It made a difference. It made all the difference in the world. She no longer saw her as a drab, mousy little creature who, by means unknown, witchcraft possibly, had hooked her eldest son, but as she recalled herself nearly thirty years ago, in desperate need of love and, even more essential, what love might bring, absorption into a family unit, where she could hope to find an identity.
She reached out, took the sherry glass from Lydia's hand, set it firmly on the occasional table, and said, fervently, “He told me, my dear, and I’m glad for you both! Alex needs a wife badly. Someone like you, to watch out for him—there!” and she kissed her soundly on both cheeks, tasting a triumph that was salty but rewarding.
Two
1
THE ORIGINAL SPONSOR WAS BONZO. BRASH, TOOTHY, OPEN-HANDED, BONZO Charteris commanded A Company, and was reckoned an experienced ladies’ man. For it was Bonzo who learned, in the course of a chance conversation as the port circulated, that “Lucky” Swann, posted to them as supernumerary whilst awaiting passage to India, had not yet paid a visit to the Empire, Leicester Square, highly recommended by Bonzo as “The resort of the most exclusive laced mutton in town.”
Alex, having spent more than five of the last seven years out of England, had not yet learned that “laced mutton” was the fashionable word for “harlot.” Last year, he recalled, it had been “rig,” and the year before “bint,” but one lost track of new slang on outpost duty and at advanced base, where laced mutton, if it was not off the menu altogether, was reserved for men who could outrank a captain, even a well-heeled one like Bonzo Charteris.
Bonzo, having extolled the bill of fare at the Empire, went on to say that the Colonel himself, (known by the subalterns as “Bejasus,” “Fwat-Fwat,” or “Vorwarts”) was himself a regular partaker of the Empire's laced mutton but took good care, as did any man with his wits about him, to go there in mufti.
“Met the old boy there half a dozen times,” he said, “but we don’t let on, y’know. Pass one another with half a wink.”
It was this conversation that led to an invitation on the part of Bonzo to escort Swann to Leicester Square on their next weekend jaunt to town for Swann, reckoned a country cousin in the garrison town, was nonetheless respected as a man who had served three campaigns and been present, lucky devil, not only at Rorke's Drift but also at Tel-el-Kebir.
It would have amazed Charteris to learn that Swann had been far from lucky in other respects, and that, at twenty-five, he was still a virgin. It was naturally assumed that a man who had spent so long on foreign stations had enjoyed the favours of numerous oriental charmers; Swann was very careful to do nothing to correct this impression.
His continence, as a matter of fact, was not from inclination, although he took careful heed of the surgeon-major's dire warnings against contracting venereal disease when serving abroad. Rather it was from lack of opportunity, and the nature of the places where he had campaigned. Between times in Deal, Cork, and Malta, there had been three or four inconclusive encounters, but no sooner had he made a tentative lodgement than he found himself whisked away to some God-forsaken spot where the local women were off limits on account of the fact that medical supervision over them was impossible.
So it came about that Alex accepted Bonzo's invitation, travelled up to town on the four-thirty, booked in for an overnight stay at a private hotel in Dover Street, and set out, in tails and opera hat, to do the town as Bonzo's protégé. His companion's air of genial patronage did not bother him, Charteris having served one campaign to his three.
They fetched up at the Empire round about nine, when the second showing of the tableaux-vivants was just beginning. Alex was excited by the colour, gaiety, and frankness of the stage entertainment, forgetting for an hour or so that this was merely the hors d’oeuvre and that the real purpose of the expedition was to seek out and price the best pieces of laced mutton on show.
The display, when it was at length presented to him on the promenades, made him gasp. Until then he had always taken it for granted that England was still a country of Puritans, and that the trade of harlotry, if practised at all on any scale, was confined to out-of-the-way corners in the seamier suburbs or that, where it did spill over into fashionable quarters, it was kept to the pavement. He soon discovered he was in error. Here, on the north side of Leicester Square, harlots plied in plush surroundings and under brilliant lighting, the promenades of the Empire being the regular resort, not of prostitutes, as he understood them, but of haughty courtesans who could easily have been mistaken for young duchesses on the Sunday after-church parade in Hyde Park.
The very least of them was a most impressive creature, tricked out in the very latest fashions and smelling like an English garden in high summer, as they glided past (they seemed to move on runners) and basked—there was simply no other word for it—in the admiration of boulevardiers.
Bonzo proved an inspired compere, but although he was obviously acquainted with many of the ladies, he was careful to refer to them all in the general rather than the particular. To do otherwise, Alex gathered, would have been considered caddish, for the kiss-and-tell code of the mess seemed to apply here as much as in a garrison-town drawing room.
“Some of them make a thousand a year,” Bonzo told him, “and from time to time one retires, snapped up by some well-heeled Johnny and installed in a love nest in St. John's Wood or Maida Vale. God bless ’em, I say, although one can’t help feeling they must live to regret settling down with some balding old cove, who pops in Tuesdays and Fridays, spends the rest of the week behind his till, and makes sure he never misses church on Sunday. I remember one who cut her losses and came back. The chap who kept her discovered she had never been confirmed and wanted to haul her off to church and get it attended to, before he paid her another visit. A place like this is a refuge as well as a high-class market. The police don’t bother ’em here. They pay their five shillings entrance fee every night and they get a chance to look their clients over in the warm and dry. No risk of a dose with one o’ these doxies. They look after themselves, and they can be particular, mark my words. Give ’em the eye but don’t make a straight proposition. Let it be understood over a glass of champagne and leave me to talk terms. By the way, don’t waste silver on chocolates, like some of the greenhorns, old boy. They sell them back over the counter the minute you turn your back. Seen anyone you fancy so far?”
Alex had, a fair, wasp-waisted girl, sitting at one of the round tables at the far end of the bar and looking a good deal less haughty than most of the mutton on show. Every now and again she laughed and showed perfect teeth whilst listening to the conversation of a dark-haired companion who had the dignity of a dowager and looked scarifyingly supercilious when a young man wearing a gardenia paused at her table and offered her a cigarette from a gold case.
“Ai don’t indulge, thenk you!” she said, and her fair companion laughed again as though, like Alex, she was here to enjoy the fun and was in no mind at all to do business. He said, “Those two over there, do you happen to know either of them?” and Bonzo said he knew the dark one who was called “Miss Montcrieff,” and priced herself at around three guineas, exclusive of dinner, posing, champagne, and any other incidentals.
“Talking of names,” he went on, “don’t use your own, old son. Blackmail is rare here—wouldn’t do the place any good—but it's not unknown, of course. I’ll introduce you as Captain Teamster, of the Bengal Lancers, and you can call me Eddie, and let on I’m a gunner, for they’re as sharp as needles here and would be sure to spot us for what we are if we tried to pass ourselves off as barristers-at-law or medical students.”
They sauntered over and introductions were formally made. Miss Montcrieff maintaining her bleak expression even when accepting a glass of champagne, but the fair girl, presented as Miss Cecilia Royston, “a cousin of Miss Montcrieff 's on a visit to London from the provinces,” seemed jolly enough and glad of his company, so they sipped champagne and made elaborate small talk un
til Bonzo proposed they took another look at the tableaux-vivants, the show being about half-way through the second run.
It was like taking part in a saraband, where every move on the part of one's partner was carefully observed, and the level of conversation was more or less equivalent to that at one of his mother's croquet-parties at Tryst. In fact, it seemed quite monstrous to imagine that the Misses Montcrieff and Royston were a couple of highly trained whores hoping, indeed resolved, to turn an honest sovereign or two before sunrise. This illusion of gentility continued right up to the time they paired off after supper at an Italian restaurant Bonzo patronised on Frith Street. Bonzo and Miss Montcrieff (she never did relax sufficiently to divulge her Christian name) then entered a hansom and went off in the direction of Tottenham Court Road, Cecilia telling him that she had rooms in Long Acre, so near as to be hardly worth a cab-ride.
By then Alex had reached a state of some exhilaration, the food and wine having been excellent and Miss Royston's company pleasantly undemanding, for Bonzo did most of the talking. Yet he felt a little shy when they were moving through a thinning crowd of West Enders and the late night snarl-up of hansoms and growlers chivvying their way through the busy streets now that the theatres were emptying.
The girl, however, seemed to make allowance for this and settled for the sisterly approach, dropping the slightly arch accent she had employed earlier in the evening. She held his arm in the friendliest fashion as she chattered gaily of all manner of things, in a way that reminded him of one of the numerous husband-hunters he had partnered at regimental soirees in Malta and Cork.
No sooner had they reached the tall, narrow-fronted house and climbed two staircases to her quarters, however, than she became very businesslike, saying, “Your friend made the arrangements with mine. It's for all night, isn’t it? Would you like a drink? I won’t myself, if you don’t mind, for I only keep whisky here and whisky doesn’t agree with me. Do make yourself comfortable. I should take off your boots if I were you.”
He took off his boots, accepted a generous whisky, and said, for something to say, that he had assumed she and Miss Montcrieff shared rooms, arid was surprised to find her living here alone.
“Oh, I’m not really alone,” she said. “Mr. Skilly, the landlord's agent, looks after a dozen or more rooms, all let to Empire girls, I understand. Although I wouldn’t really know, for I really am a newcomer to London and I’m still on commission, and likely to be until Christmas. That's the only way I could have possibly got on to the promenade. I was vouched for by Daisy—Miss Montcrieff—you understand? I’m her protégé and she has a private arrangement with Mr. Skilly in the suite below, and the rent is paid by her every Saturday. It's nice here, I think, even though the market traffic does get noisy in the small hours, Covent Garden being no more than a stone's throw away. I was right lucky to run into Daisy, I can tell you, for I’ve had real gentlemen for the most part. Will you unhook me, soldier-boy? You don’t mind me calling you soldier-boy, do you? I like soldiers. There's never any nonsense about them. I mean, they don’t want to act stupid, and you can usually have a bit of a laugh with them, and they don’t count the small change, do they? Lucy, that's the girl in the rooms immediately above, has a regular soldier at the moment, but he's very old and quite past it I’d say, although he's a rare trier, Lucy says, providing he hasn’t shipped too much before he gets here. Mostly he has, of course, and then she has to call Skilly to help him down and pack him off home. That happened earlier in the week, and I had to lend a hand, for he was having the horrors, or so it sounded, the way he was carrying on and wanting to fight everybody. Quite harmless, of course, but not good for the house, which is quiet and very respectable as a rule.”
While she was rattling on in this way, she had, with a little assistance from Alex, slipped out of her evening gown and hung it on a hanger in a recess curtained by some bright-coloured chintz with a pattern that made his eyes hurt. He said, “We don’t need this strong light, do we, Cecilia?” She said, “Why, no, not if you don’t wish it. I’m here to please. Most of them like it left on for some reason. I suppose to see what they’re getting. Either that, or they’re afraid for their pocketbooks. There,” and she turned off the overhead gas-burner, leaving a tiny jet over by the door, so that the room was thrown into part-shadow, relieved by the glow of the gas-light in the street below. She said mildly, slipping out of what seemed to Alex half a dozen petticoats, “You’re not a regular one for the girls, are you, soldier-boy? Oh, don’t misunderstand me, please. It's nice to get a quiet one now and again, for a girl looks for all sorts in this line of business, doesn’t she?”
Her naïveté, assumed or not, was very appealing he thought, and he answered that he supposed a girl did, adding that he had spent the last few years in places where one sometimes went months without even seeing a woman. This touched a chord of sympathy in her somewhere and she said, “Oh, dear, that must be awful for you! I see now why you’re well… not in a tearing hurry, like most of the gentlemen, even the polite ones. I suppose… but there, it's none of my business.”
“What were you going to say? You suppose what?”
“Well…” she gave a little chirrup of laughter, “I suppose after a time, months that is, you get out of the habit and have to work up an appetite when it's served up to you? Is that so, soldier-boy?”
“Yes,” he murmured, “something like that, I imagine,” and wondered whether she had blundered on the truth, for the fact was he did not feel in the least erotic, only intensely curious about himself and her, with all manner of strange, detached thoughts running through his head. For it did seem odd that he should be closeted here in a clean, comfortable room, with an attractive young woman stripped down to her corset and drawers. Yet he found himself wondering what she earned, where she came from, how much she spent on those fashionable clothes, and the exact nature of the “arrangement” that existed between her, the unsmiling Miss Montcrieff, and Mr. Skilly downstairs, who seemed to combine the duties of rent-collector, janitor, and whoremaster of the house.
His three grown sisters, all interested in fashions, had familiarised him with the various items of her ensemble. He could tell that they were all run up from expensive materials and would not come cheaply. He wondered whether harlots of her class looked for some kind of discount from their costumier. The evening gown, with its straw-filled bustle sewn into the panels of the dress, had a long train and deep V-shaped decolletage, and might have been worn by a society hostess without occasioning much more than the lift of an eyebrow. Her under-dress, worn over the fine linen petticoats, was of Ottoman silk, and the drawers were a riotous affair, made of cambric velvet and crossbanded with cornflower blue ribbons sewn on to the nainsook frills, with a red silk rose stitched to the seam of each leg. The sheath-like corset, shaped in wide curves and stiffened, he would say, with strips of steel, pushed her fine breasts very high and swept over the buttocks in a way that was obviously designed to emphasise the bustle she had hung in the closet. She seemed just the slightest put out by his scrutiny and said, with a smile, “A penny for them, soldier-boy!” and he replied, mildly, “I was only thinking how elegantly you dress, Cecilia,” and she said, “But of course! How else would I get admitted to the promenade? The management doesn’t let anybody in there, I can tell you. They have their reputation to think of.”
“You mean the Empire is financially involved in what happens there?”
“Oh no,” she said, laughing, “I say, you have been out of the swim a long time, haven’t you? What I mean is, we girls are the Empire, and far more important to them than the turns they book, and these tableaux-vivants we watched tonight. I mean, it's obvious, isn’t it? Rich gentlemen wouldn’t go there in such numbers if we didn’t, would they? You get far better stage turns at the Star and a dozen other places if you’re looking for straight entertainment. Mr. Skilly told Lucy—the girl above, the one with the regular—that last year the Empire shareholders drew eighty-three per cent on their
investment, so naturally we’re vetted before we’re allowed to promenade. Why, even the police know that.”
He said, suddenly, “Come and sit on my knee, Cecilia. It's years since I had a pretty girl on my knee.”
“You mean, just as I am?”
“Well, that's up to you, Cecilia.”
“Then I’ll take off my corset if you don’t mind. It's punishing me something cruel, I can tell you.”
She reached behind her and tweaked the top bow so that the corset bulged outward as on a spring, and her breasts, released from confinement, parted like a cleft pear, the resultant ripple giving him the first genuinely erotic impulse he had experienced in her company. She coiled herself on his knee, took his head in both hands, and kissed him on the mouth. “You are an odd one, soldier-boy. But nice. I wish there were more like you. Are you married, soldier-boy?”
“Good God, no,” he said, laughing. “Do I look as if I was?”
“No, you don’t,” she said, thoughtfully, “and I knew that before I asked really. Some girl is going to be lucky one day. Or maybe she isn’t because it would be awful seeing you go off to war every now and again and not showing up for months on end. How do you feel about me now?” she concluded, improbably.
“Comfortable,” he said, “and lucky, somehow. To have picked someone like you, I mean, for I can’t imagine there are two of you down at the Empire.”
“Oh, there's all sorts,” she said, carelessly. “You’d be surprised, I can tell you. We’ve got to cater for a wide range and you never stop being surprised by the gentlemen.”
“Are you surprised by me?”
“Well, so far,” she said, “but there's time enough yet, isn’t there? I realised straight off why you were shy but my experience is it soons wears off. It's beginning to already, isn’t it?”
Theirs Was The Kingdom Page 67