A Vision of Loveliness - By Louise Levene Page 0,4
Batwing sleeve. Mock turtle. Geelong lambswool. Single-ply. Two-ply. Intarsia. Argyll. A whole new dialect. He rang at home to say she could start the day after she finished school.
‘Who was that man on the phone? What did he want? Strange men on my phone.’
Auntie Doreen was not happy at the idea of a West End job. Jane fancied herself. Even the promise of forty bob a week for Jane’s keep didn’t really make up for it. Doreen couldn’t remember the last time she went to the West End. What was cashmere anyway? Goats? No thank you.
Vanda was very disappointed. Mona was retiring next year and she had hoped. Particularly after she had taken the trouble to train Jane in the business. But Edie was a sweet woman really. She gave Jane a very nice reference – ‘glowing’, Mr Philip called it – and a blouse to start work in. A rather nice striped lawn to wear with her navy gaberdine. ‘You watch out for that Mr Drayke. They can take advantage.’
The spiteful east wind flounced the length of the shopping parade and ripped easily through Jane’s cheap coat – three-quarter-length flannel grey bouclé, Magyar sleeve, cape collar and showy red buttons the size of liquorice bootlaces. She had bought it – or had been sold it, rather – in the previous January’s sale at Marshall and Snelgrove and regretted it the instant she got it home. It looked awful but it was still the warmest thing she had. The chill rose up from the pavement, freezing her knees, icing the bare tops of her thighs. She could feel her shoulders starting to curl up round her ears, sense her ribcage tightening to avoid breathing in the painfully cold night air. All wrong. Walk like a princess! A girl who walks beautifully is one of life’s thrills. Pretend two cords are tied around your ears, pulling you skyward. Your earlobes should be in a straight line with your shoulder.
She swung her carrier bag lightly – only not so lightly. She remembered the handbag with a sudden twinge of guilt and embarrassment. Why hadn’t she just handed it in at the bar? You’d have had to get to the bar first of course. Never mind. She could take it back to the pub tomorrow and say there had been a mistake.
She had reached the avenue now. The stained-glass front doors glowed faintly all along the street. Occasionally a thin slice of light escaped from between the skimpy cotton curtains of an upstairs window but there were no matching lights in the downstairs front rooms. Everyone was home – it was gone seven – but they were all out the back having their teas. For two or three weeks each winter a Christmas tree (usually an everlasting affair of wire and tinsel) would twinkle tartily in the bay windows of the darkened parlours, unseen by their owners but only visitors or funerals or Christmas Day would ever make it worth opening and heating the front room.
She walked a few yards past the house so that she could perform a nice Paris turn: Right foot forward, toes out slightly. Left foot across and in front with the weight well forward. Use the right foot to pivot you to the right, left leg straight. Pause fleetingly with weight on the left foot before moving off again on the right. Jane had watched the house models doing it at the big-store fashion shows and she had practised with a book that had a pattern of little black and white feet for you to follow. She fell over the first time she tried.
She closed the front gate carefully. Her aunt had a horror of dogs (what dogs?) getting into the ‘front garden’, a crudely concreted patch with a hole left for a dusty hydrangea bush which was now wearing its winter wardrobe of dead brown blooms. It had once had vivid, Capri-blue flowers but Aunt Doreen resented the idea of having to feed it whatever it was that kept it blue and it had sulked back, summer by summer, to a dirty, tooth-powder pink.
The Christmas tree was back in the cupboard under the stairs and the gap in Doreen’s elaborately swagged net curtains left a theatrical little space in the middle of the windowsill for her treasured ‘Royal Doulton’ figurine, a cheesy Victorian miss in a fat pink crinoline. It wasn’t actually Royal Doulton. The real Royal Doulton one (a wedding present) had been smashed by a