Authors: Kate Beaufoy
The invitations started to arrive: Lisa had been unearthed. She didn’t bother to respond. She knew that if she accepted an invitation to cocktails or a Saturday-to-Monday or a fund-raising gala, she wouldn’t be wearing clinging frocks. Her figure would be subject to scrutiny, and before long word would get back to Ziggy and her keepers in Hollywood. So, without further delay, she composed and sent a generic telegram to those concerned:
DETAINED IN EUROPE DUE TO BEREAVEMENT STOP SEEKING TEMP RELEASE FROM CONTRACT ON COMPASSIONATE GROUNDS STOP WILL RETURN WHEN POSS STOP LISA LA TOUCHE
She couldn’t get out of London fast enough.
In Connemara, the living was easy. Anxious for Lisa’s baby to be as robust and healthy as possible, Róisín reserved for her cousin the best of everything. The parlour was converted into a bedroom for her, she was served breakfast there, and fed on the freshest produce available. Lisa craved fish, and Dónal, Róisín’s husband, returned from his fishing trips with bucket-loads of mackerel. Lisa tried to do her fair share of the housework, insisting she needed the activity and the distraction, but Róisín refused every offer of help, and encouraged her instead to take gentle exercise outdoors.
It rained a lot that summer, but Lisa was glad of the unseasonable weather. It meant she could wrap herself in layers of loose clothing, to disguise her condition lest anyone recognize her. However, after the initial curiosity, nobody took much notice of the reserved, rather overweight woman – ‘a cousin from England’ – who had taken up residence in the de Courcy household. So Lisa spent her days ambling along nearby beaches and boreens, through fields and on the shores of the salt lakes just outside the town, or on the riverbank, listening to the plashing of water, watching the fish leap and enjoying the unfamiliar sensation of the rain on her face.
At night they would sit around the kitchen table, cosy in the warmth of the wood-burning stove, and Dónal would take out his fiddle and play lively Irish jigs and reels with names like ‘Toss the Feathers’ and ‘The Walls of Limerick’. Other times he would play heart-achingly sad laments which brought tears to Lisa’s eyes, and once in a while he would put his fiddle down and entertain them with ‘pishrogues’ – tales of the fairy folk; of Tír na nÓg and the Pooka, of the Banshee and the Fir Darrig and the mischief they’d get up to. And Lisa learned that the Irish freedom fighters had loved their country so much that they had given it the name of a beautiful woman with the walk of a queen, Caitlín ni Houlihan. So Lisa decided to call her baby Caitlín if she was a girl, and Patrick – after the country’s patron saint – if he was a boy.
One day, Dónal took them in the pony and trap to visit Kylemore Abbey. As they rounded a bend in the road, Lisa was greeted by the view that still had the power to take her breath away. The castle that had been her home from home fronted on to a lake, its turrets and parapets and castellations glimmering upside-down in the smooth, mirror-like surface of the water. Lisa remembered the camaraderie she had shared with the other boarders: the midnight swims, the illicit picnics in the woods, the ghost stories after dark in the dorm.
And she turned to Róisín, and said: ‘If the baby is a girl, I should like her to be educated here, as I was.’
Róisín had her conditions, too. The de Courcy surname was to appear on the birth certificate and Lisa was required to give Róisín her word that she would not return to Ireland until the child’s age of majority had been reached, lest she decide to claim it as her own and abscond back to LA. Since she had already had a daughter taken from her, Róisín was determined that it would not happen again. Lisa would be permitted to keep in touch by letter, but she was to be known as ‘aunt’ Lisa. In return, the child would be encouraged to look upon Miss La Touche as a benefactress and Róisín would keep Lisa up to date with all developments concerning the well-being of her offspring.
On 24th July, in the small hours of the morning, Caitlín – immediately known as little Cat – entered the world. With her unblinking slate blue eyes and autocratic expression, it seemed as if she had been here before, knew all there was to know, and would set about getting her own way as soon as ever she could. While Róisín assured Lisa it had been an easy birth, Lisa’s memory of the event was rather different. However, once the infant was cleaned and swaddled and tucked into bed beside her mother, the pain that she had suffered seemed as nothing. Gazing at her sleeping baby, Lisa fell hopelessly in love.
She spent a week in bed with her darling girl, and then she donned her travelling clothes, packed her bags, and fed her daughter for the last time. Before taking leave of Róisín, she carefully wrote down details of the standing order she had set up for her cousin in the bank in Clifden. Then she said goodbye to a sleepy, milk-glutted Cat, kissing her tiny fists and her perfect ears and her peach-bloom cheeks before wrapping her in a shawl of rose pink wool, and placing her in Róisín’s arms.
This time there was no car to take her to Foynes: she couldn’t spare the money for the fare. Instead, Dónal took her to the airport in the pony trap.
Lisa wept throughout the journey, nonstop.
JESSIE WAS HOLDING
a particularly arduous pose for ‘Perdita Treading Grapes’, with her breasts exposed and her skirt ruched up round her thighs. The pose was fiendishly difficult, one that required her to keep one leg raised and her head thrown back – the one that she’d demonstrated to Gervaise on the first evening they’d met.
‘Look at those lissom legs!’ said Gervaise. ‘Look at those clever feet! You are the hardest-working model I’ve ever had the privilege to paint.’
‘It’s all to do with balance,’ Jessie told him. ‘And I’ve always been supple. When I was little, I dreamed of becoming an acrobat.’
‘I know
exactly
how supple you are, beloved.’ Gervaise narrowed appreciative eyes at the canvas, then stepped back from it. ‘That’s that section done. You can take a break now.’
‘Thanks.’ Jessie eased her arms into a stretch, then strolled across the studio floor to help herself to a fig. She sang a little song as she split it. ‘I wish I could shimmy like my sister Kate, she shakes it like a bowl of jelly on a plate—’
‘You’re not going to be doing much more shimmying for a while, darling,’ he said. ‘You’re starting to show. Even those drop-waist dresses of Coco’s aren’t going to disguise your shape for much longer. The painting I embark on next will have to be called
Perdita Enceinte
.’
An Expectant Perdita . . .
She and Gervaise rarely discussed the child she was carrying. The due date was still several months away, and there was a tacit understanding between them that they’d deal with that side of life when they had to. What mattered right now was Gervaise’s work. Since he’d starting turning down commissions, it was important to establish him as eminently collectible, and he and Jessie were working flat out. Her pregnancy meant that she tired sooner than she might have once upon a time, but she soldiered on.
Since moving in with Gervaise, ‘Perdita’ had – as per Coco’s prediction – become the talk of the playground that was post-war Paris. Together they patronized nightclubs – Le Boeuf sur le Toit, or Zelli’s and El Garron in Montmartre. They were inundated with invitations to lunches, art shows, dinners, cocktails, fancy-dress balls, premieres, and Saturday-to-Mondays in the country houses of Gervaise’s moneyed patrons. At one party the King of Spain had tried to put his hand up Jessie’s dress, at another Augustus John had rashly tried to ‘poach’ her away from Gervaise, and at a gallery opening the writer Colette told her she was going to immortalize ‘Perdita’ in a book.
It seemed to Jessie that they were seldom sober; they frequently stayed out until dawn tinged the sky over Saint-Sulpice with chartreuse yellow. Then they would head to Les Halles for the best onion soup in Paris before reeling back to Gervaise’s apartment, blurred at the edges from want of sleep. Jessie loved the feeling of time going by in a giddy, kaleidoscopic haze. It meant that there was no time to dwell on the past.
The fact that their set-up was so unorthodox only added to the rather outré glamour they exuded. Hostesses competed to be on first name terms with the charming couple but Gervaise cocked a bit of a snook by being very picky about which social events he deigned to attend. Invitations to lunches and dinners were seldom taken up, because the idea of being placed next to ‘some footling, stupid goose of a socialite’ gave him the horrors. And of course, such an air of exclusivity only had the effect of making their presence at a ‘do’ even more desirable.
This suited Jessie, who lived in terror of being unmasked as an impostor. She knew that not everybody was convinced by her ‘Perdita’ persona, and that many of the women she met would take malicious delight in exposing her as a fake and charlatan if the opportunity arose.
She saw Count Demetrios occasionally, at the opera or the theatre, and he always asked solicitously after her health. She knew that this was a subtle reference to her pregnancy, and she wished she had never blurted out to him the fact that she was carrying Scotch’s child. But then, she reasoned, if she had not done that, maybe she would still be a prisoner in the Hôtel des Trois Moineaux with the debauched Adèle as her gaoler, and that was unthinkable . . .
And then one day in late December, Gervaise received a telephone call from Antoinette Chanel, Coco’s aunt, to say that Boy Capel had been killed in an automobile accident on the road to the Riviera.
‘
ZIGGY’S ANGRY WITH
me,’ Lisa told Sabu.
She was sitting poolside with him, scanning page after page of execrable dialogue.
‘How do you know?’
‘He’s refused to sell my contract to RKO, even though Mr Hughes upped the ante. And he’s cast me in another skid. I’d rather play a Bearded Lady than do this script.’
Lisa tossed aside the typescript that had been delivered earlier. She had taken up temporary residence in David Niven’s house. The quintessential gentleman – who was working in the UK – had kindly told their mutual agent that Lisa was welcome to stay
chez lui
until she started earning again. Because, ‘compassionate leave’ notwithstanding, since she had turned her back on Hollywood while still under contract, Lisa had been put on suspension, loaned out to second-rate studios and – most humiliatingly of all – asked to test for each potential role. Now she badly needed money.
‘Have you managed to see Mr Stein yet?’ asked Sabu.
‘Finally. He kept me waiting for over a fortnight this time. I guess my days as his pet English Rose are over.’
Sabu took a sip of iced tea. ‘If you want to get back in his good books, you’re going to have to bite the bullet and do what you’re told,’ he said. ‘I did, when I signed up for those rubbishy Maria Montez flicks. Never forget, Lisa, that we are just commodities.’
‘I know, I know, I know!’ She was fed up with hearing it. ‘But honestly, Sabu, this takes the biscuit.’ Picking up the typescript, she thrust it at her friend. ‘Here – have a look.’
Sabu turned over a couple of pages, and then: ‘Oh Lord, Lisa!’ he exclaimed. ‘They’ve given you a four-year-old son!’
‘Isn’t it the absolute end?’ Lisa slumped back on the sofa. ‘I’m already too old to play juves, Sabu, and my career has barely started.’
‘Tch, tch. You’re far too young to be playing mothers!’ he pronounced, loyally.
‘Thank you.’
But not too young to actually
be
a mother, Lisa thought, feigning interest in a trail of ants negotiating the grouting beneath her feet. She hadn’t told Sabu about her baby. She didn’t think that he would have a problem with Cat’s illegitimate status but, since he was one of the most principled people Lisa had ever met, she sensed he would be genuinely shocked by the fact that the father of her child was a married man. Especially one as meretricious as Lochlan.
He gave her a sympathetic look. ‘Cheer up, darling. At least they haven’t sent you off to San Fernando to do cut-price westerns.’
‘Yet,’ she added gloomily. ‘It’ll be Saturday matinée serials next.’
‘Maybe you’ll bag a sugar daddy.’
‘I couldn’t sleep with somebody I didn’t love, however rich he was.’
‘Some girls don’t seem to have a problem with it. Look at Marion Davies.’
‘Yes – but look who she has to go to bed with every night. Randolph Hearst. Ick!’
Lisa slid her sunglasses on and picked up
Modern Screen
.
‘Have you ever been in love, Lisa?’ asked Sabu.
‘No,’ she said, truthfully.
The only creature on the planet with whom she had ever been in love was little Cat. Since the war had ended, and communications with Europe had been re-established on a less erratic footing, Lisa had received photographs of her daughter from Róisín. She was extremely glad to see that the child had inherited her genes rather than Lochlan’s. The photographs were in black and white, but Róisín told her in her letters that Cat had red-gold hair and aquamarine eyes, transparent, milky skin and the sweetest, most infectious laugh of any girleen in the whole of Ireland. Strangers stopped to admire her, Dónal was in thrall to her, and a local fiddle-player had composed a tune dedicated to her. Cat, Róisín claimed, was a queen of Connemara in miniature. And every time a new photograph arrived, Lisa mounted it in a brocade-covered album kept specially for the purpose, before retiring to bed for the rest of the day so that she could gaze upon her daughter’s beauty, and weep.
‘I’ve heard rumours . . .’ continued Sabu.
‘What rumours?’
‘That you’ve been seeing Mr Howard Hughes.’
‘I have been
seeing
him, Sabu. And why not? He’s a charming, generous and most attractive man.’
‘You ought to watch out, Lisa. You think it’s bad being part of Ziggy’s stable? If you get involved with Howard Hughes you won’t just be part of a stable, you’ll be part of a harem. Don’t you know he has a string of girls that he keeps in apartments and houses all over Beverly Hills?’