Alice Ainsley once told Joan that she always got a feeling in her bones when something was about to go wrong for her. It was like a dull ache, she said. She could sense in the morning if she was facing one of those days when the world was aiming to slide out of kilter. She felt like that the day her husband announced he was leaving and when her son rang to tell her he’d been arrested for possession of Ecstasy. Alice’s people had been tenant farmers in Somerset for generations. That was where she reckoned she got the knowledge in her bones from; it was inherited. Folk who worked the land needed a feel for all kinds of things. They had to be in touch with the world around them, the weather, their animals and crops. Her grandfather could tell if a cow was sickening from the feel of its ears and could forecast thunder, snow or drought. Alice had a habit of raising her nose and sniffing the air as if she were standing in a held, scenting rain.
Joan’s bones didn’t signal any warnings to her the morning she met Nina Rawle, but then she wasn’t from country stock. Her mother’s parents had worked in a garment factory in Bromley and her father’s family were street traders in Canning Town. No hairs stood up on the back of her neck as she parked the car outside Nina’s flat. She didn’t spot any black cats or magpies presaging disaster, there was no ominous rush of goose pimples on her skin. She walked in with a smile on her face, ready to do a good job. ‘Take people as you find them’ had always been among Joan’s numerous aphorisms, one of the many commonsense dictums she had heard from her Bromley grandmother. On that April day with the tart sap of spring in the air she saw in front of her a very sick woman who obviously needed help.
Alice was Joan’s employer and her friend, a combination that wouldn’t work in many situations but fitted the two women well. Joan had been on the books of the Alice Ainsley bureau for six years and knew the business thoroughly enough to run it on the rare occasions when Alice was unwell or took a quick break. They often had a glass of Martini in a little wine bar near the bureau, sweet red with lemonade for Joan, dry white with soda water and ice for Alice. Sipping slowly, they would discuss contrary clients and their problems with men, the major difficulty being the lack of them.
Maybe if Alice had met Nina, instead of just taking her phonecall, things would have turned out differently. If Nina had made her way slowly up the stairs to Alice’s office, leaning on her sticks, her hair swinging, Alice’s nostrils might have twitched. Detecting trouble, perhaps she would have told Nina that Joan’s schedule was full and offered her another assistant. Maybe, if, perhaps. Nina didn’t visit the office; she made a phonecall and Alice simply heard a cultured voice putting business her way.
Joan’s grandmother used to sing while she did the washing, a forties’ number: ‘If I’d known then what I know now I’d be a different girl’. She sang roughly but tunefully, tapping out a rhythm with her little nailbrush on the shirt collars as she worked carbolic soap into a lather. Nina reminded Joan of her gran, perhaps that was why she warmed to her so quickly. There was something about the no-nonsense way that Nina talked, her strong chin and firm lips, that summoned up Gran’s face. And of course there was the Lily of the Valley perfume; it was so unusual, so surprising to find a younger woman wearing it. It had been many years since Joan had sniffed that fragrance. The scent of it was strong the first morning she met Nina, calling up clear, happy memories.
Joan was feeling particularly well on the sunny Wednesday morning when Alice offered her a new client. She’d had blonde highlights done the previous day and her hair had a lovely shine. The locum doctor had given her a new prescription for sleeping tablets and he’d said, with an air of surprise that told her he wasn’t just trying to make her feel better, that she didn’t look forty. When the alarm rang at seven-thirty she realised that she’d had a good night’s sleep. That was always a bonus, like an unexpected present. Her face in the mirror was smooth, her eyes clear; anyone could see why a young man had given her a genuine compliment. She cleaned her little flat before she left for work, finishing with the kitchen floor. No good keeping other people’s places ship-shape if your own’s a mess, she always said.
She was full of energy as she ran up the steps to Alice’s office above the dry cleaner’s. Alice referred to it as the nerve centre. Joan had never understood how she managed to organise so many people from that tiny space. She supposed that Alice was just a natural although she did suffer: her voice was often scratchy with tiredness. Her nails were bitten ragged and she always looked a mess, her clothes thrown on any old how. It was just as well she didn’t often get to meet the public, dressed in her shapeless skirts and limp cardigans. Sometimes Joan used to think she lived in that office. She’d had calls from her at all hours of the day and evening. Alice derived huge enjoyment from creating rotas, writing in capitals with a black, thick-nibbed marker on the wipe-clean board which she divided up into weekly grids. She spent hours puzzling out the most cost-efficient use of staff time. That was her true talent, they’d often agreed. If Napoleon had had you, Alice, Joan would joke, he wouldn’t have lost Waterloo. Joan was a people person with a liking for hands-on contact and could always find a way of getting around even the most awkward of clients. They made a complementary duo and Alice’s acknowledgment of this was evidenced in the post of deputy manager she had created for Joan and the regular, albeit small, wage increases.
The office held one large desk and a sturdy metal filing cabinet with a phone and fax machine on top. There was a microwave, a kettle and a toaster perched on a shelf next to telephone directories. Alice was eating toast spread with jam and dragging a comb through her flyaway hair when Joan arrived. She saw a hair land on the dark jam and shivered; that kind of thing made her skin creep.
Alice didn’t have to soft soap her friend the way Joan knew she did with other staff, to get them to take on cantankerous old dears with more money than sense. She could depend on Joan, especially in a crisis. Some of the staff she employed were here today, gone tomorrow, leaving her in the lurch. A certain number of them just didn’t take to the work, others found something better paid. Joan prided herself on doing a thorough, efficient job. She had never had a day’s sickness, not even when the old dreams made her restless. She would arrive for work feeling heavy-eyed when she’d have liked nothing better than to burrow back under the bedclothes. It was important to her not to let people down. Rich said that she had the kind of face that made you want to trust her. When she tried to get him to explain what he meant he laughed, saying that she was just fishing for compliments. Alice appreciated her dependability. Joan had stepped in at the last minute quite a few times to pull the irons out of the fire; she was the only one willing to look after a boy with AIDS while his parents took a holiday. She had an album full of thank you notes from people she’d helped: the man with the broken pelvis, the couple who had the car smash, the girl with ME, to name but a few.
Working for the bureau was more than simply a job for Joan. Before she was taken on by Alice she had been employed by Mrs Jacobs, a widow in her late sixties whose first name Joan had never known, in an old-fashioned ladies’ clothes shop in Forest Gate. It was one of those places that the years seem to have ignored, a narrow-fronted shop with tangerine-tinted plastic taped inside the window to protect the stock from the sun. Buxom dummies displayed corsets,
