The Cherry Blossom Corpse Page 2

  “Good God, Jan. Don’t tell me you’ve taken to reading this sort of garbage secretly?”

  “Don’t be insulting. Actually, I did read one while I was at school—could well have been an Amanda Fairchild. But I decided they weren’t for me. You’ve never found me one of the fluttering hearts mob, have you, Perry? But there’s so many of them in the newsagents’, you can’t avoid sometimes seeing the titles and authors. How they think of the names I don’t know. I expect that’s where I’ve seen the name Lorelei le Neve.”

  “It’s memorable,” I admitted. “Only one degree less memorable than Lorelei Zuckerman.”

  “The funny thing is, they don’t ask for them by the author’s name anyway. They just ask for the latest Bills and Coo romance. I say, Perry—isn’t this odd: your badge for the conference calls it the ‘Romantic Novelist’s Conference,’ the label on your folder calls it the Romantic Novelists Conference, and the heading on all the bumf is ‘Romantic Novelists’ Conference.’ You’d think they’d make up their minds, wouldn’t you?”

  “No. It proves what I’ve always imagined. Romantic novels are written by the semi-literate for the moronic. Amid all that breathless passion, who could give a thought to the inverted comma? Come on, let’s go out for a walk in the grounds.”

  We collected Cristobel and went downstairs. Others seemed to have had the same idea. As we went out into the garden, Amanda was wafting back in.

  “Such heaven!” she said. “Such utter, perfect heaven!”

  She let the words float magically on the clear air. So, at any rate, I felt she might have put it.

  Around on one of the shadowy little paths I saw the man who I thought must be Arthur Biggs, deep in a discussion of practicalities with Mary Sweeny. We took the path down to the fjord, where we found a simple little boathouse perched on a rock, and a rowing-boat. I took Daniel for a row, while Jan and Cristobel lay in the early evening sun on the wharf of the boathouse. This part of the fjord was quite narrow, because the boathouse looked towards a small island, with summer cottages dotted over it. I rowed some way, then put up the oars and lay there, parrying lazily Dan’s questions about Norway with answers of unparalleled ignorance. Soon it was time to go back for dinner.

  We had not been the last to arrive at Kvalevåg. When we had climbed the path and reached the garden in front of the house, we saw an immense and svelte Mercedes parked immediately in front of the porch. A uniformed driver soon trotted out and drove off. Whoever it was who had arrived, the proprietress had not been there to meet her. She was marching back again from the road, with another collection of people from a bus. A jolly-looking woman wearing sneakers, a rather voluptuous one, and a thickset man, gaunt of face and bloodshot of eye, who gave the impression that he had seldom been so long between drinks. Sure enough, as the party went up the steps of the porch towards the front door, I heard him say in heavily accented English:

  “Vair’s de bar?”

  The proprietress ignored him, and swept on into the house. We lingered behind, observing and pretending not to observe. At do’s such as this, you spend the first few hours watching the players and deciding who there is that you could bear spending a few hours in the company of.

  “Mary Sweeny and those two jolly women who just went past,” said Jan.

  “What’s that?”

  “You were wondering who you could manage to put up with for the next few days.”

  “Smartyboots. Know-all,” I said. One of the most demoralizing things about marriage is that it gives someone a platform ticket into your mind. Sharing rooms in Baker Street did the trick, too, for Holmes and Watson. “Anyway,” I said, “I expect there are others. Arthur Biggs didn’t look too bad.”

  “Hmmm,” said Jan.

  We were delaying going in, to let the newcomers disperse, but as we went through the porch and into the lounge we could not avoid seeing, disappearing slowly up the stairs, a heavy form dressed in black, taking the stairs one by one, and resting on both a stick and the arm of a companion. There floated down to us, in a thick, unlovely New York accent, words presumably addressed to the proprietress:

  “I eat alone. I invariably eat alone. See that I have a table to myself. Give me support, Maxwell—support, for God’s sake!”

  Cristobel looked alarmed. Jan raised her eyebrows at me.

  “Not destined to be one of your buddy pals at this conference, I think, Perry.”

  Dinner was an hour later, at seven-thirty. The normal routine of the guest-house would have seen the main meal served much earlier, but it had been changed to take in the various times of arrival of the conference-goers. When we got down to dinner there was no mistaking the important, Mercedes-borne new arrival. Seated, vast and immobile, at a table to herself was a malevolent-looking old woman, her hair dyed an aggressive black, and dressed in a shiny black material that may not have been bombazine but was what I have always imagined bombazine to look like. She was smoking a small cigar while she waited for her soup, and in front of her was a half-bottle of brandy, and a decanter of water. She poured from both into her tumbler, inhaled on her cigar, and sat there silently watching us from her malevolent little eyes.

  “Nice,” muttered Jan.

  The single table stood out the more because the rest of us were seated at two long tables—not crowded together, but still forced to mix, to make ourselves known to each other. I think in normal circumstances this would have worked very well, and brought the party happily together. But there we were making embarrassed little social gestures under the dark, contemptuous eye of the Buddha in black over by the fireplace, sipping periodically from her brandy and water. It was also ludicrous. I began to laugh, and Jan, on the other side of the table, began to giggle too. Cristobel said “Shh,” scandalized, so we both subsided. Everyone seemed subdued, even Amanda, who had come down intending to queen it, and found herself talking in hushed tones, for no pin-downable reason.

  From the next table I heard a quiet-looking young woman whom I took to be the black monster’s companion say in a whisper: “Lorelei Zuckerman,” and then repeat it to another questioner.

  “It’s Lorelei Zuckerman,” I hissed to Jan.

  “Well, I didn’t think she looked like a Doreen Smith,” she hissed back.

  Meanwhile the bombazined figure was taking in a deep slurp of soup, alternating this with a sip at the brandy and water, her eyes all the time on us, as if evil-mindedly contemplating our idiocies. For an instant social icing-over, her presence would have been hard to beat, so that even those of us who had bought a bottle of wine hardly felt more cheerful or more relaxed with our fellow delegates by the time the meal ended. I formed the conviction that I was going to have to make for the bar when this gastronomic experience was over. But before that could happen, there was an interesting little scene.

  The meal finished with an extremely good crème caramel. The cooking at Kvalevåg Gjestgiveri was not adventurous but it was extremely satisfying, and as over the next few days I got to know the horrors of the cooking in the larger hotels of Bergen I came to appreciate it more and more. When the meal was over there was nothing to keep us there. Our conversational gambits were nervous and short-lived, as if we knew we were being bugged by the KGB. We began pushing back our chairs and discussing what we would do next, and we did not notice that Amanda—in a vivid green and over-dressy frock—had swanned it over from her table and had gushed her way up to the black Buddha.

  “I couldn’t forbear coming over to say hello,” she cooed. The black eyes stared at her, the mouth puffed cigar smoke in her direction. “A little bird told me you’re Lorelei le Neve.” A pudgy hand went down to the brandy and water, and the glass was raised, while the eyes continued to regard Amanda consideringly, as if she were a rat in a laboratory. Even Amanda faltered. “And I just wanted to say . . . to say how very much I enjoyed The Belle from Baltimore . . . and all your other lovely stories . . .”

  She faded into silence as she met with no response. Then she pulled h
erself together, and with a sort of bravery that I admired her for, she thrust forward her hand, and said:

  “I’m Amanda Fairchild.”

  It was touch and go. Lorelei Zuckerman gazed speculatively at Amanda’s beringed hand. Then slowly, with palpable reluctance, she raised her own pudgy mitt towards it. Flesh touched flesh, for perhaps half a second.

  “Good night,” said Lorelei Zuckerman.

  She beckoned to the pale young girl whom I had taken to be her companion, and together they painstakingly raised the Zuckerman bulk from the table. The ridiculous thing was that none of us liked to help, or to precede her out of the dining-room. We stood there, awkwardly, as if we owed her deference, and we made a sort of path, down which Lorelei Zuckerman royally hobbled, like a larger and infinitely less genial Queen Victoria. No one, however, raised loyal hurrahs. We stood there sheepishly until we heard the sound of Lorelei and her muted companion cross the lounge and start up the stairs.

  “Phew. Thank God,” I said. “She’s not going to the bar.”

  Some breaths were let out, one or two people giggled, and we made our way out of the dining-room. Some of us made for the bar, some of us went for a twilight walk around the gardens, though in fact by the time half an hour had passed almost all of us were down there in the bar.

  That there was a bar had been attested by the gaunt man we had seen arriving. He turned out to be a Finn, and at dinner he had smelt spirituous and been virtually incoherent. This had been tested by Amanda, who had sat opposite him and had transmitted her full artillery of blandishments through the haze, with no effect. Now he led the way back there, clutching the dregs of a bottle of white wine he had drunk with his food. The bar was in the basement: an unlovely, plasticated room which contrasted sadly with the rest of the house and looked like a reluctant concession. Its stocks were bare—one brand of each drink, and that not the cheapest. I learned later that it was the only place in Kvalevåg where any sort of liquor could be obtained, and was, in the long, winter months, the resort of a few of the braver or more raffish men in that straggling rural community. There were one or two such there now, kept in stern check by the proprietress and by the young man who had brought our luggage along, who did most of the serving behind the bar. The locals regarded us with peasant curiosity, and no great approval, and before long they slipped out and left the place to us. As we stood by the counter wondering what we could afford, I felt constrained to say to Amanda Fairchild:

  “That was brave.”

  “Darling! Positively my finest hour!” she returned, flashing me a brilliant smile. I regretted saying anything, but luckily she went and sat with someone else.

  The relief of Lorelei Zuckerman’s departure relaxed us all, and we managed to form up into compatible little groups, as Jan had predicted. I teamed up with Mary Sweeny and with the jolly-looking American woman, who turned out to be Patti Drewe. Cristobel also sat with us, silent but apparently happy. Jan had slipped off after dinner to put Daniel to bed, but she joined us after a short while. Daniel was totally exhausted.

  “Though I did have trouble at first,” she said. “He kept saying he didn’t want to be up there with that black woman. ‘She’s like a great big black SLUG,’ he kept shouting. God—I hope the walls aren’t thin! In the end he quietened down when I promised to lock him in.”

  “He’s hit the nail on the head, though,” said Mary Sweeny. “That’s just about what she is.”

  “It’s just incredible she’s here,” said Patti Drewe. “I’ve never seen her before, never once, not at any conference or get-together or launching-party or anything. Rumours I had heard. In person, no.”

  “Do you have a lot of these jamborees in the States?” I asked, in fascinated horror.

  “We tend to split up, have smaller conventions. You know: the Historical, the Gothic, the straight Romance, and so on. Lorelei writes in pretty much all the categories, but never once has she come. As I say, there have been whispers about her. Now I know they’re all true.”

  “Is she well-known?” I asked.

  “Is she ever! One of our top earners, let me tell you. She may not be quite our Barbara Cartland, but she’s certainly as big with us as Amanda Fairchild is with you.”

  “Such contrasting types!” said Cristobel, plucking up courage. “Amanda being so outgoing.”

  I realized with a sick feeling in my stomach that Cristobel actually liked Amanda. I’d known she had lousy judgment about people since I’d learned who the father of her child was.

  “Quite,” said Patti Drewe crisply. “I suppose you could say they’re the two ends of the spectrum. Does a spectrum have ends?”

  “And what,” I inquired politely, “do you write?”

  “Gothics,” said Patti. “With the occasional historical thrown in.”

  “Whither the Gothic?” I murmured.

  “Oh God—don’t mention that session. I’ve been roped in to be on that goddam panel. Hey,” she said, turning to Mary Sweeny, “you write Gothics, don’t you?”

  “Now and then. And if you’re going to ask me ‘Whither the Gothic?’ you can save your breath. Backwards, I imagine. It’s been going backwards since Mrs. Radcliffe. I’ve no ideas on my trade. I’m on the committee for this damned beanfeast, and I just recruited the panels. The only perk you get for all the work is that you can keep yourself off things like that.”

  “I hope you recruited Lorelei Zuckerman for one.”

  “I wrote. When I knew she was coming I really tried. I asked her to be on ‘Romance and the Changing Morality.’ I got back a postcard with ‘No. L.Z.’ on it.”

  “She has charm,” said Jan. “It oozes out of every pore. Oh, look, there’s the poor little companion person.”

  I looked with curiosity at the companion. For once Jan seemed to have got it wrong. She was a young girl, perhaps twenty-five or so, and pretty in an unflamboyant way. She was quiet, muted, perhaps even repressed, but she didn’t look downtrodden—and certainly not “poor little.”

  “Her name is Felicity Maxwell,” whispered Patti Drewe. “Nice, I think . . .”

  If I was looking at her with curiosity, so were the rest of the bar. I’m afraid that my congratulations to Amanda had been followed by others, and she had reverted to her usual rather overbearing form. As Felicity Maxwell stood by the bar, ordering a glass of wine from the boy-of-all-work, Amanda swivelled round in her chair and said with serpentine sweetness:

  “Have you put the poor old thing to bed?”

  Felicity Maxwell let a second elapse.

  “Mrs. Zuckerman is very tired. She is not used to travelling.” She turned round to make her remarks more general. “I’m sorry if she cast a bit of a blight tonight. She’s not real companionable.”

  “More mildly it could not be put,” muttered Amanda, so as to be heard.

  “But please don’t ask me to gang up on her. I owe her a lot.”

  And Felicity Maxwell, who must have had a penchant for hard nuts, went to sit beside the Finn.

  “I’d have to owe her half the National Debt before I’d consent to be nurse-companion to Lorelei Zuckerman,” whispered Jan. “She must be afraid that anything she says will get back.”

  And I supposed that must be it. Anyway, with that subject taboo, and us feeling ever so slightly reproved, everyone got down to talking about the conference, money, the excursions, money, current trends in the market, money and so on. I sat back and surveyed my companions for the coming week. Our table you know, and we were far and away the jolliest of the lot. Patti Drewe and Mary Sweeny turned out to be a tremendous downbeat partnership, Patti with her stories of horrendous promotional tours through the deadlands of the Midwest, Mary with her accounts of the moral, social and behavioural guidelines laid down for regular Bills and Coo authors. We all had a pretty good time. Next to us at a table to themselves (because no one else would sit with him) were Felicity Maxwell and the Finn. I’d had a nasty experience with a Finn on a previous occasion, and it clearly was not des
tined to be a one-offer. This one was sodden, and was telling Felicity at great length the story of his wife’s infidelities, which—as far as one could penetrate the linguistic undergrowth—had ended with her running away with a piper. This, initially so romantic-seeming, became less so after Felicity by patient questioning managed to establish that he meant a plumber.

  “He’s always like this,” said Patti Drewe. “He’s been at the last three conferences, and he’s always full to the eyebrows. Apparently drink is a twenty-four-hour occupation with him.”

  “But how on earth can he write?” asked Cristobel.

  “If Scott Fitzgerald could write The Great Gatsby while half sloshed, I’m sure this one could write his sort of garbage while pissed out of his mind,” I said reasonably. Cristobel looked hurt, but whether at my language or my estimate of romantic fiction I could not decide.

  “You wouldn’t mind,” said Mary Sweeny, “if his wife had just left him, and he was in a state of shock. Actually, he talks about the same thing at every conference, and last time I established that she’d actually left him in 1970. It does rather dry up the well-springs of human sympathy.”

  At the next table, Arthur Biggs was holding court. That was rather what it looked like anyway. He had his wife with him, and the voluptuous American novelist (“Straight,” said Patti Drewe, referring apparently to her novels rather than her sexual preferences). Biggs was—not pontificating exactly, but talking in a pretty uninterrupted flow. The two ladies were hanging on his every word, laughing obediently at his every joke, nodding periodically, or saying “Right.” Even his wife was. I thought it rather unnatural.

  “He likes worship,” said Mary Sweeny. “Or respectful admiration, at any rate. He’s written a history of the romantic novel, from Pamela to the present day. It’s called Happy Tears.”