The Disappearance Boy (30 page)

As she was staring, the train entered a tunnel, slamming air and noise back into her face. Pam stumbled, but didn’t fall. Grabbing the edge of the window frame, she stood there and let the night air batter her. She knew it must be filthy, but it felt as though it was washing her clean.

The Balcombe tunnel under the Downs is the longest one on the Brighton to London line, and it takes a full minute to go through; after that, you’re free and into the night for a good long stretch. As the train settled down for its journey, Pam closed the window, contemplated the state of her frock, collected the notes that had been blown onto the compartment floor by that blast of air and decided that she’d better get herself looking halfway decent in case a ticket inspector turned up. She had shoes and clean clothes in her suitcase, and she could change in the toilet. It would be cramped, getting this torn and tangled dress off in there – but she’d had the training for that.

Opening her case to look for her tweed suit, the first thing she saw was the maroon satin ball gown. She pulled it out and shook it. Why not? Let’s face it, only a few months from now, it was going to be goodbye to anything with a fitted waist, that was for sure.

She never did get round to digging out a pair of shoes, but doing herself up in the ball gown did inspire Pam to open her handbag again, fish out her compact and lipstick and comb and repair the night’s damage to her face and her brand-new hairstyle. She probably didn’t know it, but I would say that she had never looked lovelier; wild, but perfect. That was why, less than an hour later, when the train finally delivered her into the teeming chaos of London on Coronation night, two tired porters nudged each other and winked in disbelief as they saw Princess Margaret herself – radiant, and barefoot – stepping out across the concourse of Victoria Station, carrying a handbag and suitcase, and laughing.

15

If I’m honest, I think that little pile of cut rope which Reggie suggested they leave on the floor of the cabinet as the finesse of their routine was about much more than just earning a few crucial seconds of bafflement from Mr Brookes. If he hadn’t been able to displace his feelings into razoring one of those hated coils of imprisoning silk into twelve separate six-inch lengths then I really think that at some point Reggie might have actually done what he was starting to dream about doing during that last strange week of play-acting, which was to draw the whispering blade of his penknife right across the features of Mr Brookes’s handsome face. As it was, when Mr Brookes was kicking at the cubicle door, Reggie already had the knife open and ready – ready to nip into action if the wood gave way. With such a small blade, what else could he have gone for but the face? Thank God things never went that far; as you know, that blade was sharp.

Getting his trousers back on, finding his own shoes and then finally getting out of the building without being seen wasn’t that easy, but the chaos of that particular night helped – and Reggie was a dodger, remember. When he did get outside, he found he was shaking with relief. He needed a drink, and instinct led him to the one place he never thought he’d be driven to choose as a refuge – partly, I suppose, because he thought no one would think to look for him there. The Spotted Dog was, on Coronation night, riotous –
crowded with incident
, as we used to say, and noisy with outrageous laughter. As Pam stepped down from the train to join the revellers around Victoria, that was where Reggie was celebrating – or at least, holding on to the bar and downing several straight Scotches in swift succession. When he was sure he’d stopped shaking, he left them all to it, and headed down Middle Street to the seafront. This was partly I think because he needed to get some of his old friend, the air, but partly I think because he wanted – perhaps for the first time in his life – to join the crowds.

I’m not going to take you there to join him, I’m afraid, because it’s time he was left alone – but let me just say that I have looked up the weather for that extraordinary night in the big bound set of volumes of the
Argus
that they still keep upstairs in the library, and although I can report that it was cold, and that there was a little more drizzle around eleven o’clock, there was no sea fret shrouding the piers or promenade that evening. Which means that although you will have to imagine Reggie making his way through those damp but noisy streets for yourself, at least you are free to imagine him doing so unconcealed.

There he goes, threading himself through the cheering crowds, exhilarated by those Scotches and what he’s done, knowing and surely not caring that he’s lost his job – and not caring either whether Mrs Steed will have forgotten to bolt her door tonight, or whether he’ll just have to stay out among the crowds until tomorrow. You can imagine him joining in the communal midnight singing of the National Anthem down on the jam-packed prom if you like, becoming just one of a thousand lifted voices – or perhaps you’d prefer to imagine him leaning on a railing, his face catching the blaze as he watches the fireworks from HMS
Eagle
paint the water with all the colours of his name. Perhaps you should imagine him doing it at the very same spot on the promenade where he once leaned on the rail to eat that bag of chips, staring at the sea while he did it and wondering just where the hell he was and who he was in this, the twenty-third year of his life. Imagine him trying to think all of that through all over again, now that everything is different. Imagine him thinking about his dead mother, and about Pam, and about the differences and samenesses between the two of them. Imagine him thinking what tomorrow will be like. Imagine him starting in surprise, as he once again feels the inexplicable warmth of a hand coming to rest on his shoulder.

Imagine that he turns round.

Reggie recognised him at once, even though he wasn’t wearing his macintosh, and they’d only ever kissed in the dark.

16

Well, there you are; misdirection, force, vanish, reveal and finesse. All you need to put together a whole routine. Or, as Mr Brookes would have said:
Hook, Skin, Finish
.

Of all the pictures that I could send you away with, I’d like to end by showing you a photograph of
my
mother. It’s the kind of shot every bride and groom had taken on their big day back then; a formal six by nine black-and-white double portrait, nicely printed on matt paper and mounted on a heavy cream card. The two of them are standing arm in arm on the steps of the church, and although they’re both doing their best to remain solemn for the benefit of the photographer, both of their faces are openly registering the happy shock of what they’ve just done to their lives. Both of them are smiling. My father, on the right, is a good six inches taller than his wife – as convention dictated a husband should be, at that time – and is, on this particular morning, looking only a bit less handsome than our Mr Brookes. His hair is brilliantined, and he’s sporting a six-buttoned wool-mixture doubled-breasted dinner jacket with the double peak of a starched handkerchief peeking from his breast pocket. He’s even carrying a pair of gloves with one pearl button at the wrist. My mother is standing with her ring-displaying hand slipped through the crook of his proudly offered arm – they are, in other words, standing in exactly the same pose as the one Pam and Mr Brookes would have struck if they had ever got as far as the magnesium flash that was supposed to bring their act to its triumphant close. The cut of my mother’s machine lace dress very closely matches that of Pam’s in the act, and she is carrying an almost-identical spray of maidenhair fern and white carnations – though her flowers are real, not silk, and threaded through with three stems of those luxurious pale freesias that she was to love all her life. Her hair isn’t as exact a copy of Princess Margaret’s as Pamela’s was, but the influence is clear. I can even be reasonably sure that my mother is wearing the same
eau de parfum
as Pam did – Elizabeth Arden’s Blue Grass was what she always wore on a special occasion.

The thing I always notice the most when I study this picture is how very young they both look – how young she looks especially – and how brave. She has slight bags under her eyes, from not having slept much the night before I suppose, but she is looking the camera right in the eye. She is truly facing the future.

That future, of course, is the same one into which Pamela was walking barefoot across the concourse of Victoria Station – the one into which her illegitimate son will be born in the harsh late January of 1954. It is the future in which my mother gets to share her life with the man she chose, and in which Princess Margaret – after all that waiting, and speculation, and looking up and down – doesn’t. It is the future which starts for Reggie as soon as he wakes up the next morning.

The first thing he notices is that the mirror on the washstand has been somehow knocked off its usual axis. Instead of reflecting his face, like it usually does, it is showing him four bare feet sticking out from under a blanket. They look odd, framed by all those surging roses. There are clothes all over the floor, and one of Reggie’s boots is stranded up on the chair. He has a vague memory of himself and his companion splitting a pair of pyjamas before they eventually went to sleep last night, and of the unsuccessfully stifled laughter that accompanied that process. He remembers undoing his companion’s shirt buttons – successfully, this time – and discovering how unexpectedly white his skin was once the shirt came off completely. He remembers discovering the freckles high up on the man’s right-hand shoulder blade, and thinking how they weren’t exactly laid out right, but still nonetheless reminded him of those stars up on the ceiling of the Grand.

He remembers wondering, in the middle of all the noise they were making, if his mother was watching him.

The window is open; the curtain stirs in a breeze. Doing it very carefully so as not to wake his companion, Reg prises himself out from under an overdraped arm and swings both naked feet to the floor. He limps over to the window, because it’s cold, and he’s stiff – Reggie hadn’t ever realised quite how uncomfortable it could be sharing a bed, even when the two of you were a good fit, and Mrs Steed’s blanket was clearly meant for one. Nonetheless, before he closes the window, he leans out to get some air. After all the noise of last night, it’s quiet. Gull-less. Reggie got the top half of the pyjamas, which means that the edge of the wooden windowsill digs into his naked pubis as he leans, but he doesn’t mind, because he wants to see the sea. The sky above it is cloudy but clearing, and the sea itself looks grey and quiet, with no waves to speak of, and there is no sound coming from the shingle. In fact, the only sound that Reggie can hear, now that he really listens, is some distant idiot still singing the National Anthem. He thinks briefly about his mother again, and hopes that whoever she was, she had everything that he had on the bed last night, and more than just once. Taking one last lungful of salt air, he levers himself back in through the window and quietly pulls the sash down closed. He restores the mirror on the washstand to its correct angle, and takes a quick look at himself, barelegged as he is. Not too bad, he reckons, considering how little he actually slept last night. Then he turns back into the room, and takes a good look at the sleeping head on his pillow.

He has no idea if this is the man with whom he is going to spend the rest of his life, but he is looking forward to finding out.

He reaches out, and gently tickles the crown of the sleeping head, stroking its hair back into place.

Its owner groans – there was quite a bit of drink involved on the way back home last night, as well as everything else – and stirs. As the young man in question struggles to unglue his eyes, Reggie’s mouth twists into a special good-morning version of his thin-lipped, rat-toothed grin, and then, as the young man succeeds in getting his eyes open, and props himself up on one elbow to look at Reggie, the grin opens out into a proper, sunny, full-on smile. The young man smiles back, and then, still smiling, and timing the line just perfectly as the sun comes in through the curtain and the young man in question groans in pain and drops his head back onto the waiting pillow, Reggie asks what it feels like he’s been waiting years to ask, which is
What d’you want for your breakfast then, mister?

The future, eh?

Here’s how it’s done;

Acknowledgements

This novel is respectfully dedicated to my great-grandmother, my great-aunt and my grandmother, all of whom worked in the Pit Bar of the Wimbledon Theatre before the war, and to my partner’s father, who was the stage-door keeper at the Golders Green Hippodrome from 1946 to 1949.

Its writing was skillfully supported by Clare Conville and Michael Fishwick. To them, my thanks.

Neil Bartlett

Brighton and London, 2014

A Note on the Author

Neil Bartlett’s first novel,
Ready to Catch Him Should He Fall
, was voted Capital Gay Book of the Year; his second,
Mr Clive and Mr Page
, was nominated for the Whitbread Prize; his third and most recent,
Skin Lane
, was shortlisted for the Costa Novel Award in 2007. In 2000 he was awarded an OBE for his work as a theatre director and playwright. He lives in Brighton and London with his partner of twenty-five years, James Gardiner. You can find out more about Neil and his work at
www.neil-bartlett.com
.

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

Who Was That Man?

Ready to Catch Him Should He Fall

Mr Clive and Mr Page

Skin Lane

First published in Great Britain 2014

Copyright © Neil Bartlett 2014

The moral right of the author has been asserted

No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embedded in critical articles or reviews

Bloomsbury Circus is an imprint of

Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

50 Bedford Square

London