At five-thirty it grew dark. I lighted one lamp, not wanting to frighten her, and wished I had brought the English newspaper. I think I must have dozed, drugged by the flowers. I was awakened by the sound of the door opening. I hadn’t heard the key. Madame Gonzalez extended a limp hand into the corridor for kissing. She wore a greyish jersey suit. It sculpted contours of which an eighteen-year-old would not be ashamed. I knew she must be almost twice that age.
She closed the door, turning the key in the lock, and leaned against it breathing a sigh of what sounded like relief. The beautiful eyes were closed. I waited a moment, not wishing to scare her, until she emerged from her reverie. I had my mouth open to say ‘Madame Gonzalez’ in as gentle a voice as I could when she did something that cleaved the words to my tongue. I thought she was running her fingers through her hair. She did in fact put her hands to her head. When she lowered them the burnished-copper what-have-you hairdo was between them. What remained was a short crop of dull, indeterminately coloured strands, springing from a crown lamentably flat. I shut my mouth unable even to think. She set the wig, like an empty busby, on the table near the champagne and walked to the mirror on the far wall. Facing it, she cupped one hand beneath her eye, extended the lid with the other and blinked; when she had repeated the process with the other eye she set two tiny objects into a small box which she took from her handbag. Before I had decided what to do she disappeared into the bedroom. I knew I must go. I was a crafty operator at best but did not care, unless the occasion provided no alternative, to wound the susceptibility of others.
I took two burglar-worthy strides to the door. She had not only locked it but removed the key. I was trapped, an unwilling peeping Tom. I resumed my seat behind the flowers and was wondering what I should do, wishing I had driven, as planned, to the Algarve, when she came out of the bedroom. I assumed at least that it was Madame Gonzalez, for it was she who had gone in. The woman who walked slowly into the sitting room reading a letter would scarcely have raised a flicker of desire in the least discriminating man. The straight crop was brushed behind her ears, which were none too small, she wore glasses with unflattering frames and heavy lenses, her silk wrap clung to her flat figure.
I was not ignorant of women and their wiles, which were as ancient as time. It was the complete metamorphosis that threw me. Somewhere I had seen this woman. I refused to admit even to myself that this was Madame Gonzalez.
‘Madame Gonzalez!’ The words came, ejected by my conscience, softly.
For a moment her eyes remained on the letter; from there they swivelled to me and from me to the red wig shining in the lamplight on the table. She might have been naked.
Her hand was on the telephone. ‘I shall call the manager.’
‘No, please; let me explain.’
‘How long have you been there?’ She was looking again at the wig.
‘Long enough. I had no intention …’ I took the receiver from her hand. ‘Let me give you some champagne.’
She sat down abruptly and I could see that she was trembling. The empty wig, like an evil eye, shrieked traitor, as I did battle with the cork. I looked from it to her in all her plainness, quite stupefied and trying not to let her see.
We both needed the drink. She didn’t look at me. The scent of the flowers filled the silence. I cleared my throat. ‘Madame Gonzalez, I would like to explain …’
She held up her hand. ‘It is all the same …’ She turned the photograph of the schoolgirl on the table towards me. Of course, the eyes. I should have known.
‘My mother used to say, “You have beautiful eyes.”’ She spoke as if to herself. ‘Eyes and hands. It was by way of consolation. I was neither talented like Maria or Rosanna, nor beautiful as she. I favoured my father. People remembered him by his nose. On him it was an asset. Maria had her piano, Rosanna her laboratory, Mother her looks, Father his nose. Wherever we went, the Gonzalez family made its mark. When I was with my sisters, one was begged to perform, the other to speak about her work. When I walked in the street with my mother, heads were turned at every step. When I walked alone I remained alone, attracting less interest than a paving stone. I did not want to be a paving stone. The nose was painful but soon over. That was the least. It takes me an hour, at the very least, to assemble Lucia Gonzalez for the street. You cannot know what it is like.’
‘Is it worth the candle?’
‘I am no longer a paving stone. Wherever I go heads are turned. There are three sisters.’
She picked up the photograph. ‘There used to be two, Maria, Rosanna and that plain one, I cannot remember her name. I killed her long ago. Only when I am alone does she rise from the tomb – or when I think I am alone.’
Alone and lonely. I pitied her, desire long ago having fled. I tried to think of something to say. That she was more beautiful without her aids. She was not. A woman on a bus. A paving stone.
I changed the subject, my voice a decibel higher than was usual. ‘Shall you stay long in Lisbon?’
‘Who knows?’
She looked round at the room, the flowers, and said unasked: ‘I have no home.’
‘That makes two of us. I am building a house in the Algarve. I am forty-two. One needs a place for household gods.’
She looked up sharply, in control now. ‘You’d better go.’
‘I haven’t explained. You don’t even know my name.’
‘It isn’t necessary.’
‘Will you have dinner with me?’
‘I’m tired. I shall dine in my room.’
‘Luncheon tomorrow?’
She looked at me, half-smiling, relaxed. ‘One o’clock in the Grill.’
‘I shall look forward to it, Madame.’
‘Now go.’
‘If you would kindly open the door.’
I could not sleep. At two I rang for whisky and a sandwich, pacing the marble floor. In the morning I rose late, jaded, and rang Faro saying I had been delayed. There were still two hours to kill. I wandered out of the hotel and into the dusty street towards the Liberdade. Lucia Gonzalez, the cobbles said. I saw a woman of remarkable plainness. Twelve o’clock, then one.
In the Grill I took my table but refused the menu. I was, I said, waiting.
At one-thirty I resolved to give her until two. At two I combed the foyer lest she had mistaken the venue. At two-thirty I demanded at the desk that they call her.
The clerk looked at me surprised.
‘Madame Gonzalez checked out, señor.’
‘Gone?’
‘She took the morning plane to Madrid.’
My actions, of course, in surprising her with her hair down, as it were, had been those of a heel. She could not have done otherwise.
I lunched alone, liver, English style, washed down with vinho verde. I did not enjoy it. I felt I should set off for the Algarve but had lost my enthusiasm.
‘A little cheese, señor?’
My rambling thoughts clicked suddenly, lucidly, into place.
I laid down my napkin.
‘I’ll take the cheese in Madrid.’
The Very Even Break
1966
It was seven-thirty when the phone rang. I had got into bed at four; it felt like five minutes ago.
‘Ginger?’
I said nothing.
‘Ginger?’
It was ten years since I had heard the voice, the nickname. Only the tone had changed, lost its note of patronage.
‘Are you there?’
‘I’m here.’
‘This is Clint, remember?’
Remember; engraved like a scar on the tissue of my memory.
‘Sorry to wake you, honey. Just touched down from the States. I have to see Rosensweig. He’s casting this fourth-century epic, two thousand extras, greatest thing to hit motion pictures since …’
‘I heard about it.’
‘You did? Who told you?’
‘Rosensweig.’
‘Did he mention Clint McGowan for the male lead?’<
br />
‘No.’
‘Listen, honey, I’m in a callbox and my car is waiting. I’m throwing a party. I want you to come.’
I made an unsteady grab for my diary.
‘OK.’ I had been waiting ten years for this.
‘Tonight. Eight thirty on. The Starlight room.’
‘Tonight!’
‘I know you’re a pretty busy woman …’
Busy! June the first. Four fifteen: the Bardsley wedding at St Peter’s Eaton Square; five thirty: cocktails with the Beckforth Smiths en route from New York to Paris; simultaneous drinks with the Cromer Waddells to celebrate their daughter’s engagement; the Savoy at seven thirty to interview David Glover on his latest production; dinner and dance at eight thirty in aid of the Children’s Winter Holiday Scheme. I had promised the viscountess …
‘I read your column every week. It’s just great. You really go all those places, know all those people, or are you a syndicate?’
‘Just little me.’
‘I always knew you’d make it. Brother, I said, that ball of fire will go right to the top. You still ginger, Ginger?’
I took a pencil and queried the viscountess, hoping I could escape after the dinner. ‘I may be a little late.’
‘Bless you, and forgive me for waking you at this hour. What time’s the deadline?’
I played dumb. ‘Deadline?’
‘Deadline for the Martha Munroe column.’
‘Three thirty a.m.’
I thought I heard a sigh of relief. ‘Don’t worry, honey. I won’t detain you.’
‘I’ve never missed a deadline.’
It was too late to go back to sleep. Susan was coming to do my hair and I had ordered breakfast for eight. I lay back on the eau-de-nil pillow with its white lace over-slip, stretched like a cat, fine for the circulation, then relaxed, enjoying as always the space, the warmth, the outrageous luxury of my bedroom and allowed my thoughts to regress.
Clint McGowan. I had grown up immune to ‘copperknob’, ‘rusty’, ‘carrots’, in my schooldays, but shaking like a leaf with humiliation on Clint McGowan’s terrace ten years ago was the first and last time until just now I had answered to Ginger.
Since I was nine years old I had wanted to be a newspaper reporter. We lived in a flat in South London, two rooms and six kids over my father’s greengrocer’s shop. Shop, well, it was tiny really, most of the stuff outside on the pavement: grapes ‘sweet as sugar’, plums ‘pick of the crop’, tomatoes ‘don’t squeeze me till I’m yours’.
He got up at four to go to the market, Dad did, and it was always after six when the shutters went up. He never made a decent living. Too honest; not believing that the quickness of the hand deceived the eye and palming nobody off with rotten apples or overripe bananas.
My mother scrubbed the floors at the town hall, recognising the dignitaries by their shoes as they muddied the steps she had just carefully washed, with never a word of apology.
I only ever saw two newspapers. The evening for the racing results, and the local rag, because my parents were both cinema fans and liked to know exactly what was on and where and who was playing in good time for Saturday night. I always waited with excitement for Wednesdays when the paper came but turned immediately to the ‘weddings’ page.
I would glance briefly at the photographs of the demure brides on the arms of their apprehensive grooms, then turn to the copy whose phrases read like poetry to my ears. ‘The bride wore a dress of criss-cross taffeta, her bouquet was of tulips and freesias … bridesmaids were her twin sister Janet and her cousin Linda Groves, charming in lemon tulle … the bride was given away by her father and wore a wild silk dress, a train falling from her waist … the Matron-of-Honour’s lilac moiré full-skirted gown was sashed with green … the bridesmaids wore Dutch bonnets … dresses were made by the bride’s mother …’
At school I got Cs for my compositions. Miss Baxter, who took us for English and had, I was convinced, a heart of stone, said I allowed myself to be carried away by words, the meanings of which I had not the slightest idea, and neither, I am willing to swear now, had Miss Baxter.
I used phrases such as ‘co-opted on to the local council’, ‘the growing threat to old people’ and ‘a warm welcome was extended to the Lady Mayoress’ culled from the local paper and without exception in the wrong context.
I told her I wanted to be a newspaper woman, Miss Baxter I mean. At first she thought I meant deliver them, but when the message finally got through she looked at me pityingly. I don’t know whether because of my essays or because my poor little overworked dad dropped down dead one morning early, in the market, just as I was in my final term and about to leave school.
The only newspaper we saw now came with the chips for tea. The racing results were no longer of any interest and Mum had no heart for the cinema. I still brooded on the brides in guipure lace, however, carrying a simple hymn book.
I took a job in a shoe shop. The money was good but my mind was not on that but ‘the honeymoon was in Jersey’ or ‘the happy couple left for St Mawes where the bridegroom’s uncle is lending them a cottage’.
They suffered me for almost a year then fired me. I called at the local newspaper office. In a weak moment they said I could run errands, make tea, in exchange for a pittance. My mother created; scrubbing her fingers to the bone and all that while I … I loved her, but I loved ambition more.
I emptied waste-paper baskets, carried copy form desk to desk, inhaling the heady smell of newsprint and absorbing through every pore the jargon of the trade. There was no knowing how long I might have persisted in my monotonous ritual if something had not happened, resulting, for me, in an almost meteoric rise in my career.
I was waiting after work, in the bus queue, first on one foot then on the other, for both were aching, when a lorry which had been cruising steadily down the high street changed course quite suddenly and headed with determination for the very paving stones on which I stood.
Miraculously, like the waters of the Red Sea, the long line of waiting commuters parted, leaving alone, and directly in the path of the vehicle gone crazy, an oblivious and heavily pregnant woman with a child in a pushchair.
In the bedlam that followed it was impossible to see exactly what happened. A hand, I think, had pulled the pregnant lady free, she had lost her grip on the pushchair and, with the child in it, it was pinned against the wall.
I learned the hard way the meaning of pandemonium but this was the whisper of leaves against the primitive shrieks of the mother calling for her child.
The ambulance came, and the fire brigade with special tackle, and the police. When it was over, the ring of bells no more than an echo, and only the lorry lay drunkenly still on the pavement, I asked a remaining constable, my heart thumping, to which hospital they had taken the child. He told me and for the first time in my life I hailed a taxi.
Next morning I appeared at the office with red-rimmed eyes. Dana Luck who did the Woman’s Page asked if I’d been crying. I said no, only hadn’t been to bed.
The waste-paper baskets no longer of any interest, I made for the News Editor’s office and knocked upon the glass with more confidence than I felt. Mike Munroe, unwed and everybody’s heart-throb, had never looked anywhere but through me. I wasn’t sure, in fact, if he knew I existed.
He said, ‘Yes?’ as if he too had had a rough night, and waited.
I laid thirteen sheets of blue-lined, handwritten paper from Mum’s writing pad on his desk.
‘What’s this?’
‘There was an accident. I was on the spot.’ He waited.
‘I wrote it up for the paper. You’ll use it, won’t you?’
He glanced at the top sheet and let me roast in hell on the uncarpeted floor until he threw back his head and started to laugh.
‘What’s wrong?’ I could see nothing funny; its composition had after all occupied me the whole long night.
He stopped laughing and watched my tired eyes fill with hu
rt tears.
‘There is something wrong?’
He nodded and looked at me, serious now.
‘The first thing you must learn if you’re going to be a reporter is never to use purple ink!’
Mike did use the paragraph, although by the time the thirteen sheets were cut to nine lines and the spelling improved upon, scarcely a word remained that was my own.
It appeared on the front page, though, and I was launched. My ascent, as ascents go, was swift. I liked to think it was because I was dedicated, but know it was because I married Mike. I had the talent, I suppose, and he taught me, with infinite patience, the technique.
Within two years I had achieved my ambition and my description of local weddings – she wore a red velvet dress and carried a basket posy – brought tears to the eyes. Within three I had thoroughly learned my craft. I was fed to the teeth, in fact, with such items as ‘Shoplifting pair fined’, ‘Vegetarian movement spreads’, ‘Public ignores warning’, ‘Apathetic? Not us, traders tell Chamber’ and similar snippets of news. Saying nothing to Mike I applied for, and to my amazement was offered, for a trial period, a job on a national evening newspaper.
I thought Mike would be angry, but he wasn’t. There was a new tea girl with a forty-inch bust and false eyelashes, so I think he was quite pleased in a way.
On my first assignment for the new paper I thought I’d die. Clarice Leighton, the second-richest woman in the world, was at Claridge’s, they said. Bring back a story, but quick.
I was still very much the local girl, unused to pile carpets, commissionaires and lifts.
Clarice Leighton was a doll; a sad, rich doll.
‘You’re shaking like a jelly,’ she said and made me drink a vodka and tomato juice at mid-morning.
She rattled through the copy for me, walking barefoot in a black negligée across the white carpet, until I had more than enough to keep even the strictest editor quite happy.
When I’d put my pen away she took me over to her dressing table, pushed me on to the stool and put a cape round my shoulders. ‘Honey,’ she said, ‘with a face like yours you could launch a million ships, but not the way you treat it.’
The Man Who Understood Women Page 10