Before I Met You (12 page)

As she slouched down the road towards Shaftesbury Avenue, she took on the demeanour of a loser. She did not want this job. She did not want this life.

The manager at Wendy’s was a very small Spanish man by the name of Rodrigo. He had a moustache that was black and hair that was white, and a very pronounced lisp. He took the form from Betty and sighed when he saw the tea ring stain and the ink smudges. He glanced up at her unhappily, through thickly lashed eyes and looked so incredibly sad that Betty almost wanted to hug him.

‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘What nationality are you?’

‘I’m British,’ she said brightly, trying to atone for her dismally presented application.

He looked at her in surprise, glossy black eyebrows shooting towards his silver hairline.

‘British,’ he repeated.

‘Yes.’

‘Oh,’ he said, ‘how great!’ His sadness seemed to turn then to
sheer
joy, and Betty felt her own heart fill with something good and pure. Finally, someone was pleased to see her. Finally someone thought she was a good thing, by simple virtue of her existence, beyond anything she had said or done, or said she would do or could do. She had merely stated her nationality, a pure accident of her birth, and this small man with a nice face had wanted her.

‘I can have you in for an interview,’ he consulted a huge chunky plastic watch on his hairy wrist, ‘well. Now. Ith good for you? You have time?’ He looked at her keenly through those soulful eyes again and she nodded, very quickly, before she could change her mind. She could not have said no. It would have broken his heart.

His office was a small cubicle at the very end of a long breeze-blocked tunnel beneath the restaurant. The walls were painted gloss white and covered in motivational posters. Bits of paper covered every surface. He asked her some standard questions, but it was clear from the outset that he would offer her the job. And he did.

‘Could I have a trial run?’ she suggested. ‘Just a few days. See if, you know, well …’

‘Thee if you can bear it?’ he asked with a broad smile.

‘Well, no, not that. Just, I’ve never worked in a restaurant before. I may not be very good at it.’

‘Oh.’ He smiled, his fur-covered hands gently holding the edge of his desk. ‘You will be good at it. I can promith you that. Thtart tomorrow? Nine a.m.? If you don’t hate it, we can fill in the paperwork and get you on board. Officially.’ He beamed at her again and offered her one of his furry hands. She squeezed it. It was soft and warm and reminiscent of a spaniel’s ear.

She beamed back at him and said, ‘Yeah. OK. Why not?’

Moments later she was being led back down the long grey tunnel, staring subconsciously at Rodrigo’s generous bottom squashed inside nylon trousers, and then she was shaking his
hand
again and wandering through the greasy mayhem of the restaurant, past the tables of junkies and drunks and back out onto the fresh, bright normality of Shaftesbury Avenue. She stood for a moment like a tree trunk in a rapid and let the crowds surge past her on both sides.

And then she slowly made her way back to the flat, her head suffused and subsumed with total and utter weirdness.

‘Wendy’s?’ her mother cried in horror. ‘You mean the burger place?’

‘Yes,’ sighed Betty, ‘that’s right.’

‘But –
why
?’

‘Because it’s good money. And regular work. Because the boss is really nice. Because it’s free dinners and free lunches. Because the people are … interesting. Because it’s local and I can walk there. And because …’ she sighed, ‘because there’s a bloody recession and no one else would give me a job.’

Her mother sighed too, a sigh weighed down with unspoken well-I-did-warn-yous.

‘It’s
fine
,’ Betty interjected before her mother could say anything annoying. ‘It’s absolutely fine. It’ll do for now. Stop worrying.’

‘I’m not worrying,’ her mother said. ‘Like you said, you’re twenty-two. Why would I be worrying?’

‘Because I’m your baby girl.’

‘Well, yes, obviously you’re my baby girl. But I trust you. You lived virtually alone in that big house with that crazy woman …’

‘She was not crazy.’

‘Well, that sick old woman. You cared for her by yourself. I think you can cope with a bit of real life.’

‘No you don’t.’

‘Yes,’ her mother laughed, ‘I honestly do! As long as you’re happy, that’s all that matters. Have you made any more friends?’

Betty shrugged. ‘Sort of,’ she said. ‘There’s a guy at Wendy’s. A gay guy. Called Joe Joe.’

‘Oh,’ said her mother in delight. Her mother was nuts about gays, had got the ferry all the way to Portsmouth last year to see Julian Clary live at the New Royal. ‘What’s he like?’

Betty thought back to their first conversation the previous day. ‘Hi,’ he’d said, ‘I’m Joe Joe. Nice to meet you.’ His accent put him somewhere in the southern reaches of the Americas.

Betty had smiled. ‘Likewise.’

‘You are very pretty.’

‘Oh. Thank you.’

‘I like your hair.’

‘Thank you!’

‘And you have beautiful eyes. Like a cat. You know. Or a fish.’

‘A fish?’

‘Yeah. A beautiful fish.’ ‘Oh.’

‘I love your accent.’

‘Thank you.’

‘I love the British accent.’

‘Uh-huh.’

‘I love your smile.’

‘Thank you.’

‘You have nice teeth.’

‘Oh, thank you.’

‘I’m from Argentina.’

‘Oh, right. Buenos Aires?’

‘Yes!’ he’d cried with delight. ‘Yes! Buenos Aires! How did you know? You must be, like, psychic or something!’

She smiled at the memory and said, ‘Mad. He’s mad. But lovely.’

At these words the front door opened and Betty found herself face to face with the Asian woman from downstairs. She averted her gaze at once in embarrassment and shuffled her bum across
the
step to allow the woman to pass her. The woman glared at her, through narrowed eyes. Betty looked at her askance and lost her thread for a moment.

‘And I’ve been getting to know the guy outside, you know, the record-stall guy. So I’m getting there, you know …’ she petered off as she became aware of the fact that her downstairs neighbour had stopped halfway up the stairs and was now staring at her expectantly. ‘Erm, hold on Mum, just a sec.’ She put her hand over the receiver and looked at the woman. ‘Yes?’ she asked pleasantly.

‘You,’ said the woman. ‘You live upstairs, yes?’

‘Yes,’ said Betty, uncertainly.

‘You smoke, yes?’

‘Er, yes.’

‘I smell it,’ she chastised, wrinkling her face distastefully. ‘I smell it. It come through my window, into my home.’

‘Erm, sorry,’ said Betty, her heart racing slightly with the stress of confrontation. ‘I can’t see … I mean, I smoke up there, right up there. On the fire escape. It’s not even on the same level as you.’

‘No,’ snapped the woman. ‘It come down. It come down the stairs. It come through my window. It come everywhere. I smell it. Everywhere on my clothes,’ she plucked at her sweater and pulled it to her nose. ‘Hmm? And in my hair,’ she held a lock aloft.

Betty gazed at her, nonplussed. ‘God, I, er, I don’t know what to say. I mean. It’s outside. I don’t really see where else you expect me to smoke.’

‘You stop smoking! Yes! You stop! Then no more problem!’ The woman smiled then, almost encouragingly. ‘Another thing,’ she continued. ‘You in bed over my bed. Your bed squeak. Every time you turn over, I hear
squeak squeak. Squeak squeak
.’

Betty stared at the woman, trying and failing to find a response that wouldn’t end in a bitch fight. Eventually she smiled and said,
‘Sorry
. I had no idea. What would you like me to do about it?’

‘You stop moving so much. You move all the time.’

Betty blinked at her. ‘So,’ she said, ‘you want me to stop smoking. And stop moving in my sleep?’

‘Yes!’ she smiled again, as though delighted to find that she had somehow just solved all her problems in one fell swoop. ‘Yes! Thank you!’ She turned to leave. Betty watched her disappear up the stairs and round the corner. She waited until she heard the woman’s front door click closed behind her and then took her hand away from the receiver.

‘What was that?’ her mother asked curiously.

‘Nothing,’ Betty exhaled. ‘Nothing. Just a neighbour.’

‘Oh,’ said her mother in a tone of voice that suggested she liked the idea of a neighbour.

Betty brought the phone call to an end, her whole body so suffused with rage and indignation that she could no longer form a proper thought.

As she walked into her flat she felt the emptiness of it really hit her, for the first time since she’d moved in. She wished for a flatmate now, for someone to cry out to: ‘Oh my God! I cannot believe what just happened! You know that woman? The one downstairs. The one who
fucks so loud that it makes my ears bleed
? She just told me that my cigarette smoke gets into her flat. And that my bed squeaks. When I move. Can you believe it!’

Betty took a bottle of cider and her tobacco pouch out on to the fire escape, where she deliberately blew her cigarette smoke through the gaps in the steps so that it would find its way into the woman’s flat. Afterwards she sat on the sofa, her head spinning with too much cider and too many cigarettes, her hair pungent with the scum of chip oil and Soho smog, the flat dark and empty around her.

The light faded beyond the windows outside and the Soho engine started revving up for the night: streetlights warming up, pubs unlocking their doors, the market dismantling and the
drinkers
arriving. Still Betty sat motionless, alone, letting the solitude filter through her system. Her job at Wendy’s would pay her two hundred pounds a week. Now she had a job she could finally focus on her search for Clara Pickle. But she still had absolutely no idea where to begin.

16

1920

LILIAN SEEMED TO
think little of the notion of being painted by a man you’d met just once in the street. She turned the card over between her delicate fingers and said, ‘Well, why not? It’s a nice address. And he’s a Worsley. They’re a good set.’

‘You know his family?’

‘Well, I know their cousins. Or is that the Horsleys? Hmm, well, it is a good address. And just think, your portrait. How nice to have a portrait. In the year of your twenty-first. When you are the loveliest you will ever be.’

‘But alone?’ said Arlette, who needed no convincing of the benefits of having her portrait painted for free. ‘Surely that can’t be wise?’

‘Well, I shall come with you, if you’re feeling that silly about it.’

Silly
, thought Arlette,
silly
? Surely the person who would walk into the home of a strange man unaccompanied was the silly one. ‘Would you really?’ she asked.

‘Of course,’ Lilian replied flippantly. ‘Whyever not?’

Two days later she and Lilian took a hackney carriage to a street of tall white houses by the river in Chelsea. The street number
took
them to the door of a small cottage painted powder blue. Arlette breathed in deeply, touching the fabric of her favourite dress, a drop-waisted chiffon affair in dark plum, which she wore under a matching coat.

‘Good afternoon ladies,’ said Gideon, greeting them himself at his door. He wore a white shirt, unbuttoned to a quarter of the way down his chest, and tight brown trousers, held up by elastic braces. He looked as though he were either halfway through getting dressed or halfway through getting undressed. Either way, it was a rather informal fashion in which to meet two ladies, Arlette could not help but feel, almost risqué, and she was glad for the bristling, effervescent presence of Lilian at her side.

‘Good afternoon,’ said Lilian, ‘you must be Mr Worsley. I am Lilian Miller. It’s very nice to meet you.’

‘Gideon,’ he replied expansively, ‘call me Gideon. And Miss De La Mare, how charming to see you again. As beautiful as I recall. Do come in. Please.’

He held the door open for Lilian and Arlette, and ushered them into a small hallway piled high with coats and boots and packing crates and tea chests. ‘I would like to say that I have only just moved in, but no, sadly, I have been in the cottage for over a year and still have not found the time or the inclination to unpack my possessions. And of course, the more time that passes the more convinced I become that whatever lies within those boxes is clearly not needed and maybe I should just dump them in the river and let the dead folk pick them over.’

Arlette noted that the house was also dirty and wondered if maybe Gideon Worsley lived without help. It seemed unlikely, but not impossible.

‘I am terribly excited,’ he continued, leading them through to a small sitting room furnished with three ancient armchairs, a brass-topped table, a credenza full of books and a statue of a naked woman carved out of old stone. The naked woman was
dressed
in silk lingerie and a hat. And there was indeed a cat, a Persian, extravagantly, dreadfully furry and in dire need of grooming, who sat on a cushion in the window watching them suspiciously. ‘I’ve been brooding over the memory of your face for ten long days. And now, finally, you are here! Now,’ said Gideon. ‘Tea. Stay here and I’ll bring it through.’

Arlette nodded uncomfortably. She had never before been brought tea by a host. She could not imagine how he would possibly be capable of doing such a thing.

‘
Bohemian
,’ whispered Lilian when he’d left the room.

‘Well, yes, I did warn you.’

‘Strange, though, he has no housemaid, or so it seems. He is clearly a man of substance and this house is in a very desirable area.’

Arlette surveyed the room again. On the brass-topped table sat a tray full of half-smoked cigars and cigarillos, and on a silver tray sat three cut-glass tumblers, sticky with the residue of Calvados poured from the bottle next to them. The air smelled sour and rancid, like the air that blew from the public houses that Arlette passed on her way to and from work. It did not smell like a home should smell, of wood-smoke and beeswax and dust. It had no order, no method. It both appalled and excited Arlette in equal measure.