Love Fifteen (6 page)

The fresh air on College Green was a relief, as the insides of cars always made him feel sick, with their pongs of petrol, leather upholstery and a scented polish the cleaners used at the firm's garage where Fred had it serviced free. And if anyone farted – him, Dad, Mum, Kay or Tilda – it hung about for hours, because if you tried to wind down the windows Rose complained it was a gale and would make her hair look like the wreck of the Hesperus.

He'd never used the central library, didn't know how, only gone once on a school visit with Jimmie Lunceford. Outside it looked as old as the cathedral and Cabot Tower and he wasn't surprised to find himself climbing another load of the sort of stone stairs they had at school, clumping along dark stony passages and ending up in a high panelled room with pointy windows that felt like church but with more books. Mrs. Hampton, wearing a headscarf and overcoat, welcomed him with a nice smile, as though she'd really been looking forward to seeing him. She introduced him as a provisional new member to three men and a woman, all still in their outer clothes. As they spoke, steam came from their mouths like visible words. George worked the projector and puffed at a pipe and Vera was his wife, a couple Theo guessed had come on the motor-bike and sidecar he'd seen parked outside. Vera, who knew as much about films as Rose did, poured tea from a Thermos and handed him the mug. As a newcomer he was given sugar-cubes and milk but told to bring his own next week. Like the others, he warmed his hands on the mug. An oil-heater was doing its best to take the chill off.

Stone and Moss were younger, though not by that much, and Theo had met their sort when Fred had made him go to Sunday school once or twice and reckoned they'd come to argue as much as watch. He guessed pretty soon that Vera was only a member because of George and George was only there to work the projector. He sat beside the machine letting his smoke drift across the rays of light, making the picture even dimmer.

Hazel switched out the overhead lamp, shaded since the blackout to light a small area directly below. Just before the picture came on, he saw her slip on her glasses, like she had in The Regent. While the French film was on, Stone and Moss kept snorting with laughter or tut-tutting as though something rude had been said, though the words underneath weren't a bit funny so Theo reckoned these were among the huge mass of jokes he wouldn't understand till he was older. After three years of French lessons with Artie Shaw, he found he could only understand the title:
Day Lifts Itself or Gets Up
but Mrs. Hampton suggested
Break of Day
. The picture quality was only a little better than he'd seen at kids' birthday parties when they showed the
Keystone Kops
or
Mickey Mouse
; the sound boomed and crackled from a speaker beside the screen, decoding a track that was all vowels and sudden loud music and seemed to have been recorded in the North Baths. This didn't matter much, though the jumps and slips and flickering did and the times when it all groaned to a halt and George had to get up and lace the next reel. This was a first for Theo but he easily read the titles, except when the white letters happened to be against a white part of the picture.

When ‘Fin' came on, the next word Theo understood, George caught the spinning reel and began rewinding.

“Weird and wonderful,” he said.

Mrs. Hampton took off her glasses and turned the light on.

“It was good to see that again,” Stone said, the Adam's apple in his neck bobbing up and down like a ping-pong ball on a jet of water in a fairground.” I'm inclined to agree with Manvell that it's Carné's masterpiece.”

“Which is where I must take issue with both you and Mister Manvell,” Moss said, smiling and tugging at his brindled beard.” Though it may be lèse-majesté. For me it's altogether too black-and-white.”

Theo wondered how a film without technicolour could have been anything else.

“Where,” Moss went on, “one can't help asking, are those greys? As it is, the innocent girl, the wicked women of the world, the inarticulate working-man caught between, the evil and perverted showman all seem mere humours, personifications of moral forces Carné wants to cast into a crucible –”

“Which is surely the whole point,” Stone broke in, “that these figures are no mere individuals but mythopeic archetypes.”

“What did you think, Vera?” Mrs. Hampton asked.

“Well, I wasn't going to say anything but, since you ask, I'm not surprised France fell like a rotten apple if they're all as depressed as that.”

George smiled at her.

“Well said, love. They got the moral fibre of a flock of geese.”

“I don't see this as an exposition of the shortcomings of The Third Republic,” Stone said, with a slight smile in Theo's direction.

“Don't you?” Mrs. Hampton said, “I do. However wonderful it is as a film, I agree with Vera that it shows only too well the moral malaise France found itself in, sitting like a rabbit waiting for the snake to gobble him up.”

“Hazel, please grant the artist the right to express himself in signs and symbols, as Chekhov did with his seagull, Ibsen with his wild duck.”

“That was then, before their revolution. But it's too late now for all that nineteenth century nudging and winking. We need artists who'll say what they mean… unambiguously.”

Moss tapped the arm of his chair with his cigarette-holder like Theo had seen a snotty prefect do the one time he'd been to a school debating society.

“Which brings us, I think, rather neatly to the subject of the film on general release this week, which I hope you all managed to see.”

“We didn't, no,” said Vera, “it's too far to come in the black-out, all the way from Patchway. We thought we'd wait till it comes to the Cabot.”

“I strongly urge you to,” Moss continued, “if only for the chalk-and-cheese contrast with what we've just seen. To compare Yankee Populism at its most effective with the defeatism of the ancien régime.”

“Effective,” Stone said, “only if you respond like one of Pavlov's dogs to the familiar stimuli the film deals in. The old Capra recipe with a few fresh flavours.”

Theo felt the veins in his forehead pulsing and pounding. This blue-jawed bastard was picking holes in a masterpiece.

“Of course,” Moss agreed at last, “one recognises the stock characters, – hillbilly hero, lovably embodied by a famous star, cynical city girl-friend gradually converted to his homespun goodness, the decent man gone bad who repents in time to provide the happy ending without which no Hollywood product is thinkable –”

Theo sipped from his empty mug to gain time and at last cleared his throat. Everyone looked at him.

“I sort-of think Capra admits all that himself… I mean, he's not sort-of covering it up or anything if he calls the film
‘Mr. Smith Goes to Washington
', is he, after already calling the other
‘Mr. Deeds Goes To Town
'? And, I mean, what's kind-of wrong with James Stewart anyway? I mean, you want a good actor for that part, don't you? And I'd rather come out feeling life's kind of good than – well – bad, and see a lot of people who are good at heart, not all being rotten to each other like in this French one.”

“Just what I was saying, son,” said Vera.

“I know.”

“No-one denies,” Mrs. Hampton said, “Capra's one of the few socially-conscious Hollywood film-makers, though his comedies are hardly radical critiques of capitalism. That system will never allow its artists to advocate the revolution we all know must come if their republic is to live up to its original egalitarian promise but still …”

George had drained his cup and was now buttoning his short overcoat.

“Well, as far as I'm concerned you can keep your bloody revolutions. There's a country I could touch with not that long a stick – about twenty miles away, in fact, – that had a revolution moons ago and much good it did them. No beliefs, nothing to cling to, so damn' feeble they cave in as soon as the first bully picks on them.”

An air-raid siren's whine began close by, rising and falling. You'd almost think those old wardens enjoyed making that din this far south-west when a couple of Jerry planes had been sighted over Dover. Vera stoppered the flask, stowed it in her bag and said: “We better be getting on. No, we don't want revolution here. Nor our houses burnt down or guillotines or being lined up against a wall. Don't expect the Yanks do either. You'll wash and wipe the mugs, will you, Hazel?”

“We'll hope to see you all next week,” said George, squinting to read from a slip of paper held beneath the light, “when it looks as though we'll be having
‘The Childhood of Maxim Gorki
' and –”

He paused and Mrs. Hampton prompted: “
Un Chien Andalou
.”

“Ah,” Stone said with some amusement, “with the notorious opening shot of a razor-blade being drawn across a naked eyeball.”

“Someone will have to tell me when that's over,” Vera said, “because I shan't be looking. So we'll say t.t.f.n… Mind how you go in the black-out.”

Stone and Moss followed soon after.

“I'd give you a hand,” Stone said to Mrs. Hampton as he went, “but my good lady gets a tight tummy when the sirens go and baby Oswald starts crying.”

“Theo can help me clear up,” she said, “or have you told your parents you'll be home?”

“No special time.”

While she rolled the glistening screen and he packed the projector, they heard George's efforts to start his bike and Stone and Moss calling goodnight. The motor juddered into life and moved off past the cathedral and across the city centre, breaking the Sunday evening silence. No church bells had rung for a year or two. When they did, it would mean invasion.

“Let's put these away first.”

She walked in front carrying the screen in its long container and Theo followed with the heavy box. He recognised the reference section from that visit when he was a titch in 3B. The long high room with rows of study-desks, a little lamp over each, the librarian's table, the cases of tiny drawers for the catalogue cards. No lights now relieved the dark, though glimmers came from the hall through panes in the door. As they entered, she shone a dim torch ahead. Her heels struck the wood-block floor as she made for an open spiral stairway in the farthest corner.

“Can you manage?”

“Think so.”

“Douglas Stone usually does this but his wife's got a new-born baby. He's an assistant librarian, which is why we can use that room and this apparatus.”

She climbed the spiral stairs ahead of him, each one a perforated metal plate that rattled slightly in its frame. As she pointed the torch's beam backwards to help him see, his eyes were level with her knees. The heels of her shoes were wooden wedges. With one hand he heaved the heavy projector in its black box; with the other he clung to the metal banister. They arrived at a narrow gallery against the wall that encircled the long and lofty room. Above them rose shelves of leather-bound books that could be reached only by a movable step ladder.

“Take this and shine it up.”

He rested the heavy box on the gallery floor. She handed him the torch which he pointed after her as she climbed six steps up the ladder. Some light, diffused by pink tissue paper across the glass, spilt on to her long legs as she raised her arms to replace the screen on its shelf. The hems of her short skirt and overcoat were lifted some inches above her knees. He was close to the shadowed outlines of whatever muscle it is that runs down from thigh to calf. Old Rabbit had done it in Double Biology. Biceps femoris? Like his sister, she wore no stockings as long as winter held off. The wishful colour had been painted on. From somewhere farther up, she'd drawn a line to resemble a seam that went straight down to her shoes.

“D'you use gravy browning?” he asked.

“Do I what?”

“Use gravy browning on your legs? My sister does.”

“I have done. No, that's real Miner's liquid make-up.”

“So how d'you do that line?”

“With eyebrow pencil. Quite a contortion actually.”

“A couple of inches have got rubbed off just above your knee.”

“I don't suppose anyone will see, except you.”

“No.”

He ran his middle finger up the missing stretch of line.

“Just there.”

“Yes ?”

She had put back the screen and now lowered her arms. The skirt and coat fell like a curtain around his hand and he stepped aside to clear the way for her to climb down. She took back the torch and shone it so that he could replace the black box. But the shelf was lower, he could do it without using the steps. She stood still and silent, invisible behind the light. Still silently, she led the way down the spiral stairs and through the hall, her wedges clapping the wooden tiles like castanets.

He was glad of the darkness and the chance to ease his jack upward in his trousers till it rested against his belly.

God, hell's embarrassing if she'd seen!

The room where they'd watched the film was warm and smoky, almost cosy, after the icy empty corridors.

Avoiding his eyes, she unbelted and took off her woollen coat and threw it down on a table. She was wearing a short cream coloured jumper he knew was angora like the one Kay was knitting. At her neck, tucked in, was a silky sort of scarf and at her waist a broad belt, buckled tight, and the jumper went on below that for a few more inches.

“Better get these washed. You dry.”

She took them on a tray to a nearby scullery that smelt of chlorine like the Baths and had a sink where she ran cold water over the mugs they'd used. Her hair was only brown, not blonde, brunette or auburn, but showed golden tints and was nice and loose like Paulette Goddard's when she was being a beggar-girl or gypsy. Some of that eyebrow pencil had been used as well on her eyebrows.