Bartholomew 02 - How to Marry a Ghost (20 page)

Even when I had it at full volume, which I frequently did.

“Jack Braithwaite had big plans for Angie. He was determined to spend a large part of his money launching her into society. She was sent off to do the debutante season and during the course of it, as she would later tell me, our paths crossed several times. As the only son of good Yorkshire stock and landowners to boot I was prime husband material. But I wasn’t your basic chinless wonder like a lot of my peers. I was a rough diamond in many ways and not just in my looks.”

I sneaked a quick glance at him. He wasn’t chinless by any means but there was nothing rough about his looks either as far as I could see. Indeed the most striking thing about his face were his fine patrician features. In many ways he was a dead ringer for

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the image of Andrew Jackson that I looked at every time I took out a twenty-dollar bill.

“Essentially, I was bored by the season. It was a round of endless parties at various estates all over the country. But I overrode my parents’ disapproval and went to Jack Braithwaite’s dance for Angie in Yorkshire.

“Two things made me fall in love with her. Jack Braithwaite’s money paid for a London group to come up and play in the disco, you know, with amps and a PA, and everything was miked up including the drums. The sound was so loud it was like being at a rock concert. Most deb dances had some local band who couldn’t be heard above all the Hooray Henrys and Henriettas braying at each other. A member of the band had a Gibson electric guitar and he let me have a go on it. I was in heaven and so high that I went straight up to Angie and asked her to dance and as I did so, they turned the lights down low and the band started playing ‘On Broadway,’ the Drifters hit.

“I held her very close and she began to sing in my ear—‘They say the neon lights are bright’—and I joined in with ‘on Broadway’ and what can I tell you? We clicked. She was this voluptuous warm armful. For the whole season I’d been dancing with callow girls and suddenly here was someone who felt like a woman. She had big tits and they pressed against my chest and I thought I was going to go wild.”

Suddenly he sat up straight and turned to face me on the sofa.

“What you have to understand, Lee, is that in those days nice girls didn’t. You couldn’t expect to have sex with your well-brought-up girlfriend—or even your fiancée—before marriage.”

“You didn’t get laid until—” I said without thinking and then blushed.

“Of course I did.” He laughed. “There were plenty of girls who weren’t ‘nice.’ But Angie was different. She was a virgin and

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she wouldn’t do more than kiss me. When I finally realized she was dead serious it came as a big shock to find that I really respected her for it. Say what you will about antiquated sexual customs, I’m here to tell you that because I had to wait for Angie, I fell in love with her.”

“So she became your girlfriend?”

Now he looked uncomfortable. “Yes—and no.There’s no getting around it, I behaved like a shit towards her. I saw her on the quiet. I was part of a certain snobby set, the kids of friends of my parents, and they didn’t acknowledge Angie as one of them. On the one occasion I took her to Mallaby, my parents were so patronizing, I think I would have preferred it if they had snubbed her altogether rather than subject her to such humiliation. And she was intelligent enough to understand that she was not accepted. In fact she was as angry with her father for inflicting his own upwardly mobile aspirations on her as I was with my parents for their superior attitude towards her family.”

“So how did the two of you wind up together?”

He didn’t answer for a minute or two.Then he said quietly, “I wish I didn’t have to put this in the book but I know I have to. But I’m ashamed—ashamed that it took an act of hateful violence to bring me to my senses about Angie.”

He turned away from me as if he did not want to see my reaction to what he was about to say.

“The other young ‘bucks,’ as Jack Braithwaite called them, my so-called friends, had her marked as an easy lay. I knew they had no concrete proof of this because she was a virgin. But, for the simple reason that she was, in their eyes, common, they assumed she was there for the taking.They referred to her as a cheap ‘bint’

or a ‘fuckable little totty,’ aping the local Yorkshire idiom. They felt she wasn’t worthy of their respect and to my shame I never set them straight.

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“They drank a lot—we all did and of course I was only a year or so away from experimenting with a ton of drugs. According to one of them from whom I got the whole story later on, they were drinking heavily the night it happened, revving themselves up to the point where they were like the pack of hounds they followed when out hunting.They scented blood and there was no stopping them.

“Jack and Mother Braithwaite—as he always called her instead of Vera—were away in Leeds. Angie was home alone. She let them in when they rang the bell at ten o’clock at night. Why wouldn’t she? She knew them, they’d all come to her dance.

There were five of them and they took turns with her, on the dining room table, in the conservatory, upstairs in her bedroom. It was like some ghastly Yorkshire variation of the girl getting gang-raped by the high school football team. They all had her except for the one who told me all about it and he came clattering out of the closet as soon as it became legal in 1967.

“She managed to get to the phone at some point and she called me and I went over there like a shot. I’d never had a boxing lesson in my life but I landed a couple of near lethal uppercuts and put at least two of them in hospital. I found myself to be capable of a violence I never knew existed within me.”

He shook himself a little and turned back to me with an almost embarrassed smile.

“So there you have it, the story of Kip and Angie, part one.”

“What happened next?”

“Well, we took off ”—he shrugged—“don’t ask me why. It just never occurred to us to do anything else. One of those monsters must have got it together to call an ambulance after we left but they kept quiet about what actually happened because no one ever came after me about it.”

“What about Angie? Didn’t she need to see a doctor?”

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“We went to Mallaby, picked up a few things, and then we drove through the night to London, stopping at a hospital in Leicester so she could be treated.We had no intention of ever returning to Yorkshire.”

“But what about her parents?”

“Jack Braithwaite’s response made me sick!” Shotgun slammed his palm down on the armrest for emphasis. “He probably had something to do with the whole thing being kept quiet.

When he came back from Leeds I called him from London and gave him the edited version. Angie wouldn’t let me go into details but I told him enough to make him see his little girl had been ruined in the eyes of Yorkshire society. I think it says it all that he didn’t care enough to go after his daughter’s rapists—or that Angie felt there was no point in contacting her mother.
Vera only
ever does what Dad tells her
. In her own way Angie was as alienated from her parents as I was from mine and that provided the core of our initial bonding.

“You see, in a way, by taking her off his hands I’d secured for Angie what he had always wanted for her. In his eyes, I was a lord of the manor.The only problem was that when I ran away to London, my father cut me out of his will.

“So there we were, Kip and Angie, living in a damp and moldy basement we’d rented in Earl’s Court. It took a few months before she was ready to have sex with me. She was traumatized and I suppose she should have had counseling. But all she had was me and I tried to be as patient and understanding as I could—even though I was panting for her. We made love for the first time on a mattress on the floor and I swear we had group sex with a ton of fleas but it was worth waiting for.”

He sighed and sitting beside him, I felt as if I were intruding on an intimate moment.

“I am never—ever—going to forget those first few years with

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Angie. I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that we were both giving—and receiving—love for the first time in our lives and it was nothing less than explosive.”

His voice had a longing in it that echoed the tenderness I had caught in Angie Marriott’s when she had talked about him. She had called him a decent man, wonderful and kind. And I think it was at this point that I knew it was not the rambunctious life of a hell-raising rock star that I would be writing, but an intense and poignant love story.

I surreptitiously looked down to see that the tape was still running as he got up and stretched.When he returned to the sofa he perched on the armrest with his arms folded and I sensed he had turned a corner in his narrative. I shifted a little now that he had left me more space on the sofa and settled down to listen to the rest of the story.

“I only had about a hundred pounds on me when we arrived in London,” he said, and I could tell he had regained control of his emotions. I made a mental note not to interrupt him unless I had to. “And although it was an absolute fortune in those days, it lasted about twenty seconds because we had to use it on renting a flat and buying food and getting established in London.We were living pretty much hand to mouth. Everything ran on a meter that you fed with coins—gas fires, electricity, phone. If you ran out of shillings, you froze.We used to go looking for empty bottles in the streets and we’d take them to pubs and get money to live on in exchange. A bit different from the life we’d been living up in Yorkshire.

“I bought Angie a battered little secondhand Remington type-writer and she taught herself to type, sitting at our rickety kitchen table till all hours of the night, bashing the keys in time to music.The faster the tempo, the faster she had to type. Sometimes I accompanied her on my guitar and she typed to that. She

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taught herself a kind of speedwriting too and once she was up to ninety words a minute she went out to get a job.”

I reached for my pad and started to scribble a few notes, confident that he was now on track to deliver the practical facts of their life together.

“She found one right away—as a secretary to a bank manager—

and there she was, going off to the office every morning leaving me to loaf around London wondering what on earth I was going to do with myself all day.There was a little record shop in a basement in Soho where they had all the American imports and I used to go there and listen to them. I drove them mad because I couldn’t afford to buy anything. Finally the owner took pity on me and invited me to accompany him to R & B all-nighters at the clubs—the Marquee, the Scene, the Hundred Club—where my heroes, Muddy Waters, Sonny Boy Williamson, B.B. King, played when they came to London.

“I was always on at Angie to come with me but she had to get up to go to work the next day, she couldn’t stay up till four in the morning every night. I offered her some of the speed I was taking to stay awake, Dexedrine I think it was, but she wasn’t into any of that. And you know I rather liked having her there all warm and sleepy when I crawled into bed with her every morning and we had a couple of hours together before her alarm went off.

“But I wished she’d been there one night at the Marquee because the support band was the one that had played at her dance and I went up and chatted to the guy who had let me have a go on his Gibson. He told me he was about to quit the band, said he’d had enough, wanted to form his own setup. Of course one thing led to another. Instead of going home to Angie that night, I went out on the razzle with Jimmy and the next morning, when he heard me play in his hotel room, he told me I was a natural and

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I should keep in touch with him. He gave me the names of a few places where I could go and sit in with a band to get some practice and pick up a few bob. Angie kept asking when I was going to get a job and I kept telling her ‘I’ve got one, I’m a musician,’

and she’d say ‘Yes, but when are you going to get a real job?’

“Well, I kept in touch with Jimmy and his Gibson and when he formed a band—the Suits—I was part of it and when he OD’d from a lethal speedball a couple of years later, I moved automatically into the lead slot. Suddenly it was Shotgun Marriott and the Suits and when we released a record and it went straight to number one, Angie found herself married to a rock star.”

“So was she along on the road with you or did she stay home to take care of Sean?” I felt it was time I started chipping in a bit.

“Neither,” he said, “we were together for years before we had Sean. We put off trying to have a kid but then when we decided it was time, it looked like we weren’t going to be able to. It was something of a miracle she didn’t get pregnant when she was raped but I began to wonder whether maybe something had happened to her then—you know, to prevent her from having a child.”

“So if she wasn’t at home with Sean and she wasn’t on tour with you, where was she?”

“Building a career for herself. Angie, it turned out, was a lot more straight than I was.”

“Straight?”

“The word didn’t have as much sexual connotation in those days. When we said someone was straight, we meant they didn’t do drugs, they had a boring office job, they were straight-up responsible, normal people. I suppose we thought they were un-cool. But Angie had a good head on her shoulders and she was shrewd about money. God knows, she had to be, she worked in it. She’s a financial adviser now, did you know that? Tells people

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what to do with their pensions. Can you imagine anything more boring?”