Say Yes Samantha Read online

  “Supper is extra,” she said. “I expect all my boarders to be out for lunch. Most of them work, like yourself.”

  She showed me where the bathroom was on a half-landing and told me that I must pay sixpence every time I used it.

  Then she said,

  There is a lounge where you can entertain your friends, but you must understand that friends are not allowed in your bedroom.”

  She said ‘friends’ in rather a strange voice and I thought it was most unlikely that anyone would want to visit me in such a bare and cheerless place. But I didn’t say so and after a moment Mrs. Simpson went on in a more severe tone,

  “What’s more, I don’t expect gentlemen to be entertained in the lounge after ten o’clock. Is that quite clear?”

  “Yes, of course,” I answered. “But, as I don’t know anyone in London, I think it is unlikely that I shall have anyone coming to see me here.”

  She gave me a hard look as if she thought that I was deceiving her and then she went downstairs to tell the porter to bring up my luggage.

  I unpacked and went to bed. I must admit that, lying on the hard mattress in the dark, I suddenly felt homesick and wished I had never set out on this adventure.

  I felt I would much rather be in my own comfortable little bed, knowing that there was nothing more alarming to think about tomorrow than getting up in time to prepare Daddy’s breakfast and clear up the mess that had been left in the house after the bazaar.

  I suddenly felt the whole thing was ridiculous.

  How could I, ordinary little Samantha Clyde, expect that anyone in London would think me attractive, let alone beautiful? I was quite certain that, when Giles developed the photographs he had taken of me, he would find I looked hideous.

  In fact I felt thoroughly depressed.

  Reflection 7

  The next few days were awful.

  I went to Giles’s studio first thing in the morning, as he had told me to do and was introduced to his secretary, Miss Macey, a thin, plain, rather bossy woman with glasses, who spoke to Giles in one voice and to me and the other models in quite a different tone.

  She always appeared to despise us, but Melanie and Hortense told me later that it was because she was madly in love with Giles and couldn’t bear any other woman to go near him.

  She always did exactly what he told her. When she was sent out to bring back the clothes he thought I should have, I must say everything she produced was absolutely lovely.

  It would have been difficult to find fault with any of them.

  Melanie had fair golden hair and a baby face, so that she looked very young and almost like an angel off a Christmas tree.

  She looked absolutely wonderful in the photographs Giles had taken of her in dresses for young girls, but she had a sharp tongue and was at times quite vitriolic.

  Hortense, on the other hand, was a brunette and, I thought very attractive, but far too lazy to be cross or disagreeable with anyone. All she wanted to do was sleep.

  “I’m dead on my feet!” she would say every morning when she arrived and at every opportunity would flop down into a chair and shut her eyes. It made Giles simply furious.

  I found there were all sorts of extra little jobs that we were expected to do while we were waiting in the studio for him to photograph us.

  We had to sort out prints, help Miss Macey pack them up, answer the telephone and do all sorts of things that, as Melanie complained continually, were not really part of our job.

  I didn’t mind, but Melanie said that Giles was a slave driver determined to have his ‘pound of flesh’ one way or another, because it annoyed him that we earned so much money outside and he had to give us fifty per cent.

  But he was very kind to me over my clothes.

  I paid for some of them and the rest he allowed me to put down as a debt against my wages.

  For the first time I had money of my own and thought that I was enormously rich!

  Just before Giles called for me at the Vicarage on Sunday evening, Daddy gave me five pounds in notes and a cheque for another fifteen pounds.

  “You can’t spare all that!” I said in astonishment.

  “I don’t want you to feel penniless, Samantha,” he answered, “and you are always to leave yourself enough money for your railway ticket home.”

  “But I can’t spend twenty pounds!” I exclaimed.

  “You’ll find it won’t go far in London,” he said dryly.

  “But how can you afford to give me so much?”

  “I have a little nest egg in the bank against a rainy day,” he said, “and I think today is definitely a storm.”

  I knew he was trying to put a cheerful face on the fact that I was going away and he was still worried about me.

  So I laughed, hugged him and promised that I would pay it all back as soon as I was raking in the millions that Giles had said I would make.

  “I want you to have a good time,” Daddy said. “I realise now how dull it must have been for you here in Little Poolbrook, and I am afraid I forgot how young you were, Samantha, or rather that you are old enough to want something more amusing than parochial tea parties.”

  “If you talk like that, you’ll make me cry,” I said. “I have been happy, terribly happy, and I don’t really want to go away at all. In fact, don’t be surprised if I’m back next week!”

  “Give it a proper trial, Samantha,” he said. “But if anything goes wrong, promise you will come home.”

  “Wrong?” I asked. “What do you mean by wrong?”

  “If you are – unhappy,” Daddy answered, “or if you lose your job.”

  I had a feeling that that was not all he envisaged might happen, but I couldn’t imagine what he was trying to say. So we just waited almost in silence until Giles arrived.

  I had no idea until I actually reached London how important a professional Giles was.

  There was no doubt that he had a name to conjure with, as they say.

  “Are you really a ‘Giles Bariatinsky model’?” people would say to me at parties or, “I might have guessed that Giles Bariatinsky would want to photograph you – he will only do beautiful women.”

  There was a legend, which I found to be untrue, that women who were ugly would offer him a blank cheque to take pictures of them and he would wave them away disdainfully.

  Actually he posed them against the most amazing and fantastic settings so that their ugliness was lost in their surroundings. And when the photographs were developed, he touched them up.

  He was really an artist and he did it so cleverly that he could produce quite lovely photographs of women described by Melanie as having ‘faces like the back of a cab’.

  Of course, they were delighted and would pay astronomical sums to have dozens of prints of each pose to give to their friends.

  I soon found out that sitting for Giles was hard work.

  The lighting was very hot and he would take one pose for hours on end until he was satisfied he had exactly what he wanted.

  It was almost as tiring as the dress shows.

  I had always imagined from the magazines that the girls who wore the dresses of the famous couturiers had a marvellous time.

  I was to find that it was just sheer hard work.

  One would have to put on perhaps twenty dresses for a show and then when it was over put them on over and over again for first one customer and then another.

  Funnily enough, it was Miss Macey who taught me how to walk when I was modelling gowns.

  I learnt there were training schools for mannequins, but Giles thought that they were just a waste of money.

  “If you are naturally graceful, as you are, Samantha,” he said, “you only have to learn a few tricks like holding yourself correctly, moving your feet in the right manner and knowing what to do with your hands.”

  It all sounded quite easy, but it took hours and hours of walking up and down the studio floor, backwards and forwards, turning, smiling, turning again and walking backward
s until Miss Macey and then Giles were satisfied.

  They made me feel gauche and clumsy, but Hortense told me that she had taken far longer to learn what they wanted and that at one time Giles had considered sacking her because she was slow.

  That made me feel better, but when I saw Melanie and Hortense in the first show we all did together, I realised how graceful they were and how they made every dress they put on seem a dream of elegance.

  I soon learnt also that we didn’t work only in the daytime, but in the evening too.

  Giles’s models were expected to appear at cocktail parties wearing dresses that were written about in the newspapers, so that they could be ordered by the smart Socialites who admired them.

  When some of the men who talked to us at cocktail parties asked us out to dinner, Melanie and Hortense made it quite clear that we were expected to accept their invitations.

  I found that the clothes Giles chose for me had all come from famous houses, Pacquin, Revelle, Molyneux and Hartnell.

  These were, of course, last season’s models, which they were prepared to dispose of for a few pounds. But they still had that indefinable chic, which made people look at me when I walked into a restaurant or appeared at a cocktail party.

  For very special occasions we borrowed the current models from the same places.

  I found that extremely nerve-racking. I was so afraid the dress would get torn or that I would upset something on it that I could not enjoy the evening because I was worrying all the time about my clothes.

  Hortense told me a terrifying story of how a young man had upset a glass of wine on a white dress she was wearing and, when the shop it had come from made her pay for it, it had taken her four months before she was out of debt.

  That story did nothing to reassure me and I was more nervous than ever.

  In fact I hated having to borrow a special gown, but Giles became quite angry when he thought I didn’t look spectacular enough.

  His photographs of me were certainly fabulous.

  It was very exciting when I saw them for the first time in Vogue and Miss Macey told me in a condescending way that there was already quite a demand from other magazines and newspapers for my pictures.

  I thought at first of sending copies back to Daddy to show him how marvellous I looked, but then I was afraid that it might upset him.

  I didn’t really look a bit like myself.

  I looked alluring and mysterious, exotic and sophisticated, and sometimes rather fast and improper.

  The young men who took me out in the evening nearly always gave me orchids because they said it was the flower I most resembled.

  Personally I have always thought that orchids are overrated – they have no smell and there is something rather unfriendly about them.

  Of course I couldn’t say so and at first I used to put them painstakingly in a vase when I came home and tried to keep them alive. But in the end I would throw them away and when I could afford it, I would buy myself a few roses from the barrow at the bottom of the street.

  I can’t remember now, looking back, who was the first man to try to kiss me when taking me home from a party.

  All the young men in the Brigade of Guards thought it smart to be seen with the ‘Giles Bariatinsky models’.

  Melanie and Hortense introduced me to some of them and they in their turn introduced me to their friends, so that I found within a week or so I knew quite a number of men in London.

  At first I felt shy of dining alone with a man and much preferred it when they asked Melanie or Hortense to make it a foursome. But one night a young man whom Melanie rather fancied obviously preferred me and she was furious.

  After that the girls wouldn’t make up a four and so it was a case of either going out alone or staying in the boarding house. That was so depressing that I would have done anything to get away.

  Anyway, whoever took me out always seemed to think he must try to kiss me. I was surprised since I had always expected to know a man a long time before he tried to kiss me.

  If my dinner host was driving his own car, he would wait until we drew up outside the boarding house, which looked dark and unwelcoming in the early hours of the morning.

  Then he would put an arm round my shoulders and begin,

  “You are very lovely, Samantha!”

  I grew very adroit at opening the door of the car just as my escort put on the brakes and I would therefore be out on the pavement before he could realise what was happening.

  “Goodnight!” I would say.

  “Wait, Samantha, wait!” he would call as he jumped out of the other side of the car!

  He would catch up with me just as I reached the front door and had my finger on the bell.

  “Aren’t you going to say goodnight to me?” he would ask.

  “Not here,” I would answer quickly.

  Sometimes the porter, who was very old, which was why Mrs. Simpson hired him cheaply, would take some time to shuffle across the hall. Then I would have to twist myself away and struggle a little, but I was always rescued just in time by the door opening.

  “Goodnight, and thank you so much!” I would say and slip inside before he could do anything more about it.

  It was rather more difficult in a taxi, because a taxi door is harder to open from the inside.

  But a man who brought me home in a taxi was, I found, not so dashing or so sure of himself as the ones who owned cars – especially Bentleys.

  He would usually begin with,

  “Please let me kiss you, Samantha.”

  “No,” I’d reply. “I don’t want to be kissed.”

  “You can’t expect me to believe that,” he would protest. “Say yes, Samantha, just this once.”

  There was sometimes a little struggle, but I always managed to avoid being kissed, simply because I didn’t want to be – until I met David.

  Oh, dear, I don’t want to think about that – but I can’t help it. It’s engraved on my heart like ‘Calais’ on Queen Mary’s – that wonderful, magical, unforgettable kiss –

  Reflection 8

  Here we are at the Meldriths’ grand house in Grosvenor Square and I only hope that she won’t ask me if I’ve seen David lately.

  Lady Meldrith may well connect us together considering I met him at one of her parties.

  But perhaps she won’t remember that and now I think about it, there is really no reason why she should give another thought to what happened in June.

  Out of all the people Lady Meldrith has entertained why should she recall the first time she entertained me?

  Of course she has asked me to dinner twice since I came back to London and each time I’ve chucked her at the last moment.

  I just couldn’t face the house and all the memories it has for me! But I am sure that Lady Meldrith only asked me because I am a ‘Giles Bariatinsky model’.

  How well I remember this hall. It impressed me the first time I came here.

  The Meldriths must be extremely rich. I think in fact he is one of the celebrated Captains of Industry or something like that.

  The marble statues are lovely. Peter would appreciate those, but, of course, he must have seen them. I am sure the Meldriths have had everything in this house valued by Christie’s at some time or another.

  The staff look very snooty and bored.

  If I ever entertain, I shall tell my servants to look welcoming and pleasant when people arrive.

  It puts me off a party from the very beginning if the servants appear to find you a nuisance the moment you come in through the door. But I suppose the sort of people the Meldriths entertain don’t care what servants think one way or another.

  I doubt if they even think of them as people.

  Lady Meldrith is what they call ‘Café Society’. She mixes with the grand and the notorious, the famous and the infamous. That sounds frightfully clever, but I didn’t think of it myself. I heard somebody say it about her and I thought it amusing.

  Reflection 9
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br />   It was obvious that Lady Meldrith would invite David to her parties the moment his book made him the most talked about young man in London.

  I had heard of him simply because everybody was arguing about Vultures Pick Their Bones.

  It was a strange, rather creepy title and it seemed to be on everybody’s tongue.

  Pacquin had a dress they called The Vulture after David’s book was serialised in one of the Sunday papers and the critics worked themselves up into a frenzy, half-praising and half-criticising it.

  1 remember Giles telling Miss Macey to try to get David to come and be photographed.

  “Do you know where he lives?” Miss Macey had asked.

  “I’ve no idea,” Giles replied. “Look in the telephone book or try the Clubs. He’s sure to be a member of White’s or Boodle’s.”

  “I’ve seen a photograph of him somewhere,” Melanie said. “I think it was by Dorothy Wilding.”

  She only said that to annoy Giles, who was jealous of Dorothy Wilding, especially when she photographed the people he wanted to do.

  “Get hold of David Durham and do it quickly!” he ordered Miss Macey.

  “If he’s the sort of young man I think he is,” Miss Macey retorted, “it’s unlikely he’ll want to sit for a studio portrait.”

  “According to Melanie, he has already had one taken,” Giles answered.

  He looked at Melanie in a searching sort of way as he spoke and she said uneasily,

  “I may have been mistaken. It might have been somebody else or an ordinary press photograph.”

  I wasn’t really listening to the conversation at the time because I was not interested in David Durham. But because Giles was making such a fuss about him, I said to Miss Macey when he had gone,

  “Who is this writer?”

  “He’s one of the so-called ‘Flaming Youth’,” she answered. “His first two books made a bit of a stir, but nothing compared to this one. You’d think he was leading a crusade instead of tearing everybody and everything to bits in a book!”

  She was obviously so irritable about having to try to find David Durham that I didn’t ask her any more.