by Peter Rimmer
“Not to my knowledge, old cocker. Frightfully nice place, Soho.”
“Push off.”
“Not before we have a drink together, old chap… Tell you what. Been watching you. Bet you ten pounds I can drink a half-pint of this pub’s very small beer quicker than you, my man.”
Fred the Miller squeezed up his face and turned to look at the young drunk on the corner bar stool. “Let’s see your ten quid.”
After a few moments of fumbling for his wallet, Byron removed the precious notes and placed them gently on the bar, hoping his imitation of drunkenness was not being overdone. Without anyone asking, two half-pints were put in front of them and bets began flying around the bar.
“I ’ate people what spends money they don’t earn,” said Fred the Miller. “Daddy’s little boy or maybe mummy’s.”
Byron got to his feet and waited for the barman to count. Silence fell around the bar and on “Go!” Byron opened his gullet and poured, slamming his glass down a fraction ahead of Fred the Miller. Neither had spilt a drop, and both glasses were empty.
Byron gave the big man a quizzical look.
“Want to have another go, old chap, or was that too much for you?” Byron picked up his original ten pounds from the bar counter and left the other man’s stake as a challenge.
“Set ’em up, barman,” said big Fred, which was unnecessary. The third challenge was more difficult. Fred the Miller had sensed the trap. There were no side bets. When the big man lost again he looked across at Jack Pike. Everyone in the bar laughed except Fred the Miller but when he turned to take a swing at Byron, the bar stool was empty.
“I’ll break that little bugger’s neck.”
“Fair bet, Fred,” said the barman, “not a drop split.”
“You was ’ad, Fred,” said Jack Pike, coming to the bar. “Give ’im a drink on me.”
“That little sod’s got my thirty quid.”
“’Is thirty quid, Fred.”
“Make it a double Scotch,” he said to the barman.
“There’s an old saying, Fred my lad. However good you are at somethin’, there’s always someone better, see.”
“You set ’im up!” shouted Fred.
“We did, Fred, we did.”
“Where the bloody ’ell did you find ’im?”
“That was our bit of luck.”
“The bugger’s got an open gullet.”
“That ’e ’as, Fred. That ’e ’as.”
The pub closed at ten-thirty. The Pike family had lived above the pub for twenty years and saw no reason to move because they were rich. Their friends were all around them in Soho, a mix of cockney, Italian, Greek, Jewish, Chinese and anyone else who had managed to obtain permanent residence in the island. Jack liked the cosmopolitan atmosphere. Up and down the side streets, below the bright neon signs were girly clubs, peep shows, the Windmill Theatre with its nude shows that never closed, bars, restaurants, whores, pimps, con artists, street vendors, tricksters, showpeople, happy people, drunks: it was alive, twenty-four hours a day. Soho, like the Windmill, never closed.
Two gas fires were burning in the small parlour on the second floor and it was hot in the room. Jack Pike was down to his vest and trousers and young Johnny was yawning, ready for bed. Johnny had repeated the story of Byron as told to him in the bar and Jack Pike had listened to every word.
“Make a friend of ’im, Johnny. We’re goin’ to need a friend in the establishment. A front, so to speak. Spread our money out of Soho. That lad’s goin’ places. You think the LSD dots will work a second time?”
“Maybe not in the army, but the RAF doctors won’t ’ave seen it.”
“Just walked in the pub. Well I never. Just shows, son, mushrooms on your doorstep. You think our Fred saw the funny side?”
“No.”
“Then we’ll ’ave to watch it, won’t we? Walked right in the pub…”
By the time Byron stood in front of the RAF medical officer he thought he was going to die, anyway. To be sure of success, he had swallowed one dot an hour before the medical and the second an hour later. His mind had left his body, which seemed to be shaking in concert with his heartbeat. The interview was short and Byron was back on the street outside the Air Ministry before the first dot took full effect and the second dot began to work. The office had given him the day off and the spring day sprung to life in a thousand colours of joy and Byron began a game of chicken with the traffic in the Mall. He tried his best to do a handstand on the bonnet of a moving car and ran off down the centre of the wide road, calling to the pigeons. His trip went into full flight when he found himself in Green Park chasing the ducks and then floating in the ice-cold water, fully clothed in his one dark suit, smiling at the clouds in heaven. People kept away, crossing the lawns and the paths to avoid the dripping wet lunatic. For Byron, the day passed in euphoric joy, a happiness so intense he found senses of pleasure he had never known before. The hallucinations were perfect. All the secrets of pleasure were open to his eyes, flooding his enjoyment. Only in the dusk did he trip the light-fantastic home and fall onto his bed, still damp but intolerably happy. The night’s dreams were electric, the morning the day after death.
“What the hell did the Air Force do to you?” asked Lionel.
“Leave me alone, I’m dying.”
“You want a doctor?”
“Just leave me alone.”
“That’s some hangover, Byron. I’ll make your excuses. Another day at the Air Ministry. They won’t let you behave like that in the RAF. Discipline, old boy. You should have been fat like me.”
Jasmine Blackburn was a hedonist who liked men and Johnny Pike had been one of them. At twenty-two she had a good, firm body that she dressed provocatively without looking cheap. Her face was elfin with black hair to go with her name and her skin was rich and creamy with a natural dusting of red on her cheeks. Her nose was long, but not too long, her ears small but visible, but it was the dark, chocolate-brown eyes that did the tricks for her: she could draw a man across the room from fifty yards. She was in life for today and never thought of tomorrow, her wandering spirit inherited from her wandering father, the only man she was ever to truly love. He was her romantic knight from the past who had drifted round the colonies between the wars, coming back to England to join the army in 1939. At the end of 1945 he was forty-one, a captain, out of work and aware that the colonies would soon be given back to the natives. Worse, he was too old to freewheel down Africa, across Australia, up the Indian subcontinent where his charm and youth had brought him the price of everything. Jasmine had been sent back from Ceylon when she was three years old to live first with her grandparents and, when they died, with a maiden aunt who hated children. Her only link to happiness was the occasional visit from her father when the luck had turned his way with the price of the sea voyage back to England. Her mother was Anglo-Indian, very beautiful, more beautiful for her father as the years were spent and the multitude of stories she heard of the empire were spellbinding. As a child she never understood that rolling stones gathered no moss, and when she was old enough to understand she forgave her father his sins. By then he was a dashing lieutenant in uniform, unfortunately posted to intelligence at the War Office as he was considered too old to take part in the fighting.
Neither of them cared about money or permanent jobs and lived largely off their wits, always invited, always included. Jasmine had been told her mother died in India but on that point she had her doubts. Daddy was a roving man and maybe so was her mother.
Johnny put to her the proposition a month after Byron had received the first and only dressing down from his father which only Granda had stopped from coming to blows. According to Red Langton his son had let down the side. At first, Byron had tried to explain and then kept his silence. For Byron, there was only one side, his own, and it had no place for a government or the Air Force. He had left Langton Manor the same day he had arrived, driven to the railway station at Wareham by Granda who gave him a look of
pained understanding, a one pound note and the advice to stay away for the summer and write to his mother.
“I don’t take money, Johnny,” Jasmine had said. “I won’t be a whore. How can I take money for something I enjoy? You overpay me for working the switchboard as it is.”
“I know, love. It’s a nice fit, you could say. We both get what we want and looking after Byron is important to me and my dad.”
“Why?”
“’Cause we like ’im, that’s why. Double date on Saturday and bring someone nice for me.”
“What’s wrong with the lot that hangs around Soho?”
“They’re common.”
Jasmine Blackburn burst out laughing and kissed Johnny full on the mouth.
“What’s that for?”
“Everyone wants what they haven’t got. Silly, really. If we both want the other, neither can be much good, can they?… Saturday night.”
“Buy a new dress. Dad said so.”
“You really are very sweet.”
“I know.”
Jasmine preferred young men as with them she did not have to appear intelligent, put on a pose, be what she was not. Her life was to be enjoyed, not philosophised into depression. They had arranged to meet at a Soho jazz club. The other girl was mediocre to look at as Jasmine Blackburn never introduced her own competition. She knew Byron was of a different class to Johnny, though class was of little importance in her life. She told everyone she was colonial, which kept most doors open.
Byron was an inch or two under six feet and not what she had expected, a public schoolboy wet behind the ears with an accent that pained her ears. The young man that smiled at her was neither wholly poof, as his name had conjured, or athletic, as his record suggested. Johnny had briefed her well on the background of the Langtons, an old landed family being picked apart by the socialists, the old home falling into genteel decay with a bemused owner who had done what he was asked to do to win the war and found himself the target of the new, socialist England which he did not understand. She had given Byron a cursory look before introducing her slightly mousy friend and then been swallowed up by the noise.
She watched him. The hands were surprisingly big with thick, powerful fingers that would surround a cricket ball with ease. She could not imagine them playing the piano. The face that drew her eyes projected a still, unblinking look from almost violet eyes. The face was square, the chin strong and deeply dimpled, the colouring fair with thick light-brown hair that flowed from a right-hand parting in a gentle wave across the top of the head, long and gently curling at the back. The skin had cleared from a spotty youth and in a year’s time would leave no trace of his adolescence. For a man so young, still a boy by some standards, he was supremely comfortable and full of confidence. In years to come the well-built athletic body would go to fat but that impediment would only come to him in his forties. Johnny had told her he was a virgin which she found difficult to believe. If he was, then it was by his own choice or plain lack of opportunity. Jasmine was glad when at the intermission Johnny suggested they go as his guests to an Indian restaurant where the owner owed his father a favour. She was slightly impressed when Byron said he had no money, not as an apology but as a statement of fact which said quite clearly, take me as I am or not at all. They left the noise and overpowering smell of chlorine and came up the stairs to the sweeter air in the street. The light was fading from the summer night and she guessed it was more ten o’clock. The smell of lime trees reached them from a side street as they crossed the road to the small restaurant. Byron had taken up position next to her mousy friend which was not what had been planned.
The table to which they were shown was round and small and covered with a big white tablecloth so Jasmine had a man on either side as did her friend. She watched Byron let the others talk, turning his face to whichever one was talking. He gave the impression of listening to every word and maybe he was. Their eye contact was fleeting, polite even, but the brief looks said nothing, not even the silent bite of interest. She leant forward and dropped open the front of her dress but his eyes stayed looking at her face as she spoke. She heard the story of his drinking competition with Fred the Miller but from Johnny. She heard his father was a famous bomber pilot but from Johnny, and from the same source she heard he had turned down a scholarship to Oxford, preferring to clerk for a stockbroker in the City.
“When do you go into the army?” she asked.
“I failed my medical.”
“You?” and when Johnny burst out laughing she asked, “Heart problems?”
“Exactly.”
“With some help from your friend?” Jasmine was smiling.
“I don’t have the time to waste.”
“Why?”
“I have to catch up with all those people who have started with money.” It was the only insight into himself she had heard.
“You intend to get rich?” she asked seriously.
“Oh, yes. There isn’t any point in life unless you are rich. The best things in life being free is a lot of poppycock.”
“How long will it take you?”
“I don’t know yet. I have to learn.”
“Do you want to come back to my flat for coffee and talk about it?”
“Why ever not?”
The bastard. He knew he was going to sleep with her all along. She was merely part of his learning curve.
For Byron she was the first and men always remember their first sex and their last. In ten weeks she taught him and not once did she envy the future women in his life. Everything the man did was calculated. If Johnny and his father thought they were going to use Byron Langton, they had better think again. The boot was already on the other foot. The penetrating look of the violet eyes, deep into her secret thoughts, made her shiver and want to bed him, the only place the terms were even. Neither of them were to forget the other.
3
Josephine Langton, Byron’s twin sister, was the only member of the family who did not think Byron was wrong avoiding his national service. The forces were establishment, with ninety-five per cent of the officers from public schools swearing allegiance to the King and not the socialist government. Money and power were in the hands of the few and the distribution of wealth and resources was out of all proportion.
Jo cut her dark, almost black hair in a fringe, wore no make-up, not even powder or lipstick, and her clothes were best suited to a nunnery. Her features were as feminine as Byron’s were masculine but a man had to have a good imagination to realise the potential hidden under the disguise of her socialist fury. She had told herself from the age of fifteen she was not wasting her life breeding the next generation while in captivity to a man. Uncle Cliff had shown her another world could exist for women, a world where they made their own decisions and led a life that was independent of the whims of men.
By dint of hard work, fuelled by desperation to get out of the trap planned for her life, she had won a bursary to the London School of Economics to study PPE (philosophy, politics and economics), all of which she considered the cornerstones of social welfare. The bursary paid her tuition but not the necessities of life and the typewriter she taught herself to use proficiently was the instrument that paid for her rent and food. Hilary was at Stanmore in his second year; Will at prep school where at last he had learnt to read. Even if there had been any money for her tertiary education, Jo would have refused any help. Her crusade had begun.
The bedsitter in Notting Hill Gate was just big enough for two single beds with a coffee table in between. At the end of the beds next to the door was a bricked up fireplace, a gas heater and single-ring gas cooker. Above the head of the beds was a sash window with a view over rooftops. Jo’s room-mate, Sofia Freemantle, was also at LSE, a feminist and a card-carrying member of the British Communist Party. She also affected a severe dress code and was trying to make herself a lesbian in her wholesale rejection of men. They lived off vegetable stew and brown bread and tea and neither of them ever stopped ta
lking. If it had not been for Uncle Cliff leading her into the Labour Party which employed her typewriter at night for cash, she would have joined the communists.
They were as happy as eighteen-year-olds can be in their first flush of independence. They were room-mates, best friends and would have been lovers if their normal hormones had not been at work under their façades. They touched and kissed and once tried to fondle but the minds were weaker than the flesh and the grope in the dark came to nothing.
For Jo and Sofia, every which way the world was being run was wrong. There was enough food production in the world but over a billion people were starving. The world’s knowledge was known to a small minority and the colonial powers tried hard to prevent their colonial subjects from learning anything, determined not to create competition. They discussed it all well into the nights. While the rich of the world flaunted their excess, further down the class structure the majority of people were living in poverty. ‘A rich man had quick access to medicine, a poor man died.’ Sofia argued, in the Third World most of the people died before they were forty. The rich grew richer, and the poor stayed exactly where they were.
The world was unjust, unhappy and Jo and Sofia thought their hours of heated conversation were going to make it change. Through eighteen-year-old, idealistic eyes, the solutions were obvious, simple, long overdue and only required the destruction of the ruling classes to eliminate war, distribute food instead of destroying surpluses to maintain inflated prices, educate everyone and make the world one blissful, socialist, caring paradise. Man had the knowledge, the science and the means to remove poverty and illiteracy from the face of the earth. All the world lacked was good government.
Sofia’s dream was one world government run by the people, for the people with wealth distribution according to each man and woman’s needs. Everything had to belong to the people, for the people and each individual in the world had the right to take what was needed to sustain physical needs. A nuclear physicist, according to Sofia, would receive the same reward for his labour as a peasant in the fields as each of them worked the same number of hours and a peasant working the fields was more beneficial to mankind than the scientist who had found a way to destroy the history of man in a minute of time. There were all manner of people in the world, she argued, each a vital cog in the greater machine and all deserved the same reward as without each other the machine would stop. ‘A factory of bosses produces not a car,’ was Sofia’s favourite expression.
