Saturday 14 July 1962
I am drowning in pink. Asphyxiated. Strangulated. Suffocated. Pink. Pink. Pink. Everything around me is pink. Pink bedspread, pink curtains, pink wallpaper, pink cushions. It’s like being stuck in the middle of a huge pink jelly.
I’m up in Christine’s bedroom in search of a button. I must be mad. How can a button stop Christine and her pneumatic boobs and grasping scarlet hands?
Her wardrobe is huge. Solid slabs of dark wood stand on fat wooden-doughnut feet, giving it the chunkiness of another age (Neolithic). On the doors, there’s some carved panelling that reminds me of the wardrobe in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, except that in Christine’s wardrobe instead of easing past fur coats and discovering the secret world of Narnia, I’m far more likely to squeeze through a wall of acrylic blouses and find myself in the Razzmatazz bingo hall in Scunthorpe.
Christine would be furious if she knew I was about to have a good rummage through her clothes. Her bedroom is strictly Off Limits. I am living very dangerously, like Marlon Brando.
Here goes, then.
The doors creak open to reveal an orgy of pastel. Christine’s taste is the colour palette of a box of fondant fancies. The wardrobe is stuffed full of clothes, all scrunched up against each other, fighting for air. Almost every hanger is different. Wire ones. Wooden ones. Plastic ones. Heavily upholstered ones with lacy frills and bows. All jutting out here and there at odd angles. It makes my head hurt.
I wonder what my mother’s wardrobe was like. If it was anything like her recipe book, it would have been very swish. I imagine a sleek line of clothes, all colour co-ordinated and elegantly spaced. She’d have beautifully shaped wooden hangers, all exactly the same, and the whole thing would smell as fresh as a spring day or as sophisticated as a Monte Carlo nightclub.
Christine’s wardrobe smells of mothballs and medicated toilet rolls. The mothballs are balanced on top of some of the clothes and at the bottom of the wardrobe, shoved under everything, there’s a big pack of Izal, Christine’s loo roll of choice. It all smells a bit like walking into a chemist. No wonder Christine douses herself in so much lavender water.
I grab a hanger at random. Out comes a yellow dress. Egg-custard yellow. Around the middle is a big bow, making the dress look like an enormous yellow present waiting to be unwrapped (not a pleasant thought). The material is shiny, hard and coarse: half polyester, half scouring pad.
This is quite good fun. I pull out another hanger. On it is a skirt the shape of a half moon and almost the size of one too. Its colour can best be described as fungal green. Now that it’s free from the scrum of clothes surrounding it in the wardrobe, the skirt springs out like a horizontal jack-in-the-box.
I can’t resist it.
I’m going to have to try it on.
Finding the right hole to put my legs through in the mass of petticoat and ballooning skirt is not easy but eventually I get everything lined up and ease the skirt over my pedal pushers. It seems to weigh a ton and I imagine there’s probably more material in this one skirt than in my entire wardrobe. I am very aware of my increased circumference and feel very bottom-heavy but manage to waddle cautiously over to the pink-framed mirror.
Staring at me in the mirror is a different Evie, one who looks like the fairy we put on top of the Christmas tree (minus the wings). It’s funny how different clothes can make us become different people. Am I going to be the type of Woman who wears sticky-out skirts? I wish choosing a Future could be a bit more like trying on clothes from a wardrobe. You could pop on a Future and give it a whirl. See how it fits. Jig it around a bit. Then try on another. Instead, choosing a Future all seems so final and definite. Once the choice is made, you’re stuck with what you’re wearing for the rest of your life, even if you look a right clown in it.
I ease my way out of the skirt, which involves a great deal of wriggling and contortion, and pull out another hanger. This time I hit the jackpot. It’s a pastel pink see-through baby-doll nightie, one of Christine’s favourite outfits. (She often wears it in the evening to watch telly, her legs sprawling across the sofa like rolls of fleshy pastry.) The nightie has little pink satin bows ranged over its flimsy surface and the bottom is trimmed with pink fur. It somehow manages to be both hilarious and horrifying at the same time. It looks quite petite for Christine (chest-wise); it must be like trying to get a couple of blancmanges in an envelope when she puts it on.
I pull it on over my top, preparing to be wowed by my new-found allure (noun – the quality of being attractive and enticing).
Unfortunately one of the little pink satin bows gets caught on the zip at the back of my top and I’m left stuck, half in, half out, flailing around with one arm free but the other one locked in a pink claw hold, bent back on itself awkwardly inside the nightie. The top of my head is sticking out of the neck hole but the rest of my head remains wedged inside, making the room look even pinker. I’m trapped, stuck inside a pink diaphanous hell. I try to struggle out of it but this just seems to make things worse. I’m terrified of tearing the paper-thin material but equally terrified of being stranded in the nightie until Christine gets back from York.
‘Ding-dong.’
Oh God. The doorbell. I manoeuvre carefully over to the window, my arms locked in place like a headless chiffon statue. Through the window, in a pink blur, I see Margaret waiting outside the front door.
‘Ding-dong. Ding-dong.’
She rings the doorbell again and then looks at her wristwatch (she has the brittle patience of all very organised people). She’d have me out of the baby doll in a jiffy (if not even quicker). I shout to her to come in but she obviously can’t hear a thing. I try to open the window but it’s not easy with only one free arm and restricted vision. I can see her looking around impatiently. I’ve got the window handle in my hand now but am struggling to lift it off the rusted latch. Margaret sighs, looks at her watch again then turns and begins to walk down the front path.
This is awful. I have one final desperate push at the handle and it flies off the latch, almost propelling me out of the now-open window.
‘Margaret,’ I cry. ‘Come back!’
She looks up. ‘Evie? Is that you? What are you doing?’ she shouts, sounding baffled (not something that happens very often). ‘What have you got over your head?’
‘Never mind that,’ I shout back. ‘I’m stuck. Can you come and help me?’
‘Hold on.’ And I hear the reassuring sound of the front door opening and closing and then the deep thud of Margaret’s sensible shoes on the stairs.
*
‘What’s going on?’ she asks, coming into the room. ‘What are you doing? Why are you wearing that pink thing like that? What’s happened to your head? And your arm?’
It’s always like this with Margaret. She is a leaking barrel of questions.
‘I was looking through Christine’s wardrobe for a button and I just ended up trying a few things on. I’m stuck.’
‘Looking for a button?’ says Margaret. ‘What were you looking for a button in Christine’s wardrobe for?’ Being with Margaret is like being stuck in a never-ending episode of What’s My Line? I can’t tell her the real reason I’m looking for a button – Margaret is hewn from pure logic and if I told her that the button was for a magic spell, she’d think I was mad (not unreasonably).
‘Never mind that now. Could you just help me out of this, please? I’m getting pins and needles in my arm and all this pink is making my head hurt.’
‘What were you doing putting a nightie on over your top?’ she asks, helping me out of my chiffon cage.
‘I just wanted to try it on. See what it was like.’ She might ask a lot of annoying questions but Margaret’s a dab hand with a zip and a satin bow. In a couple of ticks, I’m released. I decide to share my news with her. Maybe her supersonic brain can come up with a better solution than a magic button.
‘Christine’s got me a job shampooing at Maureen’s salon,’ I tell her. ‘She thinks I should get a trade.’
‘You can’t do that. You’d be a rubbish hairdresser. You’re far too clumsy.’
Harsh but true (she knows me well).
‘Who’d be mad enough to let you loose with a pair of scissors? They’d end up looking like Yul Brynner,’ she adds (unnecessarily I think).
‘It’s been a strange few days,’ I say.
We sit on the bed and I tell her about everything that’s happened. The engagement. The wedding. The farmhouse. The farm.
‘What?’ says Margaret when I’ve finished. ‘But Christine can’t do that. You can’t let her get away with it. Horrible old cow. You have to stop her.’ And there, in that brilliant shining moment, is why Margaret is my best friend.
‘I need to do two things,’ I say, sounding far more in control than I feel. ‘One. Find some way of getting Christine out of our lives. She’s only interested in Arthur and the farm because she thinks they’ll keep her in handbags and foreign holidays.’ Margaret nods enthusiastically. ‘And two, find someone much nicer for him.’
(Which could literally be anybody.)
‘Oh, I forgot. And three, find a Career and become an Independent Woman.’
Margaret stares at me as if I’d just started speaking backwards.
‘Independent woman? A career? What about your A levels? What about university? Do you mean you’re going to work in Maureen’s salon instead? As a shampooist? Or is it a shampooer?’ she adds, ever the pedant.
‘No, I’m not going to work at Maureen’s salon,’ I say. ‘But I am having second thoughts about going to sixth form, yes.’ Margaret looks baffled. ‘I could get a job and wear a pencil skirt and buy a car and go to glamorous receptions. I could be a Modern Woman,’ I continue, trying to sound sophisticated, ‘like Natalie Wood or Jacqueline Kennedy.’
‘But I don’t understand,’ says Margaret. ‘What will you do?’
I have no idea, of course, so I say the first thing that comes into my head.
‘I could move to London and do a secretarial course and then do something in fashion.’
‘What?’ says Margaret, almost falling off the bed. ‘Move to London? A secretarial course? Do something in fashion? What are you talking about? Don’t be daft. Anyway, real people don’t work in fashion.’
‘Caroline does,’ I say, enjoying saying the name.
‘Caroline?’ says Margaret. ‘Who’s Caroline?’
Am I allowed to mention Caroline? I don’t think Mrs Scott-Pym said anything about it being a secret, even though it is. Well, was. Too late now. Margaret the interrogator is in full flight.
‘Caroline who? Do I know her? What does she do? Where does she live?’
‘She’s Mrs Scott-Pym’s daughter,’ I answer. ‘She lives in London and works in fashion.’
‘But Mrs Scott-Pym doesn’t have a daughter.’
‘Yes, she does.’
‘No, she doesn’t.’
‘Yes, she does.’
‘No, she doesn’t.’
I sense this could go on a long time. Margaret is not very good at being wrong.
‘Caroline is Mrs Scott-Pym’s daughter. She was at boarding school and then went straight to London to do a secretarial course but now she works in fashion. I’ve no idea what she actually does and I’m not sure whether Mrs Scott-Pym knows either.’
‘Oh, I see,’ says Margaret.
(Evie 1: Margaret 0.)
‘How funny.’ She wrinkles her forehead. ‘What a turn up for the book!’
(This has always struck me as a strange phrase. Where did it come from? It makes no sense at all. Other ‘book’ sayings are much more straightforward. To do something by the book is clear, ditto to be in someone’s good books. To be double booked is heaven [two books!], bettered only by being tripled booked [a good trilogy, like The Oresteia or Pippi Longstocking]. Balancing the books always brings to mind me on a bike. And every trick in the book makes a lot more sense now that Mrs Scott-Pym has told me about her book of Yorkshire magic.)
‘It’s the first I’ve heard about Caroline too,’ I say. ‘Mrs Scott-Pym told me about her this morning. I don’t know why she’s never spoken about her before. It’s all very strange.’
Good strange, I mean. Not bad strange. She definitely doesn’t sound bad strange. More of a wonderful, beautiful strange, enigmatic and mysterious, full of life and colour like the big stained-glass windows in York Minster when the light comes streaming in.
‘Caroline Scott-Pym,’ I say, more to myself than to Margaret. ‘It’s the type of name that you’d find at glamorous parties, ones with actors and politicians.’
‘And foreign diplomats and aristocrats,’ says Margaret, joining in.
‘I bet she’d be wearing a fabulous dress with a really elegant hat,’ I say, twisting up Christine’s pink baby-doll nightie and plonking it on my head. ‘And she’d be drinking champagne.’
‘Or maybe smoking with a fancy cigarette holder,’ says Margaret, holding an invisible cigarette in her hand. ‘And making clever conversation with a handsome man.’
‘Yes! Or dancing with him,’ I say, grabbing Margaret’s hands and pulling her off the bed for a dance.
‘He’d be a French general,’ shouts Margaret as we fling each other around the room. ‘All dark and swarthy.’
‘Or maybe a racing driver,’ I shout back.
‘Or an artist.’
‘Or a singer.’
‘Or a pilot.’
‘Or a film star.’
‘Or a Lord.’
‘Or a farmer,’ I shout, and we both collapse on the bed laughing.
‘Hey,’ says Margaret. ‘Perhaps Caroline knows Cliff Richard. It sounds just like the kind of party he’d be at.’ Cliff Richard is Margaret’s big crush. She has every record, a Cliff Richard wall clock, and even a Cliff Richard eggcup. I think if Cliff Richard asked Margaret to marry him and not be a teacher, she would have an existential crisis. I don’t know what she sees in him. He is no Adam Faith.
‘Of course he’d be there,’ I say. ‘And Helen Shapiro. And Petula Clark. And Billy Fury. It’d be like Juke Box Jury or the Six-Five Special. They’d all be there.’
‘God, wouldn’t it be wonderful,’ says Margaret, yanking Christine’s nightie off my head.
‘Come on,’ I say. ‘Let’s go and listen to some music in my room – we can stick the volume on full while everyone’s out.’ And we put Christine’s clothes back in the wardrobe, dancing around and singing ‘The Young Ones’.
As we leave the room, I slide my hand into my pocket. There, tucked safely away in my pedal pushers, is a large round pink button that I pulled off the back of Christine’s baby-doll nightie.
Success.
I squeeze the button hard and have a sudden urge to pull it out and kiss it.