Before I Met You

4


1988




‘WHAT DID YOU do?’ Betty asked Arlette, as Arlette searched her jewellery boxes for a particular paste brooch she knew would look just perfect with Betty’s party dress. Betty did not want to wear a paste brooch, but she also knew that Arlette was rarely wrong about these things and that if she thought the brooch would go with the black taffeta off-the-shoulder dress she’d bought last week from Miss Selfridge, then she should at least try it on.

‘What did I do when?’

‘For your sixteenth birthday party.’

‘Nothing,’ said Arlette, ‘absolutely nothing. We’d just gone to war. Nobody had any parties.’

‘What was the war like?’

‘It was bleak. It was terrifying. It was horrible.’

‘And you lost your dad?’

‘I did. I lost my father.’ Arlette paused for a moment and sniffed. ‘My lovely father.’

‘And what did you do after?’ Betty asked. ‘After the war?’

Arlette sniffed again. ‘Nothing at all,’ she said. ‘I stayed here and cared for my mother. I worked in a dress shop for a little while, in St Peter Port. And then I met Mr Lafolley.’

Betty sighed. It seemed such a waste. ‘But didn’t you ever want to go somewhere else? Didn’t you ever want to have an adventure, go to London, travel?’

Arlette shook her head. Her demeanour changed for a moment. ‘No,’ she said. ‘Bloody awful place, London. No thank you. No. Guernsey girl through and through. There was never anywhere else for me.’

She found the brooch and passed it to Betty. It was made of stones in graduated shades of cranberry and pink, in the shape of a butterfly.

‘Yes!’ said Betty. ‘Yes. It is. It’s perfect. Thank you.’

‘You are very welcome, Betty, so very welcome.’ Arlette squeezed Betty’s hands inside hers and then carefully pinned it onto her dress. ‘Awful cheap fabric,’ she muttered, ‘just awful, but there.’ She stepped back to admire her. ‘There you are, looking perfectly, perfectly beautiful. Only a beautiful girl of sixteen could make fabric that cheap look so good. Now go,’ she said, ‘go to your party. Go and be sixteen.’


Sixteen, Betty felt, should sparkle. Sixteen should glimmer and twinkle and gleam. It should involve taking off your shoes at the Yacht Club and cavorting, dancing, laughing, sitting on your best friend’s lap and throwing knowing looks across the room to a tall, blond man with broad shoulders and a St Lucian tan, called Dylan Wood, who you’ve been in love with for, like, a whole year, before getting to your feet and dancing again with a sweet, spotty boy called Adam, who’s been in love with you for, like, a whole year. It should involve sneaking outside to smoke cigarettes with a girl in your class who you’ve never really spoken to before, but who suddenly feels like your best friend, and watching two other boys in your class moon through the plate-glass windows at the assembled grown-ups before being hustled back indoors by an appalled manager. It should involve disco lights and glitter balls, and it should, at around two minutes to midnight, involve being given the bumps by thirty sixteen-year-olds and blowing out sixteen candles on a huge chocolate cake whilst Sixteen Candles played in the background. And then, at five minutes past midnight, the DJ must be instructed to put on ‘Dancing Queen’ and you must untie your raven hair and twirl round and round beneath the glitter ball while your friends all stand around and clap and sing ‘only si-ix-teen’ at the top of their voices every time Abba sing ‘only seventeen’.

But sixteen could not be considered complete without a moment, somewhere between midnight and one, when the man called Dylan Wood, who you’ve been in love with for, like, a whole year, pulls you away from your party and onto a terrace overlooking the sea, and for a few minutes you both stare out together in silence at a view that could have been plucked directly from a pine-scented corner of the Mediterranean, with its yachts and its palm trees and the sound of music wafting across on a warm balmy breeze. This moment should involve some conversation and the exchange of observations such as, ‘I’ve been watching you all night.’ And, ‘You’ve always been pretty, but tonight – I don’t know – it’s like you became beautiful.’ And possibly even, ‘Is it still all right to kiss you?’

Ideally the world should recede away from you at this point, the background noises become nothing more than distant buzz, and then Dylan Wood would cup your face with his hand, tip back your head and let his lips just brush yours, soft and gentle as butterfly wings so you’re not quite sure if it really just happened or not, and then again, a little firmer, this time leaving no doubt whatsoever that he has just kissed you, that Dylan Wood has just kissed you, under the light of a pearly half-moon, with his hand in your hair and his thigh in your groin, and you should think then that you are sixteen and already your life is complete.


Sixteen shattered the following day into a thousand tiny, irretrievable little pieces. Betty knew sixteen was broken the moment her eyes opened at eight o’clock, as she felt the prickle of discomfort across her skin, the soreness of the skin around her mouth, the raw heat of devastation as she remembered Dylan smiling at her after their first shockingly passionate kiss and saying, ‘F*ck, how the hell am I supposed to go back to London after that?’

‘What?’ Her voice had sounded flat and dull.

‘I can’t believe it,’ he’d continued, his eyes on hers, his hands still clasped together behind her back. ‘I’ve been stuck on this stupid rock for six years and just when I finally find something good about it, we’re going.’

‘You’re going to London?’ she whispered.

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘didn’t you know? I thought you knew. I thought –’

‘No. I didn’t know. When are you going?’

‘Friday,’ he said. ‘We’re going on Friday.’

‘Oh. No,’ she whispered. ‘Why?’

He’d laughed then, as if there was something funny about the situation, the fact of their aborted union, his imminent emigration. But there was nothing funny about it, nothing whatsoever.


Betty pulled herself from her bed and opened the curtains. The sky was dense and grey. It didn’t look like summer. It didn’t feel like summer. Sixteen was dead and so was summer. Her black dress hung haphazardly from a wire hanger on her wardrobe handle, in stark contrast to the way it had been stored in the days running up to the party, in sheets of tissue paper and a plastic zip-up carrier, like a chrysalis. Now it was just a dress, deserving of no special treatment.

Betty sighed and let the curtain fall. She flopped backwards onto her bed and considered the ceiling while she pondered her feelings. The walls of her room seemed to close in towards her as she lay there she could feel the shores of the island tightening around her like a corset, stifling her breath. She thought of Dylan, sitting on a double-decker bus, riding down Shaftesbury Avenue, on his way to some amazing new nightclub that everyone was talking about. Then she thought of herself, a tiny pinprick of a human being with no plans beyond sixth form and an interview next week for a Saturday job at Boots.

She hated being sixteen. She hated her life. She wanted to be nineteen. She wanted to get away from this stupid, pathetic island and get on with her life.

She let a few self-indulgent tears roll down her cheeks and onto her duvet cover.

And then she lifted her head abruptly at the sound of shouting coming from downstairs.

‘Alison! Alison! Quick!’

It was Jolyon.

She heard her mother’s voice in reply.

‘What!’

‘Call an ambulance! Quick! It’s Mummy. She’s collapsed!’

‘What! Oh God!’

Betty raced to the top of the stairs and shouted down, ‘What’s happening!’

‘I don’t know!’ her mother shouted back. ‘It’s Arlette!’

Betty fell down upon the top step and sat for a moment, listening to the sounds of chaos below, her mother’s call to the emergency services, Jolyon panicking, doors opening and closing. She sat there for around thirty seconds before she could find it within her to get to her feet, because even as she sat there, her head full of fug, her cheeks still damp with just-spilled tears, she knew that whatever it was that was happening downstairs was going to impact her life in some terrible, weighty way. She knew that the future was being chipped and chiselled into some ugly new shape.

She breathed in deeply and slowly walked downstairs.





5


1993




YOU COULD HEAR it echoing down corridors and ricocheting off walls. It careered round corners and broke through the deep heavy silence of the night. Betty leaped out of bed, peroxide hair misshapen and on end, dressed in one of Arlette’s vintage négligées under a big grey jumper, her feet in chunky oatmeal socks. She tried to fight her way out of the cloud of dreams that had swallowed her up.

‘Coming,’ she croaked. Then: ‘Coming!’ louder, as her voice returned.

She stopped for just long enough to become aware that the sky was not pitch-black, that the time was 4.30 a.m. and that she had smoked way too many cigarettes the night before. And then she pushed her hair behind her ears and shuffled down the corridor, to Arlette’s room. The noise was louder now, like a widow at a soldier’s funeral, keening, wailing, scratching at the silence.

‘Coming, coming, coming.’ Betty pushed down on the handle and opened the door to Arlette’s room.

‘What’s the matter?’ She tried to keep the impatience from her voice, searched her sleep-addled soul for softness and compassion. ‘What?’ she said more gently, switching on the bedside lamp and sitting down on the edge of the bed.

‘I can’t see!’ said Arlette, pulling her sheets up around her neck, her eyes darting around the room. ‘I can’t see where I’m going!’

Betty took her hand in hers, felt the skin shift and slither around against the bone and gristle. ‘Where are you going?’ she asked.

‘I’m going to church. And I can’t see! Help me. I’ll be in so much trouble!’

‘Who will you be in trouble with, Arlette?’

‘With Papa, of course. He trusted me. He trusted me to go on my own. For the very first time. He gave me tuppence for the collection. And now I’ve lost it. Will you help me? Will you help me to find it? I dropped it here, in the dark.’

Arlette patted the top of her counterpane with both hands. Betty joined in, tap-tapping the counterpane, stifling a yawn. ‘I’ll get you another coin,’ she said. ‘Wait here.’

She went to the other end of Arlette’s room and picked a twopence coin out of a jar on her dressing table. ‘Here,’ she said, placing it in Arlette’s hand, ‘here, tuppence.’

Arlette’s face softened and she smiled. ‘I can see now,’ she said. ‘It must have been an eclipse or something, because first it was bright and then it was dark and now it’s bright again. An eclipse. When the moon covers the sun.’ She brought the coin closer to her face and examined it. ‘I’ll pay you back,’ she said, ‘next time I see you. Where do you live?’

‘Next door,’ said Betty. ‘I live next door.’

Arlette squinted at her. ‘And are you a boy. Or a girl?’

‘I’m a girl,’ she smiled. ‘My name’s Betty. I’m your granddaughter.’

Arlette let out a whoop of laughter. ‘My granddaughter!’ she said. ‘Well, that’s nice. I always wanted a little girl. Never wanted a boy. Never wanted any children. But particularly not a little boy.’ She shuddered. ‘All their little bits. Used to change his nappy with my eyes shut, y’know?’ She chuckled and glanced at Betty. ‘Do you have a little boy?’ she asked.

Betty shook her head and stifled another yawn.

Betty could hear the chickens stirring and clucking in the back garden of the new-agers up the road. The sun was warming up the leaden darkness of the room. Last night’s vodka and limes were still sloshing about in the pit of her stomach. She felt a wave of nausea and winced at a sugary repeat at the base of her throat.

‘No,’ she said huskily, ‘no. I don’t have any children. I’m only twenty-one.’

‘Quite so,’ said Arlette, her eyes growing heavy again. ‘Quite so. Too young for all that; should be out having fun. What did you say your name was again?’

‘Elizabeth,’ she replied patiently.

‘Like our queen. She is still the Queen, isn’t she?’

Betty nodded.

‘Well, I shall call you Betty. You look like a Betty. Betty Gable. Or was it Grable? Bette Davis. Elizabeths were always called Betty in my day. Where did you say you lived again?’

‘Next door,’ said Betty, ‘I live right next door.’

Arlette’s breathing slowed then and Betty watched her crêpey eyelids flicker and shut. She waited a moment to be sure she was asleep and then she left the room.

The house was waking up. It was almost five. Betty was dehydrated and too awake now to sleep. She headed downstairs, through the empty corridors and towards the kitchen. The debris of the previous night was still there on the kitchen table. Beer cans rammed with cigarette butts, congealing bowls of vegetable curry and rice, ashtrays brimming with fag ends and ring pulls and glitzy crumpled Quality Street wrappers. Someone’s baseball cap sat amidst the carnage and someone else had left a full packet of Marlboro Lights in the middle of the table. Betty groaned and poured herself a glass of water.

Bella had stayed and was sleeping upstairs, in the spare bed in Betty’s room, but everyone else had piled into Mitch’s camper van at some time around one, and disappeared in a puff of Nirvana and raucous laughter.

Arlette was oblivious to the parties that happened almost nightly in her house. She was bedbound now, after her stroke five years earlier, the one that had stricken her the morning after Betty’s sixteenth birthday.

Betty sometimes wheeled her to the terrace at the end of their corridor to feel the sun, but Arlette asked to be taken less and less these days, lived more and more inside her own head and in the endless corridors of her remembered history.

She had a carer now, a woman called Sandra, who turned her and cleaned her and medicated her. There had been talk, of course, of moving Arlette to a home. Jolyon and Alison had moved away last year, at Alison’s insistence, after the heating had packed up for the fifth winter in a row. They lived in a small two-bedroom apartment overlooking the harbour at St Peter Port, clean, new and fitted out with all mod cons. They begged Betty to come and live with them, but Betty just could not find it within herself to leave Arlette in the care of strangers every night. Alison and Jolyon visited most days but Arlette had little idea who they were any more.

Betty had chosen to do an Art diploma here in Guernsey rather than a degree in London. And she had chosen to stay on in this big cold unwelcoming house with a ninety-four-year-old woman rather than find herself a room in a shared house with her friends. She had made these choices willingly and freely, in spite of the seventy-odd years that divided them, in spite of Arlette’s irascibility and her misanthropy and her unshakeably grey-tinted view of the world, because she loved her.

Arlette had lived in this house for seventy years, had given birth in this house, grown old in this house, and Betty was determined that she would die in this house, surrounded by all her lovely things. The Alzheimer’s had arrived shortly after the stroke, but Betty didn’t mind the Alzheimer’s. In a strange way it had softened Arlette and made her more palatable.

Betty heaped two teaspoons of instant coffee into a mug and watched the kettle on the Aga slowly bringing itself to a wild and rolling boil.

‘Morning,’ someone croaked behind her. It was Bella. Her long brown hair was two curtains, half drawn across her elfin face. She was fully dressed in last night’s clothes: baggy jeans that sat on her pointy hipbones, cropped marled T-shirt, red hoodie and socks. Her stomach was a slice of toned white flesh between her clothes. Her mascara was smudged around her eyes and she had a scab on her lip where a cold sore was healing. But she was still about the prettiest girl that Betty had ever seen.

‘Nightmares?’ she asked in a husky morning tone, balling her hands up inside the sleeves of her hoodie.

Betty nodded and yawned. ‘Do you want one?’ she asked, gesturing at her freshly poured coffee.

‘Yes. Please.’

They took their coffees out onto the back step and rested the mugs upon their knees, staring out into the new day opening up across the distant gardens.

‘I’m really going to miss this place, you know,’ said Bella.

Betty sighed. ‘Not as much as I’m going to miss you.’ She breathed in deeply against encroaching tears. Everyone was going. Everyone had left, three years ago, gone to get their degrees in more inspiring places and then some of them had come back; back to save a bit of money, help out in family businesses, gird their loins, recharge their batteries, consider their positions. But now the returners were leaving again, peeling off one by one. Including Bella. Off to Bristol for a job as a trainee zookeeper at the zoo. She was to be paid five thousand pounds a year plus free accommodation and subsidised meals. She was leaving next month. If it wasn’t for Arlette, Betty would probably be going with her. As it was, she was going nowhere. She wasn’t even in a position to spend a night away from the house, let alone leave the island. Betty felt like the last plum left on the tree, overripe and splitting at the seams.

‘I’ll be back, you know?’ Bella reassured. ‘Any time off I get. And then, you know ...’ She trailed off. They both knew what that ‘you know’ meant. It meant: When she’s dead.

The longest living resident of Guernsey was currently one hundred and five. The longest living in the island’s history had made it to one hundred and eleven. These statistics filled Betty with cold dread. She was giving away her youth to a woman who often mistook her for a boy.

‘How is she? Generally?’ Bella asked delicately.

‘Yeah,’ Betty smiled stoically. ‘Healthy. Relatively.’ Her smile faltered. ‘It’s fine. It’s good. I’m fine. It’s the only way.’

‘Your time will come,’ said Bella, squeezing Betty’s thigh. ‘You’ll be away from this place without a backward glance and the world won’t know what’s hit it. Seriously.’

The sun was on the horizon now and the sky was blood red. Already the night chill was fading into the warmth of a hot July morning.

‘You know,’ said Bella, ‘nobody would hate you. If you left now. Nobody would blame you.’

Betty shook her head. ‘I can’t explain it,’ she said, ‘and I know nobody really understands. But I have to stay until the end. Leaving her here is not an option.’

It was hard sometimes for Betty not to feel secretly disappointed by Arlette’s continuing state of aliveness. It was hard for her to understand why Arlette was still alive when Freddie Mercury, for example, was dead. There was, as far as she could tell, no real advantage to Arlette’s continued existence. If anything, it brought with it numerous disadvantages, not the least of which was the fact that in order to pay for Arlette’s carer and the upkeep of the house, her personal effects and savings were being depleted at an alarmingly fast rate. All her good jewellery had gone. The few pieces of quality furniture, her car and a Wedgwood tea set dating from 1825 were gone. Consequently, Betty had absolutely no financial motivation for caring for Arlette the way she did. She knew the house would go to Jolyon, Arlette had told her that. ‘I suppose there has to be some concession to him being my son,’ she’d sighed sadly. There would be trinkets and baubles, she was sure of that, but no, she was not here for the money, she was here because she couldn’t leave until she knew that Arlette no longer needed her, and she knew that Arlette would need her here until she drew her last breath.

Bella squeezed her thigh again. ‘Saint Betty,’ she said. She yawned widely and then blew air through her lips. ‘I’m going back to bed. Wake me up if I’m still there at eleven. Off to Auntie Jill’s for lunch today; promised Mum I wouldn’t be late.’

Betty watched her pale, skinny friend head back into the house, heard her deposit her empty mug back on the kitchen table. And then she sat and watched the sun in the sky floating higher and higher like a big orange helium balloon. When it was high enough to turn the sky blue, she too headed back to bed.

She checked briefly on Arlette before turning in. She lay exactly as she’d left her an hour earlier, neatly upon her back, arms at her sides, face slack in repose, her heavy breathing the only real evidence that she was, in fact, alive and not newly expired and laid out as for a wake.

She was about to turn and leave when she heard Arlette’s sheets rustling. Arlette was awake and she was smiling. ‘Is that you, Betty?’ she asked quietly.

‘Yes, Arlette, it’s me.’

She closed her eyes, still smiling, and just before she drifted back to sleep, murmured the words: ‘I love you, very much.’

‘Oh,’ said Betty, her stomach lurching pleasantly at her words, her hand at her heart. ‘I love you too.’