trains, and men crowning each other and burning each other, and you keep coming back to the boy who was here, who I only saw half a dozen times, and you make me feel awful about taking his money in advance, and keeping his book. You shouldn't be in this lodge if you don't like it.' 'I didn't say I didn't like it.' 'And you complain about the water on the floor.'
'That's gone,' I said. 'There hasn't been any water on the floor for some time now.'
'That's only because it hasn't been raining so much,' she said. 'It's been cold but it hasn't been raining.'
'Well,' I said, 'I am very sorry about all that. I will be going now.' I walked towards the door; I was in very low water, for a man ought not to be turning his back on a face like hers. 'At the church…' she called after me.
'What church?' I said. I had forgotten that she was keen on religion, and if the subject gave me hopes of continuing in her company, then I was all in favour.
'All Saints… where they've put up a scheme to help the ladies of the night-houses.' 'The fallen women, you mean?'
'They are not fallen,' she shouted. 'It is the men who come to them who are fallen.'
I nodded, remembering a little bit of Bible class: 'Well, everybody is fallen, anyway'1 said.
She was now looking at me in amazement for some reason. 'Oh, you're not at all interested in this' she said.
'I certainly am' I said, and the beautiful looks of her – she really was an eye-opener – and the thought of her going to waste in this kitchen with its empty tins and the soap works towering over her garden, which was no garden at all, made me walk towards her and put my hands on her shoulders.
Of course, I took my hands down quickly enough when I realised what I had done, but she hadn't seemed to mind, and it was with the strangest mix of sadness and happiness that I listened to her woes.
'Well, it is the ladies who are to be involved' she said, more calmly, 'and I do mean the ladies. Oh, they all have their own broughams – and one of them a motor brougham – and three hundred pounds a year to do nothing with, and all I wanted to do was help in some small way, really nothing more than be on hand. I told them that I would make tea, I would make beds, but it is not to be. My face doesn't fit because they think I'm a skivvy, but it's just that our skivvy is taken sick, and has been for quite some time, and if you're not the right class in that place then the Christian religion goes right out of the window, Mr Stringer, I promise you it does.' 'I'd say you were in the wrong church.'
'Would you?' she said, and she almost smiled. 'Are you church, Mr Stringer, or chapel?' 'I think chapel is more modern' I said, because I knew she liked to be up-to-date, and it was also a way of not having to say I was neither.
'You're right,' she said, and then, although she was not quite crying, she gave a mighty sniff, so I handed her my undershirt, which was on the table waiting to be washed. 'Why are you giving me this?' 'So that you can blow your nose on it.' 'But it's your undershirt.'
'Would you like to come on a jaunt with me tomorrow?' I said. My plan was to cheer her up. And to spoon with her as well.
'Of course I wouldn't. Well, I couldn't. Anyway, where would we go?'
'I'd like to go on the Underground Railway,' I said. 'I've read a great deal touching on it but never seen it, and I think that, since I've been down here for so many weeks, it's high time I did.'
'It's electric in parts,' she said. She was always ardent for electricity. 'And would it be quite all right if my friend Mary Allington came along with us?' she added.
This was a blow, but, since I had gained so much ground, was only to be counted as a small one. 'I would be delighted,' I said.
'Because otherwise it would look as though I was your girl, wouldn't it?' She smiled, and all thoughts of the Old Shed, and how it was the perfect place to jack somebody in, flew from my mind for the time being, for this was London: a place of constant change. The next day my landlady knocked on my door at ten o'clock and said, 'All set?' She seemed very keen to get on. She had put on a blue coat and a very effective hat, and I thought: all this for me. It was very hard to believe. I had on my best cap, best suit and collar, and I had plastered my boots with the Nuggets and the Melton Cream, so that they quite out-did my best suit, which was actually falling apart.
We waited for Mary Allington outside the front door of Hercules Court. It was a middling sort of day: quite grey and quite cold, but it was the two of us against the weather. The air was full of church bells and trains. The Citadel was going – it went around the clock, after all – but it was quiet, and the noise was low. At ten o'clock it was like a candle that had burned right down.
By ten after ten there was still no sign of Mary Allington, and my landlady expressed the opinion that she probably wasn't going to turn up. I said, 'Well, where does that leave us?'
'There's no harm us going as friends. We were meant to be a crowd, and it's hardly your fault that it's ended up being just the two of us.'
So we set off, and I wondered whether Mary Allington was any more real than the skivvy my landlady had spoken of. In truth, I was a little put out that there was no other with us. We were all set for spooning, but I had no more idea of how to go about it than I did of how to drive the express to Bournemouth. I would have to watch her carefully, to read the signals. I paid her a compliment on her hat, and she gave me a perplexing look, so that I thought buttery of this sort was perhaps not the way.
We walked first into Waterloo – the first time I had been inside, I reflected in amazement. There was an army band playing and a Christmas tree going up. It looked better inside than out, with trains waiting in a neat row like horses in a stall; and it was very crowded, but with a Sunday lot – excursioners and shooting parties and so on. There were two of the Jubilees in, and any number of T9s, but I kept all that to myself. We both had a ham sandwich and a lemonade by way of breakfast, and tried to go down onto the Waterloo and City line to reach the Bank by Underground. The gates were locked, though, as it was closed on Sundays. As we came back up I could not resist telling my landlady that the Waterloo and City Line was run by the London and South Western Railway, who also supplied the trains for the London Necropolis and Mausoleum Company, and she said, 'I can't keep up with all these names.'
We walked over the river, going slowly, watching the boats, then we struck the District Railway at Charing Cross, but my landlady said that was no good for a first ride because the trains were not electric. We came to Tottenham Court Road after a while, and I told her it was my dad's favourite spot when he'd been in London. Being all pubs, dining rooms and doxies, and very bright and tinkly, it was hard to imagine him there. Or maybe he'd been different when young, more like me, in fact. It was the first time I'd had that thought.
We stood about looking for motor cars, and two or three did come by. My landlady said they looked very strange, and I said you could supply the horse in your imagination. We also saw a motorcycle with a man on the front and a lady on the back, and my landlady said, 'I should like to ride on one of those.'
I said, 'Well, then, you'll have to find yourself a young fellow who has one.' 'Why should I not have one of my own?' she said.
I told her I had never seen a woman on a motorcycle before, and she said, 'I daresay you've never seen a motorcycle before.' I said I certainly had, and she said, quite fiercely, 'Where?' I said on a railway waggon in a siding at Whitby, and she said, 'In a siding' and shook her head.
We walked through the front of what looked like a shop, and we were in the Central London Railway station for Tottenham Court Road. All tickets were 2d. As we rode down in the elevator my landlady had an even livelier look than usual in her eyes, and then I realised that all the half dozen fellows in there with us had the same moustache.
On the platform, you couldn't see the wall for advertisements and maps. I learnt from one of the maps that the Central went in a nearly straight line from a place called Wood Lane to a place called Bank – not a bank or the bank, but just Bank.
I was just going to ask my landlady about this – which I knew would involve the risk of a pretty sharp reply – when I saw that she was enquiring of a fellow in a uniform whether the electricity was Mr Edison's. He didn't seem to understand the question but he didn't mind being asked it by her. I could tell he was thinking that we were a handsome couple, and that I was a fellow with more luck than he deserved.
There were no timetables of any sort, just signs saying 'Trains arrive every few minutes', and certainly we only waited ninety seconds or so before one came in. We liked the coaches, which my landlady said were like little villas. It was a funny arrangement, though: a loco at the front and one at the back, but they were just electrical
