And besides, he thought, a Jewish name like mine? In a hotel owned by Lord Edgerton and frequented by all his Union friends? No, that would never work.
Raymond wandered back into the kitchen. His aunties, May and Rebecca were camped around the tiny table, making a point of pouring tea into dainty china cups. Only the best for someone as fancy as Raymond de Guise! When Raymond took one, it tasted bitter and stewed, as only the best Cohen family tea could.
The whole house was a rush of vivid memories. He’d been born here, in these four walls. He’d played in this hall, and, when his brother Artie had come along, it had been Raymond who took him out into the streets and introduced him to the other boys, who looked out for him as he grew up. The house had been so full in those days. As he got older, there were always his father’s ne’er-do-well friends turning up, any time of day and night, with mysterious boxes being buried and then unearthed from the yard out back – all of the things they traded down at the market, with never a question about from where they might have come. Artie and Raymond would be out from sun-up to sundown, back for dinner and bathing in front of the fire, while Mrs Cohen kept a pot on the stove almost every hour of the day.
‘I’ve been meaning to come, Ma. I know it’s been a time, but you’ll have to trust me on that.’
‘It’s been weeks, Ray. Mrs Adelman sought you out when summer was still high. And besides, when was the last time we saw you?’
‘Not since the Christmas after Stanley died,’ chipped in Aunt May, who, at a decade older than Raymond’s mother, had a smoky, music hall voice. ‘December 1933.’
Mrs Cohen wrung her hands on a washcloth. ‘We don’t think no less of you for it. You do what you got to do, you always did, but . . . it’s been a long time, boy. And you know what we’ve been through here, with your father passing and your brother gone.’
Again, Raymond looked up, as if trying to work out if his brother was here, lingering up above, refusing to come down.
‘It isn’t like you think it is, Ma.’
‘What is it like then, Lord de Guise?’ asked Aunt May sarcas-tically, fishing tea leaves out of her own cup.
It was like this: a boy who’d grown up off the Whitechapel Road, who’d doted on his father – God rest him – and followed him down to the Brancroft Social Club every Wednesday, Friday and Saturday night. Old Mr Cohen was fond of the dogs, and they took bets in the back room there, but on Saturday nights the place would be cleared, there’d be a pianist, a couple of decent trumpet players, and, if they were lucky, a singer. If the singer didn’t show up, they made do with some of the local girls instead – and that was good enough, because, with so many people swarming onto the dance floor, you could hardly hear the music anyway. All that really mattered was that there was enough drink and enough dance. Raymond had seen men who’d brawled with each other in the market one day drinking together the next night, and even stepping out onto the dance floor to waltz with each other’s sisters, as if drink and dance could shed all the nastiness of day-to-day life clean away. And his father . . .
His father was the strong man at home. He’d done a stretch in Pentonville for fencing stolen goods – at the trial they said he was the mastermind, that he played father figure to all the young crooks who went out robbing on his account – and this was legend among the family. The bare bones of it were true, but the way they painted him as a dastardly genius, well, that was just rot. When Raymond was small and Stanley Cohen had come back from the War, he’d sold scrap metal to make ends meet. Where the scrap metal came from, nobody asked – nobody but the occasional policeman doing his rounds, who soon got driven out or shut up by the local boys, who always owed Mr Cohen a thing or two. Scrap metal pilfered and scrap metal sold, that was Stanley’s line of work – until, one day, the law caught up with him.
But the thing about Stanley Cohen, hard man or not, was that he could dance. Didn’t care who knew it. Didn’t care who saw. Friday and Saturday nights, he’d leave his mates to go to the horses and he’d be in the Brancroft – sometimes somewhere further afield – with his prized dancing shoes on and his hair thick with cream. Once, he’d said to Raymond that he’d watched too many of his friends trot off to Flanders and never come back to worry about what anyone else thought of him, so he was going to spend the rest of his days doing exactly as he pleased. And what pleased him was dancing with whoever would have him, whether they were twice his age or half, box stepping around the Brancroft or foxtrotting up and down the Palais. Raymond was there to watch. And if, on occasion, he noticed his father’s hands where they oughtn’t be, or got paid a few pennies to tell a little white lie to his mother, he saw nothing untoward in it. He would have done all of it, and more, just to be closer to his father.
‘I’m sorry, Ma,’ Raymond finally said. ‘I’ve been a lousy son.’
‘That you have.’ She looked sad. ‘But at least you know it.’
Raymond paused. An unspoken question had hung in the air between them, and he readied himself to ask it.
‘So . . . is he here then?’
At that moment the front door opened, a broken voice called out, ‘Ma!’, and into the kitchen bouldered a black-haired rake of a man, with the same sad almond eyes as Raymond, the same unruly dark hair, the same striking cheekbones that gave him the air of some matinee idol.
The figure stopped dead in the kitchen doorway. ‘Ray Cohen,’ he said, ‘as I live and breathe.’
For a moment the two men simply looked at one another, tension crackling in the air.
Then Raymond was lost in a chaos of arms as the new arrival threw himself around him, and his aunties and mother joined in too.
‘Welcome home, Artie,’ said Raymond, his voice lost in the crush. ‘It’s good to see you, little brother.’
*
Later, when the broiled chicken was ready to serve, Mrs Cohen asked Raymond to say some words for Stanley, dearly departed and gone from this world for three long years. Raymond hardly knew what to say, so long had he been away, but as they sat around the table he dredged up the memory of the time their father had taken his two boys down to the canal and they’d sat, together, on the towpath, fishing out old boots and suitcases with a rod Stanley’s own father had once owned.
Those are the happy memories, thought Raymond, as he looked at his brother. The blacker ones come next. What it was like when the coppers trapped Pa and put him in Pentonville. What Artie and I got swept up in while he was gone just to put food on the table . . .
Artie was not quite as Raymond remembered him. When they had been boys, Artie had always been the rounder one, but now he was rangy and thin. That, Raymond supposed, was what a stretch in Pentonville Prison could do to you. It had been the same for their father.
‘You look . . . well, Artie.’
‘Ha!’ Artie cackled, displaying a mouth in which two teeth had been knocked out in a prison cell brawl. ‘I don’t, but you’re the same old charmer as ever, aren’t you, Ray?’
‘Is it good to be out, Artie?’
Artie beamed. ‘I can’t wait to get back inside.’
Aunts May and Rebecca hooted with laughter, but Mrs Cohen was less impressed. She picked up a ladle and made as if to wallop him with it.
‘No violence, Ma. They’d put you in solitary for that.’ Artie grinned as his mother humbly retreated. ‘I’m glad to be out, Ray, but it’s not all sweet tea and lemon cake out here. Inside, there was always work for us. Didn’t get paid for it, but you got your bed and board, if you see what I mean? Out here . . . Well, who wants to take on an old lag like me?’
‘He’s been trying for weeks, Ray, but it’s not like it used to be, not for the likes of us. There’s Mr Goldstein been out of work a year already, and all his sons just scraping by. They think you’re Jewish round here, now, and they wouldn’t piss on you if you was on fire. Oh, it was always there, that kind of nastiness. But now it’s out in the open, and no one pretends it isn’t. Your father and me, we had o
ur fair share of it. And you’ll remember what the Furness boys was like when you were young – always yapping at you and your brother, on account of what you are. But things have changed, Ray. You won’t notice it in that ballroom o’ yours, but it’s not the same on the streets. There’s an . . . atmosphere. Some blackshirt boys turned over the butchers on the Commercial Road. They threw pig’s blood all up the steps at the Congregation of Jacob.’
‘Pah!’ snorted Artie. ‘What would Twinkle Toes care about that? He’s got more work than he knows what to do with.’
Mrs Cohen continued, ‘Most of your father’s old crew are back in the old trade, robbing the townhouses on the river. Artie’s going to stay out of that this time, ain’t he? He’s learned his lesson. But proper jobs aren’t ten a penny like they was when you boys was just starting out. You got to fight for ’em now. And when you got a history like your brother’s—’
‘You got to find your own way in this world, Ma. Just like our Ray done.’
Raymond shifted uneasily in his chair, uncertain if Artie was castigating him or not. There was bitterness in the way Artie spoke. But then, he always blamed me, didn’t he? He thought I ought to have been there, on the night they caught him out robbing. That if I hadn’t been out dancing . . .
‘It’s all right for Ray, see. He’s got a talent. But when you ain’t got a talent, and you been out of work years already, all on account of serving at His Majesty’s pleasure, well, you ain’t got a hope. It’s like it was before I went in. Well, you remember what it was like, don’t you, Ray? Back in ’32, and all of us Great Unwashed without two pennies to rub together.’ Artie paused, shovelling another potato into his mouth. ‘Nah, I’m forgettin’ myself. You don’t remember what it was like back then at all, ’cause you was off dancing up a storm in – where was it that year? Margate? Skegness? Anywhere that’d have you, you rotten sod. And here was the rest of us, on the breadline while you paraded around with that dandy of yours.’
‘Now that isn’t fair, Artie,’ Mrs Cohen interrupted. ‘Ray sent us half his winnings, every time he ranked in one of his competitions.’
‘Yeah, and the other half he spent on fancy shoes and a nice new evening suit. And all to impress his fancy boy.’
‘His name is Georges, Artie. And he’s a friend. I owe him a great deal.’
It had been a long, hard road from following his father to the dance halls to waltzing across the Grand Ballroom at the Buckingham Hotel, and Raymond owed it all to Georges de la Motte. In the days after Raymond himself had started dancing in the Brancroft – the envy even of his father, for all the girls flocked to dance with Ray Cohen – there’d been talk of the ballroom dance festival in faraway Brighton, a place where young and old, high-born and low could pitch themselves against each other for the coveted title Dancer of the Year. Raymond had grown obsessed with going, but it was a fool’s dream; Brighton may as well have been over the oceans, an entirely different world. Only . . . Stanley Cohen loved his boy. And when he put his hand in his back pocket and came out with his fist crammed with enough money to get Ray there and back again, it was nothing more or less than an act of love. Raymond had put his arms around the old man then, and even though he had shaken him off – he was a man, after all – he had hesitated just enough that Raymond knew how much he was loved.
When he got there, Brighton was a revelation. Not just the seafront and the lights. Not just the girls, who braved the cold and turned Raymond’s eye, up and down the pier. The Elysium Hotel was quite unlike any dance hall Raymond had seen before. Opulent glass chandeliers hung down from a barrel-vaulted ceiling, patterned in panels of gold and white. Three walls of the ballroom were lined in boxes for paying customers, each one of them draped in velvet. The dance floor itself was a chequerboard of ten thousand squares of gleaming mahogany, walnut and greenwood – and when Raymond stepped on it for the first time, it seemed to shift with his weight. Waltzing across the hard stone of the Brancroft Social Club could never compare to the sprung dance floor of the Brighton Elysium. Raymond had felt like he was dancing on air.
And then there were the other dancers . . .
The clubs Raymond had been used to were small, dark, underground places where it scarcely mattered whether you danced well or not at all – but here, in the incandescent environs of the Elysium, everything seemed so much more. The ballroom itself exuded splendour. The ball gowns and evening suits that the other competitors wore were tailored perfectly to their bodies. Until then, Ray Cohen had thought he was a competent dancer, that he might even have had a chance. But now he realised: there was another world out there, a world he hadn’t even imagined, a world to which he was desperate to gain access. And right now, as he watched the elegant dancers of high society twirl, standing on the edge of the dance floor in an ill-fitting suit handed down from his father, he felt as if he was on the other side of a glass partition, peering in.
As soon as the heats began, Raymond had known that he couldn’t compete. Old men here moved with more elegance than he had ever seen in the Brancroft. Free spins and feather steps, back whisks and telemarks. Raymond had learned much already – but the opportunity to become truly proficient had, he realised with some despair, never been his in the clubs off the Whitechapel Road. However good he thought he was, the most amateur of these dancers was better. He crashed out of the competition in the first round and, chastened, would have fled back to the East End there and then had he not, deep in his cups that night, stumbled into a man by the name of Georges de la Motte. The aristocratic de la Motte, already an international darling of the ballroom, was holding court in the corner of a public house that backed on to the Elysium Hotel when Ray Cohen quite literally fell over his own feet and into him. Some sharp wit in the crowd had cried out, ‘That one’ll never be a dancer, not with feet like that!’, but de la Motte – ever the gentleman – had leaped to his defence, picked him up and made him party to the evening’s celebrations.
Georges de la Motte was the youngest son of a youngest son, a French noble by birth – if only there’d been enough estate for him to inherit. While his elder brothers were destined to become masters of country houses and lands with tenant farmers to keep them fat and indolent into their old age, there was very little for the youngest de la Motte to inherit – and instead Georges was expected to join the Legion, or enter industry, or even to dispose of his talents in some charitable endeavour. Destiny, however, had had other plans – for Georges had fallen in love with dance instead. His family, he would later confide in Raymond, had rather disowned him for it. Who, after all, would forsake his fine family for the life of a travelling dancer? But for Georges it was the world. In a ballroom, he was not a noble’s forgotten youngest son; he was the noble himself, and the ballroom his inheritance. All of life was in the ballroom.
Raymond had never known why Georges took such a shine to him that night. In the years that followed, he never dreamed to ask, for fear that the spell would be broken and the friendship soured. But de la Motte invited Raymond to the mansion where he was staying and first taught Raymond the true arts of balance and poise. It was de la Motte who had shown him how to weave from a promenade position, how to hold himself in a double reverse spin, or the trick of truly timing the hover corte. A year later, when Georges was due in London to accompany some lesser Flemish princess in the ballroom at the Savoy, he had made a personal call to Ray Cohen and – on seeing his down-at-heel East End surroundings – suggested he accompany him on a great adventure.
And that was how Ray Cohen had left the safety of the Whitechapel Road behind, swapping it for the hotels and ballrooms of Paris and Berlin. That was how Ray Cohen had seen corners of the world of which his brother Artie would only ever dream. It was all down to the tutelage and friendship of Georges de la Motte – everything from his closed wing and contra check, to his role at the Buckingham and his new name: Raymond de Guise.
By then, of course, things had been desperate in the Cohen household. It wa
s 1930, a year after the collapse, and there was so little work for Stanley that, most nights, they had little to eat. Stanley was two years out of Pentonville and had no desire to go back in. But how could Ray and Artie see their old man suffer so much? Sometimes Artie found work in the scrapyard. Ray swept floors most mornings at the meat market. But it was not enough. So when one of Stanley’s old friends suggested they go out on one of his jobs, standing guard while the old boys robbed one of the townhouses on the river, well, there wasn’t really any choice in it. And when, some weeks later, Artie started wondering why all they were good for was waiting outside and taking home a few pennies for the privilege, well, it made perfect sense that he would start casing out houses, warehouses and yards on his own. Even a carriage clock robbed from some old dear’s front room could fetch a price. But Artie’s speciality became the railway yards. Barely guarded at night, there were railway sleepers and copper and iron, if you knew where to look. And wasn’t old Stanley Cohen a dab hand at fencing stolen scrap metal?
So Artie Cohen began a racket of his own, and there was nothing Ray could do to stop him.
‘You still see your old boy Georges then, do you?’ Artie asked with contempt.
‘From time to time. When he’s in London for an engagement. I believe he’s been in St-Tropez for the summer.’
‘St-Tropez! St-Tropez, he says, like it’s the most ordinary thing! And here’s me, banged up in Pentonville for the same summer. It’s a mysterious world, Ray, you can’t deny that. I never did like the cut of that fella. He knew he was better than you, Ray. He lorded it over you.’
‘You only met him once, Artie. What impression can you make of a man in thirty seconds?’
‘Plenty,’ Artie scoffed, while their aunts bickered over who was pouring the gravy at the other end of the table. ‘When you spend a stretch inside, you get to trust your judgement – let me tell you that. Not all toffs are like de la Motte, o’ course. Some love knowing they got one up on you. They bask in it, like a pig in shit. Others, well, they’re more . . . sensitive to the matter. They know they’re born lucky and they don’t rub it in your face. See, this new king they got, this one come up while I was inside. Good King Edward, he’s one of us. He don’t care for all that pomp and circumstance. He doesn’t even care for the crown.’ At the other end of the table, Aunts May and Rebecca gasped. ‘There, I said it!’ roared Artie. ‘Yeah, he might’ve been born with a silver spoon in his mouth, same as the lot o’ them, but deep down he’s one of us really. I seen him, up and down the Mall, when I was up there with Bev – she’s my lady friend, Ray, but far too common for you. Old kings, now they used to wear gowns and furs and ermine and all sorts of that stuff you’ll be familiar with down at your hotel. But this king – well, it wasn’t exactly work boots and coveralls, but he wasn’t carrying no sceptre either. See, all that man wants – all any of us really want – is a quiet life, him and his soon-to-be-missus. It’s just that most of us don’t get the quiet life, because we’ve got to graft . . .’
One Enchanted Evening Page 9