Familiar Rooms in Darkness

by Caro Fraser

  Adam folded the magazine and showed the page to Dan, his photographer. ‘Bella Day. What d’you think?’

  Dan considered the pictures. ‘Yeah. Wouldn’t kick her out of bed, that’s for sure.’

  Adam closed the magazine and sighed.

  When he got back to his flat that afternoon, Adam played back his messages. The third was from Bella. After the night at Gandercleugh, he had hardly expected to hear from her again.

  ‘Adam, this is Bella Day. You didn’t say whether or not you had my mother’s number.’ There followed Cecile’s phone number, and nothing more. That was the content of the message.

  He sat down and went back, for the thousandth time, over the conversation they had had in his bedroom at Gandercleugh. Not really a conversation, more a fragment of one, mere words, two people not quite making sense to one another. Leaving the fact of Megan aside, his response to her availability had been instinctively truthful. She was insecure, flaky, and she had come on to him purely out of boredom. How many other men did she offer herself to on first acquaintance? Dozens, probably. A strange girl. You would think someone as beautiful as that would have a stronger sense of self-regard. He could wish the incident had never happened, given that he wanted to be able to talk to her easily and equably about what it was like being Harry Day’s daughter. Then again, it had possessed a bizarre eroticism which he found difficult to put from his mind.

  That evening he and Megan lay on the sofa after supper, Adam flicking through television channels, his shoes off, feet on the coffee table.

  ‘I still don’t know what to wear to Jo’s wedding,’ said Megan idly.

  ‘When is that again?’

  ‘In two weeks – July the first.’

  ‘I may be in France that weekend.’

  ‘Oh, Adam! You’ve known about it for ages. I’ve accepted for both of us.’

  ‘Sorry about that. But she’s your friend.’

  Megan said nothing for a moment. She had wanted very much to attend this wedding with Adam. At an old schoolfriend’s wedding, being part of a couple had a special importance. It was all very well being a single thirtysomething on the London scene, but when the chips were down, in the old church setting and at the reception afterwards, she’d look very much like remaindered goods if she had to show up on her own.

  ‘Why might you be in France?’

  ‘I pitched this idea to the commissioning editor on one of the Sundays – about farmers who’ve abandoned this country to go and farm in France. I suggested it months ago, and he’s only just come round to the idea. So I may be away for a week or so.’

  ‘Can’t you go later? I could take a couple of weeks off, come with you. It would be more like a holiday.’

  Adam considered this. ‘I could, I suppose. There’s no particular hurry. I’ll think about it.’

  ‘Anyway, I thought you were meant to be getting on with this biography thing?’

  Adam sighed. ‘I know. I really should. Actually, Bella Day rang today and left her mother’s number. You know, Cecile Patterson, Harry Day’s first wife.’

  ‘Oh, right.’ Megan had lost interest, and was watching the television.

  Adam wondered why he didn’t ring her now. He’d been hanging back on this book, hadn’t got in touch with any of the people whose phone numbers he’d taken down at Gandercleugh. His diffidence had something to do with that business with Bella. Well, he’d sorted that out in his mind, so he might as well get on with it.

  He got up and went into his room, picked up the piece of paper on which he’d written the number, and rang it.

  The voice which answered was light yet husky, very precise. ‘Cecile Patterson.’

  Adam introduced himself, and mentioned Bella.

  Cecile was warm and expansive. She said she would be delighted to assist Adam, and that he was most welcome to visit any time next week. She began to talk about Harry, unbidden, and went on for a good ten minutes. Adam started to jot down notes, but stopped. He could get it all again when he went to see her. He suspected she was somewhat lonely. She talked in the eager way that lonely people did.

  He arranged to visit her at her home in Dulwich the following Wednesday, at two in the afternoon. As he went back through to Megan, Adam wondered whether he would glean from Cecile anything more than the superficial facts of this period of Harry’s life. She sounded too civilized, too much at ease with the past, to bring out any hard and bitter truths.

  He sat down next to Megan. She half-turned, nestled against him and kissed him, unbuttoning the top of his shirt. ‘Do you want to go to bed?’

  ‘Let’s do it here.’

  ‘On the sofa? Bed’s comfier.’

  ‘Comfy,’ replied Adam, ‘is not what I want.’

  ‘Cosier.’ She slipped her hand beneath the waistband of his trousers.

  ‘Nor is cosy.’

  Undefined thoughts, vaguely connected with Megan’s friend’s wedding, drifted through Megan’s mind as Adam undressed her. They were to do with the pleasures of being part of a couple, and of patterns taking the shape of stability. Adam’s own thoughts dwelt on the sensual pleasure of sexual familiarity, quite different from the erotic charge of first encounters, and tailed off, when his mind became incapable of coherent thought, into the question of how long it took for familiarity to lose its delight and become merely boring.

  Cecile lived in a semi-detached house in Dulwich, in a street which she described as a quiet backroad. As though Dulwich contained any other kind, thought Adam, as he got out of the car that afternoon. The early summer air was blank and still, awash with suburban melancholy. He felt its genteel oppression as he walked up the pavement to Cecile’s house, through the gate, up a short flight of steps, and pressed the bell.

  Cecile answered the door, dressed in loose trousers, a long cardigan with a brightly coloured scarf at the neck, and house slippers. She smiled at Adam. ‘Do come in,’ she said. Her voice was husky, languid, with nicely accented vowels. Although she no longer appeared on stage, and very rarely on television, it was a voice which kept her much in demand with producers of a certain kind of Radio Four drama.

  She made Adam coffee, and they sat in the front room with a plate of chocolate digestives on the table between them. It was not the kind of room Adam associated with an old person. The floor was of polished wood, the walls white, hung with pictures, and the furnishings a tasteful blend of whites and neutrals. But then Cecile, as he had realized from glimpses of her at Harry’s funeral and memorial service, was not a typical old woman.

  ‘I don’t use this room a great deal. The other one,’ she gestured vaguely behind her, ‘is a dreadful clutter. Full of clothes, you know, and my sewing machine and paraphernalia. I do some dressmaking – just for a few clients, friends, really. And myself, of course.’

  Adam nodded, then took out his tape recorder and set it down on the table next to the biscuits. ‘Shall we start?’

  ‘Of course,’ said Cecile. ‘Fire away.’

  ‘Tell me about the early days with Harry. You first met when you were cast in Crying Out Loud at the Royal Court, didn’t you?’

  ‘Oh, we met before that, you know, when I was playing with the Birmingham Rep, and Harry came to see one of the plays – I can’t recall what it was. Anyway, the director was Donald Weir, and Harry was a friend of his. Donald was terribly temperamental, and not at all the kind of person one liked working for. But a job was a job in those days… So that was when we first met. Then the following spring I was in A Taste of Honey at the Wyndham’s, and he came to see me, and I suppose he thought I would be good for the part of Christine in Crying Out Loud. So he suggested me to Bill Prior, the director. The last thing in the world I expected was that Harry would ask me out. But he did…’

  ‘Do you remember what you did, the first time you went out together?’

  ‘Oh, yes. I wanted to see At the Drop of a Hat – you know, Flanders and Swann – at the New Lindsey. It was the most wonderful smash. But it was sold
out, and anyway it wasn’t really Harry’s kind of thing. So we went to a Tennessee Williams play which had just opened, Camino Real. Harry loved it and I thought it was dire. I think time has proved me right, and Harry wrong – please, do have the last biscuit. And after that,’ she clasped her hands between her knees and smiled brightly at Adam, ‘we began to see one another on a regular basis and… well, we went on from there.’

  ‘Tell me about your life together after that. You appeared in his next play, didn’t you?’

  For an hour Adam sat listening as Cecile recounted as much as she could recall of her marriage to Harry. He noticed that she scarcely mentioned Bella and Charlie.

  ‘And then, you know, we divorced.’

  ‘Was that a difficult time?’

  ‘Oh, in some ways. He was not a particularly provident person, you know, Harry, when it came to money, and so on… The children were very young, and things were quite hard, financially. But emotionally difficult? No. We had rather gone our separate ways some time before that.’ Cecile stared abstractedly at the back of her hands, and just as Adam was about to ask another question, she went on, ‘Harry really was a bit of a puzzle, you know. He started out as a rather mature person in a lot of ways, but as he got older, he seemed to become more juvenile. Like someone living their life backwards. Maybe it had something to do with the fashions of the times – manners, and so on. When he was a teenager, just after the war, you know, there was no such thing as youth, really. People reached the age of twenty-one and became grown-ups. Men in their early twenties behaved terribly like men in their forties. They dressed the same, by and large. No such thing as fashion for teenagers or young men in those days. Well, not until teddy boys, all that kind of thing.’ She glanced at Adam’s cup. ‘Would you like more coffee?’

  ‘No, thank you.’

  ‘Harry, when I met him, was a serious grown-up. He was twenty-nine, he was a playwright, he’d published books of poetry… I was only nineteen, of course. At the end of the fifties, the early sixties, society began to change. Things became looser, less well-defined. The younger generation got invented. I think Harry decided he wanted to belong to it. He’d never had much of a youth, you see, between being a schoolboy and being grown-up. Straight into National Service, bang into his first job… He refused point-blank to go to university, you know. That was a sort of rebellion against his father. Anyway, by the time he was thirty-five, or thereabouts, Harry decided to be the young man he’d never had the chance to be. He embraced it all – pop music, flower power, marijuana, modern art, modern fashion. Oh, and how he enjoyed being a celebrity. Back in the fifties, that was the last thing he thought about. When he was writing those early plays, he was utterly dedicated, he wanted to reveal the reality of the kind of life he’d seen. You know, coming from a fairly privileged, middle-class academic background, the life Harry led – the life he forced upon himself, after leaving the army… Well, it was a complete revelation to him. Living amongst working-class people, doing pretty menial work, no money… It was a kind of moral imperative with him to show to the middle-class world he came from exactly what life was like for most people, hard and basic and not at all genteel. He disliked Coward and Rattigan… though of course that’s all become fashionable again now, hasn’t it?’

  ‘What d’you think changed Harry’s idealism?’

  ‘Oh… Success. Success is very seductive. A successful playwright can’t go on living in a bedsit in Soho, even if that is where he gets most of his material from. And the world of the theatre draws you in, strokes your fur, makes you purr. Directors, actors, wealthy patrons – it was very hard to stay an angry young man under those circumstances, you know. Though God knows, some tried. I mean, look at Osborne. Poor old thing. What an effort that must have been… Not that Harry was ever a celebrity as such, not like Colin Wilson, say. But he had a following. He was writing ideal material for all those up-and-coming young actors from the provinces – Tom Courtney, Peter O’Toole, Albert Finney… Did you know that Finney and I were in Birmingham Rep together? He played Hotspur in Henry the Fifth and I was Katherine…’ Cecile paused for some seconds, her eyes fixed on her own past. Then she resumed. ‘The trouble was, by the end of the sixties, that working-class theme was rather played out. People had moved on to other things. Mainly due to the removal of the Lord Chamberlain’s powers of censorship, I suppose. There was a great sea change, culturally and morally. We had Hair and Oh! Calcutta!, nonsense of that kind. Well, by the early seventies, Harry wasn’t writing much at all. A few plays for television, that was about it. He was very much caught up in his own busy social life. He drank a lot, I remember. I suspect he was making up for all that lost time.’

  ‘Lost time?’

  Cecile shrugged. ‘As I said, he had his youth to live all over. Those years he spent in Soho, surrounded by artists and writers and God knows who else, largely blind drunk from morning to night so far as I can tell, and Harry toiling away abstemiously… It was as though he was making up for not having taken part in all that. Oh, the seventies, that was Harry’s decade for riotous living.’

  ‘And you?’

  Cecile frowned, the first indication she had given of any impatience. ‘Well, I had the children.’

  It was the first time she had mentioned them.

  ‘So you were at home with Charles and Bella, while Harry–’

  ‘Led his own life, more or less.’

  Adam hesitated for a few moments, searching for tactful words. It was past four o’clock, and she had been talking for a long time. She was probably tired. ‘It must have been difficult, Harry beginning to behave in that way, when you both had young children to care for.’ He wanted to add that it seemed odd, too, that Harry should go off the rails just when the twins were born, having been apparently solid and dependable up until that point. But he didn’t. He waited.

  ‘That’s men for you, isn’t it?’ She smiled at the banality. ‘He was wonderful at the beginning. We’d waited a long time for a family. He was there at the birth. That wasn’t the done thing in those days, you know. Harry insisted. Everything went well with Charles – he was born first – but I had such a dreadful time with Bella. Anyway, when it was all over, Harry went home and celebrated with friends. And he carried on celebrating from that day forward. Well, it seemed that way. He wasn’t there much. He always said he was seeing television people, made excuses of that kind, but he was mostly out on the spree. Just never home. I’m sure it was partly my fault. I was so bound up with the children. They say that, don’t they? That women can become so involved with their babies that they shut their husbands out. Maybe I did that…’

  She talked on for another twenty minutes or so, until Adam’s tape ran out.

  ‘I don’t think we can do any more this afternoon. It’s really been invaluable. Thank you for your time. May I come back and talk to you again, if I need to?’

  ‘Oh, of course. I rather liked talking about those old times. I don’t revisit them much, you know. I keep telling myself that I shall save up all my memories for my extreme old age, and take them out and inspect them then… Though, of course, that way one might well be dead before one gets round to remembering anything properly.’

  ‘I wonder,’ said Adam, ‘do you happen to have any photographs? From the time when you and Harry first met?’

  There was an almost imperceptible hesitation, a slipping of her gaze, and then she said, ‘Of course. Let me fetch some.’

  Cecile went to a desk which stood below the window. It was late afternoon by now, and school children trailed along the street outside.

  ‘You might be able to use some of these in your book…’ She drew out two large albums and brought them back to the table. She sat down and opened the first, smiling. As she turned the pages of the album, Adam realized how much it would please her to think of her young self living again in the pages of some biography. There were many pictures of her, theatre stills, mostly, from the fifties and early sixties, showing a tall girl wi
th wavy blonde hair and well-defined features, and the figure of the times, with a nipped waist and pointed breasts. He could probably use no more than one in the biography. The ones which interested him more were the casual snapshots, Harry and Cecile with various theatrical celebrities, some forgotten, some still well known. There was Harry in his youth – smiling eyes, handsome, rather roguish features, light-brown hair slightly receding, the same spare, muscled body, slight in stature. There, evident in these early photos, was the quiet dynamism which Adam had occasionally sensed in those long talks with the older Harry, in the days before his death.

  Cecile sat back in her chair, let Adam take over the page-turning. She seemed tired. Adam told himself he would go soon. He paused at a picture larger than the others, which had the look of having once been in a frame but later stuffed away out of sight in the album. It was of Cecile and Harry on their wedding day. A group of people outside Kensington Register Office, Cecile in a smartly tailored dress, short gloves, hat brim shading her eyes, laughing, clutching a small posy of flowers. Harry in a loose-jacketed suit, trousers with turn-ups, scarcely any taller than his wife in her high heels. Adam immediately recognized Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon among the group, and felt a little thrill of excitement. This was definitely one he could use. He turned the book towards Cecile.

  ‘This photo of your wedding – can you tell me exactly who everyone is?’

  Cecile leaned forward. She gave a quick frown of surprise when she saw the photograph. She took it from Adam’s hand and gazed at it for some seconds. She recited names, one by one, without hesitation, then handed it back to Adam.

  ‘What about this man?’ He pointed at the image of a young man with dark, slicked-back hair, who stood just behind Harry, slightly shorter than him, staring at the camera with unsmiling eyes.