Armistice (15 page)

“Felicity?” She greeted her reflection. “Felicity? Hello, Felicity. Okay, Felicity? Having fun, Felicity?” The wedding band went in her pocket.

After lunch she practiced being Felicity in a post office while searching the directories until she found a telephone number, which she rang. A servant confirmed that Anthony Dore was at home and was asking the caller's identity when Philomena replaced the handset on its cradle. Her new voice hadn't alarmed the servant. He'd acted as if the owner of the voice was legitimate. This was good. But what now? She knew where he lived, knew what he looked like; needed to speak with him without alarming him. She drifted toward his address. Dusk arrived early, and with the sundown came chill, and new doubts about how implausible and vague her plan was.

As she arrived in view of the front doors to Anthony Dore's
house they began to open. She walked on as swiftly as possible to a place where she could turn to look. But Anthony wasn't to be seen. Instead an older man was descending to the pavement. She thought that she had seen him before but couldn't think where. A grand motor car pulled up at the bottom of the steps. The driver smartly alighted and opened a passenger door. The older man entered the car and it drove away. This speculative spying on Anthony Dore's home was useless if all she was going to achieve was sightings of other men.

But then Dore himself emerged, a little furtively, and descended the stone steps. Philomena turned and walked away a few steps in the opposite direction from the one he seemed set upon.

He made off on foot and she turned and followed him, first to a restaurant, opposite which she took refuge in a cafe, where she sat staring out for nearly an hour, deflecting any friendly overtures. He visited a pub where he stood at the public bar, while she nursed a drink in the lounge. Two women in couples surveyed her with suspicion and put themselves between their men and her. In neither place was she being Felicity. In her clothes but not being her. Now Dore entered a murky passage between two tall, scruffy, nondescript buildings.

Philomena waited to see if Anthony reemerged from the passage. When he didn't, she crossed the road and looked into it. Seeing no movement, she checked behind herself, took a deep breath, followed, making as little noise as she could—trying to silence her footfalls yet not creep on tiptoe. She
walked slowly past the door that had the only visible light showing around it, looking for any sign that might tell her what lay behind. There was nothing except a spy hole. She kept walking, further into the passage.

She didn't like it down there. Didn't like it at all. She could make out different kinds of blackness but that was about it. That shade of black might have been a pile of rubbish, that one might have been something moving—and now she could hear sounds. Breathing, and perhaps the scratch of a shoe on the ground. Beginning to panic, she swore that if she got out of the passage in one piece she'd go home. In desperation she reached for her hatpin. It had a very sharp point and the shaft felt strong, but it was difficult to get a decent grip on. It would only give her a very little time to get away if she was attacked. Aim for eyes or privates.

She backed up the passage until level with the mysterious door. A closer look still revealed nothing of what kind of place it was. For a few moments all that she could hear was the erratic thumping of her own heart. One fear out here, another fear about what lay in there. Which to choose?

To knock on the door and try to gain admittance required more courage or recklessness than she possessed—she turned and walked forward as fast as she could, into the lit street, across the road, and attempted to calm herself, still keeping a tight grasp on the hatpin. A group of people, young, boisterous—five women and two men—came into view. This group was obviously in a party mood. One of the men limped badly and had an eye patch, but this didn't stop him having
his arms around the waists of two of the laughing girls and kissing their necks, each in turn. The other man rapped on the door and the party was admitted instantly. That they were inside reassured her.

Then her decision was made for her. The hairs on the back of Philomena's neck stood up and she knew that she was being watched. She turned her head a fraction. She could just make out the shadowy shape of a man standing completely still a few yards away. No movement. No acknowledgment. No greeting, no gesture of any kind. His silhouette told her that he had his hat pulled low, his hands in his coat pockets. Seconds ticked by while she watched him and knew he watched her. When he moved a foot and shifted his weight in her direction this impelled her across the road and into the passage and up to the door just at the same time as a pair of women arrived slightly ahead of her. Philomena quickly assessed them. They were dressed expensively but both had on gaudy make-up—eyes too black, lips too red. They raised their faces for inspection via the spy hole. The door opened and the two women entered without speaking. As she tremblingly crossed the threshold in their wake Philomena heard a man's cheerful Cockney voice say: “All right, girls. You're early. No show tonight?” The two women answered, in slightly posher voices: “Thank God.” The man looked over their heads toward Philomena and frowned a little. He was big, but not threatening, unless, she imagined, he chose to be.

“Gotta new friend?” asked the doorman of the two women.

The women turned to look at Philomena. She had to say something or go back out, where the threatening man might lie in wait. She made her decision, and spoke in public as Felicity for the very first time:

“No, I'm not with them.”

“No?” said the man, and he cocked his head slightly, inviting her to explain herself.

“I'm supposed to be meeting a friend,” she said, shocked at the sound of her own words, fully expecting any of the three to slap their thighs and hoot at her fake accent. But none of them did.

“Where are you supposed to be meeting this friend, miss?”

“Why, here,” she said, as Felicity.

The doorman smiled. “Where is here, miss?”

Of course she didn't know, so she tried to flutter her eyelashes. And she mined that accent, mined that voice, that sounded at once lazy and authoritative, for all it was worth.

“We're supposed to be having some fun. He told me to come here.”

“What's his name, please miss?”

Her mind raced. Before she could stop herself it was out of her mouth: “Daniel.”

“Daniel, don't know him, don't know any Daniels here. But that might be only one of his names. And how are you known?” he asked, still friendly.

She was losing her nerve. “I've made a mistake,” she said, turning to go.

The pair of women were still watching.

“Not necessarily, miss.”

Philomena stopped.

“You know what kind of place this is?” asked the man, raising an eyebrow slightly.

“I think so.”

The man shot a sideways look at the pair of women and they headed for the interior. When they were gone he peered out of the doorway left and right, before turning back to Philomena. “I'm not saying that you look like a matron, miss—the opposite, in fact, but you're not working undercover for the police by any chance?”

“The police? No.”

“Are you working for anybody? A newspaper, for instance? A gossip writer?”

“No. I'm not working for anyone,” she replied, absolutely truthfully.

He cocked his head and pursed his lips. She shrugged and spread her hands, gestures she hoped would say “What else can I do?” and “Are you going to let me in?” and “I'm not really bothered whether you do or not.”

“I'll tell you what,” he said. “You are just here to have fun, I expect, so I'm going to let you in, and if you do have fun, that's all to the good, and if others have fun because of you, likewise, and if Daniel turns up, you can have fun together.”

If only he could turn up, she thought. “That's very kind of you,” she said.

“What's your name?” asked the man.

“Felicity.”

“Let's hope you live up to it,” said the man. “My name's St. Peter; I definitely live up to mine. If anyone bothers you just let me know,” and he stepped aside, inviting her to enter wherever it was. A place of entertainment, which was something of a secret, where the clients used aliases and which didn't want the police, the press, or the law to enter. If St. Peter was on the gates, what was the name of this place? Heaven?

Philomena left her velvet coat at the cloakroom. She could hear what sounded like American jazz being played quietly upstairs. In a room on the first landing there was a trio of Negro men playing piano, double bass and a dreamy clarinet to an appreciative audience seated at tables scattered around the room. The musicians made her think of the Commonwealth soldiers and airmen who'd appeared in Manchester during the war, multiplying the black population. She scanned the audience for Anthony Dore, but he wasn't there. She turned a circle, feeling a little obvious, and looked in through the open doors into the other two rooms off the landing. One room was a bar in which people sat on high stools at the thing itself, chattering away ten to the dozen, while the other had an empty dais and one or two denizens waiting for something to begin. He was not in either, master Dore, so she climbed the stairs to the next landing. On the way there was an alcove with a curtain partly concealing a sofa on which a man and a woman were locked in an embrace. Philomena had to study the man for a second in order to ascertain whether he was Anthony Dore, thinking that if it
was him he was a quick worker—he'd only been in the place a few minutes. She was shocked to see that the woman had her hand busy inside the man's trousers. Philomena wasn't prudish by any means but she'd never seen that sort of thing in a public place before. Had had her hand inside Dan's trousers numerous times, but as far as she knew they weren't being watched at the time.

As she moved on up to the landing proper she was getting a pretty good idea of what sort of girl Anthony Dore might expect to bump into here. Trying not to think too much about the notion of behaving in a deliberately alluring way with the man who may have murdered Dan, she came across more fellow patrons engaged in playful exchanges. They were being sexual, but it wasn't dark. It was dark in that there was little illumination, but there was not a feeling of darkness. She was being scrutinized, of course. Frank attention. She told herself that if she didn't look a man straight in the eye there was no good reason for him to approach her.

Then she saw him. Anthony Dore was sitting in an easy chair, engaged in conversation with a waitress. Philomena paused for a few moments to give herself one last talking-to before she moved into his eye line and sat where he could see her. She let him have a very good look at Felicity. She crossed her legs one way, then the other. She presented her profile, one side then the other. She could feel him watching. She wished that she smoked cigarettes so she'd have had something to do with her telltale hands. She ordered them to be
still, placing one on her thigh and the other on the arm of the chair. This felt too posed, so she played with a wisp of hair. The waitress delivered a drink to Dore then came to her.

“What would you like?” she asked. She sounded European, like some of the refugees that had traveled on the trams. Almond eyes.

Philomena had planned to ask for a lemonade but suddenly, very badly wanted something stronger. “A rum, please. With a dash of blackcurrant, and water.”

The waitress nodded and moved away. As she passed near Dore, Philomena saw him beckon to her. She went to him, listened, bent her head and concentrated hard on what he was saying. It looked to be something complicated, in sections, that she had to repeat back to him, that she had to learn. She returned to Philomena, who sensed some impatience from her but there was no attitude in her voice when she recited: “That gentleman inquires whether you are alone and if so whether you want to be.”

This was it. The opportunity. The thin end of it. Should she grasp it? Or could she say that she did want to be alone and walk right out of there? Part of her very much desired to do that. She could go back home and—what? Go back home and what? Feel terrible. Sew. Sew for the rest of her life knowing that she'd been told something, told by someone she tended to believe, and she'd done nothing about it. She could go back home and sew her own shroud and climb in and lie down and wait, for twenty years or thirty years or however long her natural span was destined to be.

Or she could make some kind of reply to Dore's overture. She realized that her hands were describing shapes so she clasped them together.

“That gentleman,” she replied, as if it could have been any one of several.

“That one,” confirmed the waitress.

Philomena looked over to Anthony Dore and made eye contact for the first time bar the glimpse in the street and he smiled, then looked away. She was surprised. She'd expected him to be more assertive.

“Do you know him?” she asked the waitress.

“He is here last night, but that is my first night,” the waitress said, in her accented English.

Philomena stole another look at Dore and felt a rush of apprehension.

“If you ask me,” the waitress offered tentatively, “I think he is probably all right, and from look of him he got money. And he's young man and there aren't many of those about. And he has no bits missing, that you can see.”

Philomena looked at the waitress, wondering what event had led her to make that last observation; she had known a man who'd seemed complete whom she'd subsequently discovered was not?

“I wouldn't go so far to say suck it to see,” continued the waitress, “but you might do worse.”

Philomena saw the twinkle in her eye. Accept the drink. Why else would a girl be in this place? Grasp the opportunity.

“Tell him to come over.”