Adventures in the Skin Trade Page 4

  The man and the woman began whispering. “And it’s only half-past one,” the woman said. She shook her cup like a rat.

  “Come on. We’re going.” Mr. Allingham scraped back his chair.

  “Where to?”

  “Never you mind. It’s I’m making things happen, isn’t it?”

  “I can’t get my finger out of the bottle,” Samuel said.

  Mr. Allingham lifted up the suitcases and stood up. “What’s a little bottle?” he said. “Bring it with you, son.”

  “Father and son, too,” the woman said as Samuel followed him out.

  The bottle hung heavily on his finger.

  “Where now?” Outside in the roaring station.

  “You follow me. And put your hand in your pocket. It looks silly.”

  As they walked up the slope to the street, Mr. Allingham said, “I’ve never been with anybody with a bottle on his finger before. Nobody else has ever had a bottle on his finger. What’d you want to put your finger in the bottle for?”

  “I just pushed it in. I’ll be able to get it off with soap, there’s no need to make a fuss.”

  “Nobody else has ever had to get a bottle off with soap, that’s all I’m saying. This is Praed Street.”

  “It’s dull, isn’t it?”

  “All the horses have gone away,” Mr. Allingham said. “This is my street. This is Sewell Street. It’s dull isn’t it?”

  “It’s like the streets at home.”

  A boy passed them and shouted “Ikey Mo” to Mr. Allingham.

  ‘This is 23. See? There’s the sign, 23.”

  Mr. Allingham opened the front door with a key. “Second floor, first on the right.”

  He gave three knocks. “Mr. Allingham,” he said, and they walked in.

  The room was full of furniture.

  II. PLENTY OF FURNITURE

  Every inch of the room was covered with furniture. Chairs stood on couches that lay on tables; mirrors nearly the height of the door were propped, back to back, against the walls, reflecting and making endless the hills of desks and chairs with their legs in the air, sideboards, dressing tables, chests-of-drawers, more mirrors, empty bookcases, washbasins, clothes cupboards. There was a double bed, carefully made, with the ends of the sheets turned back, lying on top of a dining table on top of another table; there were electric lamps and lampshades, trays and vases, lavatory bowls and basins, heaped in the armchairs that stood on cupboards and tables and beds, touching the ceiling. The one window, looking out on the road, could just be seen through the curved legs of sideboards on their backs. The walls behind the standing mirrors were thick with pictures and picture frames.

  Mr. Allingham climbed into the room over a stack of mattresses, then disappeared.

  “Hop in, boy.” His voice came up from behind a high kitchen dresser hung with carpets; and, climbing over, Samuel looked down to see him seated on a chair on a couch, leaning back comfortably, his elbow on the shoulder of a statue.

  “It’s a pity we can’t cook here,” Mr. Allingham said. “There’s plenty of stoves, too. That’s a meatsafe,” he said, pointing to one corner. “Just under the bedroom suite.”

  “Have you got a piano?”

  “There used to be one,” he said. “I think it’s in the other room. She put a carpet over it. Can you play?”

  “I can vamp. You can tell what tunes I’m doing, easily. Is the other room like this?”

  “Two more rooms, but I think the piano’s locked. Yes, there’s plenty of furniture,” Mr. Allingham said, looking round with distaste. “Whenever I say 'That’s enough now,’ in she comes with her ‘Plenty more room, plenty more room.’ She’ll find she can’t get in one day, that’s what’ll happen. Or she can’t get out, I don’t know which would be the worst. It gets you sometimes, you know,” he said, “all this furniture.”

  “Is she your wife, Mr. Allingham?”

  “She’ll find there’s a limit to everything. You get to feel kind of trapped.”

  “Do you sleep here?”

  “Up there. It’s nearly twelve foot high. I’ve measured. I can touch the ceiling when I wake up.”

  “I like this room,” Samuel said. “I think it’s perhaps the best room I’ve ever seen.”

  “That’s why I brought you. I thought you’d like it. Proper little den for a man with a bottle on his finger, isn’t it? I told you, you’re not like anybody else. Nobody else can bear the sight of it. Got your cases safe?”

  “They’re there. In the bath.”

  “You keep your eye on them, that’s all. I’ve lost a sofa. One more suite and I’ll lose my bed. And what happens when a customer comes? I’ll tell you. He takes one peek through the door and off he trots. You can only buy what’s on the top at the moment, see.”

  “Can you get into the other rooms?”

  “You can,” Mr. Allingham said. “She takes a dive in, headfirst. I’ve lost all interest in the other rooms, myself. You should live and die in there and nobody’d know. There’s some nice Chippendale, too. Up by the skylight.”

  He rested his other elbow on a hallstand.

  “I get to feel lost,” he said. “That’s why I go down to the buffet, there’s only tables and chairs there.”

  Samuel sat on his perch, swinging the bottle and drumming his feet against the side of a bath mounted yards above the floor of mattresses. A carpet behind him, laid out flat and wide along the air, having no visible support, bore a great earthenware jar dangerously upon the backs of its patterned birds. High over his head, in the tall room, a rocking-chair balanced on a card-table, and the table’s thin legs rested on the top of a cupboard standing up straight among pillows and fenders, with its mirrored door wide open.

  “Aren’t you frightened of things falling? Look at that rocking-chair. One little prod and over she comes.”

  “Don’t you dare. Of course I’m frightened,” Mr. Allingham said. “If you open a drawer over there, a washstand falls down over here. You’ve got to be quick as a snake. There’s nothing on the top you’d like to buy, is there?”

  “I like a lot of the things, but I haven’t any money.”

  “No, no, you wouldn’t have money. That’s right. Other people have money.”

  “I like the big jar. You could hide a man in that. Have you got any soap for my finger?”

  “Of course, there’s no soap, there’s only washbasins. You can’t have a bath, either, and there’s five baths. Why do you want a jar big enough to hide a man in? Nobody I’ve ever met wants to hide a man in a jar. Everybody else says that jar’s too big for anything. Why do you want to find Lucille Harris, Sam?”

  “I didn’t mean I wanted to hide a man in it. I mean that you could if you wanted to. Oh, a man I know told me about Lucille, Mr. Allingham. I don’t know why I want to find her, but that’s the only London address I kept. I put the others down the lavatory in the train. When the train was moving.”

  “Good, good.” Mr. Allingham put his hand on the thick, white neck of the naked statue, and tightened his fingers.

  The door opened onto the landing. Two people came in, and climbed up the mattresses without a word. The first, a fat short woman with black hair and a Spanish comb, who had painted her face as though it were a wall, took a sudden dive toward the corner behind Samuel and disappeared between two columns of chairs. She must have landed on cushions or a bed, for she made no sound. The second visitor was a tall, youngish man with a fixed smile; his teeth were large, like a horse’s, but very white; his glistening fair hair was done in tight curls, and it smelt across the room. He stood on a spring mattress just inside the door, bouncing up and down. “Come on, Rose, don’t be sulky,” he said. “I know where you’ve gone.” Then, pretending to see Samuel for the first time, “Good gracious, you look like a bird up there,” he said. “Is Donald hiding anywhere?”

  “I’m not hiding,” Mr. Allingham said. “I’m by the statue. Sam Bennet, George Ring.”

  George Ring bowed and bounced, rising
a foot from the mattress.

  He and Mr. Allingham could not see each other. Nobody could see the woman with the Spanish comb.

  “I hope you’ve excused the room to Mr. Bennet,” George Ring said. He bounced a few steps in the direction of the hidden statue.

  “I don’t think it needs any excusing, Mr. Ring,” Samuel said. “I’ve never seen such a comfortable room.”

  “Oh, but it’s terrible.” George Ring was moving up and down rapidly now. “It’s very kind of you to say it’s comfortable, but look at the confusion. Just think of living here. You’ve got something on your finger, did you know that? Three guesses. It’s a bottle.” He shook his curls and laughed as he bounced.

  “You don’t know anything yet,” said Mr. Allingham’s voice. The heavy bouncing had shaken down a carpet on to the hall-stand and he was hidden as though in another, lower room. “You don’t know anything about him. You wait. What are you bouncing for, George? People don’t go bouncing about like a ball as soon as they come into a room.”

  “What I don’t know about you!” In one leap George Ring was standing directly below Samuel, craning up his curls.

  “He doesn’t know where he’s going, for one thing. And he’s looking for a girl he doesn’t know called Lucille.”

  “Why are you looking for her?” George Ring’s head touched the bath. “Did you see her picture in the paper?”

  “No, I don’t know anything about her, but I want to see her because she’s the only person I know by name in London.”

  “Now you know two more, don’t you? Are you sure you don’t love her?”

  “Of course I’m sure.”

  “I thought perhaps she might be a sort of Holy Grail. You know what I mean. A sort of ideal.”

  “Go on, you big pussycat,” Mr. Allingham said. “Get me out of here.”

  “Is this the first time you’ve come to London? I felt like that when I came up first, too. Years and years ago. I felt there was something I must find. I can’t explain it. Something just round the corner. I searched and searched. I was so innocent. I felt like a sort of knight.”

  “Get me out of here,” Mr. Allingham said. “I feel like the whole room’s on top of me.”

  “I never found it.” George Ring laughed and sighed and stroked the side of the bath. “Perhaps you’ll be lucky,” he said. “You’ll walk round the corner and there she’ll be. Lucille. Lucille. Is she on the telephone?”

  “Yes. I’ve got her number in my book.”

  “Oh, that makes it easier, doesn’t it? Come on, Rose,” he said. “I know exactly where you are. She’s in a pet.”

  Samuel rocked softly on his box in the middle of the furniture. This was the fullest room in England. How many hundreds of houses had been spilt in here, tables and chairs coming in on a wooden flood, chests and cupboards soaring on ropes through the window and settling down like birds. The other rooms, beyond that jostled door, would be taller and darker even than this, with the mute, black shape of the locked piano mountainous under a shroud of carpets and Rose, with her comb like the prow of a ship driving into their darkness and lying all night motionless and silent where she struck. Now she was dead still on a sunk bed between the column of chairs, buried alive, soft and fat and lost in a grave in a house.

  “I’m going to buy a hammock,” George Ring said. “I can’t bear sleeping under all this furniture.”

  Perhaps the room was crowded at night with people who could not see each other, stretched under chairs, under sofas, dizzily asleep on the tops of raised tables, waking up every morning and crying out, “Earthquake, earthquake!”

  “And then I’ll go to bed like a sailor.”

  “Tell Rose to come and get me out of here,” Mr. Allingham said, behind the cloaked hallstand, “I want to eat.”

  “She’s sulking, Donald. She’s mad about a Japanese screen now.”

  “Do you hear that, Sam? Isn’t there enough privacy in this room? Anybody can do anything, nobody can see you. I want to eat. I want to have a snack at Dacey’s. Are you sleeping here tonight?”

  “Who?” Samuel asked. “Me?”

  “You can doss down in one of the other rooms, if you think you can get up again. There’s enough beds for a harem.”

  “Harem,” George Ring said, pronouncing it another way. "You’ve got company, Rose darling. Do come out and be introduced.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Allingham,” Samuel said.

  “Didn’t you really have any idea at all?” George Ring bounced, and for a moment his scented head was level with Samuel’s. One wide, bright, horse-toothed smile, and the head was gone. “About sleeping and things. I think it’s awfully brave. You might have fallen in with all kinds of people. ‘He fell among thieves.’ Do you know Sir Henry Newbolt’s poem?”

  “He flung his empty revolver down the slope,” Samuel said.

  The day was moving carelessly on to a promised end and in a dark room full of furniture where he’d lie down with his bunch of wives in a crow’s-nest bed or rock them in a hammock under the ceiling.

  “Goodie goodie! It’s so exciting to find someone who knows about poetry. 'The voices faded and the hills slept.’ Isn’t that beautiful? The voices faded …? I can read poetry for hours, can’t I, Donald? I don’t care what kind of poetry it is, I love it all. Do you know, ‘Is there anybody there, said the traveller?’ Where do you put the emphasis, Mr. Bennet? Can I call you Sam? Do you say, ‘Is there anybody there’ or ‘Is there anybody there’?”

  “It isn’t natural,” Mr. Allingham said, “for a man not to be able to see anybody when he’s sitting right next to them. I’m not grumbling, but I can’t see anything, that’s all. It’s like not being in the room.”

  “Oh, do be quiet, Donald. Sam and I are having a perfectly serious discussion. Of course you’re in the room, don’t be morbid.”

  “I think I’d put about the same emphasis on all the words,” Samuel said.

  “But don’t you find it tends to make the line rather flat? ‘Is there anybody there, said the traveller,’” George Ring murmured, pacing the mattresses, his head on one side. “I feel you do want a stress somewhere.”

  Will I be alone tonight in the room with the piano, Samuel wondered. Alone like a man in a warehouse, lying on each bed in turn, opening cupboards and putting my hand in, looking at myself in minors in the dark.

  “Don’t call me morbid, George Ring,” Mr. Allingham said. He tried to move, but the statue fell against his chair. “I remember once I drank forty-nine Guinnesses straight off and I came home on the top of a bus. There’s nothing morbid about a man who can do that. Right on the top of the bus, too, not just in the upper deck.”

  Or will the room be full as a cemetery, but with the invisible dead breathing and snoring all around me, making love in the cupboards, drunk as tailors in the dry baths? Suddenly a warm body might dive in through the door and lie in my bed all night without a name or a word.

  “I think forty-nine Guinnesses is piggish,” said George Ring.

  “It was raining,” Mr. Allingham said, “and I never get truculent. I may sing and I may have a bit of a dance, but I never get nasty. Give me a hand, Sam.”

  Samuel took the carpet off the hallstand and pushed the statue away. It had fallen between Mr. Allingham’s legs. He came up slowly into sight and rubbed his eyes like a man waking.

  “I told you,” he said, “you get trapped. Coming to Dacey’s, George?”

  “I’ll have to stay for hours, you know that,” George Ring said. “You know I’m the only person who can humor Rosie when she’s in one of her states. Oh, come on Rosie, don’t be temperamental. It’s ninety per cent temper and ten per cent mental. Just because you’re an actress you think you can stay under the furniture all the afternoon. I’ll count five …”

  Samuel followed Mr. Allingham to the door.

  “Five, six, seven,” George Ring said, as Mr. Allingham slammed the door hard, and his voice was lost in the noise of furniture falling. They we
nt down the stairs into the hallway that smelt of cabbage, and out onto the grey street.

  “I think it must have been the rocking-chair,” Samuel said.

  “Mrs. Dacey’s is just round the corner,” Mr. Allingham said. “There you are. See the Cadbury sign?”

  2

  Mrs. Dacey’s front window was whitewashed from inside, and the words “High Class” had been scrawled across it. "'Susan Dacey, licensed to sell tobacco,’” Samuel read aloud. “Is it a restaurant too?”

  “You must tell her that,” Mr. Allingham said, opening the door. A bell rang. “It hasn’t been called that before.” He held his foot against the door so that the bell kept ringing. “She’s a woman in a thousand.”

  A tall, thin, dignified woman came through the private door at the back of the shop, her hands clasped in front of her. She was dressed in black almost down to the ankles, with a severe white collar, and she held her head primly as though it might spill. God help the other nine hundred and ninety-nine. But she smiled then, and her eyes were sharp and light; the dullness raced from her mouth, leaving it cruel and happy.

  “Take your trotter off the door,” she said.

  The bell stopped.

  “That’s better. You made enough noise to wake the dead.” She was a well-spoken woman, clear and precise, like a schoolmistress.

  “Keeping well, Mrs. Dacey? This is a new friend, Sam Bennet. Two pies and two coffees, please. Where’s Polly?”

  “Up to no good,” said Mrs. Dacey, stepping behind the counter. Her grand dress floated around her. “You’re from the country,” she said, over her shoulder, as she turned the coffee, tap on the brass um. “How did you find Ikey Mo?”

  “That’s me.” Mr. Allingham blushed on one side of his face. “I’m not from the country really.” Samuel told her where he came from. “I met Mr. Allingham in the station. I’m going to sleep in his flat tonight.”

  “I’d sooner sleep in an ashpit,” she said.

  The coffee was thick and white and tasteless. They took their cups to a cubicle and Samuel brushed off the crumbs from his chair with his sleeve. His hat was gone. There were small pellets of dirt in the dust at his feet.