Daughter of Riches (60 page)

‘I said no.'

His lip curled and she experienced a flash of fear realising just how vulnerable she was, how alone. Then he shrugged. ‘Suit yourself.'

She watched him walk away then she got up, making for the station entrance. She had to get out, get away. There might be others like him, scouting the platforms, or the police might come around and start asking questions. They might send her home or, worse, take her into care. Debbie had been in care once, a long time ago, but she had never forgotten how she had hated it. The smell of that children's home, disinfectant mingled with cooking cabbage and steamed fish, and the urine smells of the children who wet their beds, had pervaded her nightmares for long afterwards. She was fifteen now but she knew she was still not too old to be taken into care if the authorities decided she should be.

She walked along the street until she came to an alley. In the alley was a doorway stacked high with black plastic rubbish bags. They made an effective barrier. Debbie crawled into the doorway behind them and sat down on her hold all.

This would have to do for tonight. Tomorrow she would find a job and somewhere to stay. Tomorrow she would begin a new life. Tomorrow everything would be different.

When dawn broke Debbie moved on. She was stiff and cold but when she had drunk two cups of coffee and eaten a burger in the station buffet she began to feel better. The attendants there were all different – they did not spare her a second glance though she knew she must look dreadful. The most important thing was to have a wash and brush-up – no-one would consider giving a job to a girl who had so obviously been sleeping rough.

Debbie was on her way to the station cloakroom when she noticed the entrance leading to the Great Western Hotel. It looked wonderfully plush – just the sort of place she hoped to be frequenting soon. Well – why not begin now? Debbie gave her hair a quick comb, licked her finger and removed any smudged eye make-up, then walked boldly up the steps and in through the impressive doorway, past an entrance leading to a restaurant with a foreign-sounding name. On her right was the hotel reception, on her left a broad staircase. Trying to look for all the world as if she had every right to be there she turned up the stairs, following the sign marked ‘Bathrooms'. At every moment she expected someone to call out and ask where she thought she was going but no one did. The Ladies' Bathroom at the top of the stairs was very big, very grand, and deserted-Debbie washed in a huge china basin – big enough to bath a baby in, she thought – and made up in front of the mirror. She changed her cotton polo for a black halter top and her sandals for the high white plastic boots. Then, head held high, she went back down the stairs and on to the station. Again no one challenged her.

At a news stand she bought a London paper and sat down to scan the small ads, circling in biro one or two accommodation addresses. But there was no point flat-hunting until she had a job to pay the rent. Filled with a sense of purpose Debbie flicked through the pages to find the situations vacant, and one leaped out at her almost at once – a club advertising for hostesses.

Debbie circled that too in biro and looked in her purse for small change for the telephone. Then she changed her mind; she wouldn't telephone – she'd leave it until nearer lunchtime and then just go there. What was more, she would arrive in style. A taxi fare would use quite a bit of her precious store of money, but so what? She wanted to impress. Start as you mean to go on, Debbie told herself.

She waited a couple of hours, watching the trains come and go, while excitement built up inside her. Then she crossed to the line of taxis waiting for fares and went boldly up to the one at the front of the queue.

‘Benny's Club, please,' she said.

Afterwards, when she knew a great deal more about London and its clubland, Debbie came to realise just how fortunate she had been to pick on Benny's Club.

Benny's was prestigious – the rich, the famous and the titled came here as well as the lonely far-from-home businessman. It was also respectable and Benny himself was a charming aristocratic man who reminded Debbie of a Scottish laird – certainly not in the least what she had expected in a nightclub owner. He interviewed her with perfect courtesy, his shrewd eyes looking beyond the waif-like appearance and the cheap clothes and seeing a classically beautiful young face half hidden by a cloud of bleached and backcombed hair, and a figure that was lissom and shapely beneath the inelegant halter top and psychedelic mini skirt. He was also impressed by her demeanour, calm and apparently confident, though not brassy like some he saw, in spite of her youth.

‘How old are you?' he asked.

Debbie had expected this question and was ready for it.

‘I'm eighteen,' she lied. ‘I shall be nineteen in the spring.'

Benny nodded. He was not sure whether he believed her or not. It was difficult to tell when girls were made-up whether they were adding a year or two to their ages. But certainly this one would pass for nineteen – especially by the time he had finished with her.

Benny made his decision and hired her on the spot.

‘You'll have to have new clothes,' he told her. ‘And do something about your hair. It looks as though you have been dragged through a bush backwards. Now – where do you live?'

‘I don't have anywhere to stay yet. I only arrived …' (she just managed to stop herself saying ‘ yesterday') ‘today.'

‘Right. I am going to place you in Grace's hands. Grace is one of my dancers. She has been here a good while and knows the ropes. She will tell you how to behave, give you advice about your appearance and help you find a room. Do as Grace says and I think you'll do very nicely. Now, I'd better give you something in advance of your wages so that you can get yourself kitted out, hadn't I? It's a small flat rate wage, the rest you make up in commission and tips, but you understand that I expect.'

‘Yes,' Debbie lied. She did not have the faintest idea what he was talking about.

Grace was an elegant ebony-skinned beauty, nearly six feet tall and lissom. At first she was a little impatient of having to take the new girl under her wing but after they had visited a hairdressing salon, where Debbie's bleached frizz was turned into a tumble of blonde curls, and shopped for clothes together they had established a rapport, and Grace was even suggesting Debbie should move into her flat rather than looking for a room elsewhere.

‘I could do with someone to help me pay the rent but I wouldn't ask any of those other bitches at the club. Most of them have it in for me because I'm a dancer.'

Debbie looked puzzled and Grace explained – the hierarchy at Benny's was quite explicit – dancers were definitely ‘ top of the heap' as she put it, on the next rung down were the showgirls who posed, scantily clad, in the cabaret, beneath them came the hostesses. Dancers and showgirls earned a good deal more than hostesses and their earnings were also supplemented by the same perks because invariably a patron would request that the dancer or showgirl who had taken his fancy should join him at his table between performances. There was a good commission on any drink a girl could persuade her benefactor to buy for her, understandably so, since the girls were forbidden to order anything other than champagne or Bucks Fizz.

‘I always seem to be short of money though,' Grace wailed. ‘ It runs through my fingers like water. Are you any good at keeping a check on bills and things? I'm hopeless. I've had the electricity and telephone cut off more times than I care to mention. I just forget to pay the damned things and when I do remember I'm skint. Will you help me keep an eye on that sort of thing?'

Debbie nodded. Personally she hated not knowing exactly how she stood financially and she was not naturally extravagant. The taxi had been more of an investment than a luxury – and it seemed to have paid off!

‘We might even be able to turn a trick or two together,' Grace added speculatively, watching Debbie strip off to try on a white halter-necked evening gown. ‘We'd make a good pair – you small and fair, me big and black. Men like variety in bed.'

Debbie was shocked. ‘But I thought …'

‘That we weren't supposed to do things like that?'

‘Yes.' Benny had been quite explicit in his instructions. No encouraging amorous advances from the clientele and definitely no selling sexual favours or she would find herself out of a job – fast.

Grace laughed. ‘Look, sweetie, what Benny doesn't know won't harm him. A girl has to make a living for God's sake! Besides, he soon enough turns a blind eye if one of his best customers takes a fancy to a girl. Just don't make it too obvious and you'll be all right. My gentlemen are ‘‘friends” not clients – get it?'

Debbie did. But she was determined not to ‘ turn any tricks' if she could avoid it. What Grace was suggesting might be a vast improvement on what the pimp on Paddington station had had to offer but it wasn't the way she saw her future. She had come to London to make something of herself – and call girl, high class or not, was definitely not on the agenda!

Six weeks later and Debbie had still managed to avoid becoming part of one of Grace's ‘threesomes' though sometimes, she had to admit, the temptation to earn a little extra money was very strong. There had been an Arab prince, very handsome and very rich, who had taken a fancy to her and who had had a fine fit of pique when she declined his advances, and a well-known TV personality who had suggested she visit him at his Maidenhead home when his wife was away, but Debbie had resisted him too. Grace had called her all kinds of fool and asked what was wrong about having a good time and getting paid for it – in kind if not in cash – but Debbie remained stubborn. She could not explain to Grace the revulsion she felt at the thought of going to bed with a man, particularly one she scarcely knew. She did not want to talk about the disgusting Barry and the things he had made her do, she wanted to forget them and she thought that if she never had to let a man lay a finger on her again she would be happy. Besides, she was fairly sure Grace would not understand. Grace loved sex and everything about it, she loved men, she loved ‘getting laid'. If there were also financial inducements and expensive presents they were just the icing on the cake. Grace was, Debbie thought, the most sensual woman imaginable, proud of her beautiful black body and the response it could excite in men, gloriously voluptuously uninhibited about her own enjoyment. But the pleasures of the sexual romps which she recounted in graphic detail, licking her full red lips and running her hands over her own shapely body as the memory excited her, only made Debbie feel slightly sick, though she managed to hide her reaction from Grace. Sometime, she supposed, she would have to succumb. But not yet … not yet! For the moment her plans were working out very nicely – and they required every bit of her energies.

From the moment she had realised the hostesses were the lowest order in club life Debbie had made up her mind to better herself. She was not statuesque enough for a show girl, she knew, but there was no reason why she should not be a dancer. She had a good sense of rhythm and as far as she could see the routines performed by the girls at Benny's were scarcely demanding. Once the rent and her share of the electricity and telephone bills were paid Debbie put every penny she could save towards dancing classes and a modelling course, which had been Grace's idea.

‘You'd be wonderful in glamour,' she had said. ‘You've got just the right face – and shape. But you need a portfolio to get going. I can give you the name of a marvellous photographer if you like. He's a doll, and he loves women – that's why he photographs them so well.' She grinned. ‘He might even break your ice-maiden's heart!'

Debbie said nothing. She knew that good photographs could be a horrendous expense even if she avoided the rip-off merchants but if Grace was implying ‘her' photographer would do the job cheaply, or even free, in exchange for a tumble in the dark room, then tough! The photographs would just have to wait until she had saved up enough to get them done legitimately.

As for having her heart broken – Debbie was quite determined that should not happen. Perhaps one of these days she was going to have to loosen up a little for the sake of ambition if nothing else. But just at the moment she could not imagine what the circumstances would be. She was not going to prostitute herself and she was not going to fall headlong in love with the wrong man. It would be far too distracting, she decided.

And then she met Louis Langlois and overnight everything changed – her values, her resolutions, her plans. She met Louis Langlois and fell in love and knew that nothing in her life would ever be the same again.

What was it about Louis, she sometimes wondered in later years, that had had such a devastating effect? He was handsome, yes, heart-stoppingly so, especially dressed as he had been the night she had met him, in DJ and black tie, his frilly-fronted shirt somehow only accentuating the absolute maleness of him. But plenty of the men who came to Benny's were handsome – film stars and pop singers, peacocks every one – and the Arab prince had possibly been more handsome than any of them. Louis was obviously well off – the cut of his suit and the solid gold cuff links and rings he wore announced serious money, even if Debbie was not yet experienced enough to recognise a Carrier watch or handmade shoes. But again this was no novelty. Every man who came to Benny's had money to spend – if he had not he would not be there. No, it was something else, something quite indefinable and quite devastating, charm and power and the most potent brand of animal sex appeal all rolled into one and spiced with something else. For a long time Debbie could never make out what that something was. Only years afterwards did she come to realise. It was evil.

The night she met Louis had been a trying one. Debbie had been assigned to a visiting Swiss businessman who spoke little English, and since she had lied to Benny about her linguistic ability the man had been led to believe, quite wrongly, that she spoke – or at least understood – both French and German. Luckily for Debbie the man liked the sound of his own voice and Debbie had been able to keep her side of the conversation to the occasional ‘oui' and ‘non', smiling sweetly all the while, but by the time the second cabaret show was over he was beginning to want to do more than talk, pressing his leg against hers under the table and brushing her breast with the back of his hand.