What a bummer. You should’ve stayed on and painted the town red, says Eliza. Shouldn’t she, Geoff?
Viv’s husband looks at her more closely. ‘Are you all right, sweetie pie? You seem rather peaky. In fact, a bit pale and wan.’
Eliza laughs. Wan? Wan monster hangover, more likely. Double bummer! She hopes Viv at least had wan scrummy French dinner to make it all worthwhile! Viv feels her gorge rising yet again. She mumbles an excuse and heads for the en-suite bathroom. It has now been renovated, and is freshly sparkling. Rather like Eliza, she thinks sourly.
‘I decided not to stay on for the optional second. It was just a one-night stand,’ she tells Martin Glover. ‘And not even quite that, to be scrupulously honest.’
Anything go particularly pear-shaped?
Everything, really. She and the Rev were basically incompatible, you know how it is, and she should have known better because she already knew how it was before she went. Their politics were violently opposed, among other things. She’d developed a terrible stomach upset.
Not that he’s a Reverend, by the way, that’s his twin Bruder. Tom is actually an MP called Tim Daunt. Viv had glimpsed a House of Commons pass, or something of that nature, as she scrabbled around under Tim’s parents-in-law’s well-shod feet, endeavouring to retrieve her garments.
‘Incidentally, Martin, he wasn’t in the least like Bob Mitchum, either.’
Martin says he’s sorry about that, but it’s one of those things. He’ll try not to make comparisons in future. They can be invidious. Or is it odious? Human interactions are at bottom unknowable, aren’t they?
‘You can say that again. Invidious, odious, and unknowable at bottom. Covers all bases.’
Well, he says, I don’t think Mr Davidson looks like anyone except himself.
Leary had texted Viv in the train. He’d be back in the land of the halfway living the day after tomorrow. Viv read this with a feeling of exhaustion.
23
INTER-GENERATIONAL DIALOGUES
Julia has been having an early evening drink in a cosy room. She has chosen a red-wine spritzer, unusually, but since she’s the one doing the pouring it comprises mainly soda water with a dash for colour and flavour.
Her companion is Bridie Waterstreet, who as yet has no need to think of her figure and is polishing off a second glass of full-strength red. Bridie is the strawberry-blonde Irish soprano playing Lisa, the Countess’s granddaughter.
They have three scenes together, fairly brief encounters in terms of time. But Julia is well aware of her position as a role model, and is happy to act as a mentor and confidante. As a diva in the last years of a stellar career, Julia Jefferies is held in high esteem (bordering on awe, in some cases) by those just embarking on theirs. Especially aspirational young sopranos.
It’s easy to like Bridie, who is sweet, unaffected and reverential, almost (but not quite, since this is a generous arc) to a fault. She is also very pretty, which Julia has noticed Emils Liepins also observing. Julia doesn’t resent this. It would be exceedingly foolish to do that, as well as pointless, and she is far too experienced and worldly to waste her emotional energy on matters she can do nothing about.
Besides, such concerns are effectively irrelevant. She has other things, as Viv might say (although not in this context), on the back burner.
Julia has invited Bridie to her apartment for a drink. They are seated side by side on a sofa in front of the fire – gas with look-alike coals, so realistic that Bridie, admiring everything, the pictures, the furniture – thought at first it was real. Their drinks, olives and quickly assembled smoked salmon and pesto on crispy pita bites (which will double as Julia’s supper) are set out on a coffee table in front of them. The pale silk curtains are drawn. The softly glowing atmosphere is conducive to relaxed confidences.
They have covered Bridie’s impressive career path. Where she has already been, and where her teacher would like her to go. Julia’s views have been sought, respectfully, and received with deference. And now they are discussing names.
Names, for singers as well as actors, have an importance that is not to be brushed aside. Who knew whether Anna Maria Kalogeropoulou or Frances Gumm would have gone as far as Maria Callas or Judy Garland? Would Norma Jeane Mortenson ever have scaled the heights of Marilyn Monroe?
The subject came up because Bridie has confided dissatisfaction with her birth name. Too late to change it now, isn’t it, Julia? And anyway, she says charmingly, it would mortify her parents. But – Bridie Waterstreet. It sounds so prosaic. So unoperatic, she says in her light, delightful brogue. It’s like a road beside a river. Or a blowzy character in Dickens.
Bridie Waterstreet is a perfectly good name, Julia interpolates firmly. It is pictorial, with a rhythm and lilt – like your voice, Bridie – which is what you want as a singer. Not only is it unusual – unusual without being peculiar, Julia stresses – it lodges in the mind, and you want that.
It’s too late to change it anyway. You are well on your way now, and your public already knows you as Bridie. Julia knows that the phrases well on your way, and in particular your public, have an importance that far outweighs their component parts. Bridie does not miss them.
‘Had I been christened Bridie Waterstreet,’ Julia says, ‘I wouldn’t have changed my name.’
Bridie turns to look at Julia. Her eyes widen. ‘Did you …’
‘I did, as it so happens, very early on. I went from June Jeffs to Julia Jefferies at the suggestion of my first singing teacher in Melbourne. She thought June was naff, and she didn’t like two single syllables together. Julia Jeffs wasn’t much better, so we lengthened them both.’
Julia’s eyes have an absent look. ‘Funny how you almost forget things like that. It was such a big deal at the time, yet now I hardly ever think of it. A name evolves into its own symbol, in a way, doesn’t it? It becomes so familiar over the course of a career that you could say it becomes an entity in itself. My brother still sometimes calls me June.’ She smiles. ‘In unguarded moments.’
She turns to her young colleague. ‘But she was right, my teacher, don’t you think, when she said that Julia Jefferies was more harmonious?’
‘Oh yes,’ Bridie is eager to agree. ‘She was. Definitely.’
Julia steers the conversation towards another area, which will bring her within spitting distance of the topic she intends to cover tonight. Towards the opera and Bridie’s feelings about making her debut at the Royal Opera House. Her excitement is contained, in Julia’s presence, because she is a professional and wishes to behave like a composed young woman with some experience behind her.
There is a fine line between confidence and anxiety, as Julia recalls very well. She made her own debut there at twenty-six, a year younger than Bridie, with a now-legendary director. And Emils Liepins, down the line, has a very fair chance of becoming another.
She diverts Bridie by musing over the difference between hetero and homosexual directors. Homosexuals can perhaps have more empathy, heteros more intuition. But some combine both qualities. Emils, for instance, falls into this category …
Unprompted, Bridie feels secure enough to share some of Emils’ suggestions. What he has told her she needs to focus on and bring out in her role. She hasn’t had many comparisons yet, she knows that, but she hasn’t worked with a director who’s anything like him before.
He’s such an enthusiast, Bridie says, with a matter-of-fact frown. He has an overview that’s quite, you know, visionary? And yet he’s so kind of unpretentious and normal. You know – that hair. And those clothes! Do you find that, Julia? You must have worked with hundreds of directors.
Julia sees through the attempts at level-headed detachment. She has discerned that Bridie is in a state of nascent hero-worship, a condition Julia knows is not too far removed from falling head over heels. The memory of this condition, its intoxication – and the reckless extremes it can trigger – has never left her. At the moment (for other reasons that are accelerati
ng by the day) this is in the forefront of Julia’s mind.
She agrees that their young director is quite something. She contrives to remark, subtly and without emphasis (in fact, to remark almost in passing) that Emils is in the early stages of a brilliant career that will take him all over the world and place in his path innumerable temptations. To emphasise gently that among his tasks as a director is to draw the best performances out of his principals. Every one of them, whatever their age, the older woman smiles. And the capacity to enthuse and to beguile is a huge help in this endeavour.
Julia talks a little about directors she has known. She touches on what she calls the art of intellectual seduction, possessed by the top practitioners, and prosecuted upon their targets. This, she tells Bridie, is world’s best practice. It can’t be taught. It’s either innate, or it doesn’t happen.
All the best directors have it, in her experience. Almost universally. And sometimes, the ones you would least expect. Ones that might seem at first so – Julia shrugs, with evident disbelief – ordinary.
‘That ability to enthral and captivate. It can bowl you over, you know,’ she says pensively, to the air. ‘Emils has it, of course.’ She turns to her companion, and confides with a sigh, ‘I have felt it myself.’
She is aware that the young woman sitting next to her is somewhat bowled over to hear this but far too polite to express it. Seduction, even if only of an intellectual nature, is not something she will have associated with Julia.
‘Oh, yes, Bridie,’ were it not for the name, you might have thought Julia was talking to herself, ‘I have imagined myself in love countless times.’ Julia raises her shining, well-coiffed head. ‘Reciprocally, of course, and that is their genius. Later, when the season comes to an end and everyone disperses to the far corners of the globe, I’ve had to come back down to earth.’
She laughs wryly. ‘Sometimes with a thud. And I’ve realised the mutual enchantment was just another part of the production. A very lovely part, but a mirage.’
Bridie pushes her long, shining hair behind her shoulders. On her best behaviour, she has nodded and listened to all this with an earnest expression. However, her role model knows only too well that understanding the reasons for certain phenomena only goes so far.
I’ve done my level best to spell it out, Julia tells herself. Where the oblivious young are concerned, one is powerless beyond a certain point. If their minds are set on a certain course, nothing anyone can say will deter them. Their minds? Who do I think I’m kidding? It has nothing to do with their minds. As I should know better than anyone. The insecure, almost deranged extremes it can trigger…
Within easy reach on the coffee table are books and magazines in two well organised piles. On top of one is a catalogue from the current show at the Max Jeffs Gallery in Melbourne. Julia points it out.
‘My brother’s art gallery,’ she says. ‘He didn’t change his name, of course. No need. Max Jeffs is also two single syllables, but we all thought that on him it sounded just fine. What do you think?’
‘Oh, I agree,’ says Bridie. ‘I think it sounds absolutely fine. It’s an authoritative name for an art dealer.’ This answer, she is pleased to see, receives Julia’s tick of approval.
Triple G, a very different type of art gallery, is Viv’s midday destination this Tuesday. At Shoreditch’s Galerie Galleria Gallery, three emerging artists – a collage photographer, a painter, and a sculptor who works with found objects – are delivering their work today for the group show that opens on Friday at 6pm. Among them is Daisy Mayberry, the maverick painter of miniature portraits, who has suggested that her mother meet her for lunch after she has unloaded her paintings.
Her mother discovers on arrival that Daisy has branched out recently into what she and the gallery director hope may prove to be a more lucrative field. There are four paintings of male nudes, front on, larger than her usual portraits and similarly hyper-realist.
‘Adrian’s suggestion, I don’t need to tell you,’ Daisy grins. ‘You don’t like them, do you? Dad will hate them.’
‘It’s certainly not that I don’t like them,’ Viv says stoutly. She is trying to suppress an unwanted flashback. ‘It’s just that they’re – well, rather breathtaking. They make quite a statement.’ They laugh.
The gallery is made up of three rooms, white windowless cubes, identical and intersecting. The plain white walls will show off Daisy’s twelve brilliantly coloured pictures effectively. Her cube is the middle one. When Viv arrived, Daisy, in distressed grey dungarees that managed to look stylish, was walking round it with another woman. They were holding up her pictures at differing heights on the walls. Some to be hung with a yard of space around them, the nudes to be grouped together for greater impact.
‘There won’t be a hope in hell of talking at the opening, Mum,’ Daisy is saying. ‘It’ll be a bunfight. That’s if you can bear to endure it, of course,’ she adds. They have repaired to an organic cafe across the road. Salads containing a number of esoteric ingredients have been ordered.
Daisy’s opening gambit was unexpected and has Viv full of anticipation. She tries not to imbue it with too much significance so as not to meet with a sledgehammer of disappointment. But Daisy did refer to talking. Viv makes a mental note: be sensible, do not barge in, allow Daisy to introduce any sensitive subject. Which seems to include a wide range of possibilities.
‘Oh, of course I’m coming, darling. You couldn’t pay me to stay away.’ The invitation to the opening is in a prominent spot on the mantelpiece at West Hampstead. ‘Dad will certainly want to come too.’
‘His bête noire will be there, remember.’ Daisy pulls a satirical face. ‘So, how’s he been? Has he mellowed at all about anything, or is that a pigs-might-fly question? Or wouldn’t you know?’
‘Well …’ This was expected, but Viv is still unsure how to reply. ‘He’s – I’m sure he’ll get used to things eventually.’ However, she’s not at all sure he will and neither, she imagines, is his daughter. She wants to ask a follow-up question, but the area is strewn with pitfalls.
‘I suppose he can come as long as he doesn’t make a scene. Although there’ll be such a scrum no one would notice anyway.’ Daisy seems cheerful on the surface, but her mother senses she has something on her mind.
Daisy takes a sip of coconut water. ‘Did Judith tell you I took Adrian down to see her at the weekend?’ Judith dislikes words like granny, which denote a precise, or limiting, relationship.
She glances at her mother. A sidelong glance. This is a safe topic, Viv would think, or safe-ish, and does enable smooth entry into an area that may be more slippery. Sure enough, Judith had mentioned Daisy and Adrian’s visit yesterday, on the phone.
Viv smiles. ‘Adrian won her over. She found him extremely engaging. As you’d expect. She also thought his genes – I don’t mean denim – were sound. In terms of IQ and EQ. And his level of attractiveness, of course.’ This level being of paramount interest to Daisy’s grandmother. Judith had also been of the opinion that gayness was not, in the main, transferable genetically, but Viv thinks it wiser not to say this.
She is surprised that Daisy doesn’t make a follow-up comment. She becomes conscious that her daughter is watching her through lowered lashes. This is unusual in itself, because Daisy is not a guarded person. She’s habitually upfront. But her mother, who thinks (possibly erroneously) that she can read her like the proverbial book, is in no doubt that she is being furtively observed. Assessed, almost.
As it turns out, it’s more of a reassessment. Viv is on the point of filling the lengthening pause when Daisy says, with a studied casualness that is also unlike her, ‘So how’s it going with the dating agency, Mum? Have you met anyone yet?’
Viv’s glass (iced mango green tea) had been en route to her lips. She puts it down on the table, more heavily than she intended.
‘Judith said she thought I ought to know.’ Daisy’s eyebrows have gone skywards. ‘Don’t have a fit, Adrian wasn’t in th
e room. He’d gone out for takeaway. That was unusually tactful of the old girl, considering, wasn’t it?’
Viv gropes for words, but finds she is at a loss for them. If ever a woman were honest to a fault, yet brimful of ingenuous guile …
‘No doubt she’s plotting to tell him next time,’ she says grimly.
‘Just keep Dad away from her door. Unless –’ a wary grin, ‘you’re planning on telling him anytime soon?’
Viv folds her arms and rocks backwards and forwards.
‘Come on, Mum, I don’t disapprove. Not in the least, Mum. You’re probably doing the right thing. The sensible thing. Stop rocking.’
Viv stops, and takes a steadying breath. She knew it wasn’t a sensible thing to tell Judith. Telling her, in fact, was a crazy thing to have done. A stupid thing. She hears herself sounding heated.
Yeah, well, it’s done now, Daisy tells her, in an amused tone that strikes Viv, even in the state she’s in, as novel. Not unlike a mother soothing a child.
‘Anyhow, what’s the latest?’ Daisy asks. Gaily, Viv thinks, in the old sense of the word, but in a slightly hectic version of the old sense. ‘Judith couldn’t remember the details. Except she was adamant you hadn’t met Mr Right yet.’
Viv says, ‘I suppose you’ve spoken to Jules, have you?’
Jules was being very cautious and loyal, says Daisy, also cautiously. Three or four intros, she thought, but she didn’t think oil had been struck. A TV director sounded promising.
Not that cautious and loyal, Viv thinks. But given her divided loyalties, entirely understandable. At least she hadn’t mentioned the vicar. A silence falls, in which the small noises of the cafe sound unnaturally loud.
‘Are you planning to get divorced, Mum?’
Viv sees that her daughter’s expression, which she had thought inscrutable or ambiguous, is the result of a strenuous attempt to show no emotion.
The Age of Discretion Page 25