by Rosie Thomas
Then, without any warning or preliminaries, a woman rang her up.
‘Mattie Banner?’
‘Speaking.’
‘My name is Chris Fredericks, of the Women’s Stage Group. We’ve seen your work. Are you interested in coming to read for us? It’s a new play, by a new woman playwright. It’s an all-female production.’ Her low, slightly hoarse voice was attractive.
Mattie thought for a moment. She had never heard of the Women’s Stage Group. She looked across the room and saw the pile of magazines on top of the television set, and three empty bottles of wine beside it.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I think I would be interested.’
Chris Fredericks gave her an address, a place that sounded like a warehouse, south of the river, a date and a time. Then she rang off.
Mattie raised her eyebrows in mock-surprise. ‘I’m supposed to be the famous actress,’ she told the dead line. ‘What happened to please, please come and read for us?’
She found herself looking forward to the reading more keenly than its relative importance might have warranted.
When the day came she found her way to the address in Lambeth. It was, as she had imagined, a warehouse. After hammering at the big metal doors and shouting for several minutes without making herself heard, Mattie was beginning to assume that she had come on the wrong day. Then she heard a rattle on the other side of the doors and one of them slid open to leave a narrow slit. A head popped out of it. It was a girl’s, with a bush of curly dark hair.
‘Oh, hi,’ the girl said, smiling at her. ‘Sorry. We were talking. Didn’t hear you. Come on in.’
Mattie followed her. They passed through the shadowy warehouse space, which as far as she could see was still filled with bits of machinery, and through a door in a partition at the far end. The partition closed off a small high room, furnished with a table and a few packing cases. There was a layer of dust over everything, including a kettle on a tray. Coffee mugs, play-scripts, a relatively undusty bottle of milk and an open packet of chocolate digestive biscuits were scattered over the table. There were perhaps a dozen women perched on the packing cases, all talking. Two or three of them glanced up at Mattie and grinned, one of them stood up and held out her hand. She had a young face, but her black hair was thickly streaked with grey. She was wearing jeans and a man’s shirt.
‘You must be Mattie Banner. I’m Chris Fredericks.’
Mattie was used to recognition and acknowledgement, in professional encounters at least, just as she was used to the studio car and driver. But the members of the Women’s Stage Group hadn’t offered her any acknowledgement beyond ordinary, casual friendliness. Mattie dismissed the twinge of pride and decided that she liked them for it. She shook Chris Fredericks’s hand warmly.
‘We’re a women’s group, as I told you. We’re also a democratic group. All decisions, artistic or administrative, are taken collectively. I have been nominated director because only one person can make a telephone call, for instance. But I have no more authority within the group than anyone else.’ Chris pushed a copy of the script across the table to Mattie. ‘Here you are. Everywoman’s Odyssey. Shall we start reading? Is everyone ready?’
Mattie interrupted. ‘Two questions before we start. Why have you invited me?’
‘Alison read an interview with you. You said in it that you think women are more interesting than men. Also, having you in the cast will make sure that we get proper attention.’
It was the oddest read-through that Mattie had ever attended.
There was no directorial suggestion or control. As a result everyone chipped in with what they felt and how they thought a line should be spoken. If there was a serious disagreement it was put to a vote. It took five and a half hours to complete a read-through of the piece.
Mattie thought the play was pungent and funny, in parts. She also thought it was too long and much too wordy, and she said so. By linking a series of short scenes from myth and history, it aimed to illustrate the difference between men and women.
At last, at long last, they came to the final line.
There was a small silence while the words echoed in the dusty space.
Then, ‘What do you think?’ The question was timid. It took Mattie a moment to realise that after all the democracy, they were asking for her opinion.
‘I think it needs a lot of work. It’s rough, and it needs to be sharpened. Democratically, of course.’
There was another small silence.
‘So? Are you in?’
‘Yes, I’m in,’ Mattie said.
They stood up, and crowded round to shake her hand.
‘Welcome to the Group,’ Chris Fredericks said. ‘What d’you think? Shall we all go to the pub to celebrate?’
In the pub they spread around two tables and talked and joked and wisecracked. In the centre of the big, easy group of women Mattie felt warm and invulnerable. Looking beyond Jocelyn and Chris, at the couples sitting at other tables, at the knots of men lounging at the bar, Mattie experienced a new sensation. It was the feeling of being on the inside, looking out.
On the day before Alexander brought a taller, rosier Lily back to Gordon Mansions, a young man with a big suitcase walked into George Tressider’s shop. He had a lively face, long hair and a denim jacket over a stripy T-shirt. He was so much not a Tressider-looking customer that Julia frowned discouragingly. But he stood squarely in front of her desk and announced, ‘I’ve got a new product here. I want an exclusive outlet to sell it through.’
‘You’re in the right place, if it’s exclusivity you want.’ He was gleaming with enthusiasm, and it was infectious. ‘You’d better let me see this wonderful product.’
Out of the suitcase, with a flourish like a magician’s, he produced fold upon fold of bright pink plastic. While Julia stared he attached a foot pump to a nozzle, and began to inflate the plastic. In front of her eyes, the shapeless plastic took on a shape. It grew, and became an armchair, with arms and a back and even a neat plastic antimacassar.
Julia applauded, and sat down on it. It was squeaky, but perfectly comfortable.
‘Blow-up furniture,’ he said. ‘It’s cheap, and it’s fun.’
‘Do you know, I think you’re right. It is fun.’
It was as bright as a child’s balloon, and as rude as a raspberry blown in the faces of all the serious gilt and old oak and mahogany pieces that lined the walls of George Tressider’s shop.
The door to the inner sanctum opened and George himself came out. His gaze flicked over the salesman and his T-shirt, the suitcase and the shiny pink chair underneath Julia.
‘Look, George,’ she exclaimed, too enthusiastically. ‘Blow-up furniture.’
Silently, George surveyed the two of them.
‘What do you think of it?’ the blow-up man asked.
‘I think it’s the tackiest thing I’ve ever seen,’ George answered. He walked past them, past the glowering gilt and mahogany, and out into the street, as though out in the King’s Road he could breathe in air that was at least uncontaminated by pink inflatable armchairs.
Inside the shop, Julia and the salesman looked ruefully at each other, and then they started to laugh.
‘Well, it was a bit of a long shot,’ Julia snorted, ‘coming in here with it.’
‘I thought you were supposed to be decorators to the new rich. Pop stars and photographers and hairdressers. I read about you in Queen.’
‘That’s Felix,’ Julia said. She held out her hand and the salesman shook it. ‘I’m Julia Smith.’
‘Thomas Tree. Do you really like the armchair?’
‘Yes, I do.’ Julia didn’t stop to think. ‘If you can produce them, I’ll find a sales outlet for you.’
And that, although she didn’t recognise it, was the start of her brainwave.
It was also the tiny, chance-sown seed from which Garlic & Sapphires grew.
Eighteen
It started in a small way. Through her contacts, Julia found one or
two retail outlets that were willing to take a chance with Thomas Tree’s blow-up chairs. Thomas was surprised, although Julia insisted she wasn’t in the least surprised herself, when the first few samples sold at once. The shops clamoured for more, and Thomas went back to his workshop to produce them.
‘Quickly,’ Julia ordered him. ‘It’s no use turning up with them in six months’ time when everyone’s forgotten.’ She looked speculatively at Thomas and at the patches on the knees of his jeans. ‘Do you mind me telling you what to do? There’s no reason why you should take any notice, of course.’
‘I’m grateful,’ Thomas said. ‘Looks like we make quite a good team.’
‘Have you got the money for materials?’
‘I’ll find it.’
Julia had none to offer him. At his insistence, she had taken a tiny commission on the sales. The shops had sold the chairs at a huge mark-up; she knew that Thomas must have made hardly anything out of them.
He came back three weeks later with three dozen chairs in pink, green, orange and scarlet. The colours glowed when he unpacked them in Julia’s living room and Lily bounced gleefully on the orange chair that he blew up for her. Thomas had big dark rings under his eyes, and he looked even thinner than he had done when he first turned up in George’s shop.
‘I’ve been working all hours. It’s gluing the seams that’s the problem,ʼ he said. ‘The cutting, all the rest, that’s easy. But heat-sealing the seams by hand takes for ever. I need machinery if I’m going to produce in quantities.’
‘See how these sell first,’ Julia advised.
‘And I’ve got this,’ Thomas announced. From the big suitcase he produced a multi-coloured coil of plastic. Attached to the foot pump, it blossomed into a nine-foot plastic palm tree, complete with coconuts and a parrot. Lily’s face turned into three ‘O’s of astonishment. ‘Only a prototype,’ he said proudly. ‘But with half a dozen of these you could transform your front room into a desert island.’
Julia stared at it, for one second feeling like George Tressider as she imagined a roomful of waving plastic fronds. Then she started laughing again. ‘Why not? Have you got any more ideas?’
‘Hundreds. Just no money to put them into practice.’
‘Sell these chairs, then raise a bank loan. I’ll see if I can persuade Felix to guarantee it.’
‘I hope it’ll be worth while for both of you,’ Thomas said.
Julia went out with him to the foot of the basement stairs. ‘I’ll try to get you a better deal from the retailers,’ she promised. ‘But you mustn’t pay me any more commission. The chairs sell themselves.’
Thomas held out his hand, and after a moment she shook it. She noticed that he was looking at her, and that the look was admiring. She stepped backwards, away from it, with the memory of her month of freedom still sharp.
‘Bye,’ Thomas said. ‘I’ll be back soon.’
The chairs sold. Julia made the retailers pay more for them than for the first batch, and passed the difference straight to Thomas Tree. That made the final price higher, but they still sold almost as soon as they reached the shops.
There’s a market, Julia thought. The hairs prickled down the nape of her neck as she contemplated the potential size of it, and the corresponding size of her idea. The young people who swarmed down the King’s Road every Saturday had money to spend. Julia reckoned if they had so much to spend on their clothes, they might spare some for their rooms. If, that is, they were offered merchandise that was cheap, fun, and new. It was the newness that was the most important.
Through that spring and summer, she looked carefully for goods that fulfilled her criteria as brilliantly as Thomas’s did. And as soon as she began to look, she saw possibilities everywhere. In Peter Jones, she almost fell over a range of self-assembly tables and tub chairs. They were shoved away behind the garden furniture, and the cardboard was too thin and the colours were nasty, but the idea was good. A design magazine that she picked up from Felix’s desk featured a space-age chair, the square white plastic shape upholstered in scarlet vinyl, and Julia thought, That’s it, too. Only it costs too much. Could it be done more cheaply? In a lighting shop she saw Japanese paper lanterns to use as lampshades, big white globes that gave a soft, simple light. On a handicraft stall at a market she saw hand-coloured candles in the shape of apples and ice-creams and Coca-Cola bottles, and at the same market a month later she met a girl selling lurid satin cushions in the shape of lips and ears and fists.
She liked whatever made her stop short to look harder. And she particularly liked the witty, irreverent or punchy things that would make George raise his eyebrows and delicately shudder.
Julia knew that anything she had already seen somewhere else wasn’t nearly new enough. It was no good copying: originality was the key. She would have to sniff out her merchandise at its source, but she was sure that if she had the time to devote to it, and the backing, she could do it. And the trick would be to display it all, a stun-the-eye collection, under one roof. A shop. A shop that would be a meeting place and a talking point, and that would do for rooms just what Mary Quant’s Bazaar had done for clothes. Blow-up, she dreamed. Or Bang. Or just Designs.
Thomas Tree insisted on taking her out to dinner to celebrate an order. The bank had agreed to a substantial overdraft, a guarantee had proved unnecessary.
‘If I opened a shop,’ Julia said, ‘how many things could I find to sell that are as mad as your chairs?’
Thomas glanced at her. She was stirring her coffee one way, then the other. Her eyes seemed very bright. ‘Dozens,’ he answered. ‘People I was at college with are inventing things, making all kinds of weird stuff. It’s finding the right outlet that’s difficult. People are conservative. Like my mum. She likes shiny brown wood and flowered covers.’
Julia grinned. ‘So does George Tressider, except his are glazed chintz and inlaid walnut.’ She looked steadily at him and then said, ‘Thomas, if I open a shop, can I have the exclusive right to sell your furniture?’
‘Yes. All of it.’
‘Will you be my partner, then?’
‘Yes.’
They shook hands again. This time Julia didn’t draw away.
Her first plan was to persuade George and Felix, somehow, to set her up under the Tressider umbrella. If they would help her to find and stock her shop, just by lending her the money, then they could share the profits with herself and Thomas. From the very beginning Julia had no doubts that the profits would roll in. And she knew perfectly well that Tressider Designs could afford the investment. They had just enjoyed the most successful year in the company’s history.
Wisely, Julia decided to put the idea to Felix first. ‘Come and have lunch with me,’ she invited. ‘I want to talk.’
They strolled away from the offices together, with the sun warming their faces. Julia looked around her, at the crowds and the shop windows. When she breathed in she thought that she could taste and smell newness and excitement and energy. It was the first summer of the Beatles; girls were flooding out of shops and offices to buy records and posters and clothes. Everyone they passed seemed to be swinging a carrier bag with their latest purchase.
‘You look happy,’ Felix said.
‘I’m excited,’ Julia answered. ‘I’ve got an idea.’
She hardly touched her food and wine. She talked and talked, drawing shapes in the air with her hands, trying to ignite Felix’s enthusiasm with the heat of her own. As he sat and watched her Felix thought what a pleasure it was to see the old, vivid Julia again. He remembered how the same Julia had affected him in the confusing days when she had first come to the square with Mattie, and with the taste of wine on his tongue and his own food going cold in front of him, he remembered the night of Jessie’s funeral. He remembered it with surprising clarity, the lightness and fragility of Julia in his arms. He had thought that sadness and responsibility had aged her, but now the years seemed to have dropped away and she might have been fifteen again.
/> She leaned forward, touching his hands. Without thinking, he took hold of hers and held them tight. Love was a difficult commodity, but he knew that he loved Julia.
‘Don’t you think it’s a good idea?’
Her vehemence startled him. ‘What?’
‘What I’ve been telling you about for the last hour, that’s all.’
Felix thought carefully. He would have to disappoint her, but he would do it as gently as he could.
‘It’s a brilliant idea.’
He was sure that it was. There was no shop just like the one Julia described, and he knew from his own clients that anything irreverent and original would sell. Julia had style herself – he had admired it from the moment he first glimpsed her in the Rocket and if she could recognise it she could almost certainly sell it. Her shop would probably work.
‘But I don’t think George is the right person to back you.’ The truth was that George didn’t trust Julia. Felix knew that his dislike was rooted in jealousy. George was sensitive enough and clever enough to suspect the closeness of the bond between his lover and his shop girl. Julia was only tolerated at Tressider Designs because Felix wanted her to have a job that would support her and Lily, and because George couldn’t refuse anything that Felix wanted. Within reason, Felix mentally corrected himself. Setting Julia up with Tressider money in a shop selling pop furniture and plastic artefacts wouldn’t count as within reason.
He did his best to explain to Julia without any suggestion of disloyalty to George. Felix loved George too, and would have defended him against anyone, but he was beginning to feel the weight of George’s fierce possessiveness. As he talked, his eyes wandered beyond Julia to the restaurant windows. Outside, he could see people passing by. The way a head turned or a hand lifted seemed charged with eroticism. Like Julia, he felt the season’s vibration of energy carried on the dusty city air.
‘It would make good commercial sense for George,’ Julia pleaded. ‘His name needn’t be associated with it, for God’s sake.’
