The Underside

by H. R. F. Keating

  And the fly-paper man immediately confirmed her account of her failing.

  ‘Yeh,’ he said. ‘Give ’er a glass an’ she’s lost ter yer. She’d be no more able ter do what’s ter be done tonight than what she could fly.’

  ‘No,’ answered Lushy Lou composedly. ‘That’s not so. I find oblivion when I can, and you know it. But I’ll not do what you’ve asked of me without one drink. And you may know that too.’

  She challenged the grimy greasy-coated old man with a long calm look. And Godfrey, taking advantage of the fixity of her gaze, was able to observe in the harsh light of the great gasoliers above that the creamy white skin which had so struck him did in fact show lines at the eyes and at the corners of the mouth, traces checked as yet but hardly long to be so of the dissipation to which the body behind them had been put.

  ‘One drink then, one,’ the fly-paper man at last conceded. ‘Buy ’er a drain o’ pale. That’s what she likes, pale.’

  ‘Very well.’

  Godfrey ordered hot brandy-and-water for the fly-paper man and himself and for Lushy Lou the finer pale brandy that could be pleasurably swallowed undiluted.

  ‘Drink up, drink up,’ the fly-paper man said as the glasses were placed in front of them. ‘I’ve told my gentleman half-past nine, and we’ve a fair way to go.’

  He hardly need have given the instruction to Lushy Lou. She poured down her brandy in one long swallow and then pushed the glass away from her on the table as if she dared not hold it one instant longer.

  Godfrey, abruptly feeling how envied was the liquor hardly touched in his own tumbler, drank it almost as quickly. Only the old king in his long dark greasy coat defied his own orders and sat sipping slowly and with lip-smacking appreciation at his hot potion. Godfrey sat, controlling his impatience and his rage, and divided his attention between the statue-still figure of Lushy Lou and the noisy activity beyond, the sharply jesting thieves, the whores in their tawdry finery, a small child coming to the bar with a jug and reaching up over her head with it to a barmaid.

  But even the fly-paper man at last finished his drink and stood up and put on the greasy fur cap that served him in place of the towering daytime emblem of his trade. They went out and made their way through streets filled with dark predatory faces and the sounds of ferocious desperate levity in the glare of lights from shop and stall. But soon the old man had led them into darker lanes and across most of the wild territory of the rookery. And at last, after passing down a narrow alley barely lit by a solitary lamp on a high bracket at the corner, they turned into a court overpowered by the tall black buildings on every side and illuminated only by the pale sky above.

  ‘Take my arm,’ Godfrey said to the gliding black figure of Lushy Lou at his side.

  Without a word she grasped him by the forearm and together they stumbled after the tall shape of their guide. He preceded them to one of the half-dozen doorways that were dimly discernible round the court and there came to a halt.

  ‘Yer got a match?’ he demanded of Godfrey.

  Obediently Godfrey felt in the pockets of his coat and produced a lucifer. The old man struck it against the blackened brick of the wall beside him and by its little flare of yellowy-orange light he found a lantern on a shelf just inside the unlocked door and lit it.

  Then he led them down a few steps into what, by the hastily passing light, looked to Godfrey like a bare kitchen and through it to a passageway where the light showing through an open door revealed an interior full of shapeless piles of bedding and the unseen but easily to be smelt presence of perhaps some dozen or fifteen sleeping human beings. At the end of the passage a door took them out into a tiny yard.

  There the old man stopped and held his lantern high. Godfrey saw that a good part of the yard, which even in the cold of the night stank abominably from the open door of a privy in the corner and the deep puddle, apparently floating with excrement, in front of it, was occupied by a low lean-to building attached to the back wall of the house. And he saw too that from the roof of this construction almost all the boards had been stripped, recently enough to judge by the whiteness of the pair of joists revealed and the loose stack of timber up against the yard wall.

  Once the fly-paper man was sure that the two of them had seen this building and its open roof he lowered the lantern and turned to stare up at the rear of one of the houses looking down on the little yard. Following his gaze, Godfrey saw what he realised at once he was meant to see, the silhouette, black against some dim interior light, of a man wearing a cloak buttoned to the neck and, unmistakably, a tall silk hat. Glowing like a tiny point of fire just beneath this there was the tip of a lighted cigar, held between unmoving lips.

  The fly-paper man turned, when he saw that they had noted the presence of the watcher above, and, stooping, entered the lean-to by its low door. Godfrey, still giving his arm to his silent companion, presumed that they were expected to follow. He did so, urging Lushy Lou slightly forward and discovering in the process that she was shivering hard, though whether this was all because she was wearing no more in the cold than a black shawl over her black dress he could not tell. Inside, he saw that the old man was occupied in lighting from the smoky tallow stub in the lantern a row of incongruous-looking office candles, borrowed or purloined from heaven knows what clerks’ desks. There were, he reckoned, nine or ten of them, standing on the floor of the little room, and soon their combined light was illuminating the small box of a place as if it were a theatre.

  They showed a curious sight too. There was no furniture of any sort, only, lying thick on the floor everywhere, paper. Torn and shredded, dirt-stamped and sharp-smelling, mud-smeared and often coated with road-dung, it lay in a deep layer from one side of the room to the other. Brown paper and greyed-over white paper, newspaper and parcel wrappings, old handbills, letters and envelopes and long strips peeled from bills on walls with here and there gigantic yellow, red or blue capitals plainly to be seen. In the corners there were four or five sacks, but otherwise everywhere it was simply paper.

  In a moment Godfrey realised what the place must be. It was the lair—there could be no other word—of a paper-gatherer. He had seen such people often enough, old men generally grubbing about with a sack picking up any scrap of paper they could find. He knew that they must get a price for their pickings, though doubtless a small enough one. But he had never drawn the inference that there would therefore be here and there all over London places such as this, places where the gatherers stored their dirt-impregnated sour-smelling booty.

  Well, it should make a foul enough sight for the watcher above. The silhouette with the tiny glowing point of the cigar tip.

  The old man straightened from lighting the last of the big thick yellowy candles. Their light sent dramatic shadows leaping upwards across his face and made him indeed a very demon-king about to cast his spell.

  Yet it proved a flatly prosaic incantation when it was uttered.

  ‘Get to it then. Give ’im what he wants ter see. Give it ’im good, or by God yer’ll get no payment from me, neither one o’ yer nor t’other.’

  And he was gone, moving swiftly out of the brightly lit little room to vanish in the cold darkness.

  Godfrey looked at Lushy Lou. For a long moment she regarded him steadily in return in the hardly wavering light of the long row of thick candles.

  ‘And I’ll have that pay,’ she said at last with soft intensity. ‘I’ll have it. I must.’

  ‘And I mine. I too must and shall.’

  As at a signal given, they both then began simultaneously to take off their clothes. One by one Godfrey flung his garments behind him, gloves, hat, paletot, coat, one shoe, then the other, one sock scraped off the foot while standing stork-like and ridiculous, the other sock similarly, waistcoat, then braces taken down and trousers lowered to be clumsily stepped out of, tie next wrenched from his neck, then shirt with its studs sprung open by main force and the whole pulled up and over, next the vest of pure white wool, with the
cold striking now on his bare skin. And, opposite him—his eyes had scarcely left her, even in the most awkward parts of his undressing—the cold was now too striking on Lushy Lou’s bare arms and on her legs bare to the upper thighs. Only now her chemise, he supposed. And his undertrousers.

  He pushed them off, stamping them from his ankles with his bare feet. In front of him she lifted her chemise—it was patched in more than one place, he saw—and there she was naked as he.

  And she had a body as creamily white as her lily-rich face had promised. The watcher above must be feeling that part at least of his bargain had been fulfilled. Then, at the thought of that watcher, of the little glowing cigar point, what Godfrey had so far not experienced at all came with sudden urgency—sexual excitement.

  He dropped to his knees on the yielding filthy paper layer, extended his arms, took the ripe white-skinned woman in front of him by her waist and hips and pulled her towards him.

  They made love then, blatant exhibitionist love. They made it with every wild device the unseen, but always felt, watcher at the window above could have wanted. They caressed with darting tongues. They flung themselves full length in the filth on the floor and rolled now one way up now another. He stood while she, face deep in the trodden mess, thrust buttocks up both to him and that cigar-point watcher. Once they lurched round and round, in imminent danger of knocking over the solemn row of fat office candles, with her legs tucked under his arms wheelbarrow fashion.

  And only once did they falter. It was when, rolling into one of the corners, Godfrey came into sharp contact with a sack there and found it to be not springy paper but knobby as if it were filled with stones. He let out an involuntary yelp of pain and Lushy Lou, advancing towards him with out-thrust pelvis, halted and asked what the matter was.

  He told her.

  ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘I know well what’ll be in there.’

  ‘Stones. But why?’

  ‘No, not stones. Dogs’ leavings.’

  ‘Dogs— Do you mean he collects those?’

  ‘Of course. Once I did not know such work was part of the way the world goes. But tanners use the droppings of dogs, and someone must bring them what they’ll pay for.’

  For a few moments he sat on the thick papery layer and digested this curious fact. But he was not there and being paid to be there to indulge in philosophical speculations.

  He looked up through the open roof. The solitary watcher was lighting a fresh cigar.

  ‘Come on then,’ he said to Lushy Lou.

  So they joined again and gave, each of them, full value. They cursed and swore and shouted obscenities at each other. They attacked each other with lacerating nails and stinging ringing slaps. He staggered to and fro with her legs clasped tight around his waist and their mouths locked in a long prying kiss. And at the climax he stood holding her upside-down in front of him, her thighs on his shoulders, her face at his crotch.

  Then at last they subsided to the churned and filthy floor, inert.

  Lying on his back beside her, he saw in the quiet cold night beyond a tiny glowing tip of fire move swiftly downwards and be suddenly squashed out. The black silhouette in the tall silk hat disappeared.

  ‘He’s gone,’ he said, feeling abruptly that he must make some human contact with the fellow being he had made so much animal contact with until a few moments before.

  She lay there silent. The steady light of the long row of solid candles shone on her white, white skin and the smears and stains and scratches that now disfigured it. But after a little she too spoke, as if extending a helping hand to some stranger in need of it.

  ‘We earned what he’ll give us.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘We earned it.’

  He lay on in silence again. The encroaching chill was drying the sweat on his body and he supposed too that the fly-paper man would come before very long. But he did not feel able to move.

  ‘Tell me,’ he said eventually, ‘how was it you came to this? You’re a lady. No need to tell me that. How did it happen?’

  She laughed.

  One dry little laugh in the still of the night.

  ‘I was the daughter of a clergyman,’ she said. ‘It’s what they all tell you, don’t they? The others of my trade?’

  ‘So they say. But how? How?’

  ‘Oh, a common enough tale. A poor clergyman cannot keep a daughter at home. I found a position as a governess. I was young then and pretty. No, I was beautiful. And there was a son of the house. It was like the worst sort of novel, in every detail. But with the sad demerit of being true. There was a child. I could not go back home. I tried to support myself and the baby by painting little scenes of flowers and shepherdesses. I had some talent.’

  Again she laughed, that short dry laugh that was nearer a sob.

  ‘Well, you can imagine how well I prospered. The child died. He had become ill. I could afford nothing he needed. And afterwards there was drink for oblivion, and whoring for drink.’

  Godfrey said nothing. What was there, he thought, to say? The woman by his side, the woman with whom he had committed those recent acts, was not of his world, not of the world he was seeking to enter now. She was a stranger in it, picked up by a chance wind and left on its shores.

  He heard a noise outside, the scraping open of the leaning door from the house.

  ‘He’s coming,’ he said.

  Quickly they rose, picked up garments from the heaps in the corners where they had tossed them, began scrabbling their way into them, hastily, messily.

  The fly-paper man came in. He took no notice of them as they finished their dressing but instead stooped and one by one blew out the row of fat oily candles, leaving only the last to light them back to the house.

  They each of them finished their task at much the same time. The fly-paper man turned to lead them away. But Lushy Lou put a hand on his arm.

  ‘You owe me money,’ she said.

  ‘Oh, ’ave it then, ’ave it.’

  The old man thrust a hand into the deep drooping-edged pocket of his long coat and after a good deal of grubbing about he produced a single coin. Godfrey saw, as the beggar-king thrust it out and Lushy Lou’s white hand closed on it, that it was no more than a half sovereign.

  ‘Is that all?’ he exclaimed quite involuntarily.

  The old man glared at him with spiteful rage.

  ‘It’s no more nor less than what was pledged for,’ he snarled. ‘Come on.’

  He moved quickly through the low doorway and Godfrey could do nothing other than follow. But, as they made their way through the darkened house and the court on the far side that was almost as dark, he felt in the pocket of his hastily thrust-on coat, found his gold-purse and extracted two of the few sovereigns in it.

  Out in the alley beyond the court, as Lushy Lou, clergyman’s daughter, gathered her old shawl about her shoulders in preparation for leaving them, he tapped her on the elbow and proffered the additional coins.

  They would go in pale brandy, no doubt. But if that was the oblivion she chose she might at least get a just quantity of it for what she had done.

  Lushy Lou grasped the gold quickly as she had grasped the fly-paper man’s small dole. She murmured some sound of gratitude. And then she hurried away towards the feeble light of the high lamp at the corner.

  But the fly-paper man had realised what transaction had taken place.

  ‘Yer’re a fool,’ he said.

  ‘That’s as may be,’ Godfrey answered. ‘But the lady is not the only one to be paid for this night’s work. I want mine now.’

  For a long moment the old man, the defied king, did not answer. And Godfrey found himself ready to take him by his scrawny throat. But he had no need.

  ‘Oh, right enough,’ the old man grated out at last. ‘If that’s what yer’re wanting. Yer’ll find yer Mulatter Mary down Rotherhithe way.’

  ‘Whereabouts there?’ Godfrey barked.

  The old man looked for an instant confused, a scorned monarch. Then
he answered.

  ‘By—why, by St Paul’s Church. There’s a beerhouse there. Called the Globe an’ Pigeons. That’s where I told ’er ter wait, yer Mary.’

  Godfrey looked at him. But there was no more to be squeezed out. He knew now at last what he had worked for to learn. Mulatto Mary was within grasp.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Quickly as a hansom could take him, he made his way across the river and down to Rotherhithe, bullying and bribing the reluctant driver to take him through this dubious area at least as far as St Paul’s Church. From there he had to walk. But he strode off along the dank and mist-swathed street careless of any danger and fast as his feet would take him. Mulatto Mary was to be found within perhaps a few hundred yards. She was to be found, she was there to accost, there to be swept up, there for him in her and with her to drown. To drown where, to the exclusion of every other thought and feeling, he wished to drown.

  There were few lights and few people in this quarter of for the most part mean one-storey houses with the chill of the river and the flat river smell everywhere about. But, above, a half-moon now had risen to shine through gaps in the clouds and he was able to make good speed. Soon he saw a house at a corner, taller than those around it, with its boarded walls broken by the cheerful squares of red-curtained windows. Would this be the Globe and Pigeons? Would Mulatto Mary be there now, taking a glass, bold, strident, confident, looking round to pick up some seaman flush with money?

  He hurried forward. But when he came close to the house he saw that, although it was a tavern, its vilely painted sign was that of the Stump and Magpie. No bird of that shape would ever fly, he thought to himself with a touch of savagery. He thrust open its single door, however, made his way across the sanded floor to the bar and inquired of the crop-headed potboy there for directions to the Globe and Pigeons. Luckily he divined from the surly look he got that this had been a tactless request and was able to put things quickly right by ordering some sherry. He took a sip—and an appallingly nasty sherry it was—and then explained that he had an appointment at the Globe and Pigeons or otherwise would be very pleased to stay where he was. And so he got his directions.