Peace Work (16 page)

Back at the hotel, it’s NAAFI issue in Molloy’s room. I draw my fifty free cigarettes in the vacuum-packed tin. I like piercing the tin seal with the opening prong in the lid and the hiss of escaping air brings the smell of tobacco. I lay on my bed eating my chocolate ration and smoking; life was good. Both Mulgrew and Bornheim visit to repay borrowed cigarettes.

That night, the most embarrassing night of my life, the act ends with my trousers falling down. OK, I hear you say, what’s embarrassing about that? This night we arrive at the end of the act, I pull the string that drops my trousers – down they go. Then came the moment of truth: I had forgotten my underpants! My shirt
just
covered my willy, but people standing in the wings can see the lot. Two of the ballet girls, Luciana and Marisa call out, “
Bravo, Terr-ee, che bellino
” (well done, what a beauty) and who was I to disagree with experts? However, it was a near-run thing. That night Toni, Mulgrew, Bornheim and I dine together. It’s Bornheim’s birthday. He splashes out on a bottle of champagne. It’s Austrian – called Schlocknut, which sounds like part of a diesel engine and almost tastes like it.

“Don’t you like it?” he inquires.

“Not much, it’s too dry for me.” Ugh, it has almost sucked my cheeks together.

How old is he now? Can we guess? He gets a selection: twenty-nine? twenty-six? twenty-seven? No, no, no, all wrong. One more guess – sixty? Silly bugger, Milligan, no. “I am this day twenty-five.” We wish him
bon voyage
on his journey through life as a furrier in Leeds. What more can a man want of life?

We eat our dinner to the accompaniment of the quintet who are playing, as usual, waltzes. Bornheim orders another bottle of the diesel oil, then another, and I notice that Toni is getting squiffy. She is giggling into her food and missing her mouth. Enough is enough, I beg Bornheim not to give her any more.

“Just because you’re falling behind, there’s no need to persecute this poor girl.”

“Don’t you listen to him, Toni,” says Mulgrew, who is himself starling to slur his words.

The evening ended with me helping her to her room a giggling female who was very unsteady on her feet. I retire to my room, where I’m suddenly awakened from a deep sleep by Mulgrew and Bornheim. Both are smashed out of their minds.

“Schpike, S C H P I K E! Cwan on hev a drink he he he he,” says Mulgrew trying to make me drink from his glass.

“Schjust hev hay liddle schippy poos,” says Bornheim standing or rather swaying behind him. I have to get up and gradually push the unintelligible lunatics out into the corridor, where I hear them stumbling along talking gibberish. What made it amazing was that they seemed to understand each other!! How I envied them in that blissful state.

Next morning, both Bornheim and Mulgrew are missing. They appear at midday in an Austrian police wagon. They had been found wandering the streets of Vienna and have spent the night pissed in a police cell. Lieutenant Priest has to sign for them to be released from police custody. They are both unshaven, bleary-eyed and, on their release, both take to their beds to sleep it ofT. Toni, too, doesn’t appear until midday. “Oh, Terr-ee, my head go bang, bang.” It’s her own fault. I had warned her, I had tried to stop her. “I am very soree,” she says. We sit in the lounge and have coffee. “Oh, why, why I drink champagne?”

“It’s too late now, my dear, and remember in your condition I
could
have taken advantage of you and had a ‘quickie’.” As it was, I had only given them a quick squeeze.

Does she feel fit enough to go out? Yes, she thinks so. I want to see the Stephensdom (St Stephen’s). We go, again, by horse-drawn landau – known here as a fiacre. The driver, a young man wearing a bowler, is the essence of politeness; he bows as he helps Toni in and clicks his heels. The building dominates the skyline as yet unsullied by tall buildings; its Romanesque western façade and Gothic tower loom above us. Fool, I’ve left my money behind. Never mind, Toni has some. She opens her handbag stuffed with schillings, the little miser!

The building is a marvellous example of the Viennese genius for harmonious compromise. We slog up the steps to the North Tower and are rewarded with what feels like a heart attack and a wonderful view of the city, as well as the huge Pummerin Bell cast from melted-down Turkish cannons captured in the great siege of 1683. It would take pages to describe; let’s say it was a masterpiece of Gothic creativity. We have nothing like it in Brockley SE26 except St Cyprian’s breeze-block church hall.

That visit over, we found a very up-market
Kaffeehaus
– das Café Sperl, where the inevitable string trio are playing Viennese salon music. They sell a great range of coffees. I glance down the bill of fare: ah, I’ll have
ein Einspdnner
. This is coffee with a touch of perversion – whipped cream. Toni has ein Kleiner Mokka – like Joe Louis, strong, pungent and black. Toni, avis-like, is sipping the scalding drink. I am looking at her and I am thinking, does she belong to me? This petite creature, is she really mine or on loan?

“Why you look like that?” she says.

“
Tu set mio amore
,” I say in my best Italian.

She smiles. It’s quite lovely – even lovelier, Toni paid the bill.

“
Danke, mein Herr
,” says the Herr Ober with a slight, stiff bow. How courteous they all were, not at all like English waiters who pick their noses when taking your order.

It’s late afternoon when our fiacre drops us back at the hotel. Toni wants a lie-down: can I lie with her? No, no, no, she wants a sleep. I tell her I won’t wake her up, she won’t even know it’s happened. No, no, no, I am very naughty. Never mind, I can hold out. While I’m holding it out, time is passing. I press on with the Mrs Gaskell book on the Brontes. I’m up to where Branwell Bronte, on his last night alive, is in a drugged state (laudanum); he’s having dinner with a friend at his favourite piss-up pub, the Black Bull. He turns up ‘wild-eyed and drugged and demanded a brandy’. Next day Branwell dies, something that the whole family specialized in. One by one, until only the Reverend Patrick Bronte survives. How lonely must have been his last years.

Immersed in the book, I forget the time. There’s a thunderous Lieutenant Priest. “Come on, we’re all in the bloody Charabong. Don’t tell me you’re getting Hall’s disease.” I grab my guitar case and follow him to the waiting vehicle. “The new Bill Hall,” announces Priest as I board.

“Where you been, Terree?” says Toni. I explain. “Ah, Bronte sisters, I know, I read in Italian book – very sad story.”

Bornheim walks up and leans over us. “What you do today?” I told him; what did he do? He did three vests, three underpants and all his socks.

“Why didn’t you give ‘em to the laundry?”

Ah, he is trying to save money. Aren’t we all?

∗

It’s a packed house again, great. I make sure I’m wearing underpants. That experience the previous night was to haunt me all my days I was with the Trio. Some girls stood hopefully in the wings, hoping for an encore. My God, in the front row it’s that Marlene Dietrich that I screwed. After the show, she comes looking for me. She comes to the dressing-room; they hide me in the shower. I hear her saying this is her telephone number, will I phone her. Helppppp!! Thank God, Toni isn’t around. Marlene isn’t easily put off; Bornheim comes in and tells us that she’s waiting outside the stage door!! I smuggle myself out the front of the theatre and get a taxi back to the hotel. How do I explain this to Toni? When I arrive everyone is at dinner.

“Terr-ee, where you been?” says Toni. Well, I tell her the truth. “Why she come for you?” she inquires. I daren’t tell her because I was very good at it; no, I say I don’t know. “You tell the truth?”

“Yes, Toni.”

She left it at that but the atmosphere was distinctly cool. I order: “Herr Ober, ein Komenymag Leves Nokedival.” I don’t know what it is, but it sounds magnificent. It turns out to be Caraway Seed Soup! There must be some mistake, I distinctly ordered Komenymag Leves Nokedival. What? That means Caraway Seed Soup? I should sue them through the Trade Descriptions Act! It’s been a wearing day, so, after a fond goodnight at Toni’s door, I go to bed, steaming with desire.

∗

We come to our last day in Vienna sausage. It starts with a disaster for Johnny Bornheim: he left his shoes outside his room for the Boots to clean and someone has pinched them. “The thieving bastards,” he rages. He reports the theft to the manager, a short, fat, bald, puffing Austrian with pebble-glass spectacles.

“Hi am zo zorry,
mein Herr
.”

He is full of profuse apologies and halitosis. He, in turn, phones the police and, duly, an Austrian plain-clothes policeman arrives and takes details. What colour were the shoes? Brown. How old were they? About seven years. The detective tries to stifle a laugh. Bornheim knows he hasn’t a hope in hell of getting them back and, until he buys a new pair, has the embarrassment of wearing white plimsolls. He looked a real Charlie as he came down to breakfast. “Anyone for tennis?” ribbed Mulgrew.

“They were my best pair,” moaned Bornheim. He could have fooled me.

He spends the morning along with me and Toni, shopping for a new pair. In post-war Vienna, there isn’t much of a choice and the quality is very poor. Bornheim buys a cheap pair that seem to be made of reinforced brown paper with cardboard soles. To buy them, he has to borrow money from Mulgrew who goes faint at the thought. On this, our last day, Toni, Mulgrew and Bornheim, with his new shoes, decide to visit the Schatzkammer. It contains a dazzling display of the old Holy Roman Empire. I was stunned at the Imperial Crown of pure gold set with pearls and unpolished emeralds, sapphires and rubies – that, and the actual sword used by Charlemagne plus the lance that is supposed to have pierced Christ on the Cross. As I recall, this is about the tenth that I’ve seen! There was so much gold everything seemed to be made of it except Bornheim’s new shoes, whose newness has started to hurt his feet. “I must have a rest,” he says.

We repair to an adjacent coffee house and take refreshment. It’s out on the street and we watch the passing of humans in concert, while busy Herr Obers move among the pavement tables. “This is the life,” says Mulgrew, emitting a stream of smoke. Indeed, yes – it was a sunny day, I was in love, Bornheim had new shoes and Mulgrew was going to charge him interest on the money he lent him.

“I tell you,” said Toni, nibbling a pastry, “Austrians make better cake than Italy. Terr-ee, do you have places like this in England?”

“Oh, yes. There’s Lyons Corner House with Welsh rarebits.”

I have to explain what Welsh rarebits are.

“They not sweet,” she says.

“No, they savoury.”

“What is savoury?”

“Well, the opposite of sweet.”

“Ah,” she says. “
Gustoso!
”

Yes, if she says so – gustoso.

Bornheim is feeling his new shoes.

“Are they hurting?” I said.

“Just a bit. They’ll be all right when I’ve broken them in.”

Mulgrew warns him, “Don’t let water get on them, they’ll melt.”

Bornheim shoots him a meaningful stare, whereof I’m sure Mulgrew knew not the meaning.

“Toni! That’s the fourth cake you’ve had; you’ll get fat.”

No, never, she says; she’ll never get fat. “No one in my family fat.” Dare I tell her that when she was forty I would be able to roll her home?

“
Wieviel kostet das?
” I say to the Herr Ober with the aid of a phrase book. With a grin he tots up the bill. I split it three ways: “That’s five schillings each.”

“I’m skint,” says Bornheim.

“He’s had the last of my money,” says Mulgrew, so I am lumbered.

Dutifully, I pay up with a sickly grin. More expense is on the way: Bornheim can’t walk back, his shoes hurt. No, no, we will have to take a taxi. I love the ‘we’ bit. So, ‘we’ get a taxi and ‘we’ all get in and ‘we’ drive to the hotel; ‘we’ get out, but ‘I’ pay.

Toni has some mending to do, so I spend the afternoon room-bound, reading the Brontes book, occasionally drifting into a shallow sleep. Bored, I put new strings on my guitar and practise some chords. I accompany myself: boo boo da de dum, love in bloom – all wasted on four hotel walls. Boredom should be a cardinal sin. I was bored. I lay on the bed, put my Brontes book aside, stared up at the ceiling. I stared at the wall opposite; I returned to the ceiling, fixing me gaze on the light fitting. I close one eye – this makes the light jump to the right. I close the other eye and it appears to jump to the left. I close eyes alternately, making the light jump back and forth. I cross my eyes and get two lights. So far, so good. By squinting, I make the light into a blur; by opening both eyes and swivelling my eyeballs left and right, I make the light move back and forth across the ceiling. Boo boo da de dum, love in bloom. I examine my fingernails; they don’t need cutting, so I put them aside. I look down at my feet; I wiggle my toes. I give a giant yawn and nearly dislocate my jaw. By grinding my teeth, I can make the sound of a train on the inside of my eardrum. By wiggling my ears, I can make my scalp move backward and forward. Boo boo da de dum, love in bloom. By closing my eyes and pressing on them with my hands, I can see lots of different flashing lights and patterns. My house phone buzzes. It’s Toni, what am I doing? I tell her I am pressing my eyes to see flashing lights. She doesn’t understand. I tell her not to worry, neither can I. Do I want to come up and order tea in her room? Before she can put the phone down, I’m tapping on her door.

She’s in the middle of her mending. “We have nice tea, eh, Terr-ee?” Yes, but first embrace her and give her a head-swirling kiss. No, no, Terr-ee, not now. She orders tea and sandwiches. A very old waiter with watery blue eyes and a red nose brings in the tray and shakily puts it down. For his trouble, Toni gives him a tip.

He groaned ‘
Danke, Frduleiri
and went out – to die, I think.