Before I Met You

2




IT WASN’T UNTIL the second week of February, five weeks after her family’s arrival at her house, and ten days after the resurrection of the central heating, that Arlette and Elizabeth had any kind of meaningful conversation. They came upon each other in the hallway, as Elizabeth waved goodbye to her new best friend, Bella, and her mother, who had dropped her home after tea at Bella’s house.

Elizabeth was still smiling when she turned to see Arlette standing on the bottom step, clutching her stick and wearing, not her fur, but a stiff black dress with a knife-pleat skirt, a white voile collar and three-quarter-length sleeves. With her tiny waist and shapely calves, she looked to Elizabeth like a fashion illustration from 1954 come to life. She descended the last step with the assistance of the stick she now used all the time and looked at Elizabeth.

‘Who was that?’ she asked.

Elizabeth paused for a moment, giving herself time to ensure that the question was not a trick or a trap. ‘That was Bella,’ she replied.

‘Bella?’ repeated Arlette, arching a pencilled in eyebrow. ‘Who’s Bella?’

‘She’s my best friend.’

‘Ah!’ Arlette’s face brightened. ‘You have a best friend? Already?’

Elizabeth nodded proudly.

‘Well,’ said Arlette, ‘in that case, I can stop worrying about you. Come,’ she said, turning back towards the staircase. ‘I’ve just made a pot of cocoa. Come and drink it with me.’

‘OK,’ Elizabeth said brightly, and joined Arlette as she walked slowly back up the stairs.

‘You know,’ said Arlette, pausing for breath at the top of the first flight, ‘I went to your school. What’s it called, these days?’

‘Our Lady of Lourdes.’

‘Yes, that’s right. Not sure what Lourdes has to do with anything. It was called St Anne’s when I was there. And it was all in one room. All of us, from four to eleven.’ She smiled a soft smile and then continued up the stairs. ‘Do you know how old I am?’ she asked suddenly, stopping again, halfway up.

Elizabeth nodded. ‘You’re eighty-four.’

Arlette scowled at her. ‘Who told you that?’ she asked.

‘Jolyon?’ she replied breathlessly, lest it was somehow the wrong answer.

‘Hmm.’ Arlette twitched her nose and then carried on up the stairs.

‘Are you?’ asked Elizabeth, following her down the corridor. ‘Are you eighty-four?’

‘Yes,’ said Arlette, stopping, but not turning to address her. ‘Yes, I am. I was hoping I might be able to fool you into thinking I was somewhat younger than that, but never mind.’

Arlette pushed open the door to her room and held it for Elizabeth. ‘Come in, dear,’ she said, with a hint of impatience.

Elizabeth stepped forward with a shiver of anticipation. She had assumed that she would never set foot in this room, or that if she did it would be at some point in the future when Arlette was actually dead. But here she was, suddenly and thrillingly, on the threshold of a mysterious new world.

And it did not disappoint.

Arlette’s room was the loveliest place Elizabeth had ever been in her life.

A fire glowed and crackled in an ornate brass fire basket. Around the Gothically carved fireplace were red velvet club fenders. On a mantelpiece lined with creamy lace, which fell from the shelf in a tasselled, scalloped fringe, were silver-framed photographs of young men and women, of soldiers and babies and elderly people with severe haircuts. The floor was carpeted with something springy and bouncy underfoot, the windows were hung with pink silk curtains with shiny sateen fringed swags and billowy pelmets, and the walls were papered with fat, sugary roses growing amidst a pale green trellis. A standard lamp in the corner bore a lampshade that looked like a gold crinoline, wrapped in silk ribbon and dripping with black bugle beads. There were occasional tables in every corner, lit by glass-shaded lamps in shades of plum and peach. The room was full of things described by words that Elizabeth did not yet know: Chantilly, chenille, chinoiserie, chintz, chandelier.

‘Sit.’ Arlette gestured at a small blue velvet chair fringed with golden tendrils. Elizabeth lowered herself delicately onto the chair and tucked her hands beneath her bottom. Arlette poured cocoa from an ornate silver pot into a small rose-painted cup. She had a kitchenette – a small gas hob, a small fridge, a hotplate, a cupboard and some shelving stacked with antique china and dainty glasses. By Elizabeth’s chair was a green leather globe, split in half horizontally and housing half a dozen decanters, a constellation of cut-crystal glasses and a small leather tub on top of which rested a tiny pair of silver tongs.

To the side of Arlette’s four-poster bed was an oversized armchair with a matching footstool, both of which faced towards a small TV set with an aerial on top.

Arlette had everything she could possibly need in here: warmth, nourishment, entertainment, sleep and gin. No wonder nobody ever saw her. No wonder she cared so little about the conditions in the rest of her home. Here she existed in perfect comfort, a deluxe studio flat, with a view.

‘You know,’ said Arlette, passing the rose-painted cup to Elizabeth, ‘you’re the very first person to join me in here for about ten years.’

Elizabeth looked up at Arlette but didn’t say anything.

‘Yes, I have lived in this house alone since Jolyon’s father passed away. Just me. On my own.’

Elizabeth felt she should say something sympathetic but as she searched for words she saw Arlette’s face twitch and then break into a smile. ‘It’s been bloody marvellous.’ She stopped abruptly and the smile folded itself away. ‘Anyway,’ she continued, ‘it’s nice to have you about the place. Though I could do without the other two.’ She shrugged her shoulders in the direction of her bedroom door and then shuddered delicately. ‘No offence.’

Elizabeth smiled, feeling sure that none had been taken.

‘I never wanted any children, you know,’ Arlette continued.

Elizabeth glanced at her with surprise.

‘It was a mistake really. They didn’t have contraception in my day. But I wasn’t stupid. I knew all the other ways in which one could prevent these things from happening. I took my temperature, kept charts ...’

Elizabeth pursed her lips and wondered what she meant by charts, but said nothing, concentrating instead on keeping the delicate wide-mouthed cup balanced on the thin sliver of a saucer.

‘We all did,’ Arlette continued. ‘Back in those days. Because we were all having so much fun and none of us was ready for babies. I managed to keep the babies at bay for eight years. Quite some feat, I can tell you. And then there it was, two days shy of my thirty-fourth birthday. A blasted baby. And once it was there, you know, bedded inside, well, all I could hope was that it would be a girl.’ She sighed, her fingertips held to the small of her throat. ‘Ah ...’ she exhaled. ‘Well, anyway, it most certainly was not a girl. It was him.’ She shuddered lightly. ‘My late husband was delighted. A son. To carry on the family name. All I could think about was having to handle his, well, his organs. I had a nursemaid. But she worked only days. So come seven o’clock it was all down to me. Ouf.’ She sneered and brought her teacup slowly to her lips. Her hands did not shake. She seemed to Elizabeth not like an eighty-four-year-old at all, but more like a slightly etiolated fifty-year-old.

‘So, I have to admit to being very curious about you, when I heard that Jolyon had taken up with a young widow. A little girl! I could not imagine my son having to play the father figure to a little girl. Or to anyone, for that matter. Selfish life he’s lived. Takes after me,’ she laughed drily. ‘But he has become very fond of you. And now here you are. In my home. And I have to say, from the first time I saw you, I liked you very much.’ Arlette smiled then and appraised Elizabeth with twinkling eyes. ‘I’d like to call you Betty, if I may?’

‘Betty?’

‘Yes. In my day if you were Elizabeth, you were Betty. Or Bet. But Betty was more popular. And I don’t know, you just look like a Betty to me.’

Betty.

Elizabeth rolled the name around her head.

She liked it. It was more fun than Elizabeth and less little-girly than Lizzy.

‘Here,’ Arlette got to her feet and crossed the room, ‘do you like old photographs?’

Elizabeth nodded. She did like old photographs, very much.

‘I thought you might.’ Arlette walked to the other side of the room and brought down a few leather-bound books from a shelf. ‘Here, my albums. Have a look.’

Elizabeth dutifully followed Arlette’s instructions, while Arlette put a large black disc onto a gramophone player and slowly lowered a needle onto it. And there, in that moment, as the needle hit the vinyl and a crackle of static hit the air, followed by a flourish of piano, a log popping in the grate, the dusty aroma of old paper from the album on her lap, the smell of waxy candles and rich perfume, and the glimmer of a large paste brooch on Arlette’s collar in the shape of a butterfly, Elizabeth felt herself open up and pull something into herself, something she’d never before encountered in her ten short years, something heady and fragrant and electrifying. And that thing was glamour.

Her home in Surrey had been modern and clean. Her mother spent a lot of time in jeans and polo-necks. Even when she went out to smart restaurants with Jolyon she would simply replace the jeans with trousers and sling a gold chain around her polo-neck. Elizabeth’s mother wore no make-up. She listened to Radio One. She had a perm. She liked football. Elizabeth’s mother was beautiful, but she was not glamorous. And before this moment, Elizabeth herself had had no real concept of the notion of glamour. She had swooned over Audrey Hepburn’s dresses in My Fair Lady, and loved going into the jewellery section of the department store in Guildford and pretending she was going to buy herself diamonds. But this was different. In this room, with the inky light of a faded afternoon in the sky and the melancholy strains of Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 3 in D in the air, Elizabeth turned the pages of an old lady’s history and lost herself in nostalgia for a world she’d never known.

In this room, Elizabeth became Betty.





3


1987




AT THE FERRY port, Betty’s breath encircled her head and then floated out towards the sea, almost as though it were trying to find its way back like a cat abandoned far from home. She was not wearing enough for the weather. At fifteen, she was more concerned with her image than with her physical comfort, and knowing that they would soon be sitting on a train heading towards London, and that there might be real actual Londoners on the train, she did not want to look like someone who lived in a weird old house with a weird old woman on the edge of a cliff on a tiny island that was so small that it didn’t even have a motorway. So she was wearing thick black tights, a very short denim skirt, blue suede moccasins and an elderly and very misshapen navy lambswool V-neck with a lace-trim vest underneath. Her hair was short and dyed black and her lips were painted a reddish black and lined with a slightly darker shade of old blood. She did not, she felt fairly certain, look like the type of girl who came from Guernsey.

Sometimes Betty forgot that she was a big, pretty fish in a small, not so pretty pond. She and Bella were the reigning queens of their small corner of the world. They were the prettiest, the coolest, the most popular. Everything, in the realm of fifteen-year-old life on the island, revolved around the pair of them. And sometimes Betty believed that she really was, well, that she was famous. Because, on Guernsey, with her smoky-brown eyes, her fashion-drawing legs and her wardrobe of cool and slightly quirky clothes collected from dark corners of charity shops and pilfered from Arlette’s many wardrobes, she may as well have been famous.

But here, just a few miles from shore, all that fell away from her like discarded tissue paper. Here she was just a girl. A pretty girl, but no prettier than most.


It was the first time they’d been back to England since they’d left on that foggy January morning almost five years ago. Three months had turned into six months, six months into a year, and by then her mother had found the island quite to her liking. Betty had settled so well into her new school and someone had made a ‘silly offer’ for the house in Farnham, and they’d decided, as a family, to stay. Betty was delighted. From the minute she’d first set foot in Arlette’s boudoir, she’d known that this was where she wanted to be now. The white powder-sprayed bed had been shipped across from England and Betty had settled down.

But they were back for Christmas, just Betty and her mother, two nights at Betty’s grandmother’s in Farnham, and time first for a bit of Christmas shopping in town. As she entered her teenage years, clothes shopping had become pretty much the only area of common interest between Betty and her mother, and they linked their arms together companionably as they made their way up Oxford Street.


It was nearly five o’clock; the December afternoon looked like deepest, darkest night and the whole road was bathed in the soft rainbow glow of the Christmas lights strung overhead. They had another hour before they needed to get a train back to Betty’s grandmother’s in Surrey. Betty could feel something deep inside her tugging her from the thoroughfare of Oxford Street, away from the homogeny and the brand names. She pulled her mother past the fairy-tale edifice of Liberty and on to Carnaby Street. Her mother kept pausing to admire a window, to exclaim about a musical showing in a theatre, to remember something she’d forgotten to buy. But Betty kept moving.

‘Come on,’ she implored, her hands on her hips. ‘Come on!’

‘What’s the panic?’ asked her mother. ‘Where are we going?’

‘I don’t know,’ snapped Betty, casting about anxiously, as she felt the day falling away from her. ‘Just ... this way.’

She didn’t know what this way was. All she knew was that the day was dying and the night was giving birth to itself, and there was something electric, something magnetic pulling her down Carnaby Street, past self-consciously crazy boutiques, past grimy pubs, through the throngs of tourists and teenage girls just like her, girls from somewhere else with overblown ideas about themselves, girls having a special treat with dowdy mothers and bored fathers, a day in town with an early lunch at Garfunkel’s, overfilled bowls from the salad bar, tickets for a West End show tucked away safely in Mum’s bum-bag. It wasn’t real. Even to Betty’s immature, small-town eyes she could see through the fakery and the stage setting. There was something both murky and beguiling beyond this plastic street of Union Jacks and Beatles posters, something grimy and glittering. She wanted to find it and taste it right now before their time here in the West End was up and Christmas in a small cottage in Surrey swallowed her up for two whole days.

She walked urgently away from Carnaby Street and up side roads until the only lights were neon and the shops were small and anonymous.

‘Oh God, where are you taking us?’ said her mother, looking aghast at a middle-aged woman sitting on a bar stool in the entrance to a bar advertising a Live Girls Show, and dramatically underdressed for the weather in a gold boob tube and red leather shorts.

‘I think it’s Soho,’ said Betty, her voice tremulous with excitement. Soho. That’s what had been pulling her down these backstreets, of course it was. Soho. The centre of the universe. The Hundred Club. The Mud Club. The Blitz Club. Sex. Drugs. Rock and roll. Betty’s favourite film of all time was Desperately Seeking Susan. She loved it for the setting, for the neon lights glistening on oily puddles, the alleyways and mysterious doorways, subterranean dives and shabby-looking people with secrets.

She turned to her mother and smiled. And then she looked upwards into the dark windows of a thin, grimy town house. ‘Imagine living here,’ she said breathily.

‘No thank you,’ said her mother, shivering in a blast of cold air.

Betty continued to stare upwards. ‘I wonder who lives up there,’ she said.

‘French Model,’ her mother read off the doorbell.

‘Wow,’ breathed Betty, picturing a woman who looked like Beatrice Dalle floating around a cool flat, talking loudly and crossly to her French boyfriend on the phone with a strong cigarette in her other hand.

‘You know what that means, don’t you?’

Betty shrugged uncomfortably, aware that her mother was about to flag up a shortcoming in her knowledge of the big wide world.

‘It’s a euphemism,’ she said, ‘for a prostitute. There’s some poor girl up there having sex with an old ugly man. For money.’

Betty shrugged again, as if, really, what was so bad about that, whilst silently, invisibly, cringing at the very thought. But she still couldn’t help but see a certain glamour in it. A dark, ugly glamour. If you were going to sleep with an old ugly man for money, then this, mused Betty, was the place to do it.

‘Come on,’ said her mother. ‘It’s nearly six. Let’s get out of here. Let’s go back to Grandma’s.’

Betty let her gaze fall from the black eyes of the old town house, tore herself from her dreams of moody French models and Soho nights, and headed back to Surrey with her mother.