was called a marriage, but it was a sale. I was cheap goods - no dowry, no beauty. I was my mother’s only capital. She raised me to be marriageable, tried to teach me to please men, gave me all the useless capabilities - I could pour tea but I couldn’t boil water. When I was seventeen, she put me on the market.’
‘Edith Dombey,’ he said.
‘What? Oh, I suppose. Anyway, she found Frank Striker. He got me, and she got a yearly stipend and a flat in Harrogate.’ She fell silent again; he glanced aside at her and saw her face spottily reddened, her jaw set. Then she started talking again in a hard, half-strangled voice. ‘My husband liked two women at a time. That was my wedding night - a prostitute and me. I stood it for a year and then rebelled. He came for me one night with a belt and gave me three welts on my bare back, and then I tried to push him downstairs. He had me committed. Well, it’s perfectly logical, isn’t it? Any woman who’d raise her hand to her husband must be insane.’ She slowed, looked at her watch and strode on. ‘Four and a half years later, by whining and wheedling and saying I was a good girl now, I managed to get my release. He sent a servant for me. I jumped out of the cab and went straight to a woman lawyer I’d heard about in prison, and I started suit for divorce the same day. Two of his prostitutes testified for me - they were sorry for me. The prison doctor testified about my scars. We were going to win the case, and the night before the jury returned the verdict, he took his revenge - shot himself and left every penny to his Cambridge college.’ She laughed rather horribly. ‘My mother lost her stipend and her flat and tumbled on me to care for her. I sued to break his will, but I hadn’t a penny. Have you ever tried suing one of the colleges of our great universities? The nurseries of our great men, the treasuries of our best thought, the preserver of our highest traditions?’ She hooted.
‘What did you do?’
She laughed more quietly. ‘I did what women always do. I went on the street.’
He felt her look at him; he met her eyes and saw the challenge. ‘“Hard times will make a bulldog eat red pepper,” ’ he said lamely.
She laughed, this time a real laugh, almost a masculine one. ‘Wherever did that come from?’
‘My grandmother.’
‘Irish?’
‘Scotch.’
‘Scottish. Scotch is whisky.’
‘We say Scotch.’
She looked at him again, smiled, shrugged. More cheerfully then, as if it were all a kind of shared joke, she said, ‘I didn’t know a thing about going on the street. I knew only the words. So I went out on Regent Street. I didn’t know it was the French girls’ pitch. Two of them pushed me into a doorway and slapped me about and told me if I ever came on their territory again they’d cut my nose off. But it was rather pro forma; when they were done, one of them told me to try Westerley Street, where they might have a taste for a woman like me. I thought she meant prison-worn, but now I know she meant English and conventional. Anyway, that’s how I met Mrs Castle. I wasn’t much good to her as a prostitute, except for a few men who wanted to be able to say that they’d had the woman who killed Frank Striker, but she sent me on a bookkeeping course and I became her accountant and played the piano in the parlour for the gentlemen, and so I had a home and an income and a skill.’
Ahead, he saw one of the Aerated Bread Company’s tea shops. ‘May I buy you a cup of tea?’ he said.
‘You mayn’t buy me anything, Mr Denton. But I’ll buy my own cup of tea and drink it with you, if you’ll be quick.’ It surprised him. He realized that she wanted to talk.
‘You’re going on to dinner?’
She hooted again. ‘I’m going to speak at a temperance meeting at a Methodist chapel.’ She looked at the watch again. ‘I’m due in Euston Road at eight.’
‘I’ll put you in a cab after we’ve had some tea.’
They were at the shop door. She looked at him with a kind of weariness. ‘You won’t put me into anything. If I take a