I Ordered a Table for Six Read online

  Pity for the housewives took Bill to the Town Hall. He was in a reserved occupation, he said, and, struggling to avoid any suggestion that he was offering anything of importance, pointed out that he had a van, and if the Town Hall could give him the stuff, tea and that, he would go round in the evenings as soon as the siren went, and carry hot drinks to the shelterers. For some weeks this service of his, carried on by himself and one or two local lads, was all there was of its kind, but its need was as great as he had reckoned it would be, and early in October he was called to the Town Hall and there saw presented a proper mobile canteen from the people of New York. With the arrival of that canteen came the women workers, and Claire was the first. Bill was a little sceptical to begin with of his women. They came from all over London, and many, like Claire, were of a different class from himself, and he was prepared to find that after a raid or two they gave the job up, and he would manage as before with local help. From one cause or another some of the women did drop out, and for practical reasons new teams were found living nearer to the district, but Claire stayed. She worked every other night, and would have liked to have worked every night, but there were enough workers without that, but she was Bill’s first reserve.

  The one canteen had become two, and then a third arrived, which made it possible always to keep a couple on the road, and the shelter feeding became part of the life of the borough. Bill began to rely upon Claire. It was with her he discussed any changes in the service, and with her which of the women worked best together. Occasionally they probed a very small way into each other’s minds. Claire had heard about Bill’s mother, and knew, rather more by intuition than by what he actually said, what had moved him to start shelter feeding. She liked to hear him talk of the South London people; she got orders now and again which helped her to appreciate the real sympathy and understanding he had for the working-class Londoner. “Have a word with the woman with red hair, up at the second entrance to the shelter. She’s not had a letter from her son. He’s overseas, but he never did write, anyway. See if a word would cheer her up.” “This jug of cocoa is for that woman with a sick husband. He’s been bad lately and she doesn’t get much sleep, so I’ve made the cocoa extra strong, and put in a bit more sugar.” “If that woman with the three kiddies wants anything, and says she can’t pay till Friday, it’ll be all right. She’s a job to make ends meet, but she always pays up in the end.”

  It sometimes struck Bill as odd that it was Claire to whom, for choice, he turned when there was a word to be said of tact needed. On the face of it she was an unlikely selection. She was almost continually ribald about the shelterers. “My God, our treasures do smell to-night,” she would say; or she would reappear up a shelter steps with her tin hat practically covering her face, observing: “Bombs I don’t mind, but that sacking over the entrances through which we butt with our trays turns, as the Bible says, ‘my loins to water.’ I bet a lot of that stuff would show a pretty history if an analyst got hold of it.” Or she would come raging into the canteen and bang down a mug: “That old bastard with the cough says the cocoa’s cold.” South London did not throw words like bastard about in polite conversation, nor did they quote the Bible to clarify a point; but Bill knew, and so did the shelterers and the canteen workers, that Claire was being natural. She had not got it in her nature to change herself for anybody, so they accepted her and liked her as she was.

  Just sometimes, to the shelterers, Claire would go beyond her normal self, in that she would use in an emergency her own tragedy to help someone. Bill had not heard her do it, but he had heard about it afterwards. The red-headed woman with no letters from her son was an example. She had broken down when Claire had spoken to her and confessed, amidst sobs, that she was beginning to be afraid something had happened to him. “That Mrs. ’Ill wasn’t ’alf kind,” Bill had heard. “She puts down ’er tray and sits beside me. ‘You’re bein’ silly,’ she says, ‘to let yourself get in such a state. If there’s one thin’ true in this world it is that bad news travels fast.’ Then she tells me ’ow ’er ’usband was killed comin’ ’ome from Dunkirk, and ’ow she got a telegram to say ’e was missin’, but ’ow from the beginnin’ there was plenty to write and tell ’er ’e must ’ave been killed and it wasn’t no good ’opin’. So when she hears at last that he’s dead ’tisn’t no shock at all, she knew months before. She says you’d ’ave ’eard all right if there was anythin’ wrong. Then she gives me a look and says: ‘Is ’e ever one for writin’ much?’ Well, you know, ’e isn’t, never much at letterin’. So then she gets up and she’s smilin’. ‘Aren’t you silly,’ she says, ‘’aven’t you got enough to put up with without you ’as to go and work yourself up about somethin’ that never ’as ’appened and like enough never will?’ And then, just as she’s going, she says, still smilin’: ‘Did you ever know anybody that it did good to, to cry about bad news what they never ’ad?’ Well, of course, put that way it did seem silly. What with Ted bein’ so bad with letters an’ all. She is a one, that Mrs. ’Ill, isn’t she? Sad about ’er ’usband. She spoke cheerful enough, but she looked queer when she was tellin’ about ’im.”

  Claire had never spoken to Bill about her husband. He had known from the beginning, from an official at the Town Hall, that she was a war widow. Sometimes on their rounds in the ordinary course of conversation he had heard her say things which had given him a dim picture of her life before the war. Her husband had been an artist and the couple had travelled a lot. “Yes, I’ve got around,” she had said. “There’s practically no place the guide-books mention as ‘practically inaccessible’ or about which they say, ‘This journey can be attempted by the very strong at certain seasons of the year,’ only we never waited for the right seasons, that I haven’t been to. We only had to hear that a place was unhealthy, or the living would be rather worse than primitive, and we were off to paint it.” Then, in answer to a query: “No, I don’t paint, my husband did.” There was talk often about rations. “It doesn’t affect me much,” Claire said. “I live in an hotel now. Really it’s less trouble in war-time, and there’s no point in keeping a flat going when you’re on your own.” She and her husband had possessed a flat in Knightsbridge. “It never suited us a bit. The light was all wrong for painting. It has to be north or something, and it wasn’t. We took it because it had a bit at the end of the dining-room fixed up as a cocktail bar. It wasn’t a bad idea really, for people only came to see us to have a cocktail, so a bar was frightfully important.” “Yes, I’ve always driven; it’s never any good letting an artist drive a car. They think the view is so frightfully important that they leave dead scattered everywhere.” “Well, I speak useful sort of French, and a bit of Spanish, and a word or two of Italian, and a little low German. Matter of fact, except for French, it’s mostly swear words I know. Just enough to keep the hotels and things from cheating us of our last penny. Men think everybody ought to speak English, so if you’re going to get around, a female simply has to learn the necessary.” “Yes, I’ve danced in almost every place, but I was never very social minded. What we liked after a most appalling trip on a boat that had no bath fit to call a bath, and staying in a place where you had to live like a savage, was to have about three days utter luxury—hair, face, new clothes, perfect meals—but three days cured us.” South London never probed into people’s incomes, but Claire was as natural about money as anything else. “Thank the Lord,” Bill had heard her say, “we had some private money. I can’t imagine worse hell than living on what an artist earns. Talk about the dole!”

  Claire put the last of the rolls in a tray and peeled the grease-proof paper off a packet of margarine. She looked at Bill’s stooping back where he fiddled with the stoves.

  “They being tiresome?”

  “They need new wicks, really. I forgot to soak them, so I’ll put them on to-morrow. They’ll see us through to-night.”

  She began spreading the margarine.

  “With any luck we shan’t ha
ve a raid. It’s beginning to rain. Did you hear me tell you it was time you took a night or two off? There are less raids now, so you could. Why don’t you go and see your wife?”

  “I shall go for a week-end in April.”

  “I’d snatch a bit now. Anything may have happened by April.”

  Bill finished with the stoves, and picked up a jug.

  “I’ll get the milk, and see how the urns are doing. Have to be April. We lost a kiddie in April. Our first, he was. Of course we’ve had three since, but you can’t help thinking about the one that’s gone, can you? It comes hard on my wife in war-time. Being evacuated, she can’t take flowers to the cemetery, and she misses that.”

  Claire went on with her spreading, and let Bill go off with his jug without answering him. She liked him too well to give him mere lip agreement on points on which their ideas could never meet. “What idiocy!” she thought as she slapped margarine on to her rolls. “Flowers at the cemetery for a dead baby.” Then her mind tried to follow Bill’s and his wife’s. What did wreaths and visiting the cemetery mean to them? The baby was decayed by now, and it was not to please it. Was it a kind of pride so that the grave should not look deserted to the neighbours? But if that was so, Bill alone could manage the flowers. Did it seem to them that the flowers were a signpost saying: “We had a baby, and though it’s dead we still think about it”? Why did anybody, Bill and his wife or anybody else if it came to that, want people to know that they thought about their dead? She was so interested that when Bill came back with the milk she said:

  “Why do people put flowers on graves?”

  Bill placed his milk on the shelf and measured out the right quantity to mix with the tea. He had been faced by Claire before with direct questions which, in being framed at all, cut at the foundations of his established beliefs and customs.

  “We don’t want to forget them.”

  “But do you remember people better by putting flowers on their graves?”

  “We don’t want them to think we’ve forgotten them.”

  She stopped spreading and stared at him. Bill was busy opening a bottle of Bovril and did not see her expression, or he might have gleaned something to add to his knowledge of her. She opened her mouth after a moment to speak, and then, just as she moved with the force of the words she wanted to pour out, she closed it again and went back to her work, inquiring after a moment if the urns were nearly ready, as she would be finished with the rolls in a moment and could come and help carry them.

  Bill liked turning things over in his mind. Fetching the urns from the gas stoves and carrying them out with Claire and placing them over the canteen oil stoves; filling the tank over the sink with hot water, while Claire arranged the buns on the cake trays; driving the canteen out into the street and up to the entrance to the first shelter, he scarcely spoke a word, for he was thinking. Why did he put flowers on his baby’s and his parents’ graves? Partly, of course, because he had been brought up to it. His mother had always been a one for wreaths—holly at Christmas, daffodils at Easter, and something seasonable for a birthday—but she had never liked much money spent. “They wouldn’t have liked it,” she would say. “They know we can’t afford it, and the flowers will only die.” His mother had not been much of a one for caring what the neighbours thought, but then she had no need, her house always being tidy, and her doorstep clean, and nothing ever owing; then for whom were the flowers? It had been a strain to find the money to buy them, and really it would have made them all think of Dad more if, when he had a birthday, the flowers had stood by his photograph. Still, that wouldn’t have been the same thing somehow. His grave would have looked so bare. That brought him back to Claire’s question: “Why do people put flowers on graves?” Was it so that they wouldn’t look bare, so people couldn’t say: “That lot didn’t care much for their relatives”? Or was it so the relations couldn’t look down and see the bare grave and think they’d been forgotten?

  “I’ll take the buns and rolls all on one tray,” said Claire. “Will you do the Bovrils and cocoas and I’ll come up for the teas later.”

  The shelter served and Claire back beside him in the car, Bill said after a while:

  “That was a bit of a poser, that of yours about graves.”

  She lit a cigarette.

  “Pretty idiotic question really. I mean, if you think they can see the graves, of course you want to doll them up. I hadn’t thought of that.”

  “I don’t know that I really think they see them, not now. I did as a kid, of course. I used to think dead people sat about with wings and a harp.”

  “Claire puffed at her cigarette.

  “And now?”

  “I don’t know what I do think, and that’s a fact. Sometimes I think we’ve always thought of heaven as too far off. I mean, it seems sometimes that people who’ve gone aren’t all that way away. Take my mother, now. There’s days when I’ve felt her quite close.”

  He broke off, for they had reached their second shelter. It was a primitive affair, a passage scooped under the ground. Claire opened the canteen door and dragged out her tray of buns and rolls. The rain was coming down pretty heavily, and it was very dark. She turned on the torch tied to her belt.

  “What a foul night.” Her voice was dead and depressed. The road was deep in mud, and she had to circle a ring of lights round a bomb crater. She almost wished that the siren had sounded. She much preferred to be wearing a tin hat to a beret when she had to push aside the sacking over the entrance. “I’ll get,” she thought, “something awful in my hair one day.” At the bottom of the greasy wooden stairs was another piece of sacking. As she moved it she met the smell of too many bodies in too confined a space, carbolic, and that indefinable odour found in hurriedly-dug and not-well-finished shelters, of wet earth, roots, and worms. Claire braced her shoulders and smiled. “Canteen,” she called. She was rewarded by the pleased cries which passed along the people. “Here’s the mobile.”

  Up and down the shelter Claire and Bill worked. They were bent double because of the low roof, and had to twist like eels serving now those in their bunks on the one side, and then those sitting on the benches on the other. All the time Claire kept up a flow of talk.

  “No, he isn’t likely to come tonight, it’s very wet.” “Yes, aren’t the Japanese being maggots? Still, they don’t seem to be going to do anything.” “What, you got some cheese to-day? Aren’t you lucky! It’s weeks since I had any.” “Yes, sausages are a bit queer. You want to keep an eye on your cat.” Roars of laughter and the little joke passing to and fro.

  Then the shelterers’ questions.

  “You going all up to the West End to-night, ducks?”

  “Did you go up on Tuesday with that raid on?”

  “Aren’t you afraid?”

  Claire was back at the entrance. She straightened her back.

  “Why should I be afraid? If a bomb’s going to hit me, it’s as good a way to die as any other, better than most.”

  “You’ve got a nerve,” said a man admiringly.

  Claire shook her head.

  “We’ve all got a nerve for something, it just depends what.”

  Claire washed the dirty mugs, and slammed them down crossly on the side of the sink. Bill, entering, passed her some more and picked up a dish-cloth and dried those mugs she had washed. He smiled at her angry splashings. She reminded him of his mother on an extra big washing day.

  “You do hate that shelter.”

  “Who wouldn’t? One end of it is inches deep in water. Did you see?”

  “They don’t sleep that end,” Bill pointed out, with the indifference to bad conditions inseparable from those who have always lived amongst them and accepted them as their fate. “Someone’s been to see it.”

  “Someone’s been to see it,” Claire mimicked. “A lot of good that’s going to do. What the people ought to do is to go and
smash some windows or something, and then they’d get something done.”

  Bill wiped the last of the mugs and put it in its tray.

  “Proper red, you are. You ought to have been here before the war. Things get moving quicker now than they did then. Why, houses were condemned for two or three years and the people stayed on and never got rehoused. You better go on coming down after the war and see what you can do then.”

  Claire got out of the canteen and into the car.

  “After the war! I might be anywhere.”

  Bill started the car. It was too dark to see her face, but he wondered what her expression was; her tone had been queer. It was as if she had said: “Oh, to-morrow! To-morrow never comes.”

  They drove to their next shelter. It was a factory, and under it were a series of tunnels used as shelters. Several bombs had fallen in the neighbourhood, and the factory stood practically untouched amidst the wreckage of row upon row of small houses. It was raining hard, and Claire swore as she hurried backwards and forwards.

  “I hate these bloody wooden ramps into the shelters. I’ll break an ankle one day.” “They’ve all got colds, and such damned awful coughs!” “That miserable cow with the wall eye has brought all her children back from the country. If I were the Government I’d make it illegal to move a child once it’s settled somewhere safe.”