Sunday at the Cross Bones

‘He’s looking for Emily Murray,’ said the thin-faced one, ‘and then he said he was after satisfaction. So I thought –’ She glanced around the packed and fetid room, as if identifying several places where sexual activity might be conducted in comfort and privacy.

‘No, no, no!’ I said. The stupid girl. I repeated my quest and looked around the room with a sudden wild suspicion. Could one of these defeated slatterns be my dear Emily, whom I saved from the travails of sin at the hands of a procurer in Soho? Could Fate have so changed her features that I now did not recognise her?

‘… and so I am here,’ I concluded. ‘Can you help me?’ I drew closer. ‘Can it be that –’ I faltered – ‘that one of you ladies knows of her whereabouts?’

There was a silence apart from the chatterers on the bed (‘Well, ’e fuckin’ never dunit ter me,’ one was remarking to the other).

‘In fact,’ I asked, ‘is one of you called … Flo?’

‘That’s me,’ said the red-haired termagant. ‘What’s it to you? An’ what’s a protterjay when it’s at home?’

‘But this is marvellous,’ I cried. ‘I am getting somewhere at last. You are a singer in the local Palace of Varieties, I believe?’

‘You what? Girls, did you ’ear that?’ She gazed around the room, taking in her venal sisterhood in a glance. ‘I’m a well-known singer down the Palais according to his lordship here.’

There was raucous laughter. ‘Yeah,’ said one, ‘me too. An’ I always sing much better with me knickers off.’

‘Does your sister come to see you perform?’ I persisted. ‘emily, I mean?’

‘Sister? She’s not my sister. I ain’t got no sister. I know her, she lives here, on and off, but that’s it. She’s not, like, family. Someone’s been telling porky pies, mister.’

‘She lives here?’ I waved a hand that took in the squalor, the smell and the defeatedness that hung in the room like a miserable fog. I meant to imply, ‘How could anyone else fit in here?’ It came out as ‘How could anyone at all live here?’

‘She lives here when there’s room,’ said the thin woman from the shadows. ‘Been turning up and going again for three weeks. Stayed here last weekend when Katrin was off working, but she came back and Em had to go. Any more’n six, and the landlords complain the privy’ll break down and they threaten to boot us all out, even though the rent’s paid regular.’

‘But where would she have gone when there was no room for her?’ I cried.

The thin woman pursed her lips and blew a little puff of air between them. The henna-haired one, Flo, said, ‘Where’d you think? She went on the street. Probably met a fancy gent with one of them new Bentleys, who took her back to his place and fed her sherry and cake and tucked her up nice with a little story.’

The others laughed again. Flo seemed to be the humorist in this sorry sorority.

‘And if she met no fancy gent?’ I asked with some asperity. ‘What would have befallen her?’

The thin woman puffed her cheeks out again. ‘She’ll take her chances. We all take our chances.’ She raised her fist and jingled the five shillings within. ‘You going now? Some of us have to get on. If she calls, we’ll say you was asking for her.’

I could not wait to depart from that Calcuttan hole. ‘Please take this note and make sure she receives it,’ I said, writing my address and the Vauxhall telephone number. ‘It is vitally important that I speak with her soon. Here is five shillings more for you – and there will be a substantial cash reward if you bring us together. Do you understand?’

‘Oh, we understand, sir,’ laughed Flo, the non-chanteuse. ‘You can be sure you’ll ’ear from us the minute she comes back from Park Lane.’

I hurried away. The smell of decay, of month-worn bloomers and stale semen, of leaking gas and bletted fruit, of lies and tidal sewage, of traded flesh and cascading rubbish bins, of twining and scrambling and greed-frenzied rats, seemed to stick to me as if it would hang around me and cling to my coat for ever. I strode through Islington like a swimmer coming up from the depths, rising up gasping, lung-burstingly, towards the light.

Letter from Mrs Moyra Davidson

Stiffkey Rectory 19 August 1930

My dear Oona,

Lovely to get your letter with all your exciting news. I am so glad Finbar’s violin lessons have paid off, it is a marvellous thing to be able to fill the house with music, I mean real music played on instruments, not just having the radio on all the time like Sheilagh and Nugent. I thought all this flapper nonsense was over and done with, but not at all. Here I am in the rectory study, trying to collect my poor thoughts and in the next room the wireless is playing Jack Hylton and his Orchestra and he’s singing ‘If I Had a Talking Picture of You’. Such nonsense. I get distracted by thinking, well, if I did have a talking picture of H, it’d be a step up from what I have now, which is a silent picture of him in the living room, a framed photograph of him sitting in a chair holding one of his big cigars and looking – well, rather more crafty than sacred, truth to tell, and sometimes when it gets too quiet around here, I wish I could make it talk to me. I’ve got used to not seeing him all week, I mean, literally all week except for Sundays. Sometimes I feel lucky if he turns up for the Sabbath itself. Sometimes it’s so late on Saturday night, I can’t be bothered waiting up for him, and I go off to bed and read lovely Charlotte Yonge instead. The first I know of the presence of the Lord is when he’s eating a boiled egg in his study on Sunday morning and trying to cobble a sermon together from a dozen scraps of paper and the Bible. And then God help me if I interrupt to tell him about the dead seagull in the chimney, or the liberties that the Du Dumaine children have been taking, using my writing paper for crayon likenesses. He’ll only shush me and wave a hand as if to say, ‘Not now, don’t bother me with this trivial nonsense.’

‘Harold,’ I say, ‘this is a home. I know it is a haven for the sick and misfortunate, a confessional for the sinful and the desperate, a place of succour and retreat for the spiritually confused. But it is first and foremost, Harold, a home, where your children live and I live, and Cook and Mrs Henryson and Enid and Polly and the dogs and, while I’m at it, Colonel Du Dumaine and his sons. It’s a home where people live whom you love or at least are supposed to love when you get five minutes to devote to them in between showing your love for your fellow man in every fiddly backstreet in London, and it’s no use your sitting there with your breakfast egg and your sermon text playing the great Shepherd with his Flock if you cannot even spend five minutes with your own domestic flock where they need you most, namely here in the home.’

He’s surprised by this unaccustomed outburst. ‘I am shocked, my dear Mimi, shocked,’ he says, wiping crumbs from his lips, ‘by this imputation of neglect. That I, who spend the lion’s share of every day the Lord sends in working for the betterment of my fellow creatures, should be so cruelly accused of failing in my duty …’ He shakes his head, like he’s trying to get my words out of his ears. ‘Would you like to suggest, in the few minutes that remain before I go to address the village congregation on matters of Heaven and Hell, where my sin of omission lies?’

All I can think to say is, ‘You’re never here,’ and ‘You never talk to me, not properly any more, and you never take me out the way people take their wives out, not even to see the pierrots at the Hunstanton Empire.’ But it sounds so foolish and trivial and clingy. I know exactly what he’s going to say, because he always brings up St Matthew: ‘Need I remind you of the ocean of want that surges all around us? It is laid down in the Gospel of St Matthew: “For I was an hungred and ye gave me meat: I was thirsty and ye gave me drink: I was a stranger and ye took me in …”’ I try to stop him around this part, because his voice takes on a bleating quality, and I know how it is going to end, but he is unstoppable: ‘“Naked, and ye clothed me; I was sick and ye visited me; I was in prison and ye came unto me.” Now my dear,’ (this is how he goes on, it drives me crazy) ‘nowhere in St Matthew, to the best of my recollection, can be found the words, “I was a touch bored at home and ye came and took me to a dinner dance in Holt.” You may search the Gospels for a month without finding the words, “I was restless and bored from spending all day gossiping with Mrs Reynolds, and ye took me to see Mr Coward in Private Lives at the Phoenix Theatre.” I must be at my work, my darling, among the genuinely conflicted and truly wretched. But that is not to say I cannot listen to your aches and woes with a sympathetic ear. Perhaps after lunch we might discuss what is troubling you.’

You see the real trouble, Oona? I have to make an appointment to see my own husband. And that casual mention of the theatre, he knows how it cuts me to the quick. It reminds me what a stage-struck pair we were when young, him on the boards with the comic monologues, me with the lovely singing voice. I was a mezzo of course.

Did I ever tell you of the first day we met, at the Oxford Playhouse? I was part of Miss Horniman’s company of Abbey Singers, and we were visiting the students from the University Drama Society. Some of us were invited to tea with the president, Sir Reginald Kennedy-Cox, and there to welcome the Irish songbirds was Harold. He stood out, not because he was tall or handsome, but because he was older than the rest of the students, properly grown-up at twenty-three or twenty-four, and he’d seen life and was a proper actor. He’d performed at the Wigmore Hall and had lived off his stage earnings to pay for his time at college. People spoke of him with respect, they called him the ‘Holy Actor’ as though it was amazing to find a theology student able to stand up onstage and declaim comic monologues about young boys being eaten by lions at the zoo. I liked him because all the evenings spent onstage had given him a very easy manner. His voice was low, never harsh nor quarrelsome, quite deep and musical, it sort of flowed along but slowly, a river of chocolate. Of course he was ‘theatrical’, but not in the way people use the word to say someone’s false and untrue, he was theatrical as a way of putting a point across. He’d fix you with his intense brown eyes, and tell you about the poor boys in the East End of London he was trying to help by setting up a club where they could get warm food and play games at nights instead of fighting. He argued the case for giving every street child a proper education and start in life and training and an apprenticeship so they wouldn’t need handouts from grand ladies such as myself, and he argued with such passionate eloquence, I was won over to the cause, to him and to his big brown eyes. As he got to the climax of his speech, I looked down and found his hand had been gripping my forearm for so long, I’d lost any feeling in it. You could have jabbed a pin into me and it wouldn’t have hurt. ‘Why, Mr Davidson,’ I said, ‘you have become quite carried away.’ Harold clutched my little white hand in his and impetuously kissed it, with the ardour of a desert sheikh. ‘I am sorry to have spoken with such heat,’ he said, ‘and sorry to feel your hand so cold. But perhaps something of what I have said has penetrated into your heart, my dear Miss Saurin.’ And of course it had, for I never knew anybody could so arouse an audience as Harold, with that voice reverberating like the throb of an Underground train. I began to fall for him at that moment, Oona, though of course there was no question of anything happening, with him being so poor and my father expecting great things for me and the Cartwright boy in Castle Lambert. But it started then all right.

Dear me, Oona, how I’ve rattled on again. No time for proper news, except to say the major has been up to even worse tricks. Apart from his public attempts to wrest the churchwardenship from poor Mr Reynolds, he’s taken to drinking in the middle of the day and making a scene in the church. On Wednesday, he shambled in and made a scene at the war memorial in the porch, complaining about the presence in the list of someone he hadn’t liked or who was unworthy, and someone else whose name should have been there but wasn’t. Mostly I just walk away from any such dispute, but this time I caught such a waft of whisky off the major’s breath I had to ask him to leave. He swayed about and glared at me with such desperate eyes, I was scared for my life. That man is capable of anything. But, please God, Harold will deal with him, should he ever get home from ministering to the hungred, thirsty, naked, ill and imprisoned.

My love to you,

Mimi xx

Journals of Harold Davidson

London 21 August 1930

Emily Murray’s breasts are a miracle of nature. Though she is lying on her back, they do not loll towards her armpits but poke upwards like proud hills, like Sheba’s mountains in King Solomon’s Mines, and draw the hand to them as if the first impulse of mankind were not shelter, food, drink or conquest but the impulse to stroke and caress this firm softness, these astounding hills.

Her skin is white as milk, save on her forearms and the V of her throat, which have been burnished by sunlight. I believe it is called a Farmer’s Tan, the product, not of Côte d’Azur beaches, but of working in the open air under the summer’s rays with sleeves rolled up and top shirt-button undone. The tanned flesh of a working girl, as she was when I found her, and as I persuaded her not to be for a moment longer; a working girl when she resumed the calling merely two weeks ago despite all my efforts, and a working girl as she remained until yesterday.

Her eyes are closed, but her lips are set in a charming pout, the face of a young woman sure of getting her way. Her teeth were always a joy to behold, so tiny and regular but for the two in front, which stuck out in a small, enchanting overbite, to rest on the soft cushion of her lower lip. Below her ribcage, the skin is taut as a sand tarpaulin, a soft down of hair making a golden meadow of her abdomen. The pudenda are neatly hidden behind a tangle of dark curls, surprisingly black and springy when her hair was always so fair and smooth. I gaze at this secret jungle, musing on Shakespeare’s lines on his mistress’s body – ‘If snow be white, why then, her breasts are dun; / If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head’ – and thinking, Why, these are genuine wires – the electrical circuits of Emily’s secret self, masked by her street finery, her hair dye and the stews of north London where her dismal journey took her. Here, in this jungle of wires lies the truth. Maybe the wires could be likened to a telephone exchange, a seemingly incoherent Gordian knot of flex and string which nonetheless connects disparate parts of the self, the conscience to the hand, the brain to the soul …

It’s no good. All sermons have deserted me. To wring metaphors from every corner of experience is second nature to me; yet even I cannot elaborate a seam of instruction from the dark pubic hairs of a dead blonde woman.

My poor Emily. Only four days after my encounter with the dismal sisterhood in Islington, I am here, called upon by the authorities, to identify her body. The ladies of Halberd Street, those oily-faced wretches, gave my name as her next of kin, in order to save themselves from implication in a police inquiry.

I asked the mortuary sergeant the reason for her death. He hummed and hawed and muttered about Exposure and how she was found sleeping on a park bench in Highbury Fields. I pointed out that it was August, and the weather not unseasonably cold. He countered by saying that, while living in an overcrowded tenement building, she had been bitten during the night by the dreadful bug known as the Cimex lectularius, which brought her arm up in pustules and turned her blood septic. A night or two in the open, far from airing the wound, only worsened it and when she returned to the crowded apartment, she was turned away by the sextet of b*tches and directed to go off and find a hospital that would treat her gangrenous limb.

‘And consider as well,’ said the sergeant, his plausible manner not quite making up for the vagueness of his words, ‘what she’s been up to lately. It’s not just the sleeping in the parks, is it? It’s doing the business with strangers behind bushes and against trees, isn’t it? No telling what extra diseases they pick up in the middle of the night, is there?’

‘I am surprised to hear a supposed medical orderly speak such nonsense,’ I said in a voice like iron, ‘but one thing is clear. Despite the evidence of insect bites, exposure, neglect and sexual abandon, she did not die from any of them.’ I paused, in the vain hope that he might take in my words. ‘She died of poverty.’

This was no Disraelian flourish. Being poor, being a woman and being in London did for her as surely as a knife stabbed in her back. I have seen it happen again and again until I am wearied in contemplating the scale of the problem. The last four years have seized the festering sores of poverty and prostitution, and made them infinitely worse, blown them into cancerous lumps on the metropolitan body. Since the General Strike, that brave, doomed public uprising, the working class has lost its energy, its indomitable spirit. Jobs are being shed by the score every week. The roads are filling up with unemployed carters and dockhands, farm labourers and lathe operators, colliers and shipmen. For a woman of the working class, what work is there but domestic service, or drawing beer in a saloon, or seeking a position exhibiting herself to artists or the public in a coarse revue? And when she has learned that the secret of success in each of these workplaces is to find more inventive ways of pleasing men and doing their bidding, why, what is to stop her proceeding down the final half-mile to whoredom and moral decay?

Poor Emily. She is – was – no more than twenty-three. When I met her, just six months ago, outside a pub in Rupert Street, I noticed the passivity of her nature. I took her to a café in Dean Street where I learned little of her recent circumstances but much of her younger days, her brothers and sisters, her pets, her attic bedroom, the trees in the yard in whose branches she used to hide from her indulgent, tree-climbing papa. It was like talking to a child of a mildly emetic sweetness. She seemed a girl stuck firmly in her infant world, who clapped her hands together with delight if you bought her a pastry, who laughed with the angelic tinkle of Christmas chimes if you told her stories of parishioners’ follies, and who probably responded to the brutal business of sexual penetration by cries to the perpetrator to cease tickling her.

It was all a pretence. The childhood was an invention, drawn from a dozen storybooks of nursery, bathtime and barnyard adventures, of a loving mother and father, of exciting discoveries in the secret woodland. It was all make-believe. So was her breathless, ingénue surprise at everything. It was as though she had never been taken out to a beef supper before (‘Is this where lords and ladies dine?’), nor to a cathedral (‘But how could the painters have done them lovely pictures up so high?’); nor even for an innocent walk in Green Park in the moonlight: ‘Why have you brought me here?’ she would say in a breathy mumble, one hand over her mouth. ‘You are not going to – use me, are you?’

She was an actress who seldom left off playing a virgin – a woman in her early twenties playing an urchin child in ragged skirts and off-white pants. It was a pose that, she confided to me, ‘many gentlemen like’. Presumably it appealed to the kind of feeble-minded City clerk who felt himself to be a gentleman because a feathery young strumpet discerns him to be one. I cannot bear to think of the poor girl suffering in her last extremities. Nor suffering the torments of employment at the Café Royal, a position I found her, specifically to rescue her from being nightly brutalised in Soho, as she explained about her pet lamb into the ears of her straining and pounding clients. But must I blame myself? My wish was only to help her, to protect her – very well then, to save her, as one would save a robin with a crushed wing on one’s front doorstep.

I am assailed with doubts. Should I have left her alone, with her babyish fantasies? Did I make her life worse or better by taking her from gutter to decency, from Soho to Regent Street? Now she lies before me on this slab, her beauty fled, her childish patter dead as carbon.

She seems to accuse me. I cannot stand to hear her say it again, for her body to breathe the words at me, through her breasts and her ringlets and her pale skin:

‘Why have you brought me here? Harold? Why have you brought me here?’