voices echo along the corridor.
‘You here already?’ Johnny walked in first, taking his role as band leader seriously. He was a smooth talker, five years older than Lawrie.
‘Just about.’ Lawrie greeted Moses and Sonny as they came in, shaking hands with Aston.
They’d formed the band right after arriving in London, though they’d run through a few changes of personnel since. Moses and Sonny were always together; drums and a double bass required transportation and a portion of the band’s earnings was always allocated to keeping Moses’s rusty old van on the road. Al was the current fifth member, on trumpet.
‘I should go. Head out front to where the action is.’ Aston winked.
‘See you later?’
‘Perhaps, but if I disappear it only means I got lucky. ’Sides, it might be wiser to steer clear of Evie. You know I only put she in a temper.’
‘What is it with you two?’
Aston walked off without answering.
Lawrie had never been able to fathom a reason for this enmity that existed between the two people closest to him. He guessed that something had happened between them at the party where he’d first introduced them. The party which had ended so badly. The one thing both of them had in common was a reluctance to talk about whatever had happened, and the last thing Lawrie wanted was to dredge up bad memories of that night.
Johnny was warming up his fingers at the piano in the corner and Lawrie began to assemble his clarinet, massaging grease lightly into the cork. It would need replacing soon, he noticed; it was wearing as thin as his nerves.
‘They asked for upbeat tonight.’ Moses unpacked the sheet music. ‘Nothing slow ’til the end. Get everybody dancing and sweating.’
‘I could use something upbeat meself,’ Al said, eying up the bottle of whisky on the side. ‘Anyone else have a knock on the door this morning?’
Johnny stopped playing. ‘Police, you mean? Last night. I was already out but they scared the hell out of Ursula. Lucky she had the pickney right there when she answered the door so they leave her be. They still was acting sus though. Wanting to know when Joy was born, where she was born, all that. They went all along the street. Ursula know ’cause she stood out on the step and watched ’em.’
Al blew out a lungful of relief. ‘I thought it was just me.’
‘You never told me they come to the house.’ Moses frowned. He and Sonny shared a room in the same house that Ursula and Johnny’s family called home, the landlord making the most out of each inch of space.
‘You was out at work, same as me,’ Johnny shot back.
‘Well, yes, but—’
‘This is ’cause of the baby, right? Clapham Common?’ Lawrie interrupted them.
Al sparked up a rollup as he spoke. ‘They never come right out and say, but they was asking me where I was Wednesday night. Who I was with. And I asked around at work and seems like they only been asking those who are of the Negro persuasion. Not a single white fella knew what I was on about.’
‘The baby was coloured,’ Lawrie told them, his eyes trained on the floor between his feet, his chest growing tight as the men fell silent. Without looking he could feel their eyes, all of them staring at him.
‘They tell you that?’ Johnny finally broke the tension.
‘They wouldn’t answer a single question I asked them,’ Al said, sounding put out. ‘Why they tell you?’
Lawrie reached over and poured himself another measure of whisky. ‘They didn’t tell me; I saw her,’ he said quietly. ‘I was the person who found her in that pond.’
Johnny whistled, its arc descending; Moses’s mouth fell open.
‘They took me to the police station for questioning but they let me go,’ he said, the words tumbling out now. ‘It was a woman walking her dog who saw her first. She come running and I didn’t realise what she’d seen until I was almost in the pond myself.’
‘Just as well there was a witness,’ Al said, laying a hand on Lawrie’s shoulder. ‘Else I reckon they’d have questioned you a damn sight longer. Way that copper spoke to me, I started to wonder if I did it after all, in a moment of madness, and I just forgot.’
‘They think one of us did it though,’ Moses pointed out. ‘You think we know who did it? Could be someone we’re acquainted with.’
It was a sobering thought. The baby had to have at least one black parent and there were only so many black people around, most of them men. Lawrie only knew a few women whose skin was dark enough: Evie; Ursula Sands; another woman whose name he couldn’t remember but had travelled over on the boat with them and now lived at the far end of Somerleyton Road. More were starting to turn up each month, their husbands saving up enough to bring them over, but, barring the birth of Johnny’s youngest, he couldn’t think of anyone else who’d had a baby in England yet. It was as if this child, Ophelia, had been spirited to Clapham Common from somewhere else entirely.
Johnny made a show of checking his watch and stood, signalling that it was time to go even though Lawrie could see from the wall clock that they still had ten minutes. ‘Come on, fellas. For now, we got to trust the police will catch the real culprit. We all are sensible upright citizens after all. None of we got anything to do with this.’
They followed their leader onstage, Lawrie feeling temporarily soothed but he wasn’t sure if it was the effect of the whisky or the new knowledge that he wasn’t alone. If the police were questioning everyone then it meant that they hadn’t singled him out. He’d begun to wonder if Rathbone had only been biding his time, searching for scraps that could be woven into a chain to trap Lawrie. He knew there were people out there who’d be happy to help; at least one person, who he’d not seen or spoken to in months but who had every right to bear a grudge.
He shook off those dark thoughts, closing his mind to them, and it was just the usual adrenaline that kicked in as he reached his spot on the stage, sliding his feet along the solid wood until he found a comfortable stance. The nerves would pass soon enough, but those moments before they started playing, before the music took over, always made him feel like one of the tigers at London Zoo. He’d gone there with Evie the previous autumn. She had leaned against the railing and stared in awe at the big cats, lounging lazily in their compound, but all he could think was how sad they looked, these magnificent beasts now tamed and cowed by their conquerors. If anyone could understand the tigers it was him, trapped in a foreign land and reduced to parading himself before a paying audience. But then he’d raise his clarinet, the reed rough against his lips, and feel like a king.
They warmed up the crowd with a little calypso, Johnny strumming a Lord Kitchener tune on his guitar before segueing into swing for the mainly white audience. The night had barely started but the place was already half full. The men had all slicked their hair back with pomade, the humid air heavy with the scent of Brylcreem. The girls were dolled up in their best dresses, coiffed and coy, every one of them with an eye on the entrance, watching for the next eligible gent. He couldn’t see Evie but she’d be there somewhere, trawling the dancefloor as she’d said to him, trying to find Delia a lad to dance with so that she could abandon her friend for Lawrie later on. Aston would be sticking close to the bar, ready to fritter
