It was eleven p.m., another couple of hours before they finally saw off the after-theatre crowd. But on a Tuesday, the load at this hour was beginning to lighten at least. The day, even in early July, the height of summer, had long gone. Up there, way overhead and beyond the pavement grille was the jumbled clatter of pedestrians. The heave of traffic was as great as ever, but the light was the patchy, sulphurous yellow of the street lamps. Hubert Gregg’s lyrics came back to him as he washed up.
‘I’m gonna get lit up when the lights go on in London …!’
Johnny’d been lit up all right, drunk as a lord up there in the West End, spinning and weaving and kissing and dancing, a succession of girls (and a few men) in his arms, with no cares. The bad times over and the world free again, it was a kaleidoscope of swirling demob-delirious humanity with everything to live for. Looking back, those crowds were more like the food-scrapings swirling towards the sink’s blocked plughole. Human detritus. The golden future turned out to be not up, but down. Down and dark.
And here he was, four years later, back in another warzone. It was like France, the show before last, because this was what life there had been like: filthy, nauseating, soul-destroying, repetitive, much of it boring. The kitchen of the Bay Tree just off the Bayswater Road had everything in common with war, except violent death, and even that was probably only a matter of time, given the nature of the people working here and the range of weaponry at their disposal. Blood was regularly shed in the chefs’ zone and burns and scalding were commonplace.
The Bay Tree was a popular spot with the arty crowd. Every night was a battle against time, against conditions, against the chefs and the waiters, against (if they weren’t careful) the customers. The basement kitchen was very like the trenches but, at least when he was there when he looked up he could see the sky, the occasional bird, a tough, flowering weed, a cloud or two. Here, the pavement grille let through nothing but the thinnest stripes of light and the odd cigarette end.
He’d been only in his teens and looked younger, since he was small for his age. He never thought about death, perhaps that was why the bullets and the shrapnel swerved round him – because he didn’t care, so what was the point? The other blokes liked him and one or two of them liked him quite a bit, because they thought he was girly. That was fine, he took their cigarettes and the presents they made him out of their parcels from home, wrapped up by their mothers and sweethearts, the women they forgot about when they were rutting their socks off.
Clenching his jaw against the gag-reflex, he clawed the muck out of the sink and began running the tap again, shaking in the powder that made his hands raw and his nails crack.
They’d treated him like a mascot, but there was one chap who became a friend; the only person in his life he could properly call that, apart from Molly and she was a special case. Reg Nicholls was a big, raw-boned, lanky cockney, a bloke so straight he seemed almost innocent. He was not a fool, but decent through and through. The sort of bloke who never said a bad word about anyone and you just knew that was because he didn’t think ill of anyone in the first place. It wasn’t in his nature. To begin with, when Reg was kind and friendly towards him, Johnny had him marked down as another pansy. Yet as the weeks went by, in rest camp, marching, hanging about in reserve, even in the front line, he came to realise that here was someone who had no ulterior motive, who didn’t see him as a lucky charm or a quick poke. Reg liked him. He laughed at his jokes, listened to his stories and looked out for him. Reg was a gent, just about the only man in the squad who never lost his manners. Other blokes respected him for it and even modified their language a bit when he was around, though he didn’t mind what they said. Johnny once heard one of the officers say in a baffled drawl that ‘Nicholls has the milk of human kindness running through his veins,’ which seemed about right. But even allowing for that, Johnny knew he and Reg had a real friendship.
Reg had been in France since almost the start, January 1915, and been back with a Blighty one twice and still come back. You might almost have thought he liked it, or at the very least found something in the blackness that he hadn’t found elsewhere. Perhaps, thought Johnny, that was the source of their instinctive comradeship – there was nothing here they missed and you were so close to the edge nothing mattered. It turned out he was only partly right. Reg was a Barnardo’s boy, said he had no complaints about that – the teachers, the chaplain, they’d been good people who’d taught him and cared for him – so being in the army was kind of home from home. The war suited Johnny because, forget the enemy, it was every man for himself and he was already beyond corruption. Reg saw it differently, he was institutionalised, a team player.
Johnny reckoned he could deal with pain, if it happened, and he wasn’t scared of death; there was nothing he planned to do with his life, no future he had in mind. But when Reg began to lose his nerve, well, that scared him. It was like seeing a tree you thought would always be there start to die, struck down by nasty unseen blight for which there was no cure. First of all, he became withdrawn. In rest camp – a huddle of derelict farm buildings on the edge of a village – he no longer wanted to play soccer (Johnny didn’t blame him for that) or British Bulldog. And you no longer heard him singing any of those bloody hymns he knew by heart, either with or without the alternative words. He just sat and smoked, his hand trembling slightly. He held the shaking right hand propped on the other one. His long forearms were like a couple of thin, knotty sticks that had nothing to do with him, that he was just using for the purpose of holding the fag. His homely, lantern-jawed face was dishwater-grey and empty. When Johnny went to sit by him he would give him a quick, distracted look, acknowledging him almost fearfully, as if anything or anyone coming too close was a threat.
‘How you doing, Reg?’
‘Not too bad. Not too bad.’
‘Get you a cuppa?’
‘No thanks, son.’
‘Got a fag?’
Reg rummaged in his shirt pocket and brought out a wizened pack containing only two cigarettes. Johnny’s hand hovered.
‘You sure? Don’t want to leave you short.’
The pack was shaken slightly, Johnny took one.
‘Coming into town tonight? Drink at the Carrifer?’ The Carrefour was the most-frequented bar on the crossroads at the far end of the village, the one with the prettiest, friendliest girls and the least disgusting vin ordinaire and sausages. Reg’s role was usually that of benign non-participant, he didn’t drink much and kept a smile on his face and his hands to himself. One thing he would do was sing in his yodelling tenor – one of those sturdy hymns which always got him a roar of affectionately teasing applause. Now he shook his head.
‘Don’t reckon so.’
‘Might do you good,’ said Johnny. ‘Back up, the day after tomorrow.’
He should never have said that. The hand tremor turned into an uncontrollable shudder and Reg lurched to his feet, tottering for a moment so that Johnny jumped up, thinking he might be crushed along with the half-finished cigarette.
‘I’m not going!’
This couldn’t have been plainer as regards the bar, but a couple of days later it was as clear as daylight to Johnny that there had been more than one meaning. He stuck like glue to Reg on the march up, chattering like a monkey, looking up into his face for signs and portents, grabbing his sleeve now and again when he seemed to be flagging. The chaps began singing ‘When this bloody war is over’, that usually got Reg joining in with the proper churchy words, but not this time. He was a walking corpse.
They had a twenty-four-hour behind the lines and then it was on and into the trenches, passing the other lot on the way down, filtering into the bays and alleys, trying not to look at what was under your feet and stuck into the walls and the parapet. For now, they were reasonably clean and well fed, but that wasn’t going to last. The weather was hot and after the clean air of rest camp the stink was enough to make you gag, but after a few hours they wouldn’t notice that.
They were in the Wipers area, part of a little sub-salient that stuck out like a thumb – a sore thumb ho-ho – towards the German line. There weren’t many trees left in their world, but at this particular point there was a thin spinney, a fringe of elders running along the top of the thumb. God knows how they’d survived. Johnny thought they were just plain lucky, like him.
They were all on edge, all jumpy, but Reg was in a proper mess. His spoon clattered on his mess tin, his breathing was sticky and shallow like a man with a fever. He spoke when he was spoken to and was never less than civil, but you could just tell his heart wasn’t in it, there was nothing behind the words. Johnny feared for him, dreaded the moment they had to make an advance. The moment when the terror was going to finally burst out of his friend like a dose of the shits, shaming him in a way he didn’t deserve after all those years of putting his life on the line for King and fucking Country.
They had a long wait, dug into the filth with beautiful, high summer weather hovering over them: a sky of opalescent blue, feathery clouds, a few brave, scrawny meadow flowers sticking their heads over the lip of the parapet, little bobbing faces looking down on them. Three days went by with barely a squeak from the other side. Johnny looked after Reg: kept an eye on him; made sure he ate; pushed him about at stand-to and inspection; patched up his feet which were in a terrible state; scrounged some socks from someone else; talked and talked and tried to keep him from sinking altogether. No one liked the look of Reg, they all reckoned they knew how it was going to end, but there it was. If Eldridge wanted to play nursemaid that was his look-out.
On the fourth day, a recce party went out and came back quite excited with the news that Gerry had extended their trench by a couple of hundred yards, so the end of it was now just below the fringe of trees, itself about a quarter of a mile away. It didn’t take a genius to see that whoever could get up among the trees had won themselves a nice little vantage point, from which to take pot shots or even launch a full-blown attack. The officer in charge, not many years older than Johnny, fresh-faced and a bit startled-looking to find the silver spoon wrenched untimely from his mouth, decreed that, well chaps, they’d better get up there first and make the most of the element of surprise.
The days were long, not fully dark until after ten o’clock, and there was usually a desultory exchange of fire around eight, just to show no one was sleeping on the job. That was about the time when, back at the farm, the bats came out. Tiny pipistrelles flitting and swooping almost faster than the eye could follow in the dusk. The order came along from Captain Dench that they’d be going over, quietly mind, immediately after the half-hearted evening barrage. That the enemy might have exactly the same idea seemed not to have occurred to him, or to anyone. To be honest it was good to be doing something, taking some action, not just being a sitting duck in a hole in the ground.
Waiting to go over, Johnny’s main preoccupation was how to get Reg to move. A complete funk wouldn’t do him any favours. This wasn’t a charge. There’d be no whistle and no rallying cry. Dench would get out there first, poor sod, with his little tin hat and revolver, at least as terrified as the rest of them and rather less prepared. Then they’d follow, keeping low and weaving from side to side, because if Gerry had got there first you wanted to present a moving target. If he had. They hoped not.
Johnny could hear Reg just behind him on the steps. Each breath carried a squeaky moan, like a child with a bellyache. He was shot to buggery. Everyone was pretending not to hear, wishing he’d fucking put a sock in it, he was making them nervous.
Everything happened quickly. Dench went over, hoisting his arm in a beckoning motion. Over they went, Reg stumbling and now almost sobbing. Johnny fell back a few paces, prodding him along, saying daft things like ‘get a move on’ and ‘nearly there’ and ‘watch yourself’, meaningless empty phrases, pretending it wasn’t dangerous.
They’d gone about a hundred yards, when there was a volley of shots from the trees. Johnny saw Dench fall over at the same time as he saw Reg spin round and start to run back the way they’d come. Only he could run quicker. He sprinted, caught Reg, pulled him round. He was gibbering, no other word for it. When Johnny shot him, from the front, he was aiming for his shoulder, a nice, Blighty one from the enemy to send him home for good. Reg’s look of twisted, frantic panic turned in an instant to one of surprise, as he first reeled, then fell down. Safe as houses.
Johnny, stumbling on between the ribbons of smoke, didn’t know that. He’d done his bit for Reg now he had to look out for himself. They’d passed Dench, gobbing up blood, and were returning the business-like fusillade with scattered fire of their own. Corporal Hayley was about ten yards to his left, ducking and weaving like a punch-drunk boxer, but with Dench gone there would be no more heroics.
‘Halt! Give over! We’re wasting our time lads! Dig in for as long as you need to and get back when you can – got that?’
Johnny threw himself down and brought his Enfield to his cheek. He felt almost snug, with the dark falling and old Reg taken care of back there. He heard the stretcher bearers jogging out to pick up Dench, who was making a horrible racket like a half-blocked drain. He hoped they’d got Reg already and the two of them would soon be on their way to the clearing station.
An hour later, they began to make their way back, creeping and stooping towards their trench, under cover of the stealing dark. Johnny nearly trod on someone, it happened all the time, except now – in the summer weather – the bodies stayed on the surface for longer. On this occasion, something made him glance down, to find Reg’s calm, glassy-eyed face looking back at him, his tin hat tilted back like an open lid, his mouth slack. In fact, for a non-drinking man, he looked amazingly like a drunk. In the half-light, the whole front of his tunic was black with blood.
Safe all right, but going nowhere.
Johnny began slotting the steaming, dripping plates into the wooden rack over his head. After the eighth plate, he left his hand up there for a moment, leaning on it, eyes closed. He’d accounted for his share of the enemy, but that one unintended death still had the power to make him feel sick. What the devil had gone through Reg’s head in the split second before he went down? Did a man taking a bullet to the heart have time to ask what the fuck was going on? Had his last thought been that Johnny was a traitor? Or did he know him well enough to realise that couldn’t be the case – that this was an act of kindness and Johnny was doing him a favour?
‘Get out of it Johnny-boy, move yerself!’
Codger shunted his mophead into the side of Johnny’s left shoe. He stepped to one side without looking, let the sodden grey ropes swirl through the muck, submerge in the bucket, drain, swirl again. Codger breathed through his mouth, a loud, adenoidal crackle.
Which reminded Johnny, Dench had died too.
An hour later, around one thirty a.m., he was sitting in his usual place in the corner of the Pink Parakeet. He couldn’t really afford private drinking club prices, but the hotel kitchen did at least provide a plate of fried leftovers, a kind of sinister heterogeneous bubble-and-squeak, which if you were wise you wolfed down without thinking. One plate a day was all he needed and his present room was not much more than a cupboard in Camden Town, so he reasoned he was entitled to a couple of drinks after work, when most places were closed.
The Parakeet was conveniently situated on his route home and he’d come to rely on his small hours gin-and-french. The place was at its busiest between one and four, there could be as many as sixty packed into a bar not much bigger than the Gents’ at the Bay Tree. In amongst the misfits and no-hopers and lushes and ageing good-time girls there were always a few bona fide artistic types – actors and painters – that you might recognise. The management, Lewis Calhoun – a Welshman who often said he’d opened the club to satisfy his own prodigious thirst – liked them and encouraged them with preferential prices. To begin with, because of Johnny’s appearance and well-spoken manner, he’d encouraged him too. But now that Lewis kn
ew he was just another boozer and an out-at-trouser one at that, he’d been relegated. He didn’t even drink that much, so he made himself popular by mixing in, flirting with the old turkeys and making the actors laugh, telling tall stories. As in France, he’d become a sort of mascot. He’d never been good at anything else, but he was good at that. He didn’t tell them he was a dishwasher by night and a thief by day.
Tonight, this stretch of seedy, sociable small hours’ time was no different. The club was hot and crowded, the air smoggy, the faces febrile and the noise, appropriately, like a parrot house. A black chap in a pork pie hat was playing the saxophone in a far corner God alone knew who was listening.
Johnny was too tired. He couldn’t be bothered to be amusing so he affected an aesthetic gloom. That got him a couple of drinks, one from an old queer who was always sniffing around, the other from an actress. She was not half bad for her age, with a lovely voice and smile. He wouldn’t have said no, but she had the breeding not to offer.
He wasn’t really a thief, not a pro. He was an opportunist who took whatever was easy. The things that people were too lazy or stupid or preoccupied to keep an eye on and which he sold on as quickly as possible. The war years, the second show, had been good to him like that. His chest had kept him out of the army, though he wouldn’t much have minded, and the black market was there to be played. Nylons, chocolate, fags, he could get hold of them and flog them easily. It helped that he wasn’t like the other spivs. He wore a plain black coat and a red scarf, he was well spoken. It was easy to give the impression he had just happened to come by these things and was happy to let them go for a tiny profit to an attractive woman, who deserved a bit of luxury in her life.
The Rose in Winter Page 16
