Darling Sweetheart

by Stephen Price

He showed her around to the side of the house, where a long verandah was shaded by pink bougainvillea.

  ‘A few years.’

  ‘How long?’

  ‘Since the mid-nineties, but I had a lot of work done to it.’

  ‘You’d been planning it for ages, hadn’t you?’

  He offered her a seat at a rustic wooden table. ‘Would you like a drink?’

  ‘Beer.’

  ‘Beer.’

  He shuffled off through a patio door. She heard a fridge open and he returned with two frosty bottles. He settled in front of her, his back to the view. She sat Froggy on the table and took a long, cold swallow.

  ‘Ben says that you talk to it.’ He nodded at Froggy. ‘He says that you pretend it’s a real person. I’m very worried about you, Annalise.’

  ‘Father,’ she wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, ‘it’s just an old stuffed toy. It’s a prop; that’s all.’ Froggy slumped to one side, plastic eyes reflecting the sky.

  ‘Ah,’ he chortled to himself, ‘I see. Very clever. Just like the old days, eh? You used him to coax me out of my hiding place…’

  ‘It worked, didn’t it?’

  ‘So the whole thing with Froggy – that was just a performance?’

  ‘And what do you call this?’ She looked around. ‘Palatine’s great disappearing act?’

  ‘Okay, touché, touché.’ He sipped his beer. ‘It’s Fealy now, actually. I’ve been reincarnated as David Fealy, retired engineer. David Palatine was a horrible character who went on for too long, before I finally summoned the courage to kill him off.’

  ‘How incredibly brave of you.’

  ‘Look, I can see why you might be bitter–’

  ‘Full of fatherly understanding, as well as brave.’

  ‘Annalise–’

  ‘Who else knows?’

  He sighed. ‘No one, apart from Ben. He deals with everything – he’s my representative, out in the world.’

  ‘Your helper.’

  ‘My…?’

  ‘Never mind. How much did you get for Whin Abbey?’

  He looked uncomfortable. ‘The trust is dealing with that. But we’ll talk about it, I promise.’

  ‘I don’t want your money – I’m not Leon Miller. I’m just wondering how you fund your idyllic lifestyle with occasional extra work.’

  ‘Oh, being an extra is just an excuse to get out and about. This is paradise, but I’d go mad if I had to stay here all the time.’

  ‘Go mad?’

  He coughed. ‘The lawyers, uh, manage the trust on my behalf, with Ben as executor.’

  ‘And every year it pays a nice lump sum into a Spanish bank account, something like that?’

  ‘Something like that.’

  She banged her bottle on the table and he jumped. ‘You let my mother die in poverty!’

  He held up a finger. ‘Actually, I didn’t…’

  ‘You did!’

  ‘I gave her twenty thousand pounds a year!’

  ‘She said you gave her nothing!’

  ‘The trust allowed her to live in the house and sent her money every month! How she spent it was her own concern – largely on vodka, I believe.’

  ‘She died alone! Alone, at the bottom of the stairs!’

  ‘I know,’ he winced, ‘and I’m sorry, I really am. But for many years your mother and I simply didn’t–’

  ‘Alone!’ And now the tears came. ‘At the bottom of the stairs!’ She rubbed her eyes. How odd, a little part of her thought, that she should suddenly feel so upset about her mother. ‘She lay there for days!’

  ‘Yes, well, neither of us were there when it happened, were we, and unfortunately that’s not something we can go back and–’

  ‘Don’t!’ She leapt up roaring. ‘Don’t you dare blame me!’ She pushed her chair away, leaving Froggy where he lay. She stormed off across the front of the house, back towards the hillside and the forest track.

  ‘Annalise!’ he called after her. ‘Annalise!’

  But she stomped downward through the pines, cheeks red, eyes burning. The little cove was still empty apart from the boat, and if she’d had any idea how to start or steer the damn thing she’d have untied it and kept on going, just to show him. But, she realised, there was nowhere to storm off to, so she kicked off her sandals, tore off Roselaine’s dress and threw herself off the pier.

  The water was delicious – just cold enough to be refreshing, just warm enough to be comforting. She broke the surface and looked around. Nobody, nothing… just the crickets and the pines and the jagged walls of coloured rock. So to hell with it, she thought, who cares about anything any more? Treading water, she pulled off her underwear, rolled it into a sopping ball and threw it at the pier. Then she lay on her back and drifted, looking up at the cloudless sky. Her skin tautened with the salt, but slowly her fury subsided. Eventually, she rolled over and breast-stroked out of the cove, to where the sea was deeper, darker and, in spite of its calm appearance, had a bit of a swell. Gargantuan boulders frothed the surface like barnacled icebergs, nine-tenths of their bulk underwater. You would, indeed, need to know what you were doing, she thought, to steer a boat through here.

  ‘I’d be careful, if I were you. The currents can be deceptive.’

  The voice was close, almost at her shoulder. She thrashed, her first thought to cover her nudity, but grabbing at herself was hardly conducive to staying afloat. He was sitting on a jumble of rocks, just around from the mouth of the cove. She swam behind a sunken boulder, held onto it and peeked out.

  ‘It’s okay,’ he smiled, ‘I can’t see anything… well, not much, anyway. You look like a mermaid.’

  ‘So this is where you’re hiding.’ She frowned. ‘Are you afraid I’m going to box your ears?’

  ‘Aye, a bit. I’m sorry, I truly am.’

  ‘Everyone I meet today is sorry. It doesn’t change the fact that the pair of you have been stringing me along – never mind the past two weeks, what about the past eight years?’

  ‘I know it can’t be much of a comfort, but he’s been in absolute bits for a long time, wondering how on earth to tell you.’

  ‘So why not just tell me? Why not ring, write or just walk up to me in the street? Better still, why pretend to die horribly in the first place?’

  ‘For the last bit, you need to ask him. But as for telling you – would you have been any less shocked or angry if he’d done it another way?’

  ‘So you thought you’d destroy my career instead?’

  ‘It was pure coincidence,’ she noticed he spoke carefully, ‘that I got a job on Heresy – they were hiring a lot of people. When they announced that you were cast, your father decided to tag along too – but there was no plan, I swear. He was trying to summon the nerve; that’s why he kept surprising you with flowers. It was me who put them in your apartment and your trailer. He said that white roses would stir old memories.’

  ‘Most of them deeply traumatic.’

  ‘Call it cack-handed, but he was shaping up to approach you, I swear to Christ he was. He just didn’t know how; I think he was going to wait until you finished filming. But then all that paparazzi shite kicked off, and Emerson took you to London and… well, everything went bonkers. Your father told me to look after you, so I tagged along. And you know the rest.’

  ‘But how can he stand in front of my very eyes and not say, “Hello, Annalise, it’s me”?’

  ‘Because he was afraid. He was shit-scared that you’d punch him in the gob and just walk away.’

  ‘I might yet.’

  ‘I guess that’s your prerogative.’

  ‘I was right to be suspicious of you.’

  ‘I texted him or phoned him to keep him posted, but he was so worried, he followed us. He kept saying that he was gonna show himself at the right moment, but it never seemed to be the right moment. He got really freaked out when we hunted down Evelyn – he didn’t know what to do about that. Then on the train – I guess that was just a father, chec
king up on his daughter. I should have told you then; I was so fed up, I nearly did.’

  ‘Well, now that you and I have this wonderful new spirit of openness between us, perhaps you can answer what I asked you this morning – how did you get mixed up in this?’

  He smiled slightly. ‘That Fanshawe and Grovel movie set in Scotland? The scene with the balloon? That’s me, danglin’ off the rope.’

  ‘Got a thing about rope, haven’t you?’

  ‘I always leave enough to hang myself with.’

  ‘Your message about me not marrying Emerson – that was from him, wasn’t it?’

  ‘He thinks it’d be a disaster.’

  ‘Unlike his marital record which is, of course, exemplary.’

  ‘When he saw the headlines, he threw a wobbler.’

  ‘So did I. But you lied about being in his films. That’s why Miller recognised you.’

  ‘I didn’t lie about the circus! That’s where his stunt guys recruited me – I was in two of your father’s films and I was signed up for the last. But, as it turned out, he had other plans…’

  ‘So why did he pick you?’

  Proctor shrugged. ‘Because we became friends? Because I was young and impressionable and faking a big movie-star’s death seemed like a really mental thing to do?’

  ‘When Evelyn said about you being a helper – that’s when I started to guess. Your eyes give you away. You try too hard when you’re lying.’

  ‘So, unlike you when you’re pretending to be a crazy person, I’m not entirely convincing?’

  She pushed off from the rock, back towards the cove. ‘As the first part of your penance, you can fetch me a towel down from the house. A big one, please.’

  ‘Leon Miller said they found human flesh with the wreckage of the plane. Not much, but some.’

  Proctor and her father exchanged a look. Pointedly, she forked a piece of the tasty lemon chicken that Proctor had cooked and held it up to a candle, as if for inspection. The perfection of the setting – dinner on the verandah, the pink and purple sunset – was as much of a counterpoint to the underlying atmosphere as it was possible to imagine. It was like sitting in heaven, only with a pair of sneaky old devils for company. Still, they had enjoyed a convivial meal, the wine flowing, trading anecdotes as film people do. Her father’s were highly amusing – when he dropped famous names, he also acted them out, mimicking voices, expressions, turns of phrase. She’d laughed out loud several times. After her swim, she’d asked for some clothes, and he had showed her upstairs in the house, where two whole rooms were stuffed with costumes of all types, hung on wardrobe rails. There was everything from uniforms to suits to gaudy holiday-wear, like a miniature wardrobe department, as well as entire suitcases of make-up, face-paint and false eyebrows, moustaches, beards and wigs. All the disguises, she thought, that an accomplished old faker would need. The clothes were of course masculine, but she managed to pick out a simple navy shirt and a pair of baggy white shorts. As she fixed her hair in the bathroom, she checked that her upper buttons seemed casually undone – revealing a bit, but not too much. Over dinner, she caught Ben flicking his eyes away from her several times and, better still, her father had caught him too. Come into my cabin – no one need ever know. She mopped her lump of chicken about her plate then chewed it.

  ‘I’m just curious to know how you did that.’ She licked her lips. ‘I mean, most people who stage their own deaths leave their clothes lying on a beach. Or were the fragments not human? What did you do, pack the plane with pre-cooked chickens?’

  ‘Err… no,’ her father was embarrassed, ‘not exactly.’

  She let her fork drop. ‘There was someone on board? Who?’

  ‘Well, uhhh… you can buy pretty much anything in Palermo, if you have the cash.’

  ‘You’re joking!’ Her father and Ben exchanged another look, now with the air of naughty schoolboys. ‘Hey!’ She wagged her fork for emphasis. ‘If you two want forgiveness, no more lying by omission!’

  ‘An indigent…’ Proctor began, playing with his food.

  ‘A tramp,’ her father offered.

  Proctor frowned at him. ‘There’s a hospital,’ he gave up on his meal and lifted his wine, ‘where, if you have the right contacts… look, the guy had no family and he’d been dead for twenty-four hours. They’d already taken most of his organs for transplant. So in exchange for a generous, umm, donation, they let us have the rest of him.’

  ‘You complete fucking ghouls!’ She was, nonetheless, fascinated.

  Proctor sighed. ‘I packed the plane with enough ammonium nitrate – agricultural fertilizer, to you and me – and high-octane fuel drums to take out a small town. I’ve watched the special effects guys do it many times. The main thing is to get the detonator right. I flew the plane, and your father followed me in a fast boat.’

  ‘With a corpse for a passenger?’

  ‘I had to double back quite a few times so as your father could keep up, but once I thought I was inside Tunisian airspace, I dropped a life-raft and baled out after it. Three minutes later, and boom. I think I might have used too much explosive, actually.’

  ‘You’re telling me,’ her father giggled, ‘I was ten miles away, and I saw the fireball in broad bloody daylight! But we knew the Tunisian authorities would be less than thorough – it was my plane, so obviously they assumed it was me on board. I just wish I could have seen Leon Miller’s face. That greedy old bloodsucker, making me do yet another of his wretched films! He badgered me and badgered me, would never take no for an answer, so I thought, Fuck you, Leon, now for a stunt that isn’t in the script!’

  Annalise remembered the night in the Goddards’ living room, the weight of the grief, how it had buckled her at the knees, how her chest had felt chopped with a meat cleaver… how Geoffrey Goddard had stood before the fireplace, uselessly stroking his beard, whilst Monica cried her semi-secret tears. And she remembered how long it had taken for the grief to become even a little bit bearable, how her stricken love for him had become part of her identity, pushing everyone else away, like a cuckoo in the nest of her heart. But most of all, she remembered a little girl who just loved her daddy.

  Wordlessly, she set her fork down and took herself off to bed. Subdued, the two men sat on, glumly staring at the soft toy that had been tossed into a nearby chair.

  The following morning, she found him downstairs, in a room at the back of the house. She thought she was the first to wake and had creaked down the wooden staircase. The main lounge was spacious, with heavy ceiling beams and two sets of patio doors giving out onto a verandah. She stood for a moment, wondering what to do with herself, when she heard a tapping noise from under the stairs. A short passage there led into a windowless room filled with computers, wires and screens; a sort of hi-tech hideaway. Her father sat in a swivel-chair, tapping on a keyboard. The stone walls were almost bare, apart from a huge, blown-up photograph mounted directly above her father’s head. In the dim light, she had to step closer to see it properly, but it showed a disgustingly fat, near-naked man, wearing what looked like a nappy. He held on to the lattice of a window, peering out from a darkened room but not at the camera, which he seemed unaware of. It was, she realised, a paparazzi shot. Grey hair was plastered on his head, which was small in proportion to the rest of his swollen body. He looked like an overgrown baby in a cage – helpless, almost pitiful. Her father swung round.

  ‘Ah!’ He gave her a Blofeld voice and pretended to stroke a pussycat. ‘Welcome to my lair, Mr Bond. But I fear you are much too late to stop me from taking over the world!’ When she didn’t laugh, he followed her eyes to the picture. ‘Recognise him?’

  ‘Oliver Reed?’

  ‘Close, but no banana.’

  ‘It’s not you in a fat suit, is it?’

  ‘No, but you’re not entirely wrong. A few more years making Leon’s stupid films, and that’s how I’d have ended up.’

  ‘Who is it?’

  ‘That,’ he turned to admire th
e image, ‘was the greatest actor of his generation; some say, the greatest ever. Yet look at the state of him.’

  ‘It’s not…?’

  ‘Brando. Yes it is.’

  ‘Where was it taken?’

  ‘At the window of a hotel in the west of Ireland, where he was staying to make some silly thing that fell through.’

  ‘He looks awful!’

  ‘He looked even worse before he died. You may be beautiful now, my girl, but just wait until your breasts start to sag and the backs of your legs turn to cottage cheese.’

  ‘That’s how see your daughter? Tits and ass?’ He gave a slight smile, but a genuine one, she detected, not fake.

  ‘You know, your great-grandmother was an actress, back in the silent era.’

  ‘Evelyn told me; she showed me her photograph. You should have dropped in and said hello while you were snooping on us – she told me quite a lot of things.’

  ‘Yes,’ he kept his expression blank, ‘Evelyn, yes… anyway, Maude Fealy was one of the great beauties of her day. When she looked like you do now, she was idolised by millions. Here she is…’ and he summoned up a website on one screen, with several black-and-white pictures. Annalise wanted to study them, because it was like seeing a former version of herself, but she resisted the temptation to snatch the keyboard from him. ‘Hugely popular stage actress,’ he continued, ‘and a big friend of Cecil B. DeMille’s, she was in most of his films. But do you know how she ended her career?’

  ‘How?’

  ‘By crawling around Women’s Institutes in the 1950s, alone and unmarried, her looks long gone, acting out silly vignettes for anyone who would pay her a lousy appearance fee. You know, I met her once, not long before she died. After I got my first television part, in 1971 – way before you were born. I’d always been curious to meet her, so I bought a ticket and went to see her in some hospital in the Valley, near San Fernando. She was ninety, can you believe that?’ He searched her eyes, as if looking for something. ‘Nearly twenty years older than I am now. Very frail, of course, but still perfectly coherent. I introduced myself, told her all about her son, Lewis – my father. She’d been to England before, of course, but not since she had become famous – not since Queen Victoria died! Then, I told her about my acting, thinking how proud she would be. Following in your footsteps, granny! And do you know what she said? She just curled her lip and said, “Actors never give up acting; it gives them up.”’ He gestured at the bloated Brando. ‘And there’s the proof.’