Sleeping Beauties Read online

  ‘Very nice,’ said Chloe quickly again. ‘Charming.’

  As she lay wrapped in a large, fluffy towelling robe, Margery felt a spasm of happiness. It was like being a child again, and she surrendered her neck and face to be washed with little damp sponges that were deftly and firmly applied.

  Between wipes she told Chloe, ‘I have asked him out and he has accepted.’

  ‘Good,’ said Chloe, who was now applying cream (quite a lot of it) to Margery’s face and neck. ‘This contains thyme and lemon – can you smell it – very good for your particular kind of skin.’ She began the effleurage, gently roll-patting, hands following each other from left to right clavicle across the sternum in the approved manner. She paused for a moment, and winked, in a way that Tabitha would certainly not have approved.

  ‘I said you should take the initiative. Where are you taking him?’

  ‘To a field,’ said Margery happily.

  You had to hand it to Chloe, the roll-patting hardly wavered as Margery unfolded, secrets of the boudoir, her honey plan. Nor did it waver as she followed the line of the left superficial cheek muscles, crossed the chin, and followed the superficial cheek muscles of the right.

  Margery continued, in between the facial motion, ‘You said I could even have a honey face mask if he liked honey so much – that a little sweetness worked wonders; I liked what you said ...’

  Chloe felt a slight unease, but banished it. She concluded the massage with a light, slow lifting of the Occipito Frontalis muscles.

  ‘That’s right,’ she said, shrugging away the doubt. ‘If honey’s his thing, give him honey –’

  The doubt reared itself again. ‘But of course there are other things, aren’t there?’

  She began mixing the mask, averting her gaze from the appalling lilac concoction.

  ‘What?’ said Margery happily.

  Ker-ist, thought Chloe, better come up with something. If Jo-Jo were here instead of Old Betty, she’d have some ideas. Chloe racked her brains. She gave a sweet little smile as she squeezed a few droplets of orange juice into the warmed honey and stirred the pot, daring a quick peek at the gingham monstrosity.

  ‘You are wearing that?’

  Margery nodded. ‘He’ll love it,’ she said simply.

  No arguing there, thought Chloe, testing the heat of the mask with her finger. She had a sudden and very terrible picture of long frilly bloomers.

  ‘What are you going to wear under it?’ Someone had to help this thing along, poor bloke.

  Margery, a little surprised, hazarded ‘underwear’, hoping that was right.

  ‘Why?’ said Chloe, winking. ‘It’s a hot day. No need. Give him a thrill. Don’t wear anything. Believe me,’ she gave the pot one more stir, ‘I know.’ She certainly looked as if she did.

  Margery blinked.

  Chloe shrugged again, smiled again, holding the honey pot, about to apply the contents. ‘Except maybe a dot or two of the honey he likes, strategically placed. Know what I mean?’

  Smile, wink, shrug.

  Margery gave a little shriek, but Betty wrote on.

  She had just found a cosmetic corollary between the bold, wide-eyed, lip-less dollyrocker of the sixties, and Tertullian’s reference to the prominence given to Roman women’s eyes circa 200 AD ‘by that black powder itself wherewith the eyelids and eyelashes are made prominent’. And was cross-referencing it with Pliny’s recipe for mascara, consisting of bear’s fat and lampblack – or, for those special occasions, crushed ants’ eggs and squashed flies. Absolutely fascinating.

  Strategically placed?

  Margery apologized for the noise, swallowed hard, lay back to receive the face mask, and surrendered herself entirely.

  ‘After all,’ said Chloe, applying the smooth unguent, ‘who needs knickers? You’ve only got to get them off sometime.’ She paused and her face took on that dreamy quality so feared by Tabitha.

  ‘And just remember, even if it’s the size of a prawn you tell him it’s a Moby Dick. And if he’s no good at it you tell him he’s The Best you’ve ever had. Particularly if he’s no good at it – otherwise he’ll never get any better.’

  ‘Oh, there won’t be any problem there,’ said Margery, beginning to dress.

  Chloe looked at the ruffles as they swung over her matronly shoulders. ‘I wouldn’t be too sure about that,’ she muttered.

  The taxi driver grumbled. He grumbled at the length of the journey before him, he grumbled at the amount of stuff he was to pack into his cab, he grumbled at the delay while his customer stood at the salon desk paying.

  ‘People are usually ready,’ he said defiantly to the bossy young piece.

  ‘People pay you to wait,’ said she, and turned her beautiful head.

  Margery, in her gingham at last, stood proudly by the desk paying her bill.

  Betty peered at her, very closely, and then moved her head away, squinting.

  ‘Good Lord,’ she said. And gave the blurred outline of Chloe an enquiring stare.

  Margery gave a twirl. ‘Good Lord,’ said Betty again. But she had learned to be philosophical. After all, women had once considered the farthingale flattering ...

  The taxi driver went out to his cab, pausing on the way to whisper to the beautiful young bossy girl in the eau-de-Nil overall, ‘I hope she’s going to be accompanied.’

  ‘Get knotted,’ said Chloe evenly, still smiling at her creation.

  Betty said to Margery, ‘When would you like to book?’

  Margery giggled. ‘No – I’ve been done.’

  ‘Really?’ said Betty, thinking that was more than true. ‘Really?’

  Margery twirled anew. ‘She said it would look natural.’ She put her hand to her mouth to simper a little, remembered her fine teeth, and removed it, letting them blaze away.

  ‘Good grief,’ said Betty, returning to the safety of her manuscript. Some cosmetic surgery was carried out on Romano-British women, apparently. The raising of slack eyelids, the patching up of mutilated ears, lips and noses were recorded, although the lack of efficient anaesthetics must have limited such surgery cases to dire need.

  Dire Need? She watched Margery swinging out of the salon door. Fortunately it was a very blurred image, but she could have sworn that, just for a moment, as a ruffle swung high, she saw a pair of dimpled, quite naked, buttocks. Impossible.

  From the taxi, waving, issued a happy little hand, perfectly manicured, nails irridescent in the sun. And above it was Margery’s face, a work of art to behold, as Chloe reminded herself. Betty might react unenthusiastically, but then, she wasn’t a man, now was she? And the taxi driver might react unenthusiastically, but he wasn’t much of a man either. No. She had created a positive statement. She was just a little hazy about what the statement was exactly ...

  That was the way to do it, no matter what Tabitha said: give the punters what they wanted, after you’d told them what it was.

  The taxi turned the corner. Chloe loosened the ribbon in her hair. It was to be hoped the next one would be a bit easier. Love triangle, ex-wife? Piece of cake!

  19

  ‘Beauty is the power by which a woman charms a lover and terrifies a husband. Ha Ha.’ Chloe’s parting shot did not exactly settle Tabitha’s unease at leaving her in charge. She hopes this visit to the art gallery will, and takes herself off swiftly to begin with the Master, Giotto.

  His Madonna’s eyes slant and woo beguilingly. She is the difference between pretty decoration and genuine beauty. Something only becomes beautiful when the imagination is engaged.

  That, she thinks, moving on, is why Giotto is considered a Master, and why this earlier panel is not. Here are female angels and pious women (it is painted by a woman) who do not take their place in real space, in the real world, but float through it, expressionless. Beneath their stylized coiffures all their faces are the same – formula beauty as decreed by the Byzantine Church.

  Giotto’s mother looks beautiful in a real way; her child may be a God but
she holds him securely; baby gods can take a tumble; her child might be doomed, but she is proud of her achievement, enjoys him while she can. She has a soul. She holds Tabitha with eyes that look out and confront her woman to woman. The artist has lit her well. She is radiant. And Beautiful.

  Tabitha loves the mix of spiritual and practical in this painting. She smiles again at Giotto’s sweet, masculine confusion at practical female matters. The bevy of angels surrounding the Virgin Mother’s throne wear their golden auras like hats. And according to Giotto these hatlike haloes must needs be fixed in place with halo pins. How else could they withstand a rushing angel wind?

  Perhaps they fix each other’s during one of those all-girls-together beauty nights, draping themselves over celestial couches, raiding the heavenly refrigerator for paradisiscal snackettes, swapping stories and giggling into their feathers as they lined up for under-wing waxing. Trust in God up to a point, but don’t go flying around without your halo secured.

  The Boudoir. The Secrets. Eternal, wherever women congregate. Safe with Tabitha, but with Chloe? She shakes her head. Wrings her hands. Of course it will be all right. She wrings her hands some more.

  She lingers so long with the Giotto Virgin, looks so agonized, wrings her hands so much, that the two attendants become suspicious. They hover nearby, pointedly willing her to move on which, eventually, she does. Pleased, they sidle over to the painting and take a good look themselves. What’s to stare at? They peer more closely. Perhaps she was planning to pinch it? Or even more exciting, to damage it.

  Tabitha leaves the Giotto behind and walks on through the deserted galleries. If it was a beginning, it was also an end, she thinks. Beginning of realism, end of the comfortably unobtainable ideal. She passes Madonna after Madonna, thirteenth century, fourteenth century, fifteenth century, each with the beauty of a real woman in the real world. From Cranach’s pure white-skinned celestial mothers, with their ghostly bellies and bee-sting mouths – as frail as porcelain and just as rare – to Bellini’s rustic simplicity: round ruddy cheeks, downcast eyes and pretty dimpled chins.

  She walked and gazed, reflecting again upon the perfect female Chosen By God. Never an ugly one. It was poor old Brenda all over again.

  She turns the corner, much to the interest of her stalking attendant who has left his companion still staring at the Giotto Madonna and tuning his walkie-talkie just in case. The Stalker can definitely see her lips move. He knows he must be on to something. You don’t talk to a load of old, dead pictures – and they certainly don’t talk back to you.

  Stretching before her, there they all were, the Beauties of their day. So much beauty was exhausting, really.

  ‘Of course,’ she muttered, bringing her Stalker closer, eyes agleam, ‘of course. Don’t you see?’ She turned to the Stalker with troubled, importuning gesture. ‘It was when Giotto said Enough Of The Stylized Female – Now Let Us Paint Reality that we were doomed. Doomed! You do see that?’

  The Stalker saw only too clearly. This was madness. He knew better than to engage those eyes and discovered quite a large blob of something on his tie which he went to work on with a will. Made a change from ‘where’s the toilets?’ anyway.

  ‘You see, what Giotto said was You Can All Be Like This – and then he painted Beauty. And whereas before when women looked at those Byzantine women, who bore no resemblance to the world and were not meant to, they went away feeling jolly relieved because they did not have to compete, now, post-Giotto, they were looking at Possibility! See?’

  ‘She’s getting wound up to do something,’ he said into his radio. ‘Over.’ But his fellow huntsman had nipped off for tea. He tapped the machine, blew on it, fiddled until it made a crackling noise and picked up a taxi asking his base for directions.

  ‘Some bloody honey farm off the M4 she says,’ crackled the voice. ‘Funny farm more like. Over and out.’

  He looked up, annoyed to see that she had moved through into the next gallery. He skipped after her, torn between a desire for blushing honours and tea with ginger nuts.

  ‘Oh, those painters had a lot to answer for,’ she was saying, standing grim-faced before a reclining nude. He came as close as he dared. Go on, he urged her silently, touch the bloody thing – tread over the wire – do something! But she only waved her arms about and there was no particular law against that.

  ‘The secular, the classical – mythology offering more apparently attainable beauty – an elongated Venus emerges from the sea and women racked themselves to emulate her. Three Graces dancing in a wood, hair tumbling in golden curls, so that raven-haired ladies went either bewigged, or doused their heads in acid, weeping with pain and vexation. Aphrodite’s unblemished skin in the days of the pox, her perfect breasts defying gravity like the breasts on a fairground cut-out. Six, five, four hundred years ago. Yum yum said the patrons, and hung them on their walls.’

  The attendant lurked. ‘Do you see?’ she said.

  Frankly he wished she wouldn’t do that. No, he didn’t see, hadn’t got a clue – and anyway she should not try to engage him in conversation. He had read somewhere that the best thing to do if you were captured by armed guerillas was to strike up a conversation with them as soon as possible. Apparently, they found it much harder to torture you if you’d been chatting to them about the wife earlier in the day. Not necessarily a vital piece of information, but you never knew. He glared at her.

  Tabitha did not blame him. Here she was, deconstructing feminine beauty and sexual enticement – blowing the poor man’s conceptions apart – yet she would persist.

  ‘And all through the ages women have obliged. Dissimulating from little state to little state, even in this tiny bit called Europe. If you cannot achieve this look, you good women of Florence, Ghent, Venice, Burgundy – you have failed. And you – sisters of the Flatlands – no use looking at your Franco-Italian cousins – you’re Dutch. It’s different. You’ve got to be big and bouncy, you have ...’

  ‘Dutch!!’ she said loudly.

  He came closer. Was she spitting?

  ‘Dutch!!’

  Alas! She was not.

  ‘If you were Dutch you needed serious amounts of cellulite: Rubens laid it on with a heavy hand, every nymph a strapping wench, thighs like fleshly pillows. Rembrandt feathered it in delicate folds of paint, his adored Saskia’s rippling nether regions, contriving a complete reversal in his countrywomen who had gone bulimic in order to supply the slender suppleties of Dürer.

  The faces, she observed, matched the bodies – florid, full, with luminous popping eyes. Not surprising, she thought, sniffing, as she walked on. Given that weight they must have had grave heart problems.

  The attendant, moving ever more shadowily behind her, stared as she stared, and stared particularly hard at this last image of bouncing pink-nippled breasts. Now why should a woman spend so long looking at that? Middle-aged women did funny things. Take his wife. Please. Ha Ha.

  Tabitha was shrugging and fluttering her hands in vexation.

  Bronzino. Sinister deceiver. Venus, Cupid, Folly and Time, painted as a warning against lust my eye, says Tabitha, half aloud. Painted as an invitation to it, more like. Soft porn. How honest Giorgione would have despised his fellow-painter.

  ‘What do you think?’ she says aloud.

  ‘Not paid to think,’ he mutters. More dirty pictures. Woman’s a maniac. At any rate, he hopes so. He fingers his walkie-talkie just in case. Mutter, mutter, she goes. He stays very close.

  The Beauties no longer soothe. Tabitha tuts as she walks.

  Spain – different again – Velasquez requiring dainty little limbs, sallow, olive skin. What was a woman supposed to do when travelling, asks Tabitha? Metamorphose at each border town? No wonder they mostly stayed at home. You couldn’t have kept up with the dieting, for a start – and then there’s the taking in and letting out of seams, the raising and lowering of bodices while the border guards stood around waiting to check cellulite levels – hopelessly muddling. She shakes
her head, moves on quickly, passing Tintoretto, Veronese, Poussin, Van Dyck.

  Coming up behind her the attendant peers at the Velasquez. So what’s wrong with this one? He wonders. Then he knows. This one’s got a frock on. Oh for a cup of tea and a sit down.

  On and on through the galleries. Tabitha is scornful, she curls her lip. The attendant, behind her, does so, too. She moves swiftly and he knows why – she moves swiftly because these pictures have got their clothes on. And this woman on whom his eye is glued, is a pervert. In his opinion, half the people (or more) who come in here are perverts.

  As she goes she thinks, here are Chloe’s Super-models of their day – picked from the gutter, picked from the court, picked only for their beauty to hang there, as safe in the bright light of day as in the soft glow of the evening candle – hanging in their ornate frames, the loveliness never diminishing, making women ashamed, men dissatisfied.

  Tabitha flinches, stops. She stares at a sleeping Venus, naked – perhaps a harlot from the streets but the painter knew a thing or two – Beauty in every feature, every line – Beauty to Die For – and given the poison in cosmetics she probably did. How many women did he send to despair with this image?

  She peers at the name on the card by the picture.

  Giorgione.

  ‘Bastard!’ she says.

  ‘What?’ says the Stalker, who would really need witnesses.

  ‘He never really meant it after all. See?’ says Tabitha. ‘Vanitas Vanitatum, nothing to do with our vanity – do you see? It meant – quite simply – here is my clever painting.’

  She looked at the attendant’s blank, don’t-try-and-be-friendly-with-me expression. And stamped her foot. ‘Oh, you men!’ she cried.

  Oh-ho, he thought, one of those.

  And how many women had Tabitha sent to despair with her Liposome would do this, Cathiodermie that, Collagen the other? She denied it – she had made women happy, she had brought out their beauty, let them celebrate what they could, disguise what they could not. She had passed on the art, as it had been passed on to her. Today was the beginning of Chloe’s era.