The Ladies of the House

by Molly McGrann

  Heads turned as she walked down the street. She was pursued endlessly. More and more men turned up at the Mayfair house asking for Sal. Arthur was no fool; he stood aside while men argued as to who had rights over others, who went first or next or last, and no one ever said it was too much money when Arthur named his price. What did they care about money? Arthur laughed when he looked at the books.

  Sal had been working in the Mayfair house for nearly a year when he arrived one evening and told her to dress for dinner. They often dined together, Sal gleaming in green silk to set off her eyes, diamonds in her ears, tripping in and out of restaurants where the women, most of them respectable matrons, dressed another way: fussy evening frocks in shades of peony, fur wraps and pearls, women who wouldn’t dare look at Sal. The doormen passed her a special glance: they knew all about it, and the hostess made sure of a good table.

  Arthur ordered fish and it arrived with its head attached. Sal retched quietly into her napkin. She turned away and encountered cigars, bodices laced with mothballs, boiled lobsters with their eyes on stalks. A waiter passed with a tray of caviar and toast. She retched again.

  Arthur flinched. He looked at her more carefully: her pallor, her shadowed eyes. The fish was removed, their coats found – Sal buried her face in silver fox fur, its softness whispering to her. In the car, neither spoke until they drew up outside the Mayfair house.

  ‘You should have told me,’ he said, not gently.

  ‘I didn’t know.’

  ‘Well, now you know. If I know, then you know, and neither of us is stupid.’

  Her eyes narrowed. ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

  ‘Don’t be daft.’ Then he added, ‘You know what to do.’

  ‘Do I? Because I feel confused,’ she wept. ‘I feel so awfully sick that I can’t think.’

  ‘It might not be—’

  ‘What?’ she choked.

  ‘Well, whose is it?’

  At that, Sal cried out, ‘You think I don’t know?’

  ‘It can’t be proved.’

  ‘I’ll know when I see him. When I see my boy. I already know.’

  ‘You better go inside,’ he said.

  He sped off in his car, the car in which she had first arrived in town, back when she was still a girl. Wherever he went that night, whoever he was with, Sal was on his mind. She was under his skin, same as he was under hers, growing.

  *

  She pushed the baby out easily, in no time. Sal had always been a strong girl. The baby was a boy, just as she had said he would be. Joseph. She reached out her arms. The midwife hesitated; he should be washed first, she said. Sal didn’t want him washed. ‘Give him here,’ she insisted. He immediately suckled, eyes closed, nose snuffling. He seemed to know what he should be doing, and so did she. She stroked his wet head: thick black hair, just like his father – more, in fact, than his father had on top. Sal laughed. Joseph began to shiver. ‘It’s that hair. Most peculiar,’ the midwife said, reaching with a towel for the baby on Sal’s breast. ‘The wet is drawing the cold in. I better take him. Besides, he needs a wash.’

  Sal refused. ‘He hasn’t looked at me yet.’

  ‘He’s blind anyways.’ When Sal looked alarmed, the midwife said, ‘Babies are, to start with. All babies have bad eyes.’

  ‘Not bad,’ said Sal, hating the midwife. ‘Just not ready for the world yet.’ Joseph shook with cold. The midwife dropped the towel in Sal’s lap and stalked out of the room. Joseph howled when Sal pulled him from her breast in order to swaddle him – he stiffened and yelled and the whole of him turned a furious red, and then he suddenly stopped and looked at her. His blue-purple eyes, dense as a shark’s, were not blind; he knew she was his mother. She felt a rush of heat and lifted the towel in time to see the high, golden arc of his stream. She laughed. He relaxed and a cooler colour returned to him. His mouth clamped down on her breast. When he finished nursing he slept, his even breathing wondrous to her. She listened to him, felt his weight in the crook of her arm: here at last.

  She felt that she could never trust anyone else to look after him as well as she did and so she would not be parted from him at first. She didn’t wash him, preferring instead the animal emollient that had waterproofed his skin those months he was inside her; she rubbed it in and said it did him good. She refused his place in the hospital nursery, for he would sleep with her. Sal made a name for herself on the ward for being odd and apparently unnatural, outspoken in her ways. She, likewise, could not understand the other mothers who seemed happy to be rid of their newborns. ‘Poor babes,’ she sighed, drawing Joseph closer.

  She didn’t know how they knew, but they did. The midwives and doctors and even the cleaners – they all knew. Perhaps it was the absence of Arthur Gillies in the days after Joseph was born, for he had told her he would not set foot inside any hospital. He drove her to the door in his fine car when her labour pains started and shouted for a porter. Hospitals made him ill, he said; Sal understood – she always did. Instead, she had a queue of beautiful women in daring finery and full make-up, glittering with paste jewels. She heard one midwife say that she’d seen Sal sitting in a vulgar way when the doctor looked over Joseph, and another said her dressing gown was like something for a floor show. When Minnie embraced Sal and lay down alongside her in bed to chat, Joseph between them, latched onto Sal’s breast, the hospital openly declaimed against them, at which point Sal signed herself out.

  She never returned to the Mayfair house. Arthur had arranged a nearby flat for her, and a nurse to take the baby when he called. He called regularly, and so did Minnie, to keep Sal company. ‘Hello, handsome,’ she cooed to Joseph and twirled around the room with him on one shoulder as if he were her dancing partner. If Louise or Ava were with her, they fought over who held him – Sal could see the longing in their eyes. ‘Man of my dreams,’ sighed Louise. Joseph was returned to his mother, smudged with lipstick and reeking of cigarettes and setting lotion. He stank of the bordello, simply put. Sal’s mother would have said as much, had she seen the baby out and about and leaned into his pram for a better view, but she never did know about Joseph.

  Sal insisted he had aunties aplenty to dote on him and that was enough for anyone. ‘This is his family right here,’ she said.

  ‘I guess we are,’ said Louise.

  Joseph, in his cradle, smiled as he slept.

  ‘Wind,’ Minnie said.

  ‘Wind,’ Ava agreed.

  ‘Oh no, this baby is happy. He’s smiling,’ Sal said.

  ‘It’s wind,’ said Louise.

  ‘What do you know? It’s not like any of us had a baby before,’ said Sal. ‘He’s smiling with his whole self, I believe.’

  Joseph opened one eye and let it rove about, taking in the shining lamp, the silver teapot, Ava’s brightly patterned headscarf covering her curlers, the cigarette moving in Minnie’s mouth. There was his mother, on whom the eye came to rest. He smiled blissfully before drifting off again.

  ‘What a miracle he is,’ Sal whispered.

  *

  Arthur Gillies did not seem to know how to hold a baby, despite having a daughter called Marie, a bit older, up in Kettering, whom he saw every weekend. He forgot to lower his voice so that Joseph did not cry when he spoke. He banged doors. His shoes hammered the parquet floor. The hovering nurse swooped when Joseph bunched his eyes and began to shriek, exclaiming that he must be wet, tired, hungry, and off they went, down the short corridor to the safety of his nursery.

  Sal tried not to think about how Arthur looked when he held Joseph: adrift, staring with a certain horror at the thing that threatened him. His beautiful suits, so carefully fitted, restricted his arms; he could not rock the baby. His silk ties spotted with posset, his diamond cufflinks caught on the extravagant lace of Joseph’s blankets, unravelling his swaddling. Sal hated to see Arthur looking so lost, especially when she herself moved with new purpose and grace.

  ‘Let’s sit down,’ she said to him. ‘Cook roasted a joint.’
For Sal also had a cook and a maid, just like a rich woman.

  Arthur grunted. Sal poured him a drink and piled his plate high with pork and boiled potatoes and bright shreds of cabbage. He talked about business. He knew business, not babies. He was looking at a job lot of houses in the morning – pay cash and Bob’s your uncle, he said. ‘Seems like I’m the only one who’s got any money to spend in this town.’

  ‘You and the Queen. And Oxford University. I believe it was the Chancellor of Oxford himself who told me that.’ Sal sipped her tea, keeping her eyes down. ‘I heard Barbara from South Street is gone. And Shelley.’

  ‘Barbara ran off with that bloke with the long hair. What’s a bloke doing with long hair? Does he fancy himself a lady?’ Arthur laughed.

  ‘What about Shelley?’

  He shrugged. ‘Who knows? I’ll let her go.’

  ‘Ava was back at the Windmill the other day – a place has come up. She said there must have been a hundred girls there.’

  ‘What’s she doing at the Windmill? Looking for work?’ he joked.

  Sal nodded.

  ‘You might speak to Louise,’ he said. ‘She’s got to be more friendly. No one wants to hear her problems. We all lost people in the war. Always going on about finding herself a farmer.’ Arthur picked his teeth. ‘She’s not likely to find one around here, apart from them ones that call themselves farmers but are really gentleman. Driving tractors for a lark and all.’

  ‘Doesn’t the baby look well?’

  ‘Sure he does,’ Arthur replied. He reached for the mustard. ‘There’s nothing in here,’ he complained.

  Sal threw the mustard pot against the wall, smashing it; what little mustard there was spattered the paper like bird shit.

  ‘What’s with you?’

  ‘You’re losing girls because you’re not treating them right. They’re good girls.’

  ‘That’s the birds and the bees for you. No one does this kind of thing forever. Girls are always moving on.’ He shrugged. ‘I’ve been around long enough to know the way things go.’

  ‘They’re good girls,’ Sal repeated. ‘If every girl were as good as Minnie and Ava, you’d be a millionaire.’

  ‘Who says I’m not? You telling me how to run my business?’

  ‘You’ll lose me too if you’re not careful,’ Sal said, steadily as she could. ‘I intend to work again, you know.’

  He chased a potato with his fork, then pushed the plate away and faced her. ‘Look at you. You’re not the same.’

  Sal knew he was right. She was a mother. She was no longer the other woman, the whore, the honeypot every man desired. Having entered the house by one door, she had left by another.

  ‘Who’ll mind the baby?’

  ‘I will. I can do both,’ Sal said fiercely.

  ‘It’s not what I was thinking at all.’ He asked her for another drink. She poured a bit and corked the whisky bottle and returned it to the sideboard. She did not sit, but stood over him. She heard the nurse run Joseph’s bath – how he loved his bath, and splashed and paddled, his plentiful locks curling up all over his head: angelic, he was, cherubically fat, soft and white as a powder puff.

  ‘They ask for you,’ Arthur admitted.

  ‘What do you tell them?’

  Their eyes met. ‘I don’t say much. I tell them you might be back one day. They say I’m a fool for losing you.’

  ‘Have you lost me?’

  He snorted.

  ‘I want my own house to run,’ she said. ‘I’ll pick the girls. You’ll see. No one will know a better house than mine.’

  Arthur sighed. He knotted his fingers together and cracked the knuckles. He inspected his fingernails. Sal waited. Down the hall they could hear Joseph shouting with delight, all sorts of babble. Arthur brought his fist down on the table.

  The flat went silent and then Joseph wailed. His nurse shushed him. Sal never took her eyes off Arthur. He finished his drink. ‘I tell you, it’s no place to raise a child,’ he said.

  ‘I want to work. That’s what I came to London to do. I’m no layabout. I want my own house and my own girls.’

  Joseph, in his bath, did not make a sound. No one did. Minutes passed. Sal held her breath. Arthur began to laugh. He slapped his knee. ‘You’ve got to turn a profit in six months.’

  ‘I’ll do better than that.’

  ‘I don’t doubt it,’ Arthur said, grinning at her.

  ‘I’ll make it something special. That’s what they’ll say.’ She’d show him – all of them.

  *

  She took Minnie and Ava with her to the new house in the Crescent in Primrose Hill. It was not Arthur’s usual address, but she knew her customers would follow her. She liked the view from the front window, overlooking the park – which some said was just an open-air brothel anyway, come nightfall.

  There was work to be done to the house, which had been damaged during the war and had a broken staircase and blown-up outbuildings spewing bricks. She instructed the builders as to how she wanted things – she would have her modern fittings, especially in the bathrooms; and electric light everywhere, even in the larder; and a double gas cooker, a fridge and a dumb waiter; and a boiler room at the back to keep the plumbing fluent with hot water. When the house had been rebuilt to the highest standard, she dressed the rooms carefully, in rich colours: mahogany and rose damask for the dining room, Delft blue in the drawing room and a soft mossy-green wallpaper the colour of American money up and down the stairs. She hung heavy drapes to make the place quiet and secret, and there were empty gilt birdcages that Sal threatened to fill with lovebirds. Everywhere were mirrors, to reflect forever the good looks of the women who worked there, with whom the suitors could see themselves at play. Her brothel was elegant, costly, officiously clean, but it wasn’t just that: it had Sal written all over it.

  Seated fireside in the drawing room, diamonds glittering, she held court in her easy way. She read books and looked at pictures and she could always talk about what was in the newspapers. She liked a bawdy joke. Half the men came just for her conversation, or to gaze, for Sal was more beautiful than ever, resplendent in her grand house and fine clothes, never a hair out of place. She made the call as to who was welcome and who was not. Sal’s place – that’s what the concierge at certain grand hotels was asked to find. All the Hollywood actors came to the Crescent, as did MPs and high-ranking clergymen, diplomats, princes and sheiks. Her girls were appreciated as much for their coiffures and pedicures as for their bedside manner, and there were certain thrills guaranteed. Men hardly knew they were being fleeced. Every chair was occupied; standing room only. When the doorbell went, Sal herself hurried to answer – the police were handsomely paid off but she wasn’t taking any chances. The neighbours never complained, not least because she gave them nothing to complain about: no drunks or noisy queues, no half-dressed women hanging out of the windows. She made sure always to greet her neighbours when they met on the street, having introduced herself when she moved in, and she was a picture of respectability, wheeling Joseph around the park in his pram, his back supported by a gold brocade cushion. She had a natty navy-blue suit just for perambulating.

  Joseph’s nursery was at the top of the house, next to the airing cupboard. The water pipes hissed and banged all hours but he was quiet as a mouse, Sal boasted. He drank down his bottles and never made a fuss. By day he romped as any other child would do, tumbling up and down the stairs, crawling everywhere. There were hairpins to pursue along the floorboards and an old lipstick to twist, emptied of colour, as well as the usual teddies and toy cars. Then, in the evenings, when he had been put to bed, and throughout the night – all the twelve hours that he slept – Sal crept up to him at regular intervals. He slept with his knees drawn under, thumb in his mouth; sometimes he rocked, and it stirred her, that bit of independence already, to comfort himself when she wasn’t there.

  Oh, but she was always there.

  London was a bright blister that first summer in the Crescen
t, welling with yellow light. It was a happy time and Sal had all the energy in the world. She stayed up late, making money, making a name for herself, and spent the days looking after her boy in the glorious sunshine. She was safe in that house, her family with her – for she had a family now. She had Joseph and her girls, Minnie, Louise and Ava, and she saw Arthur every day that he was in town. She was blessed, she felt. She had a good life.

  Making his way on hands and knees around the back garden, Joseph pointed to a snail shell. ‘Dada!’ He pointed to a leaf on the ground. ‘Dada!’ He pointed to a red rose. ‘Dada!’

  ‘Always on about his daddy, isn’t he?’ Ava said with a frown.

  ‘It’s just what he can say,’ Sal replied. ‘It don’t mean anything.’

  ‘Mean anything? When your father is Arthur Gillies it means something.’

  Sal hushed her. ‘That’s enough, now.’

  ‘It’s nice having a little one around the house,’ Minnie said. ‘Makes the place feel like home.’ She pulled Joseph onto her lap. He beamed at her, the whole of him shining and clean. ‘I don’t mean to stay forever, you know.’

  ‘I expect some day we’ll all be on our way to a better place,’ Sal teased. ‘There’s still room up there for the likes of us. Just think about all those fellows who think heaven is a good roll in the hay

  *

  Sal did not allow herself to think about Arthur with his wife. The easy conversation they would have, talking over things familiar and near. They would discuss their daughter, Marie, and her behaviour, how well or not she did at school, what her friends were like, whether they were the right sort of friends to keep. When the girl needed something, her mother would ask Arthur for the money, a bit on top of her housekeeping, easy as can be. When Christmas was coming, they would plan together for the surprise.