Geoff Nicholson - Bleeding London

“I think it’s sort of sad,” she said.

“I knew you would,” he replied. He felt that he already knew how she would feel about a lot of things. “There will be times when you may find yourself unable to resist subverting those easy expectations.”

He smiled and she smiled back, though she didn’t really understand what he meant.

Stuart decided to start her on the Whitechapel Walk. This was generally regarded by the other guides as a hardship posting. The number of people on the tour tended to be small, hence there was less chance of making good money from tips. And the people who took the tour were an odd bunch. Some were Jack the Ripper freaks with all the weirdness that involved. Others were genuine East End enthusiasts who often wanted more information than the guides could provide. Others still had simply signed up for the wrong tour, or taken a chance because the Royal London Walk was full, or they had mistaken Whitechapel for Whitehall. Furthermore, the streets of White-chapel contained plenty of local people who thought the spectacle of someone guiding a group of tourists through their manor was an absurd and offensive one that deserved to be loudly mocked and shouted and laughed at.

These competing forms of difficulty could be tricky to deal with, but Stuart didn’t doubt that Judy would be able to cope. He knew she had the right stuff. But she still needed to be trained and that was his responsibility too. Sometimes training could take place in batches. If two or three new guides started at the same time, then they could be taught simultaneously. But there was nobody starting at the same time as Judy, so Stuart had her all to himself. He wanted it that way. He looked forward to seeing her again, and spending time with her. In fact he knew that he was looking forward to it far too much. When the morning came to train her he was in a state of ridiculous nervous excitement, an excitement that he hoped he was managing to hide from Anita.

He met Judy at Aldgate East tube station on a chilly April morning. She had abandoned her prim interview clothes and looked much happier in jeans and a stylishly battered suede jacket. He walked her round the prescribed tour route and gave her the script that he’d written for the walk. If a newly recruited guide was awkward or apprehensive he would tell him or her to stick to the script as though it were holy writ. In Judy’s case he told her to use it only as a jumping-off point.

He stressed how easy it all was, how basic the level of information had to be. Of course, Jack the Ripper had to be dealt with but Stuart told her he wanted it to be only a small part of the tour. There was more to Whitechapel than that. He said she should quote Charles Booth who in the nineteenth century called Whitechapel the Eldorado of the East, then she should move swiftly on to the Whitechapel Bell Foundry, which had been making bells for Westminster Abbey since 1565. She should take the group to Cable Street, talk briefly about Mosley, and say something bland about continuing racial tensions. He said it was worth mentioning that the Spitting Image workshops were nearby.

If the tour took place on a Sunday morning, then it would include Brick Lane market; the only place Stuart had ever seen a stall selling secondhand, partly used candles. If the group was interested in art and if there was a free exhibition on, they could be taken to the Whitechapel Art Gallery. If she liked she could mention the literary connections with Whitechapel: Walter Besant, Peter Ackroyd, Iain Sinclair, but she should go easy on this, since she could be certain that nobody on the tour would ever have heard of any of these people.

Stuart’s attitude towards tourists had hardened considerably over the years. He was sure most of them were perfecdy sane and rational when they were at home, but there was something about becoming a tourist that robbed them of their basic common sense. There’d been a woman on one of his tours, for instance, who’d asked him where she should go to see the Fire of London.

He told Judy that ending a tour wasn’t always easy. Finding the right note of finality could be strangely difficult. There would always be those walkers who lingered on and asked a lot of questions at the end simply because they wanted to prolong the tour in order to feel they were getting more for their money.

If the group had been a particularly hideous one, he recommended taking them to a pub in Commercial Road called, inevitably, Jack the Ripper, a sort of theme pub with murder and sexual mutilation as its subject. If the guide did it just right he or she could slip away quietly before the group realized they’d been dumped in a strip pub.

At the end of this particular morning, however, Stuart took Judy to the Blind Beggar, up the far end of Whitechapel Road, the pub in which Ronald Kray committed the murder which eventually led to his downfall.

“The dangers of telling the truth,” Stuart said enigmatically. “George Cornell called Ronnie Kray a fat poof, so Ronnie and Reg tracked him down to this pub and Ronnie shot him dead. But George Cornell wasn’t lying. What did Ronnie object to? To being called fat or to being called a poof? In fact he was both.”

“Maybe he wanted to be called a big-boned poof,” Judy said.

They had a couple of drinks and they ate their ploughman’s lunches and Stuart continued to talk about the joys or otherwise of being a tour guide, and more enthusiastically to talk about the joys and otherwise of living in London. Judy was attentive in a professional sort of way but to Stuart she felt like a longtime colleague, not a raw trainee.

They were getting along better than he could ever have hoped for, and he was not sure whether it was courage or recklessness or simply impatience that drew him on and led him, as if inadvertently, to say, “Look, this has nothing to do with Work, it’s not any sort of blackmail, or coercion or sexual harassment or whatever, but something tells me you and I might find ourselves having an affair, don’t you think?”

Having said it, he clenched himself, his whole body tensing up, waiting for the terrible consequences, the slap in the face, the drink poured over his head, the sound of breaking glass.

But she said, “I think so, yes.”

He wanted to cheer, to punch the air like a goal scorer, but instead he said, “I don’t know if it’s altogether wise or sensible. Obviously I’m married, very married, and it’s not as if I can really offer or promise you anything or…”

“Let’s just get on with it, shall we?” she said.

He nodded and smiled, and began running through his mental diary to see when and where the consummation might be arranged, but Judy was settling for nothing so organized or so delayed. She stood up, took his hand and pulled him out of his seat and started to walk towards the Ladies. The pub was empty, nobody was looking, and she dragged him in after her, into a cubicle, where she slipped down his trousers and her jeans, and they had rapid, raging and not really all that satisfactory or comfortable sex, but to a large extent it was the thought that counted, and the thought was pretty terrific. Stuart didn’t know what had hit him, but it was something big and powerful, like a speedboat.

The next time they met she invited him to her flat. He had offered to pay for a hotel room but she found that inappropriate. They went by taxi to Bethnal Green and he had stepped into her small attic room with some trepidation. The horrors of cheap, rented London accommodation were behind him, though not so far behind that he didn’t have horrible memories of rooms and shared flats in places like Bethnal Green. But the room was nice enough, and Judy was there in it and, in any case, as soon as they entered the room she had his clothes off and was humping him ruthlessly on the thin nylon carpet.