Love Fifteen (10 page)

Fred shrugged.” I thought it might give us something to stiffen our resolve.”

Theo now appreciated Fred's odd sense of humour. Like Theo but in a different way, he mocked the pompous way their betters talked, partly by doing the same.

In the end they relented.

Everyone knew by now roughly which important buildings had been destroyed but, as Fred drove them to the old centre, they were startled to see how much had been incendiarised. Wine, Bridge, Mary-le-Port and Castle Streets, the Dutch House, the church of St. Nicholas and of St. Peter, with its Elizabethan chapel.

“And the Regent,” said Theo.

“They can rebuild a cinema, son. I'm talking about ancient and irreplaceable houses of God.”

“I don't believe in that. My church
is
the cinema.”

When Rose told him not to risk being struck blind, Theo dared God to do it, right there in the Morris Twelve. Fred shook his head and Rose drew in her breath and held it. After a second or two, Theo said “See?” but only moments later cried out, groaned, writhed, rolled his eyes to show the whites and ran his fingers over his sister's face like Robert Colman in
The Light That Failed
. Kay wondered how anyone of his age could be so infantile. Rose told him he'd act the goat once too often and stay like it.

Theo got out and walked, taking views of the ruins with the Voigtlander he'd been given to encourage him to work at his geometry. A grotesque with an armband to show he was a special policeman asked what he thought he was up to. Was he a German spy or what? Fred left the Morris and came across.

“What's the trouble, officer?”

(Never any harm, he often told them, in applying a little soft soap, speaking to them as they'd like to be. Costs nothing and smooths the way.)

“No trouble, sir. Just telling your lad he'd better not let those snaps fall into enemy hands.”

“No fear of that, though I dare say the Luftwaffe's capable of its own aerial reconnaissance. My Lord above, though, just look at it! Virtually the whole of the old city.”

“We'll make them pay,” the policeman said.

“Oh, no question,” Fred agreed.

As they walked away, he said to his son: “How does the silly bugger think we'll do that? We've got nothing. The Americans aren't coming in and who can blame them? The Russians and Hitler have signed a peace pact. All Europe's either on his side or under his thumb. We're alone against the world.”

Dad had never spoken in that way before. Like everyone else, he coped with the war by being childish: Germans were Jerries, Hitler was like Charlie Chaplin, Goering was fat and loaded down with medals, a well-informed and effective traitor was given the name Haw-Haw. As they reached the car, Theo looked back at the gutted cinema where Hazel had posed as his big sister. He was glad to see the Things-To-Come News Theatre standing undamaged among the brokendown gables and spires. It was no use talking to Fred and Rose about a new world of glass and steel; they belonged to the old bricks-and-wood one that was going up in smoke.

“When you're a Mason,” he said to Fred, “you'll be able to give policemen like that the secret handshake. They're all part of it, aren't they?”

“Only the real ones, not these tinpot voluntaries. They're no better than wardens.”

The sickly stench from George's brewery blew across the water from beyond Bridge Street, sharpened now by whiffs of charred wood.

The fug in the car was heavy with cigarette-smoke as Rose and Kay shared a Craven A.

“Lord Haw-Haw warned us they'd be flattening all that,” Rose said.” He always knows.”

“He's not that clever,”' Theo said.” ‘He didn't know when the Regent would be starting Sunday opening or they could have killed far more”, and even this crumb of comfort raised their spirits.

“Where now?” Fred said, as he pulled the bakelite starter.

“Plenty of damage along Park Row,” said Theo.

“And down Park Street,” said Kay.

So before dropping Theo at the library they toured the ruins: the gutted Prince's Theatre, Coliseum ice-rink and Venetian-style museum. They exclaimed at the skeletal wrecks in Park Street, where débris had been cleared from the road and pavements. Theo couldn't resist boasting of how he'd seen it burn.

“So how close were you? Where-ever does this old teacher live?” Kay asked, her eyes averted to the scene outside.

“Oh, somewhere round here.”

“Good grief, boy!” she scoffed, like Estella in old Miss Havisham's place, “how
vague
can you get?”

He felt her studying his blush and turned away to look from the car-window. She was alwayws just a bit too clever for him.

“Up there, I think.”

“Charlotte Street?”

“Think so.”

“Lord,” Rose said, “I should have been worried stiff if I'd known you were right in the thick of it.”

“You can drop me here, Dad, I'll walk the rest.”

“Door-to-door service this, son. Anyway, your mother insists on going to Westbury to look at houses for sale, so we can go along by the Flying Fox, Hotwells Road to Portway, up Bridge Valley Road to Sea Walls, across the Downs…“

“I worry when you're out in a raid, Theawl,” said Rose, “look at poor mother and what a time she had in the last.”

“I'll be alright. You go on.”

“Come home as soon as it's over, mind,” said Fred, making another effort to be strict, “and allow enough time to do your prep before bed. Where d'you suppose films will get you in the big bad world, Mister Titchcock?”

Kay did her tinkling laugh and Rose told her to stop. Fred realised too late what his Dad had unintentionally implied. He made a disgusted sound and got from the car to hide his blush.

This was to be the last meeting of the film society. The members' wives were mostly too nervous to be left at home alone and anyway some civil servants who'd been bombed out of the Corn Exchange were being rehoused in the library. There was no need to let this be known to the family but he and Hazel would soon need another alibi. Kay seemed to be on to the truth and would withhold her suspicion only until she could use it to most-telling effect. Then her silence would cost him a good few Capstans, which Vince in turn would have to be blackmailed for.

Hazel was surprised by the turn-out. She'd expected a quorum at best but the threat of another raid didn't keep the entire membership from turning out to see the Dali film and
‘The Childhood of Maxim Gorky
'. Stone and Moss were there, beard tugging, Adam's-apple bobbing and scoring off each other; George laced the projector (with Theo closely watching) and Vera collected the members' tea, milk and sugar.

When he arrived, Hazel could see he didn't care for her purposely frumpish appearance. To put members off the scent, she wore a teacherish blouse and cardigan, darned stockings, flat shoes and glasses. Surely he understood? Maybe not. Boys that age lacked the subtlety of adult life.

She must stop thinking of him as a boy.

Moss welcomed them to the final meeting and warned Vera and any other ladies who might be a touch squeamish that the razor blade across the eye came early on so they'd better look away till he gave the all-clear. In mitigation he added that, of course, Bunuel hadn't used a human eye, only a dead cow's, but this upset one or two animal-loving ladies even more. Hazel sat between Vera and an unknown man so Theo was next to Moss on the end.

The infamous short was silent. The only sounds were the running projector and frequent scandalised gasps from Vera and others. Stone and Moss kept snorting with laughter at gags no-one else could see.

When the end came and George put the light on, most members said they'd thought it disgusting and silly. Feelings ran high and Vera said it was a shame they never managed to show anything with Leslie Howard. Stone declared it wilfully obscure. He was hardly a philistine, he said, so if
he
couldn't make head or tail of it, surely the artist had failed to get his message across. Moss explained that a film's having no coherent narrative didn't mean it was nonsense, rather a free association of ideas as in so much twentieth-century art, such as
‘Ulysses
' and
‘The Wasteland
'. At the mention of these sacred cows of aesthetic mysticism, Hazel determined to decided to speak out. Before she could, the sirens sounded but they started showing
‘Maxim Gorky
' anyway. After some minutes, though, the warden from downstairs came to tell them he couldn't let them stay as the ack-ack was going like billy-oh at enemy planes. The rest of them made haste to get home, leaving Mrs. Hampton and Theo to clear up.

As they left the building, the warden looked at the exploding sky and wondered who they thought was getting it tonight.

In her flat, Theo gave his view of the short film. It wasn't funny like the Marx Brothers and didn't have a story like
The Day Lifts Itself
, just a load of crazy pictures like in a dream. The sequence when the sweaty-looking bloke started massaging the girl's tits was quite sexy, especially the way the woman kept changing to a naked statue. Though it was crazy again when she was cowering in a corner and the sweaty bod couldn't get at her to feel her tits again because he was pulling a load of priests and a dead donkey on a grand piano.

“But when they talked about it afterwards, it was like Puzzle Corner on
Monday Night At Eight
. I mean, old Stone called
‘Ulysses
' modern but wasn't that Ancient Greek? And how could that be art when it was a book?”

Hazel corrected his mistakes as though marking an essay.

He reckoned, from what they'd seen of
Maxim Gorky
, it wasn't much of an advert for equal shares in Russia as there obviously wasn't enough to go round. Everyone was so poor. Was that what she wanted?

After refuting these arguments, Hazel made the speech she'd been about to when the sirens went.

“I think Geoff would probably say Dalí's escape into infantile fantasy is symptomatic of the despair of the Bohemian bourgeoisie. Alienated and confused by the excesses of capitalism, modern man can either drown in barren introspection or look outwards to a better future such as most of the world's now fighting for. Dalí was a salesman who marketed his own mental illness. The film merely describes the symptoms without providing a cure.”

He understood that, just about, but mention of her husband reminded him.

“Have you written to tell him about me? Us?”

She sounded none too sure. If he'd been here at home, face to face, she said, yes, of course, why not? But then, if he had, she and Theo would never have got together anyhow. As things were, though, with him in Egypt, she thought they should probably wait. Theo pointed out that they were only practising what Geoff preached and believed, that in the long run sharing would end the evil of property, of which the institution of marriage was only one aspect, a form of legalised prostitution that made women mere chattels. She eagerly agreed that in time all that would wither away as everyone came to see common ownership as common sense. This war was teaching us to manage with less, everyone except the toffs, who still had more than their share. Even archbishops, she had read, were advocating an end to monopolies and a future welfare state for all. Admittedly, bishops were against the Jews but that was all part of being Christian, which Theo said he'd learnt in Scripture anyway.

She was glad to have shifted their talk to a more general level.

He'd brought her a present and now produced it from his gas mask box. A pair of nylons.

“How did you come by these?”

“There's this man-friend of Mum's who comes in when Dad's away and brings us fags and sweets. He gives me and Kay stuff to keep us from telling Dad when he comes home on Friday.”

Though Theo had wondered if she'd consider stockings an insult to her high-mindedness, she readily accepted frivolity as part of her plan for a better world. In fact, the widest possible spread of pleasure was the be-all and end-all of her utopia. Political reform was only a necessary mechanism to start properly distributing the world's available treats. Once that was done, state control would wither away too.

She held one of the pair against the light of the gas fire, stretching her fingers like a fan inside to examine the fine mesh then rolled it from the top till it formed a sort of bag with a thick rim and, putting it on her foot, began to unroll it up her leg. He watched as she smoothed out any creases beyond the knee and some way up her thigh, leaving inches of naked flesh before the rest of her underwear began. He touched the thigh and bent to kiss the naked part. She did the same with the other, put on the pre-war high-heeled shoes and paraded about the room like Rita Hayworth in
Cover Girl.

‘“Aren't they beautiful?“' she asked him, coyly turning one knee across the other.

Theo told her
she
was., stood and moved to embrace her. He knelt and kissed her
there
again. She moved back and unrolled the stockings, folded the pair back into their cellophane packet and laid it carefully in a drawer, for fear he'd damage it with his clutching and scratching and the friction of his legs on hers.

She later asked how he felt about Vince. They were sharing one of his complimentary Gold Flakes in the low bed, with the black-out drawn across the dormer. She could see he was confused by his mother's betrayal, however much he tried to condone it. Not that Hazel gave much credence to psychological mumbo-jumbo but this was a text-book case of Oedipus-Theo killing Creon-Fred and conniving at the adultery of Jocasta-Rose. Put more simply, the adolescent had to free himself of the dominant male. Hazel wanted to make him examine their own affair by touching on his qualms about Rose and Vince. The Sophoclean simile failed when it came to his natural disgust at the thought of sleeping with his Mum.

“I can't think what she sees in him, that's all,” he explained.” He's a sort of glorified spiv. You know, common. Alright, so Dad's pretty boring but he's given her all she wants, except a house in Henleaze.”

“So, if you liked Vince more, you wouldn't mind him coming to see your mother when Dad's away?”

“I don't mind all that much now really. I just don't understand all this lying that grown-ups can't seem to do without. It would be simpler for Vince to call one time when Dad's home and talk it all over sensibly and come to some agreement.”

“Everyone hasn't got as open a mind as yours.”

“I can see that. Time they had though.”

“They were brought up to believe in property… that a wife's part of her husband's goods and chattels.”

“With them, yeah, I guess it may be too late. Victorians really. But you and Geoff don't see it like that. It wouldn't worry
you
if he had another woman in Cairo, would it? And, if you wrote and told him about us, he'd give us his blessing, wouldn't he?”

Hazel's heartbeat, that had calmed down after its recent tumult, quickened again at the prospect. She had no answer to the young man's proposal. His innocence shamed her. He lacked the moral duplicity, greed and jealousy she knew was still a part of her nature. Had to be. She couldn't stomach the image of Geoff with an Egyptian belly-dancer, even an ATS girl in the Education Corps. Was Theo's indifference due to his mother's offering him no moral lead? Or was he of a generation that would be ditching the old rules in a way she knew she still couldn't?

Having no answer, she was almost glad when the house was shaken by a salvo of anti-aircraft from nearby Brandon Hill.

“I'd forgotten the alert had gone,” she said, getting out of bed, slipping on a gown.

From further off came sustained barrages and the rhythmic rumble they had now learned to recognise as German aero engines. Hazel turned off the bedside lamp and opened the black-out curtains.

“God!” she said.

The sky, dark nearby, was red towards the city outskirts. A balloon was burning. Flak burst among clouds outlined by the reflected light of blazing streets.

She felt Theo joining her and made room in the narrow attic window-space.

“That's over our way,” he said, “north east.”

“You sure? Looks more south to me.”

“No. That would be beyond the cathedral. Those fires are well to the left. St. Paul's, St. George's, St. Agnes, St. Werburgh's, St. Phillips,” and asked: “Why are the poor parts all named after saints?”

“I suppose they've got most need of them.”

“Looks as though they will tonight.”

They heard a rushing then felt a jolting and splintering from along the rank of roofs.

“That was close.”

“Close? It's this terrace.”

More gunfire from the hill made them jump and clutch one another. She opened the casement and peered out and along the rising line of pitched tiles behind the stone facade. The houses stepped up towards the little park at the summit of Brandon Hill.

“Didn't explode though, did it?”

“Could be an incendiary. Or an explosive one that just didn't go off.”

They could see the tall outline of Cabot Tower on the highest point. Theo never saw it now without remembering how Jimmie Lunceford had taken off marks in his composition on the subject of John and Sebastian Cabot, the city's fifteenth century explorers. When Fred asked why he'd only got eighteen out of his usual twenty, Theo had to admit he'd thought the Cabots had built the tower in 1500 when they were alive. In fact, it was only a century old –
only ! –
named by the Victorians in their memory. Fred was just as vague about architecture. He'd thought the half-timbered lavatories on The Tramways Centre were genuine Tudor. They looked a lot like The Old Dutch House, he said, that had been burnt in the last raid and he knew
that
was old. But then, some of the houses in Henleaze were like that too and he'd actually seen them being built just before the war. There was so much to learn, Fred had discovered, which was why it was vital for Theo not to waste his schooling. Fred himself read only books on cricket.

He was behind Hazel now, naked, caressing her hips and gently pressing himself against her. She felt his hands moving up the back of her legs from the knees, raising the hem of her dressing-gown and fondling her slender behind. As his fingers moved round to touch her cleft, she gripped the window-frame and closed her eyes and slightly moved her behind from side to side, as if in a lilting dance. His hands moved to where her hips tapered to the waist. She braced herself by planting her feet wider apart on the floorboards. She knew he was holding back, teasing her and himself. She closed her eyes and bit her lower lip to control an urge to push into him. His tireless cock moved against her moistness. This was like a drug, she thought.

“You alright up there?” shouted someone from the street below. She looked down. A number of wardens and fire watchers had their faces raised to a point along the terrace to her right. Residents from the flats were joining them from various front doors in quickly put-on clothes.

She nodded and waved.

“You better come on down, my lover. An incendiary's gone through the roof a few houses up. Can you manage? Everyone else has come out.”

She nodded and drew back from the dormer, pushing Theo into the room.

“D'you hear that? Get dressed.”

“Can't we just – ?” he began.

“No. And you must go out the back way, through the garden. There's a lane leads up to Brandon Hill. You mustn't be seen. The other tenants are all out front. Hurry up!”

They dressed up warm against the chilly air. Last, she put on her glasses, a scarf and a beret and led him by the hand down the dim stairwell and to the rear-door on the ground floor. An iron spiral flight descended to the oblong strip of dark lawn.

“When shall I see you again?” he said and “How are we going to meet now the film society's wound up?”

“For the time being we better not. You'll have to walk home. I hope you'll be alright. Your parents will be worried sick.”

They kissed and she watched him clamber down and sprint away to the latched gate in the rear garden wall. She turned back to the front.