The Odd Flamingo

  Bello:

  hidden talent rediscovered

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  Contents

  Nina Bawden

  Foreword

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Nina Bawden

  The Odd Flamingo

  Nina Bawden

  Nina Bawden was one of Britain's most distinguished and best-loved novelists for both adults and young people. Several of her novels for children – Carrie’s War, a Phoenix Award winner in 1993; The Peppermint Pig, which won the Guardian Fiction Award; The Runaway Summer; and Keeping Henry – have become contemporary classics.

  She wrote over forty novels, slightly more than half of which are for adults, an autobiography and a memoir describing her experiences during and following the Potters Bar rail crash in May 2002, which killed her husband, Austen Kark, and from which she emerged seriously injured – but fighting. She was shortlisted for the 1987 Man Booker Prize for Circles of Deceit and several of her books, like Family Money (1991), have been adapted for film or television. Many of her works have been translated into numerous languages.

  Born in London in 1925, Nina studied Philosophy, Politics and Economics at Oxford University in the same year as Margaret Thatcher. Following Potter’s Bar, she was movingly portrayed as a character in the David Hare play, The Permanent Way, about the privatization of the British railways. She received the prestigious S T Dupont Golden Pen Award for a lifetime’s contribution to literature in 2004, and in 2010 The Birds on the Trees was shortlisted for the Lost Booker of 1970.

  Foreword

  When Nina Bawden published The Odd Flamingo in 1954 she at once became one of those writers whom other writers love to read. A very early crime novel of hers, this is a young woman’s book. It displays all the vitality of imagination and language of the youthful writer, just beginning to be conscious of her own powers, and busily opening the box of invention to which she has the key.

  One of the ways in which this verve shows itself is in the interesting cast of characters that soon walk on stage. Celia and Humphrey Stone, who are at the centre of the plot; Rose Blacker, Jasmine Castle (both these pretty young girls have flower names, it may be noted), and the less savoury Piers Stone and Jimmy Callaghan. The narrator is a young lawyer called Will Hunt, who is drawn into the tragedy by his friendship and love for Humphrey Stone.

  We see the story through Will’s eyes, he is the one who feels and lets us feel the impact of the terrible events that take place within the space of a few weeks. Will is a sensitive observer. As he describes the events as they hit him, they hit the reader too with force. Will speaks almost with a feminine voice. His tone is not masculine, although we are told he has loved a woman called Kate in the past and is deeply drawn to Rose. He is a romantic, possibly too dominated by his mother. Will Hunt is a lawyer, but shows little of the lawyer, in his speech and behaviour. He is at the feeling heart of the story around which all the terrible events cluster. Of all the people in it, he is the most sympathetic and the most destroyed. The author conveys this in a most touching and poignant set of scenes at the end of the book.

  The main action takes place in a seedy part of London (since become notably smarter)—Little Venice. A shady club called The Odd Flamingo is where most of the characters meet and plot their own destruction. There are plenty of deaths: four, and one aborted pregnancy.

  The Bohemian world it depicts is very much a sub-world of the 1950s. Unpleasing as it is, it would be very much nastier, tougher and more professional now. The customers of The Odd Flamingo take drugs and some of them are homosexual, but they are not in danger of AIDS. And the pregnancy of a young girl, which provides the starting point of the plot, would be less possible as a motive for murder in these days of better contraception and easy abortion.

  The complicated plot is cleverly put together and the action is gripping; we are both surprised and shocked.

  In this, as in other early books such as The Lonely Child (1956) Nina Bawden manifests the narrative skill, the sheer story telling quality which was to show itself in later novels, books for children, and work for TV.

  GWENDOLINE BUTLER

  Chapter One

  The afternoon had been hot, without any breeze. The clouds were low and ominously grey so that people walking along the street carried umbrellas and mackintoshes and from time to time glanced uneasily upwards at the sky. The town, lying in the valley, trapped the heat and the day had been one of emptiness and exhaustion. I had been unable to work and yet not quite able to give up trying and go home.

  Towards the evening thunder crawled faintly across the sky but the expected storm did not come. Instead, a wind got up and cleared the sky of cloud except for a fine tracery of milk-white stuff high up against the blue. So that by the time I had had dinner and changed my clothes and gone into the garden it was a rare, perfect evening. It was quiet, the shadows on the clipped lawn lay long and still and the air was heavy with the scent of roses. They had done exceptionally well that summer; now, in August, they were flowering as freely as they had done in June. Looking at the bushes I saw that the Crimson Glory had a light dusting of mildew on the leaves and wondered why I had not noticed it before. I was going to get the spray when I remembered about the nettles at the bottom of the kitchen garden.

  I had been intending to clear them up for weeks; it was a kind of self-imposed fatigue. Just then there was nothing I wanted to do less, but I found the scythe and sharpened it and looked for my gloves. They weren’t in their usual place in the shed and because I was too lazy to look for them I gathered the mown nettles with my bare hands until the palms blistered. I wrapped dock leaves round, my hands and cursed myself for my odd, urgent need to impose unpleasant duties on myself. I told myself that to do the jobs I disliked when I hired an adequate gardener could only be a pose on my part, a desire for the false satisfaction of a hair shirt.

  But I was not convinced; as I put the scythe back in the shed I had a lurking sense of guilt. I wondered, idly, why I should feel this need to do something that I did not enjoy. I pottered slowly and happily round the rose beds, snipping off the dead blooms and thought about the guilty feeling.

  When the telephone rang I took no notice of it for a while, hoping that whoever was calling would decide I was out; but the bell went on and on with a kind of monotonous impatience so that in the end I went to answer it with a blown, red rose in my hand.

  I had no premonition of disaster. Later I remembered that there had been a bowl of roses on the table by the telephone and that, as I picked up the receiver, I had been comparing the dead bloom with the clear crimson of a bud from the same bush and wondering whether there was anything that could be done to stop the red roses from blue-ing so badly when they opened fully.

  Celia said, “Will, is
that you? Oh, thank God. Can you come down to the School?”

  I asked her what was the matter and she said, “I can’t tell you on the’phone. Please come.”

  She sounded both frightened and distraught. It was unlike her.

  I said, “All right. I’ll come.”

  As I put the receiver down on its rest I knocked my other hand against the table edge and the petals dropped from the rose I held, scattering on the floor. I picked them up and put them in the waste-paper basket by the desk, thinking impatiently that by the time I got back from the town the light would be gone and it would be too late to do anything about the mildew. To-morrow would be no good either; I had to go to a bridge party. I hated bridge and I hated parties but I had always found it almost impossible to refuse invitations. It was one of the things for which I despised myself.

  Backing the car out of the garage, I was irritated with Celia. I hated to neglect my roses; they were my particular and cherished pride and I liked to look after them myself. They were not important, of course, if Celia was in real trouble, but I knew that what most people thought was urgent was rarely urgent at all. I told myself, wondering a little at my own resentment, that Celia had most probably forgotten to renew her driving licence and was in trouble with the police.

  I reminded myself how much I had always disliked having friends among my clients, not because they didn’t pay their bills but because it wasn’t always so easy to charge them for a professional opinion when they asked for it at their own dinner parties. Even the nicest of people were always doing that and I could never understand why.

  But as soon as I saw Celia I knew that there was something wrong that was more important than an out-of-date driving licence. She was waiting for me outside the School; as I drove down the hill I could see the pale blur of her face turned towards the car and when it stopped she ran to the door and jerked it open.

  She was very white and her whole body was trembling. She was an attractive woman normally; she had a soft, reposeful look about her that suited her slightly faded fairness. Her features were too indefinite for beauty but she had a kind of gentle good looks that made more striking women look, beside her, a little ill-bred. Now, as she opened the car door she looked plain, almost haggard. Her eyes were wild with shock and her extreme thinness, which usually made her look delicate and younger than her age, now in a curious way emphasised it.

  She said, “Thank God you’ve come, Will.”

  I said, “I came as quickly as I could.” All my ill temper had gone; I felt only alarm at the sight of her.

  She took my arm and led me through the gates of the School and across the green quad. The sun was shining on the warm stone and the air was very still. The doves were bubbling away up among the roofs and it was all very peaceful and out of this world.

  Her hand was shaking. I could feel it through the stuff of my coat although it rested on my arm quite lightly.

  She said, at last, her voice almost casual as though she were trying very hard to control it, “I don’t know how serious this is, Will. A girl came to see me this evening, just before I rang you. She’s indoors. I asked her to wait. She says she’s going to have a baby.”

  I thought of the trouble they’d had the term before. I said, “But that’s Humphrey’s business. Anyway, not yours.”

  She sounded tired. “Yes, it’s Humphrey’s business. But mine too. She says it’s Humphrey’s baby.”

  We had stopped at the bottom of a flight of steps that led on to a terrace. A pair of big, rather ugly stone urns stood on either side of the lowest step. She was standing close to one of them, running her hand nervously over its swollen side, her head down-bent and still.

  For a moment I felt nothing, and then the shock spread coldly through my body and I could feel the big artery in my neck throbbing fast as though I had been running.

  I said, “I don’t believe it.”

  I waited for her to tell me that it was a stupid, tasteless joke, knowing that it was not.

  She said, “It’s true, Will. I mean it’s true that she’s here and that she’s told me this. Her name’s Rose Blacker. She lives in the town. Her mother’s a school teacher, I think. She says she’s tried to see Humphrey and that he hasn’t answered the letters she wrote to him. I don’t think she’s a bad girl, Will.”

  All the time she was smoothing her hand over the side of the urn in a gentle, abstracted way. Then she said, “I don’t think she’s just trying to make trouble. I think she’s—desperate. She’s got some letters that she says Humphrey wrote to her. She would have let me read them—I think she wanted me to. But I couldn’t do it. So I said that I had to go and see to the children and I asked her to wait. Then I rang you up. I’m sorry, Will. This is almost as bad for you as it is for me. Almost as much of a shock, I mean.”

  I said again, “I don’t believe it.” I felt stupid and cold. Then I saw that Celia was watching me and that there was pity in her eyes. I felt, suddenly, ashamed that she should know how vulnerable I was where Humphrey was concerned. As if it were a weakness in me.

  We walked on, up the steps to the terrace, round the side of School House and on through the low arch that led to the little quad before the Headmaster’s house. Before we went into the quad there was a low white gate with a notice on it saying “Private.” We crossed the quad and went into the front hall of the house.

  Celia said, in a whisper, “She’s seen us. She’s sitting at the window. When I came to meet you I went round the back way.” She sounded panicky, as though it mattered that the girl had seen us. Then she said, “Humphrey won’t be here for four days. It’s the London conference. Shall we have to fetch him back, Will? He’s staying with Piers. I can ring him up.”

  I said, “I don’t know. I don’t know how serious this is. What do you want me to do? Do you want me to talk to the girl?”

  I felt empty and cold. The whole thing had the unreality of a bad play; I could not believe that there was a part in it for me.

  She said, “Please see her, Will. Send her away if you can. I’m stupid and a coward but I can’t talk to her just now.”

  She was playing with the string of pearls at her neck and they broke, suddenly, and rolled all over the floor of the hall. I went down on my knees and groped after them.

  She said, on the edge of hysteria, “For God’s sake, Will, leave them alone. They don’t matter.”

  I got up and gave her the pearls I had collected. I thought she looked tired to death, ill almost, and I felt a sudden and violent pity for her. I wanted to say something that would comfort her, something to take the look of dread off her face, but everything I thought of sounded either platitudinous or merely silly. In the end I said, “D’you think there could be anything in what she says?”

  As soon as I had said it I could have bitten off my tongue. To my surprise and inward alarm she answered me calmly and without indignation.

  “I don’t know, Will. There was a time, some months ago, when he was away quite a lot. Not often really, or for long. A night here and there and once a week-end. I was remembering about it when I was waiting for you. He’d had some sort of explanation each time, I think, but it can’t have been very convincing. Or I shouldn’t have thought about it when the girl told me about the baby.”

  She looked miserable, and then she said, “You know, Will, if this thing is true, it may be my fault. I’ve not been the best sort of wife for Humphrey.”

  I was angry. I said, “Don’t be a fool, Celia. You’ve done everything for him.” That sounded false and tinny and I added, “You’ve always seemed so right for each other.”

  I meant it; that had been one of the nicest things about them.

  She flushed darkly and looked angry, almost as though she didn’t like to be contradicted. She said, “No one can possibly know.” She ran her tongue over her lips and then she said unhappily, “I only meant that I’m not a very passionate person, Will. I haven’t been right for him in that way.”

  There was n
othing that I could say. I stared hard at the opposite wall feeling ridiculously embarrassed. Then I patted her arm and said heartily, “Don’t be an old ass.”

  She sighed and leaned against me as if for comfort. We stood, for a moment, like two people on the stage. Her hair tickled my cheek. I kissed her on the top of her head and pushed her gently towards the stairs. I said, “I’ll see the girl if you want me to. We can talk when she’s gone.”

  She said, “Bless you, Will.” Her face lightened and she smiled at me. She ran up the stairs and I waited until she was out of sight before I opened the drawing-room door.

  A girl got up from the window seat as I went into the room. The evening light fell on her face and her appearance was so completely unexpected that for a moment I could only stare stupidly with a rising sense of astonishment and disbelief. I was not sure what I had anticipated; certainly not this.

  She was so very, very young. I thought: a child, she should be still at school. She was small and slender and she held herself beautifully, like a dancer. Her face was pale and pretty; in spite of the mouth, tightened with alarm, it looked amazingly and softly innocent. She had remarkable eyes. They were thickly lashed and almost quite black, so very dark, anyway, that the difference between the pupil and the iris was barely perceptible. She was exquisite.

  I stood, like a fool, and looked at her.

  She said, “What are you doing here?” Her voice was gentle and pretty and faintly common. It shook a little as if she were afraid.

  I told her my name and that I knew who she was. I said, “Mrs. Stone asked me to talk to you. She’s rather upset.”

  Her mouth trembled a little and then she said with a kind of forced truculence, “To deal with me, don’t you mean? She wants you to get rid of me, doesn’t she? I know who you are. You’re a lawyer. You can tell Mrs. Stone she can’t scare me off like that.”