Sunday at the Cross Bones

Giving a rather curt wave to the grumpy sod from the bookie’s, he indicated I should get out notebook and pen. But just at that moment, the pub door opened and these two young dames strode in.

Very dramatic they were, one tall, one short, both dead swishy in their long rustling skirts, tight bodices and fancy hats. You’d have thought they’d have come straight from the Windmill Theatre, though whether part of the audience or part of the stage ensemble, it was hard to judge. Modern girls, you see, the kind we write about in the ‘Trends’ pages – a little shocking, a little too damn pleased with themselves. They were no strangers to the Coal House.

‘Ah, Dolly,’ said the vicar, ‘I was beginning to worry.’ He seized the hand of the smaller one – the one with the huge brown eyes under the rakishly tilted cloche hat – and kissed her on the cheek.

The eyes of the pub followed him. He was short, as I’ve said, and his hair was snow white and he had terrible rabbity teeth, but here he was talking to a brace of posh young flappers like they were at a cocktail party in Henley.

‘And this is …?’ he says, indicating her friend, a plump piece of work in a French hat with a torn veil covered in spots, possibly to match her complexion.

‘This, Harold, is Jezzie,’ says the bird in the cloche. ‘She started out as Jessie, changed it to Eleanora, then Zuleika, then Maudie for a while, then some horrible swell called her Jezebel in a pub one night, and made her cry, so we told her, Use it, darling, don’t let him put one over on you, and she’s been Jezzie ever since.’ She paused and looked around the snug. ‘Flip me, what’s a girl got to do to get a drink around ’ere?’

The reverend ignored her. He was too busy gazing at Jezebel (well named, what with her crimson petticoat peeping out from under her long crackling skirt) and trying to see the face through the spotty veil.

‘You have the look,’ he said, or rather breathed in her ear, or would’ve done if she hadn’t stood a good six inches taller than him, ‘of Miss Greta Garbo. You must surely have seen Flesh and the Devil?’

Jezzie regarded him with a mild stare, the way girls do when they can’t believe you’re taking liberties exactly ten seconds after meeting them.

‘What, Greta Garbo? Me?’ she said and went off into a spasm of titters.

I took the only initiative I could, and said, ‘Would you ladies care for a drink?’

Why yes, they’d love a drink, though they’d have been better off at night class in needlework than hanging round in the Strand. They both fancied Brandy Alexanders.

I went to the bar for the fourth time that night. Benny tried to stick around and ingratiate himself with the dames, but he didn’t have the lingo to handle two young poules de luxe. They could probably sniff him as an off-limits married man right from the word go.

‘I’m going home,’ he said. ‘You got your hands full here.’

‘See you next week, Ben. Give Clare one for me, all right?’

In the snug, the girls sat together on the cracked-leather divan, leaning together in a sisterly fashion, sometimes swaying a bit to right and left as if in a chorus line. The rector leaned forward a lot, his long face inches away from the girls’ cheeks, turning his shining eyes first to Dolores, then to Jezzie. He did 90 per cent of the talking. For minutes they smiled vacantly, like little girls listening to an elderly grandpa grinding on about the war, hoping that they might get a chocolate biscuit. Reckoning I’d bought myself an introduction, I took the stool beside him, and listened in.

‘… and Mrs Lake will, I’m afraid, no longer countenance your irregular hours and gentlemen callers, Dolores,’ he was saying. ‘I spoke with her on Tuesday. She has developed a singular aversion, I’m afraid, to your Maltese gentlemen friends, whom she describes, with a singular lack of racial accuracy, as Hottentots.’ His face essayed a brief, high-table smile. ‘She does not want, she says, “them swarthy chancers” dropping in and out of her establishment at all hours. So we will have to find you some new haven. I have asked about your secretarial studies at Mrs Moody’s and I fear – no, do not interrupt – you have failed to honour your commitment. I hear your morning session last week saw Mrs Moody cooling her heels for an hour with no sign of your –’

‘I can’t go studying squiggles in the middle of the bloody night,’ said Dolores, grumpily.

‘Nine o’clock in the morning is hardly the small hours. I told Mrs Moody of your circumstances, and she agreed to take you on at a very reasonable rate. It hardly repays me, or her, for our considerate impulses if you choose to spend every morning lying in bed reading rubbishy magazines and drinking chocolate.’

‘I didn’t come here for a lecture,’ said Dolores, an astonishingly self-confident young thing for her age. ‘I thought you was going to introduce me to Ivor Novello, so I could tell him about my singing.’

Jezzie giggled (again). ‘Ivor Novello?’ she said, sneeringly. ‘Ivor pain in my rear end, more like.’

The rector looked hurt. ‘You underestimate my contacts in the world of what the Americans call show business. Though I have never met the delightful Mr Novello, I have friends who’ve had the pleasure of meeting him backstage. They say he is charming to strangers, polite to ladies and friendly to young persons starting out on the musical scene.’

Jezzie unfurled herself from the banquette and took herself off to the Ladies. We all watched her go. Her sizeable young rump, tightly encased in the crackling shiny material, had a distinct wiggle.

‘Charming,’ said the rector with the fond appreciation of an uncle, ‘though unfortunate to bear such a name, whatever the eccentricity of its genesis. Have you known her long?’

‘Couple of weeks,’ said Dolores. ‘We met at the Hippodrome, hanging round the stage door for Jack Buchanan. Bloody freezing it was, and when he came out he just whisked past us and got in a cab. Not as big as you’d have expected neither.’

‘Where does she live?’

‘Oh –’ she waved a vague hand – ‘here and there.’

‘You can be a little more precise,’ said the rector.

Dolores, or Dolly, regarded him steadily. ‘I dunno what you’re thinking, right this minute, Harold, but you’re not to start with her.’ She brazenly took out a cigarette case, extracted a Virginia and lit it. ‘All right? Just don’t start in on her, the minute my back’s turned.’

The rector looked around, with a faint whinny of disavowal. ‘My dear girl –’

‘And who’s this geezer, anyhow?’ demanded the young harpy. ‘What the hell does he want?’ She leaned forward, her dark eyes lit up with suspicion.

‘This is a gentleman from the press, who seeks information about my pastoral work.’

‘Oh great,’ said Dolores, rising to her feet. ‘Bloody reporter, that’s all I need. Informer, more like.’

‘There is no reason to fear –’

‘I’m going to see what’s happened to Jezzie,’ she said, and flung herself away from our table, leaving a hefty waft of Woolworths scent and brass’s armpit.

That left us together.

‘I’m afraid I’ve upset your young friends, Padre,’ I said, as airily as I could. ‘All I was after was a few facts about your crusading work. Perhaps I should leave you to it.’

He put his hand on my arm, a gentle and insinuating gesture. ‘Stand your ground, my boy,’ he said, opening his greatcoat and taking out a huge cigar from a pocket within. ‘They will be back. These young girls regard me as their only hope in this vale of sin. They cleave to me instinctively, as though to an oak in a torrent.’

He crinkled the cigar – it was huge, I couldn’t afford a cigar like that – then picked up Dolly’s box of Swan vestas and lit it. Clouds of expensive blue smoke briefly enveloped his head in a foggy halo. He appeared to devour the enormous tube, running it two inches inside his distended lips, then sucked at it with hungry kisses – mpuh! mpuh! mpuh! – until the tip glowed wide like an orange sun, and the smoke poured from his nose and mouth like some kind of sulphurous ectoplasm.

‘Perhaps I should go,’ I said. ‘They obviously don’t like newspaper men.’

He studied the end of his Havanan torpedo. ‘No, no, I have always been convinced of the power of the press to do good rather than mischief. Without the help of journalists, we shall never reveal to the world the troubles of the homeless, the young strays and runaways, the army of fallen women.’

‘Perhaps,’ I ventured, all innocent-like, ‘we should concentrate on the work of one man. Readers don’t like being told depressing tales about kids dying in poverty and girls on the game. But a story about One Man’s Quest to take care of, you know, tarts who don’t want to be …’

He looked at me coldly. ‘Nobody, my young friend, wishes to be a prostitute. Any girl who finds herself in such employment has not sought it volitionally. It is not a matter of choice. They are driven into lives of degeneracy by the circumscription of choice. Young girls in their natural state are the innocent lambs of Creation. Without worldly knowledge, they would have no will to sin.’

‘And how can you help them?’ I asked, puzzled.

He sucked on his cigar again. ‘By showing them a route back to righteousness. By befriending them, and revealing there is a finer life, a life of the mind and of the soul, in which they may find redemption, a career in the arts or the drama.’

At that moment, the girls came back. Such a transformation! Dolores was all smiles. Jezzie carried her hat, with its spotty veil, in her hand, her face now revealed in all its seventeen-year-old wonder: her fat cheeks aglow, her hair blonde and fine as a pedigree Saluki’s, her eyes shining. You’d think they’d just won some money, these lambs of Creation.

‘We made some new friends,’ said Dolores, ‘in the public bar. They was very nice, weren’t they, Jez?’

‘He was lovely,’ breathed the other one. ‘They’re taking us to a party in a while, to meet some people who are going to put on a show at the Palladium.’

‘What an amazing stroke of luck,’ I said. ‘Don’t tell me they happen to be looking for two young actresses of no previous experience to appear in the chorus?’

‘Yeah, as a matter of fact –’ Her young face hardened. ‘How’d you know that?’