Suspicious Circumstances (2 page)

RETURN ABSOLUTELY IMPOSSIBLE NOVEL AT CRUCIAL STAGE

I ran back to Monique.

‘Don’t worry. I’m not going to let her get away with this.’

We flung ourselves into each other’s arms. Suddenly all the gaiety was gone and it was sweet and sour, tender, romantic, tragic. We forgot the coffee. It burnt through the pan, and the croissants, which Monique had been warming in the oven, became charcoal, filling the apartment with smoke.

We were leaning out of the windows, coughing, a few hours later when there was another bang at the door and another cable.

It said:

TERRIBLY SORRY DARLING MUCH TOO COMPLICATED TO EXPLAIN BUT RETURN TONIGHT IMPERATIVE. LOVE MOTHER

I cabled back a meek ‘Okay’ and took a plane that evening. In the dreary waiting-room at Les Invalides, Monique

and I clung together.

‘Chérie.’

‘Chéri.’

‘Monique.’

‘Nickle.’

‘Oh, Monique, I’ll be back. I swear it. Somehow I’ll wangle it. Somehow…’

‘Oh, chéri.’

‘Oh, chérie.’

They called my bus then. All the way to Orly the memory of Monique’s inspirational face looming through the dirty bus window haunted me.

But, by the time I was half way across the Atlantic, she began to seem rather far away and Mother began to seem terribly near. Surely, I thought, Mother would never have sent those cables unless there was some very real crisis. Norma and the plunge?

Suddenly all the pro-Mother side of me which couldn’t be smothered for long came rushing to the fore. Mother was in trouble. She needed me.

My thoughts got more and more and more ‘boring’.

There was no one to meet me at the L.A. Airport — no Mother, no Pam, not even Gino, who, after all, was supposed to be a chauffeur. I waited around uneasily for a while and then took a taxi to Beverly Hills, where we were currently living in an Italian-type mansion plus servants, loaned to Mother by a writer-producer who was off making a life of Nehru or Buddha or Marco Polo or someone Oriental in Burma. For years Mother had been intending to buy a house of her own but she’d never got around to it because, wherever we went, dearest friends were constantly pressing palazzos and villas and beach houses on her and she always felt it would hurt their feelings if she refused.

In the taxi I devoured a paper I’d bought at the airport, but there didn’t seem to be anything in it except the announcement that Norma’s funeral would take place with all the trimmings that afternoon at five, and a line in Lettie Leroy, reading: ‘What scandal might break at any minute about what international celebrity?', which might have been ominous or might merely have been a fill-in.

When I got ‘home’, I found I hadn’t enough money for the taxi because I’d forgotten to cash any travelers’ checks at the airport. I told the taxi to wait and ran into the house.

In the marble foyer which had probably been imported from Europe in individual crates, a girl I’d never seen before was sitting by the statue of a naked gentleman with a beard who loomed in a goldfish pool. She was talking into a telephone on a long extension cord.

‘No,’ she was saying. ‘I’m terribly sorry but Miss Rood isn’t available right now… Yes, yes, of course She’s going. Norma Delanay was her dearest friend. Yes, yes, of course She’s heartbroken.’

I went up to her. She was young and very smooth with very green eyes and startling red hair falling to her shoulders in one of those Carole Lombard type hairdos which someone had revived. I noticed all this about her with cool clinical detachment, for what were smooth, green-eyed California red-heads to me now? If anything, I was prepared to dislike her for representing something which was forever dead and buried.

When she slammed down the phone, I said, ‘Give me five bucks, please.’

She turned the green eyes on me in a long calm look. ‘What is this? A stick-up?’

‘I’ve got a taxi waiting.’

She gestured to the statue. ‘Since you have your own transportation, why not highjack Buster here? You could probably peddle him to MGM for twelve-fifty.’

I knew I disliked her then. There’s nothing more exhausting than a smart girl. I said, ‘Do we have to indulge in all this brilliant repartee? I’m Anny Rood’s son.’

‘Oh,’ she said. ‘In that case you come under petty cash.’

She took a five-dollar bill out of her pocket-book. The telephone rang again. I paid off the taxi and came back with my suitcase. The girl had hung up and was feeding the goldfish from a can of fish food. She looked up again, appraising me with a brisk skepticism which might once have represented a challenge but which now, thanks to Monique, was for the birds.

‘So you’re the divine son who’s writing a divine book in Paris?’

I ignored that. ‘Where’s everyone?’ I said.

‘If everyone means your mother, which it inevitably does, She’s upstairs.’ She smiled brightly. ‘And since you’re clearly so overwhelmed with interest, you’ll be thrilled to hear I’m a new addition to the group. Delight Schmidt, the secretary’s secretary, the goldfish’s friend.’

‘Delight!’

‘At the year of my birth, Delight was considered a cute name in the lower lower class circles of San Bernadino in which I moved. Want to make something of it?’

When I’d left, the girl who had helped Pam had had perpetual sinus and a bedridden father and had been called Bernice.

‘What happened to Bernice?’ I said.

‘Bernice got the boot two weeks ago. I’m a brand-new broom.’

The phone rang.

She said into it, ‘Good morning, Miss Rood’s residence ... No, I’m afraid she isn’t … No comment. No comment at all.’ She dropped the receiver and watched me again. ‘I adore this household. I’ve always wanted to say No Comment into a phone.’

I knew all the calls were about Norma, but I wasn’t going to show worry in front of one of the here-today-gone-tomorrow females who were constantly streaming through our lives. Certainly not in front of this Aren’t-I-The-Cute-One? little number.

There was a matching goldfish pool on the other side of the hall. Delight Schmidt got up, still clutching the telephone, and, with the extension cord trailing behind her, started wandering towards the second pool.

‘My feet!’ she muttered. ‘These fish will be the death of me.’

No sale, lady, I thought. I picked up my suitcase and ran upstairs.

We changed houses so often that I was apt to get lost in them. But I located Mother’s room because the door was half open and I saw pink wall. Whosever house we were in for however short a time, the first thing Mother always did was to have her room made over entirely in pink. In fact, with the reckless generosity for which she was famous, she invariably put thousands of dollars’ worth of improvements into her dearest friend’s house which, I sometimes felt, was one of the reasons why everyone was so enthusiastic about loaning their real estate to her.

I paused a moment outside the door, feeling the way I always felt when I’d been away from Mother for any length of time, a mixture of excitement and uneasiness as if I were a nine-year-old who had probably done something wrong.

When I went in, Mother was on the bed. At least it was technically a bed. It was about the size of a badminton court and covered with newspapers and letters and telephones and boxes of flowers and a breakfast tray. Somewhere in the middle of it all, tiny but dominating every acre of pink satin spread, lay Mother. She was fully dressed in black slacks, a pink blouse and scarlet-framed glasses with rhinestones, and was curled in a ball reading a movie script. She glanced up rather crossly when she heard someone, then, seeing it was me, dropped the script, pulled off the glasses and smiled a blissful smile.

‘Nickie — darling.’

She stretched out both her arms to me. There was so much bed between us that, even by stretching my own arms full out, I wasn’t anywhere near her. I swung myself on to the bed and she grabbed me, hugged me and then pushed me away with her iron grip on my shoulders, studying me from those huge, swooning eagle eyes.

‘My poor darling. You hated to come home, didn’t you? Return Impossible. Novel at crucial stage. What was it, dear? Some divine little girl?’

I might have known Mother would have smelled that out, but, demoralized as I was, I still had enough wit to realize it would be fatal if she got her teeth into Monique at this stage of the game. Instead I launched a strategic counter-attack.

‘But why didn’t you tell me what it was all about? What’s happening anyway?’

‘But, Nickie.’ Mother’s eyes did that widening bit so that the white showed all around her pupils. ‘Don’t they know in France about poor Norma? This afternoon is her funeral. You couldn’t have missed her funeral.’

I looked at her, trying to fathom what was going on in her mind. I don’t know why I ever bothered because it never got me anywhere. Had I been dragged from Monique’s arms merely because Mother saw me as an essential prop for her funeral characterization? ‘Anny Rood, stricken with grief, is supported by her son from her old friend’s grave?’

‘So that’s all?’ I said, prepared to be relieved but indignant too.

‘All?’ Mother looked shocked. ‘That is what you call it — all? How can you be so cynical? You young — you are all wild, jungle beasts. Norma was our friend. Our dear old friend. And when a friend falls down the stairs and breaks her neck, that is not — all. That is tragic. Remember that, you heartless, cynical child.’

‘I just thought…’ I began.

‘Thought — what?’

‘That there might be the stink of the world. I mean, if the columnists or the scandal magazines latched on to the fact that Ronnie is potty about you and…’

I’d expected another explosion but, as always, I’d got Mother quite wrong. She merely smiled a musing smile. ‘Potty! What a peculiar word. You picked it up at that boring English school. Perhaps it was a mistake to send you there. Those terrible purple and black caps.’ The smile became sentimental. ‘Darling, Ronnie isn’t potty about me. If you were older, you’d realize that relationships between men and women don’t always have to be lurid and dreary. What Ronnie feels for me is just a sweet, perfectly natural affection.’

‘Are the columnists old enough to see it that way?’ I said.

‘And gratitude,’ said Mother, looking modest.

‘For busting up his little fling with old Who-Is-Sylvia?’

‘For rescuing him, darling. Honestly, that poor Ronnie - he was quite, quite out of his depth. We all know he sees himself as a Big Casanova just because he has an occasional kicking up of heels with some dumb little starlet and, Norma being the way she is, who could exactly blame him? But this - it was like a fleecy lamb with a tigress. That Sylvia La Mann — She’s the most dangerous female in Hollywood, particularly now that her contract has lapsed and there are no more Texas tycoons swarming around and She’s positively struggling for her existence. If someone hadn’t done something, she’d have had Ronnie whisked through the divorce courts up to the altar and out to the nearest agent with a ten-year starring contract all ready to sign in her wedding bouquet. No, dear. You know how I hate to meddle, but someone had to do something.’

The improbable thing about all those noble sentiments was that they were perfectly genuine. Mother — or at least most of Mother — was the least selfish person who’d ever walked the face of the earth. She would go to incredible lengths to help her friends. If they were sick, they were deluged with beef-broth, personally prepared by her own dainty hands; if they were in financial difficulties, they were deluged with checks; if they were unhappy with their wives, they were deluged with sympathy and sage advice.

The hooker was that Mother, who had devoted all her energies to being a Sex-Goddess on the Silver Screen, had never learned to approve of Sex in Real Life and refused to admit that she herself could be a complicating factor in her good works. When men like Ronnie, for example, who were supposed to be taking sympathy and sage advice, started frothing at the mouth over her, she turned the blindest of eyes and went serenely on reuniting them to their Lawful Mates.

She was giving me the full Madonna. ‘Darling, luckily, I was able to rescue him. It wasn’t easy, but I flatter myself I’m more than a match for Sylvia La Mann. And while I was about it, I thought it would be a shame not to do something about Norma too. Poor Norma, I said to Ronnie, of course she drinks and of course She’s tiresome at times and, if you’re very careful, I don’t really see why you shouldn’t revert to a starlet or two every once in a while. But why not try to be a bit more patient with Norma? Think of her situation. You, the great producer with all the banks at your feet, while she… What is she anymore? Darling, she used to have a quality as that lovely Sweater Girl. Why not give her a chance? Find some great big picture for her and let her try to be a star again.’

‘Then the Ninon de Lenclos bit was your idea?’ I asked.

‘Yes, darling, it really was. Of course, the script’s been ready for months. Poor deluded Ronnie had been hoping to fish Garbo out of her hole with it. But I told him he might as well try to fish Ninon de Lenclos herself out of her tomb. Give it to poor Norma, I said. Get her a strong male star and she’ll be divine. And if she is the slightest bit bulgy, who’s going to see through all those hoops?’

I looked at her almost with awe. ‘I might have realized you were the only living creature who could have persuaded Ronnie to throw away his reputation and six million lovely bucks like that.’

Mother frowned. Any remark which could conceivably be construed as unkind was automatically condemned by her. ‘Really, how can you say such dreadful things? Norma would have made a lovely Ninon, I’m sure, and anyway Ronnie got Brad Yates to play opposite her.’

Of all the red-hot male properties in Hollywood, Brad Yates was currently the hottest. Mother herself, I knew, had been dying to act with him. She picked up her scarlet reading glasses and twirled them.

‘And to think that She’s dead just when her new career was ready to sky-rocket. What a tragedy! And for poor Ronnie. You should see him. He’s heartbroken, quite, quite shattered.’