Search:
Godiva Fawcett
Sources:
All
From:
1969–72
Publication:
Daily Express
Byline:
Hickey Column
Date:
10 06 71
Headline:
The pull of Hollywood gets weaker for Godiva
Godiva Fawcett, who left these shores three years ago for the lure of Hollywood and stardom, is to return to Blighty after a spell of ‘resting’ in her Beverly Hills home. ‘In the end,’ says the plucky twenty-year-old star of The Power Game, Beach Bunny Massacre and the ill-fated Calais, Mon Amour, ‘I just miss England too much. The Californian lifestyle is fabulous, but it’s such a shallow, bitchy world and in the end I found it hard to live with. People make so many promises, and in the end I felt terribly let down. I was constantly in work, but increasingly the roles I was offered were undemanding, and I want to do more with my life than just spend it in front of the lens. I have always been interested in charity work, and intend to get more involved once I’m back on more caring shores.’
Godiva is also to star in a pilot for a new ITV sitcom, Daddy’s Girl, and has high hopes for its success. ‘The part I’m playing is right up my street,’ she claims. ‘She’s a real old-fashioned English rose, just like me. I can’t wait to get started.’ She is also hoping that her love life will enter a more settled phase when she returns. ‘I dated a lot in America,’ she says, ‘but there was never anyone special.’ And is there someone special now? ‘Yes.’ She smiles. ‘There’s someone special: an Englishman who I met while he was over here looking for new investment opportunities.’ And does this Englishman have a name? ‘It’s early days yet,’ she says with typical discretion, ‘and he’s the sort of person who hates publicity. We’ll just have to see what happens.’
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Cleopatra, Queen of Denial
When I wake, it’s dark outside and Harriet, in a cheerful voice, is saying, ‘So she kept griping and moaning all night: this wasn’t good enough, that wasn’t seasoned enough, she didn’t want radicchio in her salad, only rocket, and why hadn’t they asked her, going on about how Linds – she’s the other waitress who was sharing the shift with me. She’s still a mate, actually. You’d like her – should’ve been filling her wine glass before it got down to halfway empty, there’s no hand cream in the Ladies and what on earth was she paying all this for if they weren’t even going to put hand cream in the Ladies, that sort of crap. A really horrible woman. She’d probably have nicked the hand cream if there had been any. One of those people who thinks that because they’ve scored a bit of money they’ve become magically exempt from the basic book of manners. And Linds knew that after all that running around, she was going to turn out to be a really mean tipper. You always know the mean tippers from the way they don’t even look at you in case they strike up some relationship and get a twinge of guilt.’
Ah, the teapot, I think, close my eyes again and drift for a bit while she finishes. Register that Harriet definitely sounds a bit different from usual: sort of like she might be batting her eyelashes while she talks. If I didn’t know better, I would almost suspect that she was flirting.
‘So once she’s pigged herself on four courses and three refills of the breadbasket, she wants fresh ginger tea because she says that the food has given her indigestion, and Linds is thinking: yeah, perhaps if you’d eaten less of it … So anyway, Linds tell the kitchen, and someone has to stop making food right in the middle of the busy period in order to go and blag some sodding ginger from the Chinese restaurant down the road and chop it up. And then obviously they have to leave it to infuse for a bit because ginger doesn’t take just like that, so it’s ten minutes before Linds can get it to the table.’
Harriet’s companion murmurs, shifts in his seat.
‘So when she arrives, this old bat goes, “Where have you been? I’ve been waiting for hours. Do you keep all your customers waiting like this? I call it terrible service. Don’t expect a tip from me. Give me my tea,” and Linds apologises and points out that ginger takes a while to infuse, and she goes, “Takes a while to have a cigarette out back when you should be working, more like,” and Linds gives her her tea and goes off to take some deep breaths. And the next thing she knows, this woman’s clicking her fingers at her – God, you’ve no idea how annoying it is to have someone click their fingers at you like you’re a sea lion or something – and going, “You’ve let this tea sit around for so long it’s stone cold. I wanted hot tea. Go and get me some hot tea.”
‘What a bitch,’ says the bloke. ‘I think she’d’ve got her tea in the face if it had been me.’
‘Too right,’ says Harriet. ‘But Linds did something else which worked much better. She took the pot back into the kitchen, where they had a ceramic hob for keeping sauces warm and that. And she turned it up full and put the pot on the hob for, like, five minutes with her hand sitting on the lid so it got immune to the heat, and waited until it was really, really boiling. And then she carries it through with her bare hand and sets it down on the table in the front of the woman, and says, “There. I hope that’s hot enough now, madam,” and walks away. So when the old hag goes to pour it out, there’s a shriek and the whole restaurant practically bursts into applause.’
‘Bloody hell,’ says the man. ‘Remind me not to tangle with your friends. What happened?’
Mike. It’s Mike the copper. Mike the fanciable copper with the blue eyes and the way of stepping in to rescue you when you least expect it. Of course. I’m not asleep because I’ve drunk too much; I have a headache because there’s a great big lump blistering up under my scalp. I open my eyes.
Harriet is cross-legged on the floor, a glass of something colourless, cold and delicious-looking nursed in her fingers. Mike is still in the armchair, spread out now like someone who’s been here for months, feet under the coffee table, hands hanging down the sides. A can of beer sits open on the table. He hasn’t taken a glass.
‘Nothing. That’s what’s so brilliant about it. Lindsey picks up the pot and stands there holding it, going, “Is there a problem, madam?”, and puts on the “Well, you told me to heat it up. Didn’t you tell me to heat it up?” act. And because she’s holding it, no one can exactly … Oh, hi, soldier, you’re awake.’
Mike tears his eyes from Harriet’s face and gives me a smile. ‘How are you feeling?’
It takes a couple of seconds for anything to come out. ‘Has Henry been anywhere near my mouth? Only it feels like it.’
They both laugh. ‘He’s out doing his Henry thing,’ says Harriet, which means that there will probably be a disembowelled something on the doormat in the morning. He likes to bring us presents, but he can rarely be bothered to carry anything up the stairs. ‘How’s the head?’
I groan. ‘Agony.’
‘Well, you were lucky Mike was there,’ she says glibly. ‘You might not have a head at all.’
I sit up. ‘Harriet! This is actually serious, you know!’
‘Oh, I know.’ She takes a sip of her drink. ‘But if you can’t have a laugh when someone tries to kidnap you, I don’t know when you can.’
Harriet always reacts to bad stuff with wisecracks. It’s a posh thing, I think. ‘Anyway,’ she continues, ‘it could have been a random thing.’
What’s more, the wisecracks really get on my tits when they get out of hand, and it seems like she hasn’t taken in just how scary this latest episode has been. ‘Listen, Cleopatra, get real. There’s obviously someone on our case and we need to think what we’re going to do.’
‘Cleopatra?’ asks Mike.
‘Queen of Denial,’ Harriet tosses at him, and glues her crown firmly to her head. ‘What evidence have you got that there’s anything personal about what’s happened lately?’
‘Urr. Doh. What evidence have I got that it’s not, stupid?’
‘Okay. So someone broke into the re
staurant. People break into restaurants all the time.’
‘They usually empty the till and nick the drink,’ Mike points out mildly. ‘It’s not that common to carve “Traitor” into the kitchen surfaces.’
‘What would you know about it?’ says Harriet. Which I take to be more evidence of denial.
‘Someone broke into the restaurant two weeks after all the tabloids went big on it,’ I say crossly. ‘Pretty big coincidence.’
‘And don’t forget the emails,’ adds Mike.
‘No, I continue, don’t forget the emails.’
‘Oh, please.’ Harriet waves this away. ‘I get emails like that all the bloody time. If I started crying and running to the Plod every time I got one my complexion would be completely ruined. Anyway–’ she gets up, rattles Mike’s empty beer tin, trying to change the subject – ‘Another?’
He shakes his head. ‘Thanks. I’ve got to be going. I was only waiting around to make sure that Sleeping Beauty didn’t slip into a coma or anything.’
He picks up his jacket, swings it round to put it on without getting up, and something made of black plastic falls from his pocket, clatters on the floor. ‘Oops,’ he says. ‘It’s always doing that.’
‘Mobiles,’ says Harriet, ‘are the bane of the twenty-first century.’ She comes over to pick it up. ‘If they’re not going off in church they’re falling out of your pocket and costing a million quid in upgrades.’
She’s about to hand it to him when she looks down and frowns. ‘What on earth is this?’ she says, holding it up on display like a spokesmodel presenting to camera on QVC. Instead of a keypad, it has two dials and a digital numerical display.
‘Oh, that? That’s my radio.’
‘Radio?’
‘Mmm.’ He puts his hand out for it.
‘Like in alpha alpha tango foxtrot?’
He nods.
‘Sierra bravo cartwheel tampon goblin two-four?’
‘Sort of thing.’
‘What are you, a policeman or something?’
‘Well, yeah,’ he says.
‘You didn’t tell me.’
‘Oh, sorry,’ he says, ‘I thought you knew.’
‘Why on earth would I know?’
‘Well, we have met before. And you acted like you recognised me. So I assumed you—’
‘Well, I did recognise you. But …’ She frowns off into the distance. ‘So why did I …? Christ. You’re not the Plod that came to the restaurant?’
Mike nods. ‘The self-same Plod.’
‘Good grief.’
‘Love you too,’ he says. Then manages a laugh despite the fact that I think I’d be more than a tad browned off in his position. ‘Anyway,’ he says, ‘this Plod has an early shift tomorrow, so I’m going to proceed towards my motor vehicle, if you don’t mind.’ He digs in his jacket pocket, jangles some keys in his hand. ‘You going to be all right, midget?’
Midget. Huh. I attempt to stand up, slump back onto my cushions. I guess if he can take being called a Plod without demur, I can deal with slurs on my height. ‘I’ll be fine,’ I reply. ‘And Mike?’
‘Mmm?’
‘Thank you. Thank you for everything.’
He puts on a policeman’s voice. ‘That’s all right, madam. All in the line of duty.’ Then he says, in a normal voice, ‘But you two have got to think about the stuff that’s been happening. I don’t think anyone but your friend here would think that the two incidents were unconnected. With the emails and that.’
Harriet glares silently. He makes for the door.
‘I’ll come back in a couple of days and we can discuss your possible best course of action under the circumstances.’
Oh, goody, I think. It’s nice when a man’s sense of duty brings him winging back. I don’t know how Harriet didn’t actually pick up that this man was a copper. He has all the verbal inflections, dipping in and out of a formal, structured way of speaking, as though he were in court trying to sound official.
He reaches the door, Harriet still standing there glaring, and turns to face the room. ‘Oh, and girls,’ he says, ‘when I come back, I don’t want to find anything like this lying around where I can fall over it.’ He holds something up between index finger and thumb. It is a piece of rolled cardboard, secured within a Rizla, one end ragged from contact with many lips, the other slightly charred. ‘I know policemen are supposed to be stupid,’ he says, ‘but you should maybe think about emptying your ashtrays from time to time.’
Oops. I go bright red. Harriet suddenly smiles.
‘I’ll escort you to your vehicular transport,’ she says.
Chapter Thirty-Nine
The Cute Policeman
She returns, Henry draped over her shoulder looking smug as she says all those girl-things like ‘Who’s the most bee-you-tiful boy in the world, then? Who’s the coolest cat in London? Who’s the coolest cat in the world? Have you had adventures, my fine gentleman? What did you get up to? Didjoo killsome bugs? Didjoo catch an urfworm?’
Henry yawns pinkly, eyes turning inside-out, great vampire teeth dried by stinky cat-breath, and stretches a long golden front leg down her back as he shifts his body weight to get more comfortable. ‘Wooaaah,’ says Harriet, running a hand over his head, down his back, rubbing the base of his tail to make him squirm. ‘Who’s my baby?’
If there were a man in the room, he would no doubt be making cracks about biological time-clocks at this juncture. It takes a very rare man to understand that the thing between women and their cats is nothing to do with babies. Yes, we like to baby them, to pick them up and turn them over and cradle them, to talk nonsense and coo at them while they fix us with placid stares of patronising contentment, but it’s not a baby thing. It’s an admiration thing. Henry is the dude I respect most in the world.
Cats are everything we aspire to be. Look at them: they’re long and slinky and elegant, with no awkward lumps that get in the way when they’re running. They never get bed-hair, and if they do, all they have to do is run a paw over it and it’s perfect. The perfect slashes of eyeliner beneath their lashes never streak when they get overexcited. They have cheekbones to die for. They never let themselves be pushed around. They sleep eighteen hours a day and no one ever tells them that there can be such a thing as sleeping too much, you know. When they curl up and try to look cute, they actually look cute instead of looking mad and blobby. Their primary talent is finding quiet places on major thoroughfares where people will take the time to stop and pay homage, and instead of being called egotistical, everyone admires them for it. They can stay up all night and still look great the next day. But most of all, we love them because they accept love as it is not how they think it should be: never lie awake obsessing about imagined slights, never complain that someone’s not there for them, never sit up stuffing their faces with chocolate and playing Wonderwall over and over on the record player.
She sits down on the sofa beside me, says, ‘Go on, give us a kiss,’ and Henry lazily raises his head for a moment, presses the tip of his nose against the tip of hers and resumes fur-tippet position, eyes closed in sybaritic repose. ‘Thank you,’ says Harriet, ‘that was a lovely kiss.’ And then she says to me, ‘I know he’s cute and all that, but what’s with the copper?’
I knew this was coming. Harriet has a strange aversion to policemen. I think it comes from the time she was stopped for riding her bike through a pedestrian precinct at three in the morning and got banged up for the night for asking if the Plod in question didn’t have a burglary to go to.
‘He’s a very nice policeman and he was worried. What was I supposed to do? Say thank you for saving my life, now bugger off?’
‘Well, I don’t know,’ she says. ‘Couldn’t you have written a cheque out to the injured coppers’ fund or something?’
‘I suppose so. But you’re not supposed to leave people with concussion on their own, and he didn’t seem to mind. Anyway, what’s the big deal?’
This stumps her, so she just s
trokes the back of Henry’s neck and glares at me. Eventually, she says, sulkily, like someone who knows that they’re just about to be told they’re talking bollocks, ‘He’ll have seen the mess.’
There’s not much I do in response to this but laugh.
‘No,’ she says, ‘no. Everyone knows that policemen are terribly respectable. He’ll have taken one look at this place and put us on the at-risk register or something.’
I laugh again, though it busts my head to do so. ‘Darling, I think we have to be children for him to do something like that.’
‘Don’t laugh,’ she says. ‘We’ll probably have the drug squad round tomorrow because you’re so bloody careless.’
I shake my head, which hurts as well. ‘Not me, darling.’
‘Well, it certainly wasn’t me.’
I shrug. I’m not too bothered, to be honest. If Mike were going to do something, he’d have done it, or he’d have gone away and said nothing and come back later with half a dozen large dogs and some blokes with guns. He certainly wouldn’t have just waved the roach around and wagged his finger. ‘I think it’s okay, Haz.’
‘And what about this kidnapping business?’
‘Ah, yes,’ I say.
‘When are we getting the visit? Giving the statements? Having our hard drive taken away for monitoring? Getting the phone tap put in?’
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