Alms for Oblivion by Philip Gooden

London expressly to see him.’”
    “Whores are sentimental,” I said. “I suppose she wanted to know what I was like as a youngster in that Somerset village.”
    “She didn’t seem very interested in that. She was more interested in what I was doing here in town. So I told her of my ambitions to become a player.”
    “She likes players . . .” I said weakly. (I could in truth think of nothing else to say.)
    “You may well say so, Nick. She gave me a free turn after that. I paid only once.”
    “ . . . and she has a heart of gold.”
    He ignored my irony, pursuing a different train of thought.
    “I think it may have been my freshness, my ambition. That seemed to touch her.”
    “She is easily touched,” I said, this time without irony. “If you are talking of Nell.”
    “Nell, yes. I didn’t know if it was her real name.”
    “It is.”
    “Not only was she able to tell me where you live but she had a message for you – if I managed to find you.”
    “Well, you have found me, Peter, and pretty soon I must sleep in order to rise fresh for work tomorrow. So tell me Nell’s message and then I’ll snuff out this filthy
candle.”
    “Didn’t make much sense to me,” said Peter drowsily.
    The excitement of the day – the playing – the drinking – the blow to the head – were at last getting the better of him.
    “Nevertheless, tell me what Nell said.”
    “She said to tell you, ‘A recovery would be fine.’ That’s all.”
    “A recovery would be fine?”
    “Her words. Sounds legal to me.”
    “It probably is,” I said, leaning across to extinguish the dirty light.
    If this comment about fines and recoveries was Nell’s way of re-establishing friendly relations, I didn’t think much of it. Or, more accurately, I wasn’t sure
what to think of it.
    Nell – for all our years together I never had discovered what her surname was (I’m not sure that she knew either) – Nell was a flesh-pedlar at Holland’s Leaguer, as
you’ll have gathered. The Leaguer was the chief stew in Southwark, got up like a fortress with a moat and battlements, but all in a pissy play-acting style that wouldn’t have kept out a
band of children equipped with pikes of straw. (Oddly enough the Leaguer had a connection with the current patron of the Chamberlain’s Company, the ailing Lord Hunsdon, since it was his
father who’d owned the place when it was just a straightforward manor house.) The residents of this house of ill-fame were higher-priced than the members of the profession in other places
like the Cardinal’s Hat or the Windmill, and they accordingly adopted a more lady-like air as though they were doing you a favour in accepting your coin.
    Not my coin, though. I got in free. And I could hardly object that Nell gave me what others paid for, nor that she was willing to give me in addition something you might have come close to
calling love. I loved her too, in my fashion. Or perhaps it was that I was merely pleased to have her at hand, winning and grateful.
    But as we grew more familiar with London our paths began to diverge, Nell’s and mine, after a couple of years. The itch of respectability started to make me restless. I grew familiar
enough with great men and their houses, two or three of them anyway. I considered that I was moving up in the world. I wasn’t the only one to feel this. When we’d first met, Dick Burbage
said that players were crawling towards respectability, even if slowly. Many of our seniors in the Chamberlain’s were married men with children, in some cases happily so. They were
shareholders, men of substance. Wasn’t that what I was aiming at too?
    In other words, I was growing up (or merely growing older).
    Nell too must have been feeling this itch for respectability. It’s even harder, though, for a doxy to get a leg up in the world than it is for a player. They start from further down the
ladder, you see. True, there were stories that circulated around Nell’s