by Liz Nugent
When I woke after the surgery, my face was swathed in bandages and all I could feel was my face burning. It felt as intense as the pain I had felt after the fire. The nurses came to increase my intravenous pain meds, and a doctor was quickly summoned to assure me that what I was feeling was normal. ‘You should be more comfortable now, and as the week goes on and your face begins to heal, we will monitor the meds to make sure you feel easier.’ The bandages were changed every two days and I was given extra painkillers an hour before they did that. Afterwards, even with the high level of pain relief, it still hurt intensely. I could not open my right eye. I panicked that it meant the operation had been botched, but Madame Chernaux came every day to convince me that everything was going to plan. I tried to read books during those days with my good eye, romance novels from the hospital bookshelf in French and English, but I could not identify with these heroines and their passion. I found a stack of New Scientist magazines and read those cover to cover instead. When I eventually turned my phone on, there were voicemails and texts from Freddie, increasingly angry, demanding to know where I was and when I was going to return. Messages also from a tearful Marjorie, to tell me that Freddie’s condition had deteriorated. He was refusing to go to hospital. She begged me to come back, as Freddie was agitated without me. I did not reply.
Eight days after the operation, the bandages were removed and I was presented with a mirror for the first time. Madame Chernaux and her team warned me first that there would still be a few weeks before it began to look normal, but she promised that I would be happy with the result. The skin was raw and swollen on the right-hand side, and bloodied, but it looked smooth. My brow-line on both sides was lifted and my right eyelid was perfectly in line with my left one. The right-hand side of my mouth matched its opposite. Despite the swelling, I could see that the work they had done was miraculous. My tears and silence alarmed them until I was able to speak. ‘Thank you,’ I whispered, ‘thank you so much.’ A little cheer went up among the team, and the surgeon produced from somewhere a small bottle of champagne, which she popped and poured into the water glass on my bedside locker. I did not hesitate for a moment to drink it. I had something to celebrate. It was just one drink.
I moved into a cheap hotel near the clinic for the next three weeks. I didn’t want to be too far away in case anything went wrong while there was still a high risk of infection. But the swelling subsided and the raw look began to fade, and I started to see the girl I used to be. Even the good side of my face looked younger. I could not stop looking at myself in the mirror, fascinated to see my familiar face.
On the 30th of April, I was ready to go home to Monaco. Only if you looked closely under my chin and on the right-hand side of my forehead would you notice anything; the skin tone matched perfectly, and only the closest scrutiny would reveal the slight difference in texture of my skin from one side to the other. Make-up would hide all of these minor discrepancies. I went to a salon and had my hair dyed blonde. Let the transformation be total. I still would have to stay out of direct sunlight and wear maximum sun protection lotions for the rest of my life, but it was a tiny price to pay and worth the long years of saving half of my maintenance payments from Peter, accepting Marjorie’s cast-off clothes and modifying them to fit me, being beholden to Freddie and ignoring his condescending comments on my ugliness.
I entered the apartment building by the street door, walked up the stairs to the apartment and let myself in the door. A young woman I recognized instantly from photographs stood in the hall. I startled her.
‘Who the hell are you?’ she said. ‘How did you get in here?’
‘Hello, I’m Cordelia. Sorry for scaring you.’
She blocked the width of the hallway with her arms outstretched. ‘No, you’re not. Who are you?’
Marjorie came out to see what the commotion was. ‘Oh my God, Cordelia! Your face. Your hair!’
Audrey looked at her mother. ‘That’s Cordelia? But … she looks normal.’
‘Oh my, you look beautiful! You must have … This is why you haven’t been in contact?’
‘It was something I needed to do. In private.’
‘I understand, but couldn’t you have waited? There is so little time.’
The Bairds were ultimately selfish. Their needs always came first. Audrey glared at me, folding her arms defensively.
I heard a long low groan from upstairs. Marjorie’s eyes flicked upwards. ‘Please go to him. He asks about you every day. He has been angry with me. He thinks I deliberately kept you away.’ Her voice broke and I did not want to comfort her. ‘Please,’ she said again, ‘just go to him.’
The change in Freddie was as drastic as the change in me. His bed had been moved into the salon, a drip stand beside it, an oxygen tank on the other side. Thin plastic tubes fed oxygen into his nose. Although he was older than me, I had never considered him old before. Now, he was a bed-ridden shrivelled ancient man. The cancer that had clearly spread to his liver cast a sickly yellow pallor over his face, and the sparse hair that covered his bony scalp was lank and white. I called his name gently: ‘Freddie, I’m back.’
His eyes flickered open, and he turned his head on the pillow to face me. I smiled my even smile with my matching lips. His eyes widened and, with my help, he sat up.
‘What have you done?’ he said, labouring each word.
‘I got fixed up, Freddie. I am so happy, I would never have been able to do this without –’
He gripped my arm so hard, I almost squealed. Tears sprang to his eyes.
‘How dare you?’ His anger was fiery.
How dare I? As sick as he was, as close to death as he was, I felt my own rage rise within me. He did not own me, despite what he thought. Did he think that talking endlessly about my ugliness and damage was easy for me to hear? I had lived twenty years in the shadows. Did he think I wanted to look like that? That’s what he wanted. If he actually cared about me, he could have paid for this operation twice over and spared me eleven years of shame and humiliation, but I worked and saved for it. This was my face, this was my life.
‘Fuck you!’ I snarled.
He let go of his grip on my arm, taken aback by my fury. Behind me, I heard a movement and turned to see Audrey and Marjorie staring at me.
‘What?’ I said, belligerent. ‘It suited you to keep me ugly, didn’t it, Marjorie?’
Audrey went to her father’s side. ‘It’s OK, Dad. Relax, it’s OK.’
‘He doesn’t care about either of you. He only cares about himself. You should hear how he talks about you …’ I was on a roll now and the venom within me began to spew out.
‘Leave,’ said Marjorie quietly. ‘Pack your bags and get out.’
I turned to Freddie. He had turned away to face the canvas that was standing against the wall adjacent to the bed. A pencil sketch of my face was there, swabbed in a sepia-toned acrylic wash. The loose shape and shadow of my image had been picked out, ready for the oils to be layered on top, to define each ridge and furrow of my scars. Beside the easel, I noticed a long bamboo stick had been firmly taped to a thin paintbrush. The tubes of flesh-and blood-toned oil paints were lined up, waiting for use.
‘Freddie,’ I said, ‘you’re no Matisse.’
He did not turn to face me, just said in a low growl ‘Get out’ and pulled the sheet up over his own head as if he were already a corpse.
Audrey followed me, watching my every move as I packed everything I owned into two suitcases and a box. She talked as I moved around the apartment, calling to her mother occasionally, ‘Mum? Does she own that laptop? … Does she own the blue pottery mugs?’
She spoke to me in a sing-song voice with an American twang.
‘At first, I was sure Dad was having an affair. And then I went home to London one time and saw you in the paintings. That’s why I didn’t recognize you. I knew he wouldn’t lower himself to sleep with someone who looked like that, but still, I understood why he let you live here, why he was so obsessed
with you. Mum didn’t mind. She said you were just one of Dad’s waifs and strays. Did you know about them? When I was small, Dad had all these pets that he got from the animal shelter, dogs with one eye, cats with three legs or a misshapen head. The more deformed the better. They never lasted long. They were always sick and dying. But he used to draw them with my crayons or coloured pencils. That’s all you were to him, you know. Another deformed creature.’
I stopped listening. When my suitcases were full, I went to see Marjorie. She was on the phone to a doctor outside the door of the salon. ‘Yes, please, come now.’ She hung up and turned to me, ice in her eyes. ‘Why? In the name of God, why did you have to be so cruel to him now? After everything he did for you? I had heard the stories, of course, about how you were so quick to abandon your own child, but Freddie believed in you.’
‘What?’
‘We’ve known all along who you are, Delia. But you hid your cruelty well.’
I should have apologized but I didn’t. I never said any further goodbye to Freddie. I went down the ramparts struggling with my suitcases, until I got to a bar overlooking the harbour. I ordered a glass of wine and lit a cigarette. Within half an hour, I had been joined by two men, ‘on casino business’ they said. I allowed them to pay for the rest of the wine that night and ended up in a room in the Hôtel de Paris with one of them. I was drunk. I don’t remember his name. When I woke up the next morning, he was gone and there was a fifty-euro note on the bedside table. Cheap. I was forty-four. Despite my surgery, my age was against me.
Marjorie
She must have been beautiful before the fire. If you caught her in profile, just the left side of her face, she was breathtaking. Freddie met her when she looked like that originally, though he never mentioned it at the time. When he came home from that party in Cornwall twenty-five years ago, all he could talk about was this broken seagull and how he should have brought his camera. After that, he brought his camera everywhere and took photographs of every rotting thing that came across his path. I’m sure the man who developed our photographs in Boots thought we were most peculiar. Freddie has always been eccentric, but I expect that if one has a brilliant mind, one must have some oddity that goes with it.
He was so excited when he saw Cordelia that day in Nice with her scarred face and neck. She tried to hide behind her hair. The scarring was visible, though not unsightly. ‘She’s just the ticket,’ he said, and he invited her to the villa in Vence and then returned home with hundreds of photographs. I couldn’t avoid her in my own home. He wanted to go back and find her. He wanted to collect her like an item from a lost and found department and install her in our home. I managed to persuade him that if he were to suggest such a thing, the girl would think he was an old pervert. I am ten years younger than Freddie, but she is more than thirty years his junior.
And then, she came to us for help, and Freddie felt she was a gift dropped into his lap – that phone call from the hospital in Nice was more than he’d hoped for. She genuinely had nowhere to go and the timing was right.
I warned Freddie that she could be anyone. His wealth has made him a target for conmen and gold-diggers and he has always been cynical, but she cast a spell on him. He declared that he had finally found his muse. I was naturally suspicious and protective. I discreetly asked around the people who had been at Jory Lattimer’s party. I learned that, despite her accent, she was Irish and her real name was Delia. Nobody in London had ever known her as Cordelia. Still, she was Cordelia to us. She had been married to an embezzler who had set up in business with that lovely boy, Daniel Wilkes. I heard that she had lost her child tragically in a fire, caused by her own drunkenness. Most people in London had heard that she had died a few years later, in Ireland. I did not contradict them.
By the time I discovered all of this and told Freddie, he told me that she’d already told him everything, except about her son. Freddie insisted it was her business and that we had no right to interfere with her private grieving.
A few years later, I met Daniel Wilkes’s mother at a funeral and she told me the real story. Cordelia’s child had actually survived the fire but suffered terrible mutilation. The rumours of her death had been put about by her husband. I never told Freddie about the disfigured son because I was afraid he would get fixated on the boy and insist on finding him and painting him too. It disturbed me, though, that a mother would never mention her child or appear to acknowledge he existed. I kept my concerns to myself because Cordelia continued to inspire my husband. I think he liked to be frustrated by her. That elusive quality she had. Even though I knew more of the truth than Freddie, I was always aware that there was something more, something darker at her core, that soul that Freddie tried to find in tubes of oil paint.
I don’t blame her at all for trying to fix her face, though God knows where she got the money for cosmetic surgery. But her cruelty to Freddie in his final days is something I will never forgive or understand. My husband died in so much pain, and most of it was not physical.
33
Freddie died just a few days later. I did not see Marjorie again, but she sold up the apartment very quickly. I heard that Audrey went back to America to finalize her divorce from the tattoo artist before he could make a claim on her inheritance, and Marjorie went home to London. I don’t know what she told people, but despite my new face I realized quickly that certain doors were closed to me. Everyone commented on my transformation, but then they looked away, embarrassed, as if I had disappointed them in some way. ‘But this is how I used to be, before the fire!’ I would exclaim, and they would look, in wonder, but it made them uncomfortable.
Freddie’s allies saw me as a traitor. The people I had been advising on their art collections withdrew their custom and went elsewhere. The gallery director apologized but said she would no longer be able to employ me because of cutbacks. There was a global recession, she said. It was not news to me, but to my knowledge these ups and downs in the market had never affected Monaco. People came and went. Some stayed on the Riviera, bought sports cars, gambled on the wrong stocks and were never seen again, but they were always replaced quickly by a new crop of middle-aged men, their eyes widened by the size of the yachts in the harbour. In Monaco, there was always someone richer than you.
I rented a small flat in Port de Fontvieille, where the servants and nannies that serviced the rich were accommodated, and began to make jewellery from beads imported from Taiwan. I tried to sell them to my friends in the gift shops but few of them bought from me. I heard through the grapevine that it was rumoured that I had tried to get Freddie to change his will as he was dying, that I had used his money to pay for my cosmetic surgery. I tried to get the friends who knew me well, like Harold and Rania, to speak for me, to tell the truth, but somehow they were never available to take my calls and if I did meet them on a social occasion they diverted the conversation to superficial matters. The invitations dried up. I was told that I was humiliating myself with my drunkenness.
August 2010
Dear Mam,
Remember me? Probably not. But here is one of your irregular reminders that I exist. I feel like I have to remind you because if I don’t, who else will?
Uncle Harry told me a funny story the other day. Not so funny. I think Uncle Harry hates you more than Dad, and that’s saying a lot because Dad is pissed off that he has to keep paying you money. Actually, I’d say it’s his wife Caroline who’s pissed off about it and getting on Dad’s case about maybe cutting off your payment. He says he’s legally obliged to pay you, but she reckons that I could sue you because of what you did to me. So I’ve been thinking about suing you and maybe you should prepare for getting less money. I think it’s only fair to tell you because you should know, and also because I want to hurt you.
You see, I’m all about justice these days. I was up in court for assaulting a woman again the other day, and this time, despite Dad’s expensive lawyers and his position as a pillar of the community, I didn’t escape a pri
son sentence, so I’m serving four months now in Mountjoy (what a great name for a prison), though everyone says I’ll get out in two. I have had it with bitches stringing me along, using me, dumping me, so I started going with prostitutes. One of them threw up at the sight of my body when I got undressed, so I hit her. Yeah, I know, you’ll be shocked, but remember, you did this to me. You put me in a fire so bad that the only people who will sleep with me have to be paid for it. Whores, hookers, slappers. How fucked up is that?
Not as fucked up as the funny story Uncle Harry told me. He said that before I was even born you wanted to abort me. Dad says that I am not to pay any attention to any of Harry’s stories, but I have never known Harry to lie to me. I’m just amazed it took him this long to tell me. Anyway, I spend more time with him than anyone else. He understands me, I think. Sometimes, when we’re both floothered, he’ll say that you were the only woman he ever loved. He’s lucky. I hate you all. Whores, hookers, slappers. Harry and I live together now in Granny’s old house. She’d be mortified if she saw it now. We’re not great at the old DIY and there’s a hole in the roof of my bedroom. I’ve a bucket underneath it to catch the drips. I hope Harry remembers to empty that bucket while I’m inside.
Prison is fine. I look so terrifying that the lads leave me alone and the ready supply of heroin passes the time and numbs the pain, but not even the shot to the arm can quell the rage I have inside me, especially for you.
There’s a chaplain here who has taken a great interest in me. He says he used to go out to Inishcrann in the summers when he was stationed in Galway, many years ago. He had heard about the fire that killed your family. He says I should go visit the island. What do you think of that? Do you think I should go and terrorize your old homeland? Maybe I will. Or maybe one day I’ll just turn up on your doorstep to teach you a lesson. Maybe I’ll come and burn your house down.