Before I Met You (15 page)

Her eyes widened at the sight of Betty.

‘What you been
doing
in there?’ she demanded.

Betty looked at her curiously. ‘Fixing the
toilet
,’ she said haughtily.

Candy Lee threw her a haughty look. ‘Why it take you so long?’

‘Because it
did
.’

‘Come in with me.’ She dragged Betty by the hand into the bathroom and locked the door behind them. Candy had clearly been carrying a heavy bladder for quite some time. Her urine was audible hitting the water in the bowl and she sighed with pleasure as she peed. Betty stared at her in horror.

‘Can I go now?’ she asked.

‘No! No. You stay. I like you. I want to talk to you.’

‘Someone’s waiting for me,’ Betty said, ‘outside. Maybe we can talk later?’

‘No,’ Candy leaned towards Betty and grabbed her wrist, ‘
now
. I want to talk
now
. Why it stink so bad in here? Someone been sick. So disgusting.’ She waved her hand in front of her nose and then pulled a canister of Impulse body spray out of a small bag slung diagonally across her chest, which she sprayed liberally around herself. ‘Here,’ she said, ‘you too. You smell of sick.’ Before Betty had a chance to argue, she had been aggressively perfumed with something that smelled like old ladies and toilet freshener.

‘Listen, you, you are a beautiful girl.’

Betty stared at her mutely.

‘You are prettiest girl I ever seen.’

‘Er …’

‘Well, nearly prettiest girl I ever seen. Meg Ryan prettiest girl I ever seen. But you are close. I like girls.’ ‘Oh …’

‘I like girls like you. Pretty girls, with big eyes and skinny bodies. You are my dream girl,’ she smiled. ‘You ever been with a girl before?’

Betty shook her head. ‘No,’ she said, feeling that there should be no grey areas whatsoever in her response. ‘Never.’

‘You should go with a girl. You should go with me. I am the best girl. The best one in Soho. The best one in London.’ She got to her feet, wiped herself and pulled up her lime-green pants. Then she pulled down her denim skirt and stared meaningfully at Betty for a moment. ‘See this,’ she said, stepping closer to Betty, ‘look.’ She stuck out her tongue and flashed a silver stud at her. ‘This is for pretty girls, missy. Pretty girls like you.’

Betty smiled. ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘didn’t that hurt?’

Candy’s face fell. ‘No!’ she barked. ‘It did not
hurt
. It is for the pleasure of my girls. It is sweet feeling. I can make you come for ten minutes with this. Maybe some time fifteen.’

Betty tried not to flinch at these words. ‘It’s not really … I’m not quite … I like boys.’

‘Ha!’ snapped Candy. ‘We
all
like boys. Everyone likes boys! Boys are
nice
! But girls are nicer.’ She was standing very close to Betty now, close enough for the rum fumes on her breath to form a cloud around her head, close enough to feel her body heat, close enough to notice a small scar above her right eyebrow and a scattering of dandruff on the shoulders of her denim jacket.

Betty took a step back from her and smiled tightly. ‘No, really, honestly, it’s not my thing. It’s not … I’ve never wanted to.’

‘I was twenty-eight first time I slept with a girl. All those years before I thought I didn’t want to. I was wrong.’ She threw her a bright smile, all small white teeth and glinting silver. ‘Come on,’ she put her hand to Betty’s hair and stroked it. ‘Come downstairs. Come to me. Come with me. Come …’ She licked her lips with her studded tongue.

‘No!’ said Betty. ‘Thank you! Really. My friend is waiting, I really need to go …’

Candy sighed and let her hand drop from Betty’s hair. ‘Well, lucky for you,’ she said, ‘I am only down there.’ She pointed beneath their feet. ‘Lucky for you, any time you want me, you
can
come and have me. Just knock on my door.’ She leaned across Betty’s body so that they were touching almost from neck to crotch and banged against the bathroom door with her knuckles,
rat-tatatat
. ‘Like this. Then I will know is you. What your name?’

‘Betty,’ she replied breathlessly.

Candy’s eyes widened. She trailed her fingertips dramatically across Betty’s cheek and then opened the bathroom door to leave, her beer in one hand, the rum bottle gripped beneath her arm. But before she went she turned one more time and looked at Betty sharply. ‘And stop smoking outside my window. So rude.’

She tutted loudly and pulled the door sharply closed behind her, and Betty let herself fall onto the side of the bath. She touched her cheek where Candy’s finger had just been and shuddered. Then she found her way to the kitchen and poured herself another tumbler of vodka. She noticed briefly that the party had thinned out, that the DJ was asleep on the sofa, that the music was quieter, that Candy was nowhere to be seen, that the Japanese American called Akiko was pensively writing something in a journal and that Joe Joe was rammed up in the corner kissing a man with a blond buzz cut and a vintage bowling shirt, his hands tucked casually in the man’s back pockets.

She absorbed all this numbly and slowly, as though on a two-second time delay. Then she took the tumbler of vodka and her tobacco pouch out of the flat and up towards the fire escape. She felt curiously excited, a swell of anticipation in her chest as she ascended the three steps to the fire-escape door. She could see where most of the party guests had gone as she pulled open the door. The escape was rammed with bodies, the air was thick with the smell of tobacco and marijuana, there was a low-level buzz of muted conversation, someone was playing a guitar. The only light out here came from the bulb on the landing downstairs.

Betty squeezed her way through the mass of people, searching for the reassuring shape of John Brightly, dying to tell him about her encounter with Candy Lee, dying to carry on their conversation, find out more about him, tell him more about her. She stepped over legs and climbed over couples, but it was soon obvious to her that he wasn’t there. Maybe he’d come out here, taken one look at this messy sprawl of stupefied youth and decided that he was too old and wise to hang around here.

She sighed and fell to her haunches.

She was tired now.

It was late and she was tired and she wanted to go to bed.

But she couldn’t because there was a party in her house. A party, probably, in her bed.

She rolled herself a cigarette and smoked it slowly and unhappily, surrounded by strangers, and she wished for a moment that she had never left Guernsey.

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.