Birmingham Friends (2 page)

And on top of that it had to be snotty, top-of-the-class Olivia Kemp. Although we were in the same class, I’d mostly kept out of her way until now. For one thing Olivia was glorious to look at, skinny, with those huge brown eyes like a puppy’s and thick, curling brown hair. I was plump with hair that was neither blond nor mousy but somewhere in between, and I had to wear specs that crouched across my nose like black crows. Olivia sat in the corner desk at the front of the class, head bent, working and working, or listening with wide eyes and what seemed exaggerated intentness to whatever the teacher was saying. She got marvellous marks and we all thought her frightfully stuck up. And she was Councillor Kemp’s daughter. Everyone in Birmingham had heard of Alec Kemp. He was the youngest yet one of the most prominent councillors in the city, and a very handsome one at that. You could see where she got her looks from.

I had enough friends to pair off with in class or at games if I needed to – Marjorie Mantel and Celia Oakley were always available. Now I actually came to think about it I wasn’t sure who Olivia’s friends were. She seemed to keep people at a distance. But I was sure she had much bigger fish to fry than me. Shame one of them hadn’t been landed with the job of looking after her. I hoped her mother would be quick. No doubt she would be utterly ravishing and think to herself what an ugly lump I was while being sweetly polite to me.

I flung open the door of the little cell-like room so violently that the brass handle banged hard into the wall behind it. Olivia was sitting on one of the two upright chairs, feet in white ankle socks and black shoes, not touching the floor. On her lap was a white enamel bowl. Her eyes widened as I crashed into the room. She looked very small alone there in the murky light. I could see her eyes were full and her cheeks wet.

‘Oh, it’s you.’ Quickly she rubbed the backs of her hands across her eyes as I shut the door behind me. ‘I do feel rotten.’

I stood opposite her, hands on hips. ‘Miss Pardoe says I’ve got to look after you.’

Olivia looked up at me doubtfully. ‘You look very cross,’ she said. ‘Actually, you very often look cross.’

Did I? I wondered, intrigued by this observation. Against my will I felt sorry for her. ‘I’m not cross. I say, you do look awfully seedy. D’you still feel sick?’ It would be rather interesting to see Councillor Kemp’s daughter being sick in a bowl.

‘Not at the moment.’

We eyed each other warily. I sat down on the other chair, opposite her.

‘I suppose they’ve sent for my mother?’ Olivia looked across at me. She had tears in her eyes again.

‘I expect so,’ I replied gruffly. ‘Doesn’t she like you being ill? My mother says we make enough mess when we’re well.’

In fact I said this mostly to cheer her up, our times of illness being those when Mummy seemed to find us most tolerable.

Olivia giggled suddenly, a rippling, infectious sound, and surprisingly loud. ‘D’you like your parents?’ she asked.

I thought about it. My parents felt like shadows who hovered round the edges of my life. My father was forever working. ‘No, not all that much,’ I said.

Olivia looked perturbed for a second at my response, then she gave a strange smile, her teeth almost bared. ‘My parents are absolutely marvellous.’ Her expression changed to one of curiosity. ‘D’you always say what you think?’

‘Mostly.’ No one else at home did, so I felt I might as well.

Olivia considered this. ‘You can probably get away with it because you’re rather plain. If you’re pretty, everyone seems to expect such a lot of you.’

‘Thanks very much.’

She clapped one hand to her mouth, eyes wider, laughing with embarrassment. ‘Golly, I shouldn’t have said that. I didn’t mean it really. I think you’re nice.’

‘That’s all right.’ For the first time I smiled at her. She wasn’t really a bit stuck up, not the way I’d imagined. ‘Anyway, it’s not true – that I get away with it, I mean. I always seem to be in trouble with Mummy, and she thinks my brother William’s the bee’s blinking knees.’

Olivia was quiet and I realized she was only half listening to me.

‘Are you going to be sick again?’ I felt slightly less hopeful about it now.

Olivia nodded miserably. Her face had gone very pale and her forehead had broken out in a sweat. Her head lolled forward, her thin hands clutching the bowl tightly. Surprised at myself, I went over to her, put one hand on her shoulder and with the other held back some loose wisps of her hair. I could see ginger lights in it. Green liquid gushed suddenly from her mouth into the white of the bowl. She retched and I felt the force of it go through her. She gulped and panted. I fetched her a cup of water.

‘Here.’ My feelings of protectiveness took me totally by surprise.

‘Ugh.’ She wiped her mouth and sipped the water as I emptied the bowl into the old sink and rinsed it out. ‘That was horrid. Thanks though. I feel better.’

From that morning on, we were inseparable.

My life changed when I got to know her. We were besotted with each other in the way young girls can be. Both of us had been lonely and needed someone to talk to. We loved each other’s company. At home there was only William, and sometimes Angus from next door. Marjorie Mantel and Celia Oakley were pale substitutes for such a friend. I felt butterflies of excitement in my stomach at the thought of seeing Olivia. She was above all things lovable, and for that you could forgive her a great deal.

As well as being in the same class she lived less than half a mile away from us. We’d sit in her huge bedroom on Park Hill, its bay windows letting in sheets of sunlight, happy for hours, talking and laughing together. Often I don’t think we even knew why we were laughing. It was just pleasure in being together.

I loved that room. It was such a pretty, girlish place, stuffed full of things: a flowery chair on which dolls and teddies and other animals snuggled together, their glass eyes or button replacements peering out between each other’s furry limbs, a grand doll’s house on a table, her shelf stuffed with books and her cupboard and drawers full of pretty, feminine clothes. We weren’t allowed pets at home, but they even let Olivia keep her two budgerigars in her room, and they flapped around and rang their little bell in a cage near the window.

‘Don’t they keep you awake?’ I asked her.

‘No, silly. I cover them up and they go to sleep on their perches.’ Even this made us laugh.

Best of all, though, was Olivia’s little dressing table with its dainty drawers, its embroidered mats on the top and its bright, slanting looking-glass. The ones in our house looked as if someone had gone over them with sandpaper and they made your face look squiffy. The top of the dressing table was covered with all her pretty things, her silver-plated brush and comb, her jewellery box from which tumbled a muddle of hairslides and combs, necklaces, rings, and a little woven basket with a few of Elizabeth Kemp’s discarded lipsticks and powder compacts. She had perfume and ribbons, she had cushions on the bed and pretty prints on the walls of flower fairies and some chubby children playing with a spaniel pup.

My own room was comfortable enough, but very plain. Candlewick bedspread, my old doll and my favourite teddy, Bosey. A small table, books . . . And usually the only other rooms I saw were William’s, which was very dull, and Angus’s, with his model aeroplanes everywhere and the smell of adhesive. Olivia’s room seemed a place of enchantment.

And she made me feel like a girl.

‘Come on, Katie,’ she’d say. ‘Let’s make ourselves up.’ She’d daub my face with rouge and powder, pencil in wobbly lines along my eyebrows and smooth on lipstick with a flourish. Then I’d do her, once she’d taught me how. My mother never wore make-up, except the odd dab of powder which she applied as a kind of nervous habit like some people smoked cigarettes.

Then we’d sit squeezed side by side on the silky-seated stool in front of Olivia’s toilet mirror, our faces close together, admiring the effects we’d created. At other times we did clown faces. Or Livy would just paint her lips thickly with scarlet, and pout and roll her eyes at the glass until we were both laughing so much we couldn’t paint anything straight.

We played the piano together. We helped each other with our prep from school. Although she was usually top of the class I was sometimes able to help her, especially with arithmetic, which boosted my confidence no end because William was always held up as the one with the brains.

And most importantly, I could tell Livy anything.

‘You’re so lucky having a brother,’ she said to me wistfully one day.

‘No I’m not. I hate him.’

‘You don’t.’

‘All right. Not hate. But he’s such a smug boots. He’s always got to have done something marvellous all the time. He has to be best. And he’s smug to Angus too, and Angus is really good at some things and much kinder than William.’

‘Well I think it’s nice. Much better than being the only one all the time, like me.’

But I felt that being on your own would be quite all right if you had parents like Olivia’s: a beautiful, sweet mother like Elizabeth Kemp with her soft, blond looks, and Alec Kemp. The amazing, glorious Alec Kemp. He was the most exciting man I had ever met. For the first time in my life he and Olivia made me feel pretty. Since I met the Kemps I felt I had become a different person: more appreciated and contented than I had been since I was a very small child.

I remember the shiny perfection of that day.

The Onion Fair – and with Olivia and Alec Kemp! We sat in the back of his Bentley, every line of it sleek and gleaming, singing, ‘We’re going to the fair, the fair, the fair,’ to the tune of ‘The cat’s got the measles . . .’

‘I want to go on everything!’ Olivia cried, bouncing excitedly in her seat as we swept towards the centre of Birmingham.

‘Oh, I expect we can arrange that,’ Alec said easily from the driver’s seat. The two of us shivered and giggled with delight.

Olivia was wearing a very pretty dress in cream broderie anglaise, a matching strip of the material holding back her wild hair. My dress was of course much plainer and more ‘serviceable’ as Mummy would say, in blue and white gingham. But I did have a beautiful tortoiseshell slide to fasten my hair, which Livy had given me. She was forever giving me things.

She peered out of the window. ‘Are we going past the factory, Daddy?’

‘No,’ Alec Kemp replied, steering the huge, smooth-running car along the cobbled streets. He had a deep voice and was proud of his Birmingham accent. ‘No need today. We’re going out for some fun, aren’t we, girls?’

I stared at the back of his neck, the dark brown hair cut in a precise line above his white collar and beautifully tailored suit. It was a surprisingly sober suit for his tastes, in grey worsted. He seemed so much bigger than my father, who always had a stooped look as if other people’s problems were actually fixed heavy on his shoulders. Alec Kemp stood very tall and he was jaunty, engaging, with large brown eyes and a vivacious face.

People turned to stare at us as the Bentley eased to a standstill at the edge of the Serpentine ground in Perry Barr. The two of us must have looked very small sitting on the plush back seats, peering out eagerly, our feet not touching the floor. Most people came to the fairground by bus or tram, but we were arriving with Councillor Kemp.

‘Will people recognize him?’ I whispered.

‘Of course.’

Of course. Pictures in the
Mail
and
Gazette
, always immaculately dressed in expensive suits with suave, black hats, or clad in vivid Prince of Wales checks. He would smile genially from the photographs, his image of himself carefully presented.

‘Will you have your picture in the papers today?’ I couldn’t resist asking him.

‘We’ll have to see,’ he said. ‘I could have my photograph taken with my daughter and her lovely friend perhaps?’

I squirmed with pleasure. Alec Kemp had a way of making you feel like a princess in gold slippers, even if you knew you really looked more like one of the pumpkins.

The fairground was already packed and milling with people. As we walked from the car we could hear shouting and screams of laughter from some of the rides, the throb of hot engines driving the roundabouts and a band playing. Everywhere we looked was a blur of curved, coloured movement: merry-go-rounds turning and the twirl of dancing skirts and lights flashing on the machines and sideshows. And smells: a delicious mixture of potatoes baking, fried onions, cigarettes and sweat and the sharp whiff of blue smoke from the engines overlaid by sweetness of candyfloss.

‘Don’t get lost now, girls,’ Alec said. ‘I’d have one heck of a job finding you again in this throng.’ With his pipe jutting from the side of his mouth he took our hands and I felt the smallness of my hand in his huge palm. I was almost bursting with pride. As we walked along he smiled and raised his hat to people, took his pipe out of his mouth, loosing us each time and then reaching for our hands again. The smell of his tobacco smoke wafted down to us. I looked up at the tall, athletic figure beside me. I saw women of all ages blushing as he smiled and spoke to them.

One young woman approached him, smiled coyly and said, ‘Aft’noon, Mr Kemp.’ And Alec replied, ‘Good day, Violet.’ She walked away giggling with her friend, casting backward glances over her shoulder.

‘How does she know you?’ Olivia asked.

‘She’s from the works,’ he told her.

Alec Kemp was one of Birmingham’s darlings. Born and educated in the city, he had won his way to grammar school and become a self-made man without ever leaving the place. He had taken over his father’s mediocre firm and used it to prove himself. Kemp’s was squeezed into a plot of land behind Birch Street, near the heart of Birmingham, round which were crushed streets of grimy dwellings, and tiny workshops and chimneys pouring out black smoke into the already speckled air. But Alec’s reward for economic prowess had been to move from the terrace in Sparkhill where he grew up, to one of the huge, ornate houses gracing the streets of middle-class Moseley. And this was considered quite fitting for a young, successful man so obviously destined to become one of the city’s aldermen, and particularly one who had taken the condition of the city’s housing so much to heart. He had already completed a successful campaign to demolish one of the decaying blocks of Victorian slums in the Birch Street area and build innovatory flats to house the occupants. His campaign slogan was ‘Prosperity and Responsibility’.