Chapter 6 Judgement Day #4
The eclairs had been baked now (“Et voilà!”), filled with cream and cloaked (rather carelessly) with melted chocolate, which was just as well as they looked burnt, although that didn’t deter Mitzi’s audience from pouncing on them like hyenas. Cynthia meanwhile had returned to the servile shadows.
“Mitzi’s really quite a celebrity, you know,” Archie Blinkhorn said proudly.
“She does seem popular,” Flynn admitted.
That wasn’t the end of the afternoon. There were books to be sold. Perfect Cooking by Parkinson, whose main contributor was Mitzi, according to Archie Blinkhorn, who sat at a little table by the exit selling signed copies. “Always here to give a hand,” he said with a mysterious wink.
Cynthia reappeared, looking harassed, took the signed copies from Archie and began to pile them up. “How d’you do?” Flynn said, and she blushed furiously.
“She’s very shy,” Archie explained.
Eventually the women trickled out of the showroom, reluctant to leave the glamorous centre of gravity that was Mitzi Blinkhorn.
“Mitzi,” Archie Blinkhorn said when the last of the women had departed. “This Johnnie’s from the Festival.”
“Harry—Harry Flynn, Miss Blinkhorn.” Or should he address her as “Mrs.”? he wondered. Despite the obvious presence of a husband, Mitzi did not have a wifely aura. Flynn suspected that, like actresses, and unlike Mrs. Betty, she preferred her denomination to be singular.
He held a hand out to be shaken, but instead she offered a heavily powdered cheek to be kissed, and he had to reach up awkwardly to achieve contact.
(From a distance she had given the impression of being shorter.) The second cheek followed—accounted for, he supposed, by the fact that she had supposedly lived in Paris before the war.
Flynn flinched when he felt his own uncontinental cheek being brushed by Mitzi Blinkhorn’s spidery false eyelashes.
There was a faint smell of perspiration about her, masked by a musky perfume, and Flynn had to stop himself from shying away.
“Enchantée, and call me Mitzi. Everyone does.” She smiled (more of a grimace), revealing a smear of lipstick on one of her front teeth.
“We’re off to the Ritz to celebrate Mitzi’s victory in the Cake Olympics,” Archie said.
Flynn followed them outside, where he hailed a cab for them, directing the driver to the Ritz. In addition to his “car coat,” Archie had pulled on a pair of driving gloves.
“Do you have a car, Major?”
“Can’t afford one, old chap.”
Mitzi climbed aboard, with quite a lot of fussing as she got settled.
She was accompanied by several large bags.
A saucepan handle was sticking out of one of them.
“Ah, caught red-handed,” Archie said. “That showroom has an extensive batterie de cuisine—they don’t notice the odd bit of kit going walkabout.
From the many to the few, as they say.” He was hovering on the pavement and Flynn said, “Was there something else, Major?”
“Well, you know, old chap, there was some mention of ‘expenses.’ The taxi fare,” he added when Flynn looked at him blankly.
“Oh, of course, sorry.” Flynn rifled through his wallet, but all it contained was the solitary pound note—far too much for a taxi fare to Piccadilly.
“Haven’t got anything smaller, I’m afraid,” he said apologetically to Archie, who replied, “Oh, not to worry, old chap,” fileting the note from between Flynn’s fingers with the deftness of a Dickensian juvenile pickpocket.
“You’re a gentleman and a scholar, Flynn. ”
“Can you get me a receipt for that, Major? For the taxi fare. And the change?” Flynn added hopefully.
He received no response other than “You must come to dinner soon, get better acquainted. I’ll tell Mitzi.
” Archie thrust his head into the cab’s gloomy interior, from where there was a muted response that could have been either affirmative or negative.
“Excellent. I’ll get word to you. We’re in Belgravia!
” he shouted gaily as he clambered into the taxi.
Flynn was left stranded on the pavement with Cynthia.
She was standing close enough for him to catch her aroma of Yardley’s Freesia talcum powder.
He only recognized it because his mother used to douse herself with it—a large tin sat on a shelf in their icy bathroom in York.
Perfume was the preserve of a more sophisticated woman than her, but talcum powder, with its notes of babies and innocence, was acceptable.
“Well, goodbye, then,” Flynn said to Cynthia.
“I must be getting back to the office. I expect we’ll see each other again.
” She seemed tongue-tied, and he wondered if perhaps she was not quite all there, but then she stuck out a hand and he realized she meant him to shake it. She flushed crimson at the touch.
When he reached the corner of the street, he glanced back and saw that she was still standing there, staring at him. He gave her a cheerful wave and she waved back, her arm moving stiffly backwards and forwards like a metronome. What a strange girl, he thought.