Lucky Bunny (9780062202512) (22 page)

T
hat night it's Tony, though, not me, who is jolted awake by a nightmare. The bed is sweaty, the sheets twisting round him, his body shiny with sweat. He pierces my sleep with a strange whimpering moan, the sound a cat might make, and then a shout and a thump—he thumps the pillow—startling us both awake. I wrap myself around him and try to soothe him and he says thickly something about birds, all the birds flying away, he says, leaving the island, where are they? And barbed wire everywhere. “Collar the lot!” Tony mumbles into his pillow. He always says this when he's having a nightmare.

I get up to make him Nescafé and bring it back to bed and snuggle beside him. Stella is out with one of her new finds: a man called James who works in the International Gem Trade, and is her ticket, she assures me, to a life furrier and sparklier than Lady Dockers's. She's in his London pad—he has a house in the country, of course—so Tony and me have the flat to ourselves for once.

I put my cheek on Tony's naked chest, let the soft fur tickle my nose, breathe in the smell of his skin, the coffee and Bay Rum hair oil; listen to the steady thump of his heart, like the throb of a big engine in a factory. He shifts me off to sit up a little and sip at the coffee. He hasn't properly opened his eyes, and after a couple of sips he puts the cup back down, next to his hat and his Kropp razor on the bedside table, and he lies on his back again, black hair all sticking up like a paintbrush. Soon his chest is rising and falling again in a deep sleep. I hesitate to turn off the bedside lamp; I want to listen to his heart for longer. This time, closing my eyes, my cheek pressed to his chest, I think of it ticking: like a gold watch, dropped into a dark cave. He's so solid, and strong, and male and real and vivid and hot and beating and . . . words keep coming, keep piling at me, they pile up and shore up and scream at me that never,
never
in my wildest dreams no matter how wicked I might be, could I do what Ruth did, what Mum did: kill a living thing, put an end to something; make something, someone, dead.

M
ost nights at the club, Tony is there. He comes upstairs, signs in, smiles and chats to me, then goes through another door into the bar, but he usually sends a glass of champagne out for me, which I hide, under the counter, to sip in between club members arriving, and he sometimes comes back to chat for longer, and feel me up when no one else is there.

One night this white-haired gent is talking to me, in his Basil Rathbone kind of voice; silly bow tie and a hunted look, leaning over the counter, obviously hopeful about the Other Book. He's actually talking about the dullest of things, the London pavements being hard on your feet, and I glance down over my desk top to see that this old chap is wearing sandals, and his feet are bare with painted toenails, which he's obviously wanting me to admire. As I lean over to do this, I become aware of Tony, glowering just a few yards from us. The gent clocks him, too, and murmuring something, seems to think better of asking me anything more and goes on up the stairs to another room in the club. Tony comes over to talk.

“I'm the jealous type,” Tony says. He hands me the champagne glass he's brought me, eyeing the books under the counter meaningfully. He leans over and kisses me. “Take the evening off. Ask Stella to cover for you.”

“Oh, yes? What're you offering? A night at Esmeralda's Barn?”

“No.”

Tony stares at the counter again, as if fixated on something. I take a sip from my champagne glass, glance around me. Two girls, student-types no doubt from St. Martins School of Art, wearing bright scarves, reeking of Carnation perfume, clatter up the stairs on the arms of a man so tall and spindly he looks like a ghoul. I offer them the book and a pen; smile in my best professional way.

“Marshall Street Baths,” Tony says, when the girls have signed in and gone through to the bar. “Hot bath. First class. When your shift's over . . . bring your own sixpence and a clean pair of knickers.”

“You really know how to spoil a girl.”

But I'm trembling: I feel my nipples tighten, even as I pop next door to ask Stella if she can cover the last half hour of my shift.

We take a taxi to Marshall Street, and Tony smokes all the way. He sits close, but doesn't touch me, but I feel the muscles in his leg through the fabric of his trousers. I'm thinking: I love the way Tony holds his cigarette, cupping his hand like that, and I love the way he draws on it so sharply like that—the same way he does everything, seizing the most pleasure possible from it.

“You're very beautiful,” he says. I'd been looking out of the window; I turn around in surprise.

“Blinkin' corny!” is all I can think of to say, but Tony doesn't smile. His eyes hold mine; I can't look away. Instead I surprise myself, after a moment or two, by nodding, and then after a second or two longer, smiling and saying, “Thanks.” I somehow know that Marshall Street Baths is somewhere Tony takes girls, has taken girls before. I don't know how I know this. I know it with a strange kind of jealousy that mixes with the hot, deep, fizzing feeling in my stomach, of something else.

I see I'm right by the way Tony enters the building; the way he pays the attendant, who lets us in by a side door, and by the silent way that money is given, towels offered, and the man looks me up and down. We step through into a long chlorine-scented corridor, past banging doors and down a long rabbit warren of corridors reeking of talcum powder and sweat, into a room that Tony has the key to, and unlocks. I've only ever been here on a Friday afternoon when the cubicles are singing with children and people shouting, “More hot water in Number Three, please!” I almost expect someone to turn the brass clock on the door, and tell us how long we've got. Tonight it's eerily quiet, and this is obviously some kind of private arrangement. The room smells strange: of baking wood, and mushrooms. The enamel tub in the center is steaming with water, and someone has added bubble bath: a lavender froth sits on top of the water. Tony puts his towel down on the brown tiled floor, takes off his socks and shoes, and begins unbuttoning his trousers.

His seriousness suddenly cracks into a big grin as he tells me to get undressed.

“Come on, Queenie Dove—too posh, are we, to get in the bath with your old fella?”

“Are you my old fella then?”

Tony's naked skin in the electric light is the color of a new penny. I glance down and then quickly up again, giggle a little. Even after all the times we've been together, I feel like I've never stood in front of him as bare as this, like he's asking me to now. He stands very still, then nods briefly in reply. It strikes me, in a funny way, as some sort of declaration. I somehow know that this is as close as he will come to telling me he loves me.

My face bursts into a broad smile, and I kiss him. He breaks away, turning his back to me, as he climbs into the tub, gasping a little at the heat. I lean towards him in the water as I undo my blouse. Steam makes my cheeks hot and pulls at my curls. My skirt brushes against the side of the tub and is soaked through. The air is liquid and the whole place a big hot cloud; I can only make out a blurred Tony in the heat. I can't help laughing and throwing a flannel towards him, leaning forward to whisper something filthy in his ear, and kissing him again. I'm thinking, as a button flies off my blouse and my stockings fall to the floor in a wet heap, that another thing I love about Tony is how unashamed he is. I put out my hand and the tip of his penis feels like velvet. I hold it tight, watching his face. He's all mine, I'm thinking.

H
e's telling the truth about the jealousy, though. I can't understand this; he never minded me rolling . . . why does he mind now?

“Because you're mine, now,” he says.

“You know I'm a flirt, Tony, I never mean nothing by it.”

One night, after work, he comes to pick me up and take me to a club back in Soho where he still has some business to do with his boss. It's just a clip joint—a one-room job hidden behind a Chinese laundry, with a telephone and a radiogram, full of smoke and musicians and girls smoking American cigarettes. We're handed whiskey as we get in the door, and Tony strides ahead of me. I recognize a girl—a brass—from Bethnal Green that I'm doing my best to ignore. I'm overdressed for this place. I don't even like to sit on one of the chairs; not that anybody could sit down in here, it's packed—and it's not a crowd I fancy either. It's just touts and bookies, whizzers, that kind of thing. I look around for Tony. There he is, leaning against the fruit machine, talking to a tall man with a huge back, flat as a blackboard, whose face I can't see. I watch Tony slick his comb through his hair, the familiar gesture, the way he runs after it with his hand, smoothing; I imagine without smelling it the Bay Rum. It's four in the morning, my legs are aching, and I want to go home. Back to my lovely little Mayfair flat; why did I even come up here?

So I trip over to Tony, my heels sticking on the beery floor, and tap him on the shoulder. He ignores me. I do it again, a bit harder, and I'm just about to say something when he wheels around with mad force, grabs my wrist, and with his other hand slaps me so hard across the face that I think he just bashed one of my teeth out. I stagger towards the bar. The man Tony is talking to turns lazily to stare at me. The noise in the bar seems to stop for a minute—girl clouted by her boyfriend—and then carries on. I can't see him, it hurts so much. My hand flies up to my cheek, and I feel sure something is crumbling in there, like a macaroon.

“You bastard!”

I grab the nearest thing to hand, an open bottle of beer on the countertop, and try to hit him with it. Of course, all that happens is the beer sloshes out, and Tony puts his hand up, and grabs it and stops me, but then he starts pushing me outside, upstairs, towards the door. I can feel by the way he does this—his hand on my arm tight enough to twist the skin, then behind me, shoving—how angry he is, and my heart is beating so fast that I feel like I might be about to have a fit, or burst into flames, or something, and I'm ashamed, being shunted outside like this, and at the same time struggling and trying to get away from him.

When we get outside, onto the street in front of the laundry, I start screaming at him, “How dare you slap me who do you think you fucking are!” and so he slaps me right back, again, and under the lamp I can see that his face is really blazing, and he keeps backing away, saying, “Don't make me, Queenie, don't make me, you hear?” His pupils are so wide that his eyes are black, and I know what that look means. I saw it that foggy night when the punter got rough with me, and Tony told me to walk away, tried not to let me witness it. But haven't I wondered all along what simmers at the bottom of Tony's dark heart? I've wondered just what Tony was capable of, how far he might match me for temper and rage, and now I'm about to find out.

L
ook, it wasn't so bad. He left me bruised and shaken, I had a cut lip, but Tony walked off, he tried to walk away from me. I could see that this was his way to try and limit the damage he might do, that he knew himself, and was ashamed, too, and frightened. The worst of it was having to hail a cab myself, blood dripping from my mouth into my handkerchief, my hair mussed, skirt filthy, and feeling like some tramp as I gave out my address and the cabby said “huh?” and asked me to repeat it, like he didn't believe me.

It was later, creeping into the flat, not switching on the light, but fumbling along the wall, trying not to wake Stella, that I started to shake. I stopped where I was near the wall and felt myself trembling, like a train was rolling through my body. Familiar; horrible. My skin felt cold, as if I'd just taken all my clothes off and stood in an icy wind. I put my face against the wallpaper. I let my knees give a little, I smelled the paint; my throat closed up. Tony, my lovely Tony. I tried to shake the picture of him: the way he'd looked at me, the way my head jerked on my neck as he hit me. Not once, but twice, but—what was it?—
three
times. First with the flat of his hand, and when I didn't fall to the floor, when I kept shouting at him, and coming at him, he hit me in the jaw with his fist, nearly splintering it. I tasted blood from my cut lip, and ran a hand along my jawline up to my ear. I thought of Moll, then, bouncing back, saying to Dad, after he'd thrown his shoe at her, “You think that fucking hurt?” I still couldn't believe it. No one's ever going to throw a shoe at me, isn't that what I'd said to myself? And here I am, and it's Tony of all people. Tony who I thought had saved me, who loved me at last, better than anyone.

T
ony is sorry, he's made me a gift, a carved tiny wooden heart, smooth, ebony, he carved it himself, he's hung it on a silver chain. He stands just inside the door to the flat, on our welcome mat, not knowing if I'll let him put it on my neck. I step towards him into the circle of his hands and he clasps it around my neck.

I try not to feel disappointed that it's not something costly, something in a red box with tissue paper.

Tony watches me carefully. Next he produces flowers from behind his back—a big bunch of roses, red ribbon. Better, I think.

“You all right? You all right, Queenie?”

I nod, not trusting myself to say anything, and he puts out his hand and touches my cheek, and when he sees that I'm not going to shake it off, his whole face changes, the light comes back in his eyes. He ruffles my hair, kisses me.

“I tried to tell you, didn't I? I tried to stop you . . . I'm a shit sometimes, you know that . . .”

Yes, I think. I know that now. I can't pretend I don't.

S
o, we jog along as before, and the only change is, we're both wary. As if—the phrase pops into my head—the gloves are off, and we both know what's what, and we don't want to fight again. Tony only takes me to fancy places on my evenings off—no sleazy clip joints anymore to do business. He takes me to the Gargoyle on Dean Street with its lovely painted ballet dancers on the walls and a four-piece band downstairs; and to the oldest dance club in London, Murrays, on Bleak Street, which feels more like a grand hotel than a club, where everyone is dressed to the nines and a great long American bar stretches along one wall, making the whole place glitter. Tony knows everyone and it seems like he can get in anywhere, so Stella, impressed, starts to join us, her new boyfriend (James the Gem Dealer) in tow, to laugh at the way the showgirls' naked bosoms bounce when they dance, and to try to spot a star—is that Cyril Ritchard over there? Isn't that Lewis Casson?