Joan and her brother Eddie went to live with their widowed grandmother in Bromley when she was three and he was eleven. Their father had died of a heart attack just before Joan’s birth and their mother was felled by cancer when Joan turned three. Gran had a two-bedroomed terraced house. She and Joan slept in the front bedroom, Eddie in the smaller back one. Gran worked long hours in the rag trade but she ran a tight ship at home and they all had their domestic jobs. Gran couldn’t stand even a speck of dust in the house. When the coalman came to shunt his sacks into the bin outside she covered the floors and furniture in the back room with sheets of newspaper. She craved an end-of-terrace house so that he could take his filthy, blackened hessian bags up the side alley but none ever came up for rent. She’d hover around him, warning him not to touch anything, monitoring his mucky boots. Sometimes, to annoy her, he’d pretend to lose his balance and her hands would fly to her face in silent agony.
The house was chilly during the day but on a winter’s evening, with the coal fire well stoked, there was nowhere cosier. When Gran arrived back from work they would make pilchards on toast and she’d tell them how she’d machined twenty skirts that day, or stitched three dozen collars. Sometimes she brought back clothes she’d got cheap because they were seconds. Joan was the first girl in the street to have a pair of loon pants and Eddie cut a dash in hipster trousers when they were just reaching the shops.
Joan was fifteen when Eddie disappeared. By then he had rented a tiny flat in Islington but he often stayed with them on a Friday or Saturday night and his room was kept ready for him. Gran would put a hot water bottle between his sheets on winter weekends to make sure that they were properly aired. His chest, weakened by bouts of childhood asthma, was easily affected by damp.
After they heard the terrible news Gran insisted on maintaining his room just as it was on the last Sunday morning they had seen him. She literally wasted away in front of Joan’s eyes, worn out with grieving for him. Joan would hear her crying in the night, deep sobs against the pillow in her bed by the window, sobs that went on month after month. Joan stopped crying after a couple of weeks. She seemed to have used up all her tears. She felt dry and tight inside and remote, as if nothing much would ever matter again. She didn’t know how to comfort her gran. She was a young fifteen, tongue-tied and awkward. What could she find to say to a woman of sixty-six who had raised two families and outlived a child and grandchild?
Her grandmother died when Joan was eighteen. She was alone in the world then apart from an aunt who’d rowed with Gran and kept her distance and a couple of cousins who’d moved out to Essex, shaking the dust of the inner city from their feet. They had never been one of those close cockney families who were supposed to inhabit London. Joan would wonder if those families ever truly existed – she had never met any of them. At times it occurred to her that she had been handed a raw deal, orphaned and then deprived of the two people closest to her. The sight of her single plate and cup on the kitchen table could make her heart knock.
Gran left her exactly one hundred pounds. Joan put it in a building society and carried on renting the house. She had left school at sixteen with four O-levels. The teachers said that she was good enough to stay on and do secretarial training, maybe head to college eventually. Eddie had been of that opinion too; he’d said that when the time came he’d help her choose a course. But then he’d gone, everything changed and Joan couldn’t see herself as college material. She didn’t have much self-confidence to start with and what had happened to Eddie made her inclined to keep her head down. The world seemed an unpredictable place. She preferred to tackle the small, domestic issues of life, move in a familiar groove where there were certainties. That was why the agency work suited her so well; things had to be done on set days at set times and this pattern rarely varied. The wider scene – politics, the environment, world problems, the chaos resulting from wars and famine – she ignored; other people were welcome to worry about and deal with those problems. She never bought a newspaper and watched only variety shows, soap operas and films on TV.
When she left school she went to work in a bakery, then in the ladies’ clothes shop where she stayed until she moved to Alice’s agency. At twenty-two she married Bernard Douglas, who had been in her class at school and turned up at her door now and again when he wasn’t driving long-distance lorries. It hadn’t lasted long and she had felt relief tinged with only a shade of melancholy when he had written from Düsseldorf to say he’d got a job based there and he wanted a divorce. She had married him because of panic, seeing that other women of her age were setting up home, choosing curtains and carpets. His motives were unclear. His absences had pervaded the house and even when he was there he imposed so little of himself on it that he left no vacuum when he took off for a trip to the continent. He was capable in a slow, unwitting way, good at practical tasks and she had confused this with dependability, ignoring the evidence that a man who chose to let his work regularly take him far from home might not have domestic interests at heart. The divorce left her with mended window latches, a new drain pipe and guttering. Occasionally she would recall the stale plastic-and-oil smell of his lorry cab and the duty-free brandy fumes he breathed on her as he came through the door.
Resolutely she put her mistake behind her, saved regular amounts and eventually had enough for the deposit on her flat in Leyton. It was on the first floor of a three-storey fifties block, one-bedroomed with no garden but she’d loved it the moment she had set eyes on it. There was a Grace Ashley verse that said:
Give me a room
And I will paint it with love’s loving colours,
Cushion it with heart’s ease
And it will be our cherished home.
Joan had worked those lines into a tapestry when she moved to her flat. It hung in its frame on the living-room wall. She went and read it over to herself on that night when Nina had appeared depressed about her marriage. It meant even more now that she was preparing a home for herself and Rich. The paint for the living room was standing ready inside the front door. They had selected white with a hint of buttercup for the walls and deep yellow gloss for the skirting board and radiator. Joan had spent the previous weekend stripping off the old wallpaper and putting up lining paper. When she told Alice what she was doing, her friend had offered to come and give her a hand with the painting. She was lonely herself, that was why she spent so much time at work. Joan understood that her business had replaced her family, who had abandoned her. Her one son had become a drug user, then joined a road protest group and was living up a tree somewhere. Her husband had taken off with his optician years ago, clearing out their joint bank account the day he left. According to Alice, all that had remained of fifteen years of marriage were his golf clubs and a stack of pornographic magazines stashed in the back of the wardrobe. It was generous of her to root so strongly for Joan and Rich, advising that they should grab whatever happiness came their way. Some people’s scars made them resentful of their friends’ good fortune.
Alice arrived promptly at eight that evening, dressed in overalls. She had brought her own roller and tray so that they could do two walls each.
‘How are you getting on with that new woman, Nina Rawle?’ she asked as they worked.
‘Okay.