by Caro Fraser
‘That’s not the point, and you know it. I love Montresor. Another place wouldn’t be the same. I couldn’t bear to sell it.’
Charlie shrugged slowly. ‘I don’t really see that we have any alternative.’
‘Well, you could tell Claire to lower her sights a bit, for a start. You’re going to be working your arse off for the rest of your days to keep up with her!’ Bella drank the remains of her wine. ‘Oh, and don’t forget the school fees. Eton for the boys, if I’m not much mistaken.’
‘Don’t be so bloody rotten about Claire. Stop going on as though she’s pushing me into this.’
‘Well, isn’t she?’
‘You may not much like her–’
‘No, I don’t, as a matter of fact.’
‘–but the fact remains, she’s going to be my wife, and we both want this house.’
Bella looked at her watch. ‘Shit. I’m going out in an hour.’ She sighed. ‘Look, Charlie, we’ll have to talk about this some other time. I’ve got to rush.’ She leaned over, kissed his cheek, and got up. ‘It’s not worth fighting about. We’ll sort something out.’
He watched her leave. There wasn’t any other way of sorting it out, so far as he could see. All right, the Lewes place was a bit big. The prospect of the mortgage was frankly terrifying. But he couldn’t face having to tell Claire they couldn’t afford it. She wanted it so badly. And when it came down to it, he had to do what was best for himself and Claire.
A light wind whipped through Leicester Square gardens as Adam walked up from Charing Cross towards Soho. It was fifteen minutes before noon, but the general vacancy of the streets and the proliferation of delivery vans gave the place a yawning, not-yet-started feeling. Which, Adam reflected, was the way of such an area, where the real day didn’t begin until the pubs got going.
With ten minutes to kill, he strolled around the stalls in Berwick Street Market, then made his way to Old Compton Street and The French House. It had not been open long, and both doors at either end of the bar were open to the street, the sash windows up, airing the place from the night before and subjecting any early drinkers to a stiffish breeze. Adam stepped in and glanced round. He had expected to find George Meacher tucked away in the alcove, surrounded by the mournful nostalgia of the dozens of black-and-white photos which covered the walls, depicting Soho in days of former glory. But the small figure, instantly recognizable to Adam, was seated round the other side of the bar, taking the brunt of the gusts of fresh air from the street outside, and tapping the ash from the end of his cigarette with soulful absorption. A glass of Scotch stood before him on the bar. Meacher took another drag on his cigarette and made some quiet remark to the barman, who, busy counting change for the float, murmured in reply. Then Meacher looked up and saw Adam.
Adam’s first impression had been of a small, seedy man, rather pathetic in detail – the grey, thin hair combed greasily across the scalp, the too-long trousers, twice or thrice turned up so that the hems bulged, the dingy woollen overcoat – but when he met Meacher’s gaze, only one word sprang to Adam’s mind. Poise. Meacher might be old, beaten and worn, but he had poise. He sat with one elbow on the bar, smoke rising from the cigarette between his leathery, yellow fingers, his legs crossed, one grizzled brow raised, and seemed to transcend his shabby clothes, his wretched shoes, his entire situation. He might as well have been Noel Coward.
‘Mr Meacher?’
The eyes, in contrast to the pouched, dull, battered old face, were dark and sharp as they surveyed Adam.
‘My name’s Adam Downing. We have a mutual friend – Giles Hamblin. He told me I might find you here.’
‘Ah, yes – Giles. He did mention you.’ The voice had a cultivated edge to it, and was light and rasping from constant smoking. Adam drew up a stool and sat down. The barman, having finished his count, moved away to pour the change into the till. ‘You’re writing a biography of Harry Day.’
‘That’s right,’ said Adam.
Meacher nodded, smoking. ‘I knew Harry.’ He eyed Adam reflectively. ‘I knew Harry way back. Last saw him back in the seventies. How did you track me down?’
‘His first wife.’
Meacher let out a creaking laugh. ‘You’re joking!’ He sounded genuinely disbelieving.
‘She didn’t mention you by name–’
‘I’ll bet she didn’t.’
‘–but she was showing me some photos, and I saw you in one of them. Their wedding photograph, actually. You and Francis Bacon and some other people.’
‘So.’ He stretched his arm out to crush his cigarette into the tin ashtray, his wrist thin beneath the frayed, slightly soiled shirt cuff. Adam could detect the sweetish, stale odour of unwashedness.
‘I take it you’re willing to talk about Harry, then?’
‘Yes. Oh, yes.’ Meacher drained his drink.
Nice timing, thought Adam. He gestured to Meacher’s empty glass. ‘Another?’
Meacher’s smile creased his face like rubber as he reached into his pocket for his cigarettes. ‘Thanks. Make it a double.’
Fifteen minutes later, Adam was buying him another. To avoid the draught from the street, Adam had suggested moving to the alcove, snug with cigarette smoke, which Adam knew would give him the mother of all headaches later.
‘So it was before you went freelance that you met Harry?’
‘Oh, well before that. I was working for a studio, going out and taking photos of people in the street, that kind of thing, charging half a dollar a photo. It was a cheapskate outfit, run by an old codger. He’d only the one camera. Harry got a job in the dark room. That’s how we met. It was ’51, we’d both just done our National Service. We used to go out to the pub together after work, and we got on all right. So after a while we figured it would be cheaper to get a room together. I was earning six quid a week, God knows what Harry was getting – half that, probably. So we took a room together, a sort of bedsit, with breakfast thrown in.’ Meacher pinched the end of his cigarette and took a final drag before stubbing it out. ‘Forty bob a week, one big attic room, bed either corner, washstand, odds and ends of furniture, and one prize bitch of a landlady.’ There were four spent butts in the ashtray already.
Adam tried to picture Meacher and Day, young men in their early twenties, and the meagre life they must have led together in the wake of the war. ‘How long did you live together?’
‘Year and a half. Something like that. Then Harry got his own place. But we still knocked around together, knew the same people, went to the same places.’
‘What was he like back then?’
‘Harry? You mean to look at? Well, you must have photos.’
‘I want you to tell me how you recall him. The way he looked, how he was, everything.’
‘Average bloke. Not too tall, but with more muscle on him than you’d think to look at him. Mousy brown hair. Quiet. Women liked him, but he wasn’t too bothered. He preferred writing his poetry of an evening. I’d often come in, and there he’d be, battering away on his Remington. Dire shit it seemed to me, half the time… Went down well with the arty-farty types, though. Old David Archer took him under his wing, and he knew a thing or two about poetry. He spotted Dylan Thomas before anyone else. Harry was always hanging round Archer’s bookshop in Greek Street. I think he was meant to be employed there at one point… Not that anyone ever bought a book there. It was more like a club, people dropping in, most of them sponging off Archer.’ Meacher lit another cigarette. ‘Soft old sod. He always liked helping people on the quiet. He put a fiver in an empty matchbox once, put it in my pocket, but I chucked it away, didn’t know what was in it. Only found out later when he said something. A bloody fortune, gone. Jesus, we were always skint in those days… I remember taking back beer bottles to get the money on them. Had to hock my suit more than once. Haven’t exactly come a long way since.’ He took a swift, bottom-of-the-lung drag on the remains of his cigarette. ‘And you know, Harry could have had money if he’d wanted. His father wo
uld have seen him right, provided Harry took the kind of job he wanted. But Harry never did. He liked to go his own way. I admired that. His mother used to send him the odd twenty now and then, and that was a real bonanza. We’d go to Wheeler’s for lunch, crack a few bottles of Chablis, then go on the piss for the rest of the day. Not that Harry was ever a great drinker, but the people he liked being with were. They’d all come running when Harry had money. You were never short of friends in Soho if you had a bob or two.’ Meacher shook his head and drained his glass. ‘We’d spend all afternoon in the Colony Room, letting the afternoon drift away. Bloody lovely times.’ Meacher stared reflectively into the bottom of his glass.
‘How do you get by now?’ asked Adam, hoping Meacher wouldn’t be offended by the question.
But he wasn’t. ‘Pension. I’ve got rooms round the corner, they don’t cost me much. Landlord owns the Greek place at the end of the street, he feeds me now and again. He’s all right.’ Meacher shook his head. ‘There was a time when I made a half-decent living, doing shoots for the glossies back in the late sixties. Gritty realism. Birds in mini-skirts and long boots standing around bomb sites. But I was never ambitious. Not like Harry. Which is probably why I’m still here.’
Adam knew it was his cue to buy Meacher another double, but he didn’t think he could spend another half-hour in this little alcove bathed in the miasma of smoke from Meacher’s endless cigarettes. ‘Would you like some lunch?’ he asked.
Meacher blinked in surprise. ‘Upstairs?’
‘Unless there’s somewhere else you’d rather go.’
‘No, upstairs is fine.’
Adam stood up. ‘I’ll go and ask the barman if they’ve got a table.’
‘I’ll have another while I’m waiting,’ said Meacher swiftly. Adam bought him another large whisky.
The restaurant upstairs was a small room, made to look bigger by a mirror at one end, and Adam and Meacher sat at a corner table by the window, overlooking the street. It was Monday, and there were few other diners. Adam set his tape recorder on the windowsill.
They talked over lunch about Harry’s early Soho days, the poetry, the jazz clubs, the characters who came and went. It was all interesting enough, but uneventful in terms of Harry’s career. When he wasn’t writing poetry, Harry appeared to have taken a variety of menial jobs to pay the rent and fund his social life.
‘Old Harry, he did most things. He was a scene shifter in one of the theatres for a while, he washed up in a café in Charlotte Street. Washed up in a number of places, in fact. The best-paid job he got was in the lampshade department in Selfridges, but one of his artist friends got drunk one lunchtime and decided to pay a call on Harry at work, and that was the end of that job. Not that he minded. I think he was pleased – he was bored out of his brain there. There was something good about all those ups and downs. Nobody liked life to get too predictable. It was like a balancing act, me and Harry. When I was on my uppers, he usually had a bit extra to spare, like money from his mother, or from flogging a poem. And when he was out of work, I might be a bit flush, say from doing some porno negatives for someone, that kind of thing. There was always something.’
Meacher had put away sweetbreads on brioche, followed by a rack of lamb, and had consumed the better part of a bottle of Burgundy. He was now leaning back in his chair in a state of comfortable satisfaction. Adam guessed he didn’t eat well, nor often. He caught the waiter’s eye and ordered another bottle.
‘And then Harry had his big success,’ said Adam, steering Meacher.
‘That’s right.’ Meacher gave a little inward belch. ‘He surprised everyone. Most of the people in Soho were real no-hopers, always talking about the book they were going to publish, the picture they were going to paint. That was just drink-driven drivel, half the time. They weren’t going to do anything, and they knew it. You generally knew who the people with real talent were. Francis, Lucian Freud, Johnny Minton… They kept quiet about it. They could drink themselves rotten with everyone else, but then they’d go home and you wouldn’t see them for two weeks. And they’d be working, doing their thing. The others just kept on drinking and talking, pissing away the days. Including me.’ Meacher looked rueful. Adam refilled his glass. ‘My mistake was staying alive. They cut out half my fucking lung, you know, and I’m still here. Sometimes I wish I wasn’t. If I’d been smart, I’d have died twenty years ago, and they’d be having retrospectives of my work at the V&A. I did some good stuff when I was working for Vogue.’
‘Maybe they will, some day.’
‘What?’
‘Have a retrospective.’
‘Hmmph.’ Meacher squared his shoulders miserably and frowned. Adam wondered if he was losing the momentum here, if he’d let the old bloke drink too much.
But Meacher sighed and his face cleared. He drew out his cigarettes. ‘Anyway, Harry did it. He pulled it off. He wrote his play, and he got out of the Soho trap. He was lucky, really. He could have gone under, like so many of them. But he wrote his play, he was in the right place at the right time, and when it was a big hit, I thought – bloody good luck to you, my friend.’
‘Didn’t you begrudge him his success – just a bit?’
‘I’d be lying if I said I didn’t envy him. But he saw me right. He paid back everything I’d ever lent him, which was quite a bit, over the years. I’d never have asked him for it, but he gave it to me. And it wasn’t like he shot off like a rocket, or anything like that. He was still part of the Soho scene, still knocked about with the same people… Till he married Cecile, of course.’
‘And the last time you saw Harry was in the seventies?’
‘That’s right. He had his reasons for not seeing me again after that.’ Meacher glanced up and looked directly at Adam, and there was a new expression in his dark eyes. It amazed Adam that the old man could knock back so much and still appear so lucid.
‘What were those?’
A long and rigid silence developed. As Meacher drew on his cigarette, Adam realized that the old man was debating within himself. He waited.
‘You know his kids were adopted, don’t you?’
‘No,’ said Adam. ‘I didn’t.’ In trying to register the sense of this startling piece of news, Adam’s mind moved swiftly over every reference Bella had ever made to her father. Not once had she ever suggested anything like this. Then something stopped his train of thought dead. ‘That can’t be right.’
‘No?’ Meacher drained off his wine and poured himself some more. The waiter brought the menu for dessert.
‘Cecile. She talked about when Bella and Charlie were born – about how she had a difficult time with one of them.’
‘Did she now?’ Meacher scanned the menu. His face expressed the unshakeable confidence of someone who, while accustomed to lying, was for once in possession of the truth.
Adam sat back and stared at him.
Meacher put out his cigarette. ‘I think I’ll have the treacle tart,’ he said to the waiter.
Adam shook his head at the waiter and handed back the menu. ‘Just coffee, please.’
Meacher savoured the tension he had generated, before saying, ‘I don’t know what story she’s made up for herself all these years, but that’s all it is. A story. The fact is, Harry and Cecile couldn’t have children. He told me one evening when we were having a drink together. About twice a year Harry always used to ring me and suggest going out. I think he felt a bit guilty where I was concerned, felt he should keep in touch. Anyway, it all came out. He told me how badly it was affecting Cecile, and that they were thinking of adopting. But even back then in the seventies it was hard to find nice little white babies to adopt, and that was what Cecile was desperate for. So Harry thought I might be able to help.’
‘Why you?’
‘I’d done my National Service with a fellow who became a GP in Camberwell, and he was always happy to do the odd favour for the right money. Help out girls in trouble, that kind of thing. A lot of the girls in Soho had
me to thank for putting them in touch with Gerald. Anyway, it had occurred to Harry that Gerald the GP, as I always called him, might be able to circumvent the old adoption process, maybe find a private client, so to speak, and the whole thing could be done without the social-services people, all that stuff.’
‘And?’
‘And that’s what happened. Gerald the GP found some woman in south-east London who was pregnant and didn’t want to be, the Days paid a few thousand, plus the private-nursing-home bills, and we all got what we wanted. I took my cut, of course, kind of a broker’s commission, Gerald the GP took his, Lottie of Lewisham was rid of her little problem and a couple of grand better off. Harry and Cecile, of course, got double what they’d bargained for, an instant family, and they were happy with that. I didn’t hear from Harry again.’ The waiter set Meacher’s pudding down, and Adam’s coffee. ‘I think that was more to do with Cecile than Harry. She wanted everyone to think they really were her kids. She and Harry went abroad for a few months before the woman was due, so no one was any the wiser.’ He shrugged. ‘It was their affair. Maybe Cecile thought if anyone found out they were adopted, but on the sly, they’d be taken away from her. I don’t know. So she told you she’d had a difficult birth, did she?’ Meacher snickered. He picked up his spoon and dug into his treacle tart. ‘Thirty years on, and still keeping up appearances. Only nowadays they call it being in denial, don’t they?’
Adam sat thinking, taking apart, then putting together again, the pieces of this story. Meacher sat hunched over his pudding, eating with slow relish. When he had finished, he picked up the empty cigarette packet from the table and flipped the top open forlornly. Adam gestured to the waiter and said, ‘Twenty Marlboro. Put them on the bill.’
The cigarettes came. Adam watched as Meacher unwrapped the fresh packet and lit one. He thought about what Giles Hamblin had said of Meacher.
Meacher winked at Adam through the smoke. ‘I fancy a brandy to round off the meal.’