Love Fifteen Page 5
“You wouldn’t know. In Bedminster.”
“A council school?”
“That’s right.”
She left money on the saucer, adding a threepenny bit to the total, then telling the waitress that, though she was very welcome, tipping was an iniquitous system that saved the bosses paying a just wage and was an affront to working women. The girl told her to keep her blooming tip if that was how she felt and to mind out who she called working-class.
“That waitress,” she said, leading the way to the foyer, “is already left behind by history. All that pecking-order business is a thing of the past. The war will see to that.”
The man this boy had called The Bloody Sergeant opened the door to let them on to the pavement. The sun, going down behind St. Nicholas church spire, cast its low light, slanting along the high shop-buildings of Castle Street. Hazel was going the other way so they parted. He hesitated though, studying the stills outside, unwilling to wake from the cinema spell. It was as though she’d ceased to exist. She asked:
“Have you ever seen any films from France, Russia or Germany?”
“I wouldn’t understand what they say. We only do Latin and school-cert French, mostly irregular verbs and a bit of translation.”
‘You don’t have to. They put the dialogue in English underneath, in what they call sub-titles.”
“Where d’you see them then?”
“At a club that meets on Sunday in The Central Library. You could come along.”
“Dad usually makes us all go for a run Sunday afternoon.”
“Athletic training, you mean?”
“No, in the Morris Twelve. Me and my Mum and sister.”
“Where’s he get the petrol?”
“He’s a traveller in hardware. It’s a business car. They reckon it’s essential war-work.”
Squinting into the sunlight, he turned on his Gaumont-British News voice.” Keeping open those vital supply-lines throughout the whole south-west to ensure no-one, however humble, goes without furniture-polish and flypaper.”
Christ, but he did it well. She smiled and said “Our meetings aren’t till early evening. You could get him to drop you on College Green when you’ve had your drive. And afterwards we drink tea and discuss the films we’ve seen in normal cinemas. We’ll be dealing with this one too. I’ve got a feeling they might give it the thumbs-down.”
“What twerps! It’s fantastically wizard.”
“So come along and make your case for it.”
He shrugged and looked across as an old man hawked and gobbed phlegm on to the pavement. On his shoulders a sandwich board advertised Garlick’s sports-shop.
Hazel felt a chill breeze touch her bare legs. She knew they were her best feature and was persevering with pre-war shoes with decent heels that gave her calves an even better shape. At school she wore flat and sensible ones. Until winter really came, she’d keep painting with liquid make-up and eyebrow pencil rather than wear those ugly stockings. As luxury goods got scarce, a sort of equality was coming into being, though not exactly the sort she and her husband Geoff had envisaged on their pre-war C.P. weekend courses. They’d imagined universal plenty but even universal shortage was a start, as long as it was fair, not discriminatory.
“I don’t even know what to call you,” she said.
“Theodore Light. Theo. What’s yours, Miss?”
“Hampton. Hazel. So we might see you Sunday?”
“Might, yeah. Thanks for taking me in. And the milk shake. Cheeroh.”
*
She turned and walked towards the bridge, pausing once to wave back, but the boy was pushing through the crowds towards Old Market. To him, she thought, she must appear almost middle aged. Before the war was over, she’d be more than thirty. And if it lasted another three years, even Theodore would be called up. Geoff was already thirty-two. Arithmetic had become a commonplace sort of day-dreaming. Playing around with past, present and future. Wishing would make it so. It’s a lovely day tomorrow. Pop songs say it all. When the lights go on again. In all the old familiar places. Bluebirds over the cliffs of Dover. Just you wait and see.
Alright, we will, stop bloody nagging. What else can we do, for Christ’s sake?
Why hadn’t she told him she was Missis not Miss? She crossed and continued beside the church into the little warren of markets, the only part of the city that reminded her of their visits to Spain and Italy for Independent Labour Party conferencesy, before Europe’s doors were closed. The narrow lanes and lighted taverns. Hardly. The poor pickings and tired people. A newspaper placard reported the usual lies about German planes shot down, a necessary myopia that just might get us through. No-one’s facing facts. They welcome any propaganda that contradicts the likelihood that Hitler will win. Old men with pitchforks won’t stop the strongest army in the world when the rest of Europe has fallen like France. A continent of rotten apples, she thought,reminded of the phrase by the pound she now paid for, along with vegetables to make a soup. And when the Wehrmacht and Luftwaffe have done what logic says they must, she and Geoff, with their Communist pasts, will be on the death lists. Unless, that is, the British ruling caste can do a deal with Hitler and set up a sort of Vichy state. A half-and-half, – what, north or south of a line from Bristol to The Wash? No, any bargains of that kind were ruled out by the drunkard Churchill’s demand for all-out war and total surrender. To think she and Geoff and their like had ended up in bed with that bellicose old bastard who’d actually called pacifists ‘spoil-sports’. He wasn’t far off Fascist himself, which was why he relished the chance of a scrap with someone his own size.
As she started down to Baldwin Street, a sudden gust along Welsh Back cut up the steps like a knife, and under the knee-length skirt, chilling her thighs. At home she’d change into slacks but, on her solitary days out, she dressed in ways Geoff would have fancied if he’d been here. She missed and needed his confidense that the war would change everything and open everyone’s eyes. Men and women in uniform were discovering what ordinary people had never known. As a sergeant in The Education Corps, he saw enlightenment dawning in men who were learning to use their minds for the first time, to understand how the world worked. He couldn’t be more specific in the censored air-mail letters he was allowed but she could read his encoded sub-text, between the lines. When she wrote that she wanted to join up too, he asked her to stay put and do the same job for the Other Ranks of Bedminster, the intended cannon fodder, as he was for those in Egypt. Though Geoff was in uniform, he wasn’t combatant but helping those who were to discover what the fight was for. They also serve who only stand and teach.
*
A new sort of teaching, Theo remembered her saying, not all boring treaties and battles and kings, handed down from on high by bods like Earl Hines with BBC voices but a debate where the class asked questions and argued with what the teachers said and they all learnt from each other. Theo thought that sounded about as shambolic as old Birdie Sparrow’s classes where all they ever learned was about the love life of axolotls.
He was walking east into Old Market Street, a part of town seldom visited by middle-class people, as Rose always called their family. Different again from narrow closed-in Castle Street in the old-as-God quarter, this wide open thoroughfare had tramlines down the centre and always a few waiting to start their journeys to parts he’d always avoid. And farther along there was a coaching-inn, a drill hall, and The Empire, a variety theatre where Theo had once appeared as The Voice of Them All in a local talent show. The rest of the bill were professional turns and one was a dancer who wrestled with a python and every night lost the struggle to retain her upper clothes, but when her blouse came off she had to stand stock-still till the lights blacked-out. If she didn’t time it exactly, the local Watch Committee would close the show. Or so he was told by Dad, who made a rare effort to come and see Theo perform in this show and happened by chance to catch the dancer too and thought her very artistic. And to his son’s surprise came a second tim
e to give him a good loud clap and some hints on how to enunciate and asked if he’d encountered the snake lady at all behind the scenes.
Old Market reeked of beer and those who drank it walked sawdust from public bars out on to pavements. Barrels were rolled down chutes into cellars where men with red spotted kerchiefs shouted in dialects that had no consonants except ‘l’ and ‘r’. Until dusk, lights from windows and poultry shops full of dead birds warmed the darkening street. It always felt countrified here, halfway between village and city. Great horses pulled carts called brewer’s drays and ate from nosebags and delivered steaming heaps of spherical turds on to the cobbles. He was glad to reach Carey’s Lane without being shouted at or barged by rough kids with snotty noses and wearing boots with metal Blakeys that struck sparks off the pavement. Here he climbed into the waiting 81 double-decker, found a window-seat upstairs, wiped a clearing in the misted glass and sat staring by turns outwards and inwards to a screen where he ran a sequence in which Miss Poland was straining against the flogging being given her by a brutal Nazi played by Conrad Veidt. Her pleas for mercy only maddened the schweinhund more as the driver started the noisy engine and turned left along the main road. Veidt had raised the whip again when his wrist was seized by Flying-Officer Light, just dropped by parachute behind enemy lines. Recovering, the Nazi drew his Luger, levelled the barrel and squinted along the sights when, with a well-aimed kick, Theo sent the pistol flying, before felling him with a blow to the jaw. Miss Poland’s breasts heaved and grateful tears brimmed in her dark eyes, as he freed her and took her in his arms. Fade-out.
Rather than start another sequence, he thought about Mrs. Hampton. She must be some sort of Communist. One or two of the teaching staff at his school had been brought back to replace younger ones who’d joined up and a few of these had been wounded in the war against Franco, cartoonish bod in breeches and funny hat who was now on Hitler’s side. That was when being against Hitler made you a Commie but now that everyone was against him (except Italy and Russia and some sissy neutrals like Portugal and Switzerland) nothing was nearly as clear. Russians were Communists but they’d signed a treaty with Germany. He liked politics in Frank Capra films but in real life they got so mixed-up it made his head ache. He wished he’d told Mrs. Hampton that, if the Africans hadn’t been taken as slaves to America, there’d never have been a negro New Orleans or Louis Armstrong or Sidney Bechet or The Nicholas Brothers that were always the best thing in those films about Argentina. So out of all that misery came all that jazz and brilliance. But probably Mrs. Hampton liked commercial music, strict tempo and ballads, like his sister did. Though he hoped not.
*
Hazel crossed The Centre where, among a few trees, Edmund Burke’s statue gestured to the half-dozen cars and buses that criss-crossed the open space, where Rose could remember only a few years ago ships moored beside the CWS on Broad Quay, Dad’s Hh.qQ. Large posters told them all to Save for Victory. Please help equip YWCA canteens for our women in uniform. Drink Georges’ beer. The Bovril sign no longer flashed its multi coloured sunrise. The walking Johnnie Walker had to go on walking in the dark. The Guinness Clock showed half-four and would do till the war ended, as it wouldn’t do to let invading Jerries know the time. So much drinking and getting drunk… was it impossible for them to face reality?
She crossed and climbed to College Green. On the far side of the unfinished Council House stood the library where the Film Club met. That boy could do with a wider view. Even his film knowledge was confined to Hollywood and ‘Things To Come’. He was the sort of promising virgin Geoff loved to educate, to mould. Educere, he’d said, when he’d begun teaching her, from the Latin ‘to lead out’, not to implant. To ‘educe’ what was already there. To cultivate, as with plants. To help them achieve their true nature and blossom into what they really are.
She crossed at the Mauretania and went on up Park Street.
*
Theo’s bus emerged from all the poor streets, where Mum was born and Gran still lived, and passed the Metropole picture-house. Before it was made De Luxe, when the lights on the aisles were gas, it had been Cary Grant’s local fleapit. He was the pioneer trailblazer. If he’d made it to Hollywood from Horfield, so could anyone who wanted it hard enough.
As they approached the long haul of Ashley Hill that took them – and had taken Rose – literally up in the world, the engine began an anguished groan while the bus laboured onwards, passing Archie’s old school on the left beside the railway bridge, changing to a sigh of relief only when they achieved the summit and cruised down between the enormous grey orphanages. A rare parked car on the main road made the bus-driver slow down and Theo was already on the rear platform watching the kerb speed by. All set, Johnnie? Then off you go and the best of British luck. Give Jerry our best regards and tell him we’ll be coming his way soon.
He gripped the straps of his ‘chute and hurled himself through the open hatchway.
The conductress pushed her way from front to back of the lower deck. Not Gale Sondergaard ; the one who always had her permed hair in a net.” ‘Just you mind out,”’ she called, “‘bloody little madgaming loobie !’”
The momentum carried him along the pavement as he changed the rhythm of his run to a syncopated trot, reining in the Palomino, turning to look back up the trail. A shot had rung out, echoing along the canyon, and he caught the glint of gun-metal on a distant cliff. So white man had again spoken with forked tongue!
He spurred his steed and nearly rode under a motor-bike and sidecar he hadn’t heard approaching. The goggled driver cursed him as he passed. Theo reared, called ‘“sorry” and crossed to Villa Borghese. Funny that he’d always sympathised with the Indians even before Mrs. Hampton’s history lesson. Cowboys in some ways were like those rugby-team oiks in school that were always teachers’ favourites, calling their elders ‘“sir’” and “‘ma’am”‘ and playing corny jokes on each other. You somehow knew they’d be good at shooting and killing animals and brown people.
Vince’s battered Austin Seven was parked outside so Rose wouldn’t be in a position to complain about him being late from sports or threaten to tell Dad when he came home on Friday.
He reckoned he might even go to Mrs., Hampton’s film club, if only to hear how her friends could find fault with a work of genius.
*
Once alone in her top floor flat, Hazel unhitched the skirt, unbuttoned the blouse and stood naked but for her underclothes and the precious shoes. She posed for the cheval-glass, inherited from Geoff’s tutor at university, that almost reached the slanting ceiling of her attic living-room. She pushed out her chin and glanced sidelong at herself, pulled up her hair again with both hands, pouting, turning away to look back over one shoulder. It was a famous pose by Bettey Grable who’d had her legs insured for something like a million dollars. The painted seam gave out some inches below the lower edge of her knickers, about where real stockings would have too. Pathetic. Enough. She took off the precious shoes and with spittle repaired a small scuff in the leather. They were already looking the worse for wear. She replaced them in tissue-paper in the box she’d bought them in three years ago. The gas-fire slowly warmed the three low rooms. She felt able to take off the rest and dress instead in cotton pyjamas Geoff had left when he went. There wasn’t much to be rolled up at wrists and ankles. She was almost his height, though a different shape.
On the table a pile of exercise-books waited to be marked. Later.
From beside the double bed she took the framed photo of him squinting into the Egyptian sunlight with the Pyramids behind. She set it on the table and sat to write an air-mail letter, knowing that whatever either of them wrote could be slobbered over by some clerk in the censoring unit. First she gave a sunny picture of the mood at home, the good news about how many Fascist planes had been shot down, not bothering with ‘according to the radio’, knowing he’d be saying precisely that to himself as he decoded her remarks. She described the afternoon’s film and how
good James Stewart was and that she’d taken in a boy who thought it was profound and how she’d tried to tell him it was only superior propaganda that just so happened to coincide with the truth for once. She wrote that she missed him terribly and, not for the first time, how large the bed seemed without him. There was no use saying how grim things looked. He could see that for himself. Everyone could. Otherwise life was so empty there wasn’t much to tell. She wrote again that she was thinking of joining one of the women’s services. Uniforms were the only fashionable clothes these days, though there was no rush on white feathers as there’d been in the Great War. As this was as much a civilian fight as a military one, no-one could know who was dodging the column. Women teachers were exempt from call-up but she could volunteer and see if they’d release her from her reserved occupation. Geoff had said he’d prefer her to keep a light burning in the window. Not very practical, she’d thought, in the black-out but he’d probably forgotten that detail since he got to Cairo. She folded the form, licked the strip of gum and smoothed it flat, for posting on the way to school next morning. The room was growing dark. She poured herself half an inch of gin and, rather than draw the curtains, turned out the low table light. Through the dormer window that faced the bed, she looked from this considerable height over the twilit city, the sun’s last rays caught by a gleaming barrage balloon beside St. Nicholas’ spire. Hardly an artifical light to be seen, almost the whole continent of Europe hiding in the dark, tribes afraid of other tribes, all of them created by competitive demands of Trade.
She lay on the divan, pulled the bedding over her and embraced Geoff’s pillow. She caressed her own breasts and ran her hand down to loosen the braid on his pyjamas. She began to massage the moist bit between her legs, trying to remember how it had felt with Geoff.
FIVE
Theo’s father represented Hardware throughout the south-west region, from Glamorgan in the north, down through Gloucestershire, Somerset, Devon and the Cornish peninsular or round to Dorset in the east. Of these, only Wiltshire had no coast or access to one. Branch managers in seaside towns reported falling business as so many residents moved inland away from the invasion that was expected any minute. The question wasn’t When but Where. The south-east was a more likely target but Fred reminded other travellers in the railway hotel bar at night that the last successful invasion of England (by the Duke of Monmouth) had been through Lyme Regis. Now that Churchill had told us we’d be fighting on the beaches, barbed-wire was rolled along promenades, bandstands were boarded up and concrete pill-boxes rose overnight to resist the imminent blitzkrieg. So no-one could get to them, said Swifty.