A Vision of Loveliness (6 page)

The proper salesladies took it in turns to patrol the ground floor. You weren’t allowed to read or smoke or look as if you were deep in conversation. No. You must either be folding or generally fiddling with the stock or just mooch about ornamentally, waiting for a customer to come in and give your life a meaning.

There were days in January when the door didn’t open at all and, rather than stand about sniping at each other, the senior sales used to take it in turns to man the shop while the others retreated downstairs to read magazines or play gin rummy. This didn’t affect the all-important pecking order. If a customer should cross the threshold, Bennett might do the ‘Good morning, Madam, can I help you’ lark but she would then hand over to Brigitta straight away. Bennett had the knack of sounding like a snotty manageress as she explained that Madam would like to see something in lovat blue with a short sleeve but it was still Brigitta who got the commission. By rights, Jane was Fourth Sales which meant that she seldom saw a single customer at this time of the year. If ever. Brigitta had been known to serve as many as three customers at once. Made a party of it, as if they were all out shopping together.

Jane had taken all the cashmere shirts out and arranged their polythene bags into tidy rainbows with each shade blending into the next like the colours on a cinema organ: primrose, moss green, lovat green, bottle green, brown, camel, natural, white, pink, camellia, tartan red, claret, black, navy, Dior blue, Sandringham blue, lovat blue, powder blue. She then somehow shoehorned the slithering pile back into its fixture. She’d polished all the mirrors – why did people touch mirrors? – and stood with her back to the stock gazing out at the arcade through the window display where the coloured cashmeres were suspended on their glass shelves like fully fashioned tropical fish.

Bennett kept up a merciless running commentary on the passers-by as they bustled along.

‘Have you seen these two?’

A pair of identically dressed girls dashed by: very ‘with-it’, very Chelsea, with red woolly tights and matching red berets on top of their shiny bobbed hair which was cut in hard lines round their faces like the hair on a cartoon character. They wore A-line flannel coats well above their knees with big shiny red buttons – like a really, really embarrassing school uniform.

Brigitta looked out of the window as she tripped past on her way back down to the basement after her tea break. She was Dutch but she could bore you to death in six languages. Her saving grace was that she swore all the time. She would never have sworn in Dutch, but she picked up dirty little scraps of English like a tramp rooting through a dustbin. It was a miracle she didn’t swear at the customers really.

‘Whoever cut those fucking jackets should cut another jacket and then be shot.’

She’d got that one from a little Jewish alterations tailor and she used it a lot.

You didn’t call her Brigitta to her face. You called her Mrs Taylor. Brigitta had been married very, very briefly to an Englishman she met nearly ten years ago while they were both working in the same department store. Bennett always reckoned it was just one of those friendly arrangements to get a work permit and that the split was all very amicable but Jane knew what really happened. Brigitta had had three Dubonnets and four glasses of punch at the Christmas party (table for twenty at the Cumberland Hotel) and had cornered Jane and explained that Mr Taylor had expected to be able to put his dirty great thing into Mrs Taylor whenever he felt like it.

‘I told him to stick it up his arse,’ said Brigitta and Jane said that would be a good trick if he could do it and Brigitta shot Dubonnet straight out of her nose.

Brigitta was, technically, still married to Mr Taylor but a week after the honeymoon she’d moved back into the salesladies’ hostel behind Marshall and Snelgrove, a miserable great barracks of a place where a girl could find refuge. Anyone with a gentleman caller had to wheel her bed out into the corridor. No gentlemen ever called. Mr Taylor was now living with his common-law wife in Carshalton Beeches and Brigitta eventually got herself a two-room flat near Clapham Common.

A very large woman in a mink coat had parked in front of the window.

Bennett pulled a face.

‘Oh no, Madam. Not in that size, Madam. Please!’

But Madam came in anyway. Very, very loud voice. Pointed to a baby-pink batwing-sleeved number in the window.

‘I’d like to see that in nigger brown in a size 48.’ No ‘good morning’.

‘I’m not sure if we still have that shade, Madam. It’s been a very popular line. But if you’d like to step downstairs one of our ladies can show you what we have. Mrs Taylor? Perhaps you could show Madam something attractive in nigger brown?’

Jane could hear the suppressed giggles and the whispered ‘Sidney Poitier’ but fortunately the customer didn’t. Brigitta hadn’t much to go on but she soon set to work persuading Madam that what she wanted was not a nigger brown, batwing-sleeved boat neck but a duck-egg blue, edge-to-edge cardigan. Unfortunately even the largest size didn’t allow edge to meet edge over Madam’s enormous tits.
The most ‘generous proportions’ can be made to appear attractive when allied with perfect posture – look at the Queen Mother
.

‘This style does run very small, Madam,’ said Mrs Taylor’s voice, apologetically. ‘I’ll just run upstairs to the stockroom and get you the next size.’

Brigitta stopped when she got to Jane and Bennett and immediately snipped the size labels off the 48 in her hand before pulling the cardigan as wide as it could possibly go. Cashmere can be any size you want. After the cardigan had had its nice little ‘schlap’, she folded it, put it in a bag and slipped back downstairs.

‘Oh yes, that’s better. Mind you the sleeve seems a bit short.’

You could hear the faintest sneer in Brigitta’s voice. ‘Short? Oh NO, Madam.
Bracelet
length.’

Whether or not they made bracelets big enough for those dimpled pink wrists Madam didn’t say, but she looked nice enough in her new cardigan and she knew when she was beaten. She even allowed Brigitta to sell her a bottle of Woolite and a D-Fuzz-It. After that, the shop went quiet for nearly an hour. Jane flicked furtively through a copy of
Vogue
on the counter.
Why go to Yucatan?

There were no prices in the window. Prices were vulgar and, besides, once they’d plucked up the courage to come in and ask, there was always the chance the customer would be too embarrassed to scuttle straight back out again and admit that a twenty-guinea three-piece was more than their husband earned in a week and you could just shame them into buying something.

The door pinged open. Mousey woman in windowpane checks.

‘How much is that cardie in the window?’

Bennett had started humming a tune. Jane raised her voice slightly.

‘The anthracite bolero, Madam? That model is six guineas, Madam. It’s pure cashmere.’

‘Oh.’ Her little fat face fell. ‘Do you have the same thing in Orlon?’

Uh-oh. Bad sign. Mr Philip couldn’t abide man-made fibres. Cheap and machine-washable, they were a threat to his whole way of life. His contempt was infectious. Did they have the same thing in fucking Orlon? No, Madam. Or Ban-Lon. Or Acrilon. Or Courtilon. Or Nylon. Or Brilon. Or Draylon. Or Vilene. Or Terylene. Or bloody polythene. Orlon
cardies
. Peasants.

‘Or what, madam?’

As she scuttled out by the far door the other one dinged open and suddenly there were two men in the shop. They didn’t seem to know it but they looked nothing like customers. One wore a leather car coat, the other had a big sheepskin draped over his shoulders. Both were wearing silk socks – wide boys always did. The beadles had already spotted them and were now stationed at either end of the arcade, on the lookout for a passing copper.

Bennett was on the attack at once.

‘Good morning,
gentlemen
. Can I help you?’ She turned to Jane. ‘I shall be busy looking after these
gentlemen
, Miss James. Perhaps you could tell Mrs Taylor and Miss Williams and Miss Stent and Mr Keating they’re wanted in the showroom?’ She made the last two up.

Jane kept her eyes on the two men and felt for the electric bell on the side of the stairs and pressed it three times. The card-players nipped swiftly up the stairs and took up their positions near the other two doors.

‘You got any intarsias, love?’ They didn’t bother with ‘good mornings’ either.

‘Yes, sir. We have some beautiful designs at the moment. What size was sir looking for?’

He looked nonplussed and opened his jacket. Bennett kept a completely straight face.

‘About a forty I should say, sir.’ She slid back the glass, pulled a single pullover from the top fixture and spread it on the counter further down while Jane smoothly came in behind her and slid the glass door back in place. Bennett shook the sweater from its folds. It was gorgeous: sooty black cashmere with exotic sprays of fuchsia, camellia and violet flowers scattered across it.

‘Would Sir like to try it on? We have a nice private fitting room downstairs, very discreet,’ said Bennett in a horribly understanding way. The man was a nice shade of camellia himself. His friend was trying not to laugh but keeping an eye on the door.

‘No. I meant that diamond pattern. You know.’

‘Ah! Sir means Argyll, I think. Not this one then?’

She and Jane went into their little dance, Bennett folding and bagging the garments while Jane worked the glass doors. Bennett moved down to the Argylls and her fingers hesitated a moment in front of the pigeonhole.

‘Same sort of colours?’

There wasn’t much left in that range. Jane had had to fill up the whole fixture with the brown and camel colourway.

‘Er. Brown?’

Bennett peered at the toffee-coloured pile in the fixture.

‘Oh dear. That’s the one colour we’re out of, sir. But we are expecting a delivery much later this year. Or early next.’

Jane opened the door and joined Bennett in a sort of pincer movement as they ushed the pair of them out of the shop under the watchful eye of the beadle.

A saleslady’s radar could recognise shoplifters immediately. She also had a sixth sense about messers. You got the same ones coming in again and again. Something about their clothes, about the angle of their feet (were they heading for the door?) told you that it wouldn’t be worth your while getting half the stock out.

Jane had spotted one of them outside looking at the window display. A painfully thin, miserable-looking woman with dyed black hair and a slightly sticky-looking beaver coat. A regular. She spent time but never money and nobody wanted to be prevented from serving a proper customer by getting bogged down with a time-waster. Jane tried to take evasive action but she was too slow off the mark. The other salesladies had begun tidying fixtures the moment she stepped through the door, leaving her to Jane. She always asked if she could take things home ‘on appro’ and always tutted when she couldn’t. She would then disappear into the fitting room and start amusing herself, putting together rather clever ensembles and walking up and down. She probably looked OK in certain lights but the crude strips and spots in the basement took no prisoners. She was even thinner than she looked –
Over-zealous slimming leads to scrawniness, salt cellars, flat chests, bad temper and even (if you read your daily newspaper) suicide
. Also, Jane soon realised that her trim figure was all spare parts: shoulders, bosom, even hips, were all little bits of wadding attached to her bra and corset. Tailored clothes hid all these bits and pieces but she looked very lumpy in knitwear.

Today Madam wanted to see something in vicuna, an animal so soft and fluffy and delicate that you practically had to kill it to get the silky brown wool off its back. They were running quite low on vicuna. So was Peru. Madam quite liked it but wasn’t sure about the brown. Did they have the same in a Saxe blue? Or a turquoise? Jane imagined Saxe blue and turquoise vicunas scampering across the Andes. No, Madam. Not in that style. Ignorant old bitch.

The only other customers that morning were a matching pair of Americans in his-and-hers camel overcoats, tartan trousers and cashmere scarves. Mrs Taylor, who had no conversation in real life, oozed professional charm. Not a very nice time of year for their trip, was it? London not at its best. Were they here on business? etc. All the while laying plans to sell them the entire shop, fixtures included. It was warm and slightly airless in the basement showroom and the cashmeres were cosy and soft and the pair could suddenly think of nothing nicer than a whole new wardrobe of knitwear plus the mix and match tweeds to go with them. They had already picked out over £200 worth of things when there was dangerous talk of lunch and coming back on Monday. Brigitta wasn’t going to let her commission get away that easily.

‘Miss James here can pop out and get you a nice smoked-salmon sandwich if you’re peckish. You still need to decide on a skirt length.’

‘Sure, honey. Let’s get it done today,’ said the husband, good-temperedly. ‘Just one skinny old English sandwich and then we can have a good lunch at that roast-beef place.’

Jane hurried into the coat room to put on her jacket and gloves and slip into her smart shoes. She walked the length of the arcade freezing to death but warm with pride at her reflection in the shop windows. She could sense the loafing shirt salesmen moving nearer the doors to watch her pass.