The Petticoat Men (10 page)

A big tall man in a gold and black uniform with a gold and black hat to match suddenly stood right in front of us.

‘Now then,’ he said looming over us as if he was a policeman. ‘I dont want any trouble from you,’ he said to Freddie. What a rude fellow.

‘Excuse me,’ I said. ‘It’s a free country,’ and from the corner of my eye I saw Freddie smile slightly but he put his hand on top of mine where it rested on his arm, as if to walk me away, but I stood my ground. ‘Could we pass, officer?’ I said in my best elegant-haughty voice.

The Beadle (as I found they were called) looked at Freddie and looked at me and next thing he’s
staring down my bosom
!

‘She’s real, is she? No stuffing dropping out of her like it did out of you last time I seen you here?’

He was still staring down at me, and I felt my cheeks go all red and my mouth go open in sort of amazement, Freddie was guiding me past but now I was feeling for my sharp stone in the pocket of my cloak, I would’ve scratched his rude fat face hard, only just at that moment one of the stylish ladies cried
Thief!
in a very loud voice next to us and the Beadle ran fatly after a thin man who was slipping like a snake through the crowd and me and Freddie looked at each other and I grinned to show it was all right, so he did too, and so we continued walking, past gloves and perfumes and hats and there was a nice smell now of cigars as we passed a tiny tobacco shop with fine pipes in the window, and there was a whip and umbrella shop, and even a magic tricks shop! And it was all
lovely
, that Arcade! (except for the Beadle), people sweeping along laughing and talking and stopping and buying and I looked at everything and I looked upwards. And I saw a thin red shawl or maybe it was a big handkerchief in one of the windows, lit by a lamp just behind it. And across the lamp a lady leaned from the window, looking down at everybody and making those little chirruping sounds like birds. Well course I know what that all means, we’ve got plenty of those red lights and chirruping ladies down by Kings Cross but I was a bit surprised to see them in such a place as Burlington Arcade! I looked at Freddie.

‘Are they – street ladies?’

‘Yes,’ he said.

‘Thought so,’ I said and I grinned as I stared upwards again, same the world over then, dont matter if it’s Burlington Arcade or Kings Cross. Then one of the ladies leaned right down, chirruping, not at Freddie but at a group of noble gentlemen in their fine-cut suits and their hats just ahead of us. And the gentlemen looked up and laughed and one of them made a discreet sign to the lady and left the group, winking at his companions. He wasn’t very handsome either, spotty skin, poor her.

‘Come and look in here, Mattie,’ said Freddie and he took me inside one of the little shops, it sold gloves, gloves laid out everywhere. Some customers were just being served and I could see Freddie was waiting for them to go before he approached the serving-person. Then I saw that there was a small spindly red-carpeted staircase in the shop that wound upwards – maybe to a lady sitting with a red scarf and a lamp! Is this how the customers got upwards I wondered – through the shops? The shop assistant winked at Freddie, as if to say
be with you in a minute
and then the customers were gone, the bell tinkled as the door was opened for them to leave and then tinkled shut again.

‘Well, Freddie dear!’ said the shop assistant and he was looking at me with some curiosity. ‘Who’s this then?’

Freddie took me to the counter and I saw that the shop-man noticed me limping but I didn’t care of course.

‘This is my friend Mattie Stacey, Claude,’ said Freddie. ‘She lives where we dress up in our paraphernalia.’

‘Stacey?’ said Claude. He looked at me carefully for a moment. ‘Did your mother work in the theatre?’ I nodded. ‘Are you her little girl with the funny leg?’

Guess what, turned out he knew Ma, she’d given him a job in the Drury Lane wardrobe when he was young, when Billy and I were staggering home with piles of books from Mudies Lending Library.

‘The books were bigger than you!’ said Claude. He was so pleased with this connection he gave me a pair of gloves from behind the counter, ‘Take these for yourself Mattie, and tell your Ma Claude says hello!’ and he smiled, so pleased, and then leaned on the counter. ‘So where’s Ern, Freddie, haven’t seen him round here lately. What’s new?’

‘Thank you, Claude,’ I said, fingering the soft gloves.

‘Put them on,’ he ordered and he drew off my own and helped me put the new gloves on, they smelled of lavender and they were soft and beautiful. He wrapped my own ones in some special blue paper and I put them inside my cloak and wore my new ones.

‘Ernest’s gone to live in Scotland for a while,’ said Freddie. ‘Fresh rich fields.’ And they both laughed.

‘Thank you, Claude,’ I said again and we were both smiling. Good old Ma, she pops up everywhere even when she aint there!

‘Can I take Mattie down, Claude?’ said Freddie. ‘She’s never been to the Arcade before,’ and Claude giggled and waved his hand in permission towards a very small downwards-winding staircase I hadn’t noticed, no red carpet on this one, and then the doorbell tinkled and more customers came in and Claude turned to them at once and Freddie and me disappeared downwards (me holding very tight to the wall as I went even with my new gloves and not letting the wall go till we got to the bottom, wondering whatever in the world we were doing).

There were two tiny rooms down there, one was filled with boxes and one was like a little kitchen, it had a fire. Two boys had been sitting smoking; they got up quick and put out their cigarettes as they saw feet that didn’t belong to Claude emerging from above.

‘What’s your name?’ said Freddie to one of the boys.

I think the boy thought he was somehow going to get into trouble and he answered very sulkily.

‘George, sir.’

‘I’ll give you a penny, George, to take this young lady and myself out to Piccadilly along the passage.’

‘Thruppence,’ said George immediately. ‘We aint allowed if we aint messaging, sir. So it’s got to be worth my while.’ Freddie took a threepenny bit out of his waistcoat but didn’t give it yet but I saw George look at it as if it was a sovereign.

‘You hold guard now, Alf,’ George said to the other boy and next thing I know he bent down and dashed out in front of us through a very small side door I hadn’t even noticed, straight into a long, long, narrow, underground tunnel. It was a bit scary and dark, though there was some lamps dotted along the way, I saw their flames flickering in the draught and some huge rats shadowed and running. I couldn’t run of course, though George was running, also the roof sloped downwards as we got nearer to Piccadilly, making it harder. But there we were, me and Freddie, hurrying along underneath the Burlington Arcade. True!

‘Hold on there, lad!’ called Freddie.

My gown and my cloak touched both sides, the passageway was that narrow, but another boy came running past us with a large wrapped parcel,
’scuse me, ’scuse me, customer waiting
, and we had to stop and press tight against the damp walls as he squeezed past with his big parcel, panting and red-faced in the flickering light. It was the queerest place I’d ever seen, I couldn’t think I was underneath all that bustling money above us! but we followed George and at the end we had to climb up a few rungs (‘It’s all right, Mattie, I’m right behind you
,
’ said Freddie), and George knocked and a boy above opened a small door. It was a bit hard to climb the rungs and my bonnet was all crooked but I was so amazed that I just somehow pushed up through that door – and there was Piccadilly again and the stone pillars at the entrance to the Arcade!

Freddie straightened my bonnet and gave George his threepence and George disappeared downwards again and it had all been such a strange and unlikely adventure that I couldn’t stop laughing even though my new gloves had dirty marks on them.

‘Do they all know?’ I asked in amazement, still laughing, as the ladies and gentlemen sauntered through the entrance portals.

‘It is considered extremely vulgar to carry your own parcels in the Arcade, Mattie,’ Freddie explained.

‘Why?’

‘As I say,
vulgar
,
my dear. Commerce is
vulgar
!’ but he was laughing with me. ‘The boys bring the parcels through the tunnel and meet the customers at the entrance. But I do not expect the customers consider how the parcels get here. This is a high-class establishment, Mattie! Of course as you know Ernest and I only ever appear at high-class establishments!’ and he grinned.

I blinked and stared at the London gentry and at my friend Freddie, and then I grinned back, entranced with this unlikely adventure. When he took me home I was so hoping he would come and be with us for a while – he brought me to the door and to Ma – but even in his gentlemen’s clothes he was already rushing off to somewhere else with that odd, excited look in his eyes. That I recognised.

‘I have to meet someone at the Euston Railway Station,’ he said.

Well. It’s told now.

I lost the baby. Freddie was there. Months ago.

All that’s how I came to – to feel about Freddie the way I do.

Listen, I know about men who like men better than women, course I do.
Sodomite it’s called. And buggery. I know they like men better than women and I know people call them filthy and dirty and dogs and people’s faces get all twisted up when they’re saying it, as if Freddie wasn’t a real person, so kind and good and – no, I’m just trying to explain. About Freddie, Frederick William Park, law student, aged twenty-three, same age as my brother Billy.

I cant forget him helping me, and holding me – that feeling of him holding me – and talking to me and being so kind and good, those stupid newspapers dont know
anything.

I dont know exactly what it is that I feel about Freddie. But this feeling feels like loving someone and that someone is arrested for being a sodomite and called a filthy fellow and sitting in a prison.

7

Big Ben boomed.

The slightly ominous sound of the chimes echoed, muffled, through the Houses of Parliament; they rippled along the busy, crowded River Thames near by; finally dispersed upwards into the sky where, perhaps, a stern but benevolent God looked down on this great city, this London.

Inside the Parliament buildings, in the busy rooms of the Prime Minister of Great Britain, private secretaries sorted and wrote and copied missives of great import. In one corner of the outer office one of the parliamentary clerks was sitting and writing. This particular clerk was Billy Stacey, called in today to help deal with the usual Monday pile of unimportant but nevertheless persistent letters from the world outside, most of which were from people that the Prime Minister did not know. Invitations to dinners the Prime Minister would never attend; requests for appearances he would never make; begging letters, proposals of marriage or other suggested gifts: all had to be acknowledged. Mr Gladstone’s private secretaries had a formula for each kind of letter. Billy Stacey had been instructed to use the appropriate formula each time, and a pile of beautifully penned, ready-to-be-signed letters already lay there beside him, neat and tidy.

Even though the letters were mostly uninteresting Billy enjoyed this part of his work more than any other; he liked the idea of being an extra cog in this special office: his beautiful handwriting, learned and perfected in the elementary school in Covent Garden his passport to the fringes of the centre. It was not to Billy’s occasional corner that the real words of power ever came and went, but nevertheless he liked the feeling of sometimes being part of the bustling activity and the heightened tension of Mr Gladstone’s outer office.

Billy Stacey had worked in the Houses of Parliament for ten years. He was, soon, the fastest messenger employed there, speeding about long corridors with outside post, or letters between Members: hard-working, reliable, known. At some point he had fallen in love with the huge buildings that he traversed so often; he breathed them in to himself; he loved the high ceilings and the Gothic arches and the sudden, hidden staircases; he loved the wide corridors and the historic paintings on the walls and the heraldry and the gilt and the statues. He loved the red carpet and the green. The Head Doorkeeper, who had taken Billy under his wing, explained that the different coloured carpet was to differentiate between the nobles’ part of the Parliament, and the others.

Eventually, Billy’s reliability and handwriting admired, he was promoted to the position of parliamentary clerk. He still had messages and letters to deliver but much of his time was spent sitting in the clerks’ corridor, bent over the long desks with the other clerks, writing what had to be written to maintain parliamentary business and records. Mountains of paper, hundreds of pens and nibs and bottles of ink: Billy understood himself to be only the latest in a long line of unremembered government clerks, stretching back far into history. Once he saw a small, ancient wall painting in the Egyptian Gallery in Regent-street: a scribe sitting cross-legged before his master, holding a marker and a piece of papyrus. Billy stared at the picture for a long time, smiling to himself in wry recognition.