Part 1 (2/2)

Stella would have none of it. She was a mimic, she said, and sure enough she took off Mrs Ackerley's own smoky tone of voice to perfection. Admittedly she was a little young for the part, but, as she shrewdly observed, this would only stress her versatility. The audition was fixed for the third Monday in September.

Ten days before, over breakfast, she told Uncle Vernon she was having second thoughts.

'Get away with you,' he said. 'It's too late to change things now.' He wrote out a shopping list and gave her a ten-s.h.i.+lling note. Half an hour later when he came up into the dark hall, jingling the loose coppers in his pocket, he found her huddled on the stairs, one plump knee wedged between the banister rails. He was annoyed because she knew she wasn't supposed to hang about this part of the house, not unless she was in her good school uniform. She was staring at the damp patch that splodged the leaf-patterned wallpaper above the telephone.

He switched on the light and demanded to know what she was playing at. At this rate there'd be nothing left on Paddy's vegetable barrow but a bunch of mouldy carrots. Did she think this was any way to conduct a business?

She was in one of her moods and pretended to be lost in thought. He could have hit her. There was nothing of her mother in her face, save perhaps for the freckles on her cheek-bones.

'Carry on like this,' he said, not for the first time, 'and you'll end up behind the counter at Woolworth's.' It was foolish of him to goad her. It was not beyond her to run towards such employment in order to spite him.

'You push me too hard,' she said. 'You want reflected glory.'

He raised his arm then, but when she pushed past him with swimming eyes his world was drowned in tears.

He telephoned Harcourt and sought rea.s.surance, in a round-about way. 'Three bottles of disinfectant,' he said, reading from the list in front of him. 'Four pounds of carbolic soap... one dozen candles... two dozen toilet rolls... George Lipman's put in a word with his sister. On Stella's behalf.'

''Fraid I can only manage a dozen,' Harcourt said. 'And they're shop-soiled.'

'Am I doing the right thing, I ask myself?'

'I don't see what else is open to her,' said Harcourt. 'Not if the school won't have her back.'

'Not won't won't,' corrected Vernon. 'It's more that they don't feel she'll gain any benefit from staying on. And you know Stella. Once her mind's made up...'

'Indeed I do,' said Harcourt. Although he had never met the girl he often remarked to his wife that he could take an exam on the subject, if pushed. His extensive knowledge of Stella was based on the regular progress reports provided by Vernon when making his monthly order for bathroom and wash-house supplies.

'She caused an uproar the other week,' confided Vernon, 'over the hoteliers' dinner dance: Lily got her hands on some parachute silk and took her to that dressmaker in Duke Street to be fitted for a frock. Come the night, with the d.a.m.n thing hanging up on the back door to get rid of the creases, she refused to wear it. She was adamant. In the end none of us went. I expect you all wondered where we were.'

'We did,' lied Harcourt.

'She took exception to the sleeves. According to her they were too puffy. She said she wasn't going out looking as if her arms belonged to an all-in wrestler. I never saw her in it, but Lily said she was a picture. She's burgeoning, you know.'

'Is she?' Harcourt said, and thought briefly of his own daughter who, in comparison with Stella, often seemed an imitation of the real thing. He had no idea whether his daughter was burgeoning or not; night and day she walked with rounded shoulders, clutching a handbag to her chest. 'And how's the cough?' he asked. He listened to the faint scratching of Vernon's moustache as it brushed against the mouthpiece.

'No problem at all,' Vernon said. 'Absolutely none. Kind of you to ask. I'm much obliged to you,' and he ordered a new bucket and a tin of bath scourer before replacing the receiver.

He told Lily that Harcourt believed they were doing the best thing. She was chopping up a rabbit in the scullery. 'Harcourt thinks she was born for it,' he said.

Lily was unconvinced. 'People like us don't go to plays,' she said. 'Let alone act in them.'

'But she's not one of us, is she?' he retorted, and what answer was there to that?

They came down the steps as though walking a tightrope, Stella pointing her toes in borrowed shoes, Uncle Vernon leaning backwards, purple waistcoat bulging above the waistband of his trousers, one hand under her elbow, the other holding aloft a black umbrella against the rain.

It was a terrible waistcoat, made out of pieces of untrimmed felt that Lily had bought at a salvage sale with the purpose of jollying up the cus.h.i.+ons in the residents' lounge. She had meant to sew triangles, squares and stars on to the covers, only she hadn't got round to it.

'Leave me alone,' the girl said, shaking herself free. 'You're embarra.s.sing me.'

'So,' Uncle Vernon said, 'what's new?' But his tone was good-humoured.

The three o'clock aeroplane, the one that climbed from Speke and circled the city on five-minute trips, had just b.u.mped overhead. Alarmed at its pa.s.sage the pigeons still swam above the cobblestones; all, that is, save the one-legged bird who hopped in the gutter, beak pecking at the rear mudguard of the taxi. It was such a dark day that the neon sign above the lintel of the door had been flas.h.i.+ng on and off since breakfast; the puddles winked crimson. Later, after he had visited the house, Meredith said that only brothels went in for red lights.

Spat upon by the rain, Stella covered her head with her hands; she knew she was watched from an upstairs window. Earlier that morning Lily had sat her down at the kitchen table and subjected her to the curling tongs. The tongs, fading in mid-air from rust to dull blue, had snapped at the locks of her hair and furled them up tight against her skull. Then, released in fits and starts, the singed curls, sausage-shaped, flopped upon the tacked-on collar of her velvet frock.

'In the grave,' Stella had said, 'my hair and nails will continue to grow.'

Lily had pulled a face, although later she intended to repeat the remark for the benefit of the commercial traveller with the skin grafts. He, more than most, even if it was a bit close to the bone, would appreciate the observation. To her way of thinking it was yet another indication of the girl's cleverness, a further example, should one be needed, of her ferocious, if morbid, imagination.

Uncle Vernon paid off the cab right away. The arrangement had been struck the night before after a turbulent discussion in which Stella had declared she'd prefer to die rather than tip the driver. 'I'll go on the tram instead,' she said.

'It'll rain,' Uncle Vernon told her. 'You'll arrive messed up.'

She said she didn't care. There was something inside her, she intimated, that would become irretrievably sullied if she got involved with the business of tipping.

'You just give him sixpence,' Uncle Vernon had argued. 'Ninepence at the most. I can't see your difficulty.'

To which Stella had retorted that she found the whole transaction degrading. In her opinion it damaged the giver quite as much as the receiver.

'Well, don't tip him, you fool,' Uncle Vernon had countered. 'Just chuck the exact amount through the window and make a run for it.'

Debating anything with the girl was a lost cause. She constantly played to the gallery. No one was denying she could have had a better start in life, but then she wasn't unique in that respect and it was no excuse for wringing the last drop of drama out of the smallest incident. Emotions weren't like was.h.i.+ng. There was no call to peg them out for all the world to view.

Mostly her behaviour smacked of manipulation, of opportunism. He'd known people like her in the army, people from working-cla.s.s backgrounds, who'd read a few books and turned soft. If she had been a boy he'd have taken his belt to her, or at least the back of his hand.

All that costly nonsense of keeping the landing light burning into the small hours. Lily said it was because she remembered that business of the night lights for G.o.d's sake, the child had been nine months old. He put it down to that poetry she was so fond of, all those rhymes and rhythms, those couplets of melancholy and madness that inflamed her imagination. Nor was he altogether sure she was afraid of the dark. Why, during the blackout, when the whole city was drowned in black ink, she had often gone out into the backyard and stood for an hour at a time, keening under the alderbush. And what about the time he had come home on leave and she had somehow slipped out of the shelter and he and the air-raid warden had found her crouched against the railings of the cemetery, clapping her hands together as the sugar warehouses on the Dock Road burst like paper bags and the sparks snapped like fire crackers against the sky?

She had always been perverse, had always, in regard to little things things which normal people took in their stride exhibited a degree of opposition that was downright absurd. He hadn't forgotten her histrionics following the removal of the half-basin on the landing. She had accused him of mutilating her past, of ripping out her memories. He'd had to bite on his tongue to stop himself from blurting out that in her case this was all to the good. There were worse things than the disappearance of basins. It had brought home to him how unreliable history was, in that the story, by definition, was always one-sided.

Nor would he forgive in a hurry the slap-stick scene resulting from the felling of the alder bush in the dismal back yard, when she had run from the bas.e.m.e.nt door like a madwoman and flung herself between axe and bush. Ma Tang from next door, believing he was murdering the girl, had s.h.i.+ed seed potatoes at him from the wash-house roof. Ma Tang's father, who was put out to roost at dawn with his scant hair done up in a pigtail, had sent his grandson for the police.

The basin had been a liability. More than one lodger, returning late at night and caught short, had utilised it for a purpose not intended. As for the alder bush, a poor sick thing with blighted leaves, it was interfering with the drains. On both occasions, and there had been many others, Stella's face had betrayed an emotion so inappropriate, a.s.sumed an expression of such false sensibility, that it was almost comic. Perhaps it wasn't entirely a.s.sumed; there had been moments when he could have sworn she felt something.

For her part, Lily had tried to wheedle Stella into letting Uncle Vernon accompany her to the theatre. She implied it was no more than his due. If he hadn't known Rose Lipman's brother when they were boys growing up rough together in Everton, Stella wouldn't have got a look-in. And it wasn't as though he would be intrusive. He was a sensitive man; even that butcher in Hardman Street, who had palmed him off with the horsemeat, had recognised as much. He would just slope off up the road and wait for her, meekly, in Brown's Cafe.

'Meekly,' Stella had repeated, and given one of her laughs. She'd threatened to lock herself in her room if he insisted on going with her. Her door didn't boast such a thing as a lock, but her resolution was plain enough. She said she would rather pa.s.s up her chance altogether than go hand in hand towards it with Uncle Vernon. 'I'm not play-acting,' she a.s.sured him.

Stung, though she hadn't allowed him her hand for donkey's years, not since he had walked her backwards and forwards from the infant school on Mount Pleasant, he had rocked sideways in his wicker chair beside the kitchen range and proclaimed her selfish. A sufferer from the cold, even in summertime, he habitually parked himself so close to the fire that one leg of the chair was charred black. Lily said he had enough diamond patterns on his s.h.i.+ns to go without socks. The moment would come, she warned him, when the chair would give up the ghost under his jiggling irritation and pitch him onto the coals.

'Keep calm,' she advised, 'it's her age.'

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