‘Miracle had her playing Guinevere with some schmuck you-should-excuse-me who thinks he can direct. Direct? Funerals he should direct. They see a girl in one of my moofies, they put her under contract and then can’t understand why she’s no damned good.’
Guests unable to bag a seat in the dining room were drifting back to the drinks table and he lowered his voice to confide that he would now be reshooting Miss Malo’s Arthurian love scenes.
‘With Lancy-lot?’ purred Evelyn.
‘Ha!’ A delighted laugh, a passionate kiss on her hand, heads turning. ‘You see those rushes! You’re with Miracle?’
He pocketed her business card and gave her cheek a pinch.
‘I like you, Mrs Murdoch! Very cleffer lady. Cute I don’t need. Cute I got.’
She was to come and watch him at work on Stage Six next week. He produced his own card from a slim gold case. ‘Come and see what I make with Magda. Poor little Magda …’
The problem with Miss Malo, he explained, was that she didn’t speak any language properly.
‘Poor kid, what a life: half Danish, half Hungarian, raised in Tirana. Her file says she’s trilingual –’ he pulled a face ‘– four times lingual if you count Yiddish, but you know I speak a little Albanian myself and trust me: her Albanian is not so good. And English? I’ve had parrots with more English. They say to me is all OK. She can learn it pho-net-ic-all-y or we can do the whole thing with blackboards and bitsy bits of paper stuck on the furniture, but this is because they kind of figured the lady – twenty-two years old according to her publicity – could actually read and you know what?’ He chuckled and shook his head. ‘But on screen? A goddess. And a puppet.’ He moved his hand as though there were a toy glove on it. ‘She’s like a beautiful blonde acting machine.’ He sighed. ‘The camera tells such luffly lies. Lucky for us she’s a good mimic. And so beautiful.’ He bunched his finger ends together and kissed them ecstatically. ‘And I taught her the basics.’
‘The basics?’
He too was a good mimic. It was as if Magda Malo herself were whispering the phrases into Evelyn’s ear: For you? Anything; You are my favourite man; I want to hear all about it; Nussing nicer darling; You read my mind.
‘She learns quick.’ He nodded towards the piano where a man so old and unattractive he could only have been a producer was lighting Miss Malo’s gold-tipped cigarette. ‘You are my favourite man,’ the actress murmured. A tray of champagne was paused in its tracks. ‘You read my mind.
‘You see?’ laughed Von Blick. ‘Just the basics. And she does ex-actly what I tell her. No motivation nonsense. Her motivation is seventeen hundred a week. Not like Mr Brains Frobisher over there. “Character immersion”, he calls it. Never again. As I live and breathe, never, ever, effer again. This guy needs a midwife, not a director. And forceps.’ He mimed an ugly pulling motion with his clawed right fist.
The volume of her own laughter surprised her and the other guests turned to watch.
‘Contralto,’ he demanded, tweaking at the stray lock of hair on her forehead, and she immediately cut the sound and resumed laughing an octave lower.
‘Cleffer.’
Miss Malo left the party on the arm of her producer friend and his limousine had hardly rolled out of the drive before Von Blick was kissing the hand of a latecomer, a tall, honey-blonde of about eighteen dressed in a knee-length gown of bronze velour. Had she been waiting outside in the car?
Von Blick took a crumb of white chalk from his pocket and marked a tiny cross on the glossy black curve of the grand piano.
He ushered Evelyn to a nearby sofa – ‘You stay right here, Liebling’ – then led his new protegée to the spot where they had been standing.
‘Action!’
The girl found the director’s chalk mark at once and began drinking it in with her limpid hazel eyes, beaded lashes casting mysterious shadows on the slopes of her high cheekbones.
Their host had returned (minus his art-loving starlet) and he greeted Von Blick with a two-handed handshake. The director drew him towards the piano and began conversing in an undertone. Kramer looked – and stayed looking – at the pretty new face.
‘Malo, schmalo: this girl is the goods. She sings too.’
‘They all sing. Believe me, Otto: they all sing. But call me,’ nodded Mr Kramer though nothing more had been said, ‘call me Monday.’
A man sat down at the keyboard and began doing a Marlene Dietrich impersonation. Mr Kramer began to laugh, everyone began to laugh.
‘You aren’t laughing, Mrs Murdoch?’ said Von Blick.
‘It doesn’t mean I’m not amused.’
‘Maybe. But you should look in the columns: everyone laughing. Maybe you can afford not to laugh? But don’t be too sure. These other ladies here, they cannot afford it. Magda and my new little friend over there, they understand this. They are not amused maybe but when the bigshot laughs they have their cue. See?’ He cocked his head towards the girl in brown velour who gave the slightest possible nod then let her golden head fall back in a silent ecstasy of mirth.
Von Blick smiled his approval and relieved Evelyn of her empty glass
‘Noch einmal?’
‘Sie haben meine Gedanken lesen.’
‘Ha!’
He snapped his fingers at a man with a tray.
‘Very cleffer. Lousy accent but sehr schlau. Pleasure talking with you, Liebling. Don’t forget: Stage Six next Friday. I’ll call you.’
Felix Kay darted over from the dining room the instant Von Blick left Evelyn’s side.
He took one of his brown cigarettes from the packet in his pocket – thrifty habit – and struck a match on his fingernail.
‘You seemed pretty palsy-walsy with Von Blick. Have you guys met before somewhere? I guess speaking German must be a help?’
Evelyn struggled to keep her breathing even. So much for cloak and dagger.
‘Just schoolgirl stuff.’
He took her elbow, parked her beside a Georgian silver salver studded with tiny squares of fish roe on toast and began posting them into his mouth.
‘Kramer needs a larger dining table. It’s murder in there.’
‘I don’t think caviar is kosher, Mr Kay.’
‘Felix, please, Felix. No I don’t think it is either. Don’t anybody tell my mother or I’ll starve to death. My wife is crazy for caviar. Bernice, have you met Mrs Murdoch?’
And he launched into a peculiar comic routine in which he had a one-sided conversation with the non-existent Mrs Kay. Evelyn would later learn that Mrs Kay was a regular partygoer, giving Felix a licence to speak his mind. Like a ventriloquist, he cast himself as the straight man to her insulting remarks.
‘Yes, she could stand to gain a few pounds but she’s a hell of a lot prettier than Connie.’ He cocked an ear towards the invisible woman on his arm. ‘Yes, it is a pretty blouse, isn’t it?’
He stepped out of character and reached across to straighten Evelyn’s collar, rubbing the silk between his fingertips.
‘Nice. Blue suits you. Connie told me about the stunt she tried to pull. I tried ringing your house to let you know it was a gag but the line was dead. I’m glad you found out in time.’
She shook her head at the sheer pointless malice of her new colleague’s little scheme.
‘Peculiar thing to do.’
‘You mustn’t mind Connie, she’s been having a really bad time. They’ve got her working on some last-minute rewrites. The studio bought this book about an amnesiac heiress in the dust bowl: Wrong Road South. It made the bestseller lists and the New York Times called it “a modern Odyssey”.’ His accent grew starchy. ‘“No contemporary novel hits harder or delves deeper into the modern American psyche.” Miracle beat off a number of rival bidders, renamed it Driving Her Crazy and now they want to rework it as a musical. Connie’s been tearing her hair out. She’s too good for this place – or thinks she is. Did you know she wrote a play? It opened – and closed – a couple of weeks ago: Dry Goods, no
t the catchiest title. The Herald said it was jejune … never seen Connie cry before …’
Evelyn found it hard to care.
‘That hardly explains her behaviour. I simply don’t see what she’d gain by it.’
‘Oh you’d be surprised. Everyone entering that office is a threat – let alone anyone in a skirt and a yellow convertible. If she can get you to make yourself conspicuous – let alone ridiculous – your stock would fall pretty fast. Kiss would have been mortified if his protégée made a faux pas at a soirée.’
‘I’m not his protégée, Mr Kay.’
He popped the last caviar toast.
‘Whatever you say, Liebling.’
Chapter 7
The dead telephone sprang to life. The voice at the other end began in medias res.
‘I should get there by nine thirty. I daren’t risk the steps down so meet me by the love seat.’
At twenty past nine Evelyn strolled up through the wilderness and out through the arch in the yew hedge. Mamie Silverman was already waiting for her, seated at the wheel of an open-topped car. She was wearing a black Italian straw hat over a gaily coloured silk headscarf and her face was almost entirely obscured by a gigantic pair of tortoiseshell sunglasses perched on a nose so thickly powdered that it looked more like papier mâché than flesh – as if it were attached to the glasses. The Invisible Woman.
Evelyn would forgive her for not coming down to the pool house. Her hip was acting up but she had taken one of the pink pills so it should ease off in a while. Evelyn was so tall. Zandor hadn’t said she was tall. Poor Zandor’s plane got stuck in Memphis and he had to go back East before he even got here. Had Evelyn met Zandor yet? Mamie had known him since the first time he came to the States when he made that kidnapping movie – the one he got Best Adapted Screenplay for? Like a brother to her.
‘When Wolfie died he came over and cooked me pancakes with sour cream and cherry jam. Poor Wolfie loved pancakes.’
Evelyn arranged her face to register sadness at the old woman’s loss.
‘Helped me bury his little collar in the yard. Always so kind. So when I saw him at some party last week and he tells me he’s got an English lady coming and asks me which hotel do I think, I said hotel nothing I have a cosy little house in Bel Air going begging.
‘My husband lived in the main house here with his first wife and the girls, but he never liked it much. I say let’s get it painted white, buy some nice couches. Manny says let’s move to Malibu. Manny says only bums live in Bel Air, millionaire bums, but bums. We move about a lot. We’ve got a house out on the ocean but Paula says we should try Pasadena. A lot of old money in Pasadena … You ought to meet Paula, my stepdaughter. Her big sister Celeste, Sissy, got married but Paula still lives with us. Paula spent a lot of time in Europe, they finished her in France.’
Mamie Silverman struggled out of the car and looked around her at the garden.
‘Yuki does a good job. I hope he isn’t keeping the pool house too warm for you. I know you English aren’t used to the heat.’
The hatted head rotated bird-style. ‘Where is that lazy Jap son-of-a-bitch?’ Her gloved hand pressed on the car’s hooter until the gardener came scuttling along the cinder path.
‘Yuki, meet your new boss: Mrs Murdoch; Mr Hashimoto.’
He bowed deeply.
‘I pay Yuki good money to look after the place. That right, Yuki? I see you’re keeping the gravel nice.’ Her toes scratched a soft shoe shuffle along what remained of his nasty little pattern.
Mr Hashimoto took a pair of secateurs from the pocket of his apron and made snipping motions in the air. ‘Trees very big. Too big.’
‘Never mind trees too big. Trees just fine. Miss Paula gave you your instructions four days ago, Yuki-san: clear the guesthouse; make nice, make shipshape. You make shipshape?’
He bowed some more, casting sly looks at Evelyn to see how much had been said.
‘You make shipshape for my dear flend Mrs Murdoch? Mrs Murdoch ruvry Engrish rady. Savvy? You lazy Jap.’
Another low bow.
‘An honour to welcome honourable lady,’ then (in Japanese) he added, ‘you ugly old she-goat!’
Mrs Silverman smiled blandly and continued issuing instructions.
‘You give Mrs Murdoch basket, yes? Fetch basket? Wishy-washy?’ The kid fingers mimed washday while the gardener looked on with the raw fish eye of a man keeping a straight face. He did some more bowing as he replied.
‘Shitty old goat. Go and wash your face with shit.’
Mamie nodded at him dementedly, earrings rattling.
‘What say we leave Mr Hashimoto to get some work done and I’ll give you a tour of the main house?’
‘I’ll catch you up,’ said Evelyn as her landlady hobbled towards the porch. ‘I dropped my handkerchief.’
Mr Hashimoto was retreating at speed through the yew hedge.
‘You very busy, Mr Hashimoto?’
He nodded repeatedly, muttering further obscenities under his breath, stopping only when Evelyn began to speak very softly, telling him that unless he put her house in order and cleaned up that mess in the driveway she would talk to honourable lady and Mr Hashimoto would have to find a new job – with no references.
‘I fix phone yesterday.’
‘You need to fix a lot more than that.’
The bowing grew deeper and more rapid. ‘Stinking foreigner. Your mother’s belly button sticks out.’
The chap running the Japanese course arranged by the Holborn office had made a point of teaching them all the insults he knew and it was tempting to give as good as she got but Evelyn remembered the carpet of swastikas and thought better of it. Perhaps she ought to start a dossier?
Mrs Silverman had only got as far as the front door and was squinting through the glass at a sunless hallway thronged with dustsheeted furniture and shrouded light fittings.
‘You sure you can be bothered with the tour?’ She plunged her hand into her bag and began rummaging for the keys she had forgotten to bring.
‘It’s a dump, anyway. Manny’s first wife chose it – chose the architect anyway. They didn’t have much of a say after that. The guy insisted on designing every last thing: cupboards, couches, door handles, light switches – even the piano, lousy piano. He told all the journals at the time that it was his masterpiece but then he didn’t have to live in it. Manny says he came over after they moved in to check them out and told them they weren’t to hang any of their pictures – and Manny had a lot of pictures. A dealer picked them out for him, smart guy. I miss those pictures. We had them all with us when we had that place up at Laughlin Park but practically all of the walls at the Malibu house are glass so most of the paintings are still either at the bank or up in the attic here in Bel Air. We put a few in the pool house. You like the pool house? It’s really a very snug little place. Manny says they were going to get the same architect but he didn’t want the job so they got a local outfit. My stepdaughter says it looks like they got it from a catalogue. Maybe they did. That was why they had to let the bushes grow. The bigshot architect heard about it and said that if it was visible from the drive, he’d come over and torch the place.’
Mrs Silverman said that she had never understood why her husband hadn’t just sold the house like a regular person but he had some sort of fetish about real estate. His most recent plan was to build a house on the Pacific but Mrs Silverman wasn’t a fan of the ocean. In fact, for two pins Mamie would move to New York but she couldn’t because that was where the first Mrs Silverman had her apartment – as though New York were an hotel or a country house where the two wives would be sure to run into one another (‘It’s a big town but it’s a small world’).
‘I miss Manhattan. I miss the theatre. People here say New York’s always either too hot or too cold but I never minded the cold. I got my sables for that.’
Mrs Silverman limped back down the house steps to her car.
‘Zandor was keen we should look after yo
u. You married? Divorced?’
‘He was killed,’ said Evelyn. Again.
The gloved hand pinched at hers.
‘You ought to come to dinner, see the ocean, meet Manny.’
Evelyn, rather dreading her solitary Saturday, was mentally selecting something to wear but the old lady started the car without naming a date.
‘I’ll call you.’
It was what they said instead of goodbye.
*
‘Mrs Murdoch got some messages.’ Connie McAllister looked down at her notepad when Evelyn arrived at the office on Monday. ‘Kiss’s office called, Von Blick called – oh yes and God called. And these came.’ She made a parade of lifting a pile of Manila document wallets from the wire tray on her desk. ‘And that.’ A nod towards a basket of red and white carnations: the card read ‘Sorry for the delay in meeting. Kisses Kiss. Maradj elfoglalt (Keep busy)’.
Evelyn walked past the flowers and unlocked HP’s office, leaving the door open (no need to escalate hostilities). She uncradled the white telephone and asked for the sign-writing department. She held a hand over the receiver and smiled through the door at Miss McAllister on the far side of the main room.
‘I’ll have a word with one of the telephonists. Ghastly for you to have to take messages all the time.’
‘Ghaaastly.’
It was the last word she uttered to Evelyn for several days.
The first Manila wallet contained a ring-bound script of something called The Lady and the Lumberjack and a small, cream-coloured envelope with a British postage stamp and no censor’s mark.
I’m so glad I’ve got you to write to [wrote Deborah]. Not that much happens. Some mad old bat from the Women’s Voluntary was doing the rounds yesterday evening. Said we ought to keep rabbits but the key word is ‘keep’ because next door’s bunnies all tunnelled to freedom within the week and Mr Meakin in the big old house on the end had his eaten by a fox off the heath. I found him bending Mother’s ear on the subject which was thoughtless of him, to put it mildly, as Mother immediately put her feet up on the fender and asked where they had been seen and how big were they and now makes me beat about under her bed with the yard broom which is tiresome but less tiresome than starting a private rabbit farm. The WVS woman says ‘one can always beg scraps of bolted lettuce and what-have-you from one’s greengrocer’. Do you think she’s even so much as seen a greengrocer? You can bet your life her cook does it all. Stupid bloody woman (excuse my French). There was a picture in the paper of the allotments in Kensington Gardens which are full of magic cabbage all grown up and gorgeous. ‘Potemkin cabbage’, Mr Meakin says. Is that an actual variety? Mrs Meakin has moved in with her aunt on the Isle of Man but Mr M seems to be managing all right on his own. Keeps giving me beetroot. Overtures, Mother says.
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