Jim turned round, as I’d known he would (according to the laws of serendipity), before we’d reached the door. His freckled face was as empty as ever underneath his towering quiff, his mouth working at a piece of chewing-gum like a ruminating cow. He clocked me.
“Why, hello Jim,” Miss Dodd said. “Small world.”
“Evenin’ Miss,” he looked at her and then at the man with her and then back at her again.
“See you tomorrow, Jim. Bright and early.”
The boy nodded, imperceptibly and returned to the jukebox, completely uninterested in dull Miss Dodd (which was how it should be when there was a pretty, little, blonde pony-tailed creature at his elbow).
As soon as we were out of the door and striding down the street, the boss took my elbow in a pincer-like grip.
“Do you believe that?”
“I do, actually. I think he lives around here.”
“Well I sure as hell don’t! Come!”
He hooked his arm through mine and propelled me across the road, despite the fact that the traffic had a green light. Then he practically threw me down some stone steps at the bottom of Putney Bridge.
“Stay!” He demanded, like a cross man to his dog, before disappearing in the direction in which we’d just come.
Of course I’d no intention of staying and had just climbed back up the steps when the boss came charging towards me again.
“He went straight to a public phone box.”
He pointed down the steps again and scowled at me,
“Back!”
So we clattered down the steps together, to where the Thames lapped at her dirty shore in the dark. Oily, black wavelets flickered here and there in the light from a lamppost high on the bridge, breaking against unidentifiable junk and probable detritus from the war (unexploded bombs were suddenly uppermost in my mind). I’d thought of Putney as virtually rural, but the river said otherwise. How close the warehouses and wharves must be: all of the frantic commerce that bled into the waters (the smell of which were overpoweringly sulphurous). The boss indicated right along the water and took my hand.
“This way. Run, Rosa and don’t stop for anything.”
I can’t tell you how exciting it was! We ran along the shoreline - because it was far more of a shoreline than a riverbank and we seemed to gallop along a littered beach at the edge of an eerie, black sea - and my uncle’s hand was warm and firm in mine and I felt so completely happy, if rather breathless. To be honest, it was as if I’d forgotten why we were running.
Then the shots rang out.
“Christ Almighty!” My uncle swore, and then, “Duck!”
So I did, but couldn’t prevent myself glancing behind us. There seemed to be quite a crowd behind us. Quite a gang of them. Not just Jim, but all of the other teen-agers, pony-tailed girls included, and several men for whom Bill Haley and His Comets would not have been their scene. It was an older man wearing a pork pie hat and a short car-coat who was waving the gun about. He shouted something but, thankfully, we weren’t quite close enough to hear; had we been, we’d probably have been riddled with bullets. I imagine he wished us to stop, but that wasn’t going to happen, not in a month of Sundays; we weren’t stopping for anything.
We had run underneath a railway bridge when it became clear that we needed a change of plan. They were gaining on us, you see - I wasn’t as fit as my uncle and was bursting with lack of breath - and the man had taken another pot-shot and the open green space of a park to our right offered scant protection and I couldn’t see how we’d ever throw them off. My earlier enthusiasm was certainly ebbing away, although I still felt cushioned by a sense of dream-like unreality; unable to equate the preposterous idea that somebody was shooting at me with anything I’d ever known in my previous nineteen years of existence. When my uncle came up with a shocker:
“Can you swim, Rosa?”
He had to be stark, staring mad. I was so knocked sideways by the very idea that I promptly stumbled and dropped my handbag. Yes, I could swim and was, in fact, a pretty strong swimmer due to my father’s determination that I should master the perfect crawl (owing to a near-drowning incident that had happened when I was a child), but nothing would persuade me to go swimming in the filthy waters of the Thames.
“You must be joking! Haven’t you heard of cholera?”
He shot me one of his swift, stern glances.
“Haven’t you heard of a bullet through the head?”
Then he picked up my beautiful, leather handbag with the gold clasp and lobbed it into the river.
“Let’s lose this thing, first off. Now, skirt, shoes and coat,” he actually smiled, the madman. “Last one in’s a cissy.”
A bullet squealed over our heads and, this time, it seemed awfully real, somehow. I tore my clothes off in two seconds flat and made straight for the water.
It was hideously cold before I’d even made the plunge, but I’d less than a heartbeat of sheer revulsion, of shivering on the shore with the tails of my blouse barely covering my stocking-tops, before he grabbed my hand and ran with me into the water. Over the slimy, green stones, through the scum of disintegrating, splintered wood and detergent froth and unknown horrors hardly worthy of the noble, Latin terms ‘flotsam’ and ‘jetsam’; it was so unpleasant in every single way that I very nearly turned around and took a bullet. And the water was beyond cold, stinging those bits of me that it could get at, which were more and more, as my uncle dragged me in and seemed to fling me at the river, loosing me from all bearings until I was all alone, trying to remember my perfect crawl. It was horrible . . and then . . it wasn’t.
Because the magic happened, the magic that only water can conjure. Everything that was unpleasant and shiver-making transformed into its opposite as I swam. Even my lungs expanded, so that I was able to breathe properly; it felt like the longest time since I’d taken a proper breath. The Thames spread out a silver pattern upon her black surface, a path for me to follow through her immense treasury of water. There, ahead of me, was my uncle’s head - his well-oiled black hair making him look like a bobbing seal - turning to see how I was doing. I think I actually laughed. All at once there was so incredibly much space; for the sky seemed to unwrap above the river as if only here did it have the freedom to show itself. Were there stars over London? I’d never noticed them before. Or were they streaks of sleet snow, glittering against so much black?
I swam as if it were the easiest thing in the world, not bothering to look over my shoulder. Bullets may have spattered on the water but, if they did, the Thames gulped them down, silently. Everything was so quiet that night. Sometimes a floating spar of wood bumped, gently, against a leg or an arm, before it went on its way. There were no river police and surprisingly little river traffic of any kind. Even the tides seemed to have slowed to the gentle pull of blood through an artery and there was no need to fight the river; one arm and then the next did their job without me, while I was free to gaze and gaze.
“Rosa!” Uncle Tristram called, nearer now. “Rosa! Grab the cable. Do you see it? The cable from the barges. Grab it as soon as you can manage!”
A flotilla of flat, black barges were moored up together and I stretched out to catch the wire cable. It held me and I waved in the water, like seaweed. As if from a deep sleep, I came to, blinking away droplets of river. My God . . we’d reached the other side! My legs snared on a mooring post and I kicked myself free, only to find that I could touch the stones on the ground with my toes.
I waded out of the water feeling like a cold-blooded being arriving in a new, warm world.
He was there to greet me, as if I’d swum alone.
“Well done, Gypsy. I knew you’d make it.”
A line from a play I’d seen bubbled up into my brain. Peggy Ashcroft in ‘Twelfth Night’[6].
“What country, friends, is this?”
3. The Journalist
My uncle thought it might be Hurlingham.
“Quick!” He continued. “They’ll be over
Wandsworth Bridge before we know it. Let’s find a taxi.”
I looked down at my sodden white blouse and torn stockings and acres of streaming hair.
“I don’t know that I can ride in a taxi like this, Uncle Tristram.”
“Details, Rosa; you have an unfortunate tendency to get hung up on details. I’ll bribe the driver. Just get a move on, will you? We haven’t got all day.”
We found some steps up from the river and began to run again. We covered the length of Hurlingham Park, negotiating rafts of daffodils and I waddled after my uncle like a duck who is infinitely much better at swimming than running. I wish I could say that the park was deserted and there wasn’t a soul to witness my half-dressed state but, sadly, that wasn’t the case. Heaven knows what they thought, (but then I’m never entirely sure what anybody thinks). Anyhow, nobody called a policeman. Perhaps they thought it was just high spirits. Actually, I didn’t care as much as I probably should have, because I was turning turquoise blue with cold. Honestly, I felt quite ill with it.
When we’d got to the park gates, the boss stopped for a breather and took his bearings.
“This isn’t looking promising.”
He was right, it wasn’t the type of area that taxis regularly frequent. Grim Victorian terraces, with Watney’s pubs on the corner and housewives gossiping on their front steps while the tea cooked, that was the kind of territory we were in. A miasma of thoroughly boiled laundry and even more thoroughly boiled cabbage floated over the rooftops. Then it dawned on me that I’d been there before.
“Crumbs,” I exclaimed, “I think I know where we are. We’re down the wrong end of the Kings Road. I’ve got a friend who lives here somewhere. Parsons Green for his sins.”
I took the lead and set off at a determined walk; it was pure agony to stand still in my frozen state - especially when a housewife in curlers and a scarf began to stare at me and make me feel strange - but a brisk walk was my limit.
“Get a move on!” I turned and waved my arms at the boss, looking as stern as possible. “We haven’t got all day, you know!”
Lettice Road, Parsons Green, that was where Magnus lived. It wasn’t difficult to remember because the whole address reminded me of salad. It was a shabby house in a shabby London street and the inside of it was even shabbier, but I liked Magnus and we needed shelter. There was a strong possibility that Magnus might be in the pub, of course, but he wouldn’t have gone further than the establishment at the end of the road. That was partly why I liked him; he wasn’t as hard to read as other people were. Magnus was a creature of habit, of smoke-filled rooms and smudged teapots, black turtle-necks and ink-stained fingers. Of darkness. The only bright thing around Magnus was Magnus, himself.
The boss tapped me on the shoulder at the beginning of Lettice Road.
“Can we trust this friend of yours, Rosa? What does he do?”
“Of course we can trust him, Uncle. If we couldn’t then he wouldn’t be any friend of mine, would he? He was up at Cambridge with me, in his final year when I was just beginning. I got to know him when I wrote a piece for Varsity.”
“Varsity? He’s not a bloody journalist, is he?”
“Um, well, yes, you could say that. He edits a small magazine called A Paler Shade of Red. He puts the whole thing out, in fact: writing, subbing, funny little cartoon, everything. I think the whole magazine actually is Magnus.”
“Whoa . . stop right there. A Paler Shade of what? Is this a home decoration magazine, flogging paint? Or am I right in thinking that your friend Magnus is a bit of a Commie?”
“Possibly,” I pretended to think about it (knowing full well that Magnus was an out and out Lefty, if not your actual, full-throated Commie). “I’d say he leans to the left. But he wouldn’t agree with smuggling uranium anywhere, you can bet your bottom dollar on that, because he’s a ban the bomb man. He’s completely against all nuclear power, and all fighting, for that matter. If he’d been old enough to fight in the war, he wouldn’t have.”
Uncle Tristram looked exasperated and hesitated, as if to hike all the way back up the Kings Road to the land where taxis plied their trade and people fought wars when they were told to.
So, I marched up to the front door of Magnus’ two-room flat and knocked, hard, on it. Magnus opened up immediately, as if he’d been skulking behind the door. He looked like a man who’d been to a funeral and forgotten to tell his hair: layers of black wool and dusty black corduroy, trousers tucked into black socks, hands even swathed in horrible, possibly home-made, black fingerless mittens, and his pink complexion and luminous, strawberry- blond hair perched on top of all that bulk. I looked a bit closer.
“You’ve grown a goatee, Magnus,” I said.
He peered at me and his face got pinker.
“You’ve got no shoes on, Rosa.”
Before I could reply to this polite observation, my uncle made himself known behind me.
“Good evening,” he said, sticking out his hand, “I’m Rosa’s uncle. We’ve taken a tumble in the river and we wondered if we might warm up a bit in front of your fire.”
Magnus hesitated to shake his hand and I could tell that he had my stocking-tops in his head and was striving, manfully, to make sense of them.
“He is, Magnus. My uncle. He’s married to my aunt and all that.”
He clasped Uncle Tristram’s hand, briefly and stepped away from the door.
“You’d best come in then,” he said.
There’s something I’ve neglected to tell you. It shouldn’t make any difference but, life being life and Britain being the class-ridden snake-pit that it patently is, it struck me - as I put on a pair of Magnus’ enormous black slacks and a scratchy, black turtle-neck - that it probably would. You see, Uncle Tristram Upshott is, actually, the Honourable Tristram Upshott because his father is an honest to goodness Lord. And Magnus is from Hull. Of course, Cambridge was over-run with Honourable types but, if I remember correctly (and I always do), Magnus hated all of them. Without exception. I know this might seem a ridiculous consideration, when one has just been faced with international smugglers and gun-toting teen-age gangs, but it was on my mind when I went back into Magnus’ other room.
The place really was a hovel. There were galleys and proofs lying upon every conceivable surface, floor included. On top of the paperwork stood an assortment of chipped mugs, some encrusted with ancient tea-leaves, others swimming with stubbed out cigarette butts. It wasn’t much warmer than outside, either, because Magnus had his gas fire turned down to the merest flicker. A shallow bowl of water stood in front of it, from which a huge marmalade tomcat was drinking thirstily, spraying water from foot-long whiskers. Things were certainly pretty bad if Magnus couldn’t even run to a bowl of milk for his cat (a truly enormous specimen; I’d often wondered whether he had some Scottish wildcat in him). Magnus followed my gaze.
“He’s not supposed to be drinking that,” he said, “it’s to stop the gas drying up the air.”
“I don’t think you’ll find that makes any difference, actually,” commented Uncle Tristram, but Magnus ignored him, ominously.
My uncle had rubbed himself down with a small, greying towel and was standing beside the cat in hopes of a bit of secondary heat.
“I don’t suppose I could trouble you for a cigarette?”
Again, Magnus said nothing at all. Eventually - in his own sweet time - he loped over to a funereal coat, which was slung over the back of a chair, retrieved some papers and tobacco and threw them at Uncle Tristram, who, looking rather surprised, caught them, miraculously, with one hand. It was as if war had been declared.
“How’s the mag. going, Magnus?” I asked, delving into a slew of papers that concealed a battered, Olivetti typewriter.
He scratched his glowing head, “Not so well, man. I’m snowed under just now. It’s going to press tomorrow and I’ve that much to do . .”
“A paler shade of red would, surely, be pink?” My uncle broke in, sticking a twist of a cigarette
between his lips and looking quizzical.
“It would. But that’s not the title of the magazine, man,” Magnus replied, extremely slowly, as if to a kindergarten class.
“ ‘Pinkos’!” Uncle Tristram exclaimed, as if it had just come to him that minute and he thought he was being frightfully helpful. “Now that would be a considerably better title, in my view. That would say what it did on the tin.”
I laughed, nervously.
“We mustn’t keep you, Magnus, not when you’re so busy. It’s terribly kind of you to lend me these clothes; I’ll see they get back to you.”
“Send a servant to deliver them, will you?”
“Hey! That’s not fair!”
He bent his broad, black shoulders over his work. From where I was standing, he looked like a buffalo.
“You and your boyfriend’d best be off, Rosa.”
“I told you! He’s my uncle!” I felt peculiarly hot.
“Pull the other one. He’s hardly older than we are.”
“That’s just . .” I tried to explain, but he interrupted me.
“I’m not interested in what you’ve been getting up to this evening, but, if you don’t mind, can you go and get up to it somewhere else and not in my office?”
“That is just so unfair, Magnus!” Now we were face to face and I may have been shouting. “It’s not true, but even if it was, it’s so square, it’s laughable. I thought you were cool, but you’re not, you’re a complete wet rag . .”
I had so much more to say, but my uncle had begun to laugh and cut me off, just when I was getting into my stride.
“Ha, ha, ha! Wet rag. I like that. The only wet rag around here is me, actually. Sopping wet. Would you turn your damned fire up a bit, man, for pity’s sake? And Rosa, stop shouting please. We’ve heard more than enough out of you. He’s absolutely right to regard this scenario with suspicion; your friend obviously has your best interests at heart. For all he knows, I’ve torn your clothes off you and been chasing you through deepest, darkest Fulham for hours on end.”
The Yellow Glass Page 3