She was, of course, the only one of the four of them who could still remotely pass as a schoolgirl. Even in school uniform, Artemis, Kiki and Geraldine had long since looked almost bizarre when dressed for school – Artemis, because no school uniform in the world could disguise her voluptuous curves. Kiki, because the knowingness in her green-gilt eyes would have been disturbing in a woman a whole decade her senior and Geraldine … Primmie paused, trying to hit on what it was about Geraldine that made it impossible to believe she was still – for the next few hours at least – a schoolgirl. Geraldine was just too effortlessly self-confident.
If it hadn’t been for Geraldine – and the confidence she inspired – she doubted if her parents would have been happy about her moving into the two-bedroomed flat Artemis’s father had provided for Artemis in Kensington.
She ran down the stairs, reflecting that though the last few months had been good ones for her they hadn’t been particularly easy for her friends.
For Artemis, the battle about not going on to university hadn’t been too bad, because her mock A-level results were so poor no university in the country would have taken her. Kiki’s battle, however, had been far different. Ever since the aftermath of the Grosvenor Square demo, when a registrar at St Thomas’s had told her father she’d had a miscarriage, Simon Lane had been a different man. Instead of being furious with Kiki – as they had all expected him to be – he had blamed himself for somehow having failed her as a parent. Not wanting to fail her again, he had brought every possible pressure to bear when it had come to the subject of her going – or not going – to university.
Kiki had been absolutely adamant about not applying for a place. ‘I’ve given up two years of my life by staying on through the sixth form to please him,’ she’d said fiercely to them all, ‘and I’ve done so on the understanding that I can then do whatever I choose. And I’m choosing to be a rock singer – not a two-a-penny university graduate.’
Geraldine, too, had been stubbornly immovable in her decision not to go on to university. ‘I’m getting engaged to my cousin, Francis,’ she had told Miss Featheringly, when Miss Featheringly had spoken to her about her decision. ‘And after we’re married we’re going to travel the world – and when we’ve travelled the world we’re going to live at Cedar Court, where our great-grandfather was born and where Francis was born.’
According to Geraldine, Miss Featheringly had been scandalized by such an idle, unproductive attitude towards life. Geraldine, however, hadn’t given two hoots. ‘At least Miss F. will be pleased with you, Primmie,’ she’d said. ‘Durham’s a top-notch university. Almost as prestigious as Oxford.’
Miss Featheringly had been pleased with her. ‘And because of your family’s financial circumstances, I think it is quite reasonable of you to take a year out in order to save money towards your costs when at Durham,’ she’d said when Primmie had told her she wouldn’t be taking up the place she’d been offered until September 1970 and that, until then, she would be working as an account handler at a leading advertising agency. Wisely, she hadn’t told Miss Featheringly that during her year before beginning university she would be sharing a flat with Geraldine, Artemis and Kiki.
‘Come on, Primmie, darlin’,’ her mother said, pushing a plate of buttered toast into her hand as she walked into the kitchen. ‘Yer never late fer school and yer don’t want to start now, on yer last day, do yer?’
‘No, Mum.’ Suppressing a fit of the giggles, Primmie took hold of the proffered plate.
‘An’so what’appens in mornin’assembly on yer last day?’ her mother asked, leaning against the sink, her hands wrapped round a mug of steaming tea. ‘Is it a bit special?’
‘Probably. I know Miss Featheringly has asked Kiki if she’d like to sing.’
‘Sing to the school?’ Her mum’s eyes widened. ‘Not one of’er rock songs, Primmie, surely?’
Primmie bit into her toast. ‘No. She was going to, but I think we’ve talked her out of it.’
‘You cannot sing a Janis Joplin number,’ Geraldine had said to Kiki emphatically, when Kiki had announced that she intended doing so. ‘There’ll be school governors in attendance as well as every member of the staff. I may not have a lot of time for Miss F., but even I wouldn’t wish her to be publicly embarrassed. And, anyway, how can you sing a heavy rock number with no backing group? Whatever you sing, you’re going to have to accompany yourself, and you’ve only got one pair of hands.’
It was probably that last argument, Primmie thought, that had dissuaded Kiki from opting for her favourite Joplin number.
‘Well, whatever darlin’Kiki sings, I’m sure it’ll go down a treat,’ her mother said, breaking in on her thoughts. ‘Now get a move on, Primmie, or yer goin’to miss that bloomin’train!’
‘I can’t believe this is the very last time I shall ever have to haul myself through the school gates,’ Geraldine said to her as, arms linked, they strolled through the usual crush towards Bickley High’s front steps. ‘Only another few hours and we’ll be free at last.’
‘I’m going to miss it. I’ve been happy here, right from my very first day.’
‘You’d be happy anywhere,’ Geraldine said dryly. ‘You have an indecent capacity for being happy. Which is more than can be said for Artemis,’ she added as they walked into the cloakroom and Artemis steamed up to them, a pained expression on her face.
‘You said no one wears uniform on their last day, Geraldine, and look at you! You are.’
It wasn’t quite true as Geraldine wasn’t wearing the cardigan that was obligatory when wearing a blouse and skirt. Not that Bickley High’s school skirt looked like a school skirt on Geraldine. Instead of being modestly A-line, it was pencil straight and, as it barely skimmed her knees, her long, colt-like legs seemed to go on for ever. The top two buttons of her blouse were carelessly undone. There was no sign at all of her school tie and her raven-black hair was coiled in a glossily sophisticated knot in the nape of her neck.
‘I said it wouldn’t surprise me if people didn’t wear uniform,’ Geraldine said gently.
‘And so I didn’t! And you are, and Primmie is, and I just know everyone else is!’
Primmie regarded Artemis’s patchwork maxi-dress with serious misgivings. It was far too fussy. And it certainly wasn’t appropriate wear for the last day at school. Only the patchwork’s colours – raspberry, bilberry, plum and wine-red – were not completely impossible.
‘It will tone with a school blazer,’ she said, ‘but you’re going to have to keep it on all day.’
‘But I haven’t got one with me!’
‘Then borrow mine.’ Primmie yanked open her locker door and retrieved the blazer she would never wear again.
Artemis gratefully took it from her. ‘Has Kiki said anything to you about what it is she’s going to sing?’ she asked, painfully aware that she was going to stick out in assembly like a sore thumb.
‘No.’ Primmie looked round the crowded cloakroom for a glimpse of Kiki’s distinctive spicy red hair. ‘Has she said anything to you?’
‘She told me that as a rock number was out and as she couldn’t plug her electric guitar in and would have to accompany herself on her Spanish guitar, she was going to opt for a French song by the actress Jane Birkin. I don’t know it, but something French seems an odd choice …’
They were now walking out of the cloakroom into the corridor that led towards the assembly hall. Geraldine stopped dead in her tracks.
‘Dear God,’ she said devoutly, her face paling. ‘Not “Je t’aime, moi non plus”?’
‘I think so. Something like that, anyway. Is it unbelievably sentimental?’
‘It’s unbelievably sexy! It isn’t so much a song as a dirty phone call heavy-breathing number – and Jane Birkin sings it with Serge Gainsbourg. Who’s Kiki going to sing it with? The school gardener?’
Primmie groaned, knowing Kiki would think singing such a song in assembly hysterically funny.
‘Perhaps she wa
s teasing me,’ Artemis said hopefully as they filed on to a row at the back of the hall.
On the platform, seated to the left of the school governors and wearing her hated yellow gingham dress, Kiki looked serenely out over the sea of faces, her guitar propped beside her chair. When Primmie caught her eye, she winked.
‘Jer-us-al-em,’ the school began singing. ‘Jer-s-al-em.’
Tears pricked Primmie’s eyes. It was the last time she would be singing it as a start to her day. The last time she would stand between Geraldine and Artemis, looking at Millet’s The Angelus and Millais’even more beautiful Ophelia.
As ‘Jerusalem’ came to an end and Miss Featheringly stepped forward to lead the school in The Lord’s Prayer, she looked at the posy of flowers in Ophelia’s hand, knowing the meaning of every one of them. A poppy, for death. A daisy, for innocence. A rose, for youth. A violet, for faithfulness. A pansy, for love in vain.
‘Such a posy of wild flowers used to be known as a tussie-mussie,’ Eva, Kiki’s mother, had once said when she’d told her how much she loved the painting.
Her heart felt as if it were being painfully squeezed. She’d grown deeply fond of Kiki’s parents and, now that she would no longer be sleeping at Petts Wood during the week, she was going to miss them.
‘And they’ll no doubt feel they same about you,’ Geraldine had said when she’d told her how much she was going to miss living half of every week at Petts Wood. ‘Mrs Lane can cope with answering calls from patients now, though, can’t she? I mean, she hasn’t had a drink since coming out of the drying-out clinic, has she?’
‘No,’ she’d said. ‘She’s absolutely sober.’
As one of the school governors got up to say a few words she thought, not for the first time, how odd it was that sobriety had made no difference at all to the tensions between Kiki’s parents. The major difference was that instead of being so solitary, Mrs Lane had formed a close friendship with a woman who had been a fellow patient, and now was out and about with her, at exhibitions and concerts, all the time.
‘And now,’ Miss Featheringly was saying in her cut-glass voice, ‘one of this year’s school leavers, Kiki Lane, is going to sing for us.’
Artemis drew in a deep, ragged breath.
Geraldine said a rare word of prayer.
Primmie felt the fingers round her heart tighten even more painfully.
Kiki moved to the front of the stage, slipped the strap of her guitar over her head and settled the guitar comfortably against her body.
It was the first time Primmie had ever seen Kiki about to sing in public, not wearing a ton of eye make-up, black leather and suicidally high-heeled boots.
In school uniform, and without all the accoutrements of the stage persona she had created for herself, she looked unbelievably young.
Kiki struck a chord on the guitar, looked straight at her and grinned.
‘Don’t do it, Kiki!’ Primmie whispered fiercely beneath her breath. ‘Please don’t do it!’
In a rich, husky alto, Kiki began singing the old English folk song ‘Greensleeves’. It was a perfect choice. A choice that couldn’t, in a million years, offend anyone.
Primmie let out the breath she had been holding and grinned back at her, happily aware that she was living through one of Kiki’s finer moments.
Three days later they were all four in the garden at Petts Wood. It was a cloudless day and a heat haze hung over the distant view of the Weald. Nearer, on the golf course that formed the garden’s lower boundary, a small group of golfers was walking and every so often they could hear the faint thwack of a club hitting a ball.
‘And so your engagement party is definitely going to be held at Cedar Court and not the Connaught?’
The speaker was Artemis and Primmie, lying on her tummy on a travel rug, felt a surge of amusement. Geraldine’s forthcoming engagement to Francis was becoming almost as central a topic of conversation with Artemis as it was with Geraldine.
‘Yah,’ Geraldine responded languidly from a gently swinging hammock. ‘Both Francis and I always wanted the party to be held at Cedar Court. It was Uncle Piers who was holding out for the Connaught.’
‘And though Uncle Piers is footing the bill, you’re getting your own way?’
This time the speaker was Kiki and Primmie rolled on to her back, throwing an arm across her eyes as a shield against the sun’s glare. It was hot. Very hot. The lavender Kiki’s mother had planted in lavish drifts amongst Bourbon and Damask roses was alive with bees and scent hung as heavy in the air as smoke.
‘Of course I am,’ Geraldine said easily. ‘Uncle Piers was only rooting for the Connaught because he can’t bear the thought of hundreds of guests trampling Cedar Court’s lawns.’
‘Is that where the main part of the party will be? Outside, in the grounds?’
Again it was Artemis, in a nearby deck chair, who was speaking.
‘It’s where the dance floor is to be set up.’
‘And the stage and sound systems.’ This was Kiki.
There came the sound of iced lemonade being poured from the thermos jug into a glass.
‘The Atoms aren’t going to be playing all night, are they? There is going to be another kind of band, as well? A band that will be playing some nice smoochy music?’
At the edge of anxiety in Artemis’s voice, Primmie’s amusement deepened. Geraldine and Francis’s guest list read like a mini Almanach de Gotha and Artemis had made no secret of how high her hopes were of snaring herself a blue-blooded boyfriend.
‘There is, but I rather think The Atoms will have a larger share of the evening.’
There was dry amusement in Geraldine’s voice and Primmie wasn’t surprised. The Atoms was the rock group Kiki had been singing with ever since she had ditched Ty. More professionally managed than the group Ty had been a roadie for, their advert for a singer had been placed in The Stage and Kiki had had to go to a rehearsal room in Leicester Square to audition before being taken on with them.
Though they didn’t indulge her passion for late-fifties and-early-sixties rock songs, they did play some of the hippest clubs in south-east London and Kiki hadn’t the least doubt that, now she was free of Bickley High and able to concentrate on her career full-time, the only way she was going was up.
‘Geraldine’s engagement party is going to be a great showcase for me,’ she’d said after seeing the names on the guest list. ‘Everyone who’s going is the sort of person who throws large parties for anything and everything, and after Geraldine and Francis’s party the only band they’re going to want to hire is whatever band I’m singing with.’
‘And the best thing about The Atoms being hired by Geraldine,’ Kiki was now saying, ‘is that at private gigs the hirer has a say in what is played.’
Primmie opened her eyes and pushed herself up into a sitting-position. ‘Don’t tell me. All of a sudden, Geraldine’s favourites are going to be Brenda Lee and Little Eva numbers.’
‘And Cilla’s “Anyone Who Had a Heart” and Dusty’s “Losing You”,’ Kiki added gleefully.
‘And what about Bobbie Gentry’s “Ode to Billy Joe”?’ Primmie asked, putting her two-penn’orth in.
‘More to the point, what about some more ice? The lemonade is warm.’
‘If you want more ice, Geraldine, you go for it,’ Kiki said, not stirring. ‘I’m too hot to move.’
Equably Geraldine slid out of the hammock and reached for the turquoise wraparound blouse she’d picked up in a flea market and that she’d shed when they had begun sunbathing.
Primmie watched her which a mixture of admiration and disbelief. The white linen trousers Geraldine was wearing were also vintage forties, wide-legged, with turn-ups and very Marlene Dietrich. By rights, she should have looked a ragbag. Instead, she looked incredibly cool – in every sense of the word.
‘Has Geraldine told you that she’s written a couple of songs for me?’ Kiki asked, still lying prone as Geraldine began walking barefoot over the grass t
owards the house.
Primmie hugged her knees, gazing down the long lawn and over the golf course to where the Kentish Weald shimmered beneath the azure blue bowl of the sky. ‘Are they good?’ she asked. ‘Are you going to use them?’
‘They’re love songs. More Nina Simone than Brenda Lee. But it’s time I was working on a variety of musical styles and if we can get the music and the vocal arrangement right …’ Her eyes gleamed. ‘If we can do that together, if I can come up with my own material, then I’ll definitely have an edge where my singing career is concerned.’
‘Why didn’t you ask me to write some songs for you?’ Artemis said, aggrieved. ‘I like writing poetry.’
‘Song-writing isn’t poetry, Artemis, or at least not the sort you have in mind, and you can’t read music and Geraldine can.’
Primmie closed her eyes, wondering, if she tried hard enough, whether she could perhaps write songs.
Artemis was obviously being persistent because the next thing she heard was Kiki saying exasperatedly, ‘Of course it matters, Artemis! I spend hours debating with Geraldine whether a chord should change to a flat or a sharp.’
Geraldine’s shadow fell across her, bringing Kiki and Artemis’s conversation to a halt.
Primmie opened her eyes.
‘As well as a fresh jug of lemonade I’ve brought some choc ices from the fridge-freezer. Your mother won’t mind, Kiki, will she?’
‘No.’ At the mention of choc ices Kiki sat up. ‘Anything in the fridge-freezer is there for anyone who wants it.’
‘Choc ices? Yummy.’ Artemis reached for her blouse, which was lying on a pile of magazines, and put it on.
Geraldine handed them round and then, having put the jug of lemonade on the table, sat down cross-legged on the picnic rug beside Primmie. ‘You are all OK for what you’re going to wear to the party, aren’t you? I don’t want any last minute flaps – and I want you all in full fig.’ She looked pointedly at Kiki. ‘This is ball gown time and whatever family jewels you can lay your hands on.’
The Four of Us Page 8