The Gigantic Shadow (7 page)

‘She was a star, a real star. In musical comedy, I mean. She was beautiful.’

Beautiful? He suppressed the words on his lips, that she had not been nearly so beautiful as her daughter, and said humbly, ‘But I don’t remember your father.’

‘He was a producer. Norman Hales Productions.
The Girl from St Louis, Song of the Clans, The Girl from Way Back, Esmeralda Went Dancing.’
She spoke the names reverently. ‘Mummy starred in some of them. They were all successes. He had a magic touch. Everyone said so.’

Hunter remained silent and she went on talking dreamily, as though he were not there.

‘Norman was a most wonderful person. I always called him Norman, he didn’t like being called daddy, said it made him feel old. We had a marvellous life, the three of us. They took me about with them everywhere. All over England, France and Italy, once to America. Lots of different hotels, restaurants, always gay, exciting people.’

And you say this room is the nearest thing to home you’ve ever known, Hunter thought in pity. When he spoke, it was to ask a question. ‘You said he hurt you. How did that happen?’

Her face was turned away. ‘He never meant to hurt me.’

‘You said that too.’

‘But he was attractive, you know, attractive to women. He had lots of affairs. Sometimes he would go off, we wouldn’t see him for a month perhaps. Mother used to cry.’ She said rather fiercely, ‘I never cried. I knew he’d come back.’

‘He loved your mother.’

‘He loved
me,’
she said emphatically. ‘When he came back he’d just come into the flat – we stayed in lots of flats then, or that’s the way I remember it – throw his hat on to a peg and say, “Hallo, Chip, remember me?” That’s what he called me, Chip. He’d always come back loaded with presents for both of us, and it would be just as though he’d never gone away.’

‘He’s dead, isn’t he?’

‘He was killed in March, 1941. He was walking along during a raid, and a warden told him to take cover. He said – the warden told us about it afterwards – “Thank you for your advice, my dear sir, but I’m already late for an appointment, and I’ve made a private arrangement with the Germans that they won’t bomb the particular district I happen to be visiting. They keep a note of my movements, you know, Lord Haw Haw looks after me in person.” He was killed two minutes later by a piece of flying shrapnel. They thought it was from one of our own guns.’

The picture she was building up, of an amorous Peter Pan who didn’t like being called daddy, and was facetious and foolhardy during air raids, seemed to Hunter thoroughly dislikeable. It would, he knew, be unwise to say so. ‘What did your mother think?’ he asked. ‘I mean about his affairs, and so on.’

‘She accepted them. You just had to accept them. That’s the kind of man he was.’ They had been drinking in a little club called the Low Down and she sat there now, legs thrust out in front of her, arms hanging loose, head sunk, a picture of clownish dejection so complete as to be comic. ‘I was only seven when he died, but I’ve never got over him. I don’t suppose I ever shall.’

‘We imagine things,’ Hunter said, out of the depth of his own experience. ‘Especially we imagine happiness. It’s always something past.’

She shook her head. ‘Not this. It was real. Sometimes I think nothing since then has been real in the same way.’

‘Then your mother married again.’

‘Two years after Norman died, yes. Daddy was mad about her, went to the theatre every night, sent her flowers, took her out, all that sort of nonsense.’

‘That must have been painful for you.’

‘Oh, I didn’t mind. I was only a kid, you know, I thought it was funny, that’s all. Norman brought home presents after he’d been away, but as for hanging round Mummy, taking her out, buying her jewellery and all that – well. It just struck me as funny. I suppose I judge everything by Norman.’

‘But he was nice to you?’

‘Who?’

‘Your stepfather. Lord Moorhouse.’

‘Oh, he was nice all right.’ She bit a fingernail, spat. ‘Too nice.’

‘How do you mean?’

‘Mummy died when I was thirteen, you know that, don’t you? She had cancer of the stomach. I was sixteen when he made a pass at me.’

‘Your stepfather?’

‘Who else? He was a bit tight at the time, at least that was the excuse he made afterwards. I dare say it was true.’

‘That’s why you hate him.’

‘Is it? I don’t know. Do you have to have a reason for hating anybody? Or liking anybody? He’s been pretty nice to me in some ways. I’m an awful bitch you know, you don’t want to have anything to do with me really.’

He said nothing. She stood up. She was swaying slightly on her feet, although they had not had much to drink. ‘Come on, let’s go back to your old Cosmos. I’m sick of it here.’

Back in the room with the mauve wallpaper it was again an animal rather than a woman in his arms, a thing that fought and tore.

A little less than two weeks later, he suggested that they should get married.

She burst out laughing and then, immediately contrite, put a hand over his. ‘I’m sorry. But it’s impossible, don’t you see? We’ve had terrible fun, we’ll go on having it, but – why, Daddy would never let me.’

‘I thought you did what you wanted to do.’

‘I do, but…’ she left the sentence unfinished. ‘I do love you. You know that, don’t you?’

‘I don’t know it,’ he said sullenly. ‘You’re like a little girl play acting. When it comes to reality you get frightened and say “Oh, I didn’t mean that.”’

‘It’s not that I’m frightened. I don’t think I’m afraid of anything. But don’t you see…’

‘No.’

‘I’m trying to be honest. Don’t you see, it’s the kind of thing I don’t want. I told you I can’t ever forget Norman.’

He said incredulously, ‘But you were seven when he died. You’re nursing a fantasy about him, that’s all.’

‘I know all that. I know Norman wasn’t – respectable. He wasn’t a good man. Not in the way that you’re good.’

‘That’s the first time anybody has called me good.’

She was impatient. ‘I know you’ve been in prison and all that. I don’t mean that. But don’t you see, the way Norman lived is the way I want to live too. I’m like him. I’ll never be anything else.’

‘That’s only an idea. And a pretty silly one.’

‘Even if I did want to get married, it would be impossible for us. I want money, Bill, I want that more than anything. What should we live on?’

‘We could live abroad. I’ve got some money. I could get a job.’

‘How long would the money last? And when it had gone, what sort of job would you get? A clerk in an insurance office? Do you think I want to keep house for you in a two-roomed flat in Brussels or Barcelona while you go out to work every day? Christ, no.’ He did not answer. She said tenderly, ‘I’m no good. You ought to be able to see that by now. I really am no good to anybody, Bill. Especially I’m no good to you. We’d better stop seeing each other.’

‘I don’t know what you’re like,’ he said. ‘I don’t know what you want. I wish I did.’

‘I don’t know either. But I think I know what
you
want.’ She had been sitting on the bed, cross-legged. Now she got off it and went over to the window, looking out on Wilton Road. ‘It’s fine. Let’s go to Kew Gardens.’

They went to Kew, and for the rest of the afternoon she was more unaffectedly gay than he had ever known her. She left him, as usual, just after six o’clock. He rarely saw her in the evenings, and to his own surprise was able to accept without jealousy the idea that she saw Roger on the evenings when she did not go somewhere with her stepfather. On this day, however, there seemed some difference in her way of saying goodbye. He was suddenly alarmed, and in need of an assurance that he would see her again.

‘Don’t look like that,’ she said. ‘I’ll ring up.’

‘Shall I see you tomorrow?’

‘No. I’ve got to go away.’

‘Next week?’

‘I don’t know if I’ll be back.’

‘You don’t want to see me again.’ He struggled to keep some shreds of his self-respect, struggled not to plead openly. ‘All right. If that’s what you want.’

‘For God’s sake,’ she said impatiently. ‘You don’t know what life’s about, do you? It’s not a matter of what I want.’

‘What then?’

‘I don’t know. I can’t explain. I just have to work things out.’ Her voice was high, hysterical.

‘Write to me.’

She shook her head. ‘Never write letters. I’ll ring, that’s for sure. Have fun.’ She kissed him on the cheek, and was gone.

The gap left by her absence was enormous. He had known her for three weeks and during that time the whole context of his life seemed to have changed, so that the future which had been first bright and then blank, now seemed to have meaning only if it included her. He had woken in the morning with the knowledge that he would see her at some time that day, hear her light voice, with a hint of self-mockery in it, arranging a meeting. It was apparent to him that he could not live without her, and that by some means he must make it possible for them to live together.

He attended the trial of the twenty people arrested at the Dance Rooms. The manager went to prison for three months, the drummer got six months for being in possession of dangerous drugs – he had a packet containing hemp in his jacket – and several other people got small fines. Roger Sennett, who pleaded guilty to attempting to resist arrest, was fined fifty pounds, a sentence which he received without a change of expression on his dark, heavy face.

On the following day he read in
The Times,
under the heading ‘Today’s Arrangements’: ‘Lord Moorhouse on “The Fellowship Circle and the Bond of Empire Unity,” at Propert Hall. 3 o’clock.’ He went after lunch to Propert Hall, a decaying piece of Victorian red brick just off the Gray’s Inn Road. There was an audience of about fifty people, some old and redly Blimpish, others young and with an eager scoutmasterly air. Two old ladies and a rather familiar-looking figure of military appearance whispered on the platform. A yellow-faced middle-aged man with a prominent Adam’s apple bobbed up and down urgently between platform and audience. Then Lord Moorhouse appeared.

It is often difficult to identify the reality of physical appearance with an original mental conception, and to Hunter, Lord Moorhouse came as a shock. He was not a modern Mr Barrett, large, fleshy and overbearing, but a mild, bright-eyed, birdlike, clean little old man, with very neat hands and feet. Could this be the man who had made what Anthea called a pass at her – a thing which she had never referred to again – and towards whom her feelings were so strangely ambivalent?

Introduced by the military figure, Brigadier Fanshawe, as a mastermind of industry, one of the most important cogs in the great wheel of Britain’s prosperity, Lord Moorhouse modestly insisted on his unimportance as an individual, and said that he came there to speak that day in his much more important capacity as Chairman of the Patriotic Fellowship Circle. In that capacity he wanted to tell them something about the vital link the Circle could be between…

Hunter put his head back and found his eyes closing. He was suddenly bored with the thing, and wondered what he had hoped to find out by coming there. For three-quarters of an hour he half-consciously listened to the bright bird voice mouthing platitudes, then to the baying of Brigadier Fanshawe. There was a paper collection, for which several fivers were offered with apparent spontaneity, and then a silver collection round the hall, made by the man with the Adam’s apple. Hunter dropped two shillings into the bag.

Afterwards he drank tea and ate Dundee cake and then, with the sense of an endless measure of time to kill, took a bus that dropped him near Cavendish Square, and walked through. When he was some twenty yards away from the steps, the door opened and two people came out. One was the man with the Adam’s apple. The other was Anthea. The man carried an umbrella with which he feebly tried to engage the attention of passing taxis. Anthea saw Hunter, must have seen him, on the pavement. It seemed to him that she hesitated, uncertain whether or not to greet him. Then the Adam’s apple man got a taxi and opened the door. She turned her back to Hunter, got into the taxi, and they drove away.

It was two days later that she telephoned him.

‘Hallo, Mr Smith, are you angry with me?’

He said carefully, ‘Why should I be angry because you don’t acknowledge that I exist?’

‘That means you are. Oh, dear. I was coming to see you this afternoon. That all right?’

‘Yes.’

‘Same time, same place. ’Bye.’

When she came up the stairs to his room that afternoon, he was shocked by her appearance. Her eyes blazed in a face on which the flesh seemed stretched tightly across the bones, and when they kissed she clung to him with an eagerness that seemed less love than desperation. Their love-making was brief, and after it she shook with sobs. Later, as they lay on the bed, she timidly touched his hand.

‘You saw me outside the house.’

‘You know I did.’

‘And you want to know about it, why I didn’t say hallo.’

‘I don’t need to ask why. You want to keep your life at home separate from the little affair you’re having with an ex-convict. That’s quite exciting in its way, but naturally I understand that Anthea Moorhouse doesn’t want her respectable friends to know about it. There’s nothing to explain.’

‘You can’t think that, you know it’s not true. Oh, you are a fool.’ She beat at him with her fists.

‘I don’t know any more what is true or what isn’t. I only know what I see. You said you were going away.’

‘That was a lie. Oh, Bill, I’ve made such a mess of my life.’

The absurdity of her saying that, a girl of twenty-three who had never been to prison, never endured the agony of isolation from her fellows, touched him.

‘I’ve thought about it all, everything you said.’

‘Yes.’

‘And I’ve decided we’ve got to go on. That’s what you want too, Bill, isn’t it?’

‘Get married, do you mean?’

The words tumbled eagerly out of her. ‘I don’t know about that, but I’ve got to get away from all this. Daddy and everything, I mean. You do want me to go away with you, Bill, don’t you? Because I’ve thought of a way to do it.’

She was sitting up naked, cross-legged, her face serious, tears smudged away. It seemed to him that he wanted nothing else.

‘This is how,’ she said, and told him.

He stared at her, unable to believe that she was serious. ‘You’re crazy,’ he said at last.

She tapped the palm of one hand with the finger of another. ‘I’m not crazy. First of all, we want to live abroad. Second, we must have money to live on. This is a safe way of getting it. Third, when we’re abroad we really want to disappear. This way we could do it.’

‘It’s crazy,’ he said again. ‘We’d never get the money.’

‘If we didn’t, there’d be no harm done. But we would get it.’

‘We might be found out.’

‘My father would never prosecute. But if we do it properly we shan’t be caught.’

‘You’re serious about this, aren’t you?’ he said wonderingly. ‘You really do mean it.’

‘I’ve never been more serious about anything. And if you want what you say you want, you’ll be serious too.’

‘You know I want it. But this – it just doesn’t make sense.’

‘All right.’ She jumped off the bed and walked over to the clothes which, as always, she had flung on the floor. ‘You’ve changed.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Once you were willing to carry a gun and fire it. Now you don’t have to carry a gun, but you’re frightened. That’s what I mean.’

‘You don’t know what you’re talking about, you little fool.’ He was suddenly frantically angry. He caught her and forced her, struggling, back on to the bed. She fought, for minutes as it seemed, scratching and biting, before she suddenly relaxed in his arms. Afterwards, looking at her on the bed, eyes closed, body limp, face drawn and pale, he was conscious both of tenderness and of need for her. ‘Tell me about it again. Perhaps it’s not so crazy.’

She opened her eyes. ‘Not crazy at all. Simple. I disappear. We send a note saying I’ve been kidnapped. Another, telling Daddy the amount of ransom money. A third, saying how the money is to be delivered. We collect the money, go abroad. I don’t see what could be simpler.’

‘How much money?’

She bit her fingernail. ‘Not sure what I’m worth to him. Say seventy-five thousand pounds.’

‘Like winning the pools.’ But the amount really seemed to take the thing away into fairyland. ‘He’d never pay it. After all, you aren’t his daughter.’

‘Do you think that matters!’ Her laughter had as little humour as a dog’s bark. ‘You don’t value me very highly, do you? All right, sixty thousand. Not a penny less.’

‘He’ll go to the police. He’ll give us paper wrapped in a bundle, instead of notes.’

She spat out a bit of nail. ‘I don’t think he’ll go to the police. He wants me, you know. I’m his most valuable possession, better even than his collection of Waterford glass. I don’t mean because of what I told you but he just does want me, that’s all. We’ll make it clear that if he goes to the police –’ She drew a hand across her throat and rolled her eyes. ‘I don’t think he’ll do it then. And for the same reason I don’t think he’ll give us paper instead of cash.’

‘And if you’re wrong?’

‘That’s the risk. But if we’re caught I’ll take the responsibility, say I planned it. Quite true, too. Do you think Lord Moorhouse is going to prosecute his stepdaughter for trying to get money out of him? What a disgrace for a man trying to forget his own lowly origins.’

‘Don’t you have any feelings about him at all?’

‘I hate him,’ she said, and would not look at Hunter.

‘Assume he does get the police on to the ransom notes. How are we going to arrange for him to deliver the money without being caught ourselves?’

‘That’s what we have to work out, master criminal. If you ask me, it’ll be fun doing it. And we’re on sixty thousand pounds to nothing. Still think it’s crazy?’

‘Yes,’ he said, but more doubtfully. ‘There are so many things to think of – a hiding place for you, the ransom notes, the delivery of the money, getting away. A slip up on just one of them and –’ He stopped. He had been talking as if he was going to do it.

‘That’s just what’s fun, thinking about them.’ She jumped off the bed again, and began hurriedly to put on her clothes. ‘Come on,’ she said. ‘Let’s go to one of those places you like. Let’s go to the Tower of London. And think.’