Angela paid her registration fee and met a few pleasant men. But she was anxious, for she wanted to conceal what she was up to from her parents. They were pressing her to marry a family friend, James, whom Angela thought nice but dreadfully staid and boring. With some reluctance, she cancelled further introductions and concentrated on work.
A year later, resisting heavy pressure from James, Angela telephoned the Bureau. A sympathetic Bottle said that her membership had lapsed, but she didn’t consider Angela had had her money’s worth and she would send an introduction.
Mr Paul took one look at Angela, the forty-eighth young woman he’d met, and knew, definitely, assuredly, incontrovertibly and for ever, that she was the one. Angela reserved judgment a little longer, but was courted with such seductive conviction (not for nothing was Mr Paul in advertising) that she was won over.
Mr Paul sent Bottle the most enormous bouquet of her favourite carnations, and a gigantic box of cigarettes, with a letter which she clutched to her heart.
Dear Miss Harbottle
I feel that this letter written in great happiness will bring you real pleasure. I want you, dear lady, who have been so understanding, to be the first to know. Angela and I are engaged. She’ll do!!
We grow more devoted every day, and after years of bitter disappointments and loneliness a new life has started at last, complete with a ready-made family. I think I must hold the record for your ‘difficult people’, and at last I can join the satisfied men in that black box marked ‘MEN OFF’ which I have so often envied.
Thank you again and again, and hang out the flags!
17
Loneliness and Heartbreak
Life in England in the aftermath of war was dreary. Despite high hopes of the new Labour government which had ousted Churchill, rationing continued – indeed, in 1946 bread, available in wartime (though a nasty colour and texture), became rationed. Housewives queued for hours outside shops which had very little to sell. Demobbed servicemen and POWs returned not to a heroes’ welcome but to the indifference of bone-weary survivors in a haunted, pessimistic country. Families had changed beyond recognition: wives had developed a taste for independence; marriages were falling apart. Jobs were hard to find, housing was scarce, bitter loneliness prevailed. The war altered everything and everybody. But in 1947 the enchanting romance, engagement and marriage of Princess Elizabeth and Philip Mountbatten lifted people’s spirits and prompted yet more to seek a spouse. The Bureau’s stairs were rarely empty.
Some of the crowds of clients were heartbreakingly sad. Bottle sighed as she perused letters from women who, through no fault of their own, were in a desperate state. A widow of forty-four, whose husband had drowned when his ship was torpedoed by a U-boat, was being forced out of his house by the children of his first wife. Her only remedy was to marry again. The divorced wife of a fishmonger, who had beaten her black and blue when he discovered that she had spent two shillings on lipstick and face powder, now pathetically hoped for ‘a man with enough income not to notice a lot stolen from the housekeeping money’. A schoolmistress who looked after her father, mentally unstable since the Great War, wanted ‘a husband who is home only for the holidays, e.g. Merchant Navy, Royal Navy or similar’. A girl of thirty sought no more than a husband ‘who would not mind that I am not pretty, and who would not be too critical of my faults’.
Sorrowfully, Bottle turned to letters from men, only to find more scarcely concealed sadness: an accountant demobbed from the army, whose job applications had all been rejected. He was living in a caravan on an isolated field, reliant on a small pension, theoretical compensation for a bad limp caused by bullets and barbed wire on the Normandy beaches. He needed a wife to help him build a house and start a fruit farm. Another letter came from an ex-POW who had returned to England full of optimism after four years languishing in a German camp, only to find his wife absorbed in the baby boy fathered by a German ex-POW who had been interned nearby. The resultant bitter fury, acrimony and violence had culminated in divorce.
Observing Bottle stubbing out cigarette after cigarette, growing more and more overwrought, Heather – who, while sympathetic, treated the horrors more dispassionately – set out to distract her invaluable but sometimes overemotional helper. ‘These stories are truly ghastly, dear Bottle. Picot’s busy interviewing, and I need some help with my mating. Come and give me some advice. For a start, what about Miss Millicent Jessop? She is forty-two, Ladyish, never been married, frightfully neat and tidy. I remember her looking all scrubbed and shiny-faced and stiff, not a hair out of place, curiously lifeless. You could mistake her for a dummy in a shop window. She trained at Domestic Science College and teaches her subject at a girls’ school. She wants a man who is “particular about himself, looks as if he enjoys a daily bath.” Note the “looks as if” – he doesn’t have to have a bath a day as long as he looks clean! What do you think?’
‘A man whose appearance is important to his daily life,’ reasoned Dorothy. ‘Perhaps a serviceman, or other uniformed chap: one who has to dress immaculately all the time. What about a footman? A very smart one came in recently: Gentish, highly presentable, lives up in Staffordshire, in a stately home. He has the advantage of good accommodation, which could be an attraction. No doubt it has a nice bathroom!’
‘You’re right, I remember him too. I’ll look him out. And Miss Jessop is living in the school, but can’t stay there if she marries, so the accom. would be a definite plus. Thank you, dear Bottle. Now, what about Miss Agnes Johns? She’s Much Better Than Most, only nineteen, but she’s been set on marrying since her father ran off with her mother’s best friend before the war. She’s quite sweet but not very bright, works as a comptometer operator and is completely stuck on films. She wants a man with dark hair, she wrote, “the Orson Welles, James Mason, Stewart Granger type.”’
‘That’s easy! I interviewed a young man yesterday, Henry Perkins. He’s twenty-five, a film technician out at Pinewood, Much Better Than Some. He has almost black hair, slicked back and incredibly shiny, and looks like a film star. He wants a pretty, lively, affectionate girl.’
‘Splendid! Just one more: a countess, very impressive, a Lady, fifty-eight, widowed, no children, clever, did something high-powered in the war but couldn’t say what, wants a man of similar standing, a governor or a mayor or a Lord Lieutenant.’
‘Difficult . . .’ Dorothy blew smoke rings as she concentrated. ‘Would she consider a foreigner? There’s that very clever and superior French baron, a publisher and writer, lives here and is completely anglicized.’
‘A brainwave! Thank you, dear Bottle!’
After her absence in Scotland, Heather was rapidly getting back into the swing of the Bureau. Picot, however, could not wait to return to the world of the theatre, which she adored. But she had grown fascinated by the Bureau, so it was with some reluctance that she handed in her notice and departed, promising to come and see them often.
‘Heather darling, you must tell me what becomes of Cyril and Cora, I am positively itching to know. And that murdered man with our address in his pocket. And some of the ones I’ve interviewed. I’ll never be a fabulous match-maker like you or Dorothy, but I’ve got a taste for it now and I shall be practising on all my friends! Good luck with all your plots, darlings. And Dorothy, I specially hope that you’ll get that sweet little Ivy off happily. Goodbye, dear ones! Or rather, au revoir!’
Ivy was a client for whom Bottle felt an almost maternal, protective affection: a winsomely pretty, trim young woman with entrancingly vivid though sorrowful green eyes. Her parents, grandmother, sister and many friends had been wiped out in an air raid which ravaged the entire street while Ivy was at work. At the age of twenty-two she had been robbed of family, friends and possessions. She earned a pittance as a nurse in an East End hospital which was swamped with casualties and which, when Ivy lost her home, found her a small room – more of a large cupboard – just off the wards. Since she was always on the premises, and there were
always crises, she was called upon night and day. At times she could scarcely squeeze another word or force another step from her exhausted body.
By the end of the war Ivy was physically and mentally dead beat, worn to a frazzle by the physical demands of the job, the pity she felt for the patients, who tugged at her heart strings, and her terror of the strict nursing sisters and draconian matron. She exchanged the hospital for a menial but less taxing job fetching and carrying in a West End department store, Debenham & Freebody. By scrimping and scraping, she paid the rent of a room at the top of a semi-derelict bombed house in Notting Hill.
Being efficient, honest, well-spoken and tastefully dressed, Ivy quickly rose to become a saleslady in the Ladies’ Fashion department, where she flourished. But after work and at weekends she was paralysingly lonely, spending most evenings in her cheerless room, eating tinned soup heated on an erratic gas ring. So when walking down Bond Street one Saturday she saw the Marriage Bureau’s sign, like a homing pigeon she flew up the stairs into the metaphorical arms of Bottle, who took an instant liking to the lost soul she perceived, and resolved to help her at all costs.
Between 1945 and 1947 Bottle introduced Ivy to several young men, many of them recently demobbed from the army, navy or air force. Ivy did not jib at a man with some disability, for she had known plenty in the hospital who had been badly wounded, losing a leg, an eye or part of their face, but who were still essentially themselves. Ivy’s wounded heart had warmed to them, giving them comfort and hope; but they were patients, not potential husbands, any more than the wealthy escorts of the ladies to whom she now sold expensive dresses. Sometimes these well-tailored, well-fed men lounged outside the changing room while their wives tried on a succession of clothes. Occasionally one of them winked suggestively or even attempted to put his arm round Ivy’s waist, which she had to endure with a tight, hollow smile while turning away.
Ivy quite liked ‘Bottle’s Boys’, though some she found rather forward, trying to kiss her when she scarcely knew them; and they reported to Bottle that Ivy was a bit shy, rather prim and proper, not much fun, not very modern. Ensconced in a double seat in the anonymous dark of the cinema they would put a hand on her knee, and were offended when she removed it and shrank back. Bottle listened to reports from Ivy and the men and scratched her white-haired head – until one day in 1947 Archibald inched his way up the stairs.
Archibald Bullin-Archer was so thin that he appeared taller than his five feet nine inches, dressed soberly in a quietly pin-striped suit, starched white shirt and sombre tie, clutching a pipe in one long-fingered hand. Taking in his pale, fine-featured face, the tentative smile, the anxious little frown, the slight stoop and the light, hesitant voice, Bottle immediately heard ‘Ivy’ in her head. She sat him down and talked calmly and comfortingly, gradually eliciting from him that he was thirty-eight, had gone from public school to university, and had a degree in his favourite subject, history, which he had taught at a boys’ prep school in Hampshire until the outbreak of war. He had always been delicate, but was pronounced fit enough to join the army and be sent to India, where he had spent the war years in administrative jobs, organizing supplies of food to the troops. This had cut him off even more from his family, from whom he already felt separate: generations of well-off Surrey landowners and gentlemen farmers, the men tall, robust and noisy, the women hearty huntswomen and polished hostesses.
Archibald made it clear to Bottle that he was uncomfortable with his family and their friends. He had returned to England in a frail state, having contracted dysentery, which he had not managed to shake off fully, and he found the boisterous social bonhomie and physical activity – hunting, shooting, tennis – of weekends at his parents’ home draining and alienating. He was not strong enough to return to teaching, but had a modest job subediting a history magazine, living in a small Bloomsbury flat which had been part of his mother’s dowry. He was chronically, agonizingly lonely.
Archibald had virtually no experience of women, though he idolized them from afar. Cautiously he confessed to Bottle that he had had a crush on the matron at the prep school and, when rebuffed by her, had focused his dreams on the English mistress, who had promptly become engaged to the Scripture master. Archibald’s heart had ached. In India, the few single English girls had been snowed under by the attentions of hordes of single soldiers, businessmen, tea planters, colonial servants, etc., all clamouring for a wife. Archibald hadn’t stood a chance, and fled from the alternative of being inveigled into the bed of a predatory, disaffected wife. He would not have known what to do in bed anyway, suspected Bottle.
The longer she talked to Archibald, the more convinced Bottle grew that Ivy was the answer to his prayers. She categorized him as a Gentleman For Here or slightly lower who could meet a Near Lady, someone a bit lower class than him. He lacked the presence, the income, the poise, the tastes of a full-blown GFH – any Lady For Here would probably find him too shy, too lacking in ambition, living in too sparse a style in an unfashionable neighbourhood. Ivy, a Near Lady, had all the qualities poor Archibald needed, and Bottle was full of optimism as she arranged for them to meet.
Bottle was right. The first reports from both Ivy and Archibald were touchingly grateful, for they found in each other a kindred spirit: modest, self-effacing, unassuming, and giddy with the desire to love and be loved. They met in the evenings, went to concerts and plays and talks, and on weekend outings. Ivy visited his flat, and sent Bottle a glowing description of its cleanliness and tidiness – Archibald was a fastidious man – and of the pictures on the walls, mostly of Princess Margaret and Princess Elizabeth with her dashing fiancé Philip, for Archibald worshipped the royal family as well as women. And the day before the sublime wedding of Elizabeth and Philip, Archibald fell to his knees and, stammering with emotion, asked Ivy to be his wife.
A lyrical letter from Ivy rejoiced Bottle’s heart. But only a week later her joy was smashed to smithereens by a ten-page letter, the ink blotched by tears. Bottle picked up the first page:
Dear Miss Harbottle
Perhaps you have seen in the newspaper that Archie is dead. I cannot believe it but I saw him lying in the police station. I know he is dead but I do not feel he is. I do not know what to do. We were so happy. We went to see his parents. We went to tell them we were engaged. I dressed ever so nicely, I wore a new suit, emerald-green because Archie says that matches my eyes, simple but nice, and a hat and gloves to match. And Archie always looks nice but he looked extra handsome in a new white shirt and a dark red tie and I bought a red carnation for his buttonhole, and we took some cheese sandwiches and a Thermos of tea in the car. It was a cold day being as it’s November and Archie tucked me up in a big car-rug. He is always so kind and thoughtful to me. We stopped and had a picnic about half way, and talked about our wedding and where we would live afterwards. We just want a small wedding, in a Register Office. My parents wouldn’t have liked it, they always wanted me to have a proper church wedding. But they’re dead and it doesn’t matter to Archie and me. He wants to marry me and I want to marry him, that’s all. He’s dead now but he isn’t really you know.
Bottle paused, wiped away the tears beginning to trickle down her face, and picked up the next pages.
We got to his parents’ house, through some great black gates and then down a long drive. The house is very big and grand and four huge dogs came rushing out barking their heads off and nearly knocked Archie and me down the front steps. Archie’s mother and father were having tea in an enormous room full of furniture and paintings and photographs and big silver cups. Mrs Bullin-Archer is taller than Archie and she was wearing a pair of riding trousers and a tweed jacket. She was warm but I was cold, it was freezing in the room with only one log fire.
Archie’s father doesn’t look anything like Archie, he’s big and heavy and his face is red and he has great bushy eyebrows and a curly moustache though he’s bald. In fact I didn’t see how he could be Archie’s father. Archie was getting very nervo
us, I could tell. His parents didn’t smile at us, they just said, ‘Good afternoon,’ and, ‘Well?’ and they didn’t say anything when Archie said, ‘This is Ivy.’ He went on, ‘Ivy and I are engaged,’ but they still didn’t say anything, just shrugged their shoulders as if they were impatient, so he stopped. He hoped they would be pleased. But Mrs Bullin-Archer looked at Archie, very coldly. She didn’t look at me. And she said, in a very crushing voice, ‘And who IS Ivy?’ Well I could feel Archie getting more and more nervous, so I said, very quietly, ‘I am Ivy.’ Then Mrs Bullin-Archer turned and gave me such a terrible look, her mouth all pinched and her eyes half-closed, and she hissed like a snake, ‘My dear girl, I can see that. But who are you? Who are your parents? Where did you go to school? How much money do you have? I want to know WHO YOU ARE!’
Appalled, Bottle fumbled with her cigarette packet but abandoned it as, transfixed with horror, she read on.
Archie was white and stammering and he could hardly get the words out but he did: ‘Ivy is Ivy Bailey and her parents are dead and we love each other and we’re engaged and we’re going to get married, and . . .’ He couldn’t go on because his father barged in in a big loud voice like a foghorn at the seaside: ‘No. Your mother is right, we want to know who this young lady is. Now tell us. Or she can tell us.’
He turned to me and stuck his head forward like a turkey cock and raised his great eyebrows and gave me such a scornful look. I said: ‘My name is Ivy Bailey and I live in London and I work in Debenham and Freebody and . . .’ I couldn’t go on because Mrs Bullin-Archer interrupted in a voice as chilly as the room: ‘You work in a department store? Do you mean you are a salesgirl?’ ‘Yes, she is,’ said Archie, ‘and a very good one too.’ ‘It is immaterial whether she is good at her job or bad,’ snapped Mrs Bullin-Archer, ‘it is quite impossible that a Bullin-Archer should marry a salesgirl. Now take her away, Archibald, and let us have no more of this nonsense.’ ‘Your mother is right,’ Mr Bullin-Archer boomed, in a terrible exploding voice. ‘The idea is ludicrous. I am sure that Miss Bailey will see sense, will you not, Miss Bailey?’ He took a step towards me and I almost feared he would hit me. ‘As your mother says,’ he carried on to Archie, ‘take her away and keep out of our sight until you have got over this stupid nonsense. Goodbye.’
Marriages are Made in Bond Street Page 20