The Way You Look Tonight Read online

  ‘Right. Put them all together and what do you get? One, two, three . . .’

  ‘Air-hair-lair!’

  ‘Which is how the Queen says: “Oh, hello”,’ Stella finished. ‘See? I told you it was easy.’

  Dorothy Rockfair clapped her hands and looked over her shoulder at Stella, her eyes sparkling.

  ‘You know what, honey? Sylvia is going to just love you.’

  Stella was surprised at how comfortable she felt with her hosts, so soon after meeting them. Of course, she’d heard this about Americans. Everyone knew they had a God-given talent for relaxed, easy friendliness. But she hadn’t expected things to go quite so swimmingly from the start; the Rockfairs were, she knew, a sophisticated, intellectual couple. She was a senior member of the faculty at Smith and he was a respected historian, author of weighty but best-selling books on nineteenth-century America. Jeb was considered an expert on slavery, the American Civil War, and President Lincoln.

  They were utterly unlike the professors she’d known at Cambridge. Her glamorous and beautiful mother was the exception that proved the rule: most of the dons and academics they knew shared the same dusty, desiccated air, along with the dusty and desiccated clothes that they affected to wear. And how ponderously they carried their academic titles and their learning! Some of her lecturers at Girton were incapable of holding a conversation about anything outside their narrow fields of expertise.

  ‘Walking, talking cobwebs,’ was her mother’s usual description.

  The Rockfairs could hardly be more different. For a start, they had undeniable glamour. Dorothy wasn’t exactly what you might call beautiful, Stella decided, but she certainly drew the eye. When Stella had passed from the baggage hall into the arrivals terminal earlier, she had spotted her hostess at once: tall and slim, with beautifully cut auburn hair feathered close to her face, and wearing black slacks pushed into ski-boots. She held a dark green ski jacket draped over one shoulder. Stella thought Dorothy Rockfair looked like a secret agent in a Hollywood spy thriller.

  For some reason, her husband reminded Stella of what she imagined a newspaper editor might look like. Strong jaw, already darkened by four o’clock shadow (it was barely past midday), glossy black hair oiled back in a classic short-back-and-sides, and wearing a crisp, white tailored shirt tucked into well-pressed silver-grey trousers. The matching jacket – he’d called it a ‘coat’ when he slipped it off earlier while they had stopped at a red light – was now neatly folded on the back seat next to Stella, and it looked suspiciously like pure silk to her. Jeb had rolled his shirtsleeves back to the elbows. Muscles in tanned forearms flexed as he steered the car towards Northampton. She decided he played a lot of tennis.

  Stella suddenly remembered her mother telling her that, when she was staying with her hosts the year before, Jeb been invited at short notice on to one of the USA’s most popular entertainment television programmes, The Ed Sullivan Show.

  ‘It’s basically a variety programme, Stella,’ Diana explained. ‘Not at all the place you’d expect to see a distinguished Professor of History pop up. Anyway, they were doing a daft musical number based on Abraham Lincoln and afterwards Ed Sullivan did a jokey interview with Jeb, as a leading expert on Lincoln’s life. He – Jeb, I mean – was hilarious. Extremely dry and witty. Dorothy and I watched it from home; we were so nervous for him we were drinking neat bourbon, but we needn’t have worried. We raised our glasses to the TV when it was over and cheered. I remember telling her you’d never get Jeb’s British equivalent to do something like that here. Can you imagine Dr Woodman from Girton going on Sunday Night at the London Palladium and larking about with Bruce Forsyth? You could hardly conceive of a more bizarre, unlikely scenario, could you? It doesn’t bear thinking about.’

  The Lincoln suddenly dipped into a deep pothole. There was a sharp thump and groaning of suspension, and Stella gave a faint yelp of surprise.

  ‘Hey, all right in the back there?’

  ‘Yes, fine thanks – sorry, I was just startled out of a daydream. Where are we?’

  Dorothy waved expansively at the rolling farmland and woods on either side of the road.

  ‘God’s own land – the sweetest countryside in the whole of America. I was born on a farm here so I should know.’

  ‘You’re right, it’s lovely,’ agreed Stella. ‘I’ve been thinking how pretty and prosperous-looking it all is since we got out of Boston. Sort of like a patchwork quilt, lots of different-sized fields and meadows and beautiful old trees everywhere. It reminds me of that film, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. I hadn’t expected America to look so . . . well, quaint and old-fashioned. What kind of farm did you grow up on, Dorothy?’

  ‘You can take your pick around here – we’ve got all sorts in Massachusetts. Horse ranches, cattle farms, fruit orchards . . . but I was brought up on one of those.’ She pointed to a green meadow where what appeared to be a red-painted barn on wheels was slowly scything down vast swathes of long grass.

  ‘My dad made hay; made hay while the sun shone, you could say, on glorious days just like this . . . I used to sit on the back of his combine harvester like that one over there and read my books. He’d look round at me and say: “Little girl, don’t you get enough of those at school?” and I’d smile back at him. I knew he knew I’d never be a farmer’s wife, not that he cared either way. He just wanted me to be happy. So God knows how I ended up with this long drink of charged water here.’ She poked her husband affectionately in the ribs.

  ‘Hey, don’t dig the driver! Anyway, she asked where we are, not where you come from.’

  Jeb spoke over his shoulder to Stella. ‘We’re about three-quarters of the way there – it’s only a hundred miles or so from Boston to Northampton, and Smith. This is Interstate 90, the Massachusetts Turnpike. See that bridge up ahead? That takes us over the Connecticut River. It used to be called the Great River – flows all the way down from Quebec up north and if you jumped on a raft here, you’d eventually be spat out into Long Island Sound. One way to get to see New York, huh?’ He slowed down as they approached a toll station, fumbling inside an ashtray.

  ‘Damn! Where’s my change?’

  Dorothy looked slightly hunted. ‘Er . . . I took it for cigarettes at the airport, Jeb. I left my purse at home again.’

  ‘Great. You always do this.’ He turned as they pulled up at the barrier and looked round sheepishly at Stella.

  ‘Sorry to ask for a cash loan, so soon after making your acquaintance, but I don’t suppose you have any quarters on you, do you, honey?’

  Stella nodded, enjoying his discomfiture. For some reason she felt an irresistible urge to tease him.

  ‘Yes, actually, I do. My mother found some in a drawer yesterday and gave them to me just before I left.’ She pursed her lips, making an elaborate show of considering the matter. ‘But you’ll have to sing for them first.’

  ‘What the – you’re kidding. What exactly do I have to sing?’

  ‘“Buddy, Can You Spare a Dime”, please. Any verse will do.’

  Jeb stared at her a moment and then turned gloomily to his wife. ‘Can you imagine what she’ll be like when she teams up with Sylvia? My life won’t be worth a damn. Can’t we just drop her off at the YWCA?’

  The driver behind them honked his horn and Stella jingled the coins in one hand.

  ‘Do you want these quarters or don’t you?’

  Jeb cleared his throat.

  5

  He had to drive north all the way up Route 1, as far as Coral Gables, to get the one he wanted.

  It was the 900 series. They’d only been in the stores for a year or so. None of the photographic outlets in the Keys had them yet and he didn’t want any of the outdated models the salesmen there had done their best to foist on him.

  Like the knives he chose, only the best would do for his peaches.

  He would have gone the day before, but Thursdays were his college nights and there wouldn’t be time between finishing work
and his class to get to Coral Gables and back. He could have skipped that week’s lecture but they were studying Paradise Lost this term and he fucking loved Milton and his take on Lucifer and Adam and Eve. Fucking loved it. Others in his class were moaning that it was too obscure and boring but he didn’t know what the hell they were talking about. He’d read the whole thing in under a week and was now reading it for the second time. He’d already started writing his 3, 000 word review of it and planned to ask his tutor if he could go over by maybe 500 words or so. There was just so much to say. The thing was a goddamned masterpiece.

  The Polaroid came with a free pack of film but he bought two more to be on the safe side. As soon as he got back to the parking lot he took the camera out of its cardboard box and inserted the double roll of film – one for recording the images, the other for instantly starting to develop them. He’d never held a Polaroid before. It was much heavier than a regular camera. He still couldn’t quite believe that it would simultaneously take and develop pictures.

  He wasn’t sure what to photograph for the test shots but in the end he snapped off some frames of his ’61 Dodge Dart. God, he loved that car, with its concave aluminium grill and fabulous elongated fins at the back above the huge rear fender. No wonder Miami-Dade police had chosen the new Dodges for their fleet of highway patrol cars. The sedans looked pretty cool in their official black-and-white county livery but he preferred the dark-red paint job on his limited-issue Dart Phoenix, with the long tapering gold and cream flashes down the sides that he had carefully sprayed on himself. They were meant to suggest the Florida sky at sunset.

  A few minutes later he was inspecting his photographs with a kind of wonder: he’d never been dumb enough to believe in miracles, not like his mother with her holy water and rosary and Hail Marys. None of that crap had stopped his father from running out on her when she’d been pregnant with the only kid she’d ever have. Her prayers hadn’t brought the bastard back, either.

  But the near-instant images he was holding in his hands seemed to him to be possessed by a kind of magic. He knew it was down to basic, classroom chemistry but all the same he felt an almost primitive superstition pricking his blood as he gazed at pictures he had conjured up moments earlier out of thin air. And when he suddenly remembered what the next subject in his viewfinder would be, that very night, his hands trembled slightly and there was a metallic dryness in his mouth. The prospect of being able to review his achievements, immediately, any time he liked, made him briefly dizzy with excitement.

  But there was another reason for buying the camera. The papers had AGAIN failed to mention his signature on the second girl, just like there’d been no description of the first. The cops HAD to be holding out on the press; the news guys wouldn’t be able to resist a juicy titbit like that. The headline would write itself, for Chrissakes. The words practically danced in front of him now:

  ‘EYE-SOCKET SLAYINGS.’

  Screw the cops, tonight he’d take two pictures – one for him, and one for the funnies. He’d send the photo to the Keys Courier. They’d be most likely to run it – they were in deadly competition with the more cautious Miami Herald. The Courier wouldn’t be able to resist such a shocking exclusive, and they’d wire-syndicate it across the country for a small fortune once they’d broken the story for themselves first.

  In forty-eight hours from now he’d be a fucking star from coast to coast.

  He tossed the camera and photos onto the passenger seat and got behind the wheel. As he fired the Dodge up, he began to laugh softly. He’d just thought of another headline, perfect for the Courier:

  ‘LOCAL BOY MAKES GOOD.’

  6

  Dear mother,

  Isn’t Bancroft Road gorgeous? What a house. I love the hardwood floors with rugs strewn everywhere, and that big sea-chest taking pride of place in what they call ‘the great room’, with those tall windows letting all the light in, and that huge open fireplace sunk into the centre of the floor. (I know it’s corny, but so much of what I see here reminds me of American films, and the living room with its split-level floors and sunken fireplace reminds me of the ski lodge in ‘White Christmas’. You know, where Bing Crosby kisses Rosemary Clooney in front of the fire and sings ‘Counting Your Blessings’!)

  Did you know that this house is known as a Colonial Revival Home? I had to look it up in the library here (imagine having a house big enough for your own private library) and apparently no sooner did the New Englanders get their independence than they began harking back to the days they were a British colony. This kind of white-painted wood-framed house with its screened porch and shuttered storm windows is a throwback to those days. The streets are full of them.

  Stella tossed her pen aside. She could finish her letter home later, when she got back from the barbecue. She climbed off her bed and went into her bathroom. Time to inspect the damage from yesterday.

  Stella looked balefully at her reflection in the bathroom mirror. She was furious with herself. She’d spent far too long on the porch the previous afternoon, gossiping with Sylvia and writing letters home, and had scarcely noticed that the Massachusetts sun had swung clear of the balcony above her to shine fully on her unprotected face. By the time she woke up this morning, her cheeks and forehead were radiant with heat and sore to the touch.

  ‘I look like a boiled lobster,’ she muttered to herself. ‘I can’t go to the barbecue like this.’

  Sylvia, who had come into the adjoining bedroom to borrow a belt for her new Levi’s, poked her head around the bathroom door.

  ‘Good God, Stella,’ she exploded in laughter. ‘You look like you’ve observed an H-bomb test at close range! What happened?’

  ‘You should bloody know,’ Stella snapped. ‘You were on the porch yesterday too. Why didn’t you warn me? Why don’t you look like this? Look at you! You’re brown as a berry. Oh God . . .’

  ‘That’s because I’m a Massachusetts girl,’ Stella replied, choking back her laughter. ‘I start getting acclimatised from April when the sun comes back.’

  ‘Bully for you. What on earth am I going to do? I can’t meet the

  Kennedys looking like this. I can’t meet anyone like this.’

  ‘Don’t worry – I’ve just the thing.’ Sylvia vanished back down the hall towards her bedroom.

  Stella liked Sylvia. Physically, they were similar – both on the tall side, with curly shoulder-length hair cut to a fringe. But Stella’s blue eyes – her father’s eyes – played to Sylvia’s brown, and although the American girl was pretty with a cheerleader’s smile that revealed (unnaturally) perfect teeth, as Stella moved into her early twenties she was increasingly compared to the Hollywood actress of the day, Elizabeth Taylor. They shared the same delicate but determined chin, almond-shaped eyes, and slim, tapering hands and feet. And while Stella might not have quite possessed Taylor’s impressive décolletage, she felt she didn’t exactly have to apologise for herself in that department.

  In fact, when she had arrived at London Airport’s first-class lounge the week before, the freelance press photographers who habitually hung around the concourse hoping to spot someone famous had begun busily taking her picture before they realised their mistake and sheepishly lowered their cameras.

  ‘Sorry, love, we thought you was Liz Taylor for a mo there,’ one of them called to her.

  ‘Thanks,’ she said wryly, as she went into the lounge. ‘She’s nearly ten years older than me.’

  ‘Take it as a compliment, darlin’.’

  Sylvia was back with a tube of what looked like green toothpaste.

  ‘It’s concealer,’ Sylvia explained. ‘This’ll do the trick.’

  ‘But it’s green!’ Stella protested. ‘I can’t put this stuff on. I’ll look like – I don’t know, the wicked witch in The Wizard of Oz . . . or a Martian.’

  ‘Trust me,’ Sylvia said, confidently dabbing on the cream with her fingertips. ‘It’ll take the redness down and when you put your make-up on top you’ll look f
ine. Actually, it’ll appear as if you have a nice suntan. Our little secret.’

  Twenty minutes later, Stella could see Sylvia had been right. All signs of redness had gone, even from her nose, which shortly before had resembled the glowing tail-light on Jeb’s Lincoln.

  She went to her bedroom door in her dressing gown and poked her head into the hall. ‘What are you wearing to the party, Sylvia?’ she called.

  ‘Jeans and a jumper and sneakers,’ came the muffled reply from the next bedroom. ‘Gotta keep it low-key. If Jackie’s there, you can bet she’ll be in jeans or slacks. You don’t want to outshine the First Lady. How about you?’

  ‘I can’t decide.’ Stella went to her wardrobe and looked unhappily at the clothes she’d brought from England. The summer dresses and skirts and tops she’d worn the year before looked staid and dated to her now. She had experimented with some of the new designs that had come out in the spring of ’62, but none of them looked right for a beach barbecue. Simple A-line skirts (inspired by Mrs Kennedy’s own effortless and much-lauded style) and the chic Harris tweeds with matching satchels that she’d bought from the achingly fashionable Urban Outfitters in London didn’t seem remotely synonymous with sea and sand to her.

  She went back into the hall. ‘Sylvia?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Help!’

  And so it was that an hour later, the Rockfairs and their English guest set off for the coast in the Continental. They looked ‘pretty damned spiffy’, as Jeb put it. Dorothy was in pink slacks and a white fitted cardigan; Jeb wore a sailing cap at a rakish angle above an electric-blue nylon windcheater.

  Stella was in pale blue jeans (Sylvia’s), a white cotton sweatshirt (Sylvia’s) with ‘Boston’ printed in large black letters across the front and ‘Red Sox’ emblazoned in crimson on the back, and high-topped sneakers (Sylvia’s) on her feet. A Red Sox baseball cap (Sylvia’s) with her hair poking out behind in a ponytail completed her outfit.

  Dorothy turned around in the sedan’s front seat to admire her.