The Lights of London (10 page)

‘Looks nice and fresh out there this morning, Kit. Makes a change from that bloody fog.’ Tibs coughed loudly as a plume of gaseous smoke poured from the hearth into the already fug-filled room, wreathing about them like rancid ribbons. ‘With a bit of luck it’ll be clear for a few days.’

Kitty concentrated on using as little of the soap as possible. She knew she couldn’t refuse – Tibs might have been tiny but she was formidable – but it still didn’t mean that she had to take advantage of her new friend’s generosity. It seemed such a waste of time bothering to wash, just as it was pointless checking up on the weather. Whatever it was like, rain, hail or snow, it made little difference to her. Kitty had had a night’s sleep – surprisingly good, considering that it was the first time she’d been in anywhere as intimidating as a common lodging house – and she was now dry, and cleaner than she’d been in days, but what did all that matter? Why should she care? What difference did any of it make to her?

She didn’t know what had got into her last night – it was probably the shock of being hoiked out of the river by that horrible pair – but she’d come back to her senses this morning. It was all very clear to her: there was no life for her in London, no life for her anywhere as far as she could see. She’d been given a second chance, had been allowed to reconsider, and all it had done was confirm that she had been right all along. Life held nothing for the likes of Kitty Wallis and she had no intention of dragging kind little Tibs down with her as well. She would get away as soon as she could without seeming rude.

‘So, what d’you fancy for breakfast then?’ Tibs asked behind the cover of her hand, so that none of the other
residents could hear that she was in possession of enough money to buy food.

‘Nothing thanks,’ Kitty said firmly. ‘Funny, but I’m not hungry this morning.’

As if on cue, her stomach gurgled noisily.

‘Blimey, Kit, I ain’t never heard no one with guts as noisy as your’n. And I tell you what, if they make that row when you ain’t even hungry I’d hate to hear ’em when you start fancying a spot of something.’

‘I don’t want nothing, honestly. And I have to be off soon, anyway.’

Tibs dried her arms on the hem of one of her scratchy underskirts, enquired with a look as to whether Kitty had finished with the soap and secreted it back into its hiding place. She lowered her voice. ‘Don’t start getting snooty with me, Kit. I told you, he was a gentleman. I never had to do nothing. So there’s no need for you being all la-di-da about it.’

‘I don’t rightly know what being all la-di-da means, but I’m sure it’s not what I’m being, Tibs.’

‘So what’s up then?’

‘It worries me and I feel proper bad that you’d go and … you know, do
that.
Just for me. Just so’s I can have a bed for the night and a decent breakfast. And it’s not as though you even know me. We only met a few hours ago.’ Kit stared into the middle distance. ‘Mind you, with everything that’s happened it seems a lot longer ago than that.’

‘Thanks!’

‘You know what I mean.’

‘Yeah, course I do. I was only joking.’ Tibs shoved her playfully. ‘You wanna relax a bit. Have a laugh. It’s good for you. You should remember that.’ Then she added casually, ‘And I think it’s good to have a bit of a singsong and all. Don’t you?’

Kitty didn’t answer her, she had other things she wanted to say. ‘Tibs, I want to explain something.’

‘You don’t have to …’

‘Please, it’s important. What I was trying to say was that I’d rather go hungry and sleep in the gutter than have to, you know, go with men.’

Tibs looked hard at Kitty, trying to figure her out. ‘You’re a funny one, you know that, Kit. I ain’t sure when you say stuff to me whether I should be offended or flattered half the time.’

‘But I meant about the danger and the …’

Tibs put her finger to Kitty’s lips to silence her. ‘I’m gonna say this one last time. When I went out the back with that bloke last night all we did was talk. I promise you. You know, we opened our mouths and all these sounds come out …’

Kit’s forehead pleated into a frown. ‘You never had to do
anything
else?’

Tibs steered Kitty over to the range, flashing haughty looks of warning at the miserable assortment of tarts, tramps and drunks who had, like them, bought refuge in exchange for their meagre fourpences.

‘I swear, Kit,’ she went on, discreetly producing a screw of powdery tea and a small rock of sugar from among the rest of the treasure trove in her hidden pocket, ‘not that it matters, mind, but he wasn’t only a gentleman, he was really nice. He gave me that half a dollar just like that, when he told me we could keep all the money you collected and all.’

‘But why?’

Tibs shrugged happily as she tipped a careful measure of tea into a battered brown enamel pot. ‘I was as bleed’n’ surprised as you, girl, I can tell you. It’s not often you get something for nothing is it?’ She winked happily. ‘Pies excepted, of course. He just said we
should take it as a thank you – for entertaining his customers, before you get any other ideas.’ She suddenly looked thoughtful. ‘Here, I wonder if he don’t like girls? It takes all sorts to make the world go round, you know. Well, so they say.’

‘That still doesn’t explain why he took you out the back.’

Tibs took her time and spoke slowly and evenly as if explaining something complicated to an elderly aunt. ‘See, he wanted to put this sort of business thing to me. What did he call it?’ She considered for a moment. ‘A
proposition.
That’s it. A business
proposition
. And he was that nice about it.’

‘You said all that. But why out the back?’

‘Because it was private, that’s why. I mean he didn’t want no nose-ointments earwigging, now did he?’

Kitty did her best to guess at what Tibs was going on about.

‘As a matter of fact it was because he was so nice that I said we’d do it.’ Tibs didn’t pause as she busied herself with brewing the tea. ‘Anyone got any milk?’ she asked without looking round. ‘There’s a ha’penny in it for you if you have and we only want a couple of splashes each.’

It took a few seconds for it to sink in and a few more for Kitty finally to ask, ‘What did you say?’

‘There’s a ha’penny in …’

‘Not about the milk.’ Kitty’s mouth felt dry and she was having trouble swallowing. ‘You said we’d do something.
We’d
do something.

A gaunt-looking woman sidled up to Tibs from out of the shadows. In her shaking hand she held an unhygienic-looking tin with its roughly sawn lid half opened, exposing a rust-speckled underside. ‘Condensed all right?’ she rasped in a tobacco-thickened croak.

Tibs searched through the jumble of cracked china on the big deal table that ran down one wall and picked out the two cups that looked the cleanest. She set them to one side where the woman could reach them.

‘That’ll do,’ she said bluntly and held out a pair of dull copper farthings she’d got out ready to hand over. After her run-in with Lily Perkins, Tibs was being especially cautious about letting anyone see where she kept her special things.

Lily Perkins. The very thought of the rotten cow had Tibs grinding her teeth. She could have kicked herself for being so bloody wet behind the ears. Fancy letting herself be robbed by the likes of her. Fancy falling for that old game. If it had been someone like Kit getting herself rolled she could have understood it. But her, Tibs Tyler?

The woman slipped the two coins down the front of her dress and patted her skinny bosom. Satisfied that they were safe, she stared at Tibs, weighing up the situation. ‘Say if there’s any tea left in the pot?’

Tibs looked at her levelly. ‘There won’t be. And if you don’t give us that milk a bit lively I’m gonna turn you upside down and shake that money back out of that chicken neck o’ your’n, then give it a quick wring for good luck into the bargain.’

With a bad-tempered snarl, the woman glooped the thick milk into the cups, spat a muttered curse into Kitty’s startled face and disappeared back into the cheerless depths of the big, flag-stoned room.

‘Silly old tart,’ Tibs hissed, stirring the tea with the handle of a food-encrusted knife then, pouring the steaming, dark-tan liquid on to the dollops of milk, she pushed a cup towards Kitty.

‘Tibs,’ Kit said as calmly as she could, ‘would you please tell me what you told this man we’d do?’

‘An act,’ she answered matter-of-factly. ‘Singing and that.’

Kitty wouldn’t have been more horrified if Tibs had announced that she’d got them work digging a new canal and filling it up with buckets from the stand-pipe. ‘Singing?’ she gasped.

Tibs slurped noisily at her tea. ‘Yeah. Good, eh?’

‘Good?’ Kitty supposed it was one up from what she had thought the man had proposed to Tibs. But
singing
? Maybe she was going mad. Why should that surprise her; the rest of the world certainly seemed to be well on its way along the path to lunacy.

She thought for a moment, trying to get things straight in her swirling brain, then said bluntly, ‘No. Not singing.’

‘Look, Kit, he’s offering us a chance.’

‘No. I mean it. I really can’t. The only singing I’ve ever done in my life was hymns, and since I left the home I’ve not been inside a church, apart from once or twice when they let me have an hour off of a Sunday when I was at the big house.’ A horrible thought occurred to her. ‘Where would we be expected to do this singing? And who’d be
listening
?’

‘In the Dog. And he only gets a few customers.’ Tibs flashed her eyebrows and grinned wickedly. ‘Anyway, you’ve heard the row I make, it obviously ain’t our voices he’s interested in. And he took a right shine to you, you know, Kit. Thought you was a real cracker.’

Tibs could only hope she sounded credible. The bloke had been plastered, hadn’t even been too sure who he was talking to, let alone whether he fancied either of them or not. Typical pub owner. So much money sloshing about in his pockets that he could afford to pour half his profits down his throat, just ’cos he felt like it. Probably didn’t have a worry in the world. It’d do the
likes of him a bit of good to find out how it was to have a problem or two. Problems like she had.

‘You’re saying he thought I was …’ Kitty looked and sounded flustered. Men had tried things of course, but no one had ever told her she was desirable, not even
him
at the big house, even though she had said to Tibs that he’d told her he loved her. It was a strange sort of feeling and she wasn’t sure whether she liked it or not. ‘Don’t you mean he thought
you
were …’

‘No. You.’ Tibs winked suggestively. ‘And if he could see you now he’d be even more impressed. I mean, look how nice you’ve cleaned up.’ Tibs’s smile was becoming thinner by the moment, this was getting a bit too much like hard work. ‘And I bet if you washed that hair of your’n it’d be lovely. Real pretty. Although,’ she added, ‘you’re good-looking in a different kind of a way to me, of course.’ She didn’t want to strong it too much or Kit would know she was lying and it might frighten her off. ‘But men ain’t all got the same sort of taste you know.’

‘Thank Gawd for that,’ sniggered a fat, middle-aged woman who was boiling up something in a pan over the fire next to them. Whatever she had in the pot was giving off a terrible stink like old socks crossed with a tinge of rotten haddock.

Tibs nodded curtly at her and guided Kitty firmly across the room, away from the stench and out of the woman’s earshot. ‘Look, we’ll go and have our breakfast and …’

‘Thanks all the same, Tibs, but I’ve decided I can’t take anything else off you.’

‘You’re not taking it off me. It’s what’s left out of what we earned last night.’

‘Left out of what
you
earned last night,’ Kitty corrected her. ‘You did the singing.’

‘Ne’mind who did what, they was looking at both of us. Now come on, let’s go and get some food in that belly of yourn, and you’ll be seeing sense in no time.’

Kitty didn’t want to argue with her new friend but, hungry as she was, she had as much intention of having breakfast as she had of going on the stage. None whatsoever. But she had to admit it would have been nice to have something to eat, if only to kill the foul taste in her mouth from the rum she had drunk the night before. And as for that barley wine, she felt queasy just thinking about it.

But feeling hungry and sick were of little consequence to Kitty, especially when the price of filling her belly was not only taking money that, by rights, belonged to Tibs, but would also have meant getting involved with this new folly that Kitty had no intention of even considering.

She was going to slip away, find the Thames and finish off what she should have done yesterday. And this time she’d do it properly. She had decided exactly how when she’d been lying in her narrow cot last night, staring into the darkness, waiting for sleep to come.

She would hide under the bridge and wait for the dark, or the fog, to return, then she’d walk downstream, well away from madmen in blazing boats, fill her pockets with stones and throw herself in. There would be no one to see her, no one to stop her and, please God, no one to try and save her.

The feeling of relief at having made the decision, of knowing what was going to happen to her, almost made her forget her hunger. Her only regret was that she would have liked to have found a way to repay Tibs’s kindness in helping her – even if it was misplaced – before she said goodbye. But Kitty had nothing to give anyone.

Jack Fisher lay on his back, staring miserably at the cracked and damp-stained ceiling of his poky little bedroom. It was way past the time he should have been up and about, but he was worn out after a night of fitful, disturbed and drunken dreams, and there was little to tempt him from under his covers in the cold, unwelcoming room.

Maybe it would have been better if he’d left himself a bit more space rather than this pitiful cubby-hole that could barely take his mean single cot and the tatty, threadbare rug. But he’d been so enthusiastic when he’d been creating the little dressing-room that led on to the stage of his theatre that he’d not given a thought to his own comfort and had happily given up over half of his own living space for his artistes.