Elijah’s Mermaid (13 page)

At this, she takes my hands in hers, If I could change these things, I would. This is the best I can do for you now. In time, I think you will understand.’

‘But I
don’t
understand.’ I wrench my hands free. ‘Why can’t
you
go on protecting me?’

‘It would be crueller to let you stay. I know
everything
that goes on in this house.’ She flings another acid glance towards where Tip is standing now, resting his arm on the back of a chair, perfectly languid and nonchalant, and almost a smile on his rouged red lips when Mrs Hibbert carries on, Men are like dogs, driven by their noses and tails!
That
dog will chase you to Hell if you stay.’

‘Then make
him
go. I shall miss it here. Mrs Hibbert, please . . . I shall miss you.’

She groans. ‘I shall miss you, ma chère. How could I not after all of these years. But now it is time to unlock the cage and let the little bird fly free.’

‘Shall this melodrama go on all night? Shall we cancel the main performance and invite our guests to this jolly instead?’ Tip’s derision cuts sharp through the air. ‘Just get on and tell her the truth . . . just tell her that times is hard, ma chère.’

She takes a step back, away from me, visibly stiffening her pose before she draws those veils back down and spends some moments arranging their folds until no one would guess at what lies beneath, or that Mrs Hibbert conceals a heart, or how her eyes burn red with tears.

‘Pearl . . .’ her voice is controlled again, ‘you are soon to meet your protector. But while the lawyer deals with him there are others arriving here tonight who have paid a great deal to attend your sale . . . to bid for your virginity, which was in fact the original plan before an alternative arose. To postpone or cancel the main event would only cause us detriment. We need to protect this house’s name, the belief in our integrity. Whatever may go on to occur, you must only remember the deal has been struck. The man who has bought you awaits elsewhere. He is not so old . . . and . . .’ She pauses now, as if pondering how best to continue. ‘I believe him to have certain passions and needs, but not the ones you might expect.’

‘You might say the same of me!’ Quick as a shadow Tip Thomas is back, taking my arm in his sharp claw hands and dragging me towards the door while Mrs Hibbert calls behind, ‘Go, ma chère, and remember my words. Deceive them all. Be extraordinaire!’

I have no slippers on my feet, my ugly webbed toes are on display as Tip leads me across the hall’s tiled floor and on through the room with the muralled walls, and into the big glass orangery, a procession as slow and decorous as in those romantic tales I’ve read – of a father leading his daughter to church, to meet her groom on her wedding day. We pass all the pots of lacy ferns that form a green aisle on either side in a room
as darkly lit as a church. And here is the congregation, though I do not dare to look their way. I keep my eyes fixed straight ahead. I think the drug must be taking its hold for I find myself to be oddly soothed by the splash of the fountain, like music, hypnotic, and when tiny droplets of water spray out they shimmer like crystals on my arms. I look at those jewels and start to shake when I hear Tip Thomas murmuring, ‘Don’t think I’ll forget you. Whatever she says . . . wherever you happen to go tonight. You know you’ll
never
be free of me. You’re my queen bee. You’re my honey trap. I found you before, and I’ll bring you back. When the old queen is dead . . . and it won’t be long.’

I give Tip Thomas my sullen response, swearing the oath he does not want to hear. ‘I’d rather die than suffer that. I hate you, and I always will.’

‘Oh, how she breaks my heart.’ He laughs. ‘Well, be plucky and smile at the toffs instead.’

I nearly jump out of my skin right then, at the echoing patter of all the claps that bounce back and forth on the crystal walls when the veiled madame appears again, following us through that aisle of green to do what she’s done so often before, when she places the crown of shells on my head. And that is when I lift my eyes to see the audience around, all the raddled brows and drooping cheeks, the eyes that leer through sunken lids as those coves lounge like sultans on Turkish divans where low japanned tables hold pineapples, and cut-glass goblets are filled with champagne, and iced silver platters hold mountains of oysters, and beside them the painted wooden stands made to resemble Negro boys, each one with a turban on top of his head, and really very little else, except for the trays held high in their hands, upon which are pipes carved as dragons or snakes, and ebony boxes filled with tobacco, or snuff, or cigars, or opium.

How lavish this hospitality. How pungent the vases of lilies around, though the perfume makes me nauseous. It makes me think of the rotting flesh that ribboned Mrs Hibbert’s face; even more so the cloying scent of the candles which, when a
door opens elsewhere in the house, dip and smoke alarmingly. Flames shudder and glisten on sweating brows, on all the slimy bear-greased heads; enough oil there to form a small slick in the Thames.

Some of these punters I recognise from all of the monthly dinners before. Others are new, lured in by the cards, from those times Mrs Hibbert walked me out, none of them knowing themselves a mug, that the deal has already been signed and sealed, when the black widow’s voice rings out like a bell as she tells the old tale – for the very last time – all the wonders and miracles of my birth –
There once was a cabman who worked Cremorne Gardens who, come to the end of his shift for the night, was about to head home across Battersea Bridge when he saw an angel flying by
. . .

In the glimmer of dark glass above I imagine black feathers floating down. I am dazzled by my reflection there, my face haloed in gold from the candles around, my arms raised high above my head with its garland of rosebuds and silver shells.

Another attack of nausea. I squeeze my eyes shut and swallow hard, trying to keep myself grounded and calm, trying to pretend I am elsewhere, perhaps even rising up into the air and melting through the crystal panes, clutching on to the hands of my mirrored twin as the two of us fly as high as the stars, grasping the tail of a meteor as it streaks its way to Margate beach. I can almost believe the racket true, that I am the spawn of a mermaid’s womb, a changeling washed up in the oyster beds, gleaming and white and innocent, as pure as the pearls after which I was named, now trapped in this tissue of vile deceits spun out to the lawyers and bankers and lords, the officers from Birdcage Walk, every one of them contemplating my price while somewhere else, in another room, Mrs Hibbert’s whores are patiently waiting to compensate those who will be disappointed. I can hear their twittering laughter. I can hear a piano starting up. And I think of the white cockatoo in its cage, its crested head being cocked to one side as it balances on one grey scaled leg. Gripped in its talons there is a nut.
Crunch
.
Snap
, the shell will crack, a sound that always makes me flinch – though tonight I hear only the plash of the fountain, and the rustle of Mrs Hibbert’s skirts as she walks past divans and offers each man a new
carte de visite
upon which to write his numbers down. And when everyone has completed that task, Tip Thomas gathers in the bids, and Mrs Hibbert stands at my side about to announce the auction results.

I see my own face looking out from the picture clutched tight in those silk-sheathed hands, a photograph taken last Christmas Eve when she had a man come into the house, to set up his tent and camera stand. For advertising purposes, that’s what Mrs Hibbert said at the time, providing her most popular whores with mementoes to offer their clientele. But mine . . . I thought my portrait to be a private remembrance for her, not a means of luring in new trade with the promise in that ornate print:
A unique opportunity to possess one of Nature’s rarest jewels
.

If I am a jewel, that jewel is black. If I had been spawned by the River Thames then how much of its filth have I swallowed down, and how much of it oozes from me still? My belly aches, as if full of grit, the grit you might find in an oyster shell, an invisible but constant reminder that whatever my outward appearance may be, however shiny and new I might seem, deep down I will never be clean again.

Mrs Hibbert calls a name. Someone stands and when I dare to look I see through a spinning tunnel of fear something I cannot comprehend, because this is the gardener employed at the house, the old man who comes three times a week to tend all the ferns that grow around, the old codger who, for this one night, has been dressed like a toff in a dinner suit, though he looks like he’ll choke on that white silk cravat, like a murderer condemned to wear a noose, when his warty hot hand is holding mine and Mrs Hibbert leads us out, back through the room with the mermaid walls where the whores all sit in silence now.

Some eyes are hard as granite. Others are damp and glittering. I walk past them and try not to look. I cannot begin to say goodbye, and too soon I am in the study again, and there the
old stooge goes on his way, a brown paper package clutched in his hands, and Mrs Hibbert helps me to dress in the clothes that someone has brought down, and in no time at all we pass the baize, descending to the basement floor. But the kitchens are strangely quiet tonight. No cook. No slaveys singing songs. It is as if some plague has struck and every doomed body has been whisked off, except for Mrs Hibbert and me – and the man who is lurking beside the hearth, who steps out of the shadows where sheets drip grey like sobbing wraiths, when he reaches to take my hand in his, when he says,

‘You are my mermaid.’

And now, some months later, he says it again. A candle flickers at his side, trembling in the concentrated breaths of the man who draws me on his page, though I try my best not to meet his gaze in case he has somehow been transformed – turned into one of those lecherous gents whose lustful eyes all fed on me that last night in the House of the Mermaids. To think of them still makes me shiver, though that could be the air down here, so cold and clinging and furtive it is, and the blackness, it seeps into my mind, and there is a moment my memory freezes. I cannot remember where I am . . . what
are
these walls, all patterned with shells?

Ah yes – we are in the grotto, and once, or so Osborne told me, these shells would be coloured and lustrous, but now every one is a uniform grey, sooted with oil from the lamps around.

None of the lamps are lit today, but this is how Osborne prefers to be. He likes this darkness through which his voice is growling and echoing around, repeating itself again and again:
My mermaid. Mermaid. Mermaid
.

This is how he is when he works. I try to grow used to his serious ways, how he constantly mutters under his breath, things like, ‘I must . . . I
will
get this right. To think that I found you . . . only by chance . . . I knew, when I saw that calling card . . . when I saw your picture in Cremorne. It was a sign . . . don’t you see? Your destiny to be my muse.’

He is as deep as Australia.

Somewhere, outside and above us, the wind is wuthering. It might almost be the sound of the sea with the faint cutting cry of the gulls overhead. I miss the beach, all our walks on the sands; sunlight and watery wind in my eyes. Down here I am blind as a sewer rat, hidden away in this warren of tunnels, hired out for Osborne’s exclusive use.

‘Who built it . . .’I wonder, ‘this cave of shells?’

‘No one knows, but they all like to make a guess. It could be a rich man’s indulgence, a folly created in Regency times. Or it could be an ancient temple, and the ledge upon which you are lying right now might once have been the altar stone where virgins were brought to be sacrificed.’

Like a story from
As Every Day Goes By
, like one of Tip Thomas’s horrible threats? What if these shells have tasted blood! It makes me afraid to think such things, for Osborne does have some peculiar whims. Would the ticket collector hear me scream – with him at the top of the steep stone steps that lead on down to this grotto’s depths? What ancient magic might they hold, all these cockles and muscles and oysters and whelks to which Osborne points, as if chanting a spell: ‘This panel depicts the tree of life. This is a rose . . . a phallus . . . a serpent . . . this one here, this is the horn of a ram.’

I see only hearts, and flowers, and stars.

There were stars in the skies on the night we left London; and me near to fainting from nerves and exhaustion by the time we entered the hotel doors. Osborne requested adjoining rooms, but the bleary-eyed receptionist stammered his earnest apologies, because he could only offer one, at which Osborne grew brusque and came up with the lie to make such an arrangement respectable. He said he was my father.

A key was taken, a door opened up, and he sat in a chair by a window and necked down a bottle of brandy. Even so, when slurring drunk, he still behaved as a father would. He did not lay one hand on me – at least not until the morning came when I’d spent the whole night awake at his side, trying not to move a
single inch for fear of disturbing his snoring sleep, my nose assailed by his hot sour breaths until he turned over and lay on his side, when he dragged off the sheets and left me cold.

Come the dawn, it was freezing the balls of brass monkeys. I didn’t feel up to snuff at all, and my heart was really very low to see the soiled walls and the tarnished jets, the curtains too skimpy to draw quite closed; nothing at all like the opulence to be found in the House of the Mermaids. And when I finally did nod off it was only to wake with a jerking gasp at the banshee screeching of the gulls that perched on the window’s balcony – and then the weight of Osborne’s hand when he pushed some hair away from my brow, when I heard the thudding thump of my heart, my mind a panicking whirling ask of,
Will it be now? Will it be now?

When he raised himself up on an elbow I focused my gaze on his fingers. No one would think they belong to an artist. They are stubby and thick, and the backs of his hands are downed with a bearish coppery hair. I thought I should swoon and take a turn when he tugged at the ribbon of my shift and then pushed the fabric below my breasts. One thumb painted an invisible line to circle a tautening nipple. He brought his bearded lips to mine, a scratching and tickling it was, and more inhalations of rancid breaths as I tried not to cringe, as I tried not to retch, but oh so relieved when he flinched away, as if something in me was repulsive to him.