Jane needed to powder her nose. Fairly urgently. And it seemed that, even at the Mirador, girls didn’t powder their noses alone so Suzy tailed her into the Ladies’. As they sat giggling on the armchairs they heard distinct sounds of retching coming from one of the cubicles. Moments later the customer with the false hips emerged, looking slightly flustered to find them there.
‘Er. Don’t have the duck,’ she said before hastily rinsing her mouth under the tap, repairing her lipstick and heading back to her table.
‘You don’t expect to find food poisoning in a place like this.’
‘Not food poisoning, darling. They do it on purpose. How else do you think she keeps that sylph-like figure? Bridge lunches with the girls, tea at Fortnum’s, business dinners with hubby. She’d be two-ton Tessie if she kept all that down.’
‘Do you think Iris does that?’
‘Bound to. Oh my God! Poor Iris. And her poor dead husband! I’ve met her husband actually. At the races. God! He tells some stories. Do you know she wouldn’t let him smoke in the house? They had this poky little service flat on the Brompton Road and he used to have to go and stand out on the balcony in the rain whenever he wanted a fag. No wonder he never went home.’
‘Ollie’s wife doesn’t understand him.’
‘You won’t have any trouble with Ollie; he’s too drunk for one thing. But we might have to find you a dancing partner later. Shouldn’t be a problem.’
They stood up and checked the fall of their skirts in the big gilt mirror on the far wall.
‘Don’t we look gorgeous? I think Terry’s right: we should see about getting some snaps done. Maybe Monday.’
Back at the table Ollie had obviously been told to smarten up his act. They’d hardly all sat down again before he started showing a polite interest. Most women have no desire for serious debate on the topics of the day. They far prefer what is known as small talk: what they did that day, a hat they admired, what they had for tea.
‘So what do you do, Janey?’
Jane had expected someone would ask this question. ‘I’m a junior in a madam shop’ was probably not the right answer.
‘Well, I’ve been living with an aunt down in Surrey since my parents died but I’m hoping I might be able to get some modelling work.’
The ‘aunt down in Surrey’ was a masterstroke. Doreen was suddenly installed in a detached house on the outskirts of Dorking: fruit trees; odd-job man; pastel twinsets with mix-and-match tweeds. She’d have hated it. The trick was always going to be putting just the hint of tragedy queen in the ‘since my parents died’ part so that it sounded too recent and too painful to talk about. What you didn’t want was the bit that went:
‘Oh dear, I am sorry. When was that?’
‘1944.’
Jane managed to sound like a plucky young creature with her living to earn.
‘I shouldn’t think you’d have any trouble modelling,’ said Ollie, who had managed to get outside an entire bottle of Chablis on his own and was now trying to hold her hand. ‘You’re a very, very, very pretty girl.’
It was like having dinner with some great big, balding talking doll. He must have other conversation. He couldn’t very well sit about in the City all day saying that to people.
Suzy and Henry’s chat had reached the whispers and giggles stage and he was stroking her tiny white wrist as he spoke. She was leaning across the table with her pretty face propped on her other hand, smiling into his eyes and occasionally lowering those big, fat false eyelashes as if everything he said was utterly fascinating. Which it wasn’t, quite honestly, not what Jane could catch. Mind you, she did hear the words ‘Curzon Street’ and wondered if this was the promised flat. That would be fascinating.
She returned to her duties with Ollie. Talk about fashions, home life and people the man has not met are utterly boring to most men.
‘Do you live in London, Ollie?’
‘I’ve got a bolt hole in St James’s but the family live out in Wiltshire.’
Out of the corner of her eye Jane could see Henry Swan wincing then laughing at Ollie’s idea of a chat-up line. Poor Ollie wasn’t really cut out to be a ladykiller. Family in Wiltshire. It was pitiful, really.
‘Oh Wiltshire! How lovely!’ Which one was Wiltshire? She tried to dredge up a long-forgotten piece of geography homework. Wiltshire was mauve. Or was it yellow?
‘Do you have a big garden?’
‘About ten acres, I suppose.’
Jane tried to picture an acre. She thought hard about those little tables on the backs of red exercise books: rods, perches, furlongs, fathoms. Biggish garden obviously. Big gardens just made work, Doreen said.
‘What flowers do you grow?’
Doreen actually disliked flowers. Cut flowers especially. It was just a vase to wash as far as she was concerned. The front room was full of virgin vases with cobwebs inside. But she hated garden flowers too: ‘They only die off. Make the place look untidy.’ The back garden in Norbury was little more than a long straight lawn, a few evergreen bushes and a lot of completely bare earth – she had George out there with the hoe most weekends. There were wooden trellises here and there but nothing grew on them. She had a horror of climbing plants. God alone knew why.
They had all had crêpes Suzette for pudding which involved setting fire to pancakes on a trolley in a rather flashy way but they tasted quite nice. So did the liqueurs Henry had ordered. The only other time Jane had ever had liqueurs was one Christmas when she was about nine. She had bitten into a chocolate only to find some kind of nasty medicine inside. But this was nice. Orangey. Took away the taste of the coffee anyway.
Meanwhile Ollie was still trying to remember what he grew in his garden in Wiltshire.
‘Don’t know much about flowers. Angela looks after all that side of things. Wonderful woman in many ways.’
He had hold of Jane’s hand again and was sandwiching it between his. It wasn’t a romantic gesture at all. Just something to fiddle with while he talked.
‘Angela used to be a very, very pretty girl,’ and suddenly the idea that veh, veh pretty girls should end up like Angela seemed too unbearably sad. If a man wants to make a hit with the opposite sex and is not as happy as he might be, he should endeavour to keep this to himself.
Henry pulled him back from the brink.
‘You up for a spot of dancing, Ollie?’
But Ollie was like a dog with a bone.
‘Used to go to a lot of dances with Angela. Met her at a dance in fact.’
Henry tried again.
‘I’ll bet you’re a fabulous dancer, Janey.’
That rather depended. She’d spent some of her Saturday wages from Vanda on a course of dancing lessons at a funny old place in Thornton Heath a couple of years ago. Doreen thought dancing lessons were swank so she had to say she was listening to records over at Joy’s house. Uncle George had been a very good dancer but Jane only found this out when a rumba came on the Light Programme one Saturday breakfast time and the pair of them were suddenly gliding round the kitchen. Doreen went to her room with Her Headache for the rest of the day.
Jane could rumba, she could waltz, she could cha-cha and she could jive (she learned that at the Locarno) but she had to quit the course before they got to the slow foxtrot – let alone the valeta and the Boston two-step. She had tried to get the basics from a book she’d got out of the library but the black and white footsteps made no sense at all, let alone ‘hovering’ and ‘feathering’. She had enough trouble with the Paris turn. But it didn’t matter. Only old people did those dances anyway – apart from on telly. The only dances Doreen had ever managed were the conga and the Okey-Cokey but now that her whole self weighed over thirteen stone she was reduced to sitting on the sidelines making unpleasant remarks about other people who were having a better time than she was.