Riptide

§ 33

Troy opened the cupboard under the gramophone and removed a stack of records-all the things Kitty liked and he didn’t. Dance bands with inanely exotic names-Orpheans, Melodians, Waldorfians-or inanely stupid-Syncopating Syd and his Tyrolean Accordianist Ensemble, Ali McDonald’s Ocarina Wizards. He’d tried and failed to get her to listen to Duke Ellington or to Art Tatum. Ellington had ‘got something’, but she’d never put him on the turntable of her own choosing, and Tatum was ‘just a racket’ and ‘ruined a good tune’.

A record slipped from the top as he reached the table. Kitty caught it or it would surely have shattered on the floor.

She held it in both hands and looked at the label, fingers brushing across the grooves, tracing out the words on the label.

‘It’s Riptide,’ she said. ‘Al Bowlly and Lew Stone.’

She hesitated, staring down at the record in the dim light.

‘Lovely Al Bowlly,’ she said. ‘Poor, lovely Al.’

Al Bowlly had been killed in an air raid in the wee small hours one Thursday morning the previous month. A land mine had floated down, taken out a large slice of Jermyn Street and Mr Bowlly with it. The women of London still mourned him. England’s greatest crooner. A womanizer extraordinaire. Troy wondered if Kitty knew this. If she did it probably didn’t matter to her. A romantic ideal, that unfleshly object-while the real man, the flesh beneath the ideal, had had half the women he’d ever met. Kitty was weeping, softly, silently for Al Bowlly. Troy said nothing.

‘Could we play it?’ she asked.

Troy wound the gramophone. It was easier by far than finding anything to say to her. He was glad she’d caught it, though the rest he could willingly have seen smashed: Riptide had that certain something. He was particularly fond of that long, slow introduction before Bowlly came in. It had an inescapable intensity. After it Bowlly’s voice could only be a let-down. He had always sounded to Troy more like a man in his seventies than his forties. He had never understood the appellation ‘the English Crosby’-he sounded nothing like Bing Crosby. Troy much preferred the women singers-Elsie Carlisle or Greta Keller. Yet-the song was pleasing. Its structure delighted him. It was all verse. No chorus. The song did not repeat itself. Just when any other song would rehash all it had said so far, the band came in again and Bowlly sang no more. It was startling to realise the song was over. It had made its statement-made a song of its precisely captured emotion, but not a ‘song-and-dance’ of it.

Kitty was shuffling around the room in a slow, sad dance for one. Caught in her own little riptide.

She came to rest in front of him-still tearful-and, though the taller, managed to rest her head upon his shoulder.

‘When was it, Fred? When was ‘e killed?’

‘It was the seventeenth, I think. A month ago to the day, all but a few hours.’

Her arms slipped around his neck. Troy braced himself immovably. I won’t dance. Don’t ask me. He half expected her feet to resume their half-hearted shuffle. They didn’t. She swayed gently, leant into him, and aimed her words somewhere into his chest.

‘So this is the anniversary of Al’s last night on earth?’

‘I suppose so. If you think a month is any kind of an anniversary.’

It was three months to the day since she’d dropped him, but he wasn’t going to tell her that. He wasn’t counting.

‘I been lucky in this war. So far. I never lost anyone. None of me family. All me old boyfriends are still alive. Two of’em even made it back from Dunkirk. I knew people who died-the bombs and that-but they weren’t people I lost. I just knew ‘em, sort of. Al Bowlly dying was like losing someone. Really it was.’

She was right. She had been lucky. They’d both been lucky. But Troy would not have been the one to say so. They could lose all, lose everyone before this war was over. To say so seemed rather like inviting it.

‘I don’t want to spend the night alone,’ Kitty said. ‘Not tonight of all nights.’

Troy said nothing. He’d heard her say this before. It was line one of Kitty’s chat-up routine.

Kitty took his right arm and slipped it around her waist. Troy did not move. She wriggled until he could escape no longer the obligation to enfold her shoulders with his left. She looked at him, eye to eye, as she stooped. Her cheeks were still wet. She kissed him lightly, and buried her head in his shoulder, singing softly to herself.

‘Riptide. Caught in a riptide, torn between two loves, the old and the new. Riptide. Lost in a riptide, where will it take me, what shall I do?’

Troy said nothing. Telling Kitty what to do had always been a waste of time.