The Ladies of the House

by Molly McGrann

When they went inside, the change in temperature meant she wet herself – the house was boiling, after the chill of the dawn. Rita was always turning up the thermostat. She said it didn’t matter about the heating bill, seeing as Arthur Gillies still paid it.

  Upstairs, she was washed, towelled dry, dressed in clean pyjamas and put to bed. Annetta had spent more than half her life in bed by then.

  ‘There now, settle down. Mustn’t get your knickers in a twist.’

  That woman, Annetta thought, not very sure who she was – she thought perhaps her name was Minnie – did nothing but talk, talk, talk all day long.

  The woman left the room. While she was out, Annetta went looking for a tiny thing she liked to carry. It charmed her. She was hunting for it in the wardrobe when the woman came back and scolded her to get into bed. The woman said she would tie her down if she had to. She was terrible, she was.

  Annetta did as she was told. She lay down and closed her eyes, opened them again. Rita was there. Annetta asked for a kiss. Rita kissed her, smoothed down the covers. Only then could Annetta rest, a hand to her back. She dropped right off to sleep and dreamed of the past.

  8

  Mr Wye was Annetta’s first. He was Arthur Gillies’ lawyer, his right-hand man, and his opinion mattered, she was told. Sal said it was the custom that he should meet all the new girls. She called Annetta into the drawing room, where she sat with Mr Wye before a blazing fire. He was tall and thin, with a ghastly grin, dressed all in black except for his shirt: purest white, a shirt just handed to him by his wife. Even in those pea-soup times, when everything was smeared in greasy soot, Mr Wye’s collars and cuffs were spotless. Dressed like an undertaker, like he put people in the ground. Annetta wore a long robe of silk and lace and a ribbon in her hair. He looked her over and nodded. She would do. Annetta smiled and took his hand, led him upstairs. He knew where he was going. She was petrified; Sal wanted to see how she handled a man.

  Annetta’s feet, in new stilettos – she tried not to limp. Her hair, combed of bugs, shone sulphur-yellow in the dim light of the room. The room – hers to keep if Mr Wye liked her – was grand, richly dressed in embroidered satin, with a divan and Chinese cabinets and wallpaper printed with phoenixes.

  Once they were alone together, he cleared his throat and asked her, in a quiet voice, to lie down.

  Face down, he meant, for he rolled her over. He took her from behind every time, but it wasn’t just that; that she didn’t mind. It was the other thing: her stockings balled in her mouth and sometimes a pillowslip over her head. He didn’t want to see her, hear her, not a peep or murmur. She was to be silent, submissive. Every time he did it the same way. It seemed to go on forever and there was nothing she could do – not if she wanted to maintain her place in the house.

  Annetta became a favourite of Mr Wye’s. Rat-a-tat-tat. Sal would answer the door with a smile and guide him to a chair, but he never wanted to sit long, being there only for one purpose. He wanted to be done with it. Annetta didn’t mess about – he’d only hit her. She got into position on the bed. He asked her if she’d washed. She had, more than once that day, for Sal’s girls must always be fresh. She was ready for him. She closed her eyes. She went somewhere else.

  *

  There was never enough money. No one had enough of anything after the war. Even the rich had to cook for themselves, their servants having moved on to labour in the factories, making things that people needed. There was little meat – no chocolate. There was the feeling of having nothing solid on the plate, no weight of coin to make a pocket hang right. They had nothing. Annetta – Ann, for she was only Ann then – had missed a childhood of sweets, of rhubarb dipped in sugar and a clementine in her Christmas stocking. Her father shouted, when the table was bare, ‘I could kill you!’ and she thought he meant it sometimes, to have one less mouth gaping stupidly, to have a little abundance there. She lost two brothers in the war and still the food didn’t always stretch to go round.

  She had few memories of her dead brothers. They were older, and before the war they hadn’t been much at home; they got into trouble, she guessed, from the things people said. The other ones in her family: their racket. Raging, always at war. Her mother was a vague, rustling presence. Her father was an ape.

  There were places where her bones didn’t look to be set right, and a dent under her hair at the back of her head, made when she landed against a doorframe: times when, simply put, the lights went off. She disappeared and no amount of shouting brought her back. She didn’t know what they did to her when she wasn’t there. She felt things later but she didn’t remember. Bruises, cuts, soreness – she just didn’t remember.

  Where she went, it was dark, but there were watery sounds – waves on a shore – and the sensation was of softness, restfulness, the easing of her body. Pain was at a distance. She could hear voices, but then she could always hear voices. The so many of her family, and neighbours close around; the noise of a street crowded with other big families jammed together in a reeking city. Inside herself it was quieter, and the voices spoke kindly, a simple language she could understand.

  She hit her head and the world went away.

  She flew against the wall and a mirror fell down and broke around her. It was a miracle she wasn’t killed, her mother said, but Annetta didn’t hear because she wasn’t there; she was beyond.

  She banged her head against the doorframe and her neck whiplashed.

  The dent under her hair.

  The bones bent, not set right.

  Next thing she knew she was in London. They said there were jobs there and she went looking for a household position. Getting off at Victoria Station, she walked until she found a street lined with grand houses. She feasted her eyes, tasting the air. She looked in windows at tables laid with silver and crystal, laden with hothouse flowers. She just about heard the rustle of full skirts – the New Look that women had started to wear after the war, not that Annetta knew a thing about Christian Dior. After a while she chose a door and knocked to ask if she were needed.

  She was at the wrong door, to begin with. She learned to knock at the service door and ask for the housekeeper. She knocked at door after door. She did not look up to the work, one said, meaning Annetta was delicate, meagre. Let me see your hands, said another. Some sneered because she was pretty and they were not; they were coarse, with warts and lined faces and grey hair and they reminded her of horses, the way their teeth stuck out.

  She had all the bad luck. She wandered London for days, spent the last of her money and began to starve. She slept behind pillars, inside railings, in parking lots built on bombed-out buildings. Her coat was thin and always wet; the heavens opened on her time and again and she never quite dried out. Her feet rotted in the only pair of shoes she owned, which had belonged to her sister first and were too small.

  Annetta finally made her way to Soho. She knew what she would find there – everyone knew it was where the fast set went. First she smelled it: coal, as was everywhere in London, as if the whole city had been fumigated, and then a blast of roasting coffee and vanilla pods. Annetta followed her nose past mysterious herbs for eating and healing, garlic, paprika, mace and fennel, and curry powders in jars – she didn’t like those. A market smell of earth and potatoes and dung. There were exotic fruits and vegetables to behold, salamis and hams, roasting birds of all sizes that made her mouth water, and cakes she coveted, fresh breads and rolls – long crisp sticks that she longed to snap the end off. She ogled the windows of Camisa’s, Lina Stores and Patisserie Valerie. She had no chance of food, being penniless; she must find work first. She picked up a trail of ersatz perfumes, Evening in Paris and Carnation, and, turning onto Old Compton Street, met a throng of women. Annetta went elbow to elbow with any number of fragrant tarts, beautifully turned out at a time when the general population was frayed and worn; having only forty-eight coupons a year, most people wore clothes that hid the grime that poured from the skies. Not the working girls. Many had poodles, coiffe
d and spoiled creatures, dyed pink and yellow and blue. The bad weather did not trouble them; they grinned and called out to the punters, and their poodles snapped and barked, a real hullaballoo. Girls hung in all the doorways, too, and gathered on the street corners. There were so many! Girls of every kind, all accents – but not good girls, for good girls didn’t go to Soho.

  Annetta sheltered inside Woolworths, trying to warm up. Her bloodless feet burned as they came to. She didn’t notice the woman by the lipsticks, not until she felt strong arms around her. The woman pulled Annetta close, onto her enormous bosom. She smelled of wet wool and body odour and violet perfume. ‘You’re so cold.’

  ‘Looking for work all day,’ Annetta muttered. It was nice, being held, but she didn’t know the woman from Adam.

  ‘They’re hiring here. If you worked here, then I’d know where to find you.’ The woman released her.

  ‘They’re hiring?’

  ‘I’m Nell, by the way.’

  ‘I’m Ann.’

  Nell offered her a lipstick. ‘You’re blue in the lips. And your hands – rub them together. Tuck yourself in. You need a scarf to hide that collar. That’s better. Now off you go,’ she said.

  Annetta soon returned. ‘I start Monday.’

  ‘What did I tell you? What did I say? This calls for a celebration,’ Nell grinned. ‘I know – we’ll stop off at Lyons.’

  Annetta had never been but naturally had heard of the place. Everyone knew Lyons’ teashops, the most famous in the world. Nell led Ann from floor to floor, pointing out the marvels of the decor, the marble columns and chandeliers and the thick carpet that muted the clatter of cups and saucers. The Nippy uniform was everywhere, charging forth through swinging doors, dashing among the many tables. Nell seemed to know all the girls by name and waved hello or blew a kiss or goosed them as they passed at speed. Finally they sat down in the Grill & Cheese, where they took a long time to eat and drink their tea.

  Nell was full of advice. She mustn’t let the city beat her down, Nell said. There was plenty of work – Annetta just had to look in the right places. Nell had been there ten years already, a country girl herself, just the hearty rustic sort London liked to devour. But London wouldn’t get her, Nell vowed, and she had mothered a good many others as well. Everywhere she looked she saw lost souls kicking about. She only wanted to help them. ‘You’re a lovely thing, too,’ Nell said, stroking Annetta’s hand. ‘A real good baby, I can tell.’

  After Lyons, Nell bought her the clothes she needed – new shoes and fur-lined gloves, a red blouse – and promised a better coat from a department store. She pointed out the bombsites in St Martin’s Lane where children played cowboys and Indians, the Maltese gangsters, the ponces and pimps, the evangelical rescuers, the tourists with money to spend, the pill dealers, the Italian waiters who looked at girls with their hearts in their eyes. Then Nell took Annetta to her room above the Sugar Shop, homely as it was, the bed covered in a pretty eiderdown and, next to it, an electric fire – there was even a chintz armchair in one corner. Annetta bathed in the tin bath and Nell put her to bed. Under cover of night: striving fingers, kisses, the bedclothes a mess.

  Annetta’s shifts at Woolworths were spent in a daze of wonder and fatigue, for Nell talked constantly, all hours, as well as doing the other things. This is love, she told herself, feeling exhilarated, electric; feeling it to be true, all the nonsense. Love made her sick to her stomach, sleepless even when she might have rested, with Nell finally passed out beside her in bed, when she gazed at her lover, marvelling at every mutter and twitch. Love was real, and yet she could hardly believe Nell existed; a woman to whom she was so perfectly matched, who understood Annetta without her having to explain herself

  A week or two passed like that before Nell asked her a favour. She didn’t like to ask, but she was in a pickle. A friend had let her down—

  She hated to ask, Nell said.

  When it was over and the gentleman had crept off, leaving ten pounds on the pillow, they fell into each other’s arms.

  ‘Were you afraid?’ Nell asked.

  ‘Not with you there,’ Annetta replied.

  ‘Was it very bad for you?’

  Annetta shook her head. They both knew she would do it again, that she had enjoyed herself enough. It wasn’t what she felt with Nell, but it had its own excitement. Nell was pleased. She had thought Annetta would like it. She said that Annetta must give herself another name if she were going to pick up the life. When Annetta asked why, she replied, ‘You think my name is Nell?’

  Annetta had never questioned it. Nothing else would suit her. ‘What’s your name, then?’

  I’m not telling. I never tell. Whatever it is, I won’t have it on my gravestone.’

  ‘Tell me,’ Annetta begged.

  ‘It’s not my name. It’s not who I am.’

  ‘Who are you?’ Annetta wondered, and she said it so sweetly, with pure wonder, that Nell laughed.

  ‘You want a sweet name. Something sweet as sugar, like you. Something like . . . Fanny. That’s you. Sweetness through and through.’

  ‘It’s dirty,’ Annetta said. Nell laughed again. She was always laughing at Annetta. Then Nell rolled down her stockings – the last bits of clothing she still wore.

  In that cosy room above the Sugar Shop, music coming up from downstairs, Annetta felt herself be. The person she was with Nell: that’s who she really was. The past was erased – she had done it, wiped it clean. She was someone else entirely from the girl she had been with her family. It was the strangest thing.

  ‘Oh darling, my Annetta,’ Nell sighed.

  *

  After that, if there was a man who wanted a young girl or more than one girl, Nell fetched Annetta to the room above the Sugar Shop. Annetta couldn’t deny the money she made with Nell was good, for the men were rich, but she kept her job at Woolworths all the same. Between the two she could afford to eat at Lyons whenever she wanted.

  It turned out that most of Soho did what she did, even the ones who said they didn’t; they could be bought for enough money at the end of the month when their bills were due. Then there were the casuals who dropped in and out of the trade – housewives, single mothers, war widows. There seemed to be so many working girls, and always very busy, no matter the time of day.

  Sometimes Nell was flushed with drink, when she called Annetta her filly and knocked her around the room. When Annetta opened her eyes, having gone elsewhere, deep in the cool dark that whispered, Nell was always distraught. Annetta forgave her, and gifts were made in the aftermath: bottles of scent, flowers, chocolates, although making up was sweet enough for Annetta.

  Woolworths gave her the sack when she skipped off with Nell halfway through a shift to meet a punter. She moved on to a stationer’s, then a launderette, but Nell always came along with a better offer. Annetta took a job in a cafe, only to set down the coffee pot she had been about to pour when Nell turned up and whispered in her ear. She sold buttonholes, she pamphleted, but always she was waiting for Nell to appear. The hours they were apart were to be endured; Annetta only lived when Nell was around, or so she felt. She thought of nothing but Nell. She was possessed – she was madly in love. Annetta had known for some time that she was unnatural, but Nell confirmed it. Nell was the same; she was with those men for the money, nothing more.

  ‘My mother took me to a doctor, looking for a cure. He told her to put me in a convent. I told them I’d have a good time in there,’ Nell laughed. ‘That’s when they kicked me out. What about you?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘What were you kicked out for?’

  ‘Who says I was kicked out? I just left.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I don’t remember.’

  ‘You don’t remember,’ Nell said. ‘That’s impossible. That’s just covering your tracks.’

  There was the one thing, when she was nine. She couldn’t remember, oh, maybe a bit – the familiar grin from certain men, and one of them once said alm
ost the exact words her uncle had: ‘You must have been a sexy little girl.’ When Annetta looked at their shoes and saw broken knotted laces and worn rubber soles scooped out in half-moons at the back, her breath cut short – but how often did she see that? Rich men paid a price for her that the working class couldn’t afford. The rich wore handmade shoes, sleek as skinned cats.

  Her uncle, with an unwashed smell on him that crossed a room, stole from her mother even though there was nothing to steal. Annetta remembered that. He stole money from his sister’s purse and stole the baking from her larder, pinching a pie crust until the top collapsed, twirling the custard with a filthy finger, strip-mining the jolliest bits of a fruit loaf. Fat when times were lean. Then he went for her daughters. He was married, but no one knew where his wife was. Under the rose bushes, some said.

  He wouldn’t leave Annetta alone. She tried to tell, but he just said that she’d always been a tart. He would know, Annetta said.

  Nell had it as well, from a brother. She shrugged. ‘It wasn’t much.’

  ‘I just don’t remember,’ Annetta said, and she wasn’t lying. ‘I don’t know why. I can’t seem to keep things in my head. Mum said it was because I didn’t pay attention. She thought I was simple, a bit.’

  ‘Was it bad?’

  Annetta nodded. It seemed a long time ago, another life. She had endured her uncle, and the general violence of her childhood: the razor strap, the hairbrush, a wooden kitchen spoon, the back of a hand – but everyone had the razor strap, the hairbrush, a wooden kitchen spoon, the back of a hand, every blooming child she knew, and some, like her, had worse.

  ‘There’s a lot I wish I could forget. Some old boy gobbed in my tea when I was in Bar Italia the other day. Said he wouldn’t pay a farthing for a trollop like me.’

  ‘What did you do?’

  ‘I put on my brightest smile and picked up my cup like to drink from it, didn’t I? I’ve had worse than that in my mouth,’ Nell laughed. No one laughed like Nell.

  *