Devotion

by Louisa Young

  And Peter? Peter looked so happy, across the room, that Kitty couldn’t rest her eyes on him for fear of burning. She didn’t speak to him, just sat towards the back, almost fainting from the smell of lilies, thinking about the days when she was the only person who was Peter’s friend, when she would go down to the damp cottage in the woods with bunches of buttercups for him, and put his slippers out in front of the fire. She didn’t know if he even remembered that.

  Afterwards, as everyone came out, a man with a camera zipped up, took some pictures, and then grabbed Kitty. ‘You’re the daughter, aintcha?’ She thought he must be the official photographer, and said yes. ‘Miss Kitty Locke?’ he said. ‘So how d’you feel about your dad marrying a fuzzy-wuzzy?’

  ‘Who are you?’ she said, and he said he was Smithers, or something, from the Mail, and it made as little sense to her as his manners.

  ‘’Pparently she entrapped him? Any comment?’ he said. ‘Who’s that other nig nog – that girl?’

  And something in Kitty moved quickly and suddenly into a sort of checkmate. To be put in this position was an insupportable extra insult to her as a result of her father’s behaviour. The way this man was talking and the story he was after was an even more insupportable insult to Mabel and to Iris. Ergo, she was required to be on Mabel and Iris’s side. Not to be would be the most insupportable insult of all.

  ‘Go away,’ she said to him. ‘You’re disgraceful.’

  The man went. ‘All right!’ he smirked, as he went, as if she were a lunatic. He lit a fag, and glanced back at her.

  Horrid, horrid man. A toxic anger rose in her. How dare he?

  How dare they bloody all! Why does nobody look after me?

  She was shaking.

  Parents are meant to look after you. That’s what they’re for. Julia never could. Peter never did.

  Peter and Mabel were standing now at the top of the steps, looking glamorous, cosmopolitan, radiant. That magic web was all around them, glowing, binding them together, excluding all others. A smile, hope, relief, conviction. Look at him there, she thought, and she looked and knew for a fact that she was not the most important person in the world to anybody, and never had been. She turned away to light a cigarette – why yes, I shall smoke on the street! – and so didn’t notice Iris approaching the happy couple, kissing her father and clasping his hands, ignoring her mother; the tightening of Peter’s face, the collapse of Mabel’s as Iris moved on. She was too busy wishing Tom were there. He would loom up and say ‘Everything all right, old girl?’ and scare the journalist off. He would make a face or a joke that would make everything all right. Tom being absent, it was easy for her to imagine that he would do what she chose to imagine him doing. All the right things, for her. Tom is actually devoted to me. He just can’t let his devotion show in public because it would be undignified, and that’s why he has to tease me or ignore me or torment me. Deep down, she thought, we have a very special relationship, based on our shared loss. We are loyal only to each other when the chips are down.

  She grimaced, the twist of eyes and mouth that comes with total concentrated self-absorption, an expression which makes anyone who chances to see it wonder what on earth is wrong with your face, and are you perhaps insane.

  Really? Tom and I have a special relationship?

  He didn’t come back for this, did he?

  You’re still taking buttercups to people who don’t much care, Kitty …

  She had already decided to give the reception a miss. If someone had taken her by the elbow and said ‘Come along with us, Kitty!’ she would have gone, of course, flush with the joy of being wanted – but without that, no. So when, as she slunk rather embarrassedly away, awash with double-negatives about what she really wanted, her elbow was taken firmly by a gloved hand, she looked up in expectation of relief. What she saw was her grandmother, Mrs Orris.

  ‘Granny,’ she exclaimed. ‘I didn’t see you – I didn’t know you were here!’

  ‘I wasn’t here, my dear,’ she replied. ‘I wouldn’t have dreamt of being here. But I wanted to catch you, because I knew how upset you would be.’

  ‘Oh!’ was all Kitty could manage, because her grandmother had never before shown any signs of perception or sympathy, or indeed interest.

  ‘I wondered how you are,’ Mrs Orris said, her eyes keen.

  ‘Well I am rather upset,’ Kitty said. ‘Actually.’ She was thinking of the horrid journalist as much as the wedding itself, the situation.

  ‘Of course you are,’ said Mrs Orris. ‘Let’s go and have a cup of tea.’

  Mrs Orris – Granny – leaned forward, attentive and generous. There was cake, and there were questions. She wanted to know how Tom was; took his non-presence as disapproval of the match, and invited Kitty to come and live with her.

  ‘In Berkshire!’ said Kitty, rather horrified.

  But no, Mrs Orris had taken a small house in Kensington some years ago. She spent about half her time there. There was room for Kitty and indeed for Tom.

  ‘All this,’ she said, ‘is the fault of the War. If the War had never happened, Julia would not have been in the condition she was in, so worn down by suffering that she lost her strength. She would never have died. Peter would not have been so difficult, Tom could have stayed at home. Everything would have been perfectly normal.’

  She dabbed her eye with her tiny lawn handkerchief, and Kitty thought: you are my flesh and blood. You are my mother’s mother …

  Mrs Orris had noticed the scene at the top of the steps. ‘Did you see?’ she said. ‘The girl didn’t even greet her own mother. Must have been brought up in a barn. Or a Jazz Club! Unless the mother is an utter monster, as she may well be.’

  Kitty smiled.

  Neither of them observed that between the two of them they had failed to greet their son-in-law and their father.

  ‘You might like to Come Out,’ Mrs Orris said. ‘As a debutante. I think we could manage that. I don’t suppose it is the sort of thing that Mrs Purefoy would have the chance to think of. It’s so important at times like this that one should do what one can.’

  But Kitty didn’t need these Jane Austen blandishments – she was already persuaded. Her father would hate it.

  *

  A few weeks after the wedding, Kitty surprised Nadine and Riley at tea.

  ‘I have a job,’ she said blandly. ‘I shall be typing, at the Foreign Office. So I thought that as I have a wage and so forth, I’d better be moving out.’

  ‘Are you going to live with – Peter and Mabel?’ asked Nadine. She looked utterly surprised.

  ‘No!’ said Kitty. ‘Of course not. Why would I?’

  ‘Because he’s your father and she’s your stepmother,’ said Nadine. ‘Why not?’

  ‘I’ll be living in London, Nadine,’ Kitty said.

  ‘You’re not old enough! You can’t set out and—’

  Kitty said, ‘I too am setting up a new family home. I too am informing everybody after the fact. You can tell Dad. If I am to put up with his wife and child then he can put up with me living with Granny.’

  She thanked them for everything they had done for her, avoided any emotive language, smiled and kissed them and promised to see them soon. And went. There was absolutely no point sitting about, continuing this unsatisfactory childhood. The chips were going to come down, pretty soon now. She could feel it, even if Chamberlain – and everybody else – couldn’t. This peace, this reprieve – she was unconvinced. It was time to launch out, have all the fun she could, and make sure she was an adult in time for whatever was heading their way. War will form me.

  But wherever she went, whatever she was doing, one thing was on her mind: the daughter, with a mother of her own.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Como, January 1939

  When the moment came, Tom didn’t get back on the train. He couldn’t. After he passed through the bureaucracy he headed up a quiet street to find a quiet place, his torso rigid with pain, his shoulders hunched
in his jacket. He glanced back across at Italy. The trolley bus wires stopped dead, he noticed, at the border. Now what? he thought. Now what? He was in something of a daze by the time he reached a small hotel, and sat in its bleak little parlour. He had no Swiss francs, but seeing his blank look the girl accepted his lire, and brought him coffee. Real coffee! The shock of pleasure at the taste booted him awake, and he smiled, and the girl noticed, and they exchanged pleasantries. It was nice. He felt the absence of the tensions he’d been entangled in, and asked her name. Elise. Thank you Elise. Can you help me?

  She could.

  She brought bandages, told him to save his pyjamas. She bound him tight, and he could tell she had done it before. ‘Fascist villains,’ she said, and he was pleased to hear those words said aloud by a stranger. He took a room, and lay down, and thought.

  Home? He didn’t want to go home.

  He certainly wasn’t going to stay here.

  Back into Italy then, back to Nenna.

  Back into Italy?

  Bertolini’s uncle.

  They wouldn’t do that to an Englishman.

  Oh, you know that, do you?

  Illegal, dangerous. And for what purpose?

  To get Nenna. Nenna who you have kissed. Nenna who has erupted inside your heart. Nenna who it always was, who you love and who loves you, with whom you are in love, who is in love with you.

  *

  Downstairs someone had a radio on, and the songs came drifting up the staircase with the smell of furniture polish: a woman singing about how she took a trip on a train, and thought about you. Peter would know who the band was, and the singer. It was a sweet lilting voice, and one of those perky tunes with sad sad words, and a blue note just waiting there, to do you in … I peeped out the crack and looked at the track, the one leading back to you, and what did I do, I thought about you …

  Nenna Nenna Nenna.

  When he didn’t stop and divert the flood, he burned up at the thought of her.

  He’d kissed girls before. He’d had what one might term a liaison with a frolicsome Cambridge barmaid, which he felt a bit bad about. Someone’s voracious sister had attempted to mangle him at a dance in a way which rendered him a combination of ecstatic and hideously embarrassed. He hadn’t been interested in love, and the power of sex had alarmed him. He hadn’t wanted to do the wrong thing. Especially with Nenna. Well, now, of course, he very much wanted to do the wrong thing, and only with Nenna.

  Now he was away from her, he could let himself think about it. But then equally he couldn’t, because it was—

  Oh God.

  He didn’t understand. This is all so—

  It was simplest to concentrate on saving her.

  But I have no more to bring to the situation. I need more evidence, or ammunition, or whatever it is that I need …

  It occurred to him that he might be able to – ah! Now here’s an idea, possibly even a practical one: a British passport, in her name, on the strength of the marriage certificate! Would that work?

  Well.

  He wrote to her. What else could he do? He was exhausted and fuzzy with the painkillers Elise had brought him.

  My darling,

  God knows what you are thinking. Well, I am all right. I’ve been chucked out, and am now up an Alp, staring back, staring forward. To be precise, I am lost. But my love – are you my love? You are, aren’t you? Good. My love, I’m going to go home and sort everything out. Don’t be scared. Everything will be all right. My heart is very full tonight. There is no doubt in it.

  Masino

  He slept badly that night in the little hotel, body aching and mind whirling with the same old stuff. What will it take for her to accept the level of danger they are in? The boots on the stairs and the banging on the door? Images of Herschel Greenszpan, pale in his pale raincoat, and Gavrilo Princip when he’d just shot Archduke Ferdinand. Bloody great bags under their eyes, looking ten years older than they were. My age, or younger. Thoughts of Riley at eighteen and twenty-two. And in the end: thoughts of her, images of her, memories of her, fear for her, desire for her.

  Each time he moved he rolled into pain. Twice he woke in a panic and had to count his money before drifting back into restless sleep, to dream of her.

  *

  Early in the dawn he looked out the little window, flinging it open to the bright air, and saw the railway line, how it laid out this way, and that, sneaking between the snowy mountains. It was cold, up here. He put his suitcase flat, and opened it to look for a jersey. Inside, on top of his stuffed-in shirts and dog-eared books, tied with string, lay a pile of letters. They were addressed to him. Each had been opened, and, presumably, read.

  He had not put them there. He had not tied them with string. He had never seen them before.

  Tom stared at the little bundle. How kind of the Duce, he thought bitterly, to return my mail.

  He took the letters out. He knew the writing on the top one: his father.

  For a few minutes Tom sat and stared. He read it again.

  Anvedi oh! he murmured. And we think nothing happens when we go away …

  Married!

  And a child!

  His first recognisable feeling, and he was proud of that, was pleasure. A small but definite, warm little spark of delight. Here was a totally unexpected good thing. Peter, doing something normal, and good, which suggested the likelihood of his being happy. Imagine! Peter, happy! But also Peter doing something really very unusual. A child out of wedlock? And a jazz singer?

  But what kind of jazz singer would marry Peter?

  Tom pictured a floozie, perky and coy and boop-boop-a-doop. He pictured a sultry Lana Turner type in satin with a retinue of gangsters. He pictured a breathy suburban dimwit who would put her hand on Peter’s arm and say, ‘Now, dear.’ He pictured Ethel Merman. She would have to be quite old – Peter after all must be fifty by now. Well. Good. A father with a new wife is probably a happy father with someone to look after him.

  And a daughter!

  A letter from Nadine put him right on some of his wonderings. She was American, a wonderful singer – they’d all been to hear her – even Grandpa had come out to the nightclub, and loved it, and had told her how much Rachmaninoff loved Art Tatum, and invited her to the Albert Hall – and that she was negro—

  That did stop Tom. Negro!

  He was just thinking that he would never have thought Peter modern enough for that when he remembered: the family he had seen on the corner of Lexington Street. He closed his eyes and tried to let the image float back – the three figures, their ease, the girl looking back at him.

  Sister.

  And he thought – aah. And then: Good old Dad!

  He found he wanted to know how old she was, this Mabel, and what she looked like close up. Now he pictured others from his father’s record collection: Billie Holiday, Mildred Bailey, Josephine Baker.

  October! They’d be married by now then.

  I have a negro stepmother. It was so surprising, without having the individual woman to look at and form an opinion of, that he found himself feeling slightly dizzy. Is she going to set up at Locke Hill? An American would be strange enough, for the types down there. Even Londoners count as exotic in Sidcup. What will the servants think? What will Granny think! And that thought made him laugh out loud.

  If Nenna and I were to actually marry, we could tell the amusing story at the wedding, of how we ‘married’ to escape the Fascists, and how it was at just the same time as my father married.

  Hang on. I have a negro sister.

  Bloody hell.

  Perhaps Mussolini had heard about that, and that was why he’d been expelled. God, now I’m black by association, as well as Jewish. Though I’m neither. Dear me, we’re a pickle for the Racial Laws, aren’t we?

  She is after all as white as she is black. Biologically. Hmm.

  His ribs really hurt. There had not been a single incidence of pain in Tom’s life that had not been accompanied by the th
ought of Riley. Buck up, fool, he thought.

  That was the only letter from Peter. A thick handful were from Kitty, confused, and cross. He read them briefly, but did not empathise. He leaned back, and closed his eyes, and found that he felt so bloody far away from them that it was difficult to picture their faces without distortion. And these new people. New sister. Take that, Benito! Take that, Adolf! The finest English blood, the Lockes of Locke Hill, with the blood of a negro American, i.e. former slave blood – i.e. perfectly likely to be African royal blood. And think of the gene pool! This being where eugenicists always get it wrong. Blood should be mixed. It’s the etiolated old aristo inbreds who end up with jaws so huge they can’t eat, and haemophilia and so forth. A bit of brand new blood from another continent can only be a strengthener.

  How things can move and change and come round in this world, sometimes even for the better. He wanted to meet this new branch to his family, and hear their story.

  Peter. You old dog.

  My third mother!

  *

  He bought a stamp and thanked Elise courteously when he left. Perhaps he was flattering himself but she seemed a little sorry that he was leaving so soon, so he took the pension’s card and said he’d come back, if ever in the neighbourhood. ‘Who knows!’ he said, and she raised her eyebrows in a parody of the impossibility of foretelling anything in these uncertain days.

  He walked gently back down to the station, suitcase in hand. The pain was nothing when he muttered buck up, buck up to himself. In the square, he posted the letter to Nenna, his breath hanging in the cold. She is there all alone, beginning to realise the danger, nobody to help her. After all this time of trying to persuade her, only now when I have been booted out is she starting to see.

  It made him jumpy.

  Riley would know. London would know. London would be on his side.

  *

  On the train he read the French newspapers, which were rather enlightening after several months of the Italian ones. Every rattling circuit of the wheels’ chorus on the tracks sang him closer to home, to reality, to impossibility, to whatever it was that was imminent but still had not arrived.