‘Yes.’
‘She said it was for insurance.’
‘Among other things.’
Dave had a feeling that he had been tricked.
Lenny said: ‘The show’s on Saturday, Eric. How come we’re going on a Thursday?’
‘Most of it’s pre-recorded. Just one or two of the acts perform live on the day.’
Dave was surprised. The show gave the impression of a fun party full of kids dancing and having a great time. He said: ‘Will there be an audience?’
‘Not today. You’ve got to pretend you’re singing to a thousand screaming girls all wetting their knickers for you.’
Buzz, the bass player, said: ‘That’s easy. I’ve been performing for imaginary girls since I was thirteen.’
It was a joke, but Eric said: ‘No, he’s right. Look at the camera and picture the prettiest girl you know standing right there taking her bra off. I promise you, it will put just the right sort of smile on your face.’
Dave realized he was smiling already. Maybe Eric’s trick worked.
They reached the studio at one. It was not very smart. Much of it was dingy, like a factory. The parts that appeared on camera had a tawdry glamour, but everything out of shot was scuffed and grubby. Busy people walked around ignoring Plum Nellie. Dave felt as though everyone knew he was a beginner.
A group called Billy and the Kids was on stage when they arrived. A record was playing loudly, and they were singing and playing along, but they had no microphones and their guitars were not plugged in. Dave knew, from his friends, that most viewers did not realize the acts were miming, and he wondered how people could be so dumb.
Lenny was scornful of the jolly Billy and the Kids record, but Dave was impressed. They smiled and gestured to the non-existent audience, and when the song came to an end, they bowed and waved as if acknowledging gales of applause. Then they did the whole thing all over again, with no less energy and charm. That was the professional way, Dave realized.
Plum Nellie’s dressing room was large and clean, with big mirrors surrounded by Hollywood lights, and a fridge full of soft drinks. ‘This is better than what we’re used to,’ said Lenny. ‘There’s even toilet roll in the bog!’
Dave put on his red shirt, then went back to watch the filming. Mickie McFee was performing now. She had had a string of hits in the fifties and was making a comeback. She was at least thirty, Dave guessed, but she looked sexy in a pink sweater stretched tight across her breasts. She had a great voice. She did a soul ballad called ‘It Hurts too Much’, and she sounded like a black girl. What must it be like, Dave wondered, to have so much confidence? He was so anxious he felt as if his stomach was full of worms.
The cameramen and technicians liked Mickie – they were mostly the older generation – and they clapped when she finished.
She came down off the stage and saw Dave. ‘Hello, kid,’ she said.
‘You were great,’ Dave said, and introduced himself.
She asked him about the group. He was telling her about Hamburg when they were interrupted by a man in an Argyle sweater. ‘Plum Nellie on stage, please,’ the man said in a soft voice. ‘Sorry to butt in, Mickie, darling.’ He turned to Dave. ‘I’m Kelly Jones, producer.’ He looked Dave up and down. ‘You look fab. Get your guitar.’ He turned back to Mickie. ‘You can eat him up later.’
She protested: ‘Give a girl a chance to play hard to get.’
‘That’ll be the day, duckie.’
Mickie waved a goodbye and disappeared.
Dave wondered whether they had meant a single word they had said.
He had little time to think about it. The group got on stage and were shown their places. As usual, Lenny turned up his shirt collar, the way Elvis did. Dave told himself not to be nervous: he would be miming, so he didn’t even have to play the song right! Then they were into it and Walli was fingering the introduction as the record began.
Dave looked at the rows of empty seats and imagined Mickie McFee pulling the pink sweater off over her head to reveal a black brassiere. He grinned happily into the camera and sang the harmony.
The record was two minutes long, but it seemed to be over in five seconds.
He expected to be asked to do it again. They all waited on stage. Kelly Jones was talking earnestly to Eric. After a minute they both came over to the group. Eric said: ‘Technical problem, lads.’
Dave feared there was something wrong with their performance, and the television appearance might be cancelled.
Lenny said: ‘What technical problem?’
Eric said: ‘It’s you, Lenny, I’m sorry.’
‘What are you talking about?’
Eric looked at Kelly, who said: ‘This show is about kids with groovy clothes and Beatle haircuts raving to the latest hits. I’m sorry, Lenny, but you’re not a kid, and your haircut is five years out of date.’
Lenny said angrily: ‘Well, I’m very sorry.’
Eric said: ‘They want the group to appear without you, Lenny.’
‘Forget it,’ said Lenny. ‘It’s my group.’
Dave was terrified. He had sacrificed everything for this! He said: ‘Listen, what if Lenny combs his hair forward and turns down the collar of his shirt?’
Lenny said: ‘I’m not doing it.’
Kelly said: ‘And he would still look too old.’
‘I don’t care,’ said Lenny. ‘It’s all of us or none of us.’ He looked around the group. ‘Right, lads?’
No one said anything.
‘Right?’ Lenny repeated.
Dave felt scared, but forced himself to speak. ‘I’m sorry, Lenny, but we can’t miss this chance.’
‘You bastards,’ Lenny said furiously. ‘I should never have let you change the name. The Guardsmen were a great little rock-and-roll combo. Now it’s a schoolboy group called Plum fucking Nellie.’
‘So,’ Kelly said impatiently. ‘You’ll go back on stage without Lenny and do the number again.’
Lenny said: ‘Am I being fired from my own group?’
Dave felt like a traitor. He said: ‘It’s only for today.’
‘No, it’s not,’ said Lenny. ‘How can I tell my friends that my group is on telly but I’m not in it? Fuck that. It’s all or nothing. If I leave now, I leave for ever.’
No one said anything.
‘Right, then,’ said Lenny, and he walked out of the studio.
They all looked shamefaced.
Buzz said: ‘That was brutal.’
Eric said: ‘That’s show business.’
Kelly said: ‘Let’s go for another take, please.’
Dave feared he would not be able to jig about merrily, after such a traumatic row, but to his surprise he managed fine.
They went through the song twice, and Kelly said he loved their performance. He thanked them for their understanding, and hoped they would come back on the show soon.
When the group returned to the dressing room, Dave hung back in the studio and sat in the empty audience section for a few minutes. He was emotionally exhausted. He had made his television debut, and he had betrayed his cousin. He could not help remembering all the helpful advice Lenny had given him. I’m an ungrateful rotter, he thought.
Heading back to join the others, he looked in at an open door and saw Mickie McFee in her dressing room, holding a glass in her hand. ‘Do you like vodka?’ she said.
‘I don’t know what it tastes like,’ said Dave.
‘I’ll show you.’ She kicked the door shut, put her arms around his neck, and kissed him with her mouth open. Her tongue had a booze taste a bit like gin. Dave kissed her back enthusiastically.
She broke the embrace and poured more vodka into her glass, then offered it to him.
‘No, you drink it,’ he said. ‘I prefer it that way.’
She emptied the glass then kissed him again. After a minute she said: ‘Oh, boy, you are a living doll.’
She stepped back then, to Dave’s astonishment and delight, she pulled her tight pink sweater over her head and threw it aside.
She was wearing a black bra.
33
Dimka’s grandmother, Katerina, died of a heart attack at the age of seventy. She was buried in Novodevichy Cemetery, a small park full of monuments and little chapels. The tombstones were prettily topped with snow, like slices of iced cake.
This prestigious resting place was reserved for leading citizens: Katerina was here because one day Grandfather Grigori, a hero of the October Revolution, would be buried in the same grave. They had been married almost fifty years. Dimka’s grandfather seemed dazed and uncomprehending as his lifelong companion was lowered into the frozen ground.
Dimka wondered what it must be like, to love a woman for half a century and then lose her, suddenly, between one beat of the heart and the next. Grigori kept saying: ‘I was so lucky to have her. I was so lucky.’
A marriage such as that was probably the best thing in the world, Dimka thought. They had loved one another and had been happy together. Their love had survived two world wars and a revolution. They had had children and grandchildren.
What would people say about Dimka’s marriage, he wondered, when he was lowered into the Moscow earth, perhaps fifty years from now? ‘Call no man happy until he is dead,’ said the playwright Aeschylus: Dimka had heard that quote at university and always remembered it. Youthful promise could be blighted by later tragedy; suffering was often rewarded by wisdom. According to family legend, the young Katerina had preferred Grigori’s gangster brother, Lev, who had fled to America leaving her pregnant. Grigori had married her and raised Volodya as his son. Their happiness had had an inauspicious beginning, proving Aeschylus’s point.
Another surprise pregnancy had triggered Dimka’s own marriage. Perhaps he and Nina could end up as happy as Grigori and Katerina. It was what he longed for, despite his feelings for Natalya. He wished he could forget her.
He looked across the grave at his Uncle Volodya and Aunt Zoya and their two teenagers. Zoya at fifty was serenely beautiful. There was another marriage that seemed to have brought lasting happiness.
He was not sure about his own parents. His late father had been a cold man. Perhaps that was a consequence of being in the secret police: how could people who did such cruel work be loving and sympathetic? Dimka looked at his mother, Anya, weeping for the loss of her own mother. She had seemed happier since his father died.
Out of the corner of his eye he looked at Nina. She was solemn but dry-eyed. Was she happy being married to him? She had been divorced once, and when Dimka met her she had said she never wanted to marry again and was unable to have children. Now she stood beside him as his wife and carried Grigor, their nine-month-old son, wrapped in a bearskin blanket. Dimka sometimes felt he had no idea what was going on in her mind.
Because Grandfather Grigori had stormed the Winter Palace in 1917, a lot of people had shown up to say a last farewell to his wife. Some were important Soviet dignitaries. Here was the bushy-eyebrowed Leonid Brezhnev, Secretary of the Central Committee, glad-handing the mourners. There was Marshal Mikhail Pushnoy, who had been a young protégé of Grigori’s in the Second World War. Pushnoy, an overweight Lothario, was stroking his luxuriant grey moustache and turning his charm on Aunt Zoya.
Anticipating this crowd, Uncle Volodya had paid for a reception in a restaurant just off Red Square. Restaurants were dismal places, with surly waiters and poor food. Dimka had heard, from both Grigori and Volodya, that they were different in the West. However, this one was typically Soviet. The ashtrays were full when they arrived. The snacks were stale: dry blinis and curling old pieces of toast with perfunctory slices of boiled egg and smoked fish. Fortunately, even Russians could not spoil vodka, and there was plenty of that.
The Soviet food crisis was over. Khrushchev had succeeded in buying grain from the United States and elsewhere, and there would be no famine this winter. But the emergency had highlighted a long-term disappointment. Khrushchev had pinned his hopes on making Soviet agriculture modern and productive – and he had failed. He ranted about inefficiency, ignorance and clumsiness, but he had made no headway against such problems. Agriculture symbolized the general miscarriage of his reforms: for all his maverick ideas and sudden radical changes, the USSR was still decades behind the West in everything except military might.
Worst of all, the opposition to Khrushchev within the Kremlin came from men who wanted not more reform but less, hidebound conservatives such as preening Marshal Pushnoy and back-slapping Brezhnev, both now roaring with laughter at one of Grigori’s war stories. Dimka had never been so worried about the future of his country, his leader and his own career.
Nina handed the baby to Dimka and got a drink. A minute later she was with Brezhnev and Marshal Pushnoy, joining in their laughter. People always laughed a lot at funeral wakes, Dimka had noticed: it was the reaction after the solemnity of the burial.
Nina was entitled to party, he felt: she had carried Grigor and given birth to him and breast-fed him, so she had not had much fun for a year.
She had got over her anger with Dimka for lying to her on the night Kennedy died. Dimka had calmed her with another lie. ‘I did work late, but then I went for a drink with some colleagues.’ She had remained angry for a while, but less so, and now she seemed to have forgotten the incident. He was pretty sure she had no suspicion of his illicit feelings for Natalya.
Dimka took Grigor around the family, proudly showing people his first tooth. The restaurant was in an old house, with tables spread through several ground-floor rooms of different sizes. Dimka ended up in the farthest room with his Uncle Volodya and Aunt Zoya.
That was where his sister cornered him. ‘Have you seen how Nina is behaving?’ Tania said.
Dimka laughed. ‘Is she getting drunk?’
‘And flirting.’
Dimka was not perturbed. Anyway, he was in no position to condemn Nina: he did the same when he went to the Riverside Bar with Natalya. He said: ‘It is a party.’
Tania had no inhibitions about what she said to her twin. ‘I noticed that she went straight for the most high-ranking men in the room. Brezhnev just left, but she’s still making eyes at Marshal Pushnoy – who must be twenty years older than her.’
‘Some women find power attractive.’