One More Slip

by Marion Adlerstein

Genres: General Fiction

Synopsis

All is fair in love and Dior in this swingingly stylish sequel to The Freudian Slip. It is the sixties and times are changing. Hemlines are getting shorter, stockings are being discarded and women are doing it for themselves. At the advertising agency of Bofinger, Adams, Rawson & Keane, three women - Desi, Bea and Isabel - are making their way in a man's world. For them jingles and catchphrases are easy - having a life outside the office is so much harder. Adulterous affairs, pining for an overseas love and being used to exact revenge on a former fiancée all take their toll on these three fashionable women. But the changing social landscape means there are surprises in store - and that love can be found in the most unexpected places. PRAISE for Marion Von Adlerstein's previous novel, The Freudian Slip : 'A perfect gift for anyone who can remember the 60s or aches to live in a world of red lips and hourglass curves.' The Australian Women's Weekly 'a truly terrific book...A fast-paced, funny, fabulous read' The Daily Telegraph 'a great beach read' Marie Claire 'an intoxicating portrait of the 1960s' Sydney Morning Herald 'a rollicking and entertaining read' Good Reading

Release date: November 26, 2013

Publisher: Hachette Australia

Print pages: 239

Sample

Isabel flung her leg over the donkey, propped up her sketch pad and arranged sticks of charcoal on the wooden beast’s arm. She was still out of breath from the rush to get here from a client meeting that went on too long; this was her final class and she hadn’t wanted to miss it. Mr Thirlmere, her teacher, took personal offence at late arrivals, particularly by anyone who worked in advertising. As a serious artiste – although one yet to be acknowledged with a one-man show – he considered himself superior to anyone who’d sold out to commercial interests.

As she dusted her smudged fingers with her handkerchief and shifted the bangles noisily from her right arm to her left, she realised that the youth perched on the donkey to her right had his eye on her thigh, so she made an effort to pull the hem of her sack dress down over her knees. When that didn’t work, she dug into her satchel for the headscarf she always carried – a precaution against Sydney’s unpredictable wind having its way with her hair – and spread it like a tablecloth across her lap.

The ogler’s stare was empty of anything but idle curiosity and maybe lust. He had the courtesy to turn his head away, just before she was tempted to say, like a belligerent schoolgirl, ‘Think you’ll know me next time?’ The tone and texture of his skin made her think of gefilte fish. Even Jacques, the seedy art director at the advertising agency where she worked as a copywriter and trainee television producer, had more to commend him. At least he had aplomb and a kind of seen-it-all manner that attracted the unwary.

Isabel responded to beauty the way her father reacted to a perfect chocolate babka and opera-goers sucked in their collective breath when Jussi Björling hit high C. That was the main reason why she’d enrolled in life-drawing classes at East Sydney Tech, the city’s best art school. It was located in what had been a gaol built by and for convicts who’d been transported to the colony from England. The building’s gruesome origins gave it a sense of history; there wasn’t much of that around in Sydney in 1964 beyond the limits of the inner city – not for Isabel, anyway. She’d grown up in a brick bungalow built in the 1930s on the windy cliffs of Dover Heights, where there was a lot of sky and a shortage of trees.

Two evenings a week for almost a year, Isabel had studied and attempted to do justice to the anatomical splendour of the body beautiful. Not that all the bodies that bared themselves to the scrutiny of art students were beautiful in the classical sense but Isabel’s talent lay in making them so on cartridge paper. With a stick of charcoal, she refined a bulbous nose, elongated a stunted limb, gave sagging flesh a tauter line and straightened a hunched back in a way that a bone surgeon could only envy. Mr Thirlmere was fond of telling her disapprovingly that she was ‘trying to play God’ whenever he stopped to look over her shoulder on his inspection rounds. Isabel just smiled and continued to draw exactly the way she wanted.

Perhaps, unbeknown to her, she was delineating her ideal self. Isabel was a little more rounded than was fashionable; not Rubenesque but inclined to go that way unless self-disciplined. Her secret wish was to become a fashion illustrator, although lately photography had begun to surpass illustration in popularity.

This evening the model disrobing before the class was as uninhibited as though she had the face and body of Margot McKendry instead of the worn features of a woman who has lived. Rather than sit firmly in the chair, she sprawled across it in a stance of abandonment. She must be at least forty, thought Isabel, as she reached for the charcoal and proceeded to restore to the model the firm line of the figure she had once possessed.

Later, when the class broke for ten minutes, the model put on her robe and moved among the students to look at what they’d made of her. She smiled wearily when she came to Isabel and said, ‘You are a kind girl.’

‘No. You are a beautiful woman,’ said Isabel.

The older woman gave her a sardonic look and moved on.

When Stella Bolt found herself positioned at the secretarial desk outside the office of Kelvin Spink, manager of the New Zealand office of Bofinger, Adams, Rawson & Keane, advertising agents, she thought of committing suicide. Though her death wish was fleeting, she now knew what it was to experience psychic pain.

A week had passed since her arrival in Auckland from Sydney; time enough for her to accept a nasty truth: the transfer she’d tried to pretend was a promotion had been a ruthless way of getting rid of her. Here she was, downgraded from copywriter to nothing more than a lackey to a jumped-up office boy with sneaky eyes and wandering hands.

As she slipped carbon paper between the company letterhead and a sheet of plain pink paper, she blamed Freddie, the creative director who’d dumped her after letting her believe she had a bright future with the company.

Winding the pages into her typewriter, she blamed Guy the account director for elevating Kelvin Spink to a position far beyond his level of capability.

Typing ‘8th June, 1964’ at top right of the page, she blamed Jacques, Casanova disguised as an art director, for seducing her, then abandoning her to chase after Isabel, who wasn’t nearly as talented as everybody seemed to think.

Banging the keys to spell out ‘Mr Felix Bofinger, Chairman …’ she blamed her mother for not preparing her properly for life in a pitiless world.

Pausing in her work to stare with disgust at Kelvin’s door when she heard her name being called, she blamed Desi – the scandalous socialite Desirée Whittleford – for forcing her to take responsibility for a commercial based on an inappropriate idea that was not her own.

As she picked up her notebook and pencil, she knew that, above all, Bea O’Connor, the deputy creative director, was to blame for standing in her way and, Stella now suspected, for sabotaging her promising career by instigating her exile to Auckland.

Pushing open the door to Kelvin’s office, she decided that Bea was the root cause of every bad thing that had happened to her.

From behind his dark wooden desk with a tooled leather top, Kelvin looked up at Stella’s scowling face above the chartreuse twin-set – hand-knitted by her mother – that made her skin look sallow. Apart from her, his secretary-cum-copywriter, his staff comprised a junior account executive named Byron Fletcher and a part-time bookkeeper everybody knew as Mrs Baxter; given her grey hair and headmistress manner, nobody dared called her Mildred. Freelance designers and artists were engaged when necessary. Kelvin was as proud to be their boss as FB could possibly have been, sitting on top of head office in Sydney.

‘Anything interesting?’ He held out his freckled hand.

One of Stella’s most demeaning tasks was to collect mail from the letterbox every morning, open it, sort the contents, then set them before him, like a dainty dish before the king. King? More like the Road Runner, he was so scrawny. She handed him the papers and sat down on the opposite side of his desk, poised for dictation.

The smile he bestowed on Stella was courteous and defensive, calculating rather than warm. Although the way her hips moved when she wore a tight skirt still aroused him, Kelvin had begun to bring his baser self under control. Guy had drummed into him lessons about the managerial responsibility that went with his promotion and Kelvin had taken them seriously. Guy’s summary – ‘Don’t shit on your own doorstep’ – had hit home. It made sense, given his long-term ambition. He’d have to look for romance – well, a root anyway – outside the office.

Although she was tired, Isabel had a Friday night feeling as she skipped up the stairs to her second-floor flat in Burton Street. She dumped her portfolio in the tiny hall and went into the space that served as a sitting room and bedroom. Her flatmate, Roxy, named after the opulent Hollywoodesque cinema at Parramatta (a misnomer, since she was as skinny as Isabel was voluptuous), was seated at the table, wrapped in what she called her peignoir, working on her face as she peered into a magnifying mirror. A dress Isabel had never seen before hung on a padded satin coat hanger at the end of the rag-trade rack that was their stand-in for a wardrobe.

‘That’s pretty,’ said Isabel. The dress was in white piqué, with a guipure lace collar.

Roxy, who’d picked up one-thousand-and-one beauty tricks since she started working for the fashion photographer Alonso Malfatti, fixed a false eyelash to her right lid, then turned her head and blinked several times at Isabel. A hairpiece bobbing about on her head in the form of a cottage loaf made her look top heavy, as though her slender frame might collapse under the weight of it.

‘It’s a sample from a groovy new designer called Prue Acton.’ She stood up quickly and pulled open the neckline of the dress to show it to Isabel. ‘The model got make-up on the collar, see? But it’s inside, so it doesn’t show. I got it for nearly nix.’ She grinned, sat down again, picked up her eyelash curler and clamped it on the false lashes of her left eyelid.

‘A happening again tonight?’ said Isabel, as she plonked herself on her daybed and watched Roxy apply eyeliner to her upper lids to hide any vestiges of glue.

Roxy surveyed her handiwork in the mirror. ‘Just a party at Darling Point. The guy from Kodak has to look after some internationals, so Alonso said he’d help.’ She stood up, slipped off her robe, dropped it on the floor, then stepped into the dress instead of pulling it over her head so as not to disturb her elaborate coiffure. ‘They want girls. Why don’t you come?’

•

From the street, the house looked weighty and self-important, as though its sandstone turrets were enough to turn its inhabitants into landed gentry. Isabel thought the edifice would be more at home on a rocky outcrop facing the North Sea instead of a hillock on the benign southern shore of Sydney Harbour.

‘Who lives here?’ asked Isabel when they’d each paid half the cab fare and stood facing a flight of steps in their party finery. She was pulling at something under the top of her backless black dress: instead of hooking the ends of her bra together in the usual way, she had managed to attach each end to an elastic band at her waist, but the invention was neither comfortable nor foolproof. Isabel’s breasts were beautiful but wayward and inclined to get out of control unless tucked firmly into a B cup.

Roxy was staring at herself in a compact mirror and patting her nose with a powder puff. ‘Some chap. I think he’s got a title.’ Snapping shut her compact, she added, ‘Alonso is very well connected.’ Her boss’s status had a direct bearing on her own, so it advanced her interests to praise him whenever possible.

Beyond a marble male torso on a plinth in the entrance hall the atmosphere seemed welcoming in a frenetic way, with the Supremes belting out ‘Baby Love’ from loudspeakers. Smoke, as though from a bush fire, hung over rooms lit by side lamps. Isabel had never been to the house before, but the clutter of its rich furnishings gave her a sense of déjà vu and she realised that the decoration had been heavily influenced by Annabel’s nightclub in Berkeley Square. The memory of the Hooray Henry who’d taken her to the opening when she worked in London made her grateful to be here in this imperfect copy.

‘Isn’t it posh?’ said Roxy, eyeing an enormous fireplace filled with pine branches. A brace of male nudes in bronze doing something unacceptable reclined on the mantel so she turned her attention to the traditional paintings of landscapes and still lifes hung so close together in their heavy frames that all she could see of the wallpaper were the strips in between.

‘I think it would like to be,’ said Isabel. She passed Alonso, in a cloud of Acqua di Genova, as he gestured to an admiring group with an ebony cigarette holder quivering between exquisite fingers, heavily burdened with rings. According to Roxy, his arms had never been inside the sleeves of his jacket, which he slung over his shoulders like a cape; this evening it was black velvet worn with a frill of pleated chiffon spilling out of his shirt front.

An elderly man wearing a conservative suit and a nicotine-stained grey moustache asked Isabel if he could have ‘the pleasure’, before putting a hand on her bare back and shunting her awkwardly towards the middle of the room. While others were dancing freestyle, tossing their arms in the air and gyrating their hips to the deafening music, Isabel’s partner kept her in a clinch. When his hand on her back started to sweat, she uncoupled herself, vowing silently never to wear the backless dress to a dance again, and managed to ease into a crowd standing near the doorway that led to the rest of the house.

Isabel did not share Roxy’s enjoyment of noisy revelries such as this one. Bored and curious, she preferred to look for a quieter place where there might be interesting people to talk to. She tried the study. It was full of men who were so engrossed in each other she retreated with the speed of an intruder at the sound of a burglar alarm. A small sitting room seemed a possibility until she noticed a group with deadpan faces sitting in a circle on the floor, silently passing around a reefer. Making her way along a passage, she heard panting and moaning from behind the door to what might have been a bathroom – or a broom cupboard. She turned around and headed for the bar.

With a glass of wine in her hand, Isabel looked around for her friend and identified Roxy at last by the bun bouncing on top of her head and unravelling like a skein of wool as she orbited around her partner to the tune of ‘Please Please Me’ by the Beatles. Isabel did a double take when she saw how handsome was the man Roxy had managed to ensnare. More than handsome, he was beautiful and he moved with sinewy grace. How did Roxy always attract the most desirable man in the room? The way she abandoned herself, her eyes and lips half open, signalled availability, thought Isabel. Roxy’s sex appeal was primitive; it had nothing to do with her perky face, her skinny body, or the Sortilège she dabbed behind her ears and knees.

Before Isabel had a chance to feel like Roxy’s ugly sister, an arm slid around her waist and she was dancing the Frug with a young Englishman with mop-top hair, stove-pipe pants, Cuban-heeled boots and the name of Archie. He turned out to be Alonso’s photographic assistant – and something more, surmised Isabel. At least he was interesting. He told her she was the sexiest woman in the room. She liked him for the compliment but doubted his expertise on the subject of women.

When the music stopped, allowing everyone to pause for breath, cool off and go in search of a drink, Isabel learned that Roxy’s find was called Tom and he was as taciturn as Archie was talkative. Roxy, having shouted herself hoarse on the dance floor telling Tom a made-up story of her life, most of which he did not hear, had momentarily lost her voice.

‘I’ll get you a glass of water,’ offered Isabel.

‘No, I’ll get it,’ said Archie and disappeared.

Tom said nothing and made no move except to remove a gold cigarette case from the inside pocket of his jacket. He opened the case and, without offering it to anyone, took a cigarette. Isabel watched his long fingers light it and put it between his finely sculpted lips. He must have been aware of her gaze because he returned it, momentarily; he looked at her the way a child would a plate of spinach. His eyes were as pale and cold as Paul Newman’s.

She smiled encouragingly and said, ‘Interesting house, isn’t it?’ but he turned to look at Roxy, who was gulping water from the glass that Archie brought.

To fill the silence and hide her embarrassment, Isabel turned away to speak to Archie. ‘Who’s our host?’

‘It’s a club. Kodak hired it for tonight.’

‘That’s an ingenious piece of engineering,’ Tom said behind her back.

‘Yeah,’ said Roxy. ‘It takes her half an hour to get into that dress.’

Isabel realised they were talking about her. She felt her face redden and hoped the flush didn’t travel to the back of her neck.

‘Must be quite a sight,’ said Tom. Without another word, he drifted off and was soon on the dance floor with a willowy blonde in a gauzy top.

Roxy looked piqued, so Isabel grasped the opportunity to suggest it was time to leave, but her friend was not to be defeated. ‘You go, if you like. It’s not even midnight yet.’

‘I’ll get you a cab,’ said the ever-helpful Archie.

A gaggle of mindless fashion types was not something Tom Boyd was looking forward to, but it was better than going home on a Friday night to his mother’s cloying attentions and her tip-toeing efforts to be tactful. He did not want her sympathy for what she imagined he was feeling. He felt nothing. Emotion had left him the day Dizzy Whittleford made a fool of him – and a spectacle of herself – on the front page of Truth. His fiancée’s scandalous affair with a married man had come not just as a shock to him, but almost as a death blow.

Since then, Tom had lost the easy sociability that comes naturally to a handsome, accomplished and rich young man. His confidence had evaporated but few people detected it; he covered the emptiness inside him with an opaque skin of indifference that was often seen as arrogance. Annoyed by the way his male friends looked at him, patronised him, felt sorry for him, he avoided their company as much as possible. And the more women indulged him with their tenderness and solicitude, the less he cared about them. He was dead, so he buried himself in his work.

Almost invariably, he was the first to arrive at and last to leave the offices of Duncan & Boyd, the firm of architects at east Circular Quay in which he was a founding partner. At the drawing board he lost himself in the sweeping design of a modernist house in the bush on Avalon Plateau and a competitive submission for an apartment building at Potts Point. The creation of a memorial to Korean War veterans that he had promised to donate to a small community near Yass kept him busy after hours. His work and the businesslike attitude of his colleagues, who seemed indifferent to the scandal or anything else to do with his private life, stablised him.

So, when the others were packing up to go home and Duff Duncan mentioned a party at Darling Point, Tom agreed to go with him. Duff was too absorbed in himself to be aware of anybody else’s sensitivities, so he was perfect company for Tom. They went to the Metropole for a few beers, then on to La Strada in Macleay Street for steak tartare and a bottle of Chianti. They talked – at least Duff did – about cars and Taliesin West, Frank Lloyd Wright’s great landmark in the Arizona desert, which Duff had visited on his last trip to the States. Tom was grateful that Duff hogged the conversation because he himself had nothing to say. Duff moved on to Chicago without noticing that Tom had tuned out, happy to be half tanked and not expected to make an effort.

The sight of the pile in Darling Point where the party was being held prompted a small measure of disgust in Tom, which was shared by Duff, an equally committed modernist. To them, its glowering presence was incongruous in a city so young its character was barely formed. Their mission was to release Sydney from the faded traditions of colonialism with their modernistic inventions. After exchanging sneers at the exterior, they went inside.

She was all over him before he had a chance to cast his eye over the throng and think about making a move; a funny little gamine wearing too much make-up and a voluminous topknot that reminded him of a Russian Orthodox onion dome. But he let himself be led on to the dance floor because it was easier that way. He knew from experience that he was unlikely to find here any woman who could stir up passion in him – or any emotion, except aversion. Judging from this one’s behaviour, she might at least be willing to relieve his physical needs: all he wanted or expected from the opposite sex these days.

But she gabbled on too much and he was put off by her clinginess. He tried to shake her off by dancing with a blonde mannequin type who made him think of Dizzy, but she was insipid in comparison and that depressed him. He tried disappearing into the crowd at the bar but the gamine was there, hanging around like a lost puppy until she pressed into his hand a scrap of paper with a telephone number written on it and went off to dance with some young bloke who was decked out like a Beatle.

Tom recognised his dentist, Owen Tolhurst, and gratefully got into conversation with him. Duff joined them for a while, then wandered off out of boredom when they started talking about the legacy of President John F Kennedy and speculating about who had really assassinated him. Tom managed to consume a number of brandies as he and Owen ranged over topics as diverse as whether or not Bob Menzies would send Australian troops to Vietnam, and the facilities at the squash courts where they competed with each other twice a week.

It was after two and the crowd had thinned out when Tom realised he was too drunk to get behind the wheel of his car, so he left it in the street when Owen offered to drive him home to Vaucluse.

When Bea O’Connor, wearing her beige raw-silk skirt and jacket cut on Chanel lines, descended the metal steps from the Qantas jet, a frangipani lei was thrust around her neck, almost sending her floppy straw hat skittering over the tarmac. Smiling faces welcomed her with ‘aloha’.

As she sped off in a limousine, the scent of the flowers, the caress of balmy air and the anticipation of seeing Bill Cabot again made her feel light-headed, as if she’d drunk too many cocktails, although she hadn’t touched a drink on the whole flight from Sydney. Her abstinence had not been due to virtue but to a copy of a book entitled Sex and the Single Girl, which she found too engrossing to be distracted by the drinks trolley.

When she stepped under the porte-cochère of the Royal Hawaiian Hotel – spread like a grand plantation in a serene garden of coconut palms and hibiscus – her bag was spirited away amid many alohas and she was led into the hotel through neo-classic pillars. She passed two blonde women wearing violently coloured muumuus. They paused to allow themselves to be garlanded with orchids, prompting one – who looked like a lorikeet – to squawk, ‘I’ll be glad to get back to the States, where a lay is a lay and not a bunch of bloody flowers.’

His flight was late, said the receptionist, but he’d left a message for Bea to be taken straight to their suite. In front of the spectacle – through large windows – of surf breaking over Waikiki Beach, was a bottle of Taittinger in a silver bucket of ice under an enormous white damask napkin beside a plate of pinwheel sandwiches, and another o. . .