Pearls

by Celia Brayfield

  The Priory was a massive grey-stone house which had been built in the fourteenth century, then added to over the generations until it was a comfortable L-shaped mass of masonry with gothic windows and a fine view over a lush river valley. Behind the house was woodland, the tame, luxuriant forestry of the Home Counties in which the trees looked as if they might be made of plastic.

  The Priory had belonged to three major rock stars in the past decade, all of whom had embellished it according to their own taste. The first rock star had built the recording studio at the back of the house; the second had landscaped the garden to add a swimming pool, in which it was always too cold to swim; the third had filled the park with fibre-glass statues of African big game. Monty was startled to steer the red Chewy into the driveway and see a family of giraffes frozen under the chestnut trees.

  The Joe Jones Band looked as boisterous and hairy as she remembered them. Even with his shirt on, Joe himself had a physical presence that made the air crackle. Contemptuous as she was of the big boys’delight in their new toy, Monty had to admit that the guy was built.

  ‘How are you getting back to London?’ he asked her. ‘Can I drive you to the station?’ It would have been absurd to refuse, so Monty climbed in at the passenger door and Joe inched the oversprung, overcharged red monster out into the narrow country lane.

  The car had a bench front seat, the kind that made Monty think about people petting at drive-in movies. How long before some dumb groupie gets another notch in her holster right here, Monty thought, stealing a sideways glance at Joe. He took the car out to a major highway and howled along in the fast lane, steering with two fingers. I suppose he thinks he’s going to turn me on by scaring me to death, Monty told herself, shifting uncomfortably on the seat.

  ‘I’m sorry, am I going too fast?’ Joe swooped the car across to the slow lane and cut its speed to well below the limit. ‘I just wanted to see if it would go round the clock. I didn’t intend to frighten you.’

  ‘What a patronizing creep!’ she said to Swallow the next day. ‘Why are men so infantile? You should have seen them, crawling all over the stupid car, feeling mucho macho just because they had a hot rod in the driveway.’

  ‘How do you fancy keeping them in order for a few weeks?’ Swallow had three telephone lines on hold and a handset in the hollow of each shoulder.

  ‘Mussolini couldn’t keep that lot in order, they’re so into the old hot and nasty number.’

  Swallow snarled down one telephone, cut the other off and kept three lines flashing on hold.

  ‘Well, they want a housekeeper and you’re the best I’ve got.’

  Monty realized that she was being asked to spend the summer living at the Priory with five brawling studs.

  ‘No, Swallow. Absolutely not.’

  ‘Absolutely yes. I can’t trust this to anyone else. Jack Nicholson’s raving about the way you watered his potted palms.’

  ‘I do not wish to spend the best summer of my life fending off passes from five oversexed morons who think they’re God’s gift to women.’

  ‘Oh come on, Monty, you should be so lucky. What are you afraid of – getting raped?’

  Swallow had shrewdly identified the source of Monty’s unease. She did feel sexually threatened by the aggressive masculinity of the Joe Jones set-up.

  ‘Is there really no one else you can send?’ she asked Swallow with resignation.

  Monty had been in Paleward Priory half a day when she realized that the Joe Jones Band was splitting up; the house was permeated with the atmosphere of recrimination. Joe and Al, the keyboards player, spent all day locked in the studio, while the other three members of the band floated around the house drinking and killing time with games of billiards.

  She filled the icebox with the beer that made Milwaukee famous and went to the village stores to order steak, bacon and beans. Chilli con carne, bacon sandwiches and barbecues usually took care of these he-man carnivores. The state of the house was not too bad, thanks to a cleaning woman who came in from the village daily.

  There was a Bluthner grand piano in the music room, black and shiny, its surface like a mirror. Monty opened it and played a few chords, feeling that the keys were stiff. It had a glorious tone, particularly in the lower registers. Monty ran through a half-remembered piece of Chopin, then tried ‘Are You Lonesome Tonight?’ which was easier but sounded ludicrous on this well-bred instrument. Then she started picking out some of her own songs, listening to the way they sounded in the piano’s rich, sweet texture. It was not quite in tune. The dissonance was almost an enhancement, rather like her sister’s limp – the tiny flaw in a perfect beauty. A few phrases of melody floated into her mind and she sighed inwardly. Here it was again. No matter which road she chose, she ended up face-to-face with her own music at the end of it.

  ‘I think the piano in the music room needs tuning,’ she told the boys at dinner. ‘Would it be OK if I called London for someone to come and fix it?’

  Dinner was a most uncomfortable meal. Joe, Al, their engineer and Monty ate in the kitchen, the rest of the band took their food into another room.

  ‘Sure, get the piano tuned,’ Joe agreed, reaching for the salad. She watched as he ignored her vat of chilli and ate a heap of lettuce with most of the chopped egg and onion. There was an awkward silence.

  ‘I guess I should tell you what’s going on,’ he said at last, chewing rapidly. ‘This is the last album to which we’re committed, and we were hoping to keep it together until it was finished but, ah, it isn’t working out that way. We want to go different routes.’

  How arrogant of him to say ‘we’when he means himself, Monty observed in silence.

  ‘So we’ve decided to give our record company a fait accompli. Al here is cutting a solo album, and I’m producing it for him.’

  Monty started clearing the plates and they got up to help her.

  ‘Won’t they go bananas when they find out what you’re doing?’

  ‘Yeah. But I think they’ll come around when they hear the tapes. I’ll take a day out next week to meet some of the guys – they’ll be in London then. I reckon we can square them.’

  She made coffee and the other two men drank theirs quickly and left the kitchen. Joe stayed; he put his feet on the table and picked his teeth, watching Monty as she finished stacking the dishwasher. She felt uncomfortable under his gaze.

  ‘You must have a very good ear to know that the piano was out of tune,’ he told her. She did not reply. ‘I heard you playing this afternoon,’ he continued. ‘I’m sure I’ve heard you some place before. Aren’t you … didn’t you have a record out some time?’

  ‘Yes, I did.’ She flicked the drying-up cloths as she folded them, wishing he would stop asking questions.

  ‘Weren’t you Rick Brown’s old lady for a while?’

  ‘Seven or eight years.’

  ‘Didn’t we meet before, when we were playing in London?’

  Monty wanted more and more to evade this interrogation. Why doesn’t he just make a play for me and get on with it, she wondered. Joe’s question lay in the air, a gauntlet she had to pick up.

  ‘Yes. I was introduced to you with Cindy Moon.’

  His full, defined lips had the suggestion of a smile about them. He leaned forward, took his feet off the table and threw away the toothpick.

  ‘Why didn’t you say? I was sure I knew you.’

  ‘I was another person then. All that was nothing to do with who I am now.’ Why was she wasting her hard-learned honesty on this trash? Why didn’t he shut up and get out of her kitchen? She felt she had to escape from the conversation, so she said, ‘If you’ve got everything you need, I’ll go to bed.’

  ‘Sure.’ He stood up. ‘I’m sorry if I was keeping you up. That was a beautiful dinner you made.’

  ‘You didn’t eat very much of it.’

  ‘I’m more or less vegetarian,’ he told her. ‘I guess I should have mentioned it.’

  She could not get to sleep.
Her mind was full of disconnected thoughts that would not be calm, and her body felt uncomfortable. She stripped off the blankets and opened the windows, letting in the sweet air and the scent of the honeysuckle. She sank into a restless unconsciousness, but woke again in the dead of night, soaked in sweat, her skin burning. She had been dreaming about something, but could not remember what.

  She turned over, and felt the old, familiar juiciness between her legs. So that was it. Monty ran her hands experimentally over her own body, feeling her breasts tingle and her skin come alive. It had been a long time since she made love, rather than submitting herself to sex.

  The next day a familiar face appeared around the kitchen door. It was Tony, the guitarist who had played in her band when she was Ruby Slippers.

  ‘Whatever are you doing here?’ she asked, making him a cup of coffee.

  ‘Joe called me, he wants me to do some sessions on this album.’ Tony hadn’t changed. He was still neat, clean, albino-pale and matter-of-fact. Monty found that she was very happy to see him.

  ‘Joe’s off riding some horse,’ she said. ‘He’s usually back by now. He won’t be long.’

  ‘Do you like him?’ Tony asked, direct as ever.

  Monty gave a pout of indecision. ‘I can’t figure him out,’ she told him. ‘I can’t stand all that macho crap.’

  ‘Joe’s nothing like that. He’s been there and back. Fascinating bloke – I was sure you’d fall for him.’ Tony shook his head, implying that women’s sexual preferences were chief among the great mysteries of the universe. ‘He was an orphan,’ Tony continued, ‘his mother abandoned him on an Indian reservation when he was a kid. He was an alcoholic when he was fourteen years old. Dried himself out and went into the Marines, got thrown out. Drifted off to New York, fell into a band, the rest is history.’

  ‘How old is he?’ Monty asked, suddenly concerned that he might be older than she was.

  ‘Thirty-ish.’

  ‘Has he ever been married?’ OK, she admitted to herself, I care. I want to know.

  ‘Yes, I think so. But, he’s never really with anyone now. He knows too much about women, I reckon. It’s amazing the way they come on to him.’

  There was a scrape of riding boots outside the door and Joe appeared, his jeans ripped at both knees. There were mud stains on his T-shirt. ‘This is what happens when your horse takes a unilateral decision to jump a fence,’ he explained. ‘I’ve busted my hand. Is there anything to strap it up with?’

  He took a shower and sat on the rim of the bath-tub while Monty ran a taut bandage around his swelling hand. She could no longer deny the message her body was giving her. She was aching with desire; just being close to that half-naked man, watching the water drip from his long, wet hair down the muscular ridges of his abdomen, made her breathless. She was captivated by the thought of his broad, bony hands, with long fingers and nails, holding her and caressing her and dipping into the hot centre of her body where her flesh was streaming wet with anticipation.

  ‘What am I going to do?’ she demanded of Swallow over the telephone. ‘My heart stops every time he comes into the room.’

  ‘Fuck him?’ Swallow suggested in practical tones.

  ‘What – and get hung up on another all-action superstud like Rick? Sign on for another term of abuse, like I did with Sig? Come on, Swallow, I need that like I need a hole in the head.’

  ‘So, don’t get hung up on him. Fuck him and run,’ Swallow counselled.

  ‘I can’t.’

  ‘Why not, everybody else does? Joe Jones has had more stray pussy than the Blue Cross. With any luck he won’t even notice.’

  ‘Thanks, Swallow, I really needed to hear that.’

  ‘Only trying to be helpful.’

  ‘For heaven’s sake, this is serious.’

  Inactivity, the food of lust, fanned the flames. Monty found herself imagining what Joe was doing every idle minute of her day, tracking him through the mansion with sonar waves of erotic yearning. If he came near her, she felt a visceral lurch which made her knees go weak and her mind a blank. In a desperate attempt to stop him permeating every cell in her body she started spending afternoons at the piano, trying to write a song. It was miserably hard work, which dismayed her; was it possible that she might have lost her talent, the gift which she had always undervalued because it came so readily whenever she called it, which she had almost begun to hate because it demanded so much from her?

  She wanted to write a song about the misery of living with a brutal, dominating man, and feeling the pain of subjugation to his selfish needs. She heard it in her head as something very down, bitter and Billie Holiday-like, but the beautiful piano simply couldn’t produce the sound of suffering that she wanted.

  Swallow’s right, she decided at last. I’ve got to have Joe. Monty knew every trick of inviting sexual approach and she began to use them unashamedly. She stood too close to Joe, touched him and let her hand linger with unmistakable emphasis on his sinewy arm. She held contact with his deep, black eyes longer than was proper, feeling thrilling palpitations as she dropped her gaze to his mouth and ran her eyes caressingly over his lips.

  She flirted outrageously, until every conversation became a minefield of suggestive double-entendres. Joe was very polite, and she suspected with dismay that he tried to avoid being alone with her. She took a walk in the rain, and came in breathless and bedraggled with her T-shirt clinging to her breasts and her erect nipples clearly revealed; in this irresistible condition she contrived to bump into Joe in a doorway, so she was held in his arms – or would have been, if Joe had not stepped back as if she were going to bite him, his hands held away from her. It was tantalizing to be within the warm aura of the body she craved for a few seconds. Monty was considering more radical measures when Joe unexpectedly sought her out in the kitchen.

  He avoided her eyes and said, ‘The goddam car’s cracking up. Half the exhaust fell off this morning. Can you get it fixed for us?’

  The custom car king told Monty to take the Chevrolet to a garage in a north London mews where they specialized in American cars. The garage also specialized in reggae music, which pounded down the street from a colossal ghetto blaster. Two mechanics in Rastafarian hats and blue overalls elevated the Chewy on a hydraulic platform and ripped out the old exhaust, moving intime to the beat. A third stood by and watched, a fat joint smouldering in his hand.

  ‘Hey man, don’t stand around. Get the torch over here,’ one of them called as they carried a new silencer out of the store and began to fit it, their spanners tinkling as they dropped them on the oil-stained concrete floor.

  ‘Could you be, could you be, could you be loved?’ sang Bob Marley and Monty lounged by the doorway, swinging her hips with the music. The mechanic put out his joint and turned on the welding torch, laughing as he set an exuberant fall of sparks through the air. One of the other men made a joke and they all roared and fell about, the white flame wavering carelessly across the underside of the car. I hope they know where the petrol tank is, Monty thought.

  At the instant the premonition crossed her mind there was a massive explosion. Jagged fragments of metal clattered on the ground all around her. The men screamed, their hair and clothes in flames, blood pouring from wounds cut by flying metal. All over the workshop floor, pools of oil were burning. Monty whirled round, searching frantically for a fire extinguisher. It was too heavy for her, but a man ran out of the office to help her and they began putting out the flames. One mechanic was yelling in agony, his back ablaze.

  When all the fires were out, Monty stood up and looked at the scene. The red Chevrolet was nothing but a mass of metal. Joe will be so angry, she thought in fear, putting her hands to her face.

  Her face hurt. Her eyebrows rubbed off under her fingers, crisp crumbs of fried hair. Her hair smelt and was falling off in charred lumps. Her body hurt too. She was burnt all over. As she looked at her hands, Monty saw they were as red as steaks. Someone put a blanket around her. ‘Come on girl,
we’re takin’you to hospital,’ he said. Monty fell sideways, pain searing her body from the waist

  upwards. ‘Joe’s going to be so mad,’ she said.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Princess Ayeshah chose to call her night club L’Equipe after weeks of turning names over and over in her mind, trying to decide on a single word which would have the right resonance. The name had to suggest exclusivity and elegance which were beyond the power of money to command. It had to have dignity, so that no taint of undue frivolity could attach to a head of state who included the club in his itinerary; at the same time the name of the club had to indicate that no woman to be found there would be less than memorably chic. Above all, the name had to embody the idea of an élite, an enclosed gathering of people with only one thing in common – their position in the highest international social echelon. L’Equipe meant ‘the team’; it had the right overtone of exclusivity.

  She found her inspiration in the game of polo, which had been a symbol of wealthy amusement familiar to her from childhood; although she had crossed the world and attained a standing far higher than anything of which she could have dreamed in the beginning, polo, she had remarked, always meant the same the world over – the most thrilling, beautiful and expensive pastime imaginable, in which horses so carefully bred and schooled that they were like living works of art were mastered by men with the wealth, the leisure and the athleticism to become superb horsemen.

  The club’s symbol was a polo pony, a tiny, prancing silhouette which was woven into the carpet, embossed on the menus, embroidered on the linen and engraved on the glasses. Beyond that, the motif was carried through with crossed mallets hung on the walls, and wooden balls arranged in the foyer in a pyramid, like the cannon balls stacked at the Ecole Militaire. The interconnecting rooms were decorated in neutral shades of wild silk woven in imitation of the chessboard patterns traditionally groomed into the ponies’coats. There were wing chairs of muted, grey-gold velvet and couches upholstered in leather which was exactly the mature, glowing shade of brown of a well-cared-for saddle.