Memoirs of a Dance Hall Romeo Read Free Page A

me get on with some work. And keep me posted.’
    It was raining hard as I went down the fire escape. When I turned and looked up he was standing in the doorway, a curiously elegant picture in that silk dressing gown, the white-blond hair glinting in the light.
    ‘Goodbye, old sport,’ he said.
    It had become a ritual with us, this, after seeing Alan Ladd in The Great Gatsby earlier that year, and through it discovering the book.
    ‘They’re a rotten crowd!’ I shouted. ‘You’re worth the whole damn bunch of them put together!’
    He raised his hand, Gatsby to the life, then went inside. I moved as far as the shrubbery and paused, for he had seemed to go to considerable pains with his appearance for the sake of a law book or two.
    I was intrigued, and with good cause as it turned out, for some minutes later the back door of the house opened and the tenant of one of the flats, a young war widow called Amy Tarrant, ran across the yard with a raincoat over her shoulders. Jake greeted her warmly on the landing and drew her inside.
    I was surprised, Aunt Alice having told me that Mrs Tarrant had her sights set more on a career than a second husband, being already deputy headmistress of a girls’ secondary school at twenty-nine, and having two young boys to support.
    It was many years later when Jake let slip that for a time they had enjoyed a mutually satisfactory relationship, meeting two or three times a week in the way I had witnessed.
    Yet in some way I felt a strange sense of betrayal that night. I had wanted to feel that, in Jake, I had found that most difficult of all things to find in this world, a friend in the deepest sense of the word. Someone with whom one could exchange mutual confidences and bare the soul. Yet already there were secrets.
    Still, his advice seemed sound enough. I gave it some thought on the way home, and later, a good deal more, sitting in the darkness by the turret window of my bedroom, smoking a cigarette, staring out at the rain.
    God knows why, but it always seemed to be raining on those quiet nights so long ago. Great silver cobwebs of the stuff drifted through the gaslight beyond the trees and the rich damp smell from the garden filled me with a restless excitement.
    It was as if something waited out there in the rain beyond the lamplight, although for the life of me I could not even guess at what it might be.

2
GLORIA
    In order to avoid being called a flirt she always yielded easily.
    CHARLES, COUNT TALLEYRAND
    T HE NEXT DAY BEING a Saturday, I decided to follow Jake’s advice without delay. The sports jacket and flannels that were the sole survivors of my pre-army wardrobe were obviously unwearable, and on my release group number I had not been granted a demobilization suit.
    It seemed to me that this was no bad thing for, as Jake had indicated, there were certain advantages to a uniform and I was entitled to continue wearing it until the end of my release leave.
    It looked remarkably well after a careful press, particularly the sergeant’s stripes and the Berlin insignia, a dark circle ringed with red to indicate a besieged city and affectionately referred to by the troops as the flaming arsehole.
    But that, and the green flash of the Intelligence Corps, were not the only splashes of colour to be seen, for I was the proud possessor of the General Service Medal (Palestine 1945-48), thanks to that month in the transit camp at Jaffa. The purple-green-purple ribbon looked rather well above the left breast pocket and there was always the remote chance that, to the uninitiated, it might be mistaken for a decoration for valour.
    The Army, in its wisdom, had released me with only five pounds in hand, against the eventuality of the records proving that I owed them money. Any surplus credits were to be paid me at their convenience. This left me distinctly on the short side financially, so I adjusted my beret to a rakish angle and went to see Aunt Alice.
    I found her in the drawing room,