Chapter 21 #2
He and Gordon would go to a café, or a dance club, and it was on these visits that Tom fell in love with Calypso, truly fell for it – not like the thin intense white boys he went to Ronnie Scott’s with who sat and sneered at anything too experimental.
Just as he loved watching the buildings go up around Ladbroke Grove – loved seeing steel girders and concrete breeze blocks, the men in hard hats with large detailed plans on boards – so did he love watching the interplay between the steel drums, the guitar, the percussion, how each musician talked to the other without words, how everything knitted together. Patterns. Beauty. Chaos. Perspective.
He had felt he needed to thank Gordon for the night he lost his sight, but Gordon wouldn’t hear it.
Keen on accuracy as ever, Gordon said, ‘It wasn’t me.
We shouldn’t have been there; we shouldn’t have had to come out to defend ourselves.
You fell well, my boy. You folded yourself up. You fell real well.’
And, as always, Gordon was interested in everything.
Tom wondered when he was ever at home. He was in a chess club that met in a park in Willesden.
He played cricket in Kensal Rise. He went to evening classes, in metal work and French, with some friends from the London Underground at the Working Men’s College in Camden.
And every week he went to listen, and dance, to Calypso in the cafés and clubs around where he lived.
One Saturday, eighteen months or so after he had started at Westminster, Tom was sitting in a café high up Ladbroke Grove with Gordon.
He had had goat curry, and some drink he wasn’t entirely sure didn’t have rum in it; anyway, he had a nice, fuzzy feeling.
He could smell spring in the air, and he was happy.
The night before he’d been to the eighteenth birthday party of Susan, Guy Mannering’s eldest sister, at her family’s house in Eaton Square.
He had drunk two glasses of champagne and then, partly at Antoine’s urging, had asked Susan’s friend Barbara to dance.
Barbara had kissed him, outside on the terrace of the house for ages, pushing him against the stone balustrades, putting his hands on her waist for him then sliding them upwards, so that one touched her creamy cool skin, the swell of her left breast, then she gasped and stepped back, dark eyes full of mischief.
‘Aren’t you naughty,’ she’d called over her shoulder as she’d walked away.
‘Susan and I had a bet about you. Make sure you tell her, if she comes looking for you. You’re delicious, aren’t you? ’
Tom didn’t know what to say to this. ‘Umm.’ He nodded, hating himself. ‘Umm – sometimes?’
‘ Sometimes ,’ he’d hissed to himself in the silence after she stepped back into the room and he was left alone. ‘You bloody idiot. Who says sometimes. For Christ’s sakes, Raven, pull yourself together .’
Having given himself this pep talk, Tom downed a glass of champagne that he found on a side table and strode back into the room, where he almost careened into a young woman.
She had short, dark hair, and was in a fuchsia-coloured tulip-shaped dress.
He’d noticed her earlier, couldn’t remember where he’d met her before.
She had eyes like a doe: black, velvety.
‘Oh! Hello,’ she’d said, smiling at him, her lips parted. ‘It’s Tom, isn’t it? I see why Susan kept saying we had to invite you,’ and Tom had blinked, his vision in his good eye still rather blurred from having someone else’s face pressed up against it.
‘Hello?’ he said cautiously.
She’d raised an eyebrow at him. ‘Evening, Tom Raven,’ she’d said. ‘I’m Celia – Guy’s sister. We were charades partners when you came to us for New Year.’ She mimed racing a chariot, holding the reins. ‘ Ben Hur . Remember?’ Her eyes raked him up and down.
‘Oh,’ said Tom, sticking his hands in his pockets in a pitiful attempt at nonchalance. ‘Wotcher, Celia.’
Wotcher. Celia stared at him, eyes widening.
‘I – er –’ said Tom, wanting to die. ‘Sorry. Of course I remember you. Hello, Celia.’
She gave a gurgle of laughter that caught in her throat and he felt something jump in his heart.
‘You do look handsome tonight. Don’t let Barbara break you in, will you? Guy says you’re one of the nice ones.’ And she’d smiled at him, her lovely dark brown eyes glinting in the haze of the doorway. Tom had swallowed, feeling himself falling, falling far into a pit of something.
He had told Gordon all this, head down, unable to meet his gaze. Gordon slapped him on the back.
‘There you go, boy! What have you done!’ he said with great amusement. ‘Yes, boy! That poor girl, Tom, you best make it right with that first one, so she don’t think you’re going to be calling her up taking her to dances and things.’
‘Oh, no,’ said Tom firmly, thinking of Barbara grabbing one of the band members by the arm and retreating into the little galley kitchen with him. ‘I’m pretty sure I don’t need to do that.’
‘Hmm,’ said Gordon, draining his glass and covering it with his palm. He stared at Tom, seriously. ‘Listen, when it comes to women, listen to me, boy.’
‘What?’
‘You are trouble.’
‘Eh?’
‘Oh, yes, you are, Tom, they like you. Look.’ He nudged Tom and glanced along the bar, to where a young woman was waiting by herself, apparently absorbed in a magazine, but in fact looking at Tom over the front cover.
Tom smiled at her, blushing slightly, then turned to Gordon. ‘Gordon, can I ask you something?’ He lowered his voice a little. ‘With … with girls, I mean. Do you just – act normal? Or should you act in a different way?’
‘Normal, boy! Always act normal. The more relaxed you are, the happier you are. Boy, there’ve been times I thought I’d be dead the next day.
And I’d still act relaxed, because what’s the point otherwise?
I’d drink some champagne, some gin, whatever.
I’d dance. Maybe a dance with a girl. I’d sleep well –’ He gave Tom a quick smile. ‘Then I’d go and fight.’
‘Is this in the war?’
Gordon nodded.
‘At Sevenstones? Girls just – around? All the time?’
Gordon nodded, pushing his cigarette out slowly, methodically. ‘Yes. But we thought we might die the next day: you got to understand that.’ He looked out of the window, as if he were looking into the distance, the past. ‘How’s she doing, your aunt Jenny?’
Tom stared down at his small glass of rum. ‘I don’t know.’
Gordon watched him, then poured himself another glass, and drank it. ‘I don’t see her much these days. When I first came back, I saw her all the time. And, for a while, I was delivering letters to her, from her. But that’s all stopped now.’
Tom said, ‘She has nightmares, Gordon. She keeps saying someone’s name, in her sleep. She shouts it and I can hear it in the room above.’ Tom ruffled his hair, mortified to be saying this to someone. It felt like a betrayal. ‘Teddy. She keeps calling out for Teddy.’
Gordon was staring at him. ‘You serious?’
‘Of course. More and more,’ said Tom, relieved to be finally telling someone. ‘I don’t know what to do. It wakes me up. It’s awful. I can’t help her. I can’t ask her.’
The champagne from the previous night, and the lack of sleep, and the dehydration, and whatever Tom was drinking now, were all conspiring to give him a blistering headache, which he often got when he was tired and his good eye was having to work too hard.
Gordon looked round, his eyes moving slowly, and Tom realized that he had drunk too much. ‘The way they treated her. Wasn’t right, to my mind. Wasn’t right at all.’
‘My mother?’
‘Not your mother, boy. She died and it was tragic. No, your aunt. Jenny and her girl.’
‘What do you mean? Jenny had – a girl?’
‘You’re so green. You don’t even understand. Jenny doesn’t like boys. She likes girls.’
‘Girls?’ Tom had heard of this obviously, was aware it was possible, something one laughed about at school – maiden aunts and games mistresses and the like. But he didn’t actually know anyone like that.
Gordon didn’t even seem that interested in that aspect of it. He said, ‘One girl especially. It was bad. And that’s why your aunt, she can’t live any more.’
Tom shivered. ‘What girl?’ he said.
‘Ah, what can it hurt for you to know that bit. She had an American girl, a WAAF. They were drivers together and they fell in love. I guess that’s how I first knew Jenny, wildly in love.
Her and the WAAF.’ He leaned forwards. ‘She was crazy, you know? Mad at her family, mad at the world. Used to see her at Sevenstones all the time.’
‘Jenny doesn’t seem the sort of person to –’ Tom began. He didn’t know how to finish the sentence.
‘You look shocked, my boy. You have to understand, no one cared about that sort of thing in the war, and especially not at Sevenstones. We were there to dance and drink, be free. Anyone was welcome. Used to see them sitting under the apple tree, like the song. Jenny was so happy. But I knew it wouldn’t last. I knew … Ah, me.’
‘How come?’
Gordon sucked in air through his closed mouth with a whistling sign.
‘It wasn’t reciprocated. Oh, maybe a little.
But the other girl, she didn’t feel the same way.
She wanted passion. And, Jenny, she requires too much.
She always has. She doesn’t really know what she wants, that’s how I see it.
She grew up with a domineering father, an invisible mother, a dashing hero for a brother, and a sister who could do no wrong.
You see? She’s in the middle, although she’s the youngest, but she doesn’t know who she is.
I always felt … she wanted to live through another person, to suck someone dry.
It was long ago. But she’s not over it.’
‘What happened?’
‘The girl got taken away. And Jenny can’t get over it, and she can’t forgive.’
‘What does that mean, Gordon?’ Tom said.
‘It means she lost the love of her life. You’ll know, when you fall in love, you’ll know how it hurts.’
‘But you’ve never been in love,’ Tom said.
‘If you’d seen what it did to them,’ Gordon said, ‘you’d understand why I’m not so hasty.’ He stood up, drained his drink and patted Tom on the back. ‘Goodbye, my boy.’
‘I’ll see you soon,’ said Tom, yet he felt for the first time that something had changed between them.