Chapter 38: Marie-Christine, Pete and Nanny - The Golden Hours

Marie-Christine hadn’t minded when Laura’s family had gone back to Norfolk last year. She’d seen it coming. She’d assumed somebody in the family must have spotted the ever-subsiding levels in the drinks cabinet, or the fact that she slipped out most nights after people had gone to bed, and that they would sack her anyway. But no. The naivety of these English people was too funny. She’d told Jemima it was not a problem: her parents missed her, she would return to France.

Her parents did not miss her. Her father was in Amiens, fighting with his third wife who had previously been his secretary, and with his secretary who wanted to be his fourth wife. Her mother was in a rest home in Le Touquet, drying out. Marie-Christine secured an excellent reference, told the agency she was taking a break, and moved in with her boyfriend, Pete, a twenty-year-old plumber with long red hair which hung below his white shoulders and a bicycle he rode shirtless in all seasons. He lived in a twelve-room squat on Elgin Crescent, around the corner from the Cazalets. She knew her former employers would not come down there to the dodgy end. Their bit of Ladbroke Grove, seven hundred yards away, was respectable, but Elgin Crescent was a sink of iniquity. The tall, faded wedding-cake frontage of the early Victorian villas and terraces, some empty since the war, falling down, loosely propped up, hid boarding houses and squats and cheap flats. No Blacks No Irish No Dogs signs in the front windows, cannabis plants hidden among the privet and mock-orange bushes in the communal gardens out the back. Pete had a Staffordshire terrier, Scottie; it ran alongside him, its ears flying like Pete’s hair. Rumour had it he could supply more than the replacement of washers and the fixing of leaks. But he always had a monkey wrench in his basket, and his tool belt was legendary. His silky skinny white torso thrilled her as he flew down the hill, his hair in the wind. She also thought him an idiot, but he was young and vigorous, whereas the man she felt she really could love, if love exists as more than a delusion of mid-twentieth-century Western capitalism, a prison designed to entrap women into consumerism and the constraints of a heteronormative family, was too sick and esoteric for sex. That is, he was happy to have sex done to him, by Marie-Christine or any other woman under twenty-three, but he would not himself do anything. Marie-Christine found him fascinating, but she had her needs too.

She did still see Laura sometimes, walking down Ladbroke Grove as if she owned it, pale hair shining, swinging her bag as she headed towards the market, or up to Holland Park or Notting Hill. It seemed she was back in London, staying with her cousins at the old house and going to school. Those people with more than one house! What a way to live. Marie-Christine had once been to Fakenham. The line from Asterix stayed with her: ils sont fous ces Anglais.

‘There goes your little blondie,’ Pete would say.

Pete liked Laura. He thought she was a laugh, with her posh voice and unjustifiably knowledgeable manner. She was a know-all all right. He’d suggest inviting her up. Marie-Christine said non – for a variety of reasons. Keeping worlds separate, mostly. Easier to control. But on one of the hot weekends that summer, Marie-Christine went to Brighton with some French pals, and Pete didn’t want to hang around with them all talking their honhihonhihon language, so he stayed in London, drinking in the courtyard behind the Prince of Wales, and smoking, and reading Carlos Castaneda.

He was lounging on the stone steps of his building with his shirt off, drinking a bottle of London Pride while Scottie barked at everyone, when Laura idled by, off her route and out of her territory. So he invited her in and showed her the place. She swanned up the grand curve of the dusty naked staircase without batting an eyelid, ignoring broken windows, a big hole in the floorboards, a badly done mural of Mick Jagger, and a scrawny Italian playing the mouth organ in the corner. Pete shepherded her up into his room: he’d been here a while and had managed to corral a nice one at the back. He’d shrouded the window overlooking the gardens with a tablecloth his nan had given him (blue-and-white check, strawberries and cornflowers round the edge; he loved her, but nans, honestly) and papered the walls with huge advertising posters nicked from a friend who nicked them from work at the London Transport advertising centre in Shepherds Bush. Brigitte Bardot, all mouth and cleavage, was falling out of a pink towel for a French movie; Italian gangsters huddled round a car with machine guns on the wall opposite, and by the door a graphic of a beautiful colourful lion was extolling the joys of London Zoo. There he closed the door on Scottie and sat Laura on the grimy mattress which, with lemon-coloured nylon sheets and a candlewick bedspread, served as his bed.

He passed her the joint he was smoking, followed in with a kiss, and had his hands up her T-shirt within fifteen minutes. She took it like a girl ten years older, quivering, but he remembered how big her dad’s house was and pulled himself away.

‘How old are you?’ he asked, and she said, with a smirk, ‘Old enough.’

‘No you’re not,’ he said.

‘I’m sixteen!’ she lied.

He was sceptical. ‘Off you go,’ he said, not unkindly. ‘Where’s your folks, anyway?’

‘They don’t care about me,’ said Laura tragically.

Pete, who had seen plenty of people whose folks didn’t care about them, managed not to laugh.

‘You keep out of trouble,’ he said, and ruffled her hair, and took her all the way downstairs again to give her a cup of tea and, after some chat, say goodbye.

Marie-Christine heard nothing of this at the time, but she saw Laura and Pete talking on the corner of Westbourne Park Road. Pete said it was nothing, but when Marie-Christine pressed he said yeah, he was just giving her a little bit of dope, so what? Whereupon Marie-Christine totally lost it, yelling at him not to be an idiot, he doesn’t understand about that kind of person, to which Pete said he probably knew a bit more about posh English people than she did actually, and she told him he was a stupide putain de cinglé anglais, which he understood well enough. Pete wasn’t that sorry when Marie-Christine left for the South of France.

* * *

Soon Laura and Pete were spending languorous afternoons having stoned almost-sex in his high-ceilinged room, her homework scattered on his floorboards: the green binder file, Kennedy’s Latin Primer, De Tocqueville on the French Revolution; Scottie barred. They drank cider together at the Prince of Wales; ate crisps in the communal garden (not the same one as behind her family’s house, thank God!). They lay on their backs on the grass, staring at the sky, feeling the vibes and talking about outer space and the meaning of life. They sat on the stoop out the front and watched the world go by.

One day Pete had a camera; he took pictures of her smiling on the steps, squinting into the sunlight, and got Irish Vince who lived upstairs to take a picture of them both, Laura in a sundress, Pete in his Levi’s with his arm over her shoulder, Scottie at their feet. When the prints came back from the chemist, Pete stuck that one in the frame of his mirror, and Laura felt like a million dollars. He got her a copy made, and she couldn’t show it to anybody.

Next year she’d be sixteen. She’d already been down to the Marie Stopes clinic in Soho, but she didn’t feel quite up to pretending to be married, to get the Pill.

* * *

Pete was queueing for bananas at Devlin’s outside the cinema on Portobello, one busy, cheerful Saturday morning, when he got chatting with a good-looking Irishwoman who was buying leeks and casting looks his way.

‘Morning!’ he said.

She said, ‘Now do I know you?’

‘Dunno,’ said Pete, amused. ‘Do you?’

‘You’ve such a look of a lad I used to know at home,’ she said, ‘and now I can’t think who it was. You’re from Dublin?’

‘I’m not,’ said Pete. ‘But Mum and Dad were. Christy and Jean O’Neill.’

‘O’Neill,’ she said thoughtfully. ‘I know I’ve seen you,’ she said, puzzled but cheerful, and by the time the bananas and the vegetables were bought she knew his name, his age, his parents’ address in Dublin, which school he’d gone to and what he did for a living. The fact that she was sweet and looked a bit like Elizabeth Taylor made him more than usually polite.

‘Well, you take care of yourself,’ she said in the end, ‘and don’t go getting into trouble.’

He gave her a little salute, and went on his way.

* * *

Well, he’s a nice enough lad, thought Nanny, who had seen him and Laura together, honestly, the girl’s a harebrain, clever enough at school but she hasn’t the sense she was born with . . . And she’d followed them to Elgin Crescent, where she’d clocked his rather noticeable bicycle, and of course there was the dog he was rarely without. So she just scanned the Lane whenever she was down there, waiting for her opportunity. And she did know Jeanie O’Neill. The O’Neills were decent people, though of course those redheads lost their hair early. She might stop by and visit Jean. And she’d keep an eye out. From the back of her head!

* * *

Laura’s mother, Nanny happened to know, meanwhile, was spending her days at the Brompton Hospital, reading to Hugh. They hadn’t wanted to upset Laura with medical information, so they hadn’t told her they were in London; they just let her carry on as usual staying with the Lestranges. Nanny had an opinion about this, but it wasn’t one she felt she should act on.

The day of the photograph, Jemima was waiting for test results, and quietly hoping that Hugh might start to perk up.