An Inconvenient Woman (58 page)

When Philip Quennell, a half hour after leaving Flo March’s house, rang the buzzer at the gates of Clouds and asked over the closed circuit television system if Mrs. Mendelson was at home, Dudley was quite put out. Although he knew that Mrs. Mendelson was fond of the young man who had become the boyfriend of Camilla Ebury, he felt that it was an impertinence for him to arrive at the gates of such a house as Clouds and ask to see her, without having called first to make an appointment. Dudley was not unaware that Jules Mendelson had despised Philip Quennell, and he joined his late employer in blaming Philip for causing the crack in the statue of the Degas ballerina.

“Is Mrs. Mendelson expecting you?” asked Dudley over the closed circuit system.

“She is not, no,” replied Philip, looking up into the television camera.

“I really don’t think it is convenient for her to see you, Mr. Quennell,” said Dudley, taking upon himself the task of speaking for the lady of the house. Although he was in no way impolite, he allowed a mild note of annoyance to creep into the tone of his voice. “Perhaps you should telephone Mrs. Mendelson later today and try to make an appointment to see her.”

Philip was not to be dissuaded so easily. “I realize I have come without calling first, Dudley, but could you please ask Mrs. Mendelson if she could see me for a few moments,” said Philip, in an insistent voice.

Dudley, annoyed now, made no reply. He turned off the system and called Pauline on the intercom to tell her that Philip Quennell had arrived at the house without an appointment and wished to see her.

“Heavens,” said Pauline over the intercom.

Although Dudley could not see Pauline, he imagined that there was a look of surprise on her face. “I’ve asked him to call you later to make an appointment,” said Dudley.

“No, no, I’ll see him, Dudley,” said Pauline. “It’s just that I have things to do. I have to meet with Jarvis in the greenhouse first, and then I’ll be up. Have Mr. Quennell wait in the library.”

Dudley, without saying anything welcoming to Philip, pushed the button that opened the gates, and Philip proceeded up the long driveway to the house. When his car pulled into the courtyard, Dudley opened the front door.

“Mrs. Mendelson has asked that you wait in the library, Mr. Quennell,” said Dudley. He walked in that direction with Philip following him. “Mrs. Mendelson is with Jarvis in the greenhouse and will be up shortly.”

He opened the door of the library and Philip went inside. As always, when he entered that room, Philip walked over to the fireplace and looked up at the painting of van Gogh’s
White Roses
.

“Is there anything you’d like? Tea? Coffee? Drink?” asked Dudley, as he turned away and put into alignment a row of magazines on the fireplace bench.

“No, thank you. I’m fine,” replied Philip, as if he were unaware of the butler’s lack of civility.

After ten minutes, Pauline walked into the room through
one of the French doors that opened onto the terrace. She was carrying a basket of roses that she had just cut in her garden. “Hello, Philip,” she said.

Philip hopped to his feet. “Pauline, I know this is inexcusable, to drop in on you without calling first. I think I have upset your butler.”

“Oh, don’t worry about it,” she said. “I hope you won’t mind if I put these flowers in a vase while we talk.” Without waiting for an answer, she took a blue-and-white Chinese vase and carried it into the lavatory, where she filled it with water. “I’m having a guest for lunch. I’m afraid I can’t ask you to join us.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t dream of staying. It’s extremely kind of you to see me. I’ll only be a few minutes.” He was beginning to feel nervous about his mission.

Pauline came out of the lavatory and took a pair of clippers from her basket and began to strip the roses and cut off the ends at an angle. “You haven’t fought with Camilla again, have you? That’s what I imagined,” she said.

Philip smiled. “No.”

Then she started to arrange the flowers in the vase, with the expertise of a person who had spent a lifetime arranging flowers in rare Chinese vases.

“It’s not unlike your painting,” said Philip, pointing to her arrangement.

“Mr. van Gogh’s picture always influences me, but certainly you didn’t come here to talk about flower arrangements,” she said.

“No.” He shook his head. “I came here to talk about Flo March.”

Pauline’s body stiffened at the mention of the woman’s name. She put down her clippers for a moment, breathed heavily, and then picked them up again and went on with her arranging.

“Have you become her spokesperson?” she asked. The expression on her face had changed, as had the tone of her voice. “If so, please contact my lawyer, Sims Lord. I have no wish to hear any message from her.”

“No, Pauline. I am not her spokesperson. Nor am I bringing you a message from her. Nor am I speaking in her defense. There is something I think you should know. Please listen to me.”

“Does Camilla know you’ve come here, Philip?”

“No, she doesn’t.”

“What do you think she’d say if she knew?”

“She’d say that it was none of my business.”

“She’d be right.”

“She would be right, I know, just as you are right to be annoyed with me because I am interfering, but I anticipate a catastrophe if you don’t listen to some reason, and it is worth your disapproval.”

Pauline continued with her work. “I’ve always liked you, Philip. You must know that. I’ve been a good friend to you. But I think you have overstepped the bounds, and I would like you to leave my house and not come back.”

Philip nodded. He walked toward the door of the library. As he opened it to leave, he turned back. “There are things she knows, Pauline.”

“Please go,” she said.

He continued to talk as if she had not spoken. “She is a desperate woman, and desperate women do desperate things. She is being manipulated by an unscrupulous man who despises you.”

“And who is that?”

“Cyril Rathbone.”

“Oh, puleeze,” she said, laughing dismissively. “A ridiculous man. An imposter. He holds a grudge against me because I would never invite him to my house.”

“You must understand that that makes him dangerous. He is writing a book in Flo March’s name, called
Jules’s Mistress
. Did you know that?”

Pauline’s silence told that she had not known. “A whore’s trick,” she said, finally.

“Cyril Rathbone has taped her for forty hours,” said Philip. “She has told him things that could be embarrassing to you.”

Pauline wanted Philip to go, but she wanted him to stay also. “What sort of things?” she asked. In order not to show the interest she had in what he was saying, she continued to arrange the roses in the Chinese vase.

“I don’t know. I haven’t heard the tapes. I must ask you something, Pauline. And you don’t have to answer me. In fact, don’t answer me, because it is none of my business. But I’m still going to ask you. Does she know something about you? Or Hector? Or something about your son that no one else knows?”

“Is that what she said?”

“Alluded to, but didn’t say.”

Ashen-faced, Pauline turned away from Philip. “The woman is a liar. She would say anything.”

“You’re wrong, Pauline,” said Philip. “That is just not so. She would prefer not to write this book. I can tell you that for a fact. She has told me that within the hour, but she is desperate. Put yourself in her place.”

“Once you start paying off a blackmailer, it never ends. Anyone will tell you that,” said Pauline.

“It’s only what Jules promised her. It’s less than what that ring on your finger is worth.”

Without looking at her finger, she lifted up her left hand and pulled the ring back and forth with her right. Since Jules’s death, Pauline had begun to wear his ring again, the huge de Lamballe diamond. When people commented on it, as they invariably did, she had taken to looking at it and smiling and then telling the story of how Jules had given it to her in Paris on the week she married him. The story was told with affection for the husband she had been married to for twenty-two years. People remarked later that there was no trace of bitterness in her toward Jules for the humiliation he had caused her. “It’s so typical of Pauline. She’s a lady through and through. After all, she is a McAdoo,” her friends said.

“Good-bye, Philip,” said Pauline.

“Good-bye, Pauline.”

He knew that he had failed in his mission and lost the friendship of Pauline at the same time. Dismissed, he walked down the hallway toward the front hall. At the instant he arrived there, Dudley entered the hall from another of the six doors that opened onto it and went straight to open the front door. But he had not opened it for Philip’s exit from the house, as Philip thought, but for the arrival of another guest who was standing there.

“Mrs. Mendelson is expecting me,” said the man. He spoke with an English accent.

“Indeed, Lord St. Vincent,” said Dudley.

Philip Quennell and Lord St. Vincent looked at each other as they passed. Dudley did not introduce them.

“I can’t understand it,” said Flo. “People are interested, very interested in my book. There is great excitement. And then,
suddenly, those very same people are no longer interested. We’re never going to sell my book.”

“You are entirely too quick to be defeated. You don’t seem to understand how strong a position you are in, Flo,” replied Cyril.

She shook her head. “I’m not in a strong position. There are forces working that have nothing to do with us.”

“You dramatize.”

“They’re no longer interested because the person to whom they have to present the idea has already been gotten to by someone,” said Flo.

“Oh, come on. Who has such power?”

“Friends of Pauline.”

“What sort of friends?”

“One of the former Presidents who has dinner in her house.”

“I don’t believe that.”

“Oh, yes.”

The initial enthusiasm in publishing circles that Joel Zircon reported for Flo March’s book,
Jules’s Mistress
, seemed to abate overnight. Publishing companies that as recently as a week earlier had claimed they were ready to make a deal, once the first chapter and the outline were turned in—which they assured Joel was only a formality—were now difficult to get on the telephone.

“It’s been a long fucking time since someone didn’t return
my
telephone calls,” complained Joel Zircon to Mona Berg, when they were having lunch. Joel had been given a promotion in the Berg Agency. “I can’t understand it.”

Mona, ever practical, had an instant solution. “Go the miniseries route,” she suggested.

“Meaning?”

“You take your first chapter, and your outline, and you go to the networks, and say, ‘I have here the first chapter and the outline of
Jules’s Mistress
, Miss Flo March’s book, which all the publishing companies are snapping at my heels for, but I have decided to skip that step and come straight to you while the story is still hot, hot, hot.’ ”

“Yeah?”

“Then you start teasing them a little. Drop the big names. Jules Mendelson. Pauline Mendelson. All those Washington
people. And bank presidents. And cabinet ministers. You’ll have them eating right out of your hand.”

“
Former
cabinet ministers.”

“All right, all right.
Former
cabinet ministers. Don’t get picky with me when I’m doing your creative work for you.”

“Sorry. Go on.”

“Use words like billionaire, and high society, and mansion when you describe it. They always like that.”

“Great idea, Mona. You’re the best in the business.”

“I know,” said Mona.

“Something’s gone off,” said Joel.

“Meaning?”

“They’re not going to do the miniseries.”

“I thought you said they were going to buy it.”

“They changed their mind.”

“Why?”

“They said mistress stories are not commercial.”

Flo pulled the covers up over her and turned toward the wall. “Somebody got to them,” she said.

“What do you mean?”

“Just what I said. Somebody got to them.”

“Oh, come on.”

“You don’t know these people the way I do.”

Joel tried the other two networks. There was enthusiasm at the lower echelons, followed by rejection when the idea was presented at the highest levels of programming.

“I must be losing my touch,” said Joel to Cyril. “I thought if anything was sure-fire, this was it. I mean, it has all the elements.”

“I have an idea,” said Cyril.

“What’s that?”

“Get Flo an appearance on the Amos Swank show. Have her tell her story to late-night America. Beautiful young girl with a story to tell can’t get it published because the powerful of the country are conspiring against her.”

“I’d stay up late to look at that.”

“So would most of the country.”

“Is Flo up to that?”

“What do you mean?”

“She don’t look so steady to me.”

“What do you mean?”

“She’s falling apart again.”

“Don’t worry about Flo. I’ll get her in shape.”

There was great excitement when the date was set for Flo to appear on “After Midnight,” the Amos Swank show. She began to pull herself together again. She went each morning to the log cabin to attend the AA meetings. On the advice of Philip Quennell, she did not raise her hand and discuss her life anymore at the meetings.

“People know who you are now. They talk about you. They’re not supposed to, but some of them do,” said Philip. He did not tell her he suspected that Rose Cliveden had repeated everything she had said to either Pauline or Sims Lord. He only said, “Don’t go out for coffee with Rose C.”

“Why not?”

“She’s a talker.”

“But she was so nice to me.”

She went to a gym and began to work out. She went back to Pooky to get her hair done, and to Blanchette to get her nails done. She brought Pooky back to her house with her to help her decide what she should wear on the night of her appearance. She had not been able to afford new clothes since Jules died, but Pooky assured her that the Chanels in her wardrobe were classics and timeless. He took the one they picked out for her to wear on the Amos Swank show to a dressmaker friend of his in the San Fernando Valley and had it shortened to the latest length. “Wear the sapphire-and-diamond ring,” he said. “That’s all. Don’t wear the canary diamond earrings.”