The Walworth Beauty by Michèle Roberts

Author:Michèle Roberts
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781408883419
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2016-12-26T09:21:36+00:00

EIGHT

Madeleine

Lamb’s Conduit Street in Holborn channels a flow of blue June weather, dust and pollen floating under the trees. Madeleine idles along between the flat-fronted, sash-windowed buildings set back from the pavement on both sides. When she steps on the edge of a broken paving-stone it tilts up, like a trapdoor entrance to the underworld. So just fall down into it.

An underground kitchen, dimly lit. Two aproned women toil, one scrubbing a saucepan, the other shaking out heavy-looking sheets. Irons heat on the range. Smell of burned onions. In a dark corner: a girl’s muffled sobs. The woman swilling the blackened pot swivels towards her, sighs. Be all right, Dorothy. I didn’t mean to shout. No, Mrs Benson, blubs the girl.

A man yells. Madeleine comes to. A passing bicyclist is berating a group of tourists blocking the middle of the street while they take photographs. Madeleine steps round the trip-up paving slab, wanders on.

On gable ends the ghosts of nineteenth-century signs, stencilled in faded black, advertise chocolates and hosiery in flowing script. Modern signs flourishing above the newly gentrified shops point Madeleine towards leather bags, French furnishings, organic vegetables, designer face cream and children’s clothes. At the top of the street, green branches above a white stuccoed wall mark the boundary of Coram’s Fields.

Wedged open, the door to the Lamb funnels in sunlight to spill along the bare, planked floor. Late morning, almost empty, just a couple of men leaning side by side nursing pints. Behind the bar, a woman wipes drips from a beer tap with a blue rag. She sells Madeleine a tomato juice. On your holidays, are you? Sort of, Madeleine says: I’ve just lost my job. The man standing next to her says: drowning your sorrows? Better make it a Bloody Mary, then.

Madeleine shakes her head at vodka, nods yes for ice, red pepper sauce. She says: I was working in a café in south-east London. It changed hands, the new owner wanted young people working for him, that was that. So now I’ve got plenty of free time.

She tucks herself into an alcove seat padded in green leather. Safely distant from Emm’s offering found earlier this morning. Getting up, hearing a sound in the hallway, she flung on her dressing-gown, went to check. Thorny dark stems thrust in through the flap of the letterbox, choking it. She opened the front door, wrenched free from the outside a bunch of dead roses. Shrivelled leaves and withered red blooms, petals dangling, accompanied by a scrap of paper scrawled with a message: My dear Madeleine, why haven’t you got back in touch? Much love – Emm.

The flowers looked like something he’d fished out of someone’s rubbish. She threw them into the brown garden-waste bin. She peered up and down the street. Quiet as usual. No one about.

The flat felt flimsily walled; a paper box. So find refuge elsewhere. She dressed, picked up her little rucksack, slammed the front door behind her, strode out of Apricot Place. She walked north, ended up in Holborn, in Lamb’s Conduit Street.

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