Chapter 5 Le Rendez-vous #2
Birds were few and far between in Romilly Street and a threadbare dawn chorus had cranked up and died down again long before Flynn woke.
It was almost nine o’clock, according to the clock by his bedside.
His eyes seemed to be glued shut, and when he did manage to unstick them, a shaft of piercing light between a gap in his curtains lanced his eyeballs.
He spent some time staring at the peeling skin of whitewash on his bedroom ceiling, trying to orientate himself to his surroundings.
He could hear the creaking and groaning of the water pipes in the rest of the building, indicating that his neighbours were more successful than he was at facing another day.
Downstairs, Hilda and Gertie were unusually quiet, as if out of respect for his throbbing head and roiling stomach.
Yesterday, the “one for the road” in the Lamb and Flag must have multiplied into several.
How much had he drunk after dispatching Delphine into her taxi?
Any memory of the previous day ceased to exist for him after that—even before that, if he was honest. The whitewashed ceiling was providing no clues as to what might have befallen him.
His head felt thick and heavy, more like the after-effects of a concussion or a sandbagging than too much alcohol. His throat rasped painfully.
Had someone slipped him a Micky Finn? Although for what possible reason he couldn’t imagine. Perhaps he had been bludgeoned by a thief or run over while he was blacked out. He moved his limbs tentatively and found that, although horribly stiff, they all seemed to be intact.
He had been knocked unconscious once at the very beginning of the Blitz.
He’d been reporting down at the West India Dock, watching a warehouse full of mahogany go up in flames, helpfully fuelled by rum from the neighbouring wharf, when he had been hit on the head by something heavy—falling masonry or a rafter, he never found out.
He was delivered to the door of St. Thomas’s by a butcher’s van that had been pulled into commission as an ambulance.
Sometimes even now the raw smell of butcher’s meat could make his gorge rise.
He had nonetheless dictated his copy from a phone in the nurses’ station, the nurses too overwhelmed with casualties to care, although he did manage to secure the promise of a date with a pretty one who insisted on shooing him back to bed.
The hospital itself was bombed not long afterwards, the nurses’ home all but destroyed.
The pretty nurse didn’t turn up for the date, but Flynn drew no conclusions from that and anyway by then he had succumbed to pneumonia.
He was still mildly delirious when Gerald Barry pitched up at his bedside and offered to send him out East. The sea voyage and the clement weather, not to mention the change of scene, would do him good, he said.
—
Despite his body’s protest, he managed to summon the energy to drag himself out from beneath the covers.
Gathering his clothes from where they lay discarded on the floor, he tried—and failed—to find a fresh shirt, before drawing a glass of water from the kitchen tap and dropping a couple of Alka-Seltzer into it.
The water in his flat always tasted brackish, as if it had travelled through Thames mud to reach the third floor.
Examining his face in the small shaving mirror that was fixed to the wall next to the Ascot heater, he was shocked by what he saw—an impressive black eye, along with another couple of rapidly blossoming bruises.
They were not the kind of injuries you acquired by walking into something, they were the kind of injuries you got by being battered by someone.
After Delphine had left in her taxi, he must have got blind drunk and become entangled in a fight with someone.
Perhaps it was time to lay off the booze.
Had he been robbed? He checked his jacket—his wallet was still there, occupied by a solitary pound note.
He was relieved that his watch was still on his wrist. It was a new one.
For a long time he had been without one.
The Omega that he had owned before the war had been bartered for food from a Chinese black marketeer, one of the camp followers of the Railway who procured and sold goods to the prisoners as they inched along.
Never reliably, never enough. It was a horribly risky business for both sides.
His head was starting to throb in earnest now, and he swallowed a couple of aspirin and waited patiently for the seething effervescence of the Alka-Seltzer to die down.
“Cor, that’s a shiner and a half, Mr. Flynn,” the Boy said admiringly.
“Christ, Harry!” Evans winced sympathetically.
“Ah,” Badger said. “The morning after—the price we pay for the night before.”
“Come on, spill the beans, Mr. Flynn,” the Boy said. “What happened? Did your new lady friend sock you one?”
“A disagreement with a bookshelf that I didn’t see when I got up in the dark.” Flynn possessed neither books nor bookshelf. He hadn’t read a book since the war.
“I hope the bookshelf came off worse, Mr. Flynn.”
“You have a new lady friend?” Badger said.
“Mr. Flynn had a date last night,” the Boy relayed eagerly.
“Really?” Evans said.
“No need to sound so surprised,” Flynn said.
“And you didn’t share this fact with us?” Badger said.
“Should he?” Evans said.
“Of course he should,” Badger said. “Flynn’s love life makes up for the deficiencies in mine.
The fairer sex are drawn to him, for some reason.
He can get a date any time. It’s very unfair.
” Badger was always claiming to be moping after one unattainable beauty or another.
Despite his geniality, not to mention his Norfolk pedigree, he seemed to have little success with the fairer sex.
The pre-Raphaelite beauty from the parade had rebuffed him, apparently.
She was called Jane Pargeter, a showgirl from Murray’s cabaret in Beak Street, one of Badger’s many late-night haunts.
“Where did you take your lady friend, Mr. Flynn?” the Boy asked, interested only in Flynn’s successes, not Badger’s failures.
“None of your business,” Evans said, throwing a pencil at him.
“The Lamb and Flag in Covent Garden,” Flynn said to the Boy. “And I would hardly call it a date, just a drink with someone who happened to be a woman.”
“A French woman,” the Boy said in a conspiratorial whisper to Evans, waggling his eyebrows suggestively. “Ooh la la.” Where did he get his information from? He would make an excellent spy.
“French?” Badger said. “Your new girlfriend’s French? What’s her name?”
“She’s not my girlfriend, new or otherwise. Simply an acquaintance. Delphine Dubois. She’s in Homes and Gardens.”
“Delphine Dubois?”
“Why so surprised? Don’t tell me you know her.”
“No,” Badger said lightly. “Never heard of her.”
Denholm appeared, like a genie out of a bottle. “It’s the Great Bard’s birthday this week. We should find a way to celebrate such a meaningful occasion.”
“The great what?” the Boy asked and was ignored (as was the Great Bard himself), because Denholm had just caught sight of Flynn and exclaimed, “Good God, man. What on earth have you been up to?” Miss Ogilvie followed him in and said, “Dearie me, Mr. Flynn, what happened to you?”
“He went twelve rounds with a bookcase,” the Boy said.
“You can’t go around the office like that, Mr. Flynn,” Denholm said. “You should mask it with something. Do you have anything in that capacious bag of yours, Miss Ogilvie? Some Max Factor pancake, perhaps?”
The Boy bent double with laughter and kept repeating, “Pancake! Pancake!” until Evans threatened to smack him over the head with his copy of Trevelyan. Miss Ogilvie raked in her bag and said, “I have a bottle of sal volatile in here somewhere.”
“I’m not in need of reviving,” Flynn said, “although thank you for the offer, Miss Ogilvie.”