The Four of Us

by Margaret Pemberton

  When a car approaching from behind them suddenly pinned them in its headlights and screeched to a halt beside them, she was the last of the four of them to recognize it.

  ‘Hell!’ Kiki had said, freezing into immobility. Geraldine had said merely, ‘That’s torn it.’ It was Primmie’s reaction that had really alerted her to the fact that an evening she had thought couldn’t possibly get more dreadful was just about to do so. Primmie had given a cry of such distress that for a moment she’d had thought the car was full of youths who had been in the Two Zeds and they were all about to be raped.

  The figure that had leaped out of the car, rounding its bonnet with such fury she’d thought he’d been going to hit one of them, hadn’t been a youth. It had been Kiki’s father.

  Geraldine, who never panicked, merely said, ‘I thought he was away this weekend at a conference,’ as Simon Lane bore down on Kiki, shouting, ‘What the devil do you think you’re playing at?’

  As she looked at her friends’ faces, captured in the glaring headlights, Artemis was well able to understand his anger. Though stone cold sober, Kiki looked as drunk as her mother often was. Her beret had slipped halfway off her head, her Cleopatra-black eye make-up looked garishly clownish and the cotton wool in her bra had rearranged itself into telltale bumps and lumps.

  Geraldine didn’t look a mess. Geraldine never looked a mess. She looked years older than fifteen, though. And because Primmie was wearing a school skirt and because her crocheted top was as prim as her name, her heavy make-up looked even more outlandish and tarty than Kiki’s did. As for herself … She shuddered to think what she’d looked like, with her hair half up and half down and one false eyelash on and the other dangling half off.

  ‘In the car!’ Simon Lane had snapped, half throwing Kiki into the front passenger seat. ‘You look like trollops, but I suppose you know that, don’t you?’ Seconds later, taut with fury, he had slammed the driver’s door shut behind him and savagely turned the key in the ignition. ‘I suppose that was the effect you were striving for, was it, Primmie?’ he’d asked, nastily singling her out as she sobbed as if her heart would break. ‘So where have you all been and who have you been with? And I don’t want any lies – not from any of you.’

  That a man usually so mild mannered could be so very angry was, to Artemis, such a frightening shock, she was incapable of saying anything.

  ‘We’ve been to a coffee bar in Bromley,’ Geraldine had said, leaving out the fact that it was a biker’s coffee bar. Primmie, still crying, had confirmed it and Kiki had simply remained mutinously silent. Once in the house he’d refused to let any of them change back into their school uniform and had phoned her parents and Geraldine’s, asking that they come and collect them. Primmie’s parents weren’t on the telephone and only Primmie had slept at Kiki’s house that night as arranged.

  There’d been ructions, of course, but though Geraldine’s parents’ anger had been directed at Geraldine, her parents’anger had been directed at Simon Lane – or at least her father’s had.

  ‘You weren’t at fault, Princess,’ he’d said. ‘It was that puffed-up doctor that was at fault. You were to stay the night at his house, under his care. He should have kept a better eye on that daughter of his. If it wasn’t that you’re best friends with her I’d have punched his lights out!’

  He would have done, as well. Artemis had long ago become aware that people around her father tried very hard not to upset him.

  ‘It’s a good thing she couldn’t come to the theatre this afternoon,’ he said now, breaking in on her thoughts as they flashed past Lewisham clock tower.

  Startled that their thoughts had been running on the same lines, Artemis said, ‘Who? Kiki?’

  He nodded, taking a hand off the wheel to shoot his cuff and look at his Rolex. ‘Yep. Didn’t this afternoon clash with her singing class?’

  Artemis nodded, knowing that even if Kiki hadn’t had a singing class to go to, she still wouldn’t have accepted the invitation to go to the theatre with her and Primmie. Her reaction, when she had told her they were going to see the Black and White Minstrels – had been to say devoutly, ‘Dear God,’ and rudely raise her eyes to heaven.

  Geraldine hadn’t been able to go with them either, because she was down in Sussex, staying the weekend with her cousin Francis.

  They were in New Cross now and passing a huge building site fronted by a giant hoarding, which declared that the site was under construction, by J. T. Lowther. Her father slapped the wheel with satisfaction at the sight of it and Artemis shuddered, hating to see her surname so publicly connected with something so manual and dirty.

  Francis’s family’s money came from land. ‘Uncle Piers owns half of Sussex,’ Geraldine had once said, and she’d found out later, after she’d met Francis, that it was true and that he really did. Meeting Francis had been a dizzyingly important event. He was eighteen and not only was he heart-stoppingly good-looking, but he also had class – real class – and would quite obviously be very, very rich one day.

  More than anything else in the world, Artemis wanted Francis as her boyfriend. Geraldine, though, was so possessive of his time she made such a scenario near impossible. ‘Why don’t you tell Geraldine that you want Francis to ask you out?’ Primmie had said to her practically. ‘Then maybe she could find out how he feels about you?’ It was a thought that had filled her with horror. She wanted Francis to ask her out without any interference from Geraldine – which he might well do if only she could spend time with him without Geraldine being always only inches away.

  As her father turned off the main road and into the warren of small streets that ran down to the docks and the river, her stomach muscles tightened. It was snobbish, she knew, but she hated visiting Primmie’s home. Mr and Mrs Surtees were always nice to her, but they were also dreadfully common and when her father had once said that Mrs Surtees reminded him of his mother, the grandma who had died before she, Artemis, had been born, the horror of it had made her feel physically ill. If Primmie was aware of how she felt about visiting Rotherhithe, she never let on, but then Primmie never did say anything that made her feel uncomfortable – which couldn’t be said for Kiki or even, sometimes, for Geraldine.

  Ever since her date with Ty the previous Saturday, Kiki had declared that he was now her boyfriend and she’d also told everyone at school that he wasn’t just a biker, but that he was a Hell’s Angel. To Artemis’s stunned amazement, instead of this exaggeration making Kiki a pariah it had, instead, sent her reputation soaring.

  As the Rolls glided to a halt, she dug her nails deep into her palms. She wasn’t going to settle for a working-class boyfriend covered in tattoos. When she got herself a boyfriend it was going to be someone so genuinely upper class no one would be able to sneer at him – or her. It was going to be someone who had a home that had been in their family for centuries; someone who had been educated at Eton or Rugby; someone who was wealthy. Someone like Francis.

  Burning with the determination to be his girlfriend she stepped out of the car in order to knock on the Surtees’door. She needn’t have bothered. Having seen the Rolls enter the street Primmie’s mother, in pinny and slippers, was already rushing down the short front path to greet them, calling out in a voice that that could have been heard in Purley, ‘Nice to see yer, Artemis darlin’. An’you too, Mr Lowther. The Rolls is lookin’nice today, ain’t it? Are yer comin’ in for a cuppa?’

  Chapter Seven

  March 1968

  Geraldine leaned back against the Drum’s shabby red plush seating. On one side of her Primmie was giggling with laughter at a joke someone had just told and on the other side of her Primmie’s mum was shouting across to the landlord that they needed another round of drinks, thank you very much.

  Her parents didn’t know, of course, that when she stayed over on a Saturday night with Primmie, she and Primmie always went to the Drum with Primmie’s mum and dad. Their still being a year under age wasn’t something the Drum’s landlord gave
much heed to, unlike the landlord of the Three Foxes at Chislehurst.

  He would single Primmie out, saying darkly, ‘She’s underage, and if she’s underage and you’re her friends, you three are probably underage as well.’

  When there was music playing and lots of talent from St Dunstan’s and Dulwich College sixth forms crowding the bar, his turning them out of the pub was infuriating. It was Kiki, as always, who found a way round it. ‘She’s my little sister,’ she would say, ‘and there’s no one in at home so I can’t leave her there, can I? All she wants is a glass of orange and a packet of crisps.’

  Because Kiki sang there on the first Friday of every month with the group Ty now managed, the landlord had grudgingly said that, as long as no one slipped Primmie any alcohol, she could stay. Primmie, publicly branded as being little more than a child, fumed over the indignity but never suggested not going with them. Apart from when Kiki was with Ty, or she, Geraldine, was down at her aunt and uncle’s in Sussex or staying over at Primmie’s, the four of them went everywhere together. Always.

  ‘’Ere you are, gels,’ the barman said, plonking down the tray of drinks Primmie’s mother had asked for down on the table they were all squeezed round and beginning to unload the brimming glasses. ‘The guv’nor wants to know when that red-’aired friend of yours is coming down again, Primmie. She ain’t’alf got a singing voice on’er, ain’t she?’

  ‘She sings with a professional group,’ Primmie said, loading empty glasses on to the tray in order to make way for the full ones. ‘If they perform, they expect to be paid.’

  ‘Well, they wouldn’t get paid’ere. They’d be lucky to get a free drink’ere, but we could’ave a whip round for’er and’er mates. Ask ’er to fink abaht it, Primmie. She’s that good she should be on one of them pop programmes.’

  When he’d gone, Geraldine said, ‘Are you still OK for next Sunday, Prim?’

  ‘The rally?’

  ‘The rally. It’s going to be big. Francis and his friends are coming up from Sussex for it. There are going to be anti-war demonstrators from all over the country there. It means there could be some scuffles with the police, so if you’re not sure about it …?’

  ‘Of course I’m sure about it!’ Primmie’s indignation was instant. ‘Just because I don’t carry an anti-war placard and organize parties in aid of the Viet Cong doesn’t mean I don’t feel just as passionately as you and Artemis about what’s going on in Vietnam! I’ll be there next Sunday, Geraldine. Even if you and Kiki and Artemis weren’t going, I’d still be there!’

  Geraldine grinned. It always amused her when Primmie got het up over anything, because generally she was so unflappable.

  Sometimes, over the last few months, the four of them hadn’t always seen eye to eye politically. Primmie, for instance, had shocked all three of them by not backing the campaign for legalized abortion and Artemis had nearly forfeited all their friendships by her inability to get passionate about civil rights in America. Where American involvement in Vietnam was concerned, though, they were all in wholehearted agreement. The Americans needed to get out of the country – and that’s what next Sunday’s demonstration was all about. There was to be a rally in Trafalgar Square and from there, after speeches by leading peace campaigners, they were going to march to Grosvenor Square in order to protest outside the American Embassy.

  ‘Don’t wear boots with heels next Sunday,’ she said as everyone round the table, apart from themselves, erupted into yet another gale of uproarious laughter. ‘If there’s a scuffle with the police, we’ll need to be able to run.’

  ‘So I’ve got a problem about Sunday.’

  They were sitting on the steps outside the second-floor room used for art classes. The class had just ended and, as there was a ten-minute break before their next class started, everyone else in their form had clattered off to the school shop for a can of Coke or a bar of chocolate.

  Geraldine quirked a sleekly shaped eyebrow. It was Kiki, not Artemis speaking, and Kiki never had any problems, now, about doing exactly as she wanted at weekends. For the first time she registered that Kiki not only looked more fed-up than she’d ever seen her, but that she also looked ill.

  ‘Why?’ she asked as Artemis fussed with her skirt, unhappy at sitting on a dirty step.

  ‘Because I’ve got more on my mind than an anti-war rally.’

  Artemis stopped fussing with her skirt. ‘Then you’re being very shallow,’ she said reprovingly. ‘Nothing is more important than standing up for what you believe in – I thought we were all agreed on that. If Daddy knew I was going up to the rally on Sunday he’d be furious, but I’m still going.’

  ‘Yeah, right on, Artemis. But you’re not pregnant, are you? I am.’

  The stunned silence went on for so long that Geraldine thought it was never going to end. Artemis’s cornflower-blue eyes widened to the size of saucers. Primmie’s face drained to the colour of parchment. Even she, who’d long known that Kiki was going all the way with Ty, was rocked by disbelief.

  ‘But you’re only seventeen!’ It was Primmie, darling Primmie who spoke first.

  ‘I know how old I am, Prim!’ Kiki looked as if she was going to explode at any minute with the force of the feelings she was trying to control. ‘The question is, what am I going to do?’

  Somewhere in the distance a bell rang, signalling the end of break. None of them took any notice of it.

  Making a vain effort to behave as if she’d known all along that Kiki had far outstripped the rest of them in sexual experience, Artemis said, ‘Have you told Ty?’ And then, as Kiki didn’t answer, ‘I mean, it is Ty’s baby, isn’t it?’

  ‘Of course it bloody is! Who else’s would it be, Artemis? Mr Hurst’s?’

  Mr Hurst was their sixty-year-old science master.

  ‘Will Ty marry you, do you think?’ There was doubt at the prospect in Primmie’s voice.

  Kiki gave a howl of anguish, tears spilling down her face, though whether they were tears of rage or distress was hard to tell. ‘He might and he might not and it doesn’t bloody matter which! I don’t want to marry him. I’m not going to have this baby, Prim! It might have passed you by, but I’m going to be a pop star! And teenage unmarried mothers aren’t on Ready, Steady, Go – or hadn’t you noticed?’

  Geraldine fought down her own feeling of panic, aware that if someone didn’t somehow reassure her, Kiki was going to freak out completely. ‘It could be worse,’ she said. ‘At least abortion is legal now.’

  ‘Only just and only if my family doctor refers me for one,’ Kiki shot back bitterly. ‘And who is my family doctor? He’s a doctor who works in Simon’s practice. Do you really think he would refer me for an abortion without telling my dad? I don’t think so, Geraldine, do you?’

  Well aware that her answer was written on her face, Geraldine kept silent, marshalling her thoughts, trying to work out what the best thing was to do.

  Primmie, too, was silent, biting her lip.

  Artemis sucked in her breath and said tentatively, ‘Perhaps if you told your mother …’

  ‘My mother’s in a drying-out clinic, as you well know, Artemis. Even I’m not so bloody selfish as to dump this on her when for the first time in years there’s a chance of her turning her life around.’

  ‘Then what are you going to do?’ Primmie asked inadequately.

  ‘I don’t know.’ Kiki wiped her nose on the sleeve of her jersey, her shoulders slumped in despair. ‘I wish I did know, but I don’t. I don’t have the faintest bloody clue.’

  Geraldine paid very little attention in class for the rest of the day. Kiki’s bombshell had unnerved her far more than she was prepared to let on, not just because Kiki’s situation was so appalling, but because, if she wasn’t careful, she, too, could quite easily find herself in the same position. Not that she and Francis had actually gone all the way yet, because they hadn’t. They had, though, come very, very close.

  ‘And so the most lasting of Charles I’s innovations w
ere those then most resented,’ Miss Fothergill, their history teacher, was saying as she hitched her gown a little further up her shoulders.

  Geraldine, her thoughts now on Francis, was indifferent to Charles’s political difficulties. She had always wanted to be with Francis. She couldn’t remember a time without him. When they were children, she and Francis had been inseparable and they’d known they were going to marry each other from the time she’d been fifteen and he’d been eighteen. That being the case, the temptation to give in to his urgings that they go all the way was becoming almost impossible to resist – or had been, until she’d known of the mess Kiki was in.

  ‘Charles I and Archbishop Laud altered the face of the Church of England,’ droned on Miss Fothergill.

  She wrote the words CONTRACEPTIVE PILL in her rough book and circled them. If she could get a prescription for the pill, her problem would be solved, but, as Kiki had found, going on the pill wasn’t easy when you were seventeen. Horror stories abounded of doctors at family planning clinics informing family GPs and of GPs informing parents. It simply wasn’t a step she dared take.

  ‘… and, although the restored Anglican Church was not Laudian, but rather Erasmian, it is much due to them that it has since been distinguished by its own particular ambience …’

  She wondered if Kiki, Artemis and Primmie were listening to Miss Fothergill’s biased presentation of Charles I as a martyr, and doubted it. Kiki certainly had too much on her mind and Artemis wasn’t much cop at history at the best of times. As for Primmie … Primmie would be trying to pay attention, but she’d be feeling too much anguish on Kiki’s behalf to be able to write a grade A essay afterwards.

  She doodled on the cover of her rough book, wondering whether or not to tell her mother about Kiki’s predicament. Unlike her friends’mothers, who, for differing reasons, would most certainly not be helpful, her own mother was fairly unshockable. It came of her being a university lecturer and, like Kiki’s parents, being relatively young. Whereas Primmie’s mum was in her fifties and Artemis’s mother was in her forties, her own mother, like Kiki’s, was only thirty-eight. In fact, Primmie’s remark about parties to raise money for the Viet Cong was in reference to a party her mother had thrown and which dozens of her mother’s left-wing, politically active friends had attended.