Paula did not go home to Liverpool for Christmas. There was nothing to mark or celebrate there; for Louis it was and always had been a normal working day at the office when he gave the staff the day off but came in himself, for he always went to shul on the high holidays leaving his employees to carry on as best they could, and he didn’t want to be thought of as a hypocrite taking holidays that were no celebration for him.
But this year he and Mina came to London. It was not their first visit but the first since the war, from which the business had done well – they had government contracts to supply chamois leathers to air force bases. They booked three nights at a well-recommended hotel near Marble Arch. It had, according to Louis, ‘quite a write-up, first class, couldn’t do better, eight storeys high, bedrooms and suites on every floor,’ and included in the tariff a Christmas Day lunch, open also to non-residents drawn from the streets and squares behind Selfridges and extending down into Mayfair.
They reserved a table for three and were excited and nervous about what to expect. None of them had ever pulled a Christmas cracker and were intrigued by the concept, the explosive snap, the paper hats, mottos and mysterious gifts inside. The menu had been posted to them and they anxiously scanned it looking for dietary pitfalls. What are pigs in blankets? The name was the clue, and a trap easy to avoid, but what about bread sauce, which forbidden ingredient might be concealed in it? As for the Christmas pudding, they satisfied themselves that mincemeat was not meat at all, in fact dried fruit, but what fat was used to bind it together they could not be sure of. Lard inveigled its way into everything. A note at the bottom of the menu said that an alternative to Christmas pudding was available, ice cream, choice of three flavours, or fruit cocktail served with fresh or artificial cream. So they hoped for the best and were resigned to some accidental lapses because the whole business was so foreign and exciting and made them feel that they had stumbled into a country, of a sort, where for just an afternoon they could pretend to be genuine English people who took these traditions for granted.
There might, Paula warned them, be carols and probably a visit from Santa, whom they found a slightly intimidating figure whose origins and meaning they could not be sure of. At home Christmas cards (which they only received from tradesmen) were kept on the mantelpiece folded shut behind the clock, as if even a snow scene with a robin perched on a twig or a sprig of holly was enough to be a narrow portal through which Christianity could squeeze its way into the room brandishing a crucifix and ranting about a certain people who murdered Our Lord.
The whole expedition was fraught, transgressive and thrilling. They hoped that it would all turn out okay and that on Yom Kippur, when they were subject to judgement and the indifferent gaze of justice, the verdict would not be too harsh, though Mina privately thought, It’s all a load of hooey in the end; you’re born, you die, that’s that. For she had tasted already forbidden fruits in the munitions canteen for which there had been no divine consequences but her husband didn’t know about that.
Roland went to his parents in Herne Hill. ‘You look like you’re setting off on a death march,’ Paula said. ‘It can’t be that bad, can it?’
‘My sister will be there. She always makes everything much, much worse.’
‘I didn’t know you had a sister. You’ve never mentioned her.’
‘Pamela. She’s of a spinsterish disposition, could sour milk with a glance, lives with her friend Elspeth Midgely, blonde cherub, rosebud mouth, simpers.’
‘Will she be there too?’
‘Who?’
‘Elspeth?’
‘Oh no, Dad wouldn’t let her in the house. Common accent. And she’s fat. He hates fat women, thinks it’s a weakness. Once, before the war, we went on holiday to Bournemouth, miles of golden sands, top-class hotels, that was what we were expecting, and we had to come home again after a couple of days, too many corpulent Jews taking up the deckchairs.’ He laughed.
‘He sounds very prejudiced.’
‘Oh, he is. And it could be anything – a wart on the nose, a double chin, the wrong accent, the wrong job. He’s a seething wiggle of pet hates.’
‘I see. And what would he think of me?’
‘They’re never going to find out. I’ve never taken a girlfriend home and I don’t plan to. If I ever get married it will be with a pair of witnesses pulled in from the street and no announcement until the deed is done.’
Paula could not think of anyone who would want to marry Roland, it would be a catastrophic mistake. He was who you misspent your golden youth on, not formed a permanent attachment to. She imagined him joining her parents for Christmas lunch at the hotel, decked out proudly in their paper hats, exclaiming over the novelty of roast parsnips, feeling a whinny of fear as they defied the Almighty and selected the ice cream, even though they’d have been safer with the fruit cocktail. She and Roland were a complete mismatch, but he had brought her through the doors of sex, that would not be forgotten. He is mad, she thought, but he’s all I have. He was my first so I’ll always remember him.
She didn’t love him, whatever that meant. She had no idea what it was supposed to feel like and he of all people wasn’t going to teach her. But she had found no evidence of other girls in the flat, no earring or handkerchief or crimson smoking stub. The girl in the poem was often on his mind, ‘ … hats and backchat.’ She asked Robin in the office if he recognised it. ‘Of course,’ he said, ‘it’s MacNeice, Autumn Journal. He works at the BBC so Roland probably knows him. Does talks, things like that.’
Your words could hurt because they were so honest … So easily hurt, so readily responsive.
That’s what he wants, not reserve and putting up a front like English girls. But that did not include him meeting Mina and Louis, and she did not impulsively suggest that they get together at Maison Lyons on Boxing Day for an early afternoon tea, another reservation Louis had made before they took a taxi to Euston for the journey home. For though she loved her parents, particularly her father whose only princess she was, and though they would be impressed by the familiarity, in person, of his radio voice, she knew perfectly well that he was not who they had in mind for her and would agitate for her return home. And while he would probably not regard them with the same curiosity as Uncle Itzik, they would still be specimens – alien, foreign, overdressed, a little overweight, too impressed by luxury and prone to a schmaltzy sentimentality that welled up at songs like ‘The White Cliffs of Dover’ and (she cringed when she thought of it) ‘Daddy Wouldn’t Buy Me a Bow-Wow.’
The Christmas crackers were a success. Mina put her paper hat on at once, it was a silver crown. ‘Look at me,’ she cried. They debated whether there was any reason not to have Christmas crackers at home in Liverpool, for they didn’t seem to serve any religious purpose but were more like children’s toys. An excavation of their contents revealed no hidden baby Jesus surprises. Louis’ contained a miniature penknife, Paula’s a tortoiseshell comb, Mina’s a little iron, a charm for a bracelet.
The band, got up in mustard jackets with black satin lapels, played a Christmas medley. Several tables burst into song, the unfamiliar words of carols. Mina and Louis smiled down at their plates. They did not want to be noticed not singing. The waiters ran back and forth with platters of turkey and troughs of vegetables. There were hundreds in the ballroom, the men in lounge suits, the women the new fashions from Paris: the cinched-in waist encircled by vicious corsetry, the peplum, the full skirts. The chandeliers irradiated everyone with a tinselly glow. A Christmas tree decorated with fairy lights and baubles ascended to the ceiling. The whole occasion lacked the austerity of their own religion with its intense pressure to always be doing the right thing in this world without even any hope of everlasting life in the next, for ideas of heaven were infrequent and sketchy. This secular Christmas occasion was proving to be all Louis and Mina had hoped for. It could hardly have gone better. They felt, for the first time, included, welcomed at the feast.
Some tables were seated with eight. At others grim silent couples sat sipping glasses poured from half bottles of wine. At a handful of tables someone sat alone trying to exchange smiles with a neighbour, failing at sparking conversation like a damp match against a damp box, reminding Paula, shudderingly, of her own pre-Roland life in London and how there really was no going back.
A waiter, racing past, lost his footing and spilled a tureen of roast potatoes into a woman’s lap, spattering her grey silk dress with fat. She had only just managed to attract the attention of a wan, elderly couple who evidently had many years ago worn out each other’s company. She left the table and did not return.
‘What a shame her day was spoiled,’ Louis said.
‘And what a life,’ said Mina, ‘to have nobody in the world, nebach.’
‘And not hide in your room either,’ Paula said, ‘but come out and sit stoically by yourself. I couldn’t bear it.’
‘I suppose you must have many friends you go out with in the evenings and weekends, though we do not know their names. Won’t you tell us?’
‘Oh yes, piles of friends. Louisa and Harriet and Mary and Rosamund, and Ralph and Roland.’
‘Very glad to hear it. Nice boys and girls?’
‘Very nice indeed.’
The invented names came rushing to her head like starbursts.
‘Itzik writes to us. I didn’t know how he got our address, he seems to know everything. He mentioned this Roland.’
‘Did he?’
‘He says he works for the BBC; we were impressed,’ her father said. ‘He wanted to see us, to meet up.’
‘Roland?’
‘Itzik, of course, but your mother said no. I said I was curious, and after all, he must be a powerful man. It couldn’t hurt.’
‘It could hurt,’ said Mina. ‘He’s trouble. Always was, like Jossel says. A polka doesn’t change its dots.’
‘A leopard, Mummy, a leopard doesn’t change its spots.’
‘Same thing. And when did I ever see one of them to know from?’
At that moment another powerful man approached their table and was introducing himself. It was Eric Fulton, Tony Agnew’s film-producing partner, the one with the accent.
A flurry of delight on her parents’ part – better than a shabby man from the Soviet embassy was a bona fide person from the Pictures, someone who was on first-name terms with film stars, rich, glamorous, their daughter’s employer, who had deigned to come over to their table from his own where he was dining with his wife.
‘How very nice to see you here, Miss Phillips, what an unexpected surprise. Your daughter has got us organised, we’re very grateful, what a find. We haven’t looked back since she joined us.’
‘But surely you’re not staying at the hotel?’ Louis said.
‘Oh, no, we live not a stone’s throw away, though I don’t recommend throwing stones, barbaric, they always do it in the Bible, and it ends badly. He who is without sin, as the gentleman whose birth we’re celebrating today would say. We’re in Manchester Square and we come here every year to eat our Christmas lunch. It’s convenient to give the cook the day off so she can see her family and I don’t want to miss out on a traditional Christmas, so exotic, so primitive, yet so very cosy.’
‘We think exactly the same. It’s our first time,’ Mina said, ‘I hope you understand.’ She had unerringly clocked this ‘Eric Fulton’ was not what the name implied, easily identifiable as one of their own.
‘Mrs. Phillips, I understand everything. Would you care to join us for coffee in the lounge a little later? They will serve us there and bring our petits fours.’
‘What a charming man,’ Mina, said, when they had agreed to this assignation. ‘Very nice; his name, what was it before?’
‘I don’t know, I don’t suppose it was anything before.’
‘Oh, it was. Don’t worry, we’ll get to the bottom of it, I think. And don’t tell a soul back home, but I’m going to have the ice cream. If the Lord smites me down, then they’ll hear all about it, if not, it’s our secret.’
Paula thought her mother seemed skittish, girlish even. She was clearly enjoying herself and the day was going to be marked down as a great success. Her parents had come back from that post-war holiday in Paris with a new, springy quality to them. They seemed to feel that they had lived, and this gave Paula the confidence to believe that they would stop making plans for her, and start making plans for themselves instead. There would be no going home to Liverpool now. When no hand of God struck Mina as she ate a strawberry ice after the un-kosher turkey, though the day of judgement might be another matter, they filed out to the lounge through the double doors where the waiters were handing out Christmas presents.
‘This is worth every penny,’ Louis said, looking round at the glass-topped tables each with its vase of silk flowers, the whole scene twinkling under chandeliers. ‘We should do this every year, you certainly get your money’s worth.’
‘Now she’s a lady,’ Mina whispered, as they approached the table where the couple were waiting for them. Fulton’s wife was a striking blonde woman. (Not platinum, Paula thought, not brassy either, sort of pale straw colour – can’t be natural, can it? Or can it? Some people have all the luck.) A triple rope of pearls with a diamond clasp brushed her throat and she wore an eau de Nil silk dress which had, Paula said later, Paris written all over it. It was a hard colour to pull off unless you had skin with bluish veins near the surface. But Mrs. Fulton, intimidating at first sight, was charming, friendly, squealing with delight as they all sat at the coffee table opening their gifts.
‘How lovely, embroidered handkerchiefs, they do pull this off rather well.’
Mina said to Eric Fulton when the coffee and petits fours arrived, ‘If you don’t mind me asking, where are you from? I don’t think you were born here, am I right?’
‘You are, of course, correct. Let me introduce myself, Elias Flüsser.’
‘I call him Eli, it’s our little joke,’ his wife said.
‘I’m from a terrible town, way out in the sticks, you’d never have heard of it, it produced nothing but rabbis and thieves. And carp from the river.’
‘And you.’
‘Yes, me! So you see, your daughter is among friends, so to speak. I will make quite sure she is looked after, she’s one of us. If you’ll excuse my wife, who has chosen to be one of us, whatever the inconvenience.’
Mina thought this was very beautifully done. She asked how he had come to be in the film business. It was a long way from fish and rabbis.
‘Well, good question. I suppose you could say I was a restless soul. I found myself, as one did in those days, in Berlin and started out first in the theatre with Max Reinhardt, then one thing leads to another.’ He gave a heavy wink. His audience nodded knowingly. ‘Scarpered in ’thirty-four. A pessimistic disposition, which was a life-saver, wouldn’t you say? But you will have your own similar story, I’m sure, or we wouldn’t all be sitting here on this delightful afternoon full of Christian delicacies. My first port of call was Paris, then I “legged it,” as Tony puts it, in early nineteen forty, skin of my teeth, you know what I mean? I had some connections in London, met Tony, luckily, found we had nicely aligned minds. And he introduced me to Diane. Didn’t want to inflict a name like Flüsser on a native-born Englishwoman.’
‘How glamorous. And Mrs.…’ But Mina did not quite know by which name to address his wife.
‘Call me Diane, please.’
‘I’m Mina or Millie, whichever you like.’
‘I like Mina, I’ll call you that.’
‘Are you also in the films?’
‘She was. She—’
‘Don’t listen to him, he’ll only over-egg it, I was an actress but I lost my nerve, stage fright, couldn’t remember my lines, froze on tour as Ophelia in Wolverhampton, the prompt had come down with flu and they forgot to put someone in his place, sheer carelessness, but when I looked across the stage for help I realised there was no one there to help. I was quite on my own, I started making up lines, can you imagine? A few boos from the gallery, ran off in tears at the end of my scene. So that was that. End of my career. Got a job as a continuity girl in the pictures, still do it, actually, only for my husband, of course. And here we are, isn’t this nice?’
And it seemed to Mina and Louis that yes, it was very nice indeed, and that Paula had landed on her feet, and there was no need to worry about her, having been told, abruptly and without preamble a month ago, that she was turning her back on bedding and going to work for a couple of movie men. Had she planned this meeting? Was it really so accidental? But Paula, who sat more or less silently, was clearly in awe of her employer, whom she still addressed formally and would have to take instructions from the day after tomorrow.
Elias Flüsser ordered a brandy, inviting Louis to join him.
Diane said she would have a snowball. Mina asked, tentatively, ‘What is that? It sounds so pretty.’
‘It’s Advocaat and lemonade, have you really never tried one? But you must, both of you. Even if you don’t like it, you can eat the maraschino cherry.’
‘Cocktails,’ Mina said, ‘whatever next! I must say, I’m having the time of my life. We’ll do this again next year now we’ve got the hang of it. To hell with the cost, you can’t put a price on memories.’
It was a third way between the drawn curtains of the suburbs (Louis always wanted to close them too early in winter, when there was still some light in the sky – ‘Don’t let the cold in, dear’) and being on the outside like that doctor from before the war, tramping the streets with his leaflets. And Paula seemed to belong here, in a new, chic dress and diamanté clips, looking years older than her true age, now taking out a cigarette and bending across to the click of their new friend’s silver lighter. The girl is a flame! she thought. This I made with my own body.
Finding a brief gap in the lively conversation, she said, ‘Well, you know, I also have a story,’ and embarked on the tale of the forest while her husband sat back and thought of the paintings he would see the next day at the famous Tate art gallery, and Eric Fulton leaned forward with glittering eyes and said, ‘How old did you say you were when this happened?’
Paula could not believe it had all gone so well but was anticipating the next time she saw Eric Fulton in the office and what sort of relationship theirs had morphed into, or had it stayed just the same and he might regret this lapse of formality? It was hard to tell; she seemed to be on first-name terms with one boss and not the other. Something had been breached, in her parents’ lives and possibly in hers. It was unnerving and odd and required, she felt, a radical readjustment. She had no idea how she would explain the occasion and all its consequences to Roland, and perhaps better not, to be on the safe side, God knows how he would make a song and dance about it, and ask all kinds of tricky questions to which she had no well-formed reply. He would be bound to trip her up.
Eventually Mina and Louis, slightly drunk, made their excuses, returned to their room for a rest, and Paula walked back to her bedsit. While she was changing, she was called to the phone.
Roland said, ‘Where have you been? I’ve had the most awful time. I suppose you’ve been enjoying yourself like a normal person.’
‘I don’t think you should be so put out about that. We can’t all suffer because you are having a bad day.’
‘How can you be so selfish? Mummy tripped over the cat – drunk, of course. She’s broken her bloody ankle; we had to take her to hospital. I’ve had nothing to eat but a piece of toast when I got home. No Christmas dinner at all. As far as I know it’s still in the oven, she forgot to turn it on. Stone cold. Can you come to see me, maybe cook me something?’
‘I’d better not, Mummy and Daddy will probably ring later.’
‘Can’t you say you’re with a pal? I’m a pal, after all. Darling, please.’
‘I have to be at the hotel first thing in the morning, we’re going sight-seeing and things, I’m in their hands.’
‘But I thought we’d spend the day together, go for a walk or take a boat out on the Serpentine.’
‘Well, I can’t. What about tomorrow night?’
‘No good, I’m on air.’
‘I’m sorry, darling.’
‘Darling. So you say. Bitch, I should give you a good thrashing.’
She laughed.
He hung up.