Funny Girl(8)

‘Don’t be daft,’ said Barbara. ‘What would I want to do anything like that for?’

The next day, Barbara asked a girl she knew on the perfume counter to swap with her for an afternoon, just to see how easy it was to find a gentleman friend. The results of the experiment were startling: you just had to turn on the light indicating that you were looking for one. Barbara was glad she hadn’t known where the switch was during her teenage years, because she’d have got herself into all sorts of trouble in Blackpool – trouble caused by married men who owned seven carpet shops, or who sang in the shows at the Winter Gardens.

Valentine Laws wasn’t much of a catch. She should probably have thrown him back in, but she wanted to get on with it. He was at least fifteen years older than her, and he smelled of pipe tobacco and Coal Tar soap. The first time he came to the perfume counter, he was wearing a wedding ring, but when he came back a couple of minutes later, apparently for a longer look at her, it was gone. He didn’t speak to her until his third lap.

‘So,’ he said, as if the conversational well had momentarily run dry. ‘Do you get out much yourself?’

‘Oh, you know,’ she said. ‘Not as much as I’d like.’

‘ “Mooch”,’ he said. ‘Lovely. Where are you from? Let me guess. I’m good at this. I know it’s somewhere oop north, but where, that is the question. Yorkshire?’

‘Lancashire. Blackpool.’

He stared, unembarrassed, at her chest.

‘Sabrina comes from Blackpool, doesn’t she?’

‘I don’t know who Sabrina is,’ said Barbara.

‘Really? I’d have thought you’d all be very proud of her.’

‘Well, we’re not,’ said Barbara. ‘Because we’ve never heard of her.’

‘Anyway, she looks like you,’ said Valentine Laws.

‘Bully for her.’

He smiled and ploughed on. He was clearly not interested in her conversational skills. He was interested in her because she looked like Sabrina.

‘Well, Miss Blackpool.’ She looked at him, startled, but it was just a line. ‘What sort of places would you like to go to?’

‘That’s for me to know and you to find out.’

She could have kicked herself. That was a tone she’d have used back home to slap away a Teddy Boy at the Winter Gardens, but it was no use to her here. She was wrestling, and Marjorie had warned her not to wrestle. Luckily for her, and perhaps because he wasn’t accustomed to the snap and snarl of Saturday night dance halls, he ignored her little flash of haughtiness.

‘I’m trying,’ he said patiently. ‘But I have a proposal to make to you.’

‘I’ll bet,’ she said.

She couldn’t help herself. All her life, or the part of it in which men were interested, she’d been trying to fend them off. Now, suddenly, she had to be different and suppress the reflex she’d needed for years.

‘And you’d be right to bet. You’d win money. I wouldn’t be talking to you if there were no proposal, would I?’

She appreciated the brutal clarification and smiled.

‘I’m meeting a friend for dinner. A client. He’s bringing a lady friend, and suggested I should too.’

In her past life, she would have mentioned his wedding ring, but she had learned something.

‘That sounds nice.’

She was still a long way from a television set, but it was a start.





Marjorie advised her to borrow something to wear from work. That’s what all the other girls did, apparently. She went upstairs in her lunch hour with a bag, had a word with one of the girls, took away a smart knee-length red dress with a plunging neckline. When she was getting ready to go out, she remembered what she could look like, when she made an effort, put on some lipstick, showed a bit of leg. It had been a while.

‘Bloody hell,’ said Marjorie, and Barbara smiled.

Valentine Laws had booked a table at the Talk of the Town to see Matt Monro, Auntie Marie’s favourite singer. On the posters at the entrance, Barbara saw that on other nights it might have been the Supremes, or Helen Shapiro, or Cliff and the Shadows, people that the girls at work would have wanted to hear all about. Matt Monro was from another time, the time that she’d left Blackpool to escape. As she was shown to the table, she noticed that she was easily the youngest person in the room.