by Barbara Tate
She pointed towards one end of the vast room. Approaching us was a consultant, followed by a gaggle of students hanging on his every word. With white coat fluttering, he was making his awe-inspiring progress along the length of the department; his acolytes walked reverently behind him with hands clasped behind their backs. He had one on each side of him: favourites, no doubt, whose job it was to nod their heads gravely whilst keeping to his exact pace.
‘Recognise who it is?’ Mae chortled, as he came nearer – the procession was soon about to pass right in front of us.
I did indeed. The great man was one of Mae’s regular clients. And only three days earlier, he had presented a ludicrously different image. He had wanted a witness – me, of course – and my memory of this majestic creature was his bare bottom bent over the end of Mae’s bed. He was a pretty experienced masochist and I knew his behind to be a complex road map of scars. Halfway through the session, Mae had thrust the knotted whip into my hands and instructed me to have a go because she was getting tired. The thought of touching those terrible lacerations with anything harsher than cotton wool had defeated me, and I had whispered, ‘Honestly, I couldn’t, Mae.’ She’d snatched the whip back – scornful of my concerns – and proceeded to lay it on with renewed zest in an effort to get the job over with more quickly. A particularly vicious blow proved to be the crowning glory of the session.
‘Oh, that’s wonderful!’ he’d said gratefully.
And now here he was: the high priest in his temple. The moment, he caught sight of Mae’s bouncing blonde curls, her grinning face and my incredulous expression, he turned brick-red and his head attempted to collapse into the safety of his white collar. Had Mae not still been as high as a kite, she doubtless would not have let on that she knew him, but she was as high as a kite and it was all great fun.
As he was about to draw level, she gave me a hefty dig in the ribs with her elbow. The red face was now an ugly purple and his waistcoat button appeared to have become the most interesting thing in the whole world.
‘Oh, if only his trousers would fall down and let those young chaps see his arse!’ Mae announced.
At last we were called into a cubicle with a doctor who was, happily, unknown to us. I told him the story of the inhaler. Mae lounged voluptuously in the doorway, ogling him and rolling her hips gently. He blinked at her uncertainly and, transferring his gaze to me, said, ‘You say a whole inhaler?’
‘S’right, love,’ said Mae, smiling provocatively.
‘Do you realise that it’s a wonder you’re not dead by now?’
‘Can’t kill me; I’m as strong as a bleeding horse.’
‘You must be,’ he muttered.
Between us we persuaded her to sit down while he took her blood pressure and sounded her heart. He was the perfect fall guy for her lewdness, and she managed to get him blushing furiously as he hurriedly gave her an injection and declared that he was ‘all done now’.
It was with extreme thankfulness that I unloaded her on to Tony, who collected her now snoring corpse and took it home to bed.
Twenty-Three
All round Mae’s beat there were quaint little shops selling antiques, jewellery and second-hand goods. Here, you could buy a diamond ring, a Georgian washstand, a rusty flat iron or a mouldering top hat. When Mae was bored with walking or standing about, she would browse these displays. This was not, as it might have seemed, a purely idle pursuit; from time to time she did make purchases on the premise that it was good policy: as a fairly regular customer, the shopkeepers would be less inclined to complain about her.
Nevertheless, she had a keen nose for a bargain and an unerring eye for quality. When the same object attracted both nose and eye, she pounced. She could never ‘pass up a snip’, whether she wanted it or not, and because of this – and the fact that she didn’t like Tony to know how much money she was spending – a lot of her ‘finds’ got passed on to me. All sorts of strange objects would nonchalantly be tossed to me with the one word:
‘Present!’
Among these treasures were exquisite items of jewellery, pretty bits of china and glass, a Chinese peasant carved from ivory, a mirror in the shape of an artist’s palette held by a serpent stand . . . The pièce de résistance arrived at the tail of a little procession led by a client, followed by Mae, with the shopkeeper bringing up the rear. He was carrying something large, covered with snowy tissue paper. Even on this occasion, Mae didn’t pause on her journey to the bedroom, but with a grin and a backward jerk of her head said:
‘Your birthday present – hope you like it.’
The shopkeeper insisted on staying and unwrapping it, saying proudly, ‘I’ve never seen anything like this before, you know. I should think it’s unique.’
When he took the last wrapping off, I gasped at the glitter of porcelain, silver and cut glass. It was a tray: but what a tray! All the paraphernalia for breakfast in bed nestled between silver railings; the little cup was cut glass, resting on a silver saucer, and the silver eggcup was perched on a silver bridge, above a cut-glass dish.
As well as giving me many of her barely worn clothes, Mae also bought garments especially for me – luxurious ones that I would never have dreamed of buying for myself – and several cuddly toy animals with musical boxes hidden within their anatomy. Also, she had clients who travelled in cosmetics and, via them, often received bottles of perfume, many of which she passed on to me. (Contrary to the popular myth, the scent that prostitutes admittedly were smothered in was certainly not cheap.)
All her suits and coats were bought from Kravetz, an expensive, wonderful ladies’ tailor in Wardour Street. She had them make a beautiful coat of chestnut-brown velour to her own design. I fell in love with this coat instantly. It was the first time I’d actually coveted anything; I was wild for it and would have lived on scraps for a month to possess it.
‘Please, Mae,’ I begged her. ‘Promise me when you’re fed up with it – even if it’s threadbare by then – you’ll let me buy it from you.’
She laughed and pirouetted, making it flair out even more. ‘’Course, love. I won’t forget.’
But despite her usual largesse, she was unpredictable, and only a few months later, she gave it away to someone else. I don’t recount this out of any pettishness, but to illustrate the sort of inconsistencies that were common among all the girls: strange, incomprehensible quirks that would lie in wait for your assumptions and trip them up. Conventions like punctuality and keeping promises were ignored; lies and excuses tripped off the tongue with the ease and lightness of birdsong. Life in Soho had different rules.
These facts were to be accepted and that was that. The best you could do was look after yourself. I always arranged to meet friends in a café rather than the street, so that their lateness – or, as like as not, non-appearance – didn’t matter so much. Excuses were always heartfelt, profuse and totally untrue, but the golden rule was to accept them courteously. Any other reaction led to the bother of being marched round to a third person, who would happily vouch for the truth of the lie, without having the vaguest idea of what it was all about.
Following the maxim of keeping in with the local shopkeepers, Mae and myself were almost literally keeping ‘Toffee-nose’ – the café proprietor below – in business.
Having predicted the failure of his venture, Mae took a morbid interest in seeing herself proved right. The succulent turkey in the window had given way to a chicken, and the lobsters had been replaced by two small dishes of prawns. Before summer came, these meagre offerings were in their turn to give way to a few long-lasting salami sausages. There was now no sign of the bay trees: passing merry-makers had broken the hardier one of the two, even though, unlike its neighbour, it had managed to survive being used as a urinal.
Soon, though, the sounds of activity on the floor immediately below us took our minds off Toffee-nose and his problems. There were stepladders, pots of paint, all sorts of tools and a couple of men hammering, banging and sawing like mad.
We were both eaten up with curiosity, and in the end, Mae cornered one of them and asked what was going on. The answer was that it was going to be opened as a private drinking club. It was an exciting idea, and henceforth we enjoyed all the noisy sounds of construction going on beneath us.
The future proprietor and her husband came up to introduce themselves. He was a grey-haired little man, who almost never spoke, was constantly chewing his nails and looked uncomfortable. The woman was big, florid and very theatrical, always saying ‘my deah’ and calling everyone ‘darling’ and ‘lovey’.
All her remarks were carried to the limit of probability. If asked if there was enough sugar in her tea, she would answer:
‘Oh, my deah, it’s absolutely perfect, really heavenly – a quite, quite wonderful cup of tea!’
They were rather a sickening couple.
Eventually, the club was finished – all concealed lights, illuminated brocade, bows and potted plants vying for space around a domineering bar in a clubroom that could never be accused of spaciousness. On the other side of the landing – and directly under our waiting room – was the toilet (which until now had been ours alone) and a storeroom.
A visitor to the clubroom had to find his way along a newly painted corridor, where embossed hearts and coronets attempted to lend the walls a regal, romantic air and the red lino on the floor was at least easily cleanable. This last went a little way towards appeasing Toffee-nose, the café owner, who had noted every occasion when one of our clients had spent a surreptitious penny in our passage. This was understandable, since it had gone straight through the bare floorboards and on to his electrics below, fusing all his lights.
On the afternoon of the club’s opening, there was a continual procession of bouquets and telegrams, and then, as the day turned to night, a plethora of guests began arriving. Above all this, like children allowed up late, Mae and I hung over the banister rail, drinking in glimpses of the spectacle and neglecting poor old Houdini, who was tied up in the waiting room.
Accompanied by the music of Nat King Cole, Peggy Lee and Ella Fitzgerald, amorphous pleasantries grew briefly louder as the door opened and closed on yet another . . .
‘Da-a-a-arling! How wonderful you could come to our little thingummy!’
Mae and I were not invited to the little thingummy – although I seem to recall that a glass of something was sent up to us. Each time that door shut us out, Mae expressed her displeasure by walloping Houdini.
It was, perhaps, unfortunate that this gathering was the club’s one and only moment of glory – and Schadenfreude aside, Mae was probably right in suspecting that it only achieved that much by serving free drinks. During the week that followed, we continued to hear Nat, Peggy and Ella, but without the accompaniment of ‘voices off’. Most of the footsteps we heard on the stairs continued on past the club door and came up to us.
Actually, the club being there helped our business enormously, as it erased any embarrassment that might have been felt at the front door. The few people who actually did go into the club were mainly chorus boys and other tired theatricals. ‘Da-a-a-arling!’ rang out like infrequent door chimes every time a newcomer arrived.
Mrs Da-a-a-arling must have drunk all the profits herself. Around nine thirty every evening this caused her to become cantankerous, and her husband was an easy, obvious and perhaps justifiable target.
The reason for his nervous nail-biting became clear. When she became nasty – and she did become nasty – he had to ease her out to the landing so she could swear at him and hit him without disturbing the clientele. When she had verbally and physically abused him for about ten minutes, she was perfectly all right again and business continued as usual. By the end of the evening, when she was pretty far gone again, she was too tired to bother with a repeat performance.
After the customers had gone, he washed the glasses while she slumped in a corner, ranting at him in a slurred monotone that came to us via the fug of cigarette smoke wafting out through the open door. Some of her comments were fairly stock ones, not taxing her imagination too much but nevertheless satisfying her vitriolic mood:
‘You’re a filthy, rotten, stinking little bastard. You know that, don’t you?’
‘Yes, dear.’
Others were marginally more poetic:
‘You’re a smelly, snivelling little snail, a crawling, lousy little worm . . . a moronic coward who should have been stamped on at birth. Aren’t you?’
Whatever the accusation, when his cue came, the answer was always the same:
‘Yes, dear.’
If it was claimed the enterprise went gradually downhill from the opening night, it would be more accurate to say it was pushed off a cliff. After-hours drinks briefly provided a parachute, but not for long. Some six months after that first ‘Da-a-a-arling!’ graced our ears, the police raided the club and took away their licence. We quite missed them, really, but on the whole, agreed that our life was hectic enough without them.
Soon after the club had shut, some men came to remove the jukebox. It became wedged halfway along the passage, where the wall bellied out and narrowed the passageway that vital inch. The two removal men were sweating and swearing. They were only six feet from victory, but no amount of pushing or heaving would budge it. Mae needed to get out to provide something for a peephole punter to be voyeuristic about. Annoyed at being blocked in to the corridor, she surveyed the scene and gave helpful advice.
‘You’ll never get it out that way; the chaps who brought it pulled it up through the window on ropes.’
‘Now she tells us,’ said one of the men, wiping a streaming brow.
‘Well I’m not your bleeding guv’nor,’ said Mae. ‘How long’s the damn thing going to be stuck here?’
After a short conference, the two men decided that the only thing to be done was to break the jukebox down into smaller pieces. The man on the door side was the obvious choice to go and fetch a big hammer.
‘God knows where from!’ he muttered as he went.
Mae came and conveyed all this news to me and the expectant voyeur in the kitchen. Seeing his forlorn expression, the ever-resourceful Mae went down and chatted up the marooned removal man as a convenient stand-in.
So Mae got herself another client, the peephole functioned again and everyone was happy, except the owner of the jukebox – although it hadn’t done the hearts and coronets on the wall much good either.
Twenty-Four
Mae always spent her Sundays at home, washing her hair and her undies and lying around reading the News of the World and the People – newspapers that served the underworld as trade papers. She often arrived on Mondays, flapping a copy and chortling over how the doings of someone she knew had been reported before giving me the real story. I think Sundays bored her; she had no hobbies or real interests and Tony wasn’t the most exhilarating of companions. She lived for her work and looked on time off as an irritating interruption to her life.
Most of the girls felt that way and a lot of them preferred not to take time off at all. Because I was known to live alone, my Sundays were treated as ‘on call’ time; I was often asked to deputise for those maids who had deserted their posts in favour of their families. Actually, I found these one-day stands quite pleasant; Sundays were very quiet for business in Soho; there was no real work involved and plenty of time to chat. Besides, having a pretext to leave my room was welcome to me. I still hadn’t so much as opened a tube of paint, or drawn a line on my single precious canvas. If I was being fiercely honest with myself, any thoughts I’d once had of becoming a painter had become mere delusions. Being able to leave my room, lock my door, and go out to work at least provided me with a tangible reason for not touching paint or canvas that day.
Unlike my weekdays with Mae, my ‘Sunday girls’ didn’t tend to hustle on the street. Maybe the shadow of religion prevented them or, more likely, they were very obvious in the quiet streets and they resented being viewed as a tourist attraction. Working on m
y day off, I at least allowed myself the indulgence of being particular about my employers. Some, I found, were not to my taste.
The angelic-looking Lou, for example: I went to her once and once only. As the only nymphomaniac on the game that I ever met, she would spend at least an hour with each client, which left very little socialising time and made the day drag for me. As if this wasn’t dull enough, she expended so much energy on sex that in the time between, she was in a state of permanent lethargy.
Like most of the girls, Lou was quite happy to regard herself as bisexual, but she was predatory with it. I had first-hand experience of this. After all, I had no boyfriend, so what was I? She would regard me coyly and invitingly through fluttering curled eyelashes, but to no avail. After my Sunday stint with her, she phoned to say she’d got a rich male all-nighter who wanted an orgy with two girls; Mae accepted the job and Lou asked if I’d like to tag along as referee. I thanked her kindly and said no.
It was some time later that Lou’s voracious appetite for sex was to save the day for us. I found Mae counselling a genteel woman, looking distinctly nervous, who had made her way up to the flat after extreme hesitation. She haltingly told us that her husband, whom she’d adored, had died two years earlier. The loneliness was terrible, but she’d coped with that, up to a point, by taking up work in charitable organisations. We waited patiently while she told us all this. Perhaps Mae had already guessed what she was leading to. The woman had, she said, always been a very passionate person, and had reached a point where she could no longer abstain from sex. To practise it alone was abhorrent to her, and the prospect of sex with another man still felt like a betrayal. Lamely, and with some embarrassment, she concluded that perhaps she could find a woman she could visit from time to time.
‘It might just work out for me,’ she said. ‘I don’t know what else to do.’
We restored her with a cup of tea, and Mae stopped everything, took her round and introduced her to Lou.
