“Wait for me,” shouted the gurgly voice again from further down the street. Daisy half turned and watched the woman totter up to her on her uncomfortable heels.
“Like to come and have a cuppa tea with me? You can’t do nothing in this weather.” A wicked grin was flashed at her from behind the wilted veil. “Don’t often have a woman to talk to now me sister’s dead. It’s all fellas around the place.” The rich laugh came again and she cupped Daisy’s elbow with her hand to guide her across the street.
“There’s a couple of other women in our house, up on the second floor. Proper bitches, they are. Take the bread out of your mouth, they would.”
Daisy glanced up and down the cross street. Cars swished behind them as they made their way over, and her skirt was splashed with mud from them. There was not a pedestrian in sight. And she could not go home yet.
“O.K.,” she agreed — any port in a storm, she thought ruefully. “What’s your name?”
“Ivy. What’s yours?”
“Daisy.”
“Daisy? I heard tell from a fella not long back about a woman called Liverpool Daisy.” She scrutinized Daisy with new interest as she propelled her towards the side door of a small tobacconist’s shop. “See, I wasn’t far from home — Liverpool Daisy, now?”
“Some of the boys calls me that.”
Ivy paused, her key extended towards the door lock, and glanced up again at Daisy. “You’re bloody lucky. That young fella was proper nice about you. You’re getting yourself a good reputation!” And again a surge of laughter rocked her, as she unlocked the door.
They entered a dingy hall lit by a single low watt bulb without a shade. A door, which Daisy assumed led into the tobacco shop, occupied one side wall, and straight ahead of her was a flight of stairs covered with shabby linoleum.
“Come on up,” invited Ivy.
At the head of the stairs was a small landing with two doors facing them, while on Daisy’s left the staircase continued upwards into darkness.
One of the doors had a grubby card pinned to it on which the name “Ivy Le Fleur” had been crudely printed in red pencil. Ivy unlocked this door and kicked her shoes off into the room which lay before her. She took off her hat and examined the sopping ruin regretfully.
She saw Daisy glance at the card on the door and her eyes twinkled, as she said, “Me real name’s Ivy Brown — that’s me name from when I was a dancer — it’s Frenchy — good for me business.”
Daisy was impressed by this display of business acumen and allowed herself to be led into the apartment which seemed to her to be very luxurious. It consisted of a single room stuffed with furniture. A large rumpled bed with numerous pillows and a bright green eiderdown dominated the room. On the other side of it a cage on a stand held a disconsolate looking canary. Behind the bird, the window was covered by shiny green curtains. An easy chair, faded to near grey, faced a large gas fire which Ivy immediately lit. The pop it made as the gas flamed, made Daisy jump, and Ivy chuckled.
“I got coal fires — more healthy ’n gas,” said Daisy defensively.
“Too much work,” replied Ivy, as she got up off her knees. “Make yourself at home while I fill up the kettle.” She took off her coat, shook it out and hung it over the back of a chair, then laid the dripping fox fur over a line strung across the corner above an ancient gas cooker. She picked up a tin kettle from the stove and hurried out of the room. The gas stove had two shelves above it and these were crammed with a dusty assortment of dishes, small saucepans, packets of salt and sugar, all mixed up with a full ash tray, several boxes of matches, a tin of talcum powder and some greasy bottles.
Daisy strolled round the tiny space not committed to furniture. Behind an old hospital screen with faded cretonne curtains was a wash-hand stand, complete with jug and basin and a slop bucket underneath. The stand was also tightly packed, with odds and ends, tooth brushes, a soap dish, a sticky pot of vaseline, aspirins and liver pills.
A small dressing-table, with a mirror suffering from smallpox, was equally littered with powder boxes, a hair tidy, pin cushions, broken combs, hairpins, pots of cream, and a gadget which Daisy did not recognise. She picked it up and was examining it when Ivy came back into the room.
“That’s me eyelash curler,” she explained in answer to Daisy’s query.
“Curl your eyelashes?” exclaimed Daisy in disbelief. She stared incredulously at the tiny contrivance and then burst into sudden laughter.
Ivy lit the gas jet under the kettle. “Aye,” she said, looking up from her task, “That’s better. You look real pretty when you laugh. Reminds me of me mother — she wore a shawl, too. Take your shawl off and put it on the fender in front of the gas fire. You’re dripping.” She bustled round, clearing a table and laying two cups and saucers on it. Then she quickly slipped off her damp dress, hung it on a hanger and put on a crumpled wrapper over her bright pink underslip. She snatched up a towel from behind the hospital screen and handed it to Daisy.
“Here. Here’s a towel for your hair.”
Daisy thankfully accepted this kind hospitality. The room was rapidly becoming deliciously warm and, as the chill went out of her, she began to relax.
She took off her shawl and laid it on the fender. Her thin cotton blouse was also sodden, as was the shift under it. The garments clung to her large breasts and Ivy eyed them enviously.
“You got a fine pair o’ bristols,” she remarked.
“Suckled all me kids,” Daisy informed her. She sat down on the easy chair, and ran her hand round the neck of her blouse to loosen it from her skin.
Ivy sloshed hot water into a small brown teapot.
“Surprisin’ how many men like fat women,” she remarked, “Seein’ as how the fashion is always for thin ones.”
“Oh, aye,” agreed Ivy.
Daisy took the pins out of her hair and began to rub it with the towel. She felt around for a piece of comb in the pocket of her wet apron and after she had found it she took the apron off and set it to steam beside the shawl.
Ivy sat down on a small straight bedroom chair and poured out the tea, ladling in spoonsful of sugar with a generous hand, while Daisy patted the front of her blouse with the towel.
Ivy handed her a cup of tea and she laid the towel across her knee while she took it gratefully.
“Ta,” she said.
Ivy drew her chair closer to the fire.
“You don’t wear no makeup?”
Daisy was shocked. “Never!” she spluttered into her teacup.
Ivy laughed at the strong denial. Her own makeup had run in the rain and she had grey rivulets of mascara down each cheek, giving her a clownlike appearance. Daisy eyed her resentfully over the steaming teacup. In her small world, only real whores like Ivy wore makeup. Of course, girls put lipstick on nowadays like their mothers would never have dared.
“Aaa, you should paint your face. It’d do a lot for you.”
“Humph,” grunted Daisy. She stirred uneasily in her chair. She wasn’t a whore like this woman and she didn’t want to look like one. She was unable to think why what she was doing for a living was different from what Ivy was engaged in; but to her it was not the same thing at all, at all, it wasn’t. Further, she had realized instinctively that the normality of her dress was an advantage to her. If she was seen with a man he could pass her off as an acquaintance, a neighbour, a relation.
“You really should buy some makeup.”
“I dunno. I dunno as it is a good idea. T’ scuffer looked at you tonight — he hardly noticed me.”
“A lot of men wouldn’t notice you neither.”
“To hell with her,” thought Daisy. “I wish I hadn’t come.” Aloud, she said stiffly, “I do all right.” She leaned over and helped herself to another spoonful of sugar. She whirled the spoon fretfully round her cup while she wondered if the rain had stopped.
Ivy picked up the sugar bowl and sat with it in her hand, as if to protect it from further raids by Daisy. She felt th
at Daisy was smarter than she was; yet, she suspected, Daisy did not know her own value.
“How much do you get?” she inquired.
“Half a dollar. If I don’t like the look o’ them, I try for five shillun.” Daisy clapped her spoon into her saucer noisily. The woman was a proper Nosy Parker, she was.
“You could do better’n that if you had a room. Ever been to a hotel?”
“Me? In a shawl? Na.” She reflected for a moment. Ivy’s face expressed only honest interest, so she confided, “I got a house of me own. But I got someone living with me, so I can’t take fellas there. Not now, anyway.”
“Your ould fella there?”
“No. He’s at sea.”
“Don’t he ever come home?”
“He’s been away for ages this time. He don’t touch Liverpool. He could be gone for years.” She had not given any thought to the possibility of Mike’s return, and Ivy’s question introduced the disturbing idea that he might indeed come home.
Ivy took a tin of broken biscuits from the shelf under the table. She took off the lid and proffered the contents.
“Have a bickie,” she invited and at the same time put the sugar basin back on the table.
Daisy took several pieces of biscuit and popped them into her mouth one after another. One piece got stuck in the top of her dentures and she had a bad moment getting it off her plate with her tongue. “Ta,” she said.
“You married?” asked Daisy after she had downed the biscuits.
“Yes. Married to a comic. I used to be on the stage. He left me years ago with a couple of kids to feed. Me Mam looked after them while I was dancing — choruses — in panto mostly. Then it got hard to find jobs — they like you thin as a rake — so I began to take fellas home.” The merry look went out of her face for a minute and she looked old and haggard. “Me boy’s in the army — he sends me an allotment — a few shillings, bless ’im. Gloria, me girl, went to London. She writes at Christmas. Says she’s workin’.”
The conversation passed to Daisy’s progeny; and Ivy was fascinated as a few sorrows over children were shared, including a tear shed for James doing time for dispatching a bloody Prottie, for little Michael, killed by a brewer’s dray, and for Tommy who had coughed himself to death and even for John who had run away to sea so long ago that it was doubtful if his mother could have recognised him if he ever returned. The high drama of James’s and Lizzie Ann’s arrests was gone over to their mutual enjoyment.
Daisy was just beginning to feel that she had found a friend, and the tin alarm clock on the mantelpiece said ten past ten, when suddenly there was the sound of the outside door being opened and the clomp of heavy feet on the stairs. Raucous, drunken voices shouted bawdy jokes to each other, and one loud male voice bayed, “Hey, Ivy, hey Doris. Open up there. Your loved ones has come in from the rain.”
TWENTY-THREE
In a matter of seconds, after opening the door and seeing the jocular crowd coming up the stairs, Daisy had been offered and had accepted Ivy’s late sister’s room next door, a noisome den still cluttered with the dead woman’s belongings. She snatched up her shawl and apron from in front of Ivy’s gas fire and followed her hostess into the dark room.
Ivy lit the gas jet and then the gas fire. “There you are,” she said, as Daisy blinked in the doorway at the sudden light. “Landlord’ll never know. Friend of mine has rented it as of next week.” She gave Daisy a playful push in the stomach, as she turned back into the hall, where the first men were shaking the rain off their bare heads like collie dogs. One of them slapped a bewildered Daisy on the bottom, and this had the effect of propelling her into the room; the man followed so closely that she could feel his breath on her bare neck. Ivy slipped off her wrapper and wriggled her pink satin-covered bottom. “Come on, lads, It’s five bob. Who’s first?”
A bear of a man clasped her round the waist from the rear, and they danced a conga into her room. The door was left ajar.
A shaken Daisy took the first tram home in the morning. She was bruised, bitten and in pain. She felt filthy and degraded. All the buttons were off her blouse, which had been nearly torn off her back. Her first client, a man so big and so drunk that she had been afraid of him, had demanded that she strip and she had hastily abandoned even her shift.
For the first time she learned what her trade could really be like.
“’T was a judgement in the eyes of God,” she thought bitterly.
Her mind had got muzzy as one drunk after another came slinking through the half shut door. Only one clear thought had stayed with her, that for Nellie’s sake she must collect the money first. This she had done, shoving the precious shillings under the mattress as each man gave it to her. How many men could one take, she wondered? A goodly number judging by the happy shouts and yelps from Ivy’s room. Must have been a bloody ship’s crew, she told herself resentfully.
The two girls upstairs had opened their doors and screeched over the banisters, and this had led to a clatter of boots climbing to the upper floor amid cheerful whoops from the steaming mob packed into the tiny hall and staircase.
“How could men be such beasts?” Daisy asked herself as the tram trundled homeward. Now she had seen it all, for sure. She had been pushed around by men all her life, but never had she felt so helpless before them as she had done on this obscene night. Near to tears, she tried to console herself with the thought of the clinking contents of her skirt pocket. With that much money added to her present hoard she need not go out for several nights.
Sore discomfort had rapidly become sharp pain and she had begun to wonder wildly how she could shut out the still clamouring men, who leaned against the door jamb shouting encouragement to whoever was with her. She finally rebelled when a young stalwart demanded a service of her which she felt was unnatural. Horrified fury took possession of her, and the surprised youngster found himself propelled back through the door by a stark naked amazon mouthing language that surprised even him. He stumbled against the next man in the queue and for a second they were out of the doorway. Daisy slammed the door on them and shot the bolts at the top and bottom. Since she had already taken the money of her last would-be client, this led to a lot of bad language in return and much hammering on the old oak panels.
Terrified, Daisy glanced around her. She snatched up her skirt and petticoats and struggled into them, pushed her arms into her buttonless blouse, scooped up the money from between the mattresses and stuffed it, with her stockings, into her skirt pocket. With her shawl, apron and shoes tight under one arm, she ran to the window.
“Hi, open up,” came a chorus from beyond the door.
“Holy Angels, preserve me,” sobbed Daisy, as she flung back the tattered curtains to reveal a big sash window.
She turned the latch and with one hand tried to heave open the long unused bottom half. It would not budge. She put down her shoes and shawl and tried with two hands. There was a lot of laughter from the hallway and a heavy thud suggested that someone had put his shoulder to the door in an effort to break it.
“Holy Mary, pray for me now,” implored Daisy as she tugged at the recalcitrant window. “Let there be a fire escape! Let there be one!”
The window gave suddenly and the rain blew cold on Daisy’s flushed face. She leaned out.
There was an iron veranda running across both her window and that of Ivy’s room. She could not see in the darkness whether it had a staircase at the end of it or whether it was enclosed. She crawled out and cautiously let her weight on to it. It shook uneasily but it held. She leaned back in and rescued her shoes, apron and shawl and then shut the window after her.
The wet iron hurt her feet and she put down her shoes and eased her feet into them. Then she flung her shawl over her hair which was tumbling down her back and wrapped it close across her naked chest. She put a shaky hand on the veranda railing and edged slowly along the complaining wrought iron beneath her feet.
She was numb with fear and sudden cold.
; A shaft of light from between Ivy’s curtains lay across her path. Beyond that she could see nothing. She paused at the light to peer ahead and then turned to look through the chink in the curtains into Ivy’s room. She caught a horrifying glimpse of Ivy standing stark naked astride a tin bowl. She was swaying like a dervish and flourishing an old towel round her head. Daisy could clearly hear her shout, “Come on, lads! Ivy’s waiting!”
Daisy moaned under her breath and put out an exploratory toe past the line of light. The veranda appeared to continue, so she eased herself past Ivy’s window. She put out her foot again and there was nothing under it. Daisy froze.
Afraid of what might be ahead and even more fearful of what lay behind her, she quivered with indecision.
“Perhaps I’m turned the wrong way,” she managed to think. “Staircase could be from the other end.”
Desperately she peered ahead of her. Below her she saw the sudden flash of a torch. The constable on the beat must be checking the back of the building, she decided. From the direction in which the torch moved it appeared that there was an open courtyard below instead of the usual tiny back yard. The light ran up the wall and illuminated for a second an iron staircase ahead of her. She nearly fainted with relief.
She waited until the torchlight had moved away and then edged herself carefully down the welcome stairs.
Careless of rats, she ran like an alley cat along the side of the building until she found an entry which led into a deserted side street. From there she found her way into Lime Street which was still quite busy, despite the rain. She huddled for a minute or two in the doorway of the Empire Theatre, until the sound of shunting in the nearby railway station penetrated her numbed brain. The familiar noise comforted her a little and reminded her that the station had a ladies’ lavatory where she might tidy herself. She sneaked up the side of the station and darted quickly through the Victorian archway which led into the platform nearest the waiting rooms. She ran the last few yards, at the same time hunting through her pockets for a penny. For a dreadful second she thought that she had only silver, then her fingers closed over one at the bottom of her pocket. She thrust the coin into the slot on a lavatory door and nipped inside. Quickly she shot the bolt, despite the fact that both station and waiting room appeared deserted.
Liverpool Daisy Page 15
