by Noel Virtue
‘I’ll make some strong coffee,’ she said. ‘Sit down.’ But when she turned Anthony was not behind her. Retracing her steps, she found him half-way up the stairs and grabbed his arm, pulling him back so roughly he tripped and fell and yelled out, the sound lost beneath the noise from above. He sat down heavily on the stairs with his head in his hands until suddenly, without warning, he leant forward and vomited all over his trousers and shirt and shoes. He had pulled off his jacket, which lay on the morning-room floor.
Fifteen minutes later he sat at the kitchen table in his underwear, bare-footed, sipping coffee and groaning. Jean had rinsed out his clothes and hung them to dry in front of the warmed oven on a chair. They’d been covered with half-digested food. Some of it had even seeped into his shoes.
‘I’ve something to tell you,’ he eventually mumbled, his words slurring.
‘You already have.’
‘No. No, not that. It’s true though. I’m in… in… I love you.’
‘Well, go home and take a large bottle of aspirin and a bottle of whisky. In the morning you won’t have to face any more suffering.’
‘Cruel. That’s a really cruel thing to say.’
Jean stood with her back to him, staring out the windows. She focused on her reflection in the glass. She remembered staring at her reflection in the same glass the night William had told her he was leaving, after throwing things out into the street in a tantrum. There had been moonlight; there was no moon now. The garden was pitch black beyond the pale lemon light from the kitchen.
‘I’ve some bad news.’ Anthony was not slurring his words. She glanced round at him. He was staring at her so intently she moved and sat down opposite. His face was stricken.
‘What’s wrong?’ she asked. ‘What’s happened?’
He stared at her as if considering his reply, licking his lips. He stank of vomit which she tried to ignore.
‘There’s a book coming out,’ he said, perfectly clearly. ‘Next month, in the States. Guess what it’s called? Go on, guess.’
‘The Naked Ape?’
If Christopher had been in the room, she thought, he would have sniggered. Anthony just stared.
‘I’m not joking.’
Something in his expression stopped her from trying to think of a snide remark. ‘Go on,’ she said.
‘It’s called Lady Sang the Blues’
‘Wasn’t that a film? Billie Holiday. Who was it who played her? Lovely, lovely voice. Oh Lord, I’ll remember in a minute.’
Anthony remained silent for a long moment. He sipped his coffee and stared down at the table, shaking his head.
‘It’s about you,’ he said eventually. ‘You. Jean Barrie. I heard about it this morning, so I went out and got drunk. There’s nothing can be done.’
‘What do you mean? About me?’
‘It’s one of those, what’s the word … exposures. Trash trade paperback. A new paperback house just formed in New York. Gossip. Drivel, scandal and speculation. Part of a series. You’re number three. They’ve already done an actor and some television personality. You’re the singer target. Deliberate crap. The book will sell. Millions.’
‘You are joking.’
Anthony shook his head vehemently. Then he grinned. ‘Well, thousands, then.’
Jean gave him a withering glance and asked, ‘Can they do this? Just anyone, publish such a book? Without even telling me?’
‘Not just anyone.’
Jean got up and rummaged in the cupboards for another bottle of comfort. There were three empties on the shelf. She found a half bottle of sherry and poured a glass, downing it with her back to him.
‘Go on,’ she said quietly.
‘It’s been written – hacked together – by someone you know. Someone who was once … close.’
‘William.’
‘No.’
When he didn’t say anything more she banged her glass down with such force it jumped out of her hand and fell to the floor and bounced. She turned her head and gave him a baleful glare.
‘Truman,’ he said, not looking her in the eye. ‘Catherine Truman.’
In the ensuing silence there was a scratching sound from inside the walls. Upstairs, laughter and voices continued to swell and subside like storm waves.
Jean kept her back to the room.
‘Rats,’ she said. ‘Ruddy, stinking, bloody, fucking rats.’
ELEVEN
In the early summer heat London is languishing. Already there are dire warnings from pernicious weather predictors of water shortages to come. A multitude of skin-protection creams are being advertised on television. The River Thames has begun to smell, according to a newspaper report Aunt Dizzy reads out one morning to Jean and the others over a cold breakfast.
Uncle Fergus now keeps three canary-yellow suits and matching ties in Christopher’s wardrobe. He has his own pink toothbrush with an enamel mug in the bathroom. The karaoke nights and evenings of charades in the drawing-room have ceased; replaced by occasional gatherings on the lawn once the sun has gone down. Aunt Dizzy wears hot pants during the day, left over and still fitting her from the sixties. Her legs are surprisingly devoid of varicose veins or other age-related blemishes. The house sits uneasily, beneath the rising heat of the early summer days. During the nights it has begun to complain in subtle ways. Cracks have appeared in the ceilings of the rooms of the departed Fallen Nun and also in one of the bathrooms. The floors creak loudly when no one is moving about. Christopher swears that unused electricity in the walls is again chattering and that along the upstairs hallways he has seen shadows of the long departed lingering in the dusk. Sometimes in the mornings while he soaks his body in a bathful of warm water, to which he adds several drops of bleach, he marvels that he is not a virgin any longer and that he is deeply in love with his uncle. Uncle Fergus, who is at the house so often that Jean has more or less given in to letting him be there whenever he likes.
Two streets away, a woman who has lived off the dubious fame of having been the star of a popular long-running series of television advertisements for pasta has returned to her unoccupied house after a difficult breach birth. The baby has died. By late afternoon she will also be dead, from swallowing two full bottles of sleeping pills with the aid of freshly squeezed orange juice and vodka.
On the southern slopes of Primrose Hill, two men of uncertain age and nationality who have never met before have been enjoying vigorous, silent oral sex in the bushes. Now that it is first light, and they have finished, they are sitting apart on the grass, enjoying the warmth of the rising sun, casually discussing unusual websites on the Internet. It is dawn on a Friday. Most of the world near by is still asleep or at least still in its pyjamas.
Jean is sitting in her nightclothes in the morning-room, clutching a mug of freshly brewed German coffee, the beans of which Christopher bought and had ground in the high street. Jean is alone, her legs drawn up beneath her on the chair. Her face is decidedly pale. She has not brushed her hair or her teeth and has been awake for most of the night. Her thoughts vaguely run along the lines of whether she should have an affair with a 25-year-old who is still married but not living with his wife and what to do about the American-published book on aspects of her life. A book that is apparently tantamount to being defamatory. She has not actually seen a copy of the book, but Anthony Hibbert has read sections of it to her over the telephone. It has yet to find a publisher in London and is looking less likely to. A fact which, Anthony tells her, has surprised everyone, as it implies good taste within the corporate publishing world. The book’s cover is a photographic monochrome negative reproduction of the mural upstairs.
The house is broodingly quiet. Dust motes hover in the air of the morning-room. Upstairs, Aunt Dizzy is awake and sitting patiently on the toilet with no great expectations. Christopher lies within the thin and bony, pale-fleshed arms of his beloved Uncle Fergus, who is gently snoring. Ivan Fitzpatrick is lying on his own bed reading. Caught up unexpectedly in a tense, hor
rific moment inside a cellar where a young woman is about to be beheaded, he ignores the fly which is circling the ceiling light, like a miniature jet waiting for permission from a control tower to land. Ivan lies on top of his blankets and sheets, naked. He has thick salt-and-pepper hair from the top of his chest, across to both his nipples and right down to his groin. He keeps tut-tutting and sighs deeply.
In the front reception room, Freida Weinreb is surfacing from dreams in which she has been pursued by an electric-blue robotic housewife without a face. She is blinking rapidly as she rises from her bed and pulls on a dressing-gown made of silk, covered with Beardsley illustrations. In bare feet she tiptoes along the hall and stands for a moment gazing through into the morning-room at Jean. Her eyes, then her heart, become filled with a kind of yearning.
Jean and Ivan were sitting in wicker chairs in the garden. Freida had gone to her hairdresser, as she usually did on a Friday morning, to have her legs and armpits waxed as well as her hair trimmed. Aunt Dizzy was out with Uncle Fergus and Christopher, being treated to a full English breakfast at a truck-drivers’ cafe just beyond Golders Green. It is Fergus’s treat, at a sawdust-and-fried-sausages venue that fills him with nostalgia for his long-lost youth, when meeting truck-drivers while eating fried sausages was a pastime. Aunt Dizzy has purchased an expensive new wig, a marvel, she claimed, of modern wig technology. She has worn it on the outing. Fergus was still planning to take everyone to his country seat in Cheshire, but there was a complication of whether Ivan Fitzpatrick should be invited. Ivan rarely speaks to Fergus and Christopher. He told them tersely but politely, a week before, that they were perverted. He has not spoken to them again, nor to anyone else expansively except Jean, to whom he is about to reveal his lonely grieving heart and the reasons for his excessive reading.
‘May met a writer, a young novelist, many, many years ago,’ he began. They were sitting surrounded by library books, mostly paperbacks with bright covers and broken spines. Jean had finally plucked up enough courage to ask him why he was reading so much. She had made coffee. It sat in a percolator alongside cups on a third wicker chair.
‘She claimed she met him at the Odeon cinema in Brighton one rainy afternoon. She had begun to visit the cinema in the afternoons back then, once or twice a week, by taxi. She never told me. They began talking during the interval. She was never to tell me until years – decades – had gone by, years after the friendship that she kept secret. And then it was because she knew she was dying. I was never to discover the author’s name. She refused to tell me. By that time, of course, it was all long over. The friendship dissolved when the man went abroad and never came back. They met several times, before he proposed something to her over lunch that she was to agree to.’
Ivan sat staring down at the books on the grass, then up at the whiteness of the sky. It was already hot and it was not yet even noon. There had been no rain for a week. By the end of each day the heat remained, and so the nights had also become still and airless. No one in the house was sleeping well. There were dark patches beneath Ivan’s eyes. His lips looked bloodless.
‘This man, whoever he was, utterly convinced May that she would make a perfect… puppet. I can’t think of a more appropriate word. The idea was for her to act out scenes from the writer’s mind so that he could then visualize them enough to write them down. I know that he was not a well-regarded author. Certainly not… literary. Ignored by the establishment. He wrote action – thrillers and suchlike, some horror apparently. May refused outright to reveal his identity or anything about him. She would meet him, eventually, at a house, and there she would become some character he was inventing. She would be given the character’s name, clothes to wear which the alleged writer provided, and do as she was told. She confessed, Jean, that she had found it wholly satisfying. It settled something. Something within her. And, looking back, all during those months – years – we were at our happiest. I had absolutely no knowledge of what was going on at the time. I was away from the house all week, home for the weekends. I was often up here in London. May was lonely, deeply so. Yet I shall never understand why this … this occupation attracted her and therefore helped us.’
Mrs Meiklejohn was watching them from her upstairs bedroom window. Jean waved and smiled, but Mrs Meiklejohn quickly withdrew from sight without acknowledgement. Ivan did not seem to notice. Jean remained silent.
‘Mock sex was involved, apparently, though May flatly refused to divulge details. There was mock violence, renditions of Gothic bloody horror, all carried out without, she said, the slightest threat of injury or debasement. Later on she would dress as various male characters and act out other roles. Sometimes with the writer joining in and two others who visited. It was all above board, she told me. She was paid for her time. Treated with respect. Meanwhile novels would be appearing during those years, in which she was featured and described in variations of disguise. She never, as far as I knew, brought any of the books home. And all that time our marriage was as harmonious as ever a marriage could be. May became loving and gentle, the mood swings she had suffered from before and which had worried me deeply just dissipated. I suspected, for a long time, that she was under some sort of treatment. Drugs or what have you, but there was no evidence of that. We had separate rooms, you see, Jean, had had for many years. William had gone, left home, moved up here by then, still in his late teens. He never knew. The extraordinary thing was that May and I were happy. Genuinely so. And all the while she was meeting this man – this writer – who was, to all intents and purposes, using her to act out his fictional fantasy.’
‘I’ve never told anyone else. I didn’t really wish to tell you, but I did not wish you, of all people, to think I was, let us say, eccentric, reading all these books. Wondering. I am not, I must admit, altogether happy living here, my dear. I do not feel comfortable with your friends. Yet you have been so kind to let me stay. I don’t wish to seem ungrateful. You deserved an explanation.’
‘Perhaps you might like to move upstairs,’ Jean said quietly, sensing that in the silence that followed Ivan expected such an offer. He was not looking at her directly. ‘Once I have the rooms redecorated. Painted. They’re in need of it. You would have more privacy.’ She could not bring herself to mention the mural.
‘Well, I don’t really wish to return to Brighton.’
‘Then don’t.’
Ivan looked straight into her eyes.
‘I fear I’ve become obsessed,’ he said. ‘I keep thinking it’s because I left Brighton. When I was down there May seemed close. In a bizarre way I kept expecting to see her. Somehow that was worse.’ After a pause, during which he picked up one of the library books, stared at its cover in distaste and put it back on the pile, he said, ‘I’d had this rather useless idea that’s become an obsession. If I hunted through enough books from the library I might somehow come across a clue, a cross-reference. A shadow of her. I don’t know, something that might tell me who the writer was. Once I started I haven’t been able to stop. There are so many of them, Jean. Novels. Writers. I occasionally get caught up in such grisly tales I feel I’m losing balance. It’s a hopeless task. Pointless really. May did say that I would never discover the author’s name, that I shouldn’t even try. When she told me the story she was terribly weak and frail. All I could feel was jealousy, a kind of jealous rage that this man, this anonymous writer, had had the power to make May happier than I was ever able to. I loved my wife. I loved her deeply. I worshipped her. Now all I can think about is that it was not me who had made her happy after William left but someone else. A stranger. What kind of a husband did that make me?’
‘You loved her. You took care of her. She must have loved you to have stayed with you until she died. You couldn’t possibly have guessed what was happening.’
Mrs Meiklejohn had appeared in her garden. Jean suddenly noticed her – or the top of her head – and wondered if she had been eavesdropping. With his back to the wall, Ivan did not appear to realize she was t
here. Mrs Meiklejohn hovered for a moment or two, then went back indoors, slamming her door so loudly it startled them both. Ivan grinned.
‘She’s been making certain overtures,’ he suddenly said in a stage whisper, then laughed.
‘You’ve been over there, haven’t you?’
‘I confess! Yes, I have. She’s undeniably lonely. Seriously uneducated. She asked me endless questions about your other … guests. I was discreet.’
‘It hardly matters.’
Jean told him a little about the book, Lady Sang the Blues. She did not mention the cover. He listened without comment, frowning, shaking his head.
‘I would not be at all surprised’, he commented, ‘if my son wasn’t involved in some way. Are you sure he wasn’t?’
Jean nodded. She began to gather the coffee cups together and stood up.
‘If I leave you alone,’ she stage-whispered back, ‘your little friend might come out again to play.’
Ivan laughed. Leaning towards her he took her hand and drew it to his lips. ‘That might provide some intrigue, if she’s still watching.’
Half-way up the garden Jean turned her head and looked back. Ivan was watching her.
‘I am sorry, Ivan. I’m sorry you’ve had that to contend with, about May.’
‘We all have something, my dear. Everybody’s closets are full.’
Later in the afternoon he came to tell her that he would be interested in renting the upper rooms, so long as it was done officially. He could pay her from his pension. Jean agreed, promising that he could move in once she had had the walls painted. No, she thought. One wall.
‘And Brighton?’ she asked.
‘I’ll phone the landlord. Give him notice. I haven’t left much behind. Almost nothing. I could fetch the rest of my things sometime. I would like to stay on, Jean. For a few months at least. If you respect that what I have told you is in the strictest confidence.’
‘I shan’t breathe a word. My lips are sealed.’
‘Am I obsessed, do you think?’