Before I Met You

by Lisa Jewell

  Elizabeth glanced at her with surprise.

  ‘It was a mistake really. They didn’t have contraception in my day. But I wasn’t stupid. I knew all the other ways in which one could prevent these things from happening. I took my temperature, kept charts ...’

  Elizabeth pursed her lips and wondered what she meant by charts, but said nothing, concentrating instead on keeping the delicate wide-mouthed cup balanced on the thin sliver of a saucer.

  ‘We all did,’ Arlette continued. ‘Back in those days. Because we were all having so much fun and none of us was ready for babies. I managed to keep the babies at bay for eight years. Quite some feat, I can tell you. And then there it was, two days shy of my thirty-fourth birthday. A blasted baby. And once it was there, you know, bedded inside, well, all I could hope was that it would be a girl.’ She sighed, her fingertips held to the small of her throat. ‘Ah ...’ she exhaled. ‘Well, anyway, it most certainly was not a girl. It was him.’ She shuddered lightly. ‘My late husband was delighted. A son. To carry on the family name. All I could think about was having to handle his, well, his organs. I had a nursemaid. But she worked only days. So come seven o’clock it was all down to me. Ouf.’ She sneered and brought her teacup slowly to her lips. Her hands did not shake. She seemed to Elizabeth not like an eighty-four-year-old at all, but more like a slightly etiolated fifty-year-old.

  ‘So, I have to admit to being very curious about you, when I heard that Jolyon had taken up with a young widow. A little girl! I could not imagine my son having to play the father figure to a little girl. Or to anyone, for that matter. Selfish life he’s lived. Takes after me,’ she laughed drily. ‘But he has become very fond of you. And now here you are. In my home. And I have to say, from the first time I saw you, I liked you very much.’ Arlette smiled then and appraised Elizabeth with twinkling eyes. ‘I’d like to call you Betty, if I may?’

  ‘Betty?’

  ‘Yes. In my day if you were Elizabeth, you were Betty. Or Bet. But Betty was more popular. And I don’t know, you just look like a Betty to me.’

  Betty.

  Elizabeth rolled the name around her head.

  She liked it. It was more fun than Elizabeth and less little-girly than Lizzy.

  ‘Here,’ Arlette got to her feet and crossed the room, ‘do you like old photographs?’

  Elizabeth nodded. She did like old photographs, very much.

  ‘I thought you might.’ Arlette walked to the other side of the room and brought down a few leather-bound books from a shelf. ‘Here, my albums. Have a look.’

  Elizabeth dutifully followed Arlette’s instructions, while Arlette put a large black disc onto a gramophone player and slowly lowered a needle onto it. And there, in that moment, as the needle hit the vinyl and a crackle of static hit the air, followed by a flourish of piano, a log popping in the grate, the dusty aroma of old paper from the album on her lap, the smell of waxy candles and rich perfume, and the glimmer of a large paste brooch on Arlette’s collar in the shape of a butterfly, Elizabeth felt herself open up and pull something into herself, something she’d never before encountered in her ten short years, something heady and fragrant and electrifying. And that thing was glamour.

  Her home in Surrey had been modern and clean. Her mother spent a lot of time in jeans and polo-necks. Even when she went out to smart restaurants with Jolyon she would simply replace the jeans with trousers and sling a gold chain around her polo-neck. Elizabeth’s mother wore no make-up. She listened to Radio One. She had a perm. She liked football. Elizabeth’s mother was beautiful, but she was not glamorous. And before this moment, Elizabeth herself had had no real concept of the notion of glamour. She had swooned over Audrey Hepburn’s dresses in My Fair Lady, and loved going into the jewellery section of the department store in Guildford and pretending she was going to buy herself diamonds. But this was different. In this room, with the inky light of a faded afternoon in the sky and the melancholy strains of Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 3 in D in the air, Elizabeth turned the pages of an old lady’s history and lost herself in nostalgia for a world she’d never known.

  In this room, Elizabeth became Betty.

  3

  1987

  AT THE FERRY port, Betty’s breath encircled her head and then floated out towards the sea, almost as though it were trying to find its way back like a cat abandoned far from home. She was not wearing enough for the weather. At fifteen, she was more concerned with her image than with her physical comfort, and knowing that they would soon be sitting on a train heading towards London, and that there might be real actual Londoners on the train, she did not want to look like someone who lived in a weird old house with a weird old woman on the edge of a cliff on a tiny island that was so small that it didn’t even have a motorway. So she was wearing thick black tights, a very short denim skirt, blue suede moccasins and an elderly and very misshapen navy lambswool V-neck with a lace-trim vest underneath. Her hair was short and dyed black and her lips were painted a reddish black and lined with a slightly darker shade of old blood. She did not, she felt fairly certain, look like the type of girl who came from Guernsey.

  Sometimes Betty forgot that she was a big, pretty fish in a small, not so pretty pond. She and Bella were the reigning queens of their small corner of the world. They were the prettiest, the coolest, the most popular. Everything, in the realm of fifteen-year-old life on the island, revolved around the pair of them. And sometimes Betty believed that she really was, well, that she was famous. Because, on Guernsey, with her smoky-brown eyes, her fashion-drawing legs and her wardrobe of cool and slightly quirky clothes collected from dark corners of charity shops and pilfered from Arlette’s many wardrobes, she may as well have been famous.

  But here, just a few miles from shore, all that fell away from her like discarded tissue paper. Here she was just a girl. A pretty girl, but no prettier than most.

  It was the first time they’d been back to England since they’d left on that foggy January morning almost five years ago. Three months had turned into six months, six months into a year, and by then her mother had found the island quite to her liking. Betty had settled so well into her new school and someone had made a ‘silly offer’ for the house in Farnham, and they’d decided, as a family, to stay. Betty was delighted. From the minute she’d first set foot in Arlette’s boudoir, she’d known that this was where she wanted to be now. The white powder-sprayed bed had been shipped across from England and Betty had settled down.

  But they were back for Christmas, just Betty and her mother, two nights at Betty’s grandmother’s in Farnham, and time first for a bit of Christmas shopping in town. As she entered her teenage years, clothes shopping had become pretty much the only area of common interest between Betty and her mother, and they linked their arms together companionably as they made their way up Oxford Street.

  It was nearly five o’clock; the December afternoon looked like deepest, darkest night and the whole road was bathed in the soft rainbow glow of the Christmas lights strung overhead. They had another hour before they needed to get a train back to Betty’s grandmother’s in Surrey. Betty could feel something deep inside her tugging her from the thoroughfare of Oxford Street, away from the homogeny and the brand names. She pulled her mother past the fairy-tale edifice of Liberty and on to Carnaby Street. Her mother kept pausing to admire a window, to exclaim about a musical showing in a theatre, to remember something she’d forgotten to buy. But Betty kept moving.

  ‘Come on,’ she implored, her hands on her hips. ‘Come on!’

  ‘What’s the panic?’ asked her mother. ‘Where are we going?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ snapped Betty, casting about anxiously, as she felt the day falling away from her. ‘Just ... this way.’

  She didn’t know what this way was. All she knew was that the day was dying and the night was giving birth to itself, and there was something electric, something magnetic pulling her down Carnaby Street, past self-consciously crazy boutiques, past grimy pubs, throug
h the throngs of tourists and teenage girls just like her, girls from somewhere else with overblown ideas about themselves, girls having a special treat with dowdy mothers and bored fathers, a day in town with an early lunch at Garfunkel’s, overfilled bowls from the salad bar, tickets for a West End show tucked away safely in Mum’s bum-bag. It wasn’t real. Even to Betty’s immature, small-town eyes she could see through the fakery and the stage setting. There was something both murky and beguiling beyond this plastic street of Union Jacks and Beatles posters, something grimy and glittering. She wanted to find it and taste it right now before their time here in the West End was up and Christmas in a small cottage in Surrey swallowed her up for two whole days.

  She walked urgently away from Carnaby Street and up side roads until the only lights were neon and the shops were small and anonymous.

  ‘Oh God, where are you taking us?’ said her mother, looking aghast at a middle-aged woman sitting on a bar stool in the entrance to a bar advertising a Live Girls Show, and dramatically underdressed for the weather in a gold boob tube and red leather shorts.

  ‘I think it’s Soho,’ said Betty, her voice tremulous with excitement. Soho. That’s what had been pulling her down these backstreets, of course it was. Soho. The centre of the universe. The Hundred Club. The Mud Club. The Blitz Club. Sex. Drugs. Rock and roll. Betty’s favourite film of all time was Desperately Seeking Susan. She loved it for the setting, for the neon lights glistening on oily puddles, the alleyways and mysterious doorways, subterranean dives and shabby-looking people with secrets.

  She turned to her mother and smiled. And then she looked upwards into the dark windows of a thin, grimy town house. ‘Imagine living here,’ she said breathily.

  ‘No thank you,’ said her mother, shivering in a blast of cold air.

  Betty continued to stare upwards. ‘I wonder who lives up there,’ she said.

  ‘French Model,’ her mother read off the doorbell.

  ‘Wow,’ breathed Betty, picturing a woman who looked like Beatrice Dalle floating around a cool flat, talking loudly and crossly to her French boyfriend on the phone with a strong cigarette in her other hand.

  ‘You know what that means, don’t you?’

  Betty shrugged uncomfortably, aware that her mother was about to flag up a shortcoming in her knowledge of the big wide world.

  ‘It’s a euphemism,’ she said, ‘for a prostitute. There’s some poor girl up there having sex with an old ugly man. For money.’

  Betty shrugged again, as if, really, what was so bad about that, whilst silently, invisibly, cringing at the very thought. But she still couldn’t help but see a certain glamour in it. A dark, ugly glamour. If you were going to sleep with an old ugly man for money, then this, mused Betty, was the place to do it.

  ‘Come on,’ said her mother. ‘It’s nearly six. Let’s get out of here. Let’s go back to Grandma’s.’

  Betty let her gaze fall from the black eyes of the old town house, tore herself from her dreams of moody French models and Soho nights, and headed back to Surrey with her mother.

  4

  1988

  ‘WHAT DID YOU do?’ Betty asked Arlette, as Arlette searched her jewellery boxes for a particular paste brooch she knew would look just perfect with Betty’s party dress. Betty did not want to wear a paste brooch, but she also knew that Arlette was rarely wrong about these things and that if she thought the brooch would go with the black taffeta off-the-shoulder dress she’d bought last week from Miss Selfridge, then she should at least try it on.

  ‘What did I do when?’

  ‘For your sixteenth birthday party.’

  ‘Nothing,’ said Arlette, ‘absolutely nothing. We’d just gone to war. Nobody had any parties.’

  ‘What was the war like?’

  ‘It was bleak. It was terrifying. It was horrible.’

  ‘And you lost your dad?’

  ‘I did. I lost my father.’ Arlette paused for a moment and sniffed. ‘My lovely father.’

  ‘And what did you do after?’ Betty asked. ‘After the war?’

  Arlette sniffed again. ‘Nothing at all,’ she said. ‘I stayed here and cared for my mother. I worked in a dress shop for a little while, in St Peter Port. And then I met Mr Lafolley.’

  Betty sighed. It seemed such a waste. ‘But didn’t you ever want to go somewhere else? Didn’t you ever want to have an adventure, go to London, travel?’

  Arlette shook her head. Her demeanour changed for a moment. ‘No,’ she said. ‘Bloody awful place, London. No thank you. No. Guernsey girl through and through. There was never anywhere else for me.’

  She found the brooch and passed it to Betty. It was made of stones in graduated shades of cranberry and pink, in the shape of a butterfly.

  ‘Yes!’ said Betty. ‘Yes. It is. It’s perfect. Thank you.’

  ‘You are very welcome, Betty, so very welcome.’ Arlette squeezed Betty’s hands inside hers and then carefully pinned it onto her dress. ‘Awful cheap fabric,’ she muttered, ‘just awful, but there.’ She stepped back to admire her. ‘There you are, looking perfectly, perfectly beautiful. Only a beautiful girl of sixteen could make fabric that cheap look so good. Now go,’ she said, ‘go to your party. Go and be sixteen.’

  Sixteen, Betty felt, should sparkle. Sixteen should glimmer and twinkle and gleam. It should involve taking off your shoes at the Yacht Club and cavorting, dancing, laughing, sitting on your best friend’s lap and throwing knowing looks across the room to a tall, blond man with broad shoulders and a St Lucian tan, called Dylan Wood, who you’ve been in love with for, like, a whole year, before getting to your feet and dancing again with a sweet, spotty boy called Adam, who’s been in love with you for, like, a whole year. It should involve sneaking outside to smoke cigarettes with a girl in your class who you’ve never really spoken to before, but who suddenly feels like your best friend, and watching two other boys in your class moon through the plate-glass windows at the assembled grown-ups before being hustled back indoors by an appalled manager. It should involve disco lights and glitter balls, and it should, at around two minutes to midnight, involve being given the bumps by thirty sixteen-year-olds and blowing out sixteen candles on a huge chocolate cake whilst Sixteen Candles played in the background. And then, at five minutes past midnight, the DJ must be instructed to put on ‘Dancing Queen’ and you must untie your raven hair and twirl round and round beneath the glitter ball while your friends all stand around and clap and sing ‘only si-ix-teen’ at the top of their voices every time Abba sing ‘only seventeen’.

  But sixteen could not be considered complete without a moment, somewhere between midnight and one, when the man called Dylan Wood, who you’ve been in love with for, like, a whole year, pulls you away from your party and onto a terrace overlooking the sea, and for a few minutes you both stare out together in silence at a view that could have been plucked directly from a pine-scented corner of the Mediterranean, with its yachts and its palm trees and the sound of music wafting across on a warm balmy breeze. This moment should involve some conversation and the exchange of observations such as, ‘I’ve been watching you all night.’ And, ‘You’ve always been pretty, but tonight – I don’t know – it’s like you became beautiful.’ And possibly even, ‘Is it still all right to kiss you?’

  Ideally the world should recede away from you at this point, the background noises become nothing more than distant buzz, and then Dylan Wood would cup your face with his hand, tip back your head and let his lips just brush yours, soft and gentle as butterfly wings so you’re not quite sure if it really just happened or not, and then again, a little firmer, this time leaving no doubt whatsoever that he has just kissed you, that Dylan Wood has just kissed you, under the light of a pearly half-moon, with his hand in your hair and his thigh in your groin, and you should think then that you are sixteen and already your life is complete.

  Sixteen shattered the following day into a thousand tiny, irretrievable little pieces. Betty knew sixteen was broken the mom
ent her eyes opened at eight o’clock, as she felt the prickle of discomfort across her skin, the soreness of the skin around her mouth, the raw heat of devastation as she remembered Dylan smiling at her after their first shockingly passionate kiss and saying, ‘Fuck, how the hell am I supposed to go back to London after that?’

  ‘What?’ Her voice had sounded flat and dull.

  ‘I can’t believe it,’ he’d continued, his eyes on hers, his hands still clasped together behind her back. ‘I’ve been stuck on this stupid rock for six years and just when I finally find something good about it, we’re going.’

  ‘You’re going to London?’ she whispered.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘didn’t you know? I thought you knew. I thought –’

  ‘No. I didn’t know. When are you going?’

  ‘Friday,’ he said. ‘We’re going on Friday.’

  ‘Oh. No,’ she whispered. ‘Why?’

  He’d laughed then, as if there was something funny about the situation, the fact of their aborted union, his imminent emigration. But there was nothing funny about it, nothing whatsoever.

  Betty pulled herself from her bed and opened the curtains. The sky was dense and grey. It didn’t look like summer. It didn’t feel like summer. Sixteen was dead and so was summer. Her black dress hung haphazardly from a wire hanger on her wardrobe handle, in stark contrast to the way it had been stored in the days running up to the party, in sheets of tissue paper and a plastic zip-up carrier, like a chrysalis. Now it was just a dress, deserving of no special treatment.

  Betty sighed and let the curtain fall. She flopped backwards onto her bed and considered the ceiling while she pondered her feelings. The walls of her room seemed to close in towards her as she lay there she could feel the shores of the island tightening around her like a corset, stifling her breath. She thought of Dylan, sitting on a double-decker bus, riding down Shaftesbury Avenue, on his way to some amazing new nightclub that everyone was talking about. Then she thought of herself, a tiny pinprick of a human being with no plans beyond sixth form and an interview next week for a Saturday job at Boots.