by Lawton, John
“Grandad ain’t up yet.”
The detective was torn between the certainty of duty, to investigate a crime, and the civility of duty, to report a death, and it seemed to Wilderness that the ambiguities of this were beyond the man. He wanted to explain and he wanted to accuse. His cheek twitched and he could not quite hold the tough-guy pose of looking him in the eye. And when he stepped in uninvited, he removed his hat.
“Anyone else at home, son?”
Wilderness had not heard Merle stir.
“What’s the matter?” Wilderness asked.
“Your grandad’s met with a . . .”
He was searching for a euphemism or perhaps just a small lie.
“An accident.”
Wilderness reached for an equivalent fib.
“You mean the air raid? You mean he’s dead?”
The detective looked at the bloke in uniform.
The bloke in uniform took the hint.
“’Fraid he is dead, but it wasn’t the raid. He died pulling a job.”
At last they had got to the point. It could only be a matter of a minute or so before they asked him where he had been last night.
“Would you mind telling me where you were round about ten o’clock last night, son?”
From behind him Wilderness heard Merle say, “He was home with me.”
She was propped in the doorway to her bedroom, a dressing gown pulled loosely round her, one hand holding it closed over her breasts, the other pressing a cigarette to her lips.
“Mrs. Riley?” asked the detective.
The uniform shook his head at this. Merle drew on her cigarette and didn’t bother to answer.
“You’re alibiing the boy?”
“Nah . . . I’d only be doing that if a crime had been committed wouldn’t I? You said an accident. What accident?”
“There has been a crime. Abner Riley died . . . accidentally . . . in the act of committing a burglary.”
“You don’t say? My Abner was a tom? Lord love a duck.”
The coppers looked at one another again. They knew.
“You’re saying the boy was with you all night?”
“Yep. Once a raid starts up. I just stay put. Ain’t been down a shelter since 1941. Who wants to die with strangers in a stinkin’ hole in the ground. Stay put, sit it out. That’s our way. Don’t even sit under the table no more. We had cup of char and a bit o’ toast an’ Bovril, listened to the bombers and went to bed. Tucked him in meself round about eleven, didn’t I, Johnnie?”
Wilderness hated the last line. It was a lie too far, a snook too cocked, but then his squirming at this could easily be read as the embarrassment of a sixteen-year-old in the presence of adults. At least she hadn’t said they’d listened to the wireless, only to have them ask her to name what programmes they’d listened to.
“Now, if you haven’t got any more questions, I’d appreciate being left in peace. I just lost me bloke. This is . . .” and here she paused. “A house in mourning.” Emphatically, her voice rising a fraction, “A house in mourning . . . so . . . be a mensch and just fuck off will you.”
They left. Wilderness had no doubts they knew, no doubts that they’d go away only to come back.
Merle lit up a second cigarette from the stub of the first, and poured herself a cup of tea. Silent tears at the corners of her eyes.
A long exhale, a cloud of smoke and a first sip. The tears suspended in time and space, ready to roll.
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I didn’t want to say the word.”
“What word?”
“Dead. That word.”
“And exactly how did Abner end up dead?”
Wilderness told her. She tilted back her head while she listened, as though it were a matter of pride that a tear should not roll.
“And where,” she said, still looking at the ceiling, “is the money?”
“On the roof.”
Now she looked at him, tears escaping her clutch to stream down her cheeks.
“What?” she said. “Out in the bleeding rain?”
§18
Merle took the money. Over two hundred pounds. For safekeeping, she told him. All Wilderness could hear was “keeping,” and keep it she did. She kept all of Abner’s loot, just as Abner had. Abner had bunged him a couple of quid every so often, but kept the bulk. It seemed to Wilderness that the old man must have built up quite a stash in his time—a successful thief, with only a fence to pay off. Rationing was a leveller, but it was clear they had lived well before the war. Well, but not high. A discreet level of consumption, attracting, whatever the rumours on the street, as little attention as possible. Abner had a decent suit, Merle some posh frocks—but the money was never flaunted. No “drinks for everybody” in the pub, no diamonds on her fingers.
All in all it seemed there must be a lot stashed away. The ill-gotten gains of all the jobs they’d pulled.
Wilderness never found it. Now it was Merle who bunged him a couple of quid every so often—and she saw he never went short, peeling notes off a roll in her handbag—but Wilderness never found the stash.
§19
The day after Wilderness was called to a police lineup at the Leman Street nick. The bloke in evening dress who’d stood on the roof pointing a shotgun at him failed to pick him out.
Toff diffidence saved him. The sense of fair play that would not have restrained most men restrained this one.
“One has to be sure, d’ye see? Couldn’t point the finger at a chap without being one hundred per cent sure. It wouldn’t be cricket,” he had said to the duty sergeant.
He could point a gun but not the finger?
Wilderness could not hear the sergeant’s muted reply, but it was bound to be along the lines of, “But he’s the old bloke’s grandson. Bound to be him. Stands to reason.”
And the toff had replied, audibly, “No it doesn’t.”
And after that all the sergeant could do was turn him loose with, “Don’t think you got away with it, son. Yer card’s marked.”
§20
On May Day 1945 the news broke that Hitler was dead. For weeks now “It’ll be all over soon” had been a rolling cliché on the streets of London.
Wilderness thought, “I’m free. They’ll never call me up now.”
He had watched his schoolmates vanish into the army over the last year and more—ever since D-Day. And ever since D-Day he had thought the odds on the army claiming him to be diminishing on a daily basis.
In the spring new weapons had crashed down on London, the noisy, puttering doodlebug, the silent, devastating V2. Enough V2s and there’d be nothing left of England—but there weren’t enough, it was Hitler’s last roll of the dice, and when the Allied Forces overran the launch pads the raids stopped. By the end of April even the blackout restrictions had been lifted.
The neighbours were cautious.
“Hard to believe, innit? I mean to say, the buggers could be back any minute.”
Merle had had none of this. She had ripped down the blackouts and thrown open the windows, clouds of dust cascading around her.
“Enough, enough of darkness and dirt. Enough of bombs. Enough of pompous little twats in tin hats. Enough is enough!”
It reminded Wilderness of scenes close to the end of Great Expectations. Ripping down the moth-eaten curtains that had shut out the light from Satis House for a generation.
Motes of dust danced in the late afternoon sunlight. Merle had danced with them, sweeping Wilderness along in her arms.
“It’s over, bleedin’ war is bleedin’ over.”
She hugged him, kissed him, told him again that it was over.
They’d never get him now.
A week passed in high anticipation—the national nerves stretched to breaking. Woolworth’s, Bourne & Hollingsworth and Whiteleys all sold out of bunting.
May Day.
Hitler was dead.
Surely it was over now?
Germans surrender
ed in chunks, a division here, a division there.
Surely it was over now?
The Russians took Berlin.
Surely it was over now?
All they needed was the word.
And on May 7 the word came—the following day would be Victory in Europe Day. The Prime Minister would address the nation at 3:00. And at 3:01 the nation would erupt in a frenzy of celebration that would last until the beer ran out. And woe betide any landlord who tried to put up the towels for the night when it did.
§21
“Not here,” Merle said.
“Eh?”
“I wanna be somewhere else for this. Not sat in the street with the neighbours, wearing a paper hat and drinking warm beer from a coronation mug.”
“Where then? Buckingham Palace?”
“No. Not the palace, but up West, definitely up West.”
“Up West” was a concept as much as a place, and as a place it was a moveable feast—the most appropriate term imaginable for the night in question. It might begin just west of St. Paul’s, but who knew where it ended? Regent Street? Park Lane? Knightsbridge? Wilderness had in a sense never been up West—he’d passed through it on trams and buses—a sensation rather like pressing your nose to the glass panes in the window of the sweetshop—and he’d pulled a couple of jobs with Abner in Mayfair and Kensington. But been up West in the sense or walking its streets, eating in its caffs and drinking in its pubs and shopping in its shops . . . never. Harrods was just a word. Westminster Abbey a postcard. The Ritz a colonnaded facade glimpsed from the top of a number 19 bus.
“I’ll take you to the Ritz,” she said.
§22
Piccadilly was a conga. A human snake that began at the circus and the boarded-up plinth on which Eros used to stand and slithered past Fortnum’s, Jacksons, the Royal Academy, the Berkeley, and the Ritz to fizzle out in Green Park.
There seemed to Wilderness to be as many in uniform as in civvies, prompting the question “who is actually at the front?” which in turn prompted the question “is Harry Holderness at the front?” but that he readily dismissed.
Merle seemed content to watch. She slipped an arm through his, and they hugged the pavement rather than let the human tide sweep them up.
She seemed happy, her head bobbing against his shoulder, and—although he’d no real idea how old she was, perhaps half Abner’s age, say thirty-two or thirty-three—“girlishly” happy.
By half past eight the sun was setting over the palace and Green Park became ablaze with bonfires. Londoners tore up the shelters that had served them since the Blitz and fed them into the flames.
Men and women danced around the fires as though in some ancient Dionysiac—a hint, more than a hint of impending intimacy between strangers, encounters flashed in the night rather than forged. To fuck but never fuck again.
The Forces were out in force. A sailor, a couple of RAF blokes wearing observers’ part-wings. And the Army—a couple of Artillery gunners and a lance bombardier, who took off their battledresses, waved them around their heads, and let them float down onto the flames like giant autumn leaves.
A benign policeman, a pointy-hatted London beat bobby, looked on without comment. A large well-dressed, matronly woman caught his eye with a wave of her brolly.
“Constable? Can this possibly be legal?”
“It is most certainly a crime to burn the king’s uniform, madam, but so long as they none of ’em get their wedding tackle out I shall be turning a blind eye.”
Merle giggled at this, not meeting the woman’s gorgon gaze—and all but collapsed in hysterics when the gunners stripped to their socks, wedding tackle out, and threw every stitch of uniform into the fire.
“War is over,” they yelled, echoing what Merle had said days ago, “Bleedin’ war is bleedin’ over.”
The blind eye turned no more. The gunners set off across the park in the direction of St. James’s at a bollock-bouncing trot, and the copper gave chase. The RAF observers stripped more slowly, fed their uniforms into the flames as though consigning the dead to the furnace—a gentle respect, a fond farewell to arms, at odds with the hysteria of the night. Then they turned and kissed. The matron stormed away trailing fury, complaining loudly about “the bloody queers.”
Merle buried her face in his chest, he could feel her laughter in his ribs. Then she wiped her eyes and said.
“C’mon. It’s past nine. Let’s get to the Ritz before they sell out of champagne.”
Wilderness was hesitant and she sensed this.
“Wossmatter?”
“Are we ready for this?”
“I been ready for the Ritz all my life. Puttin’ on the Ritz is what I do.”
“Are we even dressed right?”
Merle was in a scarlet summer frock that looked like it cost a packet. Her best patent leather handbag, with its diamante cluster on the clasp. Wilderness was in what passed for best. A light sports jacket and cavalry twill trousers. Put a cravat around his neck and he just might pass for a countryman up to town for the day.
She picked up the regulation black RAF tie dropped by one of the queers.
“Slip this on and you’ll be fine.”
“Supposing they won’t let us in?”
“I’d like to see ’em try. Tonight of all nights I’d like to see ’em try.”
As they left, heading north onto Piccadilly, the naval rating was stripping, even more slowly than the RAF queers, consigning history to the flames. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.
§23
The crush in the bar at the Ritz was scarcely less than in the street.
Merle made him sit.
“It ain’t a pub. They come to you.”
And when he came, he took one look at Merle and drew too keen a conclusion.
“Excuse me, sir,” he said to Wilderness, sotto voce, his back to Merle.
It was almost impulsive to look over his shoulder, and see to whom the waiter was talking, but he knew it was him and he knew what the man was going to say if not how he might phrase it.
“Your companion, sir. I understand it is a night for celebration, a waiving of the rules, but this is a respectable establishment—the most respectable in London. Certain things we cannot permit.”
Not admitting he was a bookworm had saved Wilderness a kicking on many occasions as a boy. Equally effective was an ability to make his enemies laugh with mimicry. Few accents could elude his ear and tongue for long, and certainly not those of the English upper classes as personified by Ronald Colman or Robert Donat. Either would do—C. Aubrey Smith perhaps a trifle excessive.
“Sorry, old man. Don’t quite catch your drift here.”
The waiter coughed once into the end of a loosely clenched fist, but by then Merle had stuck out her left hand and was waving her ring finger at him.
She was wearing a wedding ring, and Wilderness could only assume she had slipped it on in the last few moments and that she carried one just to be able to pull a stunt like this.
“’Ere, take a gander mate. What do you think this is, a bleedin’ doughnut?”
The man reddened. Wilderness thought it touch and go which way he jumped now.
“My last leave,” he said. “Popped the question. The old girl said yes. Now how about drinks for the pair of us? The sooner we get them the sooner my good lady and I will be on our way.”
The blush deepened. He must have worked out Wilderness’s age to within a year or two and might be guessing at twenty-one or twenty-two rather than seventeen, and he might deem him unlikely to be either officer or gentleman, but he wasn’t going risk it. Wilderness knew he’d won this one.
“Yeah. Make mine a Tom Collins,” Merle said.
“And for you, sir?”
“Oh, the same,” Wilderness said, with no idea what a Tom Collins was.
“I’m afraid the lemon will be out of a bottle sir.”
Ah, so it had lemon in it did it?
Wilderness smiled his assent, and the wait
er vanished.
“Old hypocrite,” Merle said. “He never told me he worked here.”
“You mean you know him?”
“Wasn’t certain till he started staring and whispering, but I think I did him a quickie in St. James’s Park last February. Cold as a polar bear’s bollocks and bombs wangin’ down everywhere, and I pick up the only fare left on the razzle. Cheeky bugger. Of course I know him. Do you think he spotted me for a brass ’cos I look like one?”
“Well I did wonder about the handbag.”
“I might just clock you with it.”
A Tom Collins turned out to be mostly gin. The tipple that had ruined his mother. Gin and sugar. It was little short of disgusting, but he sipped at it for Merle’s sake, wishing she’d ordered champagne.
She was talking at him. “At” might be “to” as far as Merle was concerned but Wilderness could not hear her. Her words were simply bouncing off him. He could suddenly hear nothing. One of the loudest evenings of his life, the letting down of the national hair—or in many cases the national trousers—and it was like watching a silent film. Or more precisely, an effect in a talking film when they drop the sound and the observer sees only faces, and faces become grimaces magnified by the glass walls of the fish tank through which he appears to be watching.
He could think of it no other way. He was in an aquarium or in a zoo—not that he’d ever been to either—he was a scientist, they were specimens . . . Homo anglicus, in all his limited variety—his native grey plumage enlivened only by the deep blues of the navy and the paler blues of the RAF and the spring colours of all the posh totty on his arm. Well-heeled Englishman and Englishwoman. So remote as to be another species.
Minutes passed, perhaps a quarter of an hour, Merle still talking, and the glass shattered. Hit his eardrums with the blast of a bomb. The mass braying of assembled toffs in their mating ritual.
“Can we go now?”
“’Course, enough is enough,” she replied. “Let me summon old winkledick and pay the sod.”
Walking towards home, walking to the point where they’d both get fed up and hop on a bus, she leaned her head on his arm said, “Wasn’t a bad idea goin’ to the Ritz was it?”
“No,” he replied. “Not a bad idea at all to put on a bit of ritz. My first glimpse of the high life.”