At the Break of Day (12 page)

It was further on that she heard the cornet, wailing up from the basement of a house just ahead of them, and then another and another and it was like the brownstones, though here, this time, the buildings weren’t empty and dead. Here, close to her home, there was jazz.

She said nothing, just clutched at Jack’s arm as they stood on the pavement, hearing Dixieland, New Orleans, hearing the drums. It was ‘Take Your Tomorrow’. Pure Bix, pure gold breathing life into the streets, and into her mind. She looked at Jack, his head bent towards her, watching her face carefully.

‘Does it make it better, little Rosie?’ he asked, his voice quiet.

She reached up and kissed his cheek because she couldn’t speak. He drew her towards him and this time their kiss was not soft and gentle, but filled with an excitement which left them both breathless, both awkward, until Jack turned towards the steps leading down to the door.

‘You coming then?’

Inside it was dim and smoky. Rosie sat at a table near an opening which led to a counter where Jack bought coffee and rolls. Rosie watched as he put sugar in using the spoon which was chained to the counter. She wanted to hold the kiss in her mind but the music was surging and as Jack joined her she sat back and listened, feeling the heat of summer, hearing the jazz across the lawn. Seeing the faded, empty New York brownstones. But here, in England, they were not empty, and she was sitting with Jack, breathing in the rhythm once again.

All evening they sat as the trumpet played that deliberately impure tone which distinguishes jazz from straight playing.

‘He’s using his lips,’ Jack said quietly.

‘No he’s not, he’s half-valving.’ But then she saw that he wasn’t. ‘OK,’ she said. ‘You win.’

‘I like the banjo, it’s cleaner than the guitar.’

‘No, it’s not. Charlie Christian showed us that.’ Rosie pointed towards the guitar player. ‘See, that guy’s using his fingertips to strike the strings as well as stop them. How about that for a clean note.’

‘How about that for a know-it-all.’ Jack was leaning towards her and they laughed together quietly while the music played and all pain ebbed away. They kissed, lightly, but they were older tonight, closer tonight.

They listened to the trumpet’s break, tapping the table with their hands as the player improvised and the others in the band fell silent. He was good, a young man with long hair, and then the rest came in. Jack picked at the wax which had clumped around the candle which stood in a jam jar. ‘Duke Ellington is right not to like improvisation. He plans everything, you know.’

Rosie looked at the candle. They had used candles to burn the bed bugs from creases in the mattresses when they were young. They had used candles for the Christmas table in Lower Falls but it didn’t hurt to think of that here. She picked at some wax herself. It was slightly warm. She rolled it into a ball. Looked at the band again. Did they play to a written arrangement or to one made familiar by use?

‘Their improvisation works though,’ she said as the band broke for a coffee.

‘Yes, you’re right, but it can turn into a right mess. Like your shorthand when I read to you too fast.’

Rosie sipped her coffee. It was cold but it didn’t matter. ‘What about you?’ she said. ‘What about your plans. Will it always be the stall? Once you were going to be an artist.’

Jack sat back, tipping the chair, resting it against the wall. ‘Don’t know. Me art’s not good enough. Not much point sorting anything out. Not yet anyway.’ He turned round to look at the band. The trumpet player was standing near them, talking to a girl with long black hair.

Rosie drank the last of her coffee. It was bitter at the bottom.

‘Why not? What’s stopping you?’

Jack turned and smiled. ‘Look, you had a good schooling. We had very little. Just mornings and then it was bloody chaos. All the evacuees in the one large school hall.’ He leaned forward taking her hand. ‘It’s not that though. Got to do me National Service, haven’t I? Not worth starting anything until then.’

She had forgotten about that. Forgotten that he would be going away for eighteen months. It was too long. She couldn’t bear to be without him. She squeezed the wax, looking at that, not at him. ‘When?’

‘Not until I’m eighteen. There’s loads of time. Bit more than a year when you work it out.’

The band were playing again and she looked at him as he sat four-square on his chair again, his hands slapping on his thighs in time to the beat, and then he turned to her.

‘I’ll fix something up afterwards, like everyone does.’

They didn’t leave the club until eleven p.m. and then travelled home, talking and laughing because tonight had been filled with music, with talk, with gently held hands. The kiss he gave her at the back yard gate was soft again but as he held her there was excitement too.

She slept that night with scarcely any dreams, only one about a silent brownstone house that turned into a noisy jazz-filled Soho basement. She woke in the morning and scratched the frost from the window. The cold didn’t matter because they were young and the war was over. Their lives were just beginning and they had a year before he had to go and that was a long time. Besides it was Christmas Eve.

Maisie cooked the turkey in her kitchen on Christmas morning and Rosie helped Jack to carry the table from Grandpa’s house and they all ate together, pulling home-made crackers, drinking beer that Ollie had ‘found’. They ate tinned peaches and tinned ham for tea and Grandpa raised his cup of tea.

‘To Frank and Nancy, God bless them.’

Yes, God bless them, Rosie thought, thinking of the stockings which had hung at the mantelpiece last year, the turkey, the Christmas lights, the smell of spruce throughout the house. The wine, the liqueurs, the guests, the warmth, the skiing in the afternoon, and the ache wasn’t as sharp, and she knew it was because of the jazz, and Jack.

She fingered the light woollen scarf which Nancy had sent. It was warm draped around her shoulders and she barely felt the draught coming from the ill-fitting windows and the gaps in the doors. All the houses were the same after the blast of the bombs which had rocked and cracked the buildings.

She looked across the table which she had helped Maisie to set for tea and smiled at Jack. His bed was down here now, moved from the boxroom to make room for Lee. Rosie wished he hadn’t moved, she wished she could still hear him shut the door, sink into bed, cough. Lee climbed on to her knee now and she hugged him, rubbing her face into his neck, making him laugh, making herself laugh.

‘That’s a nice scent,’ she said as Maisie leaned over her shoulder to put a toast soldier into Lee’s mouth. ‘What is it?’

‘You should know, you gave it to me,’ Maisie said, turning from the table quickly, moving towards the sink. Ollie stopped eating his Christmas cake, looked at Rosie and then his wife. He dropped his knife and the noise was sharp in the sudden silence. Maisie’s back was still and Ollie’s face was dark again as it had been before the hops were picked.

Rosie looked at Jack. His face was tense, his eyes wary, pained.

She turned to Maisie and laughed. ‘I’d forgotten. It’s Evening in Paris. It’s nice, isn’t it? I’ve got some myself at home.’ She poured another cup of tea for Ollie. ‘Drink up, Ollie, that cake of Nancy’s is pretty dry.’

He looked from her to Maisie, his eyes guarded, his thoughts elsewhere.

‘Don’t make those bloody crumbs,’ he said to Lee.

Rosie looked at Norah. ‘Did you like your Californian Poppy? Maybe I should have bought you the French one too.’ Norah wasn’t listening, she was reading the book of women’s love stories which Maisie had given her.

Ollie was relaxing again now with his cake and tea and Maisie brought Lee another toast finger, smiling at him, at Jack, at Ollie, at Rosie. But Rosie looked into the fire instead because she knew the perfume was not Evening in Paris. But she saw that her words had taken the anxiety from Jack’s face.

January 1947 brought bitter cold and a letter from Nancy.

Lower Falls
January 1st

My dearest Rosie,

We were so very pleased with your presents and the good wishes from your Grandpop. Please give ours to your family for a happy and safe New Year.

I say safe because Frank is getting real uptight. He’s been seeing bogeymen in the woodpile ever since Churchill’s Iron Curtain speech at Fulton, Missouri. He sees East Europe falling under the Communists and Truman’s Government getting real upset about it. Thinks they’ll have bad dreams about the Reds sweeping over here too.

Already that goddamn busybody, Gallagher, in Local Administration, is getting busy sharpening his knife, asking questions about Art, our friend in planning. Do you remember him? Had some kind of a soft spot for those revolutionaries in Russia in the thirties. He’s got a wife and kids now. Doesn’t think of politics any more but this LA is really sniffing. Does he think that there are Reds under every bed or something crazy like that? Even came round to the newspaper offices asking how long Frank had known him.

But, let’s not go on about that now. I guess Christmas without you has made me mope. I can’t tell you how we miss you. We took a ride into town. It wasn’t the same.

We’re off skiing for a week at the end of January but that won’t be the same either, without you. Sandra is busy, having a good time as always. Talking without drawing breath. We see Joe from time to time. He’d like a job on the paper. Maybe he will, but we’d rather it was you.

How are things with you, Rosie?

All our love,
Nancy

Rosie read the letter standing in a queue during her lunch-hour hoping that at the end of it there would be some sort of meat. But there wasn’t and she walked back to Woolworths, her feet cold in her Wellingtons even through the thick socks she had knitted from a pulled out jumper.

It hadn’t mattered until she read the letter, saw the round handwriting, remembered the feeling of Nancy’s arms, the smell of Frank’s pipe. Perhaps it would be better if they didn’t write, didn’t stir up memories, but then she shook her head. No, her feet would still freeze and she wanted to feel Nancy reaching out to her.

She shook her head at Norah and Mrs Eaves as she went in.

‘The soldiers couldn’t get through with it. They’re slower than the lorry drivers. Maybe tomorrow.’ She shrugged and pushed her numb feet into her shoes before taking her place behind the counter, feeling the letter in her pocket.

She wrote back to Nancy that night telling her that the road haulage workers were on strike, the meat was rotting in the warehouses, the soldiers were slowly getting it through. She told her how they thought they’d bought some from a guy called Jones at the pub who had meat which would otherwise rot, but he took their money and ran. We never seem to learn, she wrote.

She told Nancy how the greengrocer was rationing potatoes to two pounds a head a week. But there
was
corned beef – ‘So we party every night, Nancy. You’d love it.’

She switched out the light and lay back in her bed. Did her letter sound angry or just plain tired? She felt both as she lay here listening to Grandpa moving about beneath her. She sat up, read the leader column of
The Times
, and analysed a report which Frank had enclosed for her as practice. Wrote it up. Transcribed her shorthand because there was no time to waste. It was 1947. She was moving forward. She had to keep telling herself that.

She had said it as she heaped the fire with ash before she came upstairs, banking it up, hoping it would stay in until the morning. They were wrapping coal in soaked newspaper to make it last longer and Jack’s wood from the bomb site helped.

She lay down and pulled the blankets up round her ears not thinking of the food in the American shops, not thinking of the skiing slopes. Beating back the anger at the ease of the world which she had left behind.

Maisie hadn’t been any luckier with her meat queue either. Lee had been so cold after two hours she had come home and Rosie had rubbed his hands between hers to warm them up. She listened to his crying and coughing through the wall.

He was ill, his temperature was high. She put on the light again and added to her letter, telling Nancy that on New Year’s Day flags had been raised at all Britain’s collieries as they were nationalised. It hadn’t meant more coal though, not yet. A fuel crisis was threatening.

Here Rosie put down her pen. Lee was still crying and now she could hear Jack’s voice, soft and gentle, and Maisie’s too. She listened, wanting to speak through the wall to Lee, to reach out to him, but she didn’t, she just waited until there was no more sound and then she wrote again, wondering how long it would be before the new National Health Service took effect. She did not mention the Local Administrator or Eastern Europe and the Iron Curtain. It was too far away, too trivial against Lee’s cough and the bitter cold.

The next day Jack came round. It was Sunday and Lee was a bit better, he told her, his muffler up round his mouth, his dad’s old coat worn at the cuffs, the belt missing. Rosie nodded, heaping Grandpa’s sheet from the sink into a bowl, drying her hands, pulling down her sleeves, throwing her coat around her. The accidents had begun again, but Jack was here and nothing else mattered.

Jack carried the sheet into the yard and they each took an end, twisting it, hearing the water pouring on to the yard, seeing it begin to freeze even as it hit the concrete. Again they twisted. The water splashed on his coat.

‘Why are you wearing that thing?’ Rosie asked. ‘It’s so darn big.’

Jack just shrugged and grinned. ‘Makes me look older. Maybe those tarts up West would take me on now.’

Rosie looked at his face, then flicked a corner of the sheet, splashing him. ‘There’d have to be a pretty thick fog, and a Derby win to make it worth their while.’

She carried the sheet in and Jack hung it over the airer which hung from the ceiling above the fire while Rosie lifted out the other sheet from the sink. They did the same a second time and Jack asked how Nancy was, and Frank. As the cold sliced into her wet hands she would not let herself think of the skis which would be propped up in her old bedroom. She would not let herself think of the central heating, the washing machine, the hamburgers oozing out of toasted buns. Nor would she think of the Local Administrator, or Art, or Frank, because as dawn had come she had realised it wasn’t trivial, or Frank would have written himself. Nor would she think of the big coat that Jack was wearing because she thought she knew what it meant.