Darling Sweetheart

by Stephen Price

  ‘Hello?’ Annalise tried again, but her voice had shrunk. A rectangle of sunlight invited them onward through another doorway; this gave into a courtyard trimmed with beds of campanulas. The walls, again, were whitewashed to show off more glass panels. At the foot of the courtyard, steps climbed into a garden filled with meadow flowers. A cracking sound came from a stone shed; this too had a cobalt door, which lay open.

  ‘Hello?’ Annalise tried one more time.

  The woman who emerged from the shed had the bluest eyes Annalise had ever seen; they shone from a tanned face which, although wrinkled, was still striking. Her thick yellow-grey hair was tied in a ponytail; she wore a blue jumper, jeans, an immense smile and a pair of heavy gloves. She held iron pliers and a lump of purple glass, which she set down on the edge of a flowerbed.

  ‘Hello,’ Annalise began, ‘I’m–’

  ‘I know who you are.’ The woman stepped forward and embraced her fully, with the hug of a mother, not a complete stranger. Her accent was an unusual mix of lilting West Country tinged with Scots. ‘I’m so glad to meet you at last – I always knew I would, one day.’ She stepped back and looked Annalise over. ‘Oh, hello…’ She noticed Froggy hanging over her arm. ‘What have we here? A frog with sunglasses?’

  ‘Aw no…’ Proctor sighed.

  But Annalise covered Froggy’s mouth. ‘This is Froggy, and this is Ben Proctor…’

  ‘Your helper!’ Annalise thought Evelyn was referring to Froggy, but she had turned her topaz eyes on Proctor, taking him by the hands.

  He frowned. ‘Err… have we been on the news or somethin’?’

  ‘I’m afraid I don’t own a television. Why would you be on the news?’

  ‘Uh… it’s just that you called me a–’

  ‘Your name. “Proctor” is Old English for a steward or a helper.’

  ‘Oh aye?’

  She turned her attention back to Annalise. ‘Thank you so much for coming to see me.’

  ‘But how do you know…?’

  The woman reached out and pinched her cheek with strong fingers. ‘Your family owns that face. I was married to your father for five years, and your mother was an old friend of mine,’ she laughed, ‘until she stole him from me! I introduced your parents, you know, and now after all this time… well! Here you are!’

  ‘You know that my parents are both…’

  ‘Yes. How very sad for you. How very sad for all of us, they were such lovely people. But please – you must make yourselves at home.’ She ushered them into the cottage and busied herself around a gas hob in the kitchen. ‘Tea for the travellers!’ Annalise sat across from Proctor in the little living room and stared at him intently.

  ‘What?’ he asked, and she opened her mouth as if to say something, but just then Evelyn brought in a tray with a teapot and a very tasty-looking cake. Proctor didn’t wait to be offered, but threw down his bag of sweets and snaffled a slice. ‘Man, I’m starvin’! Mmm, it’s great,’ he chewed. ‘Very fruity…’

  ‘Cinnamon and apple.’ Evelyn smiled. ‘It’s home-made.’

  ‘You have no electricity.’

  ‘I don’t need electricity, so I don’t have it.’

  ‘How d’ye bake cakes with no electricity?’

  ‘I don’t; my next-door neighbour does. We run a barter system – in return, I give her fresh flowers.’ Instead of sitting down, she began poking through a bookcase. ‘Let me show you something quite amazing!’ Behind her back, Proctor made a surreptitious circular motion with his finger against his temple but Annalise just gave him another odd look, so he reached for more cake. ‘Here we are!’ Evelyn held up a gilt-bound copy of Grimm’s Fairy Tales. From it, she extracted a photograph, which she handed to Annalise. It was a very old studio portrait of a young woman with long hair and a lace blouse.

  ‘My God…’ Annalise breathed. The woman in the photograph didn’t just look like her, it was her.

  ‘I said your family owns your face.’ Evelyn crouched beside her chair. ‘That is your father’s grandmother – your great-grandmother. Now that I see the two of you together… well, it’s quite remarkable, isn’t it?’

  ‘It’s amazing…’

  ‘Her name was Maude Fealy; she was an American actress in the days of silent film. Her son, Lewis Fealy, was a GI; Lewis stayed on in England after the war to marry his sweetheart, a draper’s daughter called Sarah Palatine.’

  ‘Eh? So my father’s proper family name is–?’

  ‘Fealy, yes. He was plain old David Fealy when we first met. But he took his mother’s name when he started acting; he thought it grander, more theatrical.’

  ‘I never knew any of my grandparents,’ Annalise mused. ‘Isn’t that awful?’

  ‘Lewis was a lovely quiet man; he was a car mechanic. Sarah was a real Jewish princess – your father was extremely close to her.’

  ‘Can I see?’ Proctor reached for the photograph. ‘Christ!’ he declared. ‘Are you sure this isn’t a publicity shot from one of yer films?’

  ‘Lewis died before you were born and Sarah when you would have been quite little. You know, we have so much to talk about, but it’s such a nice day and I’ve been stuck in my workshop all morning. Are you tired from your journey, or would you care for a walk?’

  Annalise set down her teacup and almost leapt through the front door, eager to hear more as quickly as possible. Evelyn took a blue coat from a hook beneath the staircase and followed her.

  ‘That’s right,’ Proctor addressed the now-empty room, ‘just everyone pretend that I’m not here.’ He put the photo down, stole another slice of cake and went outside. ‘Hey!’ he called after the two women, who were already at the far end of the bay. ‘What about the door?’

  Evelyn called over her shoulder. ‘I never lock it!’

  ‘Bloody hippy…’ he muttered as he hurried to catch up.

  Driscoll was having a nightmare; in his nightmare, someone – he couldn’t see who – was nailing the lid onto his coffin, with him inside, alive but unable to move. He jolted awake and it was not just a nightmare, for he was still trapped inside the dark, stinking lorry. But a thumping sound had woken him, and now metal grated… noise! And noise meant…

  ‘Hey!’ he screamed. ‘Get me out of here!’

  A sudden bang made him jump, followed by a lighter impact. Something was in his prison! Rats! He shrieked and fumbled for his lighter. Shaking, he lit it. A plastic bottle of water lay at his feet. He blinked. Where had that come from? Beside it was a packet of biscuits, which must have… The grating noise came again and he looked up and saw a movement at a circular air vent in the lorry’s roof.

  ‘Hey! Let me out! I’m sorry! Just let me out!’

  Footsteps thudded across the roof then there was the rhythmic scuff of someone descending a ladder.

  ‘Hey, man!’ He banged a wall. ‘Don’t go! You can’t leave me here! I’m dying, man! If you leave me here, it’s murder!’ He listened. There was no answer, only what sounded like a heavy door closing in the distance. He lost control, screaming and hammering at the walls, hollering every obscenity he knew, until his voice was a rasp and he could barely lift his hands to slap the indifferent metal. He collapsed to the floor. Whimpering, he twisted the lid off the water bottle and gulped half the contents in one go. He opened the biscuits; they were custard creams. He hated custard creams, but he crawled over to his mattress and, still snivelling, stuffed the broken pieces into his mouth.

  ‘I’m from Cornwall originally, which is probably why I love it here so much.’ Annalise followed Evelyn along a path that wound through ferns and geometric, time-sculpted rocks. The view across the firth to the Isle of May and the East Lothian coastline was immense and pristine. Proctor trailed several paces behind. ‘But in the late sixties and early seventies,’ Evelyn continued, ‘London was the place to be. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen that Antonioni film Blowup? Well, that’s exactly what London was like back then, if you were an arts student anyway, which both me an
d your mother were. She was so beautiful and seemed so sophisticated to me, because she was a Londoner and I was from the sticks. We were at Kingston Polytechnic together; I joined the drama society, not because acting was in my blood or anything, but it was a good way to meet boys – and I did meet lots of boys. Then, one night, after a thing we put on in Richmond, your father came up to me in the pub beside the theatre. He was so unlike everyone else I knew – he wore a suit, for starters, and all my friends lived in their Afghans. He had short hair, which again was unusual; he wore glasses and was rather plump. Plump and shy. He told me he’d been nearly sick, trying to summon the nerve to speak to me, and I found that sweet. He was so full of praise for what I’d done on stage and I suppose I found that rather sweet too, because I knew I was awful. I brought him over to our table and my friends were so cruel; they pulled his leg, you see, because he was a square. But the most extraordinary thing happened; one by one, he mimicked their voices – he did everyone to a tee. Well, they couldn’t pull his leg after that, because he pulled theirs back harder. Then he started to do all sorts of voices, everyone famous from that time: Harold Wilson, Ringo Starr, Michael Caine – he could even do women, like Cathy McGowan and Thora Hird. He had everyone in hysterics – within no time my friends all loved him. He walked me home that night along the river, and soon we were seeing quite a lot of each other, although we weren’t boyfriend and girlfriend right away – I’m afraid I had another boy on the go, which rather annoyed your father. He worked for an engineering firm out towards the airport and had never been to college so I suppose he had a bit of a chip on his shoulder about that. But because of his job he had money, another highly unusual thing for those days, and a car, which made him a compelling date.

  ‘We were so different, I often wondered what he saw in me. He went on at me for ages to come and meet his parents, which I eventually did. Lewis and Sarah – they lived in a neat little terrace in Stamford Hill, away up in north London – I’d never been there before, and I don’t think I’d ever met anyone Jewish before, either. I didn’t realise David had Jewish blood until I met Sarah. He was an only child, and the odd thing was how he reverted to being a child whenever he was around her. I never saw a mother and son so affectionate, certainly not a man that age. In his late twenties he was then; I was nearly ten years younger, only nineteen. She doted on him; spoiled him terribly, but I didn’t realise that until much later. She talked nonstop, was a real chatterbox; Lewis hardly ever said a word. Your father introduced me as the girl he was going to marry, which came as a complete shock to me, but he laughed that off and when his mother asked whether I had Jewish blood, he laughed all the more. You only see these things with hindsight, because at that age, you don’t really analyse what’s happening around you, you just go with the flow, but I think he saw me as an entrée into the world I inhabited – art school, theatre groups; that young, hippy scene. And sure enough, when the Kingston drama society held an audition for Entertaining Mr Sloane, I took him along, even though he’d never acted before. I thought he’d be good, you see, because of his voices. Oh dear; I’m rambling on a bit, aren’t I?’

  ‘No, please,’ Annalise begged, ‘don’t stop.’

  ‘There’s a wonderful pub a few miles on, they do the most heavenly fish chowder. We’ll walk as far as there, shall we? Would that suit you, Ben?’ she called back. ‘I’m afraid I’m rather boring him,’ she confided.

  ‘Don’t worry about me – now that you’ve said the word “pub”, I’m fascinated.’

  ‘What happened at the audition?’ Annalise prompted impatiently.

  ‘Oh, well, your father got the lead, they positively snapped him up. I was right, you see; just enough talent of my own to recognise true talent in someone else. It was actually quite amazing: they ran it for two months at the Richmond Theatre and a lot of the reviewers said it was the best version they’d seen since Orton’s original cast. It was a hugely popular play back then, very much of its time; I don’t think it has aged well. But your father was incredible – he was Mr Sloane. I’d never seen anything like it, a sort of chameleon ability that seemed to come from nowhere. He’d been a plump engineer in a suit, for goodness sake, and now here he was, this completely different character, onstage and off, for as long as the play lasted. He didn’t eat – he lost so much weight that I worried about him – and he refused to wear his glasses. I know he got into trouble at work. Sloane is an amoral, aggressive man, but David didn’t care, he rather seemed to revel in it. Of course, Richmond was coming down with BBC types in those days – still is, I imagine – and off the back of Mr Sloane he was offered television work. Television plays were very much the thing then, and within a couple of years, he’d changed his name and quit his job and we were married!’ She laughed. ‘My mother was furious that I married someone who walked away from a steady, well-paid job, but I didn’t care – David was happy, getting all sorts of stage and television work, and I was in bliss. We rented a little house near Richmond Park and that was like a dream for me. I could be a housewife but still keep doing my art and hang out with the in-crowd; I had a husband who was going places – we felt we had it all and, for a few years, I suppose we did. But it was precisely when David really did start going places… well, that was when the trouble started.’

  ‘Trouble…’

  ‘Annalise,’ she sighed, ‘I hope you don’t mind, but I long ago developed a policy of being honest with myself and those around me. It’s not as easy as telling white lies and it hasn’t won me many friends, but it makes life less… cluttered.’

  ‘I won’t be offended; no matter what you say about him, I promise I won’t be. I just need to know, that’s all. I need to know as much as possible.’

  Evelyn stopped walking. ‘May I ask why?’

  ‘Because,’ and she tried to keep the emotion from her voice but didn’t make a very good job of it, ‘because I loved him more than anyone, ever, but I’ve come to realise… I don’t know who he was.’

  ‘Oh, you poor thing.’ She embraced Annalise even more fully than she had when they arrived, but there was a cough, and both women realised that Proctor was awkwardly lingering, pretending to study the cliffs and the sea.

  ‘I don’t want to give you the wrong impression.’ Evelyn patted her back. ‘He could be a good man; so very funny, so entertaining, so passionate – he swept me off my feet. But what he became, Annalise… I think it was won at a terrible cost.’

  ‘Yet you don’t seem bitter.’

  ‘Maybe because I wasn’t around for long enough; I suspect the same could not be said for your mother.’

  ‘How far’s that pub?’ Proctor growled.

  ‘Not far now.’

  ‘Good, ’cos ma name’s on two pints of heavy.’ The small party set off again, past beds of thistle and a rash of poppies.

  ‘You musn’t take this personally,’ Evelyn reprised, ‘but it seems to me that actors spend so much of their time in the grip of a terrible enchantment, that strange magic of becoming someone else. Yet, every time they step onto a stage or in front of a camera, they’re killed on the inside, wondering whether their magic will work.’

  ‘I know,’ Annalise agreed glumly, ‘exactly what you mean.’

  ‘Your father never trained; he was the most instinctive actor I’d ever seen. But between engagements, between personalities, he started to become more withdrawn. He wouldn’t talk to anyone, not even me. He could be the life and soul of the party, but the more time we spent together, the more I realised it wasn’t him. He used his talent to create the illusion of happiness, but when the guests went home, he ceased to exist. I think that acting drained him of his true self.’

  That too sounded very familiar to Annalise, but she stayed silent.

  ‘Then, there were the tantrums. I’d never seen a grown man lose his temper before. About three months after we were married, we played a game of crazy golf in Richmond Park with two other couples, just larking about. We lost, and he smashed these little gol
f clubs, one by one, screaming and ranting in the middle of the park, with all these people watching! I couldn’t believe it! I remember thinking, Oh my god, I’ve married this man – what have I done? And his temper grew worse the more successful he became. He broke into film, minor parts at first, but suddenly he was sharing studios with some really big names, actors like Alec Guinness, Julie Christie, Terence Stamp – lovely people, but your father felt so intimidated. Or, we’d go out to dinner with some agents or producers and he’d have them all eating out of his hand, but on the way home, he’d say things like, “Did I do all right?” or “What was I like?”, as if the entire evening had been a performance, which, of course, it was. Sometimes as a joke, he would go to parties in disguise, in full make-up and costume, and pretend to be someone else. He was so good at it, people wouldn’t recognise him, but it backfired terribly one night when a well-known director, not realising he was in the room, said nasty things about the first Fanshawe film, how cheesy it was and all that, and your father was devastated. He was a child, you see – he couldn’t deal with criticism. But the more you bit your tongue around him, the more he got away with, you see?

  ‘When he started earning serious money, he bought things like fur coats and cars as if they were toys. And I didn’t want fur coats, in fact I hated them. I wouldn’t wear them and he’d get terribly cross. He burned one, once – made me watch, as he set it on fire with a cigarette lighter. Furiously angry, yet laughing at the same time. Then, he’d crawl into a cupboard, eaten by self-pity. The only person who could talk to him when he was like that was his mother, but, you see, I thought it was her fault that he was like that in the first place. I have a theory that after the war an entire generation of men were spoiled by their mothers, as a reaction to the death that had gone before. In a way, that’s what the sixties were all about, all these spoiled little boys acting out their adolescent fantasies and calling it free love. And, of course, we women were expected to play along. But spoiled children only have two modes of behaviour – performing and sulking. Sorry, I really am starting to rave. Thank God, there’s the pub.’