John Thomas & Lady Jane

middle-class street slowly. Then he stopped, and opened the door
of the car.
    ‘Do you happen to know just about
where it is, Mm?’ he asked. ‘Blagby Street?’
    ‘It’s somewhere in England,’ said Constance.
    So the taxi edged slowly on, towards
a stand.
    ‘Eh Jim! Know where Blagby Street is?’
    There was a blank, while the words ‘Blagby Street’ were re-echoed among the chauffeurs. At last a seedy fellow shouted:
    ‘Blagby Street? Ay! Up St Ann’s
Well.’
    The driver received the information
as if he had been directed to the middle of Africa. Up St Ann’s Well Street he had been told. Why St Ann had come all this way to have a well named after
her was a puzzle. Finally:
    ‘Number fifty-seven,’ said the
driver, opening the door.
    She gave the driver a shilling tip.
He looked at it then her with the hatred of a would-be murderer.
    Constance stood on the stone doorway and knocked. She
waited. Then she knocked again and waited. At last the door was unlocked and
Soames stood there in his shirt-sleeves, grimy as he had come from work.
    ‘You come to th’ front door!’ he
said.
    ‘Isn’t that what it’s for?’ she said.
    ‘Ay! If you like! Only everybody goes
to th’ back.’
    ‘Can’t the idiots tell the front from
the back?’ said Constance.
    She stepped into the room and found
herself in a small parlour crowded with a ‘suite’ in dark rosewood and green
cotton-velvet brocade, a dark and glossy piano, various stands with ferns, a
bronze fire-screen, and huge vases and bowls and pots and ornaments on the
mantelpiece, one a clockwork tortoise with revolving eyes. Everything was very
close to everything else. One sneeze would have caused a disaster.
    ‘Your hands!’ she said, shocked.
    ‘Ay, they are my hands,’ he said.
    He opened them and looked at the
swollen, inflamed calluses.
    He was dulled, stupefied and almost
extinguished. She would never have believed he was the same man. No, it was
somebody else but who?
    ‘Has it been very horrid?’ she asked.
    But he would not look at her
basically because behind this mass of vases, pots and ornaments he could not
see her. He stared dully at his hands.
    ‘It takes a bit of getting used to,’
he admitted drearily.
    ‘But why should you get used to it?’
she asked.
    ‘It’s what other men has to — pretty
nigh every other man.’
    ‘Why should you be pretty nigh every
other man? You are not pretty nigh other men,’ she said.
    ‘I am. I’m pretty nigh other men,’ he
said.
    She remembered his white, silky,
rather slender arms, and the delicate white male shoulders, and the man’s belly
awash with beer.
    ‘Why do you do this awful work and do
it for £2 105 week?’
    ‘I’m a working-man, like pretty nigh
every other man,’ he said.
    ‘You are not. If you go on like this
you will cruple your blurzon. I went to the doctor here,’ she said. ‘He says he
thinks the child will be due in February.’
    Before she could get the words out he
had hidden in the scullery.
    ‘You mean your child,’ he said
stupidly from the security of the scullery.
    ‘Ours!’ she said.
    ‘Have you told Sir Clifford?’ he
asked, hiding even deeper in the scullery.
    A voice from behind the door said,
‘I’ve mashed the tea if you’ll come.’
    He rose to his feet in silence. One
of his attributes was his silent feet.
    ‘Are yer comin’?’ he said.
    ‘Are you sure they want me?’ she
said.
    She was led to what was slightly
larger than the parlour, but it was full, not only of furniture, but of a
large, brilliantly spread tea table and what seemed like a crowd of people,
though it was only a family. In fact they were like a crowd.
    Constance found herself in front of a thin, freckled,
pale woman in a fashionable putty-coloured silk dress.
    ‘You are Mrs Tewson,’ said Constance, holding out her hand.
    Mrs Tewson didn’t quite know what to
do with it so she left it there.
    ‘I’m afraid I’ve given you a lot of
trouble,’ said Constance.
    ‘No trouble at all, if you can put up
with the poky places we have to live in,’ said Mrs Tewson.
    So Constance put up with poky places
they had to live in.
    ‘And this is Mr Tewson,’ said Constance, to a big, pasty-faced man with dust-coloured hair and rather nice eyes. He shook
hands with her, gripping with his big, hardened hand, but it was his wife who
said:
    ‘That’s right! That’s my ’usband,
Bill.’ (What a good memory she had!) ‘But we usually call it Towson, though I
know