The Debut Read online

  One morning it teemed with rain and she darted out of the house in the rue des Marronniers with her hands apprehensively sheltering her newly coiffed hair. His car was at the curb. Once he walked into the brasserie where she ate her evening meal, made her finish it all up, and then drove her out into the Bois; they had coffee and brandy at a flashily discreet hotel with a log fire and a huge dog stretched out in front of it. Once he took her out to lunch in the Place de la Sorbonne; they trotted over a sea of cobbles to reach the restaurant, and when they arrived the headwaiter kissed her hand. There were no other diners. For the very first time, she ate lobster, forbidden on her father’s side. Once she got back to her seat in the Bibliothèque Nationale and found on her papers a bunch of Parma violets, their leaves still wet, sprayed from a watering can by the flower seller in the Place de L’Opéra. She kept them for ten days.

  He was married, of course. He had a wife called Noémi and two grown-up daughters. He had told her this and by mutual consent they never referred to it again.

  “What can I give you,” she asked him, “when you give me so much?”

  “I will give you everything I can,” he said, reaching for her hand and meeting her wide eyes. “But first you must learn to take.” And he continued to give.

  * * *

  AS she emerged from the bathroom, Rhoda said, “Oh, by the way, a friend of yours telephoned. Anthea. Would you get in touch with her at the Hotel Madison? I have written it on the pad. But not, please, now, my dear; I cannot have Humphrey disturbed. This hour before dinner is so precious to him.”

  Humphrey, pen in hand, was standing watch by the telephone, his eyes fixed on Ruth’s bare legs.

  Anthea! She was actually here, her dearest friend. Ruth dressed, smoothed her hair, and sped out to the nearest café and the nearest telephone. Yes, Anthea was free. Of course, Ruth would come over straight away. They were longing to see one another.

  But each was surprised by the other’s appearance. Anthea had put on weight around the hips, looked warm and blowsy in the more purposeful Parisian atmosphere. Ruth, Anthea remarked, looked almost human. She could think of no further recommendations to make; the words “Why don’t you?” withered on her lips.

  But there was masses to tell. Once more Ruth described her peculiar lodgings, protesting that she did not intend to stay there, that the room was cheap, that it was not too far out. Anthea gave her a dismissive glance.

  “I’ll see for myself,” she said. “We’ll take you back after dinner.”

  “Dinner,” said Ruth with rather more authority than she had displayed before to Anthea, “is on me.”

  “Fine,” said Anthea, unmoved. A rush of waters from the bathroom signaled the imminent arrival of Brian.

  “Are you happy?” asked Ruth quickly.

  Anthea hesitated for only a fraction of a second.

  “Of course,” she said. “We always suited each other. And he’s got a future. Besides, I’m used to him.”

  She looked at her friend, trying to reconcile her protégée of recent years with this expensive and assured looking creature in her mackintosh, her normally anxious eyes calm under her beautiful fringe.

  “And what about you?” They were speaking in lowered tones. “There’s a man, I take it?”

  Ruth nodded.

  “At last,” said Anthea grimly. “Well,” she added, more as a matter of form than anything else, “did the earth move?”

  Ruth did not even blush, as she would have done before.

  “Well, yes,” she replied, “it did.”

  Anthea’s eyes widened. “Now, for God’s sake, Ruth, don’t make a mess of this. Don’t give in too easily. String him along. Take another lover. Keep him guessing. Break the odd appointment. How on earth do you think I got Brian after all these years?”

  Ruth looked sadly at her friend.

  “Is it all a game, then?” she asked.

  Anthea looked sadly back. “Only if you win,” was her reply. “If you lose, it’s far more serious.”

  Thirteen

  * * *

  GEORGE, much to his annoyance, seemed to be going deaf in one ear. He went down to the doctor’s surgery, thinking to have some wax removed, but was met with the kind of hearty complicity he did not greatly appreciated.

  “Nothing to be done,” said Dr. Maxwell. “One of the penalties of getting on a bit.” He never spoke of growing old and always pretended to be the same age as any patient he was treating.

  Nevertheless, George was put out. Getting on a bit? He was only sixty, and twice the man he had been a mere two years ago. From five to six thirty every evening he took his ease in Sally’s flat, which he also liked to think of as his flat. She would cook him a little something and enjoin him to relax. The shop was left increasingly in the care of Mrs. Jacobs’ sister’s boy, Roddy, who was waiting to hear if he had got a job at Sotheby’s and who would otherwise have been working as an assistant at Harrods. The arrangement pleased everyone concerned.

  In Bayswater George rediscovered the delights of his youth. Mrs. Jacobs behaved just like his mother. “You look tired,” she would say. “Why not take a shower?” In his towelling bathroom, George would sit at ease, refreshed, and scented with a variety of lotions and powders which he now kept in Mrs. Jacobs’ hitherto unsullied bathroom. Signs of his occupancy were everywhere to be seen. In the teeth of Mrs. Jacobs’ protests he had rigged up a machine for making morning tea by the side of her bed. The only time she had used it, steam had squirted out sideways, damaging the valance of her satin counterpane. Some of the furniture in the sitting room was placed on the slant because of the size of the speakers from the record player. George’s sunlamp was in the spare room and his portable grill was in the kitchen. Sally had put her foot down when she had seen him plugging it in, and the corners of her mouth had seemed to contract with disappointment as the other items were introduced. George had taken no notice. “But I do all the cooking that goes on here,” she said. “You can take that back and get a credit note.” But George had never got around to it somehow.

  The delights of his youth. A little bit of smoked fish as an appetizer. Cold meat loaf and horseradish. Cucumbers in sour cream. And cheesecake, which Sally made herself, and which was so rich that he had to eat it with a spoon. And all the while he ate she would sit at the table and watch him sternly, her face propped in her hand, to see that he left nothing on his plate.

  She loved to have a man to feed again. The disruption of her flat, the intrusion of all the devices, which she never used, seemed a small price to pay for the pleasure of seeing George every evening. When the time came for him to leave, she would brush his collar and become slightly tearful. It was not that she desired any further physical contact; she just hated to go to bed uncomforted.

  “Couldn’t you at least telephone me to say goodnight?” she sniffed as George prepared to revert to his real life in Oakwood Court and she was faced with the washing up and the preparation of the next evening’s snack.

  “Well, darling, it’s a bit difficult. I suppose I could take the telephone into another room, but I’d hate Helen to get wind of anything.”

  Mrs. Jacobs sniffed harder. “If you really loved me, you’d try,” she murmured.

  So every evening, by dint of sending Mrs. Cutler in with a hot milk drink, which Helen barely touched, and by switching up the volume of the television very loud, he telephoned Mrs. Jacobs to say goodnight.

  “Where were you just now?” asked Helen one evening.

  “Ringing Mrs. Jacobs about an order,” said George, quite truthfully.

  “That woman doesn’t seem to be able to do anything on her own,” said Helen, shaking her sleeping pills out of the bottle.

  “We find it works better if I ring her up in the evening to remind her what to expect the next day,” said George, half terrified at his own daring.

  “Silly bitch,” sighed Helen, closing her pale blue eyelids. “She must be losing money hand over fist.” Her eyes snapped o
pen again. “Make sure she pays you properly,” she admonished George. She was serious.

  George was delighted. By dint of beginning his conversation very heartily and modulating it to a dying fall, he found that he was almost telling the truth to Helen and pleasing Sally at the same time. He liked to think of Sally sitting up in bed in her expensive nightdress, her special little pillow behind her neck, her satin curtains (a thousand pounds, she had told him, and she had sent them back twice) pulled fast against the night. He always kept the call short, as indeed he had to, and never said anything that might upset her. Plenty of time for that. Reality awaited him next door where Helen prepared to retire by brushing the crumbs off her cardigan, removing her denim cap and slinging it into a corner, and placing her book face down, spine cracking, on the littered bedside table. After getting into bed beside her, George reflected on the virtue of his behavior. No sin, no act had been committed. He remained a faithful husband, didn’t he? Sally loved him. And he was eating better than he had for years.

  So that when Dr. Maxwell told him that he was getting on a bit he was disagreeably surprised.

  “It’s my wife you really want to take a look at,” he protested. “She hardly ever gets out of bed these days. And she never goes out.”

  He had a reason for reanimating Helen, apart from the uneasiness he felt when he saw her sticklike arms and legs. If Helen rose from her bed, and somehow miraculously recovered her powers, he could get rid of Mrs. Cutler. And he wanted to do this because he had an idea that Mrs. Cutler had an idea of what he was up to. Technical innocence would be no weapon to withstand Mrs. Cutler’s condemnation.

  Dr. Maxwell looked grave. “That of course is much more serious. Her circulation will begin to suffer very soon. Is her mind all right?”

  George shrugged. Had Helen’s mind ever been all right? She had always been a mythomaniac, fascinated by her own legend, recounting it to everyone. To think of the years he had spent just listening to her. But of course he could not leave her now.

  “Yes, her mind’s all right,” he replied. “She reads most of the time. Our housekeeper sees that she eats. But I think I may have to send for my daughter if this goes on much longer.”

  Helen herself was not unhappy. “The rest is doing me good,” she maintained, as if there were anything to make her feel tired. She was still beautiful, still cleverly made up, although her hair was now long and untidy. She had altered in the sense that she now demanded to be amused rather than to dominate the conversation with anecdotes of her former fame or some screamingly funny incident that had taken place when they were on tour. Helen read a novel a day, preferring those that she had read before, and twice a week Mrs. Cutler had to set out with her wheeled trolley to the public library to bring home six nearly identical stories. These had to do with maidens in the nineteenth century taking posts as governesses and losing their hearts to the rakish son, who was also the black sheep of the family. Helen, her beautiful eyes dreamy in their huge sockets, murmured, “They never go to bed with them. I wonder if that’s where I went wrong.” Mrs. Cutler said nothing. It disgusted her that Helen should still be thinking about sex. She had got over that sort of thing herself.

  But it was in fact Mrs. Cutler who was bringing the matter to life again. Mrs. Cutler had made an unexpected hit at the Hazel Kilpatrick Marriage Bureau, which operated from a small room up a flight of stairs reached through a glass door opening off Kensington High Street. Hazel Kilpatrick herself, a retired social worker, treated her application, which she had made with some misgivings, as a matter of great seriousness. In fact she took it more seriously than Mrs. Cutler herself, who had only suggested it to give herself an excuse for leaving if the necessity ever arose. So far, five answers to her application had been received. Helen bestirred herself to patter to the door in the mornings to collect the post, which she ripped open and then spread all over the bed. “I like the sound of this one,” she would say to the resigned Mrs. Cutler, who now, in addition to doing her own chestnut lights, had to do Helen’s as well. “Recently retired,” she read out. “That means he’s knocking on seventy. Just about right for you, Maggie.” Mrs. Cutler thought seventy was too old. Helen, who found George too old at sixty, reprimanded her. “There’s no point in being starry-eyed about this sort of thing. It’s not as if you were in it for a roll in the hay.” Mrs. Cutler winced. George, who had put his head round the door to say goodbye, also winced. Helen’s language was getting coarser. She sometimes referred offhandedly to the financial habits of Jews. George found this unmannerly and said so. There had been several unharmonious evenings, complicated by the consumption of a little too much whiskey. Mrs. Cutler, her head throbbing the following morning, vowed that it could not go on; she might have to get married after all. George, seeing both women equally afflicted, hoped that they had learned their lesson and went virtuously off to Mount Street, where Jews were never mentioned and liquor was never consumed.

  It could not in fact go on. Mrs. Cutler retrieved the papers of Leslie Arthur Dunlop, recently retired, from Helen’s bed, and wrote secretly to him, arranging a meeting at the Mexicana coffee bar. He turned out to be a cheery elderly man, very spruce and clearly very lonely. He had thin, sleeked-back pepper-and-salt hair and he wore a blazer with the insignia of what Mrs. Cutler thought was his regiment on the pocket. He had come up from Folkestone, where he had a bungalow, for the day. The Mexicana was just about his mark. Mrs. Cutler wore her jade green coat and skirt, a silk blouse abstracted from Helen’s wardrobe, sling-back shoes which were murder after half an hour, and her pearl earrings. She was careful not to smoke too much or even to say too much until it became clear that Leslie Arthur Dunlop wanted to light his pipe. Hesitantly she suggested that they go next door to the Black Lion; he cheered up immediately. He ordered a pint of beer and she had a vodka and lime. His good humor reminded her of George but she reserved judgment. After the pub he took her out for a Chinese meal, which neither of them enjoyed. “Wait till you taste my cooking,” said Mrs. Cutler imprudently. “You won’t know you’re born.” Leslie Arthur Dunlop cheered up even further. “My late good lady wasn’t much of a cook,” he reminisced, “but she kept a lovely home.”

  “I do that too,” said Mrs. Cutler.

  * * *

  “THAT agency seems to have given you up as a bad job,” said Helen in disgust, as nothing further came through the post. “They probably think you’re too old.”

  Mrs. Cutler, who was meeting Leslie Arthur Dunlop again on her next afternoon off—they were going to the first performance at the Palladium—did not reply. Better to let them think what they liked. What she did was her own affair. She had reapplied her chestnut lights and varnished her nails; she held them away from her stiffly until they dried. Then, with exaggerated distaste, she removed the bottle of whiskey from its resting place on Helen’s bedside table and made a shepherd’s pie for lunch.

  “You’re going to eat this whether you like it or not,” she shouted from the kitchen. “You’ve got as thin as a rake.” She was a little worried about Helen, who seemed to take a delight in making herself helpless these days. She would totter to the bathroom, but would not take a bath on her own. Mrs. Cutler, pressed into service, did not like the look of her white knobbly spine curved over into an old woman’s position, her fleshless arms, her narrow unused feet. With a gesture unconsciously retained from earlier days, Helen held a towel to her disappearing bosom as she stepped unsteadily out of the bath. Her shoulders were still good, her face beautiful, but so pale, so lined until she had reapplied her makeup: the face of a beautiful old woman.

  Mrs. Cutler, whose initial attachment to Leslie Arthur Dunlop was as a pretext for leaving Oakwood Court, had developed a rather more reasoned liking for the man when he insisted on calling her Margaret. She in turn called him Leslie, although he had always been known as Les, he said. That was what his first wife had called him. “Not me,” said Mrs. Cutler. There was a moment’s silence while each digested this exchange. Had
they committed themselves? They looked at each other. It seemed as though they had. “We can’t live on your pension,” ruminated Mrs. Cutler, her cheeks highly colored by rouge and emotion. “We’ll have to get a job somewhere. Living in, so that we can let the bungalow. What about one of those old people’s homes? You can save all your wages there.”

  “Here, here,” protested Leslie, fending her off humorously with his pipe. He was not quite so spruce this time. “What about all that home cooking you were telling me about?”

  “Plenty of time for that,” said Mrs. Cutler (Margaret, as she now thought of herself). “First things first.” She saw herself in the Lurex two-piece she had bought in the sales, being absolutely charming to some old dear while her husband hovered cheerily in the background. “My husband will take care of it,” she would say. “You will have to speak to my husband about that.” They would make an ideal pair. After all, if she could look after Helen, she could look after a few more. And they had nurses, didn’t they ? She sent Leslie back to Folkestone with instructions to make inquiries at all likely establishments along the coast. Then she nipped into the Black Lion and had a quick one to steady her nerves after her momentous afternoon.