fifteen

‘HE DIDN’T BELIEVE YOU! BUT IT’S TRUE ! As if you’d lie about a thing like that.’ Alan plunged his head in his hands.

‘It might help if I could think of a better reason for having lied before.’

‘You can’t have been convincing enough.’

‘What do you mean? What else could I say?’ I cried. ‘It was true. I was telling him the truth.’

‘Look – all I said was you didn’t convince him.’

‘Why do you always blame me? As if I was stupid or something.’

‘How like a woman to take everything so personally!’

‘You beast!’ I was so angry. Then I looked at his handsome, frowning face and took pity on him. How stupid and insensitive I’d been. He was frightened too. Alan, always so sure of himself, always in charge, always in the right – he didn’t know what to do, he was terrified for Colin and he felt impotent. That was why he went charging about like a bull in a china shop.

‘God – this is all so hellish.’ Then, looking sideways at me he must have seen I was close to tears. ‘Sorry – I’m not blaming you. I’m so worried about Colin, that’s all.’ He stared ahead grimly. ‘Hell! Hell! Hell!’

In the silence I knew we were both thinking of the awful, dark dread, the mushroom cloud that hung on the horizon. Colin faced an ordeal at the end of which, if the worst came to the worst, was the condemned cell: the condemned cell where they never turned the lights off; the hangman to measure him; the last walk; the body dropping like a sack. After Neville Heath’s the press had lingered on the ritual of the last meal, the final walk to death, the scientific skill of the hangman, the crowd outside the prison. There was a pornographic pleasure to it all. And now we were being drawn forward towards that obscene moment, powerless to halt the course of events. But we had to find a way out.

‘It’s more important than ever to find this … chap Colin was with that evening,’ said Alan. ‘I’m visiting the prison today, I’ll talk to him, I’ll try to get him to be a bit more specific.’

.........

Colin had told Abrahams about his companion, but then, maddeningly – with some kind of mistaken chivalry, if you could call it that – had refused to say who it was. When Alan came back from the prison, however, he said, almost triumphant: ‘I got him to tell me, I know where we can find this boy. Colin wants him kept out of it, but if the police persist in saying it happened in the evening he has to have an alibi. Turns out Colin got him a job in one of the cutting rooms in Wardour Street – seems he hangs out in some café after work. Colin said it’d be better to try to see him there than at work. You’ll have to go and find him.’

‘Me? Shouldn’t we both go? I’d feel more confident if–’

Alan looked at me as though I were mad. ‘I can’t possibly go to some queer hangout. What on earth would people think!’

‘Nobody’ll know! And anyway, what’ll they think if I start slumming around all on my own.’

‘Well, for one thing they won’t think you’re a homo, will they. Look – why don’t you get Fiona to go along with you.’

I was far from sure that Fiona would welcome someone – me – who was trying to get the man accused of murdering her lover off the hook, but I did as I was told. For one thing, I quite liked the idea of seeing her again. I seemed to have lost touch with all my girlfriends since my marriage, and Gwendolen hardly made up for them.

I arrived at tea time, but Fiona was still in bed, frowsty and pale. Her room smelled intimately of stale face powder and stale tea with an overlay of gas.

She didn’t seem to mind me watching as she slid out from between the grimy sheets in her slip. I was shocked! She slept in her underwear! But I wasn’t as shocked as I would have been a year ago. I was learning fast that the behaviour I’d been brought up to think of as not merely normal but absolutely de rigueur was certainly not universal; and – amazingly! – the heavens didn’t actually fall in if you sometimes forgot to clean your teeth or went to bed without taking off your make-up, or didn’t use embossed writing paper.

Fiona padded over to the washbasin in the corner of the room. ‘I’ve hardly any soap,’ she wailed. ‘Look!’ She held up a tiny morsel.

‘Ah!’ I said, ‘but I’ve got a present for you.’ And I held out a round deliciously smelling cake of very expensive Roger et Gallet soap, wrapped in tissue paper, one of the three in the beautiful box Radu had brought back from New York and Gwendolen had given me. Fiona was thrilled.

She moved about the room very slowly. I couldn’t believe how long it took her to get dressed, and I was wriggling impatiently about on her slidey counterpane long before she’d finished. She pulled on a pair of tweed slacks and the jumper with the wooden buttons she’d been wearing the first time I met her. ‘Perhaps they’ll think we’re lesbians,’ she said with a giggle. My face went hot.

‘Oh! I hope not!’ I cried.

She gave me a funny look in the glass at which she was applying her make-up. ‘I thought that Gwendolen Grey was a bit sweet on you.’

‘Fiona! What nonsense. That’s ridiculous.’

We bundled up as usual to brave the cold. Now that we were ready to go I felt nervous. We stumbled down the rickety stairs past the restaurant and out into the street.

‘I simply have no idea how we’re going to find this boy.’

‘We probably won’t. He won’t want to get involved, will he,’ said Fiona shrewdly. ‘If word goes out we’re looking for him, he’ll simply disappear. What’s his name, you said?’

‘Johnny.’

‘There’s a lot of Johnnys between here and the Thames.’ And she sniggered.

But we were in luck. The first place we went was the Swiss Café off Charing Cross Road.

‘We’d better have a cup of tea – wait for a bit,’ said Fiona.

I thought the people there were rather awful, not only shabbily dressed and not very clean, but even a little mad-looking. One young man at least was muttering to himself and making strange gestures.

‘They all think they’re geniuses,’ whispered Fiona. ‘They think they’re going to be actors or painters or poets. But actually they’re just unemployed.’

At a corner table, two thin young men with extravagant gestures and shrill laughter were, I was sure, wearing rouge. ‘Come on,’ said Fiona, ‘we’ll have to go and ask them if they know your friend’s friend.’

Just then the door swung open and they looked up. So did we.

This boy was different. For a start he wasn’t a boy; he was in his early twenties I guessed, a bit older than me. He was short, but the opposite of willowy; stocky and muscular, with a very short haircut and a military look about him: quite unlike the rest of the café clientele, and obviously not a pansy. Yet he went and sat with the other two.

I plucked up my courage and walked over to their table. The two who’d been there all along stared and tittered in an intimidating way. ‘Hello!’ They looked me up and down. The recent arrival pushed his chair violently backwards as he stood up. He looked as if he wanted to get away. He had gone rather red. He swallowed. He wanted to speak, but couldn’t get the words out. Finally he said, his cockney voice hoarse: ‘It’s about Colin.’

I gaped. This manly young man couldn’t surely be … I pulled myself together. ‘I’m looking for Colin’s friend, Johnny, but how did you know?’

‘I’m Johnny. I saw Colin with you once – in a pub somewhere, Wardour Street probably, the Intrepid Fox?’

I’d never seen him before and my puzzlement must have showed, for he added: ‘Colin wouldn’t have introduced us. And I scarpered when I saw you together – he’d have been so embarrassed.’ Whether it was irony, amusement or bitterness in his voice I wasn’t sure.

‘I need to talk to you.’

‘Not here.’

Fiona followed us into the Charing Cross Road. There wasn’t another café in sight. We could have gone back into Soho and found one, but Johnny strode off in the direction of Leicester Square. It was too early for the pubs to be open, and we ended up in the Westminster reference library just north of St Martin-in-the-Fields. It seemed a funny place to go, but there was an echoing marble and wood-panelled hallway with a bench on which we sat down.

‘Colin’s in trouble – you know that? You know what’s happened?’ Silly question – of course he knew!

Johnny nodded. He was looking down at his feet.

‘He needs your help.’

‘There’s nothing I can do,’ he said huskily.

‘There is – really, there is. Colin didn’t want you involved. He wanted to protect you, but …’ I hesitated. ‘Have you been to see him at the prison?’

Johnny jumped in his seat. ‘Oh, God no!’ He looked appalled. ‘More’n my life’s worth.’ He paused. ‘I mean, I’d like to, but it’s just too difficult.’

‘He seemed to think you knew him quite well,’ I said in a hard voice. I wasn’t even sure that was true, but I didn’t care. I was determined to push him, to get a reaction. ‘If you’re really his friend, you’ll help him, now he’s in such terrible trouble.’

He risked a sideways glance in my direction. His eyes were very blue, with long lashes, his cheekbones knobbly, his skin rough and badly shaved.

‘There’s nothing I can do.’

I was being too hard on him. My head girl demeanour just frightened him. He wasn’t going to talk. It was all leading nowhere – as I’d always known it would, deep down.

Unexpectedly Fiona stretched a hand out and patted his knee. ‘You mustn’t be frightened. Dinah’s only trying to help Colin.’

‘I’m not frightened. Well, I am, but it isn’t that. It’s just … I could get into trouble and it wouldn’t do him any good.’

‘He needs an alibi,’ I said, still stern. ‘Colin says you were with him on the evening it happened.’

The very word ‘alibi’ upset him. ‘It wouldn’t do any good. It’d make things worse.’ He stood up. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘you don’t understand …’

‘Please – can’t you at least visit him?’

The boy shook his head, with a smile of utter contempt for my lack of understanding. ‘That’s the last thing I should do.’

He stood up. I took hold of his arm. ‘Look – the case against him is really weak. The lawyer says so. It’ll probably be dropped. This is just in case the worst comes to the worst, don’t you see.’ He shook off my restraining hand. ‘At least leave me a number, an address, somewhere–’

Reluctantly: ‘You can leave messages with the barman at the Fitzroy Tavern.’

And he was gone.

.........

Alan and I felt so desperate that we finally decided to see if my father could help. It wasn’t that we didn’t trust Abrahams, but Colin needed all the help he could get.

At Waterloo, all the trains were disrupted. We waited for nearly three hours. A grimy fog blurred the vaulted vistas of the terminus, and the atmosphere was thick with the resentful pessimism of would-be passengers. There was an air of endlessly, terminally putting up with things. Occasionally an engine in a siding trumpeted, mooed or bellowed like an elephant marooned in some distant holding pen.

Finally a train slithered, exhausted, alongside the platform. The interminable wait had drained our anger, reducing it to apathy, but now we felt a sudden surge of optimism, almost gratitude at our luck in there being a train at all. It was unheated, but it was surprisingly empty; we had a carriage to ourselves. In fits and starts we travelled past miles of suburban wasteland, bomb-sites and shabby buildings, a formless disorder that stretched on forever. Each time the train stopped at some deserted station I wondered if it would ever start again, but finally it got up speed as we came into open country.

Then unaccountably it stopped again, this time not even at a platform, but in the middle of a field. Silence fell. I went into the corridor, rubbed the window clear, and looked out. Snowfields stretched away in all directions, latticed with black lines of hedgerows, a white polar waste beneath a sulphur sky, a world slowly expiring in eerie silence. I wondered if we were now the only people on the train until I heard a high-pitched, bird-like twitter of human speech from the next carriage, in a language I neither understood, nor recognised, perhaps Chinese. I giggled rather hysterically, wondering if we actually were on the trans-Siberian express en route for Manchuria – marooned at the end of the world.

At length the train dragged itself forward again, and when we finally arrived at Alton we were not just relieved, but astonished. My father had heroically come to meet us. Somehow he’d got some petrol and he drove us at a snail’s pace over the frozen roads.

My mother had prepared a feast of duck given to them by a friend; for pudding there was treacle tart. It was the best meal we’d had in ages. It was so nice of her to have taken such trouble, and I gave her a big hug.

Afterwards we sat in the freezing drawing room, huddled round a tiny wood fire, and listened to my father’s view of the government, developed at great length. The government’s failure to resolve the question of Germany, the government’s failure to deal with Jewish terrorists in Palestine, with the chaos in Greece and the riots in the Punjab – ‘What the hell is going on?’ my father railed. ‘We’re going to hell in a handcart!’ he cried, while my mother bewailed the fact that prisoners of war were still lurking – or, according to her, larking – about in the countryside, being ferried around in lorries using the petrol she and my father needed so badly.

The poor old government got it in the neck until Alan could no longer contain himself: ‘What are they supposed to do? The Americans are slowly strangling us to death.’

‘Are you mad! We’d be bankrupt if it wasn’t for the Americans! Europe would be finished!’

‘Then why did they end Lend Lease so abruptly? Whatever happens, it’s Europe on American terms for the foreseeable future. The film industry, for example – all right, so there was the Anglo–US loan, but Senator Fulbright actually demanded restrictions in order to stop Britain building up a film industry that might seriously compete with Hollywood –’ And Alan was off on his (and Colin’s) hobby horse, indeed as he denounced Hollywood and its films for promoting the flashy materialistic ‘American way of life’, his argument was Colin’s, in other words it was the CP argument, an attack on the evils of capitalism.

Of course I agreed with him – of course I did. And yet – if I had to choose between a Hollywood musical and, say, It Always Rains on Sunday, I jolly well knew which I’d choose.

The only effect of Alan’s harangue on the film industry was to convince my father more firmly than ever that my husband was a Red, while my mother now knew for certain that there was no prospect whatsoever that he was going to be able to support me in the manner to which I’d been accustomed, or of her ever having a grandchild. She took me aside at one point and asked me if anything was ‘the matter’. ‘I thought you’d have started a family by now,’ and she looked puzzled, as if she’d never heard of birth control.

To mollify my father Alan said he’d had a script accepted, and told them about Radu and the success of House of Shadows.

‘Has this chap got any money? Are you actually going to get paid?’ These days my father treated everything with a kind of enraged scepticism. Since he’d returned from Germany he’d seemed so much older, crustier, angrier. The sickening evidence he’d had to deal with at Nuremberg seemed to have eaten into him. He just was a different person.

We finally plucked up courage to broach the real reason for our visit. It was a disaster. The Daily Telegraph had reported the case, naturally, but my parents weren’t that interested and had had no idea we were intimate with the leading characters in a sordid murder scandal.

My father raged impotently. This was the result of associating with artists and bohemians! How dare Alan lead his daughter into such depraved social circles!

‘Colin’s innocent,’ I cried, fighting back tears of rage and frustration. My father took no notice. He grudgingly admitted that Julius Abrahams was the best in the business, even if he was a Red. He’d get Colin a decent barrister, another Red most likely. That was all he had to say on the matter.

After all this, we had to stay the night – impossible to get back to London the same day.

‘For God’s sake, stay out of it,’ was my father’s parting shot, when we left the next morning. ‘I don’t want my daughter’s name in the papers, and certainly not in connection with this.’

But my name would be in the papers. Unless we could get Colin released and the charges dropped.