The Decision (7 page)

‘Well—’ Eliza hated to break the charmed circle of beaming rosy faces all peering down at Susannah Godley’s ring, in the kitchen of the shared flat, but … ‘I’m already late. Sorry. Susannah, congratulations again. Let me give you a kiss.’

‘Thank you, Eliza. Thank you so much. Work hard! As if she wouldn’t,’ she added to the other girls, as the door closed on Eliza’s back. ‘That job is just too important to her. Well, when she does get married, she’ll have to give it up, I mean no man’s going to agree to his wife working the sort of hours she does.’

The others murmured in agreement and turned their attention back to the ring.

Eliza ran out into the street, feeling the now-familiar mixture of irritation and mild depression that followed any announcement of an engagement among her friends. Irritation because she couldn’t understand how they could all get so excited about it, seeing it as the be-all and end-all of their lives – it would be the end as far as she was concerned – and depression because however much she told herself that, and that she was right and they were wrong, she was beginning to feel just a bit of an outsider. Everyone, absolutely everyone was getting married, even Princess Margaret – to a photographer called Antony Armstrong-Jones. Everyone except her, that was. Not that she wanted it, or certainly not at the moment, she hadn’t met anyone she would have remotely wished to have a serious relationship with, let alone marry: she was far more interested in her career, it seemed to offer much more than any Mr Right, however wonderful. She supposed when and if he did actually appear, she might change her mind, but he’d have to be pretty impressive in every possible way, and certainly much more so than anyone she had met so far. And that was quite a lot of men …

But it was beginning to feel a bit lonely, out there, more so with every friend’s engagement. Of course, she still had a terrific social life – although she could see that might dwindle as everyone got married, and started giving married dinner parties, so boring, she had been to a few, where the new dinner service and cut crystal were shown off in the new dining room in the new flat. It was a bit like being shown round some club you weren’t a member of. And actually didn’t want to join either.

Anyway, at least she wasn’t a virgin any more; she’d seen to that, rather unsatisfactorily but with great relief, a few months earlier, at a country-house party. She hadn’t exactly planned it, but she did want to get it over and done with, it was such a stupidly old-fashioned condition; he had been the brother of an old friend, who had actually been at her dance, they had both been rather drunk, and she had – well, seen a golden opportunity really.

Her relief was tempered with disappointment that it hadn’t been more pleasurable; how could that, which had been uncomfortable rather than anything else, possibly have anything in common, she wondered, with the surge of rapture that Lady Chatterley had clearly experienced with Mellors (the book had just become available on the open market and was being passed from Nice Girl to Nice Girl all over England). She told herself that everything required practice, presumed it must get better and that when she found the right person, it would.

She did, of course, feel considerable guilt that she couldn’t yet give her mother the pleasure – and the satisfaction and relief – of seeing her safely engaged to someone rich and appropriate. She was well aware of the investment in her Season and how difficult it was for her parents to find the money; the whole point of the ritual – and it was a ritual – was to pave her way to the altar, as it was for all the girls. Eliza could see she was, in that particular at least, a serious disappointment. But she felt unable to do anything about it.

And she had something far more important, in her opinion, the sort of job she had dreamed of, that had fulfilled all her criteria, in the publicity department of Woolfe’s, a medium-size, high-fashion Knightsbridge store on the Kensington side of Harrods. Eliza had gone to Woolfe’s as a secretary, but she had recently, and to her great pride, been promoted to Publicity Assistant. She absolutely loved her work, which consisted mostly of driving round London in taxis, delivering clothes that fashion journalists had requested for photographic sessions; she was also sometimes allowed to show the more junior journalists clothes – or more usually accessories – herself, and even suggest that such and such a hat or bag would go beautifully with the dress their magazine was featuring. Of course she wasn’t allowed near the real queens of their professions, Audrey Withers of
Vogue
, Ernestine Carter of the
Sunday Times
, Beatrix Miller of
Queen
, but she sometimes would get the chance to sit quietly in a corner and listen to her boss, Lindy Freeman, as she talked to them, studying her apparently gentle persuasion, her skilful suggestions that Woolfe’s could not only provide the one garment that had been requested for a feature, but another that was either very similar or dramatically different. She had brilliant ideas, did Lindy; the use of live mannequins in Woolfe’s windows to launch the previous autumn’s collection being her greatest yet. She was a tough boss and often had Eliza working until nine or even ten at night, and her wrath over mistakes was terrifying, but she was immensely generous, both with her praise and in giving credit where it was due. Eliza had never got over the sheer heady thrill of hearing Lindy tell Clare Rendlesham – the petrifying Lady Rendlesham of
Vogue
’s ‘Young Idea’ – that the idea of sending a cloud of multi-coloured silk scarves together with a simple black shift dress had come from ‘my assistant Eliza’.

‘You all right, darling?’ asked Lindy when she got to the office. ‘You look a bit wan.’

‘Yes, of course,’ said Eliza, ‘absolutely fine, thank you.’

‘Good. I want these coats taken over to Audrey Slaughter. I don’t know if they’re young enough for her, but it’s worth a try. And on the way back, you might pop into Ruban’s and buy a few yards of ribbon: white, pale blue and lemon. I’ve got an idea for an advertising shot; kind of weaving them into a model’s hair. Nice for our wedding promotion.’

‘It sounds lovely,’ said Eliza. She loved going into Ruban de Paris, just off Hanover Square, with its rows and racks of ribbons and buttons.

Audrey Slaughter, an inspired young editor, had just launched
Honey
, the first-ever magazine for that new social curiosity, the teenager, and moreover was persuading the big stores to open up Honey Boutiques within their fashion departments, stocking the kind of trendy, young clothes that teenagers would want to buy, rather than near-replicas of what their mothers wore. She liked the coats but said she really couldn’t use them, that they were a bit too grown up and certainly too expensive, that no teenager would ever buy them.

‘Pity though, they have a really nice line. I haven’t seen anything quite so sharp anywhere.’

Eliza reported this to Lindy, who sighed.

‘It’s a problem for us. Of course
Vogue
and
Queen
sometimes do young fashion, but for the most part our young clothes are ruled out of court as being too expensive. It’s such a shame.’

‘The customers buy them though,’ said Eliza. ‘Surely that’s what matters?’

‘We-ell, not as often as I’d like. We just don’t have many young customers, really. And the perception of Woolfe’s is still very much for the mothers rather than the daughters. And I can’t get as much publicity as I need to change that view.’

‘Couldn’t you get some younger clothes made up, that were just a bit cheaper?’ said Eliza. And then, ‘Sorry, sacrilege I know, Woolfe’s isn’t about cheap, of course.’

‘Well – maybe not complete sacrilege,’ said Lindy after a long silence. ‘Not even sacrilege at all, actually. In fact you might’ve given me an idea, Eliza. I need to think it through a bit, but meanwhile let’s have those ribbons. And I can try this idea out on your hair.’

‘Please do,’ said Eliza and sat feeling almost unbearably excited as Lindy wove yellow ribbons into her hair. She had given Lindy an idea! If only the rest of your life could be as good as work.

‘Oh, God. Here we go. Turbulence ahead. Now they’ll all be sick. Oh, the glamorous life of the air stewardess. Scarlett, it’s your turn to collect.’

Scarlett didn’t mind. She loved her job so much that even collecting and emptying sick bags was bearable. She still adored it, even now she’d been doing it for two years.

Her training, the six weeks in digs near the airport, seemed like a dream from another age. She’d been so nervous, felt so inadequate; now she was self-confident and easy in any situation the job threw at her.

She had made one particularly good friend on the course, a girl called Diana Forbes, who had gone to a private school, had a brother at Cambridge, and spoke with an impeccable accent; she had teased Scarlett out of the social anxieties she had confided to her late one night over one too many gin and tonics.

‘Scarlett, honestly! All that class stuff is completely out of date. I’m surprised at you.’

Scarlett didn’t say that it might be out of date if you were like Diana and right there at the top to start with, but it was a bit different if you were dead common and trying to claw your way up. Some of the girls had been quite off with her in the beginning, not unfriendly, but not friendly either.

Most of them had been to private schools, or at the very least to grammar schools, their fathers worked in banks and in insurance companies; none of them were builders. And their mothers stayed at home and looked after them and gave dinner parties, and had what they called charladies. It had taken Scarlett quite a long time to admit her mother had been a charlady. She knew it was dreadful of her; and when, buoyed up by her own popularity and success, she did announce it one night, nobody turned a hair and said things like ‘good for her’. But she also knew that there was an element of hypocrisy in it, that some of them at least were struggling to show how broad-minded they were, and that if the interviewing board had known it would have been a black mark against her, not an acknowledged one of course, but there, just the same. She hadn’t tried to explain all this to Diana; it would have been pointless.

Diana, it turned out, was engaged. ‘The trick is to work for a year, and then you get the honeymoon flights free.’

An old hand now, Scarlett had learnt first aid, among other things how to inject people with morphine (practising on the skin of an orange), and to deal with the inevitable air sickness; she knew about crash survival, about catering, how to work the bar, which was sealed before and after take-off. No one could leave the plane until customs – known as the rummage squad – had visited it and checked the contents of the drinks cupboard which was closed with a lead seal before take-off and after landing.

And she had swiftly learnt the real lessons in bar work: how to put white wine through the soda-stream in lieu of champagne, how to knock the top off a Rémy Martin bottle, strain the contents through a tea towel into a jug and report it ‘broken in flight’ and then how to smuggle the booty out. Flat whisky bottles were the easiest and could easily be contained inside a pantie-girdle – ‘make sure it’s at least three times too big,’ one of the old hands had told them – along with four packets of cigarettes.

Scarlett and Diana both flew Comets. The rotas were mostly European, to Rome, Madrid, Paris and occasionally down to Majorca, in the middle of the night with the fast-developing package tourists, the grockles as they called them, who begged them to tell them where they stayed or to join them for drinks. The other airline, BOAC, did the long-haul flights; the Boack girls, as they were known, were irritatingly superior about their job, their passengers – mostly VIPs – and their destinations: America, Canada, India.

Scarlett loved it; the fun, the glamour, the status of it all. She loved the dizzy excitement of the walk through the terminal, wearing her uniform, the blue-and-white dogtooth suit, the white shirt, the jaunty cap, smiling confidently, being pointed out and stared at admiringly – anyone would think they flew the bloody planes – greeting passengers at the top of the steps, directing them to their places, settling them, flirting very mildly with the men, charming the women, walking up and down slowly, smiling reassuringly, checking they were all safely strapped in. ‘It’s a bit like being a mannequin,’ they’d been told when they were training. ‘Everyone will look at you, you’re the face of the airline, you have to be calm, confident, perfectly groomed every minute of every trip.’

And they had such fun. The pilots were fantastic, glamorous, dashing figures, made so much more handsome by their uniforms – Scarlett never got over seeing a pilot for the first time without his uniform – without anything actually, but it would have made no difference, he looked smaller, paler, even his teeth seemed less white. The most dashing were the ex-fighter pilots, older, practised charmers; the girls weren’t supposed to fraternise with the air crew, they were always booked into separate hotels, ‘as if that would make any difference for God’s sake,’ Scarlett said scornfully.

Nor of course were you encouraged to have anything to do with the passengers once off the plane. There was occasional trouble with the men of course, they’d pinch your bottom, or try to stroke your legs, and some of the businessmen travelling alone would ask you to have dinner with them, but a sweet smile and an ‘excuse me’ or ‘sorry, sir’ usually did the trick, although now and again, lured by the promise of dinner at the Hilton, say, in Rome, they would succumb. There was a degree of
droit de seigneur
about the whole thing; Scarlett’s opinion of her passengers was permanently lowered when an American tipped her out of the taxi one night in the middle of Athens when she refused to go back to his hotel with him. The pilots were more fun and generally nicer.