‘Well, it’s a starting point,’ said Betty. ‘There must be records, somewhere, of who lived there and when.’ She had come to this lawyer’s office with a heavy heart and now that same heart was fluttering with excitement. First a thousand pounds. Now mysterious legatees in Soho. Her imagination crackled with potential scenarios. She saw herself pacing sleuth-like through the streets of London in Arlette’s Givenchy mackintosh and a pair of patent court shoes. She envisaged herself peering at sheets of microfiche in a high-ceilinged library, making phone calls to strangers. She knew Arlette and she knew what her intent was. She wanted Betty to find her heir. It was obvious.
‘I don’t mind doing it,’ she said breathlessly.
Everyone turned to look at her.
‘I’ll be happy to go,’ she said.
‘Go where?’ said her mother.
‘To London,’ Betty said. ‘I’ll go to London. I’ll find Clara.’
‘You don’t need to go to London,’ her mother replied hastily. ‘We just have to put an ad in a paper, surely?’
‘Well, yes,’ replied the lawyer, ‘an advert in the appropriate publication would cover your legal obligations.’
‘Well, then,’ said Alison, ‘there you go. No need to go anywhere.’
Betty blinked at her, shocked that she could have missed the point so dramatically. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘but I want to.’
‘But, why? Why would you want to find her? If you find her, you won’t get the money.’
‘I don’t want the money.’ The words flew out of Betty’s mouth before she had even thought about it. Everyone looked at her in amazement. ‘I don’t want the money,’ she said again. ‘Really.’
‘But ten thousand pounds, Lizzy,’ said her mother. ‘Think what you could do with that. That could be a deposit on a flat. A trip around the world. A wedding.’
‘A
wedding
?’ Betty sneered.
‘Well,’ her mother shrugged, ‘maybe not a wedding. But something. Something worth having.’
‘Arlette already gave me everything worth having,’ she said piously. ‘She gave me self-esteem, self-belief. I don’t need her money.’ Betty exhaled, conscious of the totally ridiculous melodrama of her preceding statement. It was only half true. The money would be nice. But not as nice as the notion of leaving Guernsey with a thousand pounds in her pocket and a burning mission to find a mysterious stranger. She was twenty-two years old and any ambition she may have had (and she wasn’t sure there’d ever been one) had curled up and died in the wake of her responsibilities to Arlette over the past few years.
The last year, in particular, had been the toughest. Arlette had been nothing more than a terrified bag of bones, there had been no more ‘I love yous’, no unintentionally funny outbursts, Bella was gone, the carer left, the summer was a washout and for a while Betty had lost herself in a fug of night-time waking, wet afternoons and loneliness. She had really felt at times that Arlette might never, never die, that she might, in fact, be trapped in the
house
with her breathing corpse for another ten years. And then, one morning, twelve days ago, Betty had woken with a start, eyed her alarm clock and seen with a shock the improbably late hour of 09.12 blinking at her. Then she’d known immediately, without even a moment’s doubt, that Arlette was dead.
She had cried, quite unexpectedly, when she touched the cold papery skin of Arlette’s bunched-together hands a moment later. She did not know whether they were tears of sadness or tears of relief. Either way, they were heartfelt. She had sat with Arlette for a full thirty minutes before she called anyone, sat and made her look the best she could. She’d combed her sparse hair, tidied her nightdress, removed her unsoiled incontinence pants and pulled her nightdress down over her legs as long as it would go. She’d wiped a tidemark of dried spittle from the corners of her mouth, dabbed some pink lipstick on with her fingertips and coloured her cheeks with a coral-tinted powder. Then she’d sat, her legs crossed together, her arms wrapped round her knees and just stared at Arlette, feeling the essence of her; the glamour, the attitude, the sharpness of her mind and her thwarted attempt at living an unconventional life, feeling it all fill the room and fill her soul, reminding her why she had loved this woman and emphasising everything that she had given to her, rather than what the final years of her life had taken away.
But suddenly it was as though it barely mattered. Suddenly Betty could look back on these last few years and smile, knowing that she had done the right thing for the right reasons and that now,
exactly
now, was absolutely the perfect moment for these binds to be severed and for her adult life finally to begin.
She would not have been ready for it before, she would not have been equipped, and now she was. And here it was, not an ambition, as such, but a mission, a goal, a
raison d’être
. Ten thousand pounds would be nice, she mused, but having a reason to get up every morning now that Arlette was gone was even nicer.
*
Betty pulled the coat free of its tissue fillings and let it fall to its full length. It was a generous coat, constructed from more animals than it rightly needed. It fell in folds and drapes, and cascaded to just above the mid-calf. Betty pulled it on and turned to her reflection in Arlette’s full-length mirror. She laughed. She looked crazy. A small child with white-blond hair, wrapped deep inside a tent of fur. She found shoes in the bottom of Arlette’s wardrobe, kicked off her canvas pumps and squeezed her feet into a pair of patent courts with small gold buckles. There. Now she stood three inches taller, inhabiting the coat slightly more convincingly. From Arlette’s dressing table she took a pair of ornate paste earrings and clipped them beside her silver hoops. She ruffled her white-blond hair with her fingertips and then tried to settle it back down again into something sleeker. Still, though, she could not take herself seriously inside this thing. Still the political incorrectness of it made her half want to rip it off with enraged disgust, half want to cry with laughter. But it was hers. It belonged to her, by law. Arlette’s mink was now Betty’s mink.
The mink wasn’t the only thing that Arlette had left for Betty on the top shelf of her middle wardrobe. There was also a book. It was
Pollyanna
, a vintage copy with an illustrated cover of a small blonde girl in a bonnet and a yellow plaid dress clutching a flower basket full of white peonies. Betty opened it to the title page and found an inscription:
To Little Miss Pickle
I do hope that you will be a glad girl
Yours eternally,
Arlette Lafolley
Betty blinked at the words.
Pickle
?
Clara Pickle.
The woman in the will.
Her breath caught.
Here was a clue. The first evidence that the woman in the will existed in a moment separate from the moment at which Arlette had placed her there. She stared at the inscription for a while, trying to read something more into it, some extra dimension, some brighter light, but failed to find any.
She put the book down and pulled the collars of the fur coat together, bringing them to her nose. The coat smelled of her room, Arlette’s room. It smelled of old face powder and faded perfume. It smelled of Elizabeth’s childhood, long afternoons sitting at Arlette’s dressing table, trying on her paste necklaces, dabbing droplets of her heady scent onto her tiny wrists and wrapping herself up in shawls and gowns and rabbit-fur stoles. It smelled of a life that Elizabeth had both adored and detested, a life of duty and of crushed dreams.
Then she appraised herself once more in Arlette’s mirror and spoke out loud. ‘Don’t you worry, Arlette,’ she said, ‘I’ll find her for you. Whoever on earth she is, I’ll find Clara Pickle and I’ll give her her book for you. I promise.’
7
BETTY CHECKED THE
address on the letter again, and then the number on the door. Behind her, fixed to the exterior wall of a pub was a sign saying ‘Berwick Street’. On the buzzer was a sticker with ‘Flat D’ written on it in black marker. She was definitely in the right place. She pressed the button again and waited. Still no response. Betty glanced around her. The market was packing up. The pavement was littered with old wrappers, cabbage leaves and rotten fruit. Men were shouting very loudly about fifty pee for a pound and everything must go, the sky was Quink blue and the air smelled of stale beer and old fruit.
She had been standing here now for nearly fifteen minutes. Her rucksack sat against the wall, looking as tired and wilted as Betty felt. It had been a long, long day. But more than the tiredness of travelling, Betty was feeling the sheer, wrung-out exhaustion of the years it had taken her finally to get to this place.
But for some reason, a girl called Marni Ali, with whom Betty had had a very animated and slightly confusing phone conversation just the night before, and who had promised to meet her here at exactly six o’clock with a key to let her in, was nowhere to be seen.
Gorgeous studio flat
Central Soho location
Adjacent to famous Berwick Street Market
£400 a month + bills
There’d been no picture. ‘Adjacent’ had suggested ‘alongside’, ‘close to’, ‘a few metres from’. Not ‘right in the screaming, squirming middle of’. Betty pulled her fur coat tighter around her body and shivered.
She’d taken the first flat she’d been offered by an agency she’d phoned the day after Arlette’s funeral. They’d faxed across the details to her mum’s office.
‘Four hundred pounds a month!’ her mother had exclaimed. ‘That sounds an awful lot. Just for a studio.’
‘Yes,’ she’d countered huffily, ‘but it’s in
Soho
.’
‘Well, yes, I can see that. But surely there must be something cheaper?’
‘No,’ Betty had said, snatching the fax from her mother’s hand. ‘This is fine. This is perfect. It’s just been redecorated and it’s available from next Wednesday. I don’t want to wait another minute. I’ve waited enough minutes. I want this flat.’
‘Well,’ her mother had sighed, ‘you’re a grown woman. You can make your own decisions. But Arlette’s money isn’t going to last very long if you’re spending that much on rent. When I lived in London I had a tiny room in a house out on the end of the Piccadilly line. And I could be in Soho in twenty-two minutes flat.’
‘But you don’t understand. When you’re on a tube, you’re
leaving
Soho. I don’t want to leave Soho. I want to
live
there.’
Her mother had sighed again. ‘So. You’ve got enough rent money for ten weeks. Then what happens?’
‘It’s fine,’ Betty had assured her. ‘I’ll get a job. I won’t need Arlette’s money for long.’
‘A job? In London? With a B.Tech in General Art and
Design
? And no work experience? Oh my God.’ Her mother had clasped her ears as though trying to keep Betty’s ill-thought-out plans from torturing them.
‘It will be
fine
.’ Betty folded her arms across her chest.
‘There’ll be thirty people lined up behind you for every job you apply for. All of them with more experience than you!’
‘Yes!’ she’d snapped. ‘I know! But they won’t be
me
, will they?’
She’d paused then, and stared at her mother for a second or two. She had shocked herself. She had always been a self-confident girl. Especially since moving to Guernsey and being picked out for special favour, first by Bella and then by Arlette. In all her years on that little speck of rock and soil in the middle of the English Channel, Betty had always floated somewhere above everything, in her big house, high above the sea, with her beautiful face, her quirky style, and latterly, of course, her saint-like commitment to the care of an age-ravaged lady right up until her final, unheard exhalation. Everyone knew who Betty Dean was. Everyone knew where she lived.
So it stood to reason, in Betty’s opinion, that she and Soho were made for each other, that they were soul mates, a perfect fit. She had no concerns about being accepted and about fitting in. She was, she believed, entirely to the manner born.
Except that this girl called Marni didn’t seem to have noticed. This girl called Marni was not here to greet her, to welcome Betty warmly and effusively to her new life. Instead, Betty was standing alone in the dark, invisible and slightly terrified. She breathed in deeply to stop herself crying and then scanned the street up and down for a payphone. She spied one to her left but it was at a critical distance from the flat. If this Marni girl arrived while she was on the phone, she would not know she was there and might just flit away again. She cast around helplessly, hoping for inspiration, and then she saw a man, late twenties, early thirties, hauling old LPs into boxes on the stall closest to where she stood.
‘Excuse me?’
‘Yes,’ he replied, slightly impatiently.
‘I need to make a phone call, but I’m supposed to be meeting someone here.’ She pointed at the front door. ‘Will you be here for the next few minutes?’
He looked at her uncertainly as though she had just spoken to him in Mandarin.
‘What?’ he said.
Betty sighed. She had had a very long day and she could see that charm and articulacy would be wasted on this man. ‘I’m going to make a phone call,’ she said abruptly. ‘If a woman turns up here, can you tell her I’m over there? Please?’
She didn’t wait for him to reply, just hitched her rucksack over her shoulder and stomped off to the phone booth.
The interior of the booth was rank, urine-sodden, damp and covered in graffiti. As Betty tapped in Marni’s phone number, she looked at the patchwork of calling cards attached to the walls with blobs of Blu-Tack. Asian babes. Earth mothers. African queens. Busty beauties. Naughty schoolgirls. Basques, whips, boots, lips, stockings, nails, heels. A dazzling collage of commercial sexual opportunities.
‘Oh, hello,’ she began as the phone was answered by a man with an Asian accent. ‘Is Marni there, please?’
‘No, she’s not, I’m afraid. Who is this calling, please?’