in a corner of the room.
‘All that rubbish? Noisy music. That’s what your dad liked. Loud music, all day and all night. We used to dance, anywhere, any time. God, we used to dance.’
Felix let her reminisce. That was what Jessie enjoyed. It was almost all she had, he understood that. He had his own memories, too, as he sat watching her. They were mostly of upstairs rooms, with the sound of music and laughter, and sometimes shouting, drifting up to him. Felix used to sit for hours, drawing and waiting. When Jessie had finished work, at all sorts of strange hours, and if she was alone, she would bustle in and sweep him off somewhere to eat. In those days she had a healthy appetite, and the meals were the best of their times together. Usually they went to one of a handful of cafés, where everyone knew her and greeted her.
‘Hello, Jess, my love. What’s it to be tonight? Extra portion for that Felix, and we’ll see if we can fill him out a bit.’
They would sit down to huge platefuls of eggs and bacon, or sausages and mash. Occasionally when his mother was feeling flush, it would be a restaurant and Felix learned to enjoy lasagne and tournedos Rossini and kleftiko while she told him stories of the day’s work, and the people who drifted endlessly in and out of the Soho clubs. In the comfortable times they were afternoon clubs, that filled the empty time for their customers between the pubs closing and opening again. Felix had a dim impression from his brief glimpses into smoky rooms of a twilight world where curtains closed out the daylight and where men sat around drinking small drinks under Jessie’s benevolent, despotic eye. For a brief period, he remembered, there had been a club called Jessie’s Place, and his mother had talked about sending him away to a ‘proper’ school. He had refused to go, and one of the periodic upheavals had taken over their life, leaving them with no more Jessie’s Place. She had gone to work in a nightclub then, which meant that there were no more cosy suppers together either. Felix came back from school and spent his evenings alone, in one of the succession of rented rooms that they used as home. He listened to music, and drew. He painted too, when he could get hold of the materials. One of Jessie’s regular friends, a dealer of some kind who was still known to Felix as Mr Mogridge, told him that he could be good. Sometimes he brought him paintings, and canvas. It was Mr Mogridge who had introduced him to the night school, and Felix was grateful for that, even though he disliked the man. The rest of his spare time, until he left school and started work in the grocer’s, Felix filled up with walking in Soho. He rummaged in the strange little shops for decorative treasures, and watched the people as they passed him in the streets.
There were other men of Jessie’s too, of course. There were plenty of them when Felix was young, fewer as Jessie aged and her body grew more cumbersome. Felix knew for sure that his mother had once been a singer, and then, because she had not been quite good enough, she had become a club hostess. Not a prostitute. He knew most of the real girls by sight, and quite a lot of them by name, because he saw them in Old Crompton Street and Frith Street, and down at the bottom end of Wardour Street. Jessie wasn’t one of them. She had men friends, that was all. Felix ignored them as far as he could. He had never been able to bear the thought of what they did together. Now, looking back over the years of moving with Jessie from one set of cramped rooms to another, waiting and watching and drawing in exercise books, Felix realised that he must have been a strange, withdrawn, prim little boy. How different from Jessie herself, and how baffling for her.
She had done her best for him, he saw now, through what must often have been difficult times. He had been lonely, but he had never felt neglected. They had never had much, but he had never gone without.
Felix had no memories of his father at all.
He knew that Desmond Lemoine and Jessie Jubb had been married, because Jessie always kept her marriage certificate with her. The wedding pre-dated his own birthday by two and a half months. Apart from that, Felix only knew what Jessie had told him. The wedding certificate stated that he was a musician, but Jessie was unreliable about exactly what sort of musician. Sometimes he was the greatest sax player there had ever been, the forgotten star of every big band of the Thirties. At other times he was a trombonist, once or twice even a trumpeter.
‘He played that sax – or trombone, or trumpet – like an angel,’ Jessie would say mistily. And then she would snort with laughter and add, ‘He looked like an angel, too. God, he was beautiful. A big, black angel.’
Desmond had come from Grenada. Felix knew that he must have been tall, because he had grown to six foot himself, towering over Jessie. But the colour of his skin was only a dim reflection of his father’s blackness.
What would I be? Felix wondered. An angel the colour of cold English coffee? He also wondered if it was his half and half-ness, the awareness of being neither one person nor the other, that gave him his sense of separation.
Desmond and Jessie had met when they were both working in a club off Shaftesbury Avenue. Within a few months Jessie was pregnant, and a few months after that her musician obligingly married her. He had also insisted on the boy’s Christian name, although Jessie had preferred Brian.
‘It means the lucky one, girl,’ he told Jessie. ‘We all need a bit of luck, don’t we?’ He disappeared for good about a year after Felix was born.
‘He went on tour, with a new band, up north somewhere,’ Jessie said. ‘Going to be his big break, it was. He never came back.’
‘Why not?’ Felix would demand. When he was small boy his father’s absence made him silently, unnervingly angry.
Jessie would only shrug. ‘Liked his drink, Des did. And pretty faces, especially if they were white ones. Plenty of those in Manchester, or wherever he was. Fell for someone else, I expect. He’s got two or three wives to his name by now, I should think.’
At sixteen, Felix had calculated, he could move away from Jessie and begin to live his own life. He dreamed of going to Rome, or Florence, to find some kind of menial job that would still give him time to paint.
Then, in the same week as the King died, Jessie fell ill.
She had double pneumonia, and for five days Felix was sure that she was going to die. He sat by her bed, waiting again, and all the waiting he had done all through the years of his childhood, seemingly for nothing, welled up out of the past and crushed the hope out of him. Later, he remembered the stillness of that week. All the music had been silenced for the King, and the faces in the street outside the hospital were sombre.
He didn’t believe the doctors when they told him that his mother would live. She seemed so fragile, with all the energy and liveliness that he had taken for granted drained out of her.
Jessie did recover, very slowly, but it was as if her illness had quenched some hope of her own. She struggled back to the current club as soon as she could, but the work exhausted her. The customers noticed and commented on her low spirits. They were allowed, even expected, to have their problems, but Jessie had to be cheerful for them. Not long afterwards she was ill again, and missed more days off work. At last the boss, the latest in a long line of owners to whom Jessie had devoted her energy, took her aside. She would have to be more like her old self, he warned her, his special girl, our Jessie, or he couldn’t promise to keep her on.
Felix was incandescent with anger when Jessie told him. He wanted to burst into the club and hit the man square in his puffy face.
‘Don’t upset yourself, love,’ Julia advised him wearily. ‘It isn’t worth it.’
Two months later Jessie was fired. A salvo of bouquets and fulsome good wishes followed her into exile from the only world she knew.
‘There
