by Jenny Eclair
In any case, they might find out who she was and what she had done and then they might send her to prison.
Renee spent the rest of the night dozing in the big double bed at the Grosvenor House Hotel, swigging the brandy when the pain got too much. As dawn broke, she woke up and wondered if she would ever meet the elusive shadow who came home bearing flowers, kissed her on the nose when she took off her pinny and told her, ‘Something smells delicious.’ Even though the only meals she’d ever made anyone consisted of Spam fritters, chips and Angel Delight.
At midday when the cleaners came knocking, she stuffed the bloodied towel in the wardrobe, slipped Hugo’s tie into her bag and walked down the corridor holding onto the wall.
55
Renee Meets Her Fate
When Renee got back to Philbeach Gardens, Patty and Gloria were horrified by the state of her face and they clucked around making cups of heavily sugared tea, ‘It’s good for the shock,’ insisted Gloria, ‘it’s what they did in the war.’ Renee didn’t mind, she liked sweet tea.
Her left eye had puffed up so much that she could barely see out of it and Patty was concerned that her jaw might be broken, but Renee insisted that it wasn’t, it was a bit hard to chew that’s all.
She asked them to tell Maureen that she’d fallen down a flight of stairs and couldn’t be seen out in public for a couple of weeks. By then she’d be as right as rain.
Her flatmates took care of her until the swelling and the bruising went down, they fed her soft-boiled eggs and porridge. Patty even went out in the rain to fetch her some Angel Delight, which was lovely, but she bought butterscotch flavour and not strawberry which was Serena’s and therefore Renee’s absolute favourite.
When the girls were working or out, Renee holed up in her bedroom under an eiderdown and tried not to cry. If only she could see Benedict and explain everything, he would help, she was sure he would. But then she remembered that Hugo was married to Benedict’s sister and his loyalties would always lie with her.
Her only option was to forget the baby. Other women had been in her position and managed to get on with their lives. If she went near the child, she had no doubt that Hugo would come after her and scar her for life.
She was twenty years old, her looks wouldn’t last for ever, but for the moment they were all she had and already the bloom was fading.
She suspected she took after her mother and that, by the time she turned twenty-five, she would be ordinary.
‘I will cut your face to ribbons.’ Every time she picked up a knife in the kitchen, she imagined the blade against her cheek and she felt sick.
Renee had lost her appetite, she still couldn’t chew without hearing an odd clicking noise below her right ear, and sometimes her entire jaw seemed to slip out of its socket and she had to make strange contorted faces to get it back to where it should be. But at least her massively swollen eye had gone down and all that was left of the injury now was a greenish-yellow circular ring.
‘You should be able to cover that up with make-up by Friday, but for God’s sake eat something, you’re starting to lose your tits,’ Gloria told her.
Friday was when Renee needed to get back to business, to show her face. Maureen was getting bored of her excuses. ‘I’m offering you a golden opportunity to mingle with society’s finest, darling, this is how girls like you get on and I want you, Patty and Gloria all there together, my bevy of beauties, my tasty trio, something for everyone. So don’t let me down.’
Individually, the three of them were arresting in their own way, but when they turned up at a venue together they were a knockout combination, and Maureen was counting on them to supply maximum impact.
‘It’s an important client,’ Maureen went on. ‘Mayfair, none of your rubbish, all highly respectable, although some of the gentlemen will be attending without their wives, so expect things to get a little lively after midnight.’
Renee went to get her roots done and Terry told her she looked a bit peaky, asked if she fancied pie and mash when she was done. She couldn’t think of anything worse, but she thanked him for the offer and watched in awed gratitude as he expertly coifed her hair into an immaculate silver meringue, while simultaneously spilling the beans about his disastrous love life.
‘It’s the fellas on the Heath that drive me mad: one minute they’re sucking you off behind a chestnut tree, the next they’re running back to their wives and lying about being kept late in the office. It’s easy-peasy for you, darling, you’ve got luck and the law on your side.’
Renee grinned, only to hear her jaw click ominously and she had to physically manoeuvre it back into place.
‘You all right, love?’ asked Terry. ‘Only for a moment there you looked exactly like my Aunty Violet when she was having a stroke.’
They started getting ready around five o’clock on the Friday evening, lining their stomachs with scrambled eggs, no toast for Renee, feeding the electricity meter with enough change for two hot baths. Patty and Gloria jumped in the first one together and Renee took the second. By the time she got out, there was a tide of leg shavings around the bath, speckles of red, black and gold.
Fresh from their ablutions, the girls sat around in dressing gowns listening to songs from the musical South Pacific on the record player while painting each other’s nails and deciding what to wear.
‘I’m going full-on silver,’ Renee announced. She’d got a little sequin shift dress that clung to every dip and curve in her body – not that she had much in the way of curves at the moment, but never mind, the dress was sensational.
She decided to add the little fox-fur shrug she’d swiped from Kittiwake. Not only would it keep her warm, it would disguise the bony sharpness of her shoulder blades and the birdlike fragility of her clavicles. ‘I’ll be better soon,’ she promised herself, fretting over finding the right pair of shoes. Nothing in her wardrobe quite worked with the silver dress, she needed something delicate and strappy. Fortunately, Patty had a pair of silver stilettoes with a diamanté buckle on the ankle strap, and once the toes were stuffed with cotton wool, they sort of fitted.
Patty opted for a purple crushed velvet all-in-one catsuit with a chunky silver zip running from throat to navel; how much flesh would be revealed depended on how far down she or anyone else pulled that zip. Gloria eventually chose a floor-length green satin ballgown that screamed Hollywood va-va-voom.
The girls were giddy, they wore multiple sets of false eyelashes, rouged their cheeks and coated their lips with the colours of summer fruits: raspberry pink, strawberry red, and the richest shade of plum. At eight o’clock they toasted themselves with Cinzano and tumbled out into the night.
The party was being held in Mayfair. Renee, skint from not working, tried to persuade the others to take the Tube straight from Earls Court to Green Park, but Gloria was feeling flush, she had a new fancy man who paid her to visit him in his office and let him fondle her breasts. ‘No trouble, doesn’t want anything else, I just sit on his knee, pretending to be his secretary, taking notes, while he plays with my tits, talking business while I pretend I know how to do shorthand.’
They laughed all the way to Curzon Place, until Renee realised she was within walking distance of the Grosvenor House Hotel and began to tremble involuntarily. She had thrown away all the clothes she was wearing that day, right down to her tights. Even Gloria’s knickers had gone in the bin. She’d wanted to be rid of everything that might remind her of that day, except for the white bag she had with her tonight – she couldn’t afford to go chucking out handbags.
As they straightened themselves up on the pavement outside an imposing white stucco terraced house, Patty ran through what they needed to know about the host and his friends.
‘A thirtieth birthday party, one Charles Gillingham, father loaded but living in Monaco, so Charlie boy has the run of the London pad, does something in the City during the day, likes to party at night, recent broken engagement to someone called Bunny or Kitty or Piggy. Anywa
y, he’s up for grabs, though we all know he’s looking for a nice girl from the Home Counties called Lucinda who wears a single strand of pearls and rides ponies, so don’t get your hopes up too high, ladies. Oh, and Mo says no fucking on the premises.’
The steps up to the house were wide and shallow with railings on either side. On the top step, flanking the front door, were two matching ornamental trees, trimmed into perfect round green lollypop shapes.
Renee felt like Alice in Wonderland: she had no idea what lay behind the huge glossy black front door. Maybe she would simply fall down a hole.
Patty lifted the door-knocker, a heavy brass ring dangling from a lion’s mouth, and she barely had time to drop it before a butler opened the door. For a moment, as the light from an enormous chandelier illuminated the trio on the front step, they froze, confused and blinking, until Gloria broke the silence.
‘We’re friends of Maureen’s,’ she gushed.
‘And Charlie’s,’ added Renee. Gloria could be a bit thick sometimes.
Behind the man, there was a hubbub of music and laughter. A kaleidoscope of women in vibrantly coloured evening dresses and men in black tie milled around a wide staircase leading up to a mezzanine floor where a small jazz band were in full swing.
The butler raised a single eyebrow and stood aside to let them in.
Renee took a deep breath. This was the first time she’d been out since the incident, it was time to get back in the saddle. Tonight, she decided, she was going to have the time of her life, and she reached a slightly grubby white satin-gloved hand out for a glass of golden fizz. Behind her she heard Patty mutter ‘fuck me’ and Renee followed her gaze across the black-and-white tiled entrance hall to where an ornamental fountain spewed jets of frothy crystal water practically as high as the ceiling. ‘Like having your very own indoor Trevi,’ squealed Gloria, and Renee watched her friends head over to the fountain, presumably to throw coins in for luck. Heads turned like sunflowers to watch them pass and it occurred to her that most of the other women present seemed as colourless as bleached-out photographs in comparison to her friends.
She would catch up with them later: Gloria and Patty always operated as a pair. Renee decided to prowl around on her own and headed for the stairs. Tonight called for drinking and dancing. Food was still a bit of a nightmare with her jaw, which was a shame because the canapés – cherry tomatoes elaborately piped with some kind of fish mousse, tiny squares of French toast slathered in rich liver pâté, and minute mushroom vol-au-vents carried around on silver salvers – looked exquisite.
At the top of the stairs, to the left of the band, was a small ballroom. For a moment, Renee wished Ida and Nanna were here to witness this, even though her nan would never make it up those stairs.
A throng of people were already dancing, girls with elaborately pinned hair in the arms of pink-faced men wearing traditional evening suits with neatly executed bow ties. Couples greeted other couples who looked more or less exactly the same as each other as they circled the floor.
Eton, Harrow, Marlborough, Winchester, intoned Renee silently. She knew the drill, Kittiwake had, in some respects, been a kind of finishing school, a crash course in learning how the other half lived and behaved. That was why she was now able to hover on the fringes without feeling entirely frozen out: she knew how these people operated. She knew that posh girls cried over big noses and being left on the shelf exactly like shop girls did, and she knew that posh boys lived in fear of never amounting to anything, and that everyone was in the same boat.
She danced in the corner, where a slightly more raffish group of guests had congregated. These girls wore shorter skirts and their hair was loose around their shoulders, cigarette smoke hung heavy in the air and champagne was being swigged directly from the bottle. Renee glided in and raised her hands in the air, the music dictating the movement in her hips. Several men tried to catch her eye, but she wasn’t ready yet, she might be dancing and she might be smiling but inside she was still cowering at Hugo’s shadow as he loomed over the bed that horrible afternoon.
Her fur jacket began to stick to her shoulders, it was too hot, she needed to leave it somewhere safe where she could retrieve it at the end of the night. Renee shimmied out of the scrum and crossed the mezzanine in front of the band, who had paused for a short break. As they watched her pass, one of the musicians put his saxophone to his lips and the instrument wolf-whistled at the pretty girl in the silver dress with the arctic fox stole.
Secretly thrilled, Renee scaled another staircase so that the band couldn’t see her blush, and chose a door at random. The house was so extraordinary, heaven only knew what she might find on the other side. For a moment she imagined a small petting zoo, complete with peacocks and miniature zebras, but it was actually a library, dark and panelled, shelves crammed with thousands of leather-bound books that reached from the floor to the ceiling. She peeled off her fur and arranged it across the back of a black leather wing back chair, one of a pair facing a large mahogany desk. On top of the desk sat several Bakelite telephones in different colours, a whisky decanter and a globe. Next to a stack of legal books was an ornate table light in the shape of a naked bronze woman holding a red satin shade above her delicately sculpted head.
Renee shut the door behind her. The room was gloriously cool and quiet and she was relieved to be alone. Giving the globe on the desk a quick spin, Renee noticed the curtains behind the desk move and realised the accompanying breeze was coming from a pair of open French windows which led out onto a small balustraded balcony. The idea of a quick cigarette in the fresh air before she rejoined the throng was irresistibly appealing and Renee, cigarettes at the ready, made her way round the back of the desk and stepped outside onto the balcony.
Natasha had come to the party alone. Hugo was at his parents’ place, his father having recently suffered a stroke. Not big enough to kill him, unfortunately – they could have done with the money.
Natasha sighed. Her family had known the Gillinghams for years, they used to attend each other’s birthday parties when they were children and somehow the invitations had never stopped – sweet really.
She hadn’t seen Charles as yet, but judging by some of the guests, he was evidently running with a rather racy crowd. Natasha had come to the library to escape from it all. Only a few minutes ago she’d watched some young idiot pour washing up liquid into the fountain and the resulting froth caused such hilarity it gave her an instant headache.
I’m too old for all this, she thought. As she perched on the balustrade and looked out at the street below, she felt slightly self-conscious about the little tiara she had worn. No one else was bothering with that sort of thing any more.
Most of all she wished Benedict would hurry up. He’d promised he’d be here by now, it was nearly ten o’clock. She decided to wait another ten minutes and then she’d go home. Annabel woke up so early and in the morning Mrs Phelan would be gone and Natasha would be dealing with the baby on her own – which was absolutely fine. After all, it was what she’d always wanted.
She was about to go inside when a blond woman emerged to join her on the balcony, a cheap white faux leather handbag over her arm and a squashed packet of filter-tipped Embassy Number 6 in her hand. She was pretty, Natasha noticed, in an obvious kind of way. The spaghetti-strapped sequined dress was cut low enough to reveal a deep cleavage while her legs were quite good, albeit with a hint of what Natasha’s mother would have called ‘bottle’ about them – but it was her voice that held her transfixed. Barbara Windsor meets My Fair Lady, thought Natasha when the girl asked her for a light. She hid her smirk in her handbag as she dug out her Dunhill lighter and clicked it in the direction of the stranger’s cigarette. As the blonde leant forward, Natasha caught a whiff of her scent. She recognised it immediately, it was very sweet, like dolly mixtures. Now where had she smelt that before?
Their eyes met across the flick of the lighter. Renee recognised her as soon as the flame illuminated her face. This w
as Natasha, this was Benedict’s sister – she had seen the photo he kept in his wallet, the one with her daughter sitting on this woman’s knee. This was Natasha Berrington née Carmichael, this was the woman who was married to the man who beat up other women, this was the woman who never got to read the letters that she wrote to her, this was the woman who was mothering her child.
Suddenly Renee was overwhelmed by an anger that had been slowly burning inside her since Hugo cracked her jaw and bloodied her nose and blackened her eye, and she hitched herself up on the balcony next to Natasha and said, ‘You’re Natasha, aren’t you?’
The woman nodded suspiciously and Renee kept talking, ‘You don’t know me, but I know you. See the thing is, my name’s Renee, but it used to be something else. I’m from Southend in real life and . . . How can I put this, Natasha? Thanks for the light by the way, darling. Lovely house, innit? Well, what I’m trying to say, Natasha – I hope you don’t mind me calling you Natasha.’
She realised she wasn’t making much sense but the words tumbled out without her having any control over them, she genuinely had no idea what might come out next. And then she said it: ‘I know your husband. We had what you might call an encounter.’ At this, the words dried up. She had shocked herself, she hadn’t known she was going to mention Hugo, but having done so she decided she was going to tell Natasha everything: that the man she was married to was a monster, that she and Annabel might not be safe. She was going to spill the beans about the letters and the lunch and the beating. It was only fair, Natasha needed to know what kind of a man he was. And once she knew, then Renee would walk away, she wouldn’t do anything else. But first she leaned down to where her handbag sat at her feet and she pulled out Hugo’s tie. ‘See, I’m not making it up.’
Natasha recognised the strip of fabric immediately – navy silk with a repeat pattern of interlocking red ellipses – she’d bought the tie for Hugo from Selfridges for Christmas last year, before Baby Annabel came to live with them. Instinctively she reached for it and again she caught the girl’s perfume, sweet like sherbet, and instantly the penny dropped, she remembered smelling it on Hugo a couple of weeks ago. He’d come home one evening reeking of it. So this was one of Hugo’s little tarts. God knows he probably wasn’t even at his father’s bedside tonight, he was more likely in some other little scrubber’s bed. They were all the same, cheap-smelling and big-titted and happy to suck her husband’s cock and do God knows what else for a few quid and the odd diamanté bracelet.
