Before I Met You

by Lisa Jewell

  ‘Is he younger than you?’ she asked knowingly.

  ‘Yeah. He is my baby brother by a matter of eighteen months. And one day. And, yes, I know, we look nothing alike. He is a carbon copy of our father and I am a carbon copy of our mother. And our older sister sneakily managed to take the best of both of them and is about the most beautiful person I know.’ She raised her eyebrows sardonically.

  Alexandra pulled the coat closed and fiddled with the hook-and-eye fastenings. Then, rather dramatically, she plunged her hands into the pockets of the coat, with a facial expression reminiscent of that of a country vet examining a pregnant ewe. ‘Lovely deep pockets,’ she said. And then: ‘Oh, this must be yours.’ Alexandra pulled out a piece of folded paper.

  ‘Oh,’ Betty said, taking the paper from Alexandra’s hand. ‘Wow. Let me see ...’

  She opened the paper to see Arlette’s handwriting. It was her pre-stroke writing, neat and controlled, spelling out a name and address:

  Peter Lawler

  22a Rodney Gardens

  London

  SW5 3DF

  Her heart leaped with excitement. ‘Any idea where that is?’ she asked, showing the paper to Alexandra.

  ‘Ah,’ Alexandra said knowingly, ‘South Ken. Very smart. Friend of your grandmother’s?’

  Betty shrugged. ‘Not that I know of. But then I think there are a few things we didn’t know about my grandmother.’

  ‘Ooh,’ said Alexandra, ‘a mystery, then. I do love a good mystery. You’ll have to go and check it out. Might be a long-lost love. God, might be a long-lost relative.’ She winked over her glasses and then removed them, rubbing gently at the bridge of her nose. ‘Anyway. Lovely coat. Lovely condition. I can give you two hundred and fifty pounds for it.’

  ‘Oh.’ Betty felt her heart plummet with disappointment.

  Alexandra looked at her kindly. ‘Not much of a market for fur these days, sweetheart. I mean, you could hold on to it for a few years, see if they come back into fashion, but even then,’ she shrugged, ‘it’s a good offer. I’d take it, if I were you. Well, if money’s the issue?’

  Betty paused and considered the suggestion. She pictured Arlette, standing in the doorway of the house on the cliff, all those years ago, in her remarkable red shoes, looking at her with that inscrutable gaze, making Betty feel like she could be anything she wanted. She thought of the smell in Arlette’s boudoir, of the dull, exotic light cast through half-drawn chintz, the sense of another time, another place, another world. The coat summed it all up: obsolete, out of fashion, but still alive with glamour. She would never wear it again. No one in their right mind would ever wear it again. Maybe she would keep it for ever, keep it for an imaginary unborn daughter, keep it for posterity. But then she closed her eyes and imagined the coat on the back of a famous actress, lights, music, action, clapperboards, make-up artists and dry ice.

  ‘No,’ she shook her head, ‘money’s not the issue. But I’d like to sell it, anyway. If that’s OK.’

  ‘That is OK, yes. Cash OK?’

  ‘Cash would be great. Thank you.’

  Betty’s arms felt oddly empty as she left Alexandra’s studio a moment later, as though she’d just handed over a child or a pet. Her shoulder bag, however, felt ripe and heavy with the twenty-pound notes that Alexandra had just counted into her hands. And there, nestled against the palm of the hand in the pocket of her coat was the paper with the mysterious address on it.

  Rodney Gardens was, as Alexandra had suggested, very smart indeed. Twin terraces of oversized red-brick houses with stucco pillars and tiled steps, each house immaculate.

  Number 22a was in a house in keeping with the rest of the street. Doorbells were housed in a recently-polished brass plate, steps were trimmed with potted palms, the door was painted mirror-shiny black.

  Betty pressed the button.

  Peter Lawler.

  He sounded like he might be a financial advisor. Or a solicitor.

  The intercom crackled and the sound of an elderly lady’s voice emerged.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Oh, hello. I’m looking for a Peter Lawler.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Peter Lawler.’

  ‘Peter Morler?’

  ‘No, Lawler. Peter Lawler.’

  ‘Hold on, dear.’

  She waited a moment and then a male voice boomed through the metal box, ‘Who is this?’

  ‘My name is Betty. My grandmother was called Arlette. I found this address in her coat pocket. Along with the name Peter Lawler. Does he live here?’

  ‘Never heard of him. Lawler?’

  ‘Yes. Peter Lawler.’

  ‘Rodney Gardens?’

  ‘Yes, 22a Rodney Gardens.’

  ‘Well, that’s us all right. But I’ve never heard of this other chap. Could be someone who used to live here, I suppose, though we’ve been here for more than ten years.’

  ‘Oh, well, never mind. I’m sure it’s nothing important.’

  ‘Tell you what. Try Flat D. Mr Mubarak. He’s the landlord. He’s lived here since the house was converted. He’ll know.’

  ‘Oh, OK. Great, thank you. I will do.’

  Mr Mubarak answered his intercom so fast it was as though he had been sitting next to it praying for someone to buzz.

  ‘Hello.’

  ‘Oh, hello. The gentleman at Flat A said you might be able to help me. Do you know if someone called Peter Lawler used to live here?’

  ‘Peter Lawler?’

  She sighed. She was growing tired of repeating the name. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘him.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I remember Peter. He moved out a long time ago. Who is it who’s looking for him?’

  ‘Well, it’s me. I think.’

  ‘You think?’ He sounded partly amused.

  ‘Well, yes.’ She explained once more about the address in the coat pocket and finally Mr Mubarak sighed and said, ‘I’m coming to the door. Wait there.’

  Mr Mubarak was attired in a dressing gown and smoking a pipe. His hair was waxed away from his face and he had deep acne scarring. He looked simultaneously suave and decrepit. His face went from stern to lascivious when he saw Betty standing on his front step.

  ‘Good morning,’ he chirped, pulling his pipe from between his lips. ‘I apologise for my appearance. I am trying to save on laundry bills.’ He beamed at her. His teeth were yellow and misshapen. ‘Now, yes, Peter Lawler. He moved out about ten years ago.’

  ‘And do you know where he went?’

  Mr Mubarak smiled, as though Betty had just asked him a suggestive question. And then he stopped smiling and looked a bit sad. ‘Ah, well, yes. Poor old Peter. Such a nice man. Always used to stop and talk with me. A loner, but a friendly loner, if you see what I mean. But then, well, he was plagued by demons.’

  ‘Oh.’ Peter Lawler was beginning to sound a little more interesting than his rather serious name might have suggested.

  ‘He was a drinker. A big drinker. He was in hospital for weeks. His liver. Had to let the flat go in the end, and I never found out where he went after that. I think he might have gone to live with his mother. Or I suppose it’s also possible that he may have passed away.’ Mr Mubarak sighed melodramatically and puffed thoughtfully on his pipe.

  ‘What did he do?’ asked Betty. ‘I mean, as a job?’

  Mr Mubarak pulled the pipe from his mouth again and narrowed his eyes at Betty. ‘That is a good question. I do not know. He did not appear to do anything.’

  ‘How old was he?’

  ‘Hard to say. The drink had probably aged him. But I’d say he was anywhere between thirty and forty. Possibly a little older. He was a good-looking fellow, I’d say. Quite blond. Very English. But, you know, not kind to himself, if you see what I mean. A bit ragged. Around the edges.’

  ‘Did he ever say anything to you, about a family. Or anything like that?’

  Mr Mubarak shook his head. ‘No. Most definitely not. No family. No lady friends. No nobody. A true lone
r.’

  Betty nodded. There it was. The end of the line. She sighed. ‘OK,’ she said, ‘thank you, anyway.’

  ‘You’re most welcome. And please,’ he pulled, with some panache, a business card from the top pocket of his dressing gown, ‘if you need anything else, anything at all, please do not hesitate to call me here. I hope you find what you are looking for.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Betty, taking the card and sliding it into her shoulder bag, ‘yes, thank you. So do I.’

  11

  1919

  EXEAT.

  Leticia’s house filled suddenly with the turbulence of young men, with boots and bikes and balls and shouting. Arthur and Henry were fair, like their sister, and, so far as Arlette could tell, every bit as badly behaved as their small brother, James, who seemed to spend entire days hitting walls with sticks and screaming at his mother. Neither of them listened to anything their mother said. It was as though she did not exist, or spoke in a voice only audible to women. Arlette watched in shocked silence as the older one – Henry, she thought he was – took a newspaper from in front of his mother, who had been reading it at the time, and although she asked him immediately to return it, refused to do so, ruffled its pages horribly and then threw it in the air, leaving it to fall to the ground in separate pieces. Then he turned and left the room, his mother all the while calling, ‘Henry, come back this instant. Henry.’ He did not return and a moment later Arlette saw Leticia sigh and collect the sheets of the paper herself.

  And such rudeness. She had heard Arthur refer to his mother as both ‘stupid’ and ‘old’. Arlette really had no idea how Leticia could prevent herself from slapping her insolent children and locking them in their rooms.

  Leticia’s husband had been promoted again, after the war, to the Brussels office, but this time he had left his family behind and returned, apparently, only once a month. Arlette had not yet met him, but she had seen his photograph: a somewhat hamster-cheeked man with a pencil moustache and thinning black hair. She could not imagine how a rose as delicate as Leticia could have allowed herself to be plucked by such an average-looking fellow, but Leticia did always talk very fondly and with great respect of her husband, and clearly, if the trappings of his fine Kensington home were any signifier, he was an immensely wealthy man. But still, it struck Arlette most emphatically that this house was in dire need of a man’s presence to rein it back under control.

  The older one, Henry, glanced at her now, across the hallway. He had the haughtiness of a man twice his age. ‘Why are you wearing that peculiar jacket?’ he asked.

  Arlette looked down at it, unsure why he should be asking her such a question. It was just a jacket. Possibly a little old-fashioned, certainly not as chic and bohemian as the clothes that his sister wore, but certainly no different from something his own mother might wear.

  ‘What do you mean?’ she asked.

  ‘I mean, it’s peculiar. How old are you?’

  ‘I’m twenty-one.’ She said this with some incredulity as he had been at his sister’s party only two weeks earlier, where a toast had been raised in her honour and she had been given twenty-one bumps by a group of people that included Henry himself.

  ‘Oh, yes, yes, of course. I forgot. I suppose it’s just the way you dress. It makes me think you must be older.’

  She looked down at herself once more. A bottle-green jacket belted upon the hip, a long skirt in Black Watch tartan, dark stockings, green velvet sandals and a chiffon scarf at her neck in midnight blue. Smart, she thought, elegant, fashionable – the silhouette was absolutely spot on; she’d seen it in one of Leticia’s many fashion magazines piled up around the house. She could think of nothing to say so instead pursed her lips and turned to walk away from him.

  ‘Sorry,’ he said, in a careless tone of voice, ‘I didn’t mean to upset you.’

  ‘I’m not upset,’ she hissed, and continued on her way. She felt tears stabbing painfully behind her eyes. The boy was sixteen. She could not allow a sixteen-year-old boy to reduce her to tears, she who had managed to make her way through the whole of her father’s funeral without shedding even one. Her father who had lain in his coffin, his constituent parts reconstructed into some semblance of his living form, minus a foot, two fingers and half his face. No, she would not cry. But she would despise him, with every atom of her own self. For ever. She would also, she knew without any shadow of doubt, make sure that from this point forward he would never be able to look upon her with anything other than speechless admiration. For on Monday she started her new job. A sales assistant at a department store on Regent Street, called Liberty. A most magical place, like a demented fairy palace, with turrets and balustrades, panelling and a thousand twinkling leaded windows. A smiling lady called Mrs Stamper had talked to her sweetly and kindly in a tiny room behind the scenes and told her that she was a charming young lady and just the sort she was looking for, and said she could start the following week and be paid five shillings and sixpence, with only one Saturday a month.

  Arlette had been walking on air ever since. Her first interview, and the job had fallen into her lap with absolutely no special effort. And not just any old job, but a magical job in a magical place working in a lavender-scented, wood-panelled room full of exquisite clothes with a clientele of the most gracious and tasteful ladies in London. Tomorrow night these nasty boys would be taken to the train station and sent back to their prison in the countryside and she would not have to look upon their smug, tiresome faces again until the end of October.

  The thought brought a smile to her face and she continued on her way. Her life had been in stasis for so long, she had felt sometimes like she might go mad on that little island in the middle of nowhere, through the swirling years of war and then in the deathly lull afterwards. But now, at last, she had taken hold of this thing called life, had it held tightly by the reins and was ready to ride it into the distance. Finally her life had begun.

  12

  1995

  BETTY TOOK HER tobacco pouch and a glass of water out onto the fire escape. The evening was mild and muggy. It was spring but it felt more like September. The air in the vacuum between the buildings was damp with condensation and rich with soupy odours rising from the kitchens below. She made herself a roll-up and smoked it thoughtfully, staring at the house across the way, at the black windows, at the faint glimmer of the chandelier twinkling beyond. The house was dark and empty. The men with the cameras must just have been tourists. Strange tourists with a penchant for photographing unexceptional Soho architecture.

  It was nearly eight o’clock.

  It was Friday.

  It was Betty’s third night in Soho.

  She had two hundred and fifty pounds in her bag.

  She heard the sounds of the Soho night starting up below, saw the sky darkening, the streetlights coming on, felt it all building inside her like a burst of energy.

  She did not want to be here in this tiny flat all alone, but then, she did not want to venture out by herself, sit alone in a bar like a character in a film noir, being offered drinks by morose men with broken hearts. She thought of Peter Lawler, this mysterious man kept tucked away in her grandmother’s coat pocket for years and years, and she thought of the potential length of a journey that appeared to have no starting point.

  Then she pulled on her coat, picked up her door keys and smiled grimly with resolve. She had no more idea of how to find a job than she had of how to find Clara Pickle, but she had to start somewhere and she may as well start right now.

  Betty got home three hours later.

  Her feet were rubbed raw from the seams on the insides of her wedges. Her face was stiff from smiling. And her ego was the size of one of the greasy peanuts she’d stuffed down her throat sitting at the bar of a restaurant on Greek Street waiting to hear yet another stressed-out manager tell her there was no work available and then ask her for a CV. She’d planned to take some of her fur money and spend it in a nice restaurant somewhere on a bowl of pasta
and a glass of beer, but with each establishment she walked away from without even a hint or a suggestion of a job, she felt more and more attached to the cash and less and less disposed towards spending it.

  She’d saved the Groucho for last.

  The Groucho.

  From magazines spread open across the kitchen table in the cold house on the cliff it had sounded to her as mystical as Narnia, as gloriously unlikely as unicorns. She had looked at the photos, pored over the grizzled rock stars, the sozzled artists emerging into the early hours, startled as wild deer, chippy as football hooligans and thought: imagine being in there. Inside there. With all those people. Surely this was where the raw red heart of Soho beat its rhythm; surely this, more than the sex shops and the Chinese lanterns and the tattoo parlours, was what Soho boiled down to: a glowing hub of celebrity, excess and notoriety, a magnet for people who created the colour of the world in which we all lived. And so she had pushed open the door and stepped into the brown murkiness of the reception area and asked to speak to the manager and been told, in charming but no uncertain terms that there was no manager available to speak to her but yes, of course, please leave your CV and we’ll pass it on. Betty had barely been listening to the sweet, smiley girl, her gaze cast half behind her at the heavy doors swinging back and forth, open and shut, people passing through, inwards and outwards, wondering if any of them might actually be somebody, somebody worth gazing upon.

  Before she’d had even a moment to really absorb her surroundings a smiling man in a suit jacket was holding the door ajar for her and wishing her gently upon her way and there she was, once again, back on the pavement, surrounded by babbling cab drivers and Friday night hordes. Without a job.

  That was half an hour ago.

  Now Betty was home, tiptoeing quietly up the stairs, her wedges in her hand, her heart full of disappointment.

  The flat was dark and silent when she let herself in.

  For a moment she missed her big empty bedroom in the big empty house, the metres of corridors, the never-used rooms, all the space and the oxygen and the silence. But she breathed it back inside, the sense of loss and nostalgia, and reminded herself instead of all the nights in that big silent bedroom, in that huge sprawling house, wishing herself to be exactly here.