Darling Sweetheart

by Stephen Price

‘Your home town! We got news this morning that they’ve finished the sets at Shepperton, so while you were flaked out there, I was tellin’ Peter we should take a break from all this outdoor stuff and do some nice, relaxin’ interiors.’

  ‘But we still have loads to do here! London isn’t scheduled until next month!’

  ‘That,’ Tress snarled from the far side of the room, ‘is what I’ve been trying to tell your co-star. This is an eighty-million-dollar production and we must observe the schedules.’

  ‘Schedules!’ Emerson flung his head back and his arms wide, as if remonstrating with some heavenly authority. ‘Do ya think I got where I am today by consultin’ fuckin’ schedules? There is no schedule for what we need to achieve here! We gotta set this movie on fire! Is the love there, Annalise?’ He banged his fist off his chest. ‘Can you and me do passion?’

  ‘Err…’

  ‘Right answer! Peter, organise a team for London! We’re gonna spend a coupla weeks gettin’ up close and personal! Just bring who you need; everyone else can stay here and shoot battle shit ’til we’re done. Levine!’ he barked. ‘Get the car! Frost! Call the jet! Annalise! You’re comin’ with me – right here, right now! Goddamn, people!’ His voice rose to a crescendo, ‘I have such a hard-on for this movie!’

  Outside, as Frost and Levine practically bundled Annalise into the back of a jeep, a van with blue flashing lights pulled into the keep. Two men wearing white uniforms leapt out of it, one carrying a holdall.

  ‘Docteur!’ he announced. ‘Ou sont les urgences?’

  ‘Guys, you’re just in time!’ Emerson laughed. ‘Give this man a very strong sedative,’ he jerked his thumb at the thunder-faced Tress, ‘then extract the bug from his ass!’ Cackling, he leapt aboard the jeep and it sped away, followed by another.

  As they neared Emerson’s castle, it became apparent that something was happening in the village of Saint-Christophe. The single street was full of cars – an unprecedented sight – and many of the normally invisible locals stood in their doorways, arms folded, staring up at the castle gates where a crowd of paparazzi waited, much bigger than the pack that had staked out Annalise’s flat.

  ‘Hey,’ Emerson’s buoyancy did not seem the least bit punctured, ‘looks like we’re pullin’ out just in time! Wonder how they found us?’

  ‘Yeah,’ Frost concurred flatly. ‘I wonder.’ Levine took a long look at them in his rear-view mirror.

  ‘Let’s have a bitta fun here.’ Emerson grinned. ‘Judy – get out. Collect our passports and stuff and meet us at the plane. Levine – you ready for some drivin’?’

  ‘Ready if you are.’

  The car stopped at the castle gates. Frost slid out and walked back to the support jeep. Annalise was seated on the side closest to the photographers; just as she opened her mouth to ask Frost to bring her a change of clothes, Emerson leaned across and opened her window to a fusillade of white, flashing light. She tried to avert her face but he pressed close against her and yelled, ‘Guys! Guess what? You’re just in time to say goodbye! We’re off to a secret location to get married! Catch us if you can!’ The glass whirred shut and the car shot off. Whooping and bouncing around like an overgrown child, Emerson watched out the rear window as the photographers dived for their vehicles. Feeling more than slightly ill, Annalise held on tight as Levine drove at a frightening pace.

  When they landed at Heathrow, Frost had two suitably paramilitary-looking people-carriers waiting – black, of course. But Annalise was still wearing Roselaine’s tatty dress and leather slippers. Surrounded by runway lights and the massive, moving tail-fins of airliners, she felt as if she were Roselaine herself, rudely jolted from the twelfth century to the twenty-first. Everything was wrong – the journey was wrong, jet planes were wrong, London was all wrong. She didn’t speak on the way into town, overwhelmed by the dense, fast-moving traffic and the infinitely illuminated office buildings. Eventually, they rounded Marble Arch and pulled up outside the Dorchester Hotel. Chattering, everyone got out except her; she huddled into the back seat.

  ‘C’mon, honey,’ he laughed, ‘I just gotta take you shoppin’ in the mornin’ – we’ll hit Harrods. You look a mess in that old dress.’

  ‘Why have we stopped here?’

  ‘’Cos we gotta buncha suites booked – c’mon! We gotta busy day tomorrow – spotta shoppin’, then we gotta getta the studio.’

  ‘But… I thought you had a flat in Mayfair? I mean, this is Mayfair…’

  ‘Is it? Hell, I always stay at the Dorchester! They know how to treat a guy right! Last time Babs Streisand stayed here, the staff were told not to look her in the eye! And guess what? They didn’t! Now that’s what I call service!’

  ‘I want to go home.’

  ‘You wanna what?’

  ‘I want to stay at my house in Greenwich.’

  He looked dubious, as if unwilling to allow her.

  ‘But I was hopin’ you’d stay here with me. Nice private dinner, hang out, relax… but,’ he added hurriedly, ‘you got your own suite; I ain’t tryin’ to be funny.’

  She forced herself to smile, leaned out of the car, squeezed his hand and kissed him on the cheek. He looked taken aback but not displeased. She was conscious of Frost, the bodyguards and the hotel porters watching them from the hotel steps.

  ‘Listen,’ she gave him her best sultry whisper, ‘we’ll spend as many nights as you want in the Dorchester, after we…’ she pecked his cheek again, ‘…you know, when we don’t need separate suites.’

  ‘Okay, kiddo,’ his voice was husky, ‘whatever you say. Bernstein!’ he called the bodyguard back to the car. ‘Drive Miss Palatine to wherever she’s goin’.’

  ‘Don’t be silly, I’ll take a cab.’

  ‘No way. C’mon, Bernstein, chop chop! See you at Shepperton tomorrow lunch-time, okay? You and me, we got work to do!’

  As the car moved off down Park Lane, she felt afraid, as if something really bad was about to happen. She felt worse than before any audition or any first day of filming. The car sat-nav had a synthetic female voice. It told Bernstein where to go, and she slid down into her seat, as if hiding from baleful, all-seeing eyes.

  In the hotel lift, Levine pressed a button and the door slid shut. Emerson shook his head.

  ‘Goddamn,’ he asked aloud, ‘what kinda woman turns down a suite at the Dorchester and a shoppin’ trip to Harrods?’

  Frost’s gaze remained fixed on the ascending floor numbers.

  It was only when she reached Maze Hill that Annalise remembered she had no key, mobile phone or money. Luckily, she kept an emergency key under a plant pot at the side of the house, so she bade Bernstein goodnight – he immediately drove off – and, after a bit of stumbling around in the shadows, let herself in. Her home was typical of that part of Greenwich: brown-brick Edwardian, with a simple façade consisting of a white-painted porch, a large window on the ground floor and two smaller ones above. Inside, it was generous for someone who lived alone, but not obscenely so. The ground floor was open-plan, with a lounge at the front and a kitchen at the rear. There were three upstairs bedrooms: hers, a spare that had never, in her time, been used and a third that she had converted into an office. She turned on the downstairs lights, revealing a bland space, painted in whites and creams, with understated modern furniture. The walls were bereft of pictures, the shelves empty of knick-knacks. She had never redecorated – the previous owners had been slavish minimalists, which suited her fine. She caught her reflection in the old full-length mirror that hung on the living-room wall. A keyhole in the wooden frame betrayed its previous life as a wardrobe door; it was one of the few sentimental items she kept on display. Her dress and leather slippers showed off her legs and arms to good effect; she’d lost weight and was brown from the French sunshine her hair was untidy but rich around her shoulders. She should have been pleased, but tonight, her image made her feel even more disconnected, as if she were a ghost, visiting a former life. She felt a sudden urge to run away…
but where to? Back to France? Back to the twelfth century? She fetched a glass, a corkscrew and a bottle of wine from the kitchen and extinguished the lights. As she did, a black people-carrier slid past the front window. It was Bernstein, looking for a place to park. She fled upstairs.

  The stark décor persisted into her bedroom. She closed the Venetian blinds, turned on a small bedside lamp, propped herself up on her pillows and poured a substantial glass of wine. She gulped it down then poured another. She wanted a cigarette but knew there were none in the house. She noticed that a metal-framed photograph lay face-down on the bedside table. She lifted it into her lap. She remembered Jimmy putting it flat because he said it creeped him out while they were having sex. A sudden surge of shame washed through her at the thought of having sex with Jimmy Lockhart.

  In the photograph, her father was crouched in front of a rubber-tyred wheel, which she knew to be that of an aeroplane. She knew this because there she was beside him, not quite six years old, her little face creased by a self-conscious smile. Her hair was short and she wore dungarees; more a boy, at that age, than a girl. Her father had one arm over her shoulders and she was holding Froggy.

  Mr Crombie had puffed as he had knelt to take the photograph. Her father had barked instructions; he had only just landed at Whin Abbey and had said he wanted to record an important occasion. He had made his last film, he had announced; now he’d be staying home for good.

  Lying on her bed eighteen years later, Annalise thought how everyone keeps a diamond lodged in their hearts, a shiny, indestructible shard made from their happiest childhood memories, compressed together by the grinding forces of adulthood. With the passing of time, scattered moments are squeezed together to form a perfect prism, through which all subsequent joy is viewed and inevitably found wanting. Her own happiest years had begun when this photograph was taken and had lasted just as long as her father had kept his word.

  She thought back to her next clear memory of that time – him driving her to school in one of his fancy cars. Until then, at her mother’s insistence, she had always walked the four miles there and back. All the other parents and children had stared at him. He had never been to her school before and, whilst everyone for miles around obviously knew that a film star owned the abbey, practically no one had ever actually met him. Her teacher, Mrs O’Kane, had nodded and smiled at everything he’d said, as if he was the boss of her, the boss of the school, the boss of everything in the world. As if by magic, Katie Brennan and Hannah Cowen had stopped hitting her at breaktime, although they had still called her a bitch and a whore. Every day after that, her father had asked her whether the other children had been nice to her. She’d always said that they had.

  Froggy had been as pleased as Annalise to have Darling Sweetheart stay at home. Together, they had watched TV in her playroom. She had lots of tapes, but their favourite thing had been Zig and Zag, a pair of puppets on Irish television. They had a real person who looked after them called Ray, and they had been cheeky to him and Darling Sweetheart had made Froggy get very excited at that and shout funny things at the screen.

  Once, he had spent days climbing ladders around the old ballroom. He had hung a huge glitterball from the ceiling – goodness knows where he’d bought it – and had set up a music stereo and coloured lights, the lot. It had been their own private disco, and the two of them had danced, night after night, to Soft Cell, to Strauss, to Sly and the Family Stone, but most of all, to Ella Fitzgerald, as she sang ‘Call Me Darling, Call Me Sweetheart, Call Me Dear’… twirling around the room, laughing, singing along, just happy to be together.

  But best of all had been the plays, up in the library. He had started off by reading her bedtime stories there, a solemn ritual that had involved pulling two armchairs together; he had sat in one, she and Froggy in the other. Then, she had watched as he became lots of different people. Her favourite stories were from Grimm’s Fairy Tales and Doctor Seuss. He had read her The Hobbit and after that she had made him read all of Lord of the Rings which he had complained would be way too hard for her, but she and Froggy had loved Gollum so much, it was worth all the boring bits about dead kings and elves for the bits where Gollum made an appearance. Froggy had said Gollum was the coolest person who had ever lived. Then, one day, Darling Sweetheart had said it was time to try something else; he had showed her a book called The Tempest and had said they were going to learn Act I, Scene 2. At first, she had understood nothing, but patiently, he had explained every line. Then, he’d read Prospero and Ariel whilst, slowly at first, she’d tried to be Miranda. To make it more fun, he’d made Froggy be Caliban, ‘You taught me language and my profit on’t is, I know how to curse! The red plague rid you for learning me your language!’ She’d kept corpsing – that was the word, he’d told her, for laughing when you shouldn’t. One morning, the house had woken to a shriek from Mrs Crombie when she’d arrived up to clean. During the night, Darling Sweetheart had hauled every potted plant in from the walled garden and a huge fallen tree branch from one of the fields and had dumped the whole lot in the black-and-white tiled hallway. ‘David, you lunatic, what on earth are you doing?’ her mother had shouted, standing on the stone steps in her nightdress. ‘Why, isn’t it obvious, you silly woman? I’m building Prospero’s island!’

  That night, with him wearing an old curtain for a cloak and Annalise in one of her mother’s dresses, they had staged Act I, Scene 2 of The Tempest as a command performance for her mother and the Crombies, the three had sat on dining chairs in the plant-filled hallway. Annalise never forgot the deliciousness of that first formal applause; how her mother had stood at the end and presented her with a bouquet of white roses as she, Froggy and Darling Sweetheart took their bows.

  But then, other times, he had got into moods and had locked himself in a bathroom or hidden in the creepo chapel. It had always been her and Froggy who had persuaded him to come out again. Banging on the door and shouting, ‘David, I hope you rot in there you bloody great child’ did not work. When her mother had done that, he had shouted rude things back, then she had run and cried on her bed. So Annalise had learned to wait patiently outside wherever her father was hiding, with Froggy on her knee, until eventually he had opened up, crawled out to her and put his big head in her little lap and said, ‘I’m sorry, poppet, I’m just a rotten bastard.’ And she had stroked his hair and said, ‘Rubbish, how can you be a rotten bastard when you are my Darling Sweetheart?’

  ‘Why do you call me that?’ he asked her one summer, as they lay together on the lawn, amongst the whins with their yellow buds; buds that made the air smell as if heaven had descended to earth in the form of wild vanilla. ‘Why do you call me Darling Sweetheart? Ever since you could talk, you’ve called me that; one minute it was Da Da Da then, all of a sudden, I was Darling Sweetheart. Is it because of that Ella Fitzgerald song?’

  ‘It’s just my name for you.’

  He laughed. ‘The best part I ever played, eh? Devised and written by a little girl…’

  When she woke, she felt like she’d been crucified. She could barely move her arms and her neck hurt like hell. She had fallen asleep spreadeagled on the duvet wearing Roselaine’s dress. White-wine pain flashed behind her eyes – the bottle was empty on the floor. Groaning, she rolled onto her side and saw that the framed photograph had fallen to the floor, too. The glass was cracked down the middle; she felt like weeping. She no more felt like going to Shepperton to meet Emerson than travelling to the moon. She rummaged through her bedside drawer, where, thank all the deities that mankind ever invented, she found a curled-up tray of Anadin with two tablets left. Gagging, she swallowed them dry, staggered to the bathroom, turned on the shower and fell into it.

  She stood under the spray for a long time, letting the hot water massage the pain in her head and neck. When she finally stepped out, the bathroom had steamed up. She wrapped herself in a towel then rubbed the misted mirror to see just how awful she looked.

  Froggy peeped over her shoulder. He sai
d, ‘Hey, bug-face – it’s time.’

  She screamed and dropped her towel. Diving to pick it up, she clipped her head against the edge of the sink. She howled with pain and staggered from the bathroom in a roll of steam.

  ‘Ow, ow, owww…’ she groaned and sat heavily at the top of the stairs. Small tears of agony came. She wiped them away and looked around; as the bathroom cleared of vapour, it was obviously empty. There was nothing she could possibly have mistaken for… Rubbing her head, she went muttering to her bedroom, where she tugged on her grungiest jeans and a black poloneck then rummaged around her bedside drawer some more until she found her spare credit card. As if laying out a body, she spread Roselaine’s dress on her bed. She found a pair of boots and another red raincoat and thundered down the stairs to the front door. The instant she opened it, someone started shouting, ‘Miss Palatine! Miss Palatine!’

  She thought it might be another hallucination, but a very real-looking Bernstein stood at the bottom of her steps. With one girder-like arm, he was blocking a young man in a cheap suit from climbing towards her. The young man yelled again, ‘Miss Palatine! What do you have to say about Jimmy Lockhart?’

  She froze, unsure whether to continue outside or to retreat. An older man wearing an anorak lifted a very big camera and pointed it at her. Bernstein pushed this man, knocking him off balance.

  ‘No pictures!’ he growled.

  ‘This is a free country and we’re standing on public property!’ the photographer protested. The younger man tried to dodge around the bodyguard.

  ‘Miss Palatine! Paul Ruddock from the Daily Star! Do you have any comment on waaauuggh–’ he choked as Bernstein seized him by the throat.

  ‘Hey!’ the photographer cried. ‘That’s assault! Let him go!’

  ‘Miss Palatine,’ Bernstein spoke calmly over his shoulder, as if none of this was actually happening, ‘would you mind stepping into the vehicle, please? H.E. is expecting you at the studio.’

  ‘That’s assault!’ the photographer repeated, levelling his equipment again. Without releasing the reporter, Bernstein yanked the camera away from the photographer’s face and whacked it off Annalise’s garden wall, separating the lens from the body.