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But he died (Mr Crosby I mean) so that’s why he was cross I expect.
    And then they’d go out, Ernest and Freddie, appearing in their gowns just like actresses going on stage, with maybe a gentleman escort waiting with a hansom or a cabriolet and they’d float out on a cloud of scents and powders (and gin, they had bottles in their room – sometimes brandy, sometimes gin), pulling on their gloves and patting their hair and adjusting their bracelets and necklaces – and always laughing and excited. I used to think the row of gowns hanging in their room made it like a theatre dressing room – a bit perspiration-smelling and a few grubby bits close up, and unwanted or dirty clothes just thrown careless into a portmanteau and just left there! but when they appeared all dressed up and perfumed they always looked lovely in the soft lamplight.
    Ernest and Lord Arthur used to live together in various different places before Lord Arthur got bankrupt. I think Freddie still lives by himself in Bruton-street.
    By himself.
    I think.
    All families have their own stories, but that’s their business. Even, so it turned out, the Prime Minister Mr Gladstone has got his own stories just like we have, that are his own business, that he’d prefer to keep to himself. The Stacey family of 13 Wakefield-street – us I mean, me and Ma and Billy – we would have gone along, our own lives our own business – if Freddie and Ernest hadn’t come to our house and made their story partly in our house, ‘the seedy headquarters of criminal activity: 13 Wakefield-street’. ‘Run by that prostitute,’ people said (meaning me). And can you believe people came and hung around our house and stared ? we would see them outside as the story went on, and sometimes things got writ on our walls, how would you like that on your house that you loved? SODOMITE LOVERS they wrote, no one wrote on the walls of 10 Downing Street did they?
    Not that it was his fault I suppose, Mr Gladstone, he was just caught up too, like we were (but all his caught-up-ness kept secret of course) and actually he was kind – well I thought he was kind in the way he thought kind, I know this sounds a bit peculiar but I felt – I dunno, I just felt a bit sorry for him when I met him, he seemed – it just felt for a moment when he stood there in the dark that there were deep things that he literally couldn’t possibly allow himself to think. So he didn’t.
    Still, no one wrote SODOMITE LOVERS on the walls of 10 Downing Street did they?
    Our Ma, with her wardrobe connections, had got me trained as a milliner when I was thirteen (in case no one married me, I used to think), which perhaps gives you an idea that I was not the prettiest young lady in London. All right I’ll just get it over with, I’m not ugly or anything but I’ve got something wrong with one of my feet. It doesn’t make me either backward or ugly, so dont think it does, in fact because I’m always looking in the glass to try my hats I know perfectly well I’m pretty – not like Ma used to be, well – well, she’s still beautiful even though she’s old, everyone says so, Freddie told me he thought she was beautiful, so I dont mean I’m like Ma, but I’m a bit pretty, the only thing is I cant run like the wind like heroines do, like Cathy in Wuthering Heights , like heroines do in almost all the novels I’ve ever read and I’ve read more novels than most people I’ve ever met once my Pa got me going. But my foot is all that’s wrong with me, got it? And it makes no difference to me, I walk everywhere, I walk and walk, just as well as everybody else, all the time. It dont even hurt most of the time, just maybe gets a little bit swollen and red if I dont stop walking for a bit. But that’s all, got it? and that’s all we’re hearing about my stupid leg. But that’s why I wasn’t just called a whore, but a crippled whore as well and that’s why I’m writing down who we really are.
    Ernest and