good on her that I suddenly and intensely wanted it back, till I remembered it had never looked that good on me. With the great jacket and her thick black hair, caught back in a ponytail, you’d never have thought she was ten years older than I was.
‘Frankie, darling, what has happened to your eye?’ she exclaimed as she leaned over to kiss me. ‘Tell me in a minute,’ she said, picking up her large wallet from the table and heading to the counter to order the coffee. She had obviously weighed up who was more deserving of sympathy and had decided that, superficially at any rate, I was.
Lena and I had known each other for almost eight years. We’d been really friendly for seven, ever since the infamous sixties night, when I’d gone into the toilets to be tragic over Kay and, instead, found Lena grimacing into the mirror, swigging determinedly from a hip flask. Her on/off girlfriend, Sophie, had just danced past her, very obviously on with someone else.
‘I wouldn’t have minded,’ she had said through gritted teeth, her dark fringe flopping into her eyes, ‘but that other woman is wearing a shirt exactly like the one I put in a bag of stuff for Sophie to take to the Oxfam shop. Bloody cheek.’ So we left the toilets together and danced all night long. We even danced the Twist, which is not something I normally do.
The day after that I rang her to see if she was OK.
‘Do you want to go to the pictures?’ I asked. ‘Then we could go out for dinner and trash our girlfriends.’
‘Oh, Frankie, what a pal you are.’ She grinned down the phone. ‘That sounds great. What shall we go and see?’
We wanted a film with wit and women, which we felt were missing from our lives. There was a Cary Grant retrospective at a small cinema in Soho and we went to see His Girl Friday, to pick up a few tips on being suave and elegant, and then we went to Chez Gerard in Charlotte Street, for the set menu. As we sat spreading anchovy butter on French bread we had shared our life histories.
They were remarkably similar. We had both grown up on council estates with parents who had wanted us to do better than they had.
My dad was an old Teddy Boy and my mum had had a beehive and wore American tan stockings, even on their wedding day. She and my dad went to the local dance hall together and jived to Bill Haley and Eddie Cochran. But when Tamla Motown came in in the sixties my mum swapped her allegiances and became a mod, while my dad naturally became a rocker. After that my mum went to dances with her girlfriends, and on the odd occasion she took me. I have no real memory of it but apparently once she took me to see Wilson Pickett at the town hall. She loved the big trumpet sound of ‘Midnight Hour’ but Wilson Pickett was late and she only dared listen to two songs before running all the way home with me asleep in her arms. Perhaps that was the night the music seeped into my blood stream.
By 1969 they were separated and Dad moved to a flat round the corner. My mum trained to be a primary teacher while my dad carried on working in his car-repair workshop. I saw him regularly and there wasn’t too much wrangling, not that there was much to wrangle about, but they both had solicitors and had to go to court a few times. I think it was the mystery of all the legal correspondence and the dressing up for the days in court that made me decide to study law.
I looked over at Lena as she smiled and chatted with the young man behind the counter. Lena had danced her way out of her estate, and eventually became a teacher of modern dance. You could tell by the way she moved. She was an inch shorter than me and her hair had one or two dashing streaks of grey. But the main difference between us was that she always made people feel that they were the most interesting person in the world. That’s how she always knew what was going on. People told her everything.
‘My darling, I thought I was feeling bad, but you look terrible,’ she said, putting two large creamy coffees down on the table. ‘I was going to suggest we go to that new bar this evening, the one that’s just opened off the City Road. To cheer me up. But you might not want to go out, looking like that.’
‘I would love to go out,’ I said, ignoring the implications of her comments. ‘My mum’s coming up.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Why? Ashamed to be seen out with me?’
She hesitated. ‘Of course not. It should be good. There’s a band too.’
‘Oh God, you didn’t say there was a band. They’ll play modern music really loudly.’ My brain was clicking. ‘Oh, I don’t know, I can’t bear to stay in with my mum, not on a Saturday. What would it say about my life?’ I took a small bottle of brandy from my inside pocket and held it up.
‘Great,’ she said, and I poured a slug into her coffee. Then I lifted the bottle to my lips but thought better of it.
‘Yes, do come,’ she went on. ‘But I will just say one thing. Those sunglasses are a little odd and they don’t actually cover up the blue and purple bits. Are you going to tell me what happened, or am I going to have to drag it out of you?’
‘It was a client.’ I didn’t want to tell Lena, I felt there was a need for secrecy, confidentiality, discretion. Perhaps I’d been doing the job too long. She looked at me amazed.
‘A client hit you? Why, because you lost? I didn’t realise clients got that unhappy with their barristers.’
‘Actually, it was the client’s husband,’ I said wildly. ‘There was a bit of a to do outside court. I don’t really want to talk about it.’
‘What did the police say?’
‘Well, I haven’t actually told them because it was partly my fault.’
‘Frankie,’ she said sadly, ‘violence is never the victim’s fault. Which court was this?’
‘I shouldn’t say any more.’ I sneaked back behind professionalism. ‘The case is ongoing.’
Lena nodded sagely and I turned the conversation to safer matters. ‘What happened in Paris?’
Lena told me how they had arrived at the Gare du Nord and argued because Sophie had wanted to sit in cafés all day while Lena had wanted to visit as many museums as she could. Then things had got more personal and Lena had had to leave. ‘She called me a tourist!’ Lena gasped.
I knew I could not afford to say, ‘Well, you were.’
‘What am I going to do with my mum?’ I asked.
‘She could come with us tonight.’
‘Lena!’
‘Just a thought. What about Columbia Road tomorrow morning? She could buy some plants to take home.’
We finished our coffee and wandered down Church Street, window shopping in the secondhand shops. It was hot and sunny and we were half looking for a new table for Lena’s kitchen (she had just reorganised her flat) but half looking for outfits for the evening. In a small shop selling pine furniture and altar cloths was a large cardboard box full of shoes. Most of them were the same style, dull black and gold slingbacks, but one pair had three-inch heels, sharply pointed toes and neat stud buttons up to the ankle.
‘Perfect club wear!’ Lena exclaimed.
‘They’re 37s,’ I said sadly, feeling like an ugly sister who knows that even if she sliced off the tips of her toes they
