Before I Met You (49 page)

‘Yes,’ agreed Lilian, ‘it is.’

‘And what of the girl?’ she asked. ‘Any news of her?’

‘Yes,’ said Lilian conspiratorially. ‘Minu had a letter from Godfrey a few days ago; her parents have thrown her from their home.’

Arlette clasped a hand across her mouth. ‘Poor girl,’ she whispered.

‘Poor girl indeed.’

‘And where is she now?’

‘Godfrey told Minu that she is staying in Soho, while he is away, at a home for unwed mothers.’

‘Oh, how sad.’

‘Yes. But he’ll be returning in early November, in time for the birth. He said he will find them rooms, that he will marry her.’

Arlette felt an agonising stab of sorrow pierce her heart at these words. She’d known it would happen. It was why she’d left London. But to hear the words, to know as fact that someone else would be spending the rest of their life with the man she loved, that someone else would live in the small house with the friendly neighbours, would take the coffee-skinned toddlers back to St Lucia on a majestic cruise ship. She held back a guttural sob and forced a tiny smile. ‘Good,’ she said. ‘That’s good.’

A clattering emanated from the hallway and Leticia and the three boys hurtled into the room. All of them were ruddy-cheeked and smiling, even Leticia, who had more colour in her face than Arlette had ever seen her carrying before.

‘Glorious Arlette!’ cried Leticia at the sight of her. ‘What a splendid, splendid treat! Welcome! Boys,’ she called out behind her, ‘look who’s here. It’s Arlette!’

The three boys peered at Arlette disinterestedly, apart from Henry, who threw her a very strange look indeed and said, ‘Well, well, well, I thought we’d seen the last of you.’

‘Henry!’ Leticia chastised. ‘There’s no need for such rudeness. Really.’

Henry merely grimaced and disappeared.

‘Henry!’ called Leticia. ‘Come back here right now and apologise to our guest.’

‘Oh, really,’ said Arlette, ‘it’s fine.’

‘No,’ said Leticia, sternly, ‘it is not fine. Come back here right now,’ she called again, ‘or I will be talking to your father and
your
allowance will not be making an appearance in your bank account this month. Now, Henry!’

Arlette almost jumped at the authoritative tone of Leticia’s voice and she looked at Lilian in surprise and vague amusement.

Lilian smiled and whispered, ‘Such changes, Arlette. Such changes.’

Henry reappeared in the doorway and stared at Arlette sulkily. ‘I apologise for my comments, Miss De La Mare. Now, if you will excuse me, I have some tiresome domestic chores to attend to.’

He disappeared and Leticia smiled at Arlette. ‘Such terrible boys,’ she said. ‘I am taking them in hand. They will be the most charming boys in London by the next time you visit!’

‘I am sure they will,’ said Arlette. ‘And possibly they will also be uncles.’

Leticia put a hand to her heart and gasped. ‘And me then a grandmother! Well, well, well. What a silly thought. But also so terribly exciting. Now, I must leave you girls to catch up. I have some last-minute party arrangements to discuss. So lovely to have you back, Arlette. Such a treat.’

She left the room and Lilian looked at Arlette and shrugged. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘sometimes bad things do happen for a good reason.’

Arlette accompanied Leticia and Lilian into the West End the next morning, where Lilian was having the last fitting for her party dress and looking for new hairpins with which to ornament her hair. Arlette left them in the dress shop and took herself for a walk through streets that had once been her second home. It was another bright September day, golden and crisp, just like the day last year when she’d walked to the river with Godfrey, when he’d told her he wanted to be with her forever, just before he’d gone to Manchester and left her to her fate with Gideon Worsley.

She found herself wandering carelessly, but maybe somewhere deep down, purposefully, towards Soho. She’d asked Minu last night about the home for unwed mothers. St Anne’s Court, Minu had told her. Just opposite the new flats.

She didn’t have a plan, she just wanted to see. See what someone looked like with Godfrey’s baby growing inside them. She crossed over Soho Square, tatty and tawdry on this bright Saturday morning. Drunks and opium addicts stared at her horribly through glassy eyes and she averted her gaze, walking briskly and with purpose. St Anne’s Court was a short road, equally dirty and sordid, but there, as Minu had said, was the shiny new block of flats, built in the modern style, all gleaming granite and streaky marble.

Arlette stood before the building and looked at the house opposite. On the ground level was a tiny shop selling supplies for cripples and injured soldiers. Above were three floors, all grimy-windowed and unwelcoming. There was no signage to suggest what the building was used for, just the number 12 engraved into the mantel. She watched the building for a while, until, after a moment a young girl scuttled out, hiding her blooming stomach with a bag held across herself. She scuttled back again a moment later, holding a paper bag from a pharmacy to her chest, and Arlette crossed the street urgently towards her.

‘Hello,’ she said.

The girl looked at her in horror.

‘I’m sorry. I don’t mean to alarm you. I’m just …’ She stopped, suddenly aware of the stupidity of her actions. ‘It’s just,’ she continued, ‘there’s a girl staying here. She’s called Esther. I wondered …’

‘Esther Jones or Esther Murray?’

‘I’m not sure,’ said Arlette. ‘The one who’s engaged to a coloured man.’

‘Ah,’ said the girl, knowingly, ‘yes, Esther Jones. What about her?’

‘I’m a friend of her fiancé’s. I was just, he asked me to check up on her, while he’s away. To make sure she’s all right.’

‘Well, you’re not allowed in there,’ she said. ‘No one’s allowed in there. But I can tell her you were asking after her. If you like?’

Arlette stared at the grimy building and then back at the grimy girl. There was another world behind those walls, a world she could not come close to imagining.

She shook her head and said, ‘Thank you. But no. It’s fine. As long as she’s all right?’

‘Yes, she’s fine. Her and the baby. Fighting fit.’

‘Good,’ said Arlette, tears blurring her vision, ‘that’s good. Thank you for your time.’

And then she turned and headed back through the dirty streets of daytime Soho towards the glittering dress shop in gleaming, glorious Mayfair.

56

Telegram

Arlette STOP Call immediately STOP Hyd 2362 STOP I have news STOP Call as soon as you can STOP

Lilian

ARLETTE READ THE
telegram, once, then twice. She felt no urgency. Just curiosity. ‘I have news.’ It could mean anything. She did not hurry to the exchange. She felt there was no need. Instead she folded the note, and tucked it into her purse, with a half-formed plan to visit the exchange on her way home from work, to where the telegram had been delivered.

But the telegram sat in her purse, calling to her, as the day passed. Why a telegram? she asked herself. If it was just family news, would not a letter have sufficed? Eventually, as the nagging feeling intensified, she asked her manager for an early break and she made her way through the bustling streets of St Peter Port to the main exchange.

The telephone was answered by the operator in Lilian’s apartment block. ‘Hyde Park Mansions, to whom would you like to be connected?’

Arlette asked for the Millers’ apartment and the telephone in
their
flat was answered by the maid: ‘Good afternoon, Millers’ residence, how may I help you?’

‘I would like to speak to Miss Lilian Miller.’

‘And who shall I say is calling?’

‘This is Miss De La Mare.’

‘Just one moment, Miss De La Mare.’

Eventually Lilian came on the line and Arlette felt herself tense up at the prospect of what she was about to hear.

‘Darling Arlette,’ said Lilian, her voice choked with tears.

‘What?’ snapped Arlette. ‘What is it?’

‘It has been on the news, but I thought it may not have got as far as the Channel Isles.’

‘What, Lilian, what?’

‘Oh, it is too, too sad. The most dreadful thing. The orchestra …’

‘The orchestra?’

‘Yes, Arlette. The orchestra have drowned.’

Arlette paused, taking it in, trying to make sense of something that sounded, in Lilian’s mangled words, faintly comical. How could an orchestra drown?

‘The SS
Rowan
. It went down last night. Off the coast of Scotland. There was a collision with another ship. The orchestra were on board, Arlette, nearly all of them.’

Arlette blanched and sunk to her knees. The operator looked at her in alarm. ‘
Comment va, Mademoiselle
?’ she asked in patois.

‘Godfrey?’ Arlette said.

‘I have no idea; they have not yet released any names. But the whole ship went down, Arlette. The whole ship!’

Arlette breathed in and brought herself up to standing again. No, she thought, it simply could not be true. No, Godfrey would not have been on the ship. He would have been on his way back to London, to marry Esther Jones, to see his baby arrive in the world. He would not have been on the ship.

An image passed through her consciousness as she listened to
Lilian
sniffing and wailing in her Hyde Park apartment. It was an image of water, dark blue, dark as ink, and a man passing down through it, a smart suit floating from his body like the tendrils of sea anemone, his arms spread out, his eyes open, the eyes of Godfrey Pickle, dead, but smiling as he drifted downwards, smiling and at peace. And then like an afterthought, drifting down behind him, a golden clarinet, glinting and glittering in the water, following him down to his watery grave. And she knew then that he was dead. Felt it inside herself, sharp as a knife, yet soothing as a lullaby.

Of course, she thought, of course.

She smiled then, the saddest smile she’d ever smiled, and said to Lilian, ‘It’s all right, Lilian. It really is. It’s all right. We’ll wait for news. Just wait for news.’

But she already knew there was no good news. The love of her life was dead. And his baby would have no father.

When it was confirmed three days later that eight members of the orchestra had perished in the icy seas off the coast of Scotland, and that one of them had been ‘world-renowned clarinettist Godfrey Pickle, otherwise known as Sandy Beach’, Arlette sat in her room for a whole day and screamed until her throat was raw.

57

1995

BETTY BARELY SLEPT
that night.

Candy Lee had a visitor downstairs and was screaming and banging walls, and the pub over the road had its doors wide open because it was such a warm night and the street was full of the sound of Iron Maiden and long-haired men wearing eyeliner. And, of course, on top of the usual night-time Soho cacophony, there was the sound of John Brightly, on the sofa down below, moaning quietly in his sleep and shouting out every now and then words that sounded like gobbledegook.

But more than the noise was the internal monologue hammering away in her head.

As she lay there, trying and failing to sleep, Clara was in a taxi coming home from the airport. And, as she lay there, trying and failing to sleep, Dom Jones was on a plane coming in to land at Berlin airport.

He’d given her the details of a farmhouse in Gloucestershire he’d looked at on Thursday. ‘Take it,’ he’d said, ‘stare at it. Dream about it.’

She pulled it out from under her pillow now and switched on a torch, not wanting to wake John. The farmhouse was called St
Luke’s
House. It was part Georgian, part Edwardian and, as she leafed through the details, she saw that it was utterly enchanting in every way, from its bleached blue stucco façade, to its vine-filled orangery, its full-length dining hall with buttressed ceiling and coat of arms, and its sweeping lawns that cascaded down towards fields of corn and rape.

From below she heard Candy Lee reaching her climax and she forced her pillow over her head until it was over. For a moment it was quiet and she turned her attention back to the details of the house. But then it started up again and she felt herself filled with a kind of primal rage.

She had not, she realised, for the full eight weeks of her time in Soho, slept through a whole night without interruptions. And if she did ever manage to sleep through a whole night without interruptions, she had been awoken at five o’clock by the rubbish trucks. And if she had ever managed to sleep through the five a.m. visits from the rubbish trucks then she had been awoken at six a.m. by the first of the market traders arriving to set up their stalls. The trucks and the traders she could stomach. Candy Lee wailing and banging on walls she could not. And so, before she’d had a chance to think through what she was doing, she’d pulled on a cardigan over her pyjamas, climbed down her ladder, tiptoed past John Brightly and marched downstairs to bang on Candy’s door.

It took a moment or two for the door to be opened and when it finally was Betty did not know where to look. There was Candy, dressed in a feathered bolero, leather chaps and PVC boots, her breasts hung out over the top of a cut-out bra. She had a glass of champagne in one hand and in the other – and this was more remarkable to Betty than anything else about her appearance – a half-smoked cigarette.

‘Beautiful Betty!’ Candy beamed at her.

‘You’re smoking,’ said Betty.

‘Yes!’ said Candy.

‘But, I thought you were asthmatic?’

‘I am! Betty! Come in! Finally, you came to see me.’

‘No,’ said Betty, suddenly flustered, ‘listen. Candy. It’s midnight. I’ve got to be up early in the morning for work. I’ve had a really, really, really long day. Could you please,
please
, PLEASE keep the noise down?’

Candy wrinkled her face up. ‘Noise? What noise?’

Betty blanched, really not wanting to spell it out. ‘The, you know, you and your friend.’

‘What friend?’

Betty grimaced. ‘You know, whoever you have staying with you tonight.’

‘Betty! I have nobody staying with me tonight. I am alone, Betty.’