Before I Met You

49


1921




ARLETTE NEVER SAW the baby. It was taken away from her before she had a chance to set eyes on it. She’d been delirious at the time, full of ether and chloroform, crazy as a street lady, no idea what was happening. The only thing she knew was that her baby had come three months early and was already dead.

‘What colour is it?’ she asked the midwife as the baby was carried from the room, like waste product.

‘Please don’t talk, Mrs De La Mare,’ she was told sternly.

‘Is it white?’ she screamed. ‘Is it white?’

‘Of course it’s white,’ the midwife snapped at her. ‘What other colour could you possibly expect it to be? A tiny white boy. Poor wee soul.’

She strode from the room and Arlette was left alone, her body aching and empty.

A tiny white boy.

Thank God for that.

Thank God for that.

For months she had feared her instincts wrong. A tiny, gritty part of her, quietly questioning the evidence. Maybe it was Godfrey’s.

But no. The baby had not been Godfrey’s. It had been Gideon’s. She had not gone through these past four months of wretchedness for nothing.

She put her trembling hands to her belly. It was still full and firm. A cruel illusion. No baby. Just an empty sack. She had known, she had known for days. Where once there had been the soothing, fascinating tumble and kick of a being inside her, suddenly there had been nothing, just a desolate stillness. And then when the pain had begun, she’d known. Known that she would be pushing out of her a baby that she would never hold in her arms.

A tiny white boy.

Francis Worsley. That was to be his name.

She sat up and felt the room spin in circles around her head. The door opened and a man stood in the doorway, a tall handsome man. Her husband. Her rapist. He was crying.

‘There,’ she said coldly. ‘There. It is over. We can end this farce. The marriage will be annulled.’

‘Our baby,’ he sobbed. Mucus bubbled from his nose.

‘I know,’ she said. ‘It was never meant to be. It was your punishment,’ she continued, ‘for what you did to me.’

He stared at her desperately, his fist half-stuffed into his mouth to hold back the tears. ‘You callous whore,’ he sobbed. ‘You dirty, callous whore.’

She stared at him. ‘You made a whore out of me, Gideon. All of this is your fault. Every last bit of it.’

‘I cannot believe I ever loved you. I had no idea your heart was made of lead.’

She turned and faced the wall, her back to him, her hands tucked beneath her cheek. ‘Please go, Gideon,’ she said. ‘When the midwife says I am fit to be up, I will pack my things and return to the Millers.’

She heard him in the doorway, the damp, ugly noises of misery, his fist beating the wall twice, and then the sound of his leather soles turning on the floorboards and the door slamming closed behind him.

She breathed in hard, sucking down her own desperate sobs.

Her baby was dead.

But her future was reborn.


Most of the orchestra was based in London now – the tour suspended temporarily because their manager had been declared bankrupt and his case was going through the courts – picking up cheques and handfuls of notes here and there, performing in smaller groups around the Soho clubs.

Arlette had kept up with Godfrey’s comings and goings through Minu, who still frequented the clubs and parties. It had been painful to be reminded that beyond the walls of her strange Chelsea prison, beyond her empty, loveless marriage with Gideon, life was still continuing in all its silly, glittering, light-hearted glory. Godfrey was still living in his rooms in south London and playing with the Love Brothers, a regular nightly slot at the Blue Butterfly on Coventry Street.

And it was there, exactly four weeks after the stillbirth of her son, that Arlette went to see what could be salvaged from the pitiful remains of their love affair.


She and Minu sat side by side in a booth, drinking pink gins, gossiping frantically and pretending that the previous six months had been merely a blink of the eye. Minu still did not know the truth about the baby, about its conception. When she had returned that night from the party at the Millers’, Arlette had brushed away her concerns, told her that she had been violently sick, too much to drink, maybe, or something she’d eaten. She did wonder if Minu had worked it out for herself, as she’d never questioned the fact of Arlette jumping so quickly and unexpectedly from a torrid love affair with Godfrey into marriage and parenthood with Gideon. But if she suspected anything she said nothing, merely went along with Arlette’s charade of being two carefree young gals out on the town.

‘My new roommate is not a patch on you, Arlette,’ she said reassuringly. ‘She is so deadly dull, you know. She attends the Sunday service at St George’s and says grace before even so much as a sip of water. I can’t think why I ever thought to let her have the room. I was swayed by her looks. So awfully pretty. I thought that a pretty girl would by definition be a jolly girl. I was wrong ...’

She laughed, and Arlette laughed, and then glanced over Minu’s shoulder at the stage where the previous band were taking their leave, bowing and smiling at the applauding audience. She breathed in deeply. Soon, she thought, any moment, Godfrey would be there. Her Godfrey. The only man she’d ever loved. Minu glanced at her and squeezed her hand. Arlette smiled back. One day Arlette would tell Minu everything. But not now. Not yet.

A smiling man took to the stage then, his hands clasped together, his hair slicked back with pomade, a daffodil pinned to his lapel and said, in a faux American accent: ‘Ladies and gentleman, sirs, lords, dukes and duchesses, kings and queens, it is my pleasure to introduce to you, our very own special guests, three of the most celebrated performers from the world-renowned Southern Syncopated Orchestra, and all the way from the sun-kissed isles of the Caribbean, please put your hands together, for Sandy Beach and his infectious Love Brothers.’

Arlette did indeed put her hands together, and she clapped until they rang with pain. The spotlights swung up and the curtains were parted and there he was. Handsome and bright-eyed, his clarinet clutched between his long fingers, in a royal-blue suit and a matching mohair fedora, his foot tapping along in rhythm with the opening bars.

Arlette caught her breath and stared.

She stared and she stared, drinking in every detail of him, knowing he would be unable to see her with all those lights in his eyes, knowing that after tonight she might never see him again.

‘He looks well,’ Minu whispered loudly in her ear.

‘Yes,’ agreed Arlette. ‘He does.’

After the performance, she and Minu made their way to the backstage, a place Arlette was by now intimately familiar with. She’d stood in a dozen different backstage areas a hundred times; she knew the smells, the noises, the protocols.

And then, even before she saw him, she smelled him: vanilla and sandalwood, the scent she’d helped him choose in Liberty almost a year ago. She turned and there he was, jacketless, his shirt stuck to his body with sweat, a towel in one hand, a cold beer in the other, a smile from some other just-finished conversation still playing on his lips.

‘Oh, my dear sweet goodness,’ he drawled, the smile freezing in place.

‘Hello,’ she said.

He looked behind himself and to the left and right as though the reason for Arlette’s presence might somehow make itself known in physical form.

‘Well, gosh, hello!’

‘You were wonderful tonight,’ she continued brightly. ‘Truly amazing.’

‘Why, thank you, Miss De La Mare. Or should I say, Mrs ...?’

‘No, I am Miss. Still.’

‘And you came ...’ he looked again from left to right, ‘... alone?’

She nodded. ‘Gideon and I are no longer together. I lost the baby. The marriage is to be annulled.’

Godfrey’s eyebrows jumped up towards his hairline. ‘My goodness, my goodness.’ He rubbed his chin and stared at the ground. ‘Well, well, what an unexpected turn of events. And of course, I hope it goes without saying that I am truly, truly sorry for your loss.’

‘Thank you, Godfrey. But it was for the best.’

He glanced at her uncertainly, taken aback by her words.

‘The marriage was never consummated, Godfrey,’ she whispered meaningfully.

He stared at her again in surprise. ‘But ...?’

‘It was never consummated. The baby,’ she lowered her voice further, ‘it was Gideon’s fault. He took advantage of me ...’

She cleared her throat and flushed red. It was the first time she had told anyone and the words burned like hot coals as they left her mouth.

Godfrey blinked and shook his head, as though mistaken in what he had heard her say. ‘You mean, he ...?’

‘Yes,’ she whispered. ‘At my birthday party.’

His face clouded over then, with anger. ‘He ... he ...’ He turned this way and that, trying to find a place for himself. ‘Jesus Christ, Arlette, why didn’t you tell me?’

‘Because it was all such a horrible, terrible mess and I wanted everything to be as simple as possible. Because it was the right thing to do.’

‘How could that have been the right thing to do? We were in love, Arlette. We were going to be together. If you’d told me, I could have –’

‘What, Godfrey? What could you have done? There is nothing you could have done. Hit him? Beaten him to a bloody mess? Then what? I would have had a bleeding husband and I would still have been pregnant. And you might have ended up in gaol.’

‘I would not have hit him, Arlette. I have never hit another person in my life. I would have ...’ He ground his hands together as he tried to find inside himself a solution to a problem that had passed. ‘I would have just wanted to know. So that I could have held you and taken care of you. So that I might not have spent the past six months in a state of terrible indescribable pain, feeling like a stake had been passed through my heart and left there.’

Arlette took his hands in hers and said, ‘It is done now. It is finished. We can go now and dance. Would you like that? To go dancing?’

He lifted his gaze from the floor and towards her. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I would very much like to go dancing. Thank you.’


They danced until three in the morning. It was the first time Arlette had danced since her birthday party in September. She felt young and light upon her feet, and for moments at a time it was really possible to believe that the past six months had never happened, that her life had continued as it had been destined to before Godfrey had gone away to Manchester and left her in the untrustworthy hands of Gideon. But she wanted more from tonight than to dance and to laugh; she had a deep, smouldering need within her to cover over the past with a new layer, to paste over the foulness of what Gideon had done to her with the goodness of what Godfrey could do for her. She wanted to go to bed with him. Desperately. And so when he offered to see her home to the Millers’ she said, very firmly, ‘No. I would like to go home with you.’

He looked at her curiously. ‘I am not really supposed to have lady friends to stay,’ he said, in a tone of voice that suggested he might be prepared to risk the wrath of his landlady on this occasion.

‘I know,’ said Arlette. ‘And I have no intention of staying, Godfrey. I should merely visit. Very briefly.’

Godfrey smiled at her. ‘Not too briefly, I hope?’

‘Let us not discuss it for another moment. I honestly feel there is nothing to lose. Nothing whatsoever.’

Godfrey said, ‘I could not agree more. Shall we?’ he offered her the crook of his elbow and they walked together from the club and into a carriage headed for the murky unknown depths of a place called New Cross.


The sun rose at six a.m. and Arlette saw clearly for the first time the dank starkness of Godfrey’s lodgings. They were squeezed, at very close quarters, upon a collapsible bed with a very thin mattress. The room was in fact only half a room, carved in two from a bigger room by a thin wall papered over with a print of damp roses. Godfrey had a sink, through which ran a long crack such that it looked as if it might fall apart at the merest touch. His clothes hung from a coat stand in the middle of the room – ‘to keep them as far away as possible from the mould on the walls,’ he’d explained. A small window hung with dirty lace looked out over a builder’s yard and cold air blew in through a missing pane. As she awoke she felt a vague horror at her surroundings, uncomfortable after a night on the loose springs of the cheap bed, and cold in spite of the proximity of Godfrey on the bed next to her. The room smelled of stale cooking: mushy vegetables and boiled bones. She brought herself closer to Godfrey’s body, the only savoury thing in the room, and he tucked his head neatly into the crook of her neck.

The room was ugly and it smelled, but in the years and the decades to come, when she looked back on this watery early April morning in a New Cross backstreet in 1921, Arlette would be filled with deep nostalgic yearning. In her mind, Godfrey’s charmless room would take on the air of a magical fairy-tale setting, an enchanted room with real roses climbing up the walls and swallows pirouetting outside the window. Because unknown to her, this would be the last time she would feel Godfrey’s body against hers, the last time she would feel his breath in the crook of her neck, his fingers curled round hers, and the last time in her whole life that she would experience real happiness.

She wished she’d known it at the time, wished she’d thought less of the smell of boiled bones and more of the feeling of his satin skin. She wished she had not rushed away so soon, had not been so concerned with the prospect of discovery by a red-faced landlady. And she wished she had said more to him, more than the rushed words of someone who thinks they have all the time in the world. She had not known at that precise moment that she was not living in her happy ever after, that her happy ever after was not going to materialise, that something had gone wrong during the editing process of the screenplay of her life. That while she made her rushed goodbyes, her unnecessary escape to the warmth and comfort of Leticia Miller’s house, other things were shifting around, little tiny imperceptible happenings that, during the course of the day to come, were going to hammer the path of her life completely out of shape.


A confused and gin-sodden Leticia was crouching in the front garden of her beautiful stucco house in Holland Park, her youngest son in her arms, her daughter by her side holding the cat, watching it burn slowly, but purposefully to the ground. A dozen firefighters were trying their best to dampen the flames, but already the bones and cavities of the house were clear to see; already it was obvious the house was dead.

‘It’s all my fault!’ Leticia was wailing. ‘All my fault!’

Lilian merely scowled at her and rubbed the cat’s head.

‘What happened?’ asked Arlette, running from the hackney carriage.

‘A burning cigarette. It fell from my fingers onto my discarded clothes. I believe, also, an upended bottle of something flammable may have played a part ...’ She said all of this in a high-pitched voice, tremulous and wistful, as though recounting a lovely dream. She smiled and held her boy closer to her.

‘Mother was drunk. Out for the count. While her children slept. The maid sounded the alarm. Thank God there was one responsible adult in the house otherwise who knows what might have become of all of us?’

The maid stood to their left, wrapped in a blanket, drinking something warm from a hipflask. The last of the night darkness had left the sky now and the scene was bathed in the stark light of day.

Lilian said, ‘I’m going back to Philip’s house.’ She looked at Arlette. ‘Will you come with me?’

Arlette looked from the house to Leticia and then to Lilian. Philip’s house next door looked warm and welcoming. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘if you think they won’t mind?’

‘Of course they won’t. They’re the very definition of hospitable. Mother, you should come too, let James get warm, get something to eat.’

‘No,’ said her mother numbly. ‘No, you take James. I’ll stay here. Until it’s done. I can’t go until it’s done.’

So Arlette, Lilian, James and the cat headed next door where Philip’s parents made sure they were given bowls of steaming porridge and strong cups of coffee, and offered them beds for the nights to come.

‘That is so, so kind of you, thank you so much. And, of course, Father has been telegraphed. He’ll be home soon, I’m sure. He’ll make arrangements for us all. This will be only for a night or two.’

‘As long as it needs,’ Philip’s mother said. ‘As long as it takes.’ And then she looked at Arlette and said, ‘And you, Miss ...?’

‘Miss De La Mare.’

‘Yes, of course, Miss De La Mare, you are welcome to stay, too, of course.’

Arlette smiled blankly. The offer was sincerely voiced, but Arlette felt a void behind it, something empty and non-existent. She would stay tonight, quite happily in this warm and welcoming house of strangers, she would stay quite happily the night after, and the night after that. But then what? Mr Miller would return, he would probably move the family into a suite at a smart hotel, or possibly take a short lease on an apartment for them all. Again, Arlette felt sure that she would be welcome, that space would be found for her, but again, there was a darkness behind the fact. Because she was twenty-two years old, she had shared rooms with a girlfriend that she had paid for with her own earned money, she had run a department in a famous London store, she had been married, she had lived in her own home, she had taken a baby to six months’ gestation and delivered it dead, she had annulled a marriage and spent the night with her charismatic lover in a boarding house in New Cross, and the days of living off the generosity of her mother’s friends seemed no longer to be quite appropriate. She was no longer ‘spending some time in London’, she was living here, and it was time, she suddenly believed, to put down roots, to stop being a transient, a guest. It was time to start her life properly.

‘Thank you,’ she said fulsomely. ‘Thank you so much. That would be most kind.’

But already she was making plans for the next phase. Already she was dreaming of the register office wedding, a just-so little blue dress, a small bouquet of gerbera daisies and sandalwood blossom, a raucous party at the Blue Butterfly or the Cygnet, maybe fancy dress, certainly an open invitation to the whole orchestra and all of her friends. She thought of the little house that she and Godfrey could share, maybe on a neat terrace somewhere in south London; she would not mind, some bits of south London were rather nice, or so she’d been told. She thought of a small cosy kitchen and a cat or two. She thought of friendly neighbours, curious about the unusual couple next door, him black, her white, both so pleasant, both so smart. She thought about parties and tours, she thought even about taking Godfrey to Guernsey, where she would march him into her mother’s house with pride, pretend that her face wasn’t really contorted with not knowing what to say. She thought about babies and she thought about a long cruise to the Caribbean, to visit his mother, with a pair of adorable coffee-skinned tots by their side. She saw it all, clearer than she’d ever seen anything in her life.

She saw her future.





50


1995




BETTY AWOKE THE following morning at six thirty, in spite of having turned her alarm clock off the night before in preparation for her first lie-in in nearly a week. For a moment she forgot that she wasn’t going to work and almost leaped out of bed. But then she remembered. Amy and the kids were in the Cotswolds. She was free until six o’clock. And then she remembered something else. What Alexandra had told her the night before. About a man called Sandy Beach. Or Godfrey Pickle.

Yes. He had existed. Whoever he was and whatever his role in Arlette’s history. He had existed. And he had somehow, although there was no record of it, passed on his colourful name to a woman called Clara. Who may or may not have been Arlette’s child. But had, in some mysterious way, been significant enough to her to warrant a sizeable chunk of her inheritance.

The facts and the stories: Gideon Worsley, Godfrey Pickle, the portraits and the houses on Abingdon Villas and Chelsea Embankment, the photos, the programmes, the book inscribed to ‘Pickle’ – she had it all now, more information than Peter Lawler had ever had at his disposal. But it felt like it had all landed on her lap in the wrong order, like a ripped-up letter that she needed to spread out flat on the floor and find a way to fit together.

She tried to make herself go back to sleep, but it was no use, her mind swirled and spun, laying out the facts this way and that, till she felt almost dizzy with it and jumped out of bed, poker straight and ready to start the day. There was one last thing she hadn’t investigated: the address in St Anne’s Court, the last known address of Clara Pickle. Arlette had already tried, and so had Peter Lawler. But there had to be another way in, another little clue in there somewhere, to open up the picture. She dressed and left the house.


The building was scruffy art deco. It would have been brand new when Arlette lived in London. Now its white walls were streaked green with mildew and the windows were thick with grime. But regardless of its appearance, the important thing about the building was that it faced directly opposite the address mentioned on Arlette’s will and that it appeared, from street level, to be entirely residential.

Betty appraised the building. It was nine thirty, early for a Soho Saturday, but she didn’t have time for polite consideration. She had no idea when she would next get a morning off work. She strode towards the entrance of the building, which was slightly recessed from the street, and before she lost her nerve she pulled back her shoulders and pushed the buzzer for apartment number one. A male voice answered, with a bright and robust, ‘Good morning!’ and she breathed a sigh of relief.

‘Good morning,’ she shouted into the intercom. ‘I’m trying to trace someone for an inheritance and I’m looking for someone who might have lived in this block for a very long time.’

There was a pause and a crackle, and then the jolly-sounding man sighed and said, sounding almost disappointed not to be able to help, ‘I’ve been here for six months.’

‘Oh,’ she said, ‘never mind. Do you happen to know if anyone else in this building has been here longer?’

‘Nobody in this building talks to anyone else,’ he hissed, camply. ‘Stuck up Londoners.’ She noticed then that his accent was northern. ‘But there is a very very old lady up on the top floor. Smells of wee. She might do you.’

Betty wrinkled her nose. ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘What flat number is she?’

‘No idea, love, but if I buzz you in, you could go up and knock on some doors.’

Betty paused. The building was dank and depressing and she didn’t really love the idea of an old lady who smelled of wee. But this was as close as she was going to get to some answers, so she said, ‘Yes, great, that would be brilliant.’ And heaved the door open when he buzzed it.

The interior of the small block was every bit as unappealing as the exterior, and she picked her way up the concrete stairs gingerly. There were only two doors at the top floor, one was painted pink and decorated with plastic flowers and garden gnomes. The other was painted dark blue and had a threadbare welcome mat outside. She looked between the two doors, trying to guess which one might belong to the incredibly old lady, and decided on the blue one, knocking on it gently with her knuckles.

She heard noises behind her door, shuffling and scuffling, muttering and moaning and she held in her breath, suddenly nervous about the imminent encounter. Then she heard catches and locks being pulled across the door before it opened against a chain and she saw a very tiny woman with dyed black hair and heavily pencilled-in eyebrows staring up at her. ‘Wrong house,’ she whispered. ‘You have the wrong house.’

Her voice was strongly accented – Russian possibly, or Polish. She went to close the door again but Betty put her hand against it. ‘How long have you lived here?’ she asked urgently.

‘Wrong house!’ she shouted out again.

‘Please!’ called Betty. ‘I’m trying to trace someone who used to live over the road, for an inheritance.’

‘What!’ the lady stopped pushing against the door and cupped a hand to her ear. Her fingernails were very long and painted burgundy.

‘I’m trying to find someone. For an inheritance,’ Betty repeated, enunciating each word precisely.

‘No,’ said the woman, ‘I am not the right person. I do not have any inheritance.’

She went to close the door again and again Betty held it open. ‘I just need to talk to someone who’s lived here for a long time. Please. Can I just ask you a question or two?’

The woman narrowed her eyes at Betty. ‘What is your name?’

‘Betty Dean.’

The woman smiled, revealing just three teeth. Betty took in the cavernous, rotten caw with silent horror.

‘Pretty girl,’ the woman said, peering at her. ‘Very pretty girl. Are you on the game?’

‘No!’

‘Drugs?’

‘No! I’m a nanny!’

The woman narrowed her eyes again and finally pulled open the door. Betty’s eyes widened at the full sight of her. No more than four foot ten, so thin that every bone in her body was visible through her clothes, she wore a tracksuit made of cream velour with a garish diamanté pattern picked out on the sleeves, and a series of huge medallions around her neck that were so heavy they caused her to stoop. The tracksuit was encrusted in places with old food and other substances which Betty didn’t care to ponder on for too long, and she did, indeed, smell very strongly of wee. Her alarmingly dark hair was piled on her head in an unsavoury bird’s nest with three inches of snow-white roots.

Betty stayed where she was, feeling quite strongly that she did not want to enter the lady’s flat, and instead she smiled encouragingly and said, ‘What year did you move in here?’

The lady winced, as though the consideration of such a fact was physically painful in some way. ‘I have been here since 1943. I came during the war. With my baby.’

Betty nodded, silently acknowledging the likelihood of a terrible story behind her words.

‘I am seventy-seven years old. Although I look much older.’

Betty shook her head. ‘No, you don’t, you –’

‘I look a hundred. I feel a hundred. I want to die.’

Betty looked at her in alarm.

‘Don’t be worried about this. It is normal. One day you will be old like me and you will not be pretty any more, and your child will be dead and your husband will be dead and your lover will be dead and you will live alone in this terrible place and you will also want to be dead. Believe me!’

Betty jumped slightly and then smiled sympathetically, a slightly inconsequential reaction to her words, but all that she could come up with.

‘When you came to live here,’ she asked, ‘do you remember at all who lived across the road, in those flats above the Mexican restaurant?’

‘Mexican restaurant? What Mexican restaurant?’

Betty pointed through the small window on the landing towards the street. ‘Down there,’ she said.

‘Ach,’ said the woman, ‘the last time I went out there, it was a French restaurant. Everything changes. All the time.’

‘And the flats,’ Betty steered the conversation back to saliency. ‘Do you remember who lived there, before they turned them into offices?’

The woman put her door onto the latch and shuffled towards the window. Betty drew in her breath against her sour aroma. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I remember.’

Betty’s heart began to race. ‘You do?’

‘Yes. How could I forget? It was a home,’ she said, ‘for unwed mothers. Mainly call girls and foreigners. Run by the Church.’

‘The Church?’

‘Yes. St Anne’s. Do-gooders. No place for children, I would have thought. But there were still children in that place up until a few years back. You could hear those babies screaming. One stopped, another started. That one stopped, another one started. All through the night. And then one day,’ she turned and smiled again, ‘all the babies left, they boarded it up and so it was until they turned it into offices.’ She turned back to the window. ‘And then, of course, I missed the babies.’

‘How long do you think it had been a home, when you moved here?’

The woman shrugged, her tiny bones of shoulders jutting almost out of their sockets. ‘I do not know,’ she snapped. ‘Ask the Church! Ask the do-gooders!’ She relaxed her shoulders again and sighed. ‘So,’ she asked, ‘who is it? Who is this lucky person who is going to get your inheritance?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Betty. ‘But I think it might be one of those screaming babies across the road. Someone called Clara Pickle. Or Clara Jones.’

‘What was her date of birth?’

‘We don’t know.’

The old lady shrugged. ‘Well, then, how are you going to find her?’

Betty stared through the window at the smart offices where Clara Pickle might have started her mysterious life and sighed. ‘I don’t know,’ she said.

‘That is a lot of not knowing.’ The woman looked at her sceptically. ‘Go and talk to the Church.’ She tapped her veined temple with one gnarled old finger. ‘Get yourself some knowledge.’


Betty breathed in huge gulps of fresh air when she left the building a moment later. She tried not to think too much about the lady, whose name she had never asked, tried not to think about her dark, day-to-day life or who cared for her, or how it might be to be so old and care so little for life itself. Instead she headed straight for St Anne’s Church on Wardour Street, hoping desperately that her run of good luck was not about to run out.


The church looked odd perched between the bars and restaurants, the gaming lounges and betting shops, as if it had been left there accidentally. A plaque commemorated its reopening by Princess Anne after it had been blown apart in the Second World War. And on this sunny Saturday morning in June, the church and its community centre were buzzing with people and activity in a very encouraging manner.

Betty found the vicar talking with a grimy, tearful man of the street, who kept sniffing very loudly and wiping his streaming nose against the sleeve of his tattered jacket. She sat and waited patiently for a few minutes until finally the homeless man smiled widely, hugged the vicar to him, picked up a filthy rucksack, nodded at Betty and left the building.

‘Good morning,’ the vicar boomed, in a soft Scottish accent. ‘Are you looking for me?’

Betty nodded and got to her feet. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘do you have a moment or two to spare?’

‘I have many moments to spare. Today is my official day of spare moments.’ He beamed.

Betty smiled back and said, ‘Do you know anything about a home for unwed mothers that your Church used to run, in St Anne’s Court?’

He smiled and held an arm out towards her. ‘This sounds like a moment for spending in my office,’ he said. ‘Do come with me.’

She followed him into a smart office, across a courtyard, located slightly away from the church itself.

‘Now,’ he said, holding the door open for her, ‘we’ve only been on these premises for a few years but I’m pretty certain that everything came with us. For a long time there was no church here to speak of, just a wreck, so all the paperwork was kept together by necessity. And I do vaguely recall something about the home for unwed mothers. Sit.’ He waved at a green chair. ‘Tea?’

‘Yes, thank you.’

He called through his door to someone in an adjoining room for two mugs of tea and then turned back to Betty.

‘So, tell me what you need to know.’

‘I’m looking for a beneficiary. For my grandmother’s will. She’s called Clara Pickle. And she lived at the address of the home at some point. And that is all I know.’

‘Right, so, no date of birth?’

‘No date of birth. But I think she might have been mixed race. And her mother’s name might have been Arlette. Or might not have been Arlette. And if it wasn’t Arlette, then I have no idea what it might have been.’

‘And her father?’

Betty blinked. And then she gulped. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘the father. I can tell you all about the father. His name was Godfrey Pickle. He was a really famous musician.’

The vicar pulled out a large box folder and said, ‘Right, let’s start at the beginning: 1920. That’s when the home was opened. Let’s start there and see where we end up. I’ll call out names, you tell me to stop if you hear anything interesting.’

It took only about five minutes for the vicar to get to the name Esther Jones.

‘Jones!’ said Betty. ‘That was the other name on the will, Clara Jones! Does it say what her baby’s name was?’

He peered at the piece of paper and sighed. ‘Let me see, hmm, hmm, yes, here it is. Esther Jones was signed into the home on the twenty-second of October 1921. And she gave birth in November 1921. To, yes, a baby girl. Called Clara Tatiana. She weighed seven pounds and fifteen ounces. Mother and baby both well, it says here.’

Betty felt tingles racing up and down her spine.

‘And ... well, it says here that they moved out in January 1922, and that, oh, this is interesting, it gives the name of the father here. And it’s not your Mr Pickle. No, it says here the baby’s father was called Edward Minchin. Yes. Edward John Minchin. Of 24 Rippon Road, London SE.’

‘But,’ Betty furrowed her brow, ‘that makes no sense. Why would my grandmother have left all her money to a girl born to two people I’ve never heard of?’

The vicar shrugged. ‘I have no idea,’ he said. ‘But although you’ve never heard of them, your grandmother clearly had. And now you have the girl’s real name ...’

She looked at him quizzically.

‘Yes. You’ve been looking for a Clara Pickle or a Clara Jones. But she was neither of those, was she? She would have been a Clara Minchin. Clara Minchin of Rippon Road.’ He leaned back into his chair and eyed her conclusively. ‘I think your search might almost be over.’