by PETER DAVEY
“So you’re going to be watching tonight too?” she said as they sat down.
“Oh yes, I watch it every night. And twice on Wednesdays and Saturdays.”
“That’s jolly loyal of you!”
“Well, I reckon if Nicola can act every night, the least I can do is watch her. And she says she needs me there, which is sweet, though I’m sure it’s rubbish. I guess you could say we’re kind of a team,” he added with a short laugh. “Ghastly expression.”
Anne contemplated him for a moment. “So how are you?”
“I’m fine. Great! I’m working on a novel.”
“Not about plagiarism, I hope!”
“No, not about plagiarism,” he laughed. “I think I’ve had enough of that subject to last me a lifetime.”
Despite the banter, the word created an awkwardness between them.
“Anne, I’m assuming you know the truth.”
“Yes I do. Ted told me everything. And so do you, obviously.”
“Nicola told me a while ago, before we escaped to New Zealand. Are you sure you wouldn’t like a coffee? Or some tea?”
“No I’m fine, really. I have to confess this isn’t a social call, even though it’s great to see you again. Ted’s disappeared. We had an argument – if you know the truth I’m sure you can guess what it was about. But he’s old now, he drinks too much and suffers from chronic back pain and, in spite of everything, I can’t help worrying about him. I’ve been over and over the whole thing endlessly in my mind and I realise that nothing is as black and white as it seems. And I need to find him so we can at least discuss things a little more calmly. I gathered from Ian at The Queen’s Head that you were in there recently asking after him and I just wondered if you’d had any luck finding him.”
Dominic was thoughtful for a long time, slowly shaking his head. “I’m afraid I have no idea where he is.”
“That’s a shame. So why did you want to see him? If you don’t mind my asking?”
He hesitated. “It was Nicola. She wanted to see him. To clear the air.”
“Oh. Right. The thing is, I discovered a letter from Miranda Cole among his rubbish, saying that the publishers were clamouring for ‘Summers’ after... well, after Nicola’s statement... and he hasn’t responded to it. I don’t know how you feel about that, but I don’t want him to miss this opportunity.”
“No, he shouldn’t miss it. It’d be a tragedy if he missed it. And Anne, I have this... feeling... that Ted’s fine. And that you shouldn’t worry about him. And that he’s going to contact you very soon.”
“You have a feeling?”
“An intuition. I get them. Didn’t you know?”
“No, I didn’t. Are they reliable?”
“Totally reliable. And I know everything’s fine. And that everything’s going to be fine.”
Anne was scrutinising him through half-closed eyes. “Dominic, is there something you’re not telling me?”
“No! No! Absolutely not!”
“Well, I’ll just have to trust in your intuition, then,” she murmured rather doubtfully. “What I can’t understand is why he didn’t just tell me what he was planning with Nicola from the start. I would have thought it was stupid and I would have disapproved but I wouldn’t have left him because of it. And I always knew he was dissatisfied with ‘Tyranny’.”
“Maybe he just didn’t want you to think he was cheating.”
She did not reply and Dominic knew she was considering the irony of his unfortunate choice of words.
“You should be together, Anne – you and Ted. I’ve always thought so. I hope that doesn’t sound presumptuous.”
“No. No, it doesn’t,” she said, though she was a little surprised by his candour. Then she lapsed again into silence, thinking about what he had said. She was so preoccupied she did not notice the young woman who had suddenly appeared by their table. Then she looked up and knew at once who she was, though in the eyes which were staring back at her she saw only a question.
“So this is where you’re hiding!” she said to Dominic.
He was on his feet, looking horrified, and Anne followed suit, partly out of politeness but mainly because she wanted to be on a level with Nicola Carson. They were almost exactly the same height. Dominic switched on a beaming smile. “Darling, this is... this is Anne. An old friend of mine.”
The two women surveyed each other in silence for a moment then Nicola held out her hand. “I’m delighted to meet you.”
Anne took the proffered hand. “I’m delighted to meet you too.” Then she added, “I understand congratulations are in order – on your return to the stage.”
“Thanks,” Nicola replied with a brief laugh, glancing at Dominic, “I’m really enjoying it.”
“And I’m really looking forward to seeing you tonight.”
“Thank you.” Then she turned again to Dominic. “Honey, I’m just off to the theatre now.”
“Okay, I’ll catch you up,” he said and kissed her on the cheek.
As she was turning to go, she smiled again at Anne. “It was nice meeting you.”
“And you.”
Her departure left a momentary vacuum in the air.
“She certainly is beautiful,” murmured Anne.
“Yes, she’s looking great, isn’t she?” Dominic remarked as they sat down again. “It wasn’t the case a few months ago – she was a wreck when I found her in Malvern Hall. It’s because she’s happy. And fulfilled.”
“And in love.”
He smiled in a way which reminded her of the old Dominic – the gawky, overgrown adolescent who had come to meet her in Gooseberries.
“Did she know who I was?”
“No, I don’t think so. I thought perhaps it might be simpler if she didn’t.”
“You’re probably right. I have to be honest, Dominic, for most of the past five years I’ve hated her. But then I realised it wasn’t her I hated, it was the Nicola Carson I’d formed in my mind out of all the lies I’d been told about her – and the lies I’d told myself. The fact was I didn’t know her. I didn’t know anything about her. And I still find it almost impossible to believe that Ted could lie to me so blatantly and consistently, out of pure vindictiveness.”
Dominic considered her words. “I don’t think that was why he lied to you, Anne. He lied to you because when I turned up with my piece of the jigsaw he saw a way of establishing himself as the true author of ‘Tyranny’ and all his other novels. That was all he cared about. But Nicola hadn’t delivered her part of the bargain. He didn’t care about her packets of money. He wanted to be given the acknowledgement he felt he deserved for one reason only – to regain your respect. He wanted you to be proud of him.”
“But I was always proud of him,” she protested. “I never allowed his failure to publish to affect my opinion of him as a writer.”
“No, but it made a difference to him. Even though every writer knows that a manuscript contains exactly the same words in exactly the same order as the published book, they also know, in their heart of hearts, that it’s not really the same.”
Anne responded with silence.
“And there was another reason he did what he did,” said Dominic. “When I first met him, it was I who suggested we involve you. I thought the fact of you being a lawyer would give weight to our cause. Ted was reluctant at first, but then he asked me to talk to you. That was why I came to see you at that coffee shop. ‘But I don’t want you to coerce her in any way,’ he said. ‘Just tell her the facts and see how she reacts. If she wants to have nothing to do with it then leave her be.’ And he said that because he didn’t want to admit he was hoping that going after Nicola might bring you closer – maybe even bring you back to him.”
Anne thought for a long time about his words then snorted once with hollow amusement. “It would have done if only...” She left the sentence hanging in the air.
“If only what?”
“If only he hadn’t told me the truth.”
> *
The stage was bathed in blue light – the light of an Andalusian farmhouse on a summer evening. Nicola, as the youngest daughter of Bernarda Alba, was centre stage, in copious red and orange skirts, yelling at her sister Martirio, “I can’t stand the horror of this house any longer, not after knowing the taste of his mouth! I will be what he wants me to be! With the whole town against me, branding me with their fiery fingers, persecuted by people who claim to be decent, I will put on a crown of thorns right in front of them, like the mistress of any married man!”
A few minutes later she would hang herself, for the love of Pepe el Romano, the man to whom her elder sister is betrothed, the sister with the dowry. But she has been with him – her petticoat is covered with straw and she has brought shame on the household. Then comes the inevitable showdown with her mother, Bernarda – she seizes the old woman's cane, snaps it across her knee and tosses it aside. “This is what I do with the tyrant’s rod! Don’t take one step more! No one gives me orders now but Pepe!”
From time to time during the performance, Anne had glanced among the darkened faces of the audience, trying to spot Dominic but he was nowhere to be seen. Perhaps he was watching from the wings. She found herself thinking about Ted, about Ted and Nicola, and about how this girl striding about the stage before her could so easily have turned the head of a disillusioned middle-aged dreamer. Then she thought about Nicola and Dominic and Dominic’s weirdly meandering route to the fulfilment of his own dreams. But then, as Adela's hanging corpse was displayed as a stark shadow slanting on a wall, she thought about Nicola and something happened to her which took her completely by surprise. Her eyes filled with tears.
Nicola, smiling and radiant, appeared second to last in the curtain call, to cheers and thunderous applause. Anne hoped she would not upstage Dame Helen Mellon who was playing Bernarda herself and who finally walked from the wings into the centre of her line of daughters. But the applause which greeted her – which greeted the entire performance – was tumultuous. It was as though Nicola, as the daughter who had committed suicide for love rather than be constrained by a tyrannical mother and a tyrannical society, had bestowed a kind of benediction upon the play by being alive for love, by being spared.
*
Anne had been privileged to see – it was later agreed by even the most hardboiled critics who were famously snooty about film stars stepping onto a stage – one of the greatest performances of Nicola’s – indeed, of anybody’s – career. ‘No corner of the human psyche was left unexplored,’ wrote one. ‘No woman will ever feel the same about being a woman after seeing Nicola Carson in this role,’ wrote another. Dominic knew it too, though he did not need critics to tell him. As soon as the curtain fell, he made his way through the barrage of excited chatter, trying to avoid getting caught in conversation, towards the private entrance leading to the dressing rooms. Anne, he noted with relief, was nowhere to be seen – she must have already left to catch the train home. He made it to the back stairs marked ‘Private’, ran up them, punched a code into the keypad by the door at the top, walked the few paces along the corridor, knocked and entered and was greeted by the spectacle of his beloved resplendent before him still in costume. He crossed the room and took her in his arms. “You were amazing!” he cried, “Absolutely bloody amazing!”
“Just doing my job.”
“That wasn’t a job! That was passion! That was genius! You’re so inside Adela now, you’ve practically become her!”
“Oh bollocks! It’s a job. And one I have to work bloody hard at! Especially tonight! I wasn’t inside Adela, I was acting! Because throughout the performance I just had one thought on my mind, one thought that’s been bugging me all evening – who was that woman you were talking to?”
Dominic was completely taken aback. “What woman?”
“You know perfectly well what woman! The woman you were in a huddle with at the hotel!”
“She’s just... someone I knew in publishing.”
“Well she didn’t look like someone in publishing. She looked like someone who’d come up from the provinces. And I’ve just got this weird feeling... that I’ve seen her before somewhere. In Wemborne.”
“Wemborne?”
“Yes, Wemborne. I did live in that dump for sixteen years, on and off, and in a place like that you see the same faces – in the bank, in the chemist, in the supermarket. And I notice people – it’s part of my job – especially people like her. Smart, attractive women are a rarity in that place – they stick out like a sore thumb. And when she was shaking my hand there was something, something in her eyes, as though she knew me or had some connection with me. And I thought, why should Dominic be talking to someone from Wemborne? The only possible connection with Wemborne is Ted. And then it all fell into place. He mentioned how smart and good-looking she was. He joked about what an incongruous couple they made. And she’d be about that age. And she’s called Anne. I may be putting two and two together and making five but I don’t think so. That woman’s Ted’s wife.”
Dominic was silent for an age. Then he heaved a sigh. “It’s no good. I can’t keep this up any longer.”
“Keep what up?”
“Let’s go back to the hotel... there are some things I have to tell you.”
“If you’ve got something to tell me you can tell me now! What the fuck’s going on, Dominic?”
He sank down into the chair in front of the dressing table. He looked at his hands. “Nicola, everything that’s happened since you met Ted... and I mean everything... has been down to me. You may think it’s been down to Ted but it hasn’t, it’s been down to me. If I hadn’t done what I did, none of this would’ve happened. You would never have got involved with Ted and ‘Loss’ would never have existed... and your life would’ve been very different.”
She was simply staring at him. “I haven’t the faintest idea what you’re talking about.”
“You told me, that night... the night we made love for the first time, that when you met Ted he’d just received a letter... from a publisher. It was from the Dragon’s Head – the little publishing house I worked for and which he’d had high hopes of. It was a letter of rejection but it also contained some sarcastic remarks which, in his already depressed state of mind, he found deeply distressing and humiliating.”
“I know. He told me. But how do you know so much about it?”
“Because I wrote it.”
Nicola’s face became a grimace of incomprehension.
“Well, strictly speaking it was Sonia – one of the secretaries – who wrote it. We made it look like it came from my boss – it had his signature on it. But I was behind it.”
She was shaking her head in disbelief. “But... why would you do that? I thought you loved ‘Tyranny’. I thought you thought it was a masterpiece.”
“I do. And it is. But I hadn’t read it then.”
“Dominic...?”
“It was all a horrible, horrible coincidence, jumbled up with my weakness and immaturity and cowardice. I’d just shown Alistair my pile of infantile crap I called a novel, assuming he’d recognise it as a work of genius and publish it instantly, instead of which he told me the truth. He let me down very gently but I’d worked on that novel for eight years – I’d put my life and soul into it – it was my life, and I was totally devastated. I just wanted to lash out at something, at somebody. And the first thing I saw when I came out of his office was Ted’s manuscript. Or, at least, some pathetic marketing thing he’d cooked up...”
He paused a moment, still staring at his hands. “It wasn’t just the letter, though. It was what happened afterwards. My job was to wade through the slush pile and pick out anything that looked promising. But I never even glanced at Ted’s sample chapters. In my distraught state I just shoved them aside. They got covered with papers, I don’t know – my desk was always chaos – and there they stayed, in a stack of other stuff, for more than a year.”
“And no one knew?”
&nb
sp; “No. It was just one of dozens of manuscripts in the slush pile – and the slush pile was my responsibility anyway. There was a pro-forma attached to every submission which we had to fill out and send back to Sonia so she could write to the author and tell them whether the book had been rejected or whether they wanted to see the whole manuscript on the strength of the samples. I just wrote on his form... well, something rude, I’m afraid, then chucked it in the rejection bin, thinking it was the actual sample. I was in such a state I didn’t know what I was doing.
“And then I forgot about it, I was so busy with my own misery. But the next day Sonia came over with the form I’d defaced and asked me what I was playing at. When I told her about his proposal – how he’d given originality as his USP – she smiled. ‘Yeah, we’ve had submissions from people like that before,’ she said. ‘Think they’re too high and mighty for a bit of self-promotion. Don’t worry, we’ll give him a taste of the old Sonia magic in his rejection letter. That’ll soon put him in his place.’
“I felt uneasy about it, even then. I was afraid she might get into trouble – that we both might. But she told me she forged Alistair’s signature on all rejection letters anyway, so he’d never even know.”
“So Alistair Milner never even saw his sample chapters?”
“Yes, he did. That was the next phase. Our office was total chaos – it was small, cramped, with too many desks and too many people for the space available. There was stuff everywhere – books, papers, magazines, computers, you name it. So more than a year later, Alistair was edging past someone to get to his office and brushed against my desk and caused an avalanche. He crouched down and picked a few things up, in a right pet. I got up to help him but then something caught his eye...”
“Ted’s chapters.”
“Yes. The folder containing Ted’s chapters. ‘The Tyranny of Love?’ he said, picking it up. ‘That’s a promising title. What is it?' I said I didn’t know but he already seemed intrigued. He was reading it – just standing there in the middle of the room, reading it. He propped his bum against my desk and carried on reading it. He started to laugh – I’d never heard him laugh like that before. Then he took the pages into his office and shut the door, re-emerging about an hour later practically wetting himself with excitement. 'Who is this Edward Haymer?’ he kept asking. ‘Has he published?’