Bond Street Story by Norman Collins Read Free Book Online Page A

Rammell’s, there was only one Marcia. Indeed, there was only one Marcia in the whole of England. Other houses had their models. Girls pretty as powder puffs. Or tall and dignified like Marchionesses. Or sun-tanned and smelling of the heather. Those girls were trained. They emerged. They walked beautifully. They were photographed. They married stockbrokers or a friend of the chief buyer. They disappeared. But Marcia remained.
    And with every year that passed her position became more firmly established. More unassailable. She was like Royalty. She went everywhere. And, when she stayed away she was missed. Ascot, Wimbledon, Roehampton, Henley, Lord’s—but only on the day of the Eton and Harrow match—the premières of big film shows, the more important first nights, the charity balls—she turned up, exquisite, delightful, smiling. Conscientiously bashing her way through an engagement diary that she dared not allow to grow empty. Her picture was in all the papers. In consequence, seven-pound-a-week typists learnt from Marcia the right way to drape themselves in two or three thousand pounds’ worth of mink, so that there was an easy, almost nonchalant informality to the whole effect. Mothers with young children, and all the ironing still to do, saw just how they should stand when they next found themselves up against the radiator of a big Rolls-Royce in front of Blenheim or of Chatsworth.
    Wherever you looked, she was there. Superb. Serene. Indisputable. The steeply arched eye-brows. The long curve of the cheek. The deep indecipherable eyes. The wide gentle mouth.The face smiled imperturbably on the public from all sides. From boxes of face powder. From the shiny pages of expensive magazines. From Mayfair pageant programmes. From the walls of Underground platforms.
    That face, and the figure that went with it, represented everything that the race was always reaching out for. It was elegance. It was poise. It was correctness. But there was more to it than that. There was also an indefinable spiritual quality to it. A placidity. Even if it were a new strapless evening-gown that she was displaying, or a Longchamps ensemble with a hat as flat and wide as a Chinese umbrella, there was still the same ethereal, faintly surprised air of a discreetly fashionable Madonna.
    But even a face and a figure must have some kind of private life. And it was the private life that wasn’t so good as the public one. Not nearly so good. A proper mess-up, in fact. To be honest, it was hardly worth living. She had known better, too. Much better. At the time of her first marriage she had lived in the country. Quite a large house as she remembered it. With lawns and paths and shubberies. And an awful lot of rain. But Marcia, against a purely agricultural background, had never made much sense. That was something that she had come to realize within the first few months of trying it. And, in the end, because her husband had refused to do the gentlemanly thing, she had allowed herself to be divorced for desertion. Had simply turned her back on the house, the stables, the kennels, the dove-cot, the goddamn awful rain, everything ...
    Then there had been the suite-in-Claridges period when she had married her American. But that, too, had proved a disappointment. He had moved out one night in a great flurry of fancy-looking suitcases, clasping his World Airways ticket-folder in his hand and begging her to wake up just once before she was really dead. That had come as a great shock to her. She never had been able to understand the American way of putting things. But he had behaved very decently. For a start, he was the sort of man who understood divorces. He had realized that a woman can’t live on old memories. And the settlement had been generous. Even lavish. But his health had been shocking. He had died suddenly in a dude-ranch somewhere outside Houston—taken his own life she learnt afterwards—just when the bottom had