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‘Nothing, but I like you.’
He must say something amusing. But nothing came. He fell back upon his memory.
‘This man was carrying a grandfather clock down the street,’ he said. ‘And he knocked over this man with it. The man got up, looked at him very crossly, and said: “Why can’t you wear a watch like everyone else?”’
‘We’ve got rather a super grandfather clock at home,’ said Polly.
‘Have you?’
‘Daddy would die if he could see me here. He’s an admiral.’
‘What attitude does he take to your being a painter?’
Polly did a loud and for all Robert knew wickedly accurate impersonation of her father. A group of people, entering the kitchen, were amazed to hear her say, in a gruff naval roar: ‘Well, it’s your choice, little Polly Perkins. All I’ll say is this. Make a success of it. Be a good painter, and we’ll be damned proud of you, the bosun and I.’
He smiled, not without a nervous glance at the new arrivals. He put a hand on her muscular arm and steered her back into the main room. Her flesh was cold and flaccid.
They began to mark time.
‘Will you be a good painter?’ he said.
‘Extremely,’ she said.
He flung his mouth on hers, too violently. She shook it off.
‘We’re supposed to be dancing,’ she said.
‘There isn’t room.’
‘Then we’d better talk. Ask me about my grisly family.’
‘Tell me about your grisly family.’
‘They think art is un-English. Unless it’s ducks and sunsets, of course. We live near Haslemere. It’s grisly.’
Up and down, up and down, marking time, a great mass of drunken people, much to the annoyance of Muswell Hill.
‘Do you really want to stay at this party, Polly?’
‘Not particularly. Why?’
‘Come home and have a drink.’
‘No.’
‘Don’t you trust me?’
‘It isn’t that.’
‘Well let me come and look at your pictures.’
‘There’s only coffee.’
‘That’s all right.’
‘Well all right then.’
‘Come on,’ he said. ‘We’d better say good-bye.’
‘It doesn’t matter.’
‘Yes, it does.’
They said good-bye to Doreen and Brenda, and their host. He wanted them all to see that he was going off with a girl.
The night was cold. ‘That’s better. It was so unreal in there,’ he said.
‘I hate parties,’ said Polly.
He offered her a taxi, but she said she’d prefer to walk. ‘It’s only just round the corner,’ she said.
They walked for ninety minutes. On Hampstead Heath he held her tight against a beech tree and squeezed two fingers down as far as they would go between her breasts. Then they walked in silence. He was frozen. An owl hooted. A goods train answered. The owl hooted again.
‘Aren’t you cold?’ he said.
‘I don’t feel the cold,’ she said. ‘We admirals’ daughters are tough.’
At last they arrived. Polly lived on the top storey of a grey nineteenth-century terrace behind Swiss Cottage. Her room was quite large. It was full of dirty things, cups, knickers, brushes, overalls, paintings. The bed wasn’t made. There was a smell of cat. All three bars of the electric fire were on. It was stifling.
She began to make two very disorganized cups of coffee.
‘I’m warning you. You’re not making love to me,’ she said.
‘Well?’
‘I just don’t want you to get the wrong idea, that’s all. I’ve decided to be a virgin until I fall in love. And I hope I never do. Men want you to give yourself to them. I want to be me. I’m an individualist. I believe people should be conventional in unimportant matters like sex. I reserve my rebellion for my work.’
‘Are these your pictures?’
‘Yes.’
They were all purple. He hated them.
‘I like them,’ he said.
‘They’re pretty good. But my next ones’ll be much better.’
‘Will they be purple too?’
‘I don’t know. Why, don’t you like purple?’
‘Yes, I do. I love purple. Polly, would you mind if we opened the window?’
‘Sorry, it doesn’t. Why, are you too hot?’
‘It is rather.’
‘I don’t feel the heat.’
‘Could we switch one of the bars off?’
‘Sorry, they don’t. It’s all or nothing. The switch has gone.’
He took a sip of his coffee. He was beginning to sweat.
‘Do you think this milk’s all right?’ he said.
‘Oh, God, isn’t it?’
‘No.’
‘I’ll make you a black one.’
‘Thanks. Do you have a cat?’
‘No. Why?’
‘I just wondered.’
He hated to admit to himself his delicacy over smells, and sweating, and sour milk.
‘It’s funny you should say that. People often ask me that,’ she said.
‘Perhaps you strike them as the sort of person who’d like cats.’
‘I don’t. I hate them.’
The sweat was pouring off him. His skin was prickling all over. How loathsome it all was, parties and sex and purple paintings and sour milk and unmade beds.
Over their coffee Polly amused him with further mimicry, imitating to perfection such well-known characters as her mother, sister, brother and headmistress. He felt too tired to do more than laugh in the right places, and as soon as he could he took his leave.
‘Thanks, Polly. It’s been lovely. See you,’ he said.
As he went down the stairs his pants and vest stuck to his body. He opened the door and breathed a great gulp of air. He was feeling sick. He was a lump in the sore throat of night. He felt messy and miserable. He wanted to play Scrabble and read books and improve his mind and work hard and help British exports and raise a family. His own children, loved and loving.
He picked up a milk bottle and hurled it viciously at the railings. Nothing stirred in the Swiss Cottage night.
It was 2.45 a.m. Perhaps Brenda or Doreen would be there and they could have a cup of coffee, delaying the moment when he’d be alone again, alone in bed. But perhaps they wouldn’t.
Bayswater 27663. Probably she’d be in bed, or still at the party, or with someone. It was absurd to ring her up at 2.45 a.m.
The tone of her telephone was French and encouraging. He whistled to keep up his worldliness.
‘Hullo.’
‘Hullo. Robert here.’
‘Who?’
‘Robert. I met you at the party.’
‘Oh, yes. Hullo.’
‘I hope I haven’t disturbed you.’
‘No. I was just having a coffee before going to bed.’
‘It’s just that I’ve sort of found myself in your area and …’ And what?
‘Twenty-three, Leominster Crescent. Top bell.’
He took a taxi. She lived between Bayswater and Notting Hill, also in a nineteenth-century terrace, but this one was cream. She had a glorious Persian carpet – a family heirloom – and a great number of books. She had a record player but no television. She was tall, slim, angular, with rather a large nose and a voice that sounded as if she had a perpetual cold caught at a very good school. When she was old there would be a permanent dewdrop on the end of her nose. She wasn’t his cup of tea, unlike her coffee, which was superb.
She represented good coffee and elegant maturity. She had bags under her eyes, and looked tired, but made no effort to get rid of him. She was 23. He couldn’t kiss her, couldn’t rouse himself to anything like that, and she seemed to understand this. She told him how much she hated parties. She didn’t mention the man she’d been with. They played a desultory but enjoyable game of Scrabble and she gave him a pile of books which she thought he’d enjoy. She asked him why he tried so hard to be amusing. Did he think himself dull? She didn’t think he was dull, except perhaps when he tried to be amusing.
They had further cups of coffee and he began to tell her the story of his life. At last the grey nicotine-stained thumbs of a London dawn began to squeeze the darkness out of the sky. Sonia drew back the curtains and made breakfast, and then he went home to bed.
‘I’m sorry I told you the story of my life,’ he said.
‘Not at all. I enjoyed it,’ she said.
Chapter 3
Early Days
Our story begins in the early hours of a fresh May morning in West London – in Richmond, to be precise – in the front second floor bedroom of number 10, River View West, to be still more precise. At 4.14 a.m. on that day in 1935 there was born to Emma Jane Bellamy, frail young wife of Thomas Robert Cunard Eddison Bellamy, a son. It was a surprisingly normal and easy birth. The boy weighed eight pounds, five ounces, had a hearty pair of lungs, sought more of his mother’s milk than his mother’s frail health permitted him, and was christened Robert Thomas Cunard Eddison Bellamy.
The prosperity of the Bellamy family had been founded in the eighteenth century by one Thomas Robert Bellamy who invented new ways of curing warts and herrings. Bellamy’s Bloater Paste and Bellamy’s Herbal Bunion Remover have a modest reputation even today in some of the more outlandish corners of Eastern England. But the family did not remain for long in these traditional pursuits. They turned their backs on the vulgarities of industry and became farmers and lawyers. Thomas Bellamy was already, at the time of his son’s birth, making a considerable name for himself in the harsh discipline of the bar. On the night of the happy event his attention was in fact divided between the bawling but as yet uninteresting infant and the preparation of what was perhaps to be his greatest case – the prosecution of the notorious Butcher of Wentworth, also known as the Stiletto Niblick Murderer, who lured his innocent victims into a bunker on the dog-leg seventeenth, always a treacherous hole. Thomas Bellamy was a staunch Conservative and a stern though humane disciplinarian. He loved his country, his wife and his only child – in that order.
Emma Bellamy’s flawless beauty revealed little of her physical frailty. Only her intimate friends knew how much suffering her asthma, anaemia, weak heart, gall-stones, ostler’s ankle, Higson’s disease and nervous headaches cost her. After Robert’s birth her husband did not permit her to rise until twelve-thirty or to remain up after nine-thirty. She spent most of the day reclining on a sofa reading books about art and architecture. Young Robert adored her from afar. He respected his father from afar and adored his mother, while his practical wants were taken care of by his nanny.
‘Ah!’ said Dr Schmuck.
The Bellamy household was, as households go, a happy one. The young child, too, seemed happy. Perhaps he had to be rather more quiet than he would have wished, because of his mother’s health. Perhaps his contacts with the other young children of the neighbourhood were not quite as frequent as he would have liked. Perhaps his social life was unduly restricted by his family’s fear that he would fall into the Thames. But there was a reason for this. He was the only male Bellamy of his generation. On his well-being depended the continuation of the family name. He must have mumps as early as possible, and no other serious diseases at all.
Grandfather Bellamy, the only man among five sisters, and now dead, had three children – Robert’s father, and his aunts Margaret and Hetty. Grandfather Bellamy’s cousin, Thomas Bellamy, never married and Thomas’s brother Robert had two children – Phyllis, who became a nun, and Thomas, who was struck by lightning at the age of twenty. Robert’s Great Uncle Thomas, a keen ornithologist, spotted a new kind of warbler near Wootton Bassett, and for a few glorious years it was accepted as a sub-species and known as Bellamy’s Warbler. But it was struck off the list in 1928, having proved to be only a slightly albino Dusky Warbler, and it now lay in Robert’s power, and his alone – for his mother was too frail to have further children – to save the family name from being associated solely with bloaters and bunions.
One Sunday afternoon in early 1938, Nanny and Robert were brought downstairs to have tea with his parents. In the street could be heard the merry pre-war street cries of the muffin man, the crumpet man, the ice-cream man and the itinerant furniture remover. But already the clouds of war were beginning to gather. At lunch Aunt Margaret had commented: ‘There’ll be war, you mark my words. That Hitler – he’s a bad lot.’ His mother had said: ‘I’m not so sure. I think Herr Hitler has been misjudged.’ Now at tea, Nanny struck a more domestic note.
