Captain Craze left the War Office in Whitehall with the other desk warriors and walked north, through Trafalgar Square into the West End. As he progressed, the crowd of uniforms and the bowler hat brigade thinned as they took their own routes to get home, but Jago didn’t feel like going home to Pimlico. The knowledge that Pristine Christine, his wife, would be there made going to his club seem a better idea. He’d recently joined – Nicky’s idea; he still wasn’t sure it had been a wise move. It was the sort of establishment he usually avoided.
The day was still hot and dusty and he wished it would rain. He liked wet weather, liked walking through a London of drizzle as the streets and the air were washed. He wanted to dissolve his disappointment in a slow, steady soaking, but the sun thought otherwise.
Civil servants fanned themselves with their bowlers as they strode, older men by and large, and feeling the heat. Some of them displayed Great War ribbons on their chests to prove that once they’d done their bit. There seemed to be a collective guilt among all who were not in uniform, who had not served overseas and heard shots fired in anger. Everyone wanted to prove that in some way, some small way, they had made a difference and donetheir bit. Jago had even witnessed a clippie on a bus refuse to let a paratrooper buy a ticket. ‘I’m not taking money from a para!’ she’d said and men had called out ‘Hear-hear!’ and ‘Bravo!’ Jago, in his uniform and Intelligence Corps cap badge, felt a total fraud. He felt he could say with absolute certainty that so far, after five years of war, he had most definitely not done his bit.
Jago scanned the streets; since the V2 attacks that had started the previous month, the West End had emptied again. For a couple of years, the streets had been crammed with servicemen on leave, arm in arm with good time girls, but Soho had become a ghost town once more. He knew Londoners had accepted the first Blitz with fortitude and humour but this second one was causing a bitter resentment; the whole world knew that Germany had lost the war so why did they go on fighting? People were wearier, less cheery, dirtier – as if the brick dust in their clothes had entered their souls. They just wanted the whole thing over.
Jago passed a closed playhouse with padlocked doors. He loved plays and had read that only eight theatres in the West End were still open and they were each playing to a handful of audience. The vengeance weapons were killing the cultural life of the capital as well as its population, though given the sort of show Jago enjoyed, he wondered if cultural was quite the word to describe it.
His mother had loathed the theatre: ‘People I don’t know shouting things I don’t want to know.’ His real mentor had been his honorary Aunt Esme, his mother’s friend. Esme loved literature and believed the theatre only justified its existence when it staged good writing. But Jago had a guilty low taste, adoring musicals and camp farces. He’d seen Lilian Braithwaite in Arsenic and Old Lace earlier in the year and still found himself chuckling over the two murderous old lady protagonists. There was something so neat and orderly in the elderly sisters’ home that felt almost Germanic. He speculated that Nazi Germany was indeed this household, where Miss Hitler and Miss Himmler and murder were dressed up as respectability.
Possibly because the West End was so deserted as Jago entered the Charing Cross Road, he became aware he was being followed. Footsteps behind too in time to his own, and too close. An amateur. He checked the shop windows on the opposite side of the street and identified his tail. Jago sighed; he just wished to walk and clear his head, but now he needed to wake up and lose the seedy young man in a suit that was too big. Jago recognised him; a cockney lowlife with whom Jago had had a very brief encounter, and had now come back to haunt him. The man was obviously a leech. Jago was nearly at the Rockingham, his club, and he decided that after his drink there he’d slip out the back way.
The Rockingham wasn’t some grand eighteenth-century gaming and dining house. Its undistinguished entrance was almost invisible; a simple doorway in a Victorian house that had been in its time both a brothel and a bistro and now looked faintly bohemian, with peeling paint and loose guttering. Jago ascended a short flight of stone steps, chequer-boarded with black-and-white quarry tiles, while before him the door swung open as if by magic.
The guardian who had granted entrance was a creature of pathos and flesh; Jago went in past Mildred, the towering club porter, and headed for the bar across the small dance floor. In the ballroom someone was playing ‘I’ll Be Seeing You’ on a gramophone and, early as it was, there were half a dozen couples swaying in time through the dust motes, illuminated by the overhead skylight. Most of the dancers were in uniform, some in suits, all were men. On the edge of the music a dancer stepped out in front of Jago, his arms wide, the invitation clear.
‘Fancy a jig, ducky?’
Jago swerved around him.
‘No thank you.’
He heard the mocking laughter and comments following him.
‘Hark at her!’
‘All that beef going to waste.’
‘Yes, and meat on the ration.’
Jago hated the campery, men dancing with men. He disliked all of it; the total acceptance they were inverts and then revelling in it without shame. He wondered again why he’d joined such a place but as he came into the bar, he saw the reason waiting for him. Nicky looked as gorgeous as ever in his naval uniform, with his brilliant blue eyes seeking out Jago in the gloom like twin searchlights. The light from the bar behind him turned his blond hair into a nimbus. Jago had never seen him first thing in the morning but he suspected that Nicky had a fair stubble that would shimmer in the early light. Jago reminded himself, Nicky was a temptation he had to fight.
‘Jago, splendid news, they’ve got some gin in from god knows where.’
Jago, not much of a drinker, nonetheless grinned at Nicky’s announcement. He seemed to take his first full breath of the day. This was Jago’s home, he realised, wherever Nicky was. Then he stifled the thought; that couldn’t be so, not in the long run, or even in the short term. ‘Gin it is,’ he said.
Nicky signed for the drinks, nudged a pink gin along the bar to Jago, while listening to his problem with the leech. Nicky knew all about Jago, as did Jago of Nicky. They’d shared their guilty secret – but that was all.
‘So, who is he?’ Nicky asked.
‘Rough trade. God I hate giving in to it; why can’t I be stronger? What could be more unpleasant than hanging around a gents’ toilet looking for some temporary relief from a lowlife?’
Sometimes Jago thought Nicky’s principal attraction was that he was a nicer person than Jago. As now: ‘They’re not lowlife, Jago, they’re people.’
Jago knew Nicky was right and wondered why he played the snob when he felt shame and guilt. They sipped their drinks and pondered the problem, and as usual when Jago was faced with an imminent threat he prevaricated.
‘It just isn’t fair. I never asked to be a queer. Things might have been different if I’d had a proper father, or I’d been sent to a boys’ school. I grew up surrounded by women and girls; by the time I went up to Oxford I was ruined. Sissified.’
Nicky tapped the bottom of his shot glass on the bar impatiently. ‘Yes, you’ve said before, quite often.’
Nicky drained his glass and indicated to the barman, whose shirt was alarmingly unbuttoned, that he’d like it refilled.
Jago sipped his gin and said, ‘I must just stay light on my toes till he latches on to some other mug to blackmail.’
Nicky cleared his throat. ‘You don’t know he wants money. Why not hear him out?’
Jago sighed. ‘He’s bound to be on the cadge. Just my luck, just my rotten run of fortune.’
Nicky reached and squeezed him across the shoulders, manly reassurance – and something more. He said, ‘You do seem to be in the wars; wars personal, not the big one we’re all stuck in. Nearly fried alive in your own rooms, and then that time you all but ended up under the Tube at Baker Street.’
Jago finished his gin. ‘That was nothing. An accident.’
Nicky looked at him. ‘Was it, old man? Can you be sure? You said you distinctly felt a hand in your back?’
Jago remembered; the awful, sudden, all-consuming shock and terror as he felt himself pushed off the platform. ‘I know I was pushed, but I don’t think it was deliberate. There was an awful crowd and I expect the owner of the hand was jostled and reached out instinctively and caught me one. After, he was probably too ashamed to come forward, especially in front of the Yanks.’
The wonderful American airmen, one of whom had seemingly plucked Jago out of the air and landed him back on the platform. They had been irreverent, loud, back-slappingly raucous. Their voices were a magic carpet ride of America; dialects from everywhere but, in that refreshing way of the New World, accents that told where the speaker came from, not what his father did for a living.
Nicky was speaking. ‘You don’t think your report has anything to do with these incidents?’
Jago shook his head. ‘I’ve been accused of being arrogant today, but I’m not that deluded. I’ve put my theory out there, but I know it’s probably the week for steam engines.’
The allusion foxed Nicky. ‘What?’
‘The steam engine was invented by three different men in three different places in the same week. The information was available to all and the inventors just joined up the dots. Same with my report. I don’t doubt that other bods are coming to the same conclusion as me. Killing Jago Craze will not stop the hypothesis. It would serve no purpose. I won’t be the only one to see things this way.’
Against his better judgement, Jago ordered another drink. He didn’t want to go home half-cut. He needed to be sober in Pimlico while dealing with the problem of Christine. Even when he had a clear head, his wife had a way of making him say things he regretted as soon as they were out.
‘And the said paper? Had your CO read it?’
‘Binned.’
Nicky suddenly seemed as angry as Jago. ‘The idiot! Your Major is a third-rate academic in a fifth-rate wig. I don’t know why you bother, Jago.’
But Jago knew. ‘You’ve been there Nick; the Spanish War, Norway, Crete, the Atlantic. Lord, you’ve even been torpedoed…’
‘Overrated.’ Said with a smile that almost sank Jago.
He blundered on, ‘I’ve never been at the sharp end, Nicky. I’ve tried but it’s no go, so I do every job that comes my way as conscientiously as I can, and this report is my way of trying to do a little bit more.’
‘Above and beyond?’
‘If you like. I just want it to be read by someone with more imagination and insight than the turd slicer.’
In the ballroom next door, someone put on a record of Billie Holiday singing ‘Night and Day’. Nick sipped his gin.
‘I’m very fond of you, Jago. You were the scruffiest queer at Oxford. It took me five days in an open lifeboat to get that look, but you’ve buffed up quite nice since. What say I get my admiral to look at it? After all, he is one of us.’
One of us. A queer. Another invert, thought Jago. ‘Can you do that? Will he read it?’
‘When he gets back. Currently he’s on a tour of naval shore establishments in the East Midlands. Where are the East Midlands?’
Jago let his sense of defeat leave him. ‘Will he be able to do something with it?’
‘My admiral has sufficient scrambled egg on his sleeve to sit on various combined committees. If there’s something in your concern he’ll get it to the right chap. Old queers’ network. What did Churchill say in 1940? Something about arranging any resistance to a Nazi occupation around the homosexual community, as we already were a secret society.’ Nicky gave another smile that was a further assault on Jago’s heart. ‘Shame your place met a fiery end, you never did take me there.’
The word take lingered between them.
Jago broke the moment and raised his glass to sip, hoping it wasn’t obvious to Nicky he was being shaken off. But Nicky was persistent. ‘I could always visit you in your upstairs. You own the whole house, don’t you?’
Jago almost snapped back, the suggestion was so shocking. ‘Where Christine and Veronica might hear us?’
Nicky turned away from Jago and spoke to him via the mirror behind the bar. ‘You’re always welcome in my set.’
Nicky’s set was his apartment in a mansion block off Piccadilly. Doing it in a bed, overnight, would be further into queerness than Jago had so far ventured. Nicky was dangerous, a temptation too far. Jago knew that one day he had to get himself straightened out. A love affair with another man would complicate that process.
Jago flashed the false smile of the coward. ‘Let me think about it.’
Nicky finished his drink and the conversation seemed to be at an end.
Jago went and his fear went with him; Nicky was proving addictive. He left by the rear of the club. Mildred, an old NCO from the Coldstream who sported the ribbon of the Military Medal among his Great War haberdashery, checked to see if the coast was clear.
‘No sign of the weasel, sir.’
Jago joined him in the doorway; the alley was empty and the dustbins were full. The early evening light seemed abashed and threatened by the shadows. It was a lurking Soho light.
‘Good luck, sir,’ said Mildred and closed the door behind Jago.
Jago came down the concrete steps and set off up the alley. The head appeared silently from behind a dustbin, like a marionette being pulled from above on a string. The seedy young man in the overlarge suit grinned at Jago. ‘Watcha cock.’
Jago was suddenly filled by a rage fuelled by snobbery. He was superior to this lowlife and it seemed simply wrong that he should be persecuted by someone who was, as his mother would have put it, NOCD: Not our class, darling.
‘Come on guv, I just want a word, can’t we have a little chinwag? You won’t shake me off, I’m – tenacious.’
His use of a word that didn’t fit his mouth tipped Jago over the edge. He kicked the dustbin the leech was standing behind. It knocked him off balance and, as he staggered, Jago remembered the training in unarmed combat he had learned in the SOE – never fight unarmed, always improvise a weapon. He snatched off the dustbin lid and hit his tormentor with it. Like a discus, the rim caught the leech in the temple. Jago hit him again with the rim, in the middle of his face, and his nose exploded with blood. He made a noise of hurt surprise that a small boy bullied in the playground might. It sounded bewildered, as if Jago’s attack had been unprovoked.
Jago stepped back, his rage leaving him as swiftly as it had arrived. This wasn’t him; this violence wasn’t him – he was an appeaser. He turned and walked away quickly up the alley. The man’s words following him.
‘What d’you wanna do that for?’ And then quieter. ‘Why couldn’t he speak to you himself?’
It froze Jago as he marched away and turned him back, but the leech was retreating himself, back up the alley and around a corner into Soho. What had the seedy man meant? Who should speak to him?