Black Marina by Emma Tennant Read Free Book Online Page B

and she smiled quite motherly at Teza when she handed over the little kid and we left. ‘It’s a pity Millie can’t stay forever and help you out,’ I said, because my admiration for Teza was growing with each minute. I mean there she is abandoned by her boyfriend and father of her child just when she needs support. It’s all very well, money isn’t everything. ‘Well, yes,’ Teza said, and then we were out of the house and walking down the empty, rainy market to this incredible old Nigerian who sells rugs and textiles patterned like nothing you’ve seen in your life before, Holly.
    *
    It’s been difficult for me out here, trying to imagine the changes at home – and in America too, of course, but the kind of man and woman you get coming down from the States are definitely the unreconstructed sort. The women are covered in scarlet nail polish and the men hold the door open for them, and at night in the little converted slave cottages at the side of Carib’s Rest you hear them helping themselves to ice and liquor from the fridge and sobbing and shouting at each other. The jet set’s a bit more cool – there was a Princess something who had a vibrator and a pistol in her bag – but usually when they go you find nothing but syringes, they’re too far out of it to leave a tip.
    Maybe I look back a little too sentimentally to the old days in King’s Road and West London, but it seems to me that Lore, Teza and I had just about the best time three girls – you say women now, of course, I know that – could have had at any time in history. London was doing all this swinging, and even though the tourists and the magazine editors did all they could to cash in on it, it just happened by itself, wherever it felt like happening. Lore’s hair was short and curly and she looked like a sexy, grinning chestnut. Teza’s long cornfield hair came down as low as the top of her mini,and the Slavonic side of her was most in evidence then. Perhaps it was before the English mother had asserted her side of the family by making over funds and all that. Teza was certainly totally broke. And I – they all said I looked a bit like Ava Gardner. It was just the time old movies were becoming a cult on their own. A couple of gays had a gigantic collection of portraits of Garbo and Dietrich and Crawford, etc., and the mags printed them large. We dressed in all colours like the Pied Piper of Hamlin by day and lay in the parks, stoned; at night we drew on Cupid’s bows and went dancing in our beaded thirties gowns from the antique supermarket. Most girls, even if they did buy a poster of the dead and beautiful Che Guevara, still thought underdevelopment was to do with your cup size in a bra.
    Once I realized I was well and truly stranded here and Lore wrote me about the fashions and whatever was going on, I began to feel like Robinson Crusoe, starting out from scratch on a desert island. It seems the more women’s consciousness was raised, the further the hemline went down. I had to sew about six minis together to get a skirt that came to the new length – and then after all that I felt like a suffragette who’d got washed up after a shipwreck. And the longer I stayed on here the more uncertain I became about going back at all. I’d be Rip Van Winkle by now. But it’s one of the factors, I’m sure, that goes to make up my lack of understanding of the new relationships. It’s not just that men nowadays seem to want to take half the responsibility for the home and the kids and so on and take courses in ante-natal breathing exercises. It’s the new way of splitting apart, too. Teza really wanted Ford to feel free, as Lore told me that time she came out here and we managed to have a good talk – when the men weren’t circling round Lore in the Bar, that is. (She still knows how to do it. In the end she was so hassled she had to go and spend the night with Ferdie the barman. At least he doesn’t want to give me anything, she said.)