‘But I don’t.’ There’s a note in Eve’s voice I haven’t heard. Cool, determined. ‘I want to stay like this. You’ve got it all wrong, dearest. I don’t want this girl here.’ She looks down at the table, at her sister’s tear stains. ‘Forgive me, Sophie,’ she says. ‘I don’t mean to be rude. In a strange way, you know, you remind me of … a little of myself. Isn’t it curious.’
Rose says to her fiercely, ‘I thought she’d be right. I thought she’d help you. She wanted you for the part, because she thinks you’re good. Don’t you?’ She turns to me. ‘Isn’t that why you’re here? Isn’t that what we’re doing this for? Someone likes you, someone remembers you, Eve. They’re here because they remember you. Lots of people do, Miss Leigh said so herself.’ Eve is shaking her head. Her sister’s voice grows louder. ‘Lots of people. Not just him. He’s real, they’re all real. The world’s full of nice people too, you know. You loved him once, Eve—’
Eve puts her hands over her ears. ‘Stop it.’ She curves over, into herself, and my heart pulls again. I put my hand on her arm.
‘Who else knows about you two? Who is it?’
She looks up at me. ‘Don Matthews,’ she says. ‘Don knows.’
The name is so familiar, the memory is almost there at the front of my brain. ‘Who’s Don?’
‘Don Matthews. He wrote Too Many—’
‘Too Many Stars!’ I break in, excited. ‘And A Girl Named Rose! You knew him? Of course! Too Many Stars, oh, my gosh. I must have seen that almost as many times. I used to act out the orphan’s speech to the stars on my bed every night. What a script!’
‘You remember him,’ Eve Noel says. ‘Oh, that’s just wonderful. You remember him,’ and for just a second I see her eyes flash, and she is young again, and beautiful, and everything in this damp quiet cell of theirs recedes and I can only gape at her, at her beauty. And in that flashing moment I understand now why they called them gods and goddesses in the golden age. This woman is a goddess, and I am lucky to be in her presence. I see why people plucked her out of obscurity and made her a star.
‘He was the love of her life,’ Rose says. ‘He’s over eighty now. He’s coming to England and he wants to see her again. After all these years. And she won’t meet him.’
‘It’s been too long. I’m not the same person, and he wouldn’t – oh God, Rose. I’m sick of talking about it.’ Eve pushes herself up, her voice throbbing with anger. ‘You may have forgotten what it was like when we first came here. I haven’t.’ She rubs her eyes, and then catches sight of me again, and her mood abruptly switches. She sounds cross. ‘You too, why do you keep coming round to bother me? Today, yesterday, the day before. All these visits and I keep saying no.’
‘One visit,’ I say quietly.
She blinks again. ‘It’s not one visit. It’s two, three.’
‘No, only once before,’ I say.
‘Yes,’ Rose says. ‘She came once before, with the man from the film company. You remember?’
‘No. I know I get things wrong, ’cause of the shocks. I’m not wrong about this, though.’
‘What shocks?’ I don’t understand her.
‘The treatment. My treatment after I lost my …’ She shakes her head. ‘No. Sophie, you came before. Or a girl who looked like you.’ She seems uncertain. ‘The day it was so hot. You had your hair—’ She sweeps her hands up behind her head, miming a ponytail.
I can feel icy water running through my body.
‘No,’ I say. ‘That wasn’t me.’
She looks at me steadily. ‘You think I’ve made it up? No, it’s true. She was real.’
‘I don’t think you made it up.’ I try to think. ‘Just that it’s very strange. Who … Have you thought about who it might have been?’
Eve moves her chair a little closer, so she’s right opposite me. ‘I’m afraid she reminded me of you.’
‘You’re afraid?’
‘Yes. Because she scared me, and I want to like you. She brought white roses, too.’
I can feel my blood run cold again, and I know something is happening, something that will take me closer to whatever or whoever it is that is in my life, in hers, creeping around, suddenly lashing out in violence.
‘It wasn’t me, I swear,’ I say, but it sounds unconvincing. Was it me? Have I gone mad, do I not remember?
She stares at my face, and Rose watches her. ‘No, she was similar to you but it wasn’t you. Like when we take it in turns to go out, and we’re almost the same person. I see it now.’
‘Can you tell if her accent was English or not? Could she have been American?’
‘Maybe. I just don’t know. I thought she was English but … she sounded strange.’
I shift uneasily in my seat. ‘Eve—’
There’s a crash from outside, and we all jump.
‘What the hell—’ I get up but Eve is faster. She moves down the long, damp corridor, scuttling fast. I wonder what’s been troubling me, and I look around the kitchen. I hear a voice, a man’s voice.
‘… told her … pick her up … Nothing for half an hour …’
‘Jimmy!’ I shout. I get up and run down the corridor. A mouse runs across the floor in the front room, piled high with boxes that sag with damp. ‘I’m here, I’m so sorry – I forgot all about you.’
Jimmy’s tapping his watch. ‘You said ten minutes. I need to get you to town before seven. That’s what I told them. Never going to happen at this rate.’
‘It’s fine, Jimmy. Give me five more minutes. I’ll be out then. I promise.’
‘Gavin says he’ll come get you himself, if you ain’t out soon. Right?’
‘OK. Just a bit longer. It’s fine.’
Eve shuts the door firmly, with a thud that sinks dully into the velvety silence of the house. The lines from My Second-Best Bed that I was learning on the way over come back to me, something Anne says to Shakespeare that he uses in a play later on. I am gone though I am here. There is no love in you. Nay, I pray you, let me go.
We go back to the kitchen and I look at my watch. ‘Sorry,’ I say. ‘They want me to go to London. It’s a long story.’
Rose gets up. ‘I’m going upstairs,’ she says. ‘I usually have a bath around this time, so I shall leave you two.’ Eve looks uncertain. She reaches out to pluck at her sister’s dress, but Rose shrugs. ‘She might understand, better than I, Eve dear. Sophie, it has been extremely interesting meeting you. We know that you are busy and I’m very glad you came.’ She takes my hand for a moment. ‘Please come back. Soon.’
I watch her go. It feels very quiet after she’s left.
Eve gestures for me to sit down. The two of us face each other at the table. ‘What do you keep in the boxes?’ I ask her, shy now we’re alone.
‘Letters,’ she says. ‘My letters. And things I’ve written down. My time there. Memories I’ve had when I dream. I have terrible dreams, since they shocked me.’ She touches the side of her head again, blinking.
‘What happened to you?’ I ask her softly.
‘I’ll try and explain it. I think I need to work it all out myself, too.’ She puts her hand on my arm. She has long slim fingers. ‘Sophie, I should have said so before but I am glad to meet you, you know. I hear about you, on the radio, on the television. I’ve always noticed because you grew up not so far away. I felt as if you might be me. Forty, fifty years on. Now I see you properly, we’re not so dissimilar, are we?’
‘Maybe,’ I say, and I can’t help smiling, because it might be the nicest thing anyone’s ever said to me. ‘But I don’t think so.’
‘That’s sometimes what keeps me going, after everything that’s happened. We were good. What we did was good, Don and I—’ She looks at me.
‘Tell me about it,’ I say, moving my chair closer to hers. Her mouth opens and her clever, dark eyes search my face.
‘You don’t have time. But I want to do something. Let me give you some things to read.’ She looks around the room. ‘I’ll give you a bo
x of papers. His letters, and some pages I’ve written about … about it all. I wrote everything down.’
She gets up and leaves me, and for the next couple of minutes I hear her moving about in the next room, the rustle of paper, the creak of furniture. She reappears with a box which seems too big for her small frame.
‘Here. Take this.’
‘I can’t take all of this,’ I say, looking down at the pages of neat, black inked writing, the letters postmarked USA, dog-eared, worn with folding and refolding, and carbon copies of her own pages, a few scraps of smooth fax paper.
‘This is just a selection,’ she says. ‘A random selection. There are hundreds, maybe thousands of letters in that room. Come back and we’ll go through them if you enjoy them. Some of them won’t make sense …’ She is holding out the box, her frail arms outstretched. She looks like a little girl, asking for approval. I hesitate, and she steps away from me, as if assailed by doubt. ‘Oh dear. Maybe it’s crazy. Do you want to read all this?’
‘Of course I want to read them.’ I want to make a film about you one day, Eve. About you and your sister, and your life. But I have to know the truth first. I know this box is only a fraction of the story.
She gives that funny, wry smile again. ‘Well … then – take these and I hope you find them interesting. Like I say –’ she gestures behind her into the huge room I passed earlier filled with boxes – ‘the story’s all back in there. We’ll go through it one day.’
I shake my head. ‘Why are you giving them to me?’
Eve’s big black eyes lock with mine. She leans forwards, touches my hand and says, very quietly,
‘Something needs to change. Someone else needs to know.’ She’s nodding, and as she blinks a tear slides down her cheek, splashing onto my hand. We both stare down at it. ‘Sophie.’ She rubs her throat, as though it hurts. ‘It’s just I’m still scared. Of what’s out there.’
‘We all are,’ I say, as softly as I can. ‘I promise you we all are.’ I take the box, gently. ‘I promise I’ll take good care of them. They’ll be safe with me.’
‘Of course. Come back soon and I’ll show you everything in that room. It tells the story. But mostly it’s up here –’ she taps her head. ‘Ah –’ she spreads her arms out and then hugs herself. ‘Wonderful.’
In her tiny, withdrawn world she has a contentment I’ll never have, because she has Don, and Rose, and because Eve Noel knows someone, somewhere is enjoying one of her films, that she’s made something good. We’re facing each other on the small kitchen chairs. She is appraising me, blinking slowly. ‘Do you know, I was so sure that girl who came to see us was you. But now I look, she can’t have been. You are lovely, you know.’
I hear the sound of footsteps on gravel. I know our time is up. I take my phone out of my pocket and fiddle with it for a moment. ‘Miss Noel – Eve. Before I go, I have to ask you something. Someone is after me. They’re trying to kill me, I think. Or – they have a grudge against me, and they want to hurt me.’ I flick through my phone, and then turn it round so she can see. ‘Can you remember, was this the person who came to visit you?’
She stares at the small screen, the light reflecting on her face.
‘Oh, yes,’ she says eventually. ‘That was her. I’m sure of it.’
Excerpts from the Correspondence Between Eve Noel and Don Matthews
1970-2012
April 4th, 1970
Dear Rose,
I have no idea whether you’ll get this letter. I’ve written you so many times over the years, and I don’t ever hear back. If you know that, you’ll throw this one aside. ‘The stupid fool, why doesn’t he take a hike?’ I wrote you at your house, the studio … I even found the village you came from and fired off a letter to the doctor’s house there. Your dad was a doctor, right? But then I had a brainwave I hadn’t considered before: that I should go through your UK agents. Who’d have thought. A mere two-week trawl of movie agents in London, and I finally get one who says she looks after you, though she’s never met you. I don’t know, Rose – is this the gal you want handling your career?
I’m being flippant, forgive me. The truth is I think you might just read this letter this time, and I feel so damn nervous at the thought it’s difficult to decide what to say. I don’t know where you are, how you are, why you’ve disappeared. I do know I have to apologise for everything that happened, but I hope you’ll understand, too. It seems a nightmare, doesn’t it? Gosh, I wish you were just in front of me and I could look into your beautiful black eyes and tell you everything, tell you how stupid I’ve been, how much I regret not letting you visit me in jail, how ashamed I felt, how much I miss you and think about you, all the time.
Anyway. I sure wish you’d write back and tell me how you get on. I haven’t heard anything of you for the longest time. When I ask friends in the business what happened to you they shrug. ‘No idea. She went mad, didn’t she?’ But then every woman over thirty-five in this town who has an opinion is apparently mad, so I don’t pay much attention.
A few facts about me: I haven’t had a drink for seven years. There wasn’t a great deal of it to be had in jail, and I started up again after I got out but then quit. For good, I hope. I’m in New York. Still working, but for TV this time. I write for The Janet Berry Show – we’re number one and it’s going into a third season, so I guess it’s not just a fluke. I have a third-floor walk-up near the park. There’s a great Italian around the corner, it does out-of-this-world cannoli and they play Sinatra on a loop. I think of you whenever we go there. But I think of you often, anyway.
Write me, if you want. I really hope you’re well.
Yours,
Don
4th June 1970
Dear Don,
It was nice to hear from you.
I am well, thank you. I live in the countryside now, and I don’t act any more. The agents are there merely to pass on mail and residuals. Thanks to you I live in a little comfort from the money A Girl Named Rose brings in.
I can’t remember a lot about that time. You said you were going to come for me. I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, from whence cometh my help. I looked all the time but you never came. Why didn’t you come for me?
Eve
September 12th, 1970
Dear Rose,
Forgive the tardiness; I only got your letter yesterday, though it’s dated June. Maybe you forgot to mail it? Or maybe the US postal service is doing its usual bang-up job.
I didn’t come for you because they arrested me. I said I’d do a favor for a friend, give him an alibi, and I was set up. Moss knew what he was doing, I was the easy solution, no one’d miss me. A drunk writer, and without Jerry I was nothing and he knew it. It’s all in the past now, but I couldn’t come for you because I was in jail and that was the worst weekend of my life, knowing you were waiting for me.
It was very hot, all the weekend we’d made our plans around. I could see out the window, up to the hills. I could picture you pacing up and down, growing impatient, looking at your watch. And then gradually giving up hope, thinking I was just another louse out to stiff you. It wasn’t like that. You know it wasn’t.
But like I say, it’s all in the past now.
You sound different, kind of distant, and I don’t blame you. Where are you living in England? Are you by yourself? Are you acting at all? Can you tell me a little more about your life? Or just tell me straight out if you want me to stop writing.
I’m glad A Girl Named Rose is providing you with some comfort. It’s the best thing I ever did, and I did it for you.
Don
1st January 1971
Dear Don,
I have good days and bad days. Your first letter arrived on a bad day. I couldn’t remember who you were, then I could, then I couldn’t. It comes and goes, like a mist, and the trouble is I don’t care to hold onto the memories, because so many of them were unhappy ones. You see, you were the one good thing in my life, and then I lost you. And I’m
scared to remember it all again. I’ve spent a lot of time trying to forget. But I have to stop being stupid and remind myself you were the good part of it all, and to separate you out from the bad. Today’s a good day. (I’m sorry to sound so black and white, good and bad. I’m childlike sometimes, and don’t talk or write much.)
So yes, I’ll tell you what you want to know. I live in Gloucestershire, where I grew up, very close to Shakespeare country. It’s beautiful. I live in a white house. I’m trying to train ivy to climb up the side, but it’s reluctant to grow. I’m a terrible gardener. I’ve never really tried before.
When you ask these questions, you make me think it through again, and I have to make some sense of it in my mind, before I answer, which is why my letters are late. There’s so much I don’t remember. I tried so hard to get to you before you went to prison, Don, afterwards, too. I waited round the corner when they took you out of the courthouse. I didn’t see you, just people jostling. Then … I spent the next year holding on, I suppose. I shut myself down, waiting for you. But on the inside I was starting to think I was mad. I couldn’t look in mirrors. I couldn’t remember my name. I kept having dreams about my sister. She drowned when I was six, and I never saw her and that’s when it all started, my madness, the different parts of it all began then. You see they took her away and I didn’t see her, they wouldn’t let me see her. She was my sister and when I lost her, it’s as though I lost a piece of my mind too.
Our parents died, Don. They died when I was in Hollywood, and I can’t remember much about it. They had influenza; my father had a heart attack, then my mother caught the influenza. I think she was already very weak. She always had been, her faith was what sustained her, not food, or real life. We weren’t close, you see. They let me go and when I went it was as though I was like their other daughter, dead to them. I was seeing things in my mind by then, things I didn’t understand, and I don’t think it particularly sunk in that they’d gone. Then I knew I’d started my baby, and at the same time I got the letter about Rose. I think they hid it from me. Gilbert – whoever it was – all of them.
Not Without You Page 33