After the Cabaret (10 page)

His answer was cautious, since he knew that Sally would one day become the next Lady Hodd. ‘It's because of the way things are,' he told her, a humorous glint in his eye.

‘Do you think it's fair?'

‘Fair? What's fair got to do with it? It's like the weather, isn't it? You can't alter it.'

The cook, who was stirring a large pot of soup on the stove, pursed her lips, and Sally squeezed Tim's knee under the table. That was the moment at which Lady Hodd came in, observed the under-the-table movement and decided not to believe her own eyes. ‘Another tea break! Heavens! No one would ever believe there was a war on.'

When they were out in the yard again, in the wind, moving cheeses the size of bicycle wheels from the shelves in the dairy down to the cellar, through a trap-door in a wall, Jessie asked, ‘Is there any news from Mr Ralph, Sally?'

‘Very bad,' said Sally. ‘The squadron's been in the air twenty nights out of the last thirty.'

‘That's awful,' Jessie said.

‘I'm going to London to meet him this weekend,' Sally said. ‘He only has a weekend pass, so it's too far to come
here. Oh, God!' she wailed, looking down. ‘My hands! My nails!'

‘Dip 'em in whey – that's what we do round here,' Jessie advised her.

They went into the dairy and hauled another cheese from a shelf. They contemplated each other from either end of it. ‘Whey?' said Sally. ‘I'll try it.' As they trudged to the trap-door Sally asked, ‘You don't think I'll last here, do you?'

Jessie did not reply.

Lady Hodd was screaming, ‘My God! With Ralph's father ill in bed again with his wound and Ralph fighting for his country, you – you – disgrace!'

The dining room at Hodd was even gloomier than the drawing room. More stags' heads lowered down on them through the misty light of a December afternoon.

Sally, who was wearing dungarees and Wellington boots, said, ‘I don't know what you expected. I know I've been working hard here for two months in the national interest, or so you say, but I think it's in yours, really. I think you're hoarding food.'

‘What the hell—' exclaimed Lady Hodd, almost speechless. ‘What the hell has that got to do with what we're talking about? You've been sleeping with my bailiff – my
bailiff
– my son's fiancée and Tim Ferris from the village. What decent girl could do that, with her fiancé at war? How could you? And now I'll have to discharge him.'

‘You'd better discharge me,' said Sally. ‘You need me less. I'll go.'

‘I think that would be best,' said Lady Hodd.

Sally turned in the doorway and asked, ‘I suppose there's no chance of any wages?'

Lady Hodd seized a complicated china fruit-stand, made of twisted, coloured porcelain, from the table and hurled it at her son's fiancée, but by that time Sally was outside the door. She heard it thud against the wood and smash to pieces, then Lady Hodd's anguished cry as she appreciated what she had done.

Tim drove her to the station. ‘I'm sorry she sacked you,' Sally said, lighting him a cigarette.

‘It doesn't matter,' he said. ‘I'm going to try to join up again. There must be something I can do …'

‘Come and see me in London.'

‘If I can.' He stopped outside the little station. ‘Hurry, or you'll miss your train.'

‘Of course,' Bruno remarked, ‘everyone at Pontifex Street laughed. Laughed, as they used to say, like a drain. “I laughed like a drain,”' he quoted.

They were sitting in a café in Bruno's neighbourhood. Bruno had bought his lunch, a solid plate of sausages, fried egg, baked beans and chips. Greg had a greasy omelette and left half of it. The door opened occasionally and a workman, or a man in a suit with a briefcase, or a local tradesman entered in a blast of cold air. His tape-recorder was on the table in front of him, concealed from the rest of the customers by a sticky sugar dispenser.

During the week in which Bruno had been off on his buying trip Greg had checked that there had indeed been a squadron leader named Ralph Hodd at Farnborough during the Second World War. He found out, too, that Hodd Hall existed and was still occupied by a member of the family. He had also talked his way into the house in Pontifex Street once occupied by Sally and her friends.
The present occupant, an American woman, was initially suspicious of him, but let him in, made him a cup of coffee, and said, ‘Yes, I heard we were living in the apartment that had once housed those British spies. I asked the landlord's agents about it but they didn't know much.' And the landlord, she told Greg, was still Sir Peveril Jones.

Greg had even gone into the loft, no longer reached by a ladder but up some stairs, for it had been converted, and looked from the same windows, he thought, through which Sally Bowles and the others must have seen the searchlights and barrage balloons of war-time London's darkened skies.

By the time he and Bruno met again, he was convinced that Bruno Lowenthal was telling the truth – or most of it. There was no way in which the old man could have conveyed, so off-handedly, so much random yet detailed information. Bruno was giving him the real stuff of Sally Bowles's life. Sometimes, though, he had the idea that he was on an archaeological site which had been excavated by a madman so that all the layers had been tumbled into each other. And he worried, too, that Bruno might have an agenda he didn't understand. But, all in all, he thought, if Bruno wanted him to listen to his tale sitting in a puddle in the middle of a field he would do it without complaint. Hell – he'd do it naked in Trafalgar Square, if that was what Bruno wanted.

However, at least he now had a hope of being able to meet Bruno somewhere out of the cold and damp of wintry London: Katherine had phoned to say a cousin of hers was going off on an archaeological dig for a few months. His
flat in Bloomsbury would be empty and she was trying to persuade him to rent it to Greg. If that worked out, thought Greg, it would give him a base where he and Bruno could meet, away from the public places which for some reason the old man preferred.

Now he sat back in the steamy atmosphere to listen.

‘Sally,' Bruno said, ‘was not very forthcoming about what had gone wrong at Hodd. She said, “It was ghastly – so cold – and an absolute nest of traitors. They were all Nazis. Lady Hodd said it would be a good idea to put the Duke of Windsor on the throne when Hitler won the war. While I was there she put a Christmas card from Wallis Simpson, the Duchess of Windsor now, on the mantelpiece. It was the last straw.”

‘Everyone laughed – and the engagement came to a natural end when Ralph was shot down in France. He survived – that time – and was taken prisoner. Sally spent Christmas with her parents in Worcestershire and Ralph Hodd was in a prisoner-of-war camp in Germany. In those days things happened quickly. He wrote releasing her from the engagement and she went on sending pots of jam and woolly jumpers until he escaped. As he did because, of course, he was a hero, poor man.' Bruno looked round. His eye lit on a young man sitting by the window, reading. ‘So young,' he said, ‘and so many of the clichés are true. Those pilots saved the country and many, many died.' He looked at Greg. ‘Ralph died too, later. So did the others, the Hermann Schmidts and the Carl Brauns. But that's war,' said Bruno. ‘There was a terrible raid at the end of December. And Theo Fitzpatrick turned up.'

‘You'd have done a lot better to have stayed up north, Sally,' said Vi, as she swept broken glass and plaster through her back door into her small garden. The wall at the end had been hit and where it had stood was a vast heap of crumbly bricks and splintered wood. Beyond that were the two walls left standing after the house opposite Vi's had been struck in a previous raid.

‘Can you lift while I fix this?' asked Sally. She was trying to put the back door, which had been blown into the garden, on its hinges.

‘Christ! My nails!' exclaimed Vi. ‘This is men's work. Let's leave it for Ted.'

‘You said yourself he was working round the clock. If we wait for him you'll freeze.'

They wrestled with the door for another five minutes, and got it roughly into place.

‘That'll have to do,' said Vi. ‘I can wedge a chair against it to keep it closed. The warden says not to try to use the
gas. I'll light the fire and boil up the kettle on it. I've got plenty of wood from up the street – the poor buggers it belonged to won't need it any more.'

The narrow street where Vi lived was a shocking sight. On either side of her home two big craters represented two houses. Rubble was piled along the pavements. Workmen were repairing a broken water main. A smell of burning still hung in the air.

As soon as they had closed the back door there was a knock at the front. A woman in an old coat, her face drawn, was standing there. She said, ‘Potter sent me round from the Rose and Crown. Your Jack's at King's Cross – he phoned the pub. He wants you to go and collect him. He hasn't got any money. Potter said to stay where he was.'

‘Oh, my God,' said Vi. ‘What's he doing there? He's meant to be in the country.'

‘He told Potter he didn't like it so he ran away.'

‘The little—' exclaimed Vi. ‘I'll go and collect him, I suppose.'

She and Sally set off for King's Cross. Some months before Jack Simcox had been evacuated to Lancaster with a small suitcase and a label bearing his name and address strung round his neck. Large numbers of London children had been sent away to be safe from the air-raids. However, it was not unusual for their parents to bring them back. Few, though, took the law into their own hands, as Jack apparently had, and returned alone.

On the bus, Vi exclaimed, ‘Silly little fool. What's he think he's coming back to? A house with all the windows boarded up. No gas. Spending all night in a tube station
well, these days Ted and me go into the Phillpots' air-raid shelter up the road, but it's horrible. You sit up all night because there's no room to lie down. You have to run down the garden to the outside lav through the middle of a raid if you need to go. The baby cries. Jack was all right up north. He was living with a vicar, in a vicarage, for God's sake. He had fresh milk, eggs, meat. My God, what wouldn't I do for a good breakfast, with bacon and eggs and a bit of sausage? Now how am I going to manage? Even my gran's disappeared – gone up to Scotland to plonk herself on an old admirer. Jack'll have to go back, if they'll still have him.'

‘The vicar's probably a bastard,' observed Sally, lighting a cigarette.

They found nine-year-old Jack on a seat in the busy station. He was talking to a soldier with a kit-bag at his feet. Jack had his gas mask with him and nothing else. His first words were ‘I didn't like it there. Don't send me back.'

The soldier said to Vi, ‘It doesn't sound any good there, miss, if you'll pardon me putting my oar in.'

‘Oh, I don't know,' said Vi. ‘Let's get you home first, what's left of it.'

‘Did we get bombed?' Jack asked keenly.

‘Yes – weren't we lucky?'

‘Part of it was that he was worrying about you, see,' the soldier explained helpfully. ‘He kept on thinking you and his brother were dead and no one was telling him.'

‘All right, Jack,' said Vi. ‘Stay here and live on grey bread and marge and spend all night in a shelter with the rest of us – I don't care.'

‘Thanks, Vi,' Jack said, in heartfelt tones.

Over tea and a bun in the station café he told her, ‘Mrs Rathbone, the vicar's wife, kept shaking me. I thought my head would drop off.'

‘What had you done?' Vi asked suspiciously.

‘Chased a few hens,' he told her. ‘They weren't hurt. She had no call to slam me up against a wall. I think she's potty.'

‘I'll write a nasty letter to the billeting officer,' Vi promised. ‘But what am I going to do with you? Your gran's gone. You'll have to go round to the Phillpots while I'm at the club. I can't leave you alone in the middle of air-raids. I can't even trust you not to disappear now you've apparently got the knack of taking long train journeys by yourself. Lancaster to London! You know our mum never left the East End in all her life – never even went up West once. Never went further than Aldgate.' Vi made this sound like proof of virtue and respectability.

‘I'll take your turn tonight,' Sally volunteered.

‘That evening Theo turned up at La Vie,' Bruno reported in the steamy café. He mimicked a rather husky, upper-class voice, ‘“The only man I've ever loved, darling.'” Reverting to his own voice he added cruelly, ‘I don't think. Vincent Tubman, a cigarette dangling from his mouth, was playing the opening bars of ‘Plaisir D'Amour'. Sally began to sing, standing in the spotlight in a blue and green chiffon dress, heavily made-up and holding her hands slightly behind her back to conceal the damage caused by her activities with Vi's door. She had been unable to repair the nail polish, as stocks had run out at her local chemist's.

‘There were twenty people in the club, some in uniform and some officials, their womenfolk in scrupulously cleaned and repaired evening dresses. They seemed to sigh, collectively but inaudibly, as Sally sang – the words of the song recalled pre-war France, travel, dancing, food, sunshine, the luxury of private life, but in imagination they were dancing on summer lawns in England to the strains
of a gramophone, they were lounging in a boat under willows. Perhaps some were in Provence, walking hand in hand over dry, herb-scented grass, drinking coffee at pavement cafés.

‘Then, Theo was standing by the stairs and Cora was embracing him. Over her head, his eyes met Sally's. She faltered for a beat, then went on singing. He was a tall man, very thin but broad-shouldered,' Bruno told Greg. ‘He had a lean face, tanned and intelligent, brown eyes, and long, narrow lips. A lock of his hair, which was black, persistently fell forward, so that he would have to brush it back with one well-shaped hand. You know the type,' Bruno appealed to Greg.