by Maggie Ford
Occasionally the place was visited by Mr James Lett, the old man getting on a bit now, and sometimes by the two sons, Geoffrey, who was the youngest, and Henry, who was a little younger than William, around twenty-one. Perhaps it was the age comparison that made him smile at William that first time, and perhaps he had liked William’s returning smile, for not long after that, William found himself praised for his diligent work and told he’d be made up to a commis. He’d been a commis for five months now and had begun looking to go up one step further, but it seemed no further promotion was forthcoming no matter how hard he worked. Being cheeky to the chef de cuisine wouldn’t help either.
Bending towards a diner and his lady in a gorgeous emerald evening dress with gems to match, Will deftly served the vegetables and reflected soberly on his attitude in the kitchen.
His thoughts drifted towards the pretty little waif to whom he had offered the half-eaten piece of bread.
Her eyes had been purest hazel edged with a darker shade to make them all the more startling. That was all he could remember of her – her eyes - and he hoped she would be back and that he would be there to confirm that that was the colour he had seen in that fraction of a second and that he was not just imagining it.
* * *
During the days that followed, he found himself waiting, hovering longer than he should when visiting the kitchen with his empty plates. He really had expected her to come back, as Mr Samson had predicted, maybe with a horde of gutter friends, but she didn’t. Others came, were ordered away with threats of police, but she never returned.
Perhaps it was her very absence, but the more William thought of her the prettier she seemed to grow in his eyes. Common sense told him he was fantasising – she was just another grubby little guttersnipe, probably, as people said, a scrounger looking for hand-outs without wanting to work in return. Yet she had said she would work, he remembered. And then his heart would swell towards the beautiful apparition his mind formed and he could not do his work as he should have.
Then, just over a week later, there she was. He happened to be in the kitchen. He saw Mr Samson notice her, raise his voice as it was ever raised without fail to his kitchen staff whether they did their work well or badly. And now he was making towards her with his ladle raised, still dripping soup.
“I warned you! Last time you was here I warned you. Come here once more, I said, and it’s the cop-shop for you.” It seemed the girl had been here again, then, in his absence.
Moving fast for a large and portly man, Mr Samson’s free hand caught one of her thin wrists before she could turn and run. “Morris, fetch the police. There’s always a copper on the comer of Jermyn Street. Quick about it, man!”
The young man flouring a tray of whitebait dropped the flour-shaker and scuttled past the straggling pair. The girl was making little high-pitched squeaks of panic, twisting the thin arm trapped in Chef’s grip, her lightly built body wriggling frantically, the shawl she wore falling from her shoulders to reveal a holey cardigan, old cream blouse and shabby skirt. One foot in its patched boot kicked out but Samson evaded it easily.
“Oh no you don’t, you vixen.” With that he dragged her bodily into the kitchen – and bodily meant just that, she all but horizontal on the tiled floor and being dragged further from any source of escape. It looked as though her arm might be pulled clean out of its socket.
William sprang to her aid before he could realise what he was doing.
“Leave her alone! She’s done no harm. We don’t need the police.”
He did not realise he had taken hold of Mr Samson’s hand in order to prise it from a grip so fierce on such a thin wrist that it really must have been painful for the victim. When he did realise what he was doing, he let go immediately and stood back. This could cost him his job. It would surely be reported.
“Chef. I’m sorry.”
Morris was already back, breathless. “I couldn’t find a policeman anywhere, Chef. I’m very sorry, sir.”
The girl, now quiet in his grip, was gazing upwards in the hope of being released. “Sir, I’m sorry. I won’t come here again. I promise. I am sorry.”
With apologies being repeated from all sides, the man looked from one speaker to the other. “Bugger me!” Samson breathed, his thick lips beginning to curl. “Being bloody apologised to from every direction. I like that.”
His broad grin revealing large discoloured teeth, he threw a glance at those who had paused in their work to watch the fracas, but instead of shouting at them to mind their own business and get on with their work, he challenged each in turn. “Dodds? Potter? Whitelaw? The rest of you? Do any of you want to add to this apologising lark – and make me a happy man?”
There came a dutifully hurried chorus of: “Sorry Chef, sorry.”
Samson broke into a sharp guffaw. “You should all be sacked, you lot.” In a suddenly good frame of mind, he let go of the girl’s wrist but caught her by the shoulder as she made to skitter gratefully away. “Now, you, you’ve leamt your lesson I hope. Don’t come back worrying us any more.”
This time William stepped in with more assurance. “Chef, I’m sure she isn’t a scrounger. I’m sure she’d work if you gave her a chance to. Can’t you set her to cleaning the floors under the sinks and such?”
Samson looked at his little captive. “This one? I don’t think so. She’s heard what you’ve said, but I bet my last brass farthing the moment I let go she’ll be off like a chased rabbit.” William looked at the girl, again struck by the appeal in those eyes. They were hazel, a remarkable hazel, with flecks of green in them. “Will you?” he asked her. “Will you be off? Or would you work here, scrubbing floors?”
To his surprise, for he wasn’t exactly expecting it, she nodded.
“I don’t mind what I do. There just isn’t any work for people like me. And all I want to do is support myself in the world, hold my head up.”
She stopped there. Why had he expected her to add that she had to support a sick mother, an unemployed father, half a dozen younger brothers and sisters? It was the stuff of the silent screen – if the one-reelers weren’t comedies, they were pathos like this.
“Do you just support yourself?” he found himself asking, and saw her nod. He would have loved to go into the question of why, but thought of duty and the fact that he had been out here too long; could be dragged over the coals when he got back into the restaurant by those at the table he was waiting upon as well as the somewhat jumped-up station head waiter, already seething with impatience.
He looked quickly, appealingly, at Mr Sampson who was still grinning his large-toothed grin, was still in his sudden but dangerously brief good mood and who now, to William’s joy, gave the girl’s shoulder a small shake.
“If I let go of you and say you can start with them tiles under the sinks, will you be away? If you do try to be away, you’ll find I’m quicker than you and you’ll be in my grip again and it will be the police station for you. Now then.” He let go, his hand hovering over her. She stood perfectly still. “Right,” he boomed, pointing to the fallen shawl. “Pick up your bits and come with me. I’ll speak for you, but you keep your mouth shut.”
Her champion, his over-long absence from his table preying weightily on his mind, hurried back with a small smile thrown at him by the girl to resume his duties and face the irritable frown of his superior.
* * *
The noise of pub drinkers punctured William Goodridge’s thoughts and dragged him back to the smell of beer, the warmth of the pub, and to the young man opposite him. For a moment he had to struggle to recall the name. Edwin – Edwin Lett, the young man who had voiced an uncertainty whether to sell his shares or not. The lad’s brown eyes were on him, wide with interest. He must have been reminiscing far more than he’d intended. But now he couldn’t recall quite what he had said and in what order.
“What was my father like, then?” Edwin was asking.
“Your father?” It was hard to focus his mind on the
present.
“Geoffrey. When he was a young man. And my uncle, when he was young. What were they like?”
Yes, when the two brothers were young. Young men about town with not a care in the world, unlike the poor perishers struggling with no work, no means of support, no thanks for what they’d done fighting for their country.
Not that he held any grudge against the more fortunate, the more privileged. They were what they were and many a wealthy man’s son had been slaughtered in the mud of no man’s land alongside those who now struggled for a hand-out.
He had liked the two Lett brothers from the first. Fine fellows. A little reckless, but no side to them for all that Henry Lett had returned from the front – his brother had been too young to go – to the luxury of good living. They had both made the most of it, restive young men that they were, eager to have their fill of all the new experience this new life offered – emancipated consenting young women, high living, responsibility thrown to the winds – and who could blame them?
Looking back it was almost natural to put oneself in their shoes, to know how they felt, to become one of them as they had been then.
Three
“A pretty girl is like a melody…” The song had embedded itself in his brain for three days now, like a splinter in the flesh refusing to be dislodged. “That haunts you night and day…”
All morning he’d been trying to pry it from his mind by thinking of something else to hum, but after a while, back it would come: “She will leave you and then come back again…”
Damn the thing! He and a group of friends had been singing it after leaving some night-club to go on to the Chelsea Arts Ball to see in the new year. It was 1920 now – an entirely new decade – the old clutter left behind with all the old sorrows of war and, so his girlfriends said, the restriction of corsets. He too was glad of that as he could fondle them more easily now. And there would be no more observing outdated rules of parents who for the most part were still stuck in the previous century, let alone the previous decade.
“A pretty girl is just like a pretty tune…” Damned silly song. The thing stuck in his head until it felt only decapitation would remove it. Defiantly, Henry hummed a snatch from The Gondoliers as he went down to lunch.
The gong in the entrance hall of Swift House having thrummed discreetly some five minutes ago, the house had fallen silent. After the glitter and noise of the Chelsea Arts Ball it felt even more lifeless than usual. Lingering in the past, it still lacked the grandeur and solemnity of a truly ancient and stately house. Swift House wasn’t old in the sense that those ancient heritages were, having been built only a hundred years ago. Its first owner and builder had apparently served in the Indian Army and, unable to break with the romance of it, had designed the house in colonial style, even to the wooden veranda running the length of the ground floor and the set-back windows of the upper floor.
Impressive, but not possessing the ordered formality of older houses, Swift House was a rambling warren of passages, even the main staircase curving off one of them instead of dominating the main entrance hall to command all eyes to its stately flight as guests entered.
As a child he had loved racing along that maze of corridors, to the consternation of the staff, who were all certain that one day one of them would be tripped up and whatever they were carrying topple all over the floor. Now he viewed the place with distaste. Cold, characterless, charmless was how he saw it, with nothing of an ancient country seat that could hold its own in any age; sadly dated in the face of today’s vibrant urgency. He felt ashamed to bring friends here whose own homes were mostly either full of three-hundred-year-old elegance or else starkly but satisfyingly modem with clean sophisticated lines and art deco simplicity.
Henry made his way down the stairs thinking again of New Year’s Eve. It had been such a marvellous night, finishing off the year just perfectly. In fact his whole year had been pretty good. His father’s business was thriving really well – contrary to the expected masses of unemployed following in the aftermath of the war, any who had employment had plenty of money to spend and they spent it innocently. He had come of age with lots of good times ahead of him, and so much more to look forward to: good times, great times, for people like him.
July had seen his twenty-first birthday; emancipation; and a huge party held in London at the Park Royal Hotel, a deal more fun than anything that could be held at his parents’ home which, spacious and accommodating though it was, was far too isolated out there among the Essex flatlands of Halstead Green. They hadn’t been keen on it being held in the heart of London. But twenty-one? They’d had to relent.
Of age at last to do as he pleased within reason, he’d spent the whole of September in Nice with a crowd of chaps and had fun with the girls there. It had struck him as strange: his last time in France had been with German shells whistling over his head, he ducking in terror as they burst with dull hollow explosions in the soft mud of once green fields, and offering prayers of gratitude at having survived each one. He had lived among clinging mud or choking dust depending on the time of year, rubbing shoulders with the dead and the wounded and the shell-shocked, and witnessing more blood than had been good for any twenty-year-old. To be whooping it up in Nice a year later with not a care in the world seemed odd indeed.
The Chelsea Arts Ball three days ago, again doing as he pleased. And what company! What sights! Girls half clothed! This being a new and enlightened age, freedom of spirit was in – in fact, the largest float there had held dozens of half-naked women, the statue it held totally naked and called the Spirit of Freedom. And dozens in fancy dress were as scantily clad as they could be: an endless parade of Roman ladies of the orgiastic sort; women of ancient Greece, Amazons, Red Indian and Stone Age maidens; Britannias and Boudiccas by the score, and of course the usual revealing art nouveau stuff, all the wearers with the same intent of baring thigh and as many other bits of flesh as they dared. The less adventurous, shielded behind medieval and Renaissance costumes or different shapes of Jacobean and Georgian crinolines, with a sprinkling of Queen Victorias and Elizabeths dotted about, had cursed their cumbersome choices and eyed the freedom of others with envy.
Well after midnight, with the party still going strong, they and their dashing heroes, growing more drunk by the minute, had clambered on to the precarious floats until they collapsed into the tight milling press of party-goers amid screams of panic, delight and sheer exuberance.
Henry had gone as Charles II, his partner Mabel Thomhurst-Hill as Nell Gwyn, her nipples on show for all to see – very dark, plum-coloured nipples they were too – because, she said, in those days women did show their nipples and she wanted to be authentic.
She had added a black beauty patch to one of her pushed-up breasts and perhaps it was the beauty spot that did it, as it was in Restoration days no doubt designed to do, but it had all tormented him so much he could hardly bear himself and they had done it in a welter of lust for each other behind a Chinese screen in some below-stage dressing-room they’d found. It had been his first really joyful experience other than those with a couple of indifferent prostitutes he’d had while on furlough in Paris in early 1918 in a desperate attempt to forget what he would go back to afterwards at the front. That didn’t count – this had. He’d imagined himself in love with Mabel as she squirmed and writhed and exclaimed, while he felt her bare legs wound around his waist, those full breasts of hers moving and pliable beneath his hands, his lips, the unexpected glorious warmth of her finally surrounding him.
Afterwards he had lost sight of Mabel in the tightly packed crowds and in the cold, barely grey light of New Year’s Day had taken another girl home instead, one dressed as Joan of Arc, complete with chains at her wrists and sackcloth-covered bosom, only her Bible having been lost in the earlier melee.
Whether it had been her concern for the loss of the Bible – she kept saying it was her mother’s and that she would get into such terrible trouble – or the chaste costume she was wea
ring – which was still in one piece, amazingly – he got nothing from her for his kindness in taking her home to her door. Still, he had been fulfilled by Mabel so he had nothing to be disappointed about. Henry hoped he would be able to see Mabel often. He had her address. He would look her up this afternoon after lunch.
Hurriedly he crossed the wide hall and entered the diningroom hoping he might not be the last to arrive. He was. Four pairs of eyes gazed at him from the long walnut dining-table as he entered – six, counting the parlour maid and Atkinson, their butler, though those two lowered their eyes quickly. As to the others, Geoffrey, nearly three years younger than he, looked amused, his sister Victoria disinterested, his father resigned, his mother… His mother was glaring at him, her eyes fiercely blue.
Smiling at them all and murmuring a perfunctory, “Sorry I’m a bit late,” he took the empty place opposite Geoffrey. His father allowed a small nod of his head, occupied with splitting open a fresh bread roll with his two thumbs. His mother said nothing, but her face spoke volumes, compelling him to further his excuse.
“Bit of a headache.” He heard Geoffrey titter. “Was having a lie-down, forgot the time.”
“Heard the gong, though?”
Henry looked directly at his father, still preoccupied with his bread roll, buttering it liberally with a small round-ended knife as he spoke. It was best not to acknowledge the remark. Lately his father seemed forever preoccupied, lacking the vitality he’d once had. He seemed suddenly to have grown old. Henry sat back as the parlour maid came to stand beside him with the soup tureen, and nodded to her silent request.
“Henry.” His mother broke the silence that had descended over the table, a silence that conveyed to him that he had been a subject of conversation prior to his making an appearance. “Isn’t it about time you started taking more of an interest in your father’s business? You are twenty-one now. You’ve had enough time frittering away your life by now.”
