Before I Met You

31




NUMBER 21 ABINGDON Villas appeared to be the best house on a remarkable street. The sky was perfectly clear and blue, and the trees on either side of the street were heavy with cherry blossom. The houses were ice-white stucco and it all looked improbably perfect, like a film set. Betty stood outside the house and stared at it for a while. It was fully detached and double-fronted, three floors high and taller than it was wide. The front garden had been given over to parking spaces, four of them. Betty had bought a disposable camera from WH Smith, which she now pulled from her bag. She photographed the house from across the street, furtively, and then slipped the camera quickly back into her bag. She wondered if Arlette had ever been here. Maybe she’d even stayed here. That would probably have been the way things were done, back then. A young girl coming to London would have stayed with a family friend, not rented herself a tiny flat in the red-light district. And this was, according to Jolyon, the home of Arlette’s mother’s best friend from childhood.

Betty crossed the street and approached the house. As Peter Lawler had confirmed, it had been divided into flats, four buttons on a panel by the double front door labelled A, B, C and D. She cupped her hands to the glass panels in the door and peered inside. She could see a large hallway, a front door on either side and two staircases in front of her that grew from the centre of the hall and rose in curves towards a landing. In the middle of the hallway was a plinth on which stood a large vase full of silk flowers.

She stepped back onto the driveway. The windows on the ground floor were full height. On the right they were obscured by net curtains, on the left the window was uncovered and Betty could see a glamorous interior, a gold standard lamp in the window and the end of an ivory chaise longue with curled wood trimmings.

Betty sighed.

There was nothing here, nothing to allude to anything about Arlette’s friends, her history. An anonymous building on a beautiful street, all ties to the past categorically severed the minute the house was cut up into apartments. She was about to turn and head back to the tube station when she noticed that the wooden door to the side of the house that led to the back garden was ajar. She glanced round her. The street was quiet and still. She looked up at the house and into the window at the plush apartment but could see no signs of life. She knew that it was bordering on pointless, that a back garden could not possibly hold any clues to the history of someone who had been here seventy-five years ago, and may never have been here at all, but still, she thought, she had come all the way here, she might as well try.

She pushed open the wooden door and tiptoed past another window, through an alleyway full of bins and out onto a long sweep of manicured grass. She kept to the sides of the lawn, not wanting anyone looking from their back windows to see a strange girl tiptoeing across their garden. At the end of the garden was a cluster of trees and rose bushes. If she could get down there, she decided, then she’d be able to obscure herself and have a proper look at the back of the house. She hid herself behind a tree, her shoes sinking into soft soil, and then turned to face the house. The ground floor opened up into two sets of double doors, onto a wrought-iron veranda, which ran the width of the house. There was no furniture in the garden, just a lawn and flowerbeds. The back of the house was as bland and uninformative as the front. She crouched down and took a photograph anyway and was about to head back to the street when she saw something carved into the trunk of the tree that she was holding on to for support. She traced her fingertip over it, rubbing off a film of reddish summer dust. Then she scraped away some moss and stared at what lay underneath:




Her pulse quickened and she quickly pulled her camera back out of her bag and took another photograph.

G&A. Someone and Arlette. Maybe? Proof, possibly, that Arlette had been here, with someone whose name began with the letter G? At first she assumed the two Xs to be representations of kisses, but then it occurred to her that maybe they were Roman numerals. Maybe it was the number 20: 1920.

She ran then, no longer caring either way, across the lawn and back towards the street. It was still early. She wasn’t due at Dom’s until 5 p.m. Buoyed up and desperate now to build up her body of evidence, she set off for Chelsea Embankment.





32


1920




‘IF YOU LET me come with you,’ said Lilian, fingering a string of silver and pearl beads at her neck, ‘I will love you for ever and ever and ever.’

Arlette peered at her over the top of Leticia’s sewing machine and frowned.

‘And that is supposed to be an irresistible enticement, is it?’ she said drily.

‘All right then, I will give you something. A gift. Some jewels, a dress. Anything you desire. There must be something of mine you’ve always secretly hankered after?’

Arlette laughed. ‘No,’ she said, ‘not really. Anything I do like, I know I am free to borrow.’

‘Well, then,’ Lilian pursed her pretty lips together, ‘if you don’t let me come with you tonight, then I shall never let you borrow anything of mine ever again!’ Her dark eyes flashed confrontationally at Arlette.

Arlette laughed again, wetted the end of the reel of blue cotton against her tongue and rethreaded the needle on the machine. ‘Lilian,’ she said, ‘it is not up to me. It is up to your mother.’

Lilian rolled her eyes. ‘As if my mother would be able to stop me,’ she said.

‘It is one thing,’ Arlette replied cautiously, ‘for you to disobey your mother’s wishes when it is to socialise with people I don’t know, but when it comes to socialising with my own friends, well, I would feel responsible for you. What if something were to happen? How would I explain it to your mother?’

‘Nothing is going to happen!’ Lilian exclaimed.

‘Something may happen,’ said Arlette, lining up the hem of her new dress against the machine. ‘If you can persuade your mother to agree to it then, yes, of course, it would be wonderful.’

‘Fine!’ Lilian stared at her angrily for a moment before getting to her feet and flouncing from the room. ‘Fine,’ she muttered again as she stamped off.

Arlette watched her leave with a look of wry amusement. A moment later she was back. ‘Mother says yes,’ she announced triumphantly.

‘Are you certain?’

‘Of course I am certain,’ she said haughtily. Leticia appeared in the doorway then, in a silk robe, holding a small china teacup that Arlette knew would have not a drop of tea in it, but a large measure of gin and a lemon slice instead.

‘I have told her,’ she said, ‘that I trust you, Arlette, and that so long as she does everything you tell her to do, and so long as she does not once leave your side, then yes, she can go to the club with you tonight. But home by midnight. And no more than a small drink or two. Here ...’

She passed Lilian a pair of coins, which Lilian glanced at disdainfully.

‘Home by midnight,’ Leticia said again. ‘Is that clear?’

‘Yes, Mother,’ said Lilian, throwing herself into an armchair. ‘Whatever you say, Mother.’

Leticia smiled, giving the impression that she somehow felt that she had done what was required of her as a mother and could now return to her own world of gin and romance novels and tea parties without a backward glance. Even as a young girl of twenty-one, Arlette could see that when it came to raising her children, Leticia set herself very low standards.

Lilian and Arlette arrived at Gideon’s cottage at 2 p.m. Although this was the fourth sitting and Arlette now knew exactly what to expect each time, after Mr Pickle’s impromptu visit to Liberty the previous week she felt a wave of nervous energy pass through her. She remembered his words: his violent urge, his needs not being sated. She thought of the large phallic flowers, the patch of scented muslin she’d tucked beneath her sleeve, the way she felt every time she brought it to her nose to remind herself of his aroma. She’d thought of his slender wrists, his silk socks, his air of total and utter entitlement to everything that London had to offer. She was pulled halfway between desire and sheer terror. She was an innocent, in every sense of the word. She knew nothing of the world. She knew nothing of men. It felt, in some ways, as if all of this – eccentric artists, jazz clubs and slightly flirtatious visits from handsome, worldly negros – was happening to the wrong girl. There was another girl in London right now who would be better suited to all this attention, to all this excitement, she was certain of it.

‘Arlette,’ said Gideon, greeting her with the customary kiss on the back of her hand. ‘And Miss Miller,’ he beamed at Lilian. ‘How enchanting to see you again. I believe you will be joining us all tonight after the sitting?’

‘I shall indeed, Mr Worsley,’ she smiled coquettishly.

‘Please,’ he said, ‘call me Gideon.’

Lilian beamed at him graciously and they all shared tea. Arlette sat knitting her fingers together nervously, trying to imagine how she would feel when the knock came on the door, when Mr Pickle was in the room. How it would feel to act out the role of thwarted lovers upstairs in Gideon’s studio when Mr Pickle had now implied that he had some kind of feelings for her, that he had violent urges. She swallowed down a wave of nausea and watched the hands on her watch as they marched towards two fifteen and there it was, the knock on the door. Knock knock knockity-knock. His customary tattoo.

But then her heart both slowed with relief and crumpled with disappointment when he showed no particular joy at seeing her perched on the edge of Gideon’s sofa, when his eyes did not rest upon her for any longer than it took to intone: ‘Miss De La Mare, enchanté.’ And then to see him fuss over his greeting with Lilian. To see him hold her gaze and say, ‘No, I do not believe we have met before, Miss Miller. Yours would be a face that I should remember, Mam’zelle.’ To watch Lilian blush and fumble under Mr Pickle’s attentions.

When they sat arranged once more upon Gideon’s chaise longue in a fabricated approximation of illicit love, she felt no ardour glowing from his warm body, no awkwardness in their physical connection.

Afterwards, when they left the cottage in high spirits after drinking two tumblers each of Cognac, they waited upon the pavement outside for a hackney carriage to take them into the West End. Mr Pickle asked Gideon if he would be so kind as to take a photograph of him with Lilian and Arlette. When Gideon had taken the photograph he suggested that he might take one of Gideon and the ladies, one he could keep, to take home to show his mother and his father, the friends he had made in London. ‘The famous artist,’ he said, ‘and the beautiful ladies.’

So Arlette stood between Gideon and Lilian, outside the cottage, his words echoing in her thoughts. Beautiful ladies. Just one of many, she realised, her heart again reeling between disappointment and relief. Just one of many.

Godfrey counted to five while they stood poised, waiting for the shutter to click shut, and then the camera was returned to the cottage and a carriage was located. Before Arlette was even aware of it, Lilian had taken the seat opposite Mr Pickle, making herself the object of his charm and attention.

‘So, Miss Miller, if I may be so bold, could I ask how old you are? I ask only because I am finding it very hard to match your fresh face with your worldly demeanour.’

‘I am just eighteen,’ she answered breathily.

Godfrey’s eyebrows arched and he said, ‘So very young. Yet so poised and elegant. When I was eighteen I was a big lanky buffoon with straw in my hair!’

‘Oh, I cannot imagine that could be true for a moment, Mr Pickle.’

‘Well, maybe I exaggerate.’ He beamed at her, and it was as if, for all the world, there was no one else in the carriage but the two of them. ‘And, Miss Miller, do you have a job of work?’

Lilian laughed. ‘No!’ she replied. ‘I do not. I should hate to work. I help my mother,’ she continued, as if this was somehow more worthy of respect, ‘with my young brother and running the house. My mother is a little ...’ she smiled a knowing smile that was so false and so silly that it set Arlette’s teeth on edge, ‘... a little immature, shall we say.’

Godfrey threw her a curious look. ‘And your father?’

‘My father lives in Belgium,’ she said in a tone of voice laden with the weight of unthinkable responsibility. ‘He rarely gets home; once a month, sometimes less.’

‘So it all falls to you, then, Miss Miller?’

She sighed dramatically and said, ‘Yes, I’m rather afraid it does.’

Arlette pursed her lips and glowered out of the carriage window.

No mention of the housemaid, no mention of the junior housemaid, no mention of the housekeeper or the cook, no mention of the nanny or the nurse. No mention of the hours Lilian spent curling her hair with rags or softening her feet with French lotions. No mention of the parties and the balls and the afternoons spending her mother’s money in department stores on hats and collars and fripperies.

Lilian was trying to impress Godfrey. And it appeared to be working.

The carriage brought them to a Georgian building on a street off Piccadilly, and Gideon paid the driver. They entered the club, two by two, Lilian with Godfrey, Arlette with Gideon. It was Godfrey who helped Lilian with her gloves and cloak, and Godfrey who showed Lilian to a seat.

They sat in a booth, painted fiery gold and draped with folds of velvet. Their table was lit with a single lamp, and had Arlette been feeling a little less infuriated by Lilian’s behaviour and the turn the evening seemed to be taking, she might have noticed that the club was peopled by extraordinary-looking men and women, ladies with feathers in their hair and cigarettes in extravagantly long holders, gentlemen with waxed moustaches and asymmetric fringes. There was a lady dressed as a man in a severe suit and with cropped hair. There was a man dressed in full dandy attire, including a powdered wig and a beauty spot. A woman in her late middle age sat with a Pekingese upon her lap while a young man of around twenty-five kissed the dip of her neck. Another man was dressed in a silk brocade dressing gown and fez, sitting upon the lap of a very thin woman wearing heavy, Cleopatra-style make-up, a skin-tight velvet dress and an elaborate paste-diamond headdress that was almost the same size as her head.

Arlette would have noticed that in the context of this bohemian mix of people, she and her companions appeared dull as daisies, even Lilian in her delicate drop-waisted chiffon dress and Godfrey in his sharply tailored, camel-coloured suit. Gideon, with his wild black curls and slightly scruffy clothes, looked almost as though he belonged here, but still, this place, the Cygnet Club, was absolutely not like anywhere else any of them had ever been before.

‘Well,’ said Godfrey, after ordering dry Martinis for the whole table, ‘I feel a little as though I have fallen down Alice’s hole and woken up in Wonderland.’

Lilian laughed over-loudly. ‘I absolutely agree with you, Mr Pickle,’ she said, in the silly new voice she appeared to have developed for his benefit. ‘But isn’t this just the most divine place in the world? All these beautiful people!’

‘And some not so beautiful,’ he replied, nodding in the direction of a woman with a heavily pencilled-in brow and a beak-like nose, dressed in head-to-toe black like a Spanish widow.

‘But still, all so different, all so unique.’

‘Well, yes, that they are.’

A young girl approached their table then. She was small as a wood nymph and dressed in gold. Her black hair was bobbed to her jaw and her lips were painted into a red rosebud. ‘Gideon!’ she trilled, lowering her cigarette and blowing some smoke from the side of her mouth. ‘My goodness, I haven’t seen you for such a dreadfully long time! How are you?’

Gideon got to his feet and clasped the girl’s hands between his. ‘Miss McAteer!’ he beamed. ‘How wonderful to see you!’

‘Oh, Gids, please don’t call me Miss. That’s just so old-fashioned.’

Gideon looked stung at the suggestion that he might be out of date and puffed out his chest. ‘Of course,’ he said, ‘Minu. Lovely Minu McAteer.’ He turned to his companions. ‘Everyone, this is my dear friend Minu McAteer. Minu, this is Mr ...’ he stopped and smiled, ‘... sorry, this is Godfrey, Lilian and Arlette.’

Minu McAteer blew kisses at all of them and Gideon pushed himself up the banquette so that she could sit down.

‘So, Mr Worsley,’ she teased, ‘how are you? And what on earth are you doing here?’

‘I am absolutely fine. And I am here at the suggestion of Mr ... of Godfrey, whose portrait I am currently painting, at my studio.’

She eyed up Mr Pickle curiously. ‘I feel I recognise you,’ she said. ‘Is it possible we have met before?’

‘Well, yes, indeed. I am a musician; you may well have seen me performing with one of my bands.’

‘One of your bands! Well, how impressive. And what bands might they be?’

‘I play clarinet, Mam’zelle, with both the Southern Syncopated Orchestra and also my own ensemble, a three-piece called Sandy Beach and the Love Brothers.’

‘Sandy Beach! Yes! Of course. We have met before. You played at another club I frequent. I asked you if you might be able to do some songs at my birthday party; you said you were too busy.’ She pouted at him and he laughed.

‘It has certainly been a busy year for me, Miss McAteer ...’

‘Call me Minu.’

‘Minu.’ He smiled at her broadly and Arlette felt her despondency grow again. ‘I have been on the road constantly since last summer. The length and breadth of your country, an itinerary that would leave you quite breathless. I apologise for being unable to play at your party. And for not remembering your quite, quite lovely face.’

Arlette tensed at his words and resisted the violent urge to collect her hat and gloves and jump into the first carriage home.

Minu McAteer turned to Arlette then and smiled sweetly, and Arlette felt her heart lift at the thought that she might be about to bring her into her conversation with Mr Pickle. But instead she said, ‘I wonder, would you mind awfully if I sat to the other side of you, so that Sandy and I may have a little chat?’

And then the winsome young thing climbed over Arlette’s lap, squeezed herself in between them and turned her tiny, gold-clad back fully on Arlette and Gideon.

Gideon looked down at Arlette and smiled. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘this place is rather a find, wouldn’t you say?’

Arlette nodded wearily.

‘All these people. Extraordinary.’ He shook his head slowly and smiled. ‘Everything all right, Arlette?’ he asked gently. ‘You haven’t seemed quite yourself today.’

‘I’m fine,’ she said, through a stiff smile. ‘Absolutely fine.’

‘Your friend Lilian, she’s quite a girl, isn’t she?’

Arlette sighed. ‘Ah, yes, that she is. As is your friend Minu.’

‘Two girls, it seems, rather spellbound by our friend Mr Pickle.’

‘You mean Godfrey,’ she said archly.

‘Ah, yes,’ Gideon smiled. ‘I must get with the modern way. The new etiquette. Godfrey.’

‘I think it sounds rather vulgar,’ said Arlette, primly. ‘We barely know him.’

‘Well, yes, that is true. But times are changing, Arlette. The world is a different place. It is impossible, I suppose, for the world to go through such upheaval and not come out of it rather changed. I rather like it. And you, well, I would call you the poster girl for the new world. A young woman of independent means, living off your own money, working at a job, finding your way in the big city almost single-handedly. You are the new modern woman. Why be scared of change?’

‘It’s not change I am scared of, Gideon, it is decline.’

‘Oh, Arlette, Arlette, Arlette ...’ He smiled affectionately and patted the top of her hand. ‘You are such a lovely little dichotomy. Such a puzzle. So unlike any girl I have met before.’ He looked at her fondly and then covered her hand with his completely, wrapping his fingers under her palm.

Arlette stared down at her hand and stopped breathing for a moment. She had no idea what to make of it. In another context, a more formal context, that hand over hers would be a shocking approach, but here, in this peculiar, decadent place, full of bohemians and eccentrics and ladies whose stocking tops were clearly visible above the hemlines of their clothes, it seemed somehow sweet and reassuring. She heard Godfrey say something behind her and then the ear-splitting sound of Lilian and Minu both exploding with carefully orchestrated mirth. She curled her fingers carefully around Gideon’s and squeezed.

‘Well,’ said Gideon, flushing slightly, ‘I am glad to see that at least one woman in this party has not succumbed to the charms of Mr Pickle.’

Arlette smiled tightly and said nothing.