by Jack Higgins
‘With success?’
‘A uniform went over very well in those days.’ He took a dressing gown from behind the door and put it on. ‘Come to think of it, there wasn’t much I turned down. Naafi girls, Wrens—anything in a skirt in a dance hall, usually through an alcoholic haze.’
‘But what if you’d caught something?’ I said. ‘Didn’t that ever worry you?’
‘But I thought I was going to die, don’t you see?’ he said patiently. ‘That was the whole point. Nothing seemed to matter very much. It’s true what they say, you know. Nothing succeeds like excess. There was a terribly nice W.V.S. lady at one of the canteens, who invited me round to her place for a beetle drive. Turned out she’d got the wrong night.’
‘What happened?’
‘I stayed for tea, and more than a little sympathy. Opened up an entirely new field of operations. Then there was a young lieutenant in a certain para-military religious organization, who gave me the most stimulating afternoon of my life in the rest room of a church hall in Plymouth, after she’d closed the canteen.’
I gazed at him in awe. ‘So what do you do now? You never go out. You’re always at that damn desk studying.’
‘I can see you’re missing the point entirely,’ he said. ‘Let’s put it this way. Most men spend a large proportion of their time at the office desk or factory bench thinking loose thoughts about their neighbour’s wife or the girl behind the bar at the local or what-have-you. But not me. I’m a free man. I can keep sex in its place, because I worked through it. In other words, it doesn’t run my life, it’s just another part of it.’
‘Thanks to all those willing ladies in Falmouth and Plymouth during the war?’
‘Exactly. No psychological hang-ups. No traumas. I even sleep nights.’
‘So what am I supposed to do?’
‘Lay Ava’s ghost, old sport. Try one of the local dance halls. Try all of them, come to that. Lots of girls on offer there. Every shape and size known to man and they’re all lovely! Just remember every woman’s beautiful in some way or other and you can’t go far wrong.’
I stared at him, unable to think of any useful comment, and he sighed heavily.
‘For God’s sake, Oliver, if you don’t get them out of your system now, you’ll go through the rest of your life spending about ninety per cent of your waking hours brooding over women and the flesh. As for your dreams, I shudder to think what they’ll be like.’ He hauled me to my feet. ‘Now get to hell out of here and let me get on with some work. And keep me posted.’
It was raining hard as I went down the fire escape. When I turned and looked up he was standing in the doorway, a curiously elegant picture in that silk dressing gown, the white-blond hair glinting in the light.
‘Goodbye, old sport,’ he said.
It had become a ritual with us, this, after seeing Alan Ladd in The Great Gatsby earlier that year, and through it discovering the book.
‘They’re a rotten crowd!’ I shouted. ‘You’re worth the whole damn bunch of them put together!’
He raised his hand, Gatsby to the life, then went inside. I moved as far as the shrubbery and paused, for he had seemed to go to considerable pains with his appearance for the sake of a law book or two.
I was intrigued, and with good cause as it turned out, for some minutes later the back door of the house opened and the tenant of one of the flats, a young war widow called Amy Tarrant, ran across the yard with a raincoat over her shoulders. Jake greeted her warmly on the landing and drew her inside.
I was surprised, Aunt Alice having told me that Mrs Tarrant had her sights set more on a career than a second husband, being already deputy headmistress of a girls’ secondary school at twenty-nine, and having two young boys to support.
It was many years later when Jake let slip that for a time they had enjoyed a mutually satisfactory relationship, meeting two or three times a week in the way I had witnessed.
Yet in some way I felt a strange sense of betrayal that night. I had wanted to feel that, in Jake, I had found that most difficult of all things to find in this world, a friend in the deepest sense of the word. Someone with whom one could exchange mutual confidences and bare the soul. Yet already there were secrets.
Still, his advice seemed sound enough. I gave it some thought on the way home, and later, a good deal more, sitting in the darkness by the turret window of my bedroom, smoking a cigarette, staring out at the rain.
God knows why, but it always seemed to be raining on those quiet nights so long ago. Great silver cobwebs of the stuff drifted through the gaslight beyond the trees and the rich damp smell from the garden filled me with a restless excitement.
It was as if something waited out there in the rain beyond the lamplight, although for the life of me I could not even guess at what it might be.
2
GLORIA
In order to avoid being called a flirt she always yielded easily.
CHARLES, COUNT TALLEYRAND
THE NEXT DAY BEING a Saturday, I decided to follow Jake’s advice without delay. The sports jacket and flannels that were the sole survivors of my pre-army wardrobe were obviously unwearable, and on my release group number I had not been granted a demobilization suit.
It seemed to me that this was no bad thing for, as Jake had indicated, there were certain advantages to a uniform and I was entitled to continue wearing it until the end of my release leave.
It looked remarkably well after a careful press, particularly the sergeant’s stripes and the Berlin insignia, a dark circle ringed with red to indicate a besieged city and affectionately referred to by the troops as the flaming arsehole.
But that, and the green flash of the Intelligence Corps, were not the only splashes of colour to be seen, for I was the proud possessor of the General Service Medal (Palestine 1945-48), thanks to that month in the transit camp at Jaffa. The purple-green-purple ribbon looked rather well above the left breast pocket and there was always the remote chance that, to the uninitiated, it might be mistaken for a decoration for valour.
The Army, in its wisdom, had released me with only five pounds in hand, against the eventuality of the records proving that I owed them money. Any surplus credits were to be paid me at their convenience. This left me distinctly on the short side financially, so I adjusted my beret to a rakish angle and went to see Aunt Alice.
I found her in the drawing room, working her way through a book on astral projection for, as I have indicated elsewhere, anything to do with the occult was meat and drink to her.
The housecoat she was wearing had been in her possession for many years, and she invariably wore it indoors, especially when she was in what she termed her mystical moods. It was embroidered with the signs of the zodiac and, combined with her jet black hair hanging straight to her shoulders, she resembled the high priestess of some strange cult.
A plump, bosomy woman, at that time in her middle-fifties, her father had left her eight or nine houses in various parts of the town, most of them split into flats, and the rent from these had enabled her to live in tolerable comfort for many years. She had looked after me with considerable kindness since I was eight and I was extremely fond of her.
I explained my present predicament, then spent a good ten minutes searching for her handbag, which finally turned out to be under the cushion of the chair she was sitting in. She offered me a ten-shilling note, which I accepted in spite of the fact that I’d been hoping for a pound, and went in search of Uncle Herbert to spread the load.
As I’d expected, I found him in the conservatory, in his baize apron and old straw boater, contentedly potting plants at the bench. He had never worked for a living in the usual sense in all the years I had known him, indeed had never once ventured beyond the garden gate. But there were reasons.
On the 1st July 1916, Uncle Herbert had gone over the top on the Somme with seven hundred and seventy-three officers and men of one of the Yorkshire Pals Regiments. Twenty minutes later, the heavy machine guns having do
ne their work, he found himself one of thirty-four survivors, albeit with two bullets in one leg and another in the throat.
And so he had lived on all these years, his voice a bare whisper when he used it at all, his left leg permanently supported in a steel brace.
This time the situation was reversed. I requested ten shillings and had a pound note thrust upon me. As any kind of conversation tired him excessively, I kept my thanks to a minimum and left him to it. A nice little man who never strayed far from the safety of the orchids in his greenhouse. A pale ghost in the evening sunlight.
I had been to a dance or two during my Army service, but not many, and those mainly mess brawls with too few girls to go round and too much drink.
In spite of that, I was capable of getting round the floor without disgracing myself, thanks to a series of Saturday night hops at the local church hall when I was sixteen. As I remember, it was all as clean as a whistle, mainly boy scouts and girl guides in their Sunday best, with the Vicar behind a trestle table dispensing lemonade at the interval.
And then Wilma turned up.
She was an entirely different proposition from the rest of the females. For one thing, she was twenty and looked older. A real woman, with long blonde hair and a figure to thank God for, or at least that’s how I remember her.
She was too good. Hardly anyone danced with her, they didn’t have the nerve. I only did myself as a dare. They were playing a slow foxtrot number from Casablanca with Humphrey Bogart, As Time Goes By. To this day, whenever I hear that tune, I feel her arm slide round my neck, her body pressing against me on the turns.
It seemed impossible that such a queen among women could be interested in me, and yet I found myself walking her home through the perfumed darkness, shaking with excitement at the very thought of being with her.
A short cut to her home lay across the school playing fields. We paused in a small wood at the edge, I kissed her clumsily. After a while, we sat on a pile of dead leaves and I attempted further liberties.
She pushed my eager hands away at once and told me not to spoil things. She seemed angry and I thought I’d gone too far. She offered me a cigarette, which I accepted eagerly for they were hard to come by at that stage of the war.
I sat smoking, inhaling deeply, for I had already discovered the pleasures of nicotine. Wilma stayed quiet for a moment, then leaned forward suddenly and unbuttoned my trousers. I reached for her at once and she pushed me away instantly. ‘No,’ she said firmly, then started to play with me with slow, capable fingers.
I lay back against the leaves, inhaling deeply until my head buzzed, alternating between the twin delights of tobacco and sexual pleasure.
This performance became something of a ritual with us, and never varied in the slightest detail except, on occasion, as regards the brand of cigarette. But I was never permitted the slightest intimacy as far as she was concerned.
A strange business. Even stranger was the way it ended, for she simply didn’t turn up to meet me one night. A week later, when I saw her by chance on a tram, she looked through me as if she had never set eyes on me in her life. Perhaps I had served her purpose in some mysterious way.
Of all the dance halls I patronized during that year, the Trocadero was my favourite. A Moorish palace that would not have disgraced a Hollywood film set, thanks to the wild fantasy of the man who had created her, incongruously set down on a main road, three miles out from the city centre in a respectable middle-class suburb.
There was music on the night air that first evening. It drew me like a magnet when I came out of the public bar of The Tall Man, where I had paused to take in two statutory pints of best bitter to fortify me for the fray, and I hurried down the road towards the red neon glow in the darkness beyond the trees.
I was dismayed by the size of the queue stretching out through the main door for it was only eight o’clock, but, as I discovered later, this was usual on a Saturday night, numbers being strictly limited according to some city bylaw or other. I stood in the rain in an agony of impatience, the queue building up behind me, inching forward for fifteen minutes or so until I was finally inside the door.
There were only five or six people between me and the glass window now but, for the moment, no more tickets were being issued. We waited under the inscrutable stares of a posse of four or five commissionaires, burly gentlemen in smart green uniforms, medal ribbons prominently displayed, sergeant majors to the last man, ready to move in at the first sign of trouble, for the Trocadero prided itself on its respectability and good order.
The glass doors at the other side of the foyer swung open, giving a tantalizing glimpse of the crowd inside as the band struck up a quickstep. The manager came through in his pre-war dinner jacket and boiled shirt, leaned down to the ticket window and murmured something to the girl inside. We moved forward with a rush. I shoved my three shillings across and received my ticket, which was immediately taken from me by one of the commissionaires.
There was a chorus of groans as the doors were closed behind me on those unfortunates who still waited in the rain. My luck was good or so it seemed to me then, and I went up the stairs to the cloakroom excitedly.
I got rid of my greatcoat, moved out on to the balcony, which ran round each side of the dance floor, and leaned on the rail. There were two eight-piece bands, each on its own stand, red tuxedos on one side of the hall, blue on the other. They played alternately, never together, for there was considerable rivalry between them. Just now, the Reds were playing Tuxedo Junction, the lights were low and two great glass balls turned slowly in the ceiling, waves of scarlet, blue and green rippling across the heads of the dancers.
The music stopped, the lights were turned up again and the floor started to clear in the hiatus between one band finishing and the other taking up the good work.
It was time. I lit a cigarette, moved to the head of the stairs and paused to check my appearance in the full-length mirror. The uniform really looked very well indeed and the medal ribbon was all that could be desired. I assumed a suitably cynical expression, pulled my hair down across my eyes, for no satisfactory reason, and descended the stairs.
I paused a few steps from the bottom and looked into the crowd, hands in pockets, cigarette dangling from the corner of my mouth, a world-weary young veteran home from the wars, an object of pity and admiration to every woman in the room. Or so I fondly imagined.
The truth is that the whole thing was something of an anticlimax. No one took the slightest notice of me. Indeed, why should they? I was just another face in the crowd, and few human beings really look at each other anyway, a lesson I learned painfully over a considerable number of years.
In any event, as they say in Yorkshire, I was spoilt for choice. It was rather like being in some gigantic store with the entire range of the product displayed in all its infinite variety. Fat, thin, blonde or brunette, from the downright ugly to the ravishingly beautiful. You name it, they had it, and in large quantities, for the women far outnumbered the men.
Something else which didn’t help was the fact that I was slightly short-sighted. The only pair of spectacles I possessed were Army issue, round-lensed, steel-framed and of a type favoured by Heinrich Himmler, Chief of the Gestapo, which was hardly the image I was trying to create. I preferred to manage without, which meant that at anything like a distance faces softened slightly, blurred at the edges, especially when the lights were low. Good-looking girls, on closer inspection often proved to be quite plain or worse, and the reverse was equally true.
The first girl I asked to dance was an example of this. I was attracted by the red-gold hair, which turned out to be purely an effect of the light when I was too close to turn away. She was also incredibly fat, something which had not been apparent because of the crush.
They were playing a waltz at the time, and manhandling her round that floor was a task that might well have taxed even Charles Atlas in his prime. She didn’t say a word during the entire proceedings, simply hung on t
ight, a great bovine grin on her face, apparently oblivious to the sweat which soaked through her blouse in large patches.
At the end of the number, I fled to the balcony café where I revived myself with a cigarette and a cup of tea before returning to the fray. The balcony was, in fact, a good place from which to spy out the land, and if you worked your way round slowly, it was possible to cover every part of the room.
There was a blonde girl standing at the side of the Reds’ bandstand. I couldn’t help noticing her for the crowd seemed to have thinned out at that point and she was quite alone. She wore a green dress, and when I furtively slipped on my spectacles to get an accurate reading, I discovered that she was really very pretty indeed.
I hurried downstairs and pushed my way through the crowd, fearful that she would be gone before I arrived, but I was fortunate for she still stood there by the bandstand, quite alone.
I moved in without hesitation and asked her to dance, and the smile I received was all that could be desired. She fitted her body into mine, every melting curve, and we drifted away onto the floor as the lights faded into a blue mist and the band eased into the smoothest of foxtrots.
A Foggy Day in London Town. I’ll never forget it, for it still brings back that, first wild feeling of elation at my unbelievable luck, followed immediately by a rapid slide down into a species of living hell. For, within seconds, I was enveloped in a kind of miasma that had to be experienced to be believed.
I had heard of body odour, had experienced it on occasion in both the male and female varieties. But this was something special, worthy of inclusion in any medical textbook.
She had one thing in common with the fat girl and that was a complete absence of conversation. The generous mouth stayed parted in a ready smile and she fastened each available inch of her well-endowed body into mine like a limpet to a rock, without the slightest evidence that she ever intended to let go.
Hell on earth would be a less-than-adequate description and I drifted round the floor in a kind of daze, holding onto my sanity with everything I had. When the first number came to an end, I mumbled some clumsy and improbable excuse and fled, leaving her there on the floor.
