A Vision of Loveliness - By Louise Levene Page 0,16
did people touch mirrors? – and stood with her back to the stock gazing out at the arcade through the window display where the coloured cashmeres were suspended on their glass shelves like fully fashioned tropical fish.
Bennett kept up a merciless running commentary on the passers-by as they bustled along.
‘Have you seen these two?’
A pair of identically dressed girls dashed by: very ‘with-it’, very Chelsea, with red woolly tights and matching red berets on top of their shiny bobbed hair which was cut in hard lines round their faces like the hair on a cartoon character. They wore A-line flannel coats well above their knees with big shiny red buttons – like a really, really embarrassing school uniform.
Brigitta looked out of the window as she tripped past on her way back down to the basement after her tea break. She was Dutch but she could bore you to death in six languages. Her saving grace was that she swore all the time. She would never have sworn in Dutch, but she picked up dirty little scraps of English like a tramp rooting through a dustbin. It was a miracle she didn’t swear at the customers really.
‘Whoever cut those fucking jackets should cut another jacket and then be shot.’
She’d got that one from a little Jewish alterations tailor and she used it a lot.
You didn’t call her Brigitta to her face. You called her Mrs Taylor. Brigitta had been married very, very briefly to an Englishman she met nearly ten years ago while they were both working in the same department store. Bennett always reckoned it was just one of those friendly arrangements to get a work permit and that the split was all very amicable but Jane knew what really happened. Brigitta had had three Dubonnets and four glasses of punch at the Christmas party (table for twenty at the Cumberland Hotel) and had cornered Jane and explained that Mr Taylor had expected to be able to put his dirty great thing into Mrs Taylor whenever he felt like it.
‘I told him to stick it up his arse,’ said Brigitta and Jane said that would be a good trick if he could do it and Brigitta shot Dubonnet straight out of her nose.
Brigitta was, technically, still married to Mr Taylor but a week after the honeymoon she’d moved back into the salesladies’ hostel behind Marshall and Snelgrove, a miserable great barracks of a place where a girl could find refuge. Anyone with a gentleman caller had to wheel her bed out into the corridor. No gentlemen ever called. Mr Taylor was now living with his common-law wife in Carshalton Beeches and Brigitta eventually got herself a two-room flat near Clapham Common.
A very large woman in a mink coat had parked in front of the window.
Bennett pulled a face.
‘Oh no, Madam. Not in that size, Madam. Please!’
But Madam came in anyway. Very, very loud voice. Pointed to a baby-pink batwing-sleeved number in the window.
‘I’d like to see that in nigger brown in a size 48.’ No ‘good morning’.
‘I’m not sure if we still have that shade, Madam. It’s been a very popular line. But if you’d like to step downstairs one of our ladies can show you what we have. Mrs Taylor? Perhaps you could show Madam something attractive in nigger brown?’
Jane could hear the suppressed giggles and the whispered ‘Sidney Poitier’ but fortunately the customer didn’t. Brigitta hadn’t much to go on but she soon set to work persuading Madam that what she wanted was not a nigger brown, batwing-sleeved boat neck but a duck-egg blue, edge-to-edge cardigan. Unfortunately even the largest size didn’t allow edge to meet edge over Madam’s enormous tits. The most ‘generous proportions’ can be made to appear attractive when allied with perfect posture – look at the Queen Mother.
‘This style does run very small, Madam,’ said Mrs Taylor’s voice, apologetically. ‘I’ll just run upstairs to the stockroom and get you the next size.’
Brigitta stopped when she got to Jane and Bennett and immediately snipped the size labels off the 48 in her hand before pulling the cardigan as wide as it could possibly go. Cashmere can be any size you want. After the cardigan had had its nice little ‘schlap’, she folded it, put it in a bag and slipped back downstairs.
‘Oh yes, that’s better. Mind you the sleeve seems a bit short.’
You could hear the faintest sneer in Brigitta’s voice. ‘Short? Oh NO, Madam. Bracelet length.’