Chapter 16 #2
In Hyde Park he always, always stopped before each statue, no matter how obscure the military figure, and took off his hat to pay his respects.
Tom would stand nearby, feeling awkward, because Gordon was punctilious about everything to a degree that Tom sometimes found embarrassing – he suspected if they’d been schoolmates he would have pointed at Gordon and yelled, ‘Swot!’ But at the same time he realized he was proud of his friend, who was so sincere in his emotions.
His father was too; most people weren’t.
‘Do you like London?’ Tom asked him, about a month after he’d seen Gordon and Jenny talking.
They were walking through Green Park. Gordon threw some patty crumbs to a pigeon. ‘Why do you ask me that?’
‘I don’t know. I want to know what you think. I’m not sure if I like it.’
‘How?’
Tom stopped and looked at the gently undulating park, the trees edged with new green growth, the rows of striped deckchairs, the flag fluttering from Buckingham Palace in the distance. ‘I feel I’m in a film all the time. And it’s not a film about me. It’s not who I am.’
Gordon bent over to pick up a tennis ball and hurled it towards two young players with a smile. ‘So who are you, then?’
Tom shrugged. ‘Dunno.’
Gordon nodded at a woman passing by. She had messy blonde hair, rolled-up jeans, flat velvet shoes, a tailored jacket with a velvet collar and an orange scarf knotted round her neck. She was smoking a cigarette. She smiled at Gordon. Gordon smiled at her.
Tom cleared his throat. ‘Is it hard to meet girls? Can you tell me how to, when the time comes?’
Gordon let out a shout of laughter. ‘Oh, my word. Yes, I can do that. When the time comes.’
‘Is it hard, though?’
‘No, it’s not hard. You don’t need to worry about that yet, okay?’
Tom sunk his hands into his pockets; there was a chill in the air.
‘Okay,’ he said, trying not to think about Joy, the girl at the fold-up fruit-and-veg stall on Portobello who sometimes helped out her dad and who had pink plump lips and a shape to her that made him feel embarrassed. ‘I want to, though.’
‘Oh! Child, there’s time for that. But I tell you, when I first came here, in the war – oh, boy.’ He trailed off, as if lost in reminiscence. ‘Oh, boy,’ he said softly to himself.
‘Was that when you met Jenny?’ said Tom curiously.
‘It was. She was beautiful back then, you know? And your mum too. We were all together, you know that. I was arriving to stay at Sevenstones – you still not been there, have you?’
‘They don’t go any more. Jenny said she wished she had a reason. But she doesn’t. The place is just standing there empty.’
‘Shame.’
‘Tell me about it. Tell me about my mum and dad.’
‘Ah.’ Gordon smiled. ‘The first time, your mother and father were just leaving when I met them. That was the rule, see? You gave way to the next party at Sevenstones. Anyone who needed it, no questions asked, no regrets the following day.’
‘Who did you come with?’
‘I came with an American girl, Teddy.’ He nodded, speaking fast. ‘I knew her, and she knew Jenny. She made me drive her to Sevenstones. That’s where I met your mother.
In a field, waist high with those large daisies, you know?
She was sitting on a swing, with your dad, and she was whittling in wood.
’ He screwed up his eyes. ‘Some spoons, if I remember rightly.’
‘My mother whittled?’
‘Oh, sure. Did you know that?’
Tom wasn’t sentimental about his mother. He wasn’t old enough to see the loss that had shaped so much of his life. ‘I don’t know many real things about my mother,’ he said. ‘Thanks. And about her and my dad.’
Gordon said gently, ‘Ah, Tom. She used to just … light up when he came in the room. Your father had something magic about him.’
‘Who was Teddy, then?’ said Tom, sifting through the information as an afterthought. ‘I’ve heard that name before.’
Gordon threw the apple core in the air. He caught it, whistled and took an extra bite out of it. ‘A friend of mine. That’s how I met your aunt.’
‘Was she – from Trinidad?’
‘No, boy. American.’ He chewed and swallowed.
‘How did you know her?’
‘I was working on tanks for the Americans, down in Dorset before Exercise Smash. She knew Jenny; they’d driven some bigwigs around together down to Dorset, I think.
Jenny told her to bring me. That’s how I first came, like I say.
And Tom,’ he said, shaking his head, ‘Sevenstones was the kind of place where anything goes. I was myself, in the war. I knew that was where I was supposed to be. We all did, at Sevenstones. Music on, dancing till we were half dead, laughing with all that champagne, acting like fools, boy, and we were all … ourselves . That’s it.
Not what other people wanted us to be. It was that kind of place.
I hope you go there sometime. I got back to Trinidad, you know, after the war, and I couldn’t stand to be there no more. I’d changed.’
‘So you wanted to come back,’ said Tom.
‘When I sailed back in ’48 I came straight here and found a flat – only everything was different. Not the same in peacetime, London.’ And he took out the paper bag in which the patties had been wrapped, plucking out a few last morsels of spiced meat. ‘Not the same at all, Tom.’
Every time they were out together something would happen.
At first Tom thought Gordon didn’t see well, as he didn’t appear to notice the ex-serviceman in his beret with his gabardine belted tightly around him spitting at Gordon as he walked past him, or the gaggle of schoolboys who called Gordon horrible names, threatening him even though they were half Tom’s height, or the young woman with a pram who hissed at him, almost desperately, ‘Just go back home all of you, why don’t you? ’
‘To answer your question, I do like London. I can see myself here for the rest of my life,’ said Gordon, and the simple, easy way he said it made Tom jealous. ‘What makes you feel it’s not for you?’
Tom shrugged. ‘I feel as if I’m waiting.’
‘For what?’
‘For something to happen.’
‘To you, you mean?’
‘Yes,’ said Tom. ‘I can’t explain it. I feel something’s on its way. Something that will change everything. Something I don’t know about yet.’