The Ballad of Peckham Rye (7 page)

‘Repeat that, Humphrey.’

‘Lie down and relax.’

‘Not after what you said. It was an insult.’

‘I know what’s the matter with you,’ he said. ‘You’re
losing all your sex. It’s all this saving up to get married and looking to the
lolly all the time, it takes the sex out of a girl. It stands to reason, it’s only
psychological.’

‘You must have been talking it over with Dougal Douglas,’ she said.
‘You wouldn’t have thought of that by yourself.’

She stood up and brushed down her coat. He folded up the rugs.

‘I won’t be talked about, it’s a let-down,’ she said.

‘Who’s talked about you?’ he said.

‘Well, if you haven’t talked about me, you’ve been listening to
him
talking.’

‘Let me tell you something,’ he said. ‘Dougal Douglas is an educated
man.’

‘My mum’s uncle’s a teacher and he doesn’t act like him. He
doesn’t cry his eyes out like Dougal did in our canteen.’ Dixie laughed.
‘He’s a pansy.’

‘That’s just his game. You don’t know Dougal. I bet he wasn’t
crying really.’

‘Yes, he was. He only just lost his girl, and he cried like anything. Makes you
laugh.’

‘Then he can’t be a pansy, or he wouldn’t cry over a girl.’

‘He must be or he wouldn’t cry at all.’

On midsummer night Trevor Lomas walked with a somnambulistic sway into Findlater’s
Ballroom and looked round for Beauty. The floor was expertly laid and polished. The
walls were pale rose, with concealed lighting. Beauty stood on the girls’ side,
talking to a group of very similar and lustrous girls. They had prepared themselves for
this occasion with diligence, and as they spoke together, they did not smile much nor
attend to each other’s words. As an accepted thing, any of the girls might break
off in the middle of a sentence, should a young man approach her, and, turning to him,
might give him her entire and smiling regard.

Most of the men looked as if they had not properly woken from deep sleep, but glided as
if drugged, and with half-closed lids, towards their chosen partner. This approach found
favour with the girls. The actual invitation to dance was mostly delivered by gesture; a
scarcely noticeable flick of the man’s head towards the dance floor. Whereupon the
girl, with an outstretched movement of surrender, would swim into the hands of the
summoning partner.

Trevor Lomas so far departed from the norm as to indicate to Beauty his wish by word of
mouth, which he did not, however, open more than a sixteenth of an inch.

‘Come and wriggle, Snake,’ he said through this aperture.

Findlater’s rooms were not given to rowdy rock but concentrated instead upon a more
cultivated jive, cha-cha, and variants. Beauty wriggled with excellence, and was
particularly good at shrugging her shoulders and lifting forward her small stomach;
while Trevor’s knee-work was easy. Dougal, who had just entered with blonde
Elaine, looked round with approval.

During the next dance — forward half a step, one fall and a dip, back half a step,
one fall and a dip — Beauty flicked her lashes toward the band-leader who was then
facing the dancers, a young pale man with a thin neck which sprouted from a loose jacket
of sky-blue. He acknowledged the gesture with one swift rise-and-drop of the eyebrows.
Trevor looked round at the man who had now turned to his band and was flicking his limp
wrists very slightly. Trevor’s teeth said, ‘Who’s your
friend?’

‘Whose friend?’

The crown of Trevor’s head briefly indicated the band-leader.

Beauty shrugged in her jive and expressed her reply, both in the same movement.

Dougal was dancing with Elaine. He leapt into the air, he let go of her hands and dangled
his arms in front of his hunched body. He placed his left hand on his hip and raised his
right while his feet performed the rapid movements of the Highland Fling, heel to
instep, then to knee. Elaine bowed her body and straightened it again and again in her
laughter. The jiving couples slowed down like an unwound toy roundabout, and gathered
beside Dougal. A tall stout man in evening dress walked over to the band; he said
something to the band-leader who looked over his shoulder, observed the crowd round
Dougal, and stopped the band.

‘Hooch!’ cried Dougal as the band stopped.

Everyone was talking or laughing. Those who were talking were all saying the same thing.
They either said, ‘Tell him to take more water in it,’ or
‘Shouldn’t be allowed,’ or ‘He’s all right. Leave him
alone.’ Some clapped their hands and said,’ ‘Core.’ The tall
stout manager came over to Dougal and said with a beaming face, ‘It’s all
right, son, but no more, please.’

‘Don’t you like Highland dancing?’ Dougal said.

The manager beamed and walked away. The band started up. Dougal left the hall followed by
Elaine. He reappeared shortly with Elaine tugging his arm in the opposite direction.
However, he pressed into the midst of the dancers, bearing before him the lid of a
dust-bin, which he had obtained from the back premises. Then he placed the lid upside
down on the floor, sat cross-legged inside it, and was a man in a rocking boat rowing
for his life. The band stopped, but nobody noticed the fact, owing to the many different
sounds of mirth, protest, encouragement, and rage. The dancers circled slowly around him
while he performed a Zulu dance with the lid for a shield.

Two West Indians among the crowd started to object.

‘No, man.’

‘We don’t take no insults, man.’

But two other tall, black, and shining dancers cheered him on, bending at the knees and
clapping. These were supported by their woolly-cropped girls who laughed loud above the
noise, rolling their bodies from the waist, rolling their shoulders, heads, and
eyes.

Dougal bowed to the black girls.

Next, Dougal sat on his haunches and banged a message out on a tom-tom. He sprang up and
with the lid on his head was a Chinese coolie eating melancholy rice. He was an ardent
cyclist, crouched over handlebars and pedalling uphill with the lid between his knees.
He was an old woman with an umbrella; he stood on the upturned edges of the lid and
speared fish from his rocking canoe; he was the man at the wheel of a racing car; he did
many things with the lid before he finally propped the dust-bin lid up on his high
shoulder, beating this cymbal rhythmically with his hand while with the other hand he
limply conducted an invisible band, being, with long blank face, the band-leader.

The manager pushed through the crowd, still beaming. And, still beaming, he pointed out
that the lid was scratching and spoiling the dance floor, and that Dougal had better
leave the premises. He took Dougal, who still bore the dust-bin lid, by the elbow.

‘Don’t you get rough with him,’ Elaine shouted. ‘Can’t you
see he’s deformed?’

Dougal disengaged his elbow from the manager’s grasp and himself took the manager
by the elbow.

‘Tell me,’ Dougal said, as he propelled the manager through the door,
‘have you got a fatal flaw?’

‘It’s the best hall in south London and we don’t want it mucked up,
see? If we put on a cabaret we do it properly.’

‘Be kind enough,’ Dougal said, ‘to replace this lid on the dust-bin out
yonder while I return to the scene within.’

Elaine was standing behind him. ‘Come and leap, leopard,’ Dougal said, and
soon they were moving with the rest.

They were passed by Trevor and Beauty. Trevor regarded Dougal from under his lids,
letting the corners of his mouth droop meaningfully.

‘Got a pain, panda?’ Dougal said.

‘Now, don’t start,’ Elaine said.

Beauty laughed up and down the scale as she wriggled.

When Trevor passed again he said to Dougal, ‘Got your lace hanky on you?’

Dougal put out his foot. Trevor stumbled. The band started playing the National Anthem.
Trevor said, ‘You ought to get a surgical boot and lift your shoulder up to
line.’

‘Have respect for the National Anthem,’ Beauty said. Her eyes were on the
band-leader who, as he turned to face the floor, raised his eyebrows slightly in her
direction.

‘See you up on the Rye,’ Dougal said.

Elaine said, ‘Oh, no, you don’t. You’re seeing me home.’

Trevor said, ‘You girls got to go home together. I’ve got a date with a rat
on the Rye.’

Several of the dancers, as they left the hall, called out to Dougal various words of
gratitude, such as, ‘Thanks a lot for the show’ and ‘You was swell,
boy.’

Dougal bowed.

Beauty, on her way to the girls’ cloakroom, loitered a little behind the queue. The
band-leader passed by her and moved his solemn lips very slightly. Trevor, close by,
heard him say, ‘Come and frolic, lamb.’

Beauty moved her eyes to indicate the presence of Trevor, who observed the gesture.

‘She’s going straight home,’ Trevor said through his nose, putting his
face close to that of the band-leader. He gave Beauty a shove in the direction of the
queue.

Beauty immediately turned back to the band-leader.

‘No man,’ she said to Trevor, ‘lays hands on me.’

The band-leader raised his eyebrows and dropped them sadly.

‘You’re coming home with me,’ Trevor told her.

‘Thought you got a date on the Rye.’

‘He’ll keep,’ Trevor said.

Beauty took a mirror from her bag and carefully applied her lipstick, turning her bronze
head from side to side as she did so. Meanwhile her eyes traced the band-leader’s
departure from the hall.

‘Elaine and I’s going home together,’ she said.

‘No, you don’t,’ Trevor said. He peered out to the crowded entrance and
there saw Elaine hanging on to Dougal. He caught her attention and beckoned to her by
moving his forefinger twice very slowly. Elaine disengaged her arm from Dougal’s,
opened her bag, took out a cigarette, lit it, puffed slowly, then ambled over to
Trevor.

‘If you know what’s good for your friend you’ll take him home,’
Trevor said.

Elaine blew a puff of smoke in his face and turned away.

‘The fight’s off,’ she said to Dougal when she rejoined him. ‘He
wants to keep an eye on his girl, he don’t trust her. She got no
morals.’

As Trevor and Beauty emerged from the hall, Dougal, on the pavement, said to him,
‘Feeling frail, nightingale?’

Trevor shook off Beauty’s arm and approached Dougal.

‘Now don’t start with him,’ Elaine shrieked at Dougal,
‘he’s ignorant.’

Beauty walked off on her own, with her high determined heels and her model-girl sway,
placing her feet confidently and as on a chalk line.

Trevor looked round after her, then ran and caught her up.

Dougal walked with Elaine to Camberwell Green where, standing under the orange lights, he
searched his pockets. When he had found a folded sheet of paper he opened it and read,
‘“I walked with her to Camberwell Green, and we said good-bye rather
sorrowfully at the corner of New Road; and that possibility of meek happiness vanished
for ever.” This is John Ruskin and his girl Charlotte Wilkes,’ Dougal said,
‘my human research. But you and I will not say good-bye here and now. No.
I’m taking you the rest of the way home in a taxi, because ‘you’re the
nicest wee process-controller I’ve ever met.’

‘One thing about you I’ll admit,’ she said, ‘you’re
different. If I didn’t know you were Scotch I’d swear you were Irish. My
mother’s Irish.’

She said they could not take a taxi up to her door because her mother didn’t like
her coming home with men in taxis. They dropped off at the Canal Head at Brixton.

‘I’m leaving Meadows Meade,’ Elaine said, ‘Saturday week.
Starting on the Monday at Drover Willis’s. It’s advancement.’

‘I saw they were advertising,’ Dougal said, ‘for staff at Drover
Willis’s.’

They walked along by the canal a little way, watching the quiet water.

M
R
D
RUCE
said with embarrassment, ‘I feel I should just
mention the fact that absenteeism has increased in the six weeks you’ve been with
us. Eight per cent to be precise. Not that I’m complaining. I’m not
complaining. Rome can’t be built in a day. I’m just mentioning a factor that
Personnel keep stressing. Weedin’s a funny sort of fellow. How do you find
Weedin?’

‘Totally,’ Dougal said, ‘lacking in vision. It is his fatal flaw.
Otherwise quite sane.’ He bore on his uneven shoulders all the learning and
experience of the world as he said it. Mr Druce looked away, looked again at Dougal, and
looked away.

‘Vision,’ said Mr Druce.

‘Vision,’ Dougal said, and he was a confessor in his box, leaning forward
with his insidious advice through the grille, ‘is the first requisite of
sanity.’

‘Sanity,’ Mr Druce said.

Dougal closed his eyes and slowly smiled with his wide mouth. Dougal nodded his head
twice and slowly, as one who understands all. Mr Druce was moved to confess,
‘Sometimes I wonder if I’m sane myself, what with one thing and
another.’ Then he laughed and said, ‘Fancy the Managing Director of Meadows,
Meade & Grindley saying things like this.’

Dougal opened his eyes. ‘Mr Druce, you are not as happy as you might be.’

‘No,’ Mr Druce said, ‘I am not. Mrs Druce, if I may speak in confidence
…’

‘Certainly,’ Dougal said.

‘Mrs Druce is not a wife in any real sense of the word.’

Dougal nodded.

‘Mrs Druce and I have nothing in common. When we were first married thirty-two
years ago I was a travelling salesman in rayon. Times were hard, then. But I got
on.’ Mr Druce looked pleadingly at Dougal. ‘I was a success. I got
on.’

Dougal tightened his lips prudishly, and nodded, and he was a divorce judge suspending
judgement till the whole story was heard out.

‘You can’t get on in business,’ Mr Druce pleaded, ‘unless
you’ve got the fibre for it.

‘You can’t get on,’ Mr Druce said, ‘unless you’ve got the
moral fibre.
And
you don’t have to be narrow-minded. That’s one
thing you don’t have to be.’