If the Invader Comes. Derek Beaven

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      Tony leant across and touched her hair. ‘You’ll have to be more careful, won’t you, girl?’

      She stood up and held out her other hand for Frances. ‘Coming, Frank? Quickly!’ Together they made their way off between the tables.

      

      AT THE SIGHT of the wound he’d said nothing, done nothing. His fingers shaking, Vic lit another cigarette. The band thumped out a Latin number and the couples on the dance floor stalked each other.

      Close to Phyllis there was always deceit, always pain, and he wore her chaos almost closer than his own skin; but the detail of the cut was more than anything he’d expected. Its implications stole over him like a dead faint. Tony had hit her, and she was protecting him.

      The regular singer, a slight young man, was dapper in his white dinner jacket with a rose in his buttonhole; he sermonised from the stage, pinned by a searchlight:

       Keep young and beautiful, it’s your duty to be beautiful,Keep young and beautiful, if you want to be loved.

      Tony got up for the gents. ‘Might as well go for a drain-off myself. Don’t go away, will you.’

      Vic dragged at his smoke. Despite her blushes, Phyllis wore the shiny little injury as an adornment. They were already lovers. She’d given this pimp what she always contrived to deny her husband, and Tony had taunted her with it, barefaced. They’d been carrying on here, right in front of him, knowing he was too simple to see – that even when he saw, he’d do nothing, nothing. He stubbed out his cigarette. His mouth was parched. He drank the glass in front of him too quickly. It tasted trite, bitter.

      Then the others returned. The girls were quite natural, and they laughed, comparing make-up and quipping one to the other. Tony, seating himself once more, was bluff. ‘There, Vic. Told you not to go away.’ His eyes were clear, the sculpted lips a design on the fine skin.

      A table next to them erupted with laughter. Someone was standing up on his chair, holding a champagne glass in his teeth to roars of encouragement. Phyllis turned round, clapping, and then smiled in Vic’s direction. ‘All right, Vic?’

      He smiled back. ‘Fine.’

      Another crackle of laughter went up. Through the din she mimed the words ‘Thanks’ and ‘Sorry’.

      Soothed, he smiled again.

      Tony set the next round up, and the next. Then Vic drank wilfully. He told himself he needed to lighten up. You’re a lucky bloke, Vic. You’ll want to hang on to a skirt like her. He was confused. He wanted to dissolve the fierce nag of not knowing, never quite seeing, and to drown all the other issues, the kid, the money, the war, the awful round of his futureless days. A man at a further table held a woman’s hand to his lips, nibbling the fingers; he thought of Clarice.

      The club became a whirl of sensations. Noise and laughter from the tables reverberated almost visibly in the low vaults, like strips of newspaper hung out; and on the spotlit floor, bright couples wove in amongst each other. Bodies swayed, clasped, parted. A woman’s naked spine was crossed by a man’s hand and the crowd at the next table was trying to form itself into a conga dance. People were crying out, ‘Come on, then! Are you with us?’ To the frugg of the band they were a counter-chorus. Cut-glass accents aped in cockney a popular song:

       Oh we ain’t got a barrel of money,Maybe we’re ragged and funny …

      Jack would be fine, probably.

      ‘Vic!’ Phyllis was speaking to him.

      Tony was insisting on something to her. He was shouting above the swirl of noise. ‘Vic here wants to make some money, Phyll. He told me.’

      ‘You’re not kidding me he does. It’s only my earnings keeping us, to tell the honest truth. If he won’t do it, I have to. Don’t I?’

      ‘Eh?’ Vic fought to concentrate. Frankie’s young eyes were contacting his. She really did have the look of Clarice Pike, the shape of the nose, something in the line of the chin. Tony and Phyllis were linked together. There was something between them, but who was he to police her friendships? In the marriage he’d been too rigid, even a little inhuman, unfaithful at the heart, and that was why Phyllis … He could see now. She was right. Of course she was right. No one’s life was really at stake. Truly he should try to be less of a bloody Nazi.

      There was a twenty-pound note on the table.

      

      IT WAS LONDON cobblestones banging under the wheels, and the car was racing east through the starlit port. Phyllis was in the front beside Tony, her mother’s fox fur draped around her shoulders. The fur cast a shadow on her hair so that there was only the clouded trace of her white neck. She was resisting sleep – her head nodded and jerked as if an outside force had it in mind to break her.

      Vic was slumped next to Frankie in the back. The window had been wound right down. Unlit gas lamps hung where the wind came from, then swept past. Forbidden headlights made the iron beaks of warehouse hoppers poke from speeding, eyeless cages. The night was a tall sack ripped by a car’s roar, and the air driving to meet his face tasted of coal.

      Still his evening replayed itself. He mustn’t close his eyes. ‘It’s your money, Vic. Yours, mate. All you have to do is pick it up.’

      He’d been wary. ‘Me? Don’t expect to see that kind of item in a month of Sundays.’

      ‘More ways to skin a cat, aren’t there? Come on, pick it up. Think what a difference a twenty would make. And twenty more like it.’

      The tyres screeched in a left-hand corner. Frankie was forced against him. Vic’s shoulder hit the right door and he was pinned under her. The car swung again. Her eyes screwed tight, she raised an arm and clung on to his neck. Then her other hand slipped across into his. He clasped at it. She made words in his ear he couldn’t catch.

      He’d danced with her. To the muted trumpet and the whining sax, she’d answered his arm’s inclination and the nudge of his hip. When they’d sat down again Phyllis and Tony were drinking through straws from each other’s glasses. Blatant and provocative, the twenty-pound note was still on the table.

      Now beside them careered the black brick ends of streets, the outlines of sheds, the ironwork of a bascule bridge. A pub sign hung above the scream of another high-speed turn. Beyond Frankie’s perfumed hair Vic saw the city momentarily framed, a hard silhouette that touched low cloud. He’d made a deal. The food was taken care of, the rent, and shoes for little Jack. He and Phyllis could tide themselves over, pull themselves up … but there was a condition attached, some codicil that he still couldn’t recollect.

      ‘Well, Vic? What am I worth to you, Vic? What would you do for me?’

      Tony thrashed the engine through the gears. Tall cranes angled darker strokes on dark. A ship’s hull, huge, loomed almost within touching distance.

      Vic had come back from the gents, his legs loose, his brilliantined hair flopping over his eyes in strands. Through them he’d stared at the persistent banknote. There were glasses and ashtrays around it. He’d been taken up with the detail, the King’s head, the faint lettering, the fine lines that looped and scrolled.

      His own head reeled with the thought СКАЧАТЬ