstairs, and laid her on the big double couch that had witnessed first their inexpert embraces, and latterly (what in fact suited both much better) their calm connubial repose. It wasn't difficult, physically, for Mr Gibson to pull the coverlet over his love and leave her to sleep alone: it only broke his heart. One final weakness he permitted himself; when he drew the comb from her hair he put it, still warm, into his pocket. Then he pulled the curtains across the window, and went quietly downstairs, and walked home to his mother's flat in Kensington.

Martha had long before entered by the kitchen-window, and stuffed a pound of cold sausages into her hardy stomach, and gone to bed. She'd had a fine time.

CHAPTER THREE

1

“Good morning, Mater,” said Harry Gibson. “Have you come to watch me drink my tea?”

“It won't be I much longer,” said old Mrs Gibson. Her bright shrewd eye, round and brown as a berry, glanced swiftly over the table; she was sixty-nine, and had been up to set it herself. “Eat your good eggs, Harry, and your toast and butter and marmalade. I like to see you!”

“I know you do,” said Mr Gibson glumly. “It's why I'm overweight.”

“Who wants to see a big man like a scarecrow? Thank God your father put on some flesh before the end!” cried Mrs Gibson dramatically. “That his last breath didn't smell of starvation!”

“It smelt of port.”

“I thank God for that too,” agreed Mrs Gibson resourcefully. “What an end for my Peter after all, to die with the smell of wine on his mouth!—Those eggs are double-yolked.”

Harry Gibson regarded them inimically. He had no appetite. But he wasn't certain whether or not his mother had heard him come in, and the best way to avoid questioning was to behave as normally as possible. As he cracked one of the double-yolked eggs, and began to eat it, it crossed his mind that he would at least have to explain his future non-absences on two nights of the week. They were officially spent in Leeds, where he had invented a tie-up with a department-store.

Whether or not because he managed to swallow, his mother didn't question him. Nor did she continue, for which he was thankful, in the vein of dramatic reminiscence. Quite apart from the fact that it was too early, Mr Gibson had been trying all his life to shut his ears to just such recitals: the tale of his father's heroic flight from Moscow (1880) in search of political freedom and wider opportunities in the cheap-fur line, was something he strictly didn't want to hear. For Harry Gibson was British to the core. He was British-born, and proud of it, and did everything he could think of to make himself a true son of Empire. By a really remarkable feat of will, he couldn't remember any other surname than Gibson. In 1914, at the age of thirty-two, he volunteered for Kitchener's Army (they wouldn't take him until three years later), and it was the greatest satisfaction of his life to have held the King's Commission. (He'd have given a leg to be decorated, and could probably have summoned up the necessary valour; but Service Corps rarely engage an enemy.) He could even recognise the slight un-Englishness of his relation with his mother: calling her Mater was an attempt to bring it into line. In short, Mr Gibson had all his life devoted himself to becoming a true-blue Britisher—solid, humdrum, unemotional; and succeeded so well, that in middle-age his rejection of a genuinely exotic background took revenge, and he fell for a pseudo-Spanish rose.

“Dolores!” thought Mr Gibson, in silent anguish. “What will become of you, O my Dolores, without your King Hal?”

The human countenance affording but a limited range of expressions, even a mother cannot always read her child's mind. What old Mrs Gibson saw in Harry's face was a justified regret that he hadn't been left a sounder business. She therefore made haste to direct a bright if oblique light upon his immediate prospects.