At home Godfrey deliberately did not take a candle to examine the Venus Verticordia. And next morning he found in himself still an odd but definite reluctance to look at the canvas on its easel. Beyond perhaps a touch or two here and there on one of the Varnishing Days at the Academy it ought to be a finished work now. He would let others judge it, the Hanging Committee at the Academy tomorrow, Herr Pohlmann this afternoon. So he spent the morning on such mundane matters as visiting his bank in Lombard Street, lunched in the City and returned to Gillingham Place only shortly before the German art-dealer was due.
Indeed he left it so late that he had time only to wheel the easel into the best light as he heard the dealer’s notoriously splendid carriage draw up in the street outside with an appropriate burst of jubilation from the local street boys.
And then Herr Pohlmann, shiningly dressed from the very crown of his tall hat to the very toes of his double-polished boots, with a diamond pin glinting and glaring in his tie, with his whiskers lustrous with pomade, with his large nose, his strong sensual mouth and his hungrily brilliant eyes, was being ushered in by a young Billy so overwhelmed that he almost bent double in his bow of announcement.
‘My dear Mr Mann, this is a moment to which I have long looked forward.’
‘You are very good, Herr Pohlmann. I need not say how honoured I am that a dealer of your reputation should seek me out.’
‘No, no, my dear sir, the honour will, I am sure, prove in the end to be all mine. In last year’s Academy there was nothing to touch your Torquato. If ever there was a picture that I wished to have the handling of, that was it. But you are too slow a worker, my dear sir. Too slow.’
‘Yes,’ Godfrey answered, a little antagonistically. ‘I do find it difficult to bring works forward with any rapidity.’
‘Conquer that, my dear sir. Conquer it. Because it is a failing. I tell you, never till this time has there been such a demand for Art. They are the buyers. Up in the North of your great country. In Birmingham. In Manchester. In Liverpool. The men who have made their success and are asking now, are begging now, to be told what to buy. Let me bring one or two only to see you, and whatever you paint I can sell it to them in an instant. And for more than the six hundred Her Majesty gave for the Torquato.’
Herr Pohlmann laughed with rich pleasure.
‘And now,’ he said, ‘this new picture. I have heard of it, and I cannot wait to set my eyes on it.’
‘You have heard of it?’ Godfrey said, somewhat surprised. ‘I had thought only a handful of acquaintances, of friends, knew what it was I was painting.’
‘Aha, my dear sir, it is my business to know what is about. Just as it is my business—I do not disguise it: I disguise nothing—to persuade you today not to send that picture to the Academy but to let me have it.’
Again Herr Pohlmann laughed.
‘But I know that there I shall fail,’ he said.
‘Perhaps you ought first to see the work,’ Godfrey said.
And he led the shining German over to the easel.
‘Aha, the Venus Verticordia. That lady we have read about in the good Lemprière. Ah. Ah. Ah.’
Godfrey, standing at the dealer’s shoulder, only slowly raised his eyes to look at that vital passage he had completed the day before.
‘Yes,’ proclaimed Herr Pohlmann as he did so.
‘Yes,’ he repeated with a wag of his head decisive as the knock-down of an auctioneer. ‘Yes. Magnificent. Wonderful. Superb. My dear sir, it will sell for more than the Torquato even if those fools at the Academy sky it as high as the ceiling.’
Godfrey stayed still, looking at those eyes.
‘It will not hang in the Academy,’ he said after a little.
Herr Pohlmann wheeled round, a tower of shining brass.
‘Then I may offer for it? My dear sir, one thousand guineas. Now.’
‘No. It is not for sale,’ Godfrey said.
The moment that Herr Pohlmann, plainly thinking he had become involved with a madman, had taken his hasty stiff and bewildered leave, he hurried away to Lisa. Hardly had the German’s grand carriage rolled away, with a tail of shouting street arabs behind, than he himself was out in the street and hailed a cab that was coming across Blackfriars Bridge.
‘Blue Cross Street, and hurry,’ he said to the driver, careless of any smirking.
It had been the very success of those two grey eyes looking out on the world that had overturned him. That easy success. There they were, brilliantly painted, shining, yes, and confident, yes. But by no manner of means the eyes of the Venus Verticordia, of the turner of hearts to all that is holy, chaste and pure. Oh yes, his success had deceived Elizabeth. But that had been because she, of all people in the world, was not in a position to know the inner look that poured forth from her when she was most herself. And, of course, he had deceived Herr Pohlmann. He had painted a pair of eyes that would have raised a fine twittering among connoisseurs appraising the newest fashionable portrait. No wonder he had earned Pohlmann’s appreciation. But he had missed the Venus Verticordia. He had not been able to live that look.
And that world of Lisa’s, which only the evening before he had dismissed as never being able to call to him again, had in an instant assumed once more a reality, a thickness and a presence.
He could not wait to be with her now, to be enmeshed in her working arms, clasped with force in her twining legs, close as body could be to body with the very pores of her flesh.
The cab drew up at the house in Blue Cross Street. He paid off the driver, ran up, knocked furiously at the door. A little slatternly servant girl opened to him, wiping her hands on a stained apron. He strode in. Mother Merewether was sprawling wheezily as ever in her big low armchair.
‘Lisa?’ he said, barking the request.
‘Lisa,’ Mother Merewether answered comfortably. ‘Oh, you come at the wrong time altogether for her. She’s been gone these two weeks. Gone, and I’ve no notion where.’
She chuckled and wheezed happily, seeming to take as much pleasure from seeing him deprived of delight as she had formerly done when she had seen him about to be rewarded.
He turned and walked out into the street, scarcely seeing where he was going.
But it was not Lisa herself that he truly wanted, he thought, standing there on the narrow pavement. He was not in love with Lisa: he was in love with her world. That was what he wanted. Needed. And there should be no difficulties in the way of slipping into that world through some other snaky path than that of Lisa’s arms. Why, he was at this moment in the very midst of a stalking-ground for strumpets. He had only to look about him.
He went hurriedly up into Leicester Square, glancing to either side for the sight of a woman walking with, as he put it to himself, that unmistakable allure of the Cyprian. But, though he saw one or two likely prospects in the distance and set off after them, it seemed that at this time of the afternoon there were few gay women about. He imagined that most of them were sitting, as he had seen Lisa sit, at ease on a sofa in front of a fire, three parts undressed, with breasts falling free from a loosened bodice or in a dressing gown for ever slipping from naked thighs, all idleness and luxury, waiting till the onset of evening to get dressed and go about their business.
But there must be some loose girl somewhere about here. He paced sharply round the streets leading off the square, glancing keenly into the narrower lanes, but still without success.
Then at last back in the square he spotted a girl in a red cloak coming towards him some thirty yards off. She was not a woman of the total flaunting carelessness that he had hoped to find, and for a few moments he doubted whether she was in fact gay. But her pork-pie hat with its white feather was by no means a poke-bonnet, though a little out of fashion. Yet what should a woman dressed like that be doing on her own in Leicester Square if she were modest?
She had stopped at the kerb and turned to face the passing noisily clip-clopping traffic, as if she was about to cross or was looking for a cab. His view of her now was almost completely blocked by an old fly-paper seller he had more than once seen at various places in the West End, a curious gaunt figure with an immensely tall hat wound round and round with the broad sheets of his wares thickly dotted with successfully caught victims. He hurried forward, fearing his prey would have stepped from the pavement and be lost to him.
But she had not. Moving round past the tall flapping-coated figure of the fly-paper seller, he went up close beside her.
‘Good afternoon, my dear,’ he said, with a boldness that a year before would have seemed impossible to him. ‘May I go home with you?’
She swung round to face him. He saw at once that her features expressed nothing but shocked outrage.
‘Please,’ she said, her voice already edgy with panic. ‘Please, sir, leave me alone. Leave me alone or I shall call a policeman.’
And she plunged off away from him, walking with long agitated strides and even blundering into a passer-by. He felt sick with shock. Mortification and fear chased each other through his head. What if she did call a policeman? What if her agitation attracted notice? He saw himself seized, hauled away to a police-station, up before a magistrate.
‘One from the country, I dare say,’ an ingratiating voice said in his ear. ‘Dressed like it, she was. That I grant. But yer could tell she weren’t truly.’
It was the fly-paper man.
Godfrey had somehow never till this moment thought of him as being capable of speech other than what was needed to caw his wares. Now, jolted out of his state of appalled numbness by this insidious voice, he turned and looked at the long-bearded tousle-locked man beside him.
‘Hot for a bit of it, were you?’ the fellow said, producing a leer of a smile under his fantastic fly-paper swathed hat.
‘I—I don’t know what you mean,’ Godfrey stammered.
‘’Cause if you are I can lead you to as nice a little creetur as ever you seen.’
‘I—I’m not sure that I under—No, I will. Yes. Yes, I would like it.’
‘It’ll cost yer, mind. A poor cove the likes o’ me can’t afford to leave his pitch for nothing. I shall want two shilling.’
‘You shall have them, when I see you haven’t tricked me,’ Godfrey answered, with a belated return of savoir-faire.
‘It’s over St Giles way, then. It’s a poor part, as you know, sir, but what you find there’ll be worth the having. Me own grand-daughter she is, and as willing as may be.’
Godfrey felt a sudden hot flush of abyss-poised joy. There had reared up in front of him in this pander of his own granddaughter a finger-post for the nether world.
‘Lead the way then,’ he said sharply to the long-bearded pimp. ‘I’ll follow you.’
The old man deftly rolled up the dangling treacly-sticky papers he had had hanging from his arm and thrust them into one of the pockets of his threadbare long-skirted old coat. Then, with one quick sly look at Godfrey, he set off northwards and east.
Godfrey walked about five paces behind, forcing himself not to think of the unpleasant episode just past nor about the risks that might lie ahead in the thief-inhabited rookery of St Giles. Instead he let vague and tremulous excitement sweep through him. He was stepping onwards into the dark land.
Ten minutes’ walk up Monmouth Street and they were there, at the meeting of the seven roads called Seven Dials, the open and noisy centre of the close-packed dark rookery, garish with its seven gin-palaces, its busy cheap provision shops, its big bakers’ shops, its old-clothes shops displaying every sort of often-used garment. The pavements and the roadway were lively with the place’s sharp-faced inhabitants, drunk and sober, ill-dressed youths with quick suspicious looks under well-pulled-down cap peaks, dark-haired Irish costers with their flat little donkey carts loaded with squashy oranges, smelly vegetables or doubtful herrings, idle-looking men of a vaguely sporting character in short-skirted velveteen coats with stubby empty pipes in their mouths, short-frocked coster-girls with red and yellow kerchiefs across their bosoms, women in shawls that were ragged but bright-coloured—more than one of them bearing a cut lip or a black eye—professional beggars of all sorts departing to prey on the respectable West End or coming slipping back home with pockets full of concealed booty, song-patterers setting out with their crudely printed sheets on a last round of the less opulent quarters, navvies in huge great ankle-jack boots, cauliflower vendors, umbrella-menders, oystermen.
The fly-paper man slid his way through all the jostle at an unvarying pace and Godfrey followed, keeping a cautious hand on watch-chain and gold-purse pocket. They headed quickly down the narrowest of the seven radiating ways.
They passed rag shops and bottle shops, dingy beer shops, cheap picture-frame and penny looking-glass makers and secondhand-furniture shops. The fly-paper man turned off once, when he saw the way ahead blocked where one of the horses of a mudcart had fallen on the slimy cobbles, and cut briefly through a street devoted to the selling of birds and birdcages, chickweed and dogs and cats. At the corner there a knot of buyers round a pawnbroker’s auction blocked their path. The pawnbroker, big and overbearing in a great shaggy pilot coat, was yelling his wares and prices. ‘’Ere’s a flannel perri-coat, warm enough, who’ll say sixpence?’ And back from the crowd came derisive shouts, ‘Give you a farden’ and ‘’Tain’t worth that.’ But at last the pawnbroker seized on some halfhearted bid and triumphantly called out ‘Tuppence. Tuppence I take.’ The crowd shifted and they got through.
Now the fantastically hatted old man ahead plunged abruptly into a maze of courts, alleys and yards where the people seemed yet more pinch-faced and poverty-marked, wan figures peering from doorways or through the few remaining dirty panes in rag-stuffed windows. But, with every pace they took into the squalid heart of the rookery, the fever in him mounted. The old fly-paper man’s grand-daughter, she was waiting for him. The old man ahead had promised her to him. He strode onwards.
And then they turned into an alley narrower, it seemed, than any yet, a gloomy cul-de-sac blocked at the far end by a high neglected windowless wall and made almost dark even in the broad afternoon by the clothes hung to dry across it on wooden rods stretching its short width from one upper-storey window to another. Gowns, trousers, drawers, vests and greyish sheets hung limply, ragged and much patched. At the doorways at the nearer end a few women were sitting on the broken steps with their knees up to their chins talking among themselves in almost incomprehensible Irish voices. Was it in such a neighbourhood that Lisa had been a child, he wondered.
The unpaved alley, spattered with ordure, strewn with old cabbage-leaves and turnip-stalks, smelt vile. Twice within its thirty or forty yard length he saw dead cats. He walked close behind the tall fly-paper seller—now no longer a piece of flotsam on the healthy tide of people passing along Coventry Street or Piccadilly, but instead a figure invested with assurance and even a sharp authority—and more than once he slipped on some piece of slimy foulness.
At the alley’s end the fly-paper man suddenly turned in at the open doorway of the last house on the left and went down a short flight of dark steps. Godfrey followed, striving to make out where he was being led. At the bottom the light of a fiercely glowing coke fire helped him to see a little. They appeared to be in some sort of kitchen, low-ceilinged but unexpectedly large. Filling all its centre was a big dirty once-white table around which were seated a number of individuals, men and women, hard to make out in the gloom. To one side of the glowing fire a rope stretched with dangling from it a dozen or more pairs of stockings and a few coloured handkerchiefs. At the other side of the fire bacon must have been hanging to cook because its sharp tang was the most evident smell among many less savoury.
Without pause the fly-paper man strode through the room. He seemed from the very way he ignored the shambling figures round the table and from the sudden silence that fell to have added once more to his growing mantle of authority. Godfrey, still keeping as close behind as possible, saw that there was a narrow flight of stairs at the far end of the room. Without a word his guide ascended them.
They went steadily up three floors, Godfrey taking good care to keep to the inside of the narrow banister-stripped stairs. At the top there was a small landing with three blackened doors opening off it. The fly-paper man went to one of them and without ceremony pushed it open.
‘’Ere,’ exclaimed a girl’s voice angrily.
But seeing who was standing there she changed her tone.
‘Oh, it’s you. What you want this time o’ the afternoon?’
‘Brought you a gentleman,’ the fly-paper man said, in much the voice of a master offering a fish to a favourite cat.
Then, without saying more, he moved aside and ushered Godfrey into the room. But at its doorway he laid a narrow horny hand on his arm.
‘There’s half a sov’ you owe,’ he said.
Godfrey, perfectly conscious that two shillings had been the actual extent of their bargain, nevertheless thought it wise to pay up without argument. The old man gave him no thanks but simply turned and went stampingly down the stairs. Godfrey gave his attention to the occupant of the room in front of him.
She was young, not much above twenty he judged. And she was pretty. Or rather—he revised his first easy judgment—she was only slightly pretty but she was decidedly beguiling.
She was smiling. And the smile, making a wide V of her mouth, had a hungry look. But it was not a hunger for food, though from the thinness of her soft flesh it was probable that she was indeed physically hungry and was used to being so. Yet in the smile, and the poised angle of her head, there was a note offeline confidence, the confidence perhaps of a hungry one who knows there is nothing now that can come between her and her feed. It was a mockingness that simultaneously disturbed and drew him. For the rest, he noted that although she had large brown eyes and softly curling hair she was in no way gently feminine.
The room behind her contained little more than a low bed with a dirty patchwork counterpane covering the bare lean ribbed ticking of a flock mattress, a broken-backed chair and a small deal table on which there was a black gin bottle, a couple of pewter quartern measures, the remains of a loaf and, incongruously, a little earthenware flower-pot in which there straggled a wretched primrose plant with one pale flower on it.
‘Come in then, gentleman,’ the girl said. ‘Come in and close the door behind you. Unless you’re one of the sort that likes it open.’
Godfrey entered, pushing the door with his back until he heard the latch click.
‘What’s your name?’ he asked in a voice that pleased him for its edge of businesslike coldness. ‘Your grandfather failed to tell me.’
‘Grandfather,’ the girl retorted. ‘Father you should say. He’s father and grandfather both.’
She smiled her scornful hungry smile.
A tiny shock did sting him at what she had said. But he succeeded in showing nothing of it. And, indeed, almost as soon as he had felt it, it vanished, swamped by a rich delight.
‘Then your father didn’t tell me your name,’ he said, savouring it.
‘It’s Kitty,’ the girl said. ‘And where’s your purse?’ Without a word he took out his purse and extracted a sovereign from it. He tossed it on to the table.
‘That,’ he said, ‘and no more.’
‘That,’ she answered, still smiling her mocking smile. ‘Until you want more.’
‘We’ll see what you can provide then,’ Godfrey said.
And he advanced on her in a manner very different from the unconfident way he had gone towards Lisa on the very first occasion that he had ever visited a whore, not so many months earlier. Without the least gentleness he pushed her backwards on to the wretched bed and lifted up both her skirt and the chemise that was all she wore under it. Then, unhesitatingly, he plunged his head between her legs. An instant later he felt her hands gripping hard at the hair of his head.
The love-making that began thus was very different from his encounters with Lisa. There was nothing in it of the shared exploration. There was much of the blood-letting cockfight. But it took him to that dark land.