CHAPTER V

 

December 8^th 1926

 

'You wouldn't dare,' Joyce said.

      'I would.'

      'No, you wouldn't.'

      'I tell you I would,' Helen Amberley insisted more emphatically.

      Maddeningly sensible.  'You'd be sent to prison if you were caught,' the elder sister went on.  'No, not to prison,' she corrected herself.  'You're too young.  You'd be sent to a reformatory.'

      The blood rushed up to Helen's face.  'You and your reformatories!' she said in a tone that was meant to be contemptuous, but that trembled with irrepressible anger.  That reformatory was a personal affront.  Prison was terrible; so terrible that there was something fine about it. (She had visited Chillon, had crossed the Bridge of Sighs.) But a reformatory – no! that was utterly ignoble.  A reformatory was on the same level as a public lavatory or a station on the District Railway.  'Reformatories!' she repeated.  It was typical of Joyce to think of reformatories.  She always dragged anything amusing and adventurous down into the mud.  And what made it so much worse, she was generally quite right in doing so: the mud was facts, the mud was common sense.  'You think I wouldn't dare to do it, because you wouldn't dare,' Helen went on.  'Well, I shall do it.  Just to show you.  I shall steal something from every shop we go to.  Every one.  So there.

      Joyce began to feel seriously alarmed.  She glanced questioningly at her sister.  A profile, pale now and rigid, the chin defiantly lifted, was all that Helen would let her see.  'Now, look here,' she began severely.

      'I'm not listening,' said Helen, speaking straight ahead into impersonal space.

      'Don't be a little fool!'

      There was no answer.  The profile might have been that of a young queen on a coin.  They turned into the Gloucester Road and walked towards the shops.

      But suppose the wretched girl really meant what she said?  Joyce changed her strategy.  'Of course I know you dare,' she said conciliatorily.  There was no answer. 'I'm not doubting it for a moment.'  She turned again towards Helen; but the profile continued to stare ahead with eyes unwaveringly averted.  The grocer's was at the next corner, not twenty yards away.  There was no time to lose.  Joyce swallowed what remained of her pride.  'Now, look here, Helen,' she said, and her tone was appealing, she was throwing herself on her sister's generosity.  'I do wish you wouldn't.'  In her fancy she saw the whole deplorable scene.  Helen caught red-handed; the indignant shopkeeper, talking louder and louder; her own attempts at explanation and excuse made unavailing by the other's intolerable behaviour.  For, of course, Helen would just stand there, in silence, not uttering a word of self-justification or regret, calm and contemptuously smiling, as though she were a superior being and everybody else just dirt.  Which would enrage the shopkeeper still more.  Until at last he'd send for a policeman.  And then ... But what would Colin think when he heard of it?  His future sister-in-law arrested for stealing!  He might break off the engagement.  'Oh, please, don't do it,' she begged; 'please!'  But she might as well have begged the image of King George on a half-crown to turn round and wink at her.  Pale, determined, a young queen minted in silver, Helen kept on.  'Please!' Joyce repeated, almost tearfully.  The thought that she might lose Colin was a torture.  'Please!'  But the smell of groceries was already in her nostrils; they were on the very threshold.  She caught her sister by the sleeve; but Helen shook her off and marched straight in.  With a sinking of the heart, Joyce followed as though to her execution.  The young man at the cheese and bacon counter smiled welcomingly as they came in.  In her effort to avert suspicion, to propitiate in advance his inevitable indignation, Joyce smiled back with an effusive friendliness.  No, that was overdoing it.  She readjusted her face.  Calm; easy; perfectly the lady, but at the same time affable; affable and (what was that word?), oh yes, gracious – like Queen Alexandra.  Graciously she followed Helen across the shop.  But why, she was thinking, why had she ever broached the subject of crime?  Why, knowing Helen, had she been mad enough to argue that, if one were properly brought up, one simply couldn't be a criminal?  It was obvious what Helen's response would be to that.  She had simply asked for it.

      It was to the younger sister that their mother had given the shopping list.  'Because she's almost as much of a scatterbrain as I am,' Mrs Amberley had explained, with that touch of complacency that always annoyed Joyce so much.  People had no right to boast about their faults.  'It'll teach her to be a good housekeeper – God help her! she added with a little snort of laughter.

      Standing at the counter, Helen unfolded the paper, read, and then, very haughtily and without a smile, as though she were giving orders to a slave, 'Coffee first of all,' she said to the assistant.  'Two pounds – the two-and-fourpenny mixture.'

      The girl, it was evident, was offended by Helen's tone and feudal manner.  Joyce felt it her duty to beam at her with a double, compensatory graciousness.

      'Do try to behave a little more civilly,' she whispered, when the girl had gone for the coffee.

      Helen preserved her silence, but with an effort.  Civil, indeed!  To this horrible little creature who squinted and didn't wash enough under the arms?  Oh, how she loathed all ugliness and deformity and uncleanliness!  Loathed and detested ...

      'And for heaven's sake,' Joyce went on, 'don't do anything idiotic.  I absolutely forbid ...'

      But even as she spoke the words, Helen stretched out a hand and without any attempt at concealment took the topmost of an elaborate structure of chocolate tablets that stood, like the section of a spiral pillar, on the counter – took it and then, with the same slow deliberation of movement, put it carefully away in her basket.

      But before the crime was fully accomplished Joyce had turned and walked away.

      'I might say I'd never seen her before,' she was thinking.  But of course that wouldn't do.  Everybody knew they were sisters.  'Oh, Colin,' she cried inwardly, 'Colin!'

      A pyramid of tinned lobster loomed up before her.  She halted.  'Calm,' she said to herself.  'I must be calm.'  Her heart was thumping with terror, and the dark magenta lobsters on the labels of the tins wavered dizzily before her eyes.  She was afraid to look round; but through the noise of her heartbeats she listened anxiously for the inevitable outcry.

      'I don't know if you're interested in lobster, Miss,' a confidential voice almost whispered into her left ear.

      Joyce stared violently; then managed, with an effort, to smile and shake her head.

      'This is a line we can heartily recommend, Miss.  I'm sure if you were to try a tin ...'

      'And now,' Helen was saying, very calmly and in the same maddeningly feudal tone, 'I need ten pounds of sugar.  But that you must send.'

      They walked out of the shop.  The young man at the cheese and bacon counter smiled his farewell; they were nice-looking girls and regular customers.  With a great effort, Joyce contrived to be gracious yet once more.  But they were hardly through the door when her face disintegrated, as it were, into a chaos of violent emotion.

      'Helen!' she said furiously.  'Helen!'

      But Helen was still the young queen on her silver florin, a speechless profile.

      'Helen!' Between the glove and the sleeve, Joyce found an inch of her sister's bare skin and pinched, hard.

      Helen jerked her arm away, and without looking round, a profile still, 'If you bother me any more,' she said in a low voice, 'I shall push you into the gutter.'

      Joyce opened her mouth to speak, then changed her mind and, absurdly, shut it again.  She knew that if she did say anything more, Helen unquestioningly would push her into the gutter.  She had to be content with shrugging her shoulders and looking dignified.

      The greengrocer's was crowded.  Waiting for her turn to be served, Helen had no difficulty in bagging a couple of oranges.

      'Have one?' she proposed insultingly to Joyce as they walked out of the shop.

      It was Joyce's turn to be a profile on a coin.

      At the stationer's there were, unfortunately, no other clients to distract the attention of the people behind the counter.  But Helen was equal to the situation.  A handful of small change suddenly went rolling across the floor; and while the assistants were hunting for the scattered pennies, she helped herself to a rubber and three very good pencils.

      It was at the butcher's that the trouble began.  Ordinarily Helen refused to go into the shop at all; the sight, the sickening smell of those pale corpses disgusted her.  But this morning she walked straight in.  In spite of the disgust.  It was a point of honour.  She had said every shop, and she wasn't going to give Joyce an excuse for saying she had cheated.  For the first half-minute, while her lungs were still full of the untainted air she had inhaled outside in the street, it was all right.  But, oh God, when at last she had to breathe ... God! She put her handkerchief to her nose.  But the sharp rasping smell of the carcases leaked through the barrier of perfume, superimposing itself upon the sweetness, so that a respiration that began with Quelques Fleurs would hideously end with dead sheep or, opening in stale blood, modulated insensibly into the key of jasmine and ambergris.

      A customer went out; the butcher turned to her.  He was an oldish man, very large, with a square massive face that beamed down at her with a paternal benevolence.

      'Like Mr Baldwin,' she said to herself, and then, aloud but indistinctly through her handkerchief, 'A pound and a half of rump-steak, please.'

      The butcher returned in a moment with a mass of gory flesh.  'There's a beautiful piece of meat, Miss!'  He fingered the dark, red lump with an artist's loving enthusiasm.  'A really beautiful piece.'  It was Mr Baldwin's fingering his Virgil, thumbing his dog's-eared Webb.

      'I shall never eat meat again,' she said to herself, as Mr Baldwin turned away and began to cut up the meat.  'But what shall I take?'  She looked round.  'What on earth ...?  Ah!' A marble shelf ran, table-high, along one of the walls of the shop.  On it, in trays, pink or purply brown, lay a selection of revolting viscera.  And among the viscera a hook – a big steel S, still stained, at one of its curving tips, with the blood of whatever drawn and decapitated corpse had hung from it.  She glanced round.  It seemed a good moment – the butcher was weighing her steak, his assistant was talking to that disgusting old woman like a bulldog, the girl at the cash desk was deep in her accounts.  Aloof and dissociated in the doorway, Joyce was elaborately overacting the part of one who interrogates the sky and wonders if this drizzle is going to turn into something serious.  Helen took three quick steps, picked up the hook, and was just lowering it into her basket when, full of solicitude, 'Look out, Miss,' came the butcher's voice, 'you'll get yourself dirty if you touch those hooks.'

      That start of surprise was the steepest descent of the Scenic Railway – sickening!  Hot in her cheeks, her eyes, her forehead, came a rush of guilty blood!  She tried to laugh.

      'I was just looking.'  The hook clanked back on to the marble.

      'I wouldn't like you to spoil your clothes, Miss.'  His smile was fatherly.  More than ever like Mr Baldwin.

      Nervously, for lack of anything better to do or say, Helen laughed again, and, in the process, drew another deep breath of corpse.  Ugh!  She fortified her nose once more with Quelque Fleurs.

      'One pound and eleven ounces, Miss.'

      She nodded her assent.  But what could she take?  And how was she to find the opportunity?

      'Anything more this morning?'

      Yes, that was the only thing to do – to order something more.  That would give her time to think, a chance to act.  'Have you any ...' she hesitated '... any sweetbreads?'

      Yes, Mr Baldwin did have some sweetbreads, and they were on the shelf with the other viscera.  Near the hook.  'Oh, I don't know,' she said, when he asked her how much she needed.  'Just the ordinary amount, you know.'

      She looked about her while he was busy with the sweetbreads, despairingly.  There was nothing in this beastly shop, nothing except the hook, that she could take.  And now that he had seen her with it in her hands, the hook was out of the question.  Nothing whatever.  Unless ... That was it!  A shudder ran through her.  But she frowned, she set her teeth.  She was determined to go through with it.

      'And now,' when he had packed up the sweetbreads, 'now,' she said, 'I must have some of those!'  She indicated the packets of pale sausages piled on a shelf at the other end of the shop.

      'I'll do it while his back is turned,' she thought.  But the girl at the cash desk had emerged from her accounts and was looking round the shop.  'Oh, damn her, damn her!' Helen fairly screamed in her imagination, and then, 'Thank goodness!' the girl had turned away.  A hand shot out; but the averted glance returned, 'Damn her!'  The hand dropped back.  And now it was too late.  Mr Baldwin had got the sausages, had turned, was coming back towards her.

      'Will that be all, Miss?'

      'Well, I wonder?' Helen frowned uncertainly, playing for time.  'I can't help thinking there was something else ... something else ...'  The seconds passed; it was terrible; she was making a fool of herself, an absolute idiot.  But she refused to give up.  She refused to acknowledge defeat.

      'We've some beautiful Welsh mutton in this morning,' said the butcher in that artist's voice of his, as though he were talking of the Georgics.

      Helen shook her head: she really couldn't start buying mutton now.

      Suddenly the girl at the cash desk began to write again.  The moment had come.  'No,' she said with decision, 'I'll take another pound of those sausages.'

      'Another?'  Mr Baldwin looked surprised.

      No wonder! she thought.  They'd be surprised at home too.

      'Yes, just one more,' she said, and smiled ingratiatingly, as though she were asking a favour.  He walked back towards the shelf.  The girl at the cash desk was still writing, the old woman who looked like a bulldog had never stopped talking to the assistant.  Quickly – there was not a second to lose – Helen turned towards the marble shelf beside her.  It was for one of those kidneys that she had decided.  The thing slithered obscenely between her gloved fingers – a slug, a squid.  In the end she had to grab it with her whole hand.  Thank heaven, she thought, for gloves!  As she dropped it into the basket, the idea came to her that for some reason she might have to take the horrible thing in her mouth, raw as it was and oozy with some unspeakable slime, take it in her mouth, bite, taste, swallow.  Another shudder of disgust ran through her, so violent this time that it seemed to tear something at the centre of her body.

      Tired of acting the meteorologist, Joyce was standing under her umbrella looking at the chrysanthemums in the florist's window next door.  She had prepared something particularly offensive to say to Helen when she came out.  But at the sight of her sister's white unhappy face she forgot even her legitimate grievances.

      'Why, Helen, what is the matter?'

      For all answer Helen suddenly began to cry.

      'What is it?'

      She shook her head and, turning away, raised her hand to her face to brush away the tears.

      'Tell me ...'

      'Oh!' Helen started and cried out as though she had been stung by a wasp.  An expression of agonized repugnance wrinkled up her face.  'Oh, too filthy, too filthy,' she repeated, looking at her fingers.  And setting her basket down on the pavement, she unbuttoned the glove, stripped it off her hand, and, with a violent gesture, flung it away from her into the gutter.