Henry returned to the projection room in a sweat, the vision of a dead German’s decapitated head at the foot of a British soldier and what that soldier did to it. Fumbling at the projector it took him much longer than usual to get the tape threaded and into place. He began to hear sing-song cries of “Why are we waiting?” coming from the auditorium and even Victor had put his head round the door to find out what the problem was.
“Everything OK, Henry? Natives getting a bit restless in the camp. Chop, chop, old son.”
“Sorry Mr Watson… Vic, I think I’ve got it sorted now.” Henry shut the cover over the spool gate and flicked the switch to set the tape running. The machine lurched into life and a cone of light emanated from the lens. A muted cheer could be heard from the stalls and Henry looked through the spy window to check at the flickering images that appeared on the screen. Where were the credits and opening titles? There were two characters talking to each other and then an outside shot of a house. Suddenly he realized that he had put up the second reel and had started the film half-way through.
“For fuck’s sake, Henry, get a grip!” Victor pressed the stop switch and the reel came to a stop. “Get the right reel on, fucking pronto, before there’s a riot down there. I’m going to have to do a song and dance act to keep the buggers happy.” He left the projection room and Henry could hear his retreating footsteps as he quickly descended the stairs.
Manually reversing the second reel off the collection spool – thankfully it hadn’t run too far ahead – Henry slipped it off and placed it on the desk before opening the other reel can and holding up the first frames to the light to check he had now got the correct reel in place. From the theatre he could hear Victor making an announcement to the audience whose catcalls had increased considerably. With the new spool in place, Henry flicked the switch once more and ran the opening credits which caught Victor mid-stage as he attempted to get down the steps to the stalls. The opening shot of the New York skyline superimposed over Victor’s head as he stumbled towards the side of the stage and as the title appeared on screen, catching Victor’s scowl in the centre of one of the “Os”, there was a knowing cheer from certain parts of the cinema.
“Notorious.”
Henry, Mavis & George
Henry decided to move out of Eastman’s shop not long before his mother announced that she would be marrying George. Mavis had felt a twinge of anxiety when Henry announced his departure but it was more than compensated for by the excitement she felt in having the shop and the house to herself – and George.
For Henry, the final decision to leave home came one morning in the autumn of 1947. Although he kept most of his books in his room, there were still one or two dotted around the kitchen and living area downstairs. He had picked up a second-hand copy of Moby Dick which he was reading intermittently at the cinema while the main feature ran. It hadn’t been an expensive copy but it was complete and had some attractive illustrations in the text as well as a dramatic picture on the front boards of a white whale about to crash down on to a small skiff manned by the whalers. The evening before, George had come round for tea and Henry had left soon afterwards for the cinema but realized that he had forgotten to bring his book with him and there was no time to go back and retrieve it.
When he got back after work George had gone but there were still the glowing remnants of the fire in the hearth. Henry poked the embers with the fire tongs and spread them around so that they quickly lost heat and died down.
The next morning Henry had come down for breakfast and noticed that his copy of Moby Dick was missing from the shelf. His mother was already in the shop serving the early customers so he couldn’t ask her where she might have put it. Turning over cushions and looking under the chairs he failed to find anything until he was close by the fire and he noticed a small piece of paper, unburnt, at the edges of the hearth. Carefully picking it up between thumb and forefinger, small flakes of charred paper tumbling away, Henry peered at the one word that was still visible on the paper:
Ahab.
Henry’s sense of shock and betrayal – somehow he knew his mother had been party to the burning of his book – was overwhelming. What kind of person threw books on the fire? And why? He had a sudden image of what he had seen on the cinema newsreels of the Nazis tossing armfuls of books into fierce bonfires. It was an image that had always upset him – all that knowledge and writing going up in flames, stoked by the brutal and ignorant. Decades, centuries even, of philosophy and enlightened thought consigned in one dreadful night to the bonfire. It was at this moment that Henry caught sight of the small mantelpiece clock that George had given to his mother a few weeks before.
“A little gift from the continent for you, Mavis. I see you haven’t got one for the mantelpiece so thought that perhaps this might come in handy.” George had pulled out a small clock with a beechwood surround from the copious depths of his overcoat and handed it over to Mavis. “Sorry it’s not gift-wrapped!”
“Oooh, George, that’s lovely.” Mavis held it out in front of her, admiring the simple clock face with its number 7 crossed in the continental style. “Look Henry, this will sit just perfectly here.”
Mavis swept past Henry who took a cursory glance at the clock and watched as his mother placed it on the centre of the mantelpiece. Before Henry could make any comment George had chipped in, “Found it in a little shop in Bavaria while I was stationed down there. The rest of the stock was cuckoo clocks which looked as if they would be a bit difficult to carry so…” he waved his hand at the clock, leaving the sentence unfinished.
Now Henry, standing by the charred remains of his Moby Dick, suddenly grabbed the clock and held it in the air ready to fling it into the hearth. The rear door on the clock flapped open and a piece of card fluttered down to the floor by his feet. Henry picked up what he could now see was a small photograph. Moving closer to the window he looked at the face of a young woman, her hair braided across her temples with a small flower inserted into the braid just above her ear. She was smiling – just enough to show her teeth – and looking out at the viewer in a confident, loving manner. Henry thought that he hadn’t seen anyone so lovely since the day he first met Madeleine. He held the photograph in his hand, the girl looking dainty and vulnerable in his large fingers. He turned it over and read the inscription.
The marriage of Mavis Eastman and George Tanner in early 1948 at the town’s Registry Office was a simple affair and the extant photos of the occasion that appeared in the local newspaper under the unimaginative headline “Bradford shopkeeper marries” showed Mavis beaming with a wide smile towards the camera. On her head sat a small hat, jauntily sitting over her right ear with a light net hovering just over her eyes. She held a small bouquet that the florist had made for her. Intertwined among the cascade of delicate flowers and greenery – the more knowledgeable would recognize – was a single forget-me-not. To her left stood the bridegroom, his arm looped around that of his wife, staring unsmilingly at the camera, his suit the demob issue, being the only one he had. Behind his back, and unseen by the viewer, he held a smoking cigarette in his left hand. To Mavis’s right, standing head and shoulders above her, was Henry. He, too, was unsmiling. Nor did he look out at the camera. In the fraction of a second for the camera lens to blink and capture the image, he had taken a sideways glance – perhaps towards his mother, or perhaps beyond her and towards George. What the present day viewer does not know and what Mavis was unaware of at the time was that in the few seconds before the small party was assembled for the photograph, Henry had asked George who Steffi was, and was George going to tell his mother or should he?
To say that the relationship between Henry and his mother was ruptured by the arrival of George would be to overstate the case, although Henry’s defence counsel was keen to introduce some element of this domestic interruption into the court proceedings. Henry’s refusal to go into the witness box at his trial finally scuppered any chances of the split between him and his mother ever
being raised. In truth it was very much more a gradual erosion of the lines of communication; two lives, once inseparable, now moving off at tangents. Mavis completely absorbed in a physical and, for the first time, a fully romantic relationship with George, and Henry becoming more isolated and inward-looking, moving in a daily routine from his single-room digs to the projection room and back again. There were, however, two major crisis points between Mavis and Henry in the five years after her marriage to George. In themselves an outsider might count them as relatively minor but this would not be taking into consideration the particular – and hidden – histories of each of the participants. Their eventual release by the prosecuting counsel into the public arena of the Old Bailey court was to prove the final nail in the coffin.
The first crisis occurred in 1950 and one wonders how Mavis could have been so insensitive as to not be aware of the effect on Henry. The assumption has to be made that she was so in thrall to George Tanner and perhaps grateful for his help in turning around the fortunes of the shop that she acceded to his suggestion – although, for all anyone knows, Mavis way well have instigated the change.
Henry had continued to see his mother on an occasional basis since the wedding – although never back at the shop. They would meet, by chance, in the town if Mavis was out shopping and Henry was on his way in to work at the cinema. She would be full of news about the shop and George and how the business had increased since they had started to take newspapers and magazines and that despite rationing they were managing to get by quite well. Henry, for his part, had become an unwilling and unsympathetic listener to anything that George might be involved with. He had heard rumours of a black market running in the area and was fairly sure – although he had no proof – that George was involved. Then one day Victor Watson had stopped him in the foyer as he came in for work. There was a smirk on his lips.
“Morning, Henry. How are we this sunny day?”
“Fine thanks, Vic.” Henry tried to divert Victor’s attention from whatever he wanted to say. “Be good to get a new show on the reels today. I got bored with On the Town last week. Pretty poor, I thought.”
“Yes. I hate bleedin’ namby-pamby musicals.” Victor laughed “Give me some murder mysteries or, better still, a nice bit of skirt or a well-filled sweater girl any day. Always brings the lads in!”
Henry said nothing.
“Talking of which, I see your ma and George know their market as well. I see they’ve turned to selling jazz mags these days.” Victor waved a glossy, rolled-up magazine in his right hand. “Not that you’d see them out on the counter though. Tucked away out of sight so the worthy of the borough don’t get themselves in a froth when they come in for their tuppence worth of shag.” Victor’s wink and his emphasis on the word “shag” brought a flush to Henry’s cheeks.
“What do you mean?”
Victor unfurled the little magazine in his hand and passed it over to Henry.
“Jazz mags, old son. Hand-shandy mags. Every teenager’s delight. Decent pin-ups, not your Hollywood arty-farty stuff.”
Henry looked down on the front cover of the magazine. Continental Keyholes showed a young woman dressed in a white negligee that barely covered her ample breasts. She was kneeling on a carpet and her arm was strategically placed between her thighs over which a suspender belt held up some dark stockings. A frisson of shock and excitement stirred in Henry’s loins but he was embarrassed by Victor’s presence. He quickly handed back the magazine.
“You got this from my mother’s shop?”
“George’s shop, old son. Since when did you last visit?” Victor pulled out a cigarette from a silver case and placed it between his lips. “You want to take a look up there sometime. Been a change or two.” He lit the cigarette and let the smoke curl upwards over his face before blowing it away with a heavy breath. He smiled. “You ought to get out more, Henry. Books are all very well but there’s more to life than words on pages, old son.” He tapped the magazine again. “Nice pair of tits can do wonders for a lad.”
Henry’s route from his digs on the Trowbridge road to the cinema didn’t take him past the old shop and it had been some months since he had walked up Silver Street. So it was a great shock when, prompted by Victor’s hints, he made a point of walking through the Shambles and up the hill to find that the elegant gilt lettering above the door had changed from M. Eastman and Son to a simple Tanners in red lettering on a white background.
When he next met his mother, all Henry could think to say was that the grammar of the shop title was wrong and that there should be an apostrophe between the “r” and “s”.
The second and more damaging crisis – damaging for Henry’s defence in that it was witnessed by quite a few of the townsfolk – came late in 1952. Henry would have been the first to admit that he went too far but no-one saw it as a culmination of years of frustration or unhappiness. Most viewed it as naked aggression by an over-sized young man against a defenceless mother.
The altercation took place outside a second-hand bookshop in Bradford. Henry had spotted a book in the window a few weeks earlier that he was sure he had given to his mother as a present before her marriage. It was a special edition of Rebecca by Daphne Du Maurier that had been signed by the author on a bookplate on the front endpaper. Henry’s eye for detail had noted that the dustwrapper had the same nick out of the top of the spine as the one he had given to his mother. Asking to see the copy, he turned it over in his hands before coming to the definite conclusion that it was the same copy. The price was five guineas – two guineas more than he had paid the Bath shop where he had originally purchased it – but the owner gave him a small discount and the facility to pay over a number of weeks. On the day of his final payment Henry picked up the book, had it wrapped and stepped out of the shop.
Mavis Eastman stood by the pavement edge, arm in arm with George, smiling towards her son. “Hello, Henry, how are you? Haven’t seen you for a few weeks.”
Afterwards, Henry was to say it was the suddenness of the meeting with his mother just after retrieving the book and the juxtaposition of the smiling – smug – George Tanner that tipped him over the edge.
“Look what I just found in this shop!” Henry ripped off the brown paper wrapping from the copy of Rebecca and waved it in his mother’s face. “Seen this before?”
Mavis, taken aback by the aggressiveness of Henry’s attitude and the sudden reappearance of a book that she had asked George to take into Bath to sell into the trade, could only make weak protests.
“Couldn’t wait to get rid of it? Needed the money to buy those dirty magazines, did you?” Henry’s face had turned a bright scarlet and his eyes flashed between George and his mother. “Did he put you up this?” He jabbed his finger towards George who continued to keep his arm locked in Mavis’s.
“Now look, son…”
“Don’t you son me. I’m not your son. You’re just some chancer who’s come along and got his feet under a pretty comfortable table.” Henry lunged towards George with the flat of his hand. George involuntarily let go of his wife’s arm and stepped back into the road. A number of passers-by had stopped to watch the growing argument including – Henry noticed out the corner of his eye – Victor Watson.
“Henry! Please don’t!” Mavis was appalled at the public squabble and shocked that her son could have instigated such an unpleasant scene. She lowered her voice: “Let’s not do this in public.” Her glance indicated the unease and embarrassment she felt.
But Henry either wasn’t listening or he was so incensed that he blurted out, “Get him to tell you about his German floozie. Has he told you yet? I bet he hasn’t?” His breaths were in short staccato bursts. “Steffi.” He turned to George. “Go on! Shall I show her the photograph your Kraut girlfriend gave you?”
Mavis turned towards George, her mouth open.
“Don’t be bloody stupid, Henry. You don’t know what you’re talking about.” George hooked his arm into Mavis’s and attempted to steer h
er away. “Let’s go on home. The fat idiot’s got some bee in his bonnet.”
“Vergissmeinicht! Vergissmeinicht!” Henry’s shout echoed off the ancient walls of the house and shops. “That’s what she wrote to you on the back of this photo. ‘Forget Me Not!”‘ Henry produced the photograph from his breast pocket and threw it towards the couple. Mavis stooped to pick it up off the pavement. Henry’s hand caught George’s shoulder. “Why didn’t you stay in Germany? Why did you have to come back here and ruin everything for us?”
George turned back towards Henry, his jaw set. “I didn’t ruin anything, Sunny Jim. You ask your ma if she’s happier now or before I came into her life?” He shook off Henry’s hand. “If it wasn’t for me, the shop would have closed and you’d be living in some pokey dive, scratching a living from your allotment.” He took a step towards Henry, grabbing him by the lapel. He lowered his voice so that only Henry could hear. “You need to wake up, you fat oaf, and count your fucking blessings. Read your sad fucking books and stay away from us.”
What happened next was happily retold by Victor Watson to all and sundry in the pub and at the cinema. “I give Henry his due. George Tanner’s a hard case, there’s no doubt, and I don’t know what he said to Henry to set him off like that, but that book he had in his hand came up like a rocket and next thing anyone knows he’s shoving it in George’s face. I mean, actually trying to shove it down George’s throat. He’d got a grip on George’s face and was ramming the corner of the book between his lips. Fucking bedlam breaks out! Mavis screaming, George gagging and trying to fight off Fatboy and all the time Henry’s shouting ‘Vergissmeinicht! Vergissmeinicht!’ and I tell you he wasn’t going easy on the shoving. If I and a couple of others hadn’t dragged Henry off I reckon he’d done for George there and then in the middle of the town. What a scene, eh? I tell you, that Henry’s a powder keg and it’s probably best he’s kept away from his ma and George. I’ll keep him on here at the cinema, especially as he’s hidden away from the public, but I almost gave him his marching orders there and then. One last chance, I told him. No fucking about.”
A Coin for the Hangman Page 20