She dismissed the matter from her mind, hurried through her returns, whisked the cash into the office safe and hurried out again, just in time to see William Powell, rescued from certain death by his wife, Myrna Loy, as she had felt certain that he would be rescued when she had watched the first half of the picture during the matinée.
CHAPTER XVIII
Elaine Falls Back On Base
ALTHOUGH ELAINE FOLLOWED her Dutch officer to various parts of the country throughout the spring and summer of 1942, she did not dispose of her Avenue base, Number Forty-Three; the house, together with its contents, had been made over to her by Esme immediately after the divorce, in February.
Esme’s theatrical gesture, in thus parting with property worth some two thousand pounds at current prices, incurred Harold’s displeasure but Esme was adamant. He had never returned to Number Forty-Three after the night he had taken Barbara to the airfield, and to put the house and furniture in the market, he argued, would involve a complicated clear-out, a humiliating division of goods, and probably an embarrassing auction sale. The property, he said, did not mean this much to him and he was certainly not in need of the money. His mother’s legacy, and his increased rate of pay as aircrew, provided him with more than he needed, and now that he had made a final break with Elaine he shunned further dealings or even discussions with her or her solicitors.
Elaine accepted his gift of the house with considerable relief. Once before she had been homeless and she knew what it was like to lack a base. Indeed, it was this very lack that had provided her with the principal reason for returning home and marrying Esme shortly before the war.
In the interval between Esme’s desertion, and her meeting with Captain Van Loon, of the Free Dutch Navy, she was not tempted to raise money by selling the property but preferred instead to draw upon her post office savings’ account.
A base was very important to Elaine. It gave her a measure of independence and independence was something she treasured, having won it, in the first instance, against very heavy odds inside Number Seventeen.
She met her Dutchman, Van Loon, in a theatre bar, and had since accompanied him about the country as a kind of a de luxe vivandière.
She had been attracted to him, at the outset, by the knowledge that he was a diamond merchant in civilian life, and it had seemed not unreasonable to assume that a man who carried precious stones as large as peas in a wash-leather bag tied around his neck, might well prove to be the Great Provider for whom she had been searching since adolescence.
Van Loon had shown her the diamonds on the first night they had met and she now realised how very drunk he must have been, for she had never set eyes on them since! Had it not been for his gift of two insignificant stones she might have wondered if she had dreamed about the little wash-leather bag that dangled alongside his service identity disc.
Their relationship had not progressed since that first night. On closer acquaintance he turned out to be an unpredictable and mysterious man, who did not belong to wartime Britain, but between the covers of a paper-backed thriller featuring taciturn Continental agents, sudden departures to Buenos Aires, passwords, and radio transmitters disguised as suitcases.
Sometimes Elaine was a little afraid of him, particularly when he had been drinking. His favourite tipple was navy rum, of which he seemed able to procure vast quantities.
He was a tall, broad-chested man, in his late thirties, with immensely powerful arms covered with hair, and a chest that was even hairier, a thick, black mat, spreading from throat to navel. When he was drunk, and padding about in his pyjama trousers, he looked like a bewildered gorilla. His heavy features, cast in solemn mould, reminded Elaine of a face she had seen in a picture somewhere but the comparison eluded her until, one day, whilst turning the pages of an illustrated magazine, she came across the reproduction of a fifteenth-century portrait painting, and read that it was a portrait of Cardinal Albergati, by Van Eyck. She recalled then that she had seen this painting at an exhibition of Flemish work, to which the tiresome Esme had dragged her before they were married. She studied the painting carefully. It was, she thought, a pitiless face, and looked as if it might have been hacked out of granite and seamed with a chisel. It was a face that, diamonds notwithstanding, was not the kind a girl would accompany to bed from choice.
They had gone, within a few days of their first encounter, to a small Cornish resort, but they did not remain down there very long, for the Dutchman was engaged in some kind of mysterious war work concerned with anti-submarine measures and his activities took him to a large number of sea-coast towns where they usually remained for about a week, accommodated in the best available hotel.
This constant movement was all very well in spring, when, having established himself and ‘wife’ in a double room with bath, Van Loon at once went about his business, leaving her to her own devices until he returned to the hotel in time for dinner. Elaine had always been an expert idler and after eating breakfast in bed she cheerfully dawdled her way through the morning, bathing and dressing, and taking lunch downstairs. She spent the afternoons floating about town, having her hair set, reading light fiction, or, if the weather was dull, attending the matinée at the nearest cinema.
She liked this kind of life. It demanded nothing of her until bedtime, and even then Van Loon was a sound sleeper and a limited conversationalist. She often lay awake wondering about him after he had gone to sleep, and sometimes she asked herself whether he was what he pretended to be, a Dutch patriot who had sailed his vessel into Cardiff the moment he learned that the Germans had invaded his country, or whether his real purpose over here, and his constant journeyings to and fro about the country, had a more sinister purpose. She reasoned that, for all she knew, he might be a spy, a saboteur, or perhaps simply a shrewd businessman using a uniform to cloak illegal commercial activities.
Her speculations, however lurid, did not worry her. She had few convictions about the Allied cause and none whatever about laws aimed at suppressing black market activities. The war was something that was happening to other people, mostly stupid people, like Esme, his stepfather, those clodhopper Carver boys, and all the dreary girls whom she saw trooping here and trooping there in hideous hats, lisle stockings, and sexless uniforms.
Elaine had never wasted a single moment’s thought on the progress of the war as an armed conflict but only on how its development and ultimate conclusion might affect her dream of financial security, the dream of terrace, courtiers, iced drinks, hammock, sports-car, yacht and Monte Carlo anchorage.
What did cause her concern, however, was Van Loon’s parsimony and the conclusion that might be drawn from it. Perhaps she was exploring yet another blind alley in the search of a Great Provider. She was getting a little exasperated with blind alleys by this time and during her more pessimistic moods she sometimes went back over the years and tried to learn something from her long train of disappointments. Whenever she did this she was never able to discover exactly where she had lost her way, yet the experiences of the past ten years did not, as she was obliged to admit, add up to any startling success on her part. She was over thirty now and had achieved but small and, for the most part, purely temporary gains. Viewed as a whole, her career as a professional adventuress was unremarkable.
There had been Eugene, the great Illusionist, great only by virtue of his billing and useful as a means of gaining an introduction to the stage. Beyond that he had been a dead loss, a tired, used-up man, with shrinking ambition and a tendency to let tomorrow take care of itself.
After Eugene there had been Benny Boy, Eugene’s agent. He at least had provided a big car and a brief trip to the Continent, but in the end he too had failed her by going bankrupt, and turning her loose with nothing but a few trumpery gifts that she was obliged to convert into subsistence money until she had the ill-luck to run across little Tom Tappertitt, the circus-owning husband of a professional strong woman.
She did not like to dwell on the Tappertitt episode fo
r it had ended in shame and humiliation. Even at this distance Elaine’s cheeks glowed in sympathy with her ill-used buttocks when she remembered lying helpless under the flail of Audrey the Amazon’s large, right hand.
After Tappertitt came poor old Esme, and Elaine still thought of Esme with affection. He had been kind and generous to her right up to the very last moment and sometimes she half-wished she could have settled for him and his limited means. She might well have done so had she known that he was on the point of inheriting another income from his mother, when he had found out about Archie.
Archie she also thought of with affection, for something more than a physical relationship had existed between them and she had always been pleased to hear his key turn in the back door of Number Forty-Three.
Archie had been so easy-going and restful, despite his obsession with business, but business had won in the end and now, she understood, his greed had landed him in some kind of serious trouble with the police. She had seen Archie once or twice since his appearance in court but had recognised at once that recent experiences had shattered his nerve. She was accustomed to men who drank but not to the extent of carrying a bottle of brandy wherever they went. There was no future in Archie now, not her sort of future anyway, and besides, he was married to a Catholic who had refused to divorce him and it would be tiresome to go through life as a mistress who could be discarded the moment she began to lose her ground in the endless battle against waistline and wrinkles.
Finally there was this Dutchman, Captain Van Loon, who had appeared to be almost a certainty but had since turned out to be more disappointing than any of them, a man who had to be bullied into providing her with a pair of nylons and then grumbled like a volcano at the price he was asked to pay for them, a man who was so secretive with his briefcase, and his little wash-leather bag, that they must surely contain stones worth a fortune.
Elaine had discovered, in Van Loon’s company, that she could forgive a man anything but meanness. Not one of the men in her past had been mean, not even poor old Eugene, who had never had two halfpence to rub together, whereas two of her lovers, Archie and Esme, had been extremely generous in their dealings with her. Remembering this Elaine sighed, and decided that, sooner or later, there would have to be some kind of showdown with ‘Dutch’. He would have to make up his mind which he preferred to hang round his neck, her or his wash-leather bag. As it was she was wasting time, precious time, now that America had entered the war, for somewhere among the Americans there must be a man who would understand her yearning for terraces, sports cars, iced drinks, steam yachts and Mediterranean anchorages. If the cinema was to be taken seriously such men were commonplace in America, and what she had to offer in exchange was readily marketable among them judging by the whistles she heard when she happened to walk past a trainload of Americans on Crewe station the other afternoon.
The showdown with Dutch came sooner than she expected and without active encouragement on her part.
It was like all the other showdowns in Elaine’s life, explosive, unexpected and by no means devoid of the elements of farce.
At their last stopping-place Dutch had made new arrangements regarding their accommodation. Instead of booking at a hotel he rented a small, detached bungalow, in a long row of similar bungalows, on the outskirts of the small Welsh port that they happened to be visiting.
Elaine disliked the arrangement from the start, for it meant that she would now be expected to do a certain amount of housework, making beds, cooking meals, and keeping the place tidy.
She grumbled about it the night they arrived but Dutch told her gruffly that there was no accommodation in either of the two local hotels and she would have to put up with the bungalow for a month, the period that he estimated they would remain in the district.
The town was one of the most depressing Elaine had ever visited, a jumble of wired-off wharfs, sagging sheds, and steep, seedy-looking streets, all leading down to a stagnant basin at the mouth of a muddy river. The air down here reeked of stale fish, tar, and diesel-oil from the shipping in the harbour and the same smell seemed to hang over the entire town.
Dutch seemed busier than usual and during the first week did not return home until dusk each evening. A minor heat wave was in progress but although the box-like rooms of the bungalow were stale and airless Elaine had little choice but to spend most of her time in them, for there was but one cinema and its programme ran from Monday to Saturday with no mid-week change of film.
Such cafés as existed were dismal, flyblown little establishments that used chipped cups, and offered a menu that, as Elaine declared after making a reconnaissance of the town, belonged in a community enduring a close siege rather than a war.
By the end of the second week she was bored and irritable and her irritability soon conveyed itself to Van Loon, who began to drink far more rum than was good for him. He began his drinking the moment he had finished his evening meal and had exhausted the limited possibilities of Elaine’s magazines and the Forces’ programme.
Under more comfortable circumstances Elaine might have derived a certain amount of gratuitous entertainment from watching him get drunk. His taciturn personality did not take kindly to the early stages of intoxication but it began to mellow after an hour or so when it assumed a kind of stilted drollery, fascinating to watch from a safe distance.
Later, if he continued drinking, his gaiety ebbed and was replaced by what Elaine learned to call ‘The Poor-Rotterdam-Stage.’ For an hour or more the Dutchman would beat his breast and commune with himself over persons and places he had lost in the initial air attack on that city. By this time, however, he would have reverted to his native tongue, so that she could only guess at his meaning, gauging by tone and expression whether he was uttering maledictions against the Nazis or expressions of sorrow for their victims.
At last he would mix himself another stiff toddy and brace up, buttoning his lips and dashing the tears from his eyes. He would then attempt to make love to her but his movements were so heavy and clumsy that he usually abandoned the idea and reeled off to bed under her expert guidance.
She reflected, on these occasions, that had she been a different kind of woman she might have used these matchless opportunities to relieve him of one or two of the stones in his wash-leather bag. It was not fear of the possible consequences that prevented her but rather a kind of pride in her ability to handle a man, any sort of man, in any sort of condition. Apart from this she was shrewd and had long since decided that if her dream was to be fulfilled it would be fulfilled in a way that bolted the door against future disasters. In other words, once settled in the hammock on the terrace, nobody was going to tip her out of it or dispute legal possession of the terrace on which it was slung.
On this particular evening Dutch was a long time getting through his preliminary stages. He glared across at her and went on drinking steadily but without moving from the armchair in which he had seated himself. She pretended to be absorbed in a fashion magazine but she kept her eye on him and glanced across from time to time to see how his solemn jag was progressing.
At last he began to hum a tune and she knew that he was approaching the mock-mellow stage. He got up, opened the french window and, still humming, peeled off his tunic and shirt and moved off into the little bathroom, where he commenced to shave with a cut-throat razor.
He was already drunk and she wondered whether he would cut himself but he did not and it occurred to her that perhaps he was not quite as drunk as he seemed. When he had finished shaving he began to run the bath water but before he actually climbed into the bath the lachrymose mood overtook him and he began to wail and gnash his teeth over the ruins of Rotterdam and the graves of his martyred shipmates.
He wandered, naked and lamenting, into the little lounge and passed through the open french windows into the garden. On the way he picked up his clarinet and began to play ‘Shenandoah’. He was a spirited but indifferent performer on the clarinet and his repertoire was limited
to two tunes, ‘Shenandoah’ and the Dutch National Anthem. The spectacle of him standing on the tiny lawn without a stitch of clothing, regaling the neighbours on each side of the hedge with an erratic rendering of the sea-shanty, diverted Elaine but she soon realised that the performance would have to be cut short before somebody summoned the police. So she went out and spoke gently to him, taking his arm and trying to lead him back to the house.
He took a good deal of persuading and in the interval both of them forgot that the bath taps were running. They were unpleasantly reminded of this fact by the appearance of a slow tide under the door.
She left him then and splashed into the flooded passage, but whilst she was struggling with the submerged taps he followed her into the bathroom and playfully upended her into the brimming bath.
At this point Elaine ceased to be amused and turned on him furiously, smashing a plastic bath brush over his head but in the end both of them went into the bath and for a moment Elaine thought she would be drowned under his immense bulk. They were facing different ways, and her violent struggles resulted in Dutch getting a heavy kick on the nose, which sent him yelping from the bathroom into the living-room, streaming blood and uttering a variety of obscure, Lowland oaths.
Elaine climbed out of the bath and locked the door before peeling off her clothes and wrapping herself in a bath robe. On the other side of the thin wall she could hear Dutch mumbling to himself and suddenly her irritation exploded into fury. She wrung out her clothes, flung open the door and marched into the living room, determined to be done with him then and there. She found herself looking into the levelled barrel of his .45 revolver.
The Avenue Goes to War Page 27