Before I Met You (3 page)

She walked urgently away from Carnaby Street and up side roads until the only lights were neon and the shops were small and anonymous.

‘Oh God, where
are
you taking us?’ said her mother, looking aghast at a middle-aged woman sitting on a bar stool in the entrance to a bar advertising a Live Girls Show, and dramatically
underdressed
for the weather in a gold boob tube and red leather shorts.

‘I think it’s Soho,’ said Betty, her voice tremulous with excitement.
Soho
. That’s what had been pulling her down these backstreets, of course it was. Soho. The centre of the universe. The Hundred Club. The Mud Club. The Blitz Club. Sex. Drugs. Rock and roll. Betty’s favourite film of all time was
Desperately Seeking Susan
. She loved it for the setting, for the neon lights glistening on oily puddles, the alleyways and mysterious doorways, subterranean dives and shabby-looking people with secrets.

She turned to her mother and smiled. And then she looked upwards into the dark windows of a thin, grimy town house. ‘Imagine living here,’ she said breathily.

‘No thank you,’ said her mother, shivering in a blast of cold air.

Betty continued to stare upwards. ‘I wonder who lives up there,’ she said.

‘French Model,’ her mother read off the doorbell.

‘Wow,’ breathed Betty, picturing a woman who looked like Beatrice Dalle floating around a cool flat, talking loudly and crossly to her French boyfriend on the phone with a strong cigarette in her other hand.

‘You know what that means, don’t you?’

Betty shrugged uncomfortably, aware that her mother was about to flag up a shortcoming in her knowledge of the big wide world.

‘It’s a euphemism,’ she said, ‘for a prostitute. There’s some poor girl up there having sex with an old ugly man. For money.’

Betty shrugged again, as if, really, what was so bad about that, whilst silently, invisibly, cringing at the very thought. But she still couldn’t help but see a certain glamour in it. A dark, ugly glamour. If you were going to sleep with an old ugly man for money, then this, mused Betty, was the place to do it.

‘Come on,’ said her mother. ‘It’s nearly six. Let’s get out of here. Let’s go back to Grandma’s.’

Betty let her gaze fall from the black eyes of the old town house, tore herself from her dreams of moody French models and Soho nights, and headed back to Surrey with her mother.

4

1988

‘WHAT DID
YOU
do?’ Betty asked Arlette, as Arlette searched her jewellery boxes for a particular paste brooch she knew would look just perfect with Betty’s party dress. Betty did not want to wear a paste brooch, but she also knew that Arlette was rarely wrong about these things and that if she thought the brooch would go with the black taffeta off-the-shoulder dress she’d bought last week from Miss Selfridge, then she should at least try it on.

‘What did I do when?’

‘For your sixteenth birthday party.’

‘Nothing,’ said Arlette, ‘absolutely nothing. We’d just gone to war. Nobody had any parties.’

‘What was the war like?’

‘It was bleak. It was terrifying. It was horrible.’

‘And you lost your dad?’

‘I did. I lost my father.’ Arlette paused for a moment and sniffed. ‘My lovely father.’

‘And what did you do after?’ Betty asked. ‘After the war?’

Arlette sniffed again. ‘Nothing at all,’ she said. ‘I stayed here and cared for my mother. I worked in a dress shop for a little while, in St Peter Port. And then I met Mr Lafolley.’

Betty sighed. It seemed such a waste. ‘But didn’t you ever want to go somewhere else? Didn’t you ever want to have an adventure, go to London, travel?’

Arlette shook her head. Her demeanour changed for a moment. ‘No,’ she said. ‘Bloody awful place, London. No thank you. No. Guernsey girl through and through. There was never anywhere else for me.’

She found the brooch and passed it to Betty. It was made of stones in graduated shades of cranberry and pink, in the shape of a butterfly.

‘Yes!’ said Betty. ‘Yes. It is. It’s perfect. Thank you.’

‘You are very welcome, Betty, so very welcome.’ Arlette squeezed Betty’s hands inside hers and then carefully pinned it onto her dress. ‘Awful cheap fabric,’ she muttered, ‘just awful, but there.’ She stepped back to admire her. ‘There you are, looking perfectly, perfectly beautiful. Only a beautiful girl of sixteen could make fabric that cheap look so good. Now go,’ she said, ‘go to your party. Go and be sixteen.’

Sixteen, Betty felt, should
sparkle
. Sixteen should glimmer and twinkle and gleam. It should involve taking off your shoes at the Yacht Club and cavorting, dancing, laughing, sitting on your best friend’s lap and throwing knowing looks across the room to a tall, blond man with broad shoulders and a St Lucian tan, called Dylan Wood, who you’ve been in love with for, like, a whole
year
, before getting to your feet and dancing again with a sweet, spotty boy called Adam, who’s been in love with you for, like, a whole
year
. It should involve sneaking outside to smoke cigarettes with a girl in your class who you’ve never really spoken to before, but who suddenly feels like your best friend, and watching two other boys in your class moon through the plate-glass windows at the assembled grown-ups before being hustled back indoors by an appalled manager. It should involve disco lights and glitter balls, and it should, at around two minutes to
midnight
, involve being given the bumps by thirty sixteen-year-olds and blowing out sixteen candles on a huge chocolate cake whilst
Sixteen Candles
played in the background. And then, at five minutes past midnight, the DJ must be instructed to put on ‘Dancing Queen’ and you must untie your raven hair and twirl round and round beneath the glitter ball while your friends all stand around and clap and sing ‘only
si-ix-teen
’ at the top of their voices every time Abba sing ‘only seventeen’.

But sixteen could not be considered complete without a moment, somewhere between midnight and one, when the man called Dylan Wood, who you’ve been in love with for, like, a whole
year
, pulls you away from your party and onto a terrace overlooking the sea, and for a few minutes you both stare out together in silence at a view that could have been plucked directly from a pine-scented corner of the Mediterranean, with its yachts and its palm trees and the sound of music wafting across on a warm balmy breeze. This moment should involve some conversation and the exchange of observations such as, ‘I’ve been watching you all night.’ And, ‘You’ve always been pretty, but tonight – I don’t know – it’s like you became beautiful.’ And possibly even, ‘Is it still all right to kiss you?’

Ideally the world should recede away from you at this point, the background noises become nothing more than distant buzz, and then Dylan Wood would cup your face with his hand, tip back your head and let his lips just brush yours, soft and gentle as butterfly wings so you’re not quite sure if it really just happened or not, and then again, a little firmer, this time leaving no doubt whatsoever that he has just kissed you, that Dylan Wood has just kissed you, under the light of a pearly half-moon, with his hand in your hair and his thigh in your groin, and you should think then that you are sixteen and already your life is complete.

Sixteen shattered the following day into a thousand tiny, irretrievable little pieces. Betty knew sixteen was broken the
moment
her eyes opened at eight o’clock, as she felt the prickle of discomfort across her skin, the soreness of the skin around her mouth, the raw heat of devastation as she remembered Dylan smiling at her after their first shockingly passionate kiss and saying, ‘Fuck, how the hell am I supposed to go back to London after that?’

‘What?’ Her voice had sounded flat and dull.

‘I can’t believe it,’ he’d continued, his eyes on hers, his hands still clasped together behind her back. ‘I’ve been stuck on this stupid rock for six years and just when I finally find something good about it, we’re going.’

‘You’re going to London?’ she whispered.

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘didn’t you know? I thought you knew. I thought –’

‘No. I didn’t know. When are you going?’

‘Friday,’ he said. ‘We’re going on Friday.’

‘Oh. No,’ she whispered. ‘Why?’

He’d laughed then, as if there was something funny about the situation, the fact of their aborted union, his imminent emigration. But there was nothing funny about it, nothing whatsoever.

Betty pulled herself from her bed and opened the curtains. The sky was dense and grey. It didn’t look like summer. It didn’t feel like summer. Sixteen was dead and so was summer. Her black dress hung haphazardly from a wire hanger on her wardrobe handle, in stark contrast to the way it had been stored in the days running up to the party, in sheets of tissue paper and a plastic zip-up carrier, like a chrysalis. Now it was just a dress, deserving of no special treatment.

Betty sighed and let the curtain fall. She flopped backwards onto her bed and considered the ceiling while she pondered her feelings. The walls of her room seemed to close in towards her as she lay there she could feel the shores of the island tightening
around
her like a corset, stifling her breath. She thought of Dylan, sitting on a double-decker bus, riding down Shaftesbury Avenue, on his way to some amazing new nightclub that everyone was talking about. Then she thought of herself, a tiny pinprick of a human being with no plans beyond sixth form and an interview next week for a Saturday job at Boots.

She hated being sixteen. She hated her life. She wanted to be nineteen. She wanted to get away from this stupid, pathetic island and get on with her life.

She let a few self-indulgent tears roll down her cheeks and onto her duvet cover.

And then she lifted her head abruptly at the sound of shouting coming from downstairs.

‘Alison! Alison! Quick!’

It was Jolyon.

She heard her mother’s voice in reply.

‘What!’

‘Call an ambulance! Quick! It’s Mummy. She’s collapsed!’

‘What! Oh God!’

Betty raced to the top of the stairs and shouted down, ‘What’s happening!’

‘I don’t know!’ her mother shouted back. ‘It’s Arlette!’

Betty fell down upon the top step and sat for a moment, listening to the sounds of chaos below, her mother’s call to the emergency services, Jolyon panicking, doors opening and closing. She sat there for around thirty seconds before she could find it within her to get to her feet, because even as she sat there, her head full of fug, her cheeks still damp with just-spilled tears, she knew that whatever it was that was happening downstairs was going to impact her life in some terrible, weighty way. She knew that the future was being chipped and chiselled into some ugly new shape.

She breathed in deeply and slowly walked downstairs.

5

1993

YOU COULD HEAR
it echoing down corridors and ricocheting off walls. It careered round corners and broke through the deep heavy silence of the night. Betty leaped out of bed, peroxide hair misshapen and on end, dressed in one of Arlette’s vintage négligées under a big grey jumper, her feet in chunky oatmeal socks. She tried to fight her way out of the cloud of dreams that had swallowed her up.

‘Coming,’ she croaked. Then: ‘
Coming!
’ louder, as her voice returned.

She stopped for just long enough to become aware that the sky was not pitch-black, that the time was 4.30 a.m. and that she had smoked way too many cigarettes the night before. And then she pushed her hair behind her ears and shuffled down the corridor, to Arlette’s room. The noise was louder now, like a widow at a soldier’s funeral, keening, wailing, scratching at the silence.

‘Coming, coming, coming.’ Betty pushed down on the handle and opened the door to Arlette’s room.

‘What’s the matter?’ She tried to keep the impatience from her voice, searched her sleep-addled soul for softness and
compassion
. ‘What?’ she said more gently, switching on the bedside lamp and sitting down on the edge of the bed.

‘I can’t see!’ said Arlette, pulling her sheets up around her neck, her eyes darting around the room. ‘I can’t see where I’m going!’

Betty took her hand in hers, felt the skin shift and slither around against the bone and gristle. ‘Where are you going?’ she asked.

‘I’m going to church. And I can’t see! Help me. I’ll be in so much trouble!’

‘Who will you be in trouble with, Arlette?’

‘With Papa, of course. He trusted me. He trusted me to go on my own. For the very first time. He gave me tuppence for the collection. And now I’ve lost it. Will you help me? Will you help me to find it? I dropped it here, in the dark.’

Arlette patted the top of her counterpane with both hands. Betty joined in, tap-tapping the counterpane, stifling a yawn. ‘I’ll get you another coin,’ she said. ‘Wait here.’

She went to the other end of Arlette’s room and picked a twopence coin out of a jar on her dressing table. ‘Here,’ she said, placing it in Arlette’s hand, ‘here, tuppence.’

Arlette’s face softened and she smiled. ‘I can see now,’ she said. ‘It must have been an eclipse or something, because first it was bright and then it was dark and now it’s bright again. An eclipse. When the moon covers the sun.’ She brought the coin closer to her face and examined it. ‘I’ll pay you back,’ she said, ‘next time I see you. Where do you live?’

‘Next door,’ said Betty. ‘I live next door.’

Arlette squinted at her. ‘And are you a boy. Or a girl?’

‘I’m a girl,’ she smiled. ‘My name’s Betty. I’m your granddaughter.’

Arlette let out a whoop of laughter. ‘My granddaughter!’ she said. ‘Well, that’s nice. I always wanted a little girl. Never wanted a boy. Never wanted any children. But particularly not a little
boy
.’ She shuddered. ‘All their little bits. Used to change his nappy with my eyes shut, y’know?’ She chuckled and glanced at Betty. ‘Do you have a little boy?’ she asked.

Betty shook her head and stifled another yawn.