Her voice trails away. There is a slight pause in the conversation.
‘Um,’ says Alison.
‘That’s drink,’ says Maureen, decisively. ‘Poor bloody Derek. What a ball-breaker to have married.’ Derek was Maureen’s childhood sweetheart. What a romantic, platonic idyll! She nearly married him once, twice, three times. Once in the very early days, before Kim, before anyone, when Derek was selling books from a barrow in Hoxton market. Once again, after Kim and before the professor, by which time Derek was taking expensive photographs of the trendy and successful — only then Erica turned up in Derek’s bed, long-legged, disdainful, beautiful, with a model’s precise and organised face, and the fluty tones of the girl who’d bought her school uniform at Harrods, and that was the end of that. Not that Derek had ever exactly proposed to Maureen; not that they’d ever even been to bed together: they just knew each other and each other’s bed partners so well that each knew what the other was thinking, feeling, hoping. Both from Hoxton, East London: Derek, Maureen; and a host of others, too. What was there, you might ask, about that particular acre of the East End which over a period of a few years gave birth to such a crop of remarkable children, such a flare-up of human creativity in terms of writing, painting, designing, entertaining? Changing the world? One might almost think God had chosen it for an experiment in intensive talent-breeding. Mauromania, God-sent.
And then there was another time in the late sixties, when there was a short break between Derek and Erica — Erica had a hysterectomy against Derek’s wishes; but during those two weeks of opportunity Maureen, her business flourishing, her designs world famous, Mauromania a label for even trendy young queens (royal, that is) to boast, rich beyond counting — during those two special weeks of all weeks Maureen fell head over heels classically in love with Pedro: no, not a fisherman, but as good as — Italian, young, open-shirted, sloe-eyed, a designer. And Pedro, it later transpired, was using Maureen as a means to laying all the models, both male and female (Maureen had gone into menswear). Maureen was the last to know, and by the time she did Derek was in Erica’s arms (or whatever) again. A sorry episode. Maureen spent six months at a health farm, on a diet of grapes and brown rice. At the end of that time Mauromania Man had collapsed, her business manager had jumped out of a tenth-floor window, and an employee’s irate mother was bringing a criminal suit against Maureen personally for running a brothel. It was all quite irrational. If the employee, a runaway girl of, it turned out, only thirteen, but looking twenty, and an excellent seamstress, had contracted gonorrhoea whilst in her employ, was that Maureen’s fault? The judge, sensibly, decided it wasn’t, and that the entire collapse of British respectability could not fairly be laid at Maureen’s door. Legal costs came to more than £12,000: the country house and stables had to be sold at a knock-down price. That was disaster year.
And who was there during that time to hold Maureen’s hand? No one. Everyone, it seemed, had troubles enough of their own. And all the time, Maureen’s poor heart bled for Pedro, of the ridiculous name and the sloe eyes, long departed, laughing, streptococci surging in his wake. And of all the old friends and allies only Ruthie and Alison lingered on, two familiar faces in a sea of changing ones, getting younger every day, and hungrier year by year not for fun, fashion, and excitement, but for money, promotion, security, and acknowledgment.
The staff even went on strike once, walking up and down outside the workshop with placards announcing hours and wages, backed by Maoists, women’s liberationists and trade unionists, all vying for their trumpery allegiance, puffing up a tiny news story into a colossal media joke, not even bothering to get Maureen’s side of the story — absenteeism, drug addiction, shoddy workmanship, falling markets, constricting profits.
But Ruthie gave birth to Poppy, unexpectedly, in the black and gold ladies’ rest room (customers only — just as well it wasn’t in the staff toilets where the plaster was flaking and the old wall-cisterns came down on your head if you pulled the chain) and that cheered everyone up. Business perked up, staff calmed down as unemployment rose. Poppy, born of Mauromania, was everyone’s favourite, everyone’s mascot. Her father, only seventeen, was doing two years inside, framed by the police for dealing in pot. He did not have too bad a time — he got three A-levels and university entrance inside, which he would not have got outside, but it meant poor little Poppy had to do without a father’s care and Ruthie had to cope on her own. Ruthie of the ribs.
Alison, meanwhile, somewhat apologetically, had married Hugo, a rather straight and respectable actor who believed in women’s rights; they had three children and lived in a cosy house with a garden in Muswell Hill: Alison even belonged to the PTA! Hugo was frequently without work, but Hugo and Alison managed, between them, to keep going and even happy. Now Hugo thinks Alison should ask for a rise, but Alison doesn’t like to. That’s the trouble about working for a friend and being only a nominal partner.
‘Don’t let’s talk about Erica Bisham any more,’ says Maureen. ‘It’s too draggy a subject.’ So they don’t.
But one midnight a couple of weeks later, when Maureen, Ruthie and Alison are working late to meet an order — as is their frequent custom these days (and one most unnerving to Hugo, Alison’s husband) — there comes a tap on the door. It’s Erica, of course. Who else would tap, in such an ingratiating fashion? Others cry ‘Hi!’ or ‘Peace!’ and enter.
Erica, smiling nervously and crookedly; her yellow hair eccentric in the extreme; bushy in places, sparse in others. Couldn’t she wear a wig? She is wearing a Marks & Spencer nightie which not even Ruthie would think of wearing, in the house or out of it. It is bloodstained down the back. (Menstruation is not yet so fashionable as to be thus demonstrable, though it can be talked about at length.) A strong smell of what? alcohol, or is it nail varnish? hangs about her. Drinking again. (Alison’s husband, Hugo, in a long period of unemployment, once veered on to the edge of alcoholism but fortunately veered off again, and the smell of nail varnish, acetone, gave a warning sign of an agitated, overworked liver, unable to cope with acetaldehyde, the highly toxic product of alcohol metabolism.)
‘Could I sit down?’ says Erica. ‘He’s locked me out. Am I speaking oddly? I think I’ve lost a tooth. I’m hurting under my ribs and I feel sick.’
They stare at her — this drunk, dishevelled, trouble-making woman.
‘He,’ says Maureen finally. ‘Who’s he?’
‘Derek.’
‘You’re going to get into trouble, Erica,’ says Ruthie, though more kindly than Maureen, ‘if you go round saying dreadful things about poor Derek.’
‘I wouldn’t have come here if there was anywhere else,’ says Erica.
‘You must have friends,’ observes Maureen, as if to say, Don’t count us amongst them if you have.
‘No.’ Erica sounds desolate. ‘He has his friends at work. I don’t seem to have any.’
‘I wonder why,’ says Maureen under her breath; and then, ‘I’ll get you a taxi home, Erica. You’re in no state to be out.’
‘I’m not drunk, if that’s what you think.’
‘Who ever is,’ sighs Ruthie, sewing relentlessly on. Four more blouses by one o’clock. Then, thank God, bed.
Little Poppy has passed out on a pile of orange ostrich feathers. She looks fantastic.
‘If Derek does beat you up,’ says Alison, who has seen her father beat her mother on many a Saturday night, ‘why don’t you go to the police?’
‘I did once, and they told me to go home and behave myself.’ ‘Or leave him?’ Alison’s mother left Alison’s father. ‘Where would I go? How would I live? The children? I’m not well.’ Erica sways. Alison puts a chair beneath her. Erica sits, legs planted wide apart, head down. A few drops of blood fall on the floor. From Erica’s mouth, or elsewhere? Maureen doesn’t see, doesn’t care. Maureen’s on the phone, calling radio cabs who do not reply.
‘I try not to provoke him, but I never know what’s going to set him