She saw me coming, and looked away, no doubt in utter confusion. I could even divine her thoughts, or make them up for myself, which was even more satisfactory. (Who was this lone romantic figure, wandering along the beach, coming nearer with every passing moment? Could it be? Yes, it was! It was the mysterious stranger of the last ten days, the pale despairing loiterer, the lover of her secret dreams! Ah, pray Heaven that he would speak! She would die if he did not, she would surely die. Be still, betraying heart! Down, fluttering bird!)
When I was level with her small encampment, I walked up from the tidemark, until I was standing by the beach umbrella. She looked up, and said: ‘Hallo,’ in a matter-of-fact American accent.
She was wearing her black swimsuit, and observing it I said the first thing which came naturally to mind. ‘You mustn’t catch cold.’
‘I was just going in,’ she said. ‘But sit down.’ As she spoke, she swung a yellow beach-robe round her shoulders, obscuring a view which really had been as lovely as I had guessed. ‘Are you through work?’
‘For today.’ I sat down beside her, not too close, not too menacing; there was a delicate balance here, to be preserved for at least the next five minutes. ‘How do you know about my work, anyway?’
‘Well, I know who you are,’ she answered. ‘Somebody told me. And I saw you typing.’ She smiled suddenly, changing a lovely face into an open-house invitation. ‘Jonathan Steele. Easy.’
After that, everything else was easy.
‘What’s your name?’
‘Susan Crompton.’
It sounded vaguely professional, but I could not yet identify the profession. ‘How long have you been here?’
‘About three weeks.’
‘All alone?’
Her face clouded briefly. ‘Sort of. I was with some people. But they had to go home.’
‘All alone now?’
‘Yes.’
‘Are you hungry?’
‘Not yet. But I will be.’
‘Would you like to have dinner with me?’
Her face was grave again. ‘Yes, I think I would. Where?’
‘Let’s start at my place. About eight o’clock. I’ll send a car.’
Her bright hair caught the last of the sun as her head turned. ‘That sounds wonderful. Can I dress up?’
‘I think that’s a very good idea.’
We dined by candlelight, under envious eyes. My hotel was staging some sort of gala dinner that night, involving floodlit coconut palms, long trestle tables laden with serve-yourself food, a steady stream of tourists gorging and screaming, and two orchestras, count them, two – a steel band playing calypso, and a smaller dance group filling in the awkward gaps. We managed to withdraw ourselves a little from this bacchanalia, and sat at a side table under the trees, where we could watch if we wanted to, and ignore when we chose; we were served as rich men squiring beautiful women should be served, in any democratic society. At $50 a day, I wasn’t going to carry any plates, not even for this one.
The girl really had dressed up, and the result was something for me to be proud of, and the rest of the mob to covet at a distance. I had been sure that she would wear black, the addiction of young things who wanted to look like women of the world; in most cases, they might as well be wearing their school uniforms. But Susan Crompton had settled for white, the badge of chastity. It was fair to say that, in this case, only the colour looked chaste.
The white dress revealed, in benevolent detail, a figure remarkable for its invitational candour; and above the expectant bosom and the creamy-brown shoulders, her face – young, alive, ready to laugh, ready to melt – had a beguiling beauty. She sat there, a few feet across the table from me, with the candlelight linking us and winking on the wine-cooler; the trees arched over our heads, and above them was a far-distant sky, black, star-pricked, the canopy of our intimate night. But I only looked at her. Thus close to, she seemed as feminine as perfume, as available as the next bed, and I could not take my eyes off her.
I had to admit to being overthrown. I was out of practice in this area, of course, and vulnerable for other reasons, other frailties of armour. But even so, even so … If the food had not been so good, I would have started eating her there and then.
She was something of an eater herself, which I welcomed; so many girls in this category of looks seemed to believe that the ideal of beauty was the kind of skinny lesbian known as a ‘top model’, and nibbled accordingly. This girl was hungry, and didn’t care who knew it, and was going to do something about it … The moment of this discovery was also the only moment when she seemed really young, almost touchingly so, in spite of all the glamour and elegance. While we were ordering, she read the menu from beginning to end, with many a sigh, and then asked: ‘Do you think I could have caviar?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Next question.’
‘It’s
so
expensive.’ She looked up, almost as if gauging my mood; she might have been an orphan at a convent picnic, wondering what the nuns would stand for. ‘Can I have steak
as
well
as lobster?’
I could not guess whom she had been dining with lately, but he sounded economical. ‘You can have two of everything, as far as I’m concerned … Susan Crompton, you look absolutely wonderful!’
I wanted to practise her name a bit, just in case. Sometimes, in moments of stress, one used the wrong one.
‘Thank you,’ she said, and gave me her ravishing smile. ‘I feel wonderful. For a change.’
I ordered dinner, and the champagne I now felt like, and then asked: ‘Why? Haven’t you been enjoying yourself?’
‘Not much. Something went wrong.’
‘What was that?’
‘Oh, just something … You’re married aren’t you?’
‘Yes,’ I said, readily enough. If she wanted to make the point at the outset, she was welcome to it. This thing was not going to stand or fall on a technicality. It was not even in the lap of the gods. It was in hers and mine, and as far as I was concerned I could feel it there already. Either we would, or we wouldn’t, and the key to this traditional puzzle was not going to have much social connotation. Freedom alone would not get us into bed; nor would the stigma of adultery keep us out, if that was where we were headed. ‘Yes, I’m married.’
‘Where’s your wife?’
‘In South Africa. Six thousand miles away.’
She nodded to herself, accepting the answer, unsurprised; as if all the people she met had 6,000-mile wives, as if there weren’t any other kind of marriage, nor breed of men. We listened to the music, which already had an agreeable, insistent beat; and then the caviar arrived, and after that the evening started swinging.
She lived in New York, she told me, between hearty mouthfuls of everything in sight. Doing what? Having fun! And for a living? Oh, all sorts of things.
She had started, at the age of fifteen, as a movie-theatre usherette, but had soon given it up. ‘It was too dark,’ she said, and her eyes grew wonderfully dark at the thought of it. ‘And I was embarrassed, anyway. The things they asked you to do in the back row!’ She had acted as a doctor’s receptionist, and sold magazine subscriptions on the telephone, and been elected ‘Miss Representation’ at a used-car dealers’ banquet in Miami.
She had walked on at the Met (gypsy-girl in
Carmen
), and off again at a ski-school in the Adirondacks, where the Austrian instructor insisted that they all lie down before they even learned to stand up. She had demonstrated lots of different things at exhibitions – potato slicers, stain removers, floor waxers, sewing machines.
‘I can do monograms on a sewing machine,’ she said importantly; and when she saw me grinning: ‘Well, it’s not so easy,’ she went on, smiling also. ‘It took me two whole weeks to learn. And I used to model at fashion shows, till I put on too much weight.’
‘Weight?’ I said. ‘Oh, come on! If you’re too big anywhere, I’m Napoleon.’
‘But it’s true,’ she answered. ‘They don’t want girls like me. You have to be as thin as a stick, so they can hang any sort of clothes on you and get away with it. They’ve all got a thing about little boys, anyway. I used to go through agonies every day, trying to keep my weight down. I starved! A few pounds here and there can make a terrific difference.’
I poured out some more champagne. ‘I’m ready to confirm that,’ I told her. ‘And three cheers.’
‘Oh, it’s all right for
that
,’ she said, leaving me to wonder. ‘But professionally it’s terrible. I used to do TV commercials too. But then you get identified with the product, and that’s no good, either.’
‘What was the last product you were identified with?’
‘It’s all very well to laugh. I had
a whole year
as one of the silhouettes for Playtex.’
Mostly, I realised, her story was keyed to the phrase ‘I used to’; there had been little clue as to what she was doing now, and how she had come to Barbados, and why. I was going to raise the point, when she said, out of the blue: ‘I’m having a wonderful time tonight. I do want to thank you. And I like that coat.’
‘It’s terrible,’ I said. The switch of subject, for some reason, had been rather moving: like a very pretty child remembering its manners. ‘But what the hell? I’m a writer … Why did you suddenly say that?’
She was playing with the stem of her wineglass, waiting for the next course, which was the much-desired steak. I watched her twining fingers, and pictured them elsewhere, like any dreaming boy. The music wove its pathway round us, soothing and sensuous at the same time. She saw my eyes on her bosom, and she said: ‘You like me, don’t you?’ and before I could answer she went on: ‘I thought we’d been talking enough about me, that’s all. You’re so important. I know that. People keep saying things about you … Do you always drink so much?’
‘Yes.’
‘I just wanted to know.’
‘I’m used to it,’ I said. ‘And champagne doesn’t count, anyway.’
‘It counts with me … Do men really say they’re “investing in a girl”?’
‘Well, yes,’ I answered, brought up short. ‘I suppose they do. In certain circles. But why?’
‘I heard it somewhere.’ She smiled, and this time it was for me. ‘In certain circles.’
‘How old are you?’
‘Nearly twenty.’
‘I’m thirty-four.’
‘Why, Mr Steele,’ she said demurely, ‘thirty-four isn’t
old
,’ and we both burst out laughing.
The steak came, and was steadily demolished by both contestants. This girl was excellent for all the appetites. A couple I knew vaguely at the hotel – they were English, the woman as leathery and loud as an old sergeant-major, the man positively pop-eyed at the first waft of female youth – tried to crowd our party, and were eased out, not too subtly. (But writers had absolutely no manners, it was well known.) Susan Crompton, sighing still, disposed of the last few licks of the
filet
, and asked: ‘Can we wait a little before the strawberries?’ as if loath to forfeit or even to hurry a single strand of the night’s enjoyment.
She was on the right lines, and I was willing her to stay there. I poured from the fresh bottle, and went back to something which had stayed in my mind.
‘Why didn’t you go on with television?’ I asked her. ‘I know all those commercials are damned stupid, but there must have been plenty of other things to do. Like ordinary acting. The way you look, there should have been lots of work for you.’
‘The way I look,’ she answered, frowning for the first time, ‘there was lots of work for me, but it was never in front of the cameras. Honestly, Johnny–’ it was a great pleasure thus to hear her say my name, ‘–you’ve got no idea how those bastards operate …’ Her face had now taken on an entirely novel look, of dislike, of reminiscent contempt. ‘To start with, every single man expects you to sleep with him, as a matter of course, as part of the deal. Whoever they are. Assistant producers. Cameramen. Dialogue writers. Every stinking little hanger-on who’s remotely connected with show-business takes it for granted you’ll lie down for him, before he’ll do a damned thing to help. It got to the point when I thought, if that’s the way it is, I might as well–’ She did not finish the sentence; instead she took a sip of her drink, and started another one. ‘It’s the same everywhere. I actually did take a screen test once – or very nearly – and that wasn’t for free, either.’
‘What happened?’
‘Everything,’ she said crisply, looking back on it with grim disdain. ‘It was one of those nights … I was in Chicago, doing the cabaret at a lawyers’ convention, and afterwards I got in with some film people, and they said, you look so gorgeous, why not come and take a screen test tomorrow? You could be famous overnight. They have screen tests in Chicago. They have everything in Chicago. So I said, OK, I’d like that very much. Then the party broke up, and I went to bed. In the middle of the night, there’s a knock on my door, and it’s one of the film people from the party, and before I knew it he pushed me inside and just jumped on me. He had this robe on, and underneath he just had his woollen underpants, and they had moth holes in them … He worked me back to the bed, and he said: “How about it, baby? I didn’t want to say anything earlier on, I didn’t want to take advantage of my position.”
His position!
’ She expelled a long breath, through lips which suddenly had a vicious twist to them, older than the oldest victim of betrayal. ‘
His position!
He was one of those jerks they have hanging round the studio, slapping two bits of wood together and saying, “Take one”. And you know–’ she was now almost breathless with indignation, ‘–that’s exactly what he did say. He said “Take one, baby”, and then there he was lying on top of me.’
‘Good heavens!’ I said, genuinely appalled, both at the picture, and at the bitter edge to her voice. ‘What then, for God’s sake?’
‘I was eighteen,’ said Susan Crompton, ‘but I still had my strength.’ Already, in the space of seconds, she was something less than bitter; her lovely brow was clearing; this was danger escaped, and therefore not too awful to remember. ‘I brought my knee up hard, the way mother teaches you in survival school, and then I called the front office, and kept on calling till they sent someone up. I don’t know who he was; one of the girls said they keep this guy they call the rape clerk, but I don’t know. Anyway, he said, like, we don’t want any scandal in this establishment, do we, and then he said, could it have been your own fault, and then by golly
he
wanted to settle down and talk things over quietly, like two reasonable people! Men!’ She ended her recital, with a sharp toss of the head which made her hair glint in the candlelight. ‘You really are a wonderful bunch, you know.’