moved on.
Ethel’s was a face at the window, pale despite the small red bulb and lampshade alongside.
I looked up and she looked down.
‘New Young Model’ read the card pinned by the door.
When she waved at me I shook my head and turned away.
Tapping on the window, she gestured for me to wait and moments later I heard her feet upon the stairs. The light over the door was cruel to her face. In the fog I hadn’t noticed what no amount of lipstick could hide, the result of an operation, partly successful, to remedy the fissure at the centre of her upper lip.
‘Why don’t you come up?’ she said.
‘I haven’t got any money.’
‘I don’t mean business, I mean just, you know, talk.’
Now that I’d noticed, it was difficult not to stare at her mouth.
She touched my hand. ‘Come on,’ she said.
An elderly woman in a floral print overall sat like somebody’s grandmother at the top of the first flight of stairs and Ethel introduced her as the maid and told me to give her ten shillings.
The room was functional and small: bed, sink, bucket, bedside table. A narrow wardrobe with a mottled mirror stood against the side wall. Hard against the window was the straight-backed chair in which she sat, a copy of yesterday’s Evening News on the floor nearby.
Now that I was there, she seemed nervous, her hands rose and fell from her sides.
‘Have you got anything?’ she said and for an instant I thought she meant johnnies and wanted business after all, but then, when I saw the twitch in her eye, I knew.
‘Only some reefer,’ I said.
‘Is that all?’
‘It was all I could get.’
She sat on the side of the bed, resigned, and I sat with her and rolled a cigarette and after the first long drag, she relaxed and smiled, her hand moving instinctively to cover the lower half of her face.
‘That plain-clothes bloke,’ I said. ‘Neville. You said not to trust him.’
‘Let’s not talk about him,’ she said. ‘Let’s talk about you.’
So I lay back with my head resting where so many other heads had rested, on the wall behind the bed, and told her about my mother who had run off with a salesman in home furnishings and started a new family in the Scottish borders, and my father who worked the halls for years as an illusionist and conjuror until he himself had disappeared. And about the moment when, age eleven, I knew I wanted to be a drummer: going to see my father on stage at Collins Music Hall and watching the comedian Max Bacon, previously a dance-band drummer, topping the bill. He had this huge, to me, drum kit set up at the centre of the stage, all gold and glittering, and at the climax of his act, played a solo, all crash and rolling tom-toms, with the assistance of the band in the pit.
I loved it.
I wanted to be him.
Not the laughter and the jokes or the showy suit, and not fat like he was, certainly not that, but sitting there behind all those shimmering cymbals and drums, the centre of everything.
‘Tell us about yourself, Ethel,’ I said after a while.
‘Oh,’ she said, ‘there’s nothing to tell.’ Her fair, mousy hair hung almost to her shoulders and she sat with her head angled forward, chin tucked in.
‘Aren’t you going to get in trouble,’ I said, ‘spending all this time with me instead of a client?’
She looked towards the door. ‘The maid goes home after twelve and then there’s nobody comes round till gone one, sometimes two.’
I presumed she meant her pimp, but I didn’t ask.
‘Besides,’ she said. ‘You saw what it’s like, it’s dead out there.’
She did tell me about her family then. Two sisters and three brothers, all scattered; she and one of her sisters had been fostered out when they were eleven and ten. Her mother worked in a laundry in Dalston, had periods in hospital, times when she couldn’t cope. She didn’t remember too much about her father, except that he had never held her, never looked at her with anything but distaste. When he was killed towards the end of the war, she’d cried without really knowing what for.
I felt a sort of affinity between us and for one moment I thought I might reach out my hand, lean across and kiss her, but I never did. Not then or later. Not even months down the line when she asked me back to the bedsitter she had near Finsbury Park, a Baby Belling cooker behind a curtain in one corner and the bathroom down the hall. But I did take to stopping by between midnight and one and sharing a little of whatever I had, Ethel’s eyes brightening like Christmas if ever it was cocaine.
Foxy was around again, but not as consistently as before; there’d been some falling-out with his suppliers, he implied, whatever arrangements he’d previously enjoyed had been thrown up in the air. And in general the atmosphere had changed: something was clearly going on. Whereas Jack Spot and Albert Dimes had more or less divided the West End between them, Spot lording it over Soho with a certain rough-hewn benevolence, now there were young pretenders coming out of the East End or from abroad, sleek, rapacious, unfeeling, fighting it out amongst themselves.
Rumour had it Gordon Neville had been demoted to a woodentop and forced to walk the beat in uniform; that he’d been shuffled north to patrol the leafy lanes of Totteridge and Whetstone. More likely, that he’d made detective inspector and was lording it in Brighton. Then one evening in the Blue Posts there he was, the same raincoat and trilby hat, same seat by the door. I’d been round the corner at 100 Oxford Street listening to the Lyttelton Band play ‘Creole Serenade’ and ‘Bad Penny Blues’. Not my kind of thing, really, except he did have Bruce Turner on alto and Turner had studied in the States with Lennie Tristano, which was more my scene.
I should have walked right on past him and out into the street.
‘If you can find your way to the bar without getting into a fight,’ he said, ‘I could use another pint.’
A favourite refrain of my mother’s came to mind: What did your last servant die of? I kept it to myself.
‘Scotch ale,’ Neville said, holding out his empty glass.
I bought a half of bitter for myself and shepherded the drinks back through the crowd.
‘So,’ Neville said, settling back. ‘How’s business?’
‘Which business is that?’
‘I thought you were in the bebop business.’
‘Once in a while.’
‘Lovely tune that.’ Pleased with himself, Neville smiled his thin-lipped smile, then supped some ale. ‘The Stardust, isn’t it?’ he said. ‘Your little home from home these days.’
The Stardust had sprung up on the site of the old Cuba Club on Gerrard Street and an old pal, Vic Farrell, who played piano there, had talked me into a job as doorman. I kept a snare drum and hi-hat behind the bar and Tommy would let me sit in whenever my hands were steady enough. Which was actually most evenings now. I wasn’t clean by a long chalk, but I had it pretty much under control.
‘Oscar still running the place, is he?’
Neville had a liking for questions that didn’t require an answer.
‘What is it with you and coons?’ Neville said. ‘Taste for the fucking exotic?’
Oscar was a half-caste Trinidadian with a bald head and a gold tooth and a jovial ‘Hail fellow, well met’ sort of manner. He was fronting the place for a couple of Maltese brothers, his name on the licence, their money. The place ran at a loss, it had to, but they were using it to feel their way in, mark out a little territory, stake a claim.
Neville leaned a shade nearer. ‘You could do me a favour there. Comings and goings. Who’s paying who. Keep me in the picture.’
I set my glass on the window ledge behind me, half-finished. ‘Do your own dirty work,’ I said. ‘I told you before.’
I got to my feet and as I did so Neville reached out and grabbed me by the balls and twisted hard. Tears sprang to my eyes.
‘That ugly little tart of yours. She’s come up light more’n a few times lately. Wouldn’t want to see anything happen to her, would you?’ He twisted again and I thought I might faint. ‘Would you?’
