Chapter Sixteen: The General

                                    

                                          
CHAPTER SIXTEEN. The General.
                          
A few nights after the show was recorded Steffi invited me to have supper with her at her apartment. I have been inside some fancy places in my time, and this one was well up near the top of the scale, with panoramic views out over the river. It was a million miles from the dingy little hole I had been living in for the previous thirty five or more years. I knew that now things were going so well I was going to have to do something about finding somewhere more befitting my star status, I just hadn’t had time to get my head round it yet. I wondered if perhaps I should think about finding an assistant who could take care of such practical details.
                          
     ‘Did you ever work at a place called The Stork Club?’ Steffi asked as we sat in the sofas after eating, staring out at the view of the silently passing boats and the lights on the other side of the water.
                          
     ‘The Stork Club?’ I was a little taken aback. It wasn’t a part of my life I would particularly have wanted to talk to my daughter about. ‘There’s a name from the past. Why do you ask?’
                          
     ‘A friend of mine said he thought he knew you from there?’
                          
     ‘You have a friend who knew the Stork Club?’
                          
     ‘Robert Lewis,’ she said.
                          
     ‘The General?’ Now I was genuinely shocked. ‘You know the General?’
                          
     ‘He’s Luke’s grandfather.’
                          
     I remembered that Luke was the young pop singer she’d had her name linked with in the media. They had won some celebrity television singing competition together and then gone on to be an item for a while. She hadn’t given me any more detail than that, but something told me this boy meant more to her than she had been letting on. I had absolutely no idea that the General had a grandson who was a pop singer. I found it hard to imagine such a thing. In the days when I had known him he wouldn’t have known any pop song from any era beyond Sinatra and the Rat Pack.  
                          
     ‘Is he? My God, what a small world. He was a character. Everyone knew the General.’ I couldn’t help but smile as pictures from the past slid into focus. ‘He knew how to spend money. I think the family had to get the lawyers out to cut him off in the end before he ruined them all. What a character.’
                          
     ‘Did you sleep with him?’
                          
     ‘Mind your own business, young lady.’
                          
      I was shocked by the question. I wanted her to think of me as having a mysterious and interesting past; I didn’t want her to think I was some sort of sad old slapper who jumped into bed with any man who bought me a drink. I tried to laugh off the fact that she had obviously made me uncomfortable with the question, and changed the subject quickly. I had plenty of other things to talk about with everything that was going on in my life.
                          
     My make-over and re-launch show was aired a couple of weeks later. There was a lot written about it in the papers during the days before transmission, and a number of television critics had highlighted it as one of the best programmes of the week, so I knew there was going to be a sizeable audience, I just didn’t know how they would react. I liked to imagine that families would be calling one another to come to sit in front of the screen as it was due to start, settling down into a respectful silence, preparing themselves to be entertained. But I knew that in reality it would be background music in most of the homes where the television was switched on, played out behind meals being prepared and eaten, baths being taken and homework being done. I pictured how the attention of the whole viewing nation would be won over by the time I stepped out from behind the curtains at Madam Jo-Jo’s. Every so often I felt a wave of sickness at the thought that there were so many millions of people who I wanted to reach but that they might not be watching or concentrating at the crucial moment.