Alasdair Gray - Poor Things

“I still do not know,” I told Millie, smiling through my tears. “I had better return to God for advice. But I cannot do that until I am rid of the poor fellow who waits outside.”

“Bring him in,” said Millie firmly. “Your apartment is ready so take him up to it, knock him off quick and we will have another talk. Your heart is too good for this wicked world, my dear. You need advice from a friendly, experienced woman you can trust.”

I thought “knock him off” a queer way to say “put him to bed”, but out I went and saw — no Duncan! Four empty little green fairy glasses stood on the table top, a waiter who wanted paid sprang forward, but my Wedder had vanished.

I went back inside. Millie made us more coffee then asked how I had met such a man and why I was wandering in Paris with so little luggage. I told her.

She said, “I greatly admire your sense, my dear, in taking a nice long honeymoon with your lover before marrying a respectable husband. Too many women enter marriage completely ignorant of what they ought to give and take. But this Wedderburn is obviously an over-sucked orange. You will be a far better wife to your husband if you now enjoy some variety.”

She explained that the hotel was the sort Londoners call a knocking-shop — her customers were men who paid to wed a total stranger for periods of an hour or less. Knocking was illegal in Britain, but any clean intelligent girl could get a licence to do it in France, or find work in a licensed establishment like her own.

“Is it possible for strangers to wed so quickly?” I asked, astonished, and she said many men preferred strangers because they could not wed those they knew best. Most of her customers were married men, and some of them had mistresses too. It seemed a mistress was what I had been to Wedder, though a Parisian kind are called midinettes.

“He obviously found one while waiting for you,” she said. “Hotels constantly lose business to amateurs — if I did not love my métier I would have retired years ago. I don’t suppose you will want to stay here forever, but many deserted women earn enough to return to God while working for me.”

“Not to my God,” I said.

“Of course not, dear. I’m talking about Catholics.”

Then Wedder strode in. He was in one of his wild states, and demanded a talk with me in private.

“Do you want that, dear?” said Millie.

“Of course!” said I.

She led us very stiffly upstairs to this nice little room then said (to Wedder) “Out of respect for the person of your companion I am forgoing the tariff which is customarily paid in advance, but if in any way she suffers you will be made to pay to an extent you will find astonishing.”

She said this in a very French voice.

“Eh?” said Wedder, looking confused as well as wild.

In a more London voice she said, “Remember, walls have ears,” and left, shutting the door.

He then strode up and down making a speech which sounded more like the Bible than Shakespeare. He spoke about God, his mother, the lost paradise of home, hell-fire, damnation and money. He said that by stealing the five hundred friedrichs d’or I had broken his run of luck, stopped him breaking the casino’s bank and cheated him out of marriage. My theft had robbed the poor of vast sums he would have donated to charity and to the church, and deprived us of a town house in London, a yacht in the Mediterranean, a grouse moor in Scotland and a mansion in the Kingdom of Heaven. And now that he no longer wished to marry — now that he wished he were separated from me by a gulf deeper than Hell itself — he was chained by his abject poverty to the fiend who had damned him to Hell — was chained to a woman for whom he now felt nothing but hate hate hate hate hate — loathing, detestation and hate.

“But Duncan,” I cried happily cutting open the lining of my coat, “luck has returned to you again! Here are Clydesdale and North of Scotland banknotes to the value of five hundred pounds sterling — they are just as valuable as friedrichs d’or. God gave them to me because he knew something like this would happen, and I have kept them for our last moment which has now arrived. Take it all! Return to Glasgow, to your mother, to maidservants who will love your manliness more than I can, to any church of God which catches your fancy. Be free as a bird once more — fly from me!”

Instead of cheering up he tried to swallow the notes while flinging himself out of the window, but being unable to get it open he rushed through the door and tried to dive downstairs head first.

Luckily Millie had been listening from the room next door (this hotel is full of apertures) and had called out her staff. They swarmed over him and filled him with exactly the right amount of brandy. It was not easy getting him off on the train to Calais. He did not really want to leave me, but many hands make light work and off he went. Millie wanted me to keep most of the five hundred pounds but I said no: Wedder loved money more than I did and it was his reward for the weddings we had enjoyed. I would now earn what I needed by working for a living: a thing I had not done before. She said, “If that’s what you really want, dear.”

So here I am.

I am no longer a parasite. For three days I have earned a wage by doing a job as well and fast as possible, not for pleasure but cash like most people do. Each morning I sink into slumber, glad to have knocked off forty and earned four hundred and eighty francs. I am surprised at my popularity. Bell Baxter is certainly a splendid looking woman, but if I was a man there are at least a dozen here I would want more than me: soft little cuddlies, tall supple elegants, wild brown exotics. Millie describes me in our brochure as “The beautiful Englishwoman (la belle Anglaise) who will fully compensate you for the pains (travail) of Agincourt and Waterloo.” She is careful that I only deal with Frenchmen, because (she says) it might embarrass me to meet some of her English clients in later life. Perhaps she also thinks it might embarrass them! She has a lot of these at the weekends who require special services from some of our girls who are between employments at the Comédie Française. I watched one of the performances through an aperture last night. Our client was Monsieur Spankybot who arrives in a cab wearing a black mask which he never removes, though he takes off everything else. He has very elaborate requirements for which he pays a great deal, being first treated as a baby, then as a little lad on his first night in a new boarding-school, then as a young soldier captured by a savage tribe. His screams were out of all proportion to what was actually done to him.

My best friend here, Toinette, is a Socialist, and we often talk about improving the world, especially for the miserable ones, as Victor Hugo calls them, though Toinette says Hugo’s special insights are très sentimental and I should apply myself to the novels of Zola. We discuss these things at the café next door because Millie Cronquebil says politics should be detached from the hotel trade. The intellectual life of Paris is in its cafés, and our quarter (which contains the University) has cafés whose customers are writers or painters or savants of other kinds, and the academics have different cafés from the revolutionaries. Our café is mostly frequented by revolutionary hôteliers who say the rich will only disgorge through a bouleversement of the structure totale.