Strange Music (35 page)

‘One way or the other it's your baby!' Felix grinned.

‘I'm serious, darling,' she said sharply. ‘I want her out of Robert Street . . . I was going to say in three days, Chris, but, seeing what problems you may yet have with the gentle Mister Garlick, I'll say a week. By this time next week you will have sorted out her situation – agreed?'

‘You're true blue – both of you,' Chris said.

‘Agreed?'

‘I suppose so. No choice, have I?'

‘Not really, no.'

Terry Garlick did not resemble the mind's-eye image of a man who would blind a barman – or anyone else. His suit was the suit of a thin man but even so he seemed to sway around loosely inside it. The hollow eyes and day-old stubble were easily explained but the cavities under his cheekbones, the half ping-pong balls of bone behind his ears, and the ropes of sinews that controlled all the movements of his head revealed a man who could not get muscle-bound in a dozen courses with Charles Atlas. Yet nor was he an obvious candidate for having sand kicked in his face on that eternal cartoon beach. His lips formed a grimly determined line and when he smiled, the lower one jutted pugnaciously forward. Not a man to meet in a dark alley, Angela decided.

‘Cor, thanks mate,' he said when he saw Chris leap from the car. ‘I'm in a bad way, I tell ya. Every city gent's a rozzer and every Austin Seven's a Black Maria. Look at me shake.' He held out a trembling hand.

‘These two friends' – Chris nodded toward the car – ‘live same place as me, right? I've explained what—'

‘No, you can't have.' Garlick thrust him aside and strode to the car. ‘It's only for the night, honest,' he said as Felix wound down the window. ‘Just till my brief has talked it over with the rozzers so I can give myself up without falling victim to an epidemic of black eyes and broken teeth. You understand? It's just for tonight. If I delay more, it'll count against me, anyway.'

‘Hop in, Mister Garlick,' Felix said. ‘Officially we know nothing of your story. You're just a friend of Chris's who's staying the night. Do
you
understand?'

‘Perfickly, squire.'

‘That was what I was going to tell you,' Chris said as he climbed in on the far side. ‘They don't know anything about what happened in Deptford.' After a pause he added, ‘How
did
it happen? Blinded – Jesus!'

‘Penny on the drum?' Garlick replied. ‘I don't think I did blind the poor bugger. I think he fell on a bottle standing up – crown cap and all on. My hammer couldn't have done all that damage.'

‘
Your
hammer?' Angela echoed.

‘Yeah, it was only a little tack-hammer, like what we use in delicate upholstery. It
couldn't
have done that much damage.'

Later that evening, Felix closed his book and laid it on his bedside table.

‘Don't put the light out yet,' Angela pleaded. ‘I've only got a page to go.'

‘What did you think when you saw me coming into the flat with that Debbie girl?' he asked casually.

She chuckled. ‘D'you really want to know?'

‘No. I think I already do.'

She responded in a sing-song, ‘I don't thi-ink so!' and went on reading.

Slightly miffed, he said, eventually, ‘You're ashamed of it now.'

She laid the book flat and turned to him with a sort of motherly exasperation. ‘If you really want to know, I was thinking,
Don't laugh! Whatever you do, don't laugh!
'

‘Laugh?'

She snapped the book shut, put it on her bedside table, lay down full length, and pulled the duvet up to her neck. ‘Think about it, darling – I'm off to sleep!'

Saturday, 14 June 1952

The theme for the midsummer party of 1952 was
My Inner Self,
which was proposed – once again – by Eric and accepted by the others without much opposition, much to their later bewilderment as they went about their business, the house, the gardens . . . Hertford . . . London . . . staring at one another and wondering, silently, what had possessed them, and what
was
their ‘inner self,' anyway? The worst part of all was that no one felt able to discuss it with anyone else for fear of revealing more about their ‘inner selves' than they imagined they were revealing – that plus the fear of having a good idea nicked.

The backlash against Eric was all the stronger as these gripes took hold. ‘We missed one vital little clue,' Sally said to Marianne as they both sat at their drawing boards one Sunday afternoon, a week before the party. They had been awarded a contract for an extension to the cottage hospital in Old Welwyn. ‘When Eric put forward this ridiculous suggestion, there wasn't a breath of opposition or criticism out of Isabella. How could we have missed that? It has
never
happened before. Usually she can't let even the smallest comment of his pass her by. The other day I heard him say what a perfect blue sky we had and she turned on him like a she-cat and snapped, “Azure!”'

‘To which I'll bet he responded, “Cerulean!”?'

‘No, he just said, “Azure wish, Chuckles, my pet.” He calls her Chuckles now. They are definitely mellowing – those two. Or
he
is. She's still, well,
Isabella
. The other day I heard her telling Faith that Eric carries bags of sugar round with him. I have no idea what she meant. I'm sure Faith didn't either.'

Marianne laughed. ‘It's just her way of saying she thinks Eric is too fat. But did you hear about Chris and the Breits last week? Julie told me – in strict confidence, so keep it to yourself. There's a girl at the Slade called Debbie something and she thinks Chris has got her pregnant, and—'

‘Julie doesn't mind?'

‘She knows him pretty well. She knew what he's like before she even moved in. She even spoke to me about it. I told her the best way to break a wild horse is slowly and gently, not like you see in the movies. Anyway, this Debbie apparently collared Felix in the street, told him all about it, and then turned on the waterworks. And poor old Felix – you can just imagine it – him standing there in the middle of London with a weeping adolescent hanging on his arm! Poor old Felix panics and thinks of getting her under cover somewhere . . . and seeing as it was just a hundred yards or so from their place in Robert Street, and—'

‘He didn't!' Sally laughed in disbelief.

‘He did. But wait, what he didn't know was that Angela was there. She'd just bought some new shoes and she wanted to try them on with a dress she keeps there. So Felix ushers Debbie in at the door and . . . tableau!'

‘Oh, I wish I'd been there – a fly on the wall! Are you using the nought-point-one?'

Marianne handed the pen across to her.

Sally went on: ‘But I wouldn't have thought Felix is that type, you know.' There was a short pause before she added, ‘Would you?'

‘I think Faith was perfect for him,' she said. ‘His time “living in sin” with her gave him the courage to think that marriage with Angela might not be an utter disaster. We're using standard four-foot windows across the entire first floor, right?'

‘On a fifteen-foot module. It leaves us three inches short but we'll cheat that back in again with the lead lining round the X-ray suite. Also it suited them both for their careers. He got lots of patronage through Fogel and his Hampstead parties and she got feathers in her cap as his agent.' After a pause she added, ‘And he didn't have to go to prostitutes after that.'

‘My God! You know about that?'

‘Adam told me. I also promised never to tell anyone else! How do
you
know?'

‘He told me, himself. He said he hated it, but . . . he thought it was all he'd ever be able to manage after Mauthausen.'

They worked in silence for a while before Marianne returned to the subject. ‘When we had our first offices in Curzon Street we had to run a gauntlet of them – in short skirts and fishnet stockings, tapping their stiletto heels on the pavements, all the way from Shepherd Market to Park Lane – and halfway up South Audley Street, too.'

‘Yes, I've seen them. One can hardly miss them there. Weren't you afraid sometimes to leave Willard working there at night on his own?'

‘My attitude is that I don't mind where he works up his appetite as long as he dines at home.' She chuckled. ‘In fact, that's exactly what I told him when we were in Sweden last year and I found he'd bought one of those magazines where young ladies lie around in positions that only their gynaecologists would expect to see. They sell them quite openly there. And he started some excuse about “gaining sociological insight into an important new market for us.” I feel sorry for them, actually – men. It's a kind of slavery. And look at the mess it's got Chris in now!'

‘Have you got the razor blade?' Sally asked. ‘This line's out by six inches. That's what comes of talking!' She started scraping the dry ink off the Kodatrace. ‘Personally, I can't imagine what all these women see in Chris. First Nina, then Anna, and now Julie – and Debbie, obviously! What is it about him? Have you got the spec? What does it say about the interior walls on the first-floor wards – stud or solid – d'you remember?'

‘Solid, to reduce acoustic penetration. Hush a mo. I think I can hear . . .'

They held their breaths and . . . silence. They breathed a sigh of relief.

‘Let's break for a cuppa now,' Sally suggested, ‘and then get them up.'

‘No, I think we should get them up now or they'll never go down tonight – or Virgil won't, anyway.' She stood up and winced. ‘This one's kicking again. I'm sure it's a boy. He'll play football for England.'

‘We're stopping at two,' Sally said firmly. ‘I'm too old to go through all that again.'

The two children, Virgil and Rachel, were fast asleep, side by side, in his bed. ‘Sprinkle them with leaves and they'd be Hansel and Gretel,' Sally murmured. She reached down and began gently stroking her daughter's temple. ‘Wake up! Wake up, you sleepyhead. Get up! Get up! Get out of bed . . .' she sang softly.

But it was Virgil who woke, blinked, focused, smiled . . . and then, becoming aware of Rachel at his side, gave a little cry of dismay and crabbed himself a foot away from her. ‘There'll come a time when you may not be so hasty!' Sally told him with a grin.

Ten minutes later, when the two children were happily absorbed in scribbling, each with their own pad of detail paper, their mothers took tea and digestive biscuits onto the balcony, where they sat on canvas chairs and gazed out over the parkland to the south of the big lawn. Trees, lifeless in the breezeless air, shimmered under the westering sun; the farther side of the valley was bleached in the heat-haze.

‘Peace is becoming the norm at last,' Sally murmured. ‘It's taken long enough. Ciggy?'

Marianne took one and parked it behind her ear for the moment. ‘The big difference is in the news – have you noticed? In the war, every bulletin was like a continuation of the last one. People had maps on their dining-room walls and they moved pins across them as armies advanced or retreated – at least, we did in Germany, until it got too depressing. Then it was somehow unpatriotic.'

‘We did that, too – except that it got better and better.'

‘But now . . .' Marianne continued, ‘it's riots in Egypt and France and Germany squabbling over the Saar and the King is dead and England's got The Bomb and anti-French riots in Tangier and on and on and on. Nothing's connected any more. Life is just random events, one after another.'

‘At least I'm designing hospitals for the sick and not barracks for soldiers.'

‘That's true.' After an easy silence Marianne added, ‘We got a food parcel from Germany last week!' Then, seeing the surprise in Sally's face, she added, ‘It's a joke. From friends of Felix and Angela – Birgit and Hermann Treite of Hamburg. Hermann was my contact to the resistance in the war. He joked with them when they went back to Germany that time, remember? He joked that Germany would soon be sending food parcels to England. Every year after that he sent them stuff, just once a year. And this year he sent one to us, too.'

‘What was it?'

‘Sausage. Cheese . . . Sally – that joke you made back there, when Virgil woke up and leaped away from Rachel . . .'

‘Yes?'

‘I don't think they will. I don't think there'll be any affairs, not even puppy-love, between any of The Tribe as they grow up. They'll feel too much like brothers and sisters – you'll see. And I think it's the same between all the husbands and wives—'

‘But I don't feel anyone's like a brother or sister to me here. Damn! I've dropped half my biscuit into the tea.'

‘I don't mean that. I mean that the emotional cost of it, the bad blood it would cause, the upheaval to his or her life – to everyone's lives . . . it would all be just too awful.'

A delegation descended on the Brandons around eight o'clock that same Saturday. ‘We want to know what
you
mean by
inner
self,' Willard said to Eric. ‘And no pussyfooting about, now.'

‘
Exactly
what you mean,' Nicole explained.

‘Ah!' He folded the book he had been reading (
Prisoner of Grace
by Joyce Cary), clasped his hands together, made a steeple of his two index fingers, and dug it into his chin, just beneath his lower lip. ‘There's more than a touch of Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle involved here—'

‘Just tell us,' Tony urged.

‘Never mind all the fancy footwork,' Faith said.

‘D'you want to know what I
mean
or the
meaning
of what I mean? It's not quite up to Heisenberg, I know, but give me time and we'll get there.'

‘What's the difference?' Angela asked.