The Underside

by H. R. F. Keating

  ‘And you,’ he asked Lisa, ‘the day came up to your expectations?’

  ‘It did. It did indeed.’

  ‘But you’ve not been again since?’

  He felt sure from the way she had talked that she had not.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘The once was enough. I knew it then. I had it here.’

  And she tapped with the taut fingers of each hand on either side of her narrow temples.

  ‘Well, I suppose you have,’ he said, thinking how odd she was and how confident of herself.

  But he felt that he now could decently leave.

  ‘Well, I must be going,’ he said. ‘But let me— May I give you a little something? For the children?’

  ‘For the childer, I’ll take it,’ Lisa said.

  And the words, simple though they were, struck him with force. For the children: it was the epitome somehow of that world above to which Lisa had so surprisingly given her allegiance. The money was to be no gift from man to woman for favours given, or even given in the past. It was to be a pledge to the future, to a better future.

  But that, after all, to come from Lisa. From Lisa who had led him so straightforwardly into the underside world of which she had seemed to be a native-born citizen. From Lisa of the whisperings. From Lisa of the cheval-glass images. He could not endure that it should be so.

  ‘Lisa,’ he burst out, not thinking what he was to say, how he was to say it. ‘Lisa, it can’t be so. What about the past, Lisa? Those times in the past? What we did. You can’t have gone back on them all. You cannot.’

  She smiled at him. That taunting crooked complicit smile of old. The smile of the caresses.

  How could she?

  ‘And who’s to say I’ve gone back on anything at all?’ she answered. ‘It’s here, like I said about the Derby. Here whenever I want it.’

  And once more she made that curious gesture of tapping at either side of her narrow forehead with her taut stretched fingers.

  Then she gave him her hand to shake with easy familiarity. And then he was gone, was walking up St Martin’s Lane again as if he had paused only at the entrance to that court and had continued on to his destination.

  But he knew from the moment he left Lisa’s door that he was not going to see the Seven Dials that day.

  He felt that he had been given a hard lumpy mass of thought to hammer at. Perhaps it was the extraordinary reversal of their positions. But the more he thought the less he seemed to know what he ought to be thinking about. His mind obstinately presented him with memories that seemed to have no logical connection with the riddle this meeting with Lisa had brought —that extraordinary day at the Derby, Lisa and her Joey as he had first seen them at the masked ball in the Holborn Casino, Lisa stooping over him in the lane off Coventry Street, Mulatto Mary, Kitty, even Lady Augusta throwing herself so unexpectedly into those Derby revels.

  So eventually, not without a mentally raised eyebrow at the inconsistencies of his own behaviour, he turned in the direction of the Charing Cross Station and his safely deposited respectable luggage.

  There he would have the valise, the easel, the water-colours satchel and the walking stick put on top of a four-wheeler and would return sedately through the bustling streets to Red Lion Square. And he would greet Elizabeth and tell her, with a peck of a kiss on the cheek, that all had gone very well among the twisted pines of Surrey—and, curiously, it had and there was a drawing in his satchel to show for it that once he would have been gloriously proud of—and thereafter there would come again the regular procession of well-cooked and neatly served meals, breakfast, luncheon, afternoon tea, dinner. And it would be again the bright and polished rooms where things had their places and were kept in them and were dusted there each morning.

  And soon it would be Christmas. The walking advertisement men who came thickly on to the streets at this time of year were already much in evidence.

  And at Christmas down in Wiltshire the warm and steady ritual would massively envelop them right from the flurry of departure at the railway station—but what an underpinnedly organised flurry—with porters in red-banded caps to bear off in due form the trunks, well bound in green upholsterer’s velvet, the portmanteaux, the hatboxes, the baskets and the carpet-bags, with the ticket-collector in his cap bearing the proper three red bands to see them in due form on to the platform, with the silk-hatted station-master to supervise the whole, and the clang of the departure-bell exact to the minute. And waiting for them in the country would be the Bosworth carriage with cheerful stately old John on the box to greet them and take them through the well-ordered countryside and into the excellently kept park. And there would be Lady Augusta and Sir Charles and all their guests and meals to eat and often take two hours in the eating. There would be the parade of visits to neighbours at five and ten miles’ distance with glasses of hot bishop to welcome them. There would be a shooting-party, and in one of the portmanteaux carefully packed would be his knickerbocker suit to wear for it and the short woollen drawers that went under it. There would be billiards in the billiards-room with the quiet exchanges of comments and solemn choosing of cue and rest, and his smoking jacket would be packed to wear for that. There would be some jolly dancing in the hall with pretty girls in pretty gowns, and for that a portmanteau would contain his evening dress with its full and proper accompaniment of shirts and studs and cufflinks. And there would be holly branches hung on the walls, as there regularly were, and Sir Charles would put the Yule log on the fire on Christmas Eve as he always did. Then there would be the Christmas Day visit to church, with the Bosworth pews filled to the doors with the Bosworth guests, and carols to be sung and the curate’s hand to be shaken afterwards and the sovereigns and half-sovereigns to be put in the poor-box. There would be the Christmas dinner, with goose and turkey, pork and baron of beef and the pudding that the servants had set to boil at four in the morning and the port and the punchbowl passing round all steaming.

  But to him it would be fleeting and meaningless as the charades that they would play, as always, on Christmas evening.

  And so it all happened.

  The only event that did not occur as he had foreseen earlier was that Mulatto Mary did not appear again in St Giles before they left for Wiltshire. Things proved a little less simple than he had expected. It seemed he had not fully appreciated the sullen vengefulness of the fly-paper king: and there were not wanting hoarse confiding voices to confirm to him when he did go to St Giles that Mary had indeed been warned off and was under the ban still, to tell him and hold out dirty palms afterwards for reward.

  But he was not unduly disconcerted. What did surprise him, however, was something quite different.

  It was Elizabeth. He had come back from Hindhead considerably apprehensive that the explanation of his refusal to make love with her which she had begun to seek before he had left would within a night or two be pursued remorselessly to the end. And nothing had happened.

  On the first night he had carefully prepared the ground with remarks about having walked miles down in Surrey that morning and how tired it had left him. And there had been no difficulties. They had gone to bed. He had blown out his bedside candle and at once turned over as if to sleep and that had been that. Much the same thing had happened the next night and he had not found it anything out of the way. But when on the following night and again the night after Elizabeth had still made no move towards him in face of his careful neutrality, then he did, lying there in the thick darkness, experience a decided sense of puzzlement.

  All his tortuously prepared excuses abruptly looked the flimsy things they were. And he saw that, had Elizabeth been as determined as she had been when he had had to invent the idea of his sketching tour, they would not have lasted three minutes. But no excuses had been asked for. It was oddly upsetting.

  And in the nights that followed, both at home and down in Wiltshire in the big old curtained fourposter that was provided for them, nothing was attempted and nothing was said. Gradually he
came to take the unexpected amnesty for granted.

  There were always, he told himself, so many possible explanations in this tricky territory. Perhaps Elizabeth was suffering from a phase of physical tiredness. She might even be a little ill, though she showed no other signs of that. There were a hundred and one possibilities. But he dared not put a single one of them to the test. Any hint at the subject might in a moment rouse Elizabeth’s sleeping perspicacity.

  In the meantime, back home after Christmas, there were shares to be sold quietly at the best price and stock not to be sold till New Year’s Day had come. There were assets to be realised. There were preparations to make, sums of gold to be taken to out-of-the-way deposit boxes and gradually accumulated. And on New Year’s Day itself he would be able to receive over the brass-edged counter of that immutable institution in Lombard Street, where he had once so unexpectedly encountered Sir Charles and had been haled away to the Derby, the last substantial sum in sovereigns.

  New Year’s Day would do it. Then it would only be a matter of finding Mulatto Mary again, of waiting for her return from wherever she was now making her living in her trade, Chatham perhaps among the sailors or Aldershot with the soldiers. In time she would come quietly back to St Giles and the West End, exercising caution, avoiding a cut face or bruised body. But she would come.

  But before New Year’s Day there came New Year’s Eve. And the breakfast table in Red Lion Square on the last day of the year found Elizabeth, by contrast with the slight with-drawnness she had seemed to show ever since he had returned from Hindhead, in a mood of something like sentimentality. It was a time, she declared, for looking back. How long ago it was, she said, since her famous impulsive letter to him hoping to soften something of the blow she had dealt with her comparison of paint-brushes and scrubbing-brushes. And that day in the Park when he had championed her over her desire to do something useful in the world, did he remember that?

  He remembered. The coaches of the Four-in-Hand Club, a pair of English-apple equestriennes. But there had been that other park scene not so long ago and a creature who had come out of the fog and set his feet suddenly on the sliding path that he had always without knowing it been destined to take.

  ‘Dearest, don’t you remember?’

  His secret thoughts had stopped him giving her the acknowledgement her reminiscence had demanded.

  ‘My dear, am I likely ever to forget?’ he said hastily. ‘To forget that, or all the things that sprang from it. The way you bearded the Bishop. Why, I even remember quite half of that interminable lecture we were given by Arthur Balneal that day.’

  He wished instantly that he had not let his guilty desire to make recompense rush him into mentioning Balneal. The Celebrated Investigator and his unexpected appearance in the heart of St Giles was something he wanted to forget. And now Elizabeth might start some gentle mockery of him. She seldom resisted the opportunity.

  But on this occasion she was not roused. Instead rather abruptly, almost as if it was she who ought to shy from the name Balneal, she put a request to him.

  ‘Dearest, tonight, if you go out, will you be back in good time?’

  ‘In good time?’

  ‘Before midnight, dearest. I should like to drink a toast with you then to the year to come.’

  The year to come. If he could perhaps find Mulatto Mary tonight, there would be a year of only half a day to come. Once visit the bank tomorrow and the stage-trap could open beneath him and the lights be left to shine on vacancy for ever more.

  If he could find Mary.

  And, quite suddenly, he guessed where she might well be. The turning of the year, it was a time for looking back as Elizabeth had just been looking back. And was it not a time for going back too? For going back to one’s place of origin. And had he not heard from the lips of that knowing hot-eel boy he had given his sixpences to that Mary had been born somewhere near the Globe and Pigeons beerhouse in Rotherhithe and that she came back there ‘like a pigeon ’erself’?

  So was it not likely, likely in the extreme, that she would for this night have come cautiously back at least that near the centre of the metropolis? He would go and see. He would go and see as soon as ever it got dark and Mary was likely to be at the Pigeons.

  ‘My dear? My dear, will you?’

  Elizabeth was pressing her question.

  What was it? Ah, yes.

  ‘Yes, my dear one. I do have to go out tonight, but I shall be back before midnight. To drink your health.’

  ‘Godfrey, do you promise?’

  She was leaning forward across the table—its array of delicate china, its plate of muffins gently steaming—and looking at him intently. Why should this little innovation in their lives mean so much to her? But no point in wondering now. That life was nearly over.

  ‘Yes, my dear, of course I promise. I promise solemnly.’

  Rotherhithe and an evening of gloom and sullen cold. Darkness had seemed to fall as early as three o’clock that afternoon and it had been impossible to read anywhere in the house except by lamplight. Elizabeth had returned early from Perkins Rents, unable to see what was clean and what dirty. And, as soon as their earlier-than-usual tea was finished, he had left, repeating once more his perfunctory promise to be home in time to drink to the year to come at midnight. He had thought, stepping out into the square with the elegant twig-fall of its leafless plane-trees almost invisible against the lowering grey sky, that it was bound to snow before long. And, as his cab had crossed London Bridge, thick slushy flakes had indeed begun to fall, sliding downwards past the big globes of the bridge lamps like little ghosts.

  It will not lie, he had thought. Within minutes it will be converted to miry sludge, yellow first then sooty grey.

  But for a few minutes, however, as it had landed on the roofs of the houses of Tooley Street it had been white and magical. And he had remembered with a sharp twist of irony the snow of his wedding day, that unseasonable sudden carpet of pure magic. He had seen it then, as it had echoed his feelings, as marking a newer purer finer world for him. But it must have melted almost as soon as their train had reached Dover to reveal the ordinary grime of the streets and as well the waiting pockets of a deeper richer dirt.

  He told the cab-driver as he had done the last time he had come to Rotherhithe to stop at St Paul’s Church. And from there he set off for the Globe and Pigeons, surer this time of the way and making better speed, past the tall board-clad shape and red-curtained windows of the rival Stump and Magpie, tracing back the way he had walked beside the bullseye-carrying policeman and his river-sodden charge, over the swing bridge between the two docks, catching a whiff of timber smell from a half-unloaded vessel even in the cold, and round the looming shape of the boat-yard. Under his tramping feet, as he had forecast, the snow was turning already to slush and mingling with the pervasive black mud.

  Then at last he was at the destination he had failed to reach before, and a wretched hovel of a place that much thought about Globe and Pigeons proved, with one sprawled fellow in a blue guernsey lying flat on his face dead drunk just outside and another in a sailor’s jacket propped up against the wall with a sealskin cap jammed over his face. But there was light inside and the sound of laughing and singing.

  He pushed at the gap-planked door and entered.

  And she was there.

  Mulatto Mary was there, sitting up on a long rough-wood table, wearing that same gaudy green dress she had had on at St Giles, swinging her legs—on her broad feet under the remarkably fine ankles were a pair of bright-red brass-heeled shoes appallingly scuffed—holding a pewter mug in her right hand, embracing with her other arm the neck of a big dirt-grimed coalwhipper sprawling in front of her.

  And the moment she saw him—in the doorway he must have stood out in that low lamplit place like a piece of glass among pebbles, for all that he had dressed as roughly as he could— she took her arm off the huge-shouldered fellow gazing drunk-enly up at her, gave him a light push, bounced down from her p
erch on the table and walked straight over to him.

  ‘Hello, gennelman,’ she said. ‘I s’pose yo ain’t lookin’ fo’ me?’

  ‘I am,’ he answered. ‘I’ve been looking ever since we saw each other last. But I knew I would find you in the end. There’s some business unfinished between us.’

  ‘There is, gennelman, there is.’

  She put back her broad bronze face, opened her great white-teethed mouth and laughed like the pealing of the bells that at midnight that night would ring out the old, ring in the new. She laughed till the whole of her well-fleshed frame shook from head to foot.

  Then she put one stout arm on his shoulder and swung him round to face the door.

  ‘Yo come along o’ me,’ she said. ‘I got a place to go. ’S not much of a place, mind. It’s dirty, gennelman, and it stink. But it’s maybe the sweeter fo’ that. Maybe all the sweeter fo’ that.’

  And they went out into the dark and the cold of the night, where the last of the snow had ceased to fall though the slush lay icy and soaking to their feet. She led him into a maze of lanes, often so narrow that baulks of timber stretched right across keeping the decaying houses from falling on to one another. They went round a dozen corners at least and passed as many stinking pockets of blackness and negotiated half a dozen passageways so straitened that they could no longer walk side by side. And in all the time there was hardly a light to see by. But she guided him with a hand on his shoulder and he left himself totally in her care.

  He did not know quite for how long they walked. It might have been as little as ten minutes only; it might have been for twice as long. But eventually Mary stopped at one of the houses in a lane that seemed from the glimpses of sky he got where there should have been solid walls to be quite deserted and falling into ruin. He saw now, standing beside her, that there were not even rag-stuffed windows here as there had been in the houses they had passed earlier. Instead there were only gaping holes with the frames long ago ripped out for firewood, and beyond the black holes it was just possible to make out walls that were more bare laths than plaster.