Three Strange Angels

by Kalpakian, Laura;

  Gigi’s eyes narrowed, and Quentin felt sure she would tell Miss St John to kiss off, but she didn’t. She went to get the cigarette.

  Miss St John looked him up and down dubiously. ‘What role are you playing? There are no Brits in this picture, though God knows there was meant to be.’

  ‘I am not in the picture. I am Frank Carson’s literary agent.’

  Her contemptuous expression altered instantly, and something of interest, possibly even tenderness, took its place. ‘You’re a lot younger than I thought.’

  ‘Oh, you’re thinking of my father. My father, Albert Castle. I’m Quentin Castle, here on behalf of the firm. I’ve come to escort him home. To take his remains back to England. To his wife, and three children,’ he said, adding, to inflict more hurt, ‘Frank was a strong swimmer. He used to swim in the English Channel. How could he have drowned in a swimming pool?’

  Her full red lips trembled till she pressed them tightly. ‘What does it matter? He’s gone, isn’t he? Gone forever. It’s devastating, you know? The loss. I’ll never get over it. I’ll live, but I’ll never get over it, over him. The phone call that morning from Aaron nearly killed me. Frank drowned? Dead in the Garden of Allah pool? And I’m supposed to be all poised and answer all these awful questions? Roy even called. Roy says, “You can do this, Linda, you’re an actress.” But I’m not acting! There’s the police and the press, everywhere, popping their little flashbulbs and trampling on the grass, and acting like they had every right to poke, and pry, and ask all sorts of nasty questions. I had to get out, to get away. We went to Santa Barbara. I’m destroyed.’ She carefully ran a fingertip under her eyes to spare her mascara. ‘I called Roy yesterday, and begged him for a few more days, just a few more days, but he said time was up. The show must go on. Frank’s dead and they want business as usual. Everybody back on their heads. It never stops. Damn them all. What do they want from me? He’s dead. Drowned.’ Her voice caught.

  She raised her green eyes to his face, and beneath the thick, fake lashes, they were full of tears and truth, and anguish, an old ignoble pain. She reminded him of someone. Mrs Rackwell? Mrs Rackwell, the charwoman, with her thin chest, her dirty hands and dusty headrag, her floured bruises and garish red mouth? How can that be? The eyes. The hurt in her eyes, ongoing, without mitigation. Such hurt was unmistakable if one has once recognized it in another. Again, Quentin had the urge to touch her shoulder, to offer some physical, ineffectual palliative. But his instincts would not permit it. He said instead, ‘I guess one simply endures.’

  ‘Endures? Like for the rest of my life?’

  ‘I can’t say. I don’t know. I am unequal to the grief people feel for Francis Carson.’ This was certainly the truth. ‘Can you help me, Miss St John? I’m looking for Frank’s suitcase full of manuscripts. He was never parted from it. No one seems to know anything about it. Do you?’

  ‘Where is that girl with the cigarette?’ Linda glanced behind Quentin, and when she turned back to him, Mrs Rackwell’s pain was gone from her eyes, and she had total control of herself, confident in her imperial self, her imperial beauty. She moistened her lips with her tongue. ‘I have no idea about anything, Mr Castle. No idea at all. I say no lines that are not given to me. I have no emotions that can’t be dictated by a director. I have no feelings whatever, and I never shall again.’

  Gigi returned with the cigarette and thrust a matchbook at her, and asked in her jaunty, snotty fashion, ‘Did you give Frank the kiss-off, Linda, so he just had to jump in the pool and drown his sorrows?’

  Linda lit a cigarette, blew out the match, dropped it on the floor. ‘You really ought to go back to Vassar, Gigi. Learn something besides how to drive and how to screw. You really are the stupidest girl on two feet.’ And with that she walked away.

  ‘Bye, Mavis!’ Gigi called out, laughing as Miss St John flipped her an obscene gesture.

  Gigi turned to Quentin. ‘She’s a bitch and Gil’s a fraud. They owe everything to Roy.’

  The man who strode towards the set could be none other than Gilbert Vernon. Tall, well built, bald, with a hawk-like nose, Gil Vernon barked out instructions. Around him, like flocks of swooping birds, people congregated, collected, moved into their respective places, and assumed their respective duties. Linda St John dropped her robe and someone whisked it off the floor. She was wearing a floozy costume c.1900 that showed off her long legs and full breasts. She handed her cigarette to the make-up girl who powdered her face, and walked into the moment, 1906, and the centre of the scene.

  ‘Let’s get out of here,’ said Gigi.

  Quentin agreed. He turned back to look, however, when he heard a clapper come down with a short snap. ‘Earthquake scene!’ a voice called out. The lights on set went up.

  ‘It’s just before dawn,’ Gilbert Vernon announced. ‘Everyone, look alive, and remember, the earthquake is coming any minute now.’

  She drove to the Santa Monica pier, which the women of his family, Margaret, Florence, Rosamund, would have deemed utterly vulgar, but Quentin suspended such judgements and walked in the sunshine beside Gigi, determined to enjoy the rides and booths and cheap games of skill to win tawdry prizes. Gigi won a gaudy bear which she left on a bench. For lunch she suggested the hot dog stand, and afterwards the Ferris wheel. Both were firsts for Quentin.

  Was it the Ferris wheel, or the hot dog, or the briny-tar smell of the pier (or perhaps an incipient ulcer) that made him nauseated, cramped and woozy? They left the pier and he sat in the cold sand feeling miserable and sick until finally he chucked the whole thing up. Gigi held his head. The last woman who had held Quentin’s head while he vomited was the much-maligned matron at his school. He felt stupid and disgusting, but Gigi said it was nothing. She threw up all the time. She said he needed to walk, and took his arm. They strolled along the shoreline, talking, till the wind and tide rose.

  ‘All right,’ he said as he got back in the MG. ‘I’ll get some new clothes. I can’t possibly deal with Aaron Reichart tomorrow wearing a suit that’s full of sand.’ He could not bring himself to mention he had also thrown up on his trousers.

  ‘Very wise,’ said Gigi.

  She took him to the May Company on Wilshire, a place she likened to Selfridges, and she personally chose everything, a double-breasted suit, wide lapels, and new shirts, new socks, and a tie that seemed to him absolutely dreadful. The old clothes were boxed up and he wore his new self out of the store, and onto the broad, palmy Wilshire Boulevard.

  ‘I look like an actor trying to play an American,’ he grumbled, as they got back in the MG.

  ‘What’s so wrong with that? You look a lot better than you did. I mean, you’re no Bob Mitchum, don’t get me wrong, but you’re a handsome guy.’

  For dinner she took him to a place in Chinatown where they knew her by name, Miss Fischer. After his experience with the hot dog, Quentin demurred, but she assured him she wouldn’t order squid or hundred–year-old eggs or bird’s nest soup. Seeing his face pale, she laughed. She taught him how to use chopsticks, not well, but adequately. He found the experience exotic, and not unpleasant.

  Gigi and Quentin opened their fortune cookies in the Garden of Allah bar where they had a drink. Perhaps it was the dim light and the dark panelling, or because this crowd was a good deal older than the people thronging Schwab’s, but no one seemed to recognize Gigi. Quentin had never had a fortune cookie, so he was disappointed that his fortune said only Expect Great Change. He said that was true for everyone, not him in particular. It wasn’t specific enough; what kind of change? Gigi laughed and called him a cynic. Gigi’s said Follow the Undiscovered Path. Gigi put it in an ashtray and lit it afire. Quentin tucked his in his pocket. She kissed his cheek before she got in the MG. He watched her drive off, and returned to his bungalow, this time avoiding the pool.

  Once there he washed out his old socks and hung them up; he hung up his old shirt and coat and brushed the bits of foul stuff from his old trousers, damped them down, and lay them ove
r the shower door. Through the thin walls some neighbour or another played the piano, three or four bars over and over, pausing, playing again, pausing. Enough to drive one mad. In the small sitting room he rolled a piece of Garden of Allah stationery into the Royal.

  The Garden of Allah

  Thursday 16 February 1950

  Dear Florence,

  I missed you all day on Valentine’s Day, and I have your lovely card here before me. I have thought of you

  All lies. He had not thought of her at all, except when he woke up alone and erect this morning. Her card remained in his suitcase. What could he possibly say to Florence? The sun-splashed California weather and some lovely little botanical bits to share with Rosamund? The lakes of butter, the steaks nearly raw, ketchup on eggs, chocolate ice cream for breakfast, Chinese food which they eat with sticks, and hot dogs? Should he say he had met Linda St John, or that his driver was a petite American beauty who drives like a race driver and walks like a racehorse? Who lives at the centre of her own little universe, a place where she can act like a duchess in an Edwardian novel and swear like a sergeant major? Should he say Gigi considers the English nasty and pinched, and suffering from bad breath?

  Loud knocks sounded at his door. Quentin got up to be confronted by a paunchy man with an incredibly beautiful girl clinging to him, her arms round his thickset middle, her head tucked against his armpit. The man asked if he had any ice. The girl was clearly underage. Quentin could not decide if she clung to him from drunken affection or if she could not stand up. Quentin told the man to sod off and closed the door.

  He returned to the desk, pulled the paper out of the typewriter, and wadded it. How could he possibly share with Florence the turmoil he felt? His own agitation with regard to Francis Carson’s life, his sudden, unseemly death, his butchered-up work. Florence only read Barbara Cartland novels, Georgette Heyer, perhaps, a bit of Agatha Christie, and enjoyed them for their assured endings. She never read novels that plunged the reader into either great joy or great sorrow, and certainly nothing as turbulent and demanding as the work of Francis Carson.

  In life Francis Carson meant nothing to Quentin, but in death…? Quentin certainly could not write to his wife that in coming here, he found himself embroiled in the very squalor that Francis Carson created and clearly relished. A free spirit, Claire had called him. And now, Quentin too was one of those cleaning up the shite Francis Carson left behind. And yet Quentin could not shirk nor shake a feeling of responsibility to Francis. Quentin felt keenly that Francis Carson was a fellow Englishman to be protected against the Americans. An author to be protected from the philistines, even a friend to be protected from people who would harm him, who had gutted his work and made a 1906 San Francisco burlesque out of the sufferings, the grandeur of Some of These Days, Carson’s masterpiece. He was dead and would never write another.

  Quentin put another sheet of paper into the Royal.

  The Garden of Allah

  Thursday 16 February 1950

  Dear Claire,

  Everyone I have met here is desolated by Frank’s death. He had many friends and admirers.

  All too many. He tore that out and tried again.

  The Garden of Allah

  Thursday 16 February 1950

  Dear Claire,

  I hope you are well, and that the agency is looking after your interests and seeing to it that money is deposited in your account, offering support in your

  Quentin put his aching head down on the Royal. It was like being asked to write Anna Karenina on flypaper. He pulled that sheet of paper out of the machine, wadded it as well. Whatever he had to say to Claire, he would say in person. Even in person, how would he tell Claire about the Hollywood tarts? No doubt she had seen the same newspapers that Quentin had read. She would surely have known that women had – what was Gigi’s phrase? They fell like flies.

  And Linda St John … Was she just another adulterous Hollywood tart? The look in her eyes told Quentin she had loved Frank. At least he thought so. He was not a man accustomed to reading women’s eyes. Would Linda St John have forsaken her director husband? Was Frank so besotted with the actress that he would abandon a wife and three children? Leave Claire for Linda St John? Preposterous. And yet, Gigi swore that Linda had turned the philandering Frank into her faithful slave.

  ‘Hmmph,’ he said aloud, distressed to sound so much like his father. ‘Would that have stood the test of time?’

  In reply to himself, he went to the fridge and got out the bottle of gin, poured two fingers’ worth. But really, be honest, he chided himself, is it even remotely possible that a gorgeous woman like Linda St John, a screen goddess, would actually fall in love with a drunk and disorderly author? Unthinkable. Any more unthinkable – came the nagging voice after the first swill of cool gin – than that Frank Carson should actually fall in love with the woman at the very heart of the evisceration of his novel? The woman who embodied the total corruption of his work? Maybe Frank bedded the lovely Linda for revenge. That was possible. A nice, slow turning of the screw. Literally. You disembowel my novel in front of my eyes, I screw your wife, your star, in front of the world. Had Frank loved Linda? Everything Quentin knew of the late, lamented author suggested he loved no one but himself, that he was an omnivorous sponge for the affections of others, that he would soak them up till he was bloated and people who loved him were empty, and still he would demand more, and expect to be loved. And he was. Claire loved him still. Linda loved him still.

  Quentin struggled with an ice-cube tray. He understood why Americans used so much ice. It was so damned dry here. From outside his window a noisy argument escalated, two men, a woman coming between them, someone else yelled for them to shut up for Chrissakes.

  What had Roy said of the night Frank drowned? The Vernon servants had found Frank asleep in one of their rooms, and he was asked to leave. Why not let him stay? Find another bed for the poor girl whose narrow bed he had taken, and let the drunken author stew in his own aromatic juices till morning. Unless Frank had been in one of the beds – servant’s or not – with Linda St John herself.

  Quentin paused with the drink to his lips. He could see the whole, like a flickering film in front of his eyes. Gilbert Vernon had come upon Linda and Frank. Gil probably yanked her out of bed, and pushed her against a wall. Maybe Frank tried to intervene. Maybe he did intervene, and maybe they argued all the way down the stairs, Gil yelling at Frank to get out, never darken my door, etc. etc. Maybe the argument extended to the outside, to the pool. Surely a famous director and a famous actress had a swimming pool. Maybe Gil pushed Frank in, or maybe Frank just fell. The two men fought in the pool. But not the Garden of Allah pool. No, Quentin thought, wandering back to the Royal. There was no fight to the death in the Garden of Allah swimming pool. There would have been spectators. Quentin felt certain that any fracas at the Garden of Allah pool, spectators would have emerged from their villas, taken sides, cheered them on, probably selling tickets. Outside Quentin’s windows, the argument escalated, and someone threw a bottle and it shattered.

  He brushed his teeth, went into the bedroom and got into his pyjamas, turned out the light and lay down. He could not sleep, no doubt because of headache, and still-unsettled digestion, fatigue, foreign peoples and their strange tribal practices. He lay in bed, semi-sleeping, alternately waking from bizarre dreams, only to find himself confronting bizarre thoughts. Had Frank and Linda rolled around in this very bed? No doubt. They fell like flies. He was uncomfortable with desire. He got up, made his way to the living room where he sat on the lumpy couch, his head in his hands. Quentin missed home. He missed Florence. What was she doing? He missed his ordinary routine, his office, his father, Miss Marr, Miss Sherrill, Monica. What were they doing? He glanced at his watch. Two in the morning. What was the time difference? Eight hours? It would be tenish, in London. Tenish in Oxfordshire. What was Claire doing? Lines from a Hardy poem came unbidden: Was it not worth a little hour or more/To add yet this: Once you, a wom
an, came/To soothe a time-torn man … like me, he thought. He focused on his watch, willing his time-torn mind to clear. The call about Frank’s death had come to Albert at around four in the morning, London time. Eight at night here. Francis Carson, found on Sunday morning, had been dead for hours and hours. They had waited for hours before calling London. Why? Why would they not have phoned England shortly after the body was found in the pool? What had happened to Francis Carson here in California? What was happening to Quentin Castle?

  He returned to the Royal at the table, turned on the light. At last the altercation moved on, and it was quiet. He put some paper in the machine.

  The Garden of Allah

  Thursday 16 February 1950

  Dear Louisa,

  A writer such as yourself can put paper in the machine and write, but I cannot simply put my thoughts in some sort of free-form expression, I must write TO someone. A letter. So I shall write to you, as, of my acquaintance, you alone, a person who has felt her life upended more than once, I should think you might understand what I am trying to convey, my thoughts, unsettled as they are, confused and contradictory, in a word,

  But that word, and others, eluded him, and he stared at the dusty plein air watercolour on the wall: a small child in an orchard of pear trees in blossom, ‘Saratoga, 1882’ written in deep-blue paint in the corner. His unknown neighbour returned to the piano, and again and again thrashed out the same intricate patterns, chords that continued to resist any happy alignment.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  THE EARTHQUAKE SCENE

  The Miss Marr of Aaron Reichart’s office was a Mrs Lindstrom, known informally as The Swede. Gigi informed Quentin on the drive to the studio that morning that the Lotus herself had chosen Mrs Lindstrom for the job, and anyone could see why. Yes, he thought when he met her, The Swede, a tall, full-figured, middle-aged woman with a jaw like a coal scuttle, exuded inflexible authority. In a business where one’s husband is likely to be surrounded by lovely young women, hungry for notice of any kind, Mrs Lindstrom counted as a marital insurance policy.