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beloveds – for all I know or care or understand but all I know is Freddie loved Ernest.
    I know Ernest actually lived, for some time anyway, with that Lord, that Lord Arthur Clinton. After that performance in Clapham where we’d seen him with his pretty sister, Lord Arthur used to visit our house occasionally (he was the first Lord I ever met, and a bit scrawny I thought). And Ernest couldn’t help it I suppose, he always said, ‘This is Lord Arthur Clinton,’ very proud and coy, he just couldn’t help stressing the title, ‘ Lord Arthur Clinton,’ and do you know our Ma said to him one day, ‘Where’s your mother living now, Lord Arthur?’ and Lord Arthur gave her a really, really funny look and said very grandly and imperiously – as if she hadn’t the right to address him at all, even if he was inside our house – ‘My mother lives in Paris.’
    And Ma said: ‘I met your mother many years ago, Lord Arthur. I worked at the Drury Lane Theatre. She came backstage one evening to meet one of the actresses. Your mother was a lovely and charming woman.’
    Lord Arthur looked so surprised. But, for just a moment, pleased in a funny lonely way, or it seemed like that.
    When Billy met him, another time he was at our house, Billy said: ‘Lord Arthur, weren’t you the Member of Parliament for Newark?’ straight up, the way Billy always is. ‘Before the last election I mean? I know you’re not there any more but I work in the Parliament and I used to see you sometimes.’
    Billy’s a clerk at the Palace of Westminster, he got promoted from a messenger because he’s so clever, he’s been there since he was thirteen, he’s twenty-three now, knows all the Members, he reads absolutely everything to do with Parliament, he’s like a Parliament fiend, Ma and I tease him. Now Billy actually works sometimes in the Prime Minister’s office, calm as anything about it he is. When suddenly more clerks are briefly needed for some reason Mr Gladstone’s office – not Mr Gladstone himself of course, but his office – often calls for Billy.
    ‘I used to see you in the Parliament,’ said Billy again to Lord Arthur.
    Lord Arthur looked again a bit thrown, not to say a bit annoyed, all this impertinent questioning from our family every time he crossed the threshold! – I suppose they’re more respectful in the upper echelons (I read echelons in a book lately and asked Billy what it meant) – and again Lord Arthur nodded rather regally (except like I said he wasn’t really a very regal-looking person, a bit small and bald me and Ma thought) but really, all he could do, Lord Arthur I mean, was moon and spoon over Ernest. He loved Ernest too, but in a quite different way, he was smitten ,anyone could see. He was berserk with love! was what me and Ma used to say. That naughty Ernest could wind Lord Arthur Pelham Clinton (that was his whole name) around his little finger, Ernest held all the cards, it was clear.
    Except money.
    Then after Lord Arthur was made bankrupt we never saw him in our house again. Ages ago. (And if anyone had told that me and Billy would see him again, would be shut up with him, just us, in a tiny secret room, we would have told them to go back to Bedlam with such an unlikely story.)
    Ernest and Freddie and their visitors never made a really spectacular noise or anything disturbing, they laughed loud, and sang a lot but – well, well not raucous and rowdy. There’s a little piano in that upstairs room they usually took if it was free, that piano was there when we came and I learned to play it and dont ask me how it was got up to the first floor! I like to think of the previous owners huffing and puffing up and trying to carry it round corners on the narrow stairs, we couldn’t imagine we’d ever get it down again. Me and Ma and Billy really enjoyed all the singing and laughing wafting down the stairs, even if one of the tenants in the room below, Mr Crosby, a salesman from Manchester, got cross.