After the Cabaret

by Hilary Bailey

  ‘But you see, we’d all overheard Theo on the phone one evening talking to someone and saying, “If you’re speaking to Blanche give her my dearest love. Don’t forget.”

  ‘Pym had been lying in a chair, half drunk, but not too drunk to understand. “Theo’s off to Washington,” he told Briggs. “He had a fling with Blanche Mencken when her uncle was en poste here in London. The Menckens are stinking rich – steel, railroads and automobiles. She’s a very pretty girl, too.”

  ‘“If he’s going to Washington, he’ll be keen to find out what the Menckens are up to,” Briggs said.

  ‘“Do you think so?” Pym said. “It’s not information about the US war effort our hero’s after, believe me.”

  ‘Then Theo came back into the room. “Washington?” Pym queried.

  ‘Theo didn’t deny it. “Nice over there,” Pym said. “Fridges, steaks, no rationing, no bombs, all those little inconveniences we’re used to.”

  ‘“One goes where duty calls,” Theo observed, cool as a cucumber.

  ‘Sally came racing in from outside complete with tin hat, gas mask and wearing a soldier’s coat. It had been raining. Theo went over and embraced her. “Shall we go out for a dance, darling?”

  ‘“Let’s,” she cried. It was touching, her open face smiling up at him. They went off, into the darkness, leaving us sitting there like three sad old bachelors. Then, of course, the place began to fill up, as it always did.

  ‘The day after that Theo left.

  ‘Sally plunged,’ Bruno reported gloomily. ‘After that, she didn’t care. It’s not that she knew where Theo was. She went on thinking pathetically that he was in some horrible field of war, fighting gallantly with partisans in sheepskin coats, sending messages back to London from caves in the mountains. But even that didn’t seem to make any difference. He’d left without giving her any guarantees, or any reassurance that he’d come back for her if he could. She got very depressed.

  ‘Pym used to go about the flat when Sally was there singing, in a fake Irish tenor, “Oh, mother dear, what a fool was I, To kill myself for the creamery boy.” What a nasty man he was.’

  Chapter 33

  ‘So for a month,’ Bruno said, ‘Sally left La Vie each night with a man who wanted her – a Norwegian seaman, a British official, a pilot, on one occasion a nursing sister, she didn’t care, she was too drunk. She got good presents, though, a bracelet here, a ring there, little boys were always coming round with flowers, the phone never stopped ringing. The atmosphere in the flat was terrible. Pym and Briggs became very censorious. Pym! Who went through the blackout like Dracula, sinking his teeth into whoever he could find in the darkness. There was never a call or a note from Theo.’

  Bruno reflected, ‘That was probably what put paid to her chance of the medal she might have been awarded for heroism in France – the night she stood on the table, dancing naked, dead drunk, in front of the Minister of Food and the exiled King of Yugoslavia.

  ‘Then she got very quiet. She went to Pym, Briggs and many others. She had to contact Theo. Was there any way? She was very pale and vomiting in the mornings. Nothing was said, but we all knew she was pregnant. Of course, everyone had to pretend they didn’t know where he was, but I know Briggs wrote to Theo in Washington giving him the bad news. There was no reply. It was a horrible episode. No one could stand it. I told Julia one day she should speak to Sally but all she said was, “My God, why on earth should I? It’s got nothing to do with me.” Finally I think the nurse helped out. Anyway, she and Sally spent a day or two in Sally’s garret, after which Sally emerged, pale and shaky, and went back to work and we all went on pretending nothing had happened.

  ‘She was pretty low during that autumn. She’d never had a voice, as I’ve told you, only what today they would call an attitude, and when that went, Cora thought of giving her the sack. I can remember her going round the flat in her pyjamas, covered in a soldier’s great-coat she had got from somewhere, singing in a tinny high soprano,

  ‘I’m going to meet him today,

  Oh, I’m in a tizz

  And the people that I meet

  When I’m going down the street

  Will say you are a bloody fool.’

  She’d stand in the kitchen, knocking up the wartime recipes – unspeakable things, sheep’s head broth, swede and carrot pie. She’d hung four thrushes in the larder for days. I came across her frying them. When I asked her what she was doing, because when our rations ran out at Pontifex Street we just went out or ate in restaurants – which was why at the end of the war Pym owed Briggs four thousand pounds in food bills – Sally just said, “It’s for the war effort,” and burst out crying. She lost weight, got paler and paler. Poor Sally.

  ‘You see Theo, like so many so-called lady-killers, specialised in confusing women. He didn’t know what he was doing, and didn’t want to, so he made no vows, no promises for the future and, when he began to feel unhappy or uncomfortable, he ran. It was hard on Sally. He was her first love but she never understood him and she was never wise enough to decide she must forget him. If she had, he would have sensed it and arrived a week later – that’s what those men are like.

  ‘Anyway,’ said Bruno, ‘she was so depressed that when her father rang and asked her to go home for Christmas, she went. I don’t think it was a success.’

  Chapter 34

  The Christmas party at Glebe House in 1942 consisted of Harold and Geneviève Jackson-Bowles, Sally’s sister Betty and her husband Gideon Cunningham, their two boys aged five and seven and Sally’s old Nanny, Miss Adelaide Trotter, who had come back to look after Gisela. There was, of course, Gisela herself, now aged eighteen months, walking and talking.

  Perhaps it was lucky that Sally had only a two-day break because she was needed back at the post office after Boxing Day.

  She arrived for the family gathering late on Christmas Eve after one of those long war-time journeys, in a darkened train full of servicemen, which had stopped on a siding outside Reading for two hours while a munitions train made its slow way past them.

  Geneviève Jackson-Bowles was unhappy. Before the war, the household had included a cook, two maids and a gardener-handyman. Now the gardener had been called up and the maids were doing factory work in Birmingham. Only the cook and Miss Trotter were there, and Geneviève’s hitherto impeccable house was suffering from the staff shortage. It was generally held by the family that Sally’s inconsiderate dumping of Gisela there was to blame for all difficulties and shortages. Gisela, dark, bright-eyed and volatile, spent much of her time in the nursery with Miss Trotter. She was asleep when Sally arrived. On Christmas Day, Sally gave her an inordinately large doll, acquired through one of Cora’s mysterious back-door visitors, and spoiled the atmosphere of war-time misery and deprivation by producing, from the same source, two pairs of nearly new roller skates for her nephews. Such things were now unheard of. ‘Black market, I’m afraid,’ Geneviève was heard murmuring to her son-in-law.

  On Christmas morning Miss Trotter, Sally and Gisela went out for a walk, Gisela trailing the doll, which was nearly as big as she was.

  ‘You don’t look very happy,’ said Miss Trotter. ‘Can’t you at least try to look as if you’re enjoying yourself?’

  ‘Theo’s left me again,’ complained Sally.

  ‘That might be the sixth or seventh time,’ the woman who had brought her up commented remorselessly. ‘I wonder if you’re entitled to say he was ever really with you. I warned you about him when you were sixteen. Never mind,’ she added, more kindly, ‘one day you’ll get fed up with him and settle down with someone nice.’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ Sally said.

  ‘I do,’ said Miss Trotter firmly. ‘But with the war on, and in London where things are so terrible, perhaps I shouldn’t say this but I suppose the best thing you can do is get as much fun as you can, while you can.’

  Sally grinned. ‘You’re a terrible woman, Trot.’ She looked at the little figure running ahead of th
em down the lane. ‘Thank goodness you came to look after little Geezer. She’s a sweetheart and it’s all your doing.’

  It might have been expected that at this point Miss Trotter would have made some reference to the influence of heredity on temperament, but she did not.

  ‘That’s partly why I’m here,’ said Sally. ‘There’s something I must tell you about Gisela. I daren’t tell anybody else, but just in case I get hit by a bus—’

  Miss Trotter looked at her calmly. ‘You’d better let me know what it is then, hadn’t you?’ So Sally did.

  There was a goose for Christmas dinner, and a Christmas pudding, and much talk of shortages. Sally smoked right through the meal. Her mother stiffened every time she lit up but said nothing. Over the port and nuts the argument broke out. The younger of Betty Cunningham’s boys was being forced now to wear his older brother’s outgrown clothes. ‘I used to give them to the charwoman,’ Betty mourned. ‘Now I haven’t even got a charwoman.’

  ‘It’s a bit easier down here in the country, though,’ remarked Sally. ‘There’s more food, and so forth.’

  ‘I feel I can complain at nothing when I think of the troubles of France,’ Geneviève said.

  ‘They’re probably all right, Maman, unless something’s gone very wrong recently,’ said Sally, who had been drinking her father’s whisky since she had come in from the walk.

  ‘I find that remark a little curious,’ said Gideon, Sally’s brother-in-law. ‘I can’t imagine how dreadful it would be to think of your family under German occupation.’

  ‘All I’m saying, Maman, is that the du Tours are all right. They go to and fro between Paris and the farm and old Jean comes up on a bike with provisions when they’re in Paris and they’ve still got Célestine. The last time I saw Paris, all was tickety-boo in the faubourg.’

  ‘I can’t understand what you’re saying, Sally,’ said Geneviève. ‘If you mean to be reassuring, I don’t think such remarks are of help. In fact, I find them rather unsympathetic.’

  ‘Perhaps Sally’s heard something,’ Harold Jackson-Bowles said. ‘If you have, Sally, perhaps you could tell us exactly what it is.’

  ‘I get news,’ said Sally, who, since her coup of the previous year, had special privileges. ‘They’re alive and all right,’ she continued. ‘That’s all they let me know.’

  ‘You might have told me,’ Geneviève said.

  ‘It’s very hush-hush,’ Sally said.

  ‘It can’t be that hush-hush if they tell you,’ Betty stated, expressing everyone’s thoughts.

  ‘They give me the information because a year and a half ago they dropped me into France by parachute.’

  ‘Oh, really, Sally,’ Geneviève said impatiently. ‘How much have you had to drink?’

  ‘Tell us, Sally,’ her father said.

  ‘I don’t believe it,’ said Betty. ‘Why you?’

  ‘Lots of people are doing their bit,’ said Sally.

  Geneviève now sat like a statue, her hand on her heart. ‘Have you really seen them, Madeleine and Bertrand?’

  ‘Just Benoît. I was only there for an hour. I wasn’t exactly a visitor. Charles and Benoît were going out killing Germans on the quiet. Benoît broke his leg running away. Otherwise, everything was fine. And I heard recently Uncle Bertrand did a big operation on an important German and saved his life.’

  ‘I suppose one must live,’ said Geneviève, ‘even in such terrible times.’

  ‘You’d think he could have arranged for the knife to slip,’ said Harold Jackson-Bowles.

  ‘I still can’t see why they sent you, Sally,’ said Gideon Cunningham.

  ‘I had to look up an old boyfriend,’ Sally said. ‘He’s a Nazi now. I can’t say any more – it’s frightfully secret.’

  Chapter 35

  ‘That put rather a damper on Christmas Day,’ Sally had reported to Bruno afterwards. ‘You’d have thought I’d done something dreadful. I think they felt terribly guilty, really, making all those complaints about food, when I know Maman has a man who cycles round with all sorts of things hidden in his bicycle basket. And Gideon had gone on and on about his bad knee preventing him from service. Poor old Daddy is the only active one, really. He’s charging in and out of his factory all week, pumping out uniforms for the Army and Navy to go and get killed in, but there you are, darling, somebody has to do it. To be utterly totally honest, I got drunker and drunker and I distinctly heard Betty telling Gideon that if I was the sort of person they were sending out on secret missions no wonder the war was going on so long. Honestly, how foul. Little Geezer’s very sweet, though – but, my God, I’m glad to be back. Even Pym’s face cheers me up so you can tell how ghastly it was chez Jackson-Bowles.’

  Bruno observed, ‘I think that moment marked when she started getting over Theo’s defection and the consequent abortion.

  ‘Then spring was on the way – and it really was. The Germans had had to surrender in Stalingrad, the Russians were driving them back, and there were victories in North Africa. The RAF was bombing Germany instead of the other way about.

  ‘There were still raids, though. One evening we were in La Vie when there was a bad one. The place rocked with the explosions. Few people were there – Pym, Briggs and Charles Denham were playing poker with another man at one table, Cora was sitting with an elderly beau, drinking gin, and a couple of American colonels. Nobody was very happy, and the musicians were slumping. However, at a certain point a young American corporal, coloured soldier as he’d have been called in those days, stood up and went to the piano. He started playing, “Bye Bye, Blackbird” above the sound of the bombardment. Sally came ducking in then in her tin hat. She’d run through the raid from Pontifex Street and grinned when she saw him. She went over and began to sing the words “Pack up all my cares and woes, here I go, Singing Low, Bye Bye, Blackbird”. Then the All Clear sounded, Vi turned up to do her act and, without a word it seemed, Sally and the soldier left.’

  Greg heard his own surprised voice on the tape. ‘An American serviceman? Black?’

  ‘Yes,’ came Bruno’s voice. ‘Eugene Hamilton. A GI. He was an artist and,’ came Bruno’s voice, with gloomy satisfaction, ‘black, ein Schwarz.’

  Greg heard himself saying, ‘Well, I’ll be damned.’

  And that was the point at which Greg’s doorbell at Everton Gardens rang.

  Chapter 36

  Katherine was in the doorway in a thick coat, woolly hat and scarf, her eyes and cheeks glowing. She leaped towards Greg and embraced him warmly in the gloomy tiled entrance. Greg, seizing her joyfully, was nevertheless a little surprised at her enthusiasm.

  They took the lift, kissing, up to the flat. ‘It’s wonderful to see you,’ she said, when they were inside. ‘And, look, I’ve brought all this food.’ And she produced from her holdall a plastic carrier bag. ‘A lovely leg of lamb.’

  She went to the kitchen and began to put away the food. ‘It looks so clean,’ she cried. ‘It was life-threatening when Dominic was here.’

  Back in the living room she looked round. ‘It’s a bit grim, I suppose. Dominic doesn’t care.’

  ‘Well, you brighten the place up,’ he said, kissing her. ‘I have a plan. Let’s go to bed, then out to dinner. The lamb can wait.’

  Greg’s was the plan they adopted. Lying contentedly in his narrow bed, Katherine said in his ear, ‘Ooh, it’s so good to be here. At this time of year Cambridge is so chilly and dull. I had to get away.’

  ‘How’s your research going?’

  ‘So-so. You know how it is, nine parts slog. How’s Sally?’

  ‘It’s good,’ Greg said, surprising himself a little by his statement. ‘I’m transcribing the latest batch of stuff Bruno Lowenthal told me. I know half the time he’s putting me on, but the other half he comes up with some amazing tales. My problem’s going to be cross-checking. I don’t want to produce a novel by Bruno Lowenthal, which he’s been slowly constructing for himself over fifty years.’

  ‘Is th
at your impression?’ she said.

  ‘It’s my worry.’

  ‘Oh,’ she said, tightening her arm round his shoulders, ‘it’s so good here. How will I ever make myself go back to Cambridge?’

  They drank a lot over a cheerful Italian meal in Soho and Greg relaxed. Up to then he had not been aware of how loneliness and distance from home had affected him. This he told Katherine. He confessed also about his almost abortive trip to Russia with Alistair Bradshaw.

  Katherine was impressed. ‘That was a bold move.’

  ‘I got tired of Lowenthal. He’s helpful and he’s fairly friendly, but it’s always like I’m an animal he’s keeping on a chain. He makes sure that as soon as I start feeling relaxed about things the chain goes tight again. And I needed to check his story. One source is not enough.’

  ‘Perhaps going to Moscow with Alistair wasn’t the best way. He’s bound to attract attention and he’s got some funny contacts.’

  ‘His trip seemed straightforward enough. He was looking into setting up a Moscow branch of the bank.’

  ‘Yes. But whose money will he be handling? Ask yourself – who’s got any in today’s Russia? It’s not the Bolshoi Ballet’s account he’ll be looking for, is it? Part of his researches will involve talking to some very dubious characters. You must have been watched from the moment you got off the plane. That might not have helped.’

  ‘He was all I had,’ said Greg. ‘Well, maybe I was deceived by the suit, and the cordial City handshake. You know that style. I guess I didn’t expect a guy like Alistair to be hanging out with gangsters.’

  Katherine laughed.

  ‘All right,’ he said, ‘but I’m still a stranger here. I guess you’re all desperate, trying to find a new empire to the east.’

  ‘Not an empire. Just some loot.

  ‘Let’s go and see Hugh Bradshaw,’ Katherine suggested. ‘I’ll give him a call.’ She produced a mobile phone from her deep handbag and rang the number.