Before I Met You

19


1920




‘ISLE OF MAN?’

‘No.’

‘Isle of Wight?’

‘No.’

‘Jersey, then?’

‘No,’ said Arlette, ‘but close.’

‘Guernsey? Yes! Guernsey!’

‘Well, yes, Mr Worsley, but if you don’t mind me saying, you have reached that conclusion only through a process of painstaking elimination. I think you left out only Lundy and the Scillies.’

‘Well, your accent, it’s not one I’ve heard before. But really, the clue should have been in your name, I suppose. De La Mare.’

‘Yes. I think my name was probably a giveaway.’

‘Hmm.’ Gideon smiled into his fist sheepishly. ‘Yes. I think maybe I need to sharpen up my regional knowledge. Not quite as perceptive as I thought I was. So, an island with a French flavour. And you with your French name. And, now I think of it, of course, such fine, French features. Have you been to France?’

‘No,’ Arlette replied. ‘Before I arrived in Portsmouth in September I had never before left the island.’

He looked at her with surprise. ‘Well, well,’ he said. ‘And you’re twenty-one? That is a long time to have spent on a rock in the middle of the Channel.’

‘Yes,’ she replied, ‘quite.’

‘And now you are here. Free. Unfettered. Alive.’ He chuckled and sharpened his pencil, leaving the curl of shavings to fall to the floor.

‘And having my portrait painted by a man I barely know.’

‘You are clearly not as timid as your appearance might suggest.’

‘Oh, no,’ she teased, ‘I am. This is entirely out of character.’

She gazed through the bowed windows of his studio. She had been here for almost an hour now and was feeling braver and braver by the minute. From the moment she had walked into this room and seen the portraits stacked up around the room, exquisite renderings in pencil and watercolour of a dozen beautiful women, all fully clothed and serene, she had felt reassured that Gideon Worsley was, as he said, a professional artist with an interest in her face.

‘So, Mr Worsley ...’

‘Please, call me Gideon. Please.’

‘Gideon. Tell me. Have you always lived in London?’

‘Oh, no, not remotely. I lived in my family’s house in Chipping Norton, until I was twenty-one.’

‘Chipping Norton?’

‘Oxfordshire. And then I came down, after university, stayed, like yourself, with a friend of my parents, and then I wandered past this cottage one watery November morning over a year ago and saw that it was for rent, and enquired with the landlord’s agent and suddenly, here I was, in a blue house by the river, which I can barely afford, alone and without help, a single man fending for himself. And not particularly well, it must be said.’

‘You need a wife.’

‘Yes, indeed I do. Can you suggest anyone who might be interested in taking up the position?’

Arlette laughed. ‘What would be the benefit? For the prospective wife?’

‘A blue cottage by the river? An artistic man with love in his heart? Weekends at a charming house in five acres of wild meadows with my spectacular mama and papa? Eclectic friends? A wild social life?’

‘Wild, you say?’

He smiled and examined the top of his pencil in the light of the window. ‘Yes,’ he said circumspectly.

‘Wild in what way?’

‘Oh, gosh, in that normal, ordinary way of wildness. When I am not working, I am playing. And playing very hard indeed.’

‘Were those your friends?’ she ventured. ‘The ones you were singing carols with when I first met you?’

‘They were some of my friends, yes. I have a lot of friends. And they are all wild.’

‘Lots of friends, but no wife?’

‘Precisely. But I am twenty-four. It is time, hopefully, to combine the two.’

‘So where does it happen, all this wildness?’

‘Here. As you could probably guess from the state of my sitting room. And there are clubs, in Mayfair, in Soho.’

‘Soho?’

‘Yes. Soho. Colourful, colourful places. I’d like to ask you to join us one night but I fear your faint Jersey heart –’

‘Guernsey!’

‘Of course ... your Guernsey heart may not be quite up to the challenge.’

Arlette flushed.

‘Have I made you cross?’ asked Gideon, peering at her playfully from behind his canvas.

‘No, Mr Worsley. You have not made me cross. Whyever would you think you had?’

‘So,’ he said, ‘would you? Would you come out to play, one evening, in the dark corners of Soho?’

‘That depends,’ she said, ‘on what exactly you do in the dark corners of Soho.’

‘We drink, we sing, we talk, we think, we dance, we love, we live, Miss De La Mare. And then, eventually, quite often when the sun is above the roofs and the whey-faced commuters have sprung out of their miserable little holes, we come home and sleep.’

Arlette pursed her lips. She was sure there was something she wanted to say, about Gideon and his dirty house and his slovenly way of life and his disregard for the people who got out of bed every morning and made his precious city run, but she could not find the words.

‘I, of course, do not include you in that number. No, no, no. Beautiful shop-girls selling dresses at Liberty. No, you are a separate breed entirely. A cut above ...’ He smiled and his face retreated once more behind his canvas.

Silence fell upon them. They had reached a tiny but perceptible impasse. For now, Arlette felt, it would be better not to talk.





20


1995




BETTY SLEPT ON the sofa that night, snuggled up next to Joe Joe and his conquest of the previous evening whose name, it transpired, was Rolf and who hailed from Munich. She had sacrificed her mezzanine to three girls from Poland who had missed the last tube home to Rayners Lane, and when she tried to stand up she couldn’t because her whole body had seized up. She eventually managed to shake out the knots in her muscles and stumbled towards the bathroom. The door was locked from the inside. She sighed. She did not want to know what was on the other side of that door. She wanted coffee. She wanted water. She wanted a cigarette. She’d finished her tobacco last night. Or, at least, the three girls from Poland had finished her tobacco, using it in numerous attempts to construct a Camberwell Carrot in order to impress an English man called Joshua, who was, apparently, their TEFL teacher. She glanced at the time on the microwave: 7.12 a.m. She’d been asleep for approximately three hours.

She ran her hands through her weird green hair, pulled on her silver beret, located her shoulder bag, checked for her purse and her front door keys, then left the flat. She tiptoed nimbly past Candy’s front door, a sudden overwhelming memory of lime-green stretch-lace knickers and a studded tongue puncturing her consciousness unpleasantly, and then she pushed open the front door and tumbled out onto the street.

It was a chilly morning for the beginning of June, the air was damp and it felt more like dawn than seven thirty. She had not yet seen her reflection, and if she had she would have observed that she was wearing only one of a pair of diamanté earrings, that a tuft of green hair was sticking out from beneath the silver hat, and curling upwards like a frond of greenery. She would also have observed that all the eyeliner on one eye had rubbed off on the sofa while she was sleep, yet the eyeliner on the other eye was fully intact. She would have seen that there were creases in her cheek from the cushion she’d slept against, that a small rash of zits had broken out on her jaw line and that the seam around the waistline of her dress had split slightly in the night, revealing an inch of pale white flesh.

She would have seen all this and she would probably have decided to stay at home and not wander the early morning streets of Soho in plain sight of the world.

But she hadn’t seen any of these things. She imagined herself to look glamorously careworn, sweetly rumpled. She sat in an Italian coffee shop on Wardour Street nursing an extra large cappuccino and smoking a roll-up, feeling like a character in a novel. She’d felt lonely last night. Now she felt alive again. Early morning Soho, in her party clothes, surrounded by chattering Italians in stained white shirts, the hiss and clatter of espresso machines, the smell of bacon, the vague edges of a hangover. She smiled to herself and thought that if the sixteen-year-old version of herself had walked past this window and seen her sitting there, she’d have wished to be her.

And as she thought that, the door of the café swung open and a small man walked in. A small man in a short-sleeved T-shirt, in spite of the chill, one hand holding a lit cigarette, his other hand in his jeans pocket, dark hair tousled and hanging around his face, a cloud of stardust glittering in his aura.

Betty froze.

It was him.

It was Dom Jones.

She put a hand to her cheek, a cheek that had suddenly, inexplicably, flushed red. She watched him from the corner of her eye, standing at the counter, ordering a full breakfast, with extra bacon and strong tea. She saw him take a seat at a table in the corner, pull a phone out of his pocket and tap something into it, scratch his scalp through his thick hair, put out his cigarette in a small metal ashtray, identical to the one on Betty’s table, and pull open a newspaper.

She saw his right leg, jigging up and down beneath the table, one hand nonchalantly scratching at his crotch through the denim of his jeans. She saw that he had a two-day stubble on his chin and that his eyes looked puffy and blank.

Unwritten rules said she should leave him be, like a free-roaming animal in a zoo. Look, don’t touch. But there was too much connecting them this damp June morning, and before she could censor herself or ask herself what she was hoping to achieve she had turned fully towards him, waited a beat for him to acknowledge her gaze and then said, ‘Hi.’

He looked annoyed for a moment. He threw her a tight smile, nodded tersely. But then she saw it, in his eyes, a tiny glint of recognition.

‘Do I know you?’ he asked.

‘No,’ she said, ‘well, not properly. I live in the building opposite you. You know? Across the courtyard.’

He looked at her blankly, his tired eyes taking in the detail of her, still failing to make the connection, until his eyes alighted upon the packet of Golden Virginia on the table in front of her and he nodded slowly and said, ‘Ah, yeah, the girl on the fire escape. Yeah. I know you.’

That should have been the end of the conversation. What else was there to say? But Betty still felt it, this sense that she and this man had something to talk about, that she was allowed to engage with him.

‘Sorry about the noise last night,’ she said. ‘Hope we didn’t disturb you.’

He moved his paper away from himself, a gesture that Betty took as an acceptance of her attempt at social intercourse. ‘You f*ckers,’ he said, with a wry smile. He leaned back into his chair and gazed at her impenetrably. ‘You absolute f*ckers. I went to bed early last night, too. First time I’ve been to bed early in about six months.’

Betty clapped her hand over her mouth. ‘Oh God,’ she said, ‘I’m really sorry.’

She could see from the curl of his mouth that he wasn’t really cross.

‘It’s all right. I moved to a bedroom on the street, took a temazepam. Feel like shit now; that stuff really knocks you out.’

She smiled at him encouragingly, amazed by how normal it felt to be chatting to Dom Jones in a café.

He picked his cigarettes from the table and offered the pack to Betty. Her instinct was to say no. She hated cigarettes. All that gunk and poison. But she absolutely had to smoke one of his cigarettes. She would regret it when she was ninety if she didn’t. She took one and let him light it for her.

‘Good party?’ he asked, blowing some smoke out of the corner of his mouth.

She nodded. ‘Yeah, well, it wasn’t really my party. It was supposed to be a housewarming. But in reality I think it was just an excuse for my friend to invite everyone in London with a foreign accent.’

‘And you were just trapped there with nowhere to go?’ he smiled at her knowingly.

‘That kind of thing.’

‘Yeah,’ he said, ‘I remember those kinds of parties. I used to lock my bedroom door and pee in a bottle until it was over.’

A short silence followed, during which time Dom’s breakfast was delivered to his table. It looked amazing, particularly the eggs, two glistening white and yellow discs, shiny as glass. She wanted eggs. But she could not afford eggs. Eggs on toast, according to the illuminated price list above the counter, were £2.50 and she had only £3.50 left in her purse to last her until her next pay cheque. She stared at the eggs lustfully, while Dom Jones folded away his newspaper and poured sugar into his tea from a glass canister.

She was about to move back to her table, aware that the conversational window had just closed up, when Dom picked up his knife and fork and said, ‘So, how long have you been living over there?’

She picked up her cappuccino and took a sip from it. ‘Three weeks and five days,’ she said.

‘Oh,’ he said, ‘right. So not much longer than me then.’

She feigned ignorance of his current domestic situation and looked at him quizzically.

‘Yeah, I’ve had the place for three years but only lived there for a month or two before I moved out again. And now I’m back.’

‘Oh,’ she said cautiously, ‘right.’

‘And where were you before you were in a flat in Soho?’

‘I was in Guernsey,’ she said.

‘Oh, right. That’s an island, yeah?’

She laughed. ‘Yes. A very small one.’

‘Yeah,’ he said, sawing through a piece of toast and egg, ‘I think I’ve got some offshore accounts over there.’ He paused and shrugged. ‘Or maybe Jersey. One or other.’ He put the egg and toast in his mouth and Betty experienced a surreal moment of thinking, I am watching Dom Jones eat an egg. She put it to the back of her mind and continued her approximation of a cool chick who could not care less about celebrities eating eggs.

‘And you’re working at Wendy’s, yeah?’

She looked at him with surprise. ‘How did you know that?’

‘I saw you,’ he said, ‘remember, in your uniform? You had blond hair then ...’ He looked disconsolately at her head as though her current lack of blond hair was a great personal sadness to him.

‘Hair situation’s gone a bit pear-shaped,’ she said. ‘I really need to get it coloured professionally, but I can’t afford to. So until then I’m stuck in a hat.’

He sliced through a thick sausage, heartily and crudely, attacking it like a lumberjack. ‘And what’s it like,’ he continued, talking with his mouth full, ‘working at Wendy’s?’

She shrugged. ‘Not as bad as you might think. Nice people. Nice boss. Free dinners.’

‘I love Wendy’s,’ he said. ‘Always used to go in there after a gig, before ... you know ... before I couldn’t any more.’

She left his allusion to his supernova fame hanging uncommented upon.

‘Do you still do those chicken sandwiches,’ he asked, his body wriggling with boyish excitement, ‘you know, with the spicy sauce?’

‘Yes. They’re a bestseller, actually.’

‘God, I used to love those. That takes me back.’ His eyes filled with a nostalgic mist. ‘Yeah,’ he sighed. ‘Wendy’s, Shaftesbury Avenue, youth.’

‘You’re still young!’

‘Yeah, I’m young, but I’m not youthful. Once you’ve crossed over from twenty-five, that’s it,’ he clicked his fingers, ‘youth takes a ride. Then you get to be young for as long as you like. I’m going to be young until I’m about forty, I reckon. Maybe even forty-five.’ He winked and chuckled to himself. ‘How old are you?’ he asked.

‘Twenty-two. Twenty-three next month.’

‘Ah,’ he said, ‘youth. Yeah. There it is. Twenty-two. Man. I would give a lot to be twenty-two again.’

‘No,’ she said. ‘Seriously. You wouldn’t. It’s shit. I live in a cupboard. Or actually, a cupboard within a cupboard. My downstairs neighbour is a crazy Asian dyke. I’ve got literally no money. And because no one in this whole city would give me a job I like, I flip burgers all day. It sucks being twenty-two, seriously.’

Dom laughed and wiped the corners of his mouth with a paper napkin.

‘Yeah, right, I get it. And I do remember being twenty-two, and I did live in a squat, and I did have crappy jobs, but I suppose I’m looking at it through this, like, bottle bottom. It’s distorted; seems so long ago I’ve forgotten what it felt like. And what sort of jobs were you looking for? Before you ended up at Wendy’s?’

She told him about the art galleries and the boutiques and the temping appointments at button factories. ‘My problem is, I’ve got no work experience,’ she said, ‘and because I’ve got no work experience, I can’t get a job. And it’s just a vicious cycle.’

‘What did you do in Guernsey? I mean, you’re nearly twenty-three, you must have been doing something, right?’

‘I was looking after my grandmother,’ Betty said. ‘She had Alzheimer’s and brain damage from a stroke. No one else wanted to live with her, so I did.’

She saw a flash of something across his features, something bright and dazzling. She couldn’t decipher it for a moment and then realised with a swell of pride that it was respect. He had thought she was an amusing young girl, some kind of diverting reflection of his own shabby, youthful existence. And now he thought she was something more than that.

‘Wow,’ he said, after a moment. ‘That’s, er ...’

‘It was nothing,’ she shrugged. ‘I loved her.’

‘So what, you did everything? Bum-wiping, the lot?’

‘Yes. The lot.’

‘On your own?’

‘Well, yes, most of the time. There was a carer, but only eight to five. I was there twenty-four-seven.’

He nodded knowingly. ‘Amazing,’ he said, ‘what you’ll do for someone you love.’ He glanced at his wristwatch and tucked his cutlery together on his plate. ‘I’ve got to run,’ he said. ‘The wife’s dropping the kids off.’

‘You’ve got kids?’ she asked, amazing herself with her fine acting skills.

‘Yes, three. Tiny ones.’ He raised his eyebrows exasperatedly. ‘And no nanny. Should be an interesting day.’

‘I can help,’ she said, the words propelled from her mouth by the force of some kind of latent insanity.

He looked at her questioningly. ‘What?’

‘I’m not working today. Well, not till later. I could come and help you. With your kids.’ She smiled a panicky, I’m-not-crazy-I-swear kind of smile.

He stopped completely in his tracks, then. She watched him, watched a thousand different and conflicting thoughts hurtling through his mind. He put a hand to his chin and rubbed it gently. Then he put his other hand to the back of his neck and squeezed it. He gazed at the floor and then at the ceiling. And then he stared straight into Betty’s eyes and said, ‘Yeah. Shit. Why not? I mean, if you’re sure. I can pay you. Obviously. Tell me how much you want.’

She shrugged and smiled. ‘Nothing. I don’t want anything. I just like kids and my flat is full of people with hangovers and I’ve got nothing better to do.’ This wasn’t strictly true. She planned to go to St Anne’s Court today, to see the building where Clara Pickle had once lived, see if there was anything new she could dredge up from that. But really, she suspected that was another dead end. And what was happening here now, in this steamed-up café, was too remarkable to ignore. She shrugged again and then Dom smiled at her.

‘I don’t know what it is ...’ he said vaguely, as though he were thinking out loud, ‘what it is, about you ...?’ And then in a louder voice, he said, ‘Cool. Excellent. Well, you want to come now?’

She fingered the rip in the seam of her dress absent-mindedly and shook her head. ‘I might pop home, first,’ she said, ‘have a shower, brush my teeth, that kind of thing.’

He looked at her, half smiling, half dazed, as though trying to ignore a persistent voice in his head telling him not to let her in his home whilst at the same time not quite believing his luck.

‘Cool,’ he said again. ‘Great. Well, you know where I am. Peter Street. Number nine. I’ll see you there in, what, half an hour?’

She nodded and tried to exude an overwhelming aura of trustworthiness and sanity. ‘Roughly,’ she said.

‘Good,’ he said. Then he scratched his head, again, put his hands into his pockets and turned to leave. He stopped at the door of the café and turned back towards her. ‘Don’t tell anyone, though, will you? Don’t tell them where you’re going?’

She gave him her best Guide’s honour fingers-up and waited until he’d disappeared from view before exhaling and collapsing bodily and dramatically onto the slightly greasy tabletop.





21




WHEN BETTY GOT home five minutes later and finally made it to the bathroom, she saw the full horror of the reality of her appearance. She stared into the bathroom mirror for so long and with such distress that all the features on her face seemed to start moving around, wriggling like fish.

She attacked her face in the shower with a bar of soap and a facial scrub. While she scrubbed she told herself it was good that she hadn’t known how bad she’d looked. If she’d known how bad she’d looked she would never have left the flat, let alone have had the gall to start a conversation with a pop star. If she’d known how bad she’d looked she would not be on her way into the pop star’s house to help him look after his children for a day.

She put on a black and white striped Lycra dress with the sleeves pushed up, knee-high boots and a denim jacket. She tucked all her hair inside the silver beret, reapplied her make-up, sprayed on some perfume, ignored every attempt by Joe Joe to find out where she was going all dressed up like that, and left the house feeling sick with nerves and excitement.

Dom Jones did a double take when he saw Betty standing on his doorstep a moment later. He had a small baby in his arms and another small child attached to his ankle. His eyes took in the full length of Betty from her crown to her toes.

‘Fresh,’ he said eventually. ‘Come in.’

He held the door open for her, his eyes scanning the street outside his house in both directions before closing it quietly behind them.

‘Come in,’ he said again, ‘excuse the chaos. This house was never meant to have kids in it.’ He smiled drily and led her through a tiny hallway painted matt black, then through a tiny, half-panelled sitting room painted aubergine. The living room beyond was furnished with two oversized, vintage tan leather sofas, art deco in appearance, a huge chrome and crystal chandelier, a wide-screen TV, distressed wooden floorboards, brown shag-pile rugs and two rectangular fish tanks embedded into a wood-panelled wall at the far end. The walls were hung with outrageous pieces of art, one of which, at least, Betty recognised immediately as a Damien Hirst. The coffee table was glass and covered in Lego and plastic beakers and plates of half-eaten toast. Betty saw the table as it had been intended, as a place for drug-fuelled sex with nubile strangers, a place for cutting up lines of top-quality cocaine, for late night card games and for displaying interesting books about artists and film-makers and dead rock stars. It had not been intended as a resting place for children’s plastic ephemera.

‘Right,’ said Dom, leaning down to pick up the small child who was still attached to his lower leg, so he was now holding two of his children, ‘let’s do some introductions. This is Acacia,’ he nodded towards the toddler, ‘this is Astrid,’ he nodded at a ringleted baby who looked like an actual doll. ‘And somewhere over there,’ he looked over his shoulder, ‘is my big boy. Where are you, Donny?’ A small boy appeared in the doorway, holding aloft a large plastic gun, with a war stripe painted across his nose and a belt of bullets thrown across his chest. ‘This is Donovan. Donovan, this is ...?’ He looked at her, aghast. ‘Jesus. I’m really sorry. I didn’t even ask you your name?’

‘Betty,’ she said, smiling from bemused child to bemused child. ‘Betty Dean.’

‘Cool name,’ he said, ‘excellent. Yeah. Kids, this is Betty. Betty lives just around the corner and she’s going to help me look after you all today until Mummy gets back. OK? So I want you all – especially you, Donny – to be really, really super-extra good today, OK?’

Donny narrowed his eyes at his father and then sat down heavily on the sofa behind him. ‘I want Mummy,’ he said.

Dom raised his eyebrows and turned to address him. ‘I know you do, mate, but Mummy’s busy today, Mummy’s working.’

‘Then I want Moira.’

Dom sighed and sat down next to him, a baby balanced on each knee. ‘Sorry, mate, but Moira had to go home, didn’t she? Moira had to go back to New Zealand.’

‘I wish there was no Noo Zeeling,’ he said, jutting out his lower lip and staring forlornly at the shag-pile rug.

Dom rubbed his hand across Donny’s thick blond shag cut and smiled. ‘Me too, buddy,’ he said. ‘Me too.’

‘So,’ said Betty, ‘how old are they all?’

‘Well, Astrid here is ... shit, I dunno – how old is the baby, Donny?’

Donny shrugged.

‘It was just before I went to Hong Kong, so must have been December, so she’s about six months. Yeah, that’s right. December the sixth. Of course. And Acacia is a year older, she was December the twelfth, so she’s eighteen months, and big boy Donny here, he turned three in ...’ he squinted, trying to conjure up the birth month of his first-born child. ‘September,’ he said triumphantly. ‘Yeah, he was three in September.’

‘Wow,’ said Betty. ‘You packed them in.’

Dom tucked the toddler, Acacia, between himself and Donny on the sofa and passed a beaker into her outstretched hands. ‘Well, yeah, not exactly planned that way. Cashie was supposed to be our last – well, I was happy for her to be our last – but it didn’t quite work out that way. Did it, little one?’ He looked down at the baby in his arms and smiled at her adoringly. ‘But still, you know, once they’re here, they’re here, and then there’s no going back. Forwards all the way, isn’t that right, troops?’

Donny put his hand to his head in a salute and Dom rubbed his hair again.

Betty stood, her hands in the pockets of her denim jacket, staring down at this family of three beautiful children and a handsome young father, and wondered for a moment what she was doing here. He didn’t need her here, surely. She was just an interloper, intruding into their beautiful world.

But as she thought this, the baby began to cry and the toddler dropped her beaker, spilling water onto the shag-pile rug, and Donny lifted his gun to his shoulder, and marched from the room. Then Dom looked up at Betty with his big brown eyes and said, ‘Thank God you’re here.’

‘Well,’ she said, ‘what can I do first?’

He got to his feet and handed her the baby. ‘You hold her,’ he said, ‘I’ll make us some tea.’

She took the baby from his arms. She was warm and solid and a little damp. ‘Does she ...’ Betty began, hesitantly, ‘... does she need a change?’

Dom looked at her blankly, and then with realisation. ‘Oh God, yeah, she probably does. Sorry, yeah, um, there’s some changing stuff in the bathroom,’ he said, going to switch on a light on the staircase and pointing her in the direction of upstairs. ‘First door on the left. Light comes on automatically.’

She nodded and looked again at the baby. The baby looked back at her with a look that said, ‘I don’t know who you are, and I don’t care, just do what you have to do.’

‘Er, OK.’

Dom poked his head back into the hallway and said, ‘Are you OK doing this? I mean, have you changed a nappy before?’

She nodded. ‘Yeah,’ she said, ‘no problem.’ She thought it only polite not to mention that it had been an incontinence nappy on a doolally old lady.

‘Just shout if you need anything.’

‘I’ll be fine,’ she said, lacing her words with cool, calm and collection.

The stairs were dark, bare floorboards with a thin piece of black and cream striped carpet running up the middle. At the top of the stairs, steps went off in two directions. The steps on the right led to what looked like it must be Dom’s bedroom. Through a gap in the door she could see black bedding, a low-slung chrome ceiling light, a fan of discarded newspapers, a huge art deco mirror, a sculpture of some description that looked like it had been built out of motorbike parts, and another fish tank, this one built into a unit that also contained a flat-screen television.

She stood for a while and watched the bubbles rise up through the water, silent and nubile, mesmerising and calming.

In Dom Jones’s bedroom.

She shook the thought from her head and turned left.

The bathroom was tiled in floor-to-ceiling gold mosaic. A bejewelled bronze Moroccan lamp hung overhead, and in the middle of the room was a free-standing bath made of copper with an enormous rectangular copper shower head hung above it. Free-floating glass shelves housed piles of fresh white towels; there was a row of three white orchids in gold-leafed pots on the window sill. And there, in the corner, a tatty, plastic-covered changing mat, a packet of Huggies, three packets of Johnson’s wipes, a basket full of plastic bath toys, and three small towelling robes with chocolate stains on them.

Why had one of the most famous people in the whole country let a total stranger into his home? Only three weeks ago this man’s house had been staked out by paparazzi. Only three weeks ago, Betty had been awoken by a police car sent to keep people away from Dom Jones’s house. He had seen her twice from his back window. He had bumped into her once outside her flat. And now, after just their fourth meeting he had invited her into his home. He had let her take his precious baby girl out of sight. How did he know she wasn’t a journalist? A stalker? How did he know she wasn’t up here poisoning his baby or drowning his baby because she was, in fact, a psychopath? Why did he trust her?

But she knew why he trusted her. He trusted her because they’d made a connection. Not just now, in the café, but weeks ago, across the courtyard. He’d seen her and she’d seen him and they had seen that they were equals. He’d seen a girl he could be friends with, a girl he might know in his real life, a girl he might once, possibly, have fallen in love with, but certainly a girl he could trust.

She placed the baby on her lap and then put everything back exactly where she’d found it, then she carried her down the stairs and into the kitchen at the back of the house, a dry, smiling baby in one arm and a balled-up nappy in the other.

‘Where does this go?’ she asked Dom, who was slicing up carrots into batons at a rough-hewn wooden surface next to a butler’s sink.

He glanced at the balled-up nappy and then at Betty and the baby, and said, ‘Well done, excellent! Bung it in here.’ He held open the lid of a large chrome bin and she dropped it in, on top of carrot peelings, beer cans, takeaway containers, old pizza and the contents of an ash tray.

Dom Jones’s rubbish.

Stop it, she told herself sternly, just stop it.

Donny was sitting on a very tall barstool, at a zinc-topped counter in the middle of the room, cutting paper into strips with a pair of blunt-ended scissors. He looked up at Betty with his big sad eyes and then turned back to his paper.

‘What are you making?’ she asked, balancing the baby on her hip.

He said nothing.

‘Don,’ said Dom, a carrot in his hand, ‘Betty asked you something ...’

Donny shrugged. ‘I just want Moira,’ he said.

Dom sighed and put down the carrot. He put a hand on Donny’s shoulder and squeezed it. ‘Guess where Betty works?’ he said into his ear.

Donny shrugged.

‘Betty works at a burger restaurant.’

Donny turned and glanced at her. ‘McDonald’s?’ he asked, with even bigger eyes.

‘No,’ she said. ‘It’s a bit like McDonald’s but it’s called Wendy’s.’

His face fell. He shrugged again.

Dom looked at Betty and smiled. ‘Oh, well,’ he said, ‘one day, when you’re big, you’ll know what Wendy’s is and you’ll be really impressed.’

Betty took the baby and sat down on a big leather armchair in the corner with her on her lap. The toddler, whose name she had already forgotten (although she suspected it was tree-related), was sitting on the counter next to Dom, picking up carrot batons and putting them in her mouth. Unlike her baby sister and her big brother, this child had fine blond hair and a less exuberant-looking physiology. This child, in fact, looked nothing at all like Dom or Amy, but like a slightly consumptive orphan with eczema. But still, she was not without her own appeal, not the least of which was her enormous blue eyes and ladylike posture. She was dressed in a smock top and leggings, both black, which struck Betty as a strange way to dress a tiny child until she remembered that this was not any child.

This child was rock royalty.

‘I love your house,’ said Betty.

‘Thanks,’ said Dom. ‘It was always the big dream, the place in Soho. Ever since I was young.’

‘Yeah, me too.’

Dom looked at her with interest. ‘Oh, yeah?’

‘Yes. My mum brought me to London when I was fifteen. We ended up getting kind of lost in the backstreets. And I remember just feeling all this kind of electricity fizzing up through me, just wanting to get more and more lost, to never find my way out again ...’

‘Yeah,’ Dom nodded. ‘Yeah, that’s exactly it. Same here. Probably when I was about twelve. I remember walking past this basement, just this shabby set of stairs leading down into this kind of manky pit. The windows were all dirty and there was this little blue neon light pinned to the wall, saying “Members Only”. Christ, I wanted to know what was down those steps so badly, wanted to be a member. Didn’t care what it was, could have been anything. And when we got our first advance, when we signed our first contract, I knew what I wanted to spend it on.’ He looked around the kitchen. ‘My own little slice of Soho.’ He smiled.

‘Wow,’ said Betty. ‘And you did.’

‘Yup. And whatever happens, I’ll never sell this place. Not ever.’

‘No,’ said Betty, with wide eyes. ‘No, you mustn’t. Never.’

She smiled, feeling the loose strands of their connection growing stronger and stronger.

Dom pulled a spoon out of a drawer, took the lid off a huge brown teapot and stirred the contents. ‘Milk?’ he said. ‘Sugar?’

‘Both, please,’ she replied. ‘Three sugars.’

He raised an eyebrow at her. ‘Girl after my own heart,’ he said. ‘I used to have five. Cut it down to two and a half. How’s your hangover?’

She considered her hangover. She’d completely forgotten she had one from the moment she’d said ‘hi’ to Dom in the café two hours ago.

‘Fine,’ she said. ‘I was, er, I was sick last night. Big time. Think it saved me from the worst of it.’

He smiled at her and passed her a large white mug full of tea. She put it down on a small table to the side of the armchair. The baby on her lap sat still and compliant, playing with the plastic bangle on Betty’s wrist. A small radio was broadcasting Xfm. They were playing the new single by Supergrass; the lyrics were all about smoking fags and being young. Dom turned it up.

‘Have you heard this?’ he said.

She shook her head.

‘This is going to be massive,’ he said. He put a finger to his chin and listened intently. ‘Seriously,’ he continued. ‘These guys are good. Look like a bunch of chimps, but they’re good. Did you like “Caught by the Fuzz”?’

She shrugged and tried to look like she may or may not have liked it but really couldn’t say.

‘Absolute gem, that song. Total gem. Wish I’d written it. Do you like this song, Don?’ he asked his small son.

Donny looked up from his pile of slivered paper and said, ‘Hmm, yes, it’s like a holiday.’

Dom laughed. ‘Exactly!’ he cried. ‘Spot on, mate. That’s exactly what it’s like. It’s like listening to a holiday. A holiday from being old.’

‘Or from being little,’ suggested Donny.

Dom laughed again.

‘What’s a fag?’ Donny asked.

‘It’s another word for a cigarette. Another word for those disgusting things that Mummy and Daddy always have hanging out of their mouths.’

Donny’s face wrinkled up. ‘Euw,’ he said. ‘I’m not ever going to smoke a fag.’

‘Good,’ said Dom. ‘Good.’

‘Disgusting habit,’ Betty agreed.

‘So, Betty,’ Dom began, ‘what time do you have to be off?’

‘My shift starts at five, so about four?’

‘Cool,’ he said. ‘Amy’s PA’s coming to collect the kids at three, so that’s perfect. I’ve got some stuff I need to sort out in my office. Are you going to be OK if I leave you alone down here for a couple of hours?’

‘Er, yeah. Yes! Of course. Sure.’

‘I’ll just be in my office, top of the house, if you need anything. Erm, they’ve all had some snacks, you’ve done Astrid’s nappy. Donny knows how to switch on the telly. Don’t you, mate?’

Donny nodded seriously.

‘Help yourself to anything you want; got loads of nice cheese in the fridge.’ He opened the door of a pale mint-green double American fridge. ‘Tea.’ He pointed to the kettle. ‘Coffee.’ He opened a cupboard door. ‘Activities.’ He opened another door revealing shelves of paper and pens, jigsaws and dolls. ‘Only rules,’ he began to count them off on his fingers, ‘no felt tips around the house, only at the table, no sugar, no dairy for Acacia – there’s soya milk in the fridge – no slamming doors – no doors at all, in fact – and no touching the music system.’ Apart from that, anything goes. And, I don’t care what you say, I am going to be paying you for this, OK?’ He threw her a fond, almost paternal look and Betty smiled.

‘OK,’ she said. ‘I’ll allow that.’

‘Cool,’ he said, one hand holding the back of his neck. He looked as though he were about to say something else to her, but he didn’t. Instead he addressed his children, warning them of the swift and harsh consequences of any mutinous behaviour and then she heard him leaping up the stairs, two at a time, to a mysterious room of business at the top of his house.

She got to her feet and looked around her. The toddler sat on the kitchen counter, eyeing her suspiciously through a mouthful of chewed-up carrot. Donny went snip snip snip with his childproof scissors and the baby sat in her arms, a heavier weight than Betty had at first suspected, but still and mellow. Betty thought, how bad can this be? These children are angels. And as this foolish thought passed through her mind, the toddler’s eyes began to fill with tears and her face turned puce. At first Betty thought she was about to scream a tantrum but then she realised that the child was unable to breathe, that the child was in fact choking.

‘Oh my God,’ she said, wishing that she could remember the child’s name. ‘Oh my God, sweetie. Are you OK?’

The child’s face went from puce to magenta and towards violet. ‘Shit,’ said Betty. ‘Shit.’ She put the baby down on the armchair and grabbed the toddler in her arms. The baby began to wail hysterically. The toddler still had not made a sound. ‘Open your mouth, sweetie, let me have a look, that’s it, that’s it, oh God.’ She forced her fingers into the child’s mouth and inserted them into the back of her throat. There she felt the outline of a hard lump. She tried to prise it out with a hooked finger, but she seemed instead to be pushing it further down. And then she remembered an incident a few years earlier. Arlette had choked on a piece of chicken and Betty had watched the carer drag Arlette from her chair, turn her back to front, lock her arms around Arlette’s frail chest and force the piece of chicken out with a hard and fast squeeze. The Heimlich manoeuvre. Or something.

She put the toddler back on the kitchen surface, turned her to face the wall, and then crunched her firmly inside the circle of her arms. The baby had fallen onto its side and was wedged, screaming, halfway down the side of the armchair. Donny said, ‘What are you doing? Stop it! Stop it!’ and then just as Betty was about to yell out for help, she felt the toddler’s body go soft inside her arms and she heard a small thud as a large piece of carrot exited her throat and hit the tiled wall in front of her.

Donny had climbed down from the bar stool and was running out into the hallway, calling, ‘Daddy! Daddy!’ The baby was now flat on her front with her arms and legs splayed out around her. But Betty and the toddler stood still, both breathing in and out in terrible, awed relief. Betty held the toddler close to her and turned her round to face her. ‘Are you OK, sweetie? Are you OK?’

The toddler cried and nodded, and buried her face into Betty’s shoulder. Betty picked up the piece of carrot and showed it to the little girl.

‘Look!’ she said brightly. ‘Look! Naughty carrot! Look at that naughty carrot! Shall we smack that naughty carrot?’

The toddler pulled her face out of Betty’s shoulder and appraised the piece of carrot fearfully. She nodded once, and Betty hit the carrot. ‘There,’ she said. ‘Bad carrot. He won’t do that again ...’

‘What’s going on?’ Dom asked breathlessly in the doorway.

‘Daddy!’ said Donny. ‘That lady hurt Cashie. She did squeeze her, very hard.’

Dom waded across the room and collected the screaming baby from the armchair. Then he threw Betty a quizzical look, tinted with anger.

‘She was choking,’ Betty said calmly, stroking the toddler’s pale silky hair. ‘She had a piece of carrot wedged in her throat. I had to squeeze it out.’

Dom blinked at her. He gulped. ‘Shit,’ he said, after a moment. ‘Shit. Cashie. Baby girl. Are you OK?’ He touched her cheek with his fingers and stared desperately into her eyes. Acacia nodded and shuddered as the last of her tears left her body.

Betty held up the offending piece of carrot.

‘Oh my God.’ Dom glanced at it in horror. ‘Christ.’ He slapped himself on the forehead. ‘I should have thought,’ he began, ‘I should have said. I shouldn’t have –’

‘It’s fine,’ said Betty. ‘It’s fine. We’re all fine. Aren’t we, sweetheart?’ The little girl held her arms out to her father and Dom and Betty swapped Acacia for the baby.

‘Shit,’ he said again, ‘how did you know ...? I mean, how did you ...?’

She shrugged. ‘I saw someone doing it to someone before. To my grandmother. It’s called the Heimlich manoeuvre.’

‘Christ,’ he said, into Acacia’s hair, rocking her back and forth against his chest. ‘Christ. Thank God. Thank God you were here. Thank God you knew what to do. Thank you.’ He looked up at her, over Acacia’s crown, with big, fearful eyes. ‘Thank you, Betty.’ He looked down at Donny, who was standing at his side, watching everything suspiciously. ‘Betty saved Acacia’s life, Don,’ he said to the boy. ‘Betty saved her life. Do you understand?’

Donny shook his head.

‘Cashie had some carrot in her throat. She couldn’t breathe. She might have died. Betty squeezed Cashie to get the carrot out. Betty saved her life. Betty is a hero, Donny. Like a real-life hero.’

Donny looked at Betty uncertainly, and then away again. He shrugged, as though heroes without capes and swords and guns could not possibly be of any interest to him, and then he climbed back onto the barstool.

Dom looked at Betty. ‘You must think I’m really ... crap,’ he said sheepishly.

Betty shook her head. ‘Why would I think that?’ she asked.

‘I don’t know,’ he continued. ‘Leaving my kids with some stranger, leaving you alone, not making sure everyone was, you know, safe.’

‘But you did,’ said Betty, ‘you knew they’d be safe. With me. I’m a safe pair of hands. You knew that. You trusted me.’ She smiled at him, his baby in her arms.

He gazed at her for a moment, absorbing her words. His face softened. He smiled. ‘I suppose so,’ he said. ‘I suppose, if you put it like that ...’

‘It’s true,’ she said. ‘You knew what you were doing. Now go back to your study,’ she said. ‘Go and work. We’ll be fine. Won’t we?’

She asked this of Donny, who said nothing, just snipped and snipped at his shards of paper, silently.

Dom inhaled, thoughtfully. He looked from Donny to Astrid to Acacia and then to Betty. ‘No,’ he said. ‘No. I’m staying here. And not because I don’t trust you. Because you’re right, I do trust you. But because I’m supposed to be spending time with my kids. And the stuff up there,’ he glanced upwards, ‘that can wait. That can wait until later. Can’t it, Don?’

Donny nodded.

‘You know,’ Dom continued, addressing Betty, ‘I just had this feeling about you, when I first saw you. I just had this feeling. You know when you look at a person and you think there’s a reason for them being there, that they’re going to be, you know, significant. Weird ...’ He shook his head dismissively as though he’d said too much. ‘Weird,’ he said again. And then he looked at Betty once more and he smiled sincerely and mouthed, ‘Thank you.’

And Betty smiled and mouthed back, ‘You’re welcome.’