by Ajay Close
Was that who she was: that tightrope walker across the void? There were times in the years that followed when I’d hoped so, because it would serve her right, and now the thought of it tore me apart.
I decided not to go to the funeral. For a moment I thought Frankie was going to drag me out of my hotel bed and fling my clothes at me, but he walked away and looked out of the window until the impulse passed. I felt sorry for him then. I knew he was struggling with troubles of his own. He was no longer the face of Scottish football. The bloggers had turned against him. Scott had won. His marriage was over. It wasn’t just that I had slept with someone else, was carrying someone else’s child (but whose?). I had been reunited with the father I had been seeking my whole life and I hadn’t thought to tell him. He’d had to ask the boy who cuckolded him to find me. Whatever my shortcomings as a wife, I had always turned to him as my best friend. Now that too was in the past.
He walked to the door. ‘I’d better get home. The car’s coming at ten.’
A stretch Jag. The undertaker would walk ahead of it to the end of the road. A theatrical touch, but not nearly hammy enough. Lilias would have wanted the mahogany casket drawn by black-plumed horses, weeping men lining the streets, a showreel of her greatest scenes playing simultaneously on giant screens in George Square and Princes Street gardens. Or would the Lilias who’d swallowed eighty amobarbital not have wanted any of this?
He hesitated, then had one last try. ‘You’ll regret it if you don’t go.’
I looked at him, letting him see how little this mattered in the grand scheme of all the things I had to regret.
I lay under the duvet watching the clock, working out when Frankie would arrive at the funeral home, and how long it would take to get the coffin into the hearse. At five to eleven they pulled up at the church. I didn’t need to be there, I saw it all in my head. A short wait for the last of the mourners to arrive, then she was wheeled up the aisle, followed by Frankie and Andro, her agent, while something suitable played over the PA. I’d suggested Sondheim’s ‘Comedy Tonight’, earning a disgusted look from my husband. He couldn’t see that, far from a jibe, it was a tribute to the woman I thought she’d been, the woman I never appreciated until she turned out to be someone else. At ten past eleven, they finished the first hymn and Andro got up to read the passage from Luke. At twenty past, the minister read out a list of her roles and the starry names she’d worked with. At twenty-five to, they sang her out of church with her favourite hymn (My song is love unknown/my savour’s love to me/love to the loveless shown/that they might lovely be). At quarter to twelve, Frankie and Andro tossed their fistfuls of earth into the grave. By midday I could stand it no longer. I rolled out of bed, climbed into the clothes I had been wearing four days earlier, and called a cab.
The Criterion was Lilias’s favourite Glasgow venue. A proper theatre, she used to say, meaning a proscenium arch with gilded cherubs, and opera glasses clipped to the backs of the seats, and grand and upper circles still in use. In the mirrored bars on the half-landings, boys in polyester shirts and dickie bows did not blink when asked for a Gin and It.
No one noticed my entrance, though I was by far the worst-dressed of the forty-odd people there. (Frankie had persuaded the MacKewon clan to stay away.) The noise in the bar was startling: all those roundly enunciated conversations with their rhythms of soliloquy and repartee. Lilias’s friends. So they did exist. I was grateful to them for turning up in their spotted veils and velvet capes and vintage cocktail dresses, their frock coats and breast pocket silk handkerchiefs. Of course, they were getting something out of it too. An excuse to dress up and scintillate on a dull afternoon, with free food and drink. Already the silver trays were almost emptied of their smoked salmon blinis and coin-sized chard-and-cheddar tarts. The staff were mixing Kir royales with proper champagne, though Prosecco would have done the job. Was Frankie making this grand gesture to compensate for my failings as a daughter or for reasons of his own?
At one end of the counter sat a huge glass vase of lilies, their wax-white trumpets streaked with orange pollen. Beside them was propped a black-and-white photograph of Lilias in the early seventies, looking like Julie Christie. Frankie had had it enlarged and mounted on black-bordered card to go with the purple drinks and the Piaf CD playing behind the bar. The sight of that white-lipsticked pout caught me off guard, tripping me into a memory. She was always smiling back then, the golden smile of mothers who want their children to know the world is full of wonders. And it was. The twinkling of the star-cloth. The hazy dazzle of the gels. The secret kingdom up in the flies, the tinny susurrus of the spotlight barn doors when a stagehand prowled along the gantry. Three decades of disenchantment, and still I felt the sadness of exile from the garden. Around the age most children stop believing in Santa, or the Tooth Fairy, I had stopped believing in theatre. In Lilias.
I felt a touch on my arm and turned to find Xavier, in a casual but clearly expensive black moleskin suit. His silver hair had been cut so short the pink of his scalp showed through. Otherwise he was as handsome as ever.
‘How are you, Freya?’
‘Oh, you know.’ I saw us from the outside: his solicitous enquiry, my dignified evasion. We were playing to a script. Revolted, I said, ‘If she wasn’t dead I’d kill her.’
He chose not to react to this, which raised him in my estimation. His glance took in the room. ‘Who are they all?’
‘I thought you could tell me. They look like they were famous forty years ago and they’re still waiting to make a comeback.’
I realised how rude this sounded and started to apologise, but he cut across me, smiling. ‘All the thesps I know these days are French.’
I must have moved slightly.
His glance sharpened. ‘Do that again.’
‘Do what?’
He gestured. ‘With your head.’
I didn’t know what he wanted, but I seemed to do it anyway.
‘I can’t believe I didn’t see it before. The way you carry yourself – you’re very like her.’
‘I’m starting to think it was the other way round: she was like me. She just made a better fist of hiding it, till the end.’
There was a moment’s dead air, made more awkward by the babble around us, before he opened his arms.
He smelled of garlic and expensive aftershave and something bodily that was faint enough to be intimate rather than disgusting. I pressed my face into his shoulder, trying to blot out the grief I hadn’t known I felt until I saw the compassion in his eyes. I could have stood like that for ever, lost in the forgiving pressure of the cloth and the bright-black patterns on the backs of my eyelids, but I sensed his attention pulled away by something behind me.
I turned round to find my father in his interview suit. Lilias would have told him to get out, but she had forfeited her rights over the living when she swallowed those pills. It was our wishes that counted now, his and mine.
‘Xavier, I’d like you to meet my…’ I couldn’t say it. ‘John Smith.’
Against all the odds, that really was his name.
Xavier put out his hand. ‘How’re you doing, John Smith?’
‘Jake,’ he said, ignoring the hand.
‘Weren’t you ASM at the Everyman?’
My father was studying the photograph of Lilias propped on the bar. After longer than was polite, he said, ‘You’re thinking of somebody else.’
‘Or the Crucible, under Clare Venables—?’
This time there was no reply.
‘I know I know you from somewhere.’
Against my will, I found myself comparing them. Moleskin and polyester. The chef’s rumpled charm. The shepherd’s weather-beaten hide and swimmy specs. Every man is an alpha male to his daughter but, objectively, Xavier had the stronger claim.
‘Xavier acted with Lilias in Manchester,’ I said.
‘And when would that have been?’
There was something obscurely insulting in this phrasing.
> Xavier looked him in the eye, and I knew he’d managed to place him. ‘About five months after you went away.’
‘It didn’t take her long to go back to tarting herself about on stage, then.’
‘She had a child to support.’
‘And she loved it,’ I butted in, not sure whether I was accusing or defending her. ‘Acting was what she lived for.’
‘Not when she was with me,’ my father said. His eyes glittered behind the distorting lenses.
Xavier’s voice dropped. ‘Oh, that’s right, you gave her a taste of real life.’
A flush spread across my father’s cheeks.
Xavier pressed his advantage. ‘Nothing fake about what happened to him.’
They both turned to look at me.
Across the room a woman started to sing a quavery ballad.
‘Oh Christ,’ Xavier muttered.
The gathering became a recital. We had to stand and listen as mourner after mourner took their turn. We heard ‘My Love Is Like a Red Red Rose’ and ‘She Moved Through the Fair’ and ‘Somewhere Over the Rainbow’ and even – from a dapper old queen whose dentures, like his jacket, were a size too big for him – a vibrato-rich ‘Something in the Way She Moves’. A couple of the singers closed their eyes, the better to concentrate on the notes, while the listeners wore that effortfully inward look actors assume when forced into the role of audience. There was a poignancy in those stilled faces lit by the iridescent lozenges of the 1950s chandelier. The softness of ageing skin, the wrinkles and thread veins and extra chins. I’m thinking I’ll never forgive you. Why had I said it? Because it was true. And so I had done something equally unforgivable. Though she was beyond all that now. Beyond our lifelong disappointment with each other, beyond the brief, blessed truce we declared in our moments of gallows humour, beyond the sardonic eyebrow she might have lifted at this singalong, even as her vanity lapped it up.
When the songs petered out, Andro tapped his Mont Blanc pen against his glass and made a speech about how he was sure Lilias was looking down on us. My father made a tutting sound, shouldering his way to the door. Glasses were lifted in a toast. One of the barmen restarted the CD.
‘How long have you known him?’ Xavier asked.
Here was the chance to satisfy my curiosity. Without a doubt Xavier wanted to tell. There might never be another opportunity. I remembered the safety of being held in his arms, the soft nap of moleskin against my eyelids, his barrel chest taking my weight. It would be so easy to ask, what did you mean when you said you gave her a taste of real life? But the next time I met my father, he would see at a glance that I knew.
How long had I known him? The six months since our first meeting? The three weeks since I’d found him on the hill? Or was the question immaterial, since I didn’t really know him even now?
I leaned in to take my leave with a kiss on his cheek. ‘Since before I was born,’ I said.
1973
In the last weeks of pregnancy Lili is overtaken by an unexpected euphoria. After months of distracting awareness, she learns to live with her engorged breasts. Her queasiness is now appetite, her super-sensitive nostrils a gift. Her weariness has become a voluptuary’s languor. She is amazed by the furnace heat she generates just lying here, the industry beneath her drum-tight flesh as her body tends the incubus. Once this thought repelled her, now it stirs her like a stranger’s glance. Her nervousness about the birth is gone. They say some women rise above the pain: why not her? Her old infallible luck has returned. The week she travels to Edinburgh to ask Julian for a loan, he inherits seven thousand pounds from his detested father and, utterly compromised by the bequest, is only too glad to part with a hundred. Distracted by Jake’s increasingly skilful touch in bed, she forgets her ulterior motive in approaching her least-discreet friend. Or, if she does not quite forget, it suits her not to dwell on the matter.
The cottage secured with Julian’s cash is little more than a bothy. The factor doesn’t care what they do inside its walls, so long as they continue to pay the rent and keep no dog to molest the pheasant poults in the adjacent wood. She spends Monday painting the table and chairs, Tuesday wheedling one of the farmhands into staining the floorboards black, and Wednesday cutting down a pair of curtains bought at a jumble sale in Blairgowrie. (She had hoped for curtains from the farm, but Mrs S takes a dim view of her son’s new ménage.) By the weekend she has created a rustic approximation of those London mews flats featured in the Sunday Times colour magazine. Jake makes no comment, but she can tell he approves. It’s strange, washing his clothes, cooking his tea, waking in the night to find his thigh pinning hers. Sometimes he slides down the mattress to sleep with his face pressed to her bump.
They don’t talk much, even now. What is there to say that their bodies don’t communicate more eloquently? She can’t imagine a lifetime of this – or even, if she’s honest, a year – but minute by minute it is everything she needs. Food, shelter, the wind’s music in the wood next door, the aromatic heat of the logs he saws off the storm-felled pine, the pulse-quickening thought of the night to come. The only shadow on this life is the hours after their lovemaking, the images that disturb her fitful sleep.
That winter she has a recurring dream, her first since those nightmares of standing naked on stage before some vast auditorium, or inching along a crumbling ledge a thousand feet above ground. In this dream, too, she is up high, but indoors, in an attic room she knows to be hers although nothing about it is recogniseable. She looks out over what might once have been a pleasant garden suburb. The surrounding buildings have been reduced to rubble. The devastation stretches for miles, forming mountains of stone and brick and splintered wood. In the distance what remains of a house is on fire. She watches the flickering, blue-tinged flames in excitement, until she notices that they are crossing the rubble towards her. Then she is afraid. She turns from the window. In a corner, by the painted skirtingboard, burns a tiny blue-and-yellow flame. The room is empty apart from a cot. Inside sleeps a newborn baby. A girl, she knows, without knowing how, the loose skin mottled, the spine still tending to a foetal curl. The existence of this infant is always a surprise, no matter how many times the dream recurs. Lili is worried about her catching fire and so, in a pre-emptive measure that makes perfect dream-sense, she carries her to the sink and turns on the cold tap. As she holds the baby in the running water, the force of the jet flays the skin from her body. Underneath, she is still an embryo, a clot of translucent jelly threaded with blood. Lili watches, feeling a cool horror, her dreaming self detached from the woman in the dream, as the water blasts this layer of jelly away, leaving a fistful of slime and, when that too is gone, some looser protein, like albumen. And still she stands there, incapable of turning off the tap or pulling her hand out of the column of water, as the albumen, too, is washed down the drain, until all that remains is a single eye, runny in her palm, looking up at her.
Gun
There was the land and the sky. Squares of red earth broken by the plough, bleached fields of wintry grass and, from horizon to horizon, the milky blue. Shading my eyes against the sun, I could see his silhouette on the ridge, the dogs at his heels. He lifted the shotgun, training the barrels across the strath to find me in the sights. I stood perfectly still until he lowered the gun and set off down the slope.
‘What was that about?’ I asked.
Sometimes he answered, sometimes he didn’t. I was learning not to take it personally.
‘Here’s where I was born,’ he said.
This strath, he meant, amid these potato fields and grazing cattle.
‘This was your farm?’
‘It would have been, if I’d stayed.’
We were standing on a fraying ribbon of asphalt barely wide enough for a tractor, lined on one side by a beech hedge, on the other by wind-stunted thorns. The lichen covering their branches was the same colour as one of the dresses I had inherited from Lilias. Antique silk crêpe de Chine, reeking of mothballs and far too small, b
ut I couldn’t bring myself to throw it away. I touched a pale green frond, and there it was: the sadness. She had been with me all my life, more often in my thoughts than in the flesh. In a way, nothing had changed. I took a deep breath to clear my throat of the tears I couldn’t shed. A hint of leaf mould carried from the coppice below us, mingling with the promissory scent of earth. Sun reflected white from the metalled road, a faint warmth on my face snatched away by the wind.
‘It doesn’t seem like Lilias’s sort of place,’ I said.
‘She was wound tight as a fiddle string when she first came here, but she settled.’
I gazed across the landscape, wondering how different it was from the view she had known. That uPVC conservatory tacked onto the farmhouse. The wind turbines just visible on the horizon. Nothing too dramatic. She settled. Had she stayed, I would have been that fleet, sure-footed child with the wind in her hair and dirt under her nails, and maybe a sister or brother to run wild with across the fields. But even as I conjured this fantasy girlhood, I found myself listing everything I would have missed. Uncle Nellaney, the house of ticking clocks, every school holiday in a different theatrical digs. Not much to mourn there, but the thought of a wholly other Lilias gave me pause. And never meeting Frankie.