‘Hating and mating?’ she said with a sneer.
‘If you like. Anyway you like it.’
She shut her eyes. ‘God, how you try to humiliate me!’
There was something on her cheek. It couldn’t have been a tear, so it must have been perspiration.
‘I will go now,’ she said.
‘Look,’ I said. ‘Forget the goddamned job! Give it to the birds. I don’t want it. What I want is you, now, now! Do you understand?’
‘And you cannot have me!’
‘Because it is beneath your dignity to sleep with a sacked employee?’
‘No, because you have hurt and offended me so much that I cannot afford to give way to this cheap approach!’
‘What is it you can’t afford – your love?’
She hesitated. ‘Now you have seen to the depths of it! There is no more to say.’
‘Love is worse than pride, isn’t it?’ I said. ‘No sticking plaster available. No soothing cream. I know.’
She slammed the empty glass down on the table and the stem broke. ‘How can you know? You have not grown up! You haven’t an idea what love is! All you feel is lust!’
I began to pick up the pieces of glass, cut my finger, and sucked the tip. When I found her here tonight I’d seen there was a pretty fair chance of getting her aboard again, and since then I’d been playing the line as tactfully as I knew how, to bring her in. It had been half instinctive, not reasoning so much whether I wanted it or not. But somewhere along the way the feeling had grown that I did want it, had wanted it, and wanted her. So that what I said I came to mean, instead of the other way round. Can’t explain it better than that. Turn the cynic inside out and he becomes a sentimentalist.
I said: ‘How d’you define love, Shona? How d’you spell it out? I don’t know … But if there’s ‘‘A’’ levels still to be taken, don’t you think I could best learn them from you?’
I’d probably said the right thing in the end, because I put my hand on her cheek and she didn’t hunch away or fling out another left hook. She turned and looked at me with eyes narrowed, their depths gleaming like newly cut coal.
‘David, I never knew I could be so weak.’
‘Or strong? Isn’t it a sign of weakness sometimes not to be able to give way?’
‘I do not think this ageing woman with jaundice can ever be in your bed and be your mistress again.’
‘At the moment,’ I said, ‘you’re magic. Go on; be a sport. Take a chance.’
III
In the end Shona bought my company. It seemed to be the only way she could save her face, so I let it go. She bought it for £20,000, got rid of Derek Jones – at a handsome profit to him – and allowed me to retain 15 per cent of the shares. ‘ Van’ Morris remained as a minority shareholder too. The company, she declared, was not to be operative. It was a big price for a frugal lady like her to pay for a company that was to bring no return, so I suspected in a few months she’d either suggest some use for it or allow me to suggest some use for it.
I went back, and the firm breathed a sigh of relief. Shona might be its inspiring spirit, but David was its Organizer.
John took it badly. He eventually told Shona he was going to retire and wanted no part in the future of the firm. We had better find a new man to take his place. I can’t say I shed any tears over him. It was a pity if he took the hump and it was a pity if this made Shona uneasy; but there was nothing I could do about it, or wanted to do about it. She and I came closer than we’d ever been before.
My thing with Erica ended as casually and as cheerfully as it had begun. She said she had a feeling in her bones that Shona and I would make it up in the end; I told her that her bones must have been sharper than mine, for I’d had no such premonition.
She and Shona were pretty close, but I don’t think Erica ever let it out or that Shona ever suspected what had gone on. This was because our little affair had been a pleasure without an emotional tie-in. We betrayed nothing because there was so little to betray.
So for pretty well going on the next three years my relations with Shona were at a new high. The age gap between us didn’t seem to matter at all. To be pompous about it, I suppose Mark Antony – give or take a year or two – was about as much younger than Cleopatra; and there’d been plenty of other cases. You can’t explain it, except by the peculiar lure of the exceptional female. Shona didn’t often pay me a compliment, but she did say once: ‘David, you have a way of making love which is subtle, seductive, not resistible. I have known no other man so good.’
‘Am I the fifty-seventh variety?’
‘what?’
‘It doesn’t matter.’
‘Oh, I see what you mean. Believe me, I am far too fastidious ever to have had fifty-seven. Less than seven. Except for several Russian soldiers on my way across Europe, and with them I had no choice …’
‘I sometimes wondered.’
‘Wonder no longer, But as for the present age, the new climate – is that not the fashionable word? – as for the present climate, it is not the amorality of permissiveness I dislike, it is the vulgarity.’
‘I think I see what you mean.’
‘But … if I had to try to explain what I mean about you, it might well insult you.’
‘Try.’
‘The best lovers – men, that is – are those with a little more that is feminine in their nature – a little more than average, I mean. Not too much – or they become effeminate. I know how you used to resent being thought a queer –’
‘Still do –’
‘But less so. Less so. You have changed, mellowed a little, I truly believe. You are not so combative a character, not so stark –’
‘Don’t bank too much on it.’
‘Well, it is beside the point. What I mean is that the butch man, the big he-man, the macho figure boasting his numerous conquests – what does he give to any woman? Not what you do. That is why I cling to you beyond my appropriate term. That is why I shall never now willingly give you up.’
‘It’s a threat,’ I said. ‘By the way, when was the appropriate term?’
‘Shut up.’
Sure enough Shona found a new use for Kilclair Ltd. She put the idea to me one night, and, smiling to myself, I immediately said OK. It was something one or two of the other highest grade companies had been dabbling in. In spite of our much expanded market there was still surplus factory space. So we put out a cheaper product under Kilclair Ltd, called Domaine, which immediately caught on. Except that it was produced in the same factory, there was no obvious link with Shona & Co. – even the representatives were different and serviced different outlets; so that no one on the outside could have known. It didn’t matter, of course, if they did, for it was a totally different product. Shona still insisted on destroying any surplus or outdated stock the main firm produced.
But it meant that we were all getting better off in the booming seventies.
We went to Paris to see Erica take part in the Women’s Foil International, but she didn’t win her bouts. Soon after her playful little affair with me she somehow got herself emotionally screwed up with an individual called Ted Cromer. I’d no idea what Erica’s previous love life had been, but this was the first time anything had surfaced in a big way. Personally I didn’t like the Cromer character, nor did Shona, so we were quite glad when it broke up. But Erica, for once in her young life, hadn’t been able to wade in deep without getting her knickers splashed. She was ill for a month and when she came back to the Sloane gymnasium the lines at the side of her mouth were not always creased in laughter. Once or twice I caught the whiff of alcohol.
I saw nothing more of Roger Manpole and didn’t go to the Cellini Club again. I told Shona what had happened and she snorted her amusement.
‘All the same, I am not sure it is good to alienate a man like that I admire your resolution when you make some unpalatable decision that may be necessary’ (I had just had to fire Marks for not being up to his job) ‘and
Manpole is all you say – the unacceptable face of private enterprise. But you seem to enjoy making enemies with no good purpose.’
‘The purpose,’ I said, ‘was to freak him out. That’s a good enough reason.’
‘Like your quarrel with Marini.’
‘No, not at all. He was just a slob who insulted me.’
‘All the same. You know the difficulties we have sometimes encountered in the States.’
It was the first time she had linked my tow-row with Marini to the comparative lack of a big success for the Shona line in the United States. I didn’t say anything in reply because there wasn’t much to say. Common sense told you that such an idea was rubbish, but little hitches were still cropping up, obstacles appearing that shouldn’t have been there. A hotel recently had denied a booking we’d made for a reception there, and when we produced their letter of confirmation they said it was a mistake made by an under-manager who had since left. Things of that sort had increased since Shona separated from John. I didn’t really suppose he’d cut off his nose to spite his face, but the pinpricks were there, and one got increasingly testy about them.
Towards the end of the third year we went to Vienna. We had been properly in the German market for only a couple of years, and although our representative there, a Mile Trudi Baumgarten, had done pretty well Shona had a hunch that things were not all they ought to be. She thought she would like to go and see for herself. A more important reason for going was that, after all this time, Mr Schmidt and his chemists at TDM Ltd had come up with a perfume that satisfied Shona. We had called it Charisma, but we’d decided to test-market it in Vienna and Zurich before launching it in a big way.
Test-marketing meant selective advertising in the chosen cities – or advertising in one and not in the other – and often carefully adjusted differences in price. In this case the products were going to be sold at a 50 per cent mark-up in Vienna as against Zurich, because we were aiming at a more aristocratic clientele. The Swiss were generally much richer but more on a level with one another.
In spite of what was known and accepted about us, we never shared a bedroom or even a suite. Shona refused the first room she was offered at the Sacher – it was, she said, far too luxurious – so we occupied two smaller but still exotic rooms on the fourth floor, decorated in the gifts and crimson of the French Empire.
Such considerations however were soon elbowed aside by the arrival of our agent. I’ve often heard the French expression ‘jolie laide’, but have never quite seen it put across by anybody until I saw this filly. If you focused her face in repose almost everything was wrong with it, the mouth too big, the eyes too pale, the nose too tilted, the cheekbones too high; but you never did see it in repose: everything moved and danced and screwed itself up and pouted and smiled until all the defects got lost in the larger picture. Shona had never met her before but knew her mother, who was Russian. She was clearly not pleased that Mlle Trudi had not been at the airport to meet us, nor was she delighted by the fuss Trudi immediately made of me.
She didn’t even seem particularly delighted when Trudi’s mother showed up, a dwarfed wizened female with a rasping parrot voice who clasped Shona to what could technically be called her bosom and engaged her in voluble Russian, while Trudi gave all her time to me.
We had the usual press conference and reception and general guff which now attended the arrival of Shona in any foreign capital. It all went very well but I found it even more blindingly boring than usual. I never have taken to the phoney bonhomie and the bright, brittle yap-yap and the champagne and the caviar. Shona was at her best in Vienna and spoke a broken German that seemed to enchant everyone; but these were the occasions when she least enchanted me. An imperious dame, of course, at the best of times; but it was only on public occasions like this that you’d put the words in capital letters. Maybe there was a squirt of jealousy in my sourness. I knew now I had a hold on her – as I recognized she had on me; but the phoney razzmatazz of these public appearances set my teeth jarring.
When it was all over and we had a few hours to squander, Mme Baumgarten – the elderly macaw – asked Shona to spend the evening with her to talk of old times. That left me on my own.
Trudi said: ‘Would you like to come with me to the Opera?’
‘What is it?’
‘Tosca.’
‘Do you have tickets?’
‘No, I can get them. Mr Wanninger will get them for me.’
‘Mr Who?’
‘The concierge. He can get you anything in Vienna.’
‘I’m bone ignorant about opera.’
‘No reason why you should not learn.’
I looked into the pale green eyes. ‘No reason at all.’
I knew Shona would very much dislike the idea.
I said: ‘Shall we eat first?’
‘No, after.’
‘Where shall I call for you?’
‘I will take a taxi here. Then we can walk over. At seven thirty.’
‘At seven thirty,’ I said.
IV
One thing about the Europeans – or some of the Europeans – if their buildings are destroyed in war they bring all their craftsmen round to rebuild the places as near as possible to what they were before. In England they put up things that look like high-security prisons designed by the inmates. It’s a matter of taste, I suppose. Or the architect’s ego.
You wouldn’t have known the Opera House had ever been gutted by bombs. It was all opulence and nineteenth-century glitter and was of course crammed to the last tier. But Mr Whatever-his-name-was had come up with front-row stalls for Miss Baumgarten.
‘I always ask for these seats,’ she said, ‘for if the opera is boring you can watch the orchestra.’
I haven’t a glimmer whether this was a good Tosca or not. The singing didn’t grab me, but the drama and the staging were good. It even took my mind off a certain preoccupation lurking there: how I wanted the evening to end. Trudi was about my age, slim and sexy, and the expensively simple frock she wore had an immodest décoiletage which showed she wasn’t slim in the wrong places. It was perfectly clear which way her mind was working – if her mind could be said to come into it. Looking her over, I thought it would be fun.
The problem was Shona. In the ordinary way I would probably still not have considered her. There was nothing in holy writ between us; the fact that I had not had anyone else since Erica didn’t disentitle me to step off the kerb if I felt like it now. The snarl-up here was simply that Trudi was an employee of the Shona organization. If you come to Austria with your chief executive and partner in tow, it doesn’t read well in the minutes if he immediately buck-jumps into bed with the lady fronting for you in Vienna. Leo Longworth, my second man, was with us, as was Alice Huntington. Unlikely Trudi would be able to disguise her satisfaction at her capture.
But it pleased me to think of kicking over a mild trace. It was what my life had been all about until I met this woman from Moscow.
Chapter Thirteen
I
We flew the following morning to Zurich In a glacial silence normally reserved for climbers of the Matterhorn. In proper fashion this time we were met at the airport by Mr Glauber and taken straight away to a press conference at the Baur au Lac. So we had very little further opportunity between us for the feast of reason and the flow of soul, had there been any desire for it on either side. It was almost dinner time before I found my way into room 114, the large apartment on the corner of the hotel, and discovered Shona writing a letter.
‘Have you a minute?’
She wrote on for a while and then took off her spectacles. ‘A minute, yes. No more. What is it?’
‘I have the distribution estimates here and a couple of accounts for advertising that I didn’t sanction. I wondered if you had.’
She held out a long slim hand and looked at the papers I offered. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I sanctioned them.’
‘Ah … That takes us well over budget.’
She shrugged. ‘So what?’
‘So nothing if you feel that way … Are you dining?’
‘Later.’
‘I’m dining now,’ I said.
‘Bon appetit.’
I turned and went to the door. As I grasped the handle she said: ‘I am just writing to Miss Baumgarten. Dispensing with her services.’
‘A pity,’ I said after a moment. ‘ I found her agreeable.’
‘That was obvious.’
‘Do we have to be represented, everywhere by hags, so that you suffer no competition?’
Shona turned slowly and crossed her legs. ‘You flatter yourself, David. I am ridding myself of Miss Baumgarten because her accounts are very unsatisfactory – as I rather suspected they would be. She owes us quite a lot of money, which we shall be lucky if we ever recover. It is purely on commercial grounds that I am dispensing with her services. The fact that one of my assistants happens to spend an hour or two scuffling around in her bed has not influenced my decision at all.’
‘As a matter of fact,’ I said, ‘ she was terrific: slim, luscious, avid.’
‘Retain it all for your reminiscences. You will be able to sell them for some ample sum to the cess press. Now leave me.’
‘Actually,’ I said, ‘I was quite exhausted …’
‘Oh, no doubt! No doubt!’
‘… Keeping her off.’
Shona picked up her pen and turned it round. ‘I should not think you tried too hard, did you?’
‘Just hard enough.’
‘Oh, come, David, you can do better than that.’
‘Better than what?’
‘Do you suppose me to be altogether mindless?’
‘Not altogether. In some degree, yes. Appearances no doubt led you astray.’
‘Astray! My God, me astray!’ She turned back to the desk. ‘Oh, what does it matter? I am not interested in your squalid little affaires. Go to hell!’
The Green Flash Page 18