Fascinated Read online

  ‘How did she answer them?’

  ‘Answer them? She never bothered to open them! They went straight through to the office where Conrad employed a couple of girls to send out catalogues. There were Dawn to Dusk pyjama sets. New Dawn vibrating ticklers. Inflatable rubber Dawns …’

  ‘She wasn’t a woman,’ protests Frank. ‘She was a trade mark.’

  ‘That’s right!’ beams Webster, very impressed by this observation. She became a living icon and people paid for the privilege of possessing anything she had touched or blessed.

  ‘How many of these do you keep in that trunk?’ asks Frank, returning the letter to Webster.

  ‘I don’t know. I’ve never had time to count them. These are the letters that came to the house in the weeks that followed her death. But nonetheless it’s a big collection.’

  ‘Why didn’t she retire when they married?’ Frank wants to know as Webster buckles the leather straps. The spoils of war. A dungeon for other men’s fantasies. A legion of forgotten prisoners, snared by their short-and-curlies, locked in the dark and rotting to dust.

  ‘It would have been a crime to have stopped her exercising her talents,’ says Webster, surprised by the question. ‘She loved it. She was a natural born performer. Conrad became her agent and manager. He sank a small fortune into her pictures.’

  ‘You mean he rented her out for exhibition like some sort of circus freak.’

  ‘That’s no way to talk about another man’s wife, Frank,’ says Webster mildly, remembering that Frank is still in a state of deep shock. ‘He was a broken man when she died. He locked himself away and grieved.’

  Frank scratches his chin and stares around the attic. ‘Why did he ask you to bring me back here?’

  ‘We like you!’ says Webster cheerfully.

  ‘I wish someone would tell Valentine.’

  ‘I’m worried about that girl,’ Conrad confides to Frank when they meet again for a picnic lunch beside the goldfish pool. He’s wearing a floral cotton two-piece with a sagging, empty cross-over top that ties on the hip with a sash. It looks faded around the armpits and the hem is badly frayed. ‘I’ve given her everything. A good home. A fine education. And what does she do with her life? Nothing. She spends her time shopping and watching TV.’ He takes a linen napkin and tucks it into the top of the dress where it hangs like a furled flag.

  ‘It sounds harmless. If it keeps her out of trouble …’ says Frank.

  ‘She’s wasting her time. It’s criminal. You can buy almost anything, Frank, but you can’t buy time.’

  ‘What do you want her to do with her life?’

  ‘I want her married while she still has her teeth. She could marry anyone. She’s fit for royalty. She could have power and influence in affairs of state. That’s why I’ve sent for you.’ He picks fastidiously at a lobster salad taken from the willow hamper beside them on the paving stones. The basket is packed with salad, fruit and cheese, bottles of mineral water and wine.

  ‘How can I help?’ says Frank, watching Conrad spear the lobster meat with a polished silver fork.

  ‘Look after her for me, Frank. She likes you.’

  ‘What makes you think that?’

  ‘It’s obvious!’ says Conrad confidently. ‘And she needs an escort. I can’t stop her shopping but I won’t have her walking around town without the benefit of my protection. The streets are crawling with vermin. Hoodlums. Bum-suckers. Junkies. Filth. Kids throwing fire bombs at grocery stores. Fourteen-year-old rapists! Did you read about that in the papers? Children raping their mothers! What’s going on out there, for Chrissakes! When I was young we had some respect for law and order. You could walk anywhere in the territory, day or night, and never feel afraid for a moment. We kept the streets clean. We were born in the gutter but we were proud of the neighbourhood. You see these granite kerb-stones?’ he says, slapping the ground with his hand. ‘I used to sit on them as a boy, I had them removed when they knocked down the street.’

  ‘I know,’ says Frank.

  ‘Who told you?’ scowls Conrad.

  ‘You told me,’ says Frank and thinks, you’re as mad as a moon-calf.

  ‘I don’t remember,’ says Conrad sadly, twirling the fork between his fingers.

  So Frank gently reminds him of their first conversation and reminds himself in the process that Conrad wants turtles for the pond.

  ‘They were hard times,’ continues Conrad proudly. ‘But you didn’t need chains and window locks before you felt safe in your bed at night. You could walk the streets. You could swim the canals. Valentine doesn’t understand. The world has gone bad but she’s too young to have seen the changes. She doesn’t know the difference. She doesn’t understand the dangers.’

  ‘What about Talbot?’ ventures Frank. He thinks again of the room in the Golden Goose Hotel, trembling in the stinking twilight while the Beast ferments from the bedclothes like a genie with a gun in his fist; Lloyd standing naked and grinning, his fingers sunk to their knuckles in the blood that spurts from his chest. They were Hamilton Talbot’s rented bruisers. Talbot must be an angry man.

  ‘He won’t crawl out of the woodwork again,’ says Conrad. He picks a quail’s egg from a little porcelain dish and squeezes it between finger and thumb while he dusts it with celery salt from a shaker no larger than a silver thimble. ‘There’s nothing to be feared from Talbot.’ He sucks the morsel into his mouth and squashes it against his teeth.

  ‘Why can’t Webster do it? He’s got the experience,’ argues Frank, suspicious that Conrad is playing a subtle and devious game.

  ‘She’s too clever for Webster,’ he grins, pleased at the thought of his daughter’s cunning. ‘She always gives him the slip.’

  ‘If she can outwit Webster she’ll run circles around me.’

  ‘It’s different. You’ll be more of a companion. You can take her out and keep her entertained. You’ll be paid for your trouble, you’ll continue to live here and it will occupy your mind while we decide how to tackle your other problem …’

  ‘I just want to forget,’ says Frank quickly. He takes an apple from the hamper and gives it a shine by rubbing it against his sleeve but he’s not hungry and the fruit, when he bites through the skin, tastes sour.

  ‘Are you planning to join the Foreign Legion or what?’ says Conrad. ‘You can’t bury your head in the sand, Frank. Believe me, you can’t forget a wound by leaving it to fester. Dawn met a lot of men in her career. A lot of men. Actors. Producers. Politicians. All kinds of poisonous riff-raff. She never looked twice at one of them. We had trust. That’s important. When you break trust it can’t be repaired.’

  ‘I don’t see what I can do to change anything.’

  ‘You can’t change what’s happened. That’s true. Life plays cruel tricks. A man has nothing but his wife and his work to help him make sense of the world. And you’ve lost both of them.’

  ‘Thanks for putting it into perspective.’

  ‘You can’t change what’s happened but you can change how you feel about it.’ He pulls the napkin from his dress and dabs at the corner of his mouth.

  ‘How’s that?’

  ‘When someone hurts you, Frank, you hurt them right back.’

  ‘When I found them together I wanted to kill them. I wanted to break his neck.’

  ‘That’s crude, Frank.’ He shakes his head and stares across the black pond where a group of waterlilies are beginning to unfold their flowers.

  ‘It felt right at the time,’ says Frank softly.

  ‘Leave it with me. We need to think about it. I’ll talk to Webster. You look after Valentine. And tell her to skip the turtles. I think I’ll have some more fish.’

  Frank’s first task is to take Valentine on a trip to Harrods and she wastes no time in making him feel unwelcome. She insists on driving the Bentley – despite his offer to be her chauffeur – and maintains a stubborn truculence as she struggles to weave the limousine through the gridlocked London traffic.

  It’
s a crisp February morning, frost in Hyde Park and diesel smoke in the streets like rolling banks of blue fog. Valentine, cursing, takes them to Knightsbridge and finally gains the sanctuary of a private car park in Basil Street. The attendant, a tall young man wearing a hooded tracksuit and a pair of wrestling boots, runs from his cabin to greet them and gives the driver a brilliant smile as she drops the car keys into his hand.

  This morning she looks demure in a pillbox hat and a huge black overcoat but the coat kicks open when she walks to allow the world to admire her legs in a skirt so short it leaves the young man mesmerised. He winks at Frank, throws the car keys into the air and catches them with a slap of his fist as he saunters back to the warmth of his cabin.

  Frank follows Valentine into the street and towards the department store. Hans Crescent is crowded. She jostles and elbows a pass between a group of indignant women and slips through number four door into the menswear department.

  Frank is left behind on the pavement, takes a wrong turning through the door, hurries away from the department towards the escalators and catching no sight of her on the staircase is forced to retrace his steps and finally tracks her down among the suits and overcoats. He grows breathless and prickly in the torpid warmth of the store. Valentine looks at him, her face blank, standing there with her hands in her pockets, pillbox perched at a jaunty angle, a remote and beautiful stranger.

  ‘Measure him!’ she snaps at the first assistant who glides towards them over the floor. She raises one hand and points a lazy finger at Frank.

  The assistant, sleek as a greyhound, wreathed in vapours of fancy cologne, unrolls a tape measure and slips it around Frank’s neck, working swiftly from collar to cuff, catching him in a loose embrace to gauge the size of his chest and waist.

  ‘What the hell are you doing?’ Frank hisses at Valentine when the assistant briefly disappears behind a marble pillar.

  ‘If you’re going to follow me around like a bad smell you could at least change your shirt,’ she says, wrinkling her nose.

  Frank is painfully aware that he’s still wearing the clothes he was given for the raid on the Golden Goose. The shirt looks dirty under the pin-bright ceiling lights and the suit has wrinkled like cheap wrapping paper. He jerks at his sleeves and buttons the jacket.

  ‘He’ll take a dozen white cotton shirts. A couple of suits. Three pairs of good leather shoes and a decent overcoat,’ she tells the assistant on his return.

  The assistant blinks and pulls nervously at his fingers, making the joints crack like firewood. He moves his weight from one foot to another in a queer little shuffling dance.

  ‘He can choose his own underwear,’ adds Valentine, in a very superior tone of voice.

  The assistant makes several obsequious bobbing movements with his head, glances furtively at Frank, and retreats. Valentine watches him slip away through the maze of stands and cabinets, borne upon his errand towards the distant shelves of shirts.

  ‘I can’t afford this stuff!’ protests Frank. He has nothing in his pockets but the bundle of twenty-pound notes that Valentine pressed upon him before he made his last trip home. His wallet, his cards, his passport, everything that gave him a sense of himself, have been left behind in the house. There’s no way he could prove his identity except by the fillings in his mouth.

  ‘Relax. We have an account,’ murmurs Valentine. ‘Why don’t you pick a couple of sweaters?’ She strolls away, kicks open her coat and flaunts her legs at a group of gormless mannequins dressed in paisley silk dressing gowns.

  Now Frank has been dressed in the proper manner, Valentine returns to the serious business of spending money for her own pleasure. In the following few days she buys sixteen pairs of shoes: five pairs black leather, four pairs red leather, three pairs yellow silk, two pairs green lizard, one pair copper velvet, one pair in soft pistachio suede; a feather skullcap, a lipstick, twelve pairs of stockings, a handbag, a set of brocade pyjamas, a pair of antique ivory chopsticks, a scarf and several strings of beads. She also remembers to buy Webster a ration of chocolate and finds Conrad a dozen ornamental carp.

  She is dedicated to department stores. They are mansions of mirrors and soft illusions. She listens, with serious concern, while thickly painted shopgirls twitter over the latest miracles in shampoo and skin cream, pauses at every opportunity to be anointed with perfumes and precious unctions, attends fashion shows and demonstrations of steam irons and patent potato peelers. She loves these rambling emporiums with their tunnels and bridges, high ceilings and stuffy, old-fashioned restaurants. She roams the endless corridors like an enchanted child while Frank trudges behind, waiting for the moment when, seduced by a skirt or a set of elaborate underwear, she will vanish behind the curtains of another changing room and he can sit down to rest on one of the painted bamboo chairs they provide for abandoned husbands.

  At such moments, sitting like a tired sentry, he finds himself tantalised by the sounds of shuffling silks, the clink of a buckle, the click of hangers against hidden mirrors, and tries to imagine her naked with no more than the fragile curtain between them. She is taller than her mother and more angular but they share the same strange sloe-eyed beauty. Did she inherit those heavy, dark-tipped breasts? The thought of it stirs him and makes him nervous. Jessica with her cropped blonde hair would be a shadow beside this woman. His wife is cold and detached. Her eyes hold a frosty blue light. Naked at night she seems reduced to a slender sprite with her neat breasts, the pink bud of her cunt peeping through its pale tuft of thistledown, her cool skin shining like moonlight. A fairy princess who likes to be fucked on the kitchen table.

  Sometimes the curtains will blow apart and Valentine emerges, unbuttoned and flustered, asking him to choose between a linen suit or a silk jacket, a pattern of poppies or cornflowers; and he’s flattered that she wants his opinion, happy to pretend that it makes a difference, as if she were buying these clothes to please him.

  At other times, but rarely, she’ll send out for him and when the sales assistant beckons from the changing room, taking them to be man and wife, he does nothing to correct the mistake but allows himself the pleasure of slipping behind the forbidden curtain where Valentine waits impatiently to be admired in her underwear.

  ‘Do you think the colour suits me?’ she says, scowling into the long, bright minors.

  ‘Perfectly,’ says Frank. A blackberry satin bra with matching French knickers. A camisole in apricot silk.

  ‘Do you think it looks cheap?’ she demands, daring him to challenge her choice of silver beads and ribbons. A cabbage rose made from taffeta. A bunch of rubber grapes. And it’s true, she has a knack of looking cheap, despite all the time and money she invests in her appearance.

  ‘Elegant,’ says Frank with studied nonchalance and is careful to slip a secret smile to the loitering sales girl. What’s to be done? He’s been asked these questions a thousand times. The young and impetuous wife. The patient and indulgent husband.

  At the end of the week Frank is called to account by Conrad who takes him into the gallery to admire his collection of paintings.

  ‘Has Valentine been buying your clothes?’ he asks suspiciously, glancing at Frank’s new wardrobe.

  ‘Yes,’ says Frank.

  ‘You look like a flaming shirt-lifter.’

  They are strolling through a long marble gallery of empty picture frames. Magnificent carved and gilded frames encrusted with fruits and curious shells. A small green typewritten card has been pinned beneath each of them and Conrad pauses now and then to read their legends.

  ‘Gustav Klimt. 1913. “Kneeling Semi-Nude Bending Forward”,’ he recites proudly. ‘It’s a pencil picture of a woman showing her backside. Nothing vulgar. Very artistic. He worked in Vienna. Lived with his mother.’

  Frank confronts a carved mahogany frame inlaid with marquetry bands of ivory, brass and satinwood, the margins embellished with stylised pear trees.

  ‘Claude Monet. 1919. Untitled. Oil painting. Looks like pond life,�
� says Conrad, squinting at the card. ‘Big beard. Blind as a badger,’ he adds by way of historical background.

  Frank considers the faux-bamboo frame containing a band of embossed leather with margins of gilded wood carved with cockles, winkles and grove snails.

  ‘Did she get you into mischief?’ enquires Conrad casually as they stand to admire the phantom canvas. ‘Where did she take you?’

  Frank describes the department stores, the fashion shows and demonstrations, tea-rooms and restaurants.

  ‘Did she talk to anyone?’ says Conrad, walking away, trying to hide his disappointment. He’s hoping for intrigues and lovers’ trysts. He wants to hear that Valentine has lost her heart to a playboy prince.

  ‘No,’ says Frank and shrugs his shoulders. He doesn’t feel inclined to list the sales girls, waiters and doormen, buskers, beggars and acrobats. Valentine talks to everyone.

  ‘Toulouse Lautrec. 1896. “Woman Removing Her Stockings”. Crayon drawing on foxed paper. He was a dwarf. Lived in a brothel,’ says Conrad, retrieving Frank and leading him forward by the arm.

  ‘Does she have many friends?’ says Frank. He contemplates a polished walnut frame with a carved cornucopia of fruits finished in glass and mother-of-pearl against bands of gilded gesso decoration.

  ‘None,’ says Conrad. ‘She had some playmates when she was small. She once brought her school chums home for Christmas. Stephanie and Charlotte. They laughed like screech owls. Ate like sparrows. I don’t know what happened to them. Probably married into the gentry …’

  ‘Did she like school?’

  ‘It cost enough! I never went there myself, of course, because of my singular circumstance. But I sent Webster down several times. Concerts. Sports days. He said it was the sort of establishment where they cut the crusts from the sandwiches. He said Valentine was popular with the other girls. But she never kept in touch with them …’

  ‘It’s strange to be so solitary.’