London Belongs to Me

by Norman Collins

  Well, there it was. An engagement. Definitely an engagement. And there were two things about the letter which were oddly flattering. In the first place, Mr Chakvar Ali was right at the top of the tree among mediums. He was one of the few. There was therefore the pleasing implication that Mr Squales was another of the few. It was as though a violinist in a second rate palm‐court somewhere had received a letter saying: ‘As Yehudi Menuhin is unable to be present at the Albert Hall on Sunday, would you please come along instead.’ And then there was the bit about suggesting the fee. Mr Squales lit a cigarette and thought it over. It could, within reason, be almost anything. He could name five shillings, five pounds, or even twenty‐five. Mr Ali probably received the latter – but then he was able to produce, apparently at will, a strong and unmistakable odour of lilies of the valley, and feathers floated down from nowhere. That sort of thing always commanded a bonus. So, in the end, Mr Squales compromised on five guineas. And a guinea for the assistant. It sounded a respectable, professional kind of fee. Like Harley Street. But he wasn’t out of the wood yet. There remained the question of the assistant. Who on earth? he wondered.

  And the note‐paper. Mr Squales remembered gloomily that he hadn’t got a decent sheet in the place – nothing that had a printed or embossed heading to it. That meant that he couldn’t reply in writing. And this was a pity because Mr Squales’ handwriting had character to it. Give him a broad nib and a bottle of violet ink, he often told himself, and he could produce something that no penman need feel ashamed of. As it was, there was nothing for it but telephone and let his voice do the trick. The one thing, he reminded himself, was to avoid the jangle of pennies at the beginning of the conversation. By pressing button A while he could still hear the ringing tone, he would be able to conceal the fact that he, Professor Enrico Qualito, the co‐equal of Mr Chavkar Ali, was ringing up from a common call box.

  And now that he had settled the fee in his own mind, he surveyed the larger question: ‘What precisely is it,’ he asked himself, ‘that the old girl wants to hear?’ If he could find that out, the séance was half way to being a success already. It might, for example, be her re‐marriage – for all he knew she might be amorous as well as wealthy. But, after reflection, he decided against such a possibility. Most women in the circumstances would want to forget their previous husband and not go trying to talk to him. Or was there something on her conscience, something that was haunting her? Yes, there might be. But what? Even a hint, no matter how small, would be useful.

  He only wished that Mrs Jan Byl was more the kind of woman who would take a man into her confidence. If only she’d tell him what she wanted the late Mr Jan Byl to say, Mr Squales would make it his business to see that Mr Jan Byl damn well said it. As it was, he was perfectly ready to admit, the whole thing might turn out a perfectly dismal failure. Even a bunch of flowers suddenly plopped down on the table from nowhere, might be out of place at the kind of séance on which Mrs Jan Byl was counting.

  This was direct‐voice stuff, or nothing.

  3

  Connie had sunk her pride. She was back with Mr Vercetti again. And Mr Vercetti had sunk his pride, too. He was no longer the proprietor of a flourishing night‐club. He was only the manager. There was a Mr Scala, or somebody they all called Mr Scala, he now worked for. But Mr Vercetti didn’t mind. It kept him in touch with his old customers and made things easier for the moment when the Government was ready to forgive him and he could open up once more on his own account.

  Mr Scala’s night‐club was called The Turban. Except for the fact that it was in the basement, instead of on the roof, it might have been designed by the same man who had designed the Moonrakers. There were the same canary coloured walls that were not much more than sparrow coloured in places where the customers had rubbed against them. There was the same box‐like lift that was so small that the occupants got to know each other by the end of the journeys. And there were the same foot‐marks on the doors as though the patrons habitually opened them with their feet. But that was only a small difference. The real difference was that the lift went down instead of up. The leather and chromium furniture, the glass and chromium tables, the plywood and chromium bar, were the same, too. Even the toy tarantula stuck in the middle of the ceiling was the same. And so was the card‐room behind the curtained door. Mr Vercetti, in fact, had every reason to feel at home at The Turban.

  And so had Connie. The Ladies’ Cloak‐room was a small, brick cavern that branched out from the passage that led into the restaurant. It had once been the coal hole. There, seated behind a counter (plywood, like the bar) with a saucerful of pins in front of her, sat Connie. By screwing her head sideways, she could just see into the room beyond and catch a glimpse of the gay life being lived. But, for the most part, her time was spent in giving rich girls sixpence change for a shilling, or running her hand lightly over the coats to see if anything interesting had been left in the pockets.

  It was her second night at The Turban and it was getting late now. Very nearly three o’clock. The crowd, except for a small group in the card‐room industriously ruining themselves, had dwindled away to nothing and half the waiters had put on raincoats and made off to their families in Balham or Mornington Crescent. Connie herself would be one of the last to leave. So long as there was even one lady – other than the professional hostesses, of course – left in the club, Connie would have to be there. After all, manners apart, she was responsible for the clothes they had come in.

  Not that they were really so bad, those late hours. You got used to them. And they were all friends together at The Turban. Only just now, the bar‐tender who had been with her at Mr Vercetti’s other club had slipped her a Manhattan that had been scarcely tasted, and she had been making up on oddments all the evening. A little earlier she had eaten the better half of a chicken sandwich, only slightly covered with cigarette ash. What was more she had got her shoes off underneath the counter which meant that she could stretch her toes a bit. Connie, in fact, was doing fine.

  She got off finally at about three‐thirty. It was a fine moonlit night and the streets had that dignified, civilised appearance that comes of being empty of people. Regent Street, as she turned into it, was a white‐walled ravine gracefully lit by hanging lamps all down the sides and centre. And Piccadilly Circus had the quietness of a country fairground. The electric signs had all been switched off and Eros, very Greek in inspiration but decidedly Edwardian in treatment, pointed his bronze bow blankly at the stars. It was late even for him.

  Despite a slight uncanniness about the place, Connie rather liked London this way. There was a pleasant feeling of importance about having the Haymarket all to yourself as though you were a one‐horse Royal procession. And she turned into Cockspur Street with her high heels setting up a kind of kettle‐drum accompaniment from the echoing walls of the tall steamship building. But by the time she reached Trafalgar Square, the echoes just died away into space. The Square was too big for one woman to have all to herself. It was like taking a midnight walk on the moon. It gave Connie the creeps. It wasn’t far now, however. She had only got to cut down Northumberland Avenue and she was where she wanted to be – on the Embankment. She could get her all‐night tram from there.

  She dozed right off in the tram and it was only the conductor calling out ‘Oval’ that roused her. It had been a nice little nap. She’d even managed to fit in a short dream. She’d dreamt that she was an aeroplane. Not in an aeroplane. But actually the aeroplane itself. She was in the midst of a giddy series of loops and side rolls under her own power when the conductor roused her. She was just the teeniest weeniest bit tiddly.

  But she got off the tram all right. And here, out at Kennington, it was even quieter than in the middle of the town. When the tram had gone swinging off into the night it seemed that she was the last living thing left in London. No, not quite the last living thing. There were the cats. Lots of them. Up in the West End there were always one or two peeping inside the lids of dust
bins. But here there was a whole sub‐jungle life going on among the bits of privet. There was prowling, love‐making and assault to be discovered in those sleeping front gardens.

  But when Connie got to Dulcimer Street there was a surprise waiting for her. She had just turned into the gate of No. 10 and was preparing to mount the steep flight of steps when she saw that the door was open and there was someone standing on the top step. The porch cast a dense black shadow and she couldn’t see who it was.

  But what she’d seen was enough. In all the years she’d been coming back to Dulcimer Street in the small hours she had never known anyone else in No. 10 still about. It smelt fishy. Distinctly fishy. So, hitching up her dress, she darted up the steps like a ferret. And when she got to the top, she found that it was Percy.

  Breathless as she was, it was Connie who was the first to speak.

  ‘Wotchu doing at this time of night?’ she asked.

  Percy paused. He was careful now to pause before answering any question about himself. It was only this afternoon that the two policemen had called on him at the garage.

  ‘Just slipped out for a breather,’ he said. ‘Couldn’t sleep. Got heart‐burn.’

  Connie walked up the stairs beside him.

  ‘Next time you’ve got anything on your conscience just come up and tell your Auntie Connie,’ she said cheerfully. ‘She’ll put things right for you.’

  As a matter of fact Percy was nearer telling her than she realised. He had been standing out there for nearly half an hour looking down the empty street, trying to sort things out.

  ‘If only I’d got someone I could talk to I’d be O.K.,’ he’d been thinking. ‘If I could get it off my chest, I’d go back to bed again. I’d go off to sleep. I’d feel fine in the morning. If only I’d got someone I could talk to, I’d be O.K.’

  4

  The proudest man in London at the moment wasn’t a Londoner at all. He wasn’t even an Englishman. And, for that matter, he wasn’t in England. He was Dr Otto Hapfel and he was standing on the German soil, the sacred German soil, of the Embassy.

  It was the first time that he had ever been inside. On other occasions he had simply stood at the top of the Duke of York steps, looking at the large yellow building that was so like all the other buildings in Carlton House Terrace. So like, but so utterly unlike. More than once the sight of that black‐and‐white flag with the Nazi swastika on it had brought tears into his eyes as he saw it there, prophetically fluttering in the very windows of the King‐Emperor’s palace.

  There had been tears in his eyes again to‐night. But that had been different. That had been when he had shaken hands with the Ambassador, had shaken the hand that had shaken the hand of the Führer. But he had pulled himself together hurriedly. It would have been un‐German to weep publicly. It would have been Latin. Worse, it would have been positively Jewish. And after he had made his bow and stepped back so that he could look at the rest of the assembly, he saw how unthinkable emotion would have been in such a company.

  Such a company. With the exception of little Dr Hapfel himself, they were all magnificent men who were gathered there. Magnificent men and blonde, motherly women. Only the Ambassador himself looked a little worn. He had pouches under his eyes like the abdicated English King‐Emperor. But the Military Attaché was superb. He was a Siegfried in the shining armour of a boiled shirt and tails. As he regarded him, Dr Hapfel tried to comfort himself by reflecting that Dr Goebbels was of small stature also: his heart was larger than his body, people said. Or the Führer himself for that matter. But that was a silly thought. It was irreverent. It was blasphemous. The Führer was beyond all size. He was not a man at all. He was a vibration, a radiation…

  One of the footmen was standing beside him. Dr Otto Hapfel, Secretary of the Overseas German Students’ Federation (London Branch), was being offered champagne. He sprang to attention. And carefully so as not to disturb anything, he selected one of the tall, gilt‐rimmed glasses. But having taken it, he made no attempt to sip it. He had drunk two glasses already and he was cautious. Only a moment ago he had caught himself staring at his own reflection in a mirror as if he had been a stranger.

  It was now three‐quarters of an hour since anyone had spoken to him. All that time he had simply been alone in his corner, watching. Not that he felt miserable, or neglected. On the contrary, Dr Hapfel, Ph.D. Heidelberg, was blissfully, rapturously, content.

  ‘Happiness,’ he was telling himself, ‘is not necessarily perfect only in retrospect as the books say. It is perfect also, provided the subject experiences it in mental solitude. If I were distracted by speaking to someone I should not realise how happy I am.’

  But the two earlier glasses of champagne had loosened something inside him. It now seemed selfish to remain silent. Dr Hapfel looked round for someone to speak to. Beside him was a very large man, a visiting industrialist perhaps, also alone. Dr Hapfel addressed him.

  ‘It is very agreeable, is it not,’ he asked, ‘to hear nothing but the German tongue spoken?’

  The large man raised his hand.

  ‘Quiet please,’ he said. ‘Excellency is about to say something.’

  Dr Hapfel blushed and spilt a little of his champagne in his agitation. Then he raised his eyes… At the far end of the immense room – more immense it seemed because of the severe German style of decoration which had covered up the English decadences of the architecture – Ribbentrop was standing. Above him hung the crossed Nazi flags which, with the Führer’s portrait in the middle, were the only decoration in the room. He was speaking to the German correspondents in London.

  ‘Less than a year ago the Agreement of Munich was signed,’ he was saying, ‘and the peaceful restraint of German foreign policy was again demonstrated. Less than three months ago our Führer assumed the Protectorate of Slovakia and a storm centre of European chaos was reduced to order. Memelland is now German territory. Has there been war? Has one drop of blood been spilled?’ The Ambassador paused and coughed into a handkerchief. ‘But it would be idle to ignore that we have enemies. Powerful enemies. Certain politicians are anxious to surround the Reich in an intricate meshwork, a barbed wire barricade I will call it, of pacts and guarantees. Take the French and British guarantees to Poland, Roumania and Greece and the signing of the Anglo‐Turkish Pact. Such indications cannot be ignored. That is why the World Powers of Germany and Italy, bound in inalienable ties of affection and respect, have concluded last week in Berlin a solemn military alliance. And to extend protection to smaller states imperilled by the frank imperialism of certain of our neighbours not entirely unconnected with the New Jerusalem’ – Ribbentrop smiled suddenly, and all the reporters smiled too – ‘this week Denmark and the Reich have signed a pact of non‐aggression. Again I remind you in this “off the record” chat, would a nation which wishes to wage war sign such a pact? The pact has already been circulated to the news agencies and our Press Attaché had advised you how to handle the London reaction…’

  If only, Dr Hapfel was thinking, my schoolmaster, my Professor of Systematic Philosophy, my mother, and my two sisters, could see me now. In the German Embassy. Representing the Students’ Federation. Listening to our Ambassador. The list of those present. I am by so much more than any who are absent…

  It was nearly one o’clock when Dr Hapfel came away from Carlton House Terrace. It was a pale June night and London looked very beautiful. Beautiful and defenceless.

  Chapter XXI

  1

  It was Sunday evening and Mr Squales and Connie were on their way to Hyde Park Drive together. They were in a taxi now. But they’d only climbed into it for appearance’ sake a hundred yards or so up the road. And the earlier part of the ride had been slower and less fashionable. Much slower, because Dulcimer Street and Hyde Park Drive were remote islands in the complicated archipelago of London. There was no direct channel joining them.

  There could be no question about it, it would have been easier by Underground. But the Undergroun
d was no good for Connie: she couldn’t stand the feeling of being buried. It was just one of those things. There were, in fact, so many of those things with Connie that Mr Squales wished already that he hadn’t brought her. But it was too late now, and he had to endure it.

  All the same, there remained the question of her clothes. Because it was a warm night, Connie had come out in something that she called her Summery‐mummery. It was of brightly flowered voile and very thin. And it was the thinness that was the trouble. It was absolutely transparent. Beneath the short ruffed sleeves could be seen a thick ridge of what looked like sensible winter underwear.

  Not that Connie hadn’t taken trouble with herself. When Mr Squales told her that her arms – her thin wrinkled arms – looked too bare she had gone straight upstairs and borrowed a pair of long lemon suède ones from Mrs Boon. Mr Squales made no comment on the gloves. What he had really meant was a coat.

  And another thing was that Connie would talk to him. She had a high piercing voice, rather like an agitated child’s, and it jarred. At one of the changes he bought an evening paper and gave it to her. But it was no use. She read him all the tit‐bits aloud as she came to them.

  As soon as they were in the taxi, Mr Squales took the paper away from her again and addressed her.

  ‘Now Connie,’ he said firmly, ‘I want you to remember everything I told you. This is really a very solemn occasion, not a funny one. An unhappy widow is trying to get in touch with her dear departed – keep on trying to think of it in that way. And you’re there to help me. If Mrs Van Byl asks how long you’ve been working for me – you’d better seem to be trying to work it out and then say something about how exhausted I am after every séance. Something about fainting in the taxi on the way back would do. And don’t forget: when I raise my foot, you say “He’s off.” That’s important. We don’t want to be there all night.’ Mr Squales paused. ‘I’ll give you your half‐guinea to‐morrow,’ he said. ‘Don’t ask for it in front of Mrs Jan Byl.’