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The First of July(33)

By:Elizabeth Speller


It was indeed the culprits, and they appeared to have anticipated no pursuit and were chatting as easy, or as hardened, as you please. Drinking lemonade! I saw two policemen coming slowly along the pavement and for one second I faltered. I was in two minds whether to return to the shop. Was it possible that in my anxiety and haste, I had simply overlooked the gloves? At exactly that moment, the friend of the would-be glove buyer looked up and saw me. He looked puzzled as if he couldn’t place me, but not in any way guilty, and as I approached he slowed and said something to his companion in a perfectly relaxed way. I reflected on my position. I could not demand that I search them. I had left the floor without permission and on an impulse. The way I was going, I had put myself in a situation where I stood to lose my job, not just the cost of a pair of gloves from my wages.

I paused as the more talkative of the two men followed his friend’s gaze and saw me; and although for a few seconds his face looked blank (people do not, in the main, recognize those who assist them in shops), I knew I had my man. He blushed, his head tipped down so his face was obscured by the brim of his hat, then he turned toward the crowd and would have walked off, I think, had his friend not stayed still. The current of humanity passed to either side of the pair.

In the business of selling apparel, one learns to be an observer. To know when to speak and when to stay silent; to know what a lady may afford or not afford or what she dreams in her heart of having, rather than knowing she needs. In the business of coffins there are dreams too, not just a matter of a good or bad job, of corners cut or corners embellished. It was observation that revealed to me that one man was guilty, his face now displaying every sign of panic, while the other had no idea that his friend had left our store with anything other than disappointment.

He had already gotten them out by the time I reached him. The gloves hung limply from his hand. “Theo?” said his friend, uncomprehending, and then “Theo” again as he caught on. Then, very quickly, he said “It was a mistake” just as he clearly realized that it was not. His look was one of pure mortification. His tone was almost pleading, as much to this Theo as to me, I thought. “We can pay. I can pay,” he said, or something like it, looking hot and feeling in his blazer pocket.

I hadn’t touched the gloves.

“I’d rather just have them back,” I said. Hoping they weren’t soiled.

“Well, take a guinea for yourself,” said the friend. He was like a man who has had a dreadful shock and although I shouldn’t have, I almost felt sorry for the two of them. And then I thought a guinea! I could have my bicycle now! Have it without joining up.

I said “The gloves will do.” Knowing that Mr. Hardy was a stickler for theft. We had a special code for alerting each other should any pilfering take place on the floor. Mr. Frederick Richmond, if notified, would call the police. “Theft is theft,” he would say, “whether a loaf for a starving man or Raffles stealing a duchess’s emeralds or a young lady helping herself to a lawn handkerchief.” Knowing all this, I simply put my hand out, and he laid the gloves in it. I looked down, folded them, and placed them in my own pocket.

“There’s this young lady,” the one who was not the thief began, still holding out the guinea.

And I thought there was always a young lady, or a bicycle, or both, but it didn’t have to turn us into thieves. If I took the guinea, I would in effect be stealing from Debenhams, because they had their rules and I would be looking away. To look away for no reason other than my own inclination was another thing.

“No, thank you, sir,” I said and turned away, already hoping I could get back to the floor and thinking what excuse I might make. That the potted tongue I’d had for tea the day before had disagreed with me, perhaps. But when I arrived breathless on the floor, it was like a fairytale in which time doesn’t change, for there was Lady Lostwithiel in a mauve hat now, and her daughter and Mr. Hardy and the entourage and items being carried out and borne away. And there was the assistant looking confused and there was the pile of gloves, hardly smaller in size than when I’d left the counter. And within a minute or two, there were the cream opera gloves, back where they should be.

After the day was finished, I walked down through Piccadilly Circus. Men on boxes were shouting the odds about this and that, and there were people milling around in the early evening sunshine. There were men with their sweethearts and a chap spinning past on an Italian Bianchi, of all things. I walked on toward Trafalgar Square, because I wanted to take a stroll before going back to my room. I went on down Whitehall, under the trees, and looked to the right and left as I came into Horse Guards Parade. There was the Admiralty and the War Office where, no doubt, grave men in frock coats and admirals in gold braid were causing office boys to scurry around, and messages and telegrams were going hither and thither and letters were being written by men of state. Mr. Asquith and Lord Kitchener and Sir John French and the King in his palace, all thinking who knows what. It seemed to me that war must be a very busy undertaking. There were soldiers on parade, looking hot with drums and bearskins, all in bright colors, just the same as they had been when war was only an idea; and there, just across from them, the dark green of St. James’s Park, where the young couples and the nursemaids and the white ducks on the lake wouldn’t know a German if they saw one. Nor what to do with him.