Wendy took another bite of her chocolate cake, signalled over to a waitress who was looking into space, made it clear that a repeat order for both women was required. The waitress, another foreign student on a working holiday by the look of her, smiled and slowly walked over to the counter and the coffee machine.
‘Not for me, prostitution. I never had any issue with what I did when I was younger, nor with running a brothel. Men need an outlet, and if no one is harmed, then I can’t see it as a crime. And why am I guilty of an offence, but the girls aren’t?’
‘The law can be illogical,’ Wendy admitted.
‘You asked about Janice.’
‘There’s more?’
‘She was a drug addict, not as bad as Cathy Parkinson, but bad enough. Even if I had wanted to help, which I didn’t. I don’t say that to be callous, but I’ve seen plenty of women like them over the years, and whereas some of them sort themselves out, most don’t.’
‘The trauma of their childhood?’ Wendy said.
‘I was academic in my earlier life, the chance of achieving something, finding a decent man, a decent life, but that didn’t happen.’
‘The “Mrs”?’
‘Briefly, when I was young, a few years before Amanda was born. A holiday romance, an infatuation with respectability. Three months later, we’re married in a registry office, just the two of us and a couple of witnesses.’
‘What happened?’
‘It came out one night. We’re in bed in the little bedsit that we rented. We’re just talking about this and that, our plans for the future, our past history, people we had known, places we had been.’
The waitress arrived, deposited the coffees and cakes on the table, made an attempt to clear away some crumbs and sauntered away, balancing the used crockery that she had taken. Wendy thought back to the shoe store in Knightsbridge and the manager of the shop. The waitress would have been lucky to have lasted the first day there, but in the coffee shop, she had the look of someone who had worked there for a while, not concerned as she started scrolling through her smartphone after she had deposited the dishes in a dishwasher.
‘You told him?’
‘My mother had been a prostitute, and she had tried to shield me from it, but I knew. How couldn’t you? There was no father figure in the house, and when you’re young, you just don’t understand, but in my teens, with the phone calls, the late-night knocks at the door, I figured it out. She admitted to it, told me that my father had taken off with another woman, not died as I believed, and that out of desperation she had turned to the only occupation that would pay enough money to look after me, give me a chance in life.’
‘A different time back then,’ Wendy said.
‘No equality, not that I’m making a case for feminism, but a deserted wife with a child didn’t have many options. It was either work in a factory making clothes or a laundry, manually scrubbing clothes and ironing, paid a pittance, allowing yourself to be treated as chattel, no more than a serf to the squire, or else you did what many others had done.’
Wendy, who was almost twenty years younger than the woman, could understand where Mary Wilton was coming from. She had experienced the injustice back then, although it was tempered to some extent by the time she entered the workforce, and growing up on a farm with a mother and father who loved and cared for her was something she was glad of.
‘Your husband?’
‘Before I met him, I was away from home, aiming to get a place at a university, struggling to make ends meet. Part-timing in a restaurant, studying at nights; I needed money. I placed an ad.’
‘Where?’
‘Not so much an ad. I had been approached a couple of times before, knocked back the offer. I just made it known to the next one who came along, a professor at the university, one of those who said he could help with my entry into the university, but couldn’t. No different to the casting couch, and I, in desperation, fell for it.’
‘You slept with him?’
‘Not that it helped. He bragged to another professor who offered his assistance for services rendered, but I knew that academia and I were not to be close friends. I was blacklisted, thrown out with the bathwater. After that, I milked whoever had the money, was outwardly respectable, inwardly half-decent, and could pay.’
‘The holiday?’
‘I wasn’t tainted by what I had done. I still maintained an innocence about it, and I always believed in romantic love.
‘I went down to Bournemouth on the south coast, booked into a small hotel, walked along the promenade, bought fish and chips, heavy on the vinegar, wrapped in a newspaper, not the cardboard box that you get today, paddled in the sea. I was happy, just minding my own business, when Albert, that was his name, comes alongside, starts talking. He was a commercial fisherman, knew all about the tides, where was the best place to catch fish. Not sure if you would find many fishermen these days, but back then, there were plenty of boats going out to sea.’
‘You spent time with him?’
‘He wasn’t educated, so I downplayed mine. But yes, we were inseparable, and then after the marriage, it came out, as I was saying. I thought that honesty in marriage was important, but it wasn’t, not to him. He attempted to put on a brave face about it, and then one day, he goes out to sea, leaving a letter on the mantlepiece, telling me he loves me, but he can’t deal with my having sold myself to other men.’
‘What did you do?’
‘I waited for him
