The Facemaker by Richard Gordon

Author:Richard Gordon
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: House of Stratus

21

Graham had taken Jean Dixon to Paris, and it had been a dreadful failure.

Jean was a red-headed, green-eyed cockney, who had been proudly started at art school one year and sadly withdrawn the next, when her father, in the building trade, was crushed into bankruptcy by the depression. She thought herself lucky to find a job with a West End photographer, a young man Graham had once treated for some minor blemish, which led to her appearing at Blackfriars to take pictures of the patients. Graham soon asked her to dinner at the Savoy, and noticed she ate like a horse.

After a few weeks he supposed she was a tart, more or less. She seemed to have plenty of men friends and plenty of presents. He felt a trip to Paris a reasonable quid pro quo, for it seemed not only risky but indelicate inviting her to the little flat near his consulting rooms in the engineered absence of the mistress-in-residence. Besides, Paris was romantic, as everyone knew. And he had been overseas only once since his honeymoon, the Cazalay family not being keen on ‘abroad’. He had accompanied Maria and her mother to Venice, a dreadful crawl by railway across the roasting face of Europe, with Lady Cazalay devastated by everything from palpitations to the incomprehensibility of ticket-collectors, both of which she expected Graham instantly to rectify. Venice itself had been hot and smelly, his painting things had been lost on the way, and Lady Cazalay’s family were exquisitely impolite to him.

First he’d had to break the news about Paris to Maria.

‘It’s a bore going all alone,’ he complained, ‘but I don’t suppose you feel up to the trip.’

‘Paris? I must have been hardly a girl when I was last there.’ Maria sighed. She was spending another day in bed. Her headaches and pains now conspired with fits of depression to poison her with feelings of inadequacy for life, so she simply retired from it between the sheets. Graham’s modestly rising affluence ran to a cook and a maid, who between them looked after Desmond and shuttled him to day-school round the corner. They had moved from Ladbroke Grove to a terrace house in Primrose Hill, a tall, poky place with steep stairs, a narrow hall floored with cracked tiles, and a front door which borrowed gay patterns from the sun through a panel of gaudy stained glass. He recalled this afterwards as his ‘suburban phase’, and had even equipped himself with suburban trappings – a dog, a cabinet radiogram, and a lawn mower, which he pushed on one or two occasions.

‘I remember the underground railway stations in Paris,’ Maria reminisced. ‘All curly green ironwork, like some strange sort of plants growing out of the pavements. There was a ball at the British Embassy, and several of the girls fainted. It was a terribly hot night. I suppose we all dressed so unsuitably in those days. I met Clemenceau, a kind-looking old man, nothing tigerish about him at all.’

‘Clemenceau – another qualified doctor,’ Graham told her.

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