Tonight, though, Dunn had left the party with only Skins, his bass, and a few bottles of champagne liberated from the party on his way out.
‘Unusual for you to be bird-less after a gig,’ said Skins as they wound through the deserted West End streets, pushing their clattering cart. ‘Although it’s been happening a lot lately, hasn’t it?’
‘A worrying trend, mate,’ said Dunn. ‘That one with the massive feather on her headband kept giving me the glad eye, but by the time we came off she was canoodling in the corner with some chinless twit with a monocle. A bleedin’ monocle.’
‘Losing your touch, then?’
‘Do you know, I think I might be. It’s been weeks since I’ve had so much as a chaste peck on the cheek. What if I’m getting too old?’
‘You’ve only just turned thirty.’
‘Five years ago,’ said Dunn. ‘I’m ancient now. No one wants to go to bed with an ancient bass player.’
‘Look on the bright side, though. There were times not so long ago when we didn’t think we’d live to see thirty. But we got through it. And you’ll get through this little drought. And you’re a jazz musician. We’re cool. The kids love a musician.’
They had arrived at the shop by now. Skins let them in and Dunn helped him lug his drums and traps case through to the back. With the gear safely stowed, they locked up and leaned the cart against the wall. They said their goodbyes on St Martin’s Lane and Dunn strolled off towards the bus stop, whistling a tune they’d been trying to learn after hearing it on a gramophone record brought over by some visiting American musicians. Skins carried on up past Seven Dials and on towards Bloomsbury.
By the time Dunn got to Finsbury Park, the sun was up and people were already making their way to work. He couldn’t face the two-and-a-half-mile walk home, so he opted to wait for a tram to take him to Wood Green.
Barty Dunn made his way round the corner from the tram stop at Wood Green, to the little terraced house on Coburg Road where he rented a room from Mrs Phyllis Cordell. She had lost her husband and both her sons in the Great War, and had welcomed Dunn into her home. She was grateful for the much-needed rent, and for the company of the rakish musician who added a bit of glamour to the otherwise perfectly ordinary, working-class street. Although, by Dunn’s reckoning, she was not much more than ten years his senior, Mrs Cordell doted on him like an indulgent mother, chuckling over his tales from the clubs and clucking over his hangovers and minor ailments.
She didn’t mind the strange hours he kept, nor did she bat an eyelid at the seemingly endless succession of pretty young ladies who emerged from his room just after lunch several times a week. She made them a cup of tea and offered them a sandwich, chattering away as though she was delighted to have them in her home. Which she was. But she didn’t expect to see them again. She knew it would be a different face that came blushing into her parlour next time.
This was the sole source of friction between tenant and landlady.
‘I don’t mind who you spend the night with,’ she had said one afternoon as she handed him yet another cup of tea. ‘And I don’t mind what you get up to when you do. Lord knows I’d enjoy a bit of that meself if I ever got the chance. Not that I ever will. Woman of my age.’ She laughed at the very idea of such a thing. ‘But I don’t want to see you ending up lonely. You need to find a nice young woman. A war widow, maybe. Settle down. Make a life for yourself. A family. You need a family around you. Everybody needs that.’
‘But what would you do then, Mrs C?’ he’d asked with a smile. ‘I can’t leave you on your own.’
‘I’ll have Gallipoli,’ she said, and patted the gormless mongrel’s friendly head.
She had adopted the dopey dog a few years earlier and had named him after the disastrous campaign that had taken both her boys from her. The neighbours had tutted.
‘You don’t want to be calling him that,’ one had said. ‘It’ll be like dwelling on it. You should put it all behind you. No good’ll come from reminding yourself of it every time you call the dog in.’
But she had insisted that it would be a comfort. The name of her new canine companion would take the sting out of it.
‘It might have took my boys,’ she had said, ‘but now I can hear the name and think of this little fella instead. I can remember my boys as the two handsome lads who went off to war, and Gallipoli as the silly little mutt who keeps me company now they’ve gone.’
It didn’t make sense to anyone but her and Dunn.
He let himself into the darkened house with his latchkey. Mrs C always left him a glass of milk and a tongue sandwich on a shelf in the larder – ‘just in case you’re hungry when you get in’ – and he sat at the kitchen table and ate it while he waited for tiredness to tell him to take himself off to bed.
Gallipoli had heard him come in and stirred himself from his basket by the stove to see if there might be any food on offer. Dunn peeled a slice of tongue from the generously filled sandwich and shared it with the dog, who ate it greedily. He lolled sleepily against Dunn’s leg for a few moments more, but when it became evident that there was to be no more to eat, he padded back to his basket and settled down again.
‘Room in there for an old soldier?’ said Dunn, but the dog was already asleep. ‘Better get myself upstairs, then. See you tomorrow, old mate.’
After a quick visit to the toilet in the tiny backyard, Dunn trod lightly up the stairs and into his room. Mrs Cordell had taken the wartime blackout restrictions more seriously than most and had run up thick, heavy curtains to try to stop light from spilling out on to the street.
‘What you doing that for?’ her neighbour had asked. ‘We’ve got the streetlights half covered up.’
‘And when the zeppelins come,’ said Mrs C, ‘they’ll see your house, not mine. You can come and sleep in my parlour when they bomb you out.’
‘What are they going to bomb us for, all the way out here?’
‘The sweet factory. Good for morale – sweets. They want to break us, them Germans.’
‘Liquorice Allsorts,’ laughed her neighbour. ‘Vital war supplies.’
Mrs Cordell had blacked out her windows nevertheless, and her neighbours had nervously followed suit. Now, nearly seven years after the end of the war, the blackout curtains served to supply semi-nocturnal Barty Dunn with the darkness he needed to sleep his way through the morning.
He threw his clothes over the back of the chair and all but fell into his bed. Sleep came almost immediately.
It only took Skins about twenty minutes to walk home from the shop. He and his wife, Ellie, lived in a Georgian town house on a leafy street not far from the British Museum. The house was part of a row of similarly impressive dwellings, each fronted with white-painted stone at the ground floor, with dun-coloured bricks on the three upper floors. A gate in the black-painted railings opened to give access to the ‘area’ below street level – the servants’ and tradesmen’s entrance to the house – while the front door was reached by climbing a flight of six stone steps. The tall windows on the first floor gave on to narrow balconies which none of the street’s residents ever used. It was rather more house than anyone expected a jazz drummer to live in, and they were right to think so – it was Ellie who had bought it for them using money from her inheritance.