The Walworth Beauty Read online

  A wave of heat rushed up into Joseph’s face. Mrs Dulcimer was looking amused. Big dark eyes wide open. One brown foot swinging a slipper. Enjoying herself pointing out his foolishness.

  What was she playing at? She could have set him straight, right away, on his first visit. Rather than correct his error, rather than take offence at his misconception, as she ought to have done, she’d gone along with him. Acted being a madam while in fact running a refuge. She had deceived him. What kind of a woman enjoyed such tricks?

  He said: so you’re a philanthropist, ma’am. You shouldn’t have pretended otherwise.

  Mrs Dulcimer looked pleased with herself. And no wonder. She’d caught him on the hop, she’d put him firmly in the wrong, so now she paused, and surveyed him, as though she felt sorry for him.

  She said: no. Not at all. You still don’t understand, do you? I’m just a businesswoman. I provide a service, and expect to be paid. I understand that some of my tenants, in between live-in domestic posts, may fall behind with their rent. I subsidise them for a certain period if necessary, so that they do not feel obliged to leave and find themselves on the street. But they always repay me. That is part of our agreement. Certainly, I help them find jobs if I can. That is one small thing I can do for them.

  Joseph said: you are generous, ma’am.

  Mrs Dulcimer shook her head. No. The arrangement suits me. I like the company. In the evenings I drink tea with my lodgers, if I’m in the mood. Sometimes I help them write their letters, if need be. Or we play cards, or we read plays together. Shakespeare, for example, is a firm favourite. His cheerful works, at any rate. At the moment we’re reading Much Ado About Nothing.

  A black woman reading Shakespeare! A joke, surely. She read plays? Joseph had never seen a play by Shakespeare. Hardly ever been to the theatre. Once with Nathalie, in the early days, before her pregnancy showed. English music hall hadn’t impressed her much. Nothing to compare with French gaieties, it seemed. Still, she’d been pleased to get out. She arranged her hair in a new style, a crown of plaits, walked very gracefully, taking neat steps, her head up, her hands lifting her full skirts. She smiled to herself, obviously pleased with the admiring glances cast her way, demurely pretending not to notice. Joseph relished other men admiring his wife’s sparkling eyes half-veiled by her downcast lashes, her rosebud mouth and delicately flushed cheeks, but their appraisal made him uneasy too. He gripped her elbow and steered her along. Just so, as a boy, had he tried to take care of his mother, when they went shopping. Often she’d jerk free: ah, stop your fussing! Leave me be! Nathalie would shake her head at him: I’m not going to fly away!

  Mrs Dulcimer continued. And then on Sunday afternoons, in fine weather, we walk in the pleasure gardens here in Walworth, or we go out into the countryside. We ramble down to Camberwell, to visit the farm, or we go up Herne Hill with a picnic, and make our reading party in a meadow.

  She twisted her mouth. Don’t look so surprised. Some of my lodgers can read and write. And those that can’t, and wish to, are learning. I teach them, because I enjoy it. And so we keep each other going.

  She put a light stress on her final word. Joseph felt the hint, as though he were a horse in harness and she had touched him on the shoulder with the thong of her whip. He could see the creased leather harness, its straps and buckles. He could feel a metal bar across his tongue.

  He wanted to summon the right words. He seemed to have few left. Like opening the chest of drawers of a morning and finding no clean shirts. No clothes at all. She’d given him his coat back, and he’d returned her cloak. They had exchanged clothes. She’d taken all of his. He shivered, naked; he wanted to pick up her loose, hanging blue wool sleeve and lift it to his face.

  He said: I should like to talk to you again. I still think you may be able to help me. You could perform some invaluable introductions for me, I am sure, if you chose to do so.

  Mrs Dulcimer raised her arms and gently flapped her sleeves, as though they were wings. The gesture released her scent of warm bread, warm skin. She said: not this morning, though. I am busy. Come back tomorrow, if you like.

  She rose from her nest of gold cushions, and so he got up too. Those dented silk mounds would be warm. He bowed. Should he shake hands? She folded her arms inside her loose blue sleeves.

  His knees felt damp. He looked down again at the green stains on his trousers, the green debris that clung there. She looked too. Unceremoniously she bent, and brushed off some bits of grass and twig. The kind of gesture Nathalie would have made, dusting him down, laughing at him. When Mrs Dulcimer straightened up, her rosy mouth was very close to his, half-open, inviting. Again he caught her scent.

  He said: I must be off, ma’am. I bid you good day.

  At the end of Apricot Place, on the corner of Orchard Street, he paused. A clamour of carts and barrows, jolting over the cobbles, a noise of hammering. A flourish of canvas awnings, their sides flapping in the wind. A market seemed to be setting up on the main road. People surged about, their shouts banging back and forth. To avoid them he cut up through a back street running parallel. He strode between rows of fine new houses fronted with long gardens, tidily planted with young laurels, beds of pink and red cyclamen, mauve Michaelmas daisies. He headed north, towards the common.

  Mayhew had criticised him for a lack of objectivity, had stressed proper research, properly organised. Very well, sir! Joseph had made a careful plan for his morning’s work. He would stick to it, whatever happened. He would not be swerved off course.

  Step one: establish the background. Discover the terrain. He needed a clearer sense of these neighbourhoods; their boundaries, their approaches. No more wandering haphazardly, as he’d done at first, depending on chance encounters with gay ladies willing to chat. No chatting today. Confirmation of the city’s south-eastern layout. Urban geography, pure and simple.

  Accordingly, map in hand, he spent a couple of hours tramping around the squalid district between Waterloo, London Bridge and the Borough, checking the names of the main roads encircling it, the side streets branching off. Each time he stopped, or dawdled, a woman slid up to him: all on your own, dearie? Shall I show you a good time? He shook these girls off, one by one, made a quick note on his map, marking the site of each encounter with a cross. Information that might come in handy, at some point. Did street prostitutes work their own particular patches, or roam more widely? How far from their lodging-houses was it economic for them to go? If one girl strayed onto another girl’s stamping ground, did they fight? Summon their bullies to do the fighting for them? He’d begun pondering these questions two days ago, when first visiting Mrs Dulcimer, hadn’t he? Only two days! At some level he felt he’d known her all his life.

  He tripped on a dead cat. He steered past a mound of dung. His map blew in the breeze, cracking and bellying out like a sail, and he struggled with the canvas-backed folds that wrapped themselves around his arm. Trying to hold it, read it, mark it, all at the same time: almost impossible.

  He paced up and down, halting every so often at the mouths of alleys, checking them against his flapping map. Most of them were unnamed. He peered into narrow openings between warrens of ancient, dilapidated buildings. From time to time the newspapers fulminated against the conditions in which the poor were forced to live: these massed rabbit hutches thrown up centuries back; to be demolished one day, presumably, when the authorities got round to it, and their inhabitants moved on, from one small city of slum tenements to another, from one net of secret ways, unknown to cartographers and government surveyors, to the next.

  Such invisibility: handy for prostitute-thieves slinking out at night to ply their trade. Armed with their false charm, their brittle smiles. A phalanx of painted girls flaunting ringlets glossy as wax, tight-waisted jackets and flimsy cloth boots, their ballooning skirts swung over their arms for quick getaways.

  Foxes had their runs, leaving beaten-down lines in meadow grass; even dogs did. Women scurried along their own night-time ways li
ke rats, lured by the smell of male flesh, male money, they scampered around your feet. Bit and nipped you.

  The rats prowled inside him, gnawing his stomach. Hunger. Church bells rang out a chime for mid-day. Time to eat. Good excuse not to have to plunge alone into any of these mazes of courts and paths, get lost most likely, encounter God knew what villains armed with clubs, no compunction whatsoever about whacking him over the head, stripping him of his watch, most of his clothes. He’d finish up his morning’s work somewhere indoors, relatively quiet, mark down particular street openings from memory.

  He stopped at a chophouse in an alley off Borough High Street, drawn by the bustle of customers surging into the paved yard. A sign chalked on a blackboard promised beefsteaks and meat pies. People yelled their orders through a hatch, then found seats.

  Here you are, darling! A hand bearing a plate shot over his shoulder. A damp armpit pressed his nose. Fresh, salty tang of her sweat. She whirled round, darted off again. Blue check skirts over a wide arse, limp white bow of apron strings.

  Steam rose from the central hole in the scalloped-edged pie shining with glaze; piping hot mashed potato, forked up in crests, to the side; the whole encircled by a neat moat of onion gravy. The crisp shell of raised pastry enclosed melting golden meat jelly, chunks of pork made savoury with plenty of black pepper, a hint of sage.

  He ate swiftly. This afternoon he would embark on step two of his plan, which was a development of step one, but altogether more ambitious. The printed street map of London he was using, published just a few years ago, was already out of date. It showed Apricot Place, for example, near its edge, but few of the newer developments of terraced houses north-east of Walworth, alongside the warehouses, following the curve of the river; few of the raw side streets being built on the south axis down towards Camberwell.

  If he were properly to include Walworth in his research, he would need to make a sketch of the entire area as it stood today, to fill in the gaps on his map. This afternoon he’d walk the district, from north to south, from east to west, making notes as he went. A kind of beating the bounds of the parish, but done according to strict scientific principles.

  The pastry tasted deliciously of lard. Fattiness on his tongue. He swallowed the last rich morsel, picked up the crumbs, pressed them to his wetted finger, and ate those too.

  He began doodling on a blank page of his notebook. What would his life have been like if he’d managed to do as he originally wanted, cook for a living? He might have worked in an establishment like this one, a whitewashed, beamed interior pleasantly dark behind small windows of thick, blurry glass, crowded with oak tables, settles and benches, a fire burning in the grate at one end. The drover’s cart from Kent had set down somewhere nearby, perhaps. His mother would have struggled out, counted her bags and bundles. The small boy clutched her hand. Don’t fret, Joseph. We’ll stop here for a moment. The landlady let the woman sit by the fire, brought the boy a cup of milk. She patted his shoulder. There you are, my love, get that down you.

  What would his life have been like if he’d been able to train as a cartographer, actually understand the principles of geometry, trigonometry, if he’d been able to travel these districts with set square and compasses, produce exact to-scale versions of these neighbourhoods? Impossible to imagine. He’d done very well, getting to where he was now. Useless to envy those with more education, better prospects. He’d show them, that was all. Surprise them with what he came up with. That includes you, Mayhew.

  He looked at his doodle. The rough pencil strokes baffled him for a moment, before he saw. An apricot in section. As in a botanical engraving; as in a textbook on gardening and husbandry. Two curves of flesh around a fringed oval stone. Like a woman’s secret mouth, secret lips. Her apricot place.

  A tide of warmth spread from the back of his shoulders down his arms, into his hands. A kind of ache. Pleasurable. Strong. It pushed through him. His cock stirred, lifted.

  Some of the books in the Holywell Street basement provoked similar effects. For example that guidebook to the exquisitely dressed, upmarket whores of the West End. Street by street. Shamelessly straightforward. What they cost and what they did.

  Why shouldn’t he do something similar for south-east London? Compose a beyond-the-Thames almanac of pleasure-for-sale? Had he known, somewhere deep down, he wanted to do that? Was that why this morning he’d begun marking the sites where girls dawdled and wheedled male passers-by? So why not pursue that particular line of enquiry? Interview the girls, get their names and addresses, find out their specialities, their favourite games and tricks. List these beauties by type, as greengrocers would arrange fruits on trays. Catalogue their glistening skins, downy bloom, fragrant smells, sweet tastes. Find a willing publisher, an unshockable printer. Duodecimo size; just right for slipping into your pocket. Elegantly bound, pink half-calf, say, with stamped gold lettering, silk headband, silk bookmark. A cheaper, cloth-bound edition for poorer punters. Advertise discreetly. Hey presto, his fortune was made. Pay off his debts, buy Cara some new frocks, squire her and the children to Boulogne to visit her family. Then what?

  His cock subsided. The dream faded. It had led him down a blind alley. A cul-de-sac. Mrs Dulcimer leaned back on her golden cushions and surveyed him from under sleepy-seeming eyelids. She licked a streak of glistening butter from her fingertip. He’d lean forwards, take her hand, lick her fingers clean.

  Start again. He picked up his half-empty tankard, gulped beer. Rush of bittersweet hops. Rush of clarity. Forget the lure of quick easy money. Something else was summoning him. It tugged at his sleeve. Murmured to him. Listen. Listen.

  Why not compose a journalistic account, authoritative and sober and complete, of the sexual underworld, the secret city, here in the south-east? Go far beyond Mayhew’s requirements. Out-Mayhew Mayhew! Include all sorts of information: thumbnail histories of the girls, exact descriptions of where they hung out, in houses and along streets, diagrams of their rat-runs, tables of what they charged, the particular services they offered, whether they worked freelance or were controlled by bullies. Describe a bully’s role, the cut he took. Finally, present the material to Mayhew and the Morning Chronicle.

  See his own words in print. A series, running week by week. His own name in full under each article. Mayhew acknowledging him as an authority.

  Cara? She would be shocked at first by his subject matter, but then, surely, she’d understand? Feel proud of him, even. Milly would too.

  He took a piss in the limewashed privy in the backyard. It didn’t smell too bad: must have been emptied recently. Horses neighed from the other side of the red-brick wall. A whiff of manure. Horses tossing their heads, stamping their feet. The Hoof used to braid their manes. He’d lay his arm along their glossy necks, rub his cheek up and down them, murmuring, while Joseph cowered at the stable door.

  Returning to his table, he began writing his overdue report to Mayhew covering the work of the last couple of days. Descriptions of tarts’ lodgings. He rubbed his head, sighed.

  As a police clerk he’d been a master of the tidy, succinct account. Recording interviews in the station with suspects, witnesses, ne’er-do-wells of all sorts, safely seated on the other side of the table from these miscreants, he had translated their grunts, cries, pleas, broken sentences, into something coherent. Subject, verb, object. Commas in the right places. Correct grammar kept everything tidy, just as the police tried to create order in the city.

  Writing for Mayhew, however, making sense of these pencilled notes jotted down while Joseph was out and about, felt different. Mayhew demanded clear narrative structure. It sounded so easy. But the words Joseph chased had an energy of their own, just like criminals, they rose up and jumped about, tried to evade control, hid themselves, then suddenly roused up again and Joseph pursued them trying to capture them but so often not succeeding.

  In fact narrative demanded a gun: pick off the facts one by one. Hang them up neat as shot pheasants in the game-butcher’
s. Alas: Joseph had never learned to handle a weapon. The Hoof had had to shoot a diseased horse once. Off went the flopping dead creature on the back of a cart. Later on, hacked into joints perhaps, the meat sold for pies in the poorer establishments, where the punters didn’t enquire too closely into what they were eating. Places like this? Let’s hope not.

  Finished, have you, dearie?

  The serving girl whisked away his plate. Her thumb in a smear of brown gravy on the china edge. Shining red face. Brown-lashed eyes. Breasts straining behind her apron. He said thank you but she hardly acknowledged him, veering to the next table to collect more dirty crocks.

  He abandoned his report for Mayhew, turned a page. He wanted to write something for this new project he’d dreamed up. Start by describing Mrs Dulcimer. His black muse. His Walworth Beauty. Follow with an account of this morning’s patrol, his encounters with the prostitutes who’d accosted him. He’d dealt with those pleading women by waving them off. Now he summoned them back, one by one. China-blue eyes. Lemony scent, mismatched boots. Smell of stale sweat, rotted teeth. Rain-draggled pink silk skirt. A purple bow above her ear. A bonnet nodding with daisies. Later he’d match these jottings with the crosses marked on his map. Then he’d join up all the crosses, see what winding lines they laid across the printed grid of streets.

  After a while he yawned, checked his watch. Time to be on the move again. He tore out the doodle, and the sheets of his new writing, wanting to keep them separate from his work notes, and put them in the right-hand pocket of his jacket. He put his notebook in the other. He pulled on his coat, pushed open the chophouse door, crossed the cobbled yard. The air in the street smelled of coal and apples, cooled his warm cheeks. He strode back towards Newington.

  The mid-day pause had renewed him. He plunged in and out of the foul warrens off the main road. He shouldered aside importunate beggars, tambourine-players, passing sellers of bootlaces. He looked for landmarks, scrawled quick notes, dashing down how one back lane connected to another, wove into the criminal web. He paced down towards the cricket ground at the Oval, back up into Walworth, around the common.