by Lisa Jewell
‘Henry!’ Leticia chastised. ‘There’s no need for such rudeness. Really.’
Henry merely grimaced and disappeared.
‘Henry!’ called Leticia. ‘Come back here right now and apologise to our guest.’
‘Oh, really,’ said Arlette, ‘it’s fine.’
‘No,’ said Leticia, sternly, ‘it is not fine. Come back here right now,’ she called again, ‘or I will be talking to your father and your allowance will not be making an appearance in your bank account this month. Now, Henry!’
Arlette almost jumped at the authoritative tone of Leticia’s voice and she looked at Lilian in surprise and vague amusement.
Lilian smiled and whispered, ‘Such changes, Arlette. Such changes.’
Henry reappeared in the doorway and stared at Arlette sulkily. ‘I apologise for my comments, Miss De La Mare. Now, if you will excuse me, I have some tiresome domestic chores to attend to.’
He disappeared and Leticia smiled at Arlette. ‘Such terrible boys,’ she said. ‘I am taking them in hand. They will be the most charming boys in London by the next time you visit!’
‘I am sure they will,’ said Arlette. ‘And possibly they will also be uncles.’
Leticia put a hand to her heart and gasped. ‘And me then a grandmother! Well, well, well. What a silly thought. But also so terribly exciting. Now, I must leave you girls to catch up. I have some last-minute party arrangements to discuss. So lovely to have you back, Arlette. Such a treat.’
She left the room and Lilian looked at Arlette and shrugged. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘sometimes bad things do happen for a good reason.’
Arlette accompanied Leticia and Lilian into the West End the next morning, where Lilian was having the last fitting for her party dress and looking for new hairpins with which to ornament her hair. Arlette left them in the dress shop and took herself for a walk through streets that had once been her second home. It was another bright September day, golden and crisp, just like the day last year when she’d walked to the river with Godfrey, when he’d told her he wanted to be with her forever, just before he’d gone to Manchester and left her to her fate with Gideon Worsley.
She found herself wandering carelessly, but maybe somewhere deep down, purposefully, towards Soho. She’d asked Minu last night about the home for unwed mothers. St Anne’s Court, Minu had told her. Just opposite the new flats.
She didn’t have a plan, she just wanted to see. See what someone looked like with Godfrey’s baby growing inside them. She crossed over Soho Square, tatty and tawdry on this bright Saturday morning. Drunks and opium addicts stared at her horribly through glassy eyes and she averted her gaze, walking briskly and with purpose. St Anne’s Court was a short road, equally dirty and sordid, but there, as Minu had said, was the shiny new block of flats, built in the modern style, all gleaming granite and streaky marble.
Arlette stood before the building and looked at the house opposite. On the ground level was a tiny shop selling supplies for cripples and injured soldiers. Above were three floors, all grimy-windowed and unwelcoming. There was no signage to suggest what the building was used for, just the number 12 engraved into the mantel. She watched the building for a while, until, after a moment a young girl scuttled out, hiding her blooming stomach with a bag held across herself. She scuttled back again a moment later, holding a paper bag from a pharmacy to her chest, and Arlette crossed the street urgently towards her.
‘Hello,’ she said.
The girl looked at her in horror.
‘I’m sorry. I don’t mean to alarm you. I’m just ...’ She stopped, suddenly aware of the stupidity of her actions. ‘It’s just,’ she continued, ‘there’s a girl staying here. She’s called Esther. I wondered ...’
‘Esther Jones or Esther Murray?’
‘I’m not sure,’ said Arlette. ‘The one who’s engaged to a coloured man.’
‘Ah,’ said the girl, knowingly, ‘yes, Esther Jones. What about her?’
‘I’m a friend of her fiancé’s. I was just, he asked me to check up on her, while he’s away. To make sure she’s all right.’
‘Well, you’re not allowed in there,’ she said. ‘No one’s allowed in there. But I can tell her you were asking after her. If you like?’
Arlette stared at the grimy building and then back at the grimy girl. There was another world behind those walls, a world she could not come close to imagining.
She shook her head and said, ‘Thank you. But no. It’s fine. As long as she’s all right?’
‘Yes, she’s fine. Her and the baby. Fighting fit.’
‘Good,’ said Arlette, tears blurring her vision, ‘that’s good. Thank you for your time.’
And then she turned and headed back through the dirty streets of daytime Soho towards the glittering dress shop in gleaming, glorious Mayfair.
56
Telegram
Arlette STOP Call immediately STOP Hyd 2362 STOP I have news STOP Call as soon as you can STOP
Lilian
ARLETTE READ THE telegram, once, then twice. She felt no urgency. Just curiosity. ‘I have news.’ It could mean anything. She did not hurry to the exchange. She felt there was no need. Instead she folded the note, and tucked it into her purse, with a half-formed plan to visit the exchange on her way home from work, to where the telegram had been delivered.
But the telegram sat in her purse, calling to her, as the day passed. Why a telegram? she asked herself. If it was just family news, would not a letter have sufficed? Eventually, as the nagging feeling intensified, she asked her manager for an early break and she made her way through the bustling streets of St Peter Port to the main exchange.
The telephone was answered by the operator in Lilian’s apartment block. ‘Hyde Park Mansions, to whom would you like to be connected?’
Arlette asked for the Millers’ apartment and the telephone in their flat was answered by the maid: ‘Good afternoon, Millers’ residence, how may I help you?’
‘I would like to speak to Miss Lilian Miller.’
‘And who shall I say is calling?’
‘This is Miss De La Mare.’
‘Just one moment, Miss De La Mare.’
Eventually Lilian came on the line and Arlette felt herself tense up at the prospect of what she was about to hear.
‘Darling Arlette,’ said Lilian, her voice choked with tears.
‘What?’ snapped Arlette. ‘What is it?’
‘It has been on the news, but I thought it may not have got as far as the Channel Isles.’
‘What, Lilian, what?’
‘Oh, it is too, too sad. The most dreadful thing. The orchestra ...’
‘The orchestra?’
‘Yes, Arlette. The orchestra have drowned.’
Arlette paused, taking it in, trying to make sense of something that sounded, in Lilian’s mangled words, faintly comical. How could an orchestra drown?
‘The SS Rowan. It went down last night. Off the coast of Scotland. There was a collision with another ship. The orchestra were on board, Arlette, nearly all of them.’
Arlette blanched and sunk to her knees. The operator looked at her in alarm. ‘Comment va, Mademoiselle?’ she asked in patois.
‘Godfrey?’ Arlette said.
‘I have no idea; they have not yet released any names. But the whole ship went down, Arlette. The whole ship!’
Arlette breathed in and brought herself up to standing again. No, she thought, it simply could not be true. No, Godfrey would not have been on the ship. He would have been on his way back to London, to marry Esther Jones, to see his baby arrive in the world. He would not have been on the ship.
An image passed through her consciousness as she listened to Lilian sniffing and wailing in her Hyde Park apartment. It was an image of water, dark blue, dark as ink, and a man passing down through it, a smart suit floating from his body like the tendrils of sea anemone, his arms spread out, his eyes open, the eyes of Godfrey Pickle, dead, but smiling as he drifted downwards, smiling and at peace. And
then like an afterthought, drifting down behind him, a golden clarinet, glinting and glittering in the water, following him down to his watery grave. And she knew then that he was dead. Felt it inside herself, sharp as a knife, yet soothing as a lullaby.
Of course, she thought, of course.
She smiled then, the saddest smile she’d ever smiled, and said to Lilian, ‘It’s all right, Lilian. It really is. It’s all right. We’ll wait for news. Just wait for news.’
But she already knew there was no good news. The love of her life was dead. And his baby would have no father.
When it was confirmed three days later that eight members of the orchestra had perished in the icy seas off the coast of Scotland, and that one of them had been ‘world-renowned clarinettist Godfrey Pickle, otherwise known as Sandy Beach’, Arlette sat in her room for a whole day and screamed until her throat was raw.
57
1995
BETTY BARELY SLEPT that night.
Candy Lee had a visitor downstairs and was screaming and banging walls, and the pub over the road had its doors wide open because it was such a warm night and the street was full of the sound of Iron Maiden and long-haired men wearing eyeliner. And, of course, on top of the usual night-time Soho cacophony, there was the sound of John Brightly, on the sofa down below, moaning quietly in his sleep and shouting out every now and then words that sounded like gobbledegook.
But more than the noise was the internal monologue hammering away in her head.
As she lay there, trying and failing to sleep, Clara was in a taxi coming home from the airport. And, as she lay there, trying and failing to sleep, Dom Jones was on a plane coming in to land at Berlin airport.
He’d given her the details of a farmhouse in Gloucestershire he’d looked at on Thursday. ‘Take it,’ he’d said, ‘stare at it. Dream about it.’
She pulled it out from under her pillow now and switched on a torch, not wanting to wake John. The farmhouse was called St Luke’s House. It was part Georgian, part Edwardian and, as she leafed through the details, she saw that it was utterly enchanting in every way, from its bleached blue stucco façade, to its vine-filled orangery, its full-length dining hall with buttressed ceiling and coat of arms, and its sweeping lawns that cascaded down towards fields of corn and rape.
From below she heard Candy Lee reaching her climax and she forced her pillow over her head until it was over. For a moment it was quiet and she turned her attention back to the details of the house. But then it started up again and she felt herself filled with a kind of primal rage.
She had not, she realised, for the full eight weeks of her time in Soho, slept through a whole night without interruptions. And if she did ever manage to sleep through a whole night without interruptions, she had been awoken at five o’clock by the rubbish trucks. And if she had ever managed to sleep through the five a.m. visits from the rubbish trucks then she had been awoken at six a.m. by the first of the market traders arriving to set up their stalls. The trucks and the traders she could stomach. Candy Lee wailing and banging on walls she could not. And so, before she’d had a chance to think through what she was doing, she’d pulled on a cardigan over her pyjamas, climbed down her ladder, tiptoed past John Brightly and marched downstairs to bang on Candy’s door.
It took a moment or two for the door to be opened and when it finally was Betty did not know where to look. There was Candy, dressed in a feathered bolero, leather chaps and PVC boots, her breasts hung out over the top of a cut-out bra. She had a glass of champagne in one hand and in the other – and this was more remarkable to Betty than anything else about her appearance – a half-smoked cigarette.
‘Beautiful Betty!’ Candy beamed at her.
‘You’re smoking,’ said Betty.
‘Yes!’ said Candy.
‘But, I thought you were asthmatic?’
‘I am! Betty! Come in! Finally, you came to see me.’
‘No,’ said Betty, suddenly flustered, ‘listen. Candy. It’s midnight. I’ve got to be up early in the morning for work. I’ve had a really, really, really long day. Could you please, please, PLEASE keep the noise down?’
Candy wrinkled her face up. ‘Noise? What noise?’
Betty blanched, really not wanting to spell it out. ‘The, you know, you and your friend.’
‘What friend?’
Betty grimaced. ‘You know, whoever you have staying with you tonight.’
‘Betty! I have nobody staying with me tonight. I am alone, Betty.’
‘But the ...?’
‘What, Betty?’ Candy smiled at her disarmingly.
‘All the ...’ She paused. ‘All the shouting. And banging. You know.’
‘Oh, Betty, that is just me! Pleasuring myself! There is nobody else. Look,’ she pulled her door open wider and Betty peered in just far enough to see that the entire flat was painted lurid lipstick pink. ‘Look!’
‘Right. Yes. I believe you. It’s just. Well, nothing. I’m just tired and I want to sleep and I’d really appreciate it if you could ... do ... be a bit quieter.’
‘I tell you what, Betty,’ said Candy, her body-language suddenly becoming more hostile. ‘You stop smoking outside my window,’ she waved her cigarette around wildly, ‘I stop being loud. Yes?’
Betty sighed. ‘But, Candy, you’re smoking. I don’t understand.’
‘Yes! I am smoking. I am not passive smoking. Big difference, OK?’ And then, before Betty had a chance to work out any kind of reasonable response to such an unreasonable declaration, the door was slammed in her face.
Betty stood there for a moment. She rubbed her hands hard down her face. She shook her head from side to side. And then she turned and headed back upstairs.
John was still sleeping as she passed him on the sofa. She stopped and looked at him for a while. The moon was shining down onto him and he looked strangely pained, the muscles of his face knotted up under his skin. Instinctively she put a hand to his cheek, cupping it gently to soothe him. His eyes flickered open and he smiled at her.
‘Betty?’
‘Sorry,’ she said, ‘I didn’t mean to wake you. You just looked so anxious.’
He smiled and yawned. ‘I think you’ll find that’s my natural state of being.’
‘No,’ she said, not wanting to play that game any more. ‘No. It’s not.’
He looked at her quizzically.
‘I’ve seen it now,’ she said, ‘the real John Brightly. In the park, chilling out, larking around with cream buns. You can’t fool me any more.’
‘Damn,’ he said. ‘Cover blown.’ He brought himself up to a sitting position and Betty sat down next to him. ‘What are you doing awake, anyway?’
‘Candy Lee,’ she sighed through a yawn. ‘Bringing herself to countless extremely loud orgasms. In sexy lingerie. Jesus. I think I’m done here, you know. I think I’m finished with Soho. My mother was right. It’s not a place to live. My contract’s nearly up and I really think I might have to move on.’
John glanced at her anxiously. ‘Oh,’ he said flatly.
Betty smiled at him. ‘You sound disappointed,’ she said.
He shrugged. ‘Well, you know, I’ve got used to having you around. Where are you thinking of going?’
‘Oh, shit, I don’t know.’ She ran her hands down her face, thinking of St Luke’s House. ‘I have no idea.’ She inhaled loudly, and then she said: ‘Dom Jones just asked me to live with him.’
John blinked. ‘What?’
‘Earlier, when I went round to his. He told me he’s crazy about me and he wants to live in the country with me and become a new person.’ As the words left her mouth she felt the full ridiculousness of them and she laughed wryly.
‘You’re kidding me.’
‘No,’ she laughed again. ‘I’m not. Look.’ She brought the particulars for St Luke’s House down from her mezzanine. ‘He wants to buy this and move me in. He wants to be a “grown-up”.’
The two of them sat side by side staring at the part
iculars for a minute, both trying to form a suitable response.
‘So, that morning,’ began John, ‘you know, when you were coming in, early ...?’
‘Yes. I slept with him. I slept with Dom Jones. You were right.’
John groaned and let his chin fall into his chest. ‘Oh, Betty,’ he said.
‘I know,’ she said. ‘And I know you said I would and I said I wouldn’t, but honestly, John, he can be so lovely ...’
John raised an eyebrow sceptically.
‘Really. He can. And then other times he can be such a prick, and I do really like him, though I definitely don’t think I love him. But look at this place!’ she waved the paperwork. ‘Just look at it! I wouldn’t have to work again. I wouldn’t have to worry about money ...’
‘You wouldn’t ever be able to trust him. Ever.’
Betty sighed and stared at her feet. ‘I know,’ she said. ‘Of course I know. It’s just. Christ. He’s a pop star. He’s a genius ...’
John snorted.
‘Well, some people think he’s a genius. And Arlette lost her chance to spend her life with a world-famous musician. She had that opportunity taken away from her and now it’s being offered to me and I kind of think it’s like history repeating itself and I’d need a really good reason not to take it.’
It was silent for a moment and Betty stared pensively at the carpet beneath her feet.
‘I can think of a really good reason.’
She looked at him curiously. ‘What?’ she said.
‘This,’ he said.
And then he brought her face towards his with warm strong hands and kissed her on the lips.
Betty stared at him. She blinked, once, and said, ‘You kissed me.’
He nodded.
‘Why?’ she said. ‘Why did you kiss me?’
He groaned and got to his feet. He paced towards the window and stared at the street below.
‘No, really,’ she continued. ‘Why?’
He turned, abruptly, and stared at her. ‘Never mind,’ he said quietly. ‘Forget it ever happened.’
