by Chris Curran
Joycie was booked to work with another photographer, John Burns, on a Vanity Fair spread and Marcus was out and about taking pictures of London for an American magazine. So they didn’t see each other during the day. But they always took Fatty for a walk when they got home. She was supposed to be trained, but when they let her off the lead she would charge madly away so that they spent most of the time chasing her. When they finally caught her they were sure she was laughing at them, tongue hanging out as she looked from one to the other to make sure they were sharing the joke.
Something had changed between Joycie and Marcus since she’d been able to tell him everything about Sid and about her dad. Although she didn’t dare ask him to sleep in her room again she often found herself gazing at him in a new way, and his smile when he caught her doing so told her he had noticed. He’d always been affectionate, but now when he touched her his hand would linger a little, his blue eyes on her face, making sure she was all right.
***
John Burns decided to do the Vanity Fair shoot in Victoria Park and around the whole Bethnal Green area. Although the weather wasn’t all that good it stayed dry and Joycie loved being in the open air. John was attractive and fun to work with but as she posed for him she found herself looking at his hands and thinking of Marcus. And when John smiled she saw, not his brown eyes, but Marcus’s blue ones. She was sure she was too distracted to give her best, but John seemed happy enough.
Amazingly Cecil Beaton had also asked for her again. It must mean their first session hadn’t been the disaster she’d imagined. He worked her hard and at the end he brushed back his white hair with an elegant hand and said, ‘I think we deserve a drink, my darling.’ She perched on a delicate antique armchair while he was out of the room. There were so many lovely and expensive-looking objects on every surface she was afraid to move in case she broke something.
He came back with champagne. They clinked glasses and he lolled on the blue velvet chaise longue he had used for many of the pictures. ‘You were positively sparkling today, my dear, so this seems more appropriate than gin.’
It was hardly raining, but even so Beaton insisted on paying for a taxi to take her home. Although the session had turned out well she was tired and she couldn’t face the thought of going out tonight. There was nothing to eat in the house so she asked the taxi driver to stop at a delicatessen and bought some bread and gorgonzola, a melon and Parma ham. The off-licence next door didn’t have much choice in wine so she settled on a bottle of Mateus Rose.
When she got in she found a note from Marcus:
Fatty was going mad for her walk so I thought I’d better take her. Back soon XXX
Maybe it was because she was so tired, but it upset her to think this was the first time they hadn’t done the walk together. But she knew she was just being silly and got on with putting the food on plates. Then she made herself a cup of tea and sat in front of the telly, waiting for him to come back.
The next moment Fatty was licking her face as she struggled to wake up fully. She pushed the dog down, shaking her head to try to clear the remnants of a dream, which she knew hadn’t been a good one. She must have been trying to call out in her sleep because her throat felt raw, but she forced a smile for Marcus. ‘Beaton gave me champagne and it really knocked me out.’
The rain had gone so they lugged the little kitchen table into the garden, rubbed the chairs dry and laid out the food. She’d forgotten to put the wine in the fridge and it wasn’t cold. Marcus said it was fine, but after the champagne and tea it tasted horrible to Joycie. The sky was a soft grey tinged with red at the horizon and it was cool after the rain. Perhaps the picnic had been a bad idea.
Marcus reached for her hand. ‘You’re shivering.’ He pulled off his big sweater and she put it on, grabbing a handful of wool and holding it to her face so she could smell his lovely musky scent. ‘You were having a bad dream when I got back, weren’t you?’ he said.
‘I think so.’ A dark haze filled her mind as she recalled something of the nightmare. Her dad being held down by huge figures, his face all bloodied as he looked at her for help and she tried to scream, but could make no noise.
When she shivered again Marcus reached over to pull her to her feet. ‘You go in and get warm. I’ll clear up here.’
‘No, come in with me, please. You’ve got an early start in the morning. I can do it then.’
Sitting on the sofa, Joycie leaned against him as he played with her hair.
‘I wasn’t going to tell you till tomorrow,’ he said, ‘but when I got in this afternoon there was a phone call for you.’ A thump from her heart. ‘It was your dad’s friend, Dennis. He said he’s onstage tonight so he’ll ring same time tomorrow.’
She drained her glass. ‘I know I said I couldn’t let it go, but now I’m not sure I want to get back into all that.’
‘You don’t have to answer the phone.’ He smiled and shook his head. ‘But you will, won’t you?’
‘I think I have to. It might even help with the nightmares.’
He didn’t say anything, but she could guess what he was thinking. Or it could make them worse.
***
The remnants of their picnic were still in the garden next morning, soggy from overnight rain. She dumped them in the bin, dragged in the table, then took Fatty for a walk. The streets were Friday morning quiet and that sense of being watched had come back so she kept the dog on the lead. It was probably a mistake because Fatty was so skittish, jumping at every sound or movement, that by the time they got home Joycie was doing the same. As she opened the front door the phone on the hall table began ringing. She grabbed it with a breathless, ‘Hello,’ as she tried to untangle herself from Fatty’s lead and unclip it from her collar.
Not Dennis – a young female voice. ‘Is that Orchid, I mean Joyce?’
‘Yes.’
‘Hi, this is Helen,’ a pause, ‘Helen Banks from Plumes,’ a little laugh, ‘and Clacton.’
Helen had been right to guess that Joycie needed a nudge to place her. She had been running through the list of models, stylists, and journalists she vaguely knew, trying to recall a Helen. ‘Oh, hello.’ A catch of breath: Helen must have remembered something more about Pauline. ‘How are you?’
‘I’m fab, thanks. Just wanted to say how lovely it was to see you again and to remind you we said we’d get together one evening this week.’
‘Did we?’ She couldn’t recall that, but her mind had been on Pauline. She must have agreed to it to keep Helen talking.
‘Yeah, and I thought tomorrow might be good, if you’re free, because my sister’s staying with me and I want to take her out on the town. She’s got two little kids, a really boring hubby, and hardly ever gets away from Clacton. She’d love to go to one of the clubs I’ve told her about. So I was thinking the Ad Lib?’
Although there was nothing Joycie fancied less, she remembered the sister was the one who might know something more about Pauline. ‘That’d be nice. Shall we meet you there?’
A pause and some clinking that Joycie guessed were Helen’s earrings tapping on the side of the phone. ‘Well, it might be better to go in together. I mean, I haven’t been there for ages and …’ Sounded as if she knew she was unlikely to get in. ‘Why don’t we come to your place first?’
‘No.’ It sounded sharp, but it was possible Bill was still watching, and she couldn’t get Helen and her sister involved. ‘I mean, we won’t be here, so we’ll pick you up.’
‘Fine, you know my address.’
It was clear she was put out, but Joycie couldn’t worry about that. She wanted to clear the line in case Dennis rang.
She fed Fatty and let her into the garden then cleaned the kitchen. The house was always a mess because neither of them had time to do it and they hated the thought of having anyone in, but when she was free Joycie actually enjoyed cleaning. She didn’t dare use the Hoover in case she missed Dennis’s call, but she scrubbed the kitchen floor then had a go at the bat
hroom.
The phone rang about four o’clock, and she grabbed it feeling a quiver of sickness in her stomach. ‘Hello?’
‘Hello, Joyce darling, it’s Dennis.’
Her legs were suddenly weak and she had to hold onto the banister and sit on the stairs.
‘I had to ring to thank you for your little note, my sweet,’ Dennis was saying. ‘Can’t tell you how much it meant. I really did think it was Kay who betrayed your dad and me.’
She leaned back and took a slow breath. So that was all. Fatty had come in from the garden and she trotted over, resting her warm chin on Joycie’s lap and gazing up with big brown eyes. Joycie rubbed the soft hair on the top of her head until she sighed and her eyes closed.
‘I’m so glad it helped, Dennis. Kay loves you to bits and I can’t imagine her ever doing anything to hurt you.’
‘I know and I’ve been an absolute bastard to her. The drinking’s bad enough, but accusing her of that was the worst.’
‘Don’t be too hard on yourself. You didn’t know Dad had told Sid he was leaving the act.’
‘But Kay told me and I wouldn’t believe her.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Charlie rang that last day. Must have been just before the police turned up. Wanted to tell me what happened with Sid and that we needed to make our move as soon as we could. Get our stake in the club we were interested in right away. I wasn’t there so he left the message with Kay.’
That phone call her dad said he was going to make just before she went out to the butcher’s. It must have been to Dennis.
He was still talking. ‘Like I told you Kay wasn’t too pleased about the whole idea, so she didn’t get round to telling me. Thought she was just delaying the inevitable, but a couple of days later the police came for me.’
‘Oh, Dennis. And when she finally told you about the call you didn’t believe her?’
Poor Kay and poor Dennis.
‘That’s right. But now you’ve set me straight.’ His voice wobbled and she knew hers would if she tried to speak. ‘But, darling,’ he said, ‘I’ve been thinking about Charlie and you know I’ve never been able to believe he would have killed himself however bad it got. He would never have left you and I flatter myself he wouldn’t have wanted to leave me either.’
Unless he’d done something terrible and he thought we were about to find out. ‘I don’t want to believe it either, Dennis, but Sid said some awful things to him that last day. Did Kay say how he sounded when he called?’
‘No, just that he said he knew it was a bit sooner than we’d planned, but we’d make it work.’
‘He didn’t seem worried about anything? Or scared?’
‘If he was Kay didn’t notice.’
When he rang off Joycie sat for a long while, stroking the silky hair on Fatty’s head and thinking of the argument she’d overheard. When Sid threatened to tell the police about the mat she’d imagined her dad staring at him, too shocked to speak, not knowing what to say. But perhaps he knew nothing about the bloodstained mat. Perhaps he had simply turned away, wondering how desperate Sid must be to make up such a story. How Joycie longed for this to be true.
Chapter Fourteen
It was only when she reached out to rub Fatty’s ears that Joycie realized the dog had moved away from her to lie on the hall carpet. She had been crouched on the stairs for so long she was cold and her legs felt stiff as she got up and headed to the kitchen. While she waited for the kettle to boil she looked out of the window. The day was so cloudy that although there should be hours to go before dark it felt like evening already.
She needed to look at her mum’s letters again. She had put them in the box on top of her wardrobe where she stored a few keepsakes, but when she got upstairs the bed looked so inviting she couldn’t resist lying propped up on the pillows to drink her tea.
Was it possible her dad had never seen the bloodstained mat and thought Sid was making it up to scare him? If he had nothing to do with her mum’s disappearance then the answer was yes. Although Joycie had found the mat rolled up under the bed there was no reason for him to look there. She had only done it because she knew where her mum kept the new shoes. Hadn’t noticed the mat was missing before that. It wasn’t very big and there were several others scattered around the living room. Mum often shifted them about when she cleaned the place. When they left the lodgings in Hastings a few weeks afterwards she asked her dad if she could have the shoes and her mum’s favourite blouse, and he seemed surprised when she slid the box out and showed them to him.
‘Looks like they’ve never been worn,’ she remembered him saying. ‘So mind you take care of them and the blouse too. She’ll …’ He had stopped then and turned away, but Joycie was sure he was going to say that Mum would want them kept nice for when she came back.
The bedroom door was ajar and Fatty nosed it open and came in, lying on the sheepskin rug beside the bed and closing her eyes with a gusty sigh. Joycie closed her eyes too. She wanted to reread the letters before Marcus got home, but she was so tired she didn’t know if she could make any sense of them.
She was jolted awake by a bang. A door slamming? Marcus must be back already. She swung her legs to the floor and Fatty shook herself and headed for the door. ‘Marcus, is that you?’ A low growl from Fatty, who stood on the landing looking down the stairs. Joycie held onto her collar. The front door was closed. Maybe he’d gone straight to the darkroom.
She walked quietly down, still holding onto Fatty. The living room was cold and for a moment she thought she smelled cigarette smoke. ‘Marcus?’ A cool breeze was coming from the kitchen. The back door was wide open. She’d forgotten to lock it when she let Fatty in from the garden. Hadn’t even closed it properly if a gust of wind had managed to blow it open.
She locked up then realized that the frosted glass in the back door meant someone could break it then reach through and get the key. So she took it out of the lock and put it into the cutlery drawer.
The darkroom was empty. It was too early for Marcus to be back anyway. She double-checked the front door and headed back upstairs. As she did so she thought she smelled smoke again. Nothing to worry about, Joycie told herself; it must have wafted in from someone’s back garden.
Fatty followed her and watched as Joycie took the keepsake box down and sat with it in front of her on the dressing table.
The black shoes and the blouse were in the box along with the letters and the few keepsakes Joycie had from the past. There was a tatty photo album and some programmes and newspaper cuttings her mum had collected about the shows her dad and Sid had been in.
The blouse was neatly folded in tissue, and Joycie pulled the paper aside and rubbed her fingers over the silky fabric. In the early days she often held it to her face breathing in the familiar scent. All too soon the smell was gone, the blouse crumpled and sad-looking. So she had washed and ironed it and packed it neatly away.
She’d read the newspaper cuttings before so she leafed quickly through them. There was one whole newspaper folded small and when she opened it she saw it was the Hastings Observer from a week or so before her mum disappeared. Presumably she hadn’t got round to cutting out the review of the show.
The photo album tempted her. Perhaps a look through would give her some clues, but she had stared at the pictures so often over the years she knew she would just be giving in to sentimentality. The letters were the important thing.
The first time she had read them Joycie had been trying to find some hints about the boyfriend her mum might have run away with, but now she was searching for anything to do with Sid. That phrase from the final note: something has happened, had been playing over and over in her head and she had started to wonder if her mum had suspicions about Sid’s behaviour towards young girls. Maybe she’d heard talk about it or even seen something.
It was just as likely, of course, that what had happened was closer to home. Something to do with her parents’ relationship.
She
took out the pack of yellowing envelopes and clicked on the lamp beside her. In the early letters from during the war, when her mum was pregnant and living with Irene, there were a couple of references to Sid: Sid Sergeant came to see me. Charlie has asked him to look in now and then. He insisted on giving me some money. Said he owed it to Charlie. I’m not sure if I believe that, but it’s very kind of him and we can certainly use it.
A while later she was writing: We had a visit from Sid, who brought some meat and tinned food. Irene said it was black market stuff, but she took it and we’ve had a couple of lovely meals, which is just as well because I’m hungry all the time! It’s strange, but although Sid is so kind and Charlie is really fond of him, Irene doesn’t seem to like him. Says he’s in with a bad crowd and that’s where he gets the black market food.
The bad crowd Irene was talking about was probably Ernie Georgious’s gang, if what Tommy Green said was right. There was nothing after that except the mention of Charlie rejoining the act when he was demobbed. Something else in one of the letters from 1946 caught her eye however: It’s wonderful to have Charlie back home and now Joycie has got used to him she’s becoming a real daddy’s girl. The war has changed him, but I’m sure we’ll get back to the way we were soon.
Joycie remembered what Cora had said about her dad realizing he was attracted to men when he was in the army. That would surely have changed the way he was with his wife. There were no more references to Sid until 1949: Charlie and Sid are playing the Chiswick Empire again this year and we’ve found new lodgings in Acton. We used to stay at the same place as Sid and Cora, but I wanted to be on our own. To be honest with you, I’ve never liked Cora and I’m not keen on Sid either.
