Bad Girls Good Women (63 page)

She liked whatever made her stop short to look harder. And she particularly liked the witty, irreverent or punchy things that would make George raise his eyebrows and delicately shudder.

Julia knew that anything she had already seen somewhere else wasn’t nearly new enough. It was no good copying: originality was the key. She would have to sniff out her merchandise at its source, but she was sure that if she had the time to devote to it, and the backing, she could do it. And the trick would be to display it all, a stun-the-eye collection, under one roof. A shop. A shop that would be a meeting place and a talking point, and that would do for rooms just what Mary Quant’s Bazaar had done for clothes.
Blow-up
, she dreamed. Or
Bang
. Or just
Designs
.

Thomas Tree insisted on taking her out to dinner to celebrate an order. The bank had agreed to a substantial overdraft, a guarantee had proved unnecessary.

‘If I opened a shop,’ Julia said, ‘how many things could I find to sell that are as mad as your chairs?’

Thomas glanced at her. She was stirring her coffee one way, then the other. Her eyes seemed very bright. ‘Dozens,’ he answered. ‘People I was at college with are inventing things, making all kinds of weird stuff. It’s finding the right outlet that’s difficult. People are conservative. Like my mum. She likes shiny brown wood and flowered covers.’

Julia grinned. ‘So does George Tressider, except his are glazed chintz and inlaid walnut.’ She looked steadily at him and then said, ‘Thomas, if I open a shop, can I have the exclusive right to sell your furniture?’

‘Yes. All of it.’

‘Will you be my partner, then?’

‘Yes.’

They shook hands again. This time Julia didn’t draw away.

Her first plan was to persuade George and Felix, somehow, to set her up under the Tressider umbrella. If they would help her to find and stock her shop, just by lending her the money, then they could share the profits with herself and Thomas. From the very beginning Julia had no doubts that the profits would roll in. And she knew perfectly well that Tressider Designs could afford the investment. They had just enjoyed the most successful year in the company’s history.

Wisely, Julia decided to put the idea to Felix first. ‘Come and have lunch with me,’ she invited. ‘I want to talk.’

They strolled away from the offices together, with the sun warming their faces. Julia looked around her, at the crowds and the shop windows. When she breathed in she thought that she could taste and smell newness and excitement and energy. It was the first summer of the Beatles; girls were flooding out of shops and offices to buy records and posters and clothes. Everyone they passed seemed to be swinging a carrier bag with their latest purchase.

‘You look happy,’ Felix said.

‘I’m excited,’ Julia answered. ‘I’ve got an idea.’

She hardly touched her food and wine. She talked and talked, drawing shapes in the air with her hands, trying to ignite Felix’s enthusiasm with the heat of her own. As he sat and watched her Felix thought what a pleasure it was to see the old, vivid Julia again. He remembered how the same Julia had affected him in the confusing days when she had first come to the square with Mattie, and with the taste of wine on his tongue and his own food going cold in front of him, he remembered the night of Jessie’s funeral. He remembered it with surprising clarity, the lightness and fragility of Julia in his arms. He had thought that sadness and responsibility had aged her, but now the years seemed to have dropped away and she might have been fifteen again.

She leaned forward, touching his hands. Without thinking, he took hold of hers and held them tight. Love was a difficult commodity, but he knew that he loved Julia.

‘Don’t you think it’s a good idea?’

Her vehemence startled him. ‘What?’

‘What I’ve been telling you about for the last hour, that’s all.’

Felix thought carefully. He would have to disappoint her, but he would do it as gently as he could.

‘It’s a brilliant idea.’

He was sure that it was. There was no shop just like the one Julia described, and he knew from his own clients that anything irreverent and original would sell. Julia had style herself – he had admired it from the moment he first glimpsed her in the Rocket and if she could recognise it she could almost certainly sell it. Her shop would probably work.

‘But I don’t think George is the right person to back you.’ The truth was that George didn’t trust Julia. Felix knew that his dislike was rooted in jealousy. George was sensitive enough and clever enough to suspect the closeness of the bond between his lover and his shop girl. Julia was only tolerated at Tressider Designs because Felix wanted her to have a job that would support her and Lily, and because George couldn’t refuse anything that Felix wanted. Within reason, Felix mentally corrected himself. Setting Julia up with Tressider money in a shop selling pop furniture and plastic artefacts wouldn’t count as within reason.

He did his best to explain to Julia without any suggestion of disloyalty to George. Felix loved George too, and would have defended him against anyone, but he was beginning to feel the weight of George’s fierce possessiveness. As he talked, his eyes wandered beyond Julia to the restaurant windows. Outside, he could see people passing by. The way a head turned or a hand lifted seemed charged with eroticism. Like Julia, he felt the season’s vibration of energy carried on the dusty city air.

‘It would make good commercial sense for George,’ Julia pleaded. ‘His name needn’t be associated with it, for God’s sake.’

‘George doesn’t need any more money,’ Felix said gently. ‘Put your efforts into getting backing from somewhere else. If it’s any help,’ he added, ‘I’ve got two or three thousand of my own that you can use.’

Her intense expression fractured into a brilliant smile of gratitude. She leaned across the table and kissed him. ‘You angel.’

‘It won’t be enough,’ he warned her. ‘Find some premises that would be suitable, work out the rent and rates, do your sums on the basis of those costs. You could try to raise a corresponding amount from your bank.’

‘Just what I advised Thomas,’ she beamed at him. ‘And Thomas did it.’

‘Mmm. Is there anyone else you could try? Mattie?’

‘I think Mattie should hang on to her money. Rainy day, all that. I don’t think she’s going to make much from the Women’s Stage Group. Financially, that is.’

Felix and Julia looked at each other, then mutually avoided the subject.

‘What about Alexander?’

The light faded from Julia’s face. ‘Of course not Alexander.’

She had seen Alexander only the day before. He had come to take Lily away to stay at Ladyhill.

Julia had recited all the truths to herself. It was good for Lily to be in the country in the middle of the summer. The Gordon Mansions flat was dark, and the streets outside were heavy with dust. At Ladyhill she could play under the trees in the orchard, and pedal her tricycle in the sheltered courtyard. Julia could see so clearly exactly how she would be, making darting rushes on the red trike, her dark head bent low over the handlebars. It was good for her to be with her father. Alexander would give his time to her more generously than Julia ever did. And the freedom would give Julia time to work. To look for premises and stock, once she had raised the problematic money. When the necessity of taking care of Lily stopped Julia from rushing to see a new designer, or from going with Thomas to look at some exciting work, she longed for the same freedom with desperate impatience.

Yet when the time came for her to hand Lily over to Alexander, she could hardly make herself do it. But she had promised. That was the deal, and she couldn’t go back on it now.

Lily went happily. She looked from one of them to the other, somehow aware, with all her three-year-old perception, of the power she possessed. Then she put her hand in Alexander’s. ‘Let’s go in the car.’ She loved cars, and because Julia didn’t own one a ride was a treat.

‘Be good for Daddy and Granny Faye. Have a nice time.’
I won’t cry. They mustn’t see me cry
.

Julia and Alexander didn’t look an each other. They said polite things in neutral voices; Alexander admired the orange plastic chair that Thomas had left behind for Lily. ‘It’s made by a friend of mine. I’ve been helping him to sell them.’

‘Good.’

Even after they had gone, Julia could hear other words in her head. But they couldn’t have been uttered, not between the two stiff, colourless people that she and Alexander had become. She was left with the physical ache of longing for the sound and the touch of Lily. Work, Julia thought. Work would anaesthetise it. Turning a slippery idea into solid reality.

‘I couldn’t ask Alexander,’ she repeated.

‘Well then, someone else. I don’t think it’ll be too difficult.’

Julia smiled at Felix. She could smell his expensive, lemony cologne mingled with the scents of coffee and garlic and French cigarettes. The existence of such things that could be measured and bought and consumed was comforting compared with the frightening equations of love and need.

‘You’re a good friend. I hope your faith in my commercial sense is justified.’

‘I think it will be.’

They finished their glasses of wine, sketching a toast, and went out again into the August sun.

The bank manager peered an her across the expanse of his big, shiny desk. There was nothing on it but her own neatly typed proposals and figures. His frown seemed to melt into his horn-rimmed glasses.

Julia had done exactly as Felix had advised. After a week of intensive searching, she had found a little shop to let just off the King’s Road itself. If she missed that one, she thought, she could find another similar one without too much trouble. She had costed out the rent and rates over a year, and added those figures to some minimal shopfitting and the major capital outlay on stock. Staff would be herself. She would have to pay herself something in order to live, but that would be as little as possible. She calculated that if she opened in time for Christmas, she could hope to break even in a few months. And she had come to lay her figures in front of her bank manager.

To Julia the careful calculations suddenly felt like little more than wishful guesses. But Felix and Thomas had assured her that they seemed businesslike enough.

The bank manager turned his Parker pen over and over in his fingers. ‘What will you call your – ah – shop, Lady Bliss? Your proposed business doesn’t seem to have a name.’

Julia almost smiled. The importance of a name. Lady Bliss might, after all, impress a bank manager more than Julia Smith. ‘I’m going to call it Garlic & Sapphires.’

The man blinked. ‘But, as I understand it, you are not intending to sell either Continental foodstuffs or precious stones?’

Julia knew then that she wouldn’t get the loan.

‘It’s from a poem. Quite a famous poem, actually.’ She had brought the volume home from Holborn Library and read it in Mattie’s Bloomsbury flat, ‘For the shop, it’s just supposed to sound different and intriguing.’

‘I see.’

It was very clear that he didn’t see anything at all. Julia guessed that the last poem he had read was ‘Daffodils’, in the fourth form. And that different and intriguing were not businesslike adjectives. He drew her papers together in front of him and tapped them to align the edges. Then he told her why he wasn’t prepared to give her a loan. Not even to match her own capital of two and a half thousand pounds. She had decided that it wasn’t necessary to mention that the money was really Felix’s.

‘It is my sad experience,’ he concluded, pompous to the last, ‘that women do not make successful business people. Particularly in ephemeral enterprises of this kind. Perhaps if your husband …’

‘My husband is not connected with this proposal,’ Julia said coldly. She found herself standing up, holding out her hand for her papers.

‘If I happened to be a man, would you think differently?’ she asked.

The man didn’t even hear the significance of the question.

‘It’s possible,’ he answered. He made a note for himself and screwed the cap back on his pen. The interview was over.

Julia strode past his minions at their desks outside his door. They reminded her of herself outside George Tressider’s door, and she promised herself that she wouldn’t stay in that subordinate position for a day longer than she had to. She walked out of the bank and straight down to the river. The muddy breeze blowing off it cooled her hot face. When her rage had subsided she leaned over the parapet and looked down at the water.

The colour of green olives, as it had been the day she met Alexander …

Julia jerked her head up. She was renewing her promises to herself, and this time not just to survive, but to be a huge, blazing, incandescent success.

She had a moment of understanding of Mattie, and of Mattie’s early craving to be an actress, a Name, a Somebody. Mattie had done it, and on her own. The recognition was like a bond, tightening, making her long for her friend’s company. And if Mattie could do it, Julia could do it too. Not even though she was a woman, but because of it. She would find the sinew to do it without a husband or a lover, a prop or a screen. And it would be something that she could pass on to Lily, even though she couldn’t give her grass or space or the protection of ancestral walls.

Not yet.

The determination to raise enough money to match Felix’s became an obsession. Julia went to see everyone she could think of and begged and flattered and cajoled. And when Sophia’s husband Toby couldn’t stand it any longer, he introduced her to a banker friend of his who had some private funds to invest. He read her proposal carefully, asked her some searching questions, and then, to Julia’s triumphant joy, agreed to the loan.

She took a deep breath, gave her notice in to George, and went out and signed the lease on the shop premises.

‘I’ve done it,’ she told Thomas Tree. ‘We’re in business.’

‘I’ve done it,’ she told Mattie. ‘You are talking to the proprietor of Garlic & Sapphires.’

Mattie shouted with delight. ‘Now we’re doing it. Now we’re going places.’