‘These were the kind old buffers who would extend a father’s indulgence in the shape of the odd half-sovereign or string of seed pearls to the half-woman, half-statue they had known in those earliest days when she had played Cupid and, sometimes, out of childish fun, sprung off her toy arrows amongst them, hitting, in play, sometimes an ear, sometimes a buttock, sometimes a ballock.
‘But with their sons and grandsons it was a different matter. When the time came for them to meet La Nelson and her girls, in they’d trot, timorous yet defiant, blushing to the tops of their Eton collars, aquiver with nervous anticipation and dread, and then their eyes would fall on the sword I held and Louisa or Emily would have the devil’s own job with them, thereafter.
‘I put it down to the influence of Baudelaire, sir.’
‘What’s this?’ cried Walser, amazed enough to drop his professional imperturbability.
‘The French poet, sir; a poor fellow who loved whores not for the pleasure of it but, as he perceived it, the horror of it, as if we was, not working women doing it for money but damned souls who did it solely to lure men to their dooms, as if we’d got nothing better to do . . . Yet we were all suffragists in that house; oh, Nelson was a one for “Votes for Women”, I can tell you!’
‘Does that seem strange to you? That the caged bird should want to see the end of cages, sir?’ queried Lizzie, with an edge of steel in her voice.
‘Let me tell you that it was a wholly female world within Ma Nelson’s door. Even the dog who guarded it was a bitch and all the cats were females, one or the other of ’em always in kitten, or newly given birth, so that a sub-text of fertility underwrote the glittering sterility of the pleasure of the flesh available within the academy. Life within those walls was governed by a sweet and loving reason. I never saw a single blow exchanged between any of the sisterhood who reared me, nor heard a cross word or a voice raised in anger. Until the hour of eight, when work began and Lizzie stationed herself behind the peephole in the front door, the girls kept to their rooms and the benign silence might be interrupted only by the staccato rattle of the typewriter as Grace practised her stenography or the lyric ripple of the flute upon which Esmeralda was proving to be something of a virtuoso.
‘But what followed after they put away their books was only poor girls earning a living, for, though some of the customers would swear that whores do it for pleasure, that is only to ease their own consciences, so that they will feel less foolish when they fork out hard cash for pleasure that has no real existence unless given freely – oh, indeed! we knew we only sold the simulacra. No woman would turn her belly to the trade unless pricked by economic necessity, sir.
‘As for myself, I worked my passage on Ma Nelson’s ship as living statue, and, during my blossoming years, from fourteen to seventeen, I existed only as an object in men’s eyes after the night-time knocking on the door began. Such was my apprenticeship for life, since is it not to the mercies of the eyes of others that we commit ourselves on our voyage through the world? I was as if closed up in a shell, for the wet white would harden on my face and torso like a death mask that covered me all over, yet, inside this appearance of marble, nothing could have been more vibrant with potentiality than I! Sealed in this artificial egg, this sarcophagus of beauty, I waited, I waited . . . although I could not have told you for what it was I waited. Except, I assure you, I did not await the kiss of a magic prince, sir! With my two eyes, I nightly saw how such a kiss would seal me up in my appearance for ever!
‘Yet I was possessed by the idea I had been feathered out for some special fate, though what it was I could not imagine. So I waited, with lithic patience, for that destiny to manifest itself.
‘As I wait now, sir,’ she said directly to Walser, swinging round to him, ‘as the last cobwebs of the old century blow away.’
Then she swung back to the mirror and thoughtfully tucked away a straying curl.
‘However, until Liz opened the door and let the men in, when all we girls needs must jump to attention and behave like women, you might say that, in our well-ordered habitation, all was “luxe, calme et volupté”, though not quite as the poet imagined. We all engaged in our intellectual, artistic or political –’
Here Lizzie coughed.
‘– pursuits and, as for myself, those long hours of leisure I devoted to the study of aerodynamics and the physiology of flight, in Ma Nelson’s library, from among whose abundant store of books I gleaned whatever small store of knowledge I possess, sir.’
With that, she batted her eyelashes at Walser in the mirror. From the pale length of those eyelashes, a good three inches, he might have thought she had not taken her false ones off had he not been able to see them lolling, hairy as gooseberries, among the formidable refuse of the dressing-table. He continued to take notes in a mechanical fashion but, as the women unfolded the convolutions of their joint stories together, he felt more and more like a kitten tangling up in a ball of wool it had never intended to unravel in the first place; or a sultan faced with not one but two Scheherezades, both intent on impacting a thousand stories into the single night.
‘Library?’ he queried indefatigably, if a touch wearily.
‘’E left it to ’er,’ said Lizzie.
‘Who left what to whom?’
‘This old geyser. Left Nelson ’is library. On account of she was the only woman in London who could get it up for him –’
‘Lizzie! You know I abhor coarse language!’
‘– and that in spite of, or, perhaps, because of, her black eye patch and her travestie. Oh, her little plump thighs like chicken cutlets in her doeskin britches! What a quaint figure she cut! He was a Scottish gentleman with a big beard. I remember him well. Never give ’is name, of course. Left her his library. Our Fevvers was always rooting about in it, nose in a book, nothing but a poke of humbugs for company.’
Humbugs, noted Walser with renewed enthusiasm. In England, a kind of candy; in America –
‘As to my flight,’ continued Fevvers inexorably, ‘you must realise that my size, weight and general construction were not such as to make flying come easy to me, although there is ample room in my chest for lungs of the size required. But the bones of birds are filled with air and mine are filled with solid marrow and if the remarkable development of my thorax forms the same kind of windbreak as does that of a pigeon, the resemblance stops abruptly there and problems of balance and of elementary negotiations with the wind – who is a fickle lover – absorbed me for a long time.
‘Have you observed my legs, sir?’
She thrust her right leg through the flap of her dressing-gown. Its foot wore a down-at-heel pink velvet slipper trimmed with grubby swansdown. The leg itself, perfectly bare, was admirably long and lean.
‘My legs don’t tally with the upper part of my body from the point of view of pure aesthetics, d’you see. Were I to be the true copy of Venus, one built on my scale ought to have legs like tree-trunks, sir; these flimsy little underpinnings of mine have more than once buckled up under the top-heavy distribution of weight upon my torso, have let me down with a bump and left me sprawling. I’m not tip-top where walking is concerned, sir, more tip-up. Any bird of my dimensions would have little short legs it could tuck up under itself and so make of itself a flying wedge to pierce the air, but old spindle-shanks here ain’t fitted out like neither bird nor woman down below.
‘Discussing this problem with Lizzie –’
‘– I suggested a Sunday afternoon trip to the Zoological Gardens, where we saw the storks, the cranes and the flamingoes –’
‘– and these long-stemmed creatures gave me the giddy promise of protracted flight, which I had thought was to be denied me. For the cranes cross continents, do they not; they winter in Africa and summer on the Baltic! I vowed I’d learn to swoop and soar, to emulate at last the albatross and glide with delighted glee on the Roaring Forties and Furious Fifties, those winds like the breath of hell that guard the white, southern pole! For, as my l
egs grew, so did my wing-span; and my ambition swelled to match both. I should never be content with short hops to Hackney Marshes. Cockney sparrow I might be by birth, but not by inclination. I saw my future as criss-crossing the globe for then I knew nothing of the constraints the world imposes; I only knew my body was the abode of limitless freedom.
‘For starters, needs must be content with small beginnings, sir. To climb on to the roof on moonless nights, nobody there to see, and take off for secret flights above the slumbering city. Some early tests we found we could conduct in our own front room as the vertical take-off.’
Lizzie repeated, as if a lesson from a book: ‘When the bird wishes to soar upwards suddenly, it lowers its elbows after it has produced the impetus –’
Fevvers pushed back her chair, rose up on tiptoe and lifted towards the ceiling a face which suddenly bore an expression of the most heavenly beatitude, face of an angel in a Sunday school picture-book, a remarkable transformation. She crossed her arms on her massive bust and the bulge in the back of her satin dressing-gown began to heave and bubble. Cracks appeared in the old satin. Everything appeared to be about to burst out and take off. But the loose curls quivering on top of her high-piled chignon already brushed a stray drifting cobweb from the smoke-discoloured ceiling and Lizzie warned:
‘Not enough room in ’ere, love. You’ll ’ave to leave it to ’is imagination. Nelson’s drawing-room was twice as ’igh as this rotten attic and our girlie wasn’t half as tall, then, as she is now; shot up like anything when you was seventeen, didn’t you, darling.’ Oh, the caress in her voice!
Fevvers reluctantly subsided on her stool and a brooding shadow crossed her brow.
‘When I was seventeen, and then our bad years started, our years in the wilderness.’ She heaved another volcanic sigh. ‘Any of that fizz left, Liz?’
Lizzie peeked behind the screen.
‘Would you believe, we’ve drunk the lot.’
Abandoned bottles rolling underfoot among the foetid lingerie gave the room a debauched look.
‘Well, then, make us a cup of tea, there’s a love.’
Lizzie ducked behind the screen and emerged with a tin kettle: ‘I’ll just trot off and fill it up at the tap in the corridor.’
Alone with the marvellous giantess, Walser saw the undercurrent of suspicion towards himself she had partially concealed during the interview now come to the surface. Her geniality evaporated; she squinted at him beneath her thick pale lashes with almost hostility, seemed ill-at-ease, reached out to toy with her bunch of violets in a bored fashion. Something, somewhere, perhaps the tin lid of the tin kettle, rattled and clanged. She cocked her head. Then the chimes of Big Ben came drifting towards them once again on the soundless night and all at once she was imbued with vivacity.
‘Twelve o’clock already! How time does fly, when one is babbling on about oneself!’
For the first time that night, Walser was seriously discomposed.
‘Hey, there! didn’t that clock strike midnight just a while ago, after the nightwatchman came round?’
‘Did it, sir? How could it have, sir? Oh, dear, no, sir! Didn’t it go – ten, eleven, twelve – just this very minute? Didn’t we both sit here and hear it? Look at your own watch, sir, if you don’t believe me.’
Walser obediently checked his fob; it clasped its hands at midnight. He put it to his ear, where it ticked away industriously in the usual fashion. Lizzie returned bearing a dripping kettle.
The dressing-room was fully equipped for making tea; there was a brass spirit stove in the cupboard beside the fireplace and a japanned tray on which lived a chubby brown teapot and thick, white, pot mugs. Lizzie set a match to the small flame and reached in the cupboard again for a blue bag of sugar and for milk.
‘Off again,’ she observed, peering within the jug.
‘We’ll have to have our tea black, then.’
‘Waaall, maybe my ears deceived me,’ Walser murmured as he slipped his fob back in his breast pocket.
‘What’s this?’ pricked sharp-eared Lizzie.
‘’E thinks we put Big Ben back an hour,’ said Fevvers with a straight face.
‘Very likely,’ said Lizzie contemptuously. ‘Oh, very like.’
Fevvers had a powerfully sweet tooth. She dispensed with measures and tipped the sugar into her steaming mug directly from the bag, in a stream. Warming her hands on its side – for, whatever time it was, it was the chill of night – Fevvers began again.
Her voice. It was as if Walser had become a prisoner of her voice, her cavernous, sombre voice, a voice made for shouting about the tempest, her voice of a celestial fishwife. Musical as it strangely was, yet not a voice for singing with; it comprised discords, her scale contained twelve tones. Her voice, with its warped, homely, Cockney vowels and random aspirates. Her dark, rusty, dipping, swooping voice, imperious as a siren’s.
Yet such a voice could almost have had its source, not within her throat but in some ingenious mechanism or other behind the canvas screen, voice of a fake medium at a seance.
‘Ma Nelson met her end with terrible suddenness, for, slipping on some foreign matter, skin of a fruit or dog turd, as she was crossing Whitechapel High Street on her way to Blooms to treat us all to salt beef sandwiches, she fell beneath the oncoming hooves and wheels of a brewer’s dray and was mangled to pulp in a trice.’
‘Dead on arrival at hospital, poor old thing,’ chimed in Lizzie like a cracked bell. ‘No chance for even so much as a “Kiss me, Hardy”, nor any tender final words like that. We give her a lovely funeral – black plumes and mutes with chiffoned toppers, sir; Whitechapel ain’t never seen such a sight before or since! The cortège followed by droves of grieving whores.’
‘But, as we were breaking a funeral baked meat or two amongst ourselves back in the parlour after our beloved old girl was laid to rest, comes a knocking at the door like Judgment Day.’
‘And Judgment Day indeed it proved to be, sir; for who should I let in but a dissenting cleric, his dog-collar up to his ears, and he gnashing his teeth and crying: “Let the wages of sin pay for the Good Lord’s work!”’
‘Now, Nelson, being taken from us so sudden when she herself was in the prime of life – not much older than my Lizzie is now – had not thought to make a will, although she thought of us as her adopted daughters, and yet she could not bear to think of death, either. So, dying intestate as she did, all her estate went by due process of the law to this, her surviving kin. To – oh, the irony of fate! – that very stern and stony-hearted elder brother who cast her from his hearth when as a girl first she slipped, and so ensured her ruin, in one sense, although her fortune in another.
‘Is there no justice in either earth or heaven? It would seem not. For this very same cruel, unnatural brother now arrived legally entitled to beggar her posthumously and, if we had not already paid for her gravestone out of the petty cash –’
‘– we chose “Safe Harbour” for the epitaph –’
‘– he’d have seen to it that good, kind, decent woman returned to the earth out of which she had been formed without so much as a pebble to mark her passage.
‘He couldn’t stand the sight of us sitting there, eating food he thought belonged to him. He overturned the pork pies and spilled on the carpets all Ma Nelson’s vintage port that we had broken out. Announces he, our time is up; he gives us till nine o’clock next morning, such was the goodness of his heart, to pack ourselves up, bag and baggage, and make ourselves scarce. Leave the only home we knew and go out on the common. In this way, he planned to “cleanse the temple of the ungodly”, although he was kind enough to hint that his God might smile at any of us who cared to repent and stay on, because, with a singular poetic justice, he intended to make of his inheritance a hostel for fallen girls and he thought a repentant harlot or two would come in handy about the place, poacher turned gamekeeper, you might say.’
‘But not one of us would take up the wardress posts he offered. No, thank you!
’
‘After he’d departed in a growler back to his manse in Deptford, we held a council amongst ourselves as to our futures, which we foresaw would no longer be held in common. Though we grieved that this should be, yet the necessity that first united us must now drive us apart and so we bowed to necessity, as all of us must do, although the invisible bonds of affection would always knit us wherever we roamed.
‘But the unexpected did not find our friends altogether unprepared. You will recall how Ma Nelson knew that the days of the grand old whorehouse were numbered and always urged the members of her academy to prepare themselves for a wider world.
‘Louisa and Emily had formed that kind of close attachment to one another as often reconciles women of the profession to its rigours and, long before Ma Nelson passed away, had decided between them to retire early, after having saved sufficient to set themselves up in a little boarding-house in Brighton. They’d long cherished the plan and often whiled away the hours of toil, while some dirty bugger poked away at them with his incompetent instrument, by planning whether their pillowcases should be left plain or edged with lace and what wallpaper to put in the dining-rooms. Although the sudden termination of our contracts forced these resourceful girls to start out on their adventure with somewhat less capital than they could have wished, they forthwith consulted their bankbooks and vowed: nothing ventured, nothing gained, and went upstairs to pack their trunks immediately, to leave next day for the South Coast and start their search for a suitable modest property.
‘Annie and Grace had also set by a little store between them and now elected to pool it in order to start up a small agency for typing and office work, for Grace could rattle away on those keys of hers like the best of castanets and Annie had such a head for figures she’d been keeping Ma Nelson’s accounts straight for years. So they, too, packed up their things, and next day, would move out to lodgings and set about finding suitable premises. I’m glad to say those girls have prospered, too, sir, by dint of hard work and good management.’