Chapter 6
Hartnell had not yet heard from the gang. It had been two, three days since the docks raid and since then he'd been feeling so criminal with the part he'd played and the money which was still in his wallet that he knew he'd go on with it for the time being. There seemed little alternative except to quit the country, which wasn't very practical, on a hundred pounds or so. He hadn't the slightest doubt that Francie would fulfill his threat to tip off the police about him if he tried to break - and the thought horrified him. The idea of being a hunted man was just too unpleasant to let the mind dwell on.
So what had he been doing with his money now that, at last, he'd got some? he asked himself. Eating, drinking, a theater, a film, nothing but escapes from boredom. And why the boredom? Because he had no purpose, nothing to give a pattern to his life - unless you could call crime a career.
He might just all well not have had the money, he decided. It did nothing for him, because it was the only thing he had. Just so much empty currency with no currency inside him. Nothing to make him feel he had any point in living. He almost looked forward to the next sortie with the gang. At least it was something to do, something exciting.
Dora no longer did him any good although he'd stayed on at her place. Beyond her body she didn't really interest him and now she was becoming so clinging and emotional that it was adversely affecting his appetite for her body. It was a relief to get away from her for a while, to escape those heartfelt looks of wanting which he couldn't return. If it could have been kept at that: liking each other, enjoying nights in bed, it would have been very pleasant. But now that the emotionalism had crept in, the wanting more than that on her side, it was ruined, the whole relationship was wrecked. He should have had the willpower to move out, he thought. It must have been his present general aimlessness that had induced him to stay on, as much as her pleadings.
So now, as usual, here he was wandering about the West End, feeling hungry. Remarkable, he thought, how boredom brought on hunger, or at least, a desire to eat. Something to do, he supposed.
Oxford Street was crowded with afternoon shoppers when he turned into the first restaurant he came to for a cup of tea.
He walked into the big, red-carpeted room, wishing he was in a country where he could get a strong drink at this time of day - and the first thing he saw was Gracie.
She was sitting alone at a table, with a smart leather bag at the side of her chair. Their eyes met and there was a moment in which both wondered if they could look away as if there had been no recognition. But they had recognized each other very definitely and their eyes seemed to lock as if the little windows of the soul were determined that they should not ignore each other.
He smiled, and she smiled back immediately. Still he hesitated. He could just pass on, having acknowledged her, and find another table. He wondered what she wanted him to do and it was probably because he looked so uncertain that she took the initiative and indicated the chair next to hers.
"I wondered whether we should just make a secret sign and then pass on," he said quietly, after he had sat down. At her rather wan smile he wished he hadn't made any reference to their shared knowledge.
"Are you shopping, or just looking?" he continued brightly.
"Just looking, until I come across something interesting," she replied. "How about you?"
"Oh I'm just wandering," he said.
There was a brief and rather awkward silence while the obvious gambit from there occurred to both of them. The waitress arrived with tea and cakes and took his order, creating a thankful diversion.
A few more pleasantries followed while they sat there: usual polite small talk about theater, films, books, likes, dislikes. They might have been any casual acquaintances having a cup of tea. Whereas, in fact, hanging over their conversation like some ignored but ever-present gauleiter was this unvoiced knowledge of their secret which cut them off from probably everyone else in the restaurant. That they were guilty, the lawbreakers, the criminals; the others the lawful, conventional, good, honest people. As they chatted, the knowledge gave Hartnell a sort of perverse pleasure, which he realized, suddenly, was because it brought the girl, Gracie, closer to him, made them completely alone together in this crowded room.
"How would you like to dine with me tonight?" He charged in, eventually, with a straight left.
She looked at him doubtfully and for a moment he felt she thought he was simply asking her because he thought she was an easy lay.
"Look," he said. "I know it's a terrible impertinence of me, but Dora has told me a little about you and I can't imagine anyone having a more unpleasant time than you've had. If you'd permit me, I'd feel it a great pleasure to be able to give you a little decent company and - I hope - a pleasant evening for a change."
For another long moment he wasn't sure whether she was going to burst into tears. She looked at him steadily, biting her lip and in that moment he suddenly felt that this was what he'd been looking for. This was hope, both for himself and her. She saw the look and perhaps the feeling communicated itself. She smiled.
"That would be very nice," she said.
Before dinner they had a couple of drinks. After the second she seemed to brighten up considerably and he remembered that she never touched the whiskey at the hideout. When she'd brightened, she talked much more readily, much better - about everything. He was quite astonished at her background of knowledge and perception. Slim Bailey knew his onions, he thought.
"Shall we have one more before we hop?" he suggested.
"Yes, please," she said, "It's a long time since I've felt so good."
By the time the third had gone down the hatch he was head over heels in love, with his good sense fighting against the danger signs which he knew were soon going to overwhelm him.
They dined at a little French restaurant in Soho, starting with sherries, good wine with the meal and finishing with liqueurs. He had intended a film or show, but it was too late by the time they'd finished. He wondered vaguely what Dora would be doing now.
He raised his liqueur and held it across towards her, saying, quietly: "Well, here's to a happier life for both of us." He managed with an effort not to say "together."
Her hazel eyes were warm as she clinked glasses with him.
"You're the nicest person I've met," she said softly.
He felt his heart contract and expand as he smiled at her. He would have to do something. He shouldn't let her go on like this. Then he told himself to get a hold of himself. This was a different set of circumstances than the usual. This would be he and Gracie against a danger-our gang - and without resources. Have to go slowly.
"You can't have met all that many," he said.
She took his remark seriously.
"There was really nobody before Daddy died," she said. "And after . . ." Her voice faded off and she put her hands to her eyes.
He took her hand across the table.
"You have to forget about afterwards," he said. "It doesn't matter to either of us. We'll have to go slowly, but we're going to find a way out of this."
She shook her head slowly, but her eyes were still warm.
"There isn't any way out once you get into this sort of mess," she said. "You just have to seize what chances you can of making things a little better."
"Gracie - ,"
"Yes? What is it?" she curled her fingers in his on the table.
"I just want you to know I fell in love with you tonight - and we're going to get out of this, the two of us together."
She leaned across the table and kissed him full on the lips, a warm soft kiss which took him by surprise so that she had pulled away before he had had time to respond. His heart went out to her. To have kissed him in the restaurant, not caring, warmly and sweetly.
"We never will," she said. "We're trapped. Normal lives aren't for us - ever again."
There was something in the way she said the words which caught at his stomach like some inevitable prophecy of doom.
"Let's go," he said. "We still have time for a drink and we can talk better in a quiet bar."
They found a bar in a big hotel. It was the quietest they'd seen - and there were a lot of people in it.
He felt full of an urgency now. There was a feeling of so little time.
"I can't get out," she told him, in reply to his demands that she flee the country with him, or that she take a job in some other part of the country. "You don't know Francie. He'd stop at nothing to ruin me if I walked out on him. He's done it before. Women have had their faces slashed horribly or they've been pulled out of the Thames. And he'd find me wherever I went. He knows people everywhere. I should be in fear wherever I went."
"Even with me with you?"
"Doubly. I'd be afraid for you, too. People like us are no match for people like them."
"So what? I hate to think of you in Francie's clutches."
"You mustn't think of it. It would be better if we just remained polite friends."
"Too late for that now as far as I'm concerned," he said. "We'll have to think of something."
They sat for some time, hand in hand.
"Where are you going when you leave here?" he asked. "Back to Francie?"
She looked at him, her long, blonde hair falling forward towards her cheek. There was all the sympathy of the woman who understood man's bitterness towards the other man in her look. She shook her head from side to side.
"You mean you don't live with him?"
"No," she said. She made an effort: "He got me a place of my own in Earl's Court - a room with kitchen and bathroom. He likes everything to be spread all over the place, then people don't have tabs on him so easily and he has more places to escape to in an emergency. He lives in Hampstead."
"How often does he ...?" He regretted starting the question - whose answer he didn't want to hear - as soon as he'd begun.
There were tears in her eyes as she looked at him.
"I don't want to talk about it - and you don't want to hear," she replied quietly. "He visits me sometimes - but he knows I'll never be his in the sense he wants me."
Hartnell felt a dull anger grow inside him at the thought of Francie visiting Gracie, stripping her, making love to her. The thought sickened him and he wished he could undo all that had happened. "The greatest tragedy in life is the utter impossibility of changing what has already happened." He thought of Galsworthy's truism and now he felt it truly for the first time. This would be with him and Gracie no matter what happened, the fact of her suffering at Francie's hands, this episode of her life and his which was now a part of them with all its repercussions, mental and material. But there was no point in trying to plan ahead. If he hadn't got mixed up with the gang, he'd never have met her. But again, perhaps that would have been a good thing. Good thing? What do I mean by a good thing, he wondered? What is a "good," respectable, comfortable, stagnating existence compared with this aching, minute-to-minute awareness of oneself existing?
"Let's go, Gracie," he said thickly.
"All right."
He paid and they got up and walked out into the neon-lit London night.
When Gracie had met Francie she'd been a virgin with all a teen-age virgin's romantic thoughts of love and the man she'd love. Francie had robbed her of her virginity - starting with threats and ending with half-violence even when she'd half yielded for fear of his power over her. Since then she couldn't remember how many times she'd suffered his embrace, accepting it, unfeeling, except for the pain and soreness and the shame he induced - and soon even the shame had been relegated to the subconscious as it does when habit makes an action lose its poignancy. But somewhere, deep down had been this cherished thought of the man she'd love and, although she'd hardly looked at Hartnell that first day at the hideout, she'd known that this was the man it could have been. It was shame and hopelessness that had kept her eyes vacant and uninterested.
But now she was with him, walking through the London streets with his arm around her, his mouth against her hair and she knew that even if he didn't mean what he was saying she was going to bed with him tonight. Before, it would have been impossible. She couldn't envision herself going to bed with a man on such short acquaintance no matter how urgent the attraction. But Francie had made it this way. She had suffered him. And now she would accept with joy a love which she desired and it would be as if it was the first time - without the physical discomfort.
She turned in towards him in the street, pulling his far shoulder round towards her with her hand and kissed him. Her breath almost sobbed in his shoulder as they broke away and the feeling inside was suddenly pain as well as joy.
Hartnell knew as well. There had been other women in his life, but they all seemed ordinary, the relationships naive compared with the desperation of this situation. The danger, the difficulty, accentuated the urgency, made them alone against a dangerous world. He felt a tingling joy throughout his body. He forced himself to forget about the circumstances which surrounded them like a wall of barbed wire. Just for now they had met in ordinary, conventional circumstances and were loving like any ordinary couple who held hands in the cinema.
"Where shall we go?" he asked, squeezing her upper arm through her dress, loving the arm, so slim and firm.
"We can go to my place," she said softly.
"And Francie?"
"He's gone to the country. He won't be back tonight in any case."
"I'm going to get you out of this, Gracie."
"Don't think about it, darling. I don't want to think about it."
He kissed her again in the street and her body pressed hard against his. She touched his face as their heads drew away and her eyes looked into his with all the searching, longing wonderment of someone who has found happiness that can't possibly last.
A group of soldiers passing on the other side of the street whistled and they moved on arm in arm. Hartnell hailed the first taxi he saw.
Back in her flat, they didn't even put the lights on. A glow from a street lamp filled the room so that they could move about, seeing objects and themselves darkly but distinctly. They didn't move about much, anyway. She went to the window and then turned back to him, eager but half shy now they were there.
He put his arms around her and felt her body trembling slightly against him. He was filled with an overwhelming tenderness for her. She was like some poor, lost little animal, which has had a bad time and needs someone to look after it. But as well as that she was a woman, a beautiful woman and her body was real, tangible, able to be caressed and loved while he loved her in his mind.
The thought flitted through his mind that he could spend the night, easily, just holding her in his arms, protecting her through the darkness.
He kissed her and she clung to him, her cheek locked against his.
"You don't have to if you would rather not," he whispered. "Just to be with you is enough."
The darkness seemed to add an intimacy to all their words.
She pressed against him, trying to look at his eyes in the dim light.
"I do want to," she whispered back - and her voice became fierce. "I do, I do. It's the first time I've ever felt like this."
"I'm going to get us out of this," he said, softly. "We're going to get away from here." He couldn't help repeating himself. He wanted to impress this fact on himself and her.
"If only I'd met you all that time ago when things were different," he said, fiercely.
"Don't, darling, don't," she whispered. "We're here. It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter."
She kissed him again swaying against him and suddenly passion flared with the tenderness in both of them. Their kisses sought wildly to lose them from the world they were in, lips moved of their own will over eyes, cheeks, necks, inflaming breath so that it choked into half-uttered words.
They swayed together in the darkness to the bed and, as, with open, loving eyes she held his face in her hands, he began to stroke her body, rippling his hands over the summer dress, learning the contours, loving them, from neck to knees.
"Oh, darling," she whispered, and this thing which had sprung up on them so suddenly and surely needed continuity, gentle unbroken continuity without breaks and pauses to struggle out of clothes. And his hand continued to caress her, opening the buttons at her bosom, pushing up the brassiere and gently fondling the warm young breasts.
Her lips trembled on his neck, her hands squeezed his shoulders with all her force and his hand went away and ran up gently under her dress, caressing the knees, the thighs, like a butterfly fluttering between them. And she opened her thighs, not even remembering Francie, only knowing that she loved and needed. Then the hand was there under the briefs, brushing gently between her legs in an agony of sensation and she buried her face in his shoulder, pressing it hard there, feeling him pulling off those briefs in a movement whose smoothness did not mar the continuity. Between her legs and up inside her was a pool of aching, needing, straining out to him with greater and greater yearning as he learned more and more of her.
She moved her hands up to his head, eyes closed now, and pulled his lips down to hers. When the pressure became great she burst her tongue into his mouth, almost in tears.
Her dress was somewhere round her waist. Vaguely she wished they were both completely naked and then she couldn't think any more for the unbearableness of wanting in her loins as he caressed her.
"Darling," she whispered again. "Oh, darling!"
And, as if from deep inside him, a long way off, she heard him say: "I love you, Gracie. God, I love you!"
She held his face hard against hers, cheek to cheek, and she felt him move and come down on top of her, gently, always gently.
Her mouth opened to murmur something and instead uttered a gasp of delight as she felt him move into her. Her mouth remained open, her face tensed and stayed tense in the passion of feeling his warmth and size closing fleshily into her, fulfilling this need, making it a rhythmic ecstasy.
She opened her thighs and then closed them in against his hips, drawing him and the sensation into her, running her hands spasmodically over his back, pressing the small, tautening buttocks at her orifice.
Inside her, between her legs, a burning funnel of relief, of love, seemed to fan out throughout her loins, imparting extra sensation to the skin of her thighs and even her belly. Her whole body was a great warm, fluid prickle of sensation.
"Oh darling, darling," she continued to whisper as his long, relentless penis broke further and further into her like breakers on an incoming tide.
His mouth moved onto hers and off in a series of passionate, uncontrollable jerks. She wriggled her buttocks, which felt hot and moist. Little whimpering gasps swirled in her throat. She could think of nothing but her love and its fulfillment here in her body and his fulfillment in her.
His penis seemed to fill her now in an enormous hard mass. She felt his hands slithering under her buttocks and she raised her hips under his slightly, straining against him, feeling the sudden stiffening rush of pleasure in her loins with the movement. She relaxed again, moaning softly and could feel his hands holding her buttocks like footballs, his fingers digging into the soft flesh, savoring it, biting into it fiercely.
She put her arms around him and clung to him desperately, almost afraid that if she didn't hang on, her passion would make her squirm off the bed. Her breasts were heaving against his chest and she felt the ache at the nipples where his chest touched them.
His hands slipped down over her buttocks and in towards the clinging opening where his organ was penetrating with all its strength. With a jerk of near-delirium, she was aware of the fingers feeling along the lips of her vagina besides his in-thrusting rod.
She heard his breath breaking sharply from his lips as he muttered words of love to her. His hips seemed to cannon into her crotch with a fierce rapidity which slowed eventually as his gasps became more agonized.
Her loins seemed to be emptied of everything material, emptied and acting as a receptacle for pure sensation. He seemed to fill the whole of her body and it was wonderful that he should, that he should by filling her become her. Her hips were like a volcano and she couldn't think, couldn't see, could only know that the end was coming, an end which, it seemed, would be too acute to bear. The acuteness was sharper and sharper, growing ever sharper like the soft scraping of knives. She gasped and choked into his neck, unable to form words any longer. There was a tense excitement in her which was beginning to boil over in a saucepan. He was jerking into her with long, raking, slow piston movements, pushing at her as if he wanted to lose the whole of his hips in her vagina. Her vagina seemed huge and incredibly naked and the boiling was rising and rising in a faster and faster flood and she couldn't bear it.
"Darling, darling, darl . . ." she managed to utter in agony and then she convulsed under him and against him, hanging on as if she was on a mad roundabout as the flood swept down and out from her loins in excruciating relief.
She remained excited, jerking spasmodically under him for some time while his gasps grew hoarser and hoarser, his thrusts slower and more forceful until he uttered one long low exclamation and, as it seemed that his penis must grind into her womb, she clasped him passionately and held him while he shot a stream of hot sperm into her waiting loins.
Later they undressed completely and got into the bed. They were still making love off and on when the dawn began to turn the sky dull gray.