Reprise

by Claire Rayner

  ‘The best’ turned out to be expense-account eating of the dreariest kind, all prawn cocktails and steaks flamed in brandy, but it didn’t matter. They sat and giggled at the other people there, the sleek polished men and their well-upholstered and heavily diamonded women, and drank a lot of claret. The wine was better than the food and they made the most of it, and slowly the afternoon’s closeness returned and Theo, made reckless by the alcohol in him – for he had had three hefty gins while waiting for their food – leaned over the table and looked owlishly at her.

  ‘What are you going to do about the Westpark, Maggy?’

  She seemed to pull back a little, like a tortoise going into its carapace. ‘What about it?’

  ‘It’s yours, isn’t it? You’ll have to do something with it, won’t you?’

  ‘Who told you it’s mine?’

  ‘Friese. He talked in circles, sizzled and twisted like a drop of water on a griddle, but I got the impression Dolly had left the place to you.’

  There was a little silence. ‘If I want it,’ she said at length.

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘If I don’t keep Ida on as a housekeeper and general queen of the lot, I lose it. She gets it. Great, isn’t it? Now you’ve got it, now you ain’t. Just the sort of thing Dolly would do to me to get her own back.’

  He blinked. There had been real venom in her voice and he drank some more of his claret and said carefully, ‘Her own back for what?’

  Maggy shrugged. ‘This and that. She’d been trying to do me down for years. Now she’s doing it even though she’s dead – oh, let’s not talk about it. It bores me.’

  ‘You’ve got to talk about it.’ Theo was filled with the stubbornness of the half-drunk. ‘Can’t just leave the place sitting there. Anyway, it’s worth money.’

  ‘Like hell it is. There’s so many debts hanging round its neck it’s a wonder the place is running at all. It’s no bargain of an inheritance, take it from me.’

  ‘Ah, but there’s something in the box, isn’t there? Something in that fancy shmancy box that’ll deal with all that. The slippery Friese said so, and he’s a legal man, so he wouldn’t tell lies, now, would he?’

  Theo was talking just for the sake of hearing his own voice now, and he knew it, and didn’t care.

  ‘Friese says that box has got enough in it to pay off all the debts. You say there’s nothing in there – mystery! Tell you what, darlin’. Old Dolly’s left you a crossword puzzle, that’s what. She’s left you a clue in that box, and you’ve got to follow it up and at the end you’ll find a bleedin’ great pot o’ gold.’

  ‘And a rainbow? Promise me a rainbow.’

  Maggy was amused now, leaning back in her chair and looking at his flushed face.

  ‘Rainbow. Hmm. Got to think about that.’ He thought for a moment, making a special thinking face, staring at her. Then he grinned, and nodded his head. ‘Yup. Rainbow. Big rainbow. Rainbow Records.’

  ‘Rainbow what?’ She stared at him now, quite nonplussed.

  ‘Rainbow Records,’ he said again, and grinned, a wide glittering grin and leaned forward and began to whisper in an obviously conspiratorial way.

  ‘Got a plan, you see, Maggy darlin’! ’S’a lovely plan. Make a fortune for us all, and make you the biggest thing in music. ‘S’a fact! Biggest thing in music –’

  She shook her head at him. ‘I think I’d better drive back, don’t you? You’re pissed out of your mind.’

  ‘No, I’m not. Jus’ a bit ambitious, tha’s all. Bit ambitious. Rainbow Records. Maggy Dundas sole rights, biggest thing in music.’

  ‘Ah!’ She nodded now, an understanding came. ‘You want to start your own label?’

  ‘There! I always said you were the brightest girl in the business, didn’t I tell everyone you were the brightest girl in the business? Tha’s it, tha’s it in one. I’m goin’ to start Rainbow Records, and make you the biggest –’

  ‘Yes, I heard you. The biggest thing in music. You make me sound like a bloody tuba. Theo, I’m taking you back to bed. You need to sleep this one off.’

  ‘I’m telling you. All I need is money, you see. Quite a lot, not just a bit. Enough to get off the ground. I’m one of the best A and R men in the business, you’re a great performer, great musician, so with you and enough money, I’m tellin’ you we could clean up. But money – that’s the problem, eh? Unless you sort out what this is all about, this bloody box, and get the cash to clear up the Westpark and sell it, eh? Then we’ll have lots of lovely money and I’ll have Rainbow Records and you’ll be the biggest thing –’

  ‘– in music,’ she said, and stared at him, trying to control the feeling that was rising in her again. Oh, Christ, not Theo too, after all? Oliver wanted whatever was in that box. Friese was more curious about it than he had any right to be, and now Theo. How many more people would she have to be careful about?

  6

  Ida had spent the morning as she usually did; supervising the chambermaids, checking on every room as they finished them, and then working her way through the kitchens, going over the day’s buying, the menus, the work schedules, yesterday’s left-overs, the lot. They went through a lot of chefs at the Westpark; few of them were willing to tolerate the invasion of their domain by someone from the front of the shop, but she was as adamant as they were. There was no way a single penny was going to be spent at the Westpark, no corner that was going to remain hidden without her being involved, and chefs who complained became out-of-work chefs. The present one was beginning to rumble but she had him in control still. Maybe in a few months’ time they’d have to find another, but right now all was going well.

  And then there was the office, the accounts to be checked, the banking to be done, the detailed careful work that she most enjoyed. Not that anyone ever knew whether Ida was enjoying herself or not. She went about every job in the same way, whether it was inspecting a blocked lavatory and supervising its cleaning up, or checking the flower arrangements the receptionist had done; straight-faced, quiet and steely sure of herself. But she did enjoy the book-keeping, and when she could spend a little longer at it than was strictly needed. There was pleasure to be found in creating those neat columns of figures, making them check out, comparing them with the figures for this week last year and the years before, looking for signs of waste or inefficiency. And she would sit there with her head bent over the red-covered ledgers, and no one seeing her would think that she was perturbed in the least.

  But of course she was. She had watched the debts rise year by year as Dolly spent more and more, raising mortgages, taking loans, wheeling and dealing in spite of Ida’s constant warnings. But Dolly was like that; cared nothing for money, never had. She threw it around like water, giving it to wastrels, lending it to people who would never pay her back in a million years, then borrowing more.

  In the early days she had kept her money affairs to herself; Ida had been allowed to work only around the bedrooms and in the kitchens, but as she had become more and more efficient, more and more indispensable, she had penetrated into the book-keeping side and eventually taken that over too; but not in time. By then the debts had already been huge, and they had been growing ever since. Looking down at the columns of figures now, Ida tightened her lips and thought: ‘They won’t wait much longer. She’ll have to decide, soon.’

  Maggy. Ida put down her pen and folded her hands over the ledger in front of her and stared down at them. Maggy had still been called Margaret Rose when Ida had first seen her. Nine years old, with a great deal of curly red hair over a pale pointed face; an edgy fidgety child, forever demanding something in the way of attention. Ida had looked at her and then at Dolly, soft laughing Dolly, sitting there with the child on her lap with her long legs twined round her mother’s and felt a twist of anger that was so sharp she had wanted to shout it aloud. But of course she had not.

  She had looked unsmilingly at the child and then said to Dolly, ‘Are you sure you want me to stay?’

/>   And Dolly had gazed at her with that silly soft face creased with surprise and said, ‘But I told you I did. O’ course you must, so long as you like, whatever suits you. Plenty to do around here, one way and another – so long as you like.’

  She had a way of speech that was difficult to identify; soft and blurred at the edges, rounded vowels that made her sound comfortable and easy, and it was a long time before Ida, London born and bred, discovered it was Gloucestershire.

  Anyway, Ida had stayed. She had moved herself and her one suitcase into the Creffield Road house and put her underwear tidily into the battered chest of drawers in the smallest back room, and hung up her three dresses and her jacket in the equally battered wardrobe, and got to work. She had cooked supper on that first evening; sitting now at the Westpark, looking down at her own hands clasped over the open ledgers, she saw herself far away down the corridor of the years, moving about that Uttered scruffy kitchen, with her sleeves rolled up and a tea towel tied round her waist for an apron. She had been twenty-two; a solidly built silent girl with dark hair club cut and deliberately unattractive over her square face. Now she was iron grey and her hair was neatly shaped by a good hairdresser and her clothes were good and well kept. Not at all like the ugly baggy tweed skirt and yellow twill shirt she had worn that long ago evening to cook bubble and squeak for them all.

  Remembering, she almost smiled; bubble and squeak. The boarders had come into the dining room and looked suspiciously at the table, because she had laid it carefully, and it looked nice. She had bought some paper serviettes at the shop on the corner and folded them into cornets and set them in the chipped drinking glasses, and then put their food in front of them carefully arranged on the plates, and considering that she had found only cold potatoes and a couple of onions and a dish of left-over cabbage in the kitchen, it was a dammed good supper. The bubble and squeak had been crisp and savoury, spiked as it was with onions to rid the cabbage component of its power, and she had bought some eggs too, and put a fried one on the middle of each portion. Not the most elegant food in the world but the boarders had wolfed it, and asked for second helpings and there had been a mood of sudden cheerfulness in the dusty dining room, with the men laughing and chaffing Dolly and the two women, those dull sisters who worked in a draper’s shop in Acton High Road – what were their names? The memory of them had vanished as surely as their thin grey faces – and Dolly saying wonderingly over and over again, ‘Well, who’d ’a’ thought it, who’d ’a’ thought you could make anything so good out o’ what I got in the kitchen of a Friday night? Who’d ’a’ thought it?’

  Everyone had been cheerful except herself and Margaret Rose. The child had sat and stared sulkily at her plate and refused to eat, while her mother coaxed and exclaimed over her and the men rallied her, until she had burst into tears and had to be given chocolate biscuits from a secret store in her mother’s desk, and all the time Ida had quietly eaten her own supper, and given the boarders their second helpings and then the fruit crumble she had put together, again using bits and pieces she had found in that appallingly ill-equipped kitchen, and said nothing. But she had registered the child as spoiled, mulish, difficult, in as bad a state of disorder as the boarding house itself, and had added her to her private plan of reorganization. And if she had wondered fleetingly what sort of child one of her own would have turned out like, she did not allow that thought to reach the front of her mind.

  Looking back down the telescope of the years, seeing those figures moving about in tiny but vivid definition so far away, Ida sighed sharply and then switched off the memories as crisply as if she had thrown a switch. Yesterday was over, had no further relevance. It was today and today’s debts and Dolly’s death and the ownership of the Westpark that mattered now. Something would have to be done.

  She made one more tour of the hotel before leaving to do it. The guests were, as usual, all out, except for Mrs Matthews, old and twisted, who sat in her favourite armchair in the corner of the lounge, staring out into the street, avid for any action, whether it be another car coming to park or someone walking a dog. She would have to go soon, Ida thought, nodding and being bright and professional at her as she went by. This wasn’t a home for the elderly. The sort of guests they wanted at the Westpark were the sort they mostly had, the tourists who spent every moment they had out in the streets of London, soaking up whatever it was tourists came to London for. The Westpark didn’t want people who used it as their home, who found human contact and security and the comfort of permanence in it. That had been what Dolly had enjoyed providing in the old days in Acton, the days when the place had been littered with all sorts of people, all day long. There had been all those men lounging around in their shirt sleeves, sometimes in their vests, in the sitting room, in the dining room, even in the kitchen unless Ida managed to turf them out, listening to the wireless and constantly on the phone with their bets. Ida had told her then, kept on telling her, that there was no profit to be made running a place like that. ‘Get them out,’ she had told Dolly. ‘Get rid of that sort – they just use up heat and light and eat more than they pay for, and expect to be waited on and they’re trouble. Go for the sort that are out all day, keep out of your hair –’

  But Dolly had just smiled that soft soppy smile of hers and agreed that Ida was absolutely right, and gone on as she always had, getting involved with the people who came as customers, turning them all into friends, almost relations, just as she had with Ida herself. Ida had come to work, so she would remind Dolly fiercely whenever the subject came up, but Dolly would just laugh and say, ‘I know, my dear, I know that very well, and glad I am that you did, for where’d we all be without you? But you’re more’n just someone as works here, now, aren’t you? Part o’ the place you are, my dear, an’ that’s the way we like it –’ Oh, it had been impossible to make Dolly see any sense; but now it would be different. Old women like Mrs Matthews had no place in a hotel like this one, a business-like place that was going to pay off its debts. So Ida told herself. But still did nothing about getting rid of Mrs Matthews. She just nodded at her and was professionally bright, and let her be. Which was, as most people who knew her would have agreed, somewhat out of character for Ida.

  She made the journey into town by underground, walking down to Lancaster Gate station in her neat check tweed coat and her highly polished lace-up real leather shoes – no nasty modern plastic for Ida – looking every inch the well-heeled, well-turned-out lady that she was. No one who was looking at her would ever doubt for a moment that she was a woman who had her life well held together, who knew good from bad, real from false, right from wrong. She was admirable without being showy, and that was precisely what she wanted to be. No one looking at her could ever know what she had once been, could guess the effect she had once had on people who saw her, the messiness that had been her life. Ida tightened her mouth and lifted her chin, and refused to think about anything but this morning’s journey.

  She had checked at the office of Jump Records and they had said vaguely that, yes, Maggy would be there and did the caller want to leave a message? Someone would probably get around to giving it to her. But Ida has said coolly that there was no need, she’d call back, and no she wouldn’t leave her name, thank you. And had set out unannounced because there was no other way she could actually talk to the girl. It had been a long time since Maggy had willingly faced Ida and there was no reason to suppose she would behave in any other way now. But somehow the matter had to be ironed out, and Ida was the one who could iron it. And would.

  She disapproved violently of the office when she found it. It was on the third floor of a tatty house in Denmark Street, and the stairs she had to climb smelled of mice and old shoes and mildew, although an attempt had been made to smarten them a bit with beige coir matting and purple paint on the walls. The outer office was a tiny cubby hole which reeked of the cheap perfume of the bored-looking girl sitting there behind a small switchboard and when Ida stonily asked for Miss Dundas,
the girl stared blankly at her with her mouth hanging lax and open, and then jerked her head sideways at a door on the other side. That led to a larger room, with walls covered with lurid posters advertising pop concerts and discos, and light fittings the shape of huge plastic breasts with vast crimson nipples fashioned in perfect detail stuck over them. One wall was dominated by a painting of a male nude with unbelievably large genitals, and beside it, hanging from a drawing pin by a string tied horribly round its lolling neck, was a rag doll which also was decorated with an outside phallus, made particularly lewd by the purple colour of the cloth of which it was made.

  And beneath it all, at a cluttered desk, sat Theo. She looked at him and nodded briefly and he stared at her, blankly, as though he didn’t recognize her.

  ‘Ida?’ he said then, and got to his feet, awkwardly, like a child who had been caught by his schoolmaster doing unspeakably wicked things behind the desk lid. ‘Ida? What are you doing – I mean, I didn’t expect – my dear, do sit down –’ And he looked round for a chair, vaguely, as though he expected one to come up out of the ground like a demon king coming through the trap door in a pantomime.

  ‘I have to talk to Maggy about the Westpark,’ she said, not moving. She was holding her heavy leather bag in front of her, as though it were some sort of bulwark, both hands neatly side by side on its wide strap. Her feet were tidily together and her toes turned out at precisely even angles. She looks like an army sergeant, Theo thought and wanted to laugh, suddenly. An army sergeant in drag.

  ‘Maggy? But, my dear, you really can’t – I mean, this isn’t the place, precisely, is it? Look, do sit down, I’ll send for some coffee – Sharlene!’ He bawled the name over his shoulder as he came round the desk and brought a chair from the other side of the room, and after a moment the girl from the outer office put her open-mouthed blank face round the door and said, ‘Eh? What’cher want?’