Sunday at the Cross Bones. John Walsh

to herself, mirthlessly. ‘Well, I mean, I am if that’s what you’re after. But I’m not here for winder-shopping, all right?’

      ‘No, Miss Harris.’ I recollected myself. ‘I was merely speculating about how you live. I cannot reconcile the apparent squalor of your address with the richness of your sleeping arrangements.’

      ‘You what?’

      ‘This bed, for example. I am older than you, yet I can only dream that some day I might possess a bed of such magnificence.’

      ‘Nice, isn’t it?’ She pulled herself upright, plumped the damask pillows into a fat double hillock and leaned back, like a plucky invalid – no, like a young duchess entertaining callers to hot chocolate and muffins at a breakfast levée in the days of Pope and Swift. ‘When I got this room a year ago, courtesy of a gentleman friend, he said, “Here’s a hundred quid, furnish it how you like,” so I blued half of it on a proper big bed. I reckon it’s where I ’ave the most fun by day as well as night, so I might as well get the best.’ She yawned. ‘You know they say people sleep for eight hours a night, so that’s like a third of a whole day? That means you spend a third of your life in bed. With me, it’s nearer half my life. So I like to be comfortable.’

      ‘Marvellous,’ I said, a little dazed. ‘I had not done the mathematical calculation before.’

      ‘What’s your bed like then?’ she asked. ‘Since we’re chattin’.’

      I was nonplussed. ‘My bed? Why it’s, um, a solid cherrywood double divan for my wife and myself, with a large headboard. It cannot match this one for opulence, though it is very comfortable. The mattress is delightfully soft after a hard day’s labour, and –’

      ‘Hopeless,’ she said, crushingly. ‘Get rid of it.’

      ‘I beg your pardon?’

      ‘Soft mattresses. They’re no good.’

      ‘No good?’

      ‘No good for screwing on. No good for the old fucky-doodah. You can’t get any friction, or purchase, or whatever the word is. Soft bloody mattresses, they ride along under you, they go boingboing-boing up an’ down, but they’re no use if you’re into deep penetration, are they? I’m sure you knew that once, even if you managed to forget it down the centuries.’

      I was unbothered by her rudeness. Few things are more delightful than provocative conversation with a young woman.

      ‘Sit down here,’ she said. ‘See what I mean?’

      I sat down, keeping my coat about me for fear of misunderstanding. The mattress was indeed a splendid combination of suppleness and give, like the sprung dance floor at the Strand Palace Hotel.

      ‘Pass me the hairbrush,’ she said, pointing to the floor. I found it between an ivory silk camisole and a single balled-up stocking. She tilted her head and began to brush her damp locks.

      As she did so, the front of her towelling robe opened a good four inches. I looked away, discreetly. My gaze fell upon a plate of breakfast debris, easily a week old, wherein a curdled mess of scrambled egg had been impaled by a cigarette butt. Revolted, I turned back to my hostess. Her left breast lay revealed from the white robe. As she brushed her hair, stroke after languorous stroke, her head on one side, her eyes shut once more. Her left hand caressed her white bosom.

      ‘I must go,’ I said. ‘I should not have intruded on your toilette. Forgive my impertinence.’

      ‘There’s no need to rush away, Henry,’ she said. ‘I still don’t know what you’re doin’ here, but if you’d like to give me a bit of a fondle – well, I shouldn’t mind. You’re nice company in a funny sort of way.’

      ‘Harold is my name,’ I said sternly. ‘And, as I have said, I have not sought your address in order to slake some carnal appetite. I am interested in you, Miss Harris, because you are a clever young woman doomed to a life of exploitation, the result of some wrong turning you have taken. I wish only to find out more about you, in order to rescue you from sliding further into moral disarray. I came here today to say that I am at your disposal, to guide, to advise, to befriend, to offer you a map out of the labyrinth of –’

      ‘Yeah, yeah,’ said the girl. ‘I’ve heard it all before. Lot of my older clients say the same thing.’ She adopted a music-hall voice of gruff, masculine gravitas. ‘“Let me take you away from all this, my dear. Let me find you a charming apartment just over a flower shop in Balham, where you won’t be a common tart no more, you’ll just be my personal private tart.” But I never said yes. I prefer to have my own place and entertain whoever I like.’

      ‘But, Barbara –’

      ‘Yes, Harold, go on then, explain how, “Oh no, it’s all different with me, I’m not like other men.” I collect excuses from men all over the place.’

      The time had come to lay my cards on the table.

      ‘I am different, Miss Harris, because, you see –’ I drew in my breath and exhaled, with a certain drama – ‘I am a pastor, who wishes only to care for you and bring good things your way.’

      ‘Pastor? What’s that? Is that what they use to make milk taste better?’

      ‘A cleric, my dear. A clergyman. A priest. I am the rector of a parish in Norfolk called Stiffkey. But I tend to spend my working days attending to the needs of girls – ladies – in troubled circumstances in London.’

      ‘Oh, a sky pilot,’ she said. ‘Well, you didn’t act like one when we met. Why didn’t you tell me then? Where’s your dog collar?’

      ‘I tend not to wear one when going among the lower elements. Some of them find it … intimidating. A priest can be an alarming figure of authority, as well as an unwelcome reminder of the sanctity they have lost.’

      ‘Right,’ said Miss Harris. ‘So when you meet young girls on the game, you don’t tell them you’re in the Church, and you don’t tell ’em you’re going to save their souls either. So who do they think you are, apart from a stranger who might or might not be a client?’

      ‘A friend,’ I said, as gently as I could. She had such need of a true friend, for all her brash ways.

      ‘Oh yeah?’ She sat up in the bed with a rivalrous glint in her eye. ‘And in your friendly way, you take ’em for chops and mash in a café – and then what?’

      ‘Sometimes I offer them sustenance, it is true,’ I confessed, feeling a little defensive. ‘Sometimes I take them to the theatre. Many of my young charges have a romantic passion for the stage.’

      ‘Well, very nice of you, I’m sure. Young girl, in London, down on her luck, making a few bob off gentlemen callers, gets asked out to a West End play by charming gent in long coat, no strings attached, after which he’ll buy ’er supper then he’ll walk her ’ome, will he, and expect nothing in return?’

      ‘Right so far,’ I said shortly. I do not take kindly to being interrogated by children too young to vote.

      ‘And that’s it? Harry, I mean, who’s kidding who ’ere?’

      I smiled at her. St Augustine himself must have encountered just such blank hostility, when conducting his saving ministry.

      ‘There is no question of “kidding”, Miss Harris,’ I said. ‘My strategy is simply to befriend these unfortunate girls, to become their ally and intimate, to establish close relations with them –’

      ‘I’ll say you want close relations. Close enough to get into their knickers.’

      ‘– in order to save them from a life on the streets, to find them work, to reunite them with their parents, to reveal the possibility of a better life. Perhaps a young girl such as you has never entertained the possibility that simple Christian altruism might govern human behaviour.’

      ‘Al-what?’