Chapter 34: Juliet - The Golden Hours

Juliet, on her way to Wapping for the first time in her life, swished with good humour. Wapping! She’d never even opened that page in the A–Z. Earlier that morning, in the station cafe, Neville had re-broken the spine when he opened it to show her, and drawn a little heart on the spot where they would meet. He’d written down the directions for her, trying at the same time to hold hands, and to apologise for not being able to come with her now, and to reassure her that he’d be along later, the pier-master’s wife was sorting out the domestic details, the rent was paid, all would be well. He looked so sweet and excited.

Her suitcase felt small. She’d had to leave a lot of things at Louise’s, but she could fetch them later, when everything was settled. Louise had been more than generous, letting her stay there rent-free, and now Stella would be leaving it would be best for Louise to have the flat to herself. Juliet knew Louise had found her trying at times. She’d be relieved. Of course, it was a pity she hadn’t been able to tell Louise anything. Sometimes you do have to seize the day! She’d tidied up at least. Left the bedding folded. And she would write to explain. She had an audition next week, and she’d probably better see Louise then.

She hadn’t seen the boat, but she knew that even if he couldn’t come every night, or even every weekend, she’d be happy, because it would be theirs. They could just sleep curled up, have tea together, go to the pub, which was called The Prospect of Whitby – something about the name made them laugh so much. How could you have a prospect of Whitby from London? Whitby was hundreds of miles away. Anyway, nobody would know them and they would just be quiet and happy. Even if they could never marry, they could live together as brother and sister. Which is what they were, after all. Love is love, isn’t it? Who gets to define that? Who is to tell anyone else what love should be like? They were finding their way to be together.

At the other end lay a different world. She came off the bus on Ratcliffe Highway, and found herself humming the old folk tune about the recruiting party come beating their drum. She cut through the churchyard, past the handsome church, and there was the water. This was not the bucolic river of Mortlake and Chiswick. Instead, an industrial scene lay before her, the water gun-metal and grubby, tall brick buildings, scrappy-looking hangars, warehouses, and men everywhere, shouting, hefting, working. Slippery cobbles and paving; the sky a grey gap. Cranes and rigs, chains and brackets, gantries, scaffolds and fire escapes. The smell of the water – it wasn’t the river, she realised, she wasn’t sure where the river actually was – rose up oily and strange.

She followed his directions: carry on round, ask for Shadwell Pierhead, just before the bridge. She’d thought it would be Tower Bridge, or at least a bridge across the river, but it was more like a kind of metal drawbridge with – was that a lock? She’d never understood locks.

Nobody at the pierhead knew anything about her. She put down her suitcase, sat on a barrel, looked at her watch, at her shoes, and waited.

After a while, a man in a heavy donkey jacket was looking at her.

‘Miz Cazalet?’ he said. It could be Miss, or could be Mrs.

‘Yes,’ she said, and he came and lifted her case. She followed him: across the bridge and down the other side. ‘Wapping Wall,’ he said, as traffic trundled by. Then he cut down an alley, past tall buildings of old brickwork and dark looming roofs, and stopped. ‘There you go, love,’ he said.

The tide was out. Stretches of sand and mud lay revealed beneath sodden wooden piers and the wet stone quay. A hulk, large, dark, swathed in tousles of green weed, lurched alongside, at a definite angle on the greasy mud. Their hulk. Standing on top – was there a special name for the top? – a gull perched, gazing down its nose at her, looking exactly like Sir John Gielgud in a particularly snooty mood. Other than that there was no sign of life.

A slimy-looking green plank led from the quay to the side of the boat. Its running boards, she thought, though no, they’re decks of course. Anyway, they were very narrow, and reminded her somehow of a car’s tyre. She looked at the plank, and suddenly, for the first time, wondered about the plumbing. Did Neville know that girls have periods?

The donkey-jacket man leapt ahead, then turned back and took her hand. ‘Welcome aboard,’ he said, opening a doorway/hatch, with some difficulty. ‘Water’s connected, coal box is full. Stove’s there’ – he scrambled down a ladder of some kind and was nodding to what looked like a metal box with a tube sticking out the top. ‘Galley’s there –’ nodding backwards ‘– main cabin forrad,’ he said. ‘Heads are aft.’

It was colder than the Fakenham ballroom in midwinter. The cold was wet. There was no table, so she put her case on a sort of bench that lined the sloping wall, painted a purpley brown, smelling of mushrooms and urine. The only boat she’d been on before was the cousins’ dinghy, sailing on sunny blue-skied Norfolk afternoons. It had not been like this.

She lit a cigarette. The flame, its liveliness and flash of heat, gave her a tiny comfort.

‘Thank you,’ she said.

‘Anyfing you need,’ he said kindly as he left.

He thinks we’re absolutely stark staring mad, she thought.

She stared at a red iron thing under what looked like a gas ring. Tank? Was that the word? Pipes came off it. She looked around for a light switch: anything to cut the gloom. She could find no light switch, and then she could find no lamp, no wire, ah, no electricity. She found some candles, though, in a withered box of grey cardboard, nibbled by, well, mice, let’s hope. She found a sink under a warped wooden cover, and a dusty jam jar with a dead spider in it. She shook the spider out, put the candle in the jar, the jar on the floor, and the flame of her lighter to the wick. The arrangement was skew-whiff – the floor was skew-whiff! – so she melted the bottom of the candle a little with the lighter, so as to make it stand straight. When the tide comes in, she thought, the boat will level, and then what I’ve made straight now will be not straight after all.

Melted wax dripped into the top of her lighter, putting it out.

The candle burned steadily. It’s silly, she thought, but the flame does take the edge off.

She hung her clothes, worked out how to use the gas ring, and filled her hot water bottle to put in the newly made-up biggest bunk even though it was nowhere near bedtime. She’d thought ahead! Everybody knows boats are cold. She changed into jeans and a jumper, and pulled her hair into a ponytail. Blew the candle out. Went outside. Standing on the roof – which wouldn’t be flat even when the boat was – she stared around. In three directions there was river, somehow murky and light at the same time, silvery yet muddy, familiar yet . . . She’d never been scared of the river at home. This is the same river, she told herself, but it didn’t seem to be. She heard voices, and turned to look behind her, to the quay. Someone came down the alley she had come by, and moved on downriver. It’s public, she thought. Up to her left, tall warehouses, then a lower, older building. It had a wooden construction up it, like balconies, one with The PROSPECT of WHITBY painted on it. Very close! she thought. People were sitting there, drinking, talking, laughing. A man in a cap noticed her and waved.

At the back of the boat was a double door, and a lower area where she’d be able to sit and not be seen. She could make it nice. She could. She found what she supposed was the loo: a cupboard containing a loo with no seat, a damp-looking roll of loo paper, some knobs and handles. It stank. She closed the door on it.

She’d saved money by not paying rent for the past months. Matches, lighter, more candles, wood polish and cloths. A cushion or two, she thought, heading for the shops.

There was a shop, run by a sweaty man. It seemed to sell mainly tins, stove-blacking and packets of Angel Delight. Later, her string bag full (though not with a cushion), she found a steamed-up caff on Milk Yard, where more men in donkey jackets were eating baked beans and huge pink sausages. They shifted and grunted at her entrance. The lady in the housecoat and turban behind the counter said, ‘Never you mind them, love, what can I do for you?’ Juliet ordered a cup of tea, an egg on toast. ‘Are you the new lady on the Kenneth?’ the woman asked, when she brought her food over.

Can it really be called Kenneth? She’d thought Neville was joking. He’d had a jellyfish called Bexhill, after all, why wouldn’t he have a boat called Kenneth? She found herself smiling.

‘Yes!’ she said, rather radiantly. ‘Just moving on board!’ She hoped this was the correct lingo.

Eggs and tea filled her with new hope. She would roll up her sleeves and pull on her new yellow rubber gloves, and she would scrub – well, not the decks, but the floors, indoors. You probably didn’t call it indoors. She would polish the portholes. She’d buy a bunch of daffodils. She would be game and feisty like a girl in a story. Swallows and Amazons sprang to mind. She could do that. She knew she looked nice in jeans. There were only two ways a girl could go in this situation, and she was not going to be the droopy chain-smoking suicidal one. She was going to break her fingernails, if that’s what it took.

She used the loo at the caff before heading back to the Kenneth, and resolved always to leave the lady a tip. She had no idea how or where she was going to shave her legs, or even wash – the sink in the galley? – and she was pretty sure the audition next week would call for a bikini.

Neville arrived just as the sun was going down, with daffodils – oh good! – a bottle of champagne – ‘It’s still quite cold,’ he said – and a packet of fish fingers. He dropped the flowers on the bulwark as he clambered in to embrace her. ‘Oh, it’s looking lovely,’ he said gratifyingly, and found some mugs, as there were no glasses. Up on the tarry roof of the cabin, they toasted themselves, and each other. ‘HMS You and Me!’ he said, clinking mugs, which would have been cheesy from anybody else. The champagne tasted slightly of instant coffee.

Arms around each other, they stared at the cloudy grey sunset.

She wanted to say something significant, but she couldn’t, and she wasn’t sure why not.

The audition did call for a bikini. She arrived early, and did her legs in the basin in the ladies’ at the studio. Then they all stood in a line, shivering prettily, and the men in their shirtsleeves and loose ties looked them up and down, and called out the ones they wanted, by number. She was called. Her role was ‘Girl in Bath’: she was to sit in a bath full of foam, and yell ‘Get orf!’ to Sid James. She was over the moon. It involved some party scenes as well; she would be Crowd. Party scenes were excellent. Pretty clothes, you meet people, and they could take days to shoot, which meant more money.

Boat life could have been all right, if there had been anything else around. But there wasn’t. There was the steamed-up caff and The Prospect of Whitby, but they were both full of dockers, and it was uncomfortable to go in alone. She couldn’t cook (even if they had an oven, which they didn’t), and he didn’t want to (though he was rather good at it). They could, in theory, live on crisps and pickled eggs, stale digestives and Angel Delight, tea and fry-ups. In theory. But he liked Indian food, and rare steak at little Italian restaurants, and she liked cold white wine and cream cakes and flirty waiters. Every time the tide rose, and the curious little lurch told her they were no longer supported by two thousand years of London mud, she thought the hull was going to drift apart. Each time the tide fell, and the wet thud and squelch told her they were settling back down, once she was sure the boat was still in one piece she felt relief. Whatever angle it had settled at.

Her clothes were becoming mildewy.

She’d written to Louise:

Dear Louise,

I’m so sorry I had to leave in a hurry – something came up and it just couldn’t wait but at least I gave you notice earlier . . . I know you’ll be glad to have the sitting room back, though, and I really did overstay my welcome but thank you SO much for your generosity. I’m living with a friend now and will come soon for the rest of my stuff. The audition went well didn’t it! I’m sorry there’s no phone here but I’ll come one morning to pick up the details; they told me the dates anyway so I’m keeping them clear. And I’ll ring you when I can to see if there’s anything else. There’s a phone box at the end of the road.

Lots of love

Juliet

Weirdly, there was a phone on the boat. It only worked at low tide; when the tide came in the wires went underwater and you’d get cut off. She didn’t give Louise the address. Of course not!

In the miserable dank woods on Boxing Day, months ago, he’d pulled her into his arms and said nothing had changed, he couldn’t live without her. When he’d kissed her she’d almost fainted. So long she had waited! But it had been her, grown-up now, prepared but shaking, who’d said, ‘But Neville, you must know we can never marry.’

What a line! She felt like a character in a bad play. If she’d been saying it in an audition, she would have given a little sob like Jack Lemmon at the end of Some Like It Hot saying he could never have children.

‘The law’s the law,’ she said. She had no idea how he would get them out of it.

‘Interesting,’ he said, holding her close, their breath hanging in the cold air. ‘But irrelevant.’ He pushed her away to look at her. ‘Because there’s no law that says we have to get married.’

Of course they didn’t! Lots of people weren’t married.

She could almost feel her eyes shining.

‘Can we live together?’ she whispered. Such a wicked phrase.

‘We can do whatever we want,’ he’d said. ‘Why would we limit ourselves? We don’t have to obey rules we don’t believe in. We’re free and solvent and over twenty-one, it would be a crime to deny ourselves the joys of life –’ And he’d started singing ‘Ready Willing and Able’.

So they were living in sin! All the nights he was there – which wasn’t all the nights – he’d hold her and lie down with her, and when she was thinking do we undress now? he would go to brush his teeth, and come back in his pyjama bottoms, and she’d put on her nightie and they’d cuddle up, and soon he would fall asleep.

Something was missing. She knew that. She didn’t know exactly what. Sex, obviously. But beyond the word, what did she know? Nothing, really.

Her mother had just told her that boys get urges, and she should resist them, and that older men are not to be trusted. She knew about the mechanics of course. But the rest of it remained mysterious. She’d never got anywhere near doing it – she’d been saving it for him! They kissed often: chastely, sexily, sometimes endlessly. But not in bed at night, which was, she understood, where these things happen. And he never took his trousers off. Or hers. Never took it to what came next. She wanted him to, she thought. But she didn’t know how to ask him about it, or how to do anything about it. She was shy.

Perhaps he just wasn’t . . . you know, sexy. In himself. She’d never heard of that, but then she wouldn’t have – men never talked to her about not having sex.

But when he kissed her, it was sexy all right.

She wondered if she was sexy, in herself? As a teenager she’d discovered that if you wriggled around, in a certain way, in bed at night, there was an amazing feeling which built up, and exploded, and she knew instinctively that this was not something ever to mention to anybody. The first time it happened she cried afterwards because she thought it would never happen again. When other girls started going boy crazy, she didn’t at first put it together with the explosion. She didn’t like the boys she’d met much: awkward and pink and dull. She liked Neville: insouciant and rude and funny.

When Neville had first started kissing her, all those years ago, it had felt like the build-up to the amazing explosion.

At some stage he’d put sheets on one of the other bunks, towards the back. ‘I sleep badly,’ he said. ‘It’s not that I don’t love you.’ He slept half each night with her; half there. He’s being a gentleman, she told herself. But why?

When he wasn’t there, and she wasn’t working, she went to the pictures, or to the pub if she dared. Sometimes Shirley from the caff was there with her boyfriend, which made it possible, and sometimes there were quite glamorous-looking people with posh voices, behaving as if they were on holiday in a different country. One time Neville knew one of them, and they were amazed that he was living on the Kenneth, and she felt better. She wasn’t proud of it but she felt safer sitting near them. One spring night when the glamorous people were there she let herself dance with a bargee boy, pretending that they were old friends, to see what the glamorous people thought of that. Later he kissed her on the quayside, under a lamp post, and she felt so gorgeous and alive and quivery that when he tried to put his hand up her jumper she almost let him. When Neville turned up late that night she was still feeling it, and she quivered when she hugged him, and said, ‘Neville?’ Whatever it was, this ‘special kind of kiss and hug for married people’, as Zoë had told her, she needed to know. When he took his shirt off, and her dress, and they kissed and kissed, she was ready, she knew. So ready. After perhaps half an hour, he sat up, ruffled her hair, and said, ‘Prettiest girl.’ Then pulled on his shirt and went out again. She cried, and rolled over, and found her own explosion.

He doesn’t want to get me pregnant, she thought. She knew that was the end result of it. So she thought well of him for it. Beloved Neville, worthy of all her devotion and loyalty. How romantic. Mariage blanche, she whispered to herself. She’d read it in a novel. It sounded romantic. Pure. Like the moon. She could do that. She would do that. For him. Because she loved him.

As the nights grew warmer and lighter, the boat became more bearable, and she almost liked it without having to talk it up to herself. She got used to the smells. One night Neville came in, creaking up the gangplank in a merry mood.

‘I know the problem,’ he said, handing her a bottle of beer. For a moment she thought he meant to talk about them and it – but no. ‘When we first dreamed of it, ten years ago, it was meant to be a boat in Chelsea,’ he said, ‘or a warehouse in Wapping. So, as the boat in Wapping is the wrong way round, when the summer’s done – the summer will be great, won’t it? Sleeping on deck, swimming in the river – I’m looking for a warehouse in Chelsea.’

Thank the Lord! she thought. Though she wasn’t going to be swimming in the Thames. She’d seen the rats.

She did have to meet Louise. She spent a morning in Chelsea, luxuriating in the boutiques, fantasising about jolly nights in the pubs and pretty dresses she could make once they had electricity, before meeting her on the bench in Golden Square. She lied as little as possible. ‘I’m living with Pansy in Chiswick,’ she said. ‘I can’t thank you enough for everything,’ she said, proffering a bunch of tulips from the stand in Sloane Square.

‘You look well,’ said Louise, considering her, with the special expression older women have for younger female relatives. For a moment there was silence. Too many things, perhaps, to talk about. Louise started. ‘Just a word, and then we’ll forget about it. One: never leave a shared house without talking about it. It frightens people, they worry about you, and it leaves them in the lurch. I pay rent, you know – with Stella leaving, and you never having paid anything – well, I’m a single woman and I earn my living. We have to pull together. It’s not as if grown-ups have magic lives and only young people have issues.’

‘I earn my living –’ Juliet said, but Louise cut her off.

‘You weren’t paying rent. You took me for granted then buggered off without a word. You left your stuff, you didn’t wash the sheets, I had to tell Zoë and Rupert that I had no idea where you were. I had nowhere to send your paperwork and no way of being in touch with you. It’s unprofessional. It’s upsetting.’

Juliet frowned. It hadn’t occurred to her that she could upset Louise. ‘All right,’ she said. ‘Sorry.’

‘I thought you might have run away with a man. On which note, anything more from Neville?’

Juliet had practised for this question. She managed a kind of gulp-cough-hiccup, which she thought covered her, and said, ‘Oh God, no. As I said, all over. There’s nothing like actually seeing someone again in reality to dispel all the crazy dreams. No, I’m seeing rather a nice boy actually, Harry, he’s a friend of Pansy’s. It’s nothing serious, but you know, fun to go about with . . .’

She could see the anxiety drain from Louise’s face.

‘Good,’ said Louise. ‘Because you know, I did fear for your sanity. And for his.’

Juliet smiled.

‘I’ve always wondered,’ Louise said, ‘if there’s something slightly wrong with Neville. He was such a little pig when we were children – you’re too young to remember. Adorable, but God, the selfishness, so brazen, as if he didn’t know or care that other people had feelings at all . . . And you know, he’s never had a girlfriend, really. I mean, why isn’t he married? He’s perfectly nice looking, and I suppose quite glamorous if you like that sort of thing.’

Juliet managed not to bridle.

‘I did wonder if he was queer,’ Louise continued, ‘but I don’t think it’s that simple. Or if it’s to do with his mother dying in childbirth, I mean, actually being part of why she died, perhaps that’s affected his relationships with women . . .’

Juliet resolved to talk to him about his mother.

‘. . . sometimes men like that have a sort of vacuum in them, and women sense it on some level, and become desperate to fill it for them. To fix them.’

That’s not me, thought Juliet. I don’t think he needs fixing. I think he’s perfect. Unusual, yes. But that makes him interesting.

‘It’s so complicated,’ Louise was saying.

It’s perfectly simple, thought Juliet.

Louise had no new work for her. ‘There’s an endless supply of bikini girls, I’m afraid, and they’re mostly seventeen. You’ve had a good run, but I really do think it’s time for you to change track. What do you want to do?’

If she were honest, Juliet didn’t much want to work. She wanted Neville to keep her. She wanted to leave the boat, while still keeping the perceived glamour of the boat. She wanted to go up to Soho to look at ribbons in MacCulloch & Wallis. She wanted to go all the way with Neville.

‘The thing is,’ Louise continued, ‘you’re not any kind of specialist. You’re not a stage actress, you’re not a dancer, you’re not a singer, you’re not very experienced. You’re pretty and reliable, but that only takes you so far, especially when you can’t remember lines. And you’re just not . . . hungry. Hungry girls are eating you alive. Plus – and I’m not saying you should, because you shouldn’t have to – you don’t play the game. Several quite important people I’ve introduced you to haven’t taken you up because you’ve been, er, straightforward in your lack of interest in them. I’m not saying you have to sleep with them. Of course not. But would it kill you to be bought dinner?’

‘I don’t like the fight in the street afterwards. The taxi stuff. It’s dirty.’

‘It is dirty,’ said Louise after a moment. ‘It’s a dirty business.’ Then, ‘It’s a decision,’ she said, quite gently. ‘Do you want to carry on? Because if you’re not planning to get married –’

‘Who said I’m not planning to get married?’

‘– you need a career. So you need to start thinking.’

‘I can get married!’ she cried.

‘Then you’d better stop rejecting everybody,’ said Louise. ‘You won’t go to dinner; Harry’s “a bit of fun”; Neville, for God’s sake! You’re too old for crushes, or to be so picky. Get a boyfriend you like, or get a job that you can advance in. Or both. Lecture over.’

‘That’s not what you did,’ said Juliet.

‘I am the last person you should model your life on,’ said Louise. ‘Are you coming to Stella’s wedding? There’ll be lovely boys there for you and you’re so pretty you’ll be able to take your pick. And go and see your parents! They miss you.’