Nameless (6 page)

‘What do you play then?’ she asked.

‘Trumpet,’ he said. ‘You ought to come over and hear us play.’

‘I have to go,’ she said, and yanked the key out of the lock and went on into the shop.

‘I’m Leroy,’he said,and held out a white-palmed hand. ‘What’s your name?’

Alicia looked at his hand and, not wishing to be rude, she shook it reluctantly. ‘I’m Mrs Ted Darke,’ she said.

‘No – I mean
your
name.’

‘Alicia,’ she said, and went inside and closed the door.

10

It was nothing fancy. That was Ruby’s first thought as she stood outside on Monday at ten in the morning and waited for Vi to show up. The Windmill Theatre stood on a corner of a block of buildings where Archer Street joined Great Windmill Street, just off Shaftesbury Avenue, and it was very plain, nothing to write home about.

‘You came then,’ said Vi with a slight smile as she joined Ruby by the front steps.

‘Yeah,’ said Ruby, her mouth dry with apprehension.

She’d lied to Dad, told the absolute whopper that she was starting work in the salvage centre. And he’d swallowed it, to her surprise. It was for charity, and as a churchgoer he had time for that.

‘It ain’t the Moulin Rouge, is it?’ she said.

Vi led the way around the side of the building to the stage door. ‘You ever
seen
the Rouge?’ she asked.

‘Well, no . . .’

‘Well no. Thought not. Let me tell you it’s every bit as good as the Rouge. We have
tableaux vivants
and everything.’

Tableaux vivants?

Vi caught her puzzled look and gave a quick, feline smile. ‘You’ll see.’

Ruby wasn’t even sure she wanted to. But she’d agreed to this, God help her. She’d
lied
to be here. She hurried after Vi and they stepped inside into chaos – or that’s how it seemed to Ruby.

‘Hello, Gord,’Vi said to a man behind a counter just inside the stage door.

He nodded.

Vi hurried on, past surging hordes of people in glitter, in feathers. There were pretty girls, tall boys with painted eyes. Ruby stared around, open-mouthed. Vi’s Mary-Jane shoes beat out a tattoo on the wooden floorboards as she surged ahead. She shot down a set of stairs with Ruby trailing behind.

‘We’re open from midday to ten fifty at night. Continuous performances, five or six a day, one right after the other,’ Vi threw back over her shoulder.

‘Apart from during raids,’ said Ruby.

‘No, we don’t close. Fuck Hitler. We
never
close. Below street level, see. Safe as houses.’ She came to a halt. Ruby could hear a girl singing ‘We’ll Gather Lilacs’, and an accompanying piano. Vi shushed her, putting one manicured finger to her lips, and they edged forward until they were standing in the wings.

‘Look,’ Vi whispered in her ear.

Ruby looked. The lights out on the stage were dazzling. There was a dark-haired girl in a pink satin evening gown lounging against a grand piano, singing her heart out. In the background there were massive empty gold-filigreed frames, four of them, each one in darkness. And then the lights changed.

‘Oh!’ burst out Ruby.

‘Shhh!’

One by one the frames were illuminated, revealing the ‘tableaux’ within – four bare-breasted beauties depicted as Britannia, Liberty, Hope and Glory.

‘They mustn’t move,’ hissed Vi to Ruby. ‘That’s the only thing. Not a muscle. Or Lord Cromer goes straight off his head.’

Ruby was dumbstruck with shock. Surely Vi didn’t expect her to do
that
?

Finally she found her voice. ‘But you said
dancing
.’

Vi turned her head and looked at her. ‘We do have dancers. But be honest – you that good a dancer?’

Ruby wasn’t. She shook her head miserably.

‘Sing?’

Again the headshake.

‘There you go. But you’ve got a bloody good body, and Liberty there – that’s Jenny – she’s going off to marry her forces sweetheart soon, so there’ll be a vacancy. Ah!’ Vi was staring across the stage towards the wings on the other side. ‘There’s Mr Van Damm now, he’s the manager – you’ll love him. Mrs Henderson’s the owner, she’s here all the time, you’ll love her too. It’s like one big happy family. We’ll go round the back and I’ll introduce you.’

Oh Jesus
, thought Ruby.

But she was doing it, wasn’t she? She was breaking free, breaking
out.
And right now, stupidly, she couldn’t help wondering what her mother would have made of it all.

11

1922

‘What the fucking hell . . . ?’ asked Ted.

Ted and Alicia were sitting by the empty hearth. It was a warm summer’s night. Too hot to go to bed yet, although it was late. The kids were asleep upstairs, the day’s exhausting shop-work done. It was nice to just sit, and rest.

Only . . . there was this noise going on out in the street.

‘Where’s that coming from?’ asked Ted, getting to his feet.

Alicia stood up too, feeling a prickle on the hairs at the back of her neck. Together, they walked through the house and out onto the front step. The street was dark, no one about: out here, the sound was much louder.

The shimmering notes of the trumpet seemed to twine like golden ribbons around the still evening air.

‘Coming from over there,’ said Ted, pointing to the bed and breakfast opposite.

Alicia shivered. She was entranced by the sound. It was
him,
she reckoned. Leroy. Playing his songs to the night. She could see an open window on the first floor of the house. The room beyond was in darkness. But she
knew
it was him.

She glanced at Ted. He hated music, although he had indulged her by buying the gramophone for her birthday. He didn’t indulge her much. Sometimes she played her records on it, just things like Richard Tauber, serious stuff, nothing like
this.
Ted always moaned about the noise and she always, in the end, switched it off.

That was marriage, her old ma had told her: give and take. But Ted seemed to do most of the taking, and she all the giving. Since the kids had come along, he never bothered to paw over her any more, and that was a relief in a way. But it still left her feeling rejected, less than a woman. It was like she was a slave, a nothing, kept to do the housework, raise the kids, run the shop . . .

‘You want to stop that bloody racket!’
bellowed Ted suddenly, making her jump.

The music stopped.

The spell was broken.

‘Let’s get off to bed,’ said Ted irritably.

Alicia followed him indoors. She only glanced back once.

12

When Betsy next met up with Charlie she didn’t tell him about what Vi and Ruby were up to. Friends were friends, she wasn’t going to drop Ruby in it. And anyway, she didn’t want to say a single thing that would upset Charlie or make him mad at her. She was already beginning to realize that Charlie could get mad at the drop of a hat.

She and Ruby had been friends all through school and beyond. They met frequently and sewed and made cakes together when they could get the rations to do it. It was Betsy who had explained to a panicking Ruby that she wasn’t dying when she got her first period at the age of twelve, that it would only last for a week and then she’d be fine again. It had been Betsy who explained the facts of life to Ruby – that the man put his thing inside the lady and then they had a baby. Ruby hadn’t believed her, she said the whole thing sounded crazy.

Betsy felt sorry for Ruby, in a superior sort of way. Ruby couldn’t help the fact that she had no mother, that she was . . . well,
coloured.
Although how that could be, given the whiteness of Ted, Charlie and Joe, she couldn’t even guess. But Ruby couldn’t help it that her father was a drunk and a religious nutter. She couldn’t help it if people talked about her brothers because they’d avoided the draft and were into all sorts of dodgy dealings. She couldn’t
help
coming from a bad family.

Betsy was magnanimously determined to help Ruby, to continue to be her friend forever, and it galled her – just a little – to see how star-struck Ruby was becoming around the older and more glamorous Vi.
She
was Ruby’s best friend in all the world. But the way Ruby was starting to hang around with Vi, you wouldn’t think it.

If Ruby was giving Betsy cause for concern, at least Charlie was not. She loved being out with Charlie. People had begun to defer to him, tipping their hats. He would shake their hand, pat their shoulder, and she was impressed. He was a big man in the neighbourhood, and she was his girl.

Betsy loved Charlie. Every time she saw him her heart nearly stopped in her chest, she was so stricken with love for him. And she knew he felt the same about her. She was the luckiest girl in the world. Soon they would get engaged, then married; Charlie would look after her and there would be babies, loads of them, dark-haired little boys like Charlie and pretty little blonde girls like her. She was so happy she could burst.

Charlie had acquired a flashy motor, something a bit similar to the one Tranter used to roar around the bomb-battered streets in. Betsy wondered if it actually
was
Tranter’s old motor; Charlie seemed to have taken over everything else that had belonged to him.

One night he drove them down to the Mildmay Tavern in the Balls Pond Road at Dalston. Charlie said he had a bit of business to do there, which was fine with her. She liked to see him doing well, being the big man; he was soon to be her fiancé. She was proud of him.

When Joe and one of the other toughs who always seemed to be hanging around the Darke boys got in the back though, she pouted a bit.

‘But, Charlie, I thought it was just going to be you and me . . .’ She hadn’t expected a mob-handed outing.

‘Shut up, darlin’,’ said Charlie, and it was said fondly – but in such a way that she thought she better had.

The pub was busy, people out trying their best to enjoy themselves even though Hitler was giving them all a bit of a bashing one way or another. They all lived in fear these days: of being bombed to death in their beds, or of getting one of those much-dreaded telegrams telling them a loved one had been killed in action.

‘Mr Darke,’ said the landlord, then he lowered his voice and tipped his head towards the half-open door of the snug: ‘He’s in.’

‘Is he, by God?’ Charlie’s eyes followed the landlord’s.

So did Betsy’s. She could see a thin, semi-bald bloke in there, laughing uproariously with a gang of his mates.

‘How’s Carol?’

‘Shattered, poor bint. Shook her up something rotten. Since Mr Tranter stopped drinking in here, it’s been bloody bedlam.’

‘Well, we can’t have that,’ said Charlie with a smile. ‘Can we?’ He looked at Betsy. ‘You stay here, darlin’, OK?’

And what if it ain’t?
wondered Betsy. But she nodded. When they were actually engaged to be married, she’d start to stamp her authority on the situation a bit more firmly; but for now, she wanted to be seen as the sweet little girlfriend, eager to please. Even if she wasn’t.

‘Come on,’ said Charlie, and together with Joe and the other man he pushed into the snug. Betsy stood at the bar, and the landlord put a sweet sherry down in front of her. She watched Charlie, his broad back, his casual elegance, through the open door of the snug. He was much more attractive than Joe, who was so bulky, so slow. And Charlie was the boss. She liked that.

‘You Bill Read?’ asked Charlie of a skinny balding man in there.

‘Who wants to know?’

And then she
saw
it. A switchblade razor seemed to jump into Charlie’s hand and he lunged forward. Yelling and screaming and cursing started up in the snug and in horror she saw the dark spurt of blood just as Joe put his back to the door from the other side, cutting off the smaller room from view.

People out in the main bar exchanged looks as the shouts and screams went on. The landlord continued pulling pints like nothing was happening.

Suddenly, everything went quiet.

Joe came out, closing the door swiftly behind him. There wasn’t a spot on him, not a mark. ‘You got the key to that other door in the snug?’ he asked the landlord.

The man nodded and quickly fetched the key from a hook behind the bar. He came round the counter and went into the snug with Joe.

Betsy thought she heard groaning when the door opened briefly. But then Joe closed it again, put his back against it. She could hear her own heart beating hard, and the sip of sherry she’d taken was starting to come back up in a sticky-sweet surge of vomit.

Everyone was chatting and laughing now in the bar, as if nothing had happened.

But something had.

Charlie and Joe were gone for over an hour while the landlord kept supplying her with glass after glass of sherry. She drank a bit, forced the sickly stuff down, and noticed that no one came near her, not a soul. She was a pretty girl, surely some bloke would sidle up and chance his arm? They always had before. Betsy with her flirty eyes and her pert little figure always drew the men in.

But no. She was stepped around like she was an invisible obstruction, like people would instinctively avoid a cold spot where a ghost hovered.

She was a ghost.

She was Charlie Darke’s girl.

She was, quite suddenly, afraid.

13

The legend of the Darke boys grew fast and furious after they did Bill Read over the Blind Carol incident. Where once Tranter had ruled the streets, now that task fell to the Darkes, and they relished it.

‘What was it about?’ Betsy asked Charlie one day.

‘What?’ He looked absent, as if his mind was elsewhere.