She came down to the capital, to attend a dance academy as a full-time student, fees paid for her by her mother, and had only been there a week when a man came up to her in the street and said, ‘Did anyone tell you that you could be a model?’ She thought it was a joke, or dodgy, her mother had spent a lifetime warning her about men like this, but it turned out to be kosher, he really was a scout for an agency. And overnight she was no longer Kathryn, she was Kitty. They tried to make it one word, like Twiggy, but it never took off.
Her mother had died at the beginning of this year. Kitty Winfield stood beside her mother’s grave and wept silently. Lung cancer, awful. Kitty went back to Solihull and nursed her. Didn’t know which was worse, watching her mother die or revisiting her own promising past. She was finding it awfully difficult to get over her mother’s death. Silly really because she hardly ever saw her.
Modelling was much easier than dancing. All you needed were good bones and a certain stoic temperament. She was never asked to do anything tacky, no nudity. Lots of lovely black-and-white portraits by famous photographers. Big fashion shoots, all the magazines, and once on the cover of Vogue. People called her ‘the face of the sixties’ for a while. People still remembered her name. Sixties’ icon Kitty Gillespie, where is she now? Only last week a Sunday supplement had chased her down, wanting to do an interview with her about her ‘obscurity’. Ian politely fended off the caller.
It had all been over by ’69. She met Ian and decided to forgo the bright lights for security. For steadfastness. She could honestly say, hand on heart, that she had never regretted the decision.
She had wanted to be a film star, of course, but, let’s face it, she couldn’t act for toffee. Kitty Gillespie walked on to the set and illuminated it. Unfortunately not. She looked the part but just couldn’t say the words. Wooden, as a board. She’d had a tiny part in a film, one of those edgy, avant-garde jobs starring a controversial rock singer. All very Bohemian. Kitty had been lolling on a sofa, supposedly in some kind of sex-and-drugs haze. One line to say, ‘Where are you going, babe?’ Hardly anyone remembered the film now, and no one remembered Kitty’s performance. Thank goodness.
The rock star laughed and said to her, ‘Don’t give up the day job, darling.’ They slept together once, it was almost expected. De rigueur, the rock star said. Sometimes she thought that when she was very old and everyone else was dead she might write her autobiography. Of her life during those years anyway. The years after her marriage would make for a very dull book in other people’s eyes.
She made the film the year after she left the writer. She was under his spell for nearly two years, it was rather like being held hostage. They were the years when she should have been larking around with her friends, enjoying all the things a girl of her age would normally enjoy. Instead she was pouring his drinks and nursing his ego and having to read his tedious manuscripts. People thought it was glamorous and grown-up but it wasn’t. It was like being a nanny who occasionally had to perform sordid sex acts. He was nearly twenty years older than she was, used to get annoyed that most of the time she had no idea what he was talking about.
*
Kitty sat down at her dressing-table mirror and took a cigarette out of her silver case. It was engraved with her initials and inside the lid there was another engraving, a birthday message from Ian: To Kitty, the woman I will always love most in the world. The famous writer had once given her a lighter engraved with something obscene in Latin. ‘Catullus,’ he said, translating it for her. Embarrassing. She had never used it in case someone who understood Latin glimpsed the words. She was much more prudish than people imagined. She threw the lighter into the Thames from Victoria Embankment the morning she walked out of his house. Kitty Gillespie was tied naked to a bedpost and degraded. There were limits. And anyway he had grown tired of her, and her place in his bed and at his side had been usurped by a Swedish poet, ‘intelligent woman,’ he said, as if Kitty wasn’t. He suffered a great tragedy not long afterwards and Kitty couldn’t but feel sorry for someone who was so imperfectly equipped to deal with any drama that they weren’t themselves the centre of.
How much better it was now to be a lovely doctor’s wife and live in a lovely house in lovely Harrogate and look in your bedroom mirror and see your lovely white neck, lovely, lovely pearls glowing against your skin. Kitty Winfield tucked a strand of hair behind one of her neatly shaped ears. She sighed. There were times when she just wanted to curl into a ball on the floor and pretend nothing existed. Kitty Winfield opened the bottle of sleeping pills prescribed for her by her husband.
She stubbed out her cigarette, freshened her lipstick, sprayed a little shot of Shalimar on the delicate, veiny skin on the inside of her wrists. The faintest scars, thready bracelets like white cotton where she had tried to slice through them, a long time ago now.
Ian was downstairs reading a medical journal, listening to Tchaikovsky. Soon he would go into the kitchen and make them both a cup of something milky. ‘We’re a real old Darby and Joan,’ he laughed.
Such a great emptiness inside where a baby should be. ‘You can never conceive,’ a consultant obstetrician had told her in London, not long before she and Ian had married. Ian was at Great Ormond Street in those days, Kitty had met him in Fortnum and Mason’s. He was buying chocolates for his mother’s birthday, she was sheltering from the rain and he had invited her to have tea and scones in the Fountain restaurant and she thought, why not?
‘Do you want me to have a chat with your fiancé?’ the obstetrician asked. ‘He’s a medical man, isn’t he? Or shall I leave it up to you?’ They were speaking a polite code. Did she want him to explain to Ian how ‘a medical procedure she had undergone when younger had resulted in her being unable to conceive a baby’? But Ian, a doctor, would want to know more and he was sure to understand what that ‘medical procedure’ had been. Kitty Gillespie lay beneath the white sheet and opened her legs.
After she left the writer, after she threw the obscene cigarette lighter in the Thames, she had realized that she was pregnant. She ignored it, thinking it might go away, but it didn’t. She knew the writer wouldn’t be the slightest bit interested in her predicament, and neither did she want him to be. She was five months gone before she had an abortion. Phoebe March had given her the name of a doctor. ‘He’ll fix you up,’ she said. ‘All the girls go to him, it’s nothing, it’s like going to the dentist.’
And it wasn’t some knitting-needle job in a grubby flat up an alleyway. He had rooms in Harley Street, a receptionist, flowers on the desk. Little man, tiny feet, you always notice their feet. Now Miss Gillespie, if you could just open your legs. Made her shiver even now just to think about it. She had expected it to be clinical, painless, but it had been a brutal affair. He nicked an artery and she almost bled to death. He drove her to the nearest hospital, told her to get out of the car outside the A and E department.
Phoebe came to visit her in hospital, bearing cheerful daffodils. ‘You were unlucky,’ she said, ‘but at least you got rid of it. We’re working girls, sweetie, we have to make tough decisions. It’s all for the best.’
Phoebe was currently playing Cleopatra at Stratford. They had been down, they often did, made a weekend of it, stayed in a nice pub. She didn’t mention to Ian that she used to know Phoebe. Kitty still thought about that little man in Harley Street. His small feet. Seemed to Kitty that he must have despised women. He messed up her insides for ever.