by Simon Brett
Because she was so caught up in her translation, Twinks spent most of her time in her state room, only emerging in the evenings to join cocktail parties and have dinner in the First Class dining room. There she was invariably seated at the Captain’s table, and usually next to the Captain (he being another of the amorous swains who’d fallen for her like a midshipman plummeting from a crow’s nest).
He was a man of considerable charm and suavity, but once Twinks had established that he didn’t have enough money to be the saviour of Tawcester Towers’ plumbing, she lost interest in him.
There was, however, another guest at the Captain’s table on the second evening of their voyage who seemed promising, at least from a financial point of view. He was seated next to Twinks on the other side of the Captain, and was tall and thin with a Latinate look about him. His skin was deep brown and his dark eyes twinkled like rogue olives. His centre-parted black hair was slicked down so firmly it looked almost as if it had been painted on. He was unquestionably handsome and caused even more fluttering in the dovecotes of the female passengers than Blotto.
The reason was that the man was not only handsome, he was also well known and fabulously wealthy. His was a face recognised in every part of the world that had been reached by Hollywood movies, as he was Toni Frangipani, the star of numerous silent films. He had played more lovers than Catherine the Great got through, so as a fantasy, he inhabited the dreams of millions of women.
And it was clear from his first words to Twinks that he was well aware of his magnetism. ‘Tonighta you are the lucky one,’ he said in a voice that was as squeaky as an unoiled hinge.
‘Sorry, not on the same page?’ said Twinks.
‘You are the lucky one who issa sitting next to me.’
‘Don’t talk such toffee,’ she said coolly. When it came to froideur, Twinks was her mother’s daughter. ‘You’re the lucky one who’s sitting next to me.’
He turned on her the smouldering eyes which had ignited answering fires in so many ardent female fans. He seemed to be taking her in for the first time. ‘You are notta bad looking,’ he said. ‘I havva forgotten your name.’
As it was only moments since they had been introduced by the Captain, Twinks found this downright insulting. ‘I am Honoria Lyminster,’ she announced in full Dowager Duchess mode. ‘Also known as Twinks.’
‘So whatta do I call you?’
‘You can call me milady,’ came the frosty response. ‘And who are you?’
Of course, she knew perfectly well who he was, but she didn’t think he should assume that she did. Though the most tolerant and modern of young women, Twinks still retained her values when it came to the business of fame. If you were a member of the British aristocracy, then the whole concept of it was rather degrading. People of her class should not have to tell people who they were; the lower orders should just know. The pursuit of fame was frankly vulgar. It reeked of that most awful of crimes in the British upper class pantheon, showing off – something at which foreigners, particularly Americans, indulged in far too often, in Twinks’s view.
The idea that the fame of some jumped-up actor should be mentioned in the same breath as the celebrity of a family like the Lyminsters, whose roots went back to the Norman Conquest, was simply ludicrous.
‘My name issa Toni Frangipani.’ The words came out clumsily as it was many years since he had had to use them, many years since he had met anyone who did not recognise him.
‘And what do you do?’
‘I am a filma star. I am the most famousa filma star in the worlda.’
‘Oh, really?’ said Twinks drily.
‘I am also the most handsoma man in the worlda.’
‘In whose opinion?’
‘In the opinion of every reader of every filma magazine in the worlda.’
‘Well, that hardly wins the coconut,’ said Twinks.
‘You do notta understand. There are millions offa women who would givva alla that they possessa to be sitting where you are tonight.’
Twinks’s azure eyes scanned the room. ‘Well, maybe you should find one of the poor deluded darlings. I’d be more than happy to park my chassis somewhere else.’
The black eyes glinted, the perfect Roman brow corrugated. Toni Frangipani was in uncharted territory. No woman had ever before reacted to him in this way. His perplexity quickly translated into a determination to keep his dinner companion with him at all costs.
‘Would you like a signeda photographa offa me?’ he asked. This generous offer had never before been refused.
Twinks’s elegant eyebrows arched. ‘What for? I know what you look like. A photograph would be about as much use to me as a tail-curler to a Manx cat.’
‘It issa facta’, said Toni Frangipani, ‘that wherever I staya in the worlda I have to keepa my bedroom doora locked.’
‘Why? Are you a somnambulist?’
‘Whatta?’
‘A boddo who walks in their sleep. Are you saying you have to keep your bedroom locked so you don’t start pongling around on the landing in the middle of the night?’
The film star was deeply affronted. ‘Noa. It is notta to keep me fromma leaving my bedda room. It is to keepa people from coming into my bedda room.’
‘Oh,’ said Twinks without interest.
‘And when I saya “people”, of coursa what I mean issa “women”. Alla women want to be in my bedda room.’
‘Not all,’ said Twinks.
At another table, another, more charming charm offensive was being unleashed. Blotto had been seated next to a lady of maturely leggy charms. Her dark hair was cut in a fashionable bob, her hazel eyes sparkled under perfectly arched eyebrows and her full lips were outlined in startling scarlet. The colour was picked up in the silk of her dress. She was, in fact, some twenty years older than her dinner companion, but the artistry of her make-up halved that number.
Her accent was basically English, with just an edge of American on certain words. She was an actress named Zelda Finch, convent-educated in genteel Virginia Water, who in her twenties had been the toast of London’s West End. Lured across to Hollywood, she’d made a considerable name for herself playing woman-in-jeopardy roles. If a director wanted threatened innocence in his next movie, then Zelda Finch was the go-to actress for the part. She’d lost count of the number of times she had been rescued from a burning house, had her hand grasped just as she was about to fall off a precipice or been tied down to railway lines by a dastardly villain with a fully twirled moustache. She was the mistress of wide-eyed horror and loving reconciliation.
The innocence so prized in Zelda Finch’s screen performances was, however, not reflected in her private life. She was known in Hollywood as ‘The Odds’ because she’d been laid so often, and her affairs kept the film community’s gossip columnists like Heddan Schoulders constantly supplied with new material.
However, as her fortieth birthday approached – though in all publicity material she was said to be ten years younger – Zelda Finch decided a change of lifestyle was needed. Her agent seemed to be calling less often with new offers for her to be tied to railway lines. She knew there was a whole generation of younger actresses whose innocence and jeopardy were more appealing to the studio moguls and their eager audiences. She was also aware that the kind of lovers she attracted were no longer from the ‘A-list’ – indeed they were slipping ever further down the alphabet – so she decided she needed the safety of marriage.
Not just safety, but also financial security. Since most of the major studio bosses were currently supplied with their latest wives (as well as the requisite number of mistresses), and since Zelda had sufficient self-knowledge to recognise how unreliable actors were, she had turned her eye towards the ranks of directors. From them she selected the biggest beast of the lot: Gottfried von Klappentrappen, the king of the Hollywood spectacular. His movies were more extravagant than anyone else’s. No one created more epic historical panoramas. No one employed more thousands of extras. No o
ne had a worse reputation as a screaming fascist on set. And no one made more money from the international distribution of his films. Nor indeed had many men been through as many divorces as Gottfried von Klappentrappen.
Having identified her quarry, Zelda Finch went into active planning mode. She caught the director on the rebound, still smarting from his sixth broken marriage. All his previous wives had been beautiful actresses. Gottfried von Klappentrappen was living proof that what made a man attractive to the opposite sex was not looks – in his case a body with the contours of a tennis ball and a face like a boiled prawn – but what he had in his wallet.
Once Zelda had decided it was her turn to share its contents, she moved quickly. It wasn’t difficult to make the acquaintance of her target. Everyone went to the same Hollywood parties, and it required only a few well-directed compliments to von Klappentrappen’s masculinity to secure an invitation for a dinner à deux. Zelda knew that if she could get him into bed, the deal was done. Her experience and sexual athleticism were such that she felt any man who had tasted the delights of her body would be left wanting more.
So it proved with Gottfried von Klappentrappen. Though she didn’t rate his prowess highly compared to her previous list of lovers, she persevered. Zelda had always thought of sex as a means to an end, and in her current pursuit the end was marriage to von Klappentrappen.
He, however, after the discomforts and costs generated by his previous wives, was in no hurry to take on another. The new status quo, having Zelda as a skilled and acquiescent lover with whom he assiduously avoided being seen in public, suited him very well and enabled him to concentrate totally on the new silent epic he was directing for Humungous Studios, The Trojan Horse.
But Zelda was not to be defeated. She took affairs into her own hands and contacted Hollywood’s premier gossip columnist, the aforementioned Heddan Schoulders. The story she confided was translated and published in Heddan’s inimitable style.
Hot news! No secrets in Hollywood, we all know that. So it was bound to come out soon that jodhpured movie supremo Gottfried von Klappentrappen has just taken another trip down the aisle. Seventh time lucky, let’s hope, Gottie! And the latest Frau von Klappentrappen is British-born vamperoonie Zelda Finch. She’s managed to tame a good few Hollywood hunks in her time, so who’ll be holding the riding crop in that household? Gottie, incidentally, if asked about it, will deny that the marriage has taken place and change the subject to his new Humungous Studios boomeroonie The Trojan Horse. You can hide a lotta soldiers in one of those, Gottie, but you can’t hide a secret marriage in Hollywood! As ever, you heard it here first from your close lady-buddy Heddan Schoulders, who’s got her ear to more grounds than a coffee percolator.
It worked. Gottfried von Klappentrappen got so sick of being congratulated on his secret wedding to Zelda Finch that he organised a secret wedding to Zelda Finch. He also cast her as Medusa in The Trojan Horse. So, not for the first time, Zelda got what she wanted.
Not all that she wanted, though. Her new husband was, in her category of lovers, a ‘bib’ (i.e., ‘boring in bed’). So Zelda had to make alternative arrangements, which included travelling to England for the purpose, so she told her husband, of visiting her ailing mother (dead now for fourteen years), but actually to visit a series of ex-lovers.
Rather than satisfying her, though, these encounters only served to sharpen her appetite. So she was still on the lookout on the S.S. Regal, which to her mind made it serendipitous that she was seated next to Blotto at dinner.
‘You’re English,’ observed Zelda Finch, starting the conversation in an uncontroversial manner.
‘I certainly am, by Wilberforce,’ Blotto responded.
‘Me too.’
‘It’s the only thing to be.’ He looked around the multiple-chandeliered dining room. ‘One can only feel sorry for the poor thimbles who got the wrong end of the sink plunger by being born in foreign places. Tough Gorgonzola for them, eh? That kind of misfortune could take the icing off the Swiss bun for the rest of your life.’
‘Probably,’ Zelda conceded. ‘Why are you called Blotto?’
His brow beneath its thatch of golden hair crinkled. He had been brought up in the kind of family where nicknames didn’t mean anything, you were just given one. ‘Because I am,’ he replied.
‘I’m an actress in the movies.’ Zelda waited for Blotto to say that of course he knew who she was, that her face was famous around the world.
But he didn’t. Instead he said, ‘I met an actress in the movies once.’ A dreaminess came into his blue eyes.
‘Oh? Who was she?’
‘Mimsy La Pim.’
‘Really?’ Zelda’s lips pursed into the mouth of a much older woman. She recognised the name. Mimsy was one of that generation of younger actors who were getting asked to play the parts of innocents being tied to railway lines that she used to be offered. She moved the conversation quickly on. ‘Are you married, Blotto?’
‘Great whiffling water rats, no!’
‘Not for lack of opportunity, I would imagine.’
His puzzlement returned. ‘Sorry, not on the same page . . . ?’
‘I mean that I’m sure there are plenty of young ladies who would be ecstatic to be married to you.’
Blotto’s handsome face purpled. ‘Don’t talk such meringue.’
Zelda had been too frequently caught out in Hollywood by men who turned out to be ‘not the marrying kind’ that she asked, ‘But you think you will get married one day?’
‘’Fraid so,’ he replied gloomily. ‘I’ve had a clear round so far, but it can’t last. One day the Mater will summon me to the Blue Morning Room in Tawcester Towers – that’s where we hang up our jim-jams, actually – and tell me who I’m going to twiddle the old reef knot with.’
‘But until that dread moment you are footloose and fancy-free?’ Zelda Finch always liked to check out the ground before embarking on one of her amours. She had no moral objection to consorting with married men, but she knew wives could be a pain, behaving as if they had some sort of exclusive rights over the spouse in question. So it was a minor relief when Blotto confirmed that he had no ongoing attachments.
‘After dinner,’ said Zelda, her voice sinking to a new level of sultriness, ‘there’s something I’d like to show you in my state room.’
‘Really?’ Blotto was intrigued.
‘Oh yes,’ she murmured thrillingly. ‘There’s a game we can play which I know you’ll enjoy.’
‘Toad in the hole!’ said Blotto. ‘You don’t mean you’ve got an indoor cricket set?’
5
State Room Keys
It was a new experience for Toni Frangipani, talking to Twinks. Since his teens back in Sicily, every woman he’d met had instantly rolled over like a kitten to have her tummy tickled, but this one seemed immune to his charms. And her behaviour produced an unusual reaction in him. The more Twinks put him down, the less she appeared to be impressed by him, the more determined he was that she should succumb. She had become a challenge for him.
His usual approach to women didn’t require much effort. All he had to do was just smoulder quietly and they offered themselves to him. With Twinks, though, he found he was having to use his charm. It was a weapon in his armoury that hadn’t been deployed much, particularly since the movies had made him world famous, so he wasn’t very skilled in using it.
The only responses his stumbling compliments elicited were yawns and admonitions not to talk such toffee. And the way Twinks kept reaching into her sequined reticule to consult her jewel-encrusted pocket watch was hardly encouraging. The last mouthful of dinner clearly couldn’t come soon enough for her.
The food was, of course, wonderful. First Class dining on S.S. Regal was created by some of the foremost chefs from both sides of the Atlantic, though most of the passengers were so inured to gourmet meals that they hardly noticed what they were eating. That evening the menu had started with a chilled consommé of partridge, followed by
sole meunière, and then mutton in caper sauce, all interspersed with a profusion of entremets and sorbets. Champagne and other vintage wines flowed like Niagara. Next came a delicate four-cheese soufflé, followed by that popular concoction of strawberries, meringue and cream known as Eton Mess. This last was presented in vast cut-glass vessels, from which the waiters served portions to the preoccupied guests.
When the Eton Mess arrived Toni Frangipani was made forcibly aware of the fact that Twinks would soon be leaving, so he resorted to a final tactic that he rarely needed to use. Reaching into his waistcoat pocket he produced a key, which he handed to her.
‘Thissa,’ he said, ‘is the spara key to mya state rooma. Numero uno. I willa see you there.’
‘No, you willa not!’ Twinks announced with an unarguable finality.
And as she left the First Class dining room, she hurled the key into the nearest large cut-glass container of Eton Mess, where it sank through the layers of fruit meringue and cream.
Twinks’s gesture did not go unnoticed by the other guests, and a ripple of giggling accompanied her departure. The brow of Toni Frangipani, who was not used to being laughed at, looked like thunder.
But Twinks did not notice that.
Nor did she notice the unfriendly looks of two bulky Mediterranean types at a side table, who had been watching her and Toni Frangipani all evening.
Which meant she also missed the throat-cutting gesture that Toni directed, with a nod towards her, at the two men.
And she was completely unaware that the hoodlums were working for the Mafia boss, Lenny ‘The Skull’ Orvieto.
Blotto felt the key in the trouser pocket of his dinner suit and remembered Zelda Finch’s instructions to him. ‘Wait half an hour after everyone has left the dining room, then come to my state room. Number two. Let yourself in and then our little game can start.’
