Adventures in the Skin Trade Page 6

  “Not too much Worcester, George, don’t bury the egg.”

  “I won’t,” Samuel said.

  “Oh, listen to the birds. It’s been such a short night for the birds, Polly.”

  “Listen to the birds,” he said clearly, and a burning drink drowned his tongue.

  “They’ve laid an egg,” Mr. Allingham said.

  “Try some Coca Cola, Donald. It can’t do any harm, he’s had tea and a prairie oyster and angostura and Oxo and everything.”

  “I used to pour the tea down by the pint,” Mrs. Dacey said affectionately, “and it came up, lump sugar and all.”

  “He doesn’t want a Coca Cola. Give him a drop of your hair oil. I knew a man who used to squeeze boot-blacking through a veil.”

  “You know everybody piggish. He’s trying to sit up, the poor darling.”

  Samuel wrestled into the dry world and looked around a room in it, at Mrs. Dacey, now miraculously divided into one long woman, folding her black silk arms in the doorway, at George Ring arching his smile and hair toward the rusty taps, at Mr. Allingham resigned above him.

  “Polly’s gone,” he said.

  It was then that he understood why the three persons in the bathroom were so tall and far. I am on the floor, looking up, he said to himself. But the others were listening.

  “You’re naked too,” Mr. Allingham said, “under the blanket.”

  “Here’s a nice wet sponge.” George Ring dabbed and smoothed. “Keep it on your forehead. There, like that. That better?”

  “Eau de cologne is for outside the body,” said Mrs. Dacey without disapproval, “and I’ll give our Polly such a dip. I’ll clip her on the earhole every time she opens her mouth.’

  Mr. Allingham nodded. “Whisky I can understand,” he said. “But eau de cologne! You put that on handkerchieves. You don’t put whisky on handkerchieves.” He looked down at Samuel. “I don’t.”

  “No, mustn’t suck the sponge, Sam.”

  “I suppose he thinks red biddy’s like bread and milk,” Mr. Allingham said.

  They gathered his clothes from the side of the bath and hurriedly dressed him. And not until he was dressed and upright, shivering along the landing to the dark stairs, did he try to speak again. George Ring and Mr. Allingham held his arms and guided him toward the top of that winding grave. Mrs. Dacey, the one mourner, followed with a rustle of silk.

  “It was the brandy from the medicine cupboard,” he said, and down they went into the coarse, earthlike silence of the stairs.

  “Give me furniture polish,” Mr. Allingham said. “Crack. Mind your head. Especially when I’m out of sorts in the bath.”

  The darkness was settling like more dirt and dust over the silent shop. Someone had hung up a sign, “Closed,” on the inside of the window, not facing the street. “Meths is finicky,” Mr. Allingham said.

  They sat Samuel down on a chair behind the counter and he heard Mrs. Dacey, still on the stairs, calling for Polly up into the dark, dirty other floors and caves of the drunken house. But Polly did not answer.

  She would be in her locked bedroom now, crying for Sam gone, at her window staring out onto the colourless, slowly disappearing street and the tall houses down at heel; or depicting, in the kitchen, the agony of a woman in childbirth, writhing and howling round the crowded sink; or being glad at a damp corner of the landing.

  “Silly goose,” said George Ring, sitting long-legged on the table and smiling at Samuel with a ferocious coyness. “You might have been drownded. Drownded,” he said again, looking slyly from under the spider line of his eyebrows.

  “Lucky you left the door open,” Mr. Allingham said. He lit a cigarette and looked at the match until it burned his finger. “I suppose,” he said, his finger in his mouth.

  “Our maid at home always said ‘drownded,’ ” said George Ring.

  “But I saw Polly lock the door. She put the key down her dress.” Samuel spoke with difficulty from behind the uncertain counter. The words came out in a rush, then reversed and were lost, tumbling among the sour bushes under his tongue. “She put it down her dress,” he said, and paused at the end of each word to untie the next. Now the shop was almost entirely dark.

  “And chimbley. You know, for chimney. Well, my dear, the door was open when we went up. No key, no Polly.”

  “Just a boy in the bath,” Mr. Allingham said. “Do you often get like that, Sam? The water was up to your chin.”

  “And the dirt!”

  “It wasn’t my dirt. Someone had been in the bath before. It was cold,” Samuel said.

  “Yes, yes.” Samuel could see Mr. Allingham’s head nodding. “That alters the situation, doesn’t it? Dear God,” he said, “you should have gone in with your clothes on like everybody else.”

  “Polly’s gone,” said Mrs. Dacey. She appeared out of nowhere in the wall and stood behind the counter at Samuel’s side. Her rustling dress brushed against his hands, and he drew them sharply back. I touched a funeral, he said to the dazed boy in his chair. Her corpse-cold hand fell against his cheek, chilling him out of a moment’s sleep. The coffin has walked upright into my sitting bed.

  “Oooh,” he said aloud.

  “Still cold, baby?” Mrs. Dacey bent down, creaking like a door, and mothered him about the hair and mouth.

  There had been little light all day, even at dawn and noon, mostly the close, false light of bedroom and restaurant. All day he had sat in small, dark places, bathroom and travelling lavatory, a jungle of furniture, a stuffed shop where no one called except these voices saying:

  “You looked so defenseless, Sam, lying there all cold and white.”

  “Where was Moses when the light went out, Mrs. Dacey?”

  “Like one of those cherubs in the Italian Primitives, only with a bottle on your finger, of course.”

  “In the dark. Like this.”

  “What did our Polly do to you, the little tart?” Mrs. Dacey said in her tidy, lady’s voice.

  Mr. Allingham stood up. “I’m not listening. Don’t you say a word, Sam, even if you could. No explanations. There he was, gassed in the bath, at half-past four in the afternoon. I can stand so much.”

  “I want to go out,” Samuel said.

  “Out the back?”

  “Out.”

  Out of the blind, stripping hole in a wall, aviary and menagerie, cold water shop, into the streets without locks. I don’t want to sleep with Polly in a drawer. I don’t want to lie in a cellar with a wet woman, drinking polish. London is happening everyhere, let me out, let me go, Mrs. Dacey is all cold fingers. “Out then, It’s six o’clock. Can you walk, son?”

  “I can walk okay, it’s my head.”

  Mrs. Dacey, unseen, stroked his hair. Nobody can see, he said silently, but Mrs. Susan Dacey, licensed to sell tobacco, is stroking my hair with her lizards; and he gave a cry.

  “I’ve got no sympathy,” said Mr. Allingham. “Are you coming, Sue?”

  “Depends where you’re going.”

  “Taking the air down the Edgware Road. He’s got to see around, hasn’t he? You don’t come up from the provinces to drink eau de cologne in the bath.”

  They all went out, and Mrs. Dacey locked the shop.

  It was raining heavily.

  “Fun!” George Ring said.

  They walked out of Sewell Street into Praed Street arm-in-arm.

  “I’m a fool for the rain.” He shook his clinging curls and danced a few steps on the pavement.

  “My new brown overcoat’s in the bathroom,” Samuel said, and Mrs. Dacey covered him with her umbrella.

  “Go on, you’re not the sort that puts a coat on in the rain, are you? Stop dancing, George.”

  But George Ring danced down the pavement in the flying rain and pulled the others with him; unwillingly they broke into a dancing run under the lampposts’ drizzle of light, Mrs. Dacey, black as a deacon, jumping high over the puddles with a rustle and creak, Mr. Allingham, on the outside, stamping and dodging along the gutter, Sa
muel gliding light and dizzy with his feet hardly touching the ground.

  “Look out. People,” cried Mr. Allingham, and dragged them, still dancing, out onto the slippery street. Caught in a circle of headlights and chased by horns, they stamped and scampered onto the pavement again, clinging fast to each other, their faces glistening, cold and wet.

  “Where’s the fire, George? Go easy, boy, go easy.” But Mr. Allingham, one foot in the gutter, was hopping along like a rabbit and tugging at George Ring’s arm to make him dance faster. "It’s all Sam’s fault,” he said as he hopped, and his voice was high and loud like a boy’s in the rain.

  Look at London flying by me, buses and glowworms, umbrellas and lampposts, cigarettes and eyes under the watery doorways, I am dancing with three strangers down Edgware Road in the rain, cried Samuel to the gliding boy around him. Light and without will as a suit of feathers, he held onto their arms, and the umbrella rode above them like a bird.

  Cold and unsmiling, Mrs. Dacey skipped by his side, seeing nothing through her misted glasses.

  And George Ring sang as he bounced, with his drenched hair rising and falling in level waves, “Here we go gathering nuts and may, Donald and Mrs. Dacey and George and Sam.”

  When they stopped, outside the Antelope, Mr. Allingham leaned against the wall and coughed until he cried. All the time he coughed he never removed his cigarette.

  “I haven’t run for forty years,” he said, his shoulders shaking, and his handkerchief like a flag to his mouth. He led them into the Saloon Bar where three young women sat with their shoes off in front of the electric log fire.

  “Three whiskies. What’s yours, Sam? Nice drop of Kiwi?”

  “He’ll have whisky, too,” Mrs. Dacey said. “See, he’s got his colour back.”

  “Kiwi’s bootpolish,” one of the young women whispered, and she bent, giggling, over the grate. Her big toe came out of a hole in her stocking, suddenly, like a cold inquisitive nose, and she giggled again.

  This was a bar in London. Dear Peggy, Samuel wrote with his finger on the counter, I am drinking in a bar called the Antelope in Edgware Road with a furniture dealer, the proprietoress of a tea-shop, three young women and George Ring. I have put these facts down clearly because the scent I drank in the bath is still troublesome and people will not keep still. I am quite well but I do not know for how long.

  “What’re you doing, Sam? Looks like you’re drawing. I’ve got a proper graveyard in my chest, haven’t I? Cough, cough,” Mr. Allingham said, angrily between each cough.

  “It wasn’t that cough that carried him off,” the young woman said. Her whole plump body was giggling.

  Everything is very trivial, Samuel wrote. Mr. Allingham is drunk on one whisky. All his face goes pale except his mark.

  “Here we are,” Mr. Allingham said, “four lost souls. What a place to put a man in.”

  “The Antelope’s charming,” said George Ring. “There’s some real hunting prints in the private bar.” He smiled at Sam and moved his long, blunt fingers rapidly along the counter as though he were playing a piano. “I’m all rhythm. It’s like a kind of current in me.”

  “I mean the world. This is only a little tiny bit in it. This is all right, it’s got regular hours; you can draw the curtains, you know what to expect here. But look at the world. You and your currents,” Mr. Allingham said.

  “No, really it’s rippling out of me.” George Ring tap-danced with one foot and made a rhythmical, kissing noise with his tongue against the roof of his mouth.

  “What a place to drop a man in. In the middle of streets and houses and traffic and people.”

  The young woman wagged her finger at her toe. "You be still.” Her friends were giggling now, covering their faces and peeping out at Mr. Allingham between their fingers, telling each other to go on, saying “hotcha” and “hi de ho” and “Minnie the Moocher’s Wedding Day” as George Ring tapped one narrow, yellow buckskin shoe and strummed on the counter. They rolled their eyes and said, “Swing it, sister,” then hissed again into a giggle.

  “I’ve been nibbling away for fifty years now,” Mr. Allingham said, “and look at me. Look at me.” He took off his hat.

  “There’s hair,” whispered the young woman with the hole in her stocking.

  His hair was the color of ferrets and thin on the crown; it stopped growing at the temples but came out again from the ears. His hat had made a deep, white wrinkle on his forehead.

  “Here we are nibbling away all day and night, Mrs. Dacey. Nibble nibble.” His brown teeth came over his lip. “No sense, no order, no nothing, we’re all mad and nasty. Look at Sam there. There’s a nice harmless boy, curly hair and big eyes and all. What’s he do? Look at his bloody bottle.”

  “No language,” said the woman behind the bar. She looked like a duchess, riding, rising and sinking slowly as she spoke, as though to the movements of a horse.

  “Tantivy,” Samuel said, and blushed as Mr. Allingham pointed a stained finger.

  “That’s right. Always the right word in the right place. Tantivy! I told you, people are all mad in the world. They don’t know where they’re going, they don’t know why they’re where they are, all they want is love and beer and sleep.”

  “I wouldn’t say no to the first,” said Mrs. Dacey. “Don’t pay any attention to him,” she said to the woman behind the counter, “he’s a philosopher.”

  “Calling everybody nasty,” said the woman, rising. “There’s people live in glass houses.” Over the hurdle she goes, thought Samuel idly, and she sank again onto the hidden saddle. She must do miles in a night, he said to his empty glass.

  “People think about all kinds of other things.” George Ring looked at the ceiling for a vision. “Music,” he said, “and dancing.” He ran his fingers along the air and danced on his toes.

  “Sex,” said Mr. Allingham.

  “Sex, sex, sex, it’s always sex with you, Donald. You must be repressed or something.”

  “Sex,” whispered the young woman by the fire.

  “Sex is all right,” Mrs. Dacey said. “You leave sex alone.”

  “Of course I’m repressed. I’ve been repressed for fifty years.”

  “You leave sex out of it.” The woman behind the counter rose in a gallop. “And religion,” she said.

  Over she goes, clean as a whistle, over the hedge and the waterjump.

  Samuel took a pound out of his wallet and pointed to the whisky on the shelf. He could not trust himself yet to speak to the riding woman with the stuffed, enormous bosom and two long milk-white loaves for arms. His throat was still on fire; the heat of the room blazed up his nostrils into his head, and all the words at the tip of his tongue caught like petrol and gorse; he saw three young women flickering by the metal logs, and his three new friends thundered and gestured before him with the terrible exaggeration of people of flesh and blood moving like dramatic prisoners on a screen, doomed forever to enact their pettiness in a magnified exhibition.

  He said to himself: Mrs. Antelope, pouring the whisky as though it were four insults, believes that sex is a bed. The act of love is an act of the bed itself; the springs cry "Tumble” and over she goes, horse and all. I can see her lying like a log on a bed, listening with hate and disgust to the masterly voice of the dented sheets.

  He felt old and all-knowing and unsteady. His immediate wisdom weighed so heavily that he clutched at the edge of the counter and raised one arm, like a man trapped in the sea, to signal his sinking.

  “You may,” Mrs. Dacey said, and the room giggled like a girl.

  Now I know, thought Samuel beneath his load, as he struggled to the surface, what is meant by a pillar of the church. Long, cold Mrs. Dacey could prop Bethesda on the remote top of her carved head and freeze with her eyes the beetle-black sinners where they scraped below her. Her joke boomed in the roof.

  “You’ve dropped a fiver, Sam.” Mr. Allingham picked up a piece of paper and held it out on the sun-stained palm of his hand.

>   “It’s Lucille Harris’s address,” Samuel said.

  “Why don’t you give her a ring? The phone’s on the stairs, up there.” George Ring pointed. “Outside the Ladies.”

  Samuel parted a curtain and mounted.

  “Outside the Ladies,” a voice said from the sinking room.

  He read the instructions above the telephone, put in two pennies, dialed, and said, “Miss Harris? I’m a friend of Austin’s."

  “I am a friend of nobody’s. I am detached,” he whispered into the buzzing receiver. “I am Lopo the outlaw, loping through the night, companion of owls and murderers. Tu wit tu woo,” he said aloud into the mouthpiece.

  She did not answer, and he shuffled down the stairs, swung open the curtain, and entered the bright bar with a loping stride.

  The three young women had gone. He looked at the grate to see if their shoes were still there, but they had gone too. People leave nothing.

  “She must have been out,” he said.

  “We heard,” said Mr. Allingham. “We heard you talking to her owl.” He raised his glass and stared at it, standing sadly and savagely in the middle of the room like a man with oblivion in his hand. Then he made his choice, and drank.

  “We’re going places,” he said. “We’re taking a taxi and Sam is going to pay for it. We’re going to the West End to look for Lucille.”

  “I knew she was a kind of Holy Grail,” George Ring said when they were all in the darkness of the taxi rattling through the rain.

  Samuel felt Mrs. Dacey’s hand on his knee.

  “Four knights at arms, it’s terribly exciting. We’ll call at the Gayspot first, then the Cheerioh, then the Neptune.”

  “Four lost souls.”

  The hand ached on along the thigh, five dry fishes dying on a cloth.

  “Marble Arch,” Mr. Allingham said. “This is where the fairies come out in the moon.”

  And the hurrying crowd in the rain might have had no flesh or blood.

  “Park Lane.”

  The crowd slid past the bonnet and the windows, mixed their faces with no features and their liquid bodies under a sudden blaze, or vanished into the streaming light of a tall door that led into the bowels of rich night London where all the women wore pearls and pricked their arms with needles.