Then We Take Berlin (10 page)

Motes of dust danced in the late afternoon sunlight. Merle had danced with them, sweeping Wilderness along in her arms.

“It’s over, bleedin’ war is bleedin’ over.”

She hugged him, kissed him, told him again that it was over.

They’d never get him now.

A week passed in high anticipation—the national nerves stretched to breaking. Woolworth’s, Bourne & Hollingsworth and Whiteleys all sold out of bunting.

May Day.

Hitler was dead.

Surely it was over now?

Germans surrendered in chunks, a division here, a division there.

Surely it was over now?

The Russians took Berlin.

Surely it was over now?

All they needed was the word.

And on May 7 the word came—the following day would be Victory in Europe Day. The Prime Minister would address the nation at 3:00. And at 3:01 the nation would erupt in a frenzy of celebration that would last until the beer ran out. And woe betide any landlord who tried to put up the towels for the night when it did.

§21

“Not here,” Merle said.

“Eh?”

“I wanna be somewhere else for this. Not sat in the street with the neighbours, wearing a paper hat and drinking warm beer from a coronation mug.”

“Where then? Buckingham Palace?”

“No. Not the palace, but up West, definitely up West.”

“Up West” was a concept as much as a place, and as a place it was a moveable feast—the most appropriate term imaginable for the night in question. It might begin just west of St. Paul’s, but who knew where it ended? Regent Street? Park Lane? Knightsbridge? Wilderness had in a sense never been up West—he’d passed through it on trams and buses—a sensation rather like pressing your nose to the glass panes in the window of the sweetshop—and he’d pulled a couple of jobs with Abner in Mayfair and Kensington. But been up West in the sense or walking its streets, eating in its caffs and drinking in its pubs and shopping in its shops . . . never. Harrods was just a word. Westminster Abbey a postcard. The Ritz a colonnaded facade glimpsed from the top of a number 19 bus.

“I’ll take you to the Ritz,” she said.

§22

Piccadilly was a conga. A human snake that began at the circus and the boarded-up plinth on which Eros used to stand and slithered past Fortnum’s, Jacksons, the Royal Academy, the Berkeley, and the Ritz to fizzle out in Green Park.

There seemed to Wilderness to be as many in uniform as in civvies, prompting the question “who is actually at the front?” which in turn prompted the question “is Harry Holderness at the front?” but that he readily dismissed.

Merle seemed content to watch. She slipped an arm through his, and they hugged the pavement rather than let the human tide sweep them up.

She seemed happy, her head bobbing against his shoulder, and—although he’d no real idea how old she was, perhaps half Abner’s age, say thirty-two or thirty-three—“girlishly” happy.

By half past eight the sun was setting over the palace and Green Park became ablaze with bonfires. Londoners tore up the shelters that had served them since the Blitz and fed them into the flames.

Men and women danced around the fires as though in some ancient Dionysiac—a hint, more than a hint of impending intimacy between strangers, encounters flashed in the night rather than forged. To fuck but never fuck again.

The Forces were out in force. A sailor, a couple of RAF blokes wearing observers’ part-wings. And the Army—a couple of Artillery gunners and a lance bombardier, who took off their battledresses, waved them around their heads, and let them float down onto the flames like giant autumn leaves.

A benign policeman, a pointy-hatted London beat bobby, looked on without comment. A large well-dressed, matronly woman caught his eye with a wave of her brolly.

“Constable? Can this possibly be legal?”

“It is most certainly a crime to burn the king’s uniform, madam, but so long as they none of ’em get their wedding tackle out I shall be turning a blind eye.”

Merle giggled at this, not meeting the woman’s gorgon gaze—and all but collapsed in hysterics when the gunners stripped to their socks, wedding tackle out, and threw every stitch of uniform into the fire.

“War is over,” they yelled, echoing what Merle had said days ago, “Bleedin’ war is bleedin’ over.”

The blind eye turned no more. The gunners set off across the park in the direction of St. James’s at a bollock-bouncing trot, and the copper gave chase. The RAF observers stripped more slowly, fed their uniforms into the flames as though consigning the dead to the furnace—a gentle respect, a fond farewell to arms, at odds with the hysteria of the night. Then they turned and kissed. The matron stormed away trailing fury, complaining loudly about “the bloody queers.”

Merle buried her face in his chest, he could feel her laughter in his ribs. Then she wiped her eyes and said.

“C’mon. It’s past nine. Let’s get to the Ritz before they sell out of champagne.”

Wilderness was hesitant and she sensed this.

“Wossmatter?”

“Are we ready for this?”

“I been ready for the Ritz all my life. Puttin’ on the Ritz is what I do.”

“Are we even dressed right?”

Merle was in a scarlet summer frock that looked like it cost a packet. Her best patent leather handbag, with its diamante cluster on the clasp. Wilderness was in what passed for best. A light sports jacket and cavalry twill trousers. Put a cravat around his neck and he just might pass for a countryman up to town for the day.

She picked up the regulation black RAF tie dropped by one of the queers.

“Slip this on and you’ll be fine.”

“Supposing they won’t let us in?”

“I’d like to see ’em try. Tonight of all nights I’d like to see ’em try.”

As they left, heading north onto Piccadilly, the naval rating was stripping, even more slowly than the RAF queers, consigning history to the flames. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.

§23

The crush in the bar at the Ritz was scarcely less than in the street.

Merle made him sit.

“It ain’t a pub. They come to you.”

And when he came, he took one look at Merle and drew too keen a conclusion.

“Excuse me, sir,” he said to Wilderness, sotto voce, his back to Merle.

It was almost impulsive to look over his shoulder, and see to whom the waiter was talking, but he knew it was him and he knew what the man was going to say if not how he might phrase it.

“Your companion, sir. I understand it is a night for celebration, a waiving of the rules, but this is a respectable establishment—the most respectable in London. Certain things we cannot permit.”

Not admitting he was a bookworm had saved Wilderness a kicking on many occasions as a boy. Equally effective was an ability to make his enemies laugh with mimicry. Few accents could elude his ear and tongue for long, and certainly not those of the English upper classes as personified by Ronald Colman or Robert Donat. Either would do—C. Aubrey Smith perhaps a trifle excessive.

“Sorry, old man. Don’t quite catch your drift here.”

The waiter coughed once into the end of a loosely clenched fist, but by then Merle had stuck out her left hand and was waving her ring finger at him.

She was wearing a wedding ring, and Wilderness could only assume she had slipped it on in the last few moments and that she carried one just to be able to pull a stunt like this.

“’Ere, take a gander mate. What do you think this is, a bleedin’ doughnut?”

The man reddened. Wilderness thought it touch and go which way he jumped now.

“My last leave,” he said. “Popped the question. The old girl said yes. Now how about drinks for the pair of us? The sooner we get them the sooner my good lady and I will be on our way.”

The blush deepened. He must have worked out Wilderness’s age to within a year or two and might be guessing at twenty-one or twenty-two rather than seventeen, and he might deem him unlikely to be either officer or gentleman, but he wasn’t going risk it. Wilderness knew he’d won this one.

“Yeah. Make mine a Tom Collins,” Merle said.

“And for you, sir?”

“Oh, the same,” Wilderness said, with no idea what a Tom Collins was.

“I’m afraid the lemon will be out of a bottle sir.”

Ah, so it had lemon in it did it?

Wilderness smiled his assent, and the waiter vanished.

“Old hypocrite,” Merle said. “He never told me he worked here.”

“You mean you know him?”

“Wasn’t certain till he started staring and whispering, but I think I did him a quickie in St. James’s Park last February. Cold as a polar bear’s bollocks and bombs wangin’ down everywhere, and I pick up the only fare left on the razzle. Cheeky bugger. Of course I know him. Do you think he spotted me for a brass ’cos I look like one?”

“Well I did wonder about the handbag.”

“I might just clock you with it.”

A Tom Collins turned out to be mostly gin. The tipple that had ruined his mother. Gin and sugar. It was little short of disgusting, but he sipped at it for Merle’s sake, wishing she’d ordered champagne.

She was talking at him. “At” might be “to” as far as Merle was concerned but Wilderness could not hear her. Her words were simply bouncing off him. He could suddenly hear nothing. One of the loudest evenings of his life, the letting down of the national hair—or in many cases the national trousers—and it was like watching a silent film. Or more precisely, an effect in a talking film when they drop the sound and the observer sees only faces, and faces become grimaces magnified by the glass walls of the fish tank through which he appears to be watching.

He could think of it no other way. He was in an aquarium or in a zoo—not that he’d ever been to either—he was a scientist, they were specimens . . .
Homo anglicus
, in all his limited variety—his native grey plumage enlivened only by the deep blues of the navy and the paler blues of the RAF and the spring colours of all the posh totty on his arm. Well-heeled Englishman and Englishwoman. So remote as to be another species.

Minutes passed, perhaps a quarter of an hour, Merle still talking, and the glass shattered. Hit his eardrums with the blast of a bomb. The mass braying of assembled toffs in their mating ritual.

“Can we go now?”

“’Course, enough is enough,” she replied. “Let me summon old winkledick and pay the sod.”

Walking towards home, walking to the point where they’d both get fed up and hop on a bus, she leaned her head on his arm said, “Wasn’t a bad idea goin’ to the Ritz was it?”

“No,” he replied. “Not a bad idea at all to put on a bit of ritz. My first glimpse of the high life.”

“The high life? And what do you make of it?”

“Dunno,” he said honestly.

It was repellent and tempting. And he did not care to discuss temptation with her.

§24

She took him to bed.

Reading the hesitation in his eyes, she splayed her left hand in front of him, her own eyes peeping coquettishly over the fan, a
strega
at
un ballo in maschera
. The slender gold ring still upon her finger.

“We got married on your last leave. Remember?”

That was the masquerade. They weren’t real any more, they were characters in a masquerade of his own devising.

Afterwards. Passion far from spent. Looking up at the skylight. Merle stirring.

“Merle,” he said. “Where’s the money?”

“Wot money?”

“Our money. Mine and Grandad’s.”

“Safe. Don’t you worry. It’s safe . . .” She yawned and paused. “Safe as houses.”

He said nothing to this, realising that she was not going to answer any more questions, and searched what she had said for a clue. But it was just a phrase—a common turn of phrase that offered nothing and concealed nothing.

She slid one hand across his belly.

“You’re a nice shape, young Johnnie. A nice flat tum on yer. A bit more muscle on yer bones and I bet all the girls’ll fancy you. Let’s do it one more time. Afore I fall asleep. After all . . . we’re not going to make a habit of it are we . . . ?”

Wilderness was damn certain they weren’t.

“So let’s do it one last time for . . . for old times’ sake.”

Wilderness saw in the first dawn of peace humping his grandfather’s mistress, a common prostitute of the London streets, shooting the second (shared) orgasm of his life into her.

She had taken his virginity. His grandfather’s mistress. He still had no idea how old she was. She took his virginity—there was no one else on earth to whom he would rather have surrendered it.

He never did find the money.

§25

When the celebrations of Victory in Europe had dwindled to a national hangover, Wilderness was convinced he was home free. Japan had not surrendered, but it could not be long, and it could hardly be worthwhile training up anyone new and shipping them East. The voyage alone took the best part of two months.