Love Fifteen (15 page)

“Hush your mouth? That the only answer you can make? Uh? You pathetic bloody clown!”

“Theo, easy,” Hazel said, moving to grab his hands.

And “Stop it,” said Kay, helping to free her father, who fell back on to an upright chair. “Dad's right.”

“What?”

“You can't do anything useful, only cause trouble for yourselves.”

“What do you know about the Yanks ?”

“More than you.”

“You weren't even there,” Hazel said.” That poor coloured man could be dead. It's like the Ku Klux Klan.”

“Right. And do
they
ever get caught?” Kay asked.

“They're not in Alabama now. This is England.”

“You don't honestly believe they'd take any notice of our police? If an English person had been involved, they just might –”

“An English woman
was
, from what we heard. The coloured man had been with a white girl.”

“Then he knew the risks he was taking.”

“How d'you know what he did to her?” Fred said from his chair, “how d'you know she was willing? The sight of a white woman drives them wild, they say. You surely can't –”

“Shut up, Dad, don't show your ignorance,” Kay said, “you know nothing about it.”

“I'm on
your
side, girl.”

“No, you're not.”

“The whites are right. I've nothing against the blacks but the races must be kept apart. God wouldn't have made oak trees and chestnuts different if he'd meant them to grow together.”

“That's not what I said.”

On the tablecloth in the bay, various condiments and sauces always stood ready for the next meal. Theo took the tomato sauce bottle, unstoppered it and held it above his father's head. Fred always eked it out by adding malt vinegar to the dregs, so when his son banged the end a splodge of the stuff was squirted on to his balding forehead and a scarlet mess dribbled down his face. Theo threw the bottle across the room and stormed out. Rose met him in the hall, arriving back from a drink with Laura. Theo passed her and took the stairs three at a time, roaring like an animal. Shaken and confused, she went on into the living room at the back. Her husband came towards her, head and face a gory mess.

“Oh, my God, what's happening?”

“Your son's gone off his chump,” Fred said, bending down to retrieve the ketchup bottle from under the sideboard.

Rose said “I thought it was blood. I thought he'd cut your head open.”

“All but. Look at this. All down the wall.”

Rose, already bewildered, now heard Hazel's laughter from the far corner. Kay laughed too and soon Rose joined them. Fred stood staring, the mixture dribbling down to stain his shirt.

For Hazel, that wasn't all. The last half-hour's events had epitomised two nations at this crucial point in both their destinies: America murderous, divided, callous, all-powerful; England cowardly, long-suffering, its former grandeur reduced to slapstick comedy, the family headman stained with Heinz's most popular variety.

The other flats at Charlotte Street became vacant one by one, as tenants found safer places to live. A few were requisitioned for serving officers or rarely-seen ministry men. So Hazel thought it safe to give Theo lessons there again, on the way home from school or on half-days when he should have been kicking or hitting balls on Golden Hill. Mostly, though, she still came to Rosemount. His mother too had been requisitioned, after her brief stay in the aircraft factory, now as an incompetent two-finger typist for the Board of Trade in a big house on The Downs. Fred had failed to arrange her exemption with a few grips of influential knuckles. In the event, she found she could manage some simple filing and tea-making and enjoyed getting out of the house. Soon she was accepting lifts home in the Regional Controller's Humber and once Theo, watching from the front upstairs as she arrived, saw him give her a kiss before she got out. He'd just put the cine-camera down after practising some really crazy angle shots of the crescent they all thought so beautiful but by the time he'd retrieved it and got the car in focus, she was walking up the front path between the laburnum and lilac.

He still pestered Hazel to write to her husband about their affair. Liking and admiring Geoff's letters and his serious face in the bedside photo, he couldn't wait for the day he'd come home and all three of them would share a new life. Many a time, in the bedrooms of Henleaze or her attic flat in Charlotte Street, he'd remind her their world of sharing and free love would be worthless if not be based on truth. Lying was what old people did, even dear Gran who had to lie to Fred for Rose. Hazel no longer seemed able to grasp the simple purity of this and he had to remind her that it was she who had first shown him that marriage was only a nicer form of white slavery. The abolition of marriage (and therefore the family) was a consummation devoutly to be wished. When he insisted, she told him there was no rush. Then Theo would declare them revolutionaries, not gradualists, guerrillas not Fabians,and press her to write one of those air-mail forms telling Geoff she'd been going to bed with this boy for more than a year and that both of them could hardly wait for him to join them.

Hazel stared.

“D'you mean literally,” she asked, “in bed?”

They were in Rosemount, she in the living-room, he mixing milk-shakes and passing them through his mother's beloved serving-hatch.

“All three?” The suggestion puzzled him. He saw that one man would have to wait for the other and that would cheapen Hazel in his eyes. She'd be like one of those good-time girls or Yankees' hussies his Gran was always cursing. Also the thought of Geoff being that close, perhaps undressed, was actually grotesque. He liked hairless bodies of his own age, like Swifty's, whom he'd sometimes kissed and cuddled, but not a middle-aged man of over thirty.

“What would be the good of that? No, I meant, it'll be something for Geoff to look forward to. If you don't, I will.”

“No! Not till I say.”

They'd made love in Theo's bed that afternoon and were now ready for whichever family member came home first. This was one of Fred's one-in-five weeks away so Kay was most likely.

To change the subject, she asked how he felt about having a new brother or sister.

“Why?”

“What, they haven't told you yet?” she said, opening a textbook.” I overheard them talking to your gran.”

“Heard who?”

“Your mum and sister.”

“Not Mum? She can't have any more, can she? At her age?”

“Forty? It's not common but quite possible. Don't they teach you biology either?”

“Only the sex life of the axylotl.”

“Well, why d'you think your dad keeps Frenchies in his drawer?”

The grotesque image and the possibility of a baby brother made trigonometry even harder to grasp and Hazel finally turned to revising Clive of India, whom she used as a cogent denunciation of The East India Company. Theo sucked his glass dry, making the gargling sound that was part of the pleasure of a milk shake.

“Mum gets pregnant – at her age! – and you never do. Is it me, d'you reckon? Am I – what is it ? – impotent?”

“That you aren't, darling. And you must mean sterile. I've told you: it's me. As Dr.Johnson said, Madam, I cannot conceive. Let's thank our lucky stars.”

Within the family, nothing was volunteered about Rose being pregnant and he was too appalled to ask. A doubt he didn't even divulge to Hazel was the identity of the father. It was repulsive but not impossible that Vince had sired his future brother/sister. A thought on the same lines as imagining Geoff undressed. ‘Sire' was a word he and Inky had learned lately and used as a euphemism for any sort of sexual doings. ‘“Hell, man, what about siring Margo?”' was followed by the usual grandiloquent groans. After Hazel had gone that evening, he evaded Kay's sly digs about the teacher's tuition by retreating to his room. He hadn't raised the matter of Rose being in the club, in case Hazel had misheard, but he now thought about other possible sires – cousin Harry, the Regional Controller of the Board of Trade… even Fred.

By this time, the war was on the turn, Hitler was losing on the Russian front and in England anyway Stalin was far more more popular than Roosevelt. Rommel had lost in North Africa and all likelihood of invasion had passed, Fred relaxed the ten inches-per-couple water economy and allowed four separate baths a week.

Sometimes he found his mother, sister or grandma sniffling or outright weeping. Conversations lapsed as he came upon them. A week later, while Fred was on his rounds of retailers close by the city, Theo was taken on one of the family's rare visits to Tilda's side of the family. Her flat was near the rented house of her sister Harriet, who shared this two-down, three-up place with daughters Gwen and Dora, son Stan and son-in-law George. This city's poorest parts, as in other bombed cities, had caught the worst of the air-raids and gaps in their mean Edwardian terraces showed the damage where they'd been strafed by sticks of incendiaries or H.E.'s.

The front parlour was reserved for rare visits by doctors, rent-collectors and vicars and for Christmas and so Tilda, Rose, Kay and Theo were received in the back room. Though it was a dazzling day outside, the only source of light here was a small coal-fire, glowing in a black iron basket in the lower half of a miniature kitchen range. The window on to a few square feet of brick-walled rear yard was so festooned with plush and net that only a glimmer came from there. The old woman didn't get up as they moved in, only sat straighter in her ancient fireside chair. As he bent over her, Theo had to steel himself for the touch of her lips, cold and dry, working to control a double-set of dentures. Like Tilda, she was so simian, he told Inky, they were living proof that Darwin had got it right. She smelt of camphor, linen, naphthalene, Dettol and a funeral home he'd been in once to see one of his London aunts laid out. It was as though death clung to Harriet, biding its time like a patient undertaker.

Rose, Kay and he were given upright chairs by the weird sisters (‘Fair is foul and foul is fair'), who then retired to the penumbra, leaving the elders and guests to form an inner firelit circle. Brother and brother-in-law stood even further off, visible by their glowing pipe and Capstan. Glasses of ruby British wine were poured for Tilda, Harriet, Rose and Gwen. Strong drink didn't agree with Dora's legendary dyspepsia. A martyr to wind, she stood belching gently, catching the expelled gas in her raised fist and begging their pardon. Beyond the men hung sepia studio portraits of Great War tommies in oval frames. Middle-aged Stan stood before the jaunty image of himself when young, just recruited, in khaki, cap held in one hand and a putteed leg resting on a footstool, smiling for a man beneath a black hood in 1915. One of the very much wanted millions, he survived Flanders and wasn't required again till the next time. Today, when he smiled, he dribbled. His sisters attended him, dabbing his mouth and taking his hand when his mind wandered and his stammering speech lost its way.

“Tell them who thee had come through the station, George,” Gwen told her amiable bushy-browed husband.

“The king did come. And Churchill,” he said, “and she from Americawl.”

“Who
is
she, Theawl?” Gwen asked, “the wife of he in the wheel-chair?”

“Mrs. Roosevelt ?”

“Aah, that's her. George do see all they nobs down the station. That's what do come of being a porter, see.”

“And Ernest Bevin, he they've made Labour Minister.”

“Best thing for'un,” Tilda snapped.” He do talk with a West Country twang thee could cut with a knife. Who'm gonna listen to ‘ee except labourers?”

“They reckon he used to drive a dray for that mineral water company,” Rose said and Gwen, Dora, Tilda and Harriet all joined in on the last three words. Theo had been waiting for the first example of this and wondered if there was an appropriate grammatical or musical term for it, like recitative or antiphon. He'd make sure to ask old Jimmie. Not only Tilda's family but neighbours at Villa Borghese who had gossipped to Rose over their garden walls all knew the knack of completing each other's sentences. He'd been hearing them do this all his life and none ever stumbled or guessed wrong. He knew that something similar went on in church, from the few occasions he'd been unable to avoid going; and in school assemblies the swots joined in with old Hines on Amens and That-Art-In-Heavens; and in troop concerts, Rose had brought them all in for reprises of
‘When the lights go on again'.
But those were familiar responses in communal liturgies. This trick was another matter and meant anticipating impromptu speech. Or what was supposed to be.

“We do never see none of they over yer,” Dora said in her voice of doom, “though this part's had the worst bombing. They toffs from London do only ever get as far as the centre.”

“Well,” Rose said, her accent getting more Mina Road by the minute “the king came to Theawl's school.”

“Well, that do be near the centre,” Dora said.

“And he did play the big drum in the Hofficer's Training Corps,” Tilda added.

“De king did play de drum?” asked Stan with his idiot grin.

“No, dear. Theawl. They had a parade on the playing-field while he inspected the hair-raid wardens. Dissn't?”

“The king, yeah,” Theo said, “not me. I missed a whole hour of Tommy Dorsey on the AFN.”

“The what?”

“American Forces Network.”

“Tis all Yanks with them,” Tilda said, half-apologising, with a look round that included not only Theo but Kay and Rose.

“What?” Stan asked in his giggly voice, “bist thee gonna be an officer when you'm called up, Theawl?”

“Time
he's
eighteen, t'will all be over,” Rose said.

“That's what they do always say,” Dora lamented, “that's what they did –”

“Say last time, yes” chorused Tilda, Harriet, Gwen, Dora and Stan.

“If you do get called up, best go as a h'officer,” said George, “Stan and me was both privates in the last.”

“That's how me and George did meet,” Gwen said, “when he come yer to visit Stan after.”

“They do say tis a hill wind,” said Harriet.

“But s'right what I said, eh, Stan?”

“What?”

“Best be an officer.”

“Aah. Mind, more of dey do get killed dan we.”

Dora could just be discerned in the darkness taking her brother's hand.

“When dey said I had to go home, dis medical officer says to me, ‘You'm swinging de lead, my man'… I tawld him no, I never asked for medicawl repat, only my sergeant reckoned I'd had enough. I tawld him I'd –”

“Sooner carry on, yes,” said the chorus.

Stan's smile had gone and he was complaining like a beaten child, looking for help from face to face.

“That's alright, Stan,” Dora said, “tis all over now.” and kissed his hand.

Before the women got down to serious talk, Theo noticed a sequence of hints and nudges worthy of Dad's Masonic rituals, which soon led to the uncles leading him to the back yard for a look at Stan's fowls, kept in laying boxes between George's push bike and a mangle draped in tarpaulin. The space was too small to accomodate a shelter so in the raids they either huddled under the stairs or left by a door into the back lane leading to a communal brick one above ground. Or had, before the night when – a street or two away – one of these had got blown down, killing everyone inside.

“So what dost they teach thee up that grammar school then?” George asked while Theo peered at Stan's birds.

“Maths, History, Geography, Art, English, French, German, Science, stuff like that –”

“What's de wanna learn German for?” Stan said.

“We did never learn none, did we, not in three years?” George said, “No French neither. Only a few words, like. Handi Hop. Parleyvoo. Silver play.”

In the semi-darkness beyond the window panes, Theo could make out the women in conference and sense the agitation as the old ones nagged and questioned. He composed it as a long shot from the yard's back wall, a picture within a picture, wide enough to include himself and the old men in the yard, with the domestic fowls, like shepherds in a crib, and the women inside framed by the window, all in deep focus. The net curtains would have to be left out to give the camera a clear view of the interior. He'd told Hazel once that the camera
always
lies, the better to tell the truth.

“What are they talking about in there?” he asked.

“That's women's troubles, son,” George said.

“D'you like a few hagues to take ‘ome, Theawl?” said Uncle Stan, actually cousin-once-removed because Aunt Harriet had begat him and she was Theo's mother's aunt. And Uncle George wasn't family at all, only married to Auntie Gwen, also begat by Harriet, and George and Gwen begat no-one and had now left it too late. The prolific families of the last century had ceased with that war. On both sides, few children were now begotten. He and Kay had only two cousins. He imagined Harriet's branch of the family tree lopped off, the stump painted black with tar as he'd sometimes seen on pruned beeches beside country roads.