Lucky Bunny (9780062202512) (21 page)

As we talk, the couple in the bedroom on the very top floor, above us, are going at it a bit too theatrically, so Ruth gets her broom and bangs it on the ceiling, her eyebrows nearly slipping back into her hairline as she stretches up to do it; then we both snigger again. So. High class though this club is, it's familiar enough.

Ruth is fidgety, never seems to sit still—obviously why she's so slender.

“How did you get yourself this job?” Stella asks.

“Oh, I met a bloke,” Ruth replies, vaguely, jumping up to put the photograph away, in a drawer.

She sits back down, looking as if she's made her mind up to trust us. “Do you know my friend Vickie Martin?” Ruth asks. Stella nods.

“I met this fella through Vickie. Stephen. I think he's some sort of doctor, a back specialist or something. He's helpful . . . you know, elocution lessons, how to tell if a wine is corked, which knife and fork to use. That sort of thing. Helps you fit in. Talk to the toffs.”

“Queenie's had elocution lessons,” Stella says, giving my arm a little punch. “Can't you tell?”

Ruth gets the Pernod out then, pouring it into these tiny little cranberry-glass sherry glasses and we sip on that. The door to her bedroom is open and I glimpse white tassels, white-painted walls and furniture, white bobbles dangling from the white curtains. She's certainly trying to convince somebody of something.

She gets up to put a record on.
Here in My Heart
. Al Martino.

“Didn't I see you in Harrods the other day?” Stella says to Ruth. “What'd you get?”

“Oh! Let me show you, it's a dress, with these pleats that open up . . . look!”

She rushes next door to the bedroom to get the dress. While she's there I hear the lavatory door open, and thinking she'll be a minute or two, I grab the leather book Ruth left on the floor between us, and seize it.

“God, Stella, listen to this: King Hussein of Jordan. King Farouk of Egypt. The actor Victor Mature. Lord Montagu of Beaulieu. Billy Butlin. Peter Rachman. Stanley Baxter. The Marquess of Milford Haven. Stephen Ward. The Maharaja of Cooch Behar . . . and get this, Stella: Lady Docker!”

We fall about laughing. This is the golden ticket for sure. An exclusive club. That's the kind of job we want, and that's where the Ronalds of this world will definitely be found, we're certain. But better still, it's a world where you can be fur-lined and dripping jewels: where you can be
self-made
. You know, like people always say about businessmen. He's a Self-Made Man. That's me. Queenie Dove, twenty years old. I've made myself up.

7

My New Job

T
hat's how I got my second job, my first proper job, you could say. Tony was as good as his word and spoke to his boss, who, amongst many other businesses, owned a private club in Curzon Street. I was thrilled: Mayfair, not Soho . . . definitely the part of town I was aiming for, and being a receptionist meant it was indoors at last, in all weathers. My job was to sit at a little desk as members of the club came trooping up the stairs, offering them our big leather book to sign in, smiling, sounding well-brought-up, and looking pretty. Also to be discreet and not say anything dumb if—say—the Marquess of Milford Haven came in or the Maharaja of Cooch Behar, probably with Stella's friend Vickie Martin. Not to acknowledge Vickie as someone I knew, just a polite “Good evening, sir, Good evening, madam.” Not to bat an eyelid if a girl I knew from the East End as Stella Capes signed herself in as Mariella Novotny, or Anita Wimble as Pat someone or other. For this I got ten pounds a week and the use of the tiny flat upstairs.

I left the Frampton Park Estate flat to Stella, who was always hopeless with money, and supposed to be covering the three-pound weekly rent. I soon discovered it had never been paid, and there were eviction notices and a big metal bar and council signs all over the door. One night we arrived late with Tony and left the motor running on his Rover. He broke the door in with a crowbar and we managed to rescue boxes and boxes of our stuff, and squeeze them into the boot to drive them over to the flat in Mayfair. It wasn't meant for two, but Stella and me shared the double bed and she moved into a fold-up in the kitchenette whenever Tony stayed over. All I remember now about that flat was the smell of Nescafé, which we were always making, and that it had a huge white-painted window to the street below, and—at last!—geraniums spilling from the window box, lovingly watered by me.

Stella got work, too, at the club as a regular hostess, serving drinks to customers in the lounge room, where there was a piano and a bar.

The women members of the club fascinated me as much as the men. I spent hours at my desk, studying every detail as they came chattering up the stairs in a cloud of perfume, let their gentlemen friends take their furs, tripped on their heels into the lounge, casually ordering their G and Ts. I don't mean the Vickies or Stellas: I mean the Duchess of Argyll and Lady So and So, or the young Debs. The ones born to it. I wanted to see how deep it went, or if it really
was
something I could do myself, work at, create. Not just clothes and the jewelry, although that was part of it. Not just the way they walked, although that, too—chin lifted, shoulders back, no swaying of the hips (too vulgar). I studied their nails, their hair, their teeth, the smell of them, the handbags they carried and how they carried them; their skin, the straightness of their noses. I felt frustrated: there was something I was missing. When I really examined a
lady
(we never said “woman” in those days) who'd been wealthy for generations, I doomily concluded that her difference from me was indeed deep, and hard to fake. Bones and flesh grown from good food, not just in one lifetime, but over generations. The jaw, the size of the ears. And most of all the profound certainty of where the next meal, the next hot bath, was coming from.

Well, I couldn't do anything about the basics. Skin that had been pampered by expensive creams rather than cooped up in an airless tenement or indoors except for the exercise hour does have a peachy quality, of course it does; you only have to glance to see that. Younger poor girls might pass more easily than older ones: Stella had good bone structure, a nice jaw line, but her teeth let her down. I suddenly thought of Annie, who I'd popped in to see, and Dad, the other week. Though only about forty then, because of her skinniness, a lifetime of undernourishment, Annie had a face with no padding at all; caved in on itself. She looked what she was: hardened.

I loved that job and soon discovered two things: there were two clubs, the legit one and another one, just as there were two leather books, one under the counter and one visible on top, and one of them offered quite a peculiar menu. Also this: posh men, educated men, ministers and dukes and barristers were no different from the types we'd been meeting in Soho; their brains, as Stella put it, were still in their balls.

I decided then that I wanted to look the part, so I went to (if the
Sunday People
was to be believed) Diana Dors's favorite hairdresser, and Mr. Teasy Weasy turned me into a platinum blonde. I put my hair up in a sophisticated French pleat to make me look a little older. Then I sat on my cream leather stool at reception, winding my legs around the base; admiring my cream ankle-strapped wedges, hoisted, in lieu of my first week's wage, from Anello & Davide on Oxford Street.

I would, at some subtle signal or playful remark from the gentleman signing in, open my eyes wide and produce the Other Book, then sit back down on my stool and pretend to be busying myself with some paperwork while he flicked through it—also with apparent casualness, but you could always feel the atmosphere changing, pick up on that strange flickering charge that meant he would soon point with quavering finger at someone's name (usually French) or description (“London's First Dusky Maiden”) and push the book back towards me. Without saying anything I'd make a softly spoken phone call, and chalk up my “extra” fee, my commission, in a red notebook. The chosen lady appeared in record time (they were all housed in flats nearby) and accompanied him to a hotel nearby where the Soho Don—Tony's boss—had a deal with the proprietor.

In those days, the fastest money for me would surely have come from joining those girls in their profession, and I've often wondered why, apart from the brief bit of rolling, I never did. It's not as if I was prudish about sex. Once I'd done it with Tony, I knew sex was the easiest barrier in the world to cross if I wanted to, and it showed me that whatever people
said
, sex was happening everywhere. He showed me something much more important though. Perhaps not many women get this with a first lover: he showed me what
I
could feel, the scope of strange pleasures
my
body was capable of. It wasn't all about him. I was most interested in this.

Once, at the Approved School, I remember Sister Grey saying to Sister Catherine, after looking at the files for a new admission and sighing theatrically, “How come
all
these street girls claim to have been abused by their fathers or uncles? I ask you—how statistically likely is that?” Based on my experience running the club, based on the Approved School, based on Ruth and Stella and everyone I knew at that time, I'd say: very. And so I've come to the conclusion that this seems to have been the other reason I didn't join the oldest profession. I wasn't interfered with as a child or young girl; I hadn't already had my boundaries invaded, or been brutalized into feeling that this was my only worth, my only ticket to success: my sexiness. I knew I had brains, too, and more than that: flair and savvy, and determination. More than once, when an older man or one I didn't fancy at all rested his hand on my backside, that powerful desire to slap him surfaced. Scared of losing my job I'd try to squash this down and sugar it with some polite “Oh, no,
I'm
not on the menu I'm afraid . . .”

I suppose I just didn't have the necessary lack of care for my own feelings; the ability to ignore the anger I felt if someone I found pug-ugly happened to touch me. This got in the way, of course, of any possibility of pursuing a “Ronald”: a sugar daddy. I'd leave that to Stella, I decided. I'd read enough magazines pondering the question: how can you tell when he is The One? None of them mentioned the fizz in the stomach just above the pubic bone that I felt whenever I looked at Tony. But they did mention the feeling of a room lighting up whenever The One was in it. I wouldn't say the room lit up. To me it felt more that all the light was sucked from it, concentrated on this one dazzling spot: the spot where Tony stood chatting, or smoking, or laughing, running a comb through his hair.

There was a Diana Dors song, later, called “The Point of No Return.” I saw her sing it once in the Bal Tabarin, you know, or was it the Revue Bar? Anyway, one of Raymond's places. I didn't think much of Diana's voice, actually. Little girly, ordinary, sort of falsely perky; not true like my favorites—Sarah Vaughan or Billie Holiday—but somehow the lyrics of this silly Diana number were the ones that stuck with me.
Why not give in? Let yourself go.
On the backseat of Tony's new racing-green Rover 3.5 coupe, I let myself go with knobs on.

Still, it was also an eye-opener, working at the club. I won't pretend I wasn't astonished at first and delighted by how fast I was learning. French polishing wasn't what I thought at all. Whipping, tying, Golden Rain—Stella had been right all those years ago when she'd told me the sorts of things men wanted to do to and on women's bodies. And the
kind
of people who wanted to do it! Judges, government ministers, senior policemen, members of the aristocracy, actors, photographers, film stars, company directors, names that I'd seen elsewhere in the papers, usually making statements of outrage at the state of British society; and I had to keep a straight face when they politely inquired whether a certain young lady possessed a bat, you know, a cricket bat, and went into great detail about what kind it should be.

When we were rolling, working girls were picked up all the time by the police, fined thirty shillings, and back on the streets the next morning. The fine was part of the job, you know, a kind of tax. Business booming on the streets of Soho was tolerated, up to a point. Stella told me about one brass, Fifi (they were always called Fifi), who when a bloke wouldn't pay, left him tied to a bed and went to get a policeman to make him cough up! But I think by then, around the mid-'50s, attitudes were starting to change. The various exposés in
The People
about the Messina brothers meant that the police had to be seen to be cracking down. They did eventually arrest Gino Messina, and things went a little further underground with private clubs like ours, backed by heavies sweeping the business off the streets.

That summer—1955—there was something much more frightening and shocking than that to preoccupy us, though. That was the summer that the woman we'd met in her little flat, Ruth, the manageress of the club in Brompton Street, was on trial for her life, for the murder of her lover, David Blakely. Tony got us tickets—God knows how, they were exchanging hands for about thirty pounds each—to sit in the Number One Court of the Old Bailey.

Stella tried hard to catch Ruth's eye from the public gallery, tried to offer her comfort, or a smile, or just recognition—anything—but throughout the proceedings, Ruth simply stared out, dressed in her two-piece suit with the astrakhan collar; her white blouse newly pressed, her hair freshly dyed. She pretended not to see us, not to hear when someone in the gallery yelled, “Blond tart!” In the end we wished we'd never gone. We didn't feel like friends or supporters; we felt like part of the braying crowd.

Ruth looked dejected, hard and cold, nothing like the delicate person we'd last seen giggling and pouring us dainty glasses of Pernod; springing up to show us her pleated new dress. Her voice fell in the hush of the courtroom, where everyone seemed to be holding their breath, as the judge donned his black cap and condemned her to death. I've never forgotten it. “Thanks,” Ruth said, without a trace of irony.

C
an you imagine killing anyone?” Stella asks, very suddenly, and not at all quietly, staring out of the bus window, on the top deck, later that day, on the way home.

I weigh my answer carefully.

“That bit,” Stella goes on, “when she said, ‘I had an idea that I wanted to kill him'—that startled the judge, didn't it. Did you see his face? Can you imagine saying that?”

The evening is warm, muggy; the bus stuffed with cigarette smoke, making our eyes water. We're due at the club in two minutes' time and at this rate we won't be there for another twenty. I wipe at the window with my sleeve.

Stella turns her green eyes to me, aware that I haven't said a word. I'm picturing it, all of it, Ruth so alone, so “upset”: her word, a word you use for a child's feelings, surely? What was it she was feeling, really: so desperate, so enraged, so desolate . . . none of those words seems to do it. I know what rage feels like, I'm thinking, so I try and remember that. Times when I've lost it, didn't care what damage I caused, to myself or anyone else. When my heart was hammering so fast it blotted all other thoughts, made anything possible. That prison officer I tipped the slop bucket over. The freedom. I close my eyes. I imagine how it might have been if I'd had a gun. The whiteout feeling. Was she drunk? No one said she'd been drinking. Hooking my finger around the trigger. Can I imagine it? Almost. I try again.

Pulling the trigger. Ending everything, giving it all up. The man you love, the children you'll never see again. Is it possible to imagine nothing, not existing, blankness? Yes, almost. Something else looms up at me: a round face. A baby. It's nothing to do with Ruth and it squeezes little hands around my lungs.

“I need some air,” I say sharply, thumping down the stairs to the lower deck of the bus, breathing deeply.

“God, what's the rush?” Stella says, clumping down the stairs after me. She nearly falls against me as the bus lurches. She ties her headscarf under her chin and winks at the conductor. “Let's call in The Star, see your brother and his crowd of fruits?” she murmurs, beside me in an instant, and just as swiftly returning to playful mood.

“We're due at work at seven o'clock,” I snap. The bus rumbles along. A lanky West Indian man tips his pork-pie hat and stands up to give an old lady his seat. She shakes her head furiously at him, flapping her hands and resolutely standing, as if the seat's contaminated. Stella chews on her gum, still pondering Ruth. Me, too. Imagining her in that dress she showed us. The heels of too-small shoes pinching her ankles, her shifting her weight from foot to foot. Sweat trickling down her ribs, inside her dress. A low stomach pain, lying like a hammock: remnant of her recent miscarriage. A gust of Christian Dior puffing from her handbag as she takes out the gun. Lifting that .38 Smith and Wesson in her slightly crippled hand, the hand I saw her slip in embarrassment under her skirt that day in her white, white flat. Now she holds it steady, as she waits for that bastard David Blakely to appear.