We Five (25 page)

“You, sir, are absolutely
disgusting
!” she cried, locking arms with Ruth, who was still looking out the window, still waiting for the denouement to the little drama being played out a half block away. “And it's time for us to go. Let's gather up the girls, Ruth, before Deloria Littlejohn or my mother or
someone
on this block who values their sleep 'phones the police.”

“Yet the evening is young and you are—I do not exaggerate, madam—the most beautiful woman I've ever met!” Will said all this without slurring a single word. He was soon joined by Jerry Castle and Tom Catts.

“They're leaving,” announced Will with a display of exaggerated dejection. “The evening has hardly gotten started and these choir babies are ‘much skidoo about nothing'—nothing at all.”

“Well, we can't have
that
!” boomed Jerry thickly. “Not to mention that, practically speaking, we seem to have lost all trace of Miss Barton.”

Carrie and Ruth looked about the room in hopes of proving Jerry wrong.

Jerry cheerfully elaborated: “We were having ourselves a nice cozy gas in the kitchen while I was helping the little lady prowl around for something ice-cold and zero-proof, and in marches this flannel-tongued hunkie or—or wop or some such species of Ellis Island gorilla, who starts to muscle in on my territory, and while I'm fending
him
off, I got a couple of thirsty professorial Yid butt-inskies stealing in behind me from the back porch, and now they're buzz-buzzing around the flame of luscious Lady M, and before I can get her hustled away to safety, two la-di-dah lizzie boys with The-da Bara eye-paint flounce in and give me the puke-belly from the stinking reality of their very
existence
, and while I'm contemplating which of these disturbers of my very own peace is going to get the knuckle sandwich, I see my Lady Fair duck out and disappear into the night, and now I feel cheated and wholly maligned by cruel circumstance.”

Will grinned. “You could have spared us the silly-quee, Jerry. She just walked in. See her over there by the clodhopper in the glee-club boater? Go tell her goodnight.”

Jerry stiff-armed his way across the crowded dance floor to reintroduce himself to Maggie, as if such a thing were necessary. At the same time, Maggie was swimming in a different direction, over to Bella Prowse, who lay sprawled upon the carpet next to the Victrola, surrounded by a cluttered imbrication of phonograph records from the Prowses' prodigious music collection. Reaching Bella, Maggie went down on her knees to put herself at eye level with her hostess.

“Hey,
you
,” said Jerry, now towering over Maggie. “Do you remember me?”

“Of course I remember you,” replied Maggie, looking up for an eye-blink and then returning her attention to the record she'd casually plucked up to inspect.

“
Struttin' the Blues Away
,” offered the blissfully bleary-eyed Bella Prowse. “That's one of Reggie's favorites.” (Not that Bella's husband Professor Reginald Prowse would be in any condition to enjoy the selection. He had, quite some time earlier, entered alcohol-abetted dreamland in his favorite easy chair in a relatively isolated corner of the room.) “I love that one too. It's the Atlantic Dance Orchestra. Do you know them?” The question was directed to Maggie, though it was repeated for Jerry's benefit. “Do
you
know them?”

“I don't know nothing except that I have to see this chickie”—pointing at Maggie—“before she flies the coop.”

“See me about what? Am I leaving?” Maggie looked up to see Ruth and Carrie, with Molly propped unsteadily between them, stationed near the front door. Ruth and Carrie were nodding exaggeratedly and making broad hand gestures indicative of departure.

“There's something I want to give you—in parting,” said Jerry. His voice now sounded poised and friendly, although there was the hint of something else there: a childlike wishfulness, which couldn't be easily dismissed.

Maggie's resistance dissolved. “I'll take it. What is it?” Maggie held out her hand, palm up. The hand wobbled.

“Not here. In private.”

Maggie was now sitting with her legs tucked delicately beneath her like a sleepy fawn in a glade. She gave Jerry her hand. He lifted her gently to her feet.

He led her to one of the bedrooms. He flung open the door. Inside was a young woman and man in a bunny hug, she seated in his lap on a chair.

“Beat it!” Jerry rumbled.

The command was speedily obeyed, the door slammed shut upon exit. And then, without a moment's hesitation, Jerry Castle bestowed his “gift”: a kiss for Maggie to remember him by.

“You drive me wild. I gotta have you,” he said, after their lips had parted.

“I—I'm flattered you need me,” inhaled Maggie, while trying to catch her breath, “but I hardly know you.”

“Then find out about me. Let's see each other. You say when. I'll say where. Or versa vicea.”

“I don't know. The room's spinning.”

“I'm sweeping you off your feet.”

“No. I think I'm drunk. I think you put something in my lemonade.”

Jerry looked away in an attempt to conceal his smirk.

“Answer me! Look at me! Did you do something to my glass of lemonade?”

“I cannot tell a lie. I adulterated your lemonade.”

“You—”

“—turned your lemonade into
adult
lemonade.”

“Why?”

“I thought you needed a little loosening—”

Maggie's hand met Jerry's face before he could even complete his answer. He responded by pulling her roughly toward him and kissing her again. This kiss was delivered without affection or even passion. It represented only the brute desire to thoroughly control her in that assailing moment.

It was answered by yet another slap.

Followed, finally, by the emergence of a sly, devilish grin on the face of the victim, and the panting declaration: “
I
.
Will
.
Have
.
You
.”

“
In
.
Hell
,” returned Maggie, who then flailed blindly for the door, yanked it open, and half-marched, half-fled down the hallway to the parlor in a show of frazzled, trembling indignation.

The phonograph wasn't playing “Strutting the Blues Away.” Instead, its speaker was blasting out the comical song “Yes, We Have No Bananas,” while Bella Prowse was eating a banana in contradiction of the lyrics, and Jane Higgins was being roused from slumber upon the sofa by three of her friends, each with one eye on the front door, and each looking conversely regretful over having to skidoo from the most interesting night of their young lives.

The sign in the grocer's window read:

Yes, We Have no Bananas

Nor onions nor oranges, sultanas, currants,

dried fruit of any kind, spaghetti, kippers & herring.

So please don't bleeding ask.

Jane laughed; Molly, Ruth, and Carrie smiled. Maggie registered nothing. As We Five hurried along to take shelter, Maggie Barton was red-faced, brow-cinched, and broodingly silent. Once the public ARP shelter was reached and the friends settled inside, Maggie persisted in closing herself off from communication with everyone round her—both those she didn't know and those four young women whom she did. Maggie was too busy recalling with revulsion exactly what Jerry Castle had said to her, had
done
to her outside the Hammersmith Palais.

And after the two had been getting on so well.

Jane had seen it. She'd been saying her own goodnights to Tom Katz and had noticed out of the corner of her eye the outlines of the ugly exchange: the vulgar overture, the harsh rejoinder. She'd then watched, now with her eyes targeted like a huff-duff antenna, as Jerry, taking drunken offense to the rebuff, pushed and then penned Maggie against the wall, where he took liberties in full view of other couples emerging from the ballroom. Jane was prepared to go and assist Maggie in removing herself from the man's vile clutches when Maggie succeeded in doing that very thing on her own, but not without delivering retributive justice in the form of a hard slap to Jerry's face.

It was a slap, which, curiously, prompted a smile, as if this—her expression of instantaneous hatred for him—was what he'd been after all along.

Jane had thought at the time: if this is how the bloke thinks he can win the affections of Maggie Barton, he'd best look elsewhere. Of We Five only Jane would have fallen for such brutish, caveman tactics, and only then because Jane would have given back as she got: cudgel-wielding caveman, meet cudgel-wielding cave
woman
. But Maggie, and Jane's other circle-sisters, weren't cudgel-carriers. They hadn't the leathery hide of the scrabbling London East Ender like Jane. They were much too staid and naïve to desire the attention of anyone but a gentleman—with special emphasis on the “gentle.” From what she'd observed outside the Hammersmith, Jane did have to admit, though, that modesty and girlish innocence hadn't prevented her friend Maggie from asserting herself when need arose.

Thought Jane: “Huzzah for my friend Maggie Barton for standing up to the bloody lout!”

Up to then—up until this display of most deplorably bad behaviour on the part of Mr. Castle, behaviour which reminded Jane in retrospection of some beastly belch from the pulpit after a particularly inspirational sermon—the evening had proceeded quite swimmingly. It was such a night as none of the five had ever before experienced. Over the course of the three and a half hours spent in the company of the five young men who'd sought them there, Maggie and Jane and Carrie and Molly and Ruth had learned things about themselves, about their needs and their natures, which could not have been predicted only a few hours before.

And best of all: they learned how to have fun—the kind of fun for which the Hammersmith Palais was nationally famous.

Carrie and the hulking young Scandinavian named Holborne had taken to one another like ducks to a cool summer pond. Carrie's love of music propelled her out onto the dance floor without a moment's hesitation, and Will did a yeoman's job of keeping in good step with her. They sat out only three or four dances through the long evening. Slowly and soulfully they gyred and dipped to both of the celestial serenades made famous by Glenn Miller. Elsetimes they jitter-jived like seasoned Lindy Hoppers to the more energetic numbers like “Woodchopper's Ball.” This particular song was played as loudly as possible to cover the sound of the evening's first Luftwaffe air attack. (Maggie had guessed wrong; it was the Ham-mersmith Palais's custom never to evacuate its ballroom in the midst of a bombing raid. Regular customers knew when they entered the palace each evening that this might very well be their last night on Earth, but, by Jove, at least they'd die happy!)

Whilst they were dancing, Carrie and Will, both of whom seemed to know the lyrics to every popular song, sang along with the orchestra, Carrie demonstrating her inarguable lyrical gift, Holborne's own voice generally on-key and perfectly serviceable as amateur voices go. They concluded their tuneful tête-à-têtes with the antepenultimate number of the evening, “The Breeze and I” (“…they know you have departed without me, and we wonder why…”) Even more moving than this was the song which came next (which they listened to in respectful silence)—the movingly valedictory “We'll Meet Again,” sung not by its famous interpreter, Miss Vera Lynn, who was presently abroad performing for the troops, but by a woman who looked and sounded very much
like
the U.K.'s beloved Miss Lynn, and who capitalized on this fact by calling herself
Deirdre
Lynn.

Molly, like many others in the crowd, could not keep herself from tearing up during the poignant “We'll Meet Again,” though the song lost all of its personal relevance given that Molly was saying goodnight (and not goodbye) to a conscientious objector, who had a very good chance of meeting Molly not only on some sunny day but for that matter
any
day of the week, irrespective of the weather. Molly also wept when the band struck up for its last number of the evening, the patriotic “There'll Always Be an England,” though in a very large room (the Palais was a great converted tram shed) with a very large number of men in uniform, We Five's beaux for the evening stood out quite conspicuously in their civvies. As a result, they became recipients of judgemental stares and glares during both this song and the earlier rendition of “Bless 'Em All,” and specifically during the song's pointed lyric, “You'll get no promotion this side of the ocean.”

Molly was comforted through her tears by the tender ministrations of her demonstrably Molly-ravenous new boyfriend Pat, the two calling into serious question through their intermittent gaiety and unfettered physical familiarity with one another on the dance floor their assertion that they had only just met.

Neither Ruth nor Cain danced, but kept up a lively marathon rag-chew over topics ranging from the recently discovered Paleolithic cave paintings in southwestern France to whether or not the popular radio comedian Tom Handley was brilliantly funny or annoyingly overrated. Their relaxed and friendly chat was marred only by a look of passing indictment from Holborne—one totally lost on Ruth—which came when the band struck up the droll “Kiss Me Goodnight, Sergeant Major,” sung, as it always was, by a male vocalist.

The first kiss of the night—and one which met the approval of both participants—was shared by Jane and Tom and elicited the following exchange:

Jane: I don't think I've ever been kissed by a Jew before.

Tom: My dear Miss Higgins, I would hazard a guess that you've never been kissed by an Anglican or a Catholic before either. Excepting, of course, your mother and father.

Jane: To tell you the truth, you'd be correct. But why don't you be a gentleman and not spread this fact about?