Touchfeather

by Jimmy Sangster

  ‘No. He’s big-time intrigue stuff. State secrets and anyone want to buy an atom bomb? He’d never use a couple of hoods. Not American hoods anyway.’

  ‘Well someone was using them. They knew what they were after.’

  ‘Did they hurt you, Katy?’ he said softly.

  ‘Not much,’ I lied.

  ‘Poor Katy. Why aren’t you married to a broth of a boy, living in an Irish bog, digging peat and raising a pack of redheaded IRA recruits?’

  ’For two very good reasons. I only like the Irish when they’re drunk. And I like my work.’

  ‘You’re a masochist,’ he said. ‘Let’s go and have some lunch.’

  I didn’t make the mistake of asking Robbie to come with us again, and we lunched at the back of a small French restaurant where they knew Walter and even had boards ready to put down so that he could wheel himself down the two steps to the rear. We were onto our coffee before he remembered something he had to tell me.

  ‘Your assignment from United has come through,’ he said. ‘You fly the lunchtime flight to LA tomorrow.’

  ‘I haven’t got a uniform yet.’

  ‘Robbie’s having it picked up this afternoon. They know your size. When will you be back?’

  ‘When United tell me,’ I said. ‘I’m strictly a working girl for the next few weeks.’

  ‘And then?’

  I shrugged. ‘If Mr. Blaser forgives and forgets, it’ll be back to the old grindstone.’

  ‘I saw Mike Fellows last week,’ said Walter, from left field. Mike was my American boyfriend, the one I hadn’t called last night.

  ‘How is he?’

  ‘Fine,’ said Walter. ‘Are you seeing him?’

  ‘I shall play it by ear,’ I said. ‘Why, are you jealous?’

  ‘Terribly,’ he said. And the sad thing was he almost meant it.

  I picked up my uniform from Robbie, did some window-shopping on Fifth Avenue, then took myself to a movie. Dinner I cooked for myself in the apartment. Then I packed my flight bag and stowed the rest of my luggage in one of the closets in the spare room of the apartment. Then I went to bed. I phoned Robbie from Kennedy Airport the following morning and told her to collect my stuff if Walter wanted to use the apartment. Then I said goodbye and joined the ranks of the working girls.

  TEN

  There are basically two types of people who travel on aeroplanes: those who travel for business and those who travel for pleasure. The business ones enjoy themselves; the ones travelling for pleasure have a terrible time. The business man opens his briefcase as soon as he embarks, and only looks up from his work long enough to shovel food into his mouth, or pour down the booze. But the others don’t want to miss a thing. If they’re sitting on the right of the aircraft, everything they want to see is out of windows on the left. If the movie doesn’t come on in time, they complain, and when it is on, they’re forever letting up the window blinds to make sure they’re not missing anything thirty thousand feet below them. They complain if we’re late and they complain if we’re early. They complain if the weather is rough, and if it’s smooth, they complain that there’s no excitement. They snigger at the hostess as she goes through the oxygen-mask and life-belt drill. Then they complain because they haven’t understood it. Some of them leave their arms dangling in the aisle so that they can give you a surreptitious feel every time you pass by, and nearly all of them proposition you at least once on the trip—and this isn’t only confined to the men. Through all this you’re supposed to move serenely, always smiling, always cheerful, always reassuring, a cross between Florence Nightingale, a wet nurse and a backstairs skivvy.

  ‘Miss, there’s a bolt missing from the wing.’

  ‘Miss, what was that bump I felt?’

  ’Miss, isn’t that Cincinnati down there?’

  ‘Miss, the coffee is cold.’

  ‘Miss, will you go to bed with me tonight?’

  So, with all this going on, why does anyone want to be an air hostess? I don’t know. You tell me.

  We had our usual crop of difficult customers on the Los Angeles flight, but I wasn’t really bothered. I did my job, walked a blister onto my heel and, six hours later, as we fastened our belts for landing, I was tired and reasonably content. It was dark and Los Angeles was spread out like a magic neon carpet below the aircraft as we put down. I stood at the hatch and smiled my goodbyes at the faceless people I had been cooped up with; then I joined the crew in the staff commissariat for a cup of coffee before we all dispersed to our respective hidey-holes. Being an out-of-town girl, I was given an expense chit entitling me to bed and meals for as long as I stayed in LA. The hotel wasn’t what I would have chosen myself, but like most American hotels it was clean, efficient and impersonal, which suited my mood completely. I ate in the nearly empty restaurant, then went to my room with every intention of having an early night. The phone was ringing as I let myself in.

  ‘Katy?’

  ‘Who’s that?’

  ‘Mary Youngman.’ Mary was the English girl who had achieved what every hostess dreamed of. She’d married a millionaire she had met while she was working.

  ‘How did you know I was here?’ I asked.

  ‘Robbie Brightwell called me from New York and told me you might be lonely.’

  She knew Robbie purely as a friend of mine; Mary had been just a normal hostess before she struck lucky, and while she obviously wondered how I could turn up in half a dozen different uniforms in as many weeks, she never embarrassed me by asking. I was fond of Mary for a number of reasons, not least of them being the fact that she had introduced me to my husband. She had been the senior hostess on my first flight and, while the Captain was generally considered a perk for the senior hostess, she was already involved with her millionaire. She had been matron of honour at our wedding, and on hand three months later when I was widowed. Six weeks after that she had been married and disappeared to America, where I managed to see her whenever I was in town at the same time as she. It wasn’t as often as either of us would have liked, because she and her husband owned six different places in America alone, and God knows how many others scattered throughout the globe.

  ‘You really are an old bag,’ she said. ‘Why didn’t you call me?’

  ‘I only just got in,’ I said. ‘I’m going to bed.’

  ‘You’re not,’ she said. ‘The car will be out front of the hotel in thirty minutes.’ Then she hung up on me, giving me no time for argument.

  Why not? I thought. It was off-day tomorrow as far as I knew, so I didn’t have to get up early. I put on a fresh face and then wondered what the hell to wear. One never knew with Mary Youngman whether one was going to a white-tie-and-tails affair or a swimming-pool party. I settled for a blouse and skirt; if I was wrong, Mary would lend me something. We were near enough the same size to make no difference.

  Thirty-five minutes later I was sitting in the back of a Rolls Royce, driven by a coloured chauffeur who had problems. He kept the partition down so that he could tell me all about himself and his wife, who had the shingles; and his son, who had just been expelled from UCLA for smoking pot; and his daughter, who showed every sign of becoming a whore if her mother didn’t take a club to her pretty soon.

  I said just now that Mary’s husband, Skip, was a millionaire. Actually he was a millionaire thirty-two times over, and he lived as though he couldn’t wait to get rid of all thirty-two of them. The house in Beverly Hills had eighteen bathrooms. It had other rooms as well, but I had always been so impressed with the first statistic that I had never bothered to enquire how many. There was also a swimming pool, whose mosaic-tiled bottom could be raised to make a dance floor; two tennis courts, one grass and one hard; a squash court; an eight-hole golf course; and a garage to hold eight cars. There was a living-in staff of five and an army of little Japanese gentlemen who swarmed all over the gardens during the daylight hours.

  Mary was waiting for me at the front door and we fell into each other’s arms while the butler
and the chauffeur looked on impassively. Then I was dragged indoors to say hello to Skip. Millionaire he might have been, but he couldn’t really help that, and he was a charming little man who had never quite got over the surprise that somebody as lovely and as elegant as Mary could have fallen in love with him. He pecked me on the cheek and told me how glad he was to see me. The nice thing about it was that I knew he meant it. He worried sometimes about the fact that he had plucked Mary from the bosom of friends and family, so when any of those friends turned up in Beverly Hills, or any place else for that matter, he bent over backwards to please them, knowing it was what Mary wanted. The silly thing was that he didn’t have to worry one little bit about Mary. She adored him and would have married him even if his father hadn’t left him thirty-two million dollars. He’s a little man, as I said, not yet forty, with bright-blue eyes in a tanned, well-ordered face. He doesn’t drink to excess and he doesn’t chase girls. His whole life revolves round Mary, and hers around him. They’re an attractive couple and I’m very fond of both of them.

  After the initial greetings, Mary dragged me upstairs while she changed out of the jeans and shirt she had welcomed me in.

  ’We’re going to The Factory,’ she said. ‘OK?’

  ‘Anything you say,’ I said.

  ‘I’ve got a fellow for you. He’s meeting us there.’ I must have pulled some sort of a face, because she immediately backtracked. ‘I can always cancel him if you’d rather not.’

  ‘Not at all,’ I said. ‘Who is he?’

  ‘Friend of Skip’s. He’s got some oil wells some place. He’s a nice man. You’ll like him. And he’s single.’

  She threw the last remark in, hoping I’d take it as an afterthought of no consequence. Mary had never really got over her good luck, and she was always trying to find spare millionaires for her unmarried friends. In the past she had paired me off with a Greek shipping tycoon in Monte Carlo, and a Venezuelan oil millionaire, who had all sorts of things on his mind, marriage not being one of them. But she pressed on regardless.

  We piled into the Rolls and the chauffeur drove us to The Factory. The usual group of young actors and actresses were playing pool, and everyone looked towards us as we came in. Then, realising that we were nobodies, they continued where they had left off.

  My millionaire date turned out to be six feet tall and one of the most beautiful men I had ever seen. His name was Marvin Torbay and it took me all of five minutes to work out that he was as queer as a two-pound note. He was only twenty-six years old, and some of the big husky men around the room looked daggers at me when they realised that I was his date. His manners were impeccable, and he spoke with a soft Southern accent which could have been sexy, but which wasn’t because of certain inflections in his voice which left no doubt in which direction his urges took him. But he was off duty this evening and he made a charming companion. I don’t know what Mary had told him, but he treated me like a cross between a maiden aunt and a sixteen-year-old girl on her first date. Mary trapped me in the toilet the first chance she got.

  ‘I’m terribly sorry, darling. Honestly, he seemed so butch the last time I met him.’

  ‘You were drunk,’ I said.

  She admitted that she might have been, and only cheered up when I was able to convince her that I didn’t mind his being queer at all. And I didn’t. I was enjoying myself and I was going to be spared the inevitable end-of-evening complications. After we had returned to the table Marvin asked me if I would like to Frug.

  We were busy shaking it all over the place when I caught sight of someone across the room who looked like Mike Fellows, my American boyfriend. I didn’t want to see him that night, so I asked Marvin to take me back to my table where I could see without being seen. Mary and Skip had moved to another table and were talking to someone they knew, and Marvin started telling me some of the more unimportant things about himself and his friends. I was still keeping an eye open for Mike Fellows, and I suppose I’d half switched off to Marvin’s conversation. Suddenly I switched on again quickly.

  ‘Who did you say?’

  ‘Gerastan. Roger Gerastan.’

  ‘What about him?’

  ‘I just said that the newspapers and the magazines print a lot of rubbish about him. They don’t know anything about him so they make it up.’

  ‘You know him?’

  ‘You haven’t been listening to me, Katy darling.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘But do you?’

  ‘I told you. I was up seeing him this afternoon in that great mausoleum he lives in.’

  ‘Tell me about him?’ I asked.

  ’What’s to tell? He’s one of the three richest men in the country and he likes his privacy.’

  ‘I know that,’ I said. ‘But what’s he like?’ After all, this was the man who had employed my Bill for five years, the man who had flown him seven thousand miles for a chat, and had grown even richer than he already was from the fruits of Bill’s inventiveness and brilliance. But before Marvin could go on, Mary and Skip came back to the table.

  ‘Tell you what,’ said Marvin. ‘Next time you’re in town, I’ll take you up there. It’s only a couple of hundred miles. He’ll adore you.’

  ‘Who will?’ said Mary, ever attentive.

  ‘Roger Gerastan.’

  I’m sure nobody noticed it except me, but I happened to be reaching for my drink at that moment, and I was looking straight at her. It was only momentary, but it was there nevertheless: at the name Roger Gerastan, Mary suddenly looked very, very frightened.

  As though to confirm what I had noticed, Mary announced five minutes later that she had a splitting headache and please would Skip take her home. Skip offered to send the car back for me, but Marvin said that he would drive me back to my hotel. For the first time since I had known her, Mary didn’t suggest that I stay with her and Skip. I think Skip noticed it, too, because he started saying something to her as they walked away, glancing back at me. She said something back to him and a moment later they were gone. I played around with the conversation for a few more minutes before steering it back to where I wanted it.

  ‘Do Skip and Mary know Gerastan?’ I asked.

  ‘Good heavens, no!’ said Marvin. ‘At least, I think Skip knows him, but he can’t stand the man, positively loathes him.’ Skip is a bit of an idealist. To him, no one is wholly bad, just ignorant. Roger Gerastan, on the other hand, is so far to the right as to be practically out of sight. If you’re not white, Protestant American, you don’t rate.’

  ‘Mary doesn’t know him though?’

  ‘No fear! Skip wouldn’t allow it. He’s got open house, has Skip, but let Roger Gerastan set foot over the threshold and he’d set the Dobermans onto him.’

  ‘It still doesn’t sound like Skip,’ I said.

  ‘You’re forgetting one thing,’ said Marvin. ‘Mary’s Jewish.’

  I had forgotten. But that couldn’t have been why she was frightened. What had made her react the way she did at the sound of Gerastan’s name?

  ‘Did you mean it about introducing me to Gerastan?’ I asked.

  ‘Next time you’re in town,’ he said. ‘Providing he approves.’

  ‘Why shouldn’t he?’

  Marvin looked at me critically. ‘You’re not Negro. And you’re not a communist, are you?’

  I shook my head. ‘I’m not American either.’

  ‘He doesn’t mind the English,’ said Marvin. ‘In fact he’s quite fond of them. He reckons that you’re idiots to have given away your empire, especially as you gave most of it to the blacks, but he still has a bit of a soft spot for the English. Apart from that, he’s a dirty old man. He’ll approve, I think.’

  ‘Thank you very much,’ I said. ‘Now, as long as you keep your hands to yourself, you can drive me back to my hotel.’

  He grinned at me; he really was one of the most beautiful men I had ever seen. ‘Half the men in the room would just love to be in my place right now,’ he said.

  �
�That makes us quits,’ I said. ‘The other half would love to be in mine.’

  He grinned again to show there was no offence taken. That was another thing I liked about him. He was as camp as a row of tents, but he didn’t give a twopenny damn. It was a criminal waste; that’s what it was, and I told him so. ‘I’ve got a good mind to take you back to my place and seduce you,’ I said.

  ‘That would take more than a good mind,’ he said cheerfully. ‘Life’s too short. Let’s go to a place I know and tie one on.’

  I agreed, and an hour later found us driving along the coast searching for a turnoff that Marvin was convinced we’d missed half a mile back. There was a heavy sea mist rolling up across the beach and spilling onto the road, which had become wet and slick. No cars were foolish enough to try to overtake us in the mist, but those going in the opposite direction glided past us silently, the lights from their headlamps feeling the way for them like a blind man’s cane.

  ‘There it is,’ said Marvin suddenly.

  He swung off the main road so quickly that, to the man driving behind us, it must have looked as though the ground had opened up and devoured us. We started to climb up out of the mist on a long road that kept doubling back on itself in a series of hairpins that would have been unnegotiable in a larger car. But Marvin was driving a neat little Mercedes, and he threw it round the hairpins like a man who had decided that life held nothing more for him. Fortunately, I had drunk sufficient to keep me from worrying too much.

  I wanted to ask him more about the Skip-Mary-Gerastan situation, but when I started to frame a question, he took his eyes off the road. So I dried up quickly and let him get on with his driving. After twenty minutes of climbing, we levelled out, and two minutes later he turned into a drive framed with two large concrete pillars. Fifty yards further on we pulled up behind half a dozen other cars. The house was a single-storey affair, meandering over the uneven ground as though it couldn’t make up its mind where to settle down. In spite of the cars in the drive, there was no light showing in any of the windows, but I could just hear the sound of oriental-flavoured music from inside. We crunched across the gravel towards the front door.