A Vision of Loveliness

Chapter 26


Relax in your bath tub and try to imagine

yourself in different difficult situations.


The Volvo was under a tarpaulin waiting to be towed away and a man from the station with a clipboard and a measuring tape was drawing a plan of the accident when the police car pulled up in the forecourt of Massingham House. Mrs Kowalski’s curtain twitched but there was no one behind the front desk.

The flat smelled of stale cigarette smoke from the evening before but there was no sign of Suzy, no sign of anything belonging to Suzy. The hangers in her wardrobe were all empty and the only stitch of clothing she’d missed was her navy and beige reversible swing coat in the hall cupboard and the fuchsia-pink Harry Popper suit which was still hanging on the back of the kitchen door where Annie had left it. No sign of Annie either and no answer to the maid’s room telephone. Jane lifted the receiver on the phone by the sitting-room window and laid it down on the side table.

She was woken by the rustle of an Evening News being stuffed under the front door. It was all foreign stuff on the front but someone had folded it round to an inside page.

There was a photo of Massingham House and a column of copy cobbled together from the morning’s post-mortem and what they’d been able to winkle out of Jim the porter.



Stockbroker crushed by Swedish car



John Hullavington, a stockbroker of Gloucester Road, Kensington, was crushed to death last night in a freak accident with his car in the forecourt of a Mayfair luxury block. An ambulance was summoned but Mr Hullavington was pronounced dead on arrival at St George’s Hospital, Hyde Park.



The Swedish-made car, a Volvo PV544, was being driven by one of his two female companions, Susan St John (20) and Jane James (19), both of Massingham House, Mayfair. Savile Row police have, as yet, been unable to determine which of the two brunettes – both of whom are believed to work as glamour models – was behind the wheel when the accident occurred.



Mr Hullavington, an Oxford graduate, was a junior partner in the stockbroking firm of Banning and Holt. He was 31 and unmarried.





‘Glamour model’. F*cking cheek. Made her sound like a tart.

The phone started to ring the minute she put it back on the hook.

‘Welcome back, Janey love,’ whispered Jim. No ‘Miss James’ now. ‘Couple of gents down here say they’re from the News of the World.’

She peeped round the edge of the silk curtains and saw a man in a Burberry looking up at the front of the block. She could see flashbulbs going off, as if there was a model posing in the doorway.

‘Tell them I’m out.’

She took the phone back off the hook and ran a bath while she had a look in the fridge. Apart from some grapes and peaches in the fruit bowl there was nothing to eat in the place but a tin of shortbread, a box of marrons glacés and half a bottle of flat champagne. She had the lot then soaked in a bath of Jasmine for an hour, to wash away the smells of the night before crawling back into her unmade bed.



The Sunday Times and the Observer were in the service hatch as usual the next morning. Nothing in either of them. She put her reversible silk raincoat over her nightie, tied on a headscarf, slipped on a pair of matching kid pumps and went downstairs. Even if you are only popping out for some cigarettes, there is no excuse for dressing all anyhow. She had a quick peep through the window in the lift door when the cage clunked to a halt at the bottom of the shaft. There was no Jim at the desk but there were still two men in raincoats hanging round the main entrance, so Jane went back up to the fifth floor, left the flat by the kitchen fire escape (the two exits had come in handy after all) and ran down to the stall on Park Lane for a News of the World. She didn’t dare open it till she was back indoors.

Christ. About half of page six. Double Date Dollies Deny Death Drive. The reporters had dug out the Frockways ad and somehow got their hands on some studio shots taken by a mate of Terry’s, designed to play up the twins gimmick.

There was a photograph of Johnny, looking very handsome and very posh in cricket whites at an old boys’ match somewhere. There was a picture of his poor widowed old mother wearing a black frock, the three strings of fake pearls and a bewildered snapshot smile in the drive of the villa in Putney. Amanda, who was reading it all over breakfast with Mummy down in the country, thought the house looked a lot nicer than she remembered it. He was the only son. There was a sister, it turned out, but she’d joined a silent order on the Isle of Wight and they never spoke about her.

The medical correspondent explained matter-of-factly that after the femoral artery was severed the victim would have bled to death in eight minutes, less time than it took the ambulance to nee-naw the short drive from St George’s Hospital to Massingham House. The motoring correspondent managed to get in two paragraphs on the irony of being killed by a car designed for safety and how James and St John emerged without a scratch, safely inside the torsional wossname and the revolutionary three-point seat belt. He’d written another paragraph boring on about the four-speed gearbox but the sub-editors cut it out. The legal desk explained that if both girls denied driving there was nothing the police could do about it because one of them was telling the truth and had committed no offence. The news reporters then laid it on good and thick about how, as he slumped in the doorway of Suzy St John’s luxury Mayfair block, Johnny Hullavington, 31, felt his young life slipping away, staining the Portland Stone façade with his heart’s blood and other claptrap. There wasn’t a bloody stain, not after Jim had been round with the Jeyes Fluid.

Jane risked putting the telephone receiver back on the cradle but she had hardly done so when it rang. Jim was back on duty.

‘There’s a young man down here says he’s your brother.’

She looked around her. The flat was in a right state. The champagne glasses still hadn’t been cleared away. The ashtrays were full of fag ends and half-eaten hard centres.

‘Let me speak to him.’

She arranged to meet him in the lounge bar of a pub in Shepherd Market, making sure he knew not to say a word to the men waiting outside. She had just enough time to fix her hair and face, wriggle into Suzy’s fuchsia suit and Glenda’s navy winkle-pickers and nip down the back stairs, her high heels echoing strangely on the cast-iron steps – Smart girls know how to change from one outfit to another in double-quick time without ever looking as if they responded to a recent fire alarm. Kenneth was sat like a lemon in the corner of the bar in his green tie holding tight to an unopened packet of crisps. He reeked of Norbury.

‘You didn’t waste much time. Who put you up to it? Uncle George?’

Kenneth salted his crisps nervously.

‘June’s in a right state.’

‘Don’t tell lies, Kenneth. She wouldn’t rotten well care. Besides, it’s not her precious name in the papers, is it?’

‘She’s very upset just the same. She couldn’t get away what with Mum and Georgette and everything. She hasn’t dared tell Mum’ – as if she’d understand a blind word anyone said to her – ‘but she says you’ve broken Dad’s heart and it’s a blessing you weren’t using the name of Deeks. Croydon Education Committee can be very particular, she says.’

Unhappily for June, the CEC turned out to be equally picky when a Mrs Doreen Deeks of Pamfield Avenue, SW16 was arrested at Thornton Heath Pond later that month after asking a succession of passers-by whether they liked her nice new pink ones.



Jane went over to the bar. It was only just gone twelve but there was already a handful of regulars in: clerical workers from the big hotels clocking off after a shift and a couple of old blondes cackling into their ports and lemon. Nicely turned out, but you could tell they were on the game: hair too yellow; eyelids too blue.

An old drunk in the far corner was making a silver paper cup from the remains of an empty fag packet he had found. Jane watched as his peeling red fingertips delicately separated the silver foil from its tissue backing and moulded the goblet round his little finger. He then gummed the paper to a sticky pulp which he squished into the base before expertly firing it at the ceiling where it joined the hundreds of others that covered the smoke-browned paint like shiny little barnacles.

Jane ordered a gin and tonic and a lemonade. She could see the landlady clocking the pink suit and trying to work out where Kenneth fitted in.

‘That your brother, dearie?’

‘That’s right, up from Bournemouth for the day.’ Why Bournemouth, for heaven’s sake? Must be something about that car coat. ‘He is sixteen.’

‘Course he is, love. Looks like a nice boy.’ No he bloody didn’t.

Back at the table Kenneth put down the paper and began to tell Jane the news of his own world.

‘Your friend Carol phoned at the crack of dawn. Wanted to know if it was really you. She’d recognised that Double Dates picture. She asked for your full address but we said we didn’t know where you’d be living. Then about an hour after breakfast her dad’s car pulled up outside and this came through the letterbox.’

It was written on that peculiar paper with the chewed edges in Carol’s babyish, Marion Richardson handwriting. She was buying back Jane’s invitation to the May wedding. ‘If it was up to me,’ she said – so tidily that she must have written it out in rough first – ‘I would have been more than happy to let an old friend join Alan and I on our Big Day but the Gazette will be covering the wedding and are sending a photographer and Mum feels it would be better not.’ Carol managed, casually, to drop in the fact that they had decided to plump for the Royal Worcester as their best china and that they were still missing the six salad plates and that they had them in Allders. Alan didn’t even like salad. She also thought that Jane would be interested to know what f*cking hymns they’d both chosen. She’d decided that she was going to obey Alan which was going to be a fairly safe promise as there was next to no chance of poor Alan ever, in his wildest dreams, daring to tell Carol to do anything. Once the letter was safely over the page Carol wound things up pretty sharpish, hoping this found Jane as it left Carol who was hers truly. ‘Sincerely’ would have been pushing it and ‘faithfully’ would have been a black lie in the circumstances.

‘What are the police going to do?’

‘Nothing they can do.’

Kenneth, being an expert on bloody everything, said that it was a classic Cut-throat Defence and that so long as they stuck to their story the police wouldn’t be able to touch them.

‘You’ve got a right bloody cheek, Kenneth Deeks.’ Kenneth cringed with embarrassment as the other drinkers turned to look. ‘Stick to what story?’ hissed Jane. ‘I wasn’t bloody driving.’

She flounced off to the Ladies’. It was a pigsty. There was an unfolded cardboard box on the floor to cover the holes in the lino. The toilet was blocked, the cracked yellow soap was striped with grime and there was a used French letter draped over the edge of the basin.

No well-bred girl ever paints her face at table, in the street or at the theatre. Sod that. Jane went back to the bar and made up while Kenneth reread the News of the World: He made sheep’s eyes at farmer’s daughter: when she got home she had lost her upper dentures, one of her gloves and her handbag. Happily she had retained her virginity. Didn’t say what sort of handbag.

Jane wiped her face over with a pressed powder puff (Honey Veil), gave her eyes a lick of brown-black pencil and transformed her lips into a big fat kiss of Persian Pink – an exact match for the suit.

Kenneth looked up.

‘You don’t need all that make-up. You’re pretty enough without.’ Pretty enough for what?

She took one last look at the girl in the mirror: glossy; glamorous; finished.

‘Why don’t you piss off back to Norbury, darling?’

She uncrossed her legs and carefully squirmed out from behind the table. She could feel bloodshot boozers’ eyes slithering over her knees. She shuddered with disgust and pulled her skirt down.

She catwalked back round the corner to the front entrance of Massingham House. There was a photographer and his spotty young sidekick lurking by the desk discussing football with Jim (who was making a small fortune in tips). The porter looked up in surprise when he saw the pink-suited figure open the door and sail into the foyer.

‘We weren’t expecting you back, Miss St John.’ He scuttled across the room to call the lift.

‘I know, darling,’ purred Jane, chin held nice and high for the photographs, ‘but I forgot something. I’ll be back down in a minute.’

The sidekick tore off back to get the reporter out of the pub where they’d left him and to take the film back to Fleet Street. The photographer settled down on the settee until one or both of the girls came out again. He’d have a bloody long wait.



Jane was stuffing knickers and stockings and her sapphire bracelet into her overnight bag. She could only find one of Glenda’s black patent stilettos. Pity about the sapphire ring really. The phone rang. The call came from a phone box and the voice on the other end had a peculiar, open-air sound.

‘Is that you?’ said the voice. It was Henry but it didn’t say it was Henry.

‘Yes.’

‘What are your plans?’

The police had said not to change address. Safest to be vague.

‘I thought I might go and see Lorna.’

‘Very good idea. Excellent.’

And he hung up.



Suzy hadn’t been driving either of course. She said so and Henry believed her. She had been whisked away from the police station and taken to a borrowed flat in St John’s Wood where Big Terry was waiting with a new short hairdo and a rather racy auburn rinse – A fresh hairstyle can make a woman feel reborn. Henry had found her a job as a receptionist in a big firm on Western Avenue somewhere where she could sit behind a bird’s-eye maple desk in tight cashmere sweaters – a whole new wardrobe of greens and blues to go with the auburn rinse – purring into telephones and flicking through her Architectural Review. When the divorce came through two years later and Sir Henry Swan married Susan, only child of the late Captain St John ‘Brandy’ Johnson, nobody made the Double Dates Death Drive connection. Henry made friends with some new maître d’s and Captain Swan got some new usual tables.



Jane picked up the phone again and rang Lorna. There was still that funny open-air sound. Lorna no longer messed about with silly voices:

‘Hello.’

‘It’s me.’

‘Hello.’

Lorna never felt the same about Suzy after the Evening News affair, as if the whole sordid business – her getting pregnant; the professor not wanting to marry her; her mother being a poisonous, loveless old bitch – were all somehow Suzy’s fault. She arranged for the murder of Lorna’s baby, she was capable of anything as far as Lorna was concerned.

‘Suzy killed him, you know. She put her foot down and drove straight into him.’

That ought to keep them busy. It had gone very quiet Lorna’s end. Jane leaned back and suddenly spotted the missing black shoe peeping out from under the sofa.

‘Is Glenda there?’

‘No. I thought she was away. Spain.’

‘I’ve got a feeling she’ll be around later on.’

The sound of pennies dropping.

‘All right.’

The line went dead.



Jane lugged the laundry box out of the airing cupboard and crammed in what she could: the navy grosgrain (unfortunate associations but still very useful); the red velvet; the blue faille; the two Hardy Amies numbers – poor old Tony; her cashmere twinsets and her tweed skirts. She remembered seeing a Junior Saleslady Required sign at a madam shop in Kensington High Street. You never knew.

She squeezed a dozen pairs of Glenda’s shoes round the sides then laid the mink jacket and alligator bag on top. She should be able to get a few quid for them or she could use them as bait for a new Sergio. Always supposing she wanted a new Sergio.

She checked the contents of her old manila envelope. There was over £100 in the post office savings book and another, smaller brown envelope tightly filled with crisp five pound notes which hadn’t been there before. And there, right at the bottom, still in their wallet were the birth certificate and National Insurance gubbins of the late Mary Jane Deeks (eighteen next birthday). That and her make-up all fitted nicely into Uncle George’s overnight bag.

She didn’t have to be a saleslady. She might be able to just do that part time, go on day release and train as something else entirely: typist; stylist; telephonist; receptionist; chiropodist; machinist; manicurist; illusionist; contortionist; abortionist. Anything she f*cking liked.

She sat at her blue dressing table and checked her make-up. The emergency paint-job might have looked all right by the light of a Fleet Street flashbulb, but in the soft, expensive glow of a Mayfair bedroom she looked suddenly very old and very cheap. She brushed her hair out of its makeshift chignon and tucked it into the old fake tortoiseshell slide. Could she still pass for a seventeen-year-old junior sales? She could if she took all that stuff off her face. She went into the blue and gold bathroom, ran the blue flannel under the hot gold tap and washed herself away.



She dragged the laundry box through the kitchen and out on to the fire escape. She had to stand on tiptoe to keep her stilettos from slipping into the square holes of the iron gridwork. Still nobody down below.

It had turned very cold all of a sudden and the March wind was cutting right through her thin mac. Suzy’s reversible swing coat was still hanging on a hook in the hall cupboard. Warmer than the silk: smarter. She nipped back inside to shrug into it (beige side out), ignoring the tinkling phone and letting the fire-escape door slam behind her as she left the empty flat for the last time. The cashmere of the turned-up collar slapped softly against her face. The sweet, sickly scent of Suzy was still trapped in the fabric: smelled a bit like Joy.



Acknowledgements

A Vision of Loveliness was locked in a drawer for a number of years. It emerged thanks to a sharp prod from the Sunday Telegraph’s literary editor Michael Prodger and to the faith and encouragement of Paul Golding, Kyran Joughin and David Benedict (who introduced me to United Agents). Anna Webber (of UA) and Helen Garnons-Williams, Alexandra Pringle, Erica Jarnes and the team at Bloomsbury have all been a joy to work with. Sarah-Jane Forder was a sharp but painless copy-editor.



June Torrance gave me the inside track on London’s post-war couture showrooms and Chief Superintendent Anthony Stanley (retired) supplied priceless insights into the workings of Savile Row police station in the early Sixties. Clement Crisp and the late Pat Creed were kind enough to check the original typescript for errors and anachronisms (remaining blunders are mine).

Most of all I must thank Pete Mulvey for his love and patience.


A Note on the Author

Louise Levene is a journalist, academic and one-time saleslady. She is currently the ballet critic of the Sunday Telegraph, and used to write and present Radio 4’s Newstand among other programmes. She lives in London. A Vision of Loveliness is her first novel.