The steward had come to replace Evelyn’s water jug. ‘We only stop here for supplies in the regular way,’ he explained, clearly expecting her to be impressed, ‘but Miss Harper’s a VIP.’
In the corridor outside Evelyn’s compartment heavy male feet were marching in time to the band. She opened her door a few inches and saw a dozen or more men heading off to reclaim the observation car where Sybil Harper had apparently been in the habit of regaling the smokers with all ten thousand words of her next article.
‘Look on the bright side, Jim,’ laughed one of the men. ‘It’s saved us a dollar on next week’s Nation.’
‘My wife says they named a sweet pea after her,’ said his friend.
‘Was it red?’
Evelyn yearned to stretch her legs and explore. Dare she risk a visit to the bar? She had not thought to pack a Bible in her suitcase – the Hungarian dictionary seemed far more to the purpose and space was limited. When Silas’s posting was announced she had bought him a tiny, India paper Bible to take with him but he hadn’t been especially pleased. There must be six, seven copies of the Good Book in the house already, he said (‘You’ve got Bibles’). She had tucked it into his kit bag without telling him but it hadn’t been among the personal effects that had been sent back to her.
To her surprise, there was a copy of the King James Version in one of the cubbyholes in her compartment. Its American cloth cover and gilt lettering glinted alluringly in the light of the bedside lamp. Evelyn slipped the book from its place, looked up at the ceiling and let the leaves fall open: the Book of Joshua: ‘Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed.’ What would Jesus do? Jesus would pick up The War of the Worlds, rub on some lipstick and head for the cocktail lounge.
Mrs Van Clark was seated in the corner enjoying a preprandial Gibson.
‘Why there you are! Come and join us.’
Mrs Van Clark was very impressed indeed by Sybil Harper’s unscheduled stop but, from habit, recast the event to reflect on her own life, reminding Wanda that they always used to stop the trains for Great-Grandpa Hopkins. Great-Grandpa Hopkins practically owned the old New England Railroad. Wanda appeared unmoved but then Wanda had probably heard this boast before.
‘Mimi Hendriks took the clipper last time she went to Palm Beach,’ said Wanda, winding her wristwatch. ‘Only takes fifteen hours. I hate trains.’
‘Do you have children, Mrs Murdoch?’ said her mother suddenly.
‘No.’ Evelyn lowered her head.
Mrs Van Clark tipped her mad little topknot to one side. Blue today, like an ailing budgerigar (Delilah had been collared accordingly). She pulled a sad face the way people always did when Evelyn admitted her childlessness then began fondling her little girl’s hand.
‘They can be such a comfort …’
Wanda ordered a second cocktail and took her hand away.
Evelyn was only six when her mother died and she found it hard not to covet the easy friendliness of mothers and daughters she saw shopping or lunching together. She had once found her father sitting in their wirelessless parlour with his wife’s photograph on his lap (she realised afterwards that it must have been the anniversary of her death) and, emboldened by the growing darkness, had asked him if she was like her. Not in the least. He had not even looked up.
She gathered up her things and smiled her apologies at the Van Clarks.
‘Excuse me, won’t you. My dinner reservation is for six thirty.’
‘You sure you won’t have another drink?’ coaxed the older woman as Evelyn rose to leave. ‘There’s so much I want to ask you.’
‘I want to get an early night.’
Evelyn was shown to the only free table and presented with a glass of iced water and a folded card. A life of irregular verbs and vocabulary lists had not prepared her for the Super Chief’s bill of fare: meunière and à la minute were simple enough but ‘Harvard beets’? ‘Devilled squab’? Did one eat it, drink it or pray for its sins?
‘Can I help at all?’
Evelyn looked up in alarm as the blond young man from the Maple Room reversed unasked into the seat opposite and signalled to the waiter to bring him a menu.
The suit was blue now, a pale, almost girlish shade, and his club stripes had been replaced by a foulard tie like a strip cut from a headscarf.
She watched a look of surprise – and mild interest – flambé across his face as he registered Alphonse’s work with the tongs. She scowled back at the bill of fare. Grits?
‘Kind of mean the way these bozos print such a lot of it in French, isn’t it? Parfait, julienne, charcuterie, all that baloney.’
Evelyn couldn’t very well explain that it was not the French that required translation without blowing her ‘cover’. Besides, it obviously pleased him to patronise her. She was about to make some reply when a small, many-buttoned boy marched in bearing a chromium-plated tray.
‘Telegram for Mrs Murdoch?’
Evelyn took care to keep Jeremy Fitzmorton’s cable out of view but realised too late that the man had already seen the address on the envelope: ‘Mrs Silas Murdoch, Miracle Studios’.
‘FELIX KAY MEETING PASADENA,’ read the telegram. ‘WILL ADVISE HOUSEWISE STOP WALLS STOP EARS STOP.’
The boy produced a printed form and Evelyn quickly pencilled a reply: ‘WILLCO STOP ALL SERENE MURDOCH.’
She handed over the slip but the boy remained beside her, waiters cursing wordlessly as they shimmied around him bearing huge trays of squab and grits. It was only when her unwanted dinner companion produced a magic coin from his pocket that the child finally disappeared.
Evelyn pocketed her telegram.
‘Thank you. I owe you a dime.’
He shook his head and turned to the waiter, his small bronzed ear a relief carving against the close-cropped side of his skull. There was something disturbingly anatomical about the tendons that built the column of that tanned hairless throat, like the curved and turgid shaft of a hyacinth stem.
He began ordering before she could protest.
‘We would like a bottle of the Margaux and we will both have consommé, antipasto, a truite aux amandes and a filet mignon – medium rare, with pommes alumettes.’ He turned to Evelyn with a well-rehearsed twinkle. ‘A hundred and thirty years since the Louisiana Purchase but we still have to dine à la carte.’ We not they. ‘Why we can’t call a clear soup a clear soup I will never understand.’
She knitted him a tiny, grateful smile, to mask her irritation.
‘Thank you for ordering; I was miles away.’
‘Not bat news in your cable, I hope?’
‘No. No. Not at all.’
‘There is no one to introduce us,’ he said. ‘My name is Weiss –’ he pronounced it with a W ‘– Joseph Weiss but please call me Joe. And you are …’
‘Evelyn Murdoch.’
The handshake was carpus-crushingly Teutonic but it was hard to be completely sure of his origins. Weiss was not an English name but then so few American surnames were. Even the grand ones were Dutch (or tried to be). His pronunciation of individual words – nooze for news, ‘coll me Joe’– was irreproachably transatlantic but his Yankee twang was very faint – it took more than a flat ‘a’ to make an American accent. He had ordered her steak and potatoes in flawless French – a far cry from Mrs Van Clark’s struggles with mousseline de soie – but his speech in general had the clipped fluency found only among those who had learned another language first. Swiss, perhaps? But he’d been ‘Sepp’ to the man seeing him off in New York – nothing Swiss about that. Evelyn thought again of his Chicago friend’s blue and white bow tie.
She tried to rebuff further sallies by turning to War of the Worlds (‘The Heat-Ray in the Chobham Road’) but Mr Weiss was unsquashable. He refilled her glass. Was she joining her husband? (The faintest nod in the direction of that telltale ring finger.)
There had been moments during her Mouzinho voyage when she thought she might very well be joining Silas
. The purser had talked airily of ‘target practice’ – alvo prática – when they heard sounds of artillery but none of the passengers was convinced and Evelyn had lain terrified in her bunk anticipating the imminent heavenly reunion. Her mother-in-law was fond of savouring the joys in store: ‘Dear Silas has gone to a Better Place.’ ‘I think she may mean Walton-on-Thames,’ said Deborah.
‘Is he based in LA?’
Evelyn gave a guilty start.
‘Is who based in LA?’
‘Your husband.’
‘No. He was killed …’
Joseph Weiss’s well-kept hand flew to his face.
‘I’m terribly sorry. So many tratchedies …’
Silas would not have approved of those polished fingernails or that hand-painted necktie. The train, with its cunning modern fittings, would have appealed to his tidy mind but the excesses of the menu would have been Frowned Upon.
Evelyn’s antipasto had been served and she looked up to see that during her reverie her dinner companion had balanced his water glass on the top of his head. Evelyn laughed in spite of herself and a man sitting across the aisle clapped his hands. Silas would not have been laughing.
‘What’s wrong, Mrs Murdoch? You were away with the fairies.’
Another hard-won idiom on parade. She chased the last olive across her plate.
‘I keep wondering what my husband would have made of all this …’
‘Did he like Italian food?’
‘Not particularly.’
The shilling lunch at the hotel where Evelyn and Silas had spent their three-night honeymoon had been spaghettis à la sauce Bolognaise. Silas hadn’t cared for it and said so repeatedly while he cleared his plate. Mr Weiss changed tack.
‘So, where are you headed, Mrs Murdoch?’
She was suddenly very conscious of Jeremy Fitzmorton’s telegraphic warning in her pocket and it struck her that this handsome young man was showing an unnatural amount of interest in her affairs, but his questions were so insistent – and so normal, after all, in this nosy new world – that she had little choice but to answer them. Stonewalling would only arouse further suspicion.
‘Pasadena.’ No sense fudging, he’d be sure to see her get off the train.
‘Hollywoot?’ Another appraising glance as he tried to decode her contradictory wardrobe. ‘No! Don’t tell me!’ Roguish suddenly. ‘Let me guess … They’d have put you on the Union Pacific if you were just a script girl and you aren’t exactly the starlet type …’
Hard to say why this remark should irritate and her face evidently betrayed her because she could sense him easing into reverse.
‘And far too pretty for a writer … I haff it! Voice culture?’
‘How clever of you.’ Far too clever. She could have been a thousand things.
‘I thought so.’ The tip of his tongue came a fraction too far forward as he made absolutely certain of the th.
‘And a mistress of the art, yes? To warrant a drawing room on the Super Chief?’
‘The studio want me to start straight away,’ murmured Evelyn. How did he know she had a drawing room?
‘Who’s your boss? I probably know him. It’s a big town but it’s a small world –’ a preening pause ‘– for anybody who iss anybody.’
He was every bit as nosy as Mrs Van Clark. Mrs Van Clark seemed the lesser of two evils – unless of course the script had made the Connecticut housewife the spy and Joseph (‘call me Joe’) Weiss the knight in shining armour. Melvyn Douglas, possibly, or nice Michael Redgrave.
Joseph Weiss leaned forward to bone his trout, releasing a blast of cologne: vanilla; lavender (‘the smell of thy garments is like the smell of Lebanon’). Nothing about Silas had smelled of vanilla or lavender (he had been trained by his mother to take his shoes off in the house). The sweet scent intensified in the heat of the dining car. Evelyn’s filet mignon had been garnished with fried onions. She felt a qualm of nausea as Joseph Weiss placed his hand on hers. A much smaller, softer hand than Jeremy Fitzmorton’s. It took real physical effort not to twitch her arm away. Pretty young men did not make passes at women like her, Alphonse or no Alphonse.
She grabbed her bag and her book with her free hand.
‘You must forgive me but I’m not quite the thing. Please let me give you some money for dinner.’
‘I wouldn’t hear of it. I’ll walk you back to your compartment.’
He paid with a note from a crocodile billfold. As he was doing so, the train swerved into a bend and a passing martini fiend tottered towards them in high patent-leather heels. Joseph Weiss put an arm out to steady the woman, letting the open wallet fall on to the tablecloth between them: two pockets, a tidy wad of dollar bills in the first and, just visible behind them, the torn half of a million-mark note.
Chapter 5
When Evelyn woke the next morning the New Mexico moonscape had cut to a backdrop of citrus groves with tidy trees that stretched out to a vanishing point like a perfectly plotted perspective drawing: gay as a child’s colouring book, neat as a Swiss orchard.
Oranges and tangerines were a Christmas food in the Murdoch kitchen which had offered pretty short rations even before Lord Woolton took a hand. Mid-morning and afternoon tea came with one very plain, very yellow biscuit. ‘They don’t grow on trees, you know’ – but maybe they did, smiled Evelyn to herself as she looked out of the train window, maybe they did here, in this strange, Oz-like world.
Evelyn’s summer dress hung dispiritedly from her thin shoulders. Its wash-weary fabric looked quite different in American sunlight and after a few minutes spent sighing at her reflection on the back of the compartment door she had retrieved her grey coat and skirt – it was October now, after all – but the sun was far too bright for the foxes. As she stepped from the refrigerated atmosphere of the Super Chief the early-morning heat of Pasadena was like opening an airing cupboard.
The way to the station exit was blocked by a group of pressmen that had gathered around the starlet from Grand Central who was posing for a photograph beneath the ‘Pasadena’ sign, a bunch of salmon-pink roses against her gleaming-white dress, lips wide and red beneath big black fly’s-eye sunglasses. A well-corseted woman in a large organza hat stood at the back of the pack, scribbling in a notebook. An anklet glinted beneath the sheer fabric of her stocking, digging into the plump flesh of her shin.
The rest of the platform was crowded with waiting friends and relations all in the gayest pastels. Albanian national dress would have been the mildest mufti in comparison with Evelyn’s sober subfusc which made her as conspicuous as a barmaid in Bible class. The chap from Miracle spotted her at once.
‘Mrs Murdoch?’ The tall, dark-haired man raised his hat, shook her hand and introduced himself as Felix Kay then led her to an open-topped car parked in pride of place in front of the main entrance. A large printed card was tucked behind the windscreen wiper: ‘Waiting for Miracle’. A camera flashed as Felix Kay helped Evelyn into the front passenger seat and when he walked round to the driver’s side the lady journalist in the hat caught him by the sleeve.
‘Anyone the Hollywood Examiner should know about?’
‘Good morning, Miss Manning. Felix Kay from Miracle. That’s Evelyn Murdoch, we just signed her from England.’ Miss Manning’s rapid mental cross-referencing drew a blank: a woman of absolutely no importance. She gave a slight shake of her head but Felix Kay wasn’t giving up that easily. ‘And that’s Fox Meredith over there.’ He jerked his chin in the direction of a lissom young man waiting by the station entrance. ‘Foxton Meredith? Plays Galahad in the new Miracle movie. Gonna be big. Want me to introduce you?’
Felix Kay turned back to Evelyn apologetically.
‘This won’t take a minute.’
He took the columnist’s arm and led her and her cameraman across to the young star then stood clear as the photographer went to work. Foxton Meredith had dressed for California in white trousers and a short-sleeved shirt with an initial on the front. A lime-green
sports coat was slung over one shoulder in the hook of his forefinger. He looked faintly unreal; too smart, too handsome for everyday use. Like an advertisement for Virginia cigarettes or a tennis professional in a country club. Evelyn had never actually seen one of these in the flesh but they lurked on the edges of love stories and murder mysteries: clean, pressed, bronzed and faintly untrustworthy.
When the snapshots had been taken Evelyn saw Felix Kay whisper something in the actor’s ear before darting back to the long, white car and vaulting into the driving seat without opening the door.
‘All set?’
‘This is terribly kind of Mr Kiss but I was thinking that it might be nice to stretch my legs and see something of the city. Is it awfully far?’
‘Fourteen miles but it’s a pleasant drive.’
Felix Kay pulled out of the parking space and eased into the morning traffic. His fingernails were as shiny as the wheel, with smoothly curved whites of a crisp and even length. Either he spent time doing it or he paid a girl to do it for him on a little marble table. Both possibilities were unnerving. Silas’s nails, jaundiced by disinfectant soap, were always pared with a penknife.
What was the Kay for? she wondered. Kravitz? Kellner? Katzenellenbogen?
Almost every street on the route was an avenue. Hothouse plants were growing abundantly in the front gardens. After fifteen minutes of driving through a never-ending suburb of hedge-ringed villas there was a sudden bend in the road and the city opened out beneath them, feather-duster palm trees pin-sharp against the dusty haze beyond.
Happy Little Bluebirds Page 7