Before I Met You (6 page)

‘My name is Betty Dean, I’m …’ But she tailed off as a face appeared at the window of the booth and beamed at her. The face was dark and large-featured, kohled eyes, full lips, black hair hanging straight and glossy from underneath a cream pull-on hat, studded nostril and hoop earrings. She was clutching a folder under her arm and mouthing the word ‘sorry’.

‘Actually,’ said Betty to the man on the phone, ‘don’t worry, it’s fine.’ She hung up.

‘Oh God,’ said the girl, ‘I am
so sorry
. I got called away to an emergency. Another tenant.
A rat
,’ she hissed conspiratorially.
‘But
, oh God, I probably shouldn’t have told you that. Seriously. You do not need to worry about rats. You’re on the second floor. This one was in a basement. In Paddington. I hate basement flats. Never, ever live in a basement flat. Especially not in London. No light at all.’

‘And rats,’ said Betty, drolly.

‘Well, yes, and rats. Anyway,’ Marni beamed, ‘I’m here now.’

‘Did that guy up there tell you where I was?’

‘Yes,’ she smiled. ‘He did. Told me there was a moody girl in a fur coat waiting for me up here.’ She laughed.

‘Oh,’ said Betty, picking up her rucksack and letting the door of the phone booth close behind her. ‘I think he’ll find that he was the grumpy one, actually.’

She followed Marni back towards the flat, deliberately averting her gaze from the trader.

‘She found you then?’ he asked brusquely.

She looked at him and nodded, feeling a warm flush rising up her neck. ‘Yes,’ she said, matching him in tone. ‘Thank you.’

‘Come on,’ said Marni, holding the door ajar for her, ‘let’s get you settled.’

Betty nodded and followed her into the downstairs hall, past a payphone on the wall with all its wires hanging out like entrails, and up a tight staircase painted buttermilk and streaked with mildew.

‘Da-dah!’ announced Marni on the top landing. ‘This is it.’

She unlocked the door and pushed it open.

Betty didn’t really know what she’d been expecting. She hadn’t really thought beyond: FLAT IN SOHO. Or NEWLY DECORATED. She hadn’t considered the possibility that NEWLY DECORATED might mean CHEAP WHITE PAINT SLAPPED ALL OVER LUMPY WALLS. And CORK FLOORING PEELING SLIGHTLY IN PLACES. And OLD METAL VENETIAN BLINDS GIVEN A WIPE DOWN WITH A DAMP CLOTH. Not to mention NEWLY
REPLACED
BARE BULBS HANGING FROM DUSTY LIGHT FITTINGS and NASTY AZTEC-PRINT SOFA COVERS GIVEN A QUICK SPIN AND SHRINKING SLIGHTLY BEFORE BEING STRETCHED BACK OVER TOO BIG SOFA.

Neither did her fantasies about FLAT IN SOHO really sufficiently prepare her for a living room that was, fundamentally, a low-ceilinged box with a kitchen counter glued to one wall and a small window on the other, with barely enough room to stretch out on the sofa without scuffing your toes against the skirting board on the other side of the room. This, she quickly concluded, was not a flat. This was a corridor with a piece of furniture in it.

Yet still the effusive Marni smiled at her with sheer delight, as though she had just shown her the presidential suite at the Savoy.

‘Here’s your kitchenette,’ she said gleefully, pointing to the three cheap units screwed to the wall, an elderly brown microwave and a two-ring Baby Belling.

‘Fridge here,’ she announced, pulling open the rust-speckled door of a miniature fridge, just large enough to house two pints of milk and a box of eggs. ‘And there’s plenty of storage space.’ She opened and closed a couple of flimsy doors, one of which almost fell off completely as she did so. ‘Having said that, we do find that our tenants in this area tend not to have much need for kitchen space. Why cook, when you can eat out every night at a different restaurant?’

It seemed to Betty that this girl, Marni, had looked neither at her nor in any detail at this flat. If she had, Betty pondered, it would be immediately obvious that she had just stepped off a ferry, that she had all her worldly possessions in a tatty rucksack and was clearly going to be paying so much rent for this tiny unprepossessing toilet cubicle of an apartment that dining out every night was not going to be an option.

‘Where do you live?’ asked Betty.

‘In Pinner,’ Marni replied brightly, in a tone that suggested this ‘Pinner’ to be a most desirable locale. ‘It’s in Middlesex,’ she continued, ‘commuter belt. Metropolitan line. I live with my mum and dad.’

Betty nodded knowingly. This girl knew as much about glamorous Soho lifestyles as she did.

She showed Betty the sleeping area, a mezzanine in the living area, accessed via a wooden stepladder, with a curtained area underneath housing a free-standing clothes rail and cheap chest of drawers.

The bathroom was, in fact, the nicest room in the flat, apparently the recipient of the majority of the redecorating budget, nicely tiled and very modern.

‘Well,’ said Marni, half an hour later, after some form-filling and tea-drinking and the handing over of a cheque for two months’ rent, ‘I’ll leave you to settle in. And remember, anything you need, just shout. My boss has a mobile phone so you should be able to get hold of him twenty-four/seven. Here’s his number, and, well,
enjoy
!’

Betty watched her leave a moment later, her dark head disappearing into the crowds below. She had a bounce in her step, the bounce of a carefree person, of a girl who had not yet asked herself any meaningful questions about her existence.

Betty watched her from the window until she’d disappeared from view and then her gaze fell upon the market trader, still packing up his stall, hefting the last of the boxes into a small white van. He was chatting to another man. She could hear him laughing, see him smiling. She examined him more closely now that he was at a distance: mid-brown hair, cut shaggy around in his face in that style beloved of modern pop stars. He wore combats, an oversized sweatshirt, a leather jacket. He looked about twenty-eight, she reckoned, with an athletic physique and a strong profile.

Suddenly he looked up at the window and his gaze met hers, and Betty gasped and fell to her knees.

‘Oh
shit
,’ she whispered angrily to herself, ‘shit.’

She let herself slide slowly to the floor, her back against the wall, shame and embarrassment coursing through her veins. She sighed loudly.

And then, for the first time since she’d rung the doorbell downstairs and realised that there was no one there to let her in, she felt a small wave of excitement building within her. This place was not what she’d imagined it would be, it was not the shadowy high-ceilinged flat in which she would pace around smoking Gauloises and being moody and interesting. But it was clean and it was warm and, more than that, it was in Soho. Right in the middle of Soho. She got to her feet and turned once more to the window. She gazed out at the now-black sky, not a star to be seen in it, and she felt reality hit her, head-on.

She was here.

She was here
.

Her real life had finally begun.

8

1919

ARLETTE DE LA
Mare adjusted her hat, a grey tweed cloche, ordered in from Paris, especially for her trip, worn at a jaunty angle and down low upon her forehead. She pressed the porcelain doorbell and cleared her throat. A moment later the large red door was opened by a nervous-looking housemaid in a frilled white cap.

‘Good evening, miss, can I help you?’

‘Yes, I am Miss De La Mare. I’m here to visit Mrs Miller.’

‘Oh, yes, of course. They’re expecting you. Do come in.’

She pulled open the door and led Arlette into a large hallway from which arose two ornately carved mahogany staircases and in the centre of which stood a vast marble jardinière holding a vase of oversized Stargazer lilies and red-hot pokers. She followed the housemaid into a small room at the back of the house, which was furnished with two bergère armchairs upholstered in sage velvet, and a large japanned standard lamp. The room looked out onto a long lawned garden, which ended in a small wooded area and a tall wall, curtained in rusty-red Virginia creeper. The housemaid offered Arlette tea and cordial, and left the room.

Arlette’s toes were sore, squeezed for too long inside velvet T-bar slippers, with a small heel. She should not have travelled in heels – her mother had said as much when she saw her off at the port that morning – but the suit she was wearing, a grey linen affair with a lean, almost angular silhouette, had demanded something feminine to soften it. She had not, after all, wanted to appear butch for her first visit to London, especially not to the home of her mother’s best friend, Mrs Leticia Miller.

After a moment she heard a small burst of laughter in the hallway and there was Leticia, all daffodil-coloured curls and ostentatiously blue eyes.

‘Lovely, lovely Arlette, in London at last. First, the blasted war then the blasted ’flu, keeping you from us for so long. So nice to finally have everything back to normal and to finally get you here.’

She clasped Arlette’s hands in hers and stared fondly into her eyes for long enough to make her feel self-conscious. ‘Last time I saw you, you were just a child. What were you, twelve, thirteen years old? Goodness, and now look at you. A woman, a lovely, remarkable woman. Now, tell me, did you have a good trip? How was the crossing? Have you asked for some tea? You must be quite worn out.’

Arlette placed her hands upon her lap and smiled politely. ‘I am, rather, yes. I was awake at four a.m. to make the ferry.’

‘Well, you have made it to your destination, still looking so pretty, and now all you have to do is make yourself at home and do as you wish until you get your energy back. Can I get you something to lift your spirits? A little Americano?’

Arlette smiled. She did not know what an Americano was but assumed it was a cocktail of some description. ‘Why not?’ she said. ‘Yes, please.’

Leticia got to her feet and opened a cabinet behind her. Arlette admired her silhouette, the way her exquisite clothes fell from her slender, boyish body, not the body of a forty-year-old
woman
, not the body of her own rather solid and round-shouldered mother; not, in fact, the body of most women Arlette had yet encountered. Her yellow hair fell from a loose bun at the nape of her neck in soft baby-hair curls and her feet were bare. Arlette had never before seen a person in their own home standing without their shoes. She stared at the narrow ridge of bone that ran from Leticia’s slender foot to the back of her ankle. It sent a shiver of pleasure through her, that hint of something new and brave.

She listened to the clinking of bottles, the fizz of bubbles, the chink of ice and Leticia’s plummy chatter, all talk of people she’d never heard of, and plays she really must go and see, and swanky restaurants she’d love to take her to. Arlette nodded and hmmed and mmmed, and tried her hardest to be the sophisticated young lady that Leticia had already decided she must be.

Leticia passed her the Americano and, through sheer thirst – the inside of her mouth was as dry as a desert – she drank it rather too fast and found herself drunk almost immediately. As the tight corners of her mind slackened and billowed, she felt herself strangely cocooned. It was as though this was a place where nothing bad had ever happened, and Leticia was a woman to whom nothing bad had ever happened, and while she was here, in this room, with this woman, all would be well for evermore. She heard footsteps against the tiles in the hallway and more laughter.

‘Lilian!’ Leticia called around the half-open door. ‘Is that you?’

‘Yes, Mother, what is it?’ The voice sounded sulky but affectionate.

‘Come into the snug. I want you to meet someone.’

Arlette heard a small sigh, and then more footsteps.

‘Lilian, darling, this is Arlette De La Mare. Dolly’s girl.’

A tiny slip of a thing sidled through the door, big blue eyes like her mother, soft blond hair hanging long down her back in a plait. She was unthinkably pretty and wearing a dress that
immediately
made Arlette feel like a large ungainly man: lace and chiffon, in a shade of faded rose, low-waisted and demure with little pearls and rosettes of lace stitched all across it.

‘Good evening,’ she said, smiling and striding confidently across the room to shake Arlette by the hand, although she was, according to Arlette’s mother, only seventeen years old. ‘How lovely to meet you. Mother has told me all about your mother and her, and their strange childhood in the middle of the English Channel. I believe you are staying with us for a while?’

‘Yes,’ said Arlette, cursing herself for the almost perceptible slur of her words and for allowing herself to feel intimidated by a seventeen-year-old girl. ‘I’m here until I can find appropriate lodgings. I’m hoping to get a job of some description.’

‘Well, don’t feel you need to get a job and lodgings on my account. I’m delighted to have another girl in the house; too many boys as it is.’

Leticia had three boys, apparently. They were aged between sixteen and five. Two of them were at boarding school. The smallest one, Arlette assumed, was in bed.

‘I do hope you’ll be coming to my birthday party. It’s on Saturday night. It’s to be a masked ball.’

‘Oh,’ said Arlette. ‘When is your birthday?’

‘It’s tomorrow, in fact. I shall be eighteen.’

‘Well, what a coincidence. It’s my birthday on Saturday. And I shall be twenty-one.’

‘Oh, well, then, you have completely stolen my thunder.’ She held a delicate hand to her face, dramatically, in a gesture that Arlette could see had been entirely stolen from her mother’s repertoire. ‘Twenty-one,’ she sighed, ‘a grown-up. How utterly glorious. We shall have to make it a joint celebration.’

‘Oh, no need,’ said Arlette. ‘My mother has already thrown me a party. Last weekend.’

‘Well, we shall raise a glass in your direction then, at least. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have somebody else’s birthday party
to
rush off to. Mother, can I take the paste drop earrings from your stand, the new ones? Please …?’

Leticia wrinkled her pretty nose at her pretty daughter and then smiled. ‘You may,’ she said, ‘but do not under any circumstances lose them. Your father will be very cross.’