by Pip Granger
When I first encountered Sugar in a frock, I had to admit I was surprised. Shocked, even. I’d led such a sheltered life. Our church had boasted one or two mustachioed spinsters and a chap who’d been arrested for something unspecified in a public lavatory near the station, but no men in frocks as far as I knew. So Sugar in full regalia came as something of a facer the first time. Then, I’m ashamed to say, I found it rather funny. But when I got to know Sugar, really know him, I was grateful to be one of the few friends he trusted enough to know about his private passion.
He said it was the way that clothes felt that did it for him. The soft feel of fine fabrics and yarns against his skin, the whiff of Shalimar behind his ears and at his throat, the soft lines and freedom of movement, or, sometimes, the opposite; the restriction of tight skirts and high heels did something for him that nothing else could do. As did wearing cavalry twill, flannel and stout cotton, when he was in the mood for being ‘a butch bastard’, as he put it.
For Sugar, it was all about freedom in a funny kind of way, even though it was so hidden and secret. It was about the freedom to be whole, or so I understood it when we talked. It had sounded wonderful to me, who had never felt that way in my entire life to date, and I suspected that dressing up as a man wouldn’t do it for me. Sometimes, I did wonder what would do it. The nearest I’d come to it was motherhood, and that had been taken away.
I didn’t see Sugar for days after Antony suggested I ask him for embroidery lessons, but that wasn’t all that unusual, despite living in such close proximity. Not only did we keep very different hours, but Sugar was known to simply vanish from time to time. No one ever knew where he went, and if Bandy knew, she wouldn’t say. Sometimes he’d be gone for days at a time and then he’d return with no explanation beyond a quiet, secretive smile.
As it turned out, I eventually found him skulking round at the cafe in Old Compton Street when I popped in for some tea on my way home from work. I hadn’t had time to shop, so sardines on toast and a cup of weak, sweet tea at home were the order of the day. The cafe was another important place in my small world. It was just around the corner from where I lived, so it was handy, but that wasn’t why I went there. I went for the warmth of the welcome I invariably received from Maggie, her husband Bert and their adopted daughter, Rosie.
It was Rosie who had first brought me to the cafe. She’d been Jenny’s very best friend at school. When Jenny had become too ill to go to school, Rosie had come to play with her at home. What a ray of sunshine that child had been in those dark times. Rosie had made Jenny’s last days so much less lonely with her chatter, school gossip, mischievous laughter and her touching presents. I remember a cardboard theatre in particular, complete with characters, costumes and scenery. That theatre had kept Jenny absorbed in a world of make-believe for many, many hours.
Maggie and Bert were legendary among the locals for their kindness and generosity, so their establishment was one of the hubs of local life, especially when the pubs were shut. Everyone who lived and worked in the area turned up at the cafe at least once a day. It was an important meeting place as well as a good cafe. Some people practically lived there, like Madame Zelda, Clairvoyant to the Stars, who when she wasn’t at the cafe, lived and worked next door; and Luigi Campanini who was from the delicatessen two doors up. They seemed to be there almost as often as Maggie and Bert.
Maggie was born to be a mother of a fine, large brood. She even looked like a fertility goddess, being big-bosomed and generous around the hips. But the brood wasn’t to be, so Rosie, Bert and her many favourite customers became her chicks. She mothered us all. Maggie embraced life and people with equal enthusiasm, and it showed in her almost permanent smile, ready laugh and her plump body encased in a wraparound pinny. A mother hen with glittering rings, she had at least one for every finger, leaving only her thumbs free.
Bert was not quite such a presence, largely because he spent most of his time in his kitchen. He, too, was a cheerful soul with more than a passing resemblance to Humphrey Bogart, and according to Madame Zelda, he had set more than one girl’s heart aflutter in his time, including hers. ‘But he’s the faithful type. Loves his old woman to death and his Rosie and that’s enough for him. He wouldn’t do nothing to upset them and everything he could to protect them,’ she’d told me once, and I’m sure she was right. Bert Featherby was that rare being, a thoroughly contented man.
Which is more than could be said about my husband, Sid. I first got to know Maggie and Bert when Sid took it into his head to desert Jenny and me for another woman. Times had been very lean then. Jenny was ill, Sid had gone and I was unable to leave home to work because Jenny needed me to care for her. It was then that Maggie, Bert and many of my neighbours stepped in to make sure we were fed and kept a roof over our heads. I have never known such kindness as I received in those awful months around the time that Jenny died.
‘Wotcha, Lizzie, what can I do you for, love?’ asked Maggie, round face gleaming with the effort of washing a sink full of crockery in scalding hot water. Maggie prided herself on her spotless china and cutlery and it took lots of hot water and elbow grease to get them that way. I’d just managed to scrape in before Maggie and Bert battened down the hatches for the night. Sugar was ensconced at the corner table.
I gave my order and carefully counted out the money. It was Thursday and I got my wages on Friday evenings, so it was a case of chasing the last farthing around a virtually empty purse.
Maggie smiled at me. ‘Go and join Sugar and I’ll bring your food over to you when it’s ready. Here’s your tea.’
I took it gratefully and joined a rather glum Sugar. ‘How’s life treating you?’ I asked, more for form’s sake than anything. I could see how it was treating him. Sugar looked depressed, a state of mind I could recognize all too easily.
Depression didn’t really suit Sugar, who was normally a gentle, good-natured giant. He was tall – over six feet – and well made, with wide shoulders and long legs. You couldn’t call him thin, but he certainly wasn’t fat either. There was no sign of a paunch. I suppose he was in his mid-thirties, but it was hard to say because his slightly rounded face and wide eyes gave him the innocent, cherubic look of a younger man. He kept his thick brown hair a little on the long side and swept back from his broad forehead, but a lock of it tended to flop in a cowlick and he was continuously pushing it back with a massive, spade-like hand. It was hard to imagine such a hand wielding anything as small as a needle, but it did, and beautifully too. The man was an artist, everyone said so.
‘Hello, Lizzie,’ he said. ‘Not bad, sweetie, but not good either. Middling, I s’pose you’d call it middling. Bandy has got herself a new man and that usually bodes difficulty, at the very least.’
I knew what he meant. Bandy, the owner of the drinking club which was the haunt of Soho’s literati, the artists’ set and the simply thirsty or curious, would launch herself at romance with the remorseless single-mindedness of a battleship on manoeuvres; but, just like a battleship in enemy waters, she was quite likely to explode at the end of it. Bandy was nothing if not volatile.
‘She’s at the permanently horizontal stage at the moment, which makes work tricky,’ Sugar continued. ‘She’s too busy in the boudoir to see to things like the ordering in the usual way.’ He brightened slightly. ‘I don’t suppose you fancy doing a spot of waitressing while her ladyship is otherwise engaged, do you? It’d free me to do the stocktaking and whatnot if you would; just for a couple of nights a week until she rises again. I’d pay the usual rate of course.’
‘I’d love to, Sugar,’ I said, a vision of my empty purse firmly in my mind. Apart from the extra money, I loved any excuse to get out of my empty flat. ‘When do you want me to start?’
The big man shrugged. ‘Is tonight too soon? I really do have to get to grips with the drinks order. We’re almost out of gin, and that will never do.’
‘I’ll be down when I’ve had a bath and changed, then,’ I told him. ‘But I’l
l have to leave before last orders. I’ve got work tomorrow.’
‘That’s all right. Just serve the after-work crowd early on and I’ll see to the hardened boozers later. A couple of hours should see me right for the ordering. Then, after that, could you do Fridays and Saturdays to help with the crowds? There’s too many those nights for one pair of hands, let alone my poor old feet.’
I looked up as Maggie delivered my food and pulled up a chair to join us. She’d taken the precaution of bringing a pot of tea, a jug of milk and a spare cup for herself.
‘How long do you reckon Bandy’ll be out of commission, then?’ Maggie asked, winking playfully at me.
‘There’s no telling,’ Sugar said mournfully. ‘Depends on the geezer’s stamina, I expect.’ Maggie laughed and I smiled. Sugar shook his head at us. ‘It’s all right for you to laugh, but it could be weeks before we get any sense out of her. You know Bandy. She didn’t come by her name for nothing.’
I looked at Sugar, then at Maggie, my eyebrows raised in enquiry. How had Bandy come by her name? As little Rosie had once pointed out, Bandy’s legs were as straight as anybody’s.
‘According to my Bert, Bandy’s … er … staying power is legendary, so it’s “Abandon hope all ye who enter here,” and “Bandy” for short.’ Maggie blushed slightly. ‘Or so Bert says.’
Sugar nodded. ‘That’s it. That, and the fact that her name really is Hope, Hope Bunyan. She’s the younger sister to Faith and older sister to Charity, or so she told me not all that long ago.’
I was amazed. Faith, Hope and Charity, whatever next? I just couldn’t imagine Bandy as one of the Virtues, and I said so.
‘Me neither, sweetie,’ Sugar agreed. ‘Let’s face it, she abandoned virtue a long time ago.’
Maggie chortled. ‘Who’s been sleeping in the knife drawer, then?’
‘I know, Maggie, I know, but it gets on my wick. Whenever Bandy lands a new bloke, I get dumped on until she comes to her senses, then I have to mop her up. I love old Band like a sister, you know I do, but I do wish she’d pick a better class of bloke, someone who’d treat her right and make her happy. But no,’ Sugar sighed long and hard, ‘she picks the dregs, sweeties, the absolute dregs!’
Maggie and I nodded sympathetically. Bandy did have lousy taste in men, we could testify to that, but I thought it politic to keep my mouth shut on the subject. I remembered my own husband, Sidney, with a shudder. I was no shining example of how to get it right, that was for sure. Then I looked at my friend Maggie and thought that she, on the other hand, was. She and Bert had one of the happiest marriages around.
‘Who is the new fella anyway?’ Maggie asked. ‘Do we know him?’ The question had been hovering on the tip of my tongue, too, but I’d been too polite to ask, an unfortunate throwback to my childhood.
‘You might do. Name of Malcolm Lamb, fancies himself as a poet, lives in Peter Street.’
‘I know,’ Maggie answered after a moment’s thought. ‘Tweedy sort, dark hair, needs a good shave most of the time. Wears sandals all year round and reeks of French baccy.’ I applied my mind and thought I knew who she meant.
‘That’s the one,’ said Sugar. ‘But French baccy isn’t the half of it. He could do with a damned good bath on a regular basis and a trip to the Chinese laundry with his togs while he’s at it.’ Sugar sniffed. ‘I call him Malodorous for short.’
Maggie almost choked on her rich tea biscuit. Sugar thumped her back a few times, shifting the crumbs enough for her to sip her tea.
‘That’s not short,’ I objected. ‘That’s long.’
‘That’s as may be, but it’s accurate,’ Maggie assured me, taking a deep breath. ‘The bloke does honk a bit.’
‘A bit! By the end of the month the man can make your eyes water at five hundred paces. Bandy says it’s manly, but I say it’s simple slackness, sweeties, in the washing department.’
Sugar’s voice was a little sharp; time to change the subject, although I secretly couldn’t wait to meet this paragon of grime. I brought up the subject of embroidery lessons and, to my delight, Sugar agreed at once.
‘Oh yes, flower, I’d love to. It’ll get me back to the soothing silks myself. Nothing like a bit of handiwork to calm a body’s shattered nerves. There was never a tremor in my hands all through the Blitz; cool as a cucumber as long as I had my needles, my embroidery ring and my silks.’
This was not strictly true – the odd shoddy stitch in his ‘war work’ attested to that – but we let it go. Distance had lent enchantment to quite a lot of our memories of the war and Sugar was far from alone in putting something of a gloss on it. If all the blokes who said they’d been heroic at Arnhem had actually been there, there’d have been no room for the Dutch, the Germans or the Americans to stand, let alone fight.
A clatter of young feet on the stairs that led up to the flat above brought my thoughts back to the cafe. Rosie burst into the room, closely followed by her friend Kathy Moon. My eyes welled up again and my heart lurched, because just for a second, Kathy could have been my Jenny, laughing and bounding into the room like a young horse, all legs and youthful enthusiasm. But she wasn’t my Jenny of course – Jenny was gone and she wasn’t coming back.
Somebody must have noticed a bleak expression on my face because I felt a warm hand find mine and give it a gentle squeeze, then the moment withdrew and I came back from the brink of utter desolation to hear Rosie’s cheery voice. ‘Hello, Auntie Lizzie, how’re you?’
‘I’m all right, sweetheart, and you? How’s school?’
Rosie laughed and rolled her eyes and said in mock exasperation at the predictability of grownups, ‘People always ask that. School’s school, what else is there to say? If you mean, how am I doing at school, then I’m doing OK, thank you.
‘Kathy and me are going round to see Mademoiselle Hortense, to help finish off that piece of scenery for Saturday’s show. What time should I be back, Auntie Maggie?’
Maggie glanced at the large, round clock hanging above the doorway to the kitchen. ‘No later than half seven. You’ve got school tomorrow. And make sure your homework is really finished before you scamper off,’ she said suspiciously.
Homework began with the build-up to the eleven-plus examination and had rapidly led to conflict between Rosie and Maggie. Maggie and I had had several planning sessions, trying to find ways to get Rosie to knuckle down to the hated chore. Bribery seemed to work the best: no homework, no pocket money, harsh but effective. I wondered briefly what strategy I would have used on Jenny. It wouldn’t have been pocket money, that much was certain; there’d never been enough cash for that kind of thing. I sighed. I probably would have fallen back on nagging and getting cross, good old standbys when all else failed.
‘Bye-bye, Auntie Lizzie,’ Rosie’s voice whispered close to my ear as she flung her bony arms around my neck and plonked a smacker on my cheek. She did the rounds and kissed Sugar and Maggie in their turn, sang out ‘Bye, Uncle Bert,’ in the general direction of the kitchen, then followed Kathy out on to the street.
‘Bye love,’ came a voice from the rear of the premises and Bert appeared in the kitchen doorway, wiping his hands on his long, white apron and smiling broadly. How that man loved that child! Fatherhood suited Bert Featherby as well as motherhood suited his Maggie.
I felt a pang of envy for this happy little family, and then snapped out of it. Envy is, in my opinion, one of the more repulsive of human emotions, dishonest and punishing if it’s allowed to get out of hand. I really didn’t want that. Envy makes people unkind. Few people are able to say, ‘I’m being horrible to you because I envy you like mad.’ No, they’re just blindly spiteful and then blame the object of their envy for deserving such treatment. I certainly didn’t want to turn into one of those poor souls, and gave myself a stern talking to. Self-pity is so hard to control when a person actually has reason to feel sorry for themselves. I had to keep reminding myself that others had known personal tragedy without being soured by it. Some had eve
n managed to become better people, but I wasn’t sure I was up to that. The best I hoped for was not to allow the terrible loneliness to turn me into a bitter person.
I squared my shoulders, mentally counted to ten, and brought the subject back to my embroidery lessons. Sugar and I agreed that Sunday teatime was best for us both.
‘I’ll tell you what,’ I said, ‘I’ll swap you one evening in the bar a week for one lesson, then if you pay me for the other session, that’ll seem fairer to me. I can’t afford to pay you for my lessons, you see.’
Sugar stuck out a hand. ‘Done!’ he said. ‘And you have been! You could have had the lessons for nothing,’ he chortled. I looked around the cafe at the familiar faces and thought that although the hand I’d been dealt had been a hard one, it had led me to all these dear friends in a roundabout way and for that I was truly grateful. Good friends could make even the hardest things in life more bearable.
3
I could hear the murmur of voices as I walked downstairs from my little flat to the club just before eight. Tobacco smoke made the air fuggy and faintly blue on the last leg of the descent. ‘Bandy’s Place’ had a reputation for its atmosphere, its clientele and, first and foremost, the double act formed by Bandy and Sugar. They had a chemistry that drew people like ants to honey – or ‘flies to cack’, as Bandy rather tastelessly put it.
The lady herself was sitting on her usual stool at the end of the bar, where she could lean casually against the wall if she was a little the worse for wear after a long night talking and drinking.