by Jemma Harvey
‘He just wants to join in,’ Alex said. ‘Hey, why don’t we put him in the show? He’s awfully clever, aren’t you, sugarpoop? – and I bet Alasdair McGoogle had a dog.’
‘He had several,’ I said. ‘There’s a portrait of him with a couple in one of the galleries. Lurchers.’
‘Dramatic licence?’ said Delphi.
Nigel persisted in hanging around in historical-expert mode, all too often having fresh inspirations, leaving Mortimer to take charge in the garden. When we first arrived, Auld Andrew had been heard to make various remarks in broad Scots about the currse of television and city types who thocht they knew aboot gardening and so on, but Mortimer made friendly if faintly patronising overtures and, thanks to the language barrier and his own native insensitivity, had no idea he was being repulsed. Improbable though it seemed, they bonded; once Auld Andrew realised he might actually appear on the small screen, holding forth on matters horticultural (hopefully with subtitles), his objections vanished. The television was no longer currsed; he even deigned to give advice, matching Mortimer’s patronage with a regal condescension that way outclassed him. In between, both of them enjoyed criticising the youthful labourers, though only Auld Andrew was allowed to tell Young Andrew when he was in error.
In the midst of all this HG moved like a king among his courtiers, a rather informal, hail-fellow-well-met sort of king who would frequently join in the digging, uproot a weed or plant a bulb, while Auld Andrew looked on with disapproval at this disruption of the natural order of things, and Mortimer surveyed him with the indulgence of a mentor for a favoured protégé who has stepped a little out of line. HG’s part in the historical scenes would be shot later – Wardrobe was still working on his costume, which would be a symphony in tartan and dead badger – so to date he had stayed away from the acting.
He was a thoughtful host, but as the place filled up he showed a tendency to retreat into a private sanctum, dining alone and only putting in occasional appearances to liaise with his guests. I didn’t blame him: a houseful of strangers was no joke, even if the house was a castle with more rooms than you could count and an efficient (if colourful) staff to look after them. I’d done some research on him over Easter, trawling the Internet for details of his past, trying to fill in the background so I could have a better understanding of the man I saw daily but didn’t feel I knew at all. There were web pages galore, books, newspaper articles, even an autobiography – Call Me God – with the ghostwriter credited in smaller print alongside HG himself. As most ghosts get no credit at all, I was favourably impressed. I rang a friend who’s a rock enthusiast, knocked him sideways by mentioning my current job and location, and borrowed videos and DVDs of HG’s concerts, going right back to the days of the Fallen Angels. I wouldn’t have time to watch half of them, but I could skip through, getting a taste of his work.
Comparing the concerts with filmed interviews, I realised he was one of those performers who only come alive on stage (and, presumably, at certain wild parties). Offstage, he was quiet, articulate even when stoned, betraying his alter ego only in rare moments, usually when drunk. But once in front of a live audience, with reeling lights and the throb of the music, his inner demon was unleashed: he became manic, electrifying, dripping with sweat, vibrating with sex appeal – more than mortal, less than human. A god, maybe, but pagan, feral – a god of crude passion and the dark. In the sixties he looked fresh-faced and rather clean under the daringly shaggy haircut; by the seventies his cheeks had begun to hollow, his hair was longer, his clothes tousled, his jeans tighter in the crotch. Come the eighties there were deep lines in his face beneath the gloss of perspiration, and the theatre lights showed his eyes both hooded above and puffy below. In interviews he slurred his words, and failed to meet the gaze of the camera. Then, as the century turned, it was comeback time. Under the ripped T-shirt his chest was fleshless, a web of rib and sinew that twitched in response to the plucking of his fingers, as if the twang of the guitar strings flowed throughout his whole body. His arms were all knobs of bone and knots of muscle; his hips were too lean for the clinging leather trousers, and the bulge in his groin looked like the only spare flesh he possessed. On talk shows it was clear he had gone beyond wildness, recovering the quiet of his youth in the calm of age. This was the Hot God I had met, but now, having seen the film excerpts from his life, I could glimpse the spectres of time and tide in his face. What was it Ash had said? Something about how the ghosts are inside us, not the dead but the living.
We all carry our own ghosts, I thought. Bits of our past selves whom we can never be free of.
HG’s private life had been nearly as public as his performances. There had been the inevitable early marriage which had gone with fame and fortune: a little investigation revealed that the wife had used her divorce settlement to train as a lawyer, had remarried, and HG’s first son had taken his stepfather’s name. His second marriage, to the actress Maggie Molloy, an Irish redhead with as much temper as temperament, had been the stuff of legend. There were two daughters of the union, Melisanda Moonshadow and Cedilla Stardust, both evidently named by their mother under the influence of hallucinatory drugs. (That was the only possible excuse.) Once asked by a journalist if she realised Cedilla was a form of punctuation, she replied airily that she didn’t care, she was too dyslexic to punctuate and had chosen it because she liked the sound. She died in a car accident when she was barely thirty, out of her mind on LSD. HG was said to be heartbroken and didn’t marry again for at least a year.
After that came the first of the models, Romany Leighton, a brunette a foot taller than her husband who streaked through his life in a mere six months, reputedly costing him five million in alimony. Deciding marriage was an expensive hobby, he refrained for a while, instead parading a succession of girlfriends in the public eye, each blonder and leggier than the last. He ventured into matrimony again with Tyndall Fiske, Dorian’s mother, a relationship which ended with her in an obscure American cult and him in rehab. When he emerged it was the turn of Basilisa Ramón – the Basilisk – a Spanish model famed for doing her own stunts in a succession of daring car ads. She had balanced on the bonnet along a twisty mountain road, steered with one foot while painting her nails, and tossed the driver out with a judo-throw in order to slip into the driving seat herself – and all this while wearing nothing but a leopard-print bikini and five-inch gold stilettos. Her marriage to HG had so far lasted six years, perhaps because he was tired of divorce, more probably because they spent a lot of time apart. She had a reputation for rapacity unequalled by any woman since Imelda Marcos, and columnists opined that if they ever did split up, he would be lucky to come out of it with a tent, let alone a castle.
But I didn’t think that was the reason he continued to put up with her. Watching him one evening when he joined us for a drink after dinner, I thought he looked bone-weary, world-weary, far older than his years. He stuck with Basilisa the way he stuck with Dunblair, if with less affection, because he’d had enough of drama and changes; he just wanted to settle down.
He made me think of a poem by Lord Byron:
So we’ll go no more a-roving
So late into the night,
Though the heart be still as loving,
And the moon be still as bright.
I couldn’t remember the rest, though there was something about ‘We’ll go no more a-roving By the light of the moon’, but I felt it said everything about HG’s state of mind. He was a pirate retired from a life of blood and swashbuckle, an adventurer who would have no more adventures, a Casanova who had hung up his – well, whatever he had to hang up – and relaxed into restful celibacy. All HG wanted, after decades of chaotic rockstardom, was to linger quietly in his garden.
Which made it pretty idiotic to call in a TV makeover team, I reflected. But that’s celebrity thinking. A normal person would go out and buy a seed catalogue; a celeb summoned Mortimer Sparrow and Delphinium Dacres. HG wasn’t really dumb: he just couldn’t kick the thoug
ht processes of a lifetime.
It was his tragic flaw, I concluded, and, as with all tragic flaws, only trouble could come of it.
Delphinium
I thought working with Alex would be a ball; I was wrong. The problem was, he’d never done a regular job in his life. I’m rich, successful and famous, but I didn’t get there without hard work (well, sometimes); Alex has just had the easy life handed to him on a plate. He evolves wonderful plans but never gets round to making them happen, he has business lunches that never produce any business, he plays at being a model, actor, impresario without ever staying the course. The pressure was on with the historical scenes – we needed to get them done quickly so we could pay off the extras and get back to the garden – but Alex was magnificently unaware of pressure. He fussed over Fenny when he should have been rehearsing, routinely got his lines wrong (‘They aren’t that good; what does it matter if I alter a few words?’), fiddled with his costume, adding out-of-period accessories, ignored direction when it didn’t suit him. I mean, I argue with Russell occasionally, but that’s different: I’m a professional. I know what I’m talking about. Alex isn’t, and doesn’t. I got pissed off with him, Russell got pissed off with him – he pissed everyone off. Probably because of that, our sexual chemistry wasn’t working the way it should. But then, with Fenny around we never managed to have sex any more.
In the bedroom, Alex said the Basilisk’s décor was ‘total pants’, but later declared the fertility goddesses reminded him of his nanny, and started dancing around naked with a devil-mask over his crotch. He wanted to shag on the zebra-skin rug, claiming it made him feel animal, but I preferred the comfort of the bed, so we had a row instead. Not a screaming row, just a bicker, but we’d had too many bickers lately. Alex was letting me down, spoiling my lovely scheme of how things should work out, and it was really getting to me.
Then Brie arrived.
Brie adored the castle, loved the décor, gushed over HG at the first opportunity. ‘It’s so exciting the way you’ve done it up,’ she told him (I hadn’t explained to her about Basilisa). ‘Most of these places are really dull, all stodgy paintings of people’s ancestors and ornaments on every table and that old-fashioned furniture that’s always so bloody uncomfortable. Frankly, I can’t see why anyone should rave about antiques just because they’re old. New stuff is much more fun. I think the castle is fabulous. The purple gallery, the African bedroom, the Indian room where I am – it’s all so cool.’
HG responded by treating Brie rather as if she were an entertaining child, an attitude she mistook for encouragement. Later, he disappeared off to have dinner on his own. Several of the crew were already claiming there was a priest’s hole or a dungeon where he hid when he wanted to get away from us all.
Acting-wise, as I’d guessed, Brie had very little to do, her only lines being in the short scene when Alex relinquishes her, when she had to say: ‘If you’re going to leave me for yon Sassenach hussy, Alasdair McGoogle, may the curse of all the powers o’ night rest upon both ye and her!’ Whether her original character had ever said anything of the kind we didn’t know, but Russell thought it would be dramatic to throw in a curse and altered Nigel’s script accordingly. (He altered Nigel’s script whenever he got the opportunity, on principle.) Unfortunately, Brie couldn’t do a Scots accent, and when we gave her a crash course of conversation with Morag to get her attuned, she really upset the old fruitbat, telling her: ‘Do shut up, you silly cow. Everyone knows that religious stuff is a load of horseshit.’
In the end, Russell sneakily decided to record someone else’s voice when she had gone, without telling her anything about it. Ten to one Brie wouldn’t notice.
The one part of my plan that did seem to work out was the bit about improving relations between Brie and Alex.
Initially they refused to air-kiss or even shake hands, treating each other as if they were mutually poisonous. Unlike Alex, Brie was capable of concentrating on work, but she had so little to do, and was so bad at it when she did, that her efforts were immaterial. Once her scene was out of the way she was at a loose end, and wound up thrown into Alex’s company because he was her only available kindred spirit. The rest of us were professionals with jobs to do, and HG, after the first evening, preferred to be reclusive in his dungeon. Brie was happy to drool over Fenny provided he didn’t crap anywhere near her, and by the second day she and Alex were getting together to bitch up media acquaintances and share scandal about the other ‘stars’ in Celebrity Murder Island, some of which Alex had watched. He still said, behind her back, that she was common, and refused to concede she might actually be quite pretty, but he admitted she could be ‘amusing’ and said grudgingly that it was okay for her to be my second bridesmaid. While I was filming the scene when I had to grope my way through a computerised reconstruction of the maze before vanishing into the dark for ever, he and Brie were hanging out, whispering and giggling a lot. When Fenny was found to have peed on Russell’s discarded jacket, I was sure it was at their instigation – Alex looked innocent, Brie smothered laughter. I’d forgotten that Alex’s sense of humour, like some of his other qualities, had never really grown up.
I removed Fenny from their vicinity, leaving him in the custody of Jules in the hope that Elton and Sting, once he got used to them, would provide better role models. Roo calmed Russell and promised to get the jacket cleaned, which dealt with the matter, but it left a sort of residue of bad feeling, like dregs in a wine glass.
Alex also enjoyed playing on the nerves of the more highly strung extras (minor actors often have more temperament than stars, to compensate for their lack of success). He removed a claymore from the castle weaponry and left it in their allocated dressing room, lavishly stained with stage blood. More blood was splashed all over the floor, the walls, and people’s street clothing, reducing one woman to hysterics. She claimed, not for the first time, that the programme was jinxed, while one of her mates cried, ‘We’re all doomed!’, if only because someone had to.
Brie thought that was funny too.
Roo didn’t.
In a display of uncharacteristic toughness she took Alex on one side and spoke to him very quietly and at some length, only releasing her stranglehold on his shirt-collar when she had completely finished. The expression on her face showed quite clearly that murder was one of the future options.
Afterwards, Alex complained, ‘I’m not sure I like your friend Roo any more. She’s getting awfully stuffy. Why do all these people take themselves so seriously?’
‘We’re trying to make a TV series,’ I said. ‘We have to take it seriously.’
‘Well, I don’t think I want stuffy Roo as one of your bridesmaids. She’s been acting so uptight lately . . .’
‘I don’t care what you think!’ I snarled. ‘It’s my wedding, and I’ll do what I bloody well like!’ What with pressure of work, and pressure of Alex, my tolerance levels were right down.
‘Can’t we get rid of those two?’ Russell grumbled the next day, eying Alex and Brie with distaste. ‘We don’t need them for shooting any more.’
But we couldn’t. I’d rashly promised them both they could remain at Dunblair till we’d finished the re-enactment scenes, and there was no way they’d pass up the prestige of a stay with Hot God (even if he was absent for most of it) for so much as an hour. Which meant, since we still had to do the razing of the computerised maze (Alex looking brooding in the background) and all the bits with HG himself, that we were stuck with them for at least another week, maybe a fortnight.
‘I do love Alex,’ I told Roo, ‘but working with him was a mistake. He just isn’t focused. Anyway, I’m afraid he’s a bit bored up here. He’s used to the big city lifestyle with clubs and restaurants and parties all the time. I think he expected this set-up to be much more glamorous, what with HG being such a big star. There isn’t enough here for him to do.’
‘Walking?’ Roo suggested. ‘Deer-stalking? Feeding the sporrans? Fishing for monsters in the loch?�
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‘He likes watching television,’ I said, ‘but HG doesn’t have very many channels. There’s only twenty or so. It seems a bit strange to me: he doesn’t even have UK Old Gold or Sky B-Movies 3.’
‘Extraordinary,’ said Roo.
‘At least Alex is getting on with Brie . . .’
‘I noticed.’
‘He doesn’t really like her all that much,’ I explained. ‘He said last night she was a natural-born Essex girl with a giggle like a tap with hiccups, but he’s sort of forced into her company at the moment, so they’ve had to bond. They’ve both got plenty of mutual friends they can enjoy being nasty about. It keeps him entertained. He’s just a child at heart.’ It was that sweetness and simplicity, that touch of playground innocence (under the sophistication and the taste for wearing my thongs) which I’d always loved in him – wasn’t it?
‘He needs plenty of toys,’ Roo deduced.
‘I thought you liked him?’ Until Dunblair, Alex and Roo had always got on.
‘Sort of,’ Roo said. ‘I do like children. But I prefer them to be less than four feet high.’
And then: ‘Are you sure you’re in love with him?’
‘Of course I am. I’m going to marry him, aren’t I? I wouldn’t marry someone I didn’t love. You can’t expect people to be perfect all the time. You know your problem? You’re too idealistic. You think someone’s going to come along like . . . like Mr Darcy, all handsome and strong and silent, but real life isn’t like that. Real life means falling in love with a real person, somebody who’ll care for you and make you happy, but who has faults that you have to put up with.’
‘I was in love with Kyle,’ Roo said quietly. ‘He was a real person. With faults.’
‘Yes, but . . . he didn’t make you happy, did he?’
She had no answer to that.
What with all the hassle, I hadn’t had much time to concentrate on getting close to Elizabeth Courtney, or figure out what had actually happened to her. Apparently, after her disappearance Alasdair had been so heartbroken he had destroyed nearly all the pictures of her, unable to bear the anguish of looking on her face again, but Nigel had unearthed a surviving portrait from one of the storerooms and hung it in the hall. Elizabeth wasn’t quite what I’d expected – not really beautiful at all, with a long, rather horsey face – but the more I looked at the picture the more sympathetic I found her. She seemed to be smiling, or maybe her mouth was naturally turned up at the corners, and her eyes were lovely, narrow but very bright, full of light and laughter. There was strength in her face, too, the courage and determination to go against the crowd. She didn’t look like someone who should have died tragically.