Before I Met You

by Lisa Jewell

  Clara fingered the photocopy gently, her eyes shining with pleasure. ‘Oh my, look at them,’ she said. ‘Aren’t they a fine-looking group of fellows? In their smart suits. I mean, gosh, I had no idea there were all these black fellows in London that long ago. I had no idea at all ...’ She looked up from the photo. ‘Are there any pictures of this Godfrey fellow? Of my ...?’

  ‘Your dad? Yes,’ Betty said, holding another photocopy to her chest. ‘I have got one. Are you ready?’

  Clara gulped and nodded. ‘Ready as I’ll ever be,’ she said.

  Betty passed her the Love Brothers flyer, the piece of paper that had gone from London to Guernsey seventy years ago, then back to London in the post to Peter Lawler, and then sat for years in a box in a flat on Battersea Park Road before being passed into her hands, and now, finally, being given to the person in the world to whom it would mean the most. Betty felt a chill run down her spine and she watched Clara intently.

  Clara didn’t say anything for a moment. She sat, with her hand at her throat, her other hand holding the corner of the flyer. Her eyes filled with tears and then she looked up at Betty and said, ‘Him, in the middle?’

  Betty nodded.

  ‘Oh my,’ she said. ‘Oh my. He’s ...’ She pulled a tissue from the pocket of her cardigan and held it to her eyes. ‘He’s ever so handsome, isn’t he? What a handsome, handsome man. My word. My word.’

  She stared at the flyer in silence again. ‘He looks like me,’ she whispered after a moment. She looked up at Betty and said it again, louder. ‘Don’t you think? He looks just like me?’

  ‘He really does,’ agreed Betty.

  ‘Is this the only picture you’ve got?’

  Betty nodded. ‘Although ...’ she began.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Well, from what I can see it looks like my grandmother also had an affair with an artist while she was in London, an artist called Gideon Worsley. He has two portraits hanging in the National Portrait Gallery, including one of my grandmother.’

  ‘Well, I never.’

  ‘He painted a lot of jazz musicians from around that time. And I met his nephew last week and he showed me a picture of a portrait of both of them. Your father and my grandmother. Apparently it’s hanging in the estate where the artist grew up. In Oxfordshire.’

  ‘My word.’

  ‘Would you like to go and see it? It’s open to the public.’

  Clara laughed nervously. ‘Well, yes. Gosh, yes, I’m sure I would. I think. But,’ her face darkened, ‘my dad. I mean, my real dad, the one who raised me. He’s so old now. He’s ninety-five. I just think, well, he mustn’t know. It might kill him, you know. All these years, he’s done everything for me, all these years, he’s been the best dad, always been my hero, you know. I want to go and see this painting. But, please, don’t ever let my dad know. Will you?’

  ‘No,’ said Betty, ‘of course I won’t. Never.’

  Clara smiled with relief. ‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘Thank you. For everything. For this,’ she gestured at the flyer, ‘and this.’ She gestured at the will. ‘You know, all my life, I’ve thought it was a miracle that I could have come into this world through such dark happenings, that I could have had the genes of such a bad man, yet my entire life has been like a fairy tale, you know. Met the man of my dreams, had the job of my dreams, two beautiful daughters, two wonderful sisters, my funny brother, my sweet, sweet parents. Never wanted for anything, never known a day’s pain or sadness. I always wondered how it could be – that maybe I had a fairy godmother, you know, or a guardian angel, someone looking over me. And now it all makes sense. My father was a special man ...’ She paused thoughtfully for a moment and then looked at Betty. ‘I mean, I assume he’s dead. This man. This Godfrey Pickle?’

  Betty nodded. ‘He died a month before you were born. He was twenty-seven. He and the orchestra were on a ship to Scotland. It collided with another ship in the fog. Eight of them died. They never found your father ...’

  Fresh tears sprang to Clara’s eyes. ‘So Godfrey and my mother, were they ...?’

  ‘I don’t know that story, unfortunately. There’s only one person who could tell you the truth about that.’

  ‘Dad.’

  ‘Yes.’

  Clara sighed. ‘Ah well,’ she said. ‘Then that is a story I will never really know.’

  Clara put all the paper into a neat pile on the coffee table in front of her and sighed again. ‘Well,’ she said, bittersweetly, ‘well I never. This is like Surprise, Surprise. I keep half-expecting Cilla Black to walk in and burst into song!’

  She laughed and picked up the Pollyanna book and as she did so, something fell from between its pages onto her lap. She picked it up and looked at it. ‘Whatever is that?’ she said, holding it up to Betty.

  It was a small square of muslin, slightly yellowed with age. Clara held it to her nose and inhaled. ‘Mmm,’ she said, ‘it smells kind of perfumey.’ She passed it to Betty, who also smelled it. And as she did so it was as if she’d been swallowed up inside a tidal wave of nostalgia and memory. She was there, in Arlette’s boudoir, sniffing all her scents, the overwrought brown fragrances in delicate glass bottles with silver filigree casings and tiny glass droppers. And she saw herself, as if it were two minutes ago, reaching for the dropper of a bottle of something green and fresh-looking, and Arlette saying, ‘Ah, now that one, Betty, is not a lady’s perfume. That is an aftershave. A scent for a man. Have a sniff, tell me what you think.’

  Betty dropped the perfume onto her tiny wrist and inhaled. ‘Yummy,’ she said. ‘It smells like being on holiday.’

  ‘Well, yes,’ Arlette had smiled, ‘exactly right. Sandalwood and vanilla. I got it shipped over specially from Liberty. It reminds me so very much of another time and place. It reminds me so much of Godfrey.’

  ‘Who was Godfrey?’

  ‘Godfrey was a friend of mine. A very long time ago. And that is how he smelled.’

  Betty had not needed or asked for any more detail than that, and until this precise moment she had not remembered the conversation at all.

  But now she passed the muslin square back to Clara and she smiled and said, ‘That was how your father smelled. Sandalwood and vanilla. From Liberty.’

  Clara smiled too, sniffed the square one more time, deeply and intensely, and put it in the pocket of her cardigan.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘Thank you for finding me. I am really ever so grateful.’

  *

  Dom’s plane landed at Heathrow at ten o’clock on Wednesday morning. At ten twenty-seven Betty’s phone rang. She was at the kitchen table in Amy’s house painting old toilet roll tubes with glitter paint.

  ‘I’m back,’ said Dom. ‘When can I see you?’

  ‘Now,’ said Betty, wanting to get this done. ‘I’m at home, with the kids, come now.’

  ‘I’ll be there in an hour,’ he said. ‘I missed you.’

  Betty didn’t reply.

  ‘You’re blond again!’ were Dom’s first words as he strolled into the hallway at eleven thirty.

  Betty put her hand to her hair and smiled. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Amy paid for it. At her hairdressers.’

  Dom rolled his eyes. ‘Ah yes,’ he said, ‘buttering you up nicely.’

  Betty smiled and said nothing but his reaction to Amy’s treat merely cemented her commitment to the decision she’d made on Sunday night.

  ‘It was a nice thing to do,’ she said.

  ‘Well, yes. It was. And you look stunning. But don’t be fooled. She has a hidden agenda, remember that.’

  Betty narrowed her eyes at him. ‘I think,’ she said, ‘that the only hidden agenda Amy has is to provide decent childcare for her children. And the only reason why the other nannies never lasted more than four months was because they weren’t good enough. And I am.’

  Dom raised his eyebrows at her and put up a pacifying hand. ‘OK, OK,’ he said. ‘I’m just trying to put you in the picture, that’s all.’


  ‘Dom,’ she said, ‘I am in the picture. I am standing right in the middle of the picture looking at it from every angle and all I can say is that while I respect you as a musician and as a father and as an employer, you are a really, really awful ex-husband.’

  He threw her a look of horror.

  ‘Seriously. I mean it. You put three babies in that woman, one after the other, and then you let yourself be dragged into a filthy toilet by some “ugly girl”, because you have no control over your “little fella”,’ she stared meaningfully at his crotch, ‘and then you spend the next two months blaming your wife for everything when it is your wife who is running around like a headless chicken trying to hold everything together. And somehow you have managed to persuade yourself that things would be different with me. But they wouldn’t. I am not the answer, Dom. Really. I’m not. No woman is the answer for you. Because any woman you end up with would become Amy in the end. And you would never ever be faithful. And I am not so desperate to live in the lap of luxury that I would want to spend the rest of my life wondering who you’re in bed with or how much you’re drinking or whether you’re going to come home and be nice Dom or not nice Dom. And besides ...’ she paused for breath, inhaled, smiled softly, ‘besides all of that, Dom, I don’t love you.’

  He stared at her agog.

  ‘So thank you, Dom, for the kind offer, but I’m afraid I won’t be taking you up on it. I’ll be staying here. In London. Working for Amy. And I’ll just be,’ she smiled again, ‘I’ll just be – the nanny.’

  The monitor on the kitchen counter crackled into life then and the sound of Astrid waking from her morning nap filled the air.

  ‘Donny and Acacia are in the kitchen,’ she said, ‘they’d love to see you. Can you stay?’

  He nodded at her mutely. ‘Er, sure,’ he said. ‘Yeah. I’m not in a hurry.’

  ‘Good,’ said Betty, heading up the stairs. ‘I’ve just boiled the kettle. Maybe you could make us a pot of tea?’

  She walked away from him then, up the stairs and down the corridor, a smile of satisfaction playing gently on her lips.

  60

  Ten Days Later

  ‘AH, MISS BETTY Dean, welcome, welcome, welcome!’ Jeremiah Worsley walked towards her, his feet crunching against the gravelled driveway, a big red hand outstretched, smiling widely. ‘Welcome to our humble abode.’

  Humble it was not. A picturebook Jacobean manor house set in a wooded vale; crenulations, candy-twist chimney stacks, box-cut yews, a moat and gargoyles. One of the prettiest houses Betty had ever seen.

  ‘Allow me to introduce you to George Worsley, my nephew, and his wife, Kitty. They run the estate now, poor buggers,’ he laughed heartily.

  Betty shook hands with the couple who looked like they’d stepped straight off the cover of Country Life, right down to their ruddy cheeks and the pair of chocolate Labradors skittering around their Wellington-booted feet.

  ‘Hellair, hellair,’ they both said, ‘how wonderful to meet you, Betty.’

  ‘Likewise,’ she said. And then she turned to the minibus parked in the driveway behind her. ‘I’ve brought quite a party,’ she said, ‘I hope you don’t mind?’

  ‘Nair nair, not at awl,’ said George, ‘after all, this is quite a momentous event.’

  The door of the minibus slid open and Betty introduced its passengers as they disembarked.

  ‘This is Jolyon, Arlette’s son, and Alison, my mother. This is Alexandra Brightly, a friend of mine, who helped with my search. And this,’ she held out her hand to help her from the bus, ‘is Clara Davies, Godfrey’s daughter.’

  Jeremiah, George and Kitty’s faces blossomed at the sight of their guests. ‘So lovely to meet you all, so utterly thrilling.’

  ‘Such a beautiful house,’ said Clara, staring upwards and around herself in awe.

  ‘Thank you veh much,’ trilled Kitty. ‘It’s a total pain, awbviously, but worth all the sweat and tears. Anyway, come in, come in, do.’

  The party followed Jeremiah, George and Kitty through breathtaking room after breathtaking room. They gave a perfunctory commentary as they passed through each: blue room, red room, green room, sitting room, library, billiards room, like a full-size tour of a Cluedo board.

  And then they came to a stop outside a room with a plaque outside that said: ‘The Gideon Worsley Room.’

  ‘Well, then, here we are,’ said Kitty, rubbing her hands together. ‘As you know, Great-uncle Gideon was a well-regarded portraitist of the post-war generation. Something of a black sheep, he found his way to London after the war and lived an unconventional life: a meagre cottage, bohemian friends and a taste for the exotic. Two of his portraits hang in the National Portrait Gallery, and five hang here, at his ancestral family home. The rest are in private ownership around the world. So,’ she glanced from Jolyon to Clara, ‘are you ready?’

  Clara and Jolyon smiled at each other and nodded.

  ‘Here it is,’ said George, removing a red velvet cover with a flourish, ‘Sandy and Arlette.’

  Betty caught her breath and held it as the cover came away. And then she gasped. Her hand went instinctively to her throat and she turned to catch Jolyon’s reaction. ‘Well, well, well,’ he said, shaking his head slowly. ‘Well, I never.’

  Betty turned then to Clara. She too had her hand to her throat and was staring at the painting with her jaw ajar.

  ‘Wow,’ said Alexandra.

  ‘Incredible,’ said Alison.

  ‘Good grief,’ said Jolyon.

  ‘Quite something, isn’t it?’ said Jeremiah, smiling with satisfaction.

  ‘It’s awesome,’ said Alexandra. ‘I want it. How much will you take for it?’

  Her joke broke through the air of stultifying shock and everyone laughed softly.

  Jolyon moved closer to the painting and squinted at it. ‘It’s incredible,’ he said, leaning in closer. ‘Utterly incredible, I mean, look at Mummy. Look at her.’ He turned incredulously to both Betty and Alison. ‘She looks so ... sexy.’ He flushed violently red as the word left his mouth. ‘Remarkable,’ he continued. ‘Just remarkable. I can’t believe you did it, Betty. You really did it.’ He eyed her proudly. ‘What an achievement. My God. And all this history. All this colour. This drama. Imagine,’ he said, dreamily, ‘if we’d just placed an advert and no one had replied and we’d never have known any of this.’ He shook his head sadly at the thought. ‘Thank you, Betty,’ he said. ‘Thank you so much.’

  Clara was sniffing and dabbing at her eyes with a tissue. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said as Betty put an arm around her shoulder, ‘it’s just, you know, wow. My daddy. Such a fine, fine man. I just want to touch him, you know, I want to stretch out my hand and just touch him.’

  George pulled a camera from a bag around his neck and said, ‘Would you mind awfully, Jolyon, Clara, just a photo, just for us, of the two of you, next to your respective parents?’

  They looked at each other uncertainly. Clara said, ‘Not for publicity? Not for anything official? My father, my real father, I don’t want him to –’

  ‘No, I assure you, just for us, for the family, for posterity.’

  Jolyon and Clara posed then, one on either side of the painting, smiling shyly, Arlette’s son, Godfrey’s daughter, neither the child that the couple had dreamed of making together, but their children none the less. Betty took some photos with her own camera and with Clara’s, and Alison took photos with hers. It was a sweet, perfect moment, as the sun streamed in through the stained leaded windows and a small group of disparate people made some kind of resolution with themselves and the truth of their pasts. A weird kind of family connection was being made here today, a connection not of blood, but of shared history.

  Betty stood back for a moment and surveyed the scene. She imagined for a moment Godfrey and Arlette watching from somewhere high above them all, from somewhere high behind that hot, round summer sun. She saw them and they were smiling.

  John Brightly did a double take when he s
aw Betty walking towards his record stall the following morning.

  ‘You’re blond again,’ he said.

  She ruffled her hair with her fingers and smiled. ‘I certainly am.’

  He nodded. ‘I like it.’

  ‘Good,’ she said, pushing her sunglasses up into her hair.

  ‘I thought you’d moved out.’ He gestured at the door behind them with his eyes.

  ‘Yeah. I did. I have. Last Friday. I would have said goodbye, but you weren’t here.’

  He shrugged. ‘Yeah. Yeah ...’ he petered off.

  ‘What happened to you?’

  He shrugged again. ‘Nothing much. Just needed to, you know, regroup. Find a new flat.’

  ‘And did you?’

  ‘Yeah. I did. A nice place. Top floor. Dry. Clean. You know.’

  ‘Whereabouts?’

  ‘Notting Hill. Well, yeah, North Kensington, more accurately, but I can walk to the tube in under ten minutes.’ He rearranged a stack of records, mindlessly. ‘And you,’ he said, eventually. ‘What about you? Where are you living now?’

  ‘I am living in Zone Three,’ she said with a grim smile.

  John winced sympathetically.

  ‘Tooting Broadway. Sharing a flat with a girl called Celia. Found it through an ad in Loot, you know, like a real Londoner. Nice quiet block. Nice quiet neighbours. Half an hour on the Northern line to work. No one’s been sick on our front step. Yet.’ She smiled and rocked back on her heels slightly.

  ‘So you decided against the rock-chick lifestyle option?’

  She snorted. ‘Of course I did.’

  He looked at her curiously. ‘Hmm.’

  ‘Hmm what?’

  ‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘Just, you know, that night, you sounded like you were seriously considering it.’

  ‘Well, yeah. I was. For about thirty seconds. Until somebody gave me a good reason not to.’

  He glanced at her with surprise. Then he turned back to his record stall as if the conversation was over.