The Willpower Dress had called a halt to Jane’s entrecôte (eighteen shillings: only the lobster cost more) so it was back to the Ladies’ to freshen up.
Johnny was there waiting on the stairs when she came out. Pissed but dishy. His tie was slightly loose and he looked like a very naughty fifth-former.
‘So who’s the boy wonder?’
No answer to that, really. She leaned against the wall of the stairwell and just looked right back at him. Let him figure out what she was thinking. She was tired of trying to work it out.
‘You look lovely in that dress.’ Tell her something she didn’t know. ‘Younger somehow.’ Was that good? ‘Like the night we first met. Why wouldn’t you see me tonight?’
‘I had a date. I’m nineteen. I have dates. We’re not engaged, you know.’
‘Why aren’t we?’
Here we bloody go again.
‘Don’t start all that. We’ll talk tomorrow.’
Then a nice half turn and back down the stairs to young James.
She decided against crêpes Suzette. She was getting sick of brushing her teeth – besides, just-a-coffee-for-me was always terribly sophisticated.
She let him kiss her in the Daimler, although not as much as the chauffeur would have liked. She let him kiss her again, harder and closer, in the tiny two-man lift. He even pressed the red ‘stop’ button between floors which was cheeky. Doreen never kissed anybody and she wouldn’t even let George kiss June and Jane for some dirty-minded reason or other. Jane had had a lot of ground to make up. She’d had more kisses in the last three months than she’d had in her whole life and being kissed goodnight was just about her favourite thing. Got you from nought to sixty in five seconds: hot, wet, excited. Only kissing was never really enough for them. It was all downhill after that.
James dug out a bit more smutty French as his hand slid up from her waist and his lips started to follow the actually rather well-worn path down to her cleavage. She pulled back sharply, keeping a weather eye on her reflection: pink; wide-eyed; slightly shocked.
‘Please. Don’t. You mustn’t.’ That old rubbish. No man can seriously be angry, whatever he may say, if a girl shows that she has decent standards of behaviour. He was very, very apologetic. A two-dozen long-stemmed apology at the very least. Roses, honestly. You couldn’t eat them, wear them or sell them. Waste of bloody time.
‘Please say you’ll forgive me. It’s just that you’re so . . . so.’ More of the old je ne sais quoi. Why couldn’t he say these things in English? ‘May I see you again?’
‘I don’t know. I don’t know what to say.’
She couldn’t very well say that an evening playing dream girl, pretending to like black coffee and running backwards and forwards to the loo to be sick wasn’t her idea of a good time. That he was too young and soft to understand about things like proper presents and she wasn’t about to start giving it away. Not at this stage of the game.
Chapter 20
The smart girl should be as deft
at whipping up a soufflé as she is
at pondering existentialism.
It was lovely back inside the flat. Annie had left the lights on and it was all warm and creamy and polished. There was a box of chocolates and a huge bowl of hothouse peaches – three bob each – on the coffee table.
Suzy wouldn’t be back yet so Jane released herself from her armour-plated, Alice-blue gown and slipped into something more comfortable – not exactly difficult. She wrapped herself in a kimono, poured herself a glass of Grand Marnier and arranged herself carefully on the long white sofa, adjusting the silk robe to show off a hint of cleavage for her imaginary audience, then lay there, pecking at the three chocolates she’d decided to allow herself (she had to eat something) and watching telly. Just as the national anthem was starting up she heard the lift gate opening and hurried away to her own room. She didn’t want to get roped into one of Henry’s three-handers. Mind you, she had a funny idea he wouldn’t be going in for all that lark again. Besides, she needed her beauty sleep for Norbury.
She couldn’t get to sleep straight away. Johnny was getting to be a right nuisance. It wasn’t just dates any more. He’d been proposing on and off for the last six weeks.
About a month after their first date he’d borrowed a car and taken her down to Putney to meet Mummy. It was a nice enough house with all the right accessories – French windows, wisteria, Country Life and Earl Grey bloody tea – but Marjorie Hullavington wasn’t half as posh as she liked to make out. Mr Hullavington Senior had been killed (instantly) during the Blitz. This made keeping up appearances a great deal easier. No one could sneer at his tailor or cringe at his vowels any more. Marjorie certainly did her best to look the part – thirty-year-old Creed suit; lisle stockings the colour of ointment and a thrifty dab of orange tangee lipstick. But the house didn’t smell right. Posh houses (like Nice Little Flats in Mayfair) smelled of brandy and beeswax, of cut flowers and Diorissimo. Dogs (at a pinch). Marjorie Hullavington’s front hall smelled like the inside of a biscuit tin. Not a posh smell. And that triple string of pearls was definitely fake. They exactly matched her dentures, which seemed a lot of trouble to go to.
Jane hadn’t taken any chances: Hardy Amies, brown shoes, a russet felt toque and a tan bag borrowed from Suzy – she didn’t think her own shiny new pet alligator would play well with the kind of woman who could make a bottle of sherry stretch to twenty tiny glasses and who served macaroni cheese for Sunday lunch. Who thought that one up? It looked like toasted vomit.
‘What does your father do, Jenny?’ Did she get the name wrong on purpose or was she going gaga?
The wonderful, wonderful thing about Jane’s shy, squinting dad was that, like Mr Hullavington, he was very, very dead and so had a wide choice of careers open to him. Jane usually chose the law. Respectable and no one would expect her to know the first thing about it.
‘And where were you at school?’
God, the woman was nosey but Jane could safely stick to the facts on that one. An Anglican convent in Surrey might not be Roedean or Cheltenham but it was quite posh enough for most purposes. There were only a handful of girls’ schools that anybody had ever heard of anyway so provided you said ‘St Ursula’s’ with enough confidence you were certain to get away with it.
‘John tells me you’re a mannequin, Gillian.’
She might just as easily have said ‘John tells me you’ll perform fellatio for a nice mink scarf’ from the tone of her voice.
‘I was living with my aunt in Surrey’ (Doreen was on a swing seat with a straw hat on this time, doing a bit of needlepoint) ‘after Daddy died’. If you didn’t mention Mummy at all they tended to assume she died-when-you-were-born and asked no further questions. ‘But when my aunt died my cousins were forced to sell the house and I had to think about making my own living. Modelling was the only thing I was fit for really.’ A little shrug. Poor me. Poor brave little me.
‘And where do you live now, er, Janet?’
She could answer that one in her sleep: friend Suzy; widower in Hong Kong. Like falling off a log.
The final test was to bowl Jane a googly about current events. Which was a bit like Philip Drayke asking her whether she spoke Italian – the last thing Mrs Hullavington actually wanted was a daughter-in-law who could bore for Britain about the international situation but it gave her a cast-iron excuse for giving her the thumb’s-down: ‘I know you, John. I know you could never really be happy with a wife who couldn’t hold her own at dinner parties.’