Annie Groves - London Belles

The hall floor was covered in well-polished linoleum in a parquet flooring design, with a red and blue patterned carpet runner over it, the same carpet continuing up the stairs and held in place by shining brass stair rods.

‘I’ll show you the room first and then you can see the rest of the house afterwards,’ Olive suggested. ‘It’s this way.’

As she followed Olive up the two flights of stairs to the upper storey, Sally took note of the clean plain off-white-painted walls and the well-polished banister rail. On the first landing the doors to the bedrooms were closed, as were the doors on the upper floor, but she liked the fact that Olive opened both bedroom doors, telling her, ‘Both these rooms are more or less the same size. The front room was my late father-in-law’s until he died. It was his idea to install a bathroom up here. I must say, at the time I thought it was a lot of work for nothing, but now I’m glad that he did. Whoever takes the rooms will share the bathroom between them.’

‘Your notice said that you wanted respectable female lodgers,’ Sally checked as she stepped inside the front-facing bedroom. It was simply furnished with the unexpected luxury of a double bed, a shiny polished mahogany wardrobe and a matching dressing table, and a square of patterned beige carpet over brown patterned lino, the walls papered with a plain cream paper with a brown trellis design. A dark gold satin-covered bedspread and eiderdown covered the bed, and when Sally lifted them back she could see that the bed linen underneath was immaculately white and starched.

In addition to the bed, wardrobe and dressing table there was a comfortable-looking chair and a small bookcase.

‘That’s right,’ Olive confirmed. ‘We’ve got another girl coming to look at the rooms at four this afternoon, an orphan, recommended by the vicar’s wife. She’s just started working at Chancery Lane underground station.

Sally nodded.

‘And this is the back bedroom,’ Olive told her, stepping across the narrow landing, its floorboards stained dark oak.

This bedroom overlooked the garden and was rather more feminine in décor, with its pale lemon wallpaper decorated with white green-stemmed daisies. Its furniture was very similar to the furniture in the front room, though its coverlet and eiderdown were more of a lemon yellow than gold.

This time Sally paid her would-be landlady the compliment of not checking the bed linen.

The bathroom was as immaculately clean and fresh-looking as the bedrooms, half tiled in white, blue curtains hanging at the windows and a blue-patterned lino on the floor.

She liked it. She liked it very much, Sally acknowledged.

‘If you were to take the room you’d be expected to keep it neat and tidy, although of course I’d given it a good clean once a week,’ Olive told her.

‘And the rent?

‘Ten shillings a week. That includes an evening meal as well as breakfast, although I dare say, you being a nurse, you’ll be working shifts.’

‘Yes,’ Sally agreed as she followed Olive downstairs and into the kitchen, which she wasn’t surprised to see was as clean and tidy as the rest of the house.

‘There are no gentleman visitors to be taken up to your room, but I do not rule out the possibility of you inviting a male friend into the front room to wait for you,’ Olive continued.

Sally didn’t have any problem with that.

‘And the kitchen?’ she asked. ‘As I work shifts I’d want to be able to make myself a hot drink and have something to eat when I get back from my shift.’

Olive pursed her lips. She didn’t like the thought of anyone else making free with her kitchen but she could see that Sally, as Tilly had said, was the sort who could be trusted and who had the right kind of standards.

‘Yes, I’d be happy to allow that,’ she agreed.

‘Good, then in that case I’ll take the room.’ Sally informed her, specifying, ‘The front room, please. I like to see what’s going on.’ What she really meant was that she didn’t want to be surprised by any unexpected visitors from Liverpool coming in search of her.

‘It will be one week’s rent in advance,’ Olive told her. Although she was striving to sound business like, inwardly she was delighted to have found such an ideal lodger, and so quickly. If the little orphan turned out to be as good then Nancy was going to have to admit that she had been wrong complaining about the prospect of lodgers bringing down the neighbourhood.

‘I’m living in the nurses’ home at Barts at the moment. I’d like to move in as soon as possible, if that’s all right with you? Say, Tuesday? I’ll pay you then.’

‘That will suit me nicely,’ Olive confirmed.

‘I’ll aim to be with you at ten in the evening, if that suits you?’ Sally offered, as she extended her hand to shake on their agreement.

‘You mean she’s taken the room already? That means that if the orphan girl says she wants the other room when she comes then you’ll have let them both straight away,’ Tilly praised her mother, after Sally had gone.

‘Yes, and I must say that it’s a relief. I was anxious whether we’d actually get anyone interested, never mind exactly the right type of person. I like your nurse, Tilly.’

‘She’s not my nurse, but I liked her too.’

Dulcie pushed off her forehead a stray curl that had escaped from her smooth Veronica Lake hair-style to curl damply against her skin. In her right hand she was holding her best handbag: white leather, bought off a market trader, probably, she imagined, having been ‘acquired’ by dubious means. Or at least that had been her interpretation of the way in which the stall holder had looked warily up and down the street before producing the bag from a sack tucked away out of sight, when she’d asked to see ‘something good quality’. Dulcie didn’t mind where it had come from. What mattered to her was that it looked exactly like the classy and expensive bags on sale in Selfridges, at prices way beyond her slender means. Dulcie didn’t consider what she had done to be dishonest. It was part and parcel of the way of life for many of those who had the same hand-to-mouth existence of her own family. The fact that her dad and her brother both worked as plumbers in the building trade meant that they both suffered periods when they weren’t working, and Dulcie had grown up knowing that one penny often had to do the work of two. Dulcie had ambitions for herself, though: nice clothes, which, along with her good looks, attracted the attention of men and the envy of other girls, and having a good time.

She wasn’t having a good time right now, though. She was already beginning to regret having said that she would find somewhere else to live. Initially, when she’d looked in the newspaper there had been so many rooms advertised that she thought it would be easy. But now, having spent over two hours of her precious Sunday – the only day she had off work – crisscrossing the streets between her parents’ home in Stepney and Selfridges where she worked, she decided she really wanted something a bit closer to Selfridges than Stepney. But one look down some of the streets in the advertisements had been enough for her to dismiss them as not the kind of places she wanted to live at all, and that was without even asking to see the rooms. She wasn’t going to give up, though; slink home with her tail between her legs, so to speak, and have Edith get one up on her because she’d failed.

Two young men on the opposite side of the road – Italian, by the looks of them – were watching her as they smoked their cigarettes. The trouble with Edith was that she was an out-and-out show off, who always wanted to be the centre of attention, Dulcie decided crossly, as she stopped walking, as though she was unaware of the men’s presence as she pretended to check the seam of her stockings. The result was a gratifying increase in their focus on her. They were good-looking lads, no doubt about that, with their olive complexions, crisp dark wavy hair, and their dark brown gazes, which were paying her such flattering attention.