Warlight(5)
Under The Moth’s care, we began eating most of our dinners from the local street barrows. Bigg’s Row, since the Blitz, remained an untravelled road. A few years earlier, some time after Rachel and I had been evacuated to live with our grandparents in Suffolk, a bomb probably intended for Putney Bridge had landed and exploded on the High Street, a quarter of a mile from Ruvigny Gardens. The Black & White Milk Bar and the Cinderella Dance Club were destroyed. Nearly a hundred had been killed. It was a night with what our grandmother called “a bomber’s moon”—the city, towns, and villages in blackout but the land below clear in the moonlight. Even after we returned to Ruvigny Gardens at war’s end, many of the streets in our area were still partly rubble, and along Bigg’s Row three or four barrows carried food cycled out from the centre of the city—whatever had not been used by West End hotels. It was rumoured The Moth was involved with steering some of that leftover produce into neighbourhoods south of the river.
Neither of us had eaten from a barrow before, but it became our regular fare—our guardian had no interest in cooking or even being cooked for. He preferred, he said, “a hasty life.” So we would stand with him almost every evening alongside a female opera singer or local tailors and upholsterers with tools still attached to their belts, as they discussed and argued over the day’s news. The Moth was more animated on the street, the eyes behind his spectacles taking in everything. Bigg’s Row appeared to be his real home, his theatre, where he seemed most at ease, whereas my sister and I felt we were trespassers.
In spite of his gregarious manner during those outdoor meals, The Moth kept to himself. His feelings were rarely offered to us. Apart from some curious questions—he kept asking me casually about the art gallery that was a part of my school and whether I could draw its floor plan for him—as with his war experiences he kept silent about his interests. He was not really at ease speaking to the young. “Listen to this….” His eyes looked up momentarily from the newspaper spread out on our dining room table. ‘Mr. Rattigan was overheard saying that le vice anglais is not pederasty or flagellation, but the inability of the English to express emotion.’?” He stopped and waited for some response from us.
We thought, during our confidently opinionated teens, that women were not likely to be attracted to The Moth. My sister made a list of his attributes. Thick black horizontal eyebrows. A large though friendly stomach. His big honker. For a private man who loved classical music, and who drifted through the house mostly in silence, he had the loudest sneezes. Bursts of air were expelled not just from his face but seemed to originate from the depths of that large and friendly stomach. Then three or four more sneezes would immediately follow, crashing loudly. Late at night, they could be heard, fully articulate, travelling down from his attic rooms as if he were some trained actor whose stage whispers could reach the furthest row.
Most evenings he sat and grazed through Country Life, peering at the pictures of stately homes, all the while sipping what seemed to be milk from a blue thimble-like glass. For a person who spoke so disapprovingly of the advance of capitalism, The Moth had an inflamed curiosity about aristocracy. The place he was most curious about was the Albany, which one entered through a secluded courtyard off Piccadilly, and he once murmured, “I’d love to wander around there.” It was a rare admission of criminal desire in him.
He usually disappeared from us at sunrise and was gone till dusk. On Boxing Day, knowing I had nothing to do, The Moth took me along with him to Piccadilly Circus. By seven a.m. I was walking beside him in the thick-carpeted lobby of the Criterion’s Banquet Halls, where he oversaw the daily work of the mostly immigrant staff. With the war over, there seemed to be a surge of celebrations. And within half an hour The Moth had set up their various duties—the vacuuming of hallways, the soaping and drying of stair carpets, varnishing of bannisters, the transporting of a hundred used tablecloths down to the basement laundry. And depending on the size of the banquet that was to occur that evening—a reception for a new member of the House of Lords, a bar mitzvah, a debutante ball, or some dowager’s last pre-death birthday party—he choreographed the staff into transforming the immense empty banquet rooms in an evolving time-lapse, until they eventually contained a hundred tables and six hundred chairs for the night’s festivities.
Sometimes The Moth had to be present at those evening events, moth-like in the shadows of the half-lit periphery of the gilded room. But it was clear he preferred the early-morning hours, when the staff who would never be seen by the evening’s guests worked mural-like in the thirty-yard-long crowded Great Hall that raged with giant vacuum cleaners, with men on ladders holding thirty-foot whisks to pluck cobwebs off chandeliers, and wood polishers who disguised the odours from the previous night. Nothing could be more unlike my father’s deserted offices. This was more like a train station where every passenger had a purpose. I climbed a narrow metal staircase to where the arc lights hung, waiting to be turned on for the hours of dancing, and looked down seeing them all; and in the midst of this great human sea, the large figure of The Moth sat alone at one of the hundred round dinner tables, with that pleasure of chaos around him as he filled out worksheets, knowing somehow where everyone was or should be in the five-storey building. All morning he organized the silver polishers and cake decorators, the oilers of trolley wheels and lift gates, the lint and vomit removers, the replacers of soap at each sink, the replacers of chlorine medallions in the urinals, and the men hosing the pavement outside the entrance, as well as immigrants who squeezed out English names they had never spelled before onto birthday cakes, diced up onions, slashed open pigs with terrible knives, or prepared whatever else would be desired twelve hours later in the Ivor Novello Room or the Miguel Invernio Room.