Eventually the train started up again, but it chugged along slowly, coming almost to a halt many times. When she finally got to Paddington, it was half past eight and the whole station was so crammed with people waiting for delayed trains that she didn’t even attempt to phone home, or the pub to speak to Andrew. She just wanted to get back to the flat.
She had to wait ages at Finsbury Park tube station for the Hornsey bus, and by the time she got to the front door it was nine-thirty and she felt completely drained, hot and sticky.
As she opened the door to the flat, she stopped in embarrassment. Meg was crouched over a man lying on one of the mattresses, wearing only a pair of black lace knickers, her hair hiding the man’s face. The Eagles’ ‘Desperado’ was blasting out on the stereo and the whole room stank of cannabis.
‘Sorry,’ Charlie said involuntarily. ‘I’ll –’ The rest of the sentence about going to her room was cut off abruptly as Meg moved, for to Charlie’s horror, the man she was making love to was Andrew.
For just one second Charlie remained rooted to the spot in shock. But as Andrew pushed Meg to one side, his eyes wide with fright and astonishment at her sudden entrance, she dropped her bag and moved. ‘You bitch,’ she screamed, running towards them, intending to claw the girl’s eyes out. But she forgot the low table, banged her shins into it and fell sideways.
Andrew leapt to his feet. He was dressed, but he had several shirt buttons undone and red lipstick all around his mouth. ‘It isn’t like you think,’ he said frantically. ‘We had a few smokes while I was waiting for you, then she came in like that.’
Charlie got up and charged at Meg again. She was still on the mattress, half sitting, half lying in the same position she had landed in when Andrew pushed her away from him. She made no attempt to cover her bare breasts, or even move.
Charlie reached down, grabbed her by the hair with her left hand, and with her right smashed her fist into the girl’s face. ‘You scheming, rotten bitch!’ she roared. ‘You’ve had every other man in north London, why did you have to have him too?’
If Andrew hadn’t caught hold of Charlie’s right arm and pulled her back, she would have kept on punching until the girl’s face was a pulp. Still holding Meg’s hair tightly, Charlie tried to shrug him off, but Andrew was too strong. ‘Enough, Charlie!’ he yelled. ‘Let her go.’
Charlie could do nothing more than yank on Meg’s hair. As she forcibly pulled back, a great clump of it came away in Charlie’s hand. But in her anger at not being allowed to hurt Meg further, she turned to Andrew and lashed out at him. ‘Get out of here, you bastard,’ she screamed at him. ‘You said you loved me, how could you go with her?’
‘I didn’t, I wouldn’t have,’ he shouted back, pulling her further away from Meg. ‘I was stoned and just lying there. On my mother’s life I wouldn’t have made love to her.’
‘No one makes love to her. They screw her or fuck her, that’s all she’s good for!’ Charlie screamed. ‘Don’t tell me you wouldn’t have done it if I hadn’t come in. Of course you would.’
‘Don’t you fucking well speak about me like that,’ Meg shouted. While Andrew held Charlie she had managed to get up and make her escape towards her bedroom door. ‘If you must know he’s been sniffing around me for weeks. I only did it to put him out of his misery.’
‘That’s a bloody lie,’ Andrew burst out, his face very flushed. ‘Admit it, Meg. Or I’ll smash your face in too.’
Charlie looked from one to the other in distress, not knowing which one to believe. Meg had blood running from her nose, her black curly hair was tousled, cascading over her naked breasts. She knew this girl was man-mad, but Charlie didn’t think she was a liar. Andrew couldn’t deny that was lipstick on his mouth. Why hadn’t he got up and left the moment Meg appeared without her clothes?
‘Get out of here, you bastard,’ Charlie hissed at him, brushing off his hand on her arm. ‘Go on, go, right now. And don’t ever come back. I never want to see you again.’
‘Tell her the truth,’ he implored Meg. ‘You got me stoned then leapt on me.’
Charlie looked again at Meg. She had her hands insolently on her hips, even now she wasn’t attempting to cover herself. ‘Fuck off, you jerk,’ she said contemptuously. ‘You were dying for it.’
‘Get out now,’ Charlie said, pushing Andrew towards the door. She was trembling and she felt nauseous. She knew any minute she was going to bring up the sandwiches and fizzy drinks she’d had on the train. ‘You and I are finished.’
‘No, Charlie,’ he begged, his eyes wide with shock and dismay. ‘Please come with me somewhere else and we’ll talk. You can’t stay in this flat with that witch.’
‘Better a witch than a snake,’ she snapped. ‘Now go.’
He turned and left. The door slammed just as the record ended and it seemed to reverberate throughout the house.
Charlie turned menacingly towards Meg. ‘You disgust me,’ she said. ‘No, disgust doesn’t cover what I feel. You make me sick.’
She felt the vomit rise up into her throat, and she took one step towards the door and the bathroom outside on the landing. But she stopped as she suddenly thought of a way to get back at Meg.
Pushing the girl back against the wall as she passed her, she went straight into Meg’s bedroom. Her bed, as always, was unmade, clothes strewn amongst the grubby, crumpled sheets.
She sensed Meg had followed her in, perhaps imagining she was going to destroy a few things, and that knowledge helped Charlie to control her nausea just that little bit longer. Stopping at the bed, she let it go, and vomited all over it. As if from a great distance she heard Meg gasp.
‘There,’ Charlie said in triumph, although she felt so weak all she wanted to do was slump down and cry. ‘A fitting place for you to rest your diseased cunt.’
‘You filthy cow,’ Meg shrieked. She was really frightened. She had never seen Charlie lose her temper before, and she hadn’t imagined she could be so violent.
Charlie surveyed the bed and the putrid mess she’d covered it in with some pride. ‘Nowhere near as filthy as you,’ she said. Then, tottering, she made towards the door where Meg was transfixed with horror.
‘You can clean it up,’ she yelled in a high-pitched shriek, trying to grab Charlie as she passed. But Charlie struck out with her fist again, and knocked her backwards against the door post.
‘I’m going to call the police. I’ll get them to throw you out on the street,’ Meg screamed, but she backed into her room.
‘Phone them if you want. But I’m going anyway,’ Charlie said. ‘I wouldn’t stay under the same roof as you even if my life depended on it.’ She turned and looked back at Meg. She was clutching on to a chair, as if she intended to use it to ward off any further blows. ‘You know what you are, Meg?’ she said with all the contempt she could muster. ‘You’re a slag! The Hornsey bike that everyone gets a free ride on. Why don’t you go on the game? You could make a fortune.’
Back in her own bedroom, Charlie put a chair under the door handle, then began flinging her clothes into her two cases. She filled them to capacity, then shoved the remainder into her pillow-cases. She was scared now, the flat was silent and she had no idea if Meg was planning a counter-attack. She had to get out quickly.
It was a tense moment as she unlocked the door and struggled out with a suitcase in each hand and the pillow-cases under her arms. But Meg wasn’t out in the living room waiting for her. Charlie reached the outside door before the girl appeared again, now dressed.
‘You owe me money for bills,’ she yelled.
‘You’ve got my deposit and this week’s rent,’ Charlie shouted back. ‘Go and steal something if you haven’t got enough, that’s what you usually do, isn’t it?’
Charlie was down the stairs and just about to open the front door when Meg’s voice rang out again from the top of the house. ‘I’ve had him already,’ she called out. ‘I had him Friday night, Saturday afternoon, and when he’d finished work he came
back again for the whole night. He’s got a nice big prick, hasn’t he?’
Charlie didn’t know how she managed to get to the phone box on Crouch Hill. Aside from the problem of trying to carry so much heavy stuff, she was blinded by tears and quivering with shock. She could only walk a few steps at a time before resting, then picked the cases up again. But she finally managed it and telephoned Rita.
The phone rang and rang, and Charlie was just about to give up in despair, when Rita answered it.
‘Of course you can come here,’ she said, without any hesitation even though Charlie wasn’t able to explain properly through her tears. ‘Now, just stay in the phone box and ring for a taxi. The address is 44 Church Road, Paddington. My flat is above a sweet shop.’
Two hours later Charlie found herself being tucked into a narrow single bed by Rita. She was too exhausted from crying, too weary and distressed to ask any questions, but she sensed she was in a child’s room. Rita had been so kind. She’d listened, let her cry, then run her a bath and given her some hot milk and a sleeping pill. By the time Charlie got out of the bath, Rita had hung up all her dresses, put the rest of her clothes in drawers, even the picture of her parents was beside the small bed.
‘Sleep tight, lovey,’ Rita said, bending to kiss her cheek. ‘I know your heart feels as if it’s been shattered, but it will mend in time. Tomorrow evening after work we’ll talk everything through again and plan what you’re going to do. But go to sleep now.’
‘I thought he loved me. Why did he do it?’ Charlie asked. She was groggy now, but the question was nagging at her.
‘Because men think with their dicks more often than with their heads,’ Rita replied. ‘And that’s why I don’t bother with them any more.’
Rita sat deep in thought for some time after she’d put Charlie to bed. She knew why Meg had done what she did, because she’d been exactly like Meg herself when she was younger. Maybe it was because they were oversexed, or suffered from some deep-seated insecurity, probably a mixture of both. Rita remembered only too well what a thrill it was to steal another girl’s man. Available ones were no challenge.
Yet she was puzzled by Andrew. Although she’d never met him, from things Charlie had told her, she felt she knew him. Why would a sensitive, intelligent man like him take the risk of losing a bright, lovely girl like Charlie, to dabble with a grubby hippie art student? It wasn’t as if Charlie had come back unexpectedly. He knew she might walk through the door at any minute!
But Charlie’s distress about tonight’s events wasn’t all that was on Rita’s mind. Charlie was young and resilient, in a few weeks’ time she would be over the worst of it. But Rita knew from her own experience that when one door closes on a person’s life, they usually look for another to open. Charlie had barely mentioned her desire to solve the mystery of her father’s disappearance in the past few months, her mind had been purely on Andrew. But now, without Andrew around, she might very well turn back to it.
Right from Charlie’s first day at Haagman’s when she’d spoken of her father, Rita had an odd sensation of involvement. It was entirely irrational; she might know a great deal about Soho and its clubs, but she didn’t know any Chinese men and she’d never heard of anyone called Jin Weish. But since the day Charlie had mentioned that her father’s mistress was called DeeDee, she hadn’t been able to get it out of her mind. The name reminded her of someone she would rather forget.
Common sense told her DeeDee was most likely a derivative of Diane or Diana, and she’d probably adopted it because strippers went in for cute stage names. The woman she knew, and had good reason to hate, had been called Daphne Dexter, and to Rita’s knowledge she had never been known by her initials ‘D. D.’ But still the thought persisted in her mind and as the similarities mounted up, so the conviction that they were one and the same person had grown.
Rita had worked out that they must be around the same age. Daphne, before she owned a string of clubs, was rumoured to have been a stripper. DeeDee was reported to have come from the East End of London with two brothers. Daphne had hid her roots very well, but she had a faint East London twang to her voice, and Rita suspected the two men who had helped ruin her life might well have been her brothers.
Rita got out of her chair to go into the kitchen. Thinking about the Dexters would only bring nightmares on again.
‘It was lucky you kept this flat on,’ she said to herself as she washed up some cups and plates. ‘You’d have been up shit creek without it.’
Back in 1961 when she found this unfurnished two-bedroom flat, Church Road and the surrounding area had been virtually a slum, with prostitutes, poor Irish and West Indian immigrants crammed into the many dilapidated houses. Time and again Rita had been tempted by more expensive flats in smarter areas, but because it was cheap and she’d spent so much money on making it nice, she always flunked out at the last moment. Now the dreadful old properties, many of them owned by the notorious Peter Rachman, had been renovated and their former tenants moved on elsewhere. Church Road was a decent address again, full of antique shops and smart boutiques, and she wouldn’t move if anyone paid her to.
Looking critically back into her living room, she was pleased with what she saw. Going to so many wealthy people’s homes in her youth had given her some taste, if nothing else. The green striped wallpaper looked classy, the plain green Wilton was as good now as it was when she had it fitted back in ’62. No one coming in here now and looking at the lovely water-colours in their gilt frames, the elegant lamps and velvet curtains would ever imagine she’d been anything other than totally respectable.
A chill went down her spine, just as it had that day Charlie spoke of DeeDee and her father’s club. Soho for all its international fame was just like a village, people who got sucked into it all knew one another, if not personally, by repute. The period they had been there made little difference, lives overlapped, and some people were so prominent they quickly became legends. Daphne Dexter was one of those.
‘If only you’d heeded her warning,’ she whispered. ‘He wasn’t worth a light as it turned out, and you might have known he wouldn’t marry a club girl anyway.’
She opened the door to the spare bedroom and looked at Charlie asleep in the small bed and her heart contracted painfully. She was such a lovely girl, both in looks and manner. The light from the open door shone on to her coal-black hair and golden cheeks. She was at rest now thanks to the pill Rita had given her, but tomorrow morning she’d wake to face it all again.
Turning back to her chair, Rita sighed deeply. If she could have just one wish right now, it would be to save Charlie any more pain. Surely she’d already had more than her fair share? But life wasn’t fair, as Rita knew only too well. And by getting involved with this kid, it might very well mean she would come face to face with her own past again too.
Closing her eyes, Rita let herself drift back to that warm summer night in 1964 when she first met Daphne. She hoped she might remember something which would convince her that her suspicions were ungrounded.
Rita had called herself Suzie then; she was twenty-five, cheeky, fearless and a real little sex-bomb with her big breasts and flowing red hair. She and some of the other girls who worked with her at the Astor Club in Mayfair were invited by Stephen Brooks, a Harley Street surgeon, to his country house weekend party in Sussex.
It was the most beautiful old house Rita had ever been to, half timbered, polished wooden floors, mullion windows and furnished with antiques. But what she remembered most of all was the garden. It was huge, the kind you could almost lose yourself in as you wandered through the formal rose gardens, across lush smooth lawns to the shrubbery and the woods beyond.
The drawing room had French windows opening on to a terrace, from where steps led down to an ornamental pool and fountain. She remembered standing on that terrace around eight in the evening, a warm breeze fluttering her chiffon dress, the perfume of roses filling her nostrils, and wishing she could stay in such a place for
ever.
Behind her the party was already in full swing. Many of the male guests were American doctors, here in England for a medical conference, and as usual when married men were on the loose, without their wives, and found an abundance of young pretty women more than ready to entertain them, they were in high spirits.
Rita had taken great care with her appearance that night. She knew she wasn’t a real beauty compared with some of the other girls, without makeup she was pale, and her features insignificant. But she was pretty enough, she had a fabulous body, lovely hair, and her provocative style made sure she was never overlooked. She was wearing a short pale green floaty chiffon dress with a neckline which exposed both her back and her ample cleavage. She’d had her hair set that morning in curls on the top of her head, and a few ringlets left loose around the nape of her neck. She knew that by anyone’s reckoning she looked sensational.
At that period in her life Rita had several wealthy lovers on a string. Granted, they were married men, but two at least of them would gladly have set her up in a little flat somewhere on the understanding she was theirs exclusively. But being a mere mistress wasn’t her goal, she had her heart set on an extremely rich husband, a grand house and servants.
She had been to many similar parties, where the girls were paid a small fee to look pretty and make the party go with a swing. There was no obligation to have sex with any of the guests, though it often did occur, but daring acts, like swimming in the pool naked, or an impromptu strip-tease, were appreciated as it lifted the host’s standing among his friends.
Around ten that same evening Rita was dancing with one of the American doctors in the drawing room, when she became aware she was being watched closely by a man standing out on the terrace. She was trying to show her partner how to do ‘the Shake’. She was an expert at this latest dance, undulating her hips like a belly-dancer and making her breasts swing from side to side. But the doctor was hopeless, waving his arms and hips without any co-ordination.