Lucius the Club | Page 2

get it up any longer.'
I nodded. It all made sense. Of a sort. Mama rang Curly for the use of a bedroom, and Billy was with Curly at the time. Mama and the boys arrived, Curly went out, and Billy was hidden behind the two-way mirror.
'So, Billy Marwell is putting the squeeze on us. Charming.... How much does he want?'
'Hasn't said yet.'
'Is Curly in on it?
'Not on the blackmail, no. I doubt that. But she may have asked him to take some piccies, since I wouldn't let her watch.'
Or join in, I thought. But I didn't mention that.
'When was this?'
'About a week ago.'
'Are the boys still in London?'
'No. They sailed on the Queen Elizabeth on Monday. They've got a six-month contract on a cruise ship out of Florida.'
I nodded again. I hope I seemed calm, but inwardly my heart was pounding and I was afraid I might have to be sick. I needed fresh air.
'Well, leave it with me, Mama,' I managed to say. 'I shall have to have a think about what we're going to do.'
*
I put on a scarf and overcoat, picked up my stick, and went out into the dusk for a walk.
It was the middle of December, 1960, and I had just finished my first term at Oxford. Elvis was number one, with 'It's Now or Never'. All was well with the world - except that we were being blackmailed.
I knew a bit about blackmail, because Jack was an expert.
Jack, you see, was my father. Nominally. Mama would never tell me who my biological father was - in fact she would never tell anyone. She said that my real father had never wanted to know me, and that was that. I never pressed her because I wasn't interested.
Mama got pregnant when she was seventeen. By mistake, I think. And although she could have got rid of me easily enough - she certainly had the contacts - she chose to let me go full term. But she did decide to get married. And since my real father had disappeared, as she put it, she knew just the right stand-in.
Jack Grebanier was an actor. Not too well known before the war, but later he became a film star. In the David Niven and Michael Wilding class. Jack had problems, however, because he was gay - or queer, as it was called in those days. And recently he'd had an unfortunate experience when he tried to pick up the wrong man in the gents lavatory at Piccadilly underground station. He was very drunk at the time, he told me, otherwise he would never have been so foolish.
Anyway, Jack's target turned out to be a plain-clothes policeman, and it cost Jack fifty quid in used oncers to settle the matter. Fifty pounds was an awful lot of money in 1940, and after that Jack became something of a connoisseur in blackmail.
One afternoon in the Haymarket, he pointed across the street. 'See that man over there, in the spectacularly vulgar brown suit?'
'Yes.'
'He has lived for years by blackmailing...' And he named a well-known Hollywood actor.
Back in 1940 Jack's needs and Mama's needs coincided. Too many people were beginning to mutter about Jack's sexuality, so it would do him no harm to be respectably married, with a family on the way. And Mama was smart enough to know that being a single mother was definitely not a good idea. So, at her suggestion, they got together.
They stayed together until I went to Follington, at the age of thirteen. Then they divorced.
Follington was Jack's old school - he came from a good middle-class family with some money in the background - and although it's not one of the famous public schools it does a pretty good job. And that connection with Jack's posh family is the reason why I call Mama Mama, you see. It helped to make peace with Jack's parents, who weren't too thrilled with him marrying a Windmill girl. But then, it was wartime, and these things happen. And Mama soon charmed them into accepting her. She charmed everyone.
*
That afternoon - the day we found out that Mama was being blackmailed - I went out into the dusk and walked down to Berwick Street market.
I think I had already realised that I was going to have to kill Billy Marwell, but I wanted to think about it to make sure.
Mama and I have always lived in Soho. It was her father's house, bought cheap in the 1930s, a big Georgian place with high ceilings and some really quite good mantelpieces.
Soho was once the home of Hogarth, Angelica Kauffman, and (briefly) Mozart. But in the post-war period it was the centre of London's vice and sin. These days, estate agents sometimes refer to our street as being in Fitzrovia, or even