The Bermondsey Bookshop Page 13

  ‘As I’ve never actually seen you resting, I need to make some sketches. I’m assuming you can rest?’ She didn’t know if he was being serious.

  ‘I’ve got four jobs, and most days I work fourteen hours, so I usually rest when I’m asleep.’

  He frowned. ‘Well, surely there must be a minute during the day?’

  He had no idea. But she sighed and thought for a moment. ‘Yes. There is a minute.’

  ‘Good! But you’ll have to remove that overall.’ He took it from her. ‘Better. Now let’s have a look at you. No. The frock will have to go too.’

  She grabbed the overall back. ‘I told you I’m not undressing for you nor no one! If you want a prostitute go up the ’dilly!’

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake, Kate. Why are you so suspicious!’

  ‘Because you’re a posh bloke!’ she said, remembering Marge’s warning, and, remembering the glimpse she’d had of a bed behind the screen, added, ‘And you’re an artist!’

  ‘Don’t tar us all with the same brush!’ he laughed. ‘I only meant that, lovely as your frock is, it’s… the wrong colour.’

  ‘And that proves you’re a bloody liar. The frock’s a disgrace, but it’s all I could afford.’ She plucked at the dull green dress, feeling miserable.

  ‘If you want me to be honest, I agree – the frock is hideous, but I have a box full of costumes. Come and help me choose.’ He beckoned her as if they were children playing a dressing-up game, and his studied manner disappeared altogether as he opened an old leather trunk to reveal dresses, shawls, capes and robes of every hue and size, all neatly folded in piles according to colour. It was like a rainbow in a box and Kate was immediately entranced.

  ‘Oh, I feel like I’m in Aladdin’s cave!’ She pulled out dresses of yellow and gold, shawls in soft shades of green and blue, there was a scarlet silk robe embroidered with dragons and clouds. ‘What about this one!’ She swirled it around her body, till she was sheathed in a dragon of gold and green.

  He took it from her. ‘Totally inappropriate. Something more suited to your age… ahhh, this.’

  He held up a rose-pink fine lawn dress, with a low waist and a scooped neckline. Delicate gold flowers and tendrils decorated the hem and waistband. She cradled it in her arms and smiled. She’d never worn any fabric as soft or pretty. ‘It’s lovely.’

  ‘It’s settled, then. So, tell me, about that minute when you can rest – what do you do?’

  ‘I just look out of the garret window – at the sky and the river.’ She wasn’t going to tell him this was the time in the day when she often let herself dream of her father’s return.

  ‘Oh, Kate! You live in a garret? And you have a dormer?’ He seemed excited. She nodded, and he made her describe the window and the view over the rooftops of East Lane. He sketched as she spoke. ‘Perfect. Go and change now.’ She picked up the dress. ‘No, not that. The dragon robe.’

  As she undressed behind the screen she dreaded what Johnny would have to say about it. She doubted she should be taking her clothes off in a single man’s flat. But now she’d seen his painting of Nora, she guessed she would have nothing to fear from Martin North.

  *

  They arrived back at the bookshop only ten minutes before the Sunday lecture.

  ‘Quick, you’ll have to help me!’ she ordered Martin. ‘You put the chairs out and the lectern and a glass of water on a side table for the speaker. I’ll do the tea things.’

  She found Martin a decent enough helper when he was given specific instructions. ‘Teacups and saucers – end of that table.’ He saluted and dashed off with both hands full. Meanwhile, in the kitchen, she sliced cake and put out biscuits. When Johnny walked in they were still setting out tea plates.

  He strolled over and planted a kiss on her cheek. ‘You look lovely,’ he said softly.

  ‘Doesn’t she just?’ Martin swept past with a plate of fruitcake. Johnny ignored him. ‘Is that a new dress?’

  Kate smoothed out the rose-pink frock, which Martin had insisted she keep. ‘Yes. It’s from Martin,’ she said.

  ‘Martin?’ His face registered disappointment, quickly followed by anger. ‘Kate! You shouldn’t accept gifts from a man like that. I warned you!’

  ‘Shhh. He’ll hear you.’

  ‘I don’t bloody care. I’m not having him ruin you. Tell me how much he pays you and I’ll match it if you promise to stay away from him!’

  She felt a surge of anger and was hardly able to speak. ‘I’ll choose who I stay away from – and if you’re going to be like this, it’ll be you!’

  The audience beginning to arrive saved her from his answer, but she couldn’t help noticing Martin’s worried gaze following her as she rushed into the kitchen. She prayed he would stay out of her way this evening. Perhaps it wasn’t fair, but instead of blaming Johnny for their argument, she decided to blame Martin.

  As the speaker was introduced, she hid herself in the kitchen. She was so bone tired she propped herself on the kitchen stool, preparing to doze. Last week’s lecture had been so dull she’d considered escaping through the kitchen window after an hour of the Reverend Ethelbert Goodchild’s ‘Glands and Their Effect on Personality’. But tonight, the speaker was a funny raconteur. Martin introduced him as ‘my friend Mr Stacy Aumonier’. His subject was ‘Stories and Storytelling’ and within minutes he had the audience roaring with laughter. It was like watching a comedian at the Star Music Hall. He read one of his own short stories called ‘The Octave of Jealousy’ and she hoped it wouldn’t be about jealous lovers, for she peeked through the door and saw Johnny looking dejected and unhappy. But Mr Aumonier’s tale gripped her. It took an example from every class in England, from tramp to lord, and showed how each envied the other, the lord finally seeing true freedom in the tramp’s life.

  She felt she herself had crossed too many lines today. Surely it was simpler to stay in your place. If she’d never accepted the dress, she wouldn’t have argued with Johnny. If Martin hadn’t been wealthy, perhaps Johnny would have been less jealous. And look at the trouble those little class distinctions had caused in her own family. Her mother, never good enough; her father, heading for the middle classes, but dragged back down by marriage to a woman born in a caravan. Mr Aumonier’s story was short, funny, bitter, wise. Just like the fairy tales in the beautiful book Johnny had given her.

  She thought of his gift and realized that if anyone were hiding their true self it was her, not Johnny. She’d kept up her seeming indifference to him, a self-protection practised during all those years she’d felt unnoticed or even despised by him. And even though now she knew better, she couldn’t seem to drop the act. She sighed and leaned her head into her hands. Hearing a sound behind her, she pushed herself off the stool. Johnny put a finger to his lips. He softly shut the door, took her in his arms and kissed her. ‘I’m sorry,’ he whispered. Do you forgive me?’ What if someone walked in on them? But she could hear the laughter of Mr Aumonier’s captive audience. She slipped her arms around him and, with her back against the door, pulled him close. ‘There’s no need for you to be jealous,’ she whispered, their lips still touching.

  ‘I can’t help it, Kate. I love you.’

  She knew this was the time to tell him she felt the same, yet the words wouldn’t come, and for answer her lips met his with such passion that her feelings could never again be masked as indifference.

  9

  Rich Man, Poor Man

  Martin seemed like a different person in the studio. More open, warmer, even eager to talk about his work or his difficult family. She began to understand that his cool, ironic manner was a mask. No one was what they seemed – she knew that much. Johnny had hidden his writing dreams, and she had tried to hide her feelings for him. With Martin, the mask made him behave as if he were set apart from others, always observing. But gradually he’d dropped his guard with her and she saw the man behind the mask. Though six years his junior, she sometimes felt much older. Especially when he talked about
his mother.

  ‘The old bat simply doesn’t like me. Don’t look so shocked. We expect that parents will love their children, but it isn’t always the case. I suppose we’ve just never got on… though how I might have offended her as an infant I can’t imagine!’ He tried to make light of his mother’s treatment of him, but Kate saw that he minded, or else why talk about it to her?

  ‘Me and Aunt Sylvie didn’t get on, but I bet your mother never stuck a knife in you!’ She displayed the long white scar on her arm.

  ‘Dear God, she did that? A bit lower and she’d have cut an artery. You could have bled to death! My mother’s attacks are a little more subtle. She cut my allowance to a pittance after I insisted on becoming an artist instead of a banker.’ He shrugged. ‘If I want her money I’ll have to toe the line. Needless to say…’ He added more paint to his palette. ‘…I’m doing nothing of the kind.’

  ‘I can understand her wanting you to have a bank job. It’s more secure than painting, I should think,’ she said, as if she’d ever known a bank clerk. She looked around the sparsely furnished room. ‘The wages must be a lot better.’

  He laughed, pausing mid-stroke. ‘Slightly. Our family owns the bank!’

  ‘And you’re complaining!’ She laughed and lost her pose.

  ‘Sit still! Perhaps it seems ridiculous to turn down that sort of wealth. But I’m only doing the same as you. You’re mistress of your own fate. You chose to leave your vile aunt, you keep body and soul together by your own hard work and you live in a garret!’

  ‘Hmm. I do. But it ain’t that comfy. It’s draughty when the wind comes up under the eaves and things live in the rafters.’ She gave a shudder.

  ‘But the view…’

  ‘Is lovely… for a minute a day.’

  He was painting the Resting study now. But he’d decided instead to call it Dreaming, though she’d never confessed to him the subject of her thoughts during those few idle moments of her day.

  A soft knocking on the flat door interrupted their conversation, and while Martin went to answer it, she took the opportunity to stand and stretch. She’d been bent forward, hands beneath her chin, gazing at the imaginary river for so long it hurt to straighten up. She twisted to ease the pain and glanced into the sitting room as Martin showed in his guest. It was Nora.

  They stood at the far end of the sitting room, speaking softly so that she couldn’t hear the words, but Nora was obviously upset. Martin took both of her hands and seemed to be reassuring her. Nora shook her head, that same sad expression on her lovely face, then she looked towards the studio. Her eyes met Kate’s, who quickly turned back to the window and out of Nora’s view. Someone shut the studio door and soon Kate heard raised voices. Nora’s high, plaintive, and Martin’s urgent, pleading, then impatient.

  Kate knew she shouldn’t be eavesdropping, but her curiosity, as it so often did, got the better of her. She moved closer to the door and heard Martin burst out violently, ‘I’ve told you what to do, Nora. You must leave him. Right now, while you’ve got the chance!’ She’d heard him ironic or gossipy, but never angry, and his outburst was more shocking because of it.

  Now she was convinced. Martin and Nora must be lovers. She had thought the throttle marks around Nora’s neck had come from a jealous husband, but they could equally have come from a jealous lover. Who knew? It was none of her business, she told herself. She just wished he’d come back in so they could get on with it. Martin always worked too long on Sundays and then drove at top speed all the way to Bermondsey so she wouldn’t be late for the lecture.

  There was silence and, after a few minutes, muffled crying and then footsteps approaching. She jumped back to her seat.

  Nora’s normally pale face was red with tears, though she affected a bright tone. ‘Hello, Kate. Martin tells me the triptych is almost finished. He must have been working you very hard!’

  ‘Oh, don’t worry about Kate, she gives me hell if I do!’ Martin quipped.

  Didn’t they think she had a pair of working ears? But they played the part of acquaintances very well.

  Nora went to the easel. ‘How lovely. Martin’s captured that faraway look in your eyes beautifully – what are you seeing in your mind’s eye, I wonder?’ she mused softly. ‘The garret reminds me of one I used as my bedroom the year I met my husband…’

  ‘Not quite the same,’ Martin said. ‘Yours was in a French chateau, wasn’t it? Kate was just explaining how draughty and infested hers is…’

  ‘Chateaux are draughty and infested too.’ She ignored him and smiled at Kate.

  Martin lifted Nora’s monochrome portrait and took it to her. But Kate could see no hint of that coldness in the woman who now stood examining her own image.

  ‘Chibby likes this one better?’ Nora asked Martin.

  ‘Your husband was… entranced.’ A secret look passed between them that Kate felt uncomfortable witnessing.

  ‘When he returns from his business trip, I’m sure he’ll send someone to collect it.’ Nora’s voice was as monotone as the painting, and she turned away with a look that verged on despair.

  ‘I mustn’t interrupt your work any longer, Martin. Don’t keep Kate too late… remember it’s lecture night and the poor girl will want to arrive in one piece.’

  Nora had obviously been chauffeured by Martin too.

  *

  The following morning Kate woke in the garret shivering and sweating. Every muscle in her body felt as if hot pokers were boring through it and she lay perfectly still, hoping this wasn’t what she thought it was. But each breath from her crackling lungs told her it was ‘Monday morning fever’, the illness all the soldering girls succumbed to eventually. It was the metal fumes that gave it to you, but oddly the symptoms only came on after a Sunday away from the factory. Once it had stolen up on you, it would lay you low for a couple of days and Miss Dane always told them to stay at home in case it turned to pneumonia. But even if Kate gave the factory a miss, cleaners were two a penny and she couldn’t afford to let down either the bookshop or the Marigold.

  She rolled out of bed and was seized with a violent spasm of dry coughing that wrenched her already-aching back muscles. She threw on a coat to stop the shivering while she boiled water on the paraffin stove. Hugging herself, she scraped ice from the dormer window and peered over the snow-rimed roof. Martin’s painting made her garret look romantic, but today what wouldn’t she give to curl up on the chaise longue by the cosy fire in his sitting room?

  She gulped hot tea and dressed hurriedly in her warmest clothes, descending as quietly as she could so as not to wake the Wilsons’ sleeping children. Out in the street the sky was just turning pink and snow blew in sleety gusts, making the cobbles slippery underfoot. She was concentrating so much on keeping her footing that she didn’t notice the slumped figure outside East Lane school until she was almost upon it. Someone had obviously tried to shelter in the lee of the school wall. As Kate bent over her, she saw it was a woman, her coat crusted by snow. She was curled up so that Kate couldn’t see her face. But as Kate shook her shoulder, the woman’s head lolled to one side. It was Mrs Bacon, and by the smell of her, she’d collapsed on the way home from the pub, which meant she’d been here half the night.

  When Kate couldn’t rouse her, she looked around for help, but the street was deserted. She sprinted to Johnny’s house, knocking frantically at the door. He was there in an instant, already dressed for work.

  ‘It’s… your…’ Kate paused, racked by a barking cough. ‘Your mum… by the school. I can’t wake her up,’ she said, her teeth chattering as she was seized with a bout of shivering. ‘I’ll show you…’

  ‘No, you’re shaking, you get inside!’ Johnny ordered. ‘I’ll find her.’

  Within minutes he was carrying his mother through the front door. Kate had stoked up the fire and pulled a blanket from Johnny’s bed, as there didn’t appear to be one on Mrs Bacon’s. Between them they stripped off her wet coat, frock and shoes and Kate wrapped he
r in the blanket. Through it all Mrs Bacon hadn’t woken. Johnny pulled the bed nearer to the fire and laid her down gently while Kate began rubbing her hands and feet.

  ‘They’re freezing! Johnny, you’d better try to wake her up.’

  He slapped her cheeks gently. ‘Mum, you’ve got to come to now. Wake up!’

  ‘Have you got any brandy in the house?’ It seemed a silly question.

  ‘No. But she might have.’ He disappeared into the scullery and came back with a bottle. ‘Tucked under the copper! After all these years there’s not a hiding place I don’t know about.’

  He forced a dribble of brandy into his mother’s mouth and then another. Mrs Bacon’s eyes fluttered open. ‘Oh, hello, Johnny. What time is it? Shouldn’t you be at work…’ Then she saw Kate. ‘Hello, me darlin’. You been looking after me again?’ She put up a hand and eventually found Kate’s cheek to pat, but her fingers were colder than ice.

  ‘Have you got any more blankets?’

  He shook his head sadly. ‘She pawned the bedding last week. I’ll get it back today.’

  ‘Coats, then?’ He nodded and ran upstairs, coming back with a couple of his old jackets.

  ‘I’m sorry, Johnny, I’m late for the Marigold. Will you stay with her?’

  He nodded. ‘But you shouldn’t be going to work either. You look terrible.’

  ‘It’s just Monday morning fever. I’ll be all right.’

  He took hold of her. ‘Thanks, Kate. She could have frozen to death out there. I knew she hadn’t come home, but I was just so tired last night… I’ll never forgive myself if anything happens to her.’

  She looked at Mrs Bacon. She’d seen her in worse condition. But the cold had seeped deeply into her bones. ‘She’ll be fine once she’s warmed up a bit.’ But Kate feared she’d need far more heat than the Bacons’ paltry fire could supply.

  ‘Don’t go,’ he said suddenly, and pulled her into the warmth of his arms. She held on to him tightly, wanting nothing more than to stay.