Funny Girl(6)

The vacancies in the back of the paper were more straightforward, and she didn’t need to look anything up. The Embassy Club in Old Bond Street wanted smart and attractive hostesses. The Nell Gwynne in Dean Street needed showgirls and/or dancers, but ‘only lovely girls’ were invited to apply. The Whisky A Go Go in Wardour Street required Pussies, minimum height 5ft 6in, but she suspected that height was not the only requirement, and she didn’t want to know what the others might be.

She hated having to think about whether she was lovely enough to be a * or a hostess or a showgirl. She feared that she wasn’t as lovely as she had been in Blackpool; or rather, her beauty was much less remarkable here. One day in the staff restaurant she counted on her fingers the girls who looked like real knockouts to her: seven. Seven skinny, beautiful creatures on her lunch break, in Derry and Toms alone. How many would there be on the next lunch break? How many on the cosmetics counters at Selfridges and Harrods and the Army and Navy?

She was pretty sure, though, that none of these girls wanted to make people laugh. That was her only hope. Whatever it was they cared about – and Barbara wasn’t sure that they cared about very much – it wasn’t that. Making people laugh meant crossing your eyes and sticking your tongue out and saying things that might sound stupid or naive, and none of those girls with their red lipstick and their withering contempt for anyone old or plain would ever do that. But that hardly gave her a competitive edge, not here, not yet. A willingness to go cross-eyed wasn’t much use to her in Cosmetics. It probably wasn’t what the Whisky A Go Go wanted from its Pussies either.

Barbara began to imagine the pretty girls working in Derry and Toms as beautiful tropical fish in a tank, swimming up and down, up and down, in serene disappointment, with nowhere to go and nothing to see that they hadn’t seen a million times before. They were all waiting for a man. Men were going to scoop them up in a net and take them home and put them into an even smaller tank. Not all of them were waiting to find a man, because some of them had already found one, but it didn’t stop the waiting. A few were waiting for a man to make up his mind and fewer still, the lucky ones, were waiting for a man who’d already made up his mind to make enough money.

Barbara wasn’t waiting for a man, she didn’t think, but she no longer knew what she was waiting for. She’d told herself on the train that she wouldn’t even think about going home for two years, but after two months she could feel all the fight and the fire in her dying away, until the only thing she wanted was access to a TV set on a Sunday. That was what work had done to her – work and the tinned soup, and Marjorie’s adenoids. She’d forgotten all about turning herself into Lucy; she just wanted to see her on the screen somehow.

‘Do you know anyone with a television?’ she asked Marjorie one night.

‘I don’t really know anyone full stop,’ said Marjorie.

It was Friday evening. She was draping stockings over the clothes horse by the gas fire. ‘But most of the girls live like us.’

‘Some of them must live at home,’ said Barbara.

‘Yes,’ said Marjorie. ‘You can befriend them and go to the pictures with them and go out dancing with them and one day they might invite you home for Sunday tea and you can watch their telly.’

‘So it has to be a boyfriend.’

‘You can go out with them and go dancing with them and go to the pictures with them and wrestle in doorways with them and …’

‘All right,’ said Barbara gloomily. ‘I get the idea.’

‘I’d say that the quickest way to a television is a gentleman friend. They’re hard to find, but they exist.’

‘You mean a rich man with a wife?’

‘You said you were looking for a TV set, not eternal love. They’ve got flats hidden away. Or they can afford hotels. Nice hotels have television sets in their bedrooms.’

So Barbara was waiting for a man too, it turned out. Of course she was. What on earth had led her to believe that she could do something without one? Why did she always think she was different from everyone else? There was no point complaining about it. Or rather, she could complain all she wanted, as long as she was trying to meet a man at the same time, and as long as she kept the complaints to herself. Whoever this man was, he probably didn’t want to spend all evening listening to her banging on about how unfair the world was. He wouldn’t be that sort of chap, from the sound of it. She needed to change something, anything. She needed to meet someone who wasn’t a bus conductor or a sales girl. There were opportunities somewhere. But they weren’t in Cosmetics, and she didn’t think they were in the Nell Gwynne.