Marnie Read online

  Contents:

  Title page

  Author biography

  Contents CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Copyright page

  CONTENTS

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER ONE

  ‘Good night, miss,’ said the policeman as I came down the steps, and ‘good night,’ I answered, wondering if he would sound as friendly if he’d known what was in this attaché case.

  But he didn’t, and I took a taxi home. Throwing money away, because you could do it easily by bus, but this was a special day and you had to splash sometimes. I paid the taxi off at the end of the street and walked down to my two-roomed flat and let myself in. People might think it lonely living on my own nearly all the time, but I never found it lonely. I always had plenty to think about, and anyway maybe I’m not so good on people.

  When I got in I took off my coat and shook out my hair and combed it in front of the mirror; then I poured out a half and half of gin and french as another part of the celebration. While I drank it I went over a few train times and emptied a couple of small drawers. Then I took a bath, my second that day. Somehow it always helped to wash something out of your system.

  While I was still in it the telephone rang. I let it go on for a bit and then climbed out of the warm water and draped a towel round myself and padded into the living-room.

  ‘Marion?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘This is Ronnie.’

  I might have guessed it. ‘Oh, hello.’

  ‘Do I detect a lack of enthusiasm in the voice?’

  ‘Well, it’s a bit inconvenient, dear. I was just in my bath.’

  ‘What a delicious thought. How I regret this isn’t television!’

  Well, I mean, I might have expected that from Ronnie.

  ‘Are you still set on going away on your own tomorrow?’ he asked.

  ‘But, Ronnie, I’ve said so at least six times.’

  ‘You’re a queer girl. Are you meeting another man?’

  ‘No, of course not. I’ve told you. I’m spending the weekend with this school-friend in Swindon.’

  ‘Then let me drive you down.’

  ‘Ronnie, dear, can’t you understand? We don’t want a man. We just want to natter together about old times. I don’t get much opportunity to see her.’

  ‘They work you too hard at that office. I’ll come and see old Pringle one of these days. But seriously . . .’

  My thumb-nail had got caught on the office door and the varnish had chipped. Needed touching up.

  ‘Seriously what?’

  ‘Won’t you give me your phone number?’

  ‘I don’t think she has one. But I’ll try and ring you.’

  ‘Promise. Tomorrow evening.’

  ‘I can’t promise. I’m not sure where the nearest box is. But I’ll really promise to try.’

  ‘What time? About nine?’

  ‘Ronnie, I’m beginning to shiver. And there’s a horrid stain on the carpet all round my feet.’

  Even then he clung on like a cadger at a fair, taking as long as he could to say goodbye. When I could get the phone back I was nearly dry and the water had gone cold, so I dusted myself with talc and began to dress.

  Everything I put on was new: brassiere, panties, shoes, nylons, frock. It wasn’t just taking care; it was the way I’d come to like it. I suppose I have a funny mind or something, but everything has to be just as it should be; and I like it to be that way with people too. That was why the tie-up with Ronnie Oliver was something I’d be glad to be out of. Human beings . . . well, they just won’t be ticked off, docketed, that’s what’s wrong with them; they spill over and spoil your plans – not because you are out in your estimates but because they are. Ronnie, of course, thought he was in love with me. Big passion. We’d only met a dozen times because I’d kept on putting him off, saying I’d other dates etc. Anyway it was the old old story.

  My cast-offs were in my case, which would only just shut. You always seem to hoard up stuff even in a few months.

  I went round the flat. I started in the kitchenette and went over it inch by inch. The only thing I saw in it was a cheap tea towel I’d bought just after Christmas, but I grabbed that and packed it with the rest. Then I went through the bathroom and lastly the bed-sitting-room.

  I always reminded myself of the coat I’d left behind in Newcastle last year. Remembering that kept me on the alert; your eyes get to see something as part of the background and then you’ve left something behind and that’s too bad because you can’t come back for it.

  I took down the calendar and packed that. Then I put on my coat and hat, picked up the suitcase and the attaché case and let myself out.

  They were glad to see me at the Old Crown at Cirencester. ‘Why, Miss Elmer, it’s three months since you were here last, isn’t it? Are you going to stay long this time? Yes, you can have your usual room. It’s not been good hunting weather this month; but of course you don’t hunt, do you; I’ll have your cases sent up directly. Would you like some tea?’

  I always grew an inch staying at the Old Crown. Often enough I got by as a lady nowadays – funny how easy it was; but this was nearly the only place where I could believe it myself. The chintzy bedroom looking on the courtyard, with this four-poster bed and the same servants, they never changed, they were part of the furniture, and every day out to Garrod’s Farm to pick up Forio and ride for hours on end, stopping at some little pub for lunch and coming home in the failing light. It was life; and this time instead of staying two weeks I stayed four.

  I didn’t read the papers. Sometimes I thought of Crombie & Strutt, but in an idle sort of way as if working for them was something that had been done by another person. That always helped. Now and then I wondered how Mr Pringle would take it and if Ronnie Oliver was still waiting for his telephone call, but I didn’t lose any sleep over it.

  At the end of four weeks I went home for a couple of days, but said it was a flying visit and left on the Saturday. I dropped most of my personal things at the Old Crown and spent the night at Bath at the Fernley, signing in as Enid Thompson, last address the Grand Hotel, Swansea. In the morning I bought a new suitcase, a new spring outfit; then I had my hair tinted at one of the stores. When I came out I bought a pair of plain-glass spectacles, but I didn’t put them on yet. When I got to the station that afternoon I took out of the left-luggage office the attaché case I’d left there nearly five weeks ago, and there was room for it inside the new suitcase I’d bought that morning.
I bought a second-class ticket for Manchester – which seemed as good a place as anywhere, as I had never lived there – and a Times, which I thought might help me in picking out a new name.

  Names are important. They have to be neither too ordinary nor too queer, just a name, like a face, that’ll go along with the crowd. And I’d found from experience that the Christian name had to be like my own, which is Margaret – or usually Marnie – because otherwise I might not answer to it when called, and that can be awkward.

  In the end I chose Mollie Jeffrey.

  So at the end of March a Miss Jeffrey took rooms in Wilbraham Road and began to look for a job. I suppose you’d have seen her as a quiet girl, quietly dressed, with fair hair cut short round the head and horn-tipped spectacles. She wore frocks that were a bit too big for her and a bit too long. It was the best way she knew of looking slightly dowdy and of making her figure not noticed – because if she dressed properly men looked at her.

  She got a job as usherette at the Gaumont Cinema in Oxford Street, and kept it until June. She was friendly enough with the other usherettes, but when they asked her to go places with them she made excuses. She looked after her invalid mother, she said. I expect they said to each other: poor object, she’s one of those, and what a pity; you’re only young once.

  If they only knew it, I couldn’t have agreed with them more. We only had different ideas what to do about it. Their idea was fooling around with long-faced pimply men, ice skating or jiving on their days off, two weeks at Blackpool or Rhyl, queuing for the Sales, Pop discs, and maybe hooking a man at the end of it, some clerk in an export office, then babies in a council house and pushing a pram with the other wives among the red-brick shops. Well, all right, I’m not saying they shouldn’t, if that’s what they want. Only I never did want that.

  One day I tried for a job at the Roxy Cinema, close by the Gaumont, where they wanted an assistant in the box office. The manager of the Gaumont gave me a good reference and I got the job.

  When I’d been there three months the staff arrangements worked out that I was due for a week’s holiday, so for the first day or two I went home.

  My mother lived in Lime Avenue, Torquay. It’s one of a row of Victorian houses behind Belgrave Road, and it’s easy for the shops and the sea front and the Pavilion. We had moved there from Plymouth about two and a half years ago, and we’d been lucky to get a house unfurnished. My mother was a cripple, or at least she got about fairly well but she’d had something wrong with one leg for about sixteen years. She always said she was the widow of a naval officer who was killed in the war, but in fact Dad hadn’t ever got further than Leading Seaman when he was torpedoed. She also said she was a clergyman’s daughter, and that wasn’t true either, but I think Grandfather was a Lay Preacher, which is much the same thing, only you don’t lose your amateur status.

  Mother was fifty-six at this time, and living with her was a woman called Lucy Nye, a small, moth-eaten, untidy, dog-eared, superstitious, kindly creature with one eye bigger than the other. One thing I’ll always say for Mother, you never saw her anything but carefully and properly got up. She always had a sense of what was right and proper and she lived for it. When I got in that day she was sitting in the front window watching, and as soon as I rapped on the door she was there, stick and all.

  She was an odd person – she really was – I got to realize it more as I grew older – and even though she kissed me and even though I knew I was the apple of her eye – God help me – I could still tell there was a sort of reserve in the welcome. She didn’t let up, and even while she kissed you she kept you just that bit at a distance. You knew she’d been waiting at that window for hours to see you come down the street, but you wouldn’t be popular if you let on.

  She was a thin woman; I always remember her as extremely thin. Not like me because although I’m quite slight I’m well covered. I don’t think she’d been like that even at twenty-two. She had a really good bone structure, like old pictures of Marlene Dietrich, but she’d never had enough flesh to cover it, and as she got older she got haggard.

  That was the hard thing of living away from home. I should never have thought of her as haggard, not that word, if I’d stayed with her; it was going away and coming back that forced you to see things with new eyes. She was in a new black tailormade today.

  ‘Bobby’s, seven guineas,’ she said, as soon as she saw me looking. ‘I took it off the peg, one advantage of keeping your figure, isn’t it? They know me there now. Hard to please, they say, but not hard to fit. Well, Marnie, you’re looking a bit peaky, not like you should after being abroad. I hope Mr Pemberton hasn’t been working you too hard.’

  Mr Pemberton was my fiction man. I’d made him up three years ago, the year after I left home, and he’d worked like a charm ever since. He was a wealthy business executive who took trips abroad and took his secretary along; it explained me being away and not always able to leave an address; it explained me being flush when I came home. Sometimes I had nightmares that Mother would find out; because there’d be Hell to pay if she ever did.

  ‘And I don’t like your hair that colour,’ she said. ‘Blonde hair looks as if you’re trying to attract the men.’

  ‘Well, I’m not.’

  ‘No, dear, you’re sensible that way. I always said you’d got an old head on young shoulders. I always say so to Lucy.’

  ‘How is Lucy?’

  ‘I sent her for some scones. I know how you like scones for tea. But she’s gettin’ slower and slower. It tries me beyond human patience sometimes, what with this leg and seeing her creep about.’

  We were in the kitchen by this time. It never changed in here; honestly it didn’t; not any of the house really; it always struck me coming home like this; you moved homes and you stayed the same; everything moved with us; from Keyham, I suppose, to the bungalow at Sangerford, then back to Plymouth, and now here. The same cups and saucers even, laid out for tea on the plastic tablecloth, the framed colour print of The Light of the World, the rocking chair with the padded arms, the awful fretwork pipe-rack, the Welsh dresser with the woodworm, that clock. I don’t know why I hated the thing. It was oblong, coffin-shaped with a glass front, and the lower half covering the weights and pendulum was painted with pink and green love-birds.

  ‘Cold, dear?’ Mother said. ‘There’s a fire laid in the front, but it’s a close day and I didn’t put a match to it. Of course, this side of the street don’t get the sun in the afternoon.’

  I made tea while she sat there eyeing me up and down like a mother cat licking over its kitten. I’d bought presents for both of them, a fur for Ma and gloves for Lucy, but Mother always had to be got into the right mood first, she had to be talked round so that in the end it was as if she was doing you a favour by taking it. The only risk was getting her suspicious that you had too much money. She went word for word by the framed texts in her bedroom, and God help you if you didn’t keep in step too. Yet I loved and thought more of her than anything else in the world because of her guts in the struggle she’d had and the way above everything else she’d kept up appearances. Appearances for her were the Holy Bible. I still remembered the terrible rows she gave me when I was ten and had been caught stealing; and I still admired her for acting like she did even though I hadn’t enjoyed it at the time and even though I hadn’t reformed the way she thought I had – only got smarter so she didn’t find out.

  She said suddenly, ‘That’s French silk isn’t it, Marnie? It must have cost you a pretty bit of money.’

  ‘Twelve guineas,’ I said, when it was thirty. ‘I got it in a sale. D’you like it?’

  She didn’t answer but put her stick down and fidgeted round in her chair. I could feel her eyes boring my back.

  ‘Mr Pemberton all right?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes, fine.’

  ‘He must be a man to work for. I often tell my friends, I say Marnie’s private secretary to a millionaire and he treats her like his daughter. That’s right, isn’t
it?’

  I put the cosy on the tea and the caddy back on the mantelpiece. ‘He hasn’t got a daughter. He’s generous, if that’s what you mean.’

  ‘But he’s got a wife, hasn’t he? I doubt she sees as much of him as you do, eh?’

  I said: ‘We’ve gone into this before, Mam. There’s nothing wrong between us. I’m his secretary, that’s all. We don’t travel alone. I’m quite safe, don’t you worry.’

  ‘Well, I often think of my daughter knocking about the world the way you do. I worry about you sometimes. Men try to catch you unawares. You’ve got to be on the lookout, always.’

  Just then Lucy Nye came in. She squeaked like a bat when she saw me and we kissed, and then I had to go about the business of giving them their presents. By the time this was over the tea was cold and Lucy stirred herself making some more. I knew of course what Mother meant about her; she moved round the scullery emptying the teapot like an engineer in a go-slow strike.

  Mother stood in front of the mirror, fidgeting with her new fur. ‘Do you like it under the chin or loose over the shoulders? Over the shoulders is more the thing, I shouldn’t wonder. Marnie, you spend your money.’

  ‘That’s what it’s for, isn’t it?’

  ‘Spent proper, spent right, yes. But saved too. You’ve got to think of that. The Bible says love of money is the root of all evil; I’ve told you so before.’

  ‘Yes, Mam. And it says that money answereth all things.’

  She looked at me sharply. ‘Don’t scoff, Marnie. I shouldn’t want a daughter of mine to scoff at sacred words.’

  ‘No, Mam, I’m not scoffing. Look.’ I moved across and pulled the fur down at the back. ‘That’s the way I’ve seen them worn in Birmingham. It suits you that way.’

  After a bit we all sat down to tea again.

  ‘I had a letter from your Uncle Stephen last week. He’s in Hong Kong. Some port job he’s got, and with a good screw. I wouldn’t like it among all those yellow people, but he was always one for something different. I’ll find his letter for you later on. He sent his love.’

  Uncle Stephen was Mother’s brother. He was the one man I really cared about; and I never saw enough of him.