by Ajay Close
‘Come on up, darling.’
The buzzing door yielded to my touch and I smelled the burned-plastic stink of Casablanca lilies. There they were on the hall table, caught by the ruby light from the stained-glass window. Every time I came here I’d glance down at the polished-brass stair rods and up at the wedding-cake cornice, caress the seductive curves of the newel post, and have the same thought: after all the rootless years of my childhood, now she gets herself a home.
It was a Victorian villa converted into flats. Lilias had the billiard room, with three adjoining closets for cooking, washing and sleeping. It felt cavernously empty, partly due to the antique, gilt-framed mirror that doubled the size of the room, and partly through lack of furniture. She owned a white linen sofa, a glass dining table and six metal chairs, a portrait of her by Robin Philipson, and little else. There were no carpets, or blinds at the windows, no photographs, no keepsakes, not even books. (The showbiz biographies were hidden in a cupboard.) No one could call it homely, or even particularly comfortable, but she loved it: her very own stage.
The lights were off, though the day was overcast. Blurred shadows converged on the walls as I handed over the brown paper bag.
‘I haven’t had figs since I was Cleopatra.’
I tried to tell myself this was said by way of thanks. Food was always a gamble, but what else was I to bring? Flowers she dumped in the sink because she didn’t own a vase, and all the scarves I’d ever given her were still folded in their original wrapping at the bottom of one of her drawers.
I noticed a script on the glass table. ‘Am I stopping you working?’
‘Yes, but half an hour won’t hurt.’
We sat on the capacious settee, leaving a cushion’s width between us.
‘How are you?’ I asked.
Her mouth performed that impatient lateral twitch a stranger might have taken for a smile. ‘As you see.’
The day she moved in I’d spent hours shifting the sofa until we found the perfect spot, but that afternoon she was beyond any trick of the light.
‘You look tired,’ I said.
She wiped a speck of matter from the corner of one eye. ‘I shouldn’t wear grey, it doesn’t do anyone any favours.’
‘How do you feel?’
‘Oh darling, I feel fine. What about you, how are you feeling?’
‘OK.’ I looked at her left breast, girlishly small under the grey linen shirt, neatly symmetrical with its partner. ‘But I’m not the one with cancer.’
A gust of air through the open window rustled the pages of the script.
‘Frankie popped in yesterday,’ she said, as if I hadn’t spoken.
This was news to me.
‘He told me that place is charging you ten thousand pounds—’
And that was just for starters.
‘Are you sure you want to do it, darling?’
My eyes narrowed in disbelief that she could ask me this but, in fairness, how was she to know what I felt? I had never told her about the conversations I had with my future daughter, how she was beside me every step I took, how we shared little jokes, how I’d bought her replacement copies of my old favourite books (Anne of Green Gables, Elidor, The Secret Garden), how I was going to tuck her in and read to her and always kiss her goodnight. I could have said some of this now, but Lilias would only have heard the reproach in it, so instead I replied, ‘I suppose we could spend the money on a conservatory, or a cruise, but on balance we’d rather have a baby.’
‘But do you really…’ She saw the look on my face and took a tactful breath, the sort of ah that carried to the back of the stalls. ‘What I don’t understand is why you have to do it now?’
‘If we leave it any longer it won’t be an option.’
‘Yes, but you have left it. You’ve been married nine years. It’s a bit,’ another tactful breath, ‘late.’
‘Maybe I feel the need to make the numbers up.’
If I’d had to supply one adjective to describe my childhood I would have said ‘lonely’, but I had never felt loneliness like the prospect of being the last Cavalle left alive.
‘I don’t want you to make a mistake you’ll—’ She broke off. I watched understanding dawn in her eyes. ‘I’m not planning on kicking the bucket just yet.’
A house fly settled on the wall behind her. Without looking she raised a hand to bat it away. I remembered all the other times I’d sat there. In winter the light from the cupola draped the room like a dust sheet, in high summer it poured like Chablis through the glass. The week I helped her redecorate I had watched it change hour by hour, vibrant in the morning, pearly in the afternoon, poignant at dusk, each shift a cue for Lilias to become someone else.
She reached across and touched my hand. ‘Darling.’
I was temporarily incapable of speech.
We sat like that awhile, me with my reddened eyes, Lilias’s hand resting on mine, until I noticed her right foot rotating from the ankle. She liked to work on her flexibility in pockets of dead time.
‘I’ve got some formosa oolong in the kitchen,’ she said.
I made the tea in a couple of mugs, then spotted the eggshell china on the top shelf of the cupboard. Cups, saucers, teapot, milk jug and sugar bowl. I’d bought them for her sixtieth birthday.
‘Oh,’ she said, when she saw them.
‘I rinsed the cups.’ I set the tray on the floor, remembered not to put the milk in first. ‘Do you know a man called Smith?’
‘Hundreds, I imagine.’
‘Tall, lean, charcoal-coloured hair. He applied for a job in the unit—’
She looked bored.
‘Asked me if I was your daughter.’
Now she was interested. ‘Was he good-looking?’
A detail I hadn’t consciously noticed came back to me. He’d smelled of livestock. ‘Too countrified for you, I’d say.’
Something happened in her face. I wasn’t sure what, only that it was an event beyond her control. ‘Smith?’ she queried.
‘Well, that’s probably not his name. The rest of his application was a pack of lies.’
She fingered the puckered skin of her throat. ‘How old?’
‘Hard to know. I thought early sixties, but he could be older.’
I knew her face as well as I knew my own. The classic bone structure to which the skin still more or less cleaved. Her creamy complexion, with just a hint of old ivory tainting its translucence in certain lights. The handsome grooves around her eyes, like claw marks from a tiger’s playful swipe. None of this was new, but there was a change in the way her features fitted together, as if the effort of harmony had become too much.
‘What’s the matter?’ I said.
She lifted her cup from its saucer. ‘Why would anything be the matter?’
Outside it began to rain. We chatted about her last audition and how the ballet was going (she was continuing with the classes though she hadn’t got the part). She had been to a garden party at an Adam house near Selkirk where she’d managed to meet a lovely man, despite being there on the arm of the clever silversmith.
A tortoiseshell cat came through the window and sprang onto the cushion between us.
‘Hello, Malvolio,’ she sang. At the sound of her voice the creature began to purr.
I nodded at the floorboards to indicate the woman downstairs. ‘Doesn’t she mind you rechristening him?’
‘I presume he still answers to Kitty or Tiddles, whatever he’s called.’
‘Toby,’ I said, turning to check the tag on his collar as he prowled along the back of the settee. ‘It must be very confusing, being named for two characters in the same play.’
‘Oh he knows who he is, don’t you, Malvolio?’
The cat came to a halt behind her and began to lick her hair. I waited for her to shoo him away, but she did nothing, even when he pulled back his lips and daintily bit her scalp.
‘Has the hospital given you a date yet?’
‘It’s just a biopsy,�
�� she said.
‘I’ll come over and drive you up there.’
‘It’s not for four weeks yet.’
‘Four weeks?’ The cat leapt to the floor. ‘In that case you’re going private.’
‘Frankie’s already offered.’
This, too, was news. ‘That’s settled then.’
‘I said no. You’ve enough to spend your money on just now.’
I had no idea why she’d declined Frankie’s offer, but I knew it had nothing to do with the state of our finances.
‘It’s not going to go away,’ I said, as gently as I could.
‘It doesn’t have to be the nasty kind.’
‘That’s what we need to find out.’
As so often when Lilias and I seemed to reach a concensus, she veered off in the opposite direction. ‘Once they get the knife into you you’re done for. I’ve seen it happen. Robert Ap Robert had his gall stones done, four months later he had a stroke. Sarah Duff-G only went in for a hip replacement. The next thing we heard—’
‘She’d had a heart attack because she was six stones overweight,’ I said. ‘Not a problem in your case.’
‘I heard a programme about these full-body scans they’re doing now. Apparently they actually lower life expectancy. They always find something, and then they want to intervene.’
I was familiar with Lilias’s views on modern medicine. Before she got around to mice with human ears growing out of their backs, I said, ‘The longer you leave it the worse it’ll be.’
She inclined her head in graceful admission. ‘I’m not the only one who puts things off.’
‘It’s not the same.’
‘Life, death,’ she shrugged, ‘it seems fairly similar. Don’t look like that, darling, you’ll get lines. You have to admit, this baby thing is rather out of the blue.’
She was avoiding the issue by changing the subject, but what could I do?
‘We’ve been trying for a while,’ I said.
There was a muffled thump from the kitchen. She cocked her head and smiled. I recalled seeing a saucer of milk on the floor. She’d never managed to give her child a home, and now she was feeding the neighbourhood cats.
‘It looks like I’m the one with the fertility problem,’ I said.
‘Well, you didn’t get that from me.’
‘Presumably I didn’t get it from either of you.’
I watched her face. Nothing changed. But then, we had been playing this game for forty years.
‘Did you never want more children?’
‘I didn’t want you, darling.’
I laughed.
‘Of course I loved when you came.’
‘Of course.’
‘It was a difficult birth.’
‘Yes I know. You missed the last act.’
‘I was in second-stage labour for thirty-six hours. My blood pressure was through the roof.’
‘Pre-eclampsia?’ If there was a hereditary predisposition I needed to know.
She made a face that said pre-eclampsia wasn’t the half of it. ‘You don’t know what pain is until you’ve delivered a baby. They wanted to give me morphine but I couldn’t take the risk of being out of my mind and letting them cut me.’
I was surprised to hear Lilias talking like this. She was the sort of performer who draped herself in a variety of becoming poses on stage but acted from the neck upwards. For all her lip-smacking sensualism, she was reticent about matters down there.
‘It was all so much more primitive in those days. I knew a man who’d lost his wife in childbirth. The midwife was completely out of her depth. “Won’t be long now,” she kept saying. She finished her shift and when she came back the next day I was still there. I saw the look on her face and thought, I’m going to die. And this thing inside me.’
‘Me, you mean,’ I said.
‘You weren’t you then.’
I wondered if this were true.
‘What about the obstetrician, wasn’t he keeping an eye on you?’
‘It was the seventies, darling. No one kept an eye on anyone. The ward was like the Marie Celeste.’
‘In Edinburgh, in the baby boom?’
For a moment she looked shifty. ‘It must have been a quiet week. Anyway, in the end another midwife turned up, an islander. She gave me castor oil. Repulsive stuff, but it did the trick.’
‘So you shat me out.’
‘If you have to be vulgar about it.’
‘And then what happened?’
‘I rejoined the tour in Liverpool.’
‘What happened in the hospital?’
‘Oh, they took you away to the nursery. I needed to sleep.’ She thought about how this sounded. ‘And you were a bit sickly, so they had to keep you warm.’
I was disappointed, yet she had only confirmed what, in my heart of hearts, I had always known. There had been no joyful moment of connection. She had not guided my mouth to the nipple. We had not bonded skin-to-skin.
‘Can I see it?’ I blurted.
‘See what, darling?’ And then she realised. Her face folded with displeasure. ‘I don’t think there’s any need for that.’
I should never have asked.
‘There’s nothing to see.’
‘I know. I just…’
‘Before they lop it off, is that it?’
I saw how far I had overstepped the mark.
‘It’s not even as if you were breastfed.’ She crossed the room to close the window, her heels clacking on the floor. ‘Anyway, that’s the beauty of genetics: mine look just like yours. With another twenty-five years’ wear and tear.’
1972
Eight o’clock and the sky is still bright, while the land below gathers shadow. Mrs S has gone out. Each time the farmhands cross the yard their eyes are drawn to the square of yellow light framing Lili at the kitchen table. Not to ogle her, as she thought at first, but to stoke their indignation. How hard they work. A good half of what they do is a mystery to her, but it’s clear that the farm is a highly ordered space, a place for everything and everything in its place. Nothing is wasted, least of all time. Except by her.
Three weeks and still she’s heard nothing from Brod. She imagines his wife finding her letters in the inside pocket of his suit, scanning the pages, taking everything in: the effort she has put into making him laugh, the part about touching herself in bed, the references to a shared future. However traumatic for all concerned, discovery would at least move things along. Do they call co-respondents to give evidence? Lili quite fancies standing in the witness box in her close-fitting grey suit. Scarlet lips, a spotted veil, the whisper of nylons as she crossed her legs. Every man in court would understand. Even the judge would blush. And then there’d be no reason to wait.
She hated it when people asked, ‘Who are you playing next?’ Apart from anything else, it was unlucky. But not that day. ‘She’s going to be Mrs Broderick.’ The elation – or was it the shock? – hit her like a glass of champagne on an empty stomach, before the inevitable doubt: did he really mean it? But he has said it so often since, in front of so many people. She likes to look back on the years before they met, not bad years, even if they seem lacklustre to her now. A day’s shooting on The Avengers, two days on The Saint, beating Rowena to the role of Juliet. The weeks in between living on fresh air, until she surrendered to the treadmill of provincial rep. She nearly didn’t go to that party in India Street. It would only be the same old crowd, and she was feeling fat. There was a man who arrived in a wine merchant’s van. Too short for such a powerful head, she thought, as he joined her on the doorstep. She teased him about the tradesman’s entrance and he looked at her with those tea-coloured eyes: ‘We were not born to sue but to command.’ Nine words, and she shed her old life like a worn-out coat. After that it was a five o’clock gin in the George every night before nipping back to the flat, supper in the Doric sometimes, the odd weekend down south while Rosie visited the sister he couldn’t stand. Henley, Royal Ascot, someone’s country
pile. D’you know Minty and Hugo and Roddy? She does now. They’ve never asked who her people are or what school she went to. They know she’s not pukka but nor is she really a pseud – it’s her job to inhabit a part. And anyway, Brod belongs enough for both of them. He was at Glenalmond with Jamie Kelso and Johnnie ffoulks. He shared a set with Rollo Drummond at Cambridge. He passes the port to the left, and goes shooting on the Twelfth, and sells an awful lot of claret to the chaps’ maters and paters. They know he charges over the odds, but he makes them laugh. And he chose Lili over all the triple-barrelled Susies and honourable Georgianas. Of course it was tricky, him being married to Johnnie’s favourite sister. Lili could see that extricating himself would take time and tact, that Rosie already had half an idea there was something going on and could be an absolute bitch when her pride was hurt, that it would be better all round if Lili made herself scarce for a while.
If only she’d known how lonely it would be.
Behind her, Mrs S’s ancient refrigerator gurgles into life. Under the table, the red-eyed spaniel whimpers in his sleep. Lili walks over to the Rayburn. The cross-eyed farmhand glances through the window to catch her filling the kettle. Another cup of tea, and half a packet of digestives! It’s the hormones. She feels sick whenever her stomach is empty. Changing her mind about the tea, she opens the back door. It’s good to be out, under a sky now pierced by the first star. The border collie approaches, wagging its tail, trailing its long tether of washing line, and she strokes it until her fingers discover a small, hard, unidentifiable something snagged in its coat. The dog gives her a reproachful look as she stands up. Her nipples are like steel bolts (the hormones, or the evening chill, or both) but she can’t face returning to the house, so she crosses the yard to the byre.