by Mavis Cheek
Not half, thinks Chloe, and she retrieves the bottle.
She grabs Mrs Baker’s hand anew, in a strong and aggressive grip. Mrs Baker yelps. Chloe glares. Tabitha is out of earshot preparing fruit extract masks, a pleasing task which scents the salon with sweet seduction – from which Mrs Baker, at this point, is very far removed. Instead she is on her own with this virago from Childline and there is nothing seductive about it. In fact, she would quite like to go home.
Impossible. She is, after all, naked, and attached to rubber with electrodes.
Chloe finishes cleaning the nails and begins trimming the cuticles. She cannot get the image of Sonny cowering in a cellar out of her mind, and becomes careless and vicious with the sharp end of the cuticle clippers. ‘Ooh,’ says Mrs Baker, non-committally.
‘Hurts, does it?’ says Chloe with satisfaction.
Something in her voice suggests to Mrs Baker that she must bear up.
‘Only in parts,’ she says weakly.
Chloe digs in harder.
Mrs Baker jumps around so much that the Slimatone pads are wrenched from their moorings. She has a sense of being in hell, but does not like to mention it since she has never had a manicure before – perhaps they are meant to hurt in this way. Tabitha may have been economical with the truth in saying it was a soothing business. After all, her pre-natal teacher said labour was Just A Bit Uncomfortable ...
Chloe, meanwhile, feels vindicated. Cruel woman, she thinks, and finishes off the manicure in disdainful silence. And she refuses to offer more lemon tea. Contempt wrinkles her beautiful lips. She pokes a little finger into Mrs Baker’s cellulite, just once, as if she were testing dough. Which does nothing for Mrs Baker’s raw nerves or painful cuticles. She turns her back and mends her own nail with One-Step, the nail rebuilding solution. She waits for it to dry, seething. The woman is a regular customer or she really would do something.
After Mrs Baker has staggered off into the noonday sun, looking as if she was in need of a beauty parlour instead of just leaving one, Tabitha’s brow wrinkles. Chloe expected this. ‘What happened?’ asks her employer.
Chloe shrugs, looks at her now-perfect nails, is silent as any chastised adolescent.
Tabitha tries again. ‘Usually Mrs Baker needs waking up after a treatment. When I came into the cubicle this time half the electrodes were on the floor and she was down on her knees trying to get dressed with the plug and two electrodes still attached. And you appeared to be grinning. Why?’
Still silence.
Tabitha sits down. ‘This is not like you, Chloe,’ she says coaxingly. ‘I thought I had trained you well.’
For once, feelings overcome caution. Chloe will speak. ‘Well how could she?’
‘How could she what?’
‘How could she be so cruel to her little boy?’
Tabitha asks for an explanation. Chloe gives it to her. Almost there are tears in her beautiful eyes as she speaks. ‘I mean – blimey – I used to get a clip round the ear now and then, or a bit of a belting – but they never stuck me in the garden for the night, or put me in the cellar. And I did some really bad things, I can tell you.’ She adds this last as an afterthought, and with some pride.
The response from Tabitha is surprising.
She laughs. She laughs with unchecked glee. She laughs as she so seldom laughs. And Chloe is offended, astonished anew. Tabitha explains through her mirth. Mrs Baker was discussing the puppy bought for little Sonny’s birthday.
The puppy?
Chloe’s jaw opens, sags, trembles. They stare at each other for a moment and then Chloe laughs too. They laugh and laugh together, an event which has never happened before. On the whole, laughter is not the kind of thing promoted in a beauty parlour. When they are calm again it is not hard to see why Tabitha and the world of beauty parlours does not encourage feckless mirth. For Chloe observes, as she reconstitutes her own mascara in the mirror, that while on her own youthful face the lines created by the merriment have quickly vanished, on Tabitha’s they remain delineated for a very long time and never – quite – fade away.
Poor Tabitha, thinks Chloe, not realizing that she should give her sympathy to the whole of womankind, including herself, including Helen of Troy. Poor Tabitha, she thinks, she is growing old.
But the sympathy does not last long. Well, well – she winks at the mirror — look on the bright side. She’ll have to retire soon.
And she’s been laughing.
And she could have been frowning hard – very hard. Chloe shivers. She could have said That Is It, Chloe. That Is The Last Straw After Mrs Pargeter. Now Out You Go.
Mrs Pargeter!
Now that was a close shave. Chloe giggles, despite the shiver. It certainly was that.
But Tabitha seems to have forgiven it after all.
Phew! Got away with it, she thinks. Thanks Mate. And she gives praise to her God-Mammon.
But Chloe is young and presumptuous.
Was either God or Mammon ever, really, a mate?
There were certainly women walking abroad, beyond the salon walls, who might one day testify that Chloe did not necessarily move through life with God on her side.
3
Women like Margery.
Until Margery had her little accident with some baclava she had lived a blameless life. She had taught music in schools, sighed for the conductor of the local choir with whom she had a brief but not altogether conclusive affair, and had, largely, been sensible. But now, as she began to move sluggishly from middle to old age with scarcely an adjustment, she had been given a quite shocking new breath of life: several thousand pounds, won on a premium bond. And instead of being absolutely sensible about it, she felt quite giddy.
The Baclava Incident, which revealed for her the path towards sin, occurred when she was out on her first spending sortie. During this she had been uncharacteristically silly: it was early summer, and she bought a gingham frock, lilac gingham, with puff sleeves, tight waist, full skirt and patch pockets. With broderie anglaise.
She did not understand the psychology of this, having forgotten that it was precisely the sort of frock she had craved as a child, instead of skirts, cardies, navy-blue Viyella with smocking and a very deep hem. It seemed it was a frock that was never to be. Her parents taught music, loved music and saw life as one long quartet, with Margery and her brother making up the correct tonal numbers. Her brother, who unknown to his sister had also craved a puffsleeved frock (though primrose was more his choice), became choirmaster to one of the lesser-known cathedral schools. Margery, destined, according to her parents, to win the Hamburg Young Pianist of the Year, never did. And now she taught music in Kingston upon Thames, which was the nearest to London she dared live.
But when she wanted to go shopping for a gingham frock, crisp and lovely twenty-pound notes rustling in her purse, she ventured to Knightsbridge, heart thumping, cheeks flushing as she bowed and bowed again to the doorman at Harvey Nicks, the place to which, being female, her instincts drove her.
But the women of Harvey Nicks were not mere salespersons; they were aesthetes. They looked at Margery’s short, rounded, fifty-one-year-old innocence. A woman who had knocked about a bit might have got away with puff sleeves and a frothy skirt by way of dashing contrast; Margery would merely look a fool. The women of Harvey Nicks were nice. They tactfully did not have the frock Margery wanted in her size.
That they had that kind of frock at all may need remarking. They had that kind of frock because of the Spielberg movie, Anne of Green Gables, which was heralded not so much for its campness, but because it gave the thirsting fashion world a new and exciting thrust. Super-models skipped down catwalks, grinning and befreckled, bringing a new kind of eroticism to Lucy Maud’s plucky heroine; Jean Paul Gaultier did something with long frilled knickers that will possibly never be forgotten; while Vivienne Westwood opened up, quite literally, a whole new concept in cotton gussetting. None of this stylish élan touched Margery, however, who merely wanted th
e frock in a straightforward frock-wanting sort of a way.
En route for Harrods she observed, in a little side-street, something called a Dress Agency. Now a dress agency is a very polite term for a second-hand clothes shop, and even in fashionable Knightsbridge, a second-hand clothes shop it remained. Nothing wrong with that. But, alas, its owner Nanette felt demeaned. She could still remember the days when We Had An Empire, and was therefore not so disposed to be kind as the women of Harvey Nicks, who did, at least, serve royalty.
In Nanette’s Nearly New she took delivery of sweat-soiled armpits, drink-stained bibs, collars smeared with face-powder – the lot. Which did not incline her towards sympathetic aestheticism. Nanette had just dealt with a particularly stubborn stain (which she fervently hoped was chocolate ice-cream) on a voile skirt, and was in no mood to view the world of frock-wanting women kindly.
Margery entered. A frock-wanting woman if ever Nanette saw one.
A benefit of the high-fashion movement to dress agencies is that one of two things usually happens. Either, carried away on a whim, a woman will buy a quite unsuitable garment and wear it once only, prove its unsuitability – and bring it with shamed double wrapping to Nanette. Or a woman with all the right equipment will buy a spectacular frock, wear it, and look so spectacular that she can never wear it again without looking cheapskate. Nanette had one of each category in puff-sleeved gingham hanging on her rails, and when Margery left the establishment, Nanette had only one.
With a small stirring of guilt, but only small, Nanette said as Margery was leaving, ‘You need to wear a frock like this with a bit of a zing. Maybe you should try a makeover?’
Margery had no idea what a makeover was. It sounded like the sort of thing her mother used to say vaguely: ‘Make do, dear, make do.’
And then she spotted a pâtisserie. And the baclava.
Baclava reminded her of being happy among the ruins of the Parthenon, in heat she had never experienced again. There she had been urged by a dark-eyed hairy man with gold teeth to take a little honeyed cake from his tray. He had then, on the thyme-scented hillside, made a woman of her. Something for which, in future years, and after infrequent couplings of a very English Choral Society nature, she was extremely glad.
Since then those honeyed cakes had been her weakness. Indeed, honey had been a source of constant delight in her life; she put it in tea, she sipped it with vinegar for hay fever, she spread it on brown bread, and she baked a gammon to take home at Christmas with honey as a glaze. Honey, she was happy to read, was one of life’s great panaceas and as such, an allowable treat.
It was on her second cake, while sipping hot coffee and ruminating upon Makeovers, that she said ‘Ooh’ out loud and clutched her jaw. Seated at the next table were two women of Knightsbridge elegance who directed her to their own beloved dentist, Mr Reginald Postgate.
‘Schoolteacher,’ they remarked, feeling safe. ‘Written all over her.’
Which was what Reginald Postgate said to himself as he pulsed through the waiting-room, wiping his mouth with a napkin to remove signs of the salade Niçoise he had been about to consume before Margery’s urgent arrival.
Reginald Postgate had a way with women. And he was a dentist. This was an excellent combination, since all women have teeth and, on the whole, have been taught from an early age that it is good to smile.
‘Teeth and eyes are the windows of the soul,’ he would say to his elderly female clientele, who lapped it up and beamed forth their souls as instructed.
Reginald Postgate’s wife enjoyed life. The children were at boarding school and she had a simply divine house. Why, the curtains for the front sitting-room alone cost two thousand pounds, not to mention the Peter Jones suite, and their pictures came from Harrod’s gallery. Reginald took only private clients. The days of piece-rate toiling over the dental decay of a classless society were over, and he made a great deal of money from his elderly female clientele. Mrs Postgate was therefore quite happy that her husband had a way with women, and did not mind at all that he promoted his charm by emulating a Man of Sorrow.
In the surgery he would sigh a little, and let sorrow momentarily shadow his noble brow. This could be interpreted by his clientele as they chose. Mostly they chose to interpret it as sorrow in his private life and in particular, sorrow about his wife. Poor man.
As soon as women walked into his surgery, they were in his power, one way or another. Once they sat in the chair, popped on the shaded glasses and thrust their heads back with mouths wide, they were made weak and seriously disadvantaged. Short of lifting a hand to stroke his thigh, or tickle him under the chin, they could give no expression of their attraction to Reginald Postgate beyond the occasional gargling noise from the back of the throat and a rolling of the eyes.
Every woman knows this is not the best way to be viewed by anybody, let alone a dental Man of Sorrow.
His women clients struggled against this irredeemable facet of their relationship, and failed. They were all, without exception, to be seen agape, dribbling and from behind. The only comfort in this was that it was the same for all of them; even those of exceptional, if vestigial, beauty looked no different from those less well-blessed, in this position. A little ember of comfort, such homogeneity.
They quite often had this thought as they eyed each other across The Lady in the waiting-room.
Reginald Postgate was safe. His women were not the kind to go in for chin-tickling or grabbing a man’s private parts by way of plighting their troth. The fantasy, therefore, remained fantasy, and he was perfectly and wonderfully in control of these obediently lacunal women.
Until Margery stood holding her cheek in the surgery and looking up, pleadingly, at his suntanned face, and into his concerned blue eyes.
He thought:
Schoolteacher.
Has she money?
Better check.
But his receptionist already had.
‘Mr Postgate is Private how can he help yew?’ she said.
But pain-racked Margery stood her ground.
Karen gave him a teeny little nod and, with a faint whiff of tuna and dental rinse wafting in her face and an ‘Oh you poor girl – ’ Margery was led, simpering, away.
In the waiting-room the receptionist, Karen, put Margery’s package safely behind her desk, taking a peek first, in case it was a bomb. ‘Golly,’ she said to herself when she saw its contents. ‘Golly!’
When Margery came out of the surgery she could feel only one side of her face, which suited her very well, and she had a lovely new white filling.
‘We could replace all the rest for you,’ he said, patting her arm, ‘and your smile would sparkle like new.’
He laughed in his dashing way, letting his fingers linger on her elbow for a fraction longer than necessary. ‘We could stop those receding gums, tidy up here and there – a little cosmetic touch where necessary – a sort of makeover of the mouth.’
He chuckled, tapping his own perfect teeth. ‘What a pity you live so far away.’
Karen winced into her appointments book at the standard routine. One day, she hoped, someone would take a real swipe at him and knock that syrupy smile for six. Margery sighed too. And looked into his tantalizing eyes for what she thought would be the very last time. He reminded her of Richard Chamberlain, even to his voice when he had spoken so directly, so gently into her ear.
She sat on the bus and heard him say again, ‘A sort of makeover of the mouth.’
Makeover: that word again. And then, as she felt for her Nanette bag on the seat beside her, she realized she had left her beautiful new frock behind.
It seemed like fate to Margery. At least, once the dentist had pointed out to her that it seemed like fate to him, she had to agree that it did to her too.
‘We have your parcel here,’ said the receptionist, ‘and Mr Postgate would like to speak to yew.’
That was all it needed.
‘I think perhaps when I come to collect it, I shall have t
hat treatment you suggested after all.’ She hoped she sounded casual. ‘The makeover.’
Reginald Postgate said, ‘Good girl!’ And behind him his receptionist squirmed. Punch him on the nose, she urged silently, smack-him one. But no such luck. Sometimes she felt she could vomit.
‘Teeth,’ he said down the telephone, ‘are the windows of the soul, as are the eyes ...’
Karen ground her own particular fenestrations.
‘You can have as much honey as you like,’ he said playfully, ‘if you make your teeth a priority.’ He cocked his head on one side, took a deep breath and Karen knew he would say it. He would, he would ... She waited, wincing, praying he would not. He did. ‘But perhaps you are already sweet enough.’
Karen’s stomach heaved. She could hear the girlish giggle on the other end of the telephone. It worked every time.
‘Excellent,’ he said. ‘I will hand you over to Karen for an appointment.’
Afterwards, Margery moved as if in a dream. It would be an investment for the future. And she would save the frock until she could smile her perfect smile above its gingham and lace, until she could smile her perfection into someone’s eyes. And she knew whose.
Whose, she knew perfectly well.
4
Mrs Pargeter was, in Chloe’s opinion, very silly.
But there you are. Takes all sorts. And the memory of her is certainly as fresh and mortifying as if it were only yesterday. Just as well, thinks Chloe, for its lesson is best remembered if she plans to take over the salon. Quite where the money will come from is unclear. Bank loans came to mind, but she knows little of such places. Never trust them, her Gran said, and she kept her savings in a sock somewhere under her skirt. The way it’s looking, she might need to know about that side of things quite soon. Given those laughter lines.
She winces.
Mrs Baker’s little Sonny’s puppy.
Mrs Pargeter’s close shave.
