London Belles

by Annie Groves

  ‘We’ll go and have a look for the fabric tomorrow.’

  ‘Could we go to Portobello Market?’ Tilly begged her excitedly. ‘We could make a real day of it. That’s where Dulcie got the fabric for her skirt. She says you can get ever such a good bargain there if you know who to ask. We could ask her where she got hers.’

  Olive forced herself to smile, pleased that, since Dulcie worked on Saturdays, Tilly would be unable to suggest that they asked her to go with them. ‘Well, I was thinking of somewhere closer. Portobello Market is a bit of a trek, I’d thought of somewhere like Leather Lane.’

  Tilly’s disappointment was immediate and obvious as she pleaded, ‘Oh, please, Mum. I really would like to go to Portobello. We could set off early.’

  Tilly’s plea tugged on Olive’s heart, and with a small sigh she amended, ‘Well, maybe, let me think about it and then we’ll see. Meanwhile,’ Olive stood up, ‘I’ll have a word with Agnes. I want to make it plain to her that it’s her own money that will be paying for her new clothes.’

  When Tilly looked questioningly at her, Olive explained, ‘All Agnes has known all her life is charity, Tilly, and the need to be grateful to others for that charity. That was all very well when she was in the orphanage, but that sort of attitude in the wider world could lead to other people not treating her as respectfully as they should. It’s only right and fair that Agnes should be able to feel proud of buying her own clothes. Now, we’d better get back downstairs before those dumplings get too well done.’

  Chapter Eight

  Nearly six o’clock. At six Selfridges would be closing to customers, although it would be closer to half-past before she eventually got away, Dulcie knew. She was hungry and looking forward to her evening meal. One thing Dulcie could say for her landlady was that she was a good cook, who didn’t cut corners on their meals or the portions she served.

  ‘Lydia Whittingham was in here earlier with that chap of hers,’ Lizzie told Dulcie, coming over to her whilst Dulcie was tidying up her counter. ‘Arlene Watts from Elizabeth Arden makeup said that Lydia told her that they’re getting engaged on her birthday.’

  Dulcie gave a dismissive shrug. ‘So what?’

  ‘So what? Have you forgotten that you said that you were going to get her beau to go dancing with you?’

  ‘Of course not,’ Dulcie answered scornfully, ‘not when I put a bet on it – and he will go dancing with me.’

  ‘You mean that you’d go out with an engaged man?’

  ‘I want to go dancing with him, not get married to him,’ Dulcie replied. It was the truth. And a large part of the reason she wanted to go dancing with David James-Thompson was because she wanted to rub Lydia Whittingham’s nose in it a bit.

  She’d disliked the other girl, with her snooty airs, from the minute she’d set eyes on her and it would be amusing to know that she’d persuaded her fiancé to go out with her behind Miss Snooty’s back.

  ‘You mean you aren’t sweet on him? Why do you want to go out with him then?’

  ‘’Cos he looks like going dancing with him would be fun.’

  That was the truth too. ‘If you aren’t careful you’ll get yourself a bad reputation and then no decent lad will want to marry you,’ Lizzie told her warningly.

  Dulcie laughed. ‘There’ll always be lads who want to marry me, but they’ll have to prove to me that they’re worth marrying before they get to put a ring on my finger. Besides, I don’t want to get married for years yet.’

  Lizzie was aghast. ‘Every girl wants to get married,’ she protested.

  ‘I’ve seen what happens to a girl when she gets married,’ Dulcie defended her intention. ‘She ends up running round after her husband, being told what to do, and then being lumbered with squalling kids. That’s not for me. When I do decide to get married it will be to someone who puts me first, not himself.’

  Twenty minutes later, as she sauntered out of the store into the sharpness of the early evening, the camel coat she was wearing over her tweed skirt and silk blouse showing off her blonde hair, she was so busy mentally planning what she was going to wear for tomorrow night’s dance, that she didn’t see David James-Thompson until he stepped in front of her.

  ‘You’re taking a risk, aren’t you?’ she taunted him. ‘Waiting for me when you’ll soon be an engaged man.’

  Unabashed, he laughed and bent his head to tell her quietly, ‘I like taking risks and something tells me that you like taking them as well.’

  He was carrying a large Selfridges bag, and unwilling to let him see how impressed she was by both his nonchalance and his response, Dulcie pointed to it and demanded, ‘What’s in there, her ladyship’s lizardskin handbag?’

  Again he laughed, shaking his head as he told her, ‘No. This is for you by way of apology for the fact that I’m afraid I won’t be able to accept your invitation – at least not this Saturday.’

  ‘It wasn’t an invitation. I was just saying that I go dancing of a Saturday,’ Dulcie insisted. ‘And what do you mean, it’s for me. What is it?’

  ‘Have a look,’ David smiled, handing her the large bag.

  For all her confidence with young men, Dulcie was not used to receiving gifts from anyone outside her family. And even when presents were given and exchanged they were small modest things, that most definitely did not come in large Selfridges bags. When a man who wasn’t part of your family, or who you weren’t courting, gave you a present, though, Dulcie knew exactly what that meant. For all her enjoyment of riling other young women by flirting with their partners, Dulcie had neither the desire to nor the intention of allowing any man to take things further than that.

  Looking David James-Thompson squarely in the eye she told him bluntly, ‘If you’re thinking that by giving me some kind of present I’m going to let you take liberties with me, then you’re going to be disappointed, because I won’t.’

  ‘That isn’t why I’m giving you this.’

  Dulcie looked searchingly at him, and then, sensing that he was telling her the truth and after a brisk accepting nod of her head, she opened the carrier bag and looked cautiously inside. When she saw what it contained, though, her head came up and she looked speechlessly at David before looking back into the carrier again at the cream and tan leather vanity case she had coveted so much, and which now so unexpectedly was hers.

  ‘I told them not to gift wrap it because I wanted to see your face when you saw it.’

  ‘I wasn’t going to pinch it. I just wanted to see what it looked like. Gracie Fields has got one. I saw a photo of her in Picture Post carrying it,’ Dulcie defended her actions earlier.

  She meant it, David recognised, contrasting her blunt outspokenness with the coy but unmistakable promise Lydia had made him earlier about showing him later, when they were alone, how pleased she would be if he bought her the handbag she wanted. A coyness that had repulsed him every bit as much as Dulcie’s bravado delighted him. Right now she was like a child at Christmas desperately trying not to look as excited as she felt, David thought, laughing as she immediately folded up the paper bag and then opened the vanity case to put the discarded bag and her own small handbag inside it, before triumphantly locking it and taking a couple of steps holding onto it.

  Without having to discuss it they’d both automatically moved into the shadows away from the store as they spoke and out of view from anyone else leaving.

  David had only bought the vanity case for Dulcie on impulse after Lydia had left him to go home with her father, but now he recognised that he was glad that he had.

  ‘I suppose you’re taking Miss Iron Knickers Lydia somewhere posh tonight, are you?’ Dulcie asked him.

  He shook his head. ‘No. I’m going back to my rooms to study some briefs. It’s a legal term meaning papers,’ he explained when he saw her looking puzzled.

  ‘Does that mean that you’re a judge, like your dad?’ Dulcie asked him, remembering that Lizzie had said that his father was a judge.

  David grinned.
‘No. I’m actually a barrister, a very newly qualified and junior barrister,’ he added wryly. He’d taken off his hat when he’d first greeted her, but now he put it on again.

  ‘A barrister? What’s that?’

  Both her naïvety and her lack of self-consciousness about questioning him appealed to David. They spoke of a freedom from the constraints of ‘correct behaviour’ and a zest for life. Things sorely lacking in both his mother and Lydia.

  ‘Basically a barrister is someone who is instructed by a solicitor on behalf of that solicitor’s client to present and plead or defend a case that is put before a judge and jury. In my case it means grubbing around in a second-rate set of chambers, hoping that the clerk will throw me a few scraps in the form of a brief.’

  ‘You don’t like being a barrister then.’

  She was sharp, David thought ruefully, he had to give her that.

  ‘It isn’t a matter of what I do or don’t like.’

  ‘Well, it should be,’ Dulcie told him stoutly. ‘Are you really going to get engaged to Miss Iron Knickers?’

  ‘It’s what my parents and hers expect.’

  Dulcie gave him a look. ‘So you’re almost an engaged man but you’ve given me this.’

  ‘To make up for the unpleasantness this afternoon.’ He paused and then told her, ‘I’m sorry – about not being able to go dancing with you.’

  ‘Don’t be. I’ve got lads queuing up to dance with me,’ Dulcie told him truthfully, thinking gleefully to herself that being given the vanity case was far better than winning her bet with Lizzie. She just couldn’t wait to see the other girl’s expression when she told her about the case.

  ‘Where are you going now then?’ she asked him.

  ‘Like I told you, I’ve got to read some briefs. The senior partner wants my notes on them in chambers first thing on Monday morning.’

  ‘Chambers?’

  ‘That’s what they call the . . . the offices that barristers work from. Mine are at Gray’s Inn. ‘Look, I’m sorry but I’ve got to go.’

  Before anyone saw them he meant, Dulcie recognised as she saw the quick look he gave over his shoulder. Well, she certainly wasn’t going to ask him to stay.

  ‘Suit yourself,’ she responded. Then giving him a dismissive shrug, Dulcie turned on her heel and walked away from him without a backward look.

  Who’d have thought that he’d buy her the vanity case, she thought gleefully. She certainly hadn’t. Oh, she’d known from the look he’d given her this afternoon that he had a bit of an eye for her, but then she’d known that the first time she’d seen him. But buying her the vanity case . . . That would be one in the eye for Miss Stuck-Up Lydia Whittingham.

  She wasn’t going to take her vanity case out with her when she went dancing tomorrow night, though, Dulcie decided, immediately protective of her new acquisition. All sorts went to the Hammersmith Palais and she didn’t want some other girl nicking it when she wasn’t looking. She would take it with her to church on Sunday, though. She couldn’t wait to see Edith’s face when she saw it, Dulcie thought happily, unconcerned both about the fact that a vanity case was hardly the kind of thing one would take to church and the fact that she wasn’t going to win her bet about dancing with David James-Thompson.

  For much longer after he had left her than was wise or sensible David was still thinking about Dulcie and the way that talking to her had made him realise how little he wanted the future his parents had planned for him, and how constraining it felt, like wearing someone else’s clothes. But he had no choice; he had to wear them, just as he had to marry Lydia, or risk being labelled a complete cad – something his determined and icily proud mother would never tolerate or accept. Marriage was marriage, and if his was going to be a duty rather than a pleasure, well then, he’d just have to find his pleasure elsewhere. His parents moved in the same social circles as the Whittinghams. They were neighbours, living on the outskirts of the same small market town. He had known Lydia for ever, and his mother had made it plain that she wanted Lydia as her daughter-in-law. Or rather, that she wanted the money Lydia’s mother would inherit to come into their own family. His parents were comfortably off but not as well off as his mother would have liked. Her own grandmother had had country connections to the aristocracy, and she was an out-and-out snob, who never lost an opportunity to make it plain that she felt she had married down in marrying David’s father.

  Until now David hadn’t really given much thought about whether or not he actually wanted to marry Lydia. Marriage was marriage, and marrying the right sort of girl was something a chap just did. When it came to having fun, that fun was something one found discreetly outside one’s marriage and away from one’s home. David was someone who liked living on the surface of life, skimming it like a pebble skimming across a flat calm pool. The emotional turmoil and danger of the depths that lay below that surface held no interest or appeal for him. He was obliging and easy-going, preferring to pay lip service to what he was supposed to do, rather than challenge the status quo. He preferred amusing flirtations to passionate affairs, risqué conversation to risqué relationships, going with the flow rather than swimming against it. Dulcie tempted him but she was a temptation he could easily resist because she was the sort who would cause him trouble. Meeting her this evening had merely been an impulse decision, his gift to her something that amused him, just as she did. As they went their separate ways David reflected cheerfully, that he would probably not even be able to recall her name in a month’s time.

  It was gone midnight according to the illuminated face of Tilly’s alarm clock, and she and Agnes should have been asleep, but instead they were lying in their separate beds in the darkness facing one another as they whispered excitedly about their promised shopping trip. Olive, having given in to maternal love, had agreed that they could make the longer journey to the Portobello Road Market.

  The Portobello Market. Tilly hugged her excitement and delight to herself, enjoying the grown-up feeling it gave her that her mother had accepted her argument that travelling to it could be cost effective in the end, given that they were bound to have a wider choice of fabrics, and possibly at better prices.

  Typically, Nancy next door had nearly brought an end to Tilly’s hopes, when the proposed shopping trip had been mentioned to her and she had sniffed in that disparaging way she had and said that you wouldn’t get her travelling all that way just to get a length of fabric, adding for good measure that she’d heard that half the stalls in Portobello Road sold things that had been acquired illegally. Tilly had held her breath whilst Nancy had been sounding off over the garden fence to her mother but, to her delight, Olive had merely nodded her head and then told her and Agnes, once Nancy had disappeared, that they might as well take a look along the Portobello Market, even if in the end they ended up buying something from Leather Lane.

  Tilly knew exactly what kind of new dress she wanted: one that was properly grown up. The kind of dress that someone like Dulcie’s brother, Rick, would see a girl wearing and immediately want to ask her out. Quite what shape and colour that dress would be Tilly hadn’t made up her mind yet, she just knew that it had to be a magical, special kind of dress that would transform her from a girl into a young woman.

  Not that she’d said anything about that to her mother. Instinctively Tilly knew that Olive might not agree with Tilly’s own plans for her new dress, and that a certain amount of coaxing and pleading might be required in order for her to get what she wanted. One thing Tilly did know, though, and that was that it would be far more exciting and much more fun looking for fabric for her dress at the Portobello Market than it would be in dull familiar Leather Lane. Thanks to Dulcie the Portobello Market had taken on an allure of glamour and excitement, the sort of place, in Tilly’s vivid imagination at least, where all sorts of enticingly new things might happen. Like finding the perfect fabric for THE dress. The one that she would come downstairs in and that Rick, who would just happen to be visiting number 13 to see
his sister, would see her in. He would look up at her with the kind of bedazzled expression she had seen on the faces of heroes at the cinema. She would smile graciously at him whilst she finished descending the stairs, and then . . . Tilly’s heart gave a thump of mingled excitement and apprehension at the romantic possibilities of such a scenario (her mother would, of course, be at a WVS meeting and thus not there to witness the scene and possibly banish Tilly back to her room), which was so intense that she had to cover her heart with her hand to calm it down.

  Agnes’s ecstatic whispered, ‘Oh, Tilly, I’m so happy I could burst,’ echoed Tilly’s own feelings so exactly that she reached across the narrow space between their beds to find Agnes’s hand and squeeze it.

  ‘Me too.’

  Agnes expelled a deep sigh of delight. ‘Your mum is that kind, Tilly. I was that worried and upset when Matron first told me that I’d got to leave the orphanage, but now, well, there’s no place I’d rather live than here at number thirteen.’

  She could hardly believe it. She was going to have something new to wear. Something of her very own that no one else had ever worn. The very thought made Agnes tremble with humble delight. She’d never had anything that was her very own, excepting her underwear. She dare not even imagine how she might look. Not as nice as Tilly, who was so much prettier – that wouldn’t be possible – but if she could just look, well, not like an orphan, but like an ordinary girl who came from a proper home. Not that she wasn’t grateful to the orphanage, of course. She was. Matron had been ever so good to her, she knew that, but to have her own outfit . . . She scarcely dared to believe that it was really going to happen.

  Chapter Nine