Based on a True Story (2 page)

three

Steam hissed from the silver machine on the café’s counter. Augusta turned to glare at it. In her day, coffee makers had been discreet things, properly overshadowed by massed rows of liquor bottles. While she’d been preoccupied they had grown vast, bristling with levers and wheels and dials, tended by white-aproned acolytes.

It was not the Soho she remembered. Where were the tarts and the toilet traders? All gone. Once, many years before, in the dregs of a May night, Augusta had seen someone who looked very much like Francis Bacon having a pee against a tobacconist’s on the corner. Now it was a shop selling reusable luncheon containers.

She was lost in a memory of the bottles that used to stand behind the bar in a magical skyline when a voice pierced her thoughts: “So, there were just a few other things I wanted to ask . . .”

Augusta focused on the girl who’d been sent to interrogate her. Was she from a newspaper? A magazine? No, the women from magazines displayed military precision in their grooming, every hair terrified into place, shoes and nails gleaming. This one was smudged around the edges.

“I wanted to ask you about the time you worked at the greyhound track in Walthamstow,” the girl said. “When you were young.”

“That long ago?” Augusta said, and the girl ducked her head. Her eye caught the empty bottle of Montrachet on the next table over. Two gin-blossomed City boys had made short work of it. How awful would it be to order a brandy at lunch? Brandy was what they drank at Oxford. It barely qualified as a spirit.

She tore her eyes away from the empty wine bottle. She’d been five days without a drink, each of them hard-won. As she slipped into her cold bed every night, she told herself that she had just climbed Kilimanjaro in a wheelchair, and congratulated herself on a lack of self-pity. The girl sitting across from her, nervously tugging a strand of dark hair straight, knew nothing of her struggles. She was a pretty, fine-featured thing, but did herself no favours with a Marks & Spencer cardigan sized for a rugby prop.

Augusta smiled. “A stunning place, the dog track. Such glamour, very East End. Wide boys and their ladies, the women all had mountains of hair and smelled of Youth Dew. I was just a pot girl, collecting glasses at the end of the night, but if you caught the eye of one of the smooth types he’d peel off a tenner and stick it down your top. Depending on how well he’d done on the dogs.” She tipped her water glass up, drained the last drops. “Of course, it’s all gone now. Possibly it’s a Poundland today.”

The girl leaned closer. Her fingernails, newly varnished and even more recently bitten, tapped the cover of the book that lay on the table between them. On the cover of her memoir Augusta looked as if her eyes doubted what her lips were saying. She knew she seemed younger in the photo than she did in person.

“Princess Margaret really came to the dog track one night?”

Augusta traced the ring her water glass had left on the table. “I think she liked a little slumming. A bit of rough and then back to Kensington. She ordered a double gin with ice, and then sent it back because the ice wasn’t cold enough. A memory I shall take with me to the grave.”

“That was incredible, that part. I mean, the Queen’s sister at a dog track in Walthamstow.”

A smile spread slowly across Augusta’s face. “You’re wondering if any of it’s true,” she said. “I suppose I opened myself up to that, given the book’s title. Not that it matters. It’s entertainment, darling.”

The girl’s pen scratched on her notepad.

“Oh, for God’s sake, child, don’t write it down! Leave some things to your readers’ imagination. The resonant space between the lines.”

“But I don’t get paid for the spaces.”

For the first time that afternoon, Augusta laughed. “Then you need to negotiate a better deal, Stella.”

“Probably I should,” the girl said. “I’m not very good at that end of it.” She paused for a moment and said, in a rush, “It’s Frances, actually.”

“Ah. And I’ve been calling you Stella all afternoon.”

“No, you called me Jacqueline once. But it’s kind of you to look for a more interesting name.”

Augusta shrugged. “Why paint the walls cream when they could be orange?”

Her eyes were drawn to the door, where an elderly lady wearing a fur coat that looked suspiciously like orangutan struggled with a shopping trolley. Outside the café, pedestrians scurried along the narrow Soho pavement, intent on phones rather than feet. Taped to the window of the sex shop opposite was a cardboard sign, its message written in blue felt-tip:
ARTISTS MODEL UPSTAIRS. NO APPT NECESARY. DOOR IS OPEN
. A sign on the townhouse next door, neater and more official, said:
THIS IS NOT A BROTHEL.
The last surviving bit of old Soho, flashing its grimy wares at the tourists.

The waitress arrived at their table. “Ladies,” she said, picking a hair off her apron. “Anything else?”

“A cappuccino for me, please,” said the girl. “Augusta, would you like something?”

Augusta knew that she should join the sorority of coffee drinkers to signal that her afternoon, too, was packed with purpose. The thought of a coffee made her stomach heave. A single brandy would smooth the wrinkles from the day.

She hesitated a moment. Alma’s voice in one ear. The distinctive throb behind her left eye urging her in the other direction. No one knew her here. Certainly not this girl. Alma’s voice won; Augusta made a note to ring her and tell her of this victory.

“I’ll have a coffee,” she said. “One of the disgusting ones filled with milk.”

* * *

The book lay between them; its pages bristled with yellow sticky notes. Frances tugged it closer, panicking, for a moment, at the thought that Augusta might open it to see the notes she’d scrawled inside:
Page 24: She gets Tylenol 4s
from her doctor? Is there even such a thing as Tylenol 4s?!? Maybe only for celebrities! Page 62: Steals pills from her father. No way!! Page 117: Can you really put a tab of acid on your eyeball? Ask.

But she hadn’t asked, not yet.

The woman across from Frances bore little resemblance to the fiend in the book’s pages. A grain of rice was stuck to her bosom, framed in the reckless V of a not-nearly buttoned blouse. Faintly glittering eyeliner drifted from the corner of one brown eye. There was a slight trembling in her hands.

Ask the question
, Frances whispered fiercely to herself.
Just ask the question
.

“I hope I’m not keeping you too long,” the girl said. “I’ve just got a few more questions.”

“And I hope I’ll have the answers.” The dull pain behind Augusta’s eyes began pulsing along to the sound of the Thompson Twins on the café’s stereo. Every song that played brought her back to the 1980s.

Their coffees arrived, and Augusta began shovelling sugar into hers.

At this, Frances plucked up her nerve. “Now that you mention it, there are some pretty glaring — I guess you’d say omissions —” Her courage fled as a cloud crossed Augusta’s face. “That is, there are things that are brought up . . . and are never returned to . . . which might be considered important, or at least relevant, and painful I suppose . . .”

Frances reached for her coffee, in order to drink instead of babble. Augusta gazed at her in silence, as she might have watched a thief slowly twist at the end of a rope.

“Your son, you only mention him once, I think, and I was wondering why —”

Augusta pushed her chair back. “The story I told is the one I wanted to tell. There wasn’t the need to drag the whole world into it. You’ll excuse me, won’t you, Frances?” She balanced carefully on her orange-velvet platforms and pushed off from the table. With a wriggle, she inched her skirt a fraction lower and tottered away.

Was she gone to the toilet or just gone? Was that a strop? What the hell was a strop, anyway? No interview subject had ever left Frances’s table in dudgeon, high or low, although once she had accidentally made a famous children’s author cry by mentioning her husband’s resemblance to Marty Feldman.

Twisting in her seat, Frances looked for the waitress. Time to collect the bill and skulk back to the office to admit she had botched an interview and had failed to get an answer to the one question that might have given her a nice scoop. Time to face Stanley’s scowl and, worse, his disappointment.

Stanley Pfeffer, features editor of the
London Advance
, was the man responsible for Frances’s increasingly outré daily assignments. When a pop star was found on a farmer’s stolen tractor with six times the legal limit of alcohol in his blood, Frances had been dispatched to the pub to see if it was possible to get that drunk without falling into a coma. She swam in the Serpentine in December to test new data about hypothermia from the University of Edinburgh.

“You’re a godsend, Frances,” Stan would say as she filed her latest story. “I can’t get that lot to do anything except scratch their arses, and even then they ask for overtime.”

He’d shown a faith in her that no one else ever had, encouraging her at work in the morning and in the pub in the evening, where they sat and moistly reminisced about the good old days of newspapers, which Stanley remembered vaguely and Frances not at all.

A scraping noise caused her to look up, and there was her subject — crimson lipstick fresh and rust-red hair minimally neatened — taking her seat again at the table. An unspoken accord hung in the air: Let’s try this again, shall we? Frances flipped open her notepad, searching for something anodyne to settle the mood.

“So you grew up in Walthamstow? I read somewhere that you said, ‘I was born to leave.’ Was it really so bad?”

“I take it that you’ve never been, Frances. Really, for your own sanity, it should remain that way.”

“But it’s the suburbs, isn’t it? Nice houses and parks?”

Augusta’s laugh turned into a small burp, which she caught with the back of her hand. “It’s not America, darling. There were no cheerleaders bouncing around. The houses were tiny. Wet. They were so tiny and wet that the men would build themselves sheds at the bottom of the garden and spend all their time hiding from their women, doing God knows what. It was misery in a glass.”

Her voice drifted off, and she turned a strained smile on Frances. “Where did you grow up? Your adorable accent tells me it wasn’t London or environs.”

This was the moment Frances always dreaded. The English asked where you were from, professing an interest, when really their minds had already calcified around a set of assumptions: Look at her, with her shiny teeth, even though she grew up on pop tarts and marshmallow sandwiches. Got her first passport at thirty. Wears panties that say “Property of Jesus.”

“I’m American,” Frances said, and regretted how defensive she sounded. “From California.”

At the word
California
Augusta sat up straight. For a moment she said nothing, merely stared with an unnerving intensity. All at once Frances knew what a gazelle at a watering hole must feel like knowing there’s a leopard hidden nearby.

Finally Augusta said: “Do you happen to know a fellow called Kenneth Deller?”

Startled, the girl shook her head.

“He used to be a journalist. Before your time, I imagine. He was old school, as you young creatures like to say. Proper Fleet Street. Christ, listen to me, I sound like I flew here on a biplane.”

“I’d like to hear about him. I love stories from those days.” Frances brought her spoon up to her lips, licked it clean. “I’ll bet he smoked.”

For a moment Augusta couldn’t formulate a response. “Yes, darling, he smoked. He smoked in every possible way.”

Even speaking his name filled her with bitterness. But sitting here in Soho brought back warmer memories, a sliver of light against the blackness of her current mood. She’d first met Kenneth in a Chinese restaurant on the next street over, when Soho was still filthy and worthy of love. That interview had started out much like this one, over lunch, and ended four days later in Salford, not one word ever appearing in print. It had been her first interview, conducted shortly after a punk production of
Hamlet
had lofted her from obscurity. Her reading of Ophelia trailed outrage in its wake.

When Deller showed up thirty minutes late at the Golden Fortune on Greek Street, Augusta had been on the verge of leaving. He sailed in on a cloud of Bell’s and Benson & Hedges, his towering yellow quiff nearly bringing down the sign over the door that offered thousand-year-old duck egg.

“How lovely to meet you, finally,” Augusta said as he arrived at her table and stuck out a giant pink paw in greeting. She ignored it. “No, you can keep your hand. I’ve got two of my own, and I’m thinking of using one of them to give you a good slap.”

“Ooh,” he said, unperturbed. “Get her.”

He sat down anyway, unfolding long legs into the aisle so she couldn’t escape. Augusta had never understood this male drive for territoriality, the way they spread their arms and legs as if they were ferns battling for every inch of sunlight.

Kenneth Deller lit a cigarette and watched her with an entirely unembarrassed grin. Augusta wondered that his hair didn’t catch fire. It spread majestically upwards in defiance of gravity, a great blond cloud billowing above the horizon of his cheeky grin. From top to bottom he was a one-man fireworks display: the golden flare atop, the tight lavender shirt, the deeper mauve of his corduroy trousers. He was ridiculous. Augusta had never seen a peacock outside of a zoo, and couldn’t take her eyes away.

“So, my girl,” he said, leaning in close. “Tell me your story, Miss . . . Augusta . . . Price.”

He tapped the back of her hand three times with his finger. Under the scotch there was another, vaguely sweet, chemical smell. It reminded her of her mother, the rare occasions her parents treated themselves to a night out at the Lord Palmerston. Hairspray, that was it. She pictured his bathroom, the spare canisters of Elnett in the cupboard, the ashtray balanced on the edge of the tub. Until that moment she’d been terrified, her first proper London interview and who knew if she’d muck it up? Then the fear fled. He was just like the boys she’d grown up with, only slightly more orange. And lavender.