Her dimples smoothed out and she turned soberly to go back. But now the red flag was up and traffic was being stopped. She wondered what it was for and noticed people gathering against the other balustrade. She crossed and saw two tugs manœuvring with a submarine between them. The nose of the submarine was high like a whale snout, but its tail shaped away long and thin, almost us though it were a silver pencil lying along the water. One tug had a hawser belayed to the bow and the other tug had a hawser from the tail. Flo, however, was not interested in the manœuvring, for on the submarine’s curved flank, with feet caught on a narrow ledge only just above the water line, lay a youth in greasy purple overalls. He lay back apparently exceedingly content and unaware of the increasing crowd peering down. His gaze was into the depth of water gently slipping past, though every now and then he glanced forward to where a small Union Jack waved gently at the submarine’s prow. Flo seemed suddenly to know his thoughts: how proud he felt, and how he was thinking on into the future when he might be captain of such a vessel. She felt a great surge of sympathy towards him and wished that she could be at his side, slipping smoothly along without effort. His face, she thought, was “roguish”. Although now he was so quiet and thoughtful, he looked as if he was of the kind that laugh naturally very easily. He moved his left hand and touched up the broad peak of his cap and his hair showed nearly the colour of Lyle’s golden syrup, which was the colour of her own hair. Now the first tug was pulsing slowly between the divisions of the bridge and the submarine followed obediently till Flo could no longer see it because of the crowd round about and because of the bridge structure. She hurried across the roadways and stared over from the opposite side. There up channel was a floating dock with a small steamer high and dry between its arms like a toy. The tug seemed a long time coming through, and Flo waited impatiently, afraid that the youth might be gone. But he was there nonchalant, undisturbed. She felt that she could have thrown her flowers right on to him. She imagined the surprise that it would have given him; though also she felt sure that he would have liked it, and probably he would have grabbed the flowers safe from the water and have waved them, and perhaps have looked up and have guessed who had thrown them. And this, of course, would lead to a meeting; she would go to the dock gates, or he would come up on the bridge. Anyway, they would meet, and then . . .
Poor Flo. Actually the youth had never looked up; and had he done, he could not have picked her out among all the rest. Nevertheless, she enjoyed this second brief daydream, and when the bridge was lowered back, she went on again more cheerfully, homeward.
Quite as she had expected, there was no one in. From the rustied biscuit tin in the dark space under the stairs that was “the pantry”, she brought out a half-loaf and ate four thick slices thinly scraped over with margarine and tinned raspberry jam. She drank weak tea brewed in a jade green teapot with the spout lip chipped off. That was her “dinner”, Ma came in just after four, red-faced and tired.
“What do they take me for?” she demanded as soon as she saw Flo. “A mug. Supposed to finish at one . . . an’ see what time it is! ‘You won’t mind stayin’ to wash pots, will you, Mrs. Royer?’”
She dragged off her black felt hat and crushed it on the dresser among the crumbs and pushed up the streaks of dark hair from over her ears and forehead and flopped into the wooden armchair as Flo got up.
“Won’t mind? Oh no! But what if I’d said as I did?” She sighed and Flo moved the daffodils three inches nearer, hoping that she would notice, but with her elbow on the table she went on: “Give me mi dinner, of course . . . cold potatoes as they don’t want . . . fish . . . boiled, mind you! Boiled,” she repeated as if it was the greatest insult.
Flo stood by and looked at the daffodils in the glass jam-jar and wondered when they would be noticed, only now Ma was looking into the fire. She put her feet on the fender where the black enamel had been worn off showing the bright metal.
“Talked an’ talked an’ never got up till after two,” she went on, but more mildly, as if telling a tale that was done with. “My feet, I don’t know what’s wrong with them; I can’t do what I could,” she added a little pathetically.
“I wish I wasn’t going away,” said Flo.
“Sure, an’ what else could I do but say ‘Yes’ when they was so good to get you the chance?” asked her mother. “Missis wouldn’t have heard . . .”
“Why wouldn’t she let me go an’ do what you do, and you stay home?” Flo demanded. “Then I needn’t . . .”
Ma stiffened all at once and looked up. “Huh, I can do it,” she announced. “We’ll both be makin’; an’ I won’t have you to always be paying out for. How d’you think I do? It’s pay, pay all the time. Hasn’t Ivy come yet?”
“No,” said Flo, and turned to the cupboard by the right of the fireplace and began to take out blue-edged cups and saucers and plates, and to lay them on the table.
“It’s time she’d come; we never know when she’s coming, these days,” said Mrs. Royer. “When I was a girl I had to be in straight from work or they’d want to know the reason. Nowadays, it’s please yourself.”
Flo ducked into the hole under the stairs again and brought the bread out once more and began to cut thinner slices.
“You wouldn’t have a piece of toast, Ma?”
“Toast; you wouldn’t want toast with my teeth.”
Flo put the jam tin out and swilled the teapot. The kettle had just begun to splutter when the back door let in a girl two years older and three inches taller than Flo. Her hair was lighter, but most of it was stuffed into a mob-cap of print, cream with a little pattern of blue moss-roses. Her brown coat had a right-angle tear near the second button, and one of her brown shoes was laced with black tape.
“What-ho, just in time, eh?” And she tossed mob-cap and coat on the dresser end and settled on a chair by her mother, but faced to the table.
“Where’ve you bin?” asked Mrs. Royer.
“What’s this . . . a giddy celebration ’cos Flo’s going?” Ivy asked, looking at the daffodils.
“What’s what?” Mrs. Royer squirmed round and stared. “Eh, now!” she exclaimed. “Wouldn’t your father have liked them?”
“Would ’e?” said Ivy, indifferent. “Where are they from, anyway? You haven’t bin spendin’ on them? They were two-pence, them wild ones. . . . I heard someone askin’. And I bet the others was more.”
“Where did they come from?” demanded Mrs. Royer, as if quite at a loss.
“Mrs. Mawson gave them . . . ’cos I’m going,” said Flo. “I thought you’d have noticed.”
“I’ll take some to-night; they’ll look as if I’m the belle of the ball. Let’s have a drink; I’m as dry as I’d been eatin’ salt,” Ivy said.
“Where you goin’ to-night?” asked Mrs. Royer, sluthering her chair so that she faced partly to the table and partly towards her elder daughter. “You’re always goin’ somewhere; when I was your age . . .”
“I know,” Ivy answered, “but I bet you did, all the same. Anyway, I’m goin’ to Ted’s; you know it’s his sister’s twenty-first. We all give threepence at the works an’ bought a handbag . . . that’s where I’ve been this after’, if you want to know.”
She took a careful suck from the edge of her cup.
“I wish it ’ud been mine. Blue, with gold leaves, an’ a silver clip. A beaut! Three-an’-six.”
“Who chose it?” asked her mother, very interested.
“All of us; well, we all went in.”
“Lucky, she is. When I was twenty-one they didn’t give me any han’-bag. You don’t know you’re born.”
Mrs. Royer fished for a tea-leaf with the tip of her little finger and flicked it on to the rag rug.