Children of the Archbishop (51 page)

This was life all right, this was. Better than St. Mark's Avenue. Better than South Kensington. Better than Hyde Park Corner. A confirmed roué by now, Ginger allowed himself to be swept away by the rapids in the direction of the whirlpool that the current was making for, the great maelstrom of Piccadilly Circus itself.

And once arrived there, the sheer intoxication of the scene overwhelmed him. It was terrific. For a start, the whirlpool arrangement made such giddy patterns of the traffic. Cars and buses were sucked in from the side tributaries, sent twirling round the rock in the centre and then slung contemptuously away up one of the side canyons. And the noise. Noise on every side. The lovely, discordant, melodious noise of a great city. Motor horns. The clatter of passing feet. Laughter. And paper-sellers shouting out about murders and fires and rail smashes. There were strange surprises, too, hidden in the midst of it all—like an old woman with shoes tied on with string, who was selling bunches of lucky white heather; and a man, rather a distinguished, smart-looking man, wearing a paper-mask, who was trying to interest passers-by in toy pomeranian dogs that yapped and jumped about when he pressed a bulb that was hidden in the palm of his hand.

Then the ladies again, the real ones with the fur coats and the golden curls. There seemed to be a great many of them in this part of London. And, as though all this pageantry, this metropolitan pomp, were not sufficient, the front of the buildings blazed and danced and dazzled with a thousand lights. It was everything that Ginger had ever dreamed of. It was adventure. It was success. It was fulfilment. It was El Dorado. It was Alleluia.

“Cor,” said Ginger. “Bet I've found it. Bet this is St. Paul's. Bet it's St. Paul's, if it isn't Paddington.”

When at last there came a break in the traffic he made his way over to the centre and sat for nearly half an hour on the steps of the statue. And while he was sitting there he had a rather disturbing thought, something that shook the foundations of this whole expedition. By all ordinary rules and according to the Archbishop Bodkin clock, it should have been night-time by now. London ought to have been tucked down and sleeping. And instead of that, it was standing about at street-corners and getting into taxis and enjoying itself. The way it was behaving, it seemed as though it didn't intend to go to bed at all. But in a sense it made it easier. Because it meant that there would be a bus whenever Ginger wanted to return. That was rather a relief, that was. He was quite prepared to walk back to Putney if necessary. But he had come a long way already, and he was feeling rather tired. And sleepy. And hungry.

Because he was hungry, he started to look for a tea-shop. And straight away in Glasshouse Street he found what he was looking for—or thought he had. Not that he was quite sure, because it looked a bit expensive. It was a coffee-stall, the first coffee-stall that Ginger had ever seen. And the appointments, particularly the gleaming copper urn, seemed somewhat on the sumptuous side. But, now that he could actually see food, and smell it, his hunger returned to him worse than ever. Here was food on the most staggering scale. There were great piles of crusty meat pies, and ham sandwiches wrapped up in a clean white napkin with the layers of bright pink ham plainly showing; and a bowl of hard-boiled eggs; and slabs of fruit cake and madeira as thick as hymn-books; and a couple of plates of fancies, mere tit-bits in the cake-line, with dense snow-falls of shredded coconut on top of the pastry.

Ginger edged up nearer so that he could find out what sort of prices the other customers were paying. And this wasn't easy because by the time he got there everybody was eating rather than ordering. And it was while he was standing there that a most extraordinary thing happened. He felt a hand—a friendly, loving sort of hand—pass over the top of his head, and a voice said:

“Hallo, Ginger.”

The fact that the unknown person knew his name astonished him. It was mysterious and creepy. He swung round, hostile and defensive. And it was then that he saw that it was one of those real ladies who was beside him, smiling down at him.

“Having a good time?” she asked.

Ginger blushed. His whole face turned a deep fiery red. And at the sight of it the strange lady tried to stroke his head again. She seemed amused at the idea of anybody's blushing. But Ginger avoided her. He wasn't going to have anyone, not even a lady, messing him about like that. So he pushed his way up to the counter and gave his order loudly. Gave it for the first thing that his eye fell upon.

“Meat pie anner cupper cocoa,” he said authoritatively, as though he never dined off anything else.

A moment later it was slapped down in front of him. Ginger took a bite. And then the awful thing happened.

“Sixpence,” the coffee-stall proprietor said to him.

Ginger blushed again. He knew that the strange lady was listening and he could see that the coffee-stall proprietor wasn't the sort of man to stand any nonsense: he had a black waxed moustache and hard glinty eyes. But what could he do? It wasn't as though the meat pie was still intact. On the contrary, he could see his own teeth-marks in it. And the cocoa had been made specially for him.

“Please, I've only got fivepence,” he said.

“Only got what?” the proprietor asked.

“Please, I've only got fivepence,” Ginger repeated.

And it was then that the strange lady stepped forward.

“Thassallright, Sid,” she said. “I'm paying for him.”

And in the circumstances what could Ginger do? It wasn't the moment to be proud when you'd got your mouth full of something that you couldn't afford to pay for. And, in any case, the strange lady had already taken a shilling out of her little fancy handbag and flipped it on to the counter. There was nothing for it, therefore, but for Ginger to be polite and grateful.

“Fanks,” he said. “Fanks very much.”

It was quite a family party at the coffee-stall, and Ginger liked the atmosphere. Everybody seemed to know everybody. The proprietor, whom the lady called Sid, called her Violet. And other friends kept dropping in. There was a tall thin man with a velvet collar to his coat whom they all called the Captain, and quite a few of the ladies—Mabel, Eve, Doris, and others that Ginger couldn't remember. Not that Violet didn't introduce him. On the contrary, she was most punctilious about it.

“Meet my new boy-friend,” she said to them one by one as
they came sauntering up. And when she wasn't saying that she was inviting Ginger to have some more.

“Have a nice piece of cake, dearie,” she kept on saying. “Better make a good meal now. You never know where the next one's coming from, do you?”

There was quite a crowd at the coffee-stall by now and Ginger was pressed up close against her. She was soft and cushiony, and she was using a thick, heavy kind of scent. It was such strong scent that he wondered if he would ever get it off him. But that wasn't the only thing that he was wondering. The thought that was uppermost in his mind was a simple one. “Wonder what Spud'd say if he could see me now,” he was thinking.

The rest of the night was a confused and jumbled memory even to Ginger himself. After the social interlude at the coffee-stall, Violet explained very politely to Ginger that she had to meet a friend, and moved off into the darkness, mysterious and unobserved. For a moment, Ginger felt quite lost without her. Then, remembering that he had so to speak had the freedom of the place conferred on him, he decided to move off himself.

All the same, he left the Circus very reluctantly. It was easily the best spot that he had struck so far; the best spot in the whole world he reckoned. And the way he was walking, through Hay-market and Trafalgar Square towards Whitehall, it was getting rottener all the time.

It was all right again on the Embankment. There were trams, some of the noisiest trams that Ginger had ever discovered; and a boat of some kind was going down-river, her navigation lights gleaming. He stood looking after her until she disappeared round the bend by Blackfriars.

But Ginger had a new difficulty to contend with now. He was sleepy again. With a meat pie and three pieces of fruit cake inside him, he had a comfortably settled sort of feeling. He decided therefore that he would take a short nap before beginning the long journey back to Putney.

And it was then that he discovered a most extraordinary thing. Purely by luck and without knowing it he had stumbled on London's largest bedroom. There were sleepers on all the benches, old men, old women and figures so nondescript that he couldn't have said
what they were unless he had asked them. With their mufflers and their bundles and their tin kettles and gaping shoes they were quietly dozing. It was, in fact, right into the dormitory of the string population that he had stumbled.

There was even some difficulty in finding a bench for himself—he didn't exactly fancy having any of these for a bedfellow. But he found an empty bench at last and sank down on to it with the rumble of Hungerford Bridge and the rattle of the trams to soothe him.

“Only a short one,” he kept saying to himself. “Just long enough so I don't feel sleepy.”

He was still saying this when he fell asleep. And it was six o'clock next morning when he woke up.

The night that Ginger spent beside the Thames was a notable night also for another member of the Bodkin community. It was in fact, the night upon which Mr. Prevarius ultimately prevailed.

After that disastrous episode in the Cannon Street Station waiting-room with the dark red rose in his lapel wilting from the sheer shame of it, it might well have seemed that everything would be up for ever between Sidney Prevarius and Desirée Standish.

But that would have been reckoning without Mr. Prevarius's remarkable powers of persistence. Indeed, rather than slacken, he redoubled all his efforts. And that was because he felt that he now had a double claim to the lady. He could not forget that, in addition to the tender, anguishing bonds of first love—or love at first sight, rather—he had already paid two separate fees of five guineas apiece for the strangely elementary privilege of meeting his own fiancée.

And so he applied himself. After discovering that letters, postcards, telegrams, even telephone-calls were contemptuously ignored or rejected, Mr. Prevarius resorted to the personal touch. In his best clothes and with a bunch of flowers held all ready in his hand, he started to haunt the Charing Cross Road.

He had already tried the simpler method of seeing Desirée
by ringing up Mr. Spike Jerome and asking for an appointment. Mr. Jerome was always ready to see him, because Mr. Prevarius was not merely a song-writer but a song-hit writer by now. The reception side of the business, however, had been terrible. Desirée had shown Mr. Prevarius in as coldly as if he had been the sanitary inspector, and had kept her nose, her face, her whole being most offensively averted.

What was even worse was the fact that, as Mr. Prevarius emerged into the outer office, Desirée was always on the phone to some unknown, passionate admirer who was apparently offering her the choice of the Savoy, the Berkeley or Quaglino's, with Drury Lane or Covent Garden or the London Hippodrome thrown in as a make-weight.

In the result, Mr. Prevarius became desperate. He planned sudden encounters; shadowings; abduction even. And in the end it was a bunch of blue and green carnations—St. Vitus's Freak they were called—that did the trick. He had been standing out on the pavement for nearly half an hour when Desirée came down the front stairs. And, as soon as he saw her, he slipped forward and thrust the bundle—one dozen each of the blue and the green and ninepenn'orth of maidenhair fern—straight into her arms.

The whole thing was so sudden and unexpected that Desirée offered no resistance. She grabbed hold of the parcel instinctively. And it was there that she made her mistake. Because, once it was in her grasp, there was nothing that she could do about it but stand there and go on holding it. It was too big for her to be able to see over it; and, if she simply let it fall, she was not sure that she would be able to step across it without stumbling.

So, firmly, she mustered all the professional charm she knew and fired off her entire social broadside. Without a quiver in her voice and speaking from somewhere hidden behind the enormous pyramid of damp tissue-paper, she said in her politest voice: “If a gentleman gives a lady flowers it is sometimes politer if he offers to carry them for her.”

After that, of course, Mr. Prevarius knew that everything was going to be all right. And to show that he was ready to make things easy for both of them he pretended that each of them had really known who the other was all the time, and that the Fairy-Prince-and-Beggar-Maid stuff via the Eros Agency had just been so much innocent fun, mere nursery teasing.

Altogether, the whole reunion passed off most agreeably. It
was not, indeed, until quite near the end of the evening, by which time Mr. Prevarius was beginning to wonder how he was going to account to Dr. Trump for his long absence, that he discovered why it was that Desirée had suddenly become so astonishingly forthcoming.

And, at first mention, the reason proved a rather disquieting one: it was simply because she happened at the moment to be quite unusually hard up. This time, moreover, there was no attempt at concealment—nothing about rethatching the stables at the old place down in Sussex; nothing about extra singing lessons for her kid sister in the ballet school; nothing about that brilliant younger brother of hers, the sea-cadet who had just passed out of Sandhurst with all those diplomas and medals and things. No, it was all humble and straightforward and personal. It was the rent of her room, already three weeks overdue, that was worrying her. And the cause of the financial crisis was Mr. Prevarius himself. The fees of the Eros Agency were apparently the same for female clients as for male. And that Cannon Street assignation had cost her ten guineas as well.