by David Smith
I dropped five one pound coins from my hat into her hand and she passed the bottle over to me. I unscrewed the cap and passed it back to her, indicating that she should take the first sip, which she did, before taking it back from her and swallowing a much larger gulp. I wiped my mouth with the sweatband on my wrist.
‘So come fair Lady Isobel, now that I have entertained you, may I accompany you to your steed?’
I took her by the hand and led her over to the kiddies’ swings, where she sat as directed, giggling, as I began to push her backwards and forwards, higher and higher. Her hair was floating in the night air as she looked up at the rushing clouds and the glint of the park lights on my face. She stopped the swing suddenly with her feet and turned to me.
‘Is something wrong?’ I asked, worried.
‘You know what?’
‘What?’
‘Nothing, I really shouldn’t!’
‘Come on, you can do better than that,’ I said.
But she thought better of whatever she was going to say, and instead blew me a kiss that hung in the air for a second before she spoke again.
‘Sorry must be the wine, you’d better not give me another swig,’ she said, giggling. ‘And I’m afraid I really do have to get to work soon.’
I placed a finger over her lips to signal that she should say no more as we stood silently for a while, looking up at the stars and counting the meteors flashing across the sky. At that point, she looked at her watch and realised that she definitely had to go or she would be late for her shift.
‘Reluctantly, Mr Penn, although I wish I could stay here all night, I do have to go to work now.’
I shrugged and we left the swings and began to walk up the path to the road, passing the remains of the little summerhouse at the corner of the garden. I stopped and this time pretended to hide behind the wall, growling like a lion before starting my next recital:
‘O wall, full often hast thou heard my moans,
For parting my fair Pyramus and me!
My cherry lips have often kiss’d thy stones,
Thy stones with lime and hair knit up in thee.’
Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream
‘You’re crazy; you really are a clown aren’t you? But a sweet, clever clown I think,’ she said.
‘It works for me every time.’
‘I bet it does.’
‘And you are now my Angell from her bowre of blis.’
‘Come on, you daft idiot,’ she said. ‘Before I do something I’ll regret later. I do have to get to work and you look like you could do with getting some sleep if you’re acting on set tomorrow.’
Chapter Six
Tristan and Iseult – (Andantino) ‘Ysobel’
Take me to that happy place of which you told me long ago. The fields whence none return, but where great singers sing their songs forever.
Joseph Bedier – The Romance of Tristan and Iseult
Penn and I walked up to the main road and headed into town, towards the traffic lights by the fire station. We were holding hands, brushing each other’s bodies deliberately as we walked. A night bus rushed past us on its way towards Warwick, faces laughing in the windows. He sang that the man with the bowtie and gabardine suit was really a spy. You know the score.
We turned north onto the road that led up towards Clarendon Square, past the estate agent and up to the row of long-term residential homes on the left where I worked.
‘Well, this is me,’ I said as we reached my work place. Penn peered at the sign.
‘Sherridge House, rest home for the gentry,’ he read. ‘You really work here?’
‘Sort of, it’s money while I study. Don’t sound so surprised. It’s OK you know.’
‘No, it’s just that I can see the building from the set where I am working. Which one is your bedroom?’ I was a bit taken aback by his forwardness.
‘Sorry, they’re day rooms only and no male admirers allowed either, much as I’d love to invite you up of course,’ I said with a slight reprimand in my voice.
‘What you mean if I were in your neighbourhood?’
‘Smoothy, I really love that movie,’ I laughed.
‘Yes, it’s kind of cool, if a little dated now.’ He kissed me courteously, creating a lovely feeling in my tummy, and we exchanged phone numbers. The street lamps lit up our faces with an amber glow as we stared at each other. Neither of us dared to lose the moment and say goodbye. I wanted him to kiss me again.
‘No moon tonight though,’ I said.
‘It’ll be out the other side of midnight, I’ll wait for you here if you want?’
‘Sorry, but I’m on an all-night shift so it would be a very long wait for you.’
‘No matter, I can still wait, I’m cultivating a career as a frustrated romantic hero. But are you sure I can’t divert you, I’m a sure thing!’ he said, winking. He pushed up my chin lightly and then brushed my lips softly with his fingertips, as if to indicate I should not utter another word, that I should not break the silence.
‘Sorry, I appreciate the seduction thing, but you’ve chosen the wrong movie again, I’m afraid, I’ve really got to go.’
‘Breakfast then?’
‘At Tiffany’s I suppose?’
‘Where else?’
‘Wait for me, after all, nothing bad could happen to you here, could it?’
*
I watched Izzie for a few moments while she rang the bell and went inside. Then I walked reluctantly back down the short drive to the wall along the pavement and sat on it, drinking the rest of the wine from the bottle, watching up at the windows above. A smartly dressed old man passed me with two dogs and I noticed how serene he looked. He was foreign. I caught on his face the expression of one who could see the approaching of his own end but seemed reconciled to it. In the distance, towards the centre of the town I could hear police sirens, dealing with some trouble presumably at the town pubs. Further down the road, there was a black cab crawling slowly alongside the kerb as if following the old man home. I thought I could hear a nightingale, bringing sanity and peace, or it might have been the first sleepy lark.
Thinking back over my sweet encounter, I began to sing to myself but was disturbed from those thoughts by a loud sound above. As I hoped, I was rewarded by a further glimpse of Izzie as she opened the sash window and popped her head out of the opening to blow me down a final kiss.
‘Did my heart love till now? Forswear it, sight! For I ne’er saw true beauty till this night.’ I shouted up at the window.
‘Be quiet, you idiot,’ she hissed back. ‘You’ll wake the patients.’
‘O, wilt thou leave me so unsatisfied?’
She threw something down at me. I picked it up. It was a little plastic juice bottle with a scribbled note and directions to her flat stuffed inside. I’ll be home about 9.00am, meet me there if you can, with breakfast and jewelled favours, I read.
Chapter Seven
Pearl’s a Singer – (Presto) ‘Troyte’
Leamington is a very new and neat town. It is more difficult to give a person who hasn’t seen England an idea of it than of such a place as Chester. It is very characteristic of England too. The prevalent hue of houses, sidewalks, road & everything is a cheerful drab or buff. The bricks are buff. The stucco with which the neat plain houses are mostly covered is buff. The stone of the nice sidewalks is the same color, and so are the smooth & clean roads. The houses are singularly devoid of all attempts at ornament or where there is any it is of a super-chaste description. The whole has that trim & trig aspect which belongs to everything English. We are living at a ruinous rate at the Regent Hotel here. We have a bed room, a large dressing room big enough for a single bed room and a parlor 7 breadths of Brussels carpet wide and as long as 11 breadths. The parlor has a wide window in the middle of its length (All English windows are very wide, which is a great beauty) & another at one end. An open grate with a fire at the end, bronzes on the mantle piece & a mirror over it. On the l
ong side opposite the window is a long mahogany sideboard inlaid with a white wood. On this sideboard is a gilt and alabaster clock & two gilt vases all under glass bells and a mirror runs the length of the sideboard & over it hangs one of those round diminishing mirrors. There is another mahogany sideboard with a marble top and mirror over it at one end of the room. There is an oblong mahogany table with a cloth in the middle of the room supported on a sort of claw. At each window there is a little mahogany stand. At the end of the room is a chess & backgammon table. There are two fauteuils before the fire. There are two ladies sewing chairs & six common chairs. One large screen & two fire screens complete the furniture of the room. The bed room measures 6 breadths by 7½. The furniture is all mahogany. There is a four post bedstead and canopy. Marble topped wash stand. High bureau, cheval glass, lace covered toilet table with mirror, bed side table, chairs, etc. The dressing room is just half the size of the bed room & contains a similar wash-stand, toilet table, bath tub, bureau, etc. The house is so quiet that no one would imagine there was another soul in it but ourselves.
Charles Sanders Peirce, Letter from Leamington to his family in America (1875)
Pearl Detroit Taylor knew before she stepped off the train that she probably would not harm him too much. She had far subtler ways planned to exact her revenge. The illegitimate daughter of a black Detroit seamstress, she was a star. She was feted across Europe as a blues and jazz singer – the woman with the honeyed voice. She had carefully built a career and a reputation as the complete entertainer; a reputation that she was not about to give up in a fit of recklessness. However, despite all this hard earned prosperity and indeed adulation, she still bore the scars of the past. Amongst them, the complex currents of her mixed race, her own troubled history and the mystery concerning the identity of her real father. She also had a diva’s reputation for being ‘difficult’.
Her mother’s family were of Creole descent, slaves escaped from the south on the Underground Railroad into the rural villages around Windsor, Ontario. Gradually they had been pulled towards the new economic slavery of Carnegie’s steel mills and Henry Ford’s giant car plants. Her mother’s legal husband was a sea captain, a difficult man who alternately ignored and abused his wife during his brief sojourns on dry land. Pearl herself was the offspring not of that marriage but of an adulterous affair. Her mother had looked to blues bar punters for comfort after her husband was reported lost at sea near Suriname. For years she did not know the name of her real father. She had been given the name Pearl by her grandmother, after the slave steamboat that was captured at Point Lookout in Maryland. The one celebrated in Uncle Tom’s Cabin. The family story was that her mother had added the name both of the city of her birth, ‘Detroit’ and the town of Pearl’s conception, ‘Taylor’ on the forms that she completed to register her birth.
An older man in a sports jacket was sitting across from her in the First Class compartment, deep in thought, reading the morning papers. She had followed him discreetly onto the train at Marylebone an hour and a half ago. She noticed that the headlines of his paper were all about the UK government’s defeat in a parliamentary debate on Syria. Pearl found this recent British squeamishness about war rather out of character; their ancestors were certainly not so fastidious, she thought. Pearl herself was no stranger to trouble. Indeed, she felt she was now closer than ever to a settling of scores with the gentleman opposite. His fate was certainly a fitting subject for divine judgement, a just war, which she would now help along in its execution. The next few days would be about her own amusement and satisfaction, if not retribution.
As the man stepped off the train at Leamington, Pearl followed discreetly at a distance. Well, as discreetly as a black diva dressed in a fur stole and fishnet stockings could in this small Midlands town. She followed her quarry down the concrete steps onto the station forecourt. The man was looking around impatiently, checking his watch, pacing up and down underneath the art deco clock that hung above the station entrance. After twenty minutes, he appeared to give up waiting and got into a cab with his suitcases. Pearl followed, enjoying the cinematic thrill of asking the taxi driver to ‘follow that cab’. After less than five minutes, they pulled up at the old man’s apparent destination, a pretty villa called ‘Hawthorne House’ in a quiet cul-de-sac called ‘Lansdowne Crescent’. The old man paid the cab driver, rattled the brass doorknocker and was let in by a young woman. Pearl asked her cabbie to circle round the little circus once more and, satisfied for the moment that he would not re-emerge, revised her instructions. ‘Take me to the Holly Hotel.’ This proved to be a second short journey of not more than 100 yards from Hawthorne House.
*
Pearl’s mother, Esther, was a strong-willed and impetuous woman in her youth, frequently in trouble for her rebellious behaviour. By day she was a seamstress, but by night she transformed into a soul singer. She continued to belt out numbers in The Soup Kitchen with the stage name Ella, even after her lover had left her pregnant and moneyless. Under threat of exposure as an adulterer, this unnamed man had paid her off but she was too afraid to use the backstreet abortionists and so she had carried his child full term.
When the baby finally arrived and its mixed race became obvious to everybody, many in the Afro-American community of her hometown of Taylor were incensed and pilloried her for bearing a nameless white man’s child. This was a blue-collar town, with a majority white population, many of whom worked in the car plants along the river. Such interracial liaisons were not uncommon but were still frowned upon. Despite the name-calling and worse, she steadfastly gave out no clue to the father’s identity. As a result, Esther was progressively ostracised within her own community. She had no choice but to sing in white men’s clubs at night and clean tables for hours in the local diner by day, to earn enough money to live. This came to a head when one night she was attacked and raped by a group of drunken steel workers. After this experience, she was much more circumspect. She wore her hair short to avoid attention. Although she was exposed to possible shame and humiliation on every street corner, she bore it all with a quiet dignity. She continued to resist the cajoling to reveal the name of her child’s father, even when she became near destitute herself. Despite her poverty, she always dressed her daughter in the best crimson pinafores she could afford.
Esther’s original husband, the supposedly lost sea captain Ishmael Chilling, returned unexpectedly to the town to reclaim his family inheritance. Small and misshapen, he soon regained his former notoriety as he trawled round the town bars haphazardly trying to find Esther. The first time he entered the bar where she worked, Esther recognised him at once. She ran out in distress to the kitchens, making an excuse of illness to leave her shift. Of course she had to return the next night or lose her job permanently, so she was careful to disguise her face as best she could. She feared what this man would do to an adulteress and her daughter when he discovered them, as she knew he surely would. She began to make plans to visit a distant relative, but that very night she was unlucky; he was back there again and she could not escape a second time.
Noticing something strange in the way she moved and avoided showing her face, the sea dog asked a local who the pretty girl who served behind the bar was. The local readily told him Esther’s story. He quickly realised, that it was the story of own wife and her infidelity. He reacted angrily, exclaiming loudly to all the other drunks that he would punish her and that the child’s father, the partner in the adulterous act, should be punished too. He set about immediately to reclaim his ready-made family. He dragged Esther outside and beat her in an attempt to make her reveal the name of the father of the child. She was later found sobbing, beaten black and blue, in the park. Her face bore the scars of his vicious attack for all to see.
Her story attracted the attention and protection of the local Baptist minister, who took her into his care. Fortunately for Esther, the sailor soon tired of pursuing this ungrateful and penniless woman. With his inheritance nearly spent, he gave up
his fruitless quest and returned to sea to seek his fortune. He was never seen in the neighbourhood again.
The Baptist minister, now somewhat attracted to Esther himself, helped her resettle in the margins of the town. But with her disfiguring facial scars she was no longer able to go out to work in the clubs; instead she scraped a living doing needlework and chores, refusing nearly all contact with the outside world. She refused even to go to church, despite the minister’s constant urging.
Her daughter, Pearl, grew up fast; she was Esther’s precious treasure plucked from a bush of wild roses but without a father the child’s behaviour became increasingly troubled. Like her mother before her, she was a capricious and unruly girl and became wilder and wilder. She chased off other children with stones when they tried to taunt her about Esther’s moral lapses. The other members of the local Baptist congregation began to talk openly about having to take her into their care and decided to ‘examine’ the child.
On that occasion, the elders questioned Pearl closely about her religious faith. She refused to answer their questions directly, instead responding with pointed questions of her own. She questioned their own probity; they were questions of such perception and bravado that the minister and elders had to relent. In lieu of being taken away from her mother, the girl was encouraged instead to join the church choir. This released in her a precocious talent. As her singing grew more and more confident, her range expanded beyond that typical of a gospel singer and she began to imitate the soul and blues artists that she heard on the jukebox in the soda store down the street. By the age of seven, her mother knew she too would become a singer, destined to follow in her footsteps, but hopefully this time with the potential to be a star.
As she blossomed into a young woman, Pearl sang with energetic rhythm for the diners in local restaurants and began to attract her own, mostly male, following. She taught herself to play the piano, entertaining in the slots between the strippers at late night clubs. Although she was no great musician, in fact she later described herself as enthusiastically incompetent at the piano; she developed a reputation for singing with a soul and pathos well beyond her tender years. She entered and won a talent contest sponsored by a local radio station; the prize was to cut a record. It sold enough to keep them going for a while but her mother knew from experience that she was never going to make it that way.