Adventures in the Skin Trade Read online

  “Ever since Neath,” the man said.

  Now the train was losing speed, running out of the lost country into the smoke and a tunnel of factories, puffing past the district platforms and the high houses with broken windows and underclothes dancing in the dirty yards. Children at the windows never waved their hands to the train. It might have been the wind passing.

  A crowd of people stood arguing outside the door as the train drew up under a great glass roof.

  4

  “Nip of Bass, please, and a ham sandwich.” He took them to a table in a corner, brushed off the crumbs with his wet hat, and sat down just before noon. He counted his money: eight pound nine and a penny, nearly three pounds more than he had ever seen. Some people had this every week. It had to last him until he was dead. At the next table sat a plump, middle-aged man with a chocolate brown birthmark over his cheek and chin like the half of a beard. He was propping his book against an empty bottle when a young man walked over from the counter.

  “Hullo, Sam.”

  “Hullo, Ron. Fancy seeing you.”

  He was Ronald Bishop who used to live in the Crescent off Stanley’s Grove.

  “Been up in the smoke for long, Sam?”

  “Just arrived, how’s tricks?”

  “Same as me, we must have been on the same train. Oh, so so. Still at the old game, Sam?”

  “Yeah, up on a bit of business. You at the usual?”

  “Yeah.”

  They had never had anything to say to each other.

  “Where you staying, Ron?”

  “Usual. Strand Palace.”

  “Daresay I’ll be seeing you, then.”

  “Okay, make it tomorrow in the bar, about seven-thirty.”

  “Okay.”

  “It’s a date, don’t forget.”

  “No fear.”

  They both forgot it at once.

  “Well, be seeing you.”

  “Be good.”

  As Ronald Bishop walked off, Samuel said silently into his glass: A fine beginning. If I go out of the station and turn round the corner I’ll be back in 42. The little Proberts will be playing doctor outside the Load of Hay. The only stranger anywhere near me is a businessman with a stained face, reading the palms of his hands. No, here comes a woman in a fur coat, she’s going to sit next to me. Yes, no, no. I smelt her as she passed: eau de cologne and powder and bed.

  The woman sat down two tables away, crossed her legs, powdered her nose.

  This is the beginning of an advance. Now she is pretending not to notice that her knees are uncovered. There’s a lynx in the room, lady. Button your overcoat. She’s rattling her spoon on her saucer to attract my attention, but when I stare at her hard, without smiling, I see she is looking down gently and innocently into her lap as though she had a baby there. He was glad she was not brazen.

  Dear mother, he wrote with his finger on the back of an envelope, looking up, between every few invisible words, at the unnoticing woman opposite, this is to tell you that I arrived safely and that I am drinking in the buffet with a tart. I will tell you later if she is Irish. She is about thirty-eight years old and her husband left her five years ago because of her carryings on. Her child is in a home, and she visits him every other Sunday. She always tells him that she is working in a hat shop. You need not worry that she will take all my money as we liked each other on first sight. And you need not worry that I shall break my heart trying to reform her, because I have always been brought up to believe that Mortimer Street is what is right, and I would not wish that on anybody. Besides, I do not want to reform her. Not that I think she is nasty. Her business is very hard on stockings, so I am going to pay the first week’s rent for our little room in Pimlico. Now she is going across to the counter to buy another cup of coffee. I hope you will notice that she is buying her own. Everybody in the buffet is unhappy except me.

  As she came back to her table, he tore up the envelope and stared at her, unsmiling, for a full minute by the Bovril clock. Once she raised her eyes to his, then looked away. She was tapping her spoon on the side of her cup, then opening and closing the clasp of her handbag, then turned her head round slowly to face him and then looking away again, quickly through the window. She must be new, he thought with a sudden compassion, but he did not stop staring. Should I wink? He tilted his hard, wet hat over one eye, and winked: a long, deliberate wink that screwed up his face and made his burning cigarette nearly touch the blunt end of his nose. She snapped her handbag, pushed two pennies under the saucer, and walked right out of die room, never looking at him as she passed.

  She’s left her coffee, he thought. And then: My God, she was blushing.

  A fine beginning.

  “Did you speak?” asked the man with the birthmark, spying up. His face was red and purple where it was not brown, faintly shabby and unshaved, shiftily angry about the eyes as though his cunning were an irritation impossible to bear.

  “I think I said it was a fine day.”

  “Stranger in town?”

  “Yes, I’ve just come up.”

  “How do you like it?” He did not appear to care at all.

  “I haven’t been outside the station yet.”

  Now the woman in the fur coat would be telling a policeman, “I have just been winked at by a short boy wearing a wet hat.” “But it isn’t raining, madam.” That would settle her.

  He put his hat under the table.

  “There’s plenty to see,” the man said, “if that’s what you want. Museums, art galleries.” Without speaking, he went through a list of names of other attractions, but rejected them all. “Museums,” he said after a long pause, “There’s one at South Kensington, and there’s the British Museum, and there’s one at Whitehall with guns. I’ve seen them all,” he said.

  Now every table was occupied. Cold, stiff people with time to kill sat staring at their tea and the clock, inventing replies to questions that would not be asked, justifying their behaviour in the past and the future, drowning every present moment as soon as it began to breathe, lying and wishing, missing all the trains in the terror of their minds, each one alone at the terminus. Time was dying all over the room. And then all the tables except the one next to Samuel’s were unoccupied again. The lonely crowd went out in a funeral procession, leaving ash and tea-leaves and newspapers.

  “You must move out of the station sometime, you know,” the man said, returning to a conversation that held no interest for him. “If you want to see around. It’s only fair. It’s not fair to come up in a train and sit in the buffet and then go back and say you’ve seen London, is it?”

  “I’m going out now, quite soon.”

  “That’s right,” the man said, “give London a chance.”

  He is so tired of talking to me that he is nearly losing his temper, Samuel thought.

  He looked around him again, at the mourners fidgeting to the counter, at the quick whisky drinkers in a knot by the tea-urn, at the waitresses listlessly busy with cardboard cakes and small change.

  “Otherwise, it’s like not getting out of bed, isn’t it?” the man said. “You’ve got to walk round, you know, you’ve got to move some time. Everybody does it,” he said in a sudden, dull passion.

  Samuel bought another nip of Bass from a girl like Joan Crawford.

  “This is the last one, then I’m going,” he said when he had returned to his table.

  “Do you think I care how many more you have? You can stay here all day, why should I mind?” The man was looking at the palms of his hands again as his temper mounted. “Am I my brother’s keeper?”

  Ronald Bishop still stood at the counter.

  Mortimer Street has tracked me down, Samuel thought bitterly, even into this lopsided quarrel with a palmist in a station restaurant. There was no escape. But it was not escape he wanted. The Street was a safe hole in a wall behind the wind in another country. He wanted to arrive and be caught. Ronald stood there like a fury with a rolled umbrella. Come in, Mrs. Rosser, in y
our fawn and beige antimacassar coat, with your tribal hat on your waves, and scream the news of the Street across the table in your whist-drive voice. I could not escape your fury on a birds’ rock, you would be mincing and pinching down to the fishy sea with your beak gaped open like a shopping bag.

  “I hate a nosey parker,” the man said, and got up. On his way to the counter he passed the table where the Irish prostitute had sat and removed the pennies from under the plate.

  “Stop, thief!” Samuel said softly. No one could hear. There is a waitress with a consumptive husband who needs those pennies. And two children. Tristram and Eve. He changed the names quickly. Tom and Marge. Then he walked over and put a sixpence under the plate just as a waitress came to the table.

  “It fell on the floor,” he said.

  “Oh, yeah?”

  As he walked back, he saw that the waitress was talking to three men at the counter and nodding her head in his direction. One man was Ronald Bishop. One was the man with the birthmark.

  Oh, fine, fine! If he had not broken the china he would have caught the next train back. The pieces would be swept up by now, but the tears would be running all over the house. “Mother, mother, he’s put my crochetwork up the chimney,” he heard his sister scream in a guard’s whistle. Herons, flower baskets, palm trees, windmills, Red Riding Hoods, stuffed up in the flames and soot. “Get me a rubber to rub out coal, Hilda. I shall of course lose my position. That is only to be expected.” “Oh my teapot, oh my blue set, oh my poor boy.” He refused to look at the counter where Ronald Bishop inaudibly reviled him. The waitress knew as soon as she saw him that he stole from the begging tins of the blind and led them by the arm into thick traffic. The birthmarked man said that he had shown a certain postcard to a customer in a fur coat. The voices of his parents condemned above the clattering of the cup. He stared hard at his book though the print climbed and staggered as if the tears of the left house had run down after him along the rails and flowed into this hot, suspicious room over the tea-stained air into his eyes. But the image was false and the book was chosen for strangers. He did not like or understand it.

  “My bills.” “My doilies.” “My willowplate.”

  Ronald Bishop went out onto the platform.

  “Be seeing you, Ron.”

  Ronald Bishop’s face was flushed with the embarrassment of not noticing him.

  One pleasure is, Samuel said to himself, that I do not know what I expect to happen to me. He smiled at the waitress behind the counter, and she stared away at once as guiltily as though he had discovered her robbing the till. I am not so innocent as I make out, he thought. I do not expect any old cobwebbed Fagin, reeking of character and stories, to shuffle out of a corner and lead me away into his grand, loud, filthy house; there will not be any Nancy to tickle my fancy in a kitchen full of handkerchiefs and beckoning, unmade beds. I did not think a choir of loose women immediately would sing and dance around the little tables, in plush cloths and advertised brassieres, as I walked into London for the first time, rattling my fortune, fresh as Copper-field. I could count the straws in my hair with one hand.

  Hush! I know you, he said, cheater at Patience, keyhole peeper, keeper of nail-clippings and earwax, lusting after silhouettes on Laburnam’s blind, searching for thighs in the Library of Classical Favourites, Sam Thumb in the manhole prying up on windy days.

  I am not like that at all, he said, as the man with the birthmark came over to his table and sat down opposite him.

  “I thought you were going,” the man said. “You told me you were going. You’ve been here an hour now.”

  “I saw you,” Samuel said.

  “I know you saw me. You must have seen me, mustn’t you, because you were looking at me,” the man said. “Not that I want the twopence, I’ve got a houseful of furniture. Three months full to the ceiling. I’ve got enough chairs for everyone in Paddington to have a sit down. Twopence is twopence,” he said.

  “But it was twopence to the waitress, too.”

  “She’s got sixpence now, hasn’t she? She’s made fourpence clear. It doesn’t do any harm to you just because she thinks you were trying to nip it off to her.”

  “It was my sixpence.”

  The man raised his hands. The palms were covered with calculations in ink. “And they talk about equality. Does it matter whose sixpence it was? It might have been mine or anybody’s. There was talk of calling the manageress,” he said, “but I put my foot down there.”

  They were both silent for several minutes.

  “Made up your mind where you’re going when you move out of here?” the man said at last. “Because move you must, some time, you know.”

  “I don’t know where I’m going. I haven’t any idea in the world. That’s why I came up to London.”

  “Look here,” the man said, controlling his voice, “there’s sense in everything. There’s bound to be. Otherwise we wouldn’t be able to carry on, would we? Everybody knows where he’s going, especially if he’s come by train. Otherwise he wouldn’t move from where he took the train from, that’s elementary.”

  “People run away.”

  “Have you run away?”

  “No.”

  “Then don’t say it. Don’t say it.” His voice trembled; he looked at the figures on his palms. Then gently and patiently he began again. “Let’s get the first thing straight. People who have come must go. People must know where they’re going, otherwise the world could not be conducted on a sane basis. The streets would be full of people just wandering about, wouldn’t they? Wandering about and having useless arguments with people who know where they’re going. My name is Allingham, I live in Sewell Street off Praed Street, and I’m a furniture dealer. That’s simple, isn’t it? There’s no need to complicate things if you keep your head and know who you are.”

  “I’m Samuel Bennet. I don’t live anywhere at all. I don’t do any work, either.”

  “Where are you going to go, then? I’m not a nosey parker, I told you my business.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “He doesn’t know,” Mr. Allingham said. “Don’t think you’re anywhere now, mind. You can’t call this place anywhere, can you? It’s breathing space.”

  “I’ve been wondering what was going to happen. That’s what I’ve been discussing with myself. I came up really to see what would happen to me. I don’t want to make anything happen myself.”

  “He was discussing it with himself. With a boy of twenty. How old are you?”

  “Twenty.”

  “That’s right. Discussing a question like that with a boy just out of his teens. What did you expect to happen?”

  “I don’t know. Perhaps people would come up and talk to me at the beginning. Women,” Samuel said.

  “Why should they talk to you? Why should I talk to you? You’re not going anywhere. You’re not doing anything. You don’t exist,” he said.

  But all Samuel’s strength was in his belly and his eyes. He should veil his eyes or the marble-topped counter might melt and all the clothes of the girls behind them peel away and all the cups chip on the shelves.

  “Anyone might come up,” he said. Then he thought of his fine beginning. “Anyone,” he said without hope.

  A clerk from the Crescent a dozen doors away; a cold, ordinary woman from Birmingham, driven off by a wink; anybody, anybody; a deacon from the Valleys on a mean blind, with his pocketbook sewn in his combs; an elderly female assistant on holiday from a flannel and calico shop where the change hums on wires. Nobody he had ever wanted.

  “Oh, anyone of course. Janet Gaynor,” Mr. Allingham said. “Marion Davies and Kay Francis and …”

  “You don’t understand. I don’t expect that kind of person. I don’t know what I do expect at all, but it isn’t that.”

  “Modest.”

  “No, I’m not modest either. I don’t believe in modesty. It’s just that here I am and I don’t know where to go. I don’t want to know where to go.”

  M
r. Allingham began to plead, leaning across the table, pulling softly at Samuel’s collar, showing the sums on his hands. “Don’t say you don’t want to know where to go. Please. There’s a good boy. We must take things easy, mustn’t we? We mustn’t complicate things. Take one simple question. Now don’t rush it. Take your own time.” He gripped a teaspoon with one hand. “Where will you be tonight?”

  “I don’t know. I’ll be somewhere else but it won’t be anywhere I’ve chosen because I’m not going to choose anything.”

  Mr. Allingham put the knotted teaspoon down.

  “What do you want, Samuel?” he whispered.

  “I don’t know.” Samuel touched his breast pocket where his wallet was. “I know I want to find Lucille Harris,” he said.

  “Who’s Lucille Harris?”

  Then Mr. Allingham looked at him.

  “He doesn’t know,” he said. “Oh, he doesn’t know!”

  A man and a woman sat down at the next table.

  “But you promised you’d destroy him,” the woman said.

  “I’ll do it, I’ll do it,” the man said. “Don’t you worry. You drink your tea. Don’t you worry.”

  They had lived a long time together, and had grown to resemble one another with their dry, bunched faces and their nibbling mouths. The woman scratched herself as she drank, as she gripped the edge of her cup with her grey lips and shook it.

  “Twopence she’s got a tail,” Samuel said in a low voice, but Mr. Allingham had not noticed them arrive.

  “That’s right,” he said. “You have it your own way. And she’s covered all over with fur.”

  Samuel put his little finger in the neck of the empty bottle.

  “I resign myself,” Mr. Allingham said.

  “But you don’t understand, Mr. Allingham.”

  “I understand enough,” he said loudly. The couple at the next table stopped talking. “You don’t want to make things happen, don’t you? I’ll make them happen all right. You can’t come in here and talk to me like you’ve been talking. Lucille Harris. Lucy da monk!”