John Walsh - Sunday at the Cross Bones

‘I hoped you might be free tonight, Emily,’ I said. ‘I have two tickets to see Mister Cinders at the Adelphi. It is light as a soufflé, but full of appealing tunes that will lift your spirits.’

She impetuously kissed my cheek. ‘Harold! You know how I adore the theatre. Give me five minutes to get ready in my going-out frock and I – oh but wait. Perhaps I shouldn’t.’

For a moment, I feared that I might have to reassure her that Dickens and Jones would not object to being left alone. But no.

‘Tomorrow I start work, thanks to you, my dear friend, at the Café Royal. Perhaps it would be better if I had an early night. I should not wish to disappoint my new employers by arriving late.’

It is very satisfying to me that she should respond so willingly to my placing her in a job at the kitchens of the distinguished Regent Street restaurant, away from her life of sin. I was moved to find how seriously she was taking it.

‘Your worries do you credit, Emily, but I was not planning on a late night. Decide what to wear tomorrow and put the clothes upon a chair. Set your alarm clock for 7 a.m. We shall go to the play, eat a light supper at Brown’s, I shall see you home and you will be tucked up in bed with, ah, Marshall and Snelgrove –’

‘Dickens and Jones , Harold. How can you tease me like this?’

‘– with your charming menagerie by eleven o’clock, and will awake refreshed to start your new employment and your new life.’

‘Oh, Harold –’ she clutched my arm – ‘I’ll get changed.’ I made a gesture towards the door. ‘There’s no need to go out into the horrid cold wind. You might look away, though, while a lady is dressing.’

I sat on Nellie’s unyielding bed, talking inconsequentially and listening to the noises behind me of rustle and snap, the tiny ladylike grunt that accompanied the fastening of hooks and eyes, the sigh of a lady’s arm sliding into a silken sleeve, all the sonic paraphernalia of a woman at her toilette. Some men might find the scene erotically promising, but I am inured to such things. Ten years of dealing with the sisterhood of vice have left me overfamiliar with the female boudoir. Odd to think I have been in hundreds of bedrooms over the last decade, but none has been that of a woman of decent moral address. Not one. What a curious state of affairs.

The door opened and Nellie came in. It was, frankly, awkward timing.

‘Oh,’ she said, seeing me first. ‘What are you doing here?’ I rose and glanced to Emily for guidance – to find her seated on a wooden chair, attaching the top of a silver stocking to the rubber flange of some item of corsetry. Her left leg – rather a beautiful sight! – was fully exposed.

‘Am I interrupting?’ In the doorway Nellie glanced from Emily’s leg to me, where I had half risen from the bed. ‘Shall I go?’

‘No, you silly thing,’ said Emily with a girlish laugh, ‘I was changing. Harold’s taking me to a play. You know lovely Harold, don’t you?’

‘We’ve met,’ she said shortly. ‘When was the last time? The Windmill Theatre, or the Carter woman’s cathouse in Drury Lane?’

‘I cannot recall,’ I said. ‘Perhaps the latter. How is life treating you, Miss Churchill?’

She didn’t reply, but crossed the room to her bed and began rooting around underneath it. Miss Churchill does not like me. Her presence casts a pall on every occasion. She seems to regard me with a suspicion I find frankly offensive. Of course, her experience of men is limited almost entirely to clients, clubland swells and prostitutes’ bullies. Show her a man intent only on the welfare of sinners, and she is puzzled, discomfited and keen to infer the worst.

‘I don’t know what you two are up to, but could you finish it and leave me in peace?’ she said. Her long face was blank with hostility. ‘There’s some things I need to do, and I could live without spectators, if that’s all right with you.’

Emily raised to me an enquiring eyebrow. How could I have communicated, in dumbshow, that her friend was looking for her supply of narcotics, her syringe, etc., without which she could not venture to Oxford Circus for an evening of drugged soliciting in alleys and cheap hotels?

‘Of course, Nellie,’ I said lightly. ‘Emily and I are just off to see Mister Cinders. I shall have her back here in bed early, because tomorrow she starts her exciting job at the Café Royal.’

Nellie’s face set in a sneer. ‘Oh yeah,’ she said. ‘She told me. Washin’ up for toffs. Hands in the sink from morning to night. Very exciting.’

‘It won’t be like that, Nellie, you beast,’ said Emily, in a hurt, schoolgirl voice. ‘I’ll probably be waiting on Ramsay MacDonald himself in the restaurant by Christmas. That’s what Harold says, anyway.’

‘It won’t be long,’ said Nellie, ‘before you’re dying to be back on the street. Or dying of boredom. Or dead on your feet. Go on and do it, but don’t say I didn’t warn you.’

If I were a young woman, I would sooner share living quarters with Cassandra, or Medea, or Lady Macbeth and all three witches, than Nellie Churchill. It took all my powers of persuasion to convince Emily that her life would soon change for the better.

She loved the play, however, and left the theatre, humming and chattering about the loveliness of the costumes.

Over a Spanish omelette, I assured her about the dignity of service, especially in so elevated a venue as the Café R, and promised to visit her in a couple of weeks. Home in Maddox Street, I instructed her to brush her teeth and say her prayers.

‘I’m so glad you took me, Harold,’ she breathed. ‘All them men who promised to care for me. Only you ever did. I’m ever so grateful.’

She pulled me towards her. I laughingly desisted and told her to get some sleep, for it was already 11.05 p.m.

‘Ain’t you going to tuck me up,’ she said, ‘and give me a little kiss?’

I would have helped her to bed, and bestowed a chaste kiss on her brow. But the image of Nellie seemed to loom from the dark bed in the corner. Before I left, I taught Emily to say, in bed every night, the words:

Matthew, Mark, Luke and John,

Bless the bed that I lay on,

Ever this night be at my side,

To light and guard, to rule and guide. Amen.

‘I had a friend once called Mark,’ she said dreamily, ‘ and one called Luke. And lots called John, or so they said. No Matthews, though. They all promised to take care of me, but they were all pretty rude in the end, all of them.’

I hastened away, to let her sleep, and wake in the arms of the Lord. It has been a most happy birthday.

Stiffkey 20 July 1930

Church attendance low this morning, fifty-five in all, but my sermon well received. Inspired by Mr Charles Sheldon’s fascinating book, Our Exemplar (1898), I took the simple proposition, ‘What Would Jesus Do?’ and enjoined the congregation, each and every one, to act on it in their daily lives.

Tired of modern sermons that offer mere exegeses of Bible texts, or dilate on abstractions (I have seldom heard a sermon on the Mystery of the Holy Trinity that conveyed any sense of their being more than a family vaudeville act – a conjuror impersonating simultaneously the Father, the Son and the Ghostly Dove), the congregation was gratifyingly, audibly, startled by my bold innovation.

Asking them to make a habit of rethinking their daily actions in the light of Christ’s teachings is, if I may immodestly call it so, a masterstroke. It sends them back to the Gospels and the Acts of the Apostles, searching for clues to correct behaviour. I smile to imagine Mrs Redwood, say, and her charming daughters perusing the Gospel of St John the Beloved in the same spirit that sends my young metropolitan friends, Madge and Agnes, to the advice pages of Peg’s Paper and Women’s Illustrated for counsel about the correct deployment of a hatpin in the fashionable bonnet.