Angel Cake (20 page)

However early I arrive in the morning – and since my promotion, I have taken to arriving a lot earlier than I used to, to Rob’s puzzlement – Mr Charles is always sitting working at his desk already. He looks up and greets me with an airy wave as I walk past his door. He wears a grey waistcoat with a silk back to work in, and a gold watch on a chain which he pulls up to the light of the desk lamp when he feels that a conversation has gone on for long enough. I think he can have no home life at all because when I leave in the evening, he is still sitting there, working away by the light of his lamp. The first few evenings, I didn’t know whether or not to call out, ‘Good night, Mr Charles,’ as I went by. I was afraid of disturbing him, but on the other hand I didn’t want him to think that I was slipping furtively away, trying to conceal my departure. I compromised with a silent wave. If he saw it, well and good; if he did not, well at least I hadn’t been furtive. My first Friday, he stopped me on my way out and called, ‘Going away for the weekend, Alison?’

I answered, ‘No, no, lots to do in London.’

‘Good, good,’ he said. ‘That’s what I like to hear. Well, run along. Shake the dust of ages from your feet.’

And, to be polite, I responded, ‘How about you? Have you got a busy weekend ahead?’

Mr Charles gave a pebbly, deprecating little laugh. ‘Oh, Alison,’ he said, ‘I’d be ashamed to tell you how an old fogey like me spends his weekends.’

All day, he leaves me to my own devices. No one breathes down my neck, no one supervises me. I float in my aquarium in a state of unruffled calm. I feel so at home there already
that I could easily nestle into my leather visitor’s chair and brew myself a pot of tea.

When I told Mrs Q about my new office, she said, ‘Feathering your nest? You’re not getting broody, are you, dear?’

Trust her to get hold of the wrong end of the stick. As if there were any chance of my ‘getting broody’ with Rob around, any chance of Rob letting me ‘get broody’. Every night, I have to check and double-check in the bathroom that my diaphragm is accurately in place, that my treacherous cervix is safely covered. Rob always checks deftly that I have done it too, although recently, I must say, he has seemed less concerned about accidents. He said to me once many months ago, when I baulked at his suggestion of using a more up-to-date method of birth control, that in that case any accidents must be my responsibility. He didn’t say it cruelly, just sensibly. We were having breakfast together companionably after one of my many scares had been called off. In future, Rob would stand by me in whatever I decided to do, he said, but if that was to have an avoidable child, then he was sorry but he would not be party to it.

I assured Mrs Q, giggling, that it was nothing of the sort. I wasn’t getting broody at all. In fact, far from it, I was plunging into my new responsibilities with relish. I was turning into quite a career woman.

She eyed me doubtfully. ‘Let me put it this way, dear,’ she said. ‘You don’t dress the part.’

It must have been the week afterwards that she produced a lot of jewellery from the depths of her drawers. It was wonderful stuff: intricate, encrusted costume jewellery, with glass rubies like smouldering passion and pearls like strip-cartoon tears. She produced it with a flourish at the end of a long tale about the miseries of wartime repertory and rationing; unheated theatres and unspeakable meals. I had said to her, ‘Weren’t you ever tempted to chuck it all in? I mean, struggling on like that with most of the men gone and all those hopeless stand-ins?’

She answered, ‘Leonard said we had a duty to our public. It was our contribution to the war effort, wasn’t it? And, anyway, thanks to Leonard, I was – what was that you said? – quite a career woman.’

She gave me a conspiratorial wink and then she got up and fished out her jewellery. ‘Take your pick,’ she said. ‘I want you to look your best for your boss.’

I gaped. ‘Honestly, Mrs Queripel!’ I cried. ‘I can’t possibly!’

She went ‘Pshaw!’ which is a noise only someone of her generation knows how to make, and she pushed it at me. ‘Go on, take your pick,’ she repeated. ‘It’s lovely stuff.’

‘I can see that,’ I said, ‘but, really, I can’t possibly. I mean, what have I done to deserve it?’

‘Don’t play the shrinking violet with me, Alison,’ she said tartly. ‘I want you to have something decent to wear to your new job.’ She fished out a necklace of lush mock amber beads clasped in tarnished silver claws and, looking at it mistily, she added, ‘Something more substantial than that rubbishy Indian stuff.’

I was in quite a quandary with the jewellery spread all over the tea-table. I didn’t want to take any of it, but I didn’t want to offend her. I couldn’t see either how I was going to explain such a lavish present that wasn’t for Christmas or for my birthday to Rob, but I couldn’t see how to refuse it.

‘Or this?’ said Mrs Q. She let the light play on a floral brooch, whose stem and leaves were made of tiny chips of green glass and whose petals were pieces of pinkish shell enclosing a diamanté centre.

‘That’s nice,’ I said, since it looked less expensive.

‘A bit frivolous,’ said Mrs Q, ‘for our purposes.’ She pawed the pile and pulled out a sombre agate earring. ‘How about this?’

‘Mrs Queripel,’ I pleaded, ‘why do you want to give me something? You shouldn’t, really.’

She pursed her lips and cocked her head in her favourite coy gesture. ‘You’ve brought me happiness, dear,’ she said. ‘I’d like to do something for you in return.’

Across the tea-table, she took my hand. We were both feeling rather emotional anyway, I suppose, with all that talk of the war and suffering and bidding farewell to brave Harry Levy going off to fight for king and country. I let her fumblingly put the earrings in my ears and I sat straight and still while she admired them.

‘Do they suit me?’ I asked.

She sighed. ‘Ravishing. If you only took a little bit more trouble with your looks, you could be a beauty, Alison.’

I got a bit annoyed at that and, irritably, I tried to pull the earrings off. But I couldn’t undo them.

‘Mind!’ Mrs Q cried sharply. ‘No need to get so uppity – you’ll damage them.’

I said, ‘Sorry.’ I sat uncomfortably, with the earrings weighing me down on either side.

Mrs Q softened and said, ‘I think you should have them, dear. They look lovely. Go and take a look at yourself in the mirror.’

Reluctantly, I did so. I said, ‘I’m not sure if they’re me.’

Mrs Q disagreed vehemently. ‘Stuff and nonsense! Take them, you look adorable.’

I thanked her. She showed me how to get them on and off and then she said, ‘Promise me you’ll wear them to work in the morning? Let’s see how your boss likes you in them.’

‘You young ones who haven’t lived through the War can’t understand how it drew people together. Afterwards, it was a terrible let-down really. That was when everything went flat. That was when we began to count the cost. After those years of struggling and scraping, pulling together through thick and thin, suddenly it was as if all the spirit had gone out of life. It took just two winters for Leonard to start to talk of throwing in the towel. Leonard, who had always breathed, eaten and drunk the stage, talking of retiring, settling down! When theatrical people talk about retiring, of course, they don’t necessarily mean collecting their pension. Leonard was thinking of opening a boarding-house, if you please, on the South Coast somewhere, so we could still keep in touch with passing theatre people. Between you and me, I’d rather have come back to London then and there instead of waiting until we did, and not had the ten years’ toil in between. Not that I didn’t want to live by the sea. Oh, I could see the attractions. But I was still young, remember, not forty yet, and I knew I’d miss the bright lights. And a
boarding-house too! I knew how much work that would be if we wanted to keep up standards. I didn’t fancy spending the rest of my days as a glorified skivvy. I said, why didn’t we go for the management of a cinema? There were enough of them opening up all around the London suburbs then; they were part of our downfall. But Leonard jumped on me for making such a suggestion; a betrayal, he called it. How could I even think of abandoning the stage for a cinema? It would be like plunging one more knife into its poor body, he said. In a boarding-house, with cut-price rates for theatrical people, we would still be serving the cause in a way. We wouldn’t be aiding and abetting its downfall. Well, Leonard had his own way, of course. He had his own way in everything.

‘We’d thought when the War was over, our people would come back, you see. The boys who’d gone off to fight, the WRACs and the WRNs and the ones who’d gone off to entertain the troops. But they didn’t. Some of them, of course, were no more. But the ones who did come back didn’t want to go into that hard life again. They wanted it easy. They went into garages and hairdressing salons and cinemas. They were glad to shake the dust of the boards from their feet, most of them. Of course, we were better off without some of them. Leonard tried to look on the bright side. But when our leading lights deserted us, he took it hard. Strange to relate, it was Harry Levy that he really missed, although all through the War he’d driven me mad by going on about what a relief it was to be rid of him. While poor Harry was risking his life in those desert sands, El Alamein and Tobruk. Harry Levy was a hero.

‘Knowing that men were laying down their lives for you made you fight with a will on the home front, too. You didn’t like to complain about lumps in the porridge or cockroaches, when you knew that others were enduring so much worse. It must sound strange to you, who’ve never known what war is, but in those days people were content with their lot. They all pulled together. They were united.’

After a pause, she went on, ‘Leonard didn’t make up his mind straight away. It wasn’t a decision to be taken lightly. We struggled on for a few years more, but the life had gone
out of the company. Forty-seven, forty-eight … it must have been the summer of 1948 that Leonard started going to look at properties between performances when we were playing in any of the South Coast resorts.’

‘Do you mind my asking you something?’ Alison interrupted.

She seemed very fidgety today, Alicia noticed with annoyance. She couldn’t seem to sit still and concentrate.

‘What is it?’ she asked sternly.

Alison hesitated. ‘I suppose it’s rather personal.’

Alicia felt more forgiving. ‘Spit it out,’ she said brusquely.

‘Well, didn’t you ever think of having a family? I mean, I know it’s none of my business, but you’d still have been just about young enough even then, when you stopped touring, wouldn’t you?’

Alicia caught her breath. Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings, she thought to herself. She’s smelt a rat.

She was about to answer, ‘Whatever will you think of next? It most certainly
is
none of your business,’ when it occurred to her that might be quite the wrong tack to take. She didn’t want Alison imagining that she was hiding anything from her. She looked pensive. ‘How could we have had a family?’ she asked. ‘The life we led?’

‘Well, what about afterwards, then?’ persisted Alison. ‘When you’d left the theatre?’

‘Children?’ exclaimed Alicia. ‘In a boarding-house? What an idea! Running about, messing the place up. We couldn’t possibly.’

‘People do though,’ said Alison doubtfully.

‘Do they indeed?’ snapped Alicia fiercely. ‘Well, not in our kind of boarding-house, they don’t. We ran a nice quiet tidy establishment. Our guests came to us seeking peace and quiet and we gave it to them. Children would have got on their nerves. True, no one ever died of nerves, but we had a reputation we were proud of. People said coming to us was a real rest cure. They used to write months ahead and book their favourite bedrooms. We tried to make sure they always got them, with fresh-cut flowers for our regulars. Oh yes, I used to really mother our regulars.’

Alison looked sheepish. She made a clumsy attempt to change the subject. ‘And what happened to Harold Levy?’ she asked.

Alicia thought when Alison had gone, that there was both for and against in their new-found friendship. Hardly a few days passed now without Alison ringing up or popping round on some pretext or other for a flying visit. When Pearl came, she always asked, ‘And how’s your young visitor?’ and chuckled hugely if Alicia had a funny story to tell about Alison. Mr Patel knew why she made a bee-line for the biscuits and cakes. It was getting harder to keep herself to herself. Alicia sometimes felt as if a hole had been cut in the front of her house through which her privacy was on view to the world. She couldn’t deny she enjoyed the attention. She couldn’t deny either that she enjoyed holding young Alison in her thrall. Only, occasionally, she worried that it had all gone too far. She had never intended to get involved in this bleeding hearts business. She had never intended to 
care
. What did it matter to her if Alison threw herself away on a good-looking good-for-nothing? Why should she be putting herself out to save her? She had never intended to tell her young visitor her life story either. She grew angry with Alison for having egged her on. It was unhealthy for a girl of Alison’s age to be so interested in things which were long gone, dead and buried.

Alicia had told her how Harry Levy went to Hollywood and became a star of the silver screen. Well, he never became a star exactly, but he went into the movies. Alicia used to watch out for his name on the posters outside the ABC. It was always in small letters but she never missed it. When Leonard thought she was out shopping or at the hairdresser’s, she would sneak into the ABC and see how Harry was getting on. He played a lot in gangster movies: the dark but dashing villain. The years hadn’t treated him too badly; he still had almost all of his curly black hair and, although he had grown a little heavier, he could still leap from a car and menacingly brandish his gun in the chases. Alicia followed his career from the back row of the ABC for years.

When Alison had gone, Alicia only had the street to keep
her mind off past shadows. With the first relaxation of winter; the street seemed to have grown noisier at night. It wasn’t possible that such a slight rise in the thermometer should prompt people to venture out later. There was still a bitter wind and Alison and Pearl both told her, lots of colds and flu about. But Alicia was disturbed more often than before by car doors slamming and footsteps and voices. She sat every evening after the television, with her lights off and watched the street come home to bed. She waited for the regular nightly events: the two old men coming from the pub and the courting couple two doors down, whom she wouldn’t be at all surprised to find out had a problem on the way, and she waited for Mr Patel and his old, old mother. They never missed an evening however foul the weather. If it was raining, they walked under an ancient wooden umbrella, which Mr Patel held high over his mother’s head as if they were walking at the front of some grand Eastern procession. Gone was his irritating daytime grin, his tiresome joky nods and winks. His face, polished by the street-light, shone with a saintly blue sadness.