Cry to dream again, p.9
Cry to Dream Again, page 9
She stopped short of going all the way home and instead of turning the corner went straight to the shop, where Mrs Salvatore was surveying a pile of boxes in the middle of the floor. “Shirley!” she exclaimed. “How good of you to come early! You can see how much I need your help! This delivery has just arrived and I have to unpack it and store the contents away before the rush of customers for their evening papers!” There was no more time for reflection as Shirley set to work unpacking the boxes, refilling the shelves and taking the excess goods away to store in the stockroom. There, seated at a desk, she found an elderly man whom she had never previously seen in the shop, though she recalled that he looked vaguely familiar. Possibly she had seen him in church, she thought.
He succeeded in introducing himself as Mr Salvatore, before dissolving into a fit of coughing. “I sit-a here all-a day,” he eventually managed to enunciate glumly in a strong Italian accent, “and I deal-a with-a the accounts, but I not-a come in-a the shop-a, my shop-a, because she say the customers not lik-a my cough.” Shirley was sorry for the poor man, but indeed his cough was dreadful and there was a spectral air about him, so it was understandable that his presence was not welcome out at the front.
Another surprise awaited her when she went back into the shop, for there stood her mother. “Ah, Chérie!” she began, to Mrs Salvatore’s puzzlement, and continued speaking in French. “I want to buy a box of chocolates for your pa from the sweet shop, so I thought I would call in here to see how you are coping and buy a magazine from you!”
It was a pleasure for Shirley to be able to serve her mother, who seemed her old self again, but after she left she had to fend off the barrage of Mrs Salvatore’s questions. “So was that your mother? Silly me! I never realized! Of course! I’ve seen you both in here and at church! Where does she come from? Was that French she was speaking? Why does she call you ‘Chérie’?” Shirley answered all these enquiries as briefly as she could, but then had to endure Mrs Salvatore’s elaborations on the theme of foreign languages and marriage to a foreigner. “I could never learn Italian,” she confessed, “and doubtless you’ve found out Mr Salvatore’s English is not very good, so it’s a wonder we manage to talk at all, what with his cough and everything!”
Shirley wondered, but not for long, how this unlikely pair had met. “You see,” Mrs Salvatore went on, “I was on my summer holidays in Brighton, and that was where I met Mr Salvatore. He was selling ice cream on the seafront. He swept me off my feet, he did, and I suppose we didn’t need much language in those days! It’s all different now though.” Shirley didn’t know whether Mrs Salvatore was going to laugh or cry, but then a customer came in and, after wiping her nose and eyes, she behaved with complete aplomb.
After she had finished serving, she reverted to her rather one-sided conversation. “Does your brother speak French too?” she asked. Shirley’s reply that yes, he did, provoked a profound sigh, which proved to be the prelude to another embarrassing outpouring. “Oh how lovely for your parents to have children who speak both languages! That must make such a difference to the way they get on together. We don’t have any children, you see, so there’s not that connection between us.” Mrs Salvatore’s voice trailed off and she sniffed into her handkerchief again. “Maybe,” she continued, “if we had been able to have children my husband would have taken greater care of his health and wouldn’t have smoked so much. He has to work out at the back because I gave him a choice: ‘Either, Salvatore,’ I said, ‘you go to the doctor’s or you keep out of the way!’” She became more assertive. “He refused to see the doctor, so there you are: he has to stay out of the shop. I won’t have him in here coughing all over the customers! That would be the end of the business!” Without moving, Shirley took a surreptitious peek at her watch. With relief she saw that in less than five minutes her shift would come to an end.
Although she had left the Salvatore establishment behind her, she carried the unfortunate image of the unhappy couple in her mind all evening, unable to decide which partner deserved the most sympathy. Mr Salvatore was in a dire situation, but it was partly of his own making. Had he agreed to seek medical help, his cough might have been cured, and he and his wife would even now be working in harmony, treating their business like the child they hadn’t had. Mrs Salvatore was obviously at the end of her tether with worry about his health, tempered by annoyance at his obstinacy, and with exhaustion from running the shop alone. At supper Shirley looked from one to the other of her parents, both of them talkative and happy – quite like old times, in fact – and she took comfort in the thought that after all, in spite of her pa’s war wound and his nightmares, and in spite of the mysterious encounter that lunchtime between her mother and Monsieur Lavasseur, hers appeared to be a united and contented family. After dinner, Maman presented Pa with the chocolates she had bought that evening, saying “Here’s a little present for you!”
Beaming from ear to ear and passing the box round the table, he exclaimed, “What a treat! How you do spoil me!”
Later, with her hands deep in the washing-up bowl, and without turning to look at her daughter while she spoke, Maman said quietly, “I’m thinking of going to Mass on Sunday. Would you come with me, Chérie?”
“If you want me to,” Shirley replied without enthusiasm. Then, after a pause for reflection, enquired, “Will that mean I’ll have to go to confession too?”
“Yes, I was intending to go tomorrow evening,” her mother replied. “Will you come too? I could meet you on my way home from work.”
Shirley’s attitude to churchgoing was lukewarm at the best of times, and she knew that her mother was generally not particularly keen either, so if Maman asked for her companionship, it had to be for a good, if unexplained reason. “All right,” she agreed, “come and meet me from the shop at about six.”
The Catholic Church in the centre of the borough was a forbidding Victorian edifice. Inside, even on a sunny autumn evening, it was even more lugubrious than its outside appearance suggested; its pillars and arches were grey with the smoke that had filtered in through ill-fitting doors and broken windows and the soot from the constant burning of candles. Only the tiny red lamps that glimmered feebly, suspended from the roof above the chancel and in the side chapels, relieved the all-pervasive gloom. Little daylight penetrated the originally garish, though nowadays muted colours of the stained glass. The plaster saints adorning the walls seemed a miserably drab bunch, crying out for a good wash, or so Shirley thought, for she preferred to go inside only when there was a Mass in progress: then at least there was a halo of both electric and candle light reflecting off the silver vessels on the altar, making the gold embroidery on the statue of the Virgin glisten, and illuminating the chancel with a brightness that brought the place alive, like a theatre where the priests and the acolytes, all in their lacy robes, moved in strict, if sometimes pathetically lame dance sequences. No matter that the words they spoke were unintelligible, all being in Latin, the spectacle was engaging, especially when bells rang and incense wafted through the stagnant air.
It had to be said, though, that she preferred going to Mass in France, where the village church was smaller, brighter and cleaner, where the saints were better tended and less dilapidated in appearance. There too the village priest, monsieur le curé, was a kind and approachable white-haired old man who knew everyone and who was liked by all. He would come to visit Mémé regularly of an afternoon and would sit quietly talking to her for hours on end. She was always happier after his visits and on the following Sunday would venture down to the village for Mass in the company of her daughter and granddaughter. Then after Mass the whole village would congregate in the church porch in a lively exchange of greetings and news. Here in the London suburbs, the church and the borough were so large that no one seemed to know anyone else and the priests were anonymous figures who flitted in and out of the service and exited by a side door.
That Friday, the day she and her mother were to make their confessions, was not a good day for Shirley: Mrs Salvatore had moaned in the shop and Mr Salvatore had coughed in the distance throughout her two shifts, both of them seeming to regard her as a target for their complaints whether mental or physical. At the dance school there was still no news about her audition and Miss Patience was still conspicuous by her absence. By six o’clock in the evening she was thoroughly annoyed and out of sorts and regretted agreeing to go to the church at all, let alone for confession; she was not in the mood for it.
Walking up the road beside her mother, she longed to be at home sitting in the garden in the last rays of the sun on this fine autumn evening, with a cup of tea at her elbow and a magazine spread open on her lap. She thought too, as she did often, how unfair it was that, as a result of some compromise between their parents years ago, Ted was never required to come to Mass, in England or in France. Ted, like Pa and Granny, was a Congregationalist, and since Pa never went to church, Ted didn’t have to either, leaving him free to spend Sunday mornings doing whatever he liked, including being blissfully lazy. Even worse, if he had gone to the Congregational church, apparently he wouldn’t have had to go through this business of confession. Shirley was debating whether she might plead the onset of a cold or a headache, but she knew that her mother would not be taken in by that sort of excuse, and in any case, she recalled, she was there to support her. In a defiant mood she entered the church and sat down on a hard pew, while Maman disappeared into a side compartment of one of the wooden cubicles ranged along the wall. She was there a long time, and when at last she emerged, she seemed distressed.
While she waited for her turn, Shirley considered what she might say to the anonymous priest hidden behind a screen. In the past she had admitted to the little lies that she had told, mostly in school, to get out of the trouble which always loomed over her head, but there had also been the stories she had invented with the intention of entertaining the invisible presence, because, she thought, his job must be so boring. These stories probably contained a modicum of truth since they often recounted sins she would have liked to commit, but for which she did not quite have the courage. For example, once she had told him, “Our headmistress is so nasty, I put powdered chalk on her chair and it stuck to her skirt when she sat down, but she couldn’t see it!”
Because his face was hidden from her view, she had no notion of the priest’s exasperated expression, and was always surprised and not a little annoyed at being quickly dismissed with an absolution and a blessing, saying, “My child, you must say your Ave Marias and pray to Our Lady to help you to behave like a good Christian.”
Today was different: she was in no mood to entertain him and anyhow felt herself to be too old to invent such fables, so when she went into the confessional she simply told him of all the frustrations in her own life and of the causes for the irritation that she had experienced in the past four days since the return from France last Monday: irritation against her father, her granny, Miss Patience and Mr and Mrs Salvatore, as well as other untold minor causes of annoyance.
“Let us pray,” said the priest with some sympathy in his voice, “that Our Lady, the Mother of God, will help you to find the patience and forbearance to cope with these and other irritations in life, my child. You are beginning to discover a major truth of human existence, and that is that our lives are full of irritations and annoyances, large and small, and how you cope with them is a measure of your strength of character.” The disembodied voice cleared its throat, then assumed a gentler tone, speaking, it seemed, from the heart, as though the advice it was imparting was born of its own experience, not gleaned from a seminary discussion or textbook. “You are lucky that you are affected only by these little problems, my child. Many people have far worse to contend with and find their lives blighted in consequence. You must pray that you never encounter greater misfortune than this. Recite your Ave Marias and ask Our Lady to come to your aid.” Thus and with a prayer, an absolution and a blessing, he brought the confession to a close.
Shirley left the confessional in an unusually sober and reflective mood. She had always considered, and had been told by Miss Patience and her mother, that she possessed great strength of character on account of the discipline that she devoted to the ballet, and also on account of her determination to succeed in that, her chosen career. How could she possibly need more of that strength, she wondered, and what did the priest mean by talking about “greater misfortune”? She fervently hoped, and her hope was only just short of a prayer, that greater misfortune than all those irritations she had suffered in the past week would never befall her. Indeed, she intended her life to follow the plan that she had devised for it, even to the extent that somewhere along the way she might meet that young man called Alan again, marry him and, after her career in the ballet was over, settle down in a comfortable home with him and a family of beautiful fair-haired, blue-eyed children. Her mother was quiet on the way home and so was she, upset by the disturbance brought to her peace of mind by the priest’s depressing predictions.
10
Only Pa’s legs were visible, stretching out from underneath his car, when Shirley returned from her ballet class at lunchtime on Saturday. “Hello, Pa!” she called out. “What on Earth are you doing there?”
He eased himself out into the daylight and pulled himself up, first by hanging onto the bumper, then onto one of the headlamps and finally onto the door handle of his precious vehicle. Wiping his hands on an old rag, he declared, “Ah, Shirl, so there you are! You’ve been out a long time. Been to your dancing, have you?” Shirley laughed at the sight of him; he was so dirty he might have been down a coal mine: his dungarees were covered in oil and his pale skin and hair were flecked with black streaks, yet he was smiling like a small boy who has been playing with his favourite toy.
“Yes, that’s right,” she answered, “but I did my shift in the paper shop first, and look, I’ve been paid!” She reached into her pocket and took out a small brown envelope in which coins jingled. “Ted’s been paid too, so we’re in the money and we can help out!”
“No, certainly not!” Pa replied without a second thought. “You’re very kind, but I won’t let you do that. You and Ted should save that money for the future. Come on, let’s go in and see if lunch is ready.” They climbed the steep steps at the back door, Shirley with great speed and agility and her father much more slowly and unsteadily.
Jacqueline was cooking a hot meal in the kitchen. “Ah, voilà!” she exclaimed. “So you have come in together! I am just about to serve lunch.”
After a somewhat cursory attempt to clean himself up, Pa sat down at the dining table and pulled a letter out of his pocket which he put down beside his place setting but did not read straight away to the family. “That can wait till after I’ve eaten,” he announced, anxious to allay the pangs of hunger. Only after he had consumed his first course did he share its contents with his wife and children. The communication, which had arrived by the morning post, was from Granny: in it she decreed that the three of them – she, Reggie and Shirley – should travel to Cousin Edith’s wedding by car rather than by train, since she would be bringing at least two suitcases plus her hatbox.
After reading the missive aloud, Pa said that he had intended to save money by using his rail pass for the train, but as a result of Granny’s command the plans would have to change, so that was why he had decided to give the car a servicing that morning well in advance of the journey to Birmingham. Apart from the cost of running the car instead of free transport on the railways, it wasn’t a problem as far as he was concerned, because he loved his car and his leg was well enough to operate the pedals. “So, remind me. When is the wedding?” Shirley enquired.
“End of this month, two weeks today,” Pa said, glancing at the calendar pinned to the wall above his head.
“Oh, good!” Ted announced gleefully, “so that is the weekend when I’ll be away at camp! I was pretty sure it would be.” Shirley frowned, went silent and cast her eyes down onto her plate.
“Why, what’s the matter?” Maman, who had been quiet until now, asked with a sharpness that was unusual in her, as if any disruption to the plans would not be welcome from her point of view, although she had decided weeks ago that she would not be attending the wedding.
“Well, I had some good news this morning, but it doesn’t seem as good now as I thought it was,” Shirley replied with a rueful sigh.
Miss Inskip’s dance class had been so much better than she had feared. In fact it was quite exciting, and Miss Inskip, who was much younger than expected, proved to be a good teacher, even if she did apply her little cane to various parts of her pupils’ anatomies when their postures did not meet with her approval. “Shoulders down!” she commanded, tapping a slouching pupil between the shoulder blades. “Strengthen your core muscles!” she ordered, pointing the stick at another girl’s midriff. “Tummies in! Straight legs, no bent knees!” she demanded of the whole class. All these imperious instructions were delivered with a disarming smile, which indicated that, though she meant what she said, her criticisms were in no way ill-tempered. She was poised to lead the class into some routines when her cousin, the receptionist, interrupted the class to summon Shirley to the telephone.
A faint voice straining to make itself heard at the other end, called out, “Shirley, Shirley, is that you? I’ve some good news for you!” It was Miss Patience. Her “good news” was that after many attempts she had at last managed to get hold of someone in authority at Sadler’s Wells and, although no one was prepared to admit to it, clearly there had been a clerical error by which Shirley’s name had been omitted from the list of candidates. As a special concession, by no means an admission of guilt, they had offered to give her an audition for the company on the Monday evening in a fortnight’s time, squeezing her in at the beginning of a session, at half-past six. “It’s not perfect timing, I know,” said Miss Patience, “but it was the best I could get out of them. Is that all right for you?”
