It was a short walk home. A network of alleys. Down one to cut into the Charing Cross Road, down a second to cross to St. Martin’s Lane, and into the third, in which Troy lived—Goodwin’s Court.
Where the court bent, about as neatly as a bolt of lightning on a weather map, a whore stood waiting. Not waiting for Troy, just waiting.
“’Allo, young Fred.”
This took no account of the fact that he was older than she. Troy had known Ruby since she first appeared at the corner shortly before the arrival of the American forces during the war. He’d thought she was about twenty or twenty-one at that time, so she’d be no more than twenty-seven now, to his thirty-two—yet he’d aways been “young Fred” from the moment she’d got over the initial panic of finding out that she’d pitched her tent in the front yard of a policeman. Troy even thought it might be to her advantage so to do. Troy held no brief for Vice. He thought policemen should have better things to do than concern themselves with who fucked who at what cost, or who smoked reefer, but he would not put up with a pimp on his own doorstep and as a result Ruby might well be the only whore within the vicinity of Leicester Square to escape the attentions of that brutal trade—none of them thinking it smart to risk his intervention. He didn’t “protect” Ruby, but it was as well if the pimps thought he might. Once Ruby had grasped this they’d got along fine. She took a little convincing that he was not up for a “free one” and there were times he wished she’d show more discretion, but they got along fine. He’d almost learnt to accept her habitual flirting.
“The lane’s dead tonight, Fred. I can’t give it away.”
Banal chatter or a big hint? He could never tell.
“It’s the light nights, Ruby. Yours is a trade of darkness.”
She gazed up at the summer sky. Only days after the longest day—evening redness in the west.
“You remember, VE Day?”
Who could ever forget?
“I mean . . . not just the night itself and the parties and that. I mean sort of the rest of that year. You know what got me? It was light. It was moving around in blazin’, dazzlin’ light after all them years in the blackout. War was over VE Day, ’less you bother about Japs an ’at, but it din’t come home to me till about October when you could walk from here to the ’Dilly in light, electric light. And then, this year, they turned all the adverts back on and lit up the ’Dilly itself. And it din’t matter that all they was doin’ was tellin’ you Guinness was good for you and stuff. It was like . . . getting washed clean. Washed clean in light.”
She could do this to him. At the most unpredictable times she could utter something approaching poetry and just miss her target.
Of course, she was right. “Now” contrasted with “then” in terms of light and darkness. Troy thought it was a world without colour—the khakis and deepening blues of the war had given way to the myriad greys and browns of the peace. The grey of Chief Superintendent Stanley Onions’ suit, the grey of the national loaf, the grey of fag ash. The brown of gravy, in which the national meal swam, or drowned, on the national plate. The nation of little ships had become the nation of gravy boats. Browning less evoked the name of one of our better poets, so much as presaged an unappetizing Sunday lunch. Brown, grey, brown. It left Troy, habitually in white shirt and black suit, craving colour. He thought it left England craving colour. He glimpsed it in his brother’s red tie and socialist socks, he soaked it up occasionally in the cinemas of the West End—transfixed by the Technicolor of The Wizard of Oz whilst simultaneously bored by its banality. And when summers came, and the summers of the Age of Austerity came long and clear, Anna would drag frocks from her prewar wardrobe and appear to be dressed in petals, to be dressed by Monet or Matisse—red, pink, and purple, yellow, orange, and green. And he took more delight in Anna’s frocks—invariably dismissed with, “oh, this old thing”—than he ever could in his brother’s socks. He doubted he would be washed clean in light, but he’d be dunked in colour.