Black Out (35 page)

‘No. I dress down to kill. For the Berkeley I dress up!’

‘We’re going to the Berkeley?’

‘Damn right we are.’

‘I … I haven’t got the togs. I don’t have evening dress any more. The moths got it.’

‘Troy, when did you last go to the Berkeley or anywhere like it? Men haven’t worn evening dress since 1940! Mufti is quite acceptable. Just put on a clean shirt and we’ll toddle off for a cab.’

‘I can’t match that. That dress looks as though it cost a packet.’

‘Of course it cost a packet! Why do you think we’re going out? I’ve waited six months for this dress. I ordered it from Victor Stiebel before Christmas. I’ll be damned if I won’t go somewhere and be seen.’

‘That’s what bothers me,’ he said, and sloped off upstairs for a clean shirt.

Slamming the door behind him, he thought that they never had been seen. He found himself simultaneously contemplating the risk and knowing he would do nothing whatsoever about it. She raced to the end of the alley to hail a cab. He followed quietly. At the kink in the alley he thought he heard a sound behind him. He turned, two hands thrust him sharply back against the wall, and a tall man loomed over him.

‘Freddie, you fool. You complete and utter bloody fool!’

‘Let me go, Jack,’ he whispered back.

‘What on earth do you think you’re playing at?’

Wildeve did not wait for an answer.

‘I knew it. I knew it. Damn me, why didn’t I see it sooner? Have you taken leave of your senses?’

Troy could see his face now. He looked up into his eyes, expressionless. Wildeve relaxed his grip. Troy heard the familiar squeal of cab brakes from St Martin’s Lane.

‘Troy,’ she called from the street. ‘Do get a move on!’ He turned his back on Wildeve and walked away.

‘Freddie, you can’t. You can’t.’

Troy did not turn. Wildeve did not follow. He could see Brack now, by the open door of a cab. She could not stand still. She seemed almost to be skipping from one foot to the other. Out of the deepest shadows he heard Ruby’s voice say ‘Who’s a lucky boy then?’

He sat in the back of the cab. She took his hand in hers, and laid her head upon his shoulder. As the cab rounded Piccadilly Circus he could hear his heartbeat. The Circus was almost empty of people. A few people out on the town and apart from the usual gathering outside Rainbow Corner, very few in uniform. One thought intruded, one feeling caused his pulse to race – in his mind’s eye he had seen Wayne not Wildeve in that first split second as Jack’s hands had grabbed him. He had told himself for weeks now that he would always be ready for Major Wayne. And he had been taken completely by surprise. Worse than this one thought was the doubt about her that had surfaced and sank in that split second, without thought.

‘When did you last go there?’ she asked.

‘To the Berkeley? I’ve never been to the Berkeley.’

‘Were you really such a stuffy old fish, Troy?’

‘I suppose I was,’ he said to avoid a better answer.

He had found in the police a convenient escape from the social exigencies of class and caste. His brother had accepted what was offered and gone up to Cambridge. His sisters had been presented at court, and had returned giggling at the confusion they had fostered by pretending to be one twin or the other, and agreeing that Queen Mary was ‘a bit of an old trout’. One morning in 1931 his father had looked up from the lectern on which he propped his morning paper – ‘his’, Troy thought, ‘his’ was always someone else’s, the opposition – and asked of the young Troy, ‘Well, my little Englander, will you play the English at their game?’ It was as though he knew that Troy would not, as though he accepted that his last child was different in some way from his elder children. It was not his habit to force things on any of his children, but in this instance he seemed to be clearly anticipating the response.

‘Don’t know,’ Troy had replied, and left it at that for several years, until the day he announced that he had been accepted into the Metropolitan Police Force.

‘Are you sure?’ his father had asked. Was all he had asked. And Troy wondered now about the pain he might have given the old man. What had Driberg meant by that remark?

It was not the game – it let him free from the social round. He could do as he wished and to hell with the dreary traipsing around the circuit of sophisticated London. He had not been in a nightclub in years. All in all being a copper was the most marvellous excuse for selfishness he could ever have thought up.

The cab drew up at the corner of Piccadilly and Berkeley Street, opposite the Ritz Hotel. The head waiter at the Berkeley knew Lady Diana Brack by sight and by name. He greeted her as though she were a valued, too rarely seen patron and told her that he would see she got her usual table. They were shown to a green-upholstered banquette.

‘Thank you, Ferraro,’ she said, ‘I don’t suppose you could manage a bottle of champagne?’

He disappeared, with her cloak over his arm, saying he would see what he could do. She smiled at Troy across the top of the menu.

‘Is this an occasion?’ he asked.

‘It is and it isn’t. I wanted to go out. I was desperate to go out. We seem to have spent a lifetime indoors.’

A lifetime?’ he queried.

She buried herself behind the menu.

‘Of course there’s no real choice. A five-bob menu is a five-bob menu. I came for the music. Before the war there was such marvellous music. Marvellous music.’

Troy looked across at the empty bandstand. The music stands displayed the name Romero in an italic slant. The name meant nothing to Troy. He’d have known Lew Stone’s band or Harry Roy’s, but few others. The club was full - as she had said, few men if any wore evening dress, and most were in uniform – an even match of naval officers and RAF types with a smattering from the army.

Five bob translated into soup and fish. A soup so watery it could have passed for Oliver Twist’s gruel. The fish was good, fresh river trout, crying out for what they’d never get, fresh Jersey potatoes. The champagne made up for everything. Looking at the golden
glow, the racing bubbles in the fluted glass, Troy realised that she too was bubbling in a way he had rarely seen her do.

She told him of her week. It verged on gossip, it approached chatter. She had been to see H. G. Wells at Hanover Gate. Stuck for a response Troy asked simply how he was.

‘Old,’ she replied.

‘Of course,’ said Troy. ‘He must be eighty.’

‘Seventy-seven, actually. But I meant old old. He has been young so long. I had begun to think age would never catch him. Now I think he might not see out the war.’

‘It’s almost over.’

‘Do you really think so? I’ve been thinking so much lately about after the war.’

‘Makes a change I suppose. Most of the time one can get heartily sick of sentences beginning “before the war”.’

She grinned and held up her hand as though taking an oath.

‘That phrase shall ne’er pass my lips again!’

Then she laughed. And Troy watched as though from another planet. He had not seen her laugh before. It was a moment as awesome as Garbo’s first laugh in
Ninotchka.
His feelings glided over one another like oil on water. Her smiles and grins and laughs captivated him utterly, and at the same time the urgency of her speech, the revelation with which she spoke, all put him in mind of the three days he had spent, as Onions put it, beating her senseless at the Yard.

She smiled her perfect smile and flicked back the lock of hair over her eye, holding it there a moment with her hand poised.

‘I wanted to ask you about after the war,’ she said, and let her hair tumble once more. ‘It’s something I’ve never thought about.’

‘Nor me,’ Troy said.

‘What shall we do?’

The question stunned him. Surely he could not have heard her right?

‘After the war. What shall we do?’ she said again, and he searched in her tone for every possible shred of meaning.

A ripple of applause announced the return of the band. Romero was a stout Latin, well past middle age, with a burnt-cork moustache and thick, Brylcreemed hair pasted tightly across his scalp
away from the forehead. He bowed slightly, turned to his band and struck up Cole Porter’s ‘Night and Day’. The floor began to fill with dancing couples, shuffling along in the slow, public embrace that passed for dancing.

‘I love this song. Can we dance?’

‘What? I mean … I don’t even know what kind of dance it is!’

‘Slow foxtrot, clot!’

She stood up and stretched out an arm towards him. The pure smile, the black black hair, and the green green green of her eyes drew him from his seat. He took the arm and let himself be pulled on to the dance floor.

‘I’m not very good at this,’ he murmured.

In her heels she was hardly less than six feet – he found himself level with her chin and constantly looking up. He blundered on, beneath the stars and under the sun, counting himself lucky not to be treading on her feet. Then it dawned on him. Dancing backwards she may be, but she was leading him certainly and securely. She was in his arms and he was surely in her hands.

As the last note trailed off the crowd applauded. She took his head in both hands and kissed him on the mouth. A kiss so passionate he felt bruised. She drew back. Rubbed his cheek where the cut from the razor showed as a small red scar.

‘What shall we do?’ she said again, and before Troy could say anything blurted out that she must, simply must, just have a word with Romero and dashed off in the direction of the bandstand.

Troy resumed his seat. Sipped at the last of the champagne.

‘What shall we do?’ He thought – she cannot possibly mean what those words seem to mean. But her tone and the look in those bottle-green eyes told him she did.

Across the dance floor he could see her returning. The grace in every movement was unearthly, a woman without a single gawky gesture. He got up once more. The band went into ‘Smoke Gets in Your Eyes’. He extended a hand to her, hoping he could lure her to the seat before she lured him back to the dance, but she stopped a few feet away from him and appeared to be looking past him. He turned to look towards the entrance. Wayne stood on the bottom step holding her cloak. He looked right through Troy to Brack as though he had not even noticed he was there. He spread
the cloak like bat’s wings, opening out the space into which he invited her to step. Troy looked back. Diana had frozen. The evening’s smile had vanished. Then her feet moved, gliding not walking, and as she came level with him he took her hand, holding it gently without force. She glided on past him. Her head turned to look down into his eyes. She floated on until both their arms were outstretched and one of them would have to break the grip. He felt her hand slide across his, her fingernails tantalisingly stroking his palm until only their fingers touched. She stopped, looked at him one last time, her fingertips left his and she fled.

He pushed his way through the crowd of dancing couples and out into the street. People were everywhere. The Ritz was disgorging a host of American soldiers, most the worse for drink. They flowed out across the road, over the pavement up towards Berkeley Square and down towards Piccadilly Circus, singing and chanting. He saw Wayne hail a cab from the Ritz side. He crossed over as a swirl of soldiers came back down Berkeley Street and took him up like a man helpless, drowning in the ebb tide. The last he saw of her was one fleeting, backward glance as Wayne dived into the cab and pulled her in behind him, then the tide surged and deposited him against one of the pillars of the Ritz and he sank down to the pavement and a thousand feet passed over him.

The roar dwindled. The street cleared like mist in a breeze. He sat on the pavement. He did not move. He felt he could not move. His legs were numb and all he felt was the illusive tingle on his hand from the passing stroke of her nails. Feet approached him, pick-pock across the tarmacadam.

‘Get up!’

He looked at a pair of high-heeled shoes and followed a pair of silk stockings thighward. There she stood, pigeon-chested again, puffed out with her own anger.

‘Get up!’ Tosca said, and when Troy failed to move held out a hand. He took it, she pulled him to his feet, let go her hand, bunched it into a fist and hit him hard across the cheek. He tasted blood.

‘You bastard!’

She walked off along Piccadilly. A young soldier approached and said, ‘Hi, Toots.’ And she hit him far harder than she had hit Troy.
He sat down in the road with a bump, pole-axed. Troy walked past him, muttered, ‘Terribly sorry’, and hastened to catch up with Tosca. All the way to Orange Street she spoke not a word, yet it seemed understood that he should follow. He dared not overtake her.

She poured a large bourbon for herself. She did not offer him one. He stood facing her across the table as she went through the familiar routine of kicking off her shoes and discarding her battledress –only now the accompanying silence rendered every action anew and stripped away the veneer of knowledge.

‘Y’ know,’ she said, at last, looking down into her glass, ‘I came looking for you to tell you Jimmy was back. I figured you’d want to know. I went to your house, but the hooker who hangs around the alley said I shouldn’t bother. She’d seen you get into a cab with what she called “a nice bit of posh” and you’d told the cabbie to take you to the Berkeley. So I walked to the Berkeley and do you know until I saw her with Jimmy I hadn’t even bothered to ask myself who this nice bit of posh might be. I mean… ’ her voiced soared, ‘I mean… ’ and louder still, ‘how dumb can a girl get? You bastard, Troy. You total fucking bastard!’

She sat down at the table, poured herself another drink, knocked it back in one and poured a third.

‘I don’t have an explanation,’ he said.

‘Thank God for that. I’d hate to sit and listen to your lies.’

‘I have to go,’ he said sheepishly.

‘How long have you been fucking Diana Brack? That was Diana Brack, wasn’t it?’

‘Yes,’ he sighed.

‘And you have been fucking her, haven’t you?’

‘Yes.’

‘So how long has this been going on?’

‘I’m not sure.’