She’d read up on dreams, including the old chestnut about falling from a great height, and if you hit the ground you never wake up. For Bobbie it was something similar: if the door opened and it came into the room, she knew she would never wake up.
That night the dream played out as usual, the footsteps on the stairs, slowly making their way up; the turning of the doorknob and herself waking up screaming, drenched in sweat. She must have screamed aloud this time because the doorknob turned and her father came through the door. He sat on the bed, kind, gentle, comforting. Then he stripped himself naked and slipped into bed with her. Roberta, as she was then called, never suffered the nightmare again. The new one had begun. The door had opened and it had walked through. And this time she was awake. And this time she was dead. Once, sometimes twice a week, the father made his visits to her room. Did the mother know? Probably, but it was never spoken of. From eleven to fourteen the father would come to her. He told her to close her eyes, but she didn’t need telling. They were squeezed shut in the hope that nothing could penetrate her corpse-like body.
Then he was struck down by a stroke: a stroke of good fortune for her. At fifteen Roberta ran away. But not until she had crept into his room. He was lying there one morning, after sucking down his breakfast through a straw, silent and supine, his eyes like one of those creepy paintings that followed you around the room. He could see what was coming: she made sure he saw what was coming, as she slowly pulled back the sheets and stuck a pair of scissors into his scrotum.
She then ran away to London, and into the arms of the first boy who showed her any interest. A young man from Clapham South. A wannabe villain, a gonnabe drunk and, if they married, a probable wife beater.
They married in a registry office. Paste sandwiches at the pub for a reception. The honeymoon at a Butlin’s holiday camp in Skegness. Roberta didn’t know where Skegness was when the boy first proposed it. It didn’t sound very exotic, but it did sound very far away. In Scotland, perhaps? Far away from the dingy two rooms they’d moved into in Battersea. But Skegness really wasn’t that far away; and really nowhere near far enough away from the dingy rooms in Battersea.
It rained – and the gags poured down about that being a bonus, because you never want to leave your room on your honeymoon. But Roberta wanted to leave that room. The boy drank all day at the bar with some fellow soaks, and didn’t make love to her at night. She was so alone.
Back at the dingy two rooms in Battersea, the blows came down hard and heavy, as the boy sank into his cups. Drenching his fears and inadequacy with booze, he’d never done right by Roberta, either in the bedroom or in the bank account. He just wasn’t up to it, and Roberta even thought he might be a queer. This boy just wasn’t set up for life, and certainly not for his chosen profession as a thief. He was one of life’s patsies and maybe a pansy, yet he really wanted to be a thief, a villain. It was his ambition, but never his calling. One night in the pub, a mate gave him a shooter to look after. Instead of hiding it away, he walked around the flat with it tucked in his waistband, admiring himself in the mirror with it. He thought he looked the business, thought it put a couple of inches on him. It scared her, so she made him hide it until his mate returned for it, though he never did. He had another gun and picked up a seven for shooting someone with it.
On a warehouse job, he took his usual position as the look-out. Not smart enough for breaking and entering or strong enough for the lifting. Just the looking. He didn’t spot the two plain-clothes coppers coming out of the pub across the street. But they clocked him all right: furtive, nervous and looking for all the world like a look-out. He got pinched.
That was Roberta’s cue to leave. During visiting time in the Scrubs, he advised her to start a new life. She needed no prompting; her bags were already packed and sitting in the car outside. The car belonged to a dashing young racing driver she’d met in a nightclub. He turned out to be a getaway driver, and got nicked while speeding away from a pay-roll job in Leatherhead. He got a six-year stretch. She wasn’t going to wait for him either.
She then answered an ad in the London Evening News for ‘models required’ and ended up with a job at the Raymond Revue Bar. Standing there stock-still and starkers, save for some ‘arty’ head gear. If a draught blew in and her nipples stood to attention, she had to leave the stage. But she met some interesting people and soon found a flat share in Earls Court with two other girls working at the Revue Bar. They were actresses training at the Webber Douglas Academy of Drama. They saw the gig as life experience (purely still life was the joke) and a quick way to make money and get an equity card. They liked young Roberta and took her under their wing, and suggested she change her name to Bobbie as a stage name, because all the world’s a stage. And, with her looks, maybe she should try her hand at acting and apply to drama school.
For the two and a half years of the flat share in Earls Court, Bobbie was the perfectly pliant Pygmalion student. She absorbed the two middle-class girls, soaked up their mannerisms, their RP accents, their affectations – of which they were legion, and all of them aspirational. They had a serious game plan: it was Hollywood or bust for these two stargazers. Each determined to be a tour de force! Not force to tour, treading the boards in half-empty reps around the country, with the indignity of shared changing rooms and damp digs. If Hollywood didn’t beckon in three years, they were determined to marry, and marry well. Bobbie read what they read, Shakespeare; Shaw; Chekhov; the Greeks – Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides; Ibsen; Tennessee Williams; Tatler, Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, Debretts. They took her to the theatre, and to the art-house cinema they were all watching at the time. The French New Wave: Charbol’s Le Beau Serge; Truffaut’s 400 Blows; Goddard’s A bout de soufflé. The Italian Neo-realism: Rossellini’s Rome, Open City; De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves. But it was Fellini’s La Dolce Vita, that was her epiphany. Anita Ekberg, shoeless, strapless, godless, dancing in the Trevi Fountain. In that moment, that image on the silver screen, all her dreams crystallized. Bobbie saw the sweet life she knew she had always wanted …
* * *
‘And the photo album?’ asked Vince.
‘I found it in a jumble sale, in an old box of stuff. I had no photos of my own, so … I was twelve at the time, just after the bastard started … ‘tucking me in’ as he called it. I used to hide it under my bed, then look at it after he left. Then I found myself looking at it all the time. I pretended they were my family. I told myself that my foster parents were just looking after me for a few days, and soon my real parents in the photo album would come and pick me up and take me back home, and the nightmare would be over. That’s how I got through it. I knew every inch of that garden, what the house looked like, what my room looked like. I imagined stables, the names of the dogs; my father’s job, GP; my mother, a teacher; my brother …’
Vince broke her reverie by taking the album and putting it on the coffee table. ‘Maybe it’s time to put it away now?’
‘It’s the only thing that kept me going. The only thing that stopped me from killing myself.’
‘But it’s the past. And it’s not real.’
She turned sharply towards him, with a defiant edge. ‘It was real to me.’
Vince didn’t argue, and he didn’t have any answers for her either. It meant reaching into a realm he knew little about. He could help her by getting practical, though. He got up and went over to a large ebonized ormolu bureau, which looked as if it weighed a ton. It didn’t, in fact, but it was heavy enough. He dragged it over to the front door.
‘What are you doing?’
‘The days of not having a lock on your door are over,’ he said, sliding it against the door. ‘You said that Pierce was always polite and courteous to you, right?’
She nodded.
‘Well, he’s not that way now, which tells me Jack’s gone and he’s not coming back. And whatever privileges you enjoyed, they’re over. And this place’ – his hand led her eye around the room, which was stuffed with art a
nd antiques – ‘is up for grabs. And you’ve got to leave town.’
‘Where will I go?’
‘Come on, Bobbie, we’ve been through this – you’re not little Miss New Forest. You’re the babe that’s been out the woods for a long time.’
Bobbie managed a small laugh. She stood up and walked over to him.
‘It’s the first time you’ve called me by my first name.’
‘Well, it’s the first time you’ve been straight with me.’
‘The first time I’ve been straight with anyone in a long time.’
‘Not even Jack?’
‘He doesn’t know what I’ve just told you. No one does.’
‘Why me?’
They were only inches apart. Vince’s hands reached out to her. She took them and their fingers laced together. He could smell the sweet brandy scent of her breath, filtered through her lipstick. He’d always loved the smell of lipstick.
‘I thought you were going to kiss me after I slapped you in your hotel.’
‘Is that why you slapped me?’
She nodded. ‘Corny, uh?’
‘You’ve been watching too many movies.’
‘I’ve been wanting to kiss you since—’
He cut her dead with a kiss.
They lay in each other’s arms, under silk sheets, and under the silk canopy of an Emperor-sized four-poster bed. It was a French antique that could have been lifted from the Palace of Versailles and, knowing Jack’s dealings with the shadier side of the antiques business, it may well have been. The ambience of the room was redolent with Jack’s touch, his sense of grandeur, bombast and Napoleonic ego.
Vince, wide awake, studied Bobbie with her eyes closed, the hint of a contented smile on her face; the tears and fears seemingly vanished. She was as strong a contender for the definition of ‘beautiful’ as he had come across. But not all his. In this room he couldn’t forget the previous occupant of the bed, under the silk canopy and sheets. The king usurped? He wasn’t sure, not yet.
Her eyes opened, aware of his gaze. ‘Penny for your thoughts?’ she asked in a sleepy, sing-song voice.
‘What brought you down to Brighton?’
‘It’s where my mother was from, I think.’ Her hand moved across his chest, tracing his musculature.
‘She lived down here?’
‘I think so. But I’m a foundling.’
Vince lifted himself up to get a better look at the foundling, the first one he’d ever met outside the pages of Tom Jones. With elbow on pillow, head propped in hand, with his free one he traced her profile. She gave him a playful nip when his forefinger reached her lips.
‘Ouch. Where were you found?’
‘On the steps of a church.’
‘In a basket?’
She kissed his finger better, held his hand to her breast and said, ‘No. I was wrapped in my mother’s dress – or what I assumed was my mother’s dress.’
‘The turquoise one?’
Bobbie yawned, and repeated lazily, ‘The turquoise one.’
The full meaning of Bobbie’s sentimental attachment to the slightly worn and faded dress, with a tear hidden by a brooch, was clear to Vince now. ‘What church?’ he asked.
‘I don’t know. I was moved about a lot and the records got lost.’
‘Then how do you know your mother was from Brighton?’
‘I don’t, not really. I was like you, a detective. I was given the dress to keep, and it has a label in it, “Penelope of Brighton”. So I came down to Brighton to find her. I put in some ads in the personals of the Evening Argus. No luck. But I did find out there’d been a dressmaker with a shop called Penelope of Brighton. But she’d died years ago, and the shop died with her. Then it was all dead ends.’
‘So you gave up?’
Bobbie sensed the slight reproving tone in his voice. ‘Aren’t you giving up?’
‘But I’m not looking for my mother.’
‘She did a pretty good job of losing me. I don’t want to hunt her down. It’s not my job. I think about her, and when I do she looks just like me. I think she must have had the same luck as me, as a kid. It couldn’t have been easy for her. She wasn’t being callous. She was young, made a mistake, and did what she thought was right. She wanted the best for me, wanted me to live in a nice house in—’
‘A village in the New Forest, with two black Labradors?’
‘You’re mocking me, Vincent.’
‘No, I’m not. But you’ve been dealt your cards, so nothing you can do about it. You just have to get on with it. All this hiding in fantasy, behind movie-star names … doesn’t seem right.’
‘So what’s your story?
‘Nothing like yours, but it wasn’t happy families either. My old man left us when we were still crawling, and my mother worked herself to an early grave raising us.’
‘You and your brother, not exactly peas in the pod?’
‘Not exactly. But, like I said, that was the card that was dealt and I got on with it. Why did you stay in Brighton?’
‘You’re changing the subject. You don’t like talking about your family?’
‘There’s only Vaughn left, so no, I don’t. And now you’ve changed the subject. And I find the subject, meaning you, endlessly fascinating.’
‘I’m tired.’
‘Me too. But I’m going to keep asking it until you answer me.’
‘You’re being a policeman.’
‘A compromised one.’
She smiled. ‘Does your authority extend to my bed, Detective Treadwell?’
He pulled the silk sheets over both their heads and said, ‘Only if I’m working undercover.’
She laughed and then pulled the sheets back down. ‘That’s corny.’
‘Then tell me, why did you stay in Brighton?’
‘The sea.’
‘Not Jack?’
She shook her head, then in a sing-song voice she intoned: ‘The sea, the sea, the sea …’ until her words faded and her eyes closed. The Valium she had taken earlier must have kicked in, because they stayed closed. He lay on his back, and he could hear her breathing, the steady peaceful rhythm of slumber. The pain in his shoulder was still there, but he knew he’d soon lose it in languid sleep. He closed his eyes.
… The door would be open. Never locked. Never an intruder. Who would dare? The feet adjusting on the black and white marble floor, the acoustics in the hallway unforgiving. Every piece of grit and spec of dust under leather registered. A pin drop was like a tree falling, he thought. You could do a dance … that reminded him of an act he once saw, two tap-dancing spades throwing down sand on the stage, the noise they made, a right fucking racket … the sandman … he was the sandman. Past the broken lift. Padding his way to the staircase. The hand on the ornate gilt banister, steadying himself, cherubs and satyrs smiling at you from every fucking cornice. Regulating his breathing so as not to be heard. But the noises in his head were so loud, terrible acoustics … Undeterred, he climbed until he reached the top floor. The hand on the doorknob, turning slowly, knowing it wasn’t locked, knowing it was never locked, who would dare? Who would fuckin’ dare?
* * *
She screamed. Sat bolt upright and tried to open her heavy eyes struggling against the cobwebs of sleep that had glued her lids shut, trapping her, wanting to keep her locked in the darkness of the nightmare. She suddenly felt hands on her. Her eyes opened to find Vince holding her.
‘What’s wrong?’ he asked.
Breathless, panting: ‘The door … the man at the door!’
He gathered her up. She fought against him, with gulping sobs, but eventually yielding and resting in his arms until the sobs subsided.
‘There’s no one there,’ said Vince. ‘It’s just a bad dream.’
‘I felt … I felt him in the room.’
‘Who was in the room?’ She didn’t answer. ‘Your father?’ Again no answer. ‘Jack?’
It’s not that she didn’t know, because it was always the
same man. It’s just that she felt foolish. She’d given up on her act, and now she felt the rest of her was slipping away, too. The parts of her she didn’t want anyone to see. Reporting your fears and your weaknesses is one thing, but to have people witness first-hand what you’ve reported is another matter entirely. She wasn’t ready, not yet, not with him. She felt too vulnerable, like a child in his arms. And being a child in a man’s arms was never a happy place for her to be. She untangled herself from him and, with a determined voice, said, ‘He was in the room.’
Vince threw back the sheets and went to investigate the bad dream. He grabbed a towel from a chair and wrapped it around his waist, went through the flat’s main hallway and into the living room. And there it was. The heavy, ebonized ormolu bureau was away from the door, almost ostentatiously so, sitting in the centre of the room. The front door itself was wide open.
Vince ran down the stairs, hand on the banister to steady himself. Within seconds he was down all four flights of stairs and in the entrance hall, the marble floor cold under his feet. The street door was wide open. He ran out into the middle of the road, looking for signs of life. Looking and listening for a heavy foot on the pavement, or the fading lights of a speeding car disappearing out of view. He saw nothing, heard nothing: it was strangely quiet, like a history of silence had mounted up. As if nothing had trodden the street or driven along the road in years. He felt as if he had stepped out into reality, still holding the fantasy of Bobbie’s nightmare, and under the radiance of the street lamps realized that it didn’t exist. But the reality before him couldn’t explain the heavy bureau sitting in the middle of the room.
He looked over at the crocus-lined lawn that occupied the centre of the crescent, where a woman was taking her dog out for an emergency visit. The dog was a small grey terrier, she was a large middle-aged brunette. She looked over at him, quickly grabbed up the dog and ran back into her house. Vince looked down and saw the towel had slipped from his waist while running down the stairs. He was naked.
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