A Vision of Loveliness (28 page)

Janey had beaten him back to their table.

‘How was your rumba?’ He was afraid she’d read his thoughts.

‘Very nice. Tiny bit rheumatic,’ and her face smiled sheepishly at him while she mentally ran through the wardrobe for the following night in search of something Sergio hadn’t seen. The new jade-green chiffon and paper taffeta creation that Lawrence Green had given her might be nice. It had cost slightly more than the usual quick feel (the workroom were up to their eyes in velvet speciality models for Debenham and Freebody and Goldie had had to nip down to John Lewis for some bias binding) but it had definitely been worth it.

Jane smiled absently at Johnny and sipped at her Grand Marnier while imagining herself stretched out on the bed in Sergio’s suite at the Connaught (you really could walk home from there) screaming ‘bracelet length!’ at the moment of climax: it still made him laugh and, besides, she quite wanted another bracelet. Blue didn’t go with everything.

Johnny gazed at the suddenly very sexy look in her half-closed eyes and immediately proposed again.

He’d proposed pretty much every date since. She never actually said no outright – a girl had to eat – but she was getting sick of being asked, of his assuming that she would say yes eventually. He’d probably be at it again tomorrow after the double date if he got the chance – he went down on one knee sometimes (usually when he was tight). Did she want to be married to him? She certainly didn’t want to
get
married. She thought again of Doreen in the yellow jerseylaine coatee.

Suzy asked her if he’d proposed and seemed quite surprised – fucking cheek – when Jane said yes as a matter of fact he had. Cow. She was even more surprised that Jane had turned him down.

‘You must be out of your tiny mind.’

‘I reckoned he was probably joking.’

‘Men never joke about a thing like that. You should have bitten his hand off.’

‘I don’t need to be married. I’m making nearly fifteen guineas a week what with the Debenham and Freebody job and all the showroom work. And the Double Dates should get us more bookings.’

‘Might do. Might not. A gimmick like that might work too well. A woman actually stopped me in Fortnum’s this morning. If we become the face of Frockways, nobody else will touch us. Besides, none of this is for ever, darling. Do you really want to be doing Paris turns and being nice to Sergios in ten years’ time? More to the point, will anyone even want you to? This is a young woman’s game. Even Iris used to be a model, you know, darling – house model at Wondercoat, in all the magazines, ten guineas a week
then
– now look at her: three quid a week alimony from Mr Iris and the odd handout from Dougie if she comes across. Or you end up like Madge, selling your body to the Reggies of this world just to keep the vet from the door.’

And there was Johnny offering to rescue her from ending up like Iris and Madge. Some rescue. He only made about three grand a year at his job in the City. You couldn’t live happily ever after on that kind of money. You could live on macaroni cheese and hand-knitted woollies and last season’s sweat-stained satin evening gowns ever after but what was happy about that?

He didn’t really love her. How could he? He loved the hourglass figure, the model gowns, the perfect make-up all right, but one whiff of the marrow moussaka and he’d be back sniffing round Amanda – or his Streatham fancy-piece.

And he had the cheek to ask what she was doing in a place like this. A place like what? And she looked around her at the chandelier and the china ornaments and the gilded mirrors and the beautiful white sofas and wondered what kind of place he had in mind. Four bedrooms in Barnes or Kingston or Wimbledon or Esher or somewhere? With nice neighbours. And mingy little ‘young marrieds’ drinks parties –
Allow two to three drinks per person or three bottles for ten people.
And poxy ‘mmm-did-you-make-these-yourself?’ coffee mornings and snobby rotten dinner parties of lousy French food wearing a cheap black frock (home-made, even. People did) being groped over the drying-up by other people’s husbands whose wives, you bet your sweet life, did not understand them at all. Where the nearest any of the women got to a job was manning the bloody cake stall at the school fête.

So long as everything was cooked and washed and starched and ironed and polished and waxed and vacuumed and baked and bottled and sewn and roasted and wiped and brushed and swept and perfumed and combed and disinfected she’d never have to earn another penny, pay another bill, open another door, wear another waspie, mow another lawn, open another bottle, empty another dustbin, read another book, pluck another eyebrow, wax another leg, paint another wall, slap another cheek, suck another cock. And she’d rather fucking die.

Chapter 21

To begin the story of Norbury we must
go back in time to 50 million years
ago to the time known as the Eocene
period when this area of south-eastern
England was covered by sea.
*

Annie shuffled in at half nine with a cup of tea, the
Daily Express
and two dozen red roses – ‘Please forgive me for being such a brute’. Handwritten in a man’s writing. He must have been up at the crack of dawn seeing to that.

‘Suzy and Love’s Young Dream are having a lie-in.’

That was one way of putting it. Suzy and her Mr Swan were at it like knives in the big pink-quilted bed next door. You could hear the velvet headboard banging against the wall. There was a mark on the wallpaper already.

‘You’d think he could leave the poor little cow alone.’

Annie muttered her way back to the kitchen and Jane shut the door behind her and climbed into her waiting bath. She made up and dressed as carefully as she would for a date. More carefully. Not just to wind up Doreen. Not just to cheer up Uncle George. This was going to be the full passing-out parade.

The whole flat already reeked of flowers so she decided to take the roses down to Norbury. They clashed rather boldly with the violet dress and coat –
Run the risk of bad taste rather than dress like a mouse
. The whole effect was very Bronwen Pugh Goes Hospital Visiting. It was a bit chilly to go without a coat but she would be in the car most of the time and, besides, she’d decided to ritz it to them good and proper with the mink scarf and matching flowerpot hat that Sergio had given her for her birthday. She had just got the scarf to sit straight when the porter buzzed up with the magic words: ‘Your driver is here, Miss James.’

Henry’s Bill had a wedding to go to, so the Bentley was being driven by Henry’s Bill’s Bob. He was holding the door open but she had to walk round the car to get to it. He wanted her where he could see her in the rear-view mirror.

The car creamed away into Knightsbridge where ladies of a certain age – messers, by the look of them – were out killing time, dressed up to the nines, trying things on and stealing squirts of scent until the stores shut at one and they skulked back home to a tin of soup in their sunless flats in Lowndes Square.

You never saw a pram in Sloane Street. Sloane Street babies were walked by nannies in parks and squares, not by mummies in high streets. Over Chelsea Bridge into the red-brick terraces of Battersea and Clapham and it was a different story. Clapham pavements were chock-a-block with huge old baby carriages and funny, low-slung pushchairs all parked outside shops with hand-knitted bundles of shit and sick strapped inside them, screaming with outrage while stupid old women with no nappies to wash stopped and coochied and nosily matched size for age. Older children, too large to strap in and wheel about, had to be dragged in and out of shops being refused things by women with faded headscarves and cross faces. Young women, really, but aged at a stroke by the magic ring that had taken away their dressing tables and left big, fat prams in their place.

Jane smugly snuggled her nose against her mink scarf sniffing the sweet expensive smells that clung to the fur: Jolie Madame; Chanel No 5 and a ghostly whiff of Miss Dior. As they cruised past Streatham Common, Jane snapped open her alligator bag – would any of the Deekses even know it was real? Would they even dream how much it cost? – took out her compact and checked her face. She could see the shy, randy little eyes of Henry’s Bill’s Bob watching in the rear-view mirror from under the patent-leather peak of his cap. He was actually very nice-looking in a skinny sort of way. High, slightly girlish cheekbones and a really lovely mouth. Her lipstick was perfectly all right but she put some on anyway, rubbing the waxy red stick across her mouth and yumming her lips together to spread the colour evenly across her smile. She saw him lick his own lips in sympathy.

‘It’s Bob, isn’t it?’

He nodded. A horny little lump in his throat made speech impossible.

‘You don’t have a tissue or something, do you?’ What a sexy little word that was:
tissue
.

He fumbled in the pocket of his cheap blue suit and passed her his clean white handkerchief – show, not blow.

‘I can’t possibly use this.’

‘No. It’s all right. It doesn’t matter. It’ll wash.’

Only it wouldn’t wash. Henry’s Bill’s Bob lived at home in Ilford with his old mum who wouldn’t have approved of lipstick on his laundry. He watched Jane’s lips make their Plum Crazy monogram on the corner and thought of other uses for her second-hand kiss.

They finally hit Norbury.

‘It’s the next on the left, then second right.’

Moments later, the long, shiny, coffee-coloured car purred to a halt outside number sixty-three. Parking was not a problem in Pamfield Avenue. Uncle George used to park his old banger outside but then it packed up and he couldn’t afford to get another one. Doreen always said the Big End went but that wasn’t actually the trouble. She just liked saying it.

Only two vehicles ever parked in the street now. One belonged to Mr Nottage at number fourteen. Mr Nottage was a travelling salesman and Doreen, who had read (but never quite finished) an Agatha Christie about one of these, was convinced that he was a mass murderer. Or a bigamist. One of the two. The other vehicle was the Ripley Removals pantechnicon. Ripley Bros was painted on the side in letters three feet high. It usually lived in a lock-up in Thornton Heath but sometimes the Bros drove home in it after a late job and left it in the avenue, lowering the tone.

Jane knew that something was seriously the matter the moment the car pulled up. The windows had been cleaned, the hydrangea had finally got its winter crew-cut, there were washed milk bottles on the front step (which had been gingered up with cardinal red) and there was a pot of daffodils by the path. The upstairs bedroom curtains (freshly laundered and hanging flowery side out) twitched as Jane opened the gate and June was at the front door before she got there. She was wearing a quilted nylon housecoat covered with pink cabbage roses and an apron. She looked like she’d been wallpapered.

‘I didn’t want you to knock, just in case she was having her nap.’ She spoke in a peculiar, nursey stage whisper. The hall lino had been polished – how did you polish lino?
Why
did you polish lino? – and there was a sickly smell of baking coming from the kitchen.

You could see that June was having the time of her fucking life just by the way she wiped her hands on her pinny. She washed them all the time: it was the nursiest thing she could think of – short of pinning a watch to her chest and walking up and down the stairs with a jug of warm piss. The pinny – pin tucks, pleats, gathers, drawn-thread embroidery, satin-stitch initials, you name it, Georgette had splashed Ribena on it – represented her last term’s work at school. She got a certificate for it.

‘How’s college?’

College was just fine. The Old Doreen would have far rather June went out and got a job to pay for her keep (particularly now that Jane’s leaving had left the housekeeping forty bob short) but she had quite liked the idea of a ‘daughter’ who was a teacher. The very thought of it had got June an automatic upgrade from ‘my late sister’s girl’. The New Doreen didn’t know what bloody day it was.

June didn’t want to chat.

‘I’ll get the kettle on. She’s in here.’ And, bold as brass, June opened the door to the front room which was now home to the telly (much better ITV reception on the street side of the house), several migrant pouffes and June’s entire glass animal collection tricked out across the mantelshelf. Every now and then she’d come home with a new specimen tenderly wrapped in newspaper but they all looked like the bastard children of a gazelle and a giraffe. Jane reckoned they fiddled with the glass first then made up the animal afterwards. Like those poodly things made of skinny pink balloons you got at funfairs.

In the corner lurked an enormous wooden playpen where Georgette sat on her fat plastic backside, furiously whacking at a celluloid clown contraption. She wanted it to lie down and shut up but the painted smile kept lurching upright again, dongling cheerily as it rolled with each punch. Eventually, Georgette pushed it flat and laid the puzzle-bricks box on top of it.

‘Night-night,’ she said firmly. She was her mother’s daughter.

No one took a blind bit of notice.

Uncle George didn’t hold with the play pen – ‘She’s not a wild animal. You ought to let her run about more’ – but he didn’t want her running about anywhere near him. He’d sneaked off down the end of the garden before June could get Georgette into her coat and boots for a bit of fresh air so she just popped her back in her cage. She was all right. Still wasn’t talking, mind you. The only words so far were ‘June’, ‘Wibena’, ‘night-night’ and ‘wee-wee’. June was a bit worried about this – they were doing Child Development at college this term.