Rich Deceiver

by Gillian White

  ‘Well, they’re all right for the kitchen.’

  ‘Better than anything I’ve got.’

  In spite of the high levels of security the police will have to be called. In the meantime, there is a nasty scuffle during which Dwarfy has to be subdued, grounded and handcuffed, and there is an unseemly wait for the police van, when Dwarfy screams out all the obscenities which he has ever heard in his life. The crowd grows larger, surly and more voluble. Certain well-known troublemakers push themselves to the front.

  Some people leave.

  This could turn into a nasty incident. The bandleader decides to play on, for he knows that music is a calming influence, and it is to the strains of Tulips from Amsterdam that Dwarfy is pushed in the wagon and carted away to spend an uncomfortable night in the familiar police cell, where he worries himself sick about his cart, weeping, ‘One of those buggers’ll whip it for certain, and then what’ll I do?’

  Inside the gallery things are slightly calmer.

  All Gabriella has to do is demand the handing over of the crudely-done cards… Promotions, parties, strip-o-grams, escorts, any thing considered for the right price and insist that Fern and Blanche Peters leave the premises forthwith. ‘It’s against the law apart from anything else,’ she tells them firmly and they quail and quake before her icy smile. All she has to do is apologise over the loudspeaker to those members of the public who have been unfortunate enough to receive one. All she has to do is prevent Jackie Skinner from sitting on the seat in front of the nude Botticelli and feeding the latest baby… her dirty bra strap is worse, actually, than her exposed breast with its crusted nipple. All she has to do is to persuade the insolent Marcus from stealing a part from the ‘World of the Machine’ room, explaining as nicely as she can in front of the crowd that that particular spanner is essential to make up the structure’s armpit, with Marcus protesting, ‘It’d be a bloody sight more use on my bike.’

  Ellie moves colourfully around the afternoon, watching, listening, missing nothing and enjoying every moment.

  When Ellie goes to bid her farewells, feeling the pleasant exhaustion of total satisfaction, Gabriella says sweetly, ‘But darling, you must stay for the fireworks! There’s a party of us going to watch from the terrace, it’ll be a marvellous end to the day.’

  Ellie declines. ‘I can only stand so much, at my age,’ she smiles.

  ‘Oh, come on,’ Gabriella insists, ‘you’ve got more energy than the rest of us put together.’

  ‘How do you feel now, Gabriella? Relieved, I expect, now that it’s nearly over? And did it go according to plan?’ In spite of all she must have endured, she does not look even slightly flustered.

  ‘Not so much according to plan, but more as I suspected it would,’ and Gabriella gives a wry smile.

  Can nothing defeat the woman? Surely, inside, she is screaming?

  ‘Well, I for one thoroughly enjoyed myself in spite of the setbacks,’ says Ellie.

  ‘Yes, you look as if you did. I’m glad,’ says Gabriella, moving off through the lingering crowds to find Malc.

  Well, she’s hardly likely to give me the satisfaction of breaking down in front of me, says Ellie, consoling herself as she drives home, smiling nearly all the way.

  Poor Malc. She imagines the rest of his evening.

  33

  GABRIELLA’S HOLD ON MALC has been loosened. She seems to be letting him go. One day he phones to ask if he can come to the bungalow, ‘to take a look at the garden.’ Ellie is quick to refuse—she doesn’t have anyone visit her any more. Di has asked several times, so has Margot, and Kev wants to come and have a look, but to everyone Ellie makes the same excuse: ‘I’ll come to you, I’d rather. You know how I love to get out.’

  To Kev she says, ‘Go and stay with your father. It’s much nicer there, and you could learn to sail.’

  The bungalow is shrivelled up like a sun-dried chrysalis, or a scaly old snakeskin; there is no real room for anyone in it. The furniture has not seen polish for months, the curtains have a tie-dye effect with damp-looking stains from being so rarely drawn, and all the surfaces are covered with that vague suggestion of frost, a kind of ashy-white dust which shows up badly when the sun shines in. It’s beginning to smell of litter and every now and then—she doesn’t know why she bothers—Ellie goes round with a black dustbin bag and gathers it all together.

  She’s got far more to do with her time than cope with nonsense like that, and she doesn’t want a cleaner, she doesn’t want anyone coming in and wanting to chat. The bungalow is a place to sleep, a place to eat and a place for telephone calls—not a place to be living in.

  Ellie spends almost every day round at twenty-eight Ridley Place. She has to be there to see that the curtains are hung properly, the carpets are laid and the brand new furniture is exactly what she ordered—not only furniture, of course, but lamps, rugs, new bedding and towels. Everything’s new, even down to biscuit tins and cruets. She has great fun with the kitchen, she keeps it old-fashioned in the most modern way and the firm which installs it wants to come and take photographs for an advertising feature. Brass-bottomed pans hang around her wonderful black Aga, great oak settles squashed with cushions sit either side of the scarred old table and only the best Worcester china is displayed in her glass-fronted dresser.

  Eventually there comes a day when even Pete Sparrow considers it finished; it is the day he comes round, not for his last cheque, because Ellie is holding that back in case of mistakes, but for his scarf and his bobble hat.

  He smacks his lips together with a fag gripped between. ‘This is a special, a one-off,’ he tells Ellie and the Brigadier, who are sitting having coffee in the drawing room. Norma is on the floor rifling through Ellie’s record collection, drinking coke with a straw. ‘And I am dead chuffed with what I’ve accomplished here.’

  ‘You have every right to be chuffed,’ says the Brigadier, dunking a dark chocolate digestive.

  ‘But I couldn’t have done it without her,’ Pete Sparrow goes on, looking at Ellie with undisguised admiration. ‘She’s been a pillar of strength to me and a rich source of inspiration. She has a natural touch, she knows what’s right, down to the last bath plug, down to the last toilet chain. She knows it’s the details what really count.’

  ‘Well,’ says Ellie.

  ‘And I think you’re wasting a great talent,’ Pete goes on. ‘I think you’d be wrong to stick at one.’

  ‘You think she should go in for this sort of thing in a professional way?’ asks Norma.

  ‘She’d be snapped up. They’d only have to come and see this and they’d snap her up. There’s not many people who know… natural-like. Most people have to be taught it and then there’s always something a little bit missing.’

  Ellie flushes with pleasure.

  ‘You know what proper people like,’ says Pete Sparrow, moving reluctantly out of the house of which he has become so proud.

  But it is really that evening when she is on her own that Ellie experiences that sensation of sheer pleasure. It is softly, calmly, summer—with a gentle green light filtering in and a nightingale singing. There is dew on the grass of her small garden, black soil, old roses are starting to grow again now the rubble has been cleared around them. The stout walls filter the sounds and only seem to allow the right ones in… this house knows Ellie and she is at one with it. She sits and she sips a glass of sherry, at one with herself and happy as she can never remember being… not so totally… no, not ever.

  She has decided to have a small house-warming party, nothing much, just drinks and nibbles—mostly the neighbours. Her shoes are off and her feet are up on the sofa. She is deciding whether or not she can stay the night; it seems such a shame to leave it. She has bought some invitations and she fills them in as she sits there, reluctant to do anything much except lie back and savour this swelling feeling of joy.

  She feels lazy.

  Lonely? No. Isn’t that funny, she’s not even slightly lonely. She frowns when she he
ars the doorbell go, she has to put on her shoes and go all the way downstairs, and it can only be a salesman, or Norma who’s forgotten something, or other neighbours coming round to introduce themselves. Ellie’s not in the mood for talking.

  She is in the mood for feeling.

  She opens the door and there’s Gabriella. Ellie jumps. Her face whitens. It is hard for Ellie to take this in—for this is another world intruding—it is as if someone from Neighbours has strayed into Coronation Street, it is worrying, disorientating—and Ellie is lost for words.

  ‘Aren’t you going to invite me in?’

  Gabriella is all eyes… admiring eyes… very wide, very blue, very certain.

  ‘How did you know about my house?’

  Gabriella just smiles and exclaims, as she mounts the stairs behind a breathless Ellie, ‘My oh my!’

  There is nothing for it but to show her into the drawing room and Gabriella, in a red towelling jumpsuit and trainers, settles down, her eyes wandering around the room, absorbing every last delicate detail. She shakes her head amazedly and asks for a drink.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I’ll have the same as you.’ She nods towards the glass which Ellie has forgotten.

  Ellie is in a state of shock. She moves, but she doesn’t know how she moves; she thinks, but without direction or logic. When she looks back she will remember every second of this unexpected encounter, every glance, every meaningful look, every slant of the light, the way the rug curls up at one corner and the creases in the magazine.

  Gabriella de Courtney relaxes by stretching her legs and allowing her arms to rest along the top of the sofa. She gazes at Ellie very seriously. ‘Much as I am enjoying the game, tempted though I am to allow it to go on, for it is compelling in itself—it is quite, quite fascinating—nevertheless I feel it is time that we stop playing and count up what we’ve got.’

  Ellie manages to squeak, ‘I do not understand you.’

  Gabriella gives a small laugh. ‘Oh, Ellie! Please give me the credit of allowing me some intelligence, some sense of foresight, some desires and motives other than the ones you have been insulting me with up until now. Every dog has its day and I have allowed you yours. You had to be allowed one small moment of triumph—a day neither of us is quickly going to forget.’

  ‘I still don’t know what you’re talking about, and I don’t understand how you knew about my house!’

  Get out get out get out you are spoiling it. You look good in it but you are ruining it! Ellie’s hands are sweating… she has been caught… she is going to be punished. She wants to run away but there is nowhere to go and Gabriella is staring at her steadily as if she knows.

  ‘Well, sweetie, I have to confess that I did not fall out with my intellectual friend, Bella Beasely, over the small matter of prisoners’ art. It was, to be truthful, much more mundane than that. I fell out with that sharp little lady because I was fucking her husband. It’s surprising what men tell you in bed. It’s astonishing to discover all the small matters they like to confide while they’re…’

  ‘Robert told you about my money?’ The pain of this is double-edged, sharp and rusty, it cuts her jaggedly and withdraws, bringing a tinny raw slice of Ellie with it. It is a betrayal of enormous proportions. Ellie remembers the discomfort on Bella Beasely’s face when she’d gone round for help on that terrible first morning and mentioned Gabriella’s name, and Robert’s unease… Ellie has to smile, because there she’d been, fantasising, dreaming that he might fancy her. Oh God, take it away…

  Gabriella is going on quite unperturbed. She probably knows how Ellie feels—she seems to know everything, doesn’t she? ‘And as far as finding out about your house, that was quite simple. I only had to follow you from Malcolm’s office one day and you led me straight to it.’

  Ellie steadies her hand as she reaches for her sherry, as the awful truth dawns. ‘So Robert told you about the money?’ she repeats.

  ‘He told me about your money before I even met Malcolm, right at the very beginning before it all started. And all about your clever little scheme—it was rather sweet, we thought. I recognised the challenge immediately. One million five hundred and twenty-five thousand pounds. Well, that’s a staggering amount, Ellie, especially for someone who’s never seen a fifty-pound note in her life.’

  ‘But you didn’t tell Malc?’

  ‘Why would I tell Malcolm?’

  Ellie shakes her head. ‘I just thought you possibly might.’

  Gabriella fills her hand with peanuts from Ellie’s new glass dish before she sits back once again.

  ‘No, I didn’t tell Malcolm. I wanted to see what you’d do with it. I was extremely interested to know what you’d do with it. I knew you’d try and buy him back but I wasn’t sure how. There was a point when I thought you might offer it to me—fair exchange, so to speak, but that was before I met you. That was before I gave the matter much serious thought.’

  ‘And then what?’

  ‘Then I realised that you would never do that. Then I threw in the bait, told Malcolm that the penthouse was mine and that my job meant more to me than anything else in the world.’

  ‘But it did! Anyone could see that it did! And the penthouse was you, Gabriella. It was perfectly and completely right for you!’

  ‘Oh Ellie, sometimes you really disappoint me. How do you know it was me? I am a total stranger!’

  ‘But the penthouse is yours! It has all your things in it!’

  Gabriella smiles, the frightening smile of a person who knows and enjoys power over another human being. She stares at Ellie through patterns of cut glass. ‘The penthouse goes with the gallery. Whoever runs the gallery lives in the penthouse. It’s not mine, it has never been mine. I furnished it because I was the first person to live in it.’

  ‘But Malc said…’

  ‘It is very easy to get Malcolm to say anything. He was very easy to catch. He is like Plasticine—like ready-made pastry. You know that, Ellie, as well as I do.’

  There is more pain in Ellie than hatred. ‘I thought those were your precious things.’

  Gabriella uses a conciliatory tone. ‘It was important to bring you to the apartments, to let you see the empty flats and make you believe that to leave there would destroy me. I made sure, I emphasised over and over again how important my job and my apartment were to me. And you soaked it up… you are frightened of women like me, aren’t you Ellie? And when you are frightened of people you do tend to make them up. It is important to humanise them, to give them all sorts of little vulnerable defects…’

  ‘How do you know that?’ asks Ellie, barely audible.

  Gabriella is cool, calm and collected while Ellie feels she is growing a hump on her back and she might well be dribbling.

  ‘Everyone knows that.’

  ‘What are you going to do?’

  Gabriella flashes an even more piercing smile. She takes her time before she answers. ‘I could have told Malcolm you had won the money and were keeping it quiet soon after I met him. I could have told him you paid for that job of his, but that wouldn’t have worked.’ Gabriella smiles at Ellie, quite fondly. ‘He would probably have loved you all the more for that. I could have told him it was you who bought the empty apartments, who moved the Skinners in and those other unsavoury people, but he would probably have laughed and understood—I certainly did. No, I had to wait until you did something that would turn him against you for ever, with no turning back, and I didn’t have to wait very long. Oh Ellie, women like you are so pathetically predictable.’ Gabriella sits forward. ‘Ellie, Malcolm would never forgive you if I told him it was you who informed the newspapers and brought all that embarrassment down on his head. It slayed him, Ellie, he was tortured by it, and he struggled, most of the time without sleep, to get through it. You hit him where it really hurt… he turned, very publicly, on his own kind and he got pulverised for it.’ Gabriella retrieves her arms and sits back, positioning them behind her head. ‘And do you know something, El
lie? I don’t think he will ever quite recover from that. From that plan of yours. From what you did to him.’

  ‘I wanted him back,’ sobs Ellie, inferior, helpless. ‘I only wanted him back.’ But her words fall and evaporate before Gabriella’s ironic, interested gaze.

  ‘And you can have him back, my dear. I certainly don’t want him any more.’ Gabriella gazes around the room again, making her eyes go wider and wider. ‘But this house will do me, this house and whatever you have left in that bank of yours which I am sure is still considerable.’

  ‘My house?’ Ellie is completely lost now.

  ‘Darling! I certainly can’t stay living in the penthouse, not now, dear, not after what you’ve done. There’s no hope of getting the buggers out, you made quite sure of that, I suppose.’

  ‘And you could make Malc come back to me?’

  ‘I’d only have to chuck him out and he’d come back to you tomorrow. Malcolm is not a man who can live well on his own. He is a man who needs to feel the strength of a woman behind him, as you well know, Ellie, as you and I both well know.’

  ‘You never loved him?’

  ‘He was good for a fling, as most men are. I do not intend to spend the rest of my life shacked up to any single one of them. Don’t look so tortured, Ellie. I am offering to let you have what you want! And you have me to thank, really, for taking Malcolm off your hands so that you could exercise your own tiny wings for a while, so that you could sort out all that destructive stuff between you. I can see you both being really happy together. Happy ever after!’

  The poison in Gabriella’s words brings a flush to Ellie’s cheeks. She asks, ‘And your job at the gallery?’

  ‘You are naive enough to think that that could be under threat. I am a professional, Ellie, and one small setback is not going to undermine my whole career! Especially if I am independent, with money behind me.’

  Mortified by her own stupidity Ellie pleads, ‘What about your family? They have money! You turned it down to be independent.’