Before I Met You (35 page)

He laughed. ‘I could get you a job there, you know. Tomorrow, if that’s what you wanted?’

‘I don’t think it is any more. All the jobs I went for I was convinced that this was it. This was my destiny. This was where I belonged. But now, I think I’ve realised that my destiny is still just a dot on the horizon. I’m nowhere near it yet. I studied art.’ She shrugged. ‘That could still lead somewhere. This nanny thing might turn into a career. Anything could happen. I’m so young …’

‘That you are, Betty. That you are.’

‘And you know, my grandmother …’ She paused, as the thought had only just occurred to her and she hadn’t worked out what it meant yet. ‘Well, I thought she’d spent her life on Guernsey. I thought that had been her entire existence. Her husband. Her house. Her son. The Yacht Club. But now it turns out that she was here, too. That she came to London when she was my age. That she hung around with jazz musicians. And artists. You know, there’s an actual portrait of her in the National Portrait Gallery.’

‘What! Seriously? Your grandmother?’

‘Yeah. My grandmother. And I just think, well, if she could have started her adult life like that, all those dreams and plans, all those ideas she must have had about how everything was going to turn out, yet she ended up back in her childhood home having a son she detested, then really, you’ve just got to go with the flow, haven’t you? Because, really,’ she shrugged again, ‘anything can happen. Can’t it?’

Dom nodded and smiled. ‘Yeah,’ he said, ‘I guess so.
Although,
in my case, I’ve been pretty much on a one-track journey since I was a kid.’

‘Well, yes, and you’re still young …’

‘Relatively.’

‘Yes. Relatively. So this might not be your destiny. I mean, you might end up – I don’t know – being a pig farmer or something. You might look back on all this and think: what the hell was all that pop-star stuff about? This is where I was always meant to be.’

Dom looked at her thoughtfully. ‘Hmm,’ he said, touching his chin, ‘a pig farmer. I can see that. I can. And you could be the pig farmer’s wife.’ He laughed, lightly, leaching any awkwardness from his comment. ‘Imagine that,’ he said quietly. ‘Imagine that.’

As he said it, Betty had a terrible overwhelming jolt of longing. Almost premonitory. She saw herself sitting at a long wooden table with Dom and his children, pouring milk into beakers. Beyond the windows she saw acres of rolling meadows and fields of fat, pink pigs. She smelled something wholesome roasting in the oven. Her. The farmer’s wife. The ex-pop star’s wife. The reformed hedonist’s wife. She could see it and smell it. Then she shook it, quite violently, from her head.

She was doing it again. Seeing her destiny carved into every fleeting comment, every half-formed moment. Her destiny did not lie in Dom Jones’s retirement plans; it lay here, in this very moment, drinking cordial, about to eat chicken and sweet potatoes. Because for all she knew, she too could end up back in Guernsey, seeing out her years alone in a big cold house on a cliff.

‘Breast or leg?’ asked Dom, carving knife poised above the golden chicken.

‘Both,’ said Betty, reeling herself back into the present. ‘Thank you.’

The food was delicious. Betty ate as if she hadn’t eaten for a month. They talked easily over the meal, about Arlette and her
missing
beneficiary, about Gideon Worsley and the Southern Syncopated Orchestra, about Alexandra and her room of old clothes, about a woman called Clara Pickle.

Dom was dumbstruck.

‘Amazing,’ he said. ‘Really amazing. You could write a book about it.’

‘Well,’ she said. ‘Yeah. Maybe. But first of all I need to find out what the ending is going to be.’

‘That’s true,’ agreed Dom. ‘And how are you going to do that?’

‘Don’t know. Alexandra’s friend is seeing what he can uncover. John from outside my house said he’d do some research for me, too.’

‘That’s the record, guy, yeah?’

‘Yes.’

‘Good bloke.’

‘Yes. He is.’

‘I reckon he’s got the hots for you.’

‘What!’

‘Yeah.’ Dom smiled mischievously. ‘Whenever I go and ask after you, he kind of bristles a bit. You know.’

‘Oh, I’m sure he doesn’t. We’re just friends.’

Dom raised an eyebrow at her. ‘You never seen
When Harry Met Sally
?’

‘Of course I have.’

‘Well, then, there you go. No such thing as “just friends”. Particularly not when the female friend looks like you.’ He skewered her, then, with a long and deep-rooted look across the table.

Betty flushed and stared into her lap. ‘No,’ she said, ‘he definitely doesn’t have the hots for me. I know he doesn’t.’

Dom raised his eyebrow higher. ‘Hmm,’ he said.

‘Really!’

‘Maybe he just really
really
likes you then,’ he said facetiously.

‘Actually,’ she said, ‘he does.’

Dom leaned back into his chair, folded his arms across his chest and smiled. ‘And reading between the lines I would suggest that it might be mutual.’

Betty laughed. ‘Of course it is!’ she said. ‘I really like him. He’s a really nice guy.’

Dom just stared at her with a smug smile on his face.

‘What!’

‘Oh, nothing,’ he said, pulling himself straight and unfolding his arms. ‘Just trying to work out if I’ve got competition.’

‘Oh my God!’ said Betty. ‘What are you talking about!’

‘Oh, nothing,’ he said, ‘nothing.’

She narrowed her eyes at him and he laughed.

‘Nothing!’ he said again. ‘I just, well, God, you must know, Betty?’

‘What!’

‘You must know that I’ve got a massive crush on you?’ He blinked, just once.

Betty blinked back.

‘The first time I saw you I thought, you know: cute blond. But then that morning in the café. You looked like shit. That gross hat. Your make-up everywhere. You had a hole in your dress. And green hair. And I just thought: that is the best-looking girl I have ever seen in my life. Seriously.’

‘Oh,’ she said.

‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘Oh.’

Betty had no idea if she was supposed to respond to this declaration. The silence that had fallen since he’d made it felt strangely comforting, as though it was protecting her from something. She smiled nervously, and then, like the onset of an uncontrollable sneeze, she felt a wave of laughter building up inside her. She held it down for as long as she could, until it physically started to hurt, and then she let it rush to the surface and explode across the table.

Dom looked at her, half injured, half amused. He looked as though he was about to question her laughter, but then he too caught the joke and started to laugh.

Betty put her hands up to her face and made a show of trying to control her laughter, but still it rolled out of her, unstoppable, like the ocean. She brought her head down onto the table top, then up again to look at Dom and then they both started up again.

The laughter peeled on for the next five minutes and by the time it finally came to a still, gentle close her head was spinning and it was as if they’d been drinking, as if they were a bit tipsy, a touch stoned.

‘Not sure where the fuck we go from there,’ giggled Dom, drawing his hands down his face and sighing.

Betty smiled. ‘Pretend it never happened?’

He glanced at her. ‘Really?’

‘Well, isn’t that what you’d like to do?’

He stared at her for a moment, as if he were trying to work out a really complicated puzzle. ‘No,’ he said, his voice serious again. ‘No. Not at all.’

Betty held his gaze and stopped breathing. ‘Then …?’

‘Well, then …’ He looked for a moment as if he were about to kiss her, but at the last second his demeanour changed and he said, ‘Fancy a spliff?’

She looked at the oversized clock on the kitchen wall. It was nearly eleven o’clock. She should head back, head for bed, get the early night she’d failed to get the night before. But she knew she wouldn’t be able to sleep now, not with a stomach full of roast chicken and a head full of Dom saying he had a crush on her, and a drag or two on a spliff would definitely help her to sleep.

‘Yes,’ she said, ‘why not?’

He brought a little box through to the kitchen and made one quickly and deftly, and then she followed him up the stairs to the
window
on the landing and she tried not to muse too much on the fact that his bedroom was just there, the door ajar, his bedding visible from where they sat. She tried not to think too much about the fact that they were sitting, knee to knee, facing each other at a negligible distance, their fingers brushing as they passed the spliff back and forth, the warm summer air vibrant against their skin, their lips taking it in turns to touch the same damp spot on the end of the spliff. She tried just to concentrate on the precise wording of her imminent announcement of her intention to leave, to go home, to her bed. She thought about Amy’s words, she thought about John’s warnings, she reminded herself that she had never looked at a picture of Dom Jones in a newspaper and thought that she might want to sleep with him. She thought about anything and everything apart from the sense of overwhelming desire building within her, the sense that the air between them was being sucked away in rhythm with the spliff, that every time their fingers touched it was bringing her closer and closer to some kind of ludicrous inevitability.

‘I wish I’d met you first,’ said Dom, staring at her thoughtfully.

‘What do you mean?’ She passed him back the last nub of spliff.

‘I mean, before Cheryl. Before Amy. I wish I was sitting here with you ten years ago, a clean slate. I wish …’ He turned and stared through the window, drew the last inhalation from the spliff, then hurled it, thoughtlessly, into the spiralling darkness below. And then, suddenly, almost stealthily, he was on his feet and tipping Betty’s head upwards towards his, and then he was kissing her, as though she were overripe fruit and he was hungry.

Betty stopped thinking entirely.

John Brightly stared at Betty curiously as she dashed past his stall and towards her front door at seven o’clock the following morning.

‘Morning,’ she trilled, feeling his gaze taking in every tiny detail of her appearance: the faded make-up, bed-hair, possibly even the bulge of her balled-up knickers in her shoulder bag.

He nodded but didn’t reply, just carried on staring at her inscrutably.

‘Just …’ She stood before him, waiting nonsensically for a miraculous rush of words to pour from her mouth that might offer a more savoury explanation for her appearance and her demeanour. But of course none came, so she pulled her keys from her handbag, smiled awkwardly and a touch psychotically at him and disappeared inside her flat, slamming the door hard behind her in her wake.

And then, her back pressed up against the door, she took a moment just to breathe, to contemplate the implications of what had just happened.

She stood like that for thirty seconds, let the embarrassment wash through her like a foul-tasting tonic, and then quickly and mindlessly, she got ready for work.

42

1920

LIKE THE OTHER
half of a Swiss weather clock couple, as Godfrey mounted a train headed for Manchester on a misty September morning and disappeared from Arlette’s life, so Gideon reappeared, new and shiny, full of charm and romantic intentions.

He was on the pavement, outside Liberty’s staff entrance on Tuesday evening, holding a bunch of roses the colour of flushed skin.

He removed his hat with his free hand when he saw her emerge, and smiled shyly.

‘Good afternoon, Arlette,’ he said, holding her hand in his and kissing the back of it with dry lips. ‘I feel I have barely seen you. You look utterly radiant.’

Arlette looked at him quizzically, because she knew that she looked anything but. ‘I have not slept in three nights, so doubt it very much. But thank you, anyhow. All compliments are welcome.’

He stared at her dreamily for a moment before gathering his senses and saying, ‘Oh, yes, flowers. For you.’

He handed them to her with a flourish and she smiled and
said
, ‘Thank you.’ She did not want to ask what the flowers were intended to suggest, because she did not wish to know the answer.

There was a moment of awkwardness then. It was incumbent upon Gideon, Arlette felt, to make his intentions clear, but he seemed reluctant to do so.

‘So,’ he said, eventually, ‘where are you headed to now?’

‘I’m going home, Gideon,’ she replied patiently.

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘yes. Of course you are. Maybe I could walk you home?’

She smiled. ‘That would be very nice. Thank you.’

He looked at her then with a mixture of awe and joy. ‘Wonderful!’ he said. ‘Super.’

It was obvious to anyone with half a brain that Gideon was in love with Arlette. And Arlette had substantially more than half a brain. She had kept him at arm’s length these past few weeks, ever since the night at the Cygnet when she had first taken Godfrey back to her lodgings and into her bed. Thereafter she had no longer automatically taken the seat next to him in clubs and bars and had taken instead to waving at him politely across rooms.

‘Poor Gideon,’ Godfrey would say, with feeling, ‘I have never before seen a man look so lost. His heart has been pulverised.’

To avoid any further pulverisation of his vital organs, Arlette had severed all but the most basic ties with him, yet now she was allowing him to walk her home and accepting his gift of flowers. In answer to the unasked question ‘Why?’, she would have to reply that she had not a single clue. It was possible that she was lonely. It was also possible that she had missed him. After all, their friendship had been a close and intimate one, forged over hours spent in his studio alone together, his eyes engaged with every detail of her.

As they strode through the darkening streets of London that evening, the pavements glowing gold beneath their feet, funnels
of
crisp russet leaves twirling and dancing in their wake, she started remembering the way it had felt to have Gideon at her side, his height and his humour, his air of always being on the verge of doing something peculiar and wonderful. She remembered the first time she’d seen him, singing carols on Regent Street last Christmas, the wild look in his eye. He’d later told her it was absinthe. His one and only meeting with the green fairy. He’d been violently sick the next day and never touched the stuff again. But seeing him like that the first time had left him forever in Arlette’s imagination as someone flighty and strange, someone almost magical.