A smiling man took to the stage then, his hands clasped together, his hair slicked back with pomade, a daffodil pinned to his lapel and said, in a faux American accent: ‘Ladies and gentleman, sirs, lords, dukes and duchesses, kings and queens, it is my pleasure to introduce to you, our very own special guests, three of the most celebrated performers from the world-renowned Southern Syncopated Orchestra, and all the way from the sun-kissed isles of the Caribbean, please put your hands together, for Sandy Beach and his infectious Love Brothers.’
Arlette did indeed put her hands together, and she clapped until they rang with pain. The spotlights swung up and the curtains were parted and there he was. Handsome and bright-eyed, his clarinet clutched between his long fingers, in a royal-blue suit and a matching mohair fedora, his foot tapping along in rhythm with the opening bars.
Arlette caught her breath and stared.
She stared and she stared, drinking in every detail of him, knowing he would be unable to see her with all those lights in his eyes, knowing that after tonight she might never see him again.
‘He looks well,’ Minu whispered loudly in her ear.
‘Yes,’ agreed Arlette. ‘He does.’
After the performance, she and Minu made their way to the backstage, a place Arlette was by now intimately familiar with. She’d stood in a dozen different backstage areas a hundred times; she knew the smells, the noises, the protocols.
And then, even before she saw him, she smelled him: vanilla and sandalwood, the scent she’d helped him choose in Liberty almost a year ago. She turned and there he was, jacketless, his shirt stuck to his body with sweat, a towel in one hand, a cold beer in the other, a smile from some other just-finished conversation still playing on his lips.
‘Oh, my dear sweet goodness,’ he drawled, the smile freezing in place.
‘Hello,’ she said.
He looked behind himself and to the left and right as though the reason for Arlette’s presence might somehow make itself known in physical form.
‘Well, gosh, hello!’
‘You were wonderful tonight,’ she continued brightly. ‘Truly amazing.’
‘Why, thank you, Miss De La Mare. Or should I say, Mrs …?’
‘No, I am Miss. Still.’
‘And you came …’ he looked again from left to right, ‘… alone?’
She nodded. ‘Gideon and I are no longer together. I lost the baby. The marriage is to be annulled.’
Godfrey’s eyebrows jumped up towards his hairline. ‘My goodness, my goodness.’ He rubbed his chin and stared at the ground. ‘Well, well, what an unexpected turn of events. And of
course
, I hope it goes without saying that I am truly,
truly
sorry for your loss.’
‘Thank you, Godfrey. But it was for the best.’
He glanced at her uncertainly, taken aback by her words.
‘The marriage was never consummated, Godfrey,’ she whispered meaningfully.
He stared at her again in surprise. ‘But …?’
‘It was
never
consummated. The baby,’ she lowered her voice further, ‘it was Gideon’s fault. He took advantage of me …’
She cleared her throat and flushed red. It was the first time she had told anyone and the words burned like hot coals as they left her mouth.
Godfrey blinked and shook his head, as though mistaken in what he had heard her say. ‘You mean, he …?’
‘Yes,’ she whispered. ‘At my birthday party.’
His face clouded over then, with anger. ‘He … he …’ He turned this way and that, trying to find a place for himself. ‘Jesus
Christ
, Arlette, why didn’t you tell me?’
‘Because it was all such a horrible, terrible mess and I wanted everything to be as simple as possible. Because it was the right thing to do.’
‘How could that have been the right thing to do? We were in
love
, Arlette. We were going to be together. If you’d told me, I could have –’
‘What, Godfrey? What could you have done? There is nothing you could have done. Hit him? Beaten him to a bloody mess? Then what? I would have had a bleeding husband and I would still have been pregnant. And you might have ended up in gaol.’
‘I would not have hit him, Arlette. I have never hit another person in my life. I would have …’ He ground his hands together as he tried to find inside himself a solution to a problem that had passed. ‘I would have just wanted to know. So that I could have held you and taken care of you. So that I might not
have
spent the past six months in a state of terrible indescribable pain, feeling like a stake had been passed through my heart and left there.’
Arlette took his hands in hers and said, ‘It is done now. It is finished. We can go now and dance. Would you like that? To go dancing?’
He lifted his gaze from the floor and towards her. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I would very much like to go dancing. Thank you.’
They danced until three in the morning. It was the first time Arlette had danced since her birthday party in September. She felt young and light upon her feet, and for moments at a time it was really possible to believe that the past six months had never happened, that her life had continued as it had been destined to before Godfrey had gone away to Manchester and left her in the untrustworthy hands of Gideon. But she wanted more from tonight than to dance and to laugh; she had a deep, smouldering need within her to cover over the past with a new layer, to paste over the foulness of what Gideon had done to her with the goodness of what Godfrey could do for her. She wanted to go to bed with him. Desperately. And so when he offered to see her home to the Millers’ she said, very firmly, ‘No. I would like to go home with you.’
He looked at her curiously. ‘I am not really supposed to have lady friends to stay,’ he said, in a tone of voice that suggested he might be prepared to risk the wrath of his landlady on this occasion.
‘I know,’ said Arlette. ‘And I have no intention of
staying
, Godfrey. I should merely visit. Very briefly.’
Godfrey smiled at her. ‘Not too briefly, I hope?’
‘Let us not discuss it for another moment. I honestly feel there is nothing to lose. Nothing whatsoever.’
Godfrey said, ‘I could not agree more. Shall we?’ he offered her the crook of his elbow and they walked together from the
club
and into a carriage headed for the murky unknown depths of a place called New Cross.
The sun rose at six a.m. and Arlette saw clearly for the first time the dank starkness of Godfrey’s lodgings. They were squeezed, at very close quarters, upon a collapsible bed with a very thin mattress. The room was in fact only half a room, carved in two from a bigger room by a thin wall papered over with a print of damp roses. Godfrey had a sink, through which ran a long crack such that it looked as if it might fall apart at the merest touch. His clothes hung from a coat stand in the middle of the room – ‘to keep them as far away as possible from the mould on the walls,’ he’d explained. A small window hung with dirty lace looked out over a builder’s yard and cold air blew in through a missing pane. As she awoke she felt a vague horror at her surroundings, uncomfortable after a night on the loose springs of the cheap bed, and cold in spite of the proximity of Godfrey on the bed next to her. The room smelled of stale cooking: mushy vegetables and boiled bones. She brought herself closer to Godfrey’s body, the only savoury thing in the room, and he tucked his head neatly into the crook of her neck.
The room was ugly and it smelled, but in the years and the decades to come, when she looked back on this watery early April morning in a New Cross backstreet in 1921, Arlette would be filled with deep nostalgic yearning. In her mind, Godfrey’s charmless room would take on the air of a magical fairy-tale setting, an enchanted room with real roses climbing up the walls and swallows pirouetting outside the window. Because unknown to her, this would be the last time she would feel Godfrey’s body against hers, the last time she would feel his breath in the crook of her neck, his fingers curled round hers, and the last time in her whole life that she would experience real happiness.
She wished she’d known it at the time, wished she’d thought
less
of the smell of boiled bones and more of the feeling of his satin skin. She wished she had not rushed away so soon, had not been so concerned with the prospect of discovery by a red-faced landlady. And she wished she had said more to him, more than the rushed words of someone who thinks they have all the time in the world. She had not known at that precise moment that she was not living in her happy ever after, that her happy ever after was not going to materialise, that something had gone wrong during the editing process of the screenplay of her life. That while she made her rushed goodbyes, her unnecessary escape to the warmth and comfort of Leticia Miller’s house, other things were shifting around, little tiny imperceptible happenings that, during the course of the day to come, were going to hammer the path of her life completely out of shape.
A confused and gin-sodden Leticia was crouching in the front garden of her beautiful stucco house in Holland Park, her youngest son in her arms, her daughter by her side holding the cat, watching it burn slowly, but purposefully to the ground. A dozen firefighters were trying their best to dampen the flames, but already the bones and cavities of the house were clear to see; already it was obvious the house was dead.
‘It’s
all my fault
!’ Leticia was wailing. ‘All my fault!’
Lilian merely scowled at her and rubbed the cat’s head.
‘What happened?’ asked Arlette, running from the hackney carriage.
‘A burning cigarette. It fell from my fingers onto my discarded clothes. I believe, also, an upended bottle of something flammable may have played a part …’ She said all of this in a high-pitched voice, tremulous and wistful, as though recounting a lovely dream. She smiled and held her boy closer to her.
‘Mother was
drunk
. Out for the count. While her children slept. The maid sounded the alarm. Thank
God
there was one
responsible
adult in the house otherwise who knows what might have become of all of us?’
The maid stood to their left, wrapped in a blanket, drinking something warm from a hipflask. The last of the night darkness had left the sky now and the scene was bathed in the stark light of day.
Lilian said, ‘I’m going back to Philip’s house.’ She looked at Arlette. ‘Will you come with me?’
Arlette looked from the house to Leticia and then to Lilian. Philip’s house next door looked warm and welcoming. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘if you think they won’t mind?’
‘Of course they won’t. They’re the very definition of hospitable. Mother, you should come too, let James get warm, get something to eat.’
‘No,’ said her mother numbly. ‘No, you take James. I’ll stay here. Until it’s done. I can’t go until it’s done.’
So Arlette, Lilian, James and the cat headed next door where Philip’s parents made sure they were given bowls of steaming porridge and strong cups of coffee, and offered them beds for the nights to come.
‘That is so, so kind of you, thank you so much. And, of course, Father has been telegraphed. He’ll be home soon, I’m sure. He’ll make arrangements for us all. This will be only for a night or two.’
‘As long as it needs,’ Philip’s mother said. ‘As long as it takes.’ And then she looked at Arlette and said, ‘And you, Miss …?’
‘Miss De La Mare.’
‘Yes, of course, Miss De La Mare, you are welcome to stay, too, of course.’
Arlette smiled blankly. The offer was sincerely voiced, but Arlette felt a void behind it, something empty and non-existent. She would stay tonight, quite happily in this warm and welcoming house of strangers, she would stay quite happily the night after, and the night after that. But then what? Mr Miller
would
return, he would probably move the family into a suite at a smart hotel, or possibly take a short lease on an apartment for them all. Again, Arlette felt sure that she would be welcome, that space would be found for her, but again, there was a darkness behind the fact. Because she was twenty-two years old, she had shared rooms with a girlfriend that she had paid for with her own earned money, she had run a department in a famous London store, she had been married, she had lived in her own home, she had taken a baby to six months’ gestation and delivered it dead, she had annulled a marriage and spent the night with her charismatic lover in a boarding house in New Cross, and the days of living off the generosity of her mother’s friends seemed no longer to be quite appropriate. She was no longer ‘spending some time in London’, she was living here, and it was time, she suddenly believed, to put down roots, to stop being a transient, a guest. It was time to start her life properly.
‘Thank you,’ she said fulsomely. ‘Thank you so much. That would be most kind.’
But already she was making plans for the next phase. Already she was dreaming of the register office wedding, a just-so little blue dress, a small bouquet of gerbera daisies and sandalwood blossom, a raucous party at the Blue Butterfly or the Cygnet, maybe fancy dress, certainly an open invitation to the whole orchestra and all of her friends. She thought of the little house that she and Godfrey could share, maybe on a neat terrace somewhere in south London; she would not mind, some bits of south London were rather nice, or so she’d been told. She thought of a small cosy kitchen and a cat or two. She thought of friendly neighbours, curious about the unusual couple next door, him black, her white, both so pleasant, both so smart. She thought about parties and tours, she thought even about taking Godfrey to Guernsey, where she would march him into her mother’s house with pride, pretend that her face wasn’t really contorted with not knowing what to say. She thought about babies and she
thought
about a long cruise to the Caribbean, to visit his mother, with a pair of adorable coffee-skinned tots by their side. She saw it all, clearer than she’d ever seen anything in her life.
She saw her future.
50
1995
BETTY AWOKE THE
following morning at six thirty, in spite of having turned her alarm clock off the night before in preparation for her first lie-in in nearly a week. For a moment she forgot that she wasn’t going to work and almost leaped out of bed. But then she remembered. Amy and the kids were in the Cotswolds. She was free until six o’clock. And then she remembered something else. What Alexandra had told her the night before. About a man called Sandy Beach. Or Godfrey Pickle.