Memoirs of a Dance Hall Romeo (6 page)

We danced again after a while,
September Song
, the world a blue mist, the glass ball in the ceiling casting great, rippling waves across us and once, and this was the only time she did such a thing publicly, she pulled down my head and kissed me, the mouth soft and warm, opening like a flower, a kiss like no other I had ever had before.

And then it was over and we were outside, walking together through a light drizzle, beneath her umbrella. I had asked to take her home, but she, naming a suburb four or five miles on the far side of town, had insisted firmly that I take her only as far as the tram stop on the main road.

We walked slowly along the wet pavement, pausing occasionally to kiss. I asked her to go out with me one evening. The cinema or just a walk, perhaps? Anything. She shook her head firmly. It just wasn’t possible. She was too busy with prior commitments.

The frustration was terrible and explains, I suppose, what followed. We were standing on the corner of a small, dark alley. I grabbed her elbow rather roughly and pushed her into the shadows. Then I crushed her to me and kissed her hard, forcing her head back.

She broke away from me, slightly breathless, shaking a little as she reached up to touch my face. ‘No, Oliver, not now. Not this way. There’s no need.’

A remark which naturally made not the slightest sense to me and I grabbed her again, caressing her right breast clumsily.

I got a good old fashioned slap in the face that sent me back across the alley. She moved into the circle of light cast by a gas lamp and paused to rearrange herself, her face pale yet calm as she glanced once towards me before walking away.

The immediate feeling was one of panic, sheer blind panic at the thought of losing her. I acted in a purely reflex way, running after her instantly, and falling into step at her right hand. I couldn’t think of anything worth the saying, but mumbled something about wanting to see her to the tram stop. At least she didn’t say no and we continued together in silence.

I have seldom felt more miserable in my life than I did standing in the rain with her at the end of a small queue. She hadn’t said a word, simply started to move out of my life forever when the tram came and the queue started forward. There was a lump in my throat the size of a fist. I could have cried like a child. I plucked at her sleeve instinctively as she reached for the handrail.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said.

‘Good,’ she said calmly. ‘A little suffering now and then is good for the soul.’

I started to turn away, and as the tram moved off, she was standing at the edge of the platform, hanging on to the handrail. ‘The Trocadero, Thursday,’ she called. ‘Seven-thirty. I’ll see you inside.’

It was like a miracle. So great was the release of energy that, instead of catching a tram myself in the opposite direction, I walked through the rain for a good mile and a half, feeling incredibly cheerful.

Some of this joy was soon displaced by a feeling of profound depression. Why on earth had I behaved in such a stupid way? It was past belief.

I finally caught a tram, and had the top deck to myself all the way to Ladywood Park, staring out into the darkness as we rattled along the track through the playing fields, alone with my thoughts.

I took them to Jake, naturally. Couldn’t possibly have gone to bed without seeing him. I told him everything as he brewed the tea and he took it all very calmly indeed.

‘But I don’t really see what’s worrying you, old sport,’ he said. ‘She’s seeing you again, isn’t she?’

‘But why did I behave like that?’ I said. ‘Like some mad rapist on the loose.’

‘A slight exaggeration.’ He started to fill his pipe, a new affectation. ‘You’ve got to learn not to let your frustration get the upper hand. No point going at it like a bull at a gate. Females are like rare china. They need delicate handling. They don’t like being mauled.’

He said a few more things which I can’t recall, and finally gave me a book on how to achieve marital bliss which he assured me I would find most enlightening, and threw me out.

When I got home, I sat in the kitchen with a pot of tea and read the book through, or rather the relevant sections. It was obvious that I had a great deal to learn, particularly about the female of the species and how to switch her on.

When I went up to my room, I sat by the open window, watching the rain lancing through the lamplight, smoking, and thinking decidedly erotic thoughts, which did me no good at all. Sleep was impossible so I did what I always did at such moments, got out my foolscap pads and favourite pen and got down to some hard writing.

I had put away my previous effort, the eighty-thousand-word Hemingway parody, and was now into the second chapter of a novel of life in Occupied Germany as a national serviceman. As always, when the words took control everything faded, even Helen.

But I couldn’t write all the time, and she filled my thoughts to an obsessional degree during the following two days. The desire for her became a kind of constant itch that simply wouldn’t go away.

I was one of the first into the Trocadero when it opened at seven, and waited impatiently at a point on the balcony where I could see everything at the right end of the hall. It was even quieter than Tuesday and there was a curiously muted air to everything. From seven-thirty to eight was a period of living hell, a slow realization that she wasn’t coming. By eight-fifteen I was in a state of abject misery and capable, I think, of leaping over the rail to the floor below.

I went to the counter and got a coffee, and as I turned, she hurried along the balcony towards me, still wearing her coat, her handbag over her shoulder. Her face was flushed and she was slightly breathless, as if she had been running.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I couldn’t get away any earlier.’ And then, by way of further explanation, ‘My mother can be a little difficult at times.’

I just stood there, staring at her, unable to believe she was really there. ‘I didn’t think you were coming,’ I whispered and then the cup started to rattle in the saucer I was holding.

She moved very close and put an arm around my neck, her face against my shoulder. I could feel her heart beating, or was it mine? It didn’t really matter. I put the cup and saucer down on the table and walked her along to the cloakroom, where I got my trenchcoat and we left.

About a quarter of a mile along a side road near the Trocadero was a small wood beside a stream. Known as Priory Grange, it was run by the city parks department and was a favourite haunt of courting couples.

I kissed her once in the entrance before moving inside, and we followed a path through the dark trees, arms entwined about each other, and finally emerged by a greystone wall at the top of a rise on the edge of a small hill.

The moon was about three-quarters full, the wind stirred the grass gently, perfumed with pine from the trees below. There was a hollow on the other side of some rhododendron bushes that was completely secluded. We paused there to kiss again.

‘Put your coat on the ground,’ she whispered. ‘We’ll sit down.’

I had been holding myself in tightly, but the moment I got down beside her I cracked, pushing her down against the ground, crushing her to me.

‘Gently, darling, gently,’ she said and stroked my face with one hand. ‘There’s no need to be rough. No need at all.’

She looked lovely, her face pale in the moonlight. It could not be happening, any of it. I told myself that as she drew me down. The moment I entered her, the tension of the past few days exploded, Ava all over again.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said.

‘What for?’ She kissed me firmly on the mouth. ‘It sometimes happens that way. There’s nothing wrong. You’ll soon learn.’

There was kindness in her voice and genuine concern. I’d heard the phrase wife, mistress and mother. Now, for the first time, I sensed just what lay behind it.

She seemed the most wonderful human being in the whole world to me then as we lay there in the moonlight. After a while, in the middle of one particularly passionate kiss, she rolled over on her back again, taking me with her.

This time it was different, a perfect matching. I murmured foolish, impossible things in her ear between the kisses, and then her hands tightened behind my back and her entire body shook with a suddenness that took me with her.

After a while, she sat up and arranged her clothing, then she put a hand to my face in that inimitable gesture of hers. ‘Perfect.’

I asked her again for a date, but she shook her head. ‘I’m sorry, Oliver. It just isn’t possible at the moment. I can manage Tuesday night again at the Trocadero. I’ll try not to be late.’

I had to be content, but then in the state I was in I would have accepted anything, and we went back down through the trees and along the road, our footsteps echoing from the pavement.

I once read somewhere of a theory that each man can expect only a certain measured amount of happiness in this life and no more. If that be true, then God help me, for I must have used up an inordinate amount of my own ration during the period that followed.

Other things were happening to me, of course. Important things. These were, for example, the first two months of my brief career as a schoolteacher, but that time, on looking back, seemed all Helen.

It was an autumnal affair. Sharp, crisp evenings, a hint of woodsmoke in the air, fog crouching at the ends of the streets. Life, for a while, became the Trocadero and Helen, three times a week, for after that first week she started to come on Fridays also. Strange, but she would never go anywhere else, not even to the cinema, and things followed a very definite routine. We usually danced until nine o’clock. This was followed by a couple of hours in the field above Priory Grange wood, then at eleven I would walk her to the tram.

We must have gone through a reasonably dry spell for, unless memory plays me false, we were not often rained off. We made love constantly, and with increasing expertise on my part for, as the old saying goes, practice makes perfect.

But very quickly she came to mean more to me than simply the physical side of things. She was Helen. The scent of pines in the darkness, the wind through the grass, kindness, concern, love. Yes, she loved me. I was convinced of that and took a childish delight in my new-found ability to give her so much pleasure. And the simple truth was that I loved her as well.

I blossomed, became a completely different person. There was a new assurance, even Jake commented on that. Aunt Alice, noticing my happiness, told me that Jupiter was moving through a very fortunate phase for me.

But others noticed the difference. Girls at the Trocadero. Sometimes I’d have the odd dance or two while waiting for Helen, and the attitude now was completely different. Lots of easy conversation and plenty of mild flirtation. I could have been away with any number of girls because I had changed, by some mysterious alchemy, into a man who had been places and done things.

But everything has to come to an end sometime. A sad fact, but quite inescapable for all that. On the other hand, life does have its compensations and the lesser gods have a habit of allowing us to sample at least the quintessence of a thing, before taking it away from us completely.

As I have said elsewhere, Uncle Herbert seldom left the house, but a bad attack of bronchitis gave him a troublesome cough, something he could not afford, having been gassed at Ypres. Aunt Alice, despite her more eccentric activities, had never weakened in her concern for him, and with the doctor’s blessing took him off to Scarborough in a hire car for some sea air.

I was left alone to fend for myself, and didn’t do too badly for there was plenty of choice in the larder, in spite of rationing. I tried some tinned whalemeat one night, a delicacy new on the British market, large quantities having been imported earlier that year to alleviate the meat shortage. The taste of the stuff put me on the side of the whale conservationists for life, and I spent the rest of the week on a diet of beans and chips augmented by school dinners and the odd meal provided by Jake’s mother.

There were other possibilities in having the house to myself and I raised the matter with Helen when I met her at the Trocadero on Tuesday. Quite simply, I suggested that we spent Thursday evening indoors. The possibilities seemed endless and I felt sure she would agree for it was wet that week.

But she wouldn’t hear of it and I accepted with as good a grace as I could muster, for I’d experienced on too many occasions the futility of arguing once she had made up her mind.

On Thursday night it rained, a steady drenching downpour that kept us inside the Trocadero till closing time. When I took her down to the tram stop, we sheltered in a shop doorway as we waited.

As the tram came, she turned to kiss me and said, ‘I’ll be earlier tomorrow, Oliver. Seven o’clock. Wait for me outside, will you?’

She was gone before I could take it further and I crossed to my own tram stop vaguely disturbed, for in all the time I had known her she had always met me inside the Trocadero. But all was revealed, for when I arrived on the following evening, some five minutes late, she was already waiting for me, a small leather vanity bag in one hand.

I kissed her briefly on the cheek. ‘What’s all this then?’

For the first time since I had known her she seemed shy and uncertain of herself. ‘I’m staying the night with you.’

I took a deep breath. ‘You mean the whole night?’

She nodded. ‘Is that all right?’

Which only goes to prove that even the best of women are capable, at times, of asking the most stupid questions imaginable.

She made an excellent supper for us. We sat in the parlour and played Monopoly, and she tried a little Chopin on Aunt Alice’s old square Schiedmayer piano, a relic of Empire if you like, for inside it said in faded gold lettering,
Specially made for the climate of India
.

Later we went up to the turret room together. I used the bathroom first and was in bed when she came in, which meant that I could savour that most intimate of all experiences, a woman undressing for bed.

I had never seen her naked before. It was a new experience and not just sexual. More than that, much more. Something quite profound that touched the very heart of things. When she came over to the bed, she sat on the edge and ruffled her fingers through my hair. Beyond, in the moonlight, I could see our reflection in the wardrobe mirror and beyond that, in an infinity of mirrors. Some trick of the light, I suppose, yet it gave me an uneasy feeling.