Zelda’s Cut

Six

When Susan Jarvis heard that her new author was coming into town for a celebration lunch she insisted that it should be at her expense and that Zelda should also meet the other people in the team who would work on her book. Troy, conscious of the mounting expense of entertaining Zelda, was relieved to hand over the cost to Justin and Freeman Press. Six people would sit down to lunch with Zelda Vere: the publisher David Quarles, the two editors Susan Jarvis and Charles Franks, the publicist, the marketing man, and the head of the sales team. They booked the large window table at the Savoy River Room, and the publicist notified the gossip columnists that the newest, hottest, and most expensive novelist of the year would be at lunch.

Troy laid out Zelda Vere’s clothes with loving attention. This time she should wear the yellow suit, he thought. He unwrapped it from its cover and put the skirt on one hanger and the jacket on another to air. There was a neat satin bustier to wear beneath it, the lace could just be glimpsed at the neck of the jacket. He spread it out on the bed and felt his own response to the silk under his fingers. He put out the sandals, the thin-heeled gold sandals, and a pair of absurdly silky fine tights. ‘She’ll have to wear gloves to put them on,’ he said thoughtfully.

He laid out the makeup on the dressing table: the foundation cream in its gold-topped bottle, the dusting powder, the blusher, the concealer pen, and then the jewel colours of eyeliner, eyeshadow, mascara, and lipsticks. He looked at them with a pang of conscious envy. It was so unfair that women should be able to change themselves so completely. Even on a bad day they could, with the skill and the equipment, make themselves look years younger, ten times happier. Artifice was part of their nature, their accepted social nature; whereas for a man to attempt to deceive was regarded as morally wrong.

Troy seated himself at the table and looked at his own neat face over the gold tops of the bottles. His hair was golden brown, his skin very smooth and fair, no shadow of stubble, no darkness at the sideboards. Acting on impulse he reached forward and swept the wig on to his head, like a little boy playing at dressing up in his mother’s room. He held the front of the wig and pulled it down at the back as he had helped Isobel to do, and then he looked at himself in the mirror.

He had expected to laugh at the reflection, he had expected to see a man absurdly dressed in drag, he had expected a pantomime dame. Instead he saw his twin, his sister, his anima. It was a pretty woman who looked back at him. A blonde woman with bouffant, wide hair but a narrow, interesting face. A strong chin set off a sensual mouth, narrow nose, wide blue eyes, high cheekbones. A beautiful woman, a woman like him, recognisably like him, but undeniably a woman.

‘Good God,’ he whispered. ‘I could be Zelda Vere.’

The illusion of Zelda that he had created with Isobel was so much of a type that almost anyone could be her. She was characterised by the big blonde hair, by the good bones. The details of eye colour and expression were almost lost under the impact of the overall appearance.

Thoughtfully he took up the lipstick brush and painted on the cherry-red lips, dusted his whole face with powder. He looked at his reflection again. He expected to see a grotesquerie. But it was not so. A woman looked back at him with a bright, confident smile, a shock of blonde hair, eyes which were more sparkling and bluer than before, enhanced by the even skin tone and the vivid lips.

The door bell rang, Troy jumped; as guilty as if he had been caught stealing. He pulled the wig from his head and smeared the lipstick from his mouth. He was still rubbing at his face with a big tissue as he ran down the stairs to his front door. He whisked it out of sight and opened the door to Isobel.

She was looking excited and fresh. Her mouse-brown hair was swept back off her face and held with two slides, not confined in a bun. She was wearing navy-blue slacks, a white shirt and a navy-blue blazer. She had been thinking ahead to this moment all the way up on the train. She had put her writer’s imagination to how she would look, how she would feel; how he would look and feel. She had even heard in her head the things that they might say to each other.

But Troy just took her in, in one long, comprehensive gaze, and she looked back at him, her chin raised, her eyes unwavering. It was the one thing she had not predicted, that long, devouring look. As soon as she met his eyes she had the shock of encountering something she had not predicted, a man she had not imagined.

‘Come in,’ he said, stepping back into the hall.

Isobel followed him in. He noticed a hint of perfume, the sweet smell of Chanel No. 5. She saw the tissue in his hand.

‘You’ll laugh,’ he said uncertainly. ‘I tried on the wig, Zelda’s wig. And then I put on some lipstick.’

She did not laugh. ‘How did you look?’

‘I looked like her, I looked like … you, when you were her,’ he said. ‘It was extraordinary.’

‘Will you show me?’

Troy opened the door to the spare bedroom, Zelda’s bedroom.

‘I don’t know if we have time …’

‘I should so like to see …’

Troy tried to laugh away his embarrassment; but Isobel’s gaze was steady and unsmiling. He realised that her naivety protected them both from the farcical nature of this scene. Isobel would not laugh because she was genuinely engaged by the question of what he would look like, dressed as Zelda. She had no knowledge of the shady absurdities of transvestism, of cross-dressing, of transsexualism, of drag queens and pantomime dames. She was completely innocent of any speculation about that world and so she brought no preconceived ideas or prejudices to this experience. It was as pure for her as a first love, untainted by knowledge.

And she was right. It was a different thing from anything anyone had ever done before. Their creation, Zelda, was not born out of a forbidden lust, or some private, secret perversion. She had come upon them quite innocently, quite unexpectedly. She transcended the boundaries of gender. She had been made by them both, both of them had an equal claim to her. Troy had coached Isobel in Zelda’s walk, he had painted Zelda’s makeup on Isobel’s face. Now it seemed perfectly natural and right that Isobel wanted to see Zelda as manifested by Troy.

He paused for only a moment. ‘I must make it clear that I’m not into dressing in women’s clothes,’ he said, laying down a boundary as if he thought it would somehow keep them safe.

‘Of course not,’ she said simply. ‘This is not anything to do with that. This is about being Zelda.’

He turned and pulled on the blonde wig, clumsy in his embarrassment. Without meeting his own eyes he looked into the mirror and painted a little dab of scarlet on his lips, which were still slightly stained from before. He turned to her judging look. He shrugged his shoulders, trying to hide his sense of shy embarrassment. ‘Ridiculous,’ he remarked.

Slowly Isobel shook her head. ‘You look beautiful,’ she said. ‘A beautiful woman in a man’s beautiful suit. You look wonderfully – ’ she searched for the word ‘ – ambiguous.’

‘You put on the other wig,’ he suggested.

They stood side by side before the dressing table, like a pair of girls sharing the mirror in the Ladies cloakroom. Isobel pulled on the blonde wig and fluffed out the bouffant hair. With her eyes on Troy’s reflection she reached forward and painted her own lips to match his scarlet. They stood in silence: twin girls, twin women.

Watching himself, watching the movement in the mirror, Troy slid his arm around her waist. Isobel, watching them both, turned inside his arm and the mirror saw his beautiful face full-on under a cascade of blonde hair, and her absorbed profile. Troy watched from the corner of his eye as his blonde hair fell forward when he turned a little and bent to kiss her. He felt the warm taste of the lipstick as they kissed gently, and then deeply, taking in the heat of each other’s mouths, the touch of the tongue, the smooth glide of the waxy coloured lips.

Troy released Isobel and she stepped back a little, her grey eyes very dark with desire.

‘This is extraordinary,’ he said, a slight quaver in his voice.

She nodded, she did not trust herself to speak.

They stood in silence for a moment.

‘You’d better start to get ready,’ Troy said, clearing his throat. ‘We have to be at the Savoy at one.’

He turned back to the mirror and pulled the wig from his head, placed it gently on the stand, wiped the scarlet from his mouth. He saw her looking at him in the mirror, he saw the naked desire in her eyes.

‘I’ll make us a nice cup of tea,’ he said.

When Troy came back into the bedroom, carrying the tray, he recoiled at the sight of her. Isobel was gone, completely gone. In her place was Zelda Vere. Zelda was seated before the dressing table naked but for the silky bustier and a tiny pair of high-cut satin pants. Her breasts were tightly encased in the lace, her hips moulded by the stretchy satin. Her arms were raised above her head, teasing further height out of her mane of blonde hair. Her eyes, dark-lidded, freighted with the weight of the false eyelashes, shadow, eyeliner, mascara, looked back at themselves in silent adoration from the mirror. Her skin, Isobel’s smooth, always-concealed skin, gleamed like white marble in the shadowy room. Her long, pale, bare legs were flexed to hold her feet on demi-point on the floor. The slack of her thighs, Isobel’s office-chair thighs, was concealed by the tense pose, perched on the dressing-room chair like a piece of fifties pornography, modest by today’s standards, but gleaming with the gloss of glamour.

For Troy, who had first seen a half-naked woman on the paperback books in the carousel at the corner shop, and glimpsed calendar girls at the back of the petrol station, she was an echo of adolescent desire, resonant with meaning. She was an icon, gilded with the longing of a boy’s half-recognised guilty desire.

Isobel heard the chink of the tea pot against the cups as Troy trembled at the sight of her, and she turned and put down the comb with unshakable serenity. ‘Come in,’ she said silkily to Troy in her Zelda voice. ‘I’m dying for a cup of tea.’

‘Perhaps you’d like champagne?’ Troy stammered, trying to keep pace with this transition.

‘D’you have some chilled Roederer?’

Troy nodded.

‘Perhaps later,’ she said.

He poured the tea and put a cup at her right hand on the dressing table. She leaned forward and added another flicker of blusher with the thick sable brush, then she leaned back.

‘How do I look?’

‘Beautiful,’ Troy said.

She turned from the reflection and looked at him. ‘You want me,’ she stated.

Troy cleared his throat. ‘I don’t know what I want,’ he said honestly. ‘I can’t answer you. I don’t even know who you are. I don’t know who I am, nor what I want. I thought we were doing a brilliant scam here, to get Isobel Latimer a proper deal for once in her career; but we seem to have unleashed something else. Something much more powerful.’ He paused. He drew a shaky breath. ‘Please, it’s my job to make sure that we get the contract signed. Let’s concentrate on that first, and talk about the rest later?’

She thought for a moment, and then to his relief and to his disappointment, he saw the sultry, sexual look pass from her face. She nodded, as Isobel would have nodded at an appeal to her common sense.

‘Of course,’ she said briskly. ‘You’re right. I apologise.’

‘Isobel?’ he asked tentatively, as if there could be some doubt.

She nodded. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘It’s very – er – taking – being her.’

‘I know,’ he said. He drank his own tea. ‘You can be her all lunchtime, and then we’ll go and buy her some more clothes.’

‘All right,’ she said. ‘And then we’ll come back here and talk?’

Troy felt himself shrink from the suggestion that any of this heated ambiguity could be pinned down in Isobel’s matter-of-fact words.

‘All right,’ he agreed.

Zelda Vere was seated between the publisher David Quarles and her editor Susan Jarvis at lunch and they plied her equally with champagne and promises. She smiled and accepted both. Troy watched with what he recognised as absurd concern as Zelda drank three glasses of champagne and let them pour a fourth. When they had finished eating and coffee was served, a photographer appeared and Zelda was photographed, listening attentively to Susan Jarvis and laughing merrily at a joke from someone else. The whole restaurant, alerted to the fact that a celebrity was lunching, took care not to look in their direction, while managing to scan them and speculate about the event.

When the coffee had been poured the publicist, quietly delighted that she had managed to get a photographer to come to the hotel, and that he had established so effectively the importance of the new author, laid before Zelda the plans for the publicity tour they would want her to embark on in January.

Zelda glanced at the first page and looked in horror towards Troy.

‘We have to preserve Zelda’s privacy at all costs,’ he said quickly, reading over her shoulder.

‘Of course.’ They all nodded.

‘Daytime television,’ Zelda quietly pointed out.

‘Yes,’ the publicist said. ‘We were especially lucky to get that. They’re doing a special feature on lucky breaks the week after next. I hoped you would talk about a rags to riches story. How your talent has brought you an amazing advance.’

‘It’s just so …’ Zelda broke off.

Troy, separated from her by the table, could only look at her inquiringly.

‘So … public,’ she said. She scowled at Troy but could find no way to warn him that Philip watched daytime television while Mrs M. was clearing up the breakfast things, and then generally left it on while he was doing his crossword and drinking his coffee. He affected to despise it, but the truth was that he seldom missed a programme, and often talked at lunch about the immense folly and waste of time of the whole premise and how amazing it was that anyone watched such drivel.

Troy grasped at once what she was saying. ‘No-one from your childhood would recognise you now,’ he said quickly. ‘It’s OK, Zelda, I promise you.’

‘And it is a wonderful opportunity,’ the publicist added. She was a young woman, a little flustered that Zelda was not thrilled at the opportunity of appearing on television. ‘I thought you’d be pleased.’

‘I am pleased,’ Zelda said. ‘It’s just I didn’t expect it all to happen so soon.’

‘We have the contract ready to go,’ David Quarles said. ‘We’re working on the artwork for the jacket already, we’ll have something to show you within a month. We’re hoping to publish in the winter season. No point wasting time or good publicity opportunities.’

Zelda looked towards Troy. He nodded firmly. She pinned her cherry smile on her painted face‘ course.’

They had ordered a limousine to take her home from the Savoy. Zelda stepped into it and arranged her long legs. Troy got in the other side. ‘Harrods,’ he said to the driver. ‘And then wait.’

He pressed the button and the glass screen slid up between the passenger seats and the front seat.

‘Don’t worry,’ he said.

Isobel’s apprehensive expression gleamed through the confident mask of Zelda. ‘It’s Philip,’ she said. ‘He never misses a programme.’

‘He’d never, never recognise you in a million years,’ Troy assured her. ‘Honestly. No-one would. And you’ve not said a word, have you? Not one word?’

‘No,’ she said.

‘And we’ve kept all of Zelda’s stuff at my house so he won’t even recognise the clothes. You underestimate how little attention men pay. Really. He’ll have the television on in the background and he’ll look up and glance at the screen and see a woman who looks like all the others. Zelda is part of a look. She’s a genre. He wouldn’t even be able to tell her apart from the others. They all look the same.’

‘But I’ll have to be away that night.’

‘Can’t you lie to him? Make up a literary conference or something?’

‘I said I might do a series of lectures at Goldsmiths,’ she confessed. ‘I was sort of preparing.’

‘Very sensible,’ Troy commended. ‘Tell him that you’re doing them and that they’re on different days. We’ll always have plenty of notice of these things. Look, this is a fortnight ahead. Come and stay with me the night before, I’ll help you with your makeup. I’ll come to the television studios with you. I’ll be there every step of the way. We’ll do it together.’

She nodded, but she still looked doubtful.

‘Let me show you something,’ Troy said. He drew an envelope out of his pocket and spread the thick document out on his dark-suited knee. ‘This is your contract. D’you see what it says here? It says £350,000. D’you know how many Isobel Latimer novels you would have to write to earn that?’

Isobel shook her head. ‘I hadn’t thought of it that way.’

‘Seventeen. D’you know how many years you would have to work?’

‘Thirty-four years,’ she said precisely. ‘Longer, if I got stuck.’

‘It’s a lifetime’s pay,’ Troy said. ‘For one book. And all you have to do now to earn it is to wear some beautiful clothes and go on television and be polite to some idiot of half your intelligence before a daytime audience that is barely watching.’

‘If Philip recognises me …’ she began quietly.

‘If he recognises you he can lump it,’ Troy said brutally. ‘He wanted a swimming pool, didn’t he? He wanted the lovely house, didn’t he? He left you to earn it, didn’t he?’

‘He can’t earn,’ she said indignantly. ‘You know how ill he is. That’s terribly unfair.’

‘But he does spend,’ Troy said, going to the very heart of the burden on Isobel. ‘He wanted something that you would never ever be able to provide unless you wrote this sort of novel. So you did it. And you did it for him. And you even lied to protect him from the hurt of knowing about it. If he ever finds out he should go down on his knees and kiss your feet.’

He was afraid that he had gone too far. She turned her blonde head away from him and looked out of the window at the slowly moving traffic.

‘You don’t understand,’ she said in a small voice.

Troy could have let it go. He could have agreed that he did not understand. But some strand of mischief in him led him on to nurture her doubts. ‘I think I understand very well,’ he said flatly. ‘And I know that if the worst comes to the worst and he recognises you as Zelda, then he will take Zelda’s money just as he has taken Isobel’s money and he’ll find one way or another to make himself feel all right about it. Because he doesn’t mind leaving you to carry the can. He doesn’t care what you’ve got to do as long as he has he gets what he wants.’

The car drew up outside Harrods and she forgot to wait for the driver to open the door. She got out of the car with Isobel’s hurried graceless speed. Troy jumped out too, strode after her and caught her as she pushed her way through the doors into the store. He touched her arm and she turned to him.

‘Calm down,’ he said. ‘We both had a bit to drink. This is a big deal for both of us. Let’s go and get a cup of tea and then look at some clothes for Zelda.’

‘You didn’t mean what you said about him?’ she demanded.

Troy shrugged. Words cannot be unsaid, their effect lasts even when they have been denied. ‘Of course not,’ he said. ‘Who knows him better than you do? I was just worried about you.’

She nodded. He opened the door for her and stepped back as she went through with Zelda’s swaying stride.