§ 1
GIFFORD ROAD, Upton Rising, seemed to be composed of various architectural remnants which had been left over from other streets. No. 14 was a dour, gloomy-looking edifice built of a stone-work that showed up in lurid prominence the particular form of eczema from which it suffered. The front garden was large, with evidences of decayed respectability, including a broken-down five-barred gate and the remains of a lawn. The wooden erection at the side of the house may once have been a coach-shed.... A flight of stone steps, much chipped and scarred, led up to a massive front door, but the usual entrance was clearly the small door underneath the steps, which generally stood ajar.... In the basement window appeared the “apartments” card and the ubiquitously respectable aspidistra plant. Cats of all sizes and colours haunted the long, lank grass of the front garden, and at the back there was a noisy, unkempt chicken-run.
Inside the tiny basement sitting-room Catherine tried to feel at home. The dried grasses and bric-à-brac on the mantelpiece did remind her somewhat of the front room at Kitchener Road, but the old faded photographs of the landlady’s relatives, most of them mercifully obscure, made her feel strange and foreign. A stuffed canary under a glass shroud surmounted the sideboard, and Catherine decided mentally that after she had been here awhile she would remove it to a less conspicuous position. A dull piety brooded over the room: there were floridly decorated texts on the walls, “I am the Bread of Life” over the doorway, and “Trust in the Lord” by the fireplace. The small bookshelf contained bound volumes of The Quiver and various missionary society reports, as well as several antiquated volumes, of which Jessica’s First Prayer was one, presented to the landlady, as the flyleaf showed, by a certain Sunday school in South London. A couple of pictures above the mantelpiece represented the Resurrection and the Ascension, and in these there was a prolific display of white-winged angels and stone slabs and halos like dinner-plates. On a November afternoon the effect of all this was distinctly chilly.
And under the cushions of the sofa there were many, many copies of Sunday newspapers, both ancient and modern.
Mrs. Carbass was a woman of cheerful respectability. She accepted Catherine as a lodger without any payment in advance. At first she was doubtful, but the production of the letter offering Catherine the situation at the Upton Rising Royal Cinema overruled her misgivings. She was apparently an occasional patron of this place of amusement.
“Sometimes I goes,” she remarked. “Of a Sat’d’y night, gener’ly.... In the ninepennies,” she added, as if excusing herself.
Catherine lived very quietly and economically during her first few weeks at Gifford Road. She had to. Her earnings did not allow her much margin after she had paid Mrs. Carbass. Out of this margin she had to buy all kinds of things she had not counted on—chiefly changes of clothing, and ranging down to small but by no means negligible articles such as wool for darning and a toothbrush. She decided to have no communication whatever with her father, though at first she had considered whether she would not write to him to ask him to send her all the property that was her own. Finally she decided against this, thinking that she would not care to let him imagine she was in need of anything. Sometimes the fear came to her that he would find her out: he could easily discover her address by enquiring at the Cinema. At times the fear became a definite expectation, and on rare occasions the expectation developed into what was perilously near to a hope. Often in the streets she met people who knew her, and to these she never mentioned either her father or her attitude towards him. Most people in Kitchener Road knew or guessed what had happened: it did not cause much of a sensation, for worse things were common enough in Kitchener Road.... Kitchener Road was quite blasé of domestic estrangements. Whenever Catherine was asked how she was getting on she replied, “Oh, quite nicely, thanks,” and would not pursue the subject.
At the Cinema she found work easy but not particularly interesting. She was annoyed to find herself agreeing with her father that the Upton Rising Royal Cinema was “third-rate.” It was a tawdry building with an exterior of white stucco (now peeling off in great scabs), and an interior into which the light of day never penetrated. A huge commissionaire with tremendously large feet, attired in the sort of uniform Rupert of Hentzau wears on the stage, paced up and down in front of the entrance, calling unmelodiously: “Nah showin’ gran’ star progrem two, four, six, nine an’ a shillin’ this way children a penny the side daw ...” all in a single breath. For this trying performance he was paid the sum of sixteen shillings a week. Inside the building a couple of heavily powdered, heavily rouged, heavily scented girls fluttered about with electric torches. There was no orchestra, save on Saturday nights, when a violinist appeared in a shabby dress suit and played the Barcarolle from “Tales of Hoffman,” and similar selections. The rest of the time Catherine was free to play what she pleased, with but a general reservation that the music should be appropriate to the pictures shown.
On Saturday mornings there was a children’s matinée, and that was nothing but pandemonium let loose. Screams, hooting, cheers, whistlings, yells and cries of all kinds.... On Saturday evenings the audience was select, save in the front seats near the piano. In the pale glare of the film all faces were white and tense. The flutter of the cinematograph went on, hour after hour. The piano tinkled feebly through the haze of cigarette smoke. Here and there the beam of an electric torch pierced the gloom like a searchlight. The sudden lighting of a match was like a pause of semi-consciousness in the middle of a dream....
And at eleven, when bedroom lights were blinking in all the residential roads of Upton Rising, Catherine passed out into the cool night air. Her fingers were tired; sometimes her head was aching.
To pass along the Ridgeway now did not always mean thinking of things that had happened there....