Love Fifteen Read online

  “Yeah,” said Raeburn, “but even last term you always stayed in class while we went up to the Hall, didn’t he, Sir?”

  “Anyone think they know?”

  “Something to do with religion, Sir?”

  “You’re supposed to be asking Mister Swift, not me.”

  “Don’t you believe in God then, Swifty?”

  “Lot more than you do, Cox, I bet.”

  “Alright then, what? What d’you bet?”

  Cox was common as muck, the son of a fruit-trader in the market, always bottom but tolerated by being unstoppable on the rugger pitch and on the big drum in the OTC band.

  “Anything you like.”

  “Right, that’s enough,” rapped Jimmie, clapping hands in the fussy old-womanish way that somehow never lost him authority. No-one played him up, no-one disliked him or spoke a word against him yet he did nothing to beg or earn their affection. Theo had been told by an Old Boy that when he’d first arrived in nineteen-oh-something, Jimmie’s suit was already an antique like Robert Donat’s in ‘Goodbye, Mr. Chips’. He must have had two, handed down perhaps, but of the same cut, material and colour so that he seemed always to wear the same one.

  The Swift incident was an example of his kindness, though none of them could have quite said why.

  He rattled through the rest of the names and saw them off to the next class. Double Maths! It was hell’s unfair to have got through the century-long Silence and still have to put up with that.

  Every bod was laden like a pack-mule. From one shoulder hung a satchel bulging with text-books, exercise-books, pencil-box and geometry set; from the other a battered box with his gas-mask in, used mostly in the way jousting warriors swung spiked iron balls. Mothers outdid each other with fabric covers in various plaids but after the first fun of blowing out the rubber cheeks to make horse-farting noises, no-one ever opened the boxes or wore the masks again. Small tables were set up in open spaces around the city, painted with some stuff that was supposed to turn yellow when poison gas was about. No gas ever was, except when a mains was hit by high-explosives and that was the wrong kind and anyway you could smell the pong a mile off. The tables were now only used as bogs by pigeons.

  Theo moved along sepulchral corridors below the Hall, where dusty light beamed through what-Dolly-called mullioned windows. Take those specks away, he thought, and there’d be no visible rays. Old Rabbit Hodges’s demonstration in Physics had shown this in a way he’d never forget in the many decades to come. The insides of a closed glass box had been lightly greased some days before, so that any floating particles had settled. Now a beam was projected through it, clearly reaching the first side, vanishing for the twelve inch depth of the tank and emerging again into the mote-filled air. Q.E.D.: Light is invisible till reflected off a surface, even the surface of dust.

  He chose to walk beside Jake Swift, whose secret he’d learned last term at the sports field while they’d both been waiting to bat. Jake got off prayers because he was a Jew. When Theo had said that surely Swift wasn’t a Jewish name and the author of ‘Gulliver’s Travels’ was Irish, he was told Jake’s great-great-great-grand somethings had come here as refugees from some Ice Age persecution in France, a bit like those in Picture Post last year, hellish weird shots of ‘Juden’ painted on shop-fronts and an old bod having his nose measured. But weird too because it was all so far away, especially pictures from the Warsaw ghetto, whatever and wherever that was, the bods all with long hair and black robes and Homburg hats like Dad sometimes used to wear and the shop-signs were done in Gothic writing like in his German reader. Anyway, Swift said, when his ancestors had landed at Falmouth, the customs-man asked the father for his name and, not knowing English, he thought he was being asked his religion and said ‘Juif’. So the name his family had gone under ever since was the nearest the customs-oik could get when he wrote it down. Jweeft.

  There was only one hope for the afternoon, the remote chance of an air-raid warning. From Room 12 evacuation was to the university basement where, among retorts and burners and all the usual boggy pongs, there were unborn human babies, huge pale tadpoles floating in jars of fluid. Only once so far an alert had sounded when they were dozing over equations and the teacher had shepherded them across the road to sit out the Double-Maths with grown-up bods and women in white overalls. They talked a sort-of English that was about as hard to crack as those bits of Chaucer he’d heard Hines reading to the swots once when he had to take round a message that the field was flooded. One of these bods had told him these grown-ups were all students. Grotesque to think of being that old and still learning, still waiting for life to begin! By the time he was their age he’d either have gone to Hollywood or killed himself, probably by plummeting ker-splatt off the bridge into the Avon Gorge, if he hadn’t long ago escaped to California. Was this the life those swots were going to, when Theo and the other decent bods had to applaud when Old Hines announced their scholarships to Oxford and Cambridge on Prize Day? Was this air-raid shelter the prize they got for being swots ?

  Today 3B were unlucky. Double-Maths crawled by uninterrupted. Copies of Men Only and London Opinion were passed along rows of clumsy iron and wooden desks that were like huge cobblers’ lasts. These books had cartoons and bits of writing but all anyone looked at were the artistic nudes with permed hairstyles, with the vital parts in deep shadow. For boys without sisters the merest glimpse of tits, cleavage and nipples was enough to give them the horn. To him, used to a family with two women – three really but Gran was too old to count – this was nothing special. Sister Kay’s he’d seen often enough as they grew from little bumps to needing a bra, and even his mother’s on occasion, despite his real efforts not to. Men who only had brothers spent a lot of time looking up breast and bosom in dictionaries. Once they’d pocketed their caps some way from school, bods were expected to shout ‘Butter!’ when a busty girl ran bouncing for a bus.

  Monday evening Dad was usually away travelling in the firm’s Morris Twelve and wouldn’t be waiting to give Theo a car-ride, so he faced either a long traipse to Jamaica Street and the 21 all the way home or a free-wheel on Inky Black’s crossbar down the Brow, to be paid for by a long haul up the other side. The city was built on steep hills with ravines between. As they pushed the bike up Cromwell Road, the 21 could usually be heard groaning in low gear behind them and Theo longed to flag it down at the next stop but by now he’d spent the fare on a Mars Bar he’d halved with Inky to give them energy for the climb. At the top, the bus at long last changed up to second, lifting every passenger’s spirits as it free-wheeled down and along Chesterfield Road. Theo and Inky stared at the bus grinding past them. They were hoping for a glimpse of Margo Carpenter, commonly acknowledged among the men from all the decent schools to be the city’s most beautiful woman. No sign of her broad-brimmed hat or maroon blazer today. Detention? Unlikely. What sin could such an angel commit? Was she at Singing then? Extra maths? Swimming? They groaned at the Esther Williams visions this aroused. Or just being kept in because none of her teachers could bear to part with her beauty till tomorrow?

  Every morning he tried to time catching the bus she usually took. She was too awesome to speak to, though once he’d sat beside her, the warmth and slight movement of her body against his giving him a horn he had to really struggle with when she wanted to get out before him at The Arches and made him stand up to let her pass.

  Inky Black was his second-best friend and his terrace house, Schubert Villa, was down the avenue, one of a group also called Mozart, Beethoven and Wagner, all built from the same sort of rough grey stone as castles and churches and their School, so probably about as old as Dad, with sticking-out windows on the bottom floor so that anyone inside, by plucking aside the net curtains, could spy up and down the avenue. Theo’s was almost the same but on a corner, with windows all down one side and the front, giving a long-shot view of both streets. He and his sister Kay did their homework at the dining-table, where they could observe the approach of the
few youths of either sex they thought worth looking at. Failing that, their grotesque elders, each by now supplied with a presumed past, a set of secret vices and bodily disorders that accounted for their shifty walks, uneven gaits, furtive twitches and famished ways of smoking.

  An Austin Seven was at the kerb outside Villa Borghese. Both boys knew this signified a visit from Vince. Inky joined him in a fleeting impression of the way Vince smoked, lighted fag-end cupped towards palm. He then pushed off, leaving Theo, standing with both feet on one pedal, down past the composers, then the painters – Constable, Gainsborough and Lawrence Villas – to where it met Appian Avenue. Far from being black, Inky wasn’t even dark, but ginger, like his mother and sister. All had flaming heads and freckled skins, which gave him the right to caricature their neighbours’ grotesqueries. Only one kind of hair was worse than ginger and that was curly. A bod called Temple was stricken with this curse and nicknamed Shirley after the Hollywood child-star, famous for her cute performance of Animal Quackers in my soup. The poor sod was envied by mothers but for all the bods he was a warning of what might happen if you ate up your crusts.

  In the front hall of Villa Borghese, about two square feet of it lit by a forty watt bulb, he dropped satchel and gas-mask, unbelted his blue mac and pelted up the stairs two at a time to the bog, slammed the door behind him, threw up the seat and just managed to unbutton his flies before a jet bounced spraying off the back of the lav where the trade-name The Jap encouraged accuracy and sheer deluge. Long before the final squirts, he began the flushing process by yanking the chain’s ceramic handle. At the third pull, the cistern released a cascade he could never quite believe would stop before it flooded the upper floor. Outside again, he grabbed banister and dado-rail and vaulted down six stairs to the half-landing. One more swing brought him to ground level, where he took off and hung his mac on the hallstand and opened the dining-room door, doing everything by touch and habit in the murky hall. He entered the middle-room where they mostly lived, known to his mother and sister as the dining-room while others were called breakfast and drawing-room.

  “Look at the oil on his trousers,” said his mother as she crossed from window to fireplace and flicked ash into the tiled grate. “That’s from riding home on Whatsname’s crossbar. I’ve told you not to. What d’you think I give you your bus fares for?”

  Victor Sylvester’s Ballroom Orchestra – sax, violin, piano and wire-brushed drums – was doing ‘Jealousy’ on the National programme.

  “Can’t we have this off?” Theo said.” Isn’t Lew Stone on?”

  “I’m asking about your trousers.”

  “Don’t you like this music, Theo?” Vince said, winking at him, always trying to make friendly advances. He flicked his dog-end into the fire. His were the sort of crumpled features you saw on men who slinked from the side-doors of pubs or served in back-street tobacconists. Rose was always telling Theo not to play with common boys from beyond the allotments but Vince looked far commoner to him, in a different way, more citified and crafty, with an accent that wasn’t from round here or London or anywhere definite at all but put together from the different towns he’d lived in. You could be pretty sure he’d never be found far from the centre of anywhere. It was right that he and Rose had met in Crocker’s, one of the city’s two cocktail bars, a place that had a neon sign of a triangular Martini glass that never stopped being filled up with red stuff with white bubbles. Until the black-out turned it off, like all the signs he used to love.

  Vince’s little suitcase, open on the settee, was very like Vince himself – what the Jerries called ersatz, made of some sort of carboard or fibre, but holding a promise of illicit treats. A sharp contrast to Dad’s case, that he set off with every Monday, of real leather, with his initials embossed on one side, and so heavy you could hardly lift it even before he filled it with his samples.

  “Sylvester’s lovely to dance to,” Vince said, “strict tempo. Like Charlie Kunz.”

  “No,” Theo answered.” It’s too commercial.”

  “Don’t start another blessed row,” Rose told them, “my head’s splitting with all the arguments in this house.”

  “What arguments? What about?” Theo asked, crossing to warm his front at the half-dozen glowing coals in the fireplace. Now he could see his face and check his Brylcreemed hair in the diamond-shaped glass built in to the panelled surround.

  “Armistice Day,” sister Kay said, without looking up from her work, “Vince reckons the last war did no good and this one won’t either and Gran says we shouldn’t speak disrespectfully of those who died.”

  “The war to end wars.” Vince gave a slight laugh, “and after twenty years here we are with another.”

  Rose lowered her voice.” You must understand Mother lost a son in the last.”

  “I do, love.”

  At this cheeky endearment, Kay raised her eyes to meet Theo’s in the glass.

  Rose went on: “All Mother said was she thought it wouldn’t hurt you to show respect for two minutes a year, even if they don’t have it at the Cenotaph any more.”

  “A respect I don’t feel?,” Vince asked.” Hypocrisy, wouldn’t you say, son?”

  He was what Rose often said of the coalman: familiar. Like calling their mother ‘love’ and him ‘son’.

  “All war’s wrong,” Theo muttered, examining how well his solemn expression in the glass matched the words he spoke. He’d got it from Leslie Howard.

  “So we shouldn’t fight Hitler?” asked Rose.

  “Got to now. That doesn’t make it right.” He felt the need to contradict this intruder. “And anyway what’s two minutes a year?”

  “The Great War doesn’t mean much more to us than, par exemple, Waterloo,” Kay said, blotting and closing one exercise-book and opening another.

  Though he disagreed, Theo didn’t argue with big sister. She could prove black was white when she felt like it and anyway he wanted her on his side against Vince.

  Tilda their grandma had now come in from upstairs. For evening wear, she’d shed her cross-over pinafore and fixed with hairpins the preserved switch of youthful brown that lay curled among the sparse grey strands remaining on her head. “All I say,” she began, “is them poor buggers died for king and country. And some did come back simple like poor Stan.”

  “More fools them,” Vince said, making his next Capstan bob up and down as he lit the end.

  Tilda turned to him. “And why aren’t you in uniform? Too old to be called up?”

  “I’m in a reserved occupation.”

  “I see, said the blind man. That’s what you do call the black market, is it ?”

  “Mother,” Rose said, “look at this boy’s trousers. Covered in oil.”

  “I’ll soon get that off. Put on another pair, Theawll. I’ll do them in the sink and go over them with the h’iron later.”

  “There’s a dear.” Rose said.

  Vince asked: “Can we get you anything while we’re out, Mother?”

  Kay and Theo exchanged another glare. Now he was calling their Grandma Mother. Next they knew he’d be calling Dad Dad. Or Pop! That’s if they ever met, which Rose would make sure never happened.

  “No, thanks, I got some stout in the larder. Just take off they flannels, Theawll.”

  “I’ll bring them down,” Theo said and ran out and up to the half-landing in two vaults, along the passage, through the bedroom Gran slept in on weekdays and which smelt of old age – mothballs, camphor, dust and damp bedlinen. And by the slight whiff of ammonia, he knew she still used the po under the bed.

  Dusk was fading to dark beyond the single window of his own room. The five apple-trees in the small back garden had shed their leaves and the year’s crop of eaters and cookers were now spread on newspaper across the attic floors upstairs.

  Though it was yet still day, Theo drew the black-out curtains, turned on the light and took a Brunswick label ten-inch of the Mills Brothers doing ‘Some of These Days’. Jiggling to the rhythm, he dr
opped his flannels and looked about the room. From his waist-height to near the sloping ceiling, cut-out photos of stars and starlets had been pasted over the faded floral wallpaper. Coloured sketches of Ladies Out Of Uniform from London Opinion showed nudes wearing only service caps or tin helmets at saucy angles. Another patriotic sequence had Misses Norway, Greece, France, Holland and his favourite, Miss Poland, her gaping bolero showing breasts with nipples just concealed by the cruel Nazi ropes of her captors stretched taut around her puff-sleeves. On her lower half she wore a skimpy European sort of teatowel.

  He had just pulled on his other trousers when Vince knocked and walked straight in.

  “You’ve got to remember, son, your mother’s going through a hard time. All mothers are. But her especially. She’s highly strung… what-you-might-call sensitive. And not used to factory work, a cut above the other women out at the Patchway aicraft works. With your Dad away during the week, she needs someone to turn to. Got me?”

  He winked, looked at the pasted pictures and threw a packet of ten Capstan Navy Cut, which Theo failed to catch.

  “Thanks, Vince,” he said, retrieving them from the floor.

  “Don’t say anything to your mother, eh?”

  He winked again.” Who’s this on the trumpet, Nat Gonella?”

  “It’s not a trumpet.”

  “What then, trombone?”

  “It’s one of the Mills Brothers doing a trumpet sound.”

  “Blackies, aren’t they ? You got to admire them, say what you like. Lovely rhythm. And good fighters. Well, look at Joe Louis.”

  He threw a false punch at Theo’s nose, making him flinch away then blush. Vince’s crumpled face smiled and winked. At last he went.

  When the record ended, he replaced it with the blue-and-gold Parlophone Rhythm Series of the Jimmie Lunceford band’s brilliant ’White Heat’. Jerking and plunging to its climactic riffs, waving his arms like the drummer, thrusting forward an imaginary sax, he felt for three minutes that life could never be better than this. When the soundbox moved to the innner groove, he lifted it, stacked the disc on its shelf and made final adjustments to his clothes.