The Last Kiss Goodbye

by Tasmina Perry

  ‘One quote?’ asked Elliot, sensing his opportunity.

  ‘I think the photo speaks for me,’ she said, taking off her glasses and putting them in her pocket ready to leave. ‘It tells you about the power and the powerlessness of love.’

  Chapter Six

  February 1961

  ‘This is outrageous!’ said Rosamund, throwing the magazine down on the cluttered desk. Across the room, a pretty girl pushed the horn-rimmed glasses up her long nose and peered at the cover.

  ‘Capital? I don’t know why you bother reading that rag. It’s the mouthpiece of the establishment.’

  ‘Exactly,’ said Rosamund. ‘That’s why we have to read it, Sam – every week, religiously. How else are we going to understand what the enemy is thinking?’

  There was a snort from behind her. Brian was tall and thin and dressed in the beatnik uniform of drainpipe denims and a baggy, slightly careworn oatmeal jumper.

  ‘The enemy?’ he sneered, pushing his long fringe from his narrow face and casting a cynical eye around the office. ‘If this is a war, then I’d have to say we’re losing.’

  Rosamund was about to object, but frankly, it was true. The Direct Action Group occupied a small room at the top of two flights of stairs behind a peeling door on Brewer Street in London’s Soho. The room itself hovered between intimate and dispiriting, depending on your mood, the four overflowing desks illuminated by one yellow-filmed window and a single naked light bulb hanging from a partially stripped wire. The filing cabinet could not be opened because every foot of floor space was taken up with piles of books, newspapers, and boxes of posters and handbills for protests, benefits and gatherings of support for various causes. Even more depressingly, whatever pretensions the DAG had towards respectability or professionalism were somewhat undermined by the fact that they had to share the front door with the ‘models’ who worked on the floor below.

  Brian had put up a poster in the stairwell declaring the DAG’s support for ‘workers in the erotic arts’, and had taken the girls’ silence on the matter as ironic confirmation of his theory that ‘we’re all getting fucked, one way or another’.

  ‘What’s got your blood boiling this time, Ros?’ asked Sam, reaching for the magazine. Her plummy voice betrayed her time at Cheltenham Ladies’ College, but she was earnestly committed to each and every cause the group held to be worth fighting for – so much so that she was paying the rent on the office with a twenty-first birthday inheritance.

  ‘That opinion piece on page fifteen,’ said Rosamund. ‘The one entitled “An End of Sense”.’

  ‘What’s it say?’ asked Brian.

  ‘Oh, nothing new. Just more patronising twaddle about how the race question can be answered by sending immigrants back to their homelands.’

  Brian clucked his tongue. ‘Typical right-wing rubbish. Why can’t they see that the Empire died with Victoria?’

  ‘Exactly,’ said Ros, warming to her subject. ‘He has the temerity to say that Indians are happier where they are. I mean, why shouldn’t they be allowed to make their own choices? If they want to come to the UK to seek a better life, who are we to deny them a decent standard of living?’

  ‘Hear, hear,’ said Sam.

  ‘Who wrote the piece?’ asked Brian.

  Sam lifted her glasses. ‘Dominic Blake,’ she confirmed, scanning the text.

  ‘Never heard of him.’

  ‘The editor, apparently.’

  ‘Fashioning a magazine out of his privileged bourgeois views,’ said Brian sourly.

  ‘Well, whoever he is, we shouldn’t let him get away with it,’ said Sam fiercely. ‘We should write to the letters page immediately.’

  ‘Like they’d print it.’

  ‘You’re right,’ said Ros, snatching the magazine back from Sam. ‘We’re the Direct Action Group. Let’s take direct action.’

  ‘Such as?’

  ‘Such as going down to the Capital offices in . . .’ she flicked through the pages quickly, ‘in Holborn and shaming them into a retraction.’

  Brian gave one of his bitter laughs.

  ‘You really think they’ll change their minds because we turn up?’

  Rosamund turned to him, exasperated. Sometimes she wondered why she paid Brian, and then she remembered she didn’t. The DAG funds couldn’t stretch as far as their own telephone, and salaries were a distant fantasy. The staff were therefore made up of people like Sam who brought money for the office and contacts to the table, and people like Brian, who was so rabid with commitment, the lack of funds was considered part of the struggle.

  ‘You could well be right, Brian,’ she said as evenly as she could. ‘We all know how much prejudice is bred into people like this, but if we don’t challenge them, how can we ever hope to change their minds about anything?’

  Brian didn’t look convinced.

  ‘All right,’ he sighed, looking up at the clock above the office door. ‘But who are you going to get to come on a protest at lunchtime on a Friday?’

  Rosamund thought about it for a moment. He was irritating, but he had a point.

  ‘We’ll find someone,’ she muttered as she headed down to the street to think.

  They gathered in a loose knot at the revolving front door of the building. Rosamund could see herself reflected in the polished brass plaque reading ‘Brook Publishing: London, New York’ and tried to ignore the fact that there were only five of them.

  ‘At least we have placards,’ said Sam, seeming to read her thoughts.

  Ros nodded. With just a couple of hours’ notice, finding people to lend weight to the protest had not been easy. On the way to the Capital office she had managed to convince two friends, Alex and George, to come along on the proviso that she meet George for a drink after work at some unspecified point. They were both tall and imposing, especially George, who had the build of a wrestler, but more importantly, they both worked at Jenning’s, the printers hidden on a back street behind Piccadilly, and consequently had easy access to both stiff card and paints. The placards reading ‘Down with Capital’ and ‘Listen to the People’ weren’t particularly inspired, but Brian had come up with ‘Blacks In’, generously daubed in red, and the possibly offensive ‘Go Back to Eton’.

  They had also managed to mimeograph a one-sheet polemic Ros had dashed off on the office typewriter entitled ‘Capital: Bold-Faced Lies’, which, along with a DAG information leaflet, they were forcing into the unwilling hands of passers-by.

  The choice of a lunchtime protest had been unexpectedly fortuitous, as it meant the entire Capital building had to run the gauntlet of their slogans as they headed out for sandwiches.

  ‘Withdraw the article!’ shouted Alex.

  ‘Fire Dominic Blake!’ yelled Ros to bemused glances from the secretaries and post boys hurrying in and out of the polished brass and glass front doors.

  ‘I’m not sure the message is getting through,’ said Sam from the side of her mouth.

  ‘That’s not the point,’ said Rosamund. ‘The point is we air our views, exercise our democratic right to protest. Whether it changes anything is neither here nor there; the fact that we’re doing it is all that matters.’

  She caught Sam’s raised eyebrows. She wasn’t at all sure she was convinced by her own argument either. The Direct Action Group was coming up to its two-year anniversary, and in her darker moments Ros wondered what her beloved pressure group had actually achieved, beyond a police caution six months ago when she had chained herself to the railings outside the Houses of Parliament.

  ‘Miss?’

  She jumped as someone tapped her on the shoulder. A young man, no more than sixteen, was standing there wearing an ill-fitting suit – probably a hand-me-down from his father, she thought, immediately regretting being so glib. Either way, he looked terrified.

  ‘Yes?’ she said as gently as she could.

  ‘Would – would you mind coming this way?’ stuttered the boy.

  ‘What? Where?’

  �
�Upstairs,’ he said, motioning into the building. ‘My boss wants a word with you.’

  She felt a little jolt of alarm, but Brian and Sam nodded in encouragement.

  Handing her placard to Sam, she walked into the building, glancing at herself in the mirrored wall of the reception. She looked pale from the cold and wished she had some colour to her face to balance the darkness of her hair. Ros had a difficult relationship with make-up. She disliked the tyranny that a ‘full face’ suggested, but secretly admitted that a slash of red lipstick could give a girl an instant lift of confidence.

  Reminding herself that she had a masters degree from the LSE, she followed the boy up a flight of stairs, into a smoky open-plan office full of desks and typewriters. There was a room at one end with large glass windows. She could see inside and noticed a man standing up behind his desk on the phone.

  The boy knocked on the door and the man put down the phone and gestured for Rosamund to come inside.

  Now his suit certainly fits, thought Ros, taking a minute to observe him. In fact you could tell at a glance that the man in question had spent a lot of time at the tailor’s. His jacket was quite short, the lapels narrow, and the colour, dove grey, matched his eyes. He held up the mimeographed sheet and raised his eyebrows as if to say ‘Well?’ Rosamund felt her heart jump; if there was an enemy, he was putting himself in her sights.

  ‘You’ve read our views?’ she said as calmly as she could.

  ‘I’m Dominic. Dominic Blake, editor of Capital,’ he said by way of brusque introduction. ‘And yes, I have read your . . . piece, Miss . . .’

  ‘Bailey. Rosamund Bailey. Chairwoman of the Direct Action Group.’

  She glanced at him and found the way he looked disconcerting. When she had pictured the author of the controversial article, she had imagined a stuffy gentleman in a waistcoat and perhaps a monocle, some stodgy old-timer stuck in the Empire, with narrow-minded colonial views to match. But the man before her was about thirty, slim yet muscular, with rich brown hair swept back from his forehead in a fashionable rakish style.

  ‘Please, take a seat,’ he offered.

  ‘I’d prefer to stand,’ she said stubbornly, smoothing down the lines of her coat as if she were about to be inspected.

  ‘Fine,’ said Blake, sitting down and lighting a cigarette with a gold lighter, tossing the packet on to the desk in front of him.

  ‘So. You’ve taken offence at Capital magazine.’

  Ros bristled. There was something very superior in the way he spoke. She reached into her bag and pulled out her copy of Capital, folded open at the offending article.

  ‘This,’ she said, holding it up and feeling her cheeks go hot. ‘This piece is a disgrace.’

  ‘That?’ said Blake, clearly bemused. ‘What on earth have you found to take offence at in my column?’

  ‘What have I found?’ laughed Ros, incredulous. ‘Everything about it, you racist, capitalist pig! How can you stand there defending it? Aren’t you ashamed?’

  Blake frowned and took the magazine from her. ‘Have you actually read it?’

  ‘Of course!’ she spat. ‘I’ve never read anything so patronising, so insulting to another race of people in my life.’

  ‘What was so offensive?’ he asked, looking increasingly puzzled.

  Ros started to shake her head. She had guessed that Dominic Blake would be thick-skinned and self-righteous, but his reaction now beggared belief.

  ‘Your attitude towards the race question,’ she said. ‘At a time when there is literally rioting on the streets over the notion of repatriation, do you really think it wise to be blithely fanning the flames?’

  She stopped, suddenly aware that Blake was smiling. She was also aware, despite herself, that when he smiled, his grey eyes crinkled at the sides in a most attractive way.

  ‘You haven’t read it at all, have you?’ he said, snapping her from her drifting thoughts.

  ‘How dare you?’ she replied. ‘I read it this morning. You argue that Indians should be sent home, and that they’re better off starving back in India.’

  ‘I say nothing of the sort,’ said Blake, the smile fading. ‘If you had taken the time to actually read my argument instead of flying off the handle at the first difficult word, you’d have seen that I’m not talking about India at all.’

  ‘Excuse me?’ said Ros.

  Blake took a deep breath and let it out, his irritation plain.

  ‘I have recently been travelling in the Amazon basin – South America, Miss Bailey.’ He waved the magazine in the air. ‘In this article, I actually argue that we should leave the Indians – Amazonian Indians, that is – alone. I write that my observations in the jungle were that they were perfectly capable of getting by in their own environment.’

  ‘Yes, but—’ began Ros, trying to regain the upper hand, but Blake simply waved her objections away with a waft of the magazine.

  ‘Moreover, I argue that when we stick our oar in via missionaries or raw commerce, we make these Indians reliant on us and turn them from proud, self-sufficient people to itinerant casual labourers by robbing them of their self-belief.’

  He fixed Rosamund with a withering look.

  ‘If you had noticed, that is a notion that could be extended to the wider race question, as you put it, regarding the recent immigrants from India – that’s the India in Asia, by the way.’

  ‘Why do you care about the Indians?’ she muttered, feeling cornered.

  ‘Compassion is not the exclusive right of socialists, Rosamund,’ he said with a hint of irritation. ‘In fact, in many cases they’re completely devoid of that one quality.’

  ‘That might be so, Mr Blake, but I still know the sort of magazine this is. The sort of man you are.’

  ‘And what would that be?’ he asked with the hint of a smile, blowing a thin line of grey smoke at the ceiling.

  ‘Public school, landed gentry. A right-wing dilettante who decides to edit his own magazine with the sole intention of peddling his establishment views. Just because you’ve been on holiday to the Amazon rainforest doesn’t change the ideas that have been ingrained into your type for generations.’

  Dominic took a long drag on his cigarette.

  ‘Until he died six years ago, my father was the manager of a grocery shop in Oxford. I was lucky enough to go to a decent boarding school in Kent, but that’s a world away from Eton, believe me. My political views are fluid, but in most people’s eyes quite central, and I launched Capital because I recognised that we are living in changing times and I wanted a talking shop to represent the excitement and change that is going on in London.’

  The tinny chants of the Direct Action Group, huddled outside, floated through an open window, and Ros knew she could not stay here another moment.

  ‘Hmm,’ she said, trying to retain some dignity.

  ‘Can I ask you a question?’

  She didn’t reply.

  ‘You don’t care for Capital magazine, but what is it you do care about, Rosamund Bailey?’

  He looked at her directly, and for a moment he caught her off guard. Cursing herself for getting distracted by his eyelashes, she regained her poise.

  ‘I care about equality, fairness. I believe that everyone should have a chance regardless of who they are or where they were born.’

  ‘I think most people, on either side of the political fence, want that. Conservatism is rooted in meritocracy, liberalism in equality, but aren’t they just different ways of saying fairness?’

  Ros snorted. She didn’t like feeling caught out. She liked being able to run people around in argumentative circles, but something was stopping her from taking Dominic Blake on.

  ‘Come on. Be more specific,’ challenged Blake. ‘What issues do you really care about? When you read the paper, what makes you boil with anger?’

  ‘I care that nuclear arms development is carrying on unchecked. I care that women’s rights are still not even nearly equal to men’s . . .’

  �
�So write about it. For me. For Capital. Tell me what’s wrong, and why.’

  ‘Write for you? For Capital? You must be joking.’

  ‘I don’t joke about who I want to contribute to my magazine.’

  ‘I don’t want to write for Capital,’ she spluttered, not believing he had just suggested it.

  ‘Why not?’ he challenged.

  ‘You might not think it’s a right-wing mouthpiece but I certainly do.’

  ‘Miss Bailey, rallies in the street, even in Hyde Park, are all well and good, but more and more I think that politics is going to be fought in the papers, in radio debates and on the television news. I don’t doubt that you want your views to be heard, but what better way to do that than to have them printed in a serious magazine with clout that reaches people who can effect change?’

  ‘As if your readers are going to like my views,’ she scoffed.

  ‘Precisely,’ said Dominic bluntly. ‘Half of them probably don’t ever hear opinions like yours. They have friends just like them, who think just like them. How can you change how people think if you don’t give them something to think about? To make waves, Miss Bailey, you have to throw the pebble in the pond.’

  Rosamund looked at him with resentful new eyes. A voice in her head told her that what he was saying made sense, but there was no way she was going to admit that to herself, let alone to him.

  ‘I should go,’ she said, glancing away.

  ‘That’s a shame.’ He picked up her hastily copied handbill again and shrugged. ‘Someone gave me one of these before you came in. I read it and thought it was good. For an overheated, one-sided argument, anyway. You have talent. Cut out the hectoring tone, and I do believe that people would enjoy reading your stuff.’

  He stubbed out his cigarette in a glass ashtray and opened his desk drawer.

  ‘The offer’s there, anyway,’ he said, pushing a business card across to her. ‘Perhaps you can ring me next time, instead of shouting outside my window.’

  Chapter Seven

  It was an ordinary street. So ordinary, in fact, that to Ros it almost felt like a parody. The trees, the neatly parked family cars, the low red-brick walls marking the edge of well-tended gardens trimmed with hedges and flower beds; it was as if someone had painted a picture entitled English Suburban Idyll and blown it up to full size. The strange thing was how distant, how detached from it Ros felt. Acacia Avenue, Teddington, had been the street she had played in as a child, running in and out of other families’ little gardens, riding her scooter then her bicycle along the pavement, chalking hopscotch squares on the flagstones. But now it was as if she was watching a movie of someone else’s life. It was familiar, yes, but at the same time somehow nothing to do with her, even though it was her home.