a barely pubertal thirteen to a prematurely lined two-and-thirty. Their clothes shone with the kind of greasy patina that comes of much hand-wiping and no washing, and a rank odour of overhung lamb and citric perfume pervaded the room. The youngest girl was round-faced and ringletted, and looked up expectantly from her vantage point on one of the mattresses, like a little girl playing with her dog in a Pears soap advertisement; but she was dolled up in skirts and high-heeled shoes, quite unsuitably. The eldest, whom I had momentarily taken for the mother, sat at the table, still as a Maltese madonna, a shawl around her shoulders. Her dark eyes reflected the light from a single half-curtained window, but she would not look in my direction. The thin-faced woman who had opened the door stepped back into the shadows, gripping my five shillings in a fist. On the bed, a dark-haired girl in a dirty green blouse and a Negress in a white lace garment that accentuated her powerful amplitude, lay side by side against a bolster talking with an absorption from which no stranger’s arrival could distract them.
‘What’s he doing here?’ said a voice. ‘What you let him in for?’ and the sixth woman came up beside me. She had a pronounced nose, but a handsome enough face with a generous mouth, which opened to reveal surprisingly fine teeth. Her hair appeared red but may have been dyed with henna in the gypsy style.
‘He’s looking for Emily Murray,’ said the thin-faced one, ‘and then he said he was after satisfaction. So I thought –’ She glanced around the packed and fetid room, as if identifying several places where sexual activity might be conducted in comfort and privacy.
‘No, no, no!’ I said. The stupid girl. I repeated my quest and looked around the room with a sudden wild suspicion. Could one of these defeated slatterns be my dear Emily, whom I saved from the travails of sin at the hands of a procurer in Soho? Could Fate have so changed her features that I now did not recognise her?
‘… and so I am here,’ I concluded. ‘Can you help me?’ I drew closer. ‘Can it be that –’ I faltered – ‘that one of you ladies knows of her whereabouts?’
There was a silence apart from the chatterers on the bed (‘Well, ’e fuckin’ never dunit ter me,’ one was remarking to the other).
‘In fact,’ I asked, ‘is one of you called … Flo?’
‘That’s me,’ said the red-haired termagant. ‘What’s it to you? An’ what’s a protterjay when it’s at home?’
‘But this is marvellous,’ I cried. ‘I am getting somewhere at last. You are a singer in the local Palace of Varieties, I believe?’
‘You what? Girls, did you ’ear that?’ She gazed around the room, taking in her venal sisterhood in a glance. ‘I’m a well-known singer down the Palais according to his lordship here.’
There was raucous laughter. ‘Yeah,’ said one, ‘me too. An’ I always sing much better with me knickers off.’
‘Does your sister come to see you perform?’ I persisted. ‘emily, I mean?’
‘Sister? She’s not my sister. I ain’t got no sister. I know her, she lives here, on and off, but that’s it. She’s not, like, family. Someone’s been telling porky pies, mister.’
‘She lives here?’ I waved a hand that took in the squalor, the smell and the defeatedness that hung in the room like a miserable fog. I meant to imply, ‘How could anyone else fit in here?’ It came out as ‘How could anyone at all live here?’
‘She lives here when there’s room,’ said the thin woman from the shadows. ‘Been turning up and going again for three weeks. Stayed here last weekend when Katrin was off working, but she came back and Em had to go. Any more’n six, and the landlords complain the privy’ll break down and they threaten to boot us all out, even though the rent’s paid regular.’
‘But where would she have gone when there was no room for her?’ I cried.
The thin woman pursed her lips and blew a little puff of air between them. The henna-haired one, Flo, said, ‘Where’d you think? She went on the street. Probably met a fancy gent with one of them new Bentleys, who took her back to his place and fed her sherry and cake and tucked her up nice with a little story.’
The others laughed again. Flo seemed to be the humorist in this sorry sorority.
‘And if she met no fancy gent?’ I asked with some asperity. ‘What would have befallen her?’
The thin woman puffed her cheeks out again. ‘She’ll take her chances. We all take our chances.’ She raised her fist and jingled the five shillings within. ‘You going now? Some of us have to get on. If she calls, we’ll say you was asking for her.’
I could not wait to depart from that Calcuttan hole. ‘Please take this note and make sure she receives it,’ I said, writing my address and the Vauxhall telephone number. ‘It is vitally important that I speak with her soon. Here is five shillings more for you – and there will be a substantial cash reward if you bring us together. Do you understand?’
‘Oh, we understand, sir,’ laughed Flo, the non-chanteuse. ‘You can be sure you’ll ’ear from us the minute she comes back from Park Lane.’
I hurried away. The smell of decay, of month-worn bloomers and stale semen, of leaking gas and bletted fruit, of lies and tidal sewage, of traded flesh and cascading rubbish bins, of twining and scrambling and greed-frenzied rats, seemed to stick to me as if it would hang around me and cling to my coat for ever. I strode through Islington like a swimmer coming up from the depths, rising up gasping, lung-burstingly, towards the light.
Letter from Mrs Moyra Davidson Stiffkey Rectory 19 August 1930
My dear Oona,
Lovely to get your letter with all your exciting news. I am so glad Finbar’s violin lessons have paid off, it is a marvellous thing to be able to fill the house with music, I mean real music played on instruments, not just having the radio on all the time like Sheilagh and Nugent. I thought all this flapper nonsense was over and done with, but not at all. Here I am in the rectory study, trying to collect my poor thoughts and in the next room the wireless is playing Jack Hylton and his Orchestra and he’s singing ‘If I Had a Talking Picture of You’. Such nonsense. I get distracted by thinking, well, if I did have a talking picture of H, it’d be a step up from what I have now, which is a silent picture of him in the living room, a framed photograph of him sitting in a chair holding one of his big cigars and looking – well, rather more crafty than sacred, truth to tell, and sometimes when it gets too quiet around here, I wish I could make it talk to me. I’ve got used to not seeing him all week, I mean, literally all week except for Sundays. Sometimes I feel lucky if he turns up for the Sabbath itself. Sometimes it’s so late on Saturday night, I can’t be bothered waiting up for him, and I go off to bed and read lovely Charlotte Yonge instead. The first I know of the presence of the Lord is when he’s eating a boiled egg in his study on Sunday morning and trying to cobble a sermon together from a dozen scraps of paper and the Bible. And then God help me if I interrupt to tell him about the dead seagull in the chimney, or the liberties that the Du Dumaine children have been taking, using my writing paper for crayon likenesses. He’ll only shush me and wave a hand as if to say, ‘Not now, don’t bother me with this trivial nonsense.’
‘Harold,’ I say, ‘this is a home. I know it is a haven for the sick and misfortunate, a confessional for the sinful and the desperate, a place of succour and retreat for the spiritually confused. But it is first and foremost, Harold, a home, where your children live and I live, and Cook and Mrs Henryson and Enid and Polly and the dogs and, while I’m at it, Colonel Du Dumaine and his sons. It’s a home where people live whom you love or at least are supposed to love when you get five minutes to devote to them in between showing your love for your fellow man in every fiddly backstreet in London, and it’s no use your sitting there with your breakfast egg and your sermon text playing the great Shepherd with his Flock if you cannot even spend five minutes with your own domestic flock where they need you most, namely here in the home.’
He’s surprised by this unaccustomed outburst.