Tell the Girl

by Sandra Howard

  ‘Oh, I’ve done that, don’t you worry,’ I bit back, fuming. ‘I’m wised up just fine.’

  It was no good being goaded, not going to solve a thing. ‘Let’s forget it,’ I muttered, calming down. ‘And we should eat – I’m starving. Probably the relief of not being radiated to a cinder last week. It had really seemed we were all done for.’

  Joe fixed himself another vodka while I went to the kitchen. Mary-Lou had put ready some soup and a pie. I turned on the oven and warmed the soup, stirring it slowly, thinking about Joe and Jackie – even Joe and Sylvia. He was so wittily amusing and appealing when he wanted to be, certainly with First Ladies and Ambassadors’ wives; they’d enjoy having him around. Walter had said Jackie didn’t go in for female friends, that the only woman she truly trusted and liked was her sister, Lee. Perhaps Joe was a sort of girlfriend to Jackie and filled a gap for her. He could act any role, after all.

  ‘Supper’s up,’ I called. Joe wandered in with a full glass. How many was that? He hitched up at the kitchen counter and peered at the thick deep-red mush in his soup bowl. ‘Beetroot,’ I said. ‘I don’t know what’s in the pie.’ It turned out to be chicken and mushroom, very tasty; we had it with a heated-up baked potato. I made a pot of coffee and made an effort as well. ‘How about going to the Village to hear some jazz?’

  Joe stared. It wasn’t what he’d expected. ‘Where? How do we know who’s playing?’

  ‘Eric Dolphy’s live at the Gaslight Café this month. Pity Thelonius Monk isn’t at the Five Spot as he’s recording, but you love alto-sax, Joe, and Dolphy’s one of the greats.’

  It was a mini-breakthrough, thanks to Gil. Joe was up for going, curious, too. I’d managed to surprise him and pushed it a bit, saying Bob Dylan played at the Gaslight and had even done an album there recently. I wondered, knowing I was secretly longing to, whether we’d happen on Gil. No good thinking that way, I was trying to mend my marriage.

  Joe loved the whole scene, clicking his fingers, eating up the music for hours. No Gill, the smoke-filled Gaslight had been quiet that night, but after Eric Dolphy’s sultry, moody, beautiful playing, Joe was in the mood and squashed into one of the cots to make love to me. ‘How come you’re suddenly so up in jazz and the Village clubs?’ he’d asked, still huddled close, given the size of the bed, and showing a little jealous interest at last.

  ‘Music’s a big deal in the studios,’ I said. ‘I work a lot with a jazz freak as well.’

  We went to other Village hangouts over the next few nights; Joe was wired up, sexed up. New York did that to people. I didn’t ask about his daytimes, feeling he needed that space; it was a fragile togetherness at best.

  Matt came for drinks two days before I left. He’d called and invited himself, much to Joan’s amusement. I sensed her absorbing the body language when he arrived and shook hands with Joe. Walter came out into the hall looking intrigued as well, and pressed cocktails on us. ‘My best martinis coming up,’ he said, going ahead to fulfil the task.

  Joan took Joe’s arm. ‘You know us Yanks and our martinis,’ she laughed. ‘You have just what you want, Joe!’ They carried on into the sitting room, while Matt held back; he stared hard then gripped my arm and kissed my mouth with fierce controlling passion.

  I broke away panting, feeling surging adrenaline as I frantically wiped my mouth and smoothed my hair. ‘How have you been?’ I asked loudly, trying to avoid suspicion about what was holding us up. ‘We so appreciated that call last week – goodness, what a relief! Now you must come and have a drink.’ Walter looked over curiously as we appeared.

  ‘How’s Pierre, Matt?’ he asked, holding out a martini and a Campari and soda for me. ‘Don’t let on to him, but I haven’t got very far yet with Jackie’s little request.’

  ‘I won’t,’ Matt promised, taking the glass. ‘But I’d say that’s the least of Pierre’s worries. Keeping the lid on the press is pretty full-on right now. We’re still waiting on confirmation that the missile bases are being dismantled. The Soviets don’t exactly enlighten us. Not an easy time if you’re Defence Secretary – McNamara said it’s like trying to talk to people who’ve spent all their lives in a cellar.’

  ‘What a gloomy thought,’ Joe said. Matt smiled at him agreeably and came to sit beside me on the sofa, the nearest place.

  ‘The British press say Whitehall doesn’t entirely trust the photographic evidence,’ Joe continued, ‘and the PM’s in a bate. Is there any real proof – just between us?’

  Matt shifted his position, managing to brush my thigh. ‘It’s sure genuine all right, grainy photographs taken from an Air Force U-2 plane. The CIA has been working on them for days, tucked away – this is certainly not for repeating – in a room over a downtown Ford car-dealer shop with the unknowing used-car salesmen wheeler-dealing below!’

  Joe enjoyed that. Secrets and titbits made his world turn. He kept the questions coming and looked quite disappointed when Matt said he must run, much as he’d rather stay.

  ‘Any chance we’ll cross paths in Washington?’ asked Joe. ‘I’m there this weekend, flying home direct from DC.’

  ‘I’ll be hard at it in the office,’ Matt said, ‘but here’s my card. Give me a call when you know how you’re placed. Maybe we can meet up for a quick jar.’

  Joe handed over a card as well. ‘Look us up if ever you’re in London, Matt. Susannah’s set on moving, but you have my agent’s details there – she’ll always put you in touch.’

  It rained the first couple of days I was back home. Bella smiled through it. Miss Hadley needed time off and went to stay with her sister in Corby. She had misgivings written all over her face, relinquishing her charge to my sole care, and checked at least ten times that I had her sister’s number. Bella was a peach, however, and slept through till six. I kept quiet about that, though, in case Miss Hadley took it personally.

  Joe arrived home direct from Washington, and set about systematically undoing all the good work of our few days together in Manhattan. His mood had plummeted. He had work, a part in a television series – a Lothario-type character, not a role to tax his ingenuity – and a radio play, but after that only voiceovers. His agent told me to keep him sweet, as film parts were in the offing and a new script – but how did you keep a man sweet who drank at least a bottle of vodka a day and was back in Alicia’s arms?

  I’d cut through Belgravia to avoid a traffic jam, driven down her street and seen his black MGB parked almost outside her door. After that, the urge to keep looking became obsessive; it was like playing Russian roulette, anticipating, tensing-up for the stab of pain, yet if the car wasn’t there, feeling a sort of perverse, reverse anti-climax.

  I got on with the move to Parson’s Green. Joe was no help, but I hadn’t expected him to be. He’d mutter glumly about it, through the bars of Frankie’s cage. ‘Alien territory, this new pad, you old wanker. No good squawking, shut your beak and don’t blame me!’

  I understood Joe’s hurt pride over leaving a rented flat that he’d had some part in, for a house bought with my money. I just wished he didn’t have to be so morbidly moody about it.

  He was mumbling either to himself or Frankie one Saturday morning while I read a letter from Joan Ferrone. She wrote long rambling screeds, streams of consciousness, gossipy, tangential and fun. I passed on to Joe, who thrived on any Kennedy news, that Ted Kennedy had just been elected as Senator for Massachusetts – Jack’s old seat.

  ‘I took to Ted,’ Joe said, perking up, ‘I met him with Jackie and her sister Lee.’

  ‘Doubt I would,’ I said. ‘He cheated at Harvard for starters, and all that stuff about renting brothels and opening up bordellos on a Latin-American trip is a bit of a turn-off.’

  ‘That’s my little bourgeoise hausfrau talking, such a prude!’ Not any more, I thought, my mind slipping to Gil spread-eagling me, securing me to a hotel bed with four silk ties.

  ‘Lee said we must come to dinner sometime,’ Joe remarked. ‘Don’t know how often she’s in L
ondon, though.’ It sounded extremely vague and I wondered why Joe had even mentioned it. Lee must have made clear to him that I was invited, too – possibly out of curiosity? She’d been his host at the villa in Italy when I’d been left at home.

  Joe would talk to Frankie, but it took news from the States for him to communicate with me. The BBC reported that Fidel Castro had accepted the removal of US weapons from Cuba. That prompted Joe to talk of envying Matt, living in Washington. They’d managed to fit in a drink back in November, it seemed. I thought privately that Joe would soon discover Washington wasn’t his bag. Jackie’s interest would wane and he’d feel claustrophobic in that enclosed diplomatic world; he was more cut out for the London scene, music, the theatre and the parties of his aristocratic friends.

  December brought a rash of those. I saw Joe virtually having it off on the dance floor with a pissed wiry rat of a girl – not Alicia – and the telephone was put down on me at times. The girl, I discovered later, was a duke’s daughter. I tried not to imagine what Joe did by day while I was at work. He was in debt. I’d taken menacing calls: ‘He pays up or his face won’t be a pretty sight, lady. You tell ’im that.’ Was Joe into gambling?

  The weather was abysmal, freezing smog that seemed to penetrate far deeper than the frosty cold of New York. The high spot of the month was an impresario inviting us to the première of David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia. I’d have given a lot for a blast of that dry unrelenting desert heat. It snowed just before Christmas, but steam trains seemed able to handle snowy tracks and we made it to Dorset to be with my parents.

  Only just, for the weather forecast was extreme – heavy snows and gale-force blizzards. We had to head back on Boxing Day. I felt sick about leaving, wracked with worry. Dad wasn’t a cadaver, he loved chips too much and carried a bit of weight, yet his face had the grey, shadowy limpness of someone drained by a fever. He looked as haggard as if he’d been out all night in the freezing snows. It was overwork. Mum was exhausted, too. I could afford to give them a holiday now if they’d only let me.

  January was the coldest month for almost two centuries. The sea froze four miles out to sea from Dunkirk and the BBC news talked of the Straits of Dover freezing. Upstream from London, the skaters took to the Thames and someone drove over it in their car. Milkmen got about on skis, children walked miles to school. Miss Hadley was stalwart, keeping Bella safe and snug with no hint of fluster. I had a new respect for her.

  More snow in February, blizzards lasting days, and sport had never been so disrupted: some football replays in the FA Cup had to be rescheduled more than ten times. However, London airport kept going with few cancellations and I was able to get to Paris for the French collections, which always had its moments.

  I was still a teenager the first time I’d gone, naïve, new to modelling and Paris, too. The Sunday Times had booked me, working with Terry Donovan on a spread for their new colour supplement. Yves St Laurent’s Trapeze line was the big story that season; I thought the clothes looked like children’s stick drawings of their mummies, but all those chic blasé fashion editors were in a spin, drooling over the look. I knew nothing.

  Terry was pissed out of his mind. The couture houses only released the collection clothes for photography after ten o’clock at night; the buyers came first, and since newspapers and magazines fought over who had first go after that, it could be two in the morning before a photographer could take a shot. Terry must have been lining up the bottles. He’d laid in plenty more as well and it was a mad session. We only had one night, given the paper’s deadline, and how he took such a spread of zany brilliant pictures, God knows.

  At five in the morning we rolled back to the cranky offbeat hotel where we all stayed; the rooms were poky, crammed to suffocating with enormous pieces of dark gloomy furniture, and the antiquated lift was minute. It wasn’t built for a gang like ours, hefty Terry, his assistant, two models and the paper’s fashion editor . . .

  The lift gave a wheezing sigh and gave up the ghost; it sank several feet below ground.

  We giggled drunkenly, leaned on the alarm and eventually two cursing, sweating garlic-reeking electricians turned up; they got the door open so we could be pulled up through the space, except for Terry who was just too big. But with its lesser weight the lift suddenly jerked itself up to ground level and he amiably sauntered out.

  The hotel’s manager, a madame whose scorpion tongue could inflict a thousand lashes, added £50 to each of our bills. I’d just started modelling and was broke; I’d had to live on bread and mustard, always on the tables in cafés, and watch others eat steak.

  I set off this year, older and wiser, booked by French Vogue, but still staying in a hotel with other English photographers and models. Returning at 4 a.m. on the second night, the hotel reception was a bear-pit, people close to fisticuffs, insisting they’d booked rooms, being told there were none. The night porter shrugged, the hotel was full.

  Pete, a photographer I’d worked with and quite liked, sidled up to me. ‘You’ve got a room and a kind heart, Susannah, can I sleep on your floor?’

  ‘No, sorry, that’s a bad idea,’ I said tiredly. ‘I couldn’t possibly trust you.’

  ‘On my honour – only the floor.’ I could have done without it, but it was too late to argue and he had very pleading eyes.

  I was just drifting off when my lumpy bed complained loudly. ‘Shit,’ Pete muttered, ‘didn’t want to wake you, but it’s very hard . . .’ Somehow I didn’t think he meant the floor. ‘We’d both sleep better,’ he whispered, ‘if I just slipped in quietly, just a little bodily warmth . . .’

  Was he in league with Gil?

  On 6 March, excited weathermen told us it was the first day that year with no frost. The temperature soared to a heady 62 degrees and the snows melted in a flash – we’d had sixty consecutive days of the stuff. I felt like a hamster unballing from hibernation and trying to remember what sunshine and warmth were about.

  People practically danced along the pavements, faces wreathed in smiles. Bella’s was too. She was six months old now, teething and greedy, but we forgave her anything for those smiles. Spring changed the shape and feel of life; everything burst forth. Photographers blossomed creatively. I worked with Cecil Beaton at his sublime Wiltshire home, reclining on a chaise longue in the conservatory, an elegant jungle of arching exotica, dangling parasols to match the dresses. The pictures were for Queen magazine. I did pictures with Brian Duffy, whom I adored, and Norman Eales, who always made his models say ‘Thursday’; it formed their lips into his trademark pout.

  Being around creative people by day was a privilege, but by night I felt despairing and lonely. My relationship with Joe was going down the pan. He loved Bella and would exclaim proudly, ‘Clever girl!’ when she learned some new trick like rolling over. And if Frankie swore he’d wag a stern finger and say, ‘You close your ears to that, young lady!’

  He loved all the hot gossip about John Profumo who’d denied having sex with Christine Keeler, which nobody believed. A new single by The Beatles was a turn-on, celebrities, parties and other women, too, but married life had none of that spice. Evenings in, nights with me, were boring, boring. Joe put on a passable act of Happy Families for Miss Hadley’s benefit, but my high hopes after New York were fallen leaves, withering on stony ground. I felt about as wanted and appreciated as a cigarette-butt, vulnerable, neglected and easy prey.

  I came home late one fine April evening, after a day on location, to find Bella tucked up and asleep already, which I was sad about, and Miss Hadley having her supper on a tray in her room. She always did, since she had firm ideas about dividing lines.

  Joe was in the sitting room, reading the evening paper, glass in hand. He looked up as I came in. ‘Pierre Salinger, his underling – what’s his name?’ he said.

  ‘Do you mean Matt Seeley?’

  ‘That’s it.’ Joe looked at me in triumph, as if he’d summoned it up himself. ‘Forgot for a moment. He’s coming over in a week or
two and wants to meet up.’

  ‘You’ll enjoy that. You liked him, didn’t you? Now I’d better get on with supper.’

  ‘Not just me, he’s expecting you along, too – he said so. I told him it was best to fix it up with you. And Toby and Alicia want us for dinner at the White Elephant on Thursday. They’re taking the Farnley-Huntingtons and some business geezer or other. Swiss, probably manufactures cuckoo clocks.’ Joe retreated behind his newspaper, shaking it irritably.

  ‘That might be somewhere to suggest to meet Matt, if he calls,’ I said, speaking to Joe’s raised paper, ‘the bar at the White Elephant.’ It was a swank showbizzy sort of club and Joe was a member, unless he’d been turfed out for non-payment of fees.

  ‘Suggest where you bloody well like,’ Joe muttered.

  ‘I’d ask him here, but it’s so unfinished; I can’t wait for the new curtains.’

  Joe lowered the newspaper with a look of point-scoring satisfaction. ‘That’s the wifey – curtains the summit of her horizons.’

  An evening with Alicia and Toby felt less of an ordeal than previously; I cared increasingly little these days, which was immensely depressing. I cared about looking my competitive best, though, and wore a flouncy low-cut floral dress, deep pinks and yellows, and I loved the way the skirt swung. With high sling-backs and fun earrings, it was a good look.

  Matt was next week’s problem. He was on my mind, though, as I walked into the White Elephant Club, since I’d just had a call from him – he’d lost none of his keenness and we’d arranged to meet there the following Tuesday. The Club had a long elegant bar made of gleaming mahogany, and the wall behind it was mirrored, so that people sitting at the counter could see into the room. And be seen, of course, which would help curb Matt’s advances.

  Alicia and Toby and their guests had arrived. Joe and I joined them, and a waiter drew up two more of the Club’s navy velvet armchairs. Alicia had pushed up the usual display of cleavage. Was she a touch larger? Pregnant again? Or was it the Empire line, peach chiffon she was wearing? Joe kissed her cheek. He chose the chair facing her and stretched out his legs. I knew he was making contact and playing footsie.