in the first place. Women customers looked at Dulcie’s flawless complexion, and the way in which the makeup she was wearing emphasised her dark brown eyes and her pouting lips, and wanted to look like her, whilst men listened mesmerised when Dulcie sprayed her wrist with scent and then invited them to ‘test’ the fragrance. It was perhaps no wonder that in the six months she had been working in Selfridges, Dulcie’s sales had earned her praise from their supervisor, but Dulcie herself had become unpopular with some of the other girls. Not Lizzie, though. Lizzie, small, plain and good-natured, worked on a counter selling bath salts, favoured by the store’s more elderly Home Counties customers.
‘Well, you should care,’ Lizzie warned, ‘because her dad’s one of the directors here. Arlene wot works on the Elizabeth Arden counter and whose dad is one of the managers is pally with her.’
Dulcie tossed her head again. ‘You mean that Arlene sucks up to her. Well, I’m not going to. And anyway, it’s not my fault that her beau was gentlemanly enough to pay me a compliment.’
Lizzie gave her an old-fashioned look. ‘Wasn’t it? I mean, the way you put that lippy on yourself and then pouted at him like you did . . .’
‘I was just showing him how it looked on,’ Dulcie defended herself virtuously. ‘So who is he anyway, then?’
Lizzie knew everything about the store and those who worked there. She’d been there herself for over ten years, after all.
‘David James-Thompson, his name is, and he’s proper posh. Lydia Whittingham met him at a house party in Surrey, according to Arlene, and the talk is that she’s going to land him and that they’ll get engaged this Christmas.’
‘Well, good luck to her, but I can’t say as I’d want to get engaged to a chap who’s always going to have an eye for other girls and flirt with them.’
‘You encouraged him.’
‘He didn’t need encouraging; that kind never does,’ Dulcie retorted smugly. ‘You can take my word for it.’
It was true. One look into David James-Thompson’s laughing hazel eyes and she’d known exactly what sort he was. Her sort, with his good looks, his thick wavy brown hair, his dashing man-of-the-world air, and most of all the devilment she had seen glinting in his eyes when he had looked at her so appreciatively. Whatever else David James-Thompson was, it certainly wasn’t good marriage material.
‘I must say, I envy Lydia being taken to the Ritz,’ Lizzie continued.
‘Well, I don’t. If he was to ask me out, I’d want to go somewhere like the Hammersmith Palais where we could have a bit of fun, not the Ritz, with all those posh types and snobs.’
Lizzie laughed at her. ‘The Palais? You’d never get a man like him going somewhere like that.’
‘Want to bet?’ Dulcie challenged her. Everyone knew that the Hammersmith Palais was simply the best dancehall in London. That was why Dulcie was prepared to make the trek from the East End to Hammersmith every Saturday night, instead of going somewhere local.
‘Don’t be daft,’ Lizzie said, but Dulcie persisted.
‘Come on, bet you five bob I can get him to meet me at the Palais, and before Christmas.’
‘You’re never serious.’
‘I certainly am.’ It was just the sort of challenge that Dulcie loved; daring, reckless, breaking the rules, pushing against boundaries, and using her looks to get her own way.
Born into a noisy cockney family, with an elder brother and a younger sister, Dulcie had learned young that she had to fight and use what nature had given her to get what she wanted, and to hang on to it once she had.
Two hours later Dulcie had left Selfridges and Oxford Street behind her, along with her white overall with its pink collar and trimmings. An admiring look from a motorist in a rakish-looking soft-topped car had her pausing to admire her reflection in a nearby shop window, and reflect that the bows she had added to the dress she was wearing, and which she had had copied by a local dressmaker from her own sketches of a dress in Selfridges Young Ladies Models Department looked much fancier than the original. The dress had small puffed sleeves and a close-fitting bodice, the bows adorning the ends of the long seams that ran from the bust down to below the waist. The fabric – silk, no less – had a dark plum background and was covered in a pansy print in a variety of hues from pale lilac through off-white to darkest purple – colours that suited her dark eyes and nicely tanned arms and legs, as well, of course, as drawing attention to her blonde hair.
White opened-toed high-heeled sandals and a white handbag completed her outfit, and Dulcie wasn’t in the least bit surprised that men turned to look at her and other women cast her assessing and very often antagonistic looks. She was nineteen now and she’d known from being fourteen that she was a head-turner. She’d had more boys asking her for dates than any of the other girls in the bustling street where her family lived, but Dulcie wasn’t daft. They could take her out but they weren’t going to take her for a ride. There was no way that she was going to end up married to some no-hoper and a new baby on the way every year, like the girls she’d been at school with and her own mother. She would marry one day, of course – every woman had to have a husband to keep her – but first she wanted to have fun. And fun for Dulcie was flirting and dressing up and going out to the pictures, or a dance hall. Once she agreed to be someone’s steady girl, all that would have to come to an end, and she wasn’t ready for that – not yet.
Gleefully she imagined her triumph when she won her bet with Lizzie. A double triumph since in achieving it she would be getting the better of Miss Hoity-Toity, with her stuck-up airs and graces. Dulcie had no doubts about the success of her plan. David James-Thompson would come back to the shop. She knew men and she knew what that gleam in his eyes had meant. He was up for some fun and so was she, although their ideas of what fun was might not be exactly the same. There was no way she would let him get into her knickers. She wasn’t daft. He was the sort that would run a mile if he thought he’d got her sort into trouble. But that wasn’t going to happen.
She joined the queue waiting for the bus that would take her home to Stepney in the East End. Her father worked in the building trade as a plumber, and the family had a better standard of living than many of their neighbours, with a whole house to themselves, though Dulcie and her sister had to share a room and a bed.
When she did get married she wasn’t going to be like her mother and have three children – six, if you counted the three that had died before being born. Dulcie didn’t really want any children at all.
The bus was crowded and Dulcie had to stand, strap hanging and receiving an admiring look from the young conductor, who had to squeeze past her as he collected everyone’s fares, whilst the bus lurched away from the kerb and pulled out into the traffic.
Dulcie was glad when the bus finally reached her stop and she was able to get off. There’d been an old man coughing away the whole time Dulcie had been standing close to him. A really poor sort he’d looked too, smelling of drink and his clothes shabby. Dulcie wrinkled her nose as she left the bus stop.
There was a pub on the corner of the street up ahead of her. Automatically Dulcie crossed the road to avoid having to walk past the group of men and women standing outside it. There were two families in their street who were notorious for the rows and fights they had when they’d been drinking. The Hitchins at number 4 and the Abbotts at number 9. It was nothing unusual to see both husbands and wives sporting bruises and black eyes. Ma Hitchins, all twenty stone of her, loved nothing
