Love Fifteen Read online

  Kay sat with eyes closed and lips pursed. Hazel saw this as her chance to put her case. She was nearing thirty, childless and barren. With a baby to care for, Kay couldn’t take up her Exhibition. The obvious solution was for Hazel to adopt it/him/her/even them. Her class study of Canada had kept the Dionne quintuplets in her mind. Great-aunt Hattie had concealed enough unwanted births to know the ropes. No-one need ever find out.

  “D’you mean hand over the baby to you?” Kay said.

  “You could see it again, of course, any time. But a clean break would be best. I understand what often happens is the mother’s happy to let it go till it appears, when she grows too fond and can’t bear to part with it.”

  “But,” Fred said, a male floundering in murky feminine waters, “will your husband agree?”

  “I’m sure. When I found out I couldn’t have my own, we did discuss adoption. Of course I must write and put it to him but why on earth wouldn’t he?”

  Kay was staring at her hands on the damask tablecloth. Hazel took them in hers.

  “Kay, love, you owe it to your sex – and your class – to take up this opportunity to go to Oxford.”

  “I don’t know what class has got to do with it,” Rose said, taking umbrage, “plenty of middle-class people go to college.”

  “Not lower middle class, Mrs. Light,” Hazel insisted, “and even fewer girls. You mustn’t let this pass. It’s a blow for equality.”

  “It makes sense, my dear,” Fred said, sitting beside his daughter, embracing her with one arm.” Here you are in a club you never wanted to join, about to miss your entry to a life among the powers-that-be. And here’s Hazel wants to be a mother and can’t – um –”

  “Conceive,” said Theo.

  “Though not for want of trying,” Hazel added and Theo blushed and they avoided each other’s gaze.

  “‘But hasn’t your husband been abroad for ages ?”’ asked Kay.

  “‘There was time before he went,”’ said Hazel.

  “My Lord, girl, it’s heaven-sent!” Fred said in conclusion.

  Next time he and Hazel were alone, Theo wanted to know how this outcome would affect their future. Given that Kay and Geoff agreed, in seven months their families would be drawn even closer. As well as their intended ménage à trois – another new phrase she’d given him – she’d be mothering his niece or nephew, and as uncle and part-time father he’d have a hand in the baby’s upbringing. He offered help in writing the letter to Geoff, to introduce himself as Hazel’s surrogate lover and outline their future domestic arrangements. But she told him to stop talking, sit still and listen to her for a minute.

  The old plan wouldn’t do any more. Surely he could see that?

  No, he couldn’t see at all. The kid’s parentage was neither here nor there but, if she thought it mattered, there was no need to tell Geoff the mother’s name. He himself thought all that was okay and quite like the new Preston Sturges comedy where Betty Hutton’s pregnant by an unknown G.I. Watching it one afternoon at the Whiteladies’, the similarity struck them both.

  Hazel repeated an old truism: films weren’t like real life. And Theo gave his old reply: high time they were.

  But they aren’t, she insisted. He was wrong anyway: the child’s parentage mattered a great deal. Given that Geoff agreed, the adoption carried through, the child becoming theirs, it was too much to expect him also to share his wife with the baby’s uncle. The far more dangerous possibility was that Kay would want to keep the baby once she saw it.

  Theo found all this possessiveness beyond him. His this, her that, their something else. Aren’t we all members of the human race? Didn’t they believe in common ownership, an end to marriage, family and property? Hadn’t she’d explained to him that’s what the war was all about? A new start, building a better world from the wreckage of the old, like the last shot of ‘San Francisco’ with Clark Gable and Spencer Tracy marching forward while Jeanette MacDonald and everyone else sang their balls off about Golden Gates? He and Inky had done that bit many a time in Blaize Castle Woods once they’d got bored with duelling like Errol Flynn and Basil Rathbone in Sherwood Forest.

  He now grasped for the first time how much he stood to lose. He’d agreed to share her with Geoff and in return had never promised to be hers alone. Or asked that she be his. Such an arrangement would be against all their beliefs. As well as which, put the case, far-fetched as it may be, that the sublime Margo Carpenter offered herself one day, without reservation, perhaps on the promise of a starring role in one of his films,. Well, he could hardly be expected to turn her down, could he, just because he was involved with Hazel and Geoff? He knew Margo was almost as remote a planetary body as that old galaxy of starlets and ravaged Miss Europes that used to decorate his bedroom wall. She was as cool as ever when their buses coincided, still more beautiful and unattainable in her Observer Corps uniform, and Hazel was thus far his only lover. So, if her adopting Kay’s baby meant they had to separate, this plan was totally duff. If life really had been a film, he’d have re-shot the whole sequence, editing out that sub-plot. Give up Hazel for the sake of some midget Churchill that all babies resembled? Not Pygmalion likely, as Fred would have said. His tears and entreaties moved her so much that this first episode ended in her reassuring him in bed. Next time they met, he had at least accepted the possibility and by degrees came round altogether. At that point, she confessed she’d already written to her husband and he’d replied agreeing in principle, though felt they should defer any action till war was over and he was home. She now had to hurry him pronto into saying yes. Without naming her, she told Kay’s story, showing how urgent the expectant girl’s predicament was and how vital to the cause of progress that she should be free to take up the offered place in the enemy camp at Somerville College.

  The social argument bore fruit where the personal one had fallen on stony ground. Geoff consented. Soon after this news, Fred drove mother, Kay and Hazel, with Theo to keep him company to Aunt Harriet’s house. Father and son waited outside in the Wolseley while urchins milled about examining the bodywork. Fred called to them to clear off and finally climbed out, threatened them to call a constable and stayed on guard, polishing the chromium wings above the bonnet with a damp shammy. The kids scattered, jeering and calling out a series of vowels that Theo noted were undivided by consonants but full of archaic vocatives.

  Hazel described for him later how uncles Stan and George were again sent to the back yard for a smoke while Tilda, Harriet, Rose, Kay and Hazel drank tea poured by Gwen and Dora from their usual dark corner under the Great War portraits. Harriet, the aged matriarch and midwife, first gave a homily on modern morals and how in her day this would have meant a spell in the poorhouse for Kay and – for the baby – a life of orphanages like the ones opposite Villa Borghese. Rose was blamed for setting a bad example with her Vinces and Canadians.

  “But Cousin Harry was family,” she insisted, close to tears.

  Harriet shrugged and Tilda shook her head while the daughters sat with folded arms and pursed lips.

  “Like those hags round the guillotine in The Scarlet Pimpernel,” Theo put in as Kay described the scene.

  This done, Harriet had explained procedures. As Kay refused to come there, the delivery would be at Rosemount. One of Fred’s medical brethren had agreed to provide a certificate. Hazel would take the child home from there and in a few days Kay would recover and see out the last of her time in Sixth Form before going up to Oxford for the Michaelmas term, whatever that was. The former Theo (and Inky) had seen universities as places where swots studied unborn babies. Or where toffs sneered at Yanks before being beaten by them in some race that was mostly run by bods of the sort Sergeant drilled on the playground. But now he knew how much more serious it was: a class conspiracy where Kay and other girls like her were going to form a sort of Fifth Column in the class war but with any luck do it a hellish sight better than Eric Portman did in converting Canada to Nazism in ‘49th Parallel’.


  For Kay’s sake, Hazel did all she could to help dispel the gloomy air that hung about Harriet’s murky living-room. Whenever the expectant girl seemed daunted by the daughters of death, Hazel made faces, smiled or rolled her eyes. Once the urgent business was done, Gwen read the leaves in their cups. The auguries were all of ships coming home, sudden fortunes and the return of long-lost family members. When Kay was promised a meeting with a tall dark stranger from a faraway land, she gripped Hazel’s hand tighter and closed her eyes, an odd gesture Hazel only later understood.

  The last brought from Rose a reminder that that’s what Gwen had predicted for her too before the Canadians came. On this occasion the cards weren’t consulted. Leaves were more equivocal, more open to agreeable interpretation. Once turned up, aces of spades could not have been misconstrued and no-one wanted to face more bad news. The leaves brought ambiguous promise of better days.

  Hazel praised the family’s tenderness to Stan and the way Dora stroked his hand and said “hush now”‘ when excitement muddled his speech and brought panic to his eyes. Once there was a thunderstorm and Tilda gave a little cry and asked if it was them Hun buggers back again. A bit later she stared through the window and asked George to send away the monkey that had been hanging about there all day. He drew aside the net, tapped on the glass and made vamoose signs.

  Once outside, Hazel embraced Kay, saying she saw why she’d decided to bring the child alive into the world after spending an hour in that charnel-house. Watching his sister and lover weeping on each other’s shoulders, Theo felt excluded. These were fundamental feelings he’d never shared but was carefully observing in case he ever had to direct such a sequence.

  NINETEEN

  The series of codgers Hines invited to speak at the weekly Jaw reached its nadir with some old chums of his droning on about stamps or scouting while the Great Hall echoed with massed murmurs, the scribbling of flickergraphs and compositions. At longed-for intervals, the clock below the organ-loft struck every quarter-hour. By frowns and outraged glares, Hines and his staff held down the lid on this seething pot till the bores finally gave up and everyone could bawl three cheers when the head swot shouted hip-hip. The entire mob pelted to the playground to fight, chew gum, light up behind the Fives Courts or boast of epic self-abuse.

  Spring term was almost over, exams done with, Theo refining the scripts for his farewell cabaret in the Science Room, promising to be the most trenchant and merciless ragging yet of the wartime staff. Prizegiving was still to come, when most swots would be going either to university, some theatre of war or officers’ training college. Now that the baby’s future was fixed, he could swank about Kay’s exhibition and groan with derision at bods who didn’t know what it meant.

  No-one could decide which was deadlier: another hour of some old boy – or Old Boy – telling how he explored an outpost of empire or the double-history they’d be missing on the Treaty of Tilsit. All but the swots had furnished themselves with light reading or writing materials and Theo had to pause from jotting down his new short story – about a jazz musician in Storyville’s New Orleans – to stand with the rest as Hines led in this week’s yawn.

  He could hardly believe his eyes, except that, even if the guest speaker had worn a mask, there’d be no mistaking the walk, turn of the head and distinctive way of hiding one hand inside the double-breasted blazer. A murmur travelled like bush-fire. Once he’d mounted the dais and taken the seat Hines offered, even the swots knew who it was. Theo looked across at Jimmie Lunceford who caught his eye, smiled and nodded, so the staff must have known beforehand but been sworn to silence.

  “Good morning, School,” Hines started, though he’d already seen them all at Prayers. “It has been your very great good fortune to be privy to the thoughts of an impressive roster of eminent men – and even a few ladies – from many of the professions and useful arts, though today’s is our first from the theatre and in some ways the greatest fish we have so far landed. If I may use such a metaphor.” He paused to give the guest a creepy smile before turning back to the school. “A metaphor being a figure of speech that not merely compares something with something else but pretends for the sake of vividness that it is so. He has won unrivalled acclaim with his Romeo, Mercutio, Hamlet, Iago, Caius Marcius in Coriolanus… the list is endless. His Henry V at the Old Vic was a stirring rendition of that soldier-king who is such a hero for these, our own stirring times.”

  Go on, you poxy snob: so what the hell’s the Old Vic when it’s at home? And all these stage plays and no mention of his films: The Divorce of Lady X, Q Planes, Lady Hamilton, 49th Parallel… Theo looked across at Swiftie and both mouthed their favourite line from Rebecca: “That’s not the northern lights, that’s Manderley!”

  At last Hines ran out of flannel and asked them to welcome Mister Olivier. The incredibly handsome but surprisingly short international star leapt up and began by remembering his last visit to the city when he and his wife Miss Leigh had flown back from Hollywood through Portugal to Whitchurch airport. (His wife! Jesus, so beautiful she’d even made it to Theo’s pin-up gallery.) He remembered Hazel passing on her special gen as a plane-spotter that this route was known earlier as the Chicken Run, by which wealthy cowards could escape wartime England. It was kept open by the Nazis as a conduit for spies and V.I.P.’s to and from neutral Lisbon. And poor old Leslie Howard had been on the outward leg when his plane was mistaken for someone else’s and shot down. The Oliviers had come the opposite way, returning at the height of the war, he was telling them now, and staying overnight at the city’s Grand Hotel which had no heating or windows, after just being blitzed.

  There followed an hour of stories about the stars and directors he’d worked with, with names like Tony and Johnny. He called Hitchcock ‘Alfred’ for Chrissake! He ended with a trailer of his forthcoming film : ‘Once more, unto the breach’, managing even in the hall’s railway-station acoustic to make the hairs stand up on Theo’s neck and at ‘England – pause – and Saint Geooorrge!’ everyone shouted and stamped as though they were about to rush off straight away and kill all the French they could find. Except that the present filthy swine were Germans. Schweinhunds really.

  Head Swot couldn’t still the uproar and looked for help to Hines who stood and made simmer-down signs and at last there was quiet enough for a vote of thanks to be proposed and three cheers that had a somewhat randy bass note as a good few of them were wondering what it was like to do it to Vivien Leigh. Wait till Kay heard her favourite star’s husband had been here in his school!

  Hines gestured his guest to go before him and Head Swot followed.

  Theo had already opened his desk and rummaged among the stacked text and exercise books. He pulled out the leather bound autograph pad Kay had given him for Christmas the year BBC Variety had been evacuated to this safe city. He’d long ago given up that pastime as unsuitable for a man nearly seventeen years of age. While they waited for the deputy head to signal school to dismiss, he leafed through pastel-tinted pages, scrawled with signatures of comedians, vocalists and compères, till he found some blank ones at the end.

  He loitered by the main door while Sergeant whisked his cane at passing buttocks until the bell rang for Double Art and Inky went in with the rest. Theo ran to the bogs and hid there, eyes on the empty playground, till Hines came out with his visitor, blatantly calling him Larry. Theo scampered forward and thrust his book at him.

  “Sir, can I have your autograph?”

  The mouth slightly smiled, the eyes remained half-closed as they had when confessing he hadn’t loved Rebecca but hated her. Hines was trying to shoo him off but Olivier looked at the pencil, shrugged and winked and took out his own fountain pen and signed. Quickly Theo babbled on, saying he wanted a start to his career in films and would there be anything he could do on the shooting of ‘Henry V’ that he’d mentioned in his talk? The famous face became wary, the eyes assessing him, his forwardness, his worth.

  “Mmm. I wonder how keen
you really are.”

  “Try me, sir.”

  “Enough to start at the bottom? Runner, tea-boy, go-fer.”

  “Go-fer, sir?”

  “Go-for this, go-for that…?”

  He literally had his tongue in his cheek while the eyes remained half-closed.

  “Anything, honestly, sir!”

  The actor had returned the book but now took it back and scribbled a name on the page facing his own.

  “Write to this chap at Elstree Studios. Say I told you to. He might have something. No promises.”

  “Now get along to your class,” Hines snapped and drew Olivier across the playground to his waiting taxi.

  *

  Olivier’s say-so led in a few weeks to a letter proposinng him as one of a team of dogsbodies on the picture. The production manager agreed to meet him in July, after school had broken up. With this in view, The Treaty of Tilsit seemed even more irrelevant and even Jenkin’s Ear had lost its magic.

  Fred ran him to Temple Meads and warned him not to be disappointed if he came away empty-handed. The theatrical business was notorious for fair-weather friends all saying ‘Dear Boy’ and ‘Darling’ and Mister Olivier may not be any different from the rest of the fraternity. He wished he could have come to London with him and tried a few handshakes on the right people but he was expected on the morrow by the manager of Gloucester branch. Theo stayed overnight with the aunt in Barking who would also be lodging Kay during her confinement. She lived about as far east as Elstree was north-west, a journey by tubes and buses that took at least two hours. Theo didn’t care. He loved the capital’s hugeness, a city that never seemed to end however far the trains took you. He gaped up at the high buildings in the centre, some of them rising six storeys into the sky. Rose had packed his overnight things in a small case Fred sometimes used for samples.