by Patrick Gale
‘Hello,’ she told him. ‘What were you playing?’
‘Secrets. I assume you’ve eaten nothing nutritious since yesterday lunchtime.’
She nodded, with a guilty smile, enjoying being made to feel about ten again.
‘Thought so,’ he growled and disappeared again, to return, minutes later, with a large plate of thick wholemeal toast spread with butter and marmalade. After setting it before her, he dug in his pockets to produce a banana and an apple as well.
‘Grandpa, I can shop you know. I do eat sometimes.’
‘I know. Silly food. Medallions of fish on vine leaves poached in some useless aromatic vapeur. Don’t stop working. We can talk later. Eat.’ He shook out the first of the newspapers and flicked with quick impatience through the news before settling with a small grunt on the weekend section. She poured them both coffee. They both took it black. Like most people who have spent years far from convenience stores, they had both learned to take coffee, tea and spirits unmixed so as to avoid the pangs of late night frustration when house supplies of milk or soda ran dry.
She worked on as he read, munching toast from one hand and brushing crumbs and butter drips off the page with the other, glancing up occasionally when he snorted or laughed to himself over something he had read. She ate the banana and the apple, almost without noticing, poured them each a second, even stronger, coffee, then worked on until she had finished.
‘Done,’ she said, slapping the pages onto the paving stone beside her and weighting them with her coffee mug.
‘Already?’ he asked.
‘Short novel,’ she explained. ‘Pithy is what I’ll say in the blurb, otherwise people won’t think they’re getting enough pages for their money. Of course, her agent has no idea how good I think it is, or he’d have doubled the advance he asked for.’
‘Has it always been like that?’ he asked.
‘Like what?’ she replied, puzzled, upending the coffee jug in vain over her mug.
‘Did Stendhal and George Eliot have agents and editors? Did they have all this politicking about money and advances.’
‘Not exactly, but then they weren’t paid nearly as much. Actually. Think about Byron. And Dickens! Authors have always been preoccupied with their earnings and now it’s one of art’s great disappointments; the Muses can’t hold hands to dance any more because they’re clutching calculators and the latest tax dodge handbooks.’
‘The Muses didn’t dance. That was the Graces.’
‘Yes. Well …’ Another chasm in her scrappy education loomed. Her knowledge of Greek mythology was as thin as her familiarity with the Bible. ‘You know what I mean.’
‘Actually they did,’ he laughed. ‘Now that I think about it. Stravinsky and Diaghilev had them dance in Apollon Musagète. Or was it Balanchine by that stage?’
‘Well of course I knew that. I was just humouring you,’ she joked and he waved a paper at her. She chuckled, reaching for some news-free pages. It was a ritual of her weekend newspaper reading, along with the fact that she never bought the papers herself, that she begin with the weekend pages – restaurant reviews, gardening chores, shopping tips – then do the crossword, then skim through the news to see what she had been missing all week and only then, when she was feeling strong, turn to the book reviews to see how her authors had fared, if indeed, any had sprung to a literary editor’s notice. She flicked idly and began to read a profile of a lovely actress Sandy had recently told her lived with another woman. The actress was shown beaming in her new, empty kitchen, and beaming, in different clothes, on the edge of her equally spacious, equally empty double bed. The piece focused on her ruthless dedication to self-development and her art.
‘Boyfriends?!’ Alison read. ‘With the hours I keep, even my cats get impatient!’
The telephone rang. Alison groaned and began to get up, then realised it was the studio one. Her grandfather sighed heavily, folding the newspaper open at the page he was reading.
‘Let it ring,’ she urged him. ‘Who’d want to bother you now?’
‘Your mother,’ he said grimly, stretching the small of his back with his hands as he rose.
‘How can you tell?’ she laughed, but he was unexpectedly grave.
‘Because by now she’ll have read this and so will most of her friends.’
He dropped the article he was reading onto her lap.
Instantly her eye was drawn to a familiar photograph of him and her grandmother, brave, ill-fated Sally, posing with baby Miriam on the steps of The Roundel, not fifteen paces from where Alison now sat. To the left, and much larger, was a glamorous picture of a film star, dressed in clothes of roughly the same late ‘forties period. It took Alison a moment or two to recognise her, she seemed so podgily vulnerable compared to her more recent bitch-goddess image. Underneath was a photograph of a letter, unmistakably in her grandfather’s sloping handwriting. It started ‘Dearest Witch’.
She drove an eminent philosopher to distraction, the bold-type headlines exclaimed. Alison read on.
She sat in bed with Auden, drinking cocoa and concocting obscene limericks, and she shattered the inhibitions and possibly the heart of Edward Pepper. See our exclusive preview serialisation of Venetia Peake’s scandalously readable biography of the soap queen with a long and surprising past: Miss Myra Toye.
As her grandfather disappeared into the studio with the coffee pot, shutting the door behind him and silencing the telephone’s shrill summons, Alison looked up briefly then began to read the extract. She was at once enthralled and mortified. As usual, having doubtless paid a fortune for the exclusive rights, the editor had felt free to gut the book and string only the choicest gobbets together, which did few favours to Ms Peake’s thinnish prose but dragged one, breathless, straight to the heart of things and left one in a position to bluff having bought and read the actual book. Alison often wished the readers’ reports she commissioned were half as efficacious.
Myra’s affair with Edward Pepper began in earnest when each was at their lowest ebb. Pepper, then known to filmgoers by his original, German-Jewish, name of Eli Pfefferberg, was nearing the pinnacle of his success as a composer of lush, unsettling movie scores. But he had become an automaton, married to his work in the few years since the horrific death of his wife in freak floods that swept in from the East Anglian coast of England. Abandoning his only daughter to a string of underqualified nannies, who by all accounts veered from the alcoholic to the downright sinister, he suppressed his considerable libido into an inhuman drive to achieve, but in so doing reduced himself to a husk of a man. Never exactly blessed in her private life, Myra was still licking her wounds at being so publicly discarded by Sir Julius. The British studios, it seemed, were determined to punish her hubris in aspiring to snub them for her first, abortive Hollywood career. But publicly they allowed people to believe it was her indiscreet bid for homewrecker status that was causing them to neglect her. Since the second abortion, she had begun to drink heavily again, Scotch this time, any which way, which only provided another excuse for them to downgrade her casting value. Financially vulnerable after Marton [her accountant, ed.] had decamped to Argentina with the lion’s share of her savings, she had no option but to take on some of the most unrewarding roles of her career – a Sioux squaw in Blue Smoke, the comic housekeeper in Knock Knock My Lady, the outwitted and discarded mistress in Hell’s Fury and, perhaps most humiliating of all, as Margaret Lockwood’s simple-minded mother in the kindly suppressed (and since lost) Katie of Killarney. This part, it was well known, had been stoutly rejected by Flora Robson. It required her to streak her hair with grey and wear merciless cosmetic dewlaps and a strap-on waist-thickener. Lockwood’s memoir claims dismay at such casting of her contemporary, but it must surely have granted her some satisfaction as recompense for the notorious mink stole incident.
Composer and fading star were already known to one another – Myra had always been meticulous in her good, even hearty, relations with members of each film’s technical crew. S
he had sent him flowers in hospital and a wreath on the death of his wife, but the acquaintance could still be described as no more than casual. After one too many days in the waist-thickener however, Myra drank more than even her iron constitution could take and passed out on a bench in the staff car park having, luckily, failed to locate her MG. Pepper found her, did the gentlemanly thing, and drove her back to the mansion block flat he had recently bought in London’s Kensington. He put clean sheets on his bed, tucked her, still comatose, under the covers and went to sleep under a blanket on the put-you-up. Some time during the night, she woke up in a screaming alcoholic panic. He hurried in to reassure her and one thing led to the inevitable other. The encounter was unplanned and possibly an embarrassment come breakfast time, but Pepper had underestimated how parched he was for passion and she, during her recent succession of bruising involvements and disastrous marriage, was a sitting duck for the first man who displayed anything approaching old-world courtesy, much less tenderness. Pepper offered her both, in spades. It was a Friday night. She spent the weekend with him, disguising herself in his clothes and an old homburg on the rare occasions they left the flat to cat. He took to visiting her little house in Carlyle Square, but seems to have had some superstition about letting her visit The Roundel, his late wife’s house in East Anglia (by now the legal property of his daughter Miriam, who was conveniently sent away to boarding school). They wrote letters to each other, little notes tucked under one another’s wind-screen wipers, scribbled into scripts and orchestral scores. Surprised by passion, their enslavement appears to have been mutual …
Alison read on, through extracts from embarrassingly unguarded letters – Dearest Ludo – Darling Witch Your tender neck – Your wicked roving fingers – I want you so badly I could burst right here in front of everybody – I don’t care!!! – Your bad bristles on my titties – Hang Larry and Vivien, come to me NOW!! – I can’t wait another hour – See you outside the gates at four – On the sound stage at six – At the station at eight – In my bed as soon as poss!!!
It was evident that there were far more details than the newspaper editor had seen fit to reproduce. He was concentrating on maximum humiliation for both parties, maximum entertainment value for his readers. There were repeated dot dot dots, then a large gap during which the affair underwent a violent offstage sea change.
The end, when it finally came, was predictably bitter, which makes it the more astonishing that they have succeeded in keeping the entire liaison a secret until now. Edward had restored her faith in herself as an attractive woman and he had gratified her old yearning to have her undertrained intellect taken seriously. But however unflattering, her gamble in taking the lead and allowing herself to be sent up so grotesquely in Goodman’s cheap horror production paid off. Come Into My Parlour proved hugely successful and gave her new bankability in the eyes of the moguls. Accordingly she came under pressure to produce a new beau for the press department. An otherworldly Jewish composer, even one on their payroll, was not a suitable candidate given the image they were intent on cultivating for her. In one of those ruthless snap decisions on which much of her extraordinary professional longevity rests, Myra made full use of the studio’s bureaucratic apparatus to make herself suddenly and entirely inaccessible to Edward. She gave no explanation, possibly because she mistrusted her own ability to withstand his tears and angry recriminations in the flesh. His last letter to her was among the bitterest she would ever receive …
When it was clear that there was no more about her grandfather in the extract, Alison, puzzled, turned back to the first page to look once again at the old photographs there, at her grandmother, pale, fresh, essentially ordinary, and at the actress, her face no less ordinary but transformed by a dazzling smile, breasts like a life jacket and all-concealing studio make-up. The first photograph was an amateur snap, over-exposed, its subjects a trifle stiff with embarrassment, but it belonged undeniably to the real world. One could almost smell the after-scents of a Sunday roast, sweetly fatty on the air. Her grandmother’s cardigan looked home-made and was unravelling at one of the cuffs. Her nails, if one could see them, would probably be chipped from gardening. The studio portrait, by contrast, had been touched up to the point where it had ceased to be a photograph and had become a kind of kitsch altar painting. Myra’s skin was flawless, her eyes twinkled with latent tears, the hairs on her head appeared to have been individually curled and bleached by patient, white-gloved attendants. The image bore as little relation to blood-and-sweat feminine reality as an orthodox icon of the Blessed Virgin or a wigless department store mannequin.
Alison dropped the paper back on the heap. Her grandfather was rooted, in her mind at least, at The Roundel, in a clutter of strange instruments and keyboards, among roses, old coats and mildewy ‘forties novels. It was as surprising to Alison that he could have passed freely from the fresh memory of one woman to the metropolitan bed of the other, as it was that Jamie had found true love. That the old man should be famous for music was only just – a natural reward for a life of inspired application – but that he should also be suddenly famous for sex shook her. She needed time to adjust to the idea. A part of her was even jealous on her grandmother’s behalf.
She saw him framed in the studio’s picture window, by the piano keyboard, telephone receiver in hand. Talking, he turned back into the room. He was agitated but hiding it. She could tell because he kept touching his free fingers to his temple, which he always did, unconsciously, at stressful moments. He hung up and stood there for a moment, watching the telephone as though waiting for it to ring again. Then he disappeared from view to emerge at the door with a fresh jug of coffee.
She found she could not face him at that moment. Turning aside with a vague wave, she hurried back into The Roundel and up to her room. She sat on the bed, then lay down and stared at the ceiling, her heart racing. This was the room, she had often heard, where he had taken refuge during the flood that had torn Sally from him. The change she felt in her view of him was no less violent than the one worked by the unnatural tides that had swept boats to the level of this room’s sill and had dragged a car down the bank of the Rexbridge road.
That her grandfather had known great love and been more or less in celibate mourning for it ever since, was one of the simple certainties on which her life was founded – like the warmth of the sun or the sweetness of sugar. Now that she was forced to examine it, the myth was of a sentimental flimsiness she would not have accepted even in the most romantic of her company’s fiction. She had always assumed the tragedy of Sally’s loss had enriched his creativity, even though it overshadowed the possibility of his enjoying any other woman. To have this faith betrayed by so much casual Saturday journalese left her breathless, confused and angry. She had only told him half the truth in the restaurant the other night. Certainly she might have idealised his marriage – perhaps it was not so special to him, or perhaps it was and he was simply lonely afterwards. There was no law against widowers remarrying or finding consolation. What she did not idealise was her view of Sally. From her earliest girlhood there had been witnesses enough to give her a detailed portrait of her grandmother. The more she heard of Sally’s feistiness and independence, the more she felt out of sympathy with her own chaotic and all too dependent mother. Sally’s memory had usurped Miriam’s place, and she had become a spectral surrogate parent, the kind of woman Alison hoped to be. Now she was forced to see her as a dead wife, nothing more, a pallid rival to a more potent heroine, her small, domestic achievements long since outrun by the grander ones of a surviving husband.
Alison walked to the bathroom and flushed the loo so as to acquire a pretext for her sudden withdrawal, then descended the stairs to rejoin her grandfather. Faced with a dilemma, she habitually asked herself what Sally would have done. In this case, she realised, Sally would have shrugged, not unlike Cynthia, and said, ‘He’s a man. Men’s needs are simpler than ours and they’re harder to deny. Besides,’ this with the laugh Alison ha
d never heard, ‘being dead, I wasn’t much use by that time.’
This revelation had brought her grandfather into a new focus. He had become less a grandparent – with all the sentimental castration the status implied – more a man.
‘You’ve read it?’ he said as he sat down beside her again.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Had she?’
‘And how. She’s reacting out of all proportion. She started saying, “Don’t worry, I’ll pack a suitcase and drive up” as though there were some crisis on, like a death or a press siege.’
‘Oh no!’
‘It’s all right. I put her off. I said you were here to answer the telephone and protect me. It’s not as if it’s in a tabloid anyway. When she goes to church tomorrow and finds she isn’t mobbed she’ll probably be disappointed and blame me for not hiring myself a press agent. I’m sorry if you feel I deceived you.’
Alison paused for a moment, to think. He had deceived her. It certainly felt that way.
‘You didn’t,’ she said. ‘Not really. You just held back the truth. May I ask why you told her anything, though? Couldn’t you have just kept quiet? None of us need ever have known!’ She heard a trace of anger enter her voice.
‘To be honest, I wasn’t sure just how detailed the book would be and I didn’t want to do more damage than was necessary.’ He looked at her benignly, mocking her caution, oblivious to her wrath. ‘In fact, I did precious little. Miss Peake already had my letters. She was obviously a most determined researcher and she was plainly going to tell the story with or without my help. When she confronted me with what she knew, I thought the least I could do was make sure she gave a balanced account. Your mother thinks I should have kept quiet. She says it will cause “difficulties for poor Frank” though how, I can’t imagine. Anyway, I’m not ashamed and I don’t see why she should be, or you. It’s all true. It happened. I’m actually rather proud about it.’
They laughed, he more than her. She fancied he was relieved at something. Perhaps there were still more embarrassing details the biographer had left out, though discretion hardly seemed to be her keynote.