Love Fifteen Read online

  Not to waste tuppence on a platform ticket, Fred said goodbye at the station’s gothic entrance, wished him good luck and palmed him four florins he could use to hand out as thanks for favours.

  On the London platform he was asked by grinning Uncle George if he wanted his case carried. He showed him where to stand to get a good seat when the train came in. Lowering his voice and looking sideways, he enquired after Kay. Theo hardly answered, more bothered by the first example of a problem that would stay with him for years: when and to whom and how-much to give as tips to people Kay called menials. Should he hand a florin to his uncle? Before he could embarrass them both by trying, the Paddington express arrived.

  At Hayes, the first signs of real civilisation prepared him for London: the Horlicks Malted Milk and Decca record factories, the last one redolent of blue-label discs and swing bands he had jumped about to when he was a mere titch. Not long after, he changed to the tube, then again at The Embankment, reaching Barking after twenty-five stops.

  His first visit to a film studio hardly brought on dizzy spells. The great sheds he would later learn to call stages looked more like the hangers at Filton aircraft factory than the promised land he expected. The film was in post-production so he saw no shooting. The few people he met weren’t much different from those in Dad’s wholesale depot. Though Fred boasted about his son’s first job when on the road, at home he advised his son to start putting in for a decent pension. The film wouldn’t last forever.

  “Yeah, but in a year or so I’ll be called up.”

  “Let’s hope the war will be over before that.”

  “They haven’t invaded France yet. And even when it’s over they won’t just suddenly sack all the soldiers. They’ll probably go on calling bods up for some time after. Even years. So Geoff says anyway.”

  “Who?”

  “Mrs. Hampton’s husband.”

  “Of course. Kay’s child’s father-to-be.”

  They were sweeping and raking the fallen leaves on a Saturday afternoon. Autumn had struck Rosemount’s garden, a season Fred found more sympathetic than spring, when all the burgeoning bewildered him. Rose badgered him to sweep up all the blessed leaves like the neighbours had and he recruited Theo to give a hand. They both enjoyed the smouldering fires that slowly reduced the pile to ash. Rose wouldn’t allow a compost heap, saying they harboured vermin.

  “I gather Mr. Hampton wasn’t keen on the idea at first,” Fred said, “which I find hardly surprising.”

  “I was surprised,” Theo said, helping with a rake.

  Fred shook his head.” A man likes to feel his children are his own.”

  “Does he?”

  “You will, in time.”

  “I don’t want kids at all. Can’t stand them. Horrible oiks, always messing and yelling.”

  He especially had in mind the way titches played up in cinemas, just like they did in school, which showed how stupid they were. He’d later find the same when the other bods in his service corps watched a film in the camp cinema. They lacked the sensibility to be a proper audience but that would change in years to come when they’d been educated like everyone else.

  “That only goes to show how young you are.”

  “Kay feels the same way about babies.”

  “Now. But wait till hers arrives. And that concerns me, I must say. The birth of her maternal instinct. Will she stick to her intention of going to Oxford? Don’t just dump them on the heap like that, son. Let the air get to the fire.”

  For awhile they worked in silence. Fred rested and, for the first time ever, offered his son a cigarette. Theo imagined a similar scene when he handed out the other contents of his drawer.

  “No,” Fred went on, sounding like Bernard Miles being the dependable countryman on a warship or C.H. Middleton doing In Your Garden on the Home Service, leaning on the rake or digging for victory on plots where once had been herbaceous borders, “I imagine your lady tutor’s not the sort who’d take no for an answer. Wouldn’t stand any old buck. Wears the trousers, I’d say.” He gave Theo a sly glance.” And looks pretty good in them too, those slacks she sometimes favours. Very attractive, I’ve often thought, but she wouldn’t be the sort to grant her favours to any Tom, Dick or Harry. Anyone who came sniffing round her would get short shrift, I imagine. Behind that severe demeanour, you know what I mean, son, once aroused… what d’you think?”

  “Dunno.”

  “No? Well, no, I’m glad you don’t. You naturally think of her as a teacher. She’s a bit on the mature side for you but from an older man’s point of view… “

  “I don’t see much of her now, since deciding to leave school. Now I’ve passed School Cert, I’ve got no more use for algebra and history. And she wants to make a clean break with our family.”

  “Much the best, especially for young Kay …”

  He tossed his fag-end into the steaming, flickering heap.

  “No, I can quite imagine her husband’s eagerness to rejoin her… also his reluctance to admit they can’t have a family of their own. A man wants to feel his line goes on, his children are his own seed that can bear his likeness as well as his name. Given that you and your sister and I aren’t always on the closest of terms, you are at least my progeny, not fathered by person or persons unknown. Which is why, however we may differ, I shall always love you both.”

  What saved Theo from rushing to his room in a fit of embarrassment was that during all this Judge Hardy stuff at least Fred never met his eyes. Next he grabbed the handles of a barrow and wheeled it up the path. “Understand, son? Flesh of my flesh?”

  To cool the hellish blush that came to his face, Theo did Mickey Rooney as Andy Hardy, moving his scalp forward and making his Adam’s Apple go up and down like old wossname used to at the Film Society. What was his name?

  At which moment swollen little Kay pushed open a French window and called them to tea, thank Christ.

  Was it Moss or Stone? Forgetting all that already.

  The shared cigarette was symbolic, a rite of passage. So much of Theo’s old life was being cast off now. His last end-of-term show had included a vicious send-up of the bollocking he’d got from old Hines after Olivier’s visit.” To importune an eminent guest in such a cavalier fashion,” he said (or that’s what Theo wrote him saying, which he thought more important), “was a gross impertinence, a social solecism of the most heinous nature. Solecism, by the way, means …”

  He’d enjoyed taking the piss out of that but somehow the mock-Gothic place and all its mock-Gothic characters were already ancient history, along with crazy comedy. Imitating Olivier’s way of talking was great but the thrill of those words in that voice was greater. It gave you a sense of something huge, going back centuries, that was still there in the present and would continue into the future.

  He and Inky saw each other still but only at school. when his old friend was free from his insurance office. Then Inky blurted out breathless accounts of how he’d kissed the breasts of one of Margo Carpenter’s plain attendants one evening up on Purdown. Once the first anguish was over, Theo found he was able to tolerate Hazel’s absence, reminding himself that after all she was quite old. For his remaining weeks at home, he avoided Charlotte Street and was watchful on walks down Park Street to the Central Library beside the Cathedral. He spent hours poring over the few books on cinema he could find in the reference section. This was before the era when film buffery became a profitable market, when every small-part player rated a full-page obit in the posh papers. At home he learnt most of Henry V by heart and even swotted the actual battles of Harfleur and Agincourt. Much as he idolised its maker, by October he doubted whether this wizard battle-cry of a play could ever make a decent film. If it did, how many of the sweaty-nightcap brigade would pay to see it ?

  His months on the production were a foretaste of National Service. In later years, when younger people wondered why British films went on fighting the second war for twenty years after it had ended, he told them how al
ike the military and movie worlds were. In both, a huge number of idle serfs supported an elite of actual fighting men; the long-awaited battles, when they finally came, were mostly a few hectic skirmishes followed by more periods of inertia while a hundred crew and cast awaited a burst of sun. The forces also embodied and codified a class system that appealed to the social climbers who ran the movie industry. Within twenty years, the dialect the actors spoke would be as archaic as sedan-chairs and top hats.

  He never exchanged words with Olivier again but was often near him when editing decisions were made. He thrilled again to those great soaring harangues before the battles. Till now he’d felt little about the war, taking for granted that we had to fight it and would certainly win. Now he found the best words for that in the unlikely but wonderful scene when the king talks with the common folk on the eve of Agincourt.” His cause being just and his quarrel honourable.” Of course Hazel was right in saying Henry’s hadn’t been just in any way, only land-grabbing and empire-building, quite like Hitler in fact, but – whatever the origins – she conceded that this second global set-to was as permissible as war could ever be. Old Swiftie may have got their goats, bunking off prayers by being a Jew but you couldn’t imprison an entire race in camps just because a few of them were jammy sods.

  TWENTY

  To cut down on travelling time, he left his Barking aunt, digged in the north-west suburbs and heard only by post that Rose and Kay had moved to stay for a spell with the Aunt in Barking. On one occasion they managed to meet, all three – mother, son and sister – in Lyons’ Corner House in Oxford Street. Rose brought some smarter new shirts and trousers Fred had scrounged from the buyer of Men’s Outfitting,. so he’d feel more at home in the big bad world. By now Theo had learnt a bit about ordering food in a restaurant and played the father’s part far better than Fred could have.

  In November, a letter from Fred at Rosemount told him Kay’s baby had ‘come along’: a premature boy, four pounds five ounces, mother and child both doing well. When the contractions became regular, Aunt Harriet and Tilda had come to Henleaze from Newfoundland Road on two buses as Fred was away in Dorset and couldn’t give them a lift. When he returned on Friday, he made another bonfire in the garden to burn the placenta, wrapped in a newspaper. This part of reproduction hadn’t come into old Sparrow’s lessons on the axolotl. Cold-blooded salamanders didn’t breed that way.

  The male child, being small, came easily and no-one was any the wiser. As planned, Hazel was there as soon after the birth as possible, to take it away before Kay could change her mind. A fortnight later,. a sunny weekday, Theo went home for the first time since taking up the film job. At Temple Meads he managed to avoid having his bag carried by his uncle and took a taxi to Charlotte Street. Hazel had been warned by a postcard. She appeared at the attic dormer and tossed down the front door key in a small cotton bag with a drawstring. He’d brought only a weekend grip and climbed the fifty stairs as he’d done so many times in so many different moods, always wanting love and sure of finding it.

  Hazel had already opened the flat door and stood not far inside. Fred, he thought, would have been pleased to see her wearing the trousers and he himself thrilled at the white angora sweater that he’d often removed over her head, pulling her eyes back, making them look Chinese. The outline of her breasts caused him a passing pang of desire. He didn’t know how to behave but she helped by offering a sisterly kiss. She led him by the hand towards the bedroom half. They approached a free-standing cot and he looked in at his new-born nephew.

  “Jesus Christ,” he said, “he’s a negro!”

  “Eugene,” she said, smiling.” As soon as she saw him, Kay knew who the father was and insisted he be named after him, though he’ll probably never see him.”

  “No-one told me,” he said, “not Dad or Mum or even Kay. Too ashamed, I suppose. Poor Mum. Did Kay expect him to be coloured?”

  “She reckoned it was fifty-fifty, judging by the dates.”

  “What about the Youth Club bods?”

  “That was a red herring. No, it had to be one of two G.I.’s. one white, one negro. She thought there was no point telling anyone before she saw which came. It was only the once. He was posted away soon after. He’s training somewhere to take part in the Second Front.”

  Taking the tiny hand between his fingers, Theo looked at the pale palms and nails. The infant gripped and kicked. and smiled.

  “Oh, ma babbie,” he remembered Rose singing, “ma liddle darkie babbie …”

  “Gorgeous, eh?” Hazel said, touching the dark hairs at his fontanelle.

  She lifted him and held him at arm’s length. “Just look at him. Isn’t he fantastic!”

  “Fantastic.”

  “Yes, he is,” she went on, swinging him from side to side, “he is, he is, oh yes he is …”

  “Quite like Fats Waller,” Theo said, “or a clean-shaven Count Basie.”

  “Thank you,” Hazel said, and began putting words into the baby’s mouth: “I’ll take that as a compliment, he says, knowing your love of jazz, he says. Yes, he does!” She put her face in his belly and blew with a shuddering sound, making the baby laugh and Theo smile..” Take him and hold him.”

  She passed Theo the swaddled boy and for the first time he held a infant and found how little it weighed. He looked a sight better than white kids of that age, all boiled cabbages or drunken Churchills, more a wrinkled walnut, hands and arms twitching, his face practising a range of expressions for later life – pleasure, outrage, welcome, fear, pain…

  “That’s all wind. Support his head more,” Hazel advised him. The skull already had a light shroud of tight black curls.

  “Have you told Geoff?”

  “Oh, yes. He’s quite alright about it.”

  “Why wouldn’t he be?”

  “Some men wouldn’t.”

  “Small-minded bastards,” he said, making Hazel look up sharply. On the film-unit he’d already learned how to use a wider vocabulary. “But not Geoff.”

  He cradled Eugene in his left arm and walked to the dormer.

  “In some ways,” Hazel said, behind him, “his being negroid works to our advantage. When Geoff comes home I mean. He couldn’t possibly be yours and mine. In case anyone ever did drop a word, you know, about us.”

  “Would that worry Geoff? Any more than it would his adopted son being brown?”

  “I just meant it could make him wonder if I’ve told him the whole truth.”

  He held the baby up to the window and showed him the panoramic view. There was little sign of the damage they’d seen done during that first raid. Most buildings in the city centre still stood. Gaps in terraces had been filled with wooden buttresses, shoring up the houses till they could be rebuilt when the men came home. Everyone’s minds had now turned to invading Europe and beyond that to bluebirds and bananas.

  “But if this was really your baby that you’d had by a coloured Yank, Geoff would really like that, wouldn’t he? All part of the new world-state of brotherly love and without all those shitty ideas our parents had. How did Mum and Dad take it, by the way, him being negro?”

  “Oh, shocked, but mostly because they’d been so easily deceived by Kay.”

  “Mum too? Talk about people in glasshouses.”

  “They didn’t have long to form a view of any sort. As soon as he was born I went over to Rosemount and found Kay giving him the breast. White against brown. A pretty picture.”

  “Will you feed him that way too?”

  He turned to find her shaking her head at him and smiling.

  “Why don’t those schools teach you something that matters?”

  She explained the biology of lactation as she’d earlier done that of ovary, sperm and the menstrual cycle. Eugene started niggling and she took him back.

  While she gave him his bottle, performing the rituals of motherhood with amazing ease, she told him a corporal from Geoff’s unit had come on compassionate leave and brought an uncensored letter from
him. He was expecting early repatriation. He’d proved too troublesome in Egypt, organising a Soldier’s Parliament which encouraged Other Rankers to ask the wrong sort of questions. The authorities had made life tough for him but hadn’t broken his spirit. He’d committed no offence against King’s Regulations, only encouraged the men to think. This hadn’t fomented mutiny and there was no chargeable crime. So now they’d decided to get him off their backs by an early release.

  The presence of baby Eugene made it easy for Theo and Hazel to exchange no more than the most formal gestures of parting. Though his cine-camera didn’t take professional film-stock, Theo had scrounged several reels of the right stuff at Elstree and now exposed close-ups, long-shots and slow pans of Hazel and the baby. He only once referred to their former intimacy, when saying how these pictures would differ from those he’d taken at Villa Borghese and Rosemount. She smiled but didn’t encourage more talk on those lines. It reminded her, though, of those undeveloped reels she still had hidden in a space beneath the roof. Now that Geoff was liable to arrive without warning, she wanted Theo to take them with him. Following her directions, he squeezed through the low door and brought them out. While wrapping them in an old copy of The Daily Worker, he promised to call again on his next time home, which would be after ‘Henry V’s completion or, as he called it, wrap. There’d be some months for him to wait for call-up, unless he volunteered and went in under age. Most likely by his next visit Geoff would be home and Theo would meet him and hear all about the Soldiers’ Parliament and the brave new world that was about to begin. And perhaps he and Hazel would tell him how they’d practised all Geoff’s ideas about free love.