Secret Love and other stories by Jillian Becker

Author:Jillian Becker
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2019-10-14T00:00:00+00:00

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On the Friday of that week the ‘housekeeper’ moved in to Mrs. Rigby’s room, as Claude still thought of it, which had a door with glass panes in it leading straight into Claude’s room. But she wasn’t a ‘girl’.

She brought three matching tartan suitcases. On the dressing-table where Mrs. Rigby had kept nothing but her own tin of tea with pink blossoms on it, she arranged a crowd of bottles and jars, and in their midst she set up a gilt-framed photograph of a man in army uniform and spectacles.

Claude watched the emptying of the suitcases and was allowed to help.

‘Now,’ she said, ‘the curliss. Just in the top drawer, my skat, I like them handy.’

‘What are they for?’ he asked, dropping a handful of broad flexible strips of metal covered with a sort of brown cotton into the top drawer, where he had found an artificial rose with a dusty smell after Mrs. Rigby’s departure. He had put it in the box with his Hornby train.

‘They keep my perm nice in between,’ she explained.

When the suitcases were zipped again, the new housekeeper lowered herself on to the bed and bounced up and down. Springs yelped like puppies.

‘Wragtig! Man!’ she exclaimed. ‘Well, beggars can’t be choosers, hey skattie?’

‘You won’t feel the springs through the mattress,’ Claude reassured her, ‘unless you’re very sensitive.’

‘I beg yours?’

‘Sensitive. Like the princess who could feel a pea through forty mattresses. She was so sensitive they knew she must be a real princess.’

‘Ach well – I like a bit of comfort,’ she confessed. ‘I’m a subject, you see. Lumbago.’

She rubbed her wrist up and down her back to demonstrate. Then she smiled at Claude with her red mouth, and he saw the she had two black teeth and two gold, neatly symmetrical on either side of her upper jaw.

Her name was Sarie du Toit. He was to call her ‘Sarie’. She had no eyebrows, only a pencil streak on each of the stippled pale bulges above her eyes. Her person smelt of scent and sweat, and her room, quite soon, of cigarettes. She smoked a lot, laying collections of reddened stubs in the old wobbly brass ashtrays she found in the back of the dining-room sideboard. The picture-cards of military medals which came in some of her cigarette boxes she hoarded in the top drawer with the ‘curliss’ and other small things.

The man in the photograph was named Cornelius.

‘He’s my boy-friend,’ Sarie said, patting the tight yellow curls of which she was very careful and proud and which she referred to as ‘my perm’. ‘But you mustn’t tell,’ she whispered.

‘He looks too old,’ Claude said, ‘to be a boy-friend.’

At which Sarie sat down on the imperfect bed and laughed, showing the black teeth and the gold.

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