The Tropical Issue (6 page)

I heard her say, ‘Jay, you look awful. I have an ultimatum.’

I didn’t hear his reply, but I heard the tone of it, before the door shut firmly behind her.

I now knew how he felt about female visitors. If he’d been bleak with her on the phone, now he was freezing.

There were three phone calls. Two were from friends of the Owner. One was for me. Mrs Sheridan required the services of Miss Rita Geddes, that afternoon at her hotel.

Miss Rita Geddes said she’d be there, thank you.

The Emerson woman stayed for ten minutes, and then came into the hall to ask if she could make coffee for Mr Johnson. Her expression, before she changed it, could be called grim.

I had switched a pot on for myself, and found some jazz on a portable radio, which I hoped no one wanted back in the sitting-room. While I got cups, she went to fetch milk from the cupboard.

She said, ‘He gets a lot of letters, doesn’t he? Are they still coming?’ She had to shout a bit, so I turned the jazz down.

The second post had just come. I went out and scooped the mail up and showed it her. She put down the milk, and sorting through it, took out all the stuff that was handwritten.

‘Do you suppose,’ she said, ‘that all the private ones, the ones like that, could get themselves lost for a day or two?’

‘He’d notice,’ I said.

‘Give him a few at a time, then,’ she said. ‘But not all of them. In a week or two, it’ll be different.’

I said, ‘It’s up to Mrs Margate, not me. I’ll give him his lunch, though.’

The devoted correspondence took on a new meaning. I was safe as houses if the Owner was the bedridden organiser of a Gay Club.

The coffee was perking, and I poured it. She said, ‘You’ve been very good. You work for Mr Braithwaite, don’t you?’

‘I’m a freelance,’ I said. ‘I’m with Natalie Sheridan this afternoon. So Mr Johnson will have to manage, I’m afraid, if his housekeeper doesn’t come back before evening.’

‘Of course, I understand that,’ said Lady Emerson. ‘I phoned the agency this morning to get a capable woman along. Someone with nursing training, who could take telephone messages and exercise Bessie.’

She hesitated, and then went to her handbag and lifted it. ‘It occurs to me that, cut off from his bank, Mr Johnson maybe hasn’t been able to thank you properly?’

She opened her bag.

‘Oh, not at all,’ I said. ‘I wouldn’t dream of it. He can always write me a cheque anyhow, can’t he? The coffee’s getting stone cold.’

I put the two cups on the tray with the spoons and sugar and milk, and she picked it up and went off to the sitting-room. I switched to the news and enjoyed a cup on my own, with some biscuits I’d discovered. I’d already found a place for the unwanted letters.

There didn’t seem much sense to me in answering letters and not answering phone calls. But you never know what the boss class is playing at. Anyway, it wasn’t my funeral.

The Emerson woman left fairly soon, and then someone called Ballantyne phoned, and I remembered just in time to tell him so that he could take the call himself, after I had plugged in the phone under his bed.

When I heard him ring off, I went in to unplug it, carrying the Oscar Peterson programme I was listening to while I was cooking. I didn’t realise he was speaking until he asked me the same thing twice over.

It was something about the other calls. When I told him my pencil had broken he was distinctly not amused. He seemed, however, too fed up to go on about it. Or thought it wiser not to.

I hoped the capable woman didn’t mind queer invalids who fussed about telephone calls.

The doctor came just as the steamed fish was ready.

Like all the Owner’s well-brought-up friends, he greeted me as if he’d known me forever, and asked after the housekeeper and Bessie, who came out and drooled over his trousers.

He seemed surprised to find Mr Johnson not in his bedroom, but opened the sitting-room door and went in with a broad doctor’s smile. I heard the Owner calling him Henry. You couldn’t tell, of course, whether anyone was on first-name terms with Johnson or not.

He was in a long time, and I ate the fish, since it was spoiling and I was hungry. After a while I thought I heard a voice in the hall, and turning the radio down, went out to find Henry leaving.

He did not, thank God, mention kindness to cripples, but just talked about Bessie. He’d had a look at the poor dear old bitch, and he agreed with the vet that she couldn’t last, although it wasn’t the time to tell Mr Johnson.

I said, ‘He’ll get more of a shock if she dies on him. Would the vet put her down?’

‘He’s been waiting to do it,’ the doctor said. ‘Should have done it, to my mind, when he had the chance. On the other hand. . .’

He stopped, and then said, ‘Anyway, it’s lucky you were here this morning. I’m sorry I’ve interrupted your lunch. It smells good. You keep cheering him up now, eh?’

Another bum. The way I felt, he’d be lucky if we just kept life ticking over, never mind bombarding the Owner with cheerfulness. And he’d be still less cheery when he found out I’d eaten his fish.

When I carried his lunch in, he didn’t seem amazed to find it was based on four egg yolks. Asked what he wanted to drink, he suggested a glass of red wine each, and told me where to look for the bottles.

I’d seen them, actually, every time I took out the vodka.

I opened a chloride and poured him one, and then one for myself, and took it to the other coffee table in the sitting-room, since he asked me. As the wine mixed with the vodka and I began to feel less unfriendly, I told him I was leaving for Mrs Sheridan’s.

‘Of course. You make her up, don’t you?’ he said. I had cooked him a good, nourishing dish, with cheese and onions and bacon as well as eggs in it, and he was working on it through his bifocals.

I was about to agree, when I remembered he and Natalie knew the same people. I said, ‘She has her own man for that usually. Kim-Jim Curtis. I do her in London.’

‘Kim-Jim Curtis doesn’t mind?’ he said. His wine glass was empty, and I got up and filled it.

‘Kim-Jim? No,’ I said. ‘He recommended me to Mrs Sheridan.’

Johnson said, ‘I suppose all make-up professionals know one another?’

‘We all know
of
one another,’ I said. ‘We all watch one another’s work, and use the same materials, and listen to all the new discoveries and everything. Some people do private work only, and some do magazine and society photographs, and some do general T.V. and screen work, and some specialise in characters or special effects.’

I broke off. He had had a lot of wine. He said, ‘Go on, I’m not bored yet.’

He was just being cheeky, not patronising. I like talking about what I do. I said, ‘Well. Some people are rubber specialists, like Chris Tucker and Stuart Freeborn. That’s working in prosthetics. Masks and noses and cheek pieces and everything. Karen Bauer does severed heads. Some like animal masks. Some people, like me, like doing work for impersonators. But I do a bit of everything.’

He said, ‘You sound as if you like screen work more than painting up Natalie Sheridan.’

I’d had a lot to drink too. I said, ‘I’d like to work for her for a bit. She knows how to dress. You can make a lot of her. And she knows a lot of people. That’s useful, when you’re a freelance. But I do sort of like the creative side. When you’ve got to find your own way through a problem. It’s an awful new industry. There are lots of things you’ve got to think out and invent for yourself. I like that.’

‘I can see that,’ said Johnson. He gazed at a forkful of quiche. ‘Is it such a new business? I thought you had families in the trade already. Like circuses.’

I’d forgotten he was an art college man. I said, ‘That’s true. I expect you know them. The Nyes. The Partleton brothers. Tony Sforzini and his daughter. Mrs Sheridan’s make-up man is one of the American Curtises, and they go back to the old M.G.M. epics. Of course, face paint is as old as Time, but it only really came into its own with the film industry.’

‘That’s the Kim-Jim Curtis you mentioned,’ Johnson said. ‘Does he stay with Mrs Sheridan?’ Invited, I had given myself more of the chloride. ‘What’s known as a houseguest?’

‘She goes in for houseguests,’ I said. ‘But he’s the permanent one. Works like a dog.’

I remembered something. I didn’t want to talk about Kim-Jim anyway. I said, ‘You’ve got a problem with Bessie.’

‘I have?’ he said. He lay down his fork and pushed his plate away. He hadn’t finished all of the quiche.

‘She’s been a great dog, but she’s a ruin,’ I said. ‘It isn’t fair, really. The doctor wants her put down.’

My hair appeared, twice over, straight in his glasses. It was quite a change.

‘Oh?’ he said, in his complete Owner voice. ‘And did he mention which day?’

I said, ‘Her legs are bad, she’s half-blind and she makes messes all over the foyer. You have to say which day. The doctor can’t and the vet’s scared.’

‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘Really, it’s just as well you’re going, isn’t it? Who knows whom you’d feel compelled to have put down next?’

I got up and collected his plate. ‘You didn’t enjoy your lunch?’

‘It was charming, thank you,’ he said. ‘Let me know when you leave.’

He had a short bloody fuse. I left him the bottle to get thoroughly sloshed with if he wanted, and let off steam with a good bash at the piano.

I had unwrapped the pot plants in the studio, and rearranged it all like a teashop. There were no grapes or chocolates left.

I fed Bessie, I supposed for the last time, and took her out to the pavement before I washed up. Then I got my shawl and my fishing case and went to say goodbye to Johnson.

Unfortunately, he had finished the bottle and was sprawling asleep on his face again. There was no way of telling if he had been going to give me a cheque.

I rubbed Bessie’s ears, and then shut her in with her master.

I went off to my date with Mrs Sheridan.

She was staying at Claridge’s but the doorkeeper and the desk clerks were well warned beforehand, and they treated me like a guest, even if I found myself in the lift p.d.q.

Natalie had got Ferdy’s photographs and was taken aback, as I knew she would be, to find how well she could look on her left side. She wanted to ask me about it. And she wanted a special make-up for that evening.

As before, she was sharpish but business-like, which suits me all right. The maid Dodo, a dead ringer for Eleanor Roosevelt, stood around glaring at me, but that was all right too.

I didn’t tell Natalie all my tricks, but I told her I could fix both sides again any time she wanted it done. And for that evening, I made her look stylish and different.

She asked me to stay while she dressed, and before she went out, she sat down and poured me a sherry, and told me what I knew already: that Kim-Jim was out of action for a short time, and she needed someone on call for her make-up.

‘I like your work, Rita,’ she said. ‘I know you don’t take jobs abroad, but it’s only a plane hop to the villa. And now this film idea has turned up, I’ll be in London for quite a few days yet, and I’d like to suggest an arrangement. Would you care to stay on call while I’m here? Will you come and work for me at the villa while Kim-Jim’s away? If, of course, my fee is agreeable.’

It was what Kim-Jim had wanted. It was why he had arranged my engagement with his employer. I knew what he had in mind. People retire. People like the chance to pick the person who will fill their shoes after them.

A pretty innocent plan, and a generous one. For an American at the top of his profession, Kim-Jim was a pretty innocent guy. And he and I were good friends.

Just professional friends. We’d met only once.

An innocent plan.

The laugh of the year. I really thought, accepting Natalie Sheridan’s offer, that it was Kim-Jim’s scheme and mine, and had nothing to do with anyone else.

The plan to make a break. To go abroad for the first time in my life. To help Kim-Jim. To do the work I loved doing. To have a great time, staying with Natalie Sheridan, in her hideaway house in Madeira.

Of course I said yes. Nothing warned me. The only man who could have warned me had been in a wheelchair.

I flew to Madeira in April.

Madeira, so my mother said, was a place you used to take your aunty to in the winter.

It depends what sort of aunty you’ve got, but I wouldn’t take one in April: not if she’s easily shot.

You can’t wear wool there in April either, so I had clothes to buy first, and a passport to apply for, and my accountants in Glasgow to visit.

A passport, because I’d never been overseas before. Britain for Rita, I’d sworn. I felt a traitor, going now. Not afraid, but a traitor.

I had a story all ready to spin my mother, but I didn’t need it. When I got to the nursing home, they said she had gone a bit confused again, and I wasn’t to mind if she was bad-tempered.

She wasn’t, and she knew me, although she thought I was still at school. It wouldn’t be Robina to be bad-tempered. We talked about hockey.

The rest of my things were in Troon, including my tape recorder and radio and cassette player, and all the make-up stuff I’d need for Natalie Sheridan. I went to pick them up, not liking the house without my mother in it, and had words with my Geddes aunt, as I always do.

That’s one aunt I wouldn’t take anywhere. She wouldn’t go with me anyway. She has a motto as well: ‘Your Dad, God rest his soul, would never have let you.’ But she runs the house while my mother’s away, and sees the gutters don’t leak and the taps have washers on them. And takes messages for me, on the telephone.

The night before I left Glasgow, I went on the town in Byres Road with a bunch of old pals from show business. Two were girls I’d been friends with at school. One of them was a singer and the other had become a producer.

Put together, they earn half what I do, and that’s leaving out my investments.

They can spell.

They liked these clothes I’d bought, and my hair. I’d had my hair cut and made a new colour. It finished up quite a nice shade of chrome with some blue in it.

They asked about the new job, and I told them.