‘Evelyn Murdoch …’ he had said, testing the name on his tongue like a foreign phrase. ‘It’ll be nice, won’t it?’
They were married in early August. Deborah had wanted a double wedding but, while Mrs Murdoch was tempted by the economies of scale to be made, she had eventually ruled that double weddings were ‘showy’ and that Jesus would make do with garden flowers and fishpaste sandwiches.
During the last war, Silas’s father, a Methodist lay preacher, had gathered enough white feathers to stuff a sofa cushion but, after much prayer, his widow had decided that Jesus would definitely have joined the Dental Corps. A more militant pacifist might have argued that stopping teeth and fitting dentures and wiring jaws was aiding the war effort but Mrs Murdoch, surprisingly Jesuitical for a Methodist, had convinced herself that a dentist’s duties to his fellow man transcended such petty, temporal considerations. Men died from their teeth! she had shouted one teatime. Ask Silas. Or Gilbert. Blood poisoning. Septuagesima. Happened often.
Silas and Gilbert had signed up at once and when Silas set off for his basic training his pack contained a framed photograph of Evelyn standing outside the ugly new Methodist church in Knaphill in a nice navy suit, nice hat, nice posy of white violets (no earrings, no icing).
Evelyn saw Silas every weekend during his training but after four short weeks Deborah’s Gilbert had been sent up to North Wales to minister to new recruits and Silas was on his way to join HMS Exeter somewhere off the South American coast.
When Evelyn had imagined married life she had assumed that she and Silas and Kowtow would have a home of their own but Mrs Murdoch had had other plans. Evelyn and Deborah soon discovered that they were expected to move into the large, chilly redbrick villa that the brothers had grown up in and take care of their seventy-two-year-old mother-in-law.
Mrs Murdoch’s mental faculties had been lightly scrambled by a minor stroke. She did have occasional sunny spells of rational thought (most often when meals were being planned) but the current hostilities remained a mystery to her. She could never quite understand how Britain had managed to be at war with Germany for more than a matter of weeks, convinced that the other country had been drastically reduced in size after their crushing defeat in the last war – ‘I tried showing her on the map,’ said Deborah, ‘but she’s got them confused with Denmark.’ Most troubling of all for Mrs Murdoch was the shameful failure of diplomacy. Either way, it had all been Chamberlain’s fault (‘neither use nor ornament’) and ‘that blackguard’ Churchill (‘as much use as a chocolate teapot’).
Evelyn and Deborah were to become very familiar with their mother-in-law’s turns of phrase. Mrs Murdoch had argued that one if not both of her daughters-in-law should remain at home with her in the daytime but was unable to find a medic who would testify to her need for round-the-clock care by two childless, able-bodied young women. Deborah continued with her job at the doctor’s surgery and Evelyn left the translation agency for a desk in the Postal Censorship office (Uncommon Languages had practically bitten her hand off).
Mrs Van Clark had just ordered a third cocktail.
‘So what part of England are you from? And what brings you to the States?’
Mrs Van Clark had the kind of voice that rose easily above the drawling murmur of her fellow passengers. A man seated at the counter with his back to the room swivelled round to look at the three of them, as if he too wanted to know what had brought Evelyn across the Atlantic. He was in his mid-twenties and wore a dark suit, a soft-collared shirt and a blue silk tie that matched his eyes: the younger German on the station platform. Delilah the lapdog’s ears pricked up at the man’s sudden movement. Young Wanda Van Clark’s ears did not but her spine arched very slightly and her chin tilted with the self-conscious, mirror-minded manner of Dolores del Ray in close-up.
‘Your dog is very well behaved,’ said Evelyn and she saw the watching man smile and swivel back as she said it, as if aware that she was ducking Mrs Van Clark’s question.
Mrs Van Clark went off to the ladies’ room, leaving Delilah on the lap of Wanda who immediately grabbed hold of the dog quite sharply with her tangerine talons and flumped it on to her mother’s empty seat. She made no attempt to talk to Evelyn but took a pad of writing paper from her clutch bag and resumed work on a long letter. She wrote in a florid and not particularly legible hand (although the M of mother was very distinct).
‘Will you make my excuses for me?’ said Evelyn, gathering her belongings. ‘I have a very long day tomorrow.’
She had planned to finish reading Deborah’s letter when she got back to her compartment but she caught the words ‘poor dear Silas’ at the top of the third sheet and stuffed it back into her skirt pocket. It was funny to see an envelope with no censor’s stamp on it.
Her work in Postal Censorship had generally been a simple matter of marking up any indiscreet references to addresses, numbers, troop movements, bombing raids and anything likely to spread alarm and despondency (the actual cutting-out was done by the section leader). The workload had hotted up considerably since the Blitz began, as careless writers hastened to tell foreign friends (who could easily turn out to be enemies) where bombs had fallen, how close they came, how well or badly the rescue services had coped. The naiveté was staggering.
They were usually far cagier when it came to more personal matters, with most correspondents sensing the censor’s eye upon them, but one letter in a hundred opened a window on to a dark and unsettling world (‘I wear them under my uniform and pretend the straps are your teeth tearing at my skin’). They must surely have known that some stranger would be reading it all but they didn’t appear to care. Evelyn’s colleagues had grown inured to these glimpses of private life but Evelyn never really got used to the sense of guilt she felt while eavesdropping on who had done what to whom.
For Mrs Murdoch the scandal was that so many letters were written in the first place – ‘Making all that work for people! What can they all find to say, for heaven’s sake?’
Evelyn herself became so conscious of the censor’s prying eyes that she struggled to fill a sheet of paper and found that her handwriting increased in size whenever she wrote to her husband. The parcel sent back to her by Silas’s commanding officer included all the letters she had sent to him and she was depressed to see how dry they were, how repetitive, how dull: ‘Deborah sends warmest regards, Mother keeps well’ – ‘keeps well’ like a heavy pre-war fruitcake. Among the correspondence was his own last unposted note. Like every one of his five letters home it had been addressed ‘To all at Number 9’ and ended, kissless, with a request to forward him the article on focal infection he had written for The Mouth Mirror. The CO hoped the unsent letter would ‘be of some comfort’ to his widow but Evelyn had not found it especially comforting.
Chapter 4
The steward brought breakfast to her compartment: big yellow eggs, ringlets of smoked bacon and a golden pile of fried potatoes. A waxy, purple and white corsage was nestling alongside the cream jug. There was no note with it. Who could possibly be sending her flowers? She remembered the look the young German had given her on the platform, how he had affected not to listen to her conversation with the Van Clarks. She felt rather foolish when she gazed out of the compartment window at the disembarking passengers and realised that every man now had a buttonhole and every woman a crunchy new purple and white orchid: like a Harvest Festival on the move as they streamed along the platform to the waiting taxis and limousines, clutching their half-eaten baskets of fruit.
Evelyn pinned the flower to her lapel and angled her new hat into place. Her old one looked ill at ease in the Fifth Avenue hatbox. She had gone into town to buy it when she first got the Holborn job and Silas, home on leave, had insisted on joining her, an unconvinced face behind her in the mirror. She had never worn it without remembering the grudging shrug he had given as she paid the cashier: ‘You’ve got hats.’
She looked down at the old hat. There was a chromium-plated rubbish bin
under the sink in her compartment. Plenty of room once she’d folded the felt into four.
Sybil Harper disembarked the moment the train stopped and was one of the first to the gate where the latest edition of pressmen was waiting for the low-down on her busy day: a flying visit to the Governor of Illinois, lunch with the Mayor and a pep talk for the Chicago branch of the Anti-Nazi League.
‘Can Wanda and I drop you anywhere?’
Mrs Van Clark (entirely against daughterly advice) had wedged her breakfast orchid beneath the brim of her hat where the glaucous petals lurked like bracket fungus under the eaves. She had two porters in tow and looked askance at Evelyn’s hatbox and bag.
‘Travelling light?’
‘It’s very convenient: sending your luggage on ahead.’ Evelyn was surprised at how easily the lie flowed. ‘Such a bore fussing with it all.’
‘The train companies always try to sell you that idea,’ tutted Mrs Van Clark as they climbed into their taxi, ‘but I like my luggage where I can see it. I remember one time on the Orange Blossom Special I lost my trunk key and do you know the conductor had a bunch as big as a man’s fist? Opened that case easy as pie.’ Mrs Van Clark’s kid-gloved claws tightened their grip on the handle of her vanity case. ‘You never did say what it was brought you to the States,’ she persisted, instinctively registering Evelyn’s third finger. ‘What does your husband say about it?’
‘He was killed.’
For a split second Mrs Van Clark looked shocked – and a tiny bit excited. The short sentence, so normal now to English ears, sounded utterly outlandish: Silas Murdoch gunned down in a bank raid or poisoned by a jealous lover or otherwise seen off in some dastardly crime. She rearranged her face into a look of stricken sympathy as she gave Evelyn’s arm a vague squeeze like a faulty blood-pressure cuff. ‘How offal! You poor dear. How long has it been? I see you don’t wear black’ (a faint nod towards the scarlet hat).
‘One tends not to: morale, you know.’
A prim sigh from Mrs Van Clark as she rubbled her cheek against Delilah’s muzzle. ‘So many young lives. Where did it happen?’
A lot of questions … ‘the nosiest people on God’s earth’. Or was this ageing, blondined matron actually an enemy agent? In a film she would have been.
Mercifully, Evelyn’s hotel was barely ten blocks from the railway station and they had pulled up outside the entrance while Mrs Van Clark was still pawing vaguely at the back of her hand. They must have a good long chinwag about it on the Super Chief tonight. The three Van Clark females were spending the nine hours between trains with a cousin on Lake Shore Drive and Evelyn mentally rehearsed a refusal ready for when she was asked to join them (‘constantly inviting one to things’) but the offer never came.
Evelyn climbed out of the taxi and was all but swept under the metal awning and through the main doors by the stiff, lakeward breeze. The hotel’s vast entrance lobby was over two storeys high and the coffered ceiling and gilded columns were an orgy of Egyptian pastiche – one half-expected Claudette Colbert to be carried down one of the staircases and unrolled from a precious carpet on to the spotless marble pavement. No music – too early in the day perhaps? – but there ought to have been: something with lots of strings spiced with oriental woodwind. The air smelled of lavender and cigar smoke and floor wax.
A very black boy in a very white uniform stood guard with the neatest of brooms, his cartoonishly wide eyes scanning the floor from behind a parlour palm. A passing guest lit a cigarette, then tossed the match aside and the young lad darted out from his cover and swept the sliver of wood into a chromium-plated dustpan before returning to his hide. Rotten manners, thought Evelyn, throwing rubbish about like that, but then if the guests behaved better the boy would be out of a job.
She strode through the lobby past the clubby clumps of armchairs and occasional tables to the sepulchral mahogany reception desk where a bevy of smartly dressed operatives were hard at work answering telephones, filling out telegraph forms and sharpening pencils. One of them peeled away from the pack and breasted the desk with a smile of greeting so wide and warm that Evelyn wondered if they had met before somewhere.
The receptionist’s white blouse had a frothy fichu in front – as if her whole bosom was being served à la mode. She was wearing a dark-blue tailor-made. It was actually rather a shoddy piece of work but the crisp pretence of the padded shoulders and exaggerated waistline made the brash ensemble pretty and eye-catching in a way that Evelyn’s suit would never be. The short skirt showed slim, honey-coloured nylon calves. One never saw stockings like that in England. Not in Woking anyway.
‘My name is Murdoch. I believe I have a room reserved for the day? I’m taking tonight’s train to Los Angeles. Perhaps you could arrange a taxi at the appropriate time?’
The girl gave a doubtful frown while her fingers bourréed across the card-index box at her elbow. Evelyn stifled the habitual pang of front-desk fear. Fear that they might not know anything about her or not have anywhere to put her or demand more currency than she had brought. The girl found the booking and unhooked a bronze key fob the size of a life preserver from the wall of pigeonholes behind her.
Evelyn instinctively spoke more softly. ‘I’m expecting to meet someone.’
An immediate beam of recognition.
‘Ah yes, Mr Fitzmorton. He sends his apologies,’ explained the girl. ‘He did get your company’s wire but he’s all tied up until eleven forty-five. He’ll be right with you just as soon as he can.’ She might have been the man’s private secretary – his wife even – so familiar and confiding was her tone.
Evelyn’s eighth-floor room was reached via half a mile of closely carpeted corridor. She felt a thrill of anticipation as the porter’s gloved fingers fumbled the key into the lock, but the polished rosewood door swung open to reveal a gloomy cabin barely wider than the bed it contained and when Evelyn asked the man to draw the floor-length curtain she found that it had been hung against a blank wall and that the only ventilation was a small grille near the ceiling.
She was ready to cry with disappointment but, like a princess in a folk tale recalling the three wishes the goblin had given her, she remembered Genista Broome’s advice and handed over a dollar bill and demanded that something be done about it, hinting that Mr Kiss – Mr Zandor Kiss (there might be other Kisses) – would not be pleased.
A fervent ‘Yez ma’am’ from the porter and the two of them retraced their steps to the front desk. He would fix everything, he promised. Evelyn looked at her new wristwatch.
‘I think I might visit the beauty parlour. Whereabouts is it?’
‘Straight down the stairs, ma’am,’ said the boy, ‘on the left side.’
The basement was a cathedral to human vanity and its central nave was flanked by chapels dedicated to separate articles of faith. Evelyn hovered on the grand staircase. Just below her, a bespectacled man was seeking a good home for the coin glinting in his fingers. A brass-buttoned boy dashed across – ‘Right this way, sir! Yessir! We’ll find you a nice chair momentarily, sir!’ – and ushered the man into a barber shop lit by crystal chandeliers and part-paved with hundreds of real silver dollars.
The morning rush had subsided and only a few of the three dozen stalls were occupied by unhurried men being mummified in hot white towels while young Negroes buffed at the uppers of their bench-made Oxfords till they gleamed like rainy slugs. Pin-curled girls in chiffon shirt-waists clipped and poked at the fingers of one hand while the other five soaked in the craters of porphyry that dimpled the stands moored beside them.
There was a Turkish bath next door to the barber shop and its double doors yawned wide as Evelyn passed. A man, his prawn-pink face clammy with perspiration above his astrakhan collar, swerved out between the swinging jaws. She made to look away, afraid that a hot and hairy harem of moist male flesh would reveal itself behind him, but a perforated copper screen had been erected the width of the entrance to spare the modesty (or thwart the curiosity) of passing
females.
‘May I help you, ma’am?’
Another pantomime soldier.
‘I wanted to spend a penny, er …’ Evelyn blushed brighter than the Turkish bather. ‘Your smallest room?’ (Odd how much easier it was in a foreign language.)
In the ladies’ room two women, freshly coiffed and dressed for a hard morning’s shopping, were repairing their faces. They turned to look at Evelyn – pricing her hat, deploring her goofy English shoes, coveting her unlikely diamonds – but they didn’t say good morning. As she checked her own reflection she took a sidelong peek at theirs. Their hair had been worked over in identical auburn waves like something piped out of a forcing bag.
Two attendants sat behind a painted screen yacking away in German about a Bund beer festival that weekend and Evelyn had to make a conscious effort not to react when their Besprechung turned to the ageing redhead touching up her lipstick in the glass. ‘Die Hässliche Juedin hat Haar wie ein gelber Scheißhaufen’ (the ugly Jewess’s hair looks like a yellow turd). Evelyn left no tip on the tray.
There was a vile smell of violets and ammonia in the beauty parlour. Lesser hairdressers were available but there were, as foreseen, no appointments to be had with Monsieur Alphonse until, with another sprinkling of green fairy dust, there jolly well was an appointment with Monsieur Alphonse, who magically materialised from behind a curtain, resplendent in sponge-bag trousers and a weirdly dental-looking white coat that reminded her, inevitably, of Silas.
The chemical stench intensified as he guided her into the salon’s interior and past one of the private cubicles where an anxious-looking woman sat with her thin silver hair rolled around countless tiny steel bolts, each wired to the Frankenstein-like gadget that was frying her curls into place.
Monsieur Alphonse installed his new client on a red velvet throne in her own little room then smarmed away to bow his goodbyes to a previous customer. Meanwhile, one assistant took Evelyn’s hat, coat and furs and draped her in a pink rayon cape while another swabbed the maestro’s scissors and combs with a rag dipped in surgical spirit and eau de cologne.
Happy Little Bluebirds Page 5