‘I was working late,’ he said. In fact, he’d been to a cheap tailor on Whitechapel Road whose sign he had remembered - ‘We Press, You Wait.’ An ascetic-looking Eastern European had shaken his head over Denton’s suit and tut-tutted while he brushed off moss and sewed up tears; Denton had waited, trouserless and jacketless, in a sort of booth with a swinging door, until the tailor appeared and, helping him on with the jacket, had said, ‘A shame - a shame - such good cloth—’ But Denton had walked out looking more or less respectable again, the damage of the roof muted. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said now.

‘I’ve another appointment at eight.’ She made it sound as if he had already made her late, although it wasn’t quite five.

‘Which are the ones I’m supposed to meet?’ He looked around at the unsmiling women.

‘Oh, they wouldn’t meet you here!’ She gave him a little push towards the door. ‘We’re going up Aldgate High Street.’ When they were out on the pavement, she said, ‘We’ll walk,’ and strode away. Denton caught up, did a sort of dance to get on her left, and found her laughing at him.

‘Quite gentlemanly,’ she said.

‘Do you mind?’

‘It’s nothing to me either way.’They walked a few strides and she said more soberly, ‘These girls won’t go near my office. They think I’ll send for the police - as if I’d do such a thing! We’re meeting them in a public house, not a very nice one - they feel safe there.’ Another stride, and she had changed the subject - a habit he would eventually get used to. ‘I asked some of my nicer acquaintances about you. They said you were “entirely respectable”. Otherwise, I’d not have let you meet these girls.’ She smiled. ‘Did you ask about me?’

Denton thought of lying, didn’t. ‘One friend,’ he muttered.

‘A man? What did he tell you? That I’d killed my husband? ’

Startled, Denton jerked his head and made a sort of grunt.

‘It’s what they usually say,’ she murmured. Pointing ahead, she again shifted ground. ‘There’s the place where we’re meeting them. Let me speak for you, please. They’re like wild kittens.’ She walked faster and led him to the saloon door of a large pub with an electric-lighted front and several entrances. With her hand ready to push the door open, she said, a rather sly smile turning up her lips, ‘I didn’t kill my husband, in fact, no matter what your friend said.’ The smile turned wry. ‘Did he say I’d spent four and a half years in an institution for the criminally insane? Well, I did.’ And she pushed her way in.

The pub was huge, pounding with human noise, most of it coming from the other side of a wall to their right. The interior managed to be both muted and garish, dark green walls punctuated with the white, glaring electric globes. Part of a mahogany bar that must have served the whole house in a shape like a racetrack jutted from the wall in front of them, disappeared in a wall at their left; in that same wall, a door with frosted glass and ‘Private Rooms’ stood just beyond the bar’s curving end. Above the bar, coloured glass panes made a screen. The overall air was of activity and seediness, false elegance blurred by a fug of pipe smoke and coal.

‘In there,’ Mrs Striker said, again shoving him, this time towards the private rooms. ‘I’ll find the girls.’

Denton stopped. ‘I don’t really like to be pushed,’ he said.

‘Oh.’ She frowned. ‘I didn’t know I’d done it. Oh, I’m sorry.’ She muttered something about bad habits and, flustered, disappeared through a door marked ‘Ladies’ Bar’.

Denton waited. His suit smelled of the pressing - hot cloth, his own sweat. The memory of the roof made him sweat again. He was still rattled by it, not really able to focus well. He wished he could go home, have a hot bath, sit in the green armchair with a drink.

‘One, anyway,’ Mrs Striker said, coming through the door. She was pushing a thin girl in front of her with jabs between the shoulder blades. ‘Move along, Sticks.’

The girl whined something about a shilling; Mrs Striker explained that the only way she’d been able to get the girl to come was to promise her a shilling. ‘After,’ she said to her and gave her another jab.

‘Leave off!’

Mrs Striker rolled her eyes and indicated the private rooms, and Denton hurried to open the door. Inside was a row of half a dozen swinging doors, theirs the third one along. Denton pushed through, found a space a little bigger than a coffin with a narrow banquette on each side covered in greasy, almost napless brown velour. At the far end was the same coloured glass that stood above the long bar, and a hatch that he guessed was for service.

The child - eleven, Denton thought, emaciated, not pretty - fell into one of the banquettes and stuck her feet out. Mrs Striker said she was off to find the others; she turned back before she went out and said to the girl, ‘Mind your manners, Sticks. You know what I mean.’

When she was gone, the child said in the door’s direction, ‘Cow.’ She looked at Denton and said, as if on a dare, ‘Stupid old cow.’

‘Don’t say that.’

‘Hate her.’ It was like trying to understand another language; he had got ‘cow’ all right, but she ran her words together, and she had an accent he couldn’t follow. He sat down next to the door, finding himself embarrassed, not sure why.

‘JerwantaFrenchwye?’ the girl said.

‘What?’

‘Frenchwye, French wye! Yer deaf? French, I does’t betternor’ny. Ask any gemmun. Quick, I am. Bring yer off in lessnor minute.’

Denton stared at her. What struck him most was how entirely sexless she seemed. Yet he supposed that ‘French way’ meant the same as Harris’s à la bouche. ‘How old are you?’ he said.

‘Fourteen, wot bus’ness’t to you? Yeserno, you wannit ’fore the cow comes back? Shilling.’

Denton said no, and she flounced back against the greasy velvet and folded her thin arms. She had no breasts at all that he could see, nor any hips; if she was fourteen, nature hadn’t brought her any maturity yet.

‘Wantersee my place?’ she said. He felt himself flush. She smiled. ‘No hair on it. Tenpence.’ She reached down to grasp the hem of her skirt; the door pushed open, and Janet Striker came in.

‘What are you doing?’ she said.

‘’E made a nindecent purposition ter me.’

Mrs Striker glanced at Denton and then at the girl. ‘You’re a terrible little liar, Sticks.’ She looked back at Denton. ‘I found the others outside the public bar; they’ll be right along.’ She sat on the same side as Denton, facing the girl, two adults apparently allied against her. ‘I know you better, Sticks. Drop it.’

The girl crossed her arms over her chest again and pouted her lips. ‘Where’s my shilling?’

‘After, I told you.’

‘Five shillings, you said!’

‘That’s if you had anything to tell us about Stella Minter. Well?’

‘Yerfinkiblab everyfink I know?’ She wiggled herself deeper into the banquette. ‘Fer five bloody shillin’? Make me larf.’

Janet Striker’s voice was tired. ‘She doesn’t know anything. I knew it was a mistake to spend time on her, but—Give her a shilling and I’ll send her on her way.’

‘I know wot I knows!’

‘Yes, nothing.’

Denton was trying to find a coin in his pocket, wondering if the tailor had taken his money. No, there it was—

‘I do know somethink, so there! Stella Minter tole me all her secrets!’

Mrs Striker took the coin and held it out. ‘Oh, Sticks - get out.’

The girl grabbed the coin and jumped up. ‘Stella Minter got the clap!’ she shouted and, giggling, ran out. She collided with two other girls, who shouted at her and she at them, and they came in red-faced. Both wore demure blouses and dark skirts and little round hats with brims. They looked at Denton and then at Mrs Striker and everybody seemed deeply embarrassed.

‘Sit down, do,’ Mrs Striker said. ‘That’s Lillian, and that’s Mary Kate.’ Lillian was plump, rather sleepy-looking, perhaps sixteen; Mary Kate was thinner, freckled. ‘This gentleman wants to know about Stella Minter, the girl who was murdered in the Minories. He’ll give you a shilling for being here and five shillings if you know something useful.’

The two girls looked at each other. They seemed still more embarrassed. Denton realized it was because of him - something about its being all right to sell themselves to a man like him but not all right to discuss their profession in front of him and another woman. Mary Kate put her feet flat on the wood floor and looked at her shoes; Lillian stared around as if she had never been in such a place before and then fanned herself with a hand and looked over Denton’s head. All at once, Mary Kate said, ‘Had a baby.’Three words, and he knew she was Irish.

Mrs Striker looked at Denton and then back at them and said, ‘Stella Minter? When?’

They looked at each other again. Lillian said, her voice so soft he could hardly hear it, ‘Wile ago.’ She glanced aside at Mary Kate and then murmured, ‘Waren’t married or nothin, she waren’t.’

‘What happened to the baby?’ Denton said. All three women turned towards him - they had been talking to each other - and frowned. Mrs Striker gave him a look and said that it was a good question, and did the girls know?

‘’Dopted,’ Lillian said.

‘She gave it up?’

Mary Kate studied her shoes but said, ‘She went to the Humphrey, an’ they kep’ it and all.’

Mrs Striker said aside to Denton, ‘The Humphrey is a home for unwed mothers.’ Then, to the other two, she said, ‘You’re sure? This is important information - you must be sure.’

‘Sure ’n’ I’m sure as sure,’ Mary Kate said, and Lillian giggled and got red.

‘Did she tell you?’

‘Sure, wasn’t she Lillian’s special pal, then? She was allus tellin’ you everthing, wasn’t she, Lil?’

‘Well, not everythin’.’ Lillian blushed deeper. ‘Oney oncet she tole me that when she were feelin’ low. She were a sad girl, she was. A’ways.’ Her face, which didn’t seem to know how to show sadness, got blank. ‘Never had no fun.’

‘Was she afraid of something?’ Denton said, and they all looked at him again.

‘Maybe. But I dunno. I do know she tole me oncet about the ’Umphrey and the awfu’ time they give ’er. Workin’ girls to death.’ She looked up at Janet Striker.

‘Yes, I know, dear.’ She glanced at Denton. ‘It’s like an old-fashioned workhouse.’Then, turning back to the others, she said, ‘Is that all? There’s nothing else you remember?’

They looked at each other once more, then around the little space as if for escape, and Lillian murmured, ‘Ever so eddicated.’

‘What’s that?’

‘Stella was eddicated. Nuffin’ she din’t know. G’ography. Reading.’

‘She owned a book,’ Mary Kate said.

Denton didn’t remember a book among Stella Minter’s belongings. Was that significant?

‘Name weren’t Stella, neither,’ Lillian said so low he wasn’t sure he had heard right.

‘What?’

‘Her name weren’t Stella. We was standin’ down Aldgate, nobody comin’ along, nuffing! And we was both sad and tellin’ things and she says, “My real name’s not Stella.” Well, lots o’ the girls change their names, don’t they? So I said, “Wot is it, then?” and she says, “Ruth, like the Bible.”’

‘Ruth what?’

‘She wooden tell that, would she? Oney Ruth.’ Lillian’s eyes were almost closed; she might have been a medium, hauling up these titbits from a trance. ‘Her sister’s name was Becca. Becky, but she says Becca. Re-becca. She’s ever so worried ’bout Becca.’

Denton leaned in. ‘Worried about what?’

‘So much younger, wasn’t she? Go the same way she done, I s’pose. She said something like, “Wind up like me.” And crying.’ Lillian looked at Mrs Striker. ‘We had such a good time at the hop-picking last summer, the three of us. Now she’s gone.’Tears shone in her eyes. ‘That’s all I know.’

‘I shouldn’t have brought Sticks. She’s a vicious little brute. Did she offer herself to you?’

‘More or less.’

‘I’m trying to reach girls like her. I apologize for using your shilling to do it. Anyway, it didn’t work.’ She strode on as if late for her appointment, although there was more than an hour yet. ‘You needn’t accompany me.’^I

‘I want to talk to you. About what they said and - other things.’

Perhaps she misunderstood; perhaps her own life was on her mind. Whatever the reason, she was silent, seemingly angry, and then she burst out, ‘I told you I spent four and a half years in an institution. Now I shall tell you why.’ She raised a finger to point to a turning to the right as they were entering the City. ‘My mother sold me to Frank Striker. It was called a marriage, but it was a sale. I was cheap goods - no dowry, no beauty. I was my mother’s only capital. She raised me to be marriageable, tried to teach me to please men, gave me all the useless capabilities - I could pour tea but I couldn’t boil water. When I was seventeen, she put me on the market.’

‘Edith Dombey,’ he said.

‘What? Oh, I suppose. Anyway, she found Frank Striker. He got me, and she got a yearly stipend and a flat in Harrogate.’ She fell silent again; he glanced aside at her and saw her face spottily reddened, her jaw set. Then she started talking again in a hard, half-strangled voice. ‘My husband liked two women at a time. That was my wedding night - a prostitute and me. I stood it for a year and then rebelled. He came for me one night with a belt and gave me three welts on my bare back, and then I tried to push him downstairs. He had me committed. Well, it’s perfectly logical, isn’t it? Any woman who’d raise her hand to her husband must be insane.’ She slowed, looked at her watch and strode on. ‘Four and a half years later, by whining and wheedling and saying I was a good girl now, I managed to get my release. He sent a servant for me. I jumped out of the cab and went straight to a woman lawyer I’d heard about in prison, and I started suit for divorce the same day. Two of his prostitutes testified for me - they were sorry for me. The prison doctor testified about my scars. We were going to win the case, and the night before the jury returned the verdict, he took his revenge - shot himself and left every penny to his Cambridge college.’ She laughed rather horribly. ‘My mother lost her stipend and her flat and tumbled on me to care for her. I sued to break his will, but I hadn’t a penny. Have you ever tried suing one of the colleges of our great universities? The nurseries of our great men, the treasuries of our best thought, the preserver of our highest traditions?’ She hooted.

‘What did you do?’

She laughed more quietly. ‘I did what women always do. I went on the street.’

He felt her look at him; he met her eyes and saw the challenge. ‘“Hard times will make a bulldog eat red pepper,” ’ he said lamely.

She laughed, this time a real laugh, almost a masculine one. ‘Wherever did that come from?’

‘My grandmother.’

‘Irish?’

‘Scotch.’

‘Scottish. Scotch is whisky.’

‘We say Scotch.’

She looked at him again, smiled, shrugged. More cheerfully then, as if it were all a kind of shared joke, she said, ‘I didn’t know a thing about going on the street. I knew only the words. So I went out on Regent Street. I didn’t know it was the French girls’ pitch. Two of them pushed me into a doorway and slapped me about and told me if I ever came on their territory again they’d cut my nose off. But it was rather pro forma; when they were done, one of them told me to try Westerley Street, where they might have a taste for a woman like me. I thought she meant prison-worn, but now I know she meant English and conventional. Anyway, that’s how I met Mrs Castle. I wasn’t much good to her as a prostitute, except for a few men who wanted to be able to say that they’d had the woman who killed Frank Striker, but she sent me on a bookkeeping course and I became her accountant and played the piano in the parlour for the gentlemen, and so I had a home and an income and a skill.’

Ahead, he saw one of the Aerated Bread Company’s tea shops. ‘May I buy you a cup of tea?’ he said.

‘You mayn’t buy me anything, Mr Denton. But I’ll buy my own cup of tea and drink it with you, if you’ll be quick.’ It surprised him. He realized that she wanted to talk.

‘You’re going on to dinner?’

She hooted again. ‘I’m going to speak at a temperance meeting at a Methodist chapel.’ She looked at the watch again. ‘I’m due in Euston Road at eight.’

‘I’ll put you in a cab after we’ve had some tea.’

They were at the shop door. She looked at him with a kind of weariness. ‘You won’t put me into anything. If I take a cab, I shall take a cab.’

Inside, flanked by a teapot and cups and a plate of aerated bread and butter, they were awkward. The silence between her tirade on the street and their seating themselves had made them both diffident - strangers again. He felt intimidated, yet knew she had told her story to have this effect - and to force him to know, from a curious egoism, who she was - and yet he felt a kind of diffidence towards her because of it. What she had said, the brutality of her saying it, seemed to invite - to challenge? - a response of the same kind. His voice tentative, he said in almost a whisper into the silence between them, ‘I was married when I was young.’

She was pouring tea for herself. Sharp eyes touched his. ‘And?’

‘She killed herself.’ He could have stopped there, had meant to, but it seemed self-pitying, and suddenly he was rushing to tell her. ‘She drank lye. She took the lye bottle out into a field and drank as much as she could stand and then began to scream. I was in the barn. I heard her, but I thought she was just—I was used to hearing her scream. She lived for three days. We were thirty miles from a doctor. I took her in the wagon; it was all we had.’ She wasn’t going to pour him tea, he had seen; he had one hand on the teapot, but his eyes were staring off into the far side of the vast room ‘She’d had four babies in six years. Two stillborn. She was carrying another when she did it. She hadn’t told me.’ He was silent. ‘That one died, of course.’

Janet Striker said nothing. Her eyes were on his face.

‘It was too much for her. I was too much for her. We had—We’d done it together. As if we’d conspired to make something that would destroy her. And we called it love.’ As he said it, he saw all of a piece what was wrong with the book he had been writing, and he saw the book he should write; he saw the image of a man and a woman making a beautiful and then hideous thing together as they laughed and endured cold silences and made love and hated each other, and he saw the title: The Machine.

‘Do you blame her?’

‘She took to drink. I’ve always blamed her for that, but I guess I shouldn’t. We did it together.’ He felt his hand hot and looked at it and saw that it was still embracing the Britannia-metal teapot. ‘The saddest words of voice or pen - we meant well.’ He grasped the teapot’s handle and poured himself tea, his hand shaking. He gulped the tea, then said, ‘I’ve had a damnable day.’ He told her about Mulcahy then, and the roof, and what he’d found in the Inventorium. ‘Getting back up that roof was the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life.’

‘I wondered about your clothes.’

‘I sent a note around to a policeman I know. They’ll be all over that place by now, and the body. I suppose they’ll make trouble for me over it. But I know now that Mulcahy didn’t kill Stella Minter.’

‘Why do you care?’

He opened his mouth to speak and then hesitated. ‘Because - because Mulcahy was a pathetic little man who came to me for help. And I didn’t help him. And because—’ He chewed on his moustache with his lower teeth. His left hand was clenched at the edge of the table. ‘I went to the post-mortem. It was all men. All of us - like a theatre, like—No better than Mulcahy. Watching, you know.’ He stammered a few syllables that made no sense. ‘I saw - Mulcahy made me see—It’s something about men and women.’ He shook his head.

‘Men hate women,’ she said, as if she were saying that tea was made with tea leaves and hot water.

‘That’s damned nonsense!’

After half a minute’s pained silence, she said, ‘You weren’t surprised to hear from Mary Kate that the Minter girl had had a baby.’

‘The surgeon at the post-mortem found something about - milk—’

‘She was still lactating? Oh, the stupid girl! If she’d come to me, I could have found her a place as a wet nurse. The money isn’t much, but she’d have had a roof over her head and a leg up on a servant’s place.’

‘Maybe she didn’t want to be a wet nurse.’

‘“Hard times will make a bulldog eat red pepper.”’ She grinned. It was a peace offering. ‘Did the girls tell you anything worthwhile? Were your twelve shillings well spent?’

‘Thirteen,’ he said, meaning Sticks. Atkins would have been furious. ‘Yes, her name. And her sister’s name. And that about being educated - I think that’s significant.’

‘Lillian wouldn’t know what education is. “Eddicated” may simply mean that Stella - Ruth - spoke better than the others. Or she knew where Norway is.’

‘Still - maybe she did have more education. How would she have got it?’

‘Oh - perhaps nothing more than doing her lessons. That would make her “eddicated” to Lillian, I suppose.’

He stirred his tea, although there was nothing in it to stir. ‘It’s grasping at straws, isn’t it.’

She poured herself more tea, then, after hesitating, poured some into his cup, as well.

‘I’m sorry.’

‘It isn’t your fault.’

She chewed a piece of the bread and butter, saying it was all she’d get to eat until she got home. Thinking of what her ‘home’ might be, he said, ‘What’s become of your mother?’

‘She’s become a drunkard. She lives with me.’ She finished the bread and wiped her fingers. ‘You can’t keep them away from it. You do everything. Finally, you give up and let them drink.’

He remembered all that. Seen through the gears of the machine they’d built, he realized now that Lily’s drinking had been an effect, not the cause. ‘Your life isn’t easy,’ he said.

‘No life is easy. I curse those mindless women who swan about in carriages and dress for dinner and have everything done for them - the women who live the way my mother meant me to - but in fact I know that even their lives aren’t easy. Theirs are lives of ease, but not easy.’

He frowned, chewed his moustache, bit something back and at last, having thought of Emma Gosden and Stella Minter and Sticks and Janet Striker and his dead wife, he settled for mumbling, ‘Yes.’

Out on the street, she strode off without waiting for him. ‘The Humphrey,’ he said, catching up.

‘The Humphrey Institution for the Betterment of Unwanted Children. Yes.’

‘I want to talk to them.’

‘Grasping at more straws?’ She hesitated. ‘I suppose I could help you - I know them from my work, not that they think much of what I do. They’re not such very nice people.’ She grunted. ‘People who do good often aren’t.’

‘Would you go with me?’

She seemed to be totting up a column of figures in some moral account book. ‘I suppose. If I have the time.’ She was walking as if trying to outpace him, and she said, ‘I shan’t want company beyond this point, thank you.’ She stopped and put out her hand. He took it, saw there was no going farther with her. He said, ‘You don’t really believe that men hate women, do you?’

‘Of course I do,’ she said and walked away.