And told us to get lost… As for feminism in general, well, my position here was that of the unbudgeably powerful mob boss who, when piqued by bothersome incursions that threaten to sour the whole deal, calls the Ladies in and calmly says, Okay, so you want a piece of this. What kept you? We thought you were happy doing all that other stuff. You stayed quiet for however many million years it is. Now you tell us. But I’m a reasonable man. Some time soon there’s a concession coming up in one of our out-of-town operations. If everything goes through okay and you keep your nose clean, who knows, we might be able to …
‘John Self?’
She stood there, poised, peering. No matter how butch and pushy they get, girls will never lose this air of sensitive expectancy. Or I hope they won’t. She wore roomy dungarees and a much-patched flying jacket — anti-rape clothes, mace clothes. They didn’t work. Now here’s someone, I thought to myself, here’s someone who’s really worth raping. With a good lawyer you’d only get a couple of years. It’s not so bad in the nick these days. They have ping-pong, telly, individual cells.
‘Sit down, Doris,’ I said, dead cool. ‘Let me get you a pint. Fat Paul!’
‘No — just water.’
‘Designer water, or is from the tap okay?’
‘From the tap is fine.’
I heaved myself up and trudged to the bar in my boxy suit. I turned. Doris was looking around with an anthropological eye … Some months ago Fielding had sent me a copy of this chick’s first book, a slender album of short stories. Young Doris had apparently done all right for herself in the States. The underlined bits of the clippings which Fielding’s LA office had enclosed spoke warmly of her originality and offbeat erotic power. The book was called The Ironic High Style, for some reason. For some other reason, one of the stories was called that too. I had yawned and blinked my way through several of these tales, late at night, looking for this offbeat erotic power. I read the one called The Ironic High Style’. It was about a tramp who spoke exclusively in quotations from Shakespeare. All he did was beg and ponce and scrounge, but he talked Shakespeare while doing it. This old tramp — I can’t tell you what a pain in the pipe he was. Anyway, even I could see that her straight dialogue had a lot of swing to it, and that’s what Doris was on the payroll for. Fielding had said she was a Jewish princess. She was certainly a little miracle to look at, a North African queen bee, with satanic complexion, hot black eyes, a blazing, tearing mouth … Oh, man. No wonder she dressed down. But there’s probably nothing you can do about those kinds of looks. They’re uncontrollable. They came at me straight through the shimmer of the heat-ripple hangover I was wearing. They peeled away its seven veils.
Like Bill from Box Office, Doris took out a pad and gazed at me encouragingly. ‘The original idea,’ she whispered. ‘You want to tell me a little about it? I mean, where was it set?’
‘What?’
‘I said where was it set?’
I shrugged. ‘Here,’ I said.
Together we stared sadly round the half-converted vault — at the rosewood, the moist velvet plush, the curtains limp against the stained glass, the brutal slab of the pool table, the armless bandits, Fat Paul with his pale eyes, his pub face, slack-mouthed as he watched the clock, ticking its way to noon.
‘Here. I was born upstairs. My dad owns this place.’
‘No kidding.’ The toy phrase slipped strangely from those opulent, deep-olive lips. Her teeth are like pearls, pearls in the oyster of the Shakespeare. I inhaled noisily and said, ‘It’s like this. There’s a Father, a Mother, a Son and a Mistress. The Mistress is shared by Father and Son. She was Father’s first, but then Son muscled in there too. Son knows about Father but Father doesn’t know about Son. Okay? You with me? You see, Father has been —’
‘I got it.’