Three Strange Angels

by Kalpakian, Laura;

  Late that afternoon he took a cab back to Number 11 where the immediate tumult had passed, and Miss Marr, in a great flurry of efficiency and telexes, had procured tickets, and reservations, rail, ship and plane; she exchanged pounds for American dollars at Lloyds Bank. Albert had dealt via transatlantic cables with various parties in California, including Roy Rosenbaum, president of Regent Films where Carson had worked. Albert conveyed Mrs Carson’s wishes that her husband’s body be returned to England, that there be no services of any sort in California, that the firm’s junior partner, Quentin Castle, would arrive there to act on her behalf. Mr Rosenbaum personally assured Albert they would take responsibility for the body, and see to the necessary paperwork so that all would be in readiness when Quentin arrived. Moreover, Regent Films would absorb all Quentin’s expenses while in Los Angeles. This last offered Albert a good deal of relief.

  From the Queen Mary Quentin sent Louisa a telegram that Apricot Olive Lemon had gone out to Chatto and Windus, John Murray, and The Bodley Head. He would discuss everything with her on his return. Louisa’s reply said simply, ‘Have every faith,’ and he could not tell if that was her advice or her conviction.

  Cunard Lines advertised that ‘Getting There Is Half the Fun’ but Quentin’s four-day crossing to New York, tourist class, was not. He socialized little, walking the decks till cold drove him inside. He had brought four typescripts to work on, but mostly he whiled the time with paperback mysteries, and crashed through the newspapers. All of them, from the stately grey columns of The Times, London and New York, to the juicy gossip sheets, served up the same information about Carson’s death, how gardeners found the body of the novelist, Francis Carson, in the Garden of Allah pool Sunday morning. No witnesses saw him plunge or fall. The American press’s breathy coverage included splashy photos of the late writer squiring beautiful women around Hollywood, and a photo of the glamorous Linda St John getting out of a taxi, captioned ‘Film Stops Production for Author’s Death’. There were long, laudatory, literary appreciations from London critics, from New York editors, and prestigious book reviews, from Hollywood illuminati, including Roy Rosenbaum of Regent Films, all of these people attesting to Carson’s genius.

  Quentin regretted bringing the four heavy typescripts once the Queen Mary docked in New York and he realized he would be carrying all this. He stood in the long lines for Customs, passport in hand, and pushed his bags along the floor with his foot. A few questions, a few rubber-stamp thumps, and he was pushed through the bureaucratic bowels, and thence through revolving doors, out onto the street where the weather was brutally cold. A huge yellow taxi pulled up at the kerb, Quentin got in, and the cabbie drove like a madman, swearing at other drivers, ‘Go backta Joisy, yamoron!’ as the urban canyons and bridges of New York flashed before Quentin’s eyes on his way to Idlewild airport.

  Quentin had never before flown. He followed the instructions of smiling young Pan Am women offering choices and directions in vaguely colonial accents. The entire flight his eyes were wide with fear, and he gripped the armrest, deafened by the roar. He took his glasses off, too terrified to look out the tiny window. The plane touched down and he was about to bolt, only to be told they were refuelling. More lay ahead. Finally the plane’s wheels skidded on the tarmac while the dulcet voice of the stewardess welcomed him to Los Angeles.

  Quentin rose unsteadily to his feet, retrieved his hat and stepped out into the aisle with his Burberry over his arm. His heavy leather case in hand, he obediently followed the man in front of him towards a wheeled stairwell they had rolled up to the door. The air that blew in was a strange brew of fog and salt water, petrol fumes, and something else that eluded definition. The light blinded him as he followed his fellow passengers down the stairwell and across a swathe of twinkling asphalt that glittered under the merciless sunshine which touched his cheek with a caress that felt at once seductive and dismissive. He came into a terminal where squawking public address systems blathered in raspy American tones. He eventually collected his two heavy bags. Everyone in the crowd wore dark glasses, and milled about, greeting one another, noisy reunions conducted in voices that were extraordinarily loud and harsh. The women looked especially strange. Few wore hats and gloves; many wore trousers. Quentin wished he hadn’t worn his winter underwear and a vest with his second-best suit. He wished he could rid himself of the totally unnecessary Burberry hanging on his arm, and that he didn’t have four heavy manuscripts in his leather case and a suitcase. Perspiration beaded his forehead. His mouth was dry.

  Crowds thinned, and people moved through broad double doors and into the sunlight. Quentin followed like a lemming. Across the way, lining the sidewalk, flowers, bright, fresh, yellow flowers, bloomed in profusion on short woody shrubs. The sunshine spilled down, and though it was cool in the shade, the brilliant light hurt his eyes. He understood the ubiquitous sunglasses. He stood there under an awning, unmoving as a figurehead on a ship. He had no idea what to do.

  ‘I’ll just bet you’re Mr Castle,’ said a voice behind him, a girl’s voice.

  He turned to her. ‘I am.’

  ‘Well, amen for that! You’re the fourth guy I’ve said that to, and they all looked at me like I was crazy,’ she said in between snaps of her chewing gum. ‘See, no one had a picture of you, and they just told me, oh, he’ll look British. Fine and dandy, but what does that mean?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ he confessed. She was like no one Quentin had ever seen up close, much less spoken to. She had auburn hair, unbecomingly short. She was petite, and wore loose, cream-coloured trousers, belted at the waist, and a short-sleeved blouse with a garish print of tropical leaves in a colour Quentin could not name. Her face and arms were the colour of warm sand. Her toes, sticking out of high-heeled espadrilles, glowed in a bright shell pink. She wore no hat, no gloves, carried no handbag. She took off her sunglasses and rested them atop her head; she had bright brown eyes. He asked, ‘And you are…?’

  ‘I’m your ride. Roy bought me the MGT on the condition that I’d be your chauffeur and all-around dogsbody while you’re here.’

  ‘I meant your name.’

  ‘Oh, sorry. I’m Georgina Fischer, that’s with a “C”, but you can call me Gigi. Everyone does. Come on. You got all your stuff? Are you ready? Oh, sorry again, I should have said right away I’m sorry for your loss. That’s what people always say. Frank Carson was your friend.’

  The fiction was easier than the truth. Quentin said yes, thank you.

  She snatched one of his suitcases and started walking with the springy tread of the natural athlete. ‘Let’s go! The car is swell!’

  The car was indeed swell, a sporty MG, racing green, top down. ‘This is the post-war model. Just like me,’ she added with a wink. He couldn’t imagine why she would wink at him. She caressed the fender of the MG. ‘They only made ten thousand of these little gems altogether.’ She put one suitcase in the boot and tied the other to the luggage rack.

  He got in the passenger’s side, astonished that they would be driving with the top down in February. He had to remind himself it was February. He felt as though he had travelled a great distance not merely in miles but in time, as though hurled into the future, a distant summer for a time-torn man.

  ‘You’ll notice the steering wheel’s on the wrong side.’ She opened her own door. ‘Roy thought that would make you feel more at home, but believe me, I had to learn how to drive like this. Not easy! Do you have a car?’

  ‘Afraid not,’ he replied, emphasis on the afraid as she fearlessly pulled out into traffic. ‘I don’t know how to drive.’

  ‘Well, I do! Take off your hat. Unless you want to lose it. I cut my hair to go with the car. With short hair, I can drive fast and it doesn’t matter. I just love this car! I fell in love with the MG when I went to London with Roy and Doris last spring. We were there for two weeks. What a dismal place. Pinched. You know? Everything just seemed pinched and nasty. And all that destruction everywhere. Everywhere you look, almost e
verywhere, there’s a bunch of rubble and destruction, houses cut in half like mouldering slices of cake.’

  Quentin’s jaw tightened on behalf of his native land, and unwillingly Sir Walter Scott’s poem rattled through his aching head: Breathes there a man with soul so dead … Finally he said, ‘They dropped a hundred thousand pounds of bombs on us in one night, the Sunday after Christmas, 1941. Bound to be a lot of destruction, don’t you think?’ He was instantly sorry he had spoken. It seemed to make her drive more recklessly. She made a blind pass that nearly drove the car up on the sidewalk. Enormous American cars with thick, high fenders lumbered on every side of the little MG until Gigi tooted the horn, pulled out and passed them. She clearly loved to use the horn. She was very young, Quentin thought, or perhaps she just seemed so, so energetic, so unencumbered with any kind of … what? The word hovered somewhere beyond the reach of his numb, unwilling brain.

  ‘The English people were fine,’ she said, ignoring his comment about the bombs. ‘Roy was working, of course, meeting after meeting – that’s where he met Frank and convinced him to come to California. And there were all kinds of people who wanted to show me and Doris, that’s my mother, around and invite us to tea. Tea! I never drank so much tea in all my life. I was constantly having to say, “’Scuse me, I have to pee,” and people were just going pale. What am I supposed to say, baby? All that tea? It goes through you just like a sieve. It does me anyway. Pee. Pee. Pee.’

  Quentin, unaccustomed to discussing bodily functions with young women he had just met, with women at all, could only nod.

  ‘Doris was happy as a clam in Harrods, but me? I fell in love. Twice.’

  ‘Twice. In two weeks?’

  ‘First there was this lord or earl, something like that. He had a nice title, the Something of Something. Everyone, and I do mean everyone, called him sir. I called him Eddie. Roy thought he had lots of moolah. He didn’t, but he was certainly agog for the picture business. Really, positively agog. Isn’t that a great word? Eddie taught it to me. Eddie introduced me to the MG.’ She patted the steering wheel and flashed him a winning grin. ‘He let me drive it. I was smitten!’

  ‘More with the car than with Eddie.’

  ‘Well, you don’t see Eddie here, do you? Eddie had a lot of titled flash, but not a lot of cash. He was looking to marry a rich American girl. I’m not looking to get married at all. I’m working now, baby. You are my first job.’

  ‘I am?’

  ‘Roy said to me, “Gigi, I have a job for you.” I said, “Great, baby! When do I start?” I thought I’d at least be a script girl, or something, but no. He said a Brit is coming to visit, on important business, and how would I like to take care of him, to see to his needs? I told Roy, “Sure. It wasn’t the job I’d hoped for, but I’ll do it. I need to be paid, though.” And Roy said, “Gigi, go out front and have a look in the driveway.” And there it was. This car. He knows me all too well.’

  ‘The car is your wages?’

  ‘Yes! And you are my job. So I hope you’ll want to go lots of places I can drive you. What do you think about Mexico? The Rosarito Beach Hotel. Baja? It’s not so very far, and they say they invented the margarita there.’

  ‘I do not know Margarita, and I could not possibly go to Mexico with you. I am not a tourist. I’m here on sad business, Miss Fischer. I am escorting the dead.’

  ‘I already told you I’m sorry for your loss. What else is there to say?’

  Quentin considered this. ‘Where are you taking me?’

  ‘Well, Roy and Aaron figured you’d be a mess, I mean, tired, so you’d want to rest, or something. You can meet them later. Drinks. Dinner. Right now I’m taking you to the Garden of Allah, a great place, or at least it used to be. Legendary way back when. It’s where Frank was staying, and we – that is, Roy and Aaron – figured you’re a friend of his, and that’s where you’d like to stay. The Brits especially loved it. Very Noël Coward, Charles Laughton, Laurence Olivier, pip pip cheerio, I say, old chap. You know how they talk. I mean that in the nicest way,’ she explained. ‘Probably that’s why Frank asked to stay there. In fact, they’ve put you in his old place. I mean, after all, the rent’s paid for the rest of this month. You don’t mind, do you? Do you think it’s too creepy because he died there? I mean in the pool, not in the room.’

  ‘So I read.’

  She frowned, tooted the horn, and zipped around another car. ‘Usually there’s just dead mice in the pool, but I’d take bets there hasn’t been so much as a ripple in that pool since they found Frank Carson there. Oh, sorry, again. I know he was your friend.’ She swung a left; another motorist honked at her and she raised her fist to him. ‘Outta my way, you geezer! I love that about convertibles. You can let everyone know exactly what you think of them.’ Her short hair blew light in the stiff wind. ‘Can’t drive a convertible at Vassar. Not on your life, baby. I don’t even care about getting kicked out.’

  ‘Of?’

  ‘Vassar. College. I got kicked out in January.’ Quentin’s instincts as a listener stood him in good stead as Gigi spun a long complex tale around a not very convolute subject, namely that Vassar was a very high-class snooty college back east, where the eastern girls thought they knew everything, but they were bores in tight girdles, and her roommate – a bore, and a prig as well – had said she was going home to Westchester to see Daddy and Mummy one weekend, but then she came back early, Saturday night to be precise, without telling Gigi – and Gigi was certain it was on purpose because she must have known (everyone did) that Gigi had already had two curfew infractions and was on social probation – and this slut walked in on Gigi and her Beau of the Moment (she talked like that, as though certain words were titles, like the Earl of Oxford) when they happened to be in bed in her dorm room which was on the ground floor. She was in a dorm rather than a sorority because she was Jewish. Vassar could put their sororities up their prim tight keesters. Anyway, getting the Beau into her room was no problem, but there wasn’t time to get him out, not when they were both of them naked as the day they were born. After this terrible infraction, Vassar kicked her out.

  He held on tight to the door. Her driving was not only fast but spine-tingling fearless as they passed oil wells, patient as nodding dinosaurs, and the sports car merged into noisy traffic traversing broad streets lined with white buildings and splashed with stout, feathery palms and blinding sunlight. ‘Roy could have bought me back in twice over but he wouldn’t do it. He said I screwed up my one chance to be something other than a Hollywood brat. My mother’s distraught. That’s her favourite word. Distraught.’ Gigi held a hand to her forehead, covering her eyes for one terrible moment. ‘I’ll have to go to UCLA or USC in the fall. I don’t want to go to college, but they tell me that I have to.’

  Quentin remembered the university women he had known at Oxford, girls from Lady Margaret Hall and St Anne’s, all so serious, so intent on their studies, so humourless, competitive and lax with their looks. Gigi too was lax with her looks, but in a different way. No careful coif, no make-up that he could discern, just a tan and ebullient health and high spirits. She wore them like a costume. He said, ‘I should think college would be a wonderful opportunity for a girl.’

  ‘I suppose. I might as well go. I’m not doing anything else. Roy and Mother won’t let me work. Won’t even let me hold the clapper.’

  ‘The clapper?’

  ‘Never mind, Quentin. I can call you that, can’t I? I hate being all formal. Call me Gigi.’

  ‘Gigi. Did you know Frank Carson?’

  ‘Oh, sure. But not biblically.’ Her laughter was easy and bountiful. ‘He was at my parents’ house a lot last summer. The last time I saw him was at my parents’ Christmas party.’

  ‘Can you tell me about his death?’ he asked, wondering about the ‘biblically’.

  ‘What’s there to tell? He was drunk. He fell in the pool. It was late at night and he drowned. They found him there in the morning.’

  ‘They?’
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br />   ‘The guys who clean out the pool, or the gardeners, someone like that. He’d been at a party Saturday night. I heard he was just his usual self. Pour a few drinks into Frank – easy enough, as I’m sure you know. You’re a friend of his – a few drinks, and he’s off! Reciting Shakespeare like we’re all supposed to stand rapt and speechless, just dazzled because Frank can do Prospero and Ariel and Miranda without taking a breath, and throw in Byron, Yeats and Auden and whoever else pops up into his mind, and off his golden tongue. What light through yonder window breaks? Then he gets all angry and morbid because no one appreciates him, calls us philistines. What did he think! This is Hollywood! They’re all actors! They all stand around and spout other people’s lines. He was nothing but a writer. And they’re a dime a dozen. Sorry. Again. Anyway, I wasn’t actually at the party, but I can imagine. I don’t get invited to the Vernons’ parties.’

  ‘Too young, I suppose.’

  ‘It’s not that. They’re afraid I’ll tell Roy what goes on.’

  ‘Your father?’

  ‘Stepfather, though Doris has been married to him for so long now he might as well be my father. I like Roy. I even respect him. It’s nice to have someone to look up to, you know?’

  ‘I do,’ he replied, thinking of Robert.

  ‘Roy always says he doesn’t care what his people do as long as they don’t frighten the make-up girl, though that’s a total lie. He cares. Oh yes. And why he should mention the make-up girl is beyond me. I’ve seen make-up girls who would do it with the cavalry and the Indians, all in the same day. No class, no morals whatever.’