by Jon Cleary
“I am Dorothy St. Martin,” said that lady. “Take off your coat, my dear. My, you do have a fine figure. And you’re only a reporter?”
“On newspapers you don’t get promoted on your figure,” said Cleo. “Well, perhaps you do, but I’ve never tried it that way.”
Miss St. Martin rang for the maid, ordered tea, then arranged herself on a chair. “Now what can we do for you? Or what can you do for us?”
“Well—” Cleo looked around her. “Do you also own the house next door?”
“Through there? Oh yes. But not the one on this side—that belongs to Bolingbroke’s. My sister and I bought that one there right after the war. Our war,” she said, and Cleo marked the sign of the times: the generations now had their own wars. “World War One. Or rather our dear father bought it for us. But we are to lose that, too. The lease on it runs out at the same time as the lease on this one.”
“There are just you and your sister? It’s a lot of accommodation for just the two of you.” She looked around again, at the tables and the grand piano. “Do you run some sort of club? A bridge club or a musical society?”
“Good heavens, no. This is a bordello,” said Miss St. Martin and smiled towards the doorway. “This is my sister Miss Rose.”
Cleo thought for a moment that she had double vision. The Misses St. Martin were identical twins, even to the way they dressed: cream blouses buttoned to the throat, cashmere cardigans, severely cut skirts, sensible shoes, a single strand of pearls. Cleo tried not to stare as she was introduced to Miss Rose, and then sat back on her chair. She remembered what she had just heard.
“A bordello? A brothel?”
“We never use that word, Miss Spearfield.” Miss Rose’s voice was identical to that of her sister, soft and cultured. “We like to think that the difference between a bordello such as ours and a brothel is the difference between the Rolls-Royce showrooms in Berkeley Square and the second-hand car showrooms on the Euston Road.”
Cleo had had no experience of London car showrooms; nor, for that matter, of bordellos or brothels. “I had no idea—”
“Are you sure you are from the Daily Examiner?” said Miss Dorothy; then explained to her sister: “She works for John Cruze.”
“We never see him nowadays.”
Cleo didn’t know Lord Cruze and wasn’t to be sidetracked by talk of him. “I’m new to London—”
“I thought I recognized the accent,” said Miss Rose. “One hears it on television when tennis players and cricketers are interviewed.”
“You’ve never had any Australian—clients here?”
“Not clients, my dear. Guests. Tea? Milk and sugar?” said Miss Dorothy as the maid wheeled in a small serving-cart. “No, we have never had any Australians. We are very selective.”
“Perhaps you should apologize for that, Dorothy. Miss Spearfield looks offended.”
Cleo took her cup and saucer and chose a French pastry from the silver tray. “No, I always defend women’s right to be selective.”
“Are you in favour of women’s liberation?” said Miss Dorothy. “We’re not. Two of our girls specialize in bondage.”
Cleo felt giddy; the cup rattled in its saucer. Pat Hamer must have set her up for this; it was some great practical joke. The Misses St. Martin were probably some retired music hall act and had sneaked into this great house to perpetrate the deception. But then commonsense returned: it was all too elaborate to be a joke played on an out-of-work journalist. Cleo tried hard to retain her commonsense, but it was like trying to keep one’s foothold on a tightrope.
“Why don’t you allow Australians in?”
“Oh, it’s not just Australians. This is an English establishment and we keep it exclusively English. We did have a Scottish duke once and we have had a French ambassador—a little entente cordiale—”
“There was also that gentleman from Boston,” said Miss Rose. “He came from one of the best families. We understand his forbears had fought on our side in the American Revolution.”
Cleo put down her cup and saucer, planted her feet firmly on the thick carpet and tried to sound patient and rational. “Miss St. Martin, both of you, how can you expect me to write a story about such an establishment and get public sympathy on your side so that you won’t be evicted?”
“Miss Spearfield—” Miss Dorothy wiped her lips delicately with a lace napkin, “we don’t expect anything. We didn’t invite you here.”
Cleo saw her mistake. “I’m sorry. But—well, to tell you the truth, I didn’t expect anything like this.”
“Your editor would have known about us. All the newspapers do. But they never mention us because they know our guests are foundation members of what I believe is now called The Establishment. Not all of them were that, I suppose—your employer, for instance. Are you sure you are from the Daily Examiner? I hope you haven’t lied to us, Miss Spearfield. My sister and I are great respecters of the truth.”
Cleo was waiting to be shown the door; but the Misses St. Martin continued to sip their tea and nibble at the French pastries. They were giving her another chance. So she told the truth. “If I can write a good story on you, a sympathetic one, the Examiner will run it. And, I hope, they may offer me a job. I need one.”
“We could offer you a position,” said Miss Rose, running what Cleo now recognized as an expert eye over her. “But we are intending to retire.”
“You’re going to sell the—the bordello? Is that why you want the lease renewed?”
“Not at all. Our family has lived in this house, this one, for one hundred and ninety-eight years. We have had two ninety nine-year leases on it. We are now seventy years old—though we’d rather you didn’t mention our age—and we should like to die in the house, as our parents and their parents and their parents did. We should then like to bequeath the house to a nephew, so that the St. Martin line may continue in it. The estate that owns the freehold knows what sort of place we have been running—indeed, some of the scions of the family that own the estate have been our guests. But now they want to evict us and sell the new lease to that gambling club next door. The new lease will be considerably more expensive than the old one, but we can afford it. We feel it is nothing but rank discrimination. They are objecting—after all these years, mind you—that we may continue to run our bordello. We have no such intention, but what if we did? What is the difference between catering for a gentleman’s physical needs and his gambling needs? Moreover, from what we have observed, not all the clients of Bolingbroke’s are gentlemen.”
Cleo suddenly saw her angle; but would the Examiner buy it? It was a tabloid and it ran pictures of bosomy, scantily-clad girls, but it was not the News of the World, it did not run stories on brothel-keepers. Or even on bordello ladies.
“How did you get into this—do you mind if I call it a business?—in the first place?”
“We started during the war, the last war—your war—”
“Not mine. Mine was, is, the Vietnam war.”
Miss Dorothy shook her head at the continuity of war. “Well, we started when we learned that some of our gentlemen friends, senior officers, were finding it difficult to meet the proper feminine company. All the girls, even those from good families, were chasing the Americans. So we did some recruiting—” she smiled at her choice of words “—and we found some very attractive young ladies who were willing to work for us. There were occasions when, if a buzz-bomb had dropped on our two houses, it would have eliminated half the brass of the British army.” The sisters smiled at each other, mirror images of genteel glee. “If the Germans had only known where to aim!”
“But how did you know—well, how did you know what to provide?”
“We had been to Paris in the 1920s,” said Miss Rose. “We sneaked away from our parents, we were rather naughty as young girls, and persuaded a French gentleman we knew to take us to one of the Paris bordellos. We never forgot what we saw.”
Miss Dorothy fanned herself with the lace napkin at th
e memory. “We used that establishment as our model, but we tried to make ours more tasteful.”
“More English?” said Cleo.
“Exactly,” said Miss Rose. “Nothing as obvious as red plush. The French do tend to overdo things when it comes to sex.”
“Please, Rose,” said Miss Dorothy, as if her sister had used a dirty word.
Cleo burst out laughing, and the sisters joined in. They could laugh at their gentility; it was part of their act, part of what they sold to English gentlemen who had physical needs.
Cleo asked for more tea, began to take notes.
An hour later she left the Misses St. Martin. “That was the nicest time I’ve had since I landed in London.”
“You must come and have tea with us again,” said Miss Rose. “We’d invite you to supper, but you have such a fine figure, some of our guests might mistake you for one of our girls.”
“If the Examiner doesn’t buy my story, I may be back.”
“I was joking, my dear. We are closing our establishment at the end of the month. After that we shall devote ourselves to our church work.”
I’m having my leg pulled this time. “Church work?”
“Oh yes. We go to Mass every Sunday down at Farm Street. The Jesuit fathers look on us as their most devout sinners. They’ll be delighted when we give up sin.”
III
“It’s marvellous,” said the Examiner’s features editor. “But Felicity Kidson, our women’s editor, wants to run it on her page. She’ll give you a whole page with pictures. She’s just discovered women’s rights, God help us.”
“I’d like it run it as is, Mr. Brearly,” said Cleo. “I don’t want the mickey taken out of those two nice old ladies.”
“That’s the point—Felicity will run it exactly as you’ve written it.” He was a tiny man with a mop of grey hair who seemed to live in a continual miasma of cigarette smoke. He would like to have visited the Misses St. Martin’s bordello, but Cleo’s story had already told him he would not qualify as a guest. “I don’t think our readers will give your nice old ladies as much sympathy as you seem to think. Let’s face it, they’re snobs. But the Mayfair Estates people won’t like it, not since they’ve known about the brothel—”
“Bordello.”
“Okay, bordello. I didn’t know there was a difference. Since they’ve known all about the bordello and done nothing about it.”
“I’ll play down the snob angle and play up the bit about only English clients. It probably won’t help the Examiner’s Scottish edition, but you Poms will love it.”
“Now you’re taking the mickey out of us.”
Which was exactly what Felicity Kidson said when Cleo went in to meet her. “But I don’t mind that at all, darling. I think we English like having the mickey taken out of us, so long as it’s not vicious. It proves we have a sense of humour about ourselves. Would you like a job with me?”
“I was hoping you’d say that. Yes, I’d like very much to work for the Examiner.”
She had not wanted to work on the women’s page, but it would be a start. It hurt her to think that she was having to start all over again, but this was England and England had always made foreigners start at the bottom. Except, of course, its imported kings.
“I have only one rule,” said Felicity. “I am the boss lady and don’t ever forget it.” She smiled, not taking the sting out of the remark, just polishing it. “I know all about you ambitious Aussies.”
“I’m surprised you’re offering me the job.”
“I like to live dangerously.” She flicked a gentle finger at the single red rose in the glass on her desk. “Good luck, darling.”
IV
That evening Cleo took Pat Hamer to dinner. “Dress up, Pat. We’ll go to the Mirabelle.”
“Luv, that costs the earth! Please don’t go off your head. Let’s go to a steak house.”
“I owe you the best, Patricia. When you get your star part with the Old Vic, you can take me out for a champagne dinner.”
“Are we going to have champagne, too? Wait till I write and tell my dad about it. He’ll die of shame.”
They went to the Mirabelle, two good-looking girls who got admiring glances from the stout, balding businessmen who stole surreptitious looks at them while their bouffant-haired wives weren’t attending.
“They think we’re a couple of tarts,” said Pat. Then, “Oh migord! There’s Mrs. Dysen, one of the ladies I clean for!”
Mrs. Dysen, a formidable woman under her blonde helmet of hair, saw Pat and reared back as if she had just been pierced in a joust. Her face cracked in a mix of grimace and smile, then she turned her head away and took a sip of water, as if recovering from an unexpected assault.
“There goes that job,” said Pat.
But it did not matter. A week later she got a job with a company going on tour before coming into the West End. She gave up her bed-sit and said goodbye to Cleo and the two of them wished each other all the luck in the world. Cleo gave up her own bed-sit, went looking for something better and found it in South Kensington. Recklessly she took a year’s lease on it with an option for a further year, leaving herself with exactly nine pounds to get her through to her first Examiner pay day. But she knew, as only the truly ambitious can tell themselves, that from now on she was safe from the dole queue. Though it was only the beginning of February even the sun broke through. True, it did only shine for an hour, as if it had come by to see if Britain was still there, but it was an omen.
Then a small package was delivered from Cartier in Bond Street. In it was a gold pen and a note written in a copperplate hand: “A small thanks for your splendid story. Our lease has been renewed for another 99 years. Do come and have tea with us again.”
The year looked as if it was going to be a good one. She rang home and told her father so. “I’m on my way, Dad.”
“Good for you, sweetheart.” But he sounded disappointed, as if he had lost something or someone.
3
I
JOHN CRUZE, Lord Cruze of Chalfont St. Aidan, was tired of the Swinging Sixties. He wondered why he had bothered to go to tonight’s party at the country house of Saul Petty; it had made him feel old, a state of mind that he tried to avoid as much as he did the thought of cancer. Everyone at the party, with the exception of himself and the host, had either been under twenty-five, or if they weren’t, had tried to look under twenty-five. He thought there was nothing more pathetic than middle-aged swingers: they might try to put the clock back but their faces showed the true time. Tonight there had been men of his own age, fifty, pillars of the City looking decidedly shaky on their Twisting legs, the creaking of their bones competing with the clanging of the gold chains and medallions round their necks; there had been so many gold medals, he had felt he was at some geriatrics’ Olympiad. There had also been their wives and mistresses, dressed in Chelsea boutique clothes that made them look as if they had looted their daughters’ wardrobes. The girls under twenty-five, in hot pants and mini-skirts, had worn make-up that wouldn’t have looked odd on a tribe of New Guinea hillmen; he reckoned there must have been enough mascara on display that night to have painted the hull of the QE2. Their escorts, hipless, chestless, shoulderless, the new fashion, looked as if they had been dressed by Cecil Beaton for the girls’ parts in a revival of the Gaiety Girls; he had never seen so many ruffles. The band, six hipless, chestless, shoulderless hairy wrecks, all wearing dark glasses against the glare of the Chinese lanterns strung around the terrace of the house, were playing so loudly, it sounded as if they were also playing for a party in Brighton, some fifty miles away.
“You were bloody sour this evening,” said Felicity Kidson. “You didn’t move out of your chair, just sat there like the bloody Archbishop of Canterbury all night.”
“I’m bloody sour now. I thought that was the Archbishop of Canterbury you were dancing with, till I saw it was Saul. What’s he doing, getting dressed up like that at his age?”
The glass
partition of the Rolls-Royce Phantom was up and Sid Cromwell, the chauffeur, could not hear their conversation. Lord Cruze never worried what his servants thought about his actions, that would have put too much of a curb on his sex life; but he had never learned to ignore them when he conversed in front of them. Which was another reminder that he was not a true aristocrat, just another life peer.
“I don’t know how Saul—he’s what? Seventy-seven?—gets a kick out of something like tonight’s bedlam. I noticed he wasn’t wearing his hearing-aid.”
Felicity sighed and sank back into her long bright-red feather boa. She was wearing white satin jodhpurs, white boots and a sequined blue silk shirt open to the bottom button; with her bright red boa, he privately thought she looked like a French hairdresser on his way to an international rugby match; but he had given up making any comment on the way she dressed these days. Beside her, in his black tie and dinner jacket, he sometimes felt like an undertaker on night duty. He knew he was narrow-minded about trendiness, homosexuality, unisexuality, women’s liberation and all the other aberrations that had broken out during that decade, but he could not help it. Like so many men who had started out as crooks, he had a narrow moral outlook in many ways.
He glanced sideways at her, still sour, and wondered what she would say in the morning when she got the farewell bunch of white roses. He always said farewell to his mistresses, whether of short or long standing, with white roses; they got red ones right up to the final bunch. He knew that his method of ending an affair was no secret, but he liked it that way: it meant that he did not have to write any farewell notes. He never put anything on paper to a woman.
