Tel protested. She ruffled his hair. He squirmed. Stilton moved up and made room for her. She and Cal sat down together. Edna Stilton stuck a plate in front of her.
‘Woolton pie,’ she said, almost as a warning.
‘Great,’ said Kitty, not even looking at it.
Cal heard the table dissolve into half a dozen conversations and felt relieved that he was no longer their focus. Kitty Stilton chatted to her father, and as her mother gathered up plates from the first course and dished out bowls for the next, she turned to him and said, ‘Well?’
‘Well?’ he said.
‘What’s the uniform you say you’re not wearing?’
‘United States Army. I’m a regular. A captain. And you?’
‘You mean you don’t know?’
‘I’m sure I’ve seen it. I just can’t place the uniform. I can’t even tell if it’s blue or black. Are you a Wren?’
She laughed, a hugely engaging laugh, devoid of mockery, genuinely amused that he had to ask.
‘I’m a copper. A sergeant in the Met. Didn’t my old man tell you?’
‘I’m sure he’d’ve gotten round to it.’
‘And there was I thinking he boasted about me to every eligible man he met.’
She paused, glanced down at the unadorned fingers of Cal’s hands.
‘And you are eligible, aren’t you?’
And, not waiting for an answer, got up to help her mother serve.
Cal had a friend in Zurich who pointedly removed his wedding band when he went out to pick up women. It left a ring of paler skin on his finger as blatant as a tattoo-it all but screamed ‘married’-and he never failed to score. Cal could not imagine putting on a wedding band, but then he could not imagine anyone who had put one on ever wanting to take it off.
Kitty returned to the table, plonked down what appeared to be a hazard to shipping in off-white, dotted with black spots that could be raisins or detonators.
‘Right,’ said Edna Stilton. ‘You know what else I got at the butcher’s? Suet. That’s what I got. I got the last bit o’ suet in the shop. So you lot get spotted dick. Only watch out for the sultanas, on account of I’ve had ‘em in the cupboard since 1932. You break a tooth, you’ve only yourself to blame.’
From the look on the face of every man present-Stilton sat with his spoon upright in his fist; ‘those about to eat salute you’-Cal was aware that, whatever it amounted to, spotted dick was to be regarded and received as a treat.
Cal put it down to the length of the evening-the light if somewhat chilly May nights. Whilst he would gladly have accepted that the social day was over and gone back to his hotel, the Stiltons would not hear of it. They adjourned to an upstairs room. Turned on the radio.
‘You can’t go now,’ they all seemed to protest in unison. ‘Billy Cotton’s on the wireless.’
This meant nothing to him. A band Cal privately thought not a patch on Benny Goodman or Dnke Ellington piped up and the twins took turns twirling a blushing but unprotesting Miss Greenlees across the carpet. She was a far better dancer than either of them, as she proved when Tom-from-the-Ministry took their place and matched her skills with his. No one involved him in the dance, no one ‘asked’ him to dance or hinted that he should ask any one of the endless Stilton daughters. Perhaps they’d reached the boundary of good manners-he would have hated to do it but could scarcely see a way to say no. Instead he listened to Edna Stilton regale him with the lives of absent lodgers. Her house, it seemed, had always had a floating population; several generations of clerks, librarians and shop girls had passed through. An extended, inconstant family.
‘O’ course this time last year there was rooms going begging. Nobody wanted ‘em. Everybody’d packed their kiddies off to the country. But we lost so many houses since the Blitz started that a good room’s become hard to find again. Mr Bell-he lodged at number thirty-eight with Mrs Wisby. Got bombed out. We took him in when old Mr Trewin went to live with his daughter in Weston-super-Mare…’
Cal stopped listening. Stilton had lit up his pipe and appeared to be in a huddle with his daughter Kitty. Cal guessed from the intent look on their faces that they were discussing work. He could hear nothing in the smothering cloud of music and laughter of what they were saying, but when Stilton looked right at him he saw his chance and took it.
‘I think I should go now, Walter. It’s been a long day.’
Stilton got up, tapped out his pipe on the side of the fireplace.
‘Then I’ll run you back.’
‘No. It’s OK. I’ll get a cab.’
‘Not in this neck o’ the woods you won’t. Like I said, I’ll run you up West.’
Kitty was looking at Cal-still perched on the edge of her father’s armchair, one arm stretched out along the back, one leg swinging gently.
‘Don’t worry, Dad. I can give Mr Cormack a lift. No bother,’ she said.
Stilton protested, ‘He doesn’t want to ride-‘
She cut him short. ‘Dad, I’m going home to Covent Garden. It’s hardly out of my way, is it?’
Then she turned to Cal.
‘Up West? What hotel you in? Claridge’s? All the Yanks is in Claridge’s.’
Only when she reached down a black motorcycle helmet from the hallstand did Cal realise the exactitude of the word ‘ride’. But he was trapped now, in the web of his own sense of ‘manners’. He said his goodbyes-thanked the Stiltons for their hospitality and followed Kitty into the night. A large Ariel motorcycle-5OOcc at least-was leaning on its stand at the kerb. Kitty hitched up her skirt.
‘Let me kick ‘er up, then you hop on behind. You ever ridden pillion?’
His ‘no’ was drowned out as she leapt bodily off the ground to land on the kickstart, and the bike fired up.
‘You put yer arms ‘round me waist! You got that?’
Cal did as he was told, stretched a leg over the pillion seat and slid on behind her, wondering, as she yelled ‘tighter’, if this was as dangerous a venture as she seemed to think it was.
Kitty had none of her father’s sense of caution. It was now pitch dark, but she throttled up the motorbike and roared through the City of London at sixty miles an hour. Past the Bank of England, over Holborn Viaduct, to streak along Oxford Street before zigzagging across Hanover Square to Claridge’s.
When she finally stopped Cal’s legs were shaking, his fingers were numb, and he felt his hair must be standing on end like Elsa Lanchester’s in The Bride of Frankenstein.
He hadn’t a clue what to say to this woman. Southern manners took over, he offered her a frozen hand and said, ‘It’s been a pleasure.’
‘I do like a feller wot can talk posh,’ she said, and had to grin before he realised she was taking the mickey.
‘You and my dad’ll be working together then?’
‘I guess we will.’
‘Then we could be havin’ a lot more “pleasure”.’
She kicked the bike back to life. Cal headed for the door, the elevator and bed.
He flicked on the bathroom light and pulled the door three-quarters shut so that a sliver of light cut across the bedroom carpet. Just enough light to see what he was doing. If the Germans could spot that maybe they’d earn the shot. He drew back the curtains onto a moonless, cloudy night. Threw off his jacket, loosened his tie and wished half-heartedly for a bottle of bourbon. It had been another day in which he had got nowhere. Some part of him wished for the spectacular distraction of an air raid, and the part of him that furnished guilt for all occasions stepped on this as though upon a cigarette butt tossed into the gutter.
There came a gentle tapping on his door, and when he opened it there stood Kitty Stilton, helmet in one hand, a large white envelope in the other.
‘Dispatch for Captain Cormack,’ she said and grinned.
‘Is that what you told them downstairs?’
‘Yeah. Actually it’s yesterday’s Evening News stuffed inside an old envelope. But Claridge’s ain’t the sort of hotel where they let a man stroll in with a strange woman.’