Half a Crown (17 page)

“As well as can be expected,” Lady Malcolm said. “I’ll leave you with your boo, but do think about what I’ve asked,” she said, getting up and pushing her way through the crowd.

“How are you?” Sir Alan asked.

That was when I wished Betsy hadn’t asked me to draw him off. Naturally, I’d have replied that there was nothing wrong with me but that Betsy had a broken arm and was on the other side of the room. With a brief to be nice to him, I couldn’t, and my hesitation was immediately apparent. “I’m fine,” I said.

It came too late; Sir Alan had decided that I wasn’t fine at all. “Would you like to dance, or are you all booked up?” he asked.

“I’d love to dance,” I said, emphatically, putting down my champagne glass and getting up. Tommy didn’t notice, the pervert, but Betsy gave me a thumbs-up sign from across the room.

Sir Alan took me back to the ballroom and onto the floor. The band were playing one of the newest tunes, a jaunty thing called “Way Up North in Hitlerhavn.” We started to waltz decorously enough, though he held me very close. I noticed Mrs. Maynard watching with narrowed eyes as he whirled me around. I looked back at Sir Alan, who was looking at me. I found the way his eyes were precisely at the same height as mine quite disconcerting.

“Your ordeal wasn’t too much for you?” he asked. “I was horrified when I heard you’d been taken by the police. One hears the most
awful things about them these days, they’re quite out of control, it should be looked into.”

“Mrs. Maynard says it was fortunate I was looked after by the police,” I said.

He laughed. “Did they ask you about me?” he asked.

“I mentioned you. I thought perhaps the title might impress them, but it didn’t seem to. I had more luck mentioning my uncle.”

“Your uncle?” he asked. “I thought you were an orphan.”

“I believe Mrs. Maynard told your mother all about my family,” I said, quite sharply, because I was sure he knew.

“Oh, but I never listen to a word my mother says,” he said, charmingly, steering me quite expertly around Mary Carron and a great clumping Guards officer.

“My uncle is Watch Commander Carmichael,” I said.

Sir Alan missed a step, so it must actually have been a surprise to him. “Good gracious,” he said, quite lightly, but his expression was very hard to read. “It seems I have been worrying about you needlessly. They surely wouldn’t have held on to someone with such highly placed relatives.”

“No,” I said, with some satisfaction.

As the Caravan Club enclosed them, Carmichael couldn’t help wishing that he were anywhere else. The air was blue with smoke. The band were playing the inevitable Cole Porter. The walls were hung with red fabric held in place with golden cords, meant to evoke tents, Morocco, and the mysterious world of the Arabian Nights. Curtains were drawn across most of the alcoves, which offered a certain degree of privacy, but sounds escaped and were not quite drowned by the band. A few couples, all men, were shuffling around the tiny dance floor. Others clustered at the bar. Some were dressed as hideous parodies of women, others were disguised so well Carmichael would hardly have guessed they were men, save for their hands. Most were dressed in ordinary male clothes, respectable enough in their hats and waistcoats, if not for the look in their eyes. Where did they go the rest of the time? Carmichael wondered. Could these men who simpered on Saturday night in the club spend their daily lives as ticket-sellers on the railway, office clerks, shopkeepers, schoolteachers, policemen, like everyone else? Some of them, he knew, would be married. Two men, having negotiated at the bar, went off into one of the alcoves and drew the curtains across. Would their wives, smelling the cat-house perfume on their collars, suspect infidelity and leap to the wrong conclusions? Could
they have any lives outside this room, the only place he ever saw them, and could they have imagined that he did?

It wasn’t that Carmichael didn’t want to make Jack happy. He did. It was just so difficult. Once, when they had been in the army, they had dreamed of having a flat together in privacy where they could close the door to everyone else. They might appear as master and man before the world, but in their own space they would just be Jack and P. A. In their dreams, that had seemed enough, and to Carmichael it was still enough. He was still thankful for the miracle that had brought him Jack. He regretted that they couldn’t go out like other people. He would have liked to take Jack to good restaurants, and to Elvira’s dinner, to be open before the world like the couples he saw holding hands as they walked down the street on a warm summer evening. But if he couldn’t have that, he didn’t want this tawdry alternative, the half-life of the bars and clubs where homosexuals gathered furtively, almost all of them speaking mincingly and miming effeminacy in their every gesture. It set his teeth on edge. He didn’t identify with them; indeed they repelled him utterly. He would have avoided them even if it had been safe to associate with them. As it was, he would have shunned them like lepers, if not for Jack.

Jack greeted friends and made for the bar, Carmichael staying close behind. Jack wanted to go to Greece and Turkey and he had to deny him. Jack wanted their life to be more open as it became ever more closed. Jack wanted fun and excitement, and the world denied him much of it and Carmichael most of the rest. The Caravan Club, long established and as safe as any such establishment could be, was their compromise. Carmichael came with Jack because otherwise Jack would come alone, as he sometimes did when Carmichael had to work long hours. “I was only having a drink with my friends. I can’t sit at home waiting for you every minute with no knowing when you’re going to deign to turn up,” Jack would say,
and every time Carmichael’s gorge rose at the thought that Jack might have gone off into the alcoves for a tryst with some of those “friends.” He loved Jack, and he trusted him, but Jack felt none of Carmichael’s distaste; he felt he belonged among the patrons of the club.

Jack ordered drinks, a cocktail for himself and a whisky and soda for Carmichael, as usual. “Bottoms up!” Jack said, and the barman laughed shrilly, though surely the joke must have worn as thin for him as it had for Carmichael, who sipped his whisky morosely. If they were raided, he thought, it would be best not to run but to hold on to Jack and go out of the front and simply overawe the police presence there with his card. He was almost sure it would work. The Watch were feared even by the Metropolitan Police, usually, until it got to high levels. Penn-Barkis—he didn’t want to think about Penn-Barkis, so he downed his whisky and bought another.

“This is nice, isn’t it, P. A.?” Jack cajoled.

“Lovely,” Carmichael said, resisting the urge to say that they had better whisky at home, and better music too. The band were sawing their way through “Anything Goes.” A man dressed quite convincingly as a woman caught Carmichael’s eye. It was interesting how men looked older in women’s clothes. Seen as a man, Carmichael would have guessed his age as perhaps twenty-two, but as a woman he looked every day of thirty. He wondered if the reverse were true.

“Dance?” the man asked Carmichael. His voice was Cockney and masculine, even though he was consciously trying to lighten and raise it.

“No, thank you,” Carmichael said.

“How about you, then?” he asked Jack.

“Do you mind, P. A.?” Jack asked.

“Doesn’t own you, does he?” the man asked.

Carmichael wanted to reply that he did, that Jack was his, every square inch of him, but he was here to make Jack happy, so he
smiled and said that Jack could certainly dance if he wanted to. He leaned against the bar and watched them. They could have been a conventional couple, and if they were, he would have described them as a forty-year-old man with a thirty-year-old woman, not married, but both very much of the same class.

Class would always come between them, Carmichael knew. Jack’s parents kept a fish and chip shop. Jack had left school at eleven and worked in a factory. He had gone from that into the army at the beginning of the War, and become Carmichael’s batman. He had almost no formal education, but he loved to read. In the years they had been together he had read far more than Carmichael, who liked to read Maugham or Forster now and then. Jack had no time for fiction, he liked only serious books. He had become almost an expert on Byzantium. But still he felt comfortable in this bar, with people like his new dance partner. He wanted to campaign for homosexual rights, and would have gone on a march once if Carmichael hadn’t explained to him the likely fate of the marchers. Carmichael knew what happened if you stuck your neck out. Jack dreamed of utopias. He had risen in the world, but resented the fact that he was stuck where he was.

Carmichael’s own family were country squires in the north of Lancashire. His brother looked after his tenants and his sheep with very much the same attitude to all of them. He had married a girl from Carlisle who had a little money from a share in a biscuit factory, so they had more spending money than the family had when Carmichael was a boy. His nephews were at Shrewsbury School. It gave him pleasure to think that he had been able to send Elvira to Arlinghurst, which was better than Shrewsbury—indeed it was widely considered to be the girls’ equivalent of Eton. Such distinctions didn’t mean much to Jack, but Carmichael couldn’t help noticing and adding up the tiny gradations of school and class and income.

It was possible to rise in the world, if you started early enough. Elvira, born the daughter of a sergeant in Scotland Yard, was being presented to the Queen. She could marry a Duke, or become Dean of a great Oxford College. But it was too late for Jack. Yet Jack would never be content with what he had. Carmichael earned a good salary as Watch Commander. He was not rich, and educating Elvira had cost a great deal, not that he begrudged it. What he had he considered as much Jack’s as his, but Jack would not see it that way. He had made a will leaving everything between Jack and Elvira, including his insurance policies. He expected to live for years, yet, but you never knew. There had been assassination attempts, after all.

Just as Carmichael was finishing his whisky and growing morbid, Jack came back from the dance floor, smiling. Carmichael bought him another drink, wincing a little as he pronounced the ridiculous name. Did anyone else still drink cocktails? Jack was getting a little drunk. He put his arm around Carmichael’s neck. “Shall we dance?” he asked.

If it wasn’t for Jack, Carmichael thought—as he thought at a certain point every time he visited this club, or one of the others like it—he would have had no way to find a partner, ever, without resorting to a place like this. He felt ridiculous as they moved onto the dance floor, conspicuous and pathetic. Jack led, and he stumbled through the steps of the dance, remembering dancing classes in the upstairs room of the Farmers Arms in Lancaster and the pink cheeks and protruding pigtails of fat Lottie Cunningham, who had always been his partner. The dance floor at the Caravan Club was as formal and chaste as those long-ago dance lessons. Except for the gender of the participants it would have been acceptable at any church social evening. “Let’s misbehave!” crooned the singer, moving into a new song. Jack winked, and Carmichael tried to smile. It was ten o’clock. In another two hours they could go home.

More people were dancing now, and Carmichael didn’t feel quite as if he stood out so conspicuously. A man in a bright pink sweater trod on his foot, and apologized profusely. Carmichael noticed an Oriental dancing with one of the less-plausible-looking men dressed as women. “Just like in Shanghai before the War!” he overheard as they swept past him.

The tune ended, and they stumbled back to the bar. The barman produced more drinks. Carmichael had a beer this time, which came in an old-fashioned pink china pint mug. “I didn’t know there were any of these left!” he said. “The last time I saw one of these was when—” He cut himself off. “It must have been about ten years ago in Bethnal Green.” He and Royston had been investigating the supposed Irish communist Guerin who had turned out to be an unemployed fitter from Liverpool called Brown. It had been part of the Farthing case. But he wouldn’t have talked about it in the bar whatever case it had been. Nobody here knew who he was, and he wanted to keep it that way.

“I’ve got a
friend
in Bethnal Green,” the barman said, stressing the word emphatically.

“Lots of nice pubs down that way,” Carmichael said. “Though it’s years since I was there. London’s like that, isn’t it, you keep to your own patch?”

The barman agreed, and explained that he came from Sunderland, where people were much friendlier and got around more, but that he’d been in London since the War. “I was too young for the forces, so I became an ARP warden, they were taking them at seventeen. I trained at home, then they sent me to London because of the Blitz. I spent night after night really thinking we were all going to be blown to bits. I got interested in London, the buildings and districts, because of saving it from burning down, which is funny when you think about it. When Thirkie made the peace in 1941 I took the first job here I was offered, and I’ve been here ever since. I can still
remember how relieved I was that the Blitz was over and the War with it. I couldn’t believe I was going to survive to grow up. I remember walking around London with one of my friends, a French boy he was, one of de Gaulle’s men who went off to Canada later. He was crying, but I just felt this incredible sense of relief.”

“It’s much the same for me,” Carmichael confided. “I was in the army, and so was my friend.” He glanced at Jack, who seemed happy enough talking to a listening coterie. “They kept us in uniform for a while, in case, and then we came out at the same time and I found a job down here. I’m from Lancashire originally.”

“I’d have guessed that from your voice,” the barman said. “What’s the scene like over there?”

“The scene?”

“You know, this sort of thing. Places for people like us to meet. That’s one thing where London has Sunderland beaten hollow, if you ask me. That’s the other reason why I stayed. There’s nowhere homely like this, almost in the open. This club has been here since 1930. It’s practically an institution. Oh, we get raided now and then, but the peelers know we don’t put up with any rough stuff, or young boys. You need to be a member to get in, and we don’t let anyone join who doesn’t already know a member. Almost like a real London gentry club.” He looked around at the little dance floor and wall hangings proudly.