Chapter 2 Living Cheek by Jowl #2
George, cheeks flushed and eyes glazed, circled an arm around her. “I’m confused,” she said, cocking her head at Jimmy. “Didn’t you say you had only just moved to London?”
“That’s right,” he said quickly. “A friend told me about the Lyceum Ballroom.” He saw he’d have to be careful around this one, the posh blonde.
As for the brunette, she wasn’t fooling him.
He knew when someone was putting on airs and graces.
She wasn’t bad-looking, either. Neat little pointy face, ringletty hair.
But too slight in the figure. The way she’d tightly belted her costume, with its big skirt, couldn’t hide that she had hips like a young boy.
And bee stings for thrupenny bits. Then again, she was only a kid.
Maybe she had some growing to do. Not the blonde. She was fully grown and then some.
George noticed Robbie peering into the bottom of his empty glass, looking worried. “Honor,” she said, “I was just wondering, where will Mr. Sullivan sleep? There’s not a great deal of room, is there?”
Honor frowned again. “I suppose there isn’t. Jimmy, for the time being we’ll have to put you in an attic bedroom, across from Robbie. It’s not ideal—rather cramped. I’ll ask Greta, our daily woman, to organize it in the morning. No doubt she’ll bite my head off, but that can’t be helped.”
This crucial question settled, Jimmy jumped to his feet and explained that he had to be getting back to the Fulham Road YMCA.
Everyone dispersed in their respective directions, except for George, who lingered, and Honor, who was brushing invisible lint from her trousers and considering the full ashtrays and dirty glasses.
“Greta can deal with this tomorrow,” she said, more to herself than George. Then, “What was that?”
George repeated, “Can I have a quick word?”
“You can, but I’m famished, aren’t you? You could do with something to eat, I’m sure. A cup of strong coffee, too. Come on, I’ll make us some supper.”
They walked through the dining room, which was separated from the drawing room by double doors and never used except for parties.
Instead, people ate in the kitchen, a squarish low-ceilinged room overlooking the garden.
There was a cavernous larder but no fridge, an electric washing machine, an enamel gas stove, and an ancient mushroom-colored dresser with an inexplicable funnel-type structure built in.
(Only Honor knew this was a flour hopper, for sifting, but she feigned bafflement.) A more modern touch was the table, hyacinth-pink Formica and pale wood, around which the residents sometimes gathered for breakfast. Their rent didn’t include board, only light and heat, but a system operated whereby ration coupons were pooled and, for unrationed staples, a kitty maintained.
Greta, the daily woman, presided strictly over the kitchen economy, terrorizing shopkeepers with her Slavic thrift and merciless haggling.
The local butcher, a sixteen-stone former POW, had taken to retreating into the back room at the sight of her, leaving his assistant to be accused of rigging the bacon scales.
Honor, for her part, seemed to require remarkably little nourishment and subsisted mainly on Macvita crackers and king-size Pall Malls.
This evening, however, she insisted on preparing for herself and George a concoction she called “egg in a nest”—a slice of stale National Loaf topped with powdered egg and fried in lard. It wasn’t bad, thought George, as she ate and considered what to say about Jimmy.
“Listen,” she ventured. “I know it’s not my place. But is it entirely appropriate for Mina to be living cheek by jowl with a strange chap? You know me, I’m a tough old boot. I’ll be twenty-six soon, God help me. But she’s just a child, however much she tries to pretend otherwise.”
“Oh dear,” said Honor. “You don’t think she’ll want to move out, do you?
I never promised to provide a female-only environment.
After all, Robbie’s here, isn’t he? I must say, I don’t really understand what you’re getting at.
” She of course knew exactly what George meant.
And she was right to speak up. Robbie wouldn’t touch a hair on a girl’s head unless expressly invited to do so.
Even then. Whereas she’d seen the way Jimmy had looked at Mina and George.
He didn’t realize he was doing it, of course.
For men like that, it was a reflex. And Mina was just a child.
Still a virgin, Honor imagined. But that clock was ticking.
Must she be in loco parentis, though? She thought of herself at Mina’s age.
No one had protected her. She’d learned the hard way what beasts men were.
All the more reason, then, to look after Mina.
As for George—well, it didn’t bear thinking about.
But George had standards. Of that Honor was quite certain.
“Oh, Robbie,” said George. “He’s like a brother.
This Jimmy Sullivan character—well, are you positive he’s the sort of person you want to have around?
It’s terribly nice of you to help him out and all that.
But couldn’t he stay on at the YMCA? I gather those places are quite comfortable.
” In the summer of 1949, George had spent several nights at the YWCA in Bloomsbury, sharing a room with four other girls.
In the mornings there was a deafening waking-up bell, like you were in prison.
And in the evenings, a ten o’clock curfew.
One night she’d rolled in at 2 a.m. with her fourteen-year-old roommate, who was three sheets to the wind and wearing a sequined cocktail dress of George’s.
They’d been at the Café Royal, being bought round after round of drinks by some merchant seamen on shore leave.
The YWCA’s battle-axe in charge had thrown George out there and then.
She’d spent the rest of the night in a twenty-four-hour milk bar off Leicester Square, repelling the attentions of pimps and one very persistent old girl who claimed to want to recruit her to MI6.
Honor speared a burnt crust with her fork and sighed.
“It seems he’s had a little trouble at the YMCA.
And I do feel an obligation, you know. To his poor mother.
Sadly, she’s not with us anymore. But she was very kind to me as a girl.
No one else was, you see. I hope you’ve never known what that’s like to feel so alone. You never forget it.”
George, who had wolfed down her food, was now sober.
She was also numb with fatigue. She opened her mouth to speak, but no words came out.
Probably for the best. She didn’t trust herself not to blurt out that she was pregnant, as she stupidly had to Robbie.
Embarrassment clenched her stomach. He must have been horrified.
“Look,” said Honor, not unsympathetically, “why don’t we see how it goes with Jimmy? If you girls feel uncomfortable, or if he misbehaves in some way, then I’ll ask him to leave. I’m afraid that’s the best I can do.” My hands are tied, she thought miserably.
Saul had returned to his basement quarters, where he had his own kitchen annex with a bath (saving him from participation in all the coupon-pooling business, which he found tawdry).
Close at his heels was Lulu the dog, who hoped for a treat.
“Oh, little one,” said Saul. “That we could all be like you, content with a scratch on the neck and a bit of liver sausage.” Lulu accepted this morsel from his hand and pressed her pink-and-white snout against his leg in gratitude.
He made himself a simple meal of sliced apple and Jacob’s Cream Crackers as he pondered the fact of Mr. Sullivan.
His arrival wasn’t a happy event, that much was evident.
But would Honor explain? You’d think she might trust him, given the past they shared, the confidences he’d kept.
Of course, that was—what was the English saying?
—all water under the bridge. Up until a year or so ago, they would still occasionally sleep together, always in his bed, after the house had gone quiet and the young people were either out gallivanting or fast asleep.
By the end of their affair, he sensed her heart wasn’t in it.
She had begun making excuses to avoid spending time with him, and when they were together, he seemed to get on her nerves.
Not daring to bring about any type of confrontation—for he couldn’t bear to cause bad feeling and risk losing her as a friend—he mirrored her coolness, her withdrawal.
And so it was that a fresh layer of sadness settled on the older layers petrifying in the pit of his stomach.
They’d first met in 1947, during the last days of that strange, sultry summer.
Britain’s hottest of the century, supposedly.
For reasons lost to time, Saul had attended a publishing company’s party in Bloomsbury.
The large, square office-cum-reception-room, with its oil paintings and glass-fronted book cabinets, had impressed him as more like a comfortably appointed home than a workplace.
He had hovered on the outer fringes of the sizable gathering, by an open window.
You could see directly into the building over the road, its rooms sliced open to reveal floors gnarled with desecrated belongings, wallpaper sun-bleached and caked in filth.
Like a hellish dollhouse. The man who’d invited him—they’d shared a publisher in Paris, now he remembered—noticed Saul standing alone and said, “Oh, but you must meet Gerald and Honor Wilson.” He conducted him over to the couple.
Saul politely shook Gerald’s hand, brought Honor’s lightly to his lips.
Poor Gerald was already ravaged by lung cancer, his face withered to its skeletal constitution, eyes huge.
And yet Honor held on to his arm, standing slightly behind him, as if she were the one in need of protection.