She felt the colour burning its way into her cheeks.
Still, for a moment, she could not move, could not escape his scrutiny.
And then suddenly, to her surprise and astonishment, his expression changed. It seemed to her that something within him galvanised him into action.
“Go, and to hell with you!” he snapped angrily and walked back across the hall the way he had come.
He re-entered the library and slammed the door behind him.
Chapter 12
Lulu Carlo walked into her bedroom and pushed the door to behind her. She had been drinking all the evening and now, at one o’clock in the morning, her eyes were slightly glazed, her cheeks flushed and her silver blonde hair a little dishevelled.
But she was still lovely. As she moved across the floor, the soft shaded lights seemed to accentuate her beauty so that each reflection of her in the many mirrors that decorated the bedroom showed her from a more alluring, more seductive angle.
She sat down at the dressing table and stared at her face, but for once she was not concentrating on the perfectly chiselled features, at the clearness of her complexion or on the exquisite curve of her rather full lips.
“Damn him!”
As she spoke she looked at a photograph of Dart that stood on the adjacent table in an ornate frame of gold set with semi-precious stones. It was only a snapshot taken by a Press photographer at a polo match, for Dart would never consent to enter a studio. But it had caught that arresting quality in his face and the inescapable grace of his lithe body.
“Damn him!” Lulu mouthed again.
She rose to her feet and began to walk rather unsteadily up and down the room. Her restlessness and indeed her agitation were sincere enough. But she could not help instinctively over-dramatising her part, throwing back her head so that her neck, rounded and lovely, gave her a swan-like grace, clasping her hands together and then closing them over her small pointed breasts.
Yet, after a few moments, even her own posturings failed to suit her. She sat down again and started to drum with her fingers on the painted wood of the dressing table.
She had never dreamed, until tonight, that there was any chance that her plans, so well laid, could end in failure. And now, insidiously, like some awful horror that was inescapable she had begun to lose her self-assurance, the confidence that all must end well.
She had known from the moment she met him that Dart was going to be hard to catch. And yet she had meant to have him from the very first night that they had been introduced at a party in New York.
She could hear her hostess’s voice now saying,
“Lulu, you’ve just got to meet the most attractive man in all America. Mr. Dart Huron – Miss Lulu Carlo.”
She had turned almost impatiently from the man she was already talking to and then, it seemed to her in retrospect, her heart had stopped beating. She had heard of him before, of course – who hadn’t? She had seen his photographs, she had read about him in the gossip column of every newspaper she opened. But because his life had not crossed hers, she had not been particularly interested.
Lulu had a one-point concentration where she herself was concerned. She had known that evening that Dart Huron was going to mean something stupendous in her life and she never for a single instant imagined that anything could really stand in the way of her taking what she desired.
They had met quite frequently after that first party.
But when Lulu had gone to California to sign a film contract, he became engaged to Beatrice Watton.
She could hardly believe that it was true when she had opened the papers and seen the announcement of their engagement. Her rage had made her agree to terms which, for the first time in her film career, did not extort from the company that employed her immeasurably more than they contemplated giving. She was in a hurry and her heart was not in the fight.
“Very well, gentlemen,” she said. “Draw up the contract and I will sign it. I’m leaving for New York tonight.”
The film company had been astonished. They were also relieved. The arguments with Lulu Carlo, when it came to money, had already made film history.
They usually resulted in shattered nerves, frayed tempers and a nervous breakdown for one or two of the executives, while Lulu invariably emerged triumphant with, in hard cash, exactly what she had her mind on.
She had arrived back in New York in the afternoon and had gone straight to Dart Huron’s apartment. She walked in to find that he was out with Beatrice Watton, but was expected back somewhere around five o’clock.
She waited and Dart, sauntering into his apartment, had found her curled up on the sofa, looking small, vulnerable and very lovely. She had not berated him. She was far too clever for that. She just told him that because she loved him so much she wanted him to be happy.
Underneath a hard exterior, Dart, like all men of his type, was susceptible to tenderness.
He was used to women who made scenes and clung to him passionately, women who denounced anyone else who had taken their place and who informed him, not once but over and over again, that they had given him the best years of their lives.
Anything that he had given them in return, such as priceless jewellery from Cartier or Tiffany, was apparently of little consequence.
That evening at his apartment Lulu put on the best act of her life. She was gentle, wistful and apparently utterly unselfish in her desire for him to find all the joy that was possible out of life. She was, at the same time, as alluring and seductive as in any of the films that had captivated the attention of the heartthrobs of worldwide audiences.
“I just had to come and see you the minute I got back,” she said, her big eyes raised to Dart’s.
“But of course! Why not?” he enquired.
“Miss Watton won’t like it,” she whispered. “Perhaps we shall never meet again after you are married. But I wanted to thank you for all the happiness you have given me up till now. I knew, of course, that I could never mean anything really in your life, but it has been so wonderful for me just knowing you.”
Dart had never known afterwards exactly how it happened, but Lulu was crying softly and not in the least dramatically, in his arms.
He was never quite certain why he began to kiss her, except perhaps as an act of compassion.
Three days later they sailed for England. They went by ship instead of by air. Lulu was wise enough to consolidate her gains and what, indeed, could be more conducive to intimacy than five-and-a-half days at sea?
“Yesterday is behind us, tomorrow is in front, and now, in the present we are alone together!” she had cooed to Dart.
They had sat together in the big Royal suite of the liner, which was filled on Dart’s instructions with exotic and fragrant flowers until it had become a veritable bower of beauty.
It was, indeed, a fitting background, he had thought, for Lulu’s gold and white beauty, for her love had seemed to anaesthetise him with its soft sensuous seduction until it was hard for him to think of anything else. And yet he had kept his head.
He admitted that his engagement to Beatrice Watton had been a mistake, but he was not prepared to shackle himself again.
“This is just fun, isn’t it?” he said to Lulu, not once but a dozen times. “You have your life and I have got mine. We couldn’t make a go of it together. Oil and water don’t mix, my dear, but we will enjoy ourselves while we can. We will have fun while I am in England and when I go back to America and you have to stay behind because of your film, you will go on having fun with someone else.”
She had been subtle enough to play up to all his moods, to laugh with him and agree that what they were doing was fun and of no ultimate consequence, to talk seriously or, rather, to listen to him when he talked of his plans for developing his property in South America and for extending American goodwill over the whole globe.
And she could be passionate with a fire that equalled and at times surpassed his, when he found the loveliness of her body
irresistible and the pouting invitation of her lips impossible to refuse.
But good actress though she was, Lulu was an egotist. Sooner or later her part began to wear a little thin and her real self peeped through the role of wistful innocent girlhood.
Lulu had lived a hard life. No one had ever known and no one would ever be told what she had suffered in her scramble to the top of her profession.
She had gone to Hollywood because she had won a beauty competition at Blackpool. It was one of those crooked, publicity-seeking competitions that bring in a great deal of money and acclaim to those who organise them, and exploit the poor little fools who enter for the glittering prizes. Fools, because at the end of all their hopes and aspirations, there is nothing but heartbreak.
The prize in Lulu’s competition had been the fare to Hollywood.
She was never able to forget the excitement, her sense of exhilaration when she won or the awful pathos and disillusionment of finding, when she arrived in Hollywood, that there was no film contract waiting for her. Indeed, there was nothing waiting for her except starvation and the terror of knowing that she had not enough money even to go home.
She had haunted the studios until hunger drove her to take the only obvious method of being able to get a square meal.
But the men who feted her were of little consequence and she drifted from man to man until, finally, by sheer chance, she met one who was actually working as an assistant to the director in one of the big film companies.
At first he was reluctant to push her forward or to even arrange for her to have a test.
“We’re happy as we are, aren’t we, honey?” he would ask, when he came back to the squalid little apartment he had rented for her.
It had taken all her cleverness to persuade him that she wanted a part only so that they could both have more money to spend together. And so he had taken her to the casting director.
She could remember so well walking into the big man’s office and feeling not anxious but somehow supremely sure of herself.
In the eighteen months that she had waited for this she had somehow never lost faith in her own ability to succeed. She knew that however disillusioned she might be, however hard the way up, she would get there in the end.
She was wearing cheap clothes because she had been able to afford nothing else. But she had youth and a beauty that even amongst the thousands of beautiful women in Hollywood had still something a little different about it, that indefinable, elusive quality which makes a star.
“So you want a test,” the director had said disagreeably.
“Yes, please.”
“I suppose you imagine you can act.”
“No, but I think I could be taught.”
He had glanced up at her through his heavily lidded eyes. She had seen the look in them, known what he was thinking and had not been afraid. He was only another man, but this time in a position where he could be of more use than paying for a hamburger or slapping down a few dollars for a night’s lodging.
They had come to terms. It had not been as difficult as Lulu had anticipated – in fact it had been surprisingly easy. And the test had been supremely successful.
She had, of course, been given only a small part at first, but it had not been cut and in the next film her name had been among those taking part.
It was then she had changed her name. Not at her own suggestion but at his, the man who was now directing not only her appearance on the screen but her private life, her thoughts and her ambitions.
“You want to capitalise that gaiety of yours,” he had said. “You want a name that is frivolous, which makes men think of entertainment, laughter – anything, in fact, except their business and their wives. Something like Frou-Frou – no, Lulu is better.”
And so the most alluring star of the century had been born, the girl who could make tired businessmen forget, the girl who was to arouse masculine passion from Yokohama to Alaska. And Lulu was happy.
She had everything in the world she wanted, everything – until she met Dart.
She looked at his photograph now and almost hated him because he still eluded her. She remembered the men who had crawled on their knees to beg her for her favours. She thought of those who had sent her wildly extravagant presents with even wilder, more extravagant notes.
She thought of the director of her first films, who cried when she left him and then consoled his sorrows, not with drink, which would have been understandable, but with morphine, which ended in his being put away in some obscure home somewhere where nobody ever heard of him again.
Men! Men! Men! Her whole life had been a series of men and yet she could not catch the one she really wanted.
She would not believe, when she arrived in England, that it was possible for Dart to be so easily absorbed in a life that hardly included her at all. Not that she wasn’t welcome amongst the society he frequented.
Anyone with a worldwide reputation such as hers, who was so successful and so decorative, was accepted as a matter of course.
It became quite an ordinary thing for people to ask Dart to bring Lulu. Nobody worried whether they were or were not living together, the point was that they were both stars in the small firmament of upper class English Society.
They went to dinner parties, balls, nightclubs, small private dances and semi-official luncheons together. At the end of it all, Lulu felt that she was further away from Dart than ever before.
Occasionally they would go out alone together, usually to look at the ancient houses for which he had an insatiable predilection.
“I hate ruins!” Lulu cried petulantly.
“They are not ruins, honey,” he would answer. “They are relics of an age of elegance which is now lost. That is something I should like to create again, a world in which good manners and beauty went hand-in-hand and where the bustle and rush and bad manners of the atomic age were unknown.”
“Why don’t you buy yourself a house, if you feel like that about it?” Lulu asked him.
“I wouldn’t belong, would I?” he replied quietly.
She didn’t understand.
“I would rather say you belonged to me,” she said and was angry because he laughed, not with humour but harshly, as if she had said something absurd.
‘I’ve got to have him! I’ve got to!’
Lulu was walking again now backwards and forwards across her bedroom floor. She had half hoped that Dart would come to her, but she had known by the way he said goodnight that he had no intention of seeing her again.
Suddenly she began to pull off the dress of silver lamé that she had worn for dinner. It made her look like a mermaid, somebody had said, and that the emeralds she wore with it had started thoughts of the sea.
Lulu took off her necklace and earrings and put them in the velvet-padded case that had been made to hold them. And then she took from its hiding place at the back of the big wardrobe her jewel box. It was her most precious possession.
In it was the record of all her struggles and all her successes. Diamonds, sapphires, rubies, emeralds – they were all there. A diary written in precious gems, a history in stones and more valuable than any history book was ever likely to be.
Lulu put away the emeralds. To do so she had to raise one of the trays from the jewel box and beneath it she saw the small ivory-handled revolver she always carried in case of burglars.
In America she usually slept with it beside her bed. Here in England she felt safer, but only because she had grown into the habit of hiding her jewel box in different places, changing it day after day and night after night.
She trusted no one, not even her maid who had been with her now nearly five years. She had a feeling that her jewels were her very lifeblood and without them she might fade away or die.
Slowly she took the revolver from the box.
She remembered once that Dart had seen it when they were travelling over on the liner.
“What do you want that for?” he had asked.
She had told him how she always protected her own jewels and then she had added,
“Besides, it might come in useful. I might one day want to do away with myself.”
“Don’t talk like that!” his voice had been sharp. “Life is a precious thing. I saw it squandered wantonly in the War and I never want to see death treated lightly again. Remember that! Remember it always!”
She had been impressed by the solemnity with which he spoke, the seriousness in his eyes, as if he was looking back into the past and weeping over what he saw there.
She had thought then, at that moment, that perhaps in this way she would have some hold over him. And now she thought that the moment had come.
She took off the last pieces of lace and chiffon that she wore as underclothes and then she put on her nightgown, as fragile as a cobweb, as transparent and as lovely as the morning mist.
She covered it with a negligée of peach-coloured crepe with pockets edged with white mink and narrow bands of the same fur on the short sleeves.
When she had buttoned it and tied the belt round her waist, she slipped the revolver almost surreptitiously into the pocket. Then she went to the dressing table and sat down to powder her cheeks until they were as pale as the milky whiteness of her neck, and in contrast her eyes looked very blue.
She combed her hair loose over her shoulders and then, with a last look at herself, opened the bedroom door.
There was only one light burning in the hall, but it told Lulu that she was right in what she had suspected. Dart would be downstairs.
He slept very little, seldom more than four or five hours a night and invariably, after his guests at Summerhill had retired, he would sit reading in the library or sometimes he would take a horse from the stables and gallop away into the night.
It was usually three or four in the morning before he came upstairs to bed, and now, at this moment, she would find him alone.
The satin bedroom slippers she wore made no sound as Lulu walked down the stairs and across the hall. Very gently she turned the handle of the library door, so gently indeed, that Dart, who was sitting in a big armchair, did not hear her.
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