After the Cabaret (12 page)

Sally's ears were full of the drone of the ancient Whitley bomber pushing across the Channel by night. She was sitting on an ammunition crate in her pink suit, which had been meticulously cleaned and restored at the expense of the British Government, which had also supplied her with makeup, stockings and the evening dress lying in a small but expensive suitcase at her feet. They had set out just after midnight from the secret airfield at Tamworth, Bedfordshire. Sally was trembling. Her escorts in the aircraft wore fleecy jackets and big boots. All she had was a jacket draped over her shoulders and a parachute strapped to her back. The blasts of cold air from the floor of the aircraft had frozen her legs and her feet. Occasionally the Whitley gave a convulsive shake, accompanied by a rattle. The first time this occurred her two companions laughed, and the mechanic said, ‘The old girl's been on the gin again.'

‘Did you work on this one after she crashed?' the other enquired.

‘Yes.' He turned to Sally, holding out a silver flask. ‘Don't worry, Miss Bowles. We'll get you there.'

She knew it didn't need two of them to get her to France. They'd done it to be friendly.

Sally took the flask and drank. ‘Quite frankly, sweetie, I'm not so worried about getting there as getting back.'

‘Not to worry,' the officer said. ‘Your return ticket's valid for six months.' He sported a huge moustache, as many pilots did. It was intended to stick out at right angles from the face, but his drooped, giving him the look of an apprentice Viking.

Sally handed back the flask but he pushed it back to her. ‘Take another nip,' he said. ‘We're over France now.'

‘How long?' she asked. She continued to shake with cold, fear and anger. She was furious with Pym for making her do this. Hadn't there been anything she could have done to stop him? No, she thought, there hadn't. He had threatened, as they said in plays, to tell all and she hadn't the slightest doubt that he would have done so, the bastard.

The mechanic tapped her knee. ‘Feeling all right about the jump?' he asked. Sally nodded.

‘Jolly good show,' said the officer.

The exit from the plane was a hole in the floor, a yard square. She had practised jumping through such a hole many times, at Templeford. You sat on the edge, legs dangling. Then, to put it crudely, they pushed you out to land on the mattress beneath. But this was different. She hoped, as she was falling, that the parachute would open. If it did, she'd have to start hoping they'd dropped
her over the right spot, a clearing, not on top of trees or into a lake – or straight into German hands.

And, of course, they all hoped they wouldn't be attacked in the air before she could even jump.

Now she sat, her legs dangling into space, buffeted by air, her bottom on the edge of the hole, as the young officer said to her, ‘We'll be back to pick you up in a week or two, then. Good luck.'

‘Thanks,' Sally said, through stiff lips. ‘Safe trip back.'

The other said, ‘I think you ought to be going now.'

He took hold of Sally's shoulders and she went out and down into a rush of air. She pulled the cord of her parachute. By now she knew it wouldn't open – some Nazi sympathiser had probably packed it at the factory – she was going to die and that was that. Her skirt blew right up – and the parachute opened. She swung down and down over the darkened landscape of northern France. Up in the sky she heard the plane turn and head away, back to England.

‘Plucky girl,' the fair young man said to his companion. ‘Pretty, too.'

‘Hope she makes it,' said the other.

They had both been awake for sixteen hours and were asleep before they landed.

‘Whoops!' Sally landed in a field, remembering to throw herself sideways on landing so that she didn't hit the ground on her feet. She lay, winded, on grass, with her eyes tight shut. She just knew that when she opened them she would be surrounded by German soldiers with rifles. She had
sailed down with her suitcase and now it was lost. Oh, God. Oh, God. She opened her eyes slowly. Yes, she was lying in a field, alone. A cow ambled up to look at her.

‘Oh, God,' said a voice, her own. She was all tangled up in her parachute, which lay behind her, billowing up whitely. She groaned.

‘Shh,' a man's voice hissed. Strong arms were pulling her to her feet. In the darkness she made out a tall figure in a dark jacket. He held her against him as he cut away the harness.

‘My suitcase,' Sally said, in French.

‘Shit,' he said. They searched the field, Sally falling over tussocks. Her feet went into a cow-pat. It was very quiet.

‘Got it,' he called across the field, softly. She stood up, with a sigh of relief. He rejoined her. ‘What about the password?' she said faintly.

‘Bugger the password.' From somewhere, he had produced a spade and went over to the parachute. He picked it up, dragged it towards a hedge, dug a hole and buried it.

In the narrow road he looked at her critically. ‘I like the suit. It's very smart. But God knows why you're wearing it.'

A lorry was parked nearby. Once inside it, Sally opened her case and struggled into a mac. She put on a headscarf.

‘Well, that's better,' he said, and started up the engine.

A few minutes later, as they bumped along the road, he said, ‘You're going to Paris with my brother. He's taking a consignment of beef there for the Germans. They'll
fill his lorry with sacks of concrete for the return trip. Got that?'

‘Thank you.'

‘If we're stopped, you're a widow. We've sneaked off for fear of the neighbours. Why that suit, in God's name? Is it Chanel?'

‘You have an eye.'

‘I used to sell dresses.'

They arrived at a gate, turned in, entered a farmyard. Inside the dark kitchen, lit only by one candle on a table, sat a second man, in a cap. He stood up as they entered, and said, ‘Bravo! We're loaded up.
Bonsoir
, Madame. Would you like to eat before we start?'

‘I'd rather go now.'

‘Good.'

After hasty farewells, Sally and Pierre Legrand were on their way to Paris. This time, though, the lights of the lorry were on.

‘How are things here?' Sally asked.

‘Bad – but they'll get worse. What about Britain? We see their bombers visiting you.'

‘The raids on London were worse last year. I think if they'd kept it up it would have been over.'

‘We listened to the BBC and wondered. What a mess.'

‘It's useful, being an island.'

He did not ask her anything about herself. And, in spite of the fear, as they got closer and closer to Paris Sally's spirits rose and she began to feel excited.

As dawn came they picnicked under a hedge in a field outside Paris. It would be safer to enter the city, which
was under curfew, when it was busier. The air was full of birdsong. Pierre raised a glass of red wine. There was a slice of bread in his hand.

‘
À vous
, Madame.'

‘
À vous, aussi.
'

He did not wish her luck.

In the Bloomsbury apartment Greg Phillips looked at the big flat face and the sturdy old body opposite him. He had a dizzy feeling, as if he had gone through the looking-glass. He pulled himself together.

‘So, how did Pym blackmail Sally into going to France?' he asked doggedly.

‘I didn't know anything definite,' said Bruno. ‘But after she came back – what an arrival that was! – she told me something. I put two and two together. It was in May,' he said, ‘and there'd been terrible raids on Liverpool, Belfast, Clydebank, Southampton, Plymouth, Portsmouth. In London alone twenty thousand people had been killed. The damage was appalling. I saw people weeping in the streets.

‘Poor Vi – her house was already half ruined and then more bombs came down and finished the job. They were all in the shelter down the road, and when the All Clear sounded they came out – she and her two brothers – and
walked up the street in all the smoke, at dawn, and there was no house, just a pile of rubble. After they'd been three nights in a rest centre Vi found a flat through her agent's secretary. It belonged to a chorus girl who'd joined the ATS and she said they could have it as long as they left a corner for her in case she needed it when she was on leave. It was two big rooms upstairs in a Victorian terrace house in Pimlico. The kitchen was a curtained-off area in the front room, the bathroom was along a passageway. After living in the rest centre, which was full of bombed-out people sleeping on cots in a converted school hall, babies crying, Vi thought it was the Ritz.

‘Anyway, Sally persuaded me to help her and the Simcoxes to take whatever they'd saved from the ruins, which wasn't much, from the rest centre to their new place. Think of me, twenty-one, all skin and bones in one of Briggs's old suits, carrying a sack full of pots and pans from Westminster Pier, where we got off the bus, to Pimlico. Vi had an old pram, piled high, Sally had two suitcases. Vi's small brother was carrying a canary in a cage. My God, what a spectacle! I felt humiliated, as only a working-class boy from Berlin could. The streets were full of gaps. You could look up at the sky through the windows of the houses. Or there'd be a wall gone, and half the floor, with a sofa, or a bath hanging over into the void. It was a brilliant day but everyone was pale. The rationing was beginning to hit – we were always hungry. And you didn't get much sleep because of the raids.

‘So, we had taken our walk, with the Simcoxes and all their remaining worldly goods, and seen them in, and then
we got a bus back in the direction of Pontifex Street. I was looking down into Trafalgar Square. It was a sea of uniforms – French sailors with pom-poms on their berets, nurses in scarlet-lined cloaks, soldiers in turbans, in bush hats, in kepis. The sight of the world in arms to defend this island should have been encouraging, but constant bombardment and lack of sleep had got us all down. And I said to her, in a low voice, “I don't think this can go on.”

‘All she said was “Hang on – it may be all right,” in that cheerful voice she had. She was wearing trousers and an old shirt and plenty of lipstick, as usual. She'd brought a year's supply back from France. And other stuff, too. My God, we could have killed her at Pontifex Street, as she wafted about in a cloud of Je Reviens. We kept thinking of cognac and sausage and all the other things she could have brought instead. As I say, we were hungry. Instead, she'd got cosmetics, scent, underwear, a pair of shoes. She'd probably risked her life to get them.

‘Anyway, she sounded hopeful, even confident, as she spoke. We were on a bus – and I had a German accent – so this was not the moment to ask questions.

‘But she told me something that night. The sirens started at about nine. She was just about to set out for La Vie but it was impossible to go. The others were all elsewhere and the two cake-shop ladies had left London months earlier – they couldn't take any more. We went together to the cellar, which we'd made quite comfortable by then with a mattress, and a table and chairs. We'd hung up some hurricane lamps and we had a little spirit stove on a table and shelves made of planks held up by bricks. So we sat there, drinking tea and
condensed milk out of enamel mugs, just like most of the rest of London, and hearing aircraft going over and explosions – by then you only worried when they were close.

‘I was in the armchair and Sally was lying full length on the mattress. “It's surreal, our little house,” she said sleepily.

‘Now at this time there was a buzz about Sally, all over the place. No one – except Pym and a few others, I assumed – knew where she'd gone or why or what had happened. But everybody knew there'd been something – her numbers at La Vie were greeted with extra applause. Winston Churchill came down and asked her to sit at his table with General de Gaulle and a pretty woman. He laughed at what she said.

‘Even at Pontifex Street she got more consideration. She could spend hours in the bathroom without someone coming up and banging on the door and swearing at her. Julia stopped bothering about her borrowings, especially after Sally gave her some makeup and a hat with a feather in it she'd brought back from Paris. People treated her differently.

‘There was a loud crash. I said, “That sounds like Oxford Street.”

‘She murmured, “It's quieter in Paris at night.”

‘“Nice for Paris,” I said.

‘And she said, “It's an awful silence.”

‘I asked her, “Sally, are you going to tell me?”

‘“What?”

‘“Why were you in Paris? What happened? How did Pym get you to do it?”

‘She laughed. “I looked up an old boyfriend.”'

‘Jesus,' Greg said. ‘Who was that?'

‘Have you any brandy?' inquired Bruno. Greg went to get it. Bruno took a few sips then went on, adopting cadences and using words Greg thought might have come direct from the lips of Sally Bowles, so long ago. Sometimes Bruno's memory did this, he had noted – produced near total recall.

It was like listening to a ghost now as the old man said, ‘“You see, darling, there's a very important officer in Paris called Christian von Torgau. He's terribly handsome, blond and blue-eyed, just like those posters they have in Germany showing big strong Aryan men. And he's amazingly clever and totally cultured. He'd been brought up in that terribly strict way they have – eat your soup,
eins, zwei, drei
, sleep flat in your bed, arms outside the covers, beatings for your own good, no slouching, walk like this, sit like that. He'd been in the Army, but when I met him before the war he'd resigned. While he was still a soldier he'd made a suitable marriage to an icy bitch from a family even older than his, which went back to Genghis Khan or something. What an iceberg. One glance from Julia von Torgau and the fire would go out, literally, darling.