The Gigantic Shadow Page 6

  ‘But that’s terrific. To have slept with a man who’s killed someone, really killed someone I mean, not just in the war. There can’t be many girls who have done that.’ She saw the expression on his face. ‘Now you hate me. But I want to live, you see. I want to experience everything, do things people haven’t done before. Isn’t that important?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘To hold life and squeeze the last drop of experience out of it – like that.’ She made her small red-nailed fingers into a fist. ‘I don’t see what else matters.’ She swung her legs off the bed and, frowning fiercely, began to put on her clothes.

  ‘Who’s Roger?’

  ‘Roger Sennett. I’m sort of engaged to him, or at least that’s what my stepfather wants. He’s fun too, but I don’t know about him. I don’t know at all. I don’t think I want to get married anyway.’

  ‘You won’t tell Roger about the terrific fun you had this evening?’

  She shook her head. Irony and sarcasm were wasted on her. ‘He wouldn’t understand. And anyway, do I want to repeat it? I don’t know.’

  ‘Have you ever considered that I might not want to?’ The question was a vain one, for he knew that he wanted nothing more.

  ‘But of course if you don’t want to see me, why should you?’ she said almost impatiently. She had her dress on and was doing her face now in front of the pocked glass. ‘I’ll just limp out and get a taxi. Don’t bother to come down.’

  He took refuge in boorishness from his unreasonable disappointment. ‘I wasn’t bothering.’

  ‘Oh.’ In the considering look she gave him he felt her own disappointment, and was immediately slightly ashamed. ‘No, don’t bother. More romantic like this.’ She crossed to the bed, kissed him lightly on the cheek, and then moved with an exaggerated hobble to the door.

  Chapter Eleven

  The process of falling in love is often painful. Bill Hunter was thirty-eight years old and, in spite of the time lost in prison, had had affairs with several women. None of these affairs, however, seemed to him to have involved the condition of being in love. How was it manifested? During the time after Anthea Moorhouse’s visit the recollection of her physical presence was like a rash on his skin. In the rusty bath down the corridor he looked at various parts of his body and thought, here and here she touched me, she held my head tenderly in her hands that want to squeeze sensation out of life, my fingers stroked her ears as I said that they were beautiful.

  These thoughts had more of wonder than of sensuality about them, although they were sensual too. He found her face so hauntingly present in his mind that he tried to put it down on paper. He had not tried to draw since winning a prize at school, and now the pencil refused to obey him, so that he created only a caricature of the fine features that were so clear in his mind. The tones of her voice were continually present to him, and he repeated over and over again the phrases she had used, It was terrific, What fun, and the rest. Submerged beneath this feeling went the knowledge that she was what under any other circumstances he would have called a rich bitch, a girl greedy for pleasure who in some way or other would come to a bad end. He acknowledged formally the existence of a girl like that, but refused to identify her with the girl of his imagination.

  He met her on a Monday. On the following morning he read in the paper of ‘Raid on Victoria Dance Hall,’ and learned that the police had arrested the manager and twenty of the people present. Among those arrested was the Honourable Roger Sennett, second son of Lord Broughleigh, and his friends racing driver Paul Makepeace and society débutante Sabina Brownlee. They had all been released on bail.

  He walked round to the public library and looked up Lord Moorhouse in Who’s Who. ‘Chairman Moorhouse Trust Companies,’ he read, ‘Vice-Chairman Enterprise Steel Corporation, director Gaines Steel Co., Iron and Steel Foundings, Paine, Lumb Associates, etc., etc. Chairman Patriotic Fellowship Circle. Publications: The Idea of Empire (1947), Hands Across the Colonies (1953). The personal material was more interesting: ‘s. of Norman Moorhouse, Leeds; m. 1918 Mary Lavinia, o.d. of Charles Grantham, Mill House, Morningford, Herts.: divorced 1937. m. 1943 Mary Elizabeth Hales, d. 1948.’ There was an address in Hampshire, Bassington Old Manor, another in Cavendish Square. There was a telephone number, which he noted down. Then he walked back to the Cosmos and stayed on his bed in a kind of waking dream, evolving fantasies about Lord Moorhouse and evoking again the painful, delightful realities associated with his daughter. That afternoon he took a bus and walked round Cavendish Square, looking at the house in which she lived. Did he hope to see her? or hope that she would come out, accompanied by her stepfather, and introduce him? He could not exactly have said.

  That evening he rang her up. She was out. Would he leave a message? Yes, he said carefully, tell her that Mr William Smith telephoned. Perhaps she would call him back when it was convenient. He gave the telephone number of the hotel. As soon as he had put down the receiver he was disgusted with himself. ‘Call him back when it was convenient’ – what a feeble, vulgar phrase. And to say that he was Mr William Smith – could there be a sillier joke? It was vital in any case, he knew, to keep a sense of proportion, to remember that whatever the affair meant for him, for her it had been no more than an amusing experience. It was possible, likely even, that she would not telephone at all.

  She rang next morning. As he ran down the stairs, past the frowsy chambermaid, to the little cubbyhole in the entrance hall where the telephone was kept, he felt his heart beating with an excitement he had not known since, at the age of fifteen, he had first walked out with a girl. Her voice on the telephone had a tone even lighter than he remembered.

  ‘Hallo,’ she said. ‘Sorry I didn’t ring last night. I was at a party, didn’t get home till all hours.’

  For a moment he found it impossible to speak. Then he was immediately jealous. ‘Was it a good party?’

  ‘Terribly boring. Not a bit like Victoria.’

  He said breathlessly, ‘It was good of you to telephone. I wondered if –’

  ‘Mr William Smith. Such fun. Did you want to suggest anything, Mr Smith?’

  ‘Could we meet again? Should I call for you?’

  ‘Do you mean here?’

  ‘Yes. I could easily do that.’

  ‘Oh no, I don’t think that would be at all a good idea.’

  She sounded quite decided. Terrified that she would end the conversation, he said hastily, ‘Anywhere you like.’

  ‘Why not the same place?’ she said carelessly. ‘At three o’clock.’

  ‘If you like. But I could easily meet you somewhere else if you wanted to.’

  ‘Three o’clock. Got to go now. Goodbye.’ And she was gone.

  Thus began for him an agonisingly painful period of days and weeks. There was a particular image of Anthea in his mind, and it was connected, as he vaguely understood, with the unrealised image of himself, of the life from which he had been cut off by the revolver shot so many years ago. He saw them doing so many things together, visiting Kew Gardens, the Tower of London and Battersea Fun Fair, feeding the ducks from the bridge in St James’s Park, listening to the speakers at Marble Arch, going to the sea, spending together days bathed in the sunlight of a primitive innocence pervaded by the presence of physical love. But reality was different. Reality was the squeaking bed at the Cosmos, the bed that was such fun. Reality was this girl who seemed possessed by a wild exhilaration of the senses in which she fought, bit and scratched him. What she wanted was either to come to the Cosmos, or to meet him in dirty little clubs where they met what she called amusing characters, to talk and drink with them for hours, and then return to the Cosmos.

  The hotel itself had a fascination for her, and she asked endless questions about its population of ponces, tarts and their clients, with one or two oddities thrown in like boxers down on their luck and faded old young men grubbing a living out of films or the theatre.

  ‘Don’t you see, Bill, it’s life itself, what goes o
n here,’ she said. Once she angered him by saying that she wished she had had his experience of prison. He told her that she talked like a stupid child, that prison life was utterly destructive of everything decent and sensitive in the personality.

  She was unimpressed. ‘It doesn’t seem to have destroyed the sweetness and light in you, Mr Smith. Rather encouraged it, I should say.’

  There were days when the wild irrational gaiety which he thought of as her chief characteristic was totally absent, and was replaced by a morose misery that deeply touched him. On these days her physical appearance changed, the fine features became drawn and unnaturally pointed, and there seemed to be a pleading look in her eyes, as though she were asking him to procure for her something she knew to be unattainable. On days like these his presence seemed to bring her a sort of peace. They would not make love, but she would sit with her legs crossed on the bed and talk about her life at home, the way in which she had been spoilt by her stepfather, and how much she disliked Roger Sennett.

  ‘Daddy wants me to marry Roger. He makes me call him daddy, though he’s not my father.’

  ‘Yes, you told me that.’

  ‘It’s a good old family he says, he’s keen on that like most self-made men. You knew he was a self-made man, that’s what they call it, isn’t it absurd?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘His father was a barber, did you know that?’

  ‘No. Does it matter?’

  ‘It doesn’t matter a tuppenny damn to me,’ she said unconvincingly. ‘But it makes me laugh to think what he’d say if he knew about us.’

  ‘What would he say?’ he asked curiously.

  She shivered. ‘I don’t know. He’d – I don’t know. And Roger too. Roger would just go wild if he knew about you.’

  ‘He doesn’t know anything?’

  ‘If he did he’d kill me. Or you.’ She shivered again.

  ‘Why does your stepfather want you to marry him, if you don’t want to.’

  She bit a red fingernail. ‘It’s hard to explain. I’ve had a terrible life. I’ll tell you about it one day.’

  The statement seemed to him, from the viewpoint of his own life, naïve, absurd even. She said hotly, as though he had contradicted her, ‘It’s true. You can laugh, but it’s true. When I was eleven years old I ran away with a circus, didn’t come back for three days. Daddy almost went crazy, offered five thousand pounds reward, had the police out dredging canals and all that.’

  ‘He’s fond of you, then.’

  ‘He wanted a son.’ She spat out a bit of nail, looked at him out of the corner of her eye. ‘Divorced his first wife because they didn’t have any children – I mean, that was the real reason. He hoped my mother would have a child by him, but she never did.’

  ‘But he loves you,’ Hunter repeated. ‘I should have thought it might have worked the other way – he could have hated you.’ Again there was that sidewise glance, again he had the sense of something not said, of some meaning beneath the surface of the words.

  ‘Oh, he loves me all right.’ She paused. ‘In his own very special kind of way. He wants to own me, wants to run my life. Would you believe it, I don’t get an allowance, have to ask him when I want money. I’m twenty-three. Isn’t it just crazy, isn’t he a crazy man?’ She went on: ‘But I fool him. I get money. I do what I want.’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘I’m here with you, aren’t I?’ The look she gave him was almost sly. ‘I hate him, most of the time. I hate him and want to hurt him. But then I love him, too. Or I like him. He’s nice. Do you understand that?’

  The fact was, as he readily admitted to himself, that he did not understand it or her, that the agonies of spirit she manifestly endured had to him no adequate cause. There were times when she clung to him weeping, and asking him not to let her go. To be regarded by a woman as a pillar of strength was to Hunter a sensation so strange that it gave him a sort of intoxication of pleasure, and pity was joined to the sensual and idealistic love he felt for her. At such times she would talk wildly of committing suicide. Looking with affection at the wretched room in the Cosmos she would say, with no apparent consciousness of absurdity, that it was the nearest thing to home she had ever known.

  On one such occasion he began to laugh. She turned on him fiercely. ‘Oh, you’re a fool. You’re just a fool, Bill Hunter. You’re so proud of having been in prison. You think you know it all, and the fact is you don’t know anything.’

  He shrugged, as a substitute for saying that if she liked to believe that she was welcome to do so.

  ‘Do you understand what it is to have the things you love destroyed?’ she asked. ‘I had a dog once, a spaniel puppy named Troy. I loved that dog more than anything. When I came home from school after my mother died, I was thirteen then, I found that Daddy had had Troy put down. He’d bitten some neighbour’s brat who had been teasing him. What do you think of that?’

  Hunter shrugged again, to suggest politely that he thought nothing at all of it.

  ‘It seems silly to you, I expect. You’re the kind of cold-blooded bastard that it would seem silly to.’ And she asked again, ‘Do you understand what it is to love someone and hate them at the same time?’

  He said slowly, ‘I don’t think I’ve ever loved anyone before you. And I don’t want to hurt you. If I ever do, it will be by accident.’

  During the conversation they had been lying on the bed. Now she rolled over and, burying her head on his chest, began to cry. He tried to raise her head, but she would not look at him. He stroked her black hair. It was some time before she lifted her head from his chest. ‘You don’t want to hurt me. You really mean that, don’t you?’

  ‘But of course I do,’ he said wonderingly.

  ‘You’re the first one.’ She clung to him, weeping, in an ardour of self-abasement that made her kneel and kiss his hands and feet. ‘I love you,’ she cried out despairingly, as though she expected contradiction. ‘I really love you. What do you want me to do to prove it? Ask me and I’ll do it. Anything, anything.’

  On the following day she talked to him about her mother and father. ‘You know I said you were the first one who didn’t want to hurt me. It wasn’t true. My father never wanted to hurt me. He did hurt me, but he never meant to. He was Norman Hales. My mother was Mary Hales.’

  ‘I seem to remember your mother’s name,’ he said uncertainly. ‘But I don’t know why.’

  ‘Christ, you are an ignorant bastard. Where were you brought up?’

  ‘For ten years I was brought up in prison,’ he said mildly. Then he remembered Mary Hales. It was as though a membrane covering and checking the flow of memory broke with the words. He saw again the hall into which they were marched every Thursday for film shows and concert parties. There was always something furtively exciting about those Thursdays. It was not simply that the darkness provided opportunities for exchange of news and the passing of tobacco, but that the two hours during which they were out of their cells always held, for Hunter, an illusion of freedom. In fact nothing ever happened on these Thursdays, there was never any riot or attempt at escape – and if there had been the attempt must have failed, for the hall was packed with warders – yet about those two hours of pretended normality there was undoubtedly the uneasy smell of spurious freedom. It was on one of the Thursdays that Mary Hales, a pretty, fragile blonde, had come down, sung some songs and done a comic sketch as part of a show called – what had it been called now? – the West End Follies. The men had talked about her and the other women, making as usual vivid use of their imaginations. She came back clearly to his mind, a small woman with a pleasant, unremarkable voice and a kittenish sense of comedy, who seemed nervous of her own daring in entering a prison, and yet had something sexually flirtatious in her manner. ‘I remember now. She came down once, took part in a show I saw in prison.’

  ‘She was a star, a real star. In musical comedy, I mean. She was beautiful.’

  Beautiful? He suppressed the words on his
lips, that she had not been nearly so beautiful as her daughter, and said humbly, ‘But I don’t remember your father.’

  ‘He was a producer. Norman Hales Productions. The Girl from St Louis, Song of the Clans, The Girl from Way Back, Esmeralda Went Dancing.’ She spoke the names reverently. ‘Mummy starred in some of them. They were all successes. He had a magic touch. Everyone said so.’

  Hunter remained silent and she went on talking dreamily, as though he were not there.

  ‘Norman was a most wonderful person. I always called him Norman, he didn’t like being called daddy, said it made him feel old. We had a marvellous life, the three of us. They took me about with them everywhere. All over England, France and Italy, once to America. Lots of different hotels, restaurants, always gay, exciting people.’

  And you say this room is the nearest thing to home you’ve ever known, Hunter thought in pity. When he spoke, it was to ask a question. ‘You said he hurt you. How did that happen?’

  Her face was turned away. ‘He never meant to hurt me.’

  ‘You said that too.’

  ‘But he was attractive, you know, attractive to women. He had lots of affairs. Sometimes he would go off, we wouldn’t see him for a month perhaps. Mother used to cry.’ She said rather fiercely, ‘I never cried. I knew he’d come back.’

  ‘He loved your mother.’

  ‘He loved me,’ she said emphatically. ‘When he came back he’d just come into the flat – we stayed in lots of flats then, or that’s the way I remember it – throw his hat on to a peg and say, “Hallo, Chip, remember me?” That’s what he called me, Chip. He’d always come back loaded with presents for both of us, and it would be just as though he’d never gone away.’

  ‘He’s dead, isn’t he?’

  ‘He was killed in March, 1941. He was walking along during a raid, and a warden told him to take cover. He said – the warden told us about it afterwards – “Thank you for your advice, my dear sir, but I’m already late for an appointment, and I’ve made a private arrangement with the Germans that they won’t bomb the particular district I happen to be visiting. They keep a note of my movements, you know, Lord Haw Haw looks after me in person.” He was killed two minutes later by a piece of flying shrapnel. They thought it was from one of our own guns.’