I had telephoned so many advertisements which stated experience was not essential, and -people sounded so nice – and then I’d turn up and miracle, miracle! every single job had been taken. And yet, call it folly, call it my pursuit of a just inheritance, but I kept on applying. The latest – and the best I’d ever seen – was a typist post at the Skelton Institute of Art, a place of pillars and porticoes. I’d even visited it once, on my monthly Saturday off. I’d spent the day wandering the rooms, moving from Gainsborough to Chagall, via aquatints by William Blake. On the train home to Clapham, a little girl gazed at me as if I was a painting. Her small fingers reached out and rubbed my earlobe, and she asked her mother, ‘Does it come off?’ Her mother didn’t chide: she looked like she damn well wanted the earlobe to give its answer.
I hadn’t scrapped with the boys to gain a first--class English Literature degree from the University of the West Indies for nothing. I hadn’t endured a child’s pinch in a train carriage for nothing. Back home, the British Consulate itself had awarded me the Commonwealth Students’ first prize for my poem, ‘Caribbean Spider--Lily’. I’m sorry, Cynth, but I was not going to put shoes on sweaty Cinderellas for the rest of my life. There were tears, of course, mainly sobbed into my sagging pillow. The pressure of desire curdled inside me, I was ashamed of it, and yet it defined me. I had bigger things I wanted to do, and I’d done five years of waiting. In the meantime, I wrote revenge poems about the English weather, and lied to my mother that London was heaven.
THE LETTER WAS ON THE mat when Cynth and I got home. I kicked off my shoes and stood stock--still in the hallway. The postmark was London W.1, the centre of the world. The Victorian tiles under my bare feet were cold; my toes flexed upon the brown and blue. I slid one finger under the flap of the envelope, lifting it like a broken leaf. It was the Skelton Institute letterhead.
‘Well?’ Cynth said.
I didn’t reply, one fingernail pressed into the floral Braille of our landlord’s Anaglypta wallpaper, as I read to the end in shock.
The Skelton Institute
Skelton Square
London, W.1
16th June, 1967
Dear Miss Bastien,
Thank you for sending your application letter and curriculum vitae.
To thrive, under whatever circumstances life presents us, is all anyone can hope for. You are clearly a young woman of great ability, amply armoured. To that degree, I am delighted to invite you to a week’s trial role in the typist position.
There is much to learn, and most of it must be learned alone. If this arrangement suits you, please advise me by return of post whether the offer is to be accepted, and we will proceed from there. The starting salary is ￡10 p/w.
With warm wishes,
Marjorie Quick
￡10 a week. At Dolcis, I only got six. Four pounds would make the difference of a world, but it wasn’t even the money. It was that I was a step closer to what I’d been taught were Important Things – culture, history, art. The signature was in thick black ink, the ‘M’ and ‘Q’ extravagant, almost Italianate in grandeur. The letter smelled faintly of a peculiar perfume. It was a bit dog--eared, as if this Marjorie Quick had left it in her handbag for some days before finally deciding to take it to the post.
Goodbye shoe shop, goodbye drudgery. ‘I got it,’ I whispered to my friend. ‘They want me. I blimmin’ got it.’
Cynth screamed and took me in her arms. ‘Yes!’
I let out a sob. ‘You did it. You did it,’ she went on, and I breathed her neck, like air after thunder in Port of Spain. She took the letter and said, ‘What kind of a name is Marjorie Quick?’
I was too happy to answer. Dig your nail in that wall, Odelle Bastien; break apart that paper flower. But I wonder, given what happened, the trouble it led you to, would you do it again? Would you turn up at eight twenty--five on the morning of Monday 3 July 1967, adjusting that new hat of yours, feet wiggling in your Dolcis shoes, to work in the Skelton for ￡10 a week and a woman called Marjorie Quick?
Yes, I would. Because I was Odelle and Quick was Quick. And to think you have a second path is to be a fool.
II
I envisaged I would be working in a whole atrium of clattering typists, but I was alone. Many of the staff were away, I supposed, taking annual holidays in exotic places like France. Every day, I would walk up the stone steps towards the Skelton’s large doors, upon whose panes was blazoned in gold lettering ARS VINCIT OMNIA. Hands on the vincit and the omnia, I pushed inside to a place that smelled of old leather and polished wood, where to my immediate right was a long reception desk and a wall of pigeonholes looming behind it, already filled with the morning’s post.
The view in the room I’d been assigned was terrible – a brick wall smeared black with soot, and a long drop when you looked down. I could see an alleyway, where porters and secretaries from the neighbouring building would line up and smoke. I could never hear their conversations, only watch their body language, the ritual of a patted pocket, heads together like a kiss as the cigarette was flourished and the lighter caught, a leg bent coquettishly backwards against a wall. It was such a hidden place.
Skelton Square was tucked behind Piccadilly, on the river side. Standing there since George III was king, it had been lucky in the Blitz. Beyond the rooftops the sounds of the Circus could be heard; bus engines and honking motor cars, the keening calls of milk boys. There was a false sense of security in a place like this, in the heart of London’s West End.