Consider Her Ways and Others

  ‘Well, you’re the chief, Chief. But there’s more to it than a name,’ Al told him.

  ‘She’s willing to go to Marinstein,’ said George.

  ‘Huh. Aren’t they all?’ said Mr de Kopf.

  ‘And she’s ready to pay for the course,’ added George.

  ‘That’s better,’ admitted Solly.

  ‘But she can’t run to living expenses as well.’

  ‘Pity,’ said Solly de Kopf.

  ‘However, Pop. Amal. Telly would be willing to advance her that, as an investment,’ said George.

  Solly de Kopf’s eyebrows lowered, and approached one another.

  ‘What the hell business is it of theirs?’ he demanded.

  ‘Well, they discovered her, on one of their quiz things,’ George explained.

  Solly went on frowning.

  ‘So now they’re out to grab our stars even before they are stars, are they?’ he growled. ‘The hell they are! Al, see this girl gets a contract – an option contract, contingent on her getting a Marinstein certificate, and us being satisfied – don’t commit us. We stake her for living exes – and see it’s a good hotel – not one of the lousy ones that telly lot’d choose. Fix it so she does it with class, and tell the publicity boys they got to get working on her fast. And don’t forget to let Marinstein know we’ll be looking for a ten-per-cent rebate. Got that?’

  ‘Sure, Chief. Right away,’ said Al, making for the door.

  Solly de Kopf turned back to George.

  ‘Well, there’s your star,’ he said. ‘Now what’s the story you’ve got for her?’

  ‘It’ll have to be written yet,’ George acknowledged. ‘But that’ll be easy. It’s her I want. She’ll be a pretty colleen with the simplicity of a child, heart of gold, etcetera; in a background of the emerald fields and the purple mists on the mountains and the blue smoke rising from the cabins. She’s vulnerable and unsophisticated, and she sings plaintive airs as she milks the cow, but she has a touch of innate ancestral wisdom over the ways of life and death, and a disposition to love lambs and believe in leprechauns. She could have a brother, a wild boy, who gets into trouble running bombs over the border, and she goes, pale, innocent, and heartrending, to plead for him. And when she meets this officer –’

  ‘What officer?’ inquired Solly de Kopf.

  ‘The officer who arrested him, of course. When she meets him, a kind of primeval spark ignites between them …’

  ‘There it is,’ said the girl beside Peggy. ‘That’s Marinstein.’

  Peggy looked out. Under the tilt of the aircraft’s wing lay a town of white houses with pink roofs clustered on the bank of a wide, winding river. Somewhat back from the river rose an abrupt mass of rock, and, perched upon the rock, a building with towers and turrets and crenellations and banners floating in the breeze – the Castle of Marinstein guarding, as it had guarded these twelve hundred years and more, its town, and the ten square miles of the principality.

  ‘Isn’t it thrilling! Marinstein!’ said the girl, in a gush of breath.

  The aircraft touched-down, ran along the concrete, and taxied to a stop in front of the airport building. There was a great deal of chattering and collecting of belongings, then the passengers descended. At the foot of the steps Peggy stopped to look round.

  It was a magic scene, lit by bright, warm sunshine. In the background rose the dark bulk of the rock and its castle, dominating everything. In the foreground, gleaming coral white, almost to hurt the eyes, stood the airport building, its central tower surmounted by a huge, but somewhat slendered, version of the Venus of Milo. In front of it, on a tall flagstaff wafted the Ducal Standard, and across the dazzling façade of the building itself ran the inscription:

  BIENVENU A MARINSTEIN – CITÉ DE BEAUTÉ

  (Marinstein the Beauty City Welcomes You)

  The baggage-hall was a concatenation of her travelling companions. The only men in sight were a few white-coated porters. One of these noticed the bright labels upon Peggy’s bags, pounced upon them, and led her to the exit.

  ‘La voiture de Ma’mselle Shilsène,’ he bawled impressively.

  Half the place stopped its chattering to look at Peggy, with awe, or envy, or thoughtful calculation. Publicity had been busy over Plantagenet Films’ new find, with a wide circulation of photographs. There had been reports of Peggy’s contract that looked considerably firmer in newsprint than they did on the form of Agreement. So already the name Deirdre Shilsean was not unknown to those who keep a close eye on these things.

  A magnificent car swept to the kerb. The porter handed Peggy into it, and presently she was whirled up to the Grand Hotel Narcisse which perched on a shoulder of the rock, just below the castle itself. There, she was ushered to an exquisite room, with a beflowered balcony that looked out over the town, and across the river and the plain beyond. There was a petal-pink bathroom, too, with big bottles of coloured salts, flasks of essences, bowls of powder, gleaming fittings, and enormous warmed towels, that surpassed anything Peggy had ever dreamed of. A maid turned on the water. Peggy shed her clothes, and stretched out with luxurious bliss in the bath that was like the nacred pink interior of a shell.

  The sound of a gong caused her eventually to leave it. Back in the bedroom she put on the long white dress that she had worn for the television spot, and went down to dinner.

  It was rather odd being in a sumptuous dining-room where the only men were the waiters, and all the ladies spent their time studying one another more or less covertly, and a bit boring, too. So when the waiter suggested she should have her coffee on the terrace she took his advice.

  The sun had set an hour since. A half-moon was up, and the river caught its gleam. On an island in the river stood a delicate little open temple where concealed lighting illuminated a snowy figure standing meditatively, with an apple in her hand. Peggy assumed it to be Eve, but though the sculptor had had Atalanta in mind, the error was not significant.

  The town itself was a-spangle with little lights; and small neon signs, too far off to be read, blinked intermittently. Further away the floodlit Venus on the airport tower hovered like a ghost. Behind was the black bulk of the rock, with the turret lights of the castle seeming to hang in the sky. Peggy sighed.

  ‘ ’Tis all like magic – so it is,’ she said.

  A solitary, somewhat older, woman at the next table glanced at her.

  ‘You’re new here?’ she inquired.

  Peggy admitted that she had just arrived.

  ‘I wish I had – or, maybe, I wish I never had,’ said the lady. ‘This is my seventh time, and more than enough.’

  ‘I think it’s lovely,’ said Peggy, ‘but if you don’t like it, why would you be coming here, at all?’

  ‘Because my friends come here – for the annual refit. Maybe you’ll have heard of the Joneses?’

  ‘I don’t know any Joneses,’ said Peggy. ‘Would they be your friends?’

  ‘They’re the people I have to live with,’ said the woman. She looked at Peggy again. ‘You’re still very young, my dear, so they’d likely not interest you a lot right now, but you’ll be meeting them socially later on.’

  Peggy perceived no reply to that, so she passed it.

  ‘You’re American, are you not?’ she asked. ‘That must be wonderful. I’ve a lot of relatives there I’ve never seen. But I hope I’ll be going there myself before too long, now.’

  ‘You can have it,’ the lady told her. ‘Me, I’ll take Paris, France.’

  Abruptly the light changed, and, looking up, Peggy saw that the castle was now floodlit with a peach-coloured glow.

  ‘Oh, ’tis beautiful – like a fairy palace, it is,’ she exclaimed.

  ‘Sure,’ said the lady, without enthusiasm. ‘That’s the idea.’

  ‘But romantic, it all is,’ said Peggy. ‘The moon – and the river – and the lights – and the wonderful smell of all the flowers …’

  ‘Friday night it’s Chany’s “Number Seven”,’ said the
lady. ‘Tomorrow it’ll be Revigant’s “Fury” – a little vulgar that, I think, but then everything everywhere is downgraded a bit on Saturday nights, isn’t it? Co-adjustment to the increased consumer-potential of the lower-income-brackets, I guess. Sundays are better – Cotinson’s “Devotée”, kind of cleaner. They puff it out from the castle turrets,’ she explained, ‘except when the wind’s the other way; then they puff it from the airport tower.’

  ‘This great profession of ours,’ Madame Letitia Chaline once memorably said, at a lunch-time address to the International Association of Practising Beauticians, ‘this calling of ours is a very great deal more than an industry. Indeed, one might call it a spiritual force that gives women faith. Tearfully, tearfully, from beyond the dawn of history unhappy women have sent up their prayers for beauty, all too seldom answered – but now, and to us, has been granted the power to give these prayers results, to bring comfort to unhappy millions of our sisters. This, my friends, is a solemn reflection …’

  And as evidence of the faith created there were the bottles and pots, sachets and tubes of Letitia Chaline Beauty Ancillaries gracing shop windows, dressing-tables, and handbags from Seattle to Helsinki to Lisbon to Tokio, and even subtly discoverable, though at a price and in shades several years behind the rest of the world’s fashion, at such places as Omsk. Elegant Chaline shrines, stationed with a good sense of real estate value, gleamed seductively in New York, London, Rio, Paris, Rome, and a dozen more leading cities, the administrative centres of an empire which had hated rivals in coexistence, but no more worlds to conquer.

  In the offices and salons of these buildings the work of calling beauty into existence went on in a state of nervous torque, for it was always possible that on any day Letitia Chaline herself (or Lettice Scheukelman, as her passport described her) might drop from the sky with scourges, and a cohort of efficiency experts. And yet, in spite of system and pressure, it seemed that the limit of expansion other than the little fillips gained by gobbling up an occasional small rival, had been reached – at least, so it had seemed until Letitia’s daughter, Miss Cathy Scheukelman (or Chaline) married an impoverished European, and so became Her Highness the Grand Duchess Katerina of Marinstein.

  Cathy had not actually seen Marinstein before she married it, and when she did, it came as something of a shock. The castle had a fine romantic manner, but was about as comfortable to inhabit as a suite of caves. The town was badly run down, and its inhabitants occupied almost entirely with begging, sleeping, procreation, and vines; in the rest of the realm it was much the same, except that there was no one to beg from.

  Many a Grand Duchess in similar circumstances has squeamed, and taken-off for an established centre of gracious living; Cathy, however, came of enterprising stock. At her world-famous mother’s knee she had absorbed not only the gospel of Beauty, but a useful working knowledge of the principles of big business, as was suitable for one who would later have considerable holdings in Letitia Chaline and its ramifications. And as she sat in her castle turret, looking out over penurious Marinstein, there sounded within her an echo of that enterprising idealism which had inspired her mother to confer the blessing of beauty upon womankind. After an hour’s cogitation she reached a verdict.

  ‘Momma,’ she said, addressing that absent though worldwide spirit, ‘Momma, dear, you’re no green pasture, but I guess you don’t have this thing sewn right up. Not even yet.’

  And she sent for her secretary, and started to dictate letters.

  Three months later the airfield had been graded, and the concrete apron was being spread, the Grand Duchess had laid the stone of the first hotel, strange machines were cutting drainage trenches in the streets, and the Marinsteiners were attending a series of compulsory lectures on hygiene and civic responsibility.

  Five years later there were, in addition to two first-class hotels, and two second-class hotels, three more being built, for it had occurred to the Grand Duchess that as well as social beauty she could supply various kinds of professional beauty along with instruction on its concomitants, and most advantageous deployment. There were half a dozen salles, cliniques, and écoles, permanent or temporary, and the Marinsteiners after severe tutelage were beginning to appreciate the economic theory behind conserving the sources of one’s golden eggs.

  After ten years there was a clean, but still picturesque, town, a University of Beauty, a world-wide reputation, an expensive clientèle, an acknowledged standard of education in the arts of pulchritude, and a regular air service by the big lines. All over the capitalist world the head of Botticelli’s Venus looked from cards in the best coiffeurs’, from posters in select travel agencies, from the glossier magazines, urging all who set store by beauty to seek and find it at its very fount, Marinstein. By which time the early prophets of disaster had long turned their minds to promoting the use of their products at Marinstein, with generous acknowledgement that its Grand Duchess was indeed a hair of the old mink.

  Thus it was that when Peggy MacRafferty, after a breakfast that had the charm of novelty, but scarcely the amplitude of Irish standards, stepped out of the Grand Hotel Narcisse on her first morning, she saw a scoured cobbled street, white houses with fresh-painted shutters, flowers tumbling over their walls, bright-striped awnings on the shops, with the sun over all. She was impelled to wave aside the waiting taxis. Another girl emerging at the same time did likewise, and glancing at Peggy, exclaimed:

  ‘Oh, isn’t it a lovely, lovely place! I’d much rather walk, and see it all.’

  Which was a pleasant change from the blasé lady of the previous evening, so that Peggy warmed to her, and they set off down the town together.

  On the south side of the Place d’Artemis (formerly the Hochgeborenprinzadelbertplatz) stood a gracefully pillared building with a facia that announced: ENREGISTREMENTS.

  ‘I suppose that’s it,’ said Peggy’s companion. ‘It does feel a bit like going in for an exam, doesn’t it?’

  At a large counter in the hall a tall soignée lady received them with a somewhat intimidating manner.

  ‘Social,’ she inquired, ‘stage, screen, model, professional television, or freelance?’

  ‘Screen,’ said Peggy and the other girl, simultaneously.

  The soignée lady signed to a small page.

  ‘Take these ladies to Miss Cardew,’ she told him.

  ‘I’m glad you’re screen, too,’ said the girl. ‘My name’s Pat – I mean, Carla Carlita.’

  ‘Mine’s – er – Deirdre Shilsean,’ Peggy told her.

  The girl’s eyes widened.

  ‘Oh, that’s wonderful. I’ve read about you. You’ve got a real contract with Plantagenet Films, haven’t you? The others were talking about it on the plane, only I didn’t realize it was you. They’re all green with envy. I am, too. Oh, I think it’s thrilling –’ She was cut short by the child ushering them into a room, and announcing: ‘Two ladies to see you, Miss Cardew.’

  At first glance the room contained little but a couple of chairs, a luxurious carpet, and a floral riot on a large desk. Round this, however, a face presently peered to say: ‘Please sit down.’

  Peggy did so, in a position from which she was able to see the unencumbered end of the desk, and also the neat card that announced: ‘Flower Tone-Poems by Persistence Fry, Rue de la Pompadour 10 (Individual Tuition).’ They gave their names, and Miss Cardew consulted a book.

  ‘Ah, yes,’ she said, ‘we have you both programmed. Now, your courses will consist partly of private treatments, and partly of classes. For details of these you should see Miss Arbuthnot at the Callisthenium …’

  There was quite a list of instructors and directors, ending up with Miss Higgins for elocution.

  ‘Miss Higgins,’ exclaimed Peggy, ‘is she Irish?’

  ‘I really could not say,’ admitted Miss Cardew, ‘but she is, as are all our staff, of course, an expert in her field – a granddaughter of the famous Professor Henry Higgins. Now I’ll ring Miss Arbuthnot and try t
o fix you an appointment for this afternoon.’

  Peggy and Carla bought some stamps with a very pretty engraving of Botticelli’s Venus’s head on them, although printed in mauve, and then spent an hour inspecting a variety of boutiques, salons, maisons, ateliers, coins, and even étals, before adjourning to the riverside restaurant, Aux Milles Bateaux, at the foot of the Boulevarde de la Belle Hélène, to put in the rest of their time until their appointment. Mostly, they talked films, with Carla showing a flattering interest in every detail that Peggy could recall of her contract.

  Miss Arbuthnot at the Callisthenium turned out to be a rather severe featured lady who regarded one with dispassion and an eye under which it was hard not to feel misshapen.

  ‘H’m,’ she said, after consideration.

  Peggy began nervously:

  ‘Och, I know my vital statistics aren’t quite –’ but Miss Arbuthnot cut her short.

  ‘I’m afraid that is not a term we favour,’ she said. ‘In Marinstein we prefer to speak of one’s Indices of Beauty. Your waist I judge as satisfactory at 22, but it will need your serious attention to enable you to attain 42–22–38.’

  ‘Forty-two!’ exclaimed Peggy. ‘Oh, I don’t think –’

  ‘It is not a question of personal taste,’ said Miss Arbuthnot. ‘As the Grand Duchess has often remarked of our social side: to be seen wearing last year’s shape is worse than driving last year’s model. On the screen side one must be even more requirement-conscious. For contemporary screen requirements 42–22–38 is beauty; anything else is not.’

  ‘But forty-two –’ Peggy protested.

  ‘Oh, we shall achieve it for you. After all, that is why we are here, isn’t it?’

  Peggy supposed, a little uncertainly, that it must be.

  ‘Now,’ said Miss Arbuthnot after she had given her the callisthenics timetable, ‘I expect you’ll want to see Miss Carnegie, your personality-coach.’

  On leaving, Peggy found the ante-room outside thronged with waiting girls. She heard her new name mentioned by several of them as she passed through. It should have been flattering, but somehow it was not; they were all watching her very carefully.