The House on Half Moon Street Read online

  Books were my education. At eleven years of age my father had looked me up and down, his gaze pausing disapprovingly on my small yet ineluctable chest, and declared that my studies were over. I was top of my class, even called upon to instruct the others when the teacher was away, yet I was evicted, forced to rely on the library we had at home, snatching time between learning to play the cacophonous violin and condemning seedlings to death in the flower beds. My father read widely and quickly on a range of topics, Hardy, Homer, Browning and Carlyle, Darwin and John Stuart Mill, as well as books on anatomy and ornithology – his other principal passion besides dogs and God, in that order – so I could tell a sparrow from a wren by the age of eight, but never mastered my mother’s delights of music, planting and pruning. That I took so much after him was a source of sadness for her and bewilderment for me, but I don’t think he noticed at all.

  Finally, the hour struck seven, and it was time to leave the house. As I was opening the back door I heard Constance call out: ‘Are you going to learn some more remedies, Mr Stanhope?’

  ‘No, Miss Smith. I’m going to play chess. A game I can win at.’

  But that was a lie. I did go west towards my chess club, hunched against the cold and spitting rain, but I carried on walking, just like every Wednesday, onwards into the tangled mews above Piccadilly.

  The pavement was empty and the lamps were broken again. A dog overtook me on my way, trotting with an easy, muscular gait, tongue lolling. On his hind legs he would have been as tall as me. He seemed to know where he was going, and I followed him into the gloom, unable to keep myself from smiling. At that moment everything seemed possible. If I just keep putting one foot in front of the other, I thought, I will reach my heart’s desire.

  Elizabeth Brafton’s brothel was on Half Moon Street, which ran between the lofty affluence of Mayfair and the ceaseless noise and bustle of Piccadilly. The house was set back from the pavement behind an iron railing, squashed between grander buildings like a thin book on a shelf of fatter volumes. It didn’t advertise itself. I had tried more commonplace dolly-houses before finding Mrs Brafton’s, and they were uniformly appalling. The girls did what they were paid to do, but they didn’t understand. Most attempted to treat me as a woman or just lay there in dumb confusion. One or two made an effort, working doggedly through their repertoire and crying out with pleasure rather as a news-seller cries out the title of his paper, with worthy intention but so much repetition it loses all meaning.

  It was my friend Jacob from the chess club, a wise old Jew with special tastes of his own and a wasteful way with pawns, who suggested I should try Mrs Brafton’s. Since then I’d been coming every week for nearly two years. Weekly was all I could afford, but if I’d been richer, if I’d had all the money in the world, I would’ve come here every day, every hour, just to be with my Maria.

  Mrs Brafton was in the drawing room, richly dressed, one arm resting on the mantelpiece. She was a widow, perhaps forty-five years old, upright and unyielding, with russet hair pulled into a schoolmistress bun to hide her wisps of grey. Outside of this place you’d never guess what she was. She treated the girls like her children and liked to pretend that her customers were friends, come round to pay a visit. We all played along.

  ‘Good evening, Mr Stanhope,’ she said. ‘How are you? Very well, I trust?’ Her voice was melodic and refined. Sometime in her past, long before she became what she was now, she’d received an education.

  ‘Yes, thank you.’

  The Colonel was slumped and shrunken in a chair, little more than a pile of clothes and a bald pate, as smooth and pink as the meat of an uncooked fish. I doubted he’d ever been a real colonel, but she always called him that. He was the only customer she ever personally entertained, out of habit or pity. The girls, chattering starlings that they were, told me he was too old to perform these days and paid for nothing more than her womanly company. They said you could hear her knitting needles click-clacking through the bedroom door.

  ‘Miss Milanes is waiting for you in the first-floor room,’ she said, and smiled. She had a girlish mouth and a banker’s eyes. I dropped two half-crowns into the willow-pattern bowl on the dresser.

  On the stairs, little Audrey winked as she passed me with a customer in tow. He was out of breath, paunchy and reeking of sweat. His wife probably doted on him, this dank-browed shopkeeper in worn-out shoes, but she wouldn’t do for him what Audrey would do. I’d been with Audrey once, on an early visit before Maria. The walls of her room were mounted with manacles, and there were ropes and buckles and canes with wickerwork handles on the shelves. Lithe and tiny as she was, she would cheerfully beat you raw for a florin, and for six shillings you could beat her in return. But that wasn’t my preference. I was a traditionalist.

  And I was in love. Today was the day I would prove it.

  There were faint sounds from the other rooms: footsteps and low voices, a woman’s laugh rippling into a lascivious giggle. I paused at Maria’s door. I would soon be in her arms, and wanted to savour these final seconds. I had waited all week. Maria Milanes. Just the sight of her name in my diary was enough to make my stomach lurch, and the taste of it in my mouth was like plums in honey: Maria Milanes.

  Her grandmother had been Italian, she’d once told me, and had pronounced their surname in three syllables, the last rhyming with ‘tease’. But her late mother had thought this too foreign and reduced the syllables to two, the last rhyming with ‘drains’ or (and Maria hesitated at the word, as if I might not know the meaning of it) ‘mundanes’. When I laughed and told her that ‘mundane’ has no plural, she pouted and turned away, only relenting when I insisted, nuzzling at the nape of her neck, that she could never be mundane, and was quite the most singular person I had ever met.

  I knocked on her door, wondering if knocking was the wrong thing to do, or if my rat-a-tat-tat was too frivolous, too silly. It didn’t matter. She opened the door and threw her arms around my neck.

  ‘Leo,’ she breathed into my ear. ‘I love you, my Leo.’ And then she kissed me.

  2

  ‘I’m glad you’ve come,’ she said. ‘I worried all day you mightn’t.’

  ‘Of course I’ve come. I always do.’

  ‘One time you didn’t. I waited and waited.’

  ‘I was unwell. I told you.’ The monthly blood had come sooner than I’d expected, and I’d stayed at home, in physical and mental anguish. ‘Is something wrong, my love?’

  She sat on the edge of the bed kicking her bare heels against the frame: thump, thump, thump. Her room was quite different from Audrey’s; no horrors here, just frilly lace on the curtains and bedspread, a gilded clock on the mantel and a dressing table with an oval mirror and a million bottles and jars. It was a pretty room for a pretty girl.

  She was all curves, my Maria. Not one part of her was hard or bony, and her softness was always moving, in her cheeks when she smiled, in her breasts when she inhaled, in her calves as she kicked. Even her hair was forever alive, bouncing when she moved her head or tickling my face as she lay in my arms.

  Her only imperfection, in her eyes though not in mine, was her stain. It spread from her nose down her cheek and across her chin like a spill of blackberry juice on white linen. She covered it with powder and the ribbons of her bonnet, and sometimes with her hands or even a fan, which was all the more endearing for being such a ridiculous affectation.

  She shrugged, a little sorrowfully. ‘It’s just that I look forward to you coming. I miss you in between. The week seems so long, and I get worried if you’re late. I know it’s silly.’

  ‘I’m not late.’ The clock stood at seven-thirty precisely.

  ‘How long do I have you for?’

  ‘For ever.’

  ‘No, really. How long?’

  ‘Two hours, for tonight.’

  I took her chin in my hand and kissed her mouth chastely, just a soft pressure, but she responded more strongly, with warm, wet lips and tongue. I pulled back, knowing the
moment would soon arrive, relishing the anticipation.

  ‘Not yet.’

  There was a jug of ale on the dressing table. She poured two glasses and held one out to me. ‘To Leo and Maria,’ she said. ‘For ever and always.’

  We clinked and drank, sitting side by side on the bed. Over the past few months we’d spent hours in that spot while she talked and I listened, absorbed in her every word, flattered by her confidence, until I felt I wasn’t with another person at all but was continuing an internal train of thought barely interrupted by the time we spent apart. She always chose the same side, with her stain away from me, though I told her endlessly it was delightful and she had nothing whatever to be ashamed of.

  ‘There’s something I want to tell you,’ I said. ‘An idea for the two of us.’

  ‘What sort of thing? You mean for us now?’

  I laughed and shook my head, and she seemed a little relieved. ‘Nothing like that. More of a gift. We’ll talk about it later.’

  She touched my cheek and I could resist no longer. I kissed her again, running my hand down her back, and she stood up to undo the hooks on her bodice, half a smile on her face. Finally, she stepped out of her petticoats and was naked in front of me, leaning against me with her lips on my forehead. The hollow between her breasts smelled of sweat and ginger mint. She kissed me fiercely, and I felt her tongue touching mine and her teeth nipping my lips. Her hands were on my arms and then my shoulders, pulling urgently at my jacket and unbuttoning my shirt, and then she knelt at my feet to tug off my shoes, staring up at me with wide eyes, part invitation and part challenge.

  She laughed at my avid expression, and stood up to unwrap my cilice.

  ‘Oh Leo, you’re bleeding.’

  I flinched as she touched my sores with the end of her finger and then her tongue.

  ‘Oh darling, it hurts you so.’

  She went to her dressing table, bending over it in a way that made me want to burst, and sorted through her perfumes and ointments, searching for something. The jars were arranged around a doll I hadn’t seen before, with staring, ceramic eyes and a red, kiss-shaped mouth. I’d always detested dolls; cold, counterfeit babies foisted on me by my aunts. Why would she have such a thing here, in plain sight?

  She returned with a pot of balm, and dabbed my sores. I stroked her hair and she guided me backwards on to the bed and unbuttoned my trousers, so I was naked, a skeletal gargoyle next to her loveliness. I covered myself with my hands.

  ‘Don’t,’ she said, and touched the hair between my legs.

  On the pillow was my instrument, a baton of soft leather that could be fastened with straps around my waist and between my thighs. Maria loved to see me putting it on. She would grip it in place or sometimes put it into her mouth, and even though I couldn’t feel it I was excited beyond endurance. She smeared some more balm on her hands and massaged it in, rubbing up and down.

  ‘Maybe I should try wearing it one day?’ she whispered.

  The thought was too horrid to contemplate. ‘I wouldn’t want to see you like that.’

  ‘But you might find it nice.’

  ‘I would not.’

  She grinned, and I sensed she was going to tease me some more, but when she spoke it was in a serious tone. ‘Why do you love my body, but not your own?’

  I pulled her gently towards me. ‘Because your body’s perfect.’

  ‘No, really, why?’

  I looked down at my anatomy, which was not something I generally chose to do. It was too skinny and angular to be a woman’s body, the result of starving myself to avoid gaining a feminine shape. But it wasn’t a man’s body either. So what was it? Something detached from me, I supposed, a vessel for my brain and soul, needing maintenance and sustenance but having no greater value. I couldn’t imagine anyone loving it.

  ‘This isn’t me,’ I said. ‘Not as I should have been.’

  She took my cheeks in her hands and looked into my eyes. ‘Leo, I wish …’ She stopped and pondered, and then very softly kissed me. ‘I wish you everything good in the world.’

  But I had the feeling that wasn’t what she had started to say.

  When we were fully spent, I unstrapped my instrument and dropped it on the floor, out of sight. We lay together on the sheet, chests heaving, skin shining, listening to the heedless clatter of the carts and carriages outside. She shifted towards me and laid her head on my shoulder, one knee slung over my leg. I could feel her breath and the tiny brush of her eyelashes when she blinked. She smelled of us.

  After a few minutes, she sat up and pulled the sheet around herself, her hair falling over her shoulders. ‘Have you ever wanted to just run away, Leo? I mean, completely.’

  ‘Many times. Why do you ask?’

  ‘When was the first time?’

  ‘The first time was … well, it was premature. I didn’t succeed.’ My fingers itched. I could almost feel the steadfast cloth of my brother’s jackets and trousers hanging in his wardrobe.

  ‘What happened? Tell me.’

  ‘I was twelve. Mummy had taken Oliver and Jane out to lunch. I was being punished for something or other, made to stay at home and take dictation for my father’s sermon. When it was all finished, he went out into the garden to practise and I was left alone in the vicarage.’

  I hesitated. There were things I couldn’t bear to explain, even to her.

  On that day, my father had been outside, preaching in his loud baritone, exhorting the magpies and thrushes against their sins. There was no one else in the house. I just wanted to pretend for a little while, like dressing up. I knew it was wrong, but I couldn’t resist.

  I slipped one of Oliver’s shirts off its hanger and put it on over my chemise, hugging it around myself. It was far too large and delightfully shapeless. Without stopping to think I threw off my skirts and pulled on a pair of grey flannel trousers and a blue blazer with black buttons. I rolled up the sleeves, shortened the braces and pushed my hair up under his tweed cap.

  In the mirror, a boy with my long face and small eyes considered me. I’d never been pretty, but he looked right. When I smiled, he smiled, and when I shoved my hands into my pockets as I’d seen boys do, he did the same. His shoulders were straight and his chin lifted. He tipped his cap. He placed his feet wide apart and inhaled from an imaginary cigar, carelessly blowing smoke into the room. He looked into my eyes, and when I winked and he winked back, I realised that it wasn’t me who was real and him a reflection, it was the other way around.

  ‘I decided to leave the house,’ I said to Maria. ‘It was a new feeling. I could go anywhere, just jump on a train and become someone new.’

  I would never have been brave enough. I would have been terrified of being caught, of what my parents would do, of the shame. I would never have dared.

  But he did.

  He was the same as any other lad, swinging his arms as he strolled along the pavement. He even tried to whistle. It was a revelation: no skirts to pick up, no bonnet to fiddle with, no harsh undergarments to pinch and scratch. On that short walk, something changed. I didn’t have the words to describe it even to myself, but somewhere inside I knew that this unnamed boy, in his stolen trousers and gaping blazer, was me; me as I was meant to be.

  I didn’t have long to enjoy it.

  ‘It turned out that Oliver had left Mummy and Jane to their lunch and met some friends. They came around the corner and saw me. They made me go back to the vicarage. It was a long time before I tried again.’

  They chased me down the street, hooting as my hair spilled out. My brother just stood there with an expression of disgust on his face. When they got bored and left me, I ran home and got changed again, and wept for an hour on my bed until Mummy and Jane returned and made me watch them practising piano.

  ‘Poor Leo,’ Maria said, and took my hand in hers.

  ‘We could run away, together, you and me, if you want to. I’ll leave my job in the hospital and go wherever you like.’

  ‘What a
lovely thought.’ She squeezed my hand, but showed no sign of taking me up on the offer. I would have done it in an instant. I would’ve left with her right there and then, out into the evening with only the clothes I had with me and no clue where our footsteps might carry us.

  She got out of bed and pulled on her drawers. Normally, we would lie naked together in the half-dark and I would tell her about my week, the people I’d seen and spoken to. It was my favourite time, almost better than what came before. And we still had more than an hour.

  ‘I wonder how you do it,’ she said, perching on the edge of the mattress. ‘You spend all day with dead things, touching them. It must be awful. They used to be people and now they’re nothing.’

  I sat up and put my arm around her, breathing her in as she rested her head on my shoulder. Her mother had died the previous year, and her grief still bubbled up from time to time.

  ‘They’re not nothing. I take care of them. We have to know what happened, how they died. We owe it to them and their family.’

  ‘Was there a family today?’

  ‘There was a widow and some children. They were too small to understand.’

  I felt a clutch of pity for them, more now than I had that afternoon. Sitting there in the comforting cool, the loss of their father seemed oddly sharper. Even so, I couldn’t shake off the suspicion that this sudden tenderness was one more betrayal by my ovaries.

  ‘What was her name?’

  I confess I struggled to recall. ‘Um… Flowers. Her husband was Jack. He drowned. What is it?’

  I thought I knew all her expressions, from helpless laughter to wrenching grief, but this one was new to me. Her face was blank, as if her thoughts were elsewhere, and she wasn’t seeing the room or the bed or anything.

  She shook herself, and was my playful Maria again.

  ‘Jack Flowers. What a sweet name.’