After Hours Read online

  He bent and kissed her. Her hat fell backwards from her head and the glossy halo of wavy hair came free. Her lips, soft and warm, opened slightly.

  She felt the dampness of his hair, the hard smoothness of his collar. She was in his arms and she was kissing him.

  Then he eased back and stooped to pick up her hat, brushing puddle-water from its velvety surface with his coatsleeve. ‘Don’t put it back on,’ he said as he handed it to her, ‘I like to see your hair.’

  The compliment took her by surprise as much as her own sudden desire to kiss Richie Palmer on the lips. ‘That’s more than Pa did when I first came home with it all chopped off.’ She stuffed her hat into her bag, trying to lighten the mood. ‘Pa’s got old-fashioned ideas, especially about women’s hairstyles. He said he’d divorce Annie if she ever came home with her hair looking like mine! And I don’t know what else.’

  Richie put his arm around her shoulder. He felt the light sweep of the offending haircut against his wrist. ‘I like it.’ He almost smiled as they walked on up the alley. Their silence was easier, though a question still hovered as they saw Bertie Hill raise his hat to them and heard the raucous music drift towards them from the pub.

  ‘And will you go with me again?’ Richie stopped and drew her into the shelter of Henshaws’ doorway, out of the cold rain that had begun to fall.

  Sadie shook her head. ‘I don’t know, Richie. Maybe I ought not?’ She looked away, catching her own reflection in the eating-house window.

  ‘Why?’ the low, slow voice insisted.

  ‘What will Walter think? Or Rob, for that matter. You could lose your job over something like this.’

  His mouth twitched down into a grimace. ‘It ain’t my job you’re fretting over.’

  She frowned and tried to sidestep him back on to the street. ‘Maybe. Maybe not. But I am bothered by us walking out together again, Richie, and that’s a fact. I wish you wouldn’t ask me right now.’

  He leaned against the door, rattling it with his shoulder, letting her step by. ‘Well, then, I expect you’ll let me know when I can ask again. Send me a telegram. Call me on the telephone.’

  ‘Don’t be like that.’

  ‘Then don’t you.’

  They walked the last few yards down Duke Street in another kind of silence. At the brightly lit double door she paused to look up at him, but Richie turned and walked across the street without looking back. She didn’t even know where he lived; not one thing about him. Yet she’d kissed him on the lips. She darted inside the pub, a hot flush of guilt on her cheeks.

  Chapter Two

  ‘This allotment will set me up good and proper,’ Arthur Ogden declared as Sadie came in. Annie stood behind the bar patiently paying attention. ‘You just see if it don’t!’

  ‘Good for you, Arthur.’ Annie went on wiping glasses.

  She waved at Sadie. ‘Hello there. Bleeding long pictures they show up at that Picturedome place!’

  ‘Picturedrome.’ Sadie rolled the second ‘r’.

  ‘And come again tomorrow. We was worried about you, girl.’

  ‘Well, there’s no need.’ She drifted into the emptying room, perched on a stool and placed her bag and gloves on the bar. ‘Here I am, safe and sound.’

  Arthur, listening in, returned Charlie’s earlier nudge with a vengeance. ‘Look lively, son, and buy the girl a drink. Can’t you see she looks done in?’

  Charlie dug into his pocket and ordered Sadie a glass of port wine.

  Duke obliged. ‘You never walked back, did you?’ he asked his youngest girl as he pushed the glass along towards her. ‘Who was you with? Them typewriter pals from work?’

  ‘That’s right.’ Sadie nodded. She sipped her drink to avoid meeting Duke’s eye.

  ‘And what’s the matter, couldn’t you get Walter to send out a taxicab to pick you all up?’ Charlie interrupted. ‘That’s a bit tight of him, ain’t it?’

  Sadie gave her old boyfriend a scornful look and turned to Arthur. ‘What was that you was saying about an allotment?’ she prompted.

  Charlie’s brows went up as he pulled at his own pint glass. ‘Them typewriters ain’t wearing trousers and trilby hats by any chance?’ he muttered.

  Again Sadie ignored him. ‘Go on, Arthur, tell us about your cabbage patch.’

  ‘Hallotment,’ Arthur announced, very grand. ‘Down the side of the railway embankment on Meredith Court.’ The words rolled inside his mouth and slipped over his tongue. He drew descriptive pictures in the air with his free hand, while the other stayed clamped around his empty glass. ‘It’s going to make me a man of substance, I can tell you. That little patch of land is going to bring pride hand prosperity to the Hogden family!’

  ‘Pride and what?’ Amy breezed up to say goodnight. ‘Leave off, Pa, and say goodnight. Time I was off.’

  ‘Shame!’ Dolly squeezed Amy’s arm as her daughter made a sour face. Though Amy fretted about having to live in at the Regent Street shop, Dolly knew she liked her life in the West End better than the office life Dolly had once planned for her. She didn’t waste much sympathy on Amy’s grumbles as she watched her, Ruby and the rest out of the door. Then she turned back to Sadie. ‘Arthur ain’t boring you with tales of his giant Brussel sprouts, I hope?’

  Sadie laughed, feeling her balance return, her heartbeat slow back to normal after the confusing episode with Richie Palmer.

  Little Arthur bridled and drew himself up. ‘No I ain’t! You just wait, Dolly Ogden, till them rows of carrots come up perfect, and all them beautiful onions and cabbages. When I’ve sold them on the market at a tidy profit, you’ll be laughing on the other side of your face!’

  Dolly’s smile was as good-humoured as ever. ‘You ain’t never held the right end of a spade in your life, old man. And you don’t know a dandelion from a dockleaf. No, it’s another of them flash-in-the-pans, if you ask me.’ She eased her husband’s grip from the empty glass and stood him upright, then pointed him in the direction of the door. ‘And we all know who’ll be down there digging and weeding, don’t we?’ she said to Sadie with a wink. ‘And that man’s name ain’t Arthur Ogden.’

  ‘Nor Charlie neither,’ her son warned. ‘You won’t catch me dirtying my hands for a few frostbitten turnips.’ He drank to the dregs, then put down his glass.

  ‘I never thought it was,’ Dolly called cheerfully. She shepherded Arthur through the front hallway on to the dismal street.

  There was the round of goodnights, scraping chairs, swinging doors before the bar eventually emptied, leaving Duke to lock up behind his regulars. Annie laid clean towels over the row of shiny new pump handles, then she dimmed the gaslights. It was already the early hours of Sunday morning.

  ‘Bye bye, Sadie,’ Charlie said. He stayed to the very last, still curious about her flushed face and evasive manner when she first came in. He looked a slight, sensitive type in his Prince of Wales tweed jacket, with his light brown hair brushed across his forehead from a side parting. His face was still fresh, smooth, even slightly womanish. He regarded his long-lost sweetheart from under furrowed brows. ‘I hope you ain’t doing nothing I wouldn’t do?’

  Sadie flicked her hair behind one-ear, pouting back at him. ‘I’d go help Dolly get your pa home safe if I was you, Charlie.’

  She outstared him easily, and he went off down the court with the usual Saturday night feeling that his own life stood still as the rest of the world hurried on by. Twenty-six, still unattached, still working for Maurice Leigh in the chain of cinemas he managed, but going nowhere fast. His work hours were unsocial, his teenaged dreams of bursting upon the world of cinema with wondrous improvements had so far come to nothing. He’d talked to Maurice about the chances of improving synchronization between sound and vision on the new talkies by incorporating the soundtrack on to the edge of the cellulose film by a series of patterned dots, like on a pianola roll. Maurice had listened approvingly, nodded his head, considered it carefully. Then he’d told him that as far as he could judge, th
ere wasn’t the demand for it as yet. ‘They flock to see Negri and Pickford, not to hear them talk,’ he’d advised. ‘Hold your horses. Work at it, Charlie; it’s a bright idea. But bide your time.’

  That was in the very early days, in his first flush of enthusiasm. Now, however, Charlie was in a rut, and he knew it. He’d chucked his chances over his scholarship for grammar school by throwing in his lot with the moving pictures game. At the same time, nearly ten years ago, he’d chucked his chances with Sadie Parsons. Sadie, was considered the smartest, most admired girl around, and didn’t Charlie know it.

  ‘What’s eating you?’ Dolly asked as he crossed the threshold of his terraced home down Paradise Court. He’d slammed the door behind him. She sighed. ‘No, don’t tell me, I don’t want to know. Just lend a hand up these stairs with your pa, for God’s sake, and don’t stand there looking like a wet weekend.’

  It was Rob Parsons’ last job of the evening to pick up his sister, Hettie, from the Mission on Bear Lane; a favour he did every Saturday night, when Southwark’s streets were full of helpless, hopeless drunks who’d turned up too late to get a bed with the Army. They curled up instead in the tunnelled walkways that ran under the railway line, or lurched out of alleyways in blind, aimless pairs.

  He pulled up outside the new redbrick Mission with its arched windows; worn out, easing his artificial leg into a less painful position, wanting his own bed. He watched a woman with a small child stagger unsteadily in the direction of his idling cab. He saw his sister emerge and come down the steps, leaned over and opened the passenger door. ‘Hop in, Ett, I’m freezing to death out here.’

  She stepped on to the running-board, then collapsed exhausted into the leather seat. ‘Sorry!’ She loosened the stiff ties to her dark blue bonnet and sighed.

  Rob eased the Bullnose into gear and edged away from the pavement, too late to avoid the woman with her outstretched hand. He dipped into his pocket, found two coins and flung them to her through the window. Hettie had closed her eyes and sunk her head against the seat. The woman, hair loose, scrawny-armed, backed into the mist with her child. The car rolled off down the road, heading for home,

  ‘Had a hard night?’ Rob glanced at his sister. This work for the Army, on top of the dress business she’d set up with Jess, was wearing Hettie out. She sat pale and still beside him.

  ‘The usual. How about you?’ She opened one eye and rolled it towards him. ‘You ain’t exactly a bundle of laughs yourself.’ She studied his slight frown, the jaw set tight. ‘Ain’t nothing wrong, is there?’ It didn’t take much to see that Rob had something on his mind.

  ‘Nothing I can’t put right.’ Rob steered through the empty streets, long since rid of their tram and bus traffic. In the fog, the old acetylene lamps on his car scarcely penetrated the gloom. ‘Electric headlamps,’ he muttered, changing the subject. ‘That’s the up-and-coming thing, Ett. Electric. Powered by a battery that starts up the engine and works a windscreen-wiper too.’ He turned at long last into the home stretch of Duke Street.

  ‘Never! Did you go over Ealing way tonight?’ Hettie enquired. She knew that her brother often picked up their brother-in-law and took him home to his posh new neighbourhood after work. She pulled herself out of her own exhaustion and tried to make pleasant conversation.

  ‘I picked Maurice up from the Picturedrome and drove him over.’

  ‘And did you see Jess?’

  He shook his head. ‘I never stopped off. There was another job waiting.’

  ‘You’ve been busy, then?’

  ‘Pretty much. Could be better.’ They drew up outside the Duke. Hettie prepared to get out.

  But she turned back and touched his elbow. ‘Rob,’ she began.

  ‘What? Get a move on, Ett. Let me drive this old girl down the depot. I need some kip.’

  ‘I know. But Rob, something happened tonight. I can’t get it off my mind.’ She looked out of the cab window at the lights dimming inside the pub.

  ‘Down the Mission?’ Rob knew she never made a fuss unless it was something serious. He studied her for a moment, finding himself wishing that she would ease up, get out of that drab Salvation Army uniform that looked like it came out of the Ark, and be more like the old, carefree Hettie, pre-Daisy O’Hagan, pre-Ernie’s trial. She used to dance and sing her way through life then.

  ‘Yes.’ She shook her head. ‘Don’t mind me, it’s probably nothing.’ She pushed down on the door-handle. ‘It’s just we gave a bed to a newcomer tonight. In pretty bad shape. I ain’t never set eyes on him before.’

  ‘And?’ Robert prompted.

  ‘He was rambling on a bit, drunk, of course. It felt like trouble, that’s all.’ She began to regret giving voice to her worry.

  ‘Trouble? Who for?’

  ‘For Annie and Duke.’ But she opened the door and scrambled out. ‘Look, forget it, Rob. Pretend I ain’t never mentioned it, OK?’

  He blew out his cheeks and shrugged. He guessed it was something about the old man’s habit of serving after hours. Rob sometimes got a bit hot under the collar about that himself, thinking that one of these days it could get them into trouble. They were tightening up the licensing laws again. He’d even heard they planned to put a full stop to alcohol altogether in America. But he nodded at Hettie. ‘As you were, Ett. My lips are sealed.’

  She leaned in and nodded. ‘Thanks, Rob. I expect it’ll all blow over. The poor old geezer’ll have sobered up by morning. He’ll be on the move again. Sorry I brought it up.’

  Rob watched her slip quietly down the court, by the side of the pub to the back entrance. She’d brushed it off, whatever it was, but he made a mental note to warn Duke to be careful about who he served after hours.

  Now he had his own bone to pick with Sadie; something he hadn’t wanted to mention to Hettie until he’d had it out with their wayward kid sister. He turned the car back on to Duke Street, recalling his little chat with Maurice earlier that night. The railway arches at the top of the street loomed into view. He’d park the Bullnose and lock her up for the night. Then he’d hurry back on foot.

  Maybe Sadie would still be up, having a cup of cocoa with Hettie before they both went off to bed. He pocketed a list of scribbled messages left on the table by Walter, then went out and bolted and padlocked the big wooden doors. ‘Davidson and Parsons’, it said on a newly painted sign, ‘Taximeter Cabs for Hire’.

  He went off down the street, shoulders hunched, cap pulled well down, a familiar late-night sight limping home to the Duke.

  Chapter Three

  Jess heard the click of the front-door lock. Maurice was home from work. She looked up from the paper pattern she had carefully laid on to the silky silver-grey fabric on the front-room table, under the glow of the standard lamp. First he would steal upstairs to look in on sleeping Grace and little Maurice, then he’d come back down to tell her about his day. Taking three pins from her mouth, she tucked them neatly into the pattern to secure the cloth beneath. Then she glanced into the mirror over the mantelpiece. Strands of hair had worked free of the loose bun at the nape of her neck. She tucked them back into position and straightened her blouse into the waistband of her skirt.

  Maurice took the stairs two at a time. Along the landing, he spotted Grace’s bedroom door standing open. When he peeped inside, it was as he’d suspected; that little monkey, Mo, had decamped from his own room further down the corridor and come to snuggle up beside his big sister. Their two dark heads lay together against the white pillow, round-cheeked and peaceful, their breathing light, almost silent. He tiptoed across the carpet, turned down the blanket on Mo’s side, and, careful not to wake him or Grace, he took the boy in his arms and carried him to his own bed. He smoothed the pillow, stroked his forehead, then bent to kiss his son’s soft cheek.

  At the sound of his return downstairs, Jess came to the hallway. She greeted him with a smile and an embrace, noticing the usual smoky, damp smell of his overcoat and the shadows around his eyes. He was working too
hard. She took his coat and hung it on the hallstand.

  ‘Mo’s been on his travels again,’ he mentioned as he took off his jacket and unbuttoned his waistcoat. ‘Sometimes I think he gets there in his sleep.’ Maurice hitched up his shirtsleeves and followed Jess into the dining-room.

  ‘Did you take him back?’ Through in the kitchen, Jess put the kettle to boil on the gas stove. It was a point of difference between them; she liked to leave the two children snuggled together, but Maurice insisted that Mo should get used to waking in his own bed, now that he was six and going to school.

  ‘Yes. But don’t worry, he’s still fast asleep.’ He wandered into the kitchen for a cosier chat. The sight of Jess, reaching for cups from the pantry cupboard, her slim waist shown off by the tight-fitting skirt, pleased him. His arms encircled her from behind and he kissed her neck.

  She returned his embrace with a light kiss on the cheek, then went to stir milk and sugar into the cocoa, waiting for the kettle to boil.

  Maurice leaned against the cupboard watching her. ‘What’ve you been up to while the cat’s been away?’

  ‘Not playing, if that’s what you think. Sewing.’ She glanced up. ‘I’ve an order to finish for Monday.’

  ‘And can’t Hettie do it?’ He didn’t like to think of Jess always working, making clothes for the well-to-do women of their new neighbourhood. He felt it could damage their name here in Ealing; people always found a way of looking down on others. As an East End Jew he knew this all too well.

  ‘Hettie’s at the Mission on a Saturday night, you know that.’

  And because he was feeling edgy about the dressmaking business which Jess and Hettie ran from a small shop on the High Street, he grumbled on. ‘Sadie came up to the Picturedrome tonight,’ he said.

  ‘Yes?’ Jess handed him the cocoa, still smiling. ‘To see the great screen lover with her pals, I expect?’

  Maurice didn’t answer directly. ‘She was wearing that red outfit you made for her. You can’t hardly miss her.’