Free Getting It Right by Elizabeth Jane Howard Page B

his mind back on his work, conscious of a passing
but real surge of gratitude for acne and dandruff – the first, after all, did recede from time to time, and the second was something that he had the professional knowledge to keep at bay.
    ‘I’m afraid you’ll have to stop reading for a minute or two while I cut your fringe,’ he said. She put down the book and smiled trustfully at him: really, in a way, she
was rather an attractive person – not his type, of course, but looking at her quite objectively he could see that quite a number of people might regard her as reasonably attractive.
    When he had finished, she gave him a 50p piece in an anxious, almost supplicatory manner – as though she was afraid he might not accept it.
    He thanked her warmly and then he had to rush over to Mrs Courcel, who had taken herself out of the dryer and was surveying herself with the unswerving interest that he had noticed she seemed
always to have for her own face. Quicker to take her rollers out himself than wait to get Mandy or Jenny.
    Mrs Courcel’s hair was black and glossy and the gloss shone blue – like the flame from methylated spirit. It was really the kind of hair that looked best when it was dressed very
simply, but when he had once suggested this, she had said to hell with simplicity, it bored her husband. Her hair piece lay on the shelf in front of the mirror like a dead raven. He brushed out her
hair from the roller curls and then asked her what she wanted him to do.
    ‘I want it all drawn back, but on top as well, and then the piece
right
at the back, with curls falling down each side. I’ve a dress with just one shoulder, so I want it
sort of Grecian.’ His heart sank. Getting the piece to stay on the back of her head (she hadn’t really
got
a back to her head – it sloped alarmingly from the top) would
be murder – however: never say no to a client. He parted her hair in the middle, fastened each side with clips and picked up the hair piece. Fifteen minutes later, he had achieved what she
had asked. He was sweating but thank God it was over. He handed her the mirror and she began a minute survey of her head from every angle.
    ‘It’s no good,’ she said at last. ‘I thought it couldn’t be: it didn’t feel right and you can see – three quarters from the back – that I
look
as though I’m wearing a hair piece. It doesn’t look like
me
.’
    There was a brief silence: Mrs Courcel did not look in the mirror at him to see what he thought of what she thought: she continued calmly to gaze at herself, picking at pieces of her hair with
her coral-painted nails, but Gavin looked fleetingly at his own face as a tidal wave of rage and hatred surged up his body and swirled about his throat, and was astonished to see that it was
suffused with a weak (and silly) smile. He had been afraid that his fury would show – might even upset the client – but his idiotic expression filled him instead with self-loathing.
‘Why don’t you ever stand
up
for yourself?’ Marge used always to say whenever awful things had happened to him as a child which they so often had. When they’d
emptied his silkworms down the school toilets, when he’d won a pig at Barnet Fair and his mother had made him give it away, when his father had said there was no sense in paying for violin
lessons, when he’d run a (sub-normal) temperature the night before he was going to the seaside with Auntie Sylvia and his mother had cancelled the trip ‘to be on the safe side’,
when Tony Williams had pinched his brand new bike and crashed it . . . He realized that he was taking down Mrs Courcel’s hair, and glancing up from his hands to the mirror again he saw with
relief that the smile had vanished – indeed, he had no expression at all.
    ‘I think if you tried the piece on top of my head with the curls below it it may work better,’ Mrs Courcel said. He set about trying that: it was what he had been going to do in the
first