by Louisa Young
So, a long letter, emptier than one would think.
Part Two
1932
Chapter Six
Kent, June 1932
Peter and Riley were striding about on the Downs. Part of the idea of walking, though this too was unspoken, was that striding along, eyes not meeting, mild distractions constantly to hand – ‘Isn’t that a kestrel—?’ ‘Ah, look, St John’s Wort’ – was a convenient forum for the exchange of confidences, should either of them be inclined. One could not escape, but neither could one be forced. But today – a drowsy, bee-heavy day, where even the river ran a little slowly and the sweet-bitter smell of clover blossoms languished across the thick meadows – this was not working. They had left the house a little too late; it was too warm for any actual effort. Their muscles were soon limp and their clothes itchy.
The lure of the river and the removal of shoes was too strong. They rolled their trousers up, sat on the banks among watercress, slow worms and kingcups, and kicked crystalline spray up into the sunlight to make rainbows.
After a while Riley said, ‘Oh, well, for God’s sake,’ and took his shirt and trousers off, and folded them (which made Peter smile) and plunged in like a shaggy dog, submerging among weed and minnows and rising again, gasping and shaking his head.
‘Beware, beware, his flashing eyes, his floating hair!’ called Peter, humorously, and Riley made a face.
Peter had a secret.
Sitting there, the sleeves of his shirt rolled up above the elbows – God I am so white – and his collar open, he wanted to tell it to Riley. But he wasn’t going to. Things were not calm enough. It is always hard to be rescued – to maintain one’s dignity, and accept that one must be grateful – and Riley had rescued him three times now. Looking back on these rescues, Peter saw how it worked: Riley could drag him out of chaos, yes, but that was as far as it went. Riley couldn’t deliver Peter into a safe and happy haven. He could only leave Peter on the outskirts of what used to be his life, and let him work out his own way back – which is what Peter tried to do. Of course there was nothing to be done about Julia. He could continue to rage, or he could accept the cruel joke that just as they had begun to regain each other, she had to die – and of the most ordinary, everyday domestic tragedy: childbirth. The woman’s equivalent of war, he had realised, after talking to Rose about it, about how many women die that way. In every thousand births, fifty women will die. One in twenty. One in twenty! Can that be right? Rose, who worked with Dr Janet Campbell on her project for a national system of ante-natal clinics, had told him about Pasteur and Semmelweis and Alexander Gordon, one of the first to realise that doctors themselves might be passing the infection that caused puerperal fever among the women they were caring for, who for his reward was chased back into the Navy by a horrified medical establishment who did not want to believe what he was saying. Rose had taken Julia’s death hard. She felt she should have been able to help. Poor Rose, Peter thought. Always so helpful, and then, when it was really needed, she simply hadn’t been there. Poor Rose. She had told him something else: before the war, one in four babies born in poverty died. Only one in ten fighting men died in the war! Only – of course only is not the word – But one in four babies! It wasn’t that he didn’t feel so sad for the babies. But those mothers! What women suffer – and people go on about men’s sufferings in the war – trauma and shock – and all the time, which I never noticed, women were suffering under our noses. He couldn’t stop thinking about this. It’s a form of mourning, no doubt – he thought. Mourning for Julia.
But I’m not dead.
His book had been respectably received, had an excellent review in The Times and two reprints. This having transformed him in his own eyes into a man of perhaps some value after all, he was preparing a second. It was about this battle, the woman’s battle. Starting with Sparta, the leaving of children on the hillsides and so on, and those Incas in Peru. Rose was to help him, and an obstetrician colleague of hers was going to steer him right medically. It would be dedicated to Julia, about whom nothing could be done. And yes, he hoped that it might be somehow good for his own children.
He had hopes of the children. With them, he thought, he had time. But though Kitty was willing, Tom held out still, and for all Riley’s optimistic declarations, would not love his father. There had been a moment, though, a curious moment, slipping between the leaves of timing and possibility, which had revealed to Peter that he and his son could come together, one day. They had all – Riley, Robert, Nadine, Kitty – gone to a concert of Schumann. After one passage of surpassing beauty, Peter had glanced up and seen his son, two along from him on the velvet seats, looking at him, facing him, from a rank of profiles. For a second Peter was embarrassed to think what entranced expression might have been hanging on his own face, but he quickly realised that Tom’s expression was not of mockery or derision but of recognition. And then, a little later, Peter had forgone the pleasure of being carried away by another intoxicating section in order to observe Tom, and he saw on his son’s face the ecstatic removed look of a human immersed in musical joy, just as he had worn moments before, and he saw it followed by a swift shadow of embarrassment as Tom realised he was observed, and then he saw Tom realise that the look on Peter’s face was, in turn, not mockery or derision but recognition. And their eyes met, and each gave a rueful little smile.
The moment glowed in Peter’s heart like a rising sun. Time, he thought, and the great victory was that he believed now that he had time, and that he was capable of the patience and dedication he would use it for, to win back his son.
His new secret, however, was unlikely to be conducive to reunion with Tom. Peter could see that.
And telling a secret, Peter thought, is usually a request for help.
Am I thinking Riley could help me with this, as with so much else?
He wasn’t sure. He wanted, really, to share joy.
Peter leaned forward, the sun warming his shoulders, his feet like pale tenuous fish in the water.
‘Riley!’ he called. But Riley was underwater. Hooting and sploshing and gasping, ‘Riley!’ Peter yelled, and caught his attention as he surfaced again. ‘Come here. I have something to tell you.’
*
When Mabel Zachary met Peter Locke for the third time – well of course, it wasn’t the third time. It felt like the third time, because it was the third episode. Even as she saw him walk into the shop that dingy November morning, she knew that this was what it was going to be.
He came in, confused slightly by some interchange between his gloves and the door handle, taking off the gloves (soft leather, black, gentlemanly), and looking up. And looking up he saw her, and seeing her, he gave her a mild, surprised, enchanting smile.
And immediately she thought: Do I want this? Am I ready? And then it was already happening.
She saw the ghost of the charm he had had in 1918, when they had first met at the Turquoisine, when everyone was crazy and drunk, and he no crazier nor drunker than the rest of the crowd, just more elegant and more polite and more understanding of the deep sorrow at the root of it all. She saw too the hunger he had had in 1919, when they had run into each other on Chelsea Embankment, and he had been so drunk for so long that after a few weeks she had had to extricate herself from his chaotic ways, and retreat, and leave him to it.
And now, because it was 10 a.m. and twelve years later and he was clean, sober, shaven, upright, looking younger than she had ever seen him look, and smiling, she knew that the involvement of drink was no longer the entangling imperative it had been before, and she smiled back.
‘Hello,’ he said. His blue eyes were clear: no misery, no bovine defiance, no shame glittering in their depths.
‘Hello,’ she said. And then she was almost embarrassed, because something in her really quite guarded heart was simply melting, melting away, at the sight of him looking well, and being here, smiling at her, and saying hello to her, in his voice.
‘Do you take
a lunch break?’ he said, just like that.
‘A half hour,’ she said, ‘at twelve thirty.’
‘Perhaps you could leave your job,’ he said, and he may have been serious, but she started laughing and said ‘No’, in a gentle and affectionate way.
‘I’ll have to wait, then,’ he said. ‘Would it get you into trouble if we were to chat?’
‘It’s quiet,’ she said. ‘Of course if a customer comes, or if Mr Moores comes in—’
‘Oh but I am a customer!’ Peter said. ‘Show me all your latest American imports. Tell me what is good. What are you listening to? And who are you singing with? What news of Mr Sidney Bechet? Florence Mills? And why are you working here? You are still singing, tell me you’re still singing …’
She told him she was still singing. She’d just finished a run in Porgy and Bess at the Theatre Royal, chorus, but on stage with Paul Robeson! She told him she had recorded, with some of the guys from the show’s orchestra, and they had a band now. Of course he wanted that record. She brought it to him: there she was on the cover, smiling her huge high-cheekboned smile, big eyes gleaming, wearing a feathered little thing on her head. She looked cool and hot at the same time. On the back she was described as ‘New York’s Newest Singing Sensation’, which was quite funny, as she had been in London since she was fourteen. They laughed about that. She told him she worked three days a week at the shop, and that it was great to get to hear all the new records early. (She didn’t tell him that before Porgy and Bess, or Porgy and Bless, as she secretly referred to it, she had been working at the shop six days, working bars and singing in the evenings, or that before Mr Moores had offered her the job in the shop she’d been cleaning houses too.)
He admired the picture. ‘I have never had a photograph of you,’ he said, and she said, ‘Well,’ and he said, ‘What, why would I? You know why I would. Don’t you?’ And she was about to say ‘I’m just a girl’ when she realised she mustn’t because he would say something and she would say something and suddenly they would be in a place neither of them were prepared for.
She turned back to the shelves behind her and said: ‘New Orleans? Chicago?’
‘Chicago, I think,’ he said.
‘Jazz or blues? I have Bessie Smith’s “Black Mountain Blues” here,’ she said. ‘You heard that? Or, the Famous Hokum Boys? “Saturday Night Rub” is the new one …’ She gave them to him. ‘Have you heard the new stuff coming out of New York? Here—’ She passed him another disc: Bix Beiderbecke, ‘At the Jazz Band Ball’. ‘Cornet player,’ she said. ‘With Adrian Rollini on bass sax. He’s something else. You know even Louis Armstrong has moved to New York now?’
‘I haven’t heard anything for a long time,’ he said. She wondered if he’d been avoiding jazz as a way of avoiding drink, and looked at him with that thought in her eyes.
He blinked at her and said, ‘But you’d have seen me, if I’d been going to any clubs.’
There was a record player behind the counter; he handed back ‘At the Jazz Band Ball’, and she put it on. The music started straight in, gay and ghostly, something mournful in the rhythms and the chords … As she turned back he was looking at her as if he were going to ask her to dance.
Oh my Lord, dear Lord, she thought. Peter was the only white man she had ever been to bed with. Her mother didn’t hold with white men.
He did, he held his arms up in a ‘dance with me?’ position, and raised his eyebrows.
She shook her head and smiled. ‘Need to stay this side of the counter,’ she said. Her heart was going, pitter-pat.
We’ve leapt up some ladders and down some snakes in the past twelve years and you don’t even know, she thought. But the music made her shrug her shoulders and swing her hips a little. She couldn’t not. And she was very pleased to see him.
They played records and talked about jazz and blues for two hours: Duke Ellington, Fletcher Henderson, Coleman Hawkins, Lead Belly, Big Bill Broonzy. Sidney Bechet was in Berlin, she’d heard – he’d been deported! No, twice! From London in, what, ’22? And then from Paris, there’d been a shooting at Bricktop’s in Montmartre – well, yes, actually she had been there – not performing that night, no, but Henry Crowder had been in on his way back from Venice, with – well, anyway, Sidney was in Berlin, was the word. But there were no new recordings. Had Peter heard the 1923 tracks, with Louis Armstrong? ‘Texas Moaner Blues’? Ooh, she’d get those out for him … She broke off from time to time to serve customers, and then he watched her, and a smile lingered, at her square shoulders, her gentleness, her courtesy and quiet enthusiasms.
‘Your voice hasn’t changed at all,’ he said. ‘It’s no more English. Does it still get more American when you’ve relaxed?’
‘Uh huh,’ she said. ‘Or excited.’
‘Or on stage?’
She smiled.
Then he bought all the records she had shown him, and took her to the Gay Hussar for the fastest goulash ever known. She told him not to come back with her, but he was waiting outside at five thirty, and only by agreeing to his coming along that evening could she get rid of him for a couple of hours before she started work.
*
Mabel was living in two rooms at the top of a narrow rickety Georgian house in Lexington Street, Soho. All afternoon she had been thinking, and she was thinking now, heading over there, and indeed she had been thinking for twelve years. But now a great big snake had been slid down, and she had to make her decisions. She had a half-formed song in her mind, and as was her habit she was working through it as she walked, because Lord knows when she’d be able to sit down at a piano and finish it. The melody was bluesy but pure, E minor, and the lyric was a Bible verse: Take ye heed, watch and pray, for ye know not when the hour is … She’d assumed it was about death, and maybe it was, but yeah, it could be about anything. Ye know not when the hour is.
The tall black door was open on to the pavement and Reginald, the Jamaican trombone player who lived below her, greeted her as she slid past him into the shaded hall. She smiled, and gave thanks that she was no longer provoked into hunger and envy by the frying smells dripping down the stairs from his room. The goulash had been huge – and they had been sitting in a dark corner, so when Peter had left the table she had shamelessly taken the larger pieces of meat from her bowl, wrapped them in her smooth white napkin, and stuffed the package, fraught with the potential to leak gravy, into her bag. She didn’t really need to do that sort of thing any more, but she couldn’t abide waste. She was sorry if the loss of the napkin would cause trouble for any of the staff. She would bring it back. The meat she knew did not count as theft, as it was Peter’s gift. He would, she thought – would he? – be glad to give it, if he knew where it was going.
But that’s the big question, isn’t it? Will he be glad?
She was steeped in sin, she knew it. It all led from the one recurrent sin: that she would not always fight men off. Well, and well. It wasn’t her coveting her neighbour’s wife, it was her neighbours coveting her. She had been through that with God on many occasions. It was unfair of God to have made men so attractive, and to have made her so attractive to them. And to put her in this white world where so many men were unable to approach their own women (women their own colour and class) unless with a view to marriage, yet thought a woman like her (different colour, and kind of unclassifiable) only too approachable. Approachable, that is, for buying a drink from, or buying a drink for. For service – in a bar, or domestic, or sexual. Housework, church, marriage, prostitution of some kind. And that, as a set of limitations, she had never liked. But a negro woman had a particular responsibility towards men. Knowing the hardships the black man suffers, she above all must not give him more. She learnt this from her mother, and all around her. A woman must be kind and service him and not knock him down, and by her womanhood she must let him be a man in a world which so often denied him his manhood. She must marry him and bear his children and look after them and cook for him and not hassle him for mon
ey and understand when he has to walk out on her. She must not shame him. And for sure she must not take his work.
To sing was all right. A girl singer was always a girl singer, that was fine. But instruments? No. Jazz is a male language, females can’t do it. When she played piano, they didn’t like it. She didn’t even bother to tell them – her friends, her band – that she wrote songs. She sang them and played them just for the guys to learn them, for the real pianist to take over – and when someone said, ‘Whose song is that?’ she said, ‘It’s one of my daddy’s.’ My daddy’s pretty up-to-date and productive for a dead guy.
So of course when a man appeared with something other than that in his eyes or his talk, it was a rainbow on a grey day. The first was Thornton Williams from Charleston Carolina, so pure a musician that he only saw her talent, and wanted to teach her. From him she had learnt to read and write music and frame a song and play Bach and Scott Joplin. Thornton was a composer and taught at the Royal College of Music; he’d helped her so much with how music actually works, how you can dismantle a song and put it back together. She’d always done it on a wing and a prayer before. When he introduced her to musical literacy, to tell the truth he had dismantled her and put her back together also. And he’d recognised Iris’s baby skills on the piano, and said, get her lessons. Every black musician doesn’t have to be self-taught. Every black musician doesn’t have to play jazz. Every black musician doesn’t have to play in church and clubs – he said it with a laugh because Lord knows they’d both done enough of both.
And most of all – every black musician doesn’t have to be a man. It wasn’t that a girl couldn’t be fully musical, it was just that other people didn’t want her to be. Mabel had been so pleased to clarify this that as a result, ironically, she would have cooked for him happily, gone back to the States with him even, if he’d wanted … but things didn’t go that way, and the man died in ’25. Thornton’s copy of the Goldberg Variations was still in Iris’s music bag. He’d taught her himself: big hands curved over small hands on the keyboard: ‘Imagine you’re holdin’ a little mouse in there. You don’t want to squash him, but you don’t want him runnin’ away …’
