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worldliness and acquiesced immediately when she offered me the job.
    ‘You’ll have to wear something else, though,’ she pointed out. I didn’t have any of the fetish-themed clothing thatthe club preferred everyone to don, so I usually borrowed a simple black dress from Liana.
    ‘I don’t think I own anything appropriate,’ I remarked with regret.
    ‘Not to worry,’ she replied, looking me up and down as if taking my modest measurements. ‘I think we can conjure something up that will suit you. Your skin is so pale, and I love the way you wear your hair.’
    I was one of the few girls I knew who still sported the hair they were born with. Jet black, it reached right down to the small of my back as I hadn’t had it cut since I’d reached my teens.
    By then, I’d found a day job assisting at the counter at a music shop in Denmark Street, London’s old Tin Pan Alley, just off Charing Cross Road. Music had always been one of my passions, maybe even my only passion. I’d had ten years or so of cello lessons and had even taught myself to play the guitar, although for some reason I’d not picked up an instrument since I’d left home. The store sold and hired instruments and also stocked sheet music.
    With my job there and the part-time hours at the fetish club, I was financially secure for the first time in my adult life, not that I had expensive tastes or a costly way of life. I didn’t begrudge the lack of free time, finding both activities enjoyable and a welcome contrast to one another. It was like living in two different worlds and it made life interesting.
    London was a forest of possibilities and I wanted to sample every single one of them. I wanted loud music and white lights, to be alone in a crowd and be a part of an unthinking multitude, to have picnics in Regent’s Park or Hyde Park or Hackney Downs, wander for hours on enddown Brick Lane or the warrens of the Camden Town markets, carouse in Hoxton and meditate in the early morning on the slopes of Primrose Hill, shop for exotic vegetables in Brixton market, halal meat in Southall or kosher patisseries in Golders Green.
    But, first of all, I treated myself to another, larger tattoo across my right shoulder: a multicoloured landscape of wild orchids. And I got my ears pierced and adorned by a welter of small, thin steel rings. Some days I would add a fake nose ring to compound my overall goth look, alongside a darker shade of crimson for my lipstick.
    Lily of London was born in earnest.
    Little did I know how violins would make a mess of all my carefully improvised plans.
    I had been working at the shop in Denmark Street for almost three months when, shortly after we’d opened at ten in the morning, this serious-looking and rather handsome – if curiously detached – middle-aged guy walked in and enquired about violin rentals.
    We normally traded in violins, but most of our demand was for electric guitars and bass guitars, so none of our stock was actually on display in the window, but was kept behind the till in a glass-fronted cabinet.
    The man seemed anxious, as if he had come to the wrong place, but he gifted me with a broad, warm smile when I pointed out the tall unit standing behind me and confirmed we also hired instruments in addition to selling them.
    My first instinct with men is to look at their fingers and I can usually recognise a musician from miles away. He wasn’t one, but his fingers were the right length and thinenough. It made me wonder what he did for a living, but it was a bit too early to ask as I unlocked the cabinet with one of the keys from the heavy bunch we kept chained to the cash register.
    He advised me the violin he was seeking to hire was not for personal use, which confirmed the fact that he didn’t actually play, and politely enquired whether I happened to play myself. The friend on whose behalf he was there worked in the classical field. I mentioned in passing that I was more of a rock’n’roll sort of gal,