The Weight of Numbers (10 page)

Kathleen worried: what could she give Margaret in return for her companionship? What amusement could she afford? She began to see that John Arven's cool curiosity had its limits, that an icy objectivity would not suffice in every situation.

She began to measure how little she knew about being alive.

Then came the awkward moment when Kathleen realized what she was: an amusement afforded Margaret by her latest dry spell. Deep down, and all the time, Margaret wanted men.

When Margaret was seeing a man, Kathleen did not see her from one day to the next.

Moments with men were the measure of Margaret's life: evenings in the cinema or at the pub; furtive whispers on the stairs; nights when she did not come home at all. Then, his furlough done, the intensity of departure: the porter tearing her hand from the handle of the carriage as the train pulled away. The smoke, the steam, the grit. These things only
piqued Margaret's appetite – when the sentiment ebbed, in a week or two – for the next glance, the next night out, another arm round her waist.

She was ‘no better than she ought to be', as Kathleen's mother would say. She was ‘second-hand goods'. From the aloof perspectives of the scientific method, however, such strictures counted for little.

‘Want to come down the Four Feathers?' said Margaret.

‘Why not?' said Kathleen, with a tremor of wrongdoing.

They got ready. Margaret did Kathleen's make-up for her. Margaret's technique began and ended at the eyes. She larded her own eyes with kohl and mascara in a vain attempt to draw attention away from her discoloured teeth. She tried this look on Kathleen.

‘It's lovely,' said Kathleen, captivated by the image in her glass, the Egyptian princess there.

‘Oh, cobblers,' Margaret snapped. She unscrewed the lid off a jar of cold cream and ordered Kathleen to wipe it away. ‘Let's try something else.'

The Four Feathers was one of those shabby commercial drinking places where scraps of lunchtime bar-shrimp litter the sawdust on the floor of the saloon bar and the sawdust is black and malty and sticks to the heel of your shoe. It was packed. Margaret led Kathleen on, head down, elbows out, a human battering ram. A cross-current parted them. Kathleen called out to her friend. Margaret, intent on reaching the counter, did not notice her. Kathleen thought she would wait where she was, but the milling crowd drove her, like a stick in a millrace, steadily towards the other side of the room. When the current changed course suddenly, she found herself pressed up against the counter. ‘What's your name, love?'

The voice was only one component of the din.

A finger jabbed her upper arm. ‘Hello. What's your name?'

She turned.

Back home, the timbres of Kathleen's voice spelled property. Here, she might as well be ‘the lowest of the low'. Her accent was a thick and
bitter Durham: sharp, flaked, a rusted gate squealing in the wind. So she spoke only when spoken to, and very softly.

‘Kathleen,' she said, softly, into the widest smile she'd ever seen.

‘Katherine?'

She nodded and tried to meet the man's eyes. His jaw was too distracting, so thick and pink and smooth.

The jaw offered to buy Kathleen a drink. She asked it for a pink gin; it was the only drink she could think of by name. A woman in a dress made of tiny mirrors had ordered one at a swank bar in a film she had seen with Margaret the night before.

He handed it to her and their eyes met. His eyes sparkled. They were pretty blue eyes. She liked them. Then he smiled – and her gaze fell, magnetized, back to his jaw again: the cleft chin, the muscular smoothness of it.

She turned away, blushing, as from something obscene. She sipped her drink and tried not to splutter. The drink was bitter, like hedge clippings.

‘What do you do, then?'

At this time, she still nursed ambitions for the person John Arven believed she could be. She still held out hopes for the letter she had sent him. So she said: ‘I'm a computer.'

‘Oh yes?'

‘Ask me anything,' she said. Not a lie, she told herself: an experiment in identity.

He smirked. ‘What's the square root of a hundred and forty-four, then?'

‘Twelve.'

He laughed. ‘Very good.'

Wrinkling her nose, she drank off a good mouthful of pink gin. She tightened her throat over the burning liquor, counted to five and risked a breath.

‘Ask me another,' she said.

‘The square root of a hundred and forty-five?' He said it like it was the easiest calculation in the world.

It certainly wasn't hard. ‘Twelve point oh-four-one-five-nine-four-five-seven-eight-eight… what?'

His smile had gone. He folded his arms.

‘You're making that up.'

‘How would you know?' This from Margaret, sprung from nowhere; she muscled in between them.

‘Oh,' he said, coldly. He knew Margaret. ‘Friend of yours, is she?' He picked up his pint and moved along the bar, away from them.

Kathleen watched him go, disappointed.

Margaret grabbed Kathleen by the arm and led her off to the other side of the central counter. She hissed in Kathleen's ear, ‘Can't you tell a bloody policeman when you see one?'

Kathleen tried to maintain eye contact with the man but he had turned his back, nursing his pint. She had to take Margaret's word that he was a policeman. He could have been anything. Munitions. Railways.

Apparently policemen didn't count. ‘A policeman!' Margaret railed. ‘Hobnobbing with a bloody policeman!' She parked herself down beside Kathleen on a padded bench near the toilets. Two sailors came up and offered them drinks. ‘What'll you have, ladies?' asked the older of the two: he had one of those permanently flushed faces you imagine might bleed if you touch it.

‘A pale ale,' said Margaret, ‘ta, love.' She glanced at Kathleen. The thought of pink gin made Kathleen queasy, but she didn't know any other drinks. ‘Two pale ales,' Margaret said, covering for Kathleen's silence.

The younger sailor went off to the bar. He was exceptionally tall and his straw-coloured hair, though regulation short, grew out at all angles. In the buffet and slew of the crowded bar, he tottered about like a young, well-groomed scarecrow.

With a strange convulsion – a red pocketknife clipping shut – the older sailor bent forward at the hip, then fell back into his chair. ‘Oof!' he said. He was short, and squat, and his limbs had no flexibility. As he got comfortable, he moved his arms with convulsive jerks, clicking them into position. His hands were red, too.

His name was Dick. Dick Jinks. A funny name for a sailor. ‘What are you drinking?' Kathleen asked him, an experiment in conversation.

‘Wallop,' Dick grinned, creasing his swollen red face so that it looked as if it might pop. He meant draught bitter. ‘Wallop by name and nature.' He laughed, revealing large, cramped teeth. All evening he came out with these catchphrases. He laughed at them, as at a joke someone else had made.

The sailors had met during the Dunkirk evacuation, and had run into each other again by accident, a couple of nights before. They had stories about Dunkirk. The younger sailor, Donald, went first. Donald seemed nervous, unused to company. He ran his hands through his hair, which ignored him and sprang back into place. His tale began dashingly enough. He was still in civvies at the time of the evacuation. He was one of those gallant yachtsmen who had joined the flotilla out of pure patriotism and fellow feeling. He had borrowed his father's yacht. Kathleen imagined his father waving him off at the jetty. The boy was very well-spoken. Almost BBC. What was he doing in a mere rating's uniform? ‘Do you know Hayling Island?' he asked them.

‘“Do you know Hayling”!' The elder sailor's laughter boomed around the lounge. Heads turned. Donald blushed. He was really very young. Margaret laid her hand on his arm. ‘Go on, love.' But Dick wanted his turn. ‘Pissing their pants they was!' He didn't have much of a story, though his description of the strafings was vivid. ‘Pissing their pants!' He laughed. Kathleen saw right down his throat.

Dick and Donald walked them home. It was impossibly dark. Kathleen staggered. The paving stones were treacherous in the shoes Margaret had lent her. Dick offered her his arm, and she hung off it,
gratefully. It surprised her to notice how short he was: he was barely taller than her. His young friend dawdled, or Margaret was holding him back; she seemed to be having trouble with her heel. Kathleen and Dick got to the door of the hostel first. He took off his cap and braced himself as though for inspection. ‘Maybe I can call on you. We can have a drink again sometime,' he said.

‘Sometime,' she said.

‘You knows what I drink,' he said, and laughed his great red booming laugh. Even his eyes were red.

‘Wallop,' she said.

‘That's the ticket,' he said, stepping forward, as though she had uttered a password. He took her hands in his. An odd look spread over his face. It was bloated and empty, all at once. No one had looked at Kathleen with need before. She did not understand. ‘Spare us a kiss, love – a little kiss.'

The impossibility of it was suddenly, liberatingly funny. She laughed. Surprised, he let her go. She coughed to cover her laughter. ‘Frog in my throat,' she said. It was as good a catchphrase as any of the sailor's, but he did not smile. An experiment: she pecked him on the corner of his mouth. He tasted of beer and cigarettes. He ran his hand around her waist, squeezed, and kissed her cheek. She experienced a moment's revulsion towards his flushed face, his too-red lips, as though the lips might leave a mark on her. Then he let go, and she found herself wanting to repeat the kiss.

‘Goodnight, then,' Dick said.

That was all.

She went inside and waited for Margaret. The sitting room was empty. She slipped Margaret's shoes off her feet – they had been too big for her, and far too high.

Weary of waiting, she went up to her room in her stockinged feet, carrying Margaret's shoes. She took off Margaret's slip. She unclipped Margaret's stockings and eased them off, ever so carefully.

Margaret was still not back.

Kathleen went to bed.

She lay still, wondering what else there was. What else she did not know.

Margaret knew, but Margaret wasn't telling. She had vanished again.

A week passed, and Kathleen didn't see Margaret once.

She was not worried or put out. She was growing used to Margaret's rhythms. Margaret's men overrode the girls' friendship for only a little while. So this time, while she waited for Margaret's man to depart, Kathleen tried to shake off her loneliness. She braved the sitting room.

The other residents were stenographers from Shepherd's Bush, WAFS from Tottenham, fellow nippies from the Lyons corner houses on the Strand and Oxford Street. They intimidated Kathleen: great iconic hulks of girls. By now, though, she knew how to smile, what to say when she entered or left the room, the gestures she should make. She loved to listen to them. The girls spoke a different language, a Margaret sort of language.

‘So I said to her…'

‘And he said to me…'

At night, bits of their conversation swirled about her, punctuating her dreams, a sort of verbal shrapnel, highly coloured, piecemeal and surreal. Billy drops leaflets over Berlin and Becky does firemen two at a time. David wants me to do it with him. James bought me a ring.

Each evening, as they got ready for this movie, that meal, this man or that, they gathered to listen to the BBC. The strange names of the cities the Nazis had overrun lent the news an operatic quality. The fall of Norway. In Denmark, something rotten. The names erupted like fantasies through the wireless – a huge mahogany box which took pride of place in the room.

One early evening, as Kathleen sat listening to the radio, breathing in the heady acetone of the other girls' nail polish, there was a knock on the door, and it was for her.

‘Remember me?' he boomed, and laughed.

There on the stoop was Dick Jinks, the powerful, squat, red-faced sailor, much older than her, who had walked her home the week before.

Kathleen blinked at him, surprised. She had imagined him in deep Atlantic, shepherding the convoys or whatever it was he did.

‘Surprised to see me, baby?' His words, glib and saucy, sat ill with the anxiety in his eyes. He raised his hand towards her – a wave? a handshake? – and stopped mid-gesture. He didn't seem to know what to do with his hand. It trembled. ‘Ho, ho,' he sang. ‘You're the port in my storm!'

London sunsets were a marvel, since the bombing had begun in earnest: cities of vapour taking leave of a city of stone.

‘Dick?'

He sang, ‘Yo, ho, ho.'

‘Where's your friend?'

Blood darkened Dick Jinks's face; in the sunset, his flushed face appeared polished and hard. ‘That poofter? That nancy? That queen? Fuck him, darling.' He blinked. ‘Ha, ha,' he added, in mitigation.

‘Dick?'

‘Will you take a turn with me?' The words struck his funny bone immediately. ‘A turn! A turn, Ho!'

‘Dick?'

‘Will you? I'll stand you a Watney's.' He winked. ‘Say you will.'

She looked at him. He was no more ready for a night on the town than she was. He was in uniform of a sort, but so threadbare it looked more like labourer's clothes. Lines of braid hung off the sleeves of his jacket in tatters. The material where the braid had been was crusted white. His bell-bottoms, uncreased and shapeless like a cowboy's chaps, scuffed the steps as she led him inside.

He came forward, flinging a leg out in front of him, then falling onto it. Flinging, falling. As he passed her, she smelled something clean but unappealing, like disinfectant.

She showed him into the sitting room and ran upstairs to dress. She was as quick as she could be. She was nervous of him, afraid of what he might say to the other girls. Every so often his ‘Yo, ho, ho!' would shiver the floor under her feet, as though he were directly beneath her, calling to her, his red, wet mouth pressed like a sucker to the ceiling.