by Louisa Young
And Peter was the second: a man who talked to her, and listened. She’d told him, back in the day, about her childhood in her mother’s troupe, flinging her limbs around dancing while Mama – Betty Zachary – sang ‘Why You Make Dem Goo Goo Eyes at Me’. The little dancers, known as Betty’s Pickaninnies – they were meant to be boys, but Mabel had been a skinny kid, and kept her hair short, and that was a way for Mama to keep her with her on the road and to keep her safe. Mama took her up and down the US, Florida to Chicago, LA to Harlem. Her bed was often enough a train seat, or a fur coat thrown into a tuba case. And thence to the other side of the world, St Petersburg, Paris, and London; Salford, Birmingham and Skegness. Mabel’s aunties were dancers and singers; her fathers sax players and piano men. It was romantic and uncomfortable and funny and bitter and tough, and hers, and she threw it over when she had her child.
None of this was what she wanted for Iris. Iris was to have piano lessons, and one home. She, Mabel, was providing it. You could depend on nobody in this world.
She didn’t want to have to fit into this system of men and women, black and white. She hoped for something easier and better, with more room for her to do what she wanted. Sometimes it seemed to her that the easiest thing might be just to accept how things were and shut up about it. Marry someone and cow down. But only sometimes.
‘Hey, ladies,’ Mabel called softly, as she pushed open her own door. Mama was in the chair, dozing, a gleam of light resting on her wide cheekbones and the gold crucifix on her breast, her mouth like carved stone. Mabel bent to kiss her cheek – a swift breath of rose hair oil and talc.
Iris, doing her homework at the scrubbed table, glanced up and said, ‘Hey Mumma.’ She stood for her embrace, tall and fair-skinned, and looking, Mabel realised, really very like her father.
*
Night after night Peter came to hear Mabel sing, to take her to supper, to walk her home. He kissed her in squares and telephone boxes and backstreets and doorways. She felt she needed great ribbons strapped round her ankles and tied to a lamppost or a tree to stop her from flying off. The suddenness and the implausibility and the familiarity made it irresistible. She took to laughing out loud in the street.
Peter would not take her to a cheap hotel, and she would not take him home. So as it was impossible for them not to be together, they became, briefly, that winter, familiar with the Savoy. Even Peter was not so naive as to imagine they could go up together. The first time, he booked and paid in advance, but when she went there, ahead of him, the smart expressionless young man in charge would not give her the room key. The next time Peter went first, and she was prevented from following. He came down, claimed her, outstared and out-embarrassed everyone present. Upstairs, finally, he watched her sit on the vast smooth cream-coloured satin jacquard bedspread with an implacable look of combined resentment and acceptance on her face.
He said ‘Well, we shall just have to get a flat. Where is nice?’
By nice, he meant, though he hardly knew it, ‘possible’. If he had thought, he would have thought he meant ‘possible for a negro woman’. If he had thought a little longer, he would perhaps have got round to thinking ‘possible for two different-coloured people’. He would never have thought that she would be thinking, ‘An area where no one who knows my mother will see us.’
‘I really am surprised at the Savoy,’ he said. ‘I thought they had more class.’ He smiled at her, held out his hand. ‘Belgravia,’ he said. ‘You can walk in to Soho, and give up where you’re living now.’
Her smile was quizzical, and he felt he ought to make things clear.
‘I won’t let you down,’ he said. It felt extremely important that she knew that. He had had no interest in any woman for years. He had, since Julia’s death, spent several years wrapped in a deep and shattering grief for the cutting off of the reunion they had only just begun. Before that, whores and hallucinations and violence and filth, and the two terrible occasions, riddled with drink and lust and misunderstanding, on which he had fathered his two children, so dear to him, so far from him. The distant memory of the early nights with Julia, under the chandelier in Venice – no, don’t look back that far. No. Mabel was the only woman in whose arms he had ever found anything like peace, let alone desire, and joy – and here they all were, still. All the tiny possibilities of love which you suddenly realise are love, if you only have the eyes to see it.
‘I won’t let you down,’ he said.
*
Every time his talk wandered into these territories, she silenced him – and indeed herself. She could not look at it too closely because it would melt away under any examination. It was too extraordinary! At her age! And with him! This joy they were feeling was not possible in this wicked world. So she would keep it separate.
The flat was beautiful: the first floor of a tall house some aristocratic family could no longer afford to run, white stucco like a wedding cake, windows almost the height of the tall ceilings, low February sunshine lying on the black branches of the plane trees outside beyond the balcony. In the evening the damp smell of the garden square rose and crept over into the room like the promise of a continent beyond. Imminent spring. The leaves will dance in the summer, out there, she thought, and then thought it best not to think ahead.
Four rooms and a parquet floor. And a kitchen.
At the flower stall in Sloane Square he had offered her a big spray of something expensive and hothouse – orchids? Some glamorous lily? – and then caught sight of her face, and bought the violets instead. She said, once they were alone, ‘Thank you. The others were kinda—’ and she had been going to say ‘mistressy’, but she didn’t even want to think that word, Lord forgive her. He took her arm, and she thought, as a passer-by glanced, I don’t suppose that in public we will ever really be alone.
He was saying, ‘That’s not how I think of you. As something expensive and exotic, to show off. That’s not – that’s not it.’
If Iris didn’t exist, she thought, what a wild joy I would make of this, spitting in the eye of everything, just loving him and going places and fighting everyone who criticised or looked sideways at us, and breaking rules and having such fun – I’d go to his places and he’d come to mine, and none of it would matter because our love is pure no matter what anybody thinks.
But I must tell him soon. I must work this out.
She was scared. She wasn’t used to fear. She had not been brought up that way.
Well what’s the worst can happen? He’ll just quit me and that’s it, like nothing ever happened. So I’d better do it soon. But the idea of him quitting her – no. I’ve earned this, she thought. I’ve lost him twice already. I don’t want to quit. I want to keep him. I want him. That part of it was – terribly simple.
‘You’ll need a maid,’ he said, unlocking the door, smiling sideways at her, and she smiled at his idea of necessity. She thought of Reginald’s eldest daughter, Rebecca – but then how could she bring any other girl here where Iris could not come? She thought, briefly, madly – I’ll bring Iris, pretend she is my maid, then she can live here in this sunlight—
Then, Oh Mabel, she thought.
‘I’ll see about it,’ she said, but she kept the rooms herself. She preferred it that way: such calm in solitude. Anyway, bringing anyone else would be too much like reality.
After he left, she surveyed her empire. There was hardly any furniture. We could have a room each, she thought. Mama in that cosy one, Iris in the sunny one, she could have a little desk in there and hang her clothes up properly – me in this one – ‘This one’ was small but on the corner, with windows south and west, a fireplace framed with twisted carved leaves and columns, a mirror the same. All so clean.
She put a tiny table in front of a window, and on it the violets in a little vase, and she lay on the bed, and she wept.
*
‘I knew it!’ crowed Riley.
They were sitting on the bank, smoking cigarettes and letting their white shoul
ders glow like ivory, grass tickling their knees. A damselfly kept settling on Riley’s toe as he lifted it in and out of the water, reminding him of Nadine, and that song about the thread of blue.
‘No you didn’t,’ Peter said. ‘How could you know it? What do you mean?’
‘Knew it in 1918,’ Riley said. ‘She was so – lovely. Fabulous eyes.’ She had been serving at the Turquoisine; he had asked her to tell Peter that he was there to take him home, and there had been a look in her eyes – he could picture it now, a sort of veiling that passed across, a look of loss, expected and accepted loss, deserved loss, even, as if she knew she would never be allowed the thing she wanted. What had she said, about Peter, or to Peter? He couldn’t remember the words. Something implying an intimacy. He remembered what she’d said to him, though, back when his scars were fresh and his voice just healing. As he had dropped his scarf to speak – to croak – this beautiful girl had looked him in the eye and said, ‘You still cute.’ A chap doesn’t forget that.
‘Oh rubbish,’ said Peter, but he glowed a little at that description of her.
‘Not rubbish,’ Riley said. He smiled. ‘Then you told me later. 1919, was it, you were with her again?’
‘A few months, after … after Julia left,’ Peter said. ‘I let her down, then. The old drink. I know you might think a girl like that might expect to be let down but—’
‘She’s not a girl like that,’ Riley said.
‘No she’s not,’ Peter said. ‘Exactly.’
A silence sat between them, companionable and open.
‘So, I’m beginning to think,’ Peter said.
Riley grunted.
‘It’s not like normal!’ Peter cried. ‘It’s not tennis and dances, we’re not twenty-two, I don’t know her people, I don’t even know if she has people. We’re practically living together, Riley! Except she won’t let me. Two nights a week, it’s as if we’re married. Otherwise, I’m packed back off to Locke Hill. Too much work! she says – days in the shop, nights singing. If it were any other kind of work I’d have her stop, of course, but it’s music, it’s her heart – I’d go and listen to her every night of the week but she won’t let me. She says people have noticed me, and there’s been talk. I haven’t even been to where she – where she really lives.’
Riley glanced round at him.
‘Husband?’ he said. ‘Boyfriend?’ He had a sudden image of Peter being beaten up by a vast and jealous jazz musician. Dear Peter, so innocent despite everything. ‘Someone keeping her?’
‘No,’ Peter said. ‘Pretty sure not. She’s – honest, you know. And proud. She doesn’t have a bean, really. Rather hard to get her to accept the slightest thing, too.’
Riley knew nothing about these things. He had gone straight from war into Nadine’s arms, had only ever had Nadine to understand or be understood by, and Christ what a woman she was for understanding … For a moment he thought to tell Peter to speak to Nadine about it – but then no. There was something delicate about this. But if Nadine did know, what would she say? She’d say, when you don’t know what to do, get more information. Which means, going up a notch.
Peter was leaning back on his elbow now, one knee bent, his arm with cigarette dangling, languid. For a moment, seeing him thus against the livid green, Riley recalled the morning of Julia’s death, the mad tableau of Peter sitting just so by Julia’s dead body at the end of the frozen lawn, the collar of his greatcoat up, cigarette dangling just the same way.
Riley bit his reconstructed lip, and let go a huge sigh. I never saw a man who more deserved happiness, he thought.
‘Have you told anybody?’ he asked. ‘Rose? The children?’
‘Good Lord no,’ said Peter.
‘Probably best leave it where it is then,’ Riley said. ‘See what happens.’
‘But,’ said Peter, and Riley glanced at him.
‘But?’
‘I want more,’ Peter said simply.
‘Then you need to go up a notch,’ Riley said, but the word notch was difficult, so he said, ‘Up a level’ to make it clear.
‘How?’ asked Peter.
‘More information,’ said Riley. ‘Keep talking.’
‘What, ask her?’ said Peter, looking slightly aghast.
‘Well I don’t think you should get a detective,’ Riley said, and shot him a look, and slipped back into the water.
Chapter Seven
London, July 1932
A few weeks later, Nadine and the family were at supper in the garden at Bayswater Road, evening sun limpid, and London just beyond the soot-blackened wall. It was Tom’s first day back from school. Rose had joined them, looking stern and cheerful, and smelling slightly of carbolic soap, and Kitty was staying up for dinner with the adults. They were having shepherd’s pie: too heavy for the weather, but Riley’s favourite. Tom was complaining about his trunks. Matron had written to Nadine during term saying the elastic – or the trunks themselves – needed replacing. But nothing had been done about it and now it was July; the old ones were hanging by a string, and Tom wanted to know, was he going to have to go to Italy with no decent trunks to wear? Talking of which, when were they leaving? Because he had plans …
And Nadine said, girding her loins a little and not looking up from the dish, ‘We’re not going to Italy this year.’
‘Aren’t you?’ said Riley, looking up. ‘Why not?’
‘But why?’ Tom said. He looked aghast.
‘It’ll be nice to have a holiday in England for a change,’ said Nadine, as if it were nothing much. ‘With Riley.’ She did hope Tom wasn’t going to kick up too much fuss.
‘What about my polenta supply?’ Riley said, cheerfully. Nadine looked across at him and said, ‘Wouldn’t you rather have a proper family holiday than polenta? I thought we might stay at Locke Hill for a change.’
Tom was quiet, and Nadine saw the stew that this proposition opened up for him, and was sorry. She thought, looking at his face, he still does not love Peter at all – and that made her sad, all over again. She recalled Riley saying to Tom once: ‘I wish you’d known your father before the war made him what he is,’ and Tom snapping back: ‘Well I don’t’ – but that was a long time ago. Hadn’t things changed?
If they had, it hadn’t been enough. The resentful set of Tom’s mouth said it all: he still wasn’t interested in his father. Of course, she thought, a boy that age isn’t expected to talk about loving his father, but he’s meant to feel it. She wondered if Tom might be somehow aware of that, and a bit inchoately ashamed of it, without perhaps really knowing it. Certainly she could see it all adding up to ‘Who on earth would want to go to Locke Hill, where we have to go at Christmas and Easter anyway, when we could be in Rome, and on the lake?’
‘Riley could come to Italy,’ Tom said, flashing his blue eyes upwards. ‘They’d love him to come.’
‘You know he doesn’t travel, darling,’ Nadine said, and a look crossed Riley’s face, a little sad frown, and Tom glanced at him. For a moment restraint sat at the table with them. Rose noticed, of course.
‘I hope I will come, one day,’ Riley said, almost apologetically, and Nadine felt suddenly tearful.
Kitty said, ‘It will be nice to be with Daddy. Locke Hill is lovely anyway, and we can ride.’
‘I’ll have your trunks ready in time, darling,’ Nadine said after a moment. ‘The river’s quite full this year. And you know, it is your home.’
‘I’m coming too,’ said Rose. ‘I’m taking some proper time off. My poor patients have all agreed to do without me for two entire weeks. I’ve made them all promise not to die or have any sick babies.’
‘I love Dr Aunt Rose,’ said Kitty dreamily, and Rose eyed her sideways and grinned.
‘I don’t understand,’ Tom said, at this series of betrayals. ‘Why should we suddenly not go? We’ve always gone before—’
‘Four times,’ said Nadine. ‘It’s not a lifelong tradition.’
‘Well it should be,’ Tom said. ‘
They’re our—’ and with that, of course, he realised that actually they weren’t what he had been going to say, ‘our cousins’. He frowned.
‘Of course they are,’ Nadine said. ‘We’re just not going this year. That’s all.’
‘Then I’ll go on my own,’ Tom said. ‘If nobody else wants to come. I am old enough – I’ve been old enough to go away to school for years, so I’m old enough to go to Italy.’
Riley gave him a look.
Tom sank back into thought, furious.
*
Riley had some work to catch up with so it was Nadine and Rose who sat out among the gleaming white roses in the dusk, drinking a little wine and talking.
‘So what was that about?’ Rose asked conversationally.
Nadine glanced at her. No hiding anything from Rose. Knowing she would have to explain, she wondered how she would phrase it.
‘Don’t you like them any more?’ Rose was saying, with kind curiosity.
‘Gosh no,’ Nadine blurted. ‘I just wanted them to come here for once, and they couldn’t, and now it’s rather late, and of course we should spend our holidays together, as a family, with Riley. It’s been selfish of us to go gadding off without him …’ She ran dry, having over-explained, and thus revealed that she had not given the real reason. Because of course there was the other reason, beyond friendliness and natural hospitality, why Nadine had tried to get the Fiore family to come to London. And Aldo’s refusal – for the perfectly good reason that there were too many of them – and insistence that she and the children should go to Rome ‘as usual’ had meant she had to take this other tack.
That photograph of the Duce was the reason. Nadine was not a political woman – she drew, she painted, she was engaged with the children and with Riley. If she was political at all it was social policy which engaged her, with Rose at her surgery, helping with her campaigns for public health and education and women, discussing ideas at length. They’d set up a weekly children’s art class at the surgery, which Nadine ran, and they hoped to expand it to other surgeries in deprived areas. That was Nadine’s politics … But she could see that the Duce, for all his social policies, was not their kind of politician. She knew that Riley, with his Fabian ways and his clear-eyed, humorous idealisms, and Aldo would lurch naturally into political discussions, and would disagree. With Aldo in London, she felt, it would be less of an issue.
