‘I didn’t come here for a lecture,’ said Dolores, an astonishingly self-confident young thing for her age. ‘I thought you was going to introduce me to Ivor Novello, so I could tell him about my singing.’
Jezzie giggled (again). ‘Ivor Novello?’ she said, sneeringly. ‘Ivor pain in my rear end, more like.’
The rector looked hurt. ‘You underestimate my contacts in the world of what the Americans call show business. Though I have never met the delightful Mr Novello, I have friends who’ve had the pleasure of meeting him backstage. They say he is charming to strangers, polite to ladies and friendly to young persons starting out on the musical scene.’
Jezzie unfurled herself from the banquette and took herself off to the Ladies. We all watched her go. Her sizeable young rump, tightly encased in the crackling shiny material, had a distinct wiggle.
‘Charming,’ said the rector with the fond appreciation of an uncle, ‘though unfortunate to bear such a name, whatever the eccentricity of its genesis. Have you known her long?’
‘Couple of weeks,’ said Dolores. ‘We met at the Hippodrome, hanging round the stage door for Jack Buchanan. Bloody freezing it was, and when he came out he just whisked past us and got in a cab. Not as big as you’d have expected neither.’
‘Where does she live?’
‘Oh –’ she waved a vague hand – ‘here and there.’
‘You can be a little more precise,’ said the rector.
Dolores, or Dolly, regarded him steadily. ‘I dunno what you’re thinking, right this minute, Harold, but you’re not to start with her.’ She brazenly took out a cigarette case, extracted a Virginia and lit it. ‘All right? Just don’t start in on her, the minute my back’s turned.’
The rector looked around, with a faint whinny of disavowal. ‘My dear girl –’
‘And who’s this geezer, anyhow?’ demanded the young harpy. ‘What the hell does he want?’ She leaned forward, her dark eyes lit up with suspicion.
‘This is a gentleman from the press, who seeks information about my pastoral work.’
‘Oh great,’ said Dolores, rising to her feet. ‘Bloody reporter, that’s all I need. Informer, more like.’
‘There is no reason to fear –’
‘I’m going to see what’s happened to Jezzie,’ she said, and flung herself away from our table, leaving a hefty waft of Woolworths scent and brass’s armpit.
That left us together.
‘I’m afraid I’ve upset your young friends, Padre,’ I said, as airily as I could. ‘All I was after was a few facts about your crusading work. Perhaps I should leave you to it.’
He put his hand on my arm, a gentle and insinuating gesture. ‘Stand your ground, my boy,’ he said, opening his greatcoat and taking out a huge cigar from a pocket within. ‘They will be back. These young girls regard me as their only hope in this vale of sin. They cleave to me instinctively, as though to an oak in a torrent.’
He crinkled the cigar – it was huge, I couldn’t afford a cigar like that – then picked up Dolly’s box of Swan vestas and lit it. Clouds of expensive blue smoke briefly enveloped his head in a foggy halo. He appeared to devour the enormous tube, running it two inches inside his distended lips, then sucked at it with hungry kisses – mpuh! mpuh! mpuh! – until the tip glowed wide like an orange sun, and the smoke poured from his nose and mouth like some kind of sulphurous ectoplasm.
‘Perhaps I should go,’ I said. ‘They obviously don’t like newspaper men.’
He studied the end of his Havanan torpedo. ‘No, no, I have always been convinced of the power of the press to do good rather than mischief. Without the help of journalists, we shall never reveal to the world the troubles of the homeless, the young strays and runaways, the army of fallen women.’
‘Perhaps,’ I ventured, all innocent-like, ‘we should concentrate on the work of one man. Readers don’t like being told depressing tales about kids dying in poverty and girls on the game. But a story about One Man’s Quest to take care of, you know, tarts who don’t want to be …’
He looked at me coldly. ‘Nobody, my young friend, wishes to be a prostitute. Any girl who finds herself in such employment has not sought it volitionally. It is not a matter of choice. They are driven into lives of degeneracy by the circumscription of choice. Young girls in their natural state are the innocent lambs of Creation. Without worldly knowledge, they would have no will to sin.’
‘And how can you help them?’ I asked, puzzled.
He sucked on his cigar again. ‘By showing them a route back to righteousness. By befriending them, and revealing there is a finer life, a life of the mind and of the soul, in which they may find redemption, a career in the arts or the drama.’
At that moment, the girls came back. Such a transformation! Dolores was all smiles. Jezzie carried her hat, with its spotty veil, in her hand, her face now revealed in all its seventeen-year-old wonder: her fat cheeks aglow, her hair blonde and fine as a pedigree Saluki’s, her eyes shining. You’d think they’d just won some money, these lambs of Creation.
‘We made some new friends,’ said Dolores, ‘in the public bar. They was very nice, weren’t they, Jez?’
‘He was lovely,’ breathed the other one. ‘They’re taking us to a party in a while, to meet some people who are going to put on a show at the Palladium.’
‘What an amazing stroke of luck,’ I said. ‘Don’t tell me they happen to be looking for two young actresses of no previous experience to appear in the chorus?’
‘Yeah, as a matter of fact –’ Her young face hardened. ‘How’d you know that?’
‘Oh, journalist’s instinct.’
‘Don’t listen to him, Jez,’ said Dolores. ‘He’s taking the mick. They’re all the same, fucking news hounds.’
I wondered if the rector had heard the obscenity, or if he had learned to ignore the startling rudeness of his young charges.
He turned to Jezzie. ‘Where did you say you lived?’
‘Mmm?’ said Jezzie, still dreamy from her recent brush with the arrow of Eros. ‘Oh, Spitalfields. I got this horrible landlady, she cooks greasy breakfasts, and ticks you off for using too much toilet roll. And no pets and no men in your room after 10 p.m., and if you want to have a bath –’
‘But your address?’
‘Oh right, 16 Fournier Street. What, you going to write to me?’
The rector, with an operatic flourish, opened his big coat wide, and ferreted about in the lining. He buried his head under his armpit, like a swan having a kip. He appeared to search in one aperture, then another, a third – Jesus, how many pockets did he have in there?
– and pulled out a red ledger, the kind a fellow might keep a note of his expenses in, and gravely inscribed the name of young Jezzie’s fragrant domicile. Then he pressed a business card into the girl’s hand. ‘And here is my address. I gather you are but recently arrived in the metropolis. I hope you will ring me on this number, Vauxhall 9137, if you are assailed by feelings of loneliness or desperation or feel in need of conversation.’
Jezzie tucked the card away in her blouse. Dolores regarded her cigar-puffing benefactor with a look of warning.
‘Harold,’ she said, evenly, ‘we’ve got to talk.’
The rector snapped the ledger shut, returned it to its home in the gaberdine folds, glanced at Jezzie’s newly enlivened presence – her mountainous blonde hair, her even more mountainous bosom and smiled at his young protégée like a fond uncle at a family reunion.