Love Fifteen Read online

  As they left the building, the warden looked at the exploding sky and wondered who they thought was getting it tonight.

  In her flat, Theo gave his view of the short film. It wasn’t funny like the Marx Brothers and didn’t have a story like The Day Lifts Itself, just a load of crazy pictures like in a dream. The sequence when the sweaty-looking bloke started massaging the girl’s tits was quite sexy, especially the way the woman kept changing to a naked statue. Though it was crazy again when she was cowering in a corner and the sweaty bod couldn’t get at her to feel her tits again because he was pulling a load of priests and a dead donkey on a grand piano.

  “But when they talked about it afterwards, it was like Puzzle Corner on Monday Night At Eight. I mean, old Stone called ‘Ulysses’ modern but wasn’t that Ancient Greek? And how could that be art when it was a book?”

  Hazel corrected his mistakes as though marking an essay.

  He reckoned, from what they’d seen of Maxim Gorky, it wasn’t much of an advert for equal shares in Russia as there obviously wasn’t enough to go round. Everyone was so poor. Was that what she wanted?

  After refuting these arguments, Hazel made the speech she’d been about to when the sirens went.

  “I think Geoff would probably say Dalí’s escape into infantile fantasy is symptomatic of the despair of the Bohemian bourgeoisie. Alienated and confused by the excesses of capitalism, modern man can either drown in barren introspection or look outwards to a better future such as most of the world’s now fighting for. Dalí was a salesman who marketed his own mental illness. The film merely describes the symptoms without providing a cure.”

  He understood that, just about, but mention of her husband reminded him.

  “Have you written to tell him about me? Us?”

  She sounded none too sure. If he’d been here at home, face to face, she said, yes, of course, why not? But then, if he had, she and Theo would never have got together anyhow. As things were, though, with him in Egypt, she thought they should probably wait. Theo pointed out that they were only practising what Geoff preached and believed, that in the long run sharing would end the evil of property, of which the institution of marriage was only one aspect, a form of legalised prostitution that made women mere chattels. She eagerly agreed that in time all that would wither away as everyone came to see common ownership as common sense. This war was teaching us to manage with less, everyone except the toffs, who still had more than their share. Even archbishops, she had read, were advocating an end to monopolies and a future welfare state for all. Admittedly, bishops were against the Jews but that was all part of being Christian, which Theo said he’d learnt in Scripture anyway.

  She was glad to have shifted their talk to a more general level.

  He’d brought her a present and now produced it from his gas mask box. A pair of nylons.

  “How did you come by these?”

  “There’s this man-friend of Mum’s who comes in when Dad’s away and brings us fags and sweets. He gives me and Kay stuff to keep us from telling Dad when he comes home on Friday.”

  Though Theo had wondered if she’d consider stockings an insult to her high-mindedness, she readily accepted frivolity as part of her plan for a better world. In fact, the widest possible spread of pleasure was the be-all and end-all of her utopia. Political reform was only a necessary mechanism to start properly distributing the world’s available treats. Once that was done, state control would wither away too.

  She held one of the pair against the light of the gas fire, stretching her fingers like a fan inside to examine the fine mesh then rolled it from the top till it formed a sort of bag with a thick rim and, putting it on her foot, began to unroll it up her leg. He watched as she smoothed out any creases beyond the knee and some way up her thigh, leaving inches of naked flesh before the rest of her underwear began. He touched the thigh and bent to kiss the naked part. She did the same with the other, put on the pre-war high-heeled shoes and paraded about the room like Rita Hayworth in Cover Girl.

  ‘“Aren’t they beautiful?“’ she asked him, coyly turning one knee across the other.

  Theo told her she was., stood and moved to embrace her. He knelt and kissed her there again. She moved back and unrolled the stockings, folded the pair back into their cellophane packet and laid it carefully in a drawer, for fear he’d damage it with his clutching and scratching and the friction of his legs on hers.

  She later asked how he felt about Vince. They were sharing one of his complimentary Gold Flakes in the low bed, with the black-out drawn across the dormer. She could see he was confused by his mother’s betrayal, however much he tried to condone it. Not that Hazel gave much credence to psychological mumbo-jumbo but this was a text-book case of Oedipus-Theo killing Creon-Fred and conniving at the adultery of Jocasta-Rose. Put more simply, the adolescent had to free himself of the dominant male. Hazel wanted to make him examine their own affair by touching on his qualms about Rose and Vince. The Sophoclean simile failed when it came to his natural disgust at the thought of sleeping with his Mum.

  “I can’t think what she sees in him, that’s all,” he explained.” He’s a sort of glorified spiv. You know, common. Alright, so Dad’s pretty boring but he’s given her all she wants, except a house in Henleaze.”

  “So, if you liked Vince more, you wouldn’t mind him coming to see your mother when Dad’s away?”

  “I don’t mind all that much now really. I just don’t understand all this lying that grown-ups can’t seem to do without. It would be simpler for Vince to call one time when Dad’s home and talk it all over sensibly and come to some agreement.”

  “Everyone hasn’t got as open a mind as yours.”

  “I can see that. Time they had though.”

  “They were brought up to believe in property… that a wife’s part of her husband’s goods and chattels.”

  “With them, yeah, I guess it may be too late. Victorians really. But you and Geoff don’t see it like that. It wouldn’t worry you if he had another woman in Cairo, would it? And, if you wrote and told him about us, he’d give us his blessing, wouldn’t he?”

  Hazel’s heartbeat, that had calmed down after its recent tumult, quickened again at the prospect. She had no answer to the young man’s proposal. His innocence shamed her. He lacked the moral duplicity, greed and jealousy she knew was still a part of her nature. Had to be. She couldn’t stomach the image of Geoff with an Egyptian belly-dancer, even an ATS girl in the Education Corps. Was Theo’s indifference due to his mother’s offering him no moral lead? Or was he of a generation that would be ditching the old rules in a way she knew she still couldn’t?

  Having no answer, she was almost glad when the house was shaken by a salvo of anti-aircraft from nearby Brandon Hill.

  “I’d forgotten the alert had gone,” she said, getting out of bed, slipping on a gown.

  From further off came sustained barrages and the rhythmic rumble they had now learned to recognise as German aero engines. Hazel turned off the bedside lamp and opened the black-out curtains.

  “God!” she said.

  The sky, dark nearby, was red towards the city outskirts. A balloon was burning. Flak burst among clouds outlined by the reflected light of blazing streets.

  She felt Theo joining her and made room in the narrow attic window-space.

  “That’s over our way,” he said, “north east.”

  “You sure? Looks more south to me.”

  “No. That would be beyond the cathedral. Those fires are well to the left. St. Paul’s, St. George’s, St. Agnes, St. Werburgh’s, St. Phillips,” and asked: “Why are the poor parts all named after saints?”

  “I suppose they’ve got most need of them.”

  “Looks as though they will tonight.”

  They heard a rushing then felt a jolting and splintering from along the rank of roofs.

  “That was close.”

  “Close? It’s this terrace.”

  More gunfire from the hill made them
jump and clutch one another. She opened the casement and peered out and along the rising line of pitched tiles behind the stone facade. The houses stepped up towards the little park at the summit of Brandon Hill.

  “Didn’t explode though, did it?”

  “Could be an incendiary. Or an explosive one that just didn’t go off.”

  They could see the tall outline of Cabot Tower on the highest point. Theo never saw it now without remembering how Jimmie Lunceford had taken off marks in his composition on the subject of John and Sebastian Cabot, the city’s fifteenth century explorers. When Fred asked why he’d only got eighteen out of his usual twenty, Theo had to admit he’d thought the Cabots had built the tower in 1500 when they were alive. In fact, it was only a century old – only ! – named by the Victorians in their memory. Fred was just as vague about architecture. He’d thought the half-timbered lavatories on The Tramways Centre were genuine Tudor. They looked a lot like The Old Dutch House, he said, that had been burnt in the last raid and he knew that was old. But then, some of the houses in Henleaze were like that too and he’d actually seen them being built just before the war. There was so much to learn, Fred had discovered, which was why it was vital for Theo not to waste his schooling. Fred himself read only books on cricket.

  He was behind Hazel now, naked, caressing her hips and gently pressing himself against her. She felt his hands moving up the back of her legs from the knees, raising the hem of her dressing-gown and fondling her slender behind. As his fingers moved round to touch her cleft, she gripped the window-frame and closed her eyes and slightly moved her behind from side to side, as if in a lilting dance. His hands moved to where her hips tapered to the waist. She braced herself by planting her feet wider apart on the floorboards. She knew he was holding back, teasing her and himself. She closed her eyes and bit her lower lip to control an urge to push into him. His tireless cock moved against her moistness. This was like a drug, she thought.

  “You alright up there?” shouted someone from the street below. She looked down. A number of wardens and fire watchers had their faces raised to a point along the terrace to her right. Residents from the flats were joining them from various front doors in quickly put-on clothes.

  She nodded and waved.

  “You better come on down, my lover. An incendiary’s gone through the roof a few houses up. Can you manage? Everyone else has come out.”

  She nodded and drew back from the dormer, pushing Theo into the room.

  “D’you hear that? Get dressed.”

  “Can’t we just – ?” he began.

  “No. And you must go out the back way, through the garden. There’s a lane leads up to Brandon Hill. You mustn’t be seen. The other tenants are all out front. Hurry up!”

  They dressed up warm against the chilly air. Last, she put on her glasses, a scarf and a beret and led him by the hand down the dim stairwell and to the rear-door on the ground floor. An iron spiral flight descended to the oblong strip of dark lawn.

  “When shall I see you again?” he said and “How are we going to meet now the film society’s wound up?”

  “For the time being we better not. You’ll have to walk home. I hope you’ll be alright. Your parents will be worried sick.”

  They kissed and she watched him clamber down and sprint away to the latched gate in the rear garden wall. She turned back to the front.

  “I’m sorry, Mrs. Hampton, we had no idea you were up there all alone.”

  She joined the group on the raised pavement and stared into the night sky at a burning attic a few stepped roofs up the hill. The front door there was open and fire-fighters in helmets were running up the stairs inside with stirrup pumps and buckets. Whistles were blown and anyone with nothing else to do shouted about lights.

  In general, she had no time for superstition or coincidence but couldn’t help wondering if this fire-bomb had fallen like a bolt from heaven, a moral meteor, warning her to end this before the world’s opinion caught up and brought scandal to them both. A new clean spirit would come in time, of course, no-one seriously doubted that, but till it did the old rules still applied. She was a soldier’s wife, a teacher. The boy was barely fifteen. The only blessing she could find was that she had no children, nor the likelihood of any. They’d been lucky but mustn’t push that luck. God, she had to somehow come to her senses. Not the senses that still held her lower body in thrall, longing for the bliss they’d nearly achieved again that night, not that but common sense.

  And moral sense.

  Theo stood giddily in the rear gardens for half a minute while the raid went on all around. A minute or two later he stumbled up the back lane, barging into a dustbin or two and finally making the open park. A great burst of gunfire came from the detachment on the hill, making him cry out with alarm. He turned left and came to the top end of Hazel’s street. When he’d first seen them by day, the houses with their iron balconies and lamp-brackets had reminded him of fuzzy old photos of New Orleans, of street parades and Buddy Bolden. One day he and Hazel and Geoff would go there together, in his own private airplane from California.

  He sat on a bench and lit a cigarette. The first breath of nicotine made him swoon. Or was it the frustration from nearly coming into her? Both maybe. He stayed there awhile with head between knees before sauntering down on street level, looking up at the burning top floor and all the tenants standing about in front. She had her back to him, chatting to her neighbours, and didn’t turn.

  *

  “Where’s young Theawl?”

  Tilda, confused, sat on the rexine sofa at Villa Borghese, a cup of tea in one hand, a tot of rum in the other. Young Kay was across the other side of the electric fire that had that glowing coal bit in front that seemed to be burning, though Tilda’d heard young Theawl say it was a disc that got turned by warmth off the red light. Or sommat o’that. He wasn’t here, that she could see.

  “We’ve already told you, Mother,” Rose answered from near the window, “we don’t know. You’d think he’d have more consideration.”

  “If he does get home safe,” that stuck-up husband of hers said, from where he was crouching by the gramophone, “this is the last time he goes to that damned Film affair. Have I made myself clear, Rose?”

  “How can I stop him? He takes no notice of me.”

  “A mad-gaming loobie,” Tilda said.

  “I think you’ll find this is the last meeting anyway,” said young Kay in that Sneed Park voice she’d started talking in lately.

  “What?” Fred said, half turning.

  Kay had seen an announcement in The Evening World and now guessed they used the meetings as an alibi. She wished she hadn’t spoken, shook her head and luckily Mum said:

  “They only meet on Sundays anyway, when you’re home, so it’s not down to me to stop him. That tea must be cold, Mother. D’you want another or is the rum enough?”

  The old woman looked from cup to glass without seeming to recognise either.

  “What d’you mean, the last meeting?” Fred asked. As Kay was thinking of an answer, he held up one hand like a policeman. A plane hummed overhead.

  “Oh, no, not them German swine again!” Tilda moaned, spilling the tea as Rose tried to take the cup. Kay quickly came and embraced her grandma.

  “Don’t worry, Gran. It’s one of ours.”

  “Wait till our boys get over there,” the old woman went on, “they’ll give that bloody Kaiser what-for.”

  “Dear oh Lord,” said Fred. He heard the front door being opened and went out to the hall.

  “There, there,” said Kay, rocking Tilda like a baby.

  “Where’s Sister Harriet?” the grandma asked.

  “She’s alright, their house wasn’t hit,” Rose said, “they’re safe at home where you’d expect.”

  “Then where am I? Bain’t I at home?”

  “No, you’re here at our house. Me and my husband Fred’s house. Remember him ?”

  “Didn’t I yer someone say it’s Sunday?
<
br />   “Yes.”

  “So why am I yer of a weekend when your blessed hubby’s home?”

  Fred returned with the boy.

  “Where’ve you been? We were frantic,” Rose told him, standing up.

  “The raid started during the film so we had to take shelter for a time. Soon as there was a lull I walked home. What’s Gran doing here on a Sunday?”

  “Her house had to be abandoned when a bomb hit a gas-mains in the street,” Fred said.” I drove down to see if she was alright. She was in her sister’s place. Down Mina Road way it’s bedlam.”

  Theo came across and crouched by his Grandma.

  “What did they say?” she asked, “I was in where?”

  “Aunt Harriet’s. You alright now?” the boy asked.

  “I was just saying, they bloody Doughboys will be coming in too late like last time, saying they’ve won the war. We don’t want them over yer, do we?”

  A burst of explosions stirred the heavy black-out curtains and shook the sash windows in their frames.

  “She was wandering about till one of your aunts spotted her and took her in. The whole street was lit like Guy Fawkes night.”

  “The house she had her flat in has gone. She’ll have to stay with us.”

  Bad news for Fred, who would be even more outnumbered in this domestic war of attrition. But Kay and Theo were glad, because for them Tilda was an entirely good and lovable person. She wore a crossover pinnie, a broad-brimmed felt hat and odd shoes with holes cut in to ease the bunions that plagued her but which also served as useful barometers to forecast every change in the weather. Her first-floor flat among the poor streets, now destroyed, had been full of furniture that smelt and felt even older than herself. When she stayed overnight at Villa Borghese – to help soothe Rose’s nerves and help with the housework – she slept on a feather mattress and, going for a drink in the local, wore a small animal round her neck with a pointy snout and beady eyes. A switch of brown hair, cut off when she was young, was usually pinned to the sparse grey strands that remained.