The Man Who Understood Women (19 page)

I opened the door, assuming it was Mercedes.

It was my pink case and next to it, in the biscuit-coloured suit and pearl tiepin from first-class, was my Italian from JFK.

It was still night, the terrace lit by spots, the cicadas singing. We looked at each other – he so smooth, I so wild I must have looked crazy – then at the pink case. Then we laughed.

How can I describe the next few days? Paradise Lost became Paradise Regained, with no apologies to anyone.

The mornings were for work and the rest of the day for Fabrice – my new love’s name. He had been visiting a friend in Runaway Bay, before coming to the hotel.

He took me to the Great House, Rose Hall and
Cinnamon
Hill, where we rode through the plantations on beat-up horses, picking peppers from the trees and drinking coconut milk. We swam in the tepid water, lay on the hot sands,
sheltered
from the rains. At night we watched the limbo
dancers
, the fire-eaters, and crab races, and danced to the haunting native band.

His father was Italian but his mother Australian. He had been educated in England but now spent his time between his house in Belgravia and his mother’s flat in Sydney; that was when he wasn’t in Rome or Barbados or St Moritz.

I was too old to believe in fairy stories; actually believe. I was content to enjoy the best time I had ever had in my life, knowing that it could only endure for a week.

We lay on mattresses in the private pool of his cottage, drinks in our hands, sunhats over our eyes. Some days we hardly moved, except to call room service when we were
hungry
. While I worked in the morning Fabrice played tennis or golf, snorkelled or water-skied. We didn’t bother with the Mannheimers or the Joneses. I scarcely had time for Sara and
Mike, who in any case were doing their own thing. I was only aware of the passing, too quickly, of the days.

When it was over, I packed my pink case, laying on top as if it were porcelain the Calypso record he had bought me,
This is My Island in the Sun
, and the sad story of Annie Palmer, the White Witch of Rose Hall. It would pass many Sydney evenings and enable me to recall in a flash the cups of gold, and almonds freshly picked, the starry sky and the symphony of the night.

To look at us you would have thought us a happy throng. Sara with her tan, and Mike with his cameras, saying
goodbye
to the soursops and the gentle tamarinds, the giant flame trees, and Mercedes in her blue-and-white-striped dress
waving
happily from the door of the cottage.

I had said goodbye to Fabrice the night before. I could not recall it without distress, so busied myself with the luggage and my myriad responsibilities.

I spent most of the journey sleeping. All of us did, exhausted by the events of the week and the steam heat of the island. I was dreaming of the vultures, or buzzards, I never knew quite which, swooping and rising again over the coral reef, when Mike shook me to say we had landed. I looked out
unenthusiastically
into the grey bleakness of the Sydney winter and wondered whether it was only the vultures that had been the dream. There was nothing to reassure me that not twelve hours ago I had embraced Fabrice in an agony of farewells.

I took no pleasure in the fact that of all of us I was the first to spot my pink case doing its circular tour on the baggage rack, so triumphantly visible.

I waited only a few moments. A half-dozen cases came
tumbling
down to be heaved on to the bench in front of me by the familiar Aussie porter.

I spotted mine, which he put down in front of me, then to my utter amazement another, identical – pink twins!

I stood stock-still.

Fabrice was by my side. I thought I would faint with
happiness
. He picked up the cases, one in each hand, looking at them fondly.

‘One of yours, one of mine,’ he said, then smiled his
fabulous
smile. ‘Next year when we go back,’ he said, ‘who knows, one of ours?’

I'll Pay Half

1975

Whenever my mother came shopping with me, when I was very much younger, of course, she would clinch the argument over a dress she considered eminently suitable and I did not by taking the pin from her emotional hand grenade and slinging it casually in my direction: ‘Take it, darling, I'll pay half!'

You must have seen us in the shops. Possibly not in the early days when you struggled in and out of dresses in tiny,
overheated
cubicles where there was no room to hang a thing, let alone swing the proverbial cat. Later, I mean, when the
changing
rooms became communal, a kind of free girlie show run on a tight budget where they couldn't afford merchandise from the top drawer. It might have been funny had it not been so pathetic: the laddered tights, the grubby smalls, the braless types who seemed generally the very ones who were most in need of them. Fat behinds attempting desperately to squeeze into size 10 jeans, spotty shoulders in backless dresses,
bean-poles
in loose-covers.

I often had the desire to cry in anguish, ‘No!' as some
Boadicea
admired herself in pink chiffon but knew very well that the image she saw, twisting and turning in the mirror, was not what she was but what she wanted to be, her fantasy self. We all had them. I was no exception. Perhaps that was why there were always the scenes with Mother.

There was, of course, nowhere for her to sit while I went through my own private little dress show or what Mother was wont to call a ‘mannequin parade'. They planned it that way, the shops, I mean. She wasn't supposed to be in the changing room anyway. There was a notice outside: ‘Customers
Trying
On Only'. We always worked it though, like some sort of practised shoplifting team. Another warning read: ‘Three
garments
only to be taken into changing room'. It was simple; I would take three and Mother another three.

I often wondered if the gum-chewing salesgirl who sat on a high stool issuing discs, red, yellow, or green according to the number of items you had, really thought that Mother was going to buy a bikini that was no more than two pieces of string, trousers that left no room for the imagination, an
evening
number in which underpinnings were not only unsuitable but impossible. I don't suppose they really cared. They were only there to prevent looting, which, in common parlance, was known as ‘shrinkage' and waited for the hours to pass so that they could escape from the Hades of sweaty female flesh into the fading sunlight of the King's Road.

She was very patient. Mother, I mean. It wasn't too bad, either, in the morning when we were fresh. About midday the
snapping began and we both recognised the need for
refreshment
. We talked politely over a wilted salad or a greasy
hamburger
until it was time once more for seconds out of the ring and the next round.

She would, of course, have liked to get me into one of her sort of shops where the madam would be unequivocally on her side and where the clothes cost a bomb, but that was a battle we had resolved long ago. War was now waged on my own ground. I say war. It was, I suppose, more a cold one, if you can call it that in a temperature of around 80 degrees and what seemed to be a total lack of breathable air. Out of – from her point of view – a pretty unlikely conglomeration Mother would select an armful of what she considered the most ‘
suitable
' things. They were generally ‘constructed' rather than ‘made' out of some serviceable material and their chief assets seemed to be one, that they would ‘last', and two, that they would take me anywhere. Anywhere, I knew well enough, meant a family occasion, wedding or funeral, although there never seemed to be any in the offing, when I might have to be seen with her. They might take me anywhere, granted, but as far as I was concerned I wouldn't be seen dead in them.

It was just the beginning, at that time, of the ethnic look, and Mother simply couldn't see how one might either wear or pay good money for a few yards of fraying cheese-cloth, a
navvy
's vest, or a row of beads. At the end of the day, by which time we could cheerfully have murdered one another, she would still be clinging tenaciously to her sensible garment in a colour that ‘matched my eyes' which would hang in my wardrobe till
kingdom come, suitable for everything and wearable for nothing. Invariably, taking advantage of the fact that I was out for the count although trying the Grecian peasant smock I knew would go a bomb on any summer occasion for the
hundred-and
-fourth time (and which she said would fall to pieces in the wash), she would clinch the deal by declaring that the blue gabardine suit, or whatever it was she was clutching, would ‘come out every year' and that if I took it she would ‘pay half'! It invariably worked.

I would return the peasant smock with a last lingering look to the bored salesgirl who was dying to go home, and watch Mother write her cheque for half the gabardine suit which, carrier-bagged, she would thrust into my unenthusiastic hand.

At home I would rush round to Fleur, my best friend, who would say ‘Very nice', while her eyes shrieked ‘My God!' then hang it in my wardrobe where it would stay until too short, too tight, or merely too old, and be sent on its way to the ‘Home for Handicapped Horses' or whatever Mother's pet charity of the time happened to be.

Those times, of course, had long passed. There came a point where she could no longer stand the hissed arguments in the changing rooms, the sulks and tantrums, the endurance tests of those shopping days. She simply capitulated, not
understanding
how anyone could survive without a single pair of ‘court' shoes, a leather handbag, or a ‘best coat'. I'm not sure whether it was ‘the age' or ‘her age' that had finally caught up with her but she suffered the faded jeans, the tie-and-dye, the thonged sandals worn with moth-eaten furs from Portobello
Road, generally in silence. When I started paying good money for dresses the like of which she had given away gladly after the war she nearly did her nut, but by then she had something else to think of, more important than the comparative merits of cheesecloth and gabardine.

The something else was me ‘settling down'. She had, I
suppose
, according to her lights, been remarkably patient. I had been through the motions of a red-brick university,
emerging
with a mediocre degree of not the slightest practical use, done the Greece and India bit, starry-eyed and knapsacked, started and abandoned a million different jobs. The fact that I was a product of my environment and a million light years away from an unmarried girl of twenty-four in the immediate post-war years did not impress. It was not that she was
without
understanding. She did her best, along with the rest of her generation, to go along with our
modus vivendi
, our morals, or lack of them, our casual approach to things that to her were of fundamental importance.

Looking at it her way, since leaving school I had had my freedom. I had studied, travelled, sought gainful employment, formed relationships; she had not interfered, until lately.

It was very subtle. I was between flats and had been living at home for a bit when she suddenly sprouted little dinner
parties
. Not for me, understand, but for friends of hers she might not have seen in years but who just happened to have eligible sons.

She started dragging me to drinks. ‘… the So-and-Sos said to be sure to bring you along …' as Tom or Dick or Harry was
down from college or back from France or whatever. I'd stand there sipping dutifully and eating little damp things made by waitresses or by the more capable hostesses six months before and consigned to the deep-freeze. Tom or Dick or Harry and I would invariably hate each other on principle and could hardly wait till the politeness was over and we could each get back to our own particular crowd.

Sometimes we had them to dinner. These occasions were worst of all because Mother became arch. ‘I'll leave you two to clear the table for me while I make some coffee. I believe you were both in Corfu last summer so you must have lots to talk about.' Or, ‘Jane has a degree in Politics and Economics she's probably much too shy to talk about, and Christopher came top of his year at Sydney Sussex … Why don't the two of you take a walk in the park …?'

You may ask why I submitted. I suppose I didn't see it as submitting; merely being amenable to their well-laid, if
abortive
, plans for me while leading my own life. It was a not too painful form of saying thank you for all they had done for me over the years. I did not want them to think me either
unappreciative
or ungrateful for the sacrifices they had made and the heartache I had caused them, wittingly or unwittingly, over the almost quarter of a century I had been around.

The pièce de résistance of Mother's scheming on my behalf came about at the same time as I met Clive. Her protégé's name was Wallace. Wallace! I ask you! Although not
actually
an ‘Honourable' himself, his father was and if he survived long enough to outlive his father and his uncle, who was the
present holder of the title and who had produced only daughters, he would ultimately become the viscount.

So Wallace was the feather in Mother's cap, the diadem in the tiara of her vicarious ambition. She found him through the work she did, and she worked very hard, for the Red Cross. In the year when she, fortuitously as she thought, was deep into her machinations vis-à-vis me, she found herself co-chairman of the local group with Wallace's mama. Papa was a Lloyd's underwriter when he wasn't hunting, shooting, or fishing, and Wallace himself seemed to do nothing more testing than hang around in his wake. Rumour had it that if Papa hadn't been who he was there wouldn't have been any wake anywhere for him to hang around in. Eligible and handsome he might have been, but he wasn't exactly what you'd call fireworks as far as the top storey was concerned.

For Mother's sake I tried, genuinely. Shutting my eyes to the fact that he wore baggy corduroys and short back and sides, I attempted to remember – for Mother's sake – that given luck I might one day be a viscountess and, my hand in his invariably cold limp one, suffered Henley, Ascot and Wimbledon. I spent two whole ghastly weekends at his ‘place' in the country where his mother seemed continuously to be piercing me with her chill blue eyes and his father was not aware of my presence at all.

I made an ass of myself in Scotland where I didn't know one end of either a gun or a horse from the other and made numerous social gaffes upon which they were far too polite to comment. Over dinner at the Ritz, which was typical, Wallace asked me to marry him.

Mother was cock-a-hoop, but then she chose not to
recognise
Clive. As far as she was concerned he did not exist. She was very smart at not seeing when she wanted. Poor Clive, the cards were stacked against him. Every one, that was, except the fact that I was gloriously, hopelessly in love with him and knew that there was nobody else with whom I would rather spend what remained of my life.

To begin with he had been married before. To my way of thinking this meant that he now knew exactly what he wanted but to Mother he was ‘no good'. He was ten years older than I whereas Wallace was three months younger. He was one half of a successful song-writing team, which to me was exciting, to Mother precarious. He wore shirts open to the waist so that you could see his nut-brown chest and was obviously what Mother called rather quaintly a ‘lady-killer'. He was the
kindest
, most generous, easy-going man I had ever met. There were neither tensions nor pretensions. When we were together I had to be nothing except myself. I could air my innermost thoughts and he his. We accepted each other totally and
absolutely
. To my mind that was what marriage was, or should be, all about.

Mother was horrified. Not least, I think, because when he wasn't wearing his open-chested shirt he came to collect me in a polo-necked sweater or a safari suit. It wasn't that she was unaware of current fashions but thought him too ‘old' for young men's gear; that through me he was seeking to
recapture
his lost or misspent youth. Wrapped up with the ideas – swollen to goodness knows what unknown grandeur – in her
head of me and Wallace, she treated Clive as something of a joke, when she wasn't dismissing him altogether.

The crunch came, if you can call it that, when they were both away for a few days leaving me a breathing space: Wallace in the country, Clive in St Trop.

Mother had asked me to come with her to choose a hat for an important luncheon at which she was to be the guest of honour and at which she had to make a speech. For the past twenty-four years, to my certain knowledge, she had managed very nicely choosing her hats without me. When she insisted that my advice was essential I realised that there was
something
more to the expedition than met the hat, so to speak.