by Juliet West
Edith emerged from a cubicle and nodded as she turned on the tap. She was shorter than Lucia, with a thin expressionless mouth and the beginnings of sweat patches at her armpits. ‘And your name is?’
‘Sorry. It’s Hazel.’
‘We’ll wait for you outside, shall we?’ said Lucia. ‘When you’ve finished?’
‘Yes . . . yes, all right,’ said Hazel, only now realizing that a cubicle was free, and that the woman behind her in the queue was shuffling with impatience.
Hazel let herself in through the kitchen door to find Mrs Waite bent over the gas ring, stirring a pan of milk. Her white hair was plaited and pinned into a loose bun which had begun to sag.
‘Your father telephoned twenty minutes ago,’ said Mrs Waite, not troubling to look up from the pan. ‘All the way from France and you weren’t here.’
Hazel made a show of checking her watch, though she knew perfectly well it was almost ten. She apologized, said the film had run on, and that she’d lost a brooch and had to search under the seats.
‘You’d better wait in the hall. He’ll be calling back presently.’
The milk sizzled to the boil just as the telephone rang. Her father was calling from a hotel telephone and he sounded harassed. He was having dinner with an important client. How long had her mother been in London, he asked, and why was she, Hazel, out so late?
If you care so much, why don’t you come back? Hazel wanted to say, but didn’t. She told him that her mother had left only that afternoon. The film was very long, that was all, and there was the fuss over the brooch.
‘How’s Paris?’ she asked.
‘Hot and dirty.’
‘When can I visit?’
‘Not just yet, Hazel. The project isn’t quite going to plan. I’m dreadfully busy. Look, I really must go. Take care. I’ll try to telephone later in the week.’
Hazel replaced the receiver on the cradle and stood for a moment, tracing her finger along the bevelled edge of the telephone table. Her father had been in Paris for five months now, and it was getting harder to remember him as he was: a whole, breathing person who would come down to breakfast every morning humming a tune, tapping out the rhythm with a spoon as he broke the top of his soft-boiled egg. Now all the music seemed to have gone from him: he hadn’t even taken his violin to France. Hazel found that when she thought of her father, she pictured only the lower half of his face, a mouth speaking into the telephone and the dark stubble of his beard, which was always visible, however close his shave.
She walked up to the landing and stood against the door of the linen cupboard, listening to the sounds from downstairs. Mrs Waite rinsed the milk pan, clattering it onto the draining board, then switched on the kitchen wireless. She’d be down there for a while now, sipping her cocoa and listening to the news.
Radio voices drifted up the stairs. Hazel longed to talk to someone, anyone, about the meeting. She put her hand to her chest. Yes, her heart was still pounding, and it wasn’t just the run back along Barrack Lane. It had been pounding before she left the theatre.
She wandered into her mother’s room. Talcum powder bloomed on the rug like bursts of white pollen, and the air was still heavy with a musky scent. The room was large and square, with an enormous black-varnished bed pushed against the wall facing the window. To the left was Francine’s dressing table, strewn with jewellery and make-up, postcards propped against the mirror. A man’s gold wristwatch lay next to a string of glass beads. Hazel lifted the watch and looked at the time on the ghost-pale face. Charles’s watch, she supposed, stopped at ten past seven. Ridiculous, the little pantomime they acted out whenever Charles stayed. He would go up to the guest room, but Hazel knew that once all the bedroom doors were closed, he crept out to join Francine in the double bed. This was where he undressed. Where he unfastened his watch.
Hazel opened the bottom drawer of the dressing table and felt around for the photograph that was buried under a tangle of stockings. She slid the frame out and clutched it to her chest, then sat on the bed and switched on the side light.
Her father was dressed in army uniform, his shoulders angled slightly but his eyes gazing straight at the lens. Even in the dulled photograph she could see that everything was polished to a high shine: his cap badge, his medals, the leather strap across his tunic. Hazel had no idea what the medals were for. No idea, in fact, where her father had been or what he had done during the war. She simply assumed that he hadn’t had too bad a time of it. He always appeared to be perfectly healthy, and cheerful enough. Until last year, of course.
The photograph must have been taken when he was in his twenties. She supposed he was handsome in an understated way: heavy brow and sensible moustache; small dark eyes; well-defined jaw. She stood up from the bed and pushed the photograph back into the stocking drawer. It was odd because Father couldn’t be more different from Charles, with his tousled brown hair and his jangly limbs. Charles was . . . sort of loose; he would lounge on a sofa or a beach chair, the top button of his shirt undone. Her father wasn’t like that at all. She couldn’t imagine him lying down in anything but a bed, at night, when it was time to go to sleep.
How serious was it between her mother and Charles, she wondered? He seemed keen, and there was an easiness between them that Hazel found disconcerting. Perhaps it was because they had known each other for so many years. For ever. Apparently they had holidayed together as children – the families were friends – but when Hazel had once asked about that time Francine had snapped shut her cigarette case and told her to stop being so tiresome.
Charles couldn’t be after their money, that was certain. From what Hazel could gather, they were getting poorer by the day. Her father was an architect, but he couldn’t be a very good one, because his projects so often seemed to fall through. In any case, Charles seemed to have plenty of his own money. Just yesterday he’d been full of the new car he was planning to buy. A Brough Superior, motto ‘Ninety in silence’. Her mother had looked through the brochure with gleaming eyes.
Hazel crossed the bedroom to the low bookcase that stood under the windowsill. The shelves were filled with romances and mysteries – Agatha Christies and Georgette Heyers. Tucked amongst them was something far more interesting: a pale yellow, cloth-bound book by someone called T. H. van de Velde. Ideal Marriage was the title, which was odd, because the book had appeared just at the time when her parents’ marriage was quite the opposite of ideal. Still, Hazel preferred not to dwell on the possibility that her mother or father had actually read the book. It was too awful to think of them reading, let alone acting on, Mr van de Velde’s words. Words that, even now, she barely understood but knew instinctively to be salacious. Erogenous, effleurage, secretions. No, the book was meant for younger people, girls like her, who needed the mysteries of sex explained. She had reached Part III: ‘Sexual Intercourse, Its Physiology and Technique’.
It was almost midnight when she put the book down and switched off the light. She had found Part III confusing. The section began by discussing the importance of the ‘Prelude’ to lovemaking, the differing arts of coquetry and flirtation. Coquetry was a little like teasing, van de Velde explained, and must not be used excessively. Lovers – beware! So was it better to be direct, to flirt and fawn, the way she’d seen her mother behave after a couple of cocktails? That seemed to be van de Velde’s conclusion. Flirtation may beautifully refresh and renew erotic feeling. For, if conducted to the rules of this oldest human art, through purely psychic stimuli, it produces an unmistakeable physical symptom in both man and woman. This symptom is the lubrication of the genitals which physically expresses the desire for closer contact. Ugh. Lubrication. Why did it all have to sound so repellent?
Hazel tried to sleep but she couldn’t have felt less tired. When she shut her eyes it was Lucia’s face she saw, the smile around her lips as she watched Mosley deliver his address. Hazel had felt oddly detached at the start of the meeting, self-conscious, as if she was watching herself from a seat in t
he upper tier. She couldn’t claim to belong with the blackshirts, couldn’t even claim any knowledge of their ideas. Politics was rarely discussed at home or at Rosewood House, unless you counted the Senate of Ancient Rome.
The first speaker at the Theatre Royal had been a man called Beckett. He wore small round spectacles and spoke in a quiet voice. His words were measured, with over-long pauses as he let the audience absorb each point. He talked about the dangers of Britain trying to compete with Oriental labour and the threat of cheap Eastern imports. It was the ‘roast beef’ standard versus the ‘handful of rice’ standard. The Tories wouldn’t be happy until all working men had been brought down to coolie level, whereas Labour would prefer every worker to join the Communist Party and starve to death. Fascism was a third way, he said, the roast-beef way. People cheered and clapped at that. Lucia touched her on the shoulder and whispered, ‘He’s terrific once he’s warmed up. You watch, he’ll take off his spectacles.’
Beckett began to outline the third way – a corporate state in which business would be run jointly by management, workers and consumers. And he did take off his spectacles, flung them onto the lectern and stared out into the darkness of the theatre. International bankers, private finance – these crooks were ruining the world’s economy, shouted Beckett. The time had come to act in Britain’s interests.
Hazel joined in the applause when Beckett stepped down and took his seat on the stage. Mosley now marched towards the podium and the audience began to rise, right arms outstretched in a fascist salute. ‘Hail, Mosley!’ they chanted. ‘Hail, Mosley!’ Lucia and Edith jumped to their feet, but Hazel stayed seated. She felt embarrassed, out of place. She wasn’t truly part of this, she shouldn’t be here. Leaning forwards, she glanced towards the aisle but she’d have to push past several people to get out, and that would only draw attention to herself. No choice but to stay put, she thought. In for a penny . . .
Mosley listened to the chants for a minute or more, nodding in approval, his nostrils flared, his chin jutting forward. Finally, he motioned for the audience to sit.
They were several rows back, but Hazel had a clear view of Mosley. He began to speak, and there was something extraordinary about the way his dark eyes seemed to glint and entice; widening one moment, narrowing the next, casting out into the audience like a thousand invisible fishing lines, hooking every single one of them. He had a wonderful voice, she thought. Commanding but somehow gentle and utterly in control. She did her best to follow every word, but really she knew nothing about economics. ‘International finance’ was the phrase that kept cropping up. It was the root of all the country’s problems, said Mosley. It was time to make a choice between the man who invests his money abroad and the man who invests not only his money, but his life, in British land.
‘National socialism’ was what Mosley advocated. Hazel seemed to remember her father calling himself a socialist, during a dinner-party argument she’d overheard from the top of the stairs. She had asked him afterwards what socialism meant, and he said that it was a way of making life fairer for everyone. National socialism. Yes, that made sense. A fairer Britain. How could any decent person disagree?
But now, lying awake, she remembered the man with the handbills in the foyer. Lies, he had shouted. The anthem he’d sung began to play again in her head. The internationale unites the human race . . . Hazel found it hard to untangle her thoughts. Was it possible to package up lies and pass them off as fact?
Whatever the truth, she was sure of one thing. The blackshirts weren’t cranks. Her mother was wrong about that.
5
Each time Tom began to doze, Beggsy would snore: a sudden, violent snort that left his nerves jangling. And then Fred let one off in his sleep, and that made Tom smile, despite himself. He wondered if the other lads had heard it too, but . . . No. Just the heavy breathing, the tooth-grinding, the sound of everyone else having a lovely bit of shut-eye, snoring and farting and doing whatever else came naturally, never mind how he was wide awake in the airless gloom and sick of the bloody lot of them.
It was too dark to check the time on his wristwatch, but he reckoned it must be after midnight. The camp was silent. Rules were clear on that point: NO CAROUSING AFTER 11 P.M. Mosley hadn’t come back to the camp after the meeting: he had climbed into a Bentley, saluting the crowds through the open window as the chauffeur pulled away from the theatre at top speed. No camp bed in a bell tent for Mosley. Doubtless he was staying in some swish country hotel, or with one of his aristocratic friends, carousing to his heart’s content. They were a nobby bunch, the blackshirt high-ups. Tom had become more aware of this fact recently, and it made him suspicious. Winchester College, Sandhurst. They looked after their own, that sort. However much Mosley claimed to be for the people, however much he courted the working classes – the labourers, the unemployed, the street-fighters – surely he didn’t really care for them? This corporate state he was so intent on setting up, there’d be fat cats just the same, wouldn’t there? And Mosley would be the fattest of the lot, cream dripping from his well-groomed moustache, while the rest of them would still be scrabbling around to keep a decent pair of boots on their feet.
Sleep seemed impossible now. Foolish to even try. He had to get outside, clear his head.
He crept from the tent, unpegged his trunks and towel from the guy rope and draped them over his bare shoulder. It was only a five-minute walk to the beach, ten at the most. There was nothing in camp rules about bathing after eleven, was there?
The moon was rising, and a few shreds of pale cloud hung in the sky. When he looked up he felt dizzy, unanchored. Somehow the stars had multiplied a thousandfold between London and Sussex; there were no street lights to mask them, no drifts of factory smoke or plumes of blackened steam from the railway engines that converged at the Lewisham depot.
Silently he picked his way between the tents to the far side of the campsite, and then on through the gap in the hedge and down the bramble-edged lane that led towards the sea. The air was sharp and clean in his lungs and he knew, with absolute certainty, that if he’d grown up here he would be at least one inch taller, his shoulders a shade broader. He patted the fresh-burned skin that was taut and tender across his chest. He was tall and broad enough, and strong as any lad who spent his working hours racing up and down office stairs, lugging boxes round greasy Fleet Street pavements.
At the end of the lane he turned right, past the row of shops and on through the gate that led to the beach. He’d forgotten how loud the shingle would sound, the slide and crunch of pebbles and tiny white shells as he made his way towards the sea. Perhaps there would be less noise if he walked barefoot.
He sat on the stones and took off his loosely laced boots. The tide was out. Dotted along the shore were cuttlefish corpses, brittle white bodies like tiny ghosts. He looked at the sea, so vast, so black, and then up again at the endless sky, and he wondered whether bathing was a good idea after all. The expanse of the Channel unnerved him. Perhaps it was enough simply to have left the tent. He felt cooler now, at least.
Behind him, a little to the west, was the garden with the summer house and the golden conifer that overhung the wall. He remembered the birds he’d seen flying in and out earlier in the day. It wouldn’t harm just to take a look, easy enough to climb the flint wall, and then up into the lower branches. If the moon stayed bright, he should be able to spot the nest. The birds themselves usually gave the game away. Rubbish parents, birds. If you approached a nest after dark, they would fly quietly off, abandoning eggs or chicks, watching from a higher branch or a nearby tree until it was safe to return.
Tom put his boots back on, tying the laces tight for climbing. When he reached the wall he found a foothold where the cement had crumbled between the flints. He wedged his boot in and grasped the top of the wall, but as he hauled himself up he felt a sharp pain in the palm of his left hand. Dropping back onto the shingle, he angled his hand towards the moonlight to get a look at the damage. A plump bead of
blood swelled from a cut and slid down his wrist. He took a step backwards, gazed up at the wall and the silhouettes of jagged flints which stood proud at three-inch intervals. He tried to shake the blood off, then pressed a corner of his towel to the cut, blotting the flow, wondering whether to give up, to walk back to the camp and forget about the eggs. Shame to have come all this way, though . . . He dropped the towel and found a foothold further along, placed his hands carefully between the flints and heaved himself up so that he was astride the five-foot-high wall, facing the conifer with his back to the summer house. He edged closer to the tree, tested the branches and gripped the one that seemed sturdiest.
A sound made him jump, the squeak of wood on wood. Branches creaking, he supposed. And then he smelt smoke. Tobacco smoke. Tom froze. Someone in the garden? He turned around, almost losing his balance, and there on the threshold of the shadowy summer house stood a girl. One arm was clenched around her waist, the other was held away from her body, wrist bent and a cigarette between her fingers.
He looked down to the shingle on the beach side of the wall: he would jump down and scarper before she had the chance to raise the alarm. But just as he was about to leap, she spoke.
‘Are you one of the blackshirt crowd?’ Her voice was hushed, a little shaky, but there was a sharpness, a determination. She had some nerve, he’d give her that. Most girls would have screamed by now.
He stopped, heart racing, muscles still tensed for the jump. ‘I was looking for a nest, miss,’ he whispered.
‘What nest?’
‘Er . . . bullfinches?’ And at that moment two small bodies flapped up from the branches, disappearing into the garden next door. Thank you, he thought. ‘I collect the eggs.’ He coughed and deepened his voice. ‘At least I used to, when I was younger. Old habits, you know.’
She came out of the summer house, shut the door, and took a step backwards on the path, widening the distance between them. She would run up the garden now, thought Tom, tattle to her parents or whoever it was she lived with. How old was she anyway? Older than she looked? She took a drag on the cigarette and a momentary glow lit up her face. Old enough to be married? She might have a husband in the house. At the very least an angry father with a service revolver, a war memento stashed in a bedside cabinet.
