Blackground

by Joan Aiken

  Nervous, at bay, I glanced round her little private room. Would she have been happier in a hospital, in a public ward? Where there was company?

  She’d enjoy the general goings-on, but I knew that, basically, privacy was as essential to her as fresh air. The room was tiny, just space for bed, chair, her own sewing table and bookshelf (Yeats, Donne, Plato), but from her window she could see the pleasant garden, a paved walk, lavender hedge, and the graceful majestic droop of a big ilex; light from the declining sun shone kindly on a section of old brick wall. No rays came into the twilit room at this hour, but the sun woke her before breakfast and that, she said, was what she liked best. And the window, despite the efforts of cleaners, nurses, matron, doctors and visitors, stood wide open all day. Like Rosy, in one respect, my mother possessed a will of iron when it came to getting her own way.

  “Well — supposing you can’t come tomorrow — you will on Friday?”

  Of course, of course I’d come on Friday, I said, and stooped and kissed her cold soft downy cheek. Friday would be her birthday and I had devoted much fruitless thought to the choice of a suitable gift. What can be offered to somebody on the threshold of death? In the end I bought her a shawl, but was denied the chance of presenting it, for she died on the Thursday night.

  People very often do die just before their birthdays, I have learned since then.

  After that, for weeks and months, I went around in two kinds of anguish, one deep, one trivial. There had been something else I had intended to say, to ask her, on that final visit. What could it have been? I tormented myself by the thought of her twilit figure, my final view of her in the shadowy room, leaning back with resignation on her piled pillows — but, nevertheless, craning her neck round at a desperately uncomfortable angle in order to get the last, the very last glimpse of me as I went away.

  Before that, while still able to sit up in a chair, she had always insisted on moving that chair to the window, before one left, in order to look out and wave as one walked across the garden to the gate. Her eyes, through the glass, were like the hands of shipwrecked sailors, extended beseechingly out of the water.

  “Would you like me to come back for the funeral?” Fitz said at once when I telephoned him to tell him of Masha’s death. “I can get on a standby flight tonight?”

  “No, no, love, what would be the point? Just to hear a few words said in some revolting crematorium building? Masha would be appalled at such extravagance and waste of your time. I’ll see you when you come back at the end of May.”

  I tried to keep my tone firm and brisk. May seemed light-years away.

  “It would be a sin to interrupt your work, just when you’ve got started. And I’m all right. Really I am. Busy with this part.” He knew about the part, from my letters.

  “Well, thank heaven for that, at least,” he said. “But you’re sure you are okay?” He still sounded doubtful, anxious, loving. Anyone lucky enough to have a Fitz in their life ought to thank heaven on annual barefoot pilgrimage to Compostella. What have I done to deserve him? I sometimes wonder. Well — Masha gave him to me.

  “Will there be someone to keep you company at the funeral?”

  Papa had died last year, and the four elder Conwil sisters before that. I could not think of any relations. But hundreds of people had loved Masha — only, unfortunately, many of them were poor, ill or elderly, and might find it impossible to get to the ceremony.

  “There’ll be plenty of people,” I said. “And I’m going to take her ashes to Dorset and scatter them in the garden at Yetford, where the squills grew, under the big cedar. She’d like to be in that place. It was her favourite.”

  “Yes it was,” he agreed. “She always talked about it. You don’t think the Dickinsons will mind? Worry that her ghost will haunt them?”

  “He’s a vicar, he shouldn’t entertain such idle superstitions. Besides,” I said, “anyone ought to be pleased to be haunted by Masha’s ghost.” I wiped a tear from my right cheek and tried to laugh but it came out shaky.

  “Well, okay old Cat; if you’re really sure,” said Fitz. “I wish you could get away and come over here.”

  “I wish I could too. This part —”

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well I hope they’re paying you a hell of a lot.”

  “It’s not peanuts. And there will be more, if they do repeats and sell it overseas.”

  “Good. When I come back we’ll buy a Peugeot and go gliding round Europe in it.”

  “That’ll be terrific —”

  “Are you eating enough food and stuff?”

  “Oh God yes; I have to, for —”

  “I know, I know, the part, the part. Well, take care —”

  “You too,” I said, choking.

  “I must go now,” he said. “Lecture.”

  “I’ll look forward to that Peugeot ride —” I called, but he had hung up.

  The next time I saw Fitz, I was married. To James Tybold, Lord Fortuneswell.

  In the first three episodes Rosy, as an unmarried daughter at home, wears her hair demurely arranged, mid-nineteenth-century-provincial-young-lady style, pulled straight back, or with coiled plaits at the front and a small cluster of ringlets at the rear. No problem, I could do it myself, though they sometimes used to tidy up my ringlets a bit in the make-up room.

  But in the latter half of the story, Rosy has nabbled her doctor and is leading the life of a successful married woman and doyenne of small-town fashion, wearing exquisitely fitted diaphanous blue dresses and elaborate hairstyles. For these I was despatched to Maître Jules Paschal in Brook Street, who himself personally cut, shaped, washed, set, dried, combed, did this, did that, and then with a triumphant flourish displayed the result of his activities. A cold rigor came over me as my incredulous eyes met the glass.

  “I don’t look like that!”

  “Now you do, madame,” corrected Maître Jules, worshippingly surveying the rococo machicolations of my new hairstyle.

  “But it’s atrocious! It’s intolerable! I can’t go around like that! I look exactly like a lemon meringue pie!”

  “Now, madame,” he chided in his phoney Franglais. “It is very beautiful, au contraire, very becoming. Madame does not look in the very least like a lemon meringue pie but, quite the reverse, most stylish, ravishingly chic, absolument comme il faut.”

  “Even at the studio I can’t believe they’ll like it,” I muttered, poking at the cendré-fair contortions, resolving to get my head under a shower at the very first opportunity and eliminate all those bouncy silvery curlicues. I felt like an Oxford Street store, decorated for Christmas.

  “They will rave about it,” pronounced Maître Jules, and he was right of course. Worse, I was obliged to live with this hideous embellishment through five episodes. Several times I rebelliously tried to wash it away under the shower, but I might as well have tried to wash away a Henry Moore statue: Maître Paschal’s work was equally impervious to water and shampoo, returning with lively, steely resilience to the shape in which he had cast it.

  I suppose spies and criminals become inured to living incognito, wearing always an appearance, an identity that isn’t their own. Perhaps at last, after years in disguise, you lose track of your original shape and aspect altogether; or it ceases to have any significance for you. We live in a fluid universe and we are, I suppose, about seventy per cent our own creations, likenesses, images that we have contrived from our basic bodies with the help of paint and dye and woven materials; just collages really.

  The trouble was that I had been accustomed to my own invented image, felt comfortable in it and approved it; walking around all the time in disguise like this I found really disconcerting. Encountering, in bar mirrors, in shop windows, in my own bathroom glass in Notting Hill, the image of this fantastic stranger, my first response, every time, was to mistake it for some third party and search again in startled di
smay for my own lost reflection. Over and over again it was like the shock of that dire moment in Schloss Dracula where poor visiting Jonathan observes for the first time that his courtly if peculiar host has no reflection in the glass. I felt that my true self had been spirited away and some opulent extra-terrestrial alien left in substitute. That feeling was repeatedly confirmed when friends failed to recognize me in the street, or colleagues in the offices of Pyramid TV. Even if I greeted them people were slow to respond.

  “Good God, what have you done to yourself, Cat, I didn’t know it was you!”

  Doubtful, embarrassed appraisals, conveying uncertainty as to whether I expected admiration or sympathy.

  “I had to do this for Rosy; it’s not what I would have wished myself.”

  “Oh, I see, that explains it then. What an amazing change in your appearance, I’d hardly have thought it possible,” they would respond nervously, as if looking for fangs to protrude from the corners of my mouth.

  I have two natural dimples which normally I take pains to suppress. I have always thought there is something repulsively cute about dimples, they are emphatically not my cast of mannerism. But Rosy was much given to dimpling. She rarely smiled, first, because the frightful creature had not the vestige of a sense of humour, and secondly, because, endowed with such a hugely inflated sense of her own value, she found none of her companions worth a smile, certainly not her poor wretched husband once she had him stapled down. “The lovely curves of her face looked good-tempered enough without smiling,” it says about her. Ugh! as if she charged for her smiles by the second. So, in civil life, I practised winding my head about on my long neck and just faintly displaying my dimples at people, males mostly. It certainly was an eye-opener to discover how different were the reactions to this technique from those evoked by my normal behaviour. And the new hairstyle in itself brought a whole series of unsought, unwonted encounters with strangers: men came up and spoke to me in trains and buses, asked if they had seen me on telly, offered in pubs to buy me drinks; I was both fascinated and alarmed by this alter ego that I had acquired, willy-nilly, and began, in a bemused, nervous, superstitious way, to wonder whether in time Rosy would take me over entirely. Plato says something of this kind, Masha once told me.

  If Masha had still been alive . . . But she wasn’t.

  At the start of the part I had been objective about Rosy; just worked hard at getting under her skin. Then I began to loathe her, because I knew her so well, because she was so destructively successful. And then, last of all, I grew to feel sorry for her because, poor shallow egotist, she was never satisfied, like the Fisherman’s Wife, always craved what she hadn’t got, and messed up the life of a decent man in the process. By that time I had grown fond of her again, as one might of a fallible but accustomed friend.

  There were many reasons for the obsessional fervour with which I threw myself into the part. It was my first big chance. I had never done anything on such a scale before, and found it an exciting challenge. Further, I was buoyed up by the other players, all much better known, more experienced, more professional than I. It was like a tennis match against first-class players: one’s own game can’t help improving.

  I became specially friendly with two others in the cast: the first was Nol Domingo, the actor who played Will, a kind of secondary hero in the complicated plot. He was gay, which made him comfortably easy to get along with, handsome in a Latin style, quick-witted, great fun off the set, and a stunningly good performer on it. He’d done a lot of stage work, National Theatre, Shaw and Shakespeare, and this was his third or fourth big TV role. He taught me a tremendous lot about acting, in the scenes where he had to flirt with, and then furiously reject me. Another of my mentors was Sophie Pitt, a middle-aged actress with a good minor role as an aristocratic, snobbish, sharp-tongued clergyman’s wife; she had a splendidly ravaged tragedy-queen’s appearance, just right for the part, and, by her excellent unselfish acting and shrewd goodnature, made herself greatly valued during the weeks of rehearsal. She possessed a gift for pulling the group together, making a homogeneous unit from a randomly assorted gang of people who met at odd intervals and intermittently. The plot structure of Rosy and Dodo is built from a leisurely novel about class-conscious Victorian provincial society, where the County never mixed with Trade, or Trade with Professional, or Professional with County, except when called in for advisory purposes; which meant that for quite a while the action was carried forward by separate groups who did not begin to intermingle until three quarters of the way through the story. Only one figure, that of my husband the doctor, well born but not well off, mixed freely with all three groups and formed a link between them. He, my husband, was played by a rather moody taciturn character called Mike Fourways. Mike was a capable actor, our scenes together went well enough, but off the set I felt I knew him not at all and found him unapproachable; the only person he talked to was the middle-aged actor who had the part of Dodo’s husband. The most distinguished member of our group, he had played Hamlet in every major city of the world including Kathmandu.

  So I hurled myself into the identity of Rosy, wrote to Fitz, cheerful letters, not too often, and took pains not to let him gather any idea that I missed him acutely.

  Shooting the serial took longer than expected, partly because of the electricians’ strike, partly because of the seasons. Winter, spring and summer all had to be displayed in the outdoor sequences. Because of the strike we lost a chunk of summer and had to wait till next year to replace the missing scenes. Several different country locations were needed, a farm, a village church, houses ranging from stately to humble. For these purposes Lord Fortuneswell, a recently created peer, who sat near the apex on the board of Pyramid TV, was active in the Arts Council and, besides that, owned a small but successful publishing house, had helpfully lent us his manor in Dorset.

  By rights, the exteriors should have been shot in the Midlands, but no one looks a free manor-house in the teeth, and the style of Knoyle Court, non-committal Queen Anne, could have been found anywhere and would do well enough. The thirty-acre estate provided a church, a hamlet with alms-houses, and a couple of farms, all in Fortuneswell’s gift. The gardens of Knoyle Court, with lofty yew-hedges, paved walks and terraces, were well suited to our needs. I found them gloomy, myself, but I suppose it would take a brave spirit to chop down dozens of two-hundred-year-old ancestral yew-trees. Lord Fortuneswell himself was not in residence which made for greater comfort and freedom. He had left for the Antipodes to look into the possibility of buying a newspaper chain; he was one of those busy-bee tycoons, I gathered, always hunting for new ways to add to their millions.

  “What’s he like?” I asked Sophie Pitt. She had met him because My Cue, her volume of theatrical memoirs, had been published by Obelisk Press, his publishing firm.

  Sophie drew in her chin, a trick she has, and looked thoughtfully down her long nose and high-boned high-coloured cheeks.

  “Very unassuming,” she said slowly. “Seeing him for the first time you’d never guess he was a millionaire. Rather fanatical he looks — a fanatical country squire. You’d expect him to be mad keen on preserving the lives of badgers or protecting Small Blue butterflies. Or at least,” added Sophie, who is nobody’s fool, “that’s the impression he wants to create. Corduroy suit, open-necked shirt, desert boots; he looks thirty-two, really I believe he’s older, but still the Young Wonder Boy on the Pyramid board. When you look again you notice that the cord he’s wearing is of superb quality and his boots are hand made. He looks as if he spent his days planting rare orchid bulbs.”

  “And? How does he spend his days?”

  “Making more money,” said Sophie. “Still, I expect you’d like him. You couldn’t help it.”

  Fitz would see through him at a glance, I thought. Fitz has very strong views about millionaires.

  Knoyle Court seemed pleasant enough: not ostentatiously stuffed with Chippendale and Romneys,
just comfortable country-house furniture and harmless nineteenth-century watercolours, many of them painted by ladies of the family. I gathered that he, the owner, spent next to no time there; he had a penthouse in Battersea, a chalet in Switzerland, a palazzo in Florence, and a yacht. The Dorset house had been left him by a friend, one of those unconsidered legacies that happen to millionaires. If I were bequeathed a manor in Dorset the whole pattern of my life would be changed to embrace it, but by him it passed almost ignored. And yet it was a handsome house, with some character. I could easily have become fond of it. Only twenty miles, too, from Yetford, where I had passed the latter portion of my childhood. One morning, when they were shooting Dodo’s scenes and I was not required, I borrowed Sophie’s Mini and made a sad little pilgrimage to the big nineteenth-century vicarage where we had lived, and said another goodbye to my mother’s ashes.

  Coming back I took a detour through Dorchester and called in at the Ludwell Hospital to inquire after old friends and enemies. But seventeen years had passed, the place was changed out of all recognition, and the only face I knew was that of Kerne, the porter. Hospital staff ebb and flow with hectic speed because the work is so taxing; even Sister Coverdale, my old bugbear, had gone, elevated to be Matron at a big modern hospital in Bournemouth, Kerne told me.

  “Hundreds of hospital cases in Bournemouth because all the old trouts move there when their husbands retire or die, so there’s plenty fancy illnesses,” he told me with relish.

  “Sister Coverdale will be in her element.” How easily I could remember the voice of exasperation broken free of all restraint in which she had said to me, “Smith, you wouldn’t make a nurse if you stayed in this hospital till the year two thousand. I honestly can’t imagine what you should take up as a career; all I can tell you is that nursing is the last thing you should ever have attempted.”