Bless ’Em All Page 5

  ‘I can pay you fifty shillings a week.’

  Fifty shillings? Two pounds ten shillings? It was more than she expected. You could buy a suit for that at the Fifty-Shilling Tailors: jacket, trousers and waistcoat, all measured and fitted.

  ‘How many?’ she said.

  ‘How many what?’

  ‘How many books would I have to read?’

  ‘Oh, lots,’ Maurice said vaguely. ‘I’ll make sure you have plenty to do.’

  So this was how the twice-weekly tryst was set up. They met in different places: in Lyons’ tea shops, in the Aerated Bread Company – or ABC – in Express Dairies, in St Paul’s Churchyard, in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, in Gamages and in Foyle’s, where Betty was dazzled by the sheer number of books on display and of Maurice’s knowledge of published works. He certainly knew his business.

  He started her on The Wind in the Willows.

  ‘Was it written for children?’

  ‘Yes, I suppose so, but adults can enjoy it.’

  ‘But they’re all animals.’

  ‘They are in the book, but there’s people about who are very like Toad and the Badger. I mean they have the same characteristics.’

  ‘Yes.’ She sounded doubtful. Maurice had soon reached the barrier. The girl took everything literally. She had no room for whimsy, and she thought that humour was a childish game.

  He tried to get her to see the fun in P.G. Wodehouse.

  ‘He puts things in a funny way. And they’re all such snobs.’

  The Stars Look Down was ‘too depressing’ and How Green Was My Valley was ‘too muddly’. It was literary criticism from the ground floor. She liked The Grapes of Wrath because she had seen the film and the American expressions were no barrier as she was familiar with them, but she found Gone with the Wind formidable. ‘It’d take months to read all that. It’s a four-hour film.’

  Maurice sighed. Was this a wild-goose chase, trying to make a mark on such a blank unyielding canvas? The poor girl was fulfilling her side of the bargain – she must have spent the whole week reading – and yet nothing she read made an impression. Nothing excited her. He still had to find the way to unlock her perception of life, of people, of her position in the world. What would be her eureka moment?

  ‘What does your husband think of your new job?’

  ‘He can’t understand it,’ said Betty. ‘And to be honest, neither can I.’

  5

  ROSA Tcherny was working herself up to it. She had been on the point when the bloody siren sounded and they all had to go down to the cellar again. At first these sudden excursions produced a flush of excitement, but now it was just boring. All you could do was sit and smile if you caught someone’s eye. You could try to read something. The trouble was that these little frissons didn’t lead to anything. You just waited until the all-clear came through and all trooped back upstairs again.

  She knew that she ought to have been given a raise. She had worked for Green’s for six months; she could do the job with her eyes closed. Most of the work was dead easy. Harry the packer sometimes said something saucy, which she liked, but then there was that acned youth Jimmy, who stared at her as though he was imagining all kinds of forbidden lusts with her as the principal lead. As for Mr Maurice, he had the expression of an undertaker and a demeanour to match. He patted the books into order like he was conducting a mass and they were all sinners. She didn’t much like it when Bernard came in, with his wolfish eyes that took snapshots, no doubt to refer to later. Bella, the other person on the notepaper, she had never seen.

  After all, she needed to build up some capital. When the war was over her family intended to return to Vienna and resume their old life. There was always that feeling of not quite fitting in here. It wasn’t because she was foreign, it was because she was a Jew. Her boyfriend Charlie was keen enough to get up to his antics in empty air-raid shelters and in the back row of the Odeon, but he had never even approached the subject of marriage. The English seemed to be embarrassed about the Jews. Before the war there were street battles between the Jews and the fascists, just as there were in Germany. It was clear that a large proportion of the population thought that Jews were sly and not to be trusted. They wouldn’t have gone so far as to consign them to camps, but, nevertheless, they weren’t easy with them about. However, Hitler’s treatment of the German Jews had made the position of those in Britain a little more secure.

  On her way to Holborn Underground station Rosa liked to window-shop. In comparison with Vienna the shops looked drab and untempting. These English, they had no style. Everything was square and durable, even more so now they had been told to ‘make do and mend’. There was hardly anything on which it was worth spending a single clothing coupon.

  It was all right for Charlie. Tall and gangling, with a prominent Adam’s apple that seemed to swallow harder when he was working himself up into a sexual frenzy – which he did with tedious frequency – awkward and backward as he was in the art of communication, he was a member of the élite. He had served an apprenticeship as a ‘comp’. His strong union went in for rises en masse. At Green’s you had the embarrassment of asking. She thought she had an opportunity when Mr Maurice pressed against her between the shelves. But his expression had given nothing away. He was married of course, but he never mentioned his wife, and Rosa had the impression that it wasn’t a very close union.

  Mr Maurice had started taking long lunch hours, more like two. This meant that she had to work like fireworks when he returned to get everything ready for the post. Not that it was a strain. In fact, it was a change from the leisurely pace of most of the day. She wondered where he went for his lunch. Maybe some hotel along the Strand. When he came back he always seemed reinvigorated, and yet, he never smelt of alcohol. Rosa went to Joe Lyons’. A roll and butter and a small wedge of cheese and a cup of tea gave change out of sixpence, in a fairly civilized atmosphere.

  ‘Mr Maurice?’

  ‘Yes, what is it?’

  ‘Er …’ she said hesitantly.

  ‘Spit it out. We’ve got a lot to do before we can send Jimmy off.’

  ‘I was thinking …’ She stared at the side of his face. His expression was like armour.

  ‘Yes?’ he said.

  ‘I was thinking about a rise …’ It came out in a rush. She felt herself going red and then assumed a defiant expression of justified insubordination. Maurice did not register any emotion at this challenge.

  ‘I’ve been here six months,’ she said, beginning to pout like a naughty child.

  ‘Yes, yes,’ he said testily. ‘We’ll think about it.’ Rosa was annoyed. This meant that she would have to bring the matter up again. Another period of steeling herself to broach the subject and the embarrassment of asking again. She flicked her invoice pad with an irritated finger.

  Rosa couldn’t help it. She spent the rest of the day in a sulk. Little Jimmy, staring at her in his customary fantasy, got the full brunt of her fury.

  ‘Didn’t anyone tell you that it’s rude to stare? What are you looking at anyway?’

  Jimmy, caught with his guard down, blushed and stammered.

  ‘Nothing, miss. Didn’t … didn’t mean anything.’

  ‘Nothing he can tell you,’ said Harry the packer out of the side of his mouth.

  Rosa marched away. She had a bar of Cadbury’s chocolate in her locker. She felt she needed it.

  For the rest of the day she barely communicated with the rest of the staff. Maurice handed her a pile of books for invoicing and she took them without even glancing at him. Quickly and efficiently she entered them in the books, tore off the counterfoils and stood mute, awaiting further instructions as if the whole operation was beneath her contempt. As the work came to her, she dispatched it immediately. Soon there was a pile for Harry the packer.

  ‘Hold on,’ said Harry. ‘I shan’t get this lot off tonight.’ Jimmy’s eyes widened as he saw his haul growing to trolley proportions. Jimmy was still on probation after the incident
when he left a pile of parcels out in the rain. The post office people phoned up, and Mr Maurice had to go over and straighten things up.

  That night she reported the whole incident to Charlie.

  ‘Give in your notice,’ he said. ‘You can easily get something else, if you’ve got a head for figures.’

  Rosa didn’t want to leave Green’s. All those books. She had been able to satisfy her curiosity about Hitler, Freud, Israel, birth control and various other subjects. Everything she wanted to know was there. And Rosa’s mother urged caution. The time in Austria when brown-shirted louts had shouted at her in the street had done something permanent to her confidence. You had a job, you kept your mouth shut. Everybody was always looking for an excuse to sack a Jew. Rosa’s father was not so meek, although he always expected the worst and seemed to take some sardonic pleasure when he was proved right.

  ‘These English, they don’t say anything, but you can see them looking, see them thinking. The Germans just brought it out in the open, but it’s here – everywhere.’ He said it as though it was fact, not just opinion.

  Rosa took due warning from her parents and said no more about getting a raise. So she was surprised when her pay packet showed an increase of ten shillings at the end of the week. Nobody said anything. Money wasn’t a subject to dwell on. Maurice regarded the work of running the warehouse almost as a higher calling.

  Later, just before they were closing he said, tight-lipped: ‘Everything all right?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘All right, thank you.’

  When she got home and told her mother she was greeted with: ‘Well, they must be pleased with you – but don’t go too far.’

  That night Charlie took her to the cinema. It was a Betty Grable film – it always seemed to be a back-stage musical. On the way home Charlie pushed her into the small front garden of a house and grabbed her breasts urgently. There was a smell of dog turd and earth soaked in cat’s pee. She felt as though she was being mauled without even the tenderness of a kiss and a few loving words. Then he put his hand between her legs and she gasped at the cheek of it all and pushed him away.

  ‘For Christ’s sake,’ he said. ‘We’ve been going out for weeks now.’

  ‘It doesn’t mean that you can jump on me like that.’

  A cat slithered out from a privet hedge.

  ‘You’re just like an animal.’

  ‘I am,’ he said miserably. ‘I am. The fact is, I’ve got me calling-up papers.’

  ‘Oh … When?’

  ‘In a few weeks.’

  ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t know.’

  Charlie had slumped into a slough of self-pity.

  ‘What do you care? You’ll soon find someone else.’

  Rosa was puzzled. ‘You never said anything.’

  ‘What d’you want? A ring?’

  ‘Well,’ she said primly. ‘It would be good to know where I stand.’

  Charlie walked out of the front garden, and Rosa followed. It was a mess. Charlie wanted a token, something to take with him, a promise, an understanding. He had been so clumsy, so tongue-tied and so awkward, and yet he wasn’t a bad man. He might go away and never return. Should she send him on his way with a night to remember? Was it so much of a sacrifice?

  Charlie stood on the pavement, a picture of dejection, all elbows and knees, just as he was when they first met at the Locarno, when he was pushed out from a gaggle of leering lads, pushed in front of a phalanx of eager, excited girls.

  ‘It’s all right for you,’ he said.

  ‘How? How is it all right for me?’

  ‘You don’t have to go.’

  She felt sorry for him. He was only a boy. ‘What about when you come back?’

  ‘I’d marry you like a shot,’ he said, as though he was bravely owning up to his responsibility in the affair.

  ‘But you haven’t asked me,’ she said. ‘Just took it for granted.’

  Charlie shuffled with embarrassment. ‘Thought you knew,’ he said.

  It was dark so she couldn’t see his face, but she knew he would be looking like a sulky schoolboy apprehended in some juvenile misdemeanour. ‘Well come on then,’ she said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘What you’re going to ask me.’

  ‘Bloody hell! You will? Will you really?’

  He seized her around her waist and pressed his body against hers.

  ‘Wait a minute,’ she said. ‘You still haven’t asked me.’

  His excitement was infectious.

  ‘Marry me. Will you? Please. It’ll be good. It’ll be … Rosa, I want you so much. I can’t go away without knowing … anything.’

  ‘All right,’ she said. ‘But not here. Not up against a wall in a stinking side street.’

  He seemed jubilant. He jumped up and down, his loose limbs at awkward angles. He kissed her on the mouth, so hard that it left her breathless. He loosened his tie and flapped his arms. He spun around. He came up behind her and squeezed her breasts, burying his face in the hair at the back of her neck.

  ‘Rosa,’ he breathed in a thrilling throttle. ‘My Rosa.’

  They made arrangements to meet the following evening, when Charlie would try to arrange for a hotel room. Somewhere they could be together, quiet and warm. Or maybe his sister’s place: she was broad-minded, and her husband was working nights at Hawker’s, the aircraft factory.

  ‘But what about your parents? I haven’t even met them. They may not like me.’

  ‘They’re not marrying you,’ he said earnestly. ‘I am.’

  The next day at home, working through the Saturday tasks, washing and ironing, was spent in a daydream. She was going to be married; maybe not soon, but eventually, married to a man with a good job with prospects who was, after all, a Gentile. She didn’t know how her parents would take to the idea, but she didn’t have to tell them just yet.

  The next evening was spent watching Errol Flynn charming his way through Hollywood, outrageously winning the demure Olivia de Havilland. Errol Flynn was a man’s idea of a man that women found irresistible. Confident, brash and yet courtly, always knowing that he would get his way in the end; flash good looks and a god’s physique, he was manliness personified.

  When they left the cinema Errol’s overconfidence seemed to carry over to Charlie. He put his arm around her and stepped out, as if carried on from the dream detailed in the film. He pressed her up against an unlit lamp-post. He acted like he wanted to plant a year’s kisses in one night. She levered herself away.

  ‘What?’ he said. ‘What’s the matter?’

  ‘Have you told your parents?’

  ‘What? About what?’

  ‘About us getting married.’

  ‘I’ll tell them,’ he said.

  ‘You can come to tea on Sunday.’

  ‘What? At your place?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But why?’ He was like a child: he wanted something, he grabbed it, put it in his mouth and sucked it dry. He had no thought of the consequences. No idea of civilized behaviour.

  ‘They have to see you. Get to know you. I want to meet your parents, too.’

  He seemed stunned. ‘Do we have to do all this? There’s only you and me. That’s all.’

  They went into a pub. There were pictures of the King and Queen and Union Jacks hastily pinned on to the walls. There were lugubrious old men and rackety old women sipping beer as though it was the last wake. The war had begun to press on the general consciousness. It had started. There were identity cards, ration books, shortages, conscription, barrage balloons, Mr Chad, Winston Churchill, Spitfires and Messerschmitts, Anderson shelters and ‘We’re Going to Hang Out the Washing on the Siegfried Line’ and ‘Roll Me Over’. People on the loose exhibited a kind of enforced gaiety, a near-sighted optimism, falsely buoying up spirits against a hollow fear just beneath the surface. They took every chance to assert their Britishness as though it was an invisible shield that protected them from all harm. They sang a lot. It was the pa
rty to end all parties. The war had been a disappointment up to now, but they knew it was coming, and they were ready for it. Some already had formed underground communities, sleeping all night on Tube station platforms. They had transferred their bank holiday picnic from Hampstead Heath to an underground location, complete with sandwiches, jam tarts, flasks, oranges and bananas, and piano accordions.

  On the Sunday Charlie came to tea in a clean shirt and a carefully knotted tie, looking like he thought he was up before the firing squad. Rosa introduced him to her mother and father who eyed him with suspicion. It may be that he had professed undying love to their daughter, that he was presenting himself as a respectable suitor, but they knew better. He was being called up, wasn’t he? And what did he want before he went? He wanted to screw their daughter. There was no engagement ring, no contract of any kind. The boy wanted to be taken on trust, and they didn’t trust him. Not a bit. He wasn’t one of them, not that a Jew would have been more trustworthy, but there was a family that you could get a hold on if something went wrong. With these Gentiles they had no such understanding. They would think that Rosa would be lucky to have been impregnated and left to suffer for it. After all, she shouldn’t get above herself.

  So it was a cautious meal, with polite scrapings of conversation, without warmth or humour, with the two principals aware that the attempt to form a bond was pushing them further apart.

  ‘A compositor,’ said Mr Tcherny, in a tone that suggested he could hardly believe that this shambling, tongue-tied youth could even spell his own name.

  ‘Yes,’ said Charlie, trying to swallow a gherkin that was having a scrambling fight with his Adam’s apple. ‘My dad was, so –’

  ‘So you inherited the job,’ said Mr Tcherny.

  ‘Eh?’ said Charlie. ‘No. He, sort of, spoke for me. It’s an apprenticeship. I got out two weeks ago.’