Dolly and the Singing Bird (8 page)

On the following day, Wednesday, the sun shone and the day’s slow motoring through the Crinan Canal provided all the convalesecence I needed. While Rupert and Lenny leaped up and down cavernous walls, threw and received ropes, switched engines on and off, heaved open lock gates in the company of curious sunburnt men and their dogs, greeted oncoming boats and dispensed, for four solid hours, more invidious regional gossip than fifty women in fifty teashops could do in a lifetime, Johnson continued to paint me; and as he did so, I talked.

Afterwards, I wondered if it was the gin or merely the blow on the head which made me so loquacious. Or perhaps, when there is violence in the air, one has an instinct to make one’s will to society: to be known and to be understood.

I am not ashamed of my past. On the contrary, I like to remember how I, from nothing and less than nothing, have become Tina Rossi, with ninety thousand pounds in the bank, and cinnamon diamonds.

Nor am I bitter. In the war my father’s family in Poland were killed. I suffered nothing but to be born in Fife, Scotland, where my father flew with other exiled Polish airmen, met and married my mother, and then died in a crash. I never knew him —or my mother, who died when I was born.

I was in an institution of one sort or another until I was seven. Then I was at school, and finding out that children from a Home were regarded as different; and also finding out what “bastard” implied. My father had married my mother, but the result was the same. He was a foreigner; she was a potato picker; they were both absent, and my mother’s relatives were largely unemployed and unemployable. It didn’t do to shout back or to fuss. I changed the subject, made a new game, admired a hairclasp. My teacher had by then discovered that I had a talent—a high, true voice—but it didn’t do to make much of that either. I hated it when I was singled out to deliver a song. It destroyed in a minute all the laborious progress I had made.

Later, when I was passed from one foster home to another, it was different. A talent brought the household some credit. I sang in church choirs, and was spoken to by ministers’ wives, but the attention I attracted was fleeting. In those days one moved without warning. I would hear a strange voice downstairs, and my foster mother of a year or less would shout to me to fold up my clothes. In half an hour I would be packed and walking downstairs, to the nameless persons waiting below.

Sitting in the train with a strange woman, in a shrunken coat with my battered bag on the rack, I never wondered where I was going. Places were all much the same. The woman might have two children of her own, or three, as well as several she was paid for; and human nature being what it is, the best of the clothes and the food went to her own. I learned to keep house in a dozen different ways in a dozen different sorts of places, from stone fisher cottages on the windy, raw east coast to a shepherd’s timber house in the Borders. Every woman had her own way, and what I learned to do in one place I had to unlearn quickly at the next.

I moved on from one to the other without regret, and bent all my mind only to making myself acceptable and useful as quickly as possible. I worked hard, and I smiled all the time. And while I was smiling, I decided that one day I was going to be rich, and famous, and sought-after. I would imagine, while writing my weekly letters to all my foster mothers and to the lady superintendents of the homes, how I would gradually break the news. I was a constant letter-writer in those days.

Not all of this I told Johnson, but enough. He made few comments, but neither did he express surprise or pity, or even admiration. He was, after all, wealthy and spoiled. Perhaps because of this, I went on to tell him of the later years, when I was put out to service in my northern village; and when, taken into the shooting lodge that season, I met Chase Ruddyman and his friends, over from Hollywood. He was due to make a big film in London when the shooting was over; and he took me back with him, to help staff his leased house. I was a very hard and a good worker; and this was what I had worked for. Also, I sang as I worked.

The rest is very well known. I was cheerful, I was hardworking, I had no self-pity. I made Chase laugh with my mixture of shrewdness and naïveté, and in time he discovered my voice. Chase and I have never been lovers. I was too remote from his world for that; and besides his taste never ran to women—all the world knows that. All the world knows too of the household he kept; actors and adventurers and artists, all the café society of the interpretative arts. He was the first man I had ever known to be careless with his wealth. All he got, he spent—on luxury, on sensation. His presents were kingly; but next week, after playing all night at a gambling club, he might be a pauper, and his secretary would be on the phone to Madrid, feverishly fixing up a new contract, a new film. Or, unexpectedly, a new backer would be charmed into the circle, and his tailors and his wine merchant would breathe again.

It was he who sent me to the Vienna conservatoire for my initial studies; and then, when the money ran out, it was my teacher in Austria who passed me, on his own account, on to Vittioni in Milan. I repaid my debt in work—and sometimes by selling a sudden, fabulous present from Chase Ruddyman. I wrote all the time to Chase, and his secretary wrote back sometimes. He would have honoured his obligations to me, I know, if he had not been killed in that plane crash. Planes have been fateful for me. But in this world you can get anything you want, if you are ready to work for it. I have no time for the idle.

I was launched from Milan, through an introduction to Giulini by the Conte and Contessa, who paid for my last year of training. They are still my very good friends.

“The prettiest coloratura soprano in the world,” said Johnson, setting down his glass. It was hot. We were tied up beneath the willows in a stretch of water so quiet that one could hear the bees humming in the meadowsweet. The towpath was deserted, and beyond there were only the flat bogs and mosses of Dalriada, and the blue sky. Lenny was below, passing up fresh salmon sandwiches, while Rupert did something among the ropes for’ard. Soon, we should be at the end of the canal, and the next day we should race.

“And it was then that you met Michael Twiss,” added Johnson, tilting his hat over his bifocal glasses. The cockpit smelled of varnish and salmon and Chablis and turpentine and the oily reek of paints; and then there was a little lift of air in the heat, and it smelt of meadowsweet. I glanced forward, where Michael was lying, stripped to the waist, in Bermuda shorts of impeccable cut. I could see the top of his thick lacquered hair, and his rib-cage, and his feet. Michael never put on weight, whatever he ate.

Yes, it was then that Michael Twiss, ambitious and out of work, stranded by a cheap engineering company that went bankrupt behind his back, met the Conte and the Contessa, and smiled and worked hard for them too, and finally met me.

I wasn’t interested. I have seen back in Scotland what happens when one meddles with men. Children happen, and a room and kitchen in Pollokshaws, and hard work where there is no point in smiling, for most people you meet are worse off than yourself.

Then I realised that Michael wasn’t interested either. That I was not a girl, or a passing entertainment, but a paycheck in prospect for the intense Mr. Twiss.

I had never known Michael’s origins, and I had never asked. He had been in his time many things, and had had many trades, but always his work had ended in disaster not of his making. Unlike me, he was embittered. He blamed not his intelligence but his birth, his accent, his lack of schooling, his lack of friends. But in fact he possessed many virtues: a quick brain, an ability to copy and to learn, and a capacity for work like my own. By the time he joined Milanese society he could pass for a gentleman, and when he left it he
was
a gentleman, and dressed and spoke like one. For he had made himself indispensable to my sponsors, and was fast becoming indispensable to me, too.

For my début was a sudden, overwhelming success. I touched on it lightly with Johnson, but. when I speak of it, to myself, my throat is choked with the thought. At last it came, what I had worked for; and because of Ruddyman’s friends, and all the others I had met and cultivated since, other things came, far more quickly than I had a right to expect: recordings, concerts and, finally, films.

For all this I needed a manager. For my money

I needed an adviser. For my new career, I needed grooming. For my voice, I needed a coach.

Michael became all these. It was Michael who, watching the Italian society we moved in, changed my hair to its present French roll; and then employed a hairdresser, whenever I appeared, to vary its style so that I photograph always differently. All my clothes were made finer: my shoes were made of thinner leather, my gloves were kid wisps; my underwear and dresses were of silk that made me more slender yet. And the pounds he forced me to lose!

I was given a style: the jewellery I must wear: the hats I must eschew. And then, he set to work on my voice.

He cannot have known that this talent lay within him, this understanding of music. He had always been fond of it, he said. He possessed, I know, at a time when he had few possessions, an ancient radiogram with bakelite records, which went everywhere with him then. To begin with, he heard me with Vittioni, listening to my faults being explained; and to Vittioni’s interpretation of the arias. Then, when he found me practising, Michael would act as Vittioni, correcting, reminding, forcing me to work on and on, improving until I was reproducing exactly what the master had said. He grew to know my voice better than I did myself; and then, as it came to light, to have a feeling for the music as great as my master’s. The day came when, having done all that could be done on my Mozart for the next study, Michael made me go on to tackle a recitative and aria I had never before sung. I learned afterwards that he had spent all the previous night poring over it in manuscript. In any case, the result was climacteric. Before Vittioni, next day, I sang Michael’s interpretation of Donna Elvira; and the master, silent for a long moment, suddenly rose and kissed me on both cheeks. Michael had made of me not a pupil, but a singer.

He went everywhere with me after that. I paid his living expenses, and a tenth of what I earned he took, and probably much else of his own on private business besides. He was rich and wore only silk shirts, and referred to the owners of opera houses by their Christian names—but very occasionally he still dropped his aitches. He had women friends, I knew, but he was discreet about them. And nothing, ever, was allowed to come between him and his chosen vocation, which was Tina Rossi.

But I said nothing of this at all to the bifocal glasses reflecting the bright cushions of
Dolly
. I merely said, “Yes. I’m very lucky to have Michael: he’s a genius for management. And he makes me work far too hard. But for Michael I should spend all my life lying on beautiful boats such as yours, being painted. Michael! Do you hear! You are a slave-driver.”

“Do I look like a slave driver?” said Michael lazily. But I knew that this evening at Crinan there would be a handful of telegrams waiting for him; and he would go ashore and make phone calls; and then out of that damned pigskin dispatch case would come the score of someone’s interminable opera, which I should then have to learn. I found I was frowning, and smoothed out my face. It was silly to be angry with Michael. Without him I should still be striving to do all these things. Without me, he would be nothing.

Then, it seemed, almost at once, we were on the last sunny stretches, and the canal basin, where we were to spend the evening and night, lay there before us.

Folded in greenery, with the blue sea beyond the lock gates and the green coastal hills and isles in the distance, the last stretch of the canal and the basin at Crinan itself was packed with yachts as with groceries. And not only yachts. Motor launches, small puffers, wartime conversions of ungainly size and unforgettable shape crowded the water, where also I could see the stout dark red belly of the Buchanan’s sloop
Binkie
, the shabby decking of Ogden’s string-tethered
Seawolf
, and the shining twin masts of Hennessy’s yawl, the suave
Symphonetta
.

“Well, there it is, Tina,” Johnson was saying. He stood, pipe in mouth, conning her in, and waving cursorily from time to time as he was hailed from either side. “All the essence of a paranoic scout camp financed by a brewery. Port, Rupert. We’ll get in beside
Cara Mia
.”

“My God, is she there?” said Rupert, craning to see over the coachroof as he eased the tiller. “Jane! Cindy!”

Two reclining figures, one in a man’s shirt and the other in an arrangement of string fulfilling the minimum requirements of decency, rolled over on the decks of a big motor cruiser as we slid past, and waved. Victoria was there too, in her patched trousers and bare feet, with a screwdriver, half sunk, in her hand. “And my God, Ogden will dig that,” said Rupert as he reversed and cut.

“He doesn’t like the
Cara Mia
?” It was not hard to see why. Compared with this, Cecil Ogden’s
Sea-wolf
was a cereal packet, with a hole in the bottom instead of a gift.

“Dotty sub-debs aren’t much in Cecil’s line,” said Rupert. “The boat belongs to Moody the financier —that’s Tim Moody over there.”

True enough, a young man came into view in very small boxer shorts and a peaked cap from the Aquatic Sports Club, Barbados. Two other boys and a fat girl in a catsuit made their appearance, and there was a general clinking and pouring. Daddy, clearly, was absent at work in the City. Music, of a sort, shuddered out from the decks.

“Huddy Leadbetter’s new single,” said Rupert thoughtfully, effecting a final clove hitch. He avoided looking at Johnson.

“Goodbye,” said Johnson lazily. “Give them my love, and don’t smoke anything I wouldn’t smoke.

In five minutes, Rupert had gone.

In five more minutes Michael too had gone, hellbent for the hotel and the telephone, leaving a fallout of Trumper’s Eucris behind him. A succession of working parties began to move round from boat to boat, like bees preparing to swarm. The clinking of glasses, competing strains of tape, radio and record player, and loud bellows of laughter, live performance, were heard all over the basin. Some of the parties came aboard
Dolly
, and Lenny served drinks.