Chapter 1 An Unconventional Situation #2
She could confide in Honor, she supposed.
Somehow Honor had managed to never have a baby, so she must know a thing or two.
Then again, she could be oddly prudish. George recalled making some throwaway lewd remark to her about a friend’s honeymoon, only for Honor to turn all red and stuttery.
It put George guiltily in mind of her school’s biology mistress, the most spinsterish of spinsters and terribly sweet with it, who almost wept when she had to describe frog reproduction to a bunch of nasty sniggering girls.
Except Honor wasn’t a spinster. Her marriage to her late husband had been very happy, supposedly.
And she and Saul were once lovers, it was gossiped, although George could scarcely credit this.
Oh well, she’d thought, Honor’s bedpost notches are none of my affair.
Still, her embarrassment at a mere allusion to sex had cast her in a new light.
Not such a seasoned sophisticate after all.
George liked living at Tregunter Road. All she needed was to be thrown out on her ear.
Before she’d moved in, nearly a year ago, she’d rented a shabby bed-sitting room off Earls Court Road.
The gas fire positively ate shillings, and the windowpanes rattled at the lightest breeze.
But even in warm weather, she dressed and undressed under the bedclothes; she suspected her landlord, who had a droopy brown mustache, of spying on her through a crack by the ceiling light fixture.
So when Auden’s wife, Edwina, had told her about Honor’s house, George had begged to be introduced.
“The situation’s a bit unconventional,” said Edwina, who vaguely knew the girl moving out, a student at the Slade who was getting married.
“She rents out all her spare rooms, and yet one can’t imagine she really needs the money.
I suppose she’s playing out a bohemian fantasy of communal living.
” Her tone was disparaging. She regretted marrying a penniless artist and longed for suburban comforts, a brand-new little house with a fitted kitchen, wall-to-wall carpets, and a mint-green bathroom suite.
“To each their own,” she went on. “She runs that magazine from home, too.” The word magazine was given verbal quotation marks.
“I’m not sure it would be your cup of tea. ”
But George thought it sounded fine. If ten years at boarding school had taught her anything, it was that privacy and solitude were luxuries, not necessities.
Edwina duly telephoned Honor, who invited George around for tea.
An anxious George sat in the drawing room at Tregunter Road, wearing a striped dress with a full skirt and matching jacket, her best outfit, while Honor talked about herself, the writers she liked, and how everyone said she ought to write a novel.
George hadn’t the first idea what to say.
She’d last read a whole book when she was twelve and an illicit unexpurgated copy of Lady Chatterley’s Lover was passed around the dorms. It was sufficiently enlightening that any further literary education seemed pointless.
Honor barely seemed to notice her silence and chattered gaily on.
Finally she said, as though they’d been discussing the room the whole time, “It’s one pound and three shillings a week.
Can you manage that? I’m sure you’ll be happy here.
” George, whose bed-sitting room was two quid, could hardly believe her luck.
There was a loud knock at George’s bedroom door. “Hang on,” she shouted, getting out of bed and smoothing the covers. “All right, come in.”
Robbie entered. He exuded even more discomfort than usual, as well he might; he’d never visited George in her room before. “Sorry,” he muttered. “I just wanted a word.”
“By all means.” Her tone was bright. She kicked a pair of drawers under the bed and pointed to her little horsehair settee. “Won’t you sit down? Can I offer you a drink? There’s only gin, I’m afraid. No tonic. But Mina might have some.”
“It’s all right. I don’t want anything.”
“If you’re sure.” George took a bottle from the tray on the sideboard and half filled a tooth glass with gin. Wasn’t gin meant to be helpful in her circumstances? She took a gulp, scalding her throat and bringing sour saliva rushing onto her tongue.
Robbie sat down, a tad gingerly, she thought.
He crossed his ankles, exposing the worn soles of his brogues, and said, “I wanted to ask you about that person in the drawing room. Have you any idea who he is? They’ve been shut up in there for an age.
” He caught George’s look. “I know. It’s nothing to do with me.
But I happened to catch a few snatches of their conversation.
It sounds like he’s going to be moving in. ”
“Really?” She perched on the edge of her bed and thought about this. “I must say, he doesn’t seem Honor’s type. Though I only exchanged a few words with him. He claimed they knew each other years ago, which struck me as queer. And there’s no room, surely?”
“The only space is the other attic bedroom. You know there’s a smaller one just across from mine? It’s basically a box room now, full of old junk. But it could be cleared out.”
She saw what he was getting at. “And you’re accustomed to some degree of privacy, up in the roof by yourself.”
“Well, quite. The only time I’ve got to write are the evenings. You know how I’m run off my feet with Vista. Supposing he has noisy friends over, or listens to the radio at odd hours? I need my sleep. I’m useless if I don’t get eight hours.”
George was touched he was confiding in her, even if only to fret and complain. She wasn’t sure she’d ever heard him speak so many words in a row.
“Yes, I do see your concern.” She sipped her gin, more slowly this time.
“I suppose I could say something to Honor. It wouldn’t seem quite right, having a strange man sleeping above our heads.
Especially for Mina. She’s only seventeen, you know.
And sometimes she wanders about in her nightdress. What would her parents say?”
Robbie grinned. “What about me—aren’t I a strange man?”
“Oh, you know what I mean!” But George realized she’d made a faux pas.
The notion of Robbie as someone to protect young girls from—as a viable romantic figure, come to that—had never even passed through the outskirts of her mind.
She wasn’t sure why. He was married, allegedly.
And he was pleasant enough to look at, if a bit on the scruffy side.
He was an intellectual, that was the problem.
All his vitality was diverted to his brain.
“You’re so evidently a decent chap,” she assured him.
“Didn’t you come to Honor via a family connection? It’s hardly the same.”
Robbie laughed. “My dear George, please don’t worry. I’m not offended. I grew up with four sisters. Haven’t you noticed that girls invariably feel comfortable around a man with sisters? We’ve had some of the masculine corners rubbed off or something.”
“What an interesting theory. I think you might be right.” Pish, she thought. She’d known plenty of utter scoundrels with sisters. “In any case,” she went on, “why don’t we wait and see if this fellow actually is moving in? Perhaps you misheard.”
“Perhaps.” He frowned and fixed his gaze on the ashtray at George’s bedside. “Are you going to finish that cigarette?”
Taken aback, she passed him the ashtray. “Be my guest.”
Robbie found some matches in his trouser pocket and lit the fag end. Then he asked, belatedly, after George’s well-being.
“Why, do I look ill?” She felt it, though she was dimly aware it was too early for morning sickness and all that malarkey.
Robbie, exhaling a stream of smoke, looked alarmed. “No… I mean, of course not. I was only—”
“I think I’m preggers, which is an awful, awful bore.
” She hadn’t planned on telling him, of all people.
She was rather tight, she realized. Several ounces of gin swirled acidly in her empty stomach.
If she finished the bottle while lying in a hot bath, would that do the trick?
It wasn’t her day for a bath, but Mina might swap with her.
Especially if she explained why. Mina would enjoy being enlisted into a crisis, would think it a learning opportunity.
She regarded George as something of a mentor, the older girl being a bona fide deb who’d received an expensive education.
For all the good it did her. Mina, the daughter of a coach driver and a district nurse from Essex, had left school at fourteen.
She’d worked as a packer in a chocolate factory until she’d saved enough to move to London.
Courageous little Mina wanted a glamorous career or a rich husband.
It hardly mattered which. When she wasn’t attending classes at Mrs. Morley’s Charm Academy for Young Ladies on Shaftesbury Avenue, she worked as an usherette at the local Classic Cinema.
“You’ll keep this under your hat, won’t you?” George said to Robbie. “I especially shouldn’t want Honor finding out. And it might be a false alarm. Fingers crossed.”
“By all means. I shan’t breathe a word. What are you going to do?”
“Get rid of it, of course.”
Robbie couldn’t help being shocked by the baldness of her statement. George saw his face and said, “Oh, come on. It’s not a baby yet. It’s no bigger than your fingertip. If it exists at all.”
“If this isn’t too gauche a question, have you…”
“Told the would-be father? No. Bit of a snag there. I’m not entirely—”
“George, no!” The words burst out. “But how many have… not that it’s any of my—”
“Goodness, keep your hair on. Only two.” She pointed an accusing finger at Robbie, a representative (albeit barely) of the sex that had got her into this mess. “Count yourself lucky you were born a man. Not that any man would do otherwise, unless he were a bloody fool.”
A look passed across his face—of skepticism, of disagreement?—and he opened his mouth to respond just as Honor’s voice trilled up the stairs. “Darlings! George! Anyone? Could you please gather in the drawing room? There’s someone I’d like you to meet.”