‘I’ll get my pennies together,’ said Avril the nightclub singer to Helen the hairdresser. ‘I’ll come in next week and you can work your usual miracles.’
Helen thought the time for miracles was almost past. Both Avril’s pennies and Avril’s hair were getting thin. But she merely said, ‘I’ll do my best,’ and ran her practised fingers through Avril’s wiry curls without flinching.
Avril was scraggy, haggard and pitifully brave. Helen was solid and worthy and could afford to be gracious. Avril had been Helen’s very first client, thirty years before, when she, Helen, had finally finished her apprenticeship. In those days Avril had worn expensive, daring green shoes with satin bows, all the better to flirt in: Helen had worn cheap navy shoes with sensible heels, all the better to work in. Helen envied Avril. Today Avril’s shoes, with their scuffed high heels, were still green, but somehow vulgar and pitiable, and the legs above them were knotted with veins. And Helen’s shoes were still navy, but expensive and comfortable, and had sensible medium heels. And Helen owned the salon, and had a husband, and grown children, and savings, and a dog, a cat and a garden, and Avril had nothing. Nothing. Childless, unmarried, and without property or money in the bank.
Now Helen pitied Avril, instead of envying her, but somehow couldn’t get Avril to understand that this switch had occurred.
With the decades the salon had drifted elegantly up-market, and now had a pleasing atmosphere of hushed brocaded luxury. Here now the wives of the educated wealthy came weekly, and the shampooers were well-spoken and careful not to wet the backs of blouses, and decaffeinated coffee was provided free, and low-calorie wholewheat sandwiches for a reasonable charge, and this month’s glossy magazines in sufficient quantity – and still Avril would walk in, unabashed, and greet Helen with an embarrassing cry of ‘darling!’ as if she were her dearest friend, in her impossibly husky and actressy voice. And she’d bring wafting in with her, so that the other clients stirred uneasily in their well-padded seats, what Helen could only think of as the aura of the street: and what is more, of a street in rapid decline – once perhaps Shaftesbury Avenue, and tolerable, with associated West End theatre and champagne cocktails, but now of some Soho alley, complete with live sex shows and heroin-pushers.
Sometimes Avril would vanish for a year or so and Helen would hope she had gone for good, and then there she’d be again, crying ‘do something, darling. Work your usual miracles. My life’s all to hell!’ and Helen would pick up the strands of brown, or red, or yellow or whatever they currently were, and bleach them right down and re-colour them, and soothe and coax them into something presentable and fashionable.
This time Avril had been away all of two years. And now here she was, back again, and the ‘do something’ had sounded really desperate, as she’d torn at crisp dry henna-and-grey curls with ringed finger-claws, and Helen had been affected, surprisingly, with real sorrow and concern. Perhaps you didn’t have to like people to feel for them? Perhaps if they were merely around for long enough you developed a fellow-feeling for them?
She remembered how once – way, way back – when Avril’s hair had been long and smooth and shiny, the rings had had diamonds and rubies on them. Then, at the time of her auburn pony-tail there’d been engagement rings and remembrance rings: and later, once or twice – at the time Avril’s hair was back-combed into blonde curls – a wedding ring. Helen could remember. But nowadays the only rings she wore were the kind anyone could buy at a jewellery stall in the market on Saturdays; they came from India or Ethiopia or somewhere ethnic, and the silver was base and the stones were glass. ‘Cheap and cheerful,’ Avril would cackle, from under the dryer, waving them round happily for all to see, as the other clients looked away, tactfully. They didn’t wear much jewellery, and if they did it was either real or Harrods make-believe, and certainly quiet.
Avril came in for the latest, desperate miracle on Friday evening. She had the last appointment, and of course wanted a bleach, a perm, a cut and a set. Helen agreed to work late. It was her policy to oblige clients – even clients such as Avril – wherever possible, and however much at her own expense. It was, in the end, good for business. Just as, in the end, steadiness, forbearance, endurance, always succeeded whether at work, in marriage, in the establishment of a home, the bringing up of children. You made the most of what you had. You were not greedy; you played safe; and you won.
Helen rang up her husband Gregory to tell him she would be working late.
‘I’ll take a chicken pie from the freezer,’ he said, ‘and there’s a nature programme on TV I want to see. And perhaps I’ll do a little DIY around the house.’
‘Well, don’t try mending the electric kettle,’ she said, and he agreed not to. Still she did not hang up.
‘Is there something the matter?’ he said, and waited patiently. He was wonderfully patient.
‘Don’t you think,’ she said presently, ‘don’t you think somehow life’s awfully sad?’
‘In what way?’ he asked, when he’d given some time to considering the question.
‘Just growing older,’ she said, vaguely, already fearing she sounded silly. ‘And what’s it all for?’
There was a further silence at the other end of the line.
‘Who’s the client?’ he asked.
‘Avril le Ray.’
‘Oh, her. She always upsets you.’
‘She’s so tragic, Gregory!’
‘She brought it on herself,’ said Gregory. ‘Now I must go and take the pie out of the freezer. It’s always better to heat them when they’re thawed out a little, isn’t that so?’
‘Yes,’ she said, and they said goodbye, and hung up.
Avril was ten minutes late for her appointment. She’d been crying. Her mouth was slack and sullen. Melted blue eye shadow made runnels down her cheeks. She insisted on sitting in the corner where one of the old-style mirrors still remained from before the last renovation. Avril claimed it threw back a kinder reflection and it probably did, but Avril sitting in front of it meant that Helen was obliged to work with her elbow up against the wall. The neck of Avril’s blouse was soiled with a mixture of make-up, sweat and dirt. And she smelt unwashed. But Helen, to her surprise, found the smell not unpleasant. Her Nan had smelt like that, she remembered, long ago and once upon a time, when she’d put little Helen to bed in a big, damp feather bed. Was that where the generations got you? Did they merely progress from chaos to order, dirt to cleanliness? Was that what it was all about?
‘Remember when I had long hair?’ said Avril. ‘So long that I could sit on it! I played Lady Godiva in the town pageant. I was in love with this boy and he said if I wanted to prove I loved him I would sit on the horse naked. So I did. Listen, I was sixteen, he was seventeen, what did we know? My mother wouldn’t speak to me for months. We lived in the big house, had servants and everything. What a disgrace! She was right about one thing: I failed my exams.’
‘What about the boy?’ asked Helen. Whole-head root-bleaches, the kind Avril wanted, were old-fashioned, but were less finickity than the more usual bleached streaks. Helen could get on quite quickly at this stage.
‘He was my one true love,’ said Avril. ‘We’d never done anything but hold hands and talk about running away to get married. Only after I played Godiva he never wanted to run any further than behind the bicycle shed. You know what men are like.’
‘But it was his idea!’
Avril shrugged.
‘He was only young. He didn’t know what he’d feel like later, after I’d gone public, as it were. How could he have? So I went with him behind the bicycle sheds. It was glorious. I’ll never forget it. The sun seemed to stop in the sky. You know?’
‘Yes,’ said Helen, who didn’t. She’d only ever been with Gregory and someone else whose name she preferred to forget, at a party, a sorry, drunken episode which had left her with NSU – non-specific urethritis. Well, that’s the way it goes. Fate reserves these unlikely punishments for the virtuous who sin only once, and then either get pregnant or catch a social disease. And she’d only ever made love to Gregory at night, so how could she know about the sun stopping? But at least it was love: warm, fond and affectionate, not whatever it was that ravaged and raddled Avril.
‘Anyway, then he broke it to me formally that he and me were through. He’d met Miss Original Pure and planned to marry her when he had his degree. I thought I’d die from misery. But I didn’t, did I? I lived to tell the tale.’
‘I do look a sight, don’t I?’ Avril said, staring at her plastery hair, but her mind was on the past. ‘It was funny. I stood in front of that full-length mirror, at the age of sixteen, and tried to decide whether to do Godiva naked or in a flesh-coloured body-stocking. I knew even then it was what they call a major life decision. Naked, and the future would go one way; body-stocking, another. I chose naked. Afterwards I cried and cried, I don’t know why. I’ve always cried a lot.
‘Then of course I couldn’t get into college because I’d failed my exams so I went to drama school. I got no help from home – they’d given me up – and I couldn’t live on my grant, no one could. So I did a centre-spread in Mayfair, perfectly decent, just bra-less, only the photographer took a lot of other shots I knew nothing about and they were published too, and got circulated everywhere, including in my home town. I tried to sue but it was no use. No one takes you seriously once you take your clothes off. I didn’t know – well, I guess I was trying to take advantage of him, too, in a way, so I can’t complain. And I can tell you this, if the sun stopped behind the bicycle shed, that photographer made the whole galaxy go the other way. Know what I mean?’
‘Oh yes,’ said Helen, testing a lock of Avril’s hair: the bleach was taking a long time to take. She wondered whether to ring Gregory and remind him not to try to mend the kettle, or whether the reminding would merely make him the more determined to do it.
‘Do I look as if I’ve been crying?’ asked Avril, peering more closely into the mirror. ‘Because I have been. This guy I’ve been living with: he’s a junkie trying to kick the habit. He’s really managed well with me. He was getting quite – well, you know, affectionate – that’s always a good sign. He used to be a teacher, really clever, until he got the habit. Young guy: bright eyes, wonderful skin – didn’t often smile, but when he did… Notice the past tense? When I got home from work this morning he’d vanished and so had my rent money. It gets you here in your heart: you can’t help it: you tell yourself it was only to be expected, but it hurts, Christ it hurts. I shouldn’t have told him I loved him, should I? Should I, Helen?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Helen. She told Gregory she loved him quite often and there seemed no sanction against it. But perhaps the word, as used by her, and by Avril, had a different meaning. She rather hoped so.
‘So you only love people who hurt you?’ she asked, cautiously.
‘That is love, isn’t it?’ said Avril. ‘That’s how you know you love them, because they can hurt you. Otherwise, who cares? How am I going to live without him? Just lying in bed beside him: he was so thin, but so hot: he was so alive! It was life burning him up, killing him. Just life. Too strong.’ Tears rolled down Avril’s cheeks.
She looks eighty, thought Helen, but she can only be my age.
‘Anyway,’ said Avril, ‘I want a new me at the end of this session. Pick yourself up and start all over, that’s my motto. Remember when you cut off all my long hair? That was after the Mayfair business; I didn’t want anyone to recognise me, but of course they did. You can’t cut off your breasts, can you? I got picked out of the end-of-the-year show by a director: very classy he was, National and all that, and he and I got friendly, and I got the lead but I wasn’t ripe for it, and the rest of the cast made a fuss and that was the end of me; three weeks later, bye-bye National. And he had a wife living in the country somewhere, and it got in the papers because he was so famous, and none of his friends would hire me, they all sided with the wife, so I got a part in a Whitehall Revue and did French maids for five years. Good wages, nice little flat, men all over the place: wonderful dinners, diamonds. You wouldn’t believe it, like in a novel, but it wasn’t me. I don’t know what is me, come to think of it. Perhaps no one ever does. I wanted to get married and have kids and settle down but men just laughed when I suggested it. I had a blonde, back-combed bob in those days. Remember?’
Helen did. That was in the days when you used so much hair spray on a finished head it felt like a birds’ nest to the touch.
‘Then I had a real break. I could always sing, you know, and by that time I really did know something about theatre. I got the lead in a Kurt Weill opera. Real classy stuff. You did my hair black and I had a beehive. How we could have gone round like that! And I fell in love with the stage manager. God, he was wonderful. Strong and silent and public school, and he really went for me, and was married, and I’ve never been happier in my life. But he was ambitious to get into films, and was offered a job in Hollywood and I just walked out of the part and went along. That didn’t do me any good in the profession, I can tell you. And I kept getting pregnant but he didn’t want us tied down so I’d have terminations, and then he went off with the studio boss’s daughter: she was into yoga, and they had three kids straight off. He complained I could never sit still. But I can, can’t I? You should know, shouldn’t you, Helen?’
‘About as still as anyone else,’ said Helen, and took Avril over to the basin and washed the bleach off. She hoped she hadn’t overdone it: the hair was very fine and in poor condition and the bleach was strong.
‘I left them to it; I just came back home; I didn’t hang around asking for money. I never do that. Once things are over, they’re over – I didn’t have any children: why should he pay? We gave each other pleasure, didn’t we? Fair exchange, while it lasted. Everything finishes, that’s the bottom line. But I never liked beehives, did you?’
‘No. Very stiff and artificial.’
‘I wept and wept, but it was good-times while it lasted!’ Avril examined a lock of hair.
‘Look here,’ said Avril, ‘that bleach simply hasn’t taken. You’ll have to put some more on and mix it stronger.’
‘It’s risky!’ said Helen.
‘So’s everything!’ said Avril. ‘I’m just sick of being hennaed frizz: I want to be a smooth blonde again.’
Helen felt weary of the salon and her bank account and her marriage and everything she valued: and of her tidy hair and sensible shoes and the way she never took risks and how her youth had passed and all she’d ever known had been in front of her eyes, and fear had kept her from turning her head or seeing what she would rather not see. She re-mixed the bleach, and made it strong. Avril would be as brassy a blonde as she wished, and Helen’s good wishes would go with her.
‘Well, of course,’ said Avril, cheerfully, ‘after that it was all downhill. Could I get another acting part? No! Too old for ingénue, too young for character and a reputation as a stripper, so Hedda Gabler was out. And frankly I don’t suppose I was ever that good. Met this really nice straight guy, an engineer, but he wanted a family and I guess my body had got tired of trying, because I never fell for a baby with him, and he made some nice girl pregnant and they got married and lived happily ever after. I went to the wedding. But how was it, I ask myself, that she could get pregnant and still stay a nice girl, and I was just somehow a slut from the beginning?’
So late, thought Helen, and the perm not even begun. Gregory will have gone to bed without me – will he notice? Will he care?
‘So now I sing in nightclubs; I’m a good singer, you know. All I need is the breaks and I’d really be someone... I do the whole gamut – from the raunchy to the nostalgic, a touch of Bogart, a touch of Bacall. Those were the days, when love was love. And I tell you, Helen, it still is, and the only thing I regret is that it can’t go on for ever – love, sex. The first touch of a man’s hand, the feel of his lips, the press of his tongue, the way the mind goes soft and the body goes weak, the opening up, the joining in. I still feel love, and I still say love, though it’s not what men want, not from me. Perhaps it comes too easily; always did. Do you think that’s what the matter is?’
When Helen took Avril to the washbasin and washed the second lot of bleach away, a good deal of Avril’s hair came with it. Helen felt her hands grow cold, and her head fill with black: she all but fainted. Then she wept. Nothing like this had ever happened before, in all her professional career. She trembled so much that Avril had to rinse off what was left of the bleach from what was left of her hair, herself.
‘Well,’ said Avril, when it was done, and large areas of her reddened scalp all too apparent, ‘that’s the bottom line and the sharp end. Nothing lasts, not even hair. My fault. I made you do it. Thirty years of hating me, and you finally got your revenge!’
‘I never hated you,’ said Helen, her face puffy and her eyes swollen. She felt, on the other side of the shock and horror, agreeably purged, sensuous, like her Nan’s little girl again.
‘Well, you ought to have,’ said Avril. ‘The way I always stirred things up in here. I just loved the look on your face!’
After a little Avril said, ‘I wonder what my future is, as a bald nightclub singer? I suppose I could wear a wig till it grows again, but I don’t think I will, it might be rather good. After the Godiva look, the Doris Day look, the Elizabeth Taylor look, then the Twiggy look – the frizz-out, the pile-up and the freak-out – none of which did me any good at all – just plain bald might work wonders for a girl’s career.’
A month later Avril le Ray was billed in Mayfair, not Soho, on really quite tasteful posters, and Helen, bravely, took Gregory around to listen to her sing. They went cautiously down into the darkness, where Avril’s coarse and melancholy voice filled out the lonely corners nicely, and a pink spotlight made her look not glamorous – for truly she was bald, and how can the bald be glamorous? – but important, as if her sufferings and her experience might be of considerable interest to others, and the customers certainly paid attention, were silent when she sang, and clapped when she’d finished, which was more than usually happened in such places.
‘How you doing, Kiddo?’ asked Avril of Helen, after the last set, going past on the arm of a glowing-eyed Arab with a hooked nose, waving a truly jewelled ring, properly set in proper gold. ‘Remember what I told you about the bottom line and the sharp end? Nothing lasts, so you’d better have as much as you can, while you can. And in the end, there’s only you and only them, and not what they think of you, but what you think of them.’