The Collected Stories

grey and purple, hanging over the back of a chair. In the room there was a teddy-bear she’d had since she was three, and a gramophone, and records by the New Seekers and the Pioneers and Diana Ross, and photographs of such performers. In her vague, uninterested manner her mother said she thought it awful that Eleanor should waste her money on these possessions, but Eleanor explained that everyone at Springfield Comprehensive did so and that she herself did not consider it a waste of money.

‘You up?’ Eleanor heard her mother calling now, and she replied that she was. She got out of bed and looked at herself in a looking-glass on her dressing-table. Her night-dress was white with small sprigs of violets on it. Her hair had an auburn tinge, her face was long and thin and was not afflicted with spots, as were a few of the faces of her companions at Springfield Comprehensive. Her prettiness was delicate, and she thought as she examined it now that Liz Jones was definitely right in her insinuations: it was a prettiness that could easily disappear overnight. Hairs would appear on her chin and her upper lip, a soft down at first, later becoming harsher. ‘Your sight, you know,’ an oculist would worriedly remark to her, and tell her she must wear glasses. Her teeth would lose their gleam. She’d have trouble with dandruff.

Eleanor slipped her night-dress over her head and looked at her naked body. She didn’t herself see much beauty in it, but she knew that the breasts were the right size for the hips, that arms and legs nicely complemented each other. She dressed and went into the kitchen, where her father was making tea and her mother was reading the Daily Express. Her father hadn’t been to bed all night. He slept during the day, being employed by night as a doorman in a night-club called Daisy’s, in Shepherd Market. Once upon a time her father had been a wrestler, but in 1961 he’d injured his back in a bout with a Japanese and had since been unfit for the ring. Being a doorman of a night-club kept him in touch, so he claimed, with the glamorous world he’d been used to in the past. He often saw familiar faces, he reported, going in and out of Daisy’s, faces that once had been his audience. Eleanor felt embarrassed when he talked like that, being unable to believe much of what he said.

‘You’re in for a scorcher,’ he said now, placing a pot of tea on the blue formica of the table. ‘No end to the heatwave, they can’t see.’

He was a large, red-faced man with closely cut grey hair and no lobe to his right ear. He’d put on weight since he’d left the wrestling ring and although he moved slowly now, as though in some way compensating for years of nimbleness on the taut canvas, he was still, in a physical sense, a formidable opponent, as occasional troublemakers at the night-club had painfully discovered.

Eleanor knocked Special ? into a dish and added milk and sugar.

‘That’s a lovely young girl,’ her father said. ‘Mia Farrow. She was in last night, Eleanor.’

His breakfast-time conversation was always the same. Princess Margaret had shaken him by the hand and Anthony Armstrong-Jones had asked if he might take his photograph for a book about London he was doing. The Burtons came regularly, and Rex Harrison, and the Canadian Prime Minister whenever he was in London. Her father had a way of looking at Eleanor when he made such statements, his eyes screwed up, almost lost in the puffed red flesh of his face: he stared unblinkingly and beadily, as if defying her to reply that she didn’t for a moment accept that Princess Margaret’s hand had ever lain in his or that Anthony Armstrong-Jones had addressed him.

‘Faceful of innocence,’ he said. ‘Just a faceful of innocence, Eleanor. “Good-night, Miss Farrow,” I said, and she turned the little face to me and said to call her Mia.’

Eleanor nodded. Her mother’s eyes were fixed on the Daily Express, moving from news item to news item, her lips occasionally moving also as she read. ‘Liz Jones,’ Eleanor wanted to say. ‘Could you complain to the school about Liz Jones?’ She wanted to tell them about the fashion in Class 2, about Miss Whitehead, and how everyone was afraid of Liz Jones. She imagined her voice speaking across the breakfast table, to her father who was still in his doorman’s uniform and her mother who mightn’t even hear her. There’d be embarrassment as her father listened, her own face would be as hot as fire. He’d turn his head away in the end, like the time she’d had to ask him for money to buy sanitary towels.

‘Lovely little fingers,’ he said, ‘like a baby’s fingers, Eleanor. Little wisps of things. She touched me with the tips.’

‘Who?’ demanded her mother, suddenly sharp, looking up. ‘Eh, then?’

‘Mia Farrow,’ he said. ‘She was down in Daisy’s last night. Sweetest thing; sweetest little face.’

‘Ah, yes, Peyton Place,’ her mother said, and Eleanor’s father nodded.

Her mother had spectacles with swept-up, elaborately bejewelled frames. The jewels were made of glass, but they glittered, especially in strong sunlight, just like what Eleanor imagined diamonds must glitter like. Her mother, constantly smoking, had hair which she dyed so that it appeared to be black. She was a thin woman with bones that stuck out awkwardly at the joints, seeming as though they might at any moment break through the surface of taut, anaemic skin. In Eleanor’s opinion her mother had suffered, and once she had had a dream in which her mother was fat and married to someone else, a man, as far as Eleanor could make out, who ran a vegetable shop.

Her mother always had breakfast in her night-dress and an old fawn-coloured dressing-gown, her ankles below it as white as paper, her feet stuck into tattered slippers. After breakfast, she would return to bed with Eleanor’s father, obliging him, Eleanor knew, as she had obliged him all her life. During the school holidays, and on Saturdays and Sundays when Eleanor was still in the flat, her mother continued to oblige him: in the bedroom he made the same kind of noise as he’d made in the wrestling ring. The Prince of Hackney he’d been known as.

Her mother was a shadow. Married to a man who ran a vegetable shop or to any other kind of man except the one she’d chosen, Eleanor believed she’d have been different: she’d have had more children, she’d have been a proper person with proper flesh on her bones, a person you could feel for. As she was, you could hardly take her seriously. She sat there in her night-clothes, waiting for the man she’d married to rise from the table and go into their bedroom so that she might follow. Afterwards she cleared up the breakfast things and washed them, while he slept. She shopped in the Express Dairy Supermarket, dropping cigarette ash over tins of soup and peas and packets of crisps, and at half past eleven she sat in the corner of the downstairs lounge of the Northumberland Arms and drank a measure of gin and water, sometimes two.

‘Listen to this,’ her mother said in her wheezy voice. She quoted a piece about a fifty-five-year-old woman, a Miss Margaret Sugden, who had been trapped in a bath for two days and three nights. ‘It ended,’ read Eleanor’s mother, ‘with two burly policemen – eyes carefully averted – lifting her out. It took them half an hour of gentle levering, for Miss Sugden, a well-rounded sixteen stone, was helplessly stuck’

He laughed. Her mother stubbed her cigarette out on her saucer and lit a fresh one. Her mother never ate anything at breakfast-time. She drank three cups of tea and smoked the same number of cigarettes. He liked a large breakfast, eggs and bacon, fried bread, a chop sometimes.