Pearls

by Celia Brayfield

  Monty recorded five new songs for her demo tape, plus one of the Juice’s old hits to remind people of her credentials. Then, with a sense of devilment, she decided to add an old classic, ‘Can’t Get Used To Losing You’, which she sang in a sarcastic whine with a maddening, incessant computer drumbeat which sounded, the engineer said, like someone banging his head against a wall.

  When the tape was finished, Monty took Cindy and went shopping to the new boutiques at the World’s End, where she bought a leather dress with a strapless top which laced tightly down the back, and was cut so low that it dipped almost to the crease of her buttocks.

  ‘You look like a walking wet-dream,’ Cindy told her, admiring the dress in the cracked mirror.

  ‘Let’s face it, I am a walking wet-dream for half the kids in town,’ Monty replied. ‘Do you think I should cut my hair?’

  ‘No, men like long hair.’

  Monty considered. It seemed a sound argument – the business of peddling your talent seemed to be largely the business of pleasing men. Cindy suggested she add a pair of red plastic stilettoes to the outfit, and some shiny black gloves that reached over her elbows.

  ‘That ought to grab their imagination.’ Monty pouted with satisfaction and pulled down the top of the leather dress to exhibit a dangerous depth of bosom. I’d better buy an eye-pencil tomorrow, she thought. Nothing looks more sixties than the old arched eyebrows just a couple of hairs thick.

  Sig Bear at Biffo Records never noticed her eyebrows. ‘Here she is, the body gorgeous!’ he shouted, bursting out of his office into the dank corridor which was Biffo’s reception area. His office had no furniture at all, only two telephones on the floor and a black 1950s statue of an Egyptian cat. I suppose, Monty thought, as she sat on the stained carpet, he’s going to want to lay me on this at some point.

  ‘Wash your mind out with soap and water,’ Sig suggested, ripping open a can of beer and offering it to her. He smiled like a frog, a wide, fat, self-satisfied grin.

  ‘The bottom line,’ he told her, ‘is that I’ve been wanting to sign you ever since we set this label up, but we ain’t got too much loot to chuck around. In six months I reckon one of the big fish’ll swim along and buy us out if we look tasty enough. I’d like to whack out a single from you straight away, then maybe another, then follow up with the album. So what I suggest is a two-year contract, with an option after that. We’ve got it drawn up somewhere – I’ll get the girl to look for it.’

  ‘Did you know I’d be round, then?’

  ‘No, but there’s no harm in wishing, is there? That’s the power of positive thinking. There’s only one thing I don’t like about you, to tell the truth.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘The name. It’s too real. We want a fantasy kind of a name.’

  To Monty’s surprise, it was Christmas Eve before she got laid on the floor of Sig’s office. Apart from the fact that they both skinned their knees on the harsh pile of the carpet, it was thoroughly satisfying. After a decade of sexual liberation, boys were a lot wiser about girls’intimate geography. Afterwards they sat on the floor sharing a beer, watching The Wizard of Oz on television. Judy Garland was putting on the ruby slippers. Suddenly Sig gulped down the mouthful of beer which he had just swigged and gestured at the screen with the can.

  ‘That’s it,’ he announced.

  ‘What’s it?’

  ‘Your name – Ruby Slippers.’

  ‘Great! I love it!’ I’d never be able to think of anything clever like that, she thought. It’s perfect. I’m so lucky I’ve got Sig to take care of all that stuff.

  ‘Follow the yellow brick road,’ he gurgled, pushing up the leather skirt she had only just put on.

  ‘Follow the yellow brick road …’ Luckily, he had not had time to put his trousers back on.

  ‘Follow, follow, follow, follow …’ There was some snuffling, then silence, then a few grunts. The sightless ceramic eyes of the Egyptian cat looked disapproving. ‘Ah Ruby,’ he breathed in Monty’s ear. ‘I always wanted to fuck a chick called Ruby.’

  The rest of the winter was much less satisfactory. Because Cathy bullied her every day, Monty at last met Dennis to check out her financial position, and discovered that Rick had copyrighted all the Juice’s songs in his name alone. She could claim no royalties, and since a new version of her old telephone song was climbing the Hot 100, and there were two disco versions of other songs deing well in Germany, this was a serious loss.

  ‘You must sue him,’ Cathy told her. ‘Don’t worry about whether you can afford to – you can’t afford not do it for your own self-respect. I’ll handle the bills.’

  Monty hired a slick law firm with offices in Mayfair, but within a few months all her signing money from Biffo had been spent, and she was embarrassed at the amount Cathy was having to find to meet the lawyers’bills when it was plain that the case could drag on for years before coming to court. She also felt increasingly uncomfortable living in Cathy’s apartment. She felt as if her big sister were taking over her life completely and so she moved into Cindy Moon’s small apartment at the top of a big house in Notting Hill Gate. As Sig was quick to point out, this also gave her the advantage of an association with Cindy’s neo-punk public profile.

  Biffo released Ruby Slippers’first single, a fast, angry song called ‘Lies’. Sig insisted that ‘Can’t Get Used To Losing You’should be the B side, and Monty realized he was right when it tore up to No. 3 in the British charts. There was a lot of publicity and Monty gave endless interviews about her split with Rick and the video scandal.

  She sat with Cindy watching herself on TV. The camera started at the red shoes and moved unsteadily up her body. The studio audience were trying to look animated.

  ‘You’ve made it, kid. Congratulations.’ Cindy patted her ankle. ‘What’s the matter, why aren’t you jumping around being happy? You’re a star!’

  ‘I don’t know.’ Monty saw herself on the TV, swinging her leather-swathed hips, her pouting lips jammy with gloss as she mimed to the sound of her own voice. ‘It doesn’t feel like me, I guess. Not yet, anyway.’

  Chapter Twenty-One

  The winter of 1945 was one of the bitterest that Britain had ever endured. The cold was no worse than in many other years; the wind blew no more meanly through the streets of London than it had before. What made the winter at the end of the war so cruel was the climate of hopeless disappointment. There was to be no reward for the years of suffering; instead there was to be greater deprivation than ever – no food, no clothes, no fuel, no homes, no work, no end to the brutalizing queues for rations and the making do. Victory had left Britain bankrupt, with nothing to take for comfort but illusions of glory.

  The Bourton family’s London home had been requisitioned by the War Office, so James and Bill had no option but to take the quarters to which they were ordered, in a shabby Pimlico terrace where an assortment of officers from the less glamorous, more unorthodox outfits in all three services were billeted. It was a cold, dingy, sour-smelling building with dog-eared exhortations to economy stuck to every wall. Over the meagre fire in the lounge was a poem in pokerwork on a piece of packing-case, which was intended to prevent the occupants using too much coal. It read:

  If it’s warmth that you desire,

  Poke the wife and not the fire,

  And if you lead a single life,

  Poke some other bugger’s wife.

  Since the trappings of grandeur were all that remained, their value was exaggerated. James, now Captain Lord James Bourton, DSO, quailed under the hearty praise for his supposed grit and courage, and tried to bury the memory of the chaotic fear-filled night in which he had been transformed from a failure to a hero. By the time he stood with Bill Treadwell on a windy street-corner by the side of Buckingham Palace, James was angry that so many people were anxious to make him a hero. He thought the heroes were the men who had died in Malaya, not the lucky ones like himself. The hideous memory of the charnel house by the rai
lway track mocked him, but he could no more repudiate it than give back the medal he now held to his side in a cheap, black mock-leather case. To do either would have been to declare himself a traitor.

  ‘How’s your father?’ Bill asked as they walked cautiously round the edge of the crowd. A pack of photographers was taking snapshots of the newly decorated men, who posed proudly in their uniforms with their medal-cases open and their families around them. James paused and forced his own case into his coat pocket.

  ‘He’s slipping away. They thought he’d die last night, but he hung on. At least it means my mother couldn’t come here with me – be grateful for small mercies, at least.’

  Lady Davina had been the most vociferous barker of his valour. She proudly annexed to herself the admiration directed to her son, the triumphant warrior.

  ‘What’ll you do when he goes? Are you coming back to Malaya?’ They turned into St James’s Park.

  ‘Yes, I want to. My job’s there, if I want it, though the company wants to run the estate now with as few Europeans as they can. Still, that’ll be more to my taste than lurking around at Bourton as the second son, and having to touch my brother for money. You’re still set to go back?’

  ‘For sure.’ The Australian stalked, heronlike, by the side of the concrete lake-basin. The water in the ornamental pools had been drained to prevent German bombers taking bearings from such prominent landmarks. ‘Heaven knows what will happen now, Jim. I went to a briefing at the Colonial Office yesterday and these Whitehall types haven’t a clue. It’s as plain as day to you and me that the Commies will just stay in the jungle and fight us instead of the Japs, but they can’t see it. They think they can just ask for the guns they dropped to the Communists to be surrendered, and that’ll be that. My guess is there are thousands of arms hidden away in the jungle and the comrades are just waiting for the moment to use them.’ He squinted up at the bleak sky. ‘My heart’s in that country, somewhere, Jim. I feel I belong there. I certainly don’t feel that this is home.’

  James did not feel that London was home either. He scarcely remembered anything about it, and the alien city-scape of bombed buildings and empty streets only reminded him more forcefully that his war had been a nursery game of make-believe in comparison with the ordeals of others.

  At Bourton there were further reminders. The house had been requisitioned as a convalescent hospital, and although most of the wounded men had left already there were enough wrecked bodies to shuffle across the neglected lawns and taunt him with their misfortune. The park was ploughed with ambulance tyretracks; many of the great trees which had been the familiar friends of his boyhood had been felled, and the deer had gone.

  The Duke of Witheram was dying by inches, his blood struggling through arteries silted with the fat of his own land. He had been barely conscious for several months, and three nurses attended him day and night.

  James whiled away the grey days shooting, but there was not much game, since the gamekeepers had been called up to fight and every able man in the village had poached a bird when he could. Shooting was James’s cover for taking a walk and enjoying the domesticated contours of the English landscape, in which every tree that flourished did so with a landowner’s approval and every field conformed to a farmer’s imperative. Only among the immense beech trees of the West Wood did James feel the arcane force of free nature that animated the jungle. James had a sensitivity which would have equipped him to be an artist had he been born into a milieu which recognized art; he enjoyed the docile beauty of his ancestral land but felt confined by it. It was a claustrophobic world in which everything was limited, regulated and ordered, including himself.

  At last the night nurse noticed that the old Duke was no longer breathing and, at a decent hour in the early morning, tapped on Hugo’s door to announce that his father was dead.

  ‘I do not wish to be known as Dowager,’ the widowed Davina told her family as they gathered for a subdued breakfast. ‘I shall revert to the title I had before my marriage – so much more attractive. I intend to put an announcement in The Times immediately.’

  ‘Mother, I think you should wait a few days. We haven’t announced Father’s death yet, after all.’ Hugo’s brown bullock’s eyes quelled his mother with reproach.

  ‘Of course, Hugo, you are the head of the family now, I shall do whatever you say,’ she conceded. ‘Will you be talking to Pasterns about the will?’

  ‘Naturally.’

  The new Duke did more than anyone expected him to do. In the greatest display of dynamism he was to give in his lifetime, Hugo took the reins of the estate firmly from his mother’s hands and applied himself to mastering the facts of the family’s situation. Even his unimpressionable nature was moved by what he discovered. ‘We’re bust, as near as dammit,’ he confided to James in their father’s study. ‘Mother’s run through a fortune without the slightest regard for the future of the estate, and there’s no evidence that Father took much interest. He said as much to me himself: “There’s enough to see me out; after that you can sink or swim on your own,” that was his line. There’s been no maintenance, no investment, no planning of any kind.’

  ‘What are you going to do?’ James was relieved that the inflexible law of primogeniture had absolved him of the responsibility for salvaging the family fortune.

  ‘Sit down with some chap from Pasterns who’s supposed to be an expert and see if we can cut our losses.’

  A few weeks later the team of lawyers arrived, curious to poke around the estate which most of them knew only through the bundles of documents which related to its disposition. Hugo announced a conference on the family’s future.

  ‘I want you to know, darling, that it’s all arranged,’ Lady Davina hissed in James’s ear as they made their way to the room set aside for the occasion.

  ‘What’s arranged?’ James pulled away his arm with irritation. He hated his mother’s possessive caresses.

  ‘Before your dear Papa went completely ga-ga, I had a word with him about you, and he agreed to something special for you,’ she told him, nodding with satisfaction at her own foresight. ‘You’ll see how clever I’ve been. You’re a very lucky boy.’

  When the will was read there was an audible gasp from Hugo as the lawyer read out the codicil to which she referred. The Duke had set up a trust for his younger son to provide a handsome endowment ‘in the event that he should see fit to marry and sire issue’. The bequest was in cash, and James knew enough to appreciate that it would be hard to find the money from the diminished estate.

  Hugo passed the next two days with the lawyers. Lady Davina bustled about the North Wing, harassing the hospital authorities to quit the main part of the house, so that she could repossess her kingdom, and outlining to James their delectable future as she saw it. She replaced the Red Cross uniform which she had affected during the war with a smart, blue costume made up from black-market wool crépe, with stylish velvet revers.

  ‘I thought you could have the London house, and I shall spend the winters there with you and the summer down here with Hugo. It’ll be such fun, won’t it, darling, when this dreary, old rationing is over? You’ve missed some marvellous parties, of course, but there’ll be so many more. London is simply crawling with pretty widows: you’ll be able to take your pick.’

  Hugo took visible pleasure in dashing her plans; discomfiting his mother’s vain ambitions was now the only pleasurable aspect of his task. ‘The best we can do is offer the house to the National Trust,’ he told them. ‘They’ll want an endowment with it, and to raise that I propose to sell the farms. The village will revert to the Rural District Council. The London house will have to go, though I’m advised to keep some stake up there so we may buy something smaller. All the property will have to be sold. Assuming that the Trust do buy the house, we’ll be allowed to remain in a part of it, and we can retain ownership of the home farm and some of the commercial holdings.’

  ‘Hugo, this is outrageous! I will not allow it! Thi
s is my home. I can’t possibly have charabancs and daytrippers in my home.’

  ‘Mother, you have no choice. I think you should know that the opinion of our advisers is that we would be in a considerably better position if you had not been determined to play the lady of the manor in quite such extravagant style.’

  ‘You forget, Hugo darling, that if I had not refitted this dismal barn, it wouldn’t be the showpiece it is today and you would have precious little chance of interesting the National Trust in it.’

  Later she told James, ‘See how lucky you are – you’ll be living better than Hugo once you’re married. Darling, do hurry up. I can’t stand another minute in this place knowing I’ve got to lose it.’

  Could she have known what the state of the family’s affairs was? Of course she must have known better than anyone. James was haunted by the conviction that his mother had finagled his bequest only to assure her own future standard of living. He was terrified of the prospect of living forever in thrall to her insatiable ego, with a wife whom she would no doubt pick out for him and children who would be her cowed playthings just as he and Hugo had been. The image of a woman rocking a contented infant in a sarong cradle flashed into his mind, trailing with it the faint memory of spiritual peace.

  What he craved now was the sturdy sense of self-determination he had enjoyed in Malaya. What he feared was the humiliating role of his mother’s pawn. James made up his mind. This bizarre legacy changed nothing. He would never claim it; instead, he would take the first passage he could get to Penang.

  Within a month he was gone, and his last sight of England was a crowd of about five hundred dockers at Southampton, fighting among themselves at the end of a demonstration against plans to close down half the dockyard and take away the jobs to which they had only just returned from the war.

  James nearly cried with emotion as the train glided to a halt and the familiar, red dirt-road through the jungle opened up before him. There was a small black car waiting at the levelled area beside the railway track, and beside it a figure he recognized with joy.