‘She’s lovely, isn’t she?’
Hugh sighed. ‘Dad, just stop. I’m tired, I could sleep for a month – I’m not interested in her.’
‘Then why come with us tonight? Henry can manage quite well on his own.’
Hugh looked at Henry’s empty chair. ‘I hurt him, didn’t I? I didn’t mean to. I suppose I’m out of practice when it comes to dealing with men like him.’
‘Oh? I thought the navy was stuffed with queers. I would’ve thought you’d get plenty of practice.’ More harshly he added, ‘Anyway, Henry loves you like a father. Maybe if he had been your father you wouldn’t be so bloody …’ He seemed lost for words and Hugh looked at him.
Levelly he said, ‘You haven’t asked me how Mum is.’
‘How is she?’
‘Fine.’
Wanting a drink, Hugh turned towards the bar. The same bunches of dusty wax grapes and vine leaves hung from the walls, looking less exotic now than when he was a child and ice cream was on the menu. They sat on the same plush-covered banquettes he remembered itching against his short-trousered legs and the same posters of Pisa and Rome curled their corners from the walls as red candles cascaded wax down the sides of wine bottles. Only one thing had changed – the man who had been proprietor then, who had pinched his cheek and smiled his rapid, incomprehensible endearments, had been interned on the Isle of Man. He’d died there, so Henry told him. Hugh sighed, trying unsuccessfully to feel anything but exhausted.
Failing to catch the waiter’s eye he turned to his father. ‘Do you want a Scotch?’
‘No, I’ve had enough.’
As Henry came back Hugh said too heartily, ‘You’ll join me, Henry, won’t you?’
‘Will I? In what?’ Henry and Mick exchanged a wry look. Irritated, Hugh turned away.
Nina Tate sat down beside him. She touched his arm briefly and at once turned her attention on his father. ‘Would you mind if your son and I go dancing?’
Hugh laughed, astonished. ‘Shouldn’t you ask me first?’
He felt her foot brush against his ankle; she had taken her shoe off and her silk-stockinged toes worked their way beneath his trouser leg. To Mick she said, ‘Thank you for this evening.’
On the street outside the restaurant Hugh said, ‘I’m not a very good dancer.’
The girl linked her arm through his. ‘Come on,’ she said. ‘I’ll teach you how to jive.’
On the Empire’s dance floor, Nina rested her head against Hugh Morgan’s shoulder. The lights had been dimmed for the last, slow dance, the spinning glitter ball casting its shards of light at the dancers’ feet. From the stage the singer crooned, ‘I’ll be seeing you, in all those old familiar places …’ Nina closed her eyes, remembering that this was one of Bobby’s favourite songs, that one September evening in 1940 she’d noticed him leave a dance as the band began on its opening bars. Outside a bright, full moon hung low in a troubled sky, and she’d watched him gaze at the racing clouds as the music played on without them. Years later he told her that fear would charge at him out of the blue, a huge monster of a feeling that left him feeling flattened and useless. That night he’d turned to her and smiled, his eyes dark with exhaustion. ‘Sad songs,’ he said. ‘Shouldn’t be allowed.’
In the Empire the singer drew breath for the last verse. Soon the lights would come up and she would be revealed, smudged and dishevelled in the merciless brightness designed to discourage lingering. She couldn’t allow Hugh Morgan to see her like that and so she stepped away from him, smiling fleetingly at his questioning face. Opening her bag she took out the cloakroom ticket and held it up in explanation. ‘Shall we avoid the queue?’
‘May I see you home?’
As the hat-girl handed them their coats, Nina glanced at Hugh. Thinking about Bobby had made her feel as vulnerable as he was – as though she wasn’t wearing knickers and everyone could see through the flimsy fabric of her dress. She put her coat on quickly, bowing her head to fasten its buttons. When she looked up again he was watching her, a good-looking, wholesome man, certain of sex. In the dance hall, she’d noticed other women casting sly glances over the shoulders of less glamorous men, their eyes lingering on his face. Nina could tell what they were thinking from their smiles: too handsome. Such good looks were almost preposterous.
She turned up her astrakhan collar. ‘It’s only a short walk,’ she said. ‘Not far.’
Hugh Morgan was tall as well as handsome, broad and muscular as a navvy, his skin tanned. She’d always imagined sailors as small and lithe. She supposed she’d seen too many films in which agile boys climbed the rigging of sailing ships, quick as monkeys. But the navy didn’t have sails any more, just the industrial metal of battleships. In the newsreels the ships were vast and slow and looked invincible. Lieutenant Hugh Morgan would be at home on such a deck.
In her bed he slept on his back, a sheet gathered at his groin. On his left arm, close to his shoulder, a Chinese dragon roared fire, its eyes bulging malice, its tail twisting to a devil’s point. He’d smiled as she’d traced her finger over it. ‘I was drunk. I wanted an anchor.’
‘Too dull.’ She drew her hand away, sitting back on her heels.
He’d reached up to cup her face in his palm. After a moment he asked, ‘Why did you come to Dad’s party?’
‘I wanted to meet him. Ever since I first read his poetry –’
He laughed, shutting her up. Fumbling on the bedside table for his cigarettes, he’d glanced at her. ‘Have you read the new book?’
‘Of course.’
‘I haven’t. Not a single line.’
Still sleeping on his back he snored, a noise that broke into garbled speech. She sat up, taking care not to wake him, and shrugged on the silk robe with its pattern of Japanese gardens. In the corner of her bed-sit she set the kettle on the single gas ring and stood over it, ready to turn off the heat as soon as its whistle sounded. Above the sink her window looked out over the huddled rooftops of slums, the crooked line broken where bombs had dropped. She could see the dome of St Paul’s in the near distance, so unaffected by the surrounding destruction that there was talk of divine intervention. Such talk made her feel weary. She rubbed at a sticky spot on the glass; a few days ago she’d removed the strips of tape a previous tenant had criss-crossed over the pane, the process a chore rather than the ritualistic celebration of the war’s end she’d imagined it would be. In the end, there had seemed nothing to celebrate.
For the whole of VE Day she had stayed in her room. Below her window crowds sang and cheered and she imagined strangers embracing on the street. Later a fight had broken out, American voices cursing like film gangsters, a lone police whistle sounding frantic, foolishly impotent. There was a noise like a gunshot, a car backfiring or a firework kept safe for the duration, exploding for the victors. All the same, in the morning she’d expected to see a body sprawled on the pavement, blood thick as tar in the gutter. She’d kept the blackout curtain closed tight, keeping the revelry at bay, and thought about Bobby enduring yet another operation on his hands. She hoped that the streets around the hospital were quiet, that someone would explain to him when he woke from the anaesthetic what all the fuss was about. After an operation he was confused and anxious and she’d wished desperately to be at his bedside, at the same time guiltily relieved that she wasn’t.
The kettle whistled shrilly and the stranger in her bed garbled a command from his sleep. Turning off the gas, she stayed very still, watching to make sure he slept on. At last, reassured, she made weak, black tea, sweetening it with the last of her sugar ration before taking Dawn Song from her bag. Curling up in the room’s only armchair she began to read.
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The Boy I Love
In Marion Husband’s highly accl
aimed debut novel, the first of the trilogy completed by All the Beauty of the Sun and Paper Moon, war hero Paul Harris returns from the trenches and finds himself torn between desire and duty. His secret lover Adam is waiting for him but so too is Margot, the pregnant fiancée of his dead brother.
Set in a time when homosexuality was ‘the love that dare not speak its name’ Paul must decide where his loyalty and his heart lie.
Paper Moon
The passionate love affair between Spitfire pilot Bobby Harris and photographer’s model Nina Tate lasts through the turmoil of World War Two, only to be tested when Bobby is disfigured after being shot down. Wanting to hide from the world, Bobby retreats from Bohemian Soho to the empty house his grandfather has left him, a house haunted by the secrets of Bobby’s childhood. Here the mysteries of his past are gradually unravelled.
Following on from The Boy I Love, Marion Husband’s highly acclaimed debut novel, and All the Beauty of the Sun, Paper Moon explores the complexities of love and loyalty against a backdrop of a world transformed by war.
All the Beauty of the Sun Page 29