Slightly to his right stood a very dapper black man of about fifty, Dot guessed. A healthy clutch of medals sat on his broad chest, hanging from a variety of striped ribbons. Dot heard the name ‘Colonel Abraham Arbuthnott’ followed by a polite ripple of applause.
His tall, slender wife was sheathed in a grosgrain silk dress of the palest tangerine with ballooned sleeves of sheer voile that were anchored around her narrow wrists by a band of velvet and a single velvet-covered button. She looked stunning, like an Arabian princess. Her arm was linked casually through his and to her right, looking slightly awkward at being so obviously scrutinised, stood the son of the latest freeloading, military-top-brass waste of space to be taking up residence in the Merchant’s House – Sol.
‘Oh shit!’ Dot backed up and using her ample bottom bumped at the padded swing door until she was back in the kitchen.
‘All gone already?’ Joan grinned, delighted. ‘Dot? I said do you need more? What are you playing at?’
‘Mum?’
‘Yes, love?’
‘Can I ask you something?’
‘If you have to.’
‘If someone called you a freeloading waste of space, would you take that as an insult?’
‘How else would I take it?’
‘Thought so. In that case, Mum, I think my waitressing days might be over.’
Joan stopped arranging the mini trifles on a tray. ‘Oh no, what’ve you done now?’
‘It’s not so much what I’ve done as what I said and who I said it to.’
‘Dot, are you having me on, cos this is no time for your shenanigans!’
Dot exhaled and was considering how best to break the news that she had insulted the son of the guest of honour and in reality her mum’s boss for the next twelve months, when there was a sharp knocking on the door frame.
The two women stood in silence as the door creaked open. ‘Oh shit!’ muttered Dot for the second time in as many minutes. It was Sol. He strode over to Joan.
‘Good evening.’
‘Good… Good evening.’ Joan wasn’t sure where this was heading; guests never ventured into her kitchen.
‘I’m Solomon Arbuthnott – Sol.’ He thrust his hand in Joan’s direction.
Joan wiped her sweaty palm on her pinny before taking his hand. ‘Joan. Hello.’ She was unused to this level of formality.
‘Joan, I just wanted to say thank you for the amazing spread that you have prepared for us tonight. The food is delicious, particularly the devilled eggs, which caused quite a stir earlier!’
Sol turned and winked at Dot, who found that the power of speech had evaded her.
Joan felt the creep of a blush working its way along her neck and up over her cheeks. It was lovely to have such a compliment. ‘Oh, well, just doing my job. It’s a pleasure! And if there is anything that you or your family fancy while you are here, just let me know and I’ll do my best to accommodate.’
Again Sol stared at Dot and raised his eyebrows. ‘There is something actually…’
‘Oh, righto, ask away!’ Joan nodded, eager as a pup.
‘I’d love to see Selfridges. I come from a very small island in the West Indies…’ This bit of information he said with added volume and precision, informing any interested parties that it was nowhere near Africa. ‘And I’m not sure I can be trusted to navigate the Tube system alone. Do you know anyone that could show me, if it wouldn’t be too much trouble?’
Joan fanned her flushed face with the tea towel while simultaneously breaking into a grin. ‘Actually yes! Our Dot works there a couple of days a week, don’t you, love? I’m sure she could point you in the right direction!’
‘She does?’
‘Yes! In the Hadashaberry—’
‘Haberdashery.’ Dot had found her voice.
‘Yes, there,’ Joan confirmed.
Sol grinned. ‘Well, that is a coincidence!’
‘Isn’t it just…’ Dot smirked, feeling a flush of excitement and a wave of anger simultaneously. Was he taking the mick?
* * *
The Arbuthnotts made their way up the wide staircase to their apartment at the top of the Merchant’s House. It felt inconceivable that only a few days ago they had been tripping over packing cases and individually pausing on the terrace, drinking in the view of the sparkling Caribbean Sea and the lush junglescape that would be denied them for twelve whole months. They were swapping their island home for the damp cobbles of London because of Arbuthnott senior’s role as military advisor to the British government on Caribbean defence.
Vida Arbuthnott had gazed at the misty tips of the Pitons in the distance one last time, knowing she would miss the majestic sight. She was mistress of the grand house and, as an Arbuthnott, was known and respected on St Lucia and all the neighbouring islands. She was renowned for her impeccable taste and for her extravagant parties, whose intricate planning could take months – a hostess of note. Not all the islanders shared her eye for the finer things, however; after one particular soirée, Vida gave all the ladies in attendance a mother-of-pearl soap dish, saying, as she pressed the trinket into the palms of those leaving, ‘It’s from Paris, Galeries Lafayette…’ Most of the guests had never left the island, let alone been to Paris, and rumour had it that in the coming weeks Mrs Arbuthnott was dismayed to see her farewell presents in island gardens, being used for everything from dog bowls to post trays.
As she drank in the view on that last evening at the Jasmine House, Vida had smiled. Her son was sitting on the step, in his running gear, clicking his tongue against his teeth and snapping his fingers at the peahen that obstinately refused to come any closer, despite the lure of the grain in his hand.
‘Sol, my dear, how long have been trying to feed that bird by hand?’
Sol replied without turning his head. ‘I reckon about four years.’
‘And you think tonight, on your last night, she might finally give in to temptation?’
He smiled at his mother. ‘Why not?’
‘Why not indeed, son. I’m sure she will succumb one day, yes, but maybe not today. Slowly, slowly…’
‘That’s what I figure, Mumma; slowly, slowly.’
‘Well, no one can doubt your optimism. It’s a good quality for a soldier.’
‘I hope so, or that’s four years at Washington’s finest military academy wasted!’
‘I’ve told you before, nothing that is an experience is wasted; whether it’s a good experience or a bad one, it shapes who you become.’
‘What about this experience, Mum? Are you looking forward to sitting in the rain, drinking tea and listening to Queen Elizabeth give her speeches?’
‘Well, yes and no. It will be a new experience and it’s right that we support Daddy, but all that terrible weather!’ Vida shuddered and rubbed her shoulders, which were draped with a pale wrap of the lightest silk. ‘I feel cold and miserable just thinking about it. Apparently January is the worst month in which to arrive – cold and rainy.’
‘I can’t remember the last time I was truly cold and miserable,’ Sol reflected as the early evening sun warmed his skin through his singlet.
‘Then consider yourself lucky.’
‘I do, Mumma.’
Vida ran her hand along the top of her son’s shoulders, feeling the taut muscles across his broad back beneath her fingertips. He had vaulted from boy to man without her really noticing: one minute his steps were faltering in the sand, the next he ran along the shoreline with an athlete’s determined stride. It seemed to have happened in the blink of an eye.
‘Truth be told, Solomon, I don’t quite know how I am going to fill my days.’
‘I’m sure you’ll be busy shopping or planning dinner; you seem to find somewhere to shop wherever we are!’
‘You are a cheeky boy, Solomon Arbuthnott.’ Vida bent low and squeezed his form against her own. ‘But you are my cheeky boy and I love you. Now, I want you to take one last sweep of your room, make sure you have everything you need
. The luggage is being collected tomorrow and should arrive in London in about two months, so only put in what you can live without for a few weeks.’
‘Mum, I know; we’ve already been through it. I just hope that my things don’t get lost.’
‘Lost? Solomon, what a thing to say! It’s one of Daddy’s ships, of course it’s not going to get lost! Don’t let him hear you say that.’
‘Besides, I think Patience has it all under control, I don’t want to interfere.’
‘Don’t leave it all to Patience; you are the only man I know that still relies on his nanny!’
‘What else would she do if not look after me? She loves me.’
‘Yes she does and I know you love her. Bless her, she has been crying all day.’
‘I hope she has a rest when we’re gone, but I doubt it. Anyway, a year will pass so quickly; we’ll be back before she notices. And then she can carry on as normal, it will be as if we have never been away.’
* * *
‘Think I’ll take a couple of the trifles back for Dad and Dee – I’ve made a few too many – and a slice or two of the cold mutton, save it going to waste.’ Joan winked at her daughter; there had to be some perks.
‘I’m going to meet Barb, Mum, so you go on home and I’ll be back in a bit.’
‘Not too late, love, you know what your dad’s like.’
‘Don’t I just!’
Joan placed a couple of bob in her daughter’s hand.
‘You sure, Mum?’
‘Treat yourself, darling.’
Dot looked at the coins in her palm. Money was always tight and she would love to get a replacement pair of stockings or a couple of magazines, but she knew how hard Joan worked and putting meat and spuds on the table was far more important that any distraction for her and Barbara. She popped one of the coins back into her mum’s pocket.
Joan smiled. ‘You’re a good girl, Dot. We’ll be all right won’t we? As your nan used to say, it’s all down to love and luck. And it wasn’t all bad, was it? You survived the night, after all that bloody fuss!’
‘Yeah, despite falling arse over tit, I live to tell the tale!’
‘And our new resident seems very nice – Mr Arbuthnott.’
‘I guess…’
‘I couldn’t make him out, Dot, really. He’s a bit formal, shook me hand and everything! You wouldn’t think it, would you?’
‘Wouldn’t think what?’
‘That coloured people could be like that!’
‘Like what?’ Dot felt an inexplicable surge of interest.
‘I dunno, I’ve never really met one before, but I didn’t expect him to be posh, like normal—’
‘Of course they are like normal. Believe it or not, Mum, they’re people just like us!’
‘Well, don’t let your dad hear you say that, you know how he feels about them!’ Joan buttoned up her mac and tied her paisley silk headscarf under her chin. ‘Night, darling,’ she said, and she left to catch the bus home with her booty in the bottom of her stripey shopping bag.
Dot considered her mum’s words. Sol’s family might be normal like other wealthy people, but they were nothing like her own. The Simpsons would never live in a huge house with a cook on hand to prepare all their food, and the local bigwigs would never hold a reception for them with as much booze as you could get down your Gregory, and her mum and dad would never have encouraged her to play the piano when she was little so she could blast out those magical notes whenever she felt like it. Dot sauntered out into the cold London night, with the words of the song filling her head.
‘The skies above are blue
My heart was wrapped up in clovers
The night I looked at you’
2
Dot’s dad, Reg, hadn’t always been a chair dweller; he had trained and worked as a sheet-metal worker before being forced to go on the sick with his chest. His wheezing breath was worse at some times than others; if he stayed in his chair and took it easy, it was manageable. His only exertion was a stroll mid-morning to the shop on the corner for his paper and tobacco or an amble into the bookies for a small bet on the gee-gees. The resourceful, industrious Joan had in their time of need increased her hours at the Merchant’s House and just got on with it. Reg was a simple man of simple pleasures who was content with his routine. It would be wrong to say that his decline into ill health had been welcomed, but he didn’t lament the loss of his role as breadwinner quite as keenly as others might. As long as his supper was on the table, his wife was in his bed and his kids were happy, he was content.
Twice yearly, when the damp and cold were at their worst, he would take to his bed under a mountain of tartan blankets while Joan ran up and down the stairs with a shallow plastic bowl into which he spat large, bloody gobs of phlegm. She would dab at his fevered grey brow and coo as though tending a sickly child. She loved him.
‘Where you off, my girl?’ Reg’s gravelly voice drifted up from behind his newspaper. His words were always a little muffled; he saw no need to remove the cigarette that was permanently clamped to his bottom lip just because he was speaking. Most of Dot’s conversations with her dad, no matter how extended, were conducted from either side of the raised Standard. Many was the time she had glanced at the chair by the fire and found herself chatting to Harold Macmillan, Geoff Hurst or D. H. Lawrence about what had happened that day – did Dee need feeding, or who wanted a cuppa?
Dot considered her response. ‘I’m going up West; Mum’s lumbered me with showing the new bloke up at the Merchant’s House where Selfridges is. Could do without it really.’
‘Christ, what did she go and do that for? It’s not as though we all bleeding work for ’em. I don’t know, that mother of yours…’ He shook his head.
‘S’okay, Dad, I don’t really mind.’
‘Well you just go careful, love,’ he muttered, shaking the invisible creases from the mid section.
Dot clicked the door shut and trotted up the street, picking up the pace. She didn’t want to be late, he was practically her mum’s boss after all. Mrs Harrison was outside enjoying her umpteenth fag of the day and watching the world go by.
‘Off out, Dot?’
Dot held her breath, not knowing how to reply. Of course she was off out, hence she had left the house and was in fact walking briskly in the opposite direction to home. She was formulating a polite yet evasive response when her eyes were drawn to a new notice in Mrs Harrison’s parlour window. Three lines that caused the breath to stop in her throat and the colour to drain from her peachy cheeks:
No Blacks.
No Irish.
No Dogs.
Dot looked at the woman she had known her whole life and realised that she did not know her at all and, equally, that Mrs Harrison didn’t know her either. Very few people did. There was so much Dot wanted to say – primarily that the only black person she knew lived in splendour with oil paintings, grand pianos and staff and so wouldn’t want to stay in her shit-hole guest house anyway, even if he had been welcome. Instead, she nodded and walked on by; it seemed easier.
Dot saw Sol from the bus before it pulled up. Her stomach jumped and her heartbeat quickened at the sight of him, just as it had the first time she saw him. She felt confused. Sol was pacing the corner back and forth, whether cold or nervous, she couldn’t tell, maybe it was a little of both. His long gabardine coat with its green diagonal rib pattern emphasised his wiry frame and its large collar was turned up against his beautiful, square chin. She enjoyed watching him unseen for a few moments, free to study his walk, take in his hair with its side part, and notice the way his long fingers curled and gripped each other in an effort to shake off the January morning.
‘You look freezing.’ She breezed up to him, her breath blowing smoke in the cold morning air; she pinched the front of her leather coat closed at the base of her throat.
‘I am! I need to buy a s… scarf.’ His teeth almost chattered.
‘No you don’t, you need to tough
en up, that’s all, and get used to this London chill. Anyway, it’s good for you, it blows the cobwebs out. Least that’s what my nan always used to tell me.’
‘Well, you can tell your nan I don’t think I want my cobwebs blown out if this is what it feels like.’
‘I would but she’s dead.’
‘Oh, I’m sorry…’ He looked mortified.
‘Don’t be – she was a cow most of the time. Didn’t really like me much at all.’
Sol looked awkwardly at his feet; he’d never heard the dead referred to with such honesty.
Dot smiled at him, still unused to the slow, rich roll of his Caribbean accent. Some of his ‘t’s were closer to ‘d’, as was his ‘th’. It was a voice that sent a tiny shiver down her spine. She was surprised at how hypnotic she found it, but knew she wanted to hear more.
‘Come on.’ Dot started to trot along the pavement.
Sol tried to keep up. ‘You got quite a wiggle there, girl.’
Dot glanced to her right and smiled again, unaware that she had ‘quite a wiggle’. She felt a bubble of happiness swell inside her.
‘Where are we going? Selfridges?’
‘Maybe, eventually, but I thought we could get a coffee first. It’ll warm you up and before I introduce you to people I work with, I want to get to know you a bit.’
‘That sounds like you’re giving me an interview!’
‘You can think of it like that, if you like!’
‘What if I don’t like?’
‘Then you can stay cold and find your own bloody way to Selfridges!’
‘Are you always this spirited?’
Dot smiled at him once again. ‘Do you want that coffee or not?’
A bell tinkled overhead as she used her shoulder to push the glass door open. The two stepped inside Paolo’s, a small, welcoming Italian coffee house whose misted-up windows added to its air of intimacy. A large Burco boiler hissed on the counter, firing steam up to the roof, and there was a deep, acrid smell of burnt coffee beans tinged with the scent of crisped bacon fat. Two older men sat in the corner booth, loading salt-slathered fried eggs onto fried bread and shovelling them into their mouths between drags on roll-ups. Discarded butt-ends smouldered in the heavy glass ashtray, half obscuring its yellow and blue transfer that advertised Pastis.
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