Lady Jean

by Noel Virtue

  ‘You’re still in love with your wife,’ Jean told him. ‘It’s as simple as that. I’m so glad you want to stay. I like having you here.’

  ‘I’m a lost cause.’

  ‘So am I, Ivan. So am I.’

  Turning away, Jean had a sudden urge to burst into laughter but resisted.

  Freida had done nothing about her home invasion. She was out a great deal during the day and treated the house as if it was a hotel. Jean did not mind. She had become so used to her alone-ness before the others had moved in that she’d come to value it; she was perfectly willing to let each of her guests seek out and maintain their own equilibrium, without intrusion into her own life. Yet they were, of course, intruding.

  She decided to paint over the mural upstairs herself, telling no one. She slipped out to buy the paint, applied layer after layer over several days until she was sure the mural would not show through. She tidied the rooms, cleaned the tiny kitchen and bathroom, adding touches she thought Ivan might appreciate. There was an abundance of bookshelf space. She saw no reason why he should give up his novel quest, if it helped him. She doubted that it did.

  Freida was not happy with the idea of Ivan taking over the tiny apartment when Jean told her. She was furious that Jean had painted over the mural. ‘Damned waste, Lady. Damned waste,’ she said. Jean had just agreed, after a telephone call from Anthony, to go out with him for a meal at Swaheenee’s, a new, expensively trendy restaurant in Soho. She was feeling almost ebulliant at the thought of seeing him again.

  ‘I’m having an affair with Anthony,’ she told Freida. ‘Or I’m about to. I’ve just decided.’

  ‘Affairs are out, Lady. You will be having a relationship. I could quite easily be envious. If he were a female I’d put poison in your gin. I shall pray that the hidden mural won’t age.’

  They were sipping glasses of mother’s ruin, sitting – sprawled – on Jean’s bed, backs propped up by cushions and pillows. It was late. There was no air, despite the windows being open.

  ‘You knew I had my beady but gorgeous eyes set on that little attic,’ Freida told her. ‘You might have asked me first. You’re a selfish bitch. You always were. Just because I’m rich. I could have lain in bed naked and gazed at the mural with unbridled lust.’

  ‘Shut up and drink your gin, you dear, sweet trollop.’

  ‘Do you want me here? I could just as easily be in a hotel.’

  ‘Never! I’m pleased you’re here. Honestly. I’d like you to stay. Sell the house! Or at least get that Mandy out somehow and rent it. You’d get a small fortune. Carefully chosen clients. A good agent.’

  ‘Maybe. Right now I’d rather sell.’

  ‘Squatters have rights.’

  ‘She has keys, Lady. I asked her to move in. She’ll screech. I couldn’t stand all the upheaval of a battle. I’m too lazy to cope.’

  ‘Well, you can’t just leave things as they are. Pass me the bottle.’

  There was a gentle knock on the door. It was one o’clock in the morning. Jean had heard Aunt Dizzy, Christopher and Uncle Fergus coming in an hour earlier, while Freida had been asleep on the bed.

  ‘Are you a lady?’ Freida called. ‘Ladies only if you please!’

  The door opened and Christopher put his head through the gap. He stared at Frieda and sniggered. His lips looked bruised and larger than normal. They were the colour of bruised plums.

  ‘Aunt Elizabeth has thrown up all over my bed,’ he said matter-of-factly. ‘It’s soaked through to the mattress.’

  ‘Drunken old slut,’ Freida muttered. Jean went to get up, but Freida stopped her and poured more gin. ‘Can’t you take care of it, Big Ears? Jean and I are discussing serious political issues here, sunshine.’

  Christopher’s head withdrew.

  ‘I must put a stop to Auntie staying out until all hours,’ Jean said. ‘I really don’t know how she manages it. Eighty-one years old and she carries on like some glue-sniffing teenager.’

  ‘Tough stock. It’s the bloodline. And she’s done nothing all her life, so let her have some more fun before the rot sets in. It can’t be long.’

  Jean allowed Freida to stay the night in her bed. They kissed drily, like sisters, before sleeping. Hours later Jean awoke and thought she could hear Aunt Dizzy along the hall, singing a Cole Porter melody perfectly in tune. Freida had a hand resting on Jean’s right breast. Jean slapped it away.

  TWELVE

  Christopher is standing half-way along the first floor hall in his pyjamas, staring at two indistinct and shadowy figures gazing back at him. He does not speak. The figures do not speak. They are vaguely eighteenth century in their style of dress, two women of indeterminate age and class. After a moment they slowly dissolve and are gone. Christopher’s bottom is dully aching. He has applied a salve and been downstairs for a glass of milk which he warmed first in a saucepan. Uncle Fergus, replete from sexual exertion, is fast asleep in Christopher’s untidy bed. One blanket lies on the floor. The nights are too warm and they’d both lain together perspiring under the top sheet after making love. The top sheet is damp from perspiration. It is three o’clock in the morning.

  Jean is lying in her bed in the arms of Anthony Hibbert, who has instigated divorce proceedings against his wife through his solicitor. He has asked Jean to marry him, but she has declined. Yet they are lovers. Jean is Anthony’s beloved. Jean enjoys Anthony’s considerable physical charms and his manner towards her which could be likened to a puppy with an indulgent owner. She is fond of him.

  Aunt Dizzy lies asleep in her bed surrounded, on the floor, by paintings. She dreams of the 1930s when she was young enough to take flattery and compliments and flirtations for granted. She whimpers in her sleep, turns over without fully waking. Her toenails, which need cutting, scrape on the silken sheets. Figures, a little similar to the figures Christopher has just witnessed, hover in her dreaming sight and speak to her in admiring tones.

  Downstairs Freida is lying back to back in her bed with a younger woman called Colette Carson, who is from California and came to London to reinvent herself. She was able to do so as she is rich and has connections and reinventing oneself in California has become too passe and common. Colette Carson is hoping to start a new trend, for she believes, being American, that no one else in England could possibly have thought of the idea of reinvention. She has opened an art gallery and exhibits semi-professional work she imports from gifted male friends in San Francisco. There is also a hairdressing salon in the gallery and a cafe. Colette has restyled Freida’s hair, so Freida has allowed her to share her bed. They have also made love, at just after midnight. Colette’s real name is Anna Chilenski. She is part Chinese on her mother’s side. She has taken her adopted names from two female authors who are dead but still revered. In several hours’ time Freida will wake Colette Carson and cheerfully send her packing, having tired of her strident accent.

  Ivan Fitzpatrick has been sleeping but is now awake. He is happily ensconced in the studio apartment at the top of the house and, during the day, haunts second-hand bookshops, having exhausted the local library. The longing to discover whose puppet his late wife had been when they were young is slowly leaving him. There are not many lurid or salacious books on his shelves. Sitting there instead are copies of novels from Victorian authors Ivan has suddenly come to admire. With the little spare money he has left he buys cheap second-hand republished paperbacks and aged copies of such luminaries as E.H. Yates, Charlotte Yonge, John Strange Winter (who was really a woman), George Alfred Lawrence and Jessie Fothergill. Ivan speaks of these novelists to Jean, who has never heard of them, with reverential awe.

  The house is serenely quiet now during the short, stifling summer nights. It is perhaps also asleep then. Christopher believes this is so, still standing in the upstairs hall unwilling to return to the demanding arms of his lover. There is a slight, refreshing coolness in the hallway as the night deepens towards the dawn. During the daytime – perhaps because of the sun which, this year,
is unexpectedly strong and appearing more often than has been recorded for decades – the rooms of the house are certainly brighter. Hidden corners, which have habitually been dark when Jean lived alone, have brightened. The morning-room is flooded with early light; it has been thoroughly cleaned and dusted by Ivan and Christopher, who now, warily, speak to each other politely. The carpet has been professionally shampooed. Some of the armchairs sit closer to the french windows, which are left open all day, so long as at least one guest, or Jean, is at home. Jean refuses to take money from Ivan for his living upstairs; Freida and Aunt Dizzy contribute lavishly to the household expenses so that they all live well at Acacia Road.

  Freida has put her house in Chiswick into the hands of her solicitor, who passed it into the hands of a manipulative estate agent. With help from sources unremarked or revealed the agent has been able to evict Mandy and her two young cohorts, because evicting them would not make them homeless. Naturally, money changed hands. Mandy owns a modest property in Putney and has moved back there, quite happily and without protest, with her organic and inorganic possessions. Freida’s house lies empty but is being viewed almost daily by conventional married couples with children. It will soon be sold. Freida is content, for the time being, to remain at Acacia Road. She has been in love with Jean for years but will never admit it, even to herself.

  A dead sparrow lies moistly in the gutter along the left-hand eave of the house. Its tiny feathered corpse is slowly decomposing with the help of enthusiastic maggots. It lies beneath a covering of leaf mulch, and no one knows it is there. Christopher, in the upstairs hall, still unwilling to return to his room, stands on one leg examining the sole of his left foot which is not terribly clean. A small and insignificant field mouse is standing up on its back legs down in the kitchen, sniffing the air. Startled by an imagined noise, it scuttles back under the breakfast table to a small hole in the skirting, behind which the mouse lives contentedly with its mate.

  ‘I know I haven’t been in touch,’ Aunt Dizzy shouted into the telephone. ‘I have been otherwise engaged, Ceddie. You don’t have the monopoly of my valuable friendship. What?… Am I? Oh dear, well, all right, I’ll have lunch with you. What … where? Oh, I don’t know, ducks. You fix it. Come and collect. Over and out.’

  She slammed down the receiver and peered along the hall to where Freida was leaning in her doorway, fanning herself with a lesbian quarterly she subscribed to.

  ‘Honestly, Freida, I don’t know why he’s so upset. Cedric. Cedric Hyde. I used to call him my paramour, you know. Heaven knows why. He never married. He once said that I was the only woman he had ever adored. Well, pooh. Pooh to him.’

  ‘You know very well he’s gay,’ Freida said. ‘You’ve always known. You shouldn’t neglect your old friends, Doo Lally. You never know when you might need them.’

  Aunt Dizzy muttered something Freida didn’t hear, then said as she wandered off down the hall towards the morning-room, ‘Gay my fanny. The bloody man’s a sissy. Always was.’

  Everyone at Acacia Road is a little fractious as the London heatwave grips. No one is allowed to water their gardens. There is talk of oncoming cut-off periods and brochures urging people to save, save, save. Bathe with a friend. Try not to flush the toilet more than is necessary. Purchase bottled water. Uncle Fergus and Christopher have been sharing a bath. Jean has refused to share one with Freida. She has bathed with Anthony Hibbert in his serviced Covent Garden apartment. She is still refusing to marry him. It is to be her fifty-eighth birthday in a few weeks and she believes, hopefully, that everyone has forgotten.

  Christopher’s mother has continued to send him letters of contrition and accusation. I am so ashamed of you, she writes in her letters. I am also thoroughly ashamed of your father, who defends you constantly. Accompanying her urgings for Christopher to seek forgiveness in Jesus Christ, she encloses religious tracts by the handful, often ones she has sent before, as there is not an endless choice. BE SURE YOUR SINS WILL FIND YOU OUT! blazes one brochure’s heading. BEING QUEER IS THE PATHWAY TO HELL was another, which Christopher showed Freida to ask if it was illegal to have such things printed. Freida had laughed but was privately shocked. I will not give up my quest to save your soul which is in jeopardy, son, Mrs Harcourt wrote in her ninth letter, pushed through the letterbox.

  Jean had decided not to take legal action over the publication of Lady Sang the Blues. She had been to an experienced, American solicitor (‘I am a lawyer,’ he’d kept correcting her) in Kensington and discussed the matter with him in depth. He was an acquaintance of Anthony’s, who had gone with her. The solicitor had cheerfully urged Jean to sue, as parts of the salaciously written book were little more than spurious speculation or gossip and he sensed money. It was quite apparent from the content of the book that Catherine Truman had managed to eavesdrop, secretly go through Jean’s private papers, spy on her (when Anthony was visiting) and even totted up how many empty bottles of gin and vodka Jean had got through over a long period of time. The book was badly written and filled with typographic errors, with little form or structure. It had at least been withdrawn from sale after Jean agreed for a letter to be sent threatening legal action. As far as Jean was concerned, that was all she wished to do. Copies had appeared in one or two of the larger London bookshops but then, just as suddenly, disappeared. There was a rumour that the publisher was to close down and was to announce bankruptcy. There were brief mentions in the press, mostly in support of the book not being stocked anywhere, but reports were few and far between. Jean Barrie was big news no longer. For a while sales of her CDs did leap; royalties and payments arrived, passed on to Jean’s ex-agent. The record companies involved had appeared to have lost her address. Jean refused to be interviewed by anyone. There were several requests.

  ‘It’s over,’ she told Anthony over dinner. ‘That part of my life is finished. Ended. That’s all.’

  It was reported that Catherine Truman had remained in New York. She had not married. The English press had treated her with a surprising, open contempt. She had stated that she would sue. Nothing happened. Jean ceremoniously buried the one copy of the book she had in the garden. Anthony found copies on sale – only a handful – in Oxford Street and, after buying them, ripped them up outside the shop. Jean told him he was being childish. Anthony, in return, told her that he loved her and would do anything for her.

  ‘I’d fly to the moon and stand on a mountain to shout out your name,’ he told her one particularly hot night.

  ‘The heat’s addled your brain,’ Jean retorted. ‘Come over here and I’ll do something about it.’

  She had become suddenly, wildly sexual with Anthony Hibbert. She had astonished herself, if not him. He spent almost every evening with her, either at the house or at his own apartment, which she disliked.

  Christopher was sitting in the garden with Uncle Fergus when his beloved brought up the subject of their relationship. His voice drifted across the dividing wall to the ears of Mrs Meiklejohn, who, kneeling on a cushion, was weeding a small circular garden of petunias, love-in-a-mist and pansies.

  ‘We need, my dear sweet lad,’ Uncle Fergus pontificated, ‘to confirm our commitment, to seek approval of our joined souls. I am thinking on it. I have spoken openly to Elizabeth, finding courage to do so. She is in perfect agreement, as I hope you are, my precious heart’s desire, that we should be joined together somehow. Although, you understand, such a thing would go unrecognized by law.’

  Christopher was examining the inward-turned, rather unattractive big toe of his right foot, which, as he went barefoot, he had painfully stubbed against a leg of the breakfast table while brewing tea. He sniggered, looked up from his toe and said, ‘Freida said there’s a priest. Ex. He does ceremonies of blessing. Private ones. He wears all the right gear, she said.’

  ‘Aha! Then there you are, you see. You are desirous! Well, the summer will be long and gloriously hot. We can, if you so wish, make arrangements. A private blessing of our union, my heart’
s desire. Splendid. It would be splendiferous. We could then all disperse to the country house for afters. I can see it all now, Master Christopher. Our love blessed, sealed and celebrated.’

  He leant across and, just after Mrs Meiklejohn, unseen, had struggled to her feet and was surreptitiously peering through the gap in the wall, Fergus took hold of Christopher’s large-knuckled hands and drew them up to his lips. Kissing each finger with tiny sucking noises emanating from his thin lips, Christopher angling himself so that he was nibbling delightedly on his uncle’s ears, Mrs Meiklejohn stared in utmost disbelief before rapidly withdrawing. Leaving her cushion where it lay, she hurried off indoors, slamming her kitchen door so loudly that a pair of collared doves three roofs away rose up into the white heat of the sky and flew towards Primrose Hill.

  The two were still exercising their mutual adoration when Aunt Dizzy, dressed as usual in hot pants the colour of fresh blood and a bright yellow silk blouse, came through the open french windows arm in arm with Freida. Jean was out. With Ivan she had driven down to Brighton for the day to collect the rest of his possessions and to pay off his landlord. The landlord had bitterly claimed that Ivan owed several weeks’ rent. Aunt Dizzy had been out for lunch with Ceddie, having taken Freida along at the last moment. They had drunk numerous bottles of wine and consumed large quantities of liver pâté made on the premises with crackers and home-made cottage cheese.

  ‘You two!’ she called, gesturing down the garden as she walked a little unsteadily towards them. ‘We need to discuss Jean’s birthday romp!’

  Fergus and Christopher quickly drew apart. Mrs Meiklejohn, having rushed upstairs, was peering at them with her reptilian eye, still unseen, from behind her newly hung net curtains that she had purchased at a Selfridges sale. She had the window open and was straining to hear what was being said.

  ‘I want Jean to have the perfect birthday surprise,’ Aunt Dizzy continued. ‘I need injections of ideas. I have one. Unhand each other and put your thinking hats on.’