The Horatio Stubbs Trilogy (19 page)

Which left our Syl. As the party warmed up – i.e., came to something approaching room-temperature – Ann was working our gramophone, then giving out with a Carroll Gibbons recording of
That Old Black Magic
, and Sylvia was standing beside her, jiffling to the tunes. It was a wind-up gramophone,
brought out of the air-raid shelter now that we were not having air raids any more, so that it needed the two of them to keep it cranked and loaded. I prowled round the perimeter of the little conversations, attracted by Sylvia's jiffle.

Her bum moved round to about ten o'clock and then worked anticlockwise to about two-thirty, after which it repeated the gambit. Since she was putting more weight on one leg than on the other, her buttocks were not quite in synch: the left was with Carroll Gibbons, while the right worked on a wilder melody of its own. What a sight! I could feel my pulses getting sludgey. Sod it, I had to have it in tonight – tomorrow, fuck knows what would happen tomorrow! My stomach gave a thin whine at the mere thought of tomorrow … At least Syl could
move
, unlike Henrietta Crane. Syl was small and rather shifty-looking, but by no means as ancient as The Enigma. Lumps of breast could be seen under a blue dress, although they were unable to coincide entirely with the tit-positions sewn into the dress. Of course, it would be an old dress of her mother's cut down. I'd met Our Syl's mother, but did not let that put me off. I smiled, she smiled, still working the buttocks in friendly fashion. Or perhaps they worked by themselves.

‘So you're off then, Horatio?'

‘The war's been taking too long. The War Office has sent for me at last.'

‘… “I hear your name, and I'm aflame …” Lushy song! What do you look like in your uniform? Smashing, I bet! All dressed for action!'

‘How'd you like to see me in nothing at all?'

‘Horatio, what do you mean?'

‘Stripped for action!'

‘Ooh, we've got a right one here!' she told Ann.

Father was not about, so Mother was being officious for two. She willowed over with a glass in her hand. ‘Now, my big soldier boy, you mustn't let Sylvia monopolize you all evening!'

‘I only just came over—'

‘
Circulate
, dear – And brush your hair back properly, you look silly with it hanging over your eyes like that!' These family pleasantries all
sotto voce.

If she overcame my natural instinct to look like Robert Preston in
Wake Island
, which I had seen five times in the
camp cinema, so she had also overcome my father's instinct to have no booze during the evening.
‘It only spoils the party.'
No, come on, he didn't really say that; I must have imagined it! But poor old Dad was the sort you could imagine saying it. Fortunately, Mother's sense of occasion had won; she had sucked up to the chap in the post office, who could get you anything, and secured two bottles of pre-war sherry, which she was now doling out gaily, with many a quip about tipsiness, into little bile-green glasses. Mr. Jeremy Church, anxious to establish what a merry old turd he was, had brought along a bottle of puce burgundy.

‘See you later,' I said over my shoulder to Sylvia, loading the words with all the disgusting sexual innuendo they would take.

I skirted the talk of scarcities and heroism, striving to look by other means than dishevelled hair as if I had just arrived from Wake Island. Collecting a burgundy from Church with a minimum of conversational involvement, I went over to peer down at Henrietta Crane.

The Enigma was offering several items of clothing between blouse and sponge cake – vests, spencers, brassieres, who knows what; wartime conditions gave this sort of girl a magnificent chance to put on every variety of fusty garment her mother had put off fifty years earlier. The sponge cake, notoriously undusted, moved slowly up and down, as if there was someone in it. Yes, I could force myself to get excited. I flung my sexual emotions into gear by imagining sponge-cakey vulvas. The prick gave a faint lethargic twitch in its sleep, like an ancient dog offered an ancient bone.

Henrietta was sipping the puce burgundy with her mother. They were making faces and whispering together. I perched on an arm of the sofa beside her – more for the sake of ‘A' Company than anything personal. She moved her elbow away surreptitiously, so that it could not by any chance come into contact with my arse.

‘So glad you could make it this evening, Henrietta – and your mother. Didn't have any trouble getting here in the blackout?'

‘So you've just got this forty-eight-hour leave, Horatio, have you?' That was her mother, not her, looking up brightly and showing her dentures.

‘That's right. Forty-eight hours. The usual.'

‘Just two days, in fact.'

I appeared to make quick calculations under my breath … ‘Thirty, thirty-three, forty, forty-eight …' ‘Yes, that's right, just two days, in fact!' said with as much feigned astonishment as I dared show.

‘And where are you going when you get back to the Army? It is the Army?'

‘First battalion, the Second Royal Mendip Borderers.'

‘Well, that is the Army, isn't it? Where are you going to go?'

‘That's a military secret, Mrs. Crane, which I am unhappily unable to reveal.' A military secret securely kept from me, I might have added. While we talked, Henrietta Crane kept looking at her mother, rather than me, her fat little lips glistening as she sipped the burgundy. There was a faint hope that if I waited long enough (say five days) she might get pissed and shed all her moral standards; if her moral standards were in proportion to the number of her underclothes – I was convinced that such a relationship existed – then the hope was faint indeed, and more than one bottle of Church's burgundy would be called for.

‘Will you be fighting then?' Mrs. Crane asked. Her thin Midland accent made the verb sound the way Southerners say ‘farting', while her tone suggested that, whatever I was going to do, it was best I did it quietly in a back street.

‘Aye, I expect I'll be doing a bit of farting,' I replied.

More in stupor than in anger, I said to Henrietta, ‘It's getting stuffy in here with all this fag smoke, and the room starts to stink of beer when it warms up. Would you like to come and see our air-raid shelter out the back?'

The Old Enigma gave me a waxworky look before her eyes slid to mum.

‘We've got an air-raid shelter too, you know,' she said, in a tone suggesting she thought she was committing repartee. ‘I keep my collection of little vases in there, don't I, mother?'

‘That's right, dear.' Smiling at me in elucidation. ‘She keeps her collection of little vases in our air-raid shelter.'

‘Mmm, I suppose that way they don't get broken if there's an air raid.'

‘That's the idea,' Henrietta said. She uttered a short laugh as if it was a prearranged code meaning
NO SEX TONIGHT.

‘Let me re-fill your glass,' I said. Dog's urine or horse piss?

Ann was still working away at the gramophone, flipping the ten-inches on one after the other. She was swigging sherry with Sylvia and giggling. Jeremy Church was hovering about as if he fancied them both, while Mrs. Church listened in agony to the Mole aunt's account of her bombing-out. Most of the records were the sentimental tunes that Ann adored.
How Green Was My Valley, Room 504, Whispering Grass, You Walked By, My Devotion, Yours
, and one that she kept slipping on in my honour,
You Can't Say No to a Soldier
. Christ, she was the only one who had said yes to me; the other bitches here assembled did not even appear to know what the question was!

I evaded old Church, who was anxious to talk about The Agony of the Great War (‘You don't remember it but things were very much harder then!'), and commenced to flirt with Sylvia again.

‘You didn't have much luck with Henrietta then!' she said, and she and Ann and I burst out laughing.

Her arms were rather spotty, but we were getting on quite well when I noticed Nelson preparing to slip out with Valerie. He winked at me, a slow thorough wink that must have bruised his eyeball. Dirty bastard! Jealousy seized me. Valerie wasn't bad, a bit hefty owing to her involvement in the Women's Land Army, but very cheerful – and everyone understood that Land Army girls needed it regular; the contact with agriculture made them that way. They would be going to the pub for a pint and afterwards Nelson would get her against our back wall for a knee-trembler. I knew this because he had told me about it in a humble but proud way. He claimed that knee-tremblers were the most exhausting way of having sex. I longed to have a try, longed to be really fucked out.

‘Like to come and see our air-raid shelter, Sylvia?'

‘What's so special about your air-raid shelter? We've got one too!'

‘Ah, but has yours got hot-and-cold running water in it?'

‘No, and I bet yours hasn't!'

‘It's got a bit of a puddle in one corner! No, look, see, I keep my collection of small vases in there. You'd be interested.'

‘You keep your what?'

At that point, when the battle to get Our Syl into a suitable
knee-trembling position might have gone either way, enter my father! He had finished his warden's parade, looking for chinks in other people's blackouts. He carried his gas mask and his torch, and was careful not to remove his steel helmet with the letters ARP on it until he was well into the room, so that everyone present was reminded of their duty. The helmet made him look more squat than ever. I noted that its rim barely came up to the most prominent bit of Henrietta Crane.

His entrance caused some confusion. The old Mole aunt interpreted it as a signal that she should take cover, and had to be restrained by the Moles and Mrs. Church from seeing the rest of the war out under our gate-leg table. In annoyance, father pretended he had noticed nothing (a favourite gambit), and went over to twitch severely at our own blackout, pulling the curtains three times, as if signalling to a drove of Dorniers circling overhead. Nelson and his pusher took the chance to sneak away, and I managed to manoeuvre Sylvia as far as the kitchen.

‘Let's go out into the back garden and get a breath of air.'

‘I'm just going to have a smoke. Do you want a Park Drive?' She offered her packet. ‘It's all our local tobacconist has got and I don't care for them all that much.'

‘Thanks. Let's smoke them outside. You can't hear yourself talk in there.' Our hands touched as I lit her fag.

‘I was enjoying the music. Wouldn't you say Artie Shaw's the best musician there ever was?'

‘Look, please let's go out! You can't rely on the music – my mother may stop it at any moment and recite some poetry, if she thinks the thing's getting out of hand. It only needs old Church to get a bit stewed and all hell will break loose in there!'

We were standing one on either side of the kitchen table, puffing our fags, staring at each other. She was looking more attractive all the time. Surely she must have had enough sense to know what I was after? Where was her patriotism? Desperately though I wanted to kiss her – just kiss her if nothing more was available – my whole upbringing prevented my telling her so directly. Everything had to be done according to a deadening set of out-of-date rules, rules so ill-defined that you could never be sure when you were set to move ahead. Or there was the more up-to-date but equally
inhibiting way of tackling it, the cinema way, where everything had to be done romantically, where there had to be that look in her eye, and a moon in the sky, and Max Steiner laying on the violins … and then you both suddenly went soft and began saying witty tender self-mocking things: ‘I've never felt so young before tonight.' ‘Why, you're looking positively boyish!' ‘It's you, my darling, you bring out the adolescent in me.' ‘Aren't we all external adolescents!' ‘Just for tonight we are!' That sort of American approach was even harder to master than the Ancient British protocol but, once mastered, it gave positive results. The music came on strong, your hands touched, you were over the hump, flowers appeared, you were prone, your lips were touching, pelvic movements started of their own accord. Over our scrubbed kitchen table, nothing began to begin.

‘Will you think of me when I'm on Wake Island or some similar hell-spot?'

Then Ann in the next room put on her favourite record, everyone's favourite record, of Len Camber singing
That Lovely Weekend.
We could hear the words in the kitchen, goading me on with their middle-class anguish at war and parting.

‘I just love this old thing,' Our Syl said. ‘There's a chap at the office calls it
That Dirty Weekend
.' She laughed.

‘It's a ghastly song – reminds me of what I'm missing. Whipped overseas tomorrow, never to be seen again. Some far corner of a foreign field and all that …' By this time, I had an arm round her waist and was smoking heavily against her left flank. She affected not to notice.

‘Whereabouts is your brother stationed?'

These days, you'd hit a girl across the chops if she asked you a silly question like that at a time like that. Eventually, I did coax her outside the back door and into the soft dark autumn air. You could tell she wasn't too reluctant. Scrunching the Park Drive underfoot, I got an arm round her
neck and muttered a few edifying remarks. I could smell her and she smelt pleasant. The night evidently encouraged her. She dropped the rest of her fag and looked up and smiled at me. She was mysterious, just about visible. A nice face, not a bit shifty. She put her hands up to my cheeks and kept them there.