Cool Repentance

by Antonia Fraser

  'Christabel Herrick, isn't she absolutely into younger men?' enquired a passing secretary innocently. 'I mean, didn't she run off with a randy teenager?'

  'Yes, Spike, you'd better keep an eye on your Focus Puller,' concurred Guthrie in a bland voice which was not at all innocent; leaving the secretary to wonder why the great - and greatly fancied - Spike Thompson gave her a wide berth in the Megalith canteen thereafter, despite a series of very straightforward propositions made there on previous occasions.

  Jemima Shore for her part found herself with two new tasks. The first was to get to know Christabel Herrick, the distinguished actress who had dominated a generation before abandoning the stage, through the medium of the Megalith cuttings library. The second was to get to know Christabel Cartwright, the lady of Lark Manor, in person.

  She was half-way through the first task, when she was interrupted by a telephone call from the object of her researches. Already Jemima had become torn between morbid curiosity and personal disgust as sensational headline followed headline. Listening to Christabel Cartwright's delightful low voice on the telephone, she found it very difficult to equate the two images.

  Christabel's call fortuitously set the second task under way, for she had rung up to propose lunch together. She suggested Larminster - Flora's Kitchen - rather than her own house on the rather vaguely expressed grounds that 'there's so much always going on at Lark'.

  A few days later at the restaurant Christabel was more explicit: 'We're redesigning the courtyard garden to make it less doleful, there are no flowers there in the summer, except climbers, which is ridiculous, lots and lots of peonies I thought, Julian says they take years to establish, but I said, we've got years darling, years and years, at least speaking for myself.. .'

  Yes, thought Jemima, it was certainly very difficult to reconcile the romantic heroine - or villainess - of the newspaper with this pleasant pretty well-dressed woman sitting opposite her, rattling on about her garden planning. Jemima watched Christabel pouring herself a large vodka from a half-bottle produced somewhat surprisingly from her Gucci handbag, and thought that was about the only eccentric note she struck. And even that proved susceptible to explanation.

  'No vodka here,' cried Christabel, 'and I can't have lunch without a voddy, can I? So Poll doesn't mind if I bring my own.'

  Poll was a girl with very long very straight hair who served them in virtual silence, except for occasional low-voiced suggestions. She moved mysteriously and gracefully, vanishing from time to time into the kitchen at the back with a swish of her long skirts. Whereupon from the kitchen much louder noises of furious expostulation usually issued.

  'That's Moll,' confided Christabel during one of these bouts. 'She cooks. And yells at Poll. They're a devoted couple except when Moll gets one of her jealous fits about Poll and the male customers. They met as art students. In Florence, you will not be totally surprised to hear.'

  The menu featured Botticelli Salad, Boeuf Primavera and Syllabub Uffizi. Impressionistic figures, roughly based on those of Botticelli, had been painted all over the walls of the dark little restaurant, giving a pleasantly cavernous effect. The table-cloths and napkins were made of Botticelli-printed linen: Jemima found herself staring down at Venus's left breast, the nipple centrally placed between her knife and fork. All the food was absolutely delicious, and except for its name, there was nothing Italianate about it at all.

  The house wine was also very good. Poll, unasked, brought a bottle of red and placed it before Christabel. Since Jemima then gently enquired for some white, Christabel was left alone with the red; the level, Jemima noticed, went down quite rapidly, as Poll filled and refilled Christabel's glass silently and deftly.

  In the far corner of Flora's Kitchen, appropriately enough in the shadow of the Three Graces, Jemima noticed Spike Thompson having lunch with Nat Fitzwilliam. Poll's long hair drooped and dipped tenderly over Spike Thompson's plate in a way that Jemima thought would not greatly please Moll were she to witness it. Spike, in a scarlet polo-necked jersey under his black leather jacket, was the only truly Italian-looking thing in the restaurant; in contrast to the schoolboy appearance of Nat Filzwilliam, he looked quite aggressively masculine.

  Jemima removed her gaze, banished some unprofessional thoughts on the subject of her cameraman, and concentrated on Christabel. Christabel's fluffy hair was framed rather than covered in the halo of a blue chiffon scarf. A ruffled white blouse under a pale-blue jacket on which a full-blown creamy rose was held by a jewelled pin made her look as ostentatiously feminine as Spike looked masculine. The jewelled pin which held the spray was in the shape of a lily of the valley simulated in pearls and jade. Yet Jemima did not feel that she had dressed with any special care for this occasion; merely that her appearance in general was the result of constant cherishing. The right word for Christabel was glamorous. In that respect she resembled royalty - or an actress.

  THE ACTRESS AND THE PLOUGHBOY - that was one glaring headline which came back into Jemima's mind. All that side of Christabel Cartwright seemed quite incomprehensible, looking at her now - unless of course one was inclined to explain the whole history of the world in terms of sex. And that, Jemima, despite being most amiably disposed towards the subject herself, had always supposed to be an error. Perhaps Christabel's history had something to teach her.

  According to the newspapers, Christabel Cartwright's torrid romance with Barry Blagge, the handsome red-haired only child of the married couple who worked at Lark Manor, had begun when he was about twenty-one. It was of course nonsense - pure headlinese - to describe him as a ptoughboy. Even the columns beneath the headlines themselves contradicted the notion. Barry Blagge, leaving aside his remarkable looks, revealed even at that stage in fuzzy newspaper photographs, had been bright, very bright. He had secured first O-levels and then A-levels at Larminster Royal, hardly a universal occurrence at that quiet school in the early 1970s.

  His bent however had not been academic, as various obliging friends had pointed out to various interested newspapers. No, a pop star was what Barry Blagge had decided that he intended to be. There was nothing in his background to explain such an ambition. Mr Blagge was a former soldier who had been Major Cartwright's batman while Mrs Blagge had been lady's maid to Julian Cartwright's mother, Lady May - two sober people. The trouble was that Barry had been born to them late in life. As a result, observers agreed, there had been far too much indulgence there, which they gleefully blamed for what followed: 'Mrs Blagge always spoiled young Barry rotten, gave him everything he wanted, motor-bike when he was sixteen, and then he wore silver bracelets! I ask you, a boy of seventeen in silver bracelets like a duchess. And that ridiculous clown's costume he paraded in about the place. And as for his hair, why didn't his father just make him cut it, cut it himself if needs be, he was in the army Jim Blagge, he knew the score, oh yes, they always gave him everything he wanted . ..' And so forth and so on went the happy prurient chorus.

  But the Blagges had not been able to give Barry everything he wanted. They had not been able to make him into a pop star overnight for example. The opportunities in Larminster for singing, even with the most humble group, being naturally somewhat limited, Barry's career had languished. Even so there were those who were sufficiently struck by his remarkable physical appearance - the features of Michelangelo's David set in a halo of profuse auburn curls which gyrated fiercely as he sang -combined with the weird sensuality of his singing, to remember and recount later the odd amateur performances. On the whole however Larminster regarded young Barry Blagge on or off his motor-bike, in silver bracelets, pierrot costumes, singing or silent, with distaste or disapproval.

  What the Blagges with their manorial connections could do for Barry was to get him a job, a job of sorts. Hence the ploughboy epithet, although Barry was actually helping to bring in the harvest at Lark.

  It was during the long hot summer of 1976, when the Bridset fields were whitening in the sun, that the romance of Christabel Cartwright and Ba
rry Blagge flamed, much as the rest of England flamed in the dry intensity of that legendary weather. Christabel had planned to spend a quiet summer holiday with her daughters, then thirteen and fourteen, after a long season at the Gray Theatre. Instead she fell passionately in love with Barry Blagge. When autumn came she returned to London and the theatre - taking Barry with her.

  The whole scandal might still have been contained since Julian Cartwright maintained a front of total reserve. He continued to refer in public to his wife's absence, even their separation, as purely temporary, something to do with the alien world of the theatre, no concern of Julian Cartwright's, the ever-courteous lord of the manor of Lark. In this way he even managed to countenance the undeniable fact that Barry Blagge was living in Christabel's apartment in Eaton Place. 'Being helped with his music,' said Mrs Blagge, caught on the telephone at Lark Manor, and Julian Cartwright went along with that too. So there the story might well have rested, for lack of further developments. Had it not been for Barry Blagge himself.

  Jemima had to admit that Barry Blagge's first exclusive interview with the Sunday Sink - headline MY FIRST LADY OF PASSION - made compellingly lurid reading even five years later. There was even a kind of black humour, a bizarre turn of phrase about some of his utterances - if indeed he and not a newspaper ghost-writer was personally responsible for them. With hindsight it was possible to see that it was not out of character for Barry Blagge, an unknown young man in his early twenties, to seek out a Sunday newspaper and insist on delivering his intimate memoirs of a famous actress. At the time the sensation caused both by the revelations and by the flagrancy of the deed itself was enormous.

  Would Barry Blagge's career have taken off without this bold stroke of treachery? Probably. The ambition which had caused him to contact the Sunday Sink in the first place would surely have enabled him to win through sooner or later - even if you discounted his astonishing looks, reinforcing his voice and lyrics. Within four months of the Sunday Sink story, Barry Blagge's first record 'Iron Boy' - a suitable title - got high into the charts. A few months later 'Daring Darling' - another suitable title - reached No. 1. Six months later Iron Boy himself, as Barry Blagge was now mainly known in public, promoting his new record 'Cool Repentance', conquered not only Britain and the United States but most of the rest of the world.

  And what of Christabel? At first she continued to work as she had always done, occupying that prominent role on the English stage so ably described by Barry Blagge when he had called her the 'First lady of passion' - if the passion as delineated by Ibsen and Chekhov was of a rather different nature from that envisaged by the Sunday Sink's readers. At first, too, there were small gossipy pictures of Barry Blagge attending her opening nights. Later these were replaced by very large pictures of Iron Boy at her opening nights, in a series of his remarkable costumes. As he grew more famous, he made some remarkable statements too on the subject of the theatrical scene. Some of his comments on Christabel's fellow-actors were really rather funny (Jemima guessed by now that the black humour was his own) as well as quite insupportably impudent. Then he discussed Christabel herself - in simpler and more laudatory terms: 'Christabel rules OK.' It all read rather oddly put side by side with the theatrical reviews of the piece in question: her rather subdued Hedda Gabler for example.

  As Iron Boy's comments on the person described by some newspapers as his paramour grew more outrageous, the critics, as though not to be outdone, became rather more strident too. Christabel Herrick, their darling for so many years, began to falter in their estimation. Her Hedda

  Gabler was merely received coldly - but that could have been the fault of an innately poor production. It was more sinister when the word 'emotional' began to creep into the papers. The reviews became more barbed, with unpleasant undertones. One critic, describing her Portia, spoke of 'liberties with the text on the first night, of the sort we do not associate with Miss Herrick'.

  There were no photographs of Christabel Herrick at Iron Boy's concerts, although her face, looking sad and very distinguished, like a French marquise at an eve-of-guillotine feast, occasionally stared out of photographs taken at restaurants afterwards.

  Six months after records such as 'Iron Boy' and 'Cool Repentance' had ensured their progenitor world-wide acclaim (that amazing Far Eastern tour, for example, which even Jemima, no connoisseur of the genre, remembered}, Christabel left the cast of a new play just before it opened in the West End. Her agent, apparently taken by surprise, spoke gallantly of the need for a complete rest. It did not help therefore when Christabel was subsequently photographed at London Airport on her way to the United States, where Barry was enjoying a further triumphal progress. Her agent's second statement was even more embarrassed than the first. Christabel in this particular photograph looked haggard and much older than what Jemima reckoned roughly to have been her forty-five years. The scarf she wore on her head did not suit her; her eyes looked huge and scared, her nose too prominent. It was as though she knew in advance of the humiliations which awaited her on the other side of the Atlantic.

  That was the last picture of Christabel Herrick in the Megalith cuttings library. There were plenty more cuttings of Iron Boy, of course - during the four months he had left to live. Jemima leafed through them with a horrid sensation of nemesis, knowing the grisly end to the story. But there was no picture of the scene when Christabel discovered that Barry had moved into the apartment of a famous black model, six foot tall, nineteen years old and very beautiful - nickname Tiny Georgianne. It seemed that he never even met Christabel when she arrived in New York, but relied on his usual mode of expression, the press statement, to convey to her the news. But of that Jemima could not be sure.

  Even the cuttings about Christabel diminished now. Somehow she had obviously struggled back to London, eluding the press at Heathrow, since there was no picture of her arrival. She had been in London, living alone, when the last pictures of Iron Boy were careened all over the newspapers - the day after his beautiful sinuous arrogant body had been cut roughly in half by a lorry, as he rode his motor-bike down the freeway in the Los Angeles dawn, pierrot clothes flying, surrounded by his followers, going from the dawn to oblivion.

  Christabel Herrick's statement on Iron Boy's death - no new picture available, just the old distraught one at London Airport - was short and dignified. It spoke with regret of the loss - and that was all. She did not, of course, attend the funeral, which took place in Los Angeles and was marked by hysterical scenes of grief from Iron Boy's fans. Nor, so far as Jemima could make out, did Mr and Mrs Blagge, still of Lark Manor. Nor was any statement from them printed on the subject of Barry's death.

  In the cuttings library, Jemima Shore pondered on Christabel's use of the word loss. There was the loss of life, of course - Barry's. Then there was the loss of love - Barry's too - assuming he had ever loved her. And what of the other losses which surrounded this squalid little story? The loss of reputation and dignity to Christabel herself? The loss of security and privacy to her children? The loss of everything to her husband?

  Sitting now in Flora's Kitchen, Jemima gazed with something like awe at the smoothly powdered brow before her, the large turquoise eyes eyeing her seductively over a glass of wine, held in a white hand on which a huge aquamarine shone with a shallow blue light. Was it really possible to return, as Christabel Cartwright had evidently done, and bury the past, as securely as Barry Blagge had buried himself in Iron Boy, and Iron Boy was now buried in some Californian cemetery?

  She could not help wondering whether Christabel herself felt any regrets for what she had done. Back in the lap of the manor with her rich husband and adoring children, did she ever think back to the events of her lurid past? Jemima sighed. She knew that her Puritan streak, inherited from generations of stubbornly Nonconformist ancestors, shrank away from the spectacle of Christabel's uncomplicated equanimity.

  She did not exactly want Christabel to be punished for her sins ... that was a ridiculous notion for Jemima
Shore, the famously tolerant liberated lady of the eighties, professionally engaged in comprehending and thus pardoning all around her. Perhaps she just wanted her to feel something, to show something of her past in her manner, in some way to repent.

  Jemima pulled herself up sharply. Now that really was a ridiculous word for Jemima Shore to use, straight out of a Puritan past. She would be advocating the stocks for adultery on television next! Jemima was never quite sure whether or not she believed in sin, but she was quite sure she did not believe in public repentance. Jemima set herself firmly to carry out the real task before her. This was not only to get to know Christabel Herrick but also to actually like her - much the best preparation for a successful programme.

  Oddly enough it proved remarkably easy to like Christabel: as well as genuine warmth, she had an excellent racy sense of humour which appealed to Jemima. It was not so easy to get to know her. Throughout lunch, Jemima sensed some reserve, some nervousness which made Christabel's original invitation to her seem rather puzzling in retrospect. Had Christabel really asked her to Flora's Kitchen merely to swap amusing stories of theatrical acquaintances and devour Syllabub Uffizi with mutual cries of dietary guilt?

  It was at the end of the meal, when Christabel was powdering her nose and looking in the mirror of her gold compact with its jewelled clasp - Cartier no doubt - that she made the first revealing remark of the lunch.

  ‘I’m so frightened about all this, you know,' she said suddenly.

  Jemima gave a tactful murmur: 'You mean the stage after so long.'

  That - and other things.' There was a silence while Poll placed the bill between them, her long hair brushing the paper. Jemima, used to entertaining in the way of business, made an instinctive gesture towards it. Christabel swept her hand away: 'On my account.' Without looking at the bill, she thrust a very large tip on top of it and signed to Poll to take it away. Poll, like a witch in Macbeth, departed as silently as she had come. The distant shouts of Moll greeted her return to the kitchen.