Darling Sweetheart

by Stephen Price

  ‘We’re due on set in six hours. What are you doing here in Beynac?’

  He gave her a sozzled grin and pushed a strand of his long, blond hair away from his face. It had been liberated from its usual ponytail, which added to his air of disarray.

  ‘Oh, after you phoned I went out in Sarlat for a little nightcap with Sergio and we had quite a few little nightcaps and then I felt bad because you are not okay, so I took a taxi over to see you. I have been neglecting my muse!’

  ‘It’s one o’clock in the morning!’

  ‘Ah, but you are a beautiful woman and for beautiful women, life should never be boring!’

  ‘Believe me when I say that my life is far from boring right now.’

  He glanced around the apartment, as if checking for the presence of another male. ‘So where are these flowers I am accused to send you?’

  ‘I threw them away.’

  ‘You do not like flowers?’

  ‘Not this particular kind.’

  ‘What is on your hands?’

  ‘Oh… just a few scratches I got disposing of the roses. Look, I’m sorry I rang you…’ He followed her eyes to the balcony, which lay open, inhaling night air. He plonked his cognac on the coffee table and went outdoors. She followed him. He spotted the white bouquets where they lay, in the garden below. He smiled.

  ‘Like bodies, at a crime scene.’ He took in the deckchair, with the empty wine bottle, the lonely glass and the half-full ashtray arrayed around it. ‘Ah! I see that you party without me! I do not know you are a smoker!’

  ‘I’m not.’

  ‘Of course not.’ He pulled a packet of Gitanes from his coat pocket and offered her one. ‘No one is a smoker until they need a cigarette.’

  She shook her head. ‘Only when I’m stressed.’

  ‘Ah,’ he lit his cigarette, ‘so it is true?’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘Everyone says that you are Emerson’s new girlfriend. I feel foolish for confiding in you. The cat is out of the bag, no?’

  ‘There is no cat and there is no bag; it’s utter living shite.’

  ‘What is utter living shite?’

  ‘The story about me and Emerson.’

  ‘No, what does it mean, utter living shite?’

  ‘Oh… it means something isn’t true.’

  ‘So where were you today?’

  ‘Somewhere private.’

  ‘Hmm. You were not with Emerson, because he was working with me. I would be very angry if you two had gone away together.’

  ‘Harry persuaded me to take a break, and I really wish I hadn’t. The film must come first.’

  He stepped towards her. ‘To hell with the film – our hearts must come first.’

  ‘Peter…?’

  He flicked his cigarette away and grabbed her shoulders. ‘To hell with Emerson and his Hollywood bullshit! I tell you, when this is over, we will make some real films, you and me! True art, not utter living shite!’ She tried to pull away, but he held her with his big, heavy hands.

  ‘Please, I’m very tired–’

  He tried to kiss her mouth but she averted her face and he slobbered on her cheek. She cried, ‘Ugh!’ and he wrapped his arms around her in a bear hug. He tried to kiss her again and she began to panic. She shook her head and gasped, ‘No!’, but he moved one hand down to the small of her back to force her towards his groin. That made her want to scream, but nothing came out and the ludicrous thought occurred to her that she was about to be raped on a balcony, in full public view. She struggled. Her foot hit the empty wine glass which fell over and broke. The noise distracted Tress so she pushed him. His legs met the deckchair and he fell backwards, pulling her over on top of him. The impact winded him; she wriggled free and fled inside the apartment. Another ludicrous thought occurred to her – she couldn’t run out to the street, because the paparazzi were waiting with their cameras. Tress came staggering after her. She bolted to the far side of the dining table.

  ‘Peter!’ she yelled, finally finding her voice. ‘What are you doing?’

  His pale eyes met hers; for a sickening moment, she thought he might try again, but then he hiccupped and his aggression seemed to wilt.

  ‘I only try to show how much I love you.’

  ‘You’re drunk!’

  ‘In vino veritas, no?’

  ‘And you’re married!’

  ‘In Sweden, we do not worry about such things.’

  ‘You have children!’

  ‘Love conquers everything.’

  ‘Only in the movies! Go home, Peter! Get out of here, right now! If Harry knew about this, he’d sack you on the spot!’

  ‘You will tell him?’

  ‘Just go!’

  ‘I apologise, undeservedly.’

  ‘Jesus! It’s unreservedly!’

  ‘Every day, I look at you in my camera. Every day, you look more beautiful.’ He sauntered into the hallway, drunken-casual, but she edged sideways, keeping the table between them. He grinned. ‘Goodnight, belle Annalise.’

  She didn’t reply. She waited until he’d descended the stairwell before running over to slam the door. She snuck into a small, darkened bedroom, to the only window that overlooked Rue de l’Ancienne Poste. She heard the front gate open then several flashes went off.

  ‘Dra!’ Tress’s voice bellowed. ‘Dra!’ She heard him run away; the flashes reached a frenzy then ceased. A small part of her mind wondered what ‘Dra’ meant in Swedish – she reckoned she could guess. She began to shake and slid to the floor, as fear had its way with her.

  It was the night-time when she woke up. Someone was crying. It was dark, but the moon came through her windows – she always slept with her curtains open. Froggy was tucked up beside her. The sound of crying faded then rose again, so she lifted Froggy and crept along the corridor in her bare feet and nightie. Mummy’s bedroom door was open and the crying came from there. Her lamp was on and she was in bed.

  ‘Mummy, what’s the matter?’

  ‘Nothing – nothing’s the matter. Go away.’

  ‘Where’s Darling Sweetheart?’

  ‘How should I know where your Darling bloody Sweetheart is? Go back to your room!’

  But she didn’t go back to her room. Instead, she went to the upstairs gallery and stood quietly, high above the hallway, which yawned below her like a pit. She could hear nothing apart from Mummy crying, so she went down the big stone steps, which were cold on her feet, but not as icy as the black-and-white tiles at the bottom. She stopped again and told Froggy, ‘Don’t worry. If we can be like brave explorers, we will find him …’

  She looked in the front reception room then tried the kitchen, but Darling Sweetheart wasn’t there. Then, she noticed a yellow glimmer from the far end of the darkest corridor. She sneaked along it; the light came from the chapel door. It was a little bit open. She took a deep breath, hugged Froggy and went inside. The door creaked and a candle flickered, which made the statues look like they were moving, getting ready to pounce. The glass faces in the windows all stared down at her and she nearly ran away. But then she heard Darling Sweetheart say, ‘Piss off, Gabriela.’ His voice came from inside a wooden box that Mr Crombie said was where the priest used to listen to your sins.

  She whimpered, ‘Darling Sweetheart?’

  There was a silence then, ‘Annalise, is that you?’

  ‘Are you talking to God?’

  ‘No. Go back to bed.’

  ‘Please come out – it’s cold and there’s faces and Mummy is crying because she doesn’t know where you are.’

  ‘No one knows where I am. Now go to bed.’

  ‘I know where you are.’

  ‘That’s not what I mean. No one knows where I am in my life; no one understands me. And now I’m discussing my problems with a five-year-old child; that just says it all. Thank you, God.’

  ‘I knew you were talking to God!’

  ‘I am not talking to God! I don’t believe in God and even if I did, it wouldn’t b
e the same God they built this place for. Now go away; I want to be alone. A shit-heel deserves to be alone.’

  ‘What’s a shit-heel?’

  ‘If I have to come out of this box, I’m going to be very cross with you.’

  ‘I want you to come out of your box.’

  ‘Oh… just go away.’

  She sat on the stone floor. It was freezing on her bum. She put Froggy on her lap; she didn’t want his bum to freeze too. She waited; she said nothing and Darling Sweetheart said nothing. After a long time, she couldn’t feel her bum any more. Then, she had an idea; she made Froggy talk. She made him say, ‘Annalise, why won’t Darling Sweetheart come out of his box?’

  She answered, ‘Because he is sad, Froggy.’

  ‘Poor Darling Sweetheart. We don’t like it when he is sad in a box.’

  She heard a click, and the door of the priest-box opened. Darling Sweetheart sat on the floor, his chin on his knees. He was in his pyjamas but had his glasses on, so she knew he could see her. He said, ‘You’re doing it all wrong.’ He crawled out and knelt in front of her. ‘Give him to me.’ He took Froggy from her. ‘You see, Froggy’s voice,’ he held him up, ‘has to come up through your nose. And he speaks quickly, like this, “Hey, bug-face. You gotta make me sound like a shit-heel.” Now copy me.’

  She said, ‘Hey, bug-face. I am a shit-heel.’

  ‘Not bad, not bad. But you need to practise over and over, until you get it absolutely right. That’s called rehearshing.’

  ‘Rehearsing.’

  ‘Another thing… do you want to know the real secret of making Froggy talk?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘When you’re pretending to be somebody else, you don’t just copy how they speak. You have to copy what they’re like, before it really works. Like, Mrs Crombie always says nice things, right?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘That’s because she’s a nice person. So if you were pretending to be Mrs Crombie, you would try to think nice things. But if you were pretending to be me, you would think bad things, because I’m a bad person.’

  ‘No you’re not!’

  ‘Don’t argue! You have to imagine what it’s like inside someone’s head, or else it doesn’t work properly!’

  ‘So inside Mummy’s head would be crying?’

  ‘Exactly! Very good! So when you make Froggy talk, you have to make him like me, cheeky and nasty – okay?’

  ‘But you’re not nasty, you’re my Darling Sweetheart!’

  ‘Pay attention!’ he barked. ‘You know, there are people who would pay an awful lot of money for acting lessons from me!’

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘Now listen closely: Froggy is always cheeky because he says the things that you really think, but you’re too polite to say. Like if someone was fat, Froggy would call them a lard-arse…’

  ‘Lar darse.’

  ‘… and if someone was stupid, he’d call them as thick as bottled pig-shit.’

  ‘But you shouldn’t call people stupid – you might hurt their feelings!’

  ‘Schnopple-kopf, no one tells you this when you’re little, but most of the people who live on this planet are profoundly stupid. Isn’t that right, Froggy?’

  And Froggy said, ‘Hey, you’re the one hiding in a creep-hole of a chapel in the middle of the freaking night!’

  Annalise slapped Froggy. ‘Bad frog! Don’t you say bad things to my daddy!’

  ‘Hands off the fur! The truth hurts, y’know?’

  ‘Now Froggy,’ her father said, ‘you have to be nice to Annalise because she is a tired little girl who needs to go back to her beddy-byes.’

  ‘No!’ Annalise cried. ‘I’m not leaving you alone in the creepo chapel!’

  It’s all right, poppet.’ He lifted her up. It was her favourite feeling in the world, when her father carried her. ‘I’m finished here. We’re all going to bed now. Here,’ he gave her Froggy, ‘take this bad article with you.’

  She yawned. ‘But who will look after Mummy?’

  He kissed her nose. ‘Don’t you worry, Schnopple-kopf – you leave Mummy to me.’

  Froggy snickered. ‘If the lady still wants some when you’re done, gimme a shout.’

  ‘Silence, you filthy frog, or you’ll find yourself sleeping in the duck pond.’

  Annalise hugged Froggy and snuggled her face into her father’s neck. He smelled of his spicy aftershave. As he carried her up the big stone stairs he sang, ‘Call me darling… call me sweetheart… call me dear…’

  7

  Roselaine de Trenceval huddled in a corner of the tumbrel as it bounced along the riverside track. Her hands were bound in front of her, one end of the rope lashed to the side of the crude cart, although, in truth, she could not have run very far with some fifty mounted men riding before her and another dozen or so behind. She’d been captured near Toulouse the previous evening, visiting a sick relative in a small, peaceful village that had been overrun by the crusaders as quickly and as casually as the tumbrel wheel crushed any unwary toads into the muck. She had been forced to watch as fifty-two villagers were burned alive. In fact, only six had been credentes – believers – the rest were ordinary Christians, consigned to the most painful death imaginable for the minor crime of tolerating Cathars in their midst. As the Dominican friar who supervised the burnings had said, ‘Kill them all; God will know his own.’

  She had been spared because her clothing, speech and pale skin marked her as an aristocrat’s daughter, therefore maybe worth a ransom. She had lied about her parentage, telling the inquisitorial monk that she belonged to a minor liege family that resided twenty leagues east of her father’s castle. She knew that if she revealed she was Raymond de Trenceval’s daughter, she would be used as a bargaining chip to force him to surrender without a fight. Or to torment him, if he resisted. Quite possibly, she had about another day to live.

  The Dominican, a certain Friar Bernard, had expressly ordered that she should not be beaten or violated, either suspecting she was more noble than she claimed or perhaps reserving her for his own purposes. Her father, in fact, was the most prominent Cathar convert in all of Languedoc: his patronage had permitted the religion to flourish in the region for many decades. The beauty of Catharism was that it required no churches, no priests, no rituals or riches; indeed, it regarded such things as evil distractions, the work of the devil. Instead, all a convert had to do was to receive the consolamentum, the only sacrament the faith required or recognised. After that, if life was lived chastely and modestly, a person attained the status of Perfect – and if you died Perfect, you could escape the hell that was this earth and rejoin the spirit of God.

  But a single slip – an act of self-indulgence or lust – and one returned to the lesser status of credente and had to receive the consolamentum all over again. That could be problematic, as only another Perfect could pass on the sacrament, and as the crusade progressed south, the Perfect were either being killed or forced into hiding. Roselaine had been Perfect since the age of eleven – her greatest fear was that she might not die in this state and therefore suffer reincarnation. Next time around, there was no guarantee that she would be born noble – or even female, for that matter – and for a less privileged mortal, attaining and keeping the status of Perfect could prove very difficult, especially if the cursed crusaders continued to murder her co-religionists with such vigour. The consolamentum had been passed from Perfect to Perfect for twelve hundred years, since the time of Christ, and if that immaculate link was broken, it could never be repaired.

  ‘I wouldn’t mind a taste of you, my pretty.’

  A mounted soldier leered into the tumbrel. He was filthy, unshaven and missing most of his teeth. Roselaine averted her face in disgust, but he drew his sword and slapped the side of the cart where she crouched, causing her to jump. She tried to wriggle away but, just then, the cart stopped. Up ahead, a handsome knight raised his sword in the air. Even through her terror, she had noticed this knight looking at her earlier.


  ‘We must ford the river here!’ he called back to his men. ‘It is deep, but in both directions it is deeper still!’

  Reluctantly, the leading soldiers began to coax their horses into the water, the knight having drawn back to let them pass. The ugly thug beside Annalise took advantage of the distraction to renew his mocking advances.

  ‘Hey, pretty pretty,’ he drooled, ‘do you know what it is to have a real man inside you?’ Again she tried to pull away, but the binding rope would not let her. The buffoon laughed and prodded at her. ‘Hey, lads!’ He summoned his fellow troops, several of whom gathered around, peering down at Roselaine with a mixture of lust and crude amusement. ‘What wager you that m’lady has never had a man between her legs?’

  ‘How could she,’ rasped another, ‘when there are no men in Languedoc?’

  A third soldier spat on her, his hot phlegm spattering her naked arm. ‘A taste of Frankish beef! That’s what this filthy Cathar needs!’ The fear and mortification of her predicament burned across Roselaine’s face. The first soldier tried to lift her dress with his sword.

  ‘Give me five minutes, I’d soon convert her!’

  She kicked his sword away, summonsing every shred of contempt in her soul. The soldier cackled and ran his tongue around his hole of a mouth. Suddenly, his expression changed from one of twisted desire to surprised pain, as he took a blow from the flat of someone else’s weapon. He swung around to retaliate, but the knight already held a blade against his hairy chin.

  ‘Get your carcass into that river – it could do with a wash.’

  The other rogues watched closely as, for an instant, it seemed as if their ringleader might risk a fight, but the knight smiled, daring him to try. The toothless soldier lowered his weapon, yanked his horse’s reins and cantered off. His fellow tormentors followed. The knight moved his mount, a large black stallion, against the side of the tumbrel.

  ‘Bernard de Vaux,’ he grinned at her. ‘You have about ten seconds to escape, so do exactly as I say.’ He glanced at the foot-soldier holding the reins of the cart-horses. He was permitting the mounted troops to pass – most of these were now in the river, trying not to fall in. The knight smiled at her again. ‘I deliberately picked a deep spot.’ She looked at him in puzzlement. ‘When I cut your rope,’ his expression turned serious, ‘you need to jump on my horse – can you do that?’