Gilbert glanced at himself in the mirror. I saw the twitch of his mouth, the bristle of his neat moustache. ‘Hm. Sounds like it.’
‘How do you know?’ I asked him.
‘Just – oh. From what you’ve said. Your letters.’ He turned towards me. ‘I’ve missed you, my dear.’
He came around to my side of the bed, gripped my shoulders, and kissed me, hard. ‘Mm,’ he said, with a grunt. ‘You seem different, somehow. Why are you different?’ He slid his hands down my back and clutched my bottom, grasping it painfully, so that he drew me against him. I pulled away.
‘I’m not different,’ I said. I scratched my cheek and coughed, as a diversion, backing away from him towards the dressing table and pouring myself some water. ‘I’m the same. You look wonderful. The desert air obviously suits you, darling.’
It was true, he did. He was leaner, more agile, virile. He seemed younger, somehow. How funny, that our being apart should be so obviously good for us both.
‘It’s a living. A bloody ridiculous one, but it’s good to tell a story people damn well ought to know about,’ Gilbert said. ‘So, you were back on Friday?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I thought you’d be here the whole weekend.’
‘Mm, well, I couldn’t in the end. Something came up.’
He turned towards the mirror and adjusted his collar; he was in a denim shirt, it didn’t need adjusting.
As I watched him, I realised he knew. I didn’t know if he knew it was Don, but he knew something was up. There was something about him that I hadn’t seen before. A confidence, an ease. He had always been handsome, agile, strong – but before it had been defensive, as if he had something to prove. Now he moved like a warrior, someone who knew how to get his own way.
Suddenly I was scared of him.
‘Come here,’ he said softly. ‘Come here and give me a proper welcome back. You’re my wife, aren’t you?’
I hate the word ‘wife’, I always have done. I did before, I think, but as I submitted to him in the bedroom, I couldn’t think how to act with him. I’d forgotten what it was like to tolerate someone’s hold over you, to lie and be dutiful. Gilbert was different, yes, and I wondered who had been keeping him company in the desert.
His chest was brown, the hairs bleached blond with the sun.
‘Come on, my dear.’ First he pulled my loose silk pants down. ‘You could at least pretend you’ve missed me.’
‘I have—’
He tugged my pyjama top over my head, hurriedly, silencing me, and pulling my hair over my ears. The static sent sparks cracking off my head. He laughed. I felt like a schoolboy, or a village idiot, standing in front of him with my trousers about my ankles, head bowed, naked. He undid his trousers, slid his belt out of its loops, pushed me onto the bed so I sat facing him, my legs dangling off the side; then he hoisted me against him, then pushed me back so he was standing between my thighs, thrusting inside me as I lay looking up at him, not sure how to react, how he wanted it, what would make this moment pass. And I locked myself out of my mind again, for the first time in weeks. It should have saddened me, how easy it was to bring it back, the blank feeling of something else. I looked into his eyes and saw nothing there, so I thought about Rose, about the funny-shaped stones in the old monastery where we used to play, about how one day, I would show them to Don if I ever went back there.
Gilbert was looking down at my breasts, then up at the wall, as he rocked backwards and forwards. He didn’t look at my face. I realised he didn’t care it was me. He was thinking about something else.
What could I say? And what could I do? He finished, heaving into me with a strangling, grunting end. Then he buttoned his trousers, and patted my knee in what I thought was a show of affection.
‘I say. Move it,’ he said.
I looked down. My leg was clamped against the bed frame, trapping his belt. ‘Oh,’ I said. ‘Sorry.’
He left then, leaving me lying on the end of the bed. I looked out, up towards the hills, as the midday sun rose higher in the sky.
So then it became rather like a farce, for the next twenty-four hours. I didn’t know that it would end, or how, of course. And I came to realise, when I thought about it, that Gilbert had misplayed his hand. He couldn’t admit that he knew I was leaving him, he wasn’t that kind of man. It would be weak. He wanted me to tell him. But he didn’t want me to tell him, either. He couldn’t be seen to be the kind of man whose wife left him for someone else, not after this, not when – as he told me in detail that evening – Refford and the studio were praising his performance to the sky, and Life had covered his ‘big screen comeback’ in a special on-set feature, and when only a few weeks into the shoot people were already – raised eyebrow – talking about what would happen come Oscar time.
Yet by pushing me into this corner he made himself complicit in what I was withholding from him. As the day wore on into evening, as we dressed for dinner and sat at opposite ends of the lovely long table shipped over from Heal’s in London especially for us, as Victoria served the chicken salad and roast lamb and fruit salad she’d made for Mr Travers’s return, it felt more and more as though we were in a film. As though what was reality and what was fantasy were changing places. At times I couldn’t remember what was true and what wasn’t. Was Don and Big Sur all a dream? Had he lied to me? Had I misunderstood him, when he kissed me at the door and whispered, ‘I love you, Rose’?
I knew I hadn’t. If it wasn’t a dream, where was he?
After dinner, I said I had a headache. ‘It must be the heat,’ Gilbert said. ‘Very humid. A storm’s coming, tonight, tomorrow.’ I shot a look at him, suspiciously, but he was all solicitude, very caring, calling Victoria to bring lavender water to bathe my temples, as though I were a Victorian heroine. I said I would go to bed and have an early night.
‘I might step out to Ciro’s,’ he said. ‘If that’s all right with you, my dear. I won’t disturb you when I come back. Promise.’ He blew me a kiss.
‘Thank you, dear,’ I said. My head did ache. My body ached, blood seemed to be thudding in my ears, like the sound of waves on the shore. I was desperate for rest but unable to sleep. Yet I went to bed, and locked the door, though I knew he wouldn’t come in now. He’d had me to show his strength, not because he wanted me, and I lay looking out towards the window, waiting for a sign. I knew something was coming. I prayed it was Don.
the facts and the names
I DIDN’T HAVE long to wait.
The very next morning I came into the breakfast room to find the Los Angeles Times and the Examiner waiting there as usual, but there was also a new issue of Confidential, the lowest rag of them all, lying on top of them.
And I stared, and then laughed.
Confidential: tells the facts and names the names!
HOLLYWOOD’S DIRTY LITTLE SECRET
TOO MANY STARS SCREENWRITER ARRESTED
FOR PUBLIC DISORDER
‘DIRTY DON’ STOLE DIRECTOR’S CAR; FAVOURITE
SONG SHOULD BE
‘MAD ABOUT THE BOY’
Apparently, they said, Don had stolen a well-known director’s car, driven to a local beauty spot outside of LA, near Malibu, and attempted to pick up a young man. The young man, who had been there with his girlfriend, had rung the police, ‘in disgust’, given them the licence-plate of the car, and they’d tracked him down.
The vehicle belonged to the Academy Award-winning director Jerome Trumbo, who is an old friend of Mr Matthews. Mr Trumbo has posted bail for Mr Matthews. There is no suggestion that Jerry Trumbo knew of the incident or of his friend’s homosexual proclivities. He was dining at Chasen’s at the time in question and was seen by several witnesses. Mr Matthews, once one of Hollywood’s most favoured screenwriters, has fallen from grace over the last few years. He is well known to have a drinking problem. Sources on the set of his latest movie, A Girl Named Rose, report that he was replaced by another writer, due to poor standard of work and questionable attitude. Mr Ma
tthews remains in the LA County Jail. The real question is: This is the third such arrest in as many months. Senator McCarthy’s long work in this area has stamped out the stain of the Left. The art of screenwriting is manipulation. Is another new wave of screenwriters inserting amoral, disgusting messages inside our films, besmirching a whole new generation? When will someone act?
My eyes flicked over the page, again and again, but no matter how often I read it, the words stayed the same.
Victoria came in with a pot of coffee. ‘Morning, Miss Eve,’ she said. ‘Mr Travers went out early today.’ She jabbed a finger at the magazine. ‘Someone delivered that for you this morning. He said to make sure you saw it. He’ll be back later. He said to tell you there’s a dinner at Harry DiMarco’s tonight and the boys are all taking their wives, and for you to be ready at six.’ She added, ‘If that suits you.’
I nodded, my head still bent over the magazine to hide my face from her. ‘Yes, Victoria. Thank you.’
‘You all right, Miss Eve?’ Victoria said.
‘I’m not all right, no,’ I said. She stared at me. ‘Go away, please. I need to think. I can’t think,’ I said, and I could hear a wild, strange strain in my voice.
I started to forget things around then. Everything started to mix together in my mind. I never heard from Jerry again. Or Conrad. They had both disappeared off the face of the earth, though I tried to reach them many times. I went to both their houses, I drove myself, I am sure. But neither of them was in. And neither of them returned my calls. No one else could help me. No one cared about Don. He was only a writer, after all, a writer with a drinking problem.
Moss Fisher was everywhere in those days. Every time I went to the studio he was there, watching me. When I rang Mr Baxter, the studio head, one afternoon from my dressing room, wanting to know where Jerry was, it was Moss who answered, as if the line in my bungalow was connected directly to his phone.
‘He’s resting before his next picture. We need to make sure he’s looked after, Miss Noel.’
I’d been silent, taking in the implicit message of what he was choosing to tell me.
‘Why are you doing this?’ I’d asked him. ‘You know it wasn’t Don.’
‘Don who?’ Moss gave a tiny inhalation. ‘Don Matthews? Oh, right. The fag they just arrested who used poor Jerry’s car to go off and get himself into a whole heap of trouble? Jerry has an alibi, Miss Noel, you know he does. He was in Chasen’s that night. A hundred witnesses.’
‘It must have been someone else, then—’ I began, but he interrupted.
‘Listen, my dear girl. We really must stop ourselves jumping to conclusions. I, more than anyone, want to see Don cleared. Of course. Until then, we have to hope justice prevails.’ And the phone went dead.
They even took his name off the credits of his latest film. A Girl Named Rose was released at the box office just over six months later and though the increasingly remote from reality and desperate studio was out of love with it themselves, the film became the biggest hit of 1960. The very same day it was released, Don was sent to prison. Two years, in the LA County Jail. For moral turpitude, attempted sodomy and intercourse with a minor.
I wrote to him at his home address, offering to help. I didn’t know who’d be reading his letters so I wrote in several different guises, but he never replied. I feigned illness on the set of my new picture one day, and slipped away to the County Jail when I knew it was visiting time. He wouldn’t see me. Finally, on the day he was sentenced, I drove to the LA Superior Court on Hollywood Boulevard, waited in my car around the corner from the courthouse. I just wanted to see him, one more time.
I kept thinking of the Confidential byline: Tells the facts and names the names!
I didn’t know why they were going after him, why he was the fall guy, where Jerry had gone, what had happened. But I knew he’d do anything to help a friend. And he owed Jerry, he felt he owed him everything. Oh, Don. Suddenly, I remembered what he’d said up in Big Sur and it terrified me.
‘I’ve told him I owe him a favour … No matter how big or small. He brought me back to you, didn’t he?’
I began to understand. And I was helpless. I only knew I had to keep letting him know I loved him, I was looking for him, and I always would.
Then it was time. They came down the steps like a swarm – reporters, photographers, cops, campaigners with placards screaming at the cops, who pushed them out of the way.
‘You goddamn filthy faggot! I hope you burn in hell!’ a man waving a placard screamed at the group descending the steps, his face a dreadful rictus of hate. I saw a flash of a dark grey suit, the glint of sunlight bouncing off a car window as a door was slammed and he was driven away, to jail. I watched him go, and then I sat in my car for a long time, not knowing what to do, where to go, how to get anywhere. I could feel my brain unravelling, the thoughts in my head whirring round like a spinning top. I looked in the rear-view mirror, trying to tell myself to calm down.
My eyes danced in front of me, my face rippled, my hair seemed to be on fire. Voices clashed – me, Don, Rose, Gilbert, Moss – voices telling me what to do … ‘Stand here, Eve.’ ‘Turn this way.’ ‘Tilt your chin.’ I was alone, in my madness, but I knew there were two people inside my head, so I wasn’t really alone, was I? ‘It’s just you, now,’ I said, to my reflection. ‘You and me. Come on, we’ll go home.’
I didn’t know what else to do.
CHAPTER TWENTY
‘WELL, LIKE I say, your father’s not here, as per, I’m afraid. Yes, he’s off in Swindon, seeing some dealers. Stayed there last night and I don’t know when he’ll be back. He never tells me anything.’ Mum pushes a teapot towards me. ‘Have another cup of tea. Or maybe water? I always keep Perrier these days. I don’t trust the local tap water.’
‘Tap’s fine, honest, Mum. Thanks. It’s my fault – it’s such short notice. I’ve got another week or so here. I’ll come back and see him.’
I’ve been at the house for one hour and twenty-five minutes, hoping Dad will walk through the door, but no sign. He always was the Invisible Man.
‘Well, I wondered when you’d call, because like I say, I knew you were here. And it’s funny because, well, we’ve fallen out now, but Dawn from next door said she’d been at lunch at the Oak for her dad’s eightieth and they had the cast and crew from some film staying there, quite a to-do, she said. Well, I know you’ve got some security thingy so of course I didn’t mention you. Don’t worry, I haven’t said a word to anyone.’ She mimes buttoning her lip. ‘Funny if she’d seen you, though I suppose you wouldn’t remember her.’
‘I remember Dawn.’ I’m lying. ‘How is she?’
‘She’s not so good. Mark isn’t very well, and the kids – well, I don’t usually like to interfere, love thy neighbour as they say, but that little girl is so fat. I had to say something. She’s just like a barrel. I only mentioned it to Dawn and she flew off the handle at me. Went completely berserk. I said, “Dawn, I’m just trying to be honest with you.”’ Mum runs a complacent hand across the immaculate kitchen surfaces. ‘Because that’s what it says you should do, in my confrontations chapter. “It’s for your own good, you have to understand. I’m telling you, Shannon is OBESE.”’
She shouts violently in the direction of the kitchen window and I turn, almost expecting to watch these last three words float outside and into the garden next door. Then she stands up, smoothes down her trousers, fluffs out her hair. The same set of gestures, always the same. I watch her curiously.
‘What you staring at?’ she says.
‘Nothing, it’s just nice to see you,’ I tell her.
‘Right.’ I don’t think she believes me. ‘Anyway, so much to catch up on! Still! How’s the film going? Are you happy? Are they treating you well?’ She screws up her face. ‘I must say, it’s very strange you don’t have a trailer or anything like that.’
‘It’s not that kind of film.’
‘Well, but Sophie, I was always fond of
the phrase, If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.’ Mum gives me a tight smile. ‘You’re doing so well. We’re all so proud of you. Do you know, last week I had lunch with Julie, you know, my old friend from drama college. She and Deena and I lived together in – oh, right grotty little flat it was, in Hither Green. How times change! We laugh about it, I can tell you. She’s done all right for herself, few parts here and there, she was in The Bill, you know, the usual. Nothing like Deena’s success, of course. Well, obviously she wanted to hear all about you and I told her everything. She said you’d done very well. Very well indeed. Yes, she’s an interesting woman … Julie.’ Mum fluffs her hair again, then moves the cups onto the draining board and wipes the table down, a grim expression on her face. ‘She was always a bit funny with me, you know, after I got the part in No Sex Please, We’re British and she didn’t, but I suppose she had the career after and I didn’t – I gave it up for you. Poor Julie, she never got married and I think it’s been a real sadness to her. No kids.’
The phone rings.
‘Oh, Deborah! Hello! Listen, Deborah, can’t chat. Sophie’s here. Yes, Sophie! Yes, I know! Oh, I know. You saw it? My word! I haven’t seen an actual copy yet! I hate that photo of me! No! It’s dreadful … Oh.’ She turns to me and then back to the phone, speaking quickly. ‘Listen, we’re just having a cuppa, catching up, girls’ chat, so I mustn’t be long. Yes. Yes, of course I will. Yes. Bye, Deborah! Bye!’
Mum’s eyes are sparkling as she puts the phone down. ‘That’s taught her to call at teatime. Hah! Who she thinks she is I have no idea. She knew you were back, I’m sure. Must have seen the car outside.’
‘I shouldn’t keep Jimmy,’ I say. I look at my watch: it’s only five. I thought it was later. Jimmy has gone to the Hand and Racquet while Mum and I have tea. He’ll read the paper and find someone to have a chat with – Jimmy knows everyone round here.
‘Your driver? Gosh, you are funny, love. He’s a driver – he can wait, can’t he? Sophie, you’re too much of a pushover.’
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