by Noel Virtue
‘We saw you at the Albert Hall,’ the one who had kissed her hand said. ‘Wonderful. Wonderful’
‘And so now you can piss off,’ Anthony told them, grinning. ‘Sorry,’ he said to Jean after they’d gone. He did not mention Catherine Truman again. Jean had fallen silent at the mention of the Royal Albert Hall and was staring down at her empty plate. ‘Are you all right? They weren’t supposed to do that. Jean?’
‘I’m fine. The meal was delicious. Really. But I’d like to go. Have we time for a walk? I’d like some fresh air.’
‘Of course. Oh Christ, we should have gone to a bar or somewhere else. You haven’t enjoyed this, have you?’
Jean leant across and kissed him on the cheek.
They walked slowly along Floral Street and down Bedford Street into the Strand. It was still early. The performance began at seven thirty. Away from the restaurant, to which she suspected Anthony had taken her simply to show her off, Jean began to relax. They discussed recent novels Anthony’s publisher had just released, Anthony recounting stories of authors he had met, liked or disliked; the competitive, cut-throat politics of corporate publishing that he confessed to enjoy but which to Jean sounded trite or even harsh. She wondered what she was doing here with him. They arrived back at the Opera House in a silence neither was willing to break.
Some time during the second act Anthony reached across and took her hand, drawing it into his lap, entwining his fingers with hers. He did it so naturally, without any hesitation or fuss that she did not pull away, even when she realized that he had an erection.
It was gone four o’clock in the morning when she arrived back at Acacia Road by taxi. She had warned Aunt Dizzy as well as Christopher that she might be late. One hall light was glowing as she quietly let herself in. She moved straight along the hall and into the kitchen, planning to brew a mug of herbal tea. Her lips felt bruised. Her breasts ached. She was exhausted but wide awake. There was a note sitting on the breakfast table.
Look in the hall. Christopher’s writing. The house was as silent as it ever could be. She retraced her steps, switching on the other hall lights. There was nothing sitting on the table beside the door. Nothing propped up on the floor. She went to turn away but then slowly realized that there was no gap along the walls any longer. Jean blinked. The framed poster was back, as if it had never been missing. Moving closer to examine it, she noticed a small plain card attached to one corner by invisible tape and that the glass had been replaced. On the card was written, 7 am so sorry. Catherine. Jean left the card where it was and returned to the kitchen. She began to feel slightly paranoid. She sat down at the table after finding an opened bottle of gin and rapidly drank three glasses. Someone upstairs was snoring, loudly.
She was woken just after ten the following morning by loud voices downstairs, one in particular, and then laughter. Still half asleep, her muscles aching, head throbbing and a sweet odour still lingering on her skin that immediately brought Anthony’s face, in close up, to mind, she pulled on a dressing-gown and staggered along the hall and down the stairs.
Christopher and Uncle Fergus stood in pyjamas in the morning-room peering along the hall towards the front door. They were holding hands. Christopher was sniggering. Just inside the front door, surrounded by a mountain of luggage and dressed completely in black and white with a huge ascot-like hat on her head with a veil, stood Freida.
As soon as she saw Jean she threw up her arms in an Ethel Merman gesture and cried out, The Devil’s Dyke has returned!’
TEN
Freida was upstairs with Jean, closely examining the mural on the wall of the departed Fallen Nun’s rooms. As soon as she set eyes on the painting she cried out, ‘Bloody Nora, Jean, it’s you!’ and demanded an explanation which Jean was unable to give. ‘How on earth did she manage to see you in the buff?’
‘It could be anyone!’ Jean snapped. ‘With my face.’
And does anyone have that mole just below the curve of your neck? Not a mole shaped like that. It’s you!’
Jean had confessed to having put the mural out of her mind. She had been too distracted to think about it.
‘This speaks volumes. The artist is obviously in love with you. Or she hates you. Look at it. I knew the Nun must have been a dyke.’
‘No you didn’t. Stop being reactionary. Besides, she’s engaged to be married.’
Freida gave Jean a tired, world-weary look and turned her gaze back to the mural.
‘It’s good. In fact I’d say quite stunning. Though your breasts aren’t that small. The empty gin bottles are a bit over the top. Well, well, well. Who would have thought. I’ve only been gone a short while and you have a secret portrait in the attic and rooms full of drop-outs.’ Freida moved to one side of the mural, turned to face Jean and added in a low, mock-serious whisper, ‘What if it ages?’
‘Don’t be flippant. No, I take that back. I need you to be. I’m a little bewildered.’
‘Hardly surprising. Jean, Jean, it’s all very well having Doo Lally here, but the others? A teenage sexually naïve giant with mega-lips who’s in love with his uncle? Your ex-father-in-law who talks to his dead wife behind a locked door?’
‘I shouldn’t have told you that. They both needed a place to live. To stay.’
‘Just like me.’
‘What?’
Freida wasn’t looking at Jean. She appeared to be studying the rest of the room. There was a small fitted kitchen leading off it and a bathroom. There was a wine stain on the carpet, Jean noticed, and a lingering smell of damp.
‘I can’t go back to the house. Now Mandy’s taken over. It’s why I fled. I told you.’
Freida had been in Prague. She had, one night, packed numerous suitcases and, clutching her passport, had taken a taxi to Heathrow; got on the first available flight, which happened to be heading to the Czech Republic. She had booked into an English-speaking hotel and walked the streets, as she put it, like a common tourist. Then she’d flown to New York to stay with an elderly transsexual friend who’d been a woman but decided late in life to revert, if not in a fully physical way, to being a man, because being a woman was too difficult. He lived in the Village so Freida had felt perfectly at ease, whereas she hadn’t in Prague.
‘She’s moved in lock, stock and sex toys with her two friends. Mandy, I mean. She has a couple of simpering little queens who adore her and who she bosses about. They only look about fourteen and spend hours in the bathroom dyeing each other’s hair. Mandy arrived with a van filled with everything she possesses including her boys, as she calls them, and announced she’d come to enrich my life. They’re still there. So I can’t go back.’
‘You want to stay here?’
Freida glanced at Jean and smiled guiltily. She remained silent but nodded.
‘You know I couldn’t deny you,’ Jean told her. ‘You could stay up here or downstairs in the room I made ready for Auntie. But you can’t just let this Mandy have your house. It’s your home! You’ll have to ask them to leave. Do something.’
Freida shrugged.
‘I could have the locks changed. Get them thrown out. I’ve been planning to sell anyway, Jean. It’s too big. I get lonely. Oh, what am I saying? I’m prattling. I’m jet-lagged. I refuse to face going back there. It’s too humiliating after running away. She started redecorating the bathroom two days after she moved in. Painted it pink. Bought frilly lace for my bedroom windows and five Steiff teddy bears to sit on the bed. She gave each of them names. Trips about the place like some demented robotic housewife. Like in that old film, what was it called? Where all the women got transformed. He wrote Rosemary’s Baby.’
Jean remained silent. Freida looked embarrassed and was on the verge of tears. Jean stepped across the room and embraced her, drawing her close. Freida grew rigid, then relaxed. They were still standing like that when Christopher walked in wearing pyjamas and a silk dressing-gown several sizes too small.
‘Mr Fitzpatrick’s shouting,’ he said. ‘In his roo
m. At his wife.’ Then he stopped and stared with widened eyes at the painting on the wall. ‘Jesus,’ he muttered.
‘No, actually it’s Jean,’ Freida said, pulling away from Jean’s embrace. ‘Did we hear you knock?’
‘Sorry,’ said Christopher. He stared at the painting open mouthed and began to wring his hands. His over-large ears turned bright crimson. They matched the colour of his lips.
‘Not seen a naked lady before, huh?’ Freida asked. ‘You’ve sure missed a great deal, sunshine.’
Christopher stopped wringing his hands and sniggered.
‘Where’s Uncle Fergus?’ Jean asked.
‘Gone. Had breakfast. Three slices of toast and two of bacon. He left most of the bacon. I ate it. I’ve made coffee.’
A voice called up the stairs.
‘Cooee! Jean? Where are you? I damn near fell over all these bloody suitcases! Can’t someone move them? Are you leaving? Christ, I hope not.’
Jean hurried Freida and Christopher out into the hallway before Aunt Dizzy tried to ascend the stairs. She locked the door behind her and pocketed the key.
‘I don’t want you telling Auntie about the painting,’ she told Christopher. ‘I’m serious. You weren’t supposed to see it either.’
Christopher’s head was turned away. ‘He’s stopped shouting,’ he said. ‘The coffee will’ve gone cold.’
‘Stepford Wives,’ Jean said to Freida.
‘Good morning, Mr Fitzpatrick!’ Aunt Dizzy’s voice trumpeted upwards. There was a muttered reply Jean did not hear.
‘Am I really?’ shouted Aunt Dizzy.
‘This is a madhouse,’ Freida said, taking Jean’s arm.
Anthony Hibbert kept telephoning. Jean kept making excuses not to see him. During the following week flowers arrived every morning. The arrangements and choice grew larger and more expensive every day. Uncle Fergus came to stay overnight almost every night, arriving sometimes past midnight and often terribly drunk, dressed in a variety of yellow, tan and orange suits. He now wore a tinted monocle. Ivan remained for hours in the garden, accompanied by piles of library books he stacked up around him on the grass like castle turrets. Jean watched him one morning, reaching for one book, reading a little, then placing it back on to a pile to take up another. His actions became rather frenzied, as if he was searching for something within the books’ pages he was desperate to find. He took out with him a flask of tea, a blanket and sandwiches as though he was under siege. Mrs Meiklejohn had begun to greet him across the dividing wall in an ingratiating voice.
Aunt Dizzy spent her time bringing paintings back to the house she had purchased and was stacking them willy-nilly along the walls of the front hall, in readiness, she explained, of their being properly sorted and hung. Most of the paintings were scenes of London that Jean believed were sold cheaply in large numbers at tourist markets. None were well rendered. Most had hideous, garish frames, but at least they were originals and not prints.
Christopher had taken the job at the library and confided in Jean that there were increasing complaints about Mr Fitzpatrick, who, being allowed to take out fifteen books at a time, was doing so every day and then returning them the next. Christopher had not confessed that Mr Fitzpatrick lived in the same house as he was too embarrassed. Everyone was laughing at him behind his back but were terribly polite to his face. The librarians were becoming irritated by his daily appearances and almost total lack of respect.
Freida, installed in the renovated front room, slept for most of the day, getting up and going out only after dark. She had gone to her house in Chiswick twice by taxi after dark and on each occasion stood opposite in darkened shop doorways and watched, as she put it, hordes of young gay and lesbian party-goers pouring in and out of her house as if it had become the latest, trendiest club.
‘Some of them I even know, she admitted. She had bought an overwhelming amount of expensive makeup accessories to cheer herself up and spent much of her time in her room trying out the latest products and entertaining Christopher, who she’d taken a liking to, with diet cokes and digestive biscuits. One morning Jean found Christopher in the kitchen making coffee in full makeup and wearing enormous false eyelashes. Jean was mostly left to her own devices and allowed to take on the role of housekeeper. Sometimes Aunt Dizzy came to sit with her in the morning-room late at night, where Jean sat with a gin or a wine bottle near by for comfort, listening to music and utterly exhausted.
‘She’s got young Christopher in her room again,’ Aunt Dizzy would say, having made herself comfortable in the best armchair, putting plastic rollers in her wig and with a lit cigar resting in an ashtray beside her. ‘She’s stolen him from me, Jean. It isn’t fair. She’s an usurper. I know she’s your best friend, but she couldn’t possibly have anything more in common with the lad than I have. Uncle Fergus is not happy, I can tell you. He told me in the strictest confidence that he fears Christopher might desert him. He doesn’t deserve that at his age.’ Jean had been quietly consuming glass after glass of a cheap Hungarian wine at the time and would have been perfectly content to be left alone. William had failed to reappear. He had not telephoned either, from New York or anywhere else. She was uneasy about the framed poster of herself that Catherine Truman had apparently stolen and returned. Christopher had found it on the front steps and brought it indoors. When she’d taken it down from its place in the hall where he’d rehung it, to look at it more closely, she realized that it had, sometime during its absence, been removed from its frame and then rather unprofessionally put back. There were two small rips in one corner that she was certain had not been there before. Freida was too distracted by her home invasion to be sympathetically interested. Aunt Dizzy was obsessed with her almost daily outings to buy paintings and now with her conviction that Christopher was being led astray. Christopher was simply being Christopher. Ivan Fitzpatrick continued to keep speech to a minimum and to hide himself behind his mountains of library books. He had also begun to have long chats with Mrs Meiklejohn. Jean suspected that he had been to visit her. In a house full of guests Jean had no one to talk to. She felt more isolated than when she had been alone. She was growing addled and was losing patience. Anthony was poised with bated breath, it appeared, for her to call him. Every note, with the daily flowers, professed as much. Jean began to spend more and more time alone in her room upstairs. It was the largest bedroom in the house, and the solidity of the walls and the solid, extra-thick door offered certain quietude, away from the business of the others which had begun to pall. Especially when Uncle Fergus was visiting or staying overnight. He, Aunt Dizzy, Freida and Christopher suddenly began to get together in the drawing-room, on Aunt Dizzy’s suggestion, to play charades. Noisy charades.
‘You should join our happy band, ducky,’ Aunt Dizzy suggested. ‘We’re working on Ivan the Terrible, to get him away from all those revolting books. It’s like the old family gatherings. It’d do you the world of good. A few laughs a day keeps the doldrums at bay. You brood too much. You drink too much. You’re alone too much. At least we still have our little late-night chats.’
Aunt Dizzy confessed to not needing much sleep. She would creep downstairs well after midnight in her floor-length chartreuse dressing-gown, just as Jean was settling in to listen to music through headphones, everybody else in their own rooms and, it was to be hoped, asleep. There was little time during the day to seek solitude. Christopher had stopped preparing breakfast every morning. Jean prepared breakfast and lunch, even dinners, and often found herself cleaning and vacuuming, as Ivan had given that up. She attended to Ivan’s washing which he left outside his door, was consulted by Freida about ‘new looks’, she pretended to admire each new batch of amateur paintings Aunt Dizzy brought home. Now there were paintings stacked in the reception room as well as along the hall, with more upstairs. Ivan kept suggesting they invite Mrs Meiklejohn across for tea and had mentioned it now seven times. Flowers, from Anthony, kept cluttering every surface. The downstairs rooms resembled a floris
t shop amidst a downmarket art gallery. While up in the Green Room, the almost nightly charade parties escalated into formal gatherings where Aunt Dizzy, smoking her cigars, presided over the proceedings and entertained the troops by holding karaoke nights from which Jean hid, in her room, wearing ear-plugs she had gone out to buy from Boots the Chemist.
Such a gathering was seemingly getting out of hand late one night, when Jean heard the doorbell ringing. She had declined to go upstairs to join the others, even after being told that Ivan had finally, though reluctantly, agreed to join in. The noise was deplorable. She was sitting in the kitchen deciding whether or not to give up and join the happy band herself or go out for a walk. Aunt Dizzy had bought a hymnal and the evening’s challenge was to sing a hymn but change the words – the most obscene renditions would win. Jean sat in her coat, sipping vodka. The spring weather was rapidly evolving into what was being predicted as the hottest summer weather to come in London records. The evenings were so balmy they invited escape.
Anthony stood on the front steps. At least, she thought, he had not brought flowers. Jean stared at him blankly. He was clean-shaven but without a tie. His eyes were bloodshot.
‘I’m in love with you, Jean Barrie,’ he said, gazing at her with alcohol-driven urgency. ‘I couldn’t bear it any longer, so here I is. Am.’ He leant against the door-jamb dissolutely, threatening to slide to the ground.
‘There’s something else. I -’
‘You are drunk,’ Jean said, interrupting him.
‘Drunk with love. With adoration. Lust.’
‘Rubbish. You’d better come in. The whole damn world’s upstairs. Partying.’
He followed her along towards the morning-room.
‘Lovely flowers,’ he said.
‘Shut up.’
From upstairs laughter and shouting drifted down, growing louder all the time. Freida shouted, ‘Ride it, Ivan. Ride it, man!’ and Aunt Dizzy was whooping. Jean went straight through into the kitchen.