After the Cabaret (29 page)

When Sally got to the Bessemer she was surprised by the warmth of Cora's welcome. ‘Sing us some of those German songs – people won't mind so much now we're winning. And we need a bit of class, foreign languages and so forth. Vi's all right but she hasn't got your touch.'

A second surprise, less pleasant, came when she ran down the stairs of La Vie and found Theo sitting at a table with Charles Denham and Geoffrey Forbes.

‘I'm just helping Vi out, darling,' she said, swooping past him to the rostrum, where the musicians were tiredly playing ‘The St Louis Blues'. Yet another new saxophonist didn't help much, but Vincent Tubman was accustomed to Sally's repertoire and she managed a Kurt Weill song, a couple of cabaret numbers and the finale, ‘Lilli Marlene', in which everybody joined. Sally felt energetic again,
admired in her red dress, interesting once more. Bowing to the applause, she reflected that another surprising aspect of her marriage was that it made her feel unlovable and unattractive. No one warned you that could happen. Or was it just her?

She had noticed Theo rising half-way through her turn but, concentrating on her performance, assumed he'd gone off to the lavatory. When she came off the stage, Cora was in Theo's seat, talking to Charles, Geoffrey and a naval officer.

‘Where's Theo?' Sally asked Charles. ‘Has he gone?'

Charles nodded but said nothing else and Sally, despondent, asked no further questions.

‘That was very nice, Sally. Have a gin,' said Cora.

‘I won't say no.'

She got back to the house at one, driven by the sailor. Outside, he put his arm round her. ‘I'm married,' she said.

‘Oh, I see,' he replied, and took away his arm.

Sally went in, but Theo wasn't at home. She went miserably to bed and next morning, when she got up early to go to work, felt even worse for Theo had still not returned.

He came in next evening at eight. Sally jumped up from her chair and said, ‘Guess what, Theo? We can have a ham omelette. Ted gave me some ham and the boss's daughter came up from Kent with some eggs and he gave me two.'

But Theo just put down a paper bag on the cluttered sideboard, took out a bottle of whisky and poured himself
a drink – not the first he had had that evening, Sally thought.

‘Do you want it now?'

‘I can't think of anything I want less,' he replied.

‘Why are you always in such a bad mood?'

‘Look round you at this place and ask yourself if you need an answer to that question.'

‘If you wanted a housekeeper you should have married one.'

‘God, Sally, that's a bit banal, isn't it? When all I ask is the minimum of comfort, a little order, the odd meal. Look here, we can't go on like this. If you can't make the place comfortable why can't we get someone in?'

‘Who?'

‘Well, can't you find a woman? It's not impossible.'

‘Where were you last night?'

‘I don't think I have to account for my movements when I see you turning up out of the blue at La Vie.'

‘I told you, I was just standing in for Vi. Anyway, why shouldn't I? I enjoyed it – Cora paid me. I think I'll go back if she'll have me. The money would be handy.'

‘That's the other thing, Sally, this money. Can't you ask your father how long it'll be before he can get it transferred?'

‘He's put some in the bank,' she said.

‘What? It's here? What bank? Why didn't you tell me? Let's get hold of some of it, for God's sake. We could get out of this place for a start.'

‘It's in his bank,' she told him.

‘What the hell's it doing there? It should be in yours.'

‘I've given it to him,' Sally said.

‘You've
what?
You've given your money to your father?
Why,
for Christ's sake?'

‘I said I'd give it away and he persuaded me not to. He made such a fuss that I said, “You keep it, then.”'

‘Oh,
God,
' Theo said. ‘Well, look, darling. Get in touch with him, tell him you've changed your mind and ask him to hand it over. Ring him up. Do it now.' They had a telephone as Theo was on government work.

‘I don't want to. I don't believe in inherited wealth. It perpetuates inequality. And I think I've heard you say that quite a lot over the years.'

‘I certainly believe that in principle, in a proper society, inherited wealth should be abolished,' Theo told her. ‘But that society has not yet come about. So in the meantime we're stuck with the old one. That being the case, I can't see any argument against your accepting your legacy.'

‘Oh,' said Sally, thinking. Then she said, ‘But how can we get to a perfect state of society if people go on acting in the same old way?'

‘By the democratic will of the people,' Theo said, ‘which they haven't yet expressed, not having had the chance to do so. You know perfectly well that individual actions are pointless and only collective action is of any use.'

‘All right,' said Sally. ‘If individual acts are pointless I won't do anything at all.'

‘What do you mean by that?' he asked sharply.

‘I won't ring up my father.'

‘You will, Sally,' he said, with assurance. ‘You will.'

‘You said—'

‘Look, you little nitwit, when I said individual actions were unimportant, that was a general statement. Theoretical.' He began to lose his temper. ‘Theory, Sally. You know what that is, don't you? Abstract ideas, impersonal thoughts, guidelines, philosophy – products of the human intellect, nothing to do with ourselves. Theories,' he crossed the room, took her by the shoulders and shook her slightly, ‘theories. Now do you know what I mean by
theories?
'

Sally looked him in the eye. ‘I know you want Aunt Clothilde's money.'

He raised his arm as if to strike her, then pushed her away with his other arm and smote himself on the brow instead. He groaned. ‘I'm sorry, Sally. Do what you like. Shall we have that omelette?'

Bruno said, ‘Things were better between Theo and Sally for a few weeks. Perhaps Theo hoped to bring her round about the money. And Sally came back, a couple of nights a week, to La Vie. But Cora said, and Cora was always right, that Sally wouldn't ask her father for her share of Aunt Clothilde's money.

‘So gradually it came about that on the nights Sally was at the club Theo wasn't, and on the nights she wasn't there, Theo frequently was, with other women, and later with just one, a girl called Penelope Forrester. She was in the ATS and working as a driver to some general. She came from a rich old family. Her father was a peer. Sally didn't know about Theo and Penelope, of course. No one told her. But you could see she was unhappy sometimes.

‘The Allies had invaded Italy early in nineteen forty-four and Germany was being bombed heavily.

‘Sally struggled on with her housekeeping. Sometimes she'd arrive at La Vie with a string bag containing some
pathetic little items she'd managed to get – cabbages and a few potatoes, a little bit of fish and a tin of Vim for the bath, but the truth is, Theo didn't like the house and he didn't like Sally enough to try to make things work. And he was still angry about the money, too.

‘Cora said to me one night, which was a surprise, “She might have been better off with the Yank. I don't like these black men going out with white girls, but Eugene was intelligent and respectable and he made her happy.” Then she said a very surprising thing. “He wrote to me recently, you know. Said he had the idea he was going into action soon and asked me as a favour to tell him how Sally was, if she was well and happy. He asked me not to let her know he'd been in touch. He'd heard she was married to Theo.”

‘She told me she'd written back to tell Eugene Sally was alive and well and still in London. But she added, “I didn't say anything about her marriage. I couldn't bring myself to say she was happy, when anyone can see she isn't. I don't know what he'll have made of that. There was another thing, too. He said he'd asked his commanding officer to let me know if he was killed. He'd enclosed a letter to Sally, to be given to her in the event of his death.”

‘I asked was it sealed, and she said of course it was, and then I asked, “So, Cora, what did it say?”

‘She told me, “He said he loved her, he regretted the quarrel, would she forgive him? Rather touching,” said Cora. She'd resealed the envelope after she'd steamed it open and read it.

‘Then she said, “I was tempted to tell him she wasn't
getting on with Theo, and invite him to come back and try again, but it's not my business to interfere. Theo and Sally might be perfectly all right when the war's over. It puts a strain on everyone. In my opinion she ought to get her money from her father so that the marriage would stand a chance. A man like Theo needs money the way a plant needs water. You can't blame the plant, can you?”

‘It was inevitable that one night the accident would occur. Sally had taken over from Vi one evening and Theo didn't know. He came in with Penny Forrester. If Cora had been in charge she would have prevented this, but that night she wasn't.

‘Sally saw the couple, I think before they even got to the foot of the stairs, and her voice faltered. Then she stopped. She took in the situation at a glance, went white and just walked out, past them. She sent all Theo's clothes and personal things round to the Bessemer in suitcases two hours later in a taxi. Theo was astute enough to stay at the hotel that night. He knew it was over.

‘He was posted back to Washington soon afterwards and took Penny with him. He married her after the war. After that, of course, Theo Fitzpatrick never had a worry again – she bore him sons, her father provided money, all was well.

‘Sally told us. She was sad, but she added, ‘I suppose, in a way, I'm glad he's gone. What a washout. What a fool I've been. I don't think I ever understood Theo at all.'

‘And Briggs said, we were at Pontifex Street, “The rest of us did, dear.”

‘“That's because you're all the same as he is,” Sally told him.

‘And Briggs told her very firmly, “No, Sally. Not quite the same.”

‘We all dreaded her moving back into Pontifex Street, now that she was alone, but she didn't. No one told Sally's parents that the marriage was effectively over so Gisela stayed where she was and Sally remained in that leaky house. She went on working at the factory, and doing her act at La Vie in the evenings. And the war went on and we were waiting for the invasion of France.

‘But before it came Hitler launched the V-1s – the flying bombs – on Britain like the last bite of a mad dog. They came in flights, making a noise like a train, then cutting out, without warning, coming straight down and exploding.

‘Our nerves went – even Sally's – and a million people left London.

‘After the V-1s came the improved version, the V-2 – rockets – which made no noise at all. Imagine a rocket coming overhead, silently, through the cloudless blue, and you didn't know where it was going to land. The fact that these rockets were unmanned made it worse. It seemed so unfair. There, a man at any hour of day or night pushed a button. Here, half an hour later a house exploded, a family was killed. You felt helpless. They started shooting them down, of course, but still they came. And all the while we were bombing Germany savagely. The punishment
on both sides was dreadful. And the rockets kept on coming.

‘Then Sally's mother became ill and this time she had to go home. Her father could not manage alone – and there was Gisela, who was four now.'

Sally found herself back in the big house in the country in which she had spent so little time since she left home, and not much before that: she had been away at boarding school from the age of eight.

Geneviève Jackson-Bowles had been diagnosed as having leukaemia, for which there was no cure. Harry still went to his Birmingham factory, though as his wife gradually weakened he cut down the number of days he spent there. Geneviève fought, but there was no hope for her.

When Sally arrived in July she found her sister Betty in charge, but itching to get back to her own home. Her suitcases were ready in the hall when Sally entered the house one afternoon and went into the kitchen, where Betty was making tea. Gisela, in a red jumper and short kilt, stood by.

‘God knows how you'll manage, Sally,' Betty told her, pouring water into the teapot. ‘This place needs a staff
of five. You know what there is now? A daily and an old man who turns up to do the garden when he feels like it. I've applied everywhere but I can't get any more help. If you ask me, Maman's exhausted herself trying to take care of everything.' And she shot a look at Gisela.

‘That's why I came,' Sally said. ‘I suppose we can close up some of the rooms and move downstairs.'

‘You're accustomed to primitive conditions,' said Betty, who had visited Sally in London. ‘Maman isn't.' She picked up the tray and started to leave the room.

Gisela looked at Sally and said in a clear voice, ‘Are you my mummy?'

Sally paused, then replied smoothly, ‘I'm not really, darling.' She took the tray from her sister. ‘Your mummy and daddy are abroad and they can't get here because of the war. I'll explain it to you later.'

‘They might have died in all the fighting,' said Gisela.

‘I know, sweetheart,' Sally said. ‘We'll try and find them when the war's over. I'll tell you all about it soon. We'd better take this tray to Granny, now.'

‘Not so fast,' said Betty. ‘What are you telling the child?'

‘The truth,' said Sally. ‘She's old enough now.'

Geneviève was in the drawing room. She held her cup in a thin hand. ‘I'm afraid this illness of mine is being a great bother to you all.'