by Lisa Jewell
She took Betty into her office, a room painted black and covered wall to wall in framed black-and-white prints of her and her band live on stage.
‘Right, right, right ...’ She rustled haphazardly through a pile of paper on her desk. ‘OK,’ she turned to face Betty and crossed her pin-thin legs together. ‘So, Betty, tell me a bit about yourself.’ She had a pen in her hand and a pad on her lap and looked strangely like a journalist.
‘Well,’ said Betty, ‘I’m twenty-two. I’m from Guernsey, in the Channel Islands. I studied art at my local college.’
‘Oh!’ said Amy, glancing up at her from her notepad, which Betty noticed she was writing on in shorthand. ‘I studied art, too! Go on ...’
‘Yes, well. I was hoping to study in London but I was living with my grandmother, in her house, and then she got ill and my mum and stepfather couldn’t cope with her – or rather, she couldn’t cope with them – so they moved out and then it was just me and her, and we’d always had this special bond so it seemed only natural that I should take care of her.’
Amy narrowed her eyes at her. ‘Right,’ she said, ‘and by “take care of”, you mean, everything.’
‘Yes,’ said Betty. ‘Apart from her medical care – she had a nurse for that. But yes, I did everything. For three years.’
‘And then she died?’
‘Yes, she died. In April. And she left me a small amount of money so I came to London. To find my fortune. And instead I ended up working in Wendy’s.’
‘Oh Jesus. What a story!’ Amy cried, looking at Betty with concern. ‘Wendy’s! You know, where I come from that is the bottom of the barrel. And from the bottom of the barrel, the only way is up and outta there. So well done to you.’ She looked at Betty fondly for a moment, an unexpected change in demeanour, which Betty found rather unsettling. ‘Anyway,’ she pulled her face back to business and examined Betty’s CV, ‘so, no actual childcare to speak of?’
‘No,’ said Betty, realising that they had reached the sticking point and that if she wanted to move past it she would have to deploy the only fact that worked in her favour. ‘The only children I’ve ever looked after are yours.’
Amy glanced up at her again and Betty saw something pass through her eyes, something sad and guilty.
‘Yes,’ she said busily, ‘right. That is true. Dom tells me you took them all out. To the park. How did you find that?’
Betty shrugged. ‘Once I’d worked out how to put the double buggy together, it was fine.’
‘And tell me about your other skills. I mean, cooking, for example. As you probably know, Dom and I like our kids to eat super-healthy. What can you say about your abilities in that area?’
‘Well, you know, if there’s healthy stuff in your fridge, I’ll give them healthy things to eat. I won’t be sneaking them out to McDonald’s behind your back. You tell me what to give them and I’ll give it to them.’
‘But can you cook?’
Betty nodded. ‘I cooked for myself and my grandmother. Never poisoned either of us.’
‘Right ...’ Amy trained her gaze back onto Betty’s CV, as if looking for something to trip her up with. ‘And what kind of activities would you do with the children? Sometimes I’m out from early a.m. until last thing; that’s a lot of hours to fill.’
‘Well, I don’t really know. I mean, drawing, obviously – we could do art things – there’s the park over the road, playgroups, walks.’
‘Hmm.’ Amy looked unconvinced.
‘What do you do with them?’ Betty asked.
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘When you’re at home, during the day. What kind of things do you do?’
Amy looked trapped suddenly, and uncomfortable. She wriggled in her seat and said, ‘Well, yeah, like you say, art, crafts, walks. I meet up with other moms for coffee, the kids hang out together. Just, you know, simple stuff.’
‘Great,’ said Betty, ‘then I’ll just do what you do. Apart from hang out with your friends, of course.’
‘Well, yeah, but you can hang out with my friend’s nannies. That’s what the other girls have tended to do.’
‘Great!’ said Betty. ‘Sounds like fun.’
‘Yeah, it is.’ Amy looked puzzled for a moment, before turning back to the CV. ‘So, another important thing: discipline. Where do you stand on discipline.’
‘Riding crop always does it. Ruler across knuckles. A wooden spoon ...’ She mimed whacking herself on the bum with a spoon and laughed.
Amy blinked at her and Betty smiled. She’d walked into this house feeling utterly terrified, but within two minutes of her encounter with Amy she had seen straight through her to a small-town girl with big ideas, just like herself.
‘Right, I see, you’re joking ...’
‘Yes, sorry. No, obviously I have no training in this area, but my mother brought me up as a single parent until the age of ten and I feel she had a lot to teach me about child-rearing. She gave me lots of positive attention. She gave me firm boundaries, there were lots of rules in my house and I knew never to breach them. Lots of cuddles and kisses. It’s not rocket science.’
Amy narrowed her eyes at her. ‘Only a person who has not had children would be able to say that. Right, moving on. Hours ...’
Betty inhaled. This was the bit she was most concerned about.
‘Flexibility is key. Every day is different. Ideally I should have a live-in nanny, but I’ve never been good sharing my house. So, it would work a little like this: probably two sleepovers a week, an eight a.m. start would be regular, but sometimes earlier if I’m catching a flight. If I’m away for more than one night, the kids go to Dom, and so do you. Regular finish time would be six o’clock. I like to be home for bedtime and baths, so I’m rarely later than that. I am super-organised and I will give you lots of notice about everything. I appreciate you have a life to live and it’s not fair to keep you hanging around or have you cancelling your own plans, so we’ll work out the schedule week by week. There shouldn’t be any surprises. But, if there are surprises, I need to be able to rely on you. Sometimes you might have to cancel a plan, OK?’
Betty gulped and nodded.
‘Conversely,’ Amy continued, ‘there may be days when I don’t need you at all, like if I have family coming to stay, or if I take the kids away. I am not one of those moms who need help around the clock. I do actually like looking after my own kids. I do actually like just hanging out with them on my own.’ She smiled at Betty defensively, as though Betty might not believe her. But actually, Betty did believe her. She was just a woman, after all, not, as it had appeared at first sight, an android.
‘So, of course, the last thing we need to discuss – apart from money, which we can talk about later if I get you back for a second interview – is privacy. More than anything I need to be able to trust you, like, one million per cent. There are people out there who would pay you life-changing amounts of money to find out what happens in my house. As much as I would love for you to receive a life-changing amount of money, that is not going to happen at my and my children’s expense. So you would have to sign a lot of stuff. OK?’
Betty shrugged. She was not sure she wanted this job. She was not sure she wanted to work for Amy Metz. She felt she had nothing to lose. ‘Fine with me,’ she said.
Amy paused then, and inhaled audibly. ‘Listen,’ she said, ‘there is one more thing. Dom.’
‘Dom?’
‘Yeah. Don’t go there. OK?’
Betty gazed at her blankly. ‘I don’t ...?’
Amy raised her eyebrows impatiently. ‘I mean, Dom would fuck a pig if it happened to be sitting in his house after a night out drinking. And you are far from a pig.’
‘Oh!’ said Betty, her own eyebrows shooting towards her hairline. ‘Oh. No. I mean ... no. Of course not.’ She cast her gaze downwards, not wanting Amy to read her expression, which, she felt, might have given away some of the more carnal thoughts she had had about Dom in the past couple of weeks.
Amy smiled, clearly satisfied with her reaction. ‘Good,’ she said. ‘Well, I think that’s about as far as we can go now. I’m seeing two more girls today. If I want to see you again I’ll let you know this time tomorrow. OK?’
‘OK. And would you mind letting me know if you don’t? Just so I can get on with finding something else.’
‘Sure. Yeah. No problem. I’ll give you a call either way.’
‘When?’
Amy grimaced at her. ‘Shit, I dunno, tomorrow. Some time.’
‘Yeah, right, except I don’t have a phone. Just a payphone. A communal one. I’d need to know you were calling to make sure I was –’
Amy stopped her and smiled. ‘Yeah. Of course. I get it. I remember those days,’ she laughed wryly. ‘I will call you ...’ she looked at her wristwatch, ‘... at two p.m. How’s that?’
‘That’s great. Really great.’
‘And yeah, if you do come and work for me, first thing we’ll have to do, sort you out with a cellphone.’
Betty smiled. A cellphone. She could not imagine herself with a mobile phone. But she was sure she could get used to it.
Betty stood in the doorway to Alexandra’s studio, watching while she collected things into plastic bags and hunted for her sunglasses, which were on top of her head.
‘I got us a picnic,’ Alexandra was saying, ‘it’s such a lovely day.’
They walked through the sunshine to Soho Square and Alexandra flapped out a vintage Black Watch rug and spread out sandwiches and dips and a half-bottle of wine.
‘I sometimes forget it’s summer at all, cooped up in that place from dawn to dusk. Cheers.’ She handed Betty a plastic cup and held hers towards it. ‘To summer. And to your amazing grandmother!’
Betty took a sip of wine and looked at Alexandra expectantly.
‘Had such a fascinating chat with David. I really wish you’d been there. He’d heard of most of those clubs and they were, literally, the first jazz clubs in London.’ She dragged a breadstick through a pot of hummus and waved it around as she talked. ‘I mean, your grandmother was trail-blazing. She was out there, in the thick of it, way before the Bloomsbury set, way before anyone had even heard of the Bright Young People.’
‘Bright Young People?’
‘Yes, they were a social set, back in the twenties. Crazy, wild hedonists. Written about in all the newspapers. They were like, I suppose, the equivalent of the Primrose Hill set today, you know, all leaping in and out of bed with each other, all thinking they were terribly fabulous and important. But, you know, this wasn’t really established until well into the decade. At this point,’ she pulled out the Sandy Beach and the Love Brothers programme, ‘this was all brand new. All these clubs,’ she pointed at the matchbooks, ‘the first of their kind. And what’s really interesting is that your grandmother doesn’t seem to have frequented any of the clubs that came later, when the scene was really established. It’s like she came and then she went.’
‘Back to Guernsey.’
‘Well, yes, probably. So she missed out on all the really juicy stuff. But in a way, far more thrilling to be there at the start. Breaking new ground.’
‘Did you find out who any of these people are, all these black guys?’
‘Well, I’m assuming they must be musicians. There was a big influx after the war. And this lot,’ she pointed again at Sandy Beach, ‘part of the Southern Syncopated Orchestra, and they were massive. I mean, they played for the King, played all the biggest venues. Huge deal. And there were dozens of them, from all over: the States, the Caribbean, Africa. It looks like your grandmother might have been a bit of a groupie.’ She held out the photograph of Arlette sitting on the floor between the legs of the well-dressed black men.
Betty laughed. ‘No way,’ she said. ‘Not Arlette.’
‘Well, darling, a few weeks ago would you have thought it possible that Arlette might have been a jazz club habitué?’
‘No, but I can believe it. As surprising as it is, I believe it. But being a groupie? No.’
Alexandra removed some slices of cucumber from a tuna sandwich and said, ‘Well, sweetie, you knew her better than anyone. And maybe we’ll never know the truth. But David’s going to fish out some more stuff about this jazz orchestra, see if we can find out more about them. Between us all we’ll stitch some kind of bigger picture together.’ She bit off some sandwich and chewed it thoughtfully. ‘Did you get anything?’ she asked. ‘On your mission yesterday?’
Betty beamed. ‘Yes!’ She told Alexandra about the tree in the back garden of the house in Kensington, the A and the G, the double X, and she told her about the cottage by the river, the blue plaque, Gideon Worsley. Alexandra’s eyes sparkled with delight.
‘A portraitist,’ she said, folding up the packaging of her mainly uneaten sandwich and putting it back into an empty carrier bag. ‘Well, then,’ she lit a cigarette, ‘there’s only one thing for it. The National Portrait Gallery. Let’s go.’
‘What, now?’
‘Yes. Finish that up, and we can walk over there right now, see if anyone’s ever heard of this Gideon Worsley character. You never know,’ she said, ‘they might even have some of his work on display.’
‘But, don’t you have to get back to work?’
‘Yes, I most certainly do. And I most certainly have no intention of doing so. This is much, much too exciting.’
36
1920
ARLETTE, LILIAN AND Minu stood together before the Kingsway Hall, chattering excitedly. They were all dressed extravagantly in chiffon and bugle beads, with ornate hair decorations, velvet slippers, and lips painted carmine red. Lilian had her arms linked through Arlette and Minu’s and was hopping from foot to foot.
‘Do you think there might be anybody famous there?’ she asked.
Minu smiled and said, ‘Well, we shall be there.’
‘We are not famous, Minu,’ chided Arlette.
‘No,’ said Minu, ‘we are infamous.’
‘We are that neither.’
‘We are potentially infamous.’
‘Well, that’s as maybe,’ she conceded.
‘Do you think we will even recognise him?’ Lilian asked breathlessly. ‘I mean, it has been a long time since we last saw him. Do you think he will recognise us?’
‘Lilian,’ said Arlette, tiring greatly of the fevered anticipation that she had been subjected to since the tickets had arrived in the post two days earlier, ‘we are here to see a performance of jazz music by a world-renowned orchestra. We are not here to ogle the famous and make eyes at Mr Pickle.’
‘Well,’ said Lilian, ‘you may not be, but I certainly am. Oh, oh, look! Is that Sarah Bernhardt over there?’
Arlette turned to see an elderly lady in a regal headdress. ‘No, of course it isn’t. Look, that lady has two complete legs.’
They all peered at the lady in question and agreed that yes, she did appear to have both her legs.
They ascended into the hall and fanned themselves with their programmes, for it was a steamy July night and they were half-crushed by a crowd of hundreds. Lilian’s head darted around like that of a sparrow looking for worms, while Minu and Arlette took in their surroundings more circumspectly.
Arlette was rather more anxious than she wished to appear. There had been a covering note attached to the tickets, in Godfrey’s now familiar neat handwriting, which had said: ‘My dear ladies, please do come by and say hello when we have finished our performance. I will be looking out for you.’
Arlette had not known whether this meant that they would be allowed backstage, that they would be seated and entertained, subject to Godfrey Pickle’s full-hearted attentions, or that they were to wait like everyone else at the stage door, like hopeful pigs around a trough, for a glimpse and an autograph. She almost thought she should not like to find out, and that it would be safer and less humiliating just to go straight home when the show ended.
A bell sounded the start of the show and th
ey found their way up dark staircases to their fine seats in the front row of the stalls. The hall was filled with the sparkle of chatter and anticipation, the rustle of people finding their way to their seats, the flutter of a hundred hand-held fans flapping away at the intense heat.
‘Look! There!’ Lilian pointed rather crudely across the theatre to a box. ‘That’s Ivor Novello! Look!’
‘Ssh,’ said Arlette, throwing apologetic glances towards the people seated near them. She glanced across the hall and saw that it was indeed Ivor Novello, and the thought that a man of such standing in the world of popular music should be sitting in prime seats to watch her friend Godfrey Pickle perform on his clarinet brought shivers down her spine.
The lights went down, the curtains rose and Arlette straightened herself in her seat. And then the spots illuminated and there they were, the Southern Syncopated Orchestra, all smart in matching black suits and bow ties, some in bowler hats. Unlike a traditional orchestra there was no warming up, no creaking of bows on violins, no dull plunking of piano keys and ponderous thumps on bass drums. They smiled first at the audience and then at each other, and they launched straight into their first number.
Arlette strained to pick out Godfrey from amongst the abundance of musicians squashed together elbow to elbow upon the stage, until Lilian shoved her roughly with her own pointy elbow and said, ‘There he is! Look! There, on the left, see, without a hat.’
Arlette’s eyes found him and she felt her heart expand and contract, her stomach convulse. She pushed Lilian’s elbow from the arm of her seat. ‘He looks well,’ she said.
‘He is the most handsome man on the stage,’ breathed Lilian.
‘I would beg to differ,’ whispered Minu. ‘Do cast your eyes upon the gentleman playing the double bass ...’
All three women turned their gaze upon the double bassist, and yes, he was handsome. He was lighter-skinned than Godfrey, his features were more even and his face more youthful, but he did not, to Arlette’s eye, have the same air of intelligence and neither did he have – and it was not a phrase she could ever utter out loud or even admit to being aware of – the same animal magnetism.
