Before I Met You (8 page)

‘No,’ he said dully, ‘I’m vandalising it.’

She peered at him through squinted eyes for a second, silently measuring his tone.

‘Ha ha,’ she said, ‘but seriously? Are you?’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I am attempting to fix your telephone. In fact,’ he plucked a red wire and then plucked a yellow wire and then leaned back and appraised the situation, ‘I’m pretty sure I have just
fixed
your telephone.’ He pulled a mobile phone from his bag and pressed in a number. The phone in the hallway rang. He smiled. Then he pulled a twenty-pence piece from his pocket, punched a number into the payphone and the phone in his other hand rang.

‘Sorted,’ he said. ‘All yours.’

Betty stared at the phone in some surprise for a moment or two after the engineer had left. She had a phone. And seventeen phone calls to make. What a piece of luck.

Betty dialled all seventeen numbers for C Pickle that morning. Of the thirteen people who answered not one had ever heard of Clara. The other four numbers were either disconnected or had not replied. But Betty had suspected as much. There was no way it could have been that easy. If it had been that easy, she mused, then Arlette would have tracked Clara Pickle down years ago. Betty appraised the five twenty-pence pieces left in her hand and called Bella.

‘Guess who’s calling you, live, from their Soho penthouse?’

‘What?’

‘Berwick Street. Top floor. Just around the corner from the Raymond Revuebar.’

‘Seriously?’

‘Yes! I just moved in! Yesterday!’

‘Wow! I don’t believe it. Finally!’

‘I know, at the ripe old age of twenty-two.’

‘So, how is it?’

‘It’s … fine, it’s …’ Betty was about to say, ‘it’s amazing’ but as she started to form the words in her mouth she felt tears suddenly overwhelm her.

‘Oh, Betty, sweetheart, are you OK?’

‘Yes!’ said Betty, trying to pull the tears back down inside. ‘Yes! I’m fine. It’s just all a bit, you know … Arlette dying, the funeral, coming here, everything’s changed so quickly, after being the same for so long.’

‘Oh, Bets, of course you’re feeling weird. Are you alone?’

‘Yes, just little old me.’

‘No flatmate?’

‘No,’ she sighed, ‘no. It’s a studio.’

‘Wow,’ said Bella, ‘that must be costing you a fortune.’

‘Kind of,’ said Betty. ‘I guess. Arlette left me a thousand pounds. This place is four hundred a month. I’ve paid for two months up front …’

‘So you’ll have blown the lot on rent by the summer? And then what?’

‘Oh God, I don’t know. I’m going to get a job. And …’ she paused. She’d been about to say,
if I can’t find the woman in Arlette’s will I’ll be getting ten thousand pounds, so I don’t need to worry too much about money
, but kept the thought to herself. She
would
find the woman in the will. She was determined to. ‘I’ll get a job,’ she said.

‘No! Betty Dean, getting a job. No way!’

‘Well, it’s about time.’

‘Good grief, what sort of job?’

‘No idea. Maybe an art gallery? A boutique? An auction house? Somewhere I can start at the bottom and work my way up.’

‘Excellent,’ Bella said. ‘Have you even got a CV?’

‘Ha,’ Betty laughed, ‘and what would it say if I did? “1990–1995: Squeezed an unexceptional B.Tech Diploma in General Art and Design in around caring for crazed old lady. The End.”.’ She sighed. ‘I don’t think I’m really a CV type of a person. I think people will just have to take me as they find me.’

‘Hmm.’

Betty groaned. She hated it when people said ‘hmm’. ‘Hmm, what?’

‘Nothing. Just, you’re in London now. As amazing as you are, I’m not sure just being “you” is going to be enough to get you the job of your dreams.’

‘Urgh, God,’ Betty groaned. ‘You sound just like my mother.’

‘I
am
just like your mother. That’s why you love me so much. And she’s right.’ Bella paused. ‘Well, maybe we’re both wrong and you’re right. But either way I agree with her. It wouldn’t hurt to put something in writing. Talk yourself up a bit. Maybe you could say you were, God, I don’t know, Arlette’s personal assistant?’

Betty laughed. ‘Not too far from the truth, I suppose.’

‘Exactly!’

‘I know what you’re saying. But I think I’ll try it my way first.’ Betty smiled.

‘Yes,’ said Bella, ‘of course you will. You always, always do.’ They fell quiet for a moment. ‘So,’ said Bella. ‘When are you coming to visit?’

‘Was just about to ask you the same thing. Have you got any holiday coming up?’

‘Not until next month. Why don’t you come down here?’

Betty paused and pondered the suggestion. She envisaged Bella’s bleak lodgings in a tumbledown cottage in a remote village just outside the zoo. She thought of cold fingers wrapped around chipped mugs of tea and condensation-covered windows looking out over tangled gardens and cool, flagstoned kitchens and early morning birdsong. She shuddered. She’d only just arrived in the kingdom of sirens and neon and filth and chaos, and double yellow lines as far as the eye could see. She could not yet countenance the prospect of a return to the countryside, even if it was to see her oldest, most-loved friend.

‘Yes,’ she said, ‘maybe.’

10

THE STALLHOLDER WAS
outside when Betty left the house the next morning.

She glanced at him awkwardly, and was taken aback when he smiled at her. ‘Morning, neighbour,’ he said.

‘Oh. Hi.’

‘Any more thoughts about the coat?’

‘Oh. Yes, definitely. Yes. I want to sell it.’

‘I mentioned it to my sister. She said to take it round to her studio. Any time.’

‘Any time, now?’

He shrugged. ‘Yeah, now would be OK.’

Betty hurtled back upstairs to retrieve the coat.

‘Here …’ He was feeling his pockets rather randomly. She watched him as he did so, noticing that his fingers were long and slender, that he had a tattoo on the inside of his wrist and that his eyes were so brown they were almost black. ‘Here.’ He pulled a small card from the inside pocket of his jacket, and handed it to her.

She glanced at it.

Alexandra Brightly.

Betty smiled. ‘Is that your name, too?’ she asked. ‘Brightly?’

‘Yeah,’ he smirked. ‘John Brightly. I know. Not exactly fitting. Or maybe,’ he continued, deadpan, ‘I’ve deliberately played against type all my life.’

Betty laughed. ‘It’s nice,’ she said. ‘I like it.’

He smirked again and then turned, almost abruptly, away from her.

‘Thank you,’ she said to his back. ‘Thank you very much.’

‘No problem,’ he said.

And that appeared to be the end of their exchange.

She stood, for a moment, suspended in an air pocket of uncertainty, wondering what she should do next. A propos of nothing she turned left, and then left again. She found herself outside the nice house on Peter Street. As she passed by, she noticed across the street a man with a large camera in one hand and a mug of coffee in the other. He was wearing a baseball cap and sunglasses, although the sky was far from blue. As she watched, another man joined him, also carrying a camera and a cup of coffee. They seemed to know each other, and made a few words of low-key conversation. Then they both turned and faced the house on Peter Street, as though waiting for something to happen. She watched them both for a moment or two, before realising that she now looked as strange as they did and hurrying on her way.

Alexandra Brightly’s studio was called 20th Century Box and was next to the Oasis Sports Centre in Covent Garden. It was up two flights of scruffy stairs in a soulless building shared with a tailor and a photographer.

‘Yes?’

‘Hi, my name’s Betty, your brother, John, gave me your card. I’ve got a fur to sell.’

‘Oh. Cool. OK. Come in! Second floor!’

The woman greeting Betty at the top of the stairs was tall and
painfully
thin, with long white-blond hair and a rather beaky nose. She was so pale, the blue of her eyes so watered down, that she almost gave the impression of albinism. She was dressed in a black chiffon shirt, a large crucifix on an overlong chain resting in the wide valley between her small breasts, and baggy jeans held together at her waist with an old leather belt. She held a fake cigarette in her right hand.

‘Wow, wow, wow,’ she said as her gaze fell upon the fur held like a slaughtered animal in Betty’s arms. ‘Wow,’ she said again, resting the fake cigarette on a pattern-cutting table and putting an arm out towards the coat, running fingers as long as chopsticks through the fur. ‘This looks fucking awesome. Fuck. I fucking
love
fur.’

Her voice was husky and smoky and her accent was half public school, half East End. She smiled at Betty, revealing smoker’s teeth. ‘Sorry,’ she said, ‘I get a bit carried away sometimes. Especially by the fur. It’s so wrong, yet it’s mm,’ she caressed the fur again, ‘sooo right. Let’s have a look then.’ She pulled half-moon glasses from the pattern-cutting table and rested them halfway down her aquiline nose. ‘Oh, yes,’ she said, now that the fur was unfolded on the table, ‘oh, yes. This is amazingly good. Where did you say you got it from?’

‘It was my grandmother’s.’

‘Class act,’ she said, opening it up and feeling the lining. ‘Oh yes, it’s a Gloria Maurice. I thought it would be. They always put an extra couple of animals in, just for the hell of it, you know.’ She peered at Betty over the top of her glasses and smiled. ‘Yeah,’ she said, turning back to the fur. ‘I could definitely buy this from you. Definitely. I’m working with a production company right now, as it happens, on a period drama – nineteen forties – they’ll love this. Let’s have a proper look at it.’ She swivelled an Anglepoise lamp over the coat and began to examine it in minute detail.

Betty glanced around the studio as she did so. It was jammed
full
of free-standing clothes rails, each one packed with plastic-wrapped clothes, divided into themes by laminated signs: ‘30s dresses’, ‘Flapper dresses’, ‘50s Cocktail’, ‘70s/Hippy beach-wear’. There were cabinets full of sunglasses and silk scarves, and mannequins in silk ball gowns and bondage punk. There were clutch bags and corsages, stilettos and bovver boots. The walls were hung with framed stills from films and TV series, and there was Alexandra snuggled up against Colin Firth and with her arm around the shoulder of Emilia Fox.

‘So,’ said Alexandra, turning the coat over, ‘how do you know my brother?’

‘Oh. No. I don’t know him. Not in that way. I live in the flat next to his stall. On the market. He just mentioned you, said you might be interested in the fur. I think it was fairly obvious to him that I’m not really a fur kind of girl.’

‘Aw,’ said Alexandra, facetiously, ‘bless.’

Betty recognised the dynamic; it was the same as the one between Bella and her younger brother, the grudging affection, the condescending praise.

‘Is he younger than you?’ she asked knowingly.

‘Yeah. He is my baby brother by a matter of eighteen months. And one day. And, yes, I know, we look nothing alike. He is a carbon copy of our father and I am a carbon copy of our mother. And our older sister sneakily managed to take the best of both of them and is about the most beautiful person I know.’ She raised her eyebrows sardonically.

Alexandra pulled the coat closed and fiddled with the hook-and-eye fastenings. Then, rather dramatically, she plunged her hands into the pockets of the coat, with a facial expression reminiscent of that of a country vet examining a pregnant ewe. ‘Lovely deep pockets,’ she said. And then: ‘Oh, this must be yours.’ Alexandra pulled out a piece of folded paper.

‘Oh,’ Betty said, taking the paper from Alexandra’s hand. ‘Wow. Let me see …’

She opened the paper to see Arlette’s handwriting. It was her pre-stroke writing, neat and controlled, spelling out a name and address:

Peter Lawler

22a Rodney Gardens

London

SW5 3DF

Her heart leaped with excitement. ‘Any idea where that is?’ she asked, showing the paper to Alexandra.

‘Ah,’ Alexandra said knowingly, ‘South Ken. Very smart. Friend of your grandmother’s?’

Betty shrugged. ‘Not that I know of. But then I think there are a few things we didn’t know about my grandmother.’

‘Ooh,’ said Alexandra, ‘a mystery, then. I do love a good mystery. You’ll have to go and check it out. Might be a long-lost love. God, might be a long-lost
relative
.’ She winked over her glasses and then removed them, rubbing gently at the bridge of her nose. ‘Anyway. Lovely coat. Lovely condition. I can give you two hundred and fifty pounds for it.’

‘Oh.’ Betty felt her heart plummet with disappointment.

Alexandra looked at her kindly. ‘Not much of a market for fur these days, sweetheart. I mean, you could hold on to it for a few years, see if they come back into fashion, but even then,’ she shrugged, ‘it’s a good offer. I’d take it, if I were you. Well, if money’s the issue?’

Betty paused and considered the suggestion. She pictured Arlette, standing in the doorway of the house on the cliff, all those years ago, in her remarkable red shoes, looking at her with that inscrutable gaze, making Betty feel like she could be anything she wanted. She thought of the smell in Arlette’s boudoir, of the dull, exotic light cast through half-drawn chintz, the sense of another time, another place, another world. The
coat
summed it all up: obsolete, out of fashion, but still alive with glamour. She would never wear it again. No one in their right mind would ever wear it again. Maybe she would keep it for ever, keep it for an imaginary unborn daughter, keep it for posterity. But then she closed her eyes and imagined the coat on the back of a famous actress, lights, music, action, clapperboards, make-up artists and dry ice.

‘No,’ she shook her head, ‘money’s not the issue. But I’d like to sell it, anyway. If that’s OK.’

‘That is OK, yes. Cash OK?’

‘Cash would be great. Thank you.’

Betty’s arms felt oddly empty as she left Alexandra’s studio a moment later, as though she’d just handed over a child or a pet. Her shoulder bag, however, felt ripe and heavy with the twenty-pound notes that Alexandra had just counted into her hands. And there, nestled against the palm of the hand in the pocket of her coat was the paper with the mysterious address on it.