Black Out (18 page)

‘Ah well – no point in following on like some cheap gumshoe. We might as well go together. Your place or mine?’

Troy said nothing. He’d no idea what she was talking about. She stared, she smiled. Still Troy said nothing – she walked on. Troy watched almost to the street corner. Zelig was right. The skirt was far too tight. Her backside moved like two ostrich eggs in a bag. She came back.

‘Are we gonna fuck or what?’ she said.

‘I … er … ’ Troy almost choked, never having heard that word spoken by a woman outside of drunken scenes in police stations.

‘Now this is stupid. Or maybe you’re stupid. For Chrissake we can’t do it on the sidewalk. Come on, shake a leg as you guys say. I don’t live too far away – you’d only of had to follow me to Orrnnjj Street.’

Troy wrestled with Orrnnjj Street and realised she meant Orange Street – a narrow, gently serpentine lane that ran between the Haymarket and the Charing Cross Road – two pubs, a chapel and a short row of Georgian houses. They crossed Lower Regent Street and the Haymarket almost in step. Once or twice she looked at Troy as though she thought he was a complete fool – very much what he felt. Into Orange Street the light disappeared suddenly and completely and the air seemed cold and quiet. He could hear the pick-pock of her high-heeled shoes on the pavement, but he couldn’t see her. She stopped. He bumped into her and heard her curse softly. Then she was rattling keys at a door and a piece of the night seemed to open up and swallow them.

‘Stay close behind me, right? Top floor, five flights, and there’s no light ’cos there’s no blackout. OK?’

He followed blindly up two flights of stairs, groping his way hand over hand on the banister rail. Rain and moonlight slanted in through a broken pane on the second floor and he caught sight of her standing in the fraction of light, invisible from the wasp waist upwards. He tripped and banged a kneecap loudly on the stairs.

‘I told you. Stay close behind or you’ll break your goddam neck before we’re halfway up.’

She bent down into the light so that he could see her face, and seized his right hand with her left.

‘You must be the clumsiest, dumbest bastard ever tried to pick me up.’

With a gentle strength she guided and pulled him to a small doorway on the top landing. She rattled the keys once more.

‘Why did you wait in the rain all that time? You know where I work. OK. We’re in.’

She flicked on the light and slammed the door shut. Troy found himself in a large bed-sitting-room that spanned the whole top floor of the house. At the front and back the roof came down almost to meet the floor, but in its vast centre the room held a large double bed, a dining table, a battered horsehair sofa, a wind-up gramophone and a wide, untidy scattering of woman’s clothing.

‘No apologies for the mess. I work most of the time. Come to think of it, if you’d told me last week you were coming I could have told you I don’t get off till past nine.’

She kicked off her shoes and crossed to a large Kelvinator refrigerator. She’d stopped looking at Troy and he followed her with his eyes. She peeled off her battledress, aimed it at the sofa, gave Troy a grin and yanked open the fridge door.

‘How do you feel about bourbon?’

She almost disappeared into the fridge.

‘I don’t know. I’ve never tried it.’

It was physically impossible for her to look over the fridge door. She darted him a quick glance round the side and rummaged in the ice-box.

‘I got ice here. And I got a good Tennessee sour mash somewhere around.’ The door hissed and sucked shut. She put two glasses and an aluminium ice-tray down on the table. ‘The PX is pretty good. It’s not always Tennessee, but … goddam it there’s a war on.’

She paused, looked him up and down once more, fixing him where he stood, lamely silent with his hands in his pockets like a recalcitrant schoolboy.

‘You gonna take your coat off or what?’

For reasons he refused even to guess at, simply unbuttoning his sodden black overcoat in front of her reminded Troy of undressing before his mother aged ten or eleven, past the stage where he needed her help or supervision but too young to convince her of his need for privacy. He pressed his palm against a large cast-iron
radiator and draped the coat over its feeble heat to dry. When he turned she’d found the bourbon and was drowning two lots of icecubes in a generous four fingers of sour mash. She pushed a glass across the table to him. Without coat or shoes she seemed even smaller. Troy felt his slight five foot eight to be lumbering and ox-like. He picked up the glass of whiskey for the sake of something to do with his hands. She took a large gulp of whiskey and sighed with the pleasure of it – eyes and lips still smiling at him.

‘First of the day. Always the best.’

For a minute or more they faced each other across the table. She seemed animated, even when stood stock-still and quiet. Troy felt grotesquely that he must be blushing or trembling. Only the width of the table separated them, but he felt it would take an earthquake, or – much more likely – a bomb, to move him. Only a single sixty-watt bulb lit the room, half-muted by its shade and several years of dust, yet Troy felt as though a searchlight had picked him out. Her gaze seemed warm, open, honest and searing. She belted back the rest of her drink and clunked the glass down. Troy sipped slowly at his. In a swift movement she peeled off her non-regulation blouse and it floated down on top of her battledress. Her bra was non-regulation black silk, and as her skirt pooled around her ankles Troy could see that the pants matched in an expensive, black-market, strictly non-issue set. Even the stockings were real not painted.

‘Wassamatterbaby? Cat gotcha tongue? Would you like me to put the light out? Is that it?’

‘Yes.’

‘Yes what?’

‘Yes I’d like you to put the light out.’

In the darkness, groping towards the bed, he heard the sudden swish as she tore back the covers.

‘There’s just one thing – what’s your name?’

‘Troy.’

‘I know that, dummy – what’s your Christian name?’

‘Frederick.’

‘OK. So I’ll call you Troy. You can call me Lara.’

Troy heard the rapid double snap of elastic and the springs creaked as she lay back on the bed.

‘Lara?’ he said.

‘Yeah. Like short for Larissa.’

‘Sounds Russian.’

‘Yeah. But only on my mother’s side.’

He pulled off a shoe. He was wet to the skin. Suddenly, freed from her gaze, buried in his elemental darkness, it seemed a relief to be getting out of his clothes.

Nearer the dawn a bomb moved Troy. A dull repeated whumpf somewhere off to the south woke him and drew him to the window. He groped for his shirt at the foot of the bed, slipped it on and peeled back a corner of one of the blackouts – he could see part of Nelson’s column and the square as it swept over towards Charing Cross. Somewhere beyond Lambeth an orange-red glow flickered on the skyline.

‘Hey. You OK?’

Her voice startled him.

‘Yes, I’m fine. There’s a raid on. I was just looking.’

‘Is it close?’

‘No. New Cross or Lewisham, I should think. Somewhere out that way.’

‘Thank God for that. I hate going down the subway in the middle of the night. It stinks. You know that? It really stinks.’

‘Half of London sleeps down there permanently.’

The dull whumpf again – then the burst of flame from the same direction. A single heavy blockbuster followed by smaller incendiaries. He turned back to look at her. The light from the open blind cut a cheese wedge into the room. She was looking at him, again.

‘Why d’you put your shirt on?’

‘I don’t know,’ he lied.

‘Come over here.’

Troy moved slowly towards her, stepping into the point of the wedge of light.

‘Take it off. No buts. Take it off!’

He sat on the bed and tossed the shirt behind him.

‘Ain’t gonna bite. Least nowhere I haven’t already.’

She traced his ribcage on the left side, bringing her fingers up to the shoulder and down his left arm.

‘Baby – you’re a mess of scars.’

‘Occupational hazard,’ he said simply.

‘What are you? A flyer? Soldier?’

‘I don’t follow … ’

‘Sergeant you said. Sergeant of what?’

‘I’m a police officer.’

‘Whaaaat?’ She sat bolt upright, almost screaming.

‘I showed you my card.’

‘So? Ace of Clubs. Jack of Diamonds – I didn’t look.’

She flopped back on to the pillows, her fists pounding her temples in a mockery of amazement.

‘My God. My God. I screwed a cop.’

‘There’s a first time for everything,’ said Troy.

‘So there is.’

She sat upright and kissed him on the lips. ‘OK. So now tell me about the scars.’ Her fingers stroked a weal on his ribs, an inch or two below the nipple.

‘That’s a knife wound.’

‘Flick knife?’

‘No … actually it was a potato peeler.’

He could see her grinning.

‘I got between a wife-beating drunken Irishman and his beaten drunken wife. She stabbed me with a potato peeler.’

She bit her lower lip, restraining the laugh and silently moved her fingers over to his arm.

‘Bullet from a Webley point thirty-eight. I went to arrest a member of Her Majesty’s Household Cavalry, who tried to deter me with his service revolver.’

‘But you got him?’

‘I got him.’

‘You’re not such a chickenshit after all.’

‘Whatever made you think I was?’

‘Oh – you should have seen yourself a couple of hours ago!’

‘Point taken.’

Her hand slid across his left thigh to the knee. ‘And this little piggy?’

‘Nothing to do with the job. My brother pushed me off a bicycle when I was eleven.’

‘What’s all the new stuff?’

‘Eh?’

‘All these scabby little nicks on your hands.’

Troy held his hands, backs up, in front of him. He could see nothing. Rubbing one with the other he could feel the cuts and weals the blast of brick and concrete had left there. He remembered how he got them – it brought him back to his subject, slightly amazed that for an hour or two at least he had allowed it to slip from his mind.

‘That was a bomb blast on the Underground. Actually, I was following a friend of yours when it happened.’

‘A friend of mine?’

‘The Major. The one who sat on your desk. You lit his cigarette for him.’

Troy felt her squirm deep into the bed, avoiding his words, pulling the blankets higher.

‘So … you’re not off duty. Tell me, do you always fuck on the company time?’

‘I just thought you might know who he was.’

‘Sure I know him. But you gotta wait till morning. I tell you now, you might arrest me before I get my beauty sleep.’

Troy walked around the foot of the bed and slipped in the other side. For a minute or two they lay like spoons in a cutlery drawer, then she wriggled and jammed her backside up against him, and with a half-audible mutter of ‘lousy copper’ she sighed her way into sleep. Before he too dropped off Troy felt almost certain she was faintly snoring.

The whistle of a full kettle rattling on the iron hob woke Troy with a wrench. He looked down the room. Tosca sat on a stool in front of the ironing board, reading a battered copy of
Huckleberry Finn.
She was dressed even to the tie, but for the skirt that lay draped across the board awaiting the long rev-up of a primitive electric iron.

‘Welcome to the world, sunbeam,’ said Tosca.

She splashed a pint of water into the coffee-pot. ‘Today we have real coffee.’

‘Good Lord.’

‘From the PX like everything else. Stick with me kid an’ I could show you a good time.’

‘Overpaid, oversexed and over here,’ said Troy.

‘Come again?’

‘Gives new lie to an old cliché,’ he muttered.

‘Oversexed, eh?’

She picked up her book and looked at him over the top, a caricature of the seductive secretary – Katharine Hepburn or Barbara Stanwyck.

‘I always read ten pages of Huck. Every day. Kinda like my Bible. Reminds me of home.’

‘You’re from Missouri?’

‘Don’t be stupid, I’m from New York.’

She slapped the book down and brought two cups and the coffee-pot to the bedside. Curiously elegant in olive green and high heels. Curiously naked without her skirt.

‘I’m from Manhattan. Or did you think I talked like this for the fun of it?’

Troy eased himself up in the bed, once more ludicrously conscious of his nakedness; the whiteness of his skin in the morning light.

‘I seen men’s nipples before, you know.’

He let go of the sheet and made an effort to be less shy.

‘Now – about Jimmy.’

‘Who? Aagh!’ The coffee cup burnt his fingers and he thrust it quickly back at the table.

‘Jimmy. Jimmy Wayne. The guy you were so indelicate as to grill me about at an intimate moment.’

‘The Major. Yes. Tell me. What’s his regiment … I mean unit?’

‘OSS.’

Troy stared, not understanding.

‘Office of Strategic Services. Dirty tricks. Nasty things overseas. You know. That sort of thing.’

‘And here?’

‘Here nothing. They’re just based here.’

‘Does he work for Zelig?’

‘Sort of. But sort of not. Like they’re … equals.’

‘And who does Zelig work for?’

‘Directly? For David Bruce, the OSS station head here, and before you ask the whole shebang is run by Donovan. Known as Wild Bill. Don’t ask me why.’

‘And he works for … ?’

‘For Ike, of course. Dammit we all work for Ike one way or another. Why, what’s Jimmy done?’

She swilled back coffee so hot Troy still found it scalding and returned to her skirt. Three or four deft strokes of the iron and she had the pleats in line and was stepping into the skirt before Troy had worked out what to tell her. She turned her back to him and pointed.

‘There’s a hook and eye thing at the back I never can reach … can you … ?’

Troy leaned towards her, fingers fumbling.

‘I think it’s all that makes a girl marry. Just to have someone around to do up the fasteners at the back. Still not gonna answer me, eh? Boy you expect a lot.’