A Vision of Loveliness

Chapter 22


Your lift home may have its

own perils in store.





Jane had been planning to give Henry’s Bill’s Bob ten shillings but from the way he’d been eyeing her up in the rear-view mirror, she decided to economise.

‘Can you do me a huge favour, Bob? And see me up to the front door? The key sticks sometimes and my flatmate might be out.’

He still had that sexy little peaked cap on. She waited for the lift to start – it always got going with a lurch – and she pretended to stagger slightly on her pointy shoes. He put out his hands to steady her and suddenly she was in his arms being passionately kissed. He’d obviously had plenty of practice back in Ilford, pretty boy like that. He’d already copped a feel of her breasts and started hitching up her dress. He’d bathed specially and his soft almost girlish skin still smelled of his mother’s cheap yellow soap and medicated shampoo. The lift shuddered to a stop at the fifth floor and she pulled away sharply as if he had been forcing himself on her, checking their reflection in the lift mirror: the pretty uniformed boy, the glimpse of black lace suspenders. She straightened her skirt with trembling fingers. Tears squeezed easily to the rim of her eyelids (any further and she’d have to re-do her mascara) and she flashed him a reproachful look.

‘I’m sorry.’

He didn’t know what had come over him. Jane bloody did, though. You never knew when you might need a lift somewhere.

Henry and Suzy had spent the morning wandering around Mayfair arm in arm, mostly in Fortnum’s and Simpsons. Henry usually only bought Suzy evening things and shortie nighties – given that was all he was ever going to see – but he’d switched to suede and cashmere and tweed all of a sudden. They had lunched around the corner at the Connaught and by the time they got back all the deliveries had arrived and the pink bedroom was full of fancy cardboard boxes – one was from Drayke’s (more commission for Brigitta). Suzy had put ‘A Pretty Girl is Like a Melody’ on the gramophone and given Henry a one-woman dress show and a very big thank you. Henry was now fast asleep on the big pink bed and Suzy was lying all anyhow on the sitting-room sofa, wearing pedal pushers and a gingham blouse, munching hothouse grapes and watching the afternoon dog racing. She switched it off as Jane came in.

‘How did it go, darling?’

Jane was still so full of how the mink hat had gone down in the Nelson Hotel that her brain had to work fast to find the right answer. The right face to wear.

‘She’s quite poorly. They won’t really tell me anything but I think it was some kind of stroke.’

A look like pain winced through Suzy’s eyes but a jerk of her chin and a tiny sniff soon wiped it clean. She leaned across and took Jane’s hand.

‘Poor you. Daddy had something like that.’

But not quite like that. Daddy, who could walk into any half-decent bar in the West End and safely order ‘the usual’ (double brandy, easy on the ginger), bled to death internally in a small flat in the Pimlico Road.

‘Will she get better, do you think?’

Tricky one. On balance Jane thought it would be easier for all concerned if June rang (while Suzy and Annie were out, obviously) to say that her aunt had passed away and let that be the end of it. Otherwise they’d be offering her rides to bloody Norbury once a week: the dutiful niece, all that rubbish.

‘She’s in a rather bad way. I think it’s only a matter of time.’ Then she (bravely) changed the subject. ‘Looks like you had fun this morning.’

The sitting room was still prettily littered with monogrammed tissue paper.

‘Henry didn’t think I had enough day clothes. He’s taking me to Paris on Thursday to get some things for the Grand National. We’re going to be spending the weekend with some people he knows up north somewhere. He’s told them about me so I’ve got to look decent. Nothing too popsified.’

Henry was married and until very recently had always looked like staying that way. He’d never made any promises about divorce. He never even said his wife didn’t understand him.

Penelope Swan met Henry at a golf-club dance in Sunningdale just before the war when he was twenty-four and she was a sort of sub-deb, programmed to go to dances and tennis parties, meet eligible young men and bang one up for life in a six-bedroomed stockbroker Tudor detached in the right part of Berkshire.

Penelope (and her beady-eyed mama) wasted no time at all. She was pretty, she played tennis and bridge very nicely, she had a fetching wardrobe of dresses that artfully supplied whatever her figure was missing (Don’t, for goodness sake, let yourself appear flat-chested) and her father owned the best part of Staines – if Staines had a best part.

Two babies and a reasonably safe corner of Virginia Water meant that Penelope had a fairly quiet war, while Henry – ‘a born leader of men’ – worked his way up to captain in a uniform exquisitely remodelled by his man in Savile Row (who actually farmed out this sort of thing to a jobbing tailor over the butcher’s in Brewer Street). After three years’ active service, Captain Swan came home with a dozen pairs of nylons, two bottles of Mitsouko liberated from a passing brothel and a nasty dose of the clap.

It was separate bedrooms after that but Penelope was a good hostess (six months being finished by the Swiss had taught her to manage menus and servants in a grand, bland manner). She was a good mother (or Nanny was, anyway) to the boy, Peter, and to Samantha, a sullen, overdressed blonde two years older than Suzy.

Samantha Swan was useful cover, Henry thought. Any present he bought Suzy (give or take the odd pair of baby dolls) could be ‘for my daughter’s birthday’. He didn’t see the salesladies’ smiles. Daughters never got nice presents like that.

Very, very occasionally someone would take Samantha out to dinner somewhere decent – as opposed to a dinner dance in some god-forgotten Berkshire country club. Her favourite places ‘up in town’ were Simpsons-in-the-Strand or the RAC Club in Pall Mall then Edmundo Ros for dancing afterwards so Henry was pretty safe but he and Suzy did once bump into her in the White Tower. Henry handled it very smoothly, introducing Suzy as ‘Miss Massingham from the Paris office’ but this was obviously codswallop, particularly as Samantha had spent most of her own dinner date clocking the pair of them, watching Suzy’s whole glorious repertoire of hand-holding, fag-lighting and head-tossing, aching with envy at the way her father laughed out loud at yet another funny story. How could he? Cheap little tart – only, of course, Samantha could see that whatever kind of tart she was, she didn’t come cheap. Samantha stole another glance at that ravishing gown – strapless faille with a jet-embroidered lace overblouse – at that tiny waist (twenty-one inches in a brand-new killer waspie) and Suzy herself: as lovely and confident and pettable as a pretty young cat.

Samantha, despite six months’ hard finishing in Montreux and three years on the Berkshire circuit, still just looked stuck-up and sex-starved. She did get dates – Henry owned most of Hammersmith, for Christ’s sake – but it was bloody hard going.

She decided not to tell Mummy. It would break Mummy’s heart, she thought. She thought wrong. Mummy’s main concern was that no one in Virginia Water should get wind. She knew Henry would never divorce her. It was Just Sex, she told herself, with the misplaced confidence of a woman who Just Hated It.

Nobody really liked Penelope – apart from her friends, obviously, who never actually thought about whether they liked each other or not. If you kept the talk small enough – children and delphiniums were safest although it was best to go easy on the children – she could get through a dinner party and she could complain about servants with the best of them but she had no real conversation any more and she thought the property business was a tiny bit vulgar (her mother was from Cirencester). She didn’t even talk about clothes. After the pre-war mantraps by Molyneux and Schiaparelli had done their work, she retreated to her mother’s dressmaker who had a rare gift for turning handsome lengths of silk and worsted into mumsy little frumps and who thought any sort of padding was common.

Just the same, Samantha did quite fancy a scene with Daddy after that chance meeting in the White Tower. She practised her lines in the dressing-table mirror, modelling herself on Deborah Kerr in Beloved Infidel, or possibly Jean Simmons in Elmer Gantry. But Henry wouldn’t play. He just told her she was being cheap and provincial, that her mother knew all about it and that it was none of Samantha’s bloody business.

She cried a lot, then blew her nose on Daddy’s handkerchief before finessing a cheque for fifty guineas. Enough for one of those new velvet evening dresses from Debenham and Freebody and a nice suede jacket from Simpsons. Twenty-three pounds – a month’s wages for the girl who sold it to her.

The velvet – they only had butterscotch left in a size fourteen – was one of eleven identical ‘speciality model gowns’ to pitch up at a Valentine’s Day ball in some Park Lane hotel (there was quite a large party down from Manchester). Samantha was mortified and Lawrence Green was in big, big trouble with half the buyers in the West End.



So. Henry hadn’t planned to marry Suzy but the Evening News business had rattled him. She’d seemed terribly brave and matter-of-fact about it but then he’d woken up to find her crying and decided that they weren’t going to kill any more babies. F*ck Penelope. Suzy reckoned that the invitation to the National clinched it but Jane couldn’t believe he’d really go through with it.

‘He’s not really going to marry you, is he? I thought they never did. That’s what you told Lorna.’

She couldn’t quite read the angry little look in Suzy’s eyes. She wasn’t sure she wanted to read it.

‘They don’t marry Lornas,’ and Suzy leaned back against the sofa cushions and raised her chin to the afternoon sunlight, a smug little smile pinching those pink, unpainted lips.

‘But wouldn’t the scandal affect his business?’

‘Property people won’t care. They’re all wide boys anyway. It’s not like he’s a banker or an MP or something.’

Besides which, most of Henry’s business associates had ‘traded the old banger in for a newer model’, as one of them put it. Not Ollie, obviously. Angela still didn’t seem to understand Ollie but, fortunately for her, nor did anyone else.

The only thing Henry had to worry about (and there was no need for Janey to know this) was the promised knighthood (services to the building trade) which would need to be put on hold for a year or two. Not a word about that to a soul. Penelope would have liked to have been Lady Swan and she’d do anything she could to spoil another woman’s chances.

‘So. Will Henry be moving in here then?’

‘Don’t be daft. No. He’s going to rent a nice little flat in Mount Street while the divorce goes through.’

Suzy, who already had her own nice little flat in Mayfair in the bag, was prepared to be patient about the divorce.

‘God knows how long it will all take but the wife won’t care so long as she can carry on as normal in her Virginia Watery way. He’s told her she can have an extra twenty grand if she does as she’s told. That ought to do the trick.’

She tried to imagine Suzy in an apron, Suzy shopping for groceries, Suzy pushing a pram. What she forgot to imagine was Suzy discussing menus with the cook; Suzy planning drinks parties; Suzy arranging flowers by the French windows in the drawing room or Suzy playing the grand piano – all the things Suzy imagined. Almost the identical fantasy Penelope had had when she married Henry twenty-five years earlier. Suzy couldn’t really play the piano but she’d had lessons when she was very small and years ago a friend of her father’s had taught her to bash out ‘Liebestraum’ and ‘Sweet Georgia Brown’ which seemed to cover most situations.

‘I didn’t think you wanted to get married.’

‘Whatever gave you that idea? Of course I want to get married. I told you, darling. You can’t live on Nice Little Presents all your life.’

‘I’ll have to find another flat.’ Aha. So it wasn’t about marriage at all. It was about somewhere for Jane to sleep. Still, you couldn’t really blame her.

‘You’ll be all right here for a while. Divorces take for ever. And you’ll be good cover.’ Oh thanks a lot. Two years listening to the pink velour bedhead banging just so Henry and Suzy could have ‘good cover’.

‘Anyway, you might change your mind and marry the lovely Johnny.’

Lovely, was he?

‘You fancy him, don’t you? You’ve always had a soft spot for Johnny.’

That put the wind up her. She was avoiding Jane’s eyes.

‘Not enough to do any damage, darling.’ She selected a violet cream from the box on the table and tried to look casual. ‘You haven’t slept with him, have you?’ Like she didn’t want her to.

‘No. I was in two minds but I decided not to risk it. It didn’t do the fiancée any good.’

‘Didn’t you ever just want to?’

Suzy wanted to. You could tell. Maybe she really did like it. But did she like it with Henry? Heavy, jowly, cigar-smelly Henry?

‘Do you love Henry? Do you actually fancy Henry?’

Suzy looked very posh all of a sudden. As if Jane had left a dead mouse on her breakfast tray. A girl who arranged abortions through the personal columns getting on her high horse because someone had the brass neck to ask her a personal question.

‘He loves me and I’m going to make him a wonderful wife.’ She turned on Jane. ‘And what about Johnny? Do you love him? Do you even like him? What colour eyes does he have, Janey?’

What? What was she talking about?

‘Ties?’ Ties she could do. He’d been wearing a nice navy silk motif tie last time she saw him. Tiny pink elephants on it.

‘Eyes. What colour are his eyes? You don’t know, do you? You’re too busy checking what he thinks about you to actually look at him.’

Suzy, sweet, soft little Suzy, seemed to have gone on the turn all of a sudden. Maybe Jane would be better off living somewhere else. Maybe Sergio could sort something out. Jane pulled a grape from the bunch. What colour were his eyes? She could picture them looking at her: amusement; desire; disappointment sometimes. All kinds of looks, but she could only remember them in black and white. Proposing a toast with a saucer of champagne; admiring her work in the cigarette-lighting routine; swallowing a smile when she used one of Suzy’s lines. Laughing eyes, sad eyes but what bloody colour were they?

‘They’re blue,’ Suzy answered her own question, ‘Dior blue.’ And the silly bitch started to cry.