Curtain Call

by Anthony Quinn

  In the wake of this convulsion other news struggled to gain purchase. Interest in the case of fraudster and ex-Mosleyite Gerald Carmody vanished overnight, and nothing more was made of his unfortunate gull, the painter Stephen Wyley.

  An item in the Daily Mail reported a raid on a house in Highgate, where men in evening gowns and make-up were engaged in ‘scenes of unspeakable vice and depravity’. The police were tipped off thanks to the sacrifice of a fellow officer who, masquerading as a partygoer, had infiltrated the event. Forty-five arrests were made.

  In the same edition was a brief paragraph detailing the discovery of a woman’s body on Hampstead Heath. Death had been caused by traumatic blows to the head. The victim’s relatives had been informed.

  Madeleine, seated alone, stared at the backs of the mourners ranged along the pews. It was a Catholic service, and many of them seemed unsure when to stand or to kneel. The church was decorated for Advent, with a crib stationed at the foot of the altar, next to the coffin. From the front pew came the steady, piteous whimpering of a woman she assumed to be the mother. Her gaze fell on the printed order of service, and the barely conceivable name on its cover.

  NINA JANE LAND † 1904–1936 †

  The hymns – ‘Dear Lord and Father of Mankind’, ‘Sweet Sacrament Divine’, ‘The King of Love My Shepherd Is’ – spirited her back to the convent. As she sang the last she felt an ache in her throat, and wondered why she had come to the funeral of a woman she barely knew. It was only by chance that she had even heard of her death. She had been on a tram in Kingsway when she happened to glance at someone’s open newspaper and an item headed ACTRESS FOUND SLAIN had leapt out at her. The strange thing was that, even before she began reading it, she had known with a terrible certainty it was Nina. A few seconds later the man whose paper it was had got up and alighted from the tram, and so she’d had to wait until her stop to jump down and run along the street in search of a newspaper vendor. She had frantically riffled through the pages, like a parrot diving into its feathers, until she’d found the story, and read it with a galloping heart.

  Her eyes had slid rapidly, distractedly, over the salient phrases: shock and bafflement . . . senseless and brutal murder . . . a stage actress of renown . . . The police said there was no indication that the victim had known her killer, though they were investigating the possibility that her body had been dumped on the Heath sometime after she was murdered. There had been no mention of tiepins or strangulation, but the horrific intuition worming inside her brain had not been quelled: the man from room 408 had somehow found his way to Nina. She had felt something rise in her gorge and had to hold herself very still before it passed.

  A lady, stately in hat and veil, stepped up to the pulpit and read a poem that began ‘Fear no more the heat o’ the sun’. At the end she explained, in a voice of quiet resignation, that this was her sister’s favourite passage from Shakespeare. Madeleine saw her dab her eyes as she returned to the front pew, and felt a sudden stirring of loss. The priest in his even manner continued the obsequies, though she didn’t take in any of it until the organ played, as a recessional, the adagio from the Sonata Pathétique. She kept her gaze averted as they slow-marched the coffin back down the aisle. The front pews emptied and people shuffled out, looking stiffly ahead, like sleepwalkers.

  Outside the sky was the colour of damp flour, and the December cold pierced to the bone. The funeral cortège was waiting to set off. The mourners, she realised, fell into two distinct categories. One was the stricken gathering of Nina’s relatives, at a loss, with her mewling mother at its centre. The other was a gravely flamboyant company of West End folk, trying to keep their voices to a decorous volume but now and then betraying themselves with loud exclamations of sympathy or grief. Madeleine wished she had slipped off before the end, instead of being the only person there who didn’t know anyone. As the hearse pulled away she obeyed an instinct to cross herself, and she started up the drive.

  She had not gone very far when she heard footsteps hurrying behind her, and turned to find a man whose face she thought familiar. He was wearing a black armband on his overcoat. His face looked drawn, and almost bruised about his eyes.

  ‘Um, Madeleine, isn’t it? I’m sorry, I don’t know your – I’m Stephen Wyley. We once met.’

  Now she knew him. The artist. ‘Yes, I remember. How are you?’ It didn’t sound like the right thing to say, but she was stumped for anything else.

  ‘Oh . . . you know,’ he said, with a vague little wave back at the church. ‘I’m finding it rather difficult to – it feels like some hideous dream I’m going to wake up from.’ He stared off into the distance.

  Madeleine sensed the tiredness in his voice, in the twitch of his eye. With some feelings it was impossible to demonstrate, or even, really, to fathom. She said haltingly, ‘We hardly knew each other, and yet – for all that, I remember thinking how much I liked her. And it’s awful to know that the one thing I should have said to her I never did.’

  ‘What was that?’

  She shook her head, as if she still couldn’t believe it. ‘I should have – thanked her. For what she did. For saving my life.’ And she knew at that moment why it had mattered so much that she should come to this funeral.

  Stephen, sunk deep in his own misery, said, ‘You’re right. It’s always the things we mean to say . . .’ He looked up, and focused. ‘Are you going on to –?’

  ‘Oh, no. I honestly don’t know a soul here.’

  ‘Nor I . . .’ He shrugged, looking lost, and by unspoken consent they fell into step up the drive. The temperature made frozen plumes of their breath. It was the right sort of day for a funeral, she thought; warmth, sunshine, birdsong would have been a wretched intrusion. Once they were on the street she prepared her expression for a parting of the ways. She had imagined that he would hurry off, their mutual commiseration done, but instead he halted of a sudden and looked at her.

  ‘Listen, I don’t think I can face – anyone – would it be too much to ask if you’d have a cup of tea with me?’

  Madeleine studied his face for a moment. He looked utterly desolate. ‘Are you sure?’

  His smile was almost a wince. ‘I’d really appreciate the company. My car’s just over here.’

  They drove around the streets of Westbourne Park and thence aimlessly through Notting Hill, neither of them speaking. Madeleine didn’t mind, used to being a silent passenger in the cars of strange men. She heard Stephen muttering to himself now and then, and chose not to intrude. Company was what he’d asked for, not conversation: she felt the difference to be significant.

  Eventually he said, ‘I thought maybe a cafe, but . . .’ His voice dropped to a forlorn undertone. ‘If I knew where to go, I’d go there.’

  She thought for a moment, and said, ‘Do you have an office?’

  ‘I have a studio. Would that do?’

  She nodded, and he drove on south towards the river. Now that a decision had been made he seemed to brighten a little, and he talked about his father, who was about to move out of London to Sussex. For the last few weeks he had been sorting through family things – albums, furniture, ‘a lot of old junk’ – he hadn’t looked at in twenty-five years or more. His mother had kept some of the very first drawings he had done as a boy, just pictures of birds and trees and people riding bicycles. Madeleine asked him whether he had always known he was going to be an artist. Not at all, he replied, and if she had seen any of those efforts by his young hand ‘you’d have been surprised how I ever became one’. She laughed at that, and for the first time in many weeks Stephen laughed too.

  At Tite Street the studio was in disarray. Loaded ashtrays, smeared wine glasses, newspapers and magazines thrown in heaps, a couch with rumpled bedclothes, the grate unswept, windows so grimy you could barely see out of them. Stephen, noticing her expression, apologised for the neglect.

  ‘The housekeeper hasn’t been in for a while, so I’ve rather let things go.’ He went into the kitchen, and
returned moments later. ‘It gets worse. I’ve neither tea nor milk. Would you mind waiting half a sec while I nip out?’

  Once he had gone she went around the room collecting the dirty dishes and glasses, she shook out the bedclothes and folded them, she opened a sash to admit some fresh air. The papers she gathered up and deposited in a wicker basket next to the fireplace. She decided not to touch anything to do with his work – the half-squeezed tubes of paint, the brushes marinating in cloudy water – lest she upset some mysterious arrangement known only to him. She was washing up at the kitchen sink when Stephen returned; he looked sheepishly about at the evidence of her tidying hand.

  ‘Here, I’ll make some tea –’

  ‘No, let me,’ said Madeleine. ‘I’ve put the kettle on – you go and sit down.’

  Feeling useless, and grateful, he wandered into the main room, chilled from the open window. He knelt at the grate – at least there were coals left – and began to lay a fire. Cinders, ashes, dust. He was still unsure of how he had held himself upright during the funeral, when just to hear her name made him nearly faint with grief. The last two weeks had passed in a kind of waking nightmare, starting on the anxious Monday evening when she didn’t show up for dinner. He knew no friends of hers he might call, so cautious had they been in their time together; he used to joke that they were more like secret agents than lovers. He telephoned her landlady, once, twice, and then stopped himself a third time for fear of provoking suspicion.

  It was Ludo Talman who had broken the news to him. He had been at home, in his study, when the telephone rang and he had heard Ludo’s voice, untypically stilted, as if he were reciting from a cue card. Nina had been found early on Tuesday morning by someone out walking on the Heath. She was fully clothed, but her coat and blouse bore traces of blood from her head wounds. The body must have been left in haste, because the police had found tokens of identification. In her coat pocket had been a business card with Ludo’s name and telephone number. Stephen had heard him say ‘I’m terribly sorry, old man’; the rest of the conversation he couldn’t remember at all. His brain had been benumbed, and his tongue had gone silent in his head. When Ludo had rung off, Stephen had been sitting at his desk. Two hours had passed before he shook off his paralysis and managed to stand up. He’d realised that he was bleeding from a cut on his forehead, where he had been banging it slowly, continuously, against the edge of the desk.

  Behind him he heard Madeleine enter the room and set down the tea tray. The fire had begun to catch, and he still knelt before it, shivering.

  ‘I just opened this to air the place,’ she said, closing the window with a bump. ‘Now it’s freezing!’

  Stephen heard the consoling note of cheer in her voice, and felt a warning prickle behind his eyes. He wasn’t sure how much kindness he could stand. ‘I’m sorry to have battened on you like this. When I saw you at the church I realised you were one of the few people who had ever seen us together. I’m afraid Nina and I, we couldn’t – we weren’t . . .’

  ‘I know,’ she said. ‘We met again, a few weeks ago, in her dressing room. I realised I’d got it wrong about your drawing of – of him. She said she would go back and explain to the police.’

  Stephen nodded. ‘They weren’t impressed. I think by that stage it was too late. You know, from the very beginning she didn’t want to get involved. She had a feeling about it. But I persuaded her.’ Head bowed, he dragged himself up from the fireplace to pour the tea. In the silence that intervened they both sensed the question they had been avoiding.

  Madeleine was first to grasp the nettle. ‘Do you think it might have been him?’

  He saw the fear in her gaze. ‘It made me wonder. I don’t know. It wasn’t his usual method, and there was no –’ He touched his tie with his fingertips. ‘But I don’t understand how he could have found her. Can you?’

  She shook her head. ‘Unless . . . unless he saw her onstage, as I did.’

  ‘Even then he might not have recognised her. She said the room was nearly dark when she went in, and they were face to face for a matter of seconds before he ordered her out.’

  ‘So it may not have been him at all,’ she said, though she felt no assurance. This man was not the sort to let things lie – the fate of poor Alice had proven that much. If he had killed Nina, then that left her as the only one who could identify him. This would be her life, looking down darkened streets, wondering if he was out there, waiting.

  No, not wondering. Knowing.

  Stephen was looking around the room, bemused. ‘So nice of you to tidy the place. I’m afraid Mrs Ronson doesn’t get about so well any more – I need to hire someone.’

  Madeleine considered this. ‘Well, if you’re looking, I could do it.’

  He gaped at her. ‘You? I thought you were –’ He stopped on the brink, and reversed. ‘Um, already employed.’

  A ghost of a smile twitched her mouth. ‘I quit the Elysian a few weeks ago. I work at a pub in Camden now, do a bit of char work too.’

  ‘Good Lord. That would be –’ It wasn’t clear to him if she had rehabilitated herself or not. She was a strange girl, really, rather an unwordly sort – not someone you’d peg for a habitué of the streets. ‘Are you sure?’

  To Madeleine’s ears it sounded like a question he might have asked of himself, but she only said, ‘If there’s a job here, yes.’

  He felt himself nodding and smiling rather stupidly. ‘Well, then . . . I’m jolly glad I asked you here for tea. Shall we talk about when you can start?’

  From his window Tom watched the two pigeons clucking at each other on top of the tree. They seemed to be conducting an argument via minute jerks of the head. He could see a flimsy-looking nest, over which the pair were at present standing guard. It was puzzling how they devised their timetable: did they take turns over the night shift, or did one just order the other about? Sometimes both of them disappeared at once, presumably to forage for food. But then who would be there to protect the home from – from what? A rook, perhaps; didn’t rooks nest in tall trees? He wished he wasn’t such an ignoramus about nature.

  ‘Oi, you, get back into bed or I’m calling matron!’

  He looked round to find Edie grinning on the threshold. Visiting hour, at last! This was his tenth day in hospital and he was almost out of his mind with boredom.

  ‘Edie, you’re a sight for sore eyes,’ he said, walking into her embrace.

  ‘How are you, darling? I mean, really how are you?’

  ‘Oh, I’m fine. They’re keeping me in here for tests, but I haven’t had a seizure in a week. I just need to be quite careful.’

  Edie cast an amused eye about his room. ‘Look at this place – more flowers than Sarah Bernhardt’s on a first night.’

  ‘People have been so kind,’ he admitted with an embarrassed smile.

  ‘Well, I’ve brought you improving literature instead.’ She dipped into her handbag and produced a book adorned with a Foyle’s promotional band.

  ‘Goodness, thank you. Not More Poems . . .’ His expression was wry. ‘Housman. One of Jimmy’s favourites.’

  ‘Didn’t he go to the funeral?’

  ‘No. Kipling’s – and cried his eyes out. So how is the old reprobate?’

  Edie returned a rueful look. ‘I think you can imagine. Ashamed, guilty – of course – with just a hint of defiance. He insists he had no choice but to flee, never mind abandoning you to danger.’

  Tom shrugged. ‘You know Jimmy . . .’

  ‘He said to me, “Have you noticed on my face that strange beauty which the poets tell us is the result of profound spiritual torment?” I said, “No, dear.”’

  They both laughed, though Tom was aware of how close a call it had been that night. Death – ‘the distinguished thing’, Henry James had called it. Maybe it was. But dying wasn’t. Dying felt dismal. Had it not been for Peter Liddell’s quick-witted intervention he would almost certainly have choked on his tongue. Lucky for him there really was a doctor
in the house. In reward for this heroic act the police arrested Peter straight afterwards, along with forty-four other partygoers.

  ‘I just don’t understand how none of us knew – about your thing. Why did you keep it from everyone?’

  Tom sighed. ‘I don’t know. I didn’t want the illness to define me – you know, “Poor Tom, the epileptic.” People would have treated me differently once they found out, so I decided they mustn’t.’ He considered for a moment. ‘Well, not all people. I did know someone who was wonderful about it. And once or twice I thought of telling Peter.’

  ‘Well, of course,’ said Edie. They looked at each other.

  ‘I heard about the sentence,’ said Tom.

  Edie shook her head. ‘Another reason for Jimmy to feel guilty. He’s scot-free, and Peter gets six months in Pentonville. You know he’s also been suspended from practising?’

  ‘No,’ said Tom with a groan. ‘How can they persecute someone just for wearing make-up at a party? It’s iniquitous.’

  ‘I know. And that boy you thought was trying to blackmail Jimmy turns out to be a police constable. Soliciting men so he could arrest them!’

  ‘Peter . . . How’s he bearing up?’

  ‘I had a letter from him yesterday. Typically droll. He remarked on the strange nature of British justice – prosecuting a man on the grounds of his preference for other men, then confining him in a place where other men are his exclusive company for months on end.’

  ‘As soon as I’m out of here I’m going to visit him,’ said Tom, suddenly rather tearful. He pinched the bridge of his nose. ‘He’s a prince, Edie.’

  ‘I know he is, darling . . . Now don’t start or you’ll have me going.’

  He pulled his dressing gown tight around himself and cracked open a window. ‘Here, let’s have a cigarette.’