A Sunday Kind of Woman Page 6

  Charlie had known Florence for at least five years, and on more than one occasion had shrunk from an encounter with her. But on that particular day her fearsome voice was as welcome as a nightingale. They had never been great friends; Florence did not approve of Charlie’s choice of profession and she was twenty-five years older than he was. But as the two longest-serving occupants of the house with its ever changing population of country girls, three to a flat and chains of overnight boyfriends, they did have the bond of long leases as common ground. While he had been away on tour, holiday or whatever, they had agreed that she should protect his property, which was why she had now fortuitously called in on him.

  Snuffling away his tears, and feeling mortified that she had caught him in such a state, he attempted an explanation, mentioning something about being mugged. Florence was not listening.

  ‘Oh, sit down, you great blubbering man,’ she insisted, as he followed her into his tiny kitchen, while she put on the kettle. ‘I see, no milk. Helpless! You wait here! I’ll get some.’ And with that she stormed off out of the front door and up the steps to her own rooms, to return a moment later with a jug of milk and some buns.

  ‘I don’t suppose you’ve eaten, have you? Just look at you, standing there like a traffic policeman on strike … what were you doing coming home with your arms crossed like that? They shouldn’t have allowed it.’

  ‘I insisted.’

  ‘Then the more fool you. Helpless! That’s what you are.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Charlie.

  But despite the scolding Charlie knew that Florence was delighted with the new challenge that had come into her life. For the next few days, until his right arm was released from its sling, she would come as close to acting as a mother to him as she had ever done to anyone – which was probably just as well, because she was a tyrant of a woman. Marty Z. Finch and Colin Devonshire came to see him that night. They were his friends. Marty was also his publisher and the nearest thing he possessed to an agent; while Colin was a writer of song lyrics and some-time collaborator. Marty was not a great publisher. He had probably been born thirty years too late for that since he had moved with extreme caution and scepticism into the world of record production in the mid-sixties, still longing for the simpler days of sheet music sales. But he was a good friend and a nice guy, which, in Charlie’s opinion, was worth more than a ton load of wheeler dealers.

  The three men had known each other for several years following a very wet and windy weekend on the Isle of Wight in 1969 when Bob Dylan had worn a white suit and come out of temporary retirement to promote a pilgrimage to that particularly inaccessible part of Southern England. Colin and Charlie had met first when they found themselves sleeping cheek to jowl in the mud of a record company’s marquee waiting for the minstrel to appear. And at four in the morning, following a ten mile trek back to Ryde for the ferry, they had both been suitably impressed when they were spotted by the dark little man known in the business as Marty the Zee and offered a free passage back to the mainland in his chartered boat. Since there had been a queue of approximately two hundred thousand people already waiting at the quayside in Ryde Marty’s offer had not gone unappreciated.

  As it turned out such grandiose gestures were not to be repeated since shortly afterwards some particularly impatient creditors had forced Marty into bankruptcy, and had thus curtailed for the moment his dream of being Bishopsgate’s answer to Robert Stigwood. But Marty was an honest soul, had repaid his creditors every penny, and struck up a relationship with Charlie and Colin which was to keep them in amusement, if not luxury, during the following ten years.

  Florence had finally left Charlie at seven. She had made him something to eat, carried his cases into his bedroom, and them bustled off to terrorize the illiterate, while Charlie had sat down in the company of stereophonic Puccini and promptly fallen asleep.

  The smell of whisky and the draught caused by a bunch of roses being waved in front of his face awoke him with a start at about ten to nine. Florence had left the door on the latch and Marty and Colin had let themselves in. The record player had turned itself off.

  ‘Jesus Christ,’ Marty was talking first. ‘The arms and the man.’

  Charlie smiled up at him with his broken, aching teeth. The effect must have been less welcoming than he had imagined.

  ‘For God’s sake … keep your mouth closed. You look like a dead crocodile.’

  ‘Hello, Colin.’ Charlie turned to the second of the two men.

  Colin Devonshire looked blankly at Charlie’s wounds. At last he spoke: ‘Apart from the arms and the face and the mouth, how are you feeling in yourself, old man?’ he asked with mock solicitude, while Marty laughed and unscrewed the top off a bottle of Bell’s whisky.

  ‘He’ll not be feeling himself – or anybody else for quite a while, will you, Charlie?’ leered Marty.

  Charlie smiled. Marty was kind, but he was coarse. He was fifty and wore a Hepworth off-the-peg suit of navy blue which collected a dusting of dandruff around his shoulders whenever he combed his sparse black hair. He had married early in life, had two good sons who became accountants, and a much younger daughter who had become a problem. But the real story of Marty’s life was the past twenty years, two decades of regretting the sexual opportunities he was sure he had missed by being born too early to take part in the permissive society.

  Colin was single and had missed no opportunities in that direction. Indeed had he devoted as much time to making a living as he did to womanizing and thinking about womanizing, then he might have made much more of himself. But then, as he had said a thousand times, he would rather blow crumpet than a trumpet.

  ‘We got your telegram, Charlie,’ said Marty. ‘Where do you keep your glasses?’

  ‘There are two glasses and one cup in the kitchen,’ said Charlie. Colin went off to fetch them, while Marty opened a large bottle of ginger ale.

  ‘Yes, we got your telegram … but we didn’t expect a stretcher case.’

  ‘I didn’t want to worry you,’ said Charlie. Before he had left Taormina he had instructed the hospital to send a brief line to Marty saying that he had had an accident, and requesting that the Starlight Rooms be informed of his non-availability. He had offered no further details.

  ‘We weren’t worried,’ said Colin deadpan, returning with the glasses. ‘What happened? Fall inside your volcano or something?’

  ‘Something like that,’ said Charlie, tiring of the bad jokes.

  ‘Hello?’ Marty exchanged glances with Colin.

  ‘You got a little secret then?’ asked Colin.

  Charlie looked at the drink that Marty was pouring out for him. He had filled a tumbler two-thirds full of Scotch.

  ‘Can you hold this?’ asked Marty.

  ‘Just about. Put it on the arm of the chair.’ said Charlie.

  Marty did as he was asked. Then there was a silence. Both men were waiting to hear the adventures of Charlie’s holiday. Marty leaned forward expectantly, thin and slight, his imitation blue silk tie loose at the collar, his hands as hairy as a monkey. Colin sat back, his clothes both elegant and careless at the same time, a bright green scarf tucked into a beige safari jacket, while hornrimmed glasses framed round blue eyes which, he liked to think, made him look like Michael Caine.

  ‘A bit of all right, was it?’ Marty was prying.

  Charlie didn’t answer.

  Colin tried a marginally more devious route: ‘Was she worth it?’

  ‘What makes you so sure it was a woman? I mean I might have been mugged for my money or political views.’

  Colin shook his head: ‘Impossible. You haven’t got any money … even a mugger could see that, and you wouldn’t know a political view if it was signed by Constable.’

  ‘Constable who?’ asked Marty.

  ‘How do you burn an Irishman’s ear?’ asked Colin.

  ‘Ring him up when he’s doing the ironing … Jesus Christ, that’s older than Moses,’ said Marty.

  Cha
rlie reached very carefully for his drink with his right arm. It hurt, but there were some things he was going to have to do for himself, and drinking Scorch was one of them.

  ‘My God,’ said Colin, as Charlie’s arm lifted painfully upwards. ‘The cripple’s uncrossing.’

  Charlie let the Scotch slurp slowly around his mouth while he lowered his glass again. He knew he could never tell them. If he did Colin would proceed to give him a lecture on how not to get into trouble with married ladies, while Marty would grin and suck at his teeth in appreciation of what he would like to do to such a woman.

  ‘What about the Starlight, Marty?’ Charlie wanted to know.

  ‘You broke their hearts. They’ve replaced you with a girl with long hair, big tits and a guitar who sings Amazing Grace. I told them you’d been hired to write the score for a Hollywood film for Liza Minelli … or was it her mum? One of them, anyway.’

  ‘You know, Marty,’ said Colin after helping hinself to another large Scotch, ‘he isn’t going to tell us.’

  ‘Come on, Charlie – don’t be boring. You can’t just sit there like a clapped-out one-armed bandit with a mouth full of broken shillings without telling us anything.’

  ‘The Italians didn’t like the songs,’ said Charlie.

  ‘Nor do the English, the Welsh, the Scottish … or even the bleeding Americans, but no one ever used you for bazooka practice before.’

  ‘How many of them were there?’ asked Colin.

  ‘Don’t know. Three, I think. One behind, two in front.’

  Colin crossed his legs effeminately. ‘And here’s me always thinking you were the butch protective type, dearie. If you can’t take on three little Italian boys … well, I don’t know …’

  ‘They were English …’ As soon as Charlie had spoken he realized that he’d walked into a trap. He’d told them more than he had intended.

  Immediately Colin guffawed in triumph. Marty poured out another three drinks.

  Charlie smiled inwardly. For all their tough talk they probably were worried about him, and surprised to see him in such bad shape. It was good to have friends like this when things were going badly. It was good to have friends at any time. And very carefully he raised his glass and swallowed a huge mouthful of whisky, feeling it washing over his broken teeth, numbing the nerves which had made eating difficult all week, and then tumbling down into the pit of his stomach. He wondered for a moment whether they would have remained friends had fame and wealth got in the way of their careers. He guessed not.

  It was after twelve when they left. Marty was quite drunk and in no fit state to drive his ageing Rover 2000, while Colin was in no state at all to do what he had planned for the rest of the night. But then she would probably do it all for him, he said. She was that sort of girl.

  And with that the two men staggered up the steps to the road, laughing and swearing, while Charlie, still sober, watched them fondly as they clambered into the car and made a haphazard way off in the direction of Holland Park Avenue.

  It was a warm night and Charlie no longer felt sleepy. He looked around the small front garden of the house. It needed weeding, he thought, but it would have to wait. Then something caught his eye. Lying in a patch of carnations was a piece of paper torn from a magazine which had probably fallen out of a dustbin. Delicately he bent down and stretched out his throbbing arm. It was a picture of a girl in what the photographer evidently imagined to be an erotic pose – that is with her legs open. He shook his head. It was about as erotic as a diagram from a gynaecological text book and he dispatched it quickly into the bin.

  But later when he could not sleep he found that the image of the girl in the picture, a small Chinese lady, did arouse him. And, although he found the association distasteful, he discovered himself thinking of Kate, and wondering about her in a more blatantly sexual way than had ever occurred to him when he was with her.

  Getting out of bed he tried to drive thoughts of her from his mind with the last of the whisky, but they refused to go. And at two o’clock he found himself staring down at the name and address scrawled on to the plaster casing of his arm: Katherine Sullivan, 15 Phillimore Mansions, Upper Phillimore Gardens.

  Later he did not particularly remember the walk to Upper Phillimore Gardens, or even the difficulty he experienced in getting dressed again. He just remembered thinking about the person he knew as Kate.

  Holland Park Avenue was busier than was usual at two-thirty in the morning. It was the beginning of the tourist season. In the quiet pathway which ran through the trees to the east of Holland Park he passed a couple of French boys, drunk and singing their way back to their Youth Hostel. But, though they called rudely after him when they saw his slings, he ignored them. Instead his mind’s eye was filled with Kate, smiling at him as she had done that afternoon in the amphitheatre, smiling like a merry saint.

  At that time of night Upper Phillimore Gardens was a quiet tree-lined avenue of enormous white stucco houses built on the grand scale by Victorian property developers. All along the road white and pink blossom showered from the gardens on to the parked cars of local residents. Most of the houses had always been of an impractical size and had suffered the indignity of conversion. One had been turned into a high school for children of the local rich, another had now become the Jordanian Embassy and boasted a limp flag and a permanent policeman on duty, and a third, fourth and fifth had been bombed out in the war and replaced by the large block of luxury flats known as Phillimore Mansions.

  Slowly Charlie walked along the pavement facing the flats. It was indeed an expensive address, a place where the double doors would probably open on to a snoozing porter and thick fitted carpets to smother the sounds of the street. There were other, older, more elegant blocks of flats in the neighbourhood, but he doubted if there were any much more expensive, and for the first time it occurred to him that Kate must be rich.

  Outside the Jordanian Embassy he stopped. Phillimore Mansions was about thirty yards away on the opposite side of the road. He didn’t know why, but for some reason he knew that he wanted to be there: to stand and wait and watch from the shadows of the fragrant trees.

  ‘Everything all right?’ The policeman on duty outside the Embassy was staring at him. He knew the police were suspicious of everyone on this street following an assassination attempt a few years ago. Right now this policeman was suspicious of Charlie and his two broken arms.

  ‘Yes. Just taking a walk. Couldn’t sleep,’ said Charlie, without taking his eyes away from the place he knew to be Kate’s home.

  The policeman didn’t answer at first. Then he said: ‘I wouldn’t hang around if I were you. They don’t like it.’

  Charlie nodded but said nothing.

  At that moment a low, black American car swung soundlessly around the corner and ran smoothly to a halt at the kerbside outside the mansions.

  The policeman clicked his tongue: ‘Lincoln Continental,’ he said. ‘Same time every night.’

  The driver’s door of the Lincoln opened. A dark, immaculately handsome man climbed out, walked briskly round to the passenger’s door and opened it. Charlie and the policeman watched in silence.

  Then suddenly Charlie saw what he had most dreaded – yet wanted. A beautiful woman in a long evening gown climbed gracefully from the car. She was tall and fair and deeply tanned. And Charlie knew that her eyes would be green and feline. Around her neck and wrists shone a sparkling of jewellery. She pulled a white fur cape around her shoulders and waited while the man locked the doors of the car. Then putting one arm through his she flashed a merry smile up at him and walked gracefully up the path to the mansion block, where the porter had already arrived to open the doors for them.

  As Charlie watched, the dark companion slipped a note into the hand of the uniformed old man, who smiled and touched his peaked hat, while the couple disappeared from view.

  ‘Nice work if you can get it,’ said the policeman as Charlie stared after them. ‘He’s from Qatar. See the car numbe
r plate. They’re better off than this lot,’ and he gestured to the Jordanian flag which hung wanly over them both.

  But Charlie wasn’t listening. His mind was only on Kate.

  Chapter Seven

  Charlie gazed at the window. It was stained glass: some sort of pastoral scene, he thought – a funny thing to have in a dentist’s surgery. But then perhaps he was imagining it. He had had a shot of high dosage Valium to ward off fear of the drill and he had no idea what the effects of shooting-up Valium might be.

  ‘That window, is it real?’ he asked Rawlings, the dentist, who was busy at his side grinding down an enamel crown for Charlie’s upper right canine.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ came the reply. ‘I only tranquillized you. The colours give patients something to concentrate on when the going gets a bit rough.’

  Charlie let his eyes wander away from the window. His mouth was stuffed with a cotton wool pad. He wanted to swallow, but he was afraid he might choke, so he resisted the temptation. Instead he let his tongue make its way around the filed-down stub of a tooth which was soon to be capped. It was the last of three to be treated and he was looking forward to being able to smile again.

  It was the end of July, and his body was as adequately repaired as it would ever be. He still had some difficulty bending his left elbow, that being where that particular arm had been most damaged, but apart from that he was fit again. Of course there were a variety of stitch marks around his mouth, made the worse from having been done in some haste by a willing but not too skilful Sicilian doctor in Taormina. But scars of war are rarely completely unattractive and they had healed well, all that was left being little white scars under his well tanned skin.