Free Before I Met You by Lisa Jewell Page A

Street. As she passed by, she noticed across the street a man with a large camera in one hand and a mug of coffee in the other. He was wearing a baseball cap and sunglasses, although the sky was far from blue. As she watched, another man joined him, also carrying a camera and a cup of coffee. They seemed to know each other, and made a few words of low-key conversation. Then they both turned and faced the house on Peter Street, as though waiting for something to happen. She watched them both for a moment or two, before realising that she now looked as strange as they did and hurrying on her way.
    Alexandra Brightly’s studio was called 20th Century Box and was next to the Oasis Sports Centre in Covent Garden. It was up two flights of scruffy stairs in a soulless building shared with a tailor and a photographer.
    ‘Yes?’
    ‘Hi, my name’s Betty, your brother, John, gave me your card. I’ve got a fur to sell.’
    ‘Oh. Cool. OK. Come in! Second floor!’
    The woman greeting Betty at the top of the stairs was tall and painfully thin, with long white-blond hair and a rather beaky nose. She was so pale, the blue of her eyes so watered down, that she almost gave the impression of albinism. She was dressed in a black chiffon shirt, a large crucifix on an overlong chain resting in the wide valley between her small breasts, and baggy jeans held together at her waist with an old leather belt. She held a fake cigarette in her right hand.
    ‘Wow, wow, wow,’ she said as her gaze fell upon the fur held like a slaughtered animal in Betty’s arms. ‘Wow,’ she said again, resting the fake cigarette on a pattern-cutting table and putting an arm out towards the coat, running fingers as long as chopsticks through the fur. ‘This looks fucking awesome. Fuck. I fucking
love
fur.’
    Her voice was husky and smoky and her accent was half public school, half East End. She smiled at Betty, revealing smoker’s teeth. ‘Sorry,’ she said, ‘I get a bit carried away sometimes. Especially by the fur. It’s so wrong, yet it’s mm,’ she caressed the fur again, ‘sooo right. Let’s have a look then.’ She pulled half-moon glasses from the pattern-cutting table and rested them halfway down her aquiline nose. ‘Oh, yes,’ she said, now that the fur was unfolded on the table, ‘oh, yes. This is amazingly good. Where did you say you got it from?’
    ‘It was my grandmother’s.’
    ‘Class act,’ she said, opening it up and feeling the lining. ‘Oh yes, it’s a Gloria Maurice. I thought it would be. They always put an extra couple of animals in, just for the hell of it, you know.’ She peered at Betty over the top of her glasses and smiled. ‘Yeah,’ she said, turning back to the fur. ‘I could definitely buy this from you. Definitely. I’m working with a production company right now, as it happens, on a period drama – nineteen forties – they’ll love this. Let’s have a proper look at it.’ She swivelled an Anglepoise lamp over the coat and began to examine it in minute detail.
    Betty glanced around the studio as she did so. It was jammed full of free-standing clothes rails, each one packed with plastic-wrapped clothes, divided into themes by laminated signs: ‘30s dresses’, ‘Flapper dresses’, ‘50s Cocktail’, ‘70s/Hippy beach-wear’. There were cabinets full of sunglasses and silk scarves, and mannequins in silk ball gowns and bondage punk. There were clutch bags and corsages, stilettos and bovver boots. The walls were hung with framed stills from films and TV series, and there was Alexandra snuggled up against Colin Firth and with her arm around the shoulder of Emilia Fox.
    ‘So,’ said Alexandra, turning the coat over, ‘how do you know my brother?’
    ‘Oh. No. I don’t know him. Not in that way. I live in the flat next to his stall. On the market. He just mentioned you, said you might be interested in the fur. I think it was fairly obvious to him that I’m not really a fur kind of