Love Fifteen Page 10

  *

  Fred let cold water run, then lit the pilot and turned it to the ring of burners inside the geyser, dodging back to avoid the sizeable explosion as they caught, flame leaping up to briefly discolour the copper cladding. Only a year ago, he’d been too slow and was left with singed eyebrows for weeks.

  “If the bombs don’t get us, that geyser will,” Rose said, from the landing, ready in curlers, shower-cap and dressing-gown. One of her dreams was to live in an all-electric house like Laura Tombs’s in Henleaze.

  The roast was already in when Rose went to bathe. Fred had prevailed on a branch manager in South Wales to slip him a joint of beef. Theo escaped to the back room to play a few of the old Brunswick dance-band records he’d got secondhand in the Upper Arcade before it was bombed the same night he’d shared Hazel’s bed. It would be safe for half an hour to smoke one of the Capstans old Vince had given him earlier in the week to buy his silence. The idea of free love and sharing wasn’t quite so attractive when he thought of Vince and Rose and Fred and he felt a few qualms about deceiving his father by not speaking out. Vince’s supplies of sweets and fags were indispensable though and Fred probably realised Rose’s evenings out at the Mauretania weren’t a real threat to their marriage, only a wartime escapade. Parents cared too much about outward shows of loyalty. Theo had made it up to his dad in a small way by returning to his bedroom drawer the Frenchie he hadn’t had to use. He never knew if Fred had missed it or, if so, wondered about its reappearance.

  He locked the door, cranked the gramophone and announced: “And now Ben Bernie and his Hotel Roosevelt Orchestra with ‘I’ll get by’.”

  He dropped the circular sound-box on to the first groove and closed the lid to reduce the surface hiss. He opened the window on to the back garden and lit up. For some time he blew out his cheeks and plonked along with the slap-tongued bass-sax. He stared about him at the three and a half walls covered from floor to ceiling with pin-up girls. Stuck to the loose old wallpaper with Grip-Fix were the scandalous Carole Landis, the modest beauty of Loretta Young, the potent blend of demure provocation that Maureen O’Sullivan embodied as Tarzan’s Jane, the brash gaiety of Judy Garland… These Hollywood images of freedom gave way in places to those of enslaved Europe such as Miss Bulgaria, flinching and writhing, tied to a stake.

  He began tearing from the top, where the wallpaper itself had separated from the plaster. The whole length came away till he reached a Lady Out of Uniform from ‘Men Only’, her WAAF cap at an angle and haversack-straps stretched between her naked tits.

  Someone knocked on the door. Damn! Old Rose should still be doing her nails and Fred would have taken over her bath.

  “Yeah?” he answered, “‘who’s there?”’

  *

  Kay surmised by the long pause that he’d be putting the lighted Capstan on the window-sill outside, in case this was their Papa knocking. She allowed a few seconds before saying: “What’s it locked for?”

  He let her in, waving smoke about.

  “Oh, good show, wretched child,” she said, “give us one.”

  Theo said: “I thought for a minute you were Dad.”

  “Naturellement. I meant you to. What are you doing?”

  “I’m cheesed off with all these pictures. Taking them down.”

  “I was led to believe they were your pride and joy.”

  “Were, yeah. Kids’ stuff now.”

  “You droll creature,” she said, drawing on the cigarette and exhaling a dragonish jet of smoke from each nostril.

  “How d’you do that?” he asked, “I’ve tried but it makes me cough.”

  “Like riding a bike. One moment you can’t and the next you can.”

  “Quite a lot of things are like that,” her brother said, tearing another strip of paper and cut-out pictures from the wall. She wondered what had brought this on. All part of his new mood of the last few weeks. It wasn’t feasible that such change in her formerly gauche brother had been wrought by the raids alone. Nor, she thought, could a few foreign films at the Library have lent him such élan, such savoir-faire. She shrugged and looked out at the gathering dusk.

  “Hey,” he asked next, “tell you another drink you must ask for when you’re old enough to go to the Mauretania. You know, like Sidecars and Martinis?”

  “Surprise me.”

  “Dutch Courage.”

  It was a good chance to give the tinkling laugh she knew he found impressive and irritating. He’d caught her practising it once but surprised her by not taking that chance to extract the Michael.

  “That laugh’s almost as good as Vivien Leigh’s now.”

  “Lest you make a faux-pas in company,” Kay said, “you should know that Dutch Courage isn’t the name of a drink but means the bravery induced by alcohol.”

  He listened, considered and nodded, then went on tearing down the wallpaper.

  “Dad may not like you doing that.” »

  “He hardly ever comes in here.”

  “That’s all you know, gormless. He comes to peek at your pin ups.”

  Kay saw this was news to him. He smiled and seemed in a mood to listen. She saw it as her duty to bring him up to scratch.

  “Just as he didn’t come twice to your talent show at The Empire to watch you. It was to see the snake dancer again. Are you doing any better at school?”

  He shrugged, “Top in English. Bottom in maths.”

  “Dad pays a fortune for you to go there because you were too stupid to get a scholarship.”

  “Didn’t ask him to.”

  “You should try harder. You’re not that stupid.”

  “Stupid? From someone who’s thinking of going to university? Which is like carrying on with school forever. What good’s geometry to a film director?”

  “Dear heart, it’s a fatal error to think so early in terms of subjects. A general education is a good start for any career. Even film producing.”

  “Directing,” he said, then: “Unborn babies.”

  “Come again?”

  “Floating in jars. That’s all I know about university.”

  “Rustic bumpkin! What the world’s going to need after this war isn’t people to make more soppy films but doctors and engineers, types who can organise things.”

  He shrugged. In the usual way that would have provoked an outburst against any attempt to improve the lot of a class he called The Sweaty Nightcaps, meaning the plebs in ‘Julius Caesar’ who threw them up when he was crowned emperor. The People’s only purpose, he often said, was to pay money to see the films he’d make when he reached Hollywood. But not today. This new Theodore was vaguely disconcerting. She longed to disturb his sang-froid. What in the world had happened at that film society?

  The record ended and he put on the other side, Ben Bernie’s band groaning from a standstill as he cranked the handle.

  “Who’s your man at the moment?” he asked.

  “You cannot feasibly believe I’d tell you.”

  “Why not?”

  “And have you giggling over it with that callow goof from along the road?”

  “Jake Swift? I reckon he’s got quite a pash on you.”

  She gave her tinkling laugh.

  “Even if he didn’t have greasy hair, I’d hardly want to be arrested for baby-snatching.”

  He inclined his head, the Gold Flake hanging from one corner of his mouth, smoke drifting up that side of his face like Philip Marlow. But his eyes began watering so he removed it and flicked ash through the open window.

  “You’re not much older than us,” he told her.

  “Swift’s not even fifteen yet.”

  “He will be soon. Like me. And you’re only just seventeen.”

  “I trust you two aren’t still carrying a torch for Margo Carpenter?”

  “Why shouldn’t I?”

  This time she saw him blush and smiled.

  “She’s about as far beyond your wildest dreams as any of these starlets you’re tearing off the wall.
”

  When the music stopped, they heard Dad’s call that he’d finished with the bath so it was Kay’s turn with the water.

  “And come up here, son, to our bedroom.”

  Now what the hell was the matter? Perhaps he was going to be asked where that Frenchie had got to for so long. Or perhaps Dad hadn’t noticed it was back. Or was it only about his school report again?

  “Come in,” Fred said when he reached the front bedroom door.” If you’re not doing your homework, help me revise the initiation.”

  Phew! Only another rehearsal for the Freemasons.

  Fred admitted his main anxiety was not forgetting the responses but failing to keep a straight face. It was vital not to smirk or in any other way show disrespect in the temple, as advancement in the retail trade depended on his being accepted for the brotherhood, without which Household Goods was a dead end and he was sick to death at seeing his colleagues promoted over him, once they’d become brothers.

  Though bored with the umpteenth repetition, Theo was relieved and gladly trudged through this corny old stuff again, about tylers and trowels and cables-lengths from the shore.

  After Bob Hope and dinner, Fred offered to get the car out and take them all to see the devastation. No-one was keen. Laura Tombs and her old man were coming from Henleaze in their Humber to play bridge later and would expect sandwiches and cake, which Rose had to prepare and set out on the three-tiered folding cake-stand ; Kay wanted to hear ‘Hi Gang!’ ; Theo was due at his Film Society.

  Fred shrugged.” I thought it might give us something to stiffen our resolve.”

  Theo now appreciated Fred’s odd sense of humour. Like Theo but in a different way, he mocked the pompous way their betters talked, partly by doing the same.

  In the end they relented.

  Everyone knew by now roughly which important buildings had been destroyed but, as Fred drove them to the old centre, they were startled to see how much had been incendiarised. Wine, Bridge, Mary-le-Port and Castle Streets, the Dutch House, the church of St. Nicholas and of St. Peter, with its Elizabethan chapel.

  “And the Regent,” said Theo.

  “They can rebuild a cinema, son. I’m talking about ancient and irreplaceable houses of God.”

  “I don’t believe in that. My church is the cinema.”

  When Rose told him not to risk being struck blind, Theo dared God to do it, right there in the Morris Twelve. Fred shook his head and Rose drew in her breath and held it. After a second or two, Theo said “See?” but only moments later cried out, groaned, writhed, rolled his eyes to show the whites and ran his fingers over his sister’s face like Robert Colman in The Light That Failed. Kay wondered how anyone of his age could be so infantile. Rose told him he’d act the goat once too often and stay like it.

  Theo got out and walked, taking views of the ruins with the Voigtlander he’d been given to encourage him to work at his geometry. A grotesque with an armband to show he was a special policeman asked what he thought he was up to. Was he a German spy or what? Fred left the Morris and came across.

  “What’s the trouble, officer?”

  (Never any harm, he often told them, in applying a little soft soap, speaking to them as they’d like to be. Costs nothing and smooths the way.)

  “No trouble, sir. Just telling your lad he’d better not let those snaps fall into enemy hands.”

  “No fear of that, though I dare say the Luftwaffe’s capable of its own aerial reconnaissance. My Lord above, though, just look at it! Virtually the whole of the old city.”

  “We’ll make them pay,” the policeman said.

  “Oh, no question,” Fred agreed.

  As they walked away, he said to his son: “How does the silly bugger think we’ll do that? We’ve got nothing. The Americans aren’t coming in and who can blame them? The Russians and Hitler have signed a peace pact. All Europe’s either on his side or under his thumb. We’re alone against the world.”

  Dad had never spoken in that way before. Like everyone else, he coped with the war by being childish: Germans were Jerries, Hitler was like Charlie Chaplin, Goering was fat and loaded down with medals, a well-informed and effective traitor was given the name Haw-Haw. As they reached the car, Theo looked back at the gutted cinema where Hazel had posed as his big sister. He was glad to see the Things-To-Come News Theatre standing undamaged among the brokendown gables and spires. It was no use talking to Fred and Rose about a new world of glass and steel; they belonged to the old bricks-and-wood one that was going up in smoke.

  “When you’re a Mason,” he said to Fred, “you’ll be able to give policemen like that the secret handshake. They’re all part of it, aren’t they?”

  “Only the real ones, not these tinpot voluntaries. They’re no better than wardens.”

  The sickly stench from George’s brewery blew across the water from beyond Bridge Street, sharpened now by whiffs of charred wood.

  The fug in the car was heavy with cigarette-smoke as Rose and Kay shared a Craven A.

  “Lord Haw-Haw warned us they’d be flattening all that,” Rose said.” He always knows.”

  “He’s not that clever,”’ Theo said.” ‘He didn’t know when the Regent would be starting Sunday opening or they could have killed far more”, and even this crumb of comfort raised their spirits.

  “Where now?” Fred said, as he pulled the bakelite starter.

  “Plenty of damage along Park Row,” said Theo.

  “And down Park Street,” said Kay.

  So before dropping Theo at the library they toured the ruins: the gutted Prince’s Theatre, Coliseum ice-rink and Venetian-style museum. They exclaimed at the skeletal wrecks in Park Street, where débris had been cleared from the road and pavements. Theo couldn’t resist boasting of how he’d seen it burn.

  “So how close were you? Where-ever does this old teacher live?” Kay asked, her eyes averted to the scene outside.

  “Oh, somewhere round here.”

  “Good grief, boy!” she scoffed, like Estella in old Miss Havisham’s place, “how vague can you get?”

  He felt her studying his blush and turned away to look from the car-window. She was alwayws just a bit too clever for him.

  “Up there, I think.”

  “Charlotte Street?”

  “Think so.”

  “Lord,” Rose said, “I should have been worried stiff if I’d known you were right in the thick of it.”

  “You can drop me here, Dad, I’ll walk the rest.”

  “Door-to-door service this, son. Anyway, your mother insists on going to Westbury to look at houses for sale, so we can go along by the Flying Fox, Hotwells Road to Portway, up Bridge Valley Road to Sea Walls, across the Downs…“

  “I worry when you’re out in a raid, Theawl,” said Rose, “look at poor mother and what a time she had in the last.”

  “I’ll be alright. You go on.”

  “Come home as soon as it’s over, mind,” said Fred, making another effort to be strict, “and allow enough time to do your prep before bed. Where d’you suppose films will get you in the big bad world, Mister Titchcock?”

  Kay did her tinkling laugh and Rose told her to stop. Fred realised too late what his Dad had unintentionally implied. He made a disgusted sound and got from the car to hide his blush.

  This was to be the last meeting of the film society. The members’ wives were mostly too nervous to be left at home alone and anyway some civil servants who’d been bombed out of the Corn Exchange were being rehoused in the library. There was no need to let this be known to the family but he and Hazel would soon need another alibi. Kay seemed to be on to the truth and would withhold her suspicion only until she could use it to most-telling effect. Then her silence would cost him a good few Capstans, which Vince in turn would have to be blackmailed for.

  TEN

  Hazel was surprised by the turn-out. She’d expected a quorum at best but the threat of another raid didn’t keep the entire membership from turning out to see the
Dali film and ‘The Childhood of Maxim Gorky’. Stone and Moss were there, beard tugging, Adam’s-apple bobbing and scoring off each other; George laced the projector (with Theo closely watching) and Vera collected the members’ tea, milk and sugar.

  When he arrived, Hazel could see he didn’t care for her purposely frumpish appearance. To put members off the scent, she wore a teacherish blouse and cardigan, darned stockings, flat shoes and glasses. Surely he understood? Maybe not. Boys that age lacked the subtlety of adult life.

  She must stop thinking of him as a boy.

  Moss welcomed them to the final meeting and warned Vera and any other ladies who might be a touch squeamish that the razor blade across the eye came early on so they’d better look away till he gave the all-clear. In mitigation he added that, of course, Bunuel hadn’t used a human eye, only a dead cow’s, but this upset one or two animal-loving ladies even more. Hazel sat between Vera and an unknown man so Theo was next to Moss on the end.

  The infamous short was silent. The only sounds were the running projector and frequent scandalised gasps from Vera and others. Stone and Moss kept snorting with laughter at gags no-one else could see.

  When the end came and George put the light on, most members said they’d thought it disgusting and silly. Feelings ran high and Vera said it was a shame they never managed to show anything with Leslie Howard. Stone declared it wilfully obscure. He was hardly a philistine, he said, so if he couldn’t make head or tail of it, surely the artist had failed to get his message across. Moss explained that a film’s having no coherent narrative didn’t mean it was nonsense, rather a free association of ideas as in so much twentieth-century art, such as ‘Ulysses’ and ‘The Wasteland’. At the mention of these sacred cows of aesthetic mysticism, Hazel determined to decided to speak out. Before she could, the sirens sounded but they started showing ‘Maxim Gorky’ anyway. After some minutes, though, the warden from downstairs came to tell them he couldn’t let them stay as the ack-ack was going like billy-oh at enemy planes. The rest of them made haste to get home, leaving Mrs. Hampton and Theo to clear up.