Starlight by Stella Gibbons

Author:Stella Gibbons [Gibbons, Stella]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Vintage Digital
Published: 2011-08-03T21:00:00+00:00

19

By tea-time, he had gone. Peggy settled herself into the routine of the house with cat-like satisfaction. The servants waited on her with obvious dislike and a curiosity about her comings and goings which amused her; she had the dogs for company.

She saw Arnold from time to time when he looked in for his letters; sometimes, he would telephone to ask if there were any for him and keep her for a few minutes in conversation – to listen to her voice, she supposed, indifferently.

She didn’t believe that he had never spoken of marriage to any woman. In her experience, men of Arnold’s type frequently spoke of marriage, but always in such a way that no definite proposal could be extracted from their remarks. They looked on themselves as glittering prizes, and enjoyed dangling themselves tantalizingly in front of women’s noses. She sometimes gave a thought to poor Gwen Palmer, and she did not think it would kill Arnold Corbett to see that he and his money were not always wanted. Whether it would ‘do him good’ or not, she neither knew nor cared.

Once a week, she went over to see her mother. Her relationship with her father expressed its tensions in cool short exchanges, often with a sting in them, but his satisfaction in Mrs Pearson’s improved health and spirits since her settling into Lily Cottage was so strong that he could not keep it to himself, and it burst out in questions. ‘Doesn’t your mother look better? Haven’t you noticed it too? She’s livelier, isn’t she? She enjoys her life, now.’

He spoke of enjoyment as a thing other people experienced. Bliss he knew, and cessation of suffering, but never ordinary simple enjoyment. His mother had laid the foundations of passion and pain in him both strong and four-square. Her dour nature, absorbed always in the moral problems looming beyond the practical ones of their poor life, had pressed like an iron clamp on the soft voluptuous one of a little half-Eastern boy; and Thomas’s jokes, Thomas’s joys, were not felt like those of ordinary men.

He went about his business during the day; meeting his managers or looking in at the fruit and vegetable shops in crowded Stratford or comfortable Ealing; sometimes taking a ten-shilling note or some silver and coppers from the hand of the derelict in charge of one of his junk shops as he walked past it; telephoning the rent-collectors who went round his dilapidated properties in Islington or Kennington.

All his projects were on a small scale … but his wiliness and persistence and his contempt for the law, blent with a natural dexterity in handling money, made him successful.

He owned solid things: houses, ship-loads of half-spoiled fruit, dilapidated little shops, collections of other people’s battered and abandoned possessions. He could never wring from them enough money to buy the laughter and the security his mother had denied him when he was a child.

And in the evenings, when his crowded, yet curiously shapeless, day was over, he would go home to the small house with the bearded mask sneering by its door.

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