Whatever their rank, they all got together in the kitchen, sitting over bacon-rind and the sludge of congealing egg as they discussed the night’s activities, rehearsing a gimmick for the next session, wondering what unnecessary goods to splurge their earnings on, the more silent, she could tell from confidences made on private occasions, mentally adding to the balance of pretty substantial savings accounts. Some of them were supporting aged parents, a husband, or a sponging lover. A certain girl handed over most of her money to a church.
Lydia was one of Mrs Trist’s most beautiful and accomplished whores. She had hoped to become a concert pianist, and worked hard enough at the piano at the convent where she was educated. In spite of the enthusiasm of the nun who was her teacher, and the prospect of going to Paris to study with a famous virtuoso, she realised her music was less a vocation than the desire to dazzle.
‘Oh, and I was lazy too, Mrs Trist. The everlasting practice!’
‘I’d have thought that being a whore was as demanding in its way — and everlasting.’
‘Yes, but you just let it happen.’
‘From what I hear, the men who have had you are impressed by your great virtuosity. That must be more than just letting it happen.’
‘Oh no, it’s the same as virtuosity in music — when there’s just that — nothing more than the desire to astonish — no heart or compulsion.’
Lydia sighed and looked at her watch. ‘I’ll be late,’ she said, ‘if I don’t get a move on.’ Every morning she went to early mass, and evenings to confession. Some of Lydia’s clients, her boss suspected, had left their cassocks behind them.
‘I feel fucked out, Mrs Trist,’ Lydia confessed, driving the lipstick down on her mouth, clothing her lips decently before receiving the sacrament. ‘I’m thinking of giving the game away.’
‘I wonder anybody so religious ever thought of taking it on.’ The whore-mistress sounded prim.
‘If it gives pleasure …’ Lydia smoothed her lips with her lips.
Staring at herself in the glass she had never looked so lustrous; the white parting in the blue-black hair, the delicate nostrils, and bland mouth. Her confessor could only have found Lydia’s sins forgivable.
‘But any day I could give it away.’
‘What would you do instead?’
‘I’d really like to fall asleep and wake in Heaven.’
Mrs Trist could not quiz the girl on her conception of Heaven because Lydia would have been late for mass.
The bawd went to her own room and fell asleep so deep that, on waking, she could not remember where she had been.
Lydia didn’t return from mass. Days later her body was found in a North London canal. Her confessor was arrested for her murder.
Bridie was another Catholic, but a lapse. She had blue eyes, black-fringed, in a white, Irish skin. She was strongly built, with broad shoulders. There were some who suspected her of being a pretty man in disguise. Mrs Trist knew otherwise, even before she had positive proof of the Irish whore’s womanhood.
Bridie had brown hair so thick and curly it had that matted look. In fact, ‘There are men,’ she confessed, ‘who accuse me of housin’ lice in me curls. Sure, I tell ’em, bein’ Irish-born, I’ve had experience of the nits, but their creepun and crawlun would never let me entertain ’em permanent like.’
Though Mrs Trist saw to it that the girl was as beautifully presented as the others, Bridie was the perfect slut in her room. On the first occasion when Eadith found a litter of prawn shells on a Bokhara rug, along with balls of combed-out hair, and in one corner a sanitary pad, she had to protest.
‘There are some clients,’ the girl began excusing herself, ‘who enjoy a bit of natural clutter. And if the prawns ’uv gone off, so much the better — the men feel at home.’
Admittedly Bridie had a rather more esoteric clientele; she specialised in whips and chains. (‘If I draw the line, madam,’ she said at the first interview, ‘it’s when it comes to the shit-eaters.’)
The bawd would have liked to think the expression a metaphor, but from her experience of life she knew that shit means shit.
She engaged Bridie for her good humour, her intrinsic beauty, and what she sensed to be a gift for dealing with the perverse in human beings without condescending to the afflicted or martyring herself.
She dressed the girl in a timeless style, not unlike the one she affected to disguise her own peculiarities: long, trailing, romantic skirts which at that period could have looked ludicrous if a woman were unable to carry them off. Eadith did, through her authority, and the mystery surrounding her. Bridie was a different matter. Her shoulders and bosom were allowed to reveal their magnificence. But the trailing skirt acted as a curtain which, as the performance got under way, was raised by fits and starts to excite her audience.
Bridie had a club foot. ‘Some gentlemen,’ she laughed in her slow, good-natured way, lowering the thick black fringes on the blue of her eyes, ‘some of ’em come in their pants at sight of me surgical boot.’
Mrs Trist recoiled momentarily for her own power to pander to the worst in human nature. In the beginning, while still inexperienced, she had had her doubts about what she was doing, but as time itself seemed to pander, and from scattered inklings, to be preparing some kind of cataclysm, she allowed her power to overpower.
Most of those who patronised her outwardly discreet house were to some extent lusting to be consumed. In the age in which they were living it had become the equivalent of consummation. She was never more aware of it than when passing Bridie’s closed door in policing the premises for which she was responsible, she heard men’s knees grinding prawn shells deeper into her Bokhara rug, the thinning knees of minor civil servants, and on one occasion the more opulent pin-stripes of a Home Secretary.
If at times her moral self condemned the rites she had initiated, she realised that the sensualist in her would always raise a frustrated head. Her torments were only a muted version of the more theatrica shriek overheard on one occasion by a noble lady across the street.
Ada came to Madam. ‘There’s a feller downstairs. I wouldn’t see him if I were you.’ Net ballooning at the window opened on its catch of river light.
‘Better to face it,’ Mrs Trist decided.
‘This,’ hissed Ada, ‘could be one of the big-time cops.’
‘I’ll see him, Ada. If you’ll tell him.’
Freckled by the past, wrinkled by encroaching age, her hands trembled: you can disguise them temporarily in a mail of rings, trailing sleeves, eventually gloves.
She went down to what was referred to as the ‘office’, a small disordered sitting room, across the hall, filled with letters waiting to be answered, receipted bills, autographed photographs of the famous and infamous who professed to love her, and easy chairs in which cats loved to sleep.
He was seated, a domed, rather hairless head rising above the padding of the chair. She frowned to see his feet propped on a velour pouffe on which the girls sat to tell their grievances. When the sound of her clothes prompted her caller to stand up, he was of medium size, stocky build, cobby-calved, thighs too intense; they might have been those of a former rugger three-quarter.
He greeted her with a smile of sorts.
‘What can I do for you?’ She smiled back after a fashion.
He said, ‘I’ve got an hour or two to put in, and would like to be entertained. I’m told you can arrange it for me.’
‘It depends on your interests.’ One side of her smile had stuck, as smiles will catch on a gold tooth, though she hadn’t one in her head.