‘Where?’
‘Tower of London to St Dunstan’s Church Hall in Maroon Street. William Joyce is speaking. Not Mosley, unfortunately. There’ll be one hundred blackshirts, they say.’
‘Where’s Maroon Street?’
‘Stepney.’
I almost said, where’s Stepney? — but stopped myself. I looked fixedly at her.
‘I’d like you to be on that march, Faith. But only if you want to.’
‘If you want me there, I’ll be there, Miss Clay,’ she said, loyally. ‘But I don’t think it’ll be much of a show.’
‘Doesn’t matter. No one else will be covering it. This might just be our scoop. Blackshirts marching into the East End. .’ I felt excitement building. ‘You’ll be marching, I’ll be taking photographs — and then we’ve got our Mosley interview. Send a teleprint to New York.’
I bought a gazetteer of London with detailed fold-out maps. As I studied them I realised that the East End might easily have been in Siam or Tanganyika or Siberia as far as I was concerned. It seemed that London stopped at Aldgate and the City and all those streets of low houses and docks and wharves and the meandering river were part of a terra incognita that only its denizens penetrated. In the gazetteer, I read:
‘To the east of the City lies Whitechapel, a district largely inhabited by Jews (tailors, dressmakers, furriers, bootmakers, cigar-makers, etc.). Their presence here, and in Mile End and Stepney, is chiefly due to the Russian persecutions of the nineteenth century.’
I unfolded my delicate beautiful map and saw the districts east of the City, traversed by the great thoroughfares heading towards the Thames Estuary — Whitechapel Road, Commercial Road, Cable Street — carving their way through Stepney, Limehouse, Bromley, Poplar, Bow and Stratford. . I felt that strange frisson of anticipation that an explorer in Africa must experience, about to set off into the unknown. Except in this case the map wasn’t blank — every little street, lane and alleyway had its appointed name. This land was densely populated — it had its churches and schools, its police stations, hospitals, post offices and civic buildings. I would be entering Olde England and the names I read were redolent of the country’s long and complex history: Shadwell, Robin Hood Lane, Regent’s Canal, Lochnagar Street, Ropemaker’s Field, Wapping Wall. . But nobody I knew ever went there.
*
THE BARRANDALE JOURNAL 1977
In anyone’s house at any given time there will, I suppose, be half a dozen appliances or components not functioning properly. A light fused, a door-handle loose, a floorboard creaking, an electric iron inexplicably giving no heat. In the cottage’s case, for example, there is a permanently dripping cold tap in my bathroom, a drawer in the kitchen that will not fully shut, and an armchair that has mysteriously lost one castor. Also, the Hillman Imp seems to be leaking oil from somewhere, judging from the dark stains on the gravel, and my wireless reception will switch off completely for ten minutes or so, offering up muffled voices obscured by crackling gunfire, before it bizarrely resumes normal service.
As with your house, so with your body. I’ve a bruise on my shin, the remains of a splinter in my palm that seems to be turning septic, an ingrowing big toenail and my left knee cartilage twinges with a spasm of pain when I rise from a seat. We make do — favour the right leg, use the left hand, slip a paperback under the armchair where the castor should be. It amazes me what compromises we happily live with. We limp along, patching up, improvising.
Talking of compromises in my life, I see now that Cleve Finzi was my knight in slightly tarnished armour. The fact that he was handsome and successful, selfish and self-absorbed — not to say a little vapid, from time to time — doesn’t reflect badly on me, I believe. At certain periods of our lives we — men and women — need exactly this type of person. Their easiness on the eye is all you require — handsome men, beautiful women, it’s a pleasure just to be close to them. Then growing maturity tells you that this type of person simply will not do any more and we sense instinctively that we need someone, something, altogether more intriguing.
So I ran away from Cleve and New York and his terrifying wife and took off, heading south with Hanna and Constanze. A mistake, another mistake.
I remember Cleve calling the office that week before the march. The teleprinter informed us of the time of the call; the phone rang; the operator connected us and we spoke across, or rather, under the Atlantic. There was a lot of hissing and interference on the line but I could hear his voice distinctly. I waved Faith out of the office, stuck a fingertip in my free ear and listened to my one-time lover’s voice crossing the thousands of miles between us.
‘Everything’s ready,’ I said, all brisk professionalism. ‘We’ve the whole march covered. And I’m going to hire another photographer. I’ll be taking pictures as well. Between the two of us we should get something good.’
‘It’s wonderful to hear your voice, Amory.’
‘I know the other photographer. He’s very competent.’
‘I miss you.’
Why do the simplest most timeworn declarations affect us so?
‘I miss you too,’ I said, clearing my throat, glad he wasn’t in the room with me. ‘But it’s much better this way.’
‘Send me everything you have as soon as possible. You choose and crop the photos. We’re going to do this big piece on fascism in England. Italy, Germany, now England. .’ He paused. ‘When’s the march, again?’
‘Wednesday.’
‘Perfect. We’re going to beat everyone on this. They sound as unpleasant as the Nazis, your blackshirts.’
Well, we shall see on Wednesday, I said, and in close-up. We talked a little more about the practicalities of sending the photographs to the USA and he told me to spare no expense. Motorcycle courier to Southampton, the fastest liner available, and so forth. I assured him I would make every expensive effort and he hung up with a breezy ‘Good luck. Don’t let me down, sweetheart.’
I remember at the weekend going to Sussex, to Beckburrow and finding that Xan was there and, to my surprise, my father. He looked well, though slimmer, and he wore a beret. It was clear that beneath it his head was shaved. Before lunch we went for a stroll around the garden.
‘I’m better now,’ he said, with a wide smile. ‘Cured. I’m home for good.’
‘What happened?’ I said. I still felt odd with him, couldn’t judge his mood and consequently was a little tense. Was this cheery humour genuine or feigned?
‘It’s a wonderful new operation.’
He took off his beret and I saw two round pink scars, like small coins, set just above both his temples, his hair short stubble growing back.
‘They just bore into the skull, you see, from both sides and then cut the fibres, you see, the connections, to the frontal lobes of your brain. It’s amazing. I’ve stopped worrying about everything. Everything. I’m back.’
He opened his arms to me and I stepped into his embrace. He held me tight.
‘Have you forgiven me, my darling?’ he whispered in my ear.
‘Of course, Papa. Of course.’
I remember meeting Lockwood in a pub on Fleet Street, the Dreadnaught. We shook hands, formally, smiling nervously at each other. He had grown a small moustache — it didn’t suit him — and he told me almost instantly that he was engaged to be married. I congratulated him, showing real pleasure, I hoped, and he began to relax.
He said he was working part-time for the Daily Sketch but was hoping for full employment there, soon. I asked him if he’d do some freelance work for Global-Photo-Watch and he said yes, immediately.
‘I love that magazine,’ he said. ‘Better than Time. Better than the Illustrated.’