Over dinner Taormina, vivacious, laughing as easily as she talked, kept them amused. She flirted mildly with Miles who, through Jonathan’s girlfriends, tried to recapture his youth, if only for the odd moment. Jonathan himself, an anxious impresario, watched her every move.
It must be difficult for her, Iris thought, helping Taormina to strawberry cake. Soon the others will come.
But Taormina seemed to be happy. After dinner, when the Miller boys came and the four Sutherlands and the Farrows’ house party complete, they drifted noisily towards the sitting room, leaving Iris and Miles on the terrace with their cigarettes.
‘Thank heavens it’s not every night,’ Miles said as the music, blasting out of the open windows, became more and more deafening and the laughter and the clapping drowned out the evening serenade of the crickets.
They looked in through the open window on their way to bed. The oldest Miller boy, sleeves rolled up, red-faced, feet thumping on the floor, was at the piano; Jonathan sat tailor-wise on the floor with his electric guitar; and on the marble table in the centre of the room, barefoot, arms above her head, hair flying, Taormina was dancing.
‘I hope they remember to lock up,’ Miles said.
Iris yawned. ‘From the look of them, I doubt if they’ll be gone by breakfast-time.’
‘At least Jonathan is over the Finals,’ Miles said. ‘He can dissipate with a clear conscience.’
‘He always has done. I keep forgetting he’s a doctor now.’
‘It’s difficult for us to remember that youth is anything other than young.’
In the morning, by the time Miles appeared, Taormina and Jonathan were on the terrace sunbathing, Taormina in a pink bikini.
‘The energy of it,’ Miles said, ‘Taormina, where did you get your lovely name?’
‘Born or conceived on the Island, I should imagine,’ Iris said coming out through the French windows. ‘Sicily is so intensely beautiful, I think it was extremely clever of your parents.’
‘They had never been further than Brighton,’ Taormina said.
Jonathan jumped up. ‘Taormina, come for a swim!’
Ballet dancers, they leaped down the steps and over the lawn.
‘Odd,’ Miles said; ‘we don’t care to discuss our antecedents.’
‘She’s an odd child,’ Iris said. ‘Jonathan always picks slightly “off-beat” ones.’
‘Amusing, though,’ Miles said. ‘I shall be quite sorry when he starts bringing home plain Janes with glasses.’
‘He’ll have to settle down some time, especially if he’s going into general practice.’
A shriek of laughter floated over the hedge from the swimming pool.
‘I think I’ll go for a dip myself,’ Miles said.
Iris smiled. ‘Give my love to Taormina.’
For lunch Taormina changed into skin-tight pink trousers and piled her hair into a knot on top of her head. Her nose had started to peel from the sun. She looked enchanting.
Next to the Watson girls, earnest in white, ready for tennis, Taormina looked not quite real. She didn’t play but picked up the balls for them, clowning all the while.
After tea, languid on the terrace, Jonathan played snake-charming music on his harmonica; Taormina, lithe, apparently boneless, was the snake.
Miles, watching her, said: ‘She’s extraordinarily graceful.’
Iris, from behind her sunglasses, was watching the movement, and the sunlight through the balustrade, and the faces of youth, and listening to the music and the laughter.
‘I wish it was always like this,’ she sighed.
‘We shall be glad of the peace on Monday.’
‘I have a horrid feeling that it can’t last, a sort of premonition.’
‘It’s always like this when Jonathan’s down.’
‘I get the impression that this is the last time; that it will never be quite the same again.’
‘It’s obvious,’ Miles said, getting up, ‘that you could do with a Pimm’s. You’re getting broody.’
Iris was watching Jonathan watching Taormina ‘There’s something going on,’ she said. ‘I feel it in my bones.’
After dinner there were twenty of them, most of the girls in floating dresses. Jonathan got out the floodlights and the record player and they danced on the lawn, Taormina, in gold lamé trousers, took off her shoes and leaped to the music like a firebird. Wherever she was, always laughing, was the centre of the crowd.
When Iris was woken by the birds at six next morning she heard them calling ‘Goodnight.’
Miles went to church alone, Taormina had letters to write, Iris had a headache, and Jonathan was waiting for a telephone call.
At mid-morning Iris, topping and tailing gooseberries in the shade of the big elm, watched Jonathan, in his open-necked white shirt and grey trousers with grass stains at the knees, pace up and down kicking at nothing on the lawn.
‘Want any help?’
This was unlike him. Iris showed no surprise. ‘That would be nice.’
He squatted beside her and picked up a gooseberry.
‘Mother?’
‘Mm?’
‘About Taormina.’
A sudden crystallisation of her earlier premonitions swept over Iris. She put a gooseberry in the colander topped but not tailed.
‘There’s something I have to tell you,’ Jonathan said. Iris looked at him.
‘You want to marry her,’ Iris said slowly.
‘No, it isn’t that.’
Iris let out a breath of relief.
‘We’re already married,’ Jonathan said.
The gooseberries, topped-and-tailed and not-topped-and-tailed, scattered over the lawn.
‘I’m sorry to spring it on you like this … I tried on Friday …’
‘Just say it again, will you, dear? Slowly,’ Iris said. ‘I have a bit of a headache and I’m not sure that 1 heard you correctly.’
‘Taormina is my wife,’ Jonathan said. ‘We were married last month in Cambridge.’
‘Jonathan,’ Iris said, ‘you’d better explain quickly because I feel very shocked and I simply don’t understand. There was no reason why you shouldn’t get married, we expected it. You’ve passed your Finals and you’re going into partnership with Dr Slocombe, but why the secrecy?’
‘I’m afraid that’s something else I have to tell you,’ Jonathan said, throwing the gooseberry he had been holding into the pond. ‘I’m not going into practice with old Slocombe.’
‘You’d better start at the beginning,’ Iris said, and noticed the bead of sweat on Jonathan’s forehead although they were in the shade.
‘Taormina’s parents died when she was small,’ Jonathan said, ‘within a year of each other. I might as well explain about her name. They hadn’t a lot of money, her parents, but a great deal of imagination. Each year before their annual holiday in Brighton they’d go to the travel agent and get all the leaflets and information about a glamorous holiday resort somewhere in the world. In their dreams they’d go there. In the year that Taormina was born it was Sicily.
‘Anyway, after they died Taormina was looked after by an aunt. Because she seemed to have talent the aunt put her on the stage when she was fifteen, and she became a dancer. After a couple of years she decided that she would rather do something for mankind other than entertain it and she took up nursing. She was doing her final year for the SRN in Cambridge when we met.’
‘Taormina a nurse?’ Iris said. ‘I can’t believe it.’
‘She is,’ Jonathan said, ‘and a good one.’
‘But I still don’t understand …’
‘The next bit is more difficult. Taormina and I got on together right from the start. Taormina will surprise you when you get to know her …’
‘She seems a sweet girl,’ Iris said. ‘Why didn’t you bring her home and get engaged and married in the usual way? There’s nothing sinister, is there?’
‘Nothing at all. Taormina, I told you, has no parents. Her aunt isn
’t very well off …’
Iris sat up. ‘You were worried about the wedding. Darling, you know that Daddy and I … You are our only son, we could have had a marquee in the garden and Follis to do the catering. They did the Beauchamps’ superbly.’
‘That’s just the point,’ Jonathan said.
‘What is?’
‘That you would have been willing to spend hundreds of pounds feeding strawberries and cream to half the county.’
‘Why on earth not? Your father can afford it.’
‘Because we want you to give us the money instead. The money you would have spent on our wedding if we hadn’t got married in Cambridge.’
‘The money, Jonathan? What on earth for?’
‘To feed bread and potatoes to people who have never seen strawberries and cream.’
Iris waited.
‘Taormina and I are young. All over the world there are people suffering, children dying. I’m a doctor and she is a nurse. We are going to help them.’
‘Darling, it’s terribly high-minded of you,’ Iris said, ‘but there are people needing your help in Dr Slocombe’s practice. I really can’t see why you have to go to the ends of the earth …’
‘For the most part, the crowd in Slocombe’s waiting room won’t die for lack of attention. Besides, there’ll never be any difficulty in finding someone to take over there. It’s a plum practice. Any young man would be glad of the opportunity in this county, particularly with the lure of the Watson girls.’
‘Whose idea was all this?’ Iris asked.
‘Taormina’s. We’re starting off in Algeria. We leave at the end of the month.’
Iris looked around. ‘There’ll be no elms,’ she said, ‘no dancing on the lawn, no tennis …’
‘We’ll be back from time to time.’
‘I knew it couldn’t last. I told your father.’
‘What’s that?’
‘Nothing. I’m going in to lie down. You’ll pick up the gooseberries?’
‘Of course, and I’m sorry …’
But Iris had gone.
When Miles came back from church he went up to change. Iris was lying on the bed.
Dangling his tie, Miles looked out of the window. Suddenly he chuckled.
‘What is it?’ Iris said.
‘Taormina. She’s wearing scarlet trousers and she’s walking round the pond on her hands.’ He turned to Iris, rolling up his tie neatly. ‘Excellent company, I must say, but I doubt if she’s a thought in her pretty little head.’
Iris got off the bed and stood where her husband had been watching the flash of red slowly circumvent the pond in the washed sunlight of the garden.
‘You know, Miles, there are times,’ she said, ‘when one can be hideously, hideously wrong.’
Peeping Tom
1965
We met at the Ritz, the Lisbon one. I was dining when she came in, and all through the potato soup and the beef with mustard sauce I had been wondering who she was. I say came in. It was not so much a coming in as an ingression, an intrusion upon the suitably muted brouhaha of the Grill. She was cocooned in mink under which there was the suggestion of nothing, for she did not remove it, and flanked – or more precisely, followed, so fast was her progress from door to table – by two alpaca-suited, beringed youths too old for sons, too young for … No, perhaps she liked them tender. One felt one should know her face. An examination of it brought hints of gossip column and glossy magazine. She looked at no one, occupied only with her paramours and the undivided attention of the maître d’. She was satisfied to be looked at. Every pair of eyes was turned in her direction, openly or secretly. One sensed she recognised this as her due. She had not so much beauty as presence, an élan vital, the current of which had charged the entire Grill, waiters and diners alike. Her hair (burnished copper was too dull, red misleading, more I would say autumn leaves of a particular variety brought to a high gloss) was done up in a kind of cone effect, its symmetry perfectly balancing her face. I have said it was not beautiful, the eyes rendered her remaining features superfluous. From where I sat I could not distinguish their colour, but the light that emanated from beneath their shadowed periphery dimmed the two small, shaded table lamps. They were truly enormous. The maître d’, inclining from the waist, almost drowned, the attendant circus danced in their fulguration. The slim hands, illustrating her requirements, were good too, pale ambassadors of her desires. I had seen her before. The name was titillating my tongue. Actress? Screen star? I could almost, but maddeningly not quite, recall.
The beef had lost its savour. I was forking it into my mouth, although it might now have been hay, and looking in her direction when she glanced round. I am forty-two and personable. The touch of grey above my ears lends an air of board or consulting room. I am intimate with my looks and the effect they are likely to produce, I have lived by them and my wits for a great many years.
She did not look away. Not until a delicate frisson of rapport had woven its web between her table and mine. I wondered what was under the mink. Predictably, aware of my interest, she turned her attentions more animatedly, or so she intended it to appear, to her companions. Their hands made brief contact, they raised glasses, shared intimate, divinely humorous jokes. I wagered with myself that before I laid down my fork she would look at me again. She did. With immense subtlety, of course. I was merely in her line of vision as her eyes swept the room seeking some elusive face-saving figment of her imagination. The field, I sensed, was open. Madame, for all her entourage, was bored.
I was feeling in my pocket for five escudos with which to bribe my waiter for her name when the very good King Wenceslaus of a diminutive page hopped down the marble steps and into the restaurant. Less elevated establishments might call their guests over speakers. Not so the Ritz. Unwilling to shatter the dearly priced silence, they dispatched a page, for whose buttoned uniform the ragamuffin youth of the city would give its eyeteeth. He passed from table to table with a neatly lettered billboard held proudly at chest level. Madame Gonzalez was wanted on the telephone.
Gonzalez. Of course. The Madame was a courtesy. She was one of the famous Gonzalez sisters. Of course I knew her, everyone did. There were three: a pianist, a physicist and a social butterfly. The hands, nails almond-shaped, that gesticulated less than ten feet away were not on close terms with a keyboard, their owner, I was willing to bet, was ignorant of the simplest scientific formula, she blazed a trail, though, from Madrid to Monte Carlo, settled, for no longer than a moonbeam, in London or New York. Her pace was matched, but only just, by the newshounds. Lucia Gonzalez.
The page had reached her table. One companion touched her sleeve, the other held her chair. She looked at me for a brief moment, clutched her coat more tightly round her, elevated her head and was gone. Everything went with her.
Noses were back in the soup. I glanced up to see if the lights had really dimmed. She did not return.
I was due to drive next morning to the Algarve. At nine the car, a Mercedes, was at the door. I instructed the girl from the hire company to park it. I would leave later in the day. She shrugged. ‘It is a six-hour drive, señor.’ I told her not to worry and she got in the car with a final word of warning to take the Villafranca road if I delayed my start later than three o’clock.
All morning I haunted the foyer, having ascertained from the desk that Madame Gonzalez was still in residence. By three o’clock, when I should have been speeding south through the cork trees and the rice fields, I was hungry and nauseatingly familiar with every item of local art and craft in the gift shop. I lunched hurriedly – well, hurriedly for the Ritz against whose tradition it was to hasten – and emerged, coffeeless in my anxiety, in time to see the copper-red-autumn-leaf-burnished coiffure disappear, minion-flanked, in the back of a matching sedan.
For ten escudos I learned that she had left for Estoril where the weary croupiers raked the tables laid only sparsely with plaques after the summer season. I coaxed the Mercedes to action and took th
e Auto-estrada, rehearsing my speech of introduction en route. In the casino parking lot there was no sign among the Fiats and Studebakers of a bronze car of any description. The man at the door was helpful. The señora had looked in for a moment only and had gone on, he thought, eyeing the crumpled note in my hand, to Cascais.
The boats at Cascais siestaed still in the sun of what, to the local inhabitants, was winter, but would have done an English August proud. Two mottled, scrawny dogs chased each other and their tails outside the bay hotel. A waiter cleared away debris from the few outside tables. He had not seen a señora with red hair. Yes, certainly he would have noticed. Perhaps she had gone to Sintra.
The afternoon was heavy, the square at Sintra empty except for cab drivers waiting for fares. Yes, a señora with red hair had driven up, to the Palace.
The scent of camellias on the steeply winding road almost overpowered me. I drew the Mercedes perilously close to the edge to allow a coach to pass. A huddle of sightseers stared from the courtyard at the grotesque contours of the Palace. Slightly apart, a girl with red hair leaned against her companion in a stance that cried out honeymoon.
I drove back along the coastal road. By now I could have been in Faro. Women had always been the primroses in my path.
No, the hotel said, Madame Gonzalez had not returned. Next to me an American enquired about tickets for the bullring. I could no longer tolerate the sight of the gift shop. I decided to be bold.
A chambermaid who supported a family of six let me into the señora’s suite. For the second time in one afternoon, I was almost anaesthetised by the fragrance of flowers. The paramours had done their work. The sitting room was a veritable bower. I telephoned for champagne and two glasses, and settled into an armchair behind one of the floral tributes from where I could see the door. This time she couldn’t escape. It didn’t occur to me that it would be I who would wish to.
The waiter came, fussed over the ice bucket and left. Apart from the flowers and one photograph, the room was impersonal. The photograph was of a schoolgirl desperately plain.
The Man Who Understood Women Page 9