so passive and round-shouldered like some professional mute. Mr Forsyth is your new benefactor. He will be your friend and employer. He can furnish you with a livelihood which will, with the Lord’s help, keep your family solvent and your poor mother able to furnish your table with meat and greens until Christmas. And if – mind me now – if you prove to be a good and biddable boy, and do as you are told, and fetch messages to and from the turf accountants, your work will stretch well into the new year.’
Gerald stood blinking pathetically, as if longing to get away. Who could blame him? He was a child still, as uninterested in the prospect of work as a pit pony being apprised of a favourable pension scheme.
‘I gotta –’ he ventured.
‘I want you now,’ said the rector, turning his remarkable eyes upon the raggedy kid’s, ‘to shake Mr Forsyth’s hand and promise to come to his office on Monday in your best jacket and shorts, and conduct yourself like the admirable young man I take you to be.’ He smiled at the spotty boy. ‘Remember St John’s Gospel. “He that followeth me shall not walk in darkness.” You have followed me this far. Mr Forsyth will guide your steps henceforth.’
The boy nodded. The rector touched the boy’s pustular cheek softly, like a duchess fingering an ermine tippet.
‘I gotta go,’ said the boy unhappily. ‘Gotta be in the King’s Arms.’ And he was gone.
Mr Forsyth – revealed, for all his grave demeanour, to be only a common bookie – swallowed some beer and, avoiding my gaze, addressed the clergyman.
‘I’ll do my best, of course, Harold. But I cannot …’ He sighed. ‘I cannot guarantee he won’t disappear out the door on day three like the last delinquents you sent me.’ He swigged more pale ale. ‘You cannot keep passing these runaways on to me, to transform into citizens. I am a businessman –’
‘A man of honour,’ said the rector, ‘a man of moral rectitude, whose indulgent interventions in the lives of these unfortunates have, as I’ve said many times –’
‘Harold, there is no need for this –’
‘Let me finish. Whose kindly impulses –’
‘Harold, really –’
‘– not only do you credit in the public arena, but rack up untold credits in the balance sheet of Heaven. I speak to you in the language of the businessman, but my admiration is that of a minister of a higher power.’
‘Ahem,’ I said. I’d been standing witnessing these interchanges like a gooseberry.
‘My dear fellow,’ said the rector, ‘I’d forgotten you were there. Forgive me. There were urgent matters at hand.’
‘You mean finding news runners jobs as bookies’ runners?’ I said, perhaps unkindly.
He regarded me coldly. ‘You evidently know nothing of my work. Yet you said you were acquainted with it. Explain yourself.’
‘I’m a news reporter on the Standard. I’m doing an article about poverty in London, how much it’s worsened in the last couple of years, who’s doing anything about it, private individuals, I mean. I want to ask about your experiences.’
He seemed hesitant.
‘Sorry about just now,’ I went on. ‘I got a bit of a short fuse where these newspaper kids are concerned. I hope you didn’t –’
‘Have you indeed? In that case, my dear fellow, we shall get on very well.’
Giving a rather curt wave to the grumpy sod from the bookie’s, he indicated I should get out notebook and pen. But just at that moment, the pub door opened and these two young dames strode in.
Very dramatic they were, one tall, one short, both dead swishy in their long rustling skirts, tight bodices and fancy hats. You’d have thought they’d have come straight from the Windmill Theatre, though whether part of the audience or part of the stage ensemble, it was hard to judge. Modern girls, you see, the kind we write about in the ‘Trends’ pages – a little shocking, a little too damn pleased with themselves. They were no strangers to the Coal House.
‘Ah, Dolly,’ said the vicar, ‘I was beginning to worry.’ He seized the hand of the smaller one – the one with the huge brown eyes under the rakishly tilted cloche hat – and kissed her on the cheek.
The eyes of the pub followed him. He was short, as I’ve said, and his hair was snow white and he had terrible rabbity teeth, but here he was talking to a brace of posh young flappers like they were at a cocktail party in Henley.
‘And this is …?’ he says, indicating her friend, a plump piece of work in a French hat with a torn veil covered in spots, possibly to match her complexion.
‘This, Harold, is Jezzie,’ says the bird in the cloche. ‘She started out as Jessie, changed it to Eleanora, then Zuleika, then Maudie for a while, then some horrible swell called her Jezebel in a pub one night, and made her cry, so we told her, Use it, darling, don’t let him put one over on you, and she’s been Jezzie ever since.’ She paused and looked around the snug. ‘Flip me, what’s a girl got to do to get a drink around ’ere?’
The reverend ignored her. He was too busy gazing at Jezebel (well named, what with her crimson petticoat peeping out from under her long crackling skirt) and trying to see the face through the spotty veil.
‘You have the look,’ he said, or rather breathed in her ear, or would’ve done if she hadn’t stood a good six inches taller than him, ‘of Miss Greta Garbo. You must surely have seen Flesh and the Devil?’
Jezzie regarded him with a mild stare, the way girls do when they can’t believe you’re taking liberties exactly ten seconds after meeting them.
‘What, Greta Garbo? Me?’ she said and went off into a spasm of titters.
I took the only initiative I could, and said, ‘Would you ladies care for a drink?’
Why yes, they’d love a drink, though they’d have been better off at night class in needlework than hanging round in the Strand. They both fancied Brandy Alexanders.
I went to the bar for the fourth time that night. Benny tried to stick around and ingratiate himself with the dames, but he didn’t have the lingo to handle two young poules de luxe. They could probably sniff him as an off-limits married man right from the word go.
‘I’m going home,’ he said. ‘You got your hands full here.’
‘See you next week, Ben. Give Clare one for me, all right?’
In the snug, the girls sat together on the cracked-leather divan, leaning together in a sisterly fashion, sometimes swaying a bit to right and left as if in a chorus line. The rector leaned forward a lot, his long face inches away from the girls’ cheeks, turning his shining eyes first to Dolores, then to Jezzie. He did 90 per cent of the talking. For minutes they smiled vacantly, like little girls listening to an elderly grandpa grinding on about the war, hoping that they might get a chocolate biscuit. Reckoning I’d bought myself an introduction, I took the stool beside him, and listened in.
‘… and Mrs Lake will, I’m afraid, no longer countenance your irregular hours and gentlemen callers, Dolores,’ he was saying. ‘I spoke with her on Tuesday. She has developed a singular aversion, I’m afraid, to your Maltese gentlemen friends, whom she describes, with a singular lack of racial accuracy, as Hottentots.’ His face essayed a brief, high-table smile. ‘She does not want, she says, “them swarthy chancers” dropping in and out of her establishment at all hours. So we will have to find you some new haven. I have asked about your secretarial studies at Mrs Moody’s and I fear – no, do not interrupt – you have failed to honour your commitment. I hear your morning session last week saw Mrs Moody cooling her heels for an hour with no sign of your –’
‘I can’t go studying squiggles in the middle of the bloody night,’ said Dolores, grumpily.
‘Nine