Before I Met You (18 page)

‘Or from being little,’ suggested Donny.

Dom laughed again.

‘What’s a fag?’ Donny asked.

‘It’s another word for a cigarette. Another word for those disgusting things that Mummy and Daddy always have hanging out of their mouths.’

Donny’s face wrinkled up. ‘Euw,’ he said. ‘I’m not ever going to smoke a fag.’

‘Good,’ said Dom. ‘Good.’

‘Disgusting habit,’ Betty agreed.

‘So, Betty,’ Dom began, ‘what time do you have to be off?’

‘My shift starts at five, so about four?’

‘Cool,’ he said. ‘Amy’s PA’s coming to collect the kids at three, so that’s perfect. I’ve got some stuff I need to sort out in my office. Are you going to be OK if I leave you alone down here for a couple of hours?’

‘Er, yeah. Yes! Of course. Sure.’

‘I’ll just be in my office, top of the house, if you need anything. Erm, they’ve all had some snacks, you’ve done Astrid’s nappy. Donny knows how to switch on the telly. Don’t you, mate?’

Donny nodded seriously.

‘Help yourself to anything you want; got loads of nice cheese in the fridge.’ He opened the door of a pale mint-green double American fridge. ‘Tea.’ He pointed to the kettle. ‘Coffee.’ He opened a cupboard door. ‘
Activities
.’ He opened another door revealing shelves of paper and pens, jigsaws and dolls. ‘Only rules,’ he began to count them off on his fingers, ‘no felt tips around the house, only at the table, no sugar, no dairy for Acacia – there’s soya milk in the fridge – no slamming doors – no doors at all, in fact – and
no touching the music system
.’ Apart from that, anything goes. And, I don’t care what you say, I
am
going to be paying you for this, OK?’ He threw her a fond, almost paternal look and Betty smiled.

‘OK,’ she said. ‘I’ll allow that.’

‘Cool,’ he said, one hand holding the back of his neck. He looked as though he were about to say something else to her, but he didn’t. Instead he addressed his children, warning them of the swift and harsh consequences of any mutinous behaviour and then she heard him leaping up the stairs, two at a time, to a mysterious room of business at the top of his house.

She got to her feet and looked around her. The toddler sat on the kitchen counter, eyeing her suspiciously through a mouthful
of
chewed-up carrot. Donny went
snip snip snip
with his childproof scissors and the baby sat in her arms, a heavier weight than Betty had at first suspected, but still and mellow. Betty thought, how bad can this be? These children are
angels
. And as this foolish thought passed through her mind, the toddler’s eyes began to fill with tears and her face turned puce. At first Betty thought she was about to scream a tantrum but then she realised that the child was unable to breathe, that the child was in fact choking.

‘Oh my God,’ she said, wishing that she could remember the child’s name. ‘Oh my God, sweetie. Are you OK?’

The child’s face went from puce to magenta and towards violet. ‘Shit,’ said Betty. ‘Shit.’ She put the baby down on the armchair and grabbed the toddler in her arms. The baby began to wail hysterically. The toddler still had not made a sound. ‘Open your mouth, sweetie, let me have a look, that’s it, that’s it, oh God.’ She forced her fingers into the child’s mouth and inserted them into the back of her throat. There she felt the outline of a hard lump. She tried to prise it out with a hooked finger, but she seemed instead to be pushing it further down. And then she remembered an incident a few years earlier. Arlette had choked on a piece of chicken and Betty had watched the carer drag Arlette from her chair, turn her back to front, lock her arms around Arlette’s frail chest and force the piece of chicken out with a hard and fast squeeze. The Heimlich manoeuvre. Or something.

She put the toddler back on the kitchen surface, turned her to face the wall, and then crunched her firmly inside the circle of her arms. The baby had fallen onto its side and was wedged, screaming, halfway down the side of the armchair. Donny said, ‘What are you doing? Stop it! Stop it!’ and then just as Betty was about to yell out for help, she felt the toddler’s body go soft inside her arms and she heard a small thud as a large piece of carrot exited her throat and hit the tiled wall in front of her.

Donny had climbed down from the bar stool and was running out into the hallway, calling, ‘Daddy! Daddy!’ The baby was now flat on her front with her arms and legs splayed out around her. But Betty and the toddler stood still, both breathing in and out in terrible, awed relief. Betty held the toddler close to her and turned her round to face her. ‘Are you OK, sweetie? Are you OK?’

The toddler cried and nodded, and buried her face into Betty’s shoulder. Betty picked up the piece of carrot and showed it to the little girl.

‘Look!’ she said brightly. ‘Look! Naughty carrot! Look at that naughty carrot! Shall we smack that naughty carrot?’

The toddler pulled her face out of Betty’s shoulder and appraised the piece of carrot fearfully. She nodded once, and Betty hit the carrot. ‘There,’ she said. ‘Bad carrot. He won’t do that again …’

‘What’s going on?’ Dom asked breathlessly in the doorway.

‘Daddy!’ said Donny. ‘That lady hurt Cashie. She did
squeeze
her, very hard.’

Dom waded across the room and collected the screaming baby from the armchair. Then he threw Betty a quizzical look, tinted with anger.

‘She was choking,’ Betty said calmly, stroking the toddler’s pale silky hair. ‘She had a piece of carrot wedged in her throat. I had to squeeze it out.’

Dom blinked at her. He gulped. ‘Shit,’ he said, after a moment. ‘Shit. Cashie. Baby girl. Are you OK?’ He touched her cheek with his fingers and stared desperately into her eyes. Acacia nodded and shuddered as the last of her tears left her body.

Betty held up the offending piece of carrot.

‘Oh my God.’ Dom glanced at it in horror. ‘Christ.’ He slapped himself on the forehead. ‘I should have thought,’ he began, ‘I should have said. I shouldn’t have –’

‘It’s fine,’ said Betty. ‘It’s fine. We’re all fine. Aren’t we, sweetheart?’ The little girl held her arms out to her father and Dom and Betty swapped Acacia for the baby.

‘Shit,’ he said again, ‘how did you know …? I mean, how did you …?’

She shrugged. ‘I saw someone doing it to someone before. To my grandmother. It’s called the Heimlich manoeuvre.’

‘Christ,’ he said, into Acacia’s hair, rocking her back and forth against his chest. ‘Christ. Thank God. Thank God you were here. Thank God you knew what to do. Thank you.’ He looked up at her, over Acacia’s crown, with big, fearful eyes. ‘Thank you, Betty.’ He looked down at Donny, who was standing at his side, watching everything suspiciously. ‘Betty saved Acacia’s life, Don,’ he said to the boy. ‘Betty saved her life. Do you understand?’

Donny shook his head.

‘Cashie had some carrot in her throat. She couldn’t breathe. She might have died. Betty squeezed Cashie to get the carrot out. Betty saved her life. Betty is a
hero
, Donny. Like a real-life
hero
.’

Donny looked at Betty uncertainly, and then away again. He shrugged, as though heroes without capes and swords and guns could not possibly be of any interest to him, and then he climbed back onto the barstool.

Dom looked at Betty. ‘You must think I’m really …
crap
,’ he said sheepishly.

Betty shook her head. ‘Why would I think that?’ she asked.

‘I don’t know,’ he continued. ‘Leaving my kids with some stranger, leaving you alone, not making sure everyone was, you know, safe.’

‘But you did,’ said Betty, ‘you knew they’d be safe. With me. I’m a safe pair of hands. You knew that. You trusted me.’ She smiled at him, his baby in her arms.

He gazed at her for a moment, absorbing her words. His face
softened
. He smiled. ‘I suppose so,’ he said. ‘I suppose, if you put it like that …’

‘It’s true,’ she said. ‘You knew what you were doing. Now go back to your study,’ she said. ‘Go and work. We’ll be fine. Won’t we?’

She asked this of Donny, who said nothing, just snipped and snipped at his shards of paper, silently.

Dom inhaled, thoughtfully. He looked from Donny to Astrid to Acacia and then to Betty. ‘No,’ he said. ‘No. I’m staying here. And not because I don’t trust you. Because you’re right, I do trust you. But because I’m supposed to be spending time with my kids. And the stuff up there,’ he glanced upwards, ‘that can wait. That can wait until later. Can’t it, Don?’

Donny nodded.

‘You know,’ Dom continued, addressing Betty, ‘I just had this feeling about you, when I first saw you. I just had this feeling. You know when you look at a person and you think there’s a reason for them being there, that they’re going to be, you know,
significant
. Weird …’ He shook his head dismissively as though he’d said too much. ‘Weird,’ he said again. And then he looked at Betty once more and he smiled sincerely and mouthed, ‘Thank you.’

And Betty smiled and mouthed back, ‘You’re welcome.’

22

1920

ARLETTE RECOGNISED ONE
or two of the faces that were currently staring at her. She recognised both a girl whose name was Anna and a man whose name was Charles as members of the band of carollers from that night before Christmas Eve. The rest of the group swirled overwhelmingly before her eyes, all young, loud, bright-eyed with names like Virginia and Magenta, Claude and Francis, an amorphous mass of glamour and chatter. She had come with Gideon and met ‘the rest of the gang’ at a club in Windmill Street called the White Oleander. She could never before have imagined herself in such a place. First of all, the general environs of Soho, a shabby, dirty place, urchins running through the night-time shadows, muck-strewn pavements, a deep stench of rotting vegetation and unwashed flesh and general putrefaction. The buildings were small and packed tightly together, like the grimiest, most secret corners of Old St Peter Port, where sailors flashed their tattoos and breathed out fumes of old brown rum and chewing tobacco. And here there were prostitutes; blatantly, unashamedly, showing themselves to the street, in gaudy clothes and with faces smeared with make-up, and a lady with breasts so large they seemed almost to be swallowing her whole.

The door into this club had seemed at first to be not so much an entrance as a trap door, located in a basement and with rickety wooden steps leading down to a dark cave of a room, lit around the walls with flickering gas fittings. But now, through a gold curtain and into the main body of the club, Arlette felt thrilled by the place, by its walls hung with gold, its tables set around a small stage draped with red velvet, lamps on every table and waitresses dressed as Greek goddesses. Upon the stage a smiling man with brown skin and shorn afro hair strummed at a double bass, held to his side like a dancing partner, and a woman with bright blond hair and a bugle-beaded evening gown ran her fingers up and down the keys of an upright piano.

The party had been shown to a small booth, all red velvet and gilt. Arlette was squeezed between Gideon and the girl called Anna, and one of the toga-wearing waitresses was unloading a tray of cocktails onto the table. Arlette had ordered an Americano, Leticia’s drink of choice and still the only cocktail she could name. It arrived with a shiny red cherry on a stick and a small bowl of dark-skinned olives.

She had by now spent three afternoons in Gideon Worsley’s studio and felt quite comfortable in his company. She felt, in fact, that he was not nearly as interesting or mysterious as her first encounter with him might have suggested and that he was, despite his top-hat-wearing ways and his eccentric cottage by the river, really a rather conventional young man, the type one’s mother would approve of.

His circle of friends, though, appeared to be anything but conventional.

Anna, who sat to her right, was wearing a silk kimono and talking very loudly of her job as a life model.

‘A life model? What is that exactly?’ Arlette asked her.

‘It is a person who removes every last stitch of their clothing and stands stark-hooter naked in a room full of artists for hours on end.’

Arlette widened her eyes and Anna laughed. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘how else is an artist meant to learn how to draw the naked form? Imagine the world if no one had ever removed their clothes for an artist before. No Rubens. No Renoir. No Alma-Tadema. These people did not paint from their imaginations, you know.’

‘And are you paid? For your, er, work?’

‘But of course! Well, I am hardly going to put myself through such physical hardship for nothing, am I? And it is hard work, you know. Cold, cold rooms, not moving for an hour or more, sometimes in the most extraordinary poses. Once, with my legs wrapped around my neck, like a necklace,’ she laughed. ‘A human pretzel, no less!’

Arlette did not know what a pretzel was, but smiled and laughed appropriately.

‘I could barely walk normally for a week after that! Although I was indeed paid extra. And you, Arlette – tell me about you.’

‘Oh, well, there is really nothing to tell.’

‘Oh, poppycock. If there’s one thing my twenty-four years on this earth have taught me it’s that there is
always
something to tell. Where are you from?’

‘Guernsey,’ she replied. ‘In the Channel Islands.’

‘Oh, yes, I know Guernsey. I went there once, as a child for my summer holidays. A glorious place.’

Arlette felt a bubble of warm feeling rise up through herself. ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘how lovely. It’s rare to meet anyone who knows of the island.’

‘And how long have you been in London?’

‘Well, only a few months. I arrived in September. And I’m staying with my mother’s best friend in Kensington.’

‘What’s her name? The friend?’

‘Leticia Miller. The Millers.’

‘Yes. Of course. I know the Millers. Abingdon Villas?’

‘Yes!’

‘A wild family! By all accounts.’

‘Well, yes, they are, rather. How do you know them?’

‘My mother was at Oxford with Mr Miller. Back in the days when women at Oxford were rather a novelty. Back in the days when my
mother
was rather a novelty. And Leticia was the loveliest thing, apparently. When Anthony Miller brought her around, jaws hit the floor, fights ensued, but he stuck to his guns and he got her. And now they have a heap of wild children and a huge ungainly house, and Mr Miller is nowhere to be seen.’ She rolled her eyes. ‘That would not happen to me, let me assure you. I never want to have children. No. I shall spend the rest of my life being fêted and adored by a dozen different men. I shall keep myself in small rooms, neat and tidy – no need of teams of staff just to keep it from falling into squalor – independent and reckless. That is how it will be for me. I will not be like my mother with her tired body and her faded eyes, and her house full of things that need to be cleaned, and furniture needing to be rotated, and a husband who looks upon her much as one would look upon a particularly hard-wearing and reasonably attractive chiffonier.’