Free Joy and Josephine by Monica Dickens Page A

should have heard the invitation.
    That was just the kind of thing she wanted for Jo, who was going to rise far above the Portobello Road. Steps up, one grander than the other, until in no time at all, she was going anywhere and everywhere, and people like the Moores proud to know her. For although Mrs Moore was a very nice lady, with a good address, she kept no style at all. The children sometimes looked ragamuffins, and Nanny had said that Mrs Moore was not above sitting down to a poached egg for supper in the kitchen, which in a Naval officer’s wife, did not seem quite the thing.
    When the shop was empty, Mrs Abinger went upstairs to make sure her suet pudding had not boiled dry. She had got so used to popping up and down between the flat and the shop, that she never thought of herself as hardworked, although the end of the day sometimes found her very short of breath. Now that she had Josephine to look after as well, she sometimes did not get a chance to read the paper until she was in bed at night, leaning lopsidedly over towards the candle. They had electricity in the flat as well as the shop, but George could not go to sleep with the light on.
    Bob had not yet finished his rounds, so Mrs Abinger put more water into the saucepan under the pudding. They could not have their dinner until Bob was back, because he had to look after the shop while they were upstairs.
    They might have taken it in turns to eat, but Mr Abinger liked to be waited on, and a good sit down midday meal together was one of the solidarities of life which Mrs Abinger would not have dreamed of discarding. So they always had their hot dinner, with the table nicely laid, and cups of tea afterwards on early closing days when there was no need to hurry down to see what Bob was up to.
    Bob’s idea of looking after the shop was to sit on a stool with the midday racing sheet, his long back curved like a banana, his feet on the top rung and his knees jack-knifed under his chin. If a customer came in, he would unfold himself with such a weary creaking of his joints, and listen to their order with such despair that they quite wished they had not given it. Having dragged himself out to the back store, he sometimes remainedthere so long that the customer would come to the doorway to see whether he had died serving her.
    Going downstairs again, Mrs Abinger rocked Josephine and clucked at her on her way through to the shop, where she found Bob, peg-topped in bicycling clips, straddling to lift a cardboard box of groceries. Mr Abinger, with a pencil behind his ear, was serving a customer with unhurried dignity.
    ‘Well, you’re being a time and a half this morning, Bob,’ said Mrs Abinger. ‘Here’s Mr Abinger and me waiting to have our dinner.’
    ‘It’s that hill,’ complained the youth, exaggerating the weight of the cardboard box. ‘I can’t somehow seem to tackle it on an empty stomach. If only I could have me dinner before I do all these orders.’ It was his eternal grievance that he could never have his own dinner until two o’clock, when the soup at Uncle Ben’s Café was off the boil and all the meat gone from the stew.
    ‘Folks don’t want their groceries delivered after lunch,’ Mrs Abinger told him. ‘What’s got to be done has got to be done.’ She always spoke kindly to him, for he had no mother. That was why she had employed him in the first place, in the hope of mothering him a little; but he was unresponsive material.
    ‘It’s that bike.’ He paused on his way to the door, clasping the box, with his stomach stuck out. ‘The front wheel’s too little.’
    ‘It’s got to be little,’ put in Mr Abinger, shaping a half-pound pat of butter with a flourish, ‘or where would the basket go?’
    ‘If only I could have one of them box-tricycles like Ellison’s boys have got.’ This was another of Bob’s grievances.
    ‘Don’t talk to me of Ellison’s if you don’t want a thick ear,’ rumbled Mr Abinger, criss-crossing the