After the Cabaret

by Hilary Bailey

  ‘You’d better discharge me,’ said Sally. ‘You need me less. I’ll go.’

  ‘I think that would be best,’ said Lady Hodd.

  Sally turned in the doorway and asked, ‘I suppose there’s no chance of any wages?’

  Lady Hodd seized a complicated china fruit-stand, made of twisted, coloured porcelain, from the table and hurled it at her son’s fiancée, but by that time Sally was outside the door. She heard it thud against the wood and smash to pieces, then Lady Hodd’s anguished cry as she appreciated what she had done.

  Tim drove her to the station. ‘I’m sorry she sacked you,’ Sally said, lighting him a cigarette.

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ he said. ‘I’m going to try to join up again. There must be something I can do …’

  ‘Come and see me in London.’

  ‘If I can.’ He stopped outside the little station. ‘Hurry, or you’ll miss your train.’

  Chapter 20

  ‘Of course,’ Bruno remarked, ‘everyone at Pontifex Street laughed. Laughed, as they used to say, like a drain. “I laughed like a drain,”’ he quoted.

  They were sitting in a café in Bruno’s neighbourhood. Bruno had bought his lunch, a solid plate of sausages, fried egg, baked beans and chips. Greg had a greasy omelette and left half of it. The door opened occasionally and a workman, or a man in a suit with a briefcase, or a local tradesman entered in a blast of cold air. His tape-recorder was on the table in front of him, concealed from the rest of the customers by a sticky sugar dispenser.

  During the week in which Bruno had been off on his buying trip Greg had checked that there had indeed been a squadron leader named Ralph Hodd at Farnborough during the Second World War. He found out, too, that Hodd Hall existed and was still occupied by a member of the family. He had also talked his way into the house in Pontifex Street once occupied by Sally and her friends. The present occupant, an American woman, was initially suspicious of him, but let him in, made him a cup of coffee, and said, ‘Yes, I heard we were living in the apartment that had once housed those British spies. I asked the landlord’s agents about it but they didn’t know much.’ And the landlord, she told Greg, was still Sir Peveril Jones.

  Greg had even gone into the loft, no longer reached by a ladder but up some stairs, for it had been converted, and looked from the same windows, he thought, through which Sally Bowles and the others must have seen the searchlights and barrage balloons of war-time London’s darkened skies.

  By the time he and Bruno met again, he was convinced that Bruno Lowenthal was telling the truth – or most of it. There was no way in which the old man could have conveyed, so off-handedly, so much random yet detailed information. Bruno was giving him the real stuff of Sally Bowles’s life. Sometimes, though, he had the idea that he was on an archaeological site which had been excavated by a madman so that all the layers had been tumbled into each other. And he worried, too, that Bruno might have an agenda he didn’t understand. But, all in all, he thought, if Bruno wanted him to listen to his tale sitting in a puddle in the middle of a field he would do it without complaint. Hell – he’d do it naked in Trafalgar Square, if that was what Bruno wanted.

  However, at least he now had a hope of being able to meet Bruno somewhere out of the cold and damp of wintry London: Katherine had phoned to say a cousin of hers was going off on an archaeological dig for a few months. His flat in Bloomsbury would be empty and she was trying to persuade him to rent it to Greg. If that worked out, thought Greg, it would give him a base where he and Bruno could meet, away from the public places which for some reason the old man preferred.

  Now he sat back in the steamy atmosphere to listen.

  ‘Sally,’ Bruno said, ‘was not very forthcoming about what had gone wrong at Hodd. She said, “It was ghastly – so cold – and an absolute nest of traitors. They were all Nazis. Lady Hodd said it would be a good idea to put the Duke of Windsor on the throne when Hitler won the war. While I was there she put a Christmas card from Wallis Simpson, the Duchess of Windsor now, on the mantelpiece. It was the last straw.”

  ‘Everyone laughed – and the engagement came to a natural end when Ralph was shot down in France. He survived – that time – and was taken prisoner. Sally spent Christmas with her parents in Worcestershire and Ralph Hodd was in a prisoner-of-war camp in Germany. In those days things happened quickly. He wrote releasing her from the engagement and she went on sending pots of jam and woolly jumpers until he escaped. As he did because, of course, he was a hero, poor man.’ Bruno looked round. His eye lit on a young man sitting by the window, reading. ‘So young,’ he said, ‘and so many of the clichés are true. Those pilots saved the country and many, many died.’ He looked at Greg. ‘Ralph died too, later. So did the others, the Hermann Schmidts and the Carl Brauns. But that’s war,’ said Bruno. ‘There was a terrible raid at the end of December. And Theo Fitzpatrick turned up.’

  Chapter 21

  ‘You’d have done a lot better to have stayed up north, Sally,’ said Vi, as she swept broken glass and plaster through her back door into her small garden. The wall at the end had been hit and where it had stood was a vast heap of crumbly bricks and splintered wood. Beyond that were the two walls left standing after the house opposite Vi’s had been struck in a previous raid.

  ‘Can you lift while I fix this?’ asked Sally. She was trying to put the back door, which had been blown into the garden, on its hinges.

  ‘Christ! My nails!’ exclaimed Vi. ‘This is men’s work. Let’s leave it for Ted.’

  ‘You said yourself he was working round the clock. If we wait for him you’ll freeze.’

  They wrestled with the door for another five minutes, and got it roughly into place.

  ‘That’ll have to do,’ said Vi. ‘I can wedge a chair against it to keep it closed. The warden says not to try to use the gas. I’ll light the fire and boil up the kettle on it. I’ve got plenty of wood from up the street – the poor buggers it belonged to won’t need it any more.’

  The narrow street where Vi lived was a shocking sight. On either side of her home two big craters represented two houses. Rubble was piled along the pavements. Workmen were repairing a broken water main. A smell of burning still hung in the air.

  As soon as they had closed the back door there was a knock at the front. A woman in an old coat, her face drawn, was standing there. She said, ‘Potter sent me round from the Rose and Crown. Your Jack’s at King’s Cross – he phoned the pub. He wants you to go and collect him. He hasn’t got any money. Potter said to stay where he was.’

  ‘Oh, my God,’ said Vi. ‘What’s he doing there? He’s meant to be in the country.’

  ‘He told Potter he didn’t like it so he ran away.’

  ‘The little—’ exclaimed Vi. ‘I’ll go and collect him, I suppose.’

  She and Sally set off for King’s Cross. Some months before Jack Simcox had been evacuated to Lancaster with a small suitcase and a label bearing his name and address strung round his neck. Large numbers of London children had been sent away to be safe from the air-raids. However, it was not unusual for their parents to bring them back. Few, though, took the law into their own hands, as Jack apparently had, and returned alone.

  On the bus, Vi exclaimed, ‘Silly little fool. What’s he think he’s coming back to? A house with all the windows boarded up. No gas. Spending all night in a tube station well, these days Ted and me go into the Phillpots’ air-raid shelter up the road, but it’s horrible. You sit up all night because there’s no room to lie down. You have to run down the garden to the outside lav through the middle of a raid if you need to go. The baby cries. Jack was all right up north. He was living with a vicar, in a vicarage, for God’s sake. He had fresh milk, eggs, meat. My God, what wouldn’t I do for a good breakfast, with bacon and eggs and a bit of sausage? Now how am I going to manage? Even my gran’s disappeared – gone up to Scotland to plonk herself on an old admirer. Jack’ll have to go back, if they’ll still have him.’

  ‘The vicar�
�s probably a bastard,’ observed Sally, lighting a cigarette.

  They found nine-year-old Jack on a seat in the busy station. He was talking to a soldier with a kit-bag at his feet. Jack had his gas mask with him and nothing else. His first words were ‘I didn’t like it there. Don’t send me back.’

  The soldier said to Vi, ‘It doesn’t sound any good there, miss, if you’ll pardon me putting my oar in.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ said Vi. ‘Let’s get you home first, what’s left of it.’

  ‘Did we get bombed?’ Jack asked keenly.

  ‘Yes – weren’t we lucky?’

  ‘Part of it was that he was worrying about you, see,’ the soldier explained helpfully. ‘He kept on thinking you and his brother were dead and no one was telling him.’

  ‘All right, Jack,’ said Vi. ‘Stay here and live on grey bread and marge and spend all night in a shelter with the rest of us – I don’t care.’

  ‘Thanks, Vi,’ Jack said, in heartfelt tones.

  Over tea and a bun in the station café he told her, ‘Mrs Rathbone, the vicar’s wife, kept shaking me. I thought my head would drop off.’

  ‘What had you done?’ Vi asked suspiciously.

  ‘Chased a few hens,’ he told her. ‘They weren’t hurt. She had no call to slam me up against a wall. I think she’s potty.’

  ‘I’ll write a nasty letter to the billeting officer,’ Vi promised. ‘But what am I going to do with you? Your gran’s gone. You’ll have to go round to the Phillpots while I’m at the club. I can’t leave you alone in the middle of air-raids. I can’t even trust you not to disappear now you’ve apparently got the knack of taking long train journeys by yourself. Lancaster to London! You know our mum never left the East End in all her life – never even went up West once. Never went further than Aldgate.’ Vi made this sound like proof of virtue and respectability.

  ‘I’ll take your turn tonight,’ Sally volunteered.

  Chapter 22

  ‘That evening Theo turned up at La Vie,’ Bruno reported in the steamy café. He mimicked a rather husky, upper-class voice, ‘“The only man I’ve ever loved, darling.’” Reverting to his own voice he added cruelly, ‘I don’t think. Vincent Tubman, a cigarette dangling from his mouth, was playing the opening bars of ‘Plaisir D’Amour’. Sally began to sing, standing in the spotlight in a blue and green chiffon dress, heavily made-up and holding her hands slightly behind her back to conceal the damage caused by her activities with Vi’s door. She had been unable to repair the nail polish, as stocks had run out at her local chemist’s.

  ‘There were twenty people in the club, some in uniform and some officials, their womenfolk in scrupulously cleaned and repaired evening dresses. They seemed to sigh, collectively but inaudibly, as Sally sang – the words of the song recalled pre-war France, travel, dancing, food, sunshine, the luxury of private life, but in imagination they were dancing on summer lawns in England to the strains of a gramophone, they were lounging in a boat under willows. Perhaps some were in Provence, walking hand in hand over dry, herb-scented grass, drinking coffee at pavement cafés.

  ‘Then, Theo was standing by the stairs and Cora was embracing him. Over her head, his eyes met Sally’s. She faltered for a beat, then went on singing. He was a tall man, very thin but broad-shouldered,’ Bruno told Greg. ‘He had a lean face, tanned and intelligent, brown eyes, and long, narrow lips. A lock of his hair, which was black, persistently fell forward, so that he would have to brush it back with one well-shaped hand. You know the type,’ Bruno appealed to Greg.

  ‘Yes, I know the type,’ said Greg.

  ‘He was wearing corduroys, an open-necked blue shirt and a huge tweed jacket, probably someone else’s, with bulging pockets. He was carrying a bottle of something foreign, which he presented to Cora with a bow. He had that kind of attractive English style,’ Bruno said, ‘great aplomb, nice manners, but still rather boyish and endearing.’

  ‘When they tell you something, believe the opposite and then start looking for the third thing,’ Greg said.

  ‘Yes, well, they made very good double agents,’ said Bruno. ‘Though I was never sure whether Theo was involved or not. He was never found out, but his career staggered when the others were exposed. But that was later. That night Theo moved forward – he had physical grace, too, what a lucky boy he was – and got Sally down from the little stage just as she finished the song, and they began to dance. Vincent was sober that night, by a miracle, and played ‘Plaisir D’Amour’ again. It was very romantic.

  ‘I don’t know when they’d last seen each other. Sally’d been in love with Theo since she’d been at school but there was Berlin in those strange days before the war, all heightened senses and danger and sex and – oh, you couldn’t describe it. You can imagine them as the linden trees greened and the sun came out, walking hand in hand past cafés with open doors and the smell of coffee coming out – and all the time, the terror continuing. Ah well,’ said Bruno, ‘we all grew up under the Chinese curse, I suppose, “May you live in interesting times.” After Germany they’d met in Madrid, where Theo was reporting for The Times.

  ‘So – it was years since they’d been in Spain, but Sally had kept him in her heart, even though there had been plenty of others in her arms. I couldn’t tell you how real this love of Theo was – what does real mean? Who can tell about another person? She believed it anyway, at that time.

  ‘She told me they walked through St James’s Park. It was very quiet and, as usual, searchlights cut the air. The grass gleamed with frost. They kissed under a tree. She said, “I love you.”

  ‘He said, “Oh, God, Sally, you know how it is – the war and everything. You know – I could not love thee, dear, so much, loved I not honour more.”’

  ‘It was an old joke between them. Later, when she was feeling bitter, she told me it was always an old joke between false lovers and their women. This time, though, she said she gave the correct response. She said, “Lucky Honor Moore.”

  ‘“Let’s go home,” he said, and they walked over the grass, she leaning against him, past two soldiers supporting a third, an air-raid warden on a bike taking a short-cut, figures pressed against trees.

  ‘“Oh, Theo, I’m so happy. I’m dancing on air.”’

  Chapter 23

  ‘He was a devil for women.’ Bruno glanced at his watch. ‘I must go soon. I have a difficult tenant in my basement. There are complaints about the plumbing.’ So the old man owned the house he lived in, Greg thought, without surprise. He wondered vaguely why the meticulous Bruno hadn’t fixed the place up better. Standing up, he said, ‘OK, thank you.’

  ‘No – I have to talk to the plumber, but not just yet,’ Bruno told him. ‘The photographs you may see of Theo do him less than justice. They could not show his lightness, intelligence, his speed of movement. Or his charm and glamour. There was an exciting touch of haggardness in his features. He was an adventurer. He was a radical, sacrificing himself for a cause – a hero, a young girl’s dream, if that young girl was in rebellion from a bourgeois family. As Sally was – as so many girls were, at that time.

  ‘Perhaps they were a little spoilt, those young men of that generation. So many of their fathers, uncles, older brothers had died in the Great War. These, the survivors, were precious and it was believed much rested on them.’

  ‘I guess it might have been thought they would have to go to war themselves,’ Greg said. ‘As they did.’

  ‘All Europeans expect to have to go to war,’ Bruno told him dismissively. ‘With you, war may be a disturbance in the natural order. Here, even when you think it’s all forgotten, it’s just in hiding, waiting to come out.’

  ‘I hope not,’ Greg said doubtfully.

  ‘Ah – I’m an old pessimist,’ Bruno said. ‘However, Sally’s honeymoon with Theo lasted less than a week. In the attic – and New Year’s Eve at the Savoy, with everybody in uniform and wondering what the next year would bring – how gay they were. Then, suddenly, one morning Theo w
as gone. He left a brief note on the dining-room table, pinched a kit-bag that one of Pym’s pick-ups had left in the sitting room, put his few things in it – the pipe, his father’s VC and a volume of Xenophon – and went off to whatever secret thing he was doing next. Pym’s poor soldier boy was punished for losing his kit-bag. Briggs said Theo had stolen away like a thief in the night and recalled some ugly incidents from their Cambridge days. Sally was distraught but stood up for him, saying he’d only left so early not to disturb anyone.

  ‘Pym was furious. If you drew a chart like a family tree of that group but showed only who had been to school or university with whom, who had grown up with whom, who had been in love with, slept with, desired but not had whom, well, it would be a big, big map with many, many names on it, some surprising. At that time I thought Pym’s rage was because he, like Briggs, had been in love with Theo. Imagine that adolescent greenhouse of a school they had all been to. Imagine all those boys trapped there, like a prison. Then imagine Sally and Theo coming downstairs arms draped around each other – think of baby Gisela, positive proof of their love. I saw Pym’s face one morning when they came into the kitchen. It was glowing, frightening almost – he went very pale and his eyes burned. He had to turn away to conceal his feelings.’

  Bruno paused for effect, then said casually, ‘I thought that was why Pym blackmailed Sally into dropping into occupied France.’

  ‘What?’ exclaimed Greg. ‘Sally dropped into France?’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ said Bruno. ‘I’m surprised you didn’t know.’ He glanced at his watch again. ‘I must go. I shall be busy until the weekend. Will you be available then?’

  ‘Will I!’ said Greg, and sat on after the old man had left, thinking, Sally? France? When? Where? Why? Was it true? Was Bruno leading him astray? Above all, what kind of a book would he end up writing?