Bright Girls

To Christabel and Florence

Table of Contents

Cover Page

Title Page

One The Arrival

Two The Neighbours

Three Auntie Jackie

Four Big Sister, Little Sister

Five The Bucket and the Bell

Six Adam

Seven Of Rats and Men

Eight Experience Preferred

Nine Oxford

Ten The Handyman

Eleven Total Peace of Mind

Twelve Brass

Thirteen Dark Chocolate

Fourteen An Invitation

Fifteen A Quick Exit

Sixteen Evacuation

Seventeen A Little Favour

Eighteen A Promise is (usually) a Promise

Nineteen Confusing Behaviour

Twenty LBDs and All that Jazz

Twenty-one Mr Elkington

Twenty-two Bad Behaviour

Twenty-three Confessions of an Understudy

Twenty-four Cinders

Twenty-five I could Have Danced All Night (But not in these shoes)

Twenty-Six Alice

Twenty-seven The Gambler

Twenty-eight The Visitor

Twenty-nine Practically Famous

Thirty Charlie’s Revenge

Thirty-one On the Sofa

Thirty-two A Genuine Fake

Thirty-three Ruth

Thirty-four The Jealous Guy

Thirty-five A Roof Over Her Head

Thirty-six Mr Elkington’s Revenge

Copyright

About the Publisher

One The Arrival

There was no one to meet us at the station, which didn’t surprise me. My only distinct memory of Auntie Jackie, along with various hints dropped by Dad, had convinced me that she wasn’t a hundred per cent reliable.

Rachel and I stood on the forecourt with our luggage, in the evening sunshine, scanning the cars as they pulled in to collect or deposit passengers, our attention continually drawn away down the hill to the horizon and the blue wedge of sea. Living in Oxford, almost as far from a proper beach as you can get in Great Britain, we had only been to the coast on a handful of occasions, and the seaside still seemed something full of mystery and promise.

“Would you recognise her?” I asked, when the crowd of commuters had melted away and no one had come forward to claim us.

Rachel nodded. “Old people don’t change that much,” she said confidently (Auntie Jackie is thirty-nine.) After about five minutes, a man approached us. This often happens when I’m out with Rachel. “Are you all right, ladies? You’re looking a bit lost.” He was wearing an open-necked shirt, white trousers and flip-flops, revealing horribly craggy male toes. A pair of mirrored sunglasses, which replaced his eyes with blank discs of sky, made him look more unsavoury still.

“We’re fine thanks. We’re just waiting for a lift,” said Rachel, giving more information than I felt was strictly necessary.

“You look familiar,” he said to her, undeterred. “Are you off the telly?”

She laughed and shook her head. “‘Fraid not.”

“Oh well.” He sauntered off, with the swinging arms and sucked-in stomach of a man who thinks he’s being watched.

“Creep,” muttered Rachel.

“Did you see his feet?” We both shuddered.

A minute or so passed. “We could phone, I suppose,” said Rachel, who was generally reluctant to waste her credit on practical matters. “Only my battery’s a bit low.” She had been firing off texts almost constantly since we’d got on the train at Victoria, so this was hardly news.

From the chaos of her bag she produced a piece of paper on which Dad had written Auntie Jackie’s address and phone number, and passed it across to me. My phone was, of course, topped up and fully charged for just this sort of eventuality because I am the Sensible One.

I thumbed in the number and it rang and rang unanswered. “She must be on her way.”

We sat at the bus stop to wait, our feet propped on our suitcases, determined not to waste the last of the day’s sunshine. Although it was after six it was still warm and Rachel rolled her skirt up as far as it could go and still be called a skirt – to soak up the maximum amount of dangerous UVB.

We’d set off from home before lunch and I was surprised how tired I was, considering that I’d been sitting down almost all day on one train or another. I suppose it was that two-hour interlude in London, lugging my suitcase the length of Oxford Street while Rachel was bargain hunting in the summer sales. Her case was one of those zippy new ones on wheels – an eighteenth-birthday present which she’d considered thoroughly uninspiring at the time, but was rather pleased with now that she’d seen my struggles. Mine was an ancient family heirloom which obviously predated the invention of the wheel, as it had to be carried everywhere – all twenty kilos of it. I was seriously considering ditching it at the end of the summer and posting my clothes back home in Jiffy bags. That’s if we ever got home of course.

“Oh, this is ridiculous. Let’s get a cab,” said Rachel. A bank of bright cloud had boiled up over the rooftops, throwing our bench into the shade, so there was no point in further sunbathing. “You’ve got the money haven’t you?”

Dad had handed me a bundle of notes as we said our goodbyes on the station platform that morning. I resisted the temptation to count them straightaway, in case it looked grasping. “I’m giving it to you to look after because Rachel would spend it before you were halfway to Brighton,” he said. She had overheard this and protested, so he’d relented and given her fifty quid of her own, which she had blown in Topshop at Oxford Circus.

“What if she turns up and we’re not here?” I asked. I didn’t want to get off on the wrong foot.

“Well, it’s her fault for being so late.”

She set off at a brisk pace towards the taxi rank, wheeling her case, while I staggered behind. The driver sprang out of the car and almost fell up the kerb in his haste to help her put the bags in the boot. “Where to, ladies?” he asked.

“Cliff Street,” I said, consulting Dad’s scrap of paper again, wondering how far away it was, and how much of that precious £100 it would cost.

“Here on holiday, are we?” he said over his shoulder as he swung out into the traffic. Rachel and I exchanged significant looks.

“Not exactly,” she replied. We were both remembering Dad’s instructions: Don’t tell anyone in Oxford where you’re going, and don’t tell anyone in Brighton why you’re there. You don’t need to lie. Just be vague.

“Oh, I don’t mind lying,” Rachel had volunteered cheerfully. “That’s the fun bit.”

Two The Neighbours

The inside of the cab smelled strongly of pine air-freshener, and the radio was tuned to drive-time on one of those easy-listening stations that refuse to play eighties music because it’s too modern. I meant to pay attention to the route so I’d know how to find my way around, but after a right and a left I lost concentration because a thought had just struck me. If there was no one at Auntie Jackie’s to answer the phone, then presumably there would be no one there to answer the doorbell either. This complication didn’t seem to have occurred to Rachel, who was sitting back, admiring the view, thoroughly at ease in her favourite form of transport.

29 Cliff Street was a tall, terraced house with railings outside and a basement window below the level of the pavement. Once white, it was now streaked with grey – not unlike a cliff in fact. There was a general air of shabbiness about the street, which made me feel quite sad. While I produced a ten-pound note from the mugger-proof zip pocket of my trousers, the driver unloaded the cases and carried them up to the front door – a piece of chivalry worth every penny of his 50p tip.

As I’d predicted, there was no one at home. A Post-it note had been stuck over the doorbell. BROKEN, PLEASE KNOCK it said in ink so faded that it suggested a longstanding problem. Rachel rapped forcefully on the knocker, and when this produced no results, shouted, “Hello?” through the letter box, snapping one of her fingernails as the flap sprang back, which didn’t improve her mood. “If only we didn’t have these stupid cases, we could go back into town and sit in a café,” she said, nursing her squared-off nail. She gave the knocker a last, defiant rap and the whole thing came off in her hand. “Oh, great.”

As if in response to this disturbance, the front door of the neighbouring house opened and an elderly woman appeared on the step. She was wearing a flowery dress and an inside out cardigan, and holding a tray of flapjacks which, for some mysterious reason, she tipped into the paper recycling box beside her. As she straightened up with some effort, she caught sight of us over the dividing wall. “Hello? Are you looking for Janice?” she said. Then, before we could correct her, added, “She went out in the car about an hour ago. She was going to get some shopping and then pick up some visitors at the station.”

“Well, we are the visitors,” said Rachel. “She didn’t turn up so we got a taxi. But there’s no one in.”

The woman peered over the wall at our cases. “Oh. Did you knock loudly? Charlie might be in – he sleeps during the day”

Rachel and I exchanged looks. This was the first we’d heard of any “Charlie”.

“We shouted through the letter box and everything,” I said.

“Oh dear, well, you can’t wait out on the doorstep. Come in here and have a cup of tea until Janice gets back.”

If I wasn’t such a polite person, and so desperate for a drink, I would have said no thanks, but the old woman had already turned back into the house so there was nothing for it but to follow, carrying our bags down the steps on to the pavement again and back up through next door’s gate.

I could sense Rachel beginning to simmer. Unless she had a cast-iron excuse on her eventual return, Auntie Jackie was likely to get an earful.

Our hostess was waiting in the long hallway beckoning us down a flight of stairs to the basement. “Leave your cases by the front door,” she sang out before hobbling ahead on feet so swollen it looked as though someone had filled her tights up with sand. “I’ll get my grandson to carry them round for you later.”

She was already filling an aluminium kettle from a rubber-snouted tap when we came into the room, which was exactly like a mock-up of a 1950s kitchen from a museum of domestic life. There was a free-standing stove and an enamel round-cornered fridge the colour of very old teeth. Beneath our feet the brown and orange checked lino rose and fell in a series of ripples, crackling slightly where we trod. A Welsh dresser looked ready to collapse under the weight of mountains of crockery, teapots, china ornaments, candlesticks, figurines, polished stones and bits of driftwood. From among this collection the old lady selected a porcelain urn, and ignoring the rising shriek of the kettle, measured out four teaspoons of black dust into a teapot.

“You must have one of my flapjacks,” she said, prising the lid off a biscuit tin which proved to contain nothing but a pile of used envelopes. She looked at them, mystified, for a second or two before laying the tin aside with a shrug. “How about a ham sandwich?” she said brightly

“No, thank you. Just tea would be lovely,” said Rachel, gesturing urgently towards the billows of steam pouring from the still-wailing kettle.

The old lady dived for the hob and snapped the gas off, and the room fell silent again. When she had tipped what was left of the boiling water on to the tea leaves, she wrenched open the fridge door and produced a sliced loaf and various cellophane packages, and began buttering bread, very fast, deaf to our protests.

Her task done, she turned back to us, beaming, holding a plate of limp sandwiches cut into eight triangles, the white bread still bearing the dimpled impression of her fingers. “There we are.” She looked at us expectantly.

“Thank you,” I said, helping myself to the least mauled of the triangles, and glaring at Rachel until she followed suit. The ham tasted slightly fishy Perhaps it wasn’t ham, I decided. Perhaps it was some form of beige, pressed fish. I ate two of the sandwiches, while Rachel nibbled delicately at the crust of her first one, and wondered how many we could leave on the plate without giving offence. I knew Rachel had no intention of sharing the obligation fifty-fifty: she tended to have sudden crippling attacks of vegetarianism on these occasions. The tea, at least, tasted recognisable, even if it was served in bone china cups so tiny they must have come from a teddy bears’ picnic.

“I wonder if we ought to have left a note on Auntie Jackie’s front door,” Rachel was saying, using this as an excuse to lay down her sandwich. “She won’t know we’re here.”

“Oh, yes. Perhaps we’d better go and see if she’s back,” the old lady agreed, as the two of us leapt to our feet. “It’s been lovely to meet you,” she said to me as we made our way along the corridor, and added confidentially, “I know your mother, you know.” And I now realised what had been dawning on me, oh so slowly all the time I had been in the house: she was completely and utterly mad.

As we reached the front door, it was pushed open by a guy of about nineteen who was holding a bicycle which he had evidently just carried up the steps. He had curly hair and thin oblong glasses and was dripping with sweat. We stood aside to let him pass into the house. He propped his bike against the wall and wiped his forehead on the edge of his T-shirt.

“Hello, dear,” said the old woman. “This is my grandson, Adam,” she explained. “These girls have come to visit Janice.”

“Jackie,” said Adam, not loudly enough for her to hear. He gave us an apologetic look.

“I said you’d carry their cases round for them later.”

“Oh, there’s no need,” said Rachel quickly. “We can manage. We’ve carried them halfway across London already”

Well, I did, I thought. You wheeled yours.

“It’s no trouble,” said Adam.

“If we could just have a piece of paper, we could leave a note to say where we are,” said Rachel, fishing in her bag for a biro.

“Why don’t you just borrow the spare key,” said Adam, selecting one from a row of hooks on the wall beside him. Rachel and I looked at each other.

“Do we have a key to Janice’s?” his grandmother said. “I didn’t know we had a key”

“She gave it to us because Charlie kept locking himself out.”

The old woman looked blank. “Who’s Charlie?”

This bewildering exchange was interrupted by the whoop of a siren which grew to a crescendo and then stopped as a police car pulled up at the kerb, lights flashing. The passenger door opened and a woman in a strappy sundress clambered out, showing rather a lot of leg. Her chunky calves were laced almost to the knee into high, cork-heeled espadrilles. She had long plum-coloured hair plaited into dozens of thin braids and gathered up into a sprouting ponytail high on her head. A pair of heavy chandelier earrings dragged at her earlobes. She flew up the steps towards us, blethering apologies.

Auntie Jackie.

Three Auntie Jackie

“You got here. Thank God!” Auntie Jackie advanced on Rachel and me with arms outstretched and crushed us against her in an uncomfortable three-way hug. “I’m so, so sorry I wasn’t at the station. I went to Asda to get something nice for your dinner and on the way back some lunatic jumped the lights and smacked into the side of me. My car’s a wreck. Luckily there were witnesses. Anyway,” she went on, releasing us at last, so we could uncrick our necks, “you’re here, safe and sound, and that’s the main thing.” She stepped back and looked us up and down, her eyes resting admiringly on the expanse of smooth tummy exposed by the ten-centimetre gap between the end of Rachel’s vest and the start of her skirt. “Your dad was right,” she sighed. “I’ll be beating the men off with a broom.” She seemed quite capable of it too, if that hug was anything to go by

“You look so much like your mum,” she said, turning to me, and for an awful moment I thought she was going to cry, but she contented herself with a last bruising hug. All this while, the policeman had been busily unloading plastic bags of groceries from the boot of his car and carrying them up to the door of number 29. I wondered if all Brighton’s policemen were this helpful.

“There you are, lovely lady,” he called out when the job was done and he was about to drive off. Auntie Jackie went haring down to the kerb and leant, head and shoulders, through the driver’s window to speak to him. In fact, from where I was standing, she looked as though she was giving him a kiss, but she couldn’t have been. Could she?

Without waiting to be asked, Adam disappeared back inside his house and emerged with our suitcases, one in each hand, and carted them next door.

“Adam’s at the university” Auntie Jackie said, as if this was some rare and marvellous feat. “So he knows all the fun places. Don’t you, Adam?”

He nodded placidly.

“Thank you for looking after them,” she went on, as she kicked a path between the piles of Asda bags to let us into the house.

He didn’t seem to take this as his cue to go, but stood, loitering awkwardly while Auntie Jackie unlocked the door. I wondered if he was waiting for a tip. Then just as I turned my back to follow Auntie Jackie and Rachel inside, he tapped me on the shoulder and said in an urgent whisper, “My gran didn’t give you any food, did she?”

“Yes,” I said, a trifle uneasily

Adam went white. “Oh my God,” he said. “She always does this.”

I didn’t have a chance to enquire what he meant as Auntie Jackie was calling from deep inside the house, so I picked up a few of the shopping bags and went inside, and when I turned round, he was gone.

My room was in the basement, along with the kitchen and a tiny, airless shower room. It faced the street and looked directly on to a wall, and, if I was lucky the passing feet and ankles of pedestrians. It felt strange to be down below pavement level, but the room was large and pretty with an open fireplace filled with chubby candles, and a sofa bed dressed up with satin cushions. It was home to assorted curiosities including an archery target, a double bass missing all but one string and a life-sized papier-mâché pig. Above the mantelpiece was a painting of a meaty nude, who bore a faint resemblance to Auntie Jackie, showing off a lot of underarm stubble and much else besides. More to my taste was a black and white photo on the opposite wall which showed a group of nuns punting on the Cherwell.

“This is usually the sitting room,” Auntie Jackie explained on our tour of the property. “But I’ve tried to tidy it up for you.”

The alternative was a recently decorated room on the first floor, bagged by Rachel because she said she was a fresh air freak and wouldn’t feel safe having the window open at night downstairs. Privately I thought it was more likely to be the double bed and the en suite that had persuaded her, but I didn’t mind. Not really. Auntie Jackie’s bedroom and an antiquated bathroom were also on this storey. The attic room at the top of the house was occupied by the lodger, Charlie, when in residence. He kept odd hours, we were told, because he was a professional musician who worked in the West End, and he liked to practise his trumpet when he got up in the afternoons, but apart from that, and a habit of locking himself out, gave very little trouble and was hardly ever in.

There were more Post-it notes, like the one over the doorbell, dotted around the house, offering warnings and reminders to past and present tenants. NO LOCK said the label on the loo door. DOOR CLOSED = OCCUPIED. Another, beside the oven, advised would-be chefs: TAKE BATTERY OUT OF SMOKE ALARM BEFORE USING GRILL. The most mysterious of all was stuck above a plug socket in the kitchen and said simply: NOT THIS ONE! On making enquiries, I was told that Charlie had once unplugged the freezer for a whole weekend while recharging his motorbike battery, resulting in the destruction of a month’s supply of Weight Watchers’ ready meals.

The whole of the ground floor was taken up by Auntie Jackie’s “business” – Ballgowns, Evening Wear and Accessories for Hire. The front room was entirely given over to dresses of every size and colour: rail upon rail of taffeta, silk, velvet and tulle; sequins, feathers and pearls. In the back were chests of drawers containing shawls and scarves and elbow-length gloves, and above our heads, beaded evening bags hung in clusters like chandeliers. In one corner was a curtained changing cubicle, and the rest of the space was occupied by a workbench and sewing machine, for repairs and alterations. Dad, typically, had got it wrong and told us Auntie Jackie worked in a second hand clothes shop, which made it sound one step up from a car boot sale.

The pride of the collection was displayed on a tailor’s dummy in a glass case. It was a midnight blue strapless dress which flowed out from knee level into a fishtail of hundreds of tissue-thin layers, all embroidered with sprays of silver stars. I wondered why it had been singled out for this attention – it was one of the least ostentatious of the lot – until Rachel gave me a nudge and pointed to a framed photograph on the opposite wall, and it suddenly made sense. In the picture, greeting a line-up of celebrities and smiling her famous, modest smile, was Princess Diana in that very same dress.

“Is that really…?” I asked Auntie Jackie.

She nodded, amused by our gawping. “You’d have been too young to remember, but Princess Diana auctioned off most of her wardrobe for charity in 1997. I’d just got an insurance payout for a whiplash injury – nearly $18,000 – and I blew the whole lot on one dress. I didn’t have the business then – I just wanted it for myself. My husband was hopping mad: he didn’t speak to me for a week. And then within two months she was dead.”

There was a solemn pause as we looked again at the holy object.

“Have you ever worn it?” asked Rachel.

Auntie Jackie shook her head. “Sadly, no.”

“Because it’s too precious?”

“No. Because I’m too bloody fat. Every time I try a new diet I think ‘I’ll be wearing Diana’s dress by Christmas!’ but it never happens.”

“It must be worth a fortune,” said Rachel wistfully She was probably thinking how much stuff she could get from Topshop if she put it on eBay

“Priceless,” Auntie Jackie agreed. “But I’ll never sell it. I could end up living in a cardboard box under the promenade, but I’ll still have my dress. They can bury me in it – it’ll probably fit me like a glove when I’ve died of starvation.”

“I wouldn’t sell it either,” I said. Although I’m the Sensible One, I do have a romantic streak.

Auntie Jackie left us to unpack and “freshen up”, as she called it, while she put away her groceries and began to prepare dinner. I could hear her clattering around in the kitchen cupboards and singing along to the radio, while I hung my few decent clothes in the wardrobe. In the absence of any empty drawers, I left the rest in the bottom of the suitcase, which I pushed under the bed. Various other items from home – my clarinet, music stand, books, tennis racquet – I deposited around the room as though marking out my territory It was only now that I came to unpack that I realised how little I’d brought. We had left in too much of a hurry. The last item to be rehoused was a cream shawl, crocheted in softest baby wool, which I used to cover up a depressed-looking armchair. It was the only thing I owned that my mother had made especially for me, which made it even more priceless in its way than Princess Diana’s dress.