Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris & Mrs. Harris Goes to New York Read Free Page B

herself, and woe to anyone who tried to encroach upon it. Her place was a world of unremitting toil, but it was illuminated by her independence. There was no room in it for extravagance and pretty clothes.
    But it was possession she desired now, feminine physical possession; to have it hanging in her cupboard, to know that it was there when she was away, to open the door when she returned and find it waiting for her, exquisite to touch, to see, and to own. It was as though all she had missed in life through the poverty, the circumstances of her birth and class in life could be made up by becoming the holder of this one glorious bit of feminine finery. The same vast, unthinkable amount of money could be represented as well by a piece of jewellery, or a single diamond which would last for ever. Mrs Harris had no interest in diamonds. The very fact that one dress could represent such a huge sum increased its desirability and her yearning for it. She was well aware that her wanting it made no sense whatsoever, but that did not prevent her one whit from doing so.
    All through the rest of that damp, miserable, and foggy day, she was warmed by the images of the creations she had seen, and the more she thought of them the more the craving grew upon her.
    That evening as the rain dripped from the thick London fog, Mrs Harris sat in the cosy warmth of Mrs Butterfield’s kitchen for the important ceremony of making out their coupons for the weekly football pool.
    Ever since she could remember, it seemed that she and Mrs Butterfield had been contributing their threepence a week to this fascinating national lottery. It was cheap at the price, the hope and excitement and the suspense that could be bought for no more than three pennies each. For once the coupon was filled in and dropped intothe pillar box it represented untold wealth until the arrival of the newspapers with the results and disillusionment, but never really disappointment since they actually did not expect to win. Once Mrs Harris had achieved a prize of thirty shillings and several times Mrs Butterfield had got her money back, or rather a free play for the following week, but, of course, that was all. The fantastic major prizes remained glamorous and ambition- inspiring fairy tales that occasionally found their way into the newspapers.
    Since Mrs Harris was not sports-minded nor had the time to follow the fortunes of the football teams, and since as well the possible combinations and permutations ran into the millions, she was accustomed to making out her selections by guess and by God. The results of some thirty games, win, lose, or draw, had to be predicted, and Mrs Harris’s method was to pause with her pencil poised over each line and to wait for some inner or outer message to arrive and tell her what to put down. Luck, she felt, was something tangible that floated around in the air and sometimes settled on people in large chunks. Luck was something that could be felt, grabbed at, bitten off; luck could be all around one at one moment and vanish in the next. And so, at the moment of wooing good fortune in the guise of the football pools, Mrs Harris tried to attune herself to the unknown. Usually, as she paused, if she experienced no violent hunches or felt nothing at all, she would mark it down as a draw.
    On this particular evening as they sat in the pool of lamplight, their coupons and steaming cups of tea before them, Mrs Harris felt the presence of luck as thickly about her as the fog without. As her pencil hovered over the first line - ‘Aston Villa
v
. Bolton Wanderers’ - she looked upand said intensely to Mrs Butterfield: ‘This is for me Dior dress.’
    ‘Your what, dearie?’ queried Mrs Butterfield who had but half heard what her friend said, for she herself was addicted to the trance method of filling out her list and was already entering into that state where something clicked in her head and she wrote her selections down one after the other without