‘It’s such a treat to eat something unusual,’ said Peter. ‘At any rate in this house.’ He spoke loudly and clearly into the silent crunching room. Inevitably, all eyes turned to his wife.
For a moment I thought she wasn’t going to respond. But she did. ‘You fucking bastard,’ said Billie, reverting to her standard vocabulary when enraged, although actually this time she spoke quite softly and the words were rather effective despite their lack of originality. Next, she stood and, leaning forward, picked up the bowl holding the remainder of the icy inedibles. With a gesture like throwing a bucket of water on to a fire, she flung what was left of the frozen fruit at Peter, in the process spraying the rest of us, as well as the table and the floor, with sharp, bouncing, painful little missiles. She finished by lobbing the bowl at him which missed since he ducked and shattered against an attractive George IV wine cooler in the corner. In the pause that followed you could hear only breathing.
‘Shall we get our coats?’ said Lady Gregson brightly. ‘How many cars are we taking to the dance?’ In a commendable effort to bring matters to a conclusion she stood, pushed back her chair, stepped on a frozen strawberry and fell completely flat, cracking her head on the edge of the table as she went down, and with her evening frock riding up to show a rather grubby petticoat and a ladder in her right stocking, although that might have been a product of the moment. She lay totally motionless, stretched out on the floor, and for a second I wondered if she were dead. I suspect the others did too, since nobody moved or spoke, and for a time we were enveloped in a positively prehistoric silence. Then a low groan ameliorated this worry at least.
‘I don’t think we all need to drive, do you, darling?’ said Peter, also standing, and the dinner party was at an end.
All of which goes to explain why I ended up in bed with Terry that night. We stayed together when we finally got to the dance, as it felt odd not to be with someone who had witnessed the previous events of the evening. Sam Hoare and Carina seemed to be similarly motivated and were soon dancing. In fact, they began a romance that was to take them through marriage, three children and a famously unpleasant divorce, when Sam ran off with the daughter of an Italian car manufacturer in 1985. At any rate, from our house party that only left Terry for me and I wasn’t sorry. From then, somehow, as the night progressed it all seemed to become inevitable, in the way these things can and do. We jigged away while the music was brisk, but when the lights lowered at around one in the morning, and the DJ put on Honey, a sickeningly sentimental hit of the day, one of those ballads about dead loved ones, we moved into each other’s arms without a question and began the slow, rhythmic clinch that passed for dancing in the last phase of these events.
In a way those mordant, melodic dirges were one of the hallmarks of the period, although the fashion for them has entirely faded long before now. It was an odd phenomenon, when you think of it, songs about husbands, wives, girlfriends, boyfriends, all being killed in car crashes and train smashes, by cancer and, above all, on motorbikes, the last scenario combining several pet crazes of the time. I suppose there must have been something in their facile, tear-soaked emotionalism that chimed with our largely false sense of trailblazing and ‘release.’ They ranged from the tuneful and robust Tell Laura I Love Her to those like Terry or Teenangel and, while we’re on the subject, Honey, which were soppy beyond endurance, but the stand-out example, the exception that proved the rule, a song which, like the more recent Dancing Queen, must have been performed in more bathrooms than any other hit of the day, was definitely The Leader of the Pack by the Shangri Las. There is a verse in it, which has always fascinated me: ‘One day my Dad said “find someone new”/ I had to tell my Jimmie we’re through/ He stood there and he asked me why/ All I could do was cry/ I’m sorry I hurt you, the Leader of the Pack.’ No prize for guessing who’s in charge here: Dad. This tough leather biker boy with his shining wheels, this girl in the grip of passion, both know better than to argue when Dad puts his foot down. ‘Find someone new! Now!’ ‘OK, Dad. Whatever you say.’ What would the lyric be changed to were it rerecorded today? ‘I had to tell my Dad to get stuffed’? I cannot think of another vignette that tells of the collapse of our family structure and our discipline as a society more economically yet more vividly. No wonder so much of the world laughs at us.
At any rate on that evening the sad refrain did its work, and by the time Terry and I were helping ourselves to breakfast in the large marquee, rather imaginatively decorated with farming tools and sheaves of corn, we both knew where we were headed and I was glad of it. As most of us can remember, there is something sweet, during the early, hunting years particularly, in the knowledge that one’s next amorous partner has been located and is willing.
I drove us back to the Mainwarings’ house in my car, drunk as I was, with Terry nudging me to keep my mind on the business, and we let ourselves in through the unlocked front door as we had been directed. How would such arrangements work in these more fearful days? The answer, I suppose, is that they wouldn’t. Then we climbed the stairs, attempting to make as little noise as possible. I do not think we even hesitated for form’s sake as we approached our separate chambers. I am pretty sure that I just followed Terry into her bedroom without either explanation or permission, closed the door gently and began.
Of course, one of the problems of being male, which I suspect has never changed nor will it, is that young men tend to operate on an Exocet-type imperative to seek bed larks no matter what. This was perhaps especially true in those days, when a great many of our female contemporaries were having no such thing, with the result that the moment there was a possibility of scoring, the faintest breach in the wall of virtue, one simply went for it without pausing to consider whether this was something one really wanted to do. Unfortunately, that realisation, that questioning of purpose, sometimes came later. Usually, when you were already in bed and it was far too late to back out. My generation was not, including the men (whatever the ageing trendies like to imply), nearly as promiscuous as those who came after us, even before we reached the complete sexual mayhem of today. But it was beginning. The male in his early twenties who was still a virgin, a comparatively normal type for my father’s generation, had become strange to us and the goal of achieving as many conquests as we could was fairly standard. And so from time to time, inevitably, any man would find himself in bed with a woman who might be termed unlikely.
Usually when this happened he would just bang on, and the dazed query, What was I thinking of? did not surface in the front of his brain until the following morning. But inevitably there were occasions when a Damascene moment would suddenly strike mid-action. The scales would fall from your eyes and the whole event would be rendered completely and indefensively insane as you lay there, naked, with another, unwanted, body in your arms. So it was that night with me and Terry Vitkov. The truth was I was not in the least attracted to her; I didn’t even like her all that much in the normal way of things, and without the Mainwarings’ battles and the near hysteria of the evening we had lived through I would never have been in this position. If events had not created a sense of artificial closeness in our hearts I would have gone to sleep, happily alone. But now that I was in bed with her, now that I could smell the faintly acrid scent of her body and feel her wiry hair and spongy waist, and handle the rather pendulous breasts, I knew with an awful clarity that I wanted to be anywhere but there. I rolled back on to the pillow, heaving my body off hers as I did so.
‘What’s the matter?’ said Terry in her now grating voice.
‘Nothing,’ I said.
‘There’d better not be.’
Which, naturally, sealed my fate. I had a momentary vision of becoming a funny story, a fake who couldn’t deliver, a joke to be sniggered over with the other girls as they wiggled their little fingers derisively, all of which I knew Terry was perfectly capable of delivering. ‘Everything’s fine,’ I said. ‘Come here.’ And with as much resolution as I could muster on the
instant I did my duty.
The dinner was not going particularly well. Gary had almost given up on us and Terry was, by this stage, airborne. We were staring at the menus for pudding and when Terry started to heckle over the ingredients of some sort of strudel it was clear from Gary’s expression that we had reached the city limits. ‘I’ll just have a cup of coffee,’ I said in a feeble attempt to push Terry forward to the next part of the evening. Inevitably, this gave her ideas.
‘Come to my place for coffee. You wanna see where I live, don’t you?’ Her drawl was beginning to stretch out to positively Southern proportions. Inexplicably, really, since I knew she came from the Midwest. It reminded me of Dorothy Parker’s description of her motherin-law as the only woman who could get three syllables out of ‘egg.’
‘Shall I bring the check?’ volunteered Gary eagerly, seizing at the chance of ridding himself of this potential troublemaker before the real storm broke. Not many minutes later we were standing in the car park.
Here we faced a dilemma. I had drunk little, knowing I would be driving back, but Terry had sunk the best part of three bottles. ‘Let me drive you,’ I suggested. ‘You can send someone for your car in the morning.’
‘Don’t be so boring.’ She laughed as if we were engaged on a teenage prank, as opposed to committing an offence that might very possibly include manslaughter. ‘Follow me!’ We then began one of the most hair-raising experiences of my entire life, shooting first up towards Beverly Hills, then skidding round the wide curves of the LA mountain roads, until we had somehow – don’t ask me how – reached Mulholland Drive, that wide ridge, the spine that divides Los Angeles proper from the San Fernando Valley. There is a thriller, A Portrait in Black, a Lana Turner vehicle I think, which involves a woman who cannot drive being told nevertheless to get behind the wheel and follow her lover, i.e. the murderer, in a car. She weaves about and is almost undone when it starts to rain, since she has no idea how to work the windscreen wipers. From side to side she veers wildly, up, down, all over the place, weeping hysterical tears (or is that from The Bad and the Beautiful?). Anyway, this was more or less my experience the night Terry Vitkov took me home. Except that in my version I was following the crazy woman who was out of control of the vehicle, instead of her following me. I do not even now know how we arrived alive.
The house, when we got there, was perhaps a little more modest than I had been expecting, although it wasn’t too bad. A large open hall, a bar that was pretending to be a library on the left and a big ‘living room’ that was glass on all three sides to make the most of the sensational view of the city below, a million lights of every colour, a giant’s jewel box, twinkling below us. It felt as if we were coming in to land. But the rooms had a cheap and dingy feel, with dirty shagpile carpets and long sofas covered in oatmeal weave, going slightly on the arms. A couple of pretend antiques and a sketch in chalks of an artificially slimmed-down Terry by what looked like a pavement artist from outside the National Portrait Gallery completed the decoration. ‘What’ll you have?’ she said, lurching towards the bar.
‘Nothing for me. I’m fine.’
‘Nobody’s fine if they haven’t got a drink.’
‘Some whisky then, thank you. I’ll do it.’ This seemed more sensible if I were not to end up with a tumblerful. Terry poured herself some Bourbon, rummaging for ice in one of those ice-makers that loudly produce their chunky load at all hours of the day or night. ‘Is Donnie here?’
‘I don’t think so.’
Again, her lack of enthusiasm made it hard to feel this was a union where their fingers were permanently on each other’s pulse. I sipped my drink, wondering if I was glad to find we were alone, although whether I was fearful of a sexual advance or alcoholic poisoning I could not tell you. Either way it was time to start inching back to the story of Greg and the woman, Susie, which had to be done by Donnie’s return. ‘So, how long have you been married this time?’
‘About four years.’
‘How did you meet?’
‘He’s a producer. In television,’ she added quickly, to differentiate this man as a working producer as opposed to simply a resident of L A. ‘I make these programmes where we discuss what’s on the market-’
‘I know. Infomercials.’ I smiled, thinking to show how up I was in the jargon of modern television.
Instead, she gave me a look as if I had slapped her across the table. ‘I hate that word!’ But the restaurant food wars had tired her out and she wasn’t looking for another fight. Instead she just sipped her drink and then said in all seriousness, ‘I prefer to think of myself as an ambassador for the buyer.’ She spoke the words with great gravitas, so I can only suppose she expected me to take them at face value. After a suitable pause she continued, ‘I went out with Donnie for a while, and then he proposed and I thought “what the hell”.’
‘Here’s to you,’ I said and raised my glass. ‘I hope you’re very happy.’
She sipped again, leaning back against the cushions. Predictably, her relaxation had brought down her guard and soon I learned that, as I had already surmised, she wasn’t very happy. In fact, I would be hard put to it to testify that she was happy at all. Donnie, it seemed, was a lot older than her and since we were both at the upper end of our fifties, he can’t have been much less than seventy. He also had less money than she’d been led to believe, ‘which I find very hurtful,’ and, worst of all, he had two daughters who wouldn’t ‘get off his back.’
‘In what way?’
‘They keep ringing him up, they keep wanting to see him. I know they’re after his money when he goes.’
This was quite hard to respond to. There was nothing unreasonable in their desire to see their father and of course they expected his money when he went. It didn’t make them unloving. ‘At least they don’t want it before he goes,’ I volunteered.
She shook her head fiercely. ‘You don’t understand. I need that money. I’ve earned it.’ She was extremely drunk by now, as she ought to have been, given how much Chardonnay, Merlot and Jack Daniel’s had passed down her capacious throat that evening.
‘Well, I’m sure he’s planning to give you a fair share. Why don’t you ask him?’
‘He’s planning to give me a life interest in half his money, which reverts to them on my death.’
What made this odd was that it was delivered as if she were describing a crime against nature, when it seemed eminently sensible, even generous, to me. I didn’t dare go that far, reasoning that while I knew Terry, Donnie was a stranger to me so he could not feel justified in relying on my help. I settled for: ‘That’s not what you want?’
‘Damn right!’ She reached across me for the bottle and filled her glass. As she did so, she caught sight of a framed photograph among a group of them arranged on the shelves behind the bar. It was of an elderly, white-haired man with two young women, one on either side. They were all smiling. ‘Those bitches,’ said Terry with soft malignity and reaching out with the hand that was not holding the glass, smashed the picture forward, face down. It hit the wood with a loud smack, but I couldn’t quite tell whether the glass had broken.
‘And you’ve been married four years?’ I asked tentatively, attempting to row for shallower water, but unable by the very nature of my task to leave her private life alone.
‘Yuh.’ More Jack Daniel’s poured down her ever-open gullet.
‘Then maybe he’ll alter things when you’ve been together for longer.’
‘Four years with Donnie is a lifetime, believe me.’ What always fascinates me about people like Terry, and I have known a few, is their absolute control over the moral universe. You and I know that she had been approaching desperation while making her dreadful infomercials and wondering if her life would ever begin again. Then along comes this nice, lonely old man and she decides to marry him, in the hope of inheriting everything to which she had no right whatever, and the sooner the better. She then discovers that he intends to leave his fortune to his two
daughters, whom he loves and who are obviously the very people he ought to leave it to. They are affectionate and close to Donnie, and apart from no doubt loathing their new stepmother they are, I’m sure, normal, sensible women. Yet Terry, and others like her, are able to take this kind of simple tale and turn and twist it until, with a glass splinter in their eye and through some kind of tainted logic, they recast the universe making themselves the ones who have the right to complain. They are the deserving put-upon victims of a cruel system. They are the ones to be pitied. I tell myself that they must know they are living a lie, yet they display no sign of it, and usually their friends and associates give in eventually, first by pretending to take their side and often, in the end, by actually believing they are in the right. My own value system had, however, survived the assault and in fact I wanted to write to Donnie with my support there and then.
My ruminations were interrupted when Terry’s shrill voice brought me back to the present. ‘Get this!’ she shouted by way of introduction. Clearly, I was going to be treated to another example of Donnie’s outrageous choices, with most of which I was sure I would agree. ‘He’s even planning to leave a sum to Susie. Outright.’ She paused, to punctuate this unbelievable injustice. ‘But not outright to me. For me, it’s a “life interest”.’ She spat out the words, nodding almost triumphantly, as if at the end of a hilarious anecdote.
Past Imperfect Page 36
