The Pleasure Quartet (13 page)

Thomas’s own pieces of luggage seemed to weigh a ton and he advanced with mighty caution.

‘What have you got in the cases that’s so heavy?’ Iris asked him.

‘Evening dresses for both of you,’ he said. ‘I don’t assume you had brought any along, had you?’

Neither of us even owned an evening dress. Anyone could have guessed that, but his presumption annoyed me.

We followed him haltingly through a network of boulevardlike staircases followed by a criss-cross of identical narrow low-ceilinged corridors winding their way under what appeared to be the roof
and finally reached our room. We were being housed together, we discovered. Somehow, I (and Iris?) had previously assumed we would be lodged separately, and that she would be staying with
Thomas.

Noting our surprise, ‘Propriety . . .’ he said with a faint smile passing his lips.

We stumbled into the room, hunting for the light switch and dropping our holdalls to the floor, while Thomas struggled further along the corridor.

‘I’m down the end,’ he indicated, his back already to us.

I was about to slam the door closed behind us when he shouted out: ‘Be ready for midnight!’

‘Midnight?’ Iris queried.

‘In those lovely evening dresses, ladies, remember! As soon as I’ve unpacked, I’ll bring them by your door. Don’t forget . . .’ He faded away.

‘I wonder what they’re like,’ Iris remarked, visibly excited.

‘I just hope he has taste and we don’t have to parade like floozies,’ I added.

Iris was freshening up in the bathroom when I heard the shuffle of feet behind the door.

‘I think he’s dropped our outfits off,’ I said to her when she stepped back into the room.

She rushed to collect them.

‘Incredible!’ she shouted out, tiptoeing back holding two large Biba carrier bags under her arms.

I knew it was not only a classy label but the hippest around according to the fashion magazines scattered in the dressing room that I sometimes leafed through on my breaks. How much had this
cost him? Or were the dresses just hired? And the thought then occurred to me: had he got our sizes right?

Iris excitedly threw the bulky bags down onto the bed and tipped them over to empty their contents on the dark chenille throw.

The glossy garments that tumbled out came in two colours and the styles appeared identical. I opted for the pale yellow confection and Iris for the pink one.

The material felt like cotton to the touch, but stretched across the skin in an uncommon manner, highlighting every curve and dip of our bodies. And the dresses were an uncanny fit, adhering to
our frames as if tailored to be a second skin. Strapless, cut in a sharp V at the front unveiling a long, thin valley of flesh, the dresses held our breasts in place in an invisible cup of
reinforced material giving the illusion of defying gravity. Then the expensive material descended all the way down to our waists with the grace and elegance of flowing folds of lapping waves, where
it held us firmly in without the ungainly visible constraints of a corset. The midriffs were cinched and below the dresses flared out like flowers, all the way down to our knees. The shoes that
also dropped out of the bag Thomas had left for us matched in colours, stylish and elegant, shiny, evidently brand-new, perilously high-heeled too.

We helped each other into the garments, marvelling at the silkiness of the material, how sensual it was both to our touch and against our bare skin.

‘It feels too good to wear,’ Iris said. After the initial try-out, she’d shed the dress and was now standing in her knickers, having jettisoned her ill-matching brassiere which
couldn’t been worn under the dress without exposing its clumsy straps and plain pattern. ‘I wish I had something else I could have on underneath.’

I picked up the crumpled Biba bag from the bedspread and turning it upside down anew, shook it, hoping there was still some treasure left deep in its bulging depths. As if by magic, a breeze of
yellow and pink silk, translucent lingerie floated down.

I couldn’t believe that Thomas had such feminine foresight. Surely it must be his sister Matilda who was at the bottom of all this.

Again, the panties fitted us perfectly. They were so light that it felt as if we were wearing nothing and, at the same time, that our skin was sheathed in a fabric made of air.

‘We’re going to be princesses,’ Iris giggled, recalling past childish games in New Zealand. I smiled, although inwardly I was gritting my teeth. I wasn’t a princess kind
of girl, and felt awkward, out of place and over-exposed in such frippery.

I caught a glimpse of my watch.

‘There’s barely an hour to go to midnight,’ I noted.

‘Oh dear,’ Iris said. ‘We must wash. Do something about our hair. We can’t go looking like this, can we?’

Further surprises awaited us in the bathroom. An impossible selection of lotions, creams, perfumes, combs, shampoos, conditioners, brushes, make-up compacts, lipsticks and powders straight out
of a Hollywood movie and an avalanche of mirrors in all shapes and sizes in which to perfect our looks for tonight. Nothing had been left to chance.

We dived in and pampered ourselves outrageously.

Iris washed her hair and I brushed it for her. She was bubbling with barely suppressed energy, excited and vibrant. I wanted to pull her into bed right there and then, intoxicated by her urchin
beauty and the thousand new smells of her. Stroke after stroke of the ivory-handled hairbrush travelling across her delicate scalp, me standing above her and observing how the tips of her nipples
were so visibly hardening with every additional movement of my hand. There are times when you wish that the world would freeze and stay that way forever. This was one of them.

Then it was my turn and Iris scrubbed me, washed me, rubbed me clean and sculpted my hair into a shape we hoped would be sophisticated enough to match the garment I’d be wearing.

‘I want you to be psychedelic,’ Iris exclaimed, her excitement just short of erupting madly. Thomas had taken her just a couple of weeks previously to a concert in a theatre on
Shaftesbury Avenue by a new American guitar ace called Jimi Hendrix who had ended his set by setting fire to his guitar. Since then she referred to everything as psychedelic!

She began foraging through the bathroom cabinet’s cave of wonders, hunting for glitter and colour, but I stopped her.

‘I’m not going to the party as a rainbow,’ I warned.

‘Oh . . .’

Her eyes begged me.

‘It would be so much fun . . .’

‘No way.’

Even I had limits.

October 31st, 1921, London

Dear diary; I have neglected you these past three weeks – can you believe it’s been just three weeks? It feels so much longer, as if time takes longer to pass here, each minute an
hour because I’m sucking the marrow from every second.

So much has happened in that short time.

There was a terrible chill in the air tonight, a prelude to the coming winter. But oh, I didn’t care a bit, because I was in London, properly in London for the first time. Not just
physically here, but out in it, the whole city whirling around Gladys and me like a tornado revolving around the eye of a storm.

Mrs Moorcroft didn’t suspect a thing when I snuck out. And why should I need to justify my movements to the landlady? So long as I pay my rent on time and keep the place clean, that
should be all that matters. The room is about as big as our larder was at home, the bed is so short that my feet hang over the end (even though I’m only five foot four) and the mattress is so
sunken that I feel sometimes like I’m resting on the floor. I know I ought to be grateful for it because even in this modern world it’s not easy to find suitable accommodation in
London, especially when you’re a woman, and with no husband or father in tow. I am sure that Mrs Moorcroft thought I was a working girl, when I first arrived.

‘No funny business is allowed,’ she said, as I followed her up those rickety stairs, praying they wouldn’t collapse beneath the weight of her enormous backside. ‘You
could rest your tea cup and saucer on that,’ my father would have said, of course when he thought that I wasn’t listening. You would never have believed she’s been on rations. She
must have been hoarding butter and sugar in her apron skirts.

Mrs Moorcroft’s lodgings also shelters five other tenants, a mournful war widow, so thin she is almost invisible, two middle-aged and red-faced cooks from up North who toil together in
church kitchens near Clapton Pond, another Irish lass whose family has fallen on bad times and who is studying to become an articled clerk, and an elderly relative of our landlady, ever dressed in
black and lurking in a corner, watching us as we go about our business.

It is not a cheerful environment.

It is easy enough to pretend that I too am a youthful war widow and pull on Mrs Moorcroft’s heartstrings and I do so unashamedly, although it hurts me to use the lost lives of our loved
ones in vain. Especially for a cramped little wardrobe of a bedroom in unfashionable Islington such as this. But at least there is a basin where I can wash my face at night without needing to walk
all the way down the corridor – so narrow it feels like the walls are preparing to swallow me up – to the house bathroom, and a crooked shelf where I can set a pot of flowers to
brighten the air and store my books. I’ve brought precious few with me, since they made my case so heavy and it seems like madness to fill what little space I have with novels and poetry. And
yet, I do anyway, for what use is worrying about clothing the body, if the soul needs feeding? I often pick them up and run my finger down the lettering on the spine and put them back on the shelf
again. I had agonised over which volumes to bring more than anything else. In the end, I chose three. Edith Wharton’s ‘Age of Innocence’, a falling-apart, battered copy of which I
had found abandoned on a train seat just weeks previously, L. Frank Baum’s ‘Magic of Oz’ – even though I was a little ashamed of reading children’s books, still, I
loved that tale, a belated one but my favourite in the series – and a popular romance that I won’t even tell you the title of, my dear diary, in case you should think me silly, or
worse, immoral. Reading certain pages of it makes me even warmer at night-time than sitting in front of Mrs Moorcroft’s fireplace in the plushly carpeted living room, even though I blush to
admit it.

Before I left home, Father Kelly had given me a page that he’d torn from a magazine – sent to him by a relative, all the way from New York – with a poem by Robert Frost that
I had pinned next to my bed.

I roll the sweet, affecting words of the poem around on my tongue as soon as I wake each morning, and before I am overtaken by sleep each night. Now I feel as though I can taste desire, or at
least I might, if given the chance. London is on my doorstep at last, and desire is on the tip of my tongue. It was such an odd choice of poem to gift me with; I wondered, and not for the first
time, what it was that Father Kelly saw in me that led him to educate me so, but I was grateful for it nonetheless.

I sleep with the window open, no matter what the weather. It’s only the size of a handkerchief so doesn’t let in much rain, and mostly the wind just slides by under the eaves. I
like the sound of the sputtering cars rushing by, and even the scent of the traffic fumes from Islington High Street below.

Do you think me odd? I asked Gladys, the first time I showed her my room, and she flicked through my books, stared at my poetry on the wall, and stood on her tiptoes to peep out of my little
window. She wore a bright red, fringed scarf and had pulled it up around her neck and cheeks to ward off the cold, blocking her face from me.

‘You just are who you are,’ she replied.

I thank my stars that I met her on my first day, arriving into London’s teeming Euston, the London and North Western Railway mainline station, at last with my old striped suitcase, a
hand-me-down from my father, so battered that the clasps broke apart as I tried to drag it up the stairs. She appeared right then with my scattered smalls in her hands, like an angel out of
nowhere, though if there are angels, I doubt they are even shorter than I am with ginger hair and freckled complexions and voices that would have better suited a market trader in the East End.
Without her, I’d have been on the street that night I suppose, instead of tucked safely alongside her in her single bed in the room she rented, just a few blocks up from the Angel and right
alongside St Mary’s Church. ‘I don’t go to church,’ Gladys told me, with her shoulders back and her chin jutting out, ‘I don’t believe in all that God nonsense.
I make my own luck. And besides, it’s creepy, that big tall spire looming over everything.’ I decided that we would be friends, right then.

What a strange feeling it was, sharing a bed with a woman. I wondered if that was what it was to have a sister. And yet my heart tells me that lying alongside a sister wouldn’t have
felt quite like that. Gladys’s hair so soft and with that strange fragrance to it – she told me she used raw egg as conditioner. That seemed so daring to me, I could only imagine what
my mother would have thought of wasting good eggs on hair. ‘Think of all the hungry children,’ she would say, tutting at me when I didn’t manage to clear my dinner plate.

The work at ‘Butler and Butler, Garment Repair and Tailoring’ is hard, harder even than work in the fields, since there’s a sort of closed in feeling of being stuck indoors
and the whole place smells acrid, like it needs a good airing. Sitting down all the time at a sewing machine is more tiresome than standing up, even more tiresome than turning earth over with a
hoe. But Gladys is there too, and I’m grateful she got me the job. Chatting to her takes my mind off things, and it’s only up in Highbury, a half hour’s brisk walk along Upper
Street and left at Highbury corner. Next door there’s a cake shop painted all red and white that sells the most delicious lardy cakes, even better than those my mother makes, although I would
never admit that to her, and even the nicest cake in London wouldn’t take my mind off the work as a seamstress. When I close my eyes at night-time, I still hear the whirring of the needle
moving at such a pace, and sometimes my foot twitches up and down as if I’m making a shirt in my sleep.