Spirit (37 page)

Elizabeth looked down at the floor. ‘Actually, you don't.'

‘Actually, I don't
what
, dear?'

‘Actually you have only two-and-a-half lines of novel and a twenty-page letter of excuses. The lines are: “Pearson sat in the middle of a day with no shadow. He had women on his mind. Women and liquor, but mostly women.” '

Margo stared at Elizabeth and her mouth squeezed tighter and tighter. ‘That's it? That's all he's written? And you
knew?
'

‘You're his editor.'

‘You're incredible! Jesus, you're
incredible
! I should sack you on the spot.'

Elizabeth turned her face aside. ‘I'm sorry. I didn't mean to be arrogant. He's a friend of the family, that's all, and I suppose that makes me more tolerant of him.'

Margo visibly quivered. Then she said, in deliberately clear and measured tones, as if she were speaking to a halfwit, ‘Johnson Ward obviously needs help with his novel. I am his
editor. I am going to take two weeks away and fly to Arizona to help him get his nose to the grindstone. If he fails to get his brain back together again, I shall make it my business to come back to New York with twenty thousand dollars of Mr Keraghter's money.'

She took a deep breath, and then she said, ‘While I am away, you will take over some of George's editorial duties, and you will also edit Mary Harper Randolph's new book, to the best of your ability. Although I was critical of the work you did on
Reds Under The Bed
, it did show promise, Lizzie, and some of your suggestions were almost usable.'

Elizabeth bit her lip. Her mind kept trying to frame the next sentence. With all due respect, Johnson Ward needs somebody who believes him when he talks about Billy. With all due respect, Johnson Ward needs companionship and relaxation, not another Vita on his back. With all due respect, you have as much appreciation of the lazy, scandalous, vain, arrogant and heartbreaking world of Johnson Ward as you have about playing the slide trombone.

With all due respect, you're a bitch.

She said none of these things. Instead, she said, ‘Yes, all right,' and pressed the button for the elevator.

‘I'm relying on you, Lizzie,' said Margo, in a steelspring, uptilting voice.

‘Yes,' said Elizabeth, and waited with her head bowed for the elevator to arrive.

Chester angled his Cadillac into the steeply downsloping driveway of his house on Summit Ridge Drive, and pulled up under the Spanish-style lantern which stood outside the front steps. It was a chilly night, but brilliantly clear, and when Chester opened the door for her and she climbed out of the car, Laura could see the lights of Los Angeles sparkling all the way to the airport. She was wearing a tight white satin dress that
Aunt Beverley had brought her for one of Sidney Skolsky's parties. It left her shoulders bare, and so Aunt Beverley had lent her a mink wrap. Aunt Beverley said that someody seriously disreputable had given it to her, but she couldn't remember whether it was Gaetano Lucchese or Franklin D. Roosevelt.

‘Come inside,' said Chester. ‘There's somebody I want you to meet.'

Laura almost lost her balance on the slope, and tip-tap-tip-tapped all the way down to the bushes at the bottom. ‘Your house isn't straight!' she giggled. ‘It's all leaning over!'.

Chester laughed and rescued her from the shrubbery. ‘I like to live on a hill,' he told her, putting his arm around her and steering her back up to the steps. ‘I like to look down on people, from up above. And that's what you're going to be doing, only from higher up.'

Laura managed to focus on his face by screwing up her left eye tight and peering with her right. ‘How high up?' she wanted to know.

Chester pointed directly to the night sky. ‘All the way up. You're a star.'

He helped her into the house, and across the marble floor of the hallway into his living-room. It was cream-painted, cream-carpeted, with huge cream leather couches. The walls were hung with oil-paintings of huge-breasted nudes, so vast that they looked as if they had been painted to be viewed from at least a half-mile away.

The south-facing wall was all glass, and gave out onto a balcony, from which they could see the whole of Los Angeles stretched out beneath them.

‘Welcome to my humble abode,' said Chester.

Laura looked around. ‘You're right, it is pretty humble, isn't it?' she slurred. ‘Come to that, you're looking pretty frowsy yourself.'

‘Groucho Marx!' said Chester. ‘You have a talent for comedy, too!'

Laura collapsed into one of the sofas and let the mink wrap slide off her shoulders. ‘I have a talent for everything,' she said.

‘Champagne?' asked Chester, walking over to the cream-lacquered liquor cabinet.

‘
More
champagne?' screamed Laura, and started giggling again.

‘Come on,' Chester urged her, taking three tall flutes out of the cabinet, and a chilled bottle of Perrier-Jouët. ‘This is a celebration. This is a night for champagne!'

‘All right, then,' Laura declared, far too loudly. ‘More champagne!'

She felt wonderful. She felt as if she were floating. Chester had picked her up promptly at seven o'clock and driven her to the Players on Sunset Boulevard. The Players was a gourmet restaurant on a second-floor verandah, owned by Preston Sturges, the director. All his Oscar-winning friends liked to gather there: not only for their own company, but for the matchless food, especially the rare beef and the Caesar salads. Laura had eaten lobster, and drunk champagne, and drunk more champagne.

All evening, Chester's face had smiled at her over the candlelit tabletop like the waxing moon, and assured her she was a star. ‘When I said shortlist, I was just trying to be cautious, you know what I mean, in case you were disappointed. But look at you now! Shortlist, schmortlist. The camera loves you, I love you. The public's going to love you.'

Now she lay back on the sofa and everything swam around her and she knew that she was going to be famous. Ohhhh, Chester . . .' she said, ‘Kiss me!'

But Chester simply smiled and shook his head. ‘Come on, Laura, you're a beautiful girl. You're the most beautiful girl I've seen in Hollywood in years. But I can't kiss you. This is a
professional relationship – director, star. How many people in Hollywood fall victim to scandal? How many actors and actresses jump into the sack with everybody they meet, practically? Far too many, that's my opinion!' He sat down beside her and clinked glasses. ‘They're at it like rabbits, for God's sake.'

Laura frowned at him. ‘Mr Bunzum,' she said.

‘I beg your pardon?'

‘Mr Bunzum . . . he was a rabbit. Do you know what happened to him?'

Chester stared at her suspiciously. ‘No,' she said, thickly, his throat filled with phlegm.

Laura sat up and pressed her nose flat against his, so that they were staring into each other's eyes at point-blank range. ‘Mr Bunzum was frozen to death. Frozen so solid that his arms fell off. Frozen so solid that his legs fell off.'

She leaned away from him, so far back that he thought she was going to topple off the sofa. ‘Frozen so solid that his
peter
fell off!'

She whacked the sofa and threw back her head and laughed and laughed. Chester pretended to laugh but he wasn't laughing at all: he was too tense. All the same, watching her, he thought that she was perfect. Beautiful, perfect, her hair golden, her skin shining, her small breasts swelling the white satin dress.

‘Listen,' he said. ‘There's somebody I want you to meet. Somebody important.'

Laura squeezed the tip of her nose between finger and thumb to stop herself laughing. She let out a terrible snort, and laughed even more, but eventually she managed to calm herself down. ‘Somebody important? Somebody
how
important? More important than you? More important than me?'

‘Just . . . somebody
very
important. His name's Raymond. You'll like him a lot. He's been thinking of putting some
finance into
Devil's Elbow
. . . quite a fair amount of finance . . . in which case – well, we can afford to have you play a starring role. Not exactly lead starring role, Shelly Summers has been cast for that, we have to have some established box-office names, after all. But “also starring”, and that's a whole lot better than “forty-seventh floozie on the left” now isn't it?'

Laura stared at him wide-eyed. ‘I'm going to be “also starring?” Really?'

Chester swept his hand across an imaginary movie screen. ‘
Devil's Elbow
, starring Michael Grant and Shelly Summers, also starring Laura Buchanan, Mitch Forbes and Zachary Moskowitz.'

‘You're kidding mee!' she squealed.

‘I'm not kidding, I promise. But be nice to Raymond, okay? Raymond is the money man . . . if Raymond gets upset, we don't get the extra finance. Then it's bye-bye “also starring”.' Chester tried to look tragic, without much success. ‘Not only that, it could be bye-bye
Devil's Elbow
altogether.'

Laura sat up and frowned at him. ‘Okay, Chester. This is my solemn-num oath. I shall be nice to Raymond.'

Chester raised his glass. ‘What a good girl, then. Raymond! Raymond – are you there? Come say hello to our brand-new star!'

There was a pause about as long as it takes for the needle to drop onto a record and the music to begin. Then a very tall swarthy man in a beautifully-cut tuxedo appeared from the dining-area, holding a balloon-glass of brandy. He was ugly in a brutally handsome way, with scar-spattered cheeks and a sloping forehead and slightly bulbous eyes. He carried himself like an athlete, although there was the hint of a limp in his left foot, trailing slightly. An injured athlete. He approached Laura and stood towering over her, and his thick lips lifted in a patronizing smile.

‘Is this her?' he asked Chester.

‘What do you think?' said Chester, suddenly nervous.

Raymond reached out one of his octave-spanning hands and touched Laura's silky curls. ‘I don't know yet,' he said. ‘Depends how pliable she is.'

 

 

Margo Rossi reached home shortly after midnight. Since September she had been living in a plush but rather stuffy two-bedroomed apartment at the Apthorp, a vast apartment building on Broadway and 78th Street, popular with actors and writers and theatrical producers. Margo's father was big in walnuts, and had paid the lease for her, two years in advance.

She peered at her face in the mirror as she went up in the elevator. She thought she was looking haggard. She had spent the evening at Downey's with a lawyer called Victor Emblem who had been pursuing her relentlessly for six months, sending her roses, sending her teasing little notes, telephoning her at the office. Victor was good-looking in a pallid, shock-haired way, rather like a handsome Stan Laurel, and his sense of humour was highly sophisticated. Victor's idea of a rib-cracking joke was a senior judge saying to a junior colleague, ‘Be just! And if you can't be just, be arbitrary.'

She suspected that he liked her because she was confident and tough. That was why she hadn't enjoyed herself this evening, in spite of drinking four green brandy stingers. She was tired of the way in which men responded to her. Either they found her threatening, and turned their backs on her; or else they wanted her to dominate them. Sometimes she felt as if the world were populated by only two kinds of men: masochists or boors.

She let herself in to her apartment and switched on the light, and suddenly became aware of how cold it was, so cold that she could see her breath. The heating was working, because the
lobby and the corridors had all been up to their usual intolerable temperature. Mostly, her apartment was so warm that she could scarcely breathe. She knew she hadn't left a window open. Unless somebody had climbed up the fire escape and broken in. She hung up her coat. She cautiously approached the living-room door, which was an inch ajar. The whole apartment was quiet, quiet enough for her to hear her wristwatch ticking.

‘Is anyone there?' she called out.

Of course there was no reply. But a draught was blowing out through the inch-wide gap in the doorway and it was freezing cold – not just window-open cold, but intensely cold, meat-freezer cold.

She hesitated. Maybe she should call the super before she went into the sitting-room. There had been a rash of burglars and intruders at the Apthorp lately. Mrs Lindhurst in 711 had been hit on the head with one of her own zinc statuettes; and the Strasbergs had lost a fortune in jewellery. But Margo considered herself more than a match for any scavenging burglar. If she were capable of reducing seasoned editors to tears, there was no reason to think that she couldn't do the same to some uneducated bum who made his living climbing other people's fire escapes.

She pushed open the sitting-room door and swung it wide. It was dark inside, except for the light from the hallway falling across the carpet, and her own attenuated shadow. And wasn't it
cold
! She groped her hand sideways until she found the lightswitch, and turned on the lamps.

The room had been catastrophically wrecked. The lamps still worked, but they lay on the floor with their bases and their shades broken. The tapestry couch had been ripped open, and its stuffing strewn everywhere. Side-tables had been overturned, ornaments smashed, paintings torn to ribbons. The carpet and the scatter-rugs had been cut to pieces, and the pale blue moiré wallcovering hung from the wall in shreds.

‘Oh, my God,' breathed Margo, and walked into the centre of the room like a woman in a nightmare. She picked up a small Dresden figure of a shepherdess, headless and crookless now, and placed it carefully on the one occasional table that remained upright – even though its unlaid surface had been deeply scored. She looked around with her mouth open and her eyes blurring with tears. It looked as if a ten-clawed monster had rampaged around the room, tearing and smashing everything in sight. She had heard of burglars doing damage before now: but she had never heard of anything like this.