The Crimson Rooms (11 page)

Poor Prudence, had there been a prince of her heart? Did she have, beneath that rigid corset, a needy, romantic side? James would have loved to know that Prudence read Ethel M. Dell beneath the covers—he and I would have succumbed to fits of laughter, but alone I was more compassionate. When she was occupied downstairs, I returned the book to her room and slipped it into her dressing-gown pocket. Now I imagined from the set of her shoulders that she was yearning toward the music as she yearned toward the sentiments of Ethel M. Dell, but would not let herself weaken.

Mother, on the other hand, was weeping, and after another moment I understood why.

Edmund was dancing with Grandmother; she barely a head taller than him, her little feet in their buttoned shoes occasionally tangling with his, her half-blind eyes gazing over the top of his head as they held each other by the hand and upper arm. The little boy was too young to be self-conscious about dancing with an old lady, and allowed himself to be maneuvered back and forth in a cross between a waltz and something much more modern, Grandmother’s approximation to jazz. She was utterly absorbed, leaning into the music, grinning, whisking her small partner from foot to foot, swinging him back and forth to the limits of her stiff limbs.

And as for Edmund, no wonder Mother was weeping. He was dressed quaintly in pale blue trousers and a loose cotton shirt with a girlishly rounded collar, and his brows were drawn together by the concentration required to keep in step. And in this expression, posture, determination, he was James, our little man, returned to us as his beloved six-year-old self. But at the same time he was patently not James, and therefore not ours. I caught Meredith’s eyes across the rim of her tumbler and saw that they were soft with love.

When the gramophone wound down, the record was left fizzing on the turntable. Nobody spoke until Mother said, wiping her eyes, “Well, I understand that you and Meredith are taking the boy to the seaside next Saturday, Evelyn. I’m very surprised you’ve managed to find the time given that the other day you said you couldn’t spare me two hours to come with me to St. Mark’s fete.”

The spell was broken; Grandmother sank into a chair, Prudence took up her pen, and Edmund retreated to his mother’s knee. I said nothing, since if I did I was bound to give offense to someone.

O
n Thursday morning, obedient to Mr. Breen,
I trekked across London to investigate Leah Marchant’s former lodgings in a tenement off Gosset Street in Haggerston, half a mile or so from my old stamping ground of Toynbee Hall in Commercial Street. Alighting from the second omnibus, I was pursued by swarms of ill-clad children, some of whom shouted abuse after I had emptied my purse of coppers and said I had nothing else to give them. Despite all my good intentions, I never could quite overcome my fear of the poor. I wanted to help but didn’t know how to cross the divide or stop myself recoiling from the dirt and brashness of even those innocent children. Perhaps there was more than a streak of Aunt Prudence in me. According to her, there were no ills that could not be righted by hard work. To compensate, I tried to engage one little girl in a conversation about school. “Can’t go to school,” she said, “till Ma gets me shoes.”

One little boy winked so naughtily that I couldn’t resist giving him sixpence though it nearly started a riot among the rest. Edmund was responsible for this flash of generosity; since his arrival, I’d developed a renewed susceptibility to small boys with shapely heads and inquisitive eyes.

Meanwhile, the sun blazed remorselessly down and the smell of privies was in places overwhelming. But when I reached number 9 Caractacus Court, I found that its front step was much better scrubbed than the late Mrs. Wheeler’s and the woman who answered the door was wearing a clean pinafore, her hair neatly controlled by a dozen or so grips. Her manner, however, was hostile. “Are you an ’ealth visitor?”

“No. Most definitely not. No.”

“Then what are you?”

“My name is Miss Gifford. I am here on business to do with Mrs. Leah Marchant. Is it Mrs. Sanders? Mrs. Marchant gave the police this address and said that a Mrs. Sanders was her landlady.”

Impasse. The woman didn’t move a muscle. She had tired eyes and a forlorn mouth, and behind her was a dank cave of a hallway. Meanwhile, from floors above came the racket of children’s voices. “I’m a lawyer,” I added desperately.

The woman’s expression changed from suspicion to cynical amusement. “You and ’oo else?”

“I’m acting on Mrs. Leah Marchant’s behalf. As you perhaps know she is in trouble, arrested on a charge of kidnapping. We need to find her a bail address, so I want to know, is there still a room available for her here?”

Mrs. Sanders acknowledged this speech with an infinitesimal shifting of weight. “She ’asn’t paid no rent for months. I’m not obliged to keep ’er a room.”

“Are her things still here?”

“They might be.”

“May I go up and look?”

“At what?”

“As I said, we need to find accommodation for Mrs. Marchant. I want to see if her old room is suitable and if not, to collect her things.”

“You’re takin’ nothin’. Like I say, she owes me rent.”

“I’m sure we might come to an agreement if you would show me her room.”

At last, after scrutinizing papers headed “Breen & Balcombe” with a good show of actually being able to read them, Mrs. Sanders said: “Well, I suppose I can’t stop you. Third floor, door on the right. I’ll unlock it for you.”

The house was similar in plan to Clivedon Hall Gardens, but whereas noise in the Gifford establishment was muffled by fabrics and the weight of furniture, this house, bare-boarded and uncurtained, echoed like a drum and the stair rail shook under my hand. From behind a half-closed door on a first-floor landing, a baby yelled, there was a sharp slap, then a woman’s raised voice and a bellow of outrage from the child. The higher we climbed, the hotter and more rank the atmosphere became, saturated with the smell of old cooking and damp clothes. At last we reached a door, horribly splintered at the bottom, presumably by somebody’s boot, which Mrs. Sanders unlocked with a key selected from a set worthy of Holloway.

Fortunately, my weeks among the insect life in the basement of Breen & Balcombe had prepared me for the scuffling that followed our intrusion into the room. There was one single bed, from which all the blankets had been stripped, leaving a mattress horribly stained with what looked like blood and worse. The only other furniture was a table covered with newspapers, assorted broken chairs, an empty hearth, and a dented kettle. Arranged on shelves were various bits of crockery, and poked behind the mantel was a photograph of a young man wearing a sailor’s uniform and a rakish smile, Mr. Marchant, perhaps. I disliked him on sight: light hair, prominent ears, a swanky way of cocking his head to one side and looking boldly into the lens.

There were very few signs of the children, except for a couple of indefinable garments hanging from the bed frame, the remains of a slate, and a worn-out packing case from which poked the earless head of a teddy bear. The window was high, small, and greasy, and a moth was trapped behind the glass.

“Thing is,” said Mrs. Sanders suddenly, “I’m ’er friend. I’ve got a loyalty to ’er. We was on the trams together. We knoo we’d be turned off at the end of the war and rather than go back into service she takes the first man that comes along: ’
im
. How could she live with ’is boozin’ and whatnot? Turns out ’e’s even worse than I first thought. Comes back once in a blue moon wantin’ money, gets ’er pregnant, disappears. ’Aven’t seen him for more’n two years. And if ’e were to crop up it would be the same as before, the drinkin’ and the draggin’ ’er down with ’im. Another baby on the way. She can’t resist, soft as putty when ’e’s about. But when ’e’s gone she sobers up, gets a grip of ’erself.”

“Would you have her back to live here?” I asked quite calmly, though all this talk of children impetuously conceived was painfully close to home.

“I’d ’ave ’er back. Trouble is, the authorities would be down on me like a ton of bricks if she brought the children ’ere. The minute you get that lot involved everything gets inspected and before you know it you’re in all kinds of trouble.”

“If the rent was paid and a little extra given you, could the room be painted and furnished? Might there even be other, adjoining rooms? We could try and find her somewhere else but if you’re her friend and she was happy here . . .”

“Who would pay the rent?”

“I don’t know yet. We’d see.”

“If the rent was paid that would be a start. But I can’t ’ave her goin’ out all day and leavin’ them kids again. The oldest is not six and she left her mindin’ the baby. It worried me to death. I couldn’t always be bringing them down to me.”

“Might you even, if necessary, be prepared to come to court and vouch for her good character?”

She gave me another expressionless stare. “If it got ’er out of prison, I would ’ave to.”

As we went downstairs, I wondered whether I ought to offer payment, but when I took out my purse Mrs. Sanders waved her hand angrily and ushered me out of the door.

I was far too hot,
my spirits were depressed by my clumsy departure from Caractacus Court—it seemed to me that Mrs. Sanders’s respect once lost would be difficult to regain—and I was a little unsure of my direction. My plan was to call at Toynbee Hall to see my friend Carrie Morrison, as Mr. Breen had suggested, and ask her opinion of the Leah Marchant case. Carrie would do me good, she would never allow herself to become mired by the kind of emotional sludge in which I currently wallowed. Her private and professional lives were bound to be kept firmly apart and there was a chance she would know, through her close connection with Toynbee, of the best help available to a woman in Leah’s position.

In another five minutes, I found myself in Commercial Road and there ahead of me, in that long, rackety road crammed with shops and traffic, was a familiar clump of greenery and, set in a high wall, a plaque engraved with the words TOYNBEE HALL. From the open doors came music, a Brahms quartet, and I realized that a Thursday lunchtime concert must be in progress.

Had it not been for Meredith, I might have shunned the music altogether, abandoned the idea of seeing Carrie and gone back to the office, but a door in my soul, closed for years, had been pushed ajar by the sight of Grandmother and Edmund dancing in the drawing room. So I marched up the path beside a patch of struggling lawn to the hall where sunlight flooded the lobby, a soft draft blew along the floor, and ahead, through another doorway, the little auditorium was crammed with chairs.

The woman on the door recognized me from the old days. Waving aside my offer of payment, she pointed to a vacant seat at the end of a row where I let my hands fall into my lap, closed my eyes, and gave myself up to the torrent of music. From the street outside, beneath the rumble of carts, came the distant clatter of Spitalfields Market, barely quarter of a mile away. I knew, without opening my eyes, that light would be splintered into shards of color by the stained-glass arch of each window and that the audience would consist largely of unemployed laborers and clerks in collarless shirts and frayed waistcoats, but that among them would be plainly dressed young men, university-educated, the latest batch of idealists come to help out at the settlement.

Of course, it was foolish of me to have ventured inside; quite apart from the music, merely being in that place rubbed me raw, because the smells of beeswax, bodies, books, and soup were redolent of the months of near despair when I was looking for work. And then the music took me deeper still into the past. Perhaps I had known it would, and that was why I couldn’t keep away. The previous night, when I watched Grandmother and Edmund dancing, and Meredith so absorbed by love for her boy, I had wanted to feel something deeply too. I thought I could take the risk; surely, enough time had gone by. So I let myself be touched, for a moment, by the rusty emotions generated by two stillborn love affairs.