Before I Met You (11 page)

At five thirty Betty had finally fallen asleep, only to be awoken an hour later by the first of the market traders arriving in their vans. More banging of doors, more cockney hollering and inconsiderate moving about of furniture and crates.

She had considered getting up at this point, heading for the fire escape and an early morning cigarette, starting the day, but had somehow found her way back to sleep before a police car, pulling up very loudly, with much screeching of siren and squealing of tyres, had brought her abruptly back to awakeness. She pulled back her curtains and watched as two policemen left the doors of their car wide open and slowly sauntered around the corner into Peter Street, watched by a dozen pairs of curious eyes.

Betty threw on a cardigan and her trainers and dashed downstairs. John Brightly was talking to some hip-looking dude about a John Otway twelve-inch disc. He glanced up curiously as Betty appeared in the doorway exuding urgency and vague panic. Betty forgot her usual tendency to play it cool and calm in front of John Brightly and looked at him desperately.

‘What’s going on?’ she asked, looking at the blue light still flashing on and off on top of the empty police car.

John Brightly gazed at her with confusion. ‘What?’ he said, with a furrowed brow.

‘There?’ she said. ‘Dom Jones’s place. The police?’

John looked again and scratched the back of his neck. ‘No idea,’ he said, before turning back to his customer and addressing him in a kind of compensatory way as though saying: ‘I do apologise for the mad woman with the blond hair … now where were we?’

Betty sighed impatiently and headed around the corner where she found the two policemen giving a member of the attendant paparazzi a warning. She listened for a while, keen to discover what had been happening, and as she stood and watched she saw one of the policemen knock on the front door of Dom Jones’s house. She rooted herself to the spot. The intercom crackled to life. She heard the vague outline of a male voice and then heard the door buzz open. The policeman pushed open the door and as she stared she caught a tiny glimpse of him, in jeans and a checked shirt. She saw he looked anxious and tired. And then the policeman was pulled inside and the door was closed again.

As the door closed, Betty felt something strange happening to her. It was an ache. It started in her heart, and ended in her stomach. It was an ache of pity and sadness, but more than that, it was an ache of longing and desire. He looked so beaten up. His marriage in shreds. His children in another house. Trapped in an empty house by a sentry of rabid photographers. His world burst open like a bag of garbage for everyone to see the sordid contents.

She wanted to take him home and care for him and make him smile. She wanted to make everything better.

She thought for a brief moment of the sleazy stills in the
Mirror
, the back of the girl’s head buried between his legs. But then she thought, God, he was married to Amy Metz. She’d been
pregnant
for about three years, non-stop. She had awful friends. She looked like a cow. And she had terrible, terrible taste in clothes.

No, thought Betty, absolutely not. She was a woman and Amy Metz was a woman, and no woman should ever find an excuse for a man to have cheated. Ever.

She set her jaw as she thought this, cementing it into her psyche, and then she headed home.

14

1919

ARLETTE FELT THE
snow beneath the thin soles of her boots. It was soft and slippery as butter, and she held onto the wall with an outstretched hand to prevent herself from falling over. She wore a cloak with a fur trim and a hat made of grosgrain velvet. The Christmas lights of Carnaby Street gleamed in the creamy slush and the windows of public houses glowed like embers. She had completed her last day at Liberty before the Christmas holiday, a busy day of last-minute adjustments to party dresses and cocktail gowns, of harried husbands looking for gifts, and acres of tissue paper and garlands of ribbon, echoing carols and the coiling aromas of cinnamon and aniseed. Arlette could not imagine a more enchanted place to spend the day before Christmas Eve than the Liberty department store. More carol singers rejoined her once again to deck the halls with boughs of holly as she turned the corner on to Regent Street: a small group of men and women, rosy-cheeked and clutching lanterns, conducted by a man in a top hat upon which lay a thin layer of frozen snow. There was something odd about the energy being exuded by this group of people, something strangely frenetic and unnatural. They seemed as though they might be drunk, yet did
not
look at all like the kind of people one would expect to be drunk in public. They were well-dressed, fashionable, cocksure. The man in the top hat spun round ostentatiously as he coaxed the last rousing note from his band of bright-eyed carollers and the crust of frozen snow from atop his head spun away from him, like a clay pigeon. It landed as a pile of glitter at Arlette’s toes and she smiled.

‘Merry Christmas!’ said the top-hatted man, and he removed the hat from his head with a theatrical flourish. Beneath his hat he had a head of dense dark curls. He ran the fingers of a gloved hand through the curls, and looked at Arlette curiously.

‘Merry Christmas,’ Arlette returned the greeting. She smiled again, a tight, modest smile, and then continued on her way. But as she walked she was aware of the man’s eyes still upon her.

She heard one of the lady carollers call out to the man, ‘What next, Gideon? “Silent Night”, “We Three Kings” …?’

‘Yes,’ she heard him reply absent-mindedly.

‘Well, which one is it to be? Your choristers await …’

‘One minute,’ he said. ‘Just one minute. Wait!’

Arlette turned. As she’d suspected, the man in the top hat, Gideon, was walking urgently towards her. ‘I want to paint you,’ he said, his eyes taking in every contour of her face.

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘I’m an artist. My name is Gideon Worsley. I want to paint you. You have the most remarkable face. The bones … just so delicate … like the bones of a tiny bird.’

She blinked at him.

‘It would require very, very tiny brushes, one or two hairs at most. My goodness. How do you not break? How do you not shatter into a hundred tiny pieces?’

Arlette couldn’t help herself; she put a hand to her cheek, trying for herself to imagine what he saw. And then she looked up at him and saw again what had unnerved her before: the fire in the eyes, not normal, not quite sane. He was not drunk, she
could
see that much. He was not slurred or unfocused quite the opposite: he was electrified, possessed.

‘Excuse me, if you would, Mr Worsley, I’m in rather a hurry.’

‘Oh, no,’ he said, ‘you mustn’t hurry, not in these treacherous conditions. You might fall, and if you fell you might break. You must walk very, very slowly, taking great care.’ He offered her the crook of his arm and she heard a caroller from behind calling, ‘Oh
God
, Gideon, please leave the poor girl alone.’

He turned to the heckler and said, ‘I shall
not
leave the poor girl alone. Can’t you see that she is made of fine bone china, that she is delicate? She cannot be expected to walk unaccompanied. Come, we shall sing and walk at the same time. Where are you going?’

‘I’m going to get on a bus,’ Arlette replied hesitantly, ‘towards Kensington.’

‘Well, we shall escort you to your bus stand. Please,’ he offered her his arm again and this time Arlette took it. She felt that her behaviour was altogether acceptable. She was being escorted not just by a single gentleman, but by a whole band of ladies and gentlemen. And she had been concerned about her footing on these slimy paving stones.

‘Thank you,’ she said.

‘What is your name?’ asked Gideon.

‘Arlette,’ she said. ‘Arlette De La Mare.’

‘
Arlette De La Mare
! Did you hear that, everyone, this delicate young lady is called Arlette De La Mare? Arlette of the sea. Probably the most romantic name I have ever heard. And what do you do, Arlette of the sea? Do you have a job? Or are you, in fact, a mermaid?’ He glanced down at her water-stained boots and sighed. ‘No. Not a mermaid. But still, a divine creature, none the less. So let me guess, a teacher? No, not a teacher – your clothes are too fine. So possibly …
fashion
? Am I close?’

She smiled inscrutably.

‘I am, I’m close. Are you a seamstress?’ He picked up her
hands
and studied them under a streetlight. ‘No,’ he said, ‘wrong again, your hands are as soft as kittens’ ears. I think you are a shop-girl, in a smart department store. Possibly … Dickins and Jones?’

‘No,’ she laughed.

‘Lillywhites?’

‘No!’

‘Then … Liberty! Must be!’

Arlette laughed and Gideon Worsley punched the air victoriously. ‘You see,’ he said, ‘as an artist, I have to understand people, to read them, to work them out. I am the Sherlock Holmes of the art world. I can probably tell you where you’re from.’

‘Right then,’ she challenged.

‘Well, no, not right away, not immediately. But if you were to allow me an opportunity to paint you, if I could study you, in a favourable light, at my leisure, I could certainly hazard some very good guesses.’

They had arrived at Arlette’s bus stand.

‘Come on, Gideon. More songs!’ called one of his male friends.

‘Yes, yes!’ he snapped. ‘One minute! Please,’ he turned back to Arlette, ‘this is a genuine request. I have never seen anyone with bone structure like yours. If I can’t paint you I shall spend the rest of my life in a state of miserable dissatisfaction. Please.’

Arlette looked at Gideon. He was, beyond the madness in his eyes and his air of troubled desperation, an attractive-looking man, probably around her age, possibly one or two years older. His eyes were dark and small, set in broad features. His nose was Roman and his mouth was full and wide. She could imagine that he had been handsome all his life, never an awkward moment in his development from child to man. She knew she must say no to his request. Of course she could not let a strange man paint
her
portrait, if, indeed, a simple portrait was all that he had in mind.

But still, a portrait. An artist. She pictured his studio, a paint-splattered garret, a jam jar full of wild flowers, dusty windows overlooking rooftops, a cat maybe, thin and slightly anxious. She imagined sitting with her face tilted towards the light, while Gideon examined her through the frame of his own fingers, finding ever thinner and thinner paintbrushes to describe the delicate lines of her face. She imagined him looking calmer than he did right now, softer, asking her gentle questions, and she imagined answering them lightly and breezily with just a hint of mysterious restraint. And then one day, he would turn the canvas to face her and she would see her own likeness played out in tiny strokes of watercolour, or maybe oils, and she would sigh and clap her hands together and say, ‘Gideon, it’s beautiful.’

Her bus approached, although not in actuality a bus proper, rather a lorry with some seats on the roof, all London had to offer to its commuters in these rather ramshackle post-war days. ‘That is a very kind offer and I am flattered, Mr Worsley, but I fear that I’m going to be too busy to accept.’

She stepped towards the bus and Gideon pulled a small leather wallet from his breast pocket. ‘Please,’ he said, ‘take a card. Should you change your mind.’

She took it from his gloved fingers and allowed him to help her up onto the bus. ‘Thank you,’ she said. And then she found herself a seat and watched from a snow-splattered window as Gideon and his band of wild-eyed carollers rejoined themselves into a circle and launched into a full-throated rendition of ‘Good King Wenceslas’. She saw Gideon’s gaze follow the bus as it passed by and then latch onto hers as she came into view. For a moment she saw someone else deep inside him. Not the fiery-eyed leonine man, but a small boy, with a look of vulnerability and sadness in his eyes. She smiled and raised her hand at him. He raised his back at hers, and then he was gone.

She looked at the card in her hand, but it was too dark to read in the early evening gloom. She would read it tomorrow. She would think about Gideon and his garret and his soulful eyes tomorrow.

15

1995

A BOOKSHOP, A
comic store, two boutiques, a small gallery, a lingerie store, a brasserie and a cake shop all told Betty that they could not give her a job over the course of the next two days. One of the agencies she signed up with had offered her a three-day stint sewing on buttons in a tailor’s shop in Bloomsbury for £2.85 an hour, which she had accepted wearily. But within two minutes of entering the shop, a festering lint-filled tomb owned by three ageing Portuguese brothers with skin like parchment and hair blackened with boot polish, who looked at her as though she had just burst out of a birthday cake, she had made her excuses (something about sore fingers) and fled.

The other agency were waiting to hear from a zip factory in Islington about two days’ zip-sorting, and there’d been talk of a few days on reception at a photographer’s studio in Kentish Town but Betty didn’t hold out much hope for that, given her performance on the typing test they’d given her. She feared there were a dozen pretty girls with winning smiles out there who could type faster than thirty words a minute.

Betty was nearing the end of her first week in Soho and she still did not have a job. She felt a small wave of panic rise up
through
her. Then she did something that chilled her to her core, something that made her want to cry and be sick, both at the same time.

She rummaged through the clutter at the bottom of her shoulder bag until she found a biro. Then she rummaged through the clutter by the side of her bed until she found the application form for Wendy’s. She filled it in, very slowly, wanting to delay for as long as possible the moment at which she would pass it into the oily, miserable hands of a person who claimed to be in a position to decide whether or not she was worthy of a place within their oily, miserable company. She deliberately misspelled some words, trying to diminish her chances before she’d even left the house. She did not apply lipstick or put a comb to her hair. She threw on a baggy zip-up cardigan and a pair of trainers, and she made herself look as unappealing as was humanly possible.