The Cherry Blossom Corpse (3 page)

She faded into silence as she met with no response. Then she pulled herself together, and with a sort of bravery that I admired her for, she thrust forward her hand, and said:

“I'm Amanda Fairchild.”

It was touch and go. Lorelei Zuckerman gazed speculatively
at Amanda's beringed hand. Then slowly, with palpable reluctance, she raised her own pudgy mitt towards it. Flesh touched flesh, for perhaps half a second.

“Good night,” said Lorelei Zuckerman.

She beckoned to the pale young girl whom I had taken to be her companion, and together they painstakingly raised the Zuckerman bulk from the table. The ridiculous thing was that none of us liked to help, or to precede her out of the dining-room. We stood there, awkwardly, as if we owed her deference, and we made a sort of path, down which Lorelei Zuckerman royally hobbled, like a larger and infinitely less genial Queen Victoria. No one, however, raised loyal hurrahs. We stood there sheepishly until we heard the sound of Lorelei and her muted companion cross the lounge and start up the stairs.

“Phew. Thank God,” I said. “She's not going to the bar.”

Some breaths were let out, one or two people giggled, and we made our way out of the dining-room. Some of us made for the bar, some of us went for a twilight walk around the gardens, though in fact by the time half an hour had passed almost all of us were down there in the bar.

That there
was
a bar had been attested by the gaunt man we had seen arriving. He turned out to be a Finn, and at dinner he had smelt spirituous and been virtually incoherent. This had been tested by Amanda, who had sat opposite him and had transmitted her full artillery of blandishments through the haze, with no effect. Now he led the way back there, clutching the dregs of a bottle of white wine he had drunk with his food. The bar was in the basement: an unlovely, plasticated room which contrasted sadly with the rest of the house and looked like a reluctant concession. Its stocks were bare—one brand of each drink, and that not the cheapest. I learned
later that it was the only place in Kvalevåg where any sort of liquor could be obtained, and was, in the long, winter months, the resort of a few of the braver or more raffish men in that straggling rural community. There were one or two such there now, kept in stern check by the proprietress and by the young man who had brought our luggage along, who did most of the serving behind the bar. The locals regarded us with peasant curiosity, and no great approval, and before long they slipped out and left the place to us. As we stood by the counter wondering what we could afford, I felt constrained to say to Amanda Fairchild:

“That was brave.”

“Darling! Positively my finest hour!” she returned, flashing me a brilliant smile. I regretted saying anything, but luckily she went and sat with someone else.

The relief of Lorelei Zuckerman's departure relaxed us all, and we managed to form up into compatible little groups, as Jan had predicted. I teamed up with Mary Sweeny and with the jolly-looking American woman, who turned out to be Patti Drewe. Cristobel also sat with us, silent but apparently happy. Jan had slipped off after dinner to put Daniel to bed, but she joined us after a short while. Daniel was totally exhausted.

“Though I did have trouble at first,” she said. “He kept saying he didn't want to be up there with that black woman. ‘She's like a great big black SLUG,' he kept shouting. God—I hope the walls aren't thin! In the end he quietened down when I promised to lock him in.”

“He's hit the nail on the head, though,” said Mary Sweeny. “That's just about what she is.”

“It's just incredible she's here,” said Patti Drewe. “I've never seen her before, never once, not at any conference or get-together or launching-party or anything. Rumours I
had
heard. In person, no.”

“Do you have a lot of these jamborees in the States?” I asked, in fascinated horror.

“We tend to split up, have smaller conventions. You know: the Historical, the Gothic, the straight Romance, and so on. Lorelei writes in pretty much all the categories, but never once has she come. As I say, there have been whispers about her. Now I know they're all true.”

“Is she well-known?” I asked.

“Is she ever! One of our top earners, let me tell you. She may not be quite our Barbara Cartland, but she's certainly as big with us as Amanda Fairchild is with you.”

“Such contrasting types!” said Cristobel, plucking up courage. “Amanda being so outgoing.”

I realized with a sick feeling in my stomach that Cristobel actually liked Amanda. I'd known she had lousy judgment about people since I'd learned who the father of her child was.

“Quite,” said Patti Drewe crisply. “I suppose you could say they're the two ends of the spectrum. Does a spectrum have ends?”

“And what,” I inquired politely, “do you write?”

“Gothics,” said Patti. “With the occasional historical thrown in.”

“Whither the Gothic?” I murmured.

“Oh God—don't mention that session. I've been roped in to be on that goddam panel. Hey,” she said, turning to Mary Sweeny, “you write Gothics, don't you?”

“Now and then. And if you're going to ask me ‘Whither the Gothic?' you can save your breath. Backwards, I imagine. It's been going backwards since Mrs. Radcliffe. I've no ideas on my trade. I'm on the committee for this damned beanfeast, and I just recruited the panels. The only perk you get for all the work is that you can keep yourself off things like that.”

“I hope you recruited Lorelei Zuckerman for one.”

“I wrote. When I knew she was coming I really tried.
I asked her to be on ‘Romance and the Changing Morality.' I got back a postcard with ‘No. L.Z.' on it.”

“She has
charm,”
said Jan. “It oozes out of every pore. Oh, look, there's the poor little companion person.”

I looked with curiosity at the companion. For once Jan seemed to have got it wrong. She was a young girl, perhaps twenty-five or so, and pretty in an unflamboyant way. She was quiet, muted, perhaps even repressed, but she didn't look downtrodden—and certainly not “poor little.”

“Her name is Felicity Maxwell,” whispered Patti Drewe. “Nice, I
think . . .”

If I was looking at her with curiosity, so were the rest of the bar. I'm afraid that my congratulations to Amanda had been followed by others, and she had reverted to her usual rather overbearing form. As Felicity Maxwell stood by the bar, ordering a glass of wine from the boy-of-all-work, Amanda swivelled round in her chair and said with serpentine sweetness:

“Have you put the poor old thing to bed?”

Felicity Maxwell let a second elapse.

“Mrs. Zuckerman is very tired. She is not used to travelling.” She turned round to make her remarks more general. “I'm sorry if she cast a bit of a blight tonight. She's not real companionable.”

“More mildly it could not be put,” muttered Amanda, so as to be heard.

“But please don't ask me to gang up on her. I owe her a lot.”

And Felicity Maxwell, who must have had a penchant for hard nuts, went to sit beside the Finn.

“I'd have to owe her half the National Debt before I'd consent to be nurse-companion to Lorelei Zuckerman,” whispered Jan. “She must be afraid that anything she says will get back.”

And I supposed that must be it. Anyway, with that
subject taboo, and us feeling ever so slightly reproved, everyone got down to talking about the conference, money, the excursions, money, current trends in the market, money and so on. I sat back and surveyed my companions for the coming week. Our table you know, and we were far and away the jolliest of the lot. Patti Drewe and Mary Sweeny turned out to be a tremendous downbeat partnership, Patti with her stories of horrendous promotional tours through the deadlands of the Midwest, Mary with her accounts of the moral, social and behavioural guidelines laid down for regular Bills and Coo authors. We all had a pretty good time. Next to us at a table to themselves (because no one else would sit with him) were Felicity Maxwell and the Finn. I'd had a nasty experience with a Finn on a previous occasion, and it clearly was not destined to be a one-offer. This one was sodden, and was telling Felicity at great length the story of his wife's infidelities, which—as far as one could penetrate the linguistic undergrowth—had ended with her running away with a piper. This, initially so romantic-seeming, became less so after Felicity by patient questioning managed to establish that he meant a plumber.

“He's
always
like this,” said Patti Drewe. “He's been at the last three conferences, and he's always full to the eyebrows. Apparently drink is a twenty-four-hour occupation with him.”

“But how on earth can he write?” asked Cristobel.

“If Scott Fitzgerald could write
The Great Gatsby
while half sloshed, I'm sure this one could write his sort of garbage while pissed out of his mind,” I said reasonably. Cristobel looked hurt, but whether at my language or my estimate of romantic fiction I could not decide.

“You wouldn't mind,” said Mary Sweeny, “if his wife had
just
left him, and he was in a state of shock. Actually,
he talks about the same thing at
every
conference, and last time I established that she'd actually left him in 1970. It does rather dry up the well-springs of human sympathy.”

At the next table, Arthur Biggs was holding court. That was rather what it looked like anyway. He had his wife with him, and the voluptuous American novelist (“Straight,” said Patti Drewe, referring apparently to her novels rather than her sexual preferences). Biggs was—not pontificating exactly, but talking in a pretty uninterrupted flow. The two ladies were hanging on his every word, laughing obediently at his every joke, nodding periodically, or saying “Right.” Even his wife was. I thought it rather unnatural.

“He likes worship,” said Mary Sweeny. “Or respectful admiration, at any rate. He's written a history of the romantic novel, from
Pamela
to the present day. It's called
Happy Tears.”

“Golly!” said Cristobel, “Think of the reading involved. It must have been terrible.”

I could go along with that.

And at the other table Amanda Fairchild had cornered a white Kenyan. She had made some play at dinner for the Finn, as I say, but had made no progress through his sodden self-absorption. Felicity Maxwell was much more successful with him because she was used to listening, which Amanda certainly was not. The Kenyan had arrived just before dinner: a rather large type with the air of a rugby player and a broken nose. He was coping with Amanda very capably, as if he knew the type well and had the necessary humorous tolerance to deal with it. And coming from where he did, he probably knew it very well indeed. I had read a bit about the Kenyan settler families.

“I do so admire
men
who can write for the romantic
market,” Amanda was cooing (quite insincerely, I suspected, for I was sure she preferred men who wrote tough fist-in-the-groin adventure stories, though these usually turn out to be small and weedy men who have regular dates with their psychiatrists). “I admire you for making the leap of sympathy involved. Such a leap it must be—for a
manly
man like yourself!”

The Kenyan shrugged.

“It's a market, like any other.”

“Oh, but hardly—”

“When the things I was doing in Kenya dried up and I thought of trying writing, I looked at the market to see what sold. Romance seemed to be world wide. Certainly in Africa it's romance all the way: everyone reads them, whites and blacks. They're always about whites, but the blacks read them just the same.”

“Really?” said Amanda, with a frown of concentration on her face. I fancied she was wondering whether she could dare to make one of her next romances multiracial, and probably rejecting the idea.

“So I studied the form. Matter of fact, what I did was read Lorelei Zuckerman.”

“Did
you?” said Amanda, with more than a touch of frost in her voice.

“She may look like the Black Death, but as far as knowing the market and supplying it are concerned, she's the cat's whiskers. Have you read
Love Song at Eventide
? Bang on target in the ‘straight' market. Or
Dark Peril
? Bang on target in the Gothic market. She's a one-woman market-survey, in fact.”

“You feel that, do you?” said Amanda, very distantly.

“Then there's
The Belle from Baltimore.
Margaret Mitchell and water, of course, but it shows she really knows her onions in the historical field too.”

“Yes. I read that. Very competent.”

“I tell you, I learnt everything I know from her. She's—”

“Well,” said Amanda briskly, getting up in a shower of green and little royal waves, “bed, I think. I don't know about you, everyone, but I have
masses
of things to do tomorrow.
Oceans
of people to see.
And
a signing session. This conference is really going to be
such
a whirl! So it's beddy-byes for me.
Good
night, darlings!”

The words were warm, but the exit was chilly. We all looked at each other.

“Did I say something wrong?” asked the Kenyan.

Most of us by now had subsided into cautious giggles.

“I suspect we have seen the beginnings of a great rivalry,” said Arthur Biggs.

“The contest for Queen of the May has opened,” said Mary Sweeny. “Or perhaps it should be Cherry Blossom Princess.”

“Amanda,” said Patti Drewe, “is choosing her weapons.”

T
HE OPENING SESSION OF THE CONGRESS
was held next morning in the Scandilux Hotel. The hotel itself was pretty much the type of place its name suggested, but it was situated near the harbour and the Hanseatic houses of Bergen, so if you could get near a window it was tolerable. The walk there had been fine too. We had dawdled along from the bus station, through the centre with its cherry and apple blossom (with no Amanda to grab credit for them), then through the fish and flower market in the morning sunlight. On this occasion the luxurious blooms had to contend with the powder blues, the blossom pinks, the springtime greens of the outfits of the various conference-goers (not to mention their feathery or ferny hats), as they swanned their way through,
cooing their enthusiasm. Jan and Daniel were to take the train later in the day to Oppheim, so I said goodbye to them in the market (Daniel being very offhand, for he was rapt over a fish in a tank of water that before long—though we didn't tell him this—would be knocked on the head when a buyer came along). Then, with sinking heart, I accompanied Cristobel to the concrete and glass splendours of the Scandilux, and through to its mauve-hessian and brass interior.