The Reinvention of Ivy Brown

A Novel

Roberta Taylor

• Publisher: Atlantic Books
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN:
  9781843547754
• eBook ISBN:
  9781848877825
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

It is February 1963, and London is enduring the coldest winter anyone can remember. Ivy Brown, typist at the Wiseman Pulverizer Company, is about to turn thirty. As she sits, staring at the back of the typist in front of her and trying to avoid thinking about her impending birthday, two things lift her from her gloom: her brand new Beaver Lamb coat and thoughts of Arthur... Arthur is the man on whom Ivy has pinned all her hopes. 'We are our own secret' Arthur says, and Ivy loves to repeat it. But when Ivy discovers that Arthur is a man who has many secrets, her determination to uncover the truth comes to spell disaster for all those in her way.

PART ONE

Chapter One

1963 | FEBRUARY

Ivy stepped out of the lift and gave the commissionaire a conniving smile. Stopping inches away from the front desk, Ivy curved a saucy lean towards him as she struggled to put her mittens on.

‘I’m sure you’re snug as a bug in that marvellous creation, Mrs Brown, going out to lunch today, are we? Mind you don’t slip.’

To anyone with an eye for these things, a small, sloping-shouldered, ginger-haired spinster in the brown black pelt of a beaver lamb coat didn’t quite manage chic. Somehow the colour, the texture, and most of all the chunky weight of it, made Ivy’s little head look like a Percy Dalton’s peanut struggling to pass through the arse of a black Labrador. Head down, she pushed through the heavy double doors out into freezing air that razor-bladed over any exposed flesh.

The acquisition of this coat six weeks ago had put paid to any chance of cycling to work, quite apart from the ice age that had descended on the whole country the past two months. A Christmas present to herself out of her fifty-pound yearly bonus. The best perk of working for an American company. The best coat that C&A Oxford Street had ever had in their shop. She’d go back to the bike in the spring, when the precious garment would be laid to rest in its special bag until next winter.

Ivy’s mottled trotter feet warily tried to keep their bearings down the three icy steps, the inch-high stiletto heels of her plain black court shoes working as crampons to keep a grip. Her engine wasn’t revving towards a sandwich. She was thinking about the weekend and Arthur. Where and how to slide into him by accident? They mustn’t be seen together. By anyone. They could both lose their jobs for a start, and Arthur particularly had told her it was always a mistake to let people know your business. We are our own secret, he had said.

‘We are our own secret.’ Ivy knew that most likely he had got the line from the pictures, but enjoyed him mouthing it between kisses. It was as good as ‘I love you’ as far as she was concerned. She also knew he was right. If anyone got an inkling of their state of affairs and immoral yearnings, they could both be out of a job. Sacked for bringing scandal and gossip to the workplace. The heavier slur would, of course, be on Ivy: she, the older woman, an apparent widow, having it off with some young lad from the printers’ depot.

Ivy went down the alley at the side of the building, hoping to find Arthur in the loading bay, slushing along the snow-covered cobblestones, making as much noise as possible but at the same time looking as if she had an important destination to somewhere other than him. She stopped and rummaged around in her handbag to have a chance to scan the backyard. The gates were wide open and she could see out of the corner of her eye that the enormous snowman with a frozen stick of liquorice poking out of his mouth was still centre-stage, surrounded by three white Luderman’s vans. He wasn’t there. She hobbled on through the alley and out on to the main road of Kingsway.

Perched on a high stool, looking out of the window of Luigi’s espresso bar, Ivy pondered her next move. She daydreamed the weekend with him, and the weekend without him.

Without him had the biggest picture.

Her mood couldn’t rise to fun and warmth, only the hanging gloom of aloneness. She hadn’t been able to get last night out of her head all morning. The tingling power she had felt when she discovered him waiting at the station, dangling keys and winking at her. How he had pushed her hand deep into his overcoat pocket to feel him at half mast, both knowing that they would have to be stealthy and walk the back alleys for at least another hour before the coast would be clear. Eventually the burglar sneak into the backyard, and a clamber up inside the back of the van. No words.

Under her coat, slowly moving up and down, Ivy dusted invisible crumbs from her right breast as she remembered his squeeze and bite through her brassiere; Arthur’s knack to keep her frizzing and wanting. Long enough to finish the job, when her tangerine lizard lips swallowed him. Over the cartons of paper and brown envelopes, surprisingly, there was never any mess to speak of.

She allowed a tiny smirk to lift her face, thinking of his skinny limp back to Vauxhall that night, and what he might have got up to once he was home. The twenty-minute ride north to her bedsit in Islington had been a moist, warm rush to keep the fires burning. That last goodnight hot pee in the lavatory on the communal landing, and then back to the secrecy of her room. Stripped in a flash, clothes everywhere, Ivy jumped into the single bed and dived under the pile of blankets. Slow, muscular throbbings with the pillow pushed high between her legs. Many, many times she managed a pleasurable outcome. Nine she clocked up at the last count. Eventually, bored, tired, and suffering from leg cramps, she hauled her stiff limbs out of the little bed and carefully hung her costume and blouse ready for the morning to avoid any sign of crumpled habits and crumpled soul.

Jostling into her contemplations, a queue of half a dozen chilled bodies rattled out their individual lunch orders. For a moment she felt stark naked. Beneath the long shelf at the window was Luigi’s only seating. Ivy sat at one end, as far away as possible from an old man further along. At first glance he could have been mistaken for a woman. The thick tartan head-scarf tied primly, in royal fashion, at the point of his chin, was completely at odds with his ripped, greasy fawn raincoat and tar-covered boots.

Hunched and wrapped in the carapace of her fur coat, Ivy clamped her woolly mittens around the hot, frothy cup of milk. She had wolfed down the sandwich in four neurotic bites. A smear of margarine and a half-chewed knot were all that were left on the small white plate: the tail end of a sausage skin. Transfixed on the struggling traffic, Ivy stared out of the window: buses and lorries creeping along in the grit and filthy mush, hoping to avoid the hidden skiddy ice beneath. Great mounds of snow were piled high on the edge of pavements, showing no signs of piddling away yet.

Some larkers had rolled newspapers and stuck them in rows along the snow heaps, the papers freezing into a rampart.

She watched three young women come towards Luigi’s, walking arm in arm and giggling, the blonde on the end holding out her engagement finger and then blowing on the diamond and rubbing it on her coat. The other two trying to get hold of her hand and pretending to take it off. A passing boy on a bike slow-pedals to a dawdle and gives them a wolf whistle. Shy shrieks that they may be making too much of a public scene, and they run out of Ivy’s view.

A twinge of something unpleasant moves around her heart. She can’t be sure if it’s the girly friendship, the engagement ring, or the wolf whistle. Female company was not something Ivy lived for. She knew she was not a belonger, a safe confider. Mostly she was an avoider of women.

Every face that swept by the café was given the once-over, followed by a study of her own face reflected in the glass. She sipped her hot milk and her ribs grasped at something needling her: jawlines. She had looked at every woman with a jawline… and realized… hers had already gone.

Chapter Two

1963 | FEBRUARY

Janet Brady checked the backs of her legs. She was finishing her tea break, getting ready for her favourite part of the day: filing. Preparing for the architects’ room first and all their sauciness, then downstairs to the ‘Don’t touch that yet I’m not finished’ from some of the more poncy typists.

Although Wiseman Pulverizer used only the top two floors of this enormous marbled, curlicued building, everyone else benefited somewhat from the American company’s extravagant twenty-four-hour heating. The main entrance on the ground floor had Mr Bertram at his commissionaire’s desk and, opposite him, a busy Irish bank. Down in the basement was Luderman’s, stationers and printers. Their entrance was through the backyard, where they kept the delivery vans, and they had an internal tradesman’s stairway to the rest of the building.

The business traffic through the great front door constantly dispersed most of the luxurious warmth felt elsewhere, but it was better than nothing. At three o’clock in the afternoon the Irish bank would close, and Mr Bertram could settle down to read, more or less uninterrupted, for the next two hours. The comings and goings would start up again when the office staff trundled out at the end of their day. The Royal Air Force Flying Review was Mr Bertram’s close study, with its true stories of wartime heroes and escapades; other times he would scan Dalton’s Weekly for second-hand puppets and any Punch and Judy equipment. Airfix Magazine would be saved for the Underground journey back to his two-room lodgings in Paddington.

Londoners were dropping dead from the smog and cold. Back in November, when the weather was beginning to get really bad, Wiseman’s had issued face masks. By February around seven hundred people had choked their lives away in the putrid yellow poison. A handkerchief would return home after a day out black and sooted.

‘Oi, I can see right up your skirt. Fancy milk and a dash after work?’ Brian, Luderman’s delivery bloke.

Janet looked down the stairwell into his amazing violet eyes and felt her face burn. Brian was so good-looking it made hearts over-pump the blood. He was more film-star dashing than Little Joe, her favourite, from Bonanza. But Little Joe didn’t have that black glossy hair and those eyes.

‘You delivering? Or have delivered? Bit late either way, isn’t it?’ Eileen Arthur, the tea-lady, was exiting the Ladies when she heard his voice. She put a protective arm around Janet, peered down the stairs at him. Like lightning he was gone.

‘Why don’t you like him?’ Janet said.

‘Did I ever say I didn’t like him?’ Eileen took a step back and searched around in the front pocket of her Wiseman’s green overall; a plunge of Catholic guilt as Janet watched her fiddle with a blue and white gentleman’s handkerchief. She couldn’t find anything else to say, so mumbled a ‘Sorry’, having absolutely no idea what she was sorry for.

‘What I don’t like is him traipsing up here for no good reason. Well, I have a bloody good idea of his reason, but you’re just a kid and he’s a grown man. It’s not right. If I told Miss Armstrong about him she could get him the sack, I reckon… and look at the time… The sack for me if I don’t get a shift on.’ Janet knew that Eileen had her own furtive whisperings with Brian sometimes, when she thought no one was about. There was no way she would get him the push.

Janet followed her along the corridor, back into the narrow kitchenette, and could see that the typing-pool tea trolley wasn’t fully organized yet.

‘Do the backs of my legs look alright? Normal?’ Janet whispered.

Moving backwards and forwards, placing sugar, milk, and teaspoons in their place, Eileen glanced a couple of times the girl’s slender legs.

‘They seem perfectly alright to me, the stockings are a bit washed out looking, that’s all. Why?’

‘Nothing,’ Janet said, readjusting her black velvet Alice band. It made Eileen smile that this pretty young girl should worry herself about a pair of legs that had everything going for them as far as she could see. But Janet wasn’t fretting about the shape of her legs, she was fretting about the backs of them. Her day had cracked badly from the beginning.

There had been pandemonium that morning, the conductress having rows with all sorts on the top deck. Passengers were always a bit more frisky on a Friday, with pay day and the weekend off to look forward to. The top deck fugged up with WildWoodbines being puffed, swearing and piss-taking of the fat conductress, then that terrifying helter-skelter on the ice when the bus went too fast around Old Street roundabout, with Janet almost obliterated as the stout conductress tilted and tipped on to her. As one, men in heavy boots had slammed and stamped their feet to aggravate the bus driver to be more careful. The comment that would eventually wobble the rest of Janet’s day had only been half absorbed in the mayhem. It came as she swayed towards the stairs, ready to hop off at the next stop. Not a mention of was she alright, or a mind how you go.

‘It looks deplorable, hasn’t your mother passed comment? It wouldn’t go amiss if you gave the backs of your legs a good wash, young lady,’ the conductress boomed, making sure that all and sundry turned round.

Later on, Tony the crooning Italian newsagent put his twopennyworth in. Not at first. At first he reminded her she was late.

‘You cutting it fine, en’t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Also by Roberta Taylor
• Copyright
• Dedication
• 1963 | APRIL
• PART ONE
• PART TWO