‘I am.’
‘Well, all right then.’
Elizabeth could not, if pressed, define exactly the mood that led her to do this; she was rather merry and careless, and this was a diversionary tactic, yes, but this man was actually now more likely to see through her disguise. She had almost decided she wanted to see what would happen when people knew that it was really her. She had seen people looking at her twice. Perhaps they had guessed. People in London did not pester people they recognised, Elizabeth thought. Bobo said that even Mr Churchill could walk across St James’s Park, on his own, without being stopped.
Mr Ware clamped Elizabeth firmly to him and they proceeded to whirl around the floor, in a frantic two-step.
‘I do love a girl in uniform!’ said Mr Ware.
‘Thank you.’
‘What uniform is that?’
‘I’m in the ATS.’
‘Huh?’ asked Mr Ware, puzzled.
‘Why aren’t you in khaki, actually?’
‘Well ...’ said Mr Ware, ‘On the trot, see?’
‘I’m so sorry, I don’t underst—’
‘Watch it, pal. Have a heart,’ Mr Ware was remonstrating with a man who had just cannoned into him, and then blundered away without replying. For a long moment, Mr Ware just stared after him, his face a plump, dead mask of hostility.
‘I don’t understand,’ persisted Elizabeth. ‘On the trot?’
Mr Ware recovered his good humour.
‘Oh. Oh well.’ He had decided to be coy. ‘I retired from the services. I invalided myself out. Army life didn’t suit me. It was my nerves.’
‘Nerves?’
‘I was extremely nervous about getting shot by a German.’
Mr Ware laughed immoderately, and Elizabeth found herself laughing too, without knowing why. The room continued to whirl after the music finished and they stopped moving.
‘Shall we return to our table, my dear?’ asked Mr Ware, with an elaborate bow, ‘I have a treat in mind.’
On regaining their former places, they found Colin and Katharine attempting to tear up their ration books.
‘We won’t be needing these any more!’ sang out Katharine gaily.
‘Not half!’
Mr Ware removed a matchbox from his pocket, and, like a schoolboy with a contraband frog, slid open the drawer to show Elizabeth its contents. They looked like six or seven squashed black pellets of something or other. Elizabeth was baffled.
‘Here you are,’ said Mr Ware, with a wink. ‘These’ll pep you up.’
‘I say,’ said Colin. ‘Steady on.’
‘Steady on? Steady on? You steady on, if you like. You’ve got a show to do. We’re here to celebrate.’
He produced a cigarette, and with a pencil shoved one of the pellets into the end; it made some of the tobacco fall out, and gave it an odd, misshapen, bulbous look. Then he lit it, inhaling deeply with a roguish smile. The smell was sweet and sharp and made some of the other people look over at their table, curiously, and then look away.
‘Well, you can jolly well give me a drag,’ said Katharine urgently. ‘Come on.’ She gave Mr Ware a sharp dig in the ribs with her fingertips and he passed the cigarette to her. Elizabeth wondered how she could be so familiar with a casual acquaintance, one whom, just ten minutes ago, she didn’t seem all that keen to get to know. Katharine took two quick puffs – the end glowed intensely with a throb – and her face assumed the same dopey, beatific look as Mr Ware’s. She offered the cigarette to Colin, who waved it away. Then she offered it to Elizabeth.
‘What is it?’ asked Elizabeth.
‘A pick-me-up,’ said Mr Ware, smiling at her. ‘A little stimulant. I take them for my nerves, but they’re good for anyone. Colin’s mother takes them for her irritable bowels. Athletes take them before a big race. I know for a fact that Mr Churchill took one at the Casablanca conference. Try it.’
Elizabeth took the cigarette, sucked and spat out the smoke.
‘You’ve got to take the smoke in,’ giggled Katharine, and Elizabeth thought: How does she know all about it? But she puffed again, and tried to keep the smoke down. This she was able to do without any mortifying splutters and coughs. There was a brief pause, and her head swam. She felt Katharine’s hand on her knee; it then moved companionably up her inner thigh, and caressed it. Elizabeth fancied she could hear the nylon shimmering and crackling. The three faces, now like moons or discs, grinned at her.
‘Another gin?’
She had not the smallest idea who had asked her that, but another gin appeared in front of her, and Elizabeth drank, and the moon-faces chattered and giggled, in what seemed like a foreign language, Lithuanian or Portuguese. Katharine’s hand was still on her thigh. Then Katharine kissed her again, and Elizabeth let her. She was wondering what Margo, Hugh and Peter were doing now. She was thinking about Philip. What was he doing now? When would he come ashore? And when was the first time he had kissed her? It had been at Windsor, before the war. They were both in civvies, anyway. He had actually initiated the process by putting a curled forefinger under her chin and raising her face to his. How Elizabeth’s heart had hammered when she realised what was going to happen! The kiss had been gentle, mannerly, temperate, quite unlike the queer kiss that Katharine was giving her now. Afterwards, Philip had withdrawn his face, smiled and said, ‘There.’ Just that. Katharine finally herself withdrew, but said nothing and only took another drag at her strange cigarette. Her hand stayed on Elizabeth’s thigh, now very high up.
‘What numbers are you going to favour us with this evening, dear heart?’ Mr Ware was saying brightly to Colin.
‘I thought I might have a bash at “Darling Je Vous Aime”.’
‘Very good. I always like that one.’
‘So do I,’ said Katharine.
Suddenly, their table was jolted, disagreeably. They all looked up to see the same man who had bumped into Elizabeth and Mr Ware when they had been on the dance floor. He was clearly drunker than ever, and grinned unrepentantly.
‘Sorry about that, old thing,’ the man trilled, and with a free hand tousled Mr Ware’s hair. Instantly, Elizabeth could feel Colin and Katharine shrink away from their companion – Katharine’s hand disappeared from her thigh.
Mr Ware ground his cigarette into an ashtray, pursed his lips and stood up. He placed his right hand on the man’s left arm as he was turning to go and, with what looked like simple physical force, compelled him to wheel back and face him.
‘Ah, listen, old thing.’
‘What is it, what do you want?’
‘What do I want? My dear old thing, I want to dance with you!’
To the man’s astonishment, Mr Ware switched the grip on his wrist – Elizabeth could see how he was pinching his skin – to his left hand and put his right around the man’s waist. His new partner smiled uncertainly, unsure whether to play along with this prank and crucially failing to appreciate how both his hands had now been practically immobilised. Mr Ware grinned and raised his left foot, as if to lead his victim in a polka. But at the same time he tilted his head back, lifting his chin.
Katharine turned to Elizabeth and, with the forefinger and middle finger of one hand, actually turned her face away, so that she could not see what Mr Ware was doing. Elizabeth heard a sharp smack or crack, and turned back to see that Mr Ware was now standing back from the man, who now had both hands clamped over his face, and was squatting down on his haunches. Blood ran from his nose, as if from an open tap. People who were close enough to see had stopped dancing, and were looking on, and stepping back.
‘That’s what,’ said Mr Ware coldly, and the crowds’ retreat from him accelerated; Elizabeth could feel the colour of her face changing – Mr Ware’s own face looked like piccalilli in this light – but she was still lucid enough to realise how the cigarette had anaesthetised her to what was happening. The music continued, the hubbub continued; it was almost possible to ignore all this, and as to what had actually happened between Mr Ware an
d the troublesome man, she was still blearily unsure. Both Colin and Katharine could see how two very large men in evening dress were now coming towards them. Mr Ware’s victim was still hunched down, the blood pool around his feet widening in diameter every second. He was very still and quiet, and Elizabeth’s ATS training was now telling her that he might be in shock, that he needed medical treatment immediately. In their very first week of instruction, ATS trainees had been told how apparently innocuous bumps on the head can lead to unconsciousness or even death. It was only in thinking about all this now that Elizabeth realised that Mr Ware had assaulted someone, and she should really call the police.
Eleven
The next thing Elizabeth knew, they were all in a taxi, with Mr Ware facing the rear windscreen, Colin opposite him and Katharine in the middle, next to Elizabeth, still stroking her thigh and nuzzling her neck, though more dopily and dozily now. Elizabeth herself was now kept awake by alternate waves of nausea and anxiety: when would she get home? Well, let’s just see this Club they were talking about. Then she imagined she would just get another taxi. She would probably be home by, say, eleven or midnight at the latest. Elizabeth wondered uneasily if anyone back home was upset with her, and pushed these thoughts away into her mental fog.
‘You and me, Lil!’ Mr Ware was saying. He was pointing at his own chest and then at Elizabeth’s. ‘You and me. Tonight’s the main event. And you and me are a vital part. An integral part. Ho yes. You wait.’
Elizabeth looked out of the window as the cab swept up to Piccadilly Circus and round into Shaftesbury Avenue. The VE celebrations now appeared to have taken on a rather different character. Everywhere she looked she saw men, young men, some in uniform, some in civvies, standing with their hands on their knees, looking down onto a pool of nameless mess. Some were holding their faces and noses, in exactly the posture Mr Ware’s victim had been back at the Ritz. She could see couples who appeared to be dancing or spooning – as Elizabeth phrased it to herself – at every corner.
‘Oh God,’ said Colin.
An American army jeep had just braked sharply, on account of two men and a dog lurching out into the road. They could see the driver’s head hit the windscreen with an audible smack and a continuous, simultaneous wail from the horn. Delayed themselves further ahead, the four could clearly see a diagonal crack in the jeep’s windscreen, a line with what could have been a bulb of blood at either end. On the other side of the street, a group of men had smashed a shopwindow and were loading coats into a perambulator. Far away, a man was shouting, ‘Victory in Japan! Victory in Japan! Victory in Japan!’
‘I’ve got plans for you, Lil,’ said Mr Ware, ‘big plans. I need a girl in uniform for what I’ve got in mind.’
Katharine nuzzled. Elizabeth drowsed.
They arrived at the Butterfly Club in Great Windmill Street to find it transformed from the gloomy cavern in which Colin and Mr Ware had been drinking earlier in the evening. It was now packed and noisy. Mr Ware now had to present himself to be recognised by two big men by the trapdoor leading down, and having done so, he went smartly on ahead, without waiting to help the ladies down the steps. This was left to Colin.
The noise and music were far worse than in the Ritz. Mr Ware greeted the proprietress, whom he introduced as Ginnie, and they admired a large banner she had put up over the bar, reading ‘Now for Japan’. Elizabeth listened to the snatches of conversation from the male patrons, which were as unintelligible as if they had been conducted in Swahili.
‘I liked your companion the other night, dear. She was a bit of rough, wasn’t she?’
‘I take it with the smooth, dearest.’
‘Was the rest of the evening à deux?’
‘Can’t you see the bruises?’
‘Fishing for compliments, are we, chérie?’
‘I was eating my meals off the mantelpiece for a week or so after that one, darling!’
‘Your trousers are a positive cockpit of humanity, my dear; they are a Belgium of the spirit.’
‘Stop it! Stop it!’
After some minutes of this, Mr Ware turned and introduced Elizabeth to his excitable and loquacious friend.
‘Lil, let me present Tom Driberg. Tom, this is my friend, Lil.’
The man, tall, bulky, with receding, crinkly hair and sharp eyes, turned to her, and it was at this point that Elizabeth realised that she had been definitively recognised. Everyone else had been too drunk to be certain, or too shy to say, or it had been too crowded and chaotic and dark, or perhaps they had dimly sensed that on this night of all nights, appearances in the street from people like her were only to be expected.
Elizabeth held her hand out, frankly, to be shaken. Driberg’s manner shifted into one of extreme deference and ostentatious tact. Smiling gently, as if taking possession of a secret, he took her hand very gently between his fingertips and bowed. Instinctively, Elizabeth turned her palm downward.
‘Lil,’ he said submissively, in a low voice. Mr Ware looked puzzled and turned away to talk to someone else.
‘Mr Driberg,’ returned Elizabeth, and then, ‘Tom.’ The covert reassumption of official duties awoke her, fractionally, from her bleary state. She looked around. Drinkers were standing shoulder to shoulder, and the room appeared to be in a rough L-shape. There was a bar along one side, and around the corner there was some sort of dance floor; directional lighting indicated the presence of a stage.
‘How are you this evening, Tom?’ she asked politely.
‘Very well, indeed, Lil,’ said Driberg, inclining his head somewhat. He, too, was obviously feeling the need to pull himself together after having had a good deal to drink. ‘I wish you had been here earlier this evening. I could have introduced you to David Ben-Gurion. Such a nice man. I never knew anyone else who could impersonate a peewit using just his tongue and teeth, my dear. Ah, here is Noël.’
A well-built man with a slightly crooked nose and faintly pursed lips – with the air of someone perpetually tasting something unfamiliar – appeared at Driberg’s side. He held his hand out with finger and thumb together, as if holding a champagne glass by the stem.
‘Lil,’ said Driberg, with that tone of proprietorial triumph which people always display on introducing an important new acquaintance to a status-conscious friend. ‘Noël Coward. Noël, this is ...’
Instantly, Coward took Elizabeth’s downturned palm in exactly the same way that Driberg had, tactfully, submissively, paying tribute to her pluck in being here, and not wishing to spoil the subterfuge.
‘Lil,’ he said with a quiet smile. ‘I do hope that Driberg has not been boring you.’
‘Not a bit,’ said Elizabeth politely, and Driberg, disconcerted by his new friend taking this raillery seriously, added:
‘Not the smallest bit. We were just talking about Proust.’
‘Were you?’
‘Were we?’
‘Oh, yes. You surely will remember, my dear Noël, Marcel’s descriptions of the blackout in Paris in the Great War, how it was the last time in history that the city’s beauties could be appreciated by moonlight. I often thought of that passage during our recent blackouts, you know, walking home.’
‘Was Proust uppermost in your mind on those occasions, my dear?’
‘French literature in the round, dearest heart.’
‘I’m so sorry, what?’ said Elizabeth. ‘It’s so very noisy in here!’
Driberg was buffeted aside by someone carrying drinks to someone else, and a third person lunging across and kissing his girl, by taking her face in both hands. When the disturbance had passed, Coward appeared to have melted back into the crowd and Driberg was talking to a pale and petulant looking youth. He seemed to have forgotten she was there.
‘Dearest,’ he was saying. ‘It will only take a moment. We would return to the fray instanter.’
‘Shan’t.’
‘Perhaps a solatium of two pounds would make all the difference.’
‘A what?’
‘A gift of two pounds.’
‘I don’t want to miss the singer.’
‘We won’t.’
‘I don’t know that I want to ...’
‘Dearest, it’s very nutritional to me. It restores my vitamins. My iron levels. I have here a doctor’s note’ – he produced a tattered letter on which the crest of the Royal College of Physicians was visible – ‘that says I have to have it.’
‘Let me read that.’
‘My dear, what would be the point? It’s all in Latin.’
‘Where’s that three pounds?’
‘Two pounds. I have it in my other coat, which is in the cloakroom. Come along.’
They left, and Coward reappeared at Elizabeth’s side.
‘Tell me, ah, Lil, if I may,’ he said, ‘how long have you known Driberg? Come to think of it,’ and here his face clouded, ‘how do you come to know all these—’
Ginnie, the proprietress, stood on a stool behind the bar, and shouted, ‘The entertainments are about to commence!’
Everyone surged onto the dance floor; Elizabeth followed. She was sober enough, now, and determined to watch one or two songs and then get a cab home. Or perhaps Mr Coward would arrange a car for her.
Ginnie took the stage and approached the microphone.
‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ she declaimed. ‘All the way from Paris.’
There was an outbreak of booing, and Elizabeth could hear some angry muttering of the word ‘Pétain’.
‘Come along, come on,’ said Ginnie, tolerantly, and resumed: ‘All the way from Paris. Please will you welcome our special VE Night chanteuse, Madame Kay L’Horreur!’
Some triumphant chords on the piano were thumped out, and then the audience was rewarded with the view of a plump woman who sashayed out onto the stage with a bizarrely emphatic hip-wiggling movement; so emphatic that Elizabeth thought she must have some sort of spinal injury. She wore a celebratory but blank smile, the sort that might be worn by a wax dummy; with a slow swivel of the head, her smile was directed first at Ginnie, and then at the cheering audience. Her makeup reflected the lighting in such a way as to make her face look two-dimensional, like a photograph. Her accompanist sat at the upright piano, with a self-effacing smile. Elizabeth managed to position herself at the back of the throng and at first thought that the woman looked so much like Colin that it was his sister or his mother. A rippling arpeggio from the piano merged into a glissando run up the keyboard and the woman twirled. Her unconvincing bodice, in profile, revealed to Elizabeth that it was a man; was in fact Colin himself. A ripple of applause and cheering swelled and then died as he approached the microphone and began to sing. Colin’s singing voice had a pleasing quality, a light, quavering tenor, utterly unlike the hesitant mumble of his conversation.
Night of Triumph Page 10