Diana's half-vicarious celebrity can be explained, on the one hand, by her mother's editrixship of "Nell's Notebook" in the pages of the distinguished glossy Euroscene, and, on the other, by her father's position as Assistant Chief Casting Director of Magnum Cinematic Promotions, Ltd., Paris and New York. Examples of that matrimonial tendency whereby unlike poles attract, Eleanor is practical, intelligent and cunning, a sharp-faced woman and angular, while Bruce is foolish, guileless, and benign, a shaggy middle-aged boy with a demeanor of nonspecific, goofy good will. Their Parisian idyll spanned Diana's conception and gestation, and survived her birth by two months, at which point Eleanor decided that she didn't much like Bruce and got on an airplane to London, where she embarked on a continuing series of compact, knowing little affairs with persons flourishing in the media; the hopeless Bruce meanwhile staggered around Paris getting drunk for six months, then took up with a Breton ingenue of such ingenuousness that she has since forgotten French and failed to learn English. Between these hearths the young Diana was patted like a listless shuttlecock for the first fifteen years of her life.
From the beginning Eleanor Parry policed her daughter's social life with astuteness and dedication. She enrolled Diana at the sort of schools where the children of the fashionable were likely to gather — Eldahurst Kindergarten, Laura and June Bateson House, The Hendlebury Association for the Furtherance of Girls' Education, Hampstead Comprehensive— then withdrew her once the requisite circle of acquaintances had been made. Selflessly Mrs. Parry attended all parents' meetings, liaison projects and school bazaars. A brief perusal of the register furnished her with remarks like, "Oh, of course, you're little Sarah's parents! My Diana absolutely adores Sarah," or, "Then Bettina's your child. Oh, dear, I'm afraid poor Diana must pester her dreadfully." Parental invitations soon followed and were as readily accepted by the young columnist. Host and hostess would then receive, consecutively, a flattering profile in "Nell's Notebook" and a long letter from Eleanor about what difficulty Diana had in making friends. And Diana was such a ferociously immaculate guest (an excellent gauger of mood, correct forms of address, prompt thank-you missives, tips for the maids) that it seemed churlish not to ask her again.
For his part, big Bruce Parry saw to it that Diana's thrice-yearly holidays with him in Paris and New York were varied and eventful. As was the case with his ex-wife, everyone was to some extent in Bruce's debt and his social standing was thus providentially enhanced. Unflappable and always eager to please, old Bruce had given many one-line parts to talentless mistresses of superannuated company-owners, had often found employment for loafing sons of neurotic lighting-cameramen, had regularly steered hysterectomized vamps through mid-career crises, was prepared to put in unpaid overtime to cover up for menopausal assistant directors and alcoholic production managers, had been known to work around the clock to appease coronary-prone producers, depressive financiers, and apoplectic entrepreneurs. And — heck — the guy just likes kids. Confidentially known in Magnum House as "The Nursery," the apartment of Bruce Parry and his alingual consort is an indulgent, eventempered Disneyland of sweets, crackers, and party games. Accordingly, little dark-haired Diana is a feted personage whenever she visits her father, the receptacle of much guilty hospitality.
Unfair. There is genuine warmth and feeling in the childish
Diana. Although she is deeply unresponsive to her parents,
there is much that remains — for she's the girl who writes thirty letters a week, who gives you her old handbags and makeup, who spends three hours a day vocally marshaling her: dolls' house, who steals stockings from the boutique, who'll tell you about sex, who likes the tanned boy in ragged socks and sandals and chucks the yobs' caps under buses, who kicks the matron and shows her pants to the gardener, who'll offer you up to 20p. to shout fuck off outside Miss Granger's study, who'd rather come with you than go home, and who bursts into tears without knowing why. Diana is as baffled as anyone by her cold envy for her mother, her cold contempt for her father, and by her fear of being alone.
A word about Diana's sex life.
Nine days after the first menstrual bloodstain had been sighted on her sheets Diana was successfully, and very painfully, seduced by a thirty-five-year-old stuntman at a Bruce Parry shindig. High time too, she thought, dispatching letters to her friends the next morning. When she got back to London she told her mother about it. Mrs. Parry, who would never stand any nonsense from Diana, marched her straight down to the gynecologist's and put her on the pill. Diana could be said never to have looked back: an intelligible procedure— at what, anyway? If someone neither sordid nor unattractive seemed to want to go to bed with her, Diana went to bed with him. Along they came — tramp tramp tramp — slowly and sporadically at first, then in steady Indian file. Unlike many of her friends, Diana never felt that she had "let herself down" in these affaires, no matter how brief and pleasureless they might have been. She had never slept with anyone who wasn't rich, well-groomed, and halfway civilized; the ubiquitous venereal maladies which she could not but occasionally complain weren't, in her case, of the chronic variety and her tolerance to antibiotics was happily low; on no account would she entertain gentlemen friends at home and her bedroom remained a silent, pink retreat of dolls and paper tissues; up until the age of nineteen, up until Andy, Diana hadn't once spent an entire night with a man, would leave unfussily when the act was completed, had never woken up to new skin and breath.
For Diana, sex was not a fleshy concern; it was a dial in
the machinery of her self-regard, a salute to her clothes sense,
applause for her exercises, a hat tipped to her dieting, the required compliment to her hairdresser, the means socially to measure herself against others. She quite enjoyed it, too, now that most people were good enough at pressing the right buttons to give her clitorial orgasms of admittedly varying quality. If anyone happened to be particularly rich, handsome, or accomplished in bed, Diana would perhaps see them more than once, and, if they were moreover kind and/or amusing, she might even get quite to like them. But sexual lassitude and disgust seemed to be everywhere among the young, and two-night stands were becoming a rarity. The party, the man, the dinner, the flat, the fuck, the taxi, the scalding bath. Besides being good exercise in itself Diana found that it helped her to eat less. She would get out of bed the next morning and complete her callisthenics program with fresh verve.
Diana and Eleanor Parry were sunbathing by the Reina Victoria swimming pool one August afternoon when Andy Adorno boomed down the Seville Road into Ronda on his 1,225 cc. Harley Davidson Hurricane, stripped to the waist, his gout of black hair driven back from his face, his heavy body dusted and sweatstained in the mountain sunshine. He pulled up at the traffic lights adjacent to the hotel driveway, and, revving hugely in the empty road, glanced round about him, enjoying the heat, the noise, the new town. Twenty yards away, Diana and Eleanor looked up from their magazines. "Why aren't there any Spick laws about scooters," said Mrs. Parry. "I don't think he's Spanish," said Diana. "Mm, too tall." Adorno turned and met their eyes; he smiled, apparently pleased that he was the theme of their irritation. "You English too?" he shouted. Removing her sunglasses, Diana nodded. "Catch you around," he said as he hurled the bike forward with needless violence into the town, causing the tan-suited patrones of the hotel to watch the thinning sprays of grit with cardiac disgust.