After the Cabaret by Hilary Bailey

Ralph fighting for his country, you – you – disgrace!’
    The dining room at Hodd was even gloomier than the drawing room. More stags’ heads lowered down on them through the misty light of a December afternoon.
    Sally, who was wearing dungarees and Wellington boots, said, ‘I don’t know what you expected. I know I’ve been working hard here for two months in the national interest, or so you say, but I think it’s in yours, really. I think you’re hoarding food.’
    â€˜What the hell—’ exclaimed Lady Hodd, almost speechless. ‘What the hell has that got to do with what we’re talking about? You’ve been sleeping with my bailiff – my
bailiff
– my son’s fiancée and Tim Ferris from the village. What decent girl could do that, with her fiancé at war? How could you? And now I’ll have to discharge him.’
    â€˜You’d better discharge me,’ said Sally. ‘You need me less. I’ll go.’
    â€˜I think that would be best,’ said Lady Hodd.
    Sally turned in the doorway and asked, ‘I suppose there’s no chance of any wages?’
    Lady Hodd seized a complicated china fruit-stand, made of twisted, coloured porcelain, from the table and hurled it at her son’s fiancée, but by that time Sally was outside the door. She heard it thud against the wood and smash to pieces, then Lady Hodd’s anguished cry as she appreciated what she had done.
    Tim drove her to the station. ‘I’m sorry she sacked you,’ Sally said, lighting him a cigarette.
    â€˜It doesn’t matter,’ he said. ‘I’m going to try to join up again. There must be something I can do …’
    â€˜Come and see me in London.’
    â€˜If I can.’ He stopped outside the little station. ‘Hurry, or you’ll miss your train.’

Chapter 20
    â€˜Of course,’ Bruno remarked, ‘everyone at Pontifex Street laughed. Laughed, as they used to say, like a drain. “I laughed like a drain,”’ he quoted.
    They were sitting in a café in Bruno’s neighbourhood. Bruno had bought his lunch, a solid plate of sausages, fried egg, baked beans and chips. Greg had a greasy omelette and left half of it. The door opened occasionally and a workman, or a man in a suit with a briefcase, or a local tradesman entered in a blast of cold air. His tape-recorder was on the table in front of him, concealed from the rest of the customers by a sticky sugar dispenser.
    During the week in which Bruno had been off on his buying trip Greg had checked that there had indeed been a squadron leader named Ralph Hodd at Farnborough during the Second World War. He found out, too, that Hodd Hall existed and was still occupied by a member of the family. He had also talked his way into the house in Pontifex Street once occupied by Sally and her friends.The present occupant, an American woman, was initially suspicious of him, but let him in, made him a cup of coffee, and said, ‘Yes, I heard we were living in the apartment that had once housed those British spies. I asked the landlord’s agents about it but they didn’t know much.’ And the landlord, she told Greg, was still Sir Peveril Jones.
    Greg had even gone into the loft, no longer reached by a ladder but up some stairs, for it had been converted, and looked from the same windows, he thought, through which Sally Bowles and the others must have seen the searchlights and barrage balloons of war-time London’s darkened skies.
    By the time he and Bruno met again, he was convinced that Bruno Lowenthal was telling the truth – or most of it. There was no way in which the old man could have conveyed, so off-handedly, so much random yet detailed information. Bruno was giving him the real stuff of Sally Bowles’s life. Sometimes, though, he had the idea that he was on an archaeological site which had been excavated by a madman so that all the