How Annetta floated through those weeks, full of secret thoughts of Nell’s long breasts curled up in a lacy brassiere, the way her hips mushroomed, a line of cherry-coloured moles snaking down one leg. Nell’s eyes: dark as flint, thickly lashed, eyes that streamed when she laughed.
Annetta took a job answering phones. She told Nell to ring her anytime. It was perfect. ‘Ring and I’ll come to you,’ she said.
‘I’ll call you every hour,’ Nell promised. ‘Just to hear your voice.’
She called once in the morning to laugh at the novelty of it and then she didn’t call again. All day Annetta waited, choking on ‘hello’ as the hours passed and Nell still didn’t ring. At the end of her shift, she went straight to Nell’s room above the Sugar Shop. The door stood open. Only the bed remained, and it looked to be broken.
Annetta sat down on the floor and felt her heart would break. It wasn’t done yet – it couldn’t be done, for they had only just started. They had dreamed a whole life together, the music coming up from downstairs while they lay in bed and talked and laughed and made love: the promises Nell made when it got late. All night Annetta waited in that room but Nell did not return. In the morning, having not slept, she went down to the street to look. She asked everyone she met and sought out Nell’s friends but no one knew where she was. Some said it was drink, a bender she was on. Some said it was another woman, an old love from whom Nell could never escape. Others said she had met a man who swept her off her feet, who had enough money to take care of everything. No one said she was dead, but Annetta feared the worst. It had happened before: girls in the river and the canals, girls in pieces by the tracks. Nobody cared when girls were found like that, except the other girls.
Annetta walked down to the Embankment and picked through the drunks lumped together in rags; she pulled at mute bodies, rolled them over to get a look at the face. She retched sometimes. ‘Nell? Nell?’ They spat at her, or tried to lift her skirt. Some lay utterly still as if waiting to die, eyes glazed: lights out.
She took a job wearing a sandwich board with an arrow pointing THIS WAY FOR A BARGAIN. Every so often she called out, loud and clear, ‘Nell!’
No Nell.
One day she bumped into an old friend of Nell’s, a regular called John. He tapped the sandwich board. ‘What have you got on under there?’
‘Wouldn’t you like to know?’
‘What do you say we walk round the corner? I know a hotel – nice rooms, clean sheets.’
Annetta hesitated. Soho hummed around her. The sandwich board hid her shabby clothes, full of holes. Her shoes were lined with cardboard. She needed the money. No one would notice if she went off with John, and they would be quick enough, if she knew the man.
He grew impatient. ‘Where’s your friend? Where’s Nell? She wouldn’t make me wait like this.’
She told him that Nell was in the south of France with her grandmother. Nell was looking after her sick auntie up north. Nell was visiting her brother in Ireland, where he worked in the police squad. It didn’t matter what she said: Nell was gone. When he looked surprised, she said, ‘You think we don’t have people.’ For the married men who sought the likes of Annetta and Nell, they were the cure for the wife, the queen who reigned at home, prematurely aged, dried out, distracted by children and their crying needs, their streaming noses and bedtime drinks and spills and bumps that made them weep as if their hearts were breaking: their absolute neediness. Men like John, they just wanted a bit of fun. It was nothing. It was relief, that’s all; it didn’t matter who the woman was.
‘I always liked you best. You were the sweetest of Nell’s girls. A real innocent.’ He tapped the sandwich board again. ‘Let’s get you into something more comfortable.’
Others followed – tap, tap on the sandwich board and off they went. Soho was free and easy then. The busy streets afforded their own privacy, having been built for pleasure, not commerce: down an alley, even a doorway would do. Or, if the punter had money, they found themselves a room, for many hotels rented by the hour.
The kind of life she led did not mean that she wasn’t good. She was honest about what she did – at least she was that. What did honest mean? What did they mean when they said she wasn’t an honest woman? She understood perfectly what she did, and what she didn’t: she didn’t steal or cheat. She worked. She had always worked; she came from a working-class family, the ethic, the exhortation to work passed down like a good set of china.
Annetta had started outside the home when she was eleven, picking strawberries, stooped over a field of fruit, arms aching, fingers torn and stinging, eyes scalded by the sun. Then she washed dishes. Scrubbed bogs. Plucked chickens. Made sausage, grappling with the squeaky intestine. Nothing bothered her. She caught spiders in her hands and threw them out of the windows of her frightened mistresses.
A girl could still walk single in Soho in those days. Annetta’s back ached from working in high heels until three or four in the morning; her feet were on fire, burning with pain, but at least it wasn’t like huddling over a sloppy floor with a cold rag cramping her hand. That’s what she told herself. She walked slowly between restaurants and bars – there were so many girls doing just the same. She dressed up in colourful dresses and stuck a rhinestone pin in her hair, hoping to stand out, but the truth was all working girls dressed like film stars.
Annetta had her beat on Romilly Street, bought from a French girl who was going home, a real Fifi with a poodle in her arms. Annetta worked the street but she might ride in a car if she got the right feeling, just to have the change of scenery. She loved getting out into the countryside, especially late at night when the sky was so very black and she had no sense of where the road was going.
She was eighteen but she looked like a baby doll. No matter how rich or poor, a man paid the same: £5 a go, and it seemed a fair amount for what was sometimes the work of minutes. She could make £100 a night on the ten-minute rule if she wanted to. She’d heard about the pampered high-class girls who were making hundreds by the hour, who had their own flats in Mayfair and all the clothes and jewellery they could wish for. She heard about girls who kept their careers brief, about a year, and then went on to marry stockbrokers.
In winter Annetta’s legs went blue, then swelled to a beefy red when she thawed indoors. The older walkers had lumps of fat buttressing their calves and veins something terrible and there were mornings they could hardly get their shoes on, they said. They’d be off to the East End soon, was the joke.
Walk between the raindrops. Close your eyes. Hold your breath. It would soon be over. Annetta learned not to be there when they touched her but sometimes she felt a stranger’s hands gripping her too hard, or saw, as if from outside herself, a man suckling her breast and she wondered how she could ever let them do that.
One afternoon, Annetta found herself in front of the Sugar Shop. Her feet often took her there but usually she hurried past, once she’d made certain that Nell still hadn’t returned. That day, she stopped. She climbed the stairs. The door swung open as if Nell were behind it, already half undressed. The soaped windows. The bed in two. The walls papered in streaks and layers and the bare bulb overhead, fiercely bright. Her breath caught. ‘Oh God,’ she said, remembering Nell’s lips, the yellow skin around her eyes, puckered and thin, and her gypsy hair in a plait down her back, almost to her waist. Her handsomeness, her height and breadth, her deep solidity and the dimpled, casually gathered flesh. Annetta fell to her knees and wept.
The next day she moved in. She fixed the bed and bought the things she needed. She had cards printed for the phone boxes: Large Chest for Sale. She hired a maid, a pockmarked girl from Lancaster, to change the linen and rinse the bath and brew the tea. Here come the millionaires, the maid would say, ducking out of the way when they heard a knock at the door. One of them, Philip, who built hotels, kept calling her Hannah but Annetta didn’t mind. She would be who they wanted.
*
Sylvain was not rich, but his sh
irts were silk – they showed his ribs. His nose was crooked, a broken-looking thing, his bottom lip seamed and swollen, chewed on, sometimes white in its cracks with the medicated balm he used. He was a pusher, although Annetta at least had the sense not to touch his tablets and powders. He peddled on the streets – he was everywhere she looked, around every Soho corner she turned. If he caught her eye he smiled, a real, genuine smile. When he finally spoke to her, he made her laugh. What a relief to laugh! She collapsed with laughter and she couldn’t seem to stop. He loved to make her laugh. Just to be with him, laughing, was nice, without the rest of it, but that happened, too. People said he was a ponce but Annetta was already in love with him. He soon moved into her room above the Sugar Shop. He was homeless, otherwise, living in the bars and clubs, friends with every doorman in town. He had a way with people, something to do with his imprisonment during the war. It was hell, he told her, but he didn’t starve, and he was kept in cigarettes as well.
She waited with a towel for his hair when it rained, cushions to pad his bones, the teapot in one hand and hot buttered toast in the other. When he undressed he threw away his socks, and he never bothered with underwear. In the bath he groaned with pleasure, pinking up like a cooked prawn. He had to scrub hard to remove the city from his skin; he dipped his hands in bleach to whiten them. In Annetta’s cheap room above the Sugar Shop, with the music coming up from downstairs, he luxuriated before the three-bar fire like a deerhound on the hearth, worn out with flushing the crowd to turn out a buyer. He dozed and started, jumping to – he never slept more than an hour at a time. He called Annetta his dolly, his baby love. Sylvain had no ejaculatory control and he had a way of looking at her, slightly dazed, that made her think he loved her.
He wanted her hair a different way. He wanted her to wear certain things, black-market finery, mostly indecent, and red nails, red lips. He didn’t want her to go with the Americans and brought her instead the soldiers who had developed their habits during the war and who complained to him that the government dried up their supply. ‘This is Annetta,’ Sylvain would say and join their hands together.
‘What do I need her for? I got a wife at home,’ some replied, but it was the married ones who always paid up first. If there were more than one they took it in turns, waiting outside in the corridor, Sylvain in last of all.
‘How much did you take?’
‘I don’t know,’ she shrugged, the money already stuffed in a cushion. ‘Will I see you later?’
He wiped the sweat from her face. ‘Wash yourself,’ he said. ‘You smell like a cat’s arse.’
With Sylvain around, her regulars disappeared, but there were always new customers. She saw knives, she got hit and scratched and bitten. Sometimes she went deep inside herself, but she always returned to find a man on top of her, bearing down. When she complained that it was too many men, Sylvain told her to shut it. Those men were war heroes, he said.
The world had changed. The world had seen things – people could not believe what had happened. Believe it, they were told. The men who came back from the war were damaged, missing parts, blinded, ruined, scarred with burns. They suffered, how they suffered. Their wives, they said, weren’t the same. The children didn’t remember them, or remembered a different man. They had children they didn’t think were theirs. Their children were frightened of them: their injuries, field-stitched, still wept and soaked the bandages, or they sat in stony silence, preoccupied with battle scenes they could not forget. There was not enough work, no homes to buy even if they could have afforded them. Annetta took their five pounds and closed her eyes and prayed they wouldn’t hurt her.
Listen to what they want, Sylvain said. No talking, just listening. Give them what they want. She listened. Their stories made her stomach turn. More than one man had cried in her bed – they couldn’t get it up, they said. The war had taken that from them. The war rubbed her all over. She picked up nits, scabies, shingles, the stuff of the trenches, and there was something wrong with her feet. She couldn’t stand for long, not without them aching so much she thought she might faint with the pain. It was a reason not to go streetwalking, to stay in her room above the Sugar Shop and let Sylvain handle her trade.
He brought her men, more men, coming and going, day and night, yet somehow she was always plumping that cushion of hers and feeling air between the feathers where the notes should have been. He never asked for a cut like most ponces did, and if he was taking one anyway, she didn’t know. He shook tablets at her but she said no. She slept when she could. Her eyelids scratched, clicking open. Sometimes she craved the beyondness a blow to the head brought.
The ordeal of a rotten mouth, a tongue that was just a tongue, a pushing thing, another pushing thing trying to find a way in, and filthy hands that wanted to have a go as well, and the crude tattoos, the wounds, the festering wounds, baroque of palette, rich with pain: the stink of men, soldiers and sailors and general vagrants, who thought nothing of screwing when they hadn’t had a wash for a week.
She should have stayed away from Sylvain. He had the smell and feel of medicine to him, his fingertips lightly dusted as if with talc – not like the hands of the men she had known growing up, who worked in factories and on farms, men who made things, their hands calloused, lightly abrasive, stained with tobacco, the nails broken, ingrained. Hands that would catch on a whore’s chemise.
Sylvain gave her a fur piece that smelled of another woman. A blouse of gold satin that was missing buttons. Ferragamo shoes with scuffed soles that didn’t fit but he insisted she wear anyway. The things came to her in a blur. She just couldn’t wake up.
One night he brought six noisy, addled punters to her room. Annetta was wearing a new dress, bright red. ‘That your bridal gown?’ Sylvain said, making everyone laugh. He didn’t love her. She would never be the one he loved. She began to cry, her eyes filling and her shoulders going like she had the hiccups, but still she had to take those men, two of them amputees. Sylvain came last, cursing her under his breath, saying the bed stank of rotten flesh. He wanted some money – he grabbed it off her. She locked the door behind him and wept until she slept. She slept like she was dead.
Next thing she knew he was back with more men, at least three or four, and they threatened to kick down the door. Annetta quaked but she didn’t get out of bed. She couldn’t. Her body had given up. All night long there were men up and down the stairs, banging and shouting, calling her a slapper, a treacherous bitch. She dared not move, dared hardly breathe lest they hear.
The rest of that long night she listened – she strained her ears to hear. Hurrying footsteps, a smutty song, police sirens, and finally, come dawn, the scrape of a handcart, rowdy vendors warming up their voices with coffee and whisky. She was still there and Sylvain was gone.
She let herself doze and then someone was at the door – a different knock, friendly, joking. Shave and a haircut, six bits. A woman’s voice said, ‘Nell? Are you there, Nell? It’s me.’ She knocked again. ‘Nell?’
‘There’s no Nell here,’ Annetta said.
‘Oh, come on, Nell. It’s me. Rita. From the Cul de Sac.’
‘Who?’ Annetta said.
‘Rita. They said you got married. They said you were dead. Someone said you turned up on a building site with a brick in your head. How about that? I knew you couldn’t be dead, Nell. Not you.’
‘What do you want?’
‘Only to say hello. I was on my way to Lyons.’
‘Anyone with you?’
‘Just me.’
‘How do I know?’
‘Open the door, Nell. I’ve had enough of this now.’
Annetta opened the door. The girl who stood there looked about her own age, dark eyes and hair and features so angular they seemed to have been drawn with one strong line. Rita, she had said her name was. ‘I’m not Nell, as you can see, but for God’s sake come in.’
‘Have you got trouble?’
‘What do you know?’ Annetta said. ‘Who are yo
u? I never seen you before in my life.’
‘I’m a friend of Nell’s.’
‘What kind of friend?’
‘Just a friend,’ Rita laughed. ‘But I haven’t seen her around.’
‘I don’t know where she is.’
‘Has she been gone long?’
Annetta didn’t answer.
‘Did she say where she was going?’
‘She’s not here. There was nothing here. Just the bed, and that was in pieces, but I managed to mend it well enough.’
‘One of life’s necessities,’ Rita said, patting it. ‘I know this old rocking horse, don’t I?’
Annetta looked at her: striking, slim, with a noble bust, but there was a hardness about her, skin like marble, luminous, well moulded and cold. ‘I suppose you do.’
‘I’m not like that. I only meant—’
‘You better go now.’
‘I haven’t got anywhere to go, have I? Nell’s seen to that.’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Don’t know what?’ Rita said.
‘About Nell.’ Annetta felt the tears start, but there was nothing she could do to stop them. It was talking about Nell that did it; she would never get over her.
‘It wasn’t like that between me and Nell.’
‘Like what?’
‘I don’t love her, if that’s what you’re asking.’
‘I’m so lonely without her!’ Annetta wailed.
Rita said, ‘I could stay. Just for a cup of tea, if you’re having one. I could do with a cup of tea myself – I was on my way to Lyons when I stopped.’
For days after, Annetta shook and was sick – that was the tablets going out of her, Rita said. ‘But I didn’t. I never touched the stuff. I swear I never did,’ Annetta protested.
‘He must have found a way. They think they’re magicians.’ Rita wiped Annetta’s face with a cool flannel. ‘Just rest now.’
9
Arthur had been one of a majestic presence of soldiers in Chiusi. They smiled – how the soldiers smiled when the war went their way. They shook hands with the men and winked at the women and teased the children, offering them broken chocolate bars. They spoke no Italian and the Italians spoke no English but everything was understood between them: these men were heroes. Arthur smiled especially at Flavia, who sat in the jagged, foreshortened shade of a building that had until recently been whole. With their eyes only they talked all afternoon, looking, smiling, laughing, fawning. Finally he stepped over to her and they made an assignation, writing with a stick in the dust of the road. That evening, hours early, she went to wait in the shadows of the bombed-out trattoria he had named, where they were sure to be hidden from view.
The Ladies of the House Page 11