Authors: Peter Bradshaw
‘What numbers are you going to favour us with this evening, dear heart?’ Mr Ware was saying brightly to Colin.
‘I thought I might have a bash at “Darling Je Vous Aime”.’
‘Very good. I always like that one.’
‘So do I,’ said Katharine.
Suddenly, their table was jolted, disagreeably. They all looked up to see the same man who had bumped into Elizabeth and Mr Ware when they had been on the dance floor. He was clearly drunker
than ever, and grinned unrepentantly.
‘Sorry about that, old thing,’ the man trilled, and with a free hand tousled Mr Ware’s hair. Instantly, Elizabeth could feel Colin and Katharine shrink away from their
companion – Katharine’s hand disappeared from her thigh.
Mr Ware ground his cigarette into an ashtray, pursed his lips and stood up. He placed his right hand on the man’s left arm as he was turning to go and, with what looked like simple
physical force, compelled him to wheel back and face him.
‘Ah, listen,
old thing
.’
‘What is it, what do you want?’
‘What do I want? My dear old thing, I want to dance with you!’
To the man’s astonishment, Mr Ware switched the grip on his wrist – Elizabeth could see how he was pinching his skin – to his left hand and put his right around the man’s
waist. His new partner smiled uncertainly, unsure whether to play along with this prank and crucially failing to appreciate how both his hands had now been practically immobilised. Mr Ware grinned
and raised his left foot, as if to lead his victim in a polka. But at the same time he tilted his head back, lifting his chin.
Katharine turned to Elizabeth and, with the forefinger and middle finger of one hand, actually turned her face away, so that she could not see what Mr Ware was doing. Elizabeth heard a sharp
smack
or
crack
, and turned back to see that Mr Ware was now standing back from the man, who now had both hands clamped over his face, and was squatting down on his haunches. Blood ran
from his nose, as if from an open tap. People who were close enough to see had stopped dancing, and were looking on, and stepping back.
‘
That’s
what,’ said Mr Ware coldly, and the crowds’ retreat from him accelerated; Elizabeth could feel the colour of her face changing – Mr Ware’s own
face looked like piccalilli in this light – but she was still lucid enough to realise how the cigarette had anaesthetised her to what was happening. The music continued, the hubbub continued;
it was almost possible to ignore all this, and as to what had actually happened between Mr Ware and the troublesome man, she was still blearily unsure. Both Colin and Katharine could see how two
very large men in evening dress were now coming towards them. Mr Ware’s victim was still hunched down, the blood pool around his feet widening in diameter every second. He was very still and
quiet, and Elizabeth’s ATS training was now telling her that he might be in shock, that he needed medical treatment immediately. In their very first week of instruction, ATS trainees had been
told how apparently innocuous bumps on the head can lead to unconsciousness or even death. It was only in thinking about all this now that Elizabeth realised that Mr Ware had assaulted someone, and
she should really call the police.
The next thing Elizabeth knew, they were all in a taxi, with Mr Ware facing the rear windscreen, Colin opposite him and Katharine in the middle, next to Elizabeth, still
stroking her thigh and nuzzling her neck, though more dopily and dozily now. Elizabeth herself was now kept awake by alternate waves of nausea and anxiety: when would she get home? Well,
let’s just see this Club they were talking about. Then she imagined she would just get another taxi. She would probably be home by, say, eleven or midnight at the latest. Elizabeth wondered
uneasily if anyone back home was upset with her, and pushed these thoughts away into her mental fog.
‘You and me, Lil!’ Mr Ware was saying. He was pointing at his own chest and then at Elizabeth’s. ‘You and me. Tonight’s the main event. And you and me are a vital
part. An integral part. Ho yes. You wait.’
Elizabeth looked out of the window as the cab swept up to Piccadilly Circus and round into Shaftesbury Avenue. The VE celebrations now appeared to have taken on a rather different character.
Everywhere she looked she saw men, young men, some in uniform, some in civvies, standing with their hands on their knees, looking down onto a pool of nameless mess. Some were holding their faces
and noses, in exactly the posture Mr Ware’s victim had been back at the Ritz. She could see couples who appeared to be dancing or spooning – as Elizabeth phrased it to herself –
at every corner.
‘Oh God,’ said Colin.
An American army jeep had just braked sharply, on account of two men and a dog lurching out into the road. They could see the driver’s head hit the windscreen with an audible smack and a
continuous, simultaneous wail from the horn. Delayed themselves further ahead, the four could clearly see a diagonal crack in the jeep’s windscreen, a line with what could have been a bulb of
blood at either end. On the other side of the street, a group of men had smashed a shopwindow and were loading coats into a perambulator. Far away, a man was shouting, ‘Victory in Japan!
Victory in
Japan! Victory in Japan!’
‘I’ve got plans for you, Lil,’ said Mr Ware, ‘big plans. I need a girl in uniform for what I’ve got in mind.’
Katharine nuzzled. Elizabeth drowsed.
They arrived at the Butterfly Club in Great Windmill Street to find it transformed from the gloomy cavern in which Colin and Mr Ware had been drinking earlier in the evening. It was now packed
and noisy. Mr Ware now had to present himself to be recognised by two big men by the trapdoor leading down, and having done so, he went smartly on ahead, without waiting to help the ladies down the
steps. This was left to Colin.
The noise and music were far worse than in the Ritz. Mr Ware greeted the proprietress, whom he introduced as Ginnie, and they admired a large banner she had put up over the bar, reading
‘Now for Japan’. Elizabeth listened to the snatches of conversation from the male patrons, which were as unintelligible as if they had been conducted in Swahili.
‘I liked your companion the other night, dear.
She
was a bit of rough, wasn’t she?’
‘I take it with the smooth, dearest.’
‘Was the rest of the evening
à deux
?’
‘Can’t you see the bruises?’
‘Fishing for compliments, are we,
chérie
?’
‘I was eating my meals off the mantelpiece for a week or so after
that
one, darling!’
‘Your trousers are a positive cockpit of humanity, my dear; they are a Belgium of the spirit.’
‘Stop it! Stop it!’
After some minutes of this, Mr Ware turned and introduced Elizabeth to his excitable and loquacious friend.
‘Lil, let me present Tom Driberg. Tom, this is my friend, Lil.’
The man, tall, bulky, with receding, crinkly hair and sharp eyes, turned to her, and it was at this point that Elizabeth realised that she had been definitively recognised. Everyone else had
been too drunk to be certain, or too shy to say, or it had been too crowded and chaotic and dark, or perhaps they had dimly sensed that on this night of all nights, appearances in the street from
people like her were only to be expected.
Elizabeth held her hand out, frankly, to be shaken. Driberg’s manner shifted into one of extreme deference and ostentatious tact. Smiling gently, as if taking possession of a secret, he
took her hand very gently between his fingertips and bowed. Instinctively, Elizabeth turned her palm downward.
‘Lil,’ he said submissively, in a low voice. Mr Ware looked puzzled and turned away to talk to someone else.
‘Mr Driberg,’ returned Elizabeth, and then, ‘Tom.’ The covert reassumption of official duties awoke her, fractionally, from her bleary state. She looked around. Drinkers
were standing shoulder to shoulder, and the room appeared to be in a rough L-shape. There was a bar along one side, and around the corner there was some sort of dance floor; directional lighting
indicated the presence of a stage.
‘How are you this evening, Tom?’ she asked politely.
‘Very well, indeed, Lil,’ said Driberg, inclining his head somewhat. He, too, was obviously feeling the need to pull himself together after having had a good deal to drink. ‘I
wish you had been here earlier this evening. I could have introduced you to David Ben-Gurion. Such a nice man. I never knew anyone else who could impersonate a peewit using just his
tongue
and
teeth
, my dear. Ah, here is Noël.’
A well-built man with a slightly crooked nose and faintly pursed lips – with the air of someone perpetually tasting something unfamiliar – appeared at Driberg’s side. He held
his hand out with finger and thumb together, as if holding a champagne glass by the stem.
‘Lil,’ said Driberg, with that tone of proprietorial triumph which people always display on introducing an important new acquaintance to a status-conscious friend. ‘Noël
Coward. Noël, this is ...’
Instantly, Coward took Elizabeth’s downturned palm in exactly the same way that Driberg had, tactfully, submissively, paying tribute to her pluck in being here, and not wishing to spoil
the subterfuge.
‘Lil,’ he said with a quiet smile. ‘I do hope that Driberg has not been boring you.’
‘Not a bit,’ said Elizabeth politely, and Driberg, disconcerted by his new friend taking this raillery seriously, added:
‘Not the smallest bit. We were just talking about Proust.’
‘Were you?’
‘Were we?’
‘Oh, yes. You surely will remember, my dear Noël, Marcel’s descriptions of the blackout in Paris in the Great War, how it was the last time in history that the city’s
beauties could be appreciated by moonlight. I often thought of that passage during our recent blackouts, you know, walking home.’
‘Was Proust uppermost in your mind on those occasions, my dear?’
‘French literature
in the round
, dearest heart.’
‘I’m so sorry, what?’ said Elizabeth. ‘It’s so very noisy in here!’
Driberg was buffeted aside by someone carrying drinks to someone else, and a third person lunging across and kissing his girl, by taking her face in both hands. When the disturbance had passed,
Coward appeared to have melted back into the crowd and Driberg was talking to a pale and petulant looking youth. He seemed to have forgotten she was there.
‘Dearest,’ he was saying. ‘It will only take a moment. We would return to the fray instanter.’
‘Shan’t.’
‘Perhaps a solatium of two pounds would make all the difference.’
‘A what?’
‘A gift of two pounds.’
‘I don’t want to miss the singer.’
‘We won’t.’
‘I don’t know that I want to ...’
‘Dearest, it’s very nutritional to me. It restores my vitamins. My iron levels. I have here a doctor’s note’ – he produced a tattered letter on which the crest of
the Royal College of Physicians was visible – ‘that says I have to have it.’
‘Let me read that.’
‘My dear, what would be the point? It’s all in Latin.’
‘Where’s that three pounds?’
‘Two pounds. I have it in my other coat, which is in the cloakroom. Come along.’
They left, and Coward reappeared at Elizabeth’s side.
‘Tell me, ah,
Lil
, if I may,’ he said, ‘how long have you known Driberg? Come to think of it,’ and here his face clouded, ‘how do you come to know all
these—’
Ginnie, the proprietress, stood on a stool behind the bar, and shouted, ‘The entertainments are about to commence!’
Everyone surged onto the dance floor; Elizabeth followed. She was sober enough, now, and determined to watch one or two songs and then get a cab home. Or perhaps Mr Coward would arrange a car
for her.
Ginnie took the stage and approached the microphone.
‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ she declaimed. ‘All the way from Paris.’
There was an outbreak of booing, and Elizabeth could hear some angry muttering of the word ‘Pétain’.
‘Come along, come on,’ said Ginnie, tolerantly, and resumed: ‘All the way from Paris. Please will you welcome our special VE Night
chanteuse
, Madame Kay
L’Horreur!’
Some triumphant chords on the piano were thumped out, and then the audience was rewarded with the view of a plump woman who sashayed out onto the stage with a bizarrely emphatic hip-wiggling
movement; so emphatic that Elizabeth thought she must have some sort of spinal injury. She wore a celebratory but blank smile, the sort that might be worn by a wax dummy; with a slow swivel of the
head, her smile was directed first at Ginnie, and then at the cheering audience. Her makeup reflected the lighting in such a way as to make her face look two-dimensional, like a photograph. Her
accompanist sat at the upright piano, with a self-effacing smile. Elizabeth managed to position herself at the back of the throng and at first thought that the woman looked so much like Colin that
it was his sister or his mother. A rippling
arpeggio
from the piano merged into a
glissando
run up the keyboard and the woman twirled. Her unconvincing bodice, in profile, revealed to
Elizabeth that it was a man; was in fact Colin himself. A ripple of applause and cheering swelled and then died as he approached the microphone and began to sing. Colin’s singing voice had a
pleasing quality, a light, quavering tenor, utterly unlike the hesitant mumble of his conversation.
Presently, to a loud cheer from everyone, the boy that Driberg had been talking to before the song began jumped up onto the stage and embraced Colin passionately. Driberg was right behind him,
standing at the edge, scowling, attempting to pull at the boy’s jacket. But his companion would not come down; instead, he snaked his arm around Colin’s waist and they duetted at the
microphone. When it was time for the final, stridently melodramatic line, Colin gamely attempted a full octave leap, maintained with an uncertain trill.
The song was over. The noise was deafening. Colin made an elaborate curtsey, incidentally disclosing that his frock had some sort of gossamer train, which fishtailed out to the side as he took
hold of it with his right hand. If he was irritated at this incursion from the audience, Colin didn’t show it. The boy attempted a bow of his own. Driberg angrily climbed up on the stage and
grasped the boy’s forearm. The boy wrenched it away and clung on to Colin’s waist, as Colin continued to beam and bask in the applause. The boy kissed his cheek to cheers and, to more
cheers, Colin kissed his new friend’s forehead. They held hands, took a bow together and then, almost without looking at him, the boy planted a hand square in Driberg’s chest – he
had again clambered up – and shoved him back, so that he toppled over backwards into the arms of a now infuriated woman. The boy nuzzled Colin; they giggled together and then Driberg came
back up to punch Colin, a blow which landed pointlessly on his shoulder. The piano accompaniment stopped as both men crashed off the stage to more roars from the onlookers.