The Reinvention of Ivy Brown by Roberta Taylor

Author:Roberta Taylor [TAYLOR, ROBERTA]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Literature
ISBN: 9781848877825
Publisher: Atlantic Books
Published: 2010-01-05T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twenty-One

1963 | MARCH

Janet had surprised herself as much as anyone else. She couldn’t stop looking at her reflection, in the glint of the bus window, in every shop she passed.

The weather was still punishing, but there was a sense that it might soon move on to something more bearable. Every now and then she would put her hands over her ears. Her Fair Isle woolly gloves felt slightly damp. She wished she’d worn a scarf now. Italian Tony would have something to say, she thought to herself. And, of course, he did.

‘G’morning, young lady, and what have you done to yourself now I ask myself? Your face will fall off in these conditions.’ He craned and swivelled his neck in all directions without moving from behind the counter. He never seemed to notice that whenever his mouth formed an ‘F’, at the beginning, middle or end of a word, a light aerosol of spit would spray out from his protruding front teeth. He passed her the chocolate; she handed over her sixpence and retreated.

‘I like my ladies with long hair, you no more my girlfriend,’ he shouted after her. Janet turned at the door and gave him a twinkly happy smile.

‘I sack you. You’re fired,’ he roared. She could still hear him chortling at his own joke by the time she was two shops away.

It had all been done on the spur. There she was looking into the hairdresser’s window, trying to see their prices, and was dragged in before she knew what had hit her. And all for free, with a cup of tea and two custard creams thrown in.

Janet peeped round the arc of the corner and saw Brian leaning against the marble pillar by the entrance. The commissionaire was standing on the top step, talking down to him. Her ribs palpitated. They were expecting her, knew what time she would appear, as they always did, but she was almost on top of them before they recognized who she was.

They stared in disbelief. The awkwardness straightened up the commissionaire and he returned inside, to his post at the monumental reception desk.

‘You don’t like it, do you?’

From yesterday’s sweet schoolgirl hairdo, kept neat and organized under her black-velvet Alice band, here she was, in exactly the same clothes, yet somehow a freshly minted wonder. Brian ogled her grown-up loveliness.

‘You look a bit… French… yeah, sort of foreign,’ he said. Her wide bony face, framed by this newly cropped halo of dark hair, showed off her arched eyebrows, the large warm eyes, straight nose and baby mouth.

‘I know who it is, that French actress who played St Joan.’

‘I never saw it,’ she said.

‘No, nor me, but a few years ago the advertising boards were everywhere.’ He stood stock-still, looking at her as if she were some sort of Christmas-present bombshell.

‘I’d better go in, else I’ll be late.’

He inched closer, surreptitiously grabbed her hand to his side, kissed her exposed ear and said, ‘I love it, I think you are absolutely beautiful.

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