The Tropical Issue (2 page)

It looked like a clip from Hammer Films. It had given their day a real buzz. I hoped they were grateful, but I didn’t stay to make sure. I just got to the lift before they did.

I wasn’t sorry. They were wrong, and I’d warned them. If they complained, Ferdy would fix them. And if he didn’t, I could take care of myself.

I pressed the button for flat 17b and, while the lift rose, I checked out my hair and my lashes and my earrings.

The mirrors didn’t crack or anything.

Just before the lift stopped, I took out my lipstick and wrote
BLOOD
on the glass, just to needle the Hit Squad when they found it.

Or, if you want the truth, I wrote
BLUD
. You can’t take a dictionary everywhere.

The door to flat 17b was opened by a pretty woman in a white service coat and fading make-up over an anxious expression.

She changed it to a nice smile, and asked me in, as if she saw me every day. ‘Mr Braithwaite won’t be a moment. I’m just making you both some fresh coffee.’

She glanced at my case as I walked through, but didn’t mention it. She said, ‘I’m Mr Johnson’s housekeeper. Would you like to take anything off?’

For Ferdy, I’d put on a grey knitted shawl over a grey quilted jacket over a grey Fair Isle Navajo waistcoat over a woollen shirt and gauchos and legwarmers. And gloves.

I was hot.

I took off the shawl and the gloves and the jacket in a double bedroom which was full of new furniture like a hotel room. I checked out the bathroom, and put my case in it. Then the woman took me to the studio.

The apartment was big. The tiled hall was covered with rugs from one or other of the four carpet shops, and had tasteful pillars with sculpture on them. There were more boxes of contract plants. There were gilt wall lights with glass earrings everywhere.

There was also a wheelchair, for God’s sake, outside one of the bedrooms. And from inside, the rattle of clinical snoring.

The owner of the flat was still in it.

I hadn’t been warned. Good old Ferdy.

Ahead, the owner’s housekeeper was opening the door of the studio. A lot of daylight came out. I went in. The studio itself seemed to be empty. Mr Braithwaite was still just coming.

I thought of the complaints coming up from below, and made my number with the housekeeper, quickly.

‘I hope,’ I said, ‘that Mr Johnson is keeping better? It must have been a terrible crash.’

She stood in the doorway, her hands clasped together. ‘He’s very much improved, thank you,’ she said. ‘It will be a long business, of course. But he’s making great strides now, considering.’

She said it as if she had had to tack it on the gates for a week, and five doctors had signed it. Then a phone rang in three different rooms and she excused herself. A moment later I heard her reeling off the same answer.

Between then and the time she brought coffee, in bone china with bluebirds on it, I counted two more calls and a ring at the doorbell. Whatever he paid her, Johnson’s housekeeper was earning her salary.

I also had a good look at the studio.

The crippled pal Johnson was rich. The walls were all done in watered silk wallpaper, and there were fancy tables with marble tops and flower arrangements; and silk lampshades everywhere held up by Chinese ladies selling kippers.

There were a lot of expensive mirrors, a sort of enamelled screen, and a grand piano. The piano was groaning with shiny boxes of tantalised fruit, a stack of new hardcover novels and eight flowering plants, two of them still in their tissue.

In the middle of the polished floor, the rugs had been rolled back to make way for Ferdy’s lighting gear, with coils of cable lying everywhere; and the easy chairs and the sofas had all been pushed to the walls except for a fat two-seater meant, I could see, for the client.

The north wall and half the ceiling were made out of glass, providing cut-price light for artists and cameramen. There was no sign of any painting equipment.

A balcony ran along half the back of the apartment, and the view was great. You could see Midas and Selfridge’s and the queue outside the American Embassy, and people blowing whistles all round Claridge’s.

I wondered what Ferdy was paying Johnson for the use of his studio, and hoped it was less than Mrs Natalie Sheridan was paying Ferdy for photographing her. I was spooning the last of the sugar into my third coffee when a door opened somewhere, and I heard footsteps and a voice, and there on the studio threshold was Ferdy, with his arms stretched out sideways like Jesus.

‘Rita! My gorgeous Toucan!’ he bellowed.

I just managed to put the bluebirds down and get up, before I was lifted out of my legwarmers, and crushed against all the silk neck-scarf and cashmere.

Ferdy’s tongue in your mouth was a bit like a doormat dipped time about in brandy and nicotine. Ferdy was great for kissing.

He’d had enough practice. If you believed all you heard, Europe’s leading magazine and society photographer was by now into his third round of crumpet.

Ferdy was the original population explosion. Working with him was great, because he had all this energy left over from the Army. He was big, with suntan all over his head, and a fuzz of sideburns in a sort of speckled fawn.

He looked like a goalie. He would, I knew from experience, take no for an answer, after a struggle.

Now, he put me down just as the housekeeper came in, smiling, with a fresh cup and saucer. In exchange, he gave her the sugar bowl, which she went off to refill. He stood, looking at me over the bluebirds.

‘Rita, my sweet sucrose junkie. A great big bikini and little black teeth, darling. It isn’t worth it. Let me look at you. There’s something different.’

He walked all round me, still hugging the teacup.

‘Not the hair: still that boring old magenta and blue. And the Dracula eye shadow. And the Biro finger-rings. But where are the stripes, darling? The tattoos? The gold balls in the nose?’

‘I slept in,’ I said. I knew he would notice when I left off the face painting.

‘And
the clothes,’ he went on. He twirled a chair and sat down, while I filled his cup for him.

‘All that lovely warm wool, just like Johnson. You should see Johnson’s cardies – straight out of the
Personality Knitting Quarterly,
and the same page, too, I shouldn’t wonder. You could swap your back numbers.’

The Navajo waistcoat was a Lauren. The rest of the gear cost just under eight hundred pounds in South Molton Street, which he knew and I knew he knew.

I said, ‘What about Johnson, then? He’s here, and you didn’t mention it?’

The sugar came back and I poured myself more coffee and added three spoonfuls before Ferdy drew the bowl slowly away.

He said, ‘I told you, my small plain and pearl, my tuppence coloured. My studio’s being rewired, and Johnson’s lent us this one to photograph the great Mrs Natalie Sheridan, who arrives at any moment. Ask me, What about Natalie, then?’

‘You told me,’ I said. ‘She likes you to do her publicity stills. She flies in this morning, gets made up for the photographs, goes off to the Award Lunch and then flies back to wherever she came from, or maybe somewhere else. And I’ve told you before. I don’t like creating one make-up for two different scenes.’

A row of capped teeth appeared between Ferdy’s sideburns.

He gave a howl. ‘You’re spooked!’ he said. ‘You’re nervous of Natalie! You’re an ignorant dwarf with a stupid conk and hockey legs and pink hair, who’s frightened of Natalie Sheridan! I apologise for taking the bowl away. Have some more energising, comforting sugar.’

It was true that I have a stupid conk and hockey legs and pink hair. It was even true that I was unstriped because of this engagement. It was not true that I was nervous.

Who is Natalie Sheridan? A syndicated political journalist. A divorcee. An economist. A maker of sharp documentaries with powerful pals in five continents. A rich woman. A woman.

Nothing there, as I see it, to worry Rita Geddes.

‘Are you joking?’ I said. ‘She asked for me; I didn’t ask for her. If she isn’t nice to me, I’ll do her up like Elephant Man, and then where will your bleeding photographs be?’

Ferdy and I stared at one another, a thing he sometimes does, until one of us blinks. It tells you not to take his insults for real. Sometimes it goes on for so long you need eye drops.

The housekeeper broke it by coming to tell us that Mrs Sheridan’s maid had arrived, and her secretary, and a fitter with the clothes she was going to wear, and that they were all waiting, installed in the guest suite.

And that Mr Braithwaite’s assistant had sent to say he couldn’t manage.

The housekeeper, in a quiet way, looked a bit worn. I guessed that the appointment had been for Mrs Sheridan, dressed, not for Mrs Sheridan undressed with her groupies.

Ferdy wasn’t upset. He said, ‘Poor dear Johnson,’ sadly to me, and turning, walked out the studio door, pouring charm all over the housekeeper.

I didn’t mean to be charming to Ferdy. As soon as he came back, I put in my tuppenceworth, coloured or not.

‘I won’t,’ I said.

I’ve doubled as Ferdy’s assistant before, and the insults get to be real. Ferdy’s assistants are always away at the dentist’s, or the police station.

The doorbell rang.

‘You will,’ said Ferdy. ‘There’s Natalie.’

There are times when I get fed up, living among giants. Everyone knows what Natalie Sheridan looks like: five foot ten, waving (natural) blonde hair, hollow cheeks and a 36–26–36 figure with no silicone in it, below the neck anyway.

Today she was wearing Halston, and had just had her hair put up in a blonde chignon plait round the corner, as we had cause to know, because her usual hairdressing lady had had a call to Kensington Palace and couldn’t fit in a personal visit.

She was also wearing a diamond brooch, a fancy ring, and a scent specially brewed for her.

She gave Ferdy a prim kiss on each cheek while she drew her gloves off; shook hands with me without a flicker of shock; and observed that it had been very good of me to come up specially from Scotland, and she hoped I had had a good journey. Which was more than Ferdy’s silicone had thought to produce.

Then she turned away, saying, ‘Well: there isn’t much time, is there? Miss Geddes and I will be as quick as we can,’ and walked out towards the guest bedroom.

I waited until she was out of earshot.

I said, ‘Ferdy! You’re scared of her! You’re a famous photographer with a house in Barbados and a prostate problem and two accountants under the doctor, and you’re scared of that plastic think-tank!’

At that moment the plastic think-tank came back to the doorway and said, ‘Are you coming, my dear?’ Musically.

I found my legwarmers beginning to move towards her quite fast, and I let them.

A lady used to high command, was Natalie Sheridan.

The bathroom had a good chair and make-up lights round the mirror. I took off a couple of things and put on my overall, and then began to lay out my stuff on the vanitory, with the door open a bit so that I could see when my client was ready.

The maid, a hefty American pensioner referred to as Dodo, was in the bedroom stripping Mrs Sheridan down to the waist like a paint job.

The lady from the designer’s, who was used to it, sat bolt upright in a corner doing a visual check of Mrs Sheridan’s latest known measurements.

Murmuring into the telephone was a smart young secretary-man from an agency, perched on one of the beds among all the laid-out clothes and tissue paper. My shawl and quilted jacket, I noticed, had been shoved in a heap on a pillow.

As well as smart, the secretary was red in the neck due to an eyeful of Mrs Sheridan’s two suntanned boobs, plump as onions and alert, each of them, as a breeding budgie.

She was in the middle of dictating cablegrams, which the secretary did his best to receive through the back of his head until she draped a towel round her shoulders.

After that he watched her nervously. There were still six inches of tanned skin to be seen between her skirtband and the edge of the towel, which was white, Turkish and monogrammed JJ in one corner.

Still talking, she lifted and looked at the corner, revealing a budgie.

The man from the agency jack-knifed quickly over the phone. Natalie said, ‘Miss Geddes – may I call you Rita? Perhaps, before we begin, I should just go and see Mr Johnson. Across the hall, I suppose?’

I stood in the bathroom doorway, a tube in my hand. Having invaded pal Johnson’s flat, she was about to walk into his sickroom. I said, ‘Mr Johnson’s asleep.’

‘Oh, you know his room then,’ said Mrs Sheridan. ‘This way?’

She was already out in the hall, and would soon hear the musical effects, so I didn’t stop her. It did cross my mind that Ferdy would never get the use of this studio ever again. I was annoyed that time was going, and I couldn’t get started. I wanted to make a good job of Natalie Sheridan.

In fact, she was back in a trice, with the towel neatly tucked in her waistband. One minute I smelt her scent, and the next she was there at my elbow.

‘Well, we really must get on, mustn’t we?’

We must. It meant she hadn’t seen Johnson. And as the sort of drumroll went on from the bedroom, that either the housekeeper or Ferdy had stopped her.

And my money, I can tell you, was on the housekeeper.

It had been a struggle. But here at last was the great Mrs Sheridan, sitting in front of the mirror and saying, ‘All right. Now Rita, just do what you can.’ And we were off.

When I am working with make-up, I’m happy.

Cosmetics are only paint, and paint is only a way of creating an illusion. You can learn all that stuff at art college. I did. Beauty colleges teach it too, and there are company courses of all sorts.

But it’s not like painting a jug. In private practice, you have to sort out for yourself what your customer really wants, and get as near to it as you’re able.

With Natalie Sheridan, I had an easy job and a hard one.

Her face was good, for pushing forty. She had had her face lifted once, so the chin was firm. Her skin was clear, with a light year-round tan that showed off all that blonde hair.