Tales from Soho

by David Barry

  The artist put on his most affronted ruffled-feathers expression and boomed, ‘You

  interrupted my story, just as I was getting to the... ’ he sniggered as he thought about what he was going to say, ‘getting to the climax.’

  ‘Oh, darling, as you yourself told us,’ Sandra said, waving the objection grandiloquently aside, ‘it wasn’t nearly as interesting or as erotic as you were led to believe.’

  He sighed deeply. ‘Life is one cruel disappointment.’

  After she had all their glasses refilled, she giggled. Harding asked her what was so funny and would she mind sharing it with the rest of the company.

  ‘I’m just trying to picture you, darling, all that naked flesh wobbling. Stick to other vices. I don’t think sex suits you. It suits some people, but not you, Ollie.’

  ‘And what other vices would you suggest? Alcohol is my favourite, so I’m doing all right there. Or should I say here?’ He toasted her with his favourite tipple, a large pink gin, a taste he had acquired during a spell in the Royal Navy.

  ‘Have you tried drugs?’ Ken Smith asked.

  Harding flashed him a brief acknowledgment with an expression suggesting boredom. Been there. Done it. Didn’t do anything for me. ‘My last exhibition owes it’s success to drug-fuelled perception,’ he boasted.

  ‘Oh, daaarling,’ Sandra said, elongating a theatrical vowel. ‘Next you’ll be telling us that all those nudes you painted you could actually see inside their flesh.’

  The artist stared at her with a mixture of animosity and affection. He loved her outspokenness, even though she had loudly criticised his nudes when she attended his latest exhibition, suggesting he found himself models with better bodies, a remark which hadn’t gone down well with some of his subjects.

  ‘Strange as it might seem, Sandra, I did get the feeling I could see them anatomically, seeing much more than pale insipid flesh. But then, I seem to remember you likening their figures to slabs of meat on a butcher’s slab.’

  ‘A criticism you found flattering,’ she countered.

  Harding chuckled. He was talented, his paintings fetched ever increasing sums of money, so he rarely felt insulted or hurt by critical comments, although it mainly depended on whether he liked the critic, and in Sandra’s case he did. She could get away with murder because he loved being teased, and suspected that deep down she respected his talent, and her banter was merely designed to bring him down to earth, and teach him not to fool himself into thinking he was the most important contemporary artist in the world.

  Harding suddenly stopped chuckling, cutting it off as if it had been put on in the first place. He turned his attention to Perry Simpson, with the intention of putting the choreographer on the spot. ‘And what about you, Perry? Your dancing girls have figures which most women want and all the men lust after. So what did you think of my painted nudes with their fulsome figures?’

  ‘Well,’ Simpson began thoughtfully, ‘I like the way you apply the paint. I didn’t really care if the subjects were fat and bloated. What mattered most was the stunning technique, the method you used to apply the paint, the style and flair of the paintings which shaped them into something unique. It’s rather like some of Shakespeare’s plays. The subject matter matters not. What’s important is the writing itself. Like many great poems, it’s the way of telling that counts, not the substance.’

  Harding grinned. ‘You know, Perry, I always thought you were a philistine but your estimation has shot up in my book.’

  ‘Thanks for the back-handed compliment,’ Simpson replied.

  Four of the group sipped their drinks in unison, knowing it would soon be time to bring a new topic into the conversation. All except the timid Margaret, who was rarely sensitive to the adjustments of conversation.

  ‘I still think you ought to paint Sandra,’ she told Harding, beaming as if this was her own inspiration, and not a subject that had been hammered into the ground on countless occasions.

  She felt eight eyes penetrating her as if she was a gatecrasher instead of a regular member of the group and her smile vanished. Harding let his irritation show as he spluttered, a shower of pink gin issuing from his rubbery lips.

  ‘Yes, yes, yes!’ he boomed. ‘We’ve been through all that.’ He stared accusingly at Sandra. ‘I could have painted her and turned her into a celebrity. Immortalised her. But she wouldn’t have it.’

  Sandra shrugged. ‘I’ve told you so many times, darling, that I will never remove my clothes for you or anyone else. And that’s the end of the matter.’

  ‘Misguided loyalty to the past,’ he boomed triumphantly.

  This, Sandra realised, was a reference to her affair with her beloved author and remained silent.

  Margaret, feeling she was to blame for the uncomfortable hiatus which followed Harding’s remark, glanced at her watch nervously, polished off the wine in her glass, and said she had to see a client about some wigs. She scurried off while the remaining four carried on drinking and bombarding each other with opinions on diverse subjects, but predominantly the arts.

  At five-thirty Sandra said she wanted to go back to her hotel to change, before meeting Oliver Harding for dinner at an Italian restaurant in Frith Street. She often walked the short distance to Fitzrovia, north along Wardour Street, across Oxford Street, followed by the short distance towards Fitzroy Square, but today she decided to jump in a taxi. Before returning to Soho to meet Ollie for dinner, she desired a long soak in the bath and wanted to read several chapters of one of her ex-lover’s books - an obscure one which had been published only in the USA by a small Greenwich Village press long before he wrote his first bestseller.

  When she arrived at her small hotel, she saw a man waiting in the reception area, seated in an upright chair next to an occasional table - an officious-looking middle-aged man in a grey three-piece suit. Her first instinct warned her that here was a man who was an emissary of distressing news, although she had no real reason to suppose he had any business with her. But Sandra always relied on her instincts, and there was something about the man which she found unnerving. Perhaps it was the way his enquiring eyes latched on to hers as she entered, as if he was searching for her identity, even though they were both strangers to each other. She felt like a criminal in a gangster film, about to be apprehended by a detective. Or even worse, she was an important witness in a trial and here was a professional killer come to eliminate her. Having lived so long in the world of books and fiction, she rationalised that she was being silly letting her imagination run rampant and dismissed her initial uneasiness, deciding the man was nothing more than a visiting businessman or a rep waiting for a business contact.

  As she approached the reception desk, she thought she could feel the man’s eyes on her back. Or was that her imagination being let off the lead again? She was keen to know if a parcel might have been delivered in the second post, a book by one of the authors she had once represented, but the receptionist was nowhere to be seen, so she thumped the bell loudly.

  ‘Ah, Miss Dorland,’ the receptionist said when she appeared from the office behind the counter. Then she looked across at the man and said, ‘This is Miss Dorland, you’re waiting for.’ She looked back at Sandra and added, ‘This gentleman is here to see you.’

  Alarmed, Sandra spun round. ‘Do I know you?’ she demanded.

  The man rose, straightened his tie, bent over and lifted a small attaché case from where it leaned against the chair, then said, ‘My name is Mr Beckett, of Beckett, Gray and Garbles, Solicitors. Is there somewhere we can go to have a private conversation?’

  Sandra felt hot and cold and wished she hadn’t drunk so much at Sam’s Place. She felt a strong desire to scream. What on earth was happening? She imagined her flimsy world was about to tumble. This was her world; surely it was not about to fall apart because of a visit from a total stranger. But the curi
ous way the receptionist stared at her gave her some comfort. At least she could take this solicitor - whatever his business was - to a pub at the end of the street where he could divulge his business in secret.

  In the pub, suspecting the solicitor’s mission was not for her benefit, Sandra ordered a large brandy and let him pay for the drinks. Once they were seated in a quiet corner, he apologised for being the bearer of bad news before he tore her cosy world apart.

  The shock waves as he spoke were like sharp icicles slicing into her. Her deceased lover, the world famous author, had an illegitimate daughter of around thirty-years- old, living in Los Angeles. As his next of kin, of which there was not a shred of doubt, she had contested his will, and according to the solicitor was entitled to the money from his estate. Sandra was devastated, dropped her head in her hands and wept. It wasn’t so much the money as the sense of betrayal on her lover’s part. Why had he never told her about this other woman on the west coast of America, the mother of his child?

  As she sobbed, the solicitor felt awkward. He offered sympathy and advised her to get herself legal representation, although he couldn’t offer much hope of success in retaining the author’s estate, but at least a solicitor might be able to help if it came down to the question of having to refund the money from the estate that Sandra had already lavishly blown.

  Opening his case, he presented her with several official documents, then excused himself and left hurriedly, leaving her to read through the legal jargon and destruction of her world.

  Dazed and dumbfounded, she returned to her hotel, where the receptionist stared at her, itching with curiosity, and obviously dying to ask if she was all right, the way she half opened her mouth to speak, but then changed her mind and strangled the question in her throat. Sandra ignored her, went up to her room, and had a long and tearful soak in the bath. After she had dressed, she glanced at her ex-lover’s book on the bedside cabinet, deciding that as an early work it wasn’t really worth reading and up to now she had been deluding herself about how good it was.

  Once she felt sufficiently composed and able to handle the devastating news, she walked to Soho to meet Oliver Harding. As she hurried along Dean Street to where she planed to meet him at the ‘French’, she came to a momentous decision. She would go out with a bang not a whimper. Her brain reeled with clichés as she thought about throwing caution to the winds and burning her bridges. After several drinks in the pub, and while they were halfway through their starters at the Italian restaurant, she giggled and knew she was getting tipsy. When Oliver asked her what was so funny, she looked him straight in the eye and told him it was a woman’s prerogative to change her mind - that’s if he was still interested.

  ‘That’s a bit cryptic. Can you please be more transparent?’ he said.

  ‘If you want to paint me, I’m quite prepared to disrobe anytime you like.’

  ‘What’s brought this on?’

  ‘Sudden impulse,’ she lied.

  Nobody knew why Sandra Dorland suddenly changed her mind about posing nude for Harding. Least of all, she had no clear idea herself why she did it, unless it was just a last gesture of bohemian behaviour, knowing she was going to have to carve out a new life for herself, and it was goodbye to Soho forever.

  Two weeks after she sat for Harding, and the paint was almost dry on the canvas, she applied for a job with a small publisher in Leamington Spa and, because of her literary background, they offered her the position with a reasonable salary. She said her goodbyes to Soho and some of the people with whom she was reasonably close, and moved to Warwick, where she settled into a new and industrious life and became one of the leading lights in an amateur dramatic company. She cut herself off from her past life, expunging all memories of Soho as if it was a life that had been lived by another person, and never once travelled south to visit London.

  Oliver Harding’s star continued to rise in the next decade and his painting of Sandra Dorland was hung in an exhibition at the Royal Academy. He tried to contact her to let her know, but she seemed to have vanished completely, and he soon gave up trying. In spite of the change in the licensing laws, allowing drinkers the freedom to consume alcohol during the afternoon, he continued to remain a loyal member and customer of Sam’s Place, even though most of the regulars he had known during the seventies had disappeared. He died of a heart attack during the late-eighties and Sandra Dorling never knew what became of the enormous nude painting the renowned British artist had painted of her. In the nineties it was exhibited in an Oliver Harding retrospective exhibition at the Hayward Gallery on London’s South Bank. It was later sold in auction and purchased for 1.5 million to a private collector in the USA. The American died in 2008, having bequeathed the painting to a public gallery in New York City, where it hangs to this day. In spite of much speculation by art critics and artists, no one has been able to identify the subject of the painting.

  Sandra Dorland, the only person still alive and connected to those hedonistic Soho days, often speaks of her sitting for Oliver Harding. Unfortunately, she is ninety-eight years old, lives in an old people’s home in Leamington Spa, and her ramblings are taken as evidence of senile dementia. So it is possible that soon her obscure fame will die with her and the true identity of the painting’s subject will remain a mystery.

  Great War Poets

  Although I’ve been retired for a few years now, I hesitate to write about a strange event which happened over twenty-five years ago. I’m neither a religious nor a superstitious person, and I like to think the explanation for the death of my friend and client was nothing more than pure coincidence. But there may be others who interpret what I am about to reveal differently, and may well think of it as a supernatural happening. Well, that is up to them. All I can do is write about it truthfully and let others decide what to make of it.

  I used to be an editor in a large publishing house based in Soho Square. My wife and I lived in a house in Highgate Village, and in 1981 both our children, a boy and a girl, were away at university. In April of that year I was drawn to Highgate Cemetery where Peter was buried. He had been dead for over eight weeks, but there was something bizarre and strangely haunting about his death. Admittedly he was murdered, brutally assaulted by a gang of drunken youths, a motiveless and pointless killing - but that wasn’t strange in itself. No, it was something else which nagged away at my subconscious, as if his murder was in some way predestined.

  Peter may not have been a close friend, but I was so haunted by his death that I kept returning again and again to the cemetery, and spent ages staring at the headstone, as if the answer was contained in the short epitaph. I was certain he, or someone, was trying to tell me something. And then I suddenly remembered a story he told me just the day before he was killed. It concerned an old lady in a shabby grey wig.

  But first let me tell you something about Peter. He was far from garrulous, extremely difficult to get to know, and rarely spoke about himself. He was probably a little bit shy - certainly he was reserved - but he was intelligent and loyal. He was a talented young poet, which was how I became acquainted with him, when our company published volumes of his poetry.

  He used to sit in Soho pubs, scribbling in tattered old exercise books, positively discouraging conversation with strangers by the concentrated frown he wore as he stared hard at his work. He would make a pint of bitter last a good forty-five minutes before buying a second pint, and he invariably got to the pub by noon, so he was assured of a seat before the pubs became crowded with the lunchtime trade. I would meet him briefly when the pubs reopened at five-thirty, and it was on one of these occasions he told me about his afternoon habit of writing poetry in pubs and consuming no more than two and a half pints of bitter between noon and two-thirty.

  The day before the tragic murder he telephoned me at work. He was clearly excited about something and wanted to meet me at lunchtime. I asked if it could possibly wait until t
he following day as I was extremely busy and behind with my work. He sounded so disappointed with my negative response, I immediately changed my mind and arranged to meet him at the John Snow in Broadwick Street.

  I’ve no idea what the pub is like now, but back then it was rather dingy. It was one of Peter’s favourite pubs though, and I suspect he liked the history attached to it, the fact that it was named after the physician who identified the Broad Street (as it was then known) water pump as the source of the cholera outbreak in 1838.

  I got to the pub at 12.30, just before the lunchtime rush started, and found Peter tucked in his usual corner, surrounded by his notebooks. But he wasn’t buried in them deeply, shutting out the rest of the world, as I usually found him whenever we arranged to meet. His eyes lit up when he saw me. He was clearly excited about something and dying to share some good news. I bought us both a couple of pints and went and sat opposite him. There was no preliminary small talk. It was straight to the eager point.

  ‘I’ve been dying to tell you,’ he said. ‘Ever since I got up this morning.’

  ‘Is this to do with the feature they plan to write about you... ’ I began, but he waved it aside impatiently and interrupted me.

  ‘No, no. I’ve been meeting this old lady in a pub for several nights now.’ Unsure of himself, he stopped speaking suddenly and frowned deeply.

  ‘And?’ I prompted.

  ‘Look, this will sound crazy. I think maybe I’d better start at the top of the page.’

  ‘It sounds as if this will become another poem.’

  ‘It will. It will,’ he agreed confidently. Then he took a deep breath and lunged into the story.

  ‘Three nights ago I discovered this small seedy pub in the north east of Soho. I thought I knew most of the pubs in the district, but this one was a new one on me. Anyway, I’d been sat at my table for a couple of minutes when I noticed opposite me - at another table - an old lady in the most appalling wig. It was grey and lifeless and limp. It was the most pathetic attempt to cover up... her alopecia, I suppose. She was so obviously poor and I immediately felt sorry for her. When she thought no one was looking I saw her tip the dregs of someone else’s beer that had been left, into her own glass. I was fascinated by this old lady and I kept staring at her. Once, she caught my eye and smiled.’