Memoirs of a Dance Hall Romeo Read online

  When I was shown into Crosby’s office that evening I found Dawson with him. They remained seated behind the desk, frowning at me sternly. The atmosphere was nothing like as cordial as it had been on that first occasion.

  ‘I’ll make it easy for you,’ I said. ‘You can have my resignation.’

  ‘I’d like to remind you that the contract you signed runs till the end of this term, Shaw,’ Crosby said sharply.

  ‘Look, let’s get this over with,’ I said. What am I here for?’

  ‘It’s a question of standards, Shaw,’ Dawson said earnestly. ‘Of common decency. I mean to say, you’ve behaved disgracefully, you must see that.’

  We’ve the morals of the children of this city to think of,’ Crosby put in.

  It really was too ludicrous for words when one considered they were willing to employ a man like Carter. One of our most able headmasters, was how Crosby had referred to him. But by then I’d had enough of this farce. Of stupid, petty little men who were only interested in expressing their authority.

  ‘Look, do you want my resignation or not?’ I demanded.

  ‘At the end of the term,’ Crosby said.

  ‘As laid down in your contract,’ Dawson added. ‘Needless to say, you’ve failed your probationary year.’

  ‘Gentlemen, I thank you.’

  I louted low, gave them a very stiff two fingers each and walked out.

  I had some tea at a Lyons café and went to the cinema. Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye, with James Cagney showing them all the way, at one point knocking the merry hell out of a man who bore a remarkable resemblance to Dawson, which cheered me considerably. I enjoyed it all immensely, and left about nine o’clock to find it raining again.

  I walked all the way home, full of energy and enormously cheerful in spite of what had happened. A few more weeks and Khyber Street would be behind me, and what could be bad about that?

  When I let myself in at the front door there was another letter waiting for me from my agent, which I could tell at a glance because he’d taken to using envelopes with his name and address printed on the flap.

  My heart started to beat a little faster, a finger touched me coldly in the pit of the stomach, a premonition of disaster. Something had gone wrong, I knew it. I sat down, opened the letter carefully and discovered that he’d had an offer for the film rights of the book.

  I sat there for a long, long moment, quite stunned, then I re-read the letter slowly to make sure I hadn’t made any mistake. But I was right first time. Two hundred pounds for a year’s option, against an eventual price of two thousand if the film was ever made.

  I did a quick sum in my head. British and American book rights and now this, giving me a grand total of seven hundred and fifty pounds in advances. About double my annual salary as a teacher at Khyber Street.

  I think I did the run through the garden to Jake’s in record time. There was a light at his window. I paused at the top of the fire escape to peer inside, and found him on the couch with his pretty war widow, Mrs Tarrant.

  Which left Harriet, and I buttoned up my trenchcoat and set off in the rain, taking the short-cut through the park. Dear Harriet, she’d really come to mean a great deal to me during the past couple of weeks. I suppose the plain truth was that she had everything. As someone once said, brains, good looks and a whore in bed.

  I moved a little more quickly, just thinking about her, but when I reached the house and went up the drive there was no light in her window. I climbed to the terrace and rapped on one of the panes.

  After a while, a lamp was switched on in her bedroom and the window was raised a little. ‘Who is it?’ she called.

  ‘Oliver.’ I moved to the window. ‘Let me in. I’ve got some wonderful news.’

  ‘Oliver?’ She sounded half-asleep. ‘What time is it?’

  I pushed the letter into her hand. ‘Go on, read that. Guaranteed to bring you wide awake.’

  And it did. She moved to the lamp beside the bed, her limbs showing through the silk nightgown enticingly, and was back in a moment.

  ‘Oh, Oliver, how wonderful. I’m so happy for you.’

  She gave me the letter, leaned out of the window and kissed me. I stood there in the rain holding her lightly, inhaling the fragrance of her hair, and suddenly knew what I wanted to do—what was the right thing to do.

  ‘Marry me, Harriet,’ I said. ‘I can afford a wife now.’

  She drew back. ‘Marry you?’

  I was piqued at the tone of her voice and showed it, and she smiled gently with genuine concern. ‘Look, Oliver, you’re lovely, you really are and you’ve certainly been very good for me in the more basic areas of life, but there’s got to be more than that, hasn’t there?’ She shrugged. ‘Anyway, I’m going to Canada at the end of the term. My father’s taking over as Managing Director of a new subsidiary in Toronto and I’ve promised to go with them.’

  I said lamely, ‘Well, that’s that.’

  She said, ‘You can come in. A farewell party if you like.’

  But that was no good. No good at all. ‘No thanks,’ I said. ‘I’d better be getting back before I start the dogs howling.’

  She sighed. ‘Dear Oliver, I owe you such a lot. I really do.’ She kissed me gently, leaning out over the sill, then closed the window and I was alone.

  Jake and I, walking through the city centre after midnight from some dance or other, had been in the habit of calling in at the central railway station, because there was an all-night café where you could get tea or coffee and sandwiches. It was a great Victorian barn of a place, cold, and with the taste of steam on the air, always deserted at that time of night, platforms disappearing into the shadows. It always filled me with a desperate unease.

  I wrote a poem about it, which I found in an old notebook years afterwards and gave to a character in one of my later novels. It had to do with life sometimes being like getting on the wrong train and not being able to get off. No way of getting back to where you started, that was the line.

  That night, standing there in the rain, I should have been happy, yet was filled with that same irrational sense of unease, the railway feeling all over again. Rather like setting off on the wrong journey. It was as if, on one of those long walks home in the rain on a Saturday night after the dance, I’d taken the first on the right when I should have taken the second on the left. It was a feeling that haunted me for years and still does.

  But not then, standing there outside Harriet’s window. It was nonsense—had to be. I pushed the thought firmly away, walked down the path and turned along the road. The rain rushed through the trees and I paused under a lamp and realized I was still clutching the letter from my agent.

  They never did film that book and all I ever received was the option money. But there were others over the years that followed, many of them, and there I still stand, caught in that timeless moment in the lamplight, the ink on the envelope beginning to run in the rain. No matter. Nothing could take the actuality of that letter away, then or now.

  There had to be something more, Harriet had said that and she was right. I think it happened then, as Jake had said it might from the beginning, with a sudden rush, a kind of release, as if a tremendous energy locked up inside me had now broken free.

  There was something more, waiting for me at the end of the street, around the corner, and I was free to find it. Really free. A hell of a year in more ways than one, but it had been worth it.

  I put the letter in my pocket and walked home through the rain, content.

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ss written permission of the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 1989 by Jack Higgins

  Cover design by Morgan Alan

  978-1-4804-3258-1

  This edition published in 2013 by Open Road Integrated Media

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