by Jenny Eclair
Benedict shrugged. ‘It doesn’t matter. Hugo is her father now and you’re her mother and you’re all going to live happily ever after.’
Natasha felt a twinge of discomfort.
‘Only I’m not. I’m not her real mother. And I was thinking, Benedict, that I’d like to know more about her, about Annabel’s real mother, because at the moment, she’s a bit of a blank and I find myself imagining all sorts of things.’
Benedict refused to meet her eye and instead he talked directly to Annabel. ‘Silly old Mummy. Yes, she’s a daft old sausage.’ Annabel chuckled and then he said, ‘You’ve never met her. She isn’t . . . maybe what you might expect? To be honest, I never knew much about her myself – ships in the night and all that. You know what it was like at Kittiwake last year, I went a bit crackers. All I can tell you is that she came from Southend. She had one of those accents, sounded like something off a market stall.’
At that moment Annabel started to cry and there was something piercing and shrill about the wail that to Natasha’s ears sounded a teeny bit common. Christ, for a moment the baby sounded like a mini-fishwife.
‘Anyway, the one thing I do know is that her name is Serena,’ Benedict concluded.
17
Stagnating
Southend, January 1962
Serena watched the clock on the far wall. Surely there was something wrong with it? She stifled a yawn and patted the back of her brand-new beehive; her hair had the texture of Shredded Wheat, peroxided and backcombed, sprayed and pinned into an immovable yellow edifice. This ’do ain’t going nowhere, thought Serena. Just like me.
Another yawn threatened to crack her jaw and she wondered if she should pretend to be on her monthly and spend a few minutes in the ladies’ toilets, smoking and checking out her stars in this week’s Rave magazine.
Aged eighteen and far better looking, in her own opinion, than average, life seemed to have stalled for Serena. She should be a model or a film star or something, instead she was wearing a nylon overall and serving tinned goods and sliced bread to bad-tempered housewives in Southend’s premier (and only) supermarket, Keddies.
At first it had been exciting – the pink nylon overall, complete with her very own name badge (‘Miss S. Tipping’) gave her a sense of pride, made her feel like a grown-up, and they let you wear make-up, so obviously it was loads better than school. On the downside, operating a till was murder on your nails, so it was a good job her mum had a mate who was a part-time Avon lady and generous with her samples.
When she had first arrived on the shop floor, the till had been a novelty, sitting there like a great mechanical beast. It felt like learning to drive a car or operating a machine at the fun fair, all push-down buttons and funny noises. She still liked the way the cash drawer sprang open on command, but after that it got difficult. The machine could add up, but it didn’t subtract the right amount of change she needed for her customers – she had to do that in her head. Serena often felt faint with the panic of it, blank with confusion while middle-aged women in headscarves with mouths like furious trout tutted and counted back the incorrect number of pennies she’d given them and demanded to see the manager. ‘She tried to diddle me, Mr Salmon.’
Mr Salmon was a sweaty man in his fifties with a damp handshake and a bloatery whiff about him. He made Serena feel a bit sick when he took her elbow and guided her into his office for a chat.
‘It’s the numbers,’ she admitted. ‘I’ve never been good at sums.’
‘Hmm,’ responded Mr Salmon, ‘let’s see about that.’ And he’d begun firing times tables at her. Serena felt as if she was back in Miss Beechcroft’s yellow class in primary and for a moment she thought she might wet her nylons.
‘I suggest you practise at home, Miss Tipping,’ he sighed when she came a cropper on six times three for the fourth time. ‘Maybe your father could help you out. We don’t want to have to demote you to shelf-stacking, do we now?’
She could have told him, ‘I haven’t got a dad, I’ve never had a dad, I live at home with my mum and Nanna Tipping and there’s not a bloke between us, three women pinching each other’s hairbrushes and rattling the bathroom door in the morning, “Get out, it’s my turn, you’ve been in there for ever.”’
But she didn’t. Instead she thanked Mr Salmon, who for some reason insisted on leaning against the doorframe as she left the office, and as she squeezed past him, her breasts brushed against his tie, almost dislodging it from its silver tie pin. Instantly she felt a wave of heat rising from his suit and wondered if she’d done it on purpose. ‘I’ll try,’ she breathed into his pockmarked face, and walked away with an exaggerated sway of her hips. Behind her she heard the door to Mr Salmon’s office close and the lock turn. A few seconds later, had she put a glass up against that door, she might have heard some peculiar whimpering noises.
Serena may not have been a virgin, but she still hadn’t a clue how relationships worked. It seemed to run in the family. Nanna Tipping’s husband, Grandfather Tommy, had been shot for desertion in the First World War. (‘Bloody coward,’ sneered Nanna Tipping. ‘He’d run away from his own shadow that one – lily-livered all the way through, too wet to change a washer on a tap. Fine way to leave a wife and child.’) Serena had once found a photograph of Tommy Tipping in her mother’s underwear drawer. ‘My Dad!’ Ida had written on the back.
Her grandfather’s face was washed out and sepia-tinted, a blond man with a woman’s mouth. There was something about him that reminded Serena of some of the boys that hung around the pier, all winkle-pickers and hungry eyes. ‘Nancy boys’ as her grandmother called them. Well, she should know, she was obviously married to one. Serena wondered how her mother was ever conceived. Poor Grandpa Tipping, forever destined to fail in his duty to king, country, wife and unborn daughter, executed by a firing squad at dawn.
I never knew him, her mother said, a pattern that had now been firmly established. When had any of the men in this family ever stuck around to see their children grow up, Serena wondered, and why was it that the women were always left holding the baby?
Ida was vague about Serena’s paternity. All she would admit was that the man in question was married and that it never should have happened. After a couple of Guinnesses, Nanna Tipping was more forthcoming. ‘He was a beast and a liar and a con artist and he treated your mother like dirt. She met him at a fun fair. She was very naive – he told her she couldn’t get in trouble if they did it standing up.’
Great, thought Serena. Thanks to her grandmother, she had an indelible picture of her own conception in her head, her mother’s knickers muddied and trampled, lying discarded round the back of the waltzers.
Serena had made a pact with herself never to get ‘in the family way’, not by accident, not until someone had put a ring on her finger and they’d got a house of their own with all the things you needed to make a home. Sometimes, when the shop was quiet, Serena carried out a mental inventory of the requisite items: a Singer sewing machine (she couldn’t sew but every woman should have one), a cream Pifco hairdryer, twin-tub washer, hostess trolley, a pressure cooker, deep-fat fryer, a television. Occasionally she had fleeting premonitions of her future life, a flash of a pair of red gingham kitchen curtains and a table set for two, glimpses of a pale green satin bedspread. She could even identify the pair of marabou-trimmed mules under the dreamt-up double bed as belonging to her, the future Mrs . . . ? But she could never see the man, he was always just out of view. She could picture his overcoat, catch a whiff of a cigarette, but his face eluded her.
What’s to become of me, she fretted. I can’t stay here in this dump of a place being snapped at by old bats and leered at by Gordon Salmon. There’s got to be more to life than sitting behind a till at Keddies supermarket.
Serena decided that she would go out that night. She would call on her friend Susie, who she used to go to school with, and they would mooch along the promenade. The upside of living in a seaside resort, even out of season, was that
there was always somewhere to go: ice-cream parlours, coffee bars – some with jukeboxes – and hotels with cocktail lounges. Yes, she would have a proper drink, a gin and tonic, a vermouth, whatever. The way she was feeling at the moment, she’d tip one of Nanna T’s bottles of stout down her neck, anything to take the edge off. She sniffed her fingers. They smelled metallic, of copper pennies and brass thruppences, and it made her feel sick. She had to leave this job, she had to leave this town; time was running out, she could feel it.
Serena clocked off at five, punching her card in the machine on the wall by the rear entrance and marched angrily home. One of her stilettoes had worn through to the metal beneath the rubber heel and the resulting screech of alloy against the concrete of the pavement matched her mood. She paused for a moment and, leaning on a convenient gatepost, scribbled a note for Susie in eyebrow pencil which she dropped through her letterbox. ‘Mad with boredom,’ she wrote. ‘Meet me at Chico’s at seven, don’t let me down.’ And off she tapped again. It was a Tuesday. Tuesday was liver and bacon with cabbage. The thought of liver made her feel sick, but at least it was better than Thursday’s tripe and onions, which was her grandmother’s favourite.
Bloody hell, what a way to live, the three of them cooped up in a two-bedroom house, with Nanna Tipping sleeping on the sofa downstairs. They’d had to start laying down newspaper for her in case she didn’t make it to the toilet in the night. Couldn’t or wouldn’t, Serena often wondered. The whole place stank of piss and cat food, so you couldn’t bring a man back even if you could find one, not with that stupid budgie twittering its nonsense in the corner all day long.
Mind you, the budgie wasn’t the only one talking rubbish these days. Nanna Tipping was as bad, rambling on about darkies and Russians under the bed.
Serena felt a pang of envy when she compared her life with Susie’s. It was all right for Susie, she’d stayed on at school, got her highers and was now at university in Bristol – studying physics. It made Serena’s blood boil that plain old Susie with her horrible frizzy hair and glasses was having a better time than she was. Yes, something needed to happen and it needed to happen very soon.
18
The Man of Her Dreams?
Southend, January 1962
Serena was finding her erstwhile best friend even more annoying than usual. Susie was due to go back to university next week and she couldn’t wait. On and on she droned about how brilliant it was in Bristol and how everyone was such good fun and all the different societies you could sign up for. Susie had already joined the Appreciation of Foreign Films Society, Conversational French and the Chess Club. ‘Urgh, I can’t think of anything more boring than chess,’ snapped Serena, who had chewed her striped paper straw so hard she couldn’t drink through it.
They were having brown cows – Coca-Cola with chocolate ice cream – even though ‘In Bristol everyone drinks coffee.’ Susie had tucked her frizzy hair under a black felt beret and she was wearing what looked like her father’s sweater over a pair of slacks; apparently, this was how everyone in Bristol dressed. And she was going on about a jazz club that all the ‘gang’ piled down to on Wednesday nights and how it was so strange coming back to Southend where everyone was ‘incredibly behind the times’.
Serena found herself getting hot with bad temper. She wasn’t even sure she believed her friend, preferring to picture her crying over a one-bar fire and a mug of cocoa in a dismal female-only hall of residence, rather than twisting the night away in some groovy little backstreet beatnik joint.
Much to her frustration, this newly confident woman of the world who exhaled Turkish cigarette fumes and casually asked Serena if she had ever read any Simone de Beauvoir seemed to have completely forgotten that she was destined to play the part of the dreary sidekick while Serena took the limelight. It felt like their roles had been reversed, and as Serena swallowed back the remnants of her ice-cream soda, it tasted oddly bitter. Must be the liver she’d had for her tea.
Susie had a boyfriend. Smugness radiated from her as she imparted this information and she pulled a sympathetic face when Serena admitted she was still very much single. ‘Oh dear,’ said Susie, cocking her bereted head. ‘Well, don’t worry, I’m sure someone will turn up soon. Isn’t there anyone at work?’ Momentarily Serena thought about the chap with no teeth that winked at her from the wet fish counter every morning, and once more her liver-and-onion supper threatened to make a reappearance.
‘Did you hear Julie Porter got engaged?’ she blurted. Her own love life might be in the doldrums, but at least she could still gossip about her acquaintances.
‘How bourgeois,’ yawned Susie. ‘See, that’s the great thing about university: being at Bristol has broadened my horizons. Who wants to be Mrs Mousey Housewife with a couple of snotty-nosed kids hanging off her pinny? No thanks! Me and Jimmy are thinking of heading off to spend some time on a kibbutz when we finish university.’
Serena wasn’t sure what a kibbutz was, so she changed the subject. ‘Yes, well, I’m going to go and live in London.’
Susie laughed in her new sophisticated way, ‘You’ve been saying that since you left school and I don’t think you’ve even been on a day-trip yet. I was up for a couple of days after Christmas – Jimmy’s folks live in Islington, it’s ever so near the centre of everything.’
So that was why she hadn’t seen her friend over the festive season, she’d been too busy gallivanting round London with her swanky boyfriend in her stupid hat.
It was 1962. The new decade was already a toddler. Serena turned nineteen in six months and had yet to achieve any of the things she imagined she’d have ticked off by now. She hadn’t been abroad, or driven round Hyde Park Corner in a convertible sports car, she hadn’t been to a casino or kissed an officer, no one had bought her proper jewellery or written her a song. So far she had allowed three men (one married) to make love to her; panicked about being pregnant twice; attempted fellatio several times but not really got the hang of it; had several dead-end jobs; gone from mouse to blond; and given up on false nails.
She could feel the panic rise. What if she never found anyone? What if Susie became horribly rich and successful and sent her postcards with foreign stamps from exotic locations, while she was stuck with Ida, Nanna T and the budgie for the rest of her life?
Then I shall put my head in the oven, she decided. The knowledge that she had this get-out clause gave her an odd sense of security. Everything would either be OK or she would kill herself – simple.
Oddly enough, in the not-too-distant future, when she was contemplating this latter option in all sincerity, she would realise that the only oven available was of the solid fuel variety, which rather than putting her to sleep for ever would merely set fire to her hair.
But all that was yet to come. Right now, she was sitting resentfully in a fugged-up seafront café on a cold and wet January night with her ex best friend, who suddenly jumped up, flung her arms wide open and squealed,
‘You came, I didn’t think you’d come, how brilliant, oh, Jimmy.’
The door of the café had chimed open, letting in a waft of dank seaside air, heavy with brine and rotten leaves that clashed with the scent of cigarettes and deep-fat fryer, and a man who appeared to be all beard and duffel coat and whose face Susie was currently kissing. Behind the amorous pair another man stood solemnly unwinding a long hand-knitted scarf from a neck which seemed to consist entirely of Adam’s apple.
Ten minutes later, Serena was horrified to realise that even in the badly oxidised mirror hanging from a fraying string in the dimly lit customers-only lavatory, she had a pronounced brown cow moustache. She scrubbed at it somewhat uselessly with shiny Izal paper and ran something crystal and pink that she found at the bottom of her handbag around her lips.
‘This is Antoine,’ Susie had gushed, before Serena managed to excuse herself. ‘He’s a poet.’ Ever since then, her heart had been beating like a cake whisk.
Serena exited the bathroom and squeezed in n
ext to the stranger in a red vinyl booth with Susie and Jimmy opposite. She couldn’t take her eyes off him. He was dressed like the conductor of an orchestra, but appeared to have been sleeping in a hedge. His shirt was ripped on the shoulder and his trousers were muddied, he rolled tobacco from a battered tin into skinny black liquorice-paper cigarettes and had the eyes of a weepy cow. She was smitten, even though he barely spoke to her. He didn’t talk much at all. He looked feverish, coughed a great deal and occasionally closed his eyes as if he desperately needed to sleep.
Apparently his mother was French and he was a musician and a poet, ‘currently living in Basildon’, Susie announced.
Antoine closed his eyes and shuddered as if in deep pain. ‘Temporarily.’
Serena was momentarily confused. Basildon? Surely he belonged in Paris, in a garret overlooking the Seine, drinking cognac and writing poems that didn’t rhyme?
Later on, Susie hissed in her ear, ‘He had a massive nervous breakdown at uni, so he’s living with his aunt until he gets better. He’s a genius, but last term he thought the secret police were after him and he burnt his passport, which means he can’t go home until he’s sorted it all out. Jimmy’s very good with him.’
Jimmy was very good with everyone. He even pretended to be interested in Serena’s job and she tried to be funny about how tedious it was to sit at a till all day and count out the correct change.
‘You were always lousy at maths,’ laughed Susie.
‘I was rubbish at everything,’ giggled Serena, conscious that Jimmy was rubbing his foot up and down her calf. Poor old Susie, she thought, pulling her leg out of mischief’s way, she hasn’t got a clue what lover boy Jimmy is doing under this table. Serena laughed: all of a sudden her own future seemed so much brighter than it had a few hours ago.
