Mabel sometimes looked up from what she was doing – writing a song, wiping a table – and felt side-swiped by a mad wave. Her arrangements had been imperfect but under control. Now she was all at sea.
Why?
Peter.
Why Peter? She asked herself that too, and answered it. Because he was so damned kind. He was honourable. He was faithful. He was everything the dashing heroes in novels weren’t – those who in real life any sane woman should rush from. The kind of heroes beloved of young women who haven’t yet learned that life will throw them enough pain and danger without them having to look for it in a man.
Every time Peter did something kind or honourable, her heart lit up slightly, and slightly more, and slightly more, and its burdens, bit by bit, slipped away. And why did this leave her all at sea? Because she had for years been in charge of her own safety, and letting somebody else contribute to it threatened it. Ironic, she knew that. And she knew she was right. Her answer was to go very very slowly.
They only wanted to be alone. They spent their hours together in peace, laughter and love-making, and left each other’s lives alone. There was an electric loveliness for them, lying in twisted sheets in the beautiful flat, talking of nothing in particular. Their conversation was abstract; their shared quotidian life made up of: ‘What shall we eat?’ ‘What shall we listen to?’ ‘How was your day?’ ‘Come here.’ The restfulness! They slept well in each other’s company, which neither of them did alone. And they both knew, though they chose not to touch on it, that the rest of the world might prove to be, or to have, a problem with them as a couple. They managed to keep that up for more than a year before the little fishes of outside attention gathered to nibble at them.
*
They touched once or twice on his sobriety. She wondered how it had come about, after the last time she’d seen him in 1919.
‘Do you remember what I said to you?’ she asked.
‘You paraphrased Homer,’ he said. ‘You said I needed to eat a little more and take a little less wine. And that I should change myself, not the company I was keeping.’
‘And you said you weren’t fit for company.’
‘I wasn’t,’ he said, and a little shiver went over him, because he remembered all too well.
‘So what happened?’ she asked.
‘I – after a while – some years – I started to feel that I didn’t deserve to be drunk. Not that I deserved better. That I didn’t deserve the relief it brought me. Drink was a prize or a solace for good men who had suffered. I felt I didn’t deserve the solace of it. So I banned myself from it. I know not everybody can do that. But it worked for me. I talked to myself as if I were someone else. Looked at myself from outside, and – I suppose – once I wasn’t drunk all the time I realised I wasn’t such a dreadful character. I had to acknowledge, I suppose, that I had done my best, and that thinking everything was my fault was another kind of vanity, of self-obsession. Claiming all the power, as it were. As if I could have had the power to stop history!’
‘Oh!’ she said. ‘And?’
‘Best thing I ever did. The biggest prize. In the long run. I see chaps now …’
‘Mmm,’ she said, for she too had seen chaps.
‘But you are a good man,’ she said.
‘Hmm,’ he said.
‘You are,’ she said. Then, ‘We most of us live in the fear of the fact of ourselves.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I’m not sure. I read it in a novel called Home to Harlem. It was about being negro—’
She stopped, and he looked at her.
‘But I was thinking, whatever we are, people expect us to be what they think that thing is …’
He smiled a little. ‘As in, a drunk is a drunk and a failure; an English gentleman is an English gentleman, a negro is a negro …’
‘Whereas a gentleman can be a drunk.’
‘And a negro can be a gentleman,’ he said.
She kind of smiled, and looked away from him, and said perhaps it was time they got up.
‘No,’ he said, and drew her back into his arms with a gaze, and they each thought, in their own way, how extraordinary this is, better not look at it too closely, this blessing we have tumbled into …
*
Iris Zachary, twelve and clever and skinny, her hair in plaits and her eyes an unexpected blue, grew impatient. Why did Mumma stay out all night twice a week?
Mabel said, ‘Work goes on too late for me to get home, so I stay with a friend.’
Iris said, ‘Which friend?’ Her mother’s friends were funny and interesting, with chocolate and saxophones and stories.
Mabel said, ‘You’re all right here with Grandma, aintcha honey?’
Iris shrugged. She liked her Grandma. Who wouldn’t? But she still didn’t look very happy about it, so Mabel said, ‘Sweetpea, I’m sorry, it won’t go on forever.’
And that was all very well, but when Mabel said it, she sensed that Iris sensed that something was not all right: a little whiff of sorrow passing over. Iris put her head to one side. And Mabel thought, Well, yes, in a way I do want it to go on forever. Because change is dangerous. Is Iris sensing that?
Lord, of course not. You’re thinking too much, baby.
Mabel had decided, about the situation. Peter would be her secret pleasure, her private life, and private. Not just for the obvious reason, but for personal ones too. It was not that she did not trust him. She did, for herself. But for Iris? No.
A man can love a woman, that she knew, but a man loving a child is a different thing. She knew that Peter had children, and she knew that they didn’t live with him. He hadn’t invited her into his past life, his family life, but he had been open in all kinds of ways about it, trying to get her to be open too. She knew he lived in a place in the country out by Sidcup, and had a mother in Scotland. He had told her, cautiously, about his wife Julia: her leaving, her returning, her death. With a little thought Mabel could see where her own past encounters with Peter fitted into the interstices of that story, and felt, for a moment, so second-best she wanted to scream. Why the outsider? Why, even here, with a man who loves her, Iris’s father, why even now the outsider, the Johnny-come-lately – why must whatever joy I’m allowed have to be secret and at the expense of the real wife’s life? She bowed her head under the weight of her anger, and waited for it to pass. It passes, it always passes, it has to pass. It passed.
He had told her how useless he had been, after the war, how he had thought he would never get himself back. He had told how much Riley had helped him, and how he never wanted to be useless again. He had told her that he had not been a good father, and that as a result his children weren’t very interested in him, though perhaps things were getting better. He had told her they lived with Riley and Nadine, and her fury roared back on a sudden hideons wave of injustice: another woman is bringing up Peter’s motherless children, when I am the one who loves him, who has his child—
What, you want to bring up his other children? When you won’t even tell him you have his child too?
Yes I do. I do—
She stopped it. That kind of fury did not keep a life together, didn’t keep a child fed and an old woman warm. She used to indulge her furies when she was younger, and her mother had been looking after her – but no grown woman with responsibilities can afford a temper like that. Bite the bullet, darling. This all proves the same point. That is his life, and Iris is mine. Iris is not for risking. Better to have no daddy than a late-coming unknown-quantity of a daddy …
So, she didn’t tell him anything. Not about Iris, about Betty, about Pixy, about Thornton …
Why not?
Fear.
If I tell him about Iris he might leave me. If I tell him my stories he’ll become part of them and part of me and I’ll never be able to extricate myself, and when he leaves me I’ll be left gutted and gaping, pulled to shreds by the ties that bind—
*
Mabel didn’t know who half the fathers in her family were. She didn’t know who Betty’s father was. She didn’t know when, where or how often the white blood that gave her her fair complexion or the Chinese blood that gave her her high cheekbones had come into the family. She knew about her Grandma Pixy, and she knew that her father was called George, back in Georgia. George from Georgia. She knew she had older brothers, in Chicago, San Francisco and Montgomery, Alabama. The name Zachary was Betty’s through Pixy – so, through Pixy’s owners.
This is what Pixy did; the story that Pixy told Betty and Betty told Mabel. Pixy cosied up to her owner Mr Zachary. (Mabel was not certain what exactly that meant.) She cosied up to him and she played him. (Does that mean she let him sleep with her and then blackmailed him? Mabel didn’t know.) She talked him into giving her time off each week. (How? Mabel wondered. Perhaps she told him she had to go to church to pray for her soul and his after the wicked adultery they had performed. Perhaps she told him he would go to hell and she wanted to save him.) She used that time to work – What work? It had to be secret, or he’d have known she wasn’t in church – and worked so hard, and saved every cent – but how much could she have made, a black girl, there, at that time, with those limited hours? – and using that money – How long must it have taken her! – and arguments from the Bible, she bought herself from Mr Zachary. Yes she did, she bought herself back. Stop a minute to think about that.
He was glad to see the back of her in the end because she talked so much and was so pretty. And then she went north, taking that long and difficult road, alone, where she started out again, working so hard, again, and saving every cent, again, and she went back down there and she bought her own father from Mr Zachary. She was fifty years old by then and her father seventy. And she would have done it again, and bought her mother, if her mother hadn’t been dead.
Pixy had Navajo blood, and was small and tough, and her hair was long. In her free life, she earnt a living playing violin day and night in a bawdy house in Chicago: any time a man made a go for her thinking she was on the menu she’d whip him across the face with the bow. She was famous for it. Some men came specially to be whipped across the face by Pixy. The proprietor was half in love with her and she made him pay for a new bow each time it got broke: this was to guarantee her some protection from the lowlifes. A fiddle bow gives a good slap around the face and leaves a welt sometimes. She was popular. The way she sang and played all the white men came down, and the whores were busy all night. This was the story. Mabel wondered if maybe Pixy was really a whore, and then she felt ashamed even for thinking it. But if she didn’t think it, she felt she was being naive. Anyway, by now, what did it matter? Pixy did what she had to do. She turned our family around. Pixy set us free and lifted our curse and sent her daughter into the world with a way of living that was neither whorehouse nor plantation. Pixy blessed us and freed us with the sweat of her body and the quickness of her brain and the fullness of her heart. By her pride.
I provide for Iris. I’ll give her no false dreams. We just live, little human creatures on the surface of the planet. We own ourselves, and that’s all. And it’s a mighty blessing. Even though it shouldn’t be.
*
Mabel knew Betty’s thoughts on taking up with white men. ‘Mabel, don’t go giving yourself to one of them for free.’
*
Iris was not a girl to show her cards. She had always known when to keep quiet and when to speak out, how to be loyal by being sneaky. You learned that kind of thing pretty quickly in the alleyways where she played, or when she was out with Mumma and trying not to be sent home. It’s not that people are mean, but when there’s not always enough to go around you learn to be protective. If Mumma was unhappy, Iris would find out why.
*
Grandma couldn’t keep her in and didn’t try to. Iris did her schoolwork and had nice manners. The vicar even trusted her with the key to the church room when she went to practise the piano. She could get away with things. She had a habit of picking her mother up from the shop at 5.30, and walking home with her, picking stuff up from the market on Brewer Street as it closed up, having tea with Grandma when they got in. Mumma would sing snatches of new songs, ones she was writing or ones she was performing or ones she’d heard. She’d warm up for her evening show, and Iris would do the exercises along with her, and Grandma would make comments. These were their habits, calm and nice. Then Iris would get ready for bed as Mumma got dressed to go out to whichever club it was. Iris did not like it that on Tuesdays and Wednesdays Mumma didn’t come home.
So one sunny afternoon she followed her. She stood on the corner of Great Marlborough Street across from the shop, hiding behind a lamppost and a man with a big dog. She saw her mother come out, and head off towards Regent Street instead of south down Poland Street towards home. Across into Mayfair – Mayfair! – and further west, the heels of her little shoes clickclicking, skirting the park at Hyde Park Corner, moving on into the fairyland beyond, where buildings as clean and white as wedding cakes rose around green lush squares, and kids like Iris did not go.
Iris went, stomping and determined.
Her mother stopped outside one of the buildings, and was looking in her purse as if for a key, and as she did so a tall white man came up, and with a quick glance around – which did not catch Iris, standing against iron railings in the fall of a rich-blossomed lilac – slipped his arm around her waist, and kissed her hair.
Iris raised her chin. She thought he was – what? What is he doing?
They went in together.
Iris sat on the kerb and stared up at the building, the tall white columns holding up its porch, the smooth broad steps, the black and white tiles, the rising layers of large clean windows and fancy plasterwork, up and up to a bluer sky than the sky she saw between Soho’s huddled buildings. She didn’t actually know the way home from here. This, she supposed, would be where Mumma stayed. She stared at it with hatred.
After a while, the white man came out again, alone. She stood up to stare at him – and he looked round at her. He gave her, suddenly, a most radiant smile. ‘Good afternoon,’ he said, and his voice was gentle.
‘Good afternoon,’ she said.
He nodded and moved on.
Mabel came down soon after. She crossed the road straight to Iris, and said: ‘What did he say to you?’
‘He said “Good Afternoon”,’ Iris said. ‘Am I in trouble?’
‘Uh uh,’ said Mabel. She put her arm round Iris’s shoulder. ‘Come on, let’s go home.’
‘’Cos you’re in trouble,’ Iris said.
‘Not for you to tell me I’m in trouble,’ Mabel said. ‘I’m the mother here.’
‘I want to go in there,’ Iris said.
‘No, honey.’
‘Why not?’
‘Later, sweetheart.’
‘Who is he?’ Iris asked.
‘Later,’ Mabel said, speeding up, blinking.
Back in Lexington Street, Iris said coldly, over tea: ‘Is it later yet?’
Looking across at her, Mabel saw a firmness in her daughter’s eyes. Glancing across to her mother, drinking her tea in her chair, wearing her pink satin gown and a cap, because she had not actually got up today, Mabel saw a questioning, and shift of position – tiny – suggesting: what’s this?
‘You promised her something for later, child?’ Betty said, the smile spreading across her glossy cheeks.
They were like pincers, the pair of them, coming at her from each side. Very gentle loving pincers.
‘Something you goin’ tell her, maybe?’
‘No,’ she said. If I tell them it will all go wrong. Things will change – heaven forfend things should change! When things change they change for the worse.
‘She went into a big white house miles away,’ said Iris. ‘With a white man. And he came out and he said Good Afternoon to me.’
Betty turned her face slowly round to Mabel.
‘He’s her boyfriend,’ said Iris. ‘He looks like Leslie Howard. The one Marion Davies should’ve married in Five and Ten.’
‘Go to bed, Iris,’ said Betty.
‘It’s not even—’ said Iris, but she went, mouth tight, giving Mabel a look – support? apology? rebellion? – as she went.
‘Close the door after ya,’ called Betty.
Iris closed it.
Betty hadn’t stirred: she just sat in her chair, and looked. She took a cigarette, examined it, tapped it on the side table, lit it, took a small, delicate puff. Looked up.
‘It’s her father,’ Mabel said.
Betty blinked, and looked at the back of her hand, and took another puff.
‘What are you hopin’ for, my child?’ she said.
‘For nothing to be ruined.’
‘Does he know about her?’
Mabel was silent.
‘You still ain’t told him. You’re hangin’ by a string, honey,’ Betty said. ‘You’re gonna fall. You know that.’
‘Not yet,’ Mabel replied, with a tiny smile.
‘Hangin’ by a string,’ her mother said again. ‘How long’s it been?’
‘Bit over a year,’ she said.
‘Tellin’ lies …’
‘Keepin’ privacy,’ Mabel retorted.
‘Tellin’ lies,’ her mother snapped back. ‘To him, to me and to Iris.’
That, Mabel thought, is not the problem. The problem is that I want to keep them both – such a demand! to have your man and your child! – and if I reveal each to the other either of them – or Lord help me both – might … they might …
‘I’m not bothered by the lies so much, Mama, forgive me, but by the potential for loss. I love the man.’
Betty gazed. ‘Love!’ she said, and she hauled herself up a little in her seat. ‘I think it’s time for you to lighten up a little, Mabel. Get yourself a new man. Reginald likes ya. You’re young enough, they all still like ya. Get one with a steady job. One you don’t care about.’
‘Mama,’ she said.
‘Have another baby, if that’ll cleave you to him. But this white father – no.’
‘Things have changed, Mama,’ she said.
‘No they ain’t. He won’t want a negro child. Leave her be. A negro child. Don’t go making her think she can be white. Don’t cast that unhappiness on her.’
‘Things have changed, Mama,’ Mabel said again, though the repetition sounded empty.
‘So why you lyin’?’
Mama, you hit the button.
I want everything, Mabel thought. I don’t believe it’s wrong to want everything. But nor do I believe it’s possible to have everything. But I want everything.
Her mother was looking at her. ‘Mabel,’ she said softly. ‘You don’t have to do everything yourself.’
‘I do!’ she cried.
‘Why?’
‘Because you did. You and Pixy both.’
‘Didn’t you just say times have changed?’
He has this kindness, Mabel thought. Don’t cut me in half – he’s the one I want. The only one.
*
She wondered if she would ever tell Peter about her family. Could he possibly understand what she came from? Well of course not. She couldn’t even understand. She knew, yes, and it was part of her, blood and bone – but understand? No. Here she was, sixty-five years after emancipation in America, living in England, with her English-born, English-fathered child, yet what had been abolished thirty years before her own birth was still ruling how she could lead her life. Only thirty years before. And then after that it was just her and Betty, moving, moving, moving, carrying no family, the brothers wherever they might be, Lord only knows, their blood lost – nothing of Pixy but the memory, for she was dead by then, wore out, Betty said, by all that working and saving, and thus she was reduced to the handful of tales and a look in Mama’s eye.
Mabel just wanted her own life. To own my life … To write her songs, be a good mother, be a good daughter, make a bit of money, not have to think about … everything that had happened to her forebears, and was happening still.
It’s not that I don’t want to be coloured. Bring coloured never proved so difficult for me. But I ain’t everybody. And whatever I want for myself, I am attached to everybody. A great river of blood flows through all of us, bearing the sufferings. White people don’t have that to fret them. Except maybe Jewish people. Irish people maybe. Foreigners in new terrains. But we are so damn visible! A Jewish man can cut his hair and lose the cap. An Irish man can learn to talk different. But being coloured ain’t just unchangeable, it’s so damned significant.
She wondered: in Africa, in the countries where everybody is coloured, do they think of themselves as coloured? Do they even have to think about it at all, until some white person walks in and tells them they’re coloured?
From time to time when she was younger she used to go along to meetings and social occasions beyond Church and Jazz. There was a bunch of folks known as the Coterie of Friends, which was black people from all over getting together to share what they learned and earned. Africans, West Indians, students and academics, musicians, all types. There was one medical student from St Mary’s Hospital in Paddington, Harry Leekham – she’d liked him. Not just the Trini accent – he was a good man. And of course Thornton … The Coterie of Friends had been, to be honest, a Coterie of Men Friends, men who had time to talk about improvements and rights and responsibilities and law and opportunities and the advancement of coloured people. She admired all of that, she truly did, and dear Lord if she had only had the time … But she didn’t have the time. And after Thornton died it wasn’t the same.
Thornton had told her a great joke though:
‘What do you want to be when you grow up, son?’
‘A musician!’
‘Well make your mind up, you can’t do both.’
Ah, Lord, it’s all just adjectives. A female, musical, coloured person.
*
Peter decided, on that beautiful evening, to walk to the station for his train to Sidcup. It had been a beautiful unexpected treat to have that hour with Mabel, outside their usual timetable.
Timetable! They were getting very set in their ways. He’d said to Riley that it was as if they were married, two days a week. Now, he was thinking about home, about Locke Hill, and this woman.
If my mother hadn’t sold Chester Square, he thought, I would have invited Mabel to live there.
He was trying the thought on for size, really. Would I have? he thought. Would I really?
Steps along the pavement, blossom hanging in the trees above. For a moment he was reminded of Riley and Nadine’s wedding.
I hope I would have. I have after all got her this flat – which is empty half the time. Like me. He barked with laughter at that image. But it’s true. It’s all very well, this. It’s marvellous – but it’s partial.
Could he take her to Locke Hill?
For goodness sake, old chap, you’re an English gentleman, you of all people can do exactly what you like. I could take her to Locke Hill, as my girlfriend, my mistress or my wife, I could épater les bourgeois like Baudelaire or Oscar Wilde … not that it would be very nice for her – would it? To be a full-time outrager of the bourgeois? No. And anyway she needs to sing … She needs London – she doesn’t need to work at Moores’ though – she needs to be looked after …
He wanted to look after her.
He didn’t know what she wanted. He still didn’t even know where she lived. It had been revealed that she lived with her mother, and thought he wouldn’t like her mother, or accept her – or vice versa! Perhaps she thinks her mother won’t like me! Or perhaps she lives in a place which is completely negro, and I wouldn’t fit in … perhaps I’m an embarrassment.
But we’re not children. It’s not 1830.
He wanted to be with her. To wake with her and go to sleep with her, put his head on her shoulder or hers on his, find her arm round his waist, or his arm round hers, slip his cold feet under her legs in bed, every night, not just two in seven. That was it. That was all. His body wanted her, his mind wanted her, his heart wanted her.
That Scottish woman had married the Sultan of Johore, after all. And another Scotswoman had married a Pathan prince and was living on the north-west frontier. Which might be easier than for a London negro woman to live outside Sidcup … She was writing a book about it: My Khyber Marriage.
For goodness sake, Peter, have you less courage than a Scotswoman?
Again he found he was laughing at himself.
Laughing!
He bought his ticket, found his train, and settled in. His delivery of books from the London Library should have arrived. He had work to catch up on.
The clubs where she sang were full of mixed couples. Not married couples though.
Paris? In Paris you see mixed couples.
He thought about that. But he was not at all comfortable thinking about it. He didn’t see why it needed thinking about – he resented it.
Would people really make a fuss, if he just drew her in?
*
He had talked to Riley about it. Riley had been sanguine. ‘Some people,’ he said, ‘will be quietly polite and deeply shocked, and will never get over it, out of embarrassment. Some will be prurient and over-interested. The ones who matter will be happy for you.’
The more real problems people have to deal with, Peter thought, the less likely they are to provoke a problem out of something which really isn’t a problem.
‘But yes, some people will be unpleasant about it,’ Riley said. ‘You may face cruelty, or scorn.’
‘What the staff at hotels say,’ Peter said, ‘is “No you can’t have a room – it’s not us, of course – but we host so many Americans, and we must respect their wishes and expectations …” So you get that, plus the unspoken assumption that she’s some kind of prostitute—’
‘Whereas she is a perfectly respectable mistress …’ Riley said, and Peter snapped: ‘Riley, I’m in love with her. She’s the one.’
Riley was sorry.
‘Hinchcliffe,’ he said, ‘reads all the scandal mags. They are agog about Nancy Cunard, apparently. An heiress, and a publisher. Do you know who she is?’
Peter did know.
‘She keeps getting into fights in nightclubs over her negro boyfriend, Hinchcliffe tells me. Doing it to annoy her mother, while living, apparently, on her mother’s money. Of course it’s different, and who knows, and I’m sorry even to mention it.’
‘Yes, it’s perfectly likely to be unfair,’ Peter said. ‘But it’s not necessarily different. Aren’t most things about money and sex and love, and trying to defend people? What do any of us know about the secrets of Nancy Cunard’s soul?’
‘Yes, it’s gossip,’ Riley agreed.
*
In fact Peter did now know the secrets of Nancy Cunard’s soul. She’d sent a pamphlet around all her friends, a sort of Christmas card last year, a copy of which had found its way to the Turquoisine, and someone had made sure, he thought, though maybe – well anyway, he’d seen it. It was called Black Man White Ladyship, and was a most phenomenal attack on her mother, and declaration of love for all things negro. In it, Miss Cunard recounted Lady Oxford arriving at some lunch for that kind of lady and greeting Nancy’s mother with the words: ‘Hello Maud, what is it now – drink, drugs or niggers?’ And then she went off into a sinkhole of gossip and resentment, reporting that Sir Thomas Beecham said that she – Nancy Cunard – should be tarred and feathered, and Lady Cunard was running around asking people if it was true her daughter ‘knows a negro’ … And the second half was an account of the history of the negroes of Africa. Well written, Peter thought, and strong stuff. And an account of a legal case going on in America, the Scottsboro case, where nine young black men had been sentenced to death, a great injustice. And thirty negroes lynched in the first six months of 1931. Lynched! Repellent. There’d been a leaflet for contributing to the cause. Peter had sent five pounds.
And what people think is unthinkable, is that a white person and a negro might be lovers. I don’t think it’s unthinkable. It’s just people being who they are, with who they want to be with. I think it is good. I think …
It was all so distasteful. And why did it have to have anything to do with him and Mabel?
He imagined himself speaking about this to his mother, to the chaps at the office before the war, to the Archbishop of Canterbury. He genuinely didn’t see why anybody would have any good reason to find it a problem. Slavery was over, it wasn’t as if half the US economy depended any more on labelling a certain kind of human as inhuman. Was it embarrassment and guilt? We treated you so badly for so long that we cannot find a way now to stop being so utterly, immorally unpleasant to you?
Surely, if there was no reason for a problem, how could there be a problem?
And what did Mabel think?
Peter had tried to keep the pamphlet from Mabel, and had succeeded, but there had been a very similar article in Crisis, an American magazine which Mabel read. Peter was then the embarrassed one. He didn’t want to think about them in those terms. He didn’t want to think that other people might think about them in those terms. If even I, an English gentleman, am getting annoyed at being thought of in particular terms, how does it feel for her? For negro people in general? It must be absolutely horrid; insult to injury, on top of all the practicalities like not getting a room, or a job. Anywhere you go, people don’t think, oh there’s Mabel or there’s Henry, they think there’s a negro. Even if you’re Paul Robeson. Except presumably in their own world …
She has another world, he thought, which is not mine. What do I think about that?
Though what I think about it is not, probably, the point.
*
Partly to put Riley at ease about all this, and because Riley was the only person who knew and Peter needed him strong by his side, Peter invited him along to hear Mabel sing. Riley did not want to come. Clubs, going out – no. It was all an oppression to him. He didn’t like the noise, the being looked at, the having to decide how to conceal himself, the being spoken to and not being able to speak back easily, the not being understood, the staying up late, the having to drink more than you wanted to in order to make it all bearable.
But he went, because it was Peter, and it was important. Peter arranged for them a small table, at the back, sheltered; he pre-ordered the wine, he sat between Riley and the crowds. It was crowded. Smoky, clattery, laughter and scent, chiffon and cocktails. It was like another world to Riley. He smiled quietly, sat himself down, took out his brass straw, and twirled it. It stopped him smoking too much. Smoking was making him cough, and coughing was difficult.
Mabel came out on stage in a gold dress, dripping with sequins and glass beads, fringed with bugling. Her hair was slicked back and gleaming, her smile wide and red. She waved to them across the room: fluttering fingers with scarlet long nails. She cracked a few jokes, sang a few funny numbers, and then said, ‘Droppin’ a gear now, boys and girls. This one is for a friend o’ mine out the back there, don’t look at him now, he’s shy. I ain’t seen him in a while, and I hope he don’t mind this song and this dedication. Our mutual friend quoted me this. It’s for them.’
She came up close to her microphone and began, a slow blues, a smoky voice, a slinky melody:
Courage … Courage … Oh courage …
for the big … Problems … in life …
Courage – (and the notes rose, crescendo)
Oh Lord courage, give it to me.
Courage, (a righteous shout)
for the big,
problems,
in life …
Oh Lord courage, give it to me.
Riley sat transfixed as she continued, quiet again, smooth and intimate, a beseeching prayer, right up with the microphone:
Oh Lord and Patience,
oh Patience, for the small …
Patience, sweet Lord patience, for the small …
By the time she got to Be of good cheer, God is awake, tears rolled down his face. If he had heard this ten years earlier he would have felt their ghosts all around him, clamouring; now he heard them turn in their graves as if in their sleep, a little shift, a sigh. Ferdinand, Dowland, Dowland’s brother, Burdock, Knightley, Atkins, Jones, Bloom, Bruce, Lovall, Hall, Green, Wester, Johnson, Taylor, Moles, Twyford. Merritt. Captain Harper. Captain Jessop. Baker. And above all Jack Ainsworth, whose prayer this was, whose scrap of paper was still, worn and creased, these words on it almost illegible, in Riley’s wallet.
*
She came to join them at their table afterwards, her silky coat slipping from her shoulders, her make-up a little worn. Riley was about to be polite, formally refer to their previous encounter all those years ago, roll his eyes at the passage of time, but she just slipped into the booth beside him and said: ‘Was that all right? To use your friend’s words for the song? If you don’t like it I won’t sing it again.’ Her hand was resting gently on Peter’s shoulder; relaxed, quietly protective, affectionate. Giving strength.
‘The only problem is how to get Sybil Ainsworth down to London so that you can reduce her to tears too,’ Riley said, and Mabel smiled, and said: ‘I’ll go to wherever she is, and I’ll sing it for her wherever she wants.’ And she meant it, and Riley saw that the offer was as honest as her wordless concern for Peter, the big heart she offered up when she sang.
‘Did you know about this, Peter?’ Riley asked, leaning forward – but Peter hadn’t known. Didn’t even remember quoting the prayer to her. ‘When was it, darling?’ he said – such a settled-couple thing to say, Riley thought. Peter was drinking soda water, and smoking. They looked beautiful together. They seem right, Riley thought.
Mabel caught his eye as he said to Peter, ‘D’you want another of those?’ – the eye catch that says, I am noticing. Each of them noticed the other’s affection for Peter and concern for his well-being, and each was glad to see it. Peter, of course, did not notice this noticing.
*
In the end, that first time they went to hear Mabel sing, Riley had said – at least Peter thought this was what he’d said, but it had been dark and quite noisy – ‘Actually, you should do yourself a favour, Peter, and just marry her.’ Of course he might not have said that at all.
By the time Peter got off the train at Sidcup he had decided to talk to Rose about it. Rose, cool-headed fount of understanding, would help.
By the time he reached home, he had decided not to after all. If he told Rose, he would need to tell Tom and Kitty, and would they not hate him for it?