The place was buzzing when I walked in. Connor was seated at our favourite table deep in the restaurant. He had ordered a bottle of Mega Spileo, a Greek merlot that we had both grown to appreciate over the years. I wasn’t sure I had the stomach for alcohol after a long night, but preferred to raise no objections. Once the wine had been uncorked and poured, Connor lifted his glass. ‘Zorba the Greek’ was playing on a stereo in the background. It usually was.
‘Happy new year, darling,’ smiled my gorgeous pal.
‘And to you. Let’s hope it’s a winner.’
And then, almost too swiftly, ‘I’ve got news.’
‘Great.’ I grinned expectantly, enjoying the tease of mystery as I lifted my glass to my lips.
‘I tested positive.’
It took me a moment. And then another. A small dish of hummus was plonked on the table between us, along with a basket of warmed pitta bread.
‘I assume we’re not talking screen tests,’ I returned drily.
‘HIV, to you and me,’ he replied, downing his wine in two long draughts. He had always drunk too fast.
‘Oh, Connor.’ My brain was signalling to me that, above everything else, I must keep my composure. I could not break down, must not let him see what a body blow this news was. Worse, totally worse, for him, but he was the only true ally I’d had for the past two decades. He was more of everything than a boyfriend or partner. We had seen one another through every kind of trauma, rejection and stint of impecuniosity life had thrown our way. He was my best buddy. Better than a husband, better than any lover I had been involved with. We had even given being lovers a disastrous shot, but we had laughed at our ineptitude. In those drama-school days, when anything went and I was the most determined and studious girl on the block, we had bonded and, for a crazy moment in time, I had arrogantly, ignorantly, believed I could ‘turn him straight’. We had cried together, covered each other’s backs, been there in the late nights, laughed ourselves to stomach-ache over jokes that were hilarious probably only to us. If ours was not a definition of fulsome love, I don’t know what was.
From the autumn of ’68 onwards, he had been my mainstay and I his. The only secret I had never shared with him was all that had come to pass during my summer of ’68 in Paris and the South of France, having brushed it off as ‘a hippie and rather risqué summer on the French Riviera’.
This last year, however, I had been jumping on and off planes, running to rehearsals, sitting in make-up caravans with scripts on my lap, weekends on late-night chat shows, awards ceremonies, and I had dropped the stitch. When he’d most needed me.
How many times had I played mock-shocked at his promiscuity, been silently amazed at the unstoppable tenacity of his libido? Mutual friends, fellow actors were dropping like flies. Ian Charleson was dying from an Aids-related illness. The gossip on the grapevine was that he didn’t have much longer to live. Others within our broad circle and across the pond were going down fast, yet I had never, never for one moment believed it would hit home, not this close, not to my Connor. He was indestructible for Heaven’s sake.
My mind flipped back to those three years of drama-school days. The parties, the nights in the pub. Groups of us piling back to someone’s pad in Belsize Park, clutching paper bags containing bottles of cheap Hungarian wine. Bull’s Blood. Sleeping on floors. His affairs, the casual liaisons. Connor dragging himself to his feet from one or other overcrowded bedsit.
‘Where you going?’ I’d ask drunkenly, pulling at his shoes or ankles.
‘Never you mind.’ He’d winked. He was off to get laid, a street pick-up, or wherever he found those casual sexual partners. The loneliness for me, dragging myself back to Grafton Road with no bed companion of my own. I lived like a nun after Peter and Pierre. My highs were my work, the challenges, the applause. Connor and I had even joked about getting married. The perfect arrangement. He’d do all the fucking and I could get on with my career without being hassled by men who judged me for being alone, branded me a lesbian or frigid.
We could have been the perfect match.
Two copious plates of lamb kebabs and rice appeared before us. I had lost what little appetite I’d had. ‘But not full-blown Aids?’
He shook his head again. ‘And I intend to keep it that way. I’m strong and healthy and I will beat it.’
‘Here’s to that,’ I said. ‘Here’s to us lunching together when we’re sixty.’
Sixty? Ian Charleson died five days after our Lemonia lunch and Connor lingered barely six months more.
Late July 1990
‘Yesterday’ was the tune, the magical accompaniment, I most remember from Connor’s cremation, which took place on a Thursday afternoon in a sweltering late-July heat wave during that summer of 1990. Paul McCartney led, then was joined by the raised voices of hundreds, literally hundreds, of mourners in the chapel and spilling out into the courtyard and gardens beyond. A chorus of inconsolable voices, many professionals straight out of London’s West End musical scene, and a forest of waving arms were raised in celebration of my darling friend, Connor.
Why had I lost him? Why had he gone? Why Connor? I had no answers.
I was numb, broken-hearted, desolate and exhausted having spent most of the previous three weeks camping at his bedside in the hospice in Hampstead where he had breathed his last. I had lost my big love. That was how he signed every note and every card he had ever sent me, scribbled to me, ‘Big Love, Connor’. Followed by a crookedly drawn star.
For the celebration of his life, I had booked two rooms on the upper floor of the pub we had frequented all our lives in Haverstock Hill, the Sir Richard Steele. ‘Nothing too swept-up, darling,’ he had insisted on several occasions, during those last few weeks when he was thin as a twig, fighting for oxygen and his face had caved in. ‘Let the Vogue lot slum it.’
The drinking, talking and speeches, the eulogizing of Connor, continued till the small hours, including a series of gloriously bawdy tales and anecdotes from friends of his I had never met, never even heard of before. Those from the side of his life I had never been a part of. A few I knew from our theatre excursions but others were part of his cruising days, the saunas, alleyways, the lonely nights of searching for companionship, fulfilment or just a quick screw. How had they all found themselves here? Who had passed on the word? He was so loved, so revered, held with immense tenderness. His generosity, his big heart were cited repeatedly. Connor had belonged to so many. I was one small part, a precious link in his life, but others glistened equally brilliantly.
Somehow the realization embedded my loneliness deeper. I suddenly found that I loved him even more than I had ever known.
Love is so short-lived, and oblivion endures for an eternity.
The Present
The following morning I was woken by my mobile a little after seven. It was out of character for me still to be sleeping at such an hour but I had suffered a restless night, the phone next to me on Peter’s pillow. Just in case.
‘Hello?’
‘I wanted to let you know how much I love you. And, all being well, I’ll see you this afternoon.’
All being well.
‘Peter, morning. How are you feeling?’
‘I’m hugely looking forward to seeing you later.’
‘Me, too. I’ll be there,’ I offered brightly, attempting to cover up the army of misgivings plaguing me. ‘The nurse said you’d be under for about three hours and then two hours sleeping off the anaesthetic. I’ll be at the clinic for one o’clock. See you later. I love you. The very best of luck.’
The phone went silent.
Had anxiety impelled him to make the call? Was he doubting the outcome? Needing reassurance, to hear my voice one more time? For the very last time?
I chided my negativity. This day would end well. Peter was going to rally, to survive.
I slipped out of bed and hurried to the beach. There was not a soul about, no boats crossing the horizon, no dogs barking. I might have been th
e last person living in this corner of the world. Even so, the beach was full of ghosts.
Peter’s absence, Moulinet’s erroneous assumptions and my worries about my husband’s ordeal were crippling me. I waded into the water but felt too queasy, too physically afraid to swim, turned from the sea and, wet feet gathering sand like small bootees, climbed back to the safety of the villa where I brewed a pot of coffee and took a shower. I wished I smoked. I wished it wasn’t too early to calm my nerves with a drink. Should I come clean with Moulinet, admit that Gissing had made contact with me? Confirm to him that Peter had played no part in any of it?
My plan was to leave the house well in advance of Peter’s return to his ward, at about eleven. Even facing the worst Monday traffic on the outskirts of Marseille, I would be at his side when he regained consciousness.
Those few hours passed at a funereal pace. I could set my mind to nothing. I returned upstairs to the attic to shower and dress.
On my way down, I hesitated on the first-floor landing, the guests’ level, at the far end of which, with views to the mountains, was Peter’s office. It was rare that I entered his sacred foxhole. I pushed open the door and took a tentative step. The room smelt of cedarwood and sandalwood, the reassuring scents of Peter, his aftershave. It gave me a sense of him welcoming me in, bolstering my courage. There were two or three used coffee cups forgotten on the desktop. His computer was switched off. Pages of notes lay beside it, his Mont Blanc pen, a Christmas present from me, on top of them. His chest of drawers, a mahogany piece inherited from his parents, stood on the far side of the room. The key to the top drawer was in its hole. I turned it to the right and pulled the metal handle. The drawer slid open. I felt a stab of guilt. This was trespassing.
Many documents were neatly stacked in folders. And there, in the back left-hand corner, was the white envelope. As he had promised, the letter for me. I reached in and plucked it out. It wasn’t heavy. Two, maximum three, foolscap pages? Written on its front, I read in my husband’s fine, flowing hand: For Grace. To be opened in the event of my death. On the back was one word: Confidential.
I felt the blood pumping through my veins.
What message was so intimate that it could be revealed to me only after my husband’s death? Surely I had a right to know its contents. And yet what an abuse of his trust to rip this – what was it, a confession? – open now. A confession, yes, surely. A disclosure of some nature, or why make such a mystery of it?
A revelation that could revise for ever the way I perceived my husband, erase my love for him, make me despise him? Was there any single act that could wipe out at a stroke the respect and deep attachment I felt for Peter?
I am not proud of that moment in my past.
Violence against another? An attempted murder?
George Andrew Gissing’s face, twisted, riddled with failure and despair, stared up at me from the unopened envelope. ‘Look at me. Who did this? Who wanted me dead and gone?’
No, no. I don’t believe it. Not Peter.
I thrust the envelope back into exactly the same corner I had found it and pushed closed the drawer. My heart was pumping hard. I was not sure I could think straight but I knew it was not my business to open any of those documents, not without Peter’s agreement, and he had spelt out his instructions clearly.
‘In the event of my death’.
But Peter wasn’t going to die, was he?
November 1990
The months after Connor’s death – I hate the euphemism ‘passing’ – were some of the most challenging for me. I was in a play in the West End. A Coward revival. Private Lives. Wit and flamboyance night after night. Some evenings it was a tall order. I was returning to the theatre, the boards, after years of television and film work. Still living in Primrose Hill where so many ghosts resided along with me. Otherwise alone. No relationship, no big-love mate. My life was my work. I fed everything into it, wholeheartedly, meat into a mincer, repudiating the void within me.
Each night after the curtain had fallen, and I was in my dressing room cleaning off my stage make-up, I’d listened to the footsteps on the stone stairs of actors leaving the building, their calls of ‘Goodnight’, or ‘Catch you in the pub’ or ‘Fancy a quick half, Jack, before you head home?’
I had said no to the other cast members so frequently they rarely bothered to invite or include me, these days. After Connor, I had set socializing aside, ironically when I needed the company most.
The backstage areas were usually resoundingly silent by the time I was heading off for home. The emptiness rattled and my footsteps echoed as I made my way to the exit, locking my dressing room, dropping off my key as I wished a good night to old bald-headed Fred, who had been manning his stage-door cubicle there for more than half a century and could, and would, given half the chance, recount stories of all the theatrical greats – Johnny G, Larry O, Ralphie and his motorbike – who had trodden these boards, passed this way before us.
Outside, in the bleak winter night, feebly brightened by the lights from Soho, a spattering of patient ‘johnnies’ hung about at the stage door, waiting for my autograph. ‘Stage-door johnnies’: I don’t know where that expression was coined. After a while, you got to know the faces of some. They turned up wherever you were performing. You didn’t remember their names but their sad, eager expressions, the cold red cheeks, noses running, greased hair, the worn-to-threadbare overcoats, hand-me-down cloth shoulder bags that carried the autograph books and the albums of photos now clutched to their breasts.
‘Hello, Grace, you’re out late. You’re the last, then. Sir Donald stopped, gave me his autograph. Said tonight’s performance went well, full house. Said you were still inside …’
Books, pencils, cheap Bic biros at the ready, proffered in my direction. The exhalation of their breath rose like smoke in the night air. Sometimes the hands trembled, from cold or illness or nerves. I always tried to take the time and trouble to sign each and every piece of paper or book, to answer their questions, hear the short tales of their journeys into town or where we had last met or whatever it was they stuttered to impart. To please the fans, give them their money’s worth, as my musician dad, my much-missed late dad, used to say. ‘They put you there, love.’
Even the lonely souls who rarely bought seats for the shows, I suspect because the ticket prices were astronomical and way outside their meagre pay packets, if they had jobs at all.
It was on one such night, November, with all the meretricious glitter of Christmas appearing in the shops and streets around Shaftesbury Avenue, the scent of roasting chestnuts drifting along the narrow lane, that a different voice from among the thin clamour caught my attention.
‘Grace. When you’re done, if you fancy a drink …’
That rich timbre, the lilt of the well-spoken voice was familiar to me. It set my blood racing. An upsurge of rather tangled emotions came flooding back and I wasn’t convinced I wanted to revisit them.
I lifted my head from the faded pink page I was scribbling my name on, peered into the darkness to identify the speaker. There, a shadow from a streetlamp hiding the features of his face, three or four heads back, was a tall, elegant man dressed in an expensively cut navy suit. Hair flecked grey about the ears. He shifted a step and I saw him more clearly. Familiar eyes aged with a few, not unattractively placed, wrinkles. Mid-forties, at a guess. For a moment I was so flummoxed that I could not recall his name, though I knew it, knew him. Had known him intimately.
I dropped my attention to the disintegrating autograph book and continued signing the others, responding by rote to a remark here and there, scrawling felt tip onto the TV and film annuals, on the pages open to my photograph. I was buying time. When all were done, the few questions answered and the hunters drifted away, I stood with my head still crooked.
‘You don’t remember me,’ he began. ‘Well, it’s been a very long time, Grace. How well you look. Forgive the intrusion.’
‘Of course I do.’ I was tremblin
g. ‘Remember you.’ The cold was eating into my marrow. My history was creeping up my spine. ‘It’s Peter.’
‘Well done. I’m delighted.’ His voice softened, washed with relief. ‘Apologies if I’ve butted in. You certainly have a legion of fans. To be expected, of course.’
I lifted my eyes hardly daring to look, unwilling to expose the rawness of the diminished inner me. The man was more handsome than the boy had been, the vigorous stripling, who had fought for Paris, who had loved and protected me, and from whom I had fled without any forwarding contact and denied access to my company even once he had tracked me down. What was he doing here after all these years? All these years.
‘You look like you could use a stiff drink.’
I nodded. It had been a tough year. A thought I didn’t share. I eschewed proposals of the Ivy and the Groucho where there would be too many familiar faces, drinking late after shows, and we settled on the Rivoli Bar at the Ritz, within easy walking distance of Shaftesbury Avenue.
The unadulterated luxury enveloped me as soon as we sank into the leopard-print bucket chairs. Peter waved over a waiter and ordered champagne without waiting to hear what, if anything in particular, was my preference.
An image flew right at me. Paris, April 1968, a small café on the Left Bank. New to the city and I knew not a soul. ‘What’s your name?’ He had been too impatient or preoccupied to wait to hear my response. In that, he did not seem to have changed.
I tuned in to the tinny sound, like dice rolling, of a shaker preparing cocktails at the bar behind me, the clink of cubes, the sluice of ice being crushed, a hissing coffee machine – who drinks coffee at this late hour? A table of Saudi Arabians in white thawbs tucked into a corner – while Peter and I familiarized ourselves silently with the shock of being in each other’s company after all this time, creatures reacquainting themselves with the other’s scent, reaching back, picking through spoor from a bygone decade.
The House on the Edge of the Cliff Page 30