Love Fifteen (9 page)

Prayers finished with a whole lot of new orders read out by the assistant head and Hines couldn't let them go without another Churchill imitation, giving Theo some new material to use in his end-of-term show: arduous combat, resolute in strife, triumphal aftermath. He warned them not to go sight-seeing and interfere with the efforts of the valiant men who strove so blah-blah-blah-ly to something-or-other.

That morning, room was found for the influx of titches. Two of their forms took lessons in the Hall, one at either end, told by their teachers to speak low, as raised voices would create acoustic chaos. Made no odds to Quasi who was already deafened by the bells of Notre Dame. Senior classes were realloted to pungent science labs and woodwork annexes, gym changing-rooms or even – on dry days – part-covered fives-courts. In time to come, as war turned to siege, the school would colonise undamaged wings of the university. Nearby houses were let to the school by well-off owners when they escaped even farther west. Midday most seniors bolted their sandwiches and went damage touring, though many hadn't thought of it till Hines told them not to. Theo avoided Inky, wanting to be alone. Queen's Road was a mess of salvaged rubble from the burnt-out university hall and city museum. Some stuffed animals had survived in their cases, no longer behind glass. A lion and elephant still struck roaring, trumpeting poses in the devastated rooms, now open to the street. When Theo crunched over broken glass through one of the opened archways, the same old bloody-sergeants, museum versions, bawled at him to be off. Park Street was closed to traffic so he went along Park Row and could see ahead the burnt-out Prince's Theatre where he'd enjoyed pantos as a titch but had long since outgrown. His parents had gone there to see
‘Murder in the Cathedral
' and thought it a real let-down. Rose said they'd expected a nice mystery but it was nothing but moaning nuns. Theo saw what a crafty title Eliot had chosen to get people to go. Well, as long as the cinemas were untouched, he could do without Thomas a Becket.

From there he crossed Park Street, its facing rows of shops now showing as many gaps as an old man's mouth, and stood some distance from Hazel's flat, pretending to gaze up at a burnt-out house, wondering if she was at home and would see him and invite him up. No, today was too soon but later, when they felt safer, she'd be looking out for him from one of those sentry-boxes she called dormers.

*

Hazel was still a part-timer. Married women were allowed to teach, replacing the men, only till war ended and they came home. Next year she'd be taken on full-time. Her advantage was being childless. Pregnancies could disrupt time-tables for weeks on end. She sometimes thought of joining an auxiliary service like the Observer Corps. One of her afternoons off was Wednesday, when Theo's last class ended well before dark. When enough weeks had passed, they risked more sessions. He was usually outside the house by four, daylight already fading as he pressed her bell push.

As far as the other tenants were concerned, he came like several others for private tutorials, more often girls than boys. If her neighbours met Theo on the stairs, gas-mask and bursting satchel, rakish cap and school tie, purposely kept on, his appearance was the perfect cover. For him the flat was a new world of shared sex, low lamplight, candid books and weird potted snacks from before the shortages. She wore a full set of clothes to go down and open the street door but hardly were they in the flat than he'd removed his
Just William
disguise to show the lean young body beneath. And, while she stood admiring, he'd start pulling her sweater over her head, her face drawn back by the narrow neck, as though caught by bomb-blast.

“Wait, it's tangled up in my hair.”

“Chinese,” he said, “you look Chinese.”

She raised her hands to help and he reached around her to unfasten the brassière brassiere at the back.

“Wait,” she said again, features still distorted, jumper tangled in hair-clip, “wait!”

“I can't. You're at my mercy.”

He knelt to kiss the breasts that fell slightly as Kay's didn't yet and Rose's did but a lot more so. Once free, she went ahead of him to the bed. When he joined her and began, her little cries and gasps still startled and scared him. He'd never imagined anything like them when he'd tossed off over Miss Poland or Princess Margaret. ‘“It's so easy, after all that wondering,”' he said over the Senior Service they shared later, inhaling in turn. “What about before Geoff? Or was he the first?”

“No. In our circle it was a point of honour to take lovers. More than one, if possible.”

“What's a point of honour?”

“A good thing. A feather in your cap. At college we broke away from our homes and all our parents' unexamined principles.”

She explained that their friends (whom she called comrades) were rebels, believing in Free Love as only one of a number of freedoms that would follow when we had a real society where all men and women shared the fruits of their labour. Theo said he didn't much fancy sharing anything with the snotty kids from down near Mina Road where his Gran lived. Hazel patiently enlarged: there wouldn't
be
any snotty kids in a new world after the war, as long as we used the time to educate people who were at present set against one another by primitive tribal chieftains disguised as toffs and bosses. This he understood: like Ralph Richardson in
‘Things To Come
' that he'd lately seen for the first time in the Metropole De Luxe. That had been made long before the war but old H.G. Wells had predicted it almost to the day. So far the populace hadn't panicked and run screaming to the shelters at the first air-raids like in the early sequences but all in good time…

“It's all a question of education,” she said.

“This what you teach them in Bedminster?”

“I try. I have to sneak it in. It's going to be our turn at last, darling. Only through Communism can we achieve fair shares and a world of music and art and foreign films.”

She threw back the covers and reached for Geoff's rough woolly dressing-gown. By the time he'd pulled on his pants and joined her, she'd made tea and was toasting bread on a trident at the gas-fire. She put it on a tray on the floor and they ate and drank with the heat beating out at them, the blue flame warming the biscuity burners till they turned a glowing orange. “Free love and a better world would be bang-on,” he told her, “but I don't want Russia or Poland… you know, old peasants and Jews in funny hats and beards. We're not like them, are we?”

He didn't care for tea, even drunk from mugs without saucers, preferring strawberry milk-shake, but the toast-and-marge was wizard and he wolfed it down while telling her again how he wished Hitler would burn all the old places down so they could have a new city of white hotels and glass-walled factories, skyscrapers and film-studios.

“America!”

“That's not America,” she said, “it's Hollywood.”

“Well, Hollywood's what I want. California, here I come! Hey, let's go there, after the war. You and me and Geoff? If he believes in free love and everyone sharing? See, I want that too, all my favourite films are about that –
Robin Hood
and
Tortilla Flat
and
You Can't Take It With You
. But we needn't bother with Communism. America's already got all that equality and one day the rest of the world will want everything American too.”

Patiently but earnestly she explained that America's wealth and supposed freedom was were based on the suffering of people in poorer lands who provided goods at slave-wages, as Britain's was drawn from all the pink parts of the map, but that in Russia progress would be slower because it would all be fair.

“Like rationing?”

“Somewhat like these wartime measures, yes, fair shares for all, as long as we don't go back afterwards to all that inequality.”

“But raising everyone to the same level could take ages, by which time we'd be too old to enjoy it. So why don't we all go and see, the three of us, and if we like it we could stay?”

As she leant across to pour more tea, she spoke as though she'd only half-listened.

“Theo, dear, don't go away with the idea I don't love Geoff. I do, of course. He's just been so long away.”

“Yeah, and that's why this is alright, what we're doing. I'm keeping you happy till he comes back and you're teaching me what he taught you.”

You've already outgrown the teacher, she thought.

Most Sunday mornings The Salvation Army played outside the Lights' bay-window: a loose circle of uniformed men, women, boys and girls, obstructing the road, forcing the occasional car to take another way, as this was God's day, dedicated to tuneless songs of praise on cornet, trombone, tuba, cymbals, bass drum and half a dozen thin voices exhorting the street to “Stand up, stand up, for Jesus, The trumpet call obey…” while Rose again sighed her longing to be released from this blessed district that had once been the summit of her hopes.

“I bet they don't get this in Henleaze.”

Kay plucked aside the net for a better view of the tall dark boy burping away on the tuba.

“Careful, Kay, love, they'll be seeing in.”

“What's there to see?” Kay asked, then: “Theo, isn't that your bosom friend beating the big drum?”

“Was for about three weeks six years ago.”

Rose squinted at the band over Kay's shoulder.

“That common boy,” she said, “with the runny nose from down near Mina Road, always wiping it on his sleeve? My Lord, and there's more of them moving in all the time.”

“More what?” asked Fred from behind
News of the World
.

Rose lowered her voice: “Poverty-stricken people.”

A straw-bonneted woman and girl now left the group and began their door-to-door progress down the street with begging-boxes. Theo saw Deanna Durbin go to the facing house, leaving the wicked witch of the north to do theirs. Fred was sent to give her sixpence, get rid of her and receive her icy blessing.

“Blooming cheek, making people give them money every blessed week!” Rose said, as Fred came back.

“A small price,” he said, “if it helps staunch the running noses of the poor…“

“And I hope you weren't too familiar, like you are with the coalman. You'll talk to anyone.”

“‘Have to, Rose, in my job.”'

“Stand up, stand up, for Jesus,” Kay sang along, “the buggers at the back can't see.”

“Shush, Kay” hissed her mother.” That the language they teach you at Redland High?”

“No, the Youth Club.”

“It's a bad influence, that place,” their father said.

“Go on, Fred,” Rose said, “it's mostly ping-pong and woodcraft.”' Kay gave a brieif snoprt of luaughter but said no more. So Rose went on : ‘“Isn't there anything cheerful on the wireless? What with the bombing and that blessed noise, my nerves are shot to bits.”

“Stand up, stand up for Jesus!

The strife will not be long,” promised the frail voices in the avenue,

“This day the noise of battle,

The next the victor's song.”

“There you are,” Fred said, “That could have come from Winnie himself.”

“You shouldn't laugh at them, whether you believe in it or not,” Rose said, turning on the radiogram.” God could blind you.”

“I wasn't,” Fred said. Sometimes even he had to wonder how Rose managed life without any sense of humour.

After some moments of deep humming from the speaker while the valves warmed up, a Hines-like voice announced that morning service would come today from St. Stephen Walbrook in the City of London.

“As though there's not enough religion every blessed Sunday,” Rose said.

Theo, who had the
Radio Times
, said “Nothing till Bob Hope at half-past-twelve.”

This gave them two hours for their weekly baths: Rose and Fred then Kay and Theo.

“The royal family have set an example,” Fred had said, “by showing that five inches is enough for anyone.”

First Kay, then Rose, then Fred himself couldn't contain their laughter at this but Theo now felt himself above smut and only sighed. Fred put on his straight face again and argued that their family's total depth of bathwater would alleviate needless sacrifice from the nation's merchant seamen. Theo wondered how they managed in the palace with three women and one man? Perhaps Margaret Rose, as the youngest, got in last? That's after her mum and dad
and
sister? Hellish sludge. Inky and Theo had done a comic strip in his Art exercise-book where she'd asked her dad if he wanted to have it first and, while he'd been stuttering and trying to answer yes, she'd said ‘“okay, you second”‘ and jumped in. That was what they
hoped
she was like anyway. They reckoned she looked a good sort, unlike her sister.

*

Fred let cold water run, then lit the pilot and turned it to the ring of burners inside the geyser, dodging back to avoid the sizeable explosion as they caught, flame leaping up to briefly discolour the copper cladding. Only a year ago, he'd been too slow and was left with singed eyebrows for weeks.

“If the bombs don't get us, that geyser will,” Rose said, from the landing, ready in curlers, shower-cap and dressing-gown. One of her dreams was to live in an all-electric house like Laura Tombs's in Henleaze.

The roast was already in when Rose went to bathe. Fred had prevailed on a branch manager in South Wales to slip him a joint of beef. Theo escaped to the back room to play a few of the old Brunswick dance-band records he'd got secondhand in the Upper Arcade before it was bombed the same night he'd shared Hazel's bed. It would be safe for half an hour to smoke one of the Capstans old Vince had given him earlier in the week to buy his silence. The idea of free love and sharing wasn't quite so attractive when he thought of Vince and Rose and Fred and he felt a few qualms about deceiving his father by not speaking out. Vince's supplies of sweets and fags were indispensable though and Fred probably realised Rose's evenings out at the Mauretania weren't a real threat to their marriage, only a wartime escapade. Parents cared too much about outward shows of loyalty. Theo had made it up to his dad in a small way by returning to his bedroom drawer the Frenchie he hadn't had to use. He never knew if Fred had missed it or, if so, wondered about its reappearance.

He locked the door, cranked the gramophone and announced: “And now Ben Bernie and his Hotel Roosevelt Orchestra with
‘I'll get by'
.”

He dropped the circular sound-box on to the first groove and closed the lid to reduce the surface hiss. He opened the window on to the back garden and lit up. For some time he blew out his cheeks and plonked along with the slap-tongued bass-sax. He stared about him at the three and a half walls covered from floor to ceiling with pin-up girls. Stuck to the loose old wallpaper with Grip-Fix were the scandalous Carole Landis, the modest beauty of Loretta Young, the potent blend of demure provocation that Maureen O'Sullivan embodied as
Tarzan
's Jane, the brash gaiety of Judy Garland… These Hollywood images of freedom gave way in places to those of enslaved Europe such as Miss Bulgaria, flinching and writhing, tied to a stake.

He began tearing from the top, where the wallpaper itself had separated from the plaster. The whole length came away till he reached a Lady Out of Uniform from
‘Men Only
', her WAAF cap at an angle and haversack-straps stretched between her naked tits.

Someone knocked on the door. Damn! Old Rose should still be doing her nails and Fred would have taken over her bath.

“Yeah?” he answered, “‘who's there?”'

*

Kay surmised by the long pause that he'd be putting the lighted Capstan on the window-sill outside, in case this was their Papa knocking. She allowed a few seconds before saying: “What's it locked for?”

He let her in, waving smoke about.

“Oh, good show, wretched child,” she said, “give us one.”

Theo said: “I thought for a minute you were Dad.”

“Naturellement. I meant you to. What are you doing?”

“I'm cheesed off with all these pictures. Taking them down.”

“I was led to believe they were your pride and joy.”

“Were, yeah. Kids' stuff now.”

“You droll creature,” she said, drawing on the cigarette and exhaling a dragonish jet of smoke from each nostril.

“How d'you do that?” he asked, “I've tried but it makes me cough.”

“Like riding a bike. One moment you can't and the next you can.”

“Quite a lot of things are like that,” her brother said, tearing another strip of paper and cut-out pictures from the wall. She wondered what had brought this on. All part of his new mood of the last few weeks. It wasn't feasible that such change in her formerly gauche brother had been wrought by the raids alone. Nor, she thought, could a few foreign films at the Library have lent him such élan, such savoir-faire. She shrugged and looked out at the gathering dusk.

“Hey,” he asked next, “tell you another drink you must ask for when you're old enough to go to the Mauretania. You know, like Sidecars and Martinis?”

“Surprise me.”

“Dutch Courage.”

It was a good chance to give the tinkling laugh she knew he found impressive and irritating. He'd caught her practising it once but surprised her by not taking that chance to extract the Michael.

“That laugh's almost as good as Vivien Leigh's now.”

“Lest you make a faux-pas in company,” Kay said, “you should know that Dutch Courage isn't the name of a drink but means the bravery induced by alcohol.”

He listened, considered and nodded, then went on tearing down the wallpaper.

“Dad may not like you doing that.” »

“He hardly ever comes in here.”

“That's all you know, gormless. He comes to peek at your pin ups.”

Kay saw this was news to him. He smiled and seemed in a mood to listen. She saw it as her duty to bring him up to scratch.

“Just as he didn't come twice to your talent show at The Empire to watch you. It was to see the snake dancer again. Are you doing any better at school?”

He shrugged, “Top in English. Bottom in maths.”

“Dad pays a fortune for you to go there because you were too stupid to get a scholarship.”

“Didn't ask him to.”

“You should try harder. You're not
that
stupid.”

“Stupid? From someone who's thinking of going to university? Which is like carrying on with school forever. What good's geometry to a film director?”

“Dear heart, it's a fatal error to think so early in terms of subjects. A general education is a good start for any career. Even film producing.”

“Directing,” he said, then: “Unborn babies.”

“Come again?”

“Floating in jars. That's all I know about university.”

“Rustic bumpkin! What the world's going to need after this war isn't people to make more soppy films but doctors and engineers, types who can organise things.”

He shrugged. In the usual way that would have provoked an outburst against any attempt to improve the lot of a class he called The Sweaty Nightcaps, meaning the plebs in
‘Julius Caesar
' who threw them up when he was crowned emperor. The People's only purpose, he often said, was to pay money to see the films he'd make when he reached Hollywood. But not today. This new Theodore was vaguely disconcerting. She longed to disturb his sang-froid. What in the world had happened at that film society?

The record ended and he put on the other side, Ben Bernie's band groaning from a standstill as he cranked the handle.

“Who's your man at the moment?” he asked.

“You cannot feasibly believe I'd tell you.”

“Why not?”

“And have you giggling over it with that callow goof from along the road?”

“Jake Swift? I reckon he's got quite a pash on you.”

She gave her tinkling laugh.

“Even if he didn't have greasy hair, I'd hardly want to be arrested for baby-snatching.”

He inclined his head, the Gold Flake hanging from one corner of his mouth, smoke drifting up that side of his face like Philip Marlow. But his eyes began watering so he removed it and flicked ash through the open window.

“You're not much older than us,” he told her.

“Swift's not even fifteen yet.”

“He will be soon. Like me. And you're only just seventeen.”

“I trust you two aren't still carrying a torch for Margo Carpenter?”

“Why shouldn't I?”

This time she saw him blush and smiled.

“She's about as far beyond your wildest dreams as any of these starlets you're tearing off the wall.”

When the music stopped, they heard Dad's call that he'd finished with the bath so it was Kay's turn with the water.

“And come up here, son, to our bedroom.”

Now what the hell was the matter? Perhaps he was going to be asked where that Frenchie had got to for so long. Or perhaps Dad hadn't noticed it was back. Or was it only about his school report again?

“Come in,” Fred said when he reached the front bedroom door.” If you're not doing your homework, help me revise the initiation.”

Phew! Only another rehearsal for the Freemasons.

Fred admitted his main anxiety was not forgetting the responses but failing to keep a straight face. It was vital not to smirk or in any other way show disrespect in the temple, as advancement in the retail trade depended on his being accepted for the brotherhood, without which Household Goods was a dead end and he was sick to death at seeing his colleagues promoted over him, once they'd become brothers.

Though bored with the umpteenth repetition, Theo was relieved and gladly trudged through this corny old stuff again, about tylers and trowels and cables-lengths from the shore.

After Bob Hope and dinner, Fred offered to get the car out and take them all to see the devastation. No-one was keen. Laura Tombs and her old man were coming from Henleaze in their Humber to play bridge later and would expect sandwiches and cake, which Rose had to prepare and set out on the three-tiered folding cake-stand ; Kay wanted to hear
‘Hi Gang!
' ; Theo was due at his Film Society.