A Woman of Integrity

by J David Simons

  She was still feeling giddy from the way she had dealt with Sal over dinner, ordering the expensive wine, managing the conversation, delivering her solicitor’s letter, timing her exit, taking control. Yes, that was it – taking control. Of the play. Of her life. Deciding what was important for her own happiness, then embarking on the necessary steps to achieve that. This was the new Laura Scott. Or perhaps it was just the young Laura Scott, the Laura Scott she had been as an aspiring teenager, now resurrected.

  It was with a head full of these thoughts that she rounded the corner, the entrance to her flat came into view, and she could see her security lamp highlighting the figure of a man sitting, possibly even asleep, on her doorstep. He wore a pulled-down trilby and a long overcoat, a garment still too warm for this late autumn night. Her first instinct was to reach inside her bag for her mobile phone, call the police. For the person waiting for her was quite possibly Braden O’Sullivan, an individual forbidden by law to knowingly approach within 500 metres of her home or place of work. Also forbidden by law to communicate with her by telephone, fax, letter, text, electronic mail or Internet. Up until two years ago when the restraining order came into force, Braden O’Sullivan, a 35 year-old unemployed mechanic from the town of Chicopee, Massachusetts, USA, had been her stalker. A man who used to send her a barrage of fan mail along with countless CDs burned with his favourite tracks, the first one always being Tell Laura I Love Her, the Ricky Valance version. A man who had once even crossed the Atlantic, and inveigled himself past a security guard to visit her on a London film set. Hence the necessity to obtain a restraining order. Could this be him here again…?

  She wasn’t quite sure. Braden was a stocky individual, yet the shape on the doorstep appeared to be quite tall, the legs sneaking out from under the hem of the overcoat rather slim. She moved forwards toward the open gate, one hand on her mobile, the other on the can of mace she always kept in her bag even though it was illegal to possess such a deterrent in this country. The figure stirred and she stepped backwards. This man had a beard, the hair long beneath his hat streaked with grey. This wasn’t Braden, this was some drunken lout loitering on her doorstep, probably having pissed in her plant pots or all over her front door. She thought again about phoning the police until the man removed his hat, she saw the familiar dark eyes above the beard and recognised immediately the voice that called her name.

  ‘Jack. What the hell are you doing here?’

  Jack scrambled to his feet. ‘Waiting for you.’

  ‘How long have you been here?’

  ‘Dunno. Must have fallen asleep. Jet-lag.’

  ‘You could have called.’

  ‘I thought I’d surprise you.’

  ‘You certainly did that. How did you know I was even in London?’

  ‘No milk bottles.’

  She laughed at that. ‘Oh, Jack. I think they stopped delivering milk in bottles about thirty years ago.’ She looked him up and down now that he was at full stretch. The overcoat worn over a faded blue T-shirt bearing some Japanese lettering, tattered jeans, sandals. No luggage. Typical Jack. An A-list movie star on her doorstep and no-one would have recognized him. ‘I thought you were a tramp. You look like… I don’t know. Tom Cruise in that Vietnam movie.’

  ‘Born on the Fourth of July.’

  ‘That’s the one.’

  ‘I’m on my way back from India. Stop-over in London. You’re my go-to girl for a haircut.’

  Laura didn’t have a lot to thank her mother for but she did have to grant her credit for that skill. To win over her parents to the giant leap of faith that made her want to be an actress, she had let her mother persuade her into learning to cut hair at Vidal Sassoon’s hairdressing school. ‘Better you have something to fall back on,’ her mother had told her with no sense of optimism whatsoever about her chosen career path. She had been right, of course. When money and acting roles were scarce, Laura had temped out at the salons at a time when Sassoon’s cuts were all the rage. She actually enjoyed the work, the snip, snip, snipping of another person’s hair acting as a meditation, as something of an escape from herself. In the few months she and Jack had been together, she had cut his hair quite often, it becoming a bit of an in-joke between them, she being his personal hairdresser rather than live-in girlfriend.

  ‘You’d better come in then,’ she said, laughing again. ‘But I’m not touching that beard.’

  Once inside, he tried to embrace her but she pointed to the bathroom. ‘Shower first.’

  ‘Come on, Laura.’

  ‘Get yourself clean.’

  Jack disappeared into the main bathroom while she went into her own en-suite to tidy herself up. What an evening it had been. First Sal. And now here was Jack in London. Jack London. The Call of the Wild. Quite appropriate really. She was actually tingling from excitement, couldn’t remember the last time she had felt this way. Probably the last time she had seen him in the States. She stripped down to her bra and panties, wrapped herself up in the yukata he had bought for her in Japan, went searching for her old hairdressing kit.

  Jack stepped out of the bathroom about twenty minutes later, dressed in her white towelling bathrobe, rubbing a clean-shaven but scored chin, his hair still lank and wet.

  ‘Hope you don’t mind,’ he said. ‘Used one of your razors in there.’

  ‘My scraper is your scraper.’

  Jack grinned at her and she looked back at him, hand cocked on her hip, thinking to herself (because there was no way she was actually going to tell him): ‘My God, Jack. You just light up a room.’ She had met many of the big time movie stars in her time and yes there was definitely a sense of awe about being in their presence. But Jack really did brighten up a room, brighten up her life. It wasn’t just his star quality but there was something else – a certain humanity – that shone through as well. The only other person she had met who bore that same quality was the late, great, Paul Newman.

  ‘Sit,’ she said, pointing to the chair she had placed in the centre of a sea of newspaper sheets.

  Jack saluted. ‘Yes, ma’am.’

  She did the usual hairdresser routine as she clipped away at his wet locks, asking questions, just letting the customer ramble away so she could concentrate on her task. Jack told her he had just completed a ten-day meditation retreat in India, a silent retreat it was too so she had to excuse him if he was babbling on as he hadn’t really spoken to anyone else since it had finished. He told her about the upcoming Boston Tea Party shoot and she declined to inform him about Edy’s offer to be involved. He asked her what she was up to. She told him a little bit about Georgie.

  ‘She was married to that director guy, Doug Mitchell, wasn’t she?’

  ‘That’s the whole problem right there, Jack. Everyone puts her together with Doug. He kind of overshadows her. A bit like Hemingway and Martha Gellhorn. But Georgie was a spectacular person in her own right. And a great photographer too.’

  ‘Don’t remember seeing her work.’

  ‘You probably have, you just didn’t know it. Lots of iconic portraits taken between the end of the war and the Swinging Sixties.’

  ‘Film stars?’

  ‘Some. Cary Grant. Audrey Hepburn. She had access through Doug, of course. But mostly ordinary people. A lost generation, she called them.’

  ‘We were the lucky ones, I suppose. The Baby Boomers.’

  It was such an intimate job really, cutting hair. There she was touching Jack’s head, moving it around as she pleased, her fingers running through his long locks, his hair still thick, snip, snip, snip, Jack complaining about all the grey he was seeing in the shorn pieces landing on the sheet she had wrapped around him. ‘Not grey, Jack. White.’ Snip, snip, snip. Normally, when she was cutting a man’s hair, she would be careful how she moved her body around the customer, not leaning in with the breasts, keeping the groin area pushed back, that was how she had been taught. But with Jack, she found that her body was rebelling against her training, letting herself step in clos
e, allowing her hair to brush his face, almost sitting astride him at one point as she moved across the front of him. She caught herself breathing heavily, sensed the flush in her neck, Jack seemingly oblivious to all of this until she felt his fingers slipping between her lower thighs where the yukata had fallen open.

  ‘Stop it,’ she said, pushing his hand away. ‘I need to finish this. Or you’re going to be all lop-sided.’

  ‘I’m all lop-sided already.’

  ‘I’m not sure I know what you mean by that.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter. Come here.’

  He gripped her round the waist, pulled her into him. It was an awkward embrace because he was sitting down, kissing her stomach through the gap in her robe, while she was bent over his head, scissors in one hand, comb in another. But in one swift movement, he had lifted himself off from the chair, taking her with him, so she was hung over his shoulder, kicking away like some captured cavewoman, as he swung her around and shouted:

  ‘Bedroom. Where?’

  She threw away her scissors and comb, balanced herself with her hands on his shoulders and shouted out, half laughing, half breathless with excitement. ‘Over there. Next to the bathroom.’

  Afterwards, she wanted a cigarette. No use wanting Jack to ease that craving, his lifestyle was too healthy for that, unless it was a grass-filled joint, without tobacco of course. She turned to look at him. He was fast asleep, zonked out by sex and jet-lag, the skin along his jawline red raw from her razor, his hair cut shorter on one side than the other, she’d fix that later. She recalled a remark she had once heard Priscilla Presley say in an interview. It went along the lines of: ‘I used to wake up next to Elvis and gaze at him and think he was the most gorgeous man I had ever seen.’ She felt the same way about Jack. Even now that he was in his fifties, he was still immensely attractive. But there was also another feeling present in her beyond this physical attraction. Not love but a lightness. Most of her lovers felt like a burden after sex. Or to put it to herself crudely, they had served their function and now she just wanted to be left alone. It didn’t feel like that with Jack. She wasn’t weighed down by him at all. He was like air beside her, hardly leaving an imprint on her pillow, sheets and mattress. Perhaps it was to do with the ephemeral quality of their relationship, the no-strings, no-future, no-nonsense approach. Jack would probably put it down to some kind of Buddhist non-attachment. Or maybe it was the opposite. Perhaps she was attached in more ways than she thought. Perhaps this was what real love should be. Weightless, timeless, purely in the moment. And then it was gone.

  Chapter Fifty-Two

  The Hepburn Archives

  Extract from an unpublished memoir

  I sold the cottage at Five Elms Down and moved to Oxfordshire to be with Susan and baby Quentin. It was an idyllic time really, an unimaginable blessing on my life to be able to enjoy these years with my daughter and grandson. Susan’s was a magnificent house where I had my own bedroom, study and darkroom. I swam every day in the pool, I played tennis with my daughter and her friends, I went for long walks in the grounds and the surrounding woodlands – I can’t remember feeling fitter. Once Susan had stopped breast-feeding Quentin, she went back to work in London, curating exhibitions for a small, high-end gallery, leaving Quentin to be looked after primarily by a succession of nannies, mostly from the Continent, Susan wanting her son to be proficient in French and Spanish. Sometimes I would steal Quentin from their charge so that I could spend my own precious time with the boy. Although he was obviously unaware I was his actual grandmother, I believe a special relationship existed between us. If each child rebels against their parent then logic dictates that the grandparent and grandchild will end up in tune. I certainly felt an exquisite harmony between us. As he grew older, it was to me he loved to show off. I recall how he would entertain me by performing little vignettes he’d written by himself, acting out all the parts from an assembly of low tables arranged as his stage, a couple of powerful torches on broom handles serving as the lighting. My grandson – quite the little actor and dramatist.

  The early years of the 1960s came and went. The building of the Berlin War, the Adolf Eichmann trial, the Cuban Missile Crisis, Yuri Gagarin becoming the first man in space, the assassination of John F Kennedy, The Beatles taking the US by storm. Susan and I together, watching history unfold on the television. Around this time, I stopped taking portraits, concentrating my attention mainly on nature photography. Camera technology had come a long way since I had first picked up Rollo’s Leica at that Bedouin camp in the Sinai so many years ago. I began experimenting with some of the latest equipment, honing in on my subjects with various close-up lenses and micro-filters. Perhaps that was the ultimate sign of old age, when we start to lose interest in people and become fascinated with nature instead.

  I loved taking sharp focus shots of flowers. Never having been good at biology, I learned a whole new vocabulary beyond petal and stamen to describe the plants I was photographing – words like sepal and carpel, anther and stigma. I would creep around the bushes in Susan’s estate, seeking out the exact flower in bloom, a drop of dew on the petal or if I was lucky a foraging bee, a caterpillar, the light shining on it just so. Quentin enjoyed accompanying me on these expeditions, my satchels of lenses strung across his little body so that he resembled some kind of intrepid explorer. Later, I would return to my darkroom to process the negatives, Quentin sitting quietly in a corner, happy to watch me work away in the glow of the amber safelight. I had also rigged up a red/green lighting system outside the door so that Susan, Quentin or anyone else in the household with an interest would know whether I was inside working or not. It was on one such occasion when I had just tidied away all my trays and chemicals that I switched my outside light to green. Susan came in immediately, as if she had been outside waiting, ready to pounce.

  ‘You’re home early,’ I said. I was standing at my angled desktop, hovering with a large magnifying glass over a contact sheet of floral shots I’d taken that afternoon. The magnifying glass had been my father’s, all that was left to me apart from his love of flying. The prints were in black-and-white which I still favoured over colour even when it came to flowers, an attempt to imitate, mostly unsuccessfully, the wonderful work of Ansel Adams.

  ‘Everyone went off to some cocktail party,’ she said. ‘I decided not to go with them.’

  ‘Pity. It’s always a chance to meet new people.’

  I could hear Susan rummaging around at the back of the room where I kept a stack of old prints. ‘You’re always saying that,’ she said. ‘You don’t know what these things are like. Bores me to tears. And I’m useless with small talk.’

  ‘You never know. Sometimes an absolute gem of a person who thinks just like you can turn up at one of these events.’ I looked up from my desk. ‘And by the way, I do know what these things can be like. I went to my fair share of these parties with Doug Mitchell.’

  ‘That’s what I was thinking.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘All these photos you took then. Where are they?’

  ‘Somewhere back there, I suppose.’

  ‘Everything is such a mess. I’m surprised you don’t keep your work in better order.’

  ‘There’s more order to my work than you think.’

  ‘Not back here, there isn’t.’

  ‘Those are just the prints. All my negatives and contact sheets are properly catalogued.’

  Susan came forward to stand by me. She was dressed in a cream blouse, short beige skirt and knee-length brown leather boots. It was hard to believe what passed for office clothes these days. She gave me a little kiss on my cheek. Oh, how I cherished these moments. ‘Really, Georgie,’ she said sweetly. ‘Show me.’

  ‘Over there,’ I said, nodding to another dark corner. ‘Under that dust sheet.’

  Susan went over, lifted the sheet to reveal a mountain of catalogue drawers. I’d bought them years ago as a job lot when the local library had closed. ‘This is br
illiant,’ she exclaimed. ‘When exactly were you out in California with Doug?’

  ‘Why the sudden interest?’

  She floated back to me again. ‘I was just thinking…’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Have you still got the photographs of all those film stars?’

  ‘Some. Doug sold off most of them.’

  ‘You know how I love all your other work. Those portraits of your mother. The elderly patients in the care home. Well, I was thinking… maybe I could arrange for you to have a small exhibition.’

  ‘And the film stars?’

  ‘Those could be our way in. Our Trojan horse. Our lure to bring in the general public. Then we can expose them to the rest of your oeuvre. These photographs of the post-war generation are fascinating. When did you go to California?’

  ‘Beginning of the fifties.’

  ‘I know that. But when exactly?’

  ‘I’m not sure about this, Susan. Going public again.’

  ‘Just let me show a few of your photographs to Michael.’

  Michael was her boss, not someone I immediately warmed to. He reminded me a bit of my director Cecil Benson on The Woman Walks Free – one of those horsey-faced toffs with an immense sense of privilege that Max would have hated. Perhaps that was why I wasn’t a big fan of Michael’s either. Then as if she was reading my mind, Susan said: ‘I know you don’t like Michael very much. But he’s got very good taste. He thinks retro-photography is going to be the next in-thing in the art world. And I agree. That’s what got me thinking about your work. Let me show him some. Please.’