Memoirs of a Dance Hall Romeo (2 page)

She seemed completely oblivious to all this, her body trembling violently as she spread her legs. The moment I entered her, breasts or no breasts, I discharged.

It was a tremendous disappointment, the whole thing so instantly accomplished. I went slack and so did she, but only for a moment. She pushed me violently to one side and sat up.

‘Thanks for nothing,’ she said.

She stood up and pulled on her pants. Believe it or not, but I was so naive in such matters at the time as to be utterly mystified by her conduct.

‘Call yourself a man,’ she said, then slapped me solidly across the face, turned and marched into the night.

I stood in the small porch of the changing hut and watched her go. I was back in that unreal world again where nothing seemed to make much sense. Except some instinct for self-preservation which reminded me to button my trousers before leaving to walk sadly home through the rain.

When I was in the first form at grammar school, Jake O’Reilly was in the Lower Sixth and waiting to go into the Forces. This meant that we were hardly bosom friends, in spite of the fact that he only lived round the corner, in the same quiet backwater of Victorian houses next to Ladywood Park.

But all that changed after my first leave. At a loose end one night, I attended a meeting of a local literary society and found Jake, who had just been demobbed. Over the coffee, we discovered a mutual interest in writing.

He had produced a considerable number of short stories without selling a thing and I had churned out three-quarters of a novel that could only be described as a parody of Hemingway at his worst.

Jake was a Yorkshire Irishman, a bad mixture, especially when he had been drinking, but there was little doubt that he was the wisest man I knew. Very definitely what Aunt Alice, who was greatly interested in such matters as spiritualism and the occult, would have termed an old soul. When I reached home after my experience with Ava, I went round the corner to see if his light was on.

His house, like ours, had been built on the high tide of Victorian prosperity, for affluent woollen merchants and solicitors. It had pointed Gothic towers at each corner and substantial outbuildings. His mother, who was a widow, had split the place into two large flats and several bedsitters.

Jake himself had a sort of studio-bedroom over the garage at the rear, and the light was on. I went up the fire escape, leaned over the landing rail and peered inside. He was sitting at the desk by the window, busily making notes from a book propped up before him. This was how I was to find him on most evenings during the year that followed, for he was trying to make up for the years lost to the Navy by passing his Law Society examinations at one fell swoop.

I poked my head round the door. ‘Can I come in?’

He swung round in the chair, probably the most engagingly ugly man I have ever known, in spite of the blue eyes and flaxen hair of an S.S. officer in a Hollywood movie. His nose, which didn’t help, had been broken in some fracas or other, for Jake had enjoyed what is known as a hard war, courtesy of the Royal Navy, as a member of the crew of a torpedo boat working the Channel out of Falmouth.

He examined me gravely. ‘You look terrible. Would you like a beer?’

‘Never again,’ I said and made for the couch by the fire.

He didn’t say a word. Simply plugged in the electric kettle, went into the bathroom and came back with something fizzing merrily away in a glass of water. I got it down and he sprawled in the chair opposite and lit a cigarette.

‘What happened to you?’

I told him about Ava in some detail. By the time I had finished the kettle was steaming and he got up and made some tea.

‘So what’s your problem?’ he demanded. ‘Most blokes I know would think they’d had a reasonably satisfactory night of it.’

‘Ava didn’t,’ I said.

‘All right, so you were a bit quick off the mark. Women like to experience the big bang, too, you know.’

I sat there sipping scalding tea, an expression, I suspect, of settled gloom on my face. Jake went into the bathroom. He returned with his face well-lathered and shaved in the mirror above the fire.

I was somewhat mystified by these proceedings but contented myself by saying, ‘It’s all right for you.’

‘If it is, it’s been a long, hard road. Did I ever tell you where I spent the morning of my eighteenth birthday? Drifting around the middle of the English Channel in a life jacket. We hit a mine on my third patrol.’

‘What happened?’

‘Nothing very much. It was bloody cold. I thought I was going to die, and I’d never have known what it was like to sleep with a woman. That thought circled endlessly in my brain.’

‘One of life’s great experiences missed?’

‘Exactly.’ He paused, wiping lather from his face. ‘I remember coming into Falmouth in the lifeboat, wrapped in blankets, with a crowd watching from the quay. It made me feel very satisfyingly like a veteran.’

‘And the other business?’ I asked. ‘What about that?’

‘Found myself a lady of the town that very night. Two quid down the drain.’ He smiled that slow, gentle, wry smile of his. ‘It was over in a moment, just like you and your Ava. But it changed me, I must confess.’

‘In what way?’

‘I became convinced that I was going to die. Some sort of delayed anxiety reaction to being blown out of the sea.’

I found difficulty in taking the remark seriously, and I suppose it showed for he held up his hand and added, ‘I used to lie awake at night waiting for my heart to stop, which seemed a significant waste of the time one spent in bed. You could say I turned to women in desperation.’

‘With success?’

‘A uniform went over very well in those days.’ He took a dressing gown from behind the door and put it on. ‘Come to think of it, there wasn’t much I turned down. Naafi girls, Wrens—anything in a skirt in a dance hall, usually through an alcoholic haze.’

‘But what if you’d caught something?’ I said. ‘Didn’t that ever worry you?’

‘But I thought I was going to die, don’t you see?’ he said patiently. ‘That was the whole point. Nothing seemed to matter very much. It’s true what they say, you know. Nothing succeeds like excess. There was a terribly nice W.V.S. lady at one of the canteens, who invited me round to her place for a beetle drive. Turned out she’d got the wrong night.’

‘What happened?’

‘I stayed for tea, and more than a little sympathy. Opened up an entirely new field of operations. Then there was a young lieutenant in a certain para-military religious organization, who gave me the most stimulating afternoon of my life in the rest room of a church hall in Plymouth, after she’d closed the canteen.’

I gazed at him in awe. ‘So what do you do now? You never go out. You’re always at that damn desk studying.’

‘I can see you’re missing the point entirely,’ he said. ‘Let’s put it this way. Most men spend a large proportion of their time at the office desk or factory bench thinking loose thoughts about their neighbour’s wife or the girl behind the bar at the local or what-have-you. But not me. I’m a free man. I can keep sex in its place, because I worked through it. In other words, it doesn’t run my life, it’s just another part of it.’

‘Thanks to all those willing ladies in Falmouth and Plymouth during the war?’

‘Exactly. No psychological hang-ups. No traumas. I even sleep nights.’

‘So what am I supposed to do?’

‘Lay Ava’s ghost, old sport. Try one of the local dance halls. Try all of them, come to that. Lots of girls on offer there. Every shape and size known to man and they’re all lovely! Just remember every woman’s beautiful in some way or other and you can’t go far wrong.’

I stared at him, unable to think of any useful comment, and he sighed heavily.

‘For God’s sake, Oliver, if you don’t get them out of your system now, you’ll go through the rest of your life spending about ninety per cent of your waking hours brooding over women and the flesh. As for your dreams, I shudder to think what they’ll be like.’ He hauled me to my feet. ‘Now get to hell out of here and let me get on with some work. And keep me posted.’

It was raining hard as I went down the fire escape. When I turned and looked up he was standing in the doorway, a curiously elegant picture in that silk dressing gown, the white-blond hair glinting in the light.

‘Goodbye, old sport,’ he said.

It had become a ritual with us, this, after seeing Alan Ladd in
The Great Gatsby
earlier that year, and through it discovering the book.

‘They’re a rotten crowd!’ I shouted. ‘You’re worth the whole damn bunch of them put together!’

He raised his hand, Gatsby to the life, then went inside. I moved as far as the shrubbery and paused, for he had seemed to go to considerable pains with his appearance for the sake of a law book or two.

I was intrigued, and with good cause as it turned out, for some minutes later the back door of the house opened and the tenant of one of the flats, a young war widow called Amy Tarrant, ran across the yard with a raincoat over her shoulders. Jake greeted her warmly on the landing and drew her inside.

I was surprised, Aunt Alice having told me that Mrs Tarrant had her sights set more on a career than a second husband, being already deputy headmistress of a girls’ secondary school at twenty-nine, and having two young boys to support.

It was many years later when Jake let slip that for a time they had enjoyed a mutually satisfactory relationship, meeting two or three times a week in the way I had witnessed.

Yet in some way I felt a strange sense of betrayal that night. I had wanted to feel that, in Jake, I had found that most difficult of all things to find in this world, a friend in the deepest sense of the word. Someone with whom one could exchange mutual confidences and bare the soul. Yet already there were secrets.

Still, his advice seemed sound enough. I gave it some thought on the way home, and later, a good deal more, sitting in the darkness by the turret window of my bedroom, smoking a cigarette, staring out at the rain.

God knows why, but it always seemed to be raining on those quiet nights so long ago. Great silver cobwebs of the stuff drifted through the gaslight beyond the trees and the rich damp smell from the garden filled me with a restless excitement.

It was as if something waited out there in the rain beyond the lamplight, although for the life of me I could not even guess at what it might be.

In order to avoid being called a flirt she always yielded easily.

CHARLES, COUNT TALLEYRAND

T
HE NEXT DAY BEING
a Saturday, I decided to follow Jake’s advice without delay. The sports jacket and flannels that were the sole survivors of my pre-army wardrobe were obviously unwearable, and on my release group number I had not been granted a demobilization suit.

It seemed to me that this was no bad thing for, as Jake had indicated, there were certain advantages to a uniform and I was entitled to continue wearing it until the end of my release leave.

It looked remarkably well after a careful press, particularly the sergeant’s stripes and the Berlin insignia, a dark circle ringed with red to indicate a besieged city and affectionately referred to by the troops as the flaming arsehole.

But that, and the green flash of the Intelligence Corps, were not the only splashes of colour to be seen, for I was the proud possessor of the General Service Medal (Palestine 1945-48), thanks to that month in the transit camp at Jaffa. The purple-green-purple ribbon looked rather well above the left breast pocket and there was always the remote chance that, to the uninitiated, it might be mistaken for a decoration for valour.

The Army, in its wisdom, had released me with only five pounds in hand, against the eventuality of the records proving that I owed them money. Any surplus credits were to be paid me at their convenience. This left me distinctly on the short side financially, so I adjusted my beret to a rakish angle and went to see Aunt Alice.

I found her in the drawing room, working her way through a book on astral projection for, as I have indicated elsewhere, anything to do with the occult was meat and drink to her.

The housecoat she was wearing had been in her possession for many years, and she invariably wore it indoors, especially when she was in what she termed her mystical moods. It was embroidered with the signs of the zodiac and, combined with her jet black hair hanging straight to her shoulders, she resembled the high priestess of some strange cult.

A plump, bosomy woman, at that time in her middle-fifties, her father had left her eight or nine houses in various parts of the town, most of them split into flats, and the rent from these had enabled her to live in tolerable comfort for many years. She had looked after me with considerable kindness since I was eight and I was extremely fond of her.

I explained my present predicament, then spent a good ten minutes searching for her handbag, which finally turned out to be under the cushion of the chair she was sitting in. She offered me a ten-shilling note, which I accepted in spite of the fact that I’d been hoping for a pound, and went in search of Uncle Herbert to spread the load.

As I’d expected, I found him in the conservatory, in his baize apron and old straw boater, contentedly potting plants at the bench. He had never worked for a living in the usual sense in all the years I had known him, indeed had never once ventured beyond the garden gate. But there were reasons.

On the 1st July 1916, Uncle Herbert had gone over the top on the Somme with seven hundred and seventy-three officers and men of one of the Yorkshire Pals Regiments. Twenty minutes later, the heavy machine guns having done their work, he found himself one of thirty-four survivors, albeit with two bullets in one leg and another in the throat.

And so he had lived on all these years, his voice a bare whisper when he used it at all, his left leg permanently supported in a steel brace.

This time the situation was reversed. I requested ten shillings and had a pound note thrust upon me. As any kind of conversation tired him excessively, I kept my thanks to a minimum and left him to it. A nice little man who never strayed far from the safety of the orchids in his greenhouse. A pale ghost in the evening sunlight.