Sleeping Beauties Read online

  She feels quite faint.

  Go on, implores the attendant, go on, touch it – just once – one little tickle from your fingertip. Wouldn’t harm. Liven things up a bit. He could see that she nearly did, he was almost sure that she would and then, in that infuriating way of women, she suddenly developed a teardrop on her cheek and dabbed it instead.

  She moves towards a bench, brushing at her other cheek with the back of her hand. She wishes she had stayed in the broom cupboard. Things don’t feel right. Too late now.

  She pauses at Goya’s smiling portrait of Isabella, full of life, aglow with vitality. She reaches out and touches the warm, red lips. They are cold and silent as death. Illusion. All Illusion. She removes her finger pensively.

  The attendant walks away sorrowfully, refixing his walkie-talkie, and looks round one last time. But she is just standing, staring at her fingertip. Harmless. Quite Mad. Thinking. But thinking what? You’re no oil painting. Ha Ha.

  Suddenly she sees the whole absurd sham of it. The salon! Chloe! She must get back. Past picture after picture she flies, with the Stalker emulating winged Mercury himself and coming on strong behind.

  Past a little Elizabethan lady, so young, and yet she is no more natural than the roses embroidered upon her gown. Swamped by artificial colouring, with eyes that look as if she has been up all night weeping – Tabitha peers again – henna – dropping a little into the eye to make the rims pink. Ouch!

  Seventeenth century: a middle-aged woman forced by Court protocol to strut her stuff. Elizabeth Grey, Countess of Kent, resembles a pantomime dame. The Beautician has painted some blue veins on her skin to give a suggestion of its translucence – lost youth, lost dignity.

  Eighteenth century: Lavinia Fenton, actress. Full red lips, finely drawn brows and plump pink cheeks – the Beautician spent time enough on her toilette. Clever this one, out to get her Duke. She knew a thing or two about looking respectably natural. On the wall is the painting’s label: Later Duchess of Bolton. Tabitha laughs. The pay-off.

  Age of enlightenment, except for its beauties. For the sweet-faced girls with glazed white faces, those little enamelled beauties created from poisoning white lead that ate its way through rosy cheek, unresisting bone, towards gum, teeth and finally the crumbling of the jaw. Lavinia Fenton, Duchess of Bolton, RIP.

  RIP, too, for those pallid, indoor, well-bred beauties whose claim to the Age of Enlightenment was to have their front hair stunted with walnut oil or shaved, to make the home of the brain, the skull, look larger.

  And romantic Rousseau lovelies in pursuit of the ultimate, ever tightening the curling tongs, having their noses broken and reset to resemble the Greek ideal. Long necks, created by sleeves set so far down their arms they could scarcely lift them high enough to scratch the lice.

  Picture after picture.

  Women obliged.

  Their Sin.

  Eve in every one of them.

  She stares so greedily, thinks the attendant. What does she see in it all? Just a load of old, long-dead tarts?

  The salon, the salon, she thinks – she must stop Chloe now, this minute, at once!

  20

  Exactly what kind of image does a female poisoner present?

  Chloe was a bit stumped.

  ‘Betty?’ shouted Chloe, on the way to get changed. ‘Know any lady poisoners?’

  ‘Not personally,’ said Betty.

  She is very wary of Chloe, ever since the last time she was left in charge, and the girl helped her complete an ionithermie treatment. The poor woman was stretched out like a fish, completely covered in sea kelp and bandages, and asked Chloe how long she would have to stay like that for maximum cellulite reduction.

  ‘Oh, about six days,’ was Chloe’s casual reply, at which point the woman sat up – well, wriggled up, really – like an injured mermaid and demanded to have it all taken off immediately.

  And it was no good saying, ‘Only a joke,’ as Chloe did. The woman was very distressed. They had not told Tabitha about that one. All the same, Betty was going to have to keep a sharp eye out – if only she had one.

  ‘What do you think a lady poisoner should look like?’

  ‘As self-effacing as possible, I should think.’ Betty said crisply, without looking up, and wiped a hand over her tired eyes. She was cross-referencing the war years, and sometimes it seemed she would never finish. The war years when you scooped out the last of your lipstick with a spoon handle, and smeared it on with a fingertip. No different, really, from the Romano-British women who used their dainty ligulae.

  ‘Well?’ said Chloe, and then came right up to her and shouted, ‘Well?!’ so that Betty jumped. ‘Lipstick,’ said Chloe. ‘Want to hear a good story about lipstick?’

  Betty firmly shook her head.

  ‘You’ll love it,’ said Chloe. ‘Everybody does.’ And she began.

  ‘Well – there was this married couple, Pam and Eric, friends of Jo-Jo’s friend Mike, and they had come adrift a bit. You know – he was carrying on with someone else, she was pissed off about it, and this Mike chap was somewhere in between sort of thing – one night he’d see Eric, and Eric would moan on at him, the next night he’d see Pam and she’d be having a go – know what I mean?’

  ‘Poisoners?’ said Betty rapidly. She had come across Hecate poisoning the bread of neglectful housewives, and a water nymph called Telphusa, with prophetic powers, whose fountain of knowledge was so bitterly cold it killed whoever drank from it. She doubted if Chloe meant that sort of thing.

  Chloe also doubted if she meant that sort of thing. ‘Something a bit more – er – strong than nymphs and whatnot – more colourful maybe? Sure you don’t want the rest of the story?’

  Betty closed her eyes. ‘Pale as the moon, with a large, purplish mouth that looks bloodsoaked. Secret eyes – dark, thick-fringed, like jungles into which the seeker for truth cannot penetrate ... lids blue-black, lashes midnight blue, brows thick and shapely ... ’ She replaced her glasses. ‘Will that do?’ she asked. But Chloe had gone. She had just remembered the Gorgons.

  ‘Why poisoners?’ called Betty after her. She would have pursued Chloe, but the book held her. Lots of those ligulae still found wherever women went – streets, baths, shops. And huge numbers of hairpins. Women were no different then than now – hair and face being considerably more important than war and politics. You could safely leave those to the men.

  ‘Custard powder,’ she wrote, ‘if you could get it, made a reasonable dusting for the night-time face – but you had to dash for cover if it rained.’

  Chloe reappeared.

  From the neck down the eau-de-Nil overall looked comforting and harmless, but from the neck up Chloe was transformed into someone it would be ill-advised to meet on a dark night.

  ‘Well – how do I look?’

  Betty saw a beautiful mixture of vampire and sharply-lit Mary Pickford.

  ‘Lovely, dear,’ said Betty vaguely. Usually that was best.

  ‘I mean – do I look enticing, do I look sinister, do I look like a woman who would take her destiny in her own hands with any means, even poison?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Betty. ‘Oh yes, indeed.’ She had just remembered that she once made her own false eyelashes out of gum and horsehair. Those were the days in which glamour was a triumph.

  ‘Just ticketty-boo,’ she said.

  *

  Caroline arrived at the salon with a smile of exhausted satisfaction on her lips. But she was not half so exhausted as Bernie, she consoled herself.

  She had left him deeply asleep, nose down in the pillows, and with the duvet over him. So who needs to cut hair? The longer he slept, the less time there would be for him to investigate the food in the kitchen. Now, weakened from a fairly dramatic attempt at going for gold, carnally speaking, and also from the sheer terror of what she had done au cuisine, she sought the balm and refuge of the Beautician’s couch. She had to say that the Little Beautician did not exactly look the part.

 
She looked dangerous.

  ‘It’s rather strong, dear,’ said Betty.

  ‘It needs to be,’ muttered Chloe, and took Caroline off to her little cubicle, shutting the door tight.

  ‘You’ll look like this when I’ve finished with you,’ she said cheerfully.

  Caroline swallowed. Chloe knew best.

  ‘Did you manage it?’ she asked, settling her client on the couch. ‘Did you do what I told you?’

  Caroline nodded, and made a silent pointing gesture.

  ‘Oh, don’t worry about the old bat. She’s past it.’

  While Chloe did all the uncomfortable bits (squeezing comedones, tidying the brow line, clucking over stray hairs like a Cruella de Vil shepherdess gathering up the strays) Caroline described what she had done, a sin committed being a sin shared. She was grateful. She would never have thought of it on her own. She settled back, ignoring Chloe’s shaking head as she mourned the way those eyebrows grew so free and untamed.

  ‘First,’ said Caroline, ‘I took out a little of the ceviche ...’

  ‘The what?’

  ‘Ceviche: raw fish marinated – soaked for a while – rather than cooked.’

  Chloe thought it sounded quite disgusting enough.

  ‘And put it on a saucer out of sight. Then to the rest – a rather good marinade of lime, ginger and soya – I added a drop or two of iodine and tasted it again. It was horrible, but only faintly horrible, as if the sea had suddenly developed an oil slick – then I replaced the clingfilm.’

  Chloe, negotiating one or two stubborn chin hairs, smiled evilly.

  ‘Next?’ she asked viciously, feeling power in every movement of the tweezers.

  ‘Tricky,’ said Caroline, barely feeling the plucking in her elation. ‘It was two brace of pheasant.’

  Chloe thought hard, tried to work it out but couldn’t, reminded herself she was a Beautician not a Blooming Mathematician and said, ‘How many’s that?’

  ‘Four.’

  ‘That’s a lot for four people.’

  ‘Five,’ Caroline reminded her, ‘with her joining us.’ Her eyes were filled with vengeance. Vengeance! She laughed, glorying in the pain as the tweezers plucked away. The bitter taste in her mouth was as nothing to the one they’d all have tonight.

  ‘So – pheasants. What did you do?’

  ‘Well, first I had to unsew their bottoms –’

  ‘How disgusting,’ said Chloe, back to squeezing Caroline’s nasal comedones with gusto.

  ‘Then I had to take out all the stuffing. I set some aside and hid it with the ceviche, and put the rest in a mixing bowl.’

  Chloe wiped the little pockmark clean.

  ‘What was it made from?’

  ‘Oh – wonderful things: walnuts, grapes, a little orange flesh and peel, breadcrumbs – and I think a little dash of whisky.’

  ‘Mmm,’ said Chloe, thinking sage and onion and licking her purplish lips, ‘sounds bad enough already. What did you do to it?’

  ‘I tasted it and it was – actually – delicious. So I added some anchovy essence and washing-up liquid, and then it wasn’t. I packed it back into the birds and sewed up their bums again.’

  ‘Washing-up liquid?’ said Chloe rapturously. ‘Cle-ver.’

  ‘Well, yes,’ said Caroline modestly, ‘I thought so too. Because it made it all ever so slightly slimy. Oh yes – and in one of them I added an unwrapped though not used Durex Fetherlite.’

  Chloe’s shriek was worthy of an old-fashioned train passing through a tunnel. Even Betty, deep in a struggle to remember what she mixed with Vaseline to create eyegloss, was roused, shaken, and moved to hobble across the salon to identify the noise.

  ‘Well, if you had a johnny what would you do with it?’ asked Chloe innocently.

  Betty went rigid. So, for that matter, did Caroline.

  ‘Pardon?’ said Betty, cupping her ear with wrinkled hand.

  Chloe took a deep breath and spoke directly into Betty’s ear: ‘I said OH HELL JUST A BIT OF STUBBORN ARMPIT,’ shouting so loudly that the glass droplets on the chandelier went tinkle, tinkle, tinkle.

  ‘That told her,’ said Chloe, when Betty had made her considerably frailer jouney back to the reception desk.

  Betty was baffled – one minute she could hear so little with Chloe, and the next it was like being on the Somme.

  Chloe closed the cubicle door again, put a finger to her head in a screw-loose gesture, and began massaging Caroline’s face with a light moisturizer. ‘Deaf as a post,’ she said, or she will be now, ha ha. Now relax.’

  Caroline tried.

  Setting the delights of good humour on one side, Chloe returned to the issue.

  ‘Of course, I love the idea of sticking a johnny up its bum,’ she said, ‘but it’s a bit crass, isn’t it?’

  ‘Oh, I took it out again. Much as I’d have loved to see the Chairman’s face as he unravelled it from his walnuts.’

  Chloe nodded and prepared a warm peel-off mask.

  ‘But at least I know it’s been in there,’ Caroline said smugly.

  ‘Don’t get found out. Just make her look a complete tit. Show her up. Right?’

  ‘Right.’

  As the mask was applied, she wondered, uncomfortably, if her actions that day had shown her to be any better.

  ‘Sod that,’ said Chloe cheerfully. ‘To win is all. That’s the way it is, her or you. Any pud, before it dries?’

  ‘Pear and almond tart, injected at intervals with bitter almonds – the stuff you use to stop yourself biting your nails. I left one bit blank though, and I know where.’

  Chloe smiled, smoothing the spatula with the last of the setting mixture. It was the basic mask. One part kaolin, one part fuller’s earth, a little water and – ‘Guess what?’ she said. ‘By coincidence, into this exotic and very special face mask, made with the finest ingredients from around the world, I have added a little – go on – smell and see if you can guess.’

  Caroline sniffed, the smell was familiar, not unpleasant, though it made her feel ill at ease and rather tense. She shook her head.

  Chloe tapped her cheek playfully. ‘I’ve added almond oil. Nice touch, eh?’

  Behind the pads, Caroline squeezed her eyes up tight and tried not to see the innocent-looking, doctored food.

  ‘Relax now,’ said Chloe, dimming the lights. But somehow Caroline couldn’t.

  While the mask dried and, as she fondly thought, her client relaxed, Chloe prepared the make-up tray with the same colourings she wore. This woman would look dangerous and beautiful. And be as tough as the Terminator.

  Caroline, overcome, finally released her muscles into softness and snoozed.

  The mask began its work.

  Later, when Caroline stood at the desk preparing to pay, Betty asked her, peering closely, if she felt quite well. Caroline, who was actually feeling quite sleepy, and beginning to understand why footballers, athletes and suchlike slept alone before important dates, smiled lazily and nodded, eyes half closed.

  Betty blinked, refocused, and recoiled. She turned to Chloe, whose face had an expression that would be referred to around the formica table as Swank. Keeping her ears well out of range, she lipread Chloe’s words, which issued from a mouth that might well have been sucking blood:

  ‘Well,’ asked the girl triumphantly, ‘is that Drop Dead Good-looking or what?’

  Betty, flinching, peered hard once more, shook her head thoughtfully, leaned back and said ‘Drop Dead something, dear – certainly Drop Dead something ...’

  The client showed all the hallmarks of a very fine snake.

  Thus did they wave Caroline out of the salon, the one with perky confidence, the other wavering, uncertain.

  Very uncertain.

  Chloe clapped her hands.

  On with the show.

  21

  Tabitha was exhausted. All that running, all that looking, all that thinking – all that Beauty. Nevertheless she pushed her way out of the swing doors, to the
top of the gallery’s steps, took a deep breath and plunged on. She had been in there longer than she knew. It was the evening rush hour – queues at bus-stops, tube line closed because someone had done the dance of death, taxis at crawling pace.

  How to get back quickly? Nothing was moving – only Tabitha herself it seemed, running from point to point and stopping at each, like a beetle trapped in a box. She looked back at the gaunt exterior of the gallery. She had gone there for reassurance and found only falseness. Even Giorgione had let her down. Now she must atone.

  Back she raced, up the steps, bursting into the marbled, silent foyer, seeking help – something – what?

  The attendant’s heart lifted to see her again. Too late for tea, he did not feel in the pink. Indeed, he felt extremely in the blue. And then in she came, looking even wilder than before. Distraught you could say. Negativism blossomed.

  ‘Telephone?’ she implored him breathlessly. ‘I must use a telephone.’

  He remembered a glorious moment several years ago when he had been a ticket collector at St Pancras. A man had come rushing up demanding to know when the next train for Sheffield departed. He, in full pride of his powers, had turned in jubilation, perhaps his finest hour, and said, ‘It’s just gone mate. It’s just bleeding gone.’

  And now Magnificent Opportunity to let this current Negativism bear fruit.

  ‘Out of order,’ he said happily. ‘Out of Order.’

  And was rewarded, this time around, with a cry somewhere between temper and tears. Which was solace for the lost tea, and a considerable improvement on last time when the bloke had punched him on the nose.

  Tabitha turned away. She drooped. She shuffled. She wondered what her life had all been about. You are no oil painting, he had once said. Well – sure – she remembered the luscious Isabella, oil painting and cold as yesterday. Her shoulders straightened. Sure, she was no oil painting – she was living, breathing, scented flesh. And that was the price you paid for being alive, not fixed in some gilded frame all primped and winsome, stuck for ever at youthful beauty’s age. ‘Be Buggered to That,’ she muttered defiantly, moving more resolutely, shoulders square. ‘I have done no wrong. Nothing at all. Nonsense.’