The Green Flash (5 page)

Perhaps anything else
ought
to be left for a second meeting. Yet I was never one to wait.

I said: ‘You've taken a fairly good look into my background. I know only the superficial things about yours.'

‘All backgrounds are superficial,' she said, ‘if that is not a contradiction of the words. It is the present that matters.'

‘What strikes me, Mme Shona, about your house, as you call it – your business – is its remarkable reputation with so small an output.'

She ignored this. ‘Are you married?'

‘No.'

‘Girlfriends?'

‘A few.'

‘Boys?'

‘Not really in that way. Perhaps if I were a pansy you might think it better.'

‘For whom?'

I shrugged.'Forget I spoke.'

She said after a moment: ‘Pansies, as you call them, are sensitive people, imaginative – far more so than most women.
And
creative. Of course bitchy. But who is not on occasion? If one were lunching here with me today he would be little different from you – wishing to play the host, touchy, prickly, on his mettle … In our trade there are many such. Of course we are not an
art
, as you well know; but there is an element of finesse, of grace, of elegance about the beautifying of women, in any aspect, which attracts them, even though they admire women and seek their company on a different level. If I am meeting you on a social basis it makes not the slightest difference to me how your tastes incline. If I am considering employing you, then it is of some importance.'

I had hoped it mattered to her how my tastes inclined.

She moved slightly, and instantly a waiter came forward and took her chair.

I said: ‘ Is this some new position you're thinking up for me?'

‘Why do you ask that?'

‘It occurred to me that you might be looking to expand.'

‘Why should I?'

‘You've just mentioned that de Luxembourg spent three hundred thousand pounds on promoting Incognito. Your publicity can never approach that.'

‘De Luxembourg is international. We are largely British. Except for a few outlets in Canada and Australia.'

‘That's what I mean. You could never justify that sort of promotion.'

‘There is something a little vulgar in pressing one's wares too hard.'

‘Oh, I know how subtly you've put the thing over up to now. But I don't see that
size
necessarily renders something unacceptable. You've moved from the corner shop – using that figuratively of course – and created a business that – although still so small – for sheer class is the envy of your competitors. To promote on a larger scale doesn't necessarily alter the quality of the approach. One doesn't need to shout louder – only more often.'

She was thoughtful as she straightened the panels of her frock. ‘Yes, you can certainly express yourself – put over a point, one might say.'

‘The gift of the gab, one might say.'

She smiled slightly. ‘An ability to persuade, one might say …'

I knew then that I was on my way. ‘May I ring you sometime?'

‘Leave it till October. Let me know what your feelings are then. I should be the last to press.'

‘Thank you for my lunch. It has been an experience.'

As we were moving out of the restaurant she said: ‘Yes, I have had the thought of creating a new position. For some time I have been looking in a desultory way … In fact I brought a man to lunch here last month.'

‘Was he not suitable?'

‘No.'

‘In what way, may I ask?'

‘For one thing he lit a cigarette in the middle of the meal. People who behave like that are savages.'

I

Perhaps I ought to say a bit more about Roger Manpole at this stage, and about Derek too.

Manpole, I suppose, was about forty when I first met him, which was at the Cellini Club in St George Street, quite near the fashionable church. I'd joined soon after I came to London so that I could take my Scottish friends there to gamble. (Joining that sort of club, of course, is nothing. Any two members who've never even seen you before will sign the proposal form; you pay your dues and walk right in.) Naturally it was Derek who introduced us. But whereas Derek looked more untrustworthy than he ever really was – something maybe about his bookmaker's smile – Roger Manpole was always the picture of rectitude and clean living. Suntanned, soft-spoken, candid grey eyes, hair a bit long and nicely waved, clothes with a hint of the countryman about them; as far as I knew he was entirely English, with a good pedigree, his father an ex-ambassador, his mother a shipowner's daughter (though the shipowner had gone bankrupt).

At that time, in the early days, I was doing honest work trying to pull Langton's together, and went to the club in the evening only for a game of bridge and to relax. Roger, I gathered from Derek, ran a company from behind the scenes called Mancat, which did big business in toiletries and the cheaper end of the perfumery trade. He also had a printing company called Henry Gervase Ltd, which had a factory in Hackney for turning out soft-porn magazines by the thousand. In those days, of course, if you printed colour pictures of nude women in revealing postures you came up against the Obscene Publications Act. Now soft porn of that sort, and a lot more explicit, is on every station bookstall; and a fat lot of no good it does to some people. But Gervase were always liable in those days to be raided, so infra-red warning rays were installed by the door and the magazines stacked on chutes so that, when the police called, while the door was being unlocked, the magazines were tipped down the chutes into a room in the house next door owned by one of Manpole's nominees.

Derek and Manpole were old chums, though Roger was as hetero as they come, being on his second wife and always on the lookout for a new bit. After meeting him a couple of times, when we talked about talcs and lipsalves and bath essences and when he went out of his way to be friendly, I came to realize that he fancied himself as the associate of young men he could patronize and manipulate. That wasn't for me, and when I made it plain it wasn't for me he ticked my name off with a black mark in the little book he kept in his memory.

All the same, as I'd told Mme Shona, when I ran into trouble and served four months and came out and stayed with Derek, Manpole did have another shot and offered me a job with Mancat. And although I was down in the mouth then and feeling at an all-time low, I still said no. So we weren't on the best of terms.

Of course we met at the Cellini from time to time and played bridge now and then. Derek was no go as a bridge player – he just didn't have card sense – but Roger was quite good and knew I was better, so we did keep on terms that way.

One evening after we'd met coming from the roulette table he said in his low soft agreeable cultured easy voice: ‘I think I should congratulate you, David.'

‘What on?'

‘Your coming move.'

‘What move?'

‘Oh, you know it's very hard in this business to keep a secret.

It's a very small world, the cosmetic world. We live in each other's pockets.'

‘Tell me what you think you've picked out of my pocket.'

The smile became a bit less amiable. ‘You're going to work for Shona.'

‘Oh,' I said, ‘reports of my death have been much exaggerated.'

‘Death? A fate worse than? I doubt it. She's a tremendous personality. You should do well.'

We passed on. As always after a meeting with Manpole I felt rubbed up the wrong way. I suppose you can't explain it, this allergy you have for some people. If he was served for lunch, I'd come out in spots. His offer of a job – though a pretty queer one – when I came out of prison had been quite well meant within his own terms. It wasn't a matter of principle on my part, for God's sake, just an antipathy.

I knew of course where he'd picked up this rumour. I didn't tackle Derek with it, but quietly I began to look for a pad of my own. I'd sponged on him, spacewise, for too long anyway, and our relationship wasn't ever going to continue or develop along the line of his ambitions. I knew that in my guts now – or wherever it is appropriate to know these things.

After my father did himself in by getting bibulous and cracking his skull on a fender, I'd gone away to a prep school for a couple of years and been crammed to pass the Common Entrance. Kenneth Kingsley, who became more and more important in our lives, insisted it was the Right Thing for me, and persuaded my mother to agree to this where my father hadn't been able to. I'd always been close to my mother, but after his death things changed. She was more distant, less concerned, less demanding. And when the next year she married Kingsley, the drift away from me put on skids.

I'd not seen my mother for upwards of three years. She knew all about the big event of last year, of course, and she'd written a couple of fairly pathetic letters when I was inside, but I think she'd persuaded herself that I was coming to a bad end anyhow and there was nothing much she could do about it. In one letter she said: ‘You should have told us about it when you were first charged; Kenneth might have been able to do something to help you.' Privately I thought Kenneth had written me off more comprehensively than she had. And why not? They had two kids of their own now – I was only a pain in the neck to him.

As I'd said to the Shona lady, the four months inside had left a taste. In fact (since this is supposed to be a candid account) it had left a hell of a taste. Apart from what you'd expect – the grey faced, hard-nosed lags trooping like zombies, their talk and their grunts and their belchings, like a Tannhauser chorus in Z flat minor; and the screws, domineering, tight-mouthed, insufferably superior; and the locked doors, the clang of keys, the drab, flat uneatable food – apart from these that you'd expect, I was knocked right out of my groove by claustrophobia. It was the jim-jams all right. That last door shutting for the night: the panic clutched at your bowels; you wanted to bloody your fists on the bars, to struggle for breath, for air that wasn't there, to scream at the top of your pipes till you ruptured something. Honestly.

And it was still too just round the corner to be ignored. Of course you wisecrack about it, it's all over and done with, isn't it? But as for the future, the memory nudges at your elbow like a tout in a pub. The deterrent. Too bad. Also it was clear from what the delightful old boy in the judge's chair had said that it would be much tougher if I was caught doing the same thing again.

‘I listen to many cases in this court in which the accused comes from a broken home or has an underprivileged background, or one in which circumstances have combined against him and made his behaviour, if not excusable, at least understandable in the framework of his life. But you come of an excellent and a distinguished family. You have been well educated. You have lived all your life in a comfortable, genteel environment. No extenuating circumstances have been put before me by your counsel for your deliberate and callous fraud upon an old friend, so I can only assume none exists. I therefore have no alternative, having regard to your previous convictions, but to sentence you to a term of imprisonment. You will go to prison for six months.'

Much as I disliked to think of the trembling old nerk or pay any attention to his humbug homily, I continued to do so from time to time.

And anyway I'd rather meet
him
behind bars than one or two of the types I did. That sort of contact hardens you up and softens you up at the same time.

The deterrent. Well …

So I looked at the idea of working for La Shona with a divided mind. On spotting her at that party it had occurred to me that an affair might pay off one way or another. It seemed probable that, apart from any personal pleasures involved, such a woman if she found herself financially out of pocket for her acquaintance would, as a foreigner and intensely proud of her firm's reputation, be likely to write off any loss to experience. But since then I had revised my views. From such slight knowledge as I now had of her, I thought I would have to get up very early in the morning to pull off any profitable exercise in which she was the loser.

So you look at the job purely on its merits. I was getting sick of Yardley's. I'd been there nine months, which was an all-time record for me. I'd no real desire to be selling lipsalve all my life, and if some other bandwagon came along I'd be quick to hop on. But in the meantime …

There was also the question of the small dent this woman had created in my protective skin. Which is a stylish way of saying that I fancied her for her own sake.

I'd never become involved in my life; my girlfriends frequently complained. But detachment is all. Well, it might be more difficult to stay detached from this lady, always supposing that one ever got near enough to her to exchange small-arms fire.

Her husband, John Carreros, supervised the factory at IsleWorth. He had, it seemed, been a research chemist for Rochas in Paris, and it was likely that he was more responsible than she was for the formulas they had first sprung on an unsuspecting world seven or eight years ago. Nobody seemed to know whether the marriage worked as a marriage. They had a flat in South Audley Street and a small house on the Green at Richmond. No children. Their shop and offices were in Wigmore Street.

It was plain enough that in a handful of years she'd become a rich woman; and yet compared to the giants she was still small-time. Why did she want me? Did she fancy me as I fancied her? Did she have a succession of handsome lapdogs following her around while she continued to keep her grip on her small, highly lucrative, top-class market? (So far I had heard of no other boyfriends, current or discarded.) Or was she really looking for someone who would help her to expand and take on the Avons and the Ardens on their own ground? And did I even remotely want to be that someone? I certainly wanted money, but not at any price, not at the price of some boring old job trying to expand a business I wasn't interested in. There were other and better things in the world.