Love Fifteen Read online

  By this time, the war was on the turn, Hitler was losing on the Russian front and in England anyway Stalin was far more more popular than Roosevelt. Rommel had lost in North Africa and all likelihood of invasion had passed, Fred relaxed the ten inches-per-couple water economy and allowed four separate baths a week.

  Sometimes he found his mother, sister or grandma sniffling or outright weeping. Conversations lapsed as he came upon them. A week later, while Fred was on his rounds of retailers close by the city, Theo was taken on one of the family’s rare visits to Tilda’s side of the family. Her flat was near the rented house of her sister Harriet, who shared this two-down, three-up place with daughters Gwen and Dora, son Stan and son-in-law George. This city’s poorest parts, as in other bombed cities, had caught the worst of the air-raids and gaps in their mean Edwardian terraces showed the damage where they’d been strafed by sticks of incendiaries or H.E.’s.

  The front parlour was reserved for rare visits by doctors, rent-collectors and vicars and for Christmas and so Tilda, Rose, Kay and Theo were received in the back room. Though it was a dazzling day outside, the only source of light here was a small coal-fire, glowing in a black iron basket in the lower half of a miniature kitchen range. The window on to a few square feet of brick-walled rear yard was so festooned with plush and net that only a glimmer came from there. The old woman didn’t get up as they moved in, only sat straighter in her ancient fireside chair. As he bent over her, Theo had to steel himself for the touch of her lips, cold and dry, working to control a double-set of dentures. Like Tilda, she was so simian, he told Inky, they were living proof that Darwin had got it right. She smelt of camphor, linen, naphthalene, Dettol and a funeral home he’d been in once to see one of his London aunts laid out. It was as though death clung to Harriet, biding its time like a patient undertaker.

  Rose, Kay and he were given upright chairs by the weird sisters (‘Fair is foul and foul is fair’), who then retired to the penumbra, leaving the elders and guests to form an inner firelit circle. Brother and brother-in-law stood even further off, visible by their glowing pipe and Capstan. Glasses of ruby British wine were poured for Tilda, Harriet, Rose and Gwen. Strong drink didn’t agree with Dora’s legendary dyspepsia. A martyr to wind, she stood belching gently, catching the expelled gas in her raised fist and begging their pardon. Beyond the men hung sepia studio portraits of Great War tommies in oval frames. Middle-aged Stan stood before the jaunty image of himself when young, just recruited, in khaki, cap held in one hand and a putteed leg resting on a footstool, smiling for a man beneath a black hood in 1915. One of the very much wanted millions, he survived Flanders and wasn’t required again till the next time. Today, when he smiled, he dribbled. His sisters attended him, dabbing his mouth and taking his hand when his mind wandered and his stammering speech lost its way.

  “Tell them who thee had come through the station, George,” Gwen told her amiable bushy-browed husband.

  “The king did come. And Churchill,” he said, “and she from Americawl.”

  “Who is she, Theawl?” Gwen asked, “the wife of he in the wheel-chair?”

  “Mrs. Roosevelt ?”

  “Aah, that’s her. George do see all they nobs down the station. That’s what do come of being a porter, see.”

  “And Ernest Bevin, he they’ve made Labour Minister.”

  “Best thing for’un,” Tilda snapped.” He do talk with a West Country twang thee could cut with a knife. Who’m gonna listen to ‘ee except labourers?”

  “They reckon he used to drive a dray for that mineral water company,” Rose said and Gwen, Dora, Tilda and Harriet all joined in on the last three words. Theo had been waiting for the first example of this and wondered if there was an appropriate grammatical or musical term for it, like recitative or antiphon. He’d make sure to ask old Jimmie. Not only Tilda’s family but neighbours at Villa Borghese who had gossipped to Rose over their garden walls all knew the knack of completing each other’s sentences. He’d been hearing them do this all his life and none ever stumbled or guessed wrong. He knew that something similar went on in church, from the few occasions he’d been unable to avoid going; and in school assemblies the swots joined in with old Hines on Amens and That-Art-In-Heavens; and in troop concerts, Rose had brought them all in for reprises of ‘When the lights go on again’. But those were familiar responses in communal liturgies. This trick was another matter and meant anticipating impromptu speech. Or what was supposed to be.

  “We do never see none of they over yer,” Dora said in her voice of doom, “though this part’s had the worst bombing. They toffs from London do only ever get as far as the centre.”

  “Well,” Rose said, her accent getting more Mina Road by the minute “the king came to Theawl’s school.”

  “Well, that do be near the centre,” Dora said.

  “And he did play the big drum in the Hofficer’s Training Corps,” Tilda added.

  “De king did play de drum?” asked Stan with his idiot grin.

  “No, dear. Theawl. They had a parade on the playing-field while he inspected the hair-raid wardens. Dissn’t?”

  “The king, yeah,” Theo said, “not me. I missed a whole hour of Tommy Dorsey on the AFN.”

  “The what?”

  “American Forces Network.”

  “Tis all Yanks with them,” Tilda said, half-apologising, with a look round that included not only Theo but Kay and Rose.

  “What?” Stan asked in his giggly voice, “bist thee gonna be an officer when you’m called up, Theawl?”

  “Time he’s eighteen, t’will all be over,” Rose said.

  “That’s what they do always say,” Dora lamented, “that’s what they did –”

  “Say last time, yes” chorused Tilda, Harriet, Gwen, Dora and Stan.

  “If you do get called up, best go as a h’officer,” said George, “Stan and me was both privates in the last.”

  “That’s how me and George did meet,” Gwen said, “when he come yer to visit Stan after.”

  “They do say tis a hill wind,” said Harriet.

  “But s’right what I said, eh, Stan?”

  “What?”

  “Best be an officer.”

  “Aah. Mind, more of dey do get killed dan we.”

  Dora could just be discerned in the darkness taking her brother’s hand.

  “When dey said I had to go home, dis medical officer says to me, ‘You’m swinging de lead, my man’… I tawld him no, I never asked for medicawl repat, only my sergeant reckoned I’d had enough. I tawld him I’d –”

  “Sooner carry on, yes,” said the chorus.

  Stan’s smile had gone and he was complaining like a beaten child, looking for help from face to face.

  “That’s alright, Stan,” Dora said, “tis all over now.” and kissed his hand.

  Before the women got down to serious talk, Theo noticed a sequence of hints and nudges worthy of Dad’s Masonic rituals, which soon led to the uncles leading him to the back yard for a look at Stan’s fowls, kept in laying boxes between George’s push bike and a mangle draped in tarpaulin. The space was too small to accomodate a shelter so in the raids they either huddled under the stairs or left by a door into the back lane leading to a communal brick one above ground. Or had, before the night when – a street or two away – one of these had got blown down, killing everyone inside.

  “So what dost they teach thee up that grammar school then?” George asked while Theo peered at Stan’s birds.

  “Maths, History, Geography, Art, English, French, German, Science, stuff like that –”

  “What’s de wanna learn German for?” Stan said.

  “We did never learn none, did we, not in three years?” George said, “No French neither. Only a few words, like. Handi Hop. Parleyvoo. Silver play.”

  In the semi-darkness beyond the window panes, Theo could make out the women in conference and sense the agitation as the old ones nagged and questioned. He composed it as a long shot from the yard’s ba
ck wall, a picture within a picture, wide enough to include himself and the old men in the yard, with the domestic fowls, like shepherds in a crib, and the women inside framed by the window, all in deep focus. The net curtains would have to be left out to give the camera a clear view of the interior. He’d told Hazel once that the camera always lies, the better to tell the truth.

  “What are they talking about in there?” he asked.

  “That’s women’s troubles, son,” George said.

  “D’you like a few hagues to take ‘ome, Theawl?” said Uncle Stan, actually cousin-once-removed because Aunt Harriet had begat him and she was Theo’s mother’s aunt. And Uncle George wasn’t family at all, only married to Auntie Gwen, also begat by Harriet, and George and Gwen begat no-one and had now left it too late. The prolific families of the last century had ceased with that war. On both sides, few children were now begotten. He and Kay had only two cousins. He imagined Harriet’s branch of the family tree lopped off, the stump painted black with tar as he’d sometimes seen on pruned beeches beside country roads.

  “Dey laid a few today,” Stan said, one arm hand reaching beneath the hens to find their eggs among the straw.” I got a couple more in th’ouse. I’ll leave that one yer cos she bin and got broody. Might have a chick or two ‘fore long.”

  Theo took the eggs into his hands.” They’re warm.”

  Stan smiled, showing his false teeth.

  “Dey do come from a warm place.”

  *

  While Theo was still outside with the men, Rose and the other women agreed not to tell him what this visit was in aid of. The three went home by way of two buses, a double-decker and a grey utility, on which the conductress sat on a front bench beside the driver, telling him when to stop and start. Tilda stayed on with her sister, where she seemed most at home. As they walked to the first stop, Kay said it was time her brother was told.

  “He’s only a boy, bless him,” Rose said.

  “That’s what’s wrong with Gran’s family,” Kay said, as Theo strode ahead, evidently glad to be out in the air and away from the gloom of Harriet’s house.” All secrecy and net curtains and poor old slobbering Uncle Stan.”

  “Don’t be unkind.”

  “I’m not. The War turned him simple and now he’s a sort-of family shame, like a village idiot.”

  “Ssh! Someone’ll hear.”

  “Let them. Time they did too.”

  “Aunt Harriet’s a trained midwife,” Rose said.” She’ve delivered more babies than she could count. And brought off a good few too –”

  “Though that can only be talked of in whispers once the men are outside.”

  “Because, if that had got around, she’d have been struck off. D’you think she wants it broadcast on the news?”

  Theo had reached the stop and held the bus, which arrived as he did, while Rose and Kay hurried to catch it.

  Back at Rosemount, they still talked in undertones, as though the walls had ears.

  “That house smells of the grave,” Kay said.” Those aunties, they’re like death-watch beetles.”

  “The hens at least are still giving birth,” Theo said.

  He had placed the cooled eggs one by one in a pudding basin in Rosemount’s larder. They had one each for tea, boiled, though as always he only ate the yolk, not the rubbery white part, and actually preferred the dried sort that came in tins.

  “Not unless they’re fertilised,” Kay said, “by the cock.”

  “You’ll put me off my tea,” Rose said.

  “D’you mean, if they sat on these eggs we’re eating there wouldn’t be any chickens?”

  He seemed to remember Inky telling him old Birdie had done Reproduction one day when Theo had been at an Embassy matinée.

  “If only this was as simple as a few eggs, and now that’s enough,” Rose said, silencing Kay and closing the subject.

  Theo went for a swing in the garden and thought again about what it would mean to him to have a baby brother and whether Fred was the father and if not who? Would old Laura’s husband Tombs of the Brylcreemed hair be among the possible candidates, known as he was for having a wife in every branch?

  A few days later Fred drove them to a red-brick pub beside Eastville Park. A swinging sign outside showed a bald man sucking a quill over the words Shakespeare Free House. Rose looked nervous as Fred parked the new Wolseley 14 business car with two others at the kerb. When she told him surely Kay and certainly Theo wouldn’t be allowed in, her husband smiled at her simplicity. The landlord came forward with a frown but, after shaking Fred’s outstreched hand, smiled and showed them to an outside table in a garden overlooking the park. He served beer for his brother-in-need, gin-and-lime for Rose, a sherry for Kay and a shandy for Theo, who noticed the familiar look the publican gave his Mum, which she ignored. Christ, not him too?

  “What’s this all about?” she asked when he’d gone.

  “Don’t you think a celebration’s due?” Fred said.” Is it every day a member of our family rises so far above the general level? It’s to drink to Kay’s achievement and her equally wonderful future.”

  “In that case,” Kay said, “I’ll need something stronger. Can’t I have a Sidecar?”

  “I doubt mine host would know what that is,” Fred said, staring out at the park beyond the terrace, “this isn’t the Mauretania.”

  The word’s satanic associations silenced mother and daughter.

  “To our young Kay!” he went on, raising his mug, “and to what we all know will be a career of great academic distinction. What d’you think of her, Rose?”

  “Wonderful. I always have.”

  “And you, son? Aren’t you proud of your sister gaining an Exhibition!”

  “I didn’t even know what an Exhibition is till she told me.”

  “I’m none too sure even now,” said Rose.

  “Try not to flaunt your ignorance. It’s a scholarship to an Oxford college.”

  “College?” Rose said.” I thought Oxford was a university.”

  Fred looked to Kay for help but she wouldn’t meet his eye, only swirled her sherry about in the dinky glass.

  “Well, which is it, my girl?”

  “The whole business is a clique,” said Theo, “a club or cartel, like Eton or Harrow.”

  “Hallo hallo?” Fred said.

  “To make sure the top people stay in charge.”

  “I must say, son, you can talk some eyewash when you choose. How can it be that if Kay’s got in? She’s hardly Milady Muck.”

  “That’s one of the crumbs they throw the rest of us to keep us in our place.”

  “Enough crumbs add up to a cake,” Fred said, making Theo look up. That was worthy of Hazel, or even old Lenin himself, whom she’d quoted as saying he and his comrades didn’t want a slice of the cake but the bakery.

  “Wait till I tell those snobs at the Lodge,” Fred went on.

  “Better not, Dad,” Kay murmured, still peering at her glass.

  “Why not? I’ve already told mine host here who was only boasting the other day about his son piloting a Spitfire.”

  “Well, leave it at that because I shan’t be going.”

  Fred stared at her then at Rose, who said in a stage whisper: “She’s expecting!”

  “Expecting what?”

  “It must be plain to everyone but you, the way she’s plumping out.”

  Kay began: “And it’s no use you talking, Dad, because –”

  “Just a second. Hadn’t Theo better wait in the car? Or walk down by the lake, son, while we –”

  “Good grief,” Kay said, “he’s fifteen. He’s probably guessed anyway. Haven’t you?”

  Theo shook his head. So – not a brother or sister but nephew or niece. He’d be an uncle and Kay a Mum !

  Fred was silent. At last he sipped his beer and shook his head.” So we’re the last to be told.”

  “We didn’t want you worrying,” Rose said.

  “Worrying? A seventeen-year-old s
choolgirl –”

  “Eighteen, just –”

  “ – with a future of dreaming spires within her very grasp! I suppose this happened at that damned Youth Club? I’ll have it shut down. Well, I think we can safely defer this celebration till the matter’s been dealt with. Come along home, all of you.”

  “Dealt with?” Kay said, staying seated as the others started to rise.

  “Well, of course. It’s got to be got rid of! Toot sweet before it’s too obvious to hide. Then it would be all round the neighbourhood and we’d be upping stumps again before we’ve hardly arranged the furniture.”

  “Dad means have it adopted,” Rose suggested, “don’t you?”

  “Adopted? Aborted!”

  “Don’t use that word. Say ‘Brought off’!”

  “No,” said Kay.” No bringing off. I’m having it.”

  The publican came up to ask if all was well and congratulate Kay on her scholarship and to offer another round on the house. Fred couldn’t face him and Rose avoided his eye again. Only Kay was equal to the occasion, gave him her Vivien Leigh laugh, enquired in vain about a Sidecar and settled for another sherry.

  Back home in Rosemount, his dad drank more beer and stood staring through French windows into the back garden with its concrete sundial and crazy paving. Enjoying his righteous mood and needing to chastise Kay, he pointed at Theo’s wonderful example. Comparatively backward, certainly no natural genius, he’d managed to pull himself up by his bootstraps, taking every advantage of Mrs. Hampton’s tuition. At this, Theo felt his sister’s eyes on his face and blushed.