Happy Little Bluebirds

by Louise Levene

  Your box of fruit arrived this morning. The Outlaw says they’ll be just the thing for Harvest Festival so I have hidden them in the mending basket with the oloroso.

  The ink was a different colour for the final page and Deborah’s handwriting less copperplate as she squeezed in a rather alarming postscript.

  I was planning to trek back up to the insurance office some time this week but something has come up. I won’t worry you with it till I have more particulars. The report we got was very vague. Will write with more gen ASAP.

  Then a scribbled PPS:

  I’d be grateful if you destroyed this letter when you’ve finished with it. If you died (not that it’s likely, but you never know …) they might send it back here and if I died in the meantime – every danger after last week – then it would be there for poor Gilbert to find and he might get the wrong idea about The Lady of Shalott and all that nonsense. Unless he died too, of course …

  Evelyn frowned as she refolded the letter. Report? What report?

  The last bit of post contained a gilt-edged portfolio with one of Zandor Kiss’s business cards clipped to it: ‘They don’t do you justice’. Inside were half a dozen prints of a long-necked, dark-haired woman, shoulders shrouded in a wisp of white lace, a collar of gold at her throat. Heavy black crayon gave the almond eyes a startling, Nefertiti-like outline and a thick layer of paint had rendered the skin supernaturally smooth, not like skin at all, more like royal icing or velvet painted by Ingres. An unearthly light haloed the hair and flickered mysteriously on the roll of studio paper behind the head. There were two cabinet portraits and a mixed pack of cartes visites for her to send to friends and admirers. She could all but hear Mrs Murdoch quoting from her library of soft-bound, hard-lined Wesleyan tracts: ‘No gold, no curling of hair, nothing apt to attract the eyes of bystanders to create and inflame lust.’

  She placed the photographs on the dressing table and after she had brushed her hair and dabbed vanishing cream on her face she tried to replicate the pose the photographer had coaxed from her: parted lips, surprised eyes.

  The framed picture of Evelyn was one of the few things that Silas’s captain had returned. The glass of the frame had broken in transit and when Evelyn removed the familiar wedding-day snapshot she found another picture behind it: a signed photograph of a smiling Nova Pilbeam. Behind that was wedged a hand-coloured French postcard. Miss Pilbeam, ‘Wimbledon-born star of Nine Days a Queen’, was fully dressed but the young French lady was sitting up in bed stark naked holding a bone-china cup and saucer. Her bosoms were the exact size and shape of iced buns. She too was smiling.

  Silas always brought Evelyn a cup of Horniman’s Black Label in the mornings. Was the tea-drinking mademoiselle his ideal? Had his wife’s flannelette nightgown been a daily disappointment?

  Chapter 12

  ‘You one of the sweet people?’

  No, Evelyn was not one of the sweet people. The uniformed woman seemed disappointed and bustled back into the house.

  The driveway of Rindy McGee’s mansion was swarming with lorries and motors belonging to the flower people and cake people and fairy-light people who had been busy transforming the inside of the house for the young star’s (official) eighth birthday party. Chinese lanterns were strung across the front of the porch, the strawberry trees were blooming with giant tissue-paper blossoms and a gross of yellow rubber ducks were being emptied into the canoe run under the watchful eye of Clinton Parker. Rindy’s press agent was having a very busy day. Ducks launched, he began marshalling a small pack of press photographers to the various points of interest, beginning with a large kennel in the shape of the Petit Trianon. It was uninhabited.

  ‘The dog’s due at two thirty when the main guests arrive. Make sure the handler takes it straight to the doghouse so the guys can get some shots. Everybody loves a dog.’

  In the main hall a pair of Japanese boys in brown Holland overalls were coiling garlands through the banisters. Mrs Zaklinsky, the McGees’ cook–housekeeper, had nothing to cook and no house to keep and had only to drift from room to room in a Battenburg lace apron telling the hired hands to wipe their feet.

  The main living room now contained a twelve-foot banqueting table covered with pink damask and every conceivable variety of cake and sweetmeat (‘a land of milk and honey’). There were cornucopias of oranges and peaches and grapes at each end of the spread but the display was dominated by two super-sized birthday cakes: an igloo made from marshmallows and a model of the Golden Gate Bridge fashioned from peanut brittle and spun sugar which had just been unboxed by Monsieur Verard, Rindy’s pâtissier, whose violet delivery sedan was parked in the drive. A smallish, red-headed boy in velvet knickerbockers and a lace shirt front appraised both structures with a connoisseur’s eye. A dimpled pink finger was picking hungrily at the candy cabling of the bridge.

  ‘My last cake was shaped like the Hoover Dam. It cost for-ty-nine million dollars – the dam, not the cake. You seen the Hoover Dam? I made them take me when we were shooting out in Nevada. Nine-ty-six men died making it. Did you know that?’

  ‘The cake?’

  ‘No, dope,’ said the child witheringly. ‘The dam.’

  ‘How horrid.’

  Hollywood children had quick ears. English, wasn’t she? Where the war was? Was her husband fighting the war? What did he die of? Did he kill a whole bunch of people? Evelyn shook her head. In his penultimate note Silas had revealed that one of his patients had contracted septicaemia following the extraction of a third molar. It happened a lot in the heat, apparently, particularly when they didn’t use the special peroxide mouthwash. ‘As if I supplied it for my own amusement,’ he had written, tetchily.

  More guests were starting to arrive and the photographers – dog and ducks safely in the can – were gathered in readiness by the time Bobby Canfield made his entrance. He wore grey flannels and a white silk shirt and club tie under a sleeveless cashmere sweater. His brogues twinkled like nutshells beneath the perfect break of his bespoke grey flannels. He was nine years old (said so in Photoplay).

  Having posed for the cameras holding his chocolate meerschaum pipe, the star of Puppy of the Baskervilles joined Evelyn and Little Lord Fauntleroy at the buffet table. Master Canfield was not a party hound.

  ‘This sucks. The picture-snatchers need to make the evening editions so my agent told Dad to drive me here early. Any sign of the birthday girl?’

  He prised a cube of marshmallow from the back half of the igloo and slyly coughed it into his mouth. There was the faintest flush of razor burn on his upper lip. He turned from them and stared, unimpressed, at the full-sized portrait of his hostess which hung above the fireplace surrounded by birthday cards showing puppies in perambulators and kittens in wellington boots. Rindy had been painted holding a frilly white (rented) dog and wore ballet shoes and a very short pink lace tutu.

  ‘They got her legs insured for half a million dollars – if you believe what the publicity people put out when she signed her contract,’ said Master Canfield. ‘They always pull that insurance stunt but nobody thinks about what it really means. There’s a guy sells matches who sits on a little cart outside the train station downtown. Only half there. I guess he forgot to get insurance. I’d sooner have legs,’ said the boy, who had clearly given the matter a great deal of thought, ‘way sooner.’

  He looked sideways at Evelyn.

  ‘You a nanny, or what?’

  ‘Voice culture.’

  ‘Figures. Too pretty for a nanny. My nanny had a moustache. You any good? They want me more la-di-dah for my next picture: The Boy in the Iron Mask. I’ll ask Rindy.’

  Guests began arriving in greater numbers and, at the stroke of three, Dorinda McGee cascaded down the main stairs in a blur of bubble-gum ruffles and an electrical storm of flashbulbs. She was accompanied by a clutch of smaller and younger eight-year-olds. Each one had its hair locked in sugar-watered ringlets and each wore a pastel-coloured frock that barely covered the pastel-coloured p
anties beneath. Their faces had been dusted with powder and their lips glazed with Vaseline for the waiting cameras. Rindy’s mother signalled for her to sit on the bottom step and the girls collapsed around her, bridesmaids at the wedding of the painted doll.

  Rindy blew out the eight pink candles that had been inserted into the igloo, leaving the guests to tear it apart while she repaired to the piano to crack a few more smiles.

  ‘Just the keyboard, no need for the whole thing – she’s the little girl next door, don’t forget – but make sure you get Steinway’s name in,’ warned Clinton. ‘We owe them.’

  His work complete, the press agent strolled over to the cakes and began jabbing at the now lopsided igloo. He smiled ruefully at Evelyn.

  ‘It’s a very fine line. Every kid wants a piano and a swell birthday party but we gotta think of the hick towns, you know? Places the train don’t stop.’

  Evelyn thought again of the mesmerised figures lining the platform as the Super Chief passed through Colorado and New Mexico and wondered aloud how many of their children had their own pâtissier. Clinton was unapologetic. Nobody minded the pâtissier (he pronounced it pad ECA). All kids liked sweet stuff but grand pianos didn’t play so well; grand pianos looked greedy. And besides, the cake guy was only hired for parties. They’d even managed to work the whole sweet-tooth thing into a sponsorship deal with Smilebrite children’s toothpaste (cherry, banana, aniseed and wildstrawberry flavours and more sugar per ounce than a marshmallow igloo).

  The birthday girl remained at the piano, picking out the chords of ‘If I Only Had a Brain’ and gazing around the room at the children Mr Parker had invited. Her personality had shut down like a Klieg light the instant the photographers left but at the sight of Evelyn she ran across the room and made a deep, sarcastic curtsey.

  ‘Why, Mrs Murdoch, how veddy, veddy naice to see you! Which witch is which, wondered Wilbur – see? I’ve been practising. I never practised with the other coach we had. I like you a whole lot better. I told PZ. The other dame was eppsolutely ghaastly.’ She dropped the accent and began peeling herself a grape. ‘I don’t know any of these bozos – not personally. I told you I wouldn’t. They’re only here for the columns. Nice dress, by the way, whole lot nicer than mine. Kingfisher is a good colour for you. This dress is lousy – Clinton picked it out. I suppose it could have been worse: they were going to make me wear gingham and come as Dorothy. I auditioned for that, you know –’ Rindy stared into space and clasped her hands together ‘– “There’s no place like home!” My agent was spitting tacks.’

  The child pinched disdainfully at her candyfloss frills. ‘Oh well, at least I don’t have to wear corduroy knickers like poor Buster over there. The dress I’m wearing to the Von Blick party next month is a whole lot better. Mother says everyone will be getting their penguin suits out of mothballs. It’s going to be real fawncy, very East Coast. Mother’s going to be having fittings with the dressmaker all day Tuesday: ivory panne velvet. Mine’s midnight blue. I look very swan-yay in midnight blue. Shame you won’t get to see it.’

  Rindy’s trained face registered sadness as if she were mentally picturing the dead puppy or a failed audition but the welling tear dried fast when Evelyn pointed out that she too was on the Von Blick guest list.

  ‘Since when did Voice Culture start getting invited to parties? I guess you Europeans got to stick together.’

  She turned to look out of the window and her face fell.

  ‘Oh no!’ Rindy pointed out to the garden. ‘There’s no escape. I thought we’d done with all the press for today but here comes the Manning Menace. I swear to God she’s pitched a tent behind the boathouse.’

  Myra Manning, wearing a leopard-skin turban and a collar of wrestling furs, was making her way across the stumble stones through a sea of celluloid wildfowl. Rindy ducked down behind the piano.

  ‘“Myra Manning: Pal to the Stars” – I don’t think I’ve ever uttered a line of dialogue without her or one of the other ghouls on set. “Good publicity”, Clinton says.’ A world-weary sigh fluttered the ruffles on her collar. ‘I guess I’d better attend to my guests. Do help yourself to drinks.’

  After an hour, the party had reached the lemonade-and-marshmallow equivalent of the three-martini stage. A musical prodigy in a sailor suit was vamping through ‘Whistle While You Work’ while an undersized adolescent with a wide, chocolate-sundae smile was standing beside her on the stool, belting out the lyric. He was wearing a scaled-down copy of Ty Hooper’s costume in The Cowboy and the Countess. A missing front tooth (a silver dollar from the tooth fairy) added to his air of saloon-bar menace.

  The soles of Evelyn’s sandals stuck to the carpet as she turned to leave. A small girl in peppermint tulle lay full-length on the white sofa and was lobbing doughnuts into one of the crystal lampshades. Mrs Zaklinsky, watching from the wings, was unperturbed. She had men arriving with ladders who could deal with that and the steam-cleaning people were booked for later that afternoon. The housekeeper made a mental note to call the piano tuner as she noticed a solitary guest diligently wedging marshmallows between the strings of the Steinway. Nothing money couldn’t fix (and it wasn’t her money).

  ‘Ain’t they cute? Not often they have any real fun. You got kids?’

  Evelyn shook her head and Mrs Zaklinksy looked suitably saddened (or perhaps merely thought about dead dogs).

  Cute? Really? Why were their hands always sticky? Was it something they secreted? And why did they smell so strongly of soiled nappies and talcum powder or the sickly sweets they had eaten or the syrupy medicines they had just been dosed with or the paraffin stuff rubbed into their hair to keep the insects off? And that was just the reasonably well-behaved ones, never mind the kind that ran amok in railway carriages or shattered the silence in libraries or charged up and down the decks of the Mouzinho while their mothers smiled indulgently.

  Like dogs – and very much unlike cats – they always assumed that one was thrilled to have them clambering on to one’s lap and pulling at one’s hair or scarf or buttons and launching into recitations of boys on burning decks or travellers knocking on moonlit doors. Worse still, once out of range of their various minders, they reverted to almost simian behaviour: biting their fingernails or scratching their private parts or picking their freckled noses and eating what they found there. Old Mrs Murdoch would have called Rindy ‘precocious’ but at least the child could hold a normal conversation.

  Mrs Zaklinsky was retrieving the wreckage of the Golden Gate Bridge from the upholstery as Evelyn made her way to the door. Could she be kind enough to let Miss McGee know that Mrs Murdoch would return next Wednesday afternoon?

  Evelyn had eaten her Saturday breakfast in her pyjamas then dozed off in a sunlit easy chair in front of the French windows.

  The Martians’ birthday cake was a scale model of Anne Hathaway’s cottage sliced in two by a spun-sugar death ray. They were holding the party at Rindy’s house and the spacemen were taking it in turns to fire their disintegrator pistols at the chandeliers, each discharge producing a loud, rapping sound.

  ‘Room service!’

  Ted Monroe was standing on the terrace behind the glass doors. He was dressed for a morning’s golf and carrying a large wicker picnic hamper.

  ‘Sorry to disturb your beauty sleep but I got you something. Close the door behind me.’

  He set the squeaking basket on the Persian rug and loosened the loop holding the twin lids together. Half a dozen kittens jumbled out.

  ‘I told the pet store they were for Betty Grable – the guy was a big fan – now all you have to do is pick the one you want. I said I’d get the rest back to him by noon.’

  One by one he pinched the tiny animals up from the carpet until Evelyn had the entire litter in her lap: one black; two tabbies; one ginger; one black and white; and one jumbled mixture of the other colourways: a shade card for the breed.

  ‘And the ones I don’t want go back to the shop?’

  ‘Sure. And the
n some nice old lady buys them. Or they get an agent. Or the guy gets hold of Betty Grable’s address. Relax.’

  The warm kittens slithered about on the satin of her kimono, mashing each other’s backs and faces with miniature velvet paws as they struggled to the top of the heap, each one strenuously auditioning for a birthday card. Ted Monroe was taking furtive peeks at his watch but she found it almost impossible to choose, to offer a home to one and not the rest. And yet people chose orphans … and evacuees … As soon as the thought occurred she began to feel that she really ought to pick the ugly calico runt with the big black smudge above its nose. The kitten with cold sores and impetigo and rats’ tails and broken glasses mended with sticking plaster, a permanent scab on its knocked knee. The kitten wetting the bed or picking its nose. The Tottenham tearaway.

  ‘How can I possibly decide?’

  ‘How did you choose your old cat?’

  She smiled sadly at the memory of the Pets’ Parlour man opening the cage behind the shop window and inviting her to take her pick. ‘Let the kitten choose you,’ the man had said – the voice of long experience – then smiled as the smallest of the litter climbed into the wide cuff of her winter coat and began sleeping there like a mandarin’s secret Pekingese. She’d named him Kowtow, not because he was remotely exotic or oriental but because he had once gone to sleep in a sleeve. She had taken him with her in her trousseau to the house on Hook Heath. Old Mrs Murdoch had a horror of mice but it was not equal to her horror of pet animals. Kowtow, a natural evangelist, had tried to win her over – without success: ‘Silas says they’re unhygienic, and he ought to know.’