‘But a good job, Simon. Ach, if only you were like your sister, she is such a good girl. Why do you want to go to strangers when your father needs you to help him?’
‘He doesn’t need me and I don’t want to sit in an office all day for the rest of my life.’
Mrs Emanuel’s tiny hand grasped her necklace tight in fury. ‘And what do you want, may I ask? Don’t tell me, I know. You want to be one of those filthy pop singers. Ridiculous. Disgusting! Joseph, you must stop him …’
Simon’s father, a pale, quiet man, had munched stolidly through the sumptuous meal as his wife and son continued their squabble. The three girls, all acutely embarrassed, lowered their eyes and said nothing.
Coffee, served in tiny cloisonné cups with petits fours, was taken in the sitting room. As soon as it was poured, Rosanna said, ‘Would you like to see my clothes?’ and the girls escaped.
Rosanna’s bedroom was a tent of white cotton lace; she had a huge dressing room, where racks and racks of beautiful garments hung, protected by plastic bags.
‘Will you be getting lots of new clothes now you’re coming out?’ she asked Cathy.
‘Didi says I need at least six ball-gowns, plus cocktail dresses, of course. She’s taking us to Hartnell next week.’ Cathy pulled a face, wistfully spreading the skirt of a pink flowered gown.
‘She can’t possibly take you to that ghastly place – why the Queen dresses there.’ There was no greater condemnation. ‘Why don’t you come with me to Jane & Jane – they’ve got beautiful things.’
‘Mmmn.’ Cathy longed to go round the mushroom crop of new fashion designers whose provocatively pretty clothes filled the fashion magazines. She could already, in her mind’s eye, imagine the ghastly dress which would be bought for her at Hartnell, no doubt with pale-blue chiffon swagged over the bust and sequins everywhere. But there was a problem.
‘Oh do come, Cathy; you can’t come out in Hartnell.’
‘I’ve got to. Didi gets a discount.’
‘Pouf.’ Rosanna had never in her young life owned anything bought for the full retail price. ‘I’ll get you a discount, if that’s all you’re worried about. And Daddy says the mark-up on Hartnell is ridiculous, anyway.’
‘Are you sure? I’ve only got the teeniest dress allowance, we can’t afford anything really. Caroline’s got five thousand for her clothes, and she’ll look awful in everything. I do hate being a poor relation.’ She tried on a bonnet smothered in cotton lace flowers. The price tag was still attached – it read 25 guineas.
‘We’ll get you a nice rich husband and then you’ll be all right,’ Rosanna reassured her, echoing the advice which her mother had hammered into her, which her grandmother had given her mother, and which had held true for generations of women before them. ‘And clothes cost nothing nowadays – look,’ she pulled out a black-and-white, flower-printed smock, ‘from that Laura Ashley shop by South Kensington station – guess how much? Two pounds.’
Monty felt oppressed by the glorious abundance of Rosanna’s wardrobe and determined to stamp out the painful wish that she too could come out. She wandered down the apartment’s corridor. Faint sounds of music came from a half-open door – a few single notes, an experimental wail or two, some rhythmic strumming. Curiously, Monty pushed the door open.
‘Oh, hello.’ Simon scrambled awkwardly upright and put his guitar down. ‘Listen, I’m sorry about my mother.’
‘She’s just as bad as mine, actually.’
‘Nobody is like my mother,’ Of this Simon was perfectly certain.
‘Mine’s awful, just the same. She drinks, you know.’ Monty had never told anyone that, or even said the words out loud.
‘That’s terrible. Though I think I’d like my mother better if she did drink, then at least she’d have an excuse for being diabolical.’
There was an awkward silence.
‘What did she mean about you getting thrown out of school?’
‘I got expelled.’
‘They were going to expel me from Benenden, too. What did you do?’
‘Oh, smoking and things. And I tried to buy some pot.’
Monty was impressed. Buying pot was a glamorous misdemeanour. Nothing was more effective in shocking the older generation than drugs. She looked at Simon with silent respect. He changed the subject before she asked more questions which might have forced him to admit that he had paid £20 for a bouillon cube in a piece of crumpled foil. ‘Do you want to hear my new Rolling Stones LP?’ he asked.
‘Which one is it?’ There had been an abrupt withdrawal of money for records since her father’s death; even if the Radio Luxembourg DJs had called the album repetitive and boring, Monty was dying to hear it.
‘The Beatles want to hold your hand, the Stones want to burn your town,’ quoted Simon, reverently placing the disc on his teak-veneered stereo.
‘You’re really lucky to have your own stereo.’ Monty made herself comfortable on the end of the bed and looked around. Simon’s room was large and immaculately neat, with an intriguing rank of guitars and attachments against one wall and the biggest collection of records Monty had ever seen, methodically stored beside them.
‘They had to buy me a stereo – they were sick of me playing Fats Domino in their sitting room. They had to sound-proof my room, too.’ Simon sat at the other end of the bed and played along with Mick Jagger’s voice.
Groovy chick, he thought, surreptitiously eyeing Monty’s clinging ribbed sweater, mini-skirt and white boots. Dare I ask her out? What if she turns me down?
Chapter Six
When she embarked on the P & O liner Carthage, Betty Clare was eighteen years old and full of dreams. From Gerald’s descriptions of Penang she imagined an enchanted island like a child’s drawing, a heap of green hills piled up in the middle of an azure sea, crystal waves lapping at its sparkling beaches. ‘The Pearl of the Orient,’ she had murmured to herself each night, looking at the small, blurred photograph of Gerald posed cheerily on a seaside terrace by a palm tree.
Gerald was the chief element of this paradise, of course; so strong, so manly, waiting for her with loving arms and a faithful heart. True, his face was not distinct in the photograph and she could not now remember it clearly. It was six months since their courtship, almost a year since he had come running after her down Guildford High Street, to return the gloves she had left behind in the tearoom. She remembered how the weak English sun shone on the gold hairs on the back of his hand, and the ruddiness of him in general. He had seemed so vibrant and healthy against the pallor of her existence in a small town whose life was overshadowed in every respect by London, an hour away on the railway.
Betty’s family were not wealthy and her cabin on the liner was not large. In fact, the bright blue tin trunks which contained her wedding clothes, her trousseau and her wedding presents almost filled it up, leaving just a narrow corridor beside her bed. Anxiety that these precious belongings would be somehow lost or damaged made her suffer this crowding rather than send the trunks to the hold. She marked them all ‘Wanted on Voyage’, and opened one on the first night at sea so that the sight of her pink linen-look going-away dress could comfort her in this strange metal cell which hummed and smelt of oil.
The trunks had another advantage; they put a barrier between Betty and the girl with whom she had to share the cabin. There was no doubt that Heather was ‘fast’. She wore slacks all day, smoked cigarettes at table and painted her nails.
‘Getting married, love?’ she enquired at the sight of the bridal supplies, and added coarsely ‘Love, money or a bun in the oven?’
‘Pardon?’ Betty had no idea what she meant, but the tone was unpleasant.
‘Skip it.’ Not bad-hearted, Heather sensed she had given offence. ‘Oh ho!’ she crowed as they became acquainted. ‘Padre’s daughter, eh? Well, you know what they say …’ She slapped Betty’s knee as if being the daughter of an army chaplain was something Betty had done on purpose to amuse future acquaintances. ‘It’s a
great institution, marriage, so they tell me. I’m just not ready for the institution yet.’
‘Why are you travelling East?’ Betty changed the subject.
‘I’m getting out while the going’s good, love. Going to stay with my aunt and uncle in Hong Kong. You won’t catch me waiting around London for the Germans. I expect that’s why your folks are keen to pack you off, too.’
‘My father says another war is out of the question now the Germans have promised us they won’t invade any more countries.’
‘Well, love, I’m not going to stick around to find out if they promised with their fingers crossed.’ Heather dabbed another layer of orange powder over her nose and snapped her compact shut. At the end of the corridor outside, a bugle was blown to signify the second sitting in the dining room. ‘Are you coming to dinner, or what?’
Betty was still wearing her twinset and skirt. Heather had changed into a bias-cut gown with a bolero in a red rayon fabric embossed with flowers. Her scent almost drowned the faint atmosphere of engine oil which pervaded all the second-class cabins.
‘I thought one didn’t dress for dinner on the first night at sea?’
‘One may wear what one likes, and I can’t see any point in looking like a frump myself.’
They walked up the narrow tube of a corridor, feeling the odd shifts of the floor as the great ship rode the ocean.
‘Your fiancé must be mad to let you come out East alone,’ Heather offered by way of conversation at dinner. It was well known that aboard ship the combined effect of warm, starry nights, the boredom and the fact that there were so many men – particularly young men, setting off to make their fortunes in the colonies, full of high spirits and hearty appetites – made it dangerous for an engaged girl to travel alone to a wedding in the East.
‘Isn’t he worried you’ll come down the gangplank on another man’s arm?’
Betty creased her rose-petal lips in a complacent smile. ‘My father has asked a missionary friend of his to take care of me, so I’ll be quite safe. Mr Forsyth, he’s called. They were at the theological college together. He’s sent me a card already.’ She showed the pasteboard oblong to Heather, who sniffed and dismissed Betty as a dead loss. She was looking at the pan of flaming crépes suzette as if it were going to bum her, Heather thought.
There were two reasons why an Englishwoman should be happy to go East – the men and the luxury. Both were in much more lavish supply than in depression-starved Britain, where a generation of men had been wiped out by World War I. The P & O voyage was just a foretaste of the good life ahead, with dancing every evening and attentive servants fulfilling every wish of even the second-class passengers.
‘Servants! You will have servants!’ Betty’s mother and her aunts had exclaimed when she told them her young man wanted to marry her and take her out East. Not having servants was a greater shame to them than having to keep rabbits. Even the most junior professional man should have been able to afford a cook or a maid, but their household could not. ‘You can’t get good servants nowadays,’ was the refrain with which they comforted themselves. Servants were the God-given right of the middle class, a right of which they had been cheated despicably by fate.
‘You must learn how to manage them,’ her female relations had warned her, ‘native servants – give them an inch and they’ll take a mile. You must be firm, Betty. Strict but fair. Make them do everything to your satisfaction every time.’ And her mother had given her a little manual called The Housewife’s Friend, one of her own wedding gifts for which she had had no use, a slim book written for those unfortunate girls who married in the twenties with the expectation of keeping only one maid.
The three women hated Betty’s father for being so inconsiderate as to have been gassed in Flanders and for being a virtual invalid now. With every chip of green soap they cut to wash clothes and every dab of blacklead with which they anointed the kitchen range, every fire they laid and every mattress they turned, their resentment intensified so that Betty had been raised in a climate of vinegary aversion to all that was male. She did not yet consciously endorse this dislike. She was barely aware of it; but anything that was aggressive, strong, loud or vigorous disturbed her.
The next day they entered the Bay of Biscay, and the liner’s vast structure began to stagger and groan like a beast in its death throes. Betty was piteously sick. Heather comforted her, wiping her face and fetching glasses of soda water to settle her heaving stomach. When she was once again fit to stand, Betty disliked her robust cabin-mate even more. She was quite obviously one of the wicked who flourished like a green bay tree.
Mrs Clare had warned her daughter. ‘You may meet some very strange people on the ship. Travelling throws you together with all sorts and you can’t always choose your company. Just take no notice of them, dear.’ Mrs Clare firmly believed that evil ignored would melt away of its own accord, and so it was with Heather, who took up with the junior purser soon after Bilbao and thereafter appeared in the cabin only to change her clothes.
Once the ship was out of the angry, grey waters of Biscay, and she was restored to health and confidence, Betty found her protector, a short man with white hair and grey eyes. The Reverend John Forsyth was on his way to Shanghai to resume his work at the Christian mission.
‘I shall be glad to get back to a city I know,’ he told her. ‘I hadn’t seen London for seventeen years, and I couldn’t get used to it at all. So much building going on. So many motor cars everywhere. My mother’s house used to be in the middle of green fields, and now there’s nothing but strips of mean little houses as far as the eye can see. Do you play bridge, Miss Clare?’
Betty gave the pack on the table in front of the Anglican priest a doubtful look. ‘I’ve never played cards at all. My father is very against gambling.’
‘Bridge isn’t gambling, my dear young lady. It’s first-class intellectual exercise. Mental callisthenics. Let me explain …’ With a supple sweep of his small hands, Mr Forsyth scooped up his game of patience and began to deal out the cards anew.
He was a superb companion for anyone, particularly for this shrinking, immature girl on a voyage of alarming sensations. There was a tradition among the colonists that the old hands initiated the young in the mysteries of the East and the Reverend John Forsyth had an inexhaustible repertoire of stories and the sensitivity to select anecdotes which would instruct her in alien ways without filling her with shapeless dread. He was witty but without malice, and worldly without disdain for her ignorance, which was profound.
Her father and stepmother had taken the greatest care to shield the only child of their house from every influence of the world, the flesh and the devil, and instead of knowledge had filled her head with precepts by which they hoped she would live a virtuous life. As a result, her ignorance was of the most dangerous kind, perpetuated by a lack of imagination, buttressed by fear of the unknown. Miss Clare, her chaperon realized, had perfected the mental trick of not perceiving anything that might disturb her; thus, for instance, she had no curiosity about the reason why the flashy Heather had abandoned their shared cabin, or where or with whom she might be sleeping.
She had a charming maidenly serenity which quite captivated their bridge partners, Miss Rogers and Miss Westlake. Betty had no curiosity about them either, and did not remark the unusual enthusiasm with which they insisted she visit them in Singapore, or ask herself why two relatively well-off English ladies should choose to live together abroad, or why two women in their thirties who took care to wave their hair and make up their faces should nevertheless prefer to pass the voyage playing bridge with an elderly missionary and a prim girl rather than amuse themselves in the society of the plentiful young men. Like Queen Victoria, Betty had never heard of lesbians and would not have believed the truth if anyone had explained it to her.
The Carthage put into Port Said for coal and as the ship halted in the harbour, the cheerful warmth of the Mediterranean gave way to a fierce, stifling heat. The ship’s off
icers exchanged their evening dress for short white jackets which reached only to the waist, and in the first class the ladies sent their furs to the ship’s cold store for the rest of the voyage.
In Betty’s cabin, a steward came to close all the portholes. ‘They say it’s to keep the coal dust out, Miss, but tell you the truth, it’s to keep out them gippo thieves,’ he told her. ‘You’ll be all right to open up once we’re at sea again.’ Her cabin was like an oven, and Betty felt nauseous and giddy. There seemed to be no cool place on the whole ship. The decks beneath her feet were like hot coals.
Mr Forsyth found her sitting on a steamer chair under a sun canopy.
‘I was hoping to take you ashore to see the sights. There’s rather an interesting mosque here and ladies usually enjoy the shopping.’ She shook her head.
‘I couldn’t, Mr Forsyth, you go on without me.’
‘Not up to it? It’s just the heat, you know. You’re not accustomed to it. Take a bath and lie down for an hour or so. I’ll tell you my adventures at dinner.’ Deliberately, he withheld his sympathy. This child would withdraw permanently into all manner of fearful illnesses unless her retreat was cut off by someone kind enough to be cruel. At dinner she was wan and ate almost nothing, but he walked her to the card room all the same, using the authority of his quasi-parental position to insist.
Thus impelled, Betty bore up through the smothering heat of the Suez Canal, and once the Carthage passed the sunbaked rock of Aden and began to cross the Indian Ocean, the air became more refreshing. The four bridge players fell more and more into the routine of the hot, listless days and cool velvet nights. The endless time was marked by daily rituals – the cocktail hour before each meal, the afternoon siesta, the daily sweepstake on the number of miles the ship had sailed.
The passengers felt a growing sense of freedom, isolated in their own little world of ease and comparative luxury. The tentative attractions of the Mediterranean waters became fierce flirtations, while love affairs begun earlier hit stormy waters. Heather reappeared in the cabin and started slamming drawers open and shut as she redistributed her belongings.
Pearls Page 13
