A Partisan's Daughter (15 page)

“I’ve often done things like that,” said Chris. Then he asked, “So why weren’t you good enough?”

“Well, you know what I did. Why would he want me? I was a bloody prostitute.”

Chris said, “He never would have found out if you didn’t tell him.”

Chris and I sat there in silence for a while, and then I said, “You know what? When we were driving from the place where I landed, I saw the most beautiful bridge over the river. It was all white and graceful like a swan, and it made me happy just to see it. You know how green everything is in England? And all the foreigners say, ‘Oh, England is so green.’ But what I noticed was the white bridge over the river.”

“That must be the Orwell Bridge,” said Chris.

“I’d love to see it again one day,” I said. “When I saw it the first time, it made me think that England must be a great country to live in.”

TWENTY-TWO

Bergonzi’s Pussycat Hostess Paradise

You get some right dodgy sods around here.

C
hris came back a couple of weeks later, standing on the doorstep and rubbing his hands, saying, “Well, well, that’s the end of an era, eh?”

“What is?”

“Oh, you know, Muhammad Ali packing it in. He’s retiring. And I remember when he beat Sonny Liston. Isn’t it incredible how the time goes?”

“Boxing is stupid,” I said.

“All the same, he’s the most famous person in the world.”

“No one’s more famous than the Queen,” I said, “and she’s not packing it in.”

“She’ll be there forever, unless the IRA get her first. Anyway, am I allowed in?”

We went down in the basement, and I made him some tea. He was drinking it Continental-style by now, because I said that putting milk in it was a stupid British custom that no one in the rest of the world could see the sense of, and if you didn’t make it so strong you wouldn’t have to put anything in it, unless you liked lemon. Anyway, he tried it, and said it wasn’t bad, and after that he became converted, so I thought maybe the British aren’t doomed to bad gastronomy forever. Chris said that the Irish drink it even stronger and milkier than the British. I saw an Irish cookbook once, and it was about three millimetres thick.

I knew it was going to be awkward today because we’d got to the point of talking about the hostess club. I was sure we were about to become lovers, and I didn’t want to put him off, but it was too late to change the story now because I’d already mentioned too many details already.

The Bob Dylan Upstairs was learning
The Deer Hunter,
and you could hear the tune coming down the staircase, along with all the mistakes and the places where he stopped. He was learning the version for classical guitar, like in the film, because he said it was better than the electric version that was the latest hit. I was getting to like him quite a lot. We were doing a lot of talking just as I did with Chris. I was doing so much talking that I wondered if I’d ever stop. I wondered if it was a kind of sickness in me. I wondered why people didn’t get bored with me. I thought, “One day I’ve got to stop talking, and start living.” I was thinking all the time that I wanted to be with Chris, even if I was only a mistress. It wouldn’t have bothered me. I never met his wife, but it was obvious that there was nothing to be jealous of. He called her “The Great White Loaf,” which was cruel, but funny. I would have liked all the time to myself that you get if you’re a mistress. I wanted him around me, that’s all. When we were talking, I kept having this urge to get up and give him a hug, and kiss him on the neck. I didn’t though. Now I think that I should have.

“So what’s next?” he asked, when we were sitting down, even though he knew perfectly well what was next.

“Bergonzi’s Pussycat Hostess Paradise,” I said.

“Is that what it was called? The brothel?”

I was offended. “It wasn’t a brothel, it was a hostess club.”

“Never been to one,” said Chris. “I don’t really know what they are.”

“I didn’t either. But I got a job working in a bar. It was a pub really. It’s difficult to get decent work when you’re illegal. You end up in bars and cafés, and businesses belonging to Pakistanis and Greek Cypriots and people like that who don’t give a damn about the law. Or rich people who want a nice girl to look after the children and do some cleaning, that’s another one.

“Anyway, I was in the pub in Clapham behind the bar, and a man started talking to me when I was in between getting drinks. He was nice. He had a gold tiepin and a big gold ring on his finger. He said, ‘A good-looking girl like you’s wasting her time in a place like this. I bet you don’t earn much, do you, darling?’ I said it wasn’t too bad, and he said, ‘Well, you could be earning a couple of hundred a night, and that’s without doing anything, almost.’

“I said, ‘What’s that then?’ and he said, ‘Hostess club. Mate of mine runs one. What the girls earn in there, well, you just wouldn’t believe it. All you got to do is be nice to the blokes who turn up looking for a break from their old ladies.’

“I got the wrong idea straight away, and I said, ‘You think I want to be a prostitute? If you think I want to be a prossie you can just piss off.’ I was picking up the London way of talking, see?

“Anyway, he laughed at me, and he said, ‘No, no, no. What happens is, they come in and you chat to them, right? You take an interest in them, right? Then they buy champagne. That’s your job. You get them to buy champagne, right? And you get commission on each bottle. Those geezers cough up a fuckin’ fortune for each bottle, excuse my French, and you get a percentage, and you get paid right before you go home, on the nail. You wouldn’t believe it, but some blokes don’t mind paying hundreds for a bottle of bubbly.’

“ ‘They must be stupid,’ I said, and he said, ‘Nah, not really, they’re just stinking rich or bleedin’ lonely, and usually both.’

“He ordered another pint, and said, ‘Are you interested, then?’

“I said, ‘It’s not one of those places where they get men to come in and then give them lots of drinks, and then give them a huge bill at the end? I heard about how they catch foreigners like that. People who don’t understand pounds.’

“ ‘No, love, that’s a clip joint. This is a hostess club. It’s different. There is one drawback, though.’

“ ‘Oh, yes?’ I said. ‘So what’s that?’ and he replied, ‘You’ve got to dress up like a bleedin’ pussycat.’

“ ‘A pussycat?’

“ ‘Yeah, a bleedin’ pussycat. You know, tail and ears and whiskers, and all that, and black fishnet stockings and stilettos.’

“I said, ‘Do cats wear stilettos and stockings, then?’ and he said, ‘London ones do, darling. You mean you ’aven’t noticed?’

“Anyway, he gave me an address in Soho, and he put a little message with it, and he said, ‘Don’t bother going before five o’clock.’ I thought, ‘What the hell, there’s no harm in taking a look.’

“Anyway, Bergonzi’s Pussycat Hostess Paradise Club was up some stairs from the street, and it was pretty bad to look at until you turned down the ordinary lights and put on the coloured ones. It was almost like this house, but not so bad. Everything dirty and old. But with red lights it looked like luxury. It was just a big bar, really, with little low glass-topped tables and lots of sofas and armchairs, and red carpet and sheepskins that weren’t really sheep, but something fake that you could put in the washing machine. It smelled stale because no one ever opened the windows.

“When I got there, I went up the stairs and at the top there was a door with a grille in it, and I knocked, and this man looked through at me and said, ‘Sod off.’

“I said, ‘I’ve come to see Bergonzi. Bob sent me.’

“So he let me in, and he turned out to be a giant man in a bow tie who looked like a gorilla, and that’s what everyone called him, and he didn’t even mind. They just said, ‘Hi, Grill, how are you, Grill?’ and he was all right really. He never said much, he just got rid of shitty customers. I never had much to do with him. He had a hobby collecting exotic empty cigarette packets that got left by foreign customers. Everyone said his flat was full of them. Anyway, Grill let me in when I said I’d come to see Bergonzi. That’s when I saw how depressing the place was with the ordinary lights on. Even so, it had a little pool with a fountain in the middle, and lots of plastic plants, and big bits of velvety cloth draped all over the place.

“Bergonzi was all right. He was Italian cockney. That’s what he said, anyway. He looked like a bloody mafioso—you know, white shoes, black shirt and trousers, big suntan, sunglasses like you don’t need indoors, nice white teeth.

“Bergonzi looked at me and said, ‘Well, doll, you’re tasty.’ I gave him the little note from Bob, and he read it and said, ‘Good old Bob. Trouble is, if I take you on, it means I owe ’im a monkey.’

“I couldn’t believe it. ‘A monkey?’

“ ‘Commission. Don’t know the lingo, eh?’ he said, and then, ‘Do you know how this place runs? Cos if you don’t know, and then you don’t like it, we’ll all have been wasting our time, won’t we?’ ”

I asked Chris, “Do you want to see my imitation of Bergonzi? All the girls had one.” Chris said, “
OK
,” so I got myself ready. I stood up and puffed out my chest a bit, and kept pushing the imaginary sunglasses up on my nose. Then I began:

“ ‘Right, doll, it’s like this, it’s dead simple, like fallin’ off a log. We gotta lotta rich geezers comin’ in ’ere wiv more dosh than common sense. All yer gotta do is be nice to ’em, right? Chat ’em up, use your powers, get ’em to buy champagne. Cos that’s the secret. A bottle a champagne costs the punters ninety quid a throw, and I pay you thirty quid for each bottle the punter knocks back, right? So you’re my little salesman.

“ ‘Here’s the club rules. Number one, admission by membership only, annual membership five hundred quid, but you can join for one night for fifty if you’re that stupid and that loaded.

“ ‘Here’s the rules for the girls. Number one: no bleedin’ taxman, no national insurance, payment cash-in-’and only. Rule number two: no bleedin’ ’anky-panky on the premises. If you want a bit of extramarital that’s down to you, some of the girls do and some of them don’t. I got birds here earnin’ a couple ton a night, catch my drift? But you go to a bleedin’ hotel or something. I don’t wanna know. I don’t want the filth up ’ere chargin’ me for bein’ a ponce or something.

“ ‘Rule number next: drink as much champers as you can ’old, and pour the rest down the plants when the punter goes to the lavvy. Rule number whatever: strictly don’t get pissed, cos it’s embarrassing, and that’s how you get fired. You gotta wear our little uniform. We give you one, but you go out and get your black tights and your high heels all on your own, and make sure they make yer arse wiggle, nice and sexy. Rule number wotsit: if yer gonna smoke, smoke classy ones, nice and long, white filters, dinky little gold band. No Woodbines, and strictly no bleedin’ roll-ups.’ ”

I sat down again, and Chris said, “You should have been an actress; that was pretty good.”

“Anyway,” I said, “Bergonzi gave me ten pounds to go out and buy the shoes and stockings, and he didn’t even know me. He was nice, really. He said, ‘Thank God for Bob, because the girls keep buggering off and marrying the bloody customers.’

“I nearly didn’t go back. I thought maybe it was bad work for someone like me. You know, I should be in a university somewhere, not in a shitty club dressed up like a cat. It was…how do you say it?”

“Demeaning? Beneath you?”

“Yes, beneath me. It was just a stupid job, you know, nothing important, but I thought, ‘
OK
, it’s plenty of money, and I don’t have to stay long, and it’s a good way to practise English.’

“Next morning I went to Oxford Street, and I bought shoes and stockings, and I looked at all the shops with nice things in, and I thought, ‘Lucky Roza, you can buy these things before too long.’ I went and looked at Leicester Square and Piccadilly, and I looked in the bookshops on Charing Cross Road. I was killing time, as you say. And I had a pizza, and I saw a man who had a big board, and on the board it said that you shouldn’t eat meat because the protein makes you lustful, and if you’re lustful you go to hell. I followed him around a bit because I thought, ‘I never saw anyone like him in Yugoslavia.’ I looked at the pigeons in Trafalgar Square, and I listened to some people playing violin and guitar together at St. Martin’s, on the steps, and then a bloody policeman came and told them to go away, and everyone who’d been listening started shouting at the policeman and telling him to piss off, and I enjoyed that. In Yugoslavia no one tells the police to piss off. Then I got my portrait done by a hippy person who was working on the pavement by the National Gallery, and he made me look like a film star or something. It was nice, I killed a whole day.

“I went to the club at half past nine, and Grill let me in. Bergonzi came and said hello, and he introduced me to a thin woman with red hair called Val, and this Val said she was manageress and she looked after all the girls. After a while I realised that Bergonzi and Val were having an affair, and his wife didn’t know.

“Val was nice. She helped me put on the pussycat suit, and I looked in the mirror and I didn’t know whether to laugh or be angry. I said to Val, ‘I don’t think I want to do this.’

“She said, ‘Bloody ridiculous, innit, love? If I was you I’d just have a good laugh about it. There’s worse things; you could be shagging lepers in the Congo or cleaning bogs in China.’

“I said, ‘I feel stupid,’ and she said, ‘It ain’t you wot’s stupid, it’s the bleedin’ punters who get a kick out of it. What you ’ave to do is say, “It’s them that’s daft, and me wot’s making idiots out of them by lifting their cash.” Simple really.’

“I said, ‘I still don’t think I can do it,’ and Val said, ‘Well, just try it once. If you can’t stand it, don’t come back. Shall we do the make-up?’ And I ended up with great big pussycat eyes, and these whiskers glued to my face.”

Chris laughed and said, “You must have looked very sweet really,” and I said, “You know what? I got to like that pussycat suit. Mine was black with a white front, and it had a sort of hood with ears on, so you only saw my face. It was quite comfortable really. I had to wear white gloves.”