Before I Met You

by Lisa Jewell

  ‘Good morning,’ she shouted into the intercom. ‘I’m trying to trace someone for an inheritance and I’m looking for someone who might have lived in this block for a very long time.’

  There was a pause and a crackle, and then the jolly-sounding man sighed and said, sounding almost disappointed not to be able to help, ‘I’ve been here for six months.’

  ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘never mind. Do you happen to know if anyone else in this building has been here longer?’

  ‘Nobody in this building talks to anyone else,’ he hissed, camply. ‘Stuck up Londoners.’ She noticed then that his accent was northern. ‘But there is a very very old lady up on the top floor. Smells of wee. She might do you.’

  Betty wrinkled her nose. ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘What flat number is she?’

  ‘No idea, love, but if I buzz you in, you could go up and knock on some doors.’

  Betty paused. The building was dank and depressing and she didn’t really love the idea of an old lady who smelled of wee. But this was as close as she was going to get to some answers, so she said, ‘Yes, great, that would be brilliant.’ And heaved the door open when he buzzed it.

  The interior of the small block was every bit as unappealing as the exterior, and she picked her way up the concrete stairs gingerly. There were only two doors at the top floor, one was painted pink and decorated with plastic flowers and garden gnomes. The other was painted dark blue and had a threadbare welcome mat outside. She looked between the two doors, trying to guess which one might belong to the incredibly old lady, and decided on the blue one, knocking on it gently with her knuckles.

  She heard noises behind her door, shuffling and scuffling, muttering and moaning and she held in her breath, suddenly nervous about the imminent encounter. Then she heard catches and locks being pulled across the door before it opened against a chain and she saw a very tiny woman with dyed black hair and heavily pencilled-in eyebrows staring up at her. ‘Wrong house,’ she whispered. ‘You have the wrong house.’

  Her voice was strongly accented – Russian possibly, or Polish. She went to close the door again but Betty put her hand against it. ‘How long have you lived here?’ she asked urgently.

  ‘Wrong house!’ she shouted out again.

  ‘Please!’ called Betty. ‘I’m trying to trace someone who used to live over the road, for an inheritance.’

  ‘What!’ the lady stopped pushing against the door and cupped a hand to her ear. Her fingernails were very long and painted burgundy.

  ‘I’m trying to find someone. For an inheritance,’ Betty repeated, enunciating each word precisely.

  ‘No,’ said the woman, ‘I am not the right person. I do not have any inheritance.’

  She went to close the door again and again Betty held it open. ‘I just need to talk to someone who’s lived here for a long time. Please. Can I just ask you a question or two?’

  The woman narrowed her eyes at Betty. ‘What is your name?’

  ‘Betty Dean.’

  The woman smiled, revealing just three teeth. Betty took in the cavernous, rotten caw with silent horror.

  ‘Pretty girl,’ the woman said, peering at her. ‘Very pretty girl. Are you on the game?’

  ‘No!’

  ‘Drugs?’

  ‘No! I’m a nanny!’

  The woman narrowed her eyes again and finally pulled open the door. Betty’s eyes widened at the full sight of her. No more than four foot ten, so thin that every bone in her body was visible through her clothes, she wore a tracksuit made of cream velour with a garish diamanté pattern picked out on the sleeves, and a series of huge medallions around her neck that were so heavy they caused her to stoop. The tracksuit was encrusted in places with old food and other substances which Betty didn’t care to ponder on for too long, and she did, indeed, smell very strongly of wee. Her alarmingly dark hair was piled on her head in an unsavoury bird’s nest with three inches of snow-white roots.

  Betty stayed where she was, feeling quite strongly that she did not want to enter the lady’s flat, and instead she smiled encouragingly and said, ‘What year did you move in here?’

  The lady winced, as though the consideration of such a fact was physically painful in some way. ‘I have been here since 1943. I came during the war. With my baby.’

  Betty nodded, silently acknowledging the likelihood of a terrible story behind her words.

  ‘I am seventy-seven years old. Although I look much older.’

  Betty shook her head. ‘No, you don’t, you –’

  ‘I look a hundred. I feel a hundred. I want to die.’

  Betty looked at her in alarm.

  ‘Don’t be worried about this. It is normal. One day you will be old like me and you will not be pretty any more, and your child will be dead and your husband will be dead and your lover will be dead and you will live alone in this terrible place and you will also want to be dead. Believe me!’

  Betty jumped slightly and then smiled sympathetically, a slightly inconsequential reaction to her words, but all that she could come up with.

  ‘When you came to live here,’ she asked, ‘do you remember at all who lived across the road, in those flats above the Mexican restaurant?’

  ‘Mexican restaurant? What Mexican restaurant?’

  Betty pointed through the small window on the landing towards the street. ‘Down there,’ she said.

  ‘Ach,’ said the woman, ‘the last time I went out there, it was a French restaurant. Everything changes. All the time.’

  ‘And the flats,’ Betty steered the conversation back to saliency. ‘Do you remember who lived there, before they turned them into offices?’

  The woman put her door onto the latch and shuffled towards the window. Betty drew in her breath against her sour aroma. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I remember.’

  Betty’s heart began to race. ‘You do?’

  ‘Yes. How could I forget? It was a home,’ she said, ‘for unwed mothers. Mainly call girls and foreigners. Run by the Church.’

  ‘The Church?’

  ‘Yes. St Anne’s. Do-gooders. No place for children, I would have thought. But there were still children in that place up until a few years back. You could hear those babies screaming. One stopped, another started. That one stopped, another one started. All through the night. And then one day,’ she turned and smiled again, ‘all the babies left, they boarded it up and so it was until they turned it into offices.’ She turned back to the window. ‘And then, of course, I missed the babies.’

  ‘How long do you think it had been a home, when you moved here?’

  The woman shrugged, her tiny bones of shoulders jutting almost out of their sockets. ‘I do not know,’ she snapped. ‘Ask the Church! Ask the do-gooders!’ She relaxed her shoulders again and sighed. ‘So,’ she asked, ‘who is it? Who is this lucky person who is going to get your inheritance?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Betty. ‘But I think it might be one of those screaming babies across the road. Someone called Clara Pickle. Or Clara Jones.’

  ‘What was her date of birth?’

  ‘We don’t know.’

  The old lady shrugged. ‘Well, then, how are you going to find her?’

  Betty stared through the window at the smart offices where Clara Pickle might have started her mysterious life and sighed. ‘I don’t know,’ she said.

  ‘That is a lot of not knowing.’ The woman looked at her sceptically. ‘Go and talk to the Church.’ She tapped her veined temple with one gnarled old finger. ‘Get yourself some knowledge.’

  Betty breathed in huge gulps of fresh air when she left the building a moment later. She tried not to think too much about the lady, whose name she had never asked, tried not to think about her dark, day-to-day life or who cared for her, or how it might be to be so old and care so little for life itself. Instead she headed straight for St Anne’s Church on Wardour Street, hoping desperately that her run of good luck was not about to run out.

  The church looked odd perched be
tween the bars and restaurants, the gaming lounges and betting shops, as if it had been left there accidentally. A plaque commemorated its reopening by Princess Anne after it had been blown apart in the Second World War. And on this sunny Saturday morning in June, the church and its community centre were buzzing with people and activity in a very encouraging manner.

  Betty found the vicar talking with a grimy, tearful man of the street, who kept sniffing very loudly and wiping his streaming nose against the sleeve of his tattered jacket. She sat and waited patiently for a few minutes until finally the homeless man smiled widely, hugged the vicar to him, picked up a filthy rucksack, nodded at Betty and left the building.

  ‘Good morning,’ the vicar boomed, in a soft Scottish accent. ‘Are you looking for me?’

  Betty nodded and got to her feet. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘do you have a moment or two to spare?’

  ‘I have many moments to spare. Today is my official day of spare moments.’ He beamed.

  Betty smiled back and said, ‘Do you know anything about a home for unwed mothers that your Church used to run, in St Anne’s Court?’

  He smiled and held an arm out towards her. ‘This sounds like a moment for spending in my office,’ he said. ‘Do come with me.’

  She followed him into a smart office, across a courtyard, located slightly away from the church itself.

  ‘Now,’ he said, holding the door open for her, ‘we’ve only been on these premises for a few years but I’m pretty certain that everything came with us. For a long time there was no church here to speak of, just a wreck, so all the paperwork was kept together by necessity. And I do vaguely recall something about the home for unwed mothers. Sit.’ He waved at a green chair. ‘Tea?’

  ‘Yes, thank you.’

  He called through his door to someone in an adjoining room for two mugs of tea and then turned back to Betty.

  ‘So, tell me what you need to know.’

  ‘I’m looking for a beneficiary. For my grandmother’s will. She’s called Clara Pickle. And she lived at the address of the home at some point. And that is all I know.’

  ‘Right, so, no date of birth?’

  ‘No date of birth. But I think she might have been mixed race. And her mother’s name might have been Arlette. Or might not have been Arlette. And if it wasn’t Arlette, then I have no idea what it might have been.’

  ‘And her father?’

  Betty blinked. And then she gulped. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘the father. I can tell you all about the father. His name was Godfrey Pickle. He was a really famous musician.’

  The vicar pulled out a large box folder and said, ‘Right, let’s start at the beginning: 1920. That’s when the home was opened. Let’s start there and see where we end up. I’ll call out names, you tell me to stop if you hear anything interesting.’

  It took only about five minutes for the vicar to get to the name Esther Jones.

  ‘Jones!’ said Betty. ‘That was the other name on the will, Clara Jones! Does it say what her baby’s name was?’

  He peered at the piece of paper and sighed. ‘Let me see, hmm, hmm, yes, here it is. Esther Jones was signed into the home on the twenty-second of October 1921. And she gave birth in November 1921. To, yes, a baby girl. Called Clara Tatiana. She weighed seven pounds and fifteen ounces. Mother and baby both well, it says here.’

  Betty felt tingles racing up and down her spine.

  ‘And ... well, it says here that they moved out in January 1922, and that, oh, this is interesting, it gives the name of the father here. And it’s not your Mr Pickle. No, it says here the baby’s father was called Edward Minchin. Yes. Edward John Minchin. Of 24 Rippon Road, London SE.’

  ‘But,’ Betty furrowed her brow, ‘that makes no sense. Why would my grandmother have left all her money to a girl born to two people I’ve never heard of?’

  The vicar shrugged. ‘I have no idea,’ he said. ‘But although you’ve never heard of them, your grandmother clearly had. And now you have the girl’s real name ...’

  She looked at him quizzically.

  ‘Yes. You’ve been looking for a Clara Pickle or a Clara Jones. But she was neither of those, was she? She would have been a Clara Minchin. Clara Minchin of Rippon Road.’ He leaned back into his chair and eyed her conclusively. ‘I think your search might almost be over.’

  51

  1921

  ARLETTE PULLED OPEN the box.

  Leticia watched her sadly, with her hands knitted together.

  ‘I think your room came out of it quite well,’ she said softly. ‘Obviously, I don’t know exactly what you had in there, but it does seem there was very little damage. Your wardrobe stood untouched, and luckily the door was closed so there may be a slight whiff of smoke, but ...’ She fluttered her fingers together, nervously. ‘Oh, I do hope you’re not too disappointed.’

  Leticia had done nothing but apologise for the past three days. She had vowed never to drink another drop of alcohol. And her husband had vowed never to leave her again. Lilian had vowed to relax now that someone was taking responsibility for her mother, and Philip had vowed to take Lilian to stay in his family’s beach-front apartment in Cannes for the whole summer. In many ways the fire had been a blessing. In other ways it had been a tragedy. Family heirlooms turned to ash. Much-loved dresses smoke-damaged beyond repair. All of James’s toys burned to nothing. Photographs gone for ever. And also, intangibly, but overwhelmingly, a loss of the sense of gay innocence that had sat over the house and its inhabitants since the very first moment Arlette had set foot there nineteen months earlier. She’d thought it a magical, enchanted place, and now it was a black carcass, and the family who once lived there all robbed of their sense of entitlement and certainty. Now, for a while at least, it was as though they were no different from anyone else.

  She reached her hands into the box and pulled out her dressing table set, her hair decorations, a box of jewels, framed photographs of her mother, her father in his uniform, a photo album, bundles of Godfrey’s postcards, some delicate underwear, silk stockings, flyers from nights out at clubs, an old cigar box filled with photographs, all in a good state. She pulled out a tapestry she’d been working on, a half-knitted hat, a dozen or so paperback novels and there, right at the bottom, she pulled out a small scrap of muslin. She stared at it for a moment. It had been in the drawer of her bed-stand, where it had lain since she’d first put it there, the day she’d brought it home from Liberty’s perfumery. Another world. Another life. She brought it to her nose and inhaled. It smelled, mainly, of smoke, but beneath the nutty smoke, it still lingered: vanilla and sandalwood. The smell of Godfrey.

  ‘Well,’ said Leticia, ‘are you happy? Has it mainly been saved?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Arlette. ‘Yes. It’s all here. Everything important. Thank you.’

  Leticia sat down heavily and brought her hand to her clavicle. ‘Oh thank goodness. Thank goodness. Finally, some good news. Finally ...’

  Arlette had not seen Godfrey for three days. There had been so much to sort out here, with the Millers. She had not felt able to swan off and leave them to it. But tomorrow they would be moving into a suite of rooms attached to Mr Miller’s London office and a firm of builders had been commissioned to start rebuilding the house. Now she felt it would be perfectly acceptable to move on with her life. And so she prettied herself at the mirror of the room she was sharing with Lilian at the neighbours’ house, changed into a fresh dress and headed for Bloomsbury, to Minu’s rooms.

  ‘I saw Gideon last night,’ said Minu, her hand holding her hair up on top of her head while she fixed it in place with grips.

  Arlette blanched at the mention of his name.

  ‘He looked terrible,’ Minu continued.

  ‘I can’t say that I am terribly unhappy to hear that.’

  Minu glanced at her. ‘I wish I could understand,’ she said. ‘You two were once the closest of friends. So easy together. It doesn’t make any sense to me that you are now so indisposed towards each
other. I feel as if a large chapter of the book is missing.’

  She kept her gaze on Arlette for a second or two, inviting her to confide, but Arlette merely smiled and said, ‘Love follows no rule book. And what of you? Still no dream of a man waiting in the wings to whisk you away?’

  Minu laughed wryly. ‘I am afraid not. No. But it serves me well to be a spinster, since my novel is all about a beautiful but lonely girl, looking for love in the city.’ She smiled and adjusted her hair. ‘There,’ she said, ‘now I look divine. And so do you. Let’s go and find this lovely man of yours and tell him to marry you.’

  They arrived at the Blue Butterfly half an hour later to find someone’s birthday party in full swing. Judging by the number of diarists in the room and the air of barely contained anticipation, it was clearly the birthday party of someone terribly important. Arlette and Minu leaned conspiratorially towards the receptionist and said, ‘Whose birthday, tell tell!’

  ‘Oh, now, girls, I couldn’t possibly say.’

  ‘Of course you can!’ they teased. ‘Tell us immediately!’

  ‘It’s Bertie Langhorn.’

  ‘Oh my goodness!’ they both cried. ‘And he, just this minute, parted from his lovely wife.’

  Arlette smiled at Minu and Minu smiled at her. Bertie Langhorn was a famous actor, very pretty, very rich and recently separated from his childhood sweetheart. Minu had had a terrible crush on him for months. Suddenly the night opened up before them serendipitously, ripe with potential for drama and fun. They took each other by the hand and headed into the club, eyes bright as diamonds, hearts full of mischief, neither of them suspecting for a moment what an unhappy turn the night would take by its closing moments.

  There was a girl backstage whom Arlette had never seen before. At first she thought she might be a cleaner, or a stagehand. But then she saw her coat draped over her arm and her hat held in her other hand, and by the way she was scanning the room, it was clear she had just arrived from the street and was looking for someone.