Before I Met You (25 page)

‘The owner of the amazing fur. Incredible.’ She pored over the photo in minute detail. ‘What a beauty,’ she said. ‘What an exquisite beauty.’ She ran a thin finger across Arlette’s image and took a drag on her plastic cigarette. ‘She looks like you,’ she said, turning to Betty.

Betty laughed. ‘That’s a lovely thing to say, but it couldn’t possibly be true. She wasn’t my real grandmother. I mean, not in terms of blood. She was my stepfather’s mother.’

Alexandra squinted at her over her glasses and said, ‘Well, then, your stepfather must subconsciously have chosen your mother because she looked like his mother. The resemblance between you both is quite startling, especially in this one.’ She pushed towards Betty the photo of Arlette sitting on the floor in front of the black men on the sofa. ‘Here,’ she tapped the photo with her plastic cigarette, ‘around the eyes.’

Betty looked at the photo and tried to see what Alexandra could see, but failed. She had always felt not quite pretty enough to be considered in the same league as Arlette.

‘So,’ said Alexandra, coming to the end of the pile of photos,
‘looks
like your grandmother had a whale of a time in the twenties, and I do recognise some of the locations. This, here,’ she pulled out a photograph; ‘that’s the Royal Albert Hall. Good seats, too – front row. This here is Kingsway Hall, Holborn; used to be a famous recording venue. I think some famous jazz acts performed there in the twenties. Turned it into a hotel now, I think. Might be worth popping up there, see if anyone can help with the history? And this,’ she pulled out another one; ‘this is Chelsea Embankment. I recognise this little row of cottages. It’s about halfway down. I wonder who these other people are?’ She pointed at a tall leggy man with a dark moustache and wearing a rather scruffy overcoat, and a pretty young girl with her hair braided on top of her head and a delicate chiffon dress on. ‘They all look so happy, don’t you think?’

Betty nodded. That was the most overwhelming thing about the photographs: the sense of
joie de vivre
that emanated from them, the sparkle in Arlette’s eye that Betty had rarely seen in all her years living with her.

‘You know, if I could go back to any period in time,’ said Alexandra, ‘it would be then. The twenties. Bright Young People, jazz. Everything new and fresh and semi-illicit. I mean, the fact that your grandmother was socialising with black men – it would have been unthinkable before, and for a long time after, too – but the twenties were this little window of optimism and broad-mindedness. And the clothes, sweetie,’ she raised her eyes blissfully towards the ceiling, ‘the clothes. To die for …’

Betty smiled. ‘Arlette always did like clothes,’ she said. ‘She left me her wardrobe, but the stuff she wore when I knew her, well, it was all very formal, you know, very stiff. Lots of starch and boning and tailoring. And in such tiny sizes. I took a few things,’ she said, ‘some négligées, some knitwear, but most of the rest of it, well, we sold it as a job lot.’

Alexandra gasped and put her hands to her mouth. ‘Don’t tell me,’ she said. ‘Please don’t tell me. I shall cry.’

‘Sorry,’ said Betty.

‘No. It’s fine. If it was that small it probably wouldn’t have fit many actresses. Even the tiny ones often aren’t as tiny as women from earlier generations. It’s the waists, usually. Even skinny women today don’t have those hand-span waists they used to have in the old days. Anyway, anyway, what else have you got …?’

‘Erm, some matchbooks.’ Betty passed them over.

‘Can I keep these?’ Alexandra said. ‘I know a guy at the Society who is like a walking encyclopaedia of jazz clubs; he might be able to shed some light on these.’ She shrugged. ‘So exciting.’

She beamed at Betty and Betty smiled back, feeling herself filling up with optimism. Not only did Alexandra have a ton of enthusiasm about the era when Arlette was in London, but she also had access to other people with enthusiasm and knowledge. Betty felt suddenly that solving the mystery was within her grasp, that she had taken a giant leap forward from the back leg of the journey to somewhere near the front.

‘When do you think …?’

‘Oh, tonight!’ Alexandra replied. ‘I’m seeing him tonight. I mean, actually, if you wanted to meet him, ask him some questions for yourself …?’

Betty sighed. ‘Can’t tonight,’ she said. ‘I’m baby-sitting.’

‘Oh, shame. But never mind. Leave it with me. I’ll find out everything I can. Come and see me tomorrow, lunchtime. I’ll let you know what he says.’

‘That would be fantastic,’ said Betty. ‘Thank you so much. If you’re sure you don’t mind?’

‘Mind!’ cried Alexandra. ‘Why would I mind? Jesus, no, this is my idea of total and utter heaven.’ A phone rang and she threw Betty an apologetic look before answering it. Betty waited while she conducted a fascinating and rather heated conversation about a pair of mouldy patchwork flares and an afghan coat that
smelled
of piss. ‘They were immaculate when they left here,’ she was saying. ‘I can only assume that they haven’t been stored properly on the set.’

‘Sorry about that,’ she said a moment later. ‘Pissy afghans. Mouldy jeans. Sublime to the bloody ridiculous. I sometimes feel like my life is being written by a team of stoned students in the sky.’ She smiled. ‘Anyway, give my love to that ugly brother of mine. And we’ll talk tomorrow, OK. And hopefully I’ll have loads of exciting things to tell you.’

She kissed Betty properly on both cheeks, holding on to her arms slightly too tightly. And then she smiled warmly and closed the door, leaving Betty on the landing with a renewed sense of urgency and enthusiasm. She would take over where Peter Lawler had left off. She would be Betty Dean, private eye.

She left the building and headed towards Tottenham Court Road underground station where she took the tube to Holland Park, her heart racing slightly with excitement. This was it, she thought, this was it. Finally the search was properly underway.

31

NUMBER 21 ABINGDON
Villas appeared to be the best house on a remarkable street. The sky was perfectly clear and blue, and the trees on either side of the street were heavy with cherry blossom. The houses were ice-white stucco and it all looked improbably perfect, like a film set. Betty stood outside the house and stared at it for a while. It was fully detached and double-fronted, three floors high and taller than it was wide. The front garden had been given over to parking spaces, four of them. Betty had bought a disposable camera from WH Smith, which she now pulled from her bag. She photographed the house from across the street, furtively, and then slipped the camera quickly back into her bag. She wondered if Arlette had ever been here. Maybe she’d even stayed here. That would probably have been the way things were done, back then. A young girl coming to London would have stayed with a family friend, not rented herself a tiny flat in the red-light district. And this was, according to Jolyon, the home of Arlette’s mother’s best friend from childhood.

Betty crossed the street and approached the house. As Peter Lawler had confirmed, it had been divided into flats, four buttons on a panel by the double front door labelled A, B, C and D. She
cupped
her hands to the glass panels in the door and peered inside. She could see a large hallway, a front door on either side and two staircases in front of her that grew from the centre of the hall and rose in curves towards a landing. In the middle of the hallway was a plinth on which stood a large vase full of silk flowers.

She stepped back onto the driveway. The windows on the ground floor were full height. On the right they were obscured by net curtains, on the left the window was uncovered and Betty could see a glamorous interior, a gold standard lamp in the window and the end of an ivory chaise longue with curled wood trimmings.

Betty sighed.

There was nothing here, nothing to allude to anything about Arlette’s friends, her history. An anonymous building on a beautiful street, all ties to the past categorically severed the minute the house was cut up into apartments. She was about to turn and head back to the tube station when she noticed that the wooden door to the side of the house that led to the back garden was ajar. She glanced round her. The street was quiet and still. She looked up at the house and into the window at the plush apartment but could see no signs of life. She knew that it was bordering on pointless, that a back garden could not possibly hold any clues to the history of someone who had been here seventy-five years ago, and may never have been here at all, but still, she thought, she had come all the way here, she might as well try.

She pushed open the wooden door and tiptoed past another window, through an alleyway full of bins and out onto a long sweep of manicured grass. She kept to the sides of the lawn, not wanting anyone looking from their back windows to see a strange girl tiptoeing across their garden. At the end of the garden was a cluster of trees and rose bushes. If she could get down there, she decided, then she’d be able to obscure herself and have a
proper
look at the back of the house. She hid herself behind a tree, her shoes sinking into soft soil, and then turned to face the house. The ground floor opened up into two sets of double doors, onto a wrought-iron veranda, which ran the width of the house. There was no furniture in the garden, just a lawn and flowerbeds. The back of the house was as bland and uninformative as the front. She crouched down and took a photograph anyway and was about to head back to the street when she saw something carved into the trunk of the tree that she was holding on to for support. She traced her fingertip over it, rubbing off a film of reddish summer dust. Then she scraped away some moss and stared at what lay underneath:

Her pulse quickened and she quickly pulled her camera back out of her bag and took another photograph.

G&A.
Someone and Arlette
. Maybe? Proof, possibly, that Arlette had been here, with someone whose name began with the letter G? At first she assumed the two Xs to be representations of kisses, but then it occurred to her that maybe they were Roman numerals. Maybe it was the number 20: 1920.

She ran then, no longer caring either way, across the lawn and back towards the street. It was still early. She wasn’t due at Dom’s until 5 p.m. Buoyed up and desperate now to build up her body of evidence, she set off for Chelsea Embankment.

32

1920

‘IF YOU LET
me come with you,’ said Lilian, fingering a string of silver and pearl beads at her neck, ‘I will love you for ever and ever and ever.’

Arlette peered at her over the top of Leticia’s sewing machine and frowned.

‘And that is supposed to be an irresistible enticement, is it?’ she said drily.

‘All right then, I will give you something. A gift. Some jewels, a dress. Anything you desire. There must be something of mine you’ve always secretly hankered after?’

Arlette laughed. ‘No,’ she said, ‘not really. Anything I do like, I know I am free to borrow.’

‘Well, then,’ Lilian pursed her pretty lips together, ‘if you don’t let me come with you tonight, then I shall never let you borrow anything of mine ever again!’ Her dark eyes flashed confrontationally at Arlette.

Arlette laughed again, wetted the end of the reel of blue cotton against her tongue and rethreaded the needle on the machine. ‘Lilian,’ she said, ‘it is not up to me. It is up to your mother.’

Lilian rolled her eyes. ‘As if my mother would be able to stop me,’ she said.

‘It is one thing,’ Arlette replied cautiously, ‘for you to disobey your mother’s wishes when it is to socialise with people I don’t know, but when it comes to socialising with my own friends, well, I would feel responsible for you. What if something were to happen? How would I explain it to your mother?’

‘Nothing is going to
happen
!’ Lilian exclaimed.

‘Something
may
happen,’ said Arlette, lining up the hem of her new dress against the machine. ‘If you can persuade your mother to agree to it then, yes, of course, it would be wonderful.’

‘Fine!’ Lilian stared at her angrily for a moment before getting to her feet and flouncing from the room. ‘Fine,’ she muttered again as she stamped off.

Arlette watched her leave with a look of wry amusement. A moment later she was back. ‘Mother says yes,’ she announced triumphantly.

‘Are you certain?’

‘Of course I am certain,’ she said haughtily. Leticia appeared in the doorway then, in a silk robe, holding a small china teacup that Arlette knew would have not a drop of tea in it, but a large measure of gin and a lemon slice instead.

‘I have told her,’ she said, ‘that I trust you, Arlette, and that so long as she does everything you tell her to do, and so long as she does not once leave your side, then yes, she can go to the club with you tonight. But home by midnight. And no more than a small drink or two. Here …’

She passed Lilian a pair of coins, which Lilian glanced at disdainfully.

‘Home by midnight,’ Leticia said again. ‘Is that clear?’

‘Yes, Mother,’ said Lilian, throwing herself into an armchair. ‘Whatever you say, Mother.’