‘Harold,’ she said thickly. ‘Harold, I –’ As her thoughts struggled to form themselves into words, I realised she was the worse for drink. The aroma of toothpaste was overpowering.
‘I been dreaming of horses,’ she said, in a dull monotone, ‘great white horses with streaming hair, galloping along the seashore. I thought I was riding one of them, only the horses in front kept charging off to the right, and the others that rode faster than me were galloping off to the left and all I was doing was running towards the sea, with no horse under me at all, and what good was that?’
She was sadly disturbed, my lovely Rose. Her father gazed at the floor neutrally, as if this were an occasion of blame and, wherever the blame could affix itself, it was certainly not to him. Her mother held my gaze as if asking how much of her daughter’s current state was due to our friendship over the last ten years.
‘Rose,’ I said, ‘I am shocked to see you like this. Sit down beside me here and tell me how you are, while your mother –’ I waved an importuning hand, confident that no mother in England would refuse the classic clergyman’s request – ‘will bring us a cup of tea and leave us to discuss your troubles in private.’
Rose sank obediently down on the threadbare ottoman and, gathering her housecoat around her spindly shoulders, gave me her attention. Her parents slunk away. I had not criticised their obvious neglect of my old friend; and their relief was palpable.
‘I’ve been very bad, Harold,’ said Rose when her parents had departed to the dark regions of tea and kitchen smells. ‘Sometimes I don’t get up ’til three, when the light outside’s changing to dusk, and the day is gone. I don’t see no one for days. When there’s visitors to the house, Dad’ll say, “Put on some clothes and a bit of lipstick and come down to join the company for the love o’ God, or they’ll think we’ve murdered you and stuffed you in the attic.” So I do what he says, and I try to talk, but I never know what to say to anyone no more, since I stopped hanging around with Violet and Ruth and the girls. I can’t talk to people any more, that’s the truth. I lost the art, if I ever had it.’
‘Rose,’ I said, ‘you give up hope too easily. I had not thought domesticity would be such a trial. When you abandoned your old life, I thought steady work in the textile warehouse would give you a new community in which to thrive. When that failed, we tried the outdoors employment offered in the tulip beds at Kew Gardens, but you ran away from it –’ I clamped my hand on her arm – ‘you ran away, my dear, like a cat from a garden hose, saying it did not suit you. As if ministering to plants and flowers were not preferable to your ministering to strange men in Smithfield.’
‘I know, Harold,’ she said, shaking her sad ringlets. ‘God knows I’ve tried. But the girls in the warehouse were horrible to me, they’d make out I was low and stupid and in the canteen they’d say to the skivvy, give her more potatoes, them Micks live on potatoes, until I’d cry. And the gardens at Kew were lovely in the summer with red camellias and the foam of apple blossom. But I couldn’t stand the cold once October came, and the ground was hard and they made me poke the soil night and day. It was so hard, it was like poking sheets of iron with a thimble. And the gardening sergeant, he’d be nice one minute, and say, that’s a fine bed there, the drills of seedlings in nice straight rows, marvellous, and before you knew it he was putting his big hands round my hips and saying, “Rhythm rhythm, you’ve got to work with the soil, shoving in the seeds this way and this” – and all the time, Harold, he’d be behind me pushing away while pretending to apprentice me, pushing so rudely until I could feel something that wasn’t a dibber-stick at all.’
‘Rose,’ I said, ‘I am so sorry. There is no reckoning the base appetites of men. But I gather, from your father and from your appearance, that your stay at home does not fulfil you either?’
‘Bored, Harold,’ she said. ‘Bored bored bored. I’m so dull at home I could cry. And I do, every day.’
Her beautiful eyes were shining with liquid salt as she clutched my arm.
‘We had such laughs together, going to the music halls in the old days, meeting them funny people you used to introduce me to. Them days, I felt I could do anything because you cared for me. When we went around together, I felt like a real person. I used to think, so bloody what if the showgirls look at me sideways and ask, “Who’s she?” and “Who invited her backstage, into this bar or this hotel?” I could stand all their fish-eyed looks because I knew, well, at least the rector thinks I’m someone worth knowing. At least he talks to me like I got half a brain. I could endure anything because I knew you loved me.’
This was a little hard to take. Had I really told her such a thing, in those words? Of course I was fond of her and had taken her to shows, as I do so many of my young charges, to invigorate their sense of the wondrous drama that might one day fill their lives. But she has clearly been nursing a private delusion. I could not speak of love to her. I am a married man, the pastor to a village of dependants and a city of lost or about-to-be-lost souls. Love is an irrelevance in all this. Her solitude has invented a love between us.
‘Rose,’ I said, ‘let us strike a deal. You must pull yourself together, read from the Book of Job in the Bible and stop abandoning yourself to misery. In turn I will promise to take you away from here and find some employment, no, some adventure, that will return a spring to your step.’
She looked at me sadly. ‘I’d give anything to get away, Harold. But you won’t send me back to the gardens, will you? I couldn’t stand that.’
‘My dear Rose,’ I said, almost laughing, ‘I will not send you anywhere. I am no evil slave-driver, like Mr Svengali in Du Maurier’s book. Together, we shall find some employment that will fulfil and gratify you, until you are sufficiently invigorated to do something more cheerful with your appearance and dress. In three months, you shall be living in pleasant rented rooms in, I don’t know, Pimlico or Bloomsbury, with fresh flowers in the hall and a white linen cloth on the table –’
‘I’d love the white tablecloths,’ she whispered.
‘– and at the close of day, Rose, we shall meet as friends in the old delightful way, and visit the amusements of Shaftesbury Avenue and go on excursions to Tooting Common and Greenwich Park, and walk in the sunshine and watch the nannies and the bicyclists. You shall make new friends, and show off your finery on picnics. And you shall, perhaps, help me with my work sometimes when your own duties are not too arduous.’
‘I will, Harold, you must count on it,’ she said with new energy (my strategy was working better than I could have hoped). ‘For there is no kinder, sweeter man than you, and I would like to help with the poor misfortunates.’
As I left, I reflected that nothing guaranteed her rehabilitation more than her blindness to her own status as the most dismal girl of my acquaintance. Once a fallen woman starts to feel sympathy for the wretchedness of others, she is on the path to recovery.
I did not seek out her parents. I left with a glow of satisfaction, that I could restore the meanest of God’s creatures to life by a few simple promises.
Outside, I recalled that Barbara’s address – 14 Queen Street, Camden – was only a few roads away, and I made the journey in short order. No traffic came or went (it was well after midnight). It was an ugly street of brick tenements. The moon hung above a shut-up public house, the Greyhound – and a single gas lamp at either end of the street illuminated the dismal flagstones and doorways. I found number 14, a common lodging house on three storeys, with an array of eight doorbells, beside each one a name on a dirty oblong of paper. The lowest one read simply, ‘BARBARA’. Impetuously, I pressed the bell. A muffled jangle sounded inside the ground-floor window. Moments passed, a feeble light flicked on and was as quickly extinguished. Voices could be heard, one girlish and querulous, one male and indignant. I stood, inches from the window, uncertain as to how to proceed. When all had been quiet for minutes, I rapped softly on