He made his way around the pub and showed Phyllis’s photograph to some of the men but they all shook their heads, some of them without even looking at the picture, either reluctant to stray from the business of drinking or unwilling to engage with a stranger. Cautiously, he approached the bar to order a single scotch, but the bartender was a muscular contortion of a man who looked at Harry with such disdain Harry decided it was safer to order a double. As he leaned against the counter he noticed a man sitting on a bar stool, rolling tobacco. He had a pudgy face and his hair was aggressively combed and greased back so that his pink scalp was visible. He wore a jacket that was too large for him and was clearly trying to look older than he was. Harry became distracted by the man’s hands, which were covered in cuts, and his fingernails were grubby and chewed away at the edges, the skin raw and ripe for infection. The fellow looked up at Harry.
‘Who are you looking for?’
Harry offered the photograph and the man paused over it, intrigued by the face and asked who the girl was to him. Harry said that she was a friend and the man gave him a look as if he were trying to dissect several possibilities but finally shook his head.
‘Can’t help you.’
The bartender placed a glass of cheap smelling scotch in front of Harry. As he picked up the glass the man sitting next to him jumped down from his stool, placed the rolled cigarette behind his ear and made to leave. Then he stopped and turned back to the bartender.
‘Harold, I’ll be back in five. Have another pint ready.’
The bartender nodded sternly and the man left the pub.
Harry felt the weight of the glass in his hands and then drained his third drink of the evening, thinking to himself what a waste of time it was to go looking for Phyllis. He was about to leave when his eyes met with a young fellow he knew but whose name escaped him. Harry was suddenly conscious of his untidiness and straightened his tie, his heart beating a little harder in his chest. The young man, not much more than a boy, was slender and blonde-haired with a round face. He kept staring at Harry between sips of a pint, his gaze poised but his manner assuming an air of nonchalance that Harry could tell was over-conscious. He was dressed in a white shirt with a worn grubby jacket slung over one shoulder but he had one of those faces so brilliantly composed of youth that his clothes while tatty were unable to detract from his beauty. The young man turned away and laughed at something. Harry realized he was with a couple of his mates but he didn’t recognize them. The name George popped into Harry’s head. He felt foolish at having forgotten it and walked outside with the intention of leaving.
On the street he lit up a cigarette and stood for a moment on the pavement, drawing the smoke deep into his lungs. He should have walked away, but with Phyllis’s disappearance, Harry couldn’t help but feel he was supposed to run in to this boy. As he suspected a minute later the door of the pub swung open and George emerged onto the pavement. They stood for a moment, not saying anything, their eyes directed at the ground.
‘I know you, don’t I?’ George said. ‘About a year ago in Camden, wasn’t it?’
‘Hello.’
Harry offered him a cigarette. George studied the open packet and it seemed to Harry that he was counting how many cigarettes were left and then took one, placing it in the corner of his mouth. He allowed Harry to light it for him.
‘You live round here?’ Harry asked.
‘Nah. Just seeing a few fellas for a drink.’
George leaned his back against the wall of the pub, mindful to appear relaxed. He expelled a trail of smoke out of his lips like a visible sigh and Harry watched as it was absorbed into the smog.
‘Can’t figure this weather out,’ George said.
‘It’s unpleasant.’
‘I dunno. Easier to get around without every bugger watching you.’
‘Where are you staying at the moment?’
‘I moved in with a friend. He’s got a room in Whitechapel. It’ll do for now.
‘What does your friend do?’
‘This and that.’
Harry nodded as though he understood exactly what ‘this and that’ involved. He reached into his jacket pocket, pulled out the photo of Phyllis and handed it to George.
‘Don’t suppose you’ve seen her?’ Harry asked.
‘Is she your wife?’
Harry shifted uncomfortably on his feet.
‘She’s missing.’
George held the photo close to his face, so that he could see her features. Harry had done such a good job of keeping the various pieces of his life separate and in showing Phyllis’s image to this boy he felt extremely vulnerable and that Phyllis was somehow, wherever she was, conscious of George.
‘I don’t think I’ve seen her before.’
Harry nodded. George was like a lot of young men, taking notice of everything and nothing all at the same time.
‘She comes here quite often, I believe.’
‘This is the first time I’ve been here. I usually drink in the city.’
Harry took the photo back from George and slipped it into his jacket.
‘She’s pretty.’
‘She is,’ Harry said, throwing his cigarette onto the ground.
‘I knew you were married. Had to be at your age. I’ll probably get married when I’m thirty-five.’
‘I’m not so very old,’ Harry answered, taking in George’s face. ‘And I wasn’t married to her when I met you.’
‘It’s no skin off my nose, either way.’
‘Yes, well it matters to me.’
George had nearly finished his cigarette and Harry could tell he was craving another.
‘It’s my birthday today.’
‘Happy Birthday.’
‘Do you know how old I am?’
Harry shrugged.
‘Twenty.’
‘Good for you.’ He didn’t know what else to say. ‘Look, I best be going. I’ve a few places to check out.’
‘I’ll help you if you like.’
Harry considered the offer as he would have liked a companion on such a dreary night, but as he allowed his gaze to linger on the young man’s face, he knew his answer.
‘It’s your birthday. Go and drink with your friends. I’ll catch up with you some other time.’
Harry reached into his wallet and pulled out a pound note and handed it to George.
‘Have a few drinks on me.’
‘Oh, ta.’
Harry reached out and placed his hand on George’s shoulder and then, feeling awkward at the gesture, turned and walked eastwards along Commercial Street and onto Wentworth Road. George was right; the smog was comforting. It gave him the space to think and move. He found a steady walking rhythm and began to think about Phyllis’s whereabouts. Clearly she had absconded, but to what end? They had rarely discussed the nature of their marriage but there had been an unspoken arrangement in which they both rubbed along pretty well while maintaining a degree of independence from one another. Harry liked to think this implicit understanding had been an expression of their honesty and acceptance for one another, but now he began to consider that he had been reckless not to keep a better eye on her. She had stayed away from home before in order to see friends and go to parties but she had always given him a forewarning. This was something more serious, and it troubled him greatly.
A clock somewhere in Spitalfields market struck nine. It was nearly time to head back and meet with his sister. There was something unsettling in the way she had dropped everything and come to London. He had not expected her to, not even wanted her to, but when Phyllis failed to return home he had felt compelled to tell someone and Jean had been the only person worth telling, the only person who had shown any consideration for his wellbeing. He felt guilty now that he thought of her trouncing about the city on his behalf, barely out of hospital, and what made him feel more at fault was that he had failed to visit her while she was ill. He wasn’t entirely to blame. Jean had been i
n hospital three days before his mother had phoned to tell him the news, her voice cold and hard, and by then Jean was about to be discharged. Still, he should have made more of an effort. It was just he couldn’t stand the thought of having to deal with her husband, Frank, a snarly bulldog of a man whose entire personality was shaped by a pitiful combination of tiredness and dependency upon his work in the law. He had no idea what his sister saw in such a fellow. Frank was simply a bore who talked of nothing but himself and believed that law was the only profession of any value and yet spoke of his clients in such disparaging terms it made Harry cringe. If Harry admitted it, he felt deeply ashamed of his sister for making such a poor choice. When he thought back to their childhood he was flooded with a wave of affection for her, recalling a time that had been fragilely happy but he was also aware that nostalgia was getting the better of him. It was far easier to bury himself in those memories than engage with Jean as a fully grown woman because there was a danger that if he knew his sister too well he might have to admit that he didn’t particularly like her.
Harry took it for granted that he was more self-aware than his sister. For all his faults, at least he had not settled as she had done. He could not confess to being happy, but then nobody was happy, and at least he was nothing like Frank. At least he made a show of being a good man and surely that was all anyone could be expected to do? In Harry’s mind, being good meant being mild and courteous. It meant trying to put Phyllis’s needs above his own, and when he considered the tenure of their relationship he felt that he had executed the role of husband valiantly if not always successfully. The problem was that, for all his apparent calmness, he was regularly overcome with seizures of desire, and he rarely had control over their direction. Phyllis certainly ignited this hunger. She had gladdened his heart simply by looking at him, and he had been won over in almost an instant. He could not pin down what it was exactly, but the way she talked, her entire physicality in fact, seemed to overwhelm him. She was beautiful certainly but his attraction urged from something to do with the way she moved and the way she was able to transform the space around her with the shift of her legs, or the turn of her head. She seemed utterly spontaneous and Harry found such impulsiveness intoxicating and the fact she had come into his world at a time when he felt nothing but trapped made her more appealing still.
*
It was a Saturday in the summer of 1950. For most people, it was a chance to relax and enjoy the sun but Harry found Saturdays almost impossible to endure. He lacked the structure of the office and often spent the day drifting around Hampstead not really knowing what to do with himself. On Sundays he occasionally compelled himself to go to church, although he usually ended up leaving half way through the sermon, the clergyman’s diatribes on the failing state of the nation being too silly to bear. He had little faith as it was.
He wasn’t completely friendless and had fallen in with a pleasant crowd from the office. They regularly went out for drinks during the week, but most of them were married or in the process of getting married and, as a consequence, they were shifting their lives towards spending what free time they had with their spouses. As he approached his thirties Harry found he was one of a dwindling number of single men. He was not overly bothered with bachelorhood and had resigned himself to the fact with a quiet cynicism towards some of his friend’s choices. Some, of course, had found happy marriages, but an equal number had married poorly because they could not abide the thought of being left behind. Loneliness was the great threat, but it was something Harry accepted with a weary inevitability, a feeling which emerged in the months after he was demobbed and something that was directly in proportion to the growing sense that he wasn’t young anymore.
There were a few like him, who looked on at the postwar crowd trying to make a go of things, and feeling that they had little to contribute. The war had taken so much energy and swallowed up so many people. It hurt Harry’s head to think of those endless dead, the countless names which were being etched onto monuments, and it upset him even more to think of all the trained killers that remained and who were now expected to recondition their minds to deal with the onslaught of civilian life and making a living. One Saturday he had been walking by the canal when he found himself once more upon a battlefield as a bunch of slum-housed children played with two old service guns, weapons with the firing pin removed, which the youngsters had bought for tuppence from a rag and bone man. One boy pointed a gun at him and shouted pow pow and he lost his temper and grabbed the child by the arm, shaking him and taking the gun, which he slung out into the middle of the canal. The furious band of children chased him along the towpath, demanding money for the lost gun and when he refused they threw stones at him and called him a conchie bastard.
Most of the time he felt fine but that summer he was made restless by the neighbours across the street, who had begun an extensive refurbishment of their house. He watched week by week as builders set to work on both the interior and exterior of the building, removing furniture and boxes, raising scaffolding and repainting the outside. The renovation induced an increasing anxiety in him. It became a ritual every weekend to open the curtains of his apartment and examine the house inch by inch and distinguish exactly what was new about it.
This particular Saturday he felt sick. He had been up all of the previous night wandering the city, drinking late and only managed to fall asleep at dawn. He woke a little after nine but he lay languorously in bed all morning watching the sunlight as it traversed his window, occasionally hitting and warming a patch of his skin. He stared at the wall, brooding on whether to give up on London and move back home into his mother’s place. Now that his father was dead, he knew that his mother needed and desired company and he as her son had certain responsibilities, or so he told himself. She was still unhappy with him for moving away and would have liked nothing better than to see him back home, and at least at his mother’s he could pretend he was busy. But then he thought about the reasons why he had moved to London and the promise he’d made to give the city a go.
Outside his window a bird started chirping manically but then there was a loud thud. Harry looked out and saw that the scaffolding was being taken down from the house. After all these months they had finished, and now this cleaned and renovated house was being unveiled to him. He saw in its completion all his weariness and failure to make something of his life. He felt almost mad with frustration and decided he ought to go down into the city and find something to do.
The warmth of the afternoon sun was promising. He began to walk along the streets, heading south with a vague sense that he would aim for the Thames. Camden was busy with shoppers but because the sky was blue, he did not feel hemmed in as he sometimes did. It took him nearly an hour of slow meandering before he found himself at the British Museum. He toyed with going in but thought it perverse to lock himself away with all the empire’s colonial loot when it was more pleasing simply to sit outside on the steps, smoke and watch people go by.
‘I swear I’ve had it with these shoes,’ a voice behind him said. ‘Really you fellas have the right idea. From now on I’m only wearing flat shoes. Are you ignoring me?’
Harry turned around to see a woman standing over him with a shoe in her hand. She held it out to him.
‘You see that? The heel has clean broken off. I’m going to have to walk barefoot now. I suppose on a day like today it doesn’t matter. You got a smoke?’
Harry offered her a cigarette and she sat down next to him. She looked over her shoe and shook her head at the unfairness of it. He couldn’t work out how old she was, but certainly little more than twenty. She had a simple boyish face with chubby cheeks and was not heavily made up, which he approved of greatly. He had always held a suspicion towards any kind of cosmetics, especially lipstick.
‘It’s a big old building. I just like coming to see what those ancient queens like to wear. I like to think one day I might be able to afford myself some of that jewellery. There’s no shame in t
hat, is there?’
‘I suppose not.’
His eyes drifted to her bare feet and he was filled with an urge to take off his own shoes and socks but decided against it.
‘Not that I ever will have that kind of money, but still it’s nice to imagine. These places are no different from the flicks really. It’s all very entertaining but it’s not for us. Still, who doesn’t like to pretend.’
He was too stunned to say anything.
‘What’s your name then?’
‘Harry,’ he managed finally, his eyes reluctantly meeting hers.
The Smog (A Jean Clarke Mystery Book 1) Page 3
