by Barbara Tate
The maid opened the door a few inches as I was beginning to turn away.
‘I wanted to see Mae,’ I told her. ‘But if she’s busy, I’ll come back some other time.’
‘No, she’s free. Come in,’ she said, opening the door wider and standing aside. ‘She’s in the bedroom. Just round that corner. Her door’s open.’
Bracing myself, I walked along the short corridor and, turning the corner, arrived at the open bedroom door.
Mae was lying on her stomach on the bed, her feet towards me. There was a grey poodle beside her. She was propped up on her elbows as she flicked through a magazine. Her flared miniskirt was dark against a light sweater. I noted with pleasure and enormous relief that her legs and her figure were as lovely as ever. For Mae, time had stood still.
‘Hey, you know what, Stella?’ she began as she swung round to face me. Her eyes widened with astonishment. ‘Babs!’ she called out at the top of her voice.
She sprang into a kneeling position on the bed and threw her arms wide open. I rushed to her and, with our arms wrapped round one another, we rolled over and over on the bed, laughing like a couple of lunatics. The poodle began yapping and the maid gazed in bewilderment. Eventually we pulled ourselves together and sat up.
‘If you knew where I was, why didn’t you come and see me before, you rotter?’ Mae said. ‘Hey! Put the kettle on, Stella, there’s a dear.’
I began explaining that I’d found her accidentally, on the way out of the Chinese shop. She interrupted me.
‘What is this ginseng? Why haven’t I ever heard of it? Show me.’
I showed her the bottle explaining that I hadn’t tried it before and that I’d heard about it on the radio.
‘Mind if I try one? I could do with a bit of vitality.’
Obviously still mad keen on anything that might pep her up, she tipped half a dozen into her hand and swallowed them.
‘Here,’ she said, rounding on me suddenly. ‘What happened to that bottle of Purple Hearts I gave you to look after? Have you still got them? I’ll have them back.’
I was thunderstruck. ‘But Mae, they’re over twenty-five years old now. I shouldn’t think they’d be safe to take. And anyway, they’re in my museum.’
‘Well, rake ’em out of your fucking museum; they’re hard to come by these days. You know it’d take an atom bomb to finish me off – and that’s only if it made a direct hit.’
We laughed. Marge called out from the next room to say the tea was ready. ‘Come on,’ Mae said. ‘Let’s have it in the sitting room; it’s more comfortable there.’
‘Sitting room, eh? My oh my, things have improved!’
‘That’s not all, my dear,’ she said in her ‘haughty’ voice. ‘I’ve got another floor above this that comes in very handy. Come and have a look.’
This upper part of her domain was in the eaves of the building, with sharply sloping ceilings and tiny windows. It was divided into three rooms and minimally furnished. Mae took me from room to room, showing me the assets of the place, like a proud suburban housewife.
In each of two of the rooms a naked man was trussed up on the floor, exhibiting that expression of moroseness and defiance that I remembered so well. Mae went and administered a few vigorous kicks and thumps while she was there, just to keep them happy for a bit longer – and to save her coming up the stairs again. In the third room a figure sat brooding by the window, like the Lady of Shallot.
‘Want a cup of tea with us, Trix?’ Mae asked.
The figure uncoiled itself and stood up. It was a tall, rather hefty man, wearing a black lace peignoir. He was heavily made up and wore an elaborately coiffured black wig and extremely high-heeled marabou-trimmed mules. His hands and arms were sheathed in elbow-length white doeskin gloves overlaid with numerous bangles and bracelets.
‘Don’t mind if I do,’ he replied in a very deep and gravelly cockney voice.
Nothing had changed at all. I glowed inwardly.
‘Does Vera still come?’ I asked.
‘No, love. He got married again and his new wife doesn’t mind him dressing up,’ said Mae, with the satisfaction of a teacher whose pupil has won through to university. ‘No need for me any more: he’s got it made, hasn’t he?’
We descended to the sitting room, which was very comfortably furnished with fitted carpets, easy chairs, a television set, stereo record player and a cocktail cabinet. From this room, a door opened into a nicely appointed kitchen. I congratulated Mae on how pleasant everything was.
‘Oh, it’s not so bad, I suppose,’ she agreed modestly. ‘But I like it nice, ’cos I live here most of the time now.’
‘No husbands or boyfriends?’
Mae went quiet for a moment. ‘Hey, Stella, if anyone comes, tell them to wait.’
In the brighter light in this room, I could now see lines and small sags that time had wrought on Mae’s face. Even so, she looked no more than forty. She gulped her tea and went on talking.
‘My last old man nearly finished me. That was husband number five. I’d learned my lesson by then and never did bung him all the gelt. We seemed okay together, until he forged my signature on a cheque and got everything out of the bank. He pinched pretty much all my jewellery – I had some nice things then – and then he scarpered. I’ve never done it before to anybody but I had him nicked for it.’ She looked contrite. ‘He was a Malt,’ she said. ‘I know you never liked them, but they’ve got something I rather go for.’
‘What happened to Tony?’ I asked.
‘Oh, it’s pitiful, love! You should see him. He works in a tailor’s shop in Shaftesbury Avenue. He’s got a tape measure round his neck and he’s got all fat and half bald. You said he’d get fat. I hear he does all his money in, gambling, just like he did all mine.’ She sighed wistfully. ‘Oh, but he was smashing once!’
‘I heard you’d married a grocer and gone straight,’ I said.
‘Oh, I did. I did.’ She burst into laughter and leaned forward to beat a tattoo on my knees in an excess of glee. ‘And what an error of bleeding judgement that was! I thought it was time I got myself a bit of security, and he wasn’t a bad bloke – English. I stuck it out for four years, serving old biddies with lumps of cheese and going to bed with a cup of cocoa at half past ten every night. But then I got so fed up, I thought I’d rather die in the poorhouse than go on like that.’ She paused and thought for a bit, ‘Makes you feel bad, doesn’t it, knowing some people live like that all their lives? Enough to drive you potty.’
Suddenly she jumped up, beaming.
‘Hey, I know someone who’d like to see you.’
She rushed to the telephone and dialled.
‘Fred? It’s Mae. Come on up here straight away. I’ve got a surprise for you.’ And she slammed the receiver down, grinning. ‘I’m dying to see his face when he sees you. He often talks about you.’
All this time, Trix had sat demurely sipping her tea, one gloved finger delicately extended. Now Marge joined us.
‘There’s three of ’em waiting now,’ she told Mae.
‘Well they’ll just have to go on waiting,’ said Mae. ‘I’m not seeing to them before Fred gets here.’
In addition to the poodle – who was, Mae said, a direct descendant of Mimi – there were two cats and a small kitten viciously attacking some imaginary monster under one of the chairs.
‘You still go in for animals quite a bit,’ I observed.
‘Oh Gawd, yes!’ said Marge, with a vehemence I fully appreciated. ‘These aren’t so bad, but it was murder when she had the monkey.’
‘I still reckon you left that window open on purpose,’ Mae said darkly.
‘As if I would, Mae,’ said Marge – rather unconvincingly, I thought.
Presently Fred arrived – walking slowly and painfully with the aid of two sticks – and there was another joyful, poignant reunion. His old back injury had aged him but his expression was just as kind, his manner just as gentle and he was clearly still very much in love
with Mae.
‘Good heavens!’ he kept repeating, grinning at me from ear to ear, ‘Good heavens!’
I almost felt like weeping at finding myself back in this environment and amongst the people responsible for so many memories. I was instantly at ease in this place where the restraints, falsities and values of ‘sophisticated’ civilisation had no real meaning. Here, there was true humanity and uncritical understanding. Where else, I thought, could one find so many unmasked examples of the basic sadness and pathos – the reality – of humanity? Where else could one find such an odd assortment of characters: the two men upstairs, roped and locked in their fantasy worlds; this tall, gruff cockney, quietly contented in his lace and wig; the crippled old man with his steadfast but hopeless devotion; me, spending my life trying to achieve in paint that which I knew to be unachievable; and above all, the great prostitute, growing old with the same splendour with which the planet grows old?
Thirty-Eight
On that day, Monday, 14 November 1977, Mae was fifty-nine, still glamorous and still working.
In the early hours of 14 December, I made the final corrections to this manuscript and parcelled it up ready for handing over to a typist. In those same pre-dawn hours, a fire broke out at Mae’s working flat in Rupert Street, Soho, and she perished in the blaze. The cosy pink room where she and I had shared our happy reunion had become a raging inferno, and her body was charred almost beyond recognition.
I will not dwell upon the horror I felt that Mae should have suffered this terrible form of death. I was incredulous and shocked that it should have occurred on that day of all days: the day I had so jubilantly completed my story. Mixed with these emotions was a conviction that Mae, with her fantastic aptitude for self-preservation, could not have died in that particular way – at least not by accident.
The following day I heard that her body had been found huddled close to the door of her flat. The door was mortise-locked and there was no key in it. It looked suspiciously as though she had been locked in.
The police called in her maid for questioning. She told them that Mae took sleeping pills every night, and that when she left her, she was usually in bed, drowsing off. It was at Mae’s own request that the maid always locked up on leaving and always slipped the key back under the door.
My suspicions grew. There were so many things that didn’t add up. Just before Christmas, impatient for answers, I went back to Soho. Beneath the early darkness of the winter sky, I found Rupert Street – age-old home of fruit and vegetable stalls – doing a roaring trade in tangerines, nuts and Christmas trees, as eager shoppers prepared for the big feast of the year. But there, rising out of reach of the festive brightness around it, was the smoke-blackened building. Its window mouldings were like broken sticks of charcoal and the protective sheets of black plastic behind them were snapping and glittering in the icy breeze. It was a sight too stark, too harshly emphatic of the event, and, sickened, I turned away.
I wandered round the market and spoke to several of the street vendors. They had all been fond of Mae and all had different ideas as to what might have happened. There were several, of course, who advanced the ‘smoking in bed’ theory. One suspected that Mae had taken an overdose and then set fire to the place deliberately. Another told me they’d caught the man who did it – a jailbird, just out of prison. The most terrible information was from a man who’d seen Mae’s body brought out wrapped in plastic.
‘It was so small,’ he said. ‘You’d never have thought it was her inside that tiny bundle.’
All the people who knew Mae more intimately and could have answered some of my questions were out of town. Whilst I was casting around for what to do next, Christmas and a ferocious attack of influenza intervened. Once back on my feet, I called at Vine Street police station. They wouldn’t answer any of my questions specifically, claiming that it might cause embarrassment to Mae’s relatives.
‘Just tell me this,’ I said. ‘Why, if the key had been pushed back under the door, couldn’t Mae find it?’
‘Probably got pushed under the lino instead,’ the policeman said. He recommended I make any other enquiries at Westminster Coroner’s Court, where the inquest had been held. They told me to send a written request to consult the Notes of Evidence. I did so, but the coroner refused my request on the grounds that the inquest had been fully reported in the Westminster and Pimlico News.
The ‘full reportage’ transpired to consist of a small panel at the foot of the back page headed ‘Smoking In Bed Caused Death – Inquest Theory’. The column ended with: ‘Death was from asphyxia due to inhalation of fire fumes.’
There was nothing to arouse any suspicions and nothing to allay mine. There was nothing to tell me why she had been found on the floor and not in bed, and no mention of that mysterious key. Nobody had asked why she had not hurried up to the safety of the roof, where she could have escaped to a neighbouring building, as she had always said she would if there was a fire.
Mae’s funeral had taken place whilst I was ill. It didn’t seem right that the woman who was once known as ‘the Queen of Soho’ should have had a council burial, but I couldn’t see who else would have come forward to pay for it. After several enquiries, I was able to contact the undertaker, who told me that Mae had been cremated and that a friend had paid the expenses.
About then, I was heartened to find that several people who had known Mae fairly well were in town again. At last the story of the final few months of Mae’s life began to unfold; it was not a happy one.
First I learned that the ‘friend’ who’d paid the undertaker was Mae’s landlord. She’d left him all her money and possessions on condition that he arranged and paid for her funeral. She had been cremated as a Catholic.
‘But she wasn’t a Catholic,’ I said.
‘No, but her landlord was,’ my informant answered drily. ‘I don’t suppose there was much in it for him, though – not after that other bastard had been at her.’
I got to hear more about this ‘other bastard’ from various sources. The most complete account was given by an elderly lady who had known Mae for almost as long as I had. Three months before her death, Mae had fallen in love with what was destined to be her last Maltese ponce, and he was the worst of the lot. Lal was in his thirties, had done time for manslaughter and had been out of prison for about two years when Mae met him. He had casually added her to his string of three other girls. She was not the big earner she had once been, mainly because she hadn’t the heart to increase the fees of her old regulars. She did not know she was the least of Lal’s considerations, and she doted on him.
‘Before he came along,’ the old lady told me, ‘I’d made her open a bank account and she’d managed to salt away over seven thousand pounds. She wasn’t getting any younger, whatever good looks she had. God knows if there’s any of that money left. I heard Lal was making her sign cheques all the time she was under sedation in hospital, after her overdose . . . You heard about her overdose, didn’t you?’
‘No, I didn’t,’ I answered.
‘She found out he was running these other girls and there was a mother of a row. When she calmed down, she said she was going to have a sleep. Well, she just went up to her bedroom and swallowed about sixty Tuinal tablets.
‘Her maid felt there was something strange about the way she was sleeping. She found the empty pill bottle and phoned for an ambulance. Thank God she did, because they had to perform an emergency tracheotomy on the way to the hospital, when she stopped breathing.
‘I didn’t visit her after that. But Lal made her start work again the very day she came out of hospital. I couldn’t bear to see what was happening to her. She looked awful.
‘He never stayed more than five minutes with her, and that was only when he called for the takings. She even got over him having other girls and just accepted them; she was daft about him. When she asked him why he didn’t seem to fancy her any more, he said he couldn’t – because of the tracheotomy hole in her n
eck. She went berserk, and threw him out like she should have done when she first met him.’
The woman told me that only hours before she died, Mae’s private little flat in Kentish Town had been ransacked. I also heard that sometime during the night of her death, screams and thumping were heard coming from the Rupert Street flat – the police were not told of this – and three days after her death, Lal was trying to sell pieces of her jewellery in the Venus Rooms.
Then, after a great deal of effort, I managed to track down Mae’s last maid, Stella. I had liked Stella on sight. She was an affable person, but was now haunted by the horror of Mae’s death and the subsequent ordeal of having to identify the body. She was still having nightmares. It was some comfort to know that at least Mae had had a pleasant and sympathetic maid at the end. Stella and I sat for several hours in The White Horse in Rupert Street, reminiscing about her.
Stella told me that the flat had continued to abound in trussed-up males, and transvestites had been on a fast increase.
‘She liked bending straight men, you know,’ she said. ‘It was her hobby. We’d get a perfectly normal bloke, and before you knew it, she’d have talked him into a bra and briefs and he’d be hooked.’
Fred and many of the old clients had still visited, and most amazing of all, so had the chastity slave, Daisy, who must have been well into his seventies. A couple of weeks before Mae died, Stella had heard Daisy mutter from his agony-racked corner, ‘But I don’t know what I’m supposed to be. I still don’t know what I’m supposed to be!’
For the last few months, Mae had apparently been giving herself daily hormone injections. Stella couldn’t bear to jab the needle in, so Mae did it herself, but Stella had to press the plunger because, with the needle in her bottom, Mae couldn’t reach it.
‘She really couldn’t bear the thought of getting old, could she?’ Stella said. ‘I often think that perhaps I should just have let her go on sleeping when she took that overdose. ’
Mae had continued to gamble, right up to the time she fell in love with Lal. One evening, she had been told that the management of her favourite casino had decided that in view of her profession, her patronage was no longer welcome. With her chin thrust proudly in the air in a queenly manner, she had sailed across the road and into the gambling club opposite.