Looking For Lucy

by Julie Houston

  ‘Well, look heeah,’ an unmistakable voice shouted, ‘it’s the Antiques Roadshow again. Yer gan reet upmarket, heeah, pet.’ David Walliams, aka Geordie Gavin, did a sort of running leap—as much as anyone could run or leap in this seething mass of humanity—landing perfectly on Izzy’s big toe before swinging her round to the music and then ignoring her as he danced with the other men.

  ‘I feel a bit sick now,’ Izzy said, trying to keep upright, but bumping into me as she recovered from spinning round, ‘and those bloody swans are doing me in.’

  ‘What swans?’ I asked, laughing.

  ‘Those pink ones on the wall,’ she said, looking a bit green. ‘Think I’ll just sit down for a bit.’

  I was really beginning to enjoy myself; it had been ages since I’d been out like this; letting my hair down, acting like a thirty-year-old without a care in the world, and Harriet, Grace, and I danced on, at times as part of the group of men, sometimes on our own. I felt free, frivolous, enjoying the evening and the music for what it was; forgetting for a while any responsibilities and thoughts of my new future that would come back to sober me up once out of this tiny, temporary microcosm that was, just for the moment, enclosing me in its very alien but womb-like world.

  I glanced over to our table where Mel and Izzy were catching up, but where Mandy was sitting rather aloof and looking distinctly uncomfortable. I found my shoes at the edge of the dancefloor and made my way over to sit with her.

  ‘It mightn’t have been your intention to end up in a gay bar, Mandy,’ I said, shouting over a thumping remix of ‘It’s Raining Men’, ‘but it’s been brilliant. Honestly, I couldn’t have planned a better night out.’

  ‘Really? Are you sure? I feel totally mortified that I’ve brought you all down here. I almost had a stroke when I saw all these semi-naked men…’

  ‘Ye fancied a stroke did ye, pet? But then ye thought, “Hands Off. No Touching.” Very sensible.’ Geordie Gavin on his way back from the bar, bottle in hand, came to a halt behind Mandy, chortling at his own wit. ‘Now then, pet, are ye not dancing?’ Gavin nodded towards the men. ‘Ye see, straight men cannee dance for sheet. Gay men actuallee dance without having to be hit first with a cattle prod like straight men. And—’ he continued sagely, pausing only to take a swig from his bottle ‘—gay men dance with their hands higher than their nipples.’

  ‘Right, er… thank you.’ Mandy didn’t seem to know what else to say and Gavin cavorted off into the centre of the dancefloor once more. She turned to me and I thought, not for the first time, what an exceptionally beautiful woman she was. Glossy, chic, well turned out, were all phrases that could have, and probably had been at some stage, applied to Mandy Henderson. No wonder she was married to such a powerful and handsome man as David Henderson.

  She turned from where she was watching the far wall, now streaming a video of Kylie Minogue, and said, ‘I need to tell you again, Clementine, just how impressed David and I were the other week with your superb cooking. Would you ever consider doing dinner parties for others? David has so many contacts if you did feel you might like to go down that route.’

  ‘That’s really kind, Mandy. I really appreciate it. At the moment I think I’ll have enough on being married and being a stepmother. But I don’t want to be dependent on Peter too much, so—’

  ‘Blimey, Clementine, I thought you’d got your kit off in there.’ Harriet laughed and indicated the room beyond with a nod of her blonde head. ‘I’ve just been to the loo and went for a nosey. You’ll never guess what there is in that bit of the club. Seems a bit strange next to a gay club… There’s a lap dancing, pole dancing sort of club. God, it’s a right den of iniquity. There are half-naked women wrapped round poles and thrusting their bits and pieces into men’s faces almost. I’m actually quite shocked. But the thing is, there was one of the pole dancers who I thought was you!’ Harriet giggled and reached for her abandoned glass of rose. ‘Honestly, I thought you must have had too much to drink and wandered in there and got your clothes off. I tell you, Clementine, you’ve got an absolute double. Come with me, come on, come and have a look…’

  Heart hammering in my chest, blood pounding in my ears, I stood up, knocking over the chair, running barefoot towards the red velvet tasselled curtain that separated Rawhide, the gay bar where we’d spent the last hour or so, from Fallen Angels, its name emblazoned in red lights on the ceiling greeting me as I ran in.

  A potently strong smell of cheap perfume and beer hit me head-on as my vision took in flashing neon signs:

  LIVE!

  NUDE!

  GIRLS! GIRLS!! GIRLS!!!

  It took a while for my eyes to accustom themselves to the gloom, but I was immediately struck by any lack of joy, glamour or even sexual charge emanating from its airless depths. There were very few people in the room, and the punters that were there didn’t appear to be particularly enjoying themselves. There was no clapping, or woo-hooing that, to the uninitiated, might have been a gauge of involved enjoyment if not an expected norm. Instead, I had the strange impression that, for the on-looking men it was more a rite of passage—something that had to be got through to ensure a good time, but with as much enjoyment as having your car engine oil changed or waiting to pay at the checkout in B&Q.

  It took only a few seconds to find her. She was swaying lethargically, almost drunkenly, her long dark hair, sprayed with pink, swinging across her face as she hugged the pole. Always slightly built, she was now much thinner than when I’d last seen her two years ago but she was still beautiful. Apart from a cheap-looking pair of white, fringed ankle boots and an accompanying white, fringed thong she was vulnerably and, quite shockingly, naked.

  Every so often she would perform an obligatory swing around the well-used, rickety pole, but apart from this there appeared to be a lot less pole activity and a lot more lying down, together with an accompanying, almost mindless, wiggling of legs in the air. As I watched, probably only for a couple of seconds, the totally ridiculous thought suddenly occurred to me that that was par for the course; she’d always hated gymnastics at school.

  ‘Lucy,’ I whispered, and then, as she continued in what appeared to be a fairly catatonic state, shouted, ‘Lucy!’

  Fleetingly aware, but not caring, that Izzy, Harriet and Grace were standing open-mouthed but silent at my side, I rushed over to her, grabbing a dirty-looking robe that had been abandoned on the floor by the pole. ‘Lucy.’ I realised I was crying as I tried to cover up her pitiful nakedness with the grubby material.

  Startled, she turned her big brown eyes and looked at me, her gaze becoming almost one of terror, and then, grabbing the robe from my hands, dashed towards the single door at the back of the room and disappeared down the flight of steps and out into the empty back streets of Leeds.

  14

  SARAH

  ‘I do hope you’re not letting Poppy run wild,’ Lady Anne Sykes said in her usual clipped tones, peering at her younger daughter over her glasses as she did so. Sarah, instantly transported back to this very sitting room and to any number of scenarios where, as a dreamy, almost anxious child and then as an inattentive teenager, she was regularly on the receiving end of her mother’s acerbic tongue, blushed.

  ‘Oh no, Mummy. Really, no.’

  ‘So why isn’t she here with you then? It seems an absolute age since we saw her. And what about school in September? I do hope that you and Roger have not given in to this dreadful idea of her going to sixth-form college rather than staying on where she is? Plenty of time to be at college—’ Anne almost spat the word ‘—when, and if, she goes to university.’

  Sarah flushed further, recalling Poppy’s last words as she’d dropped her daughter off at Harrogate station.

  ‘Mum,’ she’d said through the car’s open window as she bashed Kermit’s door closed, ‘I’m telling you, now, I am off to sixth-form college after the summer. I’ve got a place, and I told school I wasn’t going back. I know school’s been on at Dad wanting to know what�
�s happening, but there’s no way I’m going back. You know as well as I do that he’s secretly relieved he won’t have to fork out the fees. And don’t go telling Granny or she’ll bully Dad into paying up.’

  That had actually made Sarah smile; she was never quite sure who was the biggest bully—her husband or her mother.

  ‘OK, OK,’ Sarah had said, her hands off the steering wheel in a gesture of acquiescence, ‘I’m not the one that needs persuading. I’m more than happy for you to go to sixth-form college rather than stay on at school. Now, remind me again, because your Granny will want to know, who you’re meeting in Leeds and why it’s so important that you can’t come to see your grandmother with me for an hour and catch a later train?’

  ‘Mum, I’ll miss the train. I’ve told you…’

  Had she told her? Sarah tried to recall, but Poppy had been plugged into her iPod from the minute she’d got up and she, Sarah, had been so immersed in listening to Woman’s Hour where James Martin was discussing his latest recipe book, she really couldn’t be sure that Poppy had actually told her what she was up to. Sarah had sighed. She was such a poor mother, more interested in recipes, herbs and spices than with whom her daughter was meeting or where she was actually going.

  ‘All right, darling,’ Sarah had called out to Poppy’s frighteningly tight-jeaned bottom. ‘Ring me when you want picking up.’

  But Poppy had already gone, disappearing through the station entrance where, no doubt, she was already re-plugged into some alien music and wishing she could light up a fag. Sarah had sighed, reversed Kermit and, narrowly missing some old dear who, shouting ‘watch where you’re going, you fucking moron,’ had turned out to be not so dear after all, had driven off to her parents’ house in what had lately been dubbed the ‘Golden Triangle’: that area of North Yorkshire encompassing Harrogate, Wetherby and North Leeds.

  ‘So, where is she?’ The Lady Anne, as Jamie and Polly had christened her a few years ago, was insistent as she continued to peer at Sarah adding, for good measure, ‘You’re looking very flushed, Sarah.’

  ‘I think it must be the menopause, Mummy. I suppose, at fifty, it’s to be expected.’ Trying to veer her mother away from the fact that Poppy was undoubtedly at that minute in some bar with some boy, surreptitiously smoking and onto her second alcopop or worse, Sarah asked, ‘Did you suffer, Mummy? They do say daughters take after their mothers when it comes down to it.’

  The Lady Anne snorted. ‘No such thing as the menopause. Well, not in my day anyway. It’s a modern invention brought in by that Marie Claude magazine to have something to write about as well as being in cahoots with the pharmaceutical companies to get you on to their drugs.’

  ‘I think you mean Marie Claire, Mummy,’ Sarah said and then, emboldened by the fact that she’d already questioned her mother’s naming of the magazine, added, ‘and actually there was a very good article about the menopause in last month’s The Lady.’

  ‘Well, that doesn’t surprise me for one minute, knowing who’s in charge of it these days. The woman has totally ruined it. I cancelled my subscription years ago; can’t get any decent help in there these days. Anthea Drysdale wanted a new housekeeper and all she could find was some young Russian floozy who didn’t have a clue how to set a table or, apparently, even the correct way to hold her knife at dinner.’

  ‘Why was the housekeeper sitting down to dinner with Anthea Drysdale?’ Sarah asked, discreetly moving her sleeve in order to work out how much longer before she could get up and leave.

  ‘Oh, it’s all the way now. It’s all kitchen sups and everyone—children, au pairs, housekeepers, probably the gardener even, if one is still fortunate enough to have one—eating together with the family.’ Anne sniffed disparagingly and poured more tea from the Minton teapot. God, Sarah thought, what she’d give for a strong Costa coffee rather than the brackish English Breakfast tea her mother favoured.

  The sitting room was stifling and Sarah, longing to draw back the heavy Sanderson curtains her mother insisted on half closing against the sun’s fading of her brightly patterned carpet, felt beads of sweat begin on her upper lip.

  ‘How are Selena and Edward?’ Sarah asked, trying to change the subject. She knew from old that once her mother was on a rant about something, she’d be unable to steer her away from it unless she could head her off at the pass, as it were, and get her on to her favourite subject: Sarah’s elder siblings and their families.

  ‘Oh, of course, you won’t know. Hugo has been chosen as PPC…’ Anne tutted as Sarah looked blank. ‘Prospective Parliamentary Candidate for Esher. We’re all thrilled as you can imagine.’ Anne’s over-enthusiastic application of blue eye shadow had creased unbecomingly in the wrinkles of her eyelids, Sarah noticed, and her eyebrows were strangely higher and darker than one would have expected from an eighty-year-old woman. She looked… grotesque, Sarah thought, a clone of Barbara Cartland in her last years, and hurriedly looked away.

  ‘Isn’t he a bit young wanting to be an MP?’ Sarah frowned, trying to recall the last time she’d seen her nephew—her brother Edward’s son. Surely he was only about twenty-two?

  ‘He’s twenty-six,’ her mother said, almost crossly. ‘My father was Churchill’s right-hand man by the time he was thirty-five and Lord Charles Gardener by the time he was forty. I did hope Edward would follow in both sets of grandfathers’ and Daddy’s footsteps, but it wasn’t to be.’

  Too busy asset-stripping the family mill in Bradford in order to feather his own nest during the Eighties, Sarah thought, uncharacteristically sour. Not that she’d ever been in line for any of her father’s inherited, if now hugely diminished, wealth. She’d well and truly blotted her copybook when she did what she did when she was just nineteen.

  ‘We should be happy that it appears to be Hugo who is intent on carrying on the family tradition,’ Anne was saying, eyes narrowed slightly as she glanced at her younger daughter. ‘And actually, Sarah, we don’t want to go scuppering Hugo’s chances…’ She lowered her voice. ‘It wouldn’t do Hugo’s case any good if the Express or the Mail got to know about… about, well… you know…’

  ‘I know, Mummy. I know exactly what you’re getting at.’

  No good telling her mother then, that her yearning to find her babies was becoming almost overwhelming. That if she didn’t talk to someone soon she felt she might literally burst: all the pent up feelings, shame, regrets, and thoughts that her mother and Roger simply refused to listen to, exploding out of her one morning – boom!—as she stood in the checkout in Aldi, or sat in church listening to yet another of her husband’s quite dreadful sermons.

  ‘I don’t think it would be a bad idea for you to make a bit more use of your title either, Sarah. At the end of the day, with your father being in the House of Lords—as was mine—as their daughters we’ve always been entitled to the title “The Honourable.” I’ve always been proud to be The Hon. and, since your father’s knighthood, even prouder to be The Hon. Lady Anne. Your sister Selena makes sure she’s always addressed as The Hon. Selena, particularly now that she’s president of The Children’s Society charity. It does add a certain something, you know. I do feel, given your… your past history, it might not be a bad idea, particularly with Hugo’s present candidacy, to use it rather more than you do? Hmm? Sarah?’

  Sarah jumped. ‘Sorry, Mummy, I was miles away.’ Forty miles away, to be exact, pleading for her daughters not to be taken away.

  ‘You always were, Sarah,’ her mother said crossly. ‘That was always your problem.’

  *

  Heading south back down the A61 and home, Sarah suddenly couldn’t bear the thought of doing the supermarket shop, which had been her vague intention, nor did she want to actually go home. Roger, with one of his migraines—Sarah was still not convinced they were actually migraines, but rather an excuse to take himself off into his study and out of the way of his family and any wandering parishioners in search of God’s blessing—was to be avoided at all costs, but particu
larly on this humid July afternoon.

  Sarah felt restless, unwanted, aimless. That was it, she thought to herself, there was no aim to her life. She’d adored bringing up her children but, of the three, only Jamie had ever seemed to be on her wavelength. The girls, Jennifer and Poppy, had shown no interest whatsoever in art, cooking or the garden, the three things that got her through her days now that she was no longer needed by the children. Sarah knew she had very little in common with her elder daughter, Jennifer; she knew that, as with Roger, Jennifer was soon exasperated by her dreamy way of doing things, of her lack of desire to wear smart clothes and high heels. Jennifer, Sarah thought wryly as she slowed down for traffic lights, would have loved the ‘Hon.’ title. She would have used it on her letter headings, and shown no scruples in using it in her ambition to run any one of the top private schools in the country.

  Sarah slowed for a tiny hedgehog in the road. Totally squashed and dead, of course, but she couldn’t bear the thought of squashing it further. Poor little thing. Was its mother pining for it somewhere, weeping hedgehog tears in the dusty, pollution-stunted hedge of the dual carriageway, looking for her baby? She’d Google it when she got home—find out just how maternal hedgehogs were.

  Approaching her turn-off for home, Sarah indicated right and moved on to the roundabout but instead of taking the second exit decided suddenly she couldn’t bear the thought of going home to Roger and his bloody head, and carried on going round and then, back where she’d started from on the A61, headed for Leeds. She hadn’t been into Leeds for months she now realised, but she was going to go and sit in a bar. Yes, that’s what she’d do—go find a bar and sit outside on the pavement and pretend she was young and in Paris and studying art there, as had been her sole intention once she’d finished her course in Leeds all those years previously.

  Pulling into Cookridge Street, Sarah saw the amount of traffic and, realising the futility of trying to land a parking space, almost abandoned the ridiculous idea of sitting in a bar in the middle of Leeds on a Monday afternoon. But both the gods of parking and bollards were obviously on her side and she saw her chance, slipping almost seamlessly round the yellow and white plastic and neatly into a parking spot between a Porsche Boxster and a rather jaunty orange Mini.