Echo of Barbara

by John Burke

  And more clearly than ever, in spite of all she had done and all she had longed to do, she was Paula Hastings. Yet no longer Hastings — she had never really belonged to her family, and now was quite cut off from them: she was simply Paula, as she had always been.

  Now that she and Quentin were open enemies, sharpening claws and blunting words on one another, they set up strangely puritanical standards. If she went out in the evening, she knew that Quentin would not himself slink out later and leave Michael in the house alone: after their near-humiliation at the hands of the authorities, that would be against his principles. There were certain absolutes which they both accepted; certain rules which neither would break, but which each hoped to torment or lure the other into breaking.

  A long time went by before she came home and again found that he was not there. But he had not left Michael: he had taken Michael with him.

  The truth did not resolve itself from her frenzy and then from her despair until late the following day. Quentin had gone to see one of his women — one of the sympathetic young women who believed, as Paula had once done, that he would soon write something important and be among those who created splendour and made money without having to strive too hard, too long. He had stuck to his new principles. Rather than leave Michael in the house alone, he had taken the child with him. What the two of them did with Michael for an hour or two was never decided: it was a question that no one wished to pursue, and that could add nothing to the final result anyway. What was certain was that Michael travelled in the back of the young woman’s small car on the way home, and that he did not reach home. It was mentioned that, being in the back seat, he did not have as much glass in him as the other two had.

  The young woman had been Sollenbury Beauty Queen two years after Paula.

  *

  Roger Westwood said: ‘You used to call him Sammy. Remember that.’

  ‘But would I go back to it right away? After what I’ve said about him . . .’

  He looked at her with dawning respect. ‘That’s quite a point. You’re dead right. Come to think of it, that makes it all the better. You don’t have to worry about being stiff and nervous when you first meet him. That’s O.K. Take your time. Let him break down your resistance. Say two weeks — three weeks at most. Unless it works out so that you feel it’s all right to get going faster. But when he’s good and ready, and you know the time has come — well, you call him Sammy. Get it?’

  ‘I’ll remember,’ she said.

  They were sitting in his room behind Marylebone Road. She had been doubtful about coming here, at first — doubtful yet resigned. Now, as the lesson proceeded, she accepted what she had glimpsed at the start: she saw that he was truly single-minded, and that his father’s money was all that he wanted. No, not quite that: his father’s money was the symbol of his father’s power, and he wanted a share in both. There was no time for anything else.

  Almost she began to like him, or at least to admire him. The intensity of his application, and the lengths to which he was prepared to go, awoke an echo in her. Roger Westwood did not intend to remain the same, incomplete Roger Westwood all his life. He thought that he knew of a way out, and he proposed to try it.

  ‘Your hair style,’ he said.

  ‘What about it?’

  ‘You’ll have to alter it. Barbara had the same colour hair as yours — same texture, I’d say — but she always had it pulled back behind her ears.’

  ‘You mean,’ she said, ‘that that’s how she did it when your father knew her? But she must have changed it in all sorts of ways later.’

  ‘Never. It was always the same.’

  ‘It’s hard to imagine. Most girls . . . women . . . well, it’s queer.’

  He said: ‘Barbara was . . . I mean, you . . . were queer. Stiff and awkward and sure of yourself. Always.’

  He got up and crossed the room to a chest of drawers wedged into the corner. One of the drawers squealed as he pulled it open.

  It was not an expensive room. There was a modern cocktail cabinet against one wall, but the wallpaper behind it was scarred and faded. The shade on the lamp had been bought recently, somewhere fashionable, but the flex dropped slackly down the wall from an old point. The carpet was meant to cover the entire floor but curled away from the corners, and the door of the built-in cupboard beside her chair did not fit. She saw the signs of his tastes, his forward-groping desires — the television set, the bottles in the cocktail cabinet, the American magazines lying on the small Swedish table — but she saw also that he had a long way to go.

  She said: ‘Suppose she were to come back in the middle of it all, just when I was going strong?’

  Roger straightened up and closed the drawer. He laughed incredulously. ‘You think of the most wonderful things, don’t you?’

  ‘But suppose she did?’

  He sat down again, this time on the edge of his chair. He held out a bundle of snapshots to her, and one postcard-size enlargement.

  There was a picture of a child of three or four years of age on a seaside promenade, holding her father’s hand. Then, a few years older, she had her arm linked with his. The enlargement showed the head and shoulders of a girl in her middle teens, with pursed, sardonic lips and eyes that stared beyond the camera rather than at it. Paula recognized the face and yet knew that it was unfamiliar: she might have been looking into a distorting mirror.

  Other snapshots showed the whole family, with Roger often hanging slightly back or turning his head archly away. Barbara always stared arrogantly ahead, but never right into the camera.

  Roger said: ‘You can see what sort of girl she was, can’t you?’

  ‘Sure of herself,’ murmured Paula. It was not envy that she felt: she did not wish to be this girl; yet she would have liked to experience for herself that assurance of rightness.

  ‘And having walked out,’ said Roger, ‘she’ll stay out.’

  ‘Perhaps you’re right.’

  ‘I’ve got to be right.’

  Absently she went through the snapshots, then turned them over and started at the beginning again. She was imbibing an atmosphere. With the evidence before her she was trying to re-create a family. These black and white images had once been alive, and to draw close to them today she must know their yesterdays.

  She bent over a faded scene in which Sam Westwood stood with one hand on the door-handle of his Bentley.

  Quietly Roger said: ‘Barbara.’

  She did not lift her head.

  Again he said: ‘Barbara.’

  This time she responded. ‘Oh . . . yes. Sorry.’

  ‘You’ll have to be quicker than that.’

  ‘I know. I’m sorry.’

  ‘We’ve only got tomorrow.’ She heard the trembling excitement in his voice. ‘Then we drive down.’

  She caught her breath. The monstrous impossibility of the whole situation suddenly weighed down on her. It was still not too late to turn back, was it?

  He sensed nothing. Already he was living in tomorrow, and the day after. He said: ‘One more session, and then I can show him . . . what I’ve found.’

  *

  Had she ever truly been found, by anyone?

  Fleeing from Sollenbury, she had been sure that Paula was dead. As dead as her husband and her child. More than that, even: there had never been any such person. Paula had not existed, and so her son could not have existed. There had never been a Michael. It was impossible that he should have chuckled in the way that she remembered — no, not remembered, but dreamed — and then been not there. The only solution must be that he had never been there.

  Reaching London, she would discover herself or be discovered. It was time she acquired a self that she and others would recognize.

  And she must be happy. There were ways of being happy. Misery was something that you left behind with your cast-off skin in Sollenbury.

  She went to theatres and to casting offices. She grew used to the shaken heads, the tired shrugs. Experience . . .? S
he grew used, also, to the suppressed laughter. In the mirror of men’s eyes she saw something, but it was never what she was looking for.

  In due course she reached the office where Stan Morrison said to her: ‘Acting? This isn’t a film magazine company, honey. But my father runs some smart clubs — plenty of big names have started there — I might have a word with him about you. Later. Right now we could use you as a pin-up girl. Why not? A lot of the stars began as pin-up girls. Why not . . .’

  They paid her well. It amused her to see the copies of these magazines lying on bookstalls and in the corners of poky shops and on barrows or shelves at the bottom of streets under the metallic roar of a railway bridge; to turn over the pages and see herself, and to know how well she had been paid for sitting or lying in that studio, with the strips of material tied round her.

  It was puzzling, though, to see how slack and sad were the faces of the men who peered at the magazines and, fumbling for money, hastily bought copies. For a few weeks she exulted in her body and the knowledge of its power; but when she saw the shamefaced men and was aware of their sadness, the exultation faded.

  Later she wore nothing, and by now she was curious rather than hopeful. Looking at a glossy print, looking at a page in a magazine, she studied the face and breasts and legs of a complete stranger, and said over and over to herself: ‘That is Paula Hastings.’

  Still it was nobody she knew.

  Perhaps it did not matter. She was alive. There was plenty of time. She ate and drank and slept, and went out with one of the other girls who was often at the studio, until the other girl turned down the chance of an increased rate of pay.

  ‘If they think I’m going to go in for that sort of thing . . .’

  Paula did not turn it down. She was outside this flesh and bone, unconvinced by it and undisturbed by its physical humiliations. The lights burned, the cameras stared at her; somewhere the printing presses duplicated and reduplicated her; and she was paid.

  The cameras did not discover who she was. They revealed so much to greedy, sad-eyed men turning over pages, but to Paula they revealed nothing.

  It was a dull, routine, respectable world, this world of the studio.

  She moved from it into the world of Lew Morrison.

  ‘I’ve spoken to my father about you.’ It was Stan Morrison who said it, leaning in the door of his office and pointing a cigarette at her. ‘He’d like to see you. Might be a good opening for you.’

  Hope was as wavering as a candle flame. She was not prepared to let herself expect too much.

  Stan Morrison said: ‘Don’t think you’re going to be a star overnight. Just take what comes, and play your cards right, and the old man’ll treat you fine. I can promise you that.’

  It would be a beginning. She met Lew Morrison, and knew that it would be impossible to be a nobody in his hectic world. Lew Morrison, with his veiled eyes and half-insulting questions, would not be interested in a nobody. Here she might find the person who had been lying in wait within herself.

  This time she was right. This time she found Paula Hastings — that same Paula she had left behind, for ever, in Sollenbury.

  It had been easy to let herself drift from one stage to another, from the first photographic poses to the next, from the studio to Lew Morrison’s club. Easy to say that it didn’t matter; that you would get used to anything; that nobody could, really, touch you. Easy to sneer at the faint stirrings of the provincial girl buried so deeply inside you. A hard, confident smile would carry you through; a shrug of indifference showed how little you really cared . . .

  Until the bright, brittle world narrowed and closed in. Until other people receded into the background and you knew that you had been marked down by one of Lew Morrison’s clients — this man with a thick lower lip and moist, cold hands, that man with the face of a film star and the persistent high giggle of a maniac, or the fat little dwarf with slanting eyes.

  She discovered Paula Hastings. It was the old, inescapable Paula Hastings who sobbed and was sick. It was a frightened, nauseated child who clawed a man’s face and fled — and it was the older, wiser Paula without hope and without illusion who told Lew Morrison that she was leaving and why, and what she thought of him.

  In reply he told her what the future of a girl such as herself was likely to be. He also told her how powerful he was, and promised her with cold intensity that, in the world in which she would have to live from now on, there would be no place for her. He would make sure of that. Women didn’t let Lew Morrison and his friends down like this.

  ‘I can get an ordinary job,’ she said.

  ‘You can’t,’ he said. ‘Not now. You wouldn’t settle. You’re not the sort. I know. Believe me, I know.’

  Yes, he knew.

  *

  The flow of traffic had thinned some miles back. They were driving now through a stretch of sparse woodland, with a few dry leaves still blowing across the road.

  She was acutely conscious of every feature of the countryside. Her eyes were tired: she had been unable to withdraw her attention, to relax in the car and conserve her energies for the meeting that was now so close. She read road signs and signposts, advertisements, the names on shops; and now her head turned compulsively to watch the trees flickering past, as dizzying as the march of telegraph poles seen from a train.

  Roger said: ‘There’s nothing to be worried about. This is going to work beautifully.’ The knuckles of his hand on the wheel were white. ‘If you get stuck at any time at all, just play it steady. Keep calm. Don’t say a thing. He’ll expect you to be moody and unsettled, and you can be as dumb as you want to when it suits you.’

  ‘Are we nearly there?’ she said.

  ‘And when it comes to getting the details about the Mannerlaw stuff out of him . . .’

  They slowed for a sharp turn. A signpost rose from a green triangle of grass. Paula looked at it and read its fatal message. She sat as stiff and unyielding as though they might at any moment crash; almost she wished that they would.

  ‘Look down your nose at the whole business,’ Roger was saying. ‘That’s what Barbara would have done. I mean, that’s what you would always do. When you get round to talking about it, make it quite casual. Say you can’t imagine why he — how would you put it? — oh, yes . . . you simply can’t imagine why he’s making such a thing of it. Laugh a bit, and shake your head. Then talk about something else. And later, begin to wheedle it out of him, only all the time you’ve got to look as though you didn’t give a damn.’

  She hardly heard what he was saying. He went on: he could not stop talking. He was like a nervous producer harassing an actor at the last moment, just as the curtain was about to rise.

  Which, really, was what he was.

  She saw the water below them. Cold sunshine touched wavetips and scored a faint steely line along the horizon.

  Roger broke off, and suddenly, quietly, said: ‘Barbara.’

  ‘Yes?’ she responded, without looking away from the unfolding coastline.

  ‘That’s good,’ he approved. ‘That was fine.’

  They ran parallel with the sea, and now the house was there ahead of them, waiting for them.

  Chapter Six

  Mrs. Westwood must have been well primed by her son. As the car drew up she opened the front door of the house and stood there with one hand to her breast in a histrionic gesture.

  Roger got out and came round the car impatiently to open the door for Paula.

  She said: ‘Did you normally behave so politely to your sister?’

  He stopped. ‘That’s a thought.’

  She got out.

  The woman on the doorstep raised her arms as though to draw Paula towards her. She was a large, heavy woman who ought to have looked imposing yet failed to be so. There was a faded magnificence about her — slightly drooping shoulders where there should have been confidence, lines of worry and disillusion where there should have been plump self-assurance.

  Suddenly she moved
aside. A man came and stood in the opening. He stared. Paula began to walk towards him.

  She could almost feel Roger coming up behind her, treading silently as though not to distract attention from the leading player. The man in the doorway did not take his eyes off her face.

  Somebody had to speak.

  It was Mrs. Westwood who ran clumsily forward and threw her arms around Paula.

  ‘You’ve come back,’ she cried. ‘Barbara, you’ve come back.’

  It was loud and unreal. She was, or had been, a statuesque woman, and this supposedly impulsive run was out of character. Seen close to, her face was stained with blobs of a strange red flush.

  She turned, with one arm still around Paula, and faced her husband.

  He whispered: ‘Hello . . . Barbara.’

  ‘Hello,’ she said. Then she added: ‘Father.’

  His gaze seemed to plunge right into her — a remorseless light fingering into dark corners.

  ‘Well,’ said Roger. ‘Well. Shall we all go inside and celebrate?’

  They went indoors, Paula jostled by Mrs. Westwood, heavy against her. Sam Westwood — ‘Father,’ she said insistently to herself — was behind her. As they went into a room at the back of the house he moved up beside her.

  He was not deceived. He must know that she was not his daughter. She wondered when he would speak, and how he would decide to attack her.

  ‘Now, Sam, give them both a drink while I get lunch on the table,’ Mrs. Westwood fussed, prodding Paula towards a chair and giving her a speculative glance as she did so. ‘Won’t be long. Good job I’ve got plenty of things in. Of course, if I’d known’ — she flashed a twisted, surreptitious smile at Roger — ‘I’d have had something special. But I couldn’t have known, could I?’

  Sam went to the cupboard near the window. He bent down, opened it, and then turned round.

  ‘You’ll . . . have a drink? You drink nowadays?’

  Paula laughed sharply. ‘Yes. I’m a big girl now.’