With Men For Pieces [A Fab Fifties Fling In Paris]

by Sophie Meredith

  Our new home was a service flat with a fleet of efficient porters, cleaners and messenger boys. Mabiche was helping me more and more in the shop. She was more of a second-in-command now. So it came as quite a blow when she told me, blushing like a teenager despite her twenty-five years and her matronly figure, that she was to be married. I couldn’t imagine when or how she had met her Fred. She had always been around when I expected her—indeed, apart from the few months of my marriage, we had practically lived in each other’s pockets for ten years.

  Fred was a meat porter at Smithfield and the jolliest fellow I’d ever met. He told a joke a minute and laughed louder than anyone at them. His humour was infectious. You could never be miserable with Fred about.

  They were to live in the East End. I insisted on giving them the wedding reception and buying her dress. I offered to bring over her family but she refused. She had grown too much away from them, she explained. When I protested, she confessed to sending them quite a decent sum of money every month since she had left them, and that she had recently discovered that Jacques had helped them out generously and discreetly for years. He could not come over for the wedding, but he sent over the outfit. With his usual brilliance, he had chosen the perfect ensemble. A draped silk dress in a misty grey-mauve with a matching coat and a neat little flowered hat—just bridal enough without overdoing it. I had to be content with providing shoes, bag and gloves and a set of exquisite underwear.

  The ceremony was quickly but sympathetically performed in a registry office. The reception was held in the upper room of a pub in the Plaistow Road and I considered it the best hundred poundsworth I had ever spent. I had had no previous experience of Cockneys but I took to them in all their glorious, colourful uninhibitedness—and they seemed to think I wasn’t too bad either. The singing, dancing and drinking cheered me up no end. I heard so many vividly-told stories from characters who had never lived a day of their lives outside the same few streets. I was inspired to write them down and send them off to various editors. I had not thought much about writing for ages, but once the idea had been re-kindled, there was no holding back.

  Chapter 9

  An Eastern Parish

  Father Bartlett was a great comfort to the folk of Alton Street. They knew the vicarage door was always open and they were proud to have access to such a distinguished figure—almost the caricature of a Great Churchman, striding through their lives in his black robes, decorating their high days and holidays in his ceremonial vestments. But, too, there was a story behind the man with such an aristocratic mien, such an old Etonian bearing. His father had been a rag and bone man in these very streets. The son, having been raised in the luxury afforded by the humble tradesman’s rapid rise, literally from rags to riches, had returned to the East End to pay back, or perhaps atone for his father’s miraculous success. He lived amongst the Cockneys but kept another establishment, a charming country mansion on a small estate in Kent. Yet even this he shared with the Londoners, sending down parties of schoolchildren, deserving cases, overworked parish helpers—to “camp out” in the converted stables….

  To my surprise, I had a couple of stories accepted almost at once. For some reason, possibly because I was writing about their pasts and this reminded me of my own, not too distant beginnings of adulthood, I switched to children’s stories. Bedtime stories they were designated. I found myself using my memories of the ten year olds I had once so unwillingly taught as a yardstick for language and content. I knew full well how much I had hated and detested them at the time, but now I recalled their young, upturned faces with fondness. There were the twins, too—I tried out some of my younger stories on them—and they lapped them up—especially when I “did” the voices. I could always let myself go with those two—as long as Beryl was well out of the way.

  The Little Blue Car

  The little blue car loved to play. “Brrm! brrm!” he would shout, twisting and turning, backing and forwarding. But one day, a wheel fell off and rolled into a puddle. The little blue car could not reach it, and he began to cry.

  Next door lived his good friend Billy Bike. He heard the little blue car crying. He came round to see his chum. “What’s the matter?” asked Billy kindly.

  “Brrm! brrm!” The little blue car sighed. “My wheel’s in the puddle and I can’t reach it.”

  Billy Bike tried, but he could not reach it either. “Mike Motor Bike will help my chum,” he thought. But as he neared Mike’s house, the motorcycle rushed out.

  “I’m late for work!” he cried and zoomed off.

  “Never mind,” thought Billy Bike. “I will ask Felix the fire engine to help.” He hurried to the Fire Station. But just as he got there Billy heard a loud Clang! Clang! and Felix Fire Engine sped by.

  “I must get to the fire!” he cried. Move out of the way. I can’t stop now!”

  “I’ll go to the Garage where Dennis Dustcart lives,” thought Billy. “He’ll be sure to help.” But Dennis was out, collecting rubbish. The garage man did not know when he would be back. “There’s just one more chance,” thought Billy. “Colin the Coal Lorry.”

  But when he arrived, the coalman’s wife said, “Oh dear, Colin’s out, delivering his sacks of coal.”

  Billy Bike began to cry.

  A big yellow tractor working in a field saw Billy. “What’s wrong?” he asked. Billy told him about his unhappy chum. “I think I can help you.” The tractor smiled. “My digger will reach the wheel easily. He went along with Billy Bike and soon rescued the wheel.

  The little blue car was so pleased. “Brrm! brrmm!” he cried. “Thank you so much. I will be able to play now. How nice to have friends like Billy Bike and Terry Tractor. Brrm! Brrmm! Brrmmmm…”

  I went down to Alton Street, just off the East India Dock Road, to visit Mabiche and Fred. They were installed in a funny little docker’s house in what had been a terrace. Theirs was the only original house left standing in the street. Behind, towered the new blocks—opposite, lay fenced-off piles of rubble still uncleared from the Blitz. Fred had done up the inside and Mabiche had everything shining. Their love was like that, too. Yet Fred spoke no French and Mabiche had never really mastered everyday English: she spoke like a school text book. But the loving looks that passed between them, their constant squeezing of hands, brushing of shoulders—the sheer weight of love in that modest little house brought tears to my eyes. Mabiche saw me to the door. She hadn’t wanted to embarrass Fred by gossiping away in French.

  “How are you—managing?” she asked.

  “Oh, splendidly,” I lied.

  “The—love life?” she asked, staring at me keenly.

  “I’m throwing myself into my work,” I declared.

  Then I added, “Jacques is in London.”

  Her thick black eyebrows shot up.

  I shook my head.

  “He’s staying at the Ritz for a month while we get the new shop off the ground,” I explained. “And he’s brought a young man with him.”

  Mabiche sighed.

  “Actually, this one’s really charming,” I said. “I’m getting quite fond of him. We’ve been to a play or two when Jacques was having one of his all-night designing sessions.”

  I didn’t go out with Alain that night, however. I looked in on a few of my new friends, Fred’s distant relatives and childhood pals. They insisted on making a night of it and we went on a glorious pub crawl, never further west than the Aldgate Pump nor north of Bethnal Green. The Thames, of course, was our lower limit, though we nearly shot into the Blackwall tunnel at one point.

  Alas, Mabiche’s marriage lasted hardly longer than mine had. But for a very different reason. Fred dropped dead one day at his work. He had just hoisted a huge carcass onto his back when his heart gave way. I could not help a twinge of grim amusement as I imagined his body lying sprawled under a stiff, dead cow—and his cheery ghost looking down on the scene and roaring with laughter.

  Mabiche wasn’t laughing when she came back to me—in fact, I
never heard her laugh again and she seldom smiled. She didn’t talk about Fred either, and she cut herself off completely from his people as though she could not bear to be reminded of her loss. So I, too, felt I could not go down to Bow or East Ham any more. It didn’t leave too great a gap in my existence, however, because Jacques’ business was diversifying and multiplying at an alarming rate.

  We moved into a tall, elegant house in Carlton House Terrace and kept a whole floor for Jacques’ use. He stayed with us at least four times a year—with or without a young friend or two. My name was on the shop signs now. We had become Lemoine and Parker. We grew closer than ever, and I began to hope that one day things would return to their original footing.

  Then his visits stopped abruptly and I heard through the grapevine that he was ill. I caught a plane for Paris. I was horrified at his changed appearance. He was sitting, shrunken and yellow, swathed in blankets, in a big armchair in his study.

  “It’s cancer,” he told me. “Please don’t come again.”

  I didn’t argue, although it took a long time for my beloved friend and protector to die. He finished his days in a hospice and he made me his heir.

  I made the arrangements for the funeral in a daze, Mabiche always by my side with smelling salts or a steadying hand.

  Jeannine Bernaud turned up at the funeral. It was a quiet little ceremony in Viroflay, just outside Paris.

  “Why did you choose this place?” asked the tiny, vivacious woman who did not seem to have changed in the twenty-five years I had known her.

  “I don’t know,” I hedged.

  The true reason was creeping up out of my subconscious, taking root in my acknowledged memory. She looked at me sadly. I was glad the obnoxious Pierre was not with her. She had spared me that.

  “I remember coming here with you and Dad when I was quite small,” I burst out.

  She nodded and beckoned me to follow her. My feet dragged because in one corner of my mind I already knew what she was going to show me.

  “Your mother’s grave,” she said, pointing to a simple stone slab.

  The pathetic little text informed me that the young person had died in childbirth; my little dead brother was lying there beside her. The grave was well-tended but bare. I went back to Jacques’ last resting place and picked a spray of yellow roses from the dozens of floral tributes. I laid it on my mother’s grave.

  A sob came from Jeannine’s throat. She looked at me pleadingly.

  “Forgive me—forgive us,” she said.

  I gasped as it all became clear. It was because of what had been between this woman and my father that my mother had died. And he had lived with his bitter regret the rest of his life. Yet he had remained friends with Pierre as well as Jeannine. So much for my secret boast that I had shed convention, sloughed off a “respectable” skin when my father had left me—in comparison with this group, my artistic broad-mindedness dwindled to nothing.

  And what would it have been like, I wondered, if this Sophie had lived and won back her man and I had been brought up with a little boy to play with, a normal, stable background in which to develop. Would I have met Jacques—would I have married John?

  “Please keep in touch,” whispered Jeannine.

  But she and I both knew we would never meet again.

  Chapter 10

  Beryl’s boys showed signs of being brainy from the age of seven. Up till then they’d been normal noisy lads, interested in everything that came their way. David was the leader and instigator but it was Tony who carried through their various projects to full conclusion. He was the less imaginative, the plodder. He would climb to the top of the tree David had picked out for exploration, leaving his brother on a lower branch, thinking out the next adventure. It was Tony who dived from the high board, though David had been first to master the knack of swimming. David devised a mini marathon, running round and round the block of Bromley semis one hot day in June when their great-aunt was busy in the kitchen. Tony carried on running for an hour after David had been distracted by the return from work of his great-uncle who suggested they go off to seek ice-cream. As they returned with the fast-melting cones they saw Tony stagger round the corner and collapse. David was hysterical at not being allowed in the ambulance: as it turned out, Tony had a perforated appendix. While he was in hospital his brother pined pitifully, refused to eat and was almost as ill as the in-patient. David took to books soon after that and naturally, Tony, too, became an avid reader. They were never rivals in their studies. David leaned towards Literature, though he dipped into everything first. Tony was attracted by Science. They were both good all-rounders in their school subjects and Beryl began to fret about their education.

  “You and I both know what a heap of shit there is teaching in the State schools,” she said bitterly. Seeing that we had first met at Teacher Training College and that she had not even completed her probationary year, I felt indignant at this dismissive statement. I began to defend the system hotly. My spirited defence soon fizzled out, however, when I remembered a couple of head teachers and at least a dozen other lesser members of the profession whom I wouldn’t have trusted to teach a baboon. I made enquiries about Private Schools though I had my reservations about that alternative, too. Some of the wierder and most incompetent students of my year had got jobs at such establishments without bothering to wait around to be kicked off the course. But I found a place in Surrey I liked the sound of.

  When I went down to see it the boys were just running back from a swim in the river to the old ivy-covered ruin of an Elizabethan manor where the school was housed. A master and a mistress were scampering amongst the pupils, laughing and obviously genuinely happy to be amongst the youngsters. Boys and teachers were entirely nude.

  Unselfconsciously they towelled themselves in the porch—then a good-humoured tussle broke out as they rummaged amongst the heaps of clothing. I was watching all this from a taxi. I’d been prepared to go straight back to town if the place did not attract me.

  The female teacher, her dark hair plastered wetly to her head, came over and began patting it into place, using the wing mirror. She grinned at the driver then noticed me in the back.

  “Hells bells! You’re not an Inspector, are you?” she asked, leaning through the front passenger window.

  I shook my head.

  “ A—er—prospective customer,” I said. “They seem a happy bunch,” I added, nodding towards the boys.

  “They are that,” she agreed. “And most of the staff are super. I’m the new girl. Actually—I say, have you a comb?” she asked. I gave her mine and she tugged her hair forward onto her attractive, strong-featured face. I paid off the taxi and followed her to the building.

  “I’m only here for a year,” she told me. “I’m an Art School Reject…if my heart wasn’t set on other things, though, I’d be happy to stay here—how old’s your boy?”

  “It’s—they’re twins,” I said. “They’re nine….”

  “I’d recommend you to send them here,” she said. “Especially if they’ve any personality—it’s allowed here—encouraged even—to be a character—and I can honestly say there’s not a bad ’un in the place.”

  That was how I met Kathryn A. Henry and learned of her remarkable achievement in getting accepted for a place at St Hugh’s, Oxford, as a Mature Student, after attacking the Entrance paper in a very unusual way “I know nothing about Renaissance authors, but I am very fond of thirteenth century Religious Writing and propose to offer a short essay on that theme.”

  She was thirty then and by the time the twins went up to Cambridge she’d been running the Medieval Literature Department for several years. We had kept in touch by letter while she lived and worked in New York. I advised David to seek her out and make himself known as he was keen on her period. They quickly became friends. We looked forward to a personal re-union at the May Ball.

  Chapter 11

  Tony and David had invited the young daughters of one of my editors, at my reques
t. They groaned and pretended to mind, but I happened to know they were both suffering a passion for the same girl at that time, and she was maliciously playing them off one against the other. I knew they would see through my hints that escorting Sarah and Patricia would help me. But they were pleasant girls and the boys were bound to see the scheme as a solution to their own problem. After a series of phone calls that exasperated Mabiche—she, as worried for them as I was, accused me of interfering—all was arranged to my satisfaction. I would meet up with Beryl at Liverpool Street Station and we would travel down together.

  The grimy station reminded me poignantly of my younger days. I had waited around here for Beryl and Bryn often enough when he was playing at the Smythgate-Tyne Studio. I would dash into the unsavoury loo and change from my black felt circular skirt—all the rage in 1956—into tight black “drainpipes,” stuffing my “respectable” clothes into my bucket bag. Then I would go into the bleak but busy Hall and watch out for Ryl, carting an overflowing straw basket and Bryn, his “box” slung over his shoulder. I felt a lump rise in my throat at the thought of the awful inevitable passage of time and as I spotted Ryl, still vivacious but no longer the optimistic young girl, dragging her latest conquest round the draughty corner that leads to the tube trains, I gasped. Whatever was she trying to prove—? This smooth-faced boy looked hardly old enough to be allowed out without his mother.

  “Charles Peregrine,” she said, and sent him off to buy chocolate, always a weakness of hers. “He’s awfully good in bed; he hasn’t noticed my grey hairs and he’s stinking rich,” she said huffily at me as soon as he was out of hearing.

  “I wasn’t going to say anything,” I declared.

  “You bloody well don’t have to with that face you’re pulling.” She laughed. “Look, Gaby, this one’s different. Poor little sod’s serious. Most of them hang on my every word, drink in all my trumped-up stories about my lurid past—and then go off and marry the girl next door. This one bosses me about, looks after me, cherishes me—is genuinely interested in my past—we’ve just come from a tour of my old haunts—most of them long gone—I showed him the sites, at least—all the Coffee-houses where we hung about for a whole evening—Gyre and Gimble’s, Northumberland Avenue, Bunjie’s, The Nucleus—do you remember?”