‘I’m not sure …’
‘Ten pounds! Can’t say fairer than that!’
Ten pounds was more than her monthly allowance. It seemed a huge amount of money to Lizzie.
‘Really? You’d pay me ten pounds to have my hair cut?’ It seemed too good to be true and her father always said that if it seemed too good to be true it probably was. ‘But it might look awful!’
‘It won’t,’ said Terry, still playing with her hair as if it were the finest fabric. ‘I’ll supervise every step of the way. You can even choose which style. We’re not like some places who make the models have whatever we want. I’m just training one stylist who’s good already, not dozens of them. Come over to the basin. We’ll cut it wet.’
Lizzie was there for a long time but she was not put in front of a mirror. She was given cups of coffee and biscuits and then a sandwich. Every snip of the scissors was checked and supervised. But although Terry and Susan examined her closely, she couldn’t see what they were doing to her.
‘Does it look all right?’ she asked once, after what seemed to be a big lock of hair fell down into her lap.
‘It’s great!’ said Terry. ‘You really look something! You have great bones and of course perfect skin. So lucky! I was a mass of acne when I was your age.’
‘You look really lovely,’ said Susan shyly. ‘Almost like a model.’
‘Not quite like a model?’ Lizzie wasn’t satisfied by the ‘almost’.
Susan shook her head. ‘Your clothes are all wrong and you need some make-up.’
Lizzie’s mother sometimes wore a little ‘eye blue’, as she described it, as well as lipstick and powder. And of course she always pencilled in her eyebrows.But it had to be very discreet: Lizzie’s father disapproved of women who painted their faces. He would have had a fit if Lizzie had worn make-up. She thought of the ten pounds she was going to be given. Some of it would definitely go on make-up.
Lizzie hardly recognised herself when at last she was allowed to look. Her eyes were enormous, her face pixie-like and appealing and the slanted fringe and the geometric shapes of hair on her cheeks made her look, she felt, very modern.
‘Gosh!’ said Lizzie. ‘I can never go home again! My father will go mad.’
‘I’ll just take some pictures,’ said Terry.
When he’d finished, he produced two ten-pound notes. ‘I know I said ten, but it’s worked out so well …’ He handed over twenty pounds. ‘Take a tip from me. Go straight next door and buy that dress in the window. You won’t regret it.’
Lizzie took his advice. She bought the black polo-neck sweater, too. She had her own dress put in a bag so she could wear her new outfit straight away. Then she walked to Peter Jones and found a remnant of gaberdine in a plain dark green. She wouldn’t need a pattern, she decided; she could just copy the dress she already had.
Lizzie practically skipped back down the King’s Road towards Gina’s house. She hummed a pop song and swung her bag and generally felt as if shewas in a film. She was like a real London dolly bird, not the boring Home Counties girl she had been when she’d first arrived. She ran up the steps to Gina’s front door and rang the bell, hoping her aunt would soon give her a key. She lived in London, she had made some great new friends and she looked the part.
Gina opened the door and looked blankly at her for a few seconds.
‘Good Lord! I hardly recognised you!’ she said. ‘You’ve had your hair cut.’ Then she frowned. ‘Sorry, stupid thing to say. You know that. Come in.’
‘What do you think?’ Lizzie asked. ‘Is it an awful mistake? I was looking in a window and this man came out and begged me to be a model.’
‘Your father will hate it,’ said Gina, ‘but that probably means you’ve done exactly the right thing. Come and have some tea. Barry will be here soon to take us to the theatre. I wonder what he’ll think about you, with your skirt showing your knees and your hair so modern.’
Barry was impressed. He made a big fuss of Gina’s ‘little niece’ to the extent that Lizzie felt quite uncomfortable. He gave her a large glass of sherry – not like the thimblefuls Lizzie’s father thought were appropriate for the fairer sex. Then he wondered aloud if she and Gina would like to go to a club after the theatre. The Ad Lib, he said; he had a contact who could get them in.
Gina wasn’t at all keen and although Lizzie did want to go to a club sometime, she didn’t want to go with Barry and Gina in a bad mood.
The theatre trip was somewhat marred by Barry’s attentiveness and the fact that other people, strangers, also noticed her. Lizzie didn’t really like being the focus of attention. While she was in the Ladies, having queued seemingly for hours, someone admired her hair and asked her where she’d had it done. She happily told them. She only noticed a couple of other people with hair cut short like hers in the theatre and they all looked very stylish.
On Sunday afternoon Gina seemed on edge. Lizzie walked to the park and then came home and made toast for tea. She took a tray through to the sitting room where Gina was sitting by the gas fire. She smiled and made a space for the tray, pushing the Sunday papers off the table and on to the floor.
‘I’ll miss these little attentions,’ she said. ‘You’re a good girl, I must admit.’
Lizzie was alarmed. Her aunt wasn’t given to sentimentality.
She poured a cup of tea and handed it to Gina. Then she offered her the plate of buttered toast.
‘What would your parents say if you told them you didn’t want to live with me any more?’ Gina wiped her buttery fingers on her handkerchief.
