The Ladies of the House

by Molly McGrann

  ‘He said I’d had better than him.’

  ‘Is that what he said?’

  ‘I’m not making this up,’ Rita said.

  ‘And what did you say?’

  ‘Well, I was sick and tired of him saying it, wasn’t I? I said yes.’ Her eyes were swollen from crying. She had recovered herself with a cup of tea at the house in the Crescent, where she’d gone straight from the hospital. ‘And him with his bad heart. I may as well have killed him myself. Just like a bullet.’

  Terry Sourbeer was the only one of her husbands to know about Rita’s past. He knew because, a long time ago, he had got himself a girl, one of Sal’s famous girls, as a birthday present to himself, a gift for which he’d saved for months. He’d had to plead with Sal at the door, looking so ordinary and working-class, for she liked a referral, but she relented. Annetta tried to relax him, settling him on a kitchen chair away from the other men – men in suits who all seemed to know each other. She gave him a drink and when he’d downed it, she took him upstairs.

  She was his first girl, he told her, and didn’t she go and tell the others? They couldn’t believe it, a real live forty-year-old virgin, good-looking enough, just a bit shy. He didn’t know how to put himself across like other men, he said. He didn’t know how to dance. He’d come out of the war one hundred per cent intact, and that included his cherry.

  The next time Terry Sourbeer visited the house, he had Rita. He asked for Annetta – kneading the brim of his hat, his forehead studded with sweat – but she was with a Soviet agent.

  ‘Rita here is free,’ Sal said.

  ‘That’s fine,’ Terry replied, hardly able to look up. He was feeling something urgent, something that needed taking care of then and there, no matter the money, which was a lot. More than he could comfortably afford twice in one month. He went with Rita, but he didn’t stay the night, and after that Terry Sourbeer wasn’t seen again.

  He remembered her, all those years later, smiling broadly in the post office queue where they waited to collect their pensions. ‘I never forgot you girls,’ he told her, and there was nothing disrespectful in the way he said it.

  Certainly it had happened over the years, a man coming up to her, saying she had been spectacular. A few times it happened. Not so often as she would have liked. But Arthur Gillies always said that Sal’s girls were for the gods, and the gods weren’t to be found hanging around Camden on a Tuesday morning.

  How about a cup of tea, then? Terry knew a place around the corner. He used to work near there, in a big warehouse depot. That’s how he knew about the house in the Crescent. ‘It was just a normal-looking house,’ he said. ‘That’s what I couldn’t get over. You wouldn’t have known it was any different from the others. If I’d seen you on the street back then, I would have thought you were nice-looking, but not a tart. Not the kind of woman I could have. But then I did, didn’t I?’ Terry grinned.

  ‘Did you?’ Rita asked, in genuine wonder.

  ‘I sure did.’

  ‘You have a good memory.’

  ‘There were a lot of men through that house. I expect you can’t remember us all.’

  Rita smiled.

  ‘The house looks the same,’ he said. She nodded. ‘I saw someone outside the other day. Looked like Sal – I remember her hair.’

  ‘London’s Bettie Page,’ Rita said.

  ‘She didn’t look so good. She was using a stick.’ He paused. ‘But she didn’t have any hair when I saw her.’

  ‘She’s poorly. She has cancer.’

  ‘I’m sorry to hear that,’ Terry said. He wrinkled his brow and looked at the ground. Then he blurted, ‘Is it true there was a boy living there all the time?’

  Rita breathed out a heavy sigh. What was the point in hiding it now? ‘Yes.’

  ‘Just imagine,’ he murmured. ‘A child in that house, of all places.’

  ‘Where else was he supposed to live?’ Rita demanded. ‘He was with his mother. And quite right, too.’

  Terry blushed. ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean – I’m sorry,’ he said again, and he looked sorry, so very sorry that she felt badly for him. She hadn’t meant to snap; it was habit. All those years of pretending that Joseph wasn’t there.

  Rita agreed to see Terry again. For three weeks they met every single day for tea and cake, and then there was a ring planted like a starry, shiny flower in the sugar bowl. She dug it out with her teaspoon. When he slipped it on her finger, Rita didn’t say no.

  Terry Sourbeer said more than once that he was not about to let pass an opportunity to be with a woman of her calibre, no charge, but Rita didn’t take offence. He was always saying things in the name of honesty, which is just what Sal and Annetta always said about Rita, as if to excuse her rudeness. Anyway, they looked nice together, she thought, Terry with a full head of white hair and a thick moustache, his body still strong – that was forty years of lifting and moving the contents of a warehouse. And Rita, small and sharply turned out, who had shrunk in every way due to her osteoporosis, the crowded organs inside beginning to grumble and complain, her flatulence her greatest shame. Charcoal tablets were useless, she told the others, for twice a week the new Mrs Sourbeer journeyed north to the house in the Crescent and confided in her old friends.

  Annetta said, ‘He don’t care, I bet. He’s love-struck.’

  ‘He’s love-struck for a girl that’s long gone,’ Rita said. ‘Who I am – it’s all in his head.’

  ‘We were something special, don’t forget,’ whispered Sal from where she lay on the chesterfield, covered in blankets.

  ‘Now I’m just an old windbag,’ Rita laughed.

  ‘God won’t mind a bit of wind,’ Sal said.

  ‘God! What do I care about God?’ Rita said hotly. ‘It’s Terry I’m worried about.’

  For a while they were happy, the Sourbeers, sharing a simple life together. He was the best of all five husbands, although she wouldn’t say he was the love of her life. But he was a good man. He was gentle – a gentle giant. One of those. His pension was enough that they could dine out once a week in the curry house around the corner, where Terry bowed to the waiters and left big tips at Christmas, receiving in turn a bottle of port. They know how to look after a customer, he always said – he said it of the greengrocer, the butcher, the newsagent, the postmaster and especially the florist, from whom he bought the red sweetheart roses that wilted on the mantelpiece the day after he brought them home to Rita. At night he whispered, ‘You know how to look after a man,’ but once, after too much Christmas port, he said, ‘You know how to look after a customer.’ Had Rita not been deep into the passive state she assumed for her married sex life, she might have replied with a strong word or two, but she often dozed while he laboured over her, or planned her shopping list, her meal rota, what she would wear to the curry house next time.

  ‘I’m too old for this,’ she told Annetta one day. ‘I’m like a crab, with my bones so stiff around me. I get the hot-water bottle first, to loosen me up, then Terry does his thing, then I want the hot-water bottle back and I want it fresh and hot so he’s got to go down to the kitchen just when he’s exhausted himself.’

  ‘He may as well make you a cup of tea while he’s at it,’ Annetta said.

  ‘Oh yes, and that. So he does, just the way I like it, not too strong, half a teaspoon of sugar and plenty of milk,’ Rita said, and they laughed. It was always grand to laugh about men. It seemed a long time since they had laughed like that.

  Rita sat in the Dog and Duck and laughed to herself. Her fascinator jigged a merry little fairy dance. Richard John-Henry Archibald Smith – what a name. Call him Dick. Never mind. A man was a man was a man, in Rita’s book.

  *

  Joseph remembered him. There were certain ones, regulars, the faithful and devoted, and then there was Mr Wye, who seemed to be always around the house. His father joked that Mr Wye was in love with Mama – he joked, but his tone was a warning, and Joseph noticed that Mama was all business when Mr Wye
was there.

  His mother and father’s love was not to be disputed and yet could only be alluded to. Joseph knew his father was married to someone else and there was a child, a girl, not much older than he was. He knew because he listened, legs going dead in a cupboard – not because anyone told him. Mama tried to talk to him about it in her own way, which was to be nice and not say anything that hurt. Joseph knew his father didn’t love him. What was important was that Arthur loved Mama. That’s what it was all about.

  Joseph had seen men come and go from his window. He heard, from behind a door, men cry out in different ways. He remembered voices. There were certain ones he knew, even if he never put a face to the man. The way they carried up the stairs – the voice of success, the self-made millionaires, everlastingly bombastic, and the gnarled tones of the upper class. Some men cleared their throats before they spoke or even when they thought of speaking. Others repeated themselves – every time the same stories. There were one or two stutters, carefully disguised, and the odd lisp, and the curious effect of a cleft palate.

  The doorbell rang or there was a knock. Men in the front hall, Mama ushering them through to the drawing room, laughter like braying donkeys. Mama dashed here and there – she ran up to her bedroom, where the safe was, and back down again, having checked that the bathrooms were clean. She called out the drinks – gin and tonic for Mr Webster, whisky for Mr Roget.

  Joseph heard film scripts and speeches, some of them later to be famous. He heard the sound of feet running up and down the stairs the night the actor dropped dead on Annetta; he had watched from his window as they bundled the body into a car that sped off into the dark.

  He knew there was drunkenness, hearing how the noise grew as the night wore on. The bawdy jokes his mother told, her potty mouth, drawn in red. Her lipstick did abound on the faces of those who visited her house, although she was the picture of innocence if ever Arthur quizzed her, saying she was only being friendly; Arthur could be jealous. Mama pointed out that it was good for business, and when she took that line he didn’t argue with her.

  Joseph remembered there was music, of the kind that Rita called hoochy-koochy – Arthur liked ‘Tampico’ to his dying day. Sometimes there was dancing, when Annetta closed her eyes as if dreaming and laid her head on the shoulder of her partner.

  He heard them weep, all the ladies of the house. Even Rita. He heard her more than once, on her own in her room, her tears mixed up with words he couldn’t make out. Mostly she cried when she was drunk. She cried into her pillow and then she moaned as if someone else were in there with her when he knew she was alone.

  Joseph knew everything that had gone on. Of course he knew. It couldn’t be kept from him. He was always going to know. They were lucky to do so well, Mama said, later, when he was older and could understand. It seemed as if it would go on forever, the house as it was then, not the house as it was now, flaking paint, the floorboards spitting nails, the rugs full of holes – moths and stiletto heels and years of hard wear, heavy traffic in and out of the front door. Buckets everywhere, to catch the rain coming through the roof. The bath enamel had worn away and the taps dripped, forming stalactites of limescale. The front hall ceiling came down one day so that the floor joists overhead showed, a skeleton hung with shreds. Who would want it? Who else could ever live there?

  His thoughts carried him along on a bedevilling river that ran and ran and ran.

  *

  The man behind the bar called it a goblet. It was a goblet she was after. A goblet of sweet sherry, please, she said to the man, and that was gone before she knew it, so she had one more. A fellow came in who reminded her of Arthur Gillies. He looked around quickly, winked at Rita and left. It was the set of his shoulders that made her think of Arthur – built like a bull.

  She remembered how he let his eyes sink into her. She gazed back, unafraid, until he looked away. She used to stare him down – she loved to make Arthur blush. As far as she knew, he didn’t blush for anyone else, not even Sal.

  Arthur Gillies wanted Rita from the moment he laid eyes on her at the Colony Room, back when she was the coat-check girl. She tried to get off with him then but he put his tail between his legs and ran to Sal, who sat in rapt attention on a banquette, watching the band, up to her ears in silk and sables. When they met again in Sal’s drawing room, his eyes lit up. You.

  They were always preening at each other after that. He didn’t sky-point his great bill of a nose just for Sal; he did it for Rita as well. He took more care in his dress and tried not to eat so much. He looked after his teeth. He fussed with his hair to hide the bald spot. He caught Rita’s eye and smiled. He enquired, when they met, how she was, meaning how she felt about him. Was it still on? She smiled. It was on. He looked across a room full of important men to see if she were looking at him. Was she his? She was. She didn’t want anyone else. They had their own language; they had made their bond. They knew each other without speaking. For all of Sal’s talk of her sixth sense with men, she didn’t sense Arthur Gillies wandering off – but Rita did. She knew he dreamed of her in his bed. He loved her as well as loving Sal and sometimes he loved Rita more. There were whole years he loved her more.

  She waited. She thought he would come to her. She created opportunities to be with him: they met on the stairs, in corridors, the front hall, and Rita thought her heart would burst. She could hardly speak sometimes – she, Rita, speechless! He was the kind of powerful man who could change the temperature in a room, making everyone excited; and who spoiled things if he felt like it, if he were in a bad mood. She listened to every word said about Arthur and stored away the information, building a fuller picture of him in her head, loving him more and more. She learned when to expect him at the house, being, as he was, a creature of habit, and when he did finally arrive she always looked her best. Then she would take in his pupils’ dilation, the delight of seeing her there. Every time they met they renewed their bond; he happened to her all over again. It made her wild. There were times she thought she would die for wanting and not having Arthur Gillies.

  Sal was practical about the good looks and physical allure of the girls who worked for her. It was what the job called for, and Rita had proved herself a star. She bloomed with the luxuries her life afforded her, the easy hours, the soft carpeting that ran through the house and cushioned her joints, overstuffed furniture on which to drape herself into alluring shapes. The food was good, prepared by an expert cook, and just before dawn Rita would curl into a small parcel and replenish herself on the deepest mattress Harrods sold. Arthur saw how well she looked on living in his house and it pleased him.

  She felt his eyes on her all the time. When he could steal a moment, he drew up beside her, idled a while. She held her breath as they stood together, very close, looking at each other, doing nothing. Rita loved him. She had always loved him – loved him still. No other man was half as good. She could have kissed him. If only she had kissed him when she had the chance.

  Another sweet sherry, then. Who was she to refuse the offer of a drink bought for her? She smiled at the only other customer in the Dog and Duck, an ancient mariner, pure wreckage, wrapped up in a shabby coat and hat – despite the heat. Rita raised her glass and toasted him, but privately she drank to Arthur Gillies. He was in his grave and she would live forever. She’d live to be a hundred, at least, and get her letter from the Queen. That was something to hang on the wall, just the kind of thing to make Sal green with envy. If only she had lived to see.

  Rita remembered the look on Sal’s face when she announced that she would marry Pat McCarthy, who had wooed her quietly for six weeks before they booked in at the registry. They were to marry the following day and Rita was upstairs packing her case. A new dress from Peter Jones, a sheath of ivory shantung, hung in the wardrobe, and when Sal came in she admired it.

  It was then that Rita told her, having not breathed a word to anyone until that moment. Her heart had been true to Arthur Gillies for so long that she never cons
idered loving another. Besides, he could be terribly jealous. When she went upstairs on the arm of a punter, he always looked the other way and set his jaw, as if to bear it.

  How long had that dance of theirs gone on? Twenty years? Thirty? She wouldn’t have said it was a complete waste of her life, loving Arthur, who would never come to her, who did not intend to leave his wife or his mistress; who would not give up his kingdom, not for her. The old fantasy, where he carried her off in his arms to make a new life together somewhere – no, she wouldn’t wait another minute for Arthur Gillies! She didn’t have time to wait. Rita knew she had to get out fast if she stood any chance. Business at the house in the Crescent wasn’t what it once had been. They were down to a handful of loyal gentleman callers by then. They didn’t have the maids they used to, or the cook, and Joseph was all grown up. Even Arthur wasn’t around much, spending his time elsewhere, in other houses, where the younger women were. So when Sal said of Pat McCarthy that she didn’t think it was enough time to know someone properly, let alone marry him, Rita threw back at her, ‘How long do you plan to wait on Mr Gillies?’

  Sal stroked the wedding dress. She didn’t speak. Annetta was upstairs with someone, an old faithful, making an awful ruckus, and Joseph was out riding the buses. Sal said, ‘Arthur is already married.’

  Rita snorted. ‘Well. I know that. But I wouldn’t put up with it.’

  ‘Put up with it? Put up with what? I have the best of both worlds. Who wants to be a wife? Always nagging him about this or that. Not for me, thank you.’ But Rita knew Sal would have married Arthur if she could. Rita, too. She would have married Arthur Gillies at the drop of a hat, but he never asked her, either.

  ‘He hasn’t been here for three nights,’ Rita had said to Sal, and she was not sorry to say it. She’d heard that Arthur was in love with a French girl who worked in the Chelsea house. La Gorge, they called her. La Gorge had him under a spell. The younger girls, they did everything.

  La Gorge.

  ‘Business,’ Sal muttered. She looked haggard. Her eyes crinkled when she grimaced at her hands: jewelled fingers, minus a wedding band. Still, she lingered while Rita packed her case, not saying much, both of them praying for the doorbell to ring and burst the tension. It never rang. Then Annetta finished upstairs and the gentleman bade them a jolly farewell, for they were all friends, having known each other for many years. Joseph came back from riding the buses and they sat down to supper, which Rita had prepared, as usual. After supper they gathered in front of the television, where they spent most evenings, dressed up just in case. Sal listened for the door, for Arthur’s key in the lock or a knock that meant a punter was waiting. None came.