West End Girls: The Real Lives, Loves and Friendships of 1940s Soho and Its Working Girls (36 page)

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 there 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?

The maid opened the door a few inches as I was beginning to turn away.

‘I wanted to see Mae,’ I told her. ‘But if she’s busy, I’ll come back some other time.’

‘No, she’s free. Come in,’ she said, opening the door wider and standing aside. ‘She’s in the bedroom. Just round that corner. Her door’s open.’

Bracing myself, I walked along the short corridor and, turning the corner, arrived at the open bedroom door.

Mae was lying on her stomach on the bed, her feet towards me. There was a grey poodle beside her. She was propped up on her elbows as she flicked through a magazine. Her flared miniskirt was dark against a light sweater. I noted with pleasure and enormous relief that her legs and her figure were as lovely as ever. For Mae, time had stood still.

‘Hey, you know what, Stella?’ she began as she swung round to face me. Her eyes widened with astonishment. ‘Babs!’ she called out at the top of her voice.

She sprang into a kneeling position on the bed and threw her arms wide open. I rushed to her and, with our arms wrapped round one another, we rolled over and over on the bed, laughing like a couple of lunatics. The poodle began yapping and the maid gazed in bewilderment. Eventually we pulled ourselves together and sat up.

‘If you knew where I was, why didn’t you come and see me before, you rotter?’ Mae said. ‘Hey! Put the kettle on, Stella, there’s a dear.’

I began explaining that I’d found her accidentally, on the way out of the Chinese shop. She interrupted me.

‘What is this ginseng? Why haven’t I ever heard of it? Show me.’

I showed her the bottle explaining that I hadn’t tried it before and that I’d heard about it on the radio.

‘Mind if I try one? I could do with a bit of vitality.’

Obviously still mad keen on anything that might pep her up, she tipped half a dozen into her hand and swallowed them.

‘Here,’ she said, rounding on me suddenly. ‘What happened to that bottle of Purple Hearts I gave you to look after? Have you still got them? I’ll have them back.’

I was thunderstruck. ‘But Mae, they’re over twenty-five years old now. I shouldn’t think they’d be safe to take. And anyway, they’re in my museum.’

‘Well, rake ’em out of your fucking museum; they’re hard to come by these days. You know it’d take an atom bomb to finish me off – and that’s only if it made a direct hit.’

We laughed. Marge called out from the next room to say the tea was ready. ‘Come on,’ Mae said. ‘Let’s have it in the sitting room; it’s more comfortable there.’

‘Sitting room, eh? My oh my, things
have
improved!’

‘That’s not all, my dear,’ she said in her ‘haughty’ voice. ‘I’ve got another floor above this that comes in very handy. Come and have a look.’

This upper part of her domain was in the eaves of the building, with sharply sloping ceilings and tiny windows. It was divided into three rooms and minimally furnished. Mae took me from room to room, showing me the assets of the place, like a proud suburban housewife.

In each of two of the rooms a naked man was trussed up on the floor, exhibiting that expression of moroseness and defiance that I remembered so well. Mae went and administered a few vigorous kicks and thumps while she was there, just to keep them happy for a bit longer – and to save her coming up the stairs again. In the third room a figure sat brooding by the window, like the Lady of Shallot.

‘Want a cup of tea with us, Trix?’ Mae asked.

The figure uncoiled itself and stood up. It was a tall, rather hefty man, wearing a black lace peignoir. He was heavily made up and wore an elaborately coiffured black wig and extremely high-heeled marabou-trimmed mules. His hands and arms were sheathed in elbow-length white doeskin gloves overlaid with numerous bangles and bracelets.

‘Don’t mind if I do,’ he replied in a very deep and gravelly cockney voice.

Nothing had changed at all. I glowed inwardly.

‘Does Vera still come?’ I asked.

‘No, love. He got married again and his new wife doesn’t mind him dressing up,’ said Mae, with the satisfaction of a teacher whose pupil has won through to university. ‘No need for me any more: he’s got it made, hasn’t he?’

We descended to the sitting room, which was very comfortably furnished with fitted carpets, easy chairs, a television set, stereo record player and a cocktail cabinet. From this room, a door opened into a nicely appointed kitchen. I congratulated Mae on how pleasant everything was.

‘Oh, it’s not so bad, I suppose,’ she agreed modestly. ‘But I like it nice, ’cos I live here most of the time now.’

‘No husbands or boyfriends?’

Mae went quiet for a moment. ‘Hey, Stella, if anyone comes, tell them to wait.’

In the brighter light in this room, I could now see lines and small sags that time had wrought on Mae’s face. Even so, she looked no more than forty. She gulped her tea and went on talking.

‘My last old man nearly finished me. That was husband number five. I’d learned my lesson by then and never did bung him all the gelt. We seemed okay together, until he forged my signature on a cheque and got everything out of the bank. He pinched pretty much all my jewellery – I had some nice things then – and then he scarpered. I’ve never done it before to anybody but I had him nicked for it.’ She looked contrite. ‘He was a Malt,’ she said. ‘I know you never liked them, but they’ve got something I rather go for.’

‘What happened to Tony?’ I asked.

‘Oh, it’s pitiful, love! You should see him. He works in a tailor’s shop in Shaftesbury Avenue. He’s got a tape measure round his neck and he’s got all fat and half bald. You
said
he’d get fat. I hear he does all his money in, gambling, just like he did all mine.’ She sighed wistfully. ‘Oh, but he was smashing once!’

‘I heard you’d married a grocer and gone straight,’ I said.

‘Oh, I did. I did.’ She burst into laughter and leaned forward to beat a tattoo on my knees in an excess of glee. ‘And what an error of bleeding judgement that was! I thought it was time I got myself a bit of security, and he wasn’t a bad bloke – English. I stuck it out for four years, serving old biddies with lumps of cheese and going to bed with a cup of cocoa at half past ten every night. But then I got so fed up, I thought I’d rather die in the poorhouse than go on like that.’ She paused and thought for a bit, ‘Makes you feel bad, doesn’t it, knowing some people live like that all their lives? Enough to drive you potty.’