In the sitting-room, which doubled as dining-room and lunching-room when people like Mair were about, a smallish dark girl of nineteen or twenty was rearranging rugs and pushing chairs back into position. At my entry the child I’d seen earlier tottered behind the tall boxlike couch, where another of the same size was already lurking. Of this supplementary child I could make out nothing for certain, apart from a frizzy but sparse head of ginger hair. The girl had looked up at me and then quickly and shyly away again.
‘Good morning,’ I said, in the sort of tone officials visiting things are fond of and good at. I seemed not to have chosen this tone. It wasn’t my day for tones.
‘Morning, Mr Lewis,’ she muttered, going on with her work.
‘Miserable old weather.’
This notification, although accurate enough as far as it went, drew no reply. I fussed round the gate-leg table for a bit, fiddling with plates and cutlery and stealthily watching Betty Arnulfsen. Her straight black hair was ribboned in place by what looked like the belt of an old floral-pattern dress. In her plain skirt and jumper and with her meek expression she had the air of an underpaid shopgirl or bullied supply teacher. She wore no makeup. Altogether she wasn’t my idea of a delinquent, but then few people are my idea of anything.
There was a ring at the front-door bell, a favourite barking-trigger of the dog that lived downstairs. On my wife’s orders I went and let in Mair Webster, whose speed off the verbal mark proved to be at its famed best. By the time we reached the kitchen I already had a sound general grasp of the events of her morning. These included a bawling-out of the Assistant Child Care Officer down at the Town Hall, and a longer, fiercer, more categorical bawling-out of the foster-mother of one of ‘her’ babies. ‘Is Betty here?’ she added without pause. ‘Hallo, Jean dear, sorry I’m late, been dreadfully pushed this morning, everybody screaming for help. How’s Betty getting on? Where is she? I just want to have a word with her a minute.’
I was close enough behind Mair to see the children returning to defensive positions behind the couch and Betty looking harried. It was my first view of her in full face and I thought her quite pretty, but pale and washed out. I also noticed that the ginger-haired child was sucking a dummy similar to that of its fellow.
‘Ah, good morning, Betty,’ Mair said bluffly. ‘How are you getting on? Do you like working for Mrs Lewis?’
‘Aw, all right.’
Mair’s lion-like face took on the aspect of the king of beasts trying to outstare its tamer. ‘I think you know my name, don’t you, Betty? It’s polite to use it, you know.’
At this I went out into the kitchen again, but not quickly enough to avoid hearing Betty saying, ‘Sorry, Mrs Webster’, and, as I shut the door behind me, Mair saying, ‘That’s more like it, isn’t it, Betty?’
‘What’s the matter with you?’ Jean asked me.
I stopped stage-whispering obscenities and spoke some instead, using them to point or fill out a report of the recent exchange. In a moment the sitting-room door was reopened, catching me in mid-scatalogism, and Mair’s voice asked my wife to come in ‘a minute’. At the ensuing conference, I was told later, Betty’s willingness, industry and general efficiency as a domestic help were probed and a favourable account of them given. Meanwhile I put to myself the question whether the removal of all social workers, preferably by execution squads, wouldn’t do everyone a power of good. You had to do something about ill-treated, etc., children all right, but you could see to that without behaving like a sort of revivalist military policeman.
The meeting next door broke up. Betty and her children were hurried out of the place, the former carrying a tattered parcel my wife had furtively thrust into her hands. I found out afterwards that among other things it contained a tweed skirt of Jean’s I particularly liked her in and my own favourite socks. This was charity run riot.
At lunch, Mair said efficiently: ‘The trouble with girls like that is that they’ve got no moral fibre.’
‘How do you mean?’ I asked.
‘I mean this, John. They’ve no will of their own, you see. They just drift. Line of least resistance all the time. Now Betty didn’t really want to abandon those twins of hers — she was quite a good mother to them, apparently, when she was living with her parents and going out to work at this café. Then she went to a dance and met this dirty swine of a crane driver and he persuaded her to go and live with him — he’s got a wife and child himself, a real beauty, he is — and he wouldn’t take the twins, so she just went off and left them and let her parents look after them. Then the swine went off with another woman and Betty’s father wouldn’t have her back in the house. Said he’d forgiven her once when she had the twins when she was sixteen and he wasn’t going to forgive her again. He’s strong chapel, you see, believes in sinners being cast into the outer darkness, you know the kind of thing. It’s a tragic story, isn’t it?’
‘Yes,’ I said, and went on to talk about the conflict between generations, I think it was. Mair’s technique when others ventured beyond a couple of sentences was to start nodding, stepping up the tempo as long as they continued. When her face was practically juddering with nods I gave in.
‘Well,’ she went on in a satisfied tone, ‘going back to where I was just now, Betty’s father got into such a rage with her that he threw the twins out as well, and she got her job back at the café, which wasn’t really a good thing because it’s not a very desirable place, but at least it meant that there was some money coming in, but she couldn’t take the twins to work with her, so she parked them with the woman she was renting her room from. Then she, the woman, went out for the evening one time when she was working late, Betty I mean, and the twins were left unattended and they ran out into the street and wandered about and a policeman found them and that’s how we got brought into it. They were in a dreadful state, poor little dabs, half in rags and — quite filthy. I had the devil’s own job stopping them being taken into care, I can tell you. You see, while Betty was with her parents in a decent home she looked after them all right, but on her own, with bad examples all round her, she just let things slide. No moral fibre there, I’m afraid. Well, I fixed her up at the day nursery — didn’t know there were such things, she said, but I told her she’d just been too lazy to inquire — and after that things jogged along until this Norwegian came into the café for a cup of tea and saw Betty and bob’s your uncle.’
‘Hasn’t the Norwegian got to go back to Norway ever?’ Jean asked, her eyes on the forkful of fish that had been oscillating for some minutes between Mair’s plate and her mouth.
‘He’s going over for a few weeks soon, he says. He’s got a job at a chandler’s in Ogmore Street — it’s run by Norwegians, like a lot of them. Decent people. They’ve been married six weeks now, him and Betty, and he’s very fond of the twins and keeps her up to the mark about them, and of course I give her a good pep talk every so often.’
‘Of course,’ I said.
‘One job I had to do was take her out of that café. Lot of undesirables hang round the place, you know. A girl like Betty, quite pretty and none too bright, she’d have been just their meat. It’s something to have kept her out of their clutches. Oh, yes, I’m quite proud of myself in a way.’
One Sunday afternoon a couple of months later I was dozing in front of the fire — Jean had taken the kids out for a walk with a pal of hers and the pal’s kids — when the doorbell rang. Wondering if the caller mightn’t at last be some beautiful borrower come to avow her love, I hurried downstairs. The person on the doorstep was certainly a woman and probably on the right side of thirty, but she wasn’t beautiful. Nor — I’d have taken any odds — was she a borrower, not with that transparent mac, that vehement eye shadow, that squall of scent. ‘Good afternoon,’ I said.