Love Fifteen (3 page)

“Sylvester's lovely to dance to,” Vince said, “strict tempo. Like Charlie Kunz.”

“No,” Theo answered.” It's too commercial.”

“Don't start another blessed row,” Rose told them, “my head's splitting with all the arguments in this house.”

“What arguments? What about?” Theo asked, crossing to warm his front at the half-dozen glowing coals in the fireplace. Now he could see his face and check his Brylcreemed hair in the diamond-shaped glass built in to the panelled surround.

“Armistice Day,” sister Kay said, without looking up from her work, “Vince reckons the last war did no good and this one won't either and Gran says we shouldn't speak disrespectfully of those who died.”

“The war to end wars.” Vince gave a slight laugh, “and after twenty years here we are with another.”

Rose lowered her voice.” You must understand Mother lost a son in the last.”

“I do, love.”

At this cheeky endearment, Kay raised her eyes to meet Theo's in the glass.

Rose went on: “All Mother said was she thought it wouldn't hurt you to show respect for two minutes a year, even if they don't have it at the Cenotaph any more.”

“A respect I don't feel?,” Vince asked.” Hypocrisy, wouldn't you say, son?”

He was what Rose often said of the coalman: familiar. Like calling their mother ‘love' and him ‘son'.

“All war's wrong,” Theo muttered, examining how well his solemn expression in the glass matched the words he spoke. He'd got it from Leslie Howard.

“So we shouldn't fight Hitler?” asked Rose.

“Got to now. That doesn't make it right.” He felt the need to contradict this intruder. “And anyway what's two minutes a year?”

“The Great War doesn't mean much more to us than, par exemple, Waterloo,” Kay said, blotting and closing one exercise-book and opening another.

Though he disagreed, Theo didn't argue with big sister. She could prove black was white when she felt like it and anyway he wanted her on his side against Vince.

Tilda their grandma had now come in from upstairs. For evening wear, she'd shed her cross-over pinafore and fixed with hairpins the preserved switch of youthful brown that lay curled among the sparse grey strands remaining on her head. “All I say,” she began, “is them poor buggers died for king and country. And some did come back simple like poor Stan.”

“More fools them,” Vince said, making his next Capstan bob up and down as he lit the end.

Tilda turned to him. “And why aren't you in uniform? Too old to be called up?”

“I'm in a reserved occupation.”

“I see, said the blind man. That's what you do call the black market, is it ?”

“Mother,” Rose said, “look at this boy's trousers. Covered in oil.”

“I'll soon get that off. Put on another pair, Theawll. I'll do them in the sink and go over them with the h'iron later.”

“There's a dear.” Rose said.

Vince asked: “Can we get you anything while we're out, Mother?”

Kay and Theo exchanged another glare. Now he was calling their Grandma Mother. Next they knew he'd be calling Dad
Dad
. Or Pop! That's if they ever met, which Rose would make sure never happened.

“No, thanks, I got some stout in the larder. Just take off they flannels, Theawll.”

“I'll bring them down,” Theo said and ran out and up to the half-landing in two vaults, along the passage, through the bedroom Gran slept in on weekdays and which smelt of old age – mothballs, camphor, dust and damp bedlinen. And by the slight whiff of ammonia, he knew she still used the po under the bed.

Dusk was fading to dark beyond the single window of his own room. The five apple-trees in the small back garden had shed their leaves and the year's crop of eaters and cookers were now spread on newspaper across the attic floors upstairs.

Though it was yet still day, Theo drew the black-out curtains, turned on the light and took a Brunswick label ten-inch of the Mills Brothers doing ‘Some of These Days'. Jiggling to the rhythm, he dropped his flannels and looked about the room. From his waist-height to near the sloping ceiling, cut-out photos of stars and starlets had been pasted over the faded floral wallpaper. Coloured sketches of Ladies Out Of Uniform from
London Opinion
showed nudes wearing only service caps or tin helmets at saucy angles. Another patriotic sequence had Misses Norway, Greece, France, Holland and his favourite, Miss Poland, her gaping bolero showing breasts with nipples just concealed by the cruel Nazi ropes of her captors stretched taut around her puff-sleeves. On her lower half she wore a skimpy European sort of teatowel.

He had just pulled on his other trousers when Vince knocked and walked straight in.

“You've got to remember, son, your mother's going through a hard time. All mothers are. But her especially. She's highly strung… what-you-might-call sensitive. And not used to factory work, a cut above the other women out at the Patchway aicraft works. With your Dad away during the week, she needs someone to turn to. Got me?”

He winked, looked at the pasted pictures and threw a packet of ten Capstan Navy Cut, which Theo failed to catch.

“Thanks, Vince,” he said, retrieving them from the floor.

“Don't say anything to your mother, eh?”

He winked again.” Who's this on the trumpet, Nat Gonella?”

“It's not a trumpet.”

“What then, trombone?”

“It's one of the Mills Brothers doing a trumpet sound.”

“Blackies, aren't they ? You got to admire them, say what you like. Lovely rhythm. And good fighters. Well, look at Joe Louis.”

He threw a false punch at Theo's nose, making him flinch away then blush. Vince's crumpled face smiled and winked. At last he went.

When the record ended, he replaced it with the blue-and-gold Parlophone Rhythm Series of the Jimmie Lunceford band's brilliant 'White Heat'. Jerking and plunging to its climactic riffs, waving his arms like the drummer, thrusting forward an imaginary sax, he felt for three minutes that life could never be better than this. When the soundbox moved to the innner groove, he lifted it, stacked the disc on its shelf and made final adjustments to his clothes.

Soon after Theo arrived downstairs in the warm again, Vince drove his mother off in the Austin with many final warnings and instructions from Rose to Tilda, Kay and Theo. Rose had freshly Vaselined her lashes and renewed her lipstick. For someone of forty, Theo had to admit, she had a pretty face. Her own criteria for beauty were simple: high cheek-bones and small feet. ‘Petite' was her favourite word of praise.

Every woman over thirty had fat thighs best not seen or thought about and the flesh of their lower legs was mottled by too much exposure to coal fires or three-bar electric ones, a blemish they tried to hide by wearing stockings that looked more like a furry coating and required an array of corsets and suspenders usually hidden by skirts and dresses. He and Inky called this substructure ‘organisations' and thought of it as a Maginot or defensive Lline. And much use that had been saving France… The Jerries just went round the sides.

While Tilda dealt with the oily flannels, Kay helped with his homework. Brighter than Theo, she understood such things as what universities were and why someone might want to go on studying for years after school had ended. She meant to go herself.

“Good grief, wretched child,” was the sort of thing she said when he couldn't manage the work, obviously trying to sound like Vivien Leigh. And she did, quite.

Then ‘
Band Wagon
' was on The Forces Programme. For some months now, most comedy shows were broadcast from studios near Theo's school. When the war started, BBC Variety got evacuated here, to a city listed as a safe area, and he spent a good few dinner-hours outside the local broadcasting house with his autograph book, now full of the signatures of radio stars he knew by their voices on the air and their faces by
Radio Times
.

Dad was more impressed when the BBC Symphony Orchestra began rehearsing in one of the grocery showrooms of his firm's H.Q. due to the shortage of suitable spaces in the city. He was sometimes let in to hear recitals by a popular contralto, being relayed from Electrical Goods or Home Furnishings.

“Handsome woman,” he told the family, “wears a beautiful fox fur.”

“I wonder how she earned that,” Rose said.

“Lovely tone, especially in the low register.”

“Except she's got a vibrato you could cut with a knife.”

For all of them, this new nearness of stars who'd only lately been remote made their hometown seem the centre of the known world. Now only boring programmes like News came from London. Variety was just down the road.

Kay drove a stiff bargain, taking three of his remaining Capstans for doing his prep and forging an excused-games note for tomorrow afternoon when he'd really be going to an early showing at The Regent. She then retired to her bedroom across the hall from Mum's. As payment for going out twice in the dark with the shaded torch to fetch coal from the shed, Gran gave Theo enough for a half-price cinema ticket; and to reward her for that, he turned in early too. Once in the warmth of his single bed, he worked up a huge horn by thoughts of Judy Garland, Margo Carpenter and Princess Margaret Rose. In some scenes, all three of them wanted to be saved from savage natives or cruel sabre-scarred Germans. Their gratitude knew no bounds. Or would have done had he not faded out on their kisses. Once or twice he became Margo, her blouse and skirt failing to cover her tits and thighs as Theo fought off the Nazi swine and came to claim his dues. He had no experience to inform his dreams so kept changing to male again. He sometimes thought he'd rather have been a woman than a bod, though never for long when he reminded himself of having babies and having men lying on you, bumping up and down.

Now she was in The Sixths, Kay was hardly ever early to school and Inky usually cycled, so Theo was alone on the 21, with seventy others, one of whom might, on days with a special glow, be Margo Carpenter. Timing was critical. She was a Sixth Former like Kay and didn't always go in as early as he did. If the bus was full this soon on the route, Margo might not be let on when it reached Chesterfield Road, as nobody ever got off there. So deciding whether to stand aside and be first in the queue for the next was a knife-edge business. It was more than worth being late and earning another black mark, if he could wallow in the sight of her for at least ten minutes.

“Full up on top,” the conductress announced, barring the stairway, forcing him and one or two wizened or bloated grotesques into the lower deck, where he took the only empty seat. A gross wart-hog beside him shifted angrily as Theo pushed on to the narrow space. His satchel and gas-mask filled his lap. The front window to the left was misted by rancid breath and sweat, obscuring the view ahead. All down the first hill he concentrated on silent prayer, confessing he hadn't shown proper respect during yesterday's service, but pointing out that Artie Shaw falling on the organ keyboard was none of his doing and had pushed not only him but the whole school into near hysteria. He haggled with a grumpy god, promising to sing the hymns extra loud today to make up, if only Margo Carpenter was waiting at the stop at Chesterfield. Please let this happen, Lord, he begged, replacing the one who was like Hines with one more like Father Christmas, played by smiling Walter Huston, closing his eyes to give the prayer more thrust. As it did every morning, the bus swung off the hill, throwing everyone about in their seats, a few grotesques complaining that one day he'd turn it over. Sometimes the driver could be glimpsed grinning in his rear-view mirror but today Theo focussed only on the stop ahead with its huddled mass leaning out to stare at the approaching bus as though its destination sign promised to deliver them at Utopia. Being one more step up the social ladder, Chesterfield people never quite formed a queue, just stood about in ways that implied that such obedience would be beneath them, more like the sort of people who lived lower down the hill at Mina Road. Courtesy and common sense, their manner implied, were worth more than pushing to get on the bus at whatever cost. Just the same, they all knew their position in the mounting order. His heart skipped. Her maroon hat with the wide brim showed above the trilbies and dented pots of several primates in front who might prevent her getting on. He took care to thank Walter Huston at once, even though her presence may not have been due to Him at all, only to Theo's own careful planning, with a touch of good luck. A Christian friend had warned him there was no such animal, that Luck was an agnostic word for miracles. No, Theo said, vice versa.

He prayed again and heard the newcomers moving in and the conductress's double-ping and call of ‘Hauled tight!' in the local accent. Theo saw that no-one was still standing at the stop. They'd all got on, including her! In the pane on the driver's side, was a monochrome reflection of her brim moving down the aisle. He felt her push past his protruding satchel. She stood just ahead, strap-hanging, her usual slight smile seeming a politeness on her part, a goddess trying not to appear aloof from the earthlings she deigned sometimes to visit.

What possible pretext could he find to meet her eyes? Would he be laughed at for his lack of years? She was two, even three, older and could easily crush him with a look, a turn away, a suffering roll-of-the-eyes at some other woman of her own age. Hey, she was standing, he was sitting! He struggled, laden as he was, to rise, partly using his neighbour's bulk, sidestepped into the gangway and looked into her eyes. Were they grey-blue or green; were the lashes Vaselined or naturally glossy; was that provocative sideways glance one of gratitude or mockery? She'd been so thankful to be rescued from the Nazis in last night's dream and, despite her attractive modesty, almost unable to control the tendency of her clothes to fall away or apart.

She turned towards the front and offered the seat to an eyesore of eighty who'd coveted his place from the moment she got on, ahead of Margo. With serene dignity the goddess allowed the frump to pass and take his place. Even this crone couldn't resist a smile of thanks at the angelic visitant, though she ignored Theo. Had Margo done this for fear of her school badge being recognised and her lack of manners reported back? Or was it so that she could stand close to him all down Cromwell Road that took them near to their school somewhere in Redland? Her lashes lay on her upper cheeks like feathered fans. The corners of her generous lips were tucked in slightly, causing a dimple each side to set off the one that always pleated her chin.

Sweet hell!

He spoke, croaking on the last word ‘“Good morning..”' “Excuse me?”

Her voice was music as she raised her eyes to look into his. Now he knew: greeny-brown, that colour his mum called Olive.

“You get off at The Arches, don't you?”

“Mmm.”

“And take the 48 up to Redland. I've often seen you.”

“Have you?”

“I know your name too,” he blundered on, like someone who's tripped on a top step and can't stop.” It's Margo. Mine's Theo. Theo Light.”

“Is that so ?”

“Yep.”

Margo turned to smile at the conductress who'd come to the lower deck now to struggle through, taking fares. She was what old Fred called handsome when he meant he fancied a woman but wasn't going to say so. She wore her hair in one of those snoods that was supposed to save women workers getting their hair caught in the machines in the aircraft factory. She smiled back at Margo as Theo went on in an undertone:

“Gale Sondergaard.”

“What?”

“That clippie, she's like Gale Sondergaard.”

“Like who?”

“She's always a spy or someone cruel. In films. You interested in films?”

“Like anyone,” with a shrug.

“Only I'm going to be a director when I grow up. You know, in Hollywood. First I'm going to be evacuated to Canada then go on down to California.”

“Morning, dear,” the conductress said and took Margo's full price fare.” I thought for a moment you weren't going to get on this morning.”

“It was a close thing.”

Theo thought fast and handed over twopence halfpenny, saying “Same for me, please.”

“No need for that, sonny,” she said, “you can still go half fare till you're sixteen.”

She gave him his change with a child's ticket and, through a blinding haze of shame, he saw her wink at Margo.

Their pelting progress down Cromwell brought bays of protest from the herd and from the smoky upper deck howls of male enjoyment. At the Arches a rebounding collision of adolescent bodies hurtled down the curved stairs. Though the clippie shrieked curses at them, only the vision of Margo moving as though on air to the rear platform silenced this rout of groundlings. As she stepped into the street, they recovered, groaning with desire. Theo's bowels moved as he saw her modest blush. Then, without a backward glance, she was gone.

Ten minutes later they were at the top of Cotham Brow and his heartbeat slowed, his breathing calmed and he could be sure he wouldn't suddenly start blubbing.

Kay and Inky must never know. He put on his cap as the bus passed the Homeopathic Hospital, pushing and shoving with a load of other bods till they reached the platform, got off and walked the final stretch, screwing up his eyes to release the tears. A moment he'd remember till his dying day, like the ray of light through the glass box.

*

The school morning wasn't as bad as most: after a good sing at Prayers in the hall, English Grammar with Jimmie, marks for dictation (Theo top, as usual) and parsing a passage from
‘Travels With a Donkey
'; then French with Artie Shaw in head-banging, chalk-throwing mood, to forestall any advantage they might try to take of his dropping off in yesterday's service; Double-Art was a piece of cake and meant being embraced by Dolly Grey's cloak a few times but otherwise left alone to sketch from memory Margo alighting from the 21 with winged feet. That was what he meant to depict but she came out looking like the usual pound of sausages.

A note was sent round that the field was flooded, games cancelled, so they'd have Home Study instead and he could keep Kay's costly excuse-note for some future Tuesday or Thursday. Wizard! After sandwiches, he spent an hour on that night's prep and left the bulging satchel in school till next morning. He crammed his desk lid down, almost closing it on the heap of books and sports stuff. Lugging only his gas-mask, he passed some time in the City museum with a few other men chasing women from Clifton High. One of the Bloody Sergeants who patrolled the galleries caught them near the case of British Mammals and warned them to hop it or he'd report them to their Head. They left at once, as old Hines was known to be hard on anything involving the molestation of women, perhaps because he wasn't married himself so didn't know much about them. One thing Theo's men could have told him was that all Clifton High women were professional virgins and merciless cock-teasers, but you could tell which were virgins by the way they walked.

Alone, he took a bus down Park Street and around The Tramways Centre where they were still building a garden on the bit that had been a waterfront in former days and brought ships right into the city till they'd covered it to make a car park. And now there was no petrol and hardly any cars and wouldn't be till the war ended and no ships would ever be seen there again. Three barrage balloons floated above the rank of facing pubs and shops, with the Golden Shred golliwog and the Bovril sign that had flashed coloured lights like a rising sun.

He got off outside St. Nicholas church overlooking the city's oldest bridge and turned into the maze of Wine, Corn, Mary-le-Port and Castle streets, the busiest part of the city, where high old buildings were so close, Gran always told them, people on opposite sides could shake hands from the upper windows. This was another sort of city, smelling of grain and rotting fruit from the market barrows, manure from dray-horses and roasted malt from the brewery on the far bank of the floating harbour. The lofty seed-merchant's shop was at the corner where, on rough wooden floors, open sacks lay about like drunks. Outside, waterside winches hoisted the stuff from barges. Theo had been in there once with Dad, to buy grass seed to mend the bald patches on their pocket-handkerchief front lawn, an effort that had been about as effective as the hair-restorer the old man rubbed into his scalp.

Today's film was an ‘A', so he had to find an Adult to take him in. The commissionaire at the Regent was like the one who'd turned them out of the museum, and another of the same sort ran the public baths, old soldiers with limps or eye-patches or hooks where their hands should be and loud guttersnipe voices. The very sight of anyone of school age drove them into rages like those mad buggers in army films when some poor sod dropped a gun. Theo, Swiftie and Inky knew them all, had names for each and an imitation that covered their generic behaviour. This one at the Regent was one of the worst, even had medals pinned to his great-coat, though Inky reckoned he'd bought them in a junk-shop in the Lower Arcade. Once he'd marked you down as a lurker, he'd watch you like a suspected Nazi spy right up to the ticket-booth and beyond. At any point he might jump out and ask the grown-up taking you in if he was being bothered, so the first approach had to be made out of his view. As this was a chilly afternoon, every so often the old wretch went inside for a warm and during these spells Theo sneaked close enough to the doors to guess which passers-by were making for the foyer so as to accost them in good time. He avoided an oldish man of forty or so. He'd had enough of freaks with yellow teeth or smoke-stained fingers who'd take him in to an ‘A' and, once inside, start rubbing his leg above the knee or fiddling with his flies, and he couldn't watch the film in peace till he'd moved to another seat. This Caliban saw him and paused, pretending to scan the stills outside. Theo hung back, looking in a shop window at utility underwear till the old nance, after a would-be inviting look or two, had to go inside, the sergeant pulling open the door for him with a smarmy grin.

A young man and woman came from Wine Street but looked hardly old enough to get in to an A themselves, leave alone take him. After some time, Theo stepped up to a middle-aged woman coming along Bridge Street on her own. She at once understood his reason.

“So who am I meant to be? Just in case someone asks?”

“My Mum, I suppose.”

“Well, thanks. And how old are
you
?”

“Fifteen in January.”

“So how old d'you think I am?”

Her face close-up looked younger than he'd thought at first, almost any age between twenty-five and forty. As a girl she might have been okay-looking, about ten years ago.

“Don't know.”

“To have been my son, you'd have been born when I was twelve.”

He felt the blush in his face again. She must have seen it too by the way she smiled and said “You'd better be my little brother then. I'm going in the one-and-nines.”

“Okay.”

He gave her Gran's shilling for his half-price ticket.

Bloody Sergeant glared as he opened the door to let them in but the woman looked so respectable and Theo had kept hidden like an enemy sniper while he was outside, so he had to let them pass.

Though his parents always talked about The Regent as the poshest picture-house, for him it was too much like some old real-life theatre, the Prince's or Hippodrome. The organ was as good as the Palace's but the curtains were swishest at the Embassy. He liked the streamlined cinemas best, with white outsides and chromium railings, zig-zag mirrors and black wooden banisters, like the scenery in Fred Astaire films. He wanted the whole town to be Odeon style: white concrete blocks with windows that bent round corners, green, black and white tiles in the vestibule and in the hall itself hidden lights that made the curtains shine like the satin dress Rose wore to the annual travellers' dance at Dad's firm. Only a few other buildings in the city were like this – and a few more on the outskirts, the very last before the long boredom of the countryside between here and Bath Spa, super factories where they made potato crisps, brake linings and vacuum cleaners.