She got out, tied the belt of her big black coat more tightly around her and slammed the car door. At once her spirits lifted in response to the fresh, brackish night air, the heart-tripping starry beauty of the sky, the sough of the black pines and, yes – the sound of a piano rambling coolly and playfully over ‘Love Is the Sweetest Thing’.
There was a flight of curved shallow steps at the front of the house, leading first to a broad, pillared portico, and then to stately wooden doors, standing open. Inside she could see a man resplendent in a kilt and a velvet jacket, a meeter and greeter of some kind, but she was spared his attentions because he was helping a couple with their coats.
In the portico Stella stood aside to let them come out. The woman wore a lilac pashmina over her head and shoulders. She was holding her husband’s arm, not out of affection on her part nor chivalry on his but to support him. Robert Vitelio was drunk as a lord. Even had he not been unsteady on his feet, his face suffused and slack and his eyes blurry, his condition was proclaimed in the polite, icy relief on the face of the kilted man, and the loyal concentration on that of the woman.
Stella took another step back, but at the moment she did so Robert rocked sideways, in her direction. His wife said, ‘Steady,’ and Stella instinctively put out a hand and took his weight for a split second while the two of them regained control.
His wife looked across at her, and smiled her gratitude. The pashmina had slipped back from her dark hair and Stella recognised the woman from the golf course. In these horribly embarrassing circumstances her poise had not deserted her: the smile managed to convey a womanly appreciation, with no loss of dignity. There was no question of collusion, of her aligning herself with anyone other than her husband.
‘Thank you.’
Stella nodded, shrinking, not trusting herself to speak. But Robert hadn’t even seen her and was too pissed to identify her if he had. She watched in trepidation as they reached the top of the steps which, seen through their eyes, must appear awesome. She entertained a nightmare vision of the pram in The Battleship Potemkin, hurtling and bouncing down endless stone stairs, and was just about to step forward to help when a youth in a white shirt hurried past her and stepped into the breach, taking Robert’s other arm with a well-trained, ‘All right, sir?’
‘Good evening madam, welcome to Loch Ailmay.’ The kilted man’s greeting indicated unequivocally that quite enough attention had been paid to those who had overindulged.
Stella had a drink while sitting in a deep rose velvet chair by a blazing fire, studied the handwritten menu, was shown to her table. Thick white tablecloths brushed the ground, candle lamps glowed, white vases overflowed with a profusion of bluebells and jonquils, the distant ceiling swirled with softly smiling nymphs, and the pianist gave his affectionately ironic take on ‘Dancing Cheek to Cheek’. The service was of a cherishing perfection. She could have wept for the loveliness of it all.
She could have, had she not been in shock. As with hurting oneself when alone, reaction was both pointless and proscribed. Doctor Theatre saw her right. She got through three faultless courses and two glasses of champagne by thinking herself into the part of the curious and colourful metropolitan visitor. She made her surroundings her set. She had always been able to do this – alone and without saying a word she could make herself the centre of attention. It was a kind of sex appeal, a generalised allure, which she could switch on. It was the reason her audiences fell in love with her.
When she’d ordered her coffee she went outside for a cigarette. At the foot of the steps she took out her makings and rolled a smoke, knowing that the kilted man was watching her, interested but far too grand and polite to engage her in conversation.
Back at the table, her coffee arrived. The waiter said: ‘Excuse me, madam, I have a message for you from our pianist, Mr Jackman. Here’s his card.’
‘Okay.’ She took it warily.
‘He recognises you, and wonders whether you might be prepared to sing one number with him. He’s a fan of yours apparently.’
Stella noted the ‘apparently’ – the waiter was in his late-teens. A glance at Mr Jackman confirmed that he wouldn’t see fifty again. Aware of the exchange, he caught her eye and tilted his head interrogatively as he segued into ‘The Way You Look Tonight’. He’d perpetrated a breach of etiquette and they both knew it. He was chancing his arm, but it was quite comforting to meet a chancer in such unlikely surroundings.
‘I’ll go and have a word with him.’
‘I think he’d be knocked out, madam.’
She poured herself a coffee and carried it over to the piano, only too aware of trailing a discreet Mexican wave of curiosity.
Jackman held out his right hand briefly. ‘Charmed – it is Miss Carlyle, isn’t it?’ He was no Scot but a pouchy southerner with a dissipated pallor and estuarine vowels.
‘That’s right.’
He executed a choice flourish. ‘Thought I wasn’t wrong. Hope you don’t mind my soliciting you.’
‘I should but I don’t.’
‘I heard you at the Harbour Light. You were the business.’
‘Thanks, that was a new song, first time I tried it out.’
‘Want to try it again?’
‘I don’t have any music, I’ve been working without a piano.’
‘Music?’ He pulled his mouth down. ‘You see any music? We’re talking follow my leader here. I’ll vamp, you sing darling, I’ll cotton on.’
His hands pranced up the keyboard, flagging the end of the set. He smiled and bowed into the polite applause, pushed the microphone aside. She felt a fellow-entertainer’s tribal sympathy with him.
‘They like you.’
‘They’d like anyone, they’re a well brought up lot. I say that, but there was one here earlier that wasn’t. Mouth like a toilet, thought he was at the Glasgow Empire.’ He shook his head. ‘Didn’t bother me, it was like old times as a matter of fact.’
She made no comment, but he’d moved on to other things. ‘Listen.’
With one hand he picked out the tune of ‘Are you out there?’ with only a couple of mistakes. ‘How did I do?’
‘I’m impressed.’
‘Not perfect, I know that. I used to be able to hear a tune, play it from memory, harmonies, the lot. You’re on your own in the middle eight, but other than that.’
‘There’s one or two bits . . .’
He put his hands on his knees. ‘Show me.’ She did so, singing a few of the words to make sense of it. He slapped his knees. ‘All right. Shall we show them how it’s done?’
‘Why not.’
‘You want an intro?’
‘Just a chord.’
‘You got it. Straight in.’
Having pushed his luck once he knew better than to do so again by introducing her. He simply adjusted the microphone and announced in his hammy old pro’s way that they were about to hear a brand new song, and they were to remember they’d heard it here first ...
She sang the song, but not well. Jackman’s accompaniment was surprisingly sensitive, following her like a shadow, moving with her mood. And the diners stopped eating to listen, politely intrigued but unsure of themselves. The kilted major domo appeared in the high doorway. But the setting wasn’t hers and these weren’t her people. Her sadness and anger threatened to choke her, her voice lost its resonance, her style was cramped, she couldn’t make her feelings theirs. She felt she was making a spectacle of herself.
When she’d finished they applauded heartily and returned to their dinners.
Jackman rescued her by saying it for her. ‘Wasn’t quite as good as the last time. Not your sort of venue.’
‘That’s no excuse.’
He began to play ‘Yesterday’. ‘Sorry if I hustled you, shouldn’t have done that.’
‘It did me good. I don’t want to get precious.’
‘Thanks anyway. I saw your show once in Bristol, it was great stuff.’ He held out his hand briefly. ‘Take it easy . .
. You know what you needed, don’t you?’
‘What?’
‘That mouthy bastard who was here earlier. He’d have made you feel right at home.’
Next day she received a card, posted in the town, with a picture of Ailmay harbour beneath improbably blue skies.
‘I was a pig,’ it said, ‘and today I feel like shit, so there is some justice. And my elbow’s giving me hell. I may never fix eyes again, and then you’ll be sorry.’
Not knowing whether to laugh or cry she did neither, and threw the postcard in the rubbish bin. As a medical man he made a great piss-artist.
She’d been away from home for six weeks but when she got back she was confronted by the evidence that time meant different things in different places. In Ailmay there seemed to be more time because there was more space, and its texture was different, the days and weeks seeping into one another, marked out by the land, the light and the weather.
She’d forgotten how here in London time operated in spurts – scurrying, stopping and starting, regulated not by natural rhythms but by activities like shopping and work and journeys, messages and meetings. For a day or so she was unable to recalibrate, felt like someone released from an institution, in whose absence everyday life has become almost too crowded and eventful to deal with.
But stuff needed doing. Among the drift of mail on her mat were at least three red reminders, a cool note from Apollonia, a solicitor’s bill, an invitation from Alan confirming the date of their meeting, a Welcome Home card from her parents and a letter from Jamie thanking her for her cheque and for singing at the party. She’d forgotten that, it was like another lifetime. But to be reminded of it was salutary – three times recently she’d been persuaded to sing on her own, a sure sign of being too easily flattered – she must be wary of getting soft. Besides, as Alan might have said, not only was a prophet without honour among his own, but people simply didn’t value what they didn’t pay for.
Robert, of course, had said: ‘That song . . . that wasn’t about money.’ But then he knew shit about the business.
The person Alan had found for her was Jude Romilie, a witty, well-spoken, sexually ambiguous cabaret performer admitting to thirty; trailing clouds of Footlights glory, but well enough on his way to be a threat. But even had it been clearer who was giving who a leg up, he was unsuitable on just about every level Stella cared to name, mostly because he was too smooth for her. Smooth as silk, smooth as soap.Teflon-smooth, too smooth to get a purchase on, so together that there was no way in. Or not that she could see. Professionally speaking, as she told Alan over lunch, she preferred a bit of rough.
He was pained. ‘Stella – you could hardly have called Sorority rough.’
‘Maybe, but they were trailer trash compared with that prat.’
‘He’s very clever,’ said Alan, ‘and on the way up.’
She waited in vain for the other shoe to drop, before asking with heavy sarcasm: ‘Meaning what exactly?’
‘Nothing in the world except that it does no harm to pull in a younger audience.’
‘I shan’t pull in any audience at all without a congenial partnership.’
‘That’s true, but do think, angel-heart. The place is littered with the bleached bones of gifted performers who believed their mothers and thought it was enough simply to be themselves.’
‘Alan,’ she smiled at him over her glass, ‘I don’t need this.’
He touched her arm, smiled back. ‘I adore you. I want you to go stratospheric.’
She dropped her voice so that it was sibilant as the scrape of a razor. ‘I don’t need it, or him. Or you.’
He didn’t believe her, of course, and she took an exquisite pleasure in listening to him laughing out loud, then, as he became less sure, trying to josh her out of it, doing tender and fatherly, then brisk and businesslike, unable to conceal the merest tremor of anxiety in case . . . He went through all these stages in the three minutes that it took her to finish her wine, and then she pushed her chair back and got up.
‘Thanks for everything, Alan. Send on any mail, won’t you?’ Bye—’ she kissed him briskly on either cheek ‘—angel-heart.’
‘Stella . . .’ He tried to rise, but was sitting on the banquette and the table was pushed (by her) a little too close, so he was trapped. ‘Stella, I’ll ring, yup?’
‘If you must. But I’ll write.’ A waiter came with her coat and she thrust in her arms, flashing him an over the top, on-a-promise smile. ‘Oh, and Alan . . .’
‘What?’
‘Tell Romilie from me to watch his back.’
To her intense delight he followed her, rushing out on to the pavement and calling her name. It was like a scene from a film. She didn’t break stride nor so much as glance over her shoulder. She wished she had something of his, some small personal possession that she could have taken from her pocket or her bag and dropped, with withering insouciance, down a drain like the girl in the ad. But lacking that she simply waved one hand at shoulder height, the middle finger stiffly raised, and was rewarded with a cry of ‘Bitch!’ and a smattering of applause from the onlookers.
By the time she got back to her flat the elation had drained away, sucking every scrap of positive feeling down the plughole with it. What, she wondered, was the source of this pathological need to drive people away from her? What was she trying to prove? She did not, it was true, regret any of her actions, she simply did not understand them.
She rang Georgina, but her machine was on and Stella left no message. Sitting cross-legged on the window seat with a half bottle of Jack Daniel’s she wondered what it was like to have a man in one’s life, not one like Robert Vitelio but a man who cared, and listened, and said tender things like, ‘Remember, darling, whatever happens I’ll always be here,’ while taking one in his arms with soft lips and a hard prick. For some reason these musings brought Gordon to mind and she realised that she did know more or less what that was like and it had driven her crazy with irritation.
She consumed half a dozen JDs and smoked the same number of roll-ups before running out of both. She had no wine and there wasn’t even any dope in the house. Drearily she went into the bedroom, opened the top right-hand drawer of the chest and found amongst her tangle of pants and socks the container with what remained of her happy pills. Years she’d been on them, but it was now eighteen months since she’d taken anything more mood-altering than a drink. She felt the weight and texture of the plastic tub in her hand, thoughtfully shook the pink and white capsules, dinky as children’s sweets, that had the power to make every crisis seem like shouting in another street . . . But as she did she caught sight of herself in the mirror, forced herself not to move but to keep staring back. Look and remember. A modern morality tale captured by the camera. This is what the top of the slippery slope looks like. Skinny tart with pills. Woman on the brink. ‘The decision’. Moment of truth. Crap like that.
She didn’t throw the pills away – they were on prescription after all, she was entitled to have them – but she stuffed them back in the drawer and went out.
For Stella, afternoons were like a foreign country without language, map or currency, she wasn’t at home in them and had no idea what the options were. Except to fuck, and that wasn’t always available. In the build up to a show there were rehearsals. On tour or during a run afternoons were waiting time, two or three hours in which to taxi on to the runway and start revving up for take off.
She supposed that people had their routines. They returned, well-refreshed, to offices, they collected children from school, they shopped. They even ‘went out shopping’. She herself had never to her knowledge ‘been out shopping’ in the approved, retail-therapy manner, but she resolved to do so now. She would get fags and booze, and then she would go in and out of shops until she found something else to buy. She wasn’t acquisitive, she couldn’t think of a single thing she hankered after, but if she exposed herself to enough stuff for long enough she would find the thing – ‘item’, shoppe
rs called it – that she couldn’t live without. And in acquiring it, life would become worth living. That, or so she understood, was how it worked.
Even in this mood of grimly determined frivolity a small internal voice warned against extravagance. She was out of work and pretty well out of friends, it would be wise to put checks and balances in place. She drew out a hundred pounds spending money, such a fat wad that she had to shuffle around the cards in her wallet to accommodate it. It astonished her to think that there were women – she’d read about them in the papers – who spent several times that on a dress, and yet she was relying on it to save her sanity.
It was surprisingly difficult at first, not because she was parsimonious, but because she simply had no cravings. But once she’d parted with some of the wad in the off licence and left her bottle of JD and tin of makings with Jamahl behind the counter she felt more in the mood. She bought some designer coffee in Must Have Beans, and a selection of highly coloured Indian sweetmeats, and then, telling herself that perishables didn’t really count, went into Secondhand Rose and found a velvet shirt and a jet choker.
She had been out of the house three-quarters of an hour and had only spent forty pounds, but it was still more mindless spending than she normally did in a month. Over a double espresso in the café-bar, surrounded even at four p.m. by Jamie lookalikes and girls in combats, she told herself that she wasn’t doing badly for a beginner.
Contrary to what many people thought, Robert Vitelio did not dislike his patients. He could not, under the grinding weight of the system and its manifest shortcomings, know them well enough to dislike them.
The Grass Memorial Page 24