by Julia Gray
‘Perfect, thank you,’ I said, taking one.
What I really wanted was a toothbrush, but I didn’t feel that I could ask this either. A few minutes later, however, he went out and returned with a towel, a toothbrush (new, in packaging) and a tiny shampoo bottle of the free-gift variety.
‘Bel’s shown you where the bathroom is, yeah? If you want to take a shower. Not that I’m suggesting you, ah, need to take one. You know.’
I thanked him for his excellent hosting sensibilities, to spare his blushes. I heard piano music when I went upstairs: tight, mathematical scales that climbed and fell with jumpy ferocity. It seemed to me that Darian Ingram had few ways to express how he felt.
When I came back to the kitchen there was no sign of Bel. Darian was in the garden, smoking. He looked round at me, and smiled in a way that felt beckoning, so I went to join him. He offered me a cigarette; I shook my head. The air smelled of damp earth; there were some little buds peeping up through the soil in the flower beds.
‘Did you enjoy the party?’ he asked me.
‘Honestly,’ I said, ‘I’m not much of a party person.’
‘Me neither. What do you like?’
‘Reading,’ I said. ‘Reading and swimming, mostly.’
‘Do you have exams?’
‘A-levels next year. Nothing this year except coursework.’
‘Look,’ he said. ‘She’s going to ask you to, like, help with all her work. Writing essays and notes. Revising. There’s, what, two and a half months until her A-levels. I don’t want you to get dragged into all this.’
I asked him what he meant.
‘It’s just a power game between Bel and Dad. This is how they’ve always been. She asks for something ridiculous; he promises it on certain conditions. Or he bribes her with something to get her to change her behaviour. That’s how we got her off Valium. And shoplifting. Sometimes neither of them gets what they want. Sometimes they both do. But Bel survives. And that’s all Dad cares about.’ He stopped, looking embarrassed. ‘I shouldn’t be telling you so much.’
‘It’s OK,’ I said.
‘The point is,’ said Darian, ‘you should get out now, while you can. Don’t be taken in. That’s all I’m saying. Bel’s all about what she can get.’
The cat leaned over the pond and swiped for a fish, letting out a scratchy yowl that made us both jump. We stayed in the garden a while longer, not saying much, until Bel came clattering around the side of the house in purple running shorts and said, with what I presumed was sarcasm, that she hoped she wasn’t interrupting anything important.
4
Darian had known Bel all her life; she’d been a part of mine for a matter of weeks. I had no doubt that he was right. He had warned me. Clearly he was a rational person, worth listening to. I think, at that moment, it might have been possible for me to make my excuses and walk away.
But I didn’t.
Sure enough, after Bel returned from her jog, she did indeed suggest that I might be able to help her with what she called ‘organisational matters’. In return, she promised, as she always did, ‘a pedestal’, this one of rainbows and quartz and chrysanthemums, if I remember correctly. This might seem like an odd sort of exchange – unfair, really – since she was offering a made-up object of no value in exchange for so much. But what she was really offering was herself. Her time, her affection. And it was an offer I couldn’t refuse.
I began to adjust the patterns of my daily existence to suit hers. For the rest of the spring term, Bel and I spent our lunch breaks in the library, our heads close together as I helped her first to make up the considerable academic ground that she had lost, and then to create and use revision materials for English and History. Even with Art and Design I helped her, by mimicking her bold sketching style with my left hand, and filling page upon page of her sketchbooks.
We met after school. Sometimes we even met before – eating eggs on toast in the local greasy spoon and chatting both sense and nonsense. Since Evie was still in Romania, I started spending Friday nights at Bel’s house, and occasionally I’d stay over until the Monday morning, when Cody would appear out of nowhere to drive us to school. Bel had a relative who would periodically send her money, and when this happened, the theatre was what she wanted to spend it on. We saw plays by Shakespeare and Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams, sitting in the cheapest seats, but having – I thought – the most fun. I’d never really gone to the theatre; it was too expensive for me and Evie unless as an exceptionally special treat.
As good as her word, Bel neither held nor attended a single party.
Just as I’d suspected, she was not at all stupid. It was laziness and lack of drive that had resulted in her poor grades thus far, not lack of ability. I was no teacher, but I could see that she was making real progress. Her verbal memory was very sound, and although her essay technique was poor I found that if I wrote model essays that showcased exactly how to treat a particular question, she was able to reproduce them with ease. By and by we found we didn’t need to work the entire time, after all. We’d talk, and dress up; we’d read to each other in the garden and make up strange things to eat and drink. I told her about the death of my father, choosing Mysterious Disappearance as the story I felt she’d appreciate most, and she listened in soulful silence. I told her about my mother, and about Aunt Petra. I even told her about the séance in the octagonal studio, and the Chakra Flowers of Doom (not the entire story, of course, but a version of it).
Bel was entranced. ‘How did you know it was him?’ she said, at once. ‘It could have been a demon, you know, pretending to be your father.’
Like me, Bel had seen a lot of movies.
‘I need you to do it again,’ she’d say sometimes. ‘Get into your trance, and talk to my mama. Ask her whether Daddy is going to let me play Clementine.’
But I wouldn’t allow myself to be persuaded.
Announcing that tar and tobacco were wrecking her acting voice, Bel stopped smoking. She went running on the common every week; at least, that is what she said she was doing. She took to drinking a concoction of beetroot, pineapple and kale that I found totally undrinkable, but that – she claimed – would purify the blood. Her eating habits remained erratic, as did her drinking habits. But by and large, I could see that Anton’s challenge had been taken up.
‘Have you ever seen Jacaranda?’ Bel asked me, one Friday night as we sat in the conservatory, a bottle of red wine between us in a nest of crisp packets.
I fancied that she wanted to be the one to show it to me for the first time, so I said that I hadn’t. I had, of course. Twice.
‘Oh, but you must see it! Then you’ll know – you’ll understand, straight away, why it’s so important to me.’
We went downstairs to the basement, to what Bel grandly called the Cinema Room. It was more of a den, a small study with book-lined walls, a velvet sofa and a Persian carpet. A projector was mounted on one wall, and a pull-down screen took up the whole of the wall opposite. Bel rummaged through boxes of DVDs until she found Jacaranda; even in the dim light, the purplish flowering tree on the front of the box was unmistakeable.
‘Mama was nineteen when she played Clementine,’ said Bel. ‘She used to say that Ken Harmon came onto her the whole time they were filming. One day she just couldn’t stand it any longer and spiked his coffee with laxatives. Nora, darling, d’you think you could run upstairs and fetch the vino?’
The opening credits were rolling over syrupy violins when I returned with the wine. Bel was stretched out on the sofa; she curled her legs up so that I could sit beside her and I felt her hands threading through my hair. It was the sort of thing I hated, but she did things like that so often – although, thankfully, she had never again attempted to kiss me – that I found I’d got rather used to it.
The words: And introducing Phyllis Lane as Clementine appeared on the screen, and Bel caught her breath theatrically.
‘I never tire of seeing her name in writing,’ she
said. ‘She always wanted to be an actress. Her real name wasn’t Phyllis. It was Pauline. Her father was a butcher, you know. He was horrified when she said she wanted to go on the stage. But my grandmama supported her. She took on extra sewing for three years in order to pay for my mother to go to drama school. Sometimes she worried that Grandpa would never forgive her. I tell you, Nora, you don’t want to get on the wrong side of a man with a meat cleaver.’
I made encouraging noises as a shot of an English coastal village, seen from above, lit up the dark room. I’d heard some of these stories before; they changed from telling to telling and I was never sure if Bel herself could tell the grains of truth from the flowers of embellishment. In so many ways, Bel was a much worse liar than I was. I always knew when I was lying, whereas I think that Bel didn’t. I hated it when people talked during films; it had been one of Jonah Trace’s most irritating traits. After a while, however, Bel stopped talking and we let the film transport us back in time to the Devon coast in the inter-war years, to a failing marriage and a falling-down house, to murder and intrigue and rich orchestral music … and to Phyllis Lane, who played the part of the smart young daughter, Clementine, with verve and depth and luminosity.
I’d thought it before, but as I watched Bel as she watched her mother, I thought it again: Bel’s acting style (the sheer, ferocious, all-or-nothingness of it) was very similar. Perhaps Anton Ingram really did intend to offer his daughter the part.
At the end of the movie, Bel wept real tears. ‘And what did you think?’ she said.
‘It’s amazing,’ I said. ‘So moving. Also quite funny in places. I see why your dad wants to readapt it. Certain scenes – the ballroom one, and the treehouse among the yew trees where they find the key – I can just imagine them, not the same, but sort of updated.’
‘I just love Mama’s hair in this so much,’ said Bel. ‘How d’you think it would suit me?’
I looked at her sideways, comparing her profile with her mother’s. In keeping with the period, Clementine had a shortish bob that shone like the proverbial spun gold. Phyllis’s hair was a whiter shade than Bel’s, but – as far as I could tell – of a similar thickness.
‘Your bone structure’s the same,’ I said. ‘And your nose. I think it would look fine.’
‘Nora,’ said Bel. ‘Do you know how to do hair?’
And so it was that early the next morning Cody was dispatched to the shops for dye and professional scissors, and while Bel made up her beetroot-and-kale drink I plotted my course of action. Highlights, I decided, were the thing to do here, rather than an all-over tint. They’d look more natural.
‘Let’s use Dad’s bathroom,’ said Bel, when Cody returned. ‘It’s bigger.’
Bel had been eight when her mother had died, and Darian nine, but Phyllis Lane’s long absence was not that easy to discern when we opened the door to the bedroom that she and Anton had shared. A cotton kimono with an indigo print hung from an embroidered screen, as though its wearer might be changing just behind it; a set of hairbrushes and combs were stacked in a pot on the vanity table; I was sure, without looking, that the wardrobes that took up an entire wall would contain as many gowns as the Ugly Sisters’ dressing room. Now, finally, I understood why Bel wore kimonos so often. Of course: they had belonged to her mother.
The bathroom was just off the bedroom. It was tiled all over in grey marble. Bel dragged the dressing-table stool into the bathroom and put it next to the bath. She emptied the shopping bag into the sink. Cody, quite intelligently, had bought a kit from Boots, rather than the individual products I’d specified.
‘Got everything you need?’ asked Bel.
‘Pretty much,’ I said, fitting a perforated shower cap over her head and opening the sash window to let in air. ‘The scissors aren’t great. We’ll improvise.’
I’d made up the peroxide mixture and painted three or four clutches of her yellow-gold hair, drawn through the holes in the shower cap, before it occurred to me that we should have done a strand test – Evie was always going on about taking care with hair dye. Apparently Petra’s face had swollen up once when she’d tried to become a redhead and she’d spent twenty-four hours in hospital. I communicated this to Bel.
‘Nonsense, darling,’ she said, in her American voice. ‘I’m not bothered by a few poxy chemicals.’ Her phone rang. ‘Can I pick it up?’ she said.
‘You may,’ I said. ‘Just don’t hold the phone right next to your head.’
‘Giacomo!’ she said. ‘Howdy, sugar. No, I’m at the salon. We can talk.’
A low rumble of discontent from the speaker.
‘Honey, I don’t … are you sure they were broken at the party? But which ones? Those old ferns were dead anyway, surely. The mirror was cracked already. You know that. And as for the carpet …’ Bel remonstrated for some time. When she hung up, she said, ‘Goddamn Giacomo wants me to pay him money.’
‘Are you going to?’
‘He should be pleased to host parties for me on his boat. They give him the illusion of popularity. He’ll forget about it. He’s just mad because I wouldn’t sleep with him. Why would I do such a thing? Never do anything twice, that’s what I always say.’
The easy way she talked about such things always unsettled me. I focused on drawing more of the gold strands through the shower cap, painting them precisely with the lavender-coloured liquid, my hands working, as they sometimes did, in absolute synchrony.
‘Did you sleep with the Art Man?’ she said. She gazed limpidly at me in the mirror. Not taking my hands from her head, I looked back at her.
‘What art man?’
‘The sad-puppy-faced one with the toilet-brush hair.’
‘You mean the art assistant, Mr Trace,’ I said, unable to stop myself laughing at her description. One of the things I liked most about Bel was her total lack of interest in our school.
‘Yes. The Art Man.’
‘No,’ I said.
‘Why not?’
This was dangerous territory. What did she think had happened, between Jonah Trace and me? What should I tell her, I wondered – the official version of events, or something closer to the truth? I almost fancied telling her the truth, just to see how she reacted. But it would be giving too much away. Bel was still a student at Lady Agatha’s, and she wasn’t especially discreet. It wouldn’t be safe to tell her.
‘Why do you think I might have?’ I said evenly.
‘Well, sugar, there was obviously something going on. I saw you guys, sneaking into the café off the high street. I saw the way he looked at you. Mind, he looked at nearly everyone that way. The guy was a creep.’
‘Indeed,’ I said. ‘I certainly didn’t sleep with him.’
‘What did you do?’
‘Nothing. What do you think I did?’
‘Relax. I’m not trying to put you on the spot, sugar,’ she said. The cool blue eyes gleamed in the mirror. She seemed to be appraising me, somehow. ‘I was just thinking, you know. If it had been me … I’d have given him, I dunno. A taste of his own medicine.’ She winked.
I said nothing. Nothing is always safest and best. Even to Bel, whom I counted as a friend – a very good friend. It was a risk I wasn’t prepared to take.
‘How much longer?’ asked Bel.
‘We’re nearly done,’ I said, and we were.
‘God, I look mad,’ she said, surveying the shower cap and the pulled-through purple strands.
‘It’ll be beautiful,’ I said. ‘Trust me. Now we need to wait for a while. Half an hour, maybe a bit more.’
She smoked a cigarette out of the window, saying that just one wouldn’t hurt, and for a while we watched the cat digging up bulbs in the flower bed.
‘Daddy wanted to get married again,’ she said, à propos of nothing. ‘A few years ago. I scared her away.’
I busied myself at the sink, washing away the purplish traces of dye, making sure there was no stain.
‘Holly, she was called,’ Bel went on. ‘She
was all right, really. I was horrible to her. Really horrible. Horrible to everyone. I stole a lot of money from my godfather and I just spent it and spent it. Took everyone out for dinner, went to Rome for the weekend with Giacomo and stayed in a five-star hotel … so many drugs, Nora. Jewellery and vintage clothes and … oh, I can’t even remember. I paid back what I could, of course, over time. Dad never found out, thank God. But then I got kicked out of the stupid fancy school that Dad had sent me to. I hated it there. I came home and Holly just couldn’t cope with me. In the end, I think Dad realised I would only change my behaviour if he got rid of her.’ She looked round at me. ‘That’s why I always liked Cinderella so much,’ she said. ‘It was the father getting married for the second time to this awful woman that did it for me. I used to read it aloud all the time to annoy her.’
Then she shook her head. ‘Heavens,’ she said, ‘Memory lane!’
Her voice had changed back to its theatrical tone, and I realised that for the last few minutes she’d been speaking in what must have been her true voice. (Much later, I would realise something else: all the put-on accents she habitually used were taken from the films of Phyllis Lane. They were her mother’s voices.)
And then she sat with her back facing the sink and I washed her hair, twice, and conditioned it, and after that I cut her hair with toenail scissors, whose blades I thought might be sharper than those of the inferior scissors that Cody had bought, and after that we went upstairs to Bel’s bedroom to dry it.
‘It’s quite incredible,’ said Bel. ‘I look just like Mama did in Jacaranda. Do you think this will be enough to convince Papa?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘We’ll have to see.’
At this she gave me a joyful, rib-cracking squeeze; laughing, I returned it.
5
‘Let’s play a game,’ said Bel. ‘Truths.’
‘No dares?’ said Azia, arching backwards so that her upper half hung down towards the carpet. She gave a catlike yawn, and then pulled herself up again.
‘Can’t be arsed with dares,’ said Bel, yawning too.