This Lovely City

by Louise Hare

  ‘They tell you that?’ Johnny finally broke the tension.

  ‘They wouldn’t answer a single question I asked them,’ Al said, sounding put out. ‘Why they tell you?’

  Lawrie reached over and poured himself another measure of whisky. ‘They didn’t tell me; I saw her,’ he said quietly. ‘I was the person who found her in that pond.’

  Johnny whistled, its arc descending; Moses’s mouth fell open.

  ‘They took me to the police station for questioning but they let me go,’ he said, the words tumbling out now. ‘It was a woman walking her dog who saw her first. She come running and I didn’t realise what she’d seen until I was almost in the pond myself.’

  ‘Just as well there was a witness,’ Al said, laying a hand on Lawrie’s shoulder. ‘Else I reckon they’d have questioned you a damn sight longer. Way that copper spoke to me, I started to wonder if I did it after all, in a moment of madness, and I just forgot.’

  ‘They think one of us did it though,’ Moses pointed out. ‘You think we know who did it? Could be someone we’re acquainted with.’

  It was a sobering thought. The baby had to have at least one black parent and there were only so many black people around, most of them men. Lawrie only knew a few women whose skin was dark enough: Evie; Ursula Sands; another woman whose name he couldn’t remember but had travelled over on the boat with them and now lived at the far end of Somerleyton Road. More were starting to turn up each month, their husbands saving up enough to bring them over, but, barring the birth of Johnny’s youngest, he couldn’t think of anyone else who’d had a baby in England yet. It was as if this child, Ophelia, had been spirited to Clapham Common from somewhere else entirely.

  Johnny made a show of checking his watch and stood, signalling that it was time to go even though Lawrie could see from the wall clock that they still had ten minutes. ‘Come on, fellas. For now, we got to trust the police will catch the real culprit. We all are sensible upright citizens after all. None of we got anything to do with this.’

  They followed their leader onstage, Lawrie feeling temporarily soothed but he wasn’t sure if it was the effect of the whisky or the new knowledge that he wasn’t alone. If the police were questioning everyone then it meant that they hadn’t singled him out. He’d begun to wonder if Rathbone had only been biding his time, searching for scraps that could be woven into a chain to trap Lawrie. He knew there were people out there who’d be happy to help; at least one person, who he’d not seen or spoken to in months but who had every right to bear a grudge.

  He shook off those dark thoughts, closing his mind to them, and it was just the usual adrenaline that kicked in as he reached his spot on the stage, sliding his feet along the solid wood until he found a comfortable stance. The nerves would pass soon enough, but those moments before they started playing, before the music took over, always made him feel like one of the tigers at London Zoo. He’d gone there with Evie the previous autumn. She had leaned against the railing and stared in awe at the big cats, lounging lazily in their compound, but all he could think was how sad they looked, these magnificent beasts now tamed and cowed by their conquerors. If anyone could understand the tigers it was him, trapped in a foreign land and reduced to parading himself before a paying audience. But then he’d raise his clarinet, the reed rough against his lips, and feel like a king.

  They warmed up the crowd with a little calypso, Johnny strumming a Lord Kitchener tune on his guitar before segueing into swing for the mainly white audience. The night had barely started but the place was already half full. The men had all slicked their hair back with pomade, the humid air heavy with the scent of Brylcreem. The girls were dolled up in their best dresses, coiffed and coy, every one of them with an eye on the entrance, watching for the next eligible gent. He couldn’t see Evie but she’d be there somewhere, trawling the dancefloor as she’d said to him, trying to find Delia a lad to dance with so that she could abandon her friend for Lawrie later on. Aston would be sticking close to the bar, ready to fritter away his money on the first pretty girl who dared to dance with a coloured man; the sort of modern woman who had their own place, or shared with girls who wouldn’t judge them for bringing home a man who they’d likely never see again.

  It surprised Lawrie how many of these women existed in London. Back home such behaviour was unthinkable. An unmarried girl who spent the night with a fella back in Kingston would be ruined. Here it seemed like a badge of honour. What the men could do, the women could do just as well.

  For the first time in a long time he found himself thinking of Rose. Maybe it was the opening bars of ‘In the Mood’, a song they hadn’t touched in almost a year, after Sonny protested that he was hearing it in his dreams. It was a guaranteed crowd pleaser and Rose had been humming it that first day as he’d inched his way down that hated spiral staircase into the deep level shelter beneath Clapham Common.

  He’d played those notes a thousand times or more, and his fingers moved of their own accord as his mind slipped back into the past. Rose Armstrong. She had looked so respectable, dressed neatly in her WVS uniform, the ring finger on her left hand banded in gold. Lawrie had admired her at first; had even been grateful for her help. He’d thought she was a friend.

  That had been his first mistake.

  1948

  Evie watched them from across the street, concealing herself amongst the steady flow of commuters who rushed in and out of Clapham South tube station. The newcomers emerged, blinking into the bright sunshine, through a secret door that she’d never noticed before, hidden in plain sight. She’d only seen men so far, which was disappointing; she’d hoped for a girl, someone her own age who might need help settling in. Someone who would be grateful to learn how things worked in London, who might become a friend. Ma had told her that they’d have a shock in store, these newcomers who had travelled from so far away, that they would take a while to get used to the city. Maybe that was why Evie’s father had left, unable to settle in and think of London as home. Ma said there was no point talking about him since Evie would never meet him; he didn’t even know that Evie existed.

  When she’d been younger, Evie had hoped he would come back to London, that one day there would be a knock on the door and he would be standing there with his suitcase and a brilliant white smile. When Ma punished her, often for something as slight as spilling a drink or grazing her knee in the school playground, banishing her to her bedroom to think on her mistakes, Evie made up stories about him. In her daydreams, her father was an African king and Ma was a wicked witch who had stolen Evie away from his kingdom. He had spent years searching for her and when he found her they would go back to his palace and she would eat all the food she wanted, wear only new dresses and all the people of the land would envy her.

  These days she knew better. She would never meet him and that was for the best. Too much time had passed and she’d be embarrassed for him to see them now, her and Ma. He was clever, she knew that much. He’d been over on a mathematics scholarship from Sierra Leone according to Aunt Gertie who sometimes let go of tiny fragments of information after a third gin. No doubt he had made his fortune by now. An impressive man who would be disappointed to find his daughter with aspirations no higher than to become a qualified secretary; her mother a charlady who took in piecework to pay the bills.

  A couple of large army tents had been set up on the grass close to the shelter entrance and a Union Jack had been raised to make it clear that this was an official operation. Government sanctioned. They weren’t expecting trouble but Ma had told her to stay away just in case. She thought that Evie had gone to the pictures with Delia, a thrilling lie that had been stammered out over breakfast. Delia had been kept home from college for the last two days with a stomach virus so there was no risk of her running into Ma by accident. Anyway, how could she stay away? She didn’t know anybody who looked like her and now here were a whole group of people whose skin was even darker than hers. An entire ship full of them!

  She
watched on but still she could see only men. Evie bit her lip, not sure what to do. Men have needs, Ma said. Evie had to be wary of being left alone with a man, even though she wasn’t quite certain what would happen if she was. What would she say to a strange man from another country anyway? She had no idea, but she didn’t want to walk away. Instead, she made a bet with herself. She’d walk up to the next female volunteer who came out. She could pretend that she had some questions about the WVS. She was sixteen now, old enough to join if she wanted.

  She crossed her fingers and almost immediately a woman did appear. She wore the usual WVS uniform but this woman made it look glamorous, the lines fitting her body as if it had been tailored. Her hair was immaculately coiffed in neat red waves that sat below her standard issue hat. She led out her charges confidently, six men whose laughter floated out to Evie on the breeze. They all wore jackets despite the fine June day, the temperature having risen to well over seventy. One of them threw a ball into the air, casually, spinning it higher each time it left his hands. The jackets came off and were set down as markers to form a playing area. Evie found herself walking across the road before she knew she’d taken a step, like Karen in The Red Shoes, though her plain brown lace-ups were anything but fit for a princess.

  The woman had set herself up with a fold-up chair, carried out from the nearest tent by one of the men. She sat and fanned herself with a slim pamphlet or magazine, her legs crossed. Her shoes were standard brogues but with a small heel and polished to a shine. She flicked her hair back as she watched the men remove their shoes and socks, piling them to one side. She was knowingly beautiful and Evie noticed more than one of the men throwing a glance or a comment her way, trying to attract her attention.

  The game got underway and, with the men distracted, Evie moved closer. ‘Excuse me?’ The woman didn’t hear her so she took another tentative pace forward as though playing Grandmother’s Footsteps, wanting the woman to turn but uncertain what to say when she did.

  ‘Rose?’ A male voice called out from behind her, both Evie and the woman turning. ‘Have you seen my notebook?’

  ‘You left it lying about. Marge almost threw it away.’ The woman, Rose, reached under her chair and retrieved a battered blue book, a pencil trapped within its pages.

  The man looked at Evie and she felt her cheeks redden beneath his stare. He looked only a little older than her but he was different to the boys she’d gone to school with. Years of rationing and light deprivation had left them scrawny and pasty. This man was well-fed, tall, and the sun hit the angles of his cheekbones so that it seemed to her, in that moment, that he was the source of the light.

  ‘Can we help you?’ Rose walked over.

  ‘Oh. I just…’ What was wrong with her? She’d been standing across the street for half an hour, thinking of nothing but clever introductions, and now she couldn’t formulate a simple sentence? ‘Sorry, I…’

  ‘You’re from round here?’ the man interrupted.

  ‘Yes. I live over in Brixton.’ She pointed in the general direction.

  Rose handed him the notebook. ‘Lawrie, stop pestering the poor girl. She only came to see what was going on, didn’t you?’

  Evie nodded, feeling foolish. The man called Lawrie smiled at her and for almost six seconds she forgot to breathe. She felt sweat gather in shallow pools under her arms, trapped by the restrictive white blouse that was prescribed as uniform for her secretarial college. She should have made more effort with her hair, not just scraped it back and forced it into a bun. Compared to Rose, she felt like a little girl.

  ‘Why don’t you come and watch?’ Rose invited. ‘This lot are mad about cricket and it’ll be nice to have a girl to chat to.’

  Lawrie fetched another chair for her, setting it beside Rose’s before running off to join his friends. As Evie sat she caught the glint of Rose’s gold wedding band and felt inexplicably relieved. Evie shielded her eyes from the sun with her left hand and watched the cricketers. Lawrie was fielding, the closest man to her, his notebook tucked into his back pocket. She noticed that the smile never left his face. She would know. She couldn’t wrench her eyes from him.

  Ten minutes into the match, the batsman hit the ball flying high into the air, Lawrie running backwards, his eyes tracking the arc of the spinning orb, raising his hands as it aimed towards him, answering his call. Cheers and groans erupted and Rose clapped, Evie following her lead. Lawrie looked over with a proud grin, winking at Evie as she smiled back and doubled her applause.

  ‘Someone’s got an admirer,’ Rose commented. ‘He’s a handsome chap all right, our Lawrie.’

  Evie blushed again but she was so captivated by Lawrie that she didn’t think to read anything more into those words. She couldn’t imagine that behind Rose’s polite smile might lie a thin coil of jealousy.

  6

  Evie still got a thrill every time she saw him play, watching the other women stare up at him, admiring his good looks and his smart suit. She liked to stand far enough back that he wouldn’t notice her, not wanting the spell to be broken.

  The dancefloor was full now, men and women flirting as they spun around, shouting and laughing over the music as they shook off the working week. Friday night in London town; survivors of war. Who knew better how to live than those who had not so long ago wondered how short that life might be?

  ‘Bloody boiling in here.’ Delia fanned her face with a creased beermat. ‘I’m sweating like a priest in a brothel, as my old Pa says.’

  ‘Don’t let my mother hear you talk like that. She says it’s not ladylike to speak coarsely. Of course she also claims that only men sweat but women glow.’ Evie ran a light fingertip across her upper lip to check for moisture. Any warmer and she’d be ‘glowing’ off the tiny amount of powder she’d carefully applied to her face, just enough to take away the shine, not so much that her skin looked ashen.

  The pair of them were standing to one side of the dancefloor, Delia not yet having seen a man worthy of a whirl on the parquet. Evie hardly got asked to dance and, on the few occasions it had happened, at least half she reckoned had been for a dare. Still, it didn’t matter now that she had Lawrie. She’d worn red because it was his favourite colour. It was a new dress, spotted by Delia in the window of Arding and Hobbs during their lunchbreak. Its full skirt was an extravagance, Ma tutting over the wasteful amount of material when she saw it, but even she had to admit that it suited Evie. Especially after Evie had lied about the price. As Delia reminded her, it was her own money to do with as she liked. She paid enough of her wages to Ma for the rent, she knew that, but it didn’t quite quell the wave of guilt that crashed over her as she handed the notes over the counter to the shop girl.

  ‘What d’you think of him?’ Delia nodded towards a young man standing alone in the corner.

  ‘Bit greasy-looking. A charmer, I bet, the sort who’d try and have his way for the price of a drink. A small drink at that.’ Evie cast her judgemental gaze upon him. He was good-looking, she’d give him that, but there was a predatory glint in his eye that put her off. Delia always went for the no-hoper types. Her last beau, Lennie, had been with more girls behind her back than Evie could count on her fingers, and those were just the ones that Delia had found out about. She’d been besotted though, and forgave him each time until one of his conquests had got herself in the family way and, unluckily for Lennie, had a father who had the brawn and reputation to make sure she was married before the baby made an appearance.

  Delia leaned closer to Evie and lowered her voice. ‘Then what about this one just in front?’

  He was only a few feet away. Fresh-faced and young.

  ‘He’s ginger,’ Evie pointed out.

  ‘What’s wrong with that?’

  ‘Isn’t your cousin ginger? It runs in the family, see. What if you ended up married to him? I’d put money on you popping out a whole brood of ginger nuts.’

  The girls giggled and the lad in question looked over as he heard their laughter, woven
through a break in the music. Evie looked away quickly but Delia, more brazen, held his gaze.

  ‘Shush! He’s coming this way.’ Evie tried to straighten her face as Delia smoothed her skirt.

  ‘Evening, ladies.’ His smile was wide, his teeth not quite white but straight enough.

  ‘Evening,’ they chimed.

  ‘Gosh, you two are a pair, aren’t you? Chalk and cheese.’ He only had eyes for Delia.

  It had always been the same, right since schooldays. Delia was the pretty blonde girl with perfect flaxen pigtails, taking the teacher’s praise even though everyone knew Evie let her copy her work when she was stuck. Delia was made reading monitor while it was suggested to Mrs Coleridge that her daughter might be better off in a remedial class, even as Evie sat in the corner reading The Twins at St Clare’s and wondering how she could talk her mother into letting her go away to boarding school. Their schooldays might be over, but instead of the teachers it was young men who now reminded her that she was different.

  ‘D’you come here often?’ Delia asked the young man.

  ‘Every Friday. I’m Sid.’ He stuck out his hand for Delia to shake. ‘Nice to meet you.’

  ‘I’ll just be…’ Evie pointed vaguely in the direction of the bar, excusing herself before the situation became awkward. She could do with a drink and Sid looked too wet to make any untoward advances on Delia.

  The queue at the bar was dominated by men and Evie wasn’t afraid to cough delicately but insistently, hoping that some chivalrous gent would let her go ahead.

  ‘A nice little trick.’

  Evie groaned as she recognised the voice in her ear. ‘What d’you want?’ She looked over her shoulder into Aston’s grinning face.

  ‘A drink, that’s all. It is a bar is it not?’