by Jessie Keane
But here he was. With Gilda.
He saw that she was awake too, her sea-green eyes smiling into his.
‘I don’t know anything about you,’ she said.
He kissed her lightly. ‘What do you want to know?’
‘Oh, I don’t know. What you like . . . ?’
‘I like you.’
‘I know that. What you hate. What frightens you . . . ?’
‘Nothing frightens me.’
‘Something must.’
Kit lay back and thought about it. ‘Fire,’ he said at last.
‘What?’
He shrugged. ‘I don’t like to feel the heat of a fire. Weird, yeah? So come on. What frightens you?’
Gilda’s smile slipped. ‘Tito frightens me,’ she said.
Kit said nothing.
Suddenly she smiled again and put her arms around his neck. ‘Kiss me,’ she ordered.
Michael was asking his contacts about Ruby Darke. He found her so fascinating. So cool, so remote. And yet so downright sexy.
‘Her brother Charlie’s in stir,’ said Michael’s mate over a cognac.
‘He did the Post Office robbery, back in the day,’ said Michael. He knew about that. Everyone did.
‘After which his brother Joe took over the family firm.’
‘Yeah, but where does Ruby fit in?’
His friend smiled. ‘She don’t. There was a big scandal, Ted Darke’s missus was playing away with some coon in a jazz club. Got herself up the duff with Ruby. It’s a wonder the old man didn’t murder the girl, but word is he was a bit of a religious nutter: Thou shalt not kill, et cetera. Ruby’s straight. Into legitimate business, that’s all.’
‘What about the mother?’
‘I heard she died having Ruby, the poor cow.’
71
1967
It cost them just a pound to get in to the Happening at Alexandra Palace. They were wearing their lacy minidresses, lots of beads. Mandy also wore a too-large white ten-gallon hat that kept falling over her eyes, and a yellow poncho.
Late into the evening, Daisy heard that someone had been stabbed at the back of the hall but the police didn’t come because they had to get an entry warrant and at midnight it was clear that the gig would be over before that happened. Up on stage, the Crazy World of Arthur Brown was dressed in an insect costume.
Daisy could only see the stage at a far distance, and the searchlights winked on and off constantly, alternately dazzling her and then leaving her blind. She could hear the roar of the Gibson guitars and the shrieking gutsy wail of Eric Burden and his New Animals. There was a huge screen hung from the balcony, and projected onto it in multicolours was an amoeba or something, constantly dividing and reforming. Daisy thought that if she stared at it for long enough, she’d go mad.
‘Isn’t it great?’ demanded Mandy, jigging about alongside her in the midst of a huge, heaving, sweating throng of other bodies.
It was pretty great. Pretty scary too, ten thousand people packed into the Ally Pally for a mad night of psychedelic fun. Mandy rummaged around in her string bag and then shoved a pill into Daisy’s hand.
‘It’s just speed,’ she said. ‘Nothing nasty – it just gives you a lift.’
Daisy took it and suddenly she felt supercharged, all senses heightened. There was a guy squatting nearby tripping out by smoking banana scrapings, and someone ripped a fire extinguisher from the wall and started spraying the crowd with it.
Daisy and Mandy got soaked, and instead of being furious with the fool, for some reason Daisy found this enormously funny. She laughed until she thought she was going to be sick, and started thinking about her staid, boring mother, who would be so outraged to see her daughter in such a happening place.
‘I’m liberated,’ shouted Daisy, and started ripping her clothes off.
‘You’re high as a kite,’ said Mandy, trying hard to get Daisy’s clothes back on.
On top of the Ally Pally’s organ, forty feet up in the air, a man in a purple shirt was beckoning others to follow him. People in floral shirts and hipster loon pants started climbing the scaffolding. One man had a lit candle gripped in his teeth. Another was swinging like a monkey from the scaffolding, about to fall.
‘Please come down from the scaffolding!’ blared a loudspeaker suddenly.
Nobody took any notice.
‘If you don’t get down from the scaffolding, the show will be stopped!’
Daisy found this hilarious. The people kept climbing upward. She ran forward to join them, but then all the lights went out. When they went back on again, everyone was coming down off the scaffolding. A long-haired young man with a white-painted beard came down near her and grinned at her and passed her the plastic daffodil he’d had clamped between his teeth.
‘A token of love,’ he said. His eyes looked like saucers.
‘Let’s have a love-in,’ said Daisy, and suddenly this seemed like the most excellent idea. She and Mandy stripped naked but for their beads and coloured headbands, and the young man and his friend did the same. Mandy supported Daisy from behind, and the young man’s friend held him from behind, and the two connected, Daisy’s thighs locking around the young man’s waist as he stood there with his friend’s arms around him. It was a moment of complete communal love, with everyone around them observing and encouraging them to let it happen.
‘Man, this is so real,’ said someone beside Daisy’s ear. The young man penetrated her briskly and everyone crowded around them. She felt a part of the whole, accepted, wanted, desired. Then it was Mandy and the friend’s turn, and they joined together in a frantic scrabble, Daisy and her partner supporting them, fondling them, loving them.
Someone was saying Pink Floyd were on the stage, but the noise and the crush of people were so intense that Daisy found she didn’t even care. Her head was starting to spin from the heat; she felt parched. She felt . . . very odd.
She reeled away to the side of the great hall and slid down the wall. She sat there, thinking she was about to be sick. People passed by her, huge giants looming over her. She felt the stickiness between her thighs and frowned in confusion. How had that happened? Had her period come early or something . . . ? And where were her clothes?
Her stomach contracted once, hard, and she leaned over and vomited on the floor.
‘Jesus,’ she groaned, and Mandy lurched up to her and slid down beside her. Daisy had no idea where their clothes had gone. Mandy’s hat and poncho had vanished somewhere, into the crowd. But Mandy was ever resourceful. She was holding two jackets. She gave one to Daisy, who was now shivering, and put the other one on herself.
The music played on, the lights strobed. They sat there for an hour, too weak to move. Then at last Mandy said: ‘Let’s go, shall we?’ and they staggered outside.
It was two o’clock, and still there were people going into the hall.
‘What’s it like in there?’ asked one couple passing by the two girls in their jackets and – apparently – little else.
‘Groovy. Really happening,’ said Mandy.
Daisy felt too sick to speak.
There was an ambulance out here, someone was being shoved in the back, there was blood . . .
Daisy couldn’t look. Her first happening, and she’d been sick and thought she was going to pass out. And . . . oh God, she thought she’d done something really stupid. Hadn’t she fucked someone, someone she didn’t even know? Hadn’t she done that again, when she had sworn she wouldn’t? Her mind felt wired, scrabbling around like a rat in a cage, but her body was exhausted. Mandy hailed a cab, and they fell in the back of it, and went home.
72
1968
‘More flowers? God, that man just don’t know the meaning of the word quit,’ complained Ruby.
Jane, her PA, brought the huge bouquet of creamy-white roses into Ruby’s office over the flagship store. It was the third bouquet she’d received from Michael Ward.
‘Don’t knock it,’ said Jane with a wry s
mile. She was a plump, immaculate and silver-haired matron, extremely efficient, long-married and merry-eyed. ‘Mine don’t even know what flowers are for.’
Ruby stood up and took the bouquet from her. ‘Is there a note . . . ?’
‘Yeah, it’s here, look.’
Ruby read it.
Roses for a Ruby. Call me.
His number was written underneath.
Ruby gazed at it, and wondered. Mr Ward was a very handsome man with his iron-grey hair and his steely grey eyes. He oozed a brutal confidence. He scared her. All right, he attracted her too. She had to admit that.
But . . .
She’d already done the whole love thing once, in her youth, with Cornelius. It had been painful beyond belief. To start over again, try again with another man . . . she didn’t want to do it. It would hurt too much when it all went wrong. And it would; she knew it would.
‘I’ll put them in water then . . . ?’ suggested Jane, while Ruby stood there, staring at the note.
Ruby shook herself. ‘Yeah. Thanks, Jane.’
No, it was safer to cling to her business. They were launching a new wine department to run alongside the food halls, and it had taken up most of her time to debate with her team the merits of the various wines and choose which wines to select. They had settled on eighteen wines, plus vermouth, sherry, beers and cider.
‘Liebfraumilch at ninety-five pence a bottle, that’s a good deal,’ had been Jane’s input. ‘Us ladies do love a sweet wine.’
So the Liebfraumilch had been included, along with a good selection of other whites and reds.
What remained of Ruby’s time was taken up with wondering if she could get up the nerve to meet with Cornelius and ask if she could see her daughter. She quailed at asking him, though. She knew he’d be angry at the very idea. And she hadn’t seen him face-to-face in years.
She saw him often in the press: Lord Bray was a very influential man now, chairman of many charities and active in politics in the upper house. It always shocked her when she saw his photo. He was still her Cornelius, more white than blond now, with crinkling lines around his eyes when the camera caught him smiling.
Yes, he was older, but he was still the devastatingly attractive charmer she had known. If she saw him in the flesh, would she turn back into the star-struck idiot youngster she had once been, falling out of the Windmill Theatre straight into his arms?
‘You gonna put this man out of his misery soon?’ asked Jane, pausing at the door with the bouquet in her arms.
‘Mr Ward? I don’t think so,’ said Ruby, sitting down behind her desk and reaching for last month’s figures.
‘Shame,’ said Jane. ‘You could use some fun in your life.’
‘I have the business,’ said Ruby with a brisk smile. Jane was starting to sound like Vi. Going on about fun all the time, when Ruby really wasn’t interested. She’d thrown herself into business to hide from her own feelings. What else could she have done? Shit happened. All you could do was tough it out, get on with it.
‘That’s work,’ said Jane. ‘That ain’t fun.’
‘So you say.’
‘I do say. You gonna do that thing of lying on your deathbed saying you wished you’d spent more time at work? I don’t think so. Love’s what counts, girl. Family. That’s the stuff that matters in the end.’
Family! Apart from Joe and Betsy and their kids, she had none. She was pleased that Joe seemed to have drawn back a little from all the shady deals and thuggery he’d once been so deeply involved in with Charlie. Oh, he was still operating on the fringes of it all, she knew that – but she thought that Charlie’s fate had sobered Joe a lot, made him more careful. Joe was a family man these days. But what was she?
She had cashed in on her daughter.
Sacrificed her poor son.
Sold her soul to the devil, in fact.
As the door closed on Jane, Ruby turned her attention back to the figures. Maybe she didn’t even deserve happiness. Maybe she was just wicked, through and through. She concentrated on the figures, forgot the rest. She had to, or it would drive her crazy. Tonight, when she got home, she would think about all this again. About her children. She promised herself she would.
73
1968
‘Oh, for God’s sake, Daisy, this is ridiculous,’ said Aunt Ju.
They were sitting in the waiting room in Harley Street. It was a beautiful high-ceilinged Georgian building, staffed by discreet white-coated nurses and one of the best private doctors in the country.
‘I can’t believe you’ve been so stupid. Again.’
Daisy sat there, ashamed. She had been stupid. Her wild night out with Mandy had come at a cost. As the months had wound on after the happening, she had become aware of a monstrous itching in her genital region. She could remember dimly that she’d had sex with someone that night, but she didn’t know who. And now she had this horrible itch.
She suffered it in silence and then in despair and desperation went to Aunt Ju, who instantly whisked her off to her doctor.
‘Crabs,’ he pronounced, when Daisy had been examined and Aunt Ju was ushered in with her to hear the diagnosis. He wrote a prescription and Aunt Ju snatched it from him, casting a withering look at her niece. ‘This’ll clear it up. And, young woman, you should be more careful who you mix with in future.’
‘I have never been so embarrassed in my entire life,’ said Aunt Ju as she left the building with a cringing Daisy. She shook her head in disbelief. ‘For the love of God, Daisy, what on earth have you been up to?’
Daisy hung her head in shame. She’d even frightened herself this time. She’d awoken on the morning after the happening feeling dry-mouthed, foul-headed and sick. She remembered snatches of what she’d done, how she’d behaved, and was appalled. ‘You won’t tell Mother, will you?’ she begged.
‘No. I won’t. But only because I want to spare her feelings, and your father’s too. They’re so good to you. Cornelius bought you that car just a week ago.’
Daisy thought about the little car, her Mini. Red and shiny as a Christmas bauble, and she loved it. But that was always Pa’s answer to everything: throw money at it. She didn’t see him much.
Aunt Ju raised an imperious hand as a cab approached. ‘I think it’s best if you go home, Daisy. I really do. I don’t know what to do with you any more. You’re twenty-four years old, and all you do is get into trouble. You need to just grow up. You are worrying me to death.’
Considering Aunt Ju never seemed to care much what she did or where she went, Daisy thought this was a bit rich. But she didn’t say so. She was in enough trouble as it was, doomed to be sent back to the country, without Mandy, without any hope of entertainment or simple downright fun.
But maybe Aunt Ju had a point. Maybe she was just too damned old now for happenings, love-ins and all that shit.
Kit was busy with the clubs and bars and restaurants, sending Mr Ward’s boys out here, there and everywhere, raking in fistfuls of money and heading off trouble. He was also busy with the voracious Gilda, meeting up with her as often as he could in far-off locations around the home counties. They would drive there separately, meet up, make love, then go home separately the following morning.
This was what he was in the act of doing in his beautiful, treasured Bentley Tourer, driving over a little hump-backed bridge over a river somewhere in the lush Hampshire countryside. There were froths of tall creamy flowers all along the edges of the lane, and in the field below they were cutting some green stuff or other, he noticed – and then a red Mini was lurching towards him, filling his windscreen, and he accelerated, pulling the wheel hard to the left to avoid crashing into it. He shot over the bridge, hearing a shriek of metal as the other car swerved and bumped the edge of it. He slammed on the brakes, switched off the engine, and jumped out.
The Mini was over the other side of the bridge, its wheels embedded in greenery, its side scraped to bare metal. Kit went to the driver’s door and flung it open.
‘You fucking fool, what d’you think you’re doing?’ he shouted.
A dishevelled blonde girl looked up at him, her face sheet-white.
‘What am I doing?’ she shot back in a crisp Home Counties accent. ‘I’m not the one who was in the middle of the road.’
‘I wasn’t in the middle of the road. I was coming over a single-lane bridge at a reasonable speed, and your driving is crazy.’
Daisy thought that this was too much. She’d been humiliated in London, cured of her embarrassing problem and was now at home, at Brayfield, bored and wondering about a job, fending off her mother’s probing questions about why Aunt Ju had sent her home so suddenly. She’d taken the Mini out for a spin, just to kill an hour or two – and had nearly ended up getting killed herself by this maniac.
Although . . . he was quite a handsome maniac. He was very well dressed in a sharp suit and tie, about her own age, she thought, with dark skin, black curling hair and startling blue eyes. He looked prosperous – he was driving a Bentley, after all. But even without the car, his bearing alone would have commanded attention.
‘You might ask if I’m all right,’ she said.
‘Are you?’
‘I’m quite shaken up, actually. I think the least you can do is buy me a drink.’
He stared at her. ‘You’ve got some front.’
‘We can call in the garage on the way to the village and arrange to get the Mini towed.’
‘A lot of front.’
‘My father has a Bentley too.’
‘Does he?’ Kit was looking at her. She was pretty and she did look pale and genuinely shaken after that narrow scrape. If she’d been travelling any faster, the Bentley would have mangled that Mini into mush. He wasn’t in a hurry to get back today. So why not? ‘OK, come on then,’ he said, and walked back to his car.
