Mrs Midnight and Other Stories (20 page)

As I came up the drive towards Stanhill Manor I saw a girl standing on the front steps. She waved. It was Gloria. She wore a simple summer dress and her feet were in flip flops. I thought she looked more beautiful than ever.

‘Hi!’ She said. ‘Charlie told me you were coming.’

Her voice had changed. It had become less nasal and she had started to lose her South London vowels. Replacing them were the beginnings of an upper class drawl, not unlike Charles’s. I found that vaguely troubling, but I kissed her on the cheek as if she were an old friend. She neither accepted the kiss warmly, nor drew away from it. Her cheek was cold and smooth as silk.

She led me into the entrance hall, an airy space with stone flags, lit by a great south-facing oriel window which went from floor to ceiling. In the bay formed by the oriel was a great circular table on a central pedestal in the form of a Corinthian column, a ‘rent table’, Charles had informed me on my previous visit, to which tenants came to pay their dues and in drawers of which the moneys were deposited. Its leather and mahogany surface was completely covered with photographs of Gloria, many of them outstandingly beautiful. Charles had been busy. I noticed, though, that few of them showed her smiling.

Gloria called: ‘Charlie!’

He came eventually and greeted me warmly. I showed them the finished drawing in its frame. Both Gloria and Charles were so enthusiastic that very soon I found that I had agreed to do a matching drawing of Gloria that weekend. I suppose I did not need much persuading, but I felt daunted. The problem I knew was to make her look properly alive and not like the marble statue of a goddess. Even while she was showing enthusiasm for my work I was conscious of a certain restraint, as if she were doing what was expected of her rather than what she felt.

It was a fine summer evening and we ate and drank outside on a western facing terrace, the sun honeying the Cotswold stone façade behinds us, and turning the mullioned panes to plates of burnished gold. Charles monopolised the conversation. He was full of a project to bring one of the water features in his park back to life. There was a large stone basin in which stood a bronze statue of Neptune taming a giant seahorse. The seahorse was meant to spout water, but had not done so for many years. This, he told us, was going to be rectified, but he was somewhat vague about the means by which it was to be achieved. Eventually Gloria began to ask the question that was on my lips.

‘But how—?’ She got no further than that.

‘ “Heoaw”?’ said Charles. ‘What’s this “Heoaw?” Bloody Ada, how many times have I told you? We don’t want to hear those vowels here. The very stones of this ancient seat protest. Come along, Gloria Munday: how now brown cow? Come along, say it: “How now brown cow?” ’

This was obviously a discipline to which he had subjected her before. Reluctantly she repeated the words, but he was not satisfied, and he made her say them again and again until I could stand it no longer.

‘For Christ’s sake, Charles! That’s enough!’

Charles turned to me and said: ‘Fuck off, Robert,’ not with venom, but firmly and with intent, then he went back to his victim. ‘Oh, Gloria. Would you be a sweetie and do something for me? I left my tripod up at the folly. Go and fetch it for me, would you?’

‘Which folly?’

‘You know perfectly well which folly. The tempietto on the hill.’

‘Oh, do I have to?’

‘Yes, you do have to, my darling. Sit down, Robert. This is something I want Gloria to do.’

Gloria rose slowly from her seat and then began to run—a rather pathetic ungainly run—towards the folly. Charles watched her with detached curiosity.

‘Athletics obviously not a priority at her place of education,’ he said. ‘You liked my pictures of her.’ I nodded. ‘I think they’re pretty brilliant too, but there’s something missing. I’ve got a feeling I could do more with her.’

‘Hence the Pygmalion business?’

‘What the hell are you on about, Robert? Talk English.’

I had forgotten that Charles’s education, though expensive, had been truncated. At that moment Gloria returned with the tripod, still at a run and gasping for breath. Her face was white, her eyes wild with terror. I could see what Charles meant about fear giving a kind of life to her face that it did not otherwise have. When I came to draw her the following morning I tried to give her eyes the same expression. I think I succeeded.

III

A few months later I had my first major exhibition at the Talbot Gallery in Cork Street. For it I had borrowed my drawings of Charles and Gloria, and several others, but the major source of attraction was some oils I had done in Morocco: street scenes and the like. They sold well. One in particular attracted attention. It was a group of female heads. They were strikingly beautiful and unusual because all Moroccan women, of course, go about covered and are not easy to acquire as models. The truth was, I had paid a number of prostitutes to pose for me in their leisure hours, a fact I kept concealed from the general public and even my wife. The picture was bought by an American dealer who said to me: ‘You know, you ought to paint Mahalia Doone.’

Mahalia Doone was then at the zenith of her beauty and her career as a singer. Her extraordinary height, her superb figure, that incredible bone structure, the wonderful bronze sheen of her skin made her someone every self-respecting portrait artist longed to paint. At the time I thought that the dealer was simply tantalising me for purposes of his own, but it turned out that he was being serious. Only a fortnight after the exhibition the dealer rang up from New York to say that he had sold Mahalia the Moroccan heads and that she was very interested in meeting me. ‘She’s coming to London in a few weeks’ time for a concert tour, and she wants you to paint her.’

Not long after that two tickets for her concert at the Hammersmith Hippodrome arrived with a note from the dealer to the effect that I was expected to go round to see her after the show. My wife Jenny, who had an unconquerable aversion to the talents of Mahalia Doone, elected to stay at home, so I invited Charles to come with me.

Charles and I had met several times in London since the weekend when I had drawn Gloria and I felt, quite unnecessarily Jenny told me, an obligation towards him. Not only had he loaned me the two drawings for the exhibition—and, incidentally, had paid me £200 for the Gloria portrait—but he had more than once lavishly entertained me at his club, Whites.

Lord Charles in town was a different being to Lord Charles in the country; he was a kind of mirror image of Jack Worthing in
The Importance of Being Earnes
t. (When I pointed this out to him, he failed to appreciate the allusion.) In London, he wore suits, occasionally had his hair cut at Trumper’s and often sported his old school tie to which, strictly speaking, having been chucked out, he was not entitled. He stayed at his club, went to drinks parties and flirted with the kind of girls who were still being referred to as ‘debs’. I knew of at least two upper middle class mothers who had high hopes for Lord Charles and their daughters.

The performance he put on in London was no more and no less of an act than his more bohemian pose at Stanhill. Like most people who are, deep down, rather conventional, he played parts because he had not yet discovered his real self. That, at any rate, was my view at the time.

He seemed delighted to come with me to see Mahalia Doone, and, I have to admit, I thought it would do me no harm to show off the son of a Duke to Mahalia. The average American is far more susceptible to a title than an Englishman who has a better idea of how these things have been come by. But then, Mahalia Doone was not your average American.

While we were having a drink before the show I asked Charles about Gloria. He was rather offhand. She had gone back to her parents in High Wycombe, apparently, but, he added, ‘I haven’t finished with her yet.’

The performance was remarkable. Mahalia had an artistry which transcended the big band glitz of the production. There was a certain amount of modern pop, but she sang the Gershwin and Cole Porter standards with a silky perfection that rivalled Ella Fitzgerald at her best. I remember in particular a rendering of Coward’s ‘Mad About the Boy’ which was so full of the humiliation of sexual yearning that it made me shiver. It was a relief, though, to find that one could go back stage and be sincerely admiring.

After we had negotiated our way past several rather menacing minders, we reached the inner sanctuary of Mahalia’s dressing room which was ablaze with light bulbs and cellophaned flowers. At the door stood the final obstacle before access to the star was achieved, a balding, thickly spectacled young man in a dinner jacket who bore a faint resemblance to Groucho Marx. He proved to be quite affable, especially when I introduced Charles. He said his name was Artie Katzenberg and that he was Mahalia Doone’s ‘manager’.

My memory of Mahalia off stage left behind an even stronger impression than it did of her on it, sheathed in closely fitting purple satin and clutching the silvery phallus of a microphone. In her dressing room before a mirror framed by light bulbs, she was a monarch holding court. Her hair was swathed in a turban and she wore a floor-length dressing gown whose pattern was a confusion of coloured sigils and symbols. While she sipped champagne from a cut glass goblet she was idly laying out an array of cards face downwards on her dressing table. I recognised the formation she was making with the cards; it was the ‘Celtic Cross’, so I concluded that she was using a Tarot pack. There was something too about her costume and manner which suggested the shaman. We were introduced.

‘So,’ she said in her low, caressing voice. ‘You are the young genius who painted my Moroccan Heads. What is your astrological sign?’

I told her and she nodded sagely.

‘That figures. Remember, always to trust your instincts. Do not listen to false friends.’

I said that I would take her excellent advice.

‘You will paint a great picture of me,’ she said. ‘It will be your masterpiece. Talk to Artie here about arranging a sitting.’ That seemed to be the end of my audience with Mahalia because she then turned her attention to Charles.

‘Mahalia,’ said Artie Katzenberg, ‘allow me to present Robert’s friend, Lord Charles Purefoy.’

Charles stepped forward and allowed Mahalia to take his right hand in both of hers while she stared deep into his eyes.

‘So. You’re Lord Charles. That means you’re the younger son of an Earl, a Marquess or a Dook, am I right?’

‘A Duke, as it happens.’

‘A Dook. So! Just like Lord Peter Wimsey, huh? I just love that Lord Peter Wimsey stuff. See, I know a thing or two about aristocrats, being one myself. I’ve got royal blood. My ancestors were Kings and Queens of Dahomey.’

‘Was that before or after they had been slaves?’ said Charles.

Something about the insolence with which Charles asked the question stunned even Mahalia. Artie Katzenberg, fidgeted, obviously desperate to find a way out of the situation. At last he said: ‘Well, we’re all
your
slaves now, Mahalia, are we not?’

‘You bet your ass,’ said Mahalia.

Then more celebrities came in and we were relegated to a corner of Mahalia’s dressing room where we were plied with champagne. Artie Katzenberg and Charles struck up a conversation: their rapport, as I remember, was instantaneous.

In fact that evening was chiefly notable for being the occasion of the first meeting of Artie Katzenberg and Lord Charles Purefoy. It was the beginning of what I can only describe as an intense love affair. I do not mean this in a sexual sense because, though Artie may well have been gay, Charles most certainly was not. It was the kind of mutual fascination which occasionally springs up between two supreme egoists. They saw in each other the same yearnings for artistic fame and success and the possibility of its fulfilment in their collaboration.

Nothing came of my Mahalia portrait commission, partly, I suspect, because very soon after our meeting Artie ceased to be Mahalia’s manager. Whether he quit or was sacked I never knew, but I always suspected that the title of ‘manager’ had been something of a misnomer. Anyone less in need of a manager than Mahalia I could not imagine.

About a month after the concert I met Charles and Artie at a private view in Cork Street. I had heard rumours that they were working together on an artistic project. When something new and innovative is happening in the art world, there is always a preliminary rumble and I thought I had detected this about Charles and Artie. They greeted me cordially; Artie was particularly effusive.

‘Say, you just must come down to Stanhill and see what we’ve been doing. It’s pretty neat. We’ve got a real collective down there.’

A few days later I drove down to Stanhill to see for myself. The Hall had been turned into a British rural equivalent of Warhol’s famous ‘Factory’. Artie and Charles presided over about half a dozen assistants who were making silk-screen prints, sculpting clay maquettes, constructing collages and painting elaborately realistic pictures in oils and acrylics based on Charles’s photographs.

‘What do you think?’ said Artie. After I had made the appropriate gestures of admiration, he said, ‘We are a true art collective with an identity all of its own. We have a brand name as I like to call it—though Charles just hates me doing so—we call ourselves Lord Art. What do you think?’

‘Very suitable.’

‘Isn’t it just brilliant? I thought of that. We sink our identities and egos into the collective of Lord Art and come out with a super-ego and a super-identity, as I like to call it. Of course, as you can see, there is a third main partner in this collective.’

I could see. Almost every image that I had seen was of Gloria Munday in one form or another. It was not only her face but her hands, her feet, her naked torso that had been copied and represented in a hundred different ways.

‘We say that she is not so much the artist as the work of art itself,’ said Artie. ‘We are annihilating these phoney distinctions.’

I noticed a set of silk screen prints which deliberately aped the Warhol Marilyn series, except that it used Gloria’s head instead of Monroe’s.