Love Fifteen (18 page)

The last brought from Rose a reminder that that's what Gwen had predicted for
her
too before the Canadians came. On this occasion the cards weren't consulted. Leaves were more equivocal, more open to agreeable interpretation. Once turned up, aces of spades could not have been misconstrued and no-one wanted to face more bad news. The leaves brought ambiguous promise of better days.

Hazel praised the family's tenderness to Stan and the way Dora stroked his hand and said “hush now”‘ when excitement muddled his speech and brought panic to his eyes. Once there was a thunderstorm and Tilda gave a little cry and asked if it was them Hun buggers back again. A bit later she stared through the window and asked George to send away the monkey that had been hanging about there all day. He drew aside the net, tapped on the glass and made vamoose signs.

Once outside, Hazel embraced Kay, saying she saw why she'd decided to bring the child alive into the world after spending an hour in that charnel-house. Watching his sister and lover weeping on each other's shoulders, Theo felt excluded. These were fundamental feelings he'd never shared but was carefully observing in case he ever had to direct such a sequence.

The series of codgers Hines invited to speak at the weekly Jaw reached its nadir with some old chums of his droning on about stamps or scouting while the Great Hall echoed with massed murmurs, the scribbling of flickergraphs and compositions. At longed-for intervals, the clock below the organ-loft struck every quarter-hour. By frowns and outraged glares, Hines and his staff held down the lid on this seething pot till the bores finally gave up and everyone could bawl three cheers when the head swot shouted hip-hip. The entire mob pelted to the playground to fight, chew gum, light up behind the Fives Courts or boast of epic self-abuse.

Spring term was almost over, exams done with, Theo refining the scripts for his farewell cabaret in the Science Room, promising to be the most trenchant and merciless ragging yet of the wartime staff. Prizegiving was still to come, when most swots would be going either to university, some theatre of war or officers' training college. Now that the baby's future was fixed, he could swank about Kay's exhibition and groan with derision at bods who didn't know what it meant.

No-one could decide which was deadlier: another hour of some old boy – or Old Boy – telling how he explored an outpost of empire or the double-history they'd be missing on the Treaty of Tilsit. All but the swots had furnished themselves with light reading or writing materials and Theo had to pause from jotting down his new short story – about a jazz musician in Storyville's New Orleans – to stand with the rest as Hines led in this week's yawn.

He could hardly believe his eyes, except that, even if the guest speaker had worn a mask, there'd be no mistaking the walk, turn of the head and distinctive way of hiding one hand inside the double-breasted blazer. A murmur travelled like bush-fire. Once he'd mounted the dais and taken the seat Hines offered, even the swots knew who it was. Theo looked across at Jimmie Lunceford who caught his eye, smiled and nodded, so the staff must have known beforehand but been sworn to silence.

“Good morning, School,” Hines started, though he'd already seen them all at Prayers. “It has been your very great good fortune to be privy to the thoughts of an impressive roster of eminent men – and even a few ladies – from many of the professions and useful arts, though today's is our first from the theatre and in some ways the greatest fish we have so far landed. If I may use such a metaphor.” He paused to give the guest a creepy smile before turning back to the school. “A metaphor being a figure of speech that not merely compares something with something else but pretends for the sake of vividness that it
is
so. He has won unrivalled acclaim with his Romeo, Mercutio, Hamlet, Iago, Caius Marcius in
Coriolanus
… the list is endless. His Henry V at the Old Vic was a stirring rendition of that soldier-king who is such a hero for these, our own stirring times.”

Go on, you poxy snob: so what the hell's the Old Vic when it's at home? And all these stage plays and no mention of his films:
The Divorce of Lady X
,
Q Planes
,
Lady Hamilton
,
49th Parallel
… Theo looked across at Swiftie and both mouthed their favourite line from
Rebecca
: “That's not the northern lights, that's Manderley!”

At last Hines ran out of flannel and asked them to welcome Mister Olivier. The incredibly handsome but surprisingly short international star leapt up and began by remembering his last visit to the city when he and his wife Miss Leigh had flown back from Hollywood through Portugal to Whitchurch airport. (His wife! Jesus, so beautiful she'd even made it to Theo's pin-up gallery.) He remembered Hazel passing on her special gen as a plane-spotter that this route was known earlier as the Chicken Run, by which wealthy cowards could escape wartime England. It was kept open by the Nazis as a conduit for spies and V.I.P.'s to and from neutral Lisbon. And poor old Leslie Howard had been on the outward leg when his plane was mistaken for someone else's and shot down. The Oliviers had come the opposite way, returning at the height of the war, he was telling them now, and staying overnight at the city's Grand Hotel which had no heating or windows, after just being blitzed.

There followed an hour of stories about the stars and directors he'd worked with, with names like Tony and Johnny. He called Hitchcock ‘Alfred' for Chrissake! He ended with a trailer of his forthcoming film : ‘Once more, unto the breach', managing even in the hall's railway-station acoustic to make the hairs stand up on Theo's neck and at ‘England – pause – and Saint Geooorrge!' everyone shouted and stamped as though they were about to rush off straight away and kill all the French they could find. Except that the present filthy swine were Germans. Schweinhunds really.

Head Swot couldn't still the uproar and looked for help to Hines who stood and made simmer-down signs and at last there was quiet enough for a vote of thanks to be proposed and three cheers that had a somewhat randy bass note as a good few of them were wondering what it was like to do it to Vivien Leigh. Wait till Kay heard her favourite star's husband had been here in his school!

Hines gestured his guest to go before him and Head Swot followed.

Theo had already opened his desk and rummaged among the stacked text and exercise books. He pulled out the leather bound autograph pad Kay had given him for Christmas the year BBC Variety had been evacuated to this safe city. He'd long ago given up that pastime as unsuitable for a man nearly seventeen years of age. While they waited for the deputy head to signal school to dismiss, he leafed through pastel-tinted pages, scrawled with signatures of comedians, vocalists and compères, till he found some blank ones at the end.

He loitered by the main door while Sergeant whisked his cane at passing buttocks until the bell rang for Double Art and Inky went in with the rest. Theo ran to the bogs and hid there, eyes on the empty playground, till Hines came out with his visitor, blatantly calling him Larry. Theo scampered forward and thrust his book at him.

“Sir, can I have your autograph?”

The mouth slightly smiled, the eyes remained half-closed as they had when confessing he hadn't loved Rebecca but hated her. Hines was trying to shoo him off but Olivier looked at the pencil, shrugged and winked and took out his own fountain pen and signed. Quickly Theo babbled on, saying he wanted a start to his career in films and would there be anything he could do on the shooting of ‘
Henry V
' that he'd mentioned in his talk? The famous face became wary, the eyes assessing him, his forwardness, his worth.

“Mmm. I wonder how keen you really are.”

“Try me, sir.”

“Enough to start at the bottom? Runner, tea-boy, go-fer.”

“Go-fer, sir?”

“Go-for this, go-for that…?”

He literally had his tongue in his cheek while the eyes remained half-closed.

“Anything, honestly, sir!”

The actor had returned the book but now took it back and scribbled a name on the page facing his own.

“Write to this chap at Elstree Studios. Say I told you to. He might have something. No promises.”

“Now get along to your class,” Hines snapped and drew Olivier across the playground to his waiting taxi.

*

Olivier's say-so led in a few weeks to a letter proposinng him as one of a team of dogsbodies on the picture. The production manager agreed to meet him in July, after school had broken up. With this in view, The Treaty of Tilsit seemed even more irrelevant and even Jenkin's Ear had lost its magic.

Fred ran him to Temple Meads and warned him not to be disappointed if he came away empty-handed. The theatrical business was notorious for fair-weather friends all saying ‘Dear Boy' and ‘Darling' and Mister Olivier may not be any different from the rest of the fraternity. He wished he could have come to London with him and tried a few handshakes on the right people but he was expected on the morrow by the manager of Gloucester branch. Theo stayed overnight with the aunt in Barking who would also be lodging Kay during her confinement. She lived about as far east as Elstree was north-west, a journey by tubes and buses that took at least two hours. Theo didn't care. He loved the capital's hugeness, a city that never seemed to end however far the trains took you. He gaped up at the high buildings in the centre, some of them rising six storeys into the sky. Rose had packed his overnight things in a small case Fred sometimes used for samples.

Not to waste tuppence on a platform ticket, Fred said goodbye at the station's gothic entrance, wished him good luck and palmed him four florins he could use to hand out as thanks for favours.

On the London platform he was asked by grinning Uncle George if he wanted his case carried. He showed him where to stand to get a good seat when the train came in. Lowering his voice and looking sideways, he enquired after Kay. Theo hardly answered, more bothered by the first example of a problem that would stay with him for years: when and to whom and how-much to give as tips to people Kay called menials. Should he hand a florin to his uncle? Before he could embarrass them both by trying, the Paddington express arrived.

At Hayes, the first signs of real civilisation prepared him for London: the Horlicks Malted Milk and Decca record factories, the last one redolent of blue-label discs and swing bands he had jumped about to when he was a mere titch. Not long after, he changed to the tube, then again at The Embankment, reaching Barking after twenty-five stops.

His first visit to a film studio hardly brought on dizzy spells. The great sheds he would later learn to call stages looked more like the hangers at Filton aircraft factory than the promised land he expected. The film was in post-production so he saw no shooting. The few people he met weren't much different from those in Dad's wholesale depot. Though Fred boasted about his son's first job when on the road, at home he advised his son to start putting in for a decent pension. The film wouldn't last forever.

“Yeah, but in a year or so I'll be called up.”

“Let's hope the war will be over before that.”

“They haven't invaded France yet. And even when it's over they won't just suddenly sack all the soldiers. They'll probably go on calling bods up for some time after. Even years. So Geoff says anyway.”

“Who?”

“Mrs. Hampton's husband.”

“Of course. Kay's child's father-to-be.”

They were sweeping and raking the fallen leaves on a Saturday afternoon. Autumn had struck Rosemount's garden, a season Fred found more sympathetic than spring, when all the burgeoning bewildered him. Rose badgered him to sweep up all the blessed leaves like the neighbours had and he recruited Theo to give a hand. They both enjoyed the smouldering fires that slowly reduced the pile to ash. Rose wouldn't allow a compost heap, saying they harboured vermin.

“I gather Mr. Hampton wasn't keen on the idea at first,” Fred said, “which I find hardly surprising.”

“
I
was surprised,” Theo said, helping with a rake.

Fred shook his head.” A man likes to feel his children are his own.”

“Does he?”

“You will, in time.”

“I don't want kids at all. Can't stand them. Horrible oiks, always messing and yelling.”

He especially had in mind the way titches played up in cinemas, just like they did in school, which showed how stupid they were. He'd later find the same when the other bods in his service corps watched a film in the camp cinema. They lacked the sensibility to be a proper audience but that would change in years to come when they'd been educated like everyone else.

“That only goes to show how young you are.”

“Kay feels the same way about babies.”

“Now. But wait till hers arrives. And that concerns me, I must say. The birth of her maternal instinct. Will she stick to her intention of going to Oxford? Don't just dump them on the heap like that, son. Let the air get to the fire.”

For awhile they worked in silence. Fred rested and, for the first time ever, offered his son a cigarette. Theo imagined a similar scene when he handed out the other contents of his drawer.

“No,” Fred went on, sounding like Bernard Miles being the dependable countryman on a warship or C.H. Middleton doing
In Your Garden
on the Home Service, leaning on the rake or digging for victory on plots where once had been herbaceous borders, “I imagine your lady tutor's not the sort who'd take no for an answer. Wouldn't stand any old buck. Wears the trousers, I'd say.” He gave Theo a sly glance.” And looks pretty good in them too, those slacks she sometimes favours. Very attractive, I've often thought, but she wouldn't be the sort to grant her favours to any Tom, Dick or Harry. Anyone who came sniffing round her would get short shrift, I imagine. Behind that severe demeanour, you know what I mean, son, once aroused… what d'you think?”

“Dunno.”

“No? Well, no, I'm glad you don't. You naturally think of her as a teacher. She's a bit on the mature side for you but from an older man's point of view… “

“I don't see much of her now, since deciding to leave school. Now I've passed School Cert, I've got no more use for algebra and history. And she wants to make a clean break with our family.”

“Much the best, especially for young Kay …”

He tossed his fag-end into the steaming, flickering heap.

“No, I can quite imagine her husband's eagerness to rejoin her… also his reluctance to admit they can't have a family of their own. A man wants to feel his line goes on, his children are his own seed that can bear his likeness as well as his name. Given that you and your sister and I aren't always on the closest of terms, you are at least my progeny, not fathered by person or persons unknown. Which is why, however we may differ, I shall always love you both.”

What saved Theo from rushing to his room in a fit of embarrassment was that during all this Judge Hardy stuff at least Fred never met his eyes. Next he grabbed the handles of a barrow and wheeled it up the path. “Understand, son? Flesh of my flesh?”