Faustine (11 page)

– At first Greg couldn’t make out what was happening, Jasmine says. These are his words:

– You can have no idea how shocked we all were when Muriel Twyman came back from that holiday of hers – or visit to the health farm, I believe it was. Muriel looked
stunning
. She’d lost a lost of weight and her skin was glowing and all that, but there was something different – something that marked her out from the crowd. I can’t explain it.

– You mean a
je
ne
sais
quoi,
I joked, Jasmine says, because, after an evening like the one with Muriel and Bert and Harry and Anna, I thought the best thing was to play the whole thing down, not make too much of it – you know what I mean, Ella.

After all, the glow would fade pretty soon, after being exposed to city life and office air – so I said as much to Greg. Don’t encourage her, I said. She’s on a bit of a high at present. Don’t let her think she’s Catherine Deneuve or someone.

But how does she get away with it? Greg said.

The fashion room, as I’ve been telling you, was total chaos. And why? Because Muriel Twyman, a humble copywriter, has come back from her holidays and decides to fit herself out in a new dress.

No one could believe it at first. I mean, people are brought up generally to know their place in this tight little world of ours and for Muriel to go round helping herself to gowns and costume jewellery and shoes worth thousands was
completely
out of character. In fact, when we all looked back on it, we came to the conclusion we’d never seen Muriel in anything but a baggy cardigan and skirt.

Mind you, the fact she looked so great and could now fit into the clothes must have been a factor in her freak-out. And all the girls on the fashion floor were simply loving it. One of them had a portable record-player and soon there was music belting out – The Grateful Dead, I think it was.

Yes, ‘Down Beside the Rising Tide’ – my God, that song is engraved on my memory for life. Whoever it was – a young girl who was enjoying Muriel’s moment of abandon, her name was Polly, I think – kept playing it over and over, and soon Muriel was dancing on the desks, in those crazy PVC boots and a miniskirt that looked as if it were last used as a midget’s cornplaster. As I say, the whole place was hopping.

We all thought Muriel was bound to get the sack. Every single one of us was waiting for the editor’s door to open and for Liddy Wise to come out.

Liddy was a bit of a sour puss, as you must know.

But, as it turned out, the visit came from a different
direction
.

The managing director of the entire corporation, Mr New Image himself, walked into the department – and not from the elevator hall either. No, today of all days, he’d walked up the stairs and there he was, bang in the middle of us – like, like, I don’t know, a sort of sprite who appears in a puff of smoke in an opera.

Mind you, I was as embarrassed as anyone. Sammy Chen and I, well we were enjoying the break too. Sammy said he hadn’t had such a ball since Haight-Ashbury. And Muriel was singing by now – Oh, God, Jasmine, your toes would have curled. First she was singing along with The Grateful Dead. Then Joplin. Music came to an end and she just went on on her own. And that voice – of course, we’d all thought it was going to be a real caterwaul when she first opened her mouth, but after a few bars we thought it was just bloody great.

It’s like the way she looks now, you know – it kind of grows on you. So you think there’s nothing very outstanding at first, and then – wham, you can’t take your eyes off her!

It must have been that that made me think something … well, sort of funny had happened.

What do you mean, funny? I said. The last thing I wanted was more talk of miracle rejuvenation treatments and the like, and I said so.

No, no, Greg said. It must have been that strange little man who’s the head of New Image Corporation suddenly being in our midst, and Muriel dancing in that – gauzy strip and not much else – I couldn’t help thinking of some magic pact with the Devil, or whatever.

For God’s sake, Greg, I said. Muriel is only going through a rather silly phase. Keep your head.

 *

– But, Jasmine goes on, weary now, as if the meaning of that day has taken the last of her strength, but Greg insisted that the effect Muriel had on the MD was absolutely
devastating
.

Yes, it was like a fairy-tale, a movie.

I mean, Mr Lewis – that’s his name; we all know and fear it at the office, I can tell you – applauded and told Muriel she was the one to give
New
Image
a real new image, a look that belongs with the sixties, with the age we’re all living in now, and not a stifled echo of the past, as is dished up to us at present.

As he says this, he’s eyeing the editor’s door in a
meaningful
way. We all fell silent; we just couldn’t believe what was happening. But then the door opens and Liddy Wise comes through.

And, well, Jas, I can still hardly credit my own ears. Lewis fires her then and there.

I couldn’t believe what Greg was telling me either, Jasmine says. But it was true.

Muriel Twyman was that day appointed editor-in-chief of the New Image Corporation, Inc.

 *

I look up, round the room, with its memorabilia, its cult objects of the worship of Lisa Crane. Record sleeves with her picture imprinted, and the gold disc hanging behind, on the Indian arras that muffles the room with its green-gold brocade.

The first issue of
New
Image
as edited by Muriel Twyman framed in gold beside it.

And on the cover – why, of course, Muriel herself.

I think of the name, in neat handwriting, in the Mrs Beeton
Book
of
Household
Management
up by the bed where I spent last night. Muriel Twyman. And then – and from this I look away, still – in an ornate hand, Lisa Crane.

 *

– So, how did it happen? I say.

Jasmine has left the video room and is slowly walking away from the kitchen. But not to the main hall this time – in the opposite direction, to the bare, disused rooms of the servants’ quarters. I know I will see Muriel – or Lisa – soon. Yet first, I must know.

And this time, as I walk down a dark, stone-floored
passage
behind the woman who was my grandmother’s best friend – who cared for me, so she says, when Muriel ran off with Harry and there was no one to help out – I know she is ready to answer my questions. She can sense the impending evening as I can; the all-important moment when I will meet Muriel again and we can be together.

She has promised to change, Jasmine says.

So I hardly need to tell you all the painful details of the new, ruthless attitude of Muriel: to your mother; to you; to anyone, you might say, who crossed her path.

If you must know, it was when you went into hospital with meningitis that your grandmother so charmingly chose to take her own daughter’s fiancé away from her.

Jasmine stops at the entrance to a neat little room – the Neidpath sitting-room most likely – and she makes me sit with her on a settee covered in a patterned velvet that has known better days. It creaks under our weight, and Jasmine glances apologetically around before going on.

Anna rang when her mother was in the middle of one of her most extravagant ‘do’s – it was a reception for General de Gaulle and the Robert Kennedys, if I remember. And I
can say it cost poor Anna quite a lot to get in touch with her mother at all.

By then, Muriel had been living for almost a year in the most sumptuous flat imaginable – in Eaton Square, it was. Very unlike that purple and white lino place.

And why was she living in such splendour? Because, quite simply, everything Muriel – and in future I shall call her Lisa, so utterly unrecognizable was she, so totally unlike her old self – everything she touched turned to instant, shiny gold.

Don’t ask me if she had affairs with the powerful men she seduced. I wouldn’t be surprised if the answer was no, anyway. Men just did what they were told when they met Lisa.

And I never knew she had a head for business. But before long she had started a chain of companies, and made a successful bid for
New
Image
and all the affiliated companies, and had set herself up as a property millionaire as well.

As I say, it cost Anna a lot to get in touch with her mother that evening. Harry was still living in the flat with her, but something seemed to lie between them now and there wasn’t any talk of an engagement any more.

It’s as if a kind of spell has been put on Harry, Anna said to me one day, when I’d picked you up from the nursery and brought you round for your tea and bedtime story. He’s so listless – so uninterested in everything. When he used to help with the publishing, and – I don’t know – he was so keen on life.

I didn’t want to say anything, but I couldn’t help
wondering
whether Harry wasn’t coming down with some illness or other. However, I said nothing – and you needed your boiled egg and soldiers anyway and a cup of hot chocolate.

 *

As Jasmine speaks, I strain to remember her when I was a child. Yet nothing comes. And it seems that, like love, memory can never be simulated or forced. I loved Muriel; Jasmine is as blank to me as if a total stranger had unwrapped me from my coat every evening on return from playschool and chopped fish fingers into bite-sized pieces for me.

 *

It was because Anna was so terribly worried about you, Jasmine says, that she rang Muriel that night.

After all, it’s at moments like those that women do ring their mothers, isn’t it?

I suppose so, I say.

Lisa left the glittering reception immediately, as soon as Anna said you were ill.

I was at the hospital, holding Anna’s hand, and yours too, poor little baby, except you were much too ill to be conscious of anything.

 *

No, Jasmine, you are wrong, I say, but to myself and not to her, for something in me causes me to trust her less and less. As she rises and we walk to the end of the passage, disused sculleries and pantries leading off it, in a house that is now sinking back into a crepuscular state from which the bright blues and greens of the mid-summer day seem hardly to have distracted it, I hold back as she makes for the final room. I have a fear that she will confront me with this sleeping monster, this woman who was once Muriel and who long ago found she had no time for me – or for anyone other than herself. I am not ready yet, and I go to a window in the wall to look out at the cobbles, where the barricade erected by John Neidpath has grown tall enough to keep out an army of hippies or lager louts.

I say – to myself, for I have less and less belief in Jasmine:

You are wrong to say I was too ill to be conscious, because I remember the hospital, and the fever I had that carried me out to a country that was tiled like a great mosque and where weights like falling houses landed on my neck.

In the delirium of that fever, I remember the lady who came and stood by the foot of the bed.

She was dressed in white and she was made of frost and glass and snow. All the dripping icicles and snow ermines and frost sequins of the Snow Queen were on that lady at the foot of the bed. Yet somehow I knew that the Snow Queen was my grandmother, and I would never see her again.

Her heart had frozen. And when she turned and kissed the man who came in – just a minute before my poor, distracted mother – and she kissed him on the lips with her lips that were as red as hare’s blood in her snowy face, I knew he was lost to my mother, for ever.

 *

I was staying the night at Anna’s flat, Jasmine says. To see to the laundry and generally help out.

I went back about midnight. Anna said she would sleep in the ward – there was a kind nurse there who allowed her to doss down: she was so worried about you, you see. Harry said he would stay in the waiting-room, to hear if you had passed the crisis of the illness.

– And Lisa? I say. For I know; I have seen the kiss.

About three in the morning, Jasmine says, I heard the front door open. I was sleeping in the little room your
grandmother
had – before …

Anyway, Ella, I thought your mother had decided to come home, because the news about you was good.

I’m not one to meddle, so I waited until they’d gone down the corridor before calling out to them. I remember
wonder
ing 
at the time why they were nearly running. Anna, I knew, was tired out from trying to earn her living while bringing you up without her mother to help her – and with a
relationship
going sour, to boot.

So … well, perhaps I shouldn’t have gone right up to the door – I don’t think I ever would have, in normal circumstances …

– Harry and Muriel were in Anna’s bed together, I say.

– Harry and Lisa, Jasmine corrects me. Then she breaks down and weeps, puts her arm round my shoulder, and draws me to the door of the room at the end of the passage.

– I swear to God, Ella, I tried to do all I could to stop it, Jasmine says. But it was no good. Harry moved into the flat in Eaton Square. They eloped – like teenagers, for God’s sake – to Gretna Green.

 *

I see Harry and Lisa dancing, in the rain-swamped
photographs
under the ping-pong table in the outdoor room where the garden has encroached and damp cracks the
paving-stones
. They are whirling, romantic, immaculate, in the midst of the age of revolution and anarchy. And it seems oddly suitable, somehow, that their love should be so measured, calculated, formal, like a dance.

I pull the packet of photographs from my pocket and hand them to Jasmine.

Yes, she says, with a sigh – but the sigh sounds theatrical, unconvincing. Then:

– Give those to me, Ella. You don’t need them now. And she opens the door with a sudden brisk twist of the handle – as if we, like the rest of the house – risked falling into a sleep from which we would never be able to wake.