by Peter Rimmer
A knock on the door made him snuggle right under the bedclothes, pretending he was still asleep. The door opened wide and the dogs bolted. Josephine saw the fire and the lump under the blankets. In the excitement of Christmas she had not been sick.
“Get up, sleepyhead,” she said.
Quietly she moved up to the bed and threw back the clothes.
“Is there a bicycle under the tree?” asked Will, smiling at his sister.
“How should I know?”
“You could have looked.”
“We leave for church in an hour. Everyone’s going, and that includes the cook, so there won’t be any breakfast.”
“No breakfast?” Will sat straight up and hugged his knees.
“I’ll boil you an egg.”
“Thanks, Josephine.”
“Happy Christmas.”
“Happy Christmas.”
“Put the screen in front of the fire before you come down.”
The old cypress trees protected the ancient church. The graves were old and mostly neglected, the headstones angled to the weak winter sun that gave light but no warmth. The people of Langton Matravers were filing through the lichgate. The church bells were pealing the joy of Christ’s birth and man had come to worship, to thank their Maker for life with all its joy and sorrow, to find their reason for life in God.
Will was well wrapped up against the cold and Granda was coughing, the bowl of his pipe still warm in his greatcoat pocket. Hilary had gone on ahead to join the choir. Adelaide rested her gloved hand through the group captain’s arm and was leaning slightly against her husband, her small fur hat well over her ears. Byron walked beside Jasmine Blackburn but neither had talked since leaving the car. Cliff Critchley broke off an animated conversation with Great-Aunt Eve as they approached the church. The tall, grey-haired German, Wolfgang Baumann, walked next to Josephine, happy the family had accepted him even if they had not welcomed him with open arms. Two old uncles trudged along together, widowed and left alone to end their days on earth.
Will had put on two pairs of socks to keep out the cold as he stepped on the old Norman stones that led him into the church, surrounded by bigger people in heavy overcoats. Squashed inside the church it was freezing, despite the puny efforts of oil stoves scattered down the aisles, puffing oily smoke up at the distant, blackened rafters that had watched the people of the village for eight hundred years. The stone pillars were hung with holly; Christmas chrysanthemums that had come from the heated greenhouse at Langton Manor looked splendid around each side of the altar. The organist, who was also the sexton, was playing mournful music to put everyone in the proper frame of mind. After entering the church no one spoke. Will followed the broad back of his father to the left front family pew, the wooden bench worn thin by the sliding bottoms of Langton generations. Each member of the family knelt and prayed. When the church was packed full, including the folding chairs a churchwarden had set up in the aisles, a few lucky parishioners with feet to the stoves, the choir filed into the stalls and the vicar took his place facing the altar, the whole parish united in the worship of God.
“Let us pray,” said the vicar and everyone, from the rich to the poor, fell to their knees in unison, each well knowing his place in the way of things, the allotted lifespan, the allotted life.
“Let there be peace among men,” he called up to his God. With a war just finished he had the attention of every man and woman.
The choir began the first hymn, and the congregation joined the singing. Will soon lost the thread and tried to catch Hilary’s attention. His best friend was in a white surplice with a black ruffled collar, singing in the third row of the choir and, unbeknown to Will, having difficulty singing the treble notes he had learnt. After fidgeting for a few moments Will gave up and went back to dreaming about a bicycle.
The vicar stood outside his church in the wintry sun, shaking the grown-up hands, everyone glad the sermon had not been long. To Will’s surprise, the vicar put out his white, puffy hand and Will found his own engulfed in soft, silky flesh.
“Stanmore next year is it, young man?” said the vicar.
Will looked up at the man in his white surplice and smiled.
“Football team this year, I hear,” continued the vicar.
Again Will smiled. With New Year so close, the vicar’s years were lost to him. He shuffled forward in the crowd, the people still solemn around the vicar, the less religious nearer the cars and the footpath that led the poorer to their homes.
The vicar stood for a moment when the last parishioner had passed him by. With the war over four years ago, he wondered how much longer they would turn to God for solace. There was Hilary Bains bent on the Church to find his dead father and mother. Red Langton, bomber pilot, with the horror of burning Dresden, the wilful destruction of Nagasaki to live with him all his years, looking to God for the answer why. Maybe some more. But with better times the rest would forget their faith, leaving God to those who were suffering. Stamping his feet, he went back into the empty church to pray alone, to comfort his sadness.
The light had been fading for half an hour when Will drew up his new bicycle at the living room window where he propped it up carefully against the red brick wall. It was half-past three and the family Christmas lunch had been over for an hour. A snap of evening frost coated the window panes and Will had to breathe on the thin layer of ice before he could rub a patch clean enough to look inside the long room with the fires at either end. Only grown-ups were in the room, the children having gone to play with their presents. The two uncles were sprawled on the same couch, fast asleep, their jaws open, hands clasped across full bellies which rose and fell. Around the room his family were enjoying the best part of their Christmas, a snooze in the warm room. The dogs were sprawled at the feet of each fire and the cats were asleep on the arms of the chairs. Cracked nuts littered the whole carpet. Small glasses of what once had held port sat on the side tables next to the men and Great-Aunt Eve. Surprisingly, the German was fast asleep in a chair, no sign of Josephine, Byron or any of the cousins. Slowly, the patch in the window clouded and though Will was left outside with the cold, he felt warm and part of it all. They were his family.
The February night air was freezing and the lamp post three away was hidden in the London smog, the light a yellow glow. Footsteps crossed from the other side of Greek Street and Byron turned to face the sound.
“This your girlfriend?” asked a cockney voice.
“My sister,” said Byron, “my twin sister.”
“Have it as you will, mate. Come on, luv, no point waitin’.”
Josephine followed him into the smog, Byron left behind with the night. The sound of the traffic from Piccadilly was muffled and after three street turns she was lost, her mind numb. The man stopped and knocked and the door opened and Josephine was walking on a threadbare runner carpet that led up a wooden flight of stairs, a young girl leading the way, the man from the street having vanished into the smog. At the second landing the girl pushed open a wooden door and the pervasive smell of gin wafted onto the landing. Josephine followed the girl into the badly lit room; the only furniture was a high bed with a red rubber sheet covering the top.
“Better take your clothes off, ducks… Don’t you worry, been doin’ this for twenty years and never ’ad no problems. Want a gin? Better you ’ad. Couple of good ones, I say, and you know nothing, feel nothin’. You can put the money on the table… Whore I was, but you can’t make money out of whorin’ after forty, you mark my words.”
The gin tasted bad and Josephine pinched her nose and swallowed, handing back the tumbler. She took and swallowed the second glass before taking off her skirt, stockings and panties. The room was warm from an old gas heater next to the bed.
“Ships that pass in the night, ducky. What we are.” She was counting the money. Satisfied, she put it in a cupboard, in a cardboard box.
“Exactly right… One thing about us English, we never cheat each other. Now, you get
up on the bed ducks, lie back and bring your knees up, like wide open. Give me room. Close your eyes and let the gin swill your brains. ’Ad a couple myself.” She was mumbling.
The sound of washing hands from the corner basin came to Josephine behind her tightly closed eyes. Byron had made her drink two glasses of whisky in the ladies’ bar where she had met Johnny Pike for the first time. The smell of stale gin came nearer as the old woman bent to her work and Josephine felt strong hands on her thighs pushing them open. The old woman’s hand groped, pushing into her womb, filling her body and mind. She could feel the woman’s fingers searching. Waves of gin were detaching her mind from the groping hand in her womb. A sharp, searing pain made her eyes start open as the new life was wrenched from her body and the gin and vomit spurted from her mouth. The old woman turned away from the bed and went out of the room, closing the door and leaving Josephine with vomit covering her face. A distant toilet flushed and tears of horror began.
The old woman came back and washed her hands in the corner basin, bringing a damp clean towel and a bowl of warm water. Josephine could smell the Dettol in the water over the smell of gin. The gas fire flared and went out and the woman put a shilling in the meter before coming back to the bed.
“You cry, luv. Best thing about us people is memory fades. An’ I should know… Never understood what life was about in the first place. Now, let’s get you cleaned up and out of ’ere. Life stinks a lot more than this room, ducks. You mark my word. You just startin’ down the agony road.”
The young girl led her into the street and the freezing cold. The two sanitary towels already felt wet. She was soberer than before the abortion. The smog of smoke swallowed them up as she followed the girl in and out the back streets. After ten minutes she recognised the lights of Greek Street where the evening had begun. When she turned to the girl, she was alone in the street with the babble of voices from the bar muffled by the night and the noise of traffic behind. The theatres would be coming out in half an hour, thought Josephine and pushed her way into the pub and its noise. Byron was waiting for her alone at the end of the bar.
Byron saw she was ashen white, the violet eyes stark against the white, her hair wet at the back of her head. The two sets of identical eyes watched each other for a moment.
“You all right, Josephine?”
“No,” she whispered. “I’m bleeding badly. We’d better find a doctor, Byron, or I think I’m going to die. Matter of fact, I feel like dying anyway.”
Johnny had been watching from the far side of the bar and caught the nod from Byron. Within three minutes of a phone call being made, Josephine was in a taxi on her way to South Kensington and a gynaecologist who performed a D and C, stopping the haemorrhage. She was driven under sedation to Byron’s flat, the one he still shared with Lionel Marjoribanks, where she was put to bed. Byron slept on the couch. Once again he had thought ahead and saved a disaster. Well satisfied, he went to sleep. What he did not know was that his sister would never be able to have children.
Further away in Holland Park, Wolfgang Baumann slept through the night undisturbed. He had not seen Josephine after she had moved out of his flat without a word. He was never to know that his child had died that night, the only child he was ever to have.
Part 2
1955 to 1959
1
In 1955, Byron, twenty-four, was convinced the British Empire was heading for extinction and was unable to understand young Will running off to Africa in the wake of Hilary Bains. The young brother had thought himself in love.
Byron had moved out of Lionel’s flat the previous year though he still worked for Logan, Smith and Marjoribanks. Johnny Pike was his constant companion. Byron’s flat in Knightsbridge, opposite Harrods, was perfect for a predatory bachelor with tax-free cash in his pocket.
Jack Pike, Johnny’s father, racketeer, had put him on the right track towards the end of the Labour Party’s five years in office.
“They make the rules but it don’t make ’em right, see,” he said to Byron. “Just ’cause the majority don’t ’ave no money, don’t give ’em rights to make laws to steal my money. Who ever thought of being daft enough to go into business and pay some other bleeder nineteen-and-six-pence in the pound for doin’ nothin’, see? Bein’ outside the law, so to speak, means bein’ outside the income tax act which suits me. Thing is, we got to get the money where the government don’t know, which is where you come in, Byron. You watch those money people in the City to see how we can filter our money and whatever you filter for Jack Pike I’ll give you two and a half per cent in cash, but it got to be legal when it come out the other end. The government makes all them laws to benefit the politicians, and it’s up to us to find the ways round.”
For three years, Byron studied the problem while he learnt the trade of merchant banking. Exchange control regulations brought in by the socialists to stem the flight of sterling prevented money being transferred overseas through the banks. Even banking the cash earned by Jack Pike’s rackets in prostitution, peep shows and pornography would have left a trail for the taxman. Money collected in US dollars was easy to send out to Switzerland where the bank accounts were numbered and private. The problem was the bulk of the money in British pounds.
Britain under the new Tory government of Anthony Eden, who had taken over as prime minister when Winston Churchill retired for the second time, was determined to attract foreign investment into the country still ravaged by the consequences of war and the constant flow of money and people to America: war debt had mortgaged the empire.
Byron’s first exercise was to create a series of dummy companies in England with the shares owned in Switzerland, through the numbered account into which Jack Pike’s smuggled US dollars flowed. The dummy companies then imported goods into England against letters of credit paid for in cash from the Pike rackets in England which were then paid into Jack’s numbered bank account in Switzerland, less the actual cost of the goods. The dummy companies grossly overpaid for the imports. The fraud was in the certified invoice which overstated the importation.
Should a dummy company be found out by the British police it would have been dropped and the Swiss exporter accused of short delivery. The police would also find untraceable cash had been used to create the letter of credit. The trail stopped with the cash in England and the unbreakable numbered bank account in Switzerland. No finger could ever point at Jack Pike. The gnomes in Switzerland were growing rich under their banking laws of non-disclosure. As Jack Pike said, it was his money anyway.
After the first ten transactions had run smoothly, Byron knew he was going to be rich. His front of legitimacy was maintained at Logan, Smith and Marjoribanks and the word was spread that the source of Byron’s new wealth was Red Langton. He earned cash and spent cash and Byron’s private life ran as smoothly as the companies that laundered Jack Pike’s money into Switzerland.
Virginia Stepping and Fanny Try shared a one-room flat three streets behind Byron and worked as sales girls at Harrods, Virginia in cosmetics and Fanny in lingerie. Emblazoned on the entrance to their flat was the invitation ‘Stepping and Try’.
Byron had met Fanny when he was walking down Kensington High Street with a bag of groceries, entranced by a tight, rhythmic movement coming from within a tight pencil skirt. When the young lady turned fortuitously into Byron’s street he caught a flash of firm, tight breasts and followed.
The girl turned round and snapped at him. “You following me?”
“Actually this is my block of flats,” he said and began to walk up the short flight of steps towards the ornate entrance to Buckingham Court. When he reached the top, he smiled. “And you’re welcome to come up for a drink. I’m Byron Langton,” he said, giving her a dazzling smile.
She had turned round to look up at him. Flicking her long, brown hair back over her shoulders she gave him a fixed glare before striding on down the street. She had very long legs and the walk of a cat.
Byron shrugged his shoulde
rs and let himself into the foyer of the block of flats.
Not ten minutes later his phone rang in the flat and a strange voice, female, asked him if his name was Byron Langton.
“Who’s that?” he questioned lightly.
“Virginia Stepping. My flatmate is a little shy. You just met her in the street… Do you have a friend?”
“The one with the tight…”
“With a chaperone she would be happy to come for a drink, probably several drinks…”
“Johnny will be here in half an hour. We were going out to eat. Seven o’clock. Number forty-seven. What’s your friend’s name?”
“Fanny Try.”
“Is that her real name?”
“Checked her passport.” The girl let out a small giggle. “What’s he like?”
“No girl I ever knew was disappointed.”
“We were just saying the weekend looked disappointing.”
“So were we.”
They laughed and put down their phones. Byron dialled Johnny Pike.
“If the flatmate looks like the one I saw in the street, you’re in luck, Johnny boy. Seven o’clock.”
Byron disliked jazz clubs or any other place of noise when he was chatting up a girl, believing talk, expensive food and wine were the way to sexual gratification. Two drinks in the flat and a taxi to a small Polish restaurant that kept their vodka in the freezer was followed by more drinks at Buckingham Court. When Fanny helped him fill the second ice bucket in the kitchen, they heard the click of the front door and found an empty lounge, the music playing softly.
“Blind dates don’t always work for Virginia,” was all she said as she put down the ice bucket, picked up their wine glasses and said over her shoulder, “I enjoyed this evening.”
