Love Fifteen Page 21

  ‘“And perhaps not,”‘ Hazel said, took the bottle from the baby, let him lean forward and waited for his quiet belch and slight seepage of milk.

  “Of course,” she said, “I’ll always like to see you and I know you’d like to meet him, but don’t you think Eugene changes everything? You and your family should really keep away. Kay’s going up to Oxford and that will put her out of temptation’s way. Only – if you went on visiting me… d’you see what I mean?”

  He put the wrapped reels in a brown paper carrier.

  “You saying you don’t want me to come again?”

  “Want? I very much want you to, never doubt that, dearest, but you can surely see how things are changing?”

  Yes, he could. In his inner self he knew. He’d left school and was a man. He’d worked with England’s greatest actor. The career that would take him to Hollywood had begun. He was lucky to have had what he’d heard an officer-voiced location manager describe as ‘a good war’, but there would come a lovely day when they’d all feast their tear dimm’d eyes on tomorrow’s clear blue skies. And when he thought about those cowards and rich sods on the Chicken Run, he found Shakespeare had got them on the nose too for ‘he which hath no stomach to this fight, let him depart… we would not die in that man’s company that fears our fellowship, to die with us.’ Though he’d been aching to be on that boat to Canada when war started, now he was hellish glad things had turned out the way they had. He had nothing to be ashamed of. He’d been a patriot without trying.

  Hazel was careful to busy herself with Eugene, mopping the milk he’d spilt down his bib, so that she could only offer her cheek to be kissed as Theo left. She heard his footsteps skipping down the long stairwell. By the time he’d reached the front hall, she was at the dormer, looking down for him, the baby laid back in his cot. She watched the top of his head as he emerged on to the high pavement and waited expectantly for him to turn his face upward for a last look and a wave but he only walked off to Park Street, grip in one hand and in the other a carrier bag that held that pictorial unexploded bomb. She’d forgotten exactly what he’d filmed. Standing in the narrow window space, she remembered leaning out to watch the fires and how he’d raised the skirt of her gown and would have taken her from behind if those men in the street below hadn’t shouted to ask if she was needed help. Help ? No, she knew how all right. It wasn’t the actual sensation she remembered but all that happened around it, the fires and thunderous noise and lights and a feeling that nothing would ever be the same again.

  A groaning bus took him up Whiteladies Road and Blackboy Hill, then relaxed into top gear to travel across the Downs past the White Tree to Henleaze, where the negro G.I. had been shot as he tried to jump on the bus.

  Rosemount’s front garden was bare at this time, but with a few new shoots showing, crocus and snowdrops opening. To help with the baby, Tilda had moved in to his old room, so Rose had won that battle too and Fred had had to accept the old woman’s presence during his weeks at home and when he came back on those Fridays of the regular week away.

  Kay let him in and kissed him, another first, at least since they’d been kids themselves.

  He told her he’d called at Hazel’s and seen Eugene and both were fine. Rose asked him to agree the boy was lovely. He did and added that he liked his name too. It had an American sound: Eugene O’Neill the playwright, Gene Krupa the drummer, Gene Tierney the film actress…

  That first name was all she knew of the father.

  “In fact it’s more Irish but from the Greek for ‘noble’ and ‘well-born’,” Kay said. “Could have been some cruel sort of joke by the slaver who owned his great-great-grandparent.”

  “Or just a hope he’d turn out well?”

  “‘Reckon so ?”’

  “‘Not really.”’

  “She only went with him once,” Rose said, as she often did when defending what remained of her daughter’s good name.

  Kay said: “And he’ll go to war not knowing he’s got a half-English son.”

  He said he’d heard it had been an easy birth.

  “Oh, yes,” Rose said, “she’ll be fine to have lots more when the proper time comes.”

  He could see moist patches on Kay’s blouse.

  “Oh, fiddle-dee-dee!” she said in her Scarlett O’Hara voice and made him laugh by showing him the weird breast-pump Aunt Hattie had lent her to draw off the milk.

  “And Dad? How did he take it?”

  He had an image of Fred, already making every effort to accept the idea of a bastard grandson, then finding the boy was a picanniny. This family always somehow reduced the man’s ambitions to slapstick.

  “We thought it best not to tell him,” said Rose.” He was away when baby came along and Hazel took him off almost at once. By the time Dad was home on Friday there was no trace.”

  “He still doesn’t know? In this day and age?” Theo rapped out.

  “What’s it matter?” Kay said.” He’s happy I’ll be able to go to Somerville without any shame attached. Why spoil it for him?”

  “There were a few tricky moments,” Rose said, ‘“when Dad wanted to know Hazel’s address so as to go and see his first grandson. We had to persuade him it was best to make a clean break.”

  Was it only the baby Fred was eager to visit? Theo thought of his furtive admiration for the sight of Hazel in slacks, admitted man-to-man in the garden he now looked out on.

  From the kitchen Tlda brought a tray which she nearly dropped when she saw him. Now almost deaf, she hadn’t heard him arrive.

  “Where in the world did thee spring from?” she said, then to Rose: “I did think ee’d gone for a sawljur, to fight on the front in France.”

  “Well, Gran, I have in a way, at the Battle of Agincourt.”

  He kissed her, holding his breath against the smell of age and death that always hung about her.

  She held him at arm’s length.” That case, you better go out and take off your clothes in the garden, not to bring they lice in th’ouse.”

  “It was only in a film.”

  “We told you, mother,” Rose said, “several times we told you he was coming home for a day or two.”

  “I didn’t yer. Thee’awl be wanting a cup too,” she said and made her slow way back to fetch one.

  Rose offered him a cigarette and they all lit up. He wished the baby could be there then he could have got the four generations in a three-shot, closing in on Eugene’s brown head at his sister’s pale breast.

  For the rest of his stay he bragged about his new life, dropping names and technical terms he himself hadn’t known a few weeks before.

  They laughed at his imitations of Olivier and Robert Newton. It struck him as odd that it was he who was now being the sophisticated Londoner, which had till now always been Kay’s role. She still gave tinkling laughs and pinched her vowels like Vivien Leigh but that fell rather flat beside his first hand stories of her famous husband. Once or twice he found her gazing into space.

  Another job followed as go-fer, on a romance with plenty of Grieg concerto. He soon learned that this was no way to climb the slippery pole of big-screen success but would at least earn him a living while he waited to be called up. A few weeks later, at his Elstree lodging, he received a note with his home postmark, in Fred’s writing.

  “Trust you’re well and fighting fit.

  Your mother’s asked me to let you know that your sister was evidently more affected by the baby’s birth than we had thought. A day or two ago she was only just saved from throwing herself off the Clifton bridge. A passer-by got suspicious of her behaviour, as she kept approaching the metal railing and drawing back. Then she crossed to the other side and was trying to clamber up when he vaulted the barrier, ran forward and pulled her away. No bones broken but we’re all in a state of chassis here and, though I know they’ll probably finish off the war for us, I can’t help wishing those damn Yanks had never come to use our island as a stepping-stone to Europe. I enclose a cutt
ing from the Evening World reporting the incident, so some busybody must have phoned. How they got that unflattering snap of your sister is a mystery but our old Salvation Army neighbours at Villa Borghese are not above suspicion .after that business when I had to testify that they were dealing in stolen goods.”

  In spring he was called up and had to read about ‘Henry V’s triumphant opening. His two weeks’ embarkation leave was a chance to see how Kay was coping. Well, it seemed. Rose thought it was silly not to tell Theo where he was being sent. Fred explained that there was still a war on and all troop movements were top secret. The second front was launched from further along the coast and thousands were being evacuated, Rose said she was sick of hearing about the brave Cockneys and their blessed blitz doodle-bugs, as though the rest of the country hadn’t suffered too.

  Theo looked up Inky, now going steady with the same plain member of Margo’s entourage. Theo wanted to say that beauties always had beasts in attendance but held his tongue because it was clear Inky didn’t see it that way. The boyhood friends took her to eat in Carwardine’s restaurant and, as he hoped, she brought Margo along. It was the first time Theo had seen her since the day she fell in the street and the first time he’d heard her speak since the episode of the half-price ticket. He could see she was impressed by his work in films and by his having got so close to the stars.

  EPILOGUE

  Extract from Theo Light’s diary, 1st June, 2000.

  This morning, before catching the train to Bristol, I reread a few of Hazel’s old letters, ending with this one welcoming me back after my years in the US.

  24th November 1963

  Dear Theo,

  Wonderful news that you’re coming home! As you see, we’ve moved back near the city centre after so many years in Rosemount your old family home. It was good for Eugene while he was a boy, with the large garden and swing. But now he’s at the main university building, a central flat will be handier and anyway I never did feel at home in suburbia. It was good of your dad to let us have the place after your mother died and Fred went into the twilight home but not really my style. So, when you arrive in a month or so, you’ll find us not so far away from Brandon Hill and Charlotte Street. Nor for that matter from Fred’s place near Blackboy Hill.

  Your feelings at returning home are bound to be mixed. I know you thought you’d never be coming back except as a conquering hero. And perhaps you see yourself as having failed. A serious mistake, believe me. From an English viewpoint, that’s not how it looks at all. And you too should try to see your Hollywood experience as a rebuke to that whole horrible side of American capitalism. It’s their loss. Obviously those philistines wouldn’t welcome you with open arms, wouldn’t ever recognise your brilliant potential. How could they, when your whole thinking is critical of their most fundamental assumptions? Remember the day we met and saw ‘Mister Smith Goes to Washington’? Such wonderful technique and talent devoted to such a well-meaning but banal ideology! Twenty-odd years later, that propaganda machine is still mangling its most gifted members in the interest of archaic ideas – or ideals, as they say here in your hometown. To the rest of the world, Hollywood now looks obsolete. Its wasteful cars, tight-gusseted and corseted women, its Disney world-view, those grotesque religions. The paranoid fear of anyone who doesn’t kowtow to the mighty dollar.

  The American era’s over and done with. It’s history, while Europe – particularly England – is buzzing with future. Once you’re here again, you’ll see that you went off to a periphery and are coming home to an epicentre. Our new films and television plays are intelligent, critical, rebellious and based on reality. Theirs are comic-book dinosaurs.

  Kennedy’s murder the day before yesterday is being seen across the world as the death of a new kind of zeitgeist, but not by me. If we must read such insanities as portents or symbols, why not as the end of a gangster dynasty? Let’s not forget that the head of that family was a Fascist bootlegger and Nazi sympathiser. Old Joe K thought we hadn’t a chance against Hitler and advised us to surrender and save the world for capitalism before the Nazis blew us all to buggery. I’m sure all those other sons of his are only waiting to take the throne but their star’s not in the ascendant, it’s falling, burnt out. Rugged individualism, kill or be killed, is giving way to a new sort of sharing. If we can’t have all the world you and I dreamt of, let’s at least rescue some flotsam from the wreck and piece together a new homeland. We’d better, before they drop the bomb. We just about survived the Cuban missile insanity, in which the late and much-lamented hero took us to the brink. We just can’t trust James Stewart to see us through.

  And that ugly villain wasn’t reassuring either, though he finally did the right thing, despite his Kremlin bosses. Having to recognise, with great sadness, that the Russian state was only another form of slavery, we must not grow bitter or cynical, as your tone of voice suggests you’re about to. Here there’s a new eclectic consensus. Eugene was fathered on your sister by an unknown Afro-American father who came here to fight in that just war. He’s doing his doctoral thesis on this city’s slaving past and uncovering a terrible story. Of course, though there’s no detailed history and almost every physical trace of it’s gone, his ancestors were kidnapped and taken in chains from their tribal homes to labour in the southern states, to enrich with bananas, chocolate and tobacco the most respected merchant venturers of this faraway city where he was born and has grown up. The terraces and crescents of Georgian Clifton are stained with his people’s blood. The raw stuff that made possible our cigarettes and chocolate factories was harvested from their lifelong suffering and tears. The attics in which you and I first made love were the servants’ quarters of such a house. Oh, shit, I’m teaching grannie to suck eggs. You’ve written it so well in your screenplay. Come home and make the film in the right locations. They’re still here, mostly, but won’t be much longer.

  Your biological nephew has just come of age. I’m not sure whether the lack of even an adoptive father has done him any lasting damage. I’ve never burdened him with the details and it occurs to me this may be the time. Though Geoff was glad at first to have made such a symbolic gesture, he wasn’t big enough, man enough, to adopt a black bastard in the post-war years when racial prejudice was rampant here. Or perhaps it was more personal and he was ‘normal’ enough to want his manhood confirmed by siring his own children, which has since happened with his second wife. A man of fine idea(l)s but not the strength to live them, all mouth and no trousers. As well as which, choosing my words with care, he wasn’t half the man you were at half his age. A fact I evidently didn’t hide well enough. He suspected there’d been someone else but, of course, never knew exactly who. I could conceal your identity alright but not your effect on me and on my character, desires and expectations. When I remember our fond hopes – well, yours mostly – that he’d accept a ménage à trois, I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.

  Does all that embarrass you, coming from a fifty-year-old woman? Well, you ignored the difference in our ages when it was far more crucial than it seems now. When we had to end our affair because of Geoff’s release, you pretty soon chose someone your own age, or close to it. And, though it hurt me deeply, I couldn’t blame you for marrying Margo. She was (and for all I know still is) a great beauty, though her life between leaving school and becoming your wife was far from reassuring. Photographic modelling then was more glamorous than now and the sort she did was perfectly proper. She looked beautiful on those page-three bathing beauty shots, which took her into what your sister would no doubt call the demi-monde, a crowd that hung around that roadhouse out on the A38 to Bridgewater. To her credit, she pulled away just before the shooting-match that led to hubby being locked up. And I dare say Fred helped her elude the law by a few handshakes with the right policemen. So that you could both make that long westward journey at last. You must have seemed glamorous to her, coming home from those freelance jobs in films. And, as you put it in one of your early letters, she opene
d like a flower to California. So suitable for her, though not for you, despite your lifelong infatuation. Given all this, it couldn’t have totally surprised you that she went from small parts in B movies to soft-core modelling and finally the hard stuff. I dare say if you’d got a foothold in films sooner, she’d have stayed with you as long as your success lasted. But beauty like that must be as much a curse as a blessing. I’m trying to write about her with kindness but you see I can’t, I sympathise too strongly with the pain she caused you. I can share the bitterness, shock and shame of your inadvertent first sight of her performance in that blue film.

  Speaking of which, and of course only between us, did you ever have the old ciné footage developed that you took of us in Villa Borghese and Rosemount? If not, I suppose it’s mouldering somewhere in those cans. Is it acetate or nitrate stock that decomposes like that? You told me once but I forget. Not a pretty thought but even less pretty would be the prospect of its being passed around and shown somewhere. I was reading in a life of Cary Grant that he kept his childhood mementoes of this city in a Hollywood vault, his scout-uniform and snapshots of his poor mother before they locked her away in the madhouse. We’re all more or less haunted by our pasts, even heroes like him.

  Fred’s looking forward to seeing you, of course. It’s an excellent sheltered home. I call on him at least once a week and find him being waited on by all those old dears, his fellow inmates, like a bull grazing in a field of cows. Except, of course, that Rose was the only woman he ever really loved and his flirtations with the other residents are mere gallantry. Soon after your mother died, he came round to Charlotte Street one afternoon and made an inappropriate pass at me. An odd experience, you can imagine, as he resembles you a good deal and for some moments it was as though you’d overtaken me in years and we were about to start again with all the advantages of youth being with me for a change. As gently as possible, I let him know that his gesture wasn’t welcome. He begged my pardon and suddenly sobbed, saying he couldn’t bear life without his beloved Rose. Of course, his memories are mostly of a younger woman, before her dementia. Not that she ever had much of a memory, did she? In old age her mind began to play tricks with time, allowing her to relive stretches of her past as part of the montage that became her natural element. You caught that beautifully in her last scene in your script.