John Walsh - Sunday at the Cross Bones

The rector looked around, with a faint whinny of disavowal. ‘My dear girl –’

‘And who’s this geezer, anyhow?’ demanded the young harpy. ‘What the hell does he want?’ She leaned forward, her dark eyes lit up with suspicion.

‘This is a gentleman from the press, who seeks information about my pastoral work.’

‘Oh great,’ said Dolores, rising to her feet. ‘Bloody reporter, that’s all I need. Informer, more like.’

‘There is no reason to fear –’

‘I’m going to see what’s happened to Jezzie,’ she said, and flung herself away from our table, leaving a hefty waft of Woolworths scent and brass’s armpit.

That left us together.

‘I’m afraid I’ve upset your young friends, Padre,’ I said, as airily as I could. ‘All I was after was a few facts about your crusading work. Perhaps I should leave you to it.’

He put his hand on my arm, a gentle and insinuating gesture. ‘Stand your ground, my boy,’ he said, opening his greatcoat and taking out a huge cigar from a pocket within. ‘They will be back. These young girls regard me as their only hope in this vale of sin. They cleave to me instinctively, as though to an oak in a torrent.’

He crinkled the cigar – it was huge, I couldn’t afford a cigar like that – then picked up Dolly’s box of Swan vestas and lit it. Clouds of expensive blue smoke briefly enveloped his head in a foggy halo. He appeared to devour the enormous tube, running it two inches inside his distended lips, then sucked at it with hungry kisses – mpuh! mpuh! mpuh! – until the tip glowed wide like an orange sun, and the smoke poured from his nose and mouth like some kind of sulphurous ectoplasm.

‘Perhaps I should go,’ I said. ‘They obviously don’t like newspaper men.’

He studied the end of his Havanan torpedo. ‘No, no, I have always been convinced of the power of the press to do good rather than mischief. Without the help of journalists, we shall never reveal to the world the troubles of the homeless, the young strays and runaways, the army of fallen women.’

‘Perhaps,’ I ventured, all innocent-like, ‘we should concentrate on the work of one man. Readers don’t like being told depressing tales about kids dying in poverty and girls on the game. But a story about One Man’s Quest to take care of, you know, tarts who don’t want to be …’

He looked at me coldly. ‘Nobody , my young friend, wishes to be a prostitute. Any girl who finds herself in such employment has not sought it volitionally. It is not a matter of choice. They are driven into lives of degeneracy by the circumscription of choice. Young girls in their natural state are the innocent lambs of Creation. Without worldly knowledge, they would have no will to sin.’

‘And how can you help them?’ I asked, puzzled.

He sucked on his cigar again. ‘By showing them a route back to righteousness. By befriending them, and revealing there is a finer life, a life of the mind and of the soul, in which they may find redemption, a career in the arts or the drama.’

At that moment, the girls came back. Such a transformation! Dolores was all smiles. Jezzie carried her hat, with its spotty veil, in her hand, her face now revealed in all its seventeen-year-old wonder: her fat cheeks aglow, her hair blonde and fine as a pedigree Saluki’s, her eyes shining. You’d think they’d just won some money, these lambs of Creation.

‘We made some new friends,’ said Dolores, ‘in the public bar. They was very nice, weren’t they, Jez?’

‘He was lovely,’ breathed the other one. ‘They’re taking us to a party in a while, to meet some people who are going to put on a show at the Palladium.’

‘What an amazing stroke of luck,’ I said. ‘Don’t tell me they happen to be looking for two young actresses of no previous experience to appear in the chorus?’

‘Yeah, as a matter of fact –’ Her young face hardened. ‘How’d you know that?’

‘Oh, journalist’s instinct.’

‘Don’t listen to him, Jez,’ said Dolores. ‘He’s taking the mick. They’re all the same, fucking news hounds.’

I wondered if the rector had heard the obscenity, or if he had learned to ignore the startling rudeness of his young charges.

He turned to Jezzie. ‘Where did you say you lived?’

‘Mmm?’ said Jezzie, still dreamy from her recent brush with the arrow of Eros. ‘Oh, Spitalfields. I got this horrible landlady, she cooks greasy breakfasts, and ticks you off for using too much toilet roll. And no pets and no men in your room after 10 p.m., and if you want to have a bath –’

‘But your address?’

‘Oh right, 16 Fournier Street. What, you going to write to me?’

The rector, with an operatic flourish, opened his big coat wide, and ferreted about in the lining. He buried his head under his armpit, like a swan having a kip. He appeared to search in one aperture, then another, a third – Jesus, how many pockets did he have in there?

– and pulled out a red ledger, the kind a fellow might keep a note of his expenses in, and gravely inscribed the name of young Jezzie’s fragrant domicile. Then he pressed a business card into the girl’s hand. ‘And here is my address. I gather you are but recently arrived in the metropolis. I hope you will ring me on this number, Vauxhall 9137, if you are assailed by feelings of loneliness or desperation or feel in need of conversation.’

Jezzie tucked the card away in her blouse. Dolores regarded her cigar-puffing benefactor with a look of warning.

‘Harold,’ she said, evenly, ‘we’ve got to talk.’

The rector snapped the ledger shut, returned it to its home in the gaberdine folds, glanced at Jezzie’s newly enlivened presence – her mountainous blonde hair, her even more mountainous bosom and smiled at his young protégée like a fond uncle at a family reunion.

‘We are among friends, my dear, and can talk freely about your future employment –’

‘It’s not about the bloody job , Harold,’ she hissed. ‘It’s about Max. What you done with him?’

He suddenly looked a little nervous. ‘Max?’ he asked. ‘Was that the man I met you with outside the National Gallery?’

‘You know perfectly well. And you put the law on him,’ said Dolores. ‘How could you? The bloody peelers. ’

My ears were out on stalks, if that’s the phrase. I seemed to have stumbled into an interesting little row. The vicar, the tart, the villain, the mystery disappearance, the constabulary … All my antennas were quivering.

They were quivering a little too obviously. The vicar and the girls were suddenly all looking at me, none too friendly. Dolores’s enormous gob had lost its pouty allure and was thin as a Gillette blade. The rector’s cigarry animation had evaporated, leaving him with a look on his face like a man just kneed in the nadgers. In this pub snug, there was suddenly an Arctic chill. Even the birdbrain Jezzie could feel it.

‘I think,’ said the rector, and I was relieved to hear anyone saying anything to break the silence, ‘we must not keep you any longer from your friends. If you wish to interview me about my work, you must make an appointment by telephone. I keep irregular hours. It has been pleasant to make your acquaintance.’ And with that, he turned his whole chair, away from me so I was looking at his back, as he leaned into the girls again.

‘I was just going, Reverend,’ I said, rising sheepishly. ‘Unless you fancy one more drink, on me, I mean, and we could …’

He ignored me. Dolores, the little bitch, turned a look of pure contempt my way. ‘You still ’ere?’ she said. ‘Thought you were goin’. And takin’ your big flappin’ ears with you.’