without an appointment.
‘I have not called on you for – for that,’ I said. ‘I wish only to talk to you.’
‘Talk to me? What about?’ Under her curly brows, she was suspicious. ‘You’re not from some League of Decency?’
‘I come to see you as a friend, nothing more. A friend who brings you only good news. If you’d let me cross your threshold. I have’ – a brainwave struck me – ‘two small gifts for you, and an urgent message that cannot be conveyed on the street. Where, I notice, we are already becoming the object of enquiring glances.’
Two doors away, a vacuum-cleaner truck had halted and its driver was speaking to a rough-skinned matron in a housecoat and fluffy mules at number 10. Both were watching us with interest.
‘Don’t mind that old sow. You better come in. And if all this stuff about presents and news and messages means that I’ll be staring at some purple monstrosity two minutes from now, I swear to God I’ll bash it with a teaspoon, all right?’
Dazed by this onslaught, I entered the house, through a hallway filled with bicycles – one parked, as it were, halfway up the wall, hanging from two rusting bolts – and was suddenly in her living quarters.
It was a room such as I’d rarely encountered, even among the habitats of the wretched sisterhood. In one corner was a basin surmounted by a tiny mirror hanging from a nail. In the other, a rudimentary cooking hob with two gas burners was all but concealed beneath a junk-yard of blackened saucepans. Nothing, it seemed, had been washed in weeks. Against the wall, a table, stool and triptych mirror was submerged beneath an accumulation of jars, potions and powder receptacles, dead flowers, tickets, theatrical handbills, scent bottles with rubbery squeeze mechanisms. Every square inch of space was tumbled with the debris of decadence. Torn squares of magazine pages, bearing the likeness of Ivor Novello, ragged pieces of muslin veil, random photographs, undergarments in vivid shades of crimson and aquamarine – and across the side wings of the mirror, a long lilac feather boa was draped like tinsel across a Christmas tree from Gamages store.
The word ‘abandon’ hardly did justice to this wasteland of human depravity. Its centrepiece was the bed that lay before the window through which the noonday sunlight weakly shone. It was huge. Most tarts of my acquaintance count themselves fortunate to possess a single bed with a soft mattress and pillow, rather than a hard divan and a bolster. Miss Harris could boast a king-size bed, opulently arrayed with cotton sheets, a satin counterpane, an over-blanket in green chenille, and half a dozen pillows that would not have disgraced a Byzantine seraglio.
‘OK then,’ she said, sitting in the edge of the bed. ‘Where’s these little presents?’
I dug through the inner folds of my coat. From the Gifts Pocket, I located a small bar of Evening in Paris guest soap in a decorative box (special offer, 3/6, Boots pharmacy). In my Perishables Pocket, I found a bar of the new ‘Crunchie’ honeycomb-and-chocolate sweetmeat, and gave both to her with grave formality.
‘I offer you these small tokens of my esteem, Miss Harris, to mark the beginning of what I hope will be a long and fruitful alliance, as together we walk the thorny path towards the light that forever gleams –’
‘That it?’ she said, gazing at her gifts with incredulity. ‘Small is right. I never been given a bar of chocolate by a gentleman before, not since I was ten. As for the soap,’ (she sniffed it suspiciously), ‘you’d be better off cleaning drains with it rather’n giving it to a girl and saying it’s a token of your blooming esteem.’
She looked boldly up at me, her brown curls bouncing on her brow like Medusan snakes. ‘You’re a beginner in this game, int’cha? D’you really think you can bribe people with chocolates and scent?’
I was hurt by her tone. All over London I am known for my generosity. In my missionary work, I have showered the Abigails and Idas, the Jennys and Pennys, with sweet-smelling concoctions and treats, until they welcome my arrival in their lives as children welcome Father Christmas. To call my little votive offering a bribe – it was an outrageous slur on my intentions.
‘Oh, don’t look so sorry for yourself,’ said Barbara. ‘I’ve had worse things given to me by gentlemen. And I do like a bit of chocolate round about now.’ She broke off a piece of the orange-brown snack and popped it in her mouth. ‘And I know you wasn’t offering it to get a screw off me – you just wanna talk, right?’
I nodded.
‘Well, if all you want’s a little chat,’ she concluded, ‘you won’t mind me going back to bed. On me own, I mean.’ Upon which, still clad in her towelling robe, she slipped her legs under the sheets, lay back luxuriantly on the pillows and groaned. I feared that she might have suffered some injury, but it was a moan of sluggardly pleasure, as the chocolate melted on her tongue. Her face on the pillow split into a wide smile, like the Cheshire cat’s. A beam of sunshine chose that moment to intrude through the dirty window and settle on her face in a long rectangle of saturated light, falling from brow to chin, bisecting the line of her mouth to make a perfect Christian crucifix.
She closed her huge brown eyes. ‘Lovely sunny morning,’ she observed. I stood by the bed, gazing in wonder, gripped by an epiphany such as I have seldom encountered. Lines from Keats’s ‘Eve of St Agnes’ settled on my heart – that moment when Porphyro, hidden in his beloved’s chamber, discovers her at her prayers:
Full on this casement shone the wintry moon,
And threw warm gules on Madeline’s fair breast, As down she knelt for heaven’s grace and boon; Rose-bloom fell on her hands, together pressed, And on her silver cross soft amethyst, And on her hair a glory, like a saint: She seemed a splendid angel, newly dressed, Save wings, for Heaven – Porphyro grew faint; She knelt, so pure a thing, so free from mortal taint.
Never was a romantic sentiment less appropriate to its context than Keats’s words to this reeking boudoir, with its debris of flimsy undergarments by my feet, its indescribable cheap vests and grey bloomers half concealed by the huge bed. Yet I gazed at the girl as she lay silently basking on her kohl-stained pillow, illuminated by sunlight that seemed to conspire with the contours of her face and, like Porphyro, I too saw an angel there. No other word would do. Her caramel skin was flawless, her teeth, bared by a sensuous smile, were strong. Her hair, newly washed and dried, lay freed from the cloche-helmeted ropes I had encountered at Marble Arch. It curled in rich profusion around her ears and temples.
‘Are you going to stand there staring at me like I’m an exhibit?’ she asked, her eyes still shut. ‘I’m not a piece of merchandise in a bleedin’ shop, you know.’ She laughed to herself, mirthlessly. ‘Well, I mean, I am if that’s what you’re after. But I’m not here for winder-shopping, all right?’
‘No, Miss Harris.’ I recollected myself. ‘I was merely speculating about how you live. I cannot reconcile the apparent squalor of your address with the richness of your sleeping arrangements.’
‘You what?’
‘This bed, for example. I am older than you, yet I can only dream that some day I might possess a bed of such magnificence.’
‘Nice, isn’t it?’ She pulled herself upright, plumped the damask pillows into a fat double hillock and leaned back, like a plucky invalid – no, like a young duchess entertaining callers to hot chocolate and muffins at a breakfast levée in the days of Pope and Swift. ‘When I got this room a year ago, courtesy of a gentleman friend, he said, “Here’s a hundred quid, furnish it how you like,” so I blued half of it on a proper
