The Underside

by H. R. F. Keating

  ‘All right,’ Kitty had said at last, as they lay back in the darkness on the smeared and stiff ticking of the mattress, ‘you’ll pay me another shiner now.’

  ‘Yes,’ Godfrey answered. ‘You sweated for it.’

  ‘And will you pay me more, for more? Are you man enough?’

  ‘I’ll stay with you here till you beg me to leave.’

  ‘You can stay every hour you’ve got the yellow to pay for it. But I’m hungry now. Take me out and give me a fucking good supper.’

  They got dressed by the light of a stub of candle that Kitty had reached for from under the bed. Then Godfrey, having handed her the second sovereign that she had demanded and received her taunting V of a smile in return with not a word said, pushed his gold-purse as deep as it would go into its pocket and followed her step by cautious step down the pitch-black banister-less stairs.

  But this time he did not pass through the low orange-lit kitchen unaccosted, as he had done when under the protection of the gaunt fly-paper man, wisp-of-straw in the outer world, unquestionable personage in the heart of St Giles.

  From one of the slumped half-visible figures round the big table with its clutter of old blackened saucepans, greasy playing-cards, plates and scraps of food there came a jibing question.

  ‘What you got there then, Kitty? Where you a-going with the likes o’ that?’

  Peering in the dim glow of the coke fire, he saw that the speaker was a strong-featured lank-haired woman of forty or more with a face that in its blunt hardness and time-battered appearance resembled nothing so much as an old bill-hook. Yet she too, he saw, wore the uniform of her profession, the flaunting shawl, the strong-hued dress, the oiled hair.

  ‘You keep yer mouth shut, Jessie,’ Kitty had flung back. ‘When you can get more for yerself than a quartern o’ gin you’ll ‘ave a right to speak.’

  ‘Oh yes, you bitch? Many’s the time I’ve seen you flat on yer back for a quartern. Aye, and for a share o’ one.’

  Kitty, by way of answer, advanced with claws extended.

  But the fight that Godfrey had expected—would the spectacle have driven him away as the fight he had seen in Shadwell had done, he wondered—did not materialise. A girl a good deal more presentable than any of the others round intervened, a pretty buxom creature of thirty or so with a totally surprising air of invincible respectability about her.

  ‘Now, come on, girls. We can all be friends. Times is hard on all of us alike.’

  There was a moment of strain. Then the billhook-faced woman sat back on the crude bench at the table with a muttered ‘It’s well enough for you, Rosy’ and Kitty lowered her claws and turned away with a flounce.

  ‘Come on then, me fine gentleman,’ she said to Godfrey, with another of her mocking cat-smiles. ‘Show us you can spend yer money, if you can spend nothing else.’

  For an instant he was ready to counter the jibe, which was certainly grossly untrue. But commonsense prevailed and he followed her out of the house.

  He took her to eat at a slap-bang in the Tottenham Court Road, hardly a respectable establishment. But with every minute that the meal lasted she gave him more cause to regret having chosen even such a place as this. She spoke so loudly, even shouted more than once, that he several times thought that they would both be asked to leave.

  He sank to using the grossest flattery to keep her somewhat quiet.

  ‘You certainly put down that girl back at the house when she made that remark to you.’

  ‘Jessie? You know what she is? Scum. Bloody scum.’

  Her voice rang out.

  ‘Yes,’ he said quickly. ‘She looks as though she lives a hard life.’

  ‘Hard life?’ the scornful voice shouted out. ‘She’ll tell you that quick enough. Daughter of a farmer, she’ll tell you. Came to visit London, she’ll say. See her aunt. Lured away by a gentleman passing the window, that’s her tale. Drugged, she says. Woke up in a bleeding dress house.’

  ‘A dress house? What’s that?’ Godfrey asked loudly.

  ‘You fucking milksop. You wouldn’t know that, would yer? Wouldn’t know nothing about a house where the girls is kept half-naked and only given a dress to go out in—and that with a shadow to follow them every step.’

  He lapsed into silence and let her rant out more insults for Jessie and the credibility of her story and demand gin and yet more gin. He would not have believed any woman could drink so much and stay upright, had it not been for the telltale black bottle he had seen in her room beside the one-flowered primrose in its little pot.

  Once he remonstrated with her.

  ‘Better?’ she screamed. ‘Better without it?’

  She hauled herself to her feet and stood with her hands supporting her on the table, leaning over it, her pale face flushed scarlet now, her mocking smile far away.

  ‘I’m not better without it, d’you hear?’ she shouted, sweat suddenly damping the dark curls at her forehead. ‘I’m not. I’m not. I can’t do without it, see. I must have it. And neither you nor anyone on God’s earth can’t do nothing to make it different.’

  Godfrey had no answer.

  He sat still and looked down at his plate. At last Kitty slumped back in her chair. And she demanded more gin after this, and he gave it to her.

  She was singing when at last he managed to get her out of the place. And she sang and shouted all the way back to St Giles. Fuzzy from all the drink she had abused him into taking, he asked himself dazedly why he was staying with her. Why endure it all? He could walk away, knock the drab down if need be and escape. Whores were treated as badly every day of the week.

  But he knew he would do nothing but go back with her to that bare little room with the disgusting bed in the corner and, while there was so much as a scrape of willingness left in either of them, he would make love with her. If making love it could be called. Was it not rather making hate? No, though fierce enough and black-willed enough, it was not that.

  It was engaging with her to plunge and writhe and plunge deeper and deeper. And he was going to do it.

  He pushed and jerked her past the busy shops and stalls of the night-living rookery, crudely and harshly lit under the glare of the naphtha flares. The naphtha man’s cart went by, evil-smelling above all the stink of rotting vegetables, horse dung and sour secondhand clothes, its owner, a battered half-idiot, leading his old white horse while the measures round the big reeking can clinked against it. And all the while Kitty’s raucous singing screeched out above the shouts of the fruit and vegetable mongers and the roaring of the butchers and the shrill whistling of the burners of the gas-lights in their shops, unscrewed to make high wavering come-and-see jets of light. But no matter how loudly the butchers clashed their knives and shouted ‘Hi, hi, weigh away, the rosy meat at threepence ha’penny’ still Kitty’s voice out-topped them all.

  Even here she was attracting attention. Godfrey seized her by the elbow, dug his fingers in and drove her by main force through the crowds of bargainers.

  ‘You wait till I get you there, you bitch,’ he snarled in her ear.

  ‘Me wait? You wait, you bugger. I’ll show you. Oh, won’t I just show yer.’

  Godfrey drove her on. A beggar, brother to some of the shambling figures round the lodging-house table, crossed their path as they passed the rich frying odours of a fish stall. Kitty kicked out and swore at him. Godfrey, all gentlemanliness abandoned, shouldered the half-dressed wreck aside with total lack of compunction.

  At last he propelled her beyond the greasy smell of hot penny puddings and the pigs’ trotters laid out in shiny pink rows and into the close-packed courts and alleys. And then they reached the unlit unpaved blind alley of the lodging-house. He strengthened his savage grip on her elbow and plunged down it.

  But about halfway along some piece of rotten debris caught his foot and sent him, in his far from sober state, sprawling. Kitty he took with him, spitting curses.

  And then in the darkness and amid the slime and mess of the st
ony unpaved ground it came into his head to take her.

  No sooner had the thought presented itself than he was ready, welcoming it with coursing joy. So, struggling and kicking in the dark, with strong in his nostrils the smell of the ordure all around, he heaved up her skirt, tugged gropingly at his own trousers and mounted her.

  It was a wretchedly botched business but it satisfied him quite as much as any of their love-making before, or even more. Afterwards, lying half on top of her still, with one knee wet in a puddle reeking of urine, he actually slept.

  It was not a long sleep, but when he staggered to his feet he found that Kitty was still totally unconscious, snoring heavily, lost in gin-fumes and satiated lust. He tried shaking her but she hardly stirred and at last he had to heave her up across his shoulder and stagger with her down the remainder of the alley. He found with difficulty in the dark the now shut door of the house, kicked it open and stumbled down the steps to the kitchen.

  The slumped figures round the table were still there, with perhaps a few new ones, a few gone. He let Kitty’s slack body slide to the floor as he stood at the foot of the steps. Then he leant back on the greasy blackened wall behind him, feeling more than half inclined to let himself drop like Kitty into a sleep of insensibility.

  He might have done so except that his entrance caused some stir.

  The billhook-faced Jessie stood up and looked down at Kitty.

  ‘Drunk, is she?’ she said. ‘You ought to ‘ave left her lie. She ain’t long fer this world anyhow.’

  ‘Not long? No, I suppose the gin will be the finish of her sooner or later.’

  ‘That or the river,’ Jessie answered unconcernedly. ‘She’s for one or the other, that’s certain.’

  Godfrey stood in silence looking down without much pity at the sprawled doomed form at his feet.

  ‘She ain’t got a bit o’ white on ’er, ‘as she?’ asked a pale-faced squint-eyed man, thin as a lath, rising up and moving round the table towards the unconscious Kitty.

  ‘Don’t be a fool, Barney,’ Jessie said. ‘You can’t mouch what she got with the gentleman standing there. You get out wi’ your bit o’ stinking offal. There’s still folks about up the West what’ll pay yer when they sees yer chewing on that.’

  And the beggar did as she had told him, taking from the table an indescribable piece of lights and slinking past Godfrey holding it.

  ‘Rosy’d put ’er to bed,’ Jessie said, looking mournfully at Kitty’s heavily breathing form. ‘She’d do it, only she’s on the walk. Never misses that one, saving up she is. Saving up to buy ’erself a coffee-house.’

  She looked down at the dark surface of the once-white table in front of her as if it was a book she could read from.

  ‘Will no one give me a hand?’ Godfrey asked, only half caring whether he got an answer or not.

  But a figure rose up from the darkest corner of the firelit kitchen at his request. It was a figure that sent at once through his whole frame a curious tingle of uneasy cold apprehension mixed with the tiniest stirrings of what he hardly dared acknowledge was desire. In the dim orangey light he had seen first a glimpse only of big eyes rolling whitely in their sockets, then the just-caught highlights of a face, a large round face with thick lips and shining grinning teeth, and at last a body, big and wide-bosomed, straining a tattered dress of gaudy crimson, that told him he was looking again at the mulatto whore who had chased him that night in Coventry Street when he had first met Lisa and had been rescued by her from the mud of the lane where he had fallen.

  It might have been some other woman of her colouring. But he knew that it was not. It was the very same creature who had chased him, as it were, into this underworld.

  ‘She want a-carryin’ upstairs?’ the big whore said in a thick lilting voice, coming round the big table and looking down at Kitty.

  ‘Yes,’ Godfrey answered, feeling his mouth go dry. ‘Yes. I couldn’t do it on my own. Not tonight.’

  ‘You ‘most as bad as she, dearie,’ the mulatto said, giving him a brief glance.

  ‘Yes.’

  She does not recognise me, he thought. Well, why should she? A man she had chased, out of some impulse of wild devilment one night getting on for a year ago?

  But I know her. Beyond doubt she is the same.

  The big whore stooped and hauled Kitty up by her armpits, easily as if she were an empty sack.

  ‘You gonna take her legs?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes. Yes, of course.’

  Together they lugged their slack burden up the narrow darkened stairs, feeling their way by the walls and falling each of them more than once. At last they reached the room at the top and lowered the still-grunting-in-sleep Kitty on to the floor, half propped against Godfrey’s legs.

  ‘You got a lucifer, gennelman?’ the mulatto asked. ‘There ought to be a mite o’ candle, if you got a lucifer.’

  With difficulty Godfrey found in his pockets a bunch of matches and struck one, stooping to the rough surface of the floor. As the brief light flared he saw the mulatto looking round the bare little room for the candle, her figure momentarily outlined, heavy in breast and hip yet even in this glimpse plainly sinuous and life-full. He felt abruptly how ridiculous he had been that night in Coventry Street to have run from her.

  The lucifer began to scorch his finger tips. He flicked it out.

  ‘What fo’ you wanna do that?’

  ‘I could hold it no longer.’

  ‘Why, hell, what we wanna candle fo’ anyway? You wanna leave that bitch on the floor and come on the bed?’

  Godfrey stood in silence, thankful for the darkness that hid his face and his thoughts. Did he want to go on the bed with her? Yes, he did. Yet he felt possessed equally by a strong hesitation, a throbbing reluctance. It was not that he feared the big whore still, though he did so a little. It was that he seemed to feel that by holding back he was all the more adding to his desire to give himself entirely to this creature of the dark here in the dark.

  Then from further into the little blackness-swathed room the mulatto spoke again.

  ‘I can’t see nothin’. You going to go on the bed, or not?’

  It was the last two little words that decided Godfrey. Or not.’ They admitted the possibility of retreat from the experience that awaited him and he seized on them.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘Not tonight. Not after all I’ve had to drink. And her.’

  ‘Maybe tomorrow then,’ said the lilting voice from the darkness. ‘Maybe tomorrow. And you pay Mary good, huh?’

  ‘Yes, Mary, when the time comes I’ll pay.’

  ‘Then you want I help you put her on the bed now?’

  ‘Yes. Yes, if you will.’

  She came forward and he felt her picking up Kitty by her heels. He put his hands under the girl’s arms and heaved. Together they swung the sack-like body on to the bed.

  ‘Goodni’, gennelman.’

  ‘Goodnight. Goodnight.’

  Godfrey listened to her going down. Freed of a burden, she seemed able to see extraordinarily well in the darkness.

  He wondered what he should do. Leave in his turn? Creep back to Gillingham Place? He was too tired.

  He flopped down on the ruckled bed beside Kitty and let sleep overcome him. His last thought, as slumber invaded his whirling brain, was that he must have left his hat outside there in the alley where it had rolled away when he had fallen. How would he manage next day without it?

  He had gone home next morning, the hat problem proving easily solved by sending a boy stockbuzzer, or handkerchief pickpocket, round to the nearest Jew’s shop for a secondhand one. The purchase had been rather thin as to the nap but presentable enough. He had needed to re-visit the ordinary world for the simple enough reason that he had hardly any money left. His appearance in clothes still smelling of the urine that had soaked them when he had lain with Kitty in the alley had plainly astonished Billy.

  He had spent only an hour at the studio, however, just long enough to g
et himself fresh things to wear, to tell Billy vaguely that he would be away for some time and to have some breakfast. Then he had set out again, first to Lombard Street to his bank, and then back to St Giles. Yet his brief stay in the studio had not been easy. He had been unable to keep at bay any longer the thought of Elizabeth. The Venus Verticordia had greeted him the moment he had entered the room, the easel placed just where it had been put some eighteen or twenty hours earlier when he had wheeled it forward for Herr Pohlmann to see. Elizabeth’s eyes seemed to be shining on him, excited and brilliant as they had been at the moment he had agreed to that jaunt to Greenwich. Had that happened to him? The same him that had wrestled with Kitty on the stale-smelling ticking of that heap of a bed, had lain on her in the filth of the alley?

  Yet all he did was to let the thought that he could not prevent himself thinking exist. Yes, he was treating Elizabeth appallingly. But he refused to bend his mind to any consequences. He would not consider whether he should write to her breaking off the engagement. He would not consider whether he ought at least to say something to Billy to indicate that he was mysteriously ill, so that Elizabeth might have some reason to give herself to account for his betrayal of her. Excuses and engagements were for the world that stood above. And he was of the underside.

  Chapter Fifteen

  And now the underside held him. Back in the house at St Giles he plunged again with Kitty, breathed from her gin-fumed mouth, caught those softly feminine curls of hers in tight-clutched fists, hit her, was torn and scratched by her, loved her and raged at her. But he did not spend all of the weeks that followed with her, or in St Giles. Other whores lured him as he passed from hand to hand in the formless world he had dropped into so completely. In Spitalfields, round Leather Lane, in Whitechapel, his days went by in one long, almost uninterrupted dream. Or nightmare, desired nightmare.

  Seldom shaving, dressing for days in the same shirt and the same clothes, drinking more than he had ever done in his life before, and far worse, he hardly recognised day from night. Certainly he could never tell one day of the week from the next, except that sometimes as he made his way from one territory to another he noted the unusual quiet of the streets and guessed that it must be Sunday. He ate astonishingly little, buying a saveloy or a pie from the meat-pie man or a halfpenny baked potato from the vendor with the can on his arm. Or he would share with some drab he had fancied her supper of cabbage boiled with a pig’s head or a pennyworth of whelks. Neither the nauseous smell of the cheapest tea nor the rancid taste of poor butter upset him, as once they would have left him retching. He swallowed the latter spread on a slice from a quartern loaf, rough and gritty, with an ounce of dark ham or a piece of cheap Dutch cheese and felt satisfied as when he had dined on six courses at his club.