by Jacky Hyams
Not long after introducing them, I came home from work to find a message on the answer machine: she must have given him the number. ‘It’s me, Tony. I’m gonna come round tomorrow night, Rosie. Be there, gal!’
I was fully expecting Rosemary to pull a face or laugh it off when she came home to the message; instead she amazed me. ‘Oh, God! It’s him! Are you out tomorrow night, Jacky? Aren’t you seeing Jeff?’
I was, fortunately. The flat was far too small to entertain four people properly and anyway, Jeff shared the other salesmen’s dislike of this guy. But romance will have its way. Very soon, I’d arrive home at night to find distinct traces of Tony’s visits. An empty packet of Piccadilly cigarettes. A strong, all-pervasive smell of hashish. And a small, grayish white bandage that normally covered the stump that was his right thumb. He’d had most of it chopped off. Apparently the deed had been done by a henchman working for a gang of notorious south London criminals. An act of revenge, for God knows what.
I didn’t know any of this thumb stuff until he started seeing Rosemary and told her this story. Bafflingly, he chose to reveal the stump to her during their smoking sessions. It was all quite bizarre. But what did genuinely amaze me was the Rosemary I was discovering. The faithful fiancée – waiting for the postman, working hard, diligently saving for her future – was now getting locked into something – I have no idea if it was fully consummated – with a sinister ex-con who made no bones about his criminal past. What would jealous, army man Mehmet, marching around in Turkey, have to say?
The dope-smoking didn’t trouble me. I had no real interest in consuming any kind of drug or tobacco at that point. This was at a time when barbiturates and amphetamines were becoming widely used. Jacqueline Susann’s book Valley of the Dolls – the story of three women in showbiz and their gradual dependence on uppers and downers – sold 30 million copies on its publication in 1966. Far from being put off by this tragic story highlighting the prevalence and problems of pill popping, more and more people started to take pills recreationally. Around that time NHS doctors were quite keen on legally prescribing a tranquilliser called Librium for anyone who claimed to be depressed and plenty of people I knew were openly popping such pills and happily offering them around. I did try them a couple of times and found them no fun at all – a dry mouth and feeling sleepy wasn’t my idea of a wild time – but the drug culture was now making a real impact.
The wider influence of drug-taking came through the music industry as pop stars took drugs, got arrested and created huge headlines for their pains. Yet by the late ’60s it wasn’t only the wild boys of music, the Mick Jaggers and Keith Richards of this world, who were leading the way with their arrests and imprisonment for taking drugs. Beatle Paul McCartney freely admitted to millions of fans that he’d taken LSD, or acid as it is commonly known, bringing the idea of tripping on little tablets of hallucinogenic drugs out into the open. By the spring of 1968, women such as Judy Collins, a popular American singer, flew into London for concerts and TV appearances and happily told waiting press: ‘I take drugs. I’ve smoked marijuana and I’ve taken LSD. I think marijuana should be legalised as quickly as possible.’
Millions of young people in Britain agreed. Teenagers in English seaside towns were getting hold of bits of hashish. Kids in the provinces were starting to puff away surreptitiously after school. Middle-class couples were lighting up with their friends at dinner parties. All this was, naturally, being reflected in the culture – not just in the big rock’n’roll world but in more mainstream music. Broadway musicals like Hair – a celebration of US hippie culture, the sexual revolution, drugs, racial harmony and the powerful opposition of young Americans to the Vietnam war (which had started in the 1950s but really escalated in the early to mid-1960s) – were also making headlines. Hair’s ‘love is free’ message – with nudity for the first time in a musical – had already taken US by storm and it opened in London in the autumn of 1968 to a roar of appreciation.
All around us, the word was out: sex, drugs and rock’n’roll were what mattered. Everything our parents stood for was old hat, passé. ‘Tune in, turn on and drop out,’ counter-culture guru Timothy Leary told an assembly of 30,000 very stoned San Francisco hippies in 1967. Essentially, this was translated into, ‘Get stoned and if you’ve got any sense, give up the day job and do f*** all.’ How could a generation like ours – raised in peacetime, jobs a-plenty, money in our pockets, with youthful role models who seemed as beautiful and in thrall to hedonism as anyone – ever hope to ignore such a call?
This call to out-and-out hedonism took a while to take effect. By the early ’70s, smoking dope had virtually become de rigueur and people around me did start dropping out, quitting jobs, taking off, heading east. The hippie look – the beads, beards and long hair for men – started to be popular just before the end of the ’60s, but the whole hippie culture was, in essence, a West Coast US phenomenon. Then it filtered into fashion, becoming a truly commercial thing: working kids could go out and buy hippie-style clothes – the Indian jackets, the brocade waistcoats, the flowing sleeves, snakeskin boots, fur boas – and play at being a stylish hippie on the weekend. That was part of the appeal.
Yet when it came to Rosemary, her attraction to the salesman and their shared love of ganja puzzled me. When she told me that he wrote poetry and would read it to her sometimes during their sessions, I was even more bemused by it all. A prison poet? There was, I figured, a sort of weird kind of romance in that: the bad boy lover trapped, yearning for freedom. Yet I was starting to see that her official line – the devoted fiancée – was a mere smoke screen (excuse the pun). There was quite a different Rosemary underneath.
Any doubts I might have had over Tony’s notoriety were confirmed for me one summer’s night. I’d hailed a taxi from the West End, rushing to the flat to get ready to go out. Almost home, we hit a bit of a traffic jam in Circus Road. My cab was briefly stationary. And there, some distance ahead of me, crossing the road at a zebra crossing, was Tony. It was too early for Rosemary to be home. He’d obviously tried, waited and decided to leave. But if he saw me, he’d want to come in. No way, I thought. ‘Can’t you move any faster?’ I urged the cabby, diving down on the floor of the cab so Tony couldn’t spot me. The cabbie turned round, looked at me in my ridiculous crouching position – not a great idea in a low-cut top and mini-skirt – and summed it all up with typical cabbies shrewdness.
‘Nah, love. You fink I don’t know Tony Connor? Is ’e your bloke, then?’
Strangely enough, Jeff’s initial dislike of Rosemary turned into full-on loathing once Tony was dropping in regularly. I’d get a heavy-duty diatribe if he came round and discovered they’d been smoking dope in the flat. ‘He’s an ex-con, Jacky. If the coppers find out about the dope, you’ll get into trouble – it’s your flat,’ he’d remind me. ‘It’s disgusting.’
Why did he care? I thought it highly unlikely that a posse from the local police station would bother themselves about all this. At one point, I’d made a formal phone complaint to the local constabulary after encountering a man fully exposing himself to me and the deserted platform at St John’s Wood tube station one morning, en route to work. (Flashers, for some reason, adored public transport at that time, long before the introduction of the CCTV cameras all over the place halted the temptation to reveal their jewels to the world.) A youngish copper had come round to the flat to discuss it. Which promptly led to… er… did I fancy a drink sometime? My attitude to the law was pretty much what you’d expect from a Dalston-bred cynic with little respect for authority. No way would I consider drinking with a copper – cute or otherwise. Let alone anything else.
I didn’t argue with Jeff about the dope-smoking because I didn’t care that much. But I thought he was being a bit too, well, suburban about the whole thing. Square. He came from a different world, really. He’d done national service. He was a snazzy dresser – slick, lean trousers, narrow three-button jacket, silky black roll-neck top underneath �
� but his buddies were short-haired business and yachting types who talked endless boy talk about such things as sport and cars all the time. Their wives probably had home perms by Toni or Twink and wore drab dirndl skirts, I’d think to myself. These people were probably harmless, decent people leading normal, respectable lives. But I sneered, even looked down at the suburban world of relative stability – so far away and boring compared to the lives of two pelmet-skirted blondes in St John’s Wood, noisily banging the front door behind us as we rushed out into Circus Road, leaping into that night’s date’s waiting Mini Cooper or E type Jag, whizzing down the road to a party with the little Philips car record-player blasting ‘A Day in the Life’ or ‘The Mighty Quinn’.
Our dedication to our appearance was considerable, though Rosemary’s beauty routine was more advanced than mine. She’d use an infrared sun lamp, complete with little black goggles, to give her a faintly tanned look. (I tried it once but it was too strong for my pink, freckly skin.) She was also the first person I’d met to use the new, heated Carmen rollers. My focus was on getting the straight, blonde ’60s babe look with the help of my cherished silky blonde hairpiece, purchased from Wig Wham in South Molton Street for five guineas. The piece had a mesh hair base that concealed a tiny little comb. The trick was to backcomb your hair and bury the comb in your hair by dragging the comb back. Then you’d pin it all in place and fiddle with it so that it all looked natural. It was tricky but it looked good. When it worked. My problem was that I didn’t always anchor it properly because I was usually in such a hurry.
That year me and my hairpiece took a plane ride for our first trip to Majorca. I instantly fell for the pine-scented island and its sophisticated capital, Palma, drank cerveza in the bustling Plaza Gomila almost every night, and hooked up briefly with a handsome Irish singer called Danny who insisted on taking me to a club. He introduced me to his ‘friend from Belfast’, a dark-haired, dazzlingly good-looking young man we’d all been reading about. His name was George Best, El Beatle as he was dubbed. Everyone in the Palma nightclub – men and women alike – fawned over this new prince of football and an even vaster kingdom called ‘celebrity’, an ordinary lad from Northern Ireland catapulted way beyond anyone’s wildest expectations when he joined Manchester United into something he could hardly be expected to understand. Or deal with.
Yet that night, smiling, calm, quietly acknowledging the fawners, the flatterers and the perfumed blondes, he seemed unconcerned, unfazed. Who knew then? For there, surrounded by booze and birds, his destiny for much of his life (when he wasn’t on the pitch) was the first British football player elevated to the status of a pop star, a man for whom the ’60s party never really stopped.
Something else takes place towards the end of the holiday in Majorca. It is an incredible coincidence arising from an innocent chat with a stranger, yet it leads to a startling discovery. The whole holiday has been a last-minute decision. Friends from my schooldays, Brenda and Kath, took a package deal to a posh, upmarket hotel just outside Palma. Kath is a laugh-a-minute, vivacious companion because her job, selling handbags in Bond Street’s Gucci, gives her an endless stream of anecdotes about wealthy, often famous customers, mostly involving all sorts of crude passes made at her by rich older men. These, she claims, she always rejects. I tend to suspect otherwise. Booking much later, I manage to get a cheap deal to a nearby pension. This suits me fine, because I prefer not to hang out with them all the time – Kath’s non-stop repertoire, while funny, can be exhausting – and I can use their hotel for sunbathing during the day.
It is there, beside the hotel pool in Palma Nova on the day before the holiday ends, dangling my toes in the water, I find myself chatting to a pleasant older woman. She says she hails from Guildford, Surrey. ‘And where do you live?’ she wants to know, after I’ve told her I’m from London and work as a shoe chain store secretary-cum-complaints manager.
‘Oh, I’ve got a flat in St John’s Wood,’ I reply. ‘I share with another girl.’ The woman’s curiosity, never far from the surface, is now instantly piqued, I can see. Flat-sharing isn’t unknown. But at that point, with all the noise around swinging London, it probably all seems quite exotic to her.
‘So who do you flat-share with, then?’ asks Mrs Nosey. ‘Is she a secretary as well?’
‘Oh, a girl called Rosemary Smart. She manages an employment agency. She’s from Surrey, too. I think she’s from Guildford,’ I add helpfully.
The woman looks at me. Her eyes narrow. She cranes her blonde bouffant head forward. ‘Rosemary Smart? Fair hair, very thin, went to live abroad?’
‘Yes, that’s her. How amazing. You know her!’
‘Oh, everyone in the area knows Rosemary. The family. They used to have a sweet shop. Now she’s got a kid, a little girl. She had her when she was 18. The parents bring her up.’
‘No, you must be mistaken,’ I tell the woman. ‘I live with her. She’s never mentioned any little girl. Or a sweet shop. It can’t be her.’
‘Oh, I think it is,’ says Mrs Nosey, getting up from her chair, picking up her bag and towel and readying herself to move into the shade. ‘You’d better ask her. That child doesn’t even know she’s her mum. They’ve told her she’s her sister. Terrible, isn’t it?’ And with that, she just walks away, her bullets fired, leaving me stunned.
My mind is racing. Surely it can’t be true? Can it? Yet the more I think about it, the more the pieces of the jigsaw start to fit. The apparent lack of interest in sex. Her somewhat shaky pose as a virginal innocent – she’s never once admitted to me that she’s slept with anyone. Her dismay at my admission about the pill. And the way that she keeps her family and her life in London entirely separate – the weekend trips ‘home’ she never ever discusses. My mum rings the flat sometimes for a chat but Rosemary has never had a call or a message from ‘home’ since we’ve lived there. The go-go dancer in Istanbul remained there for two years because she needed or wanted to get away from her truth: she’s an unmarried mum of a small girl. Yet to most of the world, she’s a secret. She doesn’t quite exist. It’s a lot to take in. Curiously, for once, I say nothing to anyone about this surprising conversation.
On the plane going back, I think I can see why she’s deployed this subterfuge. She’d have fallen pregnant earlier in the ’60s, before the pill, before the abortion laws changed. She’d probably had no choice: a teenage girl who had been caught out by a single act and was trapped by the harsh social attitudes towards illegitimacy, attitudes that were starting to change now but too late for her. A secret it was and so it remained. Who knows what happened to the girl’s father? Maybe he’d done a runner? That could easily have happened. Or maybe her parents didn’t like him and didn’t want a marriage. I struggle with it all. I flash back to that awful day in the Dalston doctor’s surgery, his disapproval of me and I understand all too well what she’d been up against. Financially, her parents had taken over, lent their support – as I’m sure some families did sometimes.
Certainly, whatever she did, she couldn’t win. Had she kept the girl, remained with her parents at home and brought her up, they would have all faced local whispers and sniggers – as would her child once she was at school. Handing her over to strangers for adoption was obviously not an option. Yet this way, letting her parents take over, she was still open to criticism for being an uncaring, unloving mother. I do get it – well, most of it. But what I can’t get over, for some reason, is the fact that the little girl is a secret. Her own child, unacknowledged as such to the wider world. I know why this has all happened but I can’t come to terms with how she accommodates it – how she can live a lie all the time. OK, she’d gone off for a couple of years, hidden herself away. But now, if what I’d been told was right, she was willing to continue the charade, not even tell the small girl the truth. That to me is enormous, a deception too far, though I could hardly have understood what it meant to have your baby, then let your parents take over. Yet as I run through the story of Rosemary’s baby,
if you’ll forgive the cliché, I suddenly remember what Jeff had noticed. He’d spotted a millisecond of a truth withheld, a subterfuge that dominated several lives.
Can I carry on living with her, knowing the truth behind the façade? Or do I step forward and confront her with what I’d heard? In the end, I opt to say nothing, keep it to myself. For now, at least.
CHAPTER SIX
AN UNRAVELLING
A small, dark furry creature nuzzles up against me, purring as I lug my suitcase through the front door. A feline house guest. Sure enough, there’s a note on my bed from Rosemary. ‘Looks like we’ve solved the mouse problem,’ she writes, informing me she’s taken a week off work to visit her parents.
There’s also a really odd message from Jeff on the answering machine. ‘Hope you had a good time, gorgeous. Guess what? I’m going sailing with Kevin on his new 30-footer. We’re heading for France. Save your suntan for me, lovely!’ This is unusual, sets me worrying. Jeff never leaves messages on the machine. He just rings me at work. If I’m not around, he calls back until he gets me. Something’s definitely wrong.
At least the cat sticks around, vanishing briefly then reappearing intermittently through that autumn. At one point, I even start to leave food out, though I never bother to name our pet-from-nowhere, to which I become curiously attached. I’m preoccupied, mostly, with the absence of any action from Jeff. I don’t hear from him for three weeks after that message. When I do, he insists persuasively he’s had all sorts of things going on and do I want to come sailing that weekend? I go and it’s a ghastly idea. Love in a cramped, damp cabin, bobbing about on the chilly English Channel, is not a success. I am irritated and bitchy: mostly, he pretends not to notice.