The Facts of Life
Page 54
He had been astonished at the swift reaction to the few phone calls he had asked his agent to make. Covent Garden, San Francisco and Amsterdam had raced the little work into their schedules, the London opera house actually shelving several performances of an undersubscribed Bellini revival to make way for it. At first he cynically assumed this haste had something to do with the fashionable AIDS charity tag that came with the piece, but as he set about some speedy reorchestrations to allow for performances in auditoria larger than a mere college dining hall, he was forced to reasses the vigour of what he had always thought of as his sick child. Watching these last, slightly edgy rehearsals, he was surprised to feel so unembarrassed. Certainly the director and choreographer had dressed the piece up in the most flattering fashion. Dance now played an almost continuous part, dancers being used on a huge, empty stage to form breathing, shifting scenery about the singers. The costumes had been designed by a sympathetic young couturier, who had lent his services for the good cause, and the producer presented the story less as a faithful rendition of a biblical book than as a haunting dream-sequence. Time had also transformed the music. Compared to much of what was being written now, not least by himself, the music he remembered as being violent to no purpose had an almost Straussian lushness in parts, and an intoxicated, youthful brashness in others. Listening, he felt profound regret at the impossibility of Sally’s being able to hear it, and felt Thomas’s absence keenly too. Miriam’s harsh words about his attitude towards Thomas had struck home, although he was too proud to let her see it. Reading the libretto afresh made a circle of time and rendered the memory of its witty and loving author as sharp as recollections of recent weeks. The climactic moment when Job’s daughters were restored to him from the grave had, needless to say, acquired overtones that were hard for its composer to bear.
Inevitably the press and publicity office had been busy. Much was being made in profiles and articles of the arbitrary cruelty with which Sally had been taken from him and of the recent death of his beloved grandson. One, headed The Great Survivor, had crassly given equal weight to the deaths of his parents-in-law and Thomas, when, if he were frank, they had scarcely touched him at all. Several interviewers had surprised him by asking what seemed to him unpardonably intrusive questions concerning his attitude to both Thomas’s and Jamie’s sexuality. They were raking up his time in hospital too, looking through Job for signs of incipient breakdown and references to Judaism and the Holocaust.
The first night was to be a typically showy affair with people eager to pay extra so as to be seen to be patronising a charity while hobnobbing with celebrities. At least one member of the royal family was to attend, to Miriam’s great excitement, as was the Israeli prime minister and the new health minister, her predecessor having been disgraced after a lengthy trial-by-press. Rumour had it that there was to be a demonstration by AIDS activists in the foyer, but Sandy had promised to use her contacts to persuade them to keep it on the picturesque side of disruptive, with nothing noisier than a die-in.
Sandy had come along to introduce him to the charity’s honorary chairwoman who was keen to meet him. He expected at best a more discreet lesbian than herself, at worst, some tiresome society do-gooder of the species he had all too often encountered in America, with a wealthy husband and too much free time. At first glance, however, the thickly befurred creature she beckoned him up the aisle to meet put him more in mind of Dr Pertwee, she seemed so small and birdlike. At second glance, she was younger and considerably more glamorous. Her skin was pale to the point of whiteness against her dark glasses and sable coat. Smiling slightly without showing her teeth, she slipped off her blue silk headscarf, which seemed like a tablecloth in her tiny, jewelled hands. She revealed blonde hair that was no less amazing for being so patently unreal for someone of her age. Gold glistened at both her ears, around her neck and on her fingers.
The orchestra and singers were breaking up for lunch. Suddenly the place was noisy with unmusical operations and yelled instructions among the technical crew.
‘How do you do?’ he said, offering his hand in the half-light. ‘Edward Pepper.’
‘Oh my God,’ the woman drawled to Sandy, with whom she had clearly already struck up one of those instantly conspiratorial understandings at which American women so excelled. ‘He doesn’t recognise me.’
‘Mr Pepper,’ Sandy explained with a proud grin, ‘This is our honorary chairwoman, Miss Toye.’
Edward looked again at the blonde coiffure, the thin, vermilion lips. It was her.
‘Myra?’ he stammered.
She took off her glasses and was instantly recognisable, though only as the woman she had made herself, not as the woman he remembered.
‘Who did you think it was?’ she asked. ‘Her mother? Give me a kiss darling. It’s been too long.’
He kissed her cheek. Her laugh as he did so and the extraordinary resilience of her flesh were those of a younger woman, but the way she rested a hand lightly on his shoulder spoke of her true age and reassured him.
‘You look stunning,’ he said.
‘Well thank you. And so do you. Doesn’t he look good, Sandy? Your hair’s gone white.’
‘So, I would imagine, has yours.’
She laughed again, and lost her dark glasses somewhere in the folds of her coat.
‘Don’t worry, honey,’ she told Sandy. ‘This is entirely fake. It never suffered, but they charged just as much for it as the real thing, so I did.’
He kissed her again, still amazed.
‘I can’t believe you’re here,’ he said. ‘Why didn’t anyone tell me?’
‘I was going to,’ Sandy explained, ‘but Miss Toye told me you’d disappear at the very mention of her name.’
Something in the way she said ‘Miss Toye’ spoke of hopeless enslavement.
‘You must let me buy us lunch,’ he said, leading them back through the bar and on to the mirrored staircase. ‘The dress rehearsal doesn’t start until two-thirty.’
‘My treat,’ Myra insisted.
‘Let’s go Dutch,’ he countered, ‘and both treat Sandy.’
‘Er … I’d love to, but I’ve got a few things to sort out with the publicity people,’ Sandy said quickly. He knew what this lie was costing her and made a mental note to return the favour.
Those of his friends Edward thought of as famous were well-known only in the households of the intelligentsia. Myra’s fame was on quite another plane. As he led her the short distance from the opera house to an Italian restaurant where he often took lunch, pedestrians turned to stare, taxi drivers would down their windows to call greetings and he was given the impression that if they stood still, the street would soon be choked with people pressing forward simply to gawp. The restaurant was fairly expensive, its clientele studiously blasé, and yet even in there Myra’s arrival caused a flurry and the head waiter led them immediately to the corner table Edward had never succeeded in booking before. He suspected he would have no such trouble in future. As champagne was brought to them with the manager’s compliments and an admirer who had glimpsed her out in the street sent in some flowers Myra remained apparently impervious. At last, when the fuss had died down and they had both placed their orders – she for a spartan salad that appeared nowhere on the menu – she slipped her headscarf off on to the back of her chair and removed her dark glasses. She narrowed her eyes slightly at him in a near-smile that felt far more intimate than her laughter when Sandy had been with them.
‘Does this often happen to you?’ he asked. ‘It never used to.’
‘Television,’ she sighed. ‘It’s huge. It is to cinema what cinema is to books.’ She raised her champagne flute. ‘Old times,’ she said.
‘Hmm,’ he said, less certainly.
‘You don’t sound too convinced.’
‘I mistrust nostalgia.’
She arranged her scarf across her shoulders, detecting a draught and smiled dryly at the young waiter who brought their food. He noticed the waite
r’s hand shake as he topped up her champagne and wondered whether she had a lover at the moment, since she was clearly defying age and ageing anything but quietly.
‘How did Alison get hold of you?’ he asked. ‘Or was it Sandy?’
‘I think it was a combined effort. It didn’t take a detective to find out where I was staying – the papers were full of it. Anyway, I told you I was at Claridge’s in that note I sent with the flowers.’
‘Thank you for those,’ he said. ‘I was touched that you bothered.’
She waved away his thanks with an impatient gesture that recalled her younger self.
‘I’m surprised at you wanting to get involved in all this,’ he said.
‘Are you?’
‘After the book,’ he explained. ‘I thought you might be angry at the things I told your biographer.’
‘But who do you think sent her to see you? Venetia Peake is many things to many men, but she’s not a mind-reader. I admit I didn’t think you’d show her all the letters but then again I thought it was rather sweet of you to have kept them so long.’
‘You’d kept some of mine too.’
‘Sorry, darling. I hadn’t, actually. The whole lot turned up in the library of some university in Texas. God knows how. Some maid must have stolen them and sold them. Don’t be hurt. It happens all the time.’
‘Really?’
‘Really. I even got a letter the other day from some drag queen in New York who had one of my old Balmain frocks and wanted to check which shoes I’d have worn with it.’
As she laughed she patted the back of one of his hands; another gesture he remembered. Image by image, the past Myra was reassembling herself before him.
‘You’ve hardly changed at all really,’ she said after a moment. ‘And you’re a much nattier dresser than you used to be.’
‘I’m much richer than I used to be.’
‘Money has nothing to do with it. Don’t let anyone cut your hair by the way. It looks great that length. Manly. Do I sound terribly American now? I’ve been talking to a few producers over here and I’m worried they think I can’t play British any more. Do I?’
‘Only now and then. I like it. It makes you sound more relaxed.’
‘As opposed to my old voice, you mean? Do you remember? I can still do it. Listen!’ She assumed the stilted, clipped tone she would have used to play one of her romantic heroines in the ‘forties. ‘Oh darling. I’m so terribly terribly happy.’ He laughed. Encouraged, she went on. He wondered if she were quoting an actual script or making it up as she went along. ‘Sometimes, when I’m all alone here, with the wind in the trees and all those terrible shadows on the stairs, I get so frightened but then I remember there’s you and I feel alright again. Oh darling.’
‘It’s good. Really good,’ he chuckled. ‘You should stop doing all that nonsense and start playing some comedy, on stage.’
‘Night after night? It would kill me. The Shaw was only a short run and that was purgatory. And my voice goes nowhere in a big space. And what do you mean, nonsense?’
‘Well … I –’
‘It’s all right. It was crap. I know. But it paid a lot of debts.’ She sighed heavily. ‘And Claridge’s is very expensive nowadays.’
‘Jamie used to watch it every week,’ he told her.
‘You’re kidding.’
‘I’m not. And his – And Sam. They watched it every week. Nothing got in the way of it. Jamie was furious when they wrote you out of the series. In a strange way he seemed to give up trying to stay well after that.’
‘Was it very hard?’ She touched his hand again but this time she left her fingers there for a moment or two. ‘What am I saying?’ She took her hand back. ‘Of course it was hard. It must have been hell. Was he sick a long time? My dresser died of it last year. He took four years from start to finish. Four years. Jesus.’
‘I suppose Jamie was lucky,’ Edward said. ‘Alison said he went very fast compared to most people but then, he asked to be taken off medication.’
Myra creased her face in sympathy.
‘I suppose he might have gone on a lot longer than that otherwise. But you don’t want to talk about this.’
‘Yes I do,’ he insisted. ‘I brought the subject up, remember?’
He broke off a piece of bread to mop up his sauce. She had finished with her salad and pushed it to one side.
‘I keep remembering how he looked at the end,’ he told her. ‘It’s like after Sally was killed. I remember him in dreams. He got so thin, Myra! It changed his character, to look at him. I mean, he was never perfection. His feet were too big and he’d built up his muscles out of all proportion to his build –’
‘Boys will be boys.’
‘But he always, oh, I don’t know. He always exuded well-being. His skin was golden rather than white, olive really, like my mother’s, and he had thick hair –’
‘Like you.’
‘Yes.’ Edward touched his own. ‘Yes. I suppose so. And he had the kind of voice that carried across the most crowded rooms it was so full and confident. But the last time I went into his room he was wasted. Alison was washing him, I remember, and when I came in through the door he looked like some limp Christ in a Spanish Deposition.’
‘A what?’
‘You know; where they show Jesus being made ready for the grave. His hair had got all dull and thin, his cheeks had sunk in, his lips were cracked. They always seemed to have this kind of off-white spume on them at the end. His lower ribs stuck out so much it looked like he had four bony breasts.’
‘Don’t.’
‘Sorry. I’ll shut up.’
‘No.’
‘Let’s talk about something else.’
‘No.’
‘Please.’
‘Okay.’
They were plunged into silence, trying to clear their minds of the unappetising image he had conjured up between them. Their waiter returned to clear the table and offer them dessert menus. He ordered coffee, she a mint infusion.
‘So,’ she said at last, ‘your opera. You must be very proud of all the fuss.’
He shrugged.
‘People like to make a fuss. But yes, I’m pleased. It’s strange. I don’t think it’s any better than I remember it, not really, but time’s moved on. So much has happened since I wrote it. First time around it was like an amateur dramatic passion play.’
‘And now?’
‘Now it’s as if the story’s got a new meaning.’
‘It’s about Job, right?’
‘Yes. Only now it seems to be about survival not disaster.’
‘It’s you that’s changed. Losing your wife and children doesn’t seem so appalling when you get older because it’s the sort of thing older people expect. Kids expect everyone to live forever. We were so young, you know. Back then.’ She smiled sadly. ‘I thought I was ancient when I got involved with you. I was barely thirty, for God’s sake!’
‘But the thing with Job,’ he said, ‘is the ending. They all come back to life again at the end. I used to think that was so cynical. God gives him this terrible trial then just says, oh what the hell, live to be an old old man and have all your kids and wealth back twofold. I used to think that was so cynical. Now I’m not so sure.’
‘Teddy Pepper! Have you become a romantic?’
‘Hardly that,’ he laughed. ‘But. Well. I think I might be opening up to possibilities.’
She nodded, an actress playing a wise old woman.
‘Will you come to the dress rehearsal?’ he asked. ‘We could sit together.’
‘And sit through it all again tonight? Darling, try to remember, I’m a philistine. Tonight will be lovely, though.’
‘You’ll sit with me?’
‘If you don’t mind people talking. They will talk, you know, Edward. They’ll say you’re my reason for staying on in England.’
He shrugged. He was uneasy of saying anything in reply, being uncertain just what he thought as yet.
‘I wouldn’t know,’ he said.
‘Well take it from one who knows; it’s a coup. Poor boy.’
‘Why? What’s wrong with him.’
‘The usual,’ she sighed. ‘I mean, he’s up and about and working, but he’s several stone lighter than his photograph in September’s Vogue and nobody diets that successfully. That must be why he’s designed your costumes for nothing.’
‘You think dying makes people charitable?’
‘No, my sweet, but I think it can make them superstitious. Have a few thousand dollars’ worth of frocks, God, and spare me for another year or two. Do you pray, Teddy?’
‘No,’ he said. ‘I never did. You?’
‘No time,’ she said. ‘I tried chanting for a bit but it did nothing for me. I’ve been to synagogue a few times since I’ve been back here, though, and I love it.’
‘But you’re not Jewish.’
‘Says who?’
‘Your authorised biography for one.’
‘It just said I grew up in Bethnal Green, it said nothing about religion. Unlike you, I wasn’t prepared to tell Ms Peake everything.’
‘Why not?’
‘I have a career to think of. What remains of it. Let them know you’re Jewish at my age and there are even fewer parts left for you. Bang go the gracious old lady roles.’ She sipped her tea. ‘I told your granddaughter I could come to this party of hers at the weekend. Do you mind?’
‘Why should I mind?’ he asked. Alison was following up the première with a fund-raising barn dance at The Roundel.