A Vision of Loveliness

by Louise Levene

  Chapter 21

  To begin the story of Norbury we must

  go back in time to 50 million years

  ago to the time known as the Eocene

  period when this area of south-eastern

  England was covered by sea.*

  Annie shuffled in at half nine with a cup of tea, the Daily Express and two dozen red roses – ‘Please forgive me for being such a brute’. Handwritten in a man’s writing. He must have been up at the crack of dawn seeing to that.

  ‘Suzy and Love’s Young Dream are having a lie-in.’

  That was one way of putting it. Suzy and her Mr Swan were at it like knives in the big pink-quilted bed next door. You could hear the velvet headboard banging against the wall. There was a mark on the wallpaper already.

  ‘You’d think he could leave the poor little cow alone.’

  Annie muttered her way back to the kitchen and Jane shut the door behind her and climbed into her waiting bath. She made up and dressed as carefully as she would for a date. More carefully. Not just to wind up Doreen. Not just to cheer up Uncle George. This was going to be the full passing-out parade.

  The whole flat already reeked of flowers so she decided to take the roses down to Norbury. They clashed rather boldly with the violet dress and coat – Run the risk of bad taste rather than dress like a mouse. The whole effect was very Bronwen Pugh Goes Hospital Visiting. It was a bit chilly to go without a coat but she would be in the car most of the time and, besides, she’d decided to ritz it to them good and proper with the mink scarf and matching flowerpot hat that Sergio had given her for her birthday. She had just got the scarf to sit straight when the porter buzzed up with the magic words: ‘Your driver is here, Miss James.’

  Henry’s Bill had a wedding to go to, so the Bentley was being driven by Henry’s Bill’s Bob. He was holding the door open but she had to walk round the car to get to it. He wanted her where he could see her in the rear-view mirror.

  The car creamed away into Knightsbridge where ladies of a certain age – messers, by the look of them – were out killing time, dressed up to the nines, trying things on and stealing squirts of scent until the stores shut at one and they skulked back home to a tin of soup in their sunless flats in Lowndes Square.

  You never saw a pram in Sloane Street. Sloane Street babies were walked by nannies in parks and squares, not by mummies in high streets. Over Chelsea Bridge into the red-brick terraces of Battersea and Clapham and it was a different story. Clapham pavements were chock-a-block with huge old baby carriages and funny, low-slung pushchairs all parked outside shops with hand-knitted bundles of shit and sick strapped inside them, screaming with outrage while stupid old women with no nappies to wash stopped and coochied and nosily matched size for age. Older children, too large to strap in and wheel about, had to be dragged in and out of shops being refused things by women with faded headscarves and cross faces. Young women, really, but aged at a stroke by the magic ring that had taken away their dressing tables and left big, fat prams in their place.

  Jane smugly snuggled her nose against her mink scarf sniffing the sweet expensive smells that clung to the fur: Jolie Madame; Chanel No 5 and a ghostly whiff of Miss Dior. As they cruised past Streatham Common, Jane snapped open her alligator bag – would any of the Deekses even know it was real? Would they even dream how much it cost? – took out her compact and checked her face. She could see the shy, randy little eyes of Henry’s Bill’s Bob watching in the rear-view mirror from under the patent-leather peak of his cap. He was actually very nice-looking in a skinny sort of way. High, slightly girlish cheekbones and a really lovely mouth. Her lipstick was perfectly all right but she put some on anyway, rubbing the waxy red stick across her mouth and yumming her lips together to spread the colour evenly across her smile. She saw him lick his own lips in sympathy.

  ‘It’s Bob, isn’t it?’

  He nodded. A horny little lump in his throat made speech impossible.

  ‘You don’t have a tissue or something, do you?’ What a sexy little word that was: tissue.

  He fumbled in the pocket of his cheap blue suit and passed her his clean white handkerchief – show, not blow.

  ‘I can’t possibly use this.’

  ‘No. It’s all right. It doesn’t matter. It’ll wash.’

  Only it wouldn’t wash. Henry’s Bill’s Bob lived at home in Ilford with his old mum who wouldn’t have approved of lipstick on his laundry. He watched Jane’s lips make their Plum Crazy monogram on the corner and thought of other uses for her second-hand kiss.

  They finally hit Norbury.

  ‘It’s the next on the left, then second right.’

  Moments later, the long, shiny, coffee-coloured car purred to a halt outside number sixty-three. Parking was not a problem in Pamfield Avenue. Uncle George used to park his old banger outside but then it packed up and he couldn’t afford to get another one. Doreen always said the Big End went but that wasn’t actually the trouble. She just liked saying it.

  Only two vehicles ever parked in the street now. One belonged to Mr Nottage at number fourteen. Mr Nottage was a travelling salesman and Doreen, who had read (but never quite finished) an Agatha Christie about one of these, was convinced that he was a mass murderer. Or a bigamist. One of the two. The other vehicle was the Ripley Removals pantechnicon. Ripley Bros was painted on the side in letters three feet high. It usually lived in a lock-up in Thornton Heath but sometimes the Bros drove home in it after a late job and left it in the avenue, lowering the tone.

  Jane knew that something was seriously the matter the moment the car pulled up. The windows had been cleaned, the hydrangea had finally got its winter crew-cut, there were washed milk bottles on the front step (which had been gingered up with cardinal red) and there was a pot of daffodils by the path. The upstairs bedroom curtains (freshly laundered and hanging flowery side out) twitched as Jane opened the gate and June was at the front door before she got there. She was wearing a quilted nylon housecoat covered with pink cabbage roses and an apron. She looked like she’d been wallpapered.

  ‘I didn’t want you to knock, just in case she was having her nap.’ She spoke in a peculiar, nursey stage whisper. The hall lino had been polished – how did you polish lino? Why did you polish lino? – and there was a sickly smell of baking coming from the kitchen.

  You could see that June was having the time of her fucking life just by the way she wiped her hands on her pinny. She washed them all the time: it was the nursiest thing she could think of – short of pinning a watch to her chest and walking up and down the stairs with a jug of warm piss. The pinny – pin tucks, pleats, gathers, drawn-thread embroidery, satin-stitch initials, you name it, Georgette had splashed Ribena on it – represented her last term’s work at school. She got a certificate for it.

  ‘How’s college?’

  College was just fine. The Old Doreen would have far rather June went out and got a job to pay for her keep (particularly now that Jane’s leaving had left the housekeeping forty bob short) but she had quite liked the idea of a ‘daughter’ who was a teacher. The very thought of it had got June an automatic upgrade from ‘my late sister’s girl’. The New Doreen didn’t know what bloody day it was.

  June didn’t want to chat.

  ‘I’ll get the kettle on. She’s in here.’ And, bold as brass, June opened the door to the front room which was now home to the telly (much better ITV reception on the street side of the house), several migrant pouffes and June’s entire glass animal collection tricked out across the mantelshelf. Every now and then she’d come home with a new specimen tenderly wrapped in newspaper but they all looked like the bastard children of a gazelle and a giraffe. Jane reckoned they fiddled with the glass first then made up the animal afterwards. Like those poodly things made of skinny pink balloons you got at funfairs.

  In the corner lurked an enormous wooden playpen where Georgette sat on her fat plastic backside, furiously whacking at a celluloid clown contraption. She wanted it to lie down and
shut up but the painted smile kept lurching upright again, dongling cheerily as it rolled with each punch. Eventually, Georgette pushed it flat and laid the puzzle-bricks box on top of it.

  ‘Night-night,’ she said firmly. She was her mother’s daughter.

  No one took a blind bit of notice.

  Uncle George didn’t hold with the play pen – ‘She’s not a wild animal. You ought to let her run about more’ – but he didn’t want her running about anywhere near him. He’d sneaked off down the end of the garden before June could get Georgette into her coat and boots for a bit of fresh air so she just popped her back in her cage. She was all right. Still wasn’t talking, mind you. The only words so far were ‘June’, ‘Wibena’, ‘night-night’ and ‘wee-wee’. June was a bit worried about this – they were doing Child Development at college this term.

  Doreen looked like death warmed up. There was a good inch of grey roots on her lazy twist of Golden Amber hair. She was dressed but June had made her wear a fluffy pink bed jacket over her clothes as if to show she wasn’t quite the ticket. She was sat on the settee sucking thoughtfully on a banana. It still had the skin on.

  Half an hour was going to be more than enough, Jane decided. Even when you went to see someone in hospital (one of Doreen’s few hobbies) you never stayed longer than that, so as not to tire the patient and before you yourself got tired of sitting there, sneaking grapes and promising them their old selves.

  Doreen was definitely not her old self but maybe she didn’t want her old self. As soon as she recognised Jane (which took a bit of time: she had to take the mink hat off) she cracked open her face to show all her own teeth.

  ‘Don’t you look nice? Lovely colour. Don’t she look nice, June? Lovely colour on you. What colour would you call that?’

  ‘Purple?’ June was clueless about colours.

  ‘Purple?’

  ‘Purple.’

  ‘Lovely purple colour.’

  Doreen had so seldom sat down in the front room – even at Christmas she was always in and out to the kitchen moaning about not having had a chance to take the weight off her feet – that she thought she was staying somewhere else. Somewhere a bit posh to judge from all the tea trays and doilies June kept serving up. The kettle whistled and June dived back into the kitchen.

  ‘Nice here, innit?’ she whispered, chummily.

  She was wearing pale blue bedroom slippers. These seemed to bother her slightly. None of the other guests had slippers on. Did they let you wear slippers in the lounge?

  ‘Next time I come here I’ll wear my tan pumps. Bit smarter.’

  She caught sight of Jane again and smiled a bit more. Her face ached with the unfamiliar exercise.

  ‘You do look smart. Lovely colour. What colour would you call that?’

  Christ on a bike.

  June came back in with a tray. The second-best tea set, which had only ever had one (disastrous) outing from the china cabinet to the best of Jane’s knowledge, suddenly appeared, complete with a new cake plate and a doily and a pile of slightly burnt-looking cupcakes decorated with what looked like bits of red and green plastic – fun to make, ten minutes to bake.

  June had taken to making tea all the time and packet-mix cakes which she was convinced were more convenient (it said so on the box). Her new best friend Valerie’s mother had a two-tiered cake plate with doilies. And a biscuit barrel. And jam in a cut-glass pot. June had bought Doreen a cake plate for her birthday in February so that there’d be something nice on the table when Valerie came round but Doreen (this was before The Turn) took it back to the department store and exchanged it for a waterproof sheet for Georgette and a pair of support stockings. June could buy all the cake plates she wanted now.

  June’s new mumsy manner had got into her conversation. Jane looked very smart. The buses could be murder. Had she had a good journey down?

  Oh thank you, God.

  ‘Oh June, thank goodness you’ve reminded me. I ought to take a cup out to my driver. He’s waiting in the car.’ (She didn’t say ‘Bentley’ in case they didn’t know what it was.)

  Time was when Doreen’s fat blue and white hand would have broken the handle off the teacup on hearing such a pile of swank but the new, improved Doreen looked up, and her face cracked into another dazzling black smile.

  ‘Car?’

  A nicer person than Jane would have offered to take her out for a ride but then a nicer person would have come on the bloody bus.

  June covered her surprise by faffing about getting another cup and saucer – being careful not to get the one with the glued handle. ‘Did you hire one of them mini cabs then?’ June simply couldn’t make out what Jane was doing with a driver.

  ‘He works for some friends of mine. They didn’t need the car today.’

  ‘Nice friends you got.’

  Bob was curled up with Titbits – Nudity on Our Stages: does it go too far? – smoking his way through a pack of ten Player’s Navy Cut. His cap was pulled low over his eyes against the morning sun. He looked very sexy suddenly. She passed his tea (two sugars) and cupcakes (just add an egg) through the window of the Bentley. She knitted him a brave little smile.

  ‘I’m so glad you’re here. I shan’t be too much longer.’

  A dozen net curtains twitched back into place as she modelled her way back up the front garden path; Jane is wearing a Vision in Violet in a cunningly cut lightweight worsted bouclé lined with pure silk and it cost more than your last bloody rates bill.

  Doreen got a big kick out of the tea tray but she was convinced that the hotel waitresses were watching her every move so she came over all genteel, sticking her little finger out sideways as she stirred in the sugar and passing the cake plate to Jane.

  ‘Do have another sandbag.’

  Sister June weighed in with her two pennyworth.

  ‘She forgets words. Doctor’ (‘Doctor’: Dr What? Like there was only one) ‘says you have to expect that in her condition. But we try to keep her Mentally Alert.’

  This basically involved getting Doreen her first ever library book. A large-print edition of Phyllis Matthewman’s Wife on Approval was on the table beside her, the polythene cover all tacky with handling. Doreen seemed to thoroughly enjoy it – ‘Charles Trevor’s career depended on his being married, and quickly’. June had taken it back to the library one Saturday afternoon after Doreen had finally finished it.

  ‘Where’s my book?’

  ‘I got you a new one, Cupid in Mayfair. It’s the same writer. I’m sure you’ll like it.’

  ‘No, but where’s my book? My book I was reading.’

  Sunday was murder but June had managed to get to the library on Monday lunchtime and get Doreen’s old book back again. She must have read it twenty times over by now but she always cried in exactly the same place: ‘He held her closely, murmuring incoherent love words.’

  Kenneth had just got back after a morning spent lurking in a record shop on Streatham High Road. He never bought anything (George and Doreen didn’t have a gramophone) but the shop had booths where you could listen and Kenneth and his friend Simon would take it in turns to ask for different Charlie Parker records.

  Kenneth was fascinated by Jane’s mink hat. Apparently the mink was one of the weasel family and when it had killed its prey it ate the brain first followed by the contents of the stomach. It was in one of his Wonder Books of Knowledge. Apparently mink farmers usually fed them on diseased liver. Fuck off, Kenneth.

  Uncle George came in just as June was clearing away the teacups. He’d been down at the bottom of the garden, poking bare earth with a hoe, and he’d have been there still, only he thought Jane would have left by now. He seemed embarrassed.

  ‘Hello Jane, love. I didn’t know you were here. You look very nice. Doesn’t she look nice, Reen?’

  ‘Don’t she look nice! Lovely colour. What colour would you call that?’

  Oh fuck, here we go again.

  Doreen took her husband’s hand and stroked it agains
t her face, smearing the leaking tears across her purple cheeks. Uncle George tried to think of something else to say.

  ‘Your friend got her flat then? June says you’ve got a Mayfair exchange.’ Uncle George said this with a likely-story smile, as if Jane had pulled it off by hanging round outside a Park Lane call box waiting for the phone to ring. Even if she was really living there it was sure to end in tears. They might promise you a flat in Mayfair but you ended up dead in some back-street abortionist’s or on the game in Port Said. The News of the World was quite clear on this point. When she told him that Suzy’s uncle had bought the flat for her it was obvious he didn’t believe a word.

  ‘We’ve been getting quite a lot of modelling work. Suzy and I are in all the magazines this month, look.’

  She showed him the Frockways ad. That wrong-footed him. Models made a nice few bob. But he still looked uneasy.

  Jane left the Vogue on one of the pouffes then tailed her sister out to the kitchen where the Fairy June had obviously been hard at work. She’d borrowed Valerie’s mother’s sewing machine and made a new curtain for under the sink out of Jane’s orange gingham summer dress; she’d polished the lino in here as well and wrecked the enamel top of the kitchen table with a sheet of Fablon gaily covered in orange and yellow saucepans. If you can accustom yourself to doing household tasks with a smile, you’ll have come a long way towards being prepared for married life and motherhood.

  ‘This looks a lot brighter.’ What else could you say?

  ‘Auntie was never very interested in home-making.’ The smug, stupid voice of someone who knew how to get candle wax out of velvet (only she didn’t own any velvet). If this was home-making you could hardly blame Doreen for losing interest.

  In the corner next to the Utility dresser was a sparkling new fridge. It looked very strange and futuristic in Doreen’s old back kitchen. The handbook was still on top of it with a picture of some overdressed bint in a cocktail frock drunkenly hugging her new Electrolux which was packed with chickens and wine bottles and cans of Long Life lager.