The Temptation of Jack Orkney: Collected Stories Volume Two

‘Where are you going?’

‘To the pictures, if you’ve got no objection,’ she clipped out, in this new, jaunty voice that she had acquired when she left school, and which, he knew, she used as a weapon against all men. But why against him? He sat, feeling the ugly grin which was probably painted on his face, for he couldn’t remove it, and he looked at the pretty girl with her new hair-do putting thick black rings around her eyes, and he thought of how they had been two peas in a pod. In the summer … yes, that is how it seemed to him now; through a year’s-long summer of visits to friends, the park, the zoo, the pictures, they had been friends, allies, then the dark came down suddenly and in the dark had been born this cool, flip girl who hated him.

‘Who are you going with?’

‘Jem Taylor, if you don’t have any objection,’ she said.

‘Why should I have any objection, I just asked.’

‘What you don’t know won’t hurt you,’ she said, very pleased with herself because of her ease in this way of talking. He recognized his recent achievement in the exchange with Bill as the same step forward as she was making, with this tone or style; and out of a quite uncustomary feeling of equality with her asked: ‘How is old Jem, I haven’t seen him lately?’

‘Oh Fred, I’m late.’ This bad temper meant she had finished her face and wanted to put on her dress, which she would not do in front of him.

Silly cow, he thought, grinning and thinking of her alter ego, the girl of his nights, does she think I don’t know what she looks like in a slip, or nothing? Because of what went on behind the partition, in the dark, he banged his fist on it, laughing, and she whipped about and said: ‘Oh Fred, you drive me crazy, you really do.’ This being something from their brother-and-sister past, admitting intimacy, even the possibility of real equality, she checked herself, put on a sweet contained smile, and said: ‘If you don’t mind, Fred, I want to get dressed.’

He went on, remembering only as he got through the parents’ room and saw his mother’s feathered mules by the bed, that he had wanted to talk about Mrs Fortescue. He realized his absurdity, because of course his sister would pretend she didn’t understand what he meant … His fixed smile of shame changed into one of savagery as he thought: Well, Jem, you’re not going to get anything out of her but do you mind and have you any objection and please yourself, I know that much about my sweet sister … In his room he could not work, even after his sister had left, slamming three doors and making so much racket with her heels that the parents shouted at her from the shop. He was thinking of Mrs Fortescue. But she was old. She had always been old, as long as he could remember. And the old women who came up to see her in the afternoons, were they whores (tarts, prostitutes, bad women) too? And where did she, they, do it? And who was the smelly old man who came so late nearly every night?

He sat with the waves of liquor-smell from the ground floor arising past him, thinking of the sourish smell of the old man, and of the scented smell of the old women, feeling short-breathed because of the stuffy reek of his room and associating it (because of certain memories from his nights) with the reek from Mrs Fortescue’s room which he could positively smell from where he sat, so strongly did he create it.

Bill must be wrong: she couldn’t possibly be on the game still, who would want an old thing like that?

The family had a meal every night when the shop closed. It was usually about ten thirty when they sat down. Tonight there was some boiled bacon, and baked beans. Fred brought out casually: ‘I saw Mrs Fortescue going off to work when I was out.’ He waited the results of this cheek, this effrontery, watching his parents’ faces. They did not even exchange glances. His mother pushed tinted bronze hair back with a hand that had a stain of grease on it, and said: ‘Poor old girl, I expect she’s pleased about the Act, when you get down to it, in the winter it must have been bad sometimes.’ The words the Act hit Fred’s outraged sense of propriety anew; he had to work them out; thinking that his parents did not even apologize for the years of corruption. Now his father said – his face was inflamed, he must have been taking nips from the glass under the counter – ‘Once or twice, when I saw her on Frith Street before the Act I felt sorry for her. But I suppose she got used to it.’

‘It must be nicer this way,’ said Mrs Danderlea, pushing the crusting remains of the baked beans towards her husband.

He scooped them out of the dish with the edge of his fried bread, and she said: ‘What’s wrong with the spoon?’

‘What’s wrong with the bread,’ he returned, with an unconvincing whisky glare, which she ignored.

‘Where’s her place, then?’ asked Fred, casual, having worked out that she must have one.

‘Over that new club in Parton Street. The rent’s gone up again, so Mr Spencer told me, and there’s the telephone she needs now – well, I don’t know how much you can believe of what he says, but he’s said often enough that without him helping her out she’d do better at almost anything else.’

‘Not a word he says,’ said Mr Danderlea, pushing out his dome of a stomach as he sat back, replete. ‘He told me he was doorman for the Greystock Hotel in Knightsbridge – well, it turns out all this time he’s been doorman for that strip-tease joint along the street from her new place, and that’s where he’s been for years, because it was a night-club before it was strip-tease.’

‘Well, there’s no point in that, is there?’ said Mrs Danderlea, pouring second cups. ‘I mean, why tell fibs about it, I mean everyone knows, don’t they?’

Fred again pushed down protest: that, yes, Mr Spencer (Mrs Fortescue’s ‘regular’, but he had never understood what they had meant by the ugly word before) was right to lie; he wished his parents would lie even now; anything rather than this casual back-and-forth chat about this horror, years old, and right over their heads, part of their lives.

He ducked down his face and shovelled beans into it fast, knowing it was scarlet, and wanting a reason for it.

‘You’ll get heart-burn, gobbling like that,’ said his mother, as he had expected.

‘I’ve got to finish my homework,’ he said, and bolted, shaking his head at the cup of tea she was pushing over at him.

He sat in his room until his parents went to bed, marking off the routine of the house from his new knowledge. After an expected interval Mrs Fortescue came in, he could hear her moving about, taking her time about everything. Water ran, for a long time. He now understood that this sound, water running into and then out of a basin, was something he had heard at this hour all his life. He sat listening with the ashamed, fixed grin on his face. Then his sister came in; he could hear her sharp sigh of relief as she flumped on the bed and bent over to take off her shoes. He nearly called out, ‘Good night, Jane,’ but thought better of it. Yet all through the summer they had whispered and giggled through the partition.

Mr Spencer, Mrs Fortescue’s regular, came up the stairs. He heard their voices together; listened to them as he undressed and went to bed; as he lay wakeful; as he at last went off to sleep.

Next evening he waited until Mrs Fortescue went out, and followed her, careful she didn’t see him. She walked fast and efficient, like a woman on her way to the office. Why then the fur coat, the veil, the make-up? Of course, it was habit, because of all the years on the pavement; for it was a sure thing she didn’t wear that outfit to receive customers in her place. But it turned out that he was wrong. Along the last hundred yards before her door, she slowed her pace, took a couple of quick glances left and right for the police, then looked at a large elderly man coming towards her. This man swung around, joined her, and they went side by side into her doorway, the whole operation so quick, so smooth, that even if there had been a policeman, all he could have seen was a woman meeting someone she had expected to meet.

Fred then went home. Jane had dressed for her evening. He followed her too. She walked fast, not looking at people, her smart new coat flaring jade, emerald, dark-green, as she moved through varying depths of light, her black puffy hair gleaming. She went into the Underground. He followed her down the escalators, and on to the platform, at not much more than arm’s distance, but quite safe because of her self-absorption. She stood on the edge of the platform, staring across the rail at a big advertisement. It was a very large, dark-brown, gleaming revolver holster, with a revolver in it, attached to a belt for bullets; but instead of bullets each loop had a lipstick, in all the pink-orange-scarlet-crimson shades it was possible to imagine lipstick in. Fred stood just behind his sister, and examined her sharp little face examining the advertisement and choosing which lipstick she would buy. She smiled – nothing like the appealing shame-faced smile that was stuck, for ever it seemed, on Fred’s face, but a calm, triumphant smile. The train came streaming in, obscuring the advertisement. The doors slid open, receiving his sister, who did not look around. He stood close against the window, looking at her calm little face, willing her to look at him. But the train rushed her off again, and she would never know he had been there.

He went home, the ferment of his craziness breaking through his lips in an incredulous raw mutter: a revolver, a bloody revolver … His parents were at supper, taking in food, swilling in tea, like pigs, pigs, pigs, he thought, shovelling down his own supper to be rid of it. Then he said, ‘I left a book in the shop, Dad, I want to get it,’ and went down dark stairs through the sickly rising fumes. In a drawer under the till was a revolver which had been there for years, against the day when burglars would break in and Mr (or Mrs) Danderlea would frighten them off with it. Many of Fred’s dreams had been spun around that weapon. But it was broken somewhere in its bleak-gleaming interior. He carefully hid it under his sweater, and went up, to knock on his parents’ door. They were already in bed, a large double bed at which, because of this hideous world he was now a citizen of, he was afraid to look. Two old people, with sagging faces and bulging mottled fleshy shoulders lay side by side, looking at him. ‘I want to leave something for Jane,’ he said, turning his gaze away from them. He laid the revolver on Jane’s pillow, arranging half a dozen lipsticks of various colours as if they were bullets coming out of it.

He went back to the shop. Under the counter stood the bottle of Black and White beside the glass stained sour with his father’s tippling. He made sure the bottle was still half full before turning the lights out and settling down to wait. Not for long. When he heard the key in the lock he set the door open wide so Mrs Fortescue must see him.

‘Why Fred, whatever are you doing?’

‘I noticed Dad left the light on, so I came down.’ Frowning with efficiency, he looked for a place to put the whisky bottle, while he rinsed the dirtied glass. Then casual, struck by a thought, he offered: ‘Like a drink, Mrs Fortescue?’ In the dim light she focussed with difficulty, on the bottle. ‘I never touch the stuff, dear …’ Bending his face down past hers, to adjust a wine bottle, he caught the liquor on her breath, and understood the vagueness of her good nature.

‘Well all right, dear,’ she went on, ‘just a little one to keep you company. You’re like your Dad, you know that?’

‘Is that so?’ He came out of the shop with the bottle under his arm, shutting the door behind him and locking it. The stairs glimmered dark. ‘Many’s the time he’s offered me a nip on a cold night, though not when your mother could see.’ She added a short triumphant titter, resting her weight on the stair-rail as if testing it.