“I’m not listening to any of this.”
“Well, okay, but tell me. What’ll he look like?”
“I don’t know,” she said impatiently. “A dollar bill, I guess.”
Less than a week before Carol’s ship was scheduled to sail, The Peter Pan Club held a party in honor of Cathy’s third birthday. It was a fine occasion of ice cream and cake for “tea,” as well as the usual fare of bread and meat paste, bread and jam, and cups of a bright fluid that was the English equivalent of Kool-Aid. Warren and Carol stood together on the sidelines, smiling at their happy daughter as if to promise her that one way or another they would always be her parents.
“So you’ll be here alone with us for a while, Mr. Mathews,” said Marjorie Blaine, who ran the nursery school. She was a trim, chain-smoking woman of forty or so, long divorced, and Warren had noticed a few times that she wasn’t bad. “You must come round to our pub,” she said. “Do you know Finch’s, in the Fulham Road? It’s rather a scruffy little pub, actually, but all sorts of nice people go there.”
And he told her he would be sure to drop by.
Then it was the day of the sailing, and Warren accompanied his wife and child as far as the railroad station and the gate to the boat train.
“Isn’t Daddy coming?” Cathy asked, looking frightened.
“It’s all right, dear,” Carol told her. “We have to leave Daddy here for now, but you’ll see him again very soon.” And they walked quickly away into the enclosing crowd.
One of the presents given to Cathy at the party was a cardboard music box with a jolly yellow duck and a birthday-card message on the front, and with a little crank on one side: when you turned the crank it played a tinny rendition of “Happy Birthday to You.” And when Warren came back to the flat that night he found it, among several other cheap, forgotten toys, on the floor beneath Cathy’s stripped bed. He played it once or twice as he sat drinking whiskey over the strewn books and papers on his desk; then, with a child’s sense of pointless experiment, he turned the crank the other way and played it backwards, slowly. And once he’d begun doing that he found he couldn’t stop, or didn’t want to, because the dim, rude little melody it made suggested all the loss and loneliness in the world.
Dum dee dum da da-da
Dum dee dum da da-da …
He was tall and very thin and always aware of how ungainly he must look, even when nobody was there to see—even when the whole of his life had come down to sitting alone and fooling with a cardboard toy, three thousand miles from home. It was March of 1953, and he was twenty-seven years old.
* * *
“Oh, you poor man,” Judith said when she came down for her bath in the morning. “It’s so sad to find you all alone here. You must miss them terribly.”
“Yeah, well, it’ll only be a few months.”
“Well, but that’s awful. Isn’t there someone who could sort of look after you? Didn’t you and Carol meet any young people who might be company for you?”
“Oh, sure, we met a few people,” he said, “but nobody I’d want to—you know, nobody I’d especially want to have around or anything.”
“Well then, you ought to get out and make new friends.”
Soon after the first of April, as was her custom, Judith went to live in her cottage in Sussex, where she would stay until September. She would make occasional visits back to town for a few days, she explained to Warren, but “Don’t worry; I’ll always be sure to ring you up well in advance before I sort of descend on you again.”
And so he was truly alone. He went to the pub called Finch’s one night with a vague idea of persuading Marjorie Blaine to come home with him and then of having her in his own and Carol’s bed. And he found her alone at the crowded bar, but she looked old and fuddled with drink.
“Oh, I say, Mr. Mathews,” she said. “Do come and join me.”
“Warren,” he said.
“What?”
“People call me Warren.”
“Ah. Yes, well, this is England, you see; we’re all dreadfully formal here.” And a little later she said, “I’ve never quite understood what it is you do, Mr. Mathews.”
“Well, I’m on a Fulbright,” he said. “It’s an American scholarship program for students overseas. The government pays your way, and you—”
“Yes, well of course America is quite good about that sort of thing, isn’t it. And I should imagine you must have a very clever mind.” She gave him a flickering glance. “People who haven’t lived often do.” Then she cringed, to pantomime evasion of a blow. “Sorry,” she said quickly, “sorry I said that.” But she brightened at once. “Sarah!” she called. “Sarah, do come and meet young Mr. Mathews, who wants to be called Warren.”
A tall, pretty girl turned from a group of other drinkers to smile at him, extending her hand, but when Marjorie Blaine said, “He’s an American,” the girl’s smile froze and her hand fell.
“Oh,” she said. “How nice.” And she turned away again.
* * *
It wasn’t a good time to be an American in London. Eisenhower had been elected and the Rosenbergs killed; Joseph McCarthy was on the rise and the war in Korea, with its reluctant contingent of British troops, had come to seem as if it might last forever. Still, Warren Mathews suspected that even in the best of times he would feel alien and homesick here. The very English language, as spoken by natives, bore so little relation to his own that there were far too many opportunities for missed points in every exchange. Nothing was clear.
He went on trying, but even on better nights, in happier pubs than Finch’s and in the company of more agreeable strangers, he found only a slight lessening of discomfort—and he found no attractive, unattached girls. The girls, whether blandly or maddeningly pretty, were always fastened to the arms of men whose relentlessly witty talk could leave him smiling in bafflement. And he was dismayed to find how many of these people’s innuendoes, winked or shouted, dwelt on the humorous aspects of homosexuality. Was all of England obsessed with that topic? Or did it haunt only this quiet, “interesting” part of London where Chelsea met South Kensington along the Fulham Road?
Then one night he took a late bus for Piccadilly Circus. “What do you want to go there for?” Carol would have said, and almost half the ride was over before he realized that he didn’t have to answer questions like that anymore.
In 1945, as a boy on his first furlough from the Army after the war, he had been astonished at the nightly promenade of prostitutes then called Piccadilly Commandos, and there had been an unforgettable quickening of his blood as he watched them walk and turn, walk and turn again: girls for sale. They seemed to have become a laughingstock among more sophisticated soldiers, some of whom liked to slump against buildings and flip big English pennies onto the sidewalk at their feet as they passed, but Warren had longed for the courage to defy that mockery. He’d wanted to choose a girl and buy her and have her, however she might turn out to be, and he’d despised himself for letting the whole two weeks of his leave run out without doing so.
He knew that a modified version of that spectacle had still been going on as recently as last fall, because he and Carol had seen it on their way to some West End theater. “Oh, I don’t believe this,” Carol said. “Are they really all whores? This is the saddest thing I’ve ever seen.”
There had lately been newspaper items about the pressing need to “clean up Piccadilly” before the impending Coronation, but the police must have been lax in their efforts so far, because the girls were very much there.
Most of them were young, with heavily made-up faces; they wore bright clothes in the colors of candy and Easter eggs, and they either walked and turned or stood waiting in the shadows. It took him three straight whiskeys to work up the nerve, and even then he wasn’t sure of himself. He knew he looked shabby—he was wearing a gray suit coat with old Army pants, and his shoes were almost ready to be thrown away—but no clothes in the world would have kept him from feeling naked as he m
ade a quick choice from among four girls standing along Shaftesbury Avenue and went up to her and said, “Are you free?”
“Am I free?” she said, meeting his eyes for less than a second. “Honey, I’ve been free all my life.”
The first thing she wanted him to agree on, before they’d walked half a block, was her price—steep, but within his means; then she asked if he would mind taking a short cab ride. And in the cab she explained that she never used the cheap hotels and rooming houses around here, as most of the other girls did, because she had a six-month-old daughter and didn’t like to leave her for long.
“I don’t blame you,” he said. “I have a daughter too.” And he instantly wondered why he’d felt it necessary to tell her that.
“Oh yeah? So where’s your wife?”
“Back in New York.”
“You divorced then, or what?”
“Well, separated.”
“Oh yeah? That’s too bad.”
They rode in an awkward silence for a while until she said, “Listen, it’s all right if you want to kiss me or anything, but no big feely-feely in the cab, okay? I really don’t go for that.”
And only then, kissing her, did he begin to find out what she was like. She wore her bright yellow hair in ringlets around her face—it was illuminated and darkened again with each passing streetlamp; her eyes were pleasant despite all the mascara; her mouth was nice; and though he tried no big feely-feely his hands were quick to discover she was slender and firm.
It wasn’t a short cab ride—it went on until Warren began to wonder if it might stop only when they met a waiting group of hoodlums who would haul him out of the backseat and beat him up and rob him and take off in the cab with the girl—but it came to an end at last on a silent city block in what he guessed was the northeast of London. She took him into a house that looked rude but peaceful in the moonlight; then she said, “Shh,” and they tiptoed down a creaking linoleum corridor and into her room, where she switched on a light and closed the door behind them.
She checked the baby, who lay small and still and covered-up in the center of a big yellow crib against one wall. Along the facing wall, not six feet away, stood the reasonably fresh-looking double bed in which Warren was expected to take his pleasure.
“I just like to make sure she’s breathing,” the girl explained, turning back from the crib; then she watched him count out the right number of pound and ten-shilling notes on the top of her dresser. She turned off the ceiling light but left a small one on at the bedside as she began to undress, and he managed to watch her while nervously taking off his own clothes. Except that her cotton-knit underpants looked pitifully cheap, that her brown pubic hair gave the lie to her blond head, that her legs were short and her knees a little thick, she was all right. And she was certainly young.
“Do you ever enjoy this?” he asked when they were clumsily in bed together.
“Huh? How do you mean?”
“Well, just—you know—after a while it must get so you can’t really—” and he stopped there in a paralysis of embarrassment.
“Oh, no,” she assured him. “Well, I mean it depends on the guy a lot, but I’m not—I’m not a block of ice or anything. You’ll find out.”
And so, in wholly unexpected grace and nourishment, she became a real girl for him.
* * *
Her name was Christine Phillips and she was twenty-two. She came from Glasgow, and she’d been in London for four years. He knew it would be gullible to believe everything she told him when they sat up later that night over cigarettes and a warm quart bottle of beer; still, he wanted to keep an open mind. And if much of what she said was predictable stuff—she explained, for example, that she wouldn’t have to be on the street at all if she were willing to take a job as a “hostess” in a “club,” but that she’d turned down many such offers because “all those places are clip joints”—there were other, unguarded remarks that could make his arm tighten around her in tenderness, as when she said she had named her baby Laura “because I’ve always thought that’s the most beautiful girl’s name in the world. Don’t you?”
And he began to understand why there was scarcely a trace of Scotch or English accent in her speech: she must have known so many Americans, soldiers and sailors and random civilian strays, that they had invaded and plundered her language.
“So what do you do for a living, Warren?” she asked. “You get money from home?”
“Well, sort of.” And he explained, once again, about the Fulbright program.
“Yeah?” she said. “You have to be smart for that?”
“Oh, not necessarily. You don’t have to be very smart for anything in America anymore.”
“You kidding me?”
“Not wholly.”
“Huh?”
“I mean I’m only kidding you a little.”
And after a thoughtful pause she said, “Well, I wish I could’ve had more schooling. I wish I was smart enough to write a book, because I’d have a hell of a book to write. Know what I’d call it?” She narrowed her eyes, and her fingers sketched a suggestion of formal lettering in the air. “I’d call it This Is Piccadilly. Because I mean people don’t really know what goes on. Ah, Jesus, I could tell you things that’d make your—well, never mind. Skip it.”
“… Hey, Christine?” he said later still, when they were back in bed.
“Uh-huh?”
“Want to tell each other the stories of our lives?”
“Okay,” she said with a child’s eagerness, and so he had to explain again, shyly, that he was only kidding her a little.
The baby’s cry woke them both at six in the morning, but Christine got up and told him he could go back to sleep for a while. When he awoke again he was alone in the room, which smelled faintly of cosmetics and piss. He could hear several women talking and laughing nearby, and he didn’t know what he was expected to do but get up and dressed and find his way out of here.
Then Christine came to the door and asked if he would like a cup of tea. “Whyn’t you come on out, if you’re ready,” she said as she carefully handed him the hot mug, “and meet my friends, okay?”
And he followed her into a combination kitchen and living room whose windows overlooked a weed-grown vacant lot. A stubby woman in her thirties stood working at an ironing board with the electrical cord plugged into a ceiling fixture, and another girl of about Christine’s age lay back in an easy chair, wearing a knee-length robe and slippers, with her bare, pretty legs ablaze in morning sunlight. A gas fireplace hissed beneath a framed oval mirror, and the good smells of steam and tea were everywhere.
“Warren, this is Grace Arnold,” Christine said of the woman at the ironing board, who looked up to say she was pleased to meet him, “and this is Amy.” Amy licked her lips and smiled and said, “Hi.”
“You’ll probably meet the kids in a minute,” Christine told him. “Grace has six kids. Grace and Alfred do, I mean. Alfred’s the man of the house.”
And very gradually, as he sipped and listened, mustering appropriate nods and smiles and inquiries, Warren was able to piece the facts together. Alfred Arnold was an interior housepainter, or rather a “painter and decorator.” He and his wife, with all those children to raise, made ends meet by renting out rooms to Christine and Amy in full knowledge of how both girls earned their living, and so they had all become a kind of family.
How many polite, nervous men had sat on this sofa in the mornings, watching the whisk and glide of Grace Arnold’s iron, helplessly intrigued with the sunny spectacle of Amy’s legs, hearing the talk of these three women and wondering how soon it would be all right to leave? But Warren Mathews had nothing to go home to, so he began to hope this pleasant social occasion might last.
“You’ve a nice name, Warren,” Amy told him, crossing her legs. “I’ve always liked that name.”
“Warren?” Christine said. “Can you stay and have something to eat with us?”
Soon there was a fried egg on
buttered toast for each of them, served with more tea around a clean kitchen table, and they all ate as daintily as if they were in a public place. Christine sat beside him, and once during the meal she gave his free hand a shy little squeeze.
“If you don’t have to rush off,” she said, while Grace was stacking the dishes, “we can get a beer. The pub’ll be open in half an hour.”
“Good,” he said. “Fine.” Because the last thing he wanted to do was rush off, even when all six children came clamoring in from their morning’s play down the street, each of them in turn wanting to sit on his lap and poke fun at him and run jam-stained fingers through his hair. They were a shrill, rowdy crowd, and they all glowed with health. The oldest was a bright girl named Jane who looked oddly like a Negro—light-skinned, but with African features and hair—and who giggled as she backed away from him and said, “Are you Christine’s fella?”
“I sure am,” he told her.
And he did feel very much like Christine’s fella when he took her out alone to the pub around the corner. He liked the way she walked—she didn’t look anything at all like a prostitute in her fresh tan raincoat with the collar turned up around her cheeks—and he liked her sitting close beside him on a leather bench against the wall of an old brown room where everything, even the mote-filled shafts of sunlight, seemed to be steeped in beer.
“Look, Warren,” she said after awhile, turning her bright glass on the table. “Do you want to stay over another night?”
“Well, no, I really—the thing is I can’t afford it.”
“Oh, I didn’t mean that,” she said, and squeezed his hand again. “I didn’t mean for money. I meant—just stay. Because I want you to.”
Nobody had to tell him what a triumph of masculinity it was to have a young whore offer herself to you free of charge. He didn’t even need From Here to Eternity to tell him that, though he would always remember how that novel came quickly to mind as he drew her face up closer to his own. She had made him feel profoundly strong. “Oh, that’s nice,” he said huskily, and he kissed her. Then, just before kissing her again, he said, “Oh, that’s awfully nice, Christine.”