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On the top floor, the two rooms were occupied by Mrs Fortescue, and had been since before the Danderleas came. Ever since the boy could remember, grumbling went on that Mrs Fortescue had the high part of the house where the liquor smell did not rise; though she, if remarks to this effect reached her, claimed that on hot nights she could not sleep for the smell. But on the whole relations were good. The Danderleas’ energies were claimed by buying and selling liquor, while Mrs Fortescue went out a lot. Sometimes other old women came to visit her, and an old man, small, shrunken and polite, came to see her most evenings, very late indeed, often well after twelve.
Mrs Fortescue seldom went out during the day, but left every evening at about six, wearing furs: a pale shaggy coat in winter, and in summer a stole over a costume. She always had a small hat on, with a veil that was drawn tight over her face and held with a bunch of flowers where the fur began. The furs changed often: Fred remembered half a dozen blond fur coats, and a good many little animals biting their tails or dangling bright bead eyes and empty paws. From behind the veil, the dark, made-up eyes of Mrs Fortescue had glimmered at him for years; and her small old reddened mouth had smiled.
One evening he postponed his homework, and slipped out past the shop where his parents were both at work, and took a short walk that led him to Oxford Street. The exulting, fearful loneliness that surged through his blood with every heart-beat, making every stamp of shadow a reminder of death, each gleam of light a promise of his extraordinary future, drove him around and around the streets muttering to himself; brought tears to his eyes, or snatches of song to his lips which he had to suppress. For while he knew himself to be crazy, and supposed he must have been all his life (he could no longer remember himself before this autumn) this was a secret he intended to keep for himself and the tender creature who shared the stuffy box he spent his nights in. Turning a corner that probably (he would not have been able to say) he had already turned several times before that evening, he saw a woman walking ahead of him in a great fur coat that shone under the street lights, a small veiled hat, and tiny sharp feet that took tripping steps towards Soho. Recognizing Mrs Fortescue, a friend, he ran forward to greet her, relieved that this frightening trap of streets was to be shared. Seeing him, she first gave him a smile never offered him before by a woman; then looked prim and annoyed; then nodded at him briskly and said as she always did: ‘Well, Fred, and how are things with you?’ He walked a few steps with her, said he had to do his homework, heard her old woman’s voice say: ‘That’s right, son, you must work, your mum and dad are right, a bright boy like you, it would be a shame to let it go to waste’ – and watched her move on, across Oxford Street, into the narrow streets beyond.
He turned and saw Bill Bates coming towards him from the hardware shop, just closing. Bill was grinning, and he said: ‘What, wouldn’t she have you then?’
‘It’s Mrs Fortescue,’ said Fred, entering a new world between one breath and the next, just because of the tone of Bill’s voice.
‘She’s not a bad old tart,’ said Bill. ‘Bet she wasn’t pleased to see you when she’s on the job.’
‘Oh, I don’t know,’ said Fred, trying out a new man-of-the-world voice for the first time, ‘she lives over us, doesn’t she?’ (Bill must know this, everyone must know it, he thought, feeling sick.) ‘I was just saying hullo, that’s all.’ It came off, he saw, for now Bill nodded and said: ‘I’m off to the pictures, want to come?’
‘Got to do homework,’ said Fred, bitter.
‘Then you’ve got to do it then, haven’t you?’ said Bill reasonably, going on his way.
Fred went home in a seethe of shame. How could his parents share their house with an old tart (whore, prostitute – but these were the only words he knew), how could they treat her like an ordinary decent person, even better (he understood, listening to them in his mind’s ear, that their voices to her held something not far from respect) – how could they put up with it? Justice insisted that they had not chosen her as a tenant, she was the company’s tenant, but at least they should have told Sanko and Duke so that she could be evicted and …
Although it seemed as if his adventure through the streets had been as long as a night, he found when he got in that it wasn’t yet eight.
He went up to his box and set out his schoolbooks. Through the ceiling-board he could hear his sister moving. There being no door between the rooms, he went out to the landing, through his parents’ room (his sister had to creep past the sleeping pair when she came in late) and into hers. She stood in a black slip before the glass, making up her face. ‘Do you mind?’ she said daintily. ‘Can’t you knock?’ He muttered something, and felt a smile come on his face, aggressive and aggrieved, that seemed to switch on automatically these days if he saw his sister even at a distance. He sat on the edge of her bed. ‘Do you mind?’ she said again, moving away from him some black underwear. She slipped over her still puppy-fatted white shoulders a new dressing-gown in cherry-red and buttoned it up primly before continuing to work lipstick on to her mouth.
‘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