Love Fifteen (16 page)

“Dey laid a few today,” Stan said, one arm hand reaching beneath the hens to find their eggs among the straw.” I got a couple more in th'ouse. I'll leave that one yer cos she bin and got broody. Might have a chick or two ‘fore long.”

Theo took the eggs into his hands.” They're warm.”

Stan smiled, showing his false teeth.

“Dey do come from a warm place.”

*

While Theo was still outside with the men, Rose and the other women agreed not to tell him what this visit was in aid of. The three went home by way of two buses, a double-decker and a grey utility, on which the conductress sat on a front bench beside the driver, telling him when to stop and start. Tilda stayed on with her sister, where she seemed most at home. As they walked to the first stop, Kay said it was time her brother was told.

“He's only a boy, bless him,” Rose said.

“That's what's wrong with Gran's family,” Kay said, as Theo strode ahead, evidently glad to be out in the air and away from the gloom of Harriet's house.” All secrecy and net curtains and poor old slobbering Uncle Stan.”

“Don't be unkind.”

“I'm not. The War turned him simple and now he's a sort-of family shame, like a village idiot.”

“Ssh! Someone'll hear.”

“Let them. Time they did too.”

“Aunt Harriet's a trained midwife,” Rose said.” She've delivered more babies than she could count. And brought off a good few too –”

“Though that can only be talked of in whispers once the men are outside.”

“Because, if that had got around, she'd have been struck off. D'you think she wants it broadcast on the news?”

Theo had reached the stop and held the bus, which arrived as he did, while Rose and Kay hurried to catch it.

Back at Rosemount, they still talked in undertones, as though the walls had ears.

“That house smells of the grave,” Kay said.” Those aunties, they're like death-watch beetles.”

“The hens at least are still giving birth,” Theo said.

He had placed the cooled eggs one by one in a pudding basin in Rosemount's larder. They had one each for tea, boiled, though as always he only ate the yolk, not the rubbery white part, and actually preferred the dried sort that came in tins.

“Not unless they're fertilised,” Kay said, “by the cock.”

“You'll put me off my tea,” Rose said.

“D'you mean, if they sat on these eggs we're eating there wouldn't be any chickens?”

He seemed to remember Inky telling him old Birdie had done Reproduction one day when Theo had been at an Embassy matinée.

“If only this was as simple as a few eggs, and now that's enough,” Rose said, silencing Kay and closing the subject.

Theo went for a swing in the garden and thought again about what it would mean to him to have a baby brother and whether Fred was the father and if not who? Would old Laura's husband Tombs of the Brylcreemed hair be among the possible candidates, known as he was for having a wife in every branch?

A few days later Fred drove them to a red-brick pub beside Eastville Park. A swinging sign outside showed a bald man sucking a quill over the words Shakespeare Free House. Rose looked nervous as Fred parked the new Wolseley 14 business car with two others at the kerb. When she told him surely Kay and certainly Theo wouldn't be allowed in, her husband smiled at her simplicity. The landlord came forward with a frown but, after shaking Fred's outstreched hand, smiled and showed them to an outside table in a garden overlooking the park. He served beer for his brother-in-need, gin-and-lime for Rose, a sherry for Kay and a shandy for Theo, who noticed the familiar look the publican gave his Mum, which she ignored. Christ, not him too?

“What's this all about?” she asked when he'd gone.

“Don't you think a celebration's due?” Fred said.” Is it every day a member of our family rises so far above the general level? It's to drink to Kay's achievement and her equally wonderful future.”

“In that case,” Kay said, “I'll need something stronger. Can't I have a Sidecar?”

“I doubt mine host would know what that is,” Fred said, staring out at the park beyond the terrace, “this isn't the Mauretania.”

The word's satanic associations silenced mother and daughter.

“To our young Kay!” he went on, raising his mug, “and to what we all know will be a career of great academic distinction. What d'you think of her, Rose?”

“Wonderful. I always have.”

“And you, son? Aren't you proud of your sister gaining an Exhibition!”

“I didn't even know what an Exhibition is till she told me.”

“I'm none too sure even now,” said Rose.

“Try not to flaunt your ignorance. It's a scholarship to an Oxford college.”

“College?” Rose said.” I thought Oxford was a university.”

Fred looked to Kay for help but she wouldn't meet his eye, only swirled her sherry about in the dinky glass.

“Well, which is it, my girl?”

“The whole business is a clique,” said Theo, “a club or cartel, like Eton or Harrow.”

“Hallo hallo?” Fred said.

“To make sure the top people stay in charge.”

“I must say, son, you can talk some eyewash when you choose. How can it be that if Kay's got in? She's hardly Milady Muck.”

“That's one of the crumbs they throw the rest of us to keep us in our place.”

“Enough crumbs add up to a cake,” Fred said, making Theo look up. That was worthy of Hazel, or even old Lenin himself, whom she'd quoted as saying he and his comrades didn't want a slice of the cake but the bakery.

“Wait till I tell those snobs at the Lodge,” Fred went on.

“Better not, Dad,” Kay murmured, still peering at her glass.

“Why not? I've already told mine host here who was only boasting the other day about his son piloting a Spitfire.”

“Well, leave it at that because I shan't be going.”

Fred stared at her then at Rose, who said in a stage whisper: “She's expecting!”

“Expecting what?”

“It must be plain to everyone but you, the way she's plumping out.”

Kay began: “And it's no use you talking, Dad, because –”

“Just a second. Hadn't Theo better wait in the car? Or walk down by the lake, son, while we –”

“Good grief,” Kay said, “he's fifteen. He's probably guessed anyway. Haven't you?”

Theo shook his head. So – not a brother or sister but nephew or niece. He'd be an uncle and Kay a Mum !

Fred was silent. At last he sipped his beer and shook his head.” So we're the last to be told.”

“We didn't want you worrying,” Rose said.

“Worrying? A seventeen-year-old schoolgirl –”

“Eighteen, just –”

“ – with a future of dreaming spires within her very grasp! I suppose this happened at that damned Youth Club? I'll have it shut down. Well, I think we can safely defer this celebration till the matter's been dealt with. Come along home, all of you.”

“Dealt with?” Kay said, staying seated as the others started to rise.

“Well, of course. It's got to be got rid of! Toot sweet before it's too obvious to hide. Then it would be all round the neighbourhood and we'd be upping stumps again before we've hardly arranged the furniture.”

“Dad means have it adopted,” Rose suggested, “don't you?”

“Adopted? Aborted!”

“Don't use that word. Say ‘Brought off'!”

“No,” said Kay.” No bringing off. I'm having it.”

The publican came up to ask if all was well and congratulate Kay on her scholarship and to offer another round on the house. Fred couldn't face him and Rose avoided his eye again. Only Kay was equal to the occasion, gave him her Vivien Leigh laugh, enquired in vain about a Sidecar and settled for another sherry.

Back home in Rosemount, his dad drank more beer and stood staring through French windows into the back garden with its concrete sundial and crazy paving. Enjoying his righteous mood and needing to chastise Kay, he pointed at Theo's wonderful example. Comparatively backward, certainly no natural genius, he'd managed to pull himself up by his bootstraps, taking every advantage of Mrs. Hampton's tuition. At this, Theo felt his sister's eyes on his face and blushed.

“No, son, fair do's,” Fred went on, “no need to look bashful. Learn to accept praise where it's due. As you know, I had my doubts but since she took you in hand there's been no stopping you. But for Kay, with all her innate gifts, to throw away such a golden future…”

Words failed him and he drained the glass. Kay still said nothing, only examined the silhouette picture in coloured silver paper of a Regency fop posing beside a spinet. She'd known about Theo and Hazel since finding them in their parents' bed in Villa Borghese when she rushed in straight from school to steal some fags from the drawer, but had never mentioned the incident, just stored it up against a rainy day.

“Well,” Rose said, “this is no time to rub her nose in one silly mistake. She needs sympathy and help.”

“Oh, I don't blame
her
,” Fred's tone became ironic, “I pity her. She's suffering from an inborn failing. An inherited characteristic, shall we say? And I need hardly add she didn't get it from the old man's side. What with our friend Whatsisname, – Convict 99? – and Cousin Harry and various members of the U.S. forces you've been seen with at the Mauretania – ..”“

“Come on, Kay,” Rose said, “we needn't sit here listening to this.”

“You should! You might learn something.”

“I've heard it too many times.”

“And young Theodore will tell you you can't revise a good lesson too often.”

The spectre of family shame and failure appalled Fred only slightly less than the prospect of his little Kay having
that
done to her by some ping-pong champion at the Youth Club. So he welcomed a third option: that she should have the baby but allow it to be adopted by some childless couple. She herself agreed there was nothing to be gained by throwing away her life for the sake of a child fathered (she said) by one of two possible soldiers who'd both been afterwards posted elsewhere in readiness for the invasion everyone felt was coming soon. Fred's liberality was tested to its limits as he learnt more about the tragedies of global conflict. Stalin, now as popular as Churchill, had been demanding a Second Front ever since Germany invaded Russia. Fred still sold goods to retailers in seaside towns where the beaches were barbed-wired while others were being used for trial landings on the French coast.

Theo and Jake Swift the Jew did sketches where burly allied soldiers from Poland, Holland and Canada queued for donkey-rides, sucked sticks of rock or shouted ‘“He's behind you”‘ in outlandish accents at Punch-and-Judy shows. They mimed Negroes from Harlem pairing off for the valeta in end-of-the-pier ballrooms. Free French in pom-poms had their palms read by Gipsy Rose.

Overhearing part of their rehearsal for these turns, Fred told them it was no laughing matter for the few remaining native families to be overwhelmed by hordes of rude soldiery.

Leaving the room, he slammed the door.

“What's up with him?” asked Jake so Theo told him. Jake had always forlornly hankered after his friend's sister and suffered her scornful airs with tight-lipped dignity. His suntanned face flushed even redder.

“Bloody hell, man! Is it true ? Old Kay a good-time girl? A brazen hussy?”

Jake spent that night in dark depression, wishing he'd been more of a man, remembering Lady Macbeth's words to her hubbie ‘“letting ‘I dare not' wait upon ‘I would' like the poor cat i'the adage”'. The cat who wouldn't catch the fish for fear of getting its feet wet.

Theo passed his School Certificate Exams with three credits and four passes and prepared to join the grown-up world, wear a trilby and openly smoke Capstan Full Strength. Fred said his progress showed he was capable of gaining a Higher like Kay and was unlikely to spoil his chances as she had. Another year at school and Credits would become Distinctions. What for, Theo whined, how far would that get him in the film business? Fred said he could try what crackpot schemes he liked as long as he had these results behind him so that, once he'd seen sense, he'd be able to get a decent job in the civil service and start earning an old-age pension. Alone in the family in opposing his son's ambitions, he played the heavy father and insisted he stay for another year. When Rose pointed out that in two more he'd be called up, Fred said these same credentials would make a commission a distinct possibility. Didn't she want to see their son an officer ?

Perhaps, though, it would all be over before he reached eighteen. The end of the beginning had long since been followed by the beginning of the end. Hazel lectured the whole family about the lovely day that was coming tomorrow, just as Rose had sung about it to the troops. It could only be a question of time now before they could feast their tear-stained eyes on tomorrow's bright new skies.

Spring was giving way to summer in Rosemount's garden. The four family members and Theo's private tutor sat with the French windows open, eating and drinking a nice tea at the stained-oak table with double leaves and knobbly legs that had once stood in the bay window of Villa Borghese. Theo focussed his cine-camera on Hazel, lit by a sun still high but setting, reflected in her green irises between long lashes that seldom failed to stretch his trousers. She always took her glasses off as soon as he raised the camera. The exposed films of their passionate afternoons were still undeveloped and hidden in Charlotte Street.

“Of course it's important to win,” she said, “but more important still to know why. The Russians do but does anyone here or in America, really?”

“Well, I certainly don't want a lot of Germans telling me what to do,” Rose said.

“But think, haven't they as much right to be here as we have to occupy India, Malaya or Burma? Or as little? After all, the Japanese are Asians and only want somewhere to sell their goods in their own part of the world. Isn't it all about trade? Commerce? Mister Light, you're a commercial traveller.”

“I prefer to say a representative in Household Goods.”

“Your job is trying to colonise the shops, just as nations do for markets and to get their hands on raw materials like rubber, petrol, iron, coal …”

“My promoting the sale of Hoovers hardly amounts to global war, dear.”

“No, not you alone but millions of you doing it on a global scale…”

“That's not very nice, Fred.”

“I suppose I'm entitled to say my piece in my own house?”

Hazel spread lemon curd on a slice of greyish bread and Theo's camera followed her hand to the table, ending the shot on the teapot as Rose poured another cup. Kay and he had milk-shakes. Rose added sugar and frowned at a wasp that came from the garden and hovered over the jam.

Fred pointed to one wall and a
Daily Express
war map, where tiny British, Russian, American and German paper flags showed how the war was moving on all fronts. Beside this, a poster of a landscape of rolling hills, a shepherd and his flock, a village and a distant church, with the slogan ‘Your Britain – fight for it now'.

“There's your answer. We're not fighting for rubber or petrol but our own dear homeland…”

“There'll always be an Eng-land,” Rose sang, as she passed back Hazel's cup, “and Eng-land shall be free…”

“D'you think it really belongs to you?”

“To all of us.”

“Try walking across it,” Hazel went on, “you won't get far before someone tells you it belongs to
them
. Trespassers will be prosecuted. Beware the dog. Get off my land, it isn't yours.”

“Wherever there's a country lane,” Rose sang on.

Hazel smiled.” It no more belongs to you than to the kids I teach or the men who are out there fighting in deserts and jungles to preserve it.”

“Like your husband,” Kay said.

Theo had begun another shot of his dad beside the poster, below the map, and panned south through Europe to Egypt where a cardboard British flag fluttered on a pin. He was now standing and moved in for a close-up of the word Cairo.

“We shall fight in the fields and in the hills,” quoted Fred.

“Churchill,” Hazel went on, “was born in a palace, so yes, that's true, a fair whack of it belongs to him and his lot.”

“Anyway, Dad,” Theo said, “you don't give tuppence for fields and churches, only for driving through to the next town, and you wouldn't get far without the petrol and rubber Hazel talked about.”

“A lot of the time these days,” Rose told them, “your father goes by train.”

“Which needs coal and iron,” Hazel said.

“Oh, you'll make my headache with your blessed politics. I wish we'd never started.”

“Don't blame me,” Fred said, “it was Hazel telling us about the wonderful world we can look forward to once all this is over.”

“You don't believe me?”

“Well, if it's to depend on support from your average working man –”

“Or woman,” Rose said.

“-or woman indeed, it seems a mite far-fetched. Bricks without straw. I came from such a class and I know.”

Which was Hazel's cue to tell them again how education would change everything, the people were only what they were allowed to be. When Geoff and the other men came home there'd be different rulers and a new spirit in the land. The people's war would be followed by the people's peace.

Theo had turned off the camera's motor by now and rewound the spring. He had plenty of footage of Hazel talking and the family answering back and, as there was no sound, in years to come no-one would have a clue what they'd all been saying on that faraway autumn afternoon.

“Thanks all the same but no,” Rose said.” It's taken all these years for Dad and me to work our way to a lovely house like this and you want to let in all that riff-raff again?”

“With their runny noses, eh, my dear?” Dad said, catching the wasp on a plate and squashing it with the flat of his knife blade.

“Look no further than Kay,” said Hazel.” By the time she goes to Oxford, she won't find herself among a load of chinless toffs and snobs but men and women like ourselves.”

The silence that followed was ended by Kay.

“I shan't be going.”

Theo had, of course, told Hazel that it was his sister who was pregnant, not his mother, but no-one in the family knew she knew. Now Kay brought the matter into the open for reasons of her own. She wanted to insist again that there was to be no operation. The baby would be born, never mind what followed. She explained her reasons and Theo sympathised with her fear of Aunt Harriet's death-house, the Great War ghosts, the spinster aunt and her shell-shocked brother, with only the hens producing eggs. If her baby was to be a secret, she would not add a backstreet abortion to the universal carnage but do a bit to redeem it with a new life. There were some minutes of lamentation from Fred and Rose and more obstinacy from Kay.

Theo kept silent, as indifferent to babies as to Prep School titches. They all looked like Churchill or Mussolini anyway.

Hazel listened and drew general conclusions before leaving for a shift of duty as a plane-spotter. There'd been no bombs of any kind for some time but the country still lived in darkness and scanned the sky in vain for enemy planes that were too busy on the Russian front to bother with Britain.

The Light family's move to Henleaze meant Inky and Theo now lived two miles apart. They still met at school and several times a week outside, making the hilly journey between Schubert Villa and Rosemount via Horfield Common and Golden Hill. The friends still kept their skits going, inventing new ones on the same lines, chasing favourite films to outlying districts with exotic bus-numbers where unfamiliar sergeants guarded the doors. For awhile they revelled in
‘Hellzapoppin
', which seemed to them the craziest film ever made. Theo took Hazel, describing it by one of the new words she'd taught him: anarchistic. As a committed Communist, she spurned Anarchy as a dead end. She laughed a good deal but said the film lacked purpose. Its references were solipsistic, self-concerned, referring only to Hollywood movies. More broadly and intelligently applied, the wild inversion of logic could have gone so much further. Theo already sensed this and was caught between the abject enthusiasm he had shared with Inky and Swifty and his new awareness of how much deeper everything could be, even comedy.

Especially comedy.

The Marx Brothers were always ‘U' certificate so there'd be no need to ask adults to take them in. Anyway they could both pass for eighteen, with school caps and scarves hidden. Both had deep voices and smoked with assurance. Theo's Hazel experience made the first crevice in the fabric of his friendship with Inky, one that grew wider with every meeting. They both knew that one was growing up faster than the other, even at times back-pedalling so as not to move too far ahead. Their intimacy, the closest male bond either would ever know, was prolonged beyond its natural death by clinging to old ways, Theo keeping one foot in a trivial, comforting past. Inky had always worshipped Kay and it was sad to see him drooling over this burgeoning woman, whose belly and breasts swelled more every week. While Inky had loved her abjectly, spaniel-eyed, it seemed more forward bods in Sixth Forms or men awaiting call-up had sauntered with her after Youth Club evenings on Purdown, joining the seething fields of black and white G.I.'s and their tarts from one of those common districts named after a saint.

Fred fulminated, saying that, if he ever discovered which spotty oik had done the deed, he'd throw the book at him. Theo and Kay evolved a sketch where their dad identified the father and tried and failed to hit him with one of the few books he had. One was Don Bradman's ‘
My Cricketing Days
' and one about the mechanics of birth control, which Theo had found in the drawer not far from the packet-of-three. He'd spent some time studying the rudimentary diagrams and now wished he'd passed the manual on to his sister in time to save her from this unfortunate fate.