In fact, Bertie did have ambition, ambition for their joint venture, which had started to go quite well. The business partnership meant that Betty and Bertie were drawn together. They discussed future plans. Bertie was surprised that this seemingly dumb girl, who would never appreciate the finer things in life, had an acute business brain. She saw things in black and white, which were the colours of accountancy. Bertie installed a piano in the shop and began playing some of the sheet music, which attracted a crowd of dreamy housewives, who bought the music as though they were taking home a piece of Bertie. In these drab days, any piece of glamour was a tonic. Betty suggested that he started giving regular performances, at two o’clock and four, and the crowd in the shop was spilling into the street at the appointed hours.
The breakthrough came when one of the music publishers came around to ask if Bertie would play all their songs and ignore all the others. Bertie was given an offer of increased commission on sales, but Betty insisted that he was paid extra as a performer. ‘It’s taken you years to learn to play like that,’ she said.
But all the time the shop was doing well Stephen was sinking further. It pained Betty to see him. She cut down the number of visits to once a week, and each time she was shocked to see how he had deteriorated in that short time. One of the nurses had shaken her head as she came out of the ward as if it was all over bar the burying, so when Stephen died Betty wasn’t too surprised. To her he had died when he first went into the place. She had prepared herself for the inevitable, built a new life before the old one was properly ended. She knew now that she had married too soon, too young. She had had no experience of the world, had no idea of her potential, no idea that people like Bertie were around who could offer true companionship on a more equal basis.
It was a quiet funeral. Stephen’s parents couldn’t come down because the journey might be too much for them on the slow-moving, overcrowded trains. A couple of chaps from Stephen’s firm attended, but it was a ramshackle affair. A short service and tea and cakes in a local bookshop. She was glad when it was all over and she was left with Bertie, especially when he said he was going to leave his wife. He called it ‘a trial separation’, but Betty knew in her shrewd way that the break would be final.
So in 1939 the City of London and its environs had looked much as J.B. Priestley left it in Angel Pavement when it was published in 1930. Dank, with often the whiff of the Thames in its mist, stern Victorian buildings, brooding tabernacles of finance and insurance with liveried footman and smartly bobbed shorthand typists, comfortable teashops, tree-lined squares, with parcels moved by horses and carts, honking buses with no cover on the upper decks where men in smart suits pulled a fitted tarpaulin over their knees when it rained. It was a sound, serious place with its particular customs and charms. But by the end of 1940 it was a cowed, shabby place, with its business arrangements in total chaos, with scars and gaps in its fabric, awkward holes in its roads, battered and shattered beyond repair, with its citizens bewildered, roaming the streets without purpose, trying to affect an air of normality, knowing that things would never be normal again.
And amidst this upheaval the people of London tried to go about their business, turning a blind eye, cheering themselves with the thought that they were the only survivors of a collective madness.
After a spectacular trial, avidly reported, Bernard was sentenced to death for murder. Maurice failed to revive the business, and after a time Green’s closed down, Maurice and Bella filing for post-war compensation.
Charlie spent the rest of his war not knowing whether he was mad or not. He was categorized as the lowest order in the Army’s scale of usefulness. So he scraped zinc pots with sand, peeled mountains of potatoes, cleaned fatty ovens.
Rosa Tcherny went to Wandsworth Road for a short while, but she didn’t stay at Green’s when she found that she was pregnant with Charlie’s baby.
PETER OWEN PUBLISHERS
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First published in Great Britain 2007 by
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© Allen Saddler 2007
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Apart from historical people and events, the characters and incidents depicted in this book are fictional. Any resemblance to any person living or dead is purely coincidental.
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