tales from little vienna
chapter 17
17 hiroshima house
Not long after the cricket match at Wolf Hall, Hannah bumped into Freda outside the Linden Tree.
‘Are you well?’ says Hannah.
‘I’m OK. I’m aimless today’ says Freda. ‘But I don’t enjoy such days as much as I used to.’
‘Hang on a minute,’ says Hannah and calls after a scruffy kid who has just trotted past, ‘Hey Smudge – earn some cash?’ She produces a postcard picturing an edwardian model in hourglass underwear, scribbles hastily on the back and hands it to the boy. ‘Cash on delivery’ she tells him, ‘Be quick.’
‘Where to?’ says Smudge and races off when he’s told.
‘He’s one of my street arabs’ says Hannah. ‘Just letting Ronnie know I’m on my way so he can start toasting the teacakes. Coming along, Aimless Amy?’
‘Street arabs?’
‘What Sherlock Holmes called them.’
‘Small, ragged and dirty?’
‘Yes. And I know what you’re thinking.’
‘But what’s this postcard thing with you and your man? Can’t you talk to each other?’
‘It’s romantic, though, can’t you see? It’s a challenge too. We might step it up a bit. Ronnie wants us to use carrier pigeons. Anyway – ’ and she pulls another card from her bag and scribbles on it and hands it to Freda. It reads:
But how are you feeling, darlink? (Hannah is a big fan of Zsa Zsa Gabor)
‘Give me a card,’ says Freddie, and writes: I took someone for a fool and made myself a fool doing so
Hannah writes back: At that cricket game? I couldn’t find the field. Ronnie said something about that, said you were a bit hard on his sister. Said you probably went for her in both senses
‘What? She’s his sister?’ says Freddie.
‘Write it, write it. I’ve plenty more cards, old ones, new ones, used ones, I take them everywhere with me.’
‘You’re insane.’
They were soon stumbling across the bulldozed wasteland. In the distance, 103’s telephone line, strung across the desolation where once Alexandra Road and its neighbouring streets and mews alleys stood, seemed to stand for the thin thread that the future of the house was hanging by.
‘This is like navigating Glasto in high heels’ observes Hannah.
‘My goodness’ says Freda, ‘it’s empty as the moon. Apart from this,’ and she indicated 103 Alexandra that now loomed above them.
‘Welcome to Hiroshima House’ says Hannah.
Ronnie let them in and led them up to the roof terrace where he’d laid out the char and the toasties. Freda decided that an apology was due to Hilda’s brother and to Hilda by proxy.
‘I was pretty mean to that girl. She was just too good looking. And I was in pain. I should never have come. But perhaps I needed the advice she gave me.’
‘Which was?’ said Ronnie.
‘I need to get my act together. I’ve just been… I don’t know. I think I should talk to Ruby. I’m tired of onion domes. The Ottoman period was too easy, too simple.’
‘Sorry,’ said Ronnie, ‘but you’re being a bit gnomic.’
‘We lived relatively peacefully under the Ottomans, we were protected by law, we had our specialities, we did the work that others were not so fond of, we lived in our own millet, our own quarter.’
‘Like a more comfy ghetto?’
‘In Casablanca they call it the mellah. Anyway, I’m getting tired of all this trendy decadence, and the onion domes kind of stand for all that, the harems and zenanas and seraglios, curly slippers, little waistcoats and baggy pants. It doesn’t inspire me like it used to. You feel that a lot of it’s invented by outsiders, and anyway it’s all about how the rich lived, silver scimitars, eunuchs and rose water and all that jazz. None of that inspires me these days. And we seem to be hated more and more nowadays in the Middle East. Anyway, whatever… I need a change from life beneath Ruby’s latest exotic rooftop. Maybe I should move in here while it’s still standing.’
Before Freda could say more, Hannah said ‘It looks like you might have more visitors, Ronnie.’
‘What?’
‘Way over there.’ She pointed into the distance to where the desolation ended and St John’s Wood began. ‘Do you see? Two people? They just got out of that big black car and it looks like they’re headed this way. Like they’re crossing a minefield. A blonde in jeans and a guy behind her wearing what looks like a chauffeur’s cap.’
They watched for several minutes as the pair slowly approached. As they drew near the chauffeur stopped, lit a cigarette and stood waiting while the young woman came to the front door. Ronnie called down to her: ‘Afternoon! Can I help you?’
‘Yuh, hi. Um… I’m Diana. Princess Diana.’
‘Hi, Diana. I’m Ronnie. Are you lost?’
‘Not sure actually. Is this number 103 Alexandra Road?’
‘It is. What can I do for you?’
‘Oh, yuh, sorry, good. Um, could I have a word?’
‘Yeah, ’course. You’re just in time for tea. You look like you could do with a cuppa.’
Ronnie let Diana in, led her up to the roof and introduced the other two. Freddie offered her a cigarette. ‘Oh, yes please,’ she said, took a light off Freddie’s smoke, took a deep drag, flopped down in a deck chair and exhaled at length.
‘So how’s it going, Di?’ said Ronnie.
‘As if you didn’t know, yuh? But I’ll tell you what brings me here,’ says Diana. ‘I have a brother who’s a bit of an amateur historian, and he’s turned up something rather interesting in our family’s story. See, the Spencers and the Churchills – Marlboroughs if you like – sort of joined up back in the seventeenth century when we started marrying each other. So…’
‘What? Winston Churchill was your uncle or something?’ says Hannah.
‘Yuh, no, a cousin actually. People like us generate a lot of cousins and things. Anyway it turns out that when cousin Winnie was a young man he had an affair with –’
‘Don’t tell me – Lily Langtry.’
‘It was more than just a fling, they were very much in love. And they wanted to marry. But Winnie’s people wouldn’t allow it. She was too common for them, you know?’
‘So this place was their secret love nest?’ says Ronnie.
‘Winnie rented it for them.’
‘So she never actually lived here?’
‘She lived in Chelsea in those days. The closest she ever lived to this place was by Regent’s Park, by which time they had both married others. My brother couldn’t find any record of their affair lasting longer than the three years that they were meeting here in secret. But they wrote to each other till Lily died. I’ve seen the letters. It’s obvious that they loved each other till the end. It’s so touching.’
Here the princess took a crumpled hanky from her pocket and dabbed at the tear on her cheek.
‘So what’s your interest in this place?’ said Ronnie, ‘More love letters gathering dust in the attic for a hundred years?’
‘I want this house preserved. As a monument to true love.’
‘Have you found it then? Do tell.’
Diana gives a coy smile. ‘Might have done.’
‘ “The Love Museum!” ’ says Hannah. ‘I love it!’
‘Beats the Freud Museum,’ says Freddie.
‘But they’ll so complement each other,’ says Hannah.
‘I know it’ll work,’ says Di. ‘Elton’s into it. George is into it. And Boy George too, he’s a local lad these days.’
‘You need to talk to my old man,’ says Ronnie to Di, and he fills her in about Sid and his problem.
Di resolved to pay Sid a visit a.s.a.p., but right now she had to rush off for a change of clothes and some tedious function with Prince Whateverlovemeans. From the top of 103 the others watched her make her way back with her minder across the great rubble field towards their motor. When she was nearly out of the demolition zone they saw her far-off figure turn and wave to them. At that moment they saw the silent burst of smoke that suddenly concealed the distant pair, like some magician’s trick, about a second before they heard the loud explosion that had caused it. The breeze then began to lift the smoke, like a curtain being slowly raised, before the two figures came into view again. Di was standing transfixed with her hands across her mouth, while her minder could be seen pulling a pistol from beneath his coat and casting rapid glances in every direction.
An assassination attempt? A gas leak? A previously unexploded gift from the Luftwaffe?
The pair hurried away and sped off in their Roller, and a few minutes later a cacophony of sirens heralded the arrival of emergency vehicles.
And a couple of days later the unscathed Diana turned up at the town hall to meet with Sidney and provide him with the no-brainer that would finally reboot his stalled flagship project and save his council’s reputation. It would also render superfluous the latest legal challenge from that dreadful old doggerel-monger in his tweed trilby and his claim that 103 was an exceptional chunk of gaffage worth a heritage listing. 103 may have had lot of big rooms and original built-ins, dumb waiters, speaking tubes, and bell-pulls in every bedroom, not to mention a secret entrance that Winnie the Church had paid the owner to install, and it even had its own modest little ballroom where the ghost of Lily Langtry walked on high days and holidays – or would certainly be persuaded to – yet none of its architecture could be compared to what could be found elsewhere all over town. But now there was a gilt-edged reason for preserving the property. The current occupants – Ronnie, the wolf Herself, and the Dilettantes, Hannah’s brother’s band – could be paid off and the architects would work around it – in fact they’d relish the prospect – and 103 would be a huge popular attraction that would rake in the spondulicks for community and commerce combined. Never mind the Regent’s Park zoo, Madame Tussaud’s, or the endless, hypnotic back-and-forth tours of the Beatles’ zebra crossing led by out of work actors and tribute bands – the queues for the Love Museum and its exhibitions, bookfests, concerts, conferences, movie screenings, and impromptu gigs by pop megastars introduced by Diana herself would stretch from Kilburn to Cockfosters. All this and more flashed through Sidney’s brain as soon as the people’s princess presented her plan.
Meanwhile, on the same day that Diana was revealing her brainwave to Sidney King, Freda was sitting in the kitchen of the flat in Goldhurst Mansions which was Ruby Bernard’s latest onion domed home, doing tea and cake with her and chatting about nothing of particular importance to this tale until Freddie asked her how her latest novel was coming on.
‘I’m nearly there. Last chapter. I’m so looking forward to discovering how it’s going to end.’
‘You mean you don’t know already? You haven’t planned it?’
‘I never do. Surely you knew that? I know nothing about the next book until I start writing it and I invent it as I go along, I’m just living from page to page… It writes itself really. I’m not really involved. I’m just the typist. It possesses me. I love it because it’s such a release from everything else I do. Everything else, I plan, I have to plan. When I cook, when I pick up the cello, when I put together my little films. While I’m scribbling I free myself from all that, it’s like I’ve bought a ticket for the premiere of a show called “As I Go Along” and I just sit there and watch it unfold in front of me for the first time. You must know what I’m talking about, Freddie, you’re a jazzer. But I can’t improvise with music. I’ve tried… I just freeze up. I’m a dot head. I have to hang on to those dots by their tails or else I’ll fall.’
Ruby helped herself to another piece of Madeira cake. ‘Anyway,’ she said, ‘by this time next week the book’ll be done and delivered and I shall have to get my crew together. It’s going to be a pain because I’ve lost my sound man and I can’t find a replacement, and time is tight.’
‘Shame. What does a sound man do?’
Ruby laughs. ‘Well, what do you think they do?’
‘Aren’t they the one who holds a long pole with a mike on the end of it? That’s about all I know. Perhaps they play with a tape recorder? Levels and things?’
‘Why the sudden interest, Freddie?’
‘I don’t know. Why not?’
‘It’s just that I’ve never known you have any concern for the technical side of what I do.’
‘No, I suppose I haven’t. But…’
‘But what?’
Freddie went silent as she pulled out a cigarette and lit up.
Ruby looked at Freddie, cocked her head, raised her eyebrows and pouted slightly while she waited.
Freddie exhaled. Then:
‘I recently learned a new phrase,’ she said. ‘You’ve probably heard it.’
‘What’s that, then?’
‘ “All mouth and no trousers.” ’
Ruby smiled.
‘Don’t laugh,’ said Freddie. ‘It’s what I’m supposed to be.’
‘That seems a little unfair. But what are you getting at, Freddie dear?’
‘I feel like a clown. With a red nose, ridiculous lipstick and big baggy pants down around my knees. I need to change my outfit A clown is a useless distraction. I must be useful, I need to be useful.’
‘What about your Ph.D.? That would be a useful thing. A contribution.’
‘You know very well. I’m a phony. I can never find the right question. I can’t even find the right subject. First it was going to be De Beauvoir, then it was chocolate, then it was Godard… then the Ottomans… I just flit, flit, flit from one thing to another like a bored butterfly. I’m sick of myself. All I’m good for is taking orders. Being a servant. Letting someone else call the shots.’
‘What – so you want to schlepp around the Levant carrying a boom mike for weeks on end in the burning heat with me ordering you about all day long? And that’s the easy part.’
‘Is it Palestine, then?’
‘Burma wouldn’t let me in, let alone film. It’s now looking like a progress report on UNRWA. But Freddie, I don’t think it would suit you.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Well, for a start we’ll first have to deal with all sorts of officious officials when it comes to getting visas and permissions and waivers and insurance for example, and once we’re there we’ll have to negotiate with all sorts of local Napoleons and checkpoints official or otherwise. And wouldn’t you agree that diplomacy has never been a particularly strong point for you?’
‘I wouldn’t say that.’
‘Freddie, I’ve seen you react when a tube inspector has politely asked to see your ticket. How are you going to handle some trigger-happy IDF squaddie who wants your documents and a carton of Marlboros? Or a kid who throws a rock at you in Ramallah?’
‘I’d speak to the kid politely in Arabic.’
‘You have Arabic?’
‘I had to learn it for De Gaulle’s office. Algeria and all that.’
‘That could be useful. I don’t suppose you know Hebrew?’
‘A couple of intensive weeks and I could get by with it. It has a lot in common with Arabic.’
‘I wouldn’t go that far.’
‘OK but… ‘
‘I tell you what,’ says Ruby. Let me sleep on it. I can’t promise anything right now. Is your passport valid by the way? Oh yes, and you’d better make a will if you haven’t already.’
So Ruby slept on it for several days. She asked Mike Froshaugh if he thought Freda might be a liability. ‘Hmm,’ muses Frostie, ‘ “A Hedonist in Palestine” – nice title don’t you think? She’s inspired me already. But seriously? I really don’t know, Ruby.’
She asked her girls. Sharon observed that Freddie’s skilful use of tactical casebound missiles and a riding crop was well known by now. ‘She could defend herself alright,’ said Rebecca, ‘she taught me how to disarm someone coming at you with a knife – it’s all about the wrist, yours and theirs – shall I show you?’
‘Not right now thanks’ said Ruby.
By the way, Freddie learned that trick on the way over here when she was just a gangly thirteen-year-old. Even before she reached Hamburg there was a bit of bother between the Austrian kids and the others who taunted them – ‘Why didn’t you stay at home in Vienna, you and your darling Führer, and leave the rest of us alone?’ That sort of nonsense, and once aboard ship on their way to Harwich some more serious aggro among some of the more tired, lonely, seasick, orphaned and angry kids broke out with the aid of some of the ship’s cutlery. Those are the few black-eyed, bloody nosed and patched-up kids you don’t usually spot in photos of all the young passengers lined up along the gangplank neat and smart and smiling for the press, ready to disembark into an unknown future.
Some say that remnants of that Austro–German enmity persisted after the war into the days of the Cosmo and the Dorice in Little Vienna, which between them dominated the north side and the south side of the Finchleystrasse respectively, one smaller and more intense than the other although their menus didn’t differ wildly, the Dorice attracting more Germans – it was the Widow von Trips’ favourite – the Cosmo more Austrians and more writers who found its quieter location set further back from the highway more suitable for scribbling. Most say that the antagonism was quickly transformed into a friendly, mock-hostile affair. Still others say that whatever style of rivalry it was, the reason was – counter-intuitively maybe – down to having to share the beautiful tongue – as well as the cuisine – with the neighbouring nationality, like two siblings fighting over a single toy.
