The Pleasure Quartet (10 page)

I had a sudden urge to dress up and act out a character, but who would I be? Femme fatale, in a long black gown and simple flat shoes, gliding silent down corridors in search of vengeance? Or
damned young girl, wrapped up in belted red wool coat and crimson kitten heels, dark glasses and scarf obscuring part of her face, trembling in the shadows as her killer approaches? I picked up a
wide-brimmed man’s hat in tan felt, slipped it over my hair and looked at myself in the mirror. The addition of a prop did nothing to make me feel like a different person. Just the same old
Moana, but with a hat on. I took it off and hung it back on the peg, leaving the magic of the theatre to the absent actors.

As I reached for my handbag, my hand grazed against a soft bundle wrapped in tissue paper and I recalled the tuxedo trousers that Clarissa had bought for me. I had not yet worn them, expecting
that at any moment they might disappear from their hidey hole and reappear in Patricia’s studio to be sold on to someone else. The garment still seemed far too extravagant a gift for me to
accept, let alone wear. But tonight felt like the right time.

I tore off the wrapper and the trousers tumbled out, totally uncreased due to the silken nature of the fabric and Patch’s expert packing technique. I removed my work skirt and stockings
and pulled them on, tucking my blouse into the high waistband and stepping back into my shoes. I didn’t look at myself in the mirror again to view the effect. To do so felt like bad luck.

The clock struck midnight, and I snatched up my bag, closed the door behind me and hurried down the theatre’s long corridors to the exit. Again I thought of Gwillam, and his suggestion
that he go searching for the ghost of Joan. Where would she haunt, I wondered? I guessed that whatever remained of her soul on this planet skimmed the waves still on Piha beach, spraying sea salt
into surfers’ open mouths, or dancing across the hot sand, black as coal dust and glimmering like a cloudless night sky. Or would she revert back to her youth and plague the stages of music
halls, fluttering skirts and brushing the ankles of stockinged feet?

A board creaked beneath my hurrying feet and I jumped. What a crazy notion, I muttered aloud, shaking all thoughts of the supernatural aside and turning my mind back to the night ahead.

I didn’t want to keep Clarissa waiting.

8th August, 1947

Sweet dear lover of mine,

My last two letters have gone unanswered and I have this awful feeling inside of me that I will never hear from you again. Gut feeling, you used to call it.

Even though this pitiless war has finally come to an end, and two long years have passed since, these are terrible times and I guess the world and its turmoil have reclaimed you in some way,
as if the time we managed to be together was just a temporary gift.

l grieve for you, but in my own way. In silence.

I wish you were here and I could speak to you, but here I am confronting your absence and, as I am sure you would have wished, would rather celebrate the joy and pleasure we shared
together.

You always said that pleasure was a holy gift, didn’t you?

And oh, how we celebrated it!

You often asked me about my life before you, and I would evade your questions as if I knew already that we had to live in the moment, while the bombs were falling on the city and the secret
life of London was so intense and alive as a result.

Now I will tell you, even though you are not here to listen to my words. Then, it didn’t matter, because I felt that before you I was nothing.

Presently, I feel as if it is something I owe you.

I was living in Shropshire when the Great War began. Just another country girl.

My parents were farmers and I attended the parish school, but found it awkward to make friends, feeling I had little in common with my classmates. I was a happy soul but something inside me
longed for more than the small world I lived in. A few streets, thatched roofs and rolling fields, farm work and of course the dances which occurred every few months, our small town way of blowing
off steam in a flurry of brightly coloured if several-seasons-old skirts, painted on stocking lines and home brewed booze snatched slyly from hip flasks. At that age, I wasn’t allowed to join
the fray – my father was a kind and hearty man but horribly strict – so I was relegated to the sidelines and instead feasted on the unbound gaiety of others as they circled the floor in
a frenzy of movement, the music, the loudness, the sheer joy that surrounded things. There wasn’t much joy available to us then, so when we could, boy did we make the most of it.

Both my brothers died in the trenches and I was taken out of school and torn between the grief of my parents and long days of labour in the fields, trying in vain to replace the two sets of
hands we had lost with my small pair. Even though our holding was small, the amount of work required, keeping the crops going and tending to the few animals we had, managed to hold on to, soon
overcame us. We could see no future and when an offer was made to purchase our land, my father accepted it. In truth, I suspected that they just couldn’t bear to be in the same house that had
birthed my brothers, to work the same soil that Andrew and Roley had toiled over. My parents decided to return to their native Ireland to join my grandparents until my father could find employment
of some sort in the city.

I, on the other hand, had no wish to travel to Ireland. I had been born in England, and on my rare trips back to the old country, had found it unwelcoming and drab. I know they say it rains
here every other day, but at least English summers are long and hot. The sky even in Dublin is permanently grey!

But what was I to do? There could have been suitors, if I’d wanted them. It was not uncommon to marry young. But the men available to me were old and infirm or young and broken in some
way or other and at any rate, I wasn’t in love with them. I know you might think me silly and romantic, my dear – I never was the practical sort – but if I was to marry, I wanted
to marry only for love. And I had not by any means decided that I wanted to marry.

Life, from what I had so far seen, was short and hard and full of grief, except for those nights of joy and music where even my father threw his cap into the air and took my mother by the
hands and spun her like a top until she laughed as if she’d never worked a single day in her life. I wanted more of those nights, my lover. I wanted to take life by the middle and wring every
drop from it. And that, I was certain, was not going to happen in Shropshire. Or in Ireland.

I had lost most of four years of schooling working in the fields after my brothers’ departure and later death and I had reached adulthood with a patchy education. The local priest at
the country church where we had worshipped – a short man with a bald head that resembled a moon, whose outer appearance was quite different from his inner sensibilities – had taken a
shine to me, and had provided continuing lessons in English literature, mathematics, a smidgeon of philosophy, geography and the sciences and assigned me books to read from his personal library. I
read about equations and astronomy, history and geology, the breadth of the oceans and the spread of the earth around me, and I read about love, in books that I imagine most members of the church
would never even have allowed in the house. Books that challenged and opened my mind to possibilities far beyond the borders of our own hedgerows. There was never a religious message in his
teachings, nor any apparent effort to win my heart. Maybe he saw a kernel of brightness in me and considered it his pastoral duty to help. Maybe he too was trapped within the confines of his birth
and living his real life within the far broader walls of his imagination. Kindred spirits appear in the strangest places.

Little did he know where this would lead me to!

By the time my parents had made their decision about the farm and the journey to the home country, I had a mind of my own and was fiercely opposed to the idea of joining them.

There were few alternatives: remaining in the countryside and finding employment as a maid on a local estate or moving to the nearest village with hope against hope I could fit in, but I knew
that was doubtful. Villages are the same everywhere and whenever I’d had to venture through our local township’s constantly muddy streets, I invariably felt the villagers looked down on
me, the country girl, the Irish lass, as if I were an inferior form of species, when I was all too well aware that the step they occupied on the evolutionary ladder above me was just an inch apart
from mine and that their disdain was totally unjustified.

I wanted more from life.

That seed of pleasure was already working away at me, hidden, insidious, an appetite begging to be fed. It was still unformed but its power had been growing since the spectacle of the crowds
dancing in the barns had opened a window into the pleasures of the world in which I loved, but did not yet participate.

When I revealed my plans to my parents, they were profoundly shocked.

This was in 1921.

It would be another seven long years before women would obtain the right to vote in Britain. By which time I was, of course, old enough to vote, make love, be dissipated, seduce, manipulate
the hearts of men, be as wicked and unrestrained as I wished.

I informed them I intended to travel to London and live there.

My mother cried, my father roared his disapproval and the arguments continued well into the night and lingered for a whole week.

A terrible fate would befall me if I ventured into such a den of iniquity, I was warned. A place that no woman alone should even consider visiting. Let alone unaccompanied. Even the
entreaties of our priest who was summoned to the farm, bemoaning how I would be wasting my life if I persisted in my decision, failed to budge my persistence. I still remember the way the light
shone on his bald head, and I couldn’t take any of his remarks seriously, knowing as I did that he had built me up to this.

I had always been a particularly obstinate sort of person, and the efforts to dissuade me from the path I had decided to take only served to reinforce my determination.

You see, I had read so much about London, and it felt like another world, one of attraction and danger, of noises and crowds and colour the like of which we country folk didn’t even
have an inkling of.

It was the hustle, bustle and heartbreak of Charles Dickens, the dark, inviting alleys of The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, the glamour and passions of Marie Corelli’s
popular romances. It drew me in like a moth to a flame. As if I knew already it would be more fun being a good time girl and participating fully in its excesses.

Maybe then I was just an impressionable young girl, but my feelings went beyond mere curiosity and the superficial appeal of modern cities. After the perpetual silence of the country, the big
city felt like a challenge I had to attack, come to grips with. I was aware of its dangers, and the way I look at it now, they attracted me, the ‘bad’ part of me, the wanton side that
lurked under my virginity and my dormant desires.

Neither God nor the Devil could have stopped me once I decided that London was the place for me. Or maybe the Devil was actually whispering in my ear and I was mistaking his voice for my free
will? Then again, I’ve never had any faith in religion. I put my faith in other things. In my heart, and my heart drew me relentlessly towards London.

So it was in October that I arrived in the capital.

I carried a hold all in which my few belongings fitted, two spare dresses, a corset my mother had gifted me with before I left, a woollen nightdress, a handful of blouses and skirts that I
had darned again and again over the years as they kept on falling apart at the seams, some shawls I was attached to and an extra set of cotton underwear, as well as a few coins which constituted my
total fortune.

I had no idea when I would sleep that night. Or where.

To cut a long story short, I of course survived.

I experienced joy. Some sadness too. Not everything I did was right, by my own standards or in the eyes of others but I regret nothing. Until we met, my love.

I miss you.

I miss the vigour of your cock inside me.

I miss your words in my ears, your hands on my body.

And I wish I had told you so, before it was too late.

The street lights outside have been dimmed and the sky is clear of clouds, but it’s getting dark. And colder by the minute. London without you is a dull place, despite its many charms,
and if, as I fear, I do not hear from you again, I am thinking of leaving Britain and the memories behind. Going South somewhere maybe. My heart pulls me again, this time even further from home, to
lands beyond the great oceans.

I am not even sure if I will post this letter.

At times sadness overwhelms me and makes me question why I am even writing these lines. But I will always hold on to that kernel of doubt.

Because there has to be a future.

I am carrying your child. I became aware of this barely three months after you had left for Europe to see if any of your family had survived.

I know it is still a most dangerous place and the bleakness of the afterwar appears to have swallowed you up and I am prey to the fear of having lost you.

I write it again: I am carrying your child.

Warmly and wantonly yours, my dear,

Joan

Clarissa was leaning against a lamp post outside, her back pressed flat against the metal girdle, one leg forward and the other bent with the toe of her boot resting on the
footpath. A half-smoked cigarette hung from her lips. Tucked under her elbow was a worn leather satchel. She was the picture of casual chic.