by Jenny Eclair
Robbie said she should go home, back to Southend, and take the baby with her. He swore blind her mum and Nanna would love the ‘little ’un’ and that Ida would forgive her in the end, but it wasn’t Ida who needed to forgive Serena, it was Serena herself. She couldn’t get over what she had done, how stupid she’d been in allowing this to happen. She had so wanted to confound all expectations, to surprise everyone, she’d had such big dreams and they didn’t include being an unmarried mother.
She refused to take this baby back to Southend, only to hear a trail of whispers behind her back, ‘Yes, that’s her, the Tipping girl and her little bastard, oh no, no man, on her own, like her mother and her grandmother before her – not much luck with the opposite sex, those Tipping women, silly bitches!’
When she was pregnant, she couldn’t think beyond getting the baby out of her. She’d convinced herself that, once the child was born, then the next step would become obvious. But it was nearly three weeks since she had given birth and she was still confused.
Serena looked at the sleeping bundle. The baby was out of her now, detached like a mini spacecraft. She was a separate entity, the cord had been cut, they were no longer physically attached, the baby didn’t actually need her any more. When she was a foetus, she’d relied on Serena for blood and food and oxygen, Serena hadn’t quite understood the science of it all, but she knew there was a tube attaching her and the baby, and the baby survived because of the tube. Well, the tube business was over and anyone could feed a baby with a bottle as long as they had the powdered stuff.
Serena eyed the tin of Cow & Gate on her windowsill, it contained about another day’s supply, but after that she would need to get some more. Robbie had fetched it for her up until now, but he’d gone away for a bit, to work on his uncle’s farm over in Zennor, which was miles away – his uncle had broken his leg and needed help with his cows.
A great tide of loneliness engulfed Serena, she couldn’t stay here, not by herself, not without Robbie making sure she had what she needed. She shivered, her teeth physically chattering like the comedy wind-up false teeth they used to sell on Southend Pier. The house was so cold and the Aga had run out of oil, so the only way she could keep herself and the baby warm was to go to bed with Peggy’s old beaver-fur coat spread over them. Every morning when they woke up, she and the baby stared at each other in disappointment.
Without the Aga, she couldn’t dry the nappies she made herself from cutting up towels into napkin-sized squares which she had learned to pin around the baby’s skinny legs. At first she threw the shitty ones away, unable to face washing the stains out, chucking them on the fire in the sitting room, and putting her sleeve over her nose until the whiff of burning shit had evaporated, but the fire had gone out and there was no dry wood left in the log store.
Serena seethed, this was all Benedict’s fault, he should be home by now, taking care of the situation. She had written to him months ago, telling him she needed to talk to him and that the matter was urgent, but she’d heard nothing back. She realised he went skiing over Christmas – he’d told her how much he loved it – but now it was the beginning of February. God knows she understood that rich people had different rules, she’d spent enough time here at Kittiwake mixing with Benedict’s posh mates to know that, but surely you couldn’t celebrate the new year for ever. At some point even the largest jeroboam ran dry.
If only she knew for sure who the father was. She eyed the creature suspiciously, willing her to exhibit some resemblance to Benedict, but the child remained resolutely bald and nondescript, like a tiny secret service agent. She could have come from anywhere and anyone.
Her eyes may have been blue but sometimes they looked grey. Today there was yellow gooey stuff coming out of one of them. Serena wiped it clean with the edge of her sleeve. Her mother once told her that when she was a baby she won a bonniest baby competition, she got a little silver cup and some premium bonds. Maybe this ugly baby wasn’t even hers, maybe they got her mixed up with Serena’s real baby at the hospital and somewhere in another woman’s arms was a smiling baby with Serena’s blond hair and Benedict’s brown eyes. The changeling baby looked at her doubtfully and in that instant Serena made up her mind.
She couldn’t stay here, Benedict might never come back, the house would fall down around her ears and she and the baby would starve to death. She was only twenty years old, she had time for another life, she could start again with a different name and forget this chapter ever existed. Maybe one day years from now, when everything had worked out and she had married a rich, successful, handsome businessman/pilot/film star, she would visit her mother and grandmother, pulling up outside the house in a swish car that took up half the street with bags of gifts for Nanna and Mum, bottles of stout and scent and bouquets of flowers, and she would take them out for dinner and eat steaks the size of dinner plates decorated with grilled tomato and little sprigs of parsley.
‘We never gave up on you,’ her mother would say, ‘we always knew you’d come back. I said to Nanna, “You wait, one day that girl will come home, and when she does, she’ll have the world at her feet.”’
Well, that’s not going to happen if I sit around here, decided Serena. I might as well be back on the till at Keddies as rotting away down here.
It was 1963, Helen Shapiro was famous and she was only sixteen, Serena was getting left behind, she needed to catch up, she needed to go to London. If the rainbow started here, then London was where the pot of gold lay. Serena ran up to the attic room where everything that had ever been abandoned at Kittiwake eventually ended up and dug around until she found a large leather Gladstone bag, heavy but capacious. Back in the bedroom she’d adopted as hers months ago, she filled the bag with all her best clothes, plus the little white fox fur shrug plucked from a wardrobe she’d had no right to open.
Benedict had recognised it immediately. ‘That was my mother’s,’ he told her. ‘Her name is Peggy. I haven’t seen her in years, she lives in America.’
When had he told her that? After they’d had sex or over the dinner table? She couldn’t remember. She threw in a silver-backed hairbrush – she might need to sell a few things before she got settled. The bag was still not full, and it occurred to her that she could quite easily fit the baby in there. She picked her up and bundled her in, but the baby immediately started crying. She didn’t like it in the bag. Serena lifted her out again; it was a sign.
The cleaner was due the next day, Robbie’s mum. The woman was like clockwork: week after week she turned up on the same day at the same time. She would be here first thing in the morning.
The baby was properly crying now. She got louder every day. Brenda would hear her, she would find her. Robbie said she was looking forward to having a grandchild. Well, she could have this one to practise on while she waited for her own.
Serena prepared a fresh bottle for her daughter and fed her until milk spilled out of her tiny mouth. After a perfunctory attempt at winding the infant, Serena changed her nappy – the new one had been cut down from a luxurious lemon-coloured bath-sheet complete with a Harrods label – and then she dressed her in the clothes that Robbie had smuggled up from the farmhouse. Everything the baby wore had been ‘borrowed’ from the hand-knitted items Robbie’s mother was stockpiling for the arrival of his sister’s baby in a few months’ time. ‘Our Sal would go through the roof if she ever found out,’ Robbie warned her.
Conscious of how cold it would be for the child without the warmth of her mother’s body tonight, Serena swaddled the baby in a brushed-cotton pillowcase and wrapped the bundle in a velvet opera cloak (courtesy of Peggy again) before nestling her securely between the folded piles of blankets in the bottom drawer of the wardrobe.
Absent-mindedly she closed the drawer, before remembering the baby had to be able to breathe. She quickly re-opened it to discover that the baby had fallen asleep. She must have liked it in the drawer. Serena dropped a fleeting kiss on her forehead, then she dragged the beaver-skin coa
t off the bed and put it on over her Aran jumper and tartan wool trousers. There were some discarded walking boots in the hallway which were near enough her size, so she slipped them on and then, pausing only to fill the deep furry pockets of the coat with anything on the dressing table that might fetch a few bob in a pawnbroker’s, she picked up the Gladstone bag, turned her back on her baby and walked out on a future she had never planned in the first place.
52
The Reinvention of Renee Culpepper
Serena slid into London life like a fish. Luck was on her side from the moment she put out her thumb a mile or so from Kittiwake’s rusty iron gates and was picked up by a woman in her sixties.
‘Call me Gwen, dear’ was eager to have someone to chat to on the long drive to Okehampton to see her newly widowed sister.
‘Your job is to keep me awake at the wheel,’ Gwen instructed Serena, who obediently passed her cups of Thermos-flask coffee at regular intervals and shared Gwen’s tinfoil-wrapped sandwiches: ‘Corned beef and homemade pickle, or egg mayonnaise, dear?’
Serena felt safe in Gwen’s Morris Traveller with its flea-bitten travel rugs and stench of wet dog, and as she said goodbye, she promised the older woman that she wouldn’t take any lifts from lorry drivers.
But inevitably she did, she jumped in the first lorry that stopped on the A30 and was mildly surprised that, despite Dave’s cab being awash with pornographic magazines and boxes of tissues, he didn’t even bother her for a kiss.
He did however eye her up and down as he dropped her, unmolested, on the outskirts of Croydon, and told her about a ‘photographer friend’ who would probably put her up for a night or two in exchange for a couple of photography sessions, at which point he’d scribbled down an address, tapped his nose and said, ‘If you know what I mean?’
Serena didn’t but she could guess and a couple of short hitches and a stale cheese roll courtesy of a cab driver in an all-night café later, she found herself knocking on the front door of a shabby Victorian terrace in Camberwell.
A woman in her late sixties answered the door, shadowed by a man in his early forties wearing a plaid dressing gown. If either Margaret or Graham Spencer were surprised to see a total stranger standing on their doorstep at 2.45 a.m., neither of them showed it.
Within half an hour, Serena was ensconced in the spare bedroom with a hot Ribena and a custard cream biscuit, but before she could climb into the small single bed, she had to remove dozens of oversized stuffed toys and knitted gonks that were piled on top of the purple nylon counterpane.
In the morning Graham and his mother explained the house rules. Serena would get free bed and board, dinners not included, in exchange for two three-hour modelling sessions a week. ‘You’re not shy, dear, are you?’ asked Mrs Spencer, her eyes huge and innocent behind her pebble-thick lenses.
The set up was pretty simple: on Tuesday and Thursday mornings, the ‘South London Photography Society’ met up in what Mrs Spencer insisted on calling the parlour to take photographs – ‘Of the glamour persuasion,’ breathed Graham. ‘We’re very keen on appreciating the female form.’
‘And I’m always here,’ added Margaret, ‘supplying refreshments, and making sure everything’s kept nice.’
That first Tuesday, as she posed in a borrowed bikini holding a beach ball, Serena was conscious for the first time in her life of the extra roll of soft white flesh around her midriff and the slight pendulous quality of her breasts, but fortunately the participants seemed neither to notice nor care.
The photography club consisted entirely of middle-aged men, some of whom didn’t even take their coats off. What little conversation there was revolved mostly around complaining about the poor quality of light, which was entirely due to Graham’s mother keeping the front curtains closed so as not to upset the neighbours.
‘Some people are very narrow-minded,’ Margaret confided in Serena. ‘They don’t understand that Graham’s photography club is a serious amateur photographers’ association and not a regular meeting of the dirty old man brigade.’
Despite Mrs Spencer’s protestations, Serena suspected some of the men didn’t actually have any film in their cameras and these tended to be the ones who breathed most deeply and stood far too close.
This was a temporary measure, Serena persuaded herself daily, this would not last, there was something better round the corner. There had to be, she couldn’t have given up her child for this.
Several weeks later, towards the end of an exhausting session involving nightwear, soft toys and a Dralon pouffe, one of the photographers requested her name for the title of a shot he wanted to enter for a competition. ‘I’m Renee,’ she said, the lie slipping out without her even thinking. Instantly the modelling became easier; she wasn’t Serena the runaway mum any more, she was Renee, part-time glamour model, and very soon no one thought to call her anything else.
It didn’t take Renee long to realise she couldn’t survive in the capital on free bed and breakfast alone, and anyway she hadn’t come to London to get stuck in Camberwell. Once she built up the confidence to tackle the city’s complicated bus routes, she found herself a part-time bar job in a pub not far from the West End.
The Packhorse in Kennington was situated within the division bell area; according to the landlord, that meant theoretically an MP could leave his pint and be at the Houses of Parliament within eight minutes. ‘We get a lot of that type in here,’ he added darkly.
It was while working in SE1 that Renee encountered Maureen Leach, a tough port-and-lemon-drinking Irishwoman in her late fifties who ‘knew people and organised things’.
Mo was a Packhorse regular, and having taken a shine to Renee, she ‘organised things’ so that she could escape the clutches of South London’s premier photography club and move into a flat in Earls Court with two other ‘fun-loving young ladies’, Gloria, a short busty redhead, and Patty, a tall black woman with the biggest feet Renee had ever seen.
Serena Tipping was officially Renee Culpepper now. She took the name ‘Culpepper’ from the label on a jar of dyspepsia salts that had sat on the bathroom windowsill in Southend for as long as she could remember: Culpepper’s Salts for the relief of acid stomach and indigestion.
Happy in her new postcode with her new identity, as far as Renee was concerned, Serena Tipping was some girl she used to know who dyed her own hair and worked in a supermarket in Southend.
Renee, on the other hand, went to a salon in Chelsea where twinkle toes ‘Terry the poof’ had given her a silver bouffant that shone like a massive pearl.
Despite the new hairdo, Maureen informed her that she was unsuited to ‘proper modelling’, being too short and curvy, but not to fret because there was always plenty of work for a pretty girl with bags of personality.
The ‘too short and curvy’ comment had stung for a while. Renee wasn’t as short or as curvy as her flatmate Gloria, who was four foot eleven inches of pure curves and nonetheless exceedingly popular with the gentlemen. As indeed all three of them were. Maureen made sure they were invited to all the right parties, which meant they never had to pay for a drink or dinner. As to how they paid their rent, well, as Maureen said, ‘That’s none of my beeswax,’ adding with a wink, ‘See no evil – that’s me.’
It took a while for Serena to twig that some of her flatmates’ ‘gentlemen friends’ were actually clients.
Renee got paid by Terry’s salon in exchange for having her photo in the window, and for a while she continued to cross the river to work in the pub and ‘model’ for Graham and his friends. Margaret was always pleased to see her, but after a traumatic incident one Tuesday involving Mrs Spencer cajoling a nude Renee into a see-through rain mac only for one of Graham’s photographer pals to masturbate feverishly behind the sofa, she walked out and never went back.
Gloria and Patty laughed themselves silly when she told them. ‘Men are so pathetic,’ they told her, and gradually it dawned on Renee that although Gloria and Patty regularly slept with th
eir male clients, they also slept together. Mostly in Gloria’s fluffy pink boudoir, while Patty’s room was more or less exclusively kept for the correction of middle-aged gents who paid great wads of cash to be smacked around by a six-foot Nefertiti in stockings and a suspender belt.
Renee was happy, girls came up to her on the street and said how much they liked her hair and where did she get it done. She started buying better clothes – ‘Nothing too out there,’ Maureen warned her. ‘Men like it simple and sexy. Tits and arse, dear, tits and arse’ – and Maureen, it turned out, knew what she was talking about.
Men with wives gave her presents and called her their ‘special girl’, and she sat on plump pinstriped knees and pretended she didn’t mind the thrust of their cocks against her buttocks.
She danced at parties and kissed a boxer and got lots of work at the Olympia Exhibition Centre, where she was paid to perch on the bonnets of shiny new cars or demonstrate new kitchen appliances. Sometimes she even got to dress up as a bride at wedding fayres, and tried not to mind when the job was done and she had to give everything back. Well, almost everything: once she stole a garter.
Maureen was right, there was plenty of work for a girl like her, and although she and her flatmates were busy most nights, they liked to take Sundays off, spending the day sprawling around the flat in pyjamas and face masks and eating beans on toast for supper.
Renee was having fun with no strings attached, until Benedict walked into a coffee bar off Piccadilly where she was eating a breakfast of poached eggs on toast in sunglasses at 3 p.m.
He sidled into the booth next to her so that she couldn’t get out and ordered a cappuccino which he dropped three cubes of sugar into. The froth held the cubes for several seconds before they disappeared below the surface.
He didn’t say anything, he simply reached into his inside jacket pocket and brought out his wallet. Opening it, he removed a photograph from one of the compartments and slid it in front of her. ‘Annabel,’ he told her, and suddenly she was looking at her daughter. How she recognised her she couldn’t quite explain. The baby was no longer a newborn, she was sitting on a woman’s knee, smiling a lopsided smile into the camera.
