A Five Year Sentence (13 page)

‘Felix,' he said. ‘It's a silly name, I know,' he added, playing for time to think of an appropriate handle. ‘Hawkins,' he said suddenly. ‘Felix Hawkins.' His first, and so far, only client would have been flattered.

‘Are you a retired man?' she said. She framed the question in such a way as to place him in a specific class, to give him a status. Had she simply asked if he had retired, it might have hinted at his old age or possibly failure.

‘No,' he said. ‘I have a little business.'

‘Oh yes,' she said, and waited for him to elaborate.

‘I sell services,' he said.

‘That's interesting,' Mrs Makins said politely. ‘What sort of services?'

‘My own,' he said.

‘I don't quite understand you.'

What the hell, he thought, he need never see her again if he didn't so choose, and it was worth a try in the hope of a new client. But even though he was prepared to be totally honest, he couldn't find words to explain the nature of his trade. He wasn't really selling anything, because even after he had sold it, he still had it, like any respectable call-girl. ‘It's hard to explain,' he said. ‘It's – well, if you want anything, I'll sell it to you.'

‘Such as?' she said.

Then he was stuck again, reluctant to spell out particulars. ‘Well,' he said, ‘let me put it this way. I only deal with women.'

They both listened to the shattering silence that ensued. Then Brian quickly finished his tea in case she should show him the door.

‘That's very interesting,' Mrs Makins said softly, and from the tone of her voice she was clearly more than interested. ‘Would you like some more tea?' she said.

He passed her his cup and as she poured, she said, ‘I've never met anyone in your trade before.'

‘Oh there are hundreds of us,' Brian said, hoping that quantity was a guarantee of legality. ‘I know at least half a dozen personally.'

‘But how do you get your clients?' she said.

Brian noticed that her accent was suddenly very upper-class as if to give official licence to a vocation that, looked squarely in its common face, was downright salacious. She indicated, without doubt, a personal interest in the goods he had for sale, and she was anxious, for her own sake, to give them class.

Brian munched happily on a second piece of cake. ‘I meet them quite by accident,' he said, and then added, at only a small risk, ‘rather as I met you.'

She laughed, a gay little aristocratic tinkle, and Brian began to have some idea of what her little quirks were.

‘D'you have a list of services?' she said.

The woman cottoned on very quickly, and Brian hardly knew his luck. He put his hand in his inside pocket, and drew out a folded parchment. This one, he had decorated with houses and all signs of habitation, indicating some domestic security in the services rendered. Brazenly he handed it over. She took a pair of glasses and held them over her eyes. She refused to fix them firmly on her ears, holding them all the time, as if to give him the impression that glasses were only a very occasional need of hers and not permanent enough to warrant fixture. He watched her as she read. Occasionally she let out a well-born sigh or a courtly giggle. Brian began to calculate his income with confidence. She read the list to the end, and by the angle of her lowered eyes, she was clearly reading the more expensive services with interest and relish. ‘May I keep this?' she said.

‘Are you interested?'

‘Certainly,' she said. ‘But are you discreet?'

‘I wish I could name some of my satisfied clients,' he said, ‘but secrecy must be part of such a service.' He sighed, well satisfied with himself.

‘Well, in that case, I am interested,' she said. ‘With the smaller services,' she added quickly. ‘I don't know how many of the others I shall need.' She took in a quick and genteel breath, regretting perhaps that she had been so forward. ‘Shall I clear away the tea-things?' she said. ‘Then we can start. I'll draw the curtains, if you don't mind.'

Suddenly Brian did mind very much. He was not prepared for her eagerness, and besides he had no notion of what to do. He'd had so little practice. He tried to reason with himself that this was as good a time as any to start, but he was too nervous to take the sudden plunge. ‘I'd love to,' he said, ‘but I do have a client this afternoon and she lives quite a long way away.' He saw the disappointment on her face. ‘I'm sorry,' he said, ‘but we could make another time.' He took out his diary and opened it, furtively trying to hide from her its emptiness. ‘What about tomorrow,' he said, ‘round about this time? I could give you as long as you require.' He was happy with his choice of word.
Services were not wanted; such a word hinted at lust. They were required, they were needed to keep the wheels of whatever it was smoothly turning.

‘Tomorrow would do very nicely,' she said. She took him to the door. ‘I wonder,' she said, as he was leaving, ‘would you mind very much if tomorrow you came and went by the back entrance? You understand,' she said, ‘in case it will be regular, the neighbours will be very curious.'

‘Of course,' he said, ‘I would have done that in any case.'

‘Ta-ta then,' she said, her accent suddenly slipping. ‘Till tomorrow.'

He closed the gate after him, and walked briskly down the road, needing to prove his hurry in case she was watching him through the window. He was already regretting that he hadn't served her there and then, fearing perhaps that by the morning she might have second, and more respectable, thoughts. And what guarantee did he have that he could function at all. He needed practice, and above all confidence, which could only be fed by a client's satisfaction. For a moment he thought of going back to Violet, claiming that he'd made a mistake over the day of his appointment. But that would give an impression of non-professionalism which could certainly go hand in hand with indiscretion. And he had his goodwill to maintain. No, he would go straight home and sit quietly in his bedroom and think carefully how to handle the trade he'd been landed with. He concluded that for a man of enterprise it was indeed an easy and profitable calling, and he wondered whether indeed there were as many in the profession as he had sworn to Mrs Makins.

When he got home, he unpacked his shopping.

‘Are you back then?' his mother said, staring at him and seething with neglect.

He looked with disgust at the puddle at her feet, while she looked at it with pleasure, as if she'd kept a promise she'd made to him when he went out. The need to get rid of her was becoming almost an obsession with him. He was glad he had other things to contemplate, for he was encouraged by his day's sortie, but still fearful of his own ability to capitalise on it. He looked
at his mother with abject loathing. ‘It's all your fault,' he shouted at her, and she, understanding the fault to be the puddle, welcomed his angry irritation, promising herself to repeat the performance each one of his working afternoons. It only took two extra glasses of water to perform, a small inconvenience for such a rich pay-off. He went into the kitchen for the mop, and leaning on it, he calculated his possible turnover. Two more clients like Mrs Makins, and all of them wanting his whole range of services, could clinch The Petunias for as long as the old bitch survived. The thought cheered him, and he went back to the sitting-room. ‘Well you can't help it, can you, my dear?' he said, placing his hand on her knee. His sudden kindness threw her, and gave her little reason for further battle.

‘You'll be glad when I'm gone though, won't you?' she said, hanging on for dear life to the frayed remnant of their bickering.

‘What will I do without you?' he said, as he always said. That was his signature on the truce, whether she liked it or not. She watched him mop the floor, and she tried to reap some satisfaction from that. But his irritation had clearly evaporated. ‘I bought you some chocolate,' he said. It was his final declaration of armistice, and her watering mouth disarmed her.

By Monday, Miss Hawkins' scarf had angered another foot and a half. The more aware she became of the new and exciting turn in her life, the more she cursed its long delay. Now her mind was continuously filled with orphanage thoughts and the blight that matron had scarred her with. So she knitted and knitted, and as she plained away she read and re-read Brian's bill of fare, and set to knitting again. But on this Monday morning she folded it neatly away because she had other things to do. She was going to bake Brian a cake, and lay the tea-table with infinite care. She had bought a bottle of cheap port, thinking that she might need a tonic for her failing courage. Brian was new at the game too, so he too might be grateful for a stiffener. She set the bottle and two glasses discreetly at the side. When she was ready, the morning was still young and she was faced with the daily task of the diary's order. Although the day was likely to be eventful enough, and with enough data for a formal diarist to be proud of, she could not help but regard the diary as a book of challenges. That was how it had begun, with the small and timid order to forage for survival. The tone of its commands had changed. They had become more daring, and she was determined to maintain the high standards of risk that she set herself. But today presented a problem. What she had committed herself to do was daring in itself, and to simply inscribe ‘Acquitted myself,' would have been challenge enough. But she needed something even more reckless to honour the diary's purpose.

She looked again at Brian's list, and for the hundredth time totted up the prices of the first service section. If she were to treat herself to each one of them, her total investment would be a little over £2. For in her mind there was no doubt that it was
an investment, unorthodox she knew, but a way, and a pleasant one, Brian had assured her, of putting something by. The investment itself, according to Brian's promises, carried little risk, but not enough for Miss Hawkins, who by now had become intrepid enough to flaunt the minimal chance. She was becoming more and more daring, tempted each day to the margins of the impossible. A £2 investment was clearly more than she could afford, but still it constituted no risk. She would invest double, she decided, even if it meant overlapping into the second service section, which she blushed to read, leave alone imagine herself as recipient. So she opened her diary to the current page, and inscribed, ‘Brian came to tea. I spent £4.' She locked the book with the golden key and hid it on the larder shelf.

She started to make preparations for their rendezvous. She loaded the tea-trolley with her best china, a dish of assorted biscuits, and the freshly baked cake. She had second thoughts about the bottle of port and decided that on the side table it looked too exposed, so she hid it with the glasses on the lower level of the trolley. She didn't want Brian to think she had bought it expressly for their first business exchange, so she opened it and poured herself a generous helping which she sipped in the course of making her other arrangements. She wheeled the trolley into the sitting-room and put on all the lights, then she drew the curtains, shutting out the morning sun. She picked Maurice off the wall, and with a whispered apology for disturbing him, she took him into the bedroom and hid his faceless moustache under the bed. Back in the sitting-room, she took the list and propped it open on the mantelpiece, facing the settee, where she presumed the business would operate. She sat down and judged the distance from the mantelpiece for easy reading, and for a need to keep a check on her spending. She adjusted the settee until her vision was perfect, then she moved over to the door to take in a master-view of the room. It looked very romantic, she decided, conducive to the business in hand. She took another sip of port to give herself courage for the encounter, for she had to admit to a growing nervousness, and she wished he would come quickly so that she could get it over
with and tick off the order in her little book. She opened her handbag and checked on her change. Her money, all four pounds of it, was in small denominations. She intended to pay as she bought. She had gone to the bank especially for the purpose of changing the notes, otherwise Brian, lacking the right change, might have talked her into the idea of hire-purchase, and it was a principle with her never to buy anything that you couldn't pay for on the nail. She stacked the money in neat little piles on the small table next to the settee. She intended to sit on that side, so that payment would be discreet and handy.

By lunchtime, Miss Hawkins' preparations were complete. She had bathed and put on her best dress, but she had retained her slippers to offset the formality of her appearance, and to give the casual air of the ordinary to an extraordinary event. In small and nervous sips, she had managed to down half the bottle of port, and she felt aglow. Her erstwhile nervousness now focused only on whether her home-baked sponge was up to standard. And to settle that small anxiety, she cut herself a small slice, dunking it in her port, and found it satisfactory. There was nothing more to do now than to wait for him. She sat down on her side of the settee, and read off the items in the first and second section, slowly and carefully, as if her eyes were being tested on an optician's chart. The final section of Brian's services was concealed under the fold. She would not be needing those services today, certainly not today, and probably never. Never, never, she said to herself. Even if she had an appetite for them, they were certainly beyond her means, so costly indeed, that they were hardly worth bargaining for, for even at half their price she could not afford them. Yet she had to admit they made very exciting reading. She took the folder from the mantelpiece and revealed the category of unattainables. She snuggled into the corner-angle of uncut moquette and read them aloud. There was a gradual build-up of services and prices, and the final offer, the most, she assumed, Brian or any of his kind was capable of serving, was charged at the princely sum of £50. The reading of the service itself thrilled her almost beyond control and its fee was almost more exciting, and she saw through her woollen
slippers the frenetic movement of her wiggling toes. She wished that he would come. She read the section over again, trying to convince herself that the reading of it was enough, and praying that it would always be enough and that she should never seek to translate it into practical terms, even if Brian was to give it her for nothing. But above all she prayed that her diary would never order her to it. Miss Hawkins had long ago dispensed with God in any religious form, but she still clung to the estates of heaven and hell and there was no doubt in her orphan-washed mind that non-virgins, if unmarried, went straight to the fire without any right of appeal. Without using any of the words, matron had always made that very clear. She remembered the special talk matron gave to the small cluster of girls as they left for their first working day at the For Your Pleasure factory. They were all highly excited. The prospect of freedom, with the added bonus of unlimited sweets was intoxicating, and it was difficult to concentrate on the final words of wisdom and warning with which matron burdened her departing wards. Although they were now free of her, and need never, in the whole of their lives look upon her angry face again, she had so conditioned them to fear that they trembled even on the brink of their parole, and listened, as they had always listened, to her sour words of hate, mistrust and hell-fire warnings. ‘Never forget what you came from,' she told them. ‘What you came from is nothing and that is easy to remember. You have no fathers, and your mothers don't count, for they are fallen women, fallen in the sight of God.'