Before I Met You Read Free Page B

at Garfunkel’s, overfilled bowls from the salad bar, tickets for a West End show tucked away safely in Mum’s bum-bag. It wasn’t real. Even to Betty’s immature, small-town eyes she could see through the fakery and the stage setting. There was something both murky and beguiling beyond this plastic street of Union Jacks and Beatles posters, something grimy and glittering. She wanted to find it and taste it right now before their time here in the West End was up and Christmas in a small cottage in Surrey swallowed her up for two whole days.
    She walked urgently away from Carnaby Street and up side roads until the only lights were neon and the shops were small and anonymous.
    ‘Oh God, where
are
you taking us?’ said her mother, looking aghast at a middle-aged woman sitting on a bar stool in the entrance to a bar advertising a Live Girls Show, and dramatically underdressed for the weather in a gold boob tube and red leather shorts.
    ‘I think it’s Soho,’ said Betty, her voice tremulous with excitement.
Soho
. That’s what had been pulling her down these backstreets, of course it was. Soho. The centre of the universe. The Hundred Club. The Mud Club. The Blitz Club. Sex. Drugs. Rock and roll. Betty’s favourite film of all time was
Desperately Seeking Susan
. She loved it for the setting, for the neon lights glistening on oily puddles, the alleyways and mysterious doorways, subterranean dives and shabby-looking people with secrets.
    She turned to her mother and smiled. And then she looked upwards into the dark windows of a thin, grimy town house. ‘Imagine living here,’ she said breathily.
    ‘No thank you,’ said her mother, shivering in a blast of cold air.
    Betty continued to stare upwards. ‘I wonder who lives up there,’ she said.
    ‘French Model,’ her mother read off the doorbell.
    ‘Wow,’ breathed Betty, picturing a woman who looked like Beatrice Dalle floating around a cool flat, talking loudly and crossly to her French boyfriend on the phone with a strong cigarette in her other hand.
    ‘You know what that means, don’t you?’
    Betty shrugged uncomfortably, aware that her mother was about to flag up a shortcoming in her knowledge of the big wide world.
    ‘It’s a euphemism,’ she said, ‘for a prostitute. There’s some poor girl up there having sex with an old ugly man. For money.’
    Betty shrugged again, as if, really, what was so bad about that, whilst silently, invisibly, cringing at the very thought. But she still couldn’t help but see a certain glamour in it. A dark, ugly glamour. If you were going to sleep with an old ugly man for money, then this, mused Betty, was the place to do it.
    ‘Come on,’ said her mother. ‘It’s nearly six. Let’s get out of here. Let’s go back to Grandma’s.’
    Betty let her gaze fall from the black eyes of the old town house, tore herself from her dreams of moody French models and Soho nights, and headed back to Surrey with her mother.

4
    1988
    ‘WHAT DID
YOU do?’ Betty asked Arlette, as Arlette searched her jewellery boxes for a particular paste brooch she knew would look just perfect with Betty’s party dress. Betty did not want to wear a paste brooch, but she also knew that Arlette was rarely wrong about these things and that if she thought the brooch would go with the black taffeta off-the-shoulder dress she’d bought last week from Miss Selfridge, then she should at least try it on.
    ‘What did I do when?’
    ‘For your sixteenth birthday party.’
    ‘Nothing,’ said Arlette, ‘absolutely nothing. We’d just gone to war. Nobody had any parties.’
    ‘What was the war like?’
    ‘It was bleak. It was terrifying. It was horrible.’
    ‘And you lost your dad?’
    ‘I did. I lost my father.’ Arlette paused for a moment and sniffed. ‘My lovely father.’
    ‘And what did you do after?’ Betty asked. ‘After the war?’
    Arlette sniffed again. ‘Nothing at all,’ she said. ‘I stayed here and cared for my mother. I