Memoirs of a Dance Hall Romeo (16 page)

She had turned a shade pinker but otherwise seemed relatively unconcerned. ‘Nonsense,’ she said. ‘A perfectly understandable chemical reaction, that’s all. They teach you to handle that problem on any basic nursing course, men being what they are.’

She flicked sharply with her middle finger. The pain was intense, but only momentarily, and the effect was all that could be desired, detumescence setting in rapidly.

There was a certain brutal efficiency to all this which I found intensely irritating. I wanted to get back at her in any way I could. To break through that aura of quiet breeding and superiority which surrounded her like an invisible wall.

‘What are you, Methodist or Anabaptist?’ I jeered. ‘You don’t really approve of nasty things like the flesh, do you?’

‘Not at all,’ she said calmly. ‘It’s all right in its place, but a rather over-rated pastime, I would have thought.’

‘Ah, I see now,’ I said. ‘Somebody hasn’t been doing a very good job.’

It was a rotten thing to say, and what made it worse I’d hit the nail right on the head, for she flushed deeply. I could have crawled into hiding, would gladly have done so, but there was nowhere to go.

‘You can put it away now, Mr Shaw,’ she said calmly in that beautifully precise upper-crust voice of hers.

She had her back turned to me as she put the first aid box back in the cupboard and her shoulders started to shake. I was filled with the most terrible feelings of remorse to know I had so easily turned her to tears.

‘I’m sorry,’ I murmured.

I turned her round gently and discovered that she was biting on her lip to contain the laughter which bubbled up spontaneously at that very moment.

‘Poor Mr Shaw,’ she said. ‘You really did look very funny.’

Which certainly gave her game, set and match on that encounter.

The GPO, in its wisdom, altered the delivery times for our district so that the first post did not arrive until ten o’clock. During the Easter holiday this didn’t matter so much, but when I was back at school it meant that I didn’t know if there was any mail for me until I returned home in the evening.

When it happened, it was like being hit by lightning out of a clear blue sky. A Tuesday in April, a perfect spring evening, pale sunshine drifting in through the window, slanting across the hall table when I opened the door.

There were two letters lying there, both addressed to me. The first was some circular or other. The second was from my agent. The first paragraph conveyed the vital information that he’d had an offer for the book. An advance of two hundred pounds. Half on signature, the rest on publication, and they wanted an option on the next book.

There was more, a great deal more, but for the moment I simply couldn’t take it in. Aunt Alice was in the parlour with Herr Nagel, I could hear their voices. I went into the dining room and helped myself to the sherry, then I poured another rather large one and went upstairs.

I sat at the table by the turret window and read the letter through in detail. There was the prospect of more good news in the second half, for all the signs at the New York end indicated that there was every possibility of publication over there also.

He ended on a note of caution. I must not expect too much. A great many new thrillers were published each year. To achieve average sales with this first one, both here and in the States, would be a more than satisfactory start.

But none of that really mattered and I sat there at the turret window savouring the golden moment, my own private celebration. People who knew about such things actually wanted my work. Were prepared to pay for it. I was a writer, a professional in every sense of the word, at last, and nothing would ever, could ever, be the same again.

I went down to the parlour to break the news to Aunt Alice. To be honest, it fell a bit flat and not because she wasn’t interested. It was just that she seemed to take it in such an irritatingly offhand way.

It had been inevitable. She had always known, because one of the most important aspects in my map was Sun trine Jupiter. She appealed to Herr Nagel for confirmation on this point. With his usual benign smile he supplied further technical details which were above me. I made my excuses and fled.

Jake was still in London, so once again there was no one to tell. For a moment I had one of those depressingly
déjà vu
feelings of having been here before, but not for long. I had a bath, changed into my best suit, got five pounds from my mad money tin and went out into the evening.

Everything seemed different, clearer, sharper, as if suddenly I was possessed of some extra vision. I have seldom felt happier than I did on the top deck of the tram as we rattled along the track across the playing fields, creaking and groaning like a ship under sail.

Everything was the same, yet not the same. Changed, changed completely, people and things, because
I
had changed. It was a feeling I simply couldn’t shake off. Not then, on the top deck of the tram, nor later in the lounge bar of The Tall Man. I had just become some sort of outsider, a man on the periphery of things, watching the antics of more ordinary mortals with a kind of detached curiosity.

As I say, the feelings simply wouldn’t go away. Some sort of reaction I suppose, and later, at the Trocadero, I felt even more detached than ever. Who was I? What was I doing here? The saxophones droned
Night and Day
, the dancers circled in a blue mist, locked in each other’s arms. For some reason I felt quite sad and cut off from all human contact.

A moment later the lights went up and the bandleader announced a ladies’ choice. I stayed where I was, leaning against a pillar by the bandstand, in a brown study, aware of the girl in the blue silk dress walking towards me. Aware, yet not aware…When she asked me to dance I moved onto the floor automatically. It was only as she started to laugh, when I took her in my arms, that I realized it was Harriet.

‘What’s wrong with you, for heaven’s sake?’ she demanded. ‘You look like death.’

We had reached the other end of the floor and, on impulse, I took her by the hand and pulled her upstairs to the balcony. When I sat her at a table by the rail she looked thoroughly bewildered. I took the letter from my inside, pocket and dropped it on the table.

‘Read that,’ I commanded. ‘I’ll get you a coffee.’

When I returned, she looked up at me, wide-eyed. ‘But this is marvellous, Oliver. I never realized.’

I sat down, shaking like a leaf, and she leaned across, concern on her face, and put a hand on mine. ‘Are you all right?’

‘I had to get a reaction from someone,’ I said. ‘Now I can really believe it. Can you understand that?’

‘Of course.’

Her hand stayed in mine and I was aware, and not for the first time, what a very great comfort a woman can be. ‘Someone’s opened a restaurant in an old house near the park,’ I said. They tell me it’s very good. Italian food, a three-piece band, the works, and I’ve got five pounds burning a hole in my pocket. What do you say?’

She smiled delightfully and stood up. ‘Give me two minutes to get my coat and I’ll be right with you.’

It was really quite an evening for the place exceeded my wildest expectations. Food restrictions in restaurants had not been lifted very long, but it all seemed quite adequate to me. We had a Dover sole apiece, some sort of pasta and a full bottle of Pouilly-Fuissé, so cold that it seemed to burn its way down.

The trio wasn’t up to much in reality. A woman pianist and two men. One on the drums and another who played guitar and sang.

We danced a great deal, I remember that, for they weren’t particularly busy and we had the tiny floor to ourselves. What does come back to me with absolute clarity was leaving at eleven and finding that it was pouring with rain, which for some reason seemed absolutely right.

We were both pretty tight by then, which was only to be expected, and Harriet seemed like another person, running ahead of me in the rain, tightroping along the pavement edge, laughing constantly.

The streets were, quite deserted, particularly the quiet area of old Victorian houses where she lived, on the far side of the park. I had never felt so alive, so conscious of the infinite possibilities of life.

At one point we paused at the end of an old stone-walled ginnel to shelter while I attempted to light a cigarette. There was a gas lamp in a bracket above our heads, rain drifting down through it in a silver mist. Harriet stood underneath, her face upturned in a kind of ecstasy.

‘Isn’t life marvellous, Oliver?’

Strange, but I can still hear that voice echoing through the years. For a moment, she reminded me of Imogene and I moved close, taking her in my arms, but when I attempted to kiss her, she stiffened, then seemed to shrink away.

‘We’d better move on.’

Which we did, although there was a constraint between us now, which seemed unnecessary and was certainly a great pity.

The house surprised me. A Gothic brick palace in an enormous garden, converted into eight flats, as she informed me when we reached the gate. Hers was on the ground floor and we followed a path round to the side which eventually led to a flagged terrace with a balustrade.

‘I usually go in this way.’ She took a key from her handbag and unlocked one of the French windows. ‘It’s much more convenient.’

‘It must be nice in the summer,’ I said.

‘If you’d like to come in I could make some coffee.’ I hesitated, that constraint still between us, and she reached up and kissed me briefly on the cheek. ‘Please, Oliver, I really do make rather excellent coffee.’

Which was a simple statement of fact, I had to acknowledge that much to myself as we sat later by the open window in the darkness, a small table between us.

I had to say something, so tried apologizing. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said.

‘What for?’

‘Some of the things I said to you that day in your office were unforgivable.’

‘But you were right,’ she said simply. ‘Absolutely.’

There was a slight pause and then she started to talk about it. Of being seventeen in 1945, the last summer of the war, and the cousin who had convalesced with them for three months. A second lieutenant of infantry with a slight leg wound. The romantic figure who could do no wrong, the only trouble being that whatever he had done, he had not done very well…

And she was worth more than that. I sat there in the darkness when she had finished talking, remembering, for a rather obvious reason, Helen. Remembering her kindness, her gentleness in a very similar situation. I don’t know why, but I suddenly felt that I owed it to her to do something. That there was a debt here that needed repaying in the only way I knew how.

I stood up and reached for Harriet’s hand. ‘Come on,’ I said gently. ‘Let’s go to bed.’

For a moment I thought she might say no. I suspect, even now, that it was one of those knife-edge decisions on which so much of life seems to depend, and then she stood up, came into my arms and kissed me.

‘All right, Oliver, give me five minutes.’

I lit a cigarette, had another coffee, sitting there by the open window, not really thinking about anything in particular, but somehow terribly aware of my existence. Of being a part of the night, of the spring rain, the smell of damp earth. It was as if I had never been conscious of myself before.

She called my name, so softly that I hardly heard it, and when I went into the other room, she was already in bed with the light out. I undressed and got in beside her. When I took her in my arms she started to tremble, as I had trembled earlier in the evening, and I gentled her, stroking her hair with one hand.

Gradually, the trembling stopped and she moved closer. For the first time in such a situation I was conscious that I wanted nothing for myself. That the only important person here this night was her. Time ceased to have any relevance at all. I only know that when I finally took her she was absolutely ready. She gasped my name once, the only word she had spoken during the entire business. To be frank, I was rather proud of myself and lay beside her, her head pillowed on my shoulder, listening to the rain drumming against the window.

‘Was it all right?’ I asked her softly after a minute or so.

She turned inwards and kissed me in the hollow between neck and shoulder and her voice, when she spoke, was rather muffled. ‘I don’t love you, you do understand that?’

‘Of course.’

She sighed heavily. ‘Having made that point quite clear, I really would be greatly obliged, Oliver, if you’d do it again.’

The second letter from my agent arrived just over a week later, and I found it, as with the other, waiting for me on the hall table when I got home from school.

It was confirmation of the American offer. An advance of one thousand dollars, which at the current rate of exchange was worth approximately three hundred and fifty pounds. This time there was someone to tell for Jake was due home on the London train that very afternoon.

He must have seen me coming through the garden for he appeared at the top of the fire escape as I ran across the yard. ‘Now then, old sport,’ he called cheerfully.

He knew about the original offer for the book, as I had written to him, and I pushed the letter into his hand and followed him into the room, struggling for breath.

He looked up from reading it, genuinely pleased. ‘Marvellous, Oliver, bloody marvellous, and no more than you deserve.’

I sprawled in a chair and waited as he poured whisky into a couple of glasses and brought them over. ‘And now my news,’ he said as he gave me my drink.

‘Good God!’ I said, thunderstruck. ‘You’ve passed your exams.’

‘I’m afraid so.’ He grinned delightedly and raised his glass. ‘To us, old sport, the both of us, and let the good times roll.’

He dropped into the chair opposite. ‘Just think, Oliver. Now I can get down to my writing with a clear conscience. Don’t want to be a bloody solicitor all my life.’

‘Of course you can,’ I said.

It was another of those moments of perfection in life when all things seem possible, and we savoured it for a moment, then Jake jumped to his feet, rubbing his hands together.