by Lisa Jewell
‘I like girls like you. Pretty girls, with big eyes and skinny bodies. You are my dream girl,’ she smiled. ‘You ever been with a girl before?’
Betty shook her head. ‘No,’ she said, feeling that there should be no grey areas whatsoever in her response. ‘Never.’
‘You should go with a girl. You should go with me. I am the best girl. The best one in Soho. The best one in London.’ She got to her feet, wiped herself and pulled up her lime-green pants. Then she pulled down her denim skirt and stared meaningfully at Betty for a moment. ‘See this,’ she said, stepping closer to Betty, ‘look.’ She stuck out her tongue and flashed a silver stud at her. ‘This is for pretty girls, missy. Pretty girls like you.’
Betty smiled. ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘didn’t that hurt?’
Candy’s face fell. ‘No!’ she barked. ‘It did not hurt. It is for the pleasure of my girls. It is sweet feeling. I can make you come for ten minutes with this. Maybe some time fifteen.’
Betty tried not to flinch at these words. ‘It’s not really ... I’m not quite ... I like boys.’
‘Ha!’ snapped Candy. ‘We all like boys. Everyone likes boys! Boys are nice! But girls are nicer.’ She was standing very close to Betty now, close enough for the rum fumes on her breath to form a cloud around her head, close enough to feel her body heat, close enough to notice a small scar above her right eyebrow and a scattering of dandruff on the shoulders of her denim jacket.
Betty took a step back from her and smiled tightly. ‘No, really, honestly, it’s not my thing. It’s not ... I’ve never wanted to.’
‘I was twenty-eight first time I slept with a girl. All those years before I thought I didn’t want to. I was wrong.’ She threw her a bright smile, all small white teeth and glinting silver. ‘Come on,’ she put her hand to Betty’s hair and stroked it. ‘Come downstairs. Come to me. Come with me. Come ...’ She licked her lips with her studded tongue.
‘No!’ said Betty. ‘Thank you! Really. My friend is waiting, I really need to go ...’
Candy sighed and let her hand drop from Betty’s hair. ‘Well, lucky for you,’ she said, ‘I am only down there.’ She pointed beneath their feet. ‘Lucky for you, any time you want me, you can come and have me. Just knock on my door.’ She leaned across Betty’s body so that they were touching almost from neck to crotch and banged against the bathroom door with her knuckles, rat-tatatat. ‘Like this. Then I will know is you. What your name?’
‘Betty,’ she replied breathlessly.
Candy’s eyes widened. She trailed her fingertips dramatically across Betty’s cheek and then opened the bathroom door to leave, her beer in one hand, the rum bottle gripped beneath her arm. But before she went she turned one more time and looked at Betty sharply. ‘And stop smoking outside my window. So rude.’
She tutted loudly and pulled the door sharply closed behind her, and Betty let herself fall onto the side of the bath. She touched her cheek where Candy’s finger had just been and shuddered. Then she found her way to the kitchen and poured herself another tumbler of vodka. She noticed briefly that the party had thinned out, that the DJ was asleep on the sofa, that the music was quieter, that Candy was nowhere to be seen, that the Japanese American called Akiko was pensively writing something in a journal and that Joe Joe was rammed up in the corner kissing a man with a blond buzz cut and a vintage bowling shirt, his hands tucked casually in the man’s back pockets.
She absorbed all this numbly and slowly, as though on a two-second time delay. Then she took the tumbler of vodka and her tobacco pouch out of the flat and up towards the fire escape. She felt curiously excited, a swell of anticipation in her chest as she ascended the three steps to the fire-escape door. She could see where most of the party guests had gone as she pulled open the door. The escape was rammed with bodies, the air was thick with the smell of tobacco and marijuana, there was a low-level buzz of muted conversation, someone was playing a guitar. The only light out here came from the bulb on the landing downstairs.
Betty squeezed her way through the mass of people, searching for the reassuring shape of John Brightly, dying to tell him about her encounter with Candy Lee, dying to carry on their conversation, find out more about him, tell him more about her. She stepped over legs and climbed over couples, but it was soon obvious to her that he wasn’t there. Maybe he’d come out here, taken one look at this messy sprawl of stupefied youth and decided that he was too old and wise to hang around here.
She sighed and fell to her haunches.
She was tired now.
It was late and she was tired and she wanted to go to bed.
But she couldn’t because there was a party in her house. A party, probably, in her bed.
She rolled herself a cigarette and smoked it slowly and unhappily, surrounded by strangers, and she wished for a moment that she had never left Guernsey.
19
1920
‘ISLE OF MAN?’
‘No.’
‘Isle of Wight?’
‘No.’
‘Jersey, then?’
‘No,’ said Arlette, ‘but close.’
‘Guernsey? Yes! Guernsey!’
‘Well, yes, Mr Worsley, but if you don’t mind me saying, you have reached that conclusion only through a process of painstaking elimination. I think you left out only Lundy and the Scillies.’
‘Well, your accent, it’s not one I’ve heard before. But really, the clue should have been in your name, I suppose. De La Mare.’
‘Yes. I think my name was probably a giveaway.’
‘Hmm.’ Gideon smiled into his fist sheepishly. ‘Yes. I think maybe I need to sharpen up my regional knowledge. Not quite as perceptive as I thought I was. So, an island with a French flavour. And you with your French name. And, now I think of it, of course, such fine, French features. Have you been to France?’
‘No,’ Arlette replied. ‘Before I arrived in Portsmouth in September I had never before left the island.’
He looked at her with surprise. ‘Well, well,’ he said. ‘And you’re twenty-one? That is a long time to have spent on a rock in the middle of the Channel.’
‘Yes,’ she replied, ‘quite.’
‘And now you are here. Free. Unfettered. Alive.’ He chuckled and sharpened his pencil, leaving the curl of shavings to fall to the floor.
‘And having my portrait painted by a man I barely know.’
‘You are clearly not as timid as your appearance might suggest.’
‘Oh, no,’ she teased, ‘I am. This is entirely out of character.’
She gazed through the bowed windows of his studio. She had been here for almost an hour now and was feeling braver and braver by the minute. From the moment she had walked into this room and seen the portraits stacked up around the room, exquisite renderings in pencil and watercolour of a dozen beautiful women, all fully clothed and serene, she had felt reassured that Gideon Worsley was, as he said, a professional artist with an interest in her face.
‘So, Mr Worsley ...’
‘Please, call me Gideon. Please.’
‘Gideon. Tell me. Have you always lived in London?’
‘Oh, no, not remotely. I lived in my family’s house in Chipping Norton, until I was twenty-one.’
‘Chipping Norton?’
‘Oxfordshire. And then I came down, after university, stayed, like yourself, with a friend of my parents, and then I wandered past this cottage one watery November morning over a year ago and saw that it was for rent, and enquired with the landlord’s agent and suddenly, here I was, in a blue house by the river, which I can barely afford, alone and without help, a single man fending for himself. And not particularly well, it must be said.’
‘You need a wife.’
‘Yes, indeed I do. Can you suggest anyone who might be interested in taking up the position?’
Arlette laughed. ‘What would be the benefit? For the prospective wife?’
‘A blue cottage by the river? An artistic man with love in his heart? Weeke
nds at a charming house in five acres of wild meadows with my spectacular mama and papa? Eclectic friends? A wild social life?’
‘Wild, you say?’
He smiled and examined the top of his pencil in the light of the window. ‘Yes,’ he said circumspectly.
‘Wild in what way?’
‘Oh, gosh, in that normal, ordinary way of wildness. When I am not working, I am playing. And playing very hard indeed.’
‘Were those your friends?’ she ventured. ‘The ones you were singing carols with when I first met you?’
‘They were some of my friends, yes. I have a lot of friends. And they are all wild.’
‘Lots of friends, but no wife?’
‘Precisely. But I am twenty-four. It is time, hopefully, to combine the two.’
‘So where does it happen, all this wildness?’
‘Here. As you could probably guess from the state of my sitting room. And there are clubs, in Mayfair, in Soho.’
‘Soho?’
‘Yes. Soho. Colourful, colourful places. I’d like to ask you to join us one night but I fear your faint Jersey heart –’
‘Guernsey!’
‘Of course ... your Guernsey heart may not be quite up to the challenge.’
Arlette flushed.
‘Have I made you cross?’ asked Gideon, peering at her playfully from behind his canvas.
‘No, Mr Worsley. You have not made me cross. Whyever would you think you had?’
‘So,’ he said, ‘would you? Would you come out to play, one evening, in the dark corners of Soho?’
‘That depends,’ she said, ‘on what exactly you do in the dark corners of Soho.’
‘We drink, we sing, we talk, we think, we dance, we love, we live, Miss De La Mare. And then, eventually, quite often when the sun is above the roofs and the whey-faced commuters have sprung out of their miserable little holes, we come home and sleep.’
Arlette pursed her lips. She was sure there was something she wanted to say, about Gideon and his dirty house and his slovenly way of life and his disregard for the people who got out of bed every morning and made his precious city run, but she could not find the words.
‘I, of course, do not include you in that number. No, no, no. Beautiful shop-girls selling dresses at Liberty. No, you are a separate breed entirely. A cut above ...’ He smiled and his face retreated once more behind his canvas.
Silence fell upon them. They had reached a tiny but perceptible impasse. For now, Arlette felt, it would be better not to talk.
20
1995
BETTY SLEPT ON the sofa that night, snuggled up next to Joe Joe and his conquest of the previous evening whose name, it transpired, was Rolf and who hailed from Munich. She had sacrificed her mezzanine to three girls from Poland who had missed the last tube home to Rayners Lane, and when she tried to stand up she couldn’t because her whole body had seized up. She eventually managed to shake out the knots in her muscles and stumbled towards the bathroom. The door was locked from the inside. She sighed. She did not want to know what was on the other side of that door. She wanted coffee. She wanted water. She wanted a cigarette. She’d finished her tobacco last night. Or, at least, the three girls from Poland had finished her tobacco, using it in numerous attempts to construct a Camberwell Carrot in order to impress an English man called Joshua, who was, apparently, their TEFL teacher. She glanced at the time on the microwave: 7.12 a.m. She’d been asleep for approximately three hours.
She ran her hands through her weird green hair, pulled on her silver beret, located her shoulder bag, checked for her purse and her front door keys, then left the flat. She tiptoed nimbly past Candy’s front door, a sudden overwhelming memory of lime-green stretch-lace knickers and a studded tongue puncturing her consciousness unpleasantly, and then she pushed open the front door and tumbled out onto the street.
It was a chilly morning for the beginning of June, the air was damp and it felt more like dawn than seven thirty. She had not yet seen her reflection, and if she had she would have observed that she was wearing only one of a pair of diamanté earrings, that a tuft of green hair was sticking out from beneath the silver hat, and curling upwards like a frond of greenery. She would also have observed that all the eyeliner on one eye had rubbed off on the sofa while she was sleep, yet the eyeliner on the other eye was fully intact. She would have seen that there were creases in her cheek from the cushion she’d slept against, that a small rash of zits had broken out on her jaw line and that the seam around the waistline of her dress had split slightly in the night, revealing an inch of pale white flesh.
She would have seen all this and she would probably have decided to stay at home and not wander the early morning streets of Soho in plain sight of the world.
But she hadn’t seen any of these things. She imagined herself to look glamorously careworn, sweetly rumpled. She sat in an Italian coffee shop on Wardour Street nursing an extra large cappuccino and smoking a roll-up, feeling like a character in a novel. She’d felt lonely last night. Now she felt alive again. Early morning Soho, in her party clothes, surrounded by chattering Italians in stained white shirts, the hiss and clatter of espresso machines, the smell of bacon, the vague edges of a hangover. She smiled to herself and thought that if the sixteen-year-old version of herself had walked past this window and seen her sitting there, she’d have wished to be her.
And as she thought that, the door of the café swung open and a small man walked in. A small man in a short-sleeved T-shirt, in spite of the chill, one hand holding a lit cigarette, his other hand in his jeans pocket, dark hair tousled and hanging around his face, a cloud of stardust glittering in his aura.
Betty froze.
It was him.
It was Dom Jones.
She put a hand to her cheek, a cheek that had suddenly, inexplicably, flushed red. She watched him from the corner of her eye, standing at the counter, ordering a full breakfast, with extra bacon and strong tea. She saw him take a seat at a table in the corner, pull a phone out of his pocket and tap something into it, scratch his scalp through his thick hair, put out his cigarette in a small metal ashtray, identical to the one on Betty’s table, and pull open a newspaper.
She saw his right leg, jigging up and down beneath the table, one hand nonchalantly scratching at his crotch through the denim of his jeans. She saw that he had a two-day stubble on his chin and that his eyes looked puffy and blank.
Unwritten rules said she should leave him be, like a free-roaming animal in a zoo. Look, don’t touch. But there was too much connecting them this damp June morning, and before she could censor herself or ask herself what she was hoping to achieve she had turned fully towards him, waited a beat for him to acknowledge her gaze and then said, ‘Hi.’
He looked annoyed for a moment. He threw her a tight smile, nodded tersely. But then she saw it, in his eyes, a tiny glint of recognition.
‘Do I know you?’ he asked.
‘No,’ she said, ‘well, not properly. I live in the building opposite you. You know? Across the courtyard.’
He looked at her blankly, his tired eyes taking in the detail of her, still failing to make the connection, until his eyes alighted upon the packet of Golden Virginia on the table in front of her and he nodded slowly and said, ‘Ah, yeah, the girl on the fire escape. Yeah. I know you.’
That should have been the end of the conversation. What else was there to say? But Betty still felt it, this sense that she and this man had something to talk about, that she was allowed to engage with him.
‘Sorry about the noise last night,’ she said. ‘Hope we didn’t disturb you.’
He moved his paper away from himself, a gesture that Betty took as an acceptance of her attempt at social intercourse. ‘You fuckers,’ he said, with a wry smile. He leaned back into his chair and gazed at her impenetrably. ‘You absolute fuckers. I went to bed early last night, too. First time I’ve been to bed early in about six months.’
Betty clapped her hand over her mou
th. ‘Oh God,’ she said, ‘I’m really sorry.’
She could see from the curl of his mouth that he wasn’t really cross.
‘It’s all right. I moved to a bedroom on the street, took a temazepam. Feel like shit now; that stuff really knocks you out.’
She smiled at him encouragingly, amazed by how normal it felt to be chatting to Dom Jones in a café.
He picked his cigarettes from the table and offered the pack to Betty. Her instinct was to say no. She hated cigarettes. All that gunk and poison. But she absolutely had to smoke one of his cigarettes. She would regret it when she was ninety if she didn’t. She took one and let him light it for her.
‘Good party?’ he asked, blowing some smoke out of the corner of his mouth.
She nodded. ‘Yeah, well, it wasn’t really my party. It was supposed to be a housewarming. But in reality I think it was just an excuse for my friend to invite everyone in London with a foreign accent.’
‘And you were just trapped there with nowhere to go?’ he smiled at her knowingly.
‘That kind of thing.’
‘Yeah,’ he said, ‘I remember those kinds of parties. I used to lock my bedroom door and pee in a bottle until it was over.’
A short silence followed, during which time Dom’s breakfast was delivered to his table. It looked amazing, particularly the eggs, two glistening white and yellow discs, shiny as glass. She wanted eggs. But she could not afford eggs. Eggs on toast, according to the illuminated price list above the counter, were £2.50 and she had only £3.50 left in her purse to last her until her next pay cheque. She stared at the eggs lustfully, while Dom Jones folded away his newspaper and poured sugar into his tea from a glass canister.
She was about to move back to her table, aware that the conversational window had just closed up, when Dom picked up his knife and fork and said, ‘So, how long have you been living over there?’
She picked up her cappuccino and took a sip from it. ‘Three weeks and five days,’ she said.
