A groan. ‘Better not. Trying not to drink in daylight on weekdays.’ He’d taken up the gaspers again after twenty years when the situation got on top of him. Now he was trying to kick that ruddy habit all over again. He gets up. ‘Sorry, Beatrice, let me get you something.’
‘No no, please sit down, I’m fine.’ Viv had forgotten she was Beatrice. ‘There’s a Costa next door, we should have gone there, out of reach of temptation. Look, Tom, it’s not surprising that such a young woman would want children of her own, is it? Forgive me, but I don’t quite see the problem. Why are you here?’
‘Let me enlighten you,’ Tom says tersely. ‘Since producing the kid, she – Sabrina, to give the girl a name – has become completely unrecognisable.’
‘It’s not that unusual to change, after giving birth. Do you mean visually, or—’
‘She’s let herself go.’ His full-body shudder strikes Viv as involuntary. After a pause he adds, ‘Literally, I mean. And that’s a chivalrous understatement, if I may say so.’ Viv chooses not to respond to this. ‘She eats like a horse. She’s developed an antipathy towards me, won’t have me anywhere near her.’
‘What about the baby?’ Viv asks, concerned.
‘Don’t worry about that, it’s not a baby now. That’s not the problem. She’s besotted with it.’
‘It’s just you she can’t abide. Well, that’s a relief, isn’t it? In a manner of speaking?’
He breathes in deeply. ‘It’s like Lysistrata at our place, Beatrice. Except we’re not in a play, it’s not funny and there’s no happy ending. And divorce is out of the question. And please refrain from sentences ending in “ just desserts”.’
‘That’s rotten luck, Tom, but the odds are there’s a light at the end of the tunnel. Maybe Sabrina will go on a strict diet and her libido will bounce back. It’s probably something as simple as post-natal depression. After all, the baby is still young.’
An exasperated look. ‘I told you, it’s not a baby. It’s two, for God’s sake.’
Viv suppresses a laugh. ‘Perhaps it’s an unusually severe case. It can be protracted.’
‘Rubbish, of course it’s not. It’s me she can’t stand. She’s perfectly normal with everybody else. Apart from the – the parishioners. She loathes them. Which is understandable enough.’
‘Is divorce really out of the question, then? I mean, I do see—’
‘I don’t think you do see. Of course it is. Lord yes. It would be tabloid heaven. My bloody subjects would go berserk. They’d lynch me. You have to appreciate the hoo-ha that was unleashed when I took up with her.’
There was some unspeakable trolling on Facebook and Twitter. Hellish things were said. His ex-wife had been popular, she’d lavished good works all over the joint, whereas Sabrina is not into do-gooding, to put it mildly. Into hausfrauing is more like it. And the ethnic thing didn’t help. It’s all Brexit down there. He gestures, arms spread. You know, around there.
‘Around the East End? I don’t think so.’ Viv thinks about the parents and staff she knows around there.
‘You’d be surprised.’
‘I would.’ After a pause, ‘If you don’t mind my saying, why doesn’t Sabrina want to divorce you?’ According to Martin she doesn’t need money, she remembers.
He mops his brow with a large handkerchief adorned with a photo of Big Ben. ‘Don’t worry, I’m trying to bring it on. Subtly. But whatever she thinks I want she does the opposite. And there’s another thing.’
His hair falls forward, giving him a moody and rather fetching Byronic look. ‘The other maddening thing being that she’s developed a close friendship with a ghastly female jockey who’s around all the time.’
‘How close?’
‘God knows. That would be all I need.’ He yanks a fob watch from his pocket.
‘Is there a service coming on?’
‘I’m all right for a bit. Evensong threatens.’ An eye-roll. ‘Total waste of time because there’ll only be three ancient takers. That’s if they haven’t died on one.’
‘Would they notice if one didn’t show up?’ Viv says. ‘Assuming they’re still upright?’
Her high spirits are persisting in the face of some conflicted feelings about this man. Disbelief and aversion on one hand, tempered on the other by a physical attraction she would be the first to admit is perverse. The sensations seem to be co-existing without difficulty. The reason is that nothing is at stake here, she thinks. Not my feelings or his or, it would seem, anyone else’s.
Were she to be questioned at this juncture, she thinks that she just might, on balance, opt for giving the Rev Daunt a go. At least she could close her eyes and think of Robert Mitchum. Which had to be better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick, as Jules might observe. The idea of shagging a vicar: it’s just too much for human frailty to resist. In Viv’s present disposition, at any rate.
21
HOLOGRAMS
Julia is in the interesting position of rehearsing with a hologram. Her three Hollywood moments, as Emils calls them, will be the legendary high points of the production, to be filmed in a set in the rehearsal room and beamed onto the stage. There is a climactic third, in the final seconds of the opera, but they don’t need to think about that one just now.
Julia estimates her director’s stubble is four days old and doubts if he’s changed his clothes for two of them. ‘What’s happening is an optical illusion,’ he says. ‘It will look like you’re out there in front of the audience, Julia, but you’re actually in the rehearsal room. Cool, huh?’
The technology for these elaborate stage effects is quite new. Neither Julia nor Yuri Dutka, the hefty Ukrainian singing Herman, is familiar with the process. Yuri in particular, as a keen photographer, is very taken with it. The stage action will be screened on a monitor so Julia will be able to see the conductor and hear the orchestra.
She already knows what’s coming. For the first segment she has to lie in a coffin on a bier, and she is finding this unexpectedly troubling. Later she will ask herself why a seasoned old pro like herself should have had this reaction. Realistically though, being laid out as an old woman in a casket, in a burial shroud, arms folded, face waxen and bloodless, playing dead – wouldn’t that give anyone the creeps? And it can only get worse, because for this early rehearsal she’s in a plain gown and not made up as a corpse.
A gothic church – an atmospheric little set – sits in one corner of the vast rehearsal space behind the stage. The scene follows the Countess’s demise after Herman, desperate for the secret of the cards, has pulled a gun on her. Later that night, he is prowling in his bedroom seeing nightmarish visions. The music is agitated. He thinks he hears chanting – or is it the wind howling?
The hologram is Herman’s hallucination, and the film will be shot from his pov, like a dream sequence. He sings: Drawn by an unknown force, I enter the shrouded church. The camera moves towards the draped walls and flickering shadows.
The old woman lies in the coffin, immobile, lifeless. The picture floats before his eyes. The camera closes in on the remorseless face of the dead Countess whose death he has caused. And like a shock in a horror film, one eye opens and closes in a gruesome wink. Away, terrible vision! On stage, the ethereal hologram dissolves like magic.
They go through the brief sequence, with Yuri onstage in Herman’s bedroom and Julia laid out in the rehearsal room, flanked by cameras. It’s a piano rehearsal today, no orchestra. But Ray Bayliss is there, along with Marion Luce the set designer, both taking a keen professional interest. This is new to them too.
For the first hologram Julia won’t be able to see the screen because her eyes are closed in death. Her eye movement must be timed to the split-second. ‘And Julia,’ adds Emils, displaying the sensitivity that has helped propel him into the position he’s in now, directing an opera at Covent Garden at the age of twenty-eight, ‘remember this. You’re only in there before you rise again. In only a matter of seconds – nothing like three days.�
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Julia is working at suppressing her discomfort. Which is, as she repeats to herself, perfectly natural. And she wears her most beguiling smile for her young director. Who, Ray claims, is quite besotted with her already.
When they repair to the canteen for a lunch break they discover burritos and tacos. The caterer adopts different culinary themes from time to time to please the international clientele. Today it’s in honour of the Mexican Day of the Dead, which happens to fall on Sunday. How appropriate, says Julia.
Back in the rehearsal room they feel they’re getting the hang of hologram procedure. In the second one the Countess’s ghost is required to sing a few lines. She will be in her funeral weeds after rising from the dead.
She’ll be a vision in white, Emils tells her, having exited the coffin with the help of two assistants and stepped in front of a plain dark screen. She will take three slow steps, precisely measured and timed. On stage, it will look like her ghost is gliding through Herman’s bedroom door.
The rehearsal gets underway. Herman has just had his nightmare vision. He hears the Countess’s cane tapping at the window. The ominous music rises. Even with the lone piano it’s dramatic, suggesting cyclonic winds howling.
I am terrified. I hear steps. The door opens. No, I can’t bear it! Herman rushes to close his bedroom door as the music crashes around him. He reels backwards. In the hologram’s eerie shimmer, a spectre is revealed in the doorway. The ghost of the Old Countess.
Emils has been standing at Julia’s side. ‘Keep it short, simple, dramatic.’ He moves away. She steps forward.
I have come, against my will, to fulfil your request. Save Lisa, marry her, and three cards will win in succession. Three. Seven. Ace! In a daze, Herman repeats the names of the cards. Whereupon the apparition dissolves and the scene ends. ‘Stunning, Julia,’ says Emils, and hugs her.
He is still fizzing with exhilaration as he sprints out of the rehearsal room into the auditorium to compare notes with his assistant director. To consult with Ray and have a word with Yuri. To identify problems and answer questions. To deliberate, evaluate, and watch three more run-throughs from different parts of the auditorium.
The scattered onlookers in the front stalls, including the conductor and designer, one or two company bigwigs and a few technicians and stagehands, have erupted in spontaneous applause. Remarkable, they agree, an extraordinary, chilling effect. Spine-tingling.
‘Running two now, are we?’ The sound of unoperatic (and rather ruttish) laughter echoes in Viv’s ear. ‘Into threesomes, is it?’
Julia is doing an efficient job of banishing from her mind the recent stresses of impersonating the mortal remains of a Countess. She has delayed the onset of a pedicure in order to take Viv’s call. She’s hesitating over an opalescent white and the wine-dark red she usually goes for.
Off-mike, Viv hears her say: ‘Shall we go all pure and pearly for a change?’ There is a short pause while Jules removes her footwear. Viv doesn’t usually bother with pedicures in winter. After all, Geoff is unlikely to notice. Following this exchange, however, she will drop into the local nail bar and after much indecision have her toenails painted a shade called twilight violet.
She knew perfectly well that she shouldn’t have called, but the urge to tell Jules about the Rev Daunt was too strong. The spirit was willing, but the flesh was (far too) weak. Her friend’s reaction does not disappoint.
‘You cannot be serious. Not content with a hyperventilating Yank you’ve got a goatish vicar in your sights?’
‘The spitting image of Robert Mitchum, no less.’ An acceptable degree of poetic licence, in Viv’s book.
Down the phone line she hears the indistinct instruction: ‘Straight across, not too short.’ Then, ‘You haven’t signed up with Central Casting by mistake, Viv? Martin Thingo’s not producing the Xmas panto at the London Palladium? Mother Goose, perhaps?’
‘We’re meeting next week,’ Viv murmurs. She explains that Leary is on hold, for the time being, on account of the helmer being in rehab and Leary out of town on a recce. The helmer is the director and a recce is a location survey, she adds.
‘Tell me something I didn’t know. Well, no worries – when he hits town again he’ll be able to join in. The more the merrier, eh? And the priapic priest is planning to entertain you in the vicarage? While the frigid wife’s in the kitchen frying the bratwurst? They’re all rigged up with CCTV cameras, you know, Viv, to stop fundamentalist nutters getting in. You’d better wear a burqa.’
No need for that, Viv says complacently. I’m going to Paris instead. He has an apartment in the Marais. Two bedrooms, he said, so we can play it by ear. Just to put your worries at rest.
‘Two bedrooms in the Marais? On a vicar’s salary?’ Another snorting laugh. Viv extends the phone to arm’s length. Jules’s voice is at full operatic projection. ‘Do you have any idea what they earn?’
‘Well, I think it might be his German wife’s …’
‘What an accommodating little German frau he must have, to be sure. What’s his excuse for the Paris junket? They don’t get any time off, I read in the paper. They’re on call 24/7. And they mostly have more than one parish, what with the ancient fan base dwindling by the second.’
Viv had seen the same article. Jules shouldn’t believe everything she reads in the paper. He has to go to a conference—
‘A conference? Of parish priests? You know, Viv, these kinds of delusions might be a sign of early onset—’
‘There are no presumptions,’ Viv interrupts in turn. ‘He’s a man of the cloth, Jules. You can’t get much sounder than that.’ This is delivered with forceful confidence, concealing a high degree of doubt. Jules’s observations have tapped into certain suspicions already in place.
Balls. He wasn’t wearing a dog collar, and he doesn’t sound remotely like any priest of Julia’s acquaintance. Which is admittedly limited, but no more than Viv’s. Speaking of balls, she says, Viv hasn’t forgotten the pelvic floor refresher course next week? What with all this new-found excitement going on in her life. The doc was very insistent they go.
Two years ago, at Nerida Clifford’s instigation, various of her patients had signed up for a specialised exercise class. It involved the rhythmic clenching of internal muscles of the pelvic floor, in multiple repetitions, and was designed to improve bladder performance now and in perpetuity. Purely precautionary, Dr Clifford had advised. But it had beneficial side effects in other, unrelated activities. These were not to be sneezed at.
Viv and Julia had performed their routines dutifully to start with, but both had admitted subsequent lapses. All the more reason to take them up again with renewed rigour, Jules says, bearing in mind the beneficial side effects. Especially since Viv would seem to be on the verge of resuming her activities in this sphere.
Viv is surprised at Jules’s insistence. Surprised also that her friend has time to think of her pelvic floor at all, given everything else going on in her life. But she doesn’t expend much energy or thought on this, given what is going on in her own.
The last time she went to Paris was with a female friend to see the reopened Picasso Museum. The idea of going to the city of light and romance with a new male friend (even if her feelings about him are mixed) is appealing. As is the prospect of a couple of nights away from Geoff in an apartment in the Marais. Whichever room she sleeps in.
Joy, who is not disposed to indulge Viv by discussing this any further, and whose disposition remains as resolutely surly as it has been recently, is unimpressed by her friend’s behaviour and incensed by the vicar’s. She wouldn’t be caught dead in his church. Who does he think he is, telling people what they ought to be doing? He’s a tosser, just mark her words.
But Viv sees a harmony in the timing of upcoming events. The little Paris jaunt will slot neatly into the week before Daisy’s gallery opening. Almost as if it might have been divinely ordained.
22
THE REV
Viv will find it
impossible to relate the Paris story in full. Not to Jules or Joy, not to Martin Glover. Certain details are just too toe-curling.
She had texted Nerida Clifford: Swanning off to Paree for your birthday. Just so you know. A woman of few words, the doctor had responded: Roger.
I’m going to Paris for a day or two, Viv remarked airily to Geoff. It was indeed Nerida’s birthday about now, and there had been innocent trips (with and without partners) to Paris, Bruges and Lyons in previous years. Nerida had been lent an apartment in the Marais by one of her wealthy patients, Viv extemporised, a two-bedder, before remembering that to explain too much was a giveaway. It was arguably worse than not explaining at all.
No matter, in any case. She had been finding her husband’s behaviour increasingly irritating and irrational. Eliza was being set up with an IT job in Geoff’s old firm after Christmas, and she could now afford a one-bedroom instead of a studio. There would be an interim period when she couldn’t quite afford it, and Geoff would provide a bridging loan.
The two of them seemed to spend hours drinking herbal tea (which Geoff had always loathed) and poring over real-estate listings on their computers at the kitchen table. Beyond that, the exact nature of their relationship remained obscure. The plan was to take the Eurostar and connect with Tom Daunt at the end of day one of the two-day conference being held somewhere near the Petit Palais. The apartment was convenient to Bastille and the Place des Vosges. A favourite area of Viv’s; she and Geoff had stayed nearby in a small hotel on several occasions.
The forecast for Paris was cold but dry. Layering is the way to go, and take the bare minimum – Julia’s perennial travel advice was embedded in the psyche. Viv knew Julia’s idea of the bare minimum differed from her own, but had thrown in a layer or two for versatility.
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