‘Bleh,’ Mannie says dryly, miming retching. ‘Pass me the sick bag.’
Jonno ignores her. ‘Any sign of the old folks yet?’
Mannie shakes her head. ‘Should we shout?’
‘Let’s give them five minutes.’ He opens the fridge and examines the bottle nestling in the door. ‘Mmm, Sancerre. Want one, Alex?’
It’s business as usual – except that it used to be her and Cal raiding the fridge, now she’s sitting there like a gooseberry while her brother makes eyes at his girl.
In the whole of her life, she has never felt lonely, until now. It seems to Mannie that she had lost everything: Callum, Brian, even her job is hanging by a thread. Knowing, as she now does, that she can never be with Brian Henderson, she is battling as valiantly as she can against the ferocious power of her feelings. Sticking a label on them has helped, a bit. It makes her feel marginally less insane, but does little to lessen the intensity of her emotions.
Perhaps catching something of her thoughts, Alex asks, ‘You going to be okay, Mannie? Is Cal coming?’
Is Cal coming. Cal. The kindness her ex has shown makes Mannie’s heart hurt, but she still doesn’t know whether they will ever get back together – really together – or be able to recapture the love they once knew.
‘I don’t know,’ she admits. ‘He said he’d try.’
She’s sick with nerves. The whole family is going to be present at tonight’s celebration. The whole family. Including Joyce Henderson and her son, Brian. She feels herself trembling and tries to still it. She hasn’t seen Brian again and the last time she spoke to him was when he telephoned from New York, flirting with her, responding to her advances, more or less opening the door to an affair. And then had come the revelation.
Before Brian, after Brian.
Before Cal, after Cal.
Phases of my life.
Sanity, insanity, the wilderness of the space between them.
Jonathan thinks, Sis is still looking peaky.
His big sister. He remembers her aged – what? – ten? He’d have been five, just starting school and scared as hell, though it was only the village school and he knew other kids there. She held his hand that day, led him through the gates and right to the door of his class room, promised to be there at break time. She looked after him. Mannie has always looked after him. Perhaps because of the age gap and the gender difference they never developed the intimacy some siblings have, but they never squabbled much either. He knows – because it’s a family joke – that Mannie was jealous of his arrival into the world, but by the time he was old enough to be conscious of her sisterly presence, she’d got over that. It seems so strange that now their roles have reversed and he’s the one trying to look after her.
He says, as casually as he can, ‘It’ll be all right tonight, Mannie. Brian’s wife’ll be there, and Joyce. You needn’t sit near him or anything.’
She’s as pale as a ghost and he can see her hand clenching on a tissue or something. He hates what happened, but he has done what he could to sort it, with Alex’s help, of course. He perseveres, slanting the conversation away from the personal. ‘Typical of Tom bloody Coop to muscle in where he sniffs out the chance of some reflected glory.’
‘He’s got to do something,’ Mannie says, her hand still clenched, ‘to recapture the high ground after Mum turned down the Ministerial post.’
‘She was right. It was a way of trying to stifle her outspokenness.’
‘Course it was,’ Alex says. ‘They would have effectively pulled your mother’s teeth by taking her into the Cabinet.’
‘Mum said the First Minister might be coming tonight.’
‘Really? Why?’
Mannie laughs, the sound a little hollow. ‘Didn’t you know, he picked a Celtic Rock track for Desert Island Discs. Blatant posturing, of course, aimed at winning votes, I’m not sure he’s actually into Dad’s kind of music at all. But,’ she adds, ‘I think he wants to associate himself with the Scirocco Bursary. And Maitland Forbes, of course.’
‘I wouldn’t mind associating myself with Maitland Forbes,’ Alex grins.
Jon frowns at her, but ends up smiling. He can’t help himself, just looking at Alex is enough to make him glow with love and pride and sheer, breathless happiness. ‘The Bursary is a great idea of Mum’s. It’s her way of keeping her father’s name alive.’
‘And openly acknowledging him.’
‘And putting horrible little Justin Thorneloe in his place.’
The laughter this time is universal. Six months ago, on Mull, their mother made a number of decisions. Through Maureen Armstrong and with the agreement of her birth mother, she placed the story of her adoption with one of the leading newspapers and coupled it with the announcement of a Bursary, which she is funding. The Scirocco Bursary for a promising young actor is to be formally launched tonight.
In addition, she persuaded Maitland Forbes to become the saviour of the Rivo Trust, which is to be wound up and reborn as the Maitland Forbes Foundation. Tonight’s event which, at Susie’s insistence, is to be held in the Town Hall at Hailesbank and not in some swanky Edinburgh venue, is the formal launch of both the Bursary and the Foundation and Celtic Rock, celebrating their new album, is to play.
‘What a rat that journalist is,’ Jonno adds when he can make his voice heard. ‘Mum really took the wind out of his sails by preempting his attempts to dig what he thought might be dirt.’
‘Dirt?’ A voice comes from the doorway. ‘What dirt? That reminds me, Jonno, have you remembered to feed the chickens?’
Jon, who has grown up with his mother’s beauty and is inured to it, nevertheless feels the breath sucked out of him as he swings round and sees her. Susie’s hair, catching the light from one of the spots in the ceiling, shimmers and shines and reflects its golden glory back onto her face. A brush dipped in the same colour has painted her eyes, and although they glitter, they seem to promise infinite depth. High cheekbones give her face structure and a beauty that will never diminish. Recent stresses have whittled away the small, cruel bulges of middle age, so that her lustrous gold evening dress skims neatly over her breasts and stomach and hips and falls swirling to the floor.
He says breathlessly, ‘Mum. You look fantastic.’
‘Wow,’ Alex murmurs. ‘That’s an amazing dress, Mrs Wallace.’
Susie sweeps into the room, her dress rustling gently on the floor. ‘I wish you’d call me Susie, Alex. And thank you.’
‘I feel really underdressed.’ Alex pats her floral chiffon worriedly.
‘Not at all, you look wonderful, terribly pretty. I have deliberately overdressed. Any wine left, Jon? And I’m ravenous, I’d better have something to eat.’
‘I put out a plate of your melting nanoseconds.’ Jon hands her a glass of Sancerre and reaches for the biscuits. ‘Oh! There’s only one left,’ he says, puzzled. Surely – there had been a dozen biscuits – Mannie? He glares at his sister, but she’s deep in thought, her mind clearly in another world. ‘Mannie?’ He says sharply.
‘Hmm? What?’
‘Have you eaten all the biscuits?’
‘Biscuits? Have I?’
‘How could you?’
‘Sorry. I ... I wasn’t thinking.’
‘Something up?’ Archie appears, every inch the rocker in denims and leather jacket and a simple tee shirt.
‘Mannie’s eaten all the bloody biscuits!’
Archie laughs. ‘That’s great,’ he says, crossing the kitchen and giving his frail-looking daughter a hug. ‘She must be feeling a bit better.’
Susie says, ‘It’s fine Mannie, I’m glad you had them. Jon, I’d rather have something savoury anyway, there’s some really good olives in the fridge, and some hummus.’
As suddenly as it flared, Jon’s ill temper subsides.
‘Okay,’ he says. ‘I’ll forgive you, Mannie. This time.’
His voice sounds menacing, but he smiles at Mannie as he says it so that she knows he’s teasing.
/>
Archie doesn’t wait as they all have drinks and nibbles, but sets off into Hailesbank to do soundchecks with the band. It’s his evening as much as Susie’s, but he doesn’t really think of it that way. Celtic Rock’s album has already hit the charts, the tour is to start in a couple of weeks, he’s already done the rounds of the television studios and radio stations and been featured in several colour supplements and magazines.
No, this is Susie’s night. The family is turning out in force to support her. Joyce Henderson will be there. Archie has met her, now, on several occasions, and has (rather to his surprise) developed a kind of respect for the woman. She did what she had to do, aged eighteen, in another time and a different society. She did it for Susie as much as herself, to give her the best chance in life. And now that she has rediscovered her daughter, she’s coping with real dignity with the kind of publicity she could never have anticipated.
Brian Henderson is another matter. He’s undoubtedly charming and his ability as a businessman is not in question. Archie still isn’t sure how culpable he was in the whole Mannie affair and he doesn’t really want to know. They are working hard, all of them, to help Mannie through a devastating experience.
There’s something about the man that Archie instinctively dislikes. Perhaps he’s too charming. Perhaps he takes advantage of it. Whatever, Archie is happy to distance himself from ‘Uncle Brian’, and to help his daughter to keep well clear of him too.
To give the man his due, Brian was horrified to learn that he was Mannie’s uncle and insisted that Jonathan stay on in his job at CommX. Jon swears that Brian is really professional and that working with him is turning out not to be too difficult. Only Mannie still finds the situation hard. She hasn’t been able to simply put aside her feelings, although she is containing them.
Poor Mannie.
As a family, though, they’ve never been closer – that’s one positive outcome from this whole difficult period.
He pushes open the door to the big hall, where his band is already warming up.
‘Hi Jake, hi Sandie, everything in order?’
‘Cool.’
Sandie has gone Goth and is all in black. Her hair is darker than a raven’s wing, her eyes heavily rimmed with kohl, the only colour a slash of scarlet on her mouth.
‘You playing your new song?’ Sandie asks. ‘Need anything from us?’
Archie considers the offer. He’s pleased with the new album. Wrenched from his soul while he was a helpless witness to the gradual meltdown of his family, it was the most difficult thing he has ever produced – and maybe because of that he feels it’s the best. Just one thing defeated him: the tune that came to him months ago, at the beginning of Susie’s breakdown.
He wasn’t able to find the words it needed before the album was finished and launched and the niggle remained, irritating him, until now.
He started working on the song shortly after he and Susie came back from Mull. In the couple of days they snatched for themselves in the magical remoteness of the island, they reconciled their differences and rediscovered their love. The words came then, as Sandie had said they would.
‘I’d like to play it on my own, Sandie,’ he says in response to her question. ‘That okay?’
‘Cool.’
I’ll sing it for Susie.
Susie makes her entrance, as she planned it, dramatically.
A sea of faces turns towards her and applause erupts. As she draws breath and begins the long walk to the dais, the faces begin to separate and become individual.
There’s the First Minister, beside Tom Coop, the two of them pretending she never insulted them by refusing the Ministerial post. There’s no room for sentiment in politics, she reminds herself, only factional advantage.
There’s Hugh Porteus, no longer Chairman of Rivo, but Chairman-elect of the new Maitland Forbes Foundation. He has earned it. He worked tirelessly to help put everything right.
Mo Armstrong. Perhaps she is an instrument of the Party, but she rallied round when Susie really needed her. And Karen, unquestioningly loyal, a friend indeed.
She lifts her chin an inch, widens her smile a fraction, adds intensity to her gaze and marches on. The applause redoubles.
There’s Joyce Henderson – my mother – smiling and clapping and trying to wipe a tear away surreptitiously. This evening will tie up loose ends in both our lives. The Bursary is an acknowledgement of who I am and where I come from, my relationship with her and with the long-dead Jimmy Scirocco – my brilliantly accomplished, pitifully wasted father.
There’s Brian Henderson. My brother.
Susie looks instinctively for Mannie. She’s concerned, as she has been for weeks, about how her daughter will cope with this evening.
She sees that she needn’t have worried. The family has closed ranks around Mannie in a protective horseshoe. Myra and Jen, her old friends, are there. Jon and Alex are by her side – and Callum.
Callum has come! Thank God. As Susie makes her way to the seat reserved for her at the heart of her family, she holds out a hand and grips his fingers in a brief sign of appreciation. She sees him touch Mannie lightly on the shoulder, smile encouragement at her, pull her seat aside so that she can sit down. So he still cares for Mannie, despite everything. It’s still early in the journey they face, but perhaps things will come right between them, in the end.
‘Got your speech ready, Mum?’ Jon asks. ‘Nervous?’
‘Yes. And no.’
She isn’t nervous, she feels elated. If her life over the past months has been a rollercoaster that left her stomach lurching at times, the ride has stopped on a high and she has the strongest of feelings that it’s not going to plummet to the depths any more.
I am so lucky, she thinks, looking around her. I have friends who are steadfast and a family that’s come through fire and emerged strong as forged steel. I know who I am and what I value.
She turns her face upwards to scan the gallery, where batteries of cameras are ranged ready to film the speeches. The BBC is there, and Scottish Television. A crew from an arts programme in London. A team that has flown over from Los Angeles, intrigued by the involvement of their star, Maitland Forbes, in this quaint venture. Among them, a thin, pale face, dead eyes staring right at her.
It’s Justin Thorneloe, his sharp little ferret’s teeth truly blunted on his own ambition.
‘Mum?’
Mannie’s voice at her ear brings her thoughts back. She turns.
‘All right, darling?’
Mannie is still pale, but she’s smiling.
‘Callum came,’ she mouths, her eyes threatening to water.
Susie feels tearful in response.
‘I know,’ she says, tucking Mannie’s slippery hair behind her ear and kissing her cheek warmly. ‘I know. I’m so pleased.’
‘Mum,’ Jonathan hisses on the other side, ‘It’s time for your speech. Go!’
Everything she has done feels right.
Turning down the Ministerial post so that she can still speak her mind freely about the things she believes in.
Setting up the Scirocco Bursary to acknowledge her past and bring both sides of her life together.
Succeeding in persuading Maitland to come to the rescue of the Rivo Trust by setting up the Maitland Forbes Foundation.
Being here with her family.
Enjoying Archie’s success.
She stands, feels her dress settle luxuriously round her ankles, makes her way to the microphone, faces the audience.
‘First Minister, Ladies and Gentlemen, friends and family,’ she starts, smiling around her, ‘I am, as you know, a person of passionate beliefs and fierce loyalties. And tonight, I am delighted to say, I am able to bring together all the things that are important in my life. As I bring you news of the new Bursary and the charitable Foundation we are launching here, I feel prouder than I can tell you about my cherished causes and about my family.
‘My happiness is complete.’
Sh
e means what she says, but after she has finished her speech, after the applause, after Maitland has spoken and been lauded and applauded and much photographed, after she has posed with Joyce Henderson and there have been more photographs and more filming and – inevitably – yet another session of photographs at which the First Minister has smoothly and graciously taken centre stage, Archie appears again.
‘Thank you, folks, thank you.’ He holds up a hand to dampen down the applause. ‘There’s one song that’s missing off Celtic Rock’s new album.’
Susie looks at him, puzzled. Archie is holding his oldest guitar, the one she bought him when she came back to him after ‘Calgary Bay’. To her eyes, he looks as boyish as he did then. His hair might be white and his skin no longer youthful, but his eyes shine with love just as they did all those years ago.
‘I couldn’t find the words for it, that was the problem. You all know about the various twists and turns Susie’s life has taken this year. It’s been a journey of discovery and along the way there have been many thorns as well, thankfully, as roses.
‘To most of you, Susie is an actress, or a lobbyist, a passionate believer in the arts, or education, or a daughter, or a mother, or a friend. To me she is, quite simply, the most wonderful person in the world and this song is an all too inadequate expression of my love for her.’
He plugs in his guitar, swings one foot onto a chair, pulls the microphone closer to his mouth and begins to sing.
Only one thing I’m good for – Loving Susie.
One thing I’d die for – Loving Susie.
Beginning to end, my friend
I’ll always be – Loving Susie ...
Susie smiles, closes her eyes and lets the music fill her heart and top up her happiness to overflowing.
Archie, she thinks, you’re not bad for an old rocker.
THE END
Author’s note:
Thank you for taking the time to read Loving Susie. If you enjoyed it, please consider telling your friends or posting a short review. Word of mouth is an author’s best friend, and much appreciated.
The Heartlands Series
Loving Susie: The Heartlands series Page 29