The Pleasure Quartet (14 page)

Gladys is friendly with Harold Butler Jnr, the son of Mr. Butler who owns the shop where she works. He’s a horrid creature with a flat face like a pug dog and a squat round body with
bandy legs that make him look like a frog walking upright. He hadn’t been allowed to sign up, or so he said, because of his legs, and he carries a cane everywhere he goes to aid with his
‘condition’ but he never seems to use it. He lets Gladys call him Harold, but the rest of us have to say ‘Mr. Butler’. He was never ‘Harry’, even to his own
father. The shop was originally called just ‘Butler and Co.’ but Mr. Butler junior had insisted on the change, which was why half the lettering on the sign that hangs outside is now
faded, and the other half black and bold. To save money, they’d only repainted part of it.

I couldn’t understand why Gladys bats her eyelids modestly at the young Mr. Butler when he leers at her, which of course makes him leer at her even more. We had our first row over it.
‘Don’t encourage him!’ I hissed at her, and she called me a jealous little fool and a country girl, and told me to shut my trap. Then he promoted her from the machine line work of
men’s shirts and trousers onto the more delicate, tailored luxury items, and put her pay up to boot. I was still angry with her, and angrier still with myself for being so naive.

Of course, there’s no other way we could have put our Halloween costumes together. Despite her rise, neither of us had a farthing clear at the end of our outgoings, and me least of all
since I’d had to wait a fortnight for my first pay packet.

She was using him, I knew that, and took some satisfaction from the fact that she didn’t really fancy him. ‘Why would you care if I fancied him anyway?’ she asked me, and I
couldn’t answer her. ‘I fancy loads of lads,’ she insisted, and proceeded to list them until I growled at her to stop. The butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker – she
recited the rhyme to me, turned on its head. ‘We need to introduce you to some gentlemen, country girl,’ she told me. ‘Not just men – I’m going to introduce you to the
world.’ She had a plan, she said. A secret. ‘What is it?’ I asked, ‘Well it wouldn’t be a secret if I told you, would it?’ she mocked me.

Finally, she confessed what she’d been up to.

‘You’re stealing,’ I hissed at her, as she prised up the loose floorboard in the lunchroom – I’d heard it creak dozens of times as I walked over it and never
even thought to guess at what might lie beneath – and she’d showed me the pile of fabric she’d stealthily accumulated. Sequins that would have been affixed onto expensive dresses
and sold up West in swanky stores to rich women. Yellow and pink chiffon, can you imagine! A proper treasure horde of the
stuff.

‘Rubbish,’ she retorted. ‘I’m just topping up our wages. You know we don’t get paid enough. There’s men sweeping the streets who take home twice as much as
we do. Besides, these are last season’s colours, the stuff didn’t sell well. No one will miss it.’ I was still unsure. ‘You won’t tell, will you, promise me Joan, you
must promise me?’ she begged. Well, of course I had to go along with it, she was my only friend in the world.

‘There’s enough for you too,’ she said, ‘if we’re careful with the stitching, and make the skirts short.’ She giggled.

Even after a whole day at work, sitting and sewing by hand in the dim light in my quarters didn’t feel like a chore. We made masks, too, from cardboard with a tiny piece of precious
silk glued on, and pink feathers from Mrs Moorcroft’s feather duster.

We could only make the costumes stretch over both of us by cutting them terribly low, and frightfully short. If there had been a large enough mirror in my room, I don’t think I could
have glanced in it without blushing. I could only look at Gladys with her hair swept up into a knot and her earrings dangling – she’d made them so cleverly, with buttons fixed to
regular hoops – and a daring coat of rouge over lips, and imagine that I was the dark haired version of her image. She had taken the yellow, and me the pink. We looked wonderful, I thought,
but dear me how my heart raced as I imagined being seen like this by someone I knew.

For one night, tonight (yesterday now, since it’s the early hours of the morning, diary), I became a different person. And oh what fun it was. The day Joan and the night Joan. It was
like meeting a whole new version of myself that I had never even known existed. And a whole new version of London. As if the inner city with all its pomp and ceremony, the calm and grandeur of St
Paul’s Cathedral and Westminster and all the horror of the Tower were just a day-time spectacle and after dark she lifted up her skirts and displayed her underbelly to us.

We had no spare coins for the bus so put our sturdy working boots on (the only pair of shoes I owned, in fact) and walked up the Gray’s Inn Road and through Bloomsbury to Drury Lane.
Gladys carried a small hold-all with a pair of shoes for each of us to change into, heels and all (I didn’t dare ask where they had come from!). We were both shrouded in long white
workman’s coats that Gladys had ‘borrowed’ from her father who owned a butcher’s shop near Epping Forest and we had wrapped scarves over our heads to hide our elaborate hair
dos. We must have looked a sight to behold, like a pair of fishwives set loose from their market stall.

Nobody minded us though. It was Halloween! Even the moon was full and bold tonight, shining overhead like a stamp of approval on our planned hijinks.

‘I want to be an actress,’ Gladys announced, as we walked over the Holborn Viaduct, its ornate red-painted iron work casting strange, gothic shadows onto the road beneath our
feet. The winged lions crouching at either end paid us no attention at all. ‘I’ll be Gladys Nightingale,’ her voice rang out, ‘the next Betty Balfour, but better.’ She
pirouetted on the spot, as if her heavy shoes were dancing slippers and her white coat a ball gown. ‘That’s not your real name,’ I scolded her. ‘How do you know?’ she
asked me. ‘It’s my real name from now on, because I say so.’

We would both be women of the world . . . no, actresses, we decided. So much more glamorous than the life of a seamstress. No more pin pricks, no more whirring sewing machine dreams, no more
Harold Butler Jnr.

‘We’ll go to the West End and audition, seek out one of those fancy theatres and dazzle them with our charm and beauty,’ Gladys said. ‘But first, we’ll go
dancing.’

And oh, how we danced.

We were just about ready when there was a knock at our door.

Thomas.

‘Wow! You both look great . . .’

He was wearing a sober, traditional black tuxedo with shiny lapels and a purple bow tie, with his hair severely combed back. The sort of proper young man you could take back to your mother, had
it not been for the glint of mischief in his eyes that kept on annoying me.

He led us anew through the maze of corridors and imposing staircases until we reached the mansion’s ground floor, but this time around we ended up at the back of the building, at the
opposite end to the high ceilings of the entrance hall facing the gravel-laced area where the cars had arrived and parked.

The room was large enough to function as a dance hall, but it was empty. Just a wilderness of crystal chandeliers, bottomless mirrors and an endless swath of bay windows, all opened and leading
into the sloped gardens beyond.

Trees, a field of torches burning bright illuminating the landscape and a chessboard of white tents fluttering in the night breeze.

Couples were dancing, like ghosts in the flickering, shadowy darkness, weaving patterns across the gardens, knitting shapes and drawing unseen hieroglyphics into the freshly mown grass in their
wake, its distinctive aroma rising through the night air towards me, reminding me of home and raising a torrent of memories. Most of the women dancing wore diaphanous gowns that put our own outfits
to shame and moved with a nonchalant grace to the strains of the light jazz music being piped out through unseen speakers. The men led, with a quiet authority, their backs rigid and unbending as if
on parade, and some even wore uniforms while the others were a symphony of black evening wear, tuxedos, dinner suits, tunics with not a fold out of place.

‘Ah, those must be your little friends . . .’

The voice was sharp and crystal clear, both ironic and detached.

I turned round. Still holding on to Iris’s hand for dear life, as if conscious of the threat approaching us.

She was terribly tall and her deep even tan held the perfect balance between London pallor and sunburn; her lipstick was a slash of fervent scarlet across thick, greedy lips. Her eyes were
concrete grey. Her dress ran across her body like a shroud of silk, cobalt blue, shimmering with every movement she made, and her long black hair trailed all the way down to the small of her back,
catching distant reflections of moonlight in its straight, shiny lines as it did so. She was striking, in a feral sort of way, I felt. The sort of beauty that came with centuries of breeding and an
endless source of money.

‘Tilly!’

‘Dear brother.’

She looked down at us, haughty, critical.

Disappointed.

‘I’m Matilda.’ She introduced herself. Then as an aside to her brother, ‘Oh Thomas, they’re so cute, but I don’t think you’d make a very good pimp,
would you? I concede they might be jolly fun between the sheets, but it’s just not the standards our guest are accustomed to. Really.’

Thomas blushed, was about to say something but she disdainfully moved on to greet another couple who were making their way from the mansion into the gardens, her voice now effusive.

‘What did she mean, Thomas?’ Iris asked him.

‘Don’t worry,’ he attempted to reassure her. ‘She has it quite wrong. I brought you here as friends, not in any other function.’ But there was something about the
hesitant tone of his voice that failed to convince me.

He pointed to a large marquee a hundred yards further down the gardens.

‘You must surely be hungry,’ he said.

We stepped away from the improvised dance floor towards it, leaving the geometric waltz of the assorted dancers behind us, caught in their repetitive rotations, slaves to the music.

My stomach rumbled. I was actually starving, not having had a bite of anything since breakfast now fifteen or so hours ago.

A huge trestle table was laden with breads of all type, cold cuts, cheeses, sumptuous slices of smoked salmon, chicken thighs, and even caviar. I made a beeline for it, seized a large porcelain
plate and piled samples high on it and retreated to a wicker chair to stuff myself like a pig. Iris and Thomas stood in another corner, seemingly arguing, neglecting the bountiful manna.

As I sat eating, I watched guests wandering in and out of the breezy tent. The men always appeared older than the women, I noted. There was also something submissive, almost obsequious in the
way most of the women, the girls, were responding to the conversation or words addressed to them, giggling, smiling, feigning coy. All the female guests I could observe, during their brief passage
through the food tent, were undeniably beautiful but in a too-perfect sort of way, it appeared to me. As if they’d been gleaned, brown-haired, auburn, blonde, night-black, leggy, sporty,
lanky, curvaceous, from the anonymity of a luxury catalogue.

That was it, I realised: as if they were hired out for the occasion, or even on sale. Something about the way they walked, held their heads, reacted to the men on whose arms they paraded.

I recognised the face of one of the men passing by. I was certain I had seen his features in the newspapers, several times; but I struggled for his name.

Iris and Thomas had now ceased their minor altercation and came over to me, each holding a plate with merely half the amount of food I’d amassed on mine.

‘Drinks?’ Thomas suggested and it dawned on me that I’d been so famished I hadn’t even noticed the absence of liquid sustenance in the marquee.

‘Oh yes. Where is it kept?’ I looked around.

‘Not here. A bar has been set up by the pool, I gather,’ Thomas said.

I was mighty thirsty. All the smoked salmon I’d stuffed down my gullet had opened a chain reaction in my mouth that called for water, or better.

‘Tilly always chooses the best champagne,’ he added.

‘That sounds just delicious,’ said Iris, whose mood had radically improved. What could they have been discussing, I wondered? Juggling our plates, we left the marquee and headed
further down the immense gardens, following the trail of burning torches until the path turned into a row of high bushes garlanded with fairy lights in an assortment of bright colours.

Arriving at the swimming pool felt like emerging from a maze, as the bushes grew closer and closer, carving a passage that grew increasingly narrow as we approached.

‘There is a more direct way,’ Thomas revealed as we caught a first sight of the large kidney-shaped pool, ‘in a straight line from the house, but this is so much more quaint,
isn’t it?’

‘Unless you’re dying of thirst . . .’ I complained.

Isolated couples stood around the pool’s perimeter; others lounged on white deckchairs, deep in conversation or haloed in silence. At the far end stood a low marble table on which white
sheets had been draped and a crazy assortment of bottles had been scattered. A tall, shaven-headed black valet was dispensing the drinks.

‘Champagne for all,’ Thomas ordered.

The attendant set to serving us, uncorking a new bottle with deft ritual movements.

He handed us our drinks. The liquid bubbled happily, generously flirting away with the rim of the delicate, elongated glass.

‘Is this crystal?’ Iris asked, pointing to her champagne glass.

‘Nothing but the best,’ Thomas confirmed. ‘Crystal glasses for Krystal champagne . . .’ Back home in New Zealand, the few pieces of crystal in our family home were only
brought out for special occasions like birthdays, marriages and funerals.

I took a tentative initial sip. It was divine. Fizzy, sweet and sharp, flowing past my tongue, lingering and reluctantly making its way down my throat, and I was instantly ready to take a second
sip and taste it even longer. I briefly tried to think of further occasions when quality champagne could be savoured from now onwards, already a potential addict.