by Barbara Vine
‘I've no idea,’ I said. ‘When I find out I'll tell you.’
‘I've just remembered something,’ she said. ‘Wait there,’ as if I was going to jump up and run away.
She came back with a little book in her hands. In fact it was a cigarette-card album. I don't know if you've ever seen those things – well, you may not ever have heard of cigarette cards. There used to be one in every packet of cigarettes and it would be a picture of a footballer or a bird or fish or wild flower, anything you can think of. You collected the set of thirty-six, say, and stuck them in an album. I'd seen them before because my nan has a whole lot of them that my late grandad collected. The one Philippa showed me was of film stars. It was nearly full, only one missing, the space being for someone else I'd never heard of, a woman called Corinne Luchaire.
They didn't seem quite like photographs, more drawings that had been coloured in. The one of Gilda Brent showed a girl who looked, as Philippa had said, a lot like Joan Crawford but not so – I don't know what the word would be, positive maybe, dynamic. Her hair was rolled up in front and hanging down behind. She had blood-red lips and eyebrows plucked to hairlines. Underneath, where you slotted the card in, was printed on the album page: ‘Gilda Brent, born London, 1920. Real name Gwendoline Miranda Brant. Blonde hair, green eyes. Films include: HMS Valiant, The Skies Above Us, The Fiancée, The Lady in Lace, The Wife's Story, Seven for a Secret, Lora Cartwright.’
‘They were all sort of supporting roles that she had,’ Philippa said. ‘She was never the star. No, I tell a lie, she was the star of The Wife's Story, but I don't reckon it was much of a box-office success. She never made a film after the mid-fifties. Perhaps she should have gone to Hollywood but I suppose no one asked her.’
It was then that it came into my head that Gilda Brent might have been Stella. The age was wrong, Stella hadn't been born till 1923, but she could have been lying about her age. I hadn't seen her birth certificate and I don't suppose Lena had. Her maiden name could have been Brant and as for the name Stella, you can call yourself what you like, I wouldn't wonder at anyone not liking Gilda. Mum's real name is Doris but she hates it and everyone's always called her Diane. Stella's daughter Marianne is an actress and actresses often have children who are actresses. I was thinking of Judy Garland and Liza Minnelli, of Maureen O'Sullivan and Mia Farrow.
‘What happened to her?’ I said.
‘I don't know. She just disappeared. The heyday of British films was over. I reckon there wasn't any work for her. Maybe she got married to some rich tycoon.’
For the first time since the first time, Ned and I met that Thursday without making love. It wasn't just cold, it was pouring with rain. I waited for him at Thelmarsh Cross, feeling miserable and worse than that, feeling guilty because it was raining – as if I'd made it rain – and wondering how he'd react when I told him it was no good, I wouldn't do that in the backs of cars.
The marvellous thing was that he already knew, he knew it would be impossible, and he didn't mind. He was fastidious about that sort of thing too. I got into the passenger seat of his car and we kissed, a long sweet kiss that only ended because I heard the watersplash sounds of a car approaching from Curton. I broke away from Ned and looked out of the window and saw that it was the same car I'd seen last time and the same woman at the wheel. It was probably my fancy that she slowed down as she passed us.
‘I thought you wouldn't come,’ I said, ‘because there's nowhere we can be alone.’
‘We are alone,’ he said.
‘Not alone the way I want us to be.’
‘Jenny, we don't want each other just for the sex. Does it matter so much if we have an evening or two now when we sit and talk?’
We stayed there for a while and then he drove the seven or eight miles to Newall Pomeroy where there's a little pub, not much frequented, by name the White Swan. The licensee let us sit in a room at the back called the snug, but it was more than we dared even to hold hands. People kept coming in or at any rate putting their heads round the door. Ned talked some more about liking just to be with me, enjoying sitting and talking, and how about coming to the filming with him next day? He knew it was my day off. They were doing a profile of an artist who lives in Wells-next-the-Sea.
I won't pretend it didn't make me happy to be asked. I'd be there with him, the producer, and I'd meet the cameramen and all the crew, the director and perhaps even the artist. We'd eat together and drive to the different locations together and everyone would know who I was and why I was there. It was Ned's way of starting to make a public commitment to me, his way of presenting me to the world and saying: this is my girlfriend that I'll be married to one day. Sad really that I couldn't do it.
‘Why can't you, Jenny?’
‘Because Jane will get to know.’
‘She's going to have to know sometime. I'm not planning on being a bigamist.’
‘No, she isn't going to have to know, Ned. And you know why not. Hannah is why not.’
He started to argue but I said there was no way round that, and there wasn't. Because Hannah wasn't just a little girl of five who needed both her parents. She was a little girl of five with asthma. She was on corticosteroids and uses a nebulizer. That was why Ned had kept going back to Rowans from the village hall that night, because earlier in the day Hannah had had one of her asthma attacks. And when she had them, for some reason it was her dad that she wanted with her. It was not unusual for him to get up four times in the night to see to her.
Yet he could say, ‘Marriage comes with an escape clause these days. When you go into it you know that if the worst comes you can get out of it.’
‘Not when the worst is a child with asthma.’
It wrenched the heart out of me to say these things, to stand up and resist him when he looked at me like that and pleaded with me. He had such a beautiful, sensitive face, the mouth so soft when he kissed me and so firm when he spoke, his grey eyes so direct. The hand that held mine was brown and long-fingered and cool. He had long taken off the wedding ring he wore when first we met. It was hard to deny him, it was hard to be always saying no. And when I looked out at the rain streaming down the windows, at the dark already closing in, I thought how likely it was there would be no expression of love between us for many months, and it frightened me. I felt as if I was putting him to a test. Would he go on loving me when I couldn't make love to him and all we could do when we were together was talk?
He was driving me back to where my car was at Thelmarsh Cross and talking about the filming again, trying once more to persuade me to come to it, when we came slap-bang up against a tractor, parked under a dripping hedge. Not quite slap-bang, for we didn't hit it. Ned braked just in time and the car jumped and shook, jolting me forward in the tight band of the seat-belt. I don't know why that reminded me of Stella unless it was because she had warned me to drive carefully along these lanes, but one thought leads to another and that led me to Gilda Brent. And he had heard of her, he'd once even tried to get her to take part in a film he was making.
‘It must be all of fifteen years ago,’ he said. ‘I was just starting out. I was twenty-three and working in casting. I came upon a photograph of her and got on to her agent. The photograph was old then, probably twenty years old. But I thought it was the sort of face that would wear well. Good genes or good bones. Your face is one of those, Jenny.’
‘What was the part you wanted her for?’
‘She was sixty by then. It was someone's mother who had been a famous actress in her day. Gilda Brent's face was the face I held in my mind.’
I asked if she had played the part.
‘We couldn't find her. Her agent said she was still technically on his books but he hadn't been in touch with her for nearly ten years. She'd disappeared, was the way he put it, which seemed rather too dramatic. I think that that only meant he'd had no offers for her in that time. But even before that – although he didn't quite say so – jobs had been thin on the ground. She'd never worked
in television.’
I told him who I thought she was and where she was. Ned said he'd like to meet her. I didn't commit myself to anything, I was going through feelings I always had just before parting from him. They're a mixture of misery at having to separate, coming loneliness, a great inner emptiness and, yes, unsatisfied desire. Even when we've made love the unsatisfied desire remains. Only being with him night and day, living with him and sleeping beside him night after night would end that. And this could never happen.
Remembering what Stella's reaction had been when I obeyed her too promptly, I took my time telling her what I knew about Gilda Brent. It was Monday before I told her what Philippa had said and what I'd got from Ned.
The weekend had been long and dull. Mike went to Norwich on Saturday afternoon to see the Canaries play at home and in the evening he went on with what he'd been doing that morning, re-fitting the kitchen and painting it, but in such a way as to cause me the minimum inconvenience in the week to come. He's lived with me all these years but, despite all evidence to the contrary, he still believes I spend most of the time I'm at home in the kitchen. That's what women do. Bless him, he calls it ‘my’ kitchen, he's doing up ‘my’ kitchen, and it's his way of showing his love for me, it's the only present he knows how to give me. We had Sunday dinner with Mum and Len, an hour with my nan in her bungalow afterwards, and tea at Janis's. In other words, the usual way of getting through two days with no work to fill them.
Going off back to London was a relief to Mike on Monday morning. Of course he didn't show it, it wasn't blatant, he gave me a kiss and said he'd miss me, but when his mate Phil came to pick him up ten minutes early he was all ready and raring to go. He jumped into the car, he was listening to some tale of Phil's and laughing so much he forgot to look back, still less wave goodbye. The fact is that Mike, like a lot of men, best enjoys the company of men, he's happiest with his own sex, and when we go to those village hall dos he always ends up at the bar end with the men he went to school with. He even did, eventually, the night I first met Ned.
When I got to work Stella was in her room finishing her breakfast. But no sooner was I inside admiring the new tape recorder on her desk than my bleeper started, letting me know I was wanted in Arthur's room. Arthur had got his sciatica back, and by the time I'd given him a massage and made an appointment with the physiotherapist it was mid-morning and time for everyone's coffee and biscuits. Stella, for some reason, was the last to get hers. I found her in the lounge on her own, reading Sunday's newspaper, which seemed to me a bit sad, though it shouldn't have as Monday's had arrived as usual and were waiting on the table in the entrance hall.
It seems strange to me now that I could have been so naïve. I had a silly sort of smile on my face as I said, ‘She was you, wasn't she? Gilda Brent was you.’
She didn't laugh. She turned to me a grave troubled face and said, ‘What gave you that idea?’
‘I don't know, I just thought… Well, the age was nearly right and you were so mysterious about it. I just thought she must be you.’
‘I'm sorry to disappoint you, Jenny. I can see you've put in some research, but I was not Gilda Brent and she was not me.’ She added rather oddly, ‘I wish she had been.’
Saying that brought the colour into her face, or something did. She put the paper aside. She picked up her coffee cup and sipped from it in a weary sort of way, as if she didn't much care whether she had coffee or not, as if it was something to do to pass the time.
‘I was never anything, my dear. Just a secretary for a while and then a housewife and mother, as Gilda never tired of reminding me.’
She gave me a bright smile and quickly switched it off. Her eyes went back to the paper, though she didn't pick it up again. I thought she was ending our conversation as she sometimes did by simply being indifferent, by shutting off all interest and retreating inside herself.
I was going to take myself away, I had plenty to keep me busy, when she said, as if I'd asked a question, ‘Her father was quite a well-known Shakespearean actor called Everard Brant. Of course she was on the stage from a young child. I believe she was actually in The Tempest as a sprite or something, or perhaps that was A Midsummer Night's Dream. That's how she got into films, because her father was who he was.’
‘Did she have any connection with your house?’ I said.
She seemed not to hear me. ‘By the time I knew her she'd finished with films. She was forty, you see, and being forty then wasn't what it is now. Forty was middle-aged and no one wanted middle-aged film actresses except to play someone's mother and Gilda wasn't that type at all. Oh, no, she'd finished with films or films had finished with her. But she never forgot. She never let anyone forget what she'd been.’
I'd never have thought Stella could be bitchy and the way she was talking surprised me. It made me feel uncomfortable, so I repeated my question about the house, just to deflect her, not because I really cared. Stella gave me an odd look.
‘None at all,’ she said, and, seeming to think better of that, ‘she had nothing to do with it and yet she had everything to do with it. She only went there once and that was on the day of her death.’ She spoke with so much determination that I could hardly believe it when she looked up at me, her voice changed, her tone quite wistful and nervous, and said, ‘The person who told you about Gilda, did she say anything about what happened to her?’
‘It was two people,’ I said, ‘but I'm not sure I know what you mean, what happened to her.’
‘I mean, did they say she was – did they say she was dead?’
‘We didn't talk about that,’ I said. ‘I didn't know you wanted to know. You didn't say.’
She had such a look on her face that it began to frighten me. It was as if her face had suddenly got much thinner and the features had sharpened. Her cheeks had flushed, a different, duller colour than the rouge. She put out her hand and took hold of mine. It wasn't done affectionately but as if she was in need.
‘Does it matter, Stella?’ I said. ‘Do you want to know if she's dead?’
‘Oh, I know, I know. Of course she's dead. She's been dead for twenty-five years. It's not that I want to know. I want to know if anyone else knows.’
A fit of coughing seized her. It's a horrible dry cough she has and there's nothing you can do for it. She recovers by herself eventually and lies back, spent, in her chair. That was what happened and I was still holding on tight to her hand when I heard the door open behind me and someone come in. Stella saw her over my shoulder.
She dropped my hand and whispered, ‘Don't say anything about this in front of her.’
It was Marianne, back from Corfu.
She's always polite and nice, calling me by my name and asking me how I am. That over, she threw her arms round Stella the way she does and launched straightaway into a breathless account of her holiday, how wonderful it was and how awful, how dire – that's a favourite word with her – the friend's house they stayed in and how fantastic the weather, how appalling the journey, the kids’ behaviour, the food. She's always like that. She calls everyone darling, even me.
I didn't stay, though I hung about just long enough to take in her appearance. She must be forty-one or -two but I don't think she looks any older than me, she's really beautiful, slim and willowy, with strong, regular features, and long chestnut hair. Her skin was tanned a rich golden colour and she hadn't a line on her face. I thought of what Stella had said about Gilda Brent being middle-aged at forty. Marianne made me realize how times had changed.
She unloaded gifts from Corfu and duty-frees all over her mother's chair. Stella wasn't tired any more but suddenly twenty years younger, opening her presents and laughing with delight.
7
Married people sleeping in a double bed together is a strange business. Any bed-sharing for a couple who've been together a long time is strange. Yet I'm sure that that never occurs to most people. When I first started thinking about it – if I'd been happy doing it I don't suppose I ever
would have – it suddenly seemed to me one of the oddest things in life.
It isn't as if those same people sit close to each other and hold hands all their leisure time or sit in seats side by side in a restaurant. In fact, though I don't often go to restaurants, when I do someone else will always take care Mike and I don't sit together. It's not supposed to be correct. And in their own home a couple will face each other across a table, not sit in adjoining chairs. But at night they share a bed. Visitors from another time or another planet wouldn't believe it. To them it would seem like a survival from olden days, from the Middle Ages.
In the old Hollywood movies couples have single beds. That makes me wonder if the custom nearly died out in the thirties and came back again for some reason. But what reason? Not for making love, most of those couples never do that, and not for warmth these days. Besides, in our double bed Mike and I never touch each other. But we go on sleeping side by side in that four-foot-six bed and if I asked him why and why not make a change, I know he'd think I'd gone mad.
Double beds should be for new lovers. I need one to share with Ned, for it's only when love is fresh and urgent that a big warm shared bed is right. But all I'm getting now is a pub snug and promises of his devotion and that he'll never change. We kiss and kiss and he asks me to come to Norwich and spend my day off with him and every time I say no, his home ground is too dangerous. I said no once more last time we met but I did promise to watch television the next evening and see a film he'd made. It's another way of getting close to him, though not the way I want.
Your judgement, what Ned calls your critical faculty, doesn't work very well when you're looking at something that's been made by the person you love. I couldn't tell you whether Ned's film was good or not. Normally I'd be bored watching a programme about an old man's memories of Norfolk railways, but of course it was Ned's production so I kept imagining him being there and arranging this and that, choosing this set and that location. His name on the credit titles, ‘Producer, Edward Saraman’, made my heart jump as it always does when I read it anywhere.