Kitabı oku: «Sunday at the Cross Bones»

CHAPTER 1

Journals of Harold Davidson

Central Beach, Blackpool 6 September 1932

Some child of Satan has deposited a quantity of candyfloss in my hair. I suspect it may have been the gormless boy in the Edwardian sailor suit, four or five at most, whose mother lifted him up in her meaty arms to be kissed by the famous rector. A sulky, unbiddable young man with a face that Raphael himself would have found it a burden to render adorable, he performed his task with reluctance, turning his putty cheek away so that my lips found only his ear, and leaving me the inestimable gift of sticky spun sugar clamped to my snow-white locks. By the time I realised the damage that was done, she and he were long gone. I must have greeted a dozen visitors looking like a Lancashire barmaid permed and pink-rinsed for a night on the tiles.

Cramped legs; sticky hair; kissing babies; enduring the sniggers of the ungodly. These are hardly the ideal circumstances of the modern clergyman, no matter how nationwide his renown. But then neither is this barrel in which I sit for the second morning of my ten-day-long stint. I do not say it is uncomfortable. Mr Gannon has kindly provided me with a cushion upon the narrow seat where I perch like a maiden aunt. The structure of the barrel has been cut away to allow me a kind of counter upon which to rest my arms, or to write in this journal, or to sign autographs – that puzzling new phenomenon, as though the inscription of one’s name on an envelope or ticket stub forged a connection of sorts with a complete stranger, who will display it later as proof of his having met me, as though a lion in Chessington Zoo might have volunteered to him a paw-print of brotherhood.

Above my head, raised on a metal stalk, a wooden roof houses a small electric fan to circulate the late-summer air and disperse the cigar fumes. ‘We generally disapprove of the exhibits having a smoke, Padre,’ said Mr Gannon with his habitual air of a man supervising an event of vast importance, ‘but we’ll make an exception for you.’

On my left is Mr Gavin Tweedy’s World-Famous Flea Circus, a ludicrous entertainment constructed from a plywood door laid across two steel drums, upon which tiny insects are encouraged to jump over obstacles, walk through hoops, pull tiny carts and dance together to a tinny foxtrot. If Jonathan Swift were to walk by this bonsai extravaganza, what a metaphor he would find for human endeavour: the vanity of display, the pointlessness of striving, the folly of courtship, the puniness of ambition! On my right, a Miss Barbara Cockayne sits in a barrel similar to mine. Her beard is remarkable, an elaborate, flourishing beaver similar to that of Lord Rosebery, or St Jerome as imagined by Rubens. She has a limited repertoire of conversation, contenting herself with growls and oaths and lavatorial remarks; I suppose it must be hard for her to find subjects of chatty inconsequence to share with those who have paid twopence merely to come and gawp at her hairy chin.

I suppose I should be grateful that twopence is also the tariff they pay to come and inspect me, in my snug, brandy-scented wooden casket. It would be a little too cruel if I were paid less than the bearded lady and the waltzing fleas. As to the fee structure enjoyed by my other neighbours here on the strand – the Dog-Faced Man and the Three-Legged Boy of Italy – I am in the dark.

The soft crash of the incoming tide from the Irish Sea can occasionally be heard when the music – that endless, jaunty, soul-deadening jingle-jangle of popular tunes further down the promenade, played apparently on a broken pipe organ – comes to a blissful halt for a moment or two. It fills my heart with sadness, for it reminds me of the waves on the Norfolk strand at Wells-next-the-Sea, where Mimi and I would take the children for Sunday picnics in happier days, the breeze from the salt marshes stinging our nostrils, the gulls flapping and barking over our heads. Those lines from Milton’s ‘Lycidas’ come unbidden into my head:

… the stormy Hebrides

Where thou perhaps under the whelming tide

Visit’st the bottom of the monstrous world.

For there is no doubt that I have found the bottom of the monstrous world here, in Blackpool. I, who have devoted my life to the betterment of others, sit now like Diogenes the philosopher, a man who gave up the luxuries of the material world to find enlightenment, to end his days in a barrel in the Athenian marketplace. Have I found enlightenment? No. Instead, I wrestle with the events of the last two years, picking over the past, looking for the reasons why I find myself here, gazing across a multitude of day trippers, sunburned holidaymakers, squalling children, ignorant matrons perusing their puzzle magazines, scrofulous bank clerks surreptitiously kissing their new girlfriends on the lips as if amazed at their daring. They have come to see me, a line of several hundred scorched and moronic spectators, some way down the devotional scale from my kindly, God-fearing flock at Stiffkey. There, in the pulpit at St John’s, I would survey the expectant faces and know that I was called by the Lord for a purpose. But my purpose here? It is inscrutable. They pay their twopence. They shuffle past. They offer their compliments. (Some, even, their abuse; and one, a generous gout of his saliva.) I thank them, utter some words about the trial, call on their support in my appeal against the bishop, and bless them on their way with a raised hand. What have I, or we, achieved except a hollow exchange between an adventitious ‘celebrity’ (me) and a curious, sympathetic but morally indifferent public?

Mr Gannon will soon, I hope, regale me with tea and biscuits, and, when twenty or thirty of them have gathered round, I may deliver my little speech of self-exculpation and warning about the conduct of the Church of England. But let me put down this journal and think for a moment of the road that led me to the Palace of Amusements. To this place where I no longer enjoy a small congregation. I have only a huge audience.

Two years earlier …

Notebooks of Charlie Norton, Evening Standard London 1 July 1930

I’d just popped into the Old Coal House on the Strand for a few sharpeners after the final edition had been put to bed, and I was nursing a whisky and water with Benny from the Gazette when this guy comes in. Little short-arse he was, five foot two or so, but with an air about him. Bustle, bustle, Hi there, girls, little wave to the barmaids, and he sits down in the snug like he owns the place, and looks about him. He gestures to Bella, the fat lass from Scarborough, with a raised clump of fingers signalling a glass of beer in anyone’s language. Only, when it came, it looked like a pint of orange squash with a foaming head an inch thick.

Orange squash? In the Coal House?

I had him down as a masher of the old school, the kind of gutter swell you’d have seen ten years ago, smarming down the Haymarket with a carnation in his buttonhole and two iffy tarts hanging on his elbows, but this fellow was a masher down on his luck. His greatcoat was too long, it skimmed the pub’s scabby floor. His shirt cuffs were frayed, his collar was open, revealing a turkey neck, lined and wattled, and his corduroy breeches had seen better days. And his shoes! I’m not one to offer advice to geezers about what they choose to adorn their plates of meat, but this was bordering on the offensive. These were brogues that could’ve been through the trenches – shabby, flappy, held together with some kind of surgical tape.

‘Who’s he?’ I asked Benny.

‘Oh, him,’ said Benny, with that annoying, I-know-everything tone of his. ‘Surely you’ve seen the rector.’

The little chap in the snug was a reverend father? No dog collar, no black suit, no prayer book? What kind of clergyman was this?

‘He’s always in here,’ said Benny. ‘Right character he is. He sets up house at the same table every Tuesday, drinks dandelion and burdock, sarsaparilla, you know, kids’ drinks, and buys lemonade for kids that come in. Kids and brasses.’

Brasses, eh? I looked round the pub. The Coal House wasn’t the most respectable dive in Christendom, but you wouldn’t come in here to try your luck with Fanny Hill, if you know what I mean. It wasn’t that kind of billet. Old guys in the corner yarning about the war, young shavers from the City talking about the money they’d rescued from the Crash by investing in South African diamond mines, ash-lapelled lawyers talking in whispers about dodgy wills, I was used to that level of clientele. But this was the wrong milieu, pardon my French, for chaps out for a spot of how’s-your-father with ladies of the night. Or kids. That’s just disgusting. We’re not keen on that stuff down here. In Fleet Street and the Strand, we don’t hold with that Oscar Wilde rigmarole.

Anyway, me and Benny got talking about other things. Benny’s chasing a story about a racehorse owner down at Goodwood whose wife has been dancing the blanket hornpipe with some junior political at the Treasury. He’s been heard swearing and cursing to his pals about how he’ll have him put away if it doesn’t stop. There’s a stable lad Benny knows who’ll sing like a canary about terrible things that’ve been said, or hinted at, by the horsey grandee at point-to-point meetings and stockbreeder dinners, about the shocking state of morals in public office, that kind of thing.

Benny’s very funny about it, though he’s never met the cove in question. ‘How can this government,’ he rants, taking off the guy’s high rhetorical style, ‘seek to impose yet more swingeing taxes on the innocent, hard-working men of this country, when they themselves are mired in corruption, one hand in the Treasury till and the other down the undergarments of their malodorous doxies?’

‘But where can you go with it, Ben?’ I asked, laughing, ‘I mean, where’s the story? You can’t get the chap to admit what’s really buzzing in his breeches, can you?’

‘No, and there’s the problem,’ said Benny. ‘Of course, we can’t write a line about the adultery side because we are, you know, the Gazette, and we don’t do fuck stories.’ He poured a little water into his cloudy glass, reducing the amber fluid to the shade of afternoon wee. ‘But there may be some mileage in the Treasury chappie.’

‘How so?’

‘Constituency politics, old boy. Cherchez les politiques locale. He’s MP for Beckenham, wife and four kids, supposed to be a solid citizen, loving family man, et cetera. His father-in-law’s Lord Silchester, the peer with the bee in his bonnet about family life. Makes speeches all over Kent and Surrey about the importance of the family hearth and the awfulness of the modern world. If we can hint to the old martinet that his own son-in-law is having it away with a lady that’s not his wife, and furthermore that she’s connected to a leading light of the turfing demi-monde, well, I could predict some fireworks.’

‘I can’t see it, Ben,’ I observed. ‘These are powerful people.’

I took our glasses to the bar for refreshment. Up beside me comes the parson geezer, still in his long coat despite the warmish fug in the place. He only comes up to my shoulder, but he signals to Bella with a show of impatience, as if he’s seven foot tall.

‘Two large Johnnie Walkers, please,’ I say, since it’s my shout. ‘Ice in the glass and water on the side.’

He looks at me as if I’d just spat in his eye.

‘Bella,’ he says, his voice commanding and surprisingly deep for such a small man, ‘has Dolores been in tonight?’

His voice was like chocolate, smooth, low, melting, oddly caressing.

‘Dolores?’ says Bella, yanking the Bass pump so the maternal bosom inside her drawstring blouse wobbled like a milk pudding. ‘Haven’t seen her for three days.’

‘She should be here by now,’ he says, his fleshy lips working themselves into an extravagant pout. ‘I specifically asked her to join me here by seven o’clock.’

‘Sorry, Reverend,’ says Bella, ‘but brasses don’t keep strict working hours.’ Her lips were pursed like a cat’s arse.

‘She is a troubled young woman,’ says the parson with a hint of asperity, ‘and is worthy of your respect, if not your sympathy. Will you let me know if Miss Knight comes by this evening? I may be occupied in the snug.’

‘Mm-hmm,’ says Bella, disapprovingly. ‘If she comes swannin’ in here, I’ll make sure you hear about it.’

I picked up the glasses. I wanted to say something, but he’d gone by the time I turned his way. Back to the little cubicle where he stayed, hunched and preoccupied, for an hour over little bits of paper spread before him. I took the drinks back to Benny, and we shot the breeze about the stable boys, the politician and the errant wife.

‘How’s tricks at home?’ said I, changing the subject. ‘Married life going well?’

‘Oh, that’s all fine,’ said Ben, leaning back and stretching expansively. ‘Me and Clare are snug as moles in a hole. She goes to ballet Tuesdays and Thursdays, night class in fine art on Wednesdays, we stay in and play French horn together Friday evenings, and most Saturdays we head for the Dog in Dulwich and have a few laughs and bit of a sing with her sister and brother-in-law. Every marriage should have, you know, a structure.’

‘French horn?’ I asked. ‘What’s that, some kind of polite term for it?’

‘What? Oh, I see. No no no.’ Benny was laughing now, a bit pissed. ‘You silly sod, no, I don’t mean that. We first met playing actual French horns together in the Vintage Musick Ensemble in Whitechapel. You knew that.’ He chuckled, man to man. ‘No, believe me, we don’t have to make a special evening of the old how’s your father. Christ, we’ve only been married six months. She’s still keen as mustard, she is.’

‘Benny,’ I said, waving a hand, ‘spare me the details, old son.’

‘Oh yes,’ he said, ‘she’s always on for a touch. Sometimes, in the mornings, it’s all I can do to pull her off the old –’

Nice chap, Benny, but I really didn’t want to have to visualise his larks in the morning. Seeking a distraction, I looked around the pub.

The vicar was still in the snug, his pint of squash dangerously low. He wasn’t alone any longer. There was a boy beside him, about ten, with a dozen evening papers under his arm. He was a last-edition runner, the kind employed for tuppence ha’penny an hour to take the final round of the Standard to pubs and railway stations around town when the street vendors have packed up for the night and gone home to their lady wives. I assumed the kid was trying to flog the news to the old geezers, but there was something about his pinched demeanour which made me think he was waiting for something more.

I know these runners. They’re little more than urchins and strays, most of them, trying to make a few bob before heading home to their alky dads and their vicious mothers and their yowling siblings wandering around eating dripping sandwiches at nine o’clock at night. They should be in bed, after a day when they should be in school, but aren’t because they’re hanging around Smithfield Market, hosing down the stalls for a tanner or pinching offcuts of scraggy veal for their supper. Those that have homes, I mean.

I don’t have a social conscience, most of the time. I just report on things. But sometimes I get a bit hacked off about kids that age selling newsprint, with their dirty little faces and their weirdly deep voices, like they’ve been smoking Players since they were two.

Benny was still on about married bliss. He felt I should know that his wife sometimes cooks him lamb chops standing in the kitchen wearing an apron and nothing else. Now I’ve met Clare, just once. A nice girl and a whizz on the French horn, no doubt, but she wouldn’t start a riot at the peepshow. I tried to shake the vision of her aproned rear out of my head.

‘We should go out in a four some time,’ I said, not really meaning it. ‘You and Clare, me and Sal. One Friday, we could meet in town and have a bit of a carouse.’

‘Ooh. I see the rector’s making friends.’

I looked. The clergyman and the boy had been joined by an older man, a churchy greybeard in a black suit, side whiskers and droopy eyebags. Man of the cloth or manager of a chapel of rest, there was a whiff of the mortality business about him. The kid stood between them, as awkward as a bullock in a fishmonger’s.

‘What they up to, Benny, you reckon?’

‘Couldn’t say, old son. The kid’s flogging newspapers, but our friend hasn’t bought one. The old cove looks like a headmaster, so maybe the kid’s been bunking off school and the rector’s rounded him up. Either that or he’s selling him into white slavery.’

‘Be serious, Ben, this is interesting.’

‘Go and find out if you’re so keen. Go on. I’ll still be here. I got my paper.’ He tapped my arm. ‘But don’t get bogged down. Half an hour of bollocks about the Undeserving Poor and Homeless, you’ll wish you never started.’

So I went to the bar again, but this time I passed by the snug and hovered until the men stopped their chat and turned to me.

‘Can I help you?’ said the vicar.

‘I’ve had a bit of a windfall,’ I said, using an ancient ploy, ‘and I’m standing everyone in the pub a drink. Would you gentlemen care for a tipple on me?’

They looked at each other.

‘No thank you,’ said the whiskered loon, ‘I don’t care to be bought drinks by strangers.’

Well, excuse me, I thought. I looked at the kid, who just stood there, the fingers of his right hand the colour of beetroot because of the weight of the newspapers he carried. His head was bowed, poor chap, because it would never have occurred to him that he might be included in a round.

‘Yourself, sir?’ I nearly called him ‘Reverend’.

‘Come now, Mr Forsyth,’ the vicar said, turning to his surly chum, ‘surely every impulse of philanthropy should be encouraged, no matter how random its provenance.’ He talked like a Victorian gent, though he couldn’t have been all that old, and he smiled at me, his piercing eyes suddenly fixing on mine. ‘Thank you, my friend. I will take another orange cordial with a slice of lemon and plenty of water.’ He was so fastidious in his order – like a man demanding Angostura bitters in his gin Martini.

I came back with the drinks into an awkward silence.

‘Can I just ask you a question or two?’ I asked him.

‘My time is limited,’ he said. ‘I have many affairs to transact. What would you like to know?’

‘I won’t pretend with you, Vicar –’ I began.

‘– Rector, if you don’t mind.’

‘Rector. I’m a reporter on the Evening Standard. I’ve been hearing about your work among the less fortunate members of society. I wondered if maybe –’

‘Gerald.’ He cut across me, addressing the spotty youth with the newspapers. ‘Do not stand there so passive and round-shouldered like some professional mute. Mr Forsyth is your new benefactor. He will be your friend and employer. He can furnish you with a livelihood which will, with the Lord’s help, keep your family solvent and your poor mother able to furnish your table with meat and greens until Christmas. And if – mind me now – if you prove to be a good and biddable boy, and do as you are told, and fetch messages to and from the turf accountants, your work will stretch well into the new year.’

Gerald stood blinking pathetically, as if longing to get away. Who could blame him? He was a child still, as uninterested in the prospect of work as a pit pony being apprised of a favourable pension scheme.

‘I gotta –’ he ventured.

‘I want you now,’ said the rector, turning his remarkable eyes upon the raggedy kid’s, ‘to shake Mr Forsyth’s hand and promise to come to his office on Monday in your best jacket and shorts, and conduct yourself like the admirable young man I take you to be.’ He smiled at the spotty boy. ‘Remember St John’s Gospel. “He that followeth me shall not walk in darkness.” You have followed me this far. Mr Forsyth will guide your steps henceforth.’

The boy nodded. The rector touched the boy’s pustular cheek softly, like a duchess fingering an ermine tippet.

‘I gotta go,’ said the boy unhappily. ‘Gotta be in the King’s Arms.’ And he was gone.

Mr Forsyth – revealed, for all his grave demeanour, to be only a common bookie – swallowed some beer and, avoiding my gaze, addressed the clergyman.

‘I’ll do my best, of course, Harold. But I cannot …’ He sighed. ‘I cannot guarantee he won’t disappear out the door on day three like the last delinquents you sent me.’ He swigged more pale ale. ‘You cannot keep passing these runaways on to me, to transform into citizens. I am a businessman –’

‘A man of honour,’ said the rector, ‘a man of moral rectitude, whose indulgent interventions in the lives of these unfortunates have, as I’ve said many times –’

‘Harold, there is no need for this –’

‘Let me finish. Whose kindly impulses –’

‘Harold, really –’

‘– not only do you credit in the public arena, but rack up untold credits in the balance sheet of Heaven. I speak to you in the language of the businessman, but my admiration is that of a minister of a higher power.’

‘Ahem,’ I said. I’d been standing witnessing these interchanges like a gooseberry.

‘My dear fellow,’ said the rector, ‘I’d forgotten you were there. Forgive me. There were urgent matters at hand.’

‘You mean finding news runners jobs as bookies’ runners?’ I said, perhaps unkindly.

He regarded me coldly. ‘You evidently know nothing of my work. Yet you said you were acquainted with it. Explain yourself.’

‘I’m a news reporter on the Standard. I’m doing an article about poverty in London, how much it’s worsened in the last couple of years, who’s doing anything about it, private individuals, I mean. I want to ask about your experiences.’

He seemed hesitant.

‘Sorry about just now,’ I went on. ‘I got a bit of a short fuse where these newspaper kids are concerned. I hope you didn’t –’

‘Have you indeed? In that case, my dear fellow, we shall get on very well.’

Giving a rather curt wave to the grumpy sod from the bookie’s, he indicated I should get out notebook and pen. But just at that moment, the pub door opened and these two young dames strode in.

Very dramatic they were, one tall, one short, both dead swishy in their long rustling skirts, tight bodices and fancy hats. You’d have thought they’d have come straight from the Windmill Theatre, though whether part of the audience or part of the stage ensemble, it was hard to judge. Modern girls, you see, the kind we write about in the ‘Trends’ pages – a little shocking, a little too damn pleased with themselves. They were no strangers to the Coal House.

‘Ah, Dolly,’ said the vicar, ‘I was beginning to worry.’ He seized the hand of the smaller one – the one with the huge brown eyes under the rakishly tilted cloche hat – and kissed her on the cheek.

The eyes of the pub followed him. He was short, as I’ve said, and his hair was snow white and he had terrible rabbity teeth, but here he was talking to a brace of posh young flappers like they were at a cocktail party in Henley.

‘And this is …?’ he says, indicating her friend, a plump piece of work in a French hat with a torn veil covered in spots, possibly to match her complexion.

‘This, Harold, is Jezzie,’ says the bird in the cloche. ‘She started out as Jessie, changed it to Eleanora, then Zuleika, then Maudie for a while, then some horrible swell called her Jezebel in a pub one night, and made her cry, so we told her, Use it, darling, don’t let him put one over on you, and she’s been Jezzie ever since.’ She paused and looked around the snug. ‘Flip me, what’s a girl got to do to get a drink around ’ere?’

The reverend ignored her. He was too busy gazing at Jezebel (well named, what with her crimson petticoat peeping out from under her long crackling skirt) and trying to see the face through the spotty veil.

‘You have the look,’ he said, or rather breathed in her ear, or would’ve done if she hadn’t stood a good six inches taller than him, ‘of Miss Greta Garbo. You must surely have seen Flesh and the Devil?’

Jezzie regarded him with a mild stare, the way girls do when they can’t believe you’re taking liberties exactly ten seconds after meeting them.

‘What, Greta Garbo? Me?’ she said and went off into a spasm of titters.

I took the only initiative I could, and said, ‘Would you ladies care for a drink?’

Why yes, they’d love a drink, though they’d have been better off at night class in needlework than hanging round in the Strand. They both fancied Brandy Alexanders.

I went to the bar for the fourth time that night. Benny tried to stick around and ingratiate himself with the dames, but he didn’t have the lingo to handle two young poules de luxe. They could probably sniff him as an off-limits married man right from the word go.

‘I’m going home,’ he said. ‘You got your hands full here.’

‘See you next week, Ben. Give Clare one for me, all right?’

In the snug, the girls sat together on the cracked-leather divan, leaning together in a sisterly fashion, sometimes swaying a bit to right and left as if in a chorus line. The rector leaned forward a lot, his long face inches away from the girls’ cheeks, turning his shining eyes first to Dolores, then to Jezzie. He did 90 per cent of the talking. For minutes they smiled vacantly, like little girls listening to an elderly grandpa grinding on about the war, hoping that they might get a chocolate biscuit. Reckoning I’d bought myself an introduction, I took the stool beside him, and listened in.

‘… and Mrs Lake will, I’m afraid, no longer countenance your irregular hours and gentlemen callers, Dolores,’ he was saying. ‘I spoke with her on Tuesday. She has developed a singular aversion, I’m afraid, to your Maltese gentlemen friends, whom she describes, with a singular lack of racial accuracy, as Hottentots.’ His face essayed a brief, high-table smile. ‘She does not want, she says, “them swarthy chancers” dropping in and out of her establishment at all hours. So we will have to find you some new haven. I have asked about your secretarial studies at Mrs Moody’s and I fear – no, do not interrupt – you have failed to honour your commitment. I hear your morning session last week saw Mrs Moody cooling her heels for an hour with no sign of your –’

‘I can’t go studying squiggles in the middle of the bloody night,’ said Dolores, grumpily.

‘Nine o’clock in the morning is hardly the small hours. I told Mrs Moody of your circumstances, and she agreed to take you on at a very reasonable rate. It hardly repays me, or her, for our considerate impulses if you choose to spend every morning lying in bed reading rubbishy magazines and drinking chocolate.’

‘I didn’t come here for a lecture,’ said Dolores, an astonishingly self-confident young thing for her age. ‘I thought you was going to introduce me to Ivor Novello, so I could tell him about my singing.’

Jezzie giggled (again). ‘Ivor Novello?’ she said, sneeringly. ‘Ivor pain in my rear end, more like.’

The rector looked hurt. ‘You underestimate my contacts in the world of what the Americans call show business. Though I have never met the delightful Mr Novello, I have friends who’ve had the pleasure of meeting him backstage. They say he is charming to strangers, polite to ladies and friendly to young persons starting out on the musical scene.’

Jezzie unfurled herself from the banquette and took herself off to the Ladies. We all watched her go. Her sizeable young rump, tightly encased in the crackling shiny material, had a distinct wiggle.

‘Charming,’ said the rector with the fond appreciation of an uncle, ‘though unfortunate to bear such a name, whatever the eccentricity of its genesis. Have you known her long?’

‘Couple of weeks,’ said Dolores. ‘We met at the Hippodrome, hanging round the stage door for Jack Buchanan. Bloody freezing it was, and when he came out he just whisked past us and got in a cab. Not as big as you’d have expected neither.’