The Beloved Girls

by Harriet Evans

  ‘Who’s Alice?’

  ‘Alice was my other sister. I have an older sister, too, but we never got on – she’s on Digby’s side. Anyway, Alice and Mummy died during the war. They were on their way home, just around the corner from here. After that, I didn’t really care much what happened to me. So, when Digby came sniffing round, Daddy said yes and I agreed, even though I knew what he was like, why his first wife left him, how old he was . . . but, God, I made a mistake. He’s the Devil. Like I say. But no one believes me. Or wants to believe me.’ She arched her back, stretching, looking carelessly around. ‘Don’t you find, that’s the trouble with pointing out any wrong? People don’t want to believe the person who’s pointing it out. They want to believe everything’s fine. So they’d rather think it’s the person, me in this case, making it up –’ Hester stopped again, her gaze resting on the bottles behind the bar, then rattled the packet of cigarettes, but it was empty. She grimaced. ‘I don’t have her. She’s my daughter, and I don’t have her, and she needs me . . . She had me every night, to brush her hair and read her stories. Ballet Shoes was her favourite, have you read it, Mr – oh, I can’t remember your name, dammit all. Have you?’ Simon shook his head. ‘Pauline, Petrova, Posy. She always wanted to be Petrova. I washed her clothes, I folded them just so – who’s doing that for her? Her clothes are always crumpled, she wears any old thing, she’s had her hair cut off so he doesn’t have to bother with plaits and things. She should be with me. She started having her periods, the curse, you know, and she was utterly terrified – she needs her mother then, goddammit . . .’ Slowly, she let her gaze slide, so her eyes were almost closed, and then, suddenly, she pinched herself on the forearm. ‘God, Hester. No self-pity. That’s enough of me.’

  She patted the empty pack of cigarettes again, and he saw her eye fall on an open packet that the stranger on her other side had opened. He had taken one out, laid it on the bar. His attention was momentarily distracted by the barman, and Hester coolly took the cigarette, rolled it so snappily towards her and slid it into her pocket that Simon blinked, unsure whether he’d just witnessed it or not.

  It wasn’t so much the stealing of one cigarette, it was the smoothly covert way she did it. That, more than anything, was what stuck with him, then and later.

  She turned and saw him. ‘Don’t,’ she said, quietly. Her pupils were dilated; her expression was wild, and blank at the same time.

  He had seen it once before, with a mother, queuing for bread, in Naples. She had waited all night outside the bakery, and when the shipment had come in, others had pushed – of course – he was there to ensure ordering distribution, what a joke! People were trampled; he saw old people fall, one old woman balling herself up, as the hordes streamed over her, not caring that they stamped on her. A baby girl was lost in the throng, slipping from her mother’s grasp, crushed, like fruit on the floor. Simon saw this – it was almost impossible to believe it, what desperation makes of humanity, what it does. Watching Hester, Simon saw what she was like. And he was not surprised when she said, in that sideways, frank way:

  ‘You’ve had a bad time of it. I can tell.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘I always know. Call it a curse. Ah, I’m right. You don’t want to live much either, do you?’

  There was no other noise in the pub. He felt short of breath, light-headed.

  ‘I –’ He honestly didn’t know what to say. ‘Yes. Yes, Hester Bytheway. That’s it.’

  ‘It’s Raverat. But Bytheway’s better.’ She nodded, with a small smile.

  ‘I’ll call you Hester Bytheway, then.’

  She nodded. They smiled at each other, as though a pact had been made. He had the most curious sensation of wanting to reach out, to hold her very tight. Her legs were swinging on the stool, as she pushed the beer mat around with her fingers, not looking at him. ‘Well, there we are,’ she said. ‘Let’s cheer ourselves up . . . Listen, Simon, I’m so sorry –’ She looked up at him, but her gaze slid to the window behind, and she froze. ‘No. NO!’

  And then, suddenly, she rolled off the bar stool. He thought she’d fallen, but she hadn’t, she was half staggering, half running to the windows, and she banged on them, at a passer-by. ‘You said you’d telephone with the next date, Digby.’ Her voice cracked, and the slim figure in the warped glass jumped back with shock. ‘Give her back to me? Or bring her round, just for a day? Hey? Are you listening? Digby, listen! My love! My little love! Hey!!!’

  Simon heard the smashing of the glass almost before it had cracked, heard Hester’s scream of despair. And, as the landlord, roused from his melancholic stupor, came around the bar with a roar of outrage, Simon saw Sylvia’s young, heart-shaped face in the window, the fear in her eyes, and her expression as she saw him, then tried to place him, and then did. A man, in a hat pulled over his head, grabbed her arm, yanking her forward. He turned, shooting a glance at Hester. Simon saw his face. A square jaw that tapered to a pointed chin, grey narrow eyes, a wide nose. As he saw Hester he smiled, slowly. It was horrible.

  Hester had sunk to the floor and was moaning, apologising, bargaining; Sylvia hurried on, her father’s hand under her elbow, glancing back at her mother. The look in her eyes was heart-rending: longing, mixed with shame.

  ‘Simon,’ Hester was saying, weeping loudly, and she turned her white face towards him, and he saw the terror on her face. ‘I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. He’s got her. He threw me out. I can’t see her. I can’t get a divorce. I – I can’t do anything. I can’t do anything.’ She swallowed. The landlord was looking at her, shaking his head, disapproval plain to see. She took a deep breath, trying to calm herself. ‘It’s hell. It’s utter hell. I’m sorry. Sorry.’

  He kneeled down beside her, feeling something fall, swoop deep inside him. ‘Don’t worry. Don’t worry, Hester Bytheway. I’ll help you home. I’ll – I’ll help you.’

  Chapter Twenty

  Simon moved into the spare lodgings in Hester’s house in Wellington Square a couple of weeks later. As the taxi turned off the King’s Road into the long, quiet square she was waiting for him. He could see her, a small lone figure as the cab drew in: legs apart, hands by her sides, like a toy soldier waiting to be placed somewhere.

  ‘That you?’ said the cabbie, jerking his head at Hester, who, when she saw him, tore the rag she was wearing over her hair off and waved it frantically though he was only a couple of feet away.

  ‘Yes,’ said Simon, shortly. Nerves had overtaken him; this whole thing, this obsession with Chelsea, that it could save him, was ridiculous. He had given notice on his perfectly nice rooms in Hornsey and thrown over the interview in Finchley with an old friend of his father’s. What would his dear old mum say if she knew? She, who had grown up with a dirt floor and asked for absolutely nothing more than a warm bed and a full belly.

  But Hester flung open the door of the black cab, so forcefully that most of his worldly possessions tumbled out: an elephant’s foot waste-paper basket, inherited from his father and crammed with books, an old Gladstone bag full of valuables like his father’s Egyptian District Officer silver salver, his mother’s teapot – Royal Doulton, formerly her pride and joy – carefully wrapped in a jumper, more books and a battered pair of shoes. They slid onto the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea’s worn flagstones.

  ‘You’re here, you’re really here,’ she said, jumping up and down, her smile so broad he could see she had several teeth missing at the back of her mouth. But she was so like her daughter, her swift, impulsive kindness and intensity, that he had to smile.

  ‘I am here,’ he said.

  ‘Well. Don’t hang around! Come on!’

  Simon paid the cab and watched it drive away. He instinctively understood that he felt at home here, in this little village of shabby stucco houses, cafés and garden squares filled with impoverished young people, making things, doing, being, living. He credited his new appetite for life to the Chelsea atmosphere, and Hester’s need for him, an
d his for her. Last week, they had stayed up all night, walking slowly from Bloomsbury back to Chelsea, not doing anything else, mostly strolling in silence. They were – lost souls, he supposed, and that was fine.

  ‘Come up, come up,’ said Hester, grabbing the rusting handle of the giant trunk that held his clothes and scraping it towards the steps. ‘I say, help me, would you! Or am I already your servant, is that how it’ll be!’

  ‘Never, Lady Bytheway,’ he told her. Somehow, they dragged the trunk and the rest of his meagre belongings up the stairs. It was a warm spring day, and he was perspiring by the time they reached the second floor.

  ‘Here we go!’ Hester flung open the door forcefully. It banged, making him jump. ‘S-sorry,’ she said. He wondered again, at her dilated pupils, her too-loud voice.

  It would formerly have been the master bedroom – a vast, draughty room in pale lemon, with a dull chandelier hanging from its cracked and partial cornice. The floorboards were original, he guessed, untreated oak, and that summer every time he walked on them barefoot hundreds of tiny splinters embedded themselves in his soles. The windows were huge Georgian affairs, with hinged shutters – you fastened them with a rusting metal bar which frequently jammed. The fireplace was vast: deep, and tall, the size of a small Scout hut. Simon could hear the cheep of baby birds, nesting in the chimney. On the huge pink and grey marble mantelpiece was a spray of the first delicate roses, lemon yellow, the faintest blush of salmon at their edges. They were exquisite.

  Simon was touched. ‘They’re – you shouldn’t have.’

  ‘I very nearly didn’t,’ she said, carelessly.

  ‘No, really,’ said Simon. ‘Flowers are so expensive –’

  ‘Oh, it doesn’t matter, does it? They’re from Harrods – I love Harrods – I used to go with Sylvia, to the toy department – I go there to cheer myself up. I wanted to get you something but – anyway, someone gave them to me.’ She wouldn’t meet his gaze. ‘Listen, will it do? Bathroom next door, your kitchen’s just there’ – she pushed open some folding wooden doors to reveal a small alcove with a dresser, a counter with two gas rings and a kettle. ‘It’s your own. You’re the only one who’s got that. Ten pounds a month, didn’t we say?’

  Simon was gazing around him. ‘Yes,’ he said. He turned away from the roses, and drank in the sunny room, the empty shelves either side of the fireplace, the pots of geraniums on the window sill, the coal merchant shovelling glittering black lumps of coal into an ancient hole in front of the house opposite. ‘It’s wonderful,’ he said, his eyes shining. ‘It’s London, isn’t it? It really is.’

  ‘Yes!’ Hester clapped her hands. ‘Dear Simon. It’s going to be marvellous. You’re a brick for helping me out. I’m sure you’ll have a job in no time. I’ll get Sylvia back off Digby, and she and I will go to Harrods again, it’ll all be so jolly.’

  At first it seemed Hester was right. He got a job on Sloane Street, working at Durrant’s, a small but exclusive outfitters selling only the finest gentlemen’s gloves, umbrellas, waterproof boots, and wallets. Mr Durrant had long since died and the shop was owned by an elderly Italian, Mr Agnetti, well known in the business. He was most exacting in his standards, but kind. Simon found it did him good, having to be meticulous again, well turned out. Mr Agnetti was formal, his manner dry. He had a system for everything, and customers who had been with him for years. Ordinarily his fussy precision might have irritated Simon, who dreamed big, and could see how the shop should be appealing to new customers, selling gloves and scarves in bright colours, the kind favoured by Princess Margaret. But, for now, he was very grateful for the job.

  It was a quiet place to work, and that suited him too, just Mr Agnetti, Simon and a girl known only as Miss Inglis who answered the phones, placed the orders and kept the books. She was quiet, precise, with small doughy hands, and small eyes, and lived with her mother in Clerkenwell, and this was the only information she gave about herself, though often Simon would turn into the back office to find her watching him, intently. He didn’t mind; he knew girls liked him. He had always known it, just as some people know they are good at maths. It didn’t help him.

  Simon began sleeping well again; there was something about the immediate quiet of Wellington Square, against the backdrop of noise from the city just beyond. He still had nightmares – the little boy in the dress, the soldiers plunging into starving women. But there was a routine now, and it helped.

  He’d leave early for work, wandering through Chelsea up to Sloane Street, and most of the time he didn’t cross paths with Hester in the mornings – she wasn’t an early riser – and in the evenings he’d stop off somewhere for a pint on the way back, and perhaps a pie or a light supper somewhere in Chelsea. He walked as much as he could. It tired him out and helped quell the dreams. Some of his free time was spent helping Hester with the seemingly unending list of tasks required to keep 11 Wellington Square from collapsing into the dust, like one of the bombed-out houses opposite that was now a gap, like a child’s missing tooth.

  Sometimes he took little Miss Inglis from the shop to the cinema – she was fond of jazz, like him. He even went to tea at her close, dark flat just off Leather Lane with her mother, who only spoke Italian, and spent most of her time embroidering altar cloths for the Italian church on Clerkenwell Road.

  ‘My mother likes you,’ Miss Inglis had confided in him, as they left the Gaumont on the King’s Road after The Thirty-Nine Steps, looking about them and smiling at the fact that it was still light. ‘She thinks your Italian accent is good. And she said you were well turned out.’

  ‘That’s the gloves, I’m sure,’ he’d said, lightly.

  ‘No.’ She considered this carefully, as she tightened the knot on her raincoat. ‘It wasn’t the gloves.’

  ‘I meant – oh, never mind.’

  ‘Were you making a joke?’ She had raised her small blank face to him.

  ‘Only about gloves. A very poor one.’

  ‘Yes. I see.’ She blushed. She’d told him once she knew she was dull. He found himself liking her more for it. ‘Well, goodbye, Simon.’

  ‘Would you care for a cup of tea?’ he said, gesturing to the coffee bar on the corner of the road, thronged with people, fun in the air. He felt it. But Miss Inglis merely nodded, and they walked together in silence.

  He couldn’t help thinking of Hester, in his bed that morning, rolling around as she attempted to twist the bedsheet into a toga without using her hands, her mop of thick dark hair bouncing, her breasts flopping from side to side, her smile as wide as her face, and he realised it wasn’t the same, not at all. As he held the door open for Miss Inglis he longed to be back in Wellington Square, the easy familiarity of his new home. Sometimes he’d walk back along the river, watching the light on the water as the sun set out to the west on those lovely late-spring evenings, and the sense of something changing seemed to him to be everywhere.

  Sometimes he’d be at home reading or listening to the gramophone and there’d be a knock at the door and it would be Hester, holding a bottle of gin and two glasses, and they’d drink together, sitting at his small mahogany drum table that his father had inherited from a maiden aunt. Once Hester stubbed a cigarette out on the wood by mistake and he had been surprised at how furious it made him. ‘Darling, I’m sorry,’ she said, carelessly. ‘I’ll give you one of mine.’ Sometimes she’d dance: she had worn a groove into the carpet of her bed-sitting room jiving to the records she played constantly. She loved rock’n’roll; he preferred jazz. Sometimes they didn’t say much. Sometimes she made him howl with laughter – she was like that, she knew just what to say to set him off.

  Calamitous events seemed to befall Hester all the time. Her mink coat got caught in a Piccadilly Line carriage door, and she had to take it off and lose it or else risk death by running down the platform. Her wedding bouquet had had an upturned pin in it, and upon her arrival at St George’s, Hanover Square, she had leaned down to smell the arum lilies, when she saw the sh
arp point of the pin, one quarter of an inch from her eyeball: she could have been blinded. When Sylvia was a tiny baby, she had fallen down the stairs when their old lodger, a marble salesman from Czechoslovakia, had dropped one of his marbles in a hurry, and she had curled up, covering Sylvia as she fell, instinctively, and it was a wonder she hadn’t broken her neck . . .

  Simon was never sure about some of these stories – there was a photograph of her on her wedding day on her dressing table, and her bouquet was sweet peas, not arum lilies – but he’d seen enough of Hester’s life after a month with her to know drama did seem to follow her around, which was unfortunate because she didn’t really seem to welcome it. He didn’t want it either.

  They didn’t sleep together for a week or two, but it soon became almost perfunctory, and she seemed to expect it. The first time it was she who, after several glasses of gin, unbuttoned her shirt and hopped onto the bed. ‘Oh come on,’ she’d said, and he’d followed her, and they were naked, evening sun streaming into the little room. Afterwards, she’d patted him on the chest and said: ‘Well. Thank you, darling. As you were,’ sat up, and pulled on her skirt. Sometimes she’d ask him to do things he didn’t like, if she had drunk a bit too much. Sometimes he would take her against the window, pressed up to the glass, at dusk. She was sometimes drunk. Sometimes she’d come to him in the middle of the night, eyes red, and he shouldn’t have, but he was lonely too. She never wanted to stay. He never went to her.

  She wouldn’t talk about Sylvia. ‘I have to keep quiet. I have to be good. I’ll get her back one day, she’ll come back here. And I’ll go to Harrods, and buy her a huge damned teddy bear. Big enough for her now she’s almost grown-up. And I’ll keep her safe. Till then let’s not, Simon dearest. It makes me ragged inside, thinking about her.’