Blame It on the Bossa Nova

by James Brodie

  “What is this, Frank, the McCarthy hearings?” she laughed weakly.

  “Are you, or have you ever been..?” I chimed in dutifully in an attempt to defuse Frank’s coup de theatre.

  “No, I’m not joking, Alex. This woman here is a Red, a Commie,” he clarified in case I wasn’t familiar with the colour coding.

  “Go on,” I snorted in disbelief. “... Pascale? You’re joking.”

  “I’m sorry sunshine, she is.” Frank’s face too was tense. He was calling the shots but he wasn’t enjoying it. He looked as if after a lifetime of self-indulgence he had just been told that Coca Cola rots your teeth.

  “... For all I know you are too. My boys haven’t dug up any shit on you yet. Any political shit, that is... but this little lady...” he paused. Pascale looked as if she was waiting for the jury’s verdict. “... Well, just ask her what she was doing in Algeria between fifty-six and fifty-eight. It wasn’t a workout for the Kennedy Peace Corps, I can tell you that.”

  “Pascale, is this true?” I asked, the horrified Victorian father. She didn’t bother to answer. I realized then that I still had something for her inside me. She didn’t look at either of us. I got up and turned the tele off, its noise was grating.

  “Don’t worry baby,” said Frank. “... I still love you, we have fun together. I’m not going to hurt you. And you sure as hell aint gonna hurt me. We’ll get on fine.”

  We none of us did a lot of talking after that, least of all Pascale. It didn’t make me feel particularly comfortable to imagine that little card with my name on it filed away somewhere near Grosvenor Square. It wasn’t the card so much, it was Frank. All the time we’d taken him for Dumbo…we thought, both of us individually, that we had conned him good and proper. We should have known he couldn’t be such a simpleton to have got into the position he held... Not that we’d got anything out of him, not that I’d tried, but I couldn’t imagine that Pascale had achieved much.... What hurt was that all the time I’d been talking to him over the last couple of months, smiling with my face and simultaneously thinking what a thick arsehole he was, I’d been talking to a guy who wasn’t the guy I thought he was, and who was looking at me and thinking, this guy thinks he’s conning me... It was embarrassing. We were like kids who’d been caught out by teacher poking fun behind his back.

  They left not much later, with muted goodbyes and mumbled promises to see each other on our part and a distinct lack of inhibition on Frank’s. I went to the window to watch them get into Frank’s car. Gallant as ever, before going round to his side, he held the passenger door open as Pascale got in. As Pascale had stood on the pavement her face had given no clues to her inner feelings, she had recovered her composure at least. After she had got in I could still see her face and I kept my eyes fixed on it until the car drew away.

  *****

  A couple of days later Pascale phoned me. She was agitated. I hadn’t given much thought to Frank and Pascale after they had left me. In fact, far from developing the empathy I thought I had detected at her time of trial, I was glad to get shot of them.

  “Alex, have you seen Toby lately?”

  I hadn’t.

  “Have you tried to phone him?”

  I never had felt the impulse to volunteer to speak to Toby since I first met him. On the occasions that he surfaced in my consciousness I tried sinking him by reciting random sequences of numbers or conjugating Latin verbs. It frequently worked.

  “No, I haven’t tried to ring him.”

  “He’s not answering his phone.”

  “Perhaps he’s not in.”

  “He hasn’t answered it for two days now. I’ve been phoning all the hours of the day and night.”

  This was strange. Toby loved his creature comforts and needed to relax in the personalised ambience of his flat at approximately the same intervals that an electric milk float needs to be re-charged at its depot. A forty-eight hour absence was unthinkable.

  “So what d’you want me to do about it?”

  “Will you come round with me?”

  “Sure, I’ll see you outside if you like.”

  “No, I’ll pick you up.”

  “Pick me up? You don’t even drive.”

  “I’ve got a car.”

  “OK. When are you coming round?”

  “I’ll be there in ten minutes.”

  “OK.”

  She was round in twenty-five minutes. It gave me time to clean my teeth and find a comb. She’d got hold of a Phase One Standard Vanguard from somewhere.

  “Where d’you get hold of this?” I asked as we pulled off in what I considered an uncontrolled manner. She didn’t answer. I’d been right, she didn’t drive. She somehow got the car to move and then relied on other people to get out of the way.

  “What the fuck are you playing at?” I screamed as without warning she pulled into the outside lane going along the Embankment. A lorry gave us a prolonged blast on its horn and then turned its headlights on us from a point about a foot behind our rear bumper.

  “Hey watch out, that was a red light. That means be prepared to slow down... Are you mad? ... For fuck’s sake Pascale.... For fuck’s sake!”

  Eventually we arrived at Great Russell Street. We had to park round the corner where Pascale found a space reserved for a doctor.

  “I’ve never been sure of the legal status of those Do Not Park signs,” I said as we walked back and crossed the road. Toby’s flat was on the third floor and someone had left the lift-gate open on the second, but I was glad to walk, to feel the use of my limbs. It’s so easy to take these things for granted. The front door was ajar and I pushed it. From inside we could hear a woman talking, a careful voice, rising and falling within carefully constrained extremes, measured, boring. The hall was bare of furniture. I looked at Pascale and saw her incomprehension. We went into the big living room overlooking the British Museum where the woman was talking. She was, as I would have imagined her, had I taken the trouble - a worsted grey suit and glasses and a tight curled perm. She motioned us in as if she owned the place.

  “It’s alright I knew you were coming, they phoned up.”

  I looked at the telephone sitting on the carpet at the end of a long snake of cable that led back to a junction box on the skirting. All this now visible in the room’s naked state that before had been hidden, like branches by leaves in summer. I wondered who had rung to inform her of our impending arrival - M16, the CIA? She was talking to a younger woman who looked as if she might be a secretary. “... And of course it’s convenient for the West End and City, Holborn underground is five minutes walk... I’ll be right with you.”

  The young lady took notes on a shorthand notepad.

  “Perhaps you’d like to look around while I see to these people..... So you found it then,” she addressed us as she approached, extending her hand. I took it briefly, Pascale didn’t bother.

  “Ye-he-hes...” I injected a chuckle into my affirmation. “... Didn’t we darling?”

  “Well.... this is it. I should point out that we don’t expect it to be on the market long, this is a very popular block in a very popular position.”

  “Well yes, I can see that... What d’you think darling?”

  Pascale had moved to the window and was looking out and my mind returned to the first time I had come here and she had stood at the window, smoking nervously and I had wondered what she was like underneath what she presented to the world... And now here we were with the furniture and Toby gone, and I still didn’t know.

  “What d’you think darling?” I repeated.

  “I don’t like it,” she said. “No furniture.”

  “It is an unfurnished flat,” said the lady, piqued.

  “Of course,” I soothed. “... But we’d been rather hoping we might inherit some pieces from the last tenant. Did he take everything with him, or her?”

  “The last gentleman left rather suddenly,” she said, irritated by the memory. “... Some other people came and picked up his furn
iture... and belongings. It was quite unusual.”

  “I must say that if you are interested in the flat you should contact our west-end office as soon as possible. There’s a gentleman interested already, and I believe that this young lady represents a foreign bank who are very keen.”

  “Look,” said Pascale, “... they’re queuing up to see the Elgin Marbles.”

  The Museum Tavern didn’t supply the answers to Pascale’s questions but it helped put them into perspective. To me it didn’t matter, Toby could be out in Cuba dismantling rocket silos or in Germany , redecorating the Berlin Wall for all I cared. I suppose I’d never really thought about her relationship with Toby. She was in a state. Perhaps it was a combination of the business with Frank the other night and two days of worrying about Toby; perhaps it was other things, but as we sat there in the pub, in the middle of ordinary folks’ lunch breaks, she broke down crying. It wasn’t obvious. First of all she went quiet. This I didn’t notice at first, as there were frequently silences in any conversation in which she was a major participant. Then she started to shake slowly, not violently, and then as I looked at her face I saw a tear come out of each eye and run quickly down her cheek.

  “Come on luv,” I said quietly and put a friendly hand on her thigh. A man and woman at the table next to us noticed she was crying, examined her at their leisure and then looked away. Another guy looked up briefly from his Sporting Life and then continued to make his selections. She let the tears come freely now, but quietly, letting out a sort of high pitched moan that sounded like it came from behind the bar.

  “Come on luv,” I said again and the moan subsided but the tears continued. I gave her my handkerchief; unfortunately it wasn’t as clean as I would have liked, and she took it but wisely refrained from wiping her eyes with it and instead clenched and unclenched her hand around it. The tears started to dry up and I felt I could safely leave her and get a large brandy. As money was beginning to get a bit of a problem again I got myself a light ale.

  Occasionally there comes a time when your assessment of someone’s beauty ceases to be based on their physical characteristics. From the way I’ve described Pascale so far she probably doesn’t come across as likeable, more probably the opposite. But from the first, perhaps because of her perversity, I’d been attracted to her, and now she was down and thought she was alone, there in the Museum Tavern, I found her irresistible. We started fucking regularly from that day. After we left the pub I drove her back to my place. On my side there was a great emotional wave of relief that the rock-hard exterior had for a brief moment softened. She acquiesced to our lovemaking but I didn’t sense a similar catharsis in her. She had needed an injection of someone else’s passions to make up a temporary deficiency, but now she felt better thank you. She wasn’t even embarrassed that the mask had slipped - It had never happened, she’d never cried in a pub in Bloomsbury. She was re-writing history to suit the view from five foot six above her feet... Still it was a good fuck, purposeful and experienced. It knew where it was going and what it wanted out of life, and we both got there at the same time.

  She was still seeing Frank, but he didn’t come round to Battersea Park so much now and they never fucked there, although Pascale told me that they still did fuck, sometimes. I wondered why she still bothered, but then fucking was no big deal to Pascale. Frank might be the hottest thing in U.S. Navy trousers for all I knew, but even if he wasn’t I could imagine her continuing to let him have her just because the agonised debate about why she wouldn’t would be too much of a bore. It didn’t bother me. With Pascale you knew there was no long term future, no walking into glorious distant sunsets. You just grabbed what came along from day to day, because tomorrow it might not be there.

  And so, as I’ve said, we fucked, and I suppose now, although I didn’t realize it then, that at that time I was the closest person to her. And as I got to know her body better I started to notice the tiny scars that it bore, like towns on the map of a country.

  *****

  The night that things started to get out of hand was really an accident - I’m no believer in the fickle finger of fate. Neither have I ever been the sort to go in for lavish hospitality on any scale. Frank and Pascale though were the cross I had elected to bear, part of a strange deal, for which, as I remembered, I was originally supposed to be getting some kind of reward. When Frank told me he’d invited a few of his friends along to Battersea, I’d already thought that this was outside the terms of reference of the arrangement, but when Forsythe arrived at quarter to midnight, bringing with him Sandie and Jenny - The blonde from the Earls Court and Cuba night parties - I knew the management were taking the workforce for a ride.

  The three of them were well on the way to being pissed as they stepped over my humble threshold and Frank had been drinking steadily in the manner that a substitute at football jogs along the touchline, just in case his fitness is urgently required.

  I had been in touch with Forsythe in the weeks since the party. His blatant and crude threats had produced the desired change in my attitude and I had taken to telephoning him occasionally with snippets of pseudo news - “Chris seems pre-occupied... Sandie will go on a long journey...” - the sort of ambiguous data you can pick up equally easily by reading a horoscope, any horoscope of the sort that are to be found in the popular papers. It had apparently satisfied him for although I had received no payments from him, neither had I received any unpleasant surprises. That night such matters were far from Ronnie’s thoughts, or so it seemed. Where they had been, they didn’t say but he had already established his role as superman. He was bouncing with confidence and wit, everything he said was funny, even at first to me. He was on the sort of high you get when the drink hits your metabolism in just the right way. When I say I found him funny I mean that when he dropped the pearls somewhere in my brain I recognised that this was wit, I didn’t actually laugh or smile. Sandie and Jenny crumpled at the knees and started groping him or leaning on him for support in a manner that seriously threatened to leave the three of them sprawling on the floor. Frank actually jumped up and slapped him on the back.

  Forsythe was not too pissed to realize that this was all hyperbole but he was in no mood to disclaim it, frequently egging them on to further paeans of praise with small addenda to his blockbusters - ripples that swelled the merrymaking to new excesses. Apart from me only Pascale was untouched. Sure, she joined in, but that was the professional in her, she never went quite as far as the others.

  From a point somewhere behind the sofa a Bossa Nova beat told me that Sandie had discovered my landlord’s record player and his limited selection of records: Up to that date ‘The Best of Barber and Bilk’, ‘The Enigma Variations’ and the Ian Allen production ‘The Age of Steam’, had been the extent of my excavations. But here was something daringly cosmopolitan. Sandie stood up and began to move to the music on her own. She was wearing a tight dress that showed off her body. Forsythe, regarding this as merely part of the supporting bill, had embarked on a series of anecdotes about cabinet meetings and more specifically, the personality of Macmillan. To many people such elevated gossip would probably have an orgasmic effect, but I got the impression that for different reasons it was largely wasted on his audience of that evening... but they listened, each for their own reasons, they listened. Macmillan at the time wasn’t a hard person to satirise and Forsythe blasted away at his sitting duck producing imitations of unbelievable unoriginality that added nothing to one’s knowledge of the man. I like to think that Frank and Pascale were encouraging him for ulterior motives, but Sandie and Jenny managed to simulate genuine amusement, Sandie producing a ‘vivacious’ tinkle of laughter in almost uninterrupted accompaniment as she slowly swayed to the beat, looking out over the black hole of Battersea Park. Another tale came to its sad end. The imitation had now blurred to the extent that it could have been Churchill if you hadn’t known. It was well enough received though.

  “Ronnie, tell them about the time Strauss took you
to that Munich nightclub,” blurted Sandie. Frank’s face snapped off its bleary glaze and was suddenly one hundred and ten percent attentive to the conversation. Suddenly Forsythe wasn’t enjoying himself quite so much. I saw him try to send a coded message of a glance to Sandie to shut up, but she was far too pissed to decipher it.

  “... You know. That time you made that terrible cock up and promised them nuclear warheads. Tell them what Mac said - it’s so funny.”

  “What nuclear warheads are these, Ronnie?” said Frank.

  “You’re pissed Sandie - shut up,” said Forsythe. Sandie took this as an insult. It became a point of honour to prove she wasn’t pissed, or at least not pissed out of her mind.

  “Pissed am I? Not too pissed to remember you told me it was top secret and I wasn’t to breathe a word.”

  “Shut up, Sandie,” said Forsythe through tightly clenched teeth. The Bossa Nova beat surfaced to fill all the awkward gaps that were now appearing in the conversation.

  “Top secret eh, Sandie?” said Frank with a chuckle born in the depths of some remote forest.

  “Sandie, didn’t you realize, I was kidding you along,” said Forsythe.

  “Kidding me were you? Taking me for an idiot?”

  “Not exactly.” Forsythe had abandoned menaces and was now attempting a sycophantic grin calculated to charm her into silence. It only aroused contempt, or anger, I’m not sure which - either was a dangerous emotion in one so volatile as Sandie.

  “Don’t take me for a fuckin’ berk, Ronnie. I wasn’t born yesterday. I can even remember the stupid name of the rockets - bloody stupid name - Honest John. There!.... How would I know that if you hadn’t told me? I never read the papers. How would I even know who Strauss was?..... Don’t take me for an idiot Ronnie, I don’t like it.”