you knew it he was putting his big hands round my hips and saying, “Rhythm rhythm, you’ve got to work with the soil, shoving in the seeds this way and this” – and all the time, Harold, he’d be behind me pushing away while pretending to apprentice me, pushing so rudely until I could feel something that wasn’t a dibber-stick at all.’
‘Rose,’ I said, ‘I am so sorry. There is no reckoning the base appetites of men. But I gather, from your father and from your appearance, that your stay at home does not fulfil you either?’
‘Bored, Harold,’ she said. ‘Bored bored bored. I’m so dull at home I could cry. And I do, every day.’
Her beautiful eyes were shining with liquid salt as she clutched my arm.
‘We had such laughs together, going to the music halls in the old days, meeting them funny people you used to introduce me to. Them days, I felt I could do anything because you cared for me. When we went around together, I felt like a real person. I used to think, so bloody what if the showgirls look at me sideways and ask, “Who’s she?” and “Who invited her backstage, into this bar or this hotel?” I could stand all their fish-eyed looks because I knew, well, at least the rector thinks I’m someone worth knowing. At least he talks to me like I got half a brain. I could endure anything because I knew you loved me.’
This was a little hard to take. Had I really told her such a thing, in those words? Of course I was fond of her and had taken her to shows, as I do so many of my young charges, to invigorate their sense of the wondrous drama that might one day fill their lives. But she has clearly been nursing a private delusion. I could not speak of love to her. I am a married man, the pastor to a village of dependants and a city of lost or about-to-be-lost souls. Love is an irrelevance in all this. Her solitude has invented a love between us.
‘Rose,’ I said, ‘let us strike a deal. You must pull yourself together, read from the Book of Job in the Bible and stop abandoning yourself to misery. In turn I will promise to take you away from here and find some employment, no, some adventure, that will return a spring to your step.’
She looked at me sadly. ‘I’d give anything to get away, Harold. But you won’t send me back to the gardens, will you? I couldn’t stand that.’
‘My dear Rose,’ I said, almost laughing, ‘I will not send you anywhere. I am no evil slave-driver, like Mr Svengali in Du Maurier’s book. Together, we shall find some employment that will fulfil and gratify you, until you are sufficiently invigorated to do something more cheerful with your appearance and dress. In three months, you shall be living in pleasant rented rooms in, I don’t know, Pimlico or Bloomsbury, with fresh flowers in the hall and a white linen cloth on the table –’
‘I’d love the white tablecloths,’ she whispered.
‘– and at the close of day, Rose, we shall meet as friends in the old delightful way, and visit the amusements of Shaftesbury Avenue and go on excursions to Tooting Common and Greenwich Park, and walk in the sunshine and watch the nannies and the bicyclists. You shall make new friends, and show off your finery on picnics. And you shall, perhaps, help me with my work sometimes when your own duties are not too arduous.’
‘I will, Harold, you must count on it,’ she said with new energy (my strategy was working better than I could have hoped). ‘For there is no kinder, sweeter man than you, and I would like to help with the poor misfortunates.’
As I left, I reflected that nothing guaranteed her rehabilitation more than her blindness to her own status as the most dismal girl of my acquaintance. Once a fallen woman starts to feel sympathy for the wretchedness of others, she is on the path to recovery.
I did not seek out her parents. I left with a glow of satisfaction, that I could restore the meanest of God’s creatures to life by a few simple promises.
Outside, I recalled that Barbara’s address – 14 Queen Street, Camden – was only a few roads away, and I made the journey in short order. No traffic came or went (it was well after midnight). It was an ugly street of brick tenements. The moon hung above a shut-up public house, the Greyhound – and a single gas lamp at either end of the street illuminated the dismal flagstones and doorways. I found number 14, a common lodging house on three storeys, with an array of eight doorbells, beside each one a name on a dirty oblong of paper. The lowest one read simply, ‘BARBARA’. Impetuously, I pressed the bell. A muffled jangle sounded inside the ground-floor window. Moments passed, a feeble light flicked on and was as quickly extinguished. Voices could be heard, one girlish and querulous, one male and indignant. I stood, inches from the window, uncertain as to how to proceed. When all had been quiet for minutes, I rapped softly on the window.
‘Barbara?’
The reply was instant and unwelcoming. ‘Just piss off, will you? It’s one in the bloody morning.’
It was she. Miss Harris. I recalled her invitation to call ‘any time’, and was, frankly, disappointed. Seeing a crack in the curtains, I put my face to the glass, in the hope of perhaps alerting her to my presence.
Abruptly, the right-hand curtain twitched aside. A large black face looked out. The moonlight bounced off white teeth and the enormous whites of his eyes. Discretion was the better part of valour. I fled away.
London 12 September 1930
Visited Lady Fenella Royston-Smith. Her suite at Charing Cross Hotel is even more sumptuous than the one at the Ritz – which palatial address she has abandoned, pro tempore, after some altercation with the Food and Beverages staff over some detail of diet.
‘Onions, Harold, they would serve onions in every dish that appeared before me. There was no escaping the pungent under-taste in every soup, every ragout and roast, every luncheon omelette and teatime savoury. I told them, time and again, “No onions, not in casserole nor mixed grill,” but they would persist in their sickening, Frenchified obsession. I told Mr Ross, the general manager, onions do not agree with me, that my nervous metabolism cannot digest the damned things, that they bring up the colonic flux and leave me prostrate for hours on the chaise longue. Yet would they heed my simple requirements?’
‘It must be very troublesome, Fenella,’ I concurred.
‘Troublesome! Nobody knows the torments I suffer. The other day, in St Bride’s – a memorial service for Lady Henchard’s late husband – I was so crippled with indigestion, I was forced to forsake the family pew and take a turn around the graveyard to regain my composure.’
Lady R – S is a handsome woman and a steady benefactor of my work, but she can sometimes offer too much insight for comfort into the workings of her intestines. She enjoys the aristocrat’s conviction that every detail of her personal circumstances must be of interest to her confidants. I am glad to be one of this fortunate band, but sometimes the reports of her gastric eructations leave me at a loss, conversationally. (What am I to reply? ‘A huge fart can be a marvellous liberation at such moments, Your Ladyship …’?)
Since her husband, the brigadier, died face down in the mud along with a platoon of doomed infantry somewhere near the Belgian border in 1917, she has devoted herself to good works. A philanthropic soul, she has taken an interest in my Runaway Boys charity for many years. She has a wide social acquaintance with more liquefiable cash than they know what to do with. Without her, and their, monthly disbursements and ad hoc stipends, I could not continue my work among the Fallen. All she wants in return is some elevated literary conversation, and some shared outrage about public immorality.
‘That
