Mrs Headmaster, which as you soon find is her favoured mode of address (‘it saves confusion’], serves her speciality, Creamed Finnan Haddie.
‘I always enjoy your haddie,’ simpers Cynthia Singleton, who, for convenience, I call Mrs Maths. Mrs Headmaster glowers, as if this says less about her skill than her repertoire.
‘Are you also a singer?’ Mrs Maths asks to divert attention.
‘I’m a stripper,’ you say, casting off your cover as though it were your clothes. Mr Maths splutters a mouthful of peas across the table. The younger guests, Mr and Mrs Nature Study, and the man of the world, Mr Gym, suspect the double entendre of a situation comedy. Are you a paint-stripper, or even an asset-stripper? I find the situation increasingly uncomic, as you turn to Geoffrey Lindley. ‘You know, an ecdysiast … someone who sheds her skin.’
‘I most certainly do not know,’ he protests.
‘I’m sorry. I understood that you were a classicist.’
‘Candida, please.’ I am the voice of sweet reason and the undertone of blind fury. ‘People who don’t know you may not appreciate your sense of humour; it’s an acquired taste.’
‘It’s easy to acquire. £20 an hour basic. £10 more for fetishists.’
‘I’m never quite sure what a fetishist is,’ Mrs Maths cuts in on cue.
‘In my experience,’ you say slowly, ‘it’s someone who’s more aroused by my underwear than by me.’
I rush to fill the silence. ‘What Candida hasn’t explained is that she wants to be an actress. After Cambridge – we were up at Cambridge together – she needed an Equity card; and stripping – that’s to say, exotic dancing – was the only way.’ The bombshell has dropped but the building is still standing. These are words to hide behind … Cambridge, actress, equity.
‘It’s so hard for young people today with all the unemployment,’ says Mrs Nature Study, who prides herself on being a liberal.
‘Nonsense, Julia!’ Her husband has his eye on a House. ‘It’s the fault of the closed shop.’
Mr Gym boldly asks for the name of the club … gym masters are never given Houses. Mrs Headmaster decides that it is time for dessert and replaces the fish plates with a treacle tart. ‘I always enjoy your treacle tarts,’ says Mrs Maths. ‘How do you make them so sticky?’ Mr Gym looks at you and guffaws.
Mr Maths comes to the rescue. ‘I gather that you and Young are preparing for a marathon in July,’ he says to Lindley.
‘Not in the strict sense. I doubt that, like Philippides, we will be running for twenty-two miles.’ His chuckle provokes a ripple of encouragement. ‘Or, indeed that, like the heroes of today, we will compete for twenty-six.’ He laughs alone. ‘But I have persuaded our friend to join me on a peregrination through Macedonia.“Make way, you Roman writers; make way, you Greeks,” as the poet put it.’
‘Which poet was that?’ Mrs Maths asks. Lindley ignores her.
‘Do you know Greece, Miss Mulliner?’ The Headmaster gives you a final chance.
‘Oh yes,’ you reply with a treacly smile, ‘but I’m afraid I was disappointed.’
‘With the monuments?’
‘With the men. I’d been so excited by the vase-paintings; what I hadn’t realised was that the men were wearing false phalluses. I expected every Greek to come similarly endowed.’
The Headmaster draws himself to his full height and the meal to a close. ‘Yes, well, it’s eleven o’clock and a school day tomorrow. Young, don’t forget that you’re seeing me in my study before chapel.’
‘Of course, Headmaster.’ I maintain the fiction. I lead you back to the guest room.
‘Are you trying to destroy everything I’ve built up here?’
‘Hole in one!’
‘You’re more likely to destroy our friendship.’
‘Leo, I have to save you from these people.’
‘They’re decent, well-meaning people. Not the most scintillating company, I admit, but –’
‘Do you want to grow into another Lindley, filling out shapeless clothes, laughing at your own feeble jokes … “They have me, as Diogenes might have put it, over a barrel”? Oh tee-hee, tee-terribly-hee. How can you bear to sit at the same table, let alone walk across Greece, with that?’
‘He’s a highly erudite man.’
‘What about sex?’
‘Whose? His? Mine?’
‘Yes, his/yours. Surely you can see through the guff about the purity of unbroken voices? You may channel all your passion into music, but one day the dam will burst. You’ll be unable to stop yourself touching one of the boys. Maybe you’ll pat him on the head or brush his leg accidentally. The next day it will happen again; only, this time, it won’t be an accident. And, before you know, you’ll be back at Covent Garden. Hello, Mr Meacham sir, welcome to St Bride’s.’
‘That’s a foul thing to say.’
‘Have I ever lied to you?’
‘How do I know? I take people on trust.’
‘Trust me,’ you say, as you switch on the light of the sombre guest room with the old school photographs on the walls and the Headmaster’s monograph on Palmerston by the bed. ‘Trust me,’ you repeat, as you kiss me on the nose and show me the door. Two hours later, I awake to find you standing over me in a man’s short shirt, complaining that the constant patter of mice is destroying your sleep.
There may be no mice, but there is a trap, which you cunningly conceal, as you wheedle your way first into my armchair and then into my bed. ‘You won’t know I’m here,’ you say, as you push me over the edge.
I elicit your promise to leave with the alarm which, unaccountably, fails to ring, so that, when Matron brings me my tea at seven, she finds us curled together like question marks. My attempt to establish my heterosexual credentials has misfired. It is not just that I have broken school rules but I have hurt Matron’s pride; the tea being a sign of her special favour, which she accuses me of throwing back in her face. As you stifle a giggle, she throws the cup in yours. In spite of her skill on sports day, she aims wide and hits the clock, setting off the alarm. My confusion grows, as she runs, sobbing, from the room and you insist that she is in love with me. I am unable to focus; there is a ringing in my head … but it is the alarm which has jammed. As I try to silence it, two drowsy boys appear at the door and ask if there is a fire. You stand and stretch; your shirt rides over your navel. Their eyes pop.
My meeting with the Headmaster is brought forward to before breakfast. The word of warning becomes a note of dismissal. I have disappointed him, insulted Matron, scandalised the boys and degraded my calling. When I return to my room, I find that you have already packed my bags.
‘You’ll thank me one day.’
‘Will I?’ Have I? I wonder how my life would have differed if I had dared to return to Gabbitas Thring. In the event, I join you in Brewer Street and tell my mother that I am taking private pupils. It is clear that I cannot advertise locally, so you spread the word among the girls in the clubs. I am amazed, first by the response and then by the voices. They may be untrained, but there is a passion, a power and, yes, a purity, utterly belied by the sallow complexions and tawdry clothes. I am fired with enthusiasm and feel that, given time and training, a couple might take it further. You warn me not to invest my dreams in theirs: I am just the latest diversion, a temporary release from the hazards of sore feet and tacky bar stools. At first, I challenge your cynicism, but, after several weeks of late arrivals, missed lessons and drug-induced croaks and giggles, I am forced to agree.
My patience is petering out, when two girls from the Pink Lady suggest that if I use the piano in the club, they would be less likely to miss their lessons. I am sceptical of the idea and even more so of the setting. The word ‘club’ is hardly appropriate to the Meard Street clip-joint with its barred and wired, grimy windows, worn lino and rubbish-strewn stairs. The dark brown walls are too damp, the single naked light bulb too dark, the red plastic banquettes too hard, and the smoke-filled air too thick for singing, while
the battered upright with its missing pedal and three broken keys looks to have been caught in the thick of a particularly violent fight.
‘I can’t play this. There are keys missing.’
‘We can leave out those,’ says Teresa.
‘What if we swapped them with ones at the bottom?’ says Janine.
‘Come on, love,’ says Teresa, ‘it’ll give us something to do while we’re waiting.’ And, as I have so little to do myself, I agree. The lessons – such as they are – take place in an atmosphere of ribaldry, jealousy and petty bickering, where even the sweetest love song is interrupted at the first whiff of a punter. But the girls seem happy. Even sour-faced Sonia approves of me and requests various Vera Lynn favourites, which she rasps with verve. ‘I never had much of a voice,’ she cackles. ‘I did my bit for the troops in other ways.’
I am frightened of Sonia with her fat, jewel-heavy fingers, fronds of scarlet hair and eyebrows that have been plucked raw. She tells me, in a dubious compliment, that I add tone to the establishment. And yet, when her son, a real Walworth Road villain, pays a proprietorial visit, he is ‘not pleased, not pleased at all’ to see me and pins me to the piano lid. Louise runs for Sonia, who rescues me. ‘He’s just a poof,’ she says, at which he slaps me lightly on the cheek and flashes a pungent grin. Sonia’s own years on the game may convince the girls of her good faith, but I fear that they are deceived. As her son puts his hand up Teresa’s skirt and visibly twiddles, she shoos him away. ‘I won’t let none of my boys go near this riff-raff,’ she confides to me later. ‘If they want some skirt, I send them to Shepherd Market. At least there’s a bit of class.’
Sonia sometimes pays me to play in the afternoons when the girls are enticing their punters, who seem to be reassured by the presence of another man. I am torn between amazement at their naivety and pity for their plight, as they part with large sums of cash for imaginary rendez-vous outside local hotels.
Question: when is a prostitute not a prostitute?
Answer: when she has sex.
Very few of the men return and those who do have little redress. The most insistently irate are dispatched into the storeroom where Brenda, twenty-two stone and mentally retarded, waits to engulf them. She has the strength of four men – as was shown when the police came to arrest her. An encounter with her is not one that anyone is likely to forget.
‘That club provides the most moral service,’ you say. ‘Those men will go back to Birmingham’ – for some reason, it is always Birmingham – ‘and remain faithful for the rest of their lives.’
‘It seems unfair. All they want is a little warmth.’
‘Fairness is not an issue. Those men are scum … scum.’ Your vehemence takes me by surprise, and I wonder if, like Patti and Velma, you might turn to one of the girls. But the experiments – at least those which you acknowledge – fail to fulfil you, and you remain dedicated to men.
The lure of low-life fades in the endless afternoons of waiting for punters who never appear … prostitutes, like prisoners, would make the ideal audience for Beckett. The only excitements are the irregular visits of the hoisters, who promise that they can shoplift from anywhere and yet always produce Marks and Spencer, and the five o’clock-work arrival of the drug dealers, with necessities, like heroin and barbiturates, and luxuries, like cannabis and cocaine. The cruel paradox of being on the game to pay for drugs and yet needing drugs to survive on the game sharpens when I discover that the dealers work for Sonia’s brother. The world revolves in vicious circles … a revelation that leaves you unperturbed.
‘That’s life: dog eat dog.’
‘More like dog eat bitch and puppy.’
‘Some bitches bite back.’ We are sitting in the Amalfi Café. ‘Take a look at the women in here. Three work the strip clubs and four are Wardour Street researchers. I’ll bet you anything you like you can’t tell which is which.’
‘I don’t want to take your money.’
‘Anything you like.’
I look around the room and the seven women are indistinguishable. There are no Louises or Teresas, with badly bleached hair and overemphatic lipstick, whose skimping on food and compensatory crisps and chocolate are written all over their spots. Nor are there any transsexuals, whom you insist can be most reliably identified by their feet.
‘You know that I never bet.’
‘Don’t worry, I’m not trying to suggest that all women are prostitutes, any more than that all property is theft, just that it’s not going to kill me. The girls at The Pink Lady will be dead by the time they’re thirty; but not these ones. In their business browns and beiges, they might be any young executives. They’re in control.’
The distance between The Pink Lady and The Pigalle may be the difference between the boardroom and the typing pool, but the product is the same. And, while the ideal of all the girls remains to take the money and avoid the sex, there are times when it is not that simple. I never know how many men you meet at the club or how many you meet up with later, although I fear the worst. You state that it is on my account that you never bring them back to the flat. I am surprised – and touched – until you add that it has less to do with sparing my finer feelings than with protecting them from the law; if there were ever any trouble, the police could arrest me as your pimp.
I shudder as I think of how Colwyn Bay would read it … and I try to blot out the memory of your picking up the Amalfi bill. Lewis has already given it the worst possible construction. His charge that I was living off you is doubly unjust when the bulk of the money from my lessons went on rent. And yet who can corroborate my story? If the Soho class of 76 held a reunion, who would be there? How many have survived the pimps and the pills, the injections and infections, and AIDS? Only Sonia … I imagine her living in bigoted respectability in Basildon, nostalgic for the days when villains had standards and old ladies slept in peace. I wonder if she ever associates the youth who played her piano with the man who opened her local superstore. I wonder if she ever spares a thought, or a tear, for any of those spiky, speedy girls.
Lewis claims that whoring destroyed your capacity to love. He writes that he has never known an ex-prostitute who was able to establish a lasting relationship … he damns himself with his own pen. I lack the benefit of his experience, but, if he is correct, then you are the exception that proves the rule. Your sexuality was confused long before Soho … Robin told me how, at school, you went through the Upper Sixth as methodically as the Form Master for his end-of-term reports. Whether that was in revenge on your father for being a mere bursar – and, indeed, The Pigalle was revenge on your natural father for being a meat-packer – I do not know. What I do know is that you hurt no one so much as yourself.
Nevertheless, your capacity for love far exceeded your capacity for passion. Your distrust of sexuality made you all the more appreciative of friendship, even when you courted cynicism.
‘We have friends because we cannot bear to be alone.’
‘No, we cannot bear to be alone because we have friends.’
Now I would add that we cannot bear to be alone because we have memories. And yet it is the very intimacy of my memories that isolates me. Sitting here, I feel a you-shaped emptiness, while the sound of my voice echoes through the void.
4
I am happy to do my bit for the Brighton hotel industry. The conference season may be over and the tourist season not yet begun, but the courts are as busy as ever. Pagan, Susan and I have taken up residence in the Grand, while Max and Rebecca have booked into the Metropole … although her junior has, at least, gone home to Worthing. They are holding an expedited hearing to consider your parents’ new evidence. Whatever else, it is open season on me.
The driver, who takes me to court, tells me how much he enjoyed last Tuesday’s show, which put the most married couple and the most widowed woman in Britain together with a nonagenarian nun and the Registrar of Gretna Green. I am perplexed by his claim that ‘at least you and I don’t have to worry ab
out any of that’, until I see the Nation like a stain on the seat beside him.
‘My friend always said you were one of us,’ he adds. I force a smile and hanker for the bigoted cabbies of old. This new version comes with two furry dice bouncing lewdly from his mirror and a penchant for Broadway musicals. ‘You don’t mind …’ he says, turning up the volume on the cassette. It is less a question than an assumption. I nod noncommittally and stare at the sheen of talcum on his neck.
‘Is it cottaging?’
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘Your case. We have loads from London. My friend says it must be the sea air.’
‘It most certainly is not!’
‘He wasn’t under-age?’ His prurience is echoed by a barrage of hoots. He turns his attention back to the road.
‘Once and for all, I am not on trial. I’m appearing as a character witness for a friend, who’s embroiled in a custody case. I’ll thank you to keep your observations to yourself.’
His eyes narrow and he drives on in silence, switching up the volume of the cassette and leaving the lyric, as so often, to speak for him.
I set you free.
There’s not much longer to complain;
I’ll soon relieve you from your pain
When I set you free.
We reach John Street. As I step out to pay the fare, I am horrified to find a phalanx of photographers bearing down on me. The in camera hearing is belied. I look away, while trying not to look shifty. The driver takes his revenge by counting the cash as slowly as possible. ‘Seems like your friend must also be in the public eye.’ I tell him to keep the change and thrust my way towards the building, only to find that the door is still locked and I am at the mercy of the photographers whose clicking cameras are reflected in the glass.
‘You’re pushing when you should be pulling.’
‘That’s the story of his life.’
As the one sympathetic voice breaks through the raucous laughter, I realise my mistake and pull the handle so hard that I knock over a sign instructing that ‘No animals are to be brought inside this building’. The photographers remain outside.
Pagan and her parents Page 21