At the Break of Day

by Margaret Graham

  ‘Perhaps you should write about the return of the Duke of Windsor for his brother’s funeral. That might appeal to the Americans,’ she said, wanting to soften her refusal.

  ‘Trying to teach me my job?’ His voice was cold.

  Lucia called out from the bedroom Rosie had made for her out of the boxroom. She moved towards the door. She didn’t want this row. She didn’t want any rows. There had been enough struggle already, hadn’t there?

  ‘No, you know your job. I know mine.’ She didn’t want to talk about this any more. She was too tired.

  ‘I still think it would make a better feature. We’ll split the fee.’

  Rosie stopped. ‘Look, Joe. It’s not the goddamn money. I don’t need the money so much any more. It’s just that I have something I want to say from the British point of view. You wouldn’t understand.’

  Joe moved towards her, pulling her back towards the chairs. ‘Oh, come on. I don’t give up easy. Let’s talk this over.’

  ‘I’ve told you. No.’ Rosie pulled away. He had hurt her wrist. Her watch had dug into her skin. She rubbed it and returned to the door. Now she was angry. ‘Goddamn no.’ She was shouting. Lucia cried.

  Joe left her then, picking up his mac, thudding down the stairs, pushing aside Lucia’s pram, scoring the hall wall, and by the time he returned she had finished her feature and posted it. He was drunk. He was sorry. So was she, because he was a good man, a kind man.

  Joe knelt by Grandpa’s chair and kissed her and she kissed him back because he had soothed her, comforted her, and there was some sort of caring growing inside her for him, though she didn’t know how much.

  February grew colder and Rosie pulled the blankets up around Lucia’s shoulders when they went out. Lucia was sitting up now, pulling herself forward, pointing, her nose red in the cold. Joe never again drank as much as he had on the night of the King’s funeral. Instead he talked of the future, of Frank’s paper, of the need to keep it in the family, of his love for her.

  At night his body sought hers and she liked the feel of his hands and his lips and now she stroked him too, held him, kissed him, and the dreams of Jack were not so fierce. But still they came.

  Lucia was pulling herself up, using the table, and it was good to share these moments with someone else. But Rosie still read the news about Korea.

  Nancy wrote to say that she was sorry, so sorry about Jack, but it didn’t seem like the boy Rosie had loved. Was she sure of her facts?

  But Rosie wouldn’t allow herself to think about Jack any more, at least while she was awake. She had been working harder in these last few months than she had ever done before. She took phone calls late into the night and made them too, adding to the stable of bands, moving more and more into the promotion side, enjoying the battles, enjoying the triumphs, pushing away the failures.

  Joe didn’t like it. He didn’t like the phone ringing when he was stroking her hair, when he was kissing her mouth. He put on the radio too loud so that she had to strain to hear. But he was so kind and he comforted her, she told herself. He had found out about Jack for her. And it was better than being alone, wasn’t it? And after all he had said he would listen to the band again now that Luke was coming home and send his final report to Bob. Rosie planned a party and Joe helped to lay out the drinks in Mario and Mrs Orsini’s flat, because her own wasn’t big enough. And then Luke was home and the gramophone played Bix Beiderbecke. Luke and Jake kissed her, held her, gave her a package. It was a gold watch.

  She took it from the box, held it and couldn’t speak but then Joe came up.

  ‘Beat you to it, fellers.’ He lifted Rosie’s arm, pulled back her sleeve.

  Luke and Jake flushed, then laughed, but Rosie didn’t laugh. She took off Joe’s watch and put it in her bag. She offered her wrist to Luke and he slipped the new one on.

  ‘I’ll wear one today, one tomorrow,’ Rosie said, knowing that Joe had stiffened. Jack would have waited until he saw whether or not she could cope. But she mustn’t think of him.

  She took Joe’s arm, kissed his cheek, led him away, poured him a drink and told him he was handsome, kind, loving. Soon he was laughing again and asking her to book Luke for Mario’s club so that he could hear the group again.

  The music was softer now and Luke came and danced with Rosie, holding her. He was familiar and he was safe. She told him that she was sleeping with Joe. She told him that the memory of Jack still hurt so much. He nodded.

  ‘Don’t rush into anything. Remember what your grandpa said.’

  She didn’t rush anywhere. She woke, worked, loved, slept and the days passed, but it always seemed dark. It had seemed dark since Christmas. She was tired. She ached inside. Joe was with her but the loneliness remained.

  At the end of March Rosie received a letter from Frank enclosing $50 for the article on the King’s funeral.

  Lower Falls

  20th March

  Dearest Rosie,

  Yes, this is what I wanted. All your own work. I didn’t tell you that the paper spiked your feature on the Festival. You copied Joe’s ideas about drawing comparisons between the new ideas and the Nissen huts, the austerity etc. I faced him with it. He’d been having some trouble handling domestic features, you know. He told me he had talked his ideas over with you. That you must have ‘borrowed’ them.

  I was sorry you did that but he said things were tough, you might have become confused. I can understand that happening. I’ve done it myself. I was worried about you. You must have been real upset, real tired, but I guess things are better.

  I wanted you to know I love you.

  Frank

  Rosie waited for the day to pass. Waited until Joe came home. She worked, she phoned, she cancelled one booking because the manager of the theatre was known to pass drugs. Her boys were too good for that. She took a taxi to Middle Street. She walked past 15 and 17 down to the rec. The wooden fencing was still up around the bombed houses.

  ‘Will it ever be finished?’ she murmured into Lucia’s hair, sitting on the swing, hearing her laugh.

  She cooked a meal for herself, not for Joe. Not ever again for Joe.

  He came in at seven. Lucia was in bed.

  Rosie stood by the window. He slung his mac over the arm of the chair, poured a bourbon with his strong tanned hands. His cuff was white against his skin, his teeth white too. His watch golden. He was such a golden boy. He belonged at the Lake Club, not here. He moved towards her, kissed her, put his arm about her.

  She handed him the letter, not watching as he read it but knowing when he had finished because he moved away.

  For a moment there was silence, and then Joe said, ‘I know what this must look like.’

  ‘You must go,’ Rosie said, looking at him now. ‘You really must go.’

  There was no anger in her voice. Just as there was no anger in it when she was dealing with difficult promoters and managers. That was business. This was business. Nothing else now.

  ‘I’m not going. I belong with you. I love you. Together we can do things. We can build up the paper. Take over from Frank. It’s all I’ve ever wanted, you know that. Married to you, that’s possible.’ He moved to her now, gripping her arm. ‘We need each other. Jack’s gone. You need me.’

  She looked at his hand on her arm and then at him. He dropped his hand.

  Rosie said, ‘I’ve packed your bags. They’re in the café, by the counter. I’m surprised you didn’t see them.’

  His lips were thin now and there was no love in his face. There never had been, she could see that now. ‘If you do this I’ll tell them about Lucia. I’ll tell Bob to turn down Luke.’ Joe was shouting, gripping her arm again.

  Such short clean nails, suitable for the Lake Club. So very suitable. She moved away and again his hand dropped as she picked up his mac. It was still cold, damp and smelt of Joe. It meant nothing to her.

  ‘Get out, Joe. I can’t trust you, so there’s nothing left.’

  ‘I only wanted you so I
’d get the paper.’ He was spitting out the words, his shoulders rigid, his hands clenched into fists.

  ‘And I’ve used you too, and I’m sorry,’ Rosie said, holding the door, nodding to him as he stood there, large in this small room where he was now an intruder. ‘Please go now, Joe.’

  He started to say, ‘You’re a bitch …’ but then stopped, shaking his head. ‘Rosie, can’t we …?’

  She shook her head, handing him his mac. He snatched it from her, turned, flung it at the window, driving a glass ashtray to the floor. It broke and only then did he leave, his mac lying crumpled on the sill.

  Rosie quietly closed the door, knelt and picked up the splinters. She wouldn’t need an ashtray now. She didn’t smoke. Grandpa was right. Second best was no good.

  She carried the broken glass through to the kitchen in Joe’s mac, dropped them in the bin, then stood at the window listening to the sounds of the streets, to a soft cough from Lucia. Yes, he was right, it was better to be alone.

  Rosie wrote to Frank and Nancy, telling them that she and Joe had quarrelled, that the report about Luke would be bad, but that she vouched for the band. Please would they tell Bob that? She also said that the Festival feature had been her idea. Joe had copied it.

  She didn’t tell them about Lucia because Joe might not and they had enough heartache now. And she had enough too.

  In April she went again to Middle Street and slipped in through the back gate at a time when Mrs Eaves said Norah would be out. She pruned the roses, cutting them back to the healthy buds. She returned to Soho, and bought three rose plants from the market, planting them out in pots in Mario’s yard. These were in recognition that the past had gone. There was to be no more waiting for anyone.

  In May Frank and Nancy wrote to her, full of love, full of guilt at what they saw as their betrayal of her. They could not write fully until Joe returned from the POW camps where the North Koreans and Chinese were housed. Things were supposed to be bad there, he said. When Joe arrived in Lower Falls in the summer they would tell her what had been decided for that young man.

  In the summer Frank wrote to her:

  Lower Falls

  June 1952

  My dearest Rosie,

  We have spoken to Joe. He no longer works for the paper. I now write again under my own name. There has been enough subterfuge. It’s time I got out there fighting again. McCarthy can’t go on for ever. When the Korean war ends my guess is that he will lose his appeal. All this talk about betrayal by the leadership because of the reverses and then the stalemate is just too easy to spout.

  God giving that man a mouth was like giving a lunatic a gun.

  The report on Luke was bad. Yours has over-ridden it. Bob trusts you.

  But now I write about really important things. The first being that I know now that I am a grandfather. Joe told us. How can you think that this would bring anything other than joy? How can you think that it would have made our problems worse? We love you. We shall love Lucia. But your pain is our pain.

  Think carefully, Rosie. Joe vouched for the news he brought about Jack’s love affair. I have checked the POW list. He is on that but that doesn’t mean the rest is true. Give him the benefit of the doubt where love is concerned. Just wait until the end of the war when you will know one way or the other. Please. I know it is what your Grandpa would want.

  Incidentally, we are coming over to see you in July.

  Frank

  CHAPTER 24

  The year had passed slowly; tortuously slowly. The lectures didn’t change as 1952 slipped into 1953, neither did the nature of the seasons. The cold was extreme, the spring came with its usual glorious explosions of colour.

  ‘Exquisite,’ Steve said and they remembered Nigel, but Steve couldn’t really see the colour. The lack of vitamins had given him twilight blindness. He groped his way if Jack wasn’t with him, and he didn’t sleep because he thought he would never write now.

  The Doc said he would. That vitamins would reverse the situation.

  ‘But when will he be able to have those, Doc?’ Jack had asked.

  ‘When this lot is over.’

  But no one knew when that would be. Sometimes they doubted that it would ever happen.

  The peace talks continued. New prisoners, conscripts who had not volunteered, told them so. The newcomers told them about the guns which blasted from the trenches and showered shrapnel and earth on to the men of both sides. It was trench warfare again. In this age of great might, they had returned to static trench warfare.

  Conditions improved again as the blossom bloomed on the trees. The men were given two larger meals a day, with rice and soya beans. Once a week they had a piece of pork. There was steamed bread, Korean turnip, cabbage leaves which Jack made Steve eat raw because Maisie had always said that cooking boiled the vitamins away. They also had potatoes now.

  Jack told Steve how he had picked potatoes in Somerset, how Rosie’s grandpa had grown some one year in a bucket in the yard. They had been small and translucent and good enough to eat on their own.

  There were no letters from Rosie. Steve had none either though he was sure his mother would have written. Some men had letters, though, and between the news of births and deaths the words which cut deepest were those of everyday life. The sink that was cracked. The bulbs that had been planted before they left. The bike that was rusted.

  Jack wrote about all this with a journalist’s eye. ‘Keep at it. You’ll do well,’ another American whose father was a Sub-Editor on the Washington Post said when Steve showed him.

  Each day they threw stones at the marker, because why should they change the ritual of their life, just because one of them no longer saw clearly, Jack asked? He forced his friend to concentrate while he gave him instructions. ‘Same direction, not so hard this time.’ Jack told Steve that as long as he could still hit the marker he would also be able to write.

  ‘Just you wait and see. You’ll use all these months, these years. The times in the pit, the times when the blossom has bloomed and filled us with wonder, and one day you’ll win the Pulitzer Prize.’

  Steve threw another stone, hitting the target. He aimed in exactly the same direction for his next throw.

  ‘There you are, and just you wait, it’ll be over soon. You’ll get those vitamins.’

  But would it soon be over?

  It was for Steve. In April 1953 the North Koreans agreed to repatriate a number of wounded and ill prisoners and they included Steve on the list that they called out at roll-call. They included Bob too because dysentery had taken its toll of the older man and a stomach ulcer was suspected.

  Jack scribbled a note to Rosie and gave it to Bob to post. It was hurried because the trucks were already pulling in. The men had thirty minutes to grab their belongings and say their farewells. As the others were being helped to the truck Steve hugged Jack, slapped his back. They held one another and couldn’t bring themselves to say goodbye until the guard started shouting at them, pulling at Steve to move.

  ‘See you, bud,’ Steve said. ‘I almost don’t want to go. Don’t want to leave you. It’s been so long. But I’ll see you.’

  ‘You will. You get those vitamins inside you and you goddamn will,’ Jack said, helping him up into the truck.

  They clasped hands as the truck jerked away. Jack ran along behind waving to Bob, waving to Steve, watching as the mud spun from the wheels, swallowing his envy and his loss, wondering how he could go on without his American who was more than a friend, who had known the horrors of the pit alongside him. Who had defecated in the corner of the same rail-truck, who had washed Jack’s rags when he had dysentery. Whose rags Jack had washed in turn.

  He turned away as the truck eased into the haze and now the Sergeant shouted at him and the others. He lined them up. Told them that they were a motley shower, a bloody disgrace to their countries and he didn’t want to see any long faces. Their friends had left. Soon they would all leave this godforsaken country, and they would leave
with their spirits intact, their health intact, even if he had to break their bloody necks.

  ‘And don’t you forget it,’ he bellowed. ‘Dismiss.’

  Throughout April the routine remained the same as it always had been and the men stopped looking up each time the Commandant left his house outside the compound. Nothing had changed. They weren’t going home, yet.

  The days were lonely now for Jack. He threw pebbles at the marker. He sat through lectures, using them to sharpen up his précis. Using them to dream of Rosie. Using them to rest. They were all so thin and tired and more fell ill with beri-beri but no more were shipped out.

  Jack remembered the train ride to Pyongyang and feared that the same trick had been played again and maybe Steve would be trucked back. He didn’t return though as April turned into May. In the camp they were given sleeping bunks, chairs and tables. Razors, mirrors, combs, nail-clippers, toilet bags, cigarettes, wine and beer. They shaved away the unkempt beards and looked almost young again.

  The food had improved so much that the British were more able to play soccer, the Americans to play baseball. Jack wondered if Frank still had the target on the garage that Rosie had told him about.

  Each day he threw pebbles at the marker because it was part of his routine and then he squatted in the compound and listened as the Americans threw, batted, ran.

  ‘Now whad’ya gonna do, batter, batter?’ was the chant from the supporters.

  ‘Stay loose, baby, stay loose.’

  ‘Whad’ya say? Whad’ya say?’

  But solitary confinement still continued too and manual labour outside the compound: hauling logs, unloading trucks, digging channels – and the wood detail, the never-ending chopping of wood.

  Peking Radio’s English broadcasts continued too, including interviews with those UN troops who had turned, and although most of the men in the camp scarcely listened, the tone of the reports was different and some of them became convinced that the end was near. But Jack, and those who had been with him, could not forget the train journey to Pyongyang and refused to think of home.