Love Fifteen Page 18

“No, son, fair do’s,” Fred went on, “no need to look bashful. Learn to accept praise where it’s due. As you know, I had my doubts but since she took you in hand there’s been no stopping you. But for Kay, with all her innate gifts, to throw away such a golden future…”

  Words failed him and he drained the glass. Kay still said nothing, only examined the silhouette picture in coloured silver paper of a Regency fop posing beside a spinet. She’d known about Theo and Hazel since finding them in their parents’ bed in Villa Borghese when she rushed in straight from school to steal some fags from the drawer, but had never mentioned the incident, just stored it up against a rainy day.

  “Well,” Rose said, “this is no time to rub her nose in one silly mistake. She needs sympathy and help.”

  “Oh, I don’t blame her,” Fred’s tone became ironic, “I pity her. She’s suffering from an inborn failing. An inherited characteristic, shall we say? And I need hardly add she didn’t get it from the old man’s side. What with our friend Whatsisname, – Convict 99? – and Cousin Harry and various members of the U.S. forces you’ve been seen with at the Mauretania – ..”“

  “Come on, Kay,” Rose said, “we needn’t sit here listening to this.”

  “You should! You might learn something.”

  “I’ve heard it too many times.”

  “And young Theodore will tell you you can’t revise a good lesson too often.”

  The spectre of family shame and failure appalled Fred only slightly less than the prospect of his little Kay having that done to her by some ping-pong champion at the Youth Club. So he welcomed a third option: that she should have the baby but allow it to be adopted by some childless couple. She herself agreed there was nothing to be gained by throwing away her life for the sake of a child fathered (she said) by one of two possible soldiers who’d both been afterwards posted elsewhere in readiness for the invasion everyone felt was coming soon. Fred’s liberality was tested to its limits as he learnt more about the tragedies of global conflict. Stalin, now as popular as Churchill, had been demanding a Second Front ever since Germany invaded Russia. Fred still sold goods to retailers in seaside towns where the beaches were barbed-wired while others were being used for trial landings on the French coast.

  Theo and Jake Swift the Jew did sketches where burly allied soldiers from Poland, Holland and Canada queued for donkey-rides, sucked sticks of rock or shouted ‘“He’s behind you”‘ in outlandish accents at Punch-and-Judy shows. They mimed Negroes from Harlem pairing off for the valeta in end-of-the-pier ballrooms. Free French in pom-poms had their palms read by Gipsy Rose.

  Overhearing part of their rehearsal for these turns, Fred told them it was no laughing matter for the few remaining native families to be overwhelmed by hordes of rude soldiery.

  Leaving the room, he slammed the door.

  “What’s up with him?” asked Jake so Theo told him. Jake had always forlornly hankered after his friend’s sister and suffered her scornful airs with tight-lipped dignity. His suntanned face flushed even redder.

  “Bloody hell, man! Is it true ? Old Kay a good-time girl? A brazen hussy?”

  Jake spent that night in dark depression, wishing he’d been more of a man, remembering Lady Macbeth’s words to her hubbie ‘“letting ‘I dare not’ wait upon ‘I would’ like the poor cat i’the adage”’. The cat who wouldn’t catch the fish for fear of getting its feet wet.

  SEVENTEEN

  Theo passed his School Certificate Exams with three credits and four passes and prepared to join the grown-up world, wear a trilby and openly smoke Capstan Full Strength. Fred said his progress showed he was capable of gaining a Higher like Kay and was unlikely to spoil his chances as she had. Another year at school and Credits would become Distinctions. What for, Theo whined, how far would that get him in the film business? Fred said he could try what crackpot schemes he liked as long as he had these results behind him so that, once he’d seen sense, he’d be able to get a decent job in the civil service and start earning an old-age pension. Alone in the family in opposing his son’s ambitions, he played the heavy father and insisted he stay for another year. When Rose pointed out that in two more he’d be called up, Fred said these same credentials would make a commission a distinct possibility. Didn’t she want to see their son an officer ?

  Perhaps, though, it would all be over before he reached eighteen. The end of the beginning had long since been followed by the beginning of the end. Hazel lectured the whole family about the lovely day that was coming tomorrow, just as Rose had sung about it to the troops. It could only be a question of time now before they could feast their tear-stained eyes on tomorrow’s bright new skies.

  Spring was giving way to summer in Rosemount’s garden. The four family members and Theo’s private tutor sat with the French windows open, eating and drinking a nice tea at the stained-oak table with double leaves and knobbly legs that had once stood in the bay window of Villa Borghese. Theo focussed his cine-camera on Hazel, lit by a sun still high but setting, reflected in her green irises between long lashes that seldom failed to stretch his trousers. She always took her glasses off as soon as he raised the camera. The exposed films of their passionate afternoons were still undeveloped and hidden in Charlotte Street.

  “Of course it’s important to win,” she said, “but more important still to know why. The Russians do but does anyone here or in America, really?”

  “Well, I certainly don’t want a lot of Germans telling me what to do,” Rose said.

  “But think, haven’t they as much right to be here as we have to occupy India, Malaya or Burma? Or as little? After all, the Japanese are Asians and only want somewhere to sell their goods in their own part of the world. Isn’t it all about trade? Commerce? Mister Light, you’re a commercial traveller.”

  “I prefer to say a representative in Household Goods.”

  “Your job is trying to colonise the shops, just as nations do for markets and to get their hands on raw materials like rubber, petrol, iron, coal …”

  “My promoting the sale of Hoovers hardly amounts to global war, dear.”

  “No, not you alone but millions of you doing it on a global scale…”

  “That’s not very nice, Fred.”

  “I suppose I’m entitled to say my piece in my own house?”

  Hazel spread lemon curd on a slice of greyish bread and Theo’s camera followed her hand to the table, ending the shot on the teapot as Rose poured another cup. Kay and he had milk-shakes. Rose added sugar and frowned at a wasp that came from the garden and hovered over the jam.

  Fred pointed to one wall and a Daily Express war map, where tiny British, Russian, American and German paper flags showed how the war was moving on all fronts. Beside this, a poster of a landscape of rolling hills, a shepherd and his flock, a village and a distant church, with the slogan ‘Your Britain – fight for it now’.

  “There’s your answer. We’re not fighting for rubber or petrol but our own dear homeland…”

  “There’ll always be an Eng-land,” Rose sang, as she passed back Hazel’s cup, “and Eng-land shall be free…”

  “D’you think it really belongs to you?”

  “To all of us.”

  “Try walking across it,” Hazel went on, “you won’t get far before someone tells you it belongs to them. Trespassers will be prosecuted. Beware the dog. Get off my land, it isn’t yours.”

  “Wherever there’s a country lane,” Rose sang on.

  Hazel smiled.” It no more belongs to you than to the kids I teach or the men who are out there fighting in deserts and jungles to preserve it.”

  “Like your husband,” Kay said.

  Theo had begun another shot of his dad beside the poster, below the map, and panned south through Europe to Egypt where a cardboard British flag fluttered on a pin. He was now standing and moved in for a close-up of the word Cairo.

  “We shall fight in the fields and in the hills,” quoted Fred.

  “Churchill,” Hazel went o
n, “was born in a palace, so yes, that’s true, a fair whack of it belongs to him and his lot.”

  “Anyway, Dad,” Theo said, “you don’t give tuppence for fields and churches, only for driving through to the next town, and you wouldn’t get far without the petrol and rubber Hazel talked about.”

  “A lot of the time these days,” Rose told them, “your father goes by train.”

  “Which needs coal and iron,” Hazel said.

  “Oh, you’ll make my headache with your blessed politics. I wish we’d never started.”

  “Don’t blame me,” Fred said, “it was Hazel telling us about the wonderful world we can look forward to once all this is over.”

  “You don’t believe me?”

  “Well, if it’s to depend on support from your average working man –”

  “Or woman,” Rose said.

  “-or woman indeed, it seems a mite far-fetched. Bricks without straw. I came from such a class and I know.”

  Which was Hazel’s cue to tell them again how education would change everything, the people were only what they were allowed to be. When Geoff and the other men came home there’d be different rulers and a new spirit in the land. The people’s war would be followed by the people’s peace.

  Theo had turned off the camera’s motor by now and rewound the spring. He had plenty of footage of Hazel talking and the family answering back and, as there was no sound, in years to come no-one would have a clue what they’d all been saying on that faraway autumn afternoon.

  “Thanks all the same but no,” Rose said.” It’s taken all these years for Dad and me to work our way to a lovely house like this and you want to let in all that riff-raff again?”

  “With their runny noses, eh, my dear?” Dad said, catching the wasp on a plate and squashing it with the flat of his knife blade.

  “Look no further than Kay,” said Hazel.” By the time she goes to Oxford, she won’t find herself among a load of chinless toffs and snobs but men and women like ourselves.”

  The silence that followed was ended by Kay.

  “I shan’t be going.”

  Theo had, of course, told Hazel that it was his sister who was pregnant, not his mother, but no-one in the family knew she knew. Now Kay brought the matter into the open for reasons of her own. She wanted to insist again that there was to be no operation. The baby would be born, never mind what followed. She explained her reasons and Theo sympathised with her fear of Aunt Harriet’s death-house, the Great War ghosts, the spinster aunt and her shell-shocked brother, with only the hens producing eggs. If her baby was to be a secret, she would not add a backstreet abortion to the universal carnage but do a bit to redeem it with a new life. There were some minutes of lamentation from Fred and Rose and more obstinacy from Kay.

  Theo kept silent, as indifferent to babies as to Prep School titches. They all looked like Churchill or Mussolini anyway.

  Hazel listened and drew general conclusions before leaving for a shift of duty as a plane-spotter. There’d been no bombs of any kind for some time but the country still lived in darkness and scanned the sky in vain for enemy planes that were too busy on the Russian front to bother with Britain.

  The Light family’s move to Henleaze meant Inky and Theo now lived two miles apart. They still met at school and several times a week outside, making the hilly journey between Schubert Villa and Rosemount via Horfield Common and Golden Hill. The friends still kept their skits going, inventing new ones on the same lines, chasing favourite films to outlying districts with exotic bus-numbers where unfamiliar sergeants guarded the doors. For awhile they revelled in ‘Hellzapoppin’, which seemed to them the craziest film ever made. Theo took Hazel, describing it by one of the new words she’d taught him: anarchistic. As a committed Communist, she spurned Anarchy as a dead end. She laughed a good deal but said the film lacked purpose. Its references were solipsistic, self-concerned, referring only to Hollywood movies. More broadly and intelligently applied, the wild inversion of logic could have gone so much further. Theo already sensed this and was caught between the abject enthusiasm he had shared with Inky and Swifty and his new awareness of how much deeper everything could be, even comedy.

  Especially comedy.

  The Marx Brothers were always ‘U’ certificate so there’d be no need to ask adults to take them in. Anyway they could both pass for eighteen, with school caps and scarves hidden. Both had deep voices and smoked with assurance. Theo’s Hazel experience made the first crevice in the fabric of his friendship with Inky, one that grew wider with every meeting. They both knew that one was growing up faster than the other, even at times back-pedalling so as not to move too far ahead. Their intimacy, the closest male bond either would ever know, was prolonged beyond its natural death by clinging to old ways, Theo keeping one foot in a trivial, comforting past. Inky had always worshipped Kay and it was sad to see him drooling over this burgeoning woman, whose belly and breasts swelled more every week. While Inky had loved her abjectly, spaniel-eyed, it seemed more forward bods in Sixth Forms or men awaiting call-up had sauntered with her after Youth Club evenings on Purdown, joining the seething fields of black and white G.I.’s and their tarts from one of those common districts named after a saint.

  Fred fulminated, saying that, if he ever discovered which spotty oik had done the deed, he’d throw the book at him. Theo and Kay evolved a sketch where their dad identified the father and tried and failed to hit him with one of the few books he had. One was Don Bradman’s ‘My Cricketing Days’ and one about the mechanics of birth control, which Theo had found in the drawer not far from the packet-of-three. He’d spent some time studying the rudimentary diagrams and now wished he’d passed the manual on to his sister in time to save her from this unfortunate fate.

  EIGHTEEN

  Half Hazel’s working life was spent as a Civil Defence planespotter and firefighter, the other in the elementary school in Bedminster. The sun of her optimism shone on children who usually lived in the shadow of the redbrick tobacco factory where their parents mass-produced the cigarettes so vital to the war effort. In her radiance they blossomed for awhile and a few, she believed, with a helping hand from her, would bloom well into adulthood, avoiding the destiny designed for them by their betters.

  Sessions with Theo came between, whenever time could be stolen.

  Just as Theo was edging away from Inky and Jake, she was losing sight of Geoff. Before the war, they’d become lovers more from conviction than ecstasy. Ideas of shared love had come down to them from the last century, from utopian puritans, Mormons and other radical communes in the States. Polygamy was only rarely on their agenda but free love as an ultimate ideal was as fervently believed in as the withering away of the proletariat. She’d been the more sensual partner in their hesitant and obligatory pre-marital affair. Now able to compare him with Theo, she thought Geoff more dutiful than ecstatic. As war approached, they were wed in a register office because, of course, Geoff would be joining up to fight Fascism and this civil contract would ensure a married allowance to support her while he was away. Thus, for the best of reasons, they avoided having to affront the bourgeoisie by anything as brazen as living in sin, a step she now saw he’d been reluctant to take. His presence, like his absence, had always been felt more as teacher than husband. His long, regular letters seldom mentioned love. They were empirical diaries implying (to a sensitive reader, though not to the military censors) how unjustly Society worked, the Empire supported across the globe by the native poor. She was included in his wide embrace, with the huddled masses yearning to breathe free. The usual SWALKs and eandearments of correspondent lovers and pen-friends would have embarrassed him by, as he saw it, insulting her. Throughout their courtship, sitting together through many lectures on contraception as a social imperative, she’d never raised it as an issue between them. Malthus, Bradlaugh and Stopes could be discussed without much feeling of shyness but their acts of love were far from earth-moving. Hazel had known better screws with other more carnal les
s committed Utopians. With Geoff, she’d used no method, persuading him they should start a family well before he went to war. When nothing happened, she had to wonder about his infertility. Both were examined at a special clinic, to be told the biological trouble lay with her. Neither ever spoke of this again. He saw that she felt her womanhood rebuked but his parental urge was never strong and he was covertly relieved. His educational ideals were mostly to do with adults. Anyway he felt that to be concerned about fallopian tubes and hormones was self-centred and trivial when the world was about to tear itself apart. She raised the matter of adoption but was persuaded it was best to wait till afterwards, as they surely wouldn’t want a child to grow up in his absence, a stranger to his own father. As Geoff’s physical presence faded, replaced by Theo’s, the end of the war now promised for her not bluebirds over the cliffs of Dover, apple-blossom time, the lights going on again, but more soberly the advent of the brotherhood of mankind, her husband’s homecoming and a lifetime of lies. And, sooner rather than later, Theo had to be told that, though yes of course marriage was only legalised prostitution, she was still Geoff’s wife and they’d both have enough to do helping to build the new world without learning to share their domestic life with a Sixth Former. In due course they’d come clean about their affair but for the time being Theo should best concentrate on his own life.

  Scanning the sky in vain for Heinkels in her look-out post or dozing while her class traced the map of Canada, her mind fed on recent disclosures at Rosemount. She allowed a full week to pass before making her proposal one sunny afternoon in June. Rose had been home all day so Theo had to derive what fun he could from Hazel’s tutorial on The Peasants’ Revolt. Fred had picked Kay up from school and dropped a few of her friends at various points “‘on their way home”, as he called it, though in fact making detours as far afield as their old district, where they saw the whores now sat on the front garden wall of Villa Borghese for the white Yanks who’d replaced the negroes in the orphanage. Over tea, Fred raised the question again of the logistics of Kay’s delivery. He was as obsessed with it as someone planning a bank robbery. Obviously she must be taken conveniently ill before her state became too protuberant to be hidden from their posh new neighbours, then go for the final stretch to his broader-minded London relatives before coming back at the last to have the baby secretly delivered in Rosemount by Harriet the midwife. After that, said Rose, she and Kay would bring the baby up, here in Henleaze, perhaps passed off as Rose-and-Fred’s. Their new neighbours were nothing like as nosy as the old ones at Villa Borghese and preferred to keep themselves to themselves. Sometimes Rose pined for the old companionship they’d known there, the chats over the garden wall and in the queue for the Co-op. But this lack of interest was now a blessing.