A Vision of Loveliness (29 page)

Doreen looked like death warmed up. There was a good inch of grey roots on her lazy twist of Golden Amber hair. She was dressed but June had made her wear a fluffy pink bed jacket over her clothes as if to show she wasn’t quite the ticket. She was sat on the settee sucking thoughtfully on a banana. It still had the skin on.

Half an hour was going to be more than enough, Jane decided. Even when you went to see someone in hospital (one of Doreen’s few hobbies) you never stayed longer than that, so as not to tire the patient and before you yourself got tired of sitting there, sneaking grapes and promising them their old selves.

Doreen was definitely not her old self but maybe she didn’t want her old self. As soon as she recognised Jane (which took a bit of time: she had to take the mink hat off) she cracked open her face to show all her own teeth.

‘Don’t you look nice? Lovely colour. Don’t she look nice, June? Lovely colour on you. What colour would you call that?’

‘Purple?’ June was clueless about colours.

‘Purple?’

‘Purple.’

‘Lovely purple colour.’

Doreen had so seldom sat down in the front room – even at Christmas she was always in and out to the kitchen moaning about not having had a chance to take the weight off her feet – that she thought she was staying somewhere else. Somewhere a bit posh to judge from all the tea trays and doilies June kept serving up. The kettle whistled and June dived back into the kitchen.

‘Nice here, innit?’ she whispered, chummily.

She was wearing pale blue bedroom slippers. These seemed to bother her slightly. None of the other guests had slippers on. Did they let you wear slippers in the lounge?

‘Next time I come here I’ll wear my tan pumps. Bit smarter.’

She caught sight of Jane again and smiled a bit more. Her face ached with the unfamiliar exercise.

‘You
do
look smart. Lovely colour. What colour would you call that?’

Christ on a bike.

June came back in with a tray. The second-best tea set, which had only ever had one (disastrous) outing from the china cabinet to the best of Jane’s knowledge, suddenly appeared, complete with a new cake plate and a doily and a pile of slightly burnt-looking cupcakes decorated with what looked like bits of red and green plastic –
fun to make, ten minutes to bake
.

June had taken to making tea all the time and packet-mix cakes which she was convinced were more convenient (it said so on the box). Her new best friend Valerie’s mother had a two-tiered cake plate with doilies. And a biscuit barrel. And jam in a cut-glass pot. June had bought Doreen a cake plate for her birthday in February so that there’d be something nice on the table when Valerie came round but Doreen (this was before The Turn) took it back to the department store and exchanged it for a waterproof sheet for Georgette and a pair of support stockings. June could buy all the cake plates she wanted now.

June’s new mumsy manner had got into her conversation. Jane looked very smart. The buses could be murder. Had she had a good journey down?

Oh thank you, God.

‘Oh June, thank goodness you’ve reminded me. I ought to take a cup out to my driver. He’s waiting in the car.’ (She didn’t say ‘Bentley’ in case they didn’t know what it was.)

Time was when Doreen’s fat blue and white hand would have broken the handle off the teacup on hearing such a pile of swank but the new, improved Doreen looked up, and her face cracked into another dazzling black smile.

‘Car?’

A nicer person than Jane would have offered to take her out for a ride but then a nicer person would have come on the bloody bus.

June covered her surprise by faffing about getting another cup and saucer – being careful not to get the one with the glued handle. ‘Did you hire one of them mini cabs then?’ June simply couldn’t make out what Jane was doing with a driver.

‘He works for some friends of mine. They didn’t need the car today.’

‘Nice friends you got.’

Bob was curled up with
Titbits
–
Nudity on Our Stages: does it go too far?
– smoking his way through a pack of ten Player’s Navy Cut. His cap was pulled low over his eyes against the morning sun. He looked very sexy suddenly. She passed his tea (two sugars) and cupcakes (just add an egg) through the window of the Bentley. She knitted him a brave little smile.

‘I’m
so
glad you’re here. I shan’t be too much longer.’

A dozen net curtains twitched back into place as she modelled her way back up the front garden path; Jane is wearing a Vision in Violet in a cunningly cut lightweight worsted bouclé lined with pure silk and it cost more than your last bloody rates bill.

Doreen got a big kick out of the tea tray but she was convinced that the hotel waitresses were watching her every move so she came over all genteel, sticking her little finger out sideways as she stirred in the sugar and passing the cake plate to Jane.

‘
Do
have another sandbag.’

Sister June weighed in with her two pennyworth.

‘She forgets words. Doctor’ (‘Doctor’: Dr What? Like there was only one) ‘says you have to expect that in her condition. But we try to keep her Mentally Alert.’

This basically involved getting Doreen her first ever library book. A large-print edition of Phyllis Matthewman’s
Wife on Approval
was on the table beside her, the polythene cover all tacky with handling. Doreen seemed to thoroughly enjoy it – ‘Charles Trevor’s career depended on his being married, and quickly’. June had taken it back to the library one Saturday afternoon after Doreen had finally finished it.

‘Where’s my book?’

‘I got you a new one,
Cupid in Mayfair
. It’s the same writer. I’m sure you’ll like it.’

‘No, but where’s
my
book? My book I was reading.’

Sunday was murder but June had managed to get to the library on Monday lunchtime and get Doreen’s old book back again. She must have read it twenty times over by now but she always cried in exactly the same place: ‘He held her closely, murmuring incoherent love words.’

Kenneth had just got back after a morning spent lurking in a record shop on Streatham High Road. He never bought anything (George and Doreen didn’t have a gramophone) but the shop had booths where you could listen and Kenneth and his friend Simon would take it in turns to ask for different Charlie Parker records.

Kenneth was fascinated by Jane’s mink hat. Apparently the mink was one of the weasel family and when it had killed its prey it ate the brain first followed by the contents of the stomach. It was in one of his Wonder Books of Knowledge. Apparently mink farmers usually fed them on diseased liver. Fuck off, Kenneth.

Uncle George came in just as June was clearing away the teacups. He’d been down at the bottom of the garden, poking bare earth with a hoe, and he’d have been there still, only he thought Jane would have left by now. He seemed embarrassed.

‘Hello Jane, love. I didn’t know you were here. You look very nice. Doesn’t she look nice, Reen?’

‘Don’t she look nice! Lovely colour. What colour would you call that?’

Oh fuck, here we go again.

Doreen took her husband’s hand and stroked it against her face, smearing the leaking tears across her purple cheeks. Uncle George tried to think of something else to say.

‘Your friend got her flat then? June says you’ve got a Mayfair exchange.’ Uncle George said this with a likely-story smile, as if Jane had pulled it off by hanging round outside a Park Lane call box waiting for the phone to ring. Even if she was really living there it was sure to end in tears. They might promise you a flat in Mayfair but you ended up dead in some back-street abortionist’s or on the game in Port Said. The
News of the World
was quite clear on this point. When she told him that Suzy’s uncle had bought the flat for her it was obvious he didn’t believe a word.

‘We’ve been getting quite a lot of modelling work. Suzy and I are in all the magazines this month, look.’

She showed him the Frockways ad. That wrong-footed him. Models made a nice few bob. But he still looked uneasy.

Jane left the
Vogue
on one of the pouffes then tailed her sister out to the kitchen where the Fairy June had obviously been hard at work. She’d borrowed Valerie’s mother’s sewing machine and made a new curtain for under the sink out of Jane’s orange gingham summer dress; she’d polished the lino in here as well and wrecked the enamel top of the kitchen table with a sheet of Fablon gaily covered in orange and yellow saucepans.
If you can accustom yourself to doing household tasks with a smile, you’ll have come a long way towards being prepared for married life and motherhood.

‘This looks a lot brighter.’ What else could you say?

‘Auntie was never very interested in home-making.’ The smug, stupid voice of someone who knew how to get candle wax out of velvet (only she didn’t own any velvet). If this was home-making you could hardly blame Doreen for losing interest.

In the corner next to the Utility dresser was a sparkling new fridge. It looked very strange and futuristic in Doreen’s old back kitchen. The handbook was still on top of it with a picture of some overdressed bint in a cocktail frock drunkenly hugging her new Electrolux which was packed with chickens and wine bottles and cans of Long Life lager.

‘We had to get it on the never-never. It’ll cost over eighty pounds when it’s finally paid for but it was a necessity really. I can’t go shopping every day like Auntie used to.’

‘What do you do about her and Georgette while you’re at college?’

‘We manage.’ Which was just code for ‘no thanks to you’. ‘Georgette goes to the nursery round the corner every morning and Mrs Barton down the road picks her up and minds her till I come and fetch her. She wants thirty bob a week but we’ve no choice. I’ve been doing my teaching experience at our old junior school all this term so I can nip home to give Auntie her lunch. She’s not too bad really. She can use the toilet all right at least. The main thing is to stop her going out.’

‘The traffic must be a worry.’

‘It’s not that so much. It’s just that she will keep’ – dramatic whisper – ‘
showing herself
to people. I’ve had to have another lock put on the front door. But she does it everywhere – at The Doctor’s even. I bought her some new panties from Vanda’s – she can’t have had a new pair in donkey’s years and I didn’t want people saying we didn’t look after her properly – but of course that’s only made things worse.’

They’d moved into the back room by now and June was laying the table for ‘lunch’. It was Scotch eggs and salad.
Home Made
Scotch eggs and salad. June had once made Uncle George some Scotch eggs in Home Economics not realising that pork sausagemeat was pretty well top of his blacklist of mystery foods. After the first bite he’d wrapped it in his hanky, hidden it in his trouser pocket and then chucked it in the dustbin. Trouble was, he had been so complimentary about the bloody thing that she made them all the time now.

‘Pass me those serviettes, would you?’

June had made a poxy little set of embroidered napkins to go in the Bakelite rings from the sideboard (a good wipe down with spirit vinegar had seen off the silverfish). Georgette was already wedged into her high chair. She was too big for it really but it was that or let her run round the room rubbing rusk into everything. June was only laying the table for four so Jane obviously wasn’t welcome.

‘You’ll make someone a wonderful little wife, June.’

A lifetime of envy and resentment was concentrated in the look that June fired at her.

‘Oh yeah? And what will you make them, Jane?’

It was like getting a bite from a pyjama case. Saucy cat.

June walked her sister out into the hall. Jane made a show of pressing some pound notes into her damp, fat little hands and June told her not to be silly just as Jane knew she would.

Jane put her mink hat back on and popped back into the front room to say goodbye. Doreen was sat next to George on the settee murmuring incoherent love words and watching the racing from Sandown. One hand was holding her husband’s and the other was down the front of her lacy yellow nylon knickers.

Jane sat in the back of the Bentley and dabbed the tears of laughter from her eyes, taking care not to smudge her mascara, enjoying Bob’s silent sympathy.

‘Where to now, miss?’

She looked at her lovely little wristwatch. Exactly one o’clock. She’d be just late enough.

‘I have to meet my cousins at the hotel we passed on the main road. I’ll only be about half an hour. I’ll be in the lounge but the bar’s supposed to be quite nice if you want to wait for me in there.’

One last check in the mirror. The perfect make-up prettily framed by the glossy little black mink hat. She slid from the car, feeling Bob’s eyes on the inches of thigh she had taught herself to show, and then she walked the walk – on full power – through the revolving door, across the busy red Axminster and into the lounge of the Nelson Hotel. The room was a riot of smoked oak and button-backed furniture and it was inhabited by a dozen or so drinkers. Friday lunchtime was quite busy at the Nelson. Men in navy blazers and women in knitted two-pieces (no slacks allowed) and pratty little half-hats that clung on to the sides of their permed heads like satin claws.