The Twilight Hour (5 page)

five

I USED TO HAVE A RECURRING DREAM
. I would walk through the frozen square, up the steps and into the house. Or sometimes the dream would begin when I was already inside. I would peer up the stairwell to where the landing was lost in darkness. I would climb the stairs through the silence and push open the door to the room at the front of the house. He would always be lying on the sofa. Sometimes he would sit up and speak to me, and I would realise that he was drunk, but also dead. Sometimes it was as if we were back at the party and there would seem to be people laughing in the next room; sometimes he would simply lie there in the moonlight. I was always so cold, paralysed with cold.

It wasn't exactly a nightmare. I only ever had one nightmare: the first time, after it happened.

.........

We were broke. Alan got a job. He sat in an office off the Haymarket working on scripts for an American producer. He read masses of frightful novels and tried to turn them into film scenarios. At first he'd thought it would be a lifeline to Hollywood, but he was already disillusioned. In fact, he hated it. ‘Anything even faintly decent they chuck straight into the wastepaper basket.' The pay was terrible too. So when Stanley Colman rang up and offered me a job as his secretary, Alan was hardly in a position to veto it, although I knew he'd have liked to. We needed the money. I wasn't keen to be anyone's secretary, and I had grave doubts about Gwendolen's spivvy admirer, but I supposed it was better than nothing. I had heard nothing from Radu about film work; perhaps this was a kind of consolation prize.

Stanley's office in a building off Regent Street consisted of two first floor rooms – actually one room partitioned into two, so that the ceilings seemed much too high for their size – and a windowless lobby containing a sofa and some filing cabinets. We each had a substantial oak desk, unnecessary really, but: ‘They were going cheap – government sale,' said Stanley.

Stanley did almost all his work on the telephone. I typed a few letters and contracts, but it wasn't strictly speaking a full-time job. He had hardly any visitors either. Nevertheless, my role was to give his enterprise a bit of class. Even if he took most calls himself, I was the cut-glass voice of bona fide property development, and even if no one turned up to be impressed, I was the ladylike secretary to offset the ramshackle office. I was also there to keep him company.

Post-war reconstruction was a golden opportunity for Stanley, however much he complained about all the red tape and government restrictions, and I understood – if only dimly – how much he could benefit from this strange time when empty buildings lay around bombed cities and the government needed offices. He relished the challenge presented by the tortuous government controls and his labyrinthine journeys through them. He was a master of all the ways in which deals could be struck, and the grey areas where officials and developers could come to arrangements that were mutually beneficial: a place on the board for a district surveyor in return for favourable assessments of war-damaged buildings, for example. And then, now that he had his own property company he could purchase the very properties for which he was acting as agent and then re-auction them at a much higher price.

‘And the great thing is, Dinah,' he said, ‘it's all quite legal and it's all pure profit. Untaxed gains. If this was really a socialist government, they'd worry less about the mines and the railways and pay more attention to the ownership of land … Of course they have to nationalise the coal industry, the way it's been run. That's doing no more than making capitalism work more efficiently. But they don't understand the property issues. Either that or they're too nervous of all the vested interests … you know who owns most of Mayfair? Some blooming duke or the other. You can't have socialism with that sort of situation – that and the public schools.' He stared out of the window. ‘Now, don't get me wrong. I'm not a socialist, I didn't vote for this lot – tell you the truth, I didn't vote at all – but I'd have more time for them if they had the courage of their convictions.'

‘They're doing as much as they can,' I said, hopefully. ‘The country's practically bankrupt.'

‘You're right about that. And the Yanks are dragging their feet. But they'll have to bail us out in the end. And in the long run …' He paused. A grin spread across his handsome face. ‘In the long run things'll be hunky-dory. You'll see.' And he went back to his telephone.

‘Go and get some lunch,' he'd say. ‘Have a look round the shops. Buy yourself a hat.'

I went to the nearest Lyons tea shop for a poached egg on toast, and read
Sons and Lovers
as I ate. I had so much reading to catch up on. Alan had planned a whole reading programme to make up for the shortcomings of what he referred to as ‘that ridiculous boarding school'. In fact it was a perfectly good school. Alan simply didn't realise that being so much older than me he'd just had more
time
to read everything.

Stanley was a talkative chap and I was a captive audience. He was fond of telling me how he'd come up the hard way – I soon knew the story of his life off by heart. Not that I minded.

‘I left school at fourteen, left school on the Friday and started work on the Monday,' he would say. So many times he said it! It was his litany. ‘My first boss was a landlord. He sent me off round the East End. There were a lot of private rented houses then, owned by this or that small-time landlord. He was a bigger landlord – my boss, that is. My job was to get the little minnows to sell – the miserable rents they were getting weren't worth the effort, so in a way they were getting a bargain, an unexpected little windfall, see, we were doing them a favour. Afterwards we'd auction them off at a much higher price, that's true, but they weren't in a position to make those sort of profits.

‘Next I got a job as a clerk in an estate agent's. There'd been tailors' shops off Regent Street, going down towards Hanover Square, but then along came the multiple men's wear chains, Burtons in particular, and that hit them hard. It was all changing along Maddox Street – estate agents' offices springing up where the tailors used to be. Us clerks from the different offices'd go to a Lyons tea shop and talk property. Shops – that was the thing then, there was a lot of money to be made from shops.' He paused. ‘Look – I hope I'm not boring you.'

‘Oh no, not at all.' I'd heard it all before, but I wasn't bored. This unknown world of clerks and small business intrigued me. I was so green I'd thought that either you – well men, at least – went to public school and Oxbridge, or else you'd be a docker or a miner or something like that. I'd never imagined the lives of all the millions of men who, both before the war and now coming back from it, were something in between.

‘1939 – I got called up – went off for training, then there was my accident. After I got discharged I was back in civvy street, back with my old boss again. Things were just ticking over for a while, but around the time of the D-Day landings the property market began to recover – everyone feeling a bit more optimistic, when at last it seemed we were going to win. I went into partnership with a friend, Arnold Franks, and we began to buy property. He's older than me, had a bit of capital. That's how it started. And now – well, the way I see it property's an essential part of post-war reconstruction. Absolutely vital. Look at London, look at the way it is. Something's got to be done. The bomb sites! You been down the East End? I thought not. Something chronic. Well, all this council house building, and new towns – it's all very well, but it'll take years. The red tape – murder! What needs to be done is unleash the power of the money markets. Investment – we can put the money to work. There's masses of money no one can spend at the moment; if we can liberate it, we'll be doing the nation a service. We can rebuild the bombed cities, we can make life a better place after the war. It's creative. People tend to think property development's all about greed. That's a very wrong view.'

.........

One cold, frozen afternoon I went with Stan to visit a bomb site in the City. Broken heaps of rubble, walls and sightless gaps where once windows had been, pushed starkly up out of the filthy snow, with the skeleton of an old church standing bleakly behind it. The site was cheerlessness itself, but it thrilled Stan. It was to be his latest acquisition.

He stared over the low wall that remained. ‘Deserters hid out in the bomb sites, you know – some of them still there, I shouldn't wonder, except it's too cold for them now. Get frostbite or something.' He laughed.

We took a taxi back to the office. Stanley was circumspect in his use of the Bentley. Only the previous week he'd been stopped by a policeman and quizzed about his source of petrol. He'd got away with it that time, ‘But it's put the wind up me, I can tell you,' he said with a laugh.

In the impersonal confessional of the cab he began to talk about Gwendolen. I'd heard their telephone calls. He was polite, but persistent. Not that he wooed her exactly. He was more the helpful benefactor: anything she wanted, every little whim, he would obtain. I couldn't see the point. He was getting nowhere. It seemed he might finally have admitted this to himself, for he grumbled: ‘I can't make Gwendolen out. What is it with you females, always falling for these …' He groped for an adequate word.

‘Cads and bounders?' I suggested helpfully – or fascists, in her case, if Colin was to be believed.

‘You're all the same, you women. Well, not you, you've got a head on your shoulders, Di. But take my sister now – she fell for some swanky con man who ran off with her savings. Then there's my wife – mind you I'm divorcing
her
.' Then, as if he remembered something, ‘But that's turning out to be a nightmare too. Turns out getting a divorce is more difficult than closing a property deal. A
lot
more difficult. It's worse than abortion,' he said, warming to his theme. ‘All you need's the right contacts and the cash for
that
.' He stopped abruptly, looked at me. ‘Sorry, excuse me for mentioning that.'

‘It's all right,' I said airily. ‘I know all about these things.'

He looked at me quizzically. ‘Yes, I daresay you do. In theory at any rate. Anyway, the divorce laws are bloody archaic, absurd. It was only a quickie wartime marriage, and now we've gone our separate ways, but my lawyer's saying I have to fix up a dirty weekend in Brighton, so it looks as though we're not – what's the word – “colluding”. I couldn't believe it at first. I said to Joe, that's my lawyer, I said, “You mean to say we can only get a divorce if one of us doesn't want to? That's barmy, completely barmy.” “It's the law, Stanley, old son,” he said.'

Stanley looked at me. ‘Don't suppose your old man could help out there?' he said.

‘
Alan
?'

‘Don't be daft. Your dad.' He spoke in an almost wheedling tone. ‘He's a lawyer, isn't he?'

I had to tell him my father didn't do divorce. He was a criminal lawyer – and a pretty important one now, after his success at the Nuremberg trials.

‘Not to worry. It wouldn't matter if …' He let the sentence trail off into a shrug and stared out of the window at the murky streets where bent, cowed figures scuttled through the Stygian gloom.

By the time we got back to the office it was completely dark. It was the time I normally went home, but Stanley asked me to make him some coffee. He insisted on coffee, even at tea time. That was another scarce good he could always get hold of. He said I made a good cup of coffee, which pleased me inordinately, and I usually made enough for myself as well, for I enjoyed the chats we had together then, savouring our coffee with evaporated milk, and sometimes delving into the broken biscuits I bought from Woolworth's.

On this particular afternoon he still seemed preoccupied. Then, abruptly: ‘It's late, after six. Are you wanting to get off home? Doing anything this evening?'

I shook my head. ‘This weather's so awful, once you get indoors, you don't want to go out again.'

I thought he was going to invite me out for a drink, or even a meal. He hedged around a bit and then produced a letter, which he pushed across his desk towards me. A name was written on the envelope, but there was no address. The name was Titus Mavor.

Stanley didn't know the address, he said. He thought I could find out, and post the letter, or even take it round.

‘This evening?
Now
?' I was taken aback.

He looked a bit guilty: ‘Would you mind, Di? It's quite important. Take a taxi. At least it's not snowing. I wouldn't have asked if it'd been like last night. That was a
blizzard
.' And he pressed a ten shilling note into my hand.

His furtive behaviour intrigued me, but it was disturbing too. I took the blue envelope – and the rusty brown banknote.