by Jessie Keane
‘Tidy this up, will you, Bern?’ Clara said, and she picked up the cane and went back downstairs.
Mr Gray was still at the kitchen table, drinking tea. There was a bit more colour in his face than when Clara had first seen him, and the bloodstained handkerchief was on the table top. Clara could see a nasty little cut on his cheek where Henry had caned him, but the damage didn’t look too bad. She sat down, and laid the cane on the table.
‘I don’t know what to do with him,’ she admitted.
The tutor replaced his cup in the saucer. ‘He seems very difficult,’ he said, and his voice was not quite steady. ‘Very troubled. Mrs Hatton – I’m resigning my post.’
Clara nodded. She hadn’t expected anything else.
‘What should I do?’ she asked, throwing out her hands in despair. ‘The school won’t take him back.’
‘Do you want my advice?’ he asked, wincing as he drank again.
Clara nodded. The whole problem of Henry exhausted her.
‘Boarding school might knock him into shape,’ said Mr Gray.
Clara looked at him. She could afford that, now. Just about. ‘You honestly think that would help?’
‘Yes. I do.’
Clara heaved a sad, weary sigh.
She didn’t want to even think about Henry, not any more. She had a lovely house to buy for her and for good quiet little Bernie, and she would soon become absorbed by that. But it would be such a relief to have Henry off her hands at boarding school. She was concerned about the expense of it, but if it cured him of his wicked ways, why not? It looked like the only way forward – for all of them.
29
Fulton Sears had sorted himself out with some decent digs, got a job managing a raft of club doors for an owner called cotton. He spent his days idly trying to trace Jamesy – who seemed to have vanished, just like Jacko. The address he’d been given had turned out to be a dead end: when he went there, he found the place boarded up, and none of the neighbours knew anything about where Jamesy had got to.
He went down Greek Street one night and looked at the Dragon club, which had once apparently belonged to Jacko. Now it belonged to a git called Redmayne, and Fulton saw Redmayne in there that night, sharp-looking, handsome – everything Fulton himself wasn’t.
If I looked like that, I’d rule the whole fucking world, thought Fulton.
Clara Hatton would fall at his feet.
That was her name, he’d discovered. Clara. He liked the sound of it on his tongue. And after chatting to the landlord at the Bear and Ragged Staff – and bunging him a wedge for that bit of aggro with Stevey Tyler – he discovered it wasn’t her dad she was hauling out of the pub on that first night he’d seen her. That was her husband.
This amazed him. It was incredible to think of an old fart like Frank Hatton with such a prize. Fulton didn’t think that Clara would have given Frank the time of day, but there you go. She was married to the man.
And now Frank had died, and Clara was a widow. Suddenly, he noticed when he watched her, there was a spring in her step, like a weight had been lifted from her shoulders, and she was buying houses, bustling around the place, sometimes even smiling.
When she’d been half-carrying old Frank out of that pub, she hadn’t been smiling. Fulton dreamed of that smile being directed at him. God, she was so beautiful. Not that she’d ever look twice at him, of course not. And yet . . . a faint hope stirred in Fulton’s heart.
She had married Frank Hatton.
So she wasn’t that choosy.
30
Boarding school was the arse end of hell. That was Henry’s firm assumption from day one. He pitched up in a taxi with Clara and a couple of bags, and there he was, gaping at this place. It was like that gaff in The Wind in the Willows – Toad Hall, that was it. Hadn’t Mum read him stories from that, way back when he was small? He could barely remember, but he thought she had. He could also remember her perfume, the warm scented silkiness of her hair, and his heart always seemed to clench when he thought of that, it made him want to hit something.
The school was huge and sprawling and red-bricked and set in the country, and who the fuck wanted to be stuck out in the country? Nothing there but cows and greenery.
Oh, and the pricks in this place.
Out on the gravel turning circle, in they all came while he and Clara stood there. Rolls-Royces purred up the drive, and – fuck me! – someone had come in a gold-plated Daimler, what was that, Lady Docker or something? It was like a convention of the most expensive cars in the world, there were even chauffeurs, and they were all coming here to this school.
Clara – big sis – had brought him here, at huge expense, and Henry thought this was a measure of how much she wanted rid of him. Anything to get him out of her sight, wasn’t that the way it went?
Because he was a monster, after all.
And as he and Clara stood there, all the others piled out of their swish motors, didn’t they. All the fucking little Lord Fauntleroys in their perfect school uniforms and pristine boaters – he’d yanked his off when Clare told him to wear it, no way was he wearing that bloody thing – with Mummy dripping in fox furs and Daddy smoking a pipe. Everyone talking in haw-haw tones like they had a mouth full of marbles.
Shit, thought Henry.
‘You going to be all right then, Henry?’ Clara asked him, taking his shoulders in her hands and – he could see it – almost forcing herself to look him in the eye.
She hated him. Wanted him gone, out of sight.
‘Yeah,’ he muttered.
She didn’t kiss him goodbye, just got back in the taxi and buggered off. couldn’t wait to see the back of him. Yeah, he was a fucking monster. He looked around at the other boys, all of them sporting that creamy unfakeable gloss of old money, and thought That’s it. I’m dead.
‘Wash some of that city dirt out of his hair,’ said Morton from somewhere above him.
‘Christ, he’s wriggling about like a bloody ferret,’ said Archer, who was nearly pissing himself he was laughing so hard.
Morton’s meaty hands were holding his head down. They’d ambushed him in the toilets, the pair of them, two of the older boys, bloody toffs, and now they had his head down the loo and they were flushing it repeatedly, half-drowning him. He couldn’t speak, couldn’t get his breath, couldn’t do a fucking thing, they had him in such a grip.
The toilet was flushed again. Henry choked and sputtered on mouthfuls of water and thought of all the arses that had shit in this place and retched. Then they half-pulled him back out of the bog.
This was an initiation ceremony, they’d told him. All the freshers had to go through it. But funny – he hadn’t seen any of their posh mates getting the same treatment. No well-connected daddy’s offspring was going to be subjected to this, only him.
‘Don’t want to drown him, I suppose,’ said Morton.
‘Why not?’ asked Archer, giggling.
Great soft bastards, they wouldn’t have stood a chance if they hadn’t bushwhacked him in a pair. One alone, he’d have fought off. Henry was tough. He was getting stronger all the time. And now he was furious. Free of their clinging hands, he lurched to his feet and landed a haymaker on Morton’s flabby jaw; then he turned on Archer and pummelled his spare tyre with several quick jabs. Archer went down, whimpering and clutching his middle. Morton came in again, and Henry went to work. He had plenty to be angry about. And Morton got the full benefit.
And then one of the tutors arrived on the scene, and pulled Henry off or he’d have killed Morton stone dead.
‘We don’t have this sort of behaviour at our school,’ said the tutor, cuffing him around the ears.
Archer was groaning on the floor. Morton was nursing his jaw, seemed unable to speak.
Good. Prick never had anything of sense to say anyway.
Morton and Archer got the rest of the week off from studying.
And Henry?
He got detention.
31
1961
The new house was a world away from Frank’s modest little place, and far removed from the mean Houndsditch slums. It had a nice garden, two receptions, fires in every room. Clara strolled around it, and felt proud. She had pulled her family out of the mire, rescued them from penury by her advantageous marriage to Frank, God rest him. Her only regret was that she hadn’t been able to do it sooner, and save their mother too.
Still . . . it wasn’t the grand place they’d once known, back in their other life, their real life. Once, the Dolans had lived in palatial style, with servants and actual grounds. Then disaster had struck them, pulled them down. Clara walked around her house and thought that even now it wasn’t enough. The money was running out too fast. They were solvent, yes, but they had to watch the pennies still. She had invested, purchased another couple of houses: she carefully studied the markets. But what was needed was more cash. Her dwindling resources, the cost of Henry’s schooling, everything worried her.
Sometimes she still dreamed in the night that she was a girl again and that Dad had come back, that all was well. Then in her dreams he would vanish somewhere in that old hideous Houndsditch flat and she would search and search but be unable to find him. She would wander dark cavernous hallways looking for him, and she would finally see a door ajar, the door to a bedroom, light flooding out from a fire.
She would push the door open, and find not Dad there but her mum, dear sweet Kathleen, her face bleached of colour, her eyes closed. Not asleep, but dead. Dead in a fireside chair, blood pooling on the rug at her feet, the cold blue dead child cradled on her lap.
At these times Clara started awake, drenched in sweat, trembling with fear. She had to turn on the lights, go downstairs, walk around the house as she was walking around it now, to reassure herself, to calm herself down. There were no horrors here. There were no cockroaches swarming on the walls. The paper wasn’t peeling off with black, foetidsmelling damp. Her mother wasn’t there, coughing with the chest condition that had plagued her ever since they moved into the Houndsditch place. Only then, once she knew it was just a bad dream, could Clara try to go back to sleep.
No. As much as she had now, it still wasn’t enough. It wouldn’t keep the family in luxury for the rest of her days. And then she was out one day, shopping in Regent Street when she saw a familiar handsome hazel-eyed face. The man had long dark hair and was wearing a dove-grey velvet coat and a hat tilted at a rakish angle. He was coming out of Selfridges as she was going in. He paused.
‘Mrs Hatton?’
Clara stopped walking.
‘Toby Cotton – we met at your husband’s funeral a year ago.’
Clara did remember him; he was good-looking, of course she remembered. He’d been just ahead of that Marcus Redmayne person in the queue of mourners. She had barely noticed Toby, because Redmayne had been very distracting. She didn’t need distractions. She felt sure he was a bad lot; he certainly looked it with his bold black eyes and his mocking smile, and she felt a hot flush of shame when she remembered him watching her in the kitchen after she’d buried Frank.
‘It was two years ago, Mr Cotton,’ she corrected him.
‘As long as that? And how are you, Mrs Hatton?You look well.’
‘I am well, thank you. And you?’
‘Fine. Are you free? Would you join me for tea in the Palm Court . . . ?’
They took tea together, and talked. He was in nightclubs, he said; he had six Soho clubs and business was good, exceptionally good; he was into music, and booking up-and-coming bands like that new foursome called the Beatles, who were proving difficult, their manager upping their fees all the time, and for God’s sake, they weren’t even well known.
Clara was made further aware of how good his business was when they emerged from the store and his Rolls, complete with uniformed chauffeur, was waiting there at the pavement, ready to collect him.
‘Can I drop you off somewhere, Mrs Hatton?’
‘No, thank you. Look, call me Clara.’
‘Clara. Fabulous. Is there any possibility that you would agree to another meeting?’
Clara gave a slight smile. ‘I think I still have your card . . . ’
‘Take another,’ he pushed a new one into her hand. ‘If I might ask for your address . . . ?’
Clara gave it. She said goodbye.
‘Goodbye, Mrs Hatton,’ he said, ‘for now.’
Clara strolled away, aware that he was still watching her. Once out of sight, she looked at the card. The address was a good one, but just to be sure she hailed a cab and sent the driver past Toby Cotton’s house on the way to her own, to check it out.
Fulton Sears loitered among the crowds and watched Clara talking to the man he recognized as Toby Cotton, a nightclub owner. He watched Cotton get into the Rolls, watched Clara hail a cab and ride away. He couldn’t get enough of looking at her, following her around the town, and he thought that maybe this was a bit of a sickness in him, something bad maybe, but still, he loved spending his every waking moment tagging along behind Clara Hatton.
He didn’t think he’d ever summon the nerve to actually speak to her. In his dreams, he walked with her, talked with her, even did things, sexual things, with her, but in real life? The very thought made him shake inside.
He still had Ivan bending his ear over Jacko. Less and less these days, so maybe Ma wasn’t giving Ivan so much grief over it any more, not since Pa died. Fulton knew that Ivan didn’t personally care whether Jacko was ever found or not. Ivan had offered – not with any great interest, it seemed to Fulton – to have some of the boys come down from Manchester, help out maybe, but Fulton had said, Why bother? Jacko was abroad somewhere, no doubt about it. As for Fulton himself, he was happy in London, doing door work here and there, renting a little place, he was more or less his own boss and the days were free for him to follow Clara around – so that was pretty bloody perfect.
32
Down at the Houndsditch kitchen, Bernie and the other volunteers and Salvation Army people made vats of soup and begged old loaves of bread from grocery stores to serve up with it.
Bernie loved doing this: helping the poor, having people pat her on the back and tell her she was the salt of the earth. It made her feel good, and she’d never felt good, not since Dad left them. They had their regulars in here, and they also had the cheeky ones, the ones who queued once and then queued again for more. And lately . . . well, she had another reason to feel pleased with herself.
Lately, a photographer had been showing up at the soup kitchen, taking impromptu shots in and around the place, until one of the Sally Army captains asked him what he was up to.
‘Taking a few natural shots. Black-and-white, for texture. I think people should see this, should know that people are destitute, that they have to queue up for food.’
‘What’s he doing?’ asked Bernie. She found the man fascinating. He was so tall, with long thin limbs and an offbeat, arty way of dressing. His sand-coloured hair was scraped back in a ponytail, and he had warm blue eyes. When he caught her staring, he smiled. He had a lovely smile.
He was still there when they were closing up. She hesitated, then went over, fidgeting warily.
‘Hello,’ she said, as he squatted in a corner removing a roll of film from his camera. He licked it, stuck down the end paper, then put the roll in his pocket. He stood up, turned to face her.
‘Hi. I’m David.’
‘Bernie,’ she said, and shook his hand. She nodded at the camera slung around his neck. It looked expensive. ‘You ought to watch it, coming around here with that. Someone’s likely to nick it off you.’
‘A couple of people have tried,’ he said. ‘They’d have to take me with it. I can’t function without this.’
‘So . . . is this a hobby? Taking pictures?’ she asked, chewing her lip.
‘No, I rent a studio. I do this for a living. Such as it is.’
‘Really? I’d love to see it,’ said Bernie impulsively. She’d never met a phot
ographer before.
‘How about now?’ he asked.
‘Oh!’ Surprised, Bernie looked around. Clara wouldn’t expect her back until late, there was nothing else she had to do. Why not? ‘OK. If you don’t mind.’
‘Why would I mind? I’d be delighted.’
33
Toby was simply adorable. There was no other word for it. Clara was so delighted to have found him. He took her to the theatre and to the opera; he loved the arts, music, and it was pretty clear that he loved her, too. He sympathized over her difficult brother (although she didn’t confide even to Toby just how difficult Henry truly was), agonized with her over Bernie’s social shortcomings, seemed to understand her and empathize with her in a way that no other man ever had.
Annoyingly, Clara found that, attractive as Toby was, she didn’t feel a physical pull toward him in the way she had felt toward Marcus Redmayne. But she was very fond of Toby, and felt cosseted and adored in his company, and he was rich, so what more could any woman want?
You know the answer to that, a voice in her brain told her.
Oh yes. The sexual stuff. That wild fizzing in the veins that told a woman she desired a man. She’d felt it, the moment she’d clapped eyes on Redmayne. And stifled it, too, instantly. Such madness had dragged her mother down, left her penniless, pregnant, without a hope. That was not going to happen to her.
She toured the clubs with Toby, asking questions, meeting the acts, and slowly they became a couple, gossiping happily together over what was happening around the venues, laughing at private jokes. They became a fixture on the Soho club scene. Wherever Toby went, wending his flamboyant way around the streets, there was Clara, stately as a queen, at his side.
‘Who is that?’ asked Paulette, tapping Marcus’s arm as they sat at his usual table in the Blue Bird one evening. ‘I’ve seen her out with Toby Cotton a few times now.’
Marcus looked where she was indicating and saw Toby Cotton sitting down at a table with a stunning dark-haired woman. One of the hostesses went up to them and took their drinks order.