Blackground

by Joan Aiken

  But he, meanwhile, was studying me.

  “We know each other,” he said abruptly. “We’ve met before —” now beginning to go through the usual Rosy routine.

  “No we haven’t,” I snapped. “I haven’t been anywhere before. I come out of a book.”

  It seemed unlikely that he had read it. Most unwilling to prolong this conversation, I stooped and picked up the paperclip that had fallen from Fitz’s letter, put it into my purse, then walked swiftly back to my car, observing that a grey chauffeur-driven Rolls had now pulled in beside it.

  “Sorry if I gave you a fright,” I called over my shoulder, and then lost sight of him as I backed the Mini and drove off down the lane. He had called something after me which I ignored. If I did not make haste I was going to be late for rehearsal. I took the quick route, in by the back drive of Knoyle Court, which led to a stable yard, kitchen regions, and the big servants’ hall which we were using for a Green Room. I had to change into a riding-habit.

  We rehearsed, and then shot, the scene in which Rosy is thrown from her horse; that completed the outdoor sequences involving me. Dodo finding her elderly husband dead in the summerhouse had been done last winter. Now all that remained was a bit of indoor, studio work for which we would return to town. So, as this was the last shooting day at Knoyle Court, we held a party that evening for the cast and technicians. Various other people were there as well: Randolph Grove, the director, and the permanent staff of Knoyle Court and some tenants of the estate who had lent houses or gardens, a journalist who was doing a feature about the project for a Sunday colour supplement, and a couple of photographers who had come down with him to take pictures.

  One of these, Joel Redmond, I had known from ten years back when, equally poor as church mice, both attending classes at the Poly, he in photography, I in voice production, we went down in a lift together; he noticed a Lamentations record under my arm, made some remark about it, and so we got acquainted and took to having coffee together when we came from our respective classes, and then to attending Early Music concerts together in draughty churches; it was a while before he found out that the record I carried had not been for myself but a gift for Fitz. The acknowledgement to each other that we had only a limited tolerance for early music and draughty churches took our friendship forward a long step to the comfortable basis on which it had remained ever since. Joel was a highly gifted photographer: crowned heads and world-famous opera stars competed for his attentions these days; but he remained the same friendly unshaved, moth-nibbled-looking character that he had been when I first met him, with shrewd gargoyle face, tiny bright eyes like a field mouse, receding dark hair and skinny extremities. He was a boon to any party, as he could be very funny, had an agreeable singing voice, and a gift for jazz improvisation on the piano.

  Joel had not seen me since my transformation into Rosy and was both appalled and fascinated by the change.

  “Darling! God in heaven! How could they do it to you? I must say, it makes you look rather marvellous, in a disgusting way — like Blackpool Rock — hard and shiny and sickeningly sweet all through. Must be quite liberating?”

  “Oh, it is,” I assured him. “Now I’m used to the change I’m really enjoying it — like riding along on an elephant, you know, you can flatten anything that gets in the way. It’s a winner for getting attention in crowded stores and bars.”

  “What you’ve always needed, sweetheart. Haven’t I been telling you for years that you should take a course in Personal Aggressiveness? Now perhaps you’ll shed some of that puritanical humility that has stood you in bad stead for so long. I’m going to take lots and lots of pictures of you and see they get published everywhere. Then people will forget you ever looked different.”

  He seemed genuinely delighted at my good luck.

  “But what would be the point of that? When I’m going to change back into me?”

  “Ah, don’t do that yet, acushla,” he said. “Stick with it a bit longer. Like maybe for ever.”

  And for the rest of the evening Joel devoted a conspicuous amount of attention to me, handing me ceremoniously in and out of the dining room where the buffet was laid out, as if I were Anna Karenina, flirting with me, engaging in a lot of Regency flourishes, presently demanding that I have my property harp fetched from the housekeeper’s room and accompany him in improvised duets and songs.

  I demurred a bit, but Randolph Grove had no objections. “The harp’s insured to the hilt,” he said, “and we’ve finished all the harp-playing scenes anyway, you can take it apart string by string if you want to, my dear.”

  So the harp was dollied in from the room where we had shot Rosy’s family home sequences, and Joel and I improvised a music-hall waltz based on the minuet and trio from a Haydn symphony:

  “When the bluebells were blooming in gay Bloomsbury

  Square

  Oh how happy we were to eat our sandwiches there . . .

  With the pigeons cooing

  And the sparrows chirping

  We were happy as the day is long

  There was song

  In the air!

  Oh, when the bluebells were blooming . . .’’ etc

  We had everybody in the room dancing after eight bars.

  It was a good party, and managed to assuage, for a little, the aching cavity of sadness that I carry at all times inside me.

  “Just relax, willya?” Joel muttered, his hands flashing over the keys of the servants’ hall upright Bechstein piano. “Pretend the world is a happy place, can you not? You might just as well. It isn’t going to make a jot of difference, in the end.”

  “I daresay you’re right, Joel.”

  “Of course I’m right, you outrageous beauty.” And he spread his hands and kissed his fingertips in histrionic ecstasy. Joel is Jewish-Irish. Both lost tribes, he says.

  At this moment Randolph Grove tapped me on the shoulder. Naturally I had noticed him across the room, half an hour earlier, in conversation with my blue-eyed acquaintance of the morning, and assumed I’d been right in my guess that the latter was some high-up executive from Pyramid; now this was confirmed when Randolph said,

  “Joel, Cat: Lord Fortuneswell would like to meet you both. He’s come down to attend to some local business at Knoyle and spend the night here; very disappointed to find he’s just too late for the shooting.”

  Grove spoke in that plummy tone which people adopt when they reveal their familiarity with some well-known person; Joel and I both reacted with the exaggerated ease and calm of manner which other people assume in these circumstances, just to show they aren’t impressed.

  Joel of course really wasn’t impressed: TV personalities and millionaire peers were a trifle in his life.

  “I remember taking your picture five years ago when you started up the Wessex Trust,” he remarked kindly. “How’s it coming along? What was the main project? To rescue some vandalized bit of coast?”

  “Caundle Quay, yes,” Lord Fortuneswell replied, equally flat in tone, as if the subject bored him, but I was interested and pricked up my ears.

  “Caundle Quay? The cove where there’s that frightful caravan site?”

  “Trailer park, honey pie,” said Joel, playing chopsticks with one hand and the Moonlight Sonata with the other. “You must march with the times. We all speak American now.”

  But Fortuneswell turned the searchlight blue eyes on me. Not an amp or a watt of their intensity had abated since the morning; amid the come-and-go of the party they shone like cobalt explosions.

  “You haven’t been to Caundle Quay then?”

  Evidently we were to forget our little spat and begin on a new footing. That was okay by me; I hate bearing grudges.

  “Not for eight or nine years and never again,” I said. “The most depressing place in the world. Nothing would drag me back.”

  He smiled, which did n
othing to abate the intensity of the blue stare, just added a kind of rictus.

  “Oh, then you’re in for a big surprise,” he said. “Would you care to go over there tomorrow morning with me?”

  I could feel Grove, beside me, register this, like the click of a geiger counter.

  Remembering that I was Rosy, not Cat (I was even wearing one of Rosy’s dresses), I didn’t bother about explanation or thanks, just wound my head about on my long neck a bit, dropped my eyelids over the blue lenses, flashed a perfunctory dimple, and drawled,

  “Kind of you, but I can’t, I fear; we all have to be back in the Battersea studio tomorrow by ten-thirty,” and rippled an arpeggio on the harpstrings.

  “Come on, Joel, Cat! Play us another tune!” someone shouted.

  The blue stare narrowed. Fortuneswell was not accustomed to having his invitations declined. Joel jumped up from the piano.

  “Somebody else’s turn to play! I’m thirsty. Come along, Catarina, let’s top up. Can I get a drink for you?” with offhand politeness to Lord Fortuneswell.

  But Randolph had already disappeared in the direction of the bar and, by the time we reached it, was holding four glasses of champagne. Parties at Knoyle Court, when graced by the presence of the owner, were conducted with style.

  Randolph then took pains to be excessively, laboriously civil about the beauties and amenities of the house and estate, and how well it had served us on our location shooting. I could see that these civilities, obviously produced as a hint to Joel and me to mind our manners, cut no ice with Fortuneswell, who, turning his back on Grove in a dismissive and snubbing manner, said to me,

  “When can you come down again to look over Caundle Quay?”

  “Well, not for a while,” I told him, meaning Never. I had no wish to revisit the place which would be printed over with the images of Masha and Fitz and our lost (nonexistent) halcyon time. “What’s there to see, anyway? Can’t you just describe it now?” tilting my head away from him at a Rosy angle.

  “Don’t you know about it, Cat? Don’t you ever read the papers?”

  That was Randolph, anxious, unsnubbable, doing his best to play man-of-the-world, by assigning to me the role of brainless beautiful birdwit.

  As a matter of fact I do read the papers for half an hour every morning, over my coffee, but it is true that the story of Caundle Quay I had managed to miss. Perhaps it happened while I was doing the Boston mime.

  “I bought the site and turned it into a Greek village,” curtly observed his lordship.

  “A Greek village? What a very odd thing to do. Why did you do that?” I lisped. “You mean, like Portmeirion — only Greek? How peculiar.”

  “Why did I do it? Because it was absolutely disgusting the way it was. Filthy, squalid, insanitary, verminous. An eyesore.”

  “But why Greek? Why not just Dorset?” Absently, I removed a paper-clip from the bar.

  “Because I knew a Greek architect and some Greek builders who were interested in the scheme. Because I had visited a Greek island, Castelorizo, where they had derelict villages to give away. The inhabitants had all migrated to the mainland. So I bought one, lock, stock and barrel, and transferred it to Caundle.”

  “A truly heroic conception,” said Randolph Grove, working terribly hard at it.

  “Did the Greek village fit the site?” I asked. “And what did you do with the indigenous inhabitants at Caundle? There must have been some? Those trailers weren’t all inhabited by summer tenants. Didn’t they mind? Like the Palestinians?”

  “Ninety percent of the caravans were used by summer visitors,” Fortuneswell answered coldly. “For the rest, I found alternative accommodation. I can assure you that nobody suffered.”

  “Oh naturally not,” I told him on the breath of a polite ironic yawn.

  Baiting him was the sort of game I hadn’t played for a long time and I was enjoying myself. I caught a sympathetic gleam in Joel’s eye, but he shook his head at me and remarked,

  “It’s remarkable how well the Greek architecture fits into the Dorset landscape — the walls and the steps and the whitewashed cottages —”

  “Oh, you’ve been there, Joel, have you?”

  “Took a batch of pictures for Country Life. They’re using them in April, time for Orthodox Easter.”

  “There’s a church too, then? Byzantine?”

  “Oh yes,” chipped in Randolph, “and Lord Fortuneswell even imported a Greek priest, didn’t you, Ty, Father Athanasius, is it?”

  “How very thorough, sir,” said Joel.

  “Do call me Ty, everyone does,” commanded our host, a shaft evidently aimed at Grove, and he fetched up a repeat order of Moët with one snap of the fingers. I could see that even in my role as Rosy he left me laps behind when it came to obtaining bar service.

  Then, turning to me, he went on, as if the other two were not there, “I did of course try to persuade the Greek inhabitants to come with the village. But they had their hearts set on Rhodes and weren’t interested in Dorset country life. The priest wanted to stay with his church, though.”

  “Is it finished? When did all this happen? Who lives there now?”

  Really I couldn’t help being interested. If only Masha were still alive! She’d be absolutely pumping him with questions. So would Fitz. Already, of course, I was planning my letter to him.

  “It’s almost complete now,” said Lord Fortuneswell, or Ty, as he had asked us to call him. James Tybold, I remembered his name was. Child of some north-country magnate? Who had made good and migrated to warmer climes? The son James had shrewdly and cannily deployed a chunk of inherited money — from electronics? Computers? Pinball games? — and used the resulting accretion of wealth to lever himself a peerage from the last government but two. By doing something benevolent for the arts, was it? Perhaps the Caundle Quay affair had earned his good-conduct stripe?

  “Who lives there?” I asked again. “Dispossessed peasantry from the land the Army has taken? It’s too bad you can’t get that back as well.”

  “Most of the houses are still empty.” Fortuneswell ignored my remark about the Army. “What I plan is to let the accommodation at peppercorn rents to young artists, or people who need peace and quiet to get on with some project.”

  Not a particularly original idea, and (I thought) probably one of those schemes doomed to failure from their inception. On paper it looked good, but the artists would fail to pay their peppercorn rents, would quarrel with one another, and probably leave the place as squalid as the caravan dwellers had done. But it would doubtless put its originator in line for a Nobel prize, or something of the kind, and I said politely that it sounded quite, quite brilliant, a truly capital notion, what a lucky set of artists they would be. Who selected them? I wondered, and added idly,

  “I just hope there isn’t some old lady banished from her caravan who puts a hoodoo on the whole enterprise —” and what put such an idea into my head, who can tell? A touch of telepathy perhaps; if there is such a thing as telepathy it must work in a relevant way just sometimes. “Remember that North Sea Gas town they built on a Shetland island, and it turned out that some evicted monks had laid a fearful hex on the place a few centuries earlier, and they had endless trouble with the rigs and all the machinery. In the end they had to fetch in an exorcist.”

  “I heard of a terrific curse only the other day,” said Joel, cheerfully following on my lead. “That actress Polly Lasceles who ran off with somebody’s husband —”

  “Nat O’Dell the singer —”

  “Right, and so his wife Kitty O’Dell sent Polly one of those boxes of five thousand printed labels, Polly Lasceles, c/o Nat O’Dell, 15 Powdermaker Mansions.”

  “So what’s wrong with that? A kind thought, surely?”

  “She’d put a curse on the labels. Five thousand of them! Polly only stayed with Nat a week in Powdermaker Mansions
, and then they quarrelled and he kicked her out. Never used a single label.”

  “What a good idea. I must remember that,” I said, thinking that just at present I didn’t have anybody who needed cursing. Perhaps, long ago, I should have laid a curse on Papa? Or perhaps somebody had, and that was why he was the way he was? Curses must have unpredictable ripple effects, extending far beyond the immediate consequences.

  Joel and I began swapping recollections of other notable curses and suggestions for effective new ones, laughing heartily at our frivolous ideas; at least Joel laughed heartily and I practised my Rosy dimple. A frigidity next to me conveyed that Lord Fortuneswell did not find the curse theme at all entertaining; he could have given Queen Victoria two rooks and still beaten her.

  Randolph Grove was hopping from foot to foot and trying to lead the conversation elsewhere, but no one was paying him any heed.

  However at this moment we were joined by Zoë Grandison, the actress who played the part of Dodo. Dodo, in the story, is an earnest girl, very carefully brought up and educated, so wholly focused on the pursuit of Good with a capital G that she continually makes an ass of herself. But of course you can’t help liking her because she means so well. In the end, even horrible selfish Rosy comes to value Dodo’s goodness and performs her one disinterested action of the book — but that doesn’t make Rosy reform herself, oh dear no.

  Zoë Grandison’s looks were just right for Dodo, nobody needed to do any transforming work on her in the studio. She had huge myopic grey eyes, a pale heart-shaped face, and a cloud of glossy, dusky hair so long that she could sit on it. She washed the hair every day and in normal life it hung loose, so that as she walked it brushed her beautifully shaped little rump which was generally encased in skintight jeans. I have seen susceptible males literally totter as Zoë strolled past them; she exuded an aura of sex powerful as garlic bread. Of course for the part of Dodo the sex bit was subdued; Zoë was an instinctively good actress who played from her id, not from her brain, and made Dodo into a dumb, ardent and touching cluck, always up to her neck in philanthropic aspirations, and without the least idea of the powerful effect she has on others, notably the opposite sex. The choice of Zoë for that part was a shrewd bit of casting.