The Scent of Dried Roses Page 13

  His kid sister, Jean, disapproved of course, she was always inclined towards the conservative type of thing and was never in trouble in school or anywhere else. They were very close, he and Jean. They went dancing together, or up to London for the day, or for a week in Southend. They’d take their own food and the landlady would cook it. Jean was a bit shy, he thought, a home bird: making doilies with Mum, or sewing, or taking romantic novels out of Jubilee Gardens library. Despite his bad reputation, Norman imagined Jean was secretly proud of him.

  Of course he didn’t tell her everything, or anything much at all really. Not the time he whacked the foreman at his first job at the AEC bus factory, or the time he knocked out the one at the Crown Cork Company, his next job. Of course, she must have noticed when he punched the bloke who stared too hard at his girlfriend, because this one hit back and knocked him silly. By the time he got home he was covered in blood. It wasn’t something you could shrug off really. Jean hated it when he got into fights, but he couldn’t help it, especially when people took the mickey.

  Also it did something to break up the boredom. England was so ruddy boring, no colour, no money, not much to do. For fun at weekends, he’d go to the Northcote Arms in Southall to drink ten pints of mild and bitter: gnat’s piss, you didn’t even get drunk on that, just relaxed enough for the fight when the barrow boys from the White Hart in Acton came for that week’s bust-up. When it got too hairy, Norman hid under the snooker table.

  Anything to brighten things up. And it didn’t help that Dad was so mean, he had to go to job interviews wearing wellingtons and Billy’s tennis trousers. Someone laughed at him in the getup, so he floored him. He didn’t get the job. Where was life? A mate of his had an idea. The new Ealing Studios, where they were making movies, the security was non-existent, so one night – he was only fifteen – he broke into the studio village, climbing over a twelve-foot fence. Inside, he nearly fell over. The rooms were filled up with racks of clothes, and the colours! Instead of everything being black, or brown, or grey, there were colours: screaming reds, cool ferny greens, plum, chartreuse, electric blue, powder blue, an orange shirt – imagine! – jazzy socks, violent purple ties. It was like nothing he had ever seen. Norman stuffed as much as he could down his waistband – a pair of plum trousers, George Raft black-and-white shoes, two sizes too big, a pink shirt – and ran for it. When he got home, he hid everything in the loft, taking it out and dressing up when Grace and Billy were out, clumping along in the floating shoes. Now Norman saw, as he primped himself in the mirror, that there was a way out after all.

  The next time he went to work – he was mending fridges now at a place in Perivale – he closely inspected the factory opposite, Guerlain’s Lipstick. That same night he broke in, with an empty suitcase, and came out with it full, walking down the main road at twelve o’clock at night.

  A while later, he met Fingers Colleta, who’d had half his hand chopped off in a gang fight. Soho’s the place, said Fingers, and so Norman went uptown, standing on the corners of Wardour Street, his suitcase full of lipstick, rouge, eyeliner. They went like hot cakes, they loved him for it, called him a spiv, although he wasn’t really, just a hound, a hound that ran with the pack.

  Now, for the first time, Norman had money, and it was a wonderful thing. He went to Lou Sicandelphi in Wardour Street, got a Tony Curtis haircut, then splashed out on a double-breasted grey drape suit, wide shoulders, it was the bollocks, off the ration from a sharpie in Shepherd’s Bush. Jean made him a spear-point shirt to go with it, worn with one of the ties from Ealing Studios, as bright as you could crank it, Windsor knot. Ooh, you look like the dog’s dinner, said Jean. Grey snap-brim fedora with the peak steamed back, a double-breasted camelhair coat with wide belt, pointed shoes with micro-soles, wide trousers, a Players drooping from the lips. That was class.

  They always got you in the end, though, first borstal, then, in the end, the Scrubs. It was a pig for Mum and Dad, and for Jean. He supposed Jean was ashamed – how she hated anything that caused a fuss! – although she never said anything. Jean never did, never did say anything really.

  After noticing her at the snooker hall, through the blue curtain of smoke, Jack began to see her around, because the world was still small then. The absence of choice bound everything into place. She was there at the Palais, jiving with her spivvy brother, his scrawled-on pencil moustache – you could tell, burnt cork or boot polish. Black-and-white shoes, where on earth did he get those? Not such a bad mover, this girl, though heavier than Thelma; a bit of heft around the thighs and rump gave her movements just a shadow of consideration, of forethought. Not lost in it quite, but she was a trier, a hoofer, that much was sure.

  She was there at the cinemas, the Odeons, the Gaumonts, the Empires, usually with this tense-looking one, not bad, taller, not Jack’s type though. And then once she was at the hall at the Lady Margaret pub. Jack watched, tending a cup of tea and a ginger nut – no hootch allowed in the dance hall, of course, unless you smuggled it through in a teacup or a Tizer bottle. She was dancing with the other girl, coyly, a little aloof, in what looked like a Crimplene dress, blue, flared from the waist, a cute bow tied across the neckline. Mother-of-pearl necklace. She had made the dress herself. Black highish heels, about two inches, but heavy. She moved with a style that suggested will rather than grace, but it was OK, it was good.

  Jack was with Ronnie Van Den Bergh, who was as wide as a bus and a bit of a wolf. He had a reputation. As they moved in on the two girls – Jack in a plain brown single-breasted suit, turn-ups, single-pleat baggies, nothing flash – Jack was centred, calm, the unselfconsciousness that the best dancers had by right. It was no big thing. They didn’t need to say much, just a nod towards the floor, an outstretched hand, a Would you care to? It was a small band, Kathy Stobart, a six-piece. She played the saxophone. ‘Sunny Side of the Street’ melted away as it did, no big gesture to mark the final reprise, then it was ‘Can’t Get Started’.

  Ronnie took Irene’s hand, though she held back – that Ronnie! – but Jean just slid over, adopted the position: hand round waist, face six inches away, eyes focused across the right shoulder, eyes merely catching each other then letting go, silver fish in nets too wide. The perfume, he could swear, was Evening in Paris. A slight gathering. Then Jack took her off, the fishtail, the half-chassis, the whole kit and caboodle. It was easy, it was right. She kept up.

  Trumpets did not sound, nor did lightning sheet and fork. As Jack chatted over the curving and slipslide of the light, wistful music, he felt no reverberation from the future, of a lifetime in each other’s company, of children, and worry, the shared bed, achievement and loss. But, he thought, she was nice, though not in that dull, apologetic way, where niceness edged out spirit into the murk. Jean, yes, Jean was OK. They would meet again, if she would agree to it, and she did, readily enough. But Irene was less keen on Ronnie – who knew what he would try?

  Jean turned down the lift home on the Vincent Comet as he expected. Still, he knew she was impressed by the line and slip and cut of the machine, which was enough for this first time. Instead they walked the two girls to the bus stop. Jean’s dress rustled like a cornfield as she walked, with that stumpy, purposeful step. They said goodbye, without a kiss, though Ronnie tried with Irene, of course. Ugh. But still – See you soon. The Montague? Saturday? Sure.

  And they turned up, that following Saturday, as if it were a given. And soon, soon enough, without anyone really stating it, or designing it, Jack and Jean were going steady, that netherland of testing, assessing, of cautious touching. Jack paid for everything, of course, although a lot of the boys thought this was old hat, a con. For Jack, the boys – Ronnie, Derek Beard, Freddie Wade, Cyril, Terry, Derek, Phil, the Empire mob – began to take a back seat, while for Jean, Irene was edging out of the picture, especially since she and Ronnie couldn’t hit it off. As always – always! – nothing much was said, nothing that got to the heart of anything in particular. Everything was expressed through acti
on, and inference, and intuition. Perhaps there was a knack then, before the talk show, before the therapist and counsellor, of feeling your way through life, of charting some course without stating the coordinates. And perhaps that is lost now.

  But for Jean and Jack, some conviction, some invisible imperative, was working its way into palpability. They went to see the Andy Hardy movies and Sunset Boulevard and Strangers on a Train. They went to see the Ralph Reader Gang Shows, Jimmy James and Ted Ray at the Palladium. They went to see Annie Get Your Gun and Carousel. And then they parted, and Jean returned to her Singer and Jack to his paper bags, his beets and snips and toms and pots, and all the while, under the surface, choice was turning into fate, will into a kind of unconscious necessity.

  It was 1951 and England remained frozen, dull and silted down in the past. Possibilities had yet to develop; poverty and the force of the guardians of the state – behave, stop that – pressed down as insistently as ever, although there were flashes of a different future, like premonitions. Jack read about them in the Herald, and the Sunday Express – the New Edwardians of the West End, the Teds, with those narrowed trousers, the brocade waistcoats, the velvet collars. The slipping of the formal, the press of the individual, thanks to the Americans and the Italians – blue jeans, slacks, windcheaters, coloured raincoats. Rayon, Crimplene, nylon. What was once simply understood was beginning the long decay into particles of choice, of expression. Women’s hairdressing salons on every street. The new self-service Sainsbury’s that had opened. The bouffant and the backcomb. The milk bar, with frothy coffee that tasted like hot speckled nothing, too hot to taste. Leicester Square, lit up for the first time in ten years. The bonfire of controls, at least the external, visible, legal controls.

  Still, these were just coloured specks on a blank backdrop. They did not even seem to be what they were, seeds pregnant with future. England hugged you close, warming and suffocating, constricting and securing. It stretched back, it would stretch forward, storm-cloud grey, cold and sticky and pale as a Wall’s briquette. The stories it told, the stories you needed to survive, were the same as ever, the motifs like well-worn rivets holding them in place. King. Tea (always warm the pot). Bread and suet (pudding). Great. Sun that never – Stiff upper – England can take it! Dull. Decent. Brave. Best country in the – Marmalade and Bovril. Bread and dripping. Never have so many – A home fit for – Vivat. Vivat.

  Jack went to meet Billy and Grace at the house in Rosecroft Road, roaring to a halt on the Vincent, bracing himself against it, leaning into the weight. Propping it and then shaping his hair, disordered by the wind (no helmets then). He rang the electric doorbell that sounded the fanfare of the new suburbs: bing-bong.

  Grace was intimidated at first; he seemed a cut above, to have such a vehicle. Norman, back from one of his secret absences, gaped at the machine. Norman went dirt-track racing at the White City with Norman Staple, who lived around the corner in Rutland Road; he loved the thrill. So Jack had his vote. Alan talked nineteen to the dozen but only about and to himself, poor Alan, so it was hard to tell. Billy – well, Billy thought what Grace thought. And Grace was pleased.

  Such an extraordinary event – the arrival of this charming man, on his Vincent Comet, with his navy overcoat flapping around his knees like a schooner sail – demanded particular treatment. The front room was opened! After the preliminaries of tea, and Garibaldi biscuits and some Madeira or seedcake, and nervous hellos and chitter-chatter, Jean and Jack were led into the front room, to court. The hard three-piece suite, the knick-knacks in the glass-fronted case, the best carpet scrap laid over the dun lino. Beige wallpaper, cheap mirror over the open fireplace, unlit. Two cups of tea, a small sherry, they were left alone, to hold hands and to talk. Maybe a hasty kiss, not a kiss that penetrated but one that touched and teased and suggested, that inferred instead of pronounced.

  There were other marker posts to be passed, other approvals to solicit. Arthur, Jack’s brother, was living with Olive in one room over a shop in Chiswick. The roar of the cycle engine announced them in an otherwise quiet street – all the streets were quiet then, in subtopia. This time Jean was on the back, hair enclosed in a gypsy turban, face tanned by the wind. She wore a second-hand leather jacket. Oh, she was attractive all right, thought Olive, and she knew it. She could see what Jack saw in her. The hair, the bosoms. Could they be real? Olive was still working in the chocolate shop in Ealing and this impressed Jean no end. Ooh, I couldn’t do that. Haven’t got the brains for it. She gave a little laugh, at her own expense. But actually, Olive didn’t take to her, not at all. She seemed spoilt, full of herself. Almost the first thing she said was, Ooh, that lipstick. It doesn’t suit you, you know. Cheek. But Olive said nothing, she wasn’t that sort of person. Anyway, Arthur seemed to like her. Nice, isn’t she, Ol? I suppose so.

  Jack was sure now that he was in that condition, that epiphany, the singers and actors and writers were so preoccupied with, the condition of love. They were just – good together. She was everything he wanted: beautiful, intelligent, practical – that was important – and physical, sporty. He could see no flaws, no bad side, just as the songs suggested. And she loved him too, he was sure, although she never said so. They never discussed what it was they liked in each other, at least not with each other, not in words as such. Those things were only for the voice inside, and, even there, were wordless.

  In the late summer of 1951, Jean and Jack performed a final rite, a testing, on their progress towards matrimony. They went on holiday together, for a week, to a boarding house in Wey-mouth, with the blessing of Grace and Billy. They were trusted to keep within limits, and they did so, Jack sleeping in the lounge downstairs, while Jean was lodged in the bedroom upstairs. The owners insisted that he did not go upstairs at all and he kept his word.

  They motored around the town on the Vincent, stopping, going for walks, eating ice-cream, swimming, playing the arcades. Kissing, more forcefully now, the initial coyness retreating. They walked under the stars in England and they were happy, they supposed – it wasn’t a question, then, that you asked of yourself – and they knew now what must surely unfold.

  On 17 January 1952, Jack took Jean to see South Pacific at the London Palladium, to celebrate her twenty-first birthday. They were late, pushing into the row through shushes and tuts. But it was marvellous, Mary Martin and Ezio Pinza reprising their Broadway roles as Nellie Forbush and Emile de Becque, the stage transformed into paradise. It was corny, corny as Kansas in springtime, with the knee-slapping and slushy ending, but Jack and Jean loved it, the tunes, already seeming like standards, forming like foam on their lips. I’m in love, I’m in love, I’m in love, I’m in love with a…

  Walking on the streets afterwards, Jean got to talking about how much she liked Olive and Arthur and, quite casual, Jack said, How would you like them to be your in-laws? And Jean said, Oh, Jack, yes, and that was it. They carried on walking, the most natural thing in the world. Jack gave her a ring, platinum with a single solitaire. They would be married in July. No point, as Jack so straightforwardly put it, in hanging about.

  The day was set for 12 July 1952, at St James’s Church, a few yards from both the Empire Snooker Hall and Hetty’s house. Jean set to making the dress for herself and for the bridesmaids, Irene and Bud’s daughter Betty. Hers was to be white satin, full length, with a lace surplice and septagonal neckline, a headress and a veil. There would be white flowers in her hair.

  They spent the night before preparing the wedding feast for the thirty or so guests – cooked ham, salads, cheese, fresh raspberries, a few bottles of wine – and made up the trestle tables in Hetty’s back room. Billy and Grace had no money to make their contribution, but Billy baked the cake and Grace gave some loose carpet as a gift.

  The ceremony was simple, C of E. Arthur was the best man. Jack wore a blue single-breasted suit, made by Jack Gay at Northfields, with a carnation in his lapel. Jean carried a bouquet of red roses. Hymns were sung, vows made, to love and wors
hip and honour. To obey. These incantations bound them for ever, this they knew; marriage was for life. As Jean left the church, she was given the gift of two lucky horseshoes. She threw her bouquet and Irene caught it.

  They walked from the church to Hetty’s and ate that simple lunch. There were no speeches, for, being English, all were ill at ease with ritual. Every last penny had been spent on the wedding, but Terry O’Dwyer had given Jack a wedding bonus of £40, to see them through the honeymoon.

  At about four o’clock, they set off into the afternoon sun, a small crowd cheering as the neighbours peered, heading out towards Cornwall. They had put a deposit on a caravan, for Jean, as she told Irene, had always dreamed of a holiday at the seaside in a caravan. Jean had a knapsack on her back and wore an army-surplus black leather coat.

  They stopped on the way at a hotel in Shaftesbury for their wedding night. In the bedroom, a four-poster. They were both virgins, a little nervous to be having sex for the first time, she twenty-one, he twenty-six, with the one and only person they would ever sleep with. And it was a sacrament, and it sealed and bound their marriage.

  The next morning they arrived at the caravan, which they had yet to see, near Watergate Bay. They had imagined something spacious, perhaps made of painted wood in a wide field of grass, with nothing but the blue air and the far horizon. When they saw the caravan, they struggled to stifle their disappointment. It was a tiny, dirty box in the closed backyard of a house. It was a slum on wheels. Jean sat down and cried.