Chapter 21 A Well-Turned-Out Little Thing
If it weren’t for Thomas needing ready cash to pay for his solicitor and counsel, Elsie knew he’d have kept his lip buttoned about where he’d hidden the money, the thousand pounds he and Jack had stolen from Naomi and Larry.
As it was, he had little choice. He trusted her more than any of his friends, or his rotten family.
More fool him. And fair’s fair; she gave the solicitor enough to get the ball rolling.
There was no possibility of them getting bail, in any case.
Nor of being found not guilty. Though she supposed a clever King’s Counsel could make a difference when it came to sentencing.
But they didn’t deserve the help that money could buy, did they?
And you deserve it, do you? inquired the reproving angel on her shoulder.
Yes, she thought, as it happens, I do. With something like relief, she gave herself over to amorality, to ruthless self-preservation.
Her treachery to Naomi was somehow consigned to an inaccessible chamber of her mind.
She deserved to escape, to uproot herself from the poverty and sordidness into which she’d been thrust by accident of birth.
And here, unexpectedly, was her chance. She’d be an utter fool not to take it.
Jack and Thomas gone, likely for good; nearly one thousand pounds at her disposal.
And war all but certain, impending chaos she could disappear into.
The weather was volatile that August, one might even say ominous: stormy, with thunder and lightning and hailstones.
On the evening of Sunday the twenty-seventh, after her mother had gone to bed, Elsie went to her own room and slid open the sash window.
The warm, damp air rushed at her face, smelling salty and riverish and filling her with a restless excitement.
She felt in the grip of possibility, a novel and glorious sensation.
She wouldn’t take much with her, she decided.
Just a small suitcase. After all, the first order of business should be buying a new wardrobe.
The thought made her blush with happiness.
French silk underwear. Silver kid evening shoes from Jacobus.
A velvet dinner dress from Enos Ltd. Dressmaker suits from Molyneux. Blouses from Liberty’s.
She thought about leaving a letter for her mother.
But really, what was the point? What could she feasibly say?
There were no words to justify her actions.
More to the point, she didn’t care to justify herself.
From the moment she was born, not a single human had prioritized her well-being, including—no, especially—her parents.
She hadn’t been sorry when her father died, and she’d shed few tears over not seeing her mother again.
Thank God she and Thomas had no children.
He was mystified that she’d never conceived during their six years of marriage.
But she’d always known it was unlikely, if not impossible.
Occasionally guilt, even regret, had pricked her.
Yet how glad she was now! A child would be a good deal harder to discard and forget.
She left home soon after dawn and waited for the first Tube.
She traveled a few stops, then sat in a café on Marchmont Street, West Central, for a couple of hours before presenting herself at a ladies’ hostel off Russell Square.
It was a dreary and anonymous sort of place, which was for the best. Until she’d effected her transformation, she didn’t wish to draw any sort of attention to herself.
And there was plenty of time—all the time in the world, in fact.
The following days and weeks passed in a pleasant haze as she did little but stroll around the West End, shopping and sitting in tea rooms. The haze was heightened by blurry, sporadic lightheadedness thanks to her commitment to a strict diet outlined in Vogue (she studied the magazine like it was divine scripture).
Coffee, tea, wine, eggs, and beef were allowed; verboten were starches, milk and cheese, fruit and vegetables.
Her cheekbones began to emerge, her eyes looked larger, and her collarbones were gratifyingly prominent.
Her waist, however, still measured twenty inches.
When it measured eighteen, she would have attained her ideal shape.
For her appointment at the Harley Street plastic surgeon, she dressed carefully in a puff-sleeved alligator-green rayon crepe dress, tightly belted and hitting just below the knee, and a gray fox stole.
Mr. Nigel Lacey, an elderly silver-haired man smelling of cigars and carbolic soap, regarded her with an urbane twinkle.
“Young lady,” he said, “my job is to repair disfigurements caused by injury or by some defect of nature. Unless you are concealing a hideous deformity with that delightful costume, I fear you have wandered into my office by mistake. I’m a surgeon, not a god—I cannot improve upon perfection.”
Elsie—or Bianca Skelton, as she was temporarily calling herself—laughed. “A surgeon and an expert flatterer. What I’m hoping you might do, Mr. Lacey, is remove the bump on my nose.” She turned her head to display her profile.
Mr. Lacey emerged from behind his large desk and brought his face close to Elsie-Bianca’s. He ran a finger down the bridge of her nose, then grasped her chin between thumb and forefinger and moved her face from side to side. “Are you perchance an actress, Mrs. Skelton?”
She grasped at the idea gratefully. “I’m on the stage, yes. My management thinks I have a chance to be in films, but I’ve been told I don’t photograph well.”
“And what does your husband think?”
“He’s very supportive of my career. He’s in the arts himself.”
“Hmm.” He sat back down. “It should be a simple operation, very simple indeed. We break the bone, then reset it. If I might make a recommendation—it’s not necessary, and yet…”
“Oh, but please.”
“A small chin enhancement, to go with the new nose. Again, it’s very simple. We pop in a little crescent of cartilage, just to give a firmer prominence. A more elegant facial silhouette, as it were. We’ll put you to sleep, of course. You won’t feel a thing.”
She brought a hand to her chin. “Will there be a scar?”
“A tiny one. No one will notice.”
She smiled. “How soon can you fit me in?”
Once the bruises had faded, it was nearly Christmas.
The newspapers were full of Mr. Chamberlain’s visit to France, where he was inspecting the units on patrol.
These consisted of mostly rural men from the north of England, many of whom would never see their homes again.
In a way, reflected Elsie, Jack and Thomas were better off where they were.
She had found a flatlet on Bird Street, near Selfridges, and she entrusted the next stage of her transformation to the Selfridges hair salon.
A slight young Frenchman, his braces holding his trousers high on his waist, attended on her.
He struck Elsie as frail, defenseless. She hoped he’d be allowed to spend the war there, in that pink-painted room smelling of coconut shampoo and peroxide, far away from the battlefield.
But when he unfolded her mousy-brown chignon and raked his fingers through it, staring at her critically in the mirror, she realized she was in confident hands.
Emboldened, she told him, “I want something dramatic. Something sophisticated. I’m not frightened of a big change. ”
He brightened at this. “I think,” he said, “your style is à la garconne. We cut to here”—he sliced his hand across the back of her head—“and dye it black. Yes?”
Having offered him carte blanche, she could only agree, despite her mild terror.
But ninety minutes later, when he removed the dryer and began arranging her new hair, she saw she’d been right to trust him.
Not only did she look years younger, you’d never have taken her for an English-Irish jailbird’s wife from Stepney.
She appeared glamorously, indefinably continental.
With her new straight nose and firmer chin, she might even pass for an aristocrat, she thought. A debutante.
“Tell me honestly,” she said to the clever Frenchman, “looking at me now, what age would you guess me to be?”
He finished smoothing a side curl with his fingertip, considered her, and said with apparent sincerity, “Twenty, perhaps twenty-one.”
And so, three months after her thirty-first birthday, she knocked ten years off her age.
After around six months of freedom, the money, which had seemed inexhaustible, began to run low.
Elsie—now Honor Petrova, a name she chose after buying a set of Louis Vuitton luggage monogrammed HP at a Christie’s auction—turned her mind to finding work.
Since she’d have sooner died than go back to waitressing, she embarked upon a correspondence course in typing and shorthand.
She also invented an education: boarding school in Geneva, finishing school in Fontainebleau.
Guided by the announcers on the BBC, she began to alter her voice, lowering its pitch and sharpening her consonants, mimicking certain words as practice: bot-tull; iss-yu; evacu-ay-shun of civil-yins.
Her neighbors, listening through the thin walls, must have thought her quite nutty. She didn’t care.
Despite all this, it took a fair amount of courage to present herself at the secretarial agency.
She feared they’d take one glance and see her for what she truly was.
The first challenge was the girl at reception.
She was on the telephone when Honor entered the rather modest rooms, situated unpropitiously above an ironmonger’s in Goodge Street.
Lawton and Grey, the firm was called. Honor had chosen it from the telephone directory, the sole criterion being that the name sounded smart, but not too smart.