by Nick Hornby
George laughed and shook his head in wonder. He was having the time of his life, Barbara could tell.
‘No boyfriend?’ Len asked.
‘He couldn’t get the day off, Len,’ George said. He paused for a moment, clearly wondering whether he’d got too familiar, too soon. ‘They’re short-staffed, apparently, because of the holidays. Her Auntie Marie couldn’t come either, because she’s gone to the Isle of Man for a fortnight. Her first holiday for seven years. Only a caravan, but, you know. A change is as good as a rest.’
‘You should be writing all this down, Len,’ said Barbara. ‘Caravan. Isle of Man. A change is as good as a rest. Is it just her and Uncle Jack, Dad? Or have the boys gone too?’
‘He doesn’t want to know all that,’ said her father.
‘Where does she work?’ Len asked, nodding his head towards Barbara.
‘I don’t know. We could ask her,’ said Barbara.
‘She’s in the cosmetics department at R. H. O. Hills,’ her father said. ‘And Aidan’s in Menswear. That’s how they met.’
‘Well, she won’t be there much now, will she?’ said the photographer.
‘Won’t she?’ said George.
‘I’m always taking photographs of Miss Blackpool. Hospitals, shows, charity galas … She’s got a lot of responsibilities. It’ll be a busy year. We’ll be seeing each other a lot, Barbara, so you’ll have to get used to my ugly mug.’
‘Oh, Lord,’ said her father. ‘Did you hear that, Barbara?’
Hospitals? Charity galas? An entire year? What had she been thinking? Auntie Marie had told her about the shop openings and the Christmas lights, but she hadn’t thought about how she’d be letting people down if she just disappeared, and she hadn’t thought about how she’d still be Miss Blackpool in three hundred and sixty-four days’ time. She knew then that she didn’t want to be Miss Blackpool in an hour’s time.
‘Where’s she going?’ said Len.
‘Where are you going?’ said her father.
Fifteen minutes later, the runner-up, Sheila Jenkinson, a tall, dopey redhead from Skelmersdale, was wearing the tiara, and Barbara and her father were in a taxi on their way back home. She left for London the following week.
2
Saying goodbye to her father was hard. He was afraid of being left alone, she knew that, but it didn’t stop her. On the train down, she didn’t know whether she was more upset by his grief and fear, or her own ruthlessness: she never once came close to changing her mind. Saying goodbye to Aidan was easy, though. He seemed relieved, and told her that he knew she’d cause trouble for him if she stayed in Blackpool. (He married someone else the following spring, and he caused her trouble for the next fifteen years.)
And London was easy too, as long as you didn’t expect too much. She found a bed and breakfast near Euston Station, paid three days’ lodging out of her savings, went to an employment bureau and got a job in Derry and Toms in Kensington High Street, on the cosmetics counter. All you had to do, it seemed, was ask for an inferior version of the life you’d had before and London would give it to you. London didn’t mind where you came from either, as long as you didn’t mind the tobacconist and the bus conductor laughing and repeating your words back to you every time you opened your mouth. ‘Toopence!’ ‘Piccadelleh!’ ‘Coopa tea!’ Sometimes other customers and other passengers were invited to join in the hilarity.
A girl called Marjorie, who worked in Ladies’ Shoes, offered her a double room in Earl’s Court, much nearer to the store, and she agreed to take it before she’d realized that Marjorie would be in the double room with her.
She felt even more religious now: Lucille Ball had turned her into some kind of martyr to ambition. The kitchen window looked down over the railway line, and when a train went past, soot fell from the window frames on to the floor. In London, nearly all the money she earned went on food, rent and bus fares. Marjorie was every bit as lonely as Barbara, and she never went out anywhere, so the two of them spent too much time together. They lived off tinned soup and toast, and they never had enough sixpences for the gas fire. She couldn’t watch Lucy, because she didn’t have a TV set, so on Sunday afternoons her longing for home was particularly sharp. It didn’t help, reminding herself that if she were back in Blackpool she’d spend the afternoon aching to be in London. It just made her feel that she’d never be happy anywhere. Sometimes she stopped and looked in the windows of employment agencies, but nobody seemed to need a television comedienne. Some nights she lay in bed and wept silently at her own stupidity. What had she thought was going to happen?
Marjorie told her that she should buy The Stage for the advertisements. There were a lot of girls, she said, who’d worked at Derry and Toms and read The Stage during their tea breaks, then disappeared.
‘Would I have heard of any of them?’ Barbara asked.
‘Probably only Margie Nash,’ said Marjorie. ‘You must have heard us talking about her.’
Barbara shook her head, anxious for news of anyone who had found some kind of secret show-business tunnel out of the store.
‘She was the one who was caught messing about with a customer in the gents’ lav on the third floor, and then she owned up to stealing a skirt. She used to buy The Stage every week.’
And, undeterred by the cautionary tale of Margie Nash, so did Barbara, every Thursday, from the newspaper stall by Kensington High Street tube station. But she didn’t understand a lot of it. It was full of notices that seemed to be written in code:
CALLS FOR NEXT WEEK
Shaftesbury – Our Man Crichton. Kenneth More, Millicent Martin, George Benson, David Kernan, Dilys Watling, Anna Barry, Eunice Black, Glyn Worsnip, Patricia Lambert (Delfont/Lewis/Arnold).
Who, precisely, was being called for next week? Not Kenneth More and Millicent Martin and the rest of them, surely? They must all have known that they were about to appear in a West End play. Was Barbara herself being called, or girls like her? And if there was any way that these mysterious calls might involve her, or anyone like her, how was she supposed to know how to respond to them? There was no date or time or job description. Lots of shows seemed to need soubrettes, but she didn’t know what a soubrette was, and she didn’t have a dictionary, and she didn’t know where her nearest library was. If there wasn’t an English word for it, though, then it was probably work best avoided, at least until she was really desperate.
The vacancies in the back of the paper were more straightforward, and she didn’t need to look anything up. The Embassy Club in Old Bond Street wanted smart and attractive hostesses. The Nell Gwynne in Dean Street needed showgirls and/or dancers, but ‘only lovely girls’ were invited to apply. The Whisky A Go Go in Wardour Street required Pussies, minimum height 5ft 6in, but she suspected that height was not the only requirement, and she didn’t want to know what the others might be.
She hated having to think about whether she was lovely enough to be a Pussy or a hostess or a showgirl. She feared that she wasn’t as lovely as she had been in Blackpool; or rather, her beauty was much less remarkable here. One day in the staff restaurant she counted on her fingers the girls who looked like real knockouts to her: seven. Seven skinny, beautiful creatures on her lunch break, in Derry and Toms alone. How many would there be on the next lunch break? How many on the cosmetics counters at Selfridges and Harrods and the Army and Navy?
She was pretty sure, though, that none of these girls wanted to make people laugh. That was her only hope. Whatever it was they cared about – and Barbara wasn’t sure that they cared about very much – it wasn’t that. Making people laugh meant crossing your eyes and sticking your tongue out and saying things that might sound stupid or naive, and none of those girls with their red lipstick and their withering contempt for anyone old or plain would ever do that. But that hardly gave her a competitive edge, not here, not yet. A willingness to go cross-eyed wasn’t much use to her in Cosmetics. It probably wasn’t what the Whisky A Go Go wanted from its Pussies either.
Barbara began to imagine the pretty girls working in Derry and Toms as beautiful tropical fish in a tank, swimming up and down, up and down, in serene disappointment, with nowhere to go and nothing to see that they hadn’t seen a million times before. They were all waiting for a man. Men were going to scoop them up in a net and take them home and put them into an even smaller tank. Not all of them were waiting to find a man, because some of them had already found one, but it didn’t stop the waiting. A few were waiting for a man to make up his mind and fewer still, the lucky ones, were waiting for a man who’d already made up his mind to make enough money.
Barbara wasn’t waiting for a man, she didn’t think, but she no longer knew what she was waiting for. She’d told herself on the train that she wouldn’t even think about going home for two years, but after two months she could feel all the fight and the fire in her dying away, until the only thing she wanted was access to a TV set on a Sunday. That was what work had done to her – work and the tinned soup, and Marjorie’s adenoids. She’d forgotten all about turning herself into Lucy; she just wanted to see her on the screen somehow.
‘Do you know anyone with a television?’ she asked Marjorie one night.
‘I don’t really know anyone full stop,’ said Marjorie.
It was Friday evening. She was draping stockings over the clothes horse by the gas fire. ‘But most of the girls live like us.’
‘Some of them must live at home,’ said Barbara.
‘Yes,’ said Marjorie. ‘You can befriend them and go to the pictures with them and go out dancing with them and one day they might invite you home for Sunday tea and you can watch their telly.’
‘So it has to be a boyfriend.’
‘You can go out with them and go dancing with them and go to the pictures with them and wrestle in doorways with them and …’
‘All right,’ said Barbara gloomily. ‘I get the idea.’
‘I’d say that the quickest way to a television is a gentleman friend. They’re hard to find, but they exist.’
‘You mean a rich man with a wife?’
‘You said you were looking for a TV set, not eternal love. They’ve got flats hidden away. Or they can afford hotels. Nice hotels have television sets in their bedrooms.’
So Barbara was waiting for a man too, it turned out. Of course she was. What on earth had led her to believe that she could do something without one? Why did she always think she was different from everyone else? There was no point complaining about it. Or rather, she could complain all she wanted, as long as she was trying to meet a man at the same time, and as long as she kept the complaints to herself. Whoever this man was, he probably didn’t want to spend all evening listening to her banging on about how unfair the world was. He wouldn’t be that sort of chap, from the sound of it. She needed to change something, anything. She needed to meet someone who wasn’t a bus conductor or a sales girl. There were opportunities somewhere. But they weren’t in Cosmetics, and she didn’t think they were in the Nell Gwynne.
‘How do you know all this?’ she asked Marjorie, who didn’t strike her as someone who’d had a string of gentlemen friends.
‘I used to have a friend in Coats and Furs,’ said Marjorie. ‘Some of the girls there had gentlemen friends. It never happens to anyone in Shoes, of course.’
‘Why “of course”?’
‘You must have noticed.’
‘Noticed what?’
‘Well, that’s why we’re in Shoes in the first place. Because we don’t look like the sorts of girls who’d find themselves a gentleman friend.’
Barbara wanted to tell her not to be so silly, but she flicked through a few faces in her mind and recognized the truth of the observation. All the good-looking girls were in Cosmetics and Ladies’ Fashion. There was a selection process that nobody had ever mentioned.
‘Can you get yourself a couple of days in Perfume?’ said Marjorie.
‘Why Perfume?’
‘Cosmetics isn’t so good. You don’t get men buying lipstick and mascara so much, do you?’
Marjorie was right about this as well. Barbara couldn’t remember the last time she’d served a man.
‘But they buy perfume as presents. They get all flirty when they’re buying it, too. They want you to spray it on your wrists and then take your hand so they can sniff.’
Barbara had seen this back home in R. H. O. Hills, but not often, and it was never done with any real intent. People were more careful in a small town. If somebody’s husband tried something on, his wife would find out soon enough.
‘Listen,’ said Marjorie. ‘A gentleman friend isn’t interested in wrestling. I just thought I should warn you.’
Barbara was surprised. ‘What is he interested in, then? If he’s not interested in, you know, that.’
‘Oh, he’s interested in that. Just not the wrestling part.’
‘I’m not sure I get you.’
‘He won’t want to wrestle. Wrestling’s for kids.’
‘But if he’s a gentleman …’
‘I think the word “gentleman” in “gentleman friend” is like the word “public” in “public schools”. It actually means the opposite, when you put it with something else. You’re not a virgin, are you?’
‘Of course not,’ said Barbara.
The truth was that she wasn’t sure. There had been some sort of business with Aidan, right before the beauty pageant. She had decided that she wanted to be unencumbered before coming to London. He’d been hopeless, though, and she was consequently unsure of her official status.
‘Well, be warned, that’s all. They’re not messing about.’
‘Thank you.’
Marjorie looked at her, apparently exasperated.
‘You do know what you look like, don’t you?’
‘No. I thought I did, before I came down to London. But it’s different here. There’s a different scale. All those girls in Cosmetics and Ladies’ Fashion, and then when you go out on to Kensington High Street …’
‘All those little stick insects?’ said Marjorie. ‘You don’t need to worry about them. All right, you’re not very with it. But men don’t care about that. You’re ridiculous.’
‘Oh,’ said Barbara. ‘Thank you.’
‘You’re like Sabrina.’
Barbara tried not to roll her eyes. She hated Sabrina, the girl who just stood in front of the camera on the Arthur Askey Show, smiling and showing off her silly bust. She was and did the opposite of what Barbara wanted to be and to do.
‘You’ve got the bosom, the waist, the hair, the legs, the eyes … If I thought that murdering you with a meat cleaver, this minute, would get me half what you’ve got, I’d slice you up without a second’s thought and watch you bleed to death like a stuck pig.’
‘Thank you,’ said Barbara.
She thought she’d focus on the compliment, rather than the terrifying glimpse she’d been given into her flatmate’s soul. She found herself particularly worried by Marjorie’s willingness to do all that, the slicing and the bleeding and the murdering, for only a percentage of the advantages she envied. There was something in this compromise that made it seem more real than Barbara wanted it to be.
‘You shouldn’t be in of an evening, watching me dry my underwear. You should be entering beauty competitions.’
‘Don’t be daft,’ said Barbara. ‘What would I want to do anything like that for?’
The next day, Barbara asked a girl she knew on the perfume counter to swap with her for an afternoon, just to see how easy it was to find a gentleman friend. The results of the experiment were startling: you just had to turn on the light indicating that you were looking for one. Barbara was glad she hadn’t known where the switch was during her teenage years, because she’d have got herself into all sorts of trouble in Blackpool – trouble caused by married men who owned seven carpet shops, or who sang in the shows at the Winter Gardens.
Valentine Laws wasn’t much of a catch. She should probably have thrown him b
ack in, but she wanted to get on with it. He was at least fifteen years older than her, and he smelled of pipe tobacco and Coal Tar soap. The first time he came to the perfume counter, he was wearing a wedding ring, but when he came back a couple of minutes later, apparently for a longer look at her, it was gone. He didn’t speak to her until his third lap.
‘So,’ he said, as if the conversational well had momentarily run dry. ‘Do you get out much yourself?’
‘Oh, you know,’ she said. ‘Not as much as I’d like.’
‘ “Mooch”,’ he said. ‘Lovely. Where are you from? Let me guess. I’m good at this. I know it’s somewhere oop north, but where, that is the question. Yorkshire?’
‘Lancashire. Blackpool.’
He stared, unembarrassed, at her chest.
‘Sabrina comes from Blackpool, doesn’t she?’
‘I don’t know who Sabrina is,’ said Barbara.
‘Really? I’d have thought you’d all be very proud of her.’
‘Well, we’re not,’ said Barbara. ‘Because we’ve never heard of her.’
‘Anyway, she looks like you,’ said Valentine Laws.
‘Bully for her.’
He smiled and ploughed on. He was clearly not interested in her conversational skills. He was interested in her because she looked like Sabrina.
‘Well, Miss Blackpool.’ She looked at him, startled, but it was just a line. ‘What sort of places would you like to go to?’
‘That’s for me to know and you to find out.’
She could have kicked herself. That was a tone she’d have used back home to slap away a Teddy Boy at the Winter Gardens, but it was no use to her here. She was wrestling, and Marjorie had warned her not to wrestle. Luckily for her, and perhaps because he wasn’t accustomed to the snap and snarl of Saturday night dance halls, he ignored her little flash of haughtiness.
‘I’m trying,’ he said patiently. ‘But I have a proposal to make to you.’
‘I’ll bet,’ she said.