Fathers Come First Read online

  I was to go over right away. I walked out into the street and started towards this School of Charm. When I looked at that model girl that morning I said to myself, If I looked like that I’d be both irresistible and invulnerable. Colin would be bound to find me irresistible. I would walk into him one day with my sexy hips and haughty face and wham he would go, flat on his knees and say, ‘I adore you’ and so on. There’s another thing: I want to be richer, not rolling in money, but have money enough to be able to walk into the smartest shops and not feel I have to buy something because the sales girls would think I was poor. If I were a model, making a hundred pounds per photographic session, things would definitely improve. I mean, if I knew that a hundred pounds an hour was actually what I was worth, it would give me a lot of confidence. I’d look at all those damn girls in the College and think, Well I’m worth so much and that’s that.

  Suzanna sat behind a pale cream-coloured desk wearing pale cream-coloured clothes, her thick curly hair foaming round her face. It was just a question of knowing how to make the best of yourself.

  I filled in a form. I didn’t know my height, or weight, or waist, or hips or bust. I always bought 34b bras and mostly they fitted. She had a little pair of scales in her office. Off with the shoes and overcoat and onto the scales. ‘Mmh,’—she wasn’t pleased—‘You’ll have to lose about a stone,’ she said. ‘Cut out bread, potatoes and sweet things.’ She measured my bust and waist and hips. She put me up against the wall and registered my height. It all went neatly into the form. She said, ‘Come back next Saturday morning for some photographic tests—let’s hope you’ll have lost a bit of that puppy fat by then, mmh?’ Her phone rang. I was dismissed. I gathered up my shoes, my coat, my bag, my magazine. I went out into the street.

  I stood for a minute—weighed and measured, charted and taped. You were a definable, defined, material substance. You had limits. You lived in the limit of your human skin; it weighed down onto the ground. You were rooted to the ground by that weight. You were limited by your edges to other edges. You were isolated and totally imprisoned. You wanted to scream.

  I went into a bookshop and bought a book on ‘How to Slim the Easy Way’. It measured out cupful after cupful of carrot and cabbage and mince and fillet steak and double cream, by calorific value. It had pictures too. Your life stretched before you in cups, white delft cups like the ones at school, full of raw and protein foods.

  By the next Saturday I’d lost five pounds. ‘Good,’ said Suzanna, ‘you look better already. Don’t you feel better?’ I said I did. I felt awful. The book gave a diet of poached eggs and tomatoes; it was the cheapest diet they listed. The others were king prawns without olive oil dressing, or fillet steak without peperone sauce. The poached eggs sat in my tummy gaseous with reproach.

  I was brought into another room. There were five other girls there—potential models.

  The make-up expert, Miss Gilligan, came in. ‘All make-up, false eyelashes, wigs, etcetera, off please. Then line up along this wall.’ She might have been one of those Nazi women. Giggling we stripped and scrubbed and lined up. We smiled at each other and sized each other up. Miss Gilligan walked along the line looking at each one of us. She stopped by a tall girl beside me; Trrrp, trrrp, she went and whipped the girl’s eyelashes off—’I thought we said all falsies off, dear?’ The girl wept. Miss Gilligan took notes.

  The poise expert, Miss O’Halloran, came in. She had a pretty clown’s face, funny-sad. She asked each of us to walk up and down the room. Then to stoop and pretend to pick something up off the floor. Then to sit down. We each thought the other awful.

  The photographer came in. He was introduced to us. He was called Tom. He had a very humble-looking face which meant he was probably very arrogant. He called us ‘ducky’ as he got to know us better. He was Suzanna’s lover.

  The course was to take four weeks—a crash course. It was to cost forty pounds. We were to arrive at the School at 8.00 a.m., we would bring our lunches with us, we would be free to go at 5.00 p.m.; however, most evenings we would have some sort of talk from a former model or beautician or health expert. The course would not, of course, make us professional models, but it would be a start. ‘The start is the thing in this game, as in any other game,’ said Suzanna. Suzanna’s school was also an agency; that is, once we’d finished the course, our photograph, name, bust, waist, hips, height, weight and ‘personality’ would be filed in a large album that Suzanna kept on her desk. Then the men from the advertising agencies would come in and thumb through the albums trying to match their product, to our faces, to somebody else’s catchline. We all bravely smiled and pouted out from the celluloid scrap book, asking to be bought.

  I went to the College and asked Miss Gore-Browne for my holidays. She agreed. I asked Mary to lend me forty pounds. She agreed. Mary was delighted; she said, ‘Come round and let us see the developments.’

  Each day was broken up into three sessions: Poise and Personality session; Deportment and General Health session; Make-up and Dress session. Each teacher shared a common technique; the technique was to make us thoroughly and shamefully aware of our long-neglected, weedy, overgrown bodies; of our undernourished, undercleansed, under-toned skin; of our sloppy walk; our unhandy methods; our ungraceful gestures; our unshaven legs and hairy armpits; of our broken nails and rough hands, and on and on until we broke down and handed our bodies over to them to re-make. We wondered how we had survived so long in such ignorance of the tasks of beautiful women.

  ‘My God!’ Miss Gilligan, the make-up expert, would say, peering at your skin. ‘My God!’ You would cringe and cower and think, ‘Christ, what has she seen?’ She’d stand back for a minute, run her fingers through her hair. Then peer down again. This was obviously a Most Difficult Case. You would feel awful. A failure. A failure as a woman. Your skin was a pig’s back. Oh dear God, I’m sorry for not having nicer skin.

  She would give you a last minute reprieve. ‘With the greatest care and attention,’ she would say, ‘I think we can just about salvage this skin.’ You would want to fling yourself at her feet, kiss them, say ‘Thank you, thank you.’

  She would say that the three rules for the face are these: cleanse, tone and nourish; cleanse, tone and nourish; cleanse, tone and nourish—you’d chant them going home in the bus, and walking down the street, and up the stairs to your flat: cleanse, tone and nourish.

  The poise expert, Miss O’Halloran, made us act out charades of how to behave in certain situations. ‘The model girl’s artifices do not stop at her face and physical appearance,’ Miss O’Halloran would say. ‘Oh no. Being a model is a way of life.’ (A way of life? A way to change your life? A million, million ways?)

  Miss O’Halloran’s favourite charade was called ‘Going to the Restaurant’. There were two actors: the Escort, and his Escortee, the Little Lady.

  The Escort would stand looking at his (her) watch, evening paper tucked under his arm, whistling gently. Some minutes would pass. A benevolent smile would be fixed on the Escort’s face. Ten minutes. ‘Tsch, tsch. Women are such battery creatures,’ the beaming gentleman would say.

  Then. With a trot and a skip, in would come the Little Lady. Smiling and waving and ‘Oh Lord, am I ever so late?’ He would say, ‘Of course not.’

  The Escort would suggest a place to go and eat. The Little Lady would tremulously and immediately agree, ‘Oh, that would be soopa!’ The Escort would hail a cab.

  The Escort would open and close all doors, the Little Lady would swish through. At one stage she would turn and show us the contents of her neat little bag—waterproof cosmetic case, comb, atomizer, spare nylons, and a little cash—just in case.

  The Little Lady would behave like a little dumb idiot the whole time, allowing the Escort to lead her to a table, pull out her chair, choose her food, order it for her, order the wine, and order the conversation. If the Escort said, ‘The moon is made of cream caramel, lightly sp
iced with caraway seeds,’ the Little Lady would open her wide eyes wider and say, ‘Oh really?’

  The Escort would, of course, pay for everything. That’s what Escorts are for.

  Our lives became circumspect, structured. Entering a room was not simply a question of opening the door and walking in; it entailed Creating a Presence, Moving with Ease and Dignity, and so on. Leaving a room was almost as difficult; it meant getting out of the door without turning your back, or your Presence, on the company.

  Miss O’Halloran said to us: ‘Now girls, remember what Samuel Goldwyn, that doyen and genius of Hollywood, used to say to his women—beautiful women: “Ladies, if you want to be devastating use all the arts of sophistication available, but remain demure.” You must learn to seduce and make the victim think he’s enjoying it.’

  The four weeks went by in a frenzy of bashing of fatty flesh to break down fatty tissue, twirling ankles in the air, twisting necks, swivelling eyes, scraping skins down and dressing them up, entering and exiting. Becoming models. (I read a book one night that said, ‘We cry and we enter—that’s life. We cry and we exit—that’s death.’ I thought it pretty stupid. The main thing was all the crying in between.)

  One girl couldn’t take the pace. She left, white-faced, with her cosmetic case tucked under her arm.

  ‘Smile,’ said the photographer. ‘Come on then, ducky, give us a nice big smile.’ We learnt how to smile, pout, look frightened, look lustful, look baby-doll. Smiling was the most important of all. Right round the school there were pictures of girls smiling; not the kind of smiles we’d done before—I’m-going-to-burst-with-laughter-any-minute. No. Dimpled smiles, coy smiles, wide smiles, sexy smiles.

  Knowing smiles were the only taboo kind. Knowing anything, worse still showing it, was pretty taboo. All you had to know was how to sell yourself. In fact the agency would do that for you.

  The first job the agency got for me was doing a simple fashion show for the Irish Countrywomen’s Association. They were having a dinner and the new secretary had thought a little fashion parade would be ‘good fun for the girls’. The ‘girls’ were mostly in their forties and had worn the same things since they were in their thirties.

  Suzanna sent myself and another girl called Trish to do the show. Trish had quite a plain face but sensational legs. Sunbeam had once asked her to model their stockings at the Dublin Spring Show. She’d been sitting up on this display stand with all the hosiery and woollen goods, and only her legs were visible through this sort of cardboard laurel wreath affair. She had to sit there for four hours every day with her legs on display. She said it was suffocating behind the curtain. One day a big farmer from Kerry came up to the stand. She could hear him having an argument about the legs with another farmer. Were they real or were they not? ‘Yirra get on outta that,’ said the farmer and grabbed at Trish’s legs. He knocked her off her stool, the curtain fell down, the laurel wreath fell down and there was Trish amidst the debris saying ‘Ya big bloody eejit’ to the farmer who was puce with the shock already. Trish had a terrible temper if she wanted to use it.

  Well. The first job for me was a bit of a disaster. Trish was quite calm and walked up and down the little stage in tweed skirts and smiled at the women. I was terribly nervous and couldn’t remember what I was supposed to say about each costume and tore one of the dresses. The women were very polite and clapped at the end of it and said we must have the dinner with them. One of them said we were like ‘young fillies, graceful young fillies with your long legs and shining manes’. The other women looked embarrassed beside her.

  We spent the night in a bed and breakfast place. Fifteen bob each. Our room had four beds: one double, three single, and five china chamber pots.

  After that things got better.

  —7—

  The discotheque had only been open a week. The jet set still felt obliged to be there. Next week, next month, it would be somewhere else. Everyone knew everyone else. Everyone sat around in their expensive clothes, eating expensive food, unable to hear a word anyone was saying because of the pop music which was blaring out of two enormous speakers and filling the blackness of the tiny rooms. Everyone was laughing big bright orange laughs and thinking, Wow, we’re having a great time, really great. That’s if they thought at all.

  Suddenly I saw Colin. He was sitting the far side of the floor to us with a girl. I felt my face going hot. The man I was with was going on and on about some ‘terrible orgy’ he’d been to the night before and what I’d missed and blah, blah, blah.

  I said, ‘Excuse me just a minute.’ I got up and walked slowly over to Colin’s table. I said ‘Hello’ and ‘How are you’ quite loudly to some people nearby and bent over their table; then I saw him looking. I pretended to be so surprised—‘Well, fancy meeting you here, Colin!’ (You’ll never know how I waited and hurt and plotted. I’m a friendly friend, pleased, of course, to see you.)

  Colin had half got up. ‘Well Liz, I say, ehm, this is…’

  I said, ‘Oh, so this is the latest?’ and smiled at the girl. Oh the innocence of innocent women—let them all suffer, why should I care? Colin said the girl’s name and he introduced me as an old friend and you could see him looking and thinking, She’s looking pretty good. I said, ‘Anyway, don’t let me interrupt you,’ with an emphasis on interrupt. ‘Here’s my card—drop in sometime, when you feel like it.’ I handed him a card. Suzanna had told us to have some made; it looked more professional. Mine had ‘Liz’ written in long spidery letters and then my address and the address of the agency at the bottom.

  David, the man I was with, was sulky when I got back. ‘Who was that?’ he said.

  I felt like glass, like spun sugar—I felt I could shout, or never say anything again.

  I said, ‘Oh, just an old friend. Two old friends.’ Simple. David said the food was getting cold. I said, ‘Who cares about the bloody old food?’ He whined, ‘Oh Lizzie, I don’t know what’s got into you tonight.’ ‘So far,’ I said, ‘nothing.’ David groaned. His mother had told him, among a million other things, that Nice Girls were never vulgar. David’s mother didn’t really think there were such creatures as Nice Girls, at least not nice enough for her little David. She would let you know as soon as you met her.

  David weighed fifteen stone. He was a property speculator. He bought his suits in London and wore wide silk ties and a red carnation on special occasions. He had this wide and very soft face. A face like a crab’s, white, with beady eyes well out to the side.

  David and I had met at a party Suzanna gave at the school and agency. We’d often go to dinner after parties. He was always putting his hand on my knee under the table.

  David was the first person, of my own age group, whom I met who’d made a lot of money. He was fantastically vulgar with his money, always trying to impress people with it. It made him almost vulnerable. He would buy me presents and send round great wobbling bunches of flowers with stiff little messages on them. At first I used to feel guilty about all the presents. Trish said, ‘Don’t be such a bloody idiot—if he weren’t spending it on you he’d be spending it on somebody else, so what’s the difference? Anyway, he probably regards it as an investment—“fifteen dinners in the Shelbourne and then will you come to bed with me?”’ Trish could be tough as nails. Trish said, ‘Oh bugger off, I came up the hard way.’

  If I smiled and laughed at David he would say, ‘Happy Girl’; if I went mopey he’d say, ‘Who’s a Lonely Heart today?’ and put his arm around me. It was nice to have someone who said those things just to you—somebody watching your emotions and saying yes or no. He used to say ‘You’re my dark Rosaleen Liz’ and ‘I love you.’ It was comforting.

  He wanted me to come and live with him, even though he was terrified his mother might find out. He was thirty-five. He’d only moved out of home the year before. I said no. I wasn’t quite sure why. I said yes, I’d go to bed with him. He used to like us to
go to bed together on Saturdays and then spend Sunday at his flat. It was very regular.

  One night we came in very late. David was quite drunk; we’d been at a champagne party. He put on a black silky slip of mine. He stuck a carnation in his hair. He started prancing in front of the mirror. The slip was made of this stretch nylon and it was pulled across his chest with hair coming out through the cleavage. We were both roaring laughing. Then he threw himself on the bed and said, ‘Come and sit on top of me.’ He’d gone very quiet. I was quiet too, frightened (if the nuns could see me now), and I was sitting astride him and he had his eyes closed and was moaning.

  I’d nearly laugh out loud sometimes watching David with his friends talking business. Serious, and jaw, jaw. I’d think of him in that damn slip and wonder, are they like that? And everything would seem just a tiny veneer of manners and clothes over this mad chaos.

  I can’t remember what we all talked about. None of David’s friends ever read books. They had jobs in advertising, or marketing, or property firms. ‘Life,’ they’d say, ‘is a Big Joke.’ If you didn’t laugh 90 per cent of the time you were with them they’d think you were dying of heartbreak or something. They’d sit in pubs, their bottoms filling onto the seats and stretched into their trousers. They’d shout at the barman for more drinks and slap their fat, tight thighs. At Easter they’d go to the races and stand round in the beer tent going, Ha ha. They’d go to hotels and restaurants with their girlfriends and the girlfriends would laugh as well, but dropping their eyes and watching. They’d all say goodnight to each other, shouting ‘Goodnight’ across the street and slamming their car doors, still laughing.

  The girlfriends all pretended to be bosom pals. You couldn’t even go to the loo on your own without one of them rushing in after you. It was all giggles and ‘That’s a beautiful dress you have on’ and behind that hate. I hate you and damn your dress and your sexy figure and your smile.