Cindy had backstage passes and insisted that they should be presented to the performers in their dressing room when the set was finished. She always took advantage of her position as a minor London celebrity to meet the top bands in town, but Monty hated the whole business of standing in a tiny concrete room wondering what to say next to people in whom she was not interested.
Raucous laughter greeted them from behind the dressing-room door. Joe Jones’s legs seemed to fill half the room. He was sprawled in the only chair, a half-empty bottle of Bourbon in his fist, his heaving chest mantled with sweat.
‘Hi, I’m Cindy Moon from Hit Maker, and this is Ruby Slippers. How do you like London?’ Cindy always introduced herself the same way. The legs contracted, and Joe Jones shook Cindy’s small hand, putting down the bottle in order to do so. At the intrusion of women the boys fell silent.
‘I’d say “sit down” but we’re a little short of chairs. They showed me the review you gave our last album – you said some very nice things.’
They continued to exchange pleasantries while Monty wished she were somewhere else. The problem was that there was nowhere Monty could look in the mirrored cell without her eyes being drawn to Joe’s crotch. The white satin outlined his cock, and he clearly found performing exciting. Even though the erection was subsiding slowly the satin was so tight she could see the ridge of his penis. As if he were aware of her attention, Joe Jones pulled a towel from around his neck and let it fail into his lap, modestly hiding everything. After another ten minutes of small talk Cindy said goodbye and left, with Monty trailing after her.
‘See what I mean?’ Cindy said as they hailed a cab. ‘They think they’re so great, making all that noise, drinking all that whisky, having all those chicks scream for them; they’re just little boys, that’s all. They were just dying for us to come back to their hotel with them. Thank goodness we got out when we did.’
‘It might have been fun.’
‘You can’t seriously like all that macho crap.’
Monty said nothing; she was not quite sure how she felt. Of course she was repelled by all that aggressive sexuality. It was the same swaggering sham of maleness that she had hated so much in Rick.
‘I’ve got a headache,’ she recognized at last.
‘Poor, poor Monty. I’m so sorry.’
At the apartment, Cindy insisted that she should not take an aspirin – ‘it makes your stomach bleed’ – but instead put a dab of Tiger Balm on Monty’s forehead. This did nothing. The pain spread down the left side of her face and settled in her teeth. The next day was a Sunday and the pain in Monty’s teeth became so bad that she felt as if she could hardly see.
‘I know what would fix it,’ Cindy said with a curious reserve.
‘What?’
‘You won’t take it.’
‘I’ll take anything to stop this agony.’
Cindy’s lips twitched. ‘A whiff of smack would make the pain go away, I promise.’
Monty shook her head. She went into her own room and telephoned her dentist, but the number did not answer. By the afternoon all she could do was lie down and moan.
‘I can’t bear seeing you like this,’ Cindy said, bringing her some camomile tea. ‘Just a tiny bit of smack and you’d be fine.’ Monty pushed the mug away, nauseated by the idea of drinking anything.
‘You’re not thinking you’ll get hooked on one hit, are you? It’s not the same, inhaling. Look at me, I do it all the time and it’s no big deal. You don’t see me crawling round the room if I can’t get any gear, do you? And believe me, Monty, the pain would just go – it’d be there, but it’d be far away, where you could handle it.’
Monty held out until the evening, then allowed Cindy to sprinkle some of the brown granules into a piece of foil and let her breathe in the smoke. It was a little sickly and acrid, but Monty was accustomed to bizarre chemical tastes.
‘Now you’ll know what it’s all about,’ Cindy told her. ‘All the kids do smack now. It’s nothing, just a good feeling.’
Monty’s stomach heaved and she dived for the bathroom to be sick. Then relief came, sweet and calming. As Cindy had predicted the pain was still there, but it was not like pain, just a distant signal that she could ignore. The fear was far away too. Until the drug banished it, Monty had not realized how she had lived every day with terror disseminated throughout her being.
Three weeks later Ruby Slippers had another gig, and Monty asked Cindy for a hit to calm her the day before. It had worn off by the time she had to leave the apartment for the club, so Cindy gave her another. She took the stage in complete confidence, performed well, kept a brave face in front of the band and let Sig say and do what he liked with no sensation of involvement at all.
They began recording the first Ruby Slippers album, and Monty found that she could get a faster hit by embedding a grain of smack into a cigarette. She still vomited every time and as she felt like using the stuff more frequently this was becoming a real inconvenience – and worse.
‘I’m terrified Sig’ll find out,’ she told Cindy. ‘He caught me throwing up yesterday and I told him it was food poisoning, but he’s too smart to believe that again. What’ll I do? He’ll kill me if he susses.’
‘Use a needle,’ Cindy advised. This did not seem nearly as alarming to Monty as it would have done three months earlier. True, she hated needles. But she hated the fear more. She allowed Cindy to inject her. ‘You’d better lay off this Chinese stuff, though,’ her friend said as the lovely calm spread through her. ‘It’s not very pure. I’ll see if I can find you some of the old white stuff. Pharmaceutical grade, that’s what you need. Keep to your leg veins, if you can, then your arms will be clean.’
White heroin cost her about five times what the brown stuff did, but it was worth it. Monty had the money which Cathy had lent her for the lawyers’ bills, and it slowly found its way into the pocket of the dealer whom Cindy met two or three times a week in a coffeeshop near the Hit Maker office. Eventually, the money was gone.
‘Can’t you ask your sister for more?’ Cindy asked.
Monty shook her head. ‘I can’t lie to her. We’re too close, we can practically read each other’s thoughts.’ The truth was that Monty had been deliberately avoiding Cathy, and this had become sadly easy to do. The days of long, girlish telephone calls were past. In Monty’s years with the Juice she had been away on tour for months at a stretch; Cathy, too, travelled on business a great deal. No lapse of time or distance could diminish their closeness, but Monty, privately ashamed and fearing failure, could stay away from her bright confident sister with little effort now.
Cindy gave a pout of disapproval. ‘I’m skint until the end of the month,’ she hinted.
‘We’ll just have to do without dope for a bit until I finish the album and Sig pays me some more of what’s due from the single,’ Monty told her, offended that anyone should suggest she deceive her sister.
The next night, when Monty returned late from the recording studio with Tony and Stas, intending to sit and talk for a while in the apartment, she found the door open.
‘Cindy must have left it open,’ she said uncertainly. ‘That’s odd. She’s always telling me to be careful to lock up.’
‘Could be someone kicked it in.’ Tony showed her the lock, which seemed to have been loosened on its screws. ‘Anything missing?’
At once Monty noticed that her tape-recorder was gone, and almost all her expensive clothes. She opened the leather-covered case in which she kept her jewellery. It was empty. She felt behind the mirror where she kept a pair of flashy diamond-and-emerald earrings which Rick had given her, rolled up in a scrap of chamois leather. They too had gone.
‘Oh God, a break-in. That’s all I need.’ She collapsed despondently on the black divan. ‘Isn’t it great the way life always hits you when you’re down?’ The boys were sympathetic, and stayed with her until Cindy came home a few hours later. Cindy grew viciously angry when they told her that the apartment had
been burgled, but Monty watched her with detachment. Cindy had suggested the hiding-place behind the mirror for her precious earrings and Monty could not help reflecting that someone who had not known there was jewellery there would not have thought of looking for valuables in such an odd place.
Early the following morning, Cathy telephoned. ‘We’ve got to go down to Bourton at once – Didi’s dying,’ she told her sister. ‘And I’m going to pick up Mummy first. Do you want to come with me?’
Monty had not seen her mother for years, and did not want to. Neither did she feel any compulsion to pay her last respects to her grandmother. ‘No – I don’t want to come,’ she said. ‘It’ll only bring me down. And the old bat, too, I shouldn’t wonder.’ There was a pause at the end of the telephone, and Monty suddenly felt guilty that she always dumped on Cathy the whole responsibility for their unlovable family. ‘Unless you’d like me to come, of course,’ she added.
‘Please, Monty – I need you. It won’t be a great day out, but I think it’s something we should do together. Didi’s part of our lives, after all.’
Cathy’s BMW hurtled like a silver bullet down to Brighton and drew quietly to the kerbside by the tall white house where their mother lived. Bettina seemed to have shrunk in stature, Monty thought. Her hair was inaccurately tinted honey-blonde, with several inches of grey regrowth visible. The whites of her eyes were yellow, her skin was greyish and waxy, and the sisters noticed with horror that the backs of their mother’s hands were spotted with small ulcers, the result of self-neglect and malnutrition aggravated by alcoholism.
Without the care of servants, Bettina’s apartment was filthy. Piles of unwashed clothes and linen stank on the dusty floors and the kitchen was sticky with grease and crammed with putrid rubbish. Monty opened the bedroom door and recoiled at the stink. Their mother glared at them in mute defiance, challenging them to disapprove of the squalor.
At Bourton there was a peculiar air of furtive relief in the household. The servants were grave but lively. Hugo, their uncle, seemed to be taller; their cousins’children were quiet and cheerful; everyone in the house was trying to ignore the sense of festival that stole upon them as the tyrant lay dying.
‘Darlings! So good of you to come to see an old woman,’ their grandmother called from the depths of her faded chintz-curtained bed. ‘Forgive me, the doctor won’t let me get up. But I’ve fixed him.’ She arranged her bedraggled, pink satin bedjacket trimmed with marabou. ‘I just happen to know the best man in London for my kind of cancer and he’s coming down tomorrow to tell the old quack not to be so ridiculous. I’m remarkably fit for my age.’
Dutifully they sat on the uncomfortable Louis XV gilt chairs and attempted to hold a conversation with the dying woman. Her hair was nothing but a few wisps of dull, greyish-brown tucked under a girlish velvet band. Her sagging eyelids were crusted with blue mascara and a coating of rouge clogged the fissures in her cheeks.
‘I wondered, Catherine, when you are thinking of getting married again.’ She spoke with a conspiratorial gleam in her watery eyes, her hands with their joints knobbed by arthritis clutching at the satin quilt. ‘You must be quick, dear, before you lose your looks completely. Of course, you can’t hope to compete with the young beauties of today, but you can always make a man fall in love with you if you know how it’s done, dear.’
‘Of course, Didi,’ murmured Cathy, stealing a glance in the shadowy, ormolu-overhung looking-glass to reassure herself that the creamy perfection of her complexion was still intact, that her hair still gleamed like burnished bronze, and that her black chalk-stripe suit did indeed enhance the delicacy of her build in the way she intended that it should.
‘Don’t say “of course” to me like that!’ The deformed hands clutched more convulsively as if to draw support from the exhausted glamour of the fabric. ‘The only point in this work nonsense is that you can meet the right kind of man. Otherwise you ‘ll just end up on the shelf like your sister.’
Monty and Cathy exchanged glances of resignation, and Cathy steered the conversation back to Lady Davina’s cleverness in seducing London’s leading cancer specialist into attending her. This man appeared the next day, flustered and embarrassed, and spent an hour with the old woman after which he briskly took Hugo aside and advised him, ‘Nothing to be done, I doubt she’ll last the night. She’s having all sorts of delusions, don’t take any notice of them.’ It was difficult to ignore the demanding shrieks that soon sent the nurse scurrying downstairs to ask the family’s advice.
‘She wants to come down and make telephone calls,’ the alarmed woman explained. ‘She says she’s got to telephone the Prince of Wales and heaven knows who else. She says she can’t stay in bed all day like a slut. She says she’s organizing a ball and she simply must have royalty there.’
Hugo stumped upstairs and persuaded his mother to write letters instead of telephoning, and the old woman covered many pages of her rich blue writing paper with scrawled lines which tailed off midway down each page, until the bed was covered with half-written notes and she fell back into her pillows in a doze.
In the evening, Lady Davina awoke and said in apparently lucid tones, ‘I want to see my sons. My darling boys, I must see them.’ Hugo left the dinner table and went up to his mother again. ‘Where’s James?’ she demanded in anger, as if she suspected Hugo of hiding his brother.
‘James isn’t here, Mother,’ he sighed.
‘Poor boy,’ she murmured. ‘He must miss all the fun we had at the Embassy. He must be so desperately lonely out in the East. We must make him come home, darling, fix something up for him so he’ll be able to stay, eh?’ The cajoling inflexions of the rasping, old voice were almost obscene.
Later she demanded her jewel box; she spent the last of her strength raking through the jumbled trophies, occasionally holding up some glittering article to the spectral light of her chandelier, reflecting in silence on the hard-won attachment which it had symbolized. At midnight the nurse gently removed a diamond bracelet from her patient’s feeble grasp, rearranged the creased pillows and gave the semi-conscious woman her medication. Lady Davina died quietly in her sleep a few hours later.
No one had thought to ask the Trust for permission to use the chapel for the funeral, so Lady Davina received her last respects in the village church before the burial. The sisters looked with interest around the little grey-stone nave. There were few guests. Three elderly women who had outlived Didi, and one old man, one of those on whom she had never ceased to exercise her seductive skills, who left the graveyard with an unsteady step, deluded to the last that he had known a great lady.
As they walked back through the rain-sodden churchyard to their car, Monty asked, ‘Are you sorry she’s gone, Cathy?’ They paused and watched the rest of their family as they dispersed.
‘No. She should have died at thirty, for her own sake.’ Cathy spoke with surprising harshness. ‘I’m just sorry she made me waste so much time.’
Caroline and Edward, with their stout spouses and beefy children in velvet-collared coats, moved slowly down the mossy path. They were sinking into the quagmire of small salaries and dying professions, led by the will-o-the-wisp of land-gentry lifestyle which would eventually lure them as if blindfolded into the anonymous middle classes. Caroline was married to an unprofitable farmer. Edward was the sales director of a small agricultural machinery firm. They were stolid, weatherbeaten and ignorant of any world that did not revolve around shooting seasons and bloodstock lineage.
Cathy suddenly gave an irritated sigh. ‘Wherever did we come from, Monty? We’re not part of this tribe, are we? We want to change the world, not keep it as it is, pickled in vintage port and old school ties.’
‘Now you know how I’ve felt all my life.’ Monty walked briskly to the car and pulled open the door. There was never any need to lock a car in Bourton village. ‘We must have a rogue gene or something.’
‘Maybe Daddy was the same. It’s hard to imagine what he would be like if
he were still alive.’
‘I think he would have been a wonderful, wicked old man by now.’
Sadness settled on them and they were silent as Cathy drove the short distance back to the big house. They both felt that death had moved one generation closer to them. There was only Bettina ahead of them now, and they were both appalled at her rapid physical deterioration.
That evening Monty sank into black apathy and Cathy looked at her with concern as she sat on the high brass fender by the drawing-room fire staring into the distance. She noticed that her sister had lost weight, and was wearing a cheap army-surplus sweater over an old leather skirt.
‘How’s the court case going?’ Cathy asked, hoping to draw Monty into a more cheerful mood.
‘Great. We’ve got a fabulous barrister, a real shark. He looks as if he trains by biting the heads off live chickens before breakfast. I hope he’s as good as the solicitor says he is – he’s costing enough.’
‘What about the money?’
Monty gave a short, hard laugh. ‘That’s going great, too. Don’t worry about it, I’ll cope.’
‘You’re looking really slim.’ It was a sincere compliment and Monty nodded, smiling. ‘It must be the worry – look.’ She pulled up her sweater and showed Cathy that she could put two hands between the waistband of her skirt and her body.
‘Are you sure you’re eating enough?’
‘Cindy’s always on a diet, so we don’t eat much.’
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