Ha'penny (17 page)

“Why didn’t you tell me before?” Jack asked, accusingly.

“I’m sorry. I was ashamed of it, and it never seemed like the right moment,” Carmichael said. “I realized today there was never going to be a right moment, and the fact I hadn’t told you was going to get bigger and bigger.”

“You should have said.”

“I know.” Carmichael put his hand on Jack’s knee. “But listen. Today in his office Penn-Barkis taunted me with being queer, just a little bit, and I have to get out of there. I have no integrity left, Jack, he’s bought me and he knows he can do what he wants with me.”

“Would he let you leave?” Jack asked.

“I think so.” Carmichael sat back and sipped his whisky, consideringly. “I think if I resign at the end of this case, which is completely separate, it won’t look as if it has anything to do with the Thirkie murder. In those circumstances I think he’d be prepared to let me go into obscurity.”

“But what would we do? Where would the money come from?” Jack finished his whisky and put the glass down.

“We might have to cut back a bit. But there ought to be firms that would hire me. All my experience is police, but at least that shows I’m trustworthy. Or I could try going back into the Army.”

“No!”

“That would be a last resort,” Carmichael said, gently. “But I’ll always think well of the Army. It brought us together.”

“Brought us together and wouldn’t let us have a bloody minute to be together,” Jack said, bitterly.

Jack had been assigned as Carmichael’s batman, before they went to France. Carmichael was attracted, and more than attracted, not only by the young man’s beauty but by his gentleness and courage. He had seen Jack wading in to a fight to stop a baby-faced recruit being bullied, and had loved him for it even as he stopped the fight and put them all on fatigues. But he would never have spoken, never have said anything inappropriate if it hadn’t been for Dunkirk.

Jack had been beside him in the boat when they were strafed by a Stuka. They had been under fire before, all of them, but there was something peculiarly horrible in being sitting targets in the open boat. They were too tightly packed together to be able to dodge, even if it would have done any good. The machine-gun bullets hit the sea, and then the side of the boat, then the arm and head of one of the men beside them. The plane turned for another run, and they had thought they were facing their final moments. In that moment, without the slightest bit of fuss, as if it was the most natural thing in the world, Jack had got up and flung himself in front of Carmichael.

A big gun on a corvette nearby hit the Stuka neatly as it turned, and they saw it plunge into the sea in front of them, the waves it made rocking their little boat. Jack sat back into his place, and Carmichael busied himself with some others throwing the dead man into the sea. When they sat down again, he had put his arm around Jack. It had seemed natural, not only to them but apparently to the others on the boat, a mixed crew from all the regiments of the British Expeditionary Force, with one or two French poilus among them. Nobody said anything. They had sat like that for the hours of the Channel crossing, hardly speaking, but acutely aware of the touch and of each other.

The next time Carmichael was alone with Jack, in the camp at Pevensey where they were hastily assigned, he put out his hand and tried to thank him for what he had done. Jack had taken his hand, looked into his eyes, and taken him in his arms. If Carmichael had acted he would never have ceased to reproach himself for taking advantage. But it was Jack, younger but far more experienced and much less inhibited, who acted, and Carmichael followed. All the time until the end of the war, moving from one camp in England to another, constantly interrupted by drills and air raids and men wanting orders, they had talked and dreamed of the time when they could set up house together in peace and secret comfort.

“My man,” Carmichael said now, softly. It was their old joke, old endearment. It was what rich men called their valets, their servants who saw to their needs, and Carmichael could refer to Jack as his man to anyone. They had found each other and miraculously come together across all the barriers of class and gender. “My man,” he said again.

“Not the army, P. A.,” Jack said, sliding across the divan to lean against Carmichael.

“They probably wouldn’t have me anyway,” Carmichael said. “I’m getting old for that game. No, I’ll look about for an office job. Nine to five, no traveling, home on time every day, wouldn’t that suit you?”

“It wouldn’t really be any different, except that you’d be bored too,” Jack said. “We’d still be stuck in this flat, we still couldn’t ever hold hands coming out of the pictures or do anything together without being afraid. They’d fire you from a job like that for being queer, if they found out.”

“How about if I looked for a job in colonial administration then?” Carmichael stroked Jack’s hair back off his face and looked down at him tenderly. “India, or Africa? The Exotic East? Burma, maybe? I’ve heard that in Burma the people don’t care about homosexuality.”

“You bet your life the English people do,” Jack said. “There isn’t any magic place we can go that will make any difference. There’s nowhere in the world where people like us can live openly like anyone else, have friends, ordinary friends, act normally. You and I love each other but we get sick of each other because we’re too much cooped up alone.”

“Come on, you’re always telling me stories about rich queers who live on the Riviera perfectly openly.”

“Along with stories about poor queers being sent to Hitler’s camps to be worked to death. I flat out won’t go to the Continent, P. A.” Jack sat up, fully in earnest. “India or Africa if you say so, but not to Europe. We should have stopped Hitler when we had the bloody chance.”

“You and Winston Churchill and Crazy Lord Scott,” Carmichael said, fondly. “Nobody’s suggesting going to Europe. But I think it might be getting as bad as that here, by and by. We might look at Canada, or Australia?”

“I’ll miss London,” Jack said, settling back against Carmichael. “I’ll miss the libraries and the cinemas and my friends. But if you decide you have to go, I’ll go where you go, you know that.”

15

A
fter that, things settled into a kind of pattern and went on like that for a few days. I rehearsed all day, then in the evening Devlin met me at the theater, drove me home, cooked me dinner, and I cleaned up after him and after that we went to bed. I kept on moving between the three worlds—Devlin’s world where I was going to blow up tyrants and I loved him but had to be careful not to say so, Antony’s world where I was going to act in a play, and Hamlet’s world where I was going to catch the conscience of a king and die in a duel with Laertes. You could say I was acting with Devlin, but I was also acting with Antony, and certainly when, as I was more and more, I was entirely caught up in Hamlet.

When Malcolm had said I was rooted in shallow soil, like all my sisters, what he’d meant was that he didn’t think I was sane all the way through. Hamlet certainly wasn’t sane all the time, and the more I thought about what he said, and the more I moved between the three worlds, the more right it seemed. Hamlet’s upbringing lacked sisters, and mine had all too many of them, but neither of them had made us like other people.

We were working a lot on the Ophelia scene, which is the part of the play where the balance is most changed by the gender swapping. Antony had Pat standing above me, leaning over me, as he threw our sexual past in my face and I gave my responses desperately, and then starting to circle me, holding the gifts out of my reach. We kept the nunnery line in the end, because we decided it worked if Hamlet said it as if she thought Ophelia was going to have as much luck finding a partner in a nunnery as with her. I kept dreaming about this, but in my dreams, Ophelia was not Pat, but Devlin, who changed into Loy as people do in dreams, and began giving Ophelia’s mad speech, “They say the owl is a baker’s daughter,” and becoming an owl and flying around the theater. All my dreams were terribly strange. Perhaps a trick cyclist would be able to explain it, or perhaps it was because I wasn’t sleeping very much.

The next thing that really happened was on the Thursday night, when Loy and Siddy came to see us.

Devlin must have known they were coming because he’d bought enough lamb. He cooked very precisely, buying all the ingredients he needed and using them all up. If he wanted a handful of parsley, he’d buy a handful in Covent Garden, he didn’t keep any in the cupboard. If he was cooking with wine, which he was that day, he’d use what he needed and we’d drink the rest of the bottle. Everything was always ready at the same time, and it was usually delicious. That night he made lamb stroganoff with a mushroom risotto, and as I was laying the table the door opened.

I hadn’t seen Loy since the morning he’d caught me naked in the kitchen. He’d obviously listened to what Devlin said about sleeping elsewhere. But he’d kept his key, so he just walked in without knocking or anything. I didn’t like that at all. Siddy was behind him. She looked defiant somehow, the way she looked when she used Mamma’s diamonds to carve hammer-and-sickles into every window pane of Carnforth. (Actually, that wasn’t entirely her fault. I mean Pip did start it by using her engagement diamond to draw a swastika on the drawing room window. And Pip was four years older, and should have known better.)

Devlin glanced up as they came in. Loy nodded to him. “No trouble,” he said. “They don’t know they’re born, compared to the other side of the water.”

Siddy blew out smoke and did her eye-sliding thing at me. “How are you doing?”

“I’m very well, no thanks to you,” I said, and laid extra plates and knives and forks on the kitchen table.

I was angry with Siddy. I felt she’d betrayed me into all this. I didn’t blame Devlin, or even Loy; they had acted as they had to act once I was involved. I blamed Siddy for saying it was fate and dragging me in.

Devlin dished up the dinner, and I poured out the white wine that was left in the bottle. It didn’t go far between four.

“This is good,” Loy said when he tasted the meat.

“It’s a sweet little oven. I’ll be halfway sorry to leave this place,” Devlin said.

“Why do you have to leave?” I asked.

“It’ll be burned, after the job,” he said, then saw my face. “Oh, not literally burned, love, burned out. Traceable. They’re sure to find out you were living here. But then I’ll be burned too.” He shrugged.

“You’re burned, Dev?” Loy asked, concerned.

“Mollie Gaston knows me, and half the theater’s seen me picking Vi up after rehearsal. My face and papers wouldn’t stand up to too much investigation. I’ll have to go home and lie low for a while. No harm done. It’s about time I stopped taking so many chances.”

Loy frowned and chewed.

“You actually think there’s going to be something past the job?” I said.

Devlin gave me one of his lovely smiles. “Well, there might be. It all depends how we do it, and how innocent you look.”

“If they’re sure to find this flat and find out about you, then they’ll know I’m not innocent.”

“There’s always the ‘don’t they know who Pappa is’ defense,” Siddy put in. She wasn’t eating, just pushing her food around with her fork. “You are a peer’s daughter after all.”

“Do they hang peer’s daughters, or strike off their heads with an axe like Anne Boleyn?” Loy asked, raising an eyebrow and leaning his elbow on the table.

“How about Irish baronets?” I riposted. I’d asked Mrs. Tring who he was, and she’d told me he was a baronet who had done something brave in the war. “They can line up the three of us on the block, while poor Devlin hangs in lonely solitude.”

“It all depends how we do it,” Devlin said again. “If we make it look as if it was done by the dangerous Jewish communists Normanby’s been ranting about, they may not even bother to examine the people in the theater. But if we have to do it in a way that points to you, then they’re going to find this flat and find out about me, though I’ll be gone. You could be gone too, or you could stand there and look guilty, or you could stand there and look innocent.”

“You could also play ‘my boyfriend set me up,’ ” Siddy said.

“When he said to put this bomb in Hitler’s box, I had no idea it was going to explode!” Loy said in a squeaky falsetto.

“The trouble with that one is that it won’t play very well late on. You need to start coming outraged innocence from the first moment, or it doesn’t work at all,” Devlin said. “Not understanding what you did is not a fallback position from knowing nothing.”

I ate a mouthful of my dinner. It was delicious, tender and flavorful, subtle and sophisticated. I’d have swapped it in a heartbeat for one of Mrs. Tring’s corned beef hashes.

“So how are we going to do it?” Siddy asked. She pushed her plate away almost untouched and lit a cigarette.

“What’s the layout like?” Loy asked, turning to me.

After asking me to find out, the first day, Devlin hadn’t said a word to me about it. “There are two doors, well, three, but the third one’s double-locked and only used for bringing large pieces of scenery in. There’s a doorman on the stage door all the time the theater’s open, and another on the front-of-house when that door’s open, which it usually isn’t, except for performances. All the public come in through the one front-of-house door, which opens onto a lobby with a ticket office, and doors from that into the stalls, stairs straight up to the circle, and smaller stairs going all the way up to the upper circle and the ha’pennies.”

“The ha’pennies?” said Loy, raising an eyebrow.

“The very top circle, the cheapest seats,” Devlin put in. “The seats cost more than a ha’penny now, of course. They also call it that because you’re so high up.”

“To get to the boxes you go up to the upper circle and around. There are four boxes, two on each side. The Royal Box, which is pretty much bound to be where they sit, is on the left of the theater, stage right. It’s bigger and more gilded than the other boxes. There’s nothing underneath it that I can see, other than the side stalls. I think we’d have to put something right inside the box.”