long these estimates take? I’m not going without my tea-break, if that’s what you’re thinking, Miss Coverdale.” She said, “Oh, Dixie, you’re impossible,” and turned away. I jumped up and I said, “Repeat that,” I said. I said-’
‘You should have reported her to Personnel,’ Humphrey said. ‘That was your correct procedure.’
‘A disappointed spinster,’ Mavis said, ‘that’s what she is.’
‘She’s immoral with Mr Druce, a married man, that I know for a fact,’ Dixie said. ‘So she’s covered. You can’t touch her, there’s no point in reporting her to Personnel. It gets you down.’
‘Take Monday off,’ said Dougal. ‘Take Tuesday off as well. Have a holiday.’
‘No, I don’t agree to that,’ Humphrey said. ‘Absenteeism is downright immoral. Give a fair week’s work for a fair week’s pay.’
Dixie’s stepfather, who had been watching the television in the sitting-room and who suddenly felt lonely, put his head round the door.
‘Want a cup of tea, Arthur?’ said Mavis. ‘Meet Mr Douglas. Mr Douglas, Mr Crewe.’
‘Where’s Leslie?’ said Arthur Crewe.
‘Well, he ought to be in. I let him go out,’ Mavis said. ‘Because there’s something going on out the front,’ Arthur said.
They all trooped through to the sitting-room and peered into the falling dusk, where a group of young people in their teens were being questioned by an almost equal number of policemen.
‘The youth club,’ Mavis said.
Dougal immediately went out to investigate. As he opened the street door, young Leslie slid in as if from some concealment; he was breathless.
Dougal returned presently to report that the tyres of a number of cars parked up at the Rye had been slashed. The police were rounding up the teenage suspects. Young Leslie was chewing bubble-gum. Every now and then he pulled a long strand out of his mouth and let it spring back into his mouth.
‘But it seems to me the culprits may have been children,’ Dougal said, ‘as much as these older kids.’
Leslie stopped chewing for an instant and stared back at Dougal in such disgust that he seemed to be looking at Dougal through his nostrils rather than his eyes. Then he resumed his chewing.
Dougal winked at him. The boy stared back.
‘Take that muck out of your mouth, son,’ said his father.
‘You can’t stop him,’ said his mother. ‘He won’t listen to you. Leslie, did you hear what your father said?’
Leslie shifted the gum to the other side of his cheek and left the room.
Dougal looked out of the window at the group who were still being questioned.
‘Two girls there come from Meadows Meade,’ he said. ‘Odette Hill, uptwister, and Lucille rotter, gummer.’
‘Oh, the factory lot are always mixed up in the youth club trouble,’ Mavis said. ‘You don’t want anything to do with that lot.’ As she spoke she moved her hand across her perm, nipping each brown wave in turn between her third and index fingers.
Dougal winked at her and smiled with all his teeth.
Mavis said to Dixie in a whisper, ‘Has
‘Yup,’ said Dixie, meaning, yes, her stepfather had gone out for his evening drink.
Mavis went to the sideboard and fetched out a large envelope.
‘Here we are again,’ Dixie said.
‘She always says that,’ Mavis said.
‘Well, Mum, you keep on pulling them out; every new person that comes to the house, out they come.’
Mavis had extracted three large press cuttings from the envelope and handed them to Dougal.
Dixie sighed, looking at Humphrey.
‘Why you two not go on out? Go on out to the pictures,’ Mavis said.
‘We went out last night.’
‘But you didn’t go to the pictures, I bet. Saving and pinching to get married, you’re losing the best time of your life.’
‘That’s what I tell her,’ said Humphrey. ‘That’s what I say.
‘Where’d you go last night?’ Mavis said.
Dixie looked at Humphrey. ‘A walk,’ she said. ‘What you make of these?’ Mavis said to Dougal. The cuttings were dated June 1942. Two of them bore large photographs of Mavis boarding an ocean liner. All announced that she was the first of Peckham’s G.I. brides to depart these shores.
‘You don’t look a day older,’ Dougal said.
‘Oh, go on,’ Dixie said.
‘Not a day,’ said Dougal. ‘Anyone can see your mother’s had a romantic life.’
Dixie took her nail file out of her bag, snapped the bag shut, and started to grate at her nails.
Humphrey bent forward in his chair, one hand on each knee, as if, by affecting intense interest in Mavis’s affair, to compensate for Dixie’s mockery.
‘Well, it was romantic,’ Mavis said, ‘and it wasn’t. It was both. Glub – that was my first husband – Glub was wonderful at first.’ Her voice became progressively American. ‘Made you feel like a queen. He sure was gallant.
‘And got a divorce. And then I met Arthur. Old Arthur’s a good sort.’
‘Mum’s had her moments,’ Dixie said. ‘She won’t let you forget that.’
‘More than what you’ll have, if you go on like you do, putting every penny in the bank. Why, at your age I was putting all my wages what I had left over after paying my keep on my back.’
‘My own American dad pays my keep,’ Dixie said.
‘He thinks he do, but it don’t go far.’
‘Does. Doesn’t,’ Dixie said.
‘I better put the kettle on,’ Mavis said.
Dougal said then to Dixie, ‘I didn’t never have no money of my own at your age.’ He heaved his shoulder and glittered his eyes at her, and she did not dare to correct him. But when Humphrey laughed she turned to him and said, ‘What’s the joke?’
‘Dougal here,’ he said, ‘he’s your match.’
Mavis came back and switched on the television to a cabaret. Her husband returned to find Dougal keeping the cabaret company with a dance of his own in the middle of their carpet. Mavis was shrieking with joy. Humphrey was smiling with dosed lips. Dixie sat also with dosed lips, not smiling.
On Saturday mornings, as on Sundays, the gentlemen in Miss Frierne’s establishment were desired to make their own beds. On his return at eleven o’clock on Saturday night Dougal found a note in his room.
Dougal stuck it up on the mirror of his dressing-table and went downstairs to see if Miss Frierne was still up. He found her in the kitchen, sitting primly up to the table with half a bottle of stout.
‘Any letters for me?’
‘No, Dougal.’
‘There should have been a letter.’
‘Never mind. It might come on Monday.’
‘Tell me some of your stories.’
‘You’ve heard them all, I’m sure.’ He had heard about the footpads on the Rye in the old days; about the nigger minstrels in the street, or rather carriageway as Miss Frierne said it was called then. She sipped her stout and told him once more of her escapade with a girl called Flo, how they had hired a cab at Camberwell Green and gone up to the Elephant for a drink and treated the cabby to twopenn'orth of gin, and returned without anyone at home being the wiser.
‘You must have had some courting days,’ Dougal said. But her narrow old face turned away in disdain at the suggestion, for these were early days in their friendship, and it was a full month before Miss Frierne, one evening when she had finished her nourishing stout with a sigh and got out the gin bottle, told Dougal how the Gordon
