Running to Paradise (15 page)

So
I went to the Ladies, and there was Rachel Cohen. ‘Char, darling. I thought it was you hiding under the palms with that frightfully interesting-looking young man. Won’t you join us? Lew’s in one of his moods and being too boring for words.’

‘
No,’ I said. ‘We’re going for a walk round the City,’ and left her with her mouth open.

We
took a cab to St Paul’s; it was icy cold when we got out and we held hands and ran up Cannon Street trying to get warm. It was in a tiny churchyard reached by a dark alley, that he said: ‘Beautiful, angry, sad little Char, d’you want to be fucked? If you don’t it doesn’t matter, but if you did, it would be nice.’

I
felt shocked at first. Silly really, I’d heard the word before, of course. Pa trying to get through a gate out hunting and Gilles, the groom, once when he didn’t know I was there, but never as a verb. I stood with my hands in the pockets of my fur coat, thinking, my ears stinging with the cold. Then the church clock above us whirred and began to chime midnight and all the other City churches joined in. The noise was so terrific, we simply clung to one another waiting for it to stop. When everything was quiet again, I said alright, but where.

He
looked searchingly at me, with that bright, childish look he has, then after a moment seemed to have found what he was looking for in my face. ‘Here,’ he said, ‘between the tombstones. It’s much more fun outside, you know, and Ebenezer Wentworth and his dear wife Martha should make good company if we felt we needed it.’

So
we made love on the cold, frosty grass, between the tombstones of Ebenezer and Martha who ‘Departed this Vale of Tears 14th September 1741’.

It
was lovely, and funny, too. How could two men performing the same act be so entirely different? Algy, outwardly so polite, restrained, never going too near the edge, always so cool, collected and correct; in bed an ape man, a Viking raping his woman, a Crusader home from the wars. Barny, outwardly abrupt, uncouth, with no finesse, always saying the first thing that comes into his head, in bed becomes a gentle, understanding, imaginative purveyor of love, a ‘parfit knight’ indeed. I felt my cold body slowly coming to life under his touch, all the pains and stupid discomforts forgotten. I cried a little after we had ‘come’. Now I know what that means: Per’s talked of it in women, but I never really believed her. I wonder if she’s ever come with Bunny. Surely not?

Later,
we walked along the Embankment and he put me in a cab at the river entrance to the Savoy, ‘Tomorrow, or tonight, it’s nearly four a.m., we’ll tell one another about ourselves,’ he said. ‘Won’t that be nice?’

‘
I’ve got a sort of committee meeting for my Battersea Settlement this evening,’ I said. ‘I go slumming, you see.’

‘
Don’t call it that,’ he said, putting his finger over my lips. ‘Slum is an ugly word; you’re helping people to help themselves, that’s all.’ He looked austere and rather shocked, as though I’d shouted a rude word in church.

‘
We have tea and biscuits,’ I said, feeling guilty, ‘and I usually drive my Aunty Roo home afterwards.’ He smiled then, his whole face alight.

‘
In that case, I know what we’ll do. I’ll collect you from the Settlement. We drive your Aunty Roo home and then have supper at the Café Royal.’ Of course, I agreed, but what on earth will Aunty Roo say? She adores Algy, then don’t they all adore Algy?

3
Cheyne Square, Chelsea — 11th January 1933

Now
I know where I’ve seen those eyes before. They belong to my poet, H. A. Elliott; it seems he’s Barry’s father!

‘
But I thought he was a pansy,’ I said.

‘
He was,’ he said, ‘but he managed to father me. I’ve got the eyes to prove it.’

Let
me go back to the beginning; there’s not much time though. I’m taking Ann to a children’s party at Richmond after lunch.

Well
...he met me at the Settlement as we’d planned. Mrs Gladwyn: ‘There’s a gentleman to see you, Mrs Charterhouse. He says you’ll know who he is.’

Everyone
agog, of course; Aunty Roo put on her basilisk face and shut her spectacle case with a snap. ‘Any relation to the Lincolnshire family, Mr Elliott? I used to stay with the Hornsby-Elliotts as a girl — mad on dogs and frightfully good at croquet.’

‘
No,’ Barny said, smiling sweetly, ‘but I wish I had been.’

Aunty
Roo ignored this sally, although she looked as if she were trying not to giggle, and merely said, ‘Put out the lights, dears and lock up. I’m for home and Bedfordshire.’

‘
But we’re giving you a lift,’ I said. ‘You can’t possibly walk all that way to the bus stop alone.’ In the end she consented to come in the car, but she wasn’t pleased and showed it.

‘
I wonder how dear Algy’s getting on in Switzerland,’ she said, as we drove over Battersea Bridge, breaking the somewhat charged silence. ‘He’s worked so hard lately, he needed a good rest. Such a pity, Char dear, you couldn’t go with him.’

‘
He didn’t ask me,’ I said and we lapsed into silence again. Barny sat in the back smoking and winking at me whenever he caught my eye in the driving mirror.

It
was noisy and hectic at the Café Royal, everyone talking at the tops of their voices. ‘But at least no “Merry Widow” waltz,’ Barny shouted above the din. We found a little table in an alcove where it was a bit quieter and ordered oysters, smoked salmon and champagne.

‘
Now,’ he said, ‘I want to know everything about you.’

So
I told him and it didn’t seem to amount to much, but he liked the bits about Old Bats and Hubert Stokes and laughed a lot over Pa and Babs Bellingham. ‘And Algy the matador, what about him?’

‘
He was the handsome prince,’ I said, ‘who rescued the fair maiden from the tower; in my case, living with Ma in a sea of mud and broken-down machinery in the wilds of Dorset.’

‘
Do you love him?’

I
had to think for a minute. ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I love him. Once I adored him, but now, when you’re in the middle of things going wrong, it’s hard to know.’

‘
I’d never marry you, you know,’ he said, and it felt like a slap in the face, ‘but I am in love with you. Does Algy still love you?’

‘
Of course.’ I felt furious and wanted to hit him, but he smiled and put out his hand.

‘
Don’t be angry, I’d make a rotten husband. I tried marriage once and it was a most grisly failure. Believe me, it would be again. I want us from the very beginning to know where we stand.’

‘
And if Algy finds out?’

‘
I’d run,’ he said, ‘to the ends of the earth.’

‘
You’re a cad and a bounder,’ I said.

‘
I am,’ he said, ‘but honest, you have to admit that.’ He looked at me over the rim of his glass, his eyes laughing: his hair, as usual, needed a brush and his tie was just a little askew. Then, suddenly, I remembered. I saw again Bagland Common, the beautiful tramp throwing his hat for the monkey to fetch, laughing at its antics; heard the harsh, Cockney voice, ‘Henry Arthur Elliott, we are His Majesty’s Officers of the Law...’

‘
Who are you?’ I asked. ‘Who was your father?’ For the first time since I’d met him he looked nonplussed.

‘
I was about to give you my credentials, but—’

‘
Was he H. A. Elliott, the poet?’

‘
Someone’s told you. They were bound to I suppose, London’s so small—’

‘
No.’

‘
Then how—?’

‘
Because I met him. Because I was the little girl with him when he was shot by the police, and you see, I’ve always remembered his eyes.’

We
just sat there then, with waiters and people milling about us.

‘
Sachie, darling, it’s too sick-making. I’ve lost one of my gloves, do wait...’ a pre-Raphaelite girl in green moaned past my chair.

At
last Barny spoke. ‘You must have known him better than I did,’ he said. ‘I only have two memories: one of him shaving under an apple tree with the shaving mirror hanging from a branch, his face all covered in lather, and the other, by the sea, taking me on his shoulders and running along the sands shouting and laughing. Are you an angel of death then, little Char; you brought it to him, will you bring it to me too?’

‘
Don’t
say
such stupid things. He would have been caught anyway, the Common was crawling with police, Ma said—’

‘
I know,’ he said. ‘Don’t worry, I’m only teasing. Shall we go, this place’s too damned noisy.’

This
time we walked along the Embankment, our arms round each other, and he told me about his life. How, after his father’s arrest and his mother’s death, he’d been taken to live with his paternal grandparents, who subsequently adopted him. How he’d gone to public school, which he hated, to Oxford, where he’d been sent down and then, through a girlfriend, managed to get a job on a newspaper, since when he’d worked as a freelance journalist. ‘Going anywhere and everywhere,’ he said. ‘It can be fun and keeps me off the drink.’ His grandparents, old, doddery and saintly, had finally washed their hands of him.

‘
And your wife?’ I asked.

‘
What was it Forster says in
Howards
End
? “She was a rubbishy little thing and she knew it.” A very fair description of Mollie. I ran away after six months; she married a pig farmer in Devon and is blissfully happy.’

We
made love again; this time in the gardens along Cheyne Walk. My skirt was plastered in mud and Barny cut his hand on a stone.

‘
Must we?’ I asked. ‘Wouldn’t it be better in a bed?’

‘
It might, I suppose,’ he said. ‘Let’s have a try.’ So we went back to Peter Steerforth’s house and it was better — much, much better.

Algy
home on Sat. Oh God.

3 Cheyne Square, Chelsea — 16th January 1933

Is it only sixteen days since I met Barny?

Algy
home: sleek; brown from winter sun — and loving. ‘Diana is a bit of a bore, darling,’ he whispered into my hair. ‘You were right; she never stopped moaning about her damned ankle and her nose turned bright red in the sun.’

‘
Oh, dear,’ I said, ‘how horrid for you.’

Perdita
’s right (she always is, except of course about her own life); having an affair helps one’s marriage no end. Algy and I are getting on better than we have for years: he’s even showing signs of interest in the bed department, so thank God for Diana. He and Barny are to meet! Dinner on Thursday: Barny to bring a woman, plus Per and Bunny.

‘
But who will you bring?’ I asked Barny. ‘She must be unattractive or I shall be jealous and give the game away.’

‘
Edwina Bolton,’ he said promptly (too promptly?) ‘She writes the Woman’s Page on the
Echo
. She’s a damned good sort: the matador’ll love her, you see. She adores City gents, the more pucka the better — the matador is pucka, isn’t he? She says they make a refreshing change from the rest of us.’

This
afternoon he took me round the galleries in Bond Street: all snowy Dutch landscapes and bunches of flowers, and then to one in the Fulham Road presided over by a frowsty lady in purple with hairpins falling all over the place. It was freezing and badly lit, but had a picture by a man called Modigliani that would make a rat-infested cellar seem magical. A naked, elongated girl lying on a bed, her slanty eyes full of sadness. I wanted to bury my face in her lovely, soft, cool thighs and forget everything. ‘You like it then?’ Barny asked, sounding surprised.

‘
I do,’ I said. ‘It’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.’

‘
Get Algy to buy it, then, to hang in his dining room.’

‘
He wouldn’t,’ I said. ‘He only likes sporting prints.’

Ann
said today, ‘Mummy, when is the nice man going to read to us again?’

3
Cheyne Square, Chelsea — 20th January 1933

Algy
likes the lady journalist! ‘Such fun,’ he says, ‘and such a change from Diana. I always thought women journalists wore tweeds and trilbies and talked too much, but Edwina...You don’t mind, darling, do you? She’s taking me to Lord Cockermouth, the Press Baron’s place, next weekend. You know you’re always saying how boring my friends are, so here’s my chance to meet some new ones. Edwina says the place will be simply crawling with artists and writer chappies.’

When
I told Barny he looked pleased. ‘Good old Edwina,’ he said. ‘Now I can take you to Jarrow and get on with your education.’

The
dinner party was quite a success actually. Algy was a bit wary at first, but soon warmed to the sparkling Edwina. Bunny and Per in good form and my young man excelled himself. We laughed so much at his stories (none true, I’m sure), Algy did the nose trick and one of Per’s false eyelashes fell into her crêpe Suzette. Later we danced at a new club Barny knows somewhere in Soho: stale sandwiches, bad champagne and a marvellous Negro band.