A Vision of Loveliness Read online

  ‘Who was that man on the phone? What did he want? Strange men on my phone.’

  Auntie Doreen was not happy at the idea of a West End job. Jane fancied herself. Even the promise of forty bob a week for Jane’s keep didn’t really make up for it. Doreen couldn’t remember the last time she went to the West End. What was cashmere anyway? Goats? No thank you.

  Vanda was very disappointed. Mona was retiring next year and she had hoped. Particularly after she had taken the trouble to train Jane in the business. But Edie was a sweet woman really. She gave Jane a very nice reference – ‘glowing’, Mr Philip called it – and a blouse to start work in. A rather nice striped lawn to wear with her navy gaberdine. ‘You watch out for that Mr Drayke. They can take advantage.’

  The spiteful east wind flounced the length of the shopping parade and ripped easily through Jane’s cheap coat – three-quarter-length flannel grey bouclé, Magyar sleeve, cape collar and showy red buttons the size of liquorice bootlaces. She had bought it – or had been sold it, rather – in the previous January’s sale at Marshall and Snelgrove and regretted it the instant she got it home. It looked awful but it was still the warmest thing she had. The chill rose up from the pavement, freezing her knees, icing the bare tops of her thighs. She could feel her shoulders starting to curl up round her ears, sense her ribcage tightening to avoid breathing in the painfully cold night air. All wrong. Walk like a princess! A girl who walks beautifully is one of life’s thrills. Pretend two cords are tied around your ears, pulling you skyward. Your earlobes should be in a straight line with your shoulder.

  She swung her carrier bag lightly – only not so lightly. She remembered the handbag with a sudden twinge of guilt and embarrassment. Why hadn’t she just handed it in at the bar? You’d have had to get to the bar first of course. Never mind. She could take it back to the pub tomorrow and say there had been a mistake.

  She had reached the avenue now. The stained-glass front doors glowed faintly all along the street. Occasionally a thin slice of light escaped from between the skimpy cotton curtains of an upstairs window but there were no matching lights in the downstairs front rooms. Everyone was home – it was gone seven – but they were all out the back having their teas. For two or three weeks each winter a Christmas tree (usually an everlasting affair of wire and tinsel) would twinkle tartily in the bay windows of the darkened parlours, unseen by their owners but only visitors or funerals or Christmas Day would ever make it worth opening and heating the front room.

  She walked a few yards past the house so that she could perform a nice Paris turn: Right foot forward, toes out slightly. Left foot across and in front with the weight well forward. Use the right foot to pivot you to the right, left leg straight. Pause fleetingly with weight on the left foot before moving off again on the right. Jane had watched the house models doing it at the big-store fashion shows and she had practised with a book that had a pattern of little black and white feet for you to follow. She fell over the first time she tried.

  She closed the front gate carefully. Her aunt had a horror of dogs (what dogs?) getting into the ‘front garden’, a crudely concreted patch with a hole left for a dusty hydrangea bush which was now wearing its winter wardrobe of dead brown blooms. It had once had vivid, Capri-blue flowers but Aunt Doreen resented the idea of having to feed it whatever it was that kept it blue and it had sulked back, summer by summer, to a dirty, tooth-powder pink.

  The Christmas tree was back in the cupboard under the stairs and the gap in Doreen’s elaborately swagged net curtains left a theatrical little space in the middle of the windowsill for her treasured ‘Royal Doulton’ figurine, a cheesy Victorian miss in a fat pink crinoline. It wasn’t actually Royal Doulton. The real Royal Doulton one (a wedding present) had been smashed by a six-year-old Jane (who had never been allowed to forget it). The replacement had ‘foreign’ stamped accusingly on its bottom and had come from a curio shop on the Streatham High Road.

  Jane knocked on the door with the approved amount of force. It wasn’t usually loud enough to penetrate the running argument that took place in Aunt Doreen’s kitchen but if anyone rapped too hard there were more reproaches. Jane didn’t have the key-of-the-door. Aunt Doreen took the words of the song entirely literally and wouldn’t be letting Jane have one until she was twenty-one, two whole years away.

  She knocked again, fractionally louder, and instants later a light appeared at the end of the passage and her aunt tore open the door, cheered up by a fresh grievance.

  ‘Banging and banging like that! Anyone would think it was the bailiffs!’

  What bailiffs? Jane doubted very much she’d ever seen a bloody bailiff. No hello. No nice day. No kiss my arse. Nothing.

  ‘Your tea’s on the table. Don’t blame me if it’s cold.’

  Chapter 2

  Early man lived in the Croydon

  area but avoided Norbury.*

  Only fourteen bombs had fallen on Norbury (by mistake: the Germans wanted Croydon – or thought they did). But one of them, a flying one, fell on Jane’s happy, smiling mother and her shy, squinting father who had decided to go and see Fanny By Gaslight while he was home on leave in 1944. Both were killed instantly – funny how people always were killed instantly. Jane had been only three at the time and her image of her parents was based on a dog-eared snapshot of her mother, stuck for ever in black and white gingham, and one photograph of the two of them at Brighton in the boiling hot summer of 1939, sat on the stony beach fully dressed in floral flock and flannels with a nice tray of tea between them. There were no wedding photographs. Aunt Doreen had lost them – except the one of herself as matron of honour looking like Charley’s Aunt in a huge crêpe dress and a neighbour’s moth-eaten silver fox.

  Doreen was in a nursing home expecting a baby (Kenneth Leonard Deeks) when Jane’s parents were killed and so motherless little Jane and her two-year-old sister June were packed off to a war orphanage down in Kent somewhere until the Women’s Voluntary Service could arrange to billet them on some unsuspecting old couple. Asked to point out her baby sister in the recreation room, Jane’s three-year-old eyes passed over fat little June with her grubby frock and the cold sore that gnawed at her upper lip summer and winter and pointed, unhesitatingly, to a smiley-faced blonde in a pale blue polka-dotted sundress. The house they had stayed in had a lovely big garden with apple trees and a swing and a beautiful little Wendy house full of lovely old dressing-up clothes. Jane had enjoyed three months playing at sisters with that nice, friendly, pretty little girl who had followed her everywhere and who joined delightedly in all her make-believe.

  It wasn’t until Doreen turned up (reluctantly) to claim her nieces that the mistake was spotted and June was fished out of the orphanage (they hadn’t been able to find anyone to foster her). Fortunately Doreen and the family had assumed it was all just a cock-up by the WVS (‘interfering bunch of prats’ was Doreen’s verdict) but Jane was still teased mercilessly about leaving her sister to the horrors of an institution: cabbage; bed-wetting; saying grace before meals. June had had nightmares about it for years. She knew it wasn’t the WVS’s fault. Jane never saw the pretty little girl again.

  The hall smelled. A nasty, stale, mumsy mixture of bleach and burned toast. Jane ran across the dusty lino and up the stairs. She stuffed the crocodile bag under her pillow and quickly hung her new suit from the picture rail – she couldn’t bear to put it away but it did look funny against the wallpaper’s grubby pink rosebuds. There was a knock at her bedroom door. June, Kenneth and Uncle George had all been trained to do this. Doreen would have just burst in, mid-complaint. It was June. Minus the cold sore but just as unappealing. She was seventeen and had been at teachers’ training college since leaving school the previous summer.

  ‘Auntie says your tea’s stone cold.’

  June was not Doreen’s favourite; Doreen disliked and resented all the children equally, but June ran errands and told tales on Jane and there were rewards for this.

  Tea was dished ou
t in the ground-floor back or what Doreen liked to call the ‘sitting-cum-dining room’, an expression that was supposed to explain away the fact that they all had to sit and eat and watch television in one room while another perfectly good one was left empty at the front. You could barely move: table, six chairs, sideboard, three-piece suite in cut moquette and three leatherette pouffes all fanned around a huge teak-veneer telly. The TV aerial dangled over it from a hook in the ceiling that had been put there to hold up the Christmas decorations. There was a little bit of pink paper chain still stuck to it. You had to duck to walk under it but it was the only position where you could get ITV (Doreen liked Emergency Ward Ten). There was a blue glass bowl of plastic apples and oranges (Doreen had tried having real fruit but it only got eaten).

  Tea was very cold indeed but as it consisted of gala pie and ‘salad’ (two quarters of tomato and Heinz tinned potato in salad cream) this wasn’t really very surprising. There was a grey-green ring round the central disc of hard-boiled egg and a hard, glassy yellow jelly gluing the pink meat to the unnaturally orange pastry.

  Aunt Doreen had learned her housekeeping with a ration book in one hand and a tin opener in the other. She had never really got the hang of – or even seen the point of – nice food or nice houses or looking nice and so what you got was food out of packets in a grotty back room served by a lank-haired woman in a dirty nylon housecoat. Do try to greet their homecoming with smooth hair and a well-groomed, bright appearance. There is no excuse for moping about in ‘any old thing’ just because you are doing household chores.

  Doreen’s idea of a really nice hot tea was a tinned steak and kidney pie, soggy King Edwards and Surprise dried peas – the surprise being that anyone bought them. Uncle George had other ideas. He would put up with the two veg but he quietly refused to go anywhere near meat pies – tinned or otherwise. His father had been a factory inspector and told disgusting, Sweeney Todd-y tales of what passed for filling in the pie trade and young George was having none of it. Ditto sausages. And potted meat. And faggots. And mince. And fish fingers. Unless it was a recognisable slice of the animal Uncle George wasn’t interested and so he got steak or a nice chop of an evening. Jane wasn’t very interested in Doreen’s repertoire of tinned pie, Spam salad and beans on toast either, and tended to shunt most of hers on to her spotty cousin Kenneth’s plate while his mother banged the eye-level grill around, fussing furiously over her husband’s special diet.

  George and Doreen never called each other George or Doreen. When she spoke to him she didn’t call him anything and when she spoke about him he was simply E or Im. He called her Reenie or Reen, both of which drove her mad. He probably knew this.

  Doreen had been a 29-year-old mother of the newborn Kenneth when she first came to drag the two sisters back to Norbury. Kenneth was now a great big spotty kid of fifteen with a tiny bedroom full of model aeroplanes (although it was actually Uncle George who made these). Kenneth’s real hobby was bus serial numbers. He would lurk at the bus stop for hours peering at passing Routemasters and noting them down in a little red memo book.

  There had just been the three of them until eighteen months ago when, out of the blue, Kenneth’s baby sister arrived. Doreen, who didn’t want the children she’d got, let alone any more, was furious. Even more furious when people mistook her for the baby’s grandmother. She did almost warm to it in the end – it had the lardy pink blonde looks she admired in a child – but nobody else liked it much. It cried whenever you took its dummy out and could only be kept quiet with rusks and Ribena. Its name was Georgette. Georgette Ann.

  It turned out that Doreen had had two babies before Kenneth. Jane only found this out when she was seventeen because a letter arrived in the post for a Miss Mary Jane Deeks giving her National Insurance number. Uncle George made Doreen a cup of tea and told them all that there had been a second Miss Deeks as well, born a year later. Both babies had died within days. Pity really. June wasn’t much of a sister. It must have been rotten for Doreen, the babies dying like that, but when Jane dared to say as much her aunt looked genuinely surprised. What were their names?

  ‘Mary Jane and Sally Ann. Not names I would have chosen but I had to call them something. I never saw them. E saw them. Said they were very pretty babies.’

  Jane kept the National Insurance card and the birth certificates, often thinking wistfully of the missing sisters.

  She never felt that way about the ones she’d got. Georgette was wet. Wet, smelly and uncomfortable. She spent large parts of each day in her high chair in a hand-knitted pink matinée coat and a pair of elasticated plastic panties. Doreen had potty-trained Kenneth with terrifying speed at the age of twelve months. Jane remembered it happening almost overnight. The next-door neighbour was busy training a new puppy at the time and the four-year-old Jane had really begun to wonder if Doreen, too, had just rubbed Kenneth’s nose in it. And yet, since those no-nonsense days, Doreen had read a women’s magazine (in the doctor’s waiting room – she didn’t waste her money on that rubbish) which had other ideas. As a result Georgette was still producing bucketfuls of shitty terry towelling and showing no interest at all in the shell-pink celluloid potty that Doreen had bought for her. The whole upstairs stank like scented sewage.

  The family was sat round the gate-leg table for tea. No cloth. Tablecloths made work. So did napkins. There wasn’t a napkin in the house although, funnily enough, there were lots of napkin rings: one set of silver plate and one set of pearly Bakelite. Doreen had got them as wedding presents and they lived with a family of silver fish in the bottom drawer of the sideboard.

  ‘You’re late.’

  Still no hello or nothing.

  ‘We had a late customer. Had half the stock out.’

  The lie flowed nicely. Jane had once explained that she had gone for a quick drink with the girls after work (actually a rather pushy young man from the camera shop in the Arcade) but Doreen’s envious fury had taught her to think better of it. Drink? When did she ever get a chance for a Drink?

  ‘No consideration,’ said Doreen, lightly spraying the table with food.

  Doreen always talked with her mouth full, waiting until a fresh forkful had been shovelled in before starting up the next complaint. It was disgusting enough anyway but it also meant you got to see her teeth. Doreen had all her own teeth – no one else would have wanted them. She had resisted the mad rush for National Health dentures after the war, deciding that it was ‘common’. Uncle George took one look at the gleaming white gum shields being knocked out by Mr Bevin’s army of dentists and decided to make his own arrangements with a private man on Putney High Street. German Jew. Good craftsman. The result, artfully chipped and stained here and there, were a perfect fit and completely undetectable – or would have been if Doreen hadn’t gone on about them all the time.

  ‘Of course, I prefer raspberry jam,’ she’d say in the queue at the self-service, ‘but the pips get under George’s plate.’

  The family was still up to its knees in a row that had started at ‘breakfast’ (burned toast and marge with a scraping of damson jam). A small silver and white cardboard box containing a smashed slab of wedding cake had arrived in the morning post. No one had the least idea who it was from. Uncle George’s mother had been the youngest of fourteen children (disgusting, Doreen said) and they’d all bred ferociously. The various grades of removed cousins had topped a hundred some years back.

  ‘Well, whoever it was didn’t ask us to the bloody wedding,’ whined Doreen, squinting crossly at the little box’s torn wrapper. Not that they went when they were invited – not after the last time, years ago when Jane was about six. It meant Expense. Pop-up toasters. Hats. New clothes. Not likely.

  June and Kenneth had been wrangling enthusiastically all teatime about who would get to eat the cake. Doreen solved the problem by shutting it up in a rusty biscuit tin with a rather self-satisfied Yorkshire terrier on it. ‘Wedding cake keeps for months.’ Not this piece, though. Doreen, who habitually th
ought of all foods in terms of reward and punishment, made herself a little present of the cake later that evening with a cup of tea. A nice cup of tea.

  Jane was itching to finish the meal, wash up and get back upstairs. She refused pudding which always drove Doreen mad – ‘You’re skin and bone. You want to eat more.’ Only Jane didn’t want to eat more: The cold fact is that you cannot possibly be fat and chic. But Doreen ate more: much, much more. Kenneth had left the egg, June the meat and Jane the pastry of the slices of gala pie, thus making a whole extra helping for Doreen. It was as if she knew.

  Later, when everyone was out of the way watching Take Your Pick, Doreen would get to work on the strangely abundant leftovers. Doreen wasted not. The larder was empty except for a few bottles of sauce and whatever was to be eaten that day. No one ever got more pie or Spam because there never was any. But there was always too much jelly or custard or blancmange, or spotted dick (puddings were the only thing she could be bothered with). Every night the remains of the dish would be whisked away ‘for tomorrow’ only to disappear into the softly expanding Doreen who would stand by the larder door, spooning them into her mouth straight from the Pyrex bowl as she gazed unseeingly at the fat, ripe peppers and aubergines that garnished the kitchen wallpaper. Vegetables she would never actually taste. Vegetables George would probably have liked.

  Jane carried the plates out to the kitchen to wash up. Doreen didn’t believe in rubber gloves (Jane bought her own). Fortunately Doreen didn’t believe in drying-up cloths either – Germs. That and the lazy-cow’s tea her aunt had made meant there were only the plates to do (Uncle George had to do his own grill pan: a kind of penance) which could all be left on the slimy wooden draining board. Ten minutes later Jane escaped upstairs to her beautiful suit and the beautiful girl in the crocodile bag.