by Rachel Rhys
‘I told Sully I would never speak to him again if he didn’t force you to stay. You know, Eve, we don’t know each other, do we, but I get the idea we are in the same position, you and I. Both of us outsiders here. I can see I’ve spooked you. You’re thinking I’m like one of the crazies who hang around outside the studio gates for someone to invite me to a picture show or for a Coke or to meet their mother or take a drive somewhere. They think they know me because they’ve seen me forty feet high and practically naked and they’ve watched me eat and sleep and cry and fall in love and that bonds us together somehow.’
Eve assures Gloria she does not consider her in the least bit crazy.
‘I’m glad to be here,’ she says. ‘I needed to get away from Villa La Perle.’
Without even knowing she is going to, she starts telling Gloria about the damp cellar, the photograph and the letter and the way the stark black type left an impression in the paper as if someone had bashed the typewriter keys with violent force.
Gloria – who is sipping from a tall gin fizz that she’d tried without success to make Eve join her in – makes sympathetic noises, but Eve is disappointed by how little the American seems to appreciate the full horror of the situation. She tries to explain again, but Gloria flaps one of her manicured hands.
‘Oh, blackmail,’ she says, as if it is something so run-of-the-mill as to be hardly worth bothering about. ‘You can’t give in to those kinds of people, honey, or it’ll never end.’
‘But who would have sent it?’ Now that she has dredged the painful subject up, Eve is reluctant to let it go. ‘I can’t believe someone hates me so much.’
Her voice cracks and she disguises it by coughing, as if she has something stuck in her throat. The truth is that this is what troubles her most. Not the threat to involve Clifford – although she feels nauseous whenever she thinks of a brown envelope like that one arriving at his office or dropping into the hallway of the house in Sutton or, worse, being handed over by Mr Ward the postman, hovering with that expectant expression on his round florid face – but the idea that someone dislikes her enough to go to these lengths.
All Eve’s life she has structured her interactions with other people around a desire to be liked, and if not liked then at least not disliked. She supposes now she might have been trying to make up for the lack of affection at home with the knowledge that she was accepted or at least tolerated outside it, whether at school or working alongside the other women volunteers during the war.
And now this. The hatred in those little black letters gouged deep into the page.
‘Any of the Lester family could have done it. From what Sully says they all have a reason for wanting money, and you’re the one standing in the way of them getting it.’
‘Diana doesn’t need the money.’
‘Diana Lester is a bitch. I could see it the second I saw her. Bitches don’t need reasons for trying to screw you over. It’s in their blood.’
Eve’s mouth hangs open. This isn’t the first time she’s heard someone talk this way. One of her friends during her WVS days had a filthy tongue, but then she’d come from a family with five older brothers. To hear Gloria Hayes, star of Rose of Alabama, being so casually profane is thrillingly shocking.
‘Here. This one. You must. It would be too perfect.’
Gloria has produced the most glorious dress Eve has ever seen. Silver that shimmers when she stands in front of the huge windows and holds it up to the light.
They are in the pink middle tier of the house. A grand balustraded terrace runs along the length of the building, including Gloria’s dressing room, in which Eve now finds herself installed in a black velvet armchair with ornately carved wooden arms.
Eve had had no intention of coming, had even suspected it to be some sort of joke on Sully’s behalf. She had thought she would remain all day in her room, feeling sorry for herself and trying to reach some sort of decision about what to do next. The Colletts had called round but she had asked Mrs Finch to tell them she was unwell, unable to face telling them about the photograph. What would they think of her? She remembered how uncertain Ruth had been as they left Le Crystal, how she’d entreated Eve to come back to the hotel with them. Oh, why hadn’t she just said yes?
Then towards lunchtime when she’d been lying on her bed, wondering whether she could nip down to the kitchen unseen to bring up a snack, she had heard a car pulling on to the gravel to the side of the house.
A few minutes later, Mrs Finch was knocking on her door.
‘Miss Hayes is waiting in the car for you, Mrs Forrester. I tried telling her you were under the weather, but she was most insistent. I rather think she is not used to being told no.’
So Eve had gone to explain, but had somehow found herself sitting instead in the back of the car, powerless to protest. So here she is. Nestled in this very peculiar chair while a woman who until a few days ago she had seen only on a cinema screen goes through a wardrobe larger than Eve’s childhood bedroom, in search of a dress for her to wear to what the newspapers are already billing the most lavish wedding of all time.
Gloria hands her the silver gown, which Eve already knows will trail along the floor, but still she holds it up in front of her, obedient, while Gloria frowns in a way that manages not to cause so much as a wrinkle in her smooth forehead.
‘Not that one then,’ she says, snatching it away and flinging it on to the floor. ‘Oh, but this one. Yes, this is the one. It’s meant to come to the knee, but it won’t matter but it’s a little longer on you.’
‘But blue doesn’t suit me.’
Gloria stands stock-still and stares at Eve, her hand on her hip.
‘Who in God’s name has been filling your head with such cock-eyed nonsense? You were made to wear blue. It will set off your heavenly brown eyes.’
Eve remembers their neighbour Nora sitting at the tiny table in their back parlour drinking tea with her mother and saying, I’m afraid poor Eve will find that complexion quite restricting when it comes to clothes. Just browns and greys, rather than any of the pretty colours.
But now, here is Gloria holding the dress up in front of Eve’s reflection. Kingfisher blue and made of satin that gathers wide on the shoulders and then stretches over the bones of whatever is holding it in shape, and she sees instantly how it brightens her face. Gloria takes hold of Eve’s ungovernable hair and twists it up, securing it off her face with an ivory clip.
‘There,’ she says. ‘Much better. Now try on the dress.’
It won’t fit her, though. She is convinced of it. Gloria is a completely different shape to her, broader across the shoulders with long limbs.
Yet somehow it does. It is more off the shoulder than on, and the hem, which she is sure should sit on top of the knee, comes midway down her calf. But the clever construction moulds itself exactly to her body, or rather to a perfected version of her body. It is almost indecent how well it suits her.
Gloria, who has sat herself down on a stool, cocktail beside her, claps her hands in delight.
‘You will need shoes, of course. And your dainty li’l feet would be swimming around in these great ugly boats I have to wear.’
‘I shall just have to wear my own shoes.’
Gloria glares down at Eve’s feet, leaving no doubt as to her feelings on the subject of her companion’s footwear.
‘Honey, I don’t want to offend you, but … oh, just wait a minute!’
Suddenly Gloria is back on her feet and heading to a second wardrobe on the other side of the room. She opens the door and shoes start flying. Eve narrowly escapes being hit by a black slingback with a velvet bow on the toe. Finally Gloria emerges with a pink box tied up with ribbon.
‘I think this is them – I never forget a designer box.’
She impatiently tugs the ribbon and casts it aside, tearing the lid off the box.
‘Yes! I knew it!’
Reaching in, she delves through layers of tissue paper, emerging with a pair of c
ream high-heeled peep-toe shoes with a strap around the ankle and a blue platform.
‘The studio sent a photographer to capture the blushing bride in the run-up to her wedding and the idiot stylist got the English and American sizes mixed up.’
‘Ow, they’re too tight.’
The shoes pinch cruelly at the toe, but Gloria insists that Eve strap them up anyway, no mean feat on account of the invisible boning in the dress, which makes bending difficult.
‘Perfect,’ she says. ‘What did I tell you?’
‘But they hurt.’
‘Of course they hurt. Everything beautiful hurts. The trick is not to let anyone else see that it hurts.’
Eve stands up and attempts a few steps.
‘I really don’t think I could … oh!’
She has hobbled as far as the mirror at the end of the room that reaches from the ceiling right down to the carpeted floor, and now she sees the full effect of the dress and the shoes together. It is not that she looks beautiful, but that she looks like someone else.
She looks like a woman who belongs here on the Riviera, a woman who dresses up to go lunching with other women just like her, to whom marriage is like a fur stole to be shrugged on and off as the fancy takes her, who flaps her hand instead of bothering to reply.
For fifteen minutes Eve practises walking in the tortuous shoes under Gloria’s tutelage, adjusting her normal strides according to the restrictions of the boned dress. Now she not only looks like someone else, she also moves like someone else. And before long she begins to feel like someone else.
It is with reluctance that she changes back into her old clothes.
At least you have clothes to put on, she scolds herself, remembering the man she’d seen sitting on the newspaper just after she’d arrived in the country.
‘Does it ever make you feel guilty, all of this?’ she asks, gesturing at the rows of designer shoes in every different colour on display through the open wardrobe door, the ornate dressing table with its gold-framed mirror and the bottles of scent lined up like empties outside a pub door. ‘What I mean is that you – that we’ – she doesn’t want Gloria to feel singled out – ‘have so much, while those men sit there in those fishing boats, hour upon hour, trying to catch enough fish that their families might eat tonight.’
Gloria follows the direction of Eve’s gaze, out of the double doors, across the balustrades of the terrace to the sea, where the black dots that are the boats bob around under the blazing sun.
‘Honey, I grew up with eight brothers and sisters in a three-room shack. I know what it is to have a belly full of nothing but dreams. Two of my brothers are dead now. Let me tell you, the thirties were no time to be poor. Not where we lived anyhow. But I got out. Survival of the fittest. Ain’t that what the scientists call it? So no, I don’t feel guilty. I won’t even tell you some of the things I’ve had to do to get here – it’d turn your hair clean white. I’ve earned my right to be in this house, in this room, with this view and as many goddamned pairs of shoes as I like.’
While delivering this speech, Gloria has been rummaging in a large white shiny handbag, from which she now produces a small bottle. She unscrews the lid and shakes two pink pills into her hand.
‘Want one?’
Eve shakes her head.
‘Suit yourself.’
Gloria pops both pills into her mouth, tipping back her head so that her throat is stretched taut.
‘What are those?’ Eve’s curiosity gets the better of her.
‘Oh, I forget the actual name. I just call them my sweeteners ’cause that’s what they do, make life a bit sweeter.’
‘So they make you feel happier?’
Gloria laughs. She really has the biggest mouth Eve has ever seen.
‘Honey, you don’t feel anything on these pills. That’s the joy of them.’
Eve doesn’t know what to say. Already she fancies she sees Gloria’s beautiful eyes dulling as if a layer of steam has built up over them. Perhaps she should say nothing. Act as if this behaviour is all perfectly normal. Most assuredly that’s what she should do. But …
‘Gloria. Please tell me to mind my own business if you wish, but you do want to get married, don’t you?’
The words are out before she has time to vet them, and she wishes she could reel them back in.
‘I’m sorry,’ she says, seeing Gloria’s expression. ‘I didn’t mean to pry. Ignore me.’
Gloria wanders through a door into the connecting bedroom and flings herself face down across a bed so huge that she can lie diagonally with no part of her long-limbed body overhanging the sides.
‘Do you ever,’ she says, her voice muffled, ‘feel like a leaf being blown around by the wind this way and that way’ – she waves a long arm from side to side in demonstration – ‘without you actually having much say in it?’
On the other side of the doorway, Eve considers. Was that how it was when she married Clifford? But no, she wasn’t wafted into that marriage on a gust of wind that she had no control over. She’d weighed up the options open to her and made a choice. She’d chosen to believe she could grow to love Clifford, that love was a plant that would automatically grow, given the right conditions.
‘But surely if you have any doubts you can just call a halt to the whole thing?’
Gloria laughs.
‘Oh honey, you’re sweet, but Laurent Martin is not the kind of man you call a halt to. And all that moolah the studio has spent already. They want their fairytale wedding. Eve darlin’, have you read any fairytales? They’re really the nastiest things. Swans who make themselves human for love but when they walk it’s like razor blades under their feet, children kept in cages and force fed so that they’re fat enough to eat. And besides, I had the real fairytale when I married Greg. My, but I loved that man so. And look what happened there. He went off and fucked a woman with teeth bigger than her titties, and I became Poor Heartbroken Gloria, the most pitiful wife in America.’
Gloria has turned over so she is lying on her back on the white sheets, her red hair spread out around her head, one bare leg resting on the knee of the other so her foot with its painted toenails points high into the air.
‘So this time I am marrying with this’ – Gloria taps her head – ‘and not this.’ A tap to her chest. ‘Laurent is a catch. Did you know, Vogue magazine named him the most eligible bachelor in the world, two years running? He’s the kind of man folk take notice of, but he also has a cultured side. He and Victor Meunier spend so much time together talking about art. You can always tell a lot about a man by his friends, can’t you? With Laurent I get financial security beyond my wildest dreams, but also I get to take back control. If my face is all over the papers it’s because of what I’ve done, what I chose, who I chose, not because someone else has made a goddam fool of me.’
When Eve thinks of the reception at the Duke and Duchess’s house and how Laurent paraded Gloria around as if she were one of his racehorses, she feels a flutter of unease.
‘Even so, if you did have second thoughts I would help you,’ she says. ‘So would Sully. I suspect he’d do anything for you.’
‘Sully is a darling man.’
And with that damning phrase, Eve understands that whatever secret desires her fellow lodger might be harbouring towards Gloria Hayes, they are not reciprocated.
She is ruminating on this later, sitting back in a canvas deck-chair on the terrace at the villa, looking at the stars and listening to Sully explain why his most recent marriage didn’t work out.
‘I was on the rebound from my third wife, Nancy, when I met Geraldine. By that stage I’d spent six years with someone who hated my guts and who tried to pin every terrible, god-awful thing that was happening anywhere in the world on me. The war itself was a direct result of the kind of aggressive prose I was churning out in my novels, apparently. So I was a sitting duck for anyone who came along offering some morsel of affection. And Geraldine adored me. Christ, if it’s possible to s
mother a person to death with adoration, she would have done it. But you know, when you’ve been starved of love and someone comes along offering it to you on a plate, it’s very seductive. By the time I realized we had exactly nothing in common, it was too late.’
‘Nothing in common apart from loving you,’ says Eve.
‘That’s harsh, Mrs Forrester.’
‘Sorry.’
Eve is in a strange, jittery mood. She tries to calm herself by focusing on the blue satin dress hanging upstairs in her closet, remembering the way she’d felt looking in the mirror, as if she was someone else, free of the constrictions of being herself. But still knowledge of the existence of that grainy photograph is like a stone in her shoe, always there. She tries not to think about how Clifford would feel opening up an envelope and taking that picture out, tries not to imagine the depth of his disappointment.
Above her the black night has been sprayed with stars as if they have been blown there through a straw. From the bushes comes the sound of cicadas, that strange noise that is such a part of life here that you end up noticing it no more than the noise of the blood rushing in your ears or the breath entering and leaving your body, until it stops suddenly and the night rings with silence. The air is scented with eucalyptus and a dim light flickers from a yellow lantern hanging from one of the branches.
A star shoots across the sky in an arc of light that is gone almost before she registers it, and two bats flap in and out of the eaves of the house.
But now there is another sound ripping through the still night. A car roaring up a hill in the wrong gear, the screeching of brakes and the noise of gravel flying from under wheels.
There is the sound of the doorbell, long and unbroken as if someone is leaning on it. And then raised voices from inside the house. A woman laughing or crying, it’s impossible to tell.
Eve sits up and exchanges a glance with Sully, who shakes his head and shrugs.
There is the clicking of heels on polished floor and a familiar voice saying, ‘Where in hell are they?’ followed by a reply from Mrs Finch that they can’t make out.
