The Petticoat Men (17 page)

Silence. Only the distant rumble of traffic. His wife knew when to interrupt and when to listen.

‘And how could I not want to protect him still? I suppose I should rejoice that he is not alive to suffer this latest scandal spread across the newspapers in a vile and vicious manner!’ He struck at the grass, vicious also, with his stick. She restrained him gently. ‘A scandalous divorce from that beautiful charming woman we thought we knew so well, who is married now to
a courier from Belgium
! And now his son’s name in the newspapers in the most disgusting and shameful way possible.’

They reached the bottom of the garden where a wooden seat was built into a stone wall. The Prime Minister stood silently but struck the wooden arm of the seat, angry still.
‘And if his daughter is not infinitely discreet in her relations with the Prince of Wales, she will be next. Is it a curse? Is it a curse in the bloodline?’ But he shook his head in answer to his own question. ‘I cannot believe that.’

He at last sat wearily on the seat; his wife sat down quietly beside him. Somewhere an owl called: that haunting, night sound. But he did not hear. ‘The Prince of Wales needs proper work! His mother refuses any such notion. His energy is therefore dissipated elsewhere, especially in scandalous dalliances and liaisons, and it will go on being so.’

Mrs Gladstone refrained of course from making any comment about work and energy and dalliances, although she might have done. For she knew, as Elijah Fortune knew, and indeed as many people knew, that her husband dallied also – apart from the actual act: she knew him so well: he could not have lived with himself if he had been physically unfaithful – with a lady of much repute. Mrs Gladstone loved her husband. She had decided – gallantly and perhaps wisely – to live with a situation that she could do nothing about, but it had pained her nevertheless that he shared even a part of himself with another woman. She was not sorry that family ties and duties often called her away from London.

They sat in silence as darkness fell and ghosts hovered.

‘I am answerable only to God and to my conscience,’ said Mr Gladstone as if he could read her thoughts. But he was actually thinking of Arthur Clinton. ‘Nevertheless I do not require my – our – past close relationship to Lord Arthur, although it is beyond reproach, to be spread all over the newspapers also. It is not a matter for the public. It is our own private affair. It would be inappropriate – and totally unnecessary – if it became anything else.’

‘They would not dare,’ said Mrs Gladstone comfortably. ‘The newspapers would not dare. Even if they knew.’

‘The
Reynolds Newspaper
dared to pontificate quite disgracefully on the appearance of the Prince of Wales in a divorce court not long ago. Journalists have no sense of what is appropriate!’

‘The Prince of Wales had exasperated the benign allowances that are made for his behaviour, and which he thinks are his due because of his position,’ said his wife, just a little tartly. ‘The populace – and the newspaper men – expect some respect.’ She sighed, and then she added loyally: ‘You, my dear, respect the people of your country, and have never taken advantage of your position. The situation is entirely different.’

‘I do
not
respect the
Reynolds Newspaper
,
which I see seeks to raise its tone by mentioning paramours from classical history!’ He laughed shortly: if Lais and Antinous could appear in the
Reynolds Newspaper
the world was probably doomed
.

Of Lord Arthur Clinton’s actual crime they did not speak, for there were no words for the unspeakable, even between themselves in the private garden. William Gladstone stared down at his hands, saw that they were no longer young.

And then the Prime Minister of Great Britain bowed his head in the night, and prayed for guidance.

The following week – still recovering from his nervous illness, while the only news in town, the scandalous trial of ‘The Men in Petticoats’ as they were now called in the cheaper newspapers, continued in the Bow-street Magistrates’ Court – the Prime Minister wrote three times to his school friend the Solicitor-General, as he often did, and also met with him privately on several occasions. He also met the Prince of Wales a number of times.

The contacts were, perhaps, more frequent than usual.

16

I’m deaf, yes, but I’m not as deaf as Mattie and Billy think. It suits me to be deaf, it’s no blooming joke running a good-class rooming establishment round near Kings Cross and Euston and St Pancras and if anything happens to me I want those two to be forever safe. Sometimes I find it sensible to slightly exaggerate my deafness, ha! and just keep my eyes open. And – well – all right, yes, I have also read Mattie’s account of what has happened, it was lying on her work table when I went in to take thread I had purchased down Gray’s Inn Road. I’m not proud of myself but I have been so worried about her these last years, and I cant have her hurt more. She’s such a true girl, my Mattie. But in telling our story she’s entirely left out the most important thing in her life. She has every right to do that – it is too hard, and nothing to do with all this. Except it has made her who she is.

My true girl.

Yet I know she must tell her story her own way and I’m not reading her private writing again, I felt like a bleeding snoop. But there is something I have to make clear also. About 13 Wakefield-street, for everything to make some sort of sense.

Even I know who Lais was, and Antinous. I hardly missed anything when I was attending the court with Mattie, except a couple of witnesses early on who mumbled, but I observed that Mr Flowers was slightly deaf as well, he was sitting nearer than me, but he asked them to speak up! Most of the people talk as if they are giving a speech, I’m glad to say.

And even I know who Lais and Antinous was – if you work in the theatre for years and years, especially in a theatre like Drury Lane, you’d be surprised how educated you get. And I was married to a very knowledgeable man, like Billy is knowledgeable. I’ve seen a picture of a statue of Antinous, a very beautiful young man who looked like a woman. I think it was that Hadrian, the one who built that Roman wall, who loved him. And some of the actresses used to talk about that courtesan, Lais, like a kind of heroine. They identified with her I suppose because of all the offers
they
got from gentlemen who hung about the theatre – we all knew some of the actresses got money that way. (And who am I to mention that.) In Drury Lane they used to laugh in the dressing room and tell the story that Lais was once offered a thousand – well not guineas but the Greek equivalent I suppose – anyway it was a huge amount of money, but Lais took one look at the person offering and said nah, it had to be ten thousand.

‘Ten thousand!’ they used to say to each other when they saw an ugly rich man hanging about them.

Yes.

Ah – the real truth about deafness is that instead of hearing other people’s voices all the time you hear your own thoughts too much. I wonder if other people have things going round inside their heads that they find
literally unbearable
to think about? There are three unbearable things inside mine.

The first is that I cannot bear to think of Mr Rowbottom.

When we first moved to Wakefield-street they was just digging up the main road nearby to build the Metropolitan Underground Railway – dust and dirt and blooming loud digging all day long and rats, big rats from under the ground running down Wakefield-street. And carts and coaches going past our door at all hours of the day and night, trying to find their way out of the mess on the main road – it all made Drury Lane seem like a country avenue! But now of course that Metropolitan Underground Railway carries thousands of people. I wish my Joe was still alive to see such modernity – he’d find some theatrical equivalent to put on stage in Drury Lane, I bet! I know – he’d build a tunnel, with a light at the end of it, that was Joe, cheerful and optimistic and clever. But, actually, it’s smoky and odd and windy down there in the tunnels, where the underground trains now run so easy, I dont like it. I’m so glad I can still use my feet and walk.

But every single day I thank our luck that this house, 13 Wakefield-street – every day I thank our luck that it was not the
other
side of the main road. Euston and Kings Cross Railway Stations were already here when we came of course, all the crowds and noise and dirt and stinks and of course good for our lodging-house business. But when they decided to build St Pancras Station much later, do you know what they did? they just pulled down hundreds of houses on the other side of the main road that were in the way,
smash!
and left so many people with nowhere to live. If you’ve ever seen people weeping in the streets with their children and their pans and their shoes, or fighting to crowd into an already overcrowded tenement – well then, you know how lucky we are.

Here in Wakefield-street we’re safe. And Mattie and Billy have to be safe for ever: that’s what matters to me most in the whole world. We know about being unsafe, and now we’re safe and no bleeding policeman can do anything. When Billy reads to us, specially on Sundays when we dont clean and us all cosy by a fire and drinking our port in our back parlour at the end of the hall and me remembering the old days in Drury Lane when Joe used to read to us all so often – that’s when I know the decisions I made were the right ones.

As Mattie says, if they call your house that you polish and care for ‘a bordello’ or ‘the headquarters of criminal activity’, well, although you know it’s not true and you try to laugh it off it’s not blooming pleasant. But then it wasn’t blooming pleasant getting this house in the first place either. That policeman had the cheek to ask Mattie how we could afford to own a house – ‘people like you’, he said to her. And all that questioning about who owned the house in court – our private own stories getting batted about like shuttlecocks. What’s that got to do with them? What’s that to do with Freddie and Ernest?

It was cruel and sad what happened to us – and it happens to hundreds. There we were, us all safe and cosy and happy in our room at the top of Drury Lane Theatre, me and Joe working there, us able to put Billy and Mattie in the elementary school in Covent Garden, them learning reading and writing and adding, coming home with all the books from Mudies Lending Library, so keen and eager and happy. And then so suddenly – like almost in a week – Joe so ill that he couldn’t work. So ill, and the pain so bad that I couldn’t work either, I had to be with him.

There’s a lot of talk about warm-hearted theatre folk. And it’s true – the actors and the stage-hands collected some money for some of the medicines we needed and I loved them for that. But the managers: no sentiment, just businesslike, we were given a week to leave the room, needed for the next people who were to take our place. There was an opera coming on at the time, Joe getting ill just when the workload was the hardest. We weren’t paupers, we had had work and we had some money but how fast does that go when it stops, and the doctors and the medicines costing so much? In the workhouse – why do they call it the ‘workhouse’ when you go there when you aint got any work? – anyway, you know what they do there? – they have female paupers in one part and male paupers in another part and children taken separate. And most of all Joe in such pain and needing me and quiet and us with nowhere to live and having to pack up everything very quickly and go – go where? where could we go? who could take four people and one of them dying and no money to pay, I used to spew everywhere from the agony of it all. I have never been so desperate in my life.

Mr Rowbottom. All right here comes the story of Mr Rowbottom who Mattie called ‘sort of our stepfather’. Ha. He was one of the gentlemen who hung round the dressing rooms of the actresses, only Mr Rowbottom, from the very beginning, started hanging about me for God’s sake. I was in and out of the dressing rooms all the time and there were plenty of young actresses and I was married to my Joe, but no, he used to hang around me and he was a pest. But there it is, I’m supposed to be beautiful, or, rather, was, I’ve turned fifty now and not beautiful at all. (Mr Rowbottom certainly wasn’t beautiful, Lais the courtesan would have had something to say about him!)