Chocolate Bourbon biscuits were his favourite. A handful of perfect sandwich cookies he could crack open and remortar together in doubles that took his breath away. Rita was talking but he hardly heard her. Gently, ever so gently, Joseph eased the top off a Bourbon – it came free with a sheen of cream, just enough to taste.
Once, he ate twenty-nine Bourbons in one sitting, separating expertly, cream on cream perfectly joined – a real brickie, he was. Jaffa Cakes he swallowed whole, nothing to them, just a bit of air and that soft orange lozenge to nurture his throat. Ginger nuts: good for an upset stomach. Shortbread turned his mouth to paste. Hobnobs were expensive; you only paid for the name. But Bourbons – he ate a sleeve of them every Saturday night.
When he was little, Mama gave him biscuits if he hurt himself or needed cheering up; she gave him a biscuit when he had a clean plate and again before he went to sleep at night, served up on a tray with a cup of tea. But then, it was never just one biscuit, but three or four or five. Who could stop at one? Even the stale, soggy ones at the bottom of the tin were delicious, melting on his tongue.
He remembered when biscuits came out of a barrel. They were lucky not to have to buy the broken ones, Sal said – not like when she was growing up and biscuits were raked into a paper bag at the shop, the whole ones put to the side at home in case anyone called. No, Joseph had his pick of biscuits, and not for him the Garibaldi or a Rich Tea, the nothing ones that everybody had. Mama always bought the best, Florentines and Piccadilly biscuits that came in decorated tins. She had them sent from Fortnum & Mason.
Joseph liked a bit of cake, too. Mama didn’t bake, but there were years when they had a cook and he remembered well her Victoria sponge, jam oozing from the cut, and Bakewell tart and millionaires’ slices, all chocolate and caramel and a crispy bottom, rich as they come. When Joseph went out to ride the buses, he always had tea and cake with his lunch. He loved sticky brownies and lemon slices dusted with sugar and flapjack bars and meringue anything. The tea washed it down – the tea was a straightener after something so sweet.
If he hadn’t had such a stutter, he might have rhapsodized on biscuits and cakes. He might have sung, or at least spoken at length. Had he been a reader of books, especially poetry, words would have come to him that named the sensations, the palate’s pleasure.
He popped a biscuit in, a Jammie Dodger with a smile, the kind of thing that children ate at parties. The phone rang. It had started to ring lately, but when he answered, there was silence. He put the phone down, only for it to ring again. It rang off and on throughout the day, then nothing all night until the next morning, when it began again. It unnerved him. He tried to speak, to find out who it was and what they wanted, but his stutter always got in the way.
Joseph bumped up the volume on the telly. Let it ring. He was tired. He’d ridden the 274 end to end that morning, but it was hot and the bus was crowded, more people than ever: the tourist season had begun. Every summer, when the sun came out and the flowers bloomed, here they came, speaking in tongues, stopping in their tracks on the pavement, oblivious to traffic, often lost, just looking around, cameras going. Or they wanted a photo with their friends – did he mind? He did. He couldn’t bear tourists. Sometimes he became so angry he shouted at them: fucking idiots, stupid cunts, bastards, bloody nuisance. He said it loud enough for them to hear, crystal clear. No stutter.
The phone rang. He ate another biscuit. It rang and rang. Another biscuit – another three, chewing faster as the ringing phone made his heart race. When it stopped, he breathed a long sigh of relief. Then it started again. He began to think that he must answer. The phone rang and rang. It did not cease.
He got up. Crumbs everywhere. Rita would fuss.
‘Mr Gribble? Is that you? At last,’ a woman said. ‘Mr Wye would like to see you. He’ll meet you at the house and he’ll want to look things over.’
Mr Wye’s letter was still in Joseph’s pocket, soft as a rag now, the words worn away where his fingers rubbed, reading it over and over.
‘Mr Wye could be with you tomorrow.’
The biscuit tin, which Joseph had carried with him out into the hall – he could not say why – shook in his hand as he tried to get the words out. Tomorrow? What day was tomorrow? A calendar hung on the kitchen wall, but he rarely glanced at it. There was no need. Each day passed much the same as the one before, rolling along like an old dog on wheels.
‘Mr Gribble?’
He cleared his throat. ‘Y-y-yes.’
‘Tomorrow, then. He’ll be with you mid morning.’ The appointment arranged, the facts agreed, Mr Wye’s secretary promptly put down the phone.
*
On Tuesday Rita met Hugo Gardner for dinner. He had grown up by the sea and eaten fish every day of his life until he moved to London aged seventeen to conclude his education at King’s College. He was retired from dentistry ten years now. Nineteen grandchildren – he’d had five children of his own. He said, of being a grandfather, that it was another go on the carousel. He’d been a widower six years. He had been to New York three times: twice with his wife, once on his own for a dental conference, where he walked one hundred blocks in an afternoon, from Chelsea to Harlem. A hundred minutes, which was a block a minute. He looked around Harlem and took the subway back to his hotel. Twelve stops, thirty minutes. He had a head for figures.
‘Do you now,’ Rita said.
He believed in the institution of marriage. He had never strayed. His heart was true to his wife. His children, he said, thought he might find someone else now that she was dead. He needed looking after. He admitted that most men did.
Rita had been married five times. She was unlucky: her husbands always died.
All of them?
She couldn’t believe it herself. She knew how it sounded. ‘I’m a proper black widow,’ she laughed. Mind you, she had really only started getting married in her fifties. She had been busy with her career for many years. It was hard to meet the right type in her line of work.
What sort of work was it?
‘I was a companion to an older woman. I gave my whole life to her.’ Rita knew how noble it sounded. ‘But she passed away. Cancer.’ Rita knew about cancer.
Hugo, eyes wide, took hold of his glass. ‘Another bottle, I think,’ he said.
On Wednesday, Frank Churchill took her out for an Italian, then pinned her to a bed in the Covent Garden Travelodge. The following weeks were quiet; the mobile phone, when she turned it on, had nothing to report. Rita didn’t mind. The late nights wore her out, if she were honest. She liked her routine: sweet sherry at five, a simple supper on a tray, a whole evening of television until she staggered to bed. She came to slowly in the morning and didn’t rush about, drank a cup of tea, basking in the yellow haze of her kitchen – a real suntrap, it was, especially in this heat – before she went to the house in the Crescent to see how things were. Once there, she tidied up, prepared meals for Annetta and Joseph (having got in the shopping as well) and sorted the bins and the post, what little there was – mostly flyers from estate agents who wanted the house.
There was just time for a quick cuppa and a sit-down before Joseph came back from the buses. She hardly saw Annetta, who was a hump in the bedclothes, mewling sometimes, easily comforted.
A few weeks like that: quiet, humdrum, a chance to catch up with herself and pay some bills, clean her flat from top to bottom, and now Rita was on her way to meet Colonel Smith for a drink. Another widower. ‘My grandchildren tell me they don’t know what the bloody hell a colonel is. They don’t want to hear about old times.’ He’d served as a seventeen-year-old lieutenant at the very end of the war. ‘They couldn’t have done it without us. The young lads had all the energy they needed to get through.’ He’d gone on to make a career in the army, with postings in Aden and Abu Dhabi, where they lived like kings and queens, he and his wife. He tried to keep Rita on the phone but she told him they should save their conversation for when they met. Lonely men always wanted to talk, for which they wouldn’t pay.
Colonel and Mrs Smith. It had a nice ring to it. ‘My name is Richard John-Henry Archibald Smith, but my friends call me Dick,’ he had said before they hung up, leaving her with no idea what to call him when they met. Well. She would play it as it lay. Rita always made a good first impression. She had on her lavender suit, the one she had worn when she married her last husband, Terry Sourbeer. Lavender linen and lilies of the valley to carry into the registry office, and that bit of fancy, her feather fascinator, poking from the top of her head, giving her another three inches – she couldn’t resist. Terry had been a tall man, and Rita was so petite. Even with her fascinator she wasn’t close to his full height. She hadn’t worn it since, and now here she was, full of optimism that Colonel Smith might be the one. She wondered if the Colonel were tall like Terry. If he were short, that would be fine, too. Rita didn’t mind.
She picked her way among the prams that crowded the pavement. You had to be careful around so many prams; the mothers never looked where they were going, just steamed ahead, or swung round suddenly to charge in the opposite direction, having remembered something they’d forgotten in the shops. Rita’s high heels pecked like chickens. She patted her handbag. She felt people close around her, smelled them, their toothpaste and cigarettes and curry and garlic, washing powder, soap, their perfumes and gels and sprays. Their size in relation to hers: how big they were, now that she was shrinking. That was her bones drying up. Anyone could sweep her off her feet, little as she was.
It was hot. The sun shone like the life of the party, lighting things up, making everything jolly. Baking them, an almighty furnace. Rita wished for a parasol. She had a real thirst on her – parched, she was. There was a pub, a place she knew, tucked out of the way in Soho. The Dog and Duck, there for years. Cool when she went in, a sort of hush, like visiting a cathedral. Rita sat with a sweet sherry. Oh, that was nice, to get off her feet.
She had another drink, keeping out of the heat. She always allowed plenty of time before a date; she didn’t want to arrive huffing and puffing. She’d only put the man off. She looked at her watch. Another one, please, Rita said to the barman.
Sweet sherry made her sentimental. Maybe that’s why she loved it so: it brought love back to her. She thought about her husbands, all five. It was uncanny that they had died one after the other like that, but nothing to do with her. Not her fault. She’d been unlucky. Ever an optimist, though, she clucked to herself, and had another gulp. Rita loved to get married. Didn’t she love to get married? Didn’t she just. She was Mrs Sourbeer at the moment, a name she wasn’t keen on. She had been Mrs McCarthy once. Pat McCarthy worked in retail, as a shop-floor manager at Peter Jones. She married him when she was fifty-five. When she was fifty-six, he developed a mystery wasting disease and within a few months he had died, weighing just five stone. A year later she married Paul, a kindly decorator with his own business. Mrs Berndt, she was then. He was seventy-three when they married but told her he was sixty. He died six months later of a brain haemorrhage. Another one, whose name she sometimes forgot, fell from a scaffold and broke his neck looking in the windows of a house she was sure he meant to burgle.
Her last husband, Terry Sourbeer, was a real gent, but he passed on from a heart attack after a couple of years. The day he died they had been rowing, him at the top of the stairs, her at the bottom. She was ready to go out, with her hat and gloves on and a mistletoe brooch pinned to her coat. She fancied a bit of Christmas shopping, but that wasn’t what they were fighting about when he dropped dead and tumbled to her feet.
‘What on earth did you say?’ Annetta asked.
‘It wasn’t what I said. What he said. He couldn’t live with it.’
‘Live with what?’
‘He said I’d had better than him.’
‘Is that what he said?’
‘I’m not making this up,’ Rita said.
‘And what did you say?’
‘Well, I was sick and tired of him saying it, wasn’t I? I said yes.’ Her eyes were swollen from crying. She had recovered herself with a cup of tea at the house in the Crescent, where she’d gone straight from the hospital. ‘And him with his bad heart. I may as well have killed him myself. Just like a bullet.’
Terry Sourbeer was the only one of her husbands to know about Rita’s past. He knew because, a long time ago, he had got himself a girl, one of Sal’s famous girls, as a birthday present to himself, a gift for which he’d saved for months. He’d had to plead with Sal at the door, looking so ordinary and working-class, for she liked a referral, but she relented. Annetta tried to relax him, settling him on a kitchen chair away from the other men – men in suits who all seemed to know each other. She gave him a drink and when he’d downed it, she took him upstairs.
She was his first girl, he told her, and didn’t she go and tell the others? They couldn’t believe it, a real live forty-year-old virgin, good-looking enough, just a bit shy. He didn’t know how to put himself across like other men, he said. He didn’t know how to dance. He’d come out of the war one hundred per cent intact, and that included his cherry.
The next time Terry Sourbeer visited the house, he had Rita. He asked for Annetta – kneading the brim of his hat, his forehead studded with sweat – but she was with a Soviet agent.
‘Rita here is free,’ Sal said.
‘That’s fine,’ Terry replied, hardly able to look up. He was feeling something urgent, something that needed taking care of then and there, no matter the money, which was a lot. More than he could comfortably afford twice in one month. He went with Rita, but he didn’t stay the night, and after that Terry Sourbeer wasn’t seen again.
He remembered her, all those years later, smiling broadly in the post office queue where they waited to collect their pensions. ‘I never forgot you girls,’ he told her, and there was nothing disrespectful in the way he said it.
Certainly it had happened over the years, a man coming up to her, saying she had been spectacular. A few times it happened. Not so often as she would have liked. But Arthur Gillies always said that Sal’s girls were for the gods, and the gods weren’t to be found hanging around Camden on a Tuesday morning.
How about a cup of tea, then? Terry knew a place around the corner. He used to work near there, in a big warehouse depot. That’s how he knew about the house in the Crescent. ‘It was just a normal-looking house,’ he said. ‘That’s what I couldn’t get over. You wouldn’t have known it was any different from the others. If I’d seen you on the street back then, I would have thought you were nice-looking, but not a tart. Not the kind of woman I could have. But then I did, didn’t I?’ Terry grinned.
‘Did you?’ Rita asked, in genuine wonder.
‘I sure did.’
‘You have a good memory.’
‘There were a lot of men through that house. I expect you can’t remember us all.’
Rita smiled.
‘The house looks the same,’ he said. She nodded. ‘I saw someone outside the other day. Looked like Sal – I remember her hair.’
‘London’s Bettie Page,’ Rita said.
‘She didn’t look so good. She was using a stick.’ He paused. ‘But she didn’t have any hair when I saw her.’
‘She’s poorly. She has cancer.’
‘I’m sorry to hear that,’ Terry said. He wrinkled his brow and looked at the ground. Then he blurted, ‘Is it true there was a boy living there all the time?’
Rita breathed out a heavy sigh. What was the point in hiding it now? ‘Yes.’
‘Just imagine,’ he murmured. ‘A child in that house, of all places.’
‘Where else was he supposed to live?’ Rita demanded. ‘He was with his mother. And quite right, too.’
Terry blushed. ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean – I’m sorry,’ he said again, and he looked sorry, so very sorry that she felt badly for him. She hadn’t meant to snap; it was habit. All those years of pretending that Joseph wasn’t there.
Rita agreed to see Terry again. For three weeks they met every single day for tea and cake, and then there was a ring planted like a starry, shiny flower in the sugar bowl. She dug it out with her teaspoon. When he slipped it on her finger, Rita didn’t say no.
Terry Sourbeer said more than once that he was not about to let pass an opportunity to be with a woman of her calibre, no charge, but Rita didn’t take offence. He was always saying things in the name of honesty, which is just what Sal and Annetta always said about Rita, as if to excuse her rudeness. Anyway, they looked nice together, she thought, Terry with a full head of white hair and a thick moustache, his body still strong – that was forty years of lifting and moving the contents of a warehouse. And Rita, small and sharply turned out, who had shrunk in every way due to her osteoporosis, the crowded organs inside beginning to grumble and complain, her flatulence her greatest shame. Charcoal tablets were useless, she told the others, for twice a week the new Mrs Sourbeer journeyed north to the house in the Crescent and confided in her old friends.
Annetta said, ‘He don’t care, I bet. He’s love-struck.’
‘He’s love-struck for a girl that’s long gone,’ Rita said. ‘Who I am – it’s all in his head.’
‘We were something special, don’t forget,’ whispered Sal from where she lay on the chesterfield, covered in blankets.
‘Now I’m just an old windbag,’ Rita laughed.
‘God won’t mind a bit of wind,’ Sal said.
‘God! What do I care about God?’ Rita said hotly. ‘It’s Terry I’m worried about.’
For a while they were happy, the Sourbeers, sharing a simple life together. He was the best of all five husbands, although she wouldn’t say he was the love of her life. But he was a good man. He was gentle – a gentle giant. One of those. His pension was enough that they could dine out once a week in the curry house around the corner, where Terry bowed to the waiters and left big tips at Christmas, receiving in turn a bottle of port. They know how to look after a customer, he always said – he said it of the greengrocer, the butcher, the newsagent, the postmaster and especially the florist, from whom he bought the red sweetheart roses that wilted on the mantelpiece the day after he brought them home to Rita. At night he whispered, ‘You know how to look after a man,’ but once, after too much Christmas port, he said, ‘You know how to look after a customer.’ Had Rita not been deep into the passive state she assumed for her married sex life, she might have replied with a strong word or two, but she often dozed while he laboured over her, or planned her shopping list, her meal rota, what she would wear to the curry house next time.
‘I’m too old for this,’ she told Annetta one day. ‘I’m like a crab, with my bones so stiff around me. I get the hot-water bottle first, to loosen me up, then Terry does his thing, then I want the hot-water bottle back and I want it fresh and hot so he’s got to go down to the kitchen just when he’s exhausted himself.’
‘He may as well make you a cup of tea while he’s at it,’ Annetta said.
‘Oh yes, and that. So he does, just the way I like it, not too strong, half a teaspoon of sugar and plenty of milk,’ Rita said, and they laughed. It was always grand to laugh about men. It seemed a long time since they had laughed like that.
Rita sat in the Dog and Duck and laughed to herself. Her fascinator jigged a merry little fairy dance. Richard John-Henry Archibald Smith – what a name. Call him Dick. Never mind. A man was a man was a man, in Rita’s book.
*
Joseph remembered him. There were certain ones, regulars, the faithful and devoted, and then there was Mr Wye, who seemed to be always around the house. His father joked that Mr Wye was in love with Mama – he joked, but his tone was a warning, and Joseph noticed that Mama was all business when Mr Wye was there.
His mother and father’s love was not to be disputed and yet could only be alluded to. Joseph knew his father was married to someone else and there was a child, a girl, not much older than he was. He knew because he listened, legs going dead in a cupboard – not because anyone told him. Mama tried to talk to him about it in her own way, which was to be nice and not say anything that hurt. Joseph knew his father didn’t love him. What was important was that Arthur loved Mama. That’s what it was all about.
Joseph had seen men come and go from his window. He heard, from behind a door, men cry out in different ways. He remembered voices. There were certain ones he knew, even if he never put a face to the man. The way they carried up the stairs – the voice of success, the self-made millionaires, everlastingly bombastic, and the gnarled tones of the upper class. Some men cleared their throats before they spoke or even when they thought of speaking. Others repeated themselves – every time the same stories. There were one or two stutters, carefully disguised, and the odd lisp, and the curious effect of a cleft palate.
The doorbell rang or there was a knock. Men in the front hall, Mama ushering them through to the drawing room, laughter like braying donkeys. Mama dashed here and there – she ran up to her bedroom, where the safe was, and back down again, having checked that the bathrooms were clean. She called out the drinks – gin and tonic for Mr Webster, whisky for Mr Roget.
Joseph heard film scripts and speeches, some of them later to be famous. He heard the sound of feet running up and down the stairs the night the actor dropped dead on Annetta; he had watched from his window as they bundled the body into a car that sped off into the dark.
He knew there was drunkenness, hearing how the noise grew as the night wore on. The bawdy jokes his mother told, her potty mouth, drawn in red. Her lipstick did abound on the faces of those who visited her house, although she was the picture of innocence if ever Arthur quizzed her, saying she was only being friendly; Arthur could be jealous. Mama pointed out that it was good for business, and when she took that line he didn’t argue with her.
Joseph remembered there was music, of the kind that Rita called hoochy-koochy – Arthur liked ‘Tampico’ to his dying day. Sometimes there was dancing, when Annetta closed her eyes as if dreaming and laid her head on the shoulder of her partner.
He heard them weep, all the ladies of the house. Even Rita. He heard her more than once, on her own in her room, her tears mixed up with words he couldn’t make out. Mostly she cried when she was drunk. She cried into her pillow and then she moaned as if someone else were in there with her when he knew she was alone.
Joseph knew everything that had gone on. Of course he knew. It couldn’t be kept from him. He was always going to know. They were lucky to do so well, Mama said, later, when he was older and could understand. It seemed as if it would go on forever, the house as it was then, not the house as it was now, flaking paint, the floorboards spitting nails, the rugs full of holes – moths and stiletto heels and years of hard wear, heavy traffic in and out of the front door. Buckets everywhere, to catch the rain coming through the roof. The bath enamel had worn away and the taps dripped, forming stalactites of limescale. The front hall ceiling came down one day so that the floor joists overhead showed, a skeleton hung with shreds. Who would want it? Who else could ever live there?
His thoughts carried him along on a bedevilling river that ran and ran and ran.
*
The man behind the bar called it a goblet. It was a goblet she was after. A goblet of sweet sherry, please, she said to the man, and that was gone before she knew it, so she had one more. A fellow came in who reminded her of Arthur Gillies. He looked around quickly, winked at Rita and left. It was the set of his shoulders that made her think of Arthur – built like a bull.
She remembered how he let his eyes sink into her. She gazed back, unafraid, until he looked away. She used to stare him down – she loved to make Arthur blush. As far as she knew, he didn’t blush for anyone else, not even Sal.
Arthur Gillies wanted Rita from the moment he laid eyes on her at the Colony Room, back when she was the coat-check girl. She tried to get off with him then but he put his tail between his legs and ran to Sal, who sat in rapt attention on a banquette, watching the band, up to her ears in silk and sables. When they met again in Sal’s drawing room, his eyes lit up. You.
They were always preening at each other after that. He didn’t sky-point his great bill of a nose just for Sal; he did it for Rita as well. He took more care in his dress and tried not to eat so much. He looked after his teeth. He fussed with his hair to hide the bald spot. He caught Rita’s eye and smiled. He enquired, when they met, how she was, meaning how she felt about him. Was it still on? She smiled. It was on. He looked across a room full of important men to see if she were looking at him. Was she his? She was. She didn’t want anyone else. They had their own language; they had made their bond. They knew each other without speaking. For all of Sal’s talk of her sixth sense with men, she didn’t sense Arthur Gillies wandering off – but Rita did. She knew he dreamed of her in his bed. He loved her as well as loving Sal and sometimes he loved Rita more. There were whole years he loved her more.
She waited. She thought he would come to her. She created opportunities to be with him: they met on the stairs, in corridors, the front hall, and Rita thought her heart would burst. She could hardly speak sometimes – she, Rita, speechless! He was the kind of powerful man who could change the temperature in a room, making everyone excited; and who spoiled things if he felt like it, if he were in a bad mood. She listened to every word said about Arthur and stored away the information, building a fuller picture of him in her head, loving him more and more. She learned when to expect him at the house, being, as he was, a creature of habit, and when he did finally arrive she always looked her best. Then she would take in his pupils’ dilation, the delight of seeing her there. Every time they met they renewed their bond; he happened to her all over again. It made her wild. There were times she thought she would die for wanting and not having Arthur Gillies.
Sal was practical about the good looks and physical allure of the girls who worked for her. It was what the job called for, and Rita had proved herself a star. She bloomed with the luxuries her life afforded her, the easy hours, the soft carpeting that ran through the house and cushioned her joints, overstuffed furniture on which to drape herself into alluring shapes. The food was good, prepared by an expert cook, and just before dawn Rita would curl into a small parcel and replenish herself on the deepest mattress Harrods sold. Arthur saw how well she looked on living in his house and it pleased him.
She felt his eyes on her all the time. When he could steal a moment, he drew up beside her, idled a while. She held her breath as they stood together, very close, looking at each other, doing nothing. Rita loved him. She had always loved him – loved him still. No other man was half as good. She could have kissed him. If only she had kissed him when she had the chance.
Another sweet sherry, then. Who was she to refuse the offer of a drink bought for her? She smiled at the only other customer in the Dog and Duck, an ancient mariner, pure wreckage, wrapped up in a shabby coat and hat – despite the heat. Rita raised her glass and toasted him, but privately she drank to Arthur Gillies. He was in his grave and she would live forever. She’d live to be a hundred, at least, and get her letter from the Queen. That was something to hang on the wall, just the kind of thing to make Sal green with envy. If only she had lived to see.
Rita remembered the look on Sal’s face when she announced that she would marry Pat McCarthy, who had wooed her quietly for six weeks before they booked in at the registry. They were to marry the following day and Rita was upstairs packing her case. A new dress from Peter Jones, a sheath of ivory shantung, hung in the wardrobe, and when Sal came in she admired it.
It was then that Rita told her, having not breathed a word to anyone until that moment. Her heart had been true to Arthur Gillies for so long that she never considered loving another. Besides, he could be terribly jealous. When she went upstairs on the arm of a punter, he always looked the other way and set his jaw, as if to bear it.
How long had that dance of theirs gone on? Twenty years? Thirty? She wouldn’t have said it was a complete waste of her life, loving Arthur, who would never come to her, who did not intend to leave his wife or his mistress; who would not give up his kingdom, not for her. The old fantasy, where he carried her off in his arms to make a new life together somewhere – no, she wouldn’t wait another minute for Arthur Gillies! She didn’t have time to wait. Rita knew she had to get out fast if she stood any chance. Business at the house in the Crescent wasn’t what it once had been. They were down to a handful of loyal gentleman callers by then. They didn’t have the maids they used to, or the cook, and Joseph was all grown up. Even Arthur wasn’t around much, spending his time elsewhere, in other houses, where the younger women were. So when Sal said of Pat McCarthy that she didn’t think it was enough time to know someone properly, let alone marry him, Rita threw back at her, ‘How long do you plan to wait on Mr Gillies?’
Sal stroked the wedding dress. She didn’t speak. Annetta was upstairs with someone, an old faithful, making an awful ruckus, and Joseph was out riding the buses. Sal said, ‘Arthur is already married.’
Rita snorted. ‘Well. I know that. But I wouldn’t put up with it.’
‘Put up with it? Put up with what? I have the best of both worlds. Who wants to be a wife? Always nagging him about this or that. Not for me, thank you.’ But Rita knew Sal would have married Arthur if she could. Rita, too. She would have married Arthur Gillies at the drop of a hat, but he never asked her, either.
‘He hasn’t been here for three nights,’ Rita had said to Sal, and she was not sorry to say it. She’d heard that Arthur was in love with a French girl who worked in the Chelsea house. La Gorge, they called her. La Gorge had him under a spell. The younger girls, they did everything.
La Gorge.
‘Business,’ Sal muttered. She looked haggard. Her eyes crinkled when she grimaced at her hands: jewelled fingers, minus a wedding band. Still, she lingered while Rita packed her case, not saying much, both of them praying for the doorbell to ring and burst the tension. It never rang. Then Annetta finished upstairs and the gentleman bade them a jolly farewell, for they were all friends, having known each other for many years. Joseph came back from riding the buses and they sat down to supper, which Rita had prepared, as usual. After supper they gathered in front of the television, where they spent most evenings, dressed up just in case. Sal listened for the door, for Arthur’s key in the lock or a knock that meant a punter was waiting. None came.
‘Never mind,’ Annetta said.
Sal didn’t say anything, just tried to enjoy whatever programme they watched. Without Arthur, she had lost her power, her spark. To have a television in the drawing room was a step down; there was no opportunity for conversation when the telly was on, she always said. The men she knew, the men who came to her house seeking excitement or comfort, were for the most part big talkers, especially about themselves. It was part of the service. They needed attention, that’s all.
At midnight Sal rose and switched off the telly. She pushed the deadbolt into place. Arthur was not coming – no one was. Even so, she left the light on. Just in case.
When they bade each other goodnight, they always kissed on the lips, like real sisters.
‘Goodnight, then,’ Rita said.
In the morning, she rose early to bathe and dress with care. She made up her face, fastened on pearls – a wedding gift from Pat McCarthy – and sprayed her black curls into a stiff filigree crown of sorts. Her dress showed off her narrow frame; Rita hadn’t gained an ounce since she was twenty, she always boasted. When she went downstairs, Sal asked for her key and Rita gave it. Later that afternoon, after a drink or two to calm her nerves, she married Pat McCarthy, who knew nothing about her past as one of London’s famed prostitutes, and that was the end of that.
Rita had better be off. Colonel Smith awaited her at a table for two around the corner.
What was this business of her not being able to stand up properly?
It might have been five goblets. Sometimes Rita lost track, but that wasn’t her memory going, it was just her enjoying herself. She was sharp as a tack. She emptied her purse onto the table: a few pennies, a ten-pence piece. She had spent it all. Good thing she had her bus pass.
Rita knocked over her chair. Eyes on her. The ancient mariner. S’funny. She was a picture in her lavender suit and feather fascinator. Dear Lord, put out a hand, someone, for here came a black wave, rushing and boiling, fizzing in her ears, and it swept her from her feet.
*
When Arthur died suddenly, Mama went into shock. She was hysterical from the moment she heard in a phone call from one of the girls at the Chelsea house. Something about his heart. Rita had taken the phone when Mama began to scream. ‘Tell me,’ Rita said into the receiver, and when she was told, all colour drained from her face.
‘You won’t like this,’ she said, turning to Joseph. ‘Your father’s dead.’ It might have been the first time that Rita referred to Arthur Gillies as Joseph’s father. The truth was always in the air, but even so was never stated loud and clear.
Mama closed the doors to the Crescent house immediately and took to her bed. When Mr Wye forbade her to attend Arthur’s funeral, she threatened to kill herself. How she wailed as the hour of the service came and went and his body was put into the ground. She wanted death in those first months of grief. She could hardly bear to look at Joseph, who resembled his father so much. Sometimes she shut the door on him and wouldn’t see him for days on end. It broke his heart, to be pushed away like that.
Joseph cowered in his room. Mama was Mama, irreplaceable, and he wanted her desperately. He hated Arthur Gillies all the more for this last trick. His father – yet Arthur had never been a father to Joseph. Joseph felt no acknowledgment, no affection from him, just the grim, granite look whenever Arthur glanced in his direction, and the way he always wanted all of Mama’s attention when he was in the house. Forty years of that: Joseph was glad he was dead.
But Mama’s grief was slow to give; the noose was tight. For a long time all was black before her eyes. It was months before she properly embraced Joseph, and his face, so like his father’s, ceased to make her cry.
After Arthur died and the houses were officially closed, there was no need for Mr Wye to call, although he still dropped by from time to time for tea with Mama. ‘Your mother and I need to have a word,’ Mr Wye would say, and Mama smiled at Joseph as if to reassure him all was well: a nervy smile that made her cheeks tremble. Joseph always toddled off straight away to find a quiet spot to eavesdrop. Mostly Mr Wye talked business: long, dull conversations that made him yawn. He also tried to kiss Mama more than once and she was always politely firm in her refusal, reminding him of her status, if not her title.
It was only when she became ill that he stopped his visits. After she died, Mr Wye simply disappeared. There had been no communication from him since, in six years – and now this. Mr Wye was coming tomorrow.
Joseph’s asthma – the orchestra arrived. Tuning up: strings, then wind instruments, one on top of the other, and a timpani. Ribs of iron – they would not give; a vice, an almighty screw. When he breathed he crucified himself.
Breathe not.
The phone rang. He heard it as if from a distance. To breathe, he needed his inhaler – not there when he felt in his pocket. He called out for Annetta. His stutter. Breathe not. He clamoured for air: not there. The letter from Mr Wye – not there when he felt in his pocket.
The appointment tomorrow.
The phone rang and rang. Joseph picked it up but his efforts to speak were useless. He clawed at himself. Wings beat in his ears. Soon he lost consciousness.
*
Next thing she knew the driver was shaking her awake outside the house in the Crescent.
‘Black waves,’ she said to him, by way of explanation.
‘Will I help you to the door, madam?’
‘Oh, for goodness’ sake,’ Rita said. Annetta stood on the front step, wearing her underpants over a pair of trousers – Joseph’s grey flannel trousers – and nothing else. The taxi driver sniggered. Rita shot him a look. ‘Pray you don’t get what she’s got.’
Annetta seemed not to recognize Rita. She smelled strongly of urine; she was wet down her front. ‘Joseph!’ Rita banged on the door. Where was he? ‘Open up, Joseph!’ She couldn’t make the key fit. It wasn’t the right key. She tried again, and again. When she finally got the door open, there was Joseph, down on the floor.
The storm of him, lungs full of rain, every last gasp flattening into fizz. Beads of sweat stood out on his forehead like hail pellets – soaked through, he was, but no wind to fill him up. Annetta pestered him with questions. What was he doing down there? Was he sleeping? Was he tired? She joined him on the floor – she had caught sight of the biscuit tin lodged under one leg. The tin was crushed, bent out of shape; a tin that had been with them since the old days. Its lid would not fit, no matter how Annetta wept and pressed – she had the tin on his chest and was putting her weight into it, pressing for England, pushing the life out of him.
Rita barked orders that no one heard or understood, her feathery fascinator pointing fingers in all directions. ‘Annetta, hurry and get his – upstairs – no, leave the tin. Leave the tin, I said. Leave the bastard – go on! Go on. Hurry up now, darling, Joseph needs his – his – his thingy. His thing to breathe. Annetta! Do you hear me?’ And off Annetta went, taking the biscuit tin with her.
Joseph spluttered, his face like a boiled cauliflower: waterlogged, colourless. He tugged at Rita’s sleeve and then his damp hand slid down her arm. Rita fanned him, as if that would help get the air in. Annetta reappeared, empty-handed, at the top of the stairs.
‘What?’ she said.
‘His – to help him. His thing. His blue inhaler.’ Rita finally found the word. ‘His inhaler,’ she repeated triumphantly.
Annetta left and returned, bearing the biscuit tin.
Rita rolled her eyes to the ceiling. ‘God give me strength.’
‘Why is Joseph on the floor?’ Annetta said, coming down the stairs and bending over him. ‘Have you fallen, Joseph? Did you hit your head?’
Rita lurched to her feet. She would get it herself, just like she always did. In her good wedding suit, too. Chasing rainbows round the house, fetching things for them. Oh, it made her cross, the way she waited hand and foot. And then she saw it: Joseph’s inhaler in a dark corner of the front hall. ‘There,’ she cried, and she had it, sticky with cobwebs. ‘Right here all the time. What are you like, Joseph?’ She inserted the inhaler into his mouth and squirted. ‘Feel his feet. Like ice.’
‘Is that very bad?’
‘Let’s warm him up.’ Rita peeled off his socks. ‘Annetta, the other one.’ Annetta did the same – maybe it came back to her from all those years ago, how to touch a man and make him come to life in her hand.
The medicine took hold and eased Joseph’s chest. He breathed. His colour returned. Rita helped him to the chesterfield, tucked him in with a rug despite the day’s heat. She went downstairs and boiled the kettle, reappeared with a laden tea tray. The biscuit tin was passed round for inspection. No, they couldn’t believe the state of it. ‘Like an asteroid hit,’ Rita declared. ‘All bent out of shape. There’s nothing a soul can do with it now. Look at her shoulders, poor girl.’ Sure enough, the young Queen seemed to stoop under the weight of her ermine.
‘We’ll never find another one the same,’ Annetta added mournfully. ‘It was a Peek Freans. Remember the picnic we had on the day? Joseph, you were only tiny. We went across to the park and had coronation chicken sandwiches and sausage rolls and potted shrimps and lemonade and a tin of Peek Freans. I still love a Bourbon biscuit – just like you, Joseph. Always my favourite. It was what my mother called a proper biscuit. A Bourbon biscuit was a Sunday biscuit.’
‘Gracious me! How you can remember all that and not remember the blooming way home, I’ll never know,’ Rita said.
Joseph’s fingers played with the fringe of the rug. He remembered the picnic – so unusual for them to have a day out together, mixing with people as if they were just the same. He sat close to Mama, watching the other children. There was a blaze of sun. When Mama pushed him to join in the play, he cried. She had looked at Rita and Annetta and sighed, then offered him a biscuit. By the end of the day he’d got the tin on his lap, having his fill while the games went on. But then it never was enough biscuits, not even when Joseph scoffed the lot, not for the hole he had in him.
His eyes glided about the room, catching on antimacassars and cushions that had lost their feathers, the tarnished silver and filmy crystal decorating the mantel, the familiar pictures hung askew. He heard the fire click as it flared and waned, another old thing on its last legs but still going. He was alive. He could see, hear, touch and taste – he ate another biscuit, washed it down with tea. He could speak, but they would only talk over him.
‘Joseph needs another cuppa,’ Rita said. ‘Never mind me, I’ll take what’s left in the pot. I don’t mind the dregs. You look like you’ve been in the wars, Joseph. What a day.’ It was clear to Joseph that she was drunk, reeling as she was, dropping things, rattling the cups in their saucers as she passed them round. He had smelled it on her breath when she tucked him into his nest on the chesterfield – a wine of some sort, sweetly fermented.
‘I want sugar,’ Annetta said.
‘Of course you do, darling,’ Rita said, stirring it in. Finally, after much fussing and stumbling, she sat.
In such a life a biscuit tin becomes a beloved friend. As they passed the tin, they spoke of it fondly, commending its service: fifty years of biscuits. Annetta stroked the Queen’s faded cheek, then Rita took the tin and placed it on a high shelf above the telly, looking out over the room: Elizabeth, newly crowned, right hand raised to acknowledge her subjects.
‘There she is,’ Annetta said. ‘Doesn’t she look marvellous? She’s just the same as us, you know.’
Rita snorted. ‘Like hell she is.’
Then Rita said she might have another tin to spare at home – Quality Street, mind, but perfectly adequate, one of their jumbo Christmas tins that she loved.
‘I’m a chocoholic,’ Annetta declared. ‘Oh yes, a chocoholic,’ she said happily. ‘That’s me.’
‘I like a toffee,’ said Rita. ‘When was the last time you had a toffee?’ And she tipped back her head and opened her mouth as if to let the syrup pour in and set her teeth as solid as in concrete.
Annetta laughed and clapped her hands in delight, and even Rita was smiling. Joseph snuggled under his rug. No one saw them, but they were there. They had been there all the time.