The Decision

by Penny Vincenzi

  ‘Maybe when you’re really young and you don’t know the chap very well, but in a relationship, goodness, it’s fine.’

  Scarlett, thinking herself properly in love for the first time, with an Englishman she had met in Paris, consulted the gynaecologist who was kind and practical, instructed Scarlett in the mysteries of the Dutch cap and sent her back to her boyfriend’s bed with her blessing. He was, as it turned out, as so many of them had turned out to be, married; but Scarlett enjoyed several weeks of happiness with him before making the discovery and, as a by-product, learnt to enjoy sex immensely. She just couldn’t believe anything could be so wonderful, so all-consuming, so triumphantly intense – and so conducive to self-esteem.

  Diana’s fiancé was a regular soldier, a First Lieutenant in the Royal Scots Greys, serving out in Hong Kong, and as soon as he got promoted to Captain, they were getting married.

  ‘Can’t wait, it’s such a wonderful life in the army, and he’s an absolute dreamboat, Scarlett, you should see him in his mess kit.’

  ‘What’s mess kit?’ asked Scarlett curiously. She was learning a whole new vocabulary from Diana, every bit as foreign as the French, Italian and German of her passengers.

  ‘Oh, it’s what they wear in the Officers’ mess, not khaki, but bright red tunics and frightfully narrow navy trousers, so flattering.’

  In spite of everything, Scarlett always felt rather honoured Diana had befriended her.

  The plane had settled down again; Scarlett took a deep breath and went to collect the honk bags.

  ‘So, darling, how is the job? Still enjoying it?’

  ‘Oh, Gommie. I just adore it. And I’ve got the most marvellous news, I’ve been promoted.’

  ‘Really, darling, how awfully clever. I’ve never been promoted to anything in my life. Unless you can count getting married. And I don’t think Piers has turned out to be a promotion. Not nearly as rich as I’d thought. Good thing I didn’t have any brothers and all Pa’s money came to me or I’d be in a frightful bind. More champagne, darling?’

  ‘Oh, yes please.’

  Eliza beamed happily at her godmother; they were having their monthly dinner at Claridges. Anna liked to keep up with Eliza’s life; she said it was much more interesting than her own.

  ‘So what is the new job?’

  ‘Well, Woolfe’s are going to do a new young department, called Younger Generation, or something like that. And, they think it deserves a young PR. To talk to the younger journalists. And, oh Gommie, you’re looking at her!’

  ‘My darling girl, that is just thrilling. You are clever. Well done. How exciting.’

  ‘Isn’t it? And it means I can go into meetings with the buyers, stuff like that. I just can’t believe it. Lindy – that’s my boss – is so generous too. She says it was something I said that gave her the idea, and she’s told Mr Woolfe that. And she’s so young-thinking even though she’s quite old, I mean at least thirty-five, I’d say—’

  ‘Thirty-five! My God, Eliza, and she can still get herself about?’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ said Eliza, missing this irony entirely, ‘and she’s really with-it, too.’

  ‘With-it? What does that mean, darling?’

  ‘Oh, gosh, well, sort of – sort of young and trendy. You can apply it to anything, cars, clothes, music …’

  ‘I shall remember that,’ said Anna, smiling at her, raising her glass. ‘It’s one of the reasons I like seeing you, darling, keep myself up to date. Well, congratulations. Now what about your love life, anything interesting happening there?’

  ‘Absolutely nothing,’ said Eliza firmly. ‘I’m a career girl, Gommie, and a very ambitious one. Love, getting married, doesn’t fit into my plans at all at the moment.’

  ‘Better not let your mother hear you saying that,’ said Anna Marchant.

  Chapter 5

  ‘What you doing this weekend then, Matt?’

  ‘Oh, not sure.’

  Matt grinned at Paul Dickens, one of his fellow negotiators – well, OK, fellow trainee negotiators – at Barlow and Stein, Commercial Estate Agents.

  ‘Group of us going down the coast Sunday. Should be good. Going to be hot, they say. Want to come?’

  ‘Well …’ Matt did want to go – a lot. But he’d promised Mr Barlow to work on Saturday and if he didn’t finish he was quite prepared to work Sunday as well. He wanted to get promoted and fast, and he needed Mr Barlow to be pleased with him for that.

  It wasn’t exactly a difficult job; the only requirement was legwork. There was a stack of letters to go out to a great many small businesses in the area, asking them if they were looking to expand their offices and letting them know that Barlow and Stein had every type of premises to show them if they were; it would save a lot of money if they could be delivered personally.

  Barlow and Stein was a small agency, based just off Great Portland Street and specialising in commercial property. Their clients were the fast-expanding businesses cashing in on the boom in every area of commercial life. London was the place to trade and its commercial heart, the City itself, was the centre of world finance.

  ‘It’s got fewer restrictions than any other capital city, that’s the thing,’ Matt told Scarlett over a drink one evening. ‘It’s like a bloody magnet, the money just comes pouring in, banks, insurance and that. And they need office space, all these people, loads of it.’

  ‘An awful lot of my passengers are businessmen,’ said Scarlett, ‘specially in First Class, coming in from God knows where, Paris, Rome, Berlin. It isn’t half strange thinking of Germans as customers rather than the enemy, but I’ve got used to it now. And then Boack fly them in from the States, they all say London is the place to be, you’re right.’

  Matt knew that he was on the brink of doing well. He woke every morning feeling upbeat and confident, positively looking forward to going to work. All the way in on the bus – where he sat in his new suit from the Fifty Shilling Tailors, a piece of brown paper set carefully down on the seat to keep it clean – and the bowler hat Mr Stein insisted he wore – ‘it looks so much more professional, Matthew, puts you up there with the accountants and the bankers, and looks as if you really know what you’re doing’ – he studied his work place, the great bustling burgeoning city, and felt proud to be a part of it in however small a way.

  He knew he had the army to thank for much of his progress. He’d chosen to go into the Royal Engineers, and learnt stuff which he could see he could find very useful in his future life as a property tycoon. They’d done things like constructing Bailey bridges and studying mechanics and road building, and he’d learnt to drive which he could never have afforded otherwise and managed to get himself put on a vehicle maintenance course. And then he’d played every sport available to him, fraternised with the locals – he tried not to think what his father would have to say if he knew he was snogging (and worse) with Germans – and some of the ATS girls were very … well, friendly. Sex was one of the things he missed most out in civvy street. There was precious little opportunity of getting a girl into bed when you shared a room with your brothers. It was one of the many reasons he, like Scarlett, yearned for a place of his own.

  He’d left the army as Corporal Shaw, RE, with two stripes on his arm, a tough young man rather than the stroppy boy who’d gone in; and he went to the Labour Exchange on the very day of his demob, got a temporary job as an office boy and spotted an advertisement for the job with Barlow and Stein a few weeks later.

  ‘We want someone with energy,’ Mr Stein had said at the interview. ‘Energy and common sense. And nice manners of course.’

  Matt said he had plenty of energy and a fair bit of common sense, and that he hoped they could see he had the other commodity.

  ‘My mum used to box my ears if I was cheeky.’

  ‘Good for your mum,’ said Mr Barlow.

  Matt got the job and felt immediately as if he had come home. This was a world he was completely comfortable in; he seemed to understand how it worked in
the most fundamental way. Wherever you looked there were new buildings going up, or old ones being refurbished.

  There were the big boys of course: Jack Cotton, Charles Clore, Joe Levy, and Matt’s personal hero and role model Harry Hyams, who’d made twenty-seven million by the time he was thirty-nine. That’s what Matt was going to do, possibly rounding it up to thirty million. It wasn’t a dream or even a hope, it was what he planned with a hard-edged certainty, he was going to build and own properties and fill them with the thousands of new companies that were also being spawned by the booming economy.

  ‘It’s a bit like a blind date,’ said Mr Stein when he was explaining the business to Matt. ‘There they both are, girl and boy, building and tenant, both perfect for each other, not knowing the other exists, needing an introduction. That’s where we come in. You don’t have to be a genius, Matthew, just a bit sharp. You’ll soon learn.’

  Matt didn’t have to learn sharpness; it was in his bones. Within weeks Mr Stein was leaving him to show clients round premises on his own.

  He didn’t realise until much later how fortunate he had been in Mr Stein; how excellent was his grounding, how profound was his advice.

  ‘Two things count in this business, son,’ he said over a pint of warm beer one evening. ‘One is that you have to be a gentleman. Your word is your bond. You can’t let someone think they’ve got an office and then a week later tell them they haven’t, just because someone’s come in with a higher offer. This is a small world, Matthew, and people have to trust you. And you’ve got to be able to get along with people, mix with all sorts. All gossip this business, especially at the higher level.’

  There was one thing which Mr Stein didn’t mention and which Matt had no need to learn either, and that was the importance of hard work. And not just office work; if there was anything to be done, Matt did it, however disagreeable. The army had taught him that too. Indeed one day when the Barlow and Stein toilets were blocked and no plumber was to be found, Matt went out and bought caustic soda, a rubber plunger and some heavy-duty gloves and cleared the offending pipes – temporarily at least – himself. When some simpering typist said she really didn’t know how he could do such a thing, he told her about Charles Fullerton-Clark who had once been ordered to scour the army lavatories with a razor blade, and had sung rugby songs while he did it.

  He decided regretfully that he couldn’t go down to the coast with Paul Dickens.

  He set out for the City as soon as the offices closed that Friday evening, reckoning it’d be better to get that side over so that he could be in the West End on Saturday, good fun even if he was working; he’d delivered about fifty letters when he heard someone calling him.

  ‘Matt! Over here, Matt, it’s me, Charles Clark.’

  And there he was on the other side of Lombard Street, waving at him. He’d never have recognised him, Matt thought, he looked exactly like all the other toffs round here, rolled umbrella, bowler hat, pinstripe suit. But he seemed genuinely pleased to see Matt, grinning and waving him over.

  ‘It’s jolly good to see you, old chap,’ said Charles, slapping him round the shoulders. ‘What are you doing here? Got time for a pint?’

  Matt said he thought so and followed him into the King’s Head on Lombard Street.

  ‘Remember Matt Shaw?’ said Charles to Eliza next day. ‘He was in the army doing basic training with me. You met him with me at Waterloo one day.’

  They were having a drink in the Markham in the King’s Road: the newly dressed King’s Road, filled with pretty young people, glamorous cars, and the clothes boutiques that were replacing the old food shops, all following their leader, Mary Quant, who had opened Bazaar, the very first of them, as early as 1955. No one would believe it had been there that long, Lindy had told Eliza. ‘It seems so absolutely brand new, but it’s just one more proof of Mary’s genius.’

  ‘Yes, course I remember Matt Shaw,’ Eliza said. ‘He was quite tasty as I recall.’

  ‘I ran into him in the City. He had quite a sharp suit on, filled out a bit, his hair’s longer. It was really good to see him. He’s working for an estate agent. Commercial variety. He’s doing well.’

  ‘Oh, really? Well, good for him.’

  ‘Yes, it’s the business to be in at the moment, that’s for sure. The potential for development in London is incredible, I know that. Typical Matt, he was delivering letters by hand, seemed embarrassed about it. I told him not to be so bloody silly. He’s got a bit of a chip on his shoulder but I do like him a lot. We thought we’d try and track down a couple of the others, have a real reunion.’

  ‘Yes, why don’t you?’ Eliza sounded distracted suddenly. ‘Charles, there’s something I want to talk to you about.’

  ‘What’s that? You’re not getting engaged finally, are you?’

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake. Why does everybody think I have to get engaged? No, Summercourt.’

  ‘What about it?’

  ‘I was talking to Mummy last weekend. She’s desperately worried. It needs a lot of money spent on it, not just painting it and general refurbishment, but they might need a new roof as well. They had it patched up a couple of years ago, but now it’s getting really bad. And they haven’t got a bean, she’s even talking about selling a bit more land.’

  ‘They can’t do that! Anyway, the trustees won’t let them. What does Pa say?’

  ‘Not a lot, as far as I can make out. You know how loyal she is, but reading between the lines his head’s firmly the sand. Just denies there’s a real problem. I can’t think what we can do to help, but at least we must show her some support. When are you going down next?’

  ‘Well, I could pop down tomorrow. I really can’t have her selling the land. It’d wreck the place. Could you come too?’

  ‘I could actually. OK, let’s do that. It would cheer her up if nothing else. She’s really worried, can’t sleep.’

  ‘Poor Mummy. Yes, let’s go and see her. I’m sure we can come up with something. Now, how’s the job? I want to hear all about it.’

  Eliza was even less inclined towards marriage than usual that summer; gearing up for the autumn opening of Woolfe’s Young Generation was consuming all her energy. It had taken longer than even Lindy had expected, had been postponed twice and she had been in despair over the delay; Bernard Woolfe, initially enthusiastic, became slower and more cautious as he and the rest of the board debated endlessly the range of the merchandise, the look and feel of the department, its location within the store and what it would cost. Lindy and Eliza were both insistent that Woolfe’s did an own-label range of clothes to stock alongside the other designs, to link the youth and fun of the department more closely with the store and its gilt-edged fashion reputation; Bernard Woolfe said this would be a mistake, that should the new department fail, it would reflect badly on Woolfe’s as a whole, a question mark on their judgement.

  ‘Bernard, that’s just ridiculous,’ said Lindy, trying to keep her voice calm. ‘Either we believe in this thing or we don’t. If we don’t do our own line, it will look as if we’re hedging our bets.’

  ‘Perhaps that’s exactly what I am doing,’ said Woolfe, his dark eyes gleaming with good-natured malice. ‘Not such a bad thing, you know, when the going’s a bit rough …’

  If Lindy had had her way, they would have opened within three months, ‘to beat the competition that I know there’s going to be’, but Bernard argued that unless everything was right the competition would win.

  Jan Jacobson, the brilliant young buyer hired to work exclusively for Young Generation, had brought in some beautiful clothes; comparatively established designers like John Bates (of Jean Varon) and Sally Tuffin and Marion Foale would hang on rails alongside entirely new talent. He had discovered Mark Derrick, who designed apparently shapeless little shift dresses that still flattered girls’ bodies: the bodies that had seemed almost overnight to have been transformed from the shapely curves of the late Fifties to something almost boyish with neat, small breasts and
flat, hipless torsos. And then there was Pattie Newton, whose clinched trench coats cut in the finest light gaberdine could be worn to work, to the theatre, even to parties over nothing more substantial than a silk slip; and Eliza herself had discovered Maddy Brown who had reinvented the sweater so that it continued downwards from the waist, to somewhere above the knee, and who also made ribbon-edged, gilt-buttoned mohair jackets in multi-coloured wool, which owed more than a nod in the direction of Chanel in shape, but were nonetheless totally original.

  Eliza liked Maddy, she was fun, with a sweet and deceptively gentle manner; beneath it was an ambition as steely as Eliza’s own. She was the child of working-class parents, had won a scholarship to a grammar school and then to art school; she was small with long fair hair and huge green eyes, and she still lived at home and used her tiny bedroom as a studio workshop. Selling her range into Younger Generation was her greatest success yet. Eliza had spotted one of her jackets in a journalists’ office one day and had brought her into the Woolfe fold.

  ‘It was truly lovely,’ she had told Jan Jacobson, ‘and the girl at the magazine was so sorry they couldn’t use it, but she doesn’t have any stockists you see. I think you should see them.’

  This was a familiar story; new designers, young and forward-thinking, making clothes for the new young market, had very little in the way of resources; stores liked the clothes, but didn’t want to risk unreliability of supply.

  Slightly unwillingly, Jan agreed to see Maddy Brown, fell in love with the clothes and persuaded Bernard Woolfe she was worth the risk. Maddy and her one knitter, also working from home, found a couple more girls who met her exacting standards; all four of them were now installed in the unfortunate Mr and Mrs Brown’s front room.

  The department was due to open at the very beginning of September. It was late to launch autumn and winter merchandise, but they had to make a huge splash with the press and by September everyone would be back from holiday and thinking winter, as Lindy put it. It was all incredibly exciting and Eliza could hardly believe she was going to be part of it.