All Fall Down Read online

  ‘That would have been enough?’

  ‘Yes. I wanted to know how it felt.’

  He’d planned to leave on a roll of anger, now he felt drained by sadness. ‘We ain’t talked enough, you know that?’ It would take a huge effort to leave her sitting there red-eyed and subdued.

  But she took another unexpected turn, rejecting his pity. ‘I ain’t interested in talking to a man, Tommy. I thought you’d have realized that by now.’

  And now it was easy to turn away; she’d made it easy by her typical coarseness. He never knew where that came from or what she got out of it, except that it put a man in his place; all men in fact, since it turned the tables and showed that she was the one in control. As she pronounced the word, ‘talking’, stressing it and raising her eyebrows, he took the implied insult on board. ‘Righto, Dot. You go and do whatever it is you’re interested in doing.’

  He took up the case and headed for the door, slipping his hand into his jacket pocket. ‘Here’s my key. If I have to, I’ll kip in the basement for a bit, until I get me and Jimmie sorted out.’

  Damn; she’d tilted it and let it slide by not being able to resist a sly dig. She’d always said Tommy was no good in bed, not because it was true, but because it was the easiest, deepest way to hurt him. This was once too often. She sat marooned on the bed, submitting to his departure.

  He slammed the door and his footsteps faded down the stairs. Quietly she went and picked up the telephone, dialled Charlie’s new number. ‘Hello, it’s me.’ She waited while he went and turned down the wireless. ‘Yes, Tommy just left. I kicked him out. When can you come round?’

  Meggie wrote to Ronnie at least twice a week, not knowing if her letters would get through. Her favourite writing time was in the shelter under the pub, where she could retreat to a quiet corner and scribble away as the others wrapped themselves in blankets and got their heads down for the night.

  She would tell him how they’d grown used to the Blitz; these days everyone could get a good sleep in spite of the thud of bombs and rattle of guns. Bertie, for instance, could sleep through the end of the world. She had more complaints about the squeak of her pen nib across the paper as she wrote her long letters, she said. One night her Uncle George had brought down fish and chip suppers for everyone after his spell on duty, and it had put them in a good mood so that supper was followed by a sing-song and you would have thought they hadn’t a care in the world.

  She kept her letters cheerful, treasuring similar ones from Ronnie, who could give few details of his whereabouts because of security, and who concentrated instead on the tricks they got up to to better the petty-officers. He sent her a photo of himself in uniform, shoulders back, chin up, unbelievably handsome. She carried it everywhere and slept with it under her pillow.

  ‘It ain’t Ronnie I mind about,’ Sadie told her one evening while they sat darning socks by lamplight, listening as usual for the siren, almost wishing it would start up. Then they would have Ernie knocking at the door to fetch them, and they would bundle everyone into the shelter for the night and know where they stood. ‘A lovely girl like you is bound to find herself a nice young man sooner rather than later.’

  ‘I’m sure you’ll like him, Ma.’ Meggie was glad at the friendly turn of the conversation. The boys were in bed and Walter was out on patrol. They had the warm kitchen to themselves.

  ‘If I ever get to meet him.’ Sadie’s needle went in and out, weaving across the threadbare heel.

  ‘Next time he comes home on leave,’ she promised.

  ‘You said that last time.’

  ‘I know, but his ma needs him. She had to try and run the pub single-handed since they took her cellarman into the army. You know what it’s like.’

  ‘I should think she could spare him for a couple of hours,’ Sadie sniffed. ‘That’s all I’m saying. Everyone runs after that woman, you included.’ She resented the time Meggie spent away from home; first on the futile search for her father, now due to the lure of the West End and Gertie’s precious company.

  ‘It ain’t like that,’ Meggie tried to explain. ‘Gertie don’t expect no one to run round after her.’

  ‘What is it, then?’ What made Meggie spend her weekends up there, even though Ronnie wasn’t due any leave before Christmas?

  ‘I don’t know. You’d have to meet her.’

  ‘No, ta.’

  ‘Ma!’

  ‘Well, I mean to say you can’t expect me to be tripping over myself in the rush. From what I hear, she’s got plenty of admirers.’

  Meggie sighed and sewed on.

  ‘Where’s her husband anyway?’

  ‘Dead.’

  Silence, which Meggie filled.

  ‘Shankley says he’d get hitched to her like a shot, only she says once bitten, twice shy.’

  ‘Who’s Shankley?’

  ‘The oysterman in Bernhardt Court.’ For a while Meggie succeeded in diverting attention away from Gertie by regaling her mother with tales of life in theatreland, seen through the eyes of the old Irishman.

  ‘And he’s sweet on Gertie Elliot?’ Sadie swung it back round. ‘Like everyone and his aunt, apparently. And what’s she like?’

  ‘She’s good fun, Ma. She wears modern outfits and she’s always got time for a joke. And she’s been kind to me right from the start, even before me and Ronnie got together. You’d like her, you would.’

  Sadie looked doubtful, as if this was a new and exotic food she’d prefer not to taste. It was the ‘modern outfits’ that did it. It made Sadie feel dowdy and left out. ‘I expect you’ll be up there tomorrow?’ Saturday, a day off, building up to Christmas.

  ‘I said I’d help out.’

  ‘Lucky Gertie.’ Sadie snipped the end off the grey wool and inspected the darn. ‘At any rate it keeps you out of mischief.’

  ‘Meaning?’ Meggie ended up disgruntled as usual. There was no way she could persuade her mother that being with Gertie in the Bell brought her closer to Ronnie, even in his absence, and made her happy. Perhaps it was too much to expect.

  She was only saved from an awkward conversation by the familiar wail of the siren and the action stations that followed. Not having to discuss him was the best refuge from further arguments.

  With Gertie, however, she could say whatever she wanted. As soon as she stepped through the doors of the Bell the next evening she felt free and confident. There was Eddie, the Fred Astaire of Shaftesbury Avenue as Gertie called him, and the other young men who had as yet escaped enlistment. They all made a fuss of her and made her laugh with their extravagant compliments. Gertie told her to get behind the bar double-quick before someone whisked her off to the pictures and she lost a barmaid for the evening.

  ‘Spoilsport.’ Eddie looked down in the mouth.

  ‘No, she saved my bacon.’ Meggie ducked under the counter and took off her coat.

  ‘What, you mean to say you don’t want to cuddle up in the back row with me and Wormy?’

  Wormy, alias Rodney Wormall, was a tall beanpole of a youth. ‘No, I do not. In fact, I’d rather get dragged through a hedge backwards.’ She set to, stacking clean glasses.

  ‘That’s telling you, Ready Eddie.’ Gertie sidled up to poor Wormy. ‘Ain’t you gonna ask me to the flicks, Rodney? I ain’t seen the latest Gary Cooper. You could take me if you like.’

  The others laughed as Wormy reddened and failed to make a gallant reply. Meggie went along with it by winking at Eddie.

  ‘You heard from Ronnie this week?’ Gertie asked Meggie. She pulled pints with practised ease. Tonight she wore a short black dress with a row of small shiny buttons, and a double row of pearls with matching earrings. Her copper-coloured hair was curled at the front and pinned high at the back.

  ‘Just the once.’

  ‘Lucky you.’

  ‘Why, ain’t he written to you?’

  ‘I’m only his ma, remember.’ She said this without any undertone, serving beer and striking the till keys with long carmine finge
rnails.

  ‘He sends his love.’

  ‘To you or to me?’

  ‘To us both.’ Ronnie’s letters followed a pattern; stilted in the first paragraph containing general remarks; then joky in a schoolboy fashion; then suddenly tender to finish. ‘I love you, my darling, and can’t wait until we’re together again’, ‘I think of you day in, day out, hoping that you’re mine forever. Your loving Ronnie.’ These were his ways of signing off.

  ‘He’s got it bad if you ask me,’ Gertie conceded. ‘To tell you the truth, I think you’re the only thing he comes home for these days.’

  Meggie blushed with pleasure.

  ‘I mean it. You’re the cream in his coffee.’ Gertie hummed the tune.

  ‘Shh.’

  ‘What for? I don’t mind if you don’t.’ She tackled another bout of thirsty customers. ‘What it is to be young,’ she sighed. ‘ “Keep young and beautiful, If you want to be loved, tra-la.” Who sang that?’

  ‘I haven’t a clue,’ Meggie laughed. ‘Must have been before my time.’

  ‘Don’t rub it in.’

  She took a breath, gazing up at the distinguished actors smiling down from their black photograph frames, enjoying the tinkling notes of the piano. It might have been her imagination, but she thought she recognized a customer who had just come in. He wore a long camelhair coat, collar up, trilby hat pulled forward. ‘Wasn’t he in that film about the German spy?’ she whispered to Gertie, who laughed like a drain.

  ‘No, but he’d like you to think he was.’ She drew Meggie to the far end of the bar. ‘You see him over there? Now he is a film actor over in Ealing.’ She pointed to a disappointingly small, fat man with a balding head and a surprising number of female hangers-on. ‘He does the comedies with George Formby.’

  Meggie looked again. Maybe he wasn’t as fat and bald as she’d first thought. In a way he was quite attractive. He had a wicked smile. Yes, she could guess what an older woman might see in him, she admitted to Shankley, who had just made his way into the bar carrying a flat, square basket full of best seafood.

  ‘Rose-tinted glasses.’ He set the basket down. ‘I knew Roly Spence for donkeys years before he was in the flicks, when he was a fat, bald little geezer with a lisp. Now anyone would think he was Rudolph Valentino.’

  ‘He’s dead, ain’t he?’ Meggie served him his favourite mellow Guinness.

  ‘So what?’ Shankley wiped the froth from his top lip with a luxurious sucking noise. ‘Now I know who I’d rather spend my time looking at, if you ask me!’

  ‘Hands off, Shanks,’ Eddie warned. ‘Meggie’s taken.’

  ‘Only kidding.’ He winked at her, then raised a forefinger and tapped it against the bar. ‘That reminds me.’

  ‘What?’ Trust him, standing there looking as if he had something important to say, keeping her in suspense.

  ‘This Richie Palmer . . .’

  ‘What, have you seen him?’ Her heart thudded at the sound of the long-forgotten name.

  ‘Hold your horses. I only heard he was up this way.’

  ‘You ain’t seen him then?’ Her face fell.

  ‘I ain’t. But he was seen earlier this week, that’s definite. What’s the matter? Why ain’t you over the moon.’

  She needed to know every detail. ‘Did anyone talk to him? Where did he go?’ Guilt consumed her, that she could have been so callous as to have dropped all thought of finding her poor father.

  ‘Hang on, let’s see. It must’ve been Tuesday. And to tell you the honest truth, he weren’t fit to talk to by all accounts. He spent more time in the gutter than on his own two feet, until the coppers came and cleared him out of the road. That’s what I heard.’

  Meggie nodded at each scrap of information. ‘The coppers? Which station?’

  ‘Search me.’ Shankley looked sorry that he’d dropped the bombshell. ‘Look, they probably carted him off to some shelter for a kip, or to one of the big hostels. All I know is they wanted to tidy him off the street before the final curtain. It don‘t look good to have tramps cluttering the place up; bad for morale, so they say.’

  She went to serve a customer, then came back. ‘But you say you didn’t see him yourself?’

  ‘No. How many times? Look here, what’s so bleeding fascinating about Richie Palmer? Because for the life of me I can’t see why a girl like you would waste five seconds on the likes of him.’

  Meggie trusted Shankley. He was like the streetlamps, the billboards; part of the furniture. He had a lilt in his voice and a light in his eye. She leaned across the bar and whispered, ‘Don’t say nothing, Shanks, but Richie Palmer’s my pa. That’s why I want to track him down. He’s my pa and I ain’t never seen hide nor hair of him since I was a little baby. You understand, don’t you? You’d do the same if you was me.’

  Jimmie insisted on staying at Bobby’s place when Tommy left the flat. ‘I don’t want to hear her carrying on with Charlie Ogden,’ he said darkly. ‘It’s like bleeding musical beds up there.’ Charlie had moved in just as soon as Tommy had walked out. Anyway, Dorothy had made it plain that she didn’t want to catch sight of Jimmie’s ugly mug as she came up and down stairs.

  Meanwhile, it took Tommy a week or two to fix up Edie’s flat.

  ‘I don’t want it to feel like I’m rushing you,’ he told her in the bar at the Duke. He was sleeping for the time being on a sister’s floor over in Lambeth. ‘I ain’t doing the place up just so we can live together.’ If she thought things had moved too quick, he said, he was prepared to wait.

  But Edie had been the one to suggest it. ‘No, I want to be with you.’

  ‘Sure?’

  ‘Yes.’ They’d even planned how to deal with the problem of Bill. ‘I’ll wait until I next get a letter from him,’ she’d decided. ‘He don’t write often, but when he does it’s to tell me when his next leave’s due. Then he’ll ring me up at work and let me know exactly what time to expect him. That’s when I’ll tell him.’

  ‘On the blower?’

  ‘Well, I’ll say we have to talk.’

  ‘Then tell him face to face?’

  Neither relished the prospect, but Edie gained strength from having Tommy around. Making plans to move back into the flat, she felt confident that she could cope with Bill when the time came.

  ‘Sure you’re sure?’ Tommy seemed to keep something up his sleeve as they downed their drinks.

  ‘Yes, why?’ Out of the corner of her eye Edie noticed Hettie at work behind the bar. It was Wednesday, a quiet night so far and she’d arranged to come downstairs to meet Tommy after he’d put in a spell of work at the flat. Now she recalled Hettie’s well-meaning advice about not jumping into anything too quickly.

  Instead of answering, Tommy stood up and held out his hand. ‘Come right this way.’

  They walked out onto Duke Street, past houses untouched by the bombs, past shops pock-marked by flying shrapnel, past the large crater near the post office and the demolished office building where scavengers had picked the fallen roof bare, leaving a skeleton of wooden beams on a pile of rubble. A wag had stuck a Union Jack on top in an ironic show of bravado. It fluttered in the red light cast by the warning lamps surrounding the crater, making Tommy and Edie smile. Then he led her into the flats and upstairs to the third floor.

  ‘Close your eyes.’

  Standing outside her own door, she did as she was told. ‘What’s that smell?’

  ‘Paint.’ He opened it and led her in. ‘Righto, now you can open them.’

  It could only be that he’d finished, fixing things up, she knew. Yet when she looked she wasn’t prepared for the way he’d done it. ‘Oh Tommy, it looks good as new!’

  Everything was the same; the green striped wallpaper, the copper fender, the parchment lampshades, it was as if the bomb had never touched it.

  ‘How did you do it?’

  ‘Easy.’

  ‘Get away!’

  ‘I know a man who knows a man . . .’ He led her across the room, clasp
ing her arms round his waist from behind so she had to peer over his shoulder to see him lift the lid of the mended gramophone and set the turntable in motion. She bent with him to put the needle on the record, then wound her arms around his neck to the strains of Bing Crosby.

  ‘Like it?’ They turned slowly.

  ‘What do you think?’

  ‘I wanted to keep it as a surprise.’

  ‘It is. You must have worked till all hours.’

  He put on a smooth, deep voice. ‘For you, my dear . . .’

  ‘Seriously, Tommy.’

  ‘I am. Don’t you know I am? Listen,’ he said, taking half a step back but without letting go of her waist. ‘You don’t think I did this all on my tod, do you? I got Jimmie to do all the hard work, had to pay him a week’s wages and all. Bleeding daylight robbery.’

  She laughed. ‘You should see your face, Tommy O’Hagan.’

  ‘And you should see yours.’ He moved in and kissed her. ‘You know I said a while back that I didn’t want to rush you?’

  ‘Mmm.’

  ‘Well I changed my mind. I do.’

  She opened her eyes wide. ‘They’ll be expecting me back down the Duke.’ It was a half-hearted protest, she knew.

  ‘They’ll know where you are.’

  ‘What if they send out a search party?’

  ‘George with his tin hat and stirrup-pump?’ He couldn’t stop kissing her and inching her towards the bedroom.

  ‘There could be a raid.’ Tonight would be the first night for weeks if there wasn’t.

  ‘I’ll barricade the door and we’ll hide under the bed.’ They stepped into the room and he closed the door so that they stood in darkness.

  ‘Tommy, I love you.’

  ‘I love you too.’ He said the words because he knew that was what she wanted. On top of that, he meant them.

  She swam through the dark with him, sinking onto the bed and letting him unbutton her dress as she lay there, waiting to be guided by him.

  ‘Don’t you want to?’ He wondered at her passivity, whispered into her ear.

  She nodded. ‘I’m not used to you yet.’