The telephone trilled into life as the trunk call finally came through. ‘Hello? Is that Mr Kiss’s secretary? Oh hello again, Genista Broome here. We spoke yesterday about getting a few bits and pieces for HP’s new assistant? The one Mr Kiss organised? That’s right. Just waved her off at Grand Central.’ A brief squawk from the Los Angeles end. ‘Her type? Hard to say … Rosalind Russell with a sick headache? Dark hair, dark eyes, fair skin, height five seven, 34-24-35, shoes an American seven, hats six and seven-eighths, gloves six and a half, scanties 34, stockings nine. Passport says twenty-seven but she looks nearer forty-seven, so nothing too jeune fille.’ Another pause. ‘Just fill a few suitcases with whatever the well-dressed junior matron is wearing out West. We rely entirely on your taste and discretion. Cheerio – and thanks again.’
Fenn had been rummaging through the Murdoch file and unearthed a fading photostat.
‘Oh Lord. I do see what you mean.’
‘The studio are going to die laughing when they see those tweeds. Can you picture her entrance?’
‘I can, actually. Indeed I almost feel I’ve seen it already – that Garbo thing.’ He lowered his voice to a Swedish growl. ‘“You are the unfortunate product of a doomed culture.”’
‘The snapshot doesn’t tell the half of it. And body odour. Although to be fair –’ Lady Genista took a pencil and doodled a fluff of fur around Evelyn’s black-and-white shoulders and a pointy hat on her head ‘– there have been a few minor improvements since that was taken. I’d hardly put the phone down last Friday after breaking the news when Mr Kiss rang back to say that his New York office was sending round a few luxury trimmings from Bergdorf Goodman to make sure she didn’t excite comment on the train. Wouldn’t fool London or Paris but a fox stole and a diamond brooch will get you a long way over here.’
Fenn took a final look at the defaced photograph.
‘Still looks like Himmler in a dress.’
‘Yes. Although the red hat did liven things up considerably,’ conceded Lady Genista. ‘Himmler in party mood.’
Chapter 3
A giggling gaggle of young women were gathered around the ticket inspector, their braying mid-Atlantic voices begging for access to the platform reserved exlusively for the 20th Century Chicago express. One stood apart from her friends, a few feet from Evelyn and close to where the two Germans were still standing. She was engaged in a one-sided, whispery tiff with a disgruntled young man clutching a lady’s slipper orchid in a small cellophane coffin: Why was she going? Who would she dance with? Why couldn’t she spend the weekend with him here in New York? He had tickets for Johnny Belinda at the Belasco. Yes, of course he liked her to have a good time but his sister Betsy always said those military dances weren’t nice. The girl actually laughed in his face.
None of her friends was especially pretty but, like the Broome woman, they had tried so very hard to appear that way with their vulgarly bright hats and topcoats and painted faces that it would have been churlish to argue the point. A passing troop of naval cadets certainly seemed willing to play along, tooting and whistling in automatic appreciation of anything in heels that had gone to the trouble of having its hair marcelled.
The girls’ porters stood waiting for them a few yards away in their natty red-topped caps, trolleys piled with trunks and dress boxes. Some of the swankier luggage had fitted canvas cosies and cunning felt covers that buttoned over the handles, Evelyn noticed, even though the darkies wore gloves.
Her own bag looked very shabby alongside all that pigskin and alligator. At home, her battered suitcase, with its faded collage of continental railway labels, was a badge of cosmopolitanism; in America it merely meant that you couldn’t afford a new one. Her porter had taken charge of it with a very dubious air.
The log-jam persisted until a bolder pair of redcaps, piloted by a uniformed lady’s maid holding a French poodle, surged forward and parted the chatty throng like a spoon drawn through sauce. Evelyn’s man slipped into their wake and Evelyn was immediately surrounded by a fragrant fog of new clothes and face powder. The girls made no attempt to move permanently aside, blocking the way to other passengers with the heedless assurance of the very young – and very rich.
A minky matron, forehead furrowed at the prospect of sharing a carriage with a herd of noisy débutantes, had buttonholed one of the train officials.
‘The company should have a separate car for this kind of thing, a separate train. There must be nearly thirty of them. I’m a very light sleeper. I’ll pay a surcharge if I have to.’
The man mumbled something about a yearling prom at West Point and explained that the young ladies had been about to board an entirely different train – the 5.20 to Peekskill – when one of them thought she had spotted Gary Cooper, which had resulted in the whole gang rushing down the access tunnel and trying to talk its way on to the Chicago platform to get a closer look.
Evelyn’s porter left her at the train side and dashed back to deal with her reservation. The lady’s maid was now taking charge of her mistress’s caravan of luggage, giving the porters instructions about what went where. Evelyn marvelled at the baffling variety of cases that seemed to have been custom-built around their contents, like morocco-bound Christmas presents: typewriter, tennis racket, guitar, gramophone. One – a writing desk? – had a set of legs that folded underneath.
The desk’s owner, an eccentrically hatted woman in a sable stole, swept past the débutantes moments later followed by an entourage of raincoated men with press accreditation tucked into their mad hatbands. Genista Broome’s Germans, still in deep discussion, turned to look as the mysterious celebrity sailed by and the older man muttered something in the young one’s ear. It made him laugh: teeth lint-white against his nut-brown face.
The woman stopped a few yards from Evelyn and perched matily on the corner of a crate. Elbow on knee, she settled her furs, cupped a gloved hand beneath her chin and arranged her head at a calculated angle for the waiting lenses. The pose was one that flattered her sagging face – or would have done had the bleached fluff on her upper lip not caught the light so prettily.
‘Be sure and book me a stenographer, Lucette,’ she called after the maid. ‘I need to send some cables.’
She turned confidingly to the pressmen and went to work on them with a smile that offered the frosty cheer of a Wesleyan wedding.
‘Lucette is a godsend. Only girl I’ve ever had who really understands my hair.’ She patted the back of her greying coiffure.
It seemed that the woman’s attractions were more than skin deep because the journalists began calling out their questions with the Gatling-gun delivery that made Yankee cinema dialogue so very difficult to follow. Their demeanour – trench coats unbuttoned, hats on backs of heads, an instinctive lack of deference – was certainly very well copied by the film-makers or perhaps it was simply that the press pack were modelling their manners on their celluloid counterparts? It was hard to get any proper sense of reality. Even Genista Broome, with her rolled hair and painted fingernails, might have been straight from Central Casting. Evelyn’s glimpses of the New York cityscape, her arrival at the pier, the drive along Broadway and through the Park, had also looked absurdly synthetic, like a postcard – or a cartoon. The porter, ‘George’, was only the second Negro she had ever spoken to but even he felt strangely familiar. A kind of déjà vu. A New World that wasn’t new at all.
How did Miss Harper find Europe? Had Mr Hitler forgiven her yet? Had Miss Harper spoken to the President today? Why was she going to Albuquerque?
Miss Harper was of the opinion that theirs was a grand and glorious country and that the women of America were a force to be reckoned with, none of which was likely to have been news to any of them but they pencilled it all into their notebooks just the same. Editors short of copy had found that Miss Harper uttered her bromides in such rolling paragraphs that most of it was pretty much ready to print (in the more serious-minded journals at any rate). Those pressmen less excited by her tea
with Mr Winston Churchill stood at the back making notes on her wardrobe for the society pages (‘Miss Harper, 43, wore a sage-green tailor-made with matching hat and a collar of Russian sable’) while keeping a lookout for more splashable prey.
Their interviewee was about to explain why the Nazis lived in fear of a Roosevelt third term when one of the more eagle-eyed photographers slipped away from the pack, raced along the red carpet and fell to one knee at the feet of a young redhead in a leopard-skin coat. He snatched his first picture in a smoky flash of magnesium oxide.
‘Heading back home, Miss Del Ray?’
The actress paused mid-stride, gave a warm smile and grabbed a hatbox from the teetering pile beside her, swinging it carelessly by its braid handle, as if she travelled with nothing more than a toothbrush and a change of toque. More flashes now as the other journalists, despairing of the international situation, readjusted their news values.
Evelyn, still anxiously waiting for her porter to collect the relevant dockets, was forced further along the platform by an overalled man gliding down to the restaurant car on a motorised crate arrangement laden with fruit veiled in cellophane. He pulled up alongside an open window and began passing the baskets to a platoon of liveried delivery boys.
As she looked up from checking her watch for the dozenth time, Evelyn saw a woman reflected in one of the train’s plate-glass windows: tall and rather imposing with her killingly fashionable hat and the luxurious glint of precious stones at her throat. It was a long moment before she recognised herself. She turned her head to get a better look at the set of her red felt brim and noticed the younger German – Sepp, his friend called him – looking her up and down. An unfamiliar sensation. Not altogether pleasant.
Evelyn’s porter had hardly pocketed his tip when his place was taken by a black, white-coated steward who bustled into her train compartment with towels and a vacuum jug of iced water. Was there anything he could get for her? Tea, please. Hot tea? Yes, of course hot tea.
The luxury and newness of a 20th Century drawing room were a far cry from the frayed and faded gentility of a European sleeping car and Evelyn was entranced by the ingenuity of its fittings. A schoolfriend’s family had once taken her swimming in the Thames at Runnymede and they had all eaten lunch from a wicker basket kitted out with square cups and plates and beakers – finer china and glass than anything in the dresser at home – and instead of her father’s smelly old Thermos they had made tea from scratch with a spirit lamp that had its own leather suitcase. The whole of America seemed to be like that: the train; the newspaper stand; Miss Harper and her folding desk: everything slotting together like a box of puzzle bricks.
As Evelyn hung up the coat of her suit she slipped a silver and enamel St Christopher’s medal from the breast pocket and let it dangle from one of the compartment’s canny little coat hooks. The tiny papist trinket had been a parting gift from Deborah, her sister-in-law, which shared its chain with a lucky rabbit’s foot – ‘Don’t tell the Outlaw, for heaven’s sake; she saw me touch wood once, thought I’d never hear the end of it.’ Evelyn picked up the tiny paw and rubbed the fluffy white fur against her upper lip.
When she emptied the remaining contents of her jacket pockets on to the dressing table she discovered the cream-coloured envelope with the twopenny-halfpenny stamp that had been sent to Major Bannister’s mysterious box number. She had been gone less than a fortnight but her sister-in-law’s letter had beaten her across the ocean and ran to three quarto sheets of italic scrawl.
Evelyn had originally met Deborah a year before the war at a girls’ school in County Durham where Deborah washed test tubes as a laboratory assistant and Evelyn was teaching French and German conversation. In the early ‘Alouette’ days there had been talk of Girton or even the Sorbonne but her mother’s death had prompted her father to resign his living and pursue an itinerant career, gypsying around the country covering for sick or absent ministers. When Evelyn left boarding school it was suggested (only her father had such steely powers of suggestion) that she take part-time teaching posts while simultaneously keeping house for him in a succession of featureless rented rooms.
Evelyn had been obliged to leave the Durham school mid-term and follow her father to a new posting in Surrey. The Reverend’s constant removals made it almost impossible to form new friendships. Although addresses would occasionally be exchanged with school colleagues, the correspondences usually fizzled out. Deborah had been far more persistent, determined not to lose touch with her clever new friend. She had carried on working at the Durham school but was laying plans for her escape via the appointment columns of the London Times. A bank clerk’s daughter, she could keep accounts (a trained baboon could keep accounts, in Deborah’s opinion) and had taught herself to use a typewriter.
The Reverend Charles Dent’s Surrey posting turned out to be his last. After his death Evelyn had remained at the same address, a cabbage-scented flat above a stationer’s in Byfleet, but she had resigned from her latest teaching post and found work with a Fleet Street translation bureau. Her father’s final batch of parishioners had all been very kind to her after the funeral but this kindness generally took the form of weak tea and strong hints that she might join them sorting jumble or ladling soup. She had kept up her churchgoing for a month or two but she gained little comfort from begging forgiveness for uncommitted sins or giving thanks for non-existent blessings. She took to spending her Sundays at the National Gallery and her weekday evenings were passed working up her Hungarian and Portuguese (which were paid a premium rate by the bureau) with only her newly acquired kitten, Kowtow, for company.
Two months after the funeral, a letter arrived informing her that Deborah had successfully applied for the post of receptionist-cum-bookkeeper to a general practitioner in Woking, and had Evelyn seen Idiots’ Delight?
Their first outing went very well. Deborah was rather ‘soft’ on Clark Gable (and Tyrone Power and Errol Flynn). She had snapshots of all of them but didn’t bother with autographs which she said were all forged by a team of elderly ladies in the studio’s publicity department. The very next evening after Idiots’ Delight they had both cried over Bette Davis in Dark Victory in the front row of the Woking Ritz and soon the two friends were spending three evenings a week together. Not every trip was a success (a second feature about Russian spies knifing people in alleyways and identifying one another with torn banknotes was not Deborah’s cup of tea) but they saw The Hound of the Baskervilles twice and Deborah began a new Basil Rathbone section in her scrapbook.
Their cinema-going was interrupted when Deborah began courting Gilbert Murdoch, a young local dentist. ‘They say Gilbert’s big brother Silas is very nice,’ said Deborah out of the blue one day. ‘He’s a dentist too …’ Evelyn knew by the tone of her voice that Deborah was once again laying plans, mapping out their futures like the plot of a four-reeler. Within a matter of months Gilbert and Silas married Deborah and Evelyn. Three months later war was declared. Three months after that Silas was dead.
Deborah was impressed, if slightly unnerved, by Evelyn’s unorthodox postal arrangements.
If a courier collects my letters from the PO Box does that mean they bypass your old friends in Holborn? Probably just as well. They would probably cut out most of it – ‘alarm and despondency’, all that. It said in the paper that Stalin was shooting people for defeatism – Woking would be decimated on that basis.
Evelyn’s reading was interrupted by the return of the steward who began reciting a list of the onboard facilities: restaurant, barber shop, manicurist, stenographer, cocktail bar, nurse, florist, shoeshine. One of his front teeth was very slightly chipped (Silas always noted things like that) and she could see every pore on his shiny black face, smell the starch on his white mess jacket.
‘And is there a chapel?’
The dark face suddenly crestfallen.
‘No, ma’am. No, ma’am, there ain’t.’
‘And is the famous Mr Cooper on the train?’
If she hadn’t chummed up with Deborah, Evelyn might never even have heard of Gary Cooper. As a child, the cinema, like scent and music halls, had been categorised as ‘light-mindedness’ by her father. The Reverend had, grudgingly, licensed a handful of outings to films with Sunday-serious subjects but even these treats ceased after he had happened upon a screening of The Sign of the Cross and realised that the American film industry – ‘run by Jews and renegades’ – viewed the ancient world as a convenient pretext for depravity and undress. While he would not have deigned to forbid his nineteen-year-old daughter any commonplace diversion, he frowned upon things with a heavy, dampening force that sapped all pleasure from them.
Deborah and Evelyn had resumed their movie-going the moment the Murdoch brothers were mobilised – ‘better than moping around at home’ – and even Evelyn’s widowhood was to be no excuse. The War Office telegram confirming Silas’s death had arrived the same week as The Wizard of Oz and Deborah had insisted that it was what he would have wanted (people were always saying that: Silas would have wanted the most extraordinary things).
Evelyn had cried a great deal when the news first came. She carried on – everyone always carried on – and her life quickly resumed an appearance of normality but she felt peculiarly detached, as if she were watching herself from the stalls, the same strange, suspended state of mind that descended upon her when she ironed sheets or revised verbs. There was a dreamlike unreality to her widowhood: days spent in Holborn blue-pencilling other people’s love letters, evenings spent in Hollywood watching lives of thrilling excess: motor cars, marabou slippers, refrigeration, constant kisses and regular breakfasts in bed. Did every woman in America wear satin pyjamas? (What Silas would have wanted?)
The hours passed in the darkness of the Regal or the Odeon or the Plaza had paid unexpected dividends during her interview with Major Bannister when he asked her whether she spent much time at the cinema (he’d pronounced it with a K and one had the sense that for two pins – and in older, more county company – he’d have gone the whole hog and said ‘kinematograph’). Was she a ‘fan’ (slang always wore a very stiff collar when Major Bannister used it). A trick question, surely? Some sort of test of light-mindedness? But she had answered truthfully that, while not a fanatic, she attended her local picture houses two, sometimes three, evenings a week.
Happy Little Bluebirds Page 3