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  Theo sipped from his empty mug to gain time and at last cleared his throat. Everyone looked at him.

  “I sort-of think Capra admits all that himself… I mean, he’s not sort-of covering it up or anything if he calls the film ‘Mr. Smith Goes to Washington’, is he, after already calling the other ‘Mr. Deeds Goes To Town’? And, I mean, what’s kind-of wrong with James Stewart anyway? I mean, you want a good actor for that part, don’t you? And I’d rather come out feeling life’s kind of good than – well – bad, and see a lot of people who are good at heart, not all being rotten to each other like in this French one.”

  “Just what I was saying, son,” said Vera.

  “I know.”

  “No-one denies,” Mrs. Hampton said, “Capra’s one of the few socially-conscious Hollywood film-makers, though his comedies are hardly radical critiques of capitalism. That system will never allow its artists to advocate the revolution we all know must come if their republic is to live up to its original egalitarian promise but still …”

  George had drained his cup and was now buttoning his short overcoat.

  “Well, as far as I’m concerned you can keep your bloody revolutions. There’s a country I could touch with not that long a stick – about twenty miles away, in fact, – that had a revolution moons ago and much good it did them. No beliefs, nothing to cling to, so damn’ feeble they cave in as soon as the first bully picks on them.”

  An air-raid siren’s whine began close by, rising and falling. You’d almost think those old wardens enjoyed making that din this far south-west when a couple of Jerry planes had been sighted over Dover. Vera stoppered the flask, stowed it in her bag and said: “We better be getting on. No, we don’t want revolution here. Nor our houses burnt down or guillotines or being lined up against a wall. Don’t expect the Yanks do either. You’ll wash and wipe the mugs, will you, Hazel?”

  “We’ll hope to see you all next week,” said George, squinting to read from a slip of paper held beneath the light, “when it looks as though we’ll be having ‘The Childhood of Maxim Gorki’ and –”

  He paused and Mrs. Hampton prompted: “Un Chien Andalou.”

  “Ah,” Stone said with some amusement, “with the notorious opening shot of a razor-blade being drawn across a naked eyeball.”

  “Someone will have to tell me when that’s over,” Vera said, “because I shan’t be looking. So we’ll say t.t.f.n… Mind how you go in the black-out.”

  Stone and Moss followed soon after.

  “I’d give you a hand,” Stone said to Mrs. Hampton as he went, “but my good lady gets a tight tummy when the sirens go and baby Oswald starts crying.”

  “Theo can help me clear up,” she said, “or have you told your parents you’ll be home?”

  “No special time.”

  While she rolled the glistening screen and he packed the projector, they heard George’s efforts to start his bike and Stone and Moss calling goodnight. The motor juddered into life and moved off past the cathedral and across the city centre, breaking the Sunday evening silence. No church bells had rung for a year or two. When they did, it would mean invasion.

  “Let’s put these away first.”

  She walked in front carrying the screen in its long container and Theo followed with the heavy box. He recognised the reference section from that visit when he was a titch in 3B. The long high room with rows of study-desks, a little lamp over each, the librarian’s table, the cases of tiny drawers for the catalogue cards. No lights now relieved the dark, though glimmers came from the hall through panes in the door. As they entered, she shone a dim torch ahead. Her heels struck the wood-block floor as she made for an open spiral stairway in the farthest corner.

  “Can you manage?”

  “Think so.”

  “Douglas Stone usually does this but his wife’s got a new-born baby. He’s an assistant librarian, which is why we can use that room and this apparatus.”

  She climbed the spiral stairs ahead of him, each one a perforated metal plate that rattled slightly in its frame. As she pointed the torch’s beam backwards to help him see, his eyes were level with her knees. The heels of her shoes were wooden wedges. With one hand he heaved the heavy projector in its black box; with the other he clung to the metal banister. They arrived at a narrow gallery against the wall that encircled the long and lofty room. Above them rose shelves of leather-bound books that could be reached only by a movable step ladder.

  “Take this and shine it up.”

  He rested the heavy box on the gallery floor. She handed him the torch which he pointed after her as she climbed six steps up the ladder. Some light, diffused by pink tissue paper across the glass, spilt on to her long legs as she raised her arms to replace the screen on its shelf. The hems of her short skirt and overcoat were lifted some inches above her knees. He was close to the shadowed outlines of whatever muscle it is that runs down from thigh to calf. Old Rabbit had done it in Double Biology. Biceps femoris? Like his sister, she wore no stockings as long as winter held off. The wishful colour had been painted on. From somewhere farther up, she’d drawn a line to resemble a seam that went straight down to her shoes.

  “D’you use gravy browning?” he asked.

  “Do I what?”

  “Use gravy browning on your legs? My sister does.”

  “I have done. No, that’s real Miner’s liquid make-up.”

  “So how d’you do that line?”

  “With eyebrow pencil. Quite a contortion actually.”

  “A couple of inches have got rubbed off just above your knee.”

  “I don’t suppose anyone will see, except you.”

  “No.”

  He ran his middle finger up the missing stretch of line.

  “Just there.”

  “Yes ?”

  She had put back the screen and now lowered her arms. The skirt and coat fell like a curtain around his hand and he stepped aside to clear the way for her to climb down. She took back the torch and shone it so that he could replace the black box. But the shelf was lower, he could do it without using the steps. She stood still and silent, invisible behind the light. Still silently, she led the way down the spiral stairs and through the hall, her wedges clapping the wooden tiles like castanets.

  He was glad of the darkness and the chance to ease his jack upward in his trousers till it rested against his belly.

  God, hell’s embarrassing if she’d seen!

  The room where they’d watched the film was warm and smoky, almost cosy, after the icy empty corridors.

  Avoiding his eyes, she unbelted and took off her woollen coat and threw it down on a table. She was wearing a short cream coloured jumper he knew was angora like the one Kay was knitting. At her neck, tucked in, was a silky sort of scarf and at her waist a broad belt, buckled tight, and the jumper went on below that for a few more inches.

  “Better get these washed. You dry.”

  She took them on a tray to a nearby scullery that smelt of chlorine like the Baths and had a sink where she ran cold water over the mugs they’d used. Her hair was only brown, not blonde, brunette or auburn, but showed golden tints and was nice and loose like Paulette Goddard’s when she was being a beggar-girl or gypsy. Some of that eyebrow pencil had been used as well on her eyebrows.

  While she washed and he dried, she started on about what the new world would be like, as outlined by her husband Geoff. The thought of it seemed to excite her, to judge by her breathlessness. To Theo the New World meant Canada and California. She finished first and he followed her back, coming in with his fingers held up in a triangle to frame his view. She was back lit in long-shot, her coat on again but unbuttoned and loose, doing her face in a pocket-mirror held in one hand. Her breasts were outlined in the angora. He moved in for a close-up.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Getting you in an angle-shot.”

  “I’m hardly a film-star.”

  “While you’ve got that pencil out, I’ll join up that broken seam
for you.”

  “Really, don’t bother.”

  “But if you’re going upstairs in a bus, anyone behind you could see.”

  “You think anyone would look? Anyway I’ll only be walking home from here. It’s no distance.”

  Still without meeting his eyes, she let him take the pencil. Stand up on something like before,” he said and helped her up on to a chair. He began to raise her skirt.

  “I’ll do that, thanks,” she said, now in her strict teacher’s voice, and lifted the hem a few inches. .

  For awhile he pencilled in silence.

  “Why do women always want stockings?” he asked.

  “Don’t you like them?”

  “They’re alright on mums. I’d rather have bare legs.”

  “Having no idea how cold they get in an English winter.”

  “So wear slacks.”

  “Men don’t like them, do they? And most girls will suffer anything to look nice for boys.”

  “I’d sooner have slacks than those furry stockings like women wear in the army.”

  “At your age I’m surprised you even notice. You spend a lot of time with women, don’t you? What with your sister and mother and grandma. I’m more on my own, now Geoff’s away. I never had brothers or sisters so…”

  He promised God to listen tomorrow in prayers if his horn would only go down before she noticed.

  A sudden burst of ack-ack nearby startled him and his hand shook. The line he was drawing downwards didn’t meet the one she’d done up to her knee. He wetted his finger and began to rub it out.

  “Leave it. I think we should go. That gunfire sounds serious.”

  “Come on, you two,”’ called the warden, coming in to check the place. ‘“That’s not ack-ack. It’s high-explosives somewhere not far off.”

  “You mean a raid?”

  They hadn’t learnt yet to distinguish the rhythmic throb of enemy bombers from R.A.F. fighters.

  “I should say we’re target for tonight. Now get along.”

  SEVEN

  Several times while they were wrapping themselves in their outer clothes, she had to clutch his arm as a louder thump or smash came, shaking the window frames.

  They emerged on to Deanery Road to see a sky lit by intersecting beams, light made visible by falling on clouds rising from the burning city and on puffs of flak from exploding shells. Balloons blazed, easy targets for air-gunners, the flames acting like flares, helping illuminate the city for enemy bombers. One had slipped its moorings and floated in flames across the night sky, now lit by fires below.

  “God Almighty!” she said.

  “I better walk you home.”

  “No. You go on. Your parents will be worried sick.”

  “D’you reckon they’ll be running buses in this?”

  Shrapnel clattered on the pavement nearby.

  “Perhaps we’d better go back in?” he said.

  “No. That warden doesn’t want us here. He’s closed the doors. My place isn’t far. Halfway up Park Street. Come on.”

  There was a lull after the last bomber of that wave had dropped its load and left. Anti-aircraft guns on hills all around the city were reloading for the next run. Hazel sprinted across to the ornamental pool, more like a moat, that ran along the arc of the half-finished brick Council House that Dolly Grey had told them was mock-Georgian. A hot piece of metal from a stray shell fell into the water with a hiss of steam.

  The excitement they’d both felt as the boy touched her leg above the knee had become the new thrill of battle. At last they were in it. They could see the university tower at the top by the light of flaming upper storeys of Park Street shops. Already firemen were up high ladders. Hoses curled across the road through spilt pools. She’d never realised there’d be so much exploding glass, thrown out when windows got too big for their frames. Shattered panes crunched underfoot as they climbed. A sudden burst from some excited battery made her seize him and bury her face in his chest. He grasped and held her and together they fell into the doorway of the Mauretania cocktail bar as metal rained on the road.

  This street had always been the city’s smartest, a steep two hundred yards of jewellers, booksellers and cafés, rising from Baker-Baker to Bright’s department store, with London names between like Moss Bros, Jaeger and Aquascutum. Now half a dozen shops were blazing.

  “They must have dropped a stick of incendiaries,” Theo said. Even he shared the general theoretical expertise about all this. The Penguin best-seller of the time was ‘Aircraft Recognition’, with its silhouettes of enemy planes. People carried their copy in a pocket and in daylight raids peered from sky to page like bird-watchers, identifying Focker-Wolfs and Messerschmitts.

  Nearly at the top, she led him by the hand into Charlotte Street, climbing still towards Brandon Hill and Cabot Tower. Halfway along, she turned up a few steps to her front door.

  “You’ll be all right now?” he asked her, from the pavement.

  “Don’t be silly. I can’t let you go home in this. Is there a phone at home?”

  “Yeah. We got it just before war started.”

  “So ring her and tell her you’re all right.”

  He followed her, feeling his way by the banisters up several flights of stairs to the top floor. It was more like a tower than any house he’d ever been in.

  “It’s the first actual flat I’ve seen,” he said.” My Gran’s got a front room upstairs but it’s only an ordinary house, nothing like this. This is more like that French film.”

  She found her way to a door on the top landing and switched on a couple of low-level lamps. How does she manage to see to do anything, he thought, without one hanging in the centre of the room?

  He gazed about at the sloped ceilings and dormers.

  “Those windows are like the tops of sentry boxes I saw once at Horseguards Parade in London.”

  But it looked smarter, like the rooms in L.A. where private eyes kept their hats on indoors. The shades cast a warm pink glow on the mixture of queer furniture and one or two huge pictures of flowers and one that wasn’t of anything, just a sort-of pattern. A piece of cloth that in most rooms would be lying on the floor was hung on one wall. There were more books than he’d ever seen outside a library, at least five shelves full, a mixture of the cloth-covered sort he got for holiday reading, a few Penguins in red, green, blue and purple, and a huge load of political ones by people like G.B. Shaw and other authors with initials for names. On a pretty check-patterned tablecloth were piles of school exercise books. The walls weren’t papered but painted white. It was how he thought houses might be in Spain or Italy. He’d seen such rooms through the windows of restaurants with foreign names like Casa Bianca.

  “Now ring your people. They’ll be worried sick.”

  The phone wasn’t out on the stairs or landing where you’d expect, but on the floor beside a double-bed. He sat there and dialled. Kay answered, sounding as breathless as Miss Hampton.

  “What’s it like out there?” he asked.

  “There’s a great brou-ha-ha,” she said, “from the ARP men in the orphanage.”

  Fred was out, she went on, hunting fires with his stirrup pump, though so far only a few incendiaries had fallen on the allotments and there was a joke going round that the wardens would have baked potatoes for supper. Rose and she were in the cupboard under the stairs, which Fred had fitted up as a shelter. From next door, Shirley Temple was being wearisome, knocking code messages through the wall about whether that last bang or plane was one of ours or theirs but she couldn’t get the hang of it. Then, what could you expect of a boy with curls from eating up his crusts? Anyway she couldn’t hear a lot because Rose kept bursting into tears, talking about the last and wondering how Tilda was coping. Being Sunday, their gran was in her own place and it looked as though the poorer parts were getting it worst, just like in London. Kay had been to the front bedroom window and seen the city ablaze. Theo said yeah, mostly towards Old Market Street but a helluva lot of Park
Street was burning too.

  “It’s like Atlanta!” she said, doing her Vivien Leigh.

  “The Nell Gwynn Café’s caught one,” he told her.

  “Oh, say not so! One of my regular haunts. What’s killing is those old duffers are still shouting at people to put lights out. As though little chinks in the black-out matter in all this! As though Luftwaffe pilots can see our windows from the Lord knows how many thousand feet. But it gives them an excuse to blow their whistles.”

  “Yeah. Bet you anything, if Hitler ever comes, they’ll be in charge.”

  “Yet another good reason to win the war.”

  “Anyway I’m okay, tell them.”

  “You absolutely sure, dear boy?”

  “I’m with this teacher lady. Too much falling outside. I’ll be home soon as I can after the all-clear.”

  “Okay… Whoops! That was a big one.”

  “Probably a gun on Purdown. You better get back under the stairs.”

  During this, he’d been studying the bedroom, not much bigger than the sizeable bed which didn’t have a board standing up at the bottom end like normal ones but just left off. The quilt and cover weren’t nice and shiny like those at home but rough like a dog’s fur. On a little box thing by the bed was a framed picture of a soldier in tropical uniform frowning into the sun in front of one of The Pyramids. The lamp was on the floor and threw these really super weird shadows on to the ceiling.

  “Are they alright?” she asked, appearing in the door.

  “Yeah. Not much going on up there except ack-ack. I’m glad I’m here to see it all. Been long enough coming.”

  “So am I. Glad you’re here, I mean. I’d be afraid alone.”

  She came towards him with two full tumblers.” There’s no gas. So probably a mains was hit.”

  “We don’t need it” he said, standing and taking a glass, “plenty of fires outside.”

  “No, you’re right, it’s not a bit cold, is it?”

  She’d taken off her cardigan.” I decided against a warm drink anyhow. I expect that smoke’s dried your throat too.”