Mark Dunn - We Five

“Then find out about me. Let’s see each other. You say when. I’ll say where. Or versa vicea.”

“I don’t know. The room’s spinning.”

“I’m sweeping you off your feet.”

“No. I think I’m drunk. I think you put something in my lemonade.”

Jerry looked away in an attempt to conceal his smirk.

“Answer me! Look at me! Did you do something to my glass of lemonade?”

“I cannot tell a lie. I adulterated your lemonade.”

“You—”

“—turned your lemonade into adult lemonade.”

“Why?”

“I thought you needed a little loosening—”

Maggie’s hand met Jerry’s face before he could even complete his answer. He responded by pulling her roughly toward him and kissing her again. This kiss was delivered without affection or even passion. It represented only the brute desire to thoroughly control her in that assailing moment.

It was answered by yet another slap.

Followed, finally, by the emergence of a sly, devilish grin on the face of the victim, and the panting declaration: “ I. Will. Have. You .”

“ In. Hell ,” returned Maggie, who then flailed blindly for the door, yanked it open, and half-marched, half-fled down the hallway to the parlor in a show of frazzled, trembling indignation.

The phonograph wasn’t playing “Strutting the Blues Away.” Instead, its speaker was blasting out the comical song “Yes, We Have No Bananas,” while Bella Prowse was eating a banana in contradiction of the lyrics, and Jane Higgins was being roused from slumber upon the sofa by three of her friends, each with one eye on the front door, and each looking conversely regretful over having to skidoo from the most interesting night of their young lives.

London, England, October 1940

The sign in the grocer’s window read:

Yes, We Have no Bananas

Nor onions nor oranges, sultanas, currants,

dried fruit of any kind, spaghetti, kippers & herring.

So please don’t bleeding ask.

Jane laughed; Molly, Ruth, and Carrie smiled. Maggie registered nothing. As We Five hurried along to take shelter, Maggie Barton was red-faced, brow-cinched, and broodingly silent. Once the public ARP shelter was reached and the friends settled inside, Maggie persisted in closing herself off from communication with everyone round her — both those she didn’t know and those four young women whom she did. Maggie was too busy recalling with revulsion exactly what Jerry Castle had said to her, had done to her outside the Hammersmith Palais.

And after the two had been getting on so well.

Jane had seen it. She’d been saying her own goodnights to Tom Katz and had noticed out of the corner of her eye the outlines of the ugly exchange: the vulgar overture, the harsh rejoinder. She’d then watched, now with her eyes targeted like a huff-duff antenna, as Jerry, taking drunken offense to the rebuff, pushed and then penned Maggie against the wall, where he took liberties in full view of other couples emerging from the ballroom. Jane was prepared to go and assist Maggie in removing herself from the man’s vile clutches when Maggie succeeded in doing that very thing on her own, but not without delivering retributive justice in the form of a hard slap to Jerry’s face.

It was a slap, which, curiously, prompted a smile, as if this — her expression of instantaneous hatred for him — was what he’d been after all along.

Jane had thought at the time: if this is how the bloke thinks he can win the affections of Maggie Barton, he’d best look elsewhere. Of We Five only Jane would have fallen for such brutish, caveman tactics, and only then because Jane would have given back as she got: cudgel-wielding caveman, meet cudgel-wielding cave woman . But Maggie, and Jane’s other circle-sisters, weren’t cudgel-carriers. They hadn’t the leathery hide of the scrabbling London East Ender like Jane. They were much too staid and naïve to desire the attention of anyone but a gentleman — with special emphasis on the “gentle.” From what she’d observed outside the Hammersmith, Jane did have to admit, though, that modesty and girlish innocence hadn’t prevented her friend Maggie from asserting herself when need arose.

Thought Jane: “Huzzah for my friend Maggie Barton for standing up to the bloody lout!”

Up to then — up until this display of most deplorably bad behaviour on the part of Mr. Castle, behaviour which reminded Jane in retrospection of some beastly belch from the pulpit after a particularly inspirational sermon — the evening had proceeded quite swimmingly. It was such a night as none of the five had ever before experienced. Over the course of the three and a half hours spent in the company of the five young men who’d sought them there, Maggie and Jane and Carrie and Molly and Ruth had learned things about themselves, about their needs and their natures, which could not have been predicted only a few hours before.

And best of all: they learned how to have fun — the kind of fun for which the Hammersmith Palais was nationally famous.

Carrie and the hulking young Scandinavian named Holborne had taken to one another like ducks to a cool summer pond. Carrie’s love of music propelled her out onto the dance floor without a moment’s hesitation, and Will did a yeoman’s job of keeping in good step with her. They sat out only three or four dances through the long evening. Slowly and soulfully they gyred and dipped to both of the celestial serenades made famous by Glenn Miller. Elsetimes they jitter-jived like seasoned Lindy Hoppers to the more energetic numbers like “Woodchopper’s Ball.” This particular song was played as loudly as possible to cover the sound of the evening’s first Luftwaffe air attack. (Maggie had guessed wrong; it was the Ham-mersmith Palais’s custom never to evacuate its ballroom in the midst of a bombing raid. Regular customers knew when they entered the palace each evening that this might very well be their last night on Earth, but, by Jove, at least they’d die happy!)

Whilst they were dancing, Carrie and Will, both of whom seemed to know the lyrics to every popular song, sang along with the orchestra, Carrie demonstrating her inarguable lyrical gift, Holborne’s own voice generally on-key and perfectly serviceable as amateur voices go. They concluded their tuneful tête-à-têtes with the antepenultimate number of the evening, “The Breeze and I” (“…they know you have departed without me, and we wonder why…”) Even more moving than this was the song which came next (which they listened to in respectful silence) — the movingly valedictory “We’ll Meet Again,” sung not by its famous interpreter, Miss Vera Lynn, who was presently abroad performing for the troops, but by a woman who looked and sounded very much like the U.K.’s beloved Miss Lynn, and who capitalized on this fact by calling herself Deirdre Lynn.

Molly, like many others in the crowd, could not keep herself from tearing up during the poignant “We’ll Meet Again,” though the song lost all of its personal relevance given that Molly was saying goodnight (and not goodbye) to a conscientious objector, who had a very good chance of meeting Molly not only on some sunny day but for that matter any day of the week, irrespective of the weather. Molly also wept when the band struck up for its last number of the evening, the patriotic “There’ll Always Be an England,” though in a very large room (the Palais was a great converted tram shed) with a very large number of men in uniform, We Five’s beaux for the evening stood out quite conspicuously in their civvies. As a result, they became recipients of judgemental stares and glares during both this song and the earlier rendition of “Bless ’Em All,” and specifically during the song’s pointed lyric, “You’ll get no promotion this side of the ocean.”