A Vision of Loveliness (8 page)

‘It was really super of you to bring it back. Luckily I had a spare set of keys but it was still a huge pain. However did you track me down?’

She sank down on to one of the little chairs and reached into the bag for her compact. She didn’t even look to see if the money was there. Jane sat down beside her and peeped at herself in the mirror.

‘Just lucky really. There was your photograph and some Carpenter’s matches inside. I thought I’d come here first. I only work round the corner and I didn’t fancy going back to that pub.’

The girl pulled a face – a pretty face, but a face.

‘Not your local then? Don’t blame you. Anyway I can’t thank you enough. You’re an absolute darling. Take your coat off now you’re here. You must stay and have a drink. What a divine coat and skirt!’ Oh my dear, ‘coat-and-skirt’. Get her. Lady Muck.

She examined Jane with her head on one side as if sizing up the mismatch between head and body.

‘You really ought to wear your hair up.’

‘It only falls down.’

‘Not if you backcomb a bit underneath and then pin it right. Come here.’

She took the pack of hairpins out of the crocodile bag and, without even asking, began to twist and spray Jane’s hair into a neat chignon.

‘French pleats are nicer,’ she said, checking her own smooth profile in the mirror, ‘but your hair’s a bit long. Want to borrow a lipstick?’

It was wonderful. More wonderful than the suit really. Jane could have sat there all afternoon just looking at herself. The girl stood next to her, smiling, obviously waiting for Jane to smile back so Jane pulled her lips into a grateful shape.

‘That’s better. Do you not have a bag?’

‘I can’t afford a really nice one so I just keep my purse in my coat pocket.’

‘Tell you what. You borrow this one. I’d look bonkers carrying two.’

She handed Jane a black suede pochette she’d been carrying. Just right with the shoes.

‘You can give it back to me later.’

She finally took a proper look at the inside of the crocodile bag and took out the envelope. She still didn’t actually count it.

‘This’ll come in handy. I think this calls for a little celebration.’

Jane left her coat and carrier bag hanging on a hook and she followed the girl downstairs.

‘We haven’t introduced ourselves. I’m Suzy. Suzy St John.’

‘Jane. Jane James.’

‘Good name. Your own? Mine isn’t.’

They reached the bar where some of the life seemed to have leaked out of the little group.

‘Everybody, this is Janey James who has brought back my lovely crocodile bag and all my lovely winnings. Janey darling, this is Madge and Sylvia,’ Madge was the one with the laugh, ‘and this is Derek, Reggie and Bob and this disreputable-looking creature is Alpaca Pete.’

Pete took Jane’s hand and sized her up with his dirty brown eyes.

‘Peter Benson. How do you do?’

It was a posh voice but probably dyed rather than natural (Jane should know). He wore cavalry twill trousers, a lemon-yellow alpaca cardigan and a paisley silk cravat. Doreen would have had him down as a poof but he was just a man in a yellow cardigan.

They hadn’t looked at Jane when she came in but she wasn’t invisible now. They made room at the table while Suzy organised her little celebration.

‘I think we’d better make it a magnum, don’t you, Ted my darling?’ She crackled two of the crisp blue fivers and waved away the change. ‘Have a drink on me, Ted,’ she whispered. Flash.

Ted swerved out from behind the bar in his dapper maroon mess jacket and little black bow tie. He had a huge ice bucket in one hand and a bouquet of champagne saucers in the other. Jane knew about these, mainly from her etiquette books but also from Doreen’s sideboard which contained an odd pair – both pinched from the one and only wedding reception she’d agreed to go to. Jane used to drink cream soda out of them when Doreen was out. Cream soda was actually nicer, she thought, as she sipped the sour, icy bubbles.

There were lots of nice things to eat on the table. A mixed plate of smoked salmon and fresh crab sandwiches (on brown) and a huge glass dish divided into sections for Twiglets, Cheeselets, cheese straws, cheese footballs and green olives with red stuff inside. The glass ashtrays were printed with a picture of the Walrus and the Carpenter eating oysters. Similar prints covered the walls of the bar, as well as some grimy brown oil paintings showing silver trays heaped with lobsters and prawns and glassy-eyed fish. Jane sat there smiling over her champagne glass and nibbling shyly at a crab sandwich. She hadn’t said much but that probably wouldn’t matter. She looked nice, that was the important thing.

‘So what do you do, Janey?’ asked one of the men. Reg? Bob?

‘At the moment I’m working in the Albemarle Arcade, at Drayke’s.’ People always said ‘at the moment’ as if they were about to switch to something much, much better.

‘Ah, indeed,’ said Pete, ‘home of the alpaca cardigan.’

‘Done any modelling?’ wondered Reg. They were starting to sound like the awful man in the pub but Suzy joined in too, looking approvingly at Jane’s carefully casual pose.

‘You should, you know. Perfect for it.’

‘Suzy does modelling, don’t you, darling?’
The great advantage of this line of work is that you need only
be
a model. You don’t ever actually have to
do
any modelling to qualify.

‘Bits and pieces. Ooh, did I show you my composite Dickie made for me?’

Suzy reached into the bag and dug out the card with her photos on it. ‘He wants twenty guineas to make up three hundred but I’m not sure I really want photographic work. You have to get up too early. I’d much rather stagger around a showroom in a pretty frock for an hour or two. Money for old rope, darling,’ she said this to Jane.

The restaurant had finally given up hope of any more customers and the champagne was disappearing fast. Pete leaned over and stroked Jane’s best stockings appreciatively.

‘So! Are we all heading over to Dougie’s flat? You going to join us, Janey? Glass of Chablis. A few oysters? Spot of lobster?’

He nodded meaningfully at Ted the barman who disappeared through a side door, returning moments later with a huge parcel, beautifully wrapped in brown paper with drawings of oysters and carpenters printed all over it in navy-blue ink.

‘Mr Carter has made up your order, sir.’

He didn’t wink exactly but his voice seemed to be winking. No money changed hands.

‘Do come. It’ll be fun.’

Suzy was being helped into the blue sack jacket that matched her dress. Over that she wore a fingertip-length black Persian lamb coat: shawl collar; three-quarter-length sleeves (bracelet length) and long black leather gloves.

‘You look like a million dollars, Suzy my darling,’ purred Pete. ‘Very smart for a Saturday morning.’ Everyone thought this was very funny.

‘Susan always dresses so well,’ smarmed the woman called Sylvia.

‘Yes,’ muttered Pete, ‘and so
quickly
.’

Jane got her bag and her rotten grey coat from upstairs but couldn’t bear to put it on. Suzy seemed to sense the problem immediately.

‘Tell you what, darling,’ she whispered. ‘I don’t think that those buttons Do. You. Any. Favours. At. All. Do you?’

Quick as anything, she had pulled the nail scissors out of her bag and in the time it took the others to get their coats on she had snipped off all six of the big red plastic lumps and the stupid great half-belt thing at the back.

‘That’s
miles
better. You can hold it together edge-to-edge with the pockets.’

It did look better, a lot better. But she should have asked just the same.

Pete led the way to a big brown car parked outside.

‘We’ll all fit in the Rover, won’t we? It’s not far.’

Pete drove and the rest piled in after him, the girls perched on the men’s laps. Jane got Derek who had one hand on her knee and the other round her waist the whole way. He had a friend who was a photographer – funny the way they all did.

Chapter 7

Most parties can be improved by
having a few pretty girls around.

‘Dougie’s place’ turned out to be a big luxury flat up behind Selfridges somewhere.

‘Mrs Simpson used to have the one on the first floor.’ Suzy’s voice was slightly distorted by the fact that her mouth was stretched wide as she reapplied her lipstick in the mirrored wall of the automatic lift. ‘Dougie’s old mum says there used to be Secret Service men all over the place whenever the Prince of Wales popped round. Never saw the same milkman two days in a row.’

Jane had read about ‘luxury’ flats in the
News of the World
. She’d never been quite sure exactly what they meant by ‘luxury’, but she now decided it must mean white wall-to-wall carpet, central heating, glass coffee tables, two bathrooms, a real bar with little stools and every drink you could possibly want. It also meant a great big painting of a girl with no clothes all done in blues and greens and purples as if she was covered in bruises. Jane had a good nose round when she went off to the toilet. Lavatory.
Lavatory
. She opened one door but it was a cupboard full of beer and wine and whisky and Dubonnet and boxes of chocolates and great big tins of Twiglets and cheese footballs. The bathroom was wonderful: thick, thick carpet; fat pink towels on a hot chromium-plated rail and matching pink toilet paper –
lavatory
paper – with a spare roll hidden under a great big dolly in a yellow lace crinoline.

There were already people at the flat when they arrived, all sat drinking in the vast, L-shaped sitting room. There were a couple of men (who brightened up no end when Jane and Suzy walked in) plus a fat platinum-blonde called Connie who was still wearing last night’s cocktail frock. She said she was ‘going on somewhere afterwards’ but you could tell from the state of her hair – which looked like a lacquered bird’s nest – that she’d never actually made it home. Next to her on the gold brocade settee was a very, very thin dark-haired woman in a turquoise suit. She looked like the Duchess of Argyll with a headache and her lipstick was all stuck to her capped front teeth. Her name was Iris and she was divorced. Her face sank like a failed sponge at the sight of Jane and Suzy.

‘Iris,
darling
,’ lied Suzy. ‘Cheer up, sweetie. It may never happen.’

‘Lovely woman, Iris,’ she explained later in an undertone, ‘give you anything: smallpox; syphilis . . .’

Iris liked to give as good as she got.

‘And who’s your little friend, Susan?’

Cheek. The volume in the room had dropped, ready for a bit of theatre. Iris could be very good value once she got warmed up. Jane picked out a nice ritzy voice.

‘Jane James. And you are?’

‘Iris Moore.’

‘How do you do, Mrs Moore?’

It worked really well. The ‘Mrs’ definitely took the wind out of her sails. Aged her ten years for a start.

Dougie was an old army pal of Reggie’s: a posh old lech with a handlebar moustache and wandering hands. He was wearing a Sexy Rexy double cashmere cardigan, a checked Viyella shirt and a cravat. What Doreen would call a right ponce. Dougie, who had begun life with a two-gin start on the rest of the world, had been drinking solidly since just after breakfast but, drunk or sober, he was a good host and stepped in at once with offers of drinks and more drinks. It wasn’t really his flat; it belonged to his mother who was installed in the corner. Dougie managed to keep up appearances cravat-wise but he actually had his digs over a laundrette in Paddington.

Dougie had swelled with pride and happiness at the sight of Jane and Suzy. He had resigned himself to spending the afternoon with his 75-year-old mother and the dry, sour prospect of Connie or Iris for a bit of slap and tickle later (Reggie said they usually came across after a few stiff drinks and a bit of help with the gas bill) but this was much more like it. Or failing that there was always Good Old Madge.

‘Hello. Ladies, ladies, ladies. Hello, Madge old girl. Just what the doctor ordered. Got to look after myself, you know. I said to Reggie just now, “If I’m not in bed by ten o’clock, I’m going home.” ’ Shrieks of polite laughter from the sofa. Dougie leered happily in Jane’s direction. Nobody seemed to mind her gatecrashing.

‘What’s your poison, my love? We can cater for your every whim here, you know. Little drop of fizz?’

‘Super.’

Jane had taken up a pose on the sofa, her crossed legs revealing a couple of inches of firm, young thigh. Alpaca Pete was out in the kitchen shelling lobsters and Madge and Sylvia – who always pulled their weight – cut up the flesh and arranged it on some toothpicks they found in a little novelty holder on the bar. Jane helped herself to a bit of the lobster. Very nice. Much nicer than crab. Or whelks. Not that they ever had whelks in Norbury. Doreen said they were common but they were actually just far too chewy for a woman with all her own teeth.

Dougie returned with a crystal saucer full of bubbles and perched his cavalry-twilled arse on the arm of Jane’s sofa, the better to leer at her bust. He didn’t actually twirl the ends of his moustache but he looked as if he might.