The Daughter of Time

‘Their wicked uncle. Richard the Third. You didn’t ought to think of things like that when you’re poorly. You ought to be reading something nice and cheerful.’

‘Are you in a hurry to get home, Tink, or could you go round by St Martin’s Lane for me?’

‘No, I’ve plenty of time. Is it Miss Hallard? She won’t be at the theatre till six-about.’

‘No, I know. But you might leave a note for her and she’ll get it when she comes in.’

He reached for his scribbling pad and pencil and wrote:

‘For the love of Mike find me a copy of Thomas More’s history of Richard III.’

He tore off the page, folded it and scribbled Marta’s name on it.

‘You can give it to old Saxton at the stage-door. He’ll see that she gets it.’

‘If I can get near the stage-door what with the stools for the queue,’ Mrs Tinker said; in comment rather than in truth. ‘That thing’s going to run for ever.’

She put the folded paper carefully away in the cheap pseudo-leather handbag with the shabby edges that was as much a part of her as her hat. Grant had, Christmas by Christmas, provided her with a new bag; each of them a work of art in the best tradition of English leather-working, an article so admirable in design and so perfect in execution that Marta Hallard might have carried it to luncheon at the Blague. But that was the last he had ever seen of any of them. Since Mrs Tinker regarded a pawnshop as one degree more disgraceful than prison, he absolved her from any suspicion of cashing in on her presents. He deduced that the handbags were safely laid away in a drawer somewhere, still wrapped up in the original tissue paper. Perhaps she took them out to show people sometimes, sometimes perhaps just to gloat over; or perhaps the knowledge that they were there enriched her, as the knowledge of ‘something put by for my funeral’ might enrich another. Next Christmas he was going to open this shabby sack of hers, this perennial satchel à toute faire, and put something in the money compartment. She would fritter it away, of course, on small unimportances; so that in the end she would not know what she had done with it; but perhaps a series of small satisfactions scattered like sequins over the texture of everyday life was of greater worth than the academic satisfaction of owning a collection of fine objects at the back of a drawer.

When she had gone creaking away, in a shoes-and-corset concerto, he went back to Mr Tanner and tried to improve his mind by acquiring some of Mr Tanner’s interest in the human race. But he found it an effort. Neither by nature nor by profession was he interested in mankind in the large. His bias, native and acquired, was towards the personal. He waded through Mr Tanner’s statistics and longed for a king in an oak-tree, or a broom tied to a mast-head, or a Highlander hanging on to a trooper’s stirrup in a charge. But at least he had the satisfaction of learning that the Englishman of the fifteenth century ‘drank water only as a penance’. The English labourer of Richard III’s day was, it seemed, the admiration of the continent. Mr Tanner quoted a contemporary, writing in France.