Mark Dunn - We Five

“Have you met with some trouble, Ruth?”

“It depends on how you define ‘trouble.’ I have nothing better to do. I’ll come and tell you about it, and free up this instrument for those wishing to burden Mr. Mobry with matters of faith and conscience.”

“Do I detect a bit of cheek in that statement?”

“None at all. I owe everything to Mr. Mobry and his sister. It is only a small inconvenience that they still consider me the same woebegone waif who arrived on their doorstep with little more than the clothes on her back.”

Jane laughed. “They’d sing a different song if they ever clapped eyes on you working in the main shed. Dressed to the nines in your mob cap and your greasy brown overall!”

“Would that we could wear those shapeless overalls outside the factory. It might solve that little problem at the bus kiosk.”

“What little problem?”

“I’ll see you shortly.”

Ruth left the house at that moment. A scant five minutes later she was standing next to her friend Jane in the showroom of Higgins’ Emporium in Balham High Road. The name was Jane’s father’s idea; he thought it would entice a better breed of clientele for the junk shop (to little avail). The two young women were studying Jane’s sleeping brother in the casual and detached manner of two visitors to the zoo observing a slumbering gorilla.

“Sometimes he’ll be out like this for hours,” said Jane with indifference. (This wasn’t the first time she and Ruth had stood over Lyle, watching him sleep when the rest of London was up and about and being industrious and productive. And lately he’d been even more slumberous than usual, using the nightly air raids that kept him ‘up for all hours’ as convenient justification for dozing the entire day away. As if no one but Lyle Higgins was so terribly incommoded by the Blitz.)

Ruth shook her head slowly and evenly — a demonstration of both disgust and empathy: disgust for Jane’s brother and empathy for Jane, whose burden it was to contend with such a sibling. “I don’t see why you continue to live here. They’ll soon be finished with the dormitories near the factory. You really should apply. Since you’re a charge-hand now, I’m sure they’ll put you at the top of the list.”

“And then what? Move to the dormitory and have the death of this human sloth, what also happens to be my brother, on my conscience for the rest of my days? I’m not lying to you, Ruth, when I say that Lyle shouldn’t even eat if it wasn’t for me sliding the plate of food in front of him and then nudging him a few times out of his usual fog.”

The two friends sat down at a little table close to the large plate-glass window, purposefully out of sight of Jane’s snoring brother. The window, crisscrossed with sticky brown tape, had remained intact after several nearby bombings. (It was kept un -blacked out because from sundown to sunup lights in the showroom were never turned on.) Ruth was inspired on a previous visit to recite, with the obvious nod to Rudyard Kipling, “If you can keep your glass when all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on the Nazis, then you’ll be one lucky bloke of a shopkeeper, my son — um— daughter. ”

“Should I put on a pot of tea?” asked Jane. “I haven’t any biscuits. All the ones I like have disappeared from the Sainsbury’s.”

“I just had my own cuppa; don’t go to any trouble. I’m perfectly content sitting here gabbling with you and playing Nosey Parker to all the passersby in the street. I love this block, Jane, I do. Bustling, yes, but still rather quaint. It reminds me of Mrs. Gaskell’s Cranford. And this shop — I remember when we were girls — do you remember how tidy your father kept it?”

Jane nodded and smiled. “Not a shilling in the till, but you’d think he was Mr. Selfridge himself, the pride he took in this place.”

“Do you recall how he used to scold us for playing hide-and-seek behind all the old wardrobes and chest-of-drawers?”

Jane nodded. “Those were happy days. Even happier when Mum was alive. Now, you said something was the matter and you must tell me what it is.”

Ruth nodded. She allowed her gaze to lose its focus as she composed her thoughts. “There are several men— young men I see in the early morning once, sometimes twice a week, when I’m waiting for the four of you at the kiosk. They go into the pub across the street — almost always at the same time.”

“Cor! What public house opens so early in the morning?”

“Ones like the Fatted Pig that serve men who work through the night. Like those I mean to tell you about. They’re part-time fire watchers with the A.F.S. and theirs is the midnight shift. I overhear some of their talk on the way to the pub. Their full-time daylight job is delivering coal for Mr. Matthews. I suppose you know about Mr. Matthews.”

“You mean the fact that he only hires conchies?”

Ruth nodded. “After losing both of his sons at Dunkirk. Naturally, a father would be consumed with anger over his family being so cruelly singled out. And he’s very bitter, frightfully angry. But rather than direct his anger at the ones really responsible for taking his boys from him, he’s decided, instead, to abhor war in the abstract— all war , including the very one we’re in the midst of fighting. And become a violent pacifist. I say violent because he fired all the men who’d been delivering coal for him who refused to join him in taking a stand against the war. He wanted them to sign statements of conscientious objection. Those who wouldn’t, he sacked.”

“How does this concern you ?”

“Those five lads who go to the pub together — they look to be our age, maybe a little older. They are each of them proud conchies — happy to go to Mr. Matthews and present themselves as replacements. And they seem to have taken an interest in the five of us . They watch us from the pub windows as we wait together for the factory bus.”

“There’s no crime in that, Ruth.”

“Of course not. Nor is there crime in whatever scheme they’re devising to put themselves in our way.”

Jane laughed. It was not a laugh of derision but only one of disbelief. “How do you know they are — as you put it — set to put themselves in our way?”

“I’ll tell you. Mr. Andrews, the Scotsman who opens the pub so early in the morning — not only for these lads but for the other night workers who are known to pay a premium for their cockcrow pints — he came out to speak to me one morning last week, before your arrival. He said he’d overheard the five talking amongst themselves about their interest in the five of us. One of them said it was kismet the numbers should come out even and that we should all be in the same vicinity two or three mornings a week, and they were planning to divide us up amongst them, as if it were all some kind of game, to see who could get the farthest.”

“The farthest. Now what exactly does that mean? I should hope it doesn’t mean what you think it means, Ruth. I fancy it’s about winning our favour — winning our hearts .”

“Jane Higgins, you cannot be that naïve.”

“Mr. Andrews knows their character, and if he believes the thing to be all quite innocent…”

“ Innocent ? Being pursued by men with conquest clearly on their minds?”

“To be pursued by any man, Ruth, when there are so many of us and so few of them round these days, should be taken as flattery at first pitch.”

“ Flattery. Are you potty? It’s definitely sport, though. You have that much correct, at least.”

“But isn’t love in its early stages a kind of sport, Ruth? Pursuit and conquest. It is a game, rather. People don’t just bump into each other at a Lyons Corner House, fall instantly in love, and then go skipping off to the vicar to marry.”