Wicked Pleasures (10 page)

‘What are swatches?’

‘Oh, bits of fabric, samples. Like the ones in those books. And if you’re lucky, they’ll say, yes, that’s exactly what they want, and you breathe a sigh of relief and then they’ll say, but could I get it with a blue pattern on it. So it really is quite difficult and you have to be extremely patient. And they get quite rude sometimes too, and you have to be terribly nice, not answer back – could you cope with that?’

‘Oh, I think so,’ said Angie, thinking of the innumerable times Johnny had sworn at her, blamed her for things, and she had stood there taking it, in case he decided to hit her.

‘Oh, yes, and there is one other thing,’ said Virginia. ‘I forgot. I need someone to do the accounts. I can hardly tell the time, I’m so innumerate. Can you do simple book-keeping, that sort of thing? And you’d have to do the invoices, work out the time we’d spent on each job, that sort of thing.’

‘Oh yes,’ said Angie, casually confident. ‘I did book-keeping as part of my course.’

‘Good. Well, look, I have to see a couple more people, and you are a bit younger than I’d – well, thought of. But I think we’d get on well. Anyway, thank you for coming, and I’ll ring the agency tomorrow or the next day. Is that all right?’

‘Yes of course,’ said Angie, trying not to show her disappointment. She had hoped to get it settled then and there, although Suze had told her it would be very unlikely. ‘Thank you for seeing me,’ she added politely, holding out her hand. The Countess’s handshake was interestingly firm; she had expected it to be rather limp and chilly.

Angie had spent her early years in a small terrace house in Bermondsey, just down the road from the Caledonian Market, with her mother, Stella, her grandparents, and her brother Johnny. She never knew who her father was; Stella didn’t have much of an idea either.

When Angie was five, Stella got married to Eric Dobson, who owned a large draper’s shop in Brixton. He seemed rather rich to Stella; the three of them moved into his house in Romford. The marriage ended when Angie screamed aloud one night, waking to find him sitting on her bed, with his pyjama trousers down; Johnny reported rather more serious abuse. They all went back to Bermondsey, where Johnny embarked on his career, nicking things from Woolworths and selling them down the market. Angie was sometimes allowed to help him with the nicking: she considered this a great honour.

When she was seven, Stella saw an advertisement for child models. She dressed Angie up in her party dress, put her unruly blonde curls into neat ringlets and took her along to the Lovely Little Ladies agency. Angie was hired
and spent three very happy years being photographed in endless fluffy jumpers, holding endless kittens, or modelling clothes at fashion shows. She was known as Angel. When she was about eleven, the modelling agency work dropped off; she passed the eleven-plus, but they couldn’t afford the uniform for her, so she went to Secondary Modern. Angie minded quite a lot.

When she was fourteen she got her first boyfriend. He was twenty-five, his name was Guy, he owned a strip club, and he introduced her to sex. She found she liked sex. Very much.

He also suggested she left school and started modelling again. She was too small to be a proper fashion model, so she specialized in underwear. It wasn’t as nice as being Angel, but the money was good. And if the clients were allowed to come into the dressing room and supervise the fit of the bras and pantie girdles, she got tips as well. Her angelic little face, Bardot curls tumbling over her shoulders, adorned innumerable advertisements and showcards. It was around then that she changed her name from Wicks to Burbank. She got the name from one of her
Picturegoer
magazines; it was the name of a studio in Hollywood and it seemed to go with Angie. She had always hated Wicks.

When she was fifteen, she became pregnant. Guy gave her a handful of tenners and sent her off with one of his strippers to get herself sorted, as he put it. She ended up in hospital and nearly died. The doctor told her she would be lucky if she was ever able to have another baby. Shocked and weak from loss of blood, Angie couldn’t see that was a great problem.

Soon after Angie came out of hospital, Stella went into it. Her smoker’s cough was diagnosed as lung cancer; she died six weeks later.

And then she met Suze. Suze had a flat in the same block as Johnny and his girlfriend Dee, in Kennington. Dee’s dad was rich; he lived in Spain most of the time, and paid for the flat. Johnny said he was on the run and couldn’t come back to England. Angie often stayed with Johnny and Dee, especially if she was working on their stall on Saturdays. She met Suze on the stairs one wet Sunday afternoon, and they went to the pictures together; it became a weekly event. Suze seemed to her the epitome of sophistication. She worked for a secretarial agency, and she had a fur coat, and a very refined accent. She talked a lot about the life of a secretary, and how the personal ones earned a lot of money and prestige. It sounded wonderful to Angie who was beginning to find modelling pantie girdles and selling stolen goods depressing, and she said so.

‘Well,’ said Suze, ‘no reason why you shouldn’t do it, Angie. I could teach you shorthand and typing. You’ve got a good brain, you could do very well.’

‘You’re kidding,’ said Angie.

Suze said she wasn’t kidding.

Eight months later, after a baptism of fire working for a rag trade firm where she had to do a bit of modelling in between answering the phone, typing and being touched up by the owner, Suze told her she was ready for a proper job and sent her for her interview with the Countess of Caterham. ‘You most probably won’t get it,’ she said, ‘but it’ll be good for you to practise your interview technique.’

Lady Caterham phoned Suze at the agency, and told her that she felt Angie was much too young and inexperienced for the job; Suze was still trying to work out how she was going to break this news to Angie without sending her into a fit of terminal depression when Lady Caterham broke into her thoughts, an amused lift to her voice, and said that even given that, Angie was so patently a worker, would clearly be the greatest fun to work with and that she had been so impressed by her taking the trouble to find out about her and Hartest before the interview that she would like to take the gamble and hire her.

No one else in her family was very pleased about Angie’s new job; her brother said there was no money in office work and how did she think she was going to pay the rent out of the eight pounds a week the Countess was paying her? Pretty mean, he reckoned, when she was clearly as rich as Croesus. Mrs Wicks, her grandmother, said she supposed it was all right, but the aristocracy were a funny lot, and wouldn’t a big office have been more fun? Only old Mr Wicks, struggling to get the words out between coughs, told her she was a clever girl and he was proud of her. Angie bought him a packet of best Old Holborn and told him to think of her every time he rolled a ciggy with it. The whole family had agreed there was no point taking the doctor’s advice and stopping him smoking now.

Angie went to Wallis and bought what they described as a Chanel-style suit in pink tweed, which she could see was very much the kind of thing the Countess would like, and then she went to Liberty and bought two very plain wool shifts, one navy, and one beige, with a label in them that said Jane and Jane. The girl in Liberty, who was exceptionally nice, told her she had made a very wise choice and that the designer of the dresses, Jean Muir, was going to be one of the great new names in English fashion. She suggested to Angie that exactly the right shoes for the dresses would be low-heeled pumps from Russell and Bromley. ‘Their end of season sale is on, you could get a bargain.’

Angie was surprised that her shoes should have low heels; to her, sophistication had always been synonymous with high, the more teetery the better. But she could see that the girl was infinitely more familiar with the look she was after than Suze, hitherto her mentor of style, and so she thanked her, told her that if she ever wanted her house done up at a bargain rate she had only to ask, and went obediently to Bond Street where she bought two pairs of the low-heeled pumps for ten pounds each, one black patent, one navy leather; she could always, she thought, wear her new white stilettos with the unbelievably pointed toes for going out dancing on Saturday nights with Suze; and finally as she was wandering up Bond Street past Fenwicks, she saw a classically plain navy coat in the window and spent her last twenty pounds on it. She didn’t particularly like any of the clothes, but she could see they were all absolutely right for her new life. The whole thing after all was a bit of playacting; she had just acquired her costumes.

After about three weeks, she stopped feeling she was play-acting, and became totally absorbed in her job. She learnt fast; she had grasped by the end of the
first day Virginia’s highly (and necessarily) complex filing system for the fabric and wallpaper samples, how much they all cost, and how to calculate the price of a set of drawing room curtains in both full and window length. By the end of the fourth she had also grasped which phone calls were idle inquiries and which genuine, and worth spending time and calculation on. Much of the time she was alone in the office while Virginia went out seeing people; in theory then she was catching up on her typing and filing, but in practice she was talking, endlessly talking, patiently and politely to clients, telling them that yes, Lady Caterham had been working on their colour board, or design, or room plan, that it was nearly ready, that she would be phoning them in a day or two, that she was waiting for a particular sample to come in before presenting them with her ideas, or for the architect to finalize some small detail.

Angie quickly discovered that, as Lady Caterham had said at her interview, finding the right fabric for the right sofa or whatever was only a tiny part of her job. ‘You have to find out what they really want. I mean a lot of people come to decorators because they simply can’t imagine the thing themselves. They want something and they don’t know what. They’re very insecure. And you’re not sure either. So I always say, “Look, why don’t we do this room, or even just the curtains, and then see how you like it? If you do, we can go further, if you don’t we can rethink.” We have to get their confidence, make them feel they’re happy with us. Very often they say, “Oh, I didn’t think it was going to look like that.” They may like it and they may not, but at least you haven’t frightened them. Then they’re happy to go along with you, because they feel they’re going in the right direction.’

‘And what happens if they want something and you can see it’s going to be horrible?’ said Angie.

‘Oh,’ said Virginia, laughing, ‘you say, “Oh, that sounds really nice.” Then you phone next day and you say, “I thought about your suggestion, and I thought it might be even better if we did so and so.” They nearly always agree. This whole thing is at least fifty per cent psychology. Some people come to a decorator rather than a shrink. And the more difficult they are, the more they seem to come to me. Maybe because I’m a woman, maybe because I’m American, I don’t know. But anyway, that’s what happens, and mostly I seem to make it work.’

Angie regarded her with ever-increasing respect; she had never been confronted by such a combination of creative, practical and psychological skills.

Virginia had only been running her London business for a little over a year, and she already had a large number of clients, all filed on the constantly whirling little Rolodex on her desk. ‘Never leave that out,’ she said to Angie, ‘if you leave the office unmanned during the day, put it in the safe. It’s worth more to us than everything else in the office put together.’

She told Angie she wasn’t sure why she had been so instantly successful. ‘It’s so different here, in New York you boast about your interior designer, they’re starry people, the big ones, here you’re more of a tradesman. Some people, in the country particularly, would die rather than admit they’d not done it all
themselves. Obviously I’m not going to be working for many of them, although I did help a dear lady with her drawing room, she’d been married thirty-five years and only ever changed one cushion. But in London, well, it just took off so well.’

‘I suppose,’ said Angie carefully, ‘it’s got something to do with who you are. I mean, I don’t suppose Virginia Bloggs would have been quite so successful. Even if she had been as clever as you,’ she added hastily.

‘Well – yes, I suppose so,’ said Virginia, slightly reluctantly. ‘Now look, Angie, I have to go out now and I won’t be back. Mike Johns has promised to come back with the estimates for that hotel today. Chase him if he hasn’t rung by four, will you?
We’ll lose it if we don’t quote tomorrow. And when he’s done it, could you slot the figure into the quotation, and be sure to get it mailed tonight. It’s vital.’

‘Are you sure you don’t want me to take it round?’ said Angie.

‘No, really, because then you’re out of the office. Just post it. It’ll be fine. And I’ll see you tomorrow. Bye, Angie. And thank you. You’re doing a great job.’

The afternoon was surprisingly quiet; it was late November, and the rich ladies of London were on the whole psyching themselves up for Christmas, resigned to their houses’ having to pass another party season without being redone. Most of the jobs now being quoted for were small: some curtains here, some loose covers there. Angie caught up with her filing, typed some letters and invoices (‘People not paying is the worst nightmare of this job,’ Virginia had told her on the first day,
‘invoices have to go out soonest’), dealt with some fractious clients. At four she phoned Mike Johns, who was a builder Virginia often worked with, who was quoting for a job on a small but hugely luxurious hotel in Knightsbridge they were working on. The new owner, an American, Mr M. Wetherly Stern, wanted what he called a complete restyle for his South West Three Hotel, and Virginia had presented him with plans for what she called the English Country House (‘Only of course no self-respecting country house would ever look remotely like it,’ she said to Angie) with a reception area and a lounge bar full of library shelves, small tables covered with magazines, low leather sofas, fireplaces with marble surrounds, and alcoves. Mike was to build the shelves and alcoves, the bars and the reception desk, which was also to resemble a large library table. Mr Stern wanted his hotel open for the early spring and was growing impatient. ‘He’s a funny little man,’ Virginia had told Angie,
‘quite nice, and obviously terribly rich, very polite, but a bit greasy. I wouldn’t like to cross him.’ Mike’s quote was late; it looked as if Mr Stern might be crossed.