Betty would never forget the first time she met Rose. Oh, she knew of her, of course, long before she met Arthur. Rose was the renowned colliery beauty who worked in the ticket booth of the Rialto Cinema. Betty was a regular there. She liked the dazzle and nonsense of a Hollywood film. She’d hoot with laughter at all the fanciful silken costumes (no use at all for swilling out a back yard). Tremulous love scenes made her wince with gleeful embarrassment. None of those Hollywood sorts could hold candle to her Arthur, who had proposed whilst they’d shared a bag of chips looking out across Scarborough Bay one August bank holiday. The sea was rising and falling, sparkling and shimmering, like a sleeping creature made of silver scales.
‘Let’s get married, Betsey. You’ll do for me. And I like to think I’ll do for you,’ he’d said quietly. And that was that. That was quietude and grace of real love, not the toil and torment of Hollywood dramas. However, on her afternoon off from the colliery offices, she did love to treat herself to a matinee at the Rialto. It was a particular delight on drab, drizzly winter afternoons to sink into the cinema’s plush velvet womb. Even more of a delight was the delicious disorientation of arriving at the cinema in daylight, and leaving in the gathering darkness. The feeling, as shopkeepers lowered their shutters and workers queued in the rain for the 5.30 bus home, that for Betty a humdrum afternoon had been transformed into something magical.
Rose’s shift had started by the time the matinee came out. As she left the auditorium, Betty would steal a glimpse at Rose in her ticket booth. It was like looking like an otherworldly creature: a mermaid or an angel. There she sat, perched in her gilded frame; an exquisite painting made flesh. Betty also noticed the looks Rose attracted from some men. She did not envy Rose those looks at all. There was something dangerous, unsettling about them, and the comments they made under their breath about her. But, Betty got the impression that Rose could look after herself. Many’s the time she had watched young (and not so young) men approach Rose’s booth with the swagger and insolence of cowboys entering a saloon, only to be reduced to stuttering fools in her icy presence.
It was Christmas Eve when Arthur first took Betty to meet his family. ‘We’ll just pop in, say our hellos and then leave. Ten minutes, tops, Betsy, love. Maybe not even that. Don’t fret. It will be fine. In and out in five, that’s the plan.’ They were the kind of reassurances a fussing parent might give a child before a visit to the dentist. The thing was, Betty hadn’t been fretting at all. Not until that moment, anyway.
Entering the front room, Betty was struck how Rose was framed again with light and sparkle and razzamatazz. How, even in a cramped parlour in a colliery terrace, she seemed able to place herself centre stage, with the poise and stillness of an artist’s model. It was as if all the decorations: the paper chains, tinsel and fairy lights, had been set in place purely for her benefit. Everything and everyone else in the room became her background, her props. Rose was sat curled on the floor in the firelight. Her pale grey skirt spilled around her like a pool of liquid mercury. She was, Betty thought, the very essence of self-absorbed loveliness. Her face was as smooth as a teaspoon of rich cream and was tinted with the softest flush of peach in the glow of the fire. She was tiny; she had all the fragility of a nestless bird. Her clothes were elegant and almost demure, yet there were touches of ostentation: the thick black belt at her waist was belted tightly for show rather than comfort. Her skirt was a little fuller than was the custom at the time; to highlight the slightness of her waist. She had the look of a woman who would be forever checking her appearance, forever searching for her reflection: in polished spoons, shop windows and silver kettles. The component parts were undoubtedly beautiful, in another place or another time Rose, bedecked in emeralds, might have graced a dinner party at a glittering palace, or reclined on a yacht on the Cote D’Azur in a silk kimono. Yet here she was, in a colliery backstreet, still living at home with her mother, younger sister and brother. It’s Christmas Eve and she’s got nowhere to go. She’s really nothing but a spinster, Betty thought to herself.
At the other side of the fireplace, in stark relief to Rose’s lacquered femininity, lounged youngest sister, Dina. If Rose was formed from porcelain and perfume, Dina brought to mind open fields and fresh air. She seemed as guileless and free as a swallow swooping through gusting skies. She was dressed in baggy tweed trousers and a rumpled cotton shirt. In front of her, on the hearth was a blue ceramic bowl full of hazelnuts. Dina was working her way through them with a silver nutcracker. She’d crack the nut and then toss kernel high into the air, lay her head back and catch it like a lizard. She grinned at Betty when she entered the room and then threw a handful of hazelnut shells onto the fire where they sizzled and flared and scented room with the fragrance of autumn. Betty liked Dina the moment she saw her. She liked her warmth, her eccentricity and her artlessness. Dina was to be married to a doctor in the Spring. Arthur had hinted that Rose was not best pleased to be beaten to the altar by her younger sister, even less so that Dina had landed herself a professional man and would be making her home in big house in the countryside.
‘Our Dina only brushes her hair for church and won’t even wear a dress on a Sunday. She went to Aunt Florence’s funeral in trousers and a trilby hat. Our Rose cannot understand how she’s getting married first and to a doctor to boot. Although, I’m not sure Rose would even say yes to a doctor. For her, it’s Clark Gable or no one. Gone With the Wind has a lot to answer for.’
Arthur’s elder brother Bill had not been there that night. He was a quiet, mild-mannered man who lived in the village with his wife, Winnie. Arthur’s queenly mother, Iris, was very much in attendance. She was sat upright in a straight-backed chair. Her hair was snowy white and her clothes were black. She had been mourning the death of her husband for the past seventeen years. Her dark, bright eyes glittered in the firelight as she appraised Betty. Everything about the old woman suggested a starched, unyielding capability and an absolute sense of her own omnipotence. Dina aside, Betty sensed a malignancy in the room that made her the hairs on the back of her arms prickle. She felt curiously detached; she could not shake the sensation that the scene in front of her was sealed in a vacuum, like a curious museum exhibit behind thick glass. She noticed Rose’s dahlia-hued lips appeared to be moving, and that her pale violet eyes were fixed upon her. She was speaking to her and yet all Betty could hear was a curious rushing of air. Dina had stopped tossing hazelnuts and was looking at her sister with an expression of cool contempt. The fire was dying out, the dark was gathering in the corners of the tiny room. Rose raised her elegantly pencilled brows expectantly at Betty, obviously expecting a response to what she had said.
Betty felt herself flush. She was a fool. Why had she not been paying more attention? Now they would think her rude.
‘I’m sorry Rose, what did you say?’ she said.
Rose smiled thinly and repeated herself. The words curled like smoke from her mouth and drifted across the room; light and lilting and poisonous.
‘I said, your slip seems to be showing, Betty dear.’ She nodded to where Betty’s dowdy beige slip was indeed hanging down beneath her best woollen skirt. The condescension in Rose’s voice was as clear as a church bell. From that meeting, it became clear to Betty that there would be many skirmishes to come, but that the first battle had certainly been won by Rose. Arthur led a Betty out of the room. She had not spoken one word, simply nodded as he had introduced her.
‘I like her. I approve.’ Betty heard Dina proclaim as Arthur closed the parlour door.
‘Really, Dina. I must say I’m surprised to hear that. I thought she was a drab little moth,’ his mother had replied.
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