After the Cabaret

by Hilary Bailey

  ‘He responded, “Don’t get in a state, Bruno. She’s not a spy. Not if it’s really Sally. And if she is, put out the flags. If she’s spying for the Germans they’ll have surrendered by Christmas from sheer despair.”

  ‘“She’s come from St Malo, wearing a suit bought in Paris. She has a pair of silk stockings, also French. Be serious, Briggs,” I urged him.

  ‘“I am,” he said. “From what you say, she thinks she can stay here. Well, she can’t. Sally and her little illegitimate must take to the highroad before nightfall – better still, the moment she wakes up.”

  ‘“She asked me about somebody called Theo. She said it was urgent to find him.”

  ‘Briggs said, “Ah. So Theo’s the villain of the piece. Well, I can’t say I’m surprised. But there’s no point in her trying to find Theo Fitzpatrick and get him to take over because, first, he can’t be found and, second, even if he could be, he wouldn’t.”

  ‘“Even so, you should tell the authorities about her,” I said.

  ‘Briggs laughed. “About Sally? The authorities? Sometimes you’re very German, Bruno.”’

  Chapter 7

  Bruno said to Greg, ‘Briggs told me, “I have a meeting at two o’clock. You must get her out by the afternoon, old chap. I can’t face finding her and the infant here when I get back. Here’s five pounds.” Which he handed me. And departed. Leaving me to wake her up and send her off. I gave her another couple of hours’ sleep. I know what it’s like to have been on the run. It had happened to me five years earlier – but that is another story.’

  Suddenly Bruno stopped speaking. He said, as if surprised, ‘You know, I find this tiring. I have not thought of these things for many years. It seems so strange in London, now, to be looking back so far.’ He paused for a moment, then went on, ‘So – I knew what being a fugitive was like, as I say. Two hours later I woke her up. The baby, beside her in the bed, began to cry. I told her, “Briggs came back. He says you must go.”

  ‘She sat up in bed, naked, and all she said was, “Damn. I might have known it.” Then she grinned and said, “I can imagine how glad the family will be to see me after so long, especially with Gisela.” Then she got out of bed, with nothing on, went to the bathroom and came back struggling into her slip, which she had evidently rinsed out and hung up to dry. “There’s nothing like it, I can tell you, the feeling of struggling into a wet petticoat,” she told me. But I had seen my sisters doing the same, in Berlin. She got her suspender belt and started to pull on her stockings.

  ‘“Your baby has wet the bed,” I told her, when I looked at the sheets. It was screaming now.

  ‘“I’m sorry, Bruno. But there it is. That’s the worst of babies,” she told me. “Oh, God,” she groaned, then, “Oh, God.” She seemed overcome with grief.

  ‘“What?” I asked.

  ‘“I’ll have to go back to the family. Oh God – mother and father aren’t going to like this at all. Maman is French. She’s very correct. I used to pretend she was English, just to cheer myself up.” She groaned again. Then she pulled herself together, did up her suspenders and said, “Well, there’s not much choice, not with this baby.” She got into her stained suit, stood in front of the mirror and began to put on makeup.

  ‘Briggs kept his room very tidy. The furniture also belonged to Sir Peveril Jones and it was new, clean, pale-coloured, as was the carpet. I slept in the dressing room through a door, just a small bed, a wardrobe – maybe to keep up the conventions but, more because Briggs liked his privacy.

  ‘“Who else lives here?” Sally asked, putting on lipstick. I told her. “God, what a crew,” she said. “Alexander Briggs, Adrian Pym, you, Julia Montrose. You’d think they’d give a girl and her baby a bed for the night.” But she didn’t argue. She had been on the run and when they ask you to go you go, without argument. “You’re queer?” she asked, slapping a powder puff all over her face. It looked strange when she did that in that room, I can tell you.

  ‘“Of course,” I said.

  ‘“Thought I didn’t get much response from you wearing only my birthday suit,” she said, with a smile. Well, she had a pretty figure, and a pretty face, also, with those big dark eyes and the full mouth. Very good teeth, also. I suppose she was accustomed to getting a reaction from men.

  ‘And she left that day. I gave her Alexander’s five-pound note, and a flannel shirt for the baby and a hand-towel for its bottom, with pins, so it wouldn’t foul itself on the journey. As she left she asked, “Any news of Theo Fitzpatrick?” and I shook my head. “I’ll come back and ask again,” she promised and, baby under one arm, still crying, she marched off down the street, turning half-way down to fling up her arm, fist clenched, in a Communist salute.

  ‘You can imagine – I breathed a sigh of relief and went back inside to clear up. She was very untidy, Sally. You’ll want to know what I thought of her. Well, I didn’t hate her. I didn’t love her either. She was privileged, you see. OK, she was of the left, but when it came down to it there was the same old bourgeois background. A cold home, perhaps. But a cold home is better than no home at all. And then, look at what I was – gay, queer, a friend of Dorothy, one of those, whatever you call it.’

  Chapter 8

  ‘It was a nightmare at Pontifex Street,’ Sally told her father and stepmother some weeks later over breakfast. Through the window, the roses were out in the garden, and beyond lay the orchard, the farms, then the green swell of the Malvern hills. ‘The atmosphere’s gruesome, like a haunted house or something.’

  Sally’s father might have been listening. Sally’s mother was not. Paris, her home, had fallen to the German Army. They had marched victoriously through Napoleon’s Arc de Triomphe. Her heart seemed too numb for grief, her body felt like lead. She could scarcely bear to think of the defeat of France, her family and friends abandoned in that occupied country. Equally she could hardly bear to hear Sally’s prattle, except to wish that she was more like her younger sister.

  ‘I suppose it would have been difficult, with so many on the premises,’ Harold Jackson-Bowles remarked, with some restraint. For several days after Sally had rung, late at night, from the station, he had shown no restraint at all. He had ranted and raved. Sally’s absence – two years without a word, then out of the blue her unexpected arrival at the station, asking to be picked up, perhaps she didn’t realise petrol was rationed – was of minor importance. Of more note, though, was – what she had been doing all that time. Parents, surely, had a right to know what their daughter was up to. The major issue, of course, was the baby Gisela, and who the father was.

  Sally had borne almost wordlessly the attack, the questions, the appeals to common sense, smoking all the time, and in the face of her lack of response her father had wound down, finally, like a clockwork toy. Harry Jackson-Bowles was tired. Although he was long retired, a country gentleman now, he had been forced to go back to his factories, because both his managers had been called up, and he was now turning out soldiers’ khaki shirts and drawers at an enormous rate. The women were doing three shifts a day in Birmingham, and Harry Jackson-Bowles four days a week. On top of that there was the anxiety. No one knew if the Nazis would invade but they had already conquered six countries in under a year. Who knew if they might not be coming up the drive at any moment? And his heart was heavy for his wife, Geneviève, and her friends and relatives who, though they had never been very nice to him, were under the iron heel.

  Geneviève Jackson-Bowles, formerly Février de Roche, thought of her sister and brother-in-law in the big, high-ceilinged flat overlooking the Luxembourg Gardens, her nephews, Benoît and Charles, her other sister, Clothilde and her husband. Where were they? What was happening to them now? How many would survive? Would she ever see them again? Such thoughts must be suppressed or she would go mad, thought Geneviève.

  She looked at Sally, still in a Chinese dressing-gown (where had that come from?) at the breakfast table at eight thirty in the morning. How pretty she could be, if she to
ok care of herself – her carriage, her expression, her feet, hands, nails, skin, her hair. Why was she so badly regulated, so careless, physically and morally? She was a cross that Geneviève had to carry. It was on account of Sally that she, Geneviève, to her own family was still known as ‘poor Geneviève’, ‘la pauvre’.

  Geneviève came of a prosperous, conservative family, in which life moved calmly and to a strict routine. On a certain date each year they all moved for the holidays from the city to the Normandy farm. On a second date, they returned to the big apartment in Paris. In autumn, they made preserves. In Lent, they fasted. In Paris the carpets were taken up for the summer, in September they were replaced. The domestic patterns were as orderly, the family finances conducted as frugally, as those of the convents in which the women of the family had received their early training. They married in the small circles in which they lived – unions that were not quite arranged but almost.

  Geneviève broke the pattern when handsome Captain Jackson-Bowles of the Lancashire Fusiliers was brought home on leave from the trenches during the Great War by a relative in the French Army. Geneviève fell in love with Harry Jackson-Bowles and married him – an Englishman, a Protestant and a self-made man, a manufacturer. That was when she had become ‘poor Geneviève’ to her family. But had it not been for Sally, with a successful marriage on her side, sooner or later she would have lost that name. Instead it was still ‘poor Geneviève’ and ‘Sally – always something new with Sally’, spoken in a way that, while it said little, said everything.

  There had been Germany. Then the scandal when Sally went to Spain with a man – of the left! – prepared to fight on the wrong side! And now this baby, whose father she would not even name. At least, thought Geneviève, she could not undertake the painful duty of breaking this last sad piece of news to her sister Madeleine, so that she in turn could break it gently to Great-aunt Marie Claire in her convent. For there would be no news in or out of France for a long time. Geneviève did not permit herself to sigh. Instead she said, ‘I think, if you have both finished your breakfast, you would like to go for a walk now, to talk.’ The English often talked better to each other while walking in the open air, she knew. And Harry must find out the identity of the baby’s father.

  She watched father and daughter leave the house together. Perhaps it would have been better if Sally had been a boy, she thought, as she often had before. Behaviour such as Sally’s was acceptable in a boy, not in a girl. That there was an excellent reason for this rule was indisputable: upstairs, in a cradle, lay the evidence.

  Sally and her father were in the orchard. As they passed the lawn, half dug up now for vegetables, Harry Bowles had said, ‘In six months’ time there’ll be no food, none at all.’ Now he said, ‘Sally, we’re very upset. This baby – if only you’d tell us who her father is. Perhaps I could speak to him. Something must be arranged. My God, Sally,’ he burst out, ‘imagine a birth certificate saying “father unknown”. It’s too bad. It’s a disgrace.’

  To this Sally made no answer. Harry grew angry. ‘You’ve been a cross to carry for your poor mother from the word go,’ he said hotly. ‘You’re a silly girl. A very silly girl.’ He turned away from his daughter and walked back to the house.

  He’d always called her a silly girl, thought Sally. He was probably right. She kicked the gnarled old trunk of a Cox’s Orange Pippin. Too early for that satisfying, wasteful thump of apples falling to the ground. She’d have to wait until September for that, she thought, and she wouldn’t be here in September. In fact, she’d better get out as soon as she could pack her suitcase.

  Chapter 9

  ‘Well, my dear, you’d have done far better to stay where you were,’ Cora Blow remarked comfortably, from her deep chintz-covered armchair. She and Sally were alone in her cosy sitting room on the first floor of the Hotel Bessemer, which Cora owned. Situated in Bessemer Street behind Wigmore Street, behind Oxford Street, on the fringes of the area known as Mayfair, the hotel was on the edge of respectability, much as Cora herself had been on the edge of fashionable society for some fifty years. Her little tables, relics of an Edwardian past, were crowded with ornaments and framed photographs of a young and beautiful Cora with the notables of two generations – Cora in a big hat and a bustle with the old Prince of Wales, later Edward VII, Cora in a small hat and Chanel suit with the later Prince of Wales, who was now the Duke of Windsor, and Mrs Simpson. Other photographs showed Cora with a bouquet, Cora at the races, Cora at Cowes with a Balkan prince, Cora in Monte Carlo.

  How she had come by the big, faded hotel in Bessemer Street, the width of two houses, with a portico in front, no one really knew. Someone had been grateful to her for something, and had rewarded her accordingly – unless she’d won it gambling. Those who knew the details never told.

  Now she ran the hotel as a private kingdom, assisted by the head hall porter, Bates, her alter ego. There were twenty bedrooms but Cora was quite capable of turning away would-be guests when most were empty – because they were middle class, because they were Americans, because they were musicians. Cora liked aristocrats and loved artists but hated the middle class and musicians. In her hotel Cora’s whims were law.

  Now Sally gazed ingenuously at Cora, who, for this morning interview, was wearing a vast dark red peignoir, with plenty of ruffles. Her grey hair was bundled roughly on top of her head and she was smoking a thin cigar.

  In turn Cora appraised Sally, thinking, Pretty, untidy dresser, nice eyes, pale. Where does she come from? Something about a Mile Février de Roche and a bourgeois marriage with a certain Jackson-Bowles. Cora was a walking Who’s Who and Almanach de Gotha, but she knew all the secrets behind their pages, too. In a hotelier this pays.

  ‘Well, my dear,’ she said, rising to pour the first gin of the day and gesturing vaguely with the cigar at Sally – who, as befitted a would-be employee, shook her head, ‘well, dear, as I say, you’d do better to stay in the country, plenty of butter there, eggs, further away from the struggle, as you might put it, but in the circumstances, with all the staff shortages, why not? You can have the little room in the attics, so recently vacated by Doris Strong, who decided to run off and join the Army. That’s the snag, though. How long will you be here before they start putting women into war work?’

  ‘War work?’ Sally wondered.

  ‘Yes. I’ve heard a whisper they may order all the women into factories or make them work on farms, planting potatoes and milking cows. I don’t know how to keep this place going without staff. We’ll manage, I suppose.’

  ‘I’ve got a baby,’ Sally announced.

  ‘A widow,’ Cora declared, with Edwardian firmness. ‘Well, as long as you don’t bring it here to disturb my guests you will be quite suitable. The Government will probably exempt mothers from forced labour. So all’s for the best. Go and see Mr Bates about the details.’

  ‘Thank you, Mrs Blow,’ said Sally, standing up.

  As she opened the door Cora said to her back, ‘Oh – no hanky-panky with the guests, that goes without saying.’ I do not think, she added silently to the closed door. Still, she needed someone. The girl said she was a friend of Mr Fitzpatrick’s – Cora knew what that must mean.

  As she descended the sweeping marble staircase to the hall, Sally reflected that Cora had not told her what her duties would be, or, which was important, how much she would be paid.

  Frederick Bates had stood on the cold marble floor of the Bessemer behind his mahogany desk for as long as anyone could remember. Those who had faced his neutral eyes on visits to London in short trousers during their school holidays and were now dignified grown men still retained a healthy respect for Bates. They felt much the same about Cora, whom they saw as the most capricious, arbitrary school matron ever, rewarding and punishing as she saw fit.

  From behind his desk, Bates said, ‘Wages? Hah. Chance would be a fine thing. Pays you when she feels like it, which isn’t often. That’s Cora Blow for you. Still, you’ve got a roof over your
head. That’s something. And where’s your gas mask? You can be arrested for not carrying one.’

  ‘I’ll go and get one,’ Sally promised. ‘By the way, Mr Bates, do you know how to register a baby?’

  ‘As a what?’ asked Bates.

  Sally stared at him. ‘As a baby, of course,’ she responded.

  ‘Ask a policeman,’ he said promptly.

  As she left he studied her pink-clad back and muttered, ‘French suit! Get a gas mask? Where does she think she’ll go for it – Harrods? And registering a baby? She’d better not bring it here.’

  Two officers in the uniform of the Free French came up to the desk. Bates said, in French, ‘Good morning, officers. How may I help you?’

  Chapter 10

  Greg’s mouth was dry. He gazed, astonished, at Bruno as the old man went on calmly, ‘You know the history, of course. The Germans overran Denmark, Norway, Holland, Belgium and France in only six months. They’d already conquered their neighbours to the east. That summer Russia opportunistically attacked the Baltic states, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia. The Germans didn’t stop them. They were allies. Britain had no allies – only the help of its Empire. The RAF was defending the coasts day and night. Hitler would invade Britain, he said, when the Royal Air Force had been destroyed. In short, it was a siege.

  ‘Until September, the desperate battles were all over the sea and coast; the cities had been fairly safe from bombing. The country was packed with troops from all over the British Empire, Australians, Canadians, West Indians. There were also men who had escaped from occupied Europe – Belgians, Dutch, French, Poles – and their leaders, monarchs, politicians and their entourages. And we were waiting. The RAF seemed to be losing the battle of Britain. The Luftwaffe had five planes, at least, to each British one. It was a miracle they had hung on so long.