“Hurry along, Jane. Or you’ll miss the bus.”
Jane thought for a moment. “I’m going to wait and take the stragglers’ bus with the three of you.”
“But what about Ruth? She’ll be waiting for all of us and I haven’t another penny to put into this telephone.”
“I’ll ring her up. Oh, sometimes I could strangle Maggie — putting herself in the way of everyone’s happiness like this.”
“Then you know all about it.”
“I know enough. And I don’t agree with any of it.”
“I should go and see if the two have come to blows. Goodbye, Jane. We’ll see you later in the morning—I hope.”
After ringing off, Jane placed the call to Ruth. However, it was Miss Mobry, the Methodist minister’s sister, who picked up the telephone. “Hallo, Miss Mobry. This is Jane Higgins. I wish to speak with Ruth.”
“Oh yes, she’s right here. Is anything wrong? Ruth was afraid that — well, last night’s air raid—”
“Oh no, Miss Mobry. It isn’t that, although a shop not too far from the emporium did take a nasty hit. Thank God no one was hurt. No, this isn’t life and death, but it’s really quite involved. I’ll have to tell you about it some other time.”
“Yes, do, my dear. And you should come to tea. Do you fancy loganberry tarts and seed cake? Who doesn’t? Ah, two old maids taking tea together. Is there anything cozier?”
Jane didn’t respond. She resented being called an old maid. First: she wasn’t one. She was only twenty-three and still eminently marriageable. And although she hadn’t any prospects at the moment, neither had any of her circle-sisters. Second: “old maid” was such a loathsome designation, especially for an unmarried woman who was not at all content with her present unaffiliated status.
Unlike her friend Ruth.
Ruth had let it be known that she did not plan to marry under any circumstance, that this was her choice, and furthermore, that she had the right to make her own choices. Jane respected Ruth, though Ruth always seemed out of step with her sisters.
“Jane?”
“Good morning, Ruth. There’s been a hitch. You’re to step out and catch the six-thirty and not wait for the rest of us. Maggie and Molly and Carrie are running quite late and won’t be able to make it.”
“What about you?”
“I’ve decided to wait for them.”
“Then I’ll wait as well.”
“Then we shall all be late, and how will that look?”
“It will simply look as if we’ve all been detained together. Everyone knows we come to work in a clump, Jane. We are only as punctual as our weakest link allows us to be, and I take it the weak link this morning is Maggie.”
“So you must know a little something about Maggie’s mother’s big decision.”
“Know something? I received quite an earful from Maggie the evening we spent together in the A.R.P shelter. We shouldn’t tie up this line into the parsonage; otherwise I’d tell you all about it.”
“Maggie is being quite unfair.”
“Well, of course she is.”
“But you really should nip over to the factory bus kiosk, Ruth. ‘Save yourself!’ they always say in the movies.”
“I haven’t an overwhelming desire to wait for that bus alone.”
“Why?”
“Must I tell you now? Miss Mobry is flitting in and out of the vestibule with little bits of unnecessary business. I know it’s so she can eavesdrop on this conversation.”
“Is this something you don’t want her to know about?”
“Only that I shouldn’t wish to make her worry,” replied Ruth. “She’s a nervous bundle of nerves after the recent raids. She gets so flurried sometimes when she thinks of the Luftwaffe dropping a bomb on our factory. I fancy she thinks she’s my mother sometimes, or at the very least a doting gran or aunt. As it so happens, I’ve always been asked to call her ‘aunt.’”
“Have you met with some trouble, Ruth?”
“It depends on how you define ‘trouble.’ I have nothing better to do. I’ll come and tell you about it, and free up this instrument for those wishing to burden Mr. Mobry with matters of faith and conscience.”
“Do I detect a bit of cheek in that statement?”
“None at all. I owe everything to Mr. Mobry and his sister. It is only a small inconvenience that they still consider me the same woebegone waif who arrived on their doorstep with little more than the clothes on her back.”
Jane laughed. “They’d sing a different song if they ever clapped eyes on you working in the main shed. Dressed to the nines in your mob cap and your greasy brown overall!”
“Would that we could wear those shapeless overalls outside the factory. It might solve that little problem at the bus kiosk.”
“What little problem?”
“I’ll see you shortly.”
Ruth left the house at that moment. A scant five minutes later she was standing next to her friend Jane in the showroom of Higgins’ Emporium in Balham High Road. The name was Jane’s father’s idea; he thought it would entice a better breed of clientele for the junk shop (to little avail). The two young women were studying Jane’s sleeping brother in the casual and detached manner of two visitors to the zoo observing a slumbering gorilla.
“Sometimes he’ll be out like this for hours,” said Jane with indifference. (This wasn’t the first time she and Ruth had stood over Lyle, watching him sleep when the rest of London was up and about and being industrious and productive. And lately he’d been even more slumberous than usual, using the nightly air raids that kept him ‘up for all hours’ as convenient justification for dozing the entire day away. As if no one but Lyle Higgins was so terribly incommoded by the Blitz.)
Ruth shook her head slowly and evenly — a demonstration of both disgust and empathy: disgust for Jane’s brother and empathy for Jane, whose burden it was to contend with such a sibling. “I don’t see why you continue to live here. They’ll soon be finished with the dormitories near the factory. You really should apply. Since you’re a charge-hand now, I’m sure they’ll put you at the top of the list.”
“And then what? Move to the dormitory and have the death of this human sloth, what also happens to be my brother, on my conscience for the rest of my days? I’m not lying to you, Ruth, when I say that Lyle shouldn’t even eat if it wasn’t for me sliding the plate of food in front of him and then nudging him a few times out of his usual fog.”
The two friends sat down at a little table close to the large plate-glass window, purposefully out of sight of Jane’s snoring brother. The window, crisscrossed with sticky brown tape, had remained intact after several nearby bombings. (It was kept un-blacked out because from sundown to sunup lights in the showroom were never turned on.) Ruth was inspired on a previous visit to recite, with the obvious nod to Rudyard Kipling, “If you can keep your glass when all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on the Nazis, then you’ll be one lucky bloke of a shopkeeper, my son — um—daughter.”
“Should I put on a pot of tea?” asked Jane. “I haven’t any biscuits. All the ones I like have disappeared from the Sainsbury’s.”
“I just had my own cuppa; don’t go to any trouble. I’m perfectly content sitting here gabbling with you and playing Nosey Parker to all the passersby in the street. I love this block, Jane, I do. Bustling, yes, but still rather quaint. It reminds me of Mrs. Gaskell’s Cranford. And this shop — I remember when we were girls — do you remember how tidy your father kept it?”