by Rosie Thomas
‘Oh, I don’t know,’ Julia answered light-heartedly. ‘Easier than hammering a typewriter all day. Or selling fourteen pairs of shoes.’
Mattie cocked her head.
‘Listen.’
It was music, drumming out somewhere below their feet.
‘Mmm.’ Julia tried out a few steps on the pavement. ‘And look.’
There was a dingy doorway sandwiched between two shops, with a temporary-looking notice pinned to the door.
NOW OPEN! THE ROCKET CLUB.
That was how they stumbled across it.
They had been heading round the corner to Cy Laurie’s, but the Rocket was there and in its opening week it was offering free membership to girls. Mattie and Julia didn’t need any more encouragement.
A flight of uneven steps led down to a white-painted cellar. There were tables around the walls, a bar selling soft drinks, and travel posters stuck on the walls for decoration. There was a trad jazz combo just hotting up, and people spinning and whirling in the white space.
They forgot everything, and launched themselves into the dance.
It was easy to forget, in those days.
The club filled up, and the heat and the pulsing rhythm and the exhilaration of dancing swept them up and created a separate, absorbing world. They danced with anyone who asked them, not noticing whether they were young or old or white or black, and when the supply of partners temporarily dried up they danced with each other.
It was a long, hot night and it went like a flash.
At a table against the wall, from behind a stub of candle jammed into a wine bottle, Felix Lemoine was watching them.
There were lots of girls a bit like them, he thought, but there was something about these two that singled them out. They were striking enough to look at, although their clothes were grubby and looked home-made. The taller one with the dark hair had an angular, arresting face that was almost beautiful, and a thin, restless body. Her friend was plainer, but her foaming mass of hair shone in the candlelight and she was a better dancer. She moved gracefully, holding her head up.
It wasn’t their appearances that interested him, Felix decided. It was their vitality. He could almost feel the crackle of it from where he sat. The two girls were absorbed in themselves, in their dancing and the world they had created, and they were careless of everything else. Felix liked that carelessness. He had already identified it as style.
He took a notepad and pencil out of his inner pocket, and began to draw.
When the drawing was finished he went on sitting there. It didn’t occur to him to ask one of them to dance.
He just watched, as he always did.
Two
It was quiet in the studio. The Saturday afternoon life class was an unpopular option. The model was a woman, and she had been sitting for an hour. Her face was expressionless and her body looked flaccid, Felix thought, as if she had gone away somewhere and left it behind. Her long hair was pinned up on the top of her head to show the lines of her jaw and throat. He drew carefully, shading in the coils of hair. That was easy enough, but the rest of her body was more difficult. The soft heaviness of it made him feel uncomfortable, wanting to look away instead of spending another whole hour staring at it.
He glanced around at the handful of other students. They were drawing intently. The tutor strolled between them, watching. When he reached Felix’s chair he stopped and murmured, ‘Your execution is good, Lemoine, but there’s no feeling. Loosen up.’
Felix mumbled his reply, and the tutor looked at the big clock on the wall. He nodded briskly to the model. She stood up, stretching unconcernedly, and pulled on a pink wrap. Then she lit a cigarette and unfolded a newspaper. She would rest for fifteen minutes and then resume her position.
Felix put his pencil away. He waited until the tutor was on the other side of the room, and then he slipped outside. Two of the other students followed him.
‘Coming outside for a fag, Felix?’ one of them asked cheerfully.
‘No, thanks. I think I’m going home.’
‘Yeah. Bit of an old dog, isn’t she? See you Monday, then.’ They strolled away with their jackets over their shoulders and their hands in the pockets of their jeans.
Felix went outside. The air smelt hot and tarry, but the faint breeze was welcome after the enclosed studio. He would walk home, he decided.
Felix liked walking in London. He enjoyed the anonymity of the streets, and the endless variety of faces streaming past him. He set off quickly through the afternoon crowds. When he reached Hyde Park he turned northwards, his pace slowing in the cool beneath the trees. As he crossed the dirt paths little whorls of dust lifted under his feet. He forgot the dislocation that he had felt in the life class, and after a moment he forgot the art school altogether. He wasn’t close enough to home, yet, to need to focus on that either, and his thoughts slid easily, disconnected, as they always did when he was walking. Felix usually felt most comfortable in the vacuum between one place and another. It was being there, almost anywhere nowadays, that was the problem. At Marble Arch he emerged into the traffic again, and turned down the long tunnel of Oxford Street. He was within reach of home now. Another few minutes, and he reached a featureless square to the north of Oxford Street. He paused beside a row of iron railings, and emerged from the journey’s limbo. He thought of home, and Jessie, as he looked across the square at their windows.
Most of the shabby Regency stucco houses in the square were occupied by offices, but a few still housed one or two flats, stranded amongst the solicitors and small import-export companies. Felix crossed to a gaunt, peeling house and went in through the black front door. As he climbed the stairs he could hear a typewriter clicking in one of the offices below, but otherwise the house seemed oppressively silent.
At the top of the last flight of stairs he unlocked a door, and peered across the five square feet of lobby into Jessie’s room. She was sitting in her chair by the window, and the sunlight beyond stamped out her dark, sibylline profile.
Then Felix’s mother turned her face to look at him. ‘Hello, duck,’ she said. ‘You’re early.’
He saw at a glance that the vodka bottle was on the table beside her, and judging by the level in it it was still early in the day for Jessie.
‘Why are you home so early? Not missing classes, are you?’
Still just as if he was a little boy, even though it was Jessie who was the helpless one now.
‘No,’ he lied, ‘I’m not missing classes. I’m hot, I’m just going to change my clothes.’
‘Go on then, be quick. Then come and talk to me. I think it might thunder. I hate thunder. Reminds me of the Blitz, with none of the fun. Oh, you wouldn’t remember.’
Her voice followed him into his bedroom. He took some clean clothes, neatly folded, out of his cupboard. He changed, and combed his black hair.
Jessie went on talking, but she broke off when he reappeared in the doorway. She looked at him over the rim of her glass, her eyes very bright and sharp in her shapeless face.
‘God, you’re a looker all right, my boy,’ Jessie said. ‘Just like your dad. Only a better colour.’ She laughed, her massive shoulders shaking silently.
‘Have you had anything to eat?’ Felix asked.
His mother shrugged.
‘I’ll make some soup.’
Jessie didn’t answer. She wasn’t interested in food any more.
The kitchen was very neat, Felix’s domain. He had made the cupboards and the shelves, and painted everything white.
‘I don’t call that very cosy,’ Julia had sniffed.
‘Well, I like it,’ Felix told her. ‘And you don’t cook, do you?’
He took a covered bowl out of the minute larder now and tipped the contents into a saucepan. He opened a cupboard and peered in at the tidy contents, then took a handful of dried pasta shells and dropped them into the pan. He was humming softly as he worked.
When the soup was simmering he laid a wicker tray with bl
ue and white Provençal bowls. Felix had found the bowls in a little shop in Beak Street, and had brought them triumphantly home. More of his discoveries were dotted about the flat – a tiny still life of oranges in a basket, in an ornate gilt frame, a pair of pewter candlesticks, a batik wall-hanging, contrasting oddly with the battered furniture.
‘Dust-collectors,’ muttered Jessie, not that dusting occupied her at all.
Felix finished his preparations with a twist of black pepper from a wooden peppermill, and carried the tray through to Jessie. He laid the table in front of her, swinging the vodka bottle out of reach. His mother eyed the food.
‘You’ve got to eat,’ he told her patiently.
Jessie ate almost nothing, but her body seemed to grow more bloated and less mobile every day. She could only shuffle round the flat with difficulty now, and she never went outside. She lived for her vodka bottle, for her occasional visitors, who stirred up her already vivid memories, and for Felix. He felt sorry for her, and loved her, and he knew that she kept him prisoner. He watched her like a mother with a child as she spooned up her soup.
‘What did you do today?’ she demanded. ‘Tell me all about it.’
Felix looked out over the plane trees locked inside the railings of the square garden.
‘It was life class today.’
‘Nude model, does that mean? A woman?’
‘That’s right.’
Jessie chuckled coarsely. ‘Must make it hard for you boys to concentrate.’
‘Do you want some bread with your soup?’
She peered at him. ‘You’re a funny boy, sometimes. Are you all right at that college? Doing well at your drawing?’
Felix couldn’t have begun to explain to Jessie that he had no idea what he was doing there. The models embarrassed him, but setting that aside, the aridity of life drawing, and the other exercises that the students were required to undertake, seemed to have no relevance at all to the kind of painting that Felix wanted to do. He needed to shout, and to splash himself on to the canvases in violent colours. At the college he didn’t know how to do anything of the kind. He was silent, and he worked in cramped spaces with tiny pencil strokes. He knew that he had been much happier in the year and a half after he had left school, working during the day in an Italian grocer’s in Soho, and going to night class. But after night class, with his teacher’s encouragement, he had won his place at the Slade, and he had wanted to be a painter for as long as he could remember. Only he didn’t think that any of the work he was doing now would help him with that.
He couldn’t explain any of this to Jessie, who didn’t even understand what painting meant.
‘Of course I’m all right,’ he said softly.
Jessie pushed her food away. ‘Pour me a drop more of the good stuff, there’s a duck.’ Felix filled her glass for her and she sat back with a sigh of relief. ‘That’s better. God, it’s nice to have a talk. I can’t bear the quiet, all day long.’
‘You could listen to the wireless.’ The old-fashioned model in a bakelite case stood in a corner of the room.
‘All that rubbish? Noisy music. That’s what your dad liked. Loud music, all day and all night. We used to dance, anywhere, any time. God, we used to dance.’
Felix let her reminisce. That was what Jessie enjoyed. It was almost all she had, he understood that. He had his own memories, too, as he sat watching her. They were mostly of upstairs rooms, with the sound of music and laughter, and sometimes shouting, drifting up to him. Felix used to sit for hours, drawing and waiting. When Jessie had finished work, at all sorts of strange hours, and if she was alone, she would bustle in and sweep him off somewhere to eat. In those days she had a healthy appetite, and the meals were the best of their times together. Usually they went to one of a handful of cafés, where everyone knew her and greeted her.
‘Hello, Jess, my love. What’s it to be tonight? Extra portion for that Felix, and we’ll see if we can fill him out a bit.’
They would sit down to huge platefuls of eggs and bacon, or sausages and mash. Occasionally when his mother was feeling flush, it would be a restaurant and Felix learned to enjoy lasagne and tournedos Rossini and kleftiko while she told him stories of the day’s work, and the people who drifted endlessly in and out of the Soho clubs. In the comfortable times they were afternoon clubs, that filled the empty time for their customers between the pubs closing and opening again. Felix had a dim impression from his brief glimpses into smoky rooms of a twilight world where curtains closed out the daylight and where men sat around drinking small drinks under Jessie’s benevolent, despotic eye. For a brief period, he remembered, there had been a club called Jessie’s Place, and his mother had talked about sending him away to a ‘proper’ school. He had refused to go, and one of the periodic upheavals had taken over their life, leaving them with no more Jessie’s Place. She had gone to work in a nightclub then, which meant that there were no more cosy suppers together either. Felix came back from school and spent his evenings alone, in one of the succession of rented rooms that they used as home. He listened to music, and drew. He painted too, when he could get hold of the materials. One of Jessie’s regular friends, a dealer of some kind who was still known to Felix as Mr Mogridge, told him that he could be good. Sometimes he brought him paintings, and canvas. It was Mr Mogridge who had introduced him to the night school, and Felix was grateful for that, even though he disliked the man. The rest of his spare time, until he left school and started work in the grocer’s, Felix filled up with walking in Soho. He rummaged in the strange little shops for decorative treasures, and watched the people as they passed him in the streets.
There were other men of Jessie’s too, of course. There were plenty of them when Felix was young, fewer as Jessie aged and her body grew more cumbersome. Felix knew for sure that his mother had once been a singer, and then, because she had not been quite good enough, she had become a club hostess. Not a prostitute. He knew most of the real girls by sight, and quite a lot of them by name, because he saw them in Old Crompton Street and Frith Street, and down at the bottom end of Wardour Street. Jessie wasn’t one of them. She had men friends, that was all. Felix ignored them as far as he could. He had never been able to bear the thought of what they did together. Now, looking back over the years of moving with Jessie from one set of cramped rooms to another, waiting and watching and drawing in exercise books, Felix realised that he must have been a strange, withdrawn, prim little boy. How different from Jessie herself, and how baffling for her.
She had done her best for him, he saw now, through what must often have been difficult times. He had been lonely, but he had never felt neglected. They had never had much, but he had never gone without.
Felix had no memories of his father at all.
He knew that Desmond Lemoine and Jessie Jubb had been married, because Jessie always kept her marriage certificate with her. The wedding pre-dated his own birthday by two and a half months. Apart from that, Felix only knew what Jessie had told him. The wedding certificate stated that he was a musician, but Jessie was unreliable about exactly what sort of musician. Sometimes he was the greatest sax player there had ever been, the forgotten star of every big band of the Thirties. At other times he was a trombonist, once or twice even a trumpeter.
‘He played that sax – or trombone, or trumpet – like an angel,’ Jessie would say mistily. And then she would snort with laughter and add, ‘He looked like an angel, too. God, he was beautiful. A big, black angel.’
Desmond had come from Grenada. Felix knew that he must have been tall, because he had grown to six foot himself, towering over Jessie. But the colour of his skin was only a dim reflection of his father’s blackness.
What would I be? Felix wondered. An angel the colour of cold English coffee? He also wondered if it was his half and half-ness, the awareness of being neither one person nor the other, that gave him his sense of separation.
Desmond and Jessie had met when they were both working in a club off Shaftesbury Aven
ue. Within a few months Jessie was pregnant, and a few months after that her musician obligingly married her. He had also insisted on the boy’s Christian name, although Jessie had preferred Brian.
‘It means the lucky one, girl,’ he told Jessie. ‘We all need a bit of luck, don’t we?’ He disappeared for good about a year after Felix was born.
‘He went on tour, with a new band, up north somewhere,’ Jessie said. ‘Going to be his big break, it was. He never came back.’
‘Why not?’ Felix would demand. When he was small boy his father’s absence made him silently, unnervingly angry.
Jessie would only shrug. ‘Liked his drink, Des did. And pretty faces, especially if they were white ones. Plenty of those in Manchester, or wherever he was. Fell for someone else, I expect. He’s got two or three wives to his name by now, I should think.’
At sixteen, Felix had calculated, he could move away from Jessie and begin to live his own life. He dreamed of going to Rome, or Florence, to find some kind of menial job that would still give him time to paint.
Then, in the same week as the King died, Jessie fell ill.
She had double pneumonia, and for five days Felix was sure that she was going to die. He sat by her bed, waiting again, and all the waiting he had done all through the years of his childhood, seemingly for nothing, welled up out of the past and crushed the hope out of him. Later, he remembered the stillness of that week. All the music had been silenced for the King, and the faces in the street outside the hospital were sombre.
He didn’t believe the doctors when they told him that his mother would live. She seemed so fragile, with all the energy and liveliness that he had taken for granted drained out of her.
Jessie did recover, very slowly, but it was as if her illness had quenched some hope of her own. She struggled back to the current club as soon as she could, but the work exhausted her. The customers noticed and commented on her low spirits. They were allowed, even expected, to have their problems, but Jessie had to be cheerful for them. Not long afterwards she was ill again, and missed more days off work. At last the boss, the latest in a long line of owners to whom Jessie had devoted her energy, took her aside. She would have to be more like her old self, he warned her, his special girl, our Jessie, or he couldn’t promise to keep her on.