Relatively Strange

by Marilyn Messik

  She’d taken to cooking a lot of foreign, highly spiced meals and just last Friday, after a particularly stressful day, when a six-times driving test failure had made it to seven, Mr Goldie, trudging wearily up his garden path with thoughts of slippers and pipe was surprised to have the front door whipped open by the lady of the house. She had two glasses of wine in one hand, a rose between her teeth and an outfit that left far less to the imagination than might have been wise.

  Mr Goldie was in somewhat of a turmoil over these unnerving turn of events. After all, he reasoned, last Friday, he could easily have been the Man from The Pru and that would have done no-one’s nerves any good. He appreciated the Change did funny things to a woman of her age but really couldn’t say whether he’d be relieved or regretful when this phase passed. I did know that he’d have died a million deaths if he had even the vaguest notion that I too now, had a vision in my head of Mrs G and the rose, which somehow I couldn’t quite shake off either.

  Of course, I suppose what everyone craves in their life – me and Mrs Goldie no exception – is a spot of romance. But for my part, hormone-charged commentaries surging through the minds of my male contemporaries, to whom each new set of breasts was a revelation, each pair of mini-skirted legs a thrill and every slow dance an un-missable opportunity to press throbbing areas of anatomy against an unwary hip, came as a bit of a shock. There were also occasions when I could have well done without knowing that the youth, in whose sweaty grasp I was currently clasped, had screwed his courage to the sticking point to ask the girl standing next to me for a dance, lost his nerve at the last minute and grabbed the nearest thing to hand – me.

  I was constantly striving to improve the blocking of general stuff coming in as well as limiting my lamentable tendency to reach out and read. It was so much more vital, now I knew exactly what I wanted and what I didn’t, so I worked on it painstakingly in a way I’d never needed to when I was younger. After a while, inhibition of both incoming and outgoing, became ever tighter and having once clambered painfully aboard that wagon, I did my level best not to fall off too often. As a consequence, life became easier, certainly far less mortifying. I’d made my decision as to which side of the fence I wanted to be, Normal was the name of the game. And if, as time passed, my part in Faith’s family misfortunes became something I didn’t care to take out and look at too often and my time with Glory and the Peacock Girls became ever more bizarrely surreal, then that was no bad thing either.

  Chapter Fifty

  I left Technical College after a couple of enjoyable and not too studious years, armed with an impressive array of office skills and landed myself a pleasant position with an office bureau, just off Berkeley Square. The company provided ad hoc secretarial and typing services for businessmen who chose not to employ their own staff or who simply wanted a base and a good office address in town.

  Jointly owned and run by tweed and twin-setted Mrs Hillyer-Bowden and The Colonel, there was little doubt where in reality lay the seat of power – and a not insubstantial seat at that. Although Mrs H-B ostensibly deferred to her spouse on all decisions, it was clear he, despite impressive military moustache, bearing and monocle would have been pushed to say boo to the mildest of geese. The Colonel and Mrs Hillyer-Bowden shared a small, overheated office at the front of the building from which she stentoriously issued instruction in his name, despite the fact he was given to disappearing for much of the day,

  “Club.” He’d mutter “Seeing a chap … damn nuisance. Back in a jiff.”

  “Ladies,” Mrs H-B would bellow as the door closed behind him, “The Colonel says, he’d rather hear the sound of typing than talking!”

  In addition to the Hillyer-Bowden’s office, there was a Board Room and four desked and telephoned rooms, let by the half day. The plushly armchaired reception area and busy switchboard was manned, with laxity and a cut-glass accent, by the Hon. Antonia Beresford, who made up in elegance what she lacked in efficiency. She invariably got messages muddled and was always double-booking offices, but tackled, would look down her nose like the slightly offended thoroughbred she was, leaving just enough of a languorous pause for you to realise the sheer unimportance of the matter you’d just raised.

  We three secretaries or Temporary Personal Assistants as Mrs H-B preferred us to call ourselves, worked cheek by jowl, crammed into a decidedly un-plush, rear-office area that accommodated three desks, the telex, the hand-cranked Gestetner duplicating machine and two filing cabinets. So squashed in were we, that we used to joke we had to hit carriage return in unison to avoid clashing arms. The quantities of differently headed stationery, stacked below each desk didn’t help much in the leg-room department either.

  Lauretta Sears had been with the business since its inception – ten years earlier. Mid forties and single, she was sweet natured and angularly awkward, weighed down at ear, neck and wrist with quantities of chunky jewellery – her ‘little weakness’ she called it, returning frequently from lunch breaks with a sandwich, a guilty look and something new, shiny and more than she could afford. Her misty brown gaze was framed by meticulously applied false eyelashes and magnified by oversized glasses. Her pride and joy, was her thick mane of tumbling red curls, restrained during the week by black velvet Alice bands and clips, released to profusion only for special occasions such as our sedate, annual staff dinner treat at the nearby Mayfair Hotel. Lauretta was one of those people totally out of sync with the weather, chilly days invariably caught her without a cardigan; temperatures soared if she wore one and she only ever brought her umbrella when it didn’t rain. She was, she swore, meteorologically jinxed and was always either fanning herself in front of the open window or shivering over our two-bar electric fire.

  Possessed of a particularly flawless, creamy complexion, Lauretta kept her own concoction of Nivea and rosewater in her desk drawer for frequent application, to counteract the effects of West-End traffic. She went to bed, she told us with a chiffon scarf tied over her face and had trained herself only to sleep on her back to avoid pressure and creasing. She commuted daily into London from Kent. There, with the patience of several saints, she shared a bungalow with Mother, a woman unfaltering in her resolve that her daughter should miss out on no aspect of her ever downward-spiralling state of health.

  My other colleague, Rajitha Sathasivam, was just a couple of years older than me. Hair so jet black it shone, Twiggy-thin and immaculate – you never knew, she maintained, who you might come across in the course of any day, nor how important they might turn out to be and first impressions count. Her extravagances were a never-ending succession of Bond Street expensive, heels and matching handbags and she teamed these with black or navy, tight-skirted, beautifully cut suits made skilfully at home for her by her father who used to be a tailor. Despite the elegant shoes, she was chronically flat-footed, with feet turned outward in endearingly ungainly fashion. When she remembered, she devoted intense concentration to keeping them on track, giving herself a curiously stilted gait.

  Rajitha was formidably intelligent, ferociously efficient – leading to daily clashes with the Hon. Antonia – drivingly ambitious and cuttingly articulate. Over sandwiches and coffee on the summer grass of Berkeley Square, or steamy baked potatoes in the local Spud-U-Like on dull already-darkening winter days, we interminably discussed our futures. Raj was outspokenly appalled at my aim to meet the right man, marry and produce children. I was equally astounded that she was saving to start her own employment agency, working evenings as a theatre usherette, to supplement funds and that, moreover, she saw the opening of her first establishment as just the beginning. She was part of a close-knit family, but had come down to London from Leeds and was living in a small bed-sit near Charing Cross, because she wanted the opportunities the bigger city could offer. Her room was, she said, not brilliant but cheap and cheerful and walking distance to both her jobs.

  Despite, or perhaps because of, our disparate backgrounds we all got on well, laughed a lot and worked comfortably tog
ether. And no day’s work was ever the same, with the variety of different personalities who, in search of secretarial services and shepherded haphazardly by the Hon Antonia, hired the offices, some on a regular basis, others just needing assistance with a one-off project. I had a salary sufficient to cover lunchtime fashion forays and work varied enough to keep me busy during the day, undemanding enough not to have to give it a second thought, when I joined the masses disappearing down the tube each night. Life was undramatic and evenly paced and I was troubled only by the same issues affecting other young women of my age. I really felt I’d finally got the balance right. Maintaining necessary shielding had, like any exercised skill, become second nature and to all intents and purposes I was Miss Average. That’s not to say, of course, there wasn’t the odd occasion when a situation called for just a little more on the action front and with what I now considered to be my far greater control, I saw no reason to hold back if it suited me not to.

  Travelling the Northern Line in the rush hour was never fun – it hadn’t earned its misery title for nothing. Cramming in daily, cheek to armpit, with sweaty strangers was stressful enough without added unpleasantness, such as the middle-aged chap, epitome of respectability – Homburg, Burberry, FT folded pinkly beneath one arm who certainly, one evening, picked the wrong girl to rub up the wrong way.

  He’d probably done it a hundred times before, his practiced smirk and shrug of apology when I turned and glared, had obviously worked in the past. Not with me it didn’t. As I placed my large handbag pointedly and strategically between us, I reached into his head, just enough to confirm I hadn’t been mistaken. Goodness me but it was murky in there. This was a man with brain firmly in his trousers. So I gave him an itch he couldn’t scratch, at least not in respectable circles. That wiped the smirk off his face smartish. I watched cheerfully as he shifted desperately from one foot to the other, his discomfort growing by the minute. He got out at the next station, it wasn’t his stop, he didn’t seem to care. Last I saw of him, he was hurrying up the platform in an interestingly jerky way as he tried to deal with a burning private issue in a public place, without getting arrested for it.

  Equally satisfying was the opportunity of being public spirited with no risk of getting into a fight. Drawing up at the traffic lights once, I held my breath as a battered red Morris Marina hurtled up behind me, screeching to a halt less than a hoot away. The windscreen was labelled over driver and passenger side respectively, Stu and Stu’s Chick – clearly a chap who believed in keeping his options open. As we idled at the lights, their passenger window wound down and I watched in my mirror as a Wimpy box complete with half-eaten burger, chips and a polystyrene cup full of coffee were chucked out of the car. I didn’t even stop to think, why would I? Burger and box shot back through the car window before Stu’s Chick had even begun to wind it up again, followed closely by the cup, coffee and all. As I pulled away, it was apparent from a certain amount of shrieking and a rapid evacuation of the car behind, that not only had the reappearance of the rubbish created a certain amount of surprise, but that those polystyrene cups keep coffee piping hot, far longer than you’d think.

  Chapter Fifty-One

  Lauretta was assaulted, brutally beaten, stabbed and left for dead, not far from her local station, one unseasonably sunny, mid-October Thursday evening.

  We didn’t hear about it until around 11.00 o’clock on the Friday morning, when a neighbour who’d been called in to minister to Mother, thought to phone Mrs Hillyer-Bowden. Ashen-faced in the doorway of our office, the Colonel pacing back and forth behind her, she told us Lauretta was in Ashford General, currently undergoing an operation to relieve pressure on the brain from a severely fractured skull. It wasn’t certain at this point whether she’d live.

  You probably remember reading about it – Autumn of 1971 it was – it got a huge amount of coverage because it was the Lollipop Man. Commencing three years earlier, the series of murders had rocked a nation, already believing itself beyond shock after the horrors of the Moors. Striking as he did, at the heart of Kent and the south coast, choosing his commuter victims at random, the killer redefined the travelling habits of thousands. Fathers collected daughters, husbands escorted wives, car pools were organised and in some areas, train-companion groups flourished – women travelling alone, meeting up with others to head in and out of town.

  It was the papers of course, certainly not the police, who gave him the Lollipop label. And whilst a sober-faced Shaw Taylor on Police Five, broadcasting appeals for information was as un-sensational and non-specific as he could be – there was no denying the macabre incongruity of the killer’s calling card. The garishly coloured lollipop thrust into and left in the mouth of each victim, stuck as painfully in the mind of the public, as did the other details of his appallingly violent and random attacks.

  When, a week later we knew Lauretta was going to live, Rajitha and I travelled, knock-kneed with trepidation to Kent to see her. Our day off and fares were courtesy of the Colonel,

  “Least we can do. Best for you girlies to go. Won’t be up to seeing me and the lady boss.” He’d hurrumphed awkwardly and pressed an additional ten pound note into Raj’s hand.

  “Eventualities – taxi from the station, that sort of thing. And fruit, flowers – whatever you think, maybe chocolates? Some of those magazines she’s always got her nose in? Leave it to you.”

  Lauretta was in a side room, away from the rest of the ward, with a sturdy policeman seated to the left of her door. He stood slowly, feet planted squarely apart as we hurried towards him, shepherded by an overworked Irish Staff Nurse, name-tagged Bridie Brogan. She was brusquely to the point as we trotted breathlessly alongside.

  “You’ve not to let her see you’re shocked now.”

  “How is she?” Rajitha’s calm tone belied her white knuckled grip on a smart clutch bag that perfectly complemented black patent shoes. I didn’t look nearly as smart but matched her in apprehension. I was also extra-fiercely mentally cordoned. Hospitals were a minefield of emotion and beyond my barriers there would be, I was uncomfortably aware, vibrations of disturbing intensity.

  “Out of I.C. not out the woods – not by a long chalk. Now, not too long and no nonsense mind. I want no weeping and wailing – we’ve enough problems with that mother of hers. Well, what are you waiting for? In you go.” And she opened the door, put a firm hand on each of our backs and pushed.

  In the dimly lit room a policewoman, trousered legs neatly crossed, was sitting by the window catching what daylight was seeping below the drawn floral curtain onto the pages of a newspaper. She nodded at us, kept her voice low,

  “WPC Lynton. Best get your coats off – like a hothouse in here.” She indicated a corner of the room where a chair already held her thick uniform overcoat and jacket. I slipped out of my coat, adding it to the pile but could already feel sweat prickling my armpits.

  “Chairs by the bed, see? Make yourselves comfortable. She’s dropped off again I think, but she doesn’t sleep long. Friends are you? Family?”

  “Work with her.” I cleared my throat, summoning a bit of saliva to a suddenly parched mouth as we turned to the bed. I could hear Rajitha’s light, rapid breathing behind me, when I glanced back, her face was unreadable. We moved quietly but Lauretta heard us. The covers convulsed as she surged up wide and white-eyed. She saw us coming towards her and started to whimper, then shockingly, to shriek.

  “Ah, for goodness sakes, don’t just stand there gawping like a pair of eejits the two of you, take her hand, let her see who you are.” Sister Brogan hurtled back in, reaching the bed in a couple of swift strides.

  “There darlin’, you’re all right, you’re all right. We’ll have no more of this racket if you please, Dr’ll have my guts for garters. Now, will you look, sweetheart,” she reached a hand behind her and pulled me ungently forward, “See who it is come to visit.” Under the professionally soothing hands and tone, the ghastly shrieks were subsiding into sobs and dying. The woman, b
reathless in the bed, and I stared at each other. I wouldn’t have recognised her and I don’t honestly think, out of context and without her glasses on she knew who I was until Raj moved up beside me. Bridie was still bustling,

  “Sit down now, sit down, can’t chat standing can you?” We were pushed, shocked and unresisting into two chairs at one side of the bed and Lauretta, re-eased down now on to the pillows, turned her face slowly towards us.

  The whole of the left side of her head was encased in thick, cream colored bandage, stained yellow in places with some kind of ointment. The crepe, extending low over her left eye, gave her a clownish appearance, compounded by wisps of thinning red hair, flaming garishly against the cream material. I realised, abruptly, that the normal luxuriance of curls of which she was so proud, must be a hairpiece. Somehow – and ridiculously – this seemed a greater violation of her privacy than anything else.

  Twin drip tubes snaked into the back of her left hand which she kept twitching, as if to dislodge the discomfort. Another tube emerged from below the blankets and dripped into a urine bag, inadequately concealed beneath the bed-frame. I hoped Lauretta, so ladylike at all times, didn’t know we could see that. Surrounding her right eye, panda-like was a deep, bluely black bruise. It leaked down to her cheekbone where it was turning sour green. A crescent-moon, stitch-puckered, partially scabbed cut, curved from below her other cheekbone to disappear under her chin. Her lips were cut and swollen and her eyes, denuded of their customary lavish lashes were watery, red-rimmed and deeply bewildered.