Bennett had a choice of two trains from Catford and she liked to play safe with the early one and then do her face in the mirror of the basement showroom in the belief that the unflattering light was helpful. Have a powerful, shadeless light over your glass. Fool your audience, but never fool yourself. In fact, it just meant that she put on far too much make-up and the distorting colours of the fluorescent striplight meant that she never noticed the tide mark where the Honey Velvet of the foundation met the Dove Grey of her neck.
‘Let’s have a look. You’re a bit done up, aren’t you, for a Saturday morning? You after that job at Hillson’s?’
There was an ‘Experienced Saleslady Required’ notice in the window of a rival knitwear shop in Bond Street. Not such a bad idea, actually.
‘I’m going out for lunch.’
‘Ooh! Get her! Out for lunch in her –’ she peered at the jacket’s label on the hanger. ‘What make is it? I can’t see without my glasses.’
Bennett was always saying this but the plain truth was that she couldn’t read at all. No one else seemed to have tumbled but Jane was wise to all her tricks because she had an aunt – George’s sister – who was the same: always forgetting her glasses or complaining that the print was too small.
‘It’s a Hardy Amies.’
‘Hardy Amies? Where did you get that kind of money? Hardy Amies! You can’t be on more than a fiver a week – if that.’
‘Sample sale.’
‘All right for some.’ Bennett was a size eighteen. She had eaten a cheese roll and a doughnut for elevenses every day for twenty years and the evidence was all held in place under a huge whalebone and ‘power elastic’ foundation garment that was supposed to take five years off you in five seconds flat. Twenty-three separate measurements tailored to fit every inch of her lumpy, fat torso. You didn’t catch Bennett bending. If something got dropped on the floor it was gone for ever as far as she was concerned.
‘Let me see the skirt. Mmm. It fits you all right but then they’re always a very funny shape, those Hardy Amies showroom numbers. The house model – Yvonne? Yvette? Eva? Evadne? Sonia? – name like that. Lovely girl but she’s got a very peculiar figure: hollow back. What is it? Cashmere and wool? The seat will bag out if you’re not careful. You ought to have a higher heel than that. It just looks frumpy with those.’
Jane left her to it. No sense giving her the satisfaction. Poisonous old crab.
Once Jane had escaped from Bennett’s clutches she began straightening the fixtures. She was supposed to replace any colours that had been sold with new garments from the stockroom. This took all of ten minutes. The last week in January was completely dead. The sales were over (not that the Arcade’s shops ever had anything as common as a sale), there were no tourists and the rush of post-Christmas exchanges had dried up (‘So sweet of him but it just isn’t my colour’). Saturdays were even quieter if anything, because any English people with money would be in the country for the weekend. What you did get were time-wasters. Overdressed ladies from places like Stanmore and Rickmansworth who liked to spend the morning swanning in and out of smart shops before they had to decide whether to go for the set lunch at Debenham and Freebody or blow six bob on an ‘Elegant Rarebit’ in Fortnum’s – twice the price of the inelegant kind. The Welsh weren’t elegant enough for Fortnum’s apparently.
The proper salesladies took it in turns to patrol the ground floor. You weren’t allowed to read or smoke or look as if you were deep in conversation. No. You must either be folding or generally fiddling with the stock or just mooch about ornamentally, waiting for a customer to come in and give your life a meaning.
There were days in January when the door didn’t open at all and, rather than stand about sniping at each other, the senior sales used to take it in turns to man the shop while the others retreated downstairs to read magazines or play gin rummy. This didn’t affect the all-important pecking order. If a customer should cross the threshold, Bennett might do the ‘Good morning, Madam, can I help you’ lark but she would then hand over to Brigitta straight away. Bennett had the knack of sounding like a snotty manageress as she explained that Madam would like to see something in lovat blue with a short sleeve but it was still Brigitta who got the commission. By rights, Jane was Fourth Sales which meant that she seldom saw a single customer at this time of the year. If ever. Brigitta had been known to serve as many as three customers at once. Made a party of it, as if they were all out shopping together.
Jane had taken all the cashmere shirts out and arranged their polythene bags into tidy rainbows with each shade blending into the next like the colours on a cinema organ: primrose, moss green, lovat green, bottle green, brown, camel, natural, white, pink, camellia, tartan red, claret, black, navy, Dior blue, Sandringham blue, lovat blue, powder blue. She then somehow shoehorned the slithering pile back into its fixture. She’d polished all the mirrors – why did people touch mirrors? – and stood with her back to the stock gazing out at the arcade through the window display where the coloured cashmeres were suspended on their glass shelves like fully fashioned tropical fish.
Bennett kept up a merciless running commentary on the passers-by as they bustled along.
‘Have you seen these two?’
A pair of identically dressed girls dashed by: very ‘with-it’, very Chelsea, with red woolly tights and matching red berets on top of their shiny bobbed hair which was cut in hard lines round their faces like the hair on a cartoon character. They wore A-line flannel coats well above their knees with big shiny red buttons – like a really, really embarrassing school uniform.
Brigitta looked out of the window as she tripped past on her way back down to the basement after her tea break. She was Dutch but she could bore you to death in six languages. Her saving grace was that she swore all the time. She would never have sworn in Dutch, but she picked up dirty little scraps of English like a tramp rooting through a dustbin. It was a miracle she didn’t swear at the customers really.
‘Whoever cut those fucking jackets should cut another jacket and then be shot.’
She’d got that one from a little Jewish alterations tailor and she used it a lot.
You didn’t call her Brigitta to her face. You called her Mrs Taylor. Brigitta had been married very, very briefly to an Englishman she met nearly ten years ago while they were both working in the same department store. Bennett always reckoned it was just one of those friendly arrangements to get a work permit and that the split was all very amicable but Jane knew what really happened. Brigitta had had three Dubonnets and four glasses of punch at the Christmas party (table for twenty at the Cumberland Hotel) and had cornered Jane and explained that Mr Taylor had expected to be able to put his dirty great thing into Mrs Taylor whenever he felt like it.
‘I told him to stick it up his arse,’ said Brigitta and Jane said that would be a good trick if he could do it and Brigitta shot Dubonnet straight out of her nose.
Brigitta was, technically, still married to Mr Taylor but a week after the honeymoon she’d moved back into the salesladies’ hostel behind Marshall and Snelgrove, a miserable great barracks of a place where a girl could find refuge. Anyone with a gentleman caller had to wheel her bed out into the corridor. No gentlemen ever called. Mr Taylor was now living with his common-law wife in Carshalton Beeches and Brigitta eventually got herself a two-room flat near Clapham Common.