Jane crossed her legs – high on the thigh to keep the calves parallel – and his eyes slid politely down them to her black suede toes. Nothing grabs the average male’s attention faster than a pair of pretty legs.
‘Smart little shoes. But can you dance in them?’
Norma and the other three seemed about to muscle in for introductions.
‘You bet.’
The band were playing ‘C’mon Everybody’ and the room had decided to jive to it. He looked a bit old for all that. A bit big, too, but he turned out to be a lovely mover. Twirling her and her blue poppies round him with just a flick of his strong wrists. People made room. They even had the spotlight on them for a bit. He watched her the whole time. She had twirled in the wardrobe mirror enough times to know how she looked: the smiling face; the flash of stocking tops under the lace and the tidy little black suede feet.
When it was over he led her back to the bar and bought her another orange squash (no funny business, just plain squash). Norma was hovering again. He spotted her approaching and everything happened very fast after that. He leaned down, placed a hand behind Jane’s back and kissed her right on the lips. Not sloppy, but not a peck either.
‘That was very, very nice indeed.’ That word again. She could practically feel his voice between her legs. ‘But, sadly . . .’ he looked at his watch (nice watch) and took his car keys from his pocket (nice car) ‘. . . I have to see a man’ – he had timed it brilliantly – ‘about a dog.’
He left just as Norma arrived, leaving this vague insult hanging in the air. Doreen always said that Norma must take Ugly Pills. She looked extra terrible that evening. She had looked better in her old school gymslip, quite honestly. Her mother helped her with her beehives, big yellow busbies of lacquer and backcombing with a bow on the back to match whatever outfit she had on. Norma never went to the West End. If she wanted something really special she went to Croydon. The plainest woman alive can find a man somewhere who will marry her and happily have intercourse with her. Not in Norma’s experience.
Jane went to the Locarno the next week and the next but she never saw the handsome stranger in the blue suit. Why would she? What would a nice man like him be doing in a place like that? He hadn’t exactly spoiled her for the local talent but she couldn’t even be bothered to dance with them any more. Norma said she was stuck up. She didn’t dare say this to Jane’s face but Jane could imagine her saying it just the same.
Jane was in the West End six days a week so she didn’t really have a lot of time for Norma and that lot. Norma and Joy had gone to secretarial college and had got jobs in the council typing pool. Carol and Eileen were just killing time working in Woolworths until the Big Days in May. They talked about their Big Days all the time. Carol’s mum, who’d had to make do with a hideous old borrowed frock and a pitiful little wedding cake made with powdered egg, wanted Carol to have four tiers and eight bridesmaids – her dad could afford them – but Eileen cried so hard they’d agreed to both have three and six. Carol’s wedding was still going to be the biggest. Reception for two hundred at the Nelson Hotel; honeymoon at the Palace in Torquay.
Turned out that Carol had managed to pick Princess Margaret’s Big Day so they were going to have to rent a television for the reception so no one would miss it. The happy couple would then be living happily ever after in an ugly brick doll’s house on a brand-new estate just outside Crawley. Joy had never been to Crawley – none of them had except Carol and she’d only been for twenty minutes to look at where the house was going to be (semi-detached, own garage, picture windows, separate toilet) – but Joy was very snide about it: ‘Very suburban’. Joy reckoned you hadn’t reached the suburbs as long as the buses still said London Transport on the side – which let South Norwood off the hook.
Kenneth had already started scribbling down bus numbers when Jane got to the stop. A couple of his buddies were there with him and they were all laughing at some joke Kenneth had just told them. She didn’t know he knew any jokes. He looked different suddenly: smiling, relaxed, almost handsome – apart from the spots. Like a younger, skinnier version of Uncle George. He seemed to shrink when he saw Jane, when he saw his mates looking at her legs in their Bear Brand 15-denier. He didn’t say hello and nor did any of the long line of familiar faces in the tidy little queue. She tried it once but they all looked at you like you were trying to sell them something. The buses weren’t too full at that time on a Saturday and she managed to get a seat downstairs. She decided she’d better change into her old black pumps on the bus. You weren’t allowed to wear stilettos in the shop anyway – it knackered the parquet. Customers did enough damage. The whole floor was pockmarked with the traces of their spiky heels. ‘A woman in stiletto heels,’ as Mr Philip kept on saying, ‘exerts the same pressure as an elephant standing on one leg.’ He’d read it in the Daily Express.
It was a bit tricky getting the shoes on and off but the man next to her was very nice about it. Skinny dark-haired bloke. She’d seen him somewhere before. He worked in a shoe shop in Bond Street. Jane had a funny feeling he was a poof but she didn’t mind that particularly as long as they kept themselves to themselves. Doreen minded very much although Norbury didn’t give her much chance to show it except on Sundays when the News of the World sometimes served up a nice scoutmaster.
The shoe-shop man was speaking.
‘Lovely courts. Nice low vamp.’ Definitely queer.
‘Aren’t they? They’re yours, aren’t they? I didn’t buy them myself, to be honest. A customer left them in the shop and never came back for them. I was the only one with feet small enough: three and a half double A.’
‘Sample size. Tell you what, we’re having a sample sale next Monday after the shop shuts. You’re welcome to come if you like. Only ten bob a pair. There won’t be many of you. A few really, really special customers and friends with small feet.’
‘Ooh. Yes please. That would be super.’ Super. Doreen should hear her.
New shoes. And no annoying little thank-you drinks to pay him back.
‘My name’s Jane, by the way. I work at Drayke’s. Jane James.’ She had been Jane Deeks at school to make life easier for everybody but Uncle George had never got round to adopting her so it still said Jane James on her cards. It sounded better anyway.
Chapter 5
Don’t, whatever you do, forget that the
girl behind the counter is a human being
too. She has feelings just as you have.
The Arcade still had the gates up but they were pulled open a foot or so at the Bond Street end to let the sales staff sidle in. Jane had hoped to be first into the shop so that she could sneak out of her coat and jacket without anyone noticing but Bennett was in early. Bennett’s real name was Brenda but she’d been ten years in Young Separates at Derry and Toms where the manageress had been a Brenda. Something had to give and it was Bennett.
Bennett had a choice of two trains from Catford and she liked to play safe with the early one and then do her face in the mirror of the basement showroom in the belief that the unflattering light was helpful. Have a powerful, shadeless light over your glass. Fool your audience, but never fool yourself. In fact, it just meant that she put on far too much make-up and the distorting colours of the fluorescent striplight meant that she never noticed the tide mark where the Honey Velvet of the foundation met the Dove Grey of her neck.
‘Let’s have a look. You’re a bit done up, aren’t you, for a Saturday morning? You after that job at Hillson’s?’
There was an ‘Experienced Saleslady Required’ notice in the window of a rival knitwear shop in Bond Street. Not such a bad idea, actually.
‘I’m going out for lunch.’
‘Ooh! Get her! Out for lunch in her –’ she peered at the jacket’s label on the hanger. ‘What make is it? I can’t see without my glasses.’
Bennett was always saying this but the plain truth was that she couldn’t read at all. No one else seemed to have tumbled but Jane was wi
se to all her tricks because she had an aunt – George’s sister – who was the same: always forgetting her glasses or complaining that the print was too small.
‘It’s a Hardy Amies.’
‘Hardy Amies? Where did you get that kind of money? Hardy Amies! You can’t be on more than a fiver a week – if that.’
‘Sample sale.’
‘All right for some.’ Bennett was a size eighteen. She had eaten a cheese roll and a doughnut for elevenses every day for twenty years and the evidence was all held in place under a huge whalebone and ‘power elastic’ foundation garment that was supposed to take five years off you in five seconds flat. Twenty-three separate measurements tailored to fit every inch of her lumpy, fat torso. You didn’t catch Bennett bending. If something got dropped on the floor it was gone for ever as far as she was concerned.
‘Let me see the skirt. Mmm. It fits you all right but then they’re always a very funny shape, those Hardy Amies showroom numbers. The house model – Yvonne? Yvette? Eva? Evadne? Sonia? – name like that. Lovely girl but she’s got a very peculiar figure: hollow back. What is it? Cashmere and wool? The seat will bag out if you’re not careful. You ought to have a higher heel than that. It just looks frumpy with those.’
Jane left her to it. No sense giving her the satisfaction. Poisonous old crab.
Once Jane had escaped from Bennett’s clutches she began straightening the fixtures. She was supposed to replace any colours that had been sold with new garments from the stockroom. This took all of ten minutes. The last week in January was completely dead. The sales were over (not that the Arcade’s shops ever had anything as common as a sale), there were no tourists and the rush of post-Christmas exchanges had dried up (‘So sweet of him but it just isn’t my colour’). Saturdays were even quieter if anything, because any English people with money would be in the country for the weekend. What you did get were time-wasters. Overdressed ladies from places like Stanmore and Rickmansworth who liked to spend the morning swanning in and out of smart shops before they had to decide whether to go for the set lunch at Debenham and Freebody or blow six bob on an ‘Elegant Rarebit’ in Fortnum’s – twice the price of the inelegant kind. The Welsh weren’t elegant enough for Fortnum’s apparently.
The proper salesladies took it in turns to patrol the ground floor. You weren’t allowed to read or smoke or look as if you were deep in conversation. No. You must either be folding or generally fiddling with the stock or just mooch about ornamentally, waiting for a customer to come in and give your life a meaning.
There were days in January when the door didn’t open at all and, rather than stand about sniping at each other, the senior sales used to take it in turns to man the shop while the others retreated downstairs to read magazines or play gin rummy. This didn’t affect the all-important pecking order. If a customer should cross the threshold, Bennett might do the ‘Good morning, Madam, can I help you’ lark but she would then hand over to Brigitta straight away. Bennett had the knack of sounding like a snotty manageress as she explained that Madam would like to see something in lovat blue with a short sleeve but it was still Brigitta who got the commission. By rights, Jane was Fourth Sales which meant that she seldom saw a single customer at this time of the year. If ever. Brigitta had been known to serve as many as three customers at once. Made a party of it, as if they were all out shopping together.
Jane had taken all the cashmere shirts out and arranged their polythene bags into tidy rainbows with each shade blending into the next like the colours on a cinema organ: primrose, moss green, lovat green, bottle green, brown, camel, natural, white, pink, camellia, tartan red, claret, black, navy, Dior blue, Sandringham blue, lovat blue, powder blue. She then somehow shoehorned the slithering pile back into its fixture. She’d polished all the mirrors – why did people touch mirrors? – and stood with her back to the stock gazing out at the arcade through the window display where the coloured cashmeres were suspended on their glass shelves like fully fashioned tropical fish.
Bennett kept up a merciless running commentary on the passers-by as they bustled along.
‘Have you seen these two?’
A pair of identically dressed girls dashed by: very ‘with-it’, very Chelsea, with red woolly tights and matching red berets on top of their shiny bobbed hair which was cut in hard lines round their faces like the hair on a cartoon character. They wore A-line flannel coats well above their knees with big shiny red buttons – like a really, really embarrassing school uniform.
Brigitta looked out of the window as she tripped past on her way back down to the basement after her tea break. She was Dutch but she could bore you to death in six languages. Her saving grace was that she swore all the time. She would never have sworn in Dutch, but she picked up dirty little scraps of English like a tramp rooting through a dustbin. It was a miracle she didn’t swear at the customers really.
‘Whoever cut those fucking jackets should cut another jacket and then be shot.’
She’d got that one from a little Jewish alterations tailor and she used it a lot.
You didn’t call her Brigitta to her face. You called her Mrs Taylor. Brigitta had been married very, very briefly to an Englishman she met nearly ten years ago while they were both working in the same department store. Bennett always reckoned it was just one of those friendly arrangements to get a work permit and that the split was all very amicable but Jane knew what really happened. Brigitta had had three Dubonnets and four glasses of punch at the Christmas party (table for twenty at the Cumberland Hotel) and had cornered Jane and explained that Mr Taylor had expected to be able to put his dirty great thing into Mrs Taylor whenever he felt like it.
‘I told him to stick it up his arse,’ said Brigitta and Jane said that would be a good trick if he could do it and Brigitta shot Dubonnet straight out of her nose.
Brigitta was, technically, still married to Mr Taylor but a week after the honeymoon she’d moved back into the salesladies’ hostel behind Marshall and Snelgrove, a miserable great barracks of a place where a girl could find refuge. Anyone with a gentleman caller had to wheel her bed out into the corridor. No gentlemen ever called. Mr Taylor was now living with his common-law wife in Carshalton Beeches and Brigitta eventually got herself a two-room flat near Clapham Common.
A very large woman in a mink coat had parked in front of the window.
Bennett pulled a face.
‘Oh no, Madam. Not in that size, Madam. Please!’
But Madam came in anyway. Very, very loud voice. Pointed to a baby-pink batwing-sleeved number in the window.
‘I’d like to see that in nigger brown in a size 48.’ No ‘good morning’.
‘I’m not sure if we still have that shade, Madam. It’s been a very popular line. But if you’d like to step downstairs one of our ladies can show you what we have. Mrs Taylor? Perhaps you could show Madam something attractive in nigger brown?’
Jane could hear the suppressed giggles and the whispered ‘Sidney Poitier’ but fortunately the customer didn’t. Brigitta hadn’t much to go on but she soon set to work persuading Madam that what she wanted was not a nigger brown, batwing-sleeved boat neck but a duck-egg blue, edge-to-edge cardigan. Unfortunately even the largest size didn’t allow edge to meet edge over Madam’s enormous tits. The most ‘generous proportions’ can be made to appear attractive when allied with perfect posture – look at the Queen Mother.
‘This style does run very small, Madam,’ said Mrs Taylor’s voice, apologetically. ‘I’ll just run upstairs to the stockroom and get you the next size.’
Brigitta stopped when she got to Jane and Bennett and immediately snipped the size labels off the 48 in her hand before pulling the cardigan as wide as it could possibly go. Cashmere can be any size you want. After the cardigan had had its nice little ‘schlap’, she folded it, put it in a bag and slipped back downstairs.
‘Oh yes, that’s better. Mind you the sleeve seems a bit short.’
You could hear the faintest sneer in Brigitta
’s voice. ‘Short? Oh NO, Madam. Bracelet length.’
Whether or not they made bracelets big enough for those dimpled pink wrists Madam didn’t say, but she looked nice enough in her new cardigan and she knew when she was beaten. She even allowed Brigitta to sell her a bottle of Woolite and a D-Fuzz-It. After that, the shop went quiet for nearly an hour. Jane flicked furtively through a copy of Vogue on the counter. Why go to Yucatan?
There were no prices in the window. Prices were vulgar and, besides, once they’d plucked up the courage to come in and ask, there was always the chance the customer would be too embarrassed to scuttle straight back out again and admit that a twenty-guinea three-piece was more than their husband earned in a week and you could just shame them into buying something.
The door pinged open. Mousey woman in windowpane checks.
‘How much is that cardie in the window?’
Bennett had started humming a tune. Jane raised her voice slightly.
‘The anthracite bolero, Madam? That model is six guineas, Madam. It’s pure cashmere.’
‘Oh.’ Her little fat face fell. ‘Do you have the same thing in Orlon?’
Uh-oh. Bad sign. Mr Philip couldn’t abide man-made fibres. Cheap and machine-washable, they were a threat to his whole way of life. His contempt was infectious. Did they have the same thing in fucking Orlon? No, Madam. Or Ban-Lon. Or Acrilon. Or Courtilon. Or Nylon. Or Brilon. Or Draylon. Or Vilene. Or Terylene. Or bloody polythene. Orlon cardies. Peasants.
‘Or what, madam?’
As she scuttled out by the far door the other one dinged open and suddenly there were two men in the shop. They didn’t seem to know it but they looked nothing like customers. One wore a leather car coat, the other had a big sheepskin draped over his shoulders. Both were wearing silk socks – wide boys always did. The beadles had already spotted them and were now stationed at either end of the arcade, on the lookout for a passing copper.
Bennett was on the attack at once.
A Vision of Loveliness Page 4
