The Walworth Beauty

by Michèle Roberts

  Toby says: sorry. Lots on my mind.

  They have to shovel their words at each other under the hullabaloo of the drinkers, the music. Madeleine won’t bother coming here again: a place for young City workers in thrusting groups, bellowing, letting off steam after their long day cooped up inside.

  Living in the City, Madeleine sees few people of her own age. From Lombard Street to Ludgate Hill, from Stew Lane to Paternoster Row, she can roam without spotting anyone whose eyes crease up in deep wrinkles when they smile. Few people smile in the City, anyway. When she flings on her old coat and dashes out for her morning paper she bumps into commuters banging down from Cheapside with clenched faces, briefcase in one hand, little brown carrier bag of café takeaway in the other. Bunched up at the lights, jostling like horses at the gate. Racing to get to work on time.

  Toby’s shaved head shows a faint downiness. Is he letting his hair grow back? His wide-set blue eyes, his unlined face and full lips, make him look younger than he is. Fiftyish. A man in his prime. Madeleine turned sixty last birthday, but her prime still feels some way ahead. To do with wisdom; finally getting the hang of things. How will she recognise that blessed state when it arrives? If only it would come like a burglar: in a significant costume.

  Toby says: it’s how people feel inside that matters. Not their age or their hair colour!

  Madeleine crosses her fishnetted legs and regards her foot in its black suede ballerina pump. Petals of pink blossom clot the shoe’s rain-darkened toe; grains of grit.

  She says: yes and no. Depends on whether you’re looking for a job or not, doesn’t it?

  Inside herself she feels only thirty-odd. She still dances at parties, runs for the bus, flirts, would welcome another lover if one turned up. However, she has certainly reached the age of being ignored in City pubs: that besuited youth over there tried to muscle ahead of her at the bar just now, had to be nudged aside.

  Sharp and smart, with gelled locks, he resembles the official from Human Resources with whom she negotiated her compulsory redundancy. Forcibly retired, at the end of last term, by the college, when they cut most of the humanities courses, including the literature she taught, Madeleine no longer gets up early twice a week, as she’s done for twenty years, to walk towards Liverpool Street, and so she misses the cry of the newspaper-seller, that man with tight grey curls, as she rounds the corner at London Wall: hello, darling! Plucking up folded papers from the tall stack and slinging them right and left, fielding coins, he sings out quick snatches of jokes. One morning when she dawdles, and business is slack, he tells her about growing up in Bethnal Green. No bathroom. Coal-shed and lav out in the back yard. You know Bethnal Green? Full of yuppies now. Council gave us the right to buy, then we sold it. Should have hung on to it and made my fortune.

  Indeed she knows Bethnal Green. To visit Toby in his new-build canalside flat in Mile End she takes the number 8 bus eastwards from Threadneedle Street, sits eavesdropping as it chugs towards Whitechapel and the sights prod older passengers’ memories and get them chatting. Their past springs out from every Victorian-Byzantine building, stucco-decorated pub with acanthus-laden capitals, every scrap of blue tessellated pavement under the porches of former dress-shops; it endures in the arched entrances to warehouses, workshop courtyards. The newspaper-seller at London Wall looks sixty-odd. Perhaps, when he retires, no one will take over his stall. Only old people read newspapers. What does ‘old’ mean? Anyone born fifteen years earlier than Madeleine.

  Toby says: you’re not listening! He picks up his empty beer glass: my round. You want the same again?

  Madeleine says: drinking’s made me hungry. I need to eat.

  Cold air outside the pub needles her face. Blue-grey evening thickens in the doorways opposite. Arm in arm they descend Bow Lane, halt at the crossroads at the approach to Southwark Bridge, where traffic seethes along the concrete pipe of Upper Thames Street. The gathering darkness can’t soften these bleak angles and soulless forecourts, this lack of greenery, this impersonality. The ugliest street in London, surely.

  Toby recites: O City City, I can sometimes hear/ Beside a public bar in Upper Thames Street,/ The pleasant whining of a mandoline/ And a clatter and a chatter from within.

  He looks at her. Did I get that right? Madeleine hesitates. She says: no, sorry, I’m sure Eliot said Lower Thames Street.

  Oh, Mrs Teacher, he says, pinching her fingers. She pinches him back: come off it. Literature’s my life’s job.

  Was. Was. The pedestrian light turns red. They pause on the pavement. Four lanes choke solid with halted, snorting cars. The wind whistles between the high blocks, blowing petrol fumes and sour dust in their faces.

  On the far side of the street, facing them, Southwark Bridge arches up, close-pressed between concrete and stone buildings. It leaps away towards south London, into grey sky. They turn westwards, pass the Vintners’ Hall, enter a bleak lay-by.

  Gold lettering on a black plaque distinguishes Queen’s Wharf, a red-brick apartment building. To its right, Stew Lane cuts south between lofty warehouses, lets you catch sight, at its end, of a deep slice of sky, and, below it, a patch of rippling waves held between the tall façades to left and right.

  The Thames laps against the parapet dividing water from cobbled stone. As night falls, the river sinks back, merges into greyness, melts from view. Only if you walk to the far end of Stew Lane do you find it again. You lean your elbows on top of the wall, stare into mist, the reflections of opal-coloured lights.

  Once, alone here at dusk, almost dissolved into the water, the gull-filled air, Madeleine heard a hiss of laughter, the rattle of wheels over cobbles, felt a damp finger on the back of her neck. When she whipped round, the alley was empty.

  Toby scoffed at her tale, recounted to him over the phone next day. You wanted to experience something, and so you imagined it. What’s so special about Stew Lane? Stew means brothel, I know that much.

  Madeleine said: it’s where men used to embark from in Shakespeare’s time, to go and visit the stews in Southwark. Brothels were banned in the City in those days, so men wanting to buy sex had to cross the river. It’s mentioned in the history of the City I’ve been reading.

  Toby said: there you are, then.

  Madeleine said: a man I got talking to on the bus the other day told me that the lives of people in the past may coexist with ours, invisibly, behind a kind of looking-glass. Sometimes we can see through it, glimpse each other. He thought as well that perhaps we’re avatars, sent forth by those people.

  Toby hmmed. Let’s meet up soon, catch a film.

  A plate-glass wall, in shadow, makes a dark mirror that reflects their approach to Queen’s Wharf. So who would she and Toby have been, say, a hundred and fifty years back? Two porters meeting a barge, unloading crates of tea, hauling their load on a handcart up the muddy lane from the river? The tea warehouse still stands nearby, turned into offices and flats. Or perhaps Toby would have worked as a porter and Madeleine as a prostitute, chancing her luck, importuning him. What was the punishment in those days for soliciting? She doesn’t know.

  A surveillance camera dangles above the heavy, metal-framed glass door that opens into the foyer of Queen’s Wharf. Inside, a second surveillance camera swivels towards the lifts. They share the ride up with a couple of burly men in banker’s uniform of striped shirt and navy suit, who tread across the foyer just as the lift door begins to close. They stride in, bark hello, then take up position well back, clasp their gilt-cornered briefcases, study their toecaps. Toby gives them a quizzical glance, touches Madeleine’s arm. Shall we eat on the roof? It’s not too cold, is it?

  The two bankers frown. Madeleine says: oh, no, we’re not allowed up there. It’s out of bounds. We’ve no right as tenants to use it.

  Toby shrugs. They reach the third floor, halt. The bankers exit the lift. Madeleine and Toby whoosh on upwards.

  Sorry about that, Madeleine says: it’s just that I don’t want anyone to know I sneak up there. I
should have told you before. I’d be in big trouble if I got found out.

  The broad, flat roof space, edged by low iron railings, looks out over the water. The Globe Theatre and Tate Modern rear opposite. The brown-grey-green river thrashes along below. Madeleine comes here at dusk, to watch police boats dart by, tourist-laden pleasure boats plough past, occasional ferries ply up and down. On the left trains grind, slither and squeak into Cannon Street. On the right, the Millennium Bridge sways out like gossamer.

  She considers. It wasn’t too cold last Saturday. I was up there with some friends, we had a bit of a party.

  Toby says: why didn’t you invite me?

  She says: you’ve forgotten. You were busy. Dinner with Sid’s parents you said.

  The lift jolts and rattles, opening and shutting its doors on empty landings. Toby grimaces. They got out all their photograph albums, showed me every picture they’d ever taken of Sid as a boy. They insisted on giving me some to take home. I tried to explain to them, I’m not interested in turning my flat into a shrine.

  What did you do with the pictures? Madeleine asks.

  Toby says: I put them in a drawer. I look at them sometimes.

  On the sixth floor they push through heavy swing doors, emerge into a corridor wallpapered in pale blue. Madeleine’s studio flat, with its close-up view of a red-brick wall, is adjacent to the utility room, the lift foyer, and she enjoys hearing the long hush-rush of the lift coming up the shaft, the soft whump as it lands, the clunk of the metal door sliding open then closing again. During her sleepless nights after her divorce, and again after the enforced redundancy, the lifts have kept her company, rising and falling like musical notes.

  They edge into her narrow entrance hall. Off it open a tiny windowless bathroom, a galley kitchen, a single cramped room for living, working, partying, sleeping. When she moved in, ten years previously, after parting from William, she painted it green. The peapod; and she the newly single pea. She grows herbs and anemones in pots on her desk, and roses and clematis in troughs ranked on the little stepladder in front of the window. Already, in only April, the climbers reach to the ceiling and twine to the light fitting and she has to cut them back.

  Toby perches on the wooden chair near the wall of bookshelves, starts to turn over the heap of cloth-bound hardbacks lying nearby on the carpet. Frayed silk ribbon bookmarks. Bruised spines stamped with gold letters. Madeleine goes into the kitchen, opens a bottle of Medoc, pours them each a glass, carries Toby’s through to him.

  She stirs the pile of books with the toe of her shoe. I got them in the charity shop in Leather Lane the other day. A job lot. I wanted to give them a good home. I couldn’t bear the thought of their being pulped if they remained unsold. Which one’s that?

  Toby holds up a blue volume: Mayhew.

  He reads aloud from the title page: London Labour and the London Poor, by Henry Mayhew. Volume Four: Those That Will Not Work.

  He looks up at her. Victorian sociology? Bit off your usual track, isn’t it? I thought you mainly read fiction and poetry.

  She says: I haven’t read Mayhew since I was a student. It’s interesting finding out what I think of him now. I like re-discovering writers.

  Arriving home with her sack of books, she’d opened Mayhew and found she had bought an odd volume of a mid-twentieth-century edition of his work, complete with introduction and explanatory footnotes. She’d plunged into Mayhew’s categorisation of the London poor. Two strictly divided groups. On the one hand: the respectable hordes who sold fish and cabbages and flowers, drove buses, emptied cesspits, made glass eyes for dolls, groomed horses, and so on. On the other: the denizens of the London underworld, criminal characters carefully sorted according to types of villainy practised: house thieves, pickpockets, swindlers, prostitutes, cardsharps, kidnappers.

  She says to Toby: I’d forgotten how he classifies everybody! Prostitutes, for example.

  She holds up her fingers and ticks them off in a parody of herself at a blackboard: three classes. One: women who are privately kept by individual men of independent means. Two: women who live in their own lodgings and work the streets. Three: women who live and work in brothels.

  Toby tastes his wine. I don’t suppose he even mentioned male prostitutes, did he?

  Madeleine wanders back to the kitchen. She shreds grey-green sage, washes silky lettuce leaves, pats them dry on a cloth. She mixes vinaigrette and spoons it into the bottom of the big bowl, crosses the salad servers and puts them in, loosely piles the leaves on top. Her mother’s trick, to keep the salad from getting soggy. You toss it at the last minute. Would Mayhew have classified types of female salad-tossers? Probably. Take that other fervent Victorian classifier, Dewey, who devised the Dewey Decimal System for public libraries. Dewey put women in section seven, sociology, alongside lunatics and gypsies. The bureaucrat in Human Resources treated her as though she were a lunatic: pitying glances; measured, modulated tones. Now he’s put her out of a job. To wander, like a gypsy. A tosser.

  The smoky stink of garlic about to burn catches her back. Pay attention! She fishes the tiny dark-gold chips out of the pan, throws in the sage, swigs her red wine. Concentrate: you’re making supper for Toby, that excellent cook. Chop walnuts and dry-fry them. Cube Gorgonzola. Boil water. Measure out fusilli.

  Toby leans in the doorway. He strokes a hand over his skull. You noticed I’ve started growing my hair again? What d’you reckon? Madeleine says: good idea. Sid liked your curls, didn’t he? She loads a tray with food, crockery, cutlery, fills a basket with bottles of wine, candles in jars, matches, a copy of The Waste Land. Toby puts the basket over one arm, picks up the tray: let’s go.

  She follows him out, carrying cushions and blankets, a couple of folding canvas chairs, a folding card table.

  At the southern end of the corridor on the floor above they confront a large hatch. Toby stands in front of the surveillance camera set to one side of it while Madeleine produces a credit card, slips the lock. They climb through. They step from a brightly lit indoors into blowy blackness. They go slowly into this darkness pierced by diamond lights. Madeleine feels herself shrink: a tiny person in the City’s whirligig. The enormous indigo sky wheels overhead and the wind whips them. They settle themselves close to the railings, with a view down over the water.

  The glitter of the City springs up all around. Shadows cast by people walking over Southwark Bridge, to the left, stretch and flap, distorted and lengthened, on the surface of the river; wavery black silhouettes. Insubstantial; intangible as the dead.

  Madeleine lifts her glass: to Sid.

  Toby lifts his: to Sid’s memory.

  He lifts it again: and to you. Chapeau, chef!

  Madeleine says: you haven’t tried it yet.

  Shawled in blankets, they watch the racing clouds, the glimmer of stars and moon, the points of red and green lights on late river-boats, the curls of blue neon on the buildings bulking opposite. They talk and eat. They read T. S. Eliot’s poem aloud, taking it in turns. Their voices intertwine in the dark, composing a body of sound. A body of meaning, floating high and light.

  Toby lights a roll-up, stretches, leans back. He says: Sid and I used to read poetry to each other all the time. It’s good to be doing it again.

  They finish the wine. St Paul’s tolls out eleven o’clock. Back downstairs, they hug goodbye.

  In the morning Madeleine blinks awake to pale green light, a steady splashing of rain. Her quilt, light as a cloud, folds her round in the semi-darkness. Dry and warm while the rain swishes down next to her just beyond the glass. Why get up? No job to go to. She could stay in bed all day. No one would care. No one needs her to introduce them to novelists they’ve never heard of, argue passionately with them about literary values, aesthetic values. The man from Human Resources talked only of financial values. Short sentences staccato as gunfire, picking off the troublemakers, the union members. The humanities did not deliver adequate economic value. Did not deliver outcomes that could be proper
ly measured. The union would have to accept that. The union won the war over redundancy packages but lost the overall battle. Madeleine and her colleagues were kicked out.

  Three months on, the wound still smarts. So why not hide in bed? Eventually she could stop washing, stop changing her clothes, stop cleaning, never open the window, let the flat stink sour and stale. So get up this minute.

  She drinks coffee, tidies, returns the futon bed to its daytime folded position. She stands under the shower in the bathroom. She looks at herself in the mirror. Grey eyes, piled-up curly hair, flushed face. Lips tight shut. A mouth that wants to fly open, shout. It’s not fair!

  A week after their supper on the roof Toby rings to tell her he’s off to Paris to research a round-up on experimental theatre. He’ll stay with journalist friends, to save on expenses, see two shows a day, catch up on new directors.

  Come and see me off at St Pancras, he proposes: if we meet early, we can try one of the bars.

  On the day of his departure it rains. Madeleine puts on a black chiffon dress, a tight-waisted chestnut silk jacket fastened with twists of black braid. After a second’s thought, she dons the black fishnets. She darts to Bank tube under her umbrella through mists of wet, the smell of petrol and flowers. Outside the ruins of the Temple of Mithras, surrounded by office blocks, tourists in pale plastic rain-capes take photographs. A line of broken wall. The gods hide far below with their golden helmets, their spears, their hoards of gold coins. She plunges into the airless underground. The lift door clunks shut. Down they drop. Grey metal surrounds her, like the sides of a submarine.

  The escalator up to St Pancras International flashes with ads. They twinkle like the silver stars streaming from a fairy godmother’s wand. Follow the stars, into the shopping mall. Gallery of luxury goods displayed behind plate glass: toys to distract nervous travellers.

  People wheel elephantine plastic suitcases towards the coiling queues for the electronic ticket gates. Officials in crisp grey uniforms marshal passengers between lines of tape. Toby emerges from the throng; grey raincoat slung over his shoulder, bag in hand. He seizes her elbow, steers her away from the crowds, back into the main hall, up another escalator.