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‘I am almost accustomed to being shocked,’ I said. ‘Every day brings fresh news about the degradation of feeling and behaviour in modern life. That is why I wished to speak with you about –’
‘Immorality is all around us, Harold,’ said my old friend. ‘Have you seen the dimensions of the skirts worn by young girls in Knightsbridge today?’
‘I rarely venture to such select locations. My work keeps me confined to Piccadilly and Holborn. I rely on you, as in so many things, to keep me abreast of fashion.’
‘I’ve seen young women walking into Harrods, Harold, in a skirt that reveals their calves, sometimes almost to the knee,’ she said, her voice rising to a protesting squeak. ‘The other day, I was popping in to buy a crystal vase for Lobelia Graham’s wedding, and in front of me came this – this trollop in a long coat that opened to reveal a skirt so tight around the hips, it must have constricted her circulation. Were it not for a tiny flounce of fabric around the hem, it would have displayed the place where her hosiery ended! But I have shocked you, Harold, for your face has reddened alarmingly.’
‘Not at all,’ I said, applying a handkerchief to my brow. ‘Do continue.’
‘I thought she must be a tart, plying her trade in Brompton Road. But the doorman bowed with every sign of recognition, as if she were a regular customer.’
‘I can only hope,’ I said with feeling, ‘that such fashions, if that is the word for such immodesty, do not spread as far as my dear girls in Norfolk.’
We stood together, shaking our heads in a chorus of disapproval.
‘Fenella,’ I said, ‘my visit here today has a purpose beyond the delight of basking in your company.’
‘Oh?’ She rose from the sofa, smoothed her skirts and moved towards the window.
‘Not, I hasten to say, money,’ I reassured her, ‘for you are more than generous already to my young charges. I wish to ask you the favour of an introduction.’
‘Indeed. To whom?’
‘You have been good enough to bring my work to the attention of dignitaries from many walks of life,’ I said, ‘and I have forged several relationship that have been invaluable to my work. Words cannot express my gratitude for so many favours done in the past. Without the patronage of your cousin, Lord Strathclyde, there would be no Runaway Boys’ Retreat at Whitechapel. Without the intervention of your neighbour, Lady Kilfoyle, the Maidens in Distress Foundation at Bow would never have got off the ground. Had it not been for the generosity of Lord Staynes, and the Romany Rye Rehabilitation Unit, there would be a thousand homeless didicois on the streets of Sutton and Cheam. Were it not –’
‘Too kind, Harold,’ cut in Lady R-S, over her shoulder, as she peered through the glass to the view over the Strand. ‘Awfully glad to have been of help. But what you’re looking for now is …?’
I joined her at the window and, with slightly shocking directness, took her hand in mine. Did she flinch? Only for a second. Her long chilly fingers suffered the embrace of my insinuating touch (my hands are always warm) and seemed to thaw as I said, ‘Fenella, no man could wish for a finer benefactor than you, but that is not the point. For no man could wish, either, for a more sympathetic friend to turn to in the dark reaches of the night, a more understanding ally to draw close when all seems lost, a warmer image to summon up before him when one is surrounded by the cold winds of despair. Fenella –’
With (I admit) shocking presumption, I encircled her considerable waist with my arm, and turned her away from the window so that I was looking up into her eyes. It was, may God forgive my lack of gallantry, like turning a dreadnought battleship 180 degrees to port in the Solent, but it was worth it.
‘Fenella,’ I said, softly.
‘Yes, Harold?’ she whispered. It was a romantic moment, or would have been had she not towered a good eight inches above me. Her prodigious bosom, wrapped in some cantilevered phenomenon of whalebone and rustling red silk, protruded before me like a vast cushion. I looked up, like a besieger looking over a wobbling battlement, to her handsome, troubled face.
‘What you do, my dear Fenella, you do from many impulses – of noblesse oblige, of Samaritan generosity, of Christian decency. But I alone know that you do it from love.’
‘Oh, Harold,’ she breathed, ‘what do I know of love any more? Since Augustus died, I have been a stranger to the tender emotions. While all around me have danced through their middle years, and some have found other partners, I have kept faith with Gussie. My sister took me to a ball at Nancy Cunard’s, full of nigger minstrels and with a tiger from Sumatra and an ice statue of a swan whose beak some of the brazen flappers actually licked, and I was miserable throughout because there was no lovely Gus to lead me through the polka steps, and I went home early and cried into his dressing gown which stank of pipe tobacco, and I hugged it like a madwoman.’
‘My poor Fenella,’ I cooed into her bosom, startled to be allowed such intimacy. She laid her drooping head upon my neck and sobbed. Her cheek was hot against my skin.
We stood in an awkward embrace. I had, I confess, not the faintest idea what might happen next. I have known Fenella for years, ever since my work in London restarted after the war, and we have been through much together. Through night shelters in Pimlico and day-care homes in Stepney, I have introduced her to the needy and the profligate, to whom she has talked and proffered advice most helpfully over the years.
At first, the recipients of her advice did not find her engaging; she tended to address them like a duchess ticking off delinquent parlourmaids. She was always a little too intent on getting to the meat of their sufferings. Sometimes, it seemed she regarded them as turns in a burlesque show. ‘Are you an Alcoholic?’ she would ask. ‘Are you a Prostitute? Did you become a Prostitute in order to Feed a Baby Born Out of Wedlock? To what level of indignity did your employer abuse you?’ But I took her in hand, taught her to soften her voice, forsake her more intimidating hats, and learn to listen. It took a while.
Cynics might object to the enthusiasm with which she seeks out tales of sinfulness, and the relish with which she imparts the details of her findings to friends at lunch parties, but I know her impulses are pure. Disappointed by life, she has found a cause, as I have devoted my life to many causes, and she has stuck to it. Kindliness and sympathy have been her watchwords, and her transactions of money into my charitable funds have been the happy public outcome. Without her, I would eat bread and beef-dripping sandwiches every day, like the hapless masses in Lincoln’s Inn Fields.
Was I wrong to embrace her thus, as she fretted over her dead husband? I am a tactile man. If it is a fault to translate emotional generosity into physical expression, then I own up to the fault unreservedly. The girls among whom I move in London are used to my gentle embraces, my occasional bestowings of chaste kisses. They know the innocent pressure of my arms around them, telling them not to fear. What harm can be done by offering the occasional close contact of the notional swain – the touch of love that we all secretly crave? And had our lips met yesterday, I would not have been surprised nor dismayed. There is a passion in the pursuit of virtue that must find an outlet sometimes, even in salivatory exchanges. I thought of my recent sermon: what would Jesus have done in similar circumstances? I have no doubt at all that he was a kisser. His relations with Mary must have involved a degree of embrace and osculation, I am sure. His visits to the house of Martha and Mary would have ended in a flurry of fleshy connections in the doorway. I allow myself the thought that, while the one busied herself with household chores and the other was devoted to prayer and virtue, Our Lord might have stolen a kiss from the former, while the latter had her eyes shut in supplication. I can imagine him encircling Martha’s aproned waist from behind, as her hands in the sudsy water paused in their cleansing digitations, and her lovely head (I see curly fair hair darkened by the sweat of her labours, white if irregular teeth, skin like a white Egyptian peach) turned round, her eyes half anxious, half incredulous that this could be happening, her Cupid’s-bow lips parting, as he bent forward …
Lady Royston-Smith withdrew from my arms quite suddenly, with a forcefulness that suggested I had gone too far.
‘You were, I believe, about to enlist my help in an introduction, Mr Davidson?’ Suddenly, we were back on formal terms.
‘I know, Fenella, that you are a friend of Sir Arthur and Lady Bassenthwaite,’ I said, pulling my clerical jacket around me.
‘Arthur and Frederica? Of course. They are old friends. Frederica’s mother knew mine in Ashford. But I haven’t seen them for years. I believe they live in Africa.’
‘Indeed, they have spent the last three years in Kenya. But I notice from today’s Times they are sailing for England, to resume residence in Eaton Square. I would not trouble you to bring my work to their attention, except that Lady Bassenthwaite has for years worked for a charity bringing comfort to distressed gentlefolk of the region. Now she is back in London, she may be looking for a fresh outlet for her kind work …’
‘And you thought she might have some spare cash to steer towards your – ladies?’ A steely note had entered her voice.
‘All I ask, Fenella,’ I said, ‘is that I can meet them, with your help, and lay before them the size of the social problem that surrounds, for several miles, their comfortable Belgravia home.’
‘Well –’ she seemed fatigued by being asked for one more favour – ‘I’ll have to see. They’ll be acclimatising to their new life, and I don’t want to burden them with –’
‘If I could guarantee a bishop would accompany me to the meeting?’ I said. ‘Might that smooth things?’
‘Of course, Harold.’ (Suddenly we were back to Harold and Fenella; how Lady R-S loves the purple.) ‘You envisage a tea party? Here?’
‘That would be ideal.’
‘Perhaps. I’ll have to speak to Frederica when she has docked. But apart from the expatriates and the bishop, is there anything else that might enliven the occasion?’
‘I fancy,’ I said, neutrally, ‘I could bring a misfortunate girl – or two – to join our company, purely to demonstrate the scale of the problem.’
She pondered the arrangement: teatime at the Charing Cross Hotel with one peeress of the realm, one rector, one bishop and at least one prostitute, possibly two.
It was too good to turn down.
‘Shall we say Friday fortnight?’ And with that, she ushered me out the door, banished from the scene of our brief, romantic intermezzo. (Alas!)
CHAPTER 7 (#ulink_037093cf-d2a8-5da9-a431-3dc6586003e3)
Journals of Harold Davidson
London 15 September 1930
Have finally made contact with Miss Harris! It has not been easy. The young lady, despite her iniquitous employment, seems to have a positive aversion to being At Home to callers. I have made the dismal trek to Queen Street, Camden, four times now, not counting the evening when I made the error of tapping on Barbara’s window and finding an intimidating face looking out. From my knowledge of the Profession, I am aware that mornings are slow (the girls invariably sleep in), lunchtime finds some vigorous activity under way, listless afternoons speed up – like cricket matches! – after the tea interval, then die down from what we have learned to call ‘the cocktail hour’ at 6 p.m. until the pubs start to empty around ten, which is the signal for a great unloosening of sin all over the city.
I called three times in the early evening. Each visit was as fruitless at the last. I stood before the door of number 14, pressing the lowest bell, but heard only a distant inner jangling – like the twanging of my nerves as I awaited yet another hostile confrontation like the last. Resolving to give it up after this final attempt, I called yesterday in the mid-morning, pressed the bell, looked sadly at the drawn curtains and rapped my knuckles on the glass pane …
The door flew open. A small girl stood before me, clad in a garment made of towelling material, off-white or cream. Her feet were bare. With her right hand she agitated a hand towel through curly brown locks and looked at me with her head in one side. I did not recognise her.
‘Yes?’
‘Miss Barbara Harris?’
‘Might be. Who’re you? And what, more to the point, is your problem, banging on a girl’s door at this hour of the morning?’
I examined my wristwatch. ‘It is ten thirty, Miss Harris. The world has risen and been about its business for three hours at least. I am Mr Harold Davidson. We met at Marble Arch some weeks ago. We had lunch in a café and I expressed a desire to call upon you to discuss …’ I faltered. What had we agreed to discuss? I blushed to recall our little colloquy.
‘Oh, I remember you,’ she said, ‘the gent sweating to death in your long coat. You bought me lunch and come on all innocent about the pudding.’ She laughed and towelled her curls. ‘Well, hello again. So you thought you’d give it a go, did you? After all your high earnest chat, you’ve spent a few weeks tossing and turning in your bed every morning and thinking, “Oooh, shall I? Shan’t I?” And here you are.’
Her face, suddenly revealed amid all the towelling, was not as I remembered it. In the morning light, she was a quite different proposition from the poised and soignée strumpet climbing aboard an omnibus. Before me stood a child, five feet nothing, in a childish towel gown.
‘May I come in?’
‘You’re a bit eager, aren’t you? I don’t usually entertain gentlemen until after elevenses. Sorry, but I’m not in the mood. Can’t you come back at lunchtime?’
It was not unlike calling upon one’s dentist without an appointment.
‘I have not called on you for – for that,’ I said. ‘I wish only to talk to you.’
‘Talk to me? What about?’ Under her curly brows, she was suspicious. ‘You’re not from some League of Decency?’
‘I come to see you as a friend, nothing more. A friend who brings you only good news. If you’d let me cross your threshold. I have’ – a brainwave struck me – ‘two small gifts for you, and an urgent message that cannot be conveyed on the street. Where, I notice, we are already becoming the object of enquiring glances.’
Two doors away, a vacuum-cleaner truck had halted and its driver was speaking to a rough-skinned matron in a housecoat and fluffy mules at number 10. Both were watching us with interest.
‘Don’t mind that old sow. You better come in. And if all this stuff about presents and news and messages means that I’ll be staring at some purple monstrosity two minutes from now, I swear to God I’ll bash it with a teaspoon, all right?’
Dazed by this onslaught, I entered the house, through a hallway filled with bicycles – one parked, as it were, halfway up the wall, hanging from two rusting bolts – and was suddenly in her living quarters.
It was a room such as I’d rarely encountered, even among the habitats of the wretched sisterhood. In one corner was a basin surmounted by a tiny mirror hanging from a nail. In the other, a rudimentary cooking hob with two gas burners was all but concealed beneath a junk-yard of blackened saucepans. Nothing, it seemed, had been washed in weeks. Against the wall, a table, stool and triptych mirror was submerged beneath an accumulation of jars, potions and powder receptacles, dead flowers, tickets, theatrical handbills, scent bottles with rubbery squeeze mechanisms. Every square inch of space was tumbled with the debris of decadence. Torn squares of magazine pages, bearing the likeness of Ivor Novello, ragged pieces of muslin veil, random photographs, undergarments in vivid shades of crimson and aquamarine – and across the side wings of the mirror, a long lilac feather boa was draped like tinsel across a Christmas tree from Gamages store.
The word ‘abandon’ hardly did justice to this wasteland of human depravity. Its centrepiece was the bed that lay before the window through which the noonday sunlight weakly shone. It was huge. Most tarts of my acquaintance count themselves fortunate to possess a single bed with a soft mattress and pillow, rather than a hard divan and a bolster. Miss Harris could boast a king-size bed, opulently arrayed with cotton sheets, a satin counterpane, an over-blanket in green chenille, and half a dozen pillows that would not have disgraced a Byzantine seraglio.
‘OK then,’ she said, sitting in the edge of the bed. ‘Where’s these little presents?’
I dug through the inner folds of my coat. From the Gifts Pocket, I located a small bar of Evening in Paris guest soap in a decorative box (special offer, 3/6, Boots pharmacy). In my Perishables Pocket, I found a bar of the new ‘Crunchie’ honeycomb-and-chocolate sweetmeat, and gave both to her with grave formality.
‘I offer you these small tokens of my esteem, Miss Harris, to mark the beginning of what I hope will be a long and fruitful alliance, as together we walk the thorny path towards the light that forever gleams –’
‘That it?’ she said, gazing at her gifts with incredulity. ‘Small is right. I never been given a bar of chocolate by a gentleman before, not since I was ten. As for the soap,’ (she sniffed it suspiciously), ‘you’d be better off cleaning drains with it rather’n giving it to a girl and saying it’s a token of your blooming esteem.’
She looked boldly up at me, her brown curls bouncing on her brow like Medusan snakes. ‘You’re a beginner in this game, int’cha? D’you really think you can bribe people with chocolates and scent?’
I was hurt by her tone. All over London I am known for my generosity. In my missionary work, I have showered the Abigails and Idas, the Jennys and Pennys, with sweet-smelling concoctions and treats, until they welcome my arrival in their lives as children welcome Father Christmas. To call my little votive offering a bribe – it was an outrageous slur on my intentions.
‘Oh, don’t look so sorry for yourself,’ said Barbara. ‘I’ve had worse things given to me by gentlemen. And I do like a bit of chocolate round about now.’ She broke off a piece of the orange-brown snack and popped it in her mouth. ‘And I know you wasn’t offering it to get a screw off me – you just wanna talk, right?’
I nodded.
‘Well, if all you want’s a little chat,’ she concluded, ‘you won’t mind me going back to bed. On me own, I mean.’ Upon which, still clad in her towelling robe, she slipped her legs under the sheets, lay back luxuriantly on the pillows and groaned. I feared that she might have suffered some injury, but it was a moan of sluggardly pleasure, as the chocolate melted on her tongue. Her face on the pillow split into a wide smile, like the Cheshire cat’s. A beam of sunshine chose that moment to intrude through the dirty window and settle on her face in a long rectangle of saturated light, falling from brow to chin, bisecting the line of her mouth to make a perfect Christian crucifix.
She closed her huge brown eyes. ‘Lovely sunny morning,’ she observed. I stood by the bed, gazing in wonder, gripped by an epiphany such as I have seldom encountered. Lines from Keats’s ‘Eve of St Agnes’ settled on my heart – that moment when Porphyro, hidden in his beloved’s chamber, discovers her at her prayers:
Full on this casement shone the wintry moon,
And threw warm gules on Madeline’s fair breast,
As down she knelt for heaven’s grace and boon;
Rose-bloom fell on her hands, together pressed,
And on her silver cross soft amethyst,
And on her hair a glory, like a saint:
She seemed a splendid angel, newly dressed,
Save wings, for Heaven – Porphyro grew faint;
She knelt, so pure a thing, so free from mortal taint.
Never was a romantic sentiment less appropriate to its context than Keats’s words to this reeking boudoir, with its debris of flimsy undergarments by my feet, its indescribable cheap vests and grey bloomers half concealed by the huge bed. Yet I gazed at the girl as she lay silently basking on her kohl-stained pillow, illuminated by sunlight that seemed to conspire with the contours of her face and, like Porphyro, I too saw an angel there. No other word would do. Her caramel skin was flawless, her teeth, bared by a sensuous smile, were strong. Her hair, newly washed and dried, lay freed from the cloche-helmeted ropes I had encountered at Marble Arch. It curled in rich profusion around her ears and temples.
‘Are you going to stand there staring at me like I’m an exhibit?’ she asked, her eyes still shut. ‘I’m not a piece of merchandise in a bleedin’ shop, you know.’ She laughed to herself, mirthlessly. ‘Well, I mean, I am if that’s what you’re after. But I’m not here for winder-shopping, all right?’
‘No, Miss Harris.’ I recollected myself. ‘I was merely speculating about how you live. I cannot reconcile the apparent squalor of your address with the richness of your sleeping arrangements.’
‘You what?’
‘This bed, for example. I am older than you, yet I can only dream that some day I might possess a bed of such magnificence.’
‘Nice, isn’t it?’ She pulled herself upright, plumped the damask pillows into a fat double hillock and leaned back, like a plucky invalid – no, like a young duchess entertaining callers to hot chocolate and muffins at a breakfast levée in the days of Pope and Swift. ‘When I got this room a year ago, courtesy of a gentleman friend, he said, “Here’s a hundred quid, furnish it how you like,” so I blued half of it on a proper big bed. I reckon it’s where I ’ave the most fun by day as well as night, so I might as well get the best.’ She yawned. ‘You know they say people sleep for eight hours a night, so that’s like a third of a whole day? That means you spend a third of your life in bed. With me, it’s nearer half my life. So I like to be comfortable.’
‘Marvellous,’ I said, a little dazed. ‘I had not done the mathematical calculation before.’
‘What’s your bed like then?’ she asked. ‘Since we’re chattin’.’
I was nonplussed. ‘My bed? Why it’s, um, a solid cherrywood double divan for my wife and myself, with a large headboard. It cannot match this one for opulence, though it is very comfortable. The mattress is delightfully soft after a hard day’s labour, and –’
‘Hopeless,’ she said, crushingly. ‘Get rid of it.’
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘Soft mattresses. They’re no good.’
‘No good?’
‘No good for screwing on. No good for the old fucky-doodah. You can’t get any friction, or purchase, or whatever the word is. Soft bloody mattresses, they ride along under you, they go boingboing-boing up an’ down, but they’re no use if you’re into deep penetration, are they? I’m sure you knew that once, even if you managed to forget it down the centuries.’
I was unbothered by her rudeness. Few things are more delightful than provocative conversation with a young woman.
‘Sit down here,’ she said. ‘See what I mean?’
I sat down, keeping my coat about me for fear of misunderstanding. The mattress was indeed a splendid combination of suppleness and give, like the sprung dance floor at the Strand Palace Hotel.
