He answered them politely as he strolled towards Marble Arch. ‘Not tonight, thanks. Maybe tomorrow.’ He did not like to upset them. He had seen them loitering, not only like owls at their natural time, dusk, or folded in later darkness, but also in the pale mornings when he took his training run around the park. He felt sorry for the early girls. One of them had halted him in mid-run and offered him what she called a cheap thrill. She had said she was on her way to her normal job in an Oxford Street store.
This evening was fine enough to walk to the West End. Piccadilly Circus was thronged. Foreign soldiers were taking laughing photographs of each other under the plinth of Eros which was banked up with patriotic posters about war savings and avoiding coughs and sneezes and venereal diseases, but was lacking the famous winged statue who had long been taken, with his bow and arrow, to some safe accommodation. Other London memorials had not been so lucky. King Richard the Lionheart still held his bronze sword aloft outside Parliament, but bent by a bomb at the middle of its blade.
The pre-war illuminated advertising signs for Guinness, Johnny Walker whisky and Carter’s Little Liver Pills (‘Wake up your liver bile’) remained tacked to the buildings around the circus but now they were only metal shapes, dusty and lightless.
Few people bothered to look at them anyway, or at the sky, a darkening jigsaw piece fixed among the Piccadilly roofs; all attention and noisy activity were on the pavements. Buses, taxis and a few furtive cars whirled slowly around the circus and a group of exuberant French sailors, their hats enlivened by red pom-poms, linked arms with a chorus of singing shopgirls.
Miller found the theatre behind Shaftesbury Avenue. The adjoining building had been demolished by a bomb and there were fortifications of rotting sandbags around a police telephone box on the pavement. Like an ever-present extra, an old, mufflered man shouted as he touted the London evening newspapers: ‘RAF Clobbers Germany. Ruskies Advance.’
Above the theatre’s doors was a plain poster: ‘Chekov’s The Seagull.’ Only a few people were going in. He paid at the cubby-hole of the box office and sat in the middle stalls. By the time the lights dimmed, the theatre was only half full; some were men in uniform but mostly they were civilians.
Kathleen, as Arkadina, came on to the stage and he watched her carefully. She was slim, almost thin, intense and careful, her voice notable. After the performance he went around to the stage door and asked for her.
She had not changed from her stage clothes when she came down the dim, curving steps. The stage-door keeper in a faded, striped deck-chair, nodded dozily over his newspaper. ‘Oh, how very good of you to come,’ Kathleen said, surprised and a touch mystified.
‘I enjoyed it,’ he said as they shook hands. ‘I don’t get a lot of culture, I’m afraid.’
‘Not much of an audience,’ she smiled. ‘It’s the first time I can honestly say anyone has come especially to see me. My goodness – me, pulling in the crowds.’
She looked embarrassed. ‘I can’t invite you to my dressing-room for a drink,’ she said. ‘It’s shared and it’s like a cupboard. There’s not enough room for three.’
‘I’ll wait,’ he said. ‘Perhaps we could go somewhere for dinner.’
She gave a small laugh. ‘We’d be lucky,’ she said. ‘But we could try. I’ll be down in ten minutes. Don’t go away.’
‘I won’t,’ he promised. The stage-door keeper, who could scarcely keep awake, lifted his head and, heavy lidded, tapped his Evening News. ‘Them Reds will be in Berlin afore you lot, if you’re not sharp,’ he mentioned.
Five minutes’ walk through the moving shadows of the West End crowd brought them to a mews with a small restaurant among the low houses which years before had been stables. She took Miller’s arm and they threaded their way carefully. There were drunken soldiers and airmen pushing along the pavements and he knew the fact that he was an officer meant nothing. London was thronged. Boisterous songs and impromptu dances filled the streets as if the war were already over. There was an unbridled fist fight going on at one corner. Policemen, in their pointed helmets and with truncheons drawn, were heading ponderously towards the fracas.
It was necessary to knock. ‘Luigi, are you still open?’ asked Kathleen as the door of the restaurant widened cautiously.
Through the dim aperture a young man’s face beamed. ‘For you, madam, we are always open.’ The door swung wide. ‘But we only have a little food left.’
Kathleen laughed. ‘But you have some wine.’
‘Wine we have. Not as good wine as we would like, but some there is. Before long maybe we will get some new supplies from Italy.’
It was like a cave with candles and empty tables. An elderly guitar player was just packing away his instrument. He looked up. Kathleen said: ‘You were just going.’
‘For you,’ said the man, retrieving the guitar from his case, ‘I will play through the night.’
‘Until the last train,’ corrected Luigi as he showed them to a corner table. He walked with difficulty. ‘We have no tonic water although we have a whole bottle of gin. Tomorrow we get the tonic maybe.’
Kathleen glanced at Miller. ‘Wine, Luigi,’ she said. ‘This is my friend Captain Miller.’
Luigi bowed and they shook hands. ‘His mother was British,’ said Kathleen when he had gone for the wine. ‘His father Italian. His father was in Italy when they came into the war. He was put in the Italian Army and I think he’s a prisoner now.’
The young man returned. He had heard. ‘Prisoner of the Teds, the Germans,’ he said. ‘But I hear he is okay. The Tedeschi are finished. How did we get mixed up with them?’
He opened a bottle of Chianti and gave it to Miller, who handed it to Kathleen, who took a token sniff and then returned it to Luigi to pour. ‘There is a big fight in the street, isn’t there?’ he said as he did so. Miller shrugged: ‘These soldiers are boys. They can’t wait to fight.’
They each ordered a mushroom omelette with sautéed potatoes and mashed turnips and carrots. ‘Very often it’s the blacks versus the whites,’ said Kathleen.
Miller nodded. ‘Three men were killed – one knifed, two shot – and five injured in a fight, blacks and whites, in Southampton only the other night. At a dance.’
‘And yet they are expected to go into battle together,’ she said. ‘Side by side.’
Miller shook his head. ‘The United States has no black combat troops. They do the other jobs but not fighting. I have a black driver who’s the best man I know.’
Kathleen said: ‘Why don’t they allow them to fight?’
‘Maybe Uncle Sam doesn’t trust their resolve, shall we say. Personally, I think that’s crazy. They’ll be good in battle. In that way maybe they’ll get some due respect. In the not-too-distant future they’ll have to use black troops in the front line. It depends on the casualties.’
Kathleen sighed. ‘It’s so terrible that you, that we, have to think like that. Will you … when the invasion happens will you …?’
‘I hope so,’ he smiled. ‘I didn’t come all this way to watch.’
‘Are you married?’
She said it as though it were not important. She did not look up from her food. ‘Sure,’ he said. ‘She’s back in Bismarck, North Dakota, looking after the dogs.’
‘No children?’
‘No, just dogs. They win prizes, cups and ribbons and rosettes. It’s the big thing in her life. And you?’
‘I’m on my second husband,’ she said. ‘The first was a disaster. This one’s worse.’
They both laughed. ‘Full marks for being frank,’ he said. ‘For both of us.’
She had grey eyes slightly melancholy. ‘That’s all there’s time for these days, frankness.’
‘Is your husband in the services?’
‘Entertaining them,’ she said. ‘He’s an actor and he’s somewhere in the Middle East, or Italy, being Hamlet for soldiers. Sadly he’s a drunk. He once dropped off to sleep in the middle of the famous soliloquy.’
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He asked her about the play he had seen that evening. ‘On its last legs, I think,’ she said. ‘You saw the audience. In wartime most of them want lots of flesh and jokes. There’s a show called Soldiers in Skirts. It’s a sell-out every night.’
She smiled reflectively. ‘And our audiences, they complain. There’s always something. During that recent bombing someone moaned to the manager that the scenery was wobbling. It was, too. So was I, for that matter.’
‘You didn’t quit the stage during an air raid?’
‘It’s routine by now. The manager comes on and announces that an air raid is in progress and we carry on through it. Some people leave but not many. Londoners have become very tough. During the big Blitz, in 1940, there were queues outside the cinema in Leicester Square for Gone With the Wind and the firemen still hadn’t put the previous night’s fires out.’
They were there for an hour. The guitarist played dreamily but then had to leave to get the last underground train.
Luigi saw them to the door, locking it behind them. The streets seemed more crowded in the dark. They searched for a taxi. Eventually one stopped.
‘I’d like to see you home,’ said Miller.
‘I wish you would.’
The shuddering taxi took them into Belgravia, where there were fine, upstanding houses, dark against the sky; beyond the clamour of the crowds, they were surrounded by a refined silence.
‘It’s very posh,’ said Kathleen, almost like a warning. ‘You can rent these houses and apartments for very little just now. One of the few good things about this war is the bargains. Soon, I imagine, the prices will be going up again. When those people who ran off begin creeping back.’
Miller paid the driver in his box-like cab. The London taxis amused him for they appeared hardly removed from pictures of the nineteenth-century hansom cabs. ‘Good luck over there, sir,’ said the driver knowingly. He was wrapped in a muffler, despite the spring weather. ‘I wish I could come with you. The Huns in the First War was all right. Just soldiers. But I ’aven’t got time for this lot. Them and their ’Itler. Too big for their boots, if you ask me. Give ’em what for.’
‘I’ll do my best,’ promised Miller.
Kathleen opened the high black front door and touched her finger to her lips. ‘There’s a Lord and Lady Somebody in the flat on this floor,’ she whispered. ‘They complain if you come in late and the door bangs.’
With caution they went up the curved staircase. The building felt warm and cared for. She took a key from her handbag, opened a door on the first landing and switched on the lights as they went in.
Miller whistled briefly: ‘This is some place.’
The apartment was tall and finely furnished. They went from a marble-floored vestibule into a grand reception room. ‘Not bad at the rent,’ she said. ‘I’ll get you a drink. I have some champagne. It’s been waiting for somebody to drink it.’
There was an ornate electric fire which she turned on. He sat on a large sofa and wondered how many yards of material had gone into the ceiling-to-floor drapes at the windows, how much the oversized paintings were worth. He began to feel pleased and comfortable.
‘That taxi-driver was keen to fight,’ she called from the next room. She brought in a tray with two champagne glasses and the bottle. ‘There’s even a refrigerator with ice,’ she said.
‘He couldn’t wait,’ said Miller. ‘But I guess he’ll stay with his taxi.’ He stood to open the bottle but she insisted on doing it. ‘It’s my bottle,’ she said.
She opened it without fuss and poured two glasses. It was good champagne; it did not fizz or overflow but sat obediently shimmering in the glasses. ‘I liked his muffler,’ she said. ‘A London muffler is the trademark of elderly taxi-drivers and the newspaper sellers.’
‘We call a silencer on an automobile a muffler,’ he said.
They raised their glasses to each other and she said: ‘Enough of the small talk, captain.’ Confidently she moved against him; he could smell her deft perfume. ‘I have to confess that I want you desperately,’ she said, putting her forehead against his neck.
Miller put down his glass but she kept hers. His arms moved about her slender body and he said: ‘I guess I’m out of practice.’
‘You’ll soon pick it up again,’ she smiled.
Now she put her glass beside his on the table and her arms slid up his back. For a slight woman she kissed voluptuously. ‘Good,’ she said frankly. ‘I knew this would happen, from the moment we met.’
He smiled, surprised at her intensity. They eased apart and studied each other’s faces. With a sly look she took his left hand and guided it around her slim back, closing it on her wrist so that he held her like a prisoner. ‘There are a lot of things you’ll have to find out about me,’ she whispered.
‘I’m prepared to learn,’ he said.
‘Will you undress me? I want you to undress me here in front of the fire.’ Her voice was steady, almost matter-of-fact, but hardly above a whisper.
Miller kissed her cheek-bone. After a few moments her eyes half opened as if to make sure he was still there. ‘Start now,’ she said.
‘Take me through it,’ he said.
She eased his hands to buttons and catches. The pale blouse came away and then she helped him with her brassière and she stood, head bowed, displaying her breasts to him, pointing the nipples at him. ‘Don’t crease your uniform, darling,’ she murmured. ‘Let me take it.’
She undid the buttons of his tunic and then slipped it away from him. She took off his officer’s tie and undid his shirt. ‘Hmm. Bare chest,’ she observed, suddenly practical. ‘Don’t you get cold?’
‘Not right now.’
Stage by stage, garment by garment, they took turns until they were standing naked against each other, the electric fire glowing pink on their bodies. She kept her eyes on his face but moved a little away, as if for a dare, picked up his champagne glass, refilled it and handed it to him. Then she replenished her own. They were only inches apart as she, and then he, raised a glass. ‘Cheers,’ she said. ‘Darling.’
‘Cheers to you,’ he said.
They moved against each other. ‘Don’t you think I’m skinny?’ she asked.
‘Slender,’ he said.
‘This is beautiful,’ she observed. She poured a trickle of champagne on his penis and then guided his glass to let a dribble fall between her breasts.
Miller had never had an experience like this. Such things did not happen in North Dakota, not outside dreams. It was like being in a play with her.
‘Come down here now,’ she said. ‘This soft carpet is wasted on people’s feet.’
She tenderly pulled him towards her and then sank to the carpet, easing him down to her. ‘I have to tell you something,’ she said. ‘But it must wait.’
‘This is no time for conversation,’ he agreed.
At five in the morning he awoke in her four-poster bed. She stirred with him. ‘Do you have to go now?’
‘Unless I want a court martial,’ he said.
Kathleen slid down beside him and he folded her into his body. They made love again, sleepily, and she said: ‘Before you go I must tell you what I wanted to tell you last night. But I was afraid it would spoil it.’
‘Try me,’ he said.
‘I am the most terrible liar.’
‘I haven’t caught you out yet.’
‘But I am. I make things up as I go along. That day we met, I told you that I had gone into Hampton Court for some solitude. Because my friend’s husband had died in a Japanese prison camp. I’m sorry to say that was so much balls. I don’t have a friend with a dead prisoner-of-war husband.’
He turned on the bedside light and studied her face. She looked almost gaunt. ‘Why would you want to say that?’
‘I wanted to pick you up, that’s why. I saw you going in there and I wanted you.’
He laughed calmly. ‘Well, you sure enough succeeded. And I’m glad. It’s a great line.’
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‘I was down there to take something I wanted to sell to an antique shop. He’s bought things from me before, jewellery and suchlike. Sometimes I find myself behind with the rent. I felt very lonely that day, very melancholy. And then I saw you by yourself and I made up the story.’
Naked, he eased himself from the bed. ‘It was a good, sad story,’ he said. ‘And it didn’t do anybody any harm. We’re here together.’
‘And another thing. Last night when I said my husband was a drunken actor entertaining the troops in the Middle East. That wasn’t true either.’ Her eyes fell. ‘… Only it’s a bit true.’
‘Which bit?’
She looked miserable. ‘Well, he’s an actor of sorts but he’s not a drunk. You remember I mentioned that revue Soldiers in Skirts? Well, he’s one of them. And I mean one of them.’
Miller began to laugh and leaned over to kiss her. ‘Anything else? Anything you want to get off your mind?’
‘Not at the moment. I’ll try to make up some more before we see each other again.’ Her face was drawn, anxious, in the light from the single lamp. ‘That’s if we do.’
Her eyes were bright, even sharp. Her slim hand went to his face.
‘I’m not going to let you vanish just yet,’ he said. ‘Not until Uncle Sam sends me somewhere. Then I’ll be back as soon as I can.’ He grinned encouragingly. ‘How about tonight?’
She eased herself from the bed, her small buttocks tight, and reached for her robe. ‘Tonight would be wonderful,’ she said. ‘I won’t ask you to come to the play again.’ She went into the bathroom. ‘I’ll get some coffee,’ she called. ‘The number is on the telephone by the bed, Belgravia 8592. Will you ring me early evening anyway? Today I have a matinée.’
At five forty-five he left, carrying his shoes; he crept down the main stairs and stealthily opened the street door. As he did he turned and she was standing on the landing, like a wraith, slightly waving. He waved back, put on his shoes as he stood on the doorstep, closed the door, and went out.
Waiting For the Day Page 21
