by Barbara Vine
‘I shan't go into the lounge again.’
‘Not today, d'you mean?’ I said.
‘I mean, not ever. I'll stay in here. I'm best in here.’ She added mysteriously, ‘I have plenty to do in here.’
I asked her if she'd like me to help her dress. Would she like me to give her a bath? I always bath Gracie, though God knows what Lena would say if she knew. Stella shook her head, then she laughed. It was good to hear her laugh.
‘I haven't come to that yet. I'm just tired. I shall sleep and I'll be better later.’
She was too. The human spirit is amazing. It's wonderful how people can rally if they fight. I realized that day that Stella had begun to fight.
Someone had moved her chair so that it was in a new place by the french window. From there she could look whenever she wanted to at the outside world, green lawns, leafless trees now, a low blue horizon. She turned round when I came in at four, beckoned me over and although she had already greeted me that morning, caught my face in her hands the way she does and kissed me on the left cheek and the right. That White Linen perfume she uses came off her warm skeleton body in waves. She felt almost feverish, and energy was coming from her like electricity.
Three months ago I remember thinking how reserved she was, how she kept all her past life to herself. And now she talks all the time. It's as if she'd picked up the two or three stones that dammed a stream and the water flooded through the gap. When she drew back and released my face from those electric hands she began to talk almost at once. She talked as if there were things she had to say before the time ran out through the hour-glass and there was no sand left in the top.
I kept hold of her left hand in mine. Her voice and command of words seem to grow stronger as her bodily strength fails. ‘I said that was the beginning of it, do you remember, Genevieve? Charmian's letter was the beginning. And then the next beginning, the next step really, was when we all went to the cinema together to see The End of Edith Thompson, Gilda and Alan and I.’
As soon as one of her films was due to appear at a local cinema Gilda had to go and see it. She had seen it many times before, Alan had seen this one three times and even Stella had seen it once. But they had to go and see it again. It was on in Ipswich. All the way there in Alan's car they had to listen to Gilda talking about the making of the film, the way she was treated by the director, his ceaseless criticism of her performance, his insistence on her wardrobe being of the dowdiest kind, the star's malice towards her.
‘You know the story. They called each other “darlint”, not “darling”, I don't know why. She put powdered glass in her husband's food, or she said she did. She wrote it in letters to Bywaters and they were used against her at her trial. It was Bywaters who stabbed Thompson in the street near where he and Edith lived, but Edith was hanged for it as well.’
‘I've only seen the end of the film,’ I said.
‘Never mind the film. It isn't very good. I only mention it because it was the next day that Alan started what he – what we – called the Killing Gilda Tease.’
At five-fifteen on Thursday August 16th, 1969, Alan made his first Killing Gilda joke. Stella said the date was written on her memory more distinctly than her wedding or her children's birthdays or the date she first met Alan. There was only one date in her life more clearly recorded and that was yet to come.
‘I don't understand,’ I said.
‘No, I don't suppose you do. I don't understand it myself now, why it seemed funny at the time, but it did. He just said in that casual way of his, in one of those throwaway lines of his, he said, “Let's do it, let's kill Gilda.”’
‘It was a joke, wasn't it?’ I said. I truly didn't understand. ‘He wasn't serious. It sounds like a game.’
‘Of course it was a game.’ She was suddenly quite heated. She was almost cross. ‘We did play games, he and I. I told you we played house, we played at being married. We even dressed up once to look like the parents in the Figaro and Velvet books. Once we made ourselves look like Mr and Mrs Darling in Peter Pan.’
I'd almost lost her. I tried not to stare.
‘Mr and Mrs Darlint,’ she said and she gave her throaty laugh. ‘The Killing Gilda Tease was just another game we played.’
‘You played?’
‘I did it because he did,’ she said, and she had begun to sound very weary. ‘I'm ashamed of it now. It was silly and childish.’
‘Childish?’
‘All right, worse than that. Perhaps children wouldn't play that game. Do you know what folie à deux means?’
I shook my head. French wasn't very successfully taught at Newall Upper School. I did just about know it was French.
‘It means madness for two, double madness. It's when two people who are close encourage each other to do something terrible, each one eggs the other on. A couple committing murder, for instance.’
‘Bonnie and Clyde,’ I said. ‘The Moors Murderers.’
She gave the dry little laugh that ends in coughing. Once that was over she performed one of her sharp shifts of subject. She closes one drawer in her mind and opens another. It's usually accompanied by a bright smile.
‘He wanted to paint my portrait,’ she said.
‘Wanted to? He did paint it. It's hanging up at Molucca.’
‘He said it in front of Gilda. We had all been to the pictures to see Seven for a Secret and – what do you think? – the character Gilda was playing actually called another woman “little thing”. She had even got that from a film script. Alan was sitting between us and I turned to look at him and he turned to look at me and we both burst out laughing. We shouldn't have, should we? It was unkind and Gilda wasn't pleased.
‘And when we got home to my house and they came in with me, Alan suddenly said he'd like to paint my portrait. She turned viciously on me. Marianne was there, all eyes and ears, of course. Gilda said some awful things. Perhaps I deserved them – what do you think, Genevieve?’
‘Perhaps all women in our situation deserve those things,’ I said.
She hadn't expected that answer. Did she think I was going to make excuses for her and me? She pursed her lips and was quiet for a moment. Then she said,
‘Gilda said to him, “Isn't she a bit old?” as if I weren't there, and, “You once told me you only wanted to paint beauties.” She was being revenged for my laughter in the cinema and revenged on him for his. He wasn't much of a painter, she said, he could manage puppy dogs and pussy cats and women with beautiful faces but he hadn't the talent to catch an ordinary middle-aged woman's likeness. Marianne, bless her, piped up and said, “I think my mother's beautiful,” and Alan said he could paint her, for if what Gilda said was true, to catch her likeness would take no talent at all. Marianne loved that but Gilda didn't. She said that whoever Alan had in mind to paint, he wasn't doing it in her house, and just to remind him it was her house.
‘They went home after that, he and she, that was the pattern, that was what always happened. Of course it did, she was his wife. When he did paint me at last it was the following June, at Molucca, when the roses were out. That's how I came to be holding a pink rose in my hand. Painters these days don't expect a sitter to pose for them more than once or twice. They use photographs. But Alan wanted a perfect likeness. Besides, he never worked on the picture except when I was there.’ Stella lifted up her hand and looked thoughtfully at it as if she held a flower.
‘It was while I was sitting for him that the photograph you found was taken. A couple came to the door to ask the way. They were lost. That had never happened before, I don't think we'd ever had any callers before. Alan told them how to get to Breckenhall and then he asked them if they'd take our picture. I expect they thought we were quite mad. The man stared at me in my pink silk dress and my pearls, but he took our picture, the two of us out in the front garden, looking into each other's eyes.’
She sighed. Closing her eyes for a moment or two is sometimes the way she indicates the subject is to change. ‘How old
were you when your mother and father separated, Genevieve?’
That took me by surprise. ‘I was eight.’
‘He left her?’
‘She chucked him out,’ I said. ‘He'd got someone else, a woman called Kath. He'd promised to give her up but one night when he was late home again and he'd been seeing her, Mum said it was the last straw and to go and not come back.’
‘She gave him the keys to the street,’ said Stella, and when I looked mystified, ‘It's what they used to say a long time ago. We'd say, show him the door, or give him his marching orders. Was it late August? Early September?’
‘I believe it was,’ I said.
Ned's researcher had found no record of Gilda Brent's death. I must be a fool, I thought Ned would search through the records himself, but of course he wouldn't, of course there must be other people to do that.
‘You didn't tell me the time of year,’ Ned said, ‘so she looked through the whole of 1970. She wasn't there. I thought we should do a proper job for you and I got her to go through The Times obituaries too.’
‘Her obituary would have been in the paper?’ I said.
‘Yes, why not? She was a well-known actress in her day. On the strength of The Fiancée alone they'd do some sort of write-up. Only they didn't, so she didn't.’
‘Didn't what?’
‘Didn't die in 1970. After all, I spoke to her agent in 1979. I don't think she's dead at all. I've a feeling I'd know. I would have read about it and it's not something I'd have forgotten. Maybe it's worth investigating. It could make one of those unsolved mystery features. You know the kind of thing – what became of Gilda Brent? The Lady Vanishes, something like that.’
In the bedroom the air was a cold mist. Our mouths were warm but not our hands. Our fingers felt each other like ice cubes run over the skin. It wasn't the love-making of summer, the languor and the long slow all-the-time-in-the-world, holding each other loosely because sweat broke too easily. In a few minutes it was over, it had to be, so that we could hug each other for warmth and watch our breath making white streams of fog over one another's shoulders.
December, it was only December. I thought, I have to make up my mind before Christmas and before Stella dies. Before the weather gets unbearably cold. Before I lose this house. No one could make it up for me. Asking him was useless, he would only tell me not to think, that thinking was fatal, but just to leave and come to him.
16
The tapes Stella had made she wiped clean. She told herself they were useless for her purposes, mere self-indulgence, an excuse for saying things she thought she would never say aloud. So much had been suppressed. Over the years so much had been battened down. Telling it at last was therapeutic. The effect was similar to talking to Genevieve but with greater freedom and therefore greater relief.
At least it has helped, she said to the recorder, it has emptied those things out of my mind, but the tapes are clean now and my words lost.
Or can they ever quite be lost? If you write something down and destroy what you've written, cut it to pieces or burn it, and if you have no copy, those words you wrote are gone for ever. But it isn't the same with the spoken word, or so I have read. Sound is never lost, it isn't absorbed by the ears which hear it, but flies on into space, perhaps beyond the earth's atmosphere and out among the spheres. Once a word is uttered it becomes indestructible and everlasting. My words are out there, flying on and up, even maybe heard by mysterious beings on other planets.
But all that is fantasy, something I have no time for now. I shall make three more tapes. I shall shut myself up in here, making believe I'm more feeble than I am, so that I have the chance to speak in peace. The first one I shall play back to myself to test my voice as much as anything, for in making the rest I shall need all the strength I have remaining. I want to sound sane, a good witness, not an old woman sinking into senility and derangement. I want my hearer to be convinced of the truth that I tell, whatever she may decide to do with it.
It is Lady Macbeth who asks the powers or the spirits – Genevieve would know about that! – asks the ‘murdering ministers’ to unsex her, to come to her woman's breasts and take her milk for gall. That made us giggle at school which is very likely why I remember it. But it's what I want now that I am near my death, to shed the meek, gentle womanliness that everyone has ascribed to me all my life. Alan said I was the most feminine creature he had ever known. Yet it was not a feminine thing I did or helped to do, not a sweet, womanly thing. If I can't be masculine I must be Lady Macbeth.
Here begins the first tape.
It was all a joke, wasn't it? Genevieve said. She wanted to believe that and I am not in the business of disillusioning her while I'm still alive. What happens later is another thing. I must take my chance on that. She wanted to believe the Killing Gilda Tease was a game, as I too wanted to believe it. I wanted to believe it very much and I did. When we made jokes about poisons and greasing the stairs and a little push over a clifftop, I made mental reservations. It was as if I thought, it doesn't matter what we say to each other, he and I, so long as I say to myself, it's all nonsense, he doesn't mean it, it's a game.
Yet, in spite of our illicit affair, we seemed to have kept a kind of innocence that folie à deux was spoiling. I was aware of this but unable to say so to him. Gilda and I went to the seaside together one day, only to Dunwich where the cliffs are hardly high, but high enough. We walked a little way on the cliffs, it was a beautiful day, and the thought came to me that I could push her over. It's hard to credit what I actually thought, that I'd be able to go home to him and tell him I'd killed his wife, he'd be so pleased with me, it would make him love me more.
I didn't touch her, of course I didn't, but I told him what I'd thought. I wanted to amuse him, to please him. He said,
‘Why didn't you?’
He'd been telling me of some poison he'd read about in the paper, how well it would work. ‘I might ask the same of you,’ I said. ‘Why didn't you?’
‘The pale cast of thought,’ he said. ‘You know, that stuff that gets in the way of resolution.’
If you talk about something enough, if you get used to it, it can become real. And for him it was real, he was serious about it. It wasn't a joke to him. Or it was no longer a joke. When the overt joking had virtually stopped, the real possibility had been growing in his mind. I understood that, that was what frightened me, but it was still a shock when he showed me Charmian's letter. I had forgotten its existence. A psychologist would say I had suppressed the memory of it, I'd blocked it off. Seeing the letter again frightened me, knowing he had actually kept it as he had said he would. In the archives, as he had put it.
I'd forgotten what it said and I had to read those words again. The first time they hadn't meant much to me but now when I read them they seemed to me desperately pathetic and sad. Of course my memory has never let me forget them again. ‘I cannot live without you. I have tried but the days are too long.’
‘How about faking Gilda's suicide,’ Alan said, ‘and making it look as if she left this note for me?’
It was absurd, of course. It would never have worked. The words were typed. I suppose Charmian had typed them because her handwriting was unreadable. The signature certainly was, a scrawl which might just as well have been Gilda as Charmian. Except that Gilda didn't write like that, her signature was quite legible, and she didn't own a typewriter. Alan hadn't left her, she wasn't living without him. Oh, there were a host of other objections but I need not go on. For that was not the point to me, none of that was. All that mattered to me was that he had reached a stage in the tease where he was serious. The joke was over and this was the real thing.
Yet the temptation for me was to go on with the joke, to laugh it off. The possibility that a man would think of killing his wife for my sake, to be with me, was too much for me. It was too far removed from any world I had ever known. Films and books were part of that world but not the life I led in the place I lived in, a middle-aged wido
w living in a suburb of a country town.
I didn't want to talk about it. I didn't want to go on as we were. I don't know what I wanted – well, for Gilda to die I suppose, to die a natural, quick, painless death. Is there such a death?
I didn't want to talk but I had to, I made Alan talk about it, and then I said it must never be discussed again, there must be no more jokes. More than that, there must be no more serious intent. I thought I'd convinced him. I thought I knew how I'd convinced him. It was by telling him that talk of killing Gilda was changing him, corrupting him, making him into a different man from the man I loved.
It was summer, the time of the portrait. The time those people came and asked us the way, the people we had asked to take our picture. After they had gone I went back to my chair and took up the pose again with the rose in my hand. Alan started laughing.
‘He was rather sinister, didn't you think? The photographer from hell. Did you notice his pointed eye-teeth? He means to drive her into the fen and strangle her.’
‘Don't,’ I said.
‘Oh, come on, darling. It's some strange woman I'm talking about, not Gilda. Luckily for justice and the triumph of the law he's left his fingerprints on your camera.’
I dropped the rose. I got up and came close to him.
‘Will you like it,’ I said, ‘if it isn't Gilda this kills but my love for you? Because that's what will happen.’ It wasn't true, I thought then that nothing could have done that, but I said it. I said it again. ‘It will change you. It will change you into someone else, the kind of person who could kill his wife, who could really do that. And if that happens I won't love you.’
The look on his face was one I shall never forget. Better say at this stage of my life that I never have forgotten it. He went pale. He looked like a child who has lost something it dearly loves and is incapable of understanding the explanation given for that loss. Richard looked like that when his kitten was run over in the street outside our house. It is an expression of such bewilderment and helpless pain that it breaks your heart.