At the Break of Day (33 page)

She ordered toast but with no butter. It made her retch. Mario looked up at her.

‘Can you wait? We’re so busy. It gets worse and worse. You no want a job?’

She did want a job but she leaned across and said, ‘Yes, I need a job. But I’m –’

Mario interrupted. ‘I know. Mrs Eaves tell me. I no mind. My wife no mind. You come. She say you good worker. I trust her.’

Rosie looked down at the sugar clumped on the spoon. Jack had trusted a lot of people.

She started work on the spot. She walked through the streamers into the back room piled high with old tables and boxes. On into the kitchen where Mrs Orsini smiled at her, her eyes sweeping down her body.

No, it doesn’t show yet, Rosie wanted to scream at her, her face rigid as she looked at the small fat woman, not lowering her glance, though she wanted to.

‘Oh, these things happen,’ Mrs Orsini said. ‘Mrs Eaves, she tell us you are a good girl. You love this man. He leave you.’ Her arms were folded, she leaned against the table piled high with rolls. Toast was grilling, spaghetti simmering in a large pan.

‘No,’ Rosie said as she hung her coat up on the hook along the wall and washed her hands, scrubbing them hard, and then scrubbing them again. ‘No, he hasn’t left me. He’s gone to Korea. He’ll come back. He’ll write. I know he will.’ There were tears running down her face but they didn’t reach her voice. That was calm, but not calm enough, for Mrs Orsini held her, patting her back while Mario called from beyond the swing door.

‘Where my spaghetti bolognese? You women. Where my spaghetti?’

Rosie wrote to Nancy and Frank that evening when the café had closed and she had made tea in her room, that she had taken a job as manageress of a restaurant and that she would freelance for the magazine.

She walked to the window, pushing up the bottom sash, listening to the jazz, to the shouting, to the drunken singing. Her legs ached, her back ached but she had a room of her own and a job. At least for now, she was all right. She wouldn’t look into the future, there was no point.

On 20 December she heard from Frank and Nancy.

Lower Falls
December 1950

Dearest Rosie,

Have you heard anything from Jack? We worry about him.

It’s been so cold out there. The frost was 45 at its worst. Rearguard duties fell to the new British brigade just arrived in Korea. That would be Jack.

Over here it is cold too. Joe has suggested that Frank writes under a pseudonym. We are losing readers. The reversal in Korea will not help. McCarthy is shouting louder each day. Our Local Administrator has an alarmingly large chest filled with importance. I just hate him.

Let us know your news about Jack. Let us know how the new job is going. It must be good for you to give up the magazine. We understand that you can’t leave right now but come when you can. Frank is fit. He’s fighting back. He’s angry but not strained, if you know what I mean.

All our love darling girl.
Nancy

PS. The enclosed $40 is your Christmas present. It comes with love.

Rosie went into the café early that day and Mario nodded as she asked him about the decorations. She cut strips, coloured them, stuck them and wouldn’t think of the fighting. Mrs Orsini helped and it was almost like being with Maisie again. They pinned them up. Customers came in and helped. Luke held her waist, steadying her beneath the holly which Mario had rushed out and bought in the market.

They drank coffee, and ate toast and omelette in the kitchen when the lunchtime rush was over, and Rosie walked to the post office for Mario at three in the afternoon, looking at the people walking past. Looking at the market traders shouting, dipping their hands into their aprons. The religious man pushed another leaflet into her hands and she turned.

‘Don’t you know there’s a goddamn war on in Korea? Tell them all about that instead of pushing paper in people’s faces.’ He turned from her, thrusting his leaflet at an old man. She grabbed him. ‘There’s a war on and nobody cares. Go on, get your mouth round that.’

But he pulled from her and she dropped the letters. An old man helped her pick them up. They were dirty and she was crying, standing in the street crying. The old man patted her hand and walked away. Everyone walked away in the end.

But then Luke came with Sandy, the girl with the long hair, and they walked back with her to the café, and then on home because the tears would not stop, because the world wouldn’t stop either. Because life was too difficult.

She lay on the bed, and felt pain sweep across her back, and then her belly. She breathed slowly, and watched Luke boil the kettle on the ring and Sandy put tea into the pot, smelling it brewing, watching the milk being poured from the bottle, and the pain was still there and she was wet between the legs.

They called a doctor. He came and asked what she had taken. Luke held her hand as she thought of the consultant and his brass plate, his hundred-guinea offer. She thought of the gypsies and their brew and knew she might be losing the baby. All this could be over. She looked round the bedsit. She could go to America. She could stay here. Anything. She could be as young as Luke again and free.

Luke was squeezing her hand. It should have been Jack but he had gone, though her love for him had not. It never would. She turned to the doctor, who was standing over her. No one was taking the baby from her. No one had taken her career. She had done that. She had become pregnant. No one had taken Jack. She had helped to bring that about. It was time she got angry. It was time she began fighting again. It was goddamn time.

‘I fell. This baby’s part of Jack. It’s all I’ve got of him. Just do your goddamn job. Please.’

Luke squeezed her hand again and Sandy smiled but the pain was too bad. She watched as Luke went to phone for an ambulance from the box on the corner, digging into his pockets for pennies, then looking in her purse. The doctor had to give them the money in the end.

She was in hospital, there were more doctors. There was Mrs Orsini and Mrs Eaves and there were days of rest when Christmas came and went and there was no card from Jack, though she had sent a present to Ollie for him back in November. But she wouldn’t grieve because she was back in there, fighting.

In January she was back in Soho and Mrs Eaves and Mrs Orsini had put flowers in the room, and the baby was still inside her. She was fit, the doctor said, but mustn’t leap over windmills. She had laughed because for now the world was good. Her baby was alive. She was alive and so was Jack because no telegram had come to Ollie.

There was a letter from Frank and Nancy when she got back to her room, and she returned to work knowing that the Chinese offensive had been halted. The United Nations were on the attack, but no one else that she passed seemed to care.

She served coffee, cooked, smiled, and laughed when Mario pushed a chair beneath her as she cut up the vegetables and asked if she had taken her iron today.

‘And what about that soldier?’

He banged the pans when she shook her head.

Luke and Sandy made her sit too when she went out with them on a January evening to hear Luke’s band’s first gig and the warmth of these people made it seem as though the sun was shining through the fog which drifted and froze on the paintwork.

They sat at candle-lit tables in the basement of Chloe’s and Sandy pushed her long hair back from her face, as Luke and the band worked their way down through the tables to the small stage.

‘They’ve worked hard for this, all of them.’ Her nail varnish was black. It was chipped. She was smoking in quick sharp bursts.

‘Are they good?’ Rosie asked.

Sandy smiled. ‘You wouldn’t know about jazz; I suppose. But yes, they’re good.’

It was becoming crowded now. Rosie moved her chair closer to Sandy as a young man squeezed another round the table. Sandy was stubbing her cigarette out in the ashtray.

‘It’s hard, though, for them. They have to work too
and
fit this in. They need more time to practise. They need a place to practise. The flat’s too small. The landlord doesn’t like it.’

Rosie bought a beer for Sandy, a lemonade for herself from the girl behind the bar. But then the band was playing and Luke blew a trumpet as Uncle Bob had always dreamed. He explored the middle range, digging out melancholic tones, drawing pictures in the air, dredging feelings out of each person who sat and listened.

His eyes were closed, his foot tapped. He blew bends which broke her heart, he played a break while the others rested, improvising, soaring, growling, the sound beginning in his throat and forcing itself up through the instrument and out into the tone of the note. She smelt the steak on Frank’s barbecue, saw Uncle Bob moving towards his band and had to turn from Sandy because of the tears in her eyes.

Luke played, Stan and Jim too, the clarinet and the trombone picking up the rhythm, Jake on the saxophone sliding in but he needed to be more mellow, throaty. She made herself listen again, watching the group through the spiralling cigarette smoke from the young man next to her.

Dave played block chords on the piano which was effective in small doses, but Dave knew that, she could tell, because he used it sparingly. Luke played a solo.

‘Maybe he improvises too much,’ Rosie said to Sandy, who looked at her through the hair which had swung back across her face.

Yes, Jack would think so, Rosie thought, because he liked Duke Ellington. Did he still?

When they broke for a beer and the clapping had died she spoke to Luke, telling him that she thought he used too much verbal agreement on the arrangements. ‘It needs to be written out at this stage. It would be smoother, clearer.’ And Jake, on the saxophone, needed improving. But the band was good, very good.

She felt the excitement rise in her as Luke looked at her and nodded.

‘You know about jazz, don’t you?’

‘Yes, Frank taught me. Uncle Bob too. And Jack.’

She looked round as the band left to play another set. The excitement was there in everyone. One day they would be good enough for Bob, she’d make sure of that, but there was a great deal to be done before then.

The next day she poured Luke a coffee, Sandy too, as they came in for their lunch, and then she talked to Mario in the kitchen about the back room. She pointed to the packing cases, to the tables, to the extra space that could be used to bring in customers. She spoke to him about a Jazz Night where the bands could practise in front of an audience who would buy coffee and food.

Mario shook his head but Mrs Orsini nodded, slapping him on the back.

‘Why not? Rosie knows what she’s doing. That young Luke. He is good, is he not? You will hear all bands and decide. OK.’ Mrs Orsini looked at Rosie and then at Mario who spread his hands wide.

‘I will go upstairs when it starts. I will lie with my head beneath pillow. You are satisfied?’

‘Not quite,’ said Rosie, putting the dishes in the sink, talking as she washed. ‘The boys are getting calls. They are being taken for a ride. They play for too little money. I want to take the calls for them, act as their manager, their agent. If they agree.’ She turned.

‘So you want to set up another business. Why not? They use my phone already, why not my staff? You would like a small dance floor. You would like me to swing from the ceiling in a tutu?’

Rosie laughed and so did Mrs Orsini.

‘Yes, why not?’ Mario said. ‘For once there is a light in your eyes. Your Jack should see that. And don’t forget you have clinic appointment this afternoon.’

Rosie went along. The nausea had almost stopped. There were mothers with young children in the waiting room. They clung to their mothers’ legs as Lee had clung to hers and Jack’s. As she had clung to Grandpa. She had forgotten that. She smiled at a blonde child and then at the mother, who looked away and tutted.

She was given iron by the doctor and told by the nurse it would be sensible to wear a curtain ring. Her voice was cold, correct. She gave Rosie details of a Home for Unmarried Mothers.

Rosie bought a ring from Woolworths. She went back to her room, climbed the stairs, breathed in the cabbage. Her legs ached, her back ached, but there was still the jazz.

She stood at the window. The sky was grey, full of snow. There would be snow on the mountains of Korea and he hadn’t written. She lay on the bed. It was cold. He still hadn’t written. She pushed the ring on to her finger. God damn you, my darling love.

She didn’t go into work again that day. She lay on her bed but didn’t sleep. All she could see and feel were his arms, his lips, his smiling eyes. All she knew was that she loved him. That night she allowed herself to cry, but only that night because she had his child to work for, to protect. A child who would put his arms around her legs. A child she had not pictured until today.

The next day Mario, Luke and the boys turned out the back room, and set up the tables while she and Mrs Orsini wiped the tables, chairs, the walls that she could reach without stretching. Luke would do anything high.

She stood behind the counter and served coffee and tea and food, listening all the time to the banging, the heaving, telling the customers that Thursday was to be a regular Jazz Night. The playing was free, she said, smiling, but the refreshments were not.

Over thirty came the first night and as people left at midnight a man approached Luke to play a gig at Chertsey on 1 March and offered him five pounds. Luke beckoned to Rosie.

‘You’d better talk to my manager, Rosie Norton.’

The man smiled. ‘Well, Mrs Norton, I’m Tom O’Toole. So, you manage these boys. Strange job for a woman, isn’t it?’

Rosie brought out her drawl. ‘It runs in the family. You might have heard of Bob Wallen from Pennsylvania.’ She didn’t wait for him to acknowledge the name which he might or might not have known. ‘These boys can’t work for that sort of money. Not now. They were offered twice that last week. I turned it down.’

She waved at Mr Orsini.

‘Mr Orsini has had to pay ten pounds tonight and he got them for that because I know him well.’

She nodded to Mr O’Toole.

‘Give me a ring sometime. On this number.’ She handed him a card. ‘But I can’t stop now. I have to arrange their itinerary with them. Nice meeting with you.’