two

THAT WAS THE BEGINNING OF THE GREAT FREEZE. It was darkest winter, dark, endless winter. Every time you left the house you faced ice, blizzards, biting wind. Simply to keep going was an effort. Standing in the queue for rations was torture. By the end of February there’d been twenty-one straight days with no sunshine. Disaster and bankruptcy threatened as the nation ground to a standstill. Coal couldn’t get to the power stations. The trains couldn’t run. There were fuel cuts, no electricity. Street lighting returned to blackout levels. London became a black and grey world of frozen shadows.

Yet there was a thrill in these extremes and I wasn’t going to be a prisoner in this undiscovered country, even if I risked slipping and breaking a leg the moment I set foot outside the front door (precipitous steps). Alan worried when I went out on my own, not because of fractures, but we lived in Murder Mile, near the Notting Hill hotel where Neville Heath had murdered his first victim the previous year. Gentlemanly Neville Heath had been hanged, but prostitutes lingered in the shadows of decayed stucco terraces along the Bayswater Road and in the last few months two had been stabbed and strangled. I shuddered when I thought of the mangled corpses of those women, and when I passed the few tarts desperate enough still to stand out in the freezing cold, in their platform shoes and bedraggled fox furs, I thought how brave they were. I’d never be able to do that: stand there exposed to all comers, putting my life on the line.

There was another murder trial on now, a woman who’d done away with her husband, with the help of her lover. How could love turn to sordid crime, I wondered. For love was so thrilling.

Every morning I opened my eyes to see Alan’s dark hair so close on the pillow and his shoulders turned away from me as he slept. I could slide my hand under his pyjamas and stroke his back until he woke and rolled over to look at me with the serious, intense look I found so exciting. Still waters ran deep, they said. At times his passion almost scared me. Even at his gentlest, there was always a sense of withheld violence. I was not quite a virgin when I married him, but I hadn’t dreamt sex could be like this. Dangerous; there were troubling depths to my need for him – or was it just for the dark sensations he aroused in me. I did things with him that would have made me die of shame a year ago, which still half shamed me when I recalled them in the light of day. He triumphed in wrenching cries and moans from far within me. He led me into areas I’d thought were forbidden territory. He gave me Women in Love to read and I saw that our love was Lawrentian: thrilling, yet disturbing too, when I sensed I was out of my depth, submerged in his domination, losing my grip on my ambitions, on my sense of an independent self.

.........

There were times when it really was just too cold to venture out, the streets swept with flurries driven by a Siberian wind. Then we stayed in bed all day. Not just to make love; it was the warmest place – the only warm place – especially during the power cuts, and hour after hour we put off the leap from the warmth of our marriage bed and the eiderdown out into the freezing cold. ‘Nine months later there’ll be a huge rise in the birthrate,’ said Alan. ‘That’ll please the government – so worried about the declining population.’

We’d used up our coal ration weeks ago, but Alan found some packing cases and smashed them up for firewood. I sometimes wore my fur coat indoors now and in the street I felt I must look like a tramp with an old plaid blanket thrown over it and Alan’s sweaters bulking it out underneath.

So for me the world was not dingy and drab even if London lay waste all around. Austerity couldn’t dim my glorious excitement. Life was opening out in the most amazing way. It was an adventure to scavenge for firewood, to search round Soho for little treats, to sit in the loud, beery pub of an evening and then stagger home along the icy wastes of road, blackened snow banked up by the kerb, treacherous ice along the pavements.

We led a hand-to-mouth existence on hardly any money. Colin had a private income, Alan told me, but most of it went to the Party, the Communist Party, that is. Alan had had a few savings, but he’d blown them on a short-lived little film company he and Hugh had formed. It went bust after one brief documentary and now they subsisted on bits of freelance work. When push came to shove I could cadge a fiver off my parents, and Alan’s occasional meagre little cheques for articles and short stories seemed like a windfall, a free gift, manna from heaven, so we always blew the lot at Fava’s or Chez Victor, after which we’d go on a pub crawl, eventually fall into bed and wake up next morning to start all over again.

How happy we were! I lived in a bubble of happiness, seeing life through its iridescent glitter. But bubbles are transient, and after the murder everything changed.

.........

Hugh had inconveniently moved to digs in South London. One Saturday we set off on the lengthy journey to Lavender Hill, by way of Islington to pick up Colin. We got off the Circle Line at King’s Cross and struggled up the Pentonville Road to the battered terraces of Islington. It was the first time I’d been in a district where everyone looked so poor. Colin was living in a slum! Perhaps he had to, because of the Communist Party. I was shocked. In spite of the war, I’d led a sheltered life: ‘class privilege’ Colin said, irritated by my naïve dismay at the poverty all around.

At the Angel station it was like going down a coal mine as a gaunt industrial lift jerked us down into the bowels of the earth. At the bottom a flight of steps ended in the horror of a single narrow platform between two live rails. I clung to the balustrade. Alan was impatient: ‘There’s nothing to be frightened of! What is the matter with you!’

I took a few paces out onto the tightrope, but: ‘I’m sorry, I can’t do it,’ I cried, ‘I know I’m a coward.’

A wind whirled hotly out of the tunnel as the train roared towards us with stupendous force.

Hours later, it seemed, we came out of a different station into another shabby slum. A winding road meandered without purpose into the distance, no end in sight, frozen in the arctic cold. The odd gap where a stray bomb had hit a house gaped, the houses like a row of rotting teeth, grey, discoloured, dreary. Some of the shops, more like hovels, were shut. Some still had boarded-up windows, where the glass had been knocked out by bomb blast.

At last we turned up a side road and came to the house. Inside, at least it was warm, and Hugh’s bedsitter was quite comfortable. ‘She charges me five shillings for lighting and hot water, and there’s a meter for the gas. Rent’s only fifteen bob a week.’

The flames of the gas fire made a little popping noise and roasted the front of my legs. The smell of gas – like Benzedrine or menthol, sharp, slightly sweet, intoxicating – tainted the room, yet made it feel even cosier.

Hugh handed me a toasting fork and some slices of bread while he made tea. I held the slices against the ceramic filigree that caged the flames of the gas fire, and the three of them plotted and planned.

Before the war they’d been so close, Alan said, thick as thieves. They were the Three Musketeers of documentary film. But now …

My father said that when you’re young you’re all in an undefined lump with your friends, you’re all unformed like molten toffee, but as you get older you harden out and separate. Peculiarities of character stiffen into incompatibility. It had sounded a bit lonely. I wondered, too, if it also applied to marriage – you might wake up one morning and find the person you’d married had gradually turned into somebody else. I hoped that wouldn’t happen to Alan and me.

I was beginning to think it was happening to the three of them, though. Colin returned from the war a grimmer person, Alan said. What he’d seen had hardened his political views, but if only he didn’t throw his weight about so pompously: ‘You weren’t there – I was’. He always fell back on that.

Hugh with his effete Noel Coward manner had changed in the opposite direction, Alan said, more of a gadfly, skating along on the surface of life. He said he was still a socialist, but he hadn’t a good word for the government. He just seemed utterly disillusioned and did nothing but sneer and make cynical little jokes.

‘You’re incurably frivolous,’ Colin glowered.

‘You’ve no sense of fun, old dear.’

‘Life isn’t much fun.’

I wondered if Colin was hopelessly in love with some girl. That might explain a lot. I went out of my way to be nice to him, and he took more notice of me than Hugh ever did – or for that matter Alan at times.

Since the film company had folded they’d been plotting how to start another one, or at least get money for the film they were desperate to make. ‘We need Enescu.’ Hugh’s hair flopped forward. ‘His film has done so well – investors will be falling over themselves. That friend of theirs, Stanley Colman, for example.’

‘But Enescu would be the director,’ protested Colin. ‘He’d be in charge.’

‘Not if we played our cards right.’

‘But what have we got to offer?’ insisted Colin.

Alan and Hugh did have something to offer, because Home Front, their wartime documentary, had been a critical success, especially for Alan as the main scriptwriter. I hadn’t seen it and didn’t remember it at any cinema, but that’s what they said, anyway; all the right people had taken notice. The little documentary they’d made about post-war reconstruction had got less attention, but they weren’t letting that discourage them. It was Colin who’d been out of the picture. Colin needed them more than they needed him.

‘We have to make important films, films that tell the world what is really happening. Enescu won’t want that. He won’t want anything with a message.’ Colin stared at his friends defiantly.

Hugh attempted his most winning smile. ‘We can work round this,’ he murmured. He flicked ash delicately off the end of his cigarette. ‘You’re the brains, you can get the message into the story – and we’re right behind you. An audience likes a story. They want to identify with the characters. They have enough austerity in their daily lives.’

‘You mean the masses are stupid. They just want escapism.’

‘That’s not what I mean, not at all. Surely art has to inspire, to energise, to arouse our sympathies …’

‘To entertain. That great American word.’

‘Hang on – I didn’t say that. But people are tired. There’s not a lot of sympathy around. We have to create it, we have to show what it’s like in Europe today. There’s a Little England mentality in this country at the moment. It’s not anyone’s fault, and it’s not surprising people are fed up. We won the war, didn’t we, but what have we got to show for it? That’s what people are thinking. You can’t blame them. They’re not interested in how much worse things are in Poland or Germany – least of all Germany. But a story – a romance, I’m not afraid of that word – a love story will get them to feel, it’ll arouse their pity, they’ll stop thinking about the rations and the fuel shortage, and start to think how lucky we are by comparison and how we can help.’

‘That isn’t Enescu’s agenda. He’s just a little fascist toerag. His film’s hit a reactionary chord and–’

‘Don’t be so bigoted,’ interrupted Alan. It was the match to light the tinder, and with one impatient remark he’d ruined all Hugh’s attempts at diplomacy.

‘Bigoted! Me!’ Colin leaned forward, menacing. And now the real problem began to emerge: the Party. ‘I can’t go along with capitalist lies!’ shouted Colin. ‘I’m already in trouble with London District for querying the line on post-war reconstruction.’

Alan leaned forward, genuinely interested. ‘You’ve never said anything about that.’

Colin wouldn’t look at them. He pushed his hair back, staring downwards, possibly at his own feet. ‘That’s not relevant. It doesn’t matter.’ I knew he already regretted letting it slip out.

‘You’re in trouble with the Party?’ Alan, of course, wouldn’t let it go. ‘Why didn’t you tell us?’

Colin’s twisted smile was closer to a grimace. ‘You think friendship’s all-important, don’t you. But for me, you see–’

‘No one wants you to say anything you don’t want to,’ soothed Hugh. ‘And the Party doesn’t even come into it.’

‘The Party comes into everything.’

An awkward silence. Then Hugh tried again. ‘I’m sure there’s a way round this.’

‘A way round what?’ muttered Colin.

‘Look,’ said Alan, ‘I know it won’t be easy. You’re right – Radu wants melodrama and a vehicle for Gwendolen Grey. It’s not just you that wants something better than that. We do too. But we can get there with Radu. It’ll be in the way we write it – get the right kind of hero into the plot–’

‘He doesn’t want a hero. He just wants her.’

‘But Gwendolen will want a strong leading man. She’ll be that much stronger with someone to match her.’

‘For God’s sake,’ muttered Colin, ‘we don’t want a lot of romantic tosh – love scenes, sex, that’s just bourgeois decadence.’

Alan and Hugh both shouted their derision, and I was puzzled. Why was Colin so down on passion? He must be unhappy in love. There was another angry silence.

‘D’you want more toast?’ I enquired brightly, to cover up the sticky silence. They ignored me.

After a while Hugh said cautiously: ‘I know you think I shouldn’t have been talking to Enescu off my own bat, but it really will be worth it. Working with him we’ll get known – and then we won’t need him any more. Besides which, he’s in with Stanley Colman and Colman’s the man with the money.’

This further enraged Colin. ‘Stanley Colman! Why the hell do we want to have anything to do with him?’

Hugh smiled: ‘He’s got money, hasn’t he? He’s just someone who got lucky in the war. I quite liked him.’

‘Black marketeer more likely. For heaven’s sake, what are we doing with these people?’

‘We’re trying to get money for our film. We can’t be too choosy,’ said Alan. ‘And you’re the one who says the end justifies the means.’

That shut Colin up. He sat there sulking. I spread the toast thinly with marge. ‘He won’t give you any money, anyway,’ I said, ‘he’ll give it to Gwendolen Grey.’

The three men stared at me.

‘He’s in love with her, didn’t you notice?’

‘Oh, darling!’ said Alan with an indulgent smile. They thought love had nothing to do with it. They were so wrong! Love – or sex – had everything to do with what happened later … or some twisted version of love.

‘Giving it to Gwendolen Grey will be giving to us – if we get in there,’ said Hugh. ‘Enescu is a real original – he’s taken something from the German expressionist films of the twenties and put a new slant on it – it can be used for social criticism, it heightens everything, it makes it all less drab. And he’s had this wonderful idea of giving his next film a really artistic dimension.’ He paused and looked sideways, enquiringly, at Alan, but Alan gave a shake of the head so minimal I don’t think Colin noticed it.

‘Artistic? What does that mean?’ Colin was frowning.

‘Oh – I don’t know the details. Anyway, really it’s up to us to develop the refugee idea in a way that’ll interest Radu. If he takes the bait, well and good, if he doesn’t then –’ and he shrugged, ‘we try something else.’