by Barbara Tate
I realised that I was now, of my own volition, bringing an important and valuable phase of my life to an end. I knew I had to leave Soho before I weakened and my desire to paint grew weaker and eventually died. I knew that if I allowed that to happen I would have forfeited something immeasurably wonderful.
When Rita next came into the kitchen, I was unpinning my calendar from the wall.
‘Chickened out, then, have you?’ she observed drily.
‘Chickened out,’ I affirmed.
But it wasn’t true. I was ready to take on my own life, on my own terms. After twenty-one years in my family’s loveless care, and two in Soho’s riotous embrace, I had finally learned to walk on my own two feet. I had grown up. I knew what I wanted and I was determined to get it.
After our last day’s work together, Rita and I stowed all our possessions into holdalls, leaving the canes hanging on the wall for the next occupier. Then we locked the door and, for the last time, picked our way together through the treacherous, malodorous mews. Rita waved to me from her taxi and said she would phone me. I watched until she was out of sight, then turned and walked away, feeling suddenly desolate.
Somehow, I didn’t feel like going straight home. I wanted to get one more whiff of this life that I was leaving and what better swansong, I thought, than a visit to Tearaway Tina.
When I got to Tina’s, news of Rita’s impending ‘retirement’ had reached her ears. She sent her maid for cigarettes, and the moment the door was shut behind her, spun round to me.
‘Now look,’ she said, ‘I’ve been thinking. I could easy get shot of that old cow and you could come here to work. How about that? Us would have some lovely fun.’
I thought of the ‘old cow’ and how she did all Tina’s washing, prepared her meals and, in general, clucked over her like an anxious hen.
‘It’s a very kind thought, Tina,’ I answered. ‘But I’m going straight.’
‘You must be mad,’ she said, disbelievingly. ‘What you going to do?’
‘Paint,’ I told her.
She was so astonished that she leapt off her chair. ‘You going to what?’ she shrieked.
I feasted my eyes on her. There she stood, in fishnet stockings, French corsets and a flimsy short black negligee. Her legs were wide apart, her hands on her hips. She was staring back at me from under multiple layers of eyelashes, her vermilion lips curled in derision. She was corrupt, vicious, evil, rotten to the marrow of her bones – but so magnificent. I found myself sending up a prayer that some day I would be given the insight and the skill to be able to transfer what I now beheld on to canvas.
‘And what the bloody hell are you going to paint?’ she shrilled, moving into an even more devastatingly primitive pose.
Something like a great smile of excitement and joy welled up from the soles of my feet. I felt it rush through my body and almost explode in my head.
‘Why,’ I said. ‘With any luck, perhaps someone like you.’
Thirty-Six
My professional association with that life was over, but it would have needed a much stronger will than mine to make a complete break, and I didn’t see any necessity to do so.
At first it was quite impossible to settle down fully to my new regime as a painter. I would down tools at the least provocation and make my way back to the dim little streets and obscure cafés where my old friends hung out.
Rita – whose back really had been done in by the sagging old bed and who had now been advised to sleep on a board – finally had her baby. It was a boy, and he was the image of Tom.
I hoped she would find sufficient contentment and happiness to retire. I was both surprised and relieved when one day she phoned to tell me that she had decided to go straight.
‘Rita – that’s wonderful,’ I said. ‘I never thought you’d do it.’
‘No, neither did I, mate. And what d’you think I’m going do now? I’ll give you three guesses.’
‘I give up. Tell me.’
‘I’m going to run a clip-joint,’ she said. ‘I’ve been told they’re bleeding gold mines.’
Sadly for her, Tom was arrested one night with his pockets full of objects that were not rightfully his. He was given nine years ‘hard’, and later, Rita was herself arrested for receiving and sentenced to three years in Holloway.
I heard snippets of news – that Cindy was still with her ponce, Mario; that aristocratic Anne was still playing the lady in her prim little parlour and Fiona was continuing to have trouble with her epileptic maid; Lulu was still creating distress and havoc in her orbit and Jessie was in debt as always. Candy, a drug addict, died – as did poor Treesa, who slashed her wrists one lonely night. Old Hilda, permanently drunk, was living on handouts from the other girls. Benzy Nell had disappeared – it was rumoured she had forgotten to about-turn at the end of her beat and had gone marching on until she vanished over a cliff at the coast. Tina also disappeared into limbo – although some said it was Manchester.
Gradually I became more engrossed in my painting. I trotted round all the galleries, studying the ‘greats’, and took further courses at art school. When my savings ran out, I did any old part-time job to tide me over and painted in every spare minute. In short, I became dedicated. Now and again my longing for the bright lights would overwhelm me and I would take a trip to town, but to economise, I’d had my telephone removed. As a result, my links with Soho became more and more tenuous.
I could see enough, however, to know that things there were changing. A Royal Commission was set up to report on prostitution, with recommendations for abating the practice, and the results caused shock waves through the streets I used to know so well. Because of the commission’s findings, the government devised a law that would make it virtually impossible for girls to solicit men in the streets any longer. It was, in effect, so tough that even a smile from an upstairs window might be construed as soliciting, and sufficient cause for arrest.
For a while before this law came into force, there was considerable anxiety in the trade, and doubts were voiced everywhere as to whether it would be possible to continue at all; but when the blow finally struck, and zero hour arrived, the ready wits of those involved swiftly found ways and means to carry on. The word ‘Model’ was scribbled roughly on to pieces of card and pinned to the open street doors of the various gaffs; and any shopkeeper possessing a glass advertisement case became richer by virtue of that asset, as, for rocketing fees they pinned up postcards bearing the telephone numbers of young ladies available for French lessons, corrective therapy, soothing massage and other equally ambiguous services.
During this period of adjustment, there was a fair amount of gloom and hardship, but justice was done too, in that the girls who had been conscientious enough to always please their clients and had acquired plenty of regulars were the least hard hit.
One rather unpleasant side effect caused by the apparent disappearance of the prostitutes was that men desperately hunting round the streets looking for them began accosting any ordinary women who paused to look in shop windows. But gradually the dispirited and aimlessly wandering men learned the new order of things, and began to understand what the word ‘Model’ meant, and in no time at all they were galloping happily up and down the numerous stair-cases again.
Soon the furore died down, and everything was very much as it had been before; except that now Soho looked clean, for the girls had been, metaphorically speaking, swept under the mat.
Then, as though all this outward purity were anathema to the very fibre of Soho, clip joints began springing up everywhere. Along with these, strip clubs began to burgeon, and gradually everyone settled down to the new lifestyle and eventually forgot the days of walking the streets.
It was only by chance, some while later, that I heard that Mae had married a grocer. At first I couldn’t believe the news, but everyone confirmed it. She had left the West End and was serving behind the counter of her husband’s shop in the suburbs. Several girls had even taken taxi ride
s out there to verify this phenomenon. By all accounts, they returned rather speechless and a trifle sorry for her.
My own life, away from my old habits and friends, gradually became ever busier, crammed with personal events and endeavours. Time was at a premium and not to be wasted on luxuries. All superfluous activities had to be pared back. Sadly, Soho and my friends there fell victim to this economy.
The antipathy I had always felt for men had increased enormously during my time as a maid, and I had become totally sickened by what I saw as universal sweaty sexual eagerness. When at last I met a man who was able to approach the subject of sex with light-hearted bonhomie, I was so impressed that I married him. In due course we had a daughter. It was a perfect marriage.
My relations with my own family never became warm, but I did start to resume occasional contact with my mother and half-sisters. Now that I had a family of my own, I felt I had to try. My grandmother, however, I never saw again, nor ever wanted to.
The years passed with frightening rapidity. My daughter grew up and herself had a daughter. I achieved some success and a few distinctions as a painter, and took great pleasure in knowing that reproductions of my paintings hung in thousands of homes. It was what I had always dreamt of when I got that first job, painting silk. Finally all my hard work was bearing fruit. Despite being immersed in a different world, I did what I could to set my Soho life down in paint. Two of my favourite pictures – which I have never sold and never will – are one of Mae and Rabbits, and another of Tearaway Tina, she of the magnificent appearance and the rotten heart. I have never yet painted the perfect picture, but I am only eighty-three, so there’s hope for me yet. Perhaps I shall find success in some afterlife.
And then one day: a minor miracle. A small hand-written poster caught my eye outside a Spiritualist church and stirred up poignant old memories. The next visiting psychic medium was, apparently, none other than Rita. It was over twenty years since I’d last set eyes on her.
Nothing could have been more ludicrous than the thought of Rita turning spiritual; I would have thought she was more likely to be running an opium den in Wapping. I laughingly told myself that lots of people bore the same surname and it just had to be a different person. Nevertheless, the nostalgia seeped through, and I made a mental note of the time and date.
The advertised night arrived and I sat in the small hall along with about fifty others. The door near the little platform opened and the leader of the church emerged, followed by the visiting medium – and glory be, it was Rita!
I was quite overcome. I leaned back with a sigh as her now bespectacled eyes swept round the hall and inevitably met my astounded gaze. For a moment her expression was just as astonished as my own, but she recovered swiftly and took her place at the rostrum with no further sign of recognition. Her dark hair was slightly streaked with grey; it was cut short and cemented into a prim permanent wave, and her make-up was so pale as to have hardly been worth the trouble of putting on. The voluptuous, mountainous curves of the bosom that had once been the pride of Soho had been mercilessly subdued and then hidden behind the façade of a neat grey woollen dress with a white Peter Pan collar.
She led the congregation in prayers and then proceeded to give them messages from their departed loved ones. She surely can’t be sincere, I thought, but everyone was lapping up the things she said. The cockney twang had gone and so had the belligerence. If anything, she was now a little refined.
‘Ooh, she’s good,’ whispered the woman next to me. ‘Have you heard her before?’
I nodded.
Just before the meeting ended, Rita pointed to me. ‘Will that lady there stay behind afterwards, please? There’s something I’d like to say to her in private.’
It was some time before we were alone, for it seemed that everyone wanted to have private words with Rita. At last we found ourselves walking away from the church.
‘Feel like a bite to eat?’ she asked. ‘I’m starving. I have to fast before a meeting or else Spirit can’t come through.’
We went to a little café nearby, where she ordered a simple omelette. She eyed my chop with distaste.
‘You ought to give that up, you know,’ she said. ‘You’ll never get Spirit while you go on eating meat.’ She’d given it up years ago, she said, and all intoxicants – even wine – for the same reason. ‘That means no more Beaujolais,’ she said with a grin. For a moment, the old Rita peeped out from behind her eyes.
I laughed, then said, ‘But even Jesus approved of wine.’
‘That’s as maybe,’ she answered grimly, and the old Rita fled.
‘What about sex?’ I asked.
The word seemed to shock her, and she lowered her eyes to her plate.
‘No good at all. Spirit has to have a pure vessel to work through.’
This meeting had a powerfully unsettling effect on me. It evoked memories – never really far below the surface – of old friends and old events. I felt restless, sad and full of nostalgia; I thought about the past incessantly and found it hard to concentrate on my work. After one strenuous but unrewarding day at the easel, I could contain myself no longer. As usual, my poor husband bore the brunt of my outburst.
‘All those fabulous characters and the things they did,’ I said. ‘No record of them – nothing. I can’t bear the thought of them eventually having no existence.’
As always when I was upset, he gave me his complete attention. He thought for a while, then said, ‘Why not take a sort of sabbatical and write about them?’
The suggestion struck me as unassailable in its rightness. I said yes straight away.
I decided I needed to drink in the atmosphere once more and wander my beloved Soho streets. When at last I made my trip, I was amazed. Coventry Street and Charing Cross Road, where they bordered Soho, had augmented their gaiety with more amusement arcades and ice-cream kiosks, and many small boutiques selling anything from baubles to next year’s fashions. A goodly sprinkling of Indian shops were easily spotted by their open-air racks full of fluttering cheesecloth garments and vivid silk scarves, their insides filled with colourful gowns and saris and Afghan coats, and the windows a tumble of glittering bracelets, belts and chains.
I strode past them into the hinterland, only to be even more surprised. Soho had certainly thrown the covers off. The clip joints and strip clubs were still there – the latter even more profuse – but the discreet façades were gone and the tiny photo displays of strippers had blossomed into huge enlargements covering the outside walls. There were sex shops, massage parlours and sauna baths. Here and there, two or three shops had been knocked into one and the premises converted into cinemas that exhibited lurid photographs advertising films with even more lurid titles. Soho had turned into a great, greedy, grasping hand. I found myself filling with a sense of angry disgust.
Was this garish, pornographic panorama, I asked myself, visually more moral and respectable than the small groups of prostitutes one used to see? Was it for this that the girls had been pushed out of sight as unseemly? Why, in comparison with this, the whores in their tailored and stylish clothes would have seemed eminently respectable!
Moodily I plodded around until I discovered that habit had led me to the locality of the cut-price shop from which I must have bought at least two hundred gross of Durex. I recalled how once my footsteps had lagged in traversing this street, anxious to delay my embarrassing errand. Now I hastened, eager to see if something remained of the things I had known.
The shop was still there and looked exactly the same. The large and blatant fascia that had once seemed so audacious was almost staid by comparison with the rest of what I had seen. For old times’ sake I crossed the threshold, using the need for a lipstick as an excuse to enter.
‘Hullo. How are you, then?’ demanded a voice from the back of the shop, and the short, dapper, slim man came into sight from a quarter of a century before.
Then a voice from behind me said, ‘Back in the fold, then, are you?’ and t
here was the short, dapper, stocky man, returning from an errand.
At first I was almost speechless with surprise and pleasure at seeing them, but we soon fell to sharing our annoyance about the changes around us. Finally I bought my lipstick, and as I reached across the counter for it, I was blasted full in the face – as of old – by a spray of powerful perfume. As I left, I recalled that once upon a time, I had been ashamed of leaving that trail of scent in my wake, but now it didn’t seem to matter. Now, it was like a banner billowing triumphantly behind me. I was exultant that something had survived.
My spirits revived, I felt cheerful enough to go hunting for some ginseng, and made my way to where there had once been one or two Chinese shops. The ginseng bought, I had taken no more than a dozen paces when my eye alighted on the name ‘Mae’ written on a piece of cardboard pinned on the side of a doorpost. Underneath was a small visiting card: ‘M. Roberts, Plumber’.
Thirty-Seven
Past grievances were forgotten in an instant. I shot in through the door and raced up the stairs two at a time. I arrived, panting, on the second floor, where there was a door bearing a much larger piece of cardboard with Mae’s name on it. I rang the bell, and only then did I suddenly feel frightened.
Mae would be in her late fifties now; she might be like old Hilda. I couldn’t bear it. I would rather have remembered her bright and vivid as she had been. Why hadn’t I stopped to think?
