Strange Stories (31 page)

The woman gazed across the cellar at me for some time before she uttered a word. Her eyes were as dark as everything else about her, but they looked very bright and luminous at the same time. Of course, I was little more than a kid, but that was how it all seemed to me. Immediately our eyes met, the woman’s and mine, something stirred within me, something quite new and strong. This, although the light was so poor. Or perhaps at first it was because of the poor light, like what I said about sometimes seeing more when there is no definition than when there is. 

I couldn’t utter a word. I wasn’t very used to the company of women, in any case. I hadn’t much wished for it, as I have said. 

So she spoke first. Her voice was as dark as her hair and her eyes. A deep voice. But all she said was: “How old are you?” 

“Seventeen and a half, ma’am. A bit more than that, actually.” 

“So you are still a minor?” 

“Yes, ma’am.” 

“Do you live in the City of London?” 

“No, ma’am.” 

“Where then do you live?” 

“In South Clerkenwell, ma’am.” 

“But you work in the city of London?” 

“No, ma’am. I only come to the city on errands.” 

In those days, we were taught at school how to reply to catechisms of this kind. I had been taught such things very carefully. I must say
that
whatever else I might have to say about education in general. We were told to reply always simply, briefly, and directly. We used to be given exercises and practices. 

I must add that the woman was well-spoken, and that she had a highly noticeable mouth. Of course, my faculties were not at their best in all that heat and after the series of odd things that had been happening to me: complete novelties, at that age. 

“Whom do you visit on these errands?” 

“Mostly people in the backstreets and side streets. We’re only in a small way so far.” It was customary for everyone who worked for a firm to describe that firm as “we,” provided the firm was small enough, and sometimes not only then. With us, even the boozy women who cleaned everything up did it. 

“Hardly heard of in the wider world, we might say?” 

“I think that could be said, ma’am.” I had learned well that boasting was always idle, and led only to still closer interrogation. 

“Are your parents living?” 

“My father is supposed to be dead, ma’am.” 

She transfixed me. I was mopping at myself all the time. 

“I
think
he’s dead, ma’am.” 

“Was he, or is he, a sailor, or a horsebreaker, or a strolling player, or a hawker?” 

“None of those, ma’am.” 

“A Gay Lothario, perhaps?” 

“I don’t know, ma’am.” 

She was gazing at me steadily, but she apparently decided to drop the particular topic. It was a topic I specially disliked, and her dropping it so easily gave me the impression that I had begun to reach her, as well as she me. You know how it can happen. What hypnotism was then, telepathy is now. It’s mostly a complete illusion, of course. 

“And your mother? Was she pretty?” 

“I think she still is pretty, ma’am.” 

“Describe her as best you can.” 

“She’s very tiny and very frail, ma’am.” 

“Do you mean she’s ill?” 

“I don’t think she’s ill, ma’am.” 

“Do you dwell with her?” 

“I do, ma’am.” 

“Could she run from end to end of your street, loudly calling out? If the need were to arise. Only then, of course. What do you say?” 

At this strange question, the girl on the floor, who had hitherto been still as still, looked up into the woman’s face. The woman began to stroke the girl’s face and front, though from where I was I could see neither. Besides, it was so hot for caresses. 

“I doubt it, ma’am. I hope the need does not arise.” We were taught not to make comments, but I could hardly be blamed, I thought, for that one. 

“Are you an only child?” 

“My sister died, ma’am.” 

“The family diathesis seems poor, at least on the female side.” 

I know now that this is what she said, because since then I’ve worked hard at language and dictionaries and expressing myself, but I did not know then. 

“Beg pardon, ma’am?” 

But the woman left that topic, too. 

“Does your mother know where you are now?” 

At school, it might have been taken as rather a joke of a question, but I answered it seriously and accurately. 

“She never asks how I spend the day, ma’am.” 

“You keep yourselves to yourselves?” 

“I don’t wish my mother to be fussed about me, ma’am.” 

Here the woman actually looked away for a moment. By now her doing so had a curious effect on me. I should find it difficult to put it into words. I suddenly began to feel queasy. For the first time, I became aware physically of the things that had been happening to me. I longed to escape, but feared for myself if I succeeded. 

The woman’s eyes came back to me. I could not but go out to meet her. 

“Are you or your mother the stronger person?” 

“My mother is, ma’am.” 

“I don’t mean physically.” 

“No, ma’am.” 

The hot smell, familiar to me as it was, and for that reason all the more incongruous, seemed to have become more overpowering. It was perhaps a part of my newly regained faculties. I had to venture upon a question of my own. At home it was the customary question. It was asked all the time. 

“Should not the oven be turned down a little, ma’am?” 

The woman never moved a muscle, not even a muscle in her dark eyes. She simply replied “Not yet.” But for the first time she smiled at me, and straight at me. 

What more could be said on the subject? I knew that overheated ovens burned down houses. 

The catechism was resumed. 

“How much do you know of women?” 

I am sure I blushed, and I am sure that I could make no reply. Our exercises had not included such questions, and I was all but dying of the heat and smell. 

“How close have you dared to go?” 

I could not withdraw my eyes, though there was nothing that part of me could more deeply wish to do. I hated to be mocked. Mockery was the one thing that could really make me lose control, go completely wild. 

“Have you never been close even to your own mother?” 

I must all the while have looked more like a turkey than most because my head was so small. You may not allow for that, because it’s so much larger now. 

You will have gathered that the woman had been drooling slightly, as women do when appealing in a certain way to a man. As I offered no response, she spoke up quite briskly. 

“So much the better for all of us,” she said, but this time without a trace of the smile that usually goes with remarks of that kind. Then she added, “So much the better for the customers.” 

I was certainly not going to inquire what she meant, though I had no idea what I was going to do. Events simply had to take their course, as so often in life, though one is always taught otherwise. 

Events immediately began to do so. The woman stood up. I could see that the chair, which at first seemed almost like a throne, was in fact hammered together from old sugar boxes and packing cases. The coloring on the outside of it, which had so impressed me, looked much more doubtful now. 

“Let’s see what you can make of Monica and me,” said the woman. 

At that the little girl turned to me for the first time. She was a moon-faced child, so pale that it was hard to believe so swarthy a woman could possibly be her mother. 

I’m not going to tell you how I replied to what the woman had said. Old though I am, I should still hesitate to do so. 

There was a certain amount of dialogue between us. 

One factor was that heat. When Monica came to me and started trying to take off my jacket, I could not help feeling a certain relief, even though men, just as much as women, were then used to wearing far heavier clothes, even when it was warm. 

Another factor was the woman’s bright and steady gaze, though there you will simply think I am making excuses. 

Another factor again was that the woman had unlocked something within me that my mother had said should please never be unlocked, never, until she herself had passed away. It was disloyal, but there’s usually disloyalty somewhere when one is drawn in that way to a person, and more often than not in several quarters at once. 

I did resist. I prevaricated. I did not prevail. I leave it there. I don’t know how fond and dutiful you proved at such a time in the case of your own mother. 

Monica seemed sweet and gentle, though she never spoke a word. It did, I fear, occur to me that she was accustomed to what she was doing; a quite long and complicated job in those days, which only married ladies and mothers knew about among women. Monica’s own dress was made simply of sacking. It was an untrimmed sack. I realized at once that almost certainly she was wearing nothing else. Who could wonder in such heat? Her arms and legs and neck and round face were all skinny to the point of pathos, and white and slimy with the heat. But her hands were gentle, as I say. In the bad light, I could make nothing of her eyes. They seemed soft and blank. 

The woman was just standing and gazing and waiting. Her arms rested at her sides, and once more she was quite like a queen, though her dress was still open all down the front to the waist. Of course that made an effect of its own kind too. It was a dark velvet dress, I should say, with torn lace around the neck and around the ends of the sleeves. I could see that she was as bare-footed as little Monica, but that by no means diminished her dignity. She was certainly at her ease, though she was certainly not smiling. She was like a queen directing a battle. Only the once had she smiled; in response to my silly remark about turning down the oven; when I had failed to find the right and unfunny words for what I had meant, and meant so well. 

I could now see that the solitary lamp stood on a mere rough ledge rather than on any kind of desk. For that matter, the lamp itself was of a standard and very inexpensive pattern. It was equipped with a movable shade to direct the weak illumination. My mother and I owned a dozen lamps better than that, and used them too, on many, many occasions. 

In the end, Monica had me completely naked. She was a most comfortable and competent worker, and, because there was nowhere else to put them, she laid out all my different things neatly on the rough floor, where they looked extremely foolish, as male bits and pieces always do, when not being worn, and often when being worn also. 

I stood there gasping and sweating and looking every bit as ridiculous as my things. It is seldom among the most commanding moments in the life of a man. One can see why so many men are drawn to rape and such. Otherwise, if the woman has any force in her at all, the man is at such an utter disadvantage. He is lucky if he doesn’t remain so until the end of it. But I don’t need to tell you. You’ll have formed your own view. 

There was no question of that woman lacking a thing. It was doubtless grotesque that I had assented to Monica stripping me, but as soon as Monica had finished, and was moving things about on the floor to make the total effect look even neater, the woman rotated the shade on the lamp, so that the illumination fell on the other end of the cellar, the end that had formerly been in the darkness behind her. 

At once she was shedding her velvet dress (yes, it was velvet, I am sure of it) and, even at the time, it struck me as significant that she had put herself in the limelight, so to speak, in order to do so, instead of hiding behind a curtain as most women would have done, more then than now, I believe. 

She too proved to be wearing no more than the one garment. Who could wear chemises and drawers and stays in that atmosphere? 

The light showed that beneath and around the woman’s feet, and I must tell you that they were handsome, well-shaped feet, was a tangle of waste hair, mingled with fur and hide, such as the rag and bone men used to cry, and refuse to pay a farthing for, however earnestly the women selling the stuff might appeal. By no stretch of drink or poetry could one call the heap of it a bed or couch. Our cat would have refused to go near it, let alone lie on it. 

None of that made the slightest difference; no more than the heat, the smell, the mystery, or anything else. 

The woman, with no clothes on, and with her unleashed hair, was very fine, though no longer a queen. “Let’s see,” she said, and half-extended her arms toward me. 

A real queen might have expressed herself more temptingly, but being a queen is very much a matter of wearing the clothes, as is being a woman. The matter was settled by little Monica giving me a push from behind. 

It made me look even more ridiculous, because I fell across the sugar-box throne. In fact, I cut my bare thigh badly. But a flow of blood made no difference in that company, and in a second or two I was wallowing egregiously amid the woman’s dark hair and the soft mass of hair and fur from God knows where, and Monica had come in from behind, and begun to help things on. 

Almost at once, I became aware of something about Monica, which is scarcely polite to talk about. I only mention it for a reason. The thing was that she herself had no hair, where, even at that time, I knew she should have had hair, she being, I was fairly certain, old enough for it. I refer to that personal matter because it gave me an idea as to who might be Monica’s father. On Monica’s round head, locks just hung straight around her face, as if they had stopped growing prematurely, and everyone was waiting for them to continue. I began to wonder if there were not some kind of stuck-on wig. I still doubted whether the woman who held me tight was Monica’s mother, but for the moment there were other things to think about, especially by such a novice as I was. 

There seems to be only one thing worth adding to a scene which you must find obvious enough. 

It is that never since have I known a mouth like that woman’s mouth. But the entire escapade was of course my first full experience—the first time I was able to go through the whole thing again and again until I was spent and done, sold and paid for.