I unlocked my door, tried the light switch, got no joy. I struck a match and lit four candles stuck in a candelabra on the heavy mantelpiece. I glanced in the mirror and didn't like the dull-eyed face I saw there. I was reckless. My next candle allowance was a month off but I'd always liked living dangerously. In a small way.
I put on my tattered tweed overcoat, Burberry's 1938, lay down on the dirty bed and put my hands behind my head. I brooded.
I wasn't tired, but I didn't feel very well. How could I, on my rations?
I went back to thinking about Frenchy's trouble. It was better than thinking about trouble in general. She must be involved in something, although she never looked as if she had the energy to take off her slouch hat, let alone get mixed up in anything illegal. Still, since the krauts had taken over in 1946 it wasn't hard to do something illegal. As we used to say, if it wasn't forbidden, it was compulsory. Even strays and vagabonds like me were straying under license — in my case procured by brother Gottfried, ex-Godfrey, now Deputy Minister of Public Security. How he'd made it baffled me, with our background. Because obviously the first people the krauts had cleared out when they came to liberate us was the revolutionary element. And in England, of course, that wasn't the tattered, hungry mob rising in fury after centuries of oppression. It was the well-heeled, well-meaning law-civil-service-church-and-medicine brigade who came out of their warm houses to stir it all up.
Anyway, thinking about Godfrey always made my flesh creep, so I pulled my mind back to Frenchy. She was a tall, skinny rake of a girl, a worn out, battered old twenty in a dirty white mac and a shapeless pull-down hat with the smell of a Cagney gangster film about it. I never noticed what was under the mac — she never took it off. Once or twice she'd gone mad and undone it. I had the impression that underneath she was wearing a dirty black mac. No stockings, muddy legs, shoes worn down to stubs, not exactly Ginger Rogers on the town with Fred Astaire. Still, the customers liked her singing, particularly her deadpan rendering of Deutschland Über Alles, slow, husky and meaningful, with her white face staring out over the people at the bar. A kraut by nationality, but not by nature, that was Frenchy.
I yawned. Not much to do but go to sleep and try for that erotic dream where I was sinking my fork into a plate of steak and kidney pudding. Or perhaps, if I couldn't get to sleep, I'd try a nice stroll round the crater where St. Paul's had been — my favourite way of turning my usual depression into a really fruity attack of melancholia.
Then there was a knock.
I went rigid.
Late night callers were usually cops. In a flash I saw my face with blood streaming from the mouth and a lot of black bruises. Then the knock came again. I relaxed. Cops never knocked twice — just a formal rap and then in and all over you.
The door opened and Frenchy stepped in. She closed the door behind her.
I was off the bed in a hurry.
I shook my head. "Sorry, Frenchy. It's no go."
She didn't move. She stared at me out of her dark blue eyes. The shadows underneath looked as though someone had put inky thumbs under them.
"Look, Frenchy," I said. "I've told you there's nothing doing." She ought to have gone before. It was the code. If someone wanted by the cops asked for help you had the right to tell them to go. No one thought any the worse of you. If you were a breadwinner it was expected.
She went on standing there. I took her by the shoulders, about faced her, wrenched the door open with one hand and ran her out on to the landing.
She turned to look at me. "I only came to borrow a fag," she said sadly, like a kid wrongfully accused of drawing on the wallpaper.
The code said I had to warn her, so I shoved her back into my room again.
She sat on my rumpled bed in the guttering candlelight with her beautiful, mud-streaked legs dangling over the side. I passed her a cigarette and lit it.
"There were two cops in the Merrie asking about you," I said. "CID!"
"Oh," she said blankly. "I wonder why? I haven't done anything."
"Passing on coupons, trying to buy things with money, leaving London without a pass — " I suggested. Oh, how I wanted to get her off the premises.
"No. I haven't done anything. Anyhow, they must know I've got a full passport."
I gaped at her. I knew she was a kraut — but why should she have a full passport? Owning one of those was like being invisible — people ignored what you did. You could take what you wanted from who you wanted. You could, if you felt like it, turn a dying old lady out of a hospital wagon so you could have a joy-ride, pinch food — anything. A sensible man who saw a full passport holder coming towards him turned round and ran like hell in the other direction. He could shoot you and never be called to account. But how Frenchy had come by one beat me.
"You're not in the government," I said. "How is it you've got an FP?"
"My father's Willi Steiner."
I looked at her horrible hat, her draggled blonde hair, her filthy mac and scuffed shoes. My mouth tightened.
"You don't say?"
"My father's the Mayor of Berlin," she said flatly. "There are eight of us and mother's dead so no one cares much. But of course we've all got full passports."
"Well, what the hell are you shambling around starving in London for?"
"I don't know."
Suspicious, I said: "Let's have a look at it, then."
She opened her raincoat and reached down into whatever it was she had on underneath. She produced the passport. I knew what they looked like because brother Godfrey was a proud owner. They were unforgettable. Frenchy had one.
I sat down on the floor, feeling expansive. If Frenchy had an FP I was safer than I'd ever been. An FP reflected its warm light over everybody near it. I reached under the mattress and pulled out a packet of Woodies. There were two left.
Frenchy grinned, accepting the fag. "I ought to flash it about more often."
We smoked gratefully. The allowance was ten a month. As stated, the penalty for buying on the black market, presuming you could get hold of some money, was shooting. For the seller it was something worse. No one knew what, but they hung the bodies up from time to time and you got some idea of the end result.
"About this police business," I said.
"You don't mind if I kip here tonight," she said. "I'm beat."
"I don't mind," I said. "Want to hop in now? We can talk in bed."
She took off the mac, kicked away her shoes and hopped in.
I took off my trousers, shoes and socks, pulled down my sweater and blew out the candles. I got into bed. There was nothing more to it than that. Those days you either did or you didn't. Most didn't. What with the long hours, short rations and general struggle to keep half clean and slightly below par, few people had the will for sex. Also sex meant kids and the kids mostly died, so that took all the joy out of it. Also I've got the impression us English don't breed in captivity. The Welsh and Irish did, but then they've been doing it for hundreds of years.
The Highlanders didn't produce either. Increasing the population was something people like Godfrey worried about in the odd moments when they weren't eliminating it, but a declining birthrate is something you can't legislate about. What with the slave labour in the factories, cops round every corner, the jolly lads of the British Wehrmacht in every street, and being paid out in food and clothing coupons so you wouldn't do anything rash with the cash, like buying a razor blade and cutting your throat, you couldn't blame people for losing interest in propagating themselves. There'd been a resistance movement up until three or four years before, but they'd made a mistake and taken to the classic methods — blowing up bridges, the few operating railway lines and what factories had started up. It wasn't only the reprisals — on the current scale it was 20 men for every German killed, or 10 schoolkids or 5 women — but when people found out they were blowing up boot factories and stopping food trains, a loyal population, as the krauts put it, stamped out the anti-social Judaeo-Bolshevik element in their midst.