by Anne Peile
But I was careless of her concerns; I knew my capabilities, I was able to do much of my homework on the bus. The week before I had translated a passage from Catullus in a traffic jam on Battersea Bridge, I was awarded full marks for it and at the foot of the page the comment: ‘A beautifully considered piece of work. Well done!’
I set myself to learn the streets of Chelsea. The area that I selected ran from Beaufort Street to Markham Square. I treated it as if it was the lines and acts of a play. I was very quick on the uptake; soon I had not only the street names by heart but the incidental signifiers of businesses and inhabitants. I learned where certain cars habitually parked, the sun-warmed spots where cats lounged, the range of ornaments on a windowsill, the basement flat where an old man with a shawl around his shoulders had hundreds of model soldiers laid out upon a board. Up and down and through and back I went, working the streets like a tapestry needle. I placed Givan’s Irish linen, Swan Court, the antique sellers where there was a waterfall clock marked not for sale as the centrepiece. I found Ossie Clark’s in Radnor Walk and the offices of the Chelsea Post. In Margaretta Terrace, behind Oakley Street, a fortunate child was put to bed each evening in an attic with rocking horse patterned curtains. It was, I see, an extension of the notes in the exercise book, a further obsessive compulsion to amass as much detail as I could about anything remotely connected to my father. Very soon I was attached to that collection of Chelsea streets with the sort of fondness which I suppose people must feel towards the university city where they have flourished and achieved.
For the delight and the guilty anticipation of it, I used to leave Oakley Street until last. I knew that sooner or later I would see my father. When I lay down to sleep each night I imagined how it would happen. If I was feeling low I punished myself with visions of him amid a bevy of small blonde girl children, spilling out of the green front door; they were dressed in Fairisle cardigans and Russell and Bromley shoes and they clamoured and won his attention with the insistent, spoilt piping of their voices. Or I taunted myself with images of him with some tall and luscious, heavy-lidded redhead; she was draping herself across him as they paused beside the iron railings. I saw him murmur to her and kiss her, and put his hand inside her coat. I smelt the strength of her perfume which he would be inhaling. On my best days I saw just him, leaning on the doorstep as he leant in the photograph but looking, not at the camera, but at me.
From the pavement it was not possible to read the names on the bell push labels. I recognised the two or three cars which parked regularly on that side of the broad street. Soon afterwards I discovered that the residents of the Borough of Kensington and Chelsea were given coloured paper parking discs to display on their windscreens; on these circles of paper there was a dotted line for inserting the name of the entitled householder. It was very simple then. Jack’s car was the big, old Citroën, two-tone in blue and grey. And, before long, my unshakeable belief that one day he would be there when I passed by was justified.
I had just finished the Sunday afternoon shift at the restaurant, it ran from noon until five o’clock. Nobody else liked it but I volunteered because on Sunday afternoons my mother and Ron either went for what they called a lie down or they watched an old film on the sofa. I knew that they felt compelled to invite me to share in their box of Good News chocolates. I did not want to take one but if I refused my mother was huffy and affronted. I walked down Kings Road, past the town hall and the carpet seller, the chemist with his poster about Venice sinking, the Eight Bells and shuttered Givan’s. When I turned into Oakley Street I drew breath sharply and involuntarily I smiled to the darkening Chelsea afternoon. There was the figure of a man beside the Citroën. As I approached him the chink of coins from the day’s tips in my pocket seemed very loud and my every step in the platform boots sounded as though around an amphitheatre. My feet appeared to meet the ground sooner, as though the pavement had become angled, slanting upwards to meet me.
From ten houses distance there was no doubt that it was him; my father from the photograph. He was as tall as I had expected and, opening the tailgate of the old car, he lifted his arm in an arc of easy grace. His hair fell forward on his forehead. I consumed him with my eyes until he might have burned. I contemplated willing him to turn and notice me but I did not yet wish to test that alchemy, I wanted only to be allowed to gaze at him. I thought that he was a beautiful man. I wished that I could stand on the balcony above to watch him as though he and I were the only two in a theatre or a church. My father remained calmly intent upon his task. He leaned into the interior of the car and the bones and the lines of his face were illumined by the pale bulb as if it was candlelight. I could have wept for recognition although I made no outward sign.
Of my two workplaces I liked the Great Gear Trading Company best. One of the traders was a woman named Lalla. Lalla’s appearance was striking, with violet blue eyes; in earlier years she had made her living as a film extra at Shepperton Studios. Now she lived in a marriage of some disengagement in a comfortable flat in Prince of Wales Drive beside Battersea Park. There was a son, Julian. Julian attended Westminster School during the week and looked after his mother’s clothing stall on Saturdays. Julian and I were the same age but for four months; he became, at once, the friend who replaced Alison. From the other, each of us wished only for friendship and, because there was no competition or sexual tension, we were able to confide and best advise without fear or favour, as though we had been of the same gender.
In his appearance, especially as he walked towards you from a distance, Julian resembled one of those paper dressing dolls where outfits must be cut out and fitted around the cardboard figure by folding over tabs. It was the shape of clothes that young men wore at that time, tight fitting jumpers or tank tops with big shirt collars out over, above wide, parallel leg trousers and shoes with rounded toes and a platform sole. Their hairstyles were shaped to the head and neck with fine feathered strands at the crown; these strands trembled like fern leaves with sensitivity to gesture or movement.
Julian’s father, Peter, was the managing director of a firm that made cardboard packaging. He took no part in the life of his wife and son that revolved around Kings Road. Sometimes, Julian told me, his father decided that the atmosphere and general lifestyle was unsuitable and unhealthy for his teenage son. Nancyish was a word that he used. He would take Julian off with him to trade conferences in the Midlands or for weekends of golf or walking in Snowdonia. In the summer ahead he had booked the two of them on a water sports holiday. Julian loved his father and wished that things could be otherwise in his parents’ marriage but he told me that he found the activities trying.
‘It’s seriously tough going. It’s not the actual stuff that we do, that can be okay, really. It’s my dad working so hard at it, he’s determined to make life into what he sees as normal and you just know it can never turn out like he wants it to.’
The recurring topic of our conversations was sex; we had a disarmed openness in our discussions. Julian was desperate to have complete intercourse. He said that he had done other stuff which, if you added it up, almost equalled the same, but he wanted the act in its entirety.
‘I want to do it properly, you know, take time and everything. Have you done it properly?’
We were sitting in the Picasso café on Kings Road. We had taken to meeting there after school to do homework, a number of our O-level choices were the same.
‘I’m not sure, sort of, I think.’
‘You must know if you have.’
‘Well, I suppose so, but nothing really happened.’
‘Didn’t you like it?’
‘Not much.’
I thought back to the night in question. A boy from the Nine Elms estate had taken me home in a car although he was not old enough to have a licence. We had stopped in Windmill Drive on Clapham Common and he had suggested that we got into the back. Straight away he had given me a lot of instructions in a tone which was petulant and verged upon a whine. I di
d not like that there was so much of teeth and saliva in his kissing. I preferred dry kisses, of the polite, cheek, visiting- relation kind but delivered on the lips with soft persistence. Looking out through the car window I had been momentarily terrified by the sight of a duck or some other water bird landing clumsily on the dark sheet of the pond. Headlight glare from the avenue caught the pale underside of its wings and made it strange and ghostly. The boy said that he had to make sure and come outside; it sounded as though he were reading instructions from the label of a tin.
‘I don’t think it counted, not really.’
‘How long did it last?’
‘Not long, a few minutes I suppose.’
‘I’m worried I’ll only manage seconds, I’ll just come straight away, I know I will.’
‘Isn’t there anything you can do to slow it down?’
‘They say if you think about something really boring that helps and you can keep going so that the girl gets to enjoy it as well.’
‘Decide on something then, something from school, what’s your worst thing?’
‘The Mill on the Floss.’
‘That’s it then, think about The Mill on the Floss.’
Previously my only real intelligence or impression of sex had come from Lin. With her there had seemed to be something abrasive and belligerent about it, some urging demand to be discharged, an itch to be rubbed. Talking to Julian about sex made it desirable but also funny, thus it was no longer frightening or excluding. About oral sex, however, I remained unconvinced. In the first form, when I was learning numbers in French, I asked Lin why she laughed when I got to soixante-neuf and she had drawn two tadpole-shaped people in the dust on our dressing table mirror.
‘He sucks hers and she sucks his.’
I thought it was disgusting. I asked Julian about it; he said that his friend Nick had had it done by a girl on the back seat of a coach.
‘What about all the stuff, though?’
‘What about it?’
‘Do you have to swallow it? Can’t you kind of hold it in your mouth and then spit it down the loo?’
Julian was particularly smitten with a woman who ran an Estée Lauder counter in one of the Knightsbridge department stores. He watched her going to work in the mornings in high white shoes and a corporate blue-patterned dress and gilt badge. One Saturday he pointed her out to me. She was, I guessed, in her late twenties, and very groomed. Privately I thought that he was being a little ambitious but, as his friend, I felt that I should be loyal and positive about his quest. She swayed in and out of his dreams each night in the bedroom that looked into the treetops of the Park.
‘What about you then, Susie, is there anyone you really want to sleep with? We could have a contest, to see who does it first.’
‘Maybe.’
‘Who is it? Is it the drummer? Boring if it is, every girl wants to sleep with him.’
‘I don’t.’
‘All right then, older or younger than him?’
‘Older, I suppose.’
‘The stunt man, the one that looks like George Peppard?’
‘No.’
‘Not Barry, surely, he’s too pissed all the time. And he probably wouldn’t take his baker boy cap off while he was doing it.’
Julian was mentally ticking off the habitués of the Chelsea Potter. When the shops on Kings Road closed many of the traders drifted to the Chelsea Potter pub on the corner of Radnor Walk. In those pre-Punk days there was a lively community of customers who drank in pleasurable and discreet coexistence. Many trades and professions were represented there – the ironmonger from the shop next door, the rock drummer, the painter Barry French, fashion photographers, society hairdressers, the stunt man, a retired cat burglar, the editor of the Chelsea Post, a professional footballer, models and dancers and rogue knots of visiting businessmen who strayed in on trips from elsewhere, seeking chance thrills.
Julian and I, being the youngest, and strictly speaking having no place in a pub at all, were treated like pets. We remained unscathed by drugs although from time to time we drank adventurously. The Chelsea Potter was given to holding promotions for various drinks. On the Harvey Wallbanger night we were both insensible by 8 o’clock. Julian’s father took us home and covered us with blankets on the living room floor.
‘You look like the Babes in the Wood, for goodness’ sake,’ he said, next morning. Subsequently he lost his temper when he found that Julian had been sick on the bathroom floor; standing over us with a red plastic bucket he said, ‘I ask you, is this any job for a man to be doing, is it honestly?’
An elderly American, known as Uncle Herm, was the importer behind the second-hand clothing stock for the Jean Machine store further down the Kings Road. He was invariably magnanimous, clamping the end of his cigar in his mouth to free both arms to embrace us and plying us with drinks and the house food special which was a piece of steak sandwiched in a hunk of French bread. Julian said that he could not work out which of us Uncle Herm wanted to sleep with and then his mother, Lalla, commented that it was probably both of us, and simultaneously.
‘Are you screwing Julian?’ she asked me.
‘Oh, please, don’t,’ said Julian, very embarrassed.
‘No, I’m not actually, why?’ I felt I should be combative to deflect from my friend’s embarrassment.
‘You surprise me; I thought you would be, little chickens.’
After that Lalla decided that she would take me up.
‘You remind me so much of myself at your age, darling. I’m going to make you my protégée.’
Although I felt that Julian might be uneasy, at first I enjoyed being taken about by Lalla and I knew that I could learn from her what I sought to know. She said, ‘I will teach you everything you need to know about men. You can have anyone you want, darling, anyone at all.’
‘Even if it’s wrong?’
‘Wrong, what’s wrong? There is no wrong, it’s whether you want to or not, that’s all that matters.’
Obediently I followed in the wake of her perfume; we went to the Village Club which was a small private casino in Sloane Street and to the Aretusa, a club with cool white walls, newly built on Kings Road. During the day Lalla wore trousers of conker brown made especially for her by the leather craftsman in Great Gear, in the evenings she wore dresses of cheesecloth which floated, ribboned and embroidered, around her bare brown body beneath. ‘I don’t wear knickers,’ she told me. ‘What’s the point, I can never find them again the morning after.’ She also told me that she shaved away her pubic hair. ‘It’s so much nicer, darling, believe me.’
As far as I was concerned, my own part in the excursions I made with Lalla was perfectly innocent. I had neither the wish nor the intention to go to bed with any of the men we attracted, those who sent us over cocktails in the Aretusa Club or gave us stacks of gambling counters at the Village gaming tables. It was fun and it was amusing, we ate choice suppers and we were cosseted by the staff of the establishments because we were an attraction and therefore good for business. There was ceremony to our entrances, the doorman would hold the door for us and Lalla would sashay through the lobby and heads would turn. I would follow like an acolyte. We never paid for drinks ourselves, sometimes champagne was sent across, sometimes concoctions in frosted glasses would arrive, the rims rimed with a stripe of frozen sugar and a strawberry to dip.
Reclining in her seat and with a starlet smile at her surroundings Lalla told me, ‘It’s all done with the eyes, darling, you don’t need words at all. Go on, now you try.’
She, in the main, did have the wish and the intention to sleep with a number of the men that we ensnared. Sometimes there could be awkwardness when she was willing to go back to a flat or a hotel suite and I was not, leaving one disconsolate man in the party. One night, outside the Royal Court Theatre, a man who had bought us champagne shouted ‘prick teaser’ right into my face. On another evening I slipped away into the pavement shadows of Park Lane while we waited for a taxi;
an American who made films said we were going to have threesomes, foursomes and anything you like-somes.
There were men with whom Lalla seemed to have an ongoing but open arrangement. I knew that sometimes, during a slow afternoon’s trading, she and Jimmy went into one of her changing booths together through the louvre doors like a saloon bar in a Western. Jimmy said he was content so long as he had one orgasm per day. Another of Lalla’s regular men was the retired cat burglar, an Irishman who was nicknamed Scottie; he was lionised in some newspapers as the man who had stolen the jewels of an Italian film star. Sometimes he would call in to the market to see Lalla; he was a tall strong man with iron grey curls and blue eyes. During the day he wore cashmere jumpers which might be holey, the sleeves rolled up to his elbows, and gypsy man’s dark serge trousers. His platinum wrist watch was precious and thin as a wafer. Sometimes we encountered him on the evening excursions and then he would be very differently dressed, in a maroon velvet dinner jacket and a fancy frilled shirt. I liked his day clothes better.
One night Lalla was irritable with a headache. Unusually, mild Peter had come into the market to remonstrate with her over some bills and some recent instances of behaviour.
‘You don’t own me,’ she shouted at him, and then, ‘I’m going to take Julian out for his supper. I suppose you will say you can’t afford to feed him, you cheese-paring cunt.’
She had taken us to Finch’s restaurant in the Fulham Road; she said that we must eat but that she wanted nothing because Peter had caused her to have a headache. A man at another table sent me a note on a sheet begged from a waiter’s pad. It said, simply, ‘I want to fuck you.’ I giggled and showed it to Julian but Lalla snatched it from him and read it.
‘I’m bloody sick of this,’ she said bitterly, ‘I’ve taught you too well, my girl, too many of my own tricks. You’re pulling more than I am now.’
She was very annoyed with me. At first I did not realise that she was serious, her anger seemed stagey, the kind of acting she might once have done with a tight bodice and a beauty spot.
