Season of Storms

by Susanna Kearsley

  “Well, yes. I mean, not having to audition for a role is strange enough, but knowing I’ve been chosen for my name, and only that . . . I’m just not sure it’s what I want.”

  Bryan, who’d watched me fight to earn a reputation based on my own merits, not my mother’s, nodded understanding. “Then again,” he said, “from what I’ve heard D’Ascanio isn’t the type to go throwing his money about without doing his research, and considering he’s already got Maddy Hedrick and Nicholas Rutherford he’ll at least have made sure you can speak two lines together before offering the role. And even if he does just—”

  I interrupted him, my voice coming rather more sharply than I’d intended. “Madeleine Hedrick is doing the play?”

  “Didn’t Roo tell you?”

  “No.” There was an accusation in the gaze I turned on Rupert. “No, he left that bit out.”

  Rupert raised his eyebrows. “Did I? I can’t imagine why.” And then, switching focus abruptly, he straightened and set down his Scotch and looked past me towards the main dining room. “I’ll just go and see what’s happening with our table.”

  Watching his departing back I drained my glass in one long swallow, suddenly wishing I’d ordered a much stronger drink.

  He turned from the window.

  “Thompson,” he asked the valet, “you are English. Where do the English tourists like to go in Venice? Do you know?”

  “I should think they would go to the usual places, sir.”

  “Yes, yes, of course they would.” Forgetting the packing-crate half-full of books, he crossed the long floor with a purpose. “I expect I’ll be out for the day.”

  “Very good, sir.”

  “And Thompson . . .”

  “Yes, sir?”

  “If you should see a young woman, a young Englishwoman with bright golden hair and the face of an angel . . . if you should see her in the street outside, or if she comes to call, you must not let her leave, you hear?”

  The valet had been with him a long time. With no change of expression, he nodded. “Yes, sir.”

  “And tell the others, also. She is in Venice somewhere,” he said, turning at the door, “and I will find her.”

  iii

  I saw her step out of a taxi at Fortnum and Mason.

  I didn’t recognize the man at her side, but then Mother changed her men like top designers changed their fashions: something new for every season with a few choice bits thrown in for winter holidays. This man, with even blonder hair than hers and a strong Germanic jaw, might have been a remnant of the holiday collection—he looked the type she might have found while skiing over New Year’s at Gstaad—but from the way she clutched his arm and looked at him and laughed I thought it far more likely he was new, her first selection from the spring-and-summer line.

  Moving in close to the nearest shop window, I pretended an interest in silk lingerie while I kept my head half-turned to watch them. I wasn’t the only one watching. All along the pavement at my back I caught the quickening of interest and the faint excited lift of expectation as the midday shoppers nudged and pointed, whispering her name.

  She would have been difficult to miss, even if she’d wanted to be missed, and Mother seldom wanted that. She loved attention. And why not, I wondered? Why should people not go mad whenever she appeared? She had talent, she had presence, she was lovely . . .

  She was lovely. I had always thought so, always wished my own eyes could have been as large, my features half as delicate. Instead I’d inherited only her small hands and her allergy to cats. The rest of my genes I presumably owed to my father, whoever he was. Mother, I suspected, didn’t really know herself, although her husband at the time—the one whose surname I’d been given—had been working in Hong Kong all that summer and so could be safely ruled out as a candidate.

  I remembered asking Rupert once, when I was very little, if he was my father. Hunching deep into his armchair by the window, he’d told me no, he wasn’t, and that I should count myself lucky.

  Which had puzzled me a bit and hurt my feelings, until Bryan had hoisted me beside him on the sofa and explained that I should take no notice, that Rupert was just out of sorts because his mother wasn’t well.

  I’d snuggled close to Bryan, my cheek against the smoothness of his shirt, wrapped in the comfortable soap-and-Scotch smell of him. “Bryan?”

  “Yes, Angel?”

  “Are you my father?”

  He’d pulled back to look at me, and then he’d asked why I was asking, and scrunching closer I’d explained that one of the girls at my school had told me everybody had to have a father, even if he lived somewhere else; that you couldn’t be born if you didn’t have a father; and I’d told her, well, I didn’t, and she’d said that it wasn’t normal, my not having one.

  And Bryan had laughed and he’d told me that I was better off than the other girls at my school—that I had two fathers, him and Roo.

  To which I’d said something like, “But you’re not my real fathers though, are you?”

  And Bryan had admitted no, they weren’t. He’d shared a longish look with Rupert that hadn’t meant anything to me at the time but which, in hindsight, I assumed had been a silent plea for help. And then on inspiration he had said that sometimes, every now and then, real fathers needed helpers.

  “Oh,” I’d said, as I’d absorbed this in a child’s frame of reference. “Like the men who pretend to be Father Christmas, because he can’t be everywhere at once.”

  And Bryan had gathered me close in his arms. I could still feel his kiss on the top of my head, and his cheek rubbing warm on my hair. “Exactly like that, Angel.”

  So though I’d never had a father of my own, I’d had his helpers, which had seemed to me to be the next-best thing.

  As for Mother . . . well, Mother had always been absent. I’d thought that all mothers were like that, descending on you now and then, all smiles and scent and lavish frocks, to lead you by the hand past a bewildering array of staring faces, flashbulbs popping; fussing over you one minute and forgetting about you the next, and then depositing you back in your bed before you’d quite had time to sort out what was happening.

  Rupert, in a rare burst of temper, had once accused her of using me as she might use a prop. It was, after all, common knowledge that she’d only permitted herself to get pregnant in the first place because one of her reviewers had remarked in print that a woman as beautiful as my mother would be bound to have beautiful children, an offhand comment that apparently had caught her shifting fancy. The problem was that having had me, she had no idea really what to do with me. It didn’t help that I’d been born a very quiet baby. I’d almost never cried or fussed, which meant that Mother frequently forgot about me altogether, and if it hadn’t been for the housekeeper I might have gone for days on end without so much as a nappy change.

  Mother was just like that, though. Always had been, always would be. If you didn’t make a noise she didn’t see you.

  I could have made a noise, now.

  I could have called her name and waved and given her the chance to come the loving mother in full view of her adoring public. But I didn’t. Instead, as her companion paid the taxi and she smiled in recognition of the crowd upon the pavement, I turned and briskly walked away down Picadilly.

  iv

  I found Bryan alone in the flat. Which wasn’t unusual for a Saturday—Rupert liked to go off on his rounds of the antiquarian bookshops on a Saturday afternoon, and more often than not returned home with a bag full of volumes to pile on his already overstuffed shelves. Bryan often said it was a wonder that their front room didn’t collapse from the weight of those shelves. “We’ll go right through the floor someday,” he’d warn, “end up in poor old Mrs. Potter’s kitchen.” But although he’d sigh and roll his eyes at the sight of yet another bag of books, he’d let it go at that, indulging Rupert’s foibles just as Rupert indulged Bryan’s love of American football.

  He was watching a match now, in fact—o
ne that he’d taped last weekend, I assumed, since he’d paused the action to answer the door, but when he would have stopped the tape altogether I told him not to, that I didn’t mind if he watched it while I was there. Truth was, I’d been hoping that he’d have a match on. Seeing Mother always left me feeling woefully off balance, and I drew a certain comfort from the familiar trappings of a Saturday afternoon with Bryan: American football on the television and, close to hand, his bottled beer and cheese-and-onion–flavoured crisps and his remotes for video and television, lovingly arranged.

  I took the chair beside him, Rupert’s chair, and curled my legs up comfortably. No need to stand on ceremony here, or worry about my feet marking the upholstery. This was a man’s house, and besides that, it was home.

  “So,” Bryan asked me, “did Sally get off all right?”

  “Yes, she and her boyfriend took the last bits of furniture out last night.” The flat had seemed strange without her. Empty. Colder. That’s what had driven me out in the first place today, a desire for companionship. And warmth. Rupert and Bryan’s front room was deliciously cosy, compared to my own. Not that I ever complained about the way I lived—I didn’t want Rupert or Bryan to know just how close I’d come to poverty, because they would have tried to give me money, help me out. I didn’t want that. I wanted to stand on my own two feet, make my own way, just the same as I wanted to do in my acting.

  But I think Bryan had his suspicions. The sandwiches he made for me at half-time were enormous, bulging with chicken salad and served with a big hunk of cheddar and three pickled onions.

  As I took the plate from him, I said, quite as if it didn’t matter, “I saw Mother this morning, at Fortnum and Mason.”

  “Oh, yes? What did she have to say?”

  “Nothing. She didn’t see me.” I didn’t need to explain things, with Bryan. He glanced over briefly, but didn’t say anything. I said, “She has a new man.”

  “What, the blond? Yes, I’ve seen him. He’s Danish, I think.” Then he suddenly grinned as though struck by some private thought.

  “What?” I asked him.

  “I was just wondering what your mother would say if she knew you’d been offered a leading role opposite Madeleine Hedrick.”

  I didn’t see the humour. “Yes, well, I can’t imagine Madeleine Hedrick being too thrilled to learn I’ve been offered the role, either.”

  “And why is that?”

  “Because of what my mother did.”

  “Angel,” he said, “that was ages ago. Ancient history.”

  “I remember it clearly enough.” I’d have been unlikely to forget. Not only because it had been splashed across the tabloids, but because I’d been responsible. I’d been twelve at the time, just back from a school trip to Stratford-upon-Avon and the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, where I’d sat in the dark watching Madeleine Hedrick play Lady Macbeth. I’d been spellbound. I could still close my eyes and recall her performance, and how, when I’d returned home, I’d told Mother I was going to be an actress.

  To begin with, I think, she’d been flattered. But when she’d realized that it had been not her, but Madeleine Hedrick who’d inspired my decision, her reaction had been predictable. Mother might not have owned a magic mirror, nor would she necessarily have resorted to poisoned apples, but she did have a need to be fairest of all.

  I’d forgotten by now what she’d actually said, but her unjust attack on the actress I’d just seen and loved had stung me to retort, in the know-it-all tone of a twelve-year-old, that Madeleine Hedrick was more beautiful and talented than anyone; than Mother, even. I’d actually said that: “She’s better than you.”

  “Is she really?” my mother had asked with that small inward smile that spelled trouble. “We’ll see.”

  Two weeks later the tabloids had printed the picture—that picture—of Mother lying topless in a man’s arms on a beach in Monte Carlo, laughing without shame and pretending to be unaware of the cameras that she surely had known would be trained on them. The man had been famous as well—Jason Hedrick, the well-known film actor . . . and Madeleine’s husband.

  I could still feel it now, deep down in the pit of my stomach, the way that I’d felt when I’d first seen that picture, seen it staring back accusingly at me from every newsstand as I’d walked that day to school.

  The guilt had eaten holes in me, great holes I’d filled with silence as I’d watched the bitterly painful collapse of the Hedricks’ marriage play out in the press through the following weeks. I’d wished a thousand times that I’d have had the sense to keep my mouth shut, knowing that without my goading Mother she would never have gone after Jason Hedrick, and the whole sordid scandal would never have happened.

  But words, once spoken, couldn’t be taken back, and mine had done their damage.

  I’d been too ashamed to tell anyone it was my fault. To this day I had never discussed it with Rupert or Bryan. Which was why all I said now to Bryan was that I remembered what Mother had done. “And I’m sure Madeleine Hedrick remembers it, too.”

  Bryan, very dry, pointed out that if I meant to avoid working with anyone my mother had offended, that wouldn’t leave too many places I could work. “Maybe one or two small theatres in the Hebrides,” he thought, “but you’d have to forget the entire West End.”

  “Oh, Bryan . . .”

  “I’m only saying.” He took a swig of beer. “She’s a nice lady, Maddy Hedrick. I’ve met her. She doesn’t seem the kind to hold a grudge.”

  “Even so.” I drew breath; set my jaw. “I’m not taking the part.”

  “Not just because of Maddy, surely? Or . . . is it something else?” He slanted me a penetrating look. “What’s the matter, Angel—don’t you think that you can do the job?”

  He saw too much, too easily. “Of course I do. It’s just that, well, D’Ascanio’s grandson said he wants the play to run through August, and that’s a long time to be gone, and I’ve just had this audition for a part in the new Gareth Gwyn Morgan play . . .”

  “Oh, really? What’s the part?”

  I looked down again. “Sort of a servant girl.”

  “I see.”

  “It’s a fabulous play. Everyone says so. And my audition went really well; I think that—”

  “Roo wants you to go.”

  I stopped short. Raised my head. Bryan’s eyes were still trained on the television, but his face had the self-reproaching look of someone who had just betrayed a confidence, who’d spoken out of turn. “He’ll never tell you so, you know how he is, but he wants you to go with him.”

  So I hadn’t been wrong then, to think that Rupert’s giving me the Celia poems for my birthday, and his taking me to St. Paul’s Church, had been part of an effort to sway my decision. It wasn’t like Rupert to do that, any more than it was like Bryan to break rank and tell me what Rupert wanted. “Why?” I asked.

  “He’s retiring.”

  He had dropped the bombshell squarely, and it took me several seconds to absorb the impact. “What?”

  “He’s been thinking about it for some time, we both have. We’re not getting any younger . . .”

  “You’re only in your fifties; that’s not old.”

  “Well, bless you for that, but it feels old, sometimes, and there are things we’d like to do together, places where we’d like to go. We’ve got no worries financially, so we figured, why not? I’ve already handed in my notice, and Roo”—here he looked at me—“Roo wants to do this one last play, for young D’Ascanio. And then he’s finished, too.”

  “I see.” It was an awful lot for me to take in, all at once. Bryan’s retiring wasn’t so much of a shock—he’d worked for the same firm forever and he did have a fair bit of money set by, but I couldn’t imagine Rupert giving up the theatre. Directing, to him, was much more than a job . . . it was a calling.

  “Don’t you dare say I told you,” said Bryan. “He’d bloody kill me. He wasn’t going to tell you till the play’s run was over. I’m only telling you no
w because I know what it would mean to him to have you there, your first leading role, and this the last play he’s directing.”

  “Bryan . . .”

  “Look, you know that I’m not one to tell you what to do—”

  “Since when?”

  “I only think—”

  “You always tell me what to do.”

  “I only think,” he carried on, with patience, “that you should think it over.”

  It was blackmail and he knew it. I would never have been able to bear disappointing Rupert, not after learning he had his heart set on my going to Italy with him. Rupert and Bryan meant more to me than anything, and if it came down to a choice between keeping my stage name and making Rupert happy, well . . . I sighed, and looked at Bryan.

  He said, “So you’ll go?”

  “I’ll think about it.”

  “That’s my girl.” He smiled. “You never know, you might enjoy it.”

  “Oh right, I’m sure I’d have a marvellous time. Madeleine Hedrick would hate me for sure, and D’Ascanio’s grandson just wants to have my name for his publicity.”

  He shrugged. “So take it as an opportunity to show the bastard—show them all—that you can bloody act.” As he passed me the crisps he reminded me, “Chances like this one aren’t thick on the ground, Angel. And playing a servant girl isn’t the same thing as playing the lead.”

  v

  I was not a good traveller. Planes made me nervous and driving in anything other than a car made me queasy and besides that I never knew what I should pack. An open suitcase always seemed to be inviting me to fill it, which I invariably did, to the point where it became impossible to lift and carry for more than a yard at a time.

  This morning had challenged me on all three fronts—our flight had been rough, and when we’d landed at the Marco Polo airport we had transferred to an overcrowded, overheated bus that had carried us over the causeway to Venice, and when the bus had let us off I’d had to drag my heavy suitcases for what had seemed miles, up and over the little arched bridges that were, I imagined—at times when you weren’t hauling suitcases—quite picturesque, but whose endless stone steps had at the time been sheer torture. I’d felt like the porter at Rupert’s club, like poor Sisyphus endlessly rolling his boulder uphill, labouring up to the summit of each bridge only to find there was one more beyond that to climb . . . down and up, down and up . . . in the heat and the crowds it was hell.