2

Other people’s tables!

Gemma’s table is round and made of rosewood, and seats twelve people. The chairs are mahogany and heavy late Victorian. The cutlery is silver and Regency. The glass is Waterford; the place mats are embroidered with alpine scenes. The walls, almost entirely curtained, portray embroidered episodes of Haiti history, in hot reds and oranges.

As a child, Elsa ate at many tables, but seldom sat to eat. Her stepfather being a sergeant in the RAF, and there being nine in the family, there was seldom enough room for all around the tables provided by the Air Force, let alone time enough in anyone house to acquire a sufficient number of chairs. Elsa, being the eldest, served as waitress.

Someone has to.

In any case, Elsa always liked to make herself useful, and, as everyone observed, she hardly looked like someone who needed feeding up. On the contrary.

Now Elsa’s stomach is uncomfortably full of spinach quiche, boeuf bourguignon, courgettes, pasta tossed with olive oil and basil, mixed green salad, profiteroles with whipped cream and chocolate sauce: not to mention gin and peppermint. Liebfraumilch and Côtes de Beaune.

Elsa stifles a belch. The one retaining button pops off her yellow skirt. Johnnie, acting as waiter, his headmaster spectacles glinting in the light from the Venetian glass chandelier, retrieves the button from the foot of a lifesize statue of the Buddha, and politely lays it on Elsa’s side plate, where the last scraps of biscuit and Danish blue, pressed upon her by the ever-hospitable Gemma, still wait to be eaten.

Can she? No.

‘No cheese?’ asks Gemma, bending forward, perturbed. Gemma wears white silk. Her cheeks are delicately rouged. She has eaten little and drunk less. Unfair.

‘I couldn’t.’

‘Never mind,’ Gemma smiles kindly, and surveys her dinner table and her guests as a birthday child might survey the careful icing on its cake before devouring it.

Hamish and Victor are locked in happy combat (and have been since the quiche was removed) over the future of the library ladder.

Hamish! Gemma’s husband, millionaire, manufacturer of flowerpots, and unhappy with his lot in life. Elsa eyes him covertly throughout the meal; whether he sees her through his pebble glasses she cannot be sure. Certainly he behaves as if she were not there. He is a thin, scrawny, elderly man, much Adam’s-appled, who eats ravenously, as if he could never in all his life get enough food, and who twitches and jumps if anyone speaks suddenly. Hamish seems to enjoy Victor’s company. Victor, who could make two of him, moves easily about the world: has his finger on mankind’s pulse; beauty, art and history.

Hamish’s bank-balance, on the other hand, could swallow Victor’s a hundred times or more. The fact worries both of them: it would be idle to pretend it didn’t. In the meantime, Hamish is happy to allow Victor to bully him.

‘But I don’t want to sell it,’ says Hamish, adding butter to his Cheddar cheese. ‘I’m very fond of that library ladder. It belonged to my mother. She used it to get apples from the loft.’

‘Then what was it doing, out for the dustmen?’ enquires Victor. He is feeling slightly sick. It has been a long time since he has eaten meat; now he has even accepted the second helping Gemma piled upon his plate, without asking! Victor follows, normally, a macrobiotic diet, but for reasons of health rather than principle, so had no scruple about accepting so delicious a boeuf bourguignon. His body, alas, is not so quick to adjust as his mind.

‘It wasn’t out for the dustmen,’ protests Hamish. ‘It was waiting for the restorer, wasn’t it, Gemma.’

‘Of course, Hamish,’ croons Gemma, in the tone of one who knows she lies. Victor raises his eyebrows.

‘I should change your restorer,’ says Victor. ‘Whoever he is, he does a rotten job.’

‘Everything he does comes back perfect,’ says Hamish.

‘Exactly,’ says Victor. ‘Shockingly over-restored.’

There is silence; Johnnie clears the plates. Has Victor gone too far?

No.

‘I expect you’re right,’ says Hamish gloomily, a drop of chocolate sauce falling from his long nose, where it had accidentally lodged. ‘I’ve got no taste at all. Better face it.’

‘No such thing as no taste,’ says Victor cheerfully. ‘You like what you like, so long as you’re prepared to pay for it. I just don’t like to see a good library ladder out for the dustmen, and the rungs used by painters to wipe their brushes on. I’ll give you fifty quid for it.’

Hamish laughs.

‘It belonged to my mother. I’m not selling.’

‘Seventy-five.’

‘It’s worth two hundred at least,’ puts in Gemma.

‘Be quiet, Gemma,’ say both men, together and sharply.

‘Besides, I might want to use it one day,’ says Hamish. ‘A library ladder. It costs all of twelve thousand to furbish that library.’

‘You don’t read books, Hamish. Don’t pretend you do. When are you ever going to climb a ladder to read one?’

Hamish smiles. He enjoys rough treatment.

‘You’re quite right,’ says Hamish, ‘I leave all the reading to Gemma. She’s the cultured one. I just make money. Hasn’t she done wonders with the house?’

‘Wonders,’ says Victor, and Elsa echoes ‘wonders’, but nobody hears.

‘I only did what you wanted, Hamish,’ murmurs Gemma, again in the tone of one who knows she lies. ‘I just hope I didn’t overdo things. Why don’t you let poor Victor have the ladder? He’s set his heart on it, and I’m sure I’ll never climb a ladder again.’

‘True,’ says Hamish.

‘So you’ll sell,’ says Victor, triumphant. ‘I’ll write a cheque for fifty pounds here and now.’

‘You said seventy-five.’

‘Did I? My mistake.’ Victor takes out his cheque book.

‘Now what about the eight dining chairs?’ Hamish stays his hand. ‘I asked you down here in the hope you’d take them off my hands. Set of six and two carvers. Sotheby’s offered £500.’

‘Then take it.’

‘A ridiculous offer. Even I know that. Rooked right, left and centre, but I know those chairs are worth at least £1,200. Saw a set exactly like it in Bond Street. You won’t raise it, Victor? A good profit in it for you.’

‘Certainly not. Not without the ladder. I don’t like your chairs.’

‘You don’t have to like them, Victor. Only sell them.’

‘I can only sell what I like. That’s how the trade works. At least, my end of it.’

‘I don’t like plastic flowerpots,’ protests Hamish. ‘But I sell them by the million.’

‘You don’t have to look into the eyes,’ says Victor, ‘of the person who’s buying them. I do. I tell you what, I’ll give you six hundred for the chairs, and throw in the ladder.’

‘I’ll keep the chairs,’ says Hamish, closing his eyes, but not before a real dart of malignity had glinted from them, ‘and the ladder.’

‘I shouldn’t have mentioned the ladder,’ says Victor. ‘I should simply have put it in the boot of the car. No one would ever have noticed.’

And he too closes his eyes, before the real distress within can be seen.

Impasse.

‘Well,’ says Gemma brightly to Elsa, ‘shall we take our coffee to the library, before the men start bargaining again. And you can tell me all about yourself. I’m dying to hear how the young live now –’

Elsa looks across at Victor for help, but none is forthcoming. She has no option but to follow Gemma’s wheelchair, as it cruises at a speed so brisk that Elsa has almost to run to keep up with it, along window-lined corridors, lit by electric torches held in glowing onyx hands, to the library, where bound books, bought by the yard, unopened and unread, line the walls, and a mock coal fire, electric powered, leaps and sparkles redly if regularly in the stainless-steel grate.

Johnnie runs after them with Elsa’s missing button. She’d forgotten it, hidden amongst the Danish blue and biscuits. To take the button from Johnnie she has to leave go of her waistband, which she has been clutching, and nearly loses her yellow skirt. It is made of old-fashioned artificial silk, cut on the cross, and crumples and stains easily.

Johnnie and Annie lift Gemma from her wheelchair into the deep softness of a purple leather armchair; she settles herself snugly in, like a kitten in a feather pillow. Elsa sits upright on a high-backed Jacobean chair, complete with hard tapestry cushion.

‘So you’re Victor’s assistant,’ says Gemma. ‘What fun it must be. And how clever to know all about antiques. Hamish is always buying antiques: he can’t resist them. We have no children – my fault, I’m afraid – so we have to make do with things.’

‘I don’t know all that much about antiques,’ says Elsa. ‘Mostly I just do the dusting. I’m trained as a typist, actually.’

‘Yes, so Victor said. I hope you don’t mind me giving you the inventories to type? I do like things done properly. I used to be a secretary myself, once. In the days when I walked upon two legs and had a full hand of fingers.’

And she holds up her left hand for Elsa’s inspection. The ring finger is entirely missing. The stump is well-healed, smooth and white, but all the same Elsa feels sick and faint. Will she faint?

No. Gemma kindly pours her some brandy.

‘And you live at home, Elsa?’

‘No. I’ve quarrelled with my parents.’

‘What about?’

‘Victor.’

‘Oh, dear.’

‘I live with Victor, you see. In a room behind the shop. We love each other. He’s such a wonderful man, not old at all. He’s given up everything. He’s renounced his home, and his job, and all his past life, just to be able to do his own thing.’

‘And you’ve given up nothing?’

‘No.’

Gemma meditates.

‘For a man who’s given up everything,’ says Gemma eventually, ‘Victor has a very large car.’

‘He needs that for his work.’

‘I was only quoting poor Janice,’ says Gemma lightly, ‘who makes such a meal of a simple thing like paying off the mortgage. And will you be staying the whole weekend, Elsa?’

Elsa would run home that very moment if she could. Batter against her mother’s door, pleading for forgiveness; break into Victor’s shop and hide her head under the late Victorian satin pillows, beneath the Edwardian patchwork quilt, or the Art Nouveau sofa which is her and Victor’s bed, and a very dusty one at that. How she wheezes and sneezes, these days. She lives her life in a cloud of dust. Well, better that than in the typing pool, where the mustiness of new concrete walls covered with acrylic paint, and the long expanses of nylon carpet, created such a degree of static electricity as made many a poor girl jump and cry out at least ten times in a working day.

In the managerial offices they applied an anti-static spray to the carpets but the cost of general application was reckoned far too high. Girls in offices jump and cry out for one reason or another.

‘I’d thought I’d been asked,’ murmurs Elsa, unhappily.

‘My dear, of course you were. Victor’s assistant. We were going to have the whole house and contents valued; and will, so long as Hamish and Victor remain on speaking terms. Victor’s so clever about everything, it makes Hamish quite cross. But I had no idea that you and Victor were so close – and Janice is bringing Wendy to Sunday tea. It’s her eighteenth birthday.’

‘It’s my birthday, too, on Sunday,’ says Elsa, eventually. ‘I’m going to be nineteen.’

‘What a coincidence! Sharing Victor’s daughter’s birthday! I daresay you feel destiny has a hand in your relationship?’

‘Yes,’ says Elsa.

‘And Victor feels that too?’

‘Yes.’

‘Of course if you want to stay, and Victor doesn’t mind, I can make a cake for the both of you.’

‘Does Victor know Janice is coming?’

‘You must ask him that yourself. I’m sure Victor would never deliberately wish to hurt anyone.’

‘Of course he wouldn’t,’ says Elsa. ‘He’s the kindest man in the world.’

‘And now you and he are to be married!’

‘Married?’ Elsa is startled. ‘He isn’t even divorced. Why bother? If two people love each other! Marriage and divorce are only about property, after all.’

‘Who says so?’

‘Victor. In a perfect state there wouldn’t be marrying or taking in marriage.’

Gemma ruminates.

‘Do you think mostly what Victor thinks, Elsa, or do you have your own thoughts, too?’

‘Victor teaches me everything. I was very ignorant until I knew him.’

‘You remind me of myself when young,’ says Gemma, and ceases to be censorious, and becomes – or appears to become – quite easy and friendly. ‘I’m sure it’s much more civilised for you and Janice to meet,’ she says cosily, ‘and I daresay you and Wendy will get on. You must have so much in common.’

Elsa nods, as if fearful and modest. But she is not. Something has hardened in her heart. She wants struggle, conflict, victory. She has the scent of triumph in her nostrils: the taste of sexual power between her soft red lips. Something instinctive and nasty surfaces, hardens, takes possession: other women are her enemy, she perceives. Men are there to be made her allies: her stepping-stones to fulfilment and worldly success. Herself, her children cradled in luxury and safety. (Well, how else is she to do that, on a typing speed of thirty-five, and shorthand fifty-three?) Elsa looks sideways at Gemma and thinks why, if I wanted, I could have Hamish too. Then where would you be, helpless in your chair, with your unworkable legs and your mutilated hand! Sitting there, patronising me.

Johnnie fills Elsa’s glass with more brandy. His dark head bends until it all but touches her white bosom. You, too. If I wanted.

‘You aren’t going to stay a typist forever, I daresay,’ murmurs Gemma.

‘No,’ says Elsa.

‘Be careful,’ says Gemma, suddenly and sharply. ‘I know what you are thinking and I know where it can end. To be wanton, and yes, you are wanton – with your life, your sexuality, your future – is a dangerous matter. You are greedy and careless at the same time, and have made yourself a hundred times more stupid than you need be. Women do; they have to, if they are determined men shall be their masters; if they refuse to look both into the faces of men and into their own hearts.’

Elsa opens her mouth to speak.

‘Be quiet. I know it isn’t comfortable. I know that self-knowledge is painful. I know that to think you are a princess and find you are a beggar-girl is very disagreeable. I know that to look at a prince and find he is a toad is quite shocking. I also know, and you will probably never have the opportunity to find out, that to think you are a beggar-girl and end up a princess is perfectly dreadful.’

Elsa blinks, startled.

‘I can read your heart, Elsa, because I can read my own. I have a story to tell. It’s a fairy tale. I love fairy tales, don’t you?’

‘Yes.’

‘I thought you would. Princes, toads, princesses, beggar-girls – we all have to place ourselves as best we can. This one is the story of Mr Fox and Lady Mary. Lady Mary the High Lord’s daughter was betrothed to the noble Mr Fox. And the message was written in letters of fire in Mr Fox’s house, the day before her wedding, when she stole into his house to see what she could see. “Be bold” written above the first door, and all within was grand and quiet: “Be bold” above the second, and likewise; but “Not Too Bold” above the third: but in went Lady Mary on tippy-toe, and there she found a charnel house and her beloved Mr Fox feasting with his friends; a robber baron, that he was, her Mr Fox, and feasting on human flesh: and as she crouched in her dark corner, a finger flew across the room, and fell into her lap and on it was a ring. So she slipped the ring from off its finger, and crept away and showed it to her brothers; and when the next morning came and with it her marriage day, and handsome Mr Fox came up the aisle, her brothers fell upon him and killed him; and so justice was done.’

Tears stand in Gemma’s eyes. Bewilderment shines from Elsa’s.

‘Do you think it was justice? Or did it just mean that more were dead than were before? I don’t suppose she ever married after that. Well, would you?’ enquires Gemma.

‘What’s so interesting about the story?’ asks Elsa. Where’s Victor? What’s he doing? What can Hamish offer him by way of company and entertainment that she, Elsa, cannot?

‘What is so interesting about it,’ says Gemma firmly, ‘is that I heard it one night on someone else’s transistor radio, read by Dame Edith Evans. I was on a train: I had a sleepless night in front of me. And the very next morning I met a Mr Fox and fell in love with him; and rings and fingers, or the lack of them, featured prominently in my life thereafter. Had you never noticed the way the secret world sends out signs and symbols into the ordinary world? It delivers our messages in the form of coincidences: Letters crossing in the post, unfamiliar tunes heard three times in one day, the way that blows of fate descend upon the same bowed shoulders, and beams of good fortune glow perpetually upon the blessed. Fairy tales, as I said, are lived out daily. There is far more going on in the world than we ever imagine.’

‘Just a coincidence,’ muttered Elsa, disbelieving.

‘Just a coincidence! I love Mr Fox and you say just?’ Gemma is outraged. ‘It was many years ago, as they used to say at the beginning of fairy tales, when the world was fresh and young – and so was I – but it was not imagination. It was in 1966.’

1966.

Not, as Gemma observed, that the year made men any kinder or girls less foolish; all that can be said of it for sure is that skirts were definitely worn shorter by the fashionable, and even referred to as pussy pelmets.

Picture Gemma, in the year 1966, at the age of nineteen, arrived in London from the distant provinces where time stood still – as could be seen from her green tweed skirt, which reached down to her knees, and the twin-set (jumper and cardigan), which blurred the outline of her chest. The twin-set was in dusty-pink, and around her neck she wore a metal pendant, pearl-shaped, set with an artificial pearl. So her mother had walked before her, though never in London, city of sin. (Sin enough in Cumberland, where she had lived, without looking abroad for it.)

Now her daughter, Gemma, more adventurous, five good fingers still on each hand, walked on two good slender working legs down Carnaby Street, London, and saw her contemporaries with their skirts high above their knees, and breasts clearly outlined beneath thin fabric, and even, here in Carnaby Street, at the heart of the world’s fashion events, a few going bra-less, precursor of what was to come.

This is the world for me, Gemma thought. But even while she thought, she stopped in a doorway, and took off her mother’s pearl necklace, and put on the crucifix her great-aunt had given her on her sixteenth birthday.

‘Gemma,’ Great-Aunt May had said, ‘you’ll need this, too.’ Though quite what she meant Gemma was not sure. Gemma’s mother had died when Gemma was four, from (some said) too many late nights and too much rackety living, or (others said) from TB aggravated by self-neglect. Be that as it may, Eileen was certainly dead, and had left her arthritic aunt May to look after Gemma, which that lady did willingly, if painfully, until her own seventieth year, and Gemma’s sixteenth birthday.

On that day, after giving Gemma her mother’s false pearl (symbol of sin and excitement: Eileen had been wearing it the night Gemma was conceived: pressed up against an alley wall; fully dressed in twin-set and pearl, but her skirt up and her knickers down; the alley cat!) she had produced her own great-auntly crucifix, as if the second gift might somehow neutralise the power of the first. And then she had added another blessing, and had rung up the Council to take back the cottage (rent seventeen shillings and sixpence a week) in which Gemma had spent her childhood, and thrown herself upon the mercies of the National Health Service, and Gemma into the care of the local Children’s Department.

For the young to be free of the old – this is a blessing indeed. Great-Aunt May knew it; and knowing it, relinquished Gemma without a thought to the loneliness of her own old age. Such courage, such sacrifice is not uncommon: it is taken for granted and goes mostly unnoticed. It is remembered by its beneficent only in dreams, if then; but has its results, perhaps, in those small unexpected ripples of family kindness which overlap from generation to generation. The good we do lives after us: for ever and ever.

Great-Aunt May died: Gemma did not go to the funeral. But never mind. If Gemma had the crucifix now, she would hand it on to Elsa. She has lost it long ago: she talks, instead. Elsa listens, and wonders why Victor and Hamish talk so long: and Johnnie fills her glass again.

With her pearl in her handbag and her crucifix around her neck, Gemma stopped at the foot of the building where the Gallant Girls Employment Agency had sent her for her first job, and looked up and up its glass facade and marvelled that technology could construct a solid building out of a substance so essentially fragile as glass. Coloured lights played upon the surface, from within, so that even at eleven-ten on a Monday morning it seemed to demonstrate that work could be fun, that man need not waste his substance in seriousness, but could get by just as well by having a good and colourful time.

Even as Gemma stood and gasped, a yellow Rolls-Royce slowed up beside the building, and a young man in a white suit leapt out and ran past Gemma, and up the pink-veined marble steps, and into the Art Nouveau, gold-embossed lift and was gone, leaving an impression of pale good looks, lithe body and perfect teeth behind: and Gemma took off her crucifix and put her pearl back on, and followed him inside.

When Gemma was taken over by the Children’s Department she was kept for a week or two in a Children’s Home and then found employment, by a kindly social worker, as mother’s help to a widowed vicar’s wife in a remote Northumbrian village. Gemma had distinctions in eight O-level subjects, and would perhaps have benefited from further education, but the vicar’s wife, Mrs Hemsley, had five daughters and was desperate, Gemma disinclined to return to school, and the pressure for places in the Children’s Home was great. The closing of railway stations and coal pits in the area, in the undoubted interests of efficiency and progress, had resulted in considerable local unemployment, and the consequent breaking up of families and the taking of children into care. Gemma merely happened to be there, at the time. And let us not think that we get what we deserve, any of us: some of us are better at triumphing over obstacles, that’s all.

Gemma worked for Mrs Hemsley for three years. She had her keep and thirty shillings a week pocket money. During the day she and Mrs Hemsley together looked after Hannah, Hermione, Helen, Hortense and Alice. During their evenings, the two of them washed, ironed, mended, and tidied. Gemma was not unhappy at first: the little girls were fond of her and she of them. Mrs Hemsley was generous with everything except money, which was understandable, because she had so little of that to spare, living as she did upon a widow’s pension and the precarious kindness of the Church. She made up for it by giving a lot of advice, which Gemma ignored.

Gemma’s bosom, over those three years, grew whiter, plumper and more munificient; her waist more slender and her skin more translucent. Her large eyes, purple-lidded, grew dreamier. She lived without sexual activity, or overt sexual interest, or as the dentist’s wife said of her to the doctor’s wife, ‘What you don’t know you don’t miss, I suppose.’ It was, more or less, true. If Gemma dreamed, it was of pale knights upon pale horses in dark forests: her excitements were romantic, not erotic. Other girls of her age fumbled and sweated and kissed: Gemma dreamed, and sighed.

Gemma’s menstrual periods were regular, though painful: she suffered at night from vague aches and pains which kept her sleepless. The doctor, visited on this account, asked a few searching questions about the absence of boy-friends, and Gemma left, embarrassed, though not before the doctor had given her an internal examination, which, since she was a virgin, turned out to be both painful and surprising, but was presumably necessary. The doctor prescribed aspirin, and the pains went away. Later that year the dentist dropped amalgam down inside her summer dress (a shirt-waister, picked up for two shillings at a jumble sale) and had to retrieve it: again an embarrassing experience. The dentist’s wife, who acted as his assistant, had been asked to leave the room for more pink mouthwash. It seemed to Gemma that his fingers lingered and tweaked where they had no business. How, lying awake at night, Gemma scorned the doctor and the dentist, and her body’s response to them. How she pitied Mrs Hemsley, and resolved not to end up like her, as drudge to her own descendants. The purpose of life could not merely be to hand it on? She scorned her own generation, too: the sweaty village girls, the mumbling boys who stood about in jeering groups, remarking on the size of her breasts. She was grateful to be spared any more subtle attention from them – hurrying round the shops each morning as she did, obtaining as best she could food for seven on money sufficient for three – lentils, oat flakes, stewing lamb, turnips, swede – the sound of lewd catcalls in her ears. She was accustomed to frugality – life with Great-Aunt May had been austere – but could never become used to vulgarity.

Gemma was not like anyone else: she knew it. She had been told so often enough at school – she was a love child, and so was her mother before her. And this Gemma saw – at any rate on good days – as a matter of pride, not shame. Her father had been a visiting repertory actor, and wasn’t that better than being fathered in wedlock by some black-nailed farm worker? Her mother’s father was never known. Better an unknown possible prince in disguise, than a known toad or a station porter. Surely!

Gemma, though grateful to the many people who showed kindness to her, was not content. Gemma, cleaning, sweeping, mending, chiding, was merely biding her time. She was ambitious, though for what she did not know. Gemma took a correspondence course in shorthand typing.

And so one Monday morning in a hot, hot June, Gemma was able to present herself at the Gallant Girls Employment Agency in Regent Street, London. She had with her a suitcase, five pounds fifteen shillings in her purse, and a certificate of competence in shorthand typing from the Courtley Correspondence School. To acquire the latter document she had spent many late nights hard at work, burning up Mrs Hemsley’s precious electricity, wearing out Mrs Hemsley’s deceased husband’s ancient typewriter – all that poor lady had left to remember him by, apart from Helen, Hannah, Hermione, Hortense and Alice, that is. With Mrs Hemsley’s somewhat relieved blessing, Gemma had come south to London, to make good.

‘Gemma has her head screwed on the right way,’ Mrs Hemsley confided to the dentist’s wife, ‘she’ll be all right. Secretarial jobs are two a penny in London, and I’ve given her the address of the YWCA. I only wish it was me who was going.’

‘I think our Gemma will be better suited to office life than child care,’ remarked the dentist’s wife, thus putting in words what Mrs Hemsley felt, but scarcely liked to say.

Gemma, Mrs Hemsley feared, had lately been showing signs of irresponsibility. As her shorthand improved, so her sense of domestic vocation deteriorated. Even though faced, as could only be normal in the day-to-day care of five children, with emergencies such as broken limbs and cries such as high fevers, she showed a marked reluctance to call in the doctor. She had, moreover, developed an astringent style of talk which smacked, or so Mrs Hemsley feared, of cynicism. She hardly set a good example to five growing girls.

Hannah, Hermione, Helen, Hortense and Alice. Alice was born the day before her father had his first and last heart attack, leaving his wife to seek in vain for a tolerable name beginning with H.

Gemma lost her address book in the train on the way to London; in it were the names of the YWCA and the various charitable organisations she was to contact if in any trouble. But Gemma had the courage of the very young: she left the train at Euston as dawn broke, undaunted and unafraid. She sat on the steps outside the station until breakfast-time had come and gone, and then started to walk to Piccadilly, which she had heard was London’s epicentre, and which she could at least locate on the station’s street map. London seemed larger than she had imagined; but that it was dangerous she did not then know. Danger, in any case, is only relative. The alley where Gemma’s mother encountered Gemma’s father might be considered more dangerous yet.

As Gemma pushed her way through the crowds where Regent Street meets Piccadilly, and the flower-children of the world meet up, her attention was caught by a shriek of noisy laughter issuing from a first-floor window. Lettered on the glass were the words ‘Gallant Girls Employment Agency’.

Well, thought Gemma, at least they’re happy: and in she went and up the stairs, there to meet Miss Hilary, senior interviewer, from whose very lips the laugh had burst.

The laugh had not, in fact, been particularly happy, being Miss Hilary’s normal Monday morning response to any request for staff from an employer or for work from an employee. Miss Hilary knew from long experience that anyone not suited on a Friday evening – or married by the age of thirty, for that matter – was either hard to please or born unlucky.

Miss Hilary was fifty-six: her hair was neatly coiled in blonde plaits, black rooted, at the top of her head. Her voice was loud, her laughter raucous and despairing, her eyelids blue as a summer sky, and her heart as deep and sad as sin. Miss Hilary sat glinting behind upswept glasses like a spider at the centre of its web.

Miss Hilary regarded Gemma with the harsh derisive pity of one who knows the world for the one who doesn’t. She helped herself to a jam-centred cookie from the plate of biscuits brought to her with her morning coffee, and offered Gemma one made of decent wholewheat, which Gemma accepted gratefully. It was her breakfast.

‘Hungry, I see,’ said Miss Hilary.

‘Yes.’

‘And I daresay you’ve just arrived in London, have lost your purse and have nowhere to live.’

‘How did you know?’ asked Gemma, startled.

‘In London,’ observed Miss Hilary, ‘no one is unique. Girls take this route from Euston every Monday morning, and there are pickpockets on the trains. What did you say your name was?’

‘Gemma Joseph.’

‘Pretty. I go a lot by names. If the mother has imagination, sometimes the child has as well. I suppose you learned your shorthand typing by correspondence course? No, don’t show me the certificate. It will be from Courtley and means nothing.’

‘Then give me a test. I can do forty typing and eighty shorthand. Really.’

‘Take off your cardy, dear.’

‘What for?’ asked Gemma, startled.

Miss Hilary pushed Gemma another biscuit: this time a chocolate finger. Gemma took off her cardigan, and then ate the biscuit. Her bust, in its 36c St Michael’s bra (white) showed to advantage beneath the size 34 jumper. The matching cardigan was in a size 38 – the twin-set having been sold cheap on account of this discrepancy.

‘That will do,’ said Miss Hilary. ‘You’ll have to wake up your ideas on clothes, of course.’

‘Do for what?’

‘Let’s face it, dear. You need a job starting this morning. I’ve got a nice one going at Fox and First.’

‘Who are they?’

‘Never heard of Fox and First? Don’t you read your Sunday Supplements? How ever do you think you’re going to get on in the world? On forty typing and eighty shorthand? Self-taught, at that? Leon Fox is London’s most eligible bachelor. He’s a society jeweller and man about town. Most artistic! Rings for the toes and pendants for the nose: circlets for the bosom and studs for the navel; gold manacles for dainty wrists, male and female, and goodness knows what else for goodness knows where, but nothing under a thousand pounds. They’re asking for a nicely-spoken girl of good appearance for light reception and modelling work.’

‘Modelling? I’d rather be employed for my skills than my looks.’

‘Beggars can’t be choosers,’ said Miss Hilary, sharply. ‘Start today and in here Saturday ten sharp for your wages. Twenty pounds! Lucky girl! Get your card from my assistant. Next, please –’

‘Excuse me,’ said Gemma, ‘but how much do they pay you for me?’

‘It is not customary for my girls to ask that question. It is confidential information.’

‘I’m sorry,’ said Gemma, abashed.

Miss Hilary looked full at Gemma once again.

‘If I die poor,’ she said, ‘it will be the fault of girls like you, making me feel sorry for them.’

And no doubt Miss Hilary thought herself generous to a fault, considering she had her own way to make in the world and only her own efforts to sustain her.

‘I’m ever so sorry,’ said Gemma, meaning it. ‘I really am grateful.’

‘Yes, my dear,’ replied Miss Hilary, astounded. ‘I believe you are.’

And Gemma set off for Fox and First, and there on the steps, as he leapt pale and lithe from a yellow Rolls-Royce, she caught her first glimpse of the man she was to love for ever; Leon Fox.

Mr Fox, Mr Fox, Gemma loves you. Love struck like a shaft of sudden light from heaven, striking down into the narrow alley of Carnaby Street, and into Gemma’s heart, and shifted and changed and reassembled the very particles of her being, so that forever after part of him was contained in her.

‘Love’s one thing,’ says Gemma to Elsa in the library, years later, ‘and once love has struck no wonder the body craves to have even this crude physical manifestation of its new constituent lodged within it – during the act of sex, that is – making its presence felt even if only for short intervals; but gratitude, that’s another matter! Beware of gratitude, Elsa. Young girls so easily feel grateful, and it always leads them into trouble. Remember always that your good fortune is yours by right; you do not have to feel obliged to those who are the mere catalysts of your fate. Do you love Victor or are you grateful to him?’

‘Both,’ says Elsa firmly.

If Gemma had the use of her feet, no doubt she would have stamped one of them.

‘Do you think your meeting with Victor was destined?’ she asks, presently. ‘Or was it mere chance? Or was it perhaps merely your nature, and if you’d been working in a different office, you’d have fallen in love with the first married fatherly knee you sat upon?’

Elsa is indignant. She stares full at Gemma, the light of true love beaming from her blue eyes, illuminating her life.

‘Don’t be angry,’ says Gemma sadly. ‘I only ask the questions I ask myself. And I am so sorry for Janice, because she loves Victor too.’

Elsa wishes Gemma would not talk about Janice. But, as Victor later explained to Elsa, the rich lack the inhibitions of the poor when it comes to the discussion of delicate problems. The poor know there are no solutions. The rich have the experience that there generally is.

‘Janice only loves her carpets and her bourgeois comforts,’ says Elsa, ‘she’s so hung up about possessions it’s not true.’

‘Perhaps when you meet her on Sunday you’ll be able to help her to a better understanding of life,’ suggests Gemma kindly. ‘You’re not afraid Victor will decide to go back to her? No?’

No.

The ladies are joined by the men. The matter of the library ladder has not, it seems, been resolved. Conversation concerns itself with inflation, the tides of commerce, the possible profit in marketing ecologically conscious organic potting compost, and the necessity of tax evasion under a Labour Government. Elsa’s eyes close. It has been a long and tiring day. She was up cleaning the antique shop at seven in the morning: the first customers were expected at eight-thirty and all traces of her and Victor’s occupancy of the back room had to be removed: her nightie and his pyjamas tucked as usual into the case of a grandfather clock waiting for its works to come back from the menders; all their clothes, that particular morning, transferred from a linen press awaiting collection by the shippers to one marked up at £1,750 and unlikely to find a quick buyer. The shop was perhaps overstocked – Victor had raised a large second mortgage on the matrimonial home, as well as selling out his accountancy partnership, to set himself up in the business – and free movement a little difficult. Though, as Victor remarked, Elsa was perhaps more accustomed than most to cramped quarters, and one of the things he loved most about her was the way she seldom complained.

Janice always complained.

Although Elsa did not, could not, with the best will in the world, on account of her lack of knowledge and experience, actually transact sales, she was kept busy at the telephone, running messages, shifting furniture, placating disappointed customers, confirming credit card liability, and so on. For lunch she had cooked Victor buttered brown rice, served with sardines drained of oil: a perfectly balanced meal of eighty per cent carbohydrate, ten per cent fat and ten per cent protein, and rich in nucleic acids for longevity and prolonged youth. On this particular day there had also been the strain of the car ride, sex before dinner, the dinner itself, sudden acquaintance with the rich and eccentric, and the worry of Janice’s arrival on Sunday.

Sometimes Elsa wonders if she might not have been better off in the typing pool.

Except, of course, for Victor.

Wonderful Victor, so much at ease in every company!

Listen to him now. Prince amongst men.

Elsa sleeps.

When Elsa opens her eyes there is silence. All three of them regard her with a kind of sad speculation.

Elsa blushes.

‘Time for bed,’ says Gemma, kindly.