The Unquiet heart

EIGHT

Nor did I have to explain to Eve. I found her the next night celebrating her scoop with her fellow hacks in the Coal Hole in the Strand. The pub was just far enough away from Fleet Street to avoid bumping into the editor, but close enough at a slow stumble to put the evening edition to bed. Eve saw me and pushed towards me. None of her flush-faced cronies seemed to miss her. Her face was rosy with drink and success. It was a big transformation in thirty-six hours.

She waved the front page of the Trumpet at me. “Read all about it! Fearless reporter scoops gang-bust!”

“I’ve seen it. A great story. Almost wish I’d been there.”

“It’s what we agreed, isn’t it?” Her voice dropped. She looked anxious, as though I was upset.

“I don’t need the publicity. Not with Gambatti out for blood.”

“He’s going to be my follow-up piece.”

“Are you daft?” I exclaimed. “Why get Gambatti even more upset than he already is? You can’t name names without proof.”

She drew me further away from the rabble at the bar. We were standing by a shelf running along the smoke-blackened wall. Her face was close enough for me to smell her scent. She pressed a hand to my lapel and fingered the cloth. We got a hoot from her friends at the bar. She ignored them.

“Danny, this is my biggest scoop in years. I need to milk it for all it’s worth.

I’m too public for Gambatti to do anything to me. He’d be the first suspect.”

“From what I’ve heard, that wouldn’t matter a toss. He’s a complete nutter. He had a waiter’s fingers chopped off for slopping soup in his lap. He made a fortune out of the war. While the good folk of London were cowering in bomb shelters he sent his lads out on looting sprees. Lost a few of his gang in the air raids, but he never worried about it. Plenty more deserters to chose from.

Cleaned out whole streets, they tell me. Even nicked the poor blighters’ blackout curtains. Flogged them back to the owners on Saturday at the market.

He’s an all-round villain.”

“That’s what makes him so newsworthy.” Her eyes shone provocatively. And something in them – maybe a recognition of what we’d just been through – told me that if I leant forward to kiss her she wouldn’t slap my face. Her smile grew and she shook her head.

“Not here. Meet me in an hour, Baker Street tube. Unless you’re too tired?” I wasn’t.

Nothing would make me too tired for a date with Eve Copeland. Which I guess this was. Forty-five minutes later I was pacing around outside Baker Street station checking each entrance in case we missed each other. I stamped out my third cigarette, turned and saw her. She was standing looking at me, her face quizzical, as though she was wondering why I was here. Or maybe why she was.

Then she seemed to remember she’d summoned me but couldn’t decide what she was going to do with me now. I wasn’t sure myself. She switched on the smile and walked towards me. She thrust her arm through mine, leaned up and pecked me on the cheek and led me off towards her flat in Marylebone.

We lay on our backs, gazing at the ceiling, hips and legs touching in luxurious intimacy. I’d lit two cigarettes and given her one. Bergman and Bogart in Casablanca. It was the best cigarette in the world. We’d been clumsy and urgent at first; she seemed as deprived as me. Maybe she’d been telling the truth about boyfriends. Maybe the dragon who rented the room to her usually did a better job of blocking visitors. I hoped so. Eve made me take my shoes off to climb the creaky stairs. I felt like a burglar sidling up the edges of the steps in time with her. Halfway up she’d given me heart failure by shouting out, “Early night, for me, Mrs Gibson.” And got the reproving response above the sound of the wireless, “Just as well, Miss Copeland, after last night! I don’t know what sort of job that is for a young woman.”

We swallowed our giggles. Fortunately we didn’t need much verbal foreplay when we snuck into her room. We tossed our clothes on to her one chair and dived under the blankets. Her mouth was everything I’d anticipated: an erotic concoction of mint imperial, cigarette and alcohol. I couldn’t get enough of her full lips and tongue. Her mane of hair smothered me in smoky, shampooed coils. I nuzzled the soft angle of her neck and under her chin and wanted to leave teeth marks all over her skin.

I would have kissed and held her for hours. Nothing more. It was all I thought I needed. But her demands overwhelmed us. OK, mine too. Our only constraint was the bed; its old springs kept us in check, made me gentle, more careful. I wanted this to be the best for her. As it was for me.

Ages later when the house was asleep, she led me back down the stairs and pushed me reluctantly into the night with a final finger kiss to my sensitised lips. I slid my shoes on outside and walked off in a state of grace down the quiet streets of Marylebone.

Where there’s food or romance, the French have a phrase for it. In the case of love there is coup de foudre. I’d felt it the day she walked into my office, but ignored it. It was stronger after our first dinner. The warehouse raid had underpinned it. Now I was hunched over burnt toast and a cup of cold tea, worrying if we’d gone too far too fast. Wondering if she felt the same way or if it had just been that great charge, that release of tension after shared danger.

All that adrenalin swilling about. Like me and one of my more volatile girlfriends savaging each other after one of our shouting matches.

We weren’t seeing each other till the next day and I spent the next twenty-four hours oscillating between elation and panic. We met at the Lyons House in the Strand and when I saw her face my worst fears flooded through me. She was flushed and jumpy. I took it for embarrassment and regret.

“Danny, about the other night…”

“It’s all right. You don’t have to explain. It was daft. All that excitement…”

“We can’t do it again…”

“I know, I’m sorry. It was great but I understand…”

“Danny, will you shut up and let me finish!”

The girl bringing our tea gave us a look and left us in resounding silence.

She started again. “Danny, we can’t meet again like that. Not at my place. My landlady must have heard something. She gave me such a hard time yesterday. Came into my room unannounced last night. Sniffing the air like a blooming bloodhound.”

I burst out laughing.

“It’s not funny, you know! Rooms are hard to come by.”

“My place is no palace. You’ve seen it. But it’s snug.”

Her neck flushed again. “We need to go slow. We’ve got work to do. It’ll just get in the way.”

“What will?”

“This! Us. I told you, I don’t have time for men.”

“We could read to each other.”

“Shut up, Danny.”

It wasn’t till the day after we’d gone looking for trouble at the White City dog track that I could persuade her back to my place. I’d scrubbed my bedroom and changed the sheets just in case, but it still seemed cheap and tawdry when I showed her in. I wanted an Arabian tent filled with cushions and wafting silks for her. She didn’t seem to mind brown lino and faded carpet. Nor that I kissed her and helped her off with her clothes.

Afterwards we lay together with my arm under her head, nearly asleep.

“You must think I’m easy,” she said.

“I think you’re beautiful. I think you’re funny and brave.”

Her head shook in denial. Her shrub of hair tickled my nose. I calmed it down.

“I don’t do this.”

“What, go to bed with Scotsmen?”

She punched my chest. “With anyone.”

“So this is special?”

She shifted her head so she could look at me. Her eyes were anxious. “This is lovely, Danny. But it’s just fun. It’s not anything else. Right?”

“Sure, Eve. It’s whatever you want it to be.”

Suddenly she sat up, supporting herself with her arm. “Danny, listen. This isn’t anything. It’s not going anywhere.” She was fierce.

“OK, princess. Message received.”

She studied my face, looking for the truth. I don’t know what she saw, but she lay down again, and we held each other tight. Just for fun.

A pattern emerged over the next few days. We would keep up the professional faзade while I helped her find new stories, but when the work was done – or sometimes when we couldn’t wait a second longer – we’d make for my place. There, the only guardian we had to contend with was the moggy, and Eve soon had her purring round her legs. Me too for that matter.

Each time Eve would try to resist the temptation and each time she’d give in.

And after each time she would say we had to stop. And we did, till the next time.

Guilt that we might be using her column as an excuse to leap into bed spurred us to put more effort into her work. Of course it would take something special to top the Tommy Chandler story, and I had nothing lined up that needed the unique skills of Midge, Cyril and Stan. So we began to frequent the seedier dives and haunts of the underclass looking for trouble. Sniffing around and catching the mood. So as not to kill the golden goose, Eve made it clear to anyone who asked that names and addresses would be changed to protect the guilty. Just as well, for she wrote about the dog fixers at White City, the protection rackets in London restaurants, and the stolen goods for sale in every open market in town.

To read her exposйs was to imagine a London corrupt from top to bottom, a festering swamp of thieving and cheating. She wasn’t far wrong. It sometimes made me wonder how I kept myself clean. And why.

She took me into her newspaper one day when I showed interest in the process.

I’d thought about becoming a journalist after uni, but there was more money in the police. She started me in a room swamped with papers and reporters. A haze of smoke swirling above the jumble of desks. Journalists sat talking together or pounding at typewriters. It was late in the afternoon and there was a sense of mild desperation in the hangar-like room as they fought to put the next edition together. We passed an office just as the door crashed open and a grey-haired man with broken veins on his pock-marked face emerged shouting.

“Where’s the bloody lead? That lead was to be on my desk twenty minutes ago.”

The sheer volume of his voice was offset by the clean vowels of northern Scotland. I placed him from Inverness.

A shout from the depths of the hubbub came back: “Coming, Jimmy! Just coming!”

The man turned his glowering eyes on us, and his face softened. “It’s yourself, Eve. Nice piece today. We’ll run with that. But a wee bit too much alliteration.

We’re not a poetry magazine. Who’s this?” he demanded scrutinising me.

“Jim, this is the man who’s been helping me with those scoops. This is Danny McRae. Danny, this is my boss, the editor, James Hutcheson.”

“You’ve been costing me a wee fortune, Mr McRae. But so far it’s been worth it.

Any more adventures like that warehouse job in the offing?” He raised one of his huge grey eyebrows in inquiry and reached out a hand to shake mine.

“Not this week, Mr Hutcheson.”

“In that case my expenses will be lower, eh?”

There was more than a hint of seriousness in his comment, but he suddenly softened.

“Look, come on, Danny. Call me Jim. You’re an interesting character. Come and have a dram. You’ll take a malt, I trust.” His back was already retreating into his den as he said this. Eve shrugged and smiled, and we followed him into his nicotine cave. He cleared a two-foot pile of old papers off a chair and dumped them on an already tottering stalagmite of newsprint. He unearthed another chair and dipped into the top drawer of a dented filing cabinet and triumphantly hooked out a whisky bottle. His desk drawer yielded tumblers of uncertain cleanliness and we were off.

It was an entertaining half hour punctuated by bellows at his staff and splashings of Scotch. But no matter how much he drank, it didn’t seem to affect his ability to scan a draft. He flourished his blue pencil with deadly skill and loud scorn for the English education system.

The rest of Eve’s tour was thankfully less whisky-fuelled. My head was already buzzing by the time we reached the bedlam in the foundry. It was like a blacksmiths’ convention: benches lined with men hammering lead type on to metal sheets and feeding discarded slugs back into the melting pot for re-use. I wondered what it did to your brain to be writing backwards and upside down all the time.

In the next room, they slid the still-hot plates into the presses, and inked the typefaces before feeding through the first of the sheets from the giant rolls.

Eve handed me the first edition, still hot and wet. I glanced at the headlines and the cartoons, then up and around at this Vulcan choreography. I shook my head – metaphorically; I didn’t want to hurt Eve’s feelings; such industry and effort for something so slight.