Miss Carter's War (13 page)

He shuddered to a halt and turned to look at her.

‘Better? Blown the dirty cobwebs away?’

‘Oh Tony, yes, thank you. I’d clean forgotten about laughter.’

Windblown and dusty, they stopped at the shop, where she watched Tony charm both the butcher and his wife into producing a rabbit from behind the empty counter. Seeing Marguerite’s baffled face as he put the rabbit into the saddle bag he laughed.

‘I know, I’m a shameless hussy. But if you’ve got it, flaunt it, I say.’

‘But the butcher, is he—?’

‘No he’s not a poof. He’s a bit of a closet queen, plays rugby with the local team and enjoys a frolic in the showers after, but he wouldn’t really do anything. He’s neither Arthur nor Martha. There’s a lot of men like him. Especially after being in the services during the war. Stuck in a ship for months on end in the Navy I had a ball, I can tell you. He does no harm, poor sod.’

Once in the flat, Marguerite busied herself in the kitchenette, making a rabbit pie, whilst Tony looked around.

‘Nice view.’

‘Yes, they play cricket out there in the summer. I love watching it. It’s very English.’

‘But you’re French.’

‘Only half, remember. My father was English.’

‘Was?’

‘Yes, they’re both dead. I told you.’

‘Where did they die? You never told me that.’

‘Paris. I think.’

‘You think?’

‘Yes. Do your parents still live in Oldham?’

‘Yes. We don’t know much about one another, do we?’

Marguerite realised that was true. Their relationship before had been fun but necessarily superficial because, she now knew, both of them had a lot to hide. Marguerite opened a bottle of wine that she had kept for a special occasion. He poured them a glass.

He leant on the door and watched her chopping and rolling, occasionally tasting or smelling an ingredient.

‘You’re good. Do you like cooking?’

‘Not for myself. But I enjoy cooking for others.’

‘Perhaps you should stop doing so much for others. Don’t risk all your eggs in other people’s baskets.’

‘You mean Elsie?’

‘And that other girl.’

‘Irene?’

‘Yes.’

‘I meant to help them.’

‘And you did. But you can’t dictate what they do with your help.’

‘But I am a teacher. My job is changing children’s lives.’

‘No. It’s to teach them English, French, Sport, whatever. Their lives are their own. Take me. I was in a slum school, and a teacher moved heaven and earth to get me to physical-training college. If it hadn’t been for him I’d be sweeping streets now. Mind you, they’d look bona if I did. He rescued me but, try as he would, he couldn’t stop me being queer.’

Marguerite was embarrassed.

‘Are you sure you are? Maybe you’re like the butcher.’

‘ ’Fraid not, poppet. My teacher made me go to a doctor to be “cured”. He looked at me with revulsion and said, “You do know you’re breaking the law?” and prescribed aversion therapy, electric shocks, hormone injections, the lot. I refused all of it, but agreed to try therapy, and ended up making a pass at my butch psychiatrist.’

Marguerite laughed on cue but hid her face as she put the pie in the oven. Tony chattered merrily whilst looking through her LP records stacked on the floor, a mixture of classical and jazz, like the George Melly and the Humphrey Lyttelton they had bought together after hearing them play in clubs. He held up the Judy Garland LP that they got after the concert at the Palladium.

‘Fancy a bit of Judy to celebrate what I hope is our reunion?’ He looked at her anxiously.

‘Yes, I’d love that.’

As the familiar throbbing voice started, Marguerite remembered.

‘Those men that night. Were they your friends?’

‘Ships that pass in the night.’

‘What does that mean?’

He paused, looking out of the window, then turned to face her.

‘Marguerite this is difficult for me. I want to be honest with you, but I tread a dangerous path. Can I trust you?’

Marguerite felt battered by the complexities of other people’s lives, but knew that to reject Tony’s offer of openness would sever any bond they might have.

‘Yes, Tony, you can trust me.’

‘Do you know where it’s from, that quotation? “Ships that pass in the night”?’

‘Yes, it’s Longfellow.’

‘An old actor laddie, a sad old queen, taught me it. I know it by heart:

‘ “Ships that pass in the night, and speak each other in passing;

Only a signal shown and a distant voice in the darkness;

So on the ocean of life we pass and speak one another,

Only a look and a voice; then darkness again and a silence.” ’

Marguerite waited for him to say more. Eventually he took a deep breath.

‘I have this secret life, you see, and that describes it perfectly, if somewhat more poetically than it merits.’

‘It sounds so lonely.’

‘It has to be. I dream of meeting the love of my life, but it is not allowed. So I make do with hanging around Hyde Park looking for guardsmen who want to earn a few bob, or lurking around shop windows in Piccadilly till someone asks me for a light, and we go and spend the night in the Savoy Turkish Baths on Jermyn Street. Or I find a bit of rough in Trafalgar Square.’

Marguerite wanted him to stop. She felt sickened.

‘Yes, it sounds squalid, I know. Just sex really. But we have some jolly times together too. There’s all sorts of clubs, pubs where we meet and shock the natives with our camping about, before we go back to our schools, banks, hospitals, whatever, and become respectable citizens again.’

Marguerite tried to equate this new image with the Tony she thought she knew.

‘Does it make you happy?’

He laughed.

‘God, no. But it’s a relief not to have to pretend all the time. We cling together, us poofs. We belong to a Masonic society with its own language and rules. And some of it is more elegant. There is a famous theatrical producer who has parties with all the stars that I go to as decoration, and a very clever art historian who has fabulous parties in a flat on the top of the Courtauld Gallery. The conversation is slightly more superior than the average orgy. He’s very left wing, and we are delightfully classless, we pansies. Intellectuals, the odd Tory MP, bank clerks, politicians, actors, judges, soldiers, sailors, navvies, anyone is welcome, especially if they’ve got a bona bod.’

‘What if you get caught?’

‘Well, the game’s up. My proper life, the one I’m proud of, my work, my place in society, will be destroyed. No room for queers. It would kill my mum and dad. I’m the one bright spot of their lives – their son, the teacher. Two world wars, and a lifetime of drudgery. They don’t deserve a pervert for a son.’

‘Oh Tony, don’t, please. Don’t talk of yourself like that.’

He looked straight at her.

‘Well, they are not “experts in sexual deviation”.’

She closed her eyes.

‘I am so very, very sorry I said that.’

‘Don’t worry, it’s normal. Unlike me.’

‘Don’t—’

‘No, let’s face it, we are pariahs and they’re out to get us. Anyone caught is used as an example by our erudite press. Especially if they’re important and clever people, as many queers are. Like poor John Gielgud. You, and the great British public, would be amazed if I told you how many of the people you admire are pansies.’

‘Oh Lord. Why does sex, love, whatever you call it, have to be so furtive? Same with Elsie. Full of guilt and fear.’

‘Well now you know about me, I’m in your power. You could blackmail me, which is another of our little worries.’

‘Don’t be silly, Tony. But I’m now very scared for you.’

‘I’m Lady Luck, don’t worry. Last week I was in a club in Soho, full of screamers, and Lilly Law raided it and started taking everyone’s names. The young copper who came up to me had a northern accent so I reverted to my Oldham lingo that my mum tried so hard to get rid of. He said, “Where are you from?” and when I told him it turned out he grew up a few streets away from me, so he let me nip out the back way, and pinched my bottom as I left.’

‘Thank God.’

Tony helped Marguerite lay the knives and forks on her yellow Formica table, and she brought the welcome distraction of the rabbit pie from the oven. As they ate, she with some difficulty, he looked at her across the table.

‘You asked about happiness. I’m happy now. Here with you. Bona mangarie and Judy singing. What more could a girl want?’

‘But where do I fit in?’

‘You’re everything I want. Companionship, beauty, style, shared tastes, shared ideals. I love you. You are the relationship of my dreams.’

‘But you don’t desire me.’

‘I don’t want to possess you. I don’t need to own you. I just would like to be part of your life for as long as you want me or need me. But I’ll quite understand if you prefer to back off, after what I’ve just told you.’

She just shook her head, not knowing what to say to such a strange proposal. Of what? Not marriage obviously. And not a normal friendship. It was definitely not a normal situation. There was a long pause.

Then, as though at a polite dinner party, Tony said, ‘This is delicious.’

‘It was my mother’s recipe. I used to have it as a child.’

He nodded and concentrated on his plate.

‘
Thank you, Maman, that was delicious
.’

Why are they so solemn, why aren’t they talking like they usually do over supper? Why are there long pauses?

‘Marguerite, we are going away.’

‘What?’

‘And you are going to stay with Henri and Anne.’

‘Why? When?’

‘After supper I’m taking you there. I have packed your bag.’

‘I don’t want to go and stay with them. What about the leaflets? Who will deliver them?’

‘Marguerite. You must forget all that. Never tell anyone what you have been doing.’

‘Why aren’t you coming?’

‘The work needs to go on. But you must go tonight.’

Tony was looking at her anxiously.

‘I’m sorry I’ve upset you so.’

‘It’s not you. I was just remembering something.’

‘About your parents?’

‘Yes. Temps perdu. It’s the taste of the rabbit. It’s my madeleine. We had this pie the last night I saw them. A week later they were killed. For distributing anti-Nazi propaganda. They and a group of like-minded intellectuals produced a newspaper and posters and stickers attacking the occupation. I used to deliver some of them. I took them round Paris hidden in the frame of my bike, or in my satchel or music case. They suspected they had been betrayed and planned to get me away before they were arrested.’

‘Did you know at the time they had been killed?’

‘Not until I got to England and joined the SOE and they found out for me that they had been taken to Fresnes Prison. My beautiful mother was tortured to death and my father was shot.’

‘God, you’ve never told me any of that before.’

‘No, I don’t talk about it. It’s bloody Judy Garland, she’s lowered my defences. Forget it.’

‘But you worked in the Resistance—?’

‘Please. Enough. It’s all in the past. I can’t talk about it.’

She genuinely couldn’t; she did not know how to gather the fragments into a whole that could be voiced out loud. It was buried deep in her mind, where she did her best to keep it.

‘Fair’s fair,’ Tony persisted, ‘I’ve been honest with you. It’s confession time. How did you get to England?’

‘OK, but no more after this. I was fine. My parents had organised my escape through France to Spain and eventually to England.’

‘On your own?’

‘Yes.’

‘How old were you?’

‘Fifteen.’

‘Christ. Younger than Elsie and Irene.’

‘Yes.’

‘See? And look at you now. You survived all that.’

‘Only just. Many didn’t. My best friend Rachel and her sister were taken away, with many of our Jewish friends. I discovered later that she spent six days shut up in a sports stadium called the Vélodrome d’Hiver.’

Marguerite was now fighting to block the memory but the words forced their way out.

‘Six thousand of them, six days in the blistering heat. No shelter, no food, no water, no lavatories. Those that didn’t die there were carted off in cattle trucks, where more died. She was thirteen, her sister was four years old, crouched on the floor amongst the shit and corpses for days, only to be stripped, gassed and incinerated at Auschwitz.’

Tony had his head in his hands.

‘Oh my God.’

‘And from my bedroom window I watched them taking her away. And did nothing. Which is why I can’t do nothing ever again.’