Liberty Silk (5 page)

Cheerio, dears. By jove! What a holiday we are having!

The aroma of coffee drifted under the door of the bedroom on the third floor of the hotel. Was that what had woken her? Or had it been the tinny sound of the church bell striking the hour? Or the squabbling of sparrows under the eaves? Or the plangent French accents floating up from the narrow street below? Or had it been the wind that was gusting fiercely in from the north through the open window and setting the curtains billowing?

She turned to take Scotch in her arms, but he was gone.

There came a knock at the door.

‘Madame?’

‘Come in, Suzette.’ Reaching for her wrapper, Jessie shrugged it on.

It wasn’t Suzette. It was Madame Simonet.

‘Have you given your little girl the morning off?’ asked Jessie, idly knotting her sash.

‘No, Madame. I wanted to wake you myself. I have something to tell you.’

Jessie looked up. The woman’s expression was anguished. She was twisting one of the strings of her apron and could barely bring herself to meet Jessie’s eyes.

Jessie was instantly alert. ‘You have bad news, Madame? What is it?’

‘My – my husband was up early this morning, before cockcrow. He went to the milking parlour to fetch fresh cans for breakfast, and on the way there he saw Scotch get up on to a drover’s cart.’

Jessie gave her a look of enquiry, then shrugged, trying to conceal her surprise. ‘Maybe he wanted to make haste to paint today,’ she hazarded, ‘to catch the dawn light before we pack up.’

‘He had his painting satchel with him, that is true. But he also had – other luggage.’

‘What other luggage?’

‘A suitcase. And a holdall. He left money to cover the bill. I’m sorry Madame, to have to bring you such news.’ Madame Simonet bowed her head, then backed out of the room clumsily.

Feeling like a woman sculpted from ice, Jessie moved to the wardrobe and opened the door. All Scotch’s clothes were gone, and all his effects. The only item that remained was a kerchief that had fallen to the floor, one that he habitually wore around his neck. She picked it up and pressed it to her face. He was gone. Of course he was. And she knew where.

Scotch had left her for the Italian girl.

THE BIG SHOT
from the Pru pulled some strings, and Baba was put on the payroll at Denham Studios. Her job description – second assistant script girl on
The Thief of Bagdad
– turned out to be something of a misnomer, because (a) she was really just expected to run errands, and (b) there actually was
no
script.
The Thief of Bagdad
just sort of happened – with bits of it being made up as it went along.

Sometimes it seemed impossible that the movie would ever get finished, so gargantuan was the scale of the project. Baba got used to overhearing directives that went: ‘Mr Korda wants a flying horse. Mr Korda wants a forty-foot genie. Mr Korda wants a six-armed goddess.’ And everything Mr Korda wanted, he got.

Alexander Korda masterminded the operation, but Baba rarely saw him. Her dreams of being plucked from obscurity and groomed for stardom were dashed when she got stuck instead with a succession of different directors, one of whom was a lumpy-looking German with wispy hair and no sense of humour. Still, she managed to smile while she unfolded canvas chairs for him and Miss Duprez and the other leading lights, and she managed not to look too sick when the dancing girls wafted gaily past her in their diaphanous harem pants, and she even managed a joke when the dog star of the movie got loose one day and tried to savage her.

But she fell in love at first sight with Sabu, the boy who played the ‘thief’ of the title.
He
had been propelled to stardom three years ago when he’d been cast as the lead in
Elephant Boy
. Sabu Dastagir was only fifteen, but already he was the toast of London: he’d been sculpted by Lady Kennet, painted by Egerton Cooper, and he’d even appeared on television.

He might have been the toast of London, but Sabu was one of the easiest-going, most approachable people on the set, with a smile as broad as the Ganges and charm enough to lure the stripes off a tiger. It was only a matter of days before he and Baba became good friends, after he’d accidentally knocked off one of the goddess’s six arms. Thereafter, Baba had nicknamed him ‘Sabutage’, and allowed him in return to call her by her pet name.

‘How did your parents feel about you leaving India?’ she asked him one lunchtime, when they were sitting together at the top table in the canteen. A gaggle of costume extras at the far end of the room were eyeing Sabu and giggling, clearly keen to pluck up the courage to ask for his autograph. Baba knew she was very privileged to be sitting at the top table, and she found it hard not to preen a little.

‘I’m an orphan, Baba,’ he said. ‘My mother died when I was a baby, and my father died when I was six.’

‘Oh. I
am
sorry.’

‘My father was a mahout, like me.’

‘A mahout?’

‘An elephant handler. He looked after the elephants in the Maharajah of Mysore’s stables.’

‘What a swell job!’

Sabu gave her a cynical look. ‘You don’t get paid a pile of rupees for sweeping up dung. But he loved the elephants, and they loved him. He taught his favourite animal to rock my cradle when I was a baby, and even to pick me up in his trunk and rock me that way too. When my father died, that elephant went mad with grief. He broke his chains and ran off into the jungle.’

‘Oh, how sad!’ Out of the corner of her eye, Baba could see the extras nudging a slave girl in vermilion chiffon towards their table. ‘Have you any family left in India, Sabu?’

‘Yes. They are completely dependent on me now, since I was discovered by Robert O’Flaherty. The filmmaker,’ he added, for her enlightenment.

‘He made
Man of Aran
, didn’t he?’

Sabu looked surprised. ‘How do you know that? I wouldn’t have thought that was your sort of film.’

‘I went to the Aran Islands on a day trip once. I was at boarding school on the west coast of Ireland.’

‘Ireland? Why didn’t your folks send you to an English boarding school?’

‘I have cousins over there.’ Baba didn’t want to tell Sabu that she had been shipped off to this remote outpost of Europe at her grandmother’s behest. ‘My best friend there was an Indian girl.’

‘An Indian girl – at school in Ireland? How weird!’

‘It’s true. Girls came from all over the world to be educated at Kylemore Abbey. I had friends from Japan, Mexico and America, as well as India.’

‘Was it a posh school?’

‘I guess it was, but we ran a little wild. It was in the middle of the country, miles from anywhere, with lakes to swim in and mountains to climb.’

The extra was approaching, blinking in nervous supplication. ‘May I have your autograph, Mr Dastagir?’ she asked, her face nearly as purple as her pants.

‘Sabu,’ he corrected her, taking the pen and autograph book and signing with very good grace. And once he’d signed one autograph, a queue formed, and he was obliged to sign forty more.

‘Do you know,’ said Baba, when he’d finished, ‘that until I met you, I assumed all child stars to be spoilt brats. You could give some of those Hollywood kids a run for their money. You’re ten times more talented than most of them.’

Sabu frowned. ‘I’ll meet some of them soon. I’m off to Hollywood once this epic is in the can. I have hired an agent there.’

Baba looked at him, agape. ‘A Hollywood agent? You lucky dog!’

Sabu shrugged. ‘I don’t mean to sound ungrateful, but I’m not too keen on the idea. Hollywood is my idea of hell. But Boss Man Korda advised me that America is the best place to be now that war is on the way.’

War really was on the way. Only the other day newspaper headlines had bellowed FRANCE MOBILIZES! and since July, air raid shelters were being built all over London. Sandbags and gas masks were being distributed, too. Baba dreaded the idea of donning a gas mask because they looked like pigs’ snouts.

‘That’s my dream, you know,’ Baba confessed. ‘To escape from here and go to Hollywood.’

‘No! Don’t tell me you are hankering after stardom, Baba?’

‘I’m hankering after excitement, really. I’m dreading this war. It’s going to make life so bloody dreary. Everybody keeps droning on about the New Austerity.’

The ‘New Austerity’ was reflected in the fashions being showcased in
Vogue
. Fashion was no longer frivolous – it was borderline frumpy. Hair was pinned up and hidden away under scarves and duster hats, skirts were skimpily cut to save on fabric, and shoes were clumpy cork-wedged affairs. To Baba, it felt very strange to come to work in Denham Studios, where there was a profusion of riotous colours and opulent fabrics and exotic artefacts. While Churchill roared in Whitehall and Hitler barked in Germany and Mussolini yapped in Italy, the boys and girls at Denham were busy making fairy tales.

Baba took a look at her watch. Miss Duprez would be waiting for her tea. ‘Time for me to scoot,’ she said, giving Sabu’s hand a squeeze. ‘I’ll be happy to run lines with you later, if you like.’

‘There’s not a lot of point,’ said Sabu ruefully. ‘The script’s changed again.’

Baba set off back across the lot, taking care to steer clear of one of the sparks, who was watching her wolfishly with his pop eyes. She’d foolishly tried out her ‘Lisa’ persona on him one day, and that had been a big mistake because Popeye now ogled her lecherously everywhere she went.

As she passed by the ‘harbour’ where muscle-bound stuntmen in loincloths were furling sails and sliding down ropes, she found herself wondering why she had never bothered to try out her ‘Lisa’ persona on Sabu. He was too young for her, she knew, but it never did any harm to put in a little practice. And then she realized why. It was because she liked him too much to toy with his affections. She liked him too much to make a lapdog of him.

One Sunday morning as Baba sat on her little stool assiduously marking a list of props, Mr Korda himself appeared on the set, a huge Corona cigar between his teeth, and announced that there was to be an important radio broadcast. It was a surreal scene. June Duprez in her floaty pink pyjamas and Conrad Veidt in his red turban and Miles Malleson as the Sultan with his fake white whiskers, all congregated in the throne room of the princess’s palace with strained, ashen faces. And Baba clutched Sabu’s hand as Neville Chamberlain’s voice came over the speakers and told them that Britain was at war with Germany.

When Baba returned home that evening she ran up to her room and dived under her eiderdown, awash with awful self-pity. She couldn’t help it. The war was coming and all the young men would be called up to fight, and there’d be rationing, and drabness, and the only films that would be made would be dreary black-and-white propaganda ones, not glorious, expensive Technicolor fairy tales like
Thief
, and life wouldn’t be worth living.

‘Baba!’ her grandfather called up to her from the hall below. ‘There’s a telephone call for you.’

It would be Dorothy, phoning to moan about the war. Well, hell’s bells! At least she had a wedding to look forward to, and a new husband she could play happy families with. The Government was hardly likely to conscript married men unless things got really bad. As Baba shrugged out from under her eiderdown, she wondered if maybe she
should
wangle a proposal out of Richard Napier. At least she’d have a future as the wife of someone with prospects. There’d be no other kind of future for her in bloody war-torn Britain.

She ran down three flights of stairs to where the phone sat on the console table in the hall.

‘Hello?’ she said into the receiver.

‘Baba.’

It was Sabu’s voice.

‘Sabutage! Why are you phoning me at home?’

‘I have news for you. I spoke with Mr Korda earlier. He filled me in on the future of the film.’

‘It’s being axed, isn’t it?’ She’d heard from her grandfather that the Prudential had withdrawn financial backing because Mr Korda had gone so precipitously over budget. The word ‘hubris’ was on everybody’s lips.

‘No. It’s not being axed. It is being moved, lock, stock and barrel.’

Baba felt tears threaten. ‘So you’re phoning to say goodbye?’

‘No. I’m phoning to offer you a job.’

‘A job?’

‘Yes. I decided that it was about time I used some film star clout and called a few shots. I told Mr Korda that I needed a personal assistant.’

‘What’s that got to do with me?’

‘The job is yours if you want it.’

‘You want me to be your personal assistant?’

‘Yes. I’ve already been uprooted from my country, Baba, and since they expect me to go somewhere else where I have no family or friends, I decided it would be a good idea to bring a friend with me – someone who will like me for myself, not just because I’m a big-shot movie star.

‘So where are we going?’

Sabu paused dramatically, and there was a smile in his voice when he spoke again.

‘Los Angeles,’ he said. ‘We’re going to Hollywood, Baba.’

‘
YOU KNOW WHAT
to do?’

Jessie nodded. She knew for sure what to do. She’d done it gladly on countless occasions: but this was the first time she’d offered her services in exchange for payment.

Her workplace was a garret, sparsely furnished with ramshackle bits and pieces. The only exceptional item of furniture was the day bed. This had been the first thing she’d seen when she’d entered the room. It stood in the centre of the floor, richly upholstered in brocade, with gilded claw feet and plump tasselled cushions: fit for a Pompadour.

‘You’ll find a kimono behind the screen.’

He indicated with a peremptory nod the screen that stood in a corner of the room. It was Victorian, covered in cracked greyish-brown hide that had peeled away in places to expose the rotting jute beneath. It had a leprous look. Assuming a confidence she didn’t feel, Jessie moved towards it, aware that his eyes were on her.