Gordon Ferris - The Unquiet heart

“This! Us. I told you, I don’t have time for men.”

“We could read to each other.”

“Shut up, Danny.”

It wasn’t till the day after we’d gone looking for trouble at the White City dog track that I could persuade her back to my place. I’d scrubbed my bedroom and changed the sheets just in case, but it still seemed cheap and tawdry when I showed her in. I wanted an Arabian tent filled with cushions and wafting silks for her. She didn’t seem to mind brown lino and faded carpet. Nor that I kissed her and helped her off with her clothes.

Afterwards we lay together with my arm under her head, nearly asleep.

“You must think I’m easy,” she said.

“I think you’re beautiful. I think you’re funny and brave.”

Her head shook in denial. Her shrub of hair tickled my nose. I calmed it down.

“I don’t do this.”

“What, go to bed with Scotsmen?”

She punched my chest. “With anyone.”

“So this is special?”

She shifted her head so she could look at me. Her eyes were anxious. “This is lovely, Danny. But it’s just fun. It’s not anything else. Right?”

“Sure, Eve. It’s whatever you want it to be.”

Suddenly she sat up, supporting herself with her arm. “Danny, listen. This isn’t anything. It’s not going anywhere.” She was fierce.

“OK, princess. Message received.”

She studied my face, looking for the truth. I don’t know what she saw, but she lay down again, and we held each other tight. Just for fun.

A pattern emerged over the next few days. We would keep up the professional faзade while I helped her find new stories, but when the work was done – or sometimes when we couldn’t wait a second longer – we’d make for my place. There, the only guardian we had to contend with was the moggy, and Eve soon had her purring round her legs. Me too for that matter.

Each time Eve would try to resist the temptation and each time she’d give in.

And after each time she would say we had to stop. And we did, till the next time.

Guilt that we might be using her column as an excuse to leap into bed spurred us to put more effort into her work. Of course it would take something special to top the Tommy Chandler story, and I had nothing lined up that needed the unique skills of Midge, Cyril and Stan. So we began to frequent the seedier dives and haunts of the underclass looking for trouble. Sniffing around and catching the mood. So as not to kill the golden goose, Eve made it clear to anyone who asked that names and addresses would be changed to protect the guilty. Just as well, for she wrote about the dog fixers at White City, the protection rackets in London restaurants, and the stolen goods for sale in every open market in town.

To read her exposйs was to imagine a London corrupt from top to bottom, a festering swamp of thieving and cheating. She wasn’t far wrong. It sometimes made me wonder how I kept myself clean. And why.

She took me into her newspaper one day when I showed interest in the process.

I’d thought about becoming a journalist after uni, but there was more money in the police. She started me in a room swamped with papers and reporters. A haze of smoke swirling above the jumble of desks. Journalists sat talking together or pounding at typewriters. It was late in the afternoon and there was a sense of mild desperation in the hangar-like room as they fought to put the next edition together. We passed an office just as the door crashed open and a grey-haired man with broken veins on his pock-marked face emerged shouting.

“Where’s the bloody lead? That lead was to be on my desk twenty minutes ago.”

The sheer volume of his voice was offset by the clean vowels of northern Scotland. I placed him from Inverness.

A shout from the depths of the hubbub came back: “Coming, Jimmy! Just coming!”

The man turned his glowering eyes on us, and his face softened. “It’s yourself, Eve. Nice piece today. We’ll run with that. But a wee bit too much alliteration.

We’re not a poetry magazine. Who’s this?” he demanded scrutinising me.

“Jim, this is the man who’s been helping me with those scoops. This is Danny McRae. Danny, this is my boss, the editor, James Hutcheson.”

“You’ve been costing me a wee fortune, Mr McRae. But so far it’s been worth it.

Any more adventures like that warehouse job in the offing?” He raised one of his huge grey eyebrows in inquiry and reached out a hand to shake mine.

“Not this week, Mr Hutcheson.”

“In that case my expenses will be lower, eh?”

There was more than a hint of seriousness in his comment, but he suddenly softened.

“Look, come on, Danny. Call me Jim. You’re an interesting character. Come and have a dram. You’ll take a malt, I trust.” His back was already retreating into his den as he said this. Eve shrugged and smiled, and we followed him into his nicotine cave. He cleared a two-foot pile of old papers off a chair and dumped them on an already tottering stalagmite of newsprint. He unearthed another chair and dipped into the top drawer of a dented filing cabinet and triumphantly hooked out a whisky bottle. His desk drawer yielded tumblers of uncertain cleanliness and we were off.

It was an entertaining half hour punctuated by bellows at his staff and splashings of Scotch. But no matter how much he drank, it didn’t seem to affect his ability to scan a draft. He flourished his blue pencil with deadly skill and loud scorn for the English education system.

The rest of Eve’s tour was thankfully less whisky-fuelled. My head was already buzzing by the time we reached the bedlam in the foundry. It was like a blacksmiths’ convention: benches lined with men hammering lead type on to metal sheets and feeding discarded slugs back into the melting pot for re-use. I wondered what it did to your brain to be writing backwards and upside down all the time.

In the next room, they slid the still-hot plates into the presses, and inked the typefaces before feeding through the first of the sheets from the giant rolls.

Eve handed me the first edition, still hot and wet. I glanced at the headlines and the cartoons, then up and around at this Vulcan choreography. I shook my head – metaphorically; I didn’t want to hurt Eve’s feelings; such industry and effort for something so slight.

Eve announced she wanted to move upmarket. In the three weeks we’d been working together she’d written about warehouse theft and dog doping at White City. Now she wanted to tackle corruption among the toffs, bearding them in their fancy gambling dens.

“The one in Mayfair,” she said. We were walking in her lunch hour through Lincoln’s Inn, sidestepping blokes in wigs and winged collars. It was like the movie set for David Copperfield.

“Carlyle’s? Start at the top, why don’t you? How do you know about that?”

“Danny, it may be illegal but any cabbie will take you. All I need is an escort.” She took my hand and gave me her most winning smile. She knew that I knew she was conning me. She also knew I was a sucker for her smile.

I tried to be practical. “You also need a sponsor. It’s a very private club. No coppers, no press. Especially no press.”

“Jimmie Hutcheson has it all arranged,” she said gaily. “A friend of a friend who didn’t want her name in the papers. Divorce can be so messy.”

“You folk have the morals of an alley cat.”

She waved the notion away. “As Jimmie says, it’s all bread and circuses. The baying crowds want blood. And if it’s the blood of wealthy spivs or the ruling class so much the better. It makes our fellow citizens feel less guilty about buying that extra sausage without a coupon.”

I laughed and agreed we’d put on the glad rags and enter the den of iniquity on Thursday night.