Before I Met You

11


1919




EXEAT.

Leticia’s house filled suddenly with the turbulence of young men, with boots and bikes and balls and shouting. Arthur and Henry were fair, like their sister, and, so far as Arlette could tell, every bit as badly behaved as their small brother, James, who seemed to spend entire days hitting walls with sticks and screaming at his mother. Neither of them listened to anything their mother said. It was as though she did not exist, or spoke in a voice only audible to women. Arlette watched in shocked silence as the older one – Henry, she thought he was – took a newspaper from in front of his mother, who had been reading it at the time, and although she asked him immediately to return it, refused to do so, ruffled its pages horribly and then threw it in the air, leaving it to fall to the ground in separate pieces. Then he turned and left the room, his mother all the while calling, ‘Henry, come back this instant. Henry.’ He did not return and a moment later Arlette saw Leticia sigh and collect the sheets of the paper herself.

And such rudeness. She had heard Arthur refer to his mother as both ‘stupid’ and ‘old’. Arlette really had no idea how Leticia could prevent herself from slapping her insolent children and locking them in their rooms.

Leticia’s husband had been promoted again, after the war, to the Brussels office, but this time he had left his family behind and returned, apparently, only once a month. Arlette had not yet met him, but she had seen his photograph: a somewhat hamster-cheeked man with a pencil moustache and thinning black hair. She could not imagine how a rose as delicate as Leticia could have allowed herself to be plucked by such an average-looking fellow, but Leticia did always talk very fondly and with great respect of her husband, and clearly, if the trappings of his fine Kensington home were any signifier, he was an immensely wealthy man. But still, it struck Arlette most emphatically that this house was in dire need of a man’s presence to rein it back under control.

The older one, Henry, glanced at her now, across the hallway. He had the haughtiness of a man twice his age. ‘Why are you wearing that peculiar jacket?’ he asked.

Arlette looked down at it, unsure why he should be asking her such a question. It was just a jacket. Possibly a little old-fashioned, certainly not as chic and bohemian as the clothes that his sister wore, but certainly no different from something his own mother might wear.

‘What do you mean?’ she asked.

‘I mean, it’s peculiar. How old are you?’

‘I’m twenty-one.’ She said this with some incredulity as he had been at his sister’s party only two weeks earlier, where a toast had been raised in her honour and she had been given twenty-one bumps by a group of people that included Henry himself.

‘Oh, yes, yes, of course. I forgot. I suppose it’s just the way you dress. It makes me think you must be older.’

She looked down at herself once more. A bottle-green jacket belted upon the hip, a long skirt in Black Watch tartan, dark stockings, green velvet sandals and a chiffon scarf at her neck in midnight blue. Smart, she thought, elegant, fashionable – the silhouette was absolutely spot on; she’d seen it in one of Leticia’s many fashion magazines piled up around the house. She could think of nothing to say so instead pursed her lips and turned to walk away from him.

‘Sorry,’ he said, in a careless tone of voice, ‘I didn’t mean to upset you.’

‘I’m not upset,’ she hissed, and continued on her way. She felt tears stabbing painfully behind her eyes. The boy was sixteen. She could not allow a sixteen-year-old boy to reduce her to tears, she who had managed to make her way through the whole of her father’s funeral without shedding even one. Her father who had lain in his coffin, his constituent parts reconstructed into some semblance of his living form, minus a foot, two fingers and half his face. No, she would not cry. But she would despise him, with every atom of her own self. For ever. She would also, she knew without any shadow of doubt, make sure that from this point forward he would never be able to look upon her with anything other than speechless admiration. For on Monday she started her new job. A sales assistant at a department store on Regent Street, called Liberty. A most magical place, like a demented fairy palace, with turrets and balustrades, panelling and a thousand twinkling leaded windows. A smiling lady called Mrs Stamper had talked to her sweetly and kindly in a tiny room behind the scenes and told her that she was a charming young lady and just the sort she was looking for, and said she could start the following week and be paid five shillings and sixpence, with only one Saturday a month.

Arlette had been walking on air ever since. Her first interview, and the job had fallen into her lap with absolutely no special effort. And not just any old job, but a magical job in a magical place working in a lavender-scented, wood-panelled room full of exquisite clothes with a clientele of the most gracious and tasteful ladies in London. Tomorrow night these nasty boys would be taken to the train station and sent back to their prison in the countryside and she would not have to look upon their smug, tiresome faces again until the end of October.

The thought brought a smile to her face and she continued on her way. Her life had been in stasis for so long, she had felt sometimes like she might go mad on that little island in the middle of nowhere, through the swirling years of war and then in the deathly lull afterwards. But now, at last, she had taken hold of this thing called life, had it held tightly by the reins and was ready to ride it into the distance. Finally her life had begun.





12


1995




BETTY TOOK HER tobacco pouch and a glass of water out onto the fire escape. The evening was mild and muggy. It was spring but it felt more like September. The air in the vacuum between the buildings was damp with condensation and rich with soupy odours rising from the kitchens below. She made herself a roll-up and smoked it thoughtfully, staring at the house across the way, at the black windows, at the faint glimmer of the chandelier twinkling beyond. The house was dark and empty. The men with the cameras must just have been tourists. Strange tourists with a penchant for photographing unexceptional Soho architecture.

It was nearly eight o’clock.

It was Friday.

It was Betty’s third night in Soho.

She had two hundred and fifty pounds in her bag.

She heard the sounds of the Soho night starting up below, saw the sky darkening, the streetlights coming on, felt it all building inside her like a burst of energy.

She did not want to be here in this tiny flat all alone, but then, she did not want to venture out by herself, sit alone in a bar like a character in a film noir, being offered drinks by morose men with broken hearts. She thought of Peter Lawler, this mysterious man kept tucked away in her grandmother’s coat pocket for years and years, and she thought of the potential length of a journey that appeared to have no starting point.

Then she pulled on her coat, picked up her door keys and smiled grimly with resolve. She had no more idea of how to find a job than she had of how to find Clara Pickle, but she had to start somewhere and she may as well start right now.


Betty got home three hours later.

Her feet were rubbed raw from the seams on the insides of her wedges. Her face was stiff from smiling. And her ego was the size of one of the greasy peanuts she’d stuffed down her throat sitting at the bar of a restaurant on Greek Street waiting to hear yet another stressed-out manager tell her there was no work available and then ask her for a CV. She’d planned to take some of her fur money and spend it in a nice restaurant somewhere on a bowl of pasta and a glass of beer, but with each establishment she walked away from without even a hint or a suggestion of a job, she felt more and more attached to the cash and less and less disposed towards spending it.

She’d saved the Groucho for last.

The Groucho.

From magazines spread open across the kitchen table in the cold house on the cliff it had sounded to her as mystical as Narnia, as gloriously unlikely as unicorns. She had looked at the photos, pored over the grizzled rock stars, the sozzled artists emerging into the early hours, startled as wild deer, chippy as football hooligans and thought: imagine being in there. Inside there. With all those people. Surely this was where the raw red heart of Soho beat its rhythm; surely this, more than the sex shops and the Chinese lanterns and the tattoo parlours, was what Soho boiled down to: a glowing hub of celebrity, excess and notoriety, a magnet for people who created the colour of the world in which we all lived. And so she had pushed open the door and stepped into the brown murkiness of the reception area and asked to speak to the manager and been told, in charming but no uncertain terms that there was no manager available to speak to her but yes, of course, please leave your CV and we’ll pass it on. Betty had barely been listening to the sweet, smiley girl, her gaze cast half behind her at the heavy doors swinging back and forth, open and shut, people passing through, inwards and outwards, wondering if any of them might actually be somebody, somebody worth gazing upon.

Before she’d had even a moment to really absorb her surroundings a smiling man in a suit jacket was holding the door ajar for her and wishing her gently upon her way and there she was, once again, back on the pavement, surrounded by babbling cab drivers and Friday night hordes. Without a job.

That was half an hour ago.

Now Betty was home, tiptoeing quietly up the stairs, her wedges in her hand, her heart full of disappointment.

The flat was dark and silent when she let herself in.

For a moment she missed her big empty bedroom in the big empty house, the metres of corridors, the never-used rooms, all the space and the oxygen and the silence. But she breathed it back inside, the sense of loss and nostalgia, and reminded herself instead of all the nights in that big silent bedroom, in that huge sprawling house, wishing herself to be exactly here.

She changed into pyjamas, wiped off the grime of her disappointing Soho night with a baby wipe and then fell into bed with the sound of people outside having a much, much better time than she had, ringing in her ears.


There were three more paps outside the house on Peter Street on Monday morning. This time there was no mistaking them. They wore capacious jackets, multiple pockets bulging with packets of film and spare lens caps, paper coffee cups clutched in gloved hands, eyes slanted against the piquant morning light, grumbling to each other quietly like bystanders at a stranger’s funeral.

Betty stopped for a while to watch, but absolutely nothing appeared to be happening. She strolled back around the corner and waited for John Brightly to finish parking his van. He appeared a moment later, carrying a cardboard box with a coffee cup balanced on the top of it. He smiled grimly when he spotted Betty standing on his pitch.

‘Morning,’ he said.

‘Morning,’ replied Betty, taking the cup off the box and holding it for him while he found somewhere to rest the box. ‘How are you?’

‘Not bad,’ he said, ‘not bad at all.’

‘Met your sister on Friday,’ she continued. ‘She bought my coat.’

He raised one eyebrow at her and said, ‘Oh, yeah? Give you a good price for it?’

Betty nodded and passed him his coffee. ‘Not bad,’ she said. ‘Amazing place, she works.’

He shrugged, pulled some LPs from the box. ‘Yeah,’ he said, as though the appearance of his sister’s workplace had never before occurred to him. ‘It’s quite cool, I guess.’

‘And she’s really nice.’

‘You reckon?’

Betty paused, unsure how to take what he’d just said. He was either being negative or he was being facetious. She decided not to venture down that grenade-littered path and smiled blankly. ‘So, over there?’ she pointed towards Peter Street, ‘load of paparazzi hanging around outside someone’s house. Any idea who lives there?’

‘What, on Peter Street?’ He looked at her with a touch more interest now.

‘Yeah.’

‘That’s Dom Jones’s place.’

‘Dom Jones?’

‘Yeah, you know the singer with –’

‘Yes! I know. Of course I know. Wall. And that’s his house? Over there?’ Betty’s mind boggled with the gloriousness of this fact. Wall were not her favourite band. Dom Jones was not her favourite singer. But he was the biggest singer with the biggest band in the UK right now. And it was his chandelier and anarchic artwork she’d admired through the window on her first night in Soho. Dom Jones was her neighbour.

‘Yeah, that’s his place. He used to live there until a couple of years ago. Moved out, you know, when he married –’

‘Amy Metz. Yes, yes, of course.’ Remembered facts from crappy magazines swirled around her mind, nuggets of regurgitated gossip, half-baked facts, how Dom Jones had left Cheryl Glass, the much-loved, elfin-beautiful lead singer of girl band Blossom, for Amy Metz, the hard-nosed, scary-beautiful lead singer of girl band Mighty. Two years later they were married with three children under three and living in a massive pink house in Primrose Hill amid a constantly raging storm of rumours and scandal. And then it hit her, the reason why that front door had looked so familiar the other day. She must have seen it dozens of times in paparazzi shots of Dom Jones taken outside his house.

‘Yeah, he moved out then, but I don’t think he ever sold it. It’s just sat there. Empty.’ John threw a glance towards Peter Street and shrugged. ‘Maybe he’s moving back. Have you checked the headlines today?’

Betty wrinkled her nose and then went immediately to the newsagent across the road, where the very first headline to hit her from the front of the Mirror screamed: ‘DOM DUMPED’, illustrated by a blurred photograph of Dom Jones looking very rough around the edges and leaving the Groucho Club ‘in the early hours of last night’.

Betty grabbed the paper and started to read. Apparently Dom had been caught in a backstage toilet after a gig being gifted a blow job by a nineteen-year-old called Carly Ann. The only reason why this sordid yet unsurprising interlude had made it to the attention of Amy Metz was that Carly Ann’s boyfriend had secretly filmed the encounter and then attempted to blackmail Dom Jones with it. Dom had failed to take the threat seriously and a copy of the tape had then been posted through the letterboxes of both Dom and Amy’s distinctive pink house and the Mirror’s head office in Canary Wharf.

Beneath the article were three blurred stills taken from the tape. And there it was, at the very end of the article, a simple sentence that would mean very little to most people but sent shivers of excitement down Betty’s spine:


Dom Jones is now believed to be returning to his bachelor pad, a three-storey town house in London’s Soho, where the singer previously lived with former lover, Cheryl Glass.


Betty paid for the paper, suppressing an ecstatic smile. While those hapless men with cameras stood about pathetically hoping for a glimpse of their prey, Betty had a front-row view all to herself. She tucked the paper under her arm and dashed back to the flat, flashing the headline at John Brightly as she passed him. His response was just to raise one heavy eyebrow as if to say, ‘Fairly interesting, I suppose.’

Betty bundled up the stairs, two at a time, to the fire escape at the top of the house where she made a roll-up with fluttering fingers. She lit it and looked across and into the windows of Dom Jones’s house.

The light fell well at this time of day, not casting the glass impenetrable black but allowing a blurred glimpse of wall and furnishings. Her eyes roamed around the interior, searching for a sign of movement, and then suddenly, there it was, after all these days of stillness and silence, a shadow moving up a wall and then, too fast for Betty to really fix on any defining characteristics, a person walked past the window, turned, once, and then ascended the next flight. It was a man, of that she was certain, a smallish man with a lightweight build and narrow hips. She would not be able to say with one hundred per cent certainty that it was definitely Dom Jones, but she was fairly certain that it was. Another shiver ran through her. She was sitting here, at the very heart of a front-page controversy. Right here. In Soho. Watching Dom Jones walk up his stairs.

She rolled and smoked another three cigarettes, her gaze fixed upon Dom Jones’s windows, but there was no more to be seen. She packed up her tobacco pouch and headed back indoors. She had wasted enough of her new life staring at the back of a stranger’s house. She had more important things to worry about. If the bars and restaurants and clubs of night-time Soho didn’t have a job for her, maybe the shops and galleries of daytime Soho would.


The interior of the fast-food restaurant was shockingly bright after the dimness of the street outside. It was filled with tourists and losers, and smelled cloyingly of congealed meat and stale oil. In the smoking section half a dozen single men pulled nervously on cigarettes in between handfuls of chips. Another corner appeared to have been put aside for emaciated alcoholics and tattooed junkies, who all sat snarling to themselves under their breath, nursing single cups of cold coffee. On the other side of the restaurant a group of high-octane language students shouted at each other with much hilarity in broken English.

Betty queued up behind a small group of bemused Japanese, true to stereotype, with large expensive cameras and oversized baseball caps. Muzak played in the background, Betty thought it might be a synthesiser version of ‘Copacabana’ by Barry Manilow, but it was hard to be sure.

She got to the front of the queue and an awkward boy with a hairnet on smiled at her and said, ‘Hello! Welcome to Wendy’s! What can I get for you today?’

She ordered herself a Crispy Chicken Sandwich, a portion of fries and a Pepsi, and as she waited for her order to be prepared, she glanced at a wall to her left.

‘Wendy’s are recruiting now!’ said a small poster. ‘Wendy’s are looking for enthusiastic people to work as customer service professionals. Free uniform + generous rates ...’ blah blah blah ... ‘Please ask for an application form.’

Betty twitched.

A voice in her head said, Get one. Get a form.

Another voice said, Don’t be ridiculous. I can’t work here.

The first voice said, Why not? It’s local. It’s well paid. It’s something to put on your CV. It’s money in the bank. It’s the rent paid. And you have spent the whole day looking for jobs in nice places and nobody wanted you.

‘Can I have one?’ she asked bluntly, pointing at the poster. ‘An application form?’

The boy looked at her strangely and then smiled. ‘Sure,’ he said.

She snatched the application form from the young boy’s hands and shoved it into her shoulder bag, her cheeks hot with embarrassment and shame. She thought of Arlette, imagined what she would say if she could see Betty now, her precious girl, her beautiful girl standing in a bleak burger shop in the middle of the afternoon, with an application form for a job here in her handbag. Arlette would snatch it from her and shred it into a hundred pieces without uttering so much as a solitary word. Arlette would take her from here, firmly by the hand, and treat her to a plate of oysters in St James’s. But then, Arlette had never been in Soho, young and penniless and desperate not to have to go home. If Arlette wanted Betty to find Clara Pickle – and Betty knew she did – then Betty would have to earn some money, because here, in the city, a thousand pounds was not going to go very far.





13




BEFORE SHE WENT to bed that night, Betty returned to the fire escape for a final cigarette. It was nearly midnight and the lights in Dom Jones’s house were dimmed. The clank of crockery and the clutter of cutlery was a familiar soundtrack now to her moments out here. Comforting, almost. She lit her roll-up and as she inhaled something caught her eye, a movement across the yard. She looked up and saw a man in the window. He was pushing against the sash, trying to lift it open, struggling with unyielding mechanisms, his face screwed up with the effort. Betty stopped breathing and stared in awe at the scene unfolding. She couldn’t tell if it was him. The view through the glass was obscured. As she watched she heard the sash come free and the window loop open and then there he was. Without a shadow of doubt it was him, Dom Jones, in a white vest, tattooed forearms, cupping his hands around a cigarette buried between his lips as he lit it with a Zippo. She watched his face contort with angry relief as the tobacco made its way down his throat and then she saw his eyes moving slowly across the backyard, tired and vaguely furious until they found Betty’s gaze and froze.

Betty quickly looked away, horrified to have been caught staring. Then she looked back, feeling that pretending that she hadn’t been staring at him wasn’t going to fool anyone and would make her look even more stupid. He was still looking at her, with an expression of vague bemusement. He raised one hand to her and she returned the gesture, her heart racing with excitement. She wondered if he would say anything to her, but the thrum of air-conditioning units, the clatter of the kitchen, the yelling of the kitchen staff below, would have meant he’d have to shout to be heard. Instead he stared thoughtfully into the middle distance, sucking from his cigarette rhythmically before rubbing it out against the brickwork and letting it fall to the ground.

He threw Betty one more look before pulling himself back into his house. It was a strange look: half suspicion, half approval. Then he was gone, the sashes rattling back into place, his face a mere shadow behind the glass again. Betty quickly finished her own cigarette and then glanced at her watch. Ten past midnight. Too late to call Bella, the only person she knew who would care about what had just happened. About the most exciting thing that had ever happened to her in her life. But she had no one to share it with.


Betty did not open her eyes until ten o’clock the following morning. When she did she was painfully aware of the fact that from two thirty to four forty-five the previous night she had lain wide awake listening to the woman downstairs having sex. She had seen the woman downstairs only once or twice since she’d moved in, a small Asian woman who wore a lot of denim and looked rather pinched and anxious. She had not smiled or said hello as they’d passed on the stairs, and Betty had followed her instincts not to force a greeting upon her. She had not looked like a person who would have sex for two and a half hours in the middle of the night. She had not looked the type to scream at the top of her voice or to experience several multiple orgasms in quick succession and to bang the walls with her fists every single time she did so. Whoever she had been f*cking (and there really seemed to Betty to be no other word for it) had left the building around three minutes after the woman’s last orgasm, stamping noisily down the stairs and banging the front door very loudly in their wake.

Shortly after this the bin men had arrived.

Nobody had warned Betty about bin men before she’d decided to rent a flat in Soho. Nobody told her that in Soho the bin men came every single morning. And that they came early. That they whistled and they hollered and they bantered with each other in sonorous East End accents. That they slammed doors and banged lids and threw entire pieces of furniture into the back end of their growling truck without even a hint of restraint.

At five thirty Betty had finally fallen asleep, only to be awoken an hour later by the first of the market traders arriving in their vans. More banging of doors, more cockney hollering and inconsiderate moving about of furniture and crates.

She had considered getting up at this point, heading for the fire escape and an early morning cigarette, starting the day, but had somehow found her way back to sleep before a police car, pulling up very loudly, with much screeching of siren and squealing of tyres, had brought her abruptly back to awakeness. She pulled back her curtains and watched as two policemen left the doors of their car wide open and slowly sauntered around the corner into Peter Street, watched by a dozen pairs of curious eyes.

Betty threw on a cardigan and her trainers and dashed downstairs. John Brightly was talking to some hip-looking dude about a John Otway twelve-inch disc. He glanced up curiously as Betty appeared in the doorway exuding urgency and vague panic. Betty forgot her usual tendency to play it cool and calm in front of John Brightly and looked at him desperately.

‘What’s going on?’ she asked, looking at the blue light still flashing on and off on top of the empty police car.

John Brightly gazed at her with confusion. ‘What?’ he said, with a furrowed brow.

‘There?’ she said. ‘Dom Jones’s place. The police?’

John looked again and scratched the back of his neck. ‘No idea,’ he said, before turning back to his customer and addressing him in a kind of compensatory way as though saying: ‘I do apologise for the mad woman with the blond hair ... now where were we?’

Betty sighed impatiently and headed around the corner where she found the two policemen giving a member of the attendant paparazzi a warning. She listened for a while, keen to discover what had been happening, and as she stood and watched she saw one of the policemen knock on the front door of Dom Jones’s house. She rooted herself to the spot. The intercom crackled to life. She heard the vague outline of a male voice and then heard the door buzz open. The policeman pushed open the door and as she stared she caught a tiny glimpse of him, in jeans and a checked shirt. She saw he looked anxious and tired. And then the policeman was pulled inside and the door was closed again.

As the door closed, Betty felt something strange happening to her. It was an ache. It started in her heart, and ended in her stomach. It was an ache of pity and sadness, but more than that, it was an ache of longing and desire. He looked so beaten up. His marriage in shreds. His children in another house. Trapped in an empty house by a sentry of rabid photographers. His world burst open like a bag of garbage for everyone to see the sordid contents.

She wanted to take him home and care for him and make him smile. She wanted to make everything better.

She thought for a brief moment of the sleazy stills in the Mirror, the back of the girl’s head buried between his legs. But then she thought, God, he was married to Amy Metz. She’d been pregnant for about three years, non-stop. She had awful friends. She looked like a cow. And she had terrible, terrible taste in clothes.

No, thought Betty, absolutely not. She was a woman and Amy Metz was a woman, and no woman should ever find an excuse for a man to have cheated. Ever.

She set her jaw as she thought this, cementing it into her psyche, and then she headed home.





14


1919




ARLETTE FELT THE snow beneath the thin soles of her boots. It was soft and slippery as butter, and she held onto the wall with an outstretched hand to prevent herself from falling over. She wore a cloak with a fur trim and a hat made of grosgrain velvet. The Christmas lights of Carnaby Street gleamed in the creamy slush and the windows of public houses glowed like embers. She had completed her last day at Liberty before the Christmas holiday, a busy day of last-minute adjustments to party dresses and cocktail gowns, of harried husbands looking for gifts, and acres of tissue paper and garlands of ribbon, echoing carols and the coiling aromas of cinnamon and aniseed. Arlette could not imagine a more enchanted place to spend the day before Christmas Eve than the Liberty department store. More carol singers rejoined her once again to deck the halls with boughs of holly as she turned the corner on to Regent Street: a small group of men and women, rosy-cheeked and clutching lanterns, conducted by a man in a top hat upon which lay a thin layer of frozen snow. There was something odd about the energy being exuded by this group of people, something strangely frenetic and unnatural. They seemed as though they might be drunk, yet did not look at all like the kind of people one would expect to be drunk in public. They were well-dressed, fashionable, cocksure. The man in the top hat spun round ostentatiously as he coaxed the last rousing note from his band of bright-eyed carollers and the crust of frozen snow from atop his head spun away from him, like a clay pigeon. It landed as a pile of glitter at Arlette’s toes and she smiled.

‘Merry Christmas!’ said the top-hatted man, and he removed the hat from his head with a theatrical flourish. Beneath his hat he had a head of dense dark curls. He ran the fingers of a gloved hand through the curls, and looked at Arlette curiously.

‘Merry Christmas,’ Arlette returned the greeting. She smiled again, a tight, modest smile, and then continued on her way. But as she walked she was aware of the man’s eyes still upon her.

She heard one of the lady carollers call out to the man, ‘What next, Gideon? “Silent Night”, “We Three Kings” ...?’

‘Yes,’ she heard him reply absent-mindedly.

‘Well, which one is it to be? Your choristers await ...’

‘One minute,’ he said. ‘Just one minute. Wait!’

Arlette turned. As she’d suspected, the man in the top hat, Gideon, was walking urgently towards her. ‘I want to paint you,’ he said, his eyes taking in every contour of her face.

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘I’m an artist. My name is Gideon Worsley. I want to paint you. You have the most remarkable face. The bones ... just so delicate ... like the bones of a tiny bird.’

She blinked at him.

‘It would require very, very tiny brushes, one or two hairs at most. My goodness. How do you not break? How do you not shatter into a hundred tiny pieces?’

Arlette couldn’t help herself; she put a hand to her cheek, trying for herself to imagine what he saw. And then she looked up at him and saw again what had unnerved her before: the fire in the eyes, not normal, not quite sane. He was not drunk, she could see that much. He was not slurred or unfocused quite the opposite: he was electrified, possessed.

‘Excuse me, if you would, Mr Worsley, I’m in rather a hurry.’

‘Oh, no,’ he said, ‘you mustn’t hurry, not in these treacherous conditions. You might fall, and if you fell you might break. You must walk very, very slowly, taking great care.’ He offered her the crook of his arm and she heard a caroller from behind calling, ‘Oh God, Gideon, please leave the poor girl alone.’

He turned to the heckler and said, ‘I shall not leave the poor girl alone. Can’t you see that she is made of fine bone china, that she is delicate? She cannot be expected to walk unaccompanied. Come, we shall sing and walk at the same time. Where are you going?’

‘I’m going to get on a bus,’ Arlette replied hesitantly, ‘towards Kensington.’

‘Well, we shall escort you to your bus stand. Please,’ he offered her his arm again and this time Arlette took it. She felt that her behaviour was altogether acceptable. She was being escorted not just by a single gentleman, but by a whole band of ladies and gentlemen. And she had been concerned about her footing on these slimy paving stones.

‘Thank you,’ she said.

‘What is your name?’ asked Gideon.

‘Arlette,’ she said. ‘Arlette De La Mare.’

‘Arlette De La Mare! Did you hear that, everyone, this delicate young lady is called Arlette De La Mare? Arlette of the sea. Probably the most romantic name I have ever heard. And what do you do, Arlette of the sea? Do you have a job? Or are you, in fact, a mermaid?’ He glanced down at her water-stained boots and sighed. ‘No. Not a mermaid. But still, a divine creature, none the less. So let me guess, a teacher? No, not a teacher – your clothes are too fine. So possibly ... fashion? Am I close?’

She smiled inscrutably.

‘I am, I’m close. Are you a seamstress?’ He picked up her hands and studied them under a streetlight. ‘No,’ he said, ‘wrong again, your hands are as soft as kittens’ ears. I think you are a shop-girl, in a smart department store. Possibly ... Dickins and Jones?’

‘No,’ she laughed.

‘Lillywhites?’

‘No!’

‘Then ... Liberty! Must be!’

Arlette laughed and Gideon Worsley punched the air victoriously. ‘You see,’ he said, ‘as an artist, I have to understand people, to read them, to work them out. I am the Sherlock Holmes of the art world. I can probably tell you where you’re from.’

‘Right then,’ she challenged.

‘Well, no, not right away, not immediately. But if you were to allow me an opportunity to paint you, if I could study you, in a favourable light, at my leisure, I could certainly hazard some very good guesses.’

They had arrived at Arlette’s bus stand.

‘Come on, Gideon. More songs!’ called one of his male friends.

‘Yes, yes!’ he snapped. ‘One minute! Please,’ he turned back to Arlette, ‘this is a genuine request. I have never seen anyone with bone structure like yours. If I can’t paint you I shall spend the rest of my life in a state of miserable dissatisfaction. Please.’

Arlette looked at Gideon. He was, beyond the madness in his eyes and his air of troubled desperation, an attractive-looking man, probably around her age, possibly one or two years older. His eyes were dark and small, set in broad features. His nose was Roman and his mouth was full and wide. She could imagine that he had been handsome all his life, never an awkward moment in his development from child to man. She knew she must say no to his request. Of course she could not let a strange man paint her portrait, if, indeed, a simple portrait was all that he had in mind.

But still, a portrait. An artist. She pictured his studio, a paint-splattered garret, a jam jar full of wild flowers, dusty windows overlooking rooftops, a cat maybe, thin and slightly anxious. She imagined sitting with her face tilted towards the light, while Gideon examined her through the frame of his own fingers, finding ever thinner and thinner paintbrushes to describe the delicate lines of her face. She imagined him looking calmer than he did right now, softer, asking her gentle questions, and she imagined answering them lightly and breezily with just a hint of mysterious restraint. And then one day, he would turn the canvas to face her and she would see her own likeness played out in tiny strokes of watercolour, or maybe oils, and she would sigh and clap her hands together and say, ‘Gideon, it’s beautiful.’

Her bus approached, although not in actuality a bus proper, rather a lorry with some seats on the roof, all London had to offer to its commuters in these rather ramshackle post-war days. ‘That is a very kind offer and I am flattered, Mr Worsley, but I fear that I’m going to be too busy to accept.’

She stepped towards the bus and Gideon pulled a small leather wallet from his breast pocket. ‘Please,’ he said, ‘take a card. Should you change your mind.’

She took it from his gloved fingers and allowed him to help her up onto the bus. ‘Thank you,’ she said. And then she found herself a seat and watched from a snow-splattered window as Gideon and his band of wild-eyed carollers rejoined themselves into a circle and launched into a full-throated rendition of ‘Good King Wenceslas’. She saw Gideon’s gaze follow the bus as it passed by and then latch onto hers as she came into view. For a moment she saw someone else deep inside him. Not the fiery-eyed leonine man, but a small boy, with a look of vulnerability and sadness in his eyes. She smiled and raised her hand at him. He raised his back at hers, and then he was gone.

She looked at the card in her hand, but it was too dark to read in the early evening gloom. She would read it tomorrow. She would think about Gideon and his garret and his soulful eyes tomorrow.