After the Cabaret (23 page)

‘I must go, Sally,' said Eugene.

‘By the way,' Pym said, ‘Theo's back. He's in La Vie with the others.'

‘What?' cried Sally. ‘I'll go there.' And she pushed past Eugene and was off. He stared after her.

‘Don't worry, old man. She probably wants to see him about the baby,' Pym remarked from his chair.

‘What baby?' asked Eugene.

‘Oh,' said Pym luxuriously. ‘She hasn't told you about the baby?'

‘Why the hell didn't you tell me you had a baby?' shouted Eugene. ‘A baby, for God's sake. How come you didn't mention your baby? A baby!' he continued disgustedly. ‘Theo Fitzpatrick's baby, whoever and whatever the hell he is!'

‘Don't you talk like that about Theo,' yelled Sally.

They stood in darkness outside a dance-hall in the Strand, from which came the sounds of music. Nearby, a couple were embracing against a wall. Two soldiers passed them, hurrying into light and clouds of smoke.

‘To hell with Theo. What about the baby?'

‘Shut up about the baby,' cried Sally, who was very upset about Theo.

On getting downstairs at La Vie she'd searched for him with her eyes – and found only the usuals, including Briggs and Bruno, in his ambulance-driver's uniform. There was no sign of Theo. Briggs had explained he'd gone to Chequers, for a high-level secret conference, and
would be leaving immediately afterwards. A plane had been laid on.

‘Going where?' Sally had asked.

‘It's hush-hush,' Briggs had told her, tapping his nose.

‘Did he leave a message?' she'd been forced to ask. Briggs had just shaken his head.

‘Well, if you don't care about this baby, I guess I don't have to,' Eugene declared.

‘Let's go in and dance,' said Sally. So they did.

The band was loud, the crowd of dancers huge. There were women in bright frocks, though some wore ankle socks due to the lack of stockings. There were soldiers, sailors, airmen and uniforms of every description and nation. There was a haze of smoke above the dancers. Under a notice sternly saying ‘No Jitterbugging' couples flung around, jitterbugging.

Then Eugene and Sally were dancing. But Eugene kept saying, ‘What upsets me is that you didn't tell me. What did you think I'd say? That it was wrong that you had it? Didn't you trust—'

And then there was a big hand on Sally's shoulder and a Southern American voice said to Eugene, ‘Mind if I cut in?'

‘Not if the lady doesn't object,' said Eugene, expressionlessly.

‘I do, actually,' Sally said. ‘I'm dancing with this man. And I don't know you.'

‘I think it's better if you dance with me,' he said politely. He was a tall man, with a lieutenant's stripes. ‘Don't you, boy?' he said to Eugene.

‘Like I said, it's the lady's choice,' said Eugene, but his eyes told Sally to dance with the lieutenant. Sally wouldn't.

‘I don't think so,' she said. She moved a little closer to Eugene's rigid body.

‘Dance with him,' he muttered.

The eyes of ten soldiers who had massed behind the lieutenant were on him. Immediately a dozen black soldiers came from all corners of the hall. The band stopped playing. Couples scattered to the edge of the floor.

A British soldier observed, in a disgruntled tone, ‘It's about time these blokes thought about fighting the enemy once in a while, instead of each other.'

‘Ain't that what I'm always telling them?' said a vast white-helmeted military policeman, pushing past him. He grabbed a soldier and fielded him into the arms of the MP behind him. ‘Do you guys from Dixie never learn?'

Meanwhile Eugene had dragged Sally away from the core of the fight. A man in a red jacket beckoned them down a passageway at the back of the dance hall where he pulled up a bar and opened the door into an alleyway. They ran up it to a deserted street with another black soldier behind them. An exchange of nods between Eugene and the other man established that one would go right, the other left. ‘Same old story,' said the other soldier. ‘Feets, do your stuff.' He took off and Eugene and Sally found themselves back in another part of the Strand. They pulled up, panting.

‘You could have explained,' Sally said. ‘It wasn't your fault.'

‘Yeah. Those white boys would have up and confessed to everything,' Eugene said harshly. ‘“Sorry, officer. We all apologise that we launched an unprovoked attack on our fellow soldiers.”'

A bus came crawling along and Eugene and Sally got on. All the seats were full, so they stood.

Sally went on with the argument. ‘What did you want me to do? Give in and dance with a perfect stranger?'

‘Didn't you see the guys crowding up behind?'

‘No, actually.'

‘I did. And you wanted to know whether I wanted you to give in and dance with a perfect stranger. I told you then and there – yes. It wasn't just me, you know. It was all the other guys.'

‘Look,' she said, ‘this is England.'

‘No, Sally, it is not England. The US troops are under US military law. If you are a US enlisted man they will try you and if they want, they will hang you.' He paused. ‘This just isn't working out.'

‘OK, Eugene. If you want me to say I'm sorry, I'm sorry.'

‘It's not only that.'

‘What?' she exclaimed.

‘The baby – the fight – the baby,' he said. He told her, ‘I'm going. Just for a while, to clear my mind. Just for a while, Sally.' And he pushed his way down the bus and got off, leaving Sally, bewildered, still clinging to the strap. She looked back to see if she could spot him on the pavement, but there were heads in the way. Her eyes filled with tears. People who had been pretending not to
listen to their conversation, pretended now not to notice what had happened, except for one old lady, sitting under Sally's elbow.

‘You should have stuck with your own kind, girl,' she said, though it was not clear whether she was referring to Eugene's colour or his uniform.

‘Shut up,' Sally said venomously. Listeners were shocked, faces set in disapproval. First, she'd been going out with a Yank, then there was something about a baby, now she'd turned on a poor old lady. It was all due to the war. It was disgusting.

‘Eugene didn't get in touch again. Sally wrote to him at his base but he did not reply.

‘They would probably have made up the row if there had been time,' Bruno said. ‘But it was war, there was always too much time or too little. Eugene got posted, so that seemed to be the end of it.'

Greg said goodbye to Bruno in the restaurant and, thinking hard, went down the tube station steps, planning to go back to Everton Gardens and write up his notes, perhaps do some reading. Instead, on impulse, he went to the Tate Gallery. At a desk he asked for information about an artist, Eugene Hamilton.

He half expected some heavy delving and then, possibly, instructions to visit some remote gallery or archive. He was surprised when the young woman he had asked answered briskly, ‘We've got one. I'll check exactly where it is.'

‘You mean you have a painting here by Eugene Hamilton, an American?'

‘Yes,' she told him. ‘The Metropolitan in New York has more, two or three, I think.'

‘This would be a black American, around the time of the Second World War,' persisted Greg.

‘That's right,' she said. She pulled out a book. ‘Here we are – Eugene Hamilton, born in New York in nineteen
fifteen, illustrator, painter, relationship with the Harlem Renaissance. There's nothing after the fifties, though he was certainly painting immediately after the Second World War. In fact, that's the point.' And she told him how to find the painting.

The picture was largely in blacks and browns. From the light, it was dusk and at the centre of the canvas was a glow of red, a small fire around which six figures sat – three men, two women and a child. All were emaciated and in rags. One of the men, gaunt and shaven-headed, wore a tattered uniform of some striped material. A woman, a shawl over her head, looked out at Greg with huge, blank eyes, eyes that chilled and sobered the viewer. Behind the group was a long wooden barrack block. The child, a wizened dwarf hunched over an enamel mug, was gazing, plainly in fear, at something or someone invisible to one side of the picture. All the others looked into space or at the fire, incapable, it seemed, of any thought, movement, reaction.

There could be no doubt of what the picture showed.

Greg gazed at it in awe for some minutes. Then he ran downstairs and spoke again to the woman at the enquiry desk. ‘When you said the Second World War was the point, did you mean that all he painted were war pictures?'

‘Pictures of the Holocaust,' she said. ‘Just a few, perhaps four, and some drawings, and then nothing more. I've just looked it up. His regiment, or part of it, was stationed at Dachau to guard the camp after it was liberated.'

‘My God!'

‘Yes,' she said. ‘Terrible.'

‘Is he alive?'

She checked her book again. ‘It looks as if no one knows. He disappeared.'

‘Disappeared?'

She nodded.

‘Can I get that book you have?' he asked. She wrote down the title for him.

Greg crossed the road and stood looking down into the swirling water of the Thames. He felt very sober. Now his story included a young American, much the same age as himself, first an inheritor of that bygone world of the Harlem Renaissance, then a guard in the terrible Dachau camp. And it seemed the young man had shown what he had seen, then ceased to draw or paint.

Shaken, he made his way back to Everton Gardens and Katherine. When he came in, her voice seemed to come from a distance as she said, ‘I've been wondering what to do at Christmas. I thought of going to my uncle Simon's. Will you come with me?'

Greg, his mind still full of Eugene Hamilton, said, ‘Christmas? Oh, yes, sure. I haven't any plans. Who is your uncle? Where does he live?'

‘In a little village in Dorset – very pretty. He's my great-uncle, really, my grandfather's brother, but he's only about ten years older than Dad. The only reason I can give my parents for not spending Christmas at home. And it'll be much more fun at Simon's, more still if you come. I know he'd be pleased to meet you.'

‘I'll rent a car,' Greg said. ‘It'd be good to get out of London.'

‘Great,' she said. ‘Any more news of Pym?'

‘Why should there be?' he asked. And then told her eagerly about the picture of Sally, and Eugene and Sally's row, and of his discoveries at the Tate. He said also, ‘I've asked Bruno to dinner here tomorrow and he accepted. I thought you'd like to meet him.'

‘Bruno Lowenthal, coming here!' she exclaimed. ‘Oh, Greg, what a disappointment! I've got to go back early to Cambridge tomorrow. It's an emergency – a sudden funding crisis, a half-million shortfall just discovered and consequent staffing and curriculum changes. Don't ask how they mislaid half a million. But you know what it's like, these days. You have to be there when these things are discussed. My professor's demanded my presence. Or else.'

Greg was disappointed and a little upset that she did not seem more sorry to go. The evening was dull. They ate, and opened a bottle of wine of which Katherine drank more than her fair share. Greg phoned the Metropolitan Museum in New York and confirmed that they had several Hamiltons on their walls. They agreed to fax him any information they had about the artist, but said that they had no current address for him. Any business connected with the paintings was done through his late brother's lawyers in Atlanta. This address they agreed to send to Greg. He went back into the living room and opened another bottle of wine. As soon as they got into bed Katherine fell asleep. Greg lay awake, feeling lonely.

Next day he said, as she packed, ‘I guess you'll be stuck
in Cambridge pretty much up to Christmas now. Shall I pick you up?'

‘Mm,' agreed Katherine, trying to zip her holdall.

By now he was wondering if Katherine had suddenly gone off him, and asked, ‘Is the visit still on?'

‘Of course!' she exclaimed, finally closing the zip. ‘It'll be wonderful. It's a beautiful house, called Chapel Manor Farm, stuffed with paintings and china and all the rest of it. Simon inherited it from some ‘relative'. But we think his benefactor was more a lover. The family connection was pretty tenuous. You'll love it – it's so English, fields, village green, incredible views. Can you pick me up on the twenty-third? Sit on this little case, darling. I can't close it. I don't know why. I haven't bought anything extra.'

It was on the bed so Greg sat on it and asked, ‘You're not going just to avoid Bruno, are you?'

She looked at him incredulously, ‘Don't be daft. Why should I? I told you the reason I had to go. To be honest, I think my job may be at stake.' She fell on him and they made love, beside the little suitcase, one last time.

After Katherine's departure Greg was feeling low and lonely but pulled himself together and fixed a careful dinner for Bruno: a plate of antipasto from a nearby delicatessen, to be followed by meatloaf and tomato sauce, his speciality, then pastries, fruit and cheese. While he was tending the tomato sauce he received the material from the Metropolitan Museum, along with the address of Eugene Hamilton's brother's lawyer. He wrote a letter of enquiry to them and faxed the letter as well as posting it. Later Bruno arrived and they ate in front of the gas fire in the little sitting room. That was when Bruno produced the picture of Sally, nicely mounted. ‘I have a man who does a lot of work for me,' he said, ‘so he did it quickly. I knew how much you wanted to see it again.'

Greg did not mention his fear that Bruno would not, in the end, give it to him. He accepted and propped it on the mantelpiece where Sally, annoyed and laughing in spite of herself, her big sack on her shoulder, looked down at them.