Crimson (21 page)

“Let’s get some champagne and go into the back rooms, where they’re playing roulette and chem my suggested Adam, not present for pleasure only.

Mike had asked Adam to look around, because Mike’s game was straight and he wanted to keep it so. A few games had been quietly taken over by their ‘protectors’, after which the games were crooked. East End thugs were astonished at the idea of running a straight game. Of course you let the punter win a bit at first, in order to encourage him, but after that naturally, the house won. You were in business to make money. And if, by chance, a punter had a big win, he was generally relieved of his winnings on the way to his car, and nobody could prove that the mugging was connected. However, this was rarely necessary, since the punter usually lost it was the law of nature.

Mike reckoned that, should anyone try to put pressure on him, Adam would know someone to apply a little firm counterpressure.

Adam now worked full-time for the family firm; he had taken his solicitors” finals the previous year and was now fully conversant with trust accounts and bookkeeping, papers and property law, conveyancing and the law of contracts. At night, whenever possible, he gambled.

By one o’clock in the morning Clare was tired and ready to go home, but Adam was still playing roulette. Again he offered Clare fifty pounds with which to gamble but she shook her head.

“Take money from a man? Gran would throw me into the snow and cut me off without a shilling.”

“Rubbish. She’s mad about all of you. Youll never be cut off without a shilling. She may lose her temper from time to time, but Elinor’s bark is far worse than her bite. Look how your row ended she’s agreed that you can go to a crammer and study.” “I won’t be able. to study anything tomorrow unless you me home soon.”

“Just one more throw,” Adam promised. Clare yawned as she watched Adam swiftly place his stake. She felt too tired and shy to speak to anyone else, and anyway, the people in this quiet room were intent only on gambling.

Above the rattling clunk of the ball, Clare heard a faint commotion from the hall.

Adam’s head jerked up. Ignoring his winnings, he took Clare by the arm in a grip that was hard enough to bruise.

“That sounds like a police raid. Follow me quickly.”

“But, Adam … my cloak

Adam had hustled Clare out of the rear door while other guests were still looking puzzled.

“Ow, Adam, you’re hurting me,” Clare cried, but Adam took no notice. He opened a door at the back of the hall and pushed her down the stone stairs to the basement. She nearly collided with a waiter, who was carrying champagne up from the kitchen below.

Once at the bottom of the stairs, Clare could hear hammering against the front basement door, around which scared kitchen staff had gathered.

“Better let ‘em in, Ernie,” she heard someone say as Adam dragged her out of the back door and into the dark garden.

“There should be a ladder to your right,” Adam whispered.

“Get up it and wait on top of the garden wall.”

“But I can’t … my dresW In the dark, Adam grabbed Clare’s chiffon skirts, pulled them up to her waist, and threw them over her shoulders.

“The ladder’s right in front of you, Clare! Climb itf Clare pulled off her silver slipper she’d lost the other on the stairs and slowly climbed the workman’s ladder, which wobbled each time she cautiously moved her foot up a rung into the darkness.

“Got a move on!” Adam whispered urgently.

“I can hear the police in the kitchen!”

Tentatively Clare groped with her left hand, feeling for the wall, but pawed only air.

“Hurry! ” She moved up two more rungs and again stretched her hand upward, but still felt nothing. This wall was as high as the Great Wall of China!

Again Clare reached out her hand, and this time touched the damp, uneven, unyielding bricks. Below her, she felt the ladder tremble as Adam started to climb. Clare thought she preferred to be caught by the police, rather than break her neck falling from a ladder in the dark.

After she climbed the next rung, Clare’s hands groped forward, but she grasped empty air. Clearly she was now at the top of the wall and would have to get off the ladder.

As she crouched atop the wall, she heard windows thrown open with a crash. Someone shouted, “Send two men into the garden!”

Adam nimbly scrambled up beside her. No time to pull the ladder up so we-can climb down the other side, Adam thought, and pushed the ladder backwards. Before it hit the ground, he had jumped into the dark safety of the neighbouring garden.

“I’m in a flower bed,” he whispered up to Clare.

“You’ll have to risk it. I can’t see to catch you. For God’s sake jump!, Clare clung to the top of the wall, too frightened to jump.

“What about MikeTshe whispered anxiously.

Adam hesitated a moment, as he thought of the many occasions when Mike had loyally shouldered the blame for his adored elder brother. Adam fleetingly remembered the biweekly ceremony of stealing chocolate from the local sweetshop counter, where, eventually, the police had been “ought in by the irate shopkeeper and were waiting for the two schoolboy thieves; Mike confessed although Adam had been the ringleader and Mike refused to name the other schoolboy conspirator, for which bravery he was soundly whipped by his father. Adam also remembered the ringing-doorbells-and-x-unning-away episodes when Adam’, the ringleader and the faster runner, had always managed to hide in someone’s garden or up an alley, where he listened heart pounding to Mike’s capture, knowing that a thundering row with their father would follow, and that Mike, after loyally swearing that Adam had nothing to do with it, would be beaten and punished.

Through childhood and adolescence, there had been many similar instances and never once had Adam confessed to having taken part in them. He had become used to this useful fraternal hero-worship. So now, in the earthy, damp darkness, he shrugged his shoulders and -whispered to Clare, “Mike won’t mind, he never does. Now, for God’s sake jump!”

The back door behind Clare opened with a crash. She jumped downward, into the dark, into Adam’s arms.

Before she had caught her breath, he grabbed her right. wrist.

“Let’s get to the back door. It should be open.” As quickly as he could, Adam groped his way along the garden wall towards the silent house, shoving shrubs aside as he did so.

Eventually the garden wall ended and his fingertips moved to the left: they touched … a window … more brick wall … and then a panelled door. He felt for the handle, gently turned it to the left, and pushed.

The door opened. Adam yanked Clare into the house; then slowly and very quietly he shut the door. His fingertips found the key in the lock, and he turned it carefully to the right. Swiftly

AN

AAk he pushed upward, until he found the bolt and rammed it home.

“Adam, we’ve just broken into someone’s house!” Clare whispered.

“Mike always plans an escape route for himself.”

“But you pushed the ladder away, so Mike couldn’t use it!” Your grandmother wouldn’t like anything to happen to you.” “What do we do now?” “We sit here until morning. Then we’ll borrow a couple of coats and simply walk out of the front door and past the police.”

Adam draped his jacket around Clare’s shoulders. They both sat on the stone-paved floor of what seemed to be an old scullery, leading off a kitchen.

In the dark, Clare shivered as much from excitement as from cold. The voluptuous gambling party represented the kind of decadence that she had always considered waste, but it had been exciting to feel decadent, and wickedly sophisticated, just for a few hours. After that evening, Clare always felt protected when she was with Adam. It never occurred to her that, had Adam not taken her to an illegal game, there would have been no need to rescue her from it.

THURSDAY, 17 APRIL 1958

11 don’t suppose you deserve breakfast in bed,” Buzz said as she carried a tray into Annabel’s frilled pink bedroom.

“How many hearts did you break last night?” “Owl Buzz, darling Buzz, please don’t pull back the curtains. Owl That sunshine is blinding.”

“It’s nearly midday.” Buzz cruelly drew the curtains farther apart, and looked down to see Elinor picking anemones beneath the white and pink blossoming trees of the orchard.

Eighteen-year-old Annabel sat up and stretched. She looked older than her age, Buzz thought. Beneath that tangle of tawny hair, Annabel was the sister who most resembled the young Elinor; she had the same steady gaze and full, moist mouth with a natural curve, so that she seemed always to be smiling slightly, even when asleep.

The difference between Annabel’s debut and Clare’s had been that Annabel loved every minute of it. Lady Rushleigk had again been very helpful, and Elinor had not only paid her expenses for the London season but had also given her a sunburst diamond brooch she had admired when Elinor wore it.

Lady Rushleigh’s prot6g6e had met with great success.

Beautiful, indolent Annabel was always surrounded by men; flirtation seemed natural to her, she was as gently provocative to the postman and the butcher’s boy on his bicycle as she was to the more eligible young men with whom she danced. Lighthearted, gay, and frivolous, Annabel

did not restrict her encounters with these gentlemen to the dance floor: there had been much furtive groping on ballroom balconies, in taxis, and, early in the morning, in the cold and darkened drawing room of Elinor’s London flat.

Annabel was wildly excited by the eroticism of the forbidden as well as by the turbulent hormones that coursed through her body. No matter how tired she felt when she left a party, she was always re-energized by the feel of a man’s arm around her waist, a man’s hard, warm palm on her naked shoulder as he pushed straps aside and explored the soft flesh of her breasts: Annabel felt a swooning, delirious tug from the bottom of her stomach as she murmured, “You mustn’t … you really mustn’t…” Trembling from these touches, Annabel would sometimes allow what, earlier in the evening, she had decided on no account to permit; and a man’s hand would slide beneath the net or taffeta skirt to her smooth, nylon covered knee, eventually to move stealthily over the stocking top, over a taut satin suspender, and slip inward over Annabel’s soft, quivering thigh. The young man was then pushed off into the night, tumescent, throbbing, painfully frustrated.

“Time you was up and packing,” Buzz said, turning again to the window.

Elinor, in the orchard, looked up, saw Buzz at Annabel’s window, and waved. In her gardening clothes, she did not look the glittering, glamorous legend that she had become since Billy’s death. Buzz had been astonished by the change in her personality: Nell had blossomed; she had clearly become a person in her own right as well as a soaring success in the world.

Her American publisher now wished her to meet her readers on the other side of the Atlantic, so Elinor, accompanied by Annabel, was about to fly to New York, the first city on her US tour.

Annabel yawned.

“Buzz, has anyone taken breakfast to Hare Buzz sniffed, placed the tray before Annabel, and chopped off the top of Annabel’s boiled egg with an unnecessary violence that clearly showed her opinion of Harry” You don’t want to bother too much about him,” Buzz said.

“There’ll be tears before bedtime over that young n3asher.”

“I don’t understand why you dislike him, Buzz. You’ve hardly met him,” Annabel protested. Buzz had lectured her incessantly about the pitfalls of love.

Buzz poured herself a cup of coffee and sat on the end of the bed.

“Seen his type before: Don Juan.” Buzz pronounced thej, as in jab

“Harry don’t love you, my girl Harry don’t love anyone. Pays the girls a lot of attention, o’course, but so does a hunter stalking deer. I bet Harry rushes from one girl to the next, just to show himself he can.” She wrinkled her forehead.

“I ain’t never fathomed why a man who gets through a lot of women is reckoned to be some sort of hero, while a woman who has a lot of fellas is called a nymphomaniac.”

Annabel said, “And how do you know so much about. men, Buzz?”

Buzz hesitated. She still felt mild astonishment that Ginger Higby had, long ago, so clearly preferred her to all other women. She still kept all his letters, and his mother showing great kindness had given her two photographs of Ginger as a child. Buzz was comforted by the big buff envelope that contained these remnants of all the sexual love she would ever know.

The feelings that Ginger’s body had aroused in her had, after his death, led Buzz to touch herself experimentally, hoping to remember those past moments of thwarted passion. To her astonishment, she

discovered the erotic Ii climax, which should have been the culmination of her always abruptly severed lovemaking with Ginger. Because she alone was responsible for her pleasure, Buzz felt guilty, felt disloyal to Ginger. She knew instinctively that this was a forbidden game. But why, she asked herself defensively, should she not experience those physical feelings she had been denied by some unknown soldier who would never know if he still existed that an accidental squeeze of his finger had caused an eternal void in Buzz’s life, which had not seemed empty before she met Ginger.

Looking at beautiful Annabel, able to have any fellow she fancied, Buzz sighed and said, “I know about rascals like Harry because I’ve got eyes, miss, and I’ve been using them for years. The Harrys don’t bother about an old stick like me they don’t notice I’m watching ‘em.” Harry reminded Buzz of Billy.

The door was flung open and seventeen-year-old Miranda made her entrance; she wore Stuart tartan slacks and a black sweater; her thick, shoulder-length hair was the brilliant orange of marmalade.

“Like it? As Miranda twisted her head from side to side, the flaming hair swung outward.

“John French. Cost a fortune four guineas.” Annabel was impressed.

“Gran’ll kill you.”.

“Theatrical,” Buzz sniffed.

“You’d better wash it off before she sees you.”

“Can’t. It’s dyed.” Miranda was triumphant.

“She’ll definitely kill you,” Annabel said respectfully.