You don’t think I’m going to let you pay.
I invited you.’
‘That’s very kind of you.’
‘But I’ll tell you what you can do, let me bring my young lady to see you in your dressing-room one day.
Just shake ’ands with her, see?
It would mean a rare lot to her.
Why, she’d go on talking about it the rest of her life.’
Julia’s manner had been for some minutes growing stiffer and now, though gracious still, it was almost haughty.
‘I’m so sorry, but we never allow strangers behind.’
‘Oh, sorry.
You don’t mind my asking though, do you?
I mean, it’s not as if it was for meself.’
‘Not at all.
I quite understand.’
She signalled to a cab crawling along the kerb and gave her hand to the young man.
‘Good-bye, Miss Lambert.
So long, good luck and all that sort of thing.
And thanks for the autograph.’
Julia sat in the corner of the taxi raging.
‘Vulgar little beast.
Him and his young lady.
The nerve of asking if he could bring her to see ME.’
When she got home she went upstairs to her room.
She snatched her hat off her head and flung it angrily on the bed.
She strode over to the looking-glass and stared at herself.
‘Old, old, old,’ she muttered.
‘There are no two ways about it; I’m entirely devoid of sex appeal.
You wouldn’t believe it, would you?
You’d say it was preposterous.
What other explanation is there?
I walk from one end of the Edgware Road to the other and God knows I’d dressed the part perfectly, and not a man pays the smallest attention to me except a bloody little shop-assistant who wants my autograph for his young lady.
It’s absurd.
A lot of sexless bastards.
I don’t know what’s coming to the English.
The British Empire!’
The last words she said with a scorn that would have withered a whole front bench of cabinet ministers.
She began to gesticulate.
‘It’s ridiculous to suppose that I could have got to my position if I hadn’t got sex appeal.
What do people come to see an actress for?
Because they want to go to bed with her.
Do you mean to tell me that I could fill a theatre for three months with a rotten play if I hadn’t got sex appeal?
What is sex appeal anyway?’
She paused, looking at herself reflectively.
‘Surely I can act sex appeal.
I can act anything.’
She began to think of the actresses who notoriously had it, of one especially, Lydia Mayne, whom one always engaged when one wanted a vamp.
She was not much of an actress, but in certain parts she was wonderfully effective.
Julia was a great mimic, and now she began to do an imitation of Lydia Mayne.
Her eyelids drooped sensually over her eyes as Lydia’s did and her body writhed sinuously in her dress.
She got into her eyes the provoking indecency of Lydia’s glance and into her serpentine gestures that invitation which was Lydia’s speciality.