A Vision of Loveliness (20 page)

‘You’ll do, darling.’ Thanks a bunch. ‘Walk your best walk and he’ll snap you up.’

Jane sashayed into the showroom which was still extra chilly after a whole weekend without heating. It smelled expensively of hothouse lilies and floor wax. Jane’s tidy suede toes crossed the floor, then did a half turn towards the waiting Mr Green. He smelled nice and expensive too. He wore a single-breasted blue Savile Row suit and Turnbull and Asser shirt and tie. His cufflinks were plain yellow gold knots. Every detail beyond reproach. Like a spy. His (actually rather sexy) brown eyes followed Jane closely.

‘This is my cousin Janey. She’s going to give me a hand getting dressed, if that’s all right. Janey James: Lawrence Green.’

He took her hand and came straight to the point. Suzy wouldn’t have brought her in unless there was a reason.

‘Ever done any modelling, Miss James?’

‘Do call me Janey, everybody does. I’ve only done a little modelling, I’m afraid.’ She smiled shyly and slyly at him from under her heavy, brown-black automatic eyelashes. ‘Why do you ask?’ As if they didn’t both know.

‘Lots of gowns to show this morning, Miss James, lots of gowns. Tell you what, the first client won’t be here for half an hour. Why don’t you slip one on for me right now and show me what you can do. You know where to go, Suzy.’

Their heels pick-pocked their way across the shiny parquet, behind a fancy screen and through a polished mahogany door.

You could see why they kept the screen in front.

The models’ dressing room was a chilly little cubby-hole with manky black and white lino and a single sickly striplight on the peeling ceiling. The morning’s models were ranked on a dress rail next to a full-length looking glass and there was a yellow Formica table with a dressing-table mirror, a desk lamp and a Watney’s ashtray still overflowing with lipsticked fag ends from last week’s shows. There was a used corn plaster stuck on the mirror.

Suzy was already slipping her suit on to a spare hanger, flicking along the rail with the other hand.

‘That ought to do it.’

Riviera Secret was strapless sapphire blue with a duchesse satin bodice and a tiered lace skirt. It had built-in support and Jane was just stripped down to stockings and panty girdle when Mr Green’s handsome dark head popped round the door. Jane’s hands flew to her breasts. So did his eyes.

‘All right, ladies? My first buyer will be here in ten minutes. Get your drawers on.’ He flashed a smile. He had beautiful, very real-looking teeth. They might even be real. There was one missing round the side. And a snazzy gold one at the back. You didn’t see that with dentures.

Jane swanned out from behind the gilt screen. Mr Green had now been joined by a thin but handsome woman with honey-brown tweeds, marmalade hair and tiny lizard shoes the colour of Marmite. This was Mrs Green and nothing was ever really going to happen without her say-so. Goldie Green would commère the show but she was never introduced as the wife and there wasn’t a spark of life between them. In office hours Lawrence had eyes only for his buyer.

Jane crossed the floor then risked a full basic turn. There was nothing basic about it.
Pivot on the balls of both feet. Go back on your right foot, which must be at right-angles to the left. Pause. Then step off again with the left foot
. Just as she completed the manoeuvre she saw that Suzy had entered the room having somehow managed to zip herself into the identical dress in white satin. She was wearing the white pumps from her kit bag. They were slightly grubby but then so was the frock after umpteen showings. They passed each other then both did a full turn and faced the Greens. Mrs G walked up to Jane and checked the fit of the bodice.

‘Not bad. Not bad at all. Quite a nice effect, the two of them. What do you say, Larry? Nice effect?’

She drew on her cigarette, deepening the hollows beneath her high, bony cheeks. She lowered her powder-blue lids slightly, glancing sidelong at Larry, waiting for his agreement.

‘Very nice effect, Goldie, should be very good for sales. They’ll find it hard to choose between them: take both colours.’

He nipped back into the changing room and re-jigged the running order, ringing the stockroom to send down a few more duplicates: lupin and rose; black and white; silver and gold; marigold and violet (African violet was going to be very big next season).

Mr Green turned to Jane. ‘Very nice. Very
promising
.’ (Promising was cheaper than nice.) ‘Thirty bob for the morning all right for you?’ This was way below the going rate but she needed the experience.

‘Aren’t you going to throw in a frock, Larry?’ Mrs Green was back in the workroom so Suzy could work the lashes. ‘You must have lots of stuff hanging about from last season. What about that sale or return deal you did with Barkers? They can’t have shifted all of it. Not the small sizes. Be a darling. Janey’s got a really hot date tomorrow.’

She posed demurely on a little gilt chair, hands crossed at the wrist to deepen the round, creamy cleavage visible over the white satin rim of the bodice. Like a very naughty bridesmaid. Lawrence Green straightened his Windsor knot and gave them another flash of that smart gold tooth.

‘We’ll see how it goes this morning. I’ve got one buyer coming down from Manchester; Firbridges Young and Gay department and the head of model gowns for Debenham and Freebody – first time we’ve had her here. One of her suppliers has let her down and she needs some spring models in a hurry. Wedding gowns are big business at the moment. Nobody wants a Windsor grey costume in a register office when they can screw daddy for white faille and six bridesmaids.’ Jane thought of Eileen and her four fat cousins in home-made peach pongee.

The first buyer arrived on the stroke of half nine. A huge, heavily corseted Manchester woman who had picked out a showy fat personality to match her size. She was on the lookout for ‘soomthing a bit different’ which was why she always came up to London to service her ‘special’ customers: toffee-nosed, butterscotch-blonde matrons from Wilmslow.

In fact, as Lawrence Green well knew, ‘soomthing a bit different’ actually meant something very plain indeed. The gown manufacturers of the North West were still hopelessly addicted to bugle-beading.

Mrs Stockley loved coming to Green’s. All the gown buyers did. Goldie Green would stay out of the way while her husband worked them over: hand-kissing; flirting; smiling that handsome smile; oscillating around them like an attentive boyfriend. Almost all the buyers were single – most big stores (and most husbands) frowned on female staff keeping their jobs after marriage – and almost all of them were susceptible to a little professional flattery. Place a big enough order and you might even get lunch at one of Mr Green’s regular haunts: the Langham Hotel or maybe even L’Etoile. Like Henry Swan, he knew the value of a familiar face (and a big fat tip). Half the fun of coming to London was to be wined and dined by a witty, handsome, hand-stitched creature like Lawrence Green. And he listened. All her problem customers, their fads, their tantrums. Her staff. And the orders were always turned around nice and fast.

When he could, Lawrence liked to schedule a good fifteen-minute firebreak between appointments so that his buyers didn’t see each other coming and going. He’d have had separate entrances if he could. Everything was always Exclusive but that could mean a lot and he didn’t want two rival stores seeing each other buying. The important thing was to sprinkle the collection across as wide an area as possible so that none of the model gowns brushed against each other at the same dinner dance – the punters would be mortified and the shops would get it in the neck. The budget customers had to take their chances.

In the tiny changing room Suzy was zipping Jane into a green creation in ottoman satin – ‘In a Jade Garden’ – while Jane hastily stuffed some paper handkerchiefs into the dyed-to-match shoes.

‘Try to keep your left side to the wall. There’s a coffee stain down the skirt.’

The dress was fat and heavy with fabric, giving the ballerina-length skirts a slow, graceful sway. She swung out from behind the screen and Mrs Green began her running commentary to an audience of one (‘Janey’s gown has standaway fluting in the Balenciaga manner’). Jane had watched such shows dozens of times, played models in the mirror till her feet burned. She paused by the screen as if scanning the room for her date, raised her chin and smiled as if she had spotted him on the far side of the room, then loped purposefully towards him, swinging her hips very slightly to exaggerate the lilt of the skirt. A hasty full turn (to keep the coffee stain on the move) and then a classic pose while Goldie drew the buyer’s attention to the built-in boning – ‘for a smoother line’; the pistachio net petticoats – ‘ideal for dancing’; the clever new Seenozip and the fact that the same style was available in tangerine, raspberry ice and Capri blue. Other colours by arrangement. Jane’s next basic turn twirled her behind the screen.

The buyer was settling back for the usual grouch about whether ‘those nipped-in numbers were right for her Larger Ladies’. Lawrence Green flashed his teeth politely but said nothing. Half his output was outsize but nobody wanted Larger Ladies doing Paris turns in the showroom. He had once tried using a Young Matron type (three inches bigger all round) to show the models for his winter collection but the dresses didn’t look half so well and he abandoned the experiment after the first morning when a head buyer from Dickins and Jones – a flat-chested, stony-faced, pear-shaped pudding of a woman with the legs of a hockey international and a fluffy little moustache – had complained that this year’s collection seemed a bit on the frumpy side. The poor model – Shirley, her name was, lovely-looking girl. Wore the merchandise like a queen. Natural blonde. Baby-blue eyes and very modern ideas – ran about the dressing room practically starkers. Goldie Green wasn’t sorry to see the back of her, to tell you the truth. Anyway, poor Shirley was sent packing after six gowns leaving Goldie scouring the building for size tens and Lawrence on the phone to the agency trying to find somebody – anybody – to work the rest of the day. The agency got very hoity-toity and said they had no one available. For one terrible moment Lawrence Green thought that he was going to have to show two dozen model gowns ‘in the hand’ until he suddenly remembered Suzy.

He’d met her at a rag-trade party the previous week. A fellow gown merchant had had a big fortieth birthday affair at his house in St John’s Wood. Champagne, caviare, chopped liver and a wild party game in which Lawrence and five other dress designers were given ten yards of ‘art’ silk, a box of pins and a half-naked model to dress. After a certain amount of groping and tucking there was a fashion parade which the wives judged and Lawrence and Suzy had won first prize (a box of Havana cigars) by a landslide.

Suzy had made it round to the showroom in half an hour and had twirled through his winter collection so fast that no one saw the pins and bulldog clips holding the size fourteen frocks in place. Lawrence sold every stitch.

Today’s buyer was just settling into her usual whinge when Suzy appeared in a turquoise velvet sheath with matching satin train. The woman was quite startled to see what looked like the same brunette appear from behind the screen. They hardly gave her pause for breath: burnt-orange bayadère stripe, citron lace, cerise ribbed silk.
Jane is wearing ‘Midnight Moment’, in Prussian-blue figured satin with black evening coat lined with the matching blue fabric. The ensemble is completed with a matching organza stole.
Jane let the stole droop to her waist as she twisted and gazed over her shoulder at the imaginary man just behind Lawrence Green’s buyer. It was Johnny Hullavington, she decided, wearing that nice blue suit. She imagined his slow smile listening to the prattle of ‘my larger ladies’ and the ‘select foonctions’ they attended. Ballerina length might be all very well Down South but they wouldn’t let you through the door without a long frock in Wilmslow, apparently.

The final part of the show was bridal wear. They did this as a pair. ‘Suzy and Jane wear “Rosy Whisper” and “Lemon Dream”, bridesmaids’ dresses of paper taffeta with tulip skirts.’ Suzy and Jane tore back into the changing room – by now strewn with warm silk – and hurriedly wriggled into their gowns for the double wedding finale. The showroom, which had been chilly at nine o’clock, was ringed by fat old radiators and the room’s only window was painted shut. By half eleven it was like an oven.
There are, don’t forget, approximately three million sweat glands in the human body
.

Jane had never tried on a wedding dress before. Carol had already got hers ready for the Big Bloody Day and a gang of them had gone round to drool over it. Norma was allowed to slip it on, but not Jane – afraid she’d look better in it probably. Eileen’s was going to be a cheap flocked Tricel number but it would still set her dad back fifteen quid:
Man likes woman to look exciting, luxurious, adorable . . . So man made Tricel
. Carol’s was much more swanky but it was an absolute swine. After trying on every wedding dress in Croydon, she’d finally plumped for a peculiar-looking crinoline affair in French brocade patterned with silver frosted roses cut into a huge shawl collar, the wide revers forming a sort of double-breasted effect on the front of the bodice. Carol, who was only five feet two when she took off the shoes (covered in matching French brocade), had read something about adding height with a coronet so she’d picked out a silver satin pill box with a full short veil of pure white softlon silk gossamer – she’d have done better with an old net curtain, quite honestly. Dress, veil and shoes cost fifty-five guineas – more than Jane earned in three months – let alone the going-away outfit – no final decision as yet, but there was talk of shell-pink Tricosa.