Alfie (12 page)

‘Sorry, Alfie,’ she said, and her face came over real guilty. She’d a kind of oval face – you don’t see so many of those sort of faces around on working girls. I was sorry I’d spoke. She looked upset at being found out. I said to myself: Alfie, she’s as sensitive as you are! Yet no doubt the shock must have done her good.

‘Annie, I’m nearly ready,’ I said.

‘I’ll give you a brush down, Alfie,’ she said, ‘not be a 
tick.’ That’s what I like to see – a willing woman. One volunteer is worth four pressed men. She wiped her hands and took hold of the clothes-brush and began to brush me down. That’s the beauty of a gal like Annie, the light touch. I’ve had some birds brush me down and it’s been like being birched in a Sauna bath – you’re black and blue when they’re through.

‘Shall I say you’ll be back about seven, Alfie?’ she said.

‘You can
say
what you want, gal,’ I said, ‘no harm in that. But whether or not I’ll be back is another matter entirely. You have something ready and if I’m here I’ll eat it, and if I ain’t here I won’t. It’s as simple as that.’ You’ve got to make yourself clear with a bird – it’s always on the watch-out for doubts. I didn’t want to carry it too far because as soon as I get uppity it seems something brings me down.

‘Know what, Annie,’ I said, ‘you’re quite a nice looking gal, you are straight, only you need to brighten yourself up. You don’t want to mope around scrubbin’ and washin’ and thing’ all the time – thinkin’ that’s a way out. That’s nearly as bad as anything else. You can dope yourself with work like some people do with drink. You want to shake yourself right out of it.’ That was as far as I wanted to go with what I knew about her. ‘So long, gal.’

‘Take care of yourself, Alfie,’ she said.

‘Make yourself a nice little pot of tea,’ I said, ‘and get your feet up.’ I thought how that must be the only bird in my life I’d had to give that advice to. 

‘Yes I will,’ she said, ‘as soon as you’ve gone.’

But I could see she wouldn’t. She’d put that record on again, about the geezer who’d want her when she didn’t want him, and she’d start scrubbing and polishing and washing all my socks and shirts. Still, I suppose we’ve all got to get through life the one way we know. You’ve got to have a bit of charity in your outlook on others.

I drove off in this second-hand Vauxhall Velox I’d bought handy. You never want to buy a doctor’s used motor-car, because they’re in and out of the car all the time, out visiting patients, and though the mileage might be low on the clock, the doors and driving-seat are worn out. You can always replace an engine but you can’t replace them.

As I was driving over Lambeth Bridge the sun was shining and there was a lovely little view of Westminster and the City, so that even I stopped to have a look, and I thought what a cracking little place London is on a sunny Sunday morning.

It was a pity I’d had to leave little Annie behind, but of course I couldn’t have taken her with me, because I’m off to visit this Ruby. I don’t know any feeling much nicer than you’re saying good-bye to one bird to go off to meet another. Whoever said a change was as good as a rest must have had birds in mind. It sort of re-charges all your batteries. Now Ruby’s one of these women who go in for Sunday
lunch-time
drinks. It seems quite a number of these toffs go in for 
that sort of lark, having a few mates call in and knocking back these gin cocktails made up of Martini, then eating a few nuts and seeing ’em all off about half past one in the afternoon and going to bed with the
Sunday Express
and the
News of the World
. But she don’t seem to want me to meet her friends, so she just makes it a party for two.

I got past the porter all right, and then went up in the lift to the sixth floor, and along the corridor to Ruby’s flat. I rang the bell and waited. She always makes me wait. She thinks I don’t know her game but I do. She likes to keep me in my place, see. For myself I would prefer not to mix with birds from a different station in life – because sooner or later they’re going to let you see it – if they don’t do it in touches along the way. I rang it pretty quick again and kept my finger on it. It doesn’t do to let a bird go too far. She opened the door sharp: ‘What are you so impatient about?’ she said.

She was wearing a new pink frilly housecoat with a low front and she hadn’t too much on underneath. ‘What do you think?’ I whispered into her ear. Knowing her weakness I thought it best to get steaming in at the start, so I put my arms round her and start kissing her quietly, putting the tension on when I feel the current’s got going inside her.

Did I say
early
thirties? Well, on much closer inspection up and down I think I’d put her in her
late
thirties. She could be thirty-seven or thirty-eight, in fact she could be forty, top-weight. But she’s in beautiful condition. And when I say beautiful condition I don’t mean she’s in
hard
condition, like you get a good little working pony, but in perfect
soft
condition, like you get a filly that’s been out to 
grass, not overworked, and is sleek, fat, round and has got a lovely glossy coat and is in good nick and rearing to go.

‘Don’t kiss me on the ear,’ she said, in a funny throaty voice, ‘you know what it does to me.’ One minute she’s a big woman keeping me waiting at the door and the next she melts like a child in my arms. I mean at times she’s like a child with a lollipop – she’s no sooner coming to the end of one than she has one eye open for the next. No man – if he’s human – can accommodate that. Well, up to a point I can. But only up to a point.

‘I can handle it,’ I said.

‘Give yourself time to take your jacket off,’ she said.

‘I don’t need to get my jacket off,’ I said.

I was just breaking free in a crafty way to get my breath and my bearings when she got hold of me and gave me one of her long passionate kisses. I won’t go into detail, except to say that the feeling it left me with was almost exactly the same as I used to get when I was on the Preston run with a big lorry one time, and my landlady up there, Mrs Bickerstaffe, used to give me a great feed of cow-heel pie for dinner. You get a feeling of being full up right to the tonsils.

‘I think I’ll have a drink first,’ I said, when I did get my breath.

She went straight to the cocktail cabinet. I will say this for Ruby – she’s not a dawdler. She knows what she wants and if there’s any going she’s going to get it.

‘What will you have?’ she said in her best cut-glass voice.

I could see she wanted to get the formalities over and get down to business. I felt a large tumbler of egg flip wouldn’t have been out of place. ‘I think I’ll have 
a whisky,’ I said. ‘A Dimple Haig, if you’ve got it.’ I knew she hadn’t. And to be quite frank I wouldn’t know Dimple Haig from Long Tom except for the shape of the bottle, but I find I like reeling off a name now and again.

‘I’ve got no Dimple,’ she said, ‘but I’ve got a Grant’s.’

‘A Grant’s Standfast?’ I said, ‘That’ll do nicely.’ I know it’s a lot of play-acting but I get a kick out of throwing these little names about.

She poured me out what she must have thought was a generous whisky, but I find they never give me quite enough. But to be honest I’ve never met a woman yet who could be said to be liberal with the old whisky. I had a taste of it and it struck me that whisky wasn’t what I wanted just then. I had this cow-heel pie taste. It must have been her tongue or something.

‘Here, you ain’t got a beer have you?’ I said, ‘a light ale or something – I’d fancy a chaser.’ A Scotch word that, chaser; it’s catching on down here.

‘I’ve got some canned Pilsner in the fridge,’ she said.

‘That’s a gal,’ I said as she went into the little kitchen. Having got her hooked I felt I could play my cards easy. I looked round the flat – all off business expenses, I’ll bet, and yet the working man has to pay his own bus fare. She came in pouring the beer into a long glass. She just didn’t want to waste any time.

‘Good health,’ I said.

‘Cheers,’ she said, lifting her glass of brandy and ginger ale.

Here, that brandy reminds me of a funny thing about women in general, but more about Ruby, and I may as 
well get it out now whilst it’s on my mind. The first time I took her out I says to her: ‘What you having?’ So she says, ‘A brandy and ginger ale. A Hennessey if they’ve got it.’ That’s going to set me back a bit, I thought. Still I’ll do anything once. So I go up to the bar and come back with a brandy and ginger ale and a light ale for myself. Now when we’d drunk up, I wait a minute to see if she’s going to dip into her bag and at least
offer
to pay. But she don’t. So I says to her: ‘What you having?’ and she says: ‘Same again – a brandy and ginger ale.’ She’s coming it a bit strong, I thinks – so I more or less cock a deaf ’un, and I go up to the bar and this time I come back with two light ales. I put one in front of her and one in front of me. So she stares at them and she looks at me and she says: ‘What’s that?’ and I says: ‘A light ale.’ And she says: ‘But I’m a
brandy
drinker.’ So I says to her: ‘That might be, but I ain’t a brandy
buyer
. If you want a brandy and ginger ale, you go and get yourself one.’

Now it was touch and go for a minute, if you see what I mean. But then she saw where she stood. The light must have dawned on her. She drank her light ale and we got on beautifully. In fact she got her hand into her bag and paid the next round – and had her brandy and ginger ale, to which she was entitled. In fact, I had one too to keep her company. With women like that you’ve got to know your own mind. And I’ve always said that most women don’t mind paying, what a woman doesn’t like is being under obligation. They start growing resentful under it.

‘Know what, Ruby,’ I said, after I’d had a drink of this ice-cold Pilsner, ‘I think them fridges take the taste 
out of everything. Things taste more of
cold
than they do of what they should taste of.’

A mate of mine bought his wife a fridge and he reckons his stomach hasn’t been right since. He wants a drink of milk and he takes a sup from the bottle out of the fridge and it chills his stomach. Matter of fact, I do believe anything too cold paralyses your taste buds, if you see what I mean. I reckon you can’t beat the old-fashioned box larder with perforated zinc round for keeping things at the right temperature. Ruby wasn’t going to be drawn.

‘Ruby,’ I said, ‘a small favour—’

‘What’s that?’ she said.

‘Will you not stick your nails into me like you did last Wednesday? You left bloody great long scratches all down my back.’

She laughed: ‘It was worth it, wasn’t it?’ she said.

It was for you, I thought. Great long weals they were – dug her nails right in she did. I took another drink of the whisky and chased it down with the lager.

‘I thought I’d put my brand on you,’ she said. ‘Keep the others off.’

‘What others?’ I said.

‘The others,’ she said.

Somebody’s been talking to her, I thought. It must be that time I took her to the club and Sharpey and Perce were there.

She’s had these two husbands. Both dead. And as I gave my back a rub it struck me that I had a bleeding good idea what they must have died of. She don’t spare you.

‘Don’t put your cold glass on my polished table,’ she 
said. She thinks more of her polished table than she do of my poor back, I thought. Still it had almost been worth it – at the time. Nearly everything is worth it at the time. I suppose they’ve got to have their bit of pleasure as well.

‘Don’t be so fussy,’ I said. I play up to them a bit and then I find I’m off going my own way. I chanced to knock a rose out of a big bowl she had on this table and she put it back and began to arrange them. She looked at me and said: ‘Do you ever think of taking flowers to your lady friends, Alfie?’

‘I often think about it,’ I said, ‘but I never do it. Not unless they’re in hospital.’

When I said that the memory suddenly came back to me about the bunch of freesias I’d taken to little Gilda that time she’d gone into hospital to have Malcolm. A thought will often drop in on me like that, a little moment from the past, you could say, and for a second the inside of me lights up with these faces that have gone. Know what – it makes you feel like a bleeding old man. I mean I could even see his face – his two faces come to that, what he was as an infant and what he was when they took him away from me. I came over choked at the thought. Because that’s something they can never make up again to you – a child’s only a child once. And there in front of me is this big lustbox Ruby, and I felt like picking up this big bowl of roses and flinging them through the bloody window and straight down on to the pavement outside. I mean just for a minute that ponced-up flat made me feel sick. Of course I controlled myself. You’ve got to.

‘What’s up, Alfie?’ she said.

‘Nothing,’ I said. 

I got up and went to her bathroom. I must admit she had a smashing bath, put in special, primrose yellow, with all these mirrors round no matter which way you looked. Agreed it got a bit tight-fitting with the two of us in, she was some size was Ruby, but I’d had lots of fun splashing about and whatnot. The tricks we’d got up to in that bath. Yes, there were times when I’d felt lucky to step out of it alive. This Gilda had definitely misguided me. She’d made out she couldn’t live without me – but she could. It’s not playing the game really.

‘I’m not fussy, am I?’ said Ruby, coming in the bathroom behind me, and putting her arms round me. What can you do?

‘You are fussy,’ I said.

‘I’m not fussy,’ she said and she put her arms round the back of my neck and started kissing me and pressing her middle against me.

‘You’re a proper little sex-pot, ain’t you,’ I said.

‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I’m a sex-pot but I’m not fussy. Am I, Alfie?’

Know what, she seemed to have a tender look or something in her eye. As though I’d hurt her. She’s mumsie inside as well as outside, I thought, if she’d only give way to it. ‘Course you’re not,’ I said and I kissed her. I quite like the smell of a bathroom – I mean all the mixed smells hanging about. And you can’t be seen. I started slipping off her housecoat. After all, life has to go on. And same as I say, she’s in such beautiful condition.