Liberty Silk (3 page)

‘Oh, come on!’ said Dorothy. ‘You can’t go all coy and abandon a subject once you’ve brought it up. That goes against all the girlfriend rules.’

Baba set the teapot down, gave Dorothy a thoughtful look, then said, a little hesitantly, ‘It might be easier if I demonstrate. Watch this.’

Sliding a cigarette from the pack on the table, she rose from her chair and crossed the floor of the tea room, moving the way she’d seen Vivien Leigh move at a garden party once. The party had been held by the family of the film star’s husband, Leigh Holman, but the normally intrepid Baba hadn’t managed to pluck up the nerve to introduce herself. Miss Leigh had moved as gracefully as a trained dancer, with demurely lowered eyes and with a secret little smile playing around her lips; and the eyes of all the men attending the event had kept swivelling in her direction, as if their eyes were compasses and Vivien Leigh were North.

‘Excuse me, sir?’ Baba said in low, velvety tones to the young man sitting solo at a corner table, reading the
Evening Standard
and smoking a pipe. ‘Do you have a match, by any chance?’

The man looked up from his paper, and his expression of indifference turned into one of complete confusion.

‘Of course, Miss,’ he said, getting to his feet and sliding a box of Swan Vestas from his pocket. ‘Be my guest.’ He struck the match a little clumsily, then held the flame to the tip of Baba’s cigarette. She drew on it, raised her eyes to his, exhaled and smiled.

‘Thank you so much. I’m sorry to have disturbed you.’

‘My pleasure.’

Another smile, a sweet look, a switch of her hip as she turned away – and the unfortunate gent was her captive for ever.

Baba made her way back to the table where Dorothy sat observing her. ‘Is he still looking?’ she asked, sotto voce.

‘Yes,’ said a clearly amused Dorothy. ‘With his eyes out on stalks. What did you
do
to him?’

‘I’m not quite sure. I know it sounds crackpot, but if I want men to notice me, Dorothy, I just pull on this persona and they sit up and beg.’

Dorothy leaned forward, an interested gleam in her eye. ‘Is it an “It” thing?’

‘I – I guess so,’ said Baba. ‘I mean, usually I can walk down the street and no-one will look twice. But when I think “Lisa”, people notice.’

It was true. Baba had discovered the secret of sex appeal, and it had come about quite by accident. She had been in the shoe department in Selfridges one afternoon, when she almost bumped into a girl who was approaching from the other direction. She had been about to say ‘Excuse me,’ when she realized that she was addressing her own reflection in a mirror. Oh, sweet Jehovah. How nondescript she looked! She could have been Miss A.N. Other, Josephine Bloggs or Joanne Public, and because Baba found the notion of being Joanne Public truly terrifying, she decided to do something about it.

Being a quick study, it didn’t take her long to work out what made people look twice. She discovered that if she moved in that Vivien Leigh way, and adopted a certain expression, men looked; and once they looked, they quite evidently found it hard to
stop
looking. Some men looked in a knowing way, with narrowed eyes, some men looked in a slippery way, as if afraid to be caught, and some men just plain stared.

It had become a game for her. Some days she could walk the streets unnoticed, but when Baba ‘thought Lisa’, she became a magnet for the gaze of the entire populace – because women looked too. The women always glanced away quickly, of course, and made hapless efforts to distract their menfolk. Sometimes the expressions she saw were so comical that she found it hard not to laugh out loud – especially when she remembered the invisible sixteen-year-old she’d been – the girl with the knock knees, and the stupid name.

She wasn’t Baba any more! She didn’t
feel
like a Baba. But it was proving difficult to persuade those nearest and dearest to her that she was poised to become a woman of the world.

Baba had spent the past ten years of her life at a boarding school run by Benedictine nuns in a castle in the west of Ireland, where she had numbered among her friends the niece of the Japanese ambassador, the daughter of a Bajan millionaire, and an Indian princess named Rajkumari Rajendra Kumari of Jamnagar. Of course there were Irish students there as well, but most of them went home at weekends, leaving a handful of boarders to amuse themselves in the purlieus of the school: the walled garden, the woodland, the mountain paths and the lake, which was rumoured to harbour a monster and which was perfect for illicit swimming.

The school’s promotional literature described it as being ‘high-class’, but it boasted none of the facilities traditionally associated with posh boarding schools (apart from an overgrown tennis court upon which sheep grazed), and bore little resemblance to the
Chalet School
books so beloved of pubescent girls. Ponies were of the half-wild Connemara variety which either bucked their riders or refused to budge; theatricals were infrequent, consisting of playlets such as
Episodes of the Turkish Conquest of the Ionian Isles
or
The Fisher Girls, Danced by Pupils of the Fourth Form
, and the only men the girls ever saw were moth-eaten priests in frocks, gnarled gardeners, and a goatherd-type boy who spied on them when they did PE al fresco.

Baba was glad of the occasional invitation to spend half-terms and holidays with a family of distant cousins in the nearby town of Clifden. But Clifden was small and parochial, and she yearned to escape to the city for a taste of what they called the ‘high life’. Now that she was back in London and had discovered ‘Lisa’, she was ready to move on.

She took a long pull on her cigarette, as a thought struck her. ‘If I can’t get into the movie business through the front door, Dorothy, maybe I should try going in through the back.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Like Alice White. She was a script girl before she was discovered.’

‘You mean, you’d try to get a job behind the scenes?’

‘Yes.’ Baba picked up the form that she had so painstakingly filled in and proceeded to tear it into tiny little bits, which she then sprinkled into the ashtray.

‘You’d need a contact in the business who could pull strings for you.’

‘I have one. My grandfather had a friend to dinner last week—’

‘Did you experiment on him?’

‘With my persona?’

‘No! With a new Countess Morphy recipe.’

‘Yes. Beef Stroganoff.’

‘Good choice. Go on.’

‘He was a big shot from the Pru. He knows Alexander Korda—’

‘He
knows
Alexander Korda? How?’

‘The Pru’s backing his latest extravaganza, apparently. It’s a remake of
The Thief of Bagdad
. It’s being shot in Denham Studios.’

‘Wow. Who’s playing the princess?’

‘June Duprez. Anyway, the man from the Pru told Gramps that Mr Korda’s having trouble recruiting staff now that everyone’s going off to make propaganda films.’ Baba was stubbing out her cigarette carefully, so that the torn-up pieces of her CV wouldn’t catch fire. ‘It may be a long shot, Dorothy, but there’s no harm in asking Gramps’s friend to have a word in Mr Korda’s shell-like. Maybe he could find me a job.’

‘You think Alexander Korda is going to take one look at his new script girl and say “My, but you’re beautiful! I am going to make you a star overnight!”’

Baba shrugged. ‘Mr Korda has a big reputation for discovering stars.’

It was true. Just four years earlier Alexander Korda had signed Vivien Leigh (the newspaper headlines had screamed £50,000 FILM CONTRACT FOR LAST WEEK’S UNKNOWN ACTRESS!), and before that he had signed Maureen O’Sullivan and Wendy Barrie, and now he was married to his latest discovery, the exotically beautiful Merle Oberon.

‘Overnight stardom only happens in Busby Berkeley musicals,’ said Dorothy. ‘And those musicals are about as far removed from real life as you can get.’

‘Oh, come on! Allow me to dream a little. Your dream came true just last week.’

‘I guess it did.’ Dorothy smiled at the brand new cluster of diamonds on her ring finger, then tapped her Regimental Red fingernails on the tabletop. ‘OK. Say you did wangle a job in Denham. What would your grandma have to say, since she’s so set on a match with your oh-so-eligible neighbour?’

‘He hasn’t popped the question yet.’

‘But you know it’s on the cards, sugar. The Hon. Mrs. Richard Napier has an elegant ring to it, don’t you think?’

‘I’m just out of boarding school, Dorothy! Allow me to live a little. Anyway, Richard’s too caught up in his political career to think about getting married, especially now that war’s on the horizon.’

‘Oh, Lord! War talk.’ Dorothy gave an ostentatious yawn, then rose to her feet. ‘Excuse me, dear “Lisa”. I need to powder my nose.’

Off Dorothy went, snake-walking past the table where the pipe-smoker was still reading his
Evening Standard
. He didn’t look up.

Baba leaned her chin on her hand and gazed through the steamed-up window of the café. A stranger waiting at a bus stop beyond was watching her, clearly mesmerized. He tipped his hat at her, but she was too absorbed in thought to see him, which was a pity, because the way he was looking at her might have made her realize that Baba didn’t need to ‘think Lisa’ to attract attention from members of the opposite sex. The infrastructure was all there.

IN THE DISTANCE
the sea was diamantine, its whisper seductive. The leather soles of Jessie’s sandals made a satisfying slapping sound on the path, there was a pungent smell of wild thyme in the air, and fat clouds sculled lazily overhead. She felt sweat accumulating in the hair she’d piled haphazardly under her straw hat, felt the sun trace a burning finger along her collarbone. She longed to swim.

Her husband had been hellbent on getting to Raguenez, a Mecca for painters since Gauguin had discovered it. Jessie had been glad for sea air at last, for Scotch’s sake especially. It would do him good after his recent illness. If only he would stop smoking: the doctor in Chambéry had insisted ‘
pas de tabac!
’ but Scotch smoked like a chimney: there was a cigarette always between his lips, especially when he was concentrating on a canvas.

They tramped on, pausing occasionally to examine an unfamiliar plant, or to listen to birdsong, or to kiss and kiss, and kiss again. Jessie loved the weight of her husband’s arm slung over her shoulders; loved the smell of him – sandalwood and sea salt and a hint of linseed oil; loved the sound of his voice: low, musical, with that lilting burr – Scotch (‘but not too Scotch!’) as she’d stressed in a letter to her parents, mindful of her mother’s distaste for provincial accents.

They were nearing the beach. To judge by the crowd milling about outside a church, it was time for Mass. Some of the young women were sporting traditional peasant dress – full-skirted frocks plumped out by layers of starched petticoats and teamed with intricately embroidered aprons. Lace fichus were draped around shoulders, filigree earrings hung from earlobes, and tightly cinched waists showed off enviable figures. But the
pièces de résistance
were the beautiful headdresses: elaborate confections of felt and straw trimmed with ribbon. The gaudy colours gave the demoiselles the appearance of flirtatious butterflies as they preened ostentatiously for the youths loitering on the steps.

‘They make me feel like a perfect frump,’ remarked Jessie, casting covetous glances at them. ‘Even the men are gorgeous! Look at the embroidery on that waistcoat.’

The most striking of the girls – who was wearing what resembled a lace-trimmed mitre atop her gleaming chignon – slid a rather too interested look in Scotch’s direction, then tossed her head when she caught Jessie’s eye. Jessie could have sworn there had been a curl of the lip too.

‘Oh! Did you see the way she glared at me? Just because she’s wearing the Leaning Tower of Pisa on her head doesn’t entitle her to look down her nose, as if I’m some kind of a tramp.’

Jessie hadn’t got used to the way girls looked at her, but she had got used to the way they looked at Scotch, and it made her swell with pride to be able to display her ring finger, with its wedding band and cabochon sapphire. He cut a Byronesque figure in his bohemian waistcoats, workman’s trousers and wide-brimmed hats; his figure long and lean, his honey-dark hair worn a little long, falling over patrician features. She remembered the Italian girl they had encountered in the hotel in Chambéry, the one who had begged him to paint her. She was a sultry temptress of the Pre-Raphaelite kind – more beautiful by far than Jessie. Since Jessie had no Italian she could not follow the conversations she and Scotch shared, but their animated chatter and the girl’s theatrical gestures made her laugh. Until one evening when she had seen her bite into a peach while regarding her husband from beneath her thick black lashes. That was when Jessie had decided that Scotch’s health had improved enough for him to travel, and it was time for them to move on.

A gull shrieked above them. There was a heaviness in the atmosphere, suddenly, presaging a change in the weather.

‘There’s a storm on the way,’ said Jessie, drawing in a lungful of air. ‘They say that in this part of France the winds can blow up overnight. I hope it’s an electric storm – it would be so exciting, wouldn’t it, to have one on our last night? Maybe we could go out into the garden and watch the lightning show and get soaking wet. We could take a bar of soap with us, and then we wouldn’t need to bother about washing tomorrow, and we could arrive in Folkestone smelling of rain and lavender. Tuppenny told me that rainwater’s much better for the hair than tap water. When we set up home we should have a barrel to collect rainwater for me to rinse my hair in every day. I should be a real water nymph then. Maybe I could pose for you in a bath, the way Lizzie Siddal did, when Millais painted her as Ophelia? But with no clothes on. Then it would be just for us – we could hang it above our bed and no one else would ever get to see it, and—’

Beside her Scotch had fallen uncharacteristically silent. She gave him a look of enquiry.