Zelda’s Cut

Troy shook his head warningly at Freddie, but it was too late.

‘D’you take cocaine?’ Isobel demanded, deeply shocked.

‘He doesn’t, I do,’ Freddie said, desperately lying. ‘I’m always trying to persuade Troy to try it, but he won’t.’

‘I should think not,’ Isobel said staunchly. ‘It’s terribly addictive, isn’t it? And bad for you?’

Troy looked meaningfully at Isobel. ‘You surprise me,’ he said carefully. ‘I’d always thought of you as a woman of great sophistication. Everyone says to me that Zelda Vere is very much a woman of the world.’

Isobel checked herself for a moment and then wiped her look of indignation from her face. ‘Oh, of course,’ she said, recovering. ‘I’ve just seen so many people have so much trouble with it.’

Troy nodded. ‘Let’s just stick with champagne, shall we?’

‘Sure,’ Freddie said, agreeably.

Troy poured them all another glass and the two men started to exchange anecdotes, for Isobel’s amusement. Isobel kicked off the pink mules and curled her long legs underneath her, and felt young and bohemian and daring. They laughed together as the level in the bottle fell lower and lower.

‘Now then,’ Troy said as the conversation paused. ‘Let’s see the family jewels, Freddie.’

Isobel followed the two men to the spare bedroom. Troy closed the door behind him and there was a sudden moment of delicious, clandestine intimacy. Isobel, dizzy from the champagne and aroused: by her own new beauty, by the company of two handsome men, by the whole extraordinary circumstances, leaned back against the door and absorbed the fact that she was in a bedroom, rather drunk and quite alone with two attractive young men.

‘I feel quite shy,’ Freddie said.

‘Do show,’ Isobel encouraged him. ‘I really do need to know.’

Freddie unzipped his trousers, let them fall to his knees and then slid his black silk boxer shorts downwards to show her his gently rising penis. ‘Excuse us,’ he said charmingly. ‘It’s just all the attention.’

She regarded it with fascination. This was only the second penis she had ever seen in her life. Philip had been her first and only lover and she had not seen him naked and aroused for more than three years. ‘Why, it’s lovely,’ she breathed.

He had ringed the foreskin with delicate studs of silver and the very peak boasted a delicate silver sleeper. The three of them gazed at it, quietly impressed.

‘Will it be of any help?’ Freddie asked.

The question was too much for Troy. He exploded into raucous mirth. ‘I should think it would be of tremendous help!’

Isobel hesitated, trying to keep a straight face, and then was caught by the wave of laughter, howling with merriment until the tears came into her eyes and smudged her mascara.

Troy bundled Freddie out of the house at ten and then turned to Isobel. ‘C’mon, Cinderella,’ he said. ‘We’ve got to get you back into rags to catch the train.’

They were like actors in a play, intent on the work they had to do. He helped her take off the pink jacket and hang it on the hanger, he put shoe trees in the mules. The wardrobe in his spare bedroom was now dedicated to Zelda Vere’s shrouded clothes. There were two stands for the wigs. Zelda Vere’s expensive cosmetics were in the dressing-table drawer. Isobel let Troy draw the plastic covers over the jacket and skirt while she pulled on her linen dress. She realised for the first time that it did not exactly fit. It gaped slightly at the armholes, you could glimpse her old ill-fitting bra from the side, the waist was too long; the fall of the skirt to mid-calf with the flat shoes made her legs look short and fat.

‘I could take one of the suits home,’ she said wistfully.

‘Not one of them,’ Troy ruled. ‘If you overlap your identities at all, someone will see you and make the connection. You’ve got to be like a spy. You’ve got to have waterproof compartments. Zelda waits for you here – in the drawers and in the wardrobe. Isobel is catching the train home tonight and you’d better have some idea where she’s been all evening, if you’re hoping to keep this deception up.’

‘He already knows I’ll be late,’ Isobel said reluctantly. ‘I rang him from Harrods to tell him I was having dinner with my publishers. He isn’t expecting me home.’

‘Just get your story perfect,’ Troy urged her, putting her jacket round her shoulders and opening the front door. ‘Where did you have dinner? What did you eat? That sort of thing. If this deception is to work it has to be totally, totally convincing.’

She hesitated on the doorstep, reluctant to leave him. ‘Thank you for today,’ she said. ‘We’ve never spent so much time together before and you’ve been my agent for – what? – six years.’

In an odd courtly gesture he took her hand and kissed it. ‘It was my pleasure,’ he said. ‘We did great shopping. And I loved sitting on the sofa like a sultan and seeing you modelling things.’

The thought of him enjoying her gave her pause. ‘You liked seeing me?’

He made a little deprecatory gesture. ‘Of course. You were transforming from one sort of woman to another. One would have to have a heart of stone not to be fascinated.’

Her face warmed at the thought of being fascinating. Oh Troy! I always thought that you …’ She hesitated to choose her words carefully. ‘I always thought that you were not very interested in women.’

He laughed. ‘I’m interested in people,’ he said. ‘I love Freddie because he’s bold and risk-taking and exciting. And I like you because you’re determined and courageous and suddenly you have embarked on some kind of new path here that could take you anywhere – and that’s fascinating for me.’

‘But your preference?’ she asked delicately.

He stepped forward and hailed a cab. The car swung in and Troy opened the door for her. ‘Neither here nor there. Don’t forget to construct your alibi on the way home.’

‘You were late last night,’ Philip said at breakfast. ‘I didn’t hear you come in.’

‘I know,’ Isobel said. ‘It went on and on.’

‘You should have told them you had a train to catch,’ he said with disapproval. ‘You must have got the last one home.’

‘I didn’t want to make a fuss.’

‘You should make a fuss,’ he corrected her. ‘They may be the publishers but you’re the author. Where do they get their living from, that’s what I’d like to know?’

‘They look after me very well,’ she said. She put his toast down before him and poured his tea. She wondered at the readiness of the lies that were sliding from her mouth.

‘I sat next to James Ware,’ she told Philip. ‘Of the Sunday Times.’

‘Did you tell him what I said about that last review of your book?’ Philip asked.

‘No,’ she said. ‘We talked about Spender.’

‘Fat lot he’d know,’ Philip said crossly, and opened the newspaper. ‘You should have told him what I said. If I’d been there I’d have made sure that he knew he had completely the wrong end of the stick.’

She hesitated. ‘What are you going to do today?’

He looked around the paper. ‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘My exercises, the crossword, lunch, walk, tea. What are you doing today? Writing?’

Isobel looked at her navy calf-length skirt with mild dissatisfaction. ‘I thought I might go to Tonbridge and look at some clothes. I’m so bored of all my clothes.’

‘Why bother?’ he asked. ‘You hardly go anywhere. What d’you want a smart dress for?’

‘I don’t know,’ she said wearily. ‘I just thought in London yesterday that the cream shift is awfully – ordinary.’

He smiled his charming smile at her. ‘We’re ordinary people,’ he said. ‘That’s our strength. We don’t need the gloss. We have genuine substance.’

‘I suppose one could have both,’ she said. ‘Gloss on the outside and substance underneath. We don’t have to be wholly solid and worthy and always wearing flat shoes.’

Philip looked puzzled at her disagreement. ‘Of course you can’t have both,’ he said. ‘You’re either a trivial person or a deep one. You either care about the things that matter or you run continually after fashion. We know who we are. How we appear doesn’t matter.’

‘Yes,’ she said reluctantly. ‘Yes, I suppose so.’

‘So no point wasting your time and our money on shopping.’

‘No,’ Isobel conceded. ‘I’d better get to work.’

She closed the study door behind her and pulled out her chair. She switched on the computer and watched the screen come to life. She thought that she had been doing these actions, like a line worker in a factory, every morning at this time for the last six years. It seemed very odd to her that this was perhaps the first morning ever that she had resented it.

It had been the conversation at breakfast. Philip’s certainty in her seriousness, in her moral values, should have been a matter of joy to her. That her husband thought well of her should please any woman. But because she was held so high in his esteem she was never given new clothes. Because he admired her intellect and her seriousness, she was never given treats. He discouraged her from taking an interest in fashion, or from changing her appearance in any way. Isobel had worn flat shoes, calf-length skirts and her hair tied back at their first meeting when she had been a scholarly postgraduate; and nothing had ever changed. Isobel thought that she was fifty-two and she had not known till yesterday that she had a beautiful neck. Perhaps fifty-two was rather late to discover such an asset. Who would admire it, other than well-trained shop assistants selling earrings? Who would notice if she had her ears pierced? Who would run a finger from ear lobe to collarbone? Would anyone ever sweep up her hair and kiss the nape of her neck and graze the skin with his teeth?

Isobel clicked on the file marked ‘Letters to the Bank’ and put the vision of a man caressing her neck out of her mind. She had made a commitment to Philip and a promise to herself, never to look back, never to wonder how their marriage might have been if he had not been ill. She believed that she should be grateful only that he had lived. That was the most important thing. Shopping, and a man with a liking for long necks, and vanity were supremely irrelevant. She opened chapter one and started to format and print it.

Isobel carried the first ten chapters of her novel into the village post office and put it on the scales. It weighed as much as a complete manuscript of one of her usual books. She paid for it to be sent recorded delivery to Troy’s office, and then stepped back from the counter. Isobel normally never ate sweets of any kind. She had been forbidden them as a child, except for one chocolate egg at Easter, and had never acquired the taste. But she felt that the posting of the first instalment of the Zelda Vere novel deserved some reward. And she was certain that Zelda Vere ate chocolate.

She looked at the confectionery counter. There were few things she remembered from her childhood. Then she saw a large box of chocolate brazils. She smiled. Of course Zelda Vere would eat chocolate brazils, probably while drinking crème de menthe. ‘I’ll have them,’ she said, pointing.

‘For a present?’ the woman asked, reaching for the large box.

‘Yes,’ Isobel said.

‘Lucky lady,’ the woman said.

‘Yes,’ Isobel agreed. ‘She is terribly lucky.’

She parked on the side of the road on the way back to her house and ate a dozen of them, one after another, with intense relish, filling her mouth with the sharp taste and then savouring the warm nuttiness of the centre. When she had eaten so many that she felt slightly, guiltily queasy, she hid the rest of the box under a scarf on the back seat. She was just about to start the car when she remembered Troy’s warning that the compartments between Isobel Latimer and Zelda Vere must be watertight. She must be like a spy. Reluctantly she got from the car and looked at the land falling away from the road – a patchwork of fields intersected by half-hidden lanes, a farmhouse down to her left, her own house hidden by the fold of the hill. With a powerful overarm throw she flung the box high into the air. It went up in a grand arc into the blue sky and then turned over in the air and scattered chocolate brazils like a rain storm of incredible richness. Isobel clapped her hands together in delight and watched the expensive chocolates tumble recklessly down on Kent.

‘That was pure Zelda Vere,’ she whispered to herself and wiped the chocolate from her lips, pulled up the sagging waistband of her navy skirt, got back into the car and drove home.

‘Did you get some whisky?’ Philip asked her. ‘We’re nearly out.’

‘Didn’t you put it on the list for Mrs M? It’s her day to shop tomorrow.’

‘I don’t like her buying my whisky,’ Philip complained.

‘I don’t see why not.’

They were at lunch together. Isobel, a little sick from too many chocolate brazils, was eating very little. Philip had a green salad before him and a slice of cheese on toast.

‘Doesn’t seem right,’ he said.

Isobel raised her eyebrows. She knew that she was being unusually impatient with Philip. Something of the spirit of Zelda Vere had entered her with the chocolate brazils.

‘Well, I wasn’t planning to go down to the village again,’ she said shortly. ‘I want to work this afternoon.’

‘I suppose I’ll have to go then,’ he said. There was a pause while he waited for her to say that she would drive down rather than make him go. Isobel said nothing.

‘I could walk down and you could pick me up,’ he said. ‘It could be my afternoon walk.’

Isobel hesitated for only one moment and then she experienced the familiar rush of guilt at the thought that she was being selfish and ungracious to Philip. ‘Of course,’ she said. ‘Shall I pick you up from the pub at two thirty?’

He smiled, pleased that he had got his own way. ‘Call it three and that’ll give you time to pop into the off licence and buy the whisky on your way,’ he said. ‘I’d rather not trek down the High Street. I’ll wait for you in the pub.’

‘All right,’ Isobel said again. ‘At three.’

‘There’s a problem with the manuscript,’ Troy said on the telephone.

Isobel felt the falling sensation of fear. ‘What?’ she asked quickly.

‘I don’t think you completely understand the genre,’ he said.

‘What d’you mean?’ Isobel demanded. She looked at the screen before her where Charity was about to confront the businesswoman who had left the coven and founded an international cosmetics business. Charity was posing as a model, the face of the spring collection. At any moment she would tie the woman up and scar her face forever. The woman would never be seen in public again. Isobel was as certain as she could be that the scene was a perfect example of the genre.

‘It’s these semi-colons,’ Troy said, the glee at last revealed in his voice.

‘What?’

‘Nobody in popular fiction uses semi-colons. They wouldn’t know what to do with them.’

‘What do they use?’

‘Commas. They use nothing but commas.’

‘But what about subjunctive clauses?’

‘Commas again.’

‘Lists?’

‘Still commas.’

‘Do they use full colons?’

‘Never!’ Troy exclaimed gleefully. ‘You’re still too erudite, Isobel. It’s a dead giveaway. You’ll have to re-format these chapters before I can send them out. They have to have nothing but commas and full stops. Nothing else.’

Isobel could hear the laughter in her own voice. ‘But the story?’

‘Perfect,’ Troy said. ‘Perfect in every way. It’s a hit, Isobel. Or rather, I should say, Zelda. We’ve hit the jackpot. You’re going to make a lot of money with this one. I promise.’

She closed her eyes for a moment and felt the sense of relief wash through her, unknot the tightness in her shoulders and the strain around her eyes. ‘A lot of money,’ she repeated softly. She visualised the swimming pool they would build in the barn so that Philip could exercise his muscles daily. The gymnasium they would put next to it. And she would buy some clothes – not in the Zelda Vere league of course, but some well-cut, elegant clothes. And she might get her hair tinted, just to give herself a little more – ‘Presence,’ she whispered. She would get her ears pierced and wear earrings which would show off the length of her neck. And Philip, fitter from swimming, might yet admire her looks.

‘Replace all the semi-colons with commas or full stops. And rough up the text a bit,’ Troy commanded. ‘Your imagery is still too precise, think cliché, darling, not original imagery. More cliché and not so many long words. And then send it to me again and I’ll send it out to all the publishers.’

‘All the publishers?’ she queried. ‘Not just Penshurst?’

‘Absolutely not!’ he declared. ‘We’re going to be fighting them off for this manuscript. They’ll all want to buy it. We’ll have to hold an auction.’

Philip put his head around the study door. ‘Isn’t it time for lunch?’ he asked.

Isobel flinched and moved her head so that she blocked his view of the screen.

Philip saw that she was on the telephone. ‘Who is it?’

She put her hand over the mouthpiece and whispered: ‘Troy, I’ll only be a moment.’

‘Can’t he phone back?’

Isobel nodded. ‘Just one minute more.’

Philip waited for a moment, and when she did not put down the telephone he made a little irritable tutting noise, pointed to his wrist watch, and went out of the room, closing the door briskly behind him.

‘An auction?’ Isobel whispered into the phone.

‘Is it safe to talk?’

‘Yes, if I’m quick.’

Troy, miles away in London, lowered his voice as if to keep the secret safe. ‘I’ll send the three chapters and a synopsis out to all the big London publishers. They’ll read it, and then they’ll bid. We’ll give them a starting price and we’ll take bids over the telephone. We’ll let it go on for a day – not longer. At the end of the day the highest bid gets the book.’

‘But how will they know what price to pay? How will they know what it’s worth?’

‘That’s the joy of it! They won’t know. Because nobody knows Zelda Vere so they can’t set a price based on her previous sales. She’s a dark horse. They have to gamble. But when they know that all the others are in and making bids they’ll all make bids too. It’s my job to get the buzz going, to get the excitement up.’

Isobel closed her eyes again and saw once more the warm waters of the heated pool and the clean white tiles. ‘And my job to write the novel.’

‘And lose those semi-colons,’ Troy advised. ‘How long before you are finished?’

Isobel looked at the screen. This was only Charity’s second victim, she had to seek revenge on two others and then meet and fall in love with the leader. ‘It’s got to be two months,’ she said. ‘I can’t see how to do it quicker.’

‘Perfect,’ Troy said. ‘I’ll get the buzz going at once.’

Four

Rhett crushed her in his strong grip, his powerful member pressing against her thighs in a forceful reminder of their pleasure of the night before when she had lain whimpering with ecstasy beneath the pounding rush of his thrusts.

‘Do you swear that you love me more than you have ever loved anyone?’ Charity demanded.

‘I swear it,’ he said hoarsely. She could feel him pressing against her more urgently. In a moment, she knew she would succumb –

‘No, melt.’

– melt into his arms

‘No, beneath …’

beneath his desire and her resolve would be lost.

‘I love you more than anyone,’ he promised. ‘If I lost you my life would not be worth living.’

They were the words she had been waiting for.

‘I will be your wife,’ she said. ‘Love me.’

‘Mmm,’ Isobel muttered critically. She sat back for a moment and then typed a new version.

They were the words she had been waiting for. She drew back from him, quickly before the seduction of his body should entrap her.

‘You will never see me again,’ she said icily. ‘You will spend the rest of your life longing for me, longing for another night like last night, aching for my body, crying for my smile. This is the great revenge I have played out upon you. You will never be happy again.’

He would have snatched her to his mouth for a rain of hungry kisses but he was too late. Charity had slipped out of his embrace and was gone.

The last thing she heard was the cry of a man completely destroyed.

‘The end,’ Isobel wrote in quiet triumph. ‘The end.’ She hesitated, looking at the screen. ‘But which end?’

She turned to the bookshelves and pulled out the hidden commercial novels and flicked through to the last pages. They all ended happily. Isobel paused. ‘I can’t do it,’ she said with sudden resolution. ‘Even to work inside the genre, I can’t do it. This is a story about a woman who takes revenge, about a woman taking a decision about the sort of life she wants to live. I won’t have her melting at the last moment. I want her to be free, I want her to leave the man and go.’

She pushed her chair back from the desk and unconsciously unravelled the knot of her hair, ran her fingers through the thick softness of it and then tied it back up. ‘I can’t bear to have her just collapse under a man, after all she’s been through,’ Isobel whispered. ‘This isn’t a story about wanting a man. This is a story about a woman making her own choices. About a woman who has the guts to say that love is not the important thing: the important thing is autonomy.’

She stabbed a grip firmly into the re-made bun, pulled her chair closer to the desk, and with one sweep of the computer mouse, highlighted the tender reconciliation scene and cut it. It disappeared from the screen leaving Charity’s curse on the man she had loved and her disappearance from his life.

‘Quite right too,’ Isobel said with satisfaction. ‘Why should a woman be stuck with a man?’ She paused for a moment, savouring the sense of completion. Then she picked up the telephone.

‘It’s finished,’ she announced to Troy. ‘I’ve done it.’

‘Zelda Vere – well done!’ he said in a whisper. ‘And something’s come up here.’

‘What?’

‘You know the auction date is next Tuesday?’

‘Of course,’ she said. ‘I wanted it finished by then so you could tell them you had the whole book, as soon as it is bought.’

‘One of them wants to meet you.’

‘What?’

‘It’s not unreasonable. They’re talking about investing a lot of money. But it does leave us with a bit of a problem. D’you think you could come up and be Zelda Vere for a day? Say on the Monday?’

‘For how many people?’ Isobel spoke cautiously but she had a great sense of excitement and anticipation at the thought of putting on Zelda Vere’s beautiful clothes and her golden head of hair and that wonderful makeup.

‘I don’t know how many would want to come. You’d have to be prepared for half a dozen. And you’ll have to have a back-story. You’ll have to think who Zelda is, where she comes from. Where she got the ideas for this novel. Why don’t you come and stay the night before, Sunday night, and we’ll spend some time and get our act together?’

Isobel thought quickly. Mrs M. usually came in to sleep if Isobel was away at literary conferences or at book festivals. She generally brought a videotape and she and Philip would settle down for the evening and watch something trivial. He would complain for days after that her company rotted his brain; but his relish for the light thrillers which she chose was undeniable.

‘If I can, I will,’ Isobel said. ‘I’ll have to sort out things here.’

‘I think we need to spend some time on this,’ Troy said. Unusually for him, he sounded anxious. ‘I didn’t look ahead to this. I thought they’d just snap at the book. I didn’t think they’d want to meet you before the auction.’

‘It’s all right.’ Isobel heard herself sounding calm and reassuring. She realised that she was looking forward to being Zelda Vere. She wanted to wear that lovely suit, to be a blonde beautiful woman. She wanted to see her long legs in the gold strappy sandals and to wear the expensive underwear against her skin. She even wanted the firm sensation of the underwired bra pressing against the bones of her chest. She wanted to be that other woman, far away from the tedium and the responsibility of her normal life.