by Jack Higgins
Beyond the fringe of green-painted iron railings there was a small asphalt playground, with toilets in one corner. There were two entrances at each end of the main building, the sexes being strictly segregated.
I pushed open the door marked Boys and found myself in a dark hall at the bottom of a flight of stairs. There was a vaguely unpleasant smell, possibly from the dustbins ranged against the wall beside a door.
I hesitated. The door opened and a man in a brown overall appeared and emptied a shovelful of wood shavings into one of the bins. He looked at me enquiringly, a small, wiry fox terrier of a man, with iron-grey hair that fell untidily across his eyes. Beyond his shoulder, I could see a sullen-looking youth in shirt-sleeves planing a plank of wood at a bench.
I asked him for the headmaster’s office and he directed me in a dry West Riding voice. I thanked him, and as I turned away he flicked the shoulder flash on my battledress sleeve. ‘Intelligence, eh? By gum, lad, but we could do with some of that around here.’
He went back into the woodwork room and I went up the steps. The walls were covered with white tiles which, coupled with the smell, reminded me depressingly of a public urinal.
On the next landing I found two boys lounging against the wall, opposite the headmaster’s door, their heads together over some health magazine or other, nude ladies baring their bosoms to God’s good air. The magazine disappeared into the pocket of a shabby tweed jacket a couple of sizes too large for its owner. He was a burly-looking lad of perhaps fourteen, with ginger hair and a face that seemed all low cunning, yet intelligent with it.
‘I’m looking for Mr Carter,’ I said.
‘In the office, sir.’
He spoke with a hard, nasal twang and with apparent politeness, and yet the insolence about an eighth of an inch beneath the surface had to be heard to be believed. Most sinister of all, I noticed that the belt around his waist was heavily studded with Army badges. His companion, a vacuous youth in a torn jersey, head shaven except for a tuft of hair above the forehead, stared at me, a candle of snot descending from one nostril. Thirty-three pounds, ten shillings and twopence a month. I turned to the door hurriedly and knocked.
There was no reply. I knocked again, was aware of a sudden flurry of movement, and then the door was flung open violently. ‘Didn’t I tell you to wait, boy?’
The voice had a parade ground roar, perfected over the years by necessity, one supposed, for Mr Carter was a small man. His face was wrinkled and tinged with yellow, even the bald head, so that he had the perpetual look of a man only just recovering from a severe attack of jaundice. He wore wire-rimmed glasses and held a cigarette in the exact centre of his mouth, the upper lip being brown with nicotine.
A ready smile replaced the frown, sunshine through the clouds. ‘Mr Shaw, I presume?’
‘That’s right,’ I said.
He drew me inside, sternly ordering my two friends at the wall to await his pleasure. His office walls were adorned with the same white tiles as the corridor outside. For the first time I could appreciate what they meant by the term neo-lavatorial architecture.
There were several filing cabinets, an untidy desk, a shabby carpet, a pint pot redolent of guardhouse days beside an electric kettle. Beyond, through the window, I could see the roofs of those mean little houses. The whole thing was unbelievably depressing, including Mr Carter. He lit another cigarette from the stub of the one in his mouth and sat down behind his desk, wreathed in smoke, his words punctuated by a series of graveyard coughs.
Mr Crosby had phoned him from the education offices to warn him that I was coming and had obviously managed to convey his own ecstatic delight at their good fortune in getting me, for Mr Carter was just as delighted. His extravagant regard for someone he had never met before in his life filled me with astonishment, but, as I discovered later, he simply couldn’t believe his luck at being offered another man, any man, after the school year had started.
‘We’ll be delighted to have a graduate on the staff,’ he commented at one stage in the conversation.
I pointed out that I had no teacher training. More than that, had no experience whatsoever.
He frowned. ‘You do have a degree, don’t you? There hasn’t been any mistake?’
‘Yes, but it’s in Sociology and Social Psychology.’
His brow cleared. ‘That’s all right then.’
An attitude which mystified me less after my first few months in teaching, for I had by then encountered amongst general class teachers, a man with a degree in Brewing Engineering, another with an MSc. in Textiles, having specialized particularly in the area of ropes and cordage, and a delectable Eurasian lady with a Law qualification.
On the question of future duties, Mr Carter proved not only vague, but evasive. All would be taken care of in good time, and he looked forward to seeing me on Monday morning at ten to nine.
When he opened the door to usher me out, my two friends at the wall had a smaller boy between them and were twisting an arm apiece.
‘Varley!’ roared Mr Carter. ‘How many times have I told you?’
The ginger boy ducked expertly and the headmaster’s fist connected with his companion’s face. He drove them towards the stairs, striking indiscriminately at each head, including that of the wretched little boy who had been the object of the bullying.
They disappeared into the gloom below and he turned and said solemnly, ‘Grand lads, Mr Shaw. Grand lads, really, all of them.’
He shook hands and disappeared back into his office.
The woodwork instructor was standing at his open door lighting a pipe when I went downstairs. He looked at me enquiringly and I held out my hand.
‘I’m joining you Monday.’
‘God help you,’ he said ignoring my hand and went back inside the woodwork room before I could introduce myself.
There was a small transport café on the other side of the street. I ordered a cup of tea and sat at the window staring across at the school, hoping, in some strange way, that if I looked at it long enough I might get used to it.
I heard the four o’clock bell quite clearly. The first person out of the entrance was the woodwork instructor, in shabby raincoat and trilby, clutching a briefcase. Within seconds, a steady stream of boys boiled after him, with here and there an adult or two bobbing helplessly, presumably other teachers.
Finally, Mr Carter himself appeared, a grey topcoat over his arm. The yard by then was quite deserted and he looked relaxed and happy as he went through the gate. I checked my watch. It was exactly five minutes past four.
I went into town the following morning to get some new clothes. There were no difficulties, clothes rationing had ended earlier that year. A pair of flannels and a Donegal tweed sports jacket seemed the right sort of thing for Khyber Street. For more formal occasions, I chose a double-breasted suit of dark-blue worsted in the new drape style, the latest import from America.
It really looked rather well as I dressed that evening before leaving for the Trocadero. I adjusted the Windsor knot in my tie, gave my hair a final comb, and went in search of Aunt Alice to settle my few debts with her.
I found her in the drawing room, in company with a large Teutonic-looking gentleman with hair like a brush top. He wore pince-nez and stood up and clicked his heels when she introduced him.
‘This is Herr Nagel, dear, he’s doing your horoscope.’
I was not particularly dismayed at this item of news for Aunt Alice usually had some such creature in tow, and although she had a particular penchant for mediums, astrology was an old love. He shook hands, exposing gold-capped teeth in a frozen smile, before sitting and returning to his labours. He was, as I discovered later, a German Jew who had got out of Berlin by the skin of his teeth just before the war.
She asked me where I was going and when I told her she shook her head, a serious look on her face. ‘Oh, dear, that’s bad. Isn’t that bad, Conrad?’ Here she appealed to Herr Nagel who glanced up dutifully. ‘Oliver’s going da
ncing,’ she explained.
‘So what?’ I said.
‘Is that wise in view of what you said about his relations with the opposite sex?’ She patted my hand. ‘It’s in your map, you see, dear.’
I turned enquiringly to Herr Nagel as enlightenment dawned on his face like a sunburst.
‘Ah, vimmen!’ he said. ‘Now I understand.’
He got up and walked about the room, his pince-nez in one hand, the other under his coat-tails, grinding his teeth together, speaking slowly and with considerable drama in a manner which, coupled with his accent, would hardly have disgraced Erich von Stroheim playing the Gestapo Chief.
‘Amongst your aspects, young man, you haff Venus squared mit Mars, which means that you will meet with more than your fair share of unkindness from the opposite sex.’ He paused to savour that word, which was obviously a favourite, and he rolled it sibilantly around his tongue, one hand on Aunt Alice’s shoulder, before continuing. ‘For you, my boy, the ideal never works out in reality. I do not say that a happy marriage vill not come, for you haff Jupiter in the House of Marriage, unt the Moon in goot aspect mit Venus.’
I glanced helplessly at Aunt Alice. ‘But what’s it all supposed to mean?’
‘You tend to put them on a pedestal, mein young friend, that’s vot it means.’ He put a hand on my shoulder. ‘Unt they always fall off. Sad, isn’t it?’
He apparently found this funny and laughed uproariously. So did Aunt Alice, which seemed to be the signal for him to take her hand, kiss it passionately and click his heels.
I withdrew, found an old trenchcoat in the hall cupboard in case of rain and let myself out of the front door, whistling cheerfully, for I didn’t believe a word of it, or, at least, not enough to let it spoil my evening.
The Trocadero that Tuesday evening was everything Jake had promised. There was room to breathe, to move about the floor. I don’t suppose there could have been more than three hundred people in the place, which meant that it seemed half empty.
Only one band was on duty, the Reds as it happened, and a great deal of serious ballroom dancing was going on when I came out of the cloakroom and looked down from the balcony. As usual, there were more females in evidence, yet the clientele seemed different. On the whole, a little older, more serious. The girls seemed to look my way more often, although that was perhaps imagination, or, quite simply, the new suit.
As before, I needed to make an entrance, if only for my own private sake, to assure myself that I was in some way in control. I paused at the mirror at the top of the stairs for a final check. The drape suit with those trousers about half-a-yard wide made me look like a young Robert Mitchum, or so I fondly imagined. I hooded my eyes and stuck a cigarette in the corner of my mouth.
When I turned, I was disconcerted to find myself the object of some amusement for a young woman who had just appeared from the cloakroom. She was hardly dressed for dancing, for she wore a suit of a kind of orange tweed with a rather prim skirt and neat brown brogues. The black hair, which was tied in a bun, framed a pale, oval face, dark eyes, very little lipstick.
The smile would best be described as one of gentle amusement, not mockery, but I turned away in confusion and stumbled down the stairs.
The older I get, the more convinced I am that time and chance have more of a hand in man’s affairs than is generally realized, especially where matters of import are concerned. Take that first meeting with Helen, for example, one of the most important of my life. It was a miracle that we ever got together at all.
First, there was the circumstance that brought her out of the cloakroom at exactly the right moment to catch me naked, in a manner of speaking, in front of that mirror. I know now that it was my vulnerability that immediately attracted her. Yet for me, the shame of it was such that I could not have walked up to her and asked her to dance for a hundred pounds.
In any case, she wasn’t the sort I was looking for at all. Far too prim and lady-like, and she was too old for me. She admitted, at a later stage, to twenty-eight, but I am sure now that she was older than that.
So everything was against us, until the band leader announced that the next number would be a ladies’ choice, an event which only took place rarely and certainly not every night. Surprisingly few girls availed themselves of the opportunity, presumably for reasons of maidenly modesty. It was a great thing to be asked at all and most men waited, chatting with friends, with every evidence of unconcern.
But if, as the Bible has it, few were chosen, I was one of them. I was aware of a tug at my arm and turned to find the woman in the orange tweed suit from the balcony.
‘May I have this dance?’ she asked in a low, sweet voice.
I have no means of knowing whether or not I blushed, but I swallowed my confusion and followed her onto the floor.
Everything about her was wrong, the neat clothes, the madonna-like face, that beautifully modulated voice, and yet when I took her in my arms my heart started to pound, my stomach contracted, the inside of my mouth went dry.
That two members of the opposite sex can strike sparks from each other from the first meeting, without even a word being spoken, is a common enough phenomenon, and frequently such passion has nothing to do with love in the usual sense of the word. Something inexplicable happens and two people come together inexorably.
To hold her in my arms, even lightly, was the most exciting thing that had ever happened to me. They were playing an old early thirties number, recently revived, Put Your Head on my Shoulder. She did just that, one hand up around the back of my neck, dancing as intimately as it was possible to get.
From the beginning, then, there was an inevitability to it all. When the dance ended, she allowed her hand to stay in mine as if it were the most natural thing in the world. I can’t even recall asking her to have a coffee with me. I believe we just went.
We sat at a balcony table, drank coffee, smoked cigarettes, watched the dancing below and talked, heads together in a low, intimate way, like lovers who, having been long parted, had much to tell each other. And that, I recall at a distance of time, was the strangest thing of all, for it was as if I had always known her, in spite of the fact that in the end I never really knew her at all.
I cannot remember when we exchanged names for, in retrospect, she was Helen from that very first moment, but I do know that I talked of myself as I had never talked to anyone other than Jake. The Army, my writing, teaching, future hopes and past disappointments. Of herself, she had strangely little to say, or nothing of a very revealing nature, although this, too, only became apparent later. I remember her saying that she was private secretary to a solicitor in the town, no more than that.
We danced again after a while, September Song, the world a blue mist, the glass ball in the ceiling casting great, rippling waves across us and once, and this was the only time she did such a thing publicly, she pulled down my head and kissed me, the mouth soft and warm, opening like a flower, a kiss like no other I had ever had before.
And then it was over and we were outside, walking together through a light drizzle, beneath her umbrella. I had asked to take her home, but she, naming a suburb four or five miles on the far side of town, had insisted firmly that I take her only as far as the tram stop on the main road.
We walked slowly along the wet pavement, pausing occasionally to kiss. I asked her to go out with me one evening. The cinema or just a walk, perhaps? Anything. She shook her head firmly. It just wasn’t possible. She was too busy with prior commitments.
The frustration was terrible and explains, I suppose, what followed. We were standing on the corner of a small, dark alley. I grabbed her elbow rather roughly and pushed her into the shadows. Then I crushed her to me and kissed her hard, forcing her head back.
She broke away from me, slightly breathless, shaking a little as she reached up to touch my face. ‘No, Oliver, not now. Not this way. There’s no need.’
A remark which naturally made not the slightest sense to me and I grabb
ed her again, caressing her right breast clumsily.
I got a good old fashioned slap in the face that sent me back across the alley. She moved into the circle of light cast by a gas lamp and paused to rearrange herself, her face pale yet calm as she glanced once towards me before walking away.
The immediate feeling was one of panic, sheer blind panic at the thought of losing her. I acted in a purely reflex way, running after her instantly, and falling into step at her right hand. I couldn’t think of anything worth the saying, but mumbled something about wanting to see her to the tram stop. At least she didn’t say no and we continued together in silence.
I have seldom felt more miserable in my life than I did standing in the rain with her at the end of a small queue. She hadn’t said a word, simply started to move out of my life forever when the tram came and the queue started forward. There was a lump in my throat the size of a fist. I could have cried like a child. I plucked at her sleeve instinctively as she reached for the handrail.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said.
‘Good,’ she said calmly. ‘A little suffering now and then is good for the soul.’
I started to turn away, and as the tram moved off, she was standing at the edge of the platform, hanging on to the handrail. ‘The Trocadero, Thursday,’ she called. ‘Seven-thirty. I’ll see you inside.’
It was like a miracle. So great was the release of energy that, instead of catching a tram myself in the opposite direction, I walked through the rain for a good mile and a half, feeling incredibly cheerful.
Some of this joy was soon displaced by a feeling of profound depression. Why on earth had I behaved in such a stupid way? It was past belief.
I finally caught a tram, and had the top deck to myself all the way to Ladywood Park, staring out into the darkness as we rattled along the track through the playing fields, alone with my thoughts.
I took them to Jake, naturally. Couldn’t possibly have gone to bed without seeing him. I told him everything as he brewed the tea and he took it all very calmly indeed.
‘But I don’t really see what’s worrying you, old sport,’ he said. ‘She’s seeing you again, isn’t she?’
