She had worked hard all her life. Would she see retirement now as a long-yearned-for release? Or would she feel herself all at once grown old and useless, banished from the absorbing bustle of commerce to a suburban desert?
Arnold shook his head slowly in bafflement. He simply didn’t know. Forty years since Sarah had followed her mother up the path into Walter Pierson’s house and Arnold still could never guess with any certainty how Sarah would feel or think about anything important. She never quarrelled with him but neither did she ever laugh or joke with him. If the two of them sat together in a room without talking, it wouldn’t be a companionable silence but the total deadness of a couple of switched-off radio sets.
The kneeling girl put out a hand and steadied herself against a display stand. She turned her head to glance out at the last of the afternoon and her eyes met those of Arnold, unwaveringly fixed on her without seeing her, looking back down the long slope of years at some childish memory of Sarah jerking him along to school in the grey of winter and the blue of summer, on her way to work.
The girl blinked, disconcerted and a little alarmed by the intent quality of that gaze, at once piercing and veiled. She drew her brows together in irritation at the queer fish staring in at her goldfish-bowl activities and then, suddenly recognizing the watcher in his dual identity of Miss Pierson’s brother and accountant at Underwood’s, did her best to transform her expression into one of professional friendliness.
A whirling eddy of icy air stung the blood into Arnold’s cheeks, whisking him back from the gate of that far-off infant school to the yellow lights of the January evening, to the melancholy plateau of middle age and the abrupt recollection that if he was going to catch Mrs Fleming before closing-time, he had better get a move on. He turned from the window, totally unaware of the girl and her nod of recognition. His long strides took him in another minute or two to the top of the High Street, down a side turning, past another intersection, and into the quieter road that led to Linda Fleming’s establishment.
It was still open, he saw as he approached. The lights shone out into the street and a woman who had been studying the window display walked without haste into the shop. Arnold halted in front of the polished panes adorned with a long streamer proclaiming a sale shortly to begin. Between the bright dresses and the trim coats he could see into the shop above the partition that reached only halfway up the back of the window.
Linda Fleming’s pretty profile as she leaned forward, listening earnestly to her customer’s requirements. Her soft dark hair was taken up in a casual swirl on top of her neat head; he could see the gleam of a large tortoiseshell slide that held the tresses in position. Behind the opposite counter a young girl reached up to a shelf, restoring boxes of knitwear to an orderly appearance.
Mrs Fleming pulled open a long drawer and took out a brilliant assortment of silk scarves, spreading them out before her one by one, lifting a corner to allow the shimmering material to drape into delicate folds. The customer assumed an expression of intense thoughtfulness. She’ll be there for four or five minutes yet, Arnold thought with a vast sense of relief. No need to walk inside just yet.
He was seized with a powerful impulse to flee. That trim dark head with its puffs and curls, those finely-wrought features, that gentle smile, seemed all at once to represent danger, the terrifying possibility of intimate involvement on a deep and intolerably sensitive level with another human being. He glanced up the road, at the drifts of fog deepening about the street-lamps, and the path to safety seemed also to lead to a dull and deadly emptiness. He had a brief, bleak vision of the days ahead, with his father gone and Sarah sunk into apathetic retirement. He closed his eyes for an instant against that appalling picture, the two of them locked in a silent vacuum for ten, twenty, thirty years.
He stared in again at Mrs Fleming, smiling and chatting to her customer, at her hands moving lightly between the patterned silks, and he saw those hands now as holding not only the threat of danger but the impossible notion of happiness.
He drew a deep breath and began to search the window display with his eyes, looking for something he might buy for Sarah’s birthday. He had bought her Christmas present from Mrs Fleming, nerving himself to enter the little shop and strengthen the slender connection with the pretty new proprietress–he had met her for the first time at the factory, when she had called in to view the sample garments and place a small order.
Owen Yorke had come across her at a social gathering of one of the trade federations of which he was a distinguished member. She had joined every organization that seemed to offer assistance; she was not very long widowed, inexperienced in business, a stranger to Milbourne, desperately anxious to make a success of her new venture. Owen Yorke had taken her under his wing, offered to advise her, invited her to take a look at his factory.
And the only thing Arnold Pierson had been able to think of, having no factory to show her round, had been to buy Sarah’s Christmas present at Mrs Fleming’s shop. There had been several customers at the time, Linda had been able to give him no more than a few minutes’ half-abstracted attention. He had bought a handbag, careless of the fact that Sarah already had three or four handbags more than she would ever have occasion to use, and that her own shop held several drawers stuffed with handbags of every conceivable shape and material.
Not that Sarah had expressed either irritation or exasperated amusement at the gift; she had in fact expressed nothing at all beyond the ritual words of thanks with which she had received presents all her life.
In the whole of her existence no living soul had ever wrinkled an anxious brow over a Christmas or birthday offering for her. She had always been given–when she had been given anything at all–something chosen dutifully and swiftly, any pleasure or usefulness resulting from the occasion being entirely accidental. She invariably made her own annual purchases on the same obscure principles, having grown up with the conviction that this was the way the system operated between relatives and she had never had a sweetheart or indeed a close personal friend, male or female, to cause her to review the system in the fierce glow of love or affection.
Arnold swept his eye over the jersey suits, the fur-collared coats, the Shetland sweaters, rejecting them all. But he frowned in determination, resolved now to buy something, even, if all other inspiration deserted him, another expensive and useless handbag.
Inside the shop, Linda Fleming admired her customer’s choice, wrapped it in gay paper and uttered a farewell comment on the harsh weather.
‘You can lock up now, Iris,’ she said to her assistant as soon as the door had pinged behind the departing customer. ‘I don’t think Mrs Bond can be coming. She ought to have been here ten minutes ago.’ She sighed, tired from the long day and the unreliability of her charwoman. ‘Not that she’s all that much use when she does come.’ She sighed again. ‘I wish I could hear of somebody younger.’ Old, erratic, no longer sufficiently competent, Mrs Bond did at least turn up from time to time. She was better than no one at all; it would be folly to dispense with her limited services before a more vigorous and willing replacement could be found.
Iris bustled about the shop, straightening it for the night. ‘I’d stay myself and do a bit of cleaning for you,’ she offered with the cheerfulness of one who knows this is out of the question. ‘But you know how it is at home, with Mum in bed and the kids to see to.’ Her mother had been laid low by the influenza that was beginning to sweep through Milbourne and there was a limit to how far neighbours could be called on when their own families were afflicted.
‘Yes, I know, I wasn’t dropping a hint, it was good of you to offer.’ Linda hoped fervently that the influenza wouldn’t claim Iris as its next victim, leaving her to struggle along without an assistant as well as a charwoman. ‘Wrap up well, it’s bitterly cold outside.’
Iris reversed the sign behind the glass panel of the door. ‘Oh–there’s another customer.’ She glanced at Linda. ‘Shall I let him in? It’s past closing-time.’
The look of weariness dissolved