The Clothes On Their Backs: A Novel (No Series) Page 4
‘You see, when we started you were quite an ugly sallow girl, but now you look like Elizabeth Taylor. I’ll show you a picture.’
‘Is this really me?’
‘Yes, of course. It’s who you really are.’
‘Thank you.’
‘My pleasure.’
The explosions were dying away. Only an occasional bang interrupted the night.
She put on her coat.
‘I can go out now,’ she said. And we left the flat together. She went down in the lift and I walked up the remaining flight of stairs. I heard her come in much later than usual, around 7.30 in the morning for she had had that delayed start.
My mother screamed when she saw me and my father went white. ‘What have you done?’ she cried. ‘And who did this to you?’
‘What, are you a tramp, now?’ said my father. ‘Do you go with men?’
‘A girl from school did it,’ I said, ‘and don’t tell me to wash it out because I’m not going to. I’m seventeen and I’ll do what I like.’
My parents were flabbergasted. They had not brought up a daughter to talk back to her parents. They saw me descending into the world, which seemed to them to be the dark forest of fairy tales, prowled by wolves, bad elves, and other creatures of the Middle European night. A short walk away in Hyde Park, the year before, the Rolling Stones had played a concert and the noise of the guitars and drums had echoed as far away as Marylebone, even through the windows of Benson Court where my parents sat, holding hands, as if the music were the sound of marching bands, ahead of an army come to shoot them.
The next day, after school, I went to Boots the chemist and bought a red lipstick in a gold case and painted my mouth with it in the evenings to wear while I did my homework. A few days later I ventured into the territory of mascara, after a lesson in its application from the sales lady. I never wore any of this stuff outside the flat, but I began to stop at dress shops and look inside. I tried to do my hair as Mrs Prescott had styled it but without much success and eventually I asked the hairdresser who cut it every three months for advice. She sold me a lotion I was to put on after shampooing and she told me where I could get a second-hand hairdryer cheap. From this time on, I spent a lot of time straightening my hair.
Like Louis Jourdan in the film Gigi, it was Gilbert, the cartoonist, who first noticed that a little girl had grown up, and invited me into 4G for a drink and then rolled a joint. I floated away down Marylebone High Street and an hour or so later I lost my virginity to him–an afternoon of intense rain which flooded the gutters, and lightning flashes that hit a pigeon in the communal gardens. Afterwards he made me toast with Gentleman’s Relish, and drew me, for his private collection of sketches. I only did it because I had read a lot about love in books. It wasn’t satisfactory, it was wet and uncomfortable but it drew my attention to the next set of possibilities. I was precocious in that department, what they call an enthusiast.
They say you get a glow about you once you have had sex. I must have done, because all the old goats in the building were after me now. The retired ballerina used to go out twice a week for lunch at the Fountain Room at Fortnum & Mason to meet her old chums and reminisce about days long gone when they were Odette and Giselle. The potentate prowled the halls looking for me. ‘I want to show you my first editions,’ he said. He was a tubby chap with a pink cravat and owned one of the earliest telephone answering machines, which his wife didn’t know how to operate. It allowed him to organise his complicated love life.
I was planning to apply to study philosophy at university because of all that lonely thinking in my bedroom, but then I started to try on characters in novels for a day or two, to see how they fitted. I’d dress like them, think like them, walk around being Emma Bovary, with no understanding at all of either provincial life or farming, but boredom I knew very well.
The last time I saw Mrs Prescott, she was hovering on the step looking worn out. Only because of the time of night could I know if she was coming or going.
‘I did the trick,’ she said, in a voice as flimsy as tissue. ‘Much improved.’
‘Thank you.’
‘I think you should eat some red meat, you need iron and protein. You are going to be a very strong girl. It’s your frame, your bones. You come from peasant stock.’
‘I don’t think so.’
‘Oh, yes. That’s quite certain.’
‘Can I come with you?’
‘Where?’
‘Wherever you’re going.’
‘No, my dear. I wouldn’t want that.’
And she walked off lightly along the street, faster than I had expected. I followed her for a little way, as far as Edgware Road, before turning back. I saw her waiting at the lights at Hyde Park Corner, her own hair sparkling under the light rain.
Everything was lit up with an amber radiance: the traffic lights seemed held forever on amber. I was filled with sudden exultation, like a person aroused from a coma. It was a joy to be alive, a pleasure.
‘Mrs Prescott,’ I cried, ‘tell me—’ but she ran across the road and however fast I followed, I never caught her, that night or another.
She was a missionary, an expeditionary. She was an explorer, she was a huntress, and glory be to her and the glory she left me. She expired like a railway ticket, on the Edgware Road ten days later, at the corner of Frampton Street, with no explanation.
Everything was taken away by a man in a stained leather jerkin and studded boots. As he was hefting a trunk its rotten bottom fell out, showering the hall with silks, satins, velvets, broiderie anglaise, lace and feathers, in peach, apricot, grape and plum-coloured shades: a dazzling momentary rain of richness, that my mother ran to gather in her arms and then she raced up the stairs, slamming the door of our flat, panting.
‘A thief she has made me,’ she whispered, ‘a pilferer of dead woman’s clothes. But look at this, Vivien, look at the beauty of it, I never saw things like this except on the Hollywood stars, come on help me, what do we have here? Gold buttons–no, gilt, it comes off if you scratch it.’ A smell arose of lily of the valley scent, old pre-war flowers overwhelming a mouldy odour that permeated the trunk.
She held up a dress against her, but her form broadly overlapped its seams. ‘It’s too small, I knew it. Well these are much too good to go to waste, but they will not fit me, I’m afraid. Vivien, you must try. For parties.’
After I had exhausted all the possibilities of Mrs Prescott’s clothes and began to acquire a taste for the tailored, the bias cut, the calf-length skirt, the bolero jacket, the wide high-waisted Katharine Hepburn pants, and the Dietrich shoulder pad, I started to frequent second-hand clothes shops, where in those days you could still quite easily find outfits from much earlier eras. The inhabitants of the many mansion blocks of London died and their wardrobes–flappers’ fringed dresses, cloche hats, the occasional Fortuny silk pleated robe–were emptied out by grieving relatives and carted off by the same house clearance people who had tried to take away Mrs Prescott’s outfits, before my mother had nabbed them.
Amongst us aficionados of what is now called ‘vintage’, who refused to wear the ghastly styles of the period, the wide lapels and lurid tank tops, the huge collars, all the brown and orange, certain addresses were passed around, quietly, as if they were the hideouts of drug dealers. The most sought after were the places where you rang a bell in a side door and were buzzed up to a dingy room above a shop where racks and racks of treasure stood slovenly together, the moth-eaten furs with the Schiaparelli jacket. The owners knew exactly what they had. They were old-clothes men. Rag dealers. They did not understand why a procession of young girls traipsed up their stairs and handed over folded pound notes for worthless rubbish, when brand new clothes were freely available in the shops; we must be a bit touched in the head or terribly poor. But they, the dealers, were bright enough to understand that certain labels sold for a good price and it didn’t matter whether the label was attached to a little blouse or a sensible winter
coat. The label was the point.
There was rarely anything like a dressing room. A bit of curtain was slung across the corner of the shop and after a while one calculated that the angle of the mirror on the ceiling was in line with a second mirror outside, and worked out that, if you were adept at it, you were going to need to change from one set of clothes into another without actually stripping down to your bra and pants.
The shop I went to most often was on Endell Street in Covent Garden, above a butcher’s, and the whiff of pork, lamb, beef, livers and kidneys hung around the clothes so you had to wash them a few times or have them dry-cleaned before you could wear them. An old Pole ran it, bearded, and swaddled in boots and sheepskins during most months of the year except the really high summer, when he wore a tweed jacket and a cap. If you came in regularly, he would offer you a filthy drink from a bottle of Cyprus sherry and smile in gratitude when you refused. His English was atrocious, no one understood a word he said, and the prices on the clothes were never marked. You asked and he looked at it, looked at you, then wrote something down on a piece of paper and either you said yes, or you said no. He wrapped everything in brown paper parcels with string. It felt like a secret to be walking down the stairs with that old-fashioned package then coming home and seeing what you’d really got, outside the fluorescent strip lighting of the cluttered, smoky, meat-smelling room. Often there were stains you hadn’t noticed and sometimes they wouldn’t come out. But then you could get a little jacket with the label CHANEL PARIS inside it.
I arrived at university in a crêpe de Chine cocktail dress and created an instant, sensational impression. Now life begins, I thought, and yes, it did.
At the low-lying concrete campus on the outskirts of the medieval ‘city’ of York (it was no bigger than a town), I gave the appearance of being a worldly sophisticate, a Londoner-born, brought up in the heart of the city, confident, full of self-assurance and originality. Inside–fear, uncertainty, social awkwardness. I was told I had an aloof charisma, wandering around the man-made lake populated by ducks and other water birds, empty fields stretching to the horizon. But all I felt was an aching loneliness of perpetually grey skies and beyond them in one direction the Pennines, bare, brown denuded hills and, heading east, the North Sea.
In some ways it was a disastrous choice, influenced solely by a teacher who had merely recommended the excellence of its English department and knew nothing more. I was city bred. The furthest distance I had travelled from London was the hour-long journey to Brighton, and I had only seen cows sheep horses pigs chickens in pictures. A field was generally green, sometimes yellow at wheat time. The great outdoors was the distance between the bus stop and the front door, and parks laying themselves down flat as if for a rest, and not getting up again.
I did not know how to explain the refugee parents, my mother’s felt waistcoats, the claustrophobic atmosphere of Benson Court, Mrs Prescott, Gilbert and his joints and sketch pad, and my nervy anxiety about open spaces and fresh air. My clothes acted as a kind of carapace, an armour with which I protected my inner, soft body. But the way I dressed made someone stop me on the covered walkway beside the lake on a windy late autumn day and ask if I would be interested in joining the drama society. Not as an actress but as a costume maker. I could not sew, I said, surprised. But sewing didn’t really come into it, just scouring junk shops, so it was me who devised the outfits for a famous production of The Winter’s Tale which would live on for many years in the memories of those who took part in it for the enormous amount of sexual tension it released, along with silver bangles, floating scarves and other campery.
It was through the drama society that I learned how to manage the tricky manoeuvres of the divided self, the inner longings at war with inner panic. Gay men gave me the courage to be Vivien, or rather to develop her from scratch, from the materials at my disposal. I became, I suppose, a gay icon. A gay man’s fantasy fuck. And if they were going to have one final experiment with the opposite sex, just to make absolutely certain before committing themselves to boys, it would be with me. I got very tired of floating scarves and silver bangles, but quite comfortable with taking my clothes off and being examined with the slightly repelled curiosity of one who is looking at a physical example of another species.
One summer day at the end of my second year, I was lying in the bath smoking a cigarette when a tall, thin, blond boy from the biochemistry department barged in, desperate to take a leak while returning a textbook to one of my flatmates.
The choice was his, not mine, instant and decisive:
So there you were, lying next to that vase of poppies on the washstand, and you had a slant of red across your breasts from the stained glass panel in the window. Everything was covered in steam and you were smoking a cigarette with your wet fingers, lipstick on the stub and splashing the water with your other hand. You looked exactly like a Modigliani painting I once saw. The whole room smelt of red and what was going through my mind was who is she and what is she thinking?
An unlikely pair, but many couples are.
Alexander Amory. He seemed the most extraordinary person to be chosen by: cerebral, opinionated, self-confident. He was, I now think, rather shallow, but in a very complicated way. Sometimes he could be a rigid post, inflexible in the certainty of his ideas, droning on about science and progress, his research into proteins; yet other times he would be lying on the sofa reading, his feet hanging over the arms, lit up by lamplight, giggling over a newspaper article, reading bits out loud, mocking the follies of our politicians.
Mine, he once pointed out, was not what he considered an objective intelligence, and literature was not, he considered, a real subject. You could talk about literature with a hard precision if you extracted from it ideas about political philosophy, for example; whenever he read a book I had the impression of a man putting in a thumb and pulling out a plum, which he would hold up to the light and examine before putting it in his mouth. But as a guide to the perplexity of human nature, he considered it inexact, more or less useless. My own approach he thought hilarious. Somehow I would manage to climb inside the books I read, feeling and tasting them–I became the characters themselves. It was too intuitive an understanding of art to be comprehensible by him.
If I was a hothouse orchid which thrives indoors, bunched up by the fire, reading, in winter Alexander would sit for hours in the freezing fog looking at the Canada geese rising from the water of the campus lake, hearing the echo of the beat of their wings across the slushy ice. Then he would come home, blowing on his fingers, and try to write poetry, ‘which is your field, not mine, so what do you think, Vivien? You’re the expert.’
Poetry was different from the novel’s mush, he declared, and his poems were hard work. Clever, metaphysical, something buried in them, like a crack of light showing beneath a door. I admired, but did not like them. I did like it when he tried to describe his proteins. Poetry and proteins, he said, much the same thing. He explained how they resembled dense ice etchings on a winter window. ‘Now do you see?’ Sort of.
What I really adored about him was how immensely interested he was in me. He had never met anyone like Vivien Kovaks, he said: it was what he perceived as my lack of logic that was the attraction, as if I were an immensely hard sum he were trying to work out, a mathematical equation to be cracked. He was always asking me questions about myself, trying to shed his clear cold illuminating brilliance on every aspect of my personality.
For example: ‘Every pair of Fair Isle gloves you buy ends up with holes in the fingers,’ he said, picking up my hands, ‘and then you have to buy new ones and all because you never cut your nails. Why, Vivien? Why don’t you cut your nails? Don’t look at me like that, I’m not being judgemental, I’m just fascinated.’
‘I don’t notice how long they’ve got till it’s too late.’
‘Isn’t there some deeper reason? That your fingers hate to be trapped in there?’
‘No. I’m just lazy and forgetful.’
‘I don’t know.’
‘You’re off in a dream the whole time and I just have to know what you’re thinking.’
But I was thinking how lucky I was to have escaped from Benson Court, walking along the street holding hands with this tall blond Englishman with his mutton chop whiskers which were all the rage in the early seventies, and the long narrow feet in their suede desert boots, and the fine, already thinning hair, and his blue eyes. For there was something inordinately sexy about the idea of Alexander without him being obviously sexy himself. He had saved me from the pallid hands of my gay boyfriends, about whom he had no principled objection, but thought I was unwise to allow myself to be an experimental station in the science of the discovery of sexual orientation.
His father was a vicar in the county town of Hereford; his people were types I had only read about in books and magazines. They emerged from their two dimensions into a fleshy discomforting reality. For example his mother bred a type of long-haired dog as a hobby and showed them at Crufts. The house smelt of dogs, dog food and mildew and they ate small pale meals: pink slices of ham with wide rinds of white fat, boiled potatoes, boiled marrow, rice pudding. After dinner one of his sisters played the cello and another played the viola and everyone nodded along or read the score. I slept in an icy room under an eiderdown and Christ, with his arms spread out, bled wooden blood on the wall above my bed. At breakfast Alexander’s father ate a soft-boiled egg with a vivid runny yellow yolk that flecked his beard, and his mother held a dog on her lap, kissing it on the mouth. No one paid any attention. The dog put its tongue on hers–they reached out to lick each other.
Nonetheless, I could not imagine how the child of the vicarage could meet the man with the dusty glasses and the copies of the Radio Times with the evening’s programmes ticked and circled.