‘Bully for her.’
He smiled and ploughed on. He was clearly not interested in her conversational skills. He was interested in her because she looked like Sabrina.
‘Well, Miss Blackpool.’ She looked at him, startled, but it was just a line. ‘What sort of places would you like to go to?’
‘That’s for me to know and you to find out.’
She could have kicked herself. That was a tone she’d have used back home to slap away a Teddy Boy at the Winter Gardens, but it was no use to her here. She was wrestling, and Marjorie had warned her not to wrestle. Luckily for her, and perhaps because he wasn’t accustomed to the snap and snarl of Saturday night dance halls, he ignored her little flash of haughtiness.
‘I’m trying,’ he said patiently. ‘But I have a proposal to make to you.’
‘I’ll bet,’ she said.
She couldn’t help herself. All her life, or the part of it in which men were interested, she’d been trying to fend them off. Now, suddenly, she had to be different and suppress the reflex she’d needed for years.
‘And you’d be right to bet. You’d win money. I wouldn’t be talking to you if there were no proposal, would I?’
She appreciated the brutal clarification and smiled.
‘I’m meeting a friend for dinner. A client. He’s bringing a lady friend, and suggested I should too.’
In her past life, she would have mentioned his wedding ring, but she had learned something.
‘That sounds nice.’
She was still a long way from a television set, but it was a start.
Marjorie advised her to borrow something to wear from work. That’s what all the other girls did, apparently. She went upstairs in her lunch hour with a bag, had a word with one of the girls, took away a smart knee-length red dress with a plunging neckline. When she was getting ready to go out, she remembered what she could look like, when she made an effort, put on some lipstick, showed a bit of leg. It had been a while.
‘Bloody hell,’ said Marjorie, and Barbara smiled.
Valentine Laws had booked a table at the Talk of the Town to see Matt Monro, Auntie Marie’s favourite singer. On the posters at the entrance, Barbara saw that on other nights it might have been the Supremes, or Helen Shapiro, or Cliff and the Shadows, people that the girls at work would have wanted to hear all about. Matt Monro was from another time, the time that she’d left Blackpool to escape. As she was shown to the table, she noticed that she was easily the youngest person in the room.
He was waiting for her at a table for four at the side of the stage. His other guests hadn’t arrived. He ordered her a Dubonnet and lemonade without asking her, and they talked about work, and London, and nightclubs, and then he looked up and smiled.
‘Sidney!’
But Sidney, a small, bald man with a moustache, didn’t seem pleased to see Valentine, and then Valentine’s face became too complicated for Barbara to read. There was the smile, then the smile vanished, and then there was a quick, shocked widening of the eyes. And then a smile returned, but it contained no warmth or pleasure.
‘Audrey!’ said Valentine.
Audrey was a large woman in an extremely purple and inappropriately long dress. She was, Barbara guessed, Sidney’s wife. And as Barbara watched, she began to see that there had been some kind of misunderstanding. Sidney had thought that it was a night out with one kind of lady (‘the ladies’, ‘our good lady wives’, that sort of thing), but Valentine had invited Barbara on the assumption that it was another sort of night out altogether, one involving ladies but not the ladies. Presumably they had enjoyed both kinds of evening in the past, hence the confusion. The lives of married men with money were so complicated and so deceitful, the codes they spoke in so ambiguous, that Barbara wondered why this sort of thing didn’t happen all the time. Perhaps it did. Perhaps the Talk of the Town was full of tables at which women of wildly different ages were sitting, all glowering at each other.
‘Valentine and I have a tiny bit of business to discuss at the bar,’ said Sidney. ‘Please excuse us for five minutes.’
Valentine stood up, nodded at the women and followed Sidney, who was stomping away angrily. It was a misunderstanding with consequences, obviously. Sidney’s good lady wife would realize who Barbara was and what she represented; she would presumably work out that there had been other, similar evenings to which she hadn’t been invited. If Valentine had been quicker on the uptake he could have introduced Barbara as his cousin, or his secretary, or his parole officer, but he’d allowed himself to be dragged away by Sidney for an ear-bashing, and left the two women to come to their own conclusions.
Audrey sat down heavily opposite Barbara and looked at her.