Before I Met You Read Free

birthday. A blasted baby. And once it was there, you know, bedded inside, well, all I could hope was that it would be a girl.’ She sighed, her fingertips held to the small of her throat. ‘Ah …’ she exhaled. ‘Well, anyway, it most certainly was
not
a girl. It was him.’ She shuddered lightly. ‘My late husband was delighted. A son. To carry on the family name. All I could think about was having to handle his, well, his organs. I had a nursemaid. But she worked only days. So come seven o’clock it was all down to me. Ouf.’ She sneered and brought her teacup slowly to her lips. Her hands did not shake. She seemed to Elizabeth not like an eighty-four-year-old at all, but more like a slightly etiolated fifty-year-old.
    ‘So, I have to admit to being very curious about you, when I heard that Jolyon had taken up with a young widow. A little girl! I could not imagine my son having to play the father figure to a little girl. Or to anyone, for that matter. Selfish life he’s lived. Takes after me,’ she laughed drily. ‘But he has become very fond of you. And now here you are. In my home. And I have to say, from the first time I saw you, I liked you very much.’ Arlette smiled then and appraised Elizabeth with twinkling eyes. ‘I’d like to call you Betty, if I may?’
    ‘Betty?’
    ‘Yes. In my day if you were Elizabeth, you were Betty. Or Bet. But Betty was more popular. And I don’t know, you just look like a Betty to me.’
    Betty
.
    Elizabeth rolled the name around her head.
    She liked it. It was more fun than Elizabeth and less little-girly than Lizzy.
    ‘Here,’ Arlette got to her feet and crossed the room, ‘do you like old photographs?’
    Elizabeth nodded. She did like old photographs, very much.
    ‘I thought you might.’ Arlette walked to the other side of the room and brought down a few leather-bound books from a shelf. ‘Here, my albums. Have a look.’
    Elizabeth dutifully followed Arlette’s instructions, while Arlette put a large black disc onto a gramophone player and slowly lowered a needle onto it. And there, in that moment, as the needle hit the vinyl and a crackle of static hit the air, followed by a flourish of piano, a log popping in the grate, the dusty aroma of old paper from the album on her lap, the smell of waxy candles and rich perfume, and the glimmer of a large paste brooch on Arlette’s collar in the shape of a butterfly, Elizabeth felt herself open up and pull something into herself, something she’d never before encountered in her ten short years, something heady and fragrant and electrifying. And that thing was glamour.
    Her home in Surrey had been modern and clean. Her mother spent a lot of time in jeans and polo-necks. Even when she went out to smart restaurants with Jolyon she would simply replace the jeans with trousers and sling a gold chain around her polo-neck. Elizabeth’s mother wore no make-up. She listened to Radio One. She had a perm. She liked football. Elizabeth’s mother was beautiful, but she was not glamorous. And before this moment, Elizabeth herself had had no real concept of the notion of glamour. She had swooned over Audrey Hepburn’s dresses in
My Fair Lady
, and loved going into the jewellery section of the department store in Guildford and pretending she was going to buy herself diamonds. But this was different. In this room, with the inky light of a faded afternoon in the sky and the melancholy strains of Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 3 in D in the air, Elizabeth turned the pages of an old lady’s history and lost herself in nostalgia for a world she’d never known.
    In this room, Elizabeth became Betty.

3
    1987
    AT THE FERRY port, Betty’s breath encircled her head and then floated out towards the sea, almost as though it were trying to find its way back like a cat abandoned far from home. She was not wearing enough for the weather. At fifteen, she was more concerned with her image than with her physical comfort, and knowing that they