by Pip Granger
‘Do you come from a large family?’ I asked politely. ‘I was an only child myself, so if there was any disappointing to be done, I had to be the one to do it. Marrying Sid and leaving the Church were my greatest sins.’
We’d strolled into the ladies’ clothes department. Brilliant idly flicked through some sensible, tweedy skirts. I couldn’t imagine Brilliant in a sensible, tweedy skirt somehow. That afternoon she was dressed in an elegant, grey fitted suit, worn with black accessories; bag, leather gloves, stiletto-heeled shoes and the sweetest little hat perched on the back of her head. On top she wore a long swagger coat, in a black and white fleck. Her blouse was white linen, with a starched collar, lifted to frame her face. She wore her long hair gathered into a heavy knot at the nape of her neck, so that it didn’t foul that dear little hat. A long crimson scarf of heavy silk damask, with self-coloured chrysanthemums woven into the fabric, added the final flourish. That splash of red lifted the whole outfit from smart to gorgeous.
‘I have many many cousins, uncles, aunts, but there were only two of us born to my parents, myself and my little brother.’ Brilliant laughed her funny tinkly laugh. ‘Although he is not so little. My brother is fat, fat.’ Brilliant spread her arms and puffed out her cheeks to show me just how fat. ‘He lives in Hong Kong and has many fat children.’
I was so charmed by the image that floated across my mind, of a variety of balloon-shaped versions of Brilliant Chang, that I wasn’t really very aware of my surroundings.
Luckily, Brilliant was not so slack. ‘There, over by the raincoats,’ she said under her breath. ‘I know that face, it’s one of my husband’s chaps. Let’s make our way to the Ladies where he may not follow. Suspicious husbands are such a bore.’ She swept over to the bank of lifts and waited impatiently to be whisked off to the ladies’ cloakroom and a few moments of privacy.
Once we were safely away from prying ears I quickly told Brilliant that we’d got Peace back and were very keen to keep her in Soho. I explained about Peace’s wish to marry and our concerns about her safety from another kidnap attempt. It took a while to tell it all. Brilliant did not interrupt once, but listened attentively to every word.
‘So, you see, we need to find out who kidnapped her and why, and we have to see if we can come to some arrangement so that it isn’t attempted again,’ I finished breathlessly, anxious in case I’d forgotten anything.
Brilliant was thoughtful for a while, then seemed to come to a decision. ‘Remember the troublesome relative I told you about just now?’ she asked, and I nodded silently. ‘Well, it is my husband, Douglas. Henry is Douglas’s elder brother and …’ Brilliant paused for so long, I thought she wasn’t going to finish her sentence. ‘They have never really …’ Again she paused and sighed deeply. ‘My husband has always been so jealous of his brother. Well, today they had a terrible argument; what about, I do not know.’
I opened my mouth to speak but she held up her hand imperiously and I closed it again. ‘Your story could explain a lot about the flap he was causing this morning. I think I may understand now why he was so angry with the men who brought the news. It takes great tact to talk my husband out of his rage. I was afraid of what I might find when I got home. That is why I was late.’
‘Do you think you can help us?’ I asked. ‘Do you think you can help Peace and Lucky with their plan to marry?’
Brilliant shrugged. ‘I can only try. I will do my very best to help them.’ She smiled ruefully. ‘We are women, we know what it is to be in love, yes?’
‘Oh yes,’ I said, with more emphasis than I had intended.
Brilliant looked at me knowingly. ‘Ah! I see. You are in love now – at this very moment!’ She clapped and tinkled at me, ‘You must tell me everything! Let us leave our sanctuary and have morning coffee in the restaurant and a nice fattening cake. Then you may tell me all about your lover.’
Her face lost its animation suddenly. ‘We Chinese, we do not often marry for love; we marry for duty. To form alliances, to join families, it is all arranged. That is why I cannot promise that my brother-in-law will agree to Peace’s marriage. Lucky is from a much lower class.’
I wasn’t sure what Henry had to do with anything, but I ploughed on anyway. ‘But Peace is half foreign, as well as illegitimate. That doesn’t make her a very marriageable prospect either, does it?’
Brilliant’s attention sharpened. ‘That is true. All I can do is put it to the family.’ Her smile came back. ‘Time for coffee and cake and tales of your handsome lover. We have been in here far too long.’
Over coffee and a most delicious chocolate confection, I answered some of Brilliant’s questions.
‘Tell me, is he handsome?’
‘I think so,’ I answered shyly.
‘What is his name? Does he work? What does he do?’ The questions came thick and fast, and before long Brilliant knew almost everything, including T.C.’s involvement in rescuing Peace from the warehouse.
‘Is he a good lover?’ Brilliant asked finally.
I blushed deeper than my jumper and admitted that I didn’t know.
She was aghast. ‘You do not know! Well, you must find out straight away. There is no point in taking a bad lover to your bed more than once.’ Brilliant paused a fraction, then said, ‘Unless you are married to him, then it is your duty, of course.’
I shuddered as the thought of Sid crossed my mind. I resolved there and then to consult Sharky Finn at my earliest convenience. It was time I tracked Sid down and began the long, drawn-out, tedious and often humiliating business of divorce.
39
I was working an extra shift in the club that night, as Bandy was too weary to cope: although not too weary to sit in her corner, drinking steadily with Malcolm. I liked to keep busy myself, as the strain was telling on me too. True, Peace was back, but she was still in danger and under heavy guard and everyone was feeling it.
Sugar was out on an errand somewhere. He was due back to give me a hand, thank goodness, because the place was already pretty full and I was run off my feet. Sylvia was in with Toothy, and Cassie soon joined them with Harry in tow. Some of Bobby Bristowe’s pals were taking a break from guard duty, while Bobby and Pansy did the honours upstairs and sat with Peace. Last I’d seen, they’d been playing cards. There was also a whole mob in from the BBC.
My heart fluttered as I noticed T.C. stroll into the club around nine, just after Cassie and Harry had taken their seats with their friends. I had poured some drinks ready to deliver to their table, so I simply smiled ‘Hello’ at T.C. and indicated that he should wait for my return at the bar. As I neared the table Cassie raised red-rimmed eyes and caught sight of me approaching, then she saw T.C. at the bar and her expression hardened. Her eyes returned to me. ‘Why the fuck are you wearing my pearls?’ she demanded.
My hand flew to my throat. ‘Am I?’ I asked, wide-eyed with horror.
‘Yes you bloody well are,’ Cassie replied, her lovely face purple with booze and rage.
‘Hold hard there, Cassie,’ T.C. said firmly. He’d come up behind me and had heard everything. ‘Don’t go accusing anyone before you’re in full possession of all the facts. What’s more, look who you’re accusing. Lizzie isn’t capable of theft.’ He sounded very angry and it was enough to give Cassie a moment’s pause.
Bandy got up from her bar stool and weighed in as well. ‘Lizzie’s our good friend, and you know that. So shut up, Cassandra, and let me handle this.’ Bandy looked at the pearls at my throat. ‘So where did you get them, Liz? May I have a closer look?’
I took the necklace off and handed it to Bandy with shaking fingers as I explained about the shop, the costume jewellery and Antony’s lending the pearls to me. ‘I thought they came from our usual stock.’
I felt T.C.’s comforting arm around my waist and tried not to look at Cassie’s thunderous expression.
‘I must have left them there last time I had a fitting. Antony had no right to lend out my necklace. The bloody nerve!’ Cassie spat.
/> Harry looked startled and managed a strangled, ‘I say …’ before Bandy butted in.
‘The thing is, Cassandra, these pearls are mine. I can tell by the clasp. It’s made out of my initials in diamonds, you see.’ Bandy held out the clasp for us all to see. Sure enough the letters were H.B. – for Hope Bunyan. ‘Your initials are not H.B., are they? So the question is, what are you doing with my pearls?’
T.C.’s arm tightened around my waist as we waited for some kind of explanation. Then Cassie rounded on Harry, who was blinking madly behind his spectacles. ‘Where did you get them?’ she demanded. ‘You gave me the damned things! Where did you get them?’
Harry cringed slightly, but spoke up manfully. ‘I bought them for you from a chap in a pub. You were there! Don’t you remember? I paid him twenty-five pounds, as I recall.’
Cassie began to shake her head uncertainly, then said, ‘Come to think of it, I do have a dim recollection. Wasn’t it at The French House?’
‘Could you give us a description of the bloke, by any chance?’ T.C. asked Harry hopefully.
‘I can do better than that, I can point him out. That’s the chap over there.’ Harry indicated Malcolm, who was creeping quietly towards the door, only to find it barred by Sugar who was just coming in.
‘Grab him!’ T.C. shouted with such authority that Sugar did as he was told without question or understanding. He caught Malcolm by the collar and marched him over to our little group, grinning with pleasure.
Harry nodded firmly. ‘That’s the fellow. He said you had fallen upon hard times,’ he told Bandy, his eyes enormous behind his glasses, ‘but wanted to keep it hush hush. He said you were letting a little jewellery go on the quiet, through him. Said you didn’t want your business creditors getting wind. I thought I was doing my bit, as it were, in helping to keep the old watering hole afloat.’
Sugar shook Malcolm slightly, as if he were a rat. ‘When in fact,’ he said, ‘you were buying stolen goods.’ He shook Malcolm a little harder. ‘What do you want me to do with this, Band?’
The look that Bandy shot Malcolm would have pickled vinegar. ‘I’ll deal with him. Leave him to me. I’ve had a lifetime of dealing with vermin.’
‘With pleasure. Where do you want him? Upstairs?’ Sugar enquired politely, while getting a firmer grip on his prize.
I almost began to feel sorry for Malcolm. He seemed too paralysed with fear, embarrassment, or possibly both, to move, struggle or protest. Of course, he was completely surrounded by hostile forces. Some of them, namely Bobby’s pals, were very beefy forces indeed, so resistance would have been not only useless but probably damaging to his health.
Bandy nodded and followed Sugar and Malcolm towards the door. It wasn’t until they’d gone that I realized I’d been holding my breath.
T.C. was the first to speak. ‘How about a drink?’ he asked, and so I returned to the bar and gave him his beer, aware all the time that Cassie’s fiery eyes were following us malevolently.
Sugar returned to the club and grinned. ‘We should hear the merry tinkle of breaking crockery any second now,’ he said. There was a tremendous crash, right on cue, followed by several smaller ones in rapid succession.
‘There goes another tea service.’ Sugar sighed and rolled his eyes towards heaven. There was a thunder of big feet on the stairs, then another almighty crash, followed by an ominous skittering sound, as something heavy hit the landing, then scattered its broken parts around and about. ‘That’ll be his typewriter,’ Sugar told us knowledgeably. ‘I heard his previous one go the same way. She had to buy him a new one. Still, I don’t suppose she’ll trouble this time.’
Another pair of feet thundered down the stairs and a fine old set-to began in the hallway, close by the club doors, so that we could hear every single word. Although, as T.C. remarked later, the good people of Slough had probably heard it all quite clearly too.
‘Stealing from me is one thing, you loathsome pool of ordure.’ There was a thud, and Sugar mouthed that Bandy had just delivered a left jab. ‘But letting Peace take the blame is beyond the bloody pale, even for a slack-jawed, craven prick like you.’ Another thud.
‘Right hook!’ Sugar grinned with glee.
‘How do you know?’ I asked.
‘She always leads with her left and follows up with a right,’ Sugar explained.
‘Does she often beat men up?’ T.C. asked.
‘No, not often. Only when they piss her off.’ Sugar smiled. ‘And then it’s only her boyfriends. She’s never whacked me, and very few of the customers.’
‘I’m not sure that that makes it all right, though,’ I said doubtfully. I mean, I didn’t think it was all right for men to beat their women up, so it seemed to me, in the interests of fairness, it shouldn’t be all right for women to beat up their men, surely?
‘She’s right, you know, Sugar,’ T.C. said. ‘It’s not really on. We ought to intervene.’
‘Be my guest, mate. Personally, I’m taking the view that the man stole from her, then let a sixteen-year-old girl take the blame, so if Bandy didn’t whack him, I would. If you think Lily Law can do better, make a citizen’s arrest and do it the legal way. But will the punishment really fit the crime? Will the judge take into account that Peace was out there, up to her neck in God knows what, because that prick wouldn’t own up to being a light-fingered bastard?’
T.C. shook his head. ‘I shouldn’t think it’d be taken into account, no.’
‘Then I say let her beat the shit out of him, because if she doesn’t, I’d probably have to do it,’ Sugar observed. ‘The man did wrong. He betrayed her and Peace. He deserves a whack.’
‘But to err is human, to forgive divine,’ I found myself saying, to my utter astonishment. I sounded like my mother – not that she’d ever forgiven anyone in her life. My mother could have won medals in grudge-holding.
‘Well, Bandy is erring,’ Sugar shrugged, ‘and she is human. But nobody ever suggested she was divine.’
Further sounds of Bandy being human followed.
‘Now you can fuck off, you slimy low-life! Don’t ever come near me, my club or my friends again. Better still, bollock-brain, get out of Soho, otherwise I’ll turn the Chinese on to you and they won’t leave enough of you for your own bloody mother to recognize.’ She drew breath. ‘That’s if you weren’t hatched like all the other fucking snakes in the grass.’
For the first time, Malcolm’s voice managed to penetrate the furious tirade, the hail of blows and flying pieces of china. ‘I can explain,’ he began.
‘HOW?’ The word rang out like a thunderclap. ‘You stole my pearls, got drunk and sold them in a public house. Then you allowed a frightened, unhappy child to take the blame. How can you possibly explain such treachery?’
‘We’d parted,’ Malcolm said, as if that explained everything. ‘You remember? You’d thrown me out and I thought we were all over.’
Obviously, Bandy didn’t think any more of that excuse than I did, because we heard another crash and then, ‘Oh for God’s sake, get out of my sight and never soil my eyeballs again, you repulsive little man.’
The street door slammed with a resounding thud and a flushed Bandy appeared in the doorway to the club. She wiped her hands down her thighs as if to clean them off, grinned at the assembled company and said casually, ‘Well, that’s got shot of that bastard. Anyone feel like a drink?’
The club took on a party atmosphere after that and it was getting late by the time Sugar told me to go home to bed. I took him up on it gratefully. T.C. escorted me to my door. ‘Tonight has been fun. Thanks, Lizzie.’ He moved a pace or two towards me and stared at my face for so long, I felt sure he could have painted a portrait from memory.
I stared back, hardly daring to breathe. What was he thinking? I couldn’t tell. Finally, our eyes met and he moved another pace forward, put his arms around me and kissed me so softly on the mouth, it felt like the beat of a moth’s wing, nothing more.
It ended all too so
on, and I was too dumb to speak and too paralysed to move. T.C. smiled at me, touched my cheek gently, and whispered ‘Goodnight, Lizzie, sleep well and sweet dreams.’ Then he disappeared into the night, taking my heart with him.
40
‘No!’ Freddy breathed the next day, as I told him all about the previous evening and the way it had ended. ‘Did you hear that, Ant?’
‘Yes Freddy, I did, because I am standing less than three feet away and I am blessed with average hearing.’ Antony gave Freddy a little smile, to show that the sarcasm held no real sting.
‘I could swear you sleep in the knife drawer sometimes, Ant. There’s nothing wrong with a little romance, even if it is second-hand.’
Freddy turned back to me. ‘So what happened then?’
‘He went home,’ I said. To me, that was self-evident, but not to Freddy, apparently.
‘He went home!’ Freddy positively screeched in mock horror. ‘He went home?’ he repeated, not sure he had heard right. ‘You didn’t jump on his bones while the jumping was good?’ He turned to Antony in exasperation. ‘Did you hear that, Ant?’
He continued without waiting for a reply, especially a sarcastic one. ‘She had him at the end of her lips and she let him go home!’ Freddy threw his hands in the air. ‘What are we going to do with you?’
I was contrite. ‘What else was I supposed to do?’ The moment the question escaped me, I realized I’d asked the one man who was likely to tell me in graphic detail.
‘Grab the bugger gently by the goolies, haul him off to your bed and roger him rigid while the rogering was good. What the hell did you think you were supposed to do with him?’ Freddy asked with heavy patience. ‘Learn bleeding square dancing?’
‘Now who’s being sarcastic?’ Antony enquired mildly. ‘What he is trying to say, Liz, in his rather crude way, is that T.C. is a man of honour. Had he slept with you, he would have felt obliged to take responsibility for you. It’s his pattern. Look at Pat, look at Cassandra.’
I thought about it for some moments. It was a way of looking at things that simply hadn’t occurred to me. It felt wrong to me, but when I examined the idea closer I realized that this was how a man was supposed to behave, if he was honourable.