Sleeping Beauties Read online

  She twisted her head round and opened her mouth, making a noise of ecstasy from the back of her throat. You beautiful, beautiful man, she said firmly, over and over and over again.

  *

  Tabitha retired to bed early and lay awake all night. The whisky – and something else. What? She knew. She was thinking again of the three women who had passed through Chloe’s sharp little claws. What had happened to them? Why did she get that panic in the gallery yesterday as she looked at the beauties of the past? After all, women took their own destinies in their own hands – what difference did it make if they had a makeover first? She threshed about looking for a cool place on the pillow, closed her eyes, and hoped for oblivion. Those three women. The Thumbs Up?

  Something was troubling her – something so close she could not see it. She opened her eyes. What? She snuggled down and closed her eyes again. And just as she was drifting off into the soft, downy world of forgetfulness, she heard:

  Ping! Ping! Ping!

  To which her panicking heart responded:

  Boom! Boom! Boom!

  She sat up again, feeling sick. And it was nothing to do with gall of goat. For she who had dispensed beauty, controlled beauty, realized, quite suddenly, that she, too, had been its dupe.

  Chloe!

  Consider Chloe.

  She was beautiful beyond her clients’ wildest dreams. She looked the part. She was truly a walking advertisement. Beautiful. Beautiful and – Disastrous.

  All those terrible mistakes – the Baker, the Pargeter, the O’Rourke – even that poor woman whose stockings got stuck to her toenails. And others – lots of others. Why – really – Chloe had been Appalling. And she had got away with it –

  Because

  She

  Was

  Beautiful.

  Oh!

  Chloe was Appallingly Disastrous. And why was she still there? Because Tabitha was seduced by her looks. If she had been Brenda, she wouldn’t have kept the job – probably wouldn’t even have got the job. Wendy Woods all over again. Shame on me, she thought, shame, shame on me. A purveyor of the Arts deceived by them. Thus would the world continue to seek the Beautician’s Couch, because it cut you a swathe through life, put you at the front of the queue, got you there quickly, safely, and in very good time. To be beautiful was to have a First Class Ticket.

  The only question, really, was To Where?

  She knew now what had been troubling her. She knew what she had to do.

  She rose, dressed, and walked in the primrose light of morning towards the salon. Saturday, her busiest day. She rang each of the clients on her books and cancelled them. And then, with a shaking hand that had nothing to do with last night’s whisky, she turned back the pages of the appointments book, found the three telephone numbers, and began to dial.

  She had to know. She had to.

  But really,

  she already

  did.

  The pink cards were blank.

  To Chloe, the Dawn.

  27

  Margery had been practising with cheap make-up. Somehow it never looked as good as it did after the Beauty Parlour, but when she asked the little beautician for help, the little beautician said not if she couldn’t afford it. Fair enough. Reginald wouldn’t do her teeth again, either, not until she had saved up. That was why the make-up was cheap. She was saving.

  Reginald was only being noble when he became angry, she knew that. Mrs Postgate had called the police, not him. The Old Queen Bee would just have to go. She fluffed up her hair, put a very cross expression on her face, and tapped at the window.

  ‘Buzz Off!’ she mouthed, when Mrs Reginald Postgate pulled aside the lounge curtains, which were still persimmon and peach because of all this time-consuming honey mania flying about. It made Mrs Reginald Postgate very upset – both the unfinished colour scheme and the madwoman.

  ‘Mine,’ she mouthed back at the disgusting creature, ‘mine, mine, mine.’

  Mrs Reginald Postgate became very distressed as she followed the baleful gaze towards the nests of tables, the suite, the silver carriage clock with the chimes that said London Bridge Is Falling Down and all the other nice things she had accrued.

  ‘Mine,’ she mouthed again. And pulled the curtains. Margery smiled with teeth that were already yellowing from lack of a good brushing. ‘Don’t bet on it,’ she mouthed back.

  Mrs Postgate winced. Reginald would just have to cope, that was all. Otherwise she would have a nervous breakdown. She felt one was quite close already and, after all, she had never had one before. She picked up the telephone.

  ‘Hallo my name’s Karen how may I help yew?’

  Mrs Reginald Postgate very nearly said By giving me my husband right away – but stopped herself. ‘Put me through to my husband,’ she said.

  ‘Out all day,’ said Karen. ‘Tennis match in Brighton.’

  Mrs Reginald Postgate put down the telephone and began to giggle. It really was quite mad, and hysterically funny. She lay on the couch and began shredding the Bentalls catalogue. He loves me, he loves me not, she repeated. Out all day in Brighton. And the silver carriage clock went –

  Ping, Ping, Ping.

  Margery was giggling too. It was no use the Old Queen pulling those curtains and thinking she would go away. How unintelligent of her. There was a back entrance to the house, with a little potting shed just below the wall – quite easy to drop on to. She knew, because she had reconnoitred. And not a policeman in sight this time. She tucked the gingham ruffles into her knickers (it was a bit too cool nowadays to go without them) and began to creep along the wall. You had to be one jump ahead in this game. As the little beautician said.

  *

  Caroline had looked perfectly normal when he went round the next day, and felt perfectly normal when she put her arms around him and apologized.

  She had even made him a cup of tea and tried to laugh about it all. Just a silly joke, she said, just a whim – she had meant no harm, only tampered a little, nothing genuinely poisonous.

  For a moment, just for a moment, he nearly joined in the humour. But then he remembered Rita, and it was impossible. She was very upset. Very, very upset. And frankly he had had enough. He’d been up all night calming her – camomile tea, foot massage – he had even washed down the paintwork on the stairs which was covered in multi-coloured streaks from Caroline’s alarming outburst. Smeared and rubbed there – disgusting – disgusting. Rita was right: she was probably unbalanced. Anyone who would do such a thing, anyone who would even think of such a thing must be unbalanced.

  And besides, what was there to laugh about? Was it amusing that he and Rita were both shattered? Well, she was, certainly. Believe me, he wanted to say, when Rita’s shattered nobody laughs. Not unless they want their heads examined. And here was Caroline, arms round his neck, saying see the funny side. Saying she got carried away in a Beauty Parlour. Beauty Parlour? He had never seen anything less beautiful in his life.

  ‘I could sue you,’ Rita had said. ‘You ugly great tart.’

  ‘Aah,’ said Caroline, in a voice that had Bernie believing the best, ‘was he a Little Bit Pansy Then? Aah.’

  And that was when it really started.

  It was very hard to equate either the sweet little thing his wife had been a moment before, or the sobbing apologizer who had held fast to the newel post. Caroline suddenly seemed to discover an ability to pack a startlingly accurate punch and – even more surprising – Rita showed herself to be what might be called Wiry but Powerful. Bernie remembered thinking, as the shrieking women toppled on to him, how accurate the sound-effect of smacking a cabbage was.

  He finally separated them at a particularly dramatic point, over the completely mystifying, ‘Go to the gym did you?’ from Caroline, which incensed his wife so much that she returned fire inaccurately and fell clinging to her opponent’s neck instead. Having pulled them apart they both looked out from faces much besmeared, and said together, as if rehearsed:

 
‘Bernie. Bernie I love you.’

  You could have fooled me, he thought. You could have fooled me.

  And now here was Caroline, draped all around his neck, wanting to be nice – which made it hardest of all.

  He stepped back and held out her key. And he said, ‘Could I have mine back please?’

  He felt a little resentful that she did not plead with him, simply doing as she was bid and then opening the front door.

  He went back down the path feeling low in spirits. It had been easier than he thought, yet harder. And he pondered during the walk home about last night. Was there any more puzzling sight than a woman whose face had once been feminine and who seconds later, and seemingly effortlessly, with the shedding of tears, had the face of a nightmare?

  Yes there is, he answered himself:

  TWO women with perfectly immaculate faces which then descended into hell.

  In which case, he thought, as he turned into his gate, it was a case of Better The Devil You Know.

  He used Caroline’s key, and felt a momentary twist in his heart as it turned in the lock. No going back now. No going back ever again. He stepped into the hall. He could hear little Rita busy in the kitchen. Comforting.

  So much sweeter than Caroline; so much more vulnerable; so much more feminine. He tucked the key out of sight in a drawer. Wouldn’t be needed again. ‘I’m home,’ he called.

  *

  Caroline read the label on the bottle of moisturizer carefully. It said: ‘Used Daily It Protects And Cherishes.’ Mere propaganda, important to any offensive. She dropped it into the rubbish bin and slammed the lid.

  Watchful Venus gave a little sigh, and then a chuckle. She reached out and rubbed her finger under Mars’ stubbly chin. ‘Just goes to show,’ she said, amused, ‘there are never any winners when you are involved.’

  And he – smiling too, sleepy for once, said through his yawns, ‘Nor you, my love, nor you.’

  *

  Well, you didn’t feel better and you didn’t feel worse. You had just done it, that was all. Done it standing up in a pair of heels with your back against the fridge, your Joseph pulled up round your fanny and an urgency about it that gave him no time to consider the morality of the event.

  First time she had ever heard him say Yes. Half asleep and looking for the fizzy water, and there it was. All over before he could quite believe it and shooed back into bed, where Megan lay peaceful as she would never be peaceful again, for Jim was an honest man. Gemma didn’t care – she had made her pact with God and been passed on to the Devil who had obliged her by providing the circumstances.

  ‘Why?’ he had asked afterwards, and not unreasonably.

  ‘Why not?’ she shrugged. ‘Now – shoo.’

  Gemma had got out early this morning to avoid the confrontation. For confrontation there would be. Jim was not many things, in Gemma’s opinion, but he was certainly honest. To Megan’s inevitable waking question of, ‘Jim dear, what are you doing with lipstick all over your face?’ he would come back with an honest answer. And Gemma really could not cope with the rotating ordure that would follow. Anyway, it was best being out and about – she’d done a good morning’s work, surprisingly, and her conscience was reasonably quiescent. Megan would move out, of course. But she’d find someone else.

  If she thought about Megan, the sap of sympathetic human kindness seemed to have dried up. Somehow when she thought of anybody just at the moment, the sap of sympathetic human kindness seemed to have dried up. It did not help that her half-leg and bikini was growing back rather itchily and she thought she had a touch of folliculitis in her crutch – folliculitis in the crutch being a great determiner of the strength of one’s Sympathetic Human Kindness.

  If someone were to make the smallest transgression with her now she had a feeling she would either bark or bite. She pulled up at the lights in Battersea’s Restaurant Mile. Perhaps she was hungry? It was more or less lunchtime.

  She drummed her fingers on the wheel. Funnily enough, she thought idly, as she waited for the lights to change; funnily enough, she thought, as she gazed at the teeming pavements awash with humans; funnily enough, I thought that you only saw His Face In Every Crowd when you loved the bugger – not when you were enraged and contemplating doing a pit bull terrier on him.

  Yet apparently this was not so, for looking across the street, whom should she imagine she saw but M. Le Fulcrum of last night. Even down to the glint of that ghastly medallion. And next to him a woman who looked not unlike herself, but minus the sumptuous mouth.

  Mind playing tricks? She blinked, tried again. Bared her teeth. Growling imminent. Shook her head. Silly old me. Scratched her upper thigh and regretted it because all the other cousins and aunties of the Big Itch suddenly wanted attention too. Gritted her teeth, still bared, and looked again. Nope, it was him. It was him, and it was him with a her. Number Two on his list, no doubt, about to be put through the whole sordid, high-expectation process – a man with a Château and an MG, what more could a lonely woman want? Not one who required a Fulcrum, that’s for sure.

  She did not look like a lonely woman, Number Two On The List. She looked very together, well-groomed and perfectly at ease. Not quite so dashing as Gemma, perhaps, but not bad – not bad at all. Poor woman. Gemma’s gorge rose. From the depths rose a pit bull and a Rottweiler to merge into one canine hellhound – a Cerberus whom no amount of cake seasoned with poppies and honey could quell.

  The British Telecom van-driver behind her had his view of women drivers reinforced when she slewed the car into the kerb and parked it on white zig-zag lines at an interesting angle. With a last thorough scratch that had the entire family demanding more, she exited stage right, streaked through honking traffic, and fetched up at the door of the restaurant they had entered. An Oyster Bar. For some reason this made her even more wild, so that when she entered and spotted them sitting calmly together, poised, as it were, for a feast, her hand shot out, finger pointed with accusing zeal like a Conan Doyle sleuth:

  ‘Ah-ha – It is You!’

  Well, it was an interesting colour, no doubt about it, and not unlike the oysters on the next table – drained you might say. Whey-faced, oyster-eyed, such descriptive phrases came to mind as she stood there, finger never wavering, staring from his face, stark with terror, to Number Two’s face, stark with incomprehension. She looked at least as old as Gemma – a fleeting thought, but a gratifying one. She approached the table, changing from Fury to dulcet-toned sweetie-pie. She slid into the chair opposite them, and the waiter, who had been hovering, ceased to feel anxious and asked if they would care to order.

  ‘Not yet,’ said Gemma, never taking her eyes off M. Le Fulcrum. ‘We may not be staying very long.’

  M. Le Fulcrum looked even paler. Gemma found this interesting since she would have said, on a racing certainty, it was impossible.

  ‘Please don’t have a heart attack yet – not until I have finished.’ She smiled even more sweetly and then turned to the woman.

  ‘This man,’ she said, ‘is looking for a Fulcrum. That is what he requires you to be.’ She paused. The woman said nothing, simply looked astonished. It was possible, thought Gemma cruelly, that she did not know what a fulcrum was. ‘Fulcrum,’ said Gemma evenly. ‘Something to push against in order to break free.’

  He covered his face with his hands and made a small groaning noise. The woman looked at him, startled.

  ‘He may well groan,’ said Gemma. ‘This man, I have to tell you, is a married man. I expect you answered the advertisement in The Times? Man with Château seeks lovely lady to share it with? That one? I did too. As did a good many other women, I gather. I was number one on the list of applicants for the position. We had a very jolly dinner together last night.’

  She reached out a hand and removed his from his face. He had his eyes screwed up very tight. ‘Didn’t we, darling?’ He replaced his hand. ‘Before he told me that he was – surprise, surprise – A Married Man. But all he needed was a Fulcru
m. Someone to get him out of his beastly old marriage to a woman he despised and children he cared little for, someone like me who was single, attractive, willing...’

  She pinched his earlobe very hard. ‘Only I wasn’t – alas, alack – now was I?’ And she pinched considerably harder. It says much for his mental agony that whereas someone else might have needed peeling off the ceiling at such a painful physical assault on such a tender organ, M. Le Fulcrum did not flinch.

  The woman, on the other hand, did. Stark incomprehension changed to rage. And a depth of rage, Gemma was interested to note, that was considerably more striking than she would have believed in one of such quiet style and new acquaintance. Truly, if Gemma had thought she was a desperate female, this one was much, much worse.

  The woman said, ‘Tell me what the advertisement said again.’

  Gemma did so.

  ‘He had a lot of replies?’

  Gemma concurred. ‘Feel flattered,’ she added, ‘that you were number two on the list. He got a sackload.’

  ‘A sackload?’

  The woman turned and looked at him. ‘Graham Prothero,’ she said, ‘remove your hands at once.’

  There was something distinctly proprietorial about the way she said it. And, more to the point, there was something distinctly obedient about the way he responded.

  Gemma had an inkling that this might not be their first date.

  Gemma had an inkling, considerably worse, which she refused to dwell on further.

  She had no need.

  ‘Oh my God,’ said Graham Prothero.

  Graham Prothero? thought Gemma idly. Better or worse than Keith?

  ‘Oh my God,’ repeated Graham Prothero.

  Interested diners stopped eating to watch.

  Woman Number Two said, ‘I’m not sure He can help at this point, Graham.’

  And she got up, moved to their neighbours’ table, asked if they were enjoying the show, picked up two very large full oyster shells from a dish, returned and tipped both of them over Graham Prothero’s head. Then she picked up her bag and marched out with not so much as a backward glance.