by Barbara Tate
My pride shot up to the roof of my head. I looked at her coldly and turned away.
‘Maybe, one day, you’ll learn who you can trust,’ I told her over my shoulder. Then, ‘Can you get someone to take my place by tomorrow?’
Thankfully, there wasn’t much of the evening left; the atmosphere was too strained to be endured much longer. Several times Mae looked as though she wanted to say something, but she didn’t. After locking up, we said good night and parted company. In the taxi going home, I burst into tears.
Thirty-Two
A few evenings later, the telephone rang about four times in one hour, and I finally took a deep breath and picked up the receiver. It was not Mae, but Rita. Her raucous voice came bellowing through to me with all the comforting reassurance of a Wagnerian overture.
‘You poor bloody sod,’ she said. ‘I’ve heard all about it. What surprises me is how you put up with it all for as long as you did.’
My gratitude bubbled up and I told her that she was like a tonic to me. She brushed my words aside and continued:
‘I told Mae straight, she must be potty believing anything that bleeding Lulu says. One day that girl’s going to end up with her throat cut, you mark my words. If it wasn’t for all them pills Mae takes, she’d never have been took in. Hasn’t she bleeding changed? I’d never have believed it.’
Her tone deepened confidentially. ‘But here, what do you think? That bastard Tony has taken her out of the flat and put her in one that’s got a maid that goes with it. That’s so she won’t get no ideas about having you back. But listen . . .’ Here, her voice gathered all the gusto and dramatic effect of someone who has left the best bit until last. ‘She’s going to marry him next week – special licence, she says. It would have to be a very special bleeding licence before I’d marry that sod. She must want her fucking brains tested.’
She paused while I voiced my surprise at the news, then she burst into full spate again. I was listening merely to the cadences of her voice as it crashed like breakers against my eardrums, when something she said caught my attention once more:
‘So look, I’ve had a smashing idea. I don’t like the flat I’ve got now and I don’t like the bleeding maid that goes with it. If I was to take another flat – I’ve got one lined up – would you come and maid for me?’
I was taken off balance for a moment and didn’t know what to say. I had got on well with Rita during the month when Mae was in hospital and had enjoyed that first Christmas with her, but as she considered sentiment a weakness, I hadn’t realised she was so fond of me. I was surprised and touched that she had taken up cudgels on my behalf and was now prepared to uproot herself to accommodate me.
‘Do you really want us to do that?’ I asked. I realised I was close to tears.
‘Course, mate,’ she answered gruffly.
‘When do we start?’ I asked, breaking into a grin.
I powdered my nose, put on some lipstick and went to meet her, feeling happier than I had for a long while.
Our inspection of the new flat was cursory and routine. Naturally, it was in a state of utter filth, so we decided to give it a good clean before Rita attempted to do any work there. We thought we could get it presentable during the afternoons of the following week, leaving enough time for a quick meal before Rita went on to her old flat for the evening’s hustling.
‘Bleeding nice, isn’t it?’ she remarked. ‘Charring all fucking afternoon and whoring all sodding night. Talk about being a lady of easy virtue – I haven’t seen nuffing easy about it yet.’
The flat was situated at the bottom end of a long, narrow mews that was approached through an archway from a northern Soho street. Nowadays the term ‘mews flat’ conjures up visions of elegance and grace. Our mews was not like that: it was an original murky, Dickensian mews, a Jack the Ripper alley, unlit even by gaslight. It was monopolised by barrow boys, who at night-time used the old stables to house their portable stalls, along with their unsold fruit and veg. In the morning, before first light, these street traders brought fresh produce from nearby Covent Garden and reorganised their displays. They threw wrappings, wooden boxes and yesterday’s bad fruit on to the cobbles, where they awaited the midnight gangs of refuse men. By the time we arrived each day, there was a mash of slowly putrefying vegetation amongst the debris, overlaid by that pungent, winey smell of rotting oranges. Even now, the faintest whiff of fermenting oranges takes me back once more to that place. It makes me think of picking my way through the puddles and filth, between the blackened and decaying buildings, up to Rita’s flat.
After dark, when we were pretty much its only inhabitants, the mews had a sinister quality. Lit only by the feeble light from the street beyond the distant archway, the puddles took on a baleful gleam and the unhoused barrows and piles of boxes had the appearance of crouching, furtive monsters. Rita bought herself a powerful and heavy flashlight to serve her during her repeated excursions to the world beyond the archway.
There was a bright new lock on the door of our flat, gleaming like a jewel on the leprous surface. Immediately inside, there was a steep, narrow flight of bare wooden stairs. These gave out on to a large room carpeted in red and furnished with heavy Victorian furniture – well abused, but polishable – and a double bed with brass knobs and a deep sag in the middle. Rita later claimed it had done her back in for life.
Reluctantly she forwent a repeat of the operating-theatre sterility of her previous flats. With a few pretty shaded lamps – bought under pressure from me – and a judicious plant here and there, the place looked quite nice. Through a curtained doorway at the other side of the bedroom you entered the kitchen, which justified that title only inasmuch as it held an old stone sink – an everlasting attraction for cockroaches – and an ancient black iron gas stove. The floor here was just plain boards, and a much-splintered tea chest served as a table. At the side of this was an old Windsor chair with part of its back rest missing and the remaining spokes waiting their turn to do someone damage. Best of all, through a door at the end of the kitchen was a real toilet. Almost the first thing we did was to buy a pretty toilet roll holder, some coloured paper and a lavatory brush. With this priceless luxury in our midst, the future had to be all right, we reckoned.
We draped a chequered tablecloth over the tea chest and, during the first tea break of our actual residency, debated whether we might prepare a roast in the antiquated oven. Everything seemed very rosy, and as we sat eating our meal after Rita’s first day’s trial run, we were filled with a sense of well-being and of bright new vistas opening before us. Rita even bought a couple of canes and hung them on a nail in the bedroom.
‘They’re to make you feel more at home,’ she announced sheepishly.
Apparently she was determined that this time she was going to make a bomb and set herself up in a proper business. It was a nice thought and we both let ourselves believe it.
Rita and I had always got on pretty well together, but the fact that we were now a permanent team improved on that and created a closer rapport between us. Our days were spent in the relaxed and easy intimacy of established friendship. I even dared to criticise her treatment of the clients.
‘Think I can’t be nice to ’em, eh? You just wait and see, mate,’ she declared.
Knowing that I could hear every word through the curtained kitchen doorway, she became treacly sweet to the men for my benefit, loudly admiring their suits, their physiques and their looks, no matter how ghastly their appearance. Amazingly, no one ever seemed to have the slightest idea that she was lying.
She certainly could have made a bomb if she had really applied herself but that was not Rita’s way. She was quite content to earn the rent, fund her leisure activities and buy small luxuries. On days that were running with liquid gold, days when any other girl would have kept going, Rita would say, ‘Come on, mate, let’s sling our hook and go and have a nice salt beef sandwich.’
She was mad keen on Jewish food and taught me to like it too. In
fact, it is Rita, Cindy and Tina who I have to thank for my now cosmopolitan tastes in food. Rita introduced me to Chinese and Jewish cuisine, Cindy to the delights of Indian cooking and Tina to all the Latin specialities. It’s strange to think, that Mae, who as a person was the most individualistic of the lot, stuck doggedly to sausage and mash or chicken and chips.
So it was that, on busy Saturday evenings, when all the other girls were working like robots, Rita and I would be sitting in the Nosh Bar in Great Windmill Street, shovelling down delicious slabs of hot salt beef and latkas, gazing out at the scandalous Windmill Theatre with its constant queue of slightly furtive men.
She was very proud of her home and happy to invite me round to admire it. We often sat in front of her new lighted-coals-effect electric fire, drinking gin, whilst everyone else in the West End was grafting.
Since I had first met her, Rita had been married and divorced again, but she still went under the name of her notorious first husband, who was now doing time – as, indeed, was her second ex-husband. They both happened to land up in the same prison and, having her in common, had become friends.
‘Oh well,’ she said. ‘At least I know where they both are now, and that’s more than I could ever do before they was nicked.’
Rita’s love life was always careless during the periods between husbands, and she invariably chose men younger than herself. She ruled them with a rod of iron and treated them more like sons than lovers. There was something of the deadly siren about her, and all her husbands and lovers gravitated irresistibly towards prison. The clang of the great doors marked the end of each romance, but the current young man, Eddy, appeared to have a charmed life. Consequently, he was outstaying his welcome.
Arriving at Rita’s house in the early hours, while we were still talking and sipping gin after a day’s work, he would dump all his swag on the carpet at Rita’s feet. Then, fastidiously and imperiously, like a dowager at a jumble sale, she would pick everything over, admiring some items and condemning others. Mostly, she condemned:
‘What a load of rubbish! Where’s all the bleeding Georgian teapots and carriage clocks these days?’
Her bark was worse than her bite, and when all the ‘junk’ was stowed away, fabulous things were produced from her new fridge. We munched our way through chicken and smoked salmon while Eddy told us of hair-raising hazards encountered during his nocturnal endeavours, before swaggering off to bed.
‘Silly little bastard,’ she said sourly, almost to his retreating back. ‘Gets on my bleeding wick. He don’t know Ming from Minge. Why can’t he get nicked like all the others did?’
Though I was becoming settled at Rita’s, I still missed Mae. I felt angry with her. I hated Tony and the vicious effect that he, along with the avenging angels of Drugs and Debt, had had on her. At the same time, I was too proud to seek a reconciliation. I knew that if I had gone round and made some of the noises expected of me, Mae and I would instantly have embraced, accompanied by tears, laughter, promises and tea. Yet Tony and I had fought over her, and Tony had won. A friendship carried out under his gloating eyes would have been no friendship at all. So although I missed her, I let her go. My life was moving on.
Thirty-Three
After working with Mae for so long, my life with Rita was delightfully peaceful, with not even the swish of a cane to break the tranquillity. She was terribly strait-laced in some ways. According to her, if a man wanted ‘six of the best’, she would scornfully condemn him as ‘kinked up to the eyebrows’. The props she had bought to make me feel at home remained merely decorative and were unused. I was thankful.
Eyeing the stove one day, Rita remembered that as a child, she’d loved bread pudding, and she suddenly developed a craving for it. Until we both got sick of it, she prepared a bread pudding at home each day, bringing it for me to cook at work. For several weeks, the clients’ nostrils were assailed with the homely smell of hot spice and currants.
For quite some time, the new flat and the bread pudding kept her mind off the irritating boyfriend. But as the novelty faded, her boredom with her love life increased and she started speculating hopefully on Eddy’s lack of fidelity. One evening she got a really hot tip. She had been told in roughly what area he might be found, and after reaching it and instructing the driver to keep circling until she told him to stop, she saw Eddy walking along the street with his arm round the shoulders of a young redhead.
‘That’s it! I got you!’ she said jubilantly. ‘Look hard, Babs. Remember you’ve seen them too, just so we don’t got no fucking arguments from him.’
With that, she called to the driver, ‘Home, James, and don’t spare the horses.’ We hadn’t gone far when Rita decided on a change of tactics. She said she wanted to find out the girl’s address; I demurred.
‘Oh, do leave off!’ she said. ‘I’m not going to bleeding bash the poor little madam. I’m glad she’s taken him off my hands.’
It wasn’t difficult to find out where she lived; Rita had the information in no time at all. Still in the same taxi, we sped back to Rita’s house, where she went rushing round collecting all her newly appointed ex-boyfriend’s belongings and stuffing them into boxes. I helped her to stow them in the waiting taxi, and we then drove to the ‘fancy piece’s’ address, dumped them outside her door and got back in the cab.
‘Right, mate,’ chortled Rita, hugging herself with glee. ‘Let them put that in their pipes and smoke it – and I hope it don’t choke ’em.’ Then she turned and slapped me on the knee. ‘And now,’ she said, ‘we’re going to celebrate.’
From then on, Rita thoroughly enjoyed the freedom of her manless state, but also took great pleasure in choosing her next mate.
Wherever she went, there was much flirting, ogling and innuendo between her and any unattached males present. Rita loved every minute of it, but conveyed the impression that she barely tolerated these vulgar advances. Surprisingly enough, her indifferent responses seemed to have no chastening effects whatsoever. After every snub, the competitors for her favour bobbed up again and again like cheerful cherries in a bowl of water. After all, Rita was a beautiful, wealthy woman. The magic of her first husband’s name still invested her with a kind of glamour in the eyes of lesser crooks, and her little girl was a distinct asset: to be stepfather to the great man’s daughter was tantamount to wearing a lifebelt in these turbulent Soho seas. Remorselessly, destiny was jostling Rita towards husband number three.
One day, after one of our grand ‘blow-outs’ at our favourite Chinese restaurant, she suggested a bottle of Beaujolais. We had finished our meal and the bottle, and had an amusing time getting back to the flat, where we flung ourselves on to the sagging double bed. We must have fallen asleep; the next thing I knew, Rita, obviously still drunk, was leaning up on one elbow, prodding me awake with a bony forefinger.
‘Fine fuckin’ maid you’ve turned out to be, letting me sleep half the night! Come on, I’ve decided I’m gonna get myself a bloke today.’
Still slightly tipsy with wine, we sallied forth to a place called Leo’s – the most favoured thieves’ kitchen of them all. On the ground floor, ordinary mortals sat amidst tropical plants with concealed lighting, but the in-crowd used the basement. It smelt like a damp air-raid shelter, there were no plants and the electric lighting was harsh and crude. It was open all night, and for many who went there, it was the nearest thing they had to a home.
There were thieves and crooks there of every denomination. The girls with them were mostly clip-joint hostesses and mysteries. Prostitutes seldom went there, as they considered themselves to be a cut above this rabble. Rita’s arrival caused something of a stir.
She had been gradually sieving through the candidates for her affections and had ended up with a shortlist of three; it was pot luck which one of them got to her first. There was not long to wait: no sooner had we sat than one of the chosen arrived at our table.
‘Wotcher,’ he said. ‘How’s tricks?’
And with that, the
romance commenced.
His name was Tom, and he wasn’t quite so young as Rita’s previous lovers. He was large and cheerful, with that honest, candid gaze that is the successful rogue’s most valuable stock-in-trade. His eyes were a warm brown, and he had neat, well-oiled chestnut hair; his clothes were smart and his tie bore a discreet monogram. His speech was heavily larded with rhyming slang and his gestures were virile, with lots of muscle-flexing. It was clear that he was out to impress.
Rita reacted to this mating display with demure coquetry and fluttering eyelashes. After about a quarter of an hour, I couldn’t stand any more of it and went home to sleep off the residual effects of the Beaujolais. The following day Rita was all smiles; Tom had thawed the snow maiden to a greater degree than I would have thought possible.
At the beginning of May, she married him. Although this was her third stab at matrimony, she made as much of it as if it had been her first. No expense was spared to make it a great and memorable occasion. Rita was opulently lovely in velvet and fur, and with her little girl in a smart dark suit, the couple appeared to be the epitome of hard-working honesty. After the registry office, we moved to a hall adjoining an East End pub, where a band played until the early hours of the morning and the booze flowed non-stop. A good time was had by all, and Rita, flushed with happiness and with sparkling eyes, confided to me that this time she was sure it was for keeps.
Afterwards, she found it difficult to settle down to hustling again and the clients began to suffer once more. She took a lot of time off to be with Tom, so when rent nights came round, there was never enough in the kitty to pay.
‘Your heart isn’t in it any more,’ I said. ‘Why don’t you retire? Then you could have a proper married life with Tom.’
She was scandalised. ‘What? Me chuck the game? I wouldn’t know what to do with myself. I’d go spare!’ Then she looked at me with genuine affection and added, ‘Anyway, what would you do if I went straight?’
