It was not a park he had entered, it was the Brompton Cemetery. In the dull light I could just make him out, hurrying down a path between rows of tombstones and mausolea. There were no street lights there. I hesitated before following, then went in after him, but he had vanished. I spent almost an hour stumbling about in that sickening grey space before giving up on my search.
I retraced my steps to the gates, which had somehow swung to and were now locked. I dare not describe what I felt. Luckily, rage still predominated over other feelings, and I was pretty fit. Several attempts and a number of cuts and bruises later I had climbed over the railings.
An account of my vain efforts to discover more about Tony White was not sympathetically received at Harrison-Hargrave. I was told to try again, and try harder. I can’t remember now what I did but I know I was again unsuccessful. My only resort was to keep a watch on Bolton Mansions during my time off, and one evening I had some luck. I saw Tony White arrive, ring the bell and go in. I followed shortly afterwards and, on ringing the bell, I heard on the entry phone the high, fearful voice of Harriet. I explained who I was and said I wanted to see Dinah Shuckwell. Harriet seemed doubtful. I said that it was urgent and that it would only take a moment. I was buzzed in and took the lift, an ancient, clattering machine with old-fashioned folding lattice doors, up to Flat 5B on the second floor.
The door was answered by Harriet, a big, pale young woman in a shift dress. It reminded me of the kind of thing patients are made to wear in hospital for an operation. Her large feet were encased in pale yellow pop socks and flat-heeled shoes. Her look was wary but not unfriendly.
‘You can only see Dinah for a moment,’ she said. I smelt fear on her.
The light outside was already beginning to dim, but no lights had been turned on in the flat. There was a narrow passage lined with framed photographs and playbills, and then Harriet showed me into the main room.
Dinah was sitting with her back to the bay window that looked out on to the street, so almost all of her face was in shadow. She was sitting very upright behind a desk on which one of her four cats was arching its back. The other three were perched on sofas and chairs, watching me carefully. I had very little time, and not much light with which to observe the room properly, but I saw that it was crammed with valuables. Along the top of a bookcase was ranged a collection of African masks. The only artificial light in the room came from a glass-fronted cabinet on one wall, with a mirrored interior illuminated from within by strip lighting. The cabinet was crammed with gaudy Venetian glass whose blood reds and poison greens scintillated viciously in the gloom.
‘Hello, Lucy,’ said Dinah, ‘we meet at last.’ Of course there was mockery in her voice, but it was the kind of mockery that is only a habit, and bestows nothing but contempt on those who are subjected to it.
I said: ‘Is Tony White here, by the way? I thought I saw him coming in.’
‘That’s who you want to talk about, isn’t it?’
‘Yes. Is he here?’
‘What have you got to say?’ said Dinah lighting a cigarette
‘Is he here?’
‘You’re wasting my time, darling. What do you want?’
There seemed no point in prevaricating. I told her that Harrison-Hargrave and Realfoods Ltd were interested in putting Tony under an exclusive contract to sell their products. I told her that the deal would be to everyone’s advantage. There was a pause after I had finished. The cigarette glowed as she sucked at it, then her gaunt head leaned forward so that I could see her fierce eyes.
‘I thought I had made it quite clear, lovey,’ said Dinah. ‘Tony is under exclusive contract to one person only, and that’s me. Can’t you and your bosses get that into your thick noddles?’
‘Doesn’t Tony have a say in this?’
‘Tony says what I say.’
‘I’d like to hear him say it himself. Is he here?’
‘What’s the matter with you, ducky? Are you hung up on him? Do you want to crawl into his underwear or something? Is that what’s eating you? For the last time, you wretched little numbskull, Tony White is mine. I own Tony White.’
‘Don’t you think he owns himself?’
Dinah let out an awful catarrhal rattle, halfway between a cough and a guffaw. ‘My God, Lucy darling, you are so full of shit. You’re just like the rest of them. I don’t want to listen to any more of your crap, ducky. Get out! Shift your arse, sister.’
She banged something down on the desk with a crack like a pistol shot. A cat screeched. I had enough self possession to turn and walk away from her quite slowly. When I was in the passageway I saw Harriet beckoning to me by the flat door. The light was very dim, but her whole posture, and the urgency with which she gesticulated, suggested fear. She looked like a mental patient seen in a hospital corridor. When I got to the door she put her mouth up to my ear and whispered into it: ‘Don’t go down in the lift.’ Her breath smelt of terror and peppermint.
I looked at her in astonishment but she only shook her head urgently and pushed me gently out of the door. Before she shut it, she whispered again: ‘Don’t go down in the lift.’
I had no reason not to obey her. I took my time walking down the marble steps, calmly contemplating the complete failure of my mission. In the little lobby on the ground floor I met a red-faced man in his fifties who wore a British Warm overcoat: Stock Exchange, ex-army, I guessed. He was standing in front of the lift doors, poking the button irritably. The lift was evidently on a higher floor.
‘Bloody thing!’ He said. ‘Every time! Every damn time I come and see mother, the damn fool of a lift isn’t working. Why don’t they do something about it? She pays enough in service charges, Christ knows.’ Once again he jabbed at the button to summon the lift. Far above us we heard a little mechanical whine.
‘Aha!’ He said. ‘And about time——’
There was a crack like a gun shot, then a rush of air which nearly blew us off our feet. We saw the lift fall past us at incredible speed and heard it smash into the basement. A cloud of dust and smoke was wafted upwards, together with an acrid smell of burning rubber and hot metal. I saw that the man’s normally red face had become as white and smooth and blank as a baby’s belly. I must have looked the same to him.
‘See what I mean?’ said the man in the British Warm eventually. ‘I could have been in that lift. Dammit, Mother and her bloody Dachshund could have been in it! Typical. Absolutely typical!’
The failure of my negotiations with Dinah came as no surprise to Harrison-Hargrave, nor did my subsequent firing from Harrison-Hargrave to me. Shortly afterwards, while I was still looking for work, I read in the
Evening Standard
of the death of Dinah Shuckwell in a fire at her flat. She had gone to bed drunk with her old electric blanket full on; incontinence did the rest. Work it out for yourself. All her papers and stuff went up in smoke; her entire and considerable fortune was left to a cat’s home, which was only fair, considering that her cats must have been the innocent victims of her involuntary cremation.
I made some enquiries out of sheer curiosity and discovered that all Dinah’s clients had been accounted for, except one: Tony White. No trace could be found of him; nor could I find out anything about Dinah’s assistant, Harriet. Nobody even knew her second name.
That was the beginning of a dark period, because I was starting to realise that I was living in a dark world. I was breaking up with my boyfriend too. There was nothing much wrong with Doug except that our relationship was going nowhere and either he did not recognise the fact or did not mind it. I was beginning to understand that in order to love someone else properly I first needed to love myself, and that required time and space alone. Yes, I know, it was all very elementary. I had little to sustain me, except, oddly enough, those words of Harriet: ‘Don’t go down in the lift.’ They stayed with me, because she had had nothing to gain from warning me. Who Harriet was, or quite what made her say those words, is a mystery, but she meant well and she did me good. Her high, frightened voice is still in my head. Other voices were there too, of course, inane, dead voices uttering inane, dead phrases and words. One in particular haunted me.
And yet I thought that I was over the worst. I got a new job at Carter-Nelson: better pay, better conditions, better everything. Then one day I am on a photo shoot for a new promotion. We’re working on this range of designer clothes from Boris Birdbaker. The style is called ‘Gothic Chic’, and if you haven’t heard of it already you soon will. Well the photographer, Harry, who’s a pretty brilliant guy, has decided to do this big shoot of all the models in their clothes in a cemetery. It was the Brompton cemetery he decided on as the ultimate in Gothic Chic. I thought nothing of it at the time; I just went ahead and arranged it.
The weather’s pretty dull and overcast but Harry likes that. So there we are in that garden of stone, smoke-tarnished white and grey interwoven with dull grass and cypress green. There are models draped over tombstones or mooning at mausolea, their sculptured faces staring wistfully at stone angels, mirroring each other’s vacuity. Harry is clicking happily. I am looking at the sky, wondering if there are enough umbrellas to protect the clothes if it comes on to rain; and then something happens. I’m not sure what because my memory gets hazy at this point, but the others tell me it’s as if I’ve seen something or someone I know. I start to run forward, trip over a stone and fall flat on my face.
The next thing I remember I’m on the grass staring up at a dozen anxious-looking girls. The models don’t know what to do; they just stand there like statues, their perfect hair flicked by the breeze, their long dark lashes quivering. It is like being surrounded by a herd of gazelles. I pick myself up and say I am fine. They say ‘Are you sure?’, relieved as much for themselves as for me. I see Harry coming towards me, a concerned look on his face. Then I look down at my feet, and I see what I have tripped over. It is a little square memorial stone, flat on the ground, almost flush with the surrounding lawn. It is made of granite incised with black lettering. What I read makes my heart stop.
ANTONY WHITE SHUCKWELL
1950–1984
Of course that means nothing. Absolutely nothing.
Puss-Cat
SO YOU WANT TO KNOW about Sir Roderick Bentley, do you? Well, you’ve come to the right department, as they say. Thank you, I’ll have a large Bell’s Whisky, if I may. Plenty of soda. Ice? Good God, no! Yes, Roddy and I went back a long way, to the Old Vic days just after the war. No. No resentment. Roddy was always destined for great things, me for the supporting roles.
‘Godders,’ Roddy said to me once. He always called me ‘Godders’ for some reason, but I prefer to be called Godfrey, if you don’t mind. That’s my name. ‘Godders, you’re a good actor. Devilish good, and you’ll always be in work. I’ll tell you why. You’re good but you haven’t enough personality to worry a leading man.’ I’ll never forget that. Of course, I suppose I knew he was right, but that doesn’t mean to say it wasn’t an almighty sock in the jaw.
Well, when Roddy formed his own company, Navigator Productions, he asked me to be in it. Played some good parts — not leads or anything, of course — but I did understudy him quite a bit. In fact I understudied him in his last two productions, and thereby hangs a tale, as they say.
Want to know a funny thing about Roddy? He couldn’t stand cats. No, I know on it’s own that’s not particularly strange, but it is odd when you consider that, in spite of that, he always used to call his girlfriends ‘puss-cat’.
You don’t know about the girlfriends? Oh, perhaps I shouldn’t have said, but you were bound to find out in the end, weren’t you? But you won’t mention, will you, in this biography of yours that it was I who told you? I’d hate it to get back to Lady Margery that I said such a thing. I rather doubt that she knows, you see. Or perhaps she does and won’t admit it. Women are queer cattle. Ah, the drinks! Well, here’s to your book, eh?
Let me make it quite clear: Roddy was devoted to Lady Margery. Devoted. But, you know, when Margery started to have the kids she gave up the stage. They had this lovely home down in Kent, and she didn’t like to leave it just to go on tour with him or off to some godforsaken film location in Spain or California. So Roddy had his little adventures, but he always came home.