At Death's Door

by Robert Barnard

  When she awoke, it was early evening. She bathed luxuriously long, brooded over the clothes she had brought with her, and finally selected another incongruously bright and youthful dress. Then she spent much time with pots and bottles in front of her dressing-table mirror. That she looked, at the end of the session, like an embalmed galah she was quite unaware.

  When she opened the door to her bedroom, which was close to the top of the stairs, she heard noises from the bars. She nodded, satisfied. She went down the stairs in a parody of aristocratic poise and stood at the door to the Saloon Bar. Again, it was very crowded. A few locals, but mostly hotel guests having a drink before dinner. However, this time, at the far end, unmistakably making herself the center of the room, she spotted Myra Mason. Beside her was what Isobel decided was a very nice looking young man. (Isobel, doubtless in reaction to her husband, went for fair and willowy men with a facile middle-class charm.) With their backs to her were two young people. Father’s bastard and her lover, Isobel said to herself. She got herself a medium sherry from the bar, then made for a table with an empty chair, not too far from the Myra Mason group.

  “Is this free?”

  The woman on the other side of the table smiled, nodded, and went back to her book. Isobel thought vaguely that she’d seen her before. The Red Lion had a large number of summer regulars; probably she’d been staying there on one of her previous visits. Isobel glanced covertly at the book. The Radiant Way. Not one of her father’s. Isobel was always hoping that her father’s novels would go out of fashion. That would serve Roderick and Caroline right! Then she would be found to have done better out of the will.

  She settled down, not displeased that the other woman was disinclined to talk. She slipped a cigarette into her little gold holder and lit up. She leaned back, relaxed, into her chair, apparently looking through the window at the Downs, stretching green and lush into the distance, but in fact noting and remembering everything that happened at Dame Myra’s table. The atmosphere there was apparently quite genial. That was a disappointment. Isobel was banking on a tremendous scene, the details of which she would retail to her hairdresser, her manicurist, and the few friends she had. Well, there was still time for one.

  As the Myra Mason party prepared to go in to dinner and were gathering together their things (though most of the “things” were Myra’s), they were stalled by one of those intrusions that Isobel imagined were frequent with the rich and famous. Someone she vaguely knew (a naval man—that’s right; she’d met him last year in this very pub, a friend of Roderick’s, or on the school governing board, or something of that sort) went over and scraped an introduction through the little bastard. He succeeded in delivering what were obviously a few standard compliments on Myra’s stage performances, shook her hand, and introduced his busty and bossy-looking wife. Then—Myra having left a pregnant pause in the conversation—the pair retreated, and the Mason party made its way toward the dining room, Myra smiling graciously at the drinkers standing in her path.

  Isobel left it five minutes. She had always intended to scrape a few words with Dame Myra, and the intrusion of the naval person whose name she could not remember had made up her mind. She had a damned sight better reason for making herself known than he had, she told herself. She downed her drink, smiled at the Drabble reader, and said: “I really feel like my dinner,” as if she had just come back from a stiff hike over the Downs. Then she went toward the dining room.

  She was known to the waitresses. She indicated a table by the window with a distant view of the sea and left her handbag on it. But instead of sitting down, she sailed over to the table on the other side of the room where Myra Mason and her party were beginning their soup.

  “I couldn’t resist having a few words,” she said, in her high, sharp voice, addressing herself mainly to Dame Myra as the obvious Queen Bee of the table. “I’m Cordelia’s—stepsister, is it? Rather an unusual relationship, anyway. And I thought that now Cordelia had made contact with Roderick and Caroline, we ought at least to make ourselves known to each other. I live in Wiltshire—a large house, modern but large—and any time Cordelia would care to come and pay us a visit”—she turned to her, now breathlessly ingratiating—“you and your, er, friend, my dear, of course—please just ring and we’d be over the moon. I’m just itching to get better acquainted, and I know my husband and son will feel the same. Well, I won’t interrupt your meal. I’m sure you’ve got lots of family gossip to catch up on. But do you mind if I just say, Dame Myra, how much I’ve enjoyed your stage and television work? It sounds silly, but I’ve always felt quite proud, seeing you, because of the connection. I just loved you in Separate Tables. That, to me, is what acting is all about. Well, I won’t keep you. . . .”

  And she smiled a bright, brittle smile and retreated to her table.

  “Ben always said that one of his children was a prig and the other was a fool,” said Myra in a voice that, if not intended to carry, was certainly not designed to keep private.

  “And you’ve never done Separate Tables,” said Cordelia.

  “She’s probably mixing it up with Antony and Cleopatra,” said Myra. “Though it could have been a deliberate insult. With a fool you can never tell.”

  “I think my father was unfair to call Roderick a prig,” said Cordelia, pushing her soup bowl away. “I don’t find him so at all.”

  “Don’t you?” asked Myra. “All that business of devoting himself to teaching backward children—little pudding bowls who can’t wipe their noses properly? Such nonsense to leave a good school like Stowe to do that. As if he felt guilty about having an idiot child himself. Oh, no—he’s a prig; a highly articulate and intelligent one. But most prigs are that.”

  She delivered her judgments as if no other opinion was possible. The soup was succeeded by game pie. The menu at the Red Lion was restricted: one meat and one fish dish as the main course. It was traditional British cooking, but good and imaginative and ideal for those who had gone in for vigorous physical pursuits during the day. Myra ate what was put before her as if quite indifferent to food, which indeed she was.

  “I didn’t mean to imply that all teachers were prigs,” she said offhandedly to Pat. “But why do you stay in the job when the pay is abysmal?”

  Pat found it difficult to light on a reply that did not sound priggish.

  “Jobs are not two-a-penny these days. So far I’ve found I enjoy teaching.”

  “But you’re not intending to be stuck in a village primary school for the rest of your life?”

  Cordelia turned to Granville Ashe with a sweet smile. “Are you intending to be stuck in provincial rep for the rest of your life?”

  It was a sticky moment. Myra looked daggers, but Ashe decided to laugh it off. “Touché,” he said.

  “The situation is not comparable at all,” said Myra sharply. “I am merely trying to establish, in as tactful a manner as possible, what kind of support my daughter will have if, as you say, this . . . union—affair, whatever you want to call it—is intended to be permanent.”

  “Quite a lot of the teachers at the Pelstock Primary School are married,” said Pat mildly. “I haven’t noticed that any of them are starving.”

  “You missed out the bit about ‘the manner to which she is accustomed,’ Mother,” said Cordelia. “The heavy-father act is ridiculous in this day and age, and the heavy-mother act still more so. Anyway, the manner to which I was accustomed was always a pretty rackety manner.”

  “Rackety! When I think what I shielded you from!”

  “What I remember is the stuff that got past the shield. Why don’t you just accept the fact that Pat and I are living together and intend to go on doing so? Is it harming you? Surely it makes you freer. What should you have said to your parents if they’d tried to put a stop to your affair with Benedict Cotterel?”

  “What I would have said I don’t know, but what I should have said is ‘Thank you very much,’ ” said Myra Mason through clenched teeth.

 
“This discussion is getting out of hand,” said Granville Ashe. “And it’s quite unnecessary. Myra has accepted that you two are living together. She’s just worried that you won’t have enough to live on.”

  “Well, don’t be,” said Cordelia. Myra stared gloomily at her plate. “How’s John Gabriel Borkman going?”

  “Exhaustingly!” Myra switched moods immediately and became intensely, volubly, professional. “You know, Ibsen is the most exhausting writer. You can never relax into him as the run proceeds. I noticed it with Rosmersholm, and I’m finding it with Borkman, too. Even with Shakespeare, when the play is well run in, you can coast along, to some extent. Not with Ibsen. You have to be on the qui vive the whole time. Darlings, the sweat at the end of the performance . . .”

  She was no longer talking to family but to a stage crowd. The new impulse, or new mood, took them through the pudding—though Myra, who had to be careful of her figure and really didn’t care what she ate, waved aside the plum duff or syllabub and toyed with cheese and biscuits. She talked about the National Theatre, the forthcoming change of director, and what she had said to the director-elect, and around and around the theatrical maypole. Cordelia threw in questions, Granville made appropriate responses, Pat kept amiably silent. It would have looked, to an outsider, like a pretty typical two-generation family party.

  It was about ten to eight by the clock behind her when Myra pushed away her coffee cup.

  “Right. I don’t know what you men are going to do, but Cordelia and I have something to discuss. Alone.”

  Chapter 8

  “NOW,” said Myra, closing the bedroom door behind her.

  She gestured toward the double bed, but Cordelia, with apparent composure, walked around it and sat on the upright chair at the dressing table. She looked up at her mother expectantly.

  “What do you think you’re doing?” demanded Myra.

  Cordelia furrowed her brow. “Sorry—what are we actually talking about?”

  Myra’s mouth was twisted. “We are talking about this book you are telling everyone you are writing about me.”

  “Oh, yes . . . what was your question?”

  Myra’s voice rose a couple of tones toward hysteria. “I want to know what you are damned well writing!”

  Cordelia nodded, apparently with unruffled composure. “Well, the bulk of the book will be a survey of your career—plays, films, television plays—in chronological order. There will be extracts from your notices—you know I’ve always kept your scrapbooks—and personal reactions, for example from other actors, perhaps from writers, from any theatrical notables who saw you and will talk to me. And of course I’ve seen everything you’ve done since the late sixties.”

  “I know all about that side. I’ve talked to your damned publishers.”

  Cordelia was irritatingly nannyish. “There, then. What’s all the fuss about?”

  “What else is there? They say there’s supposed to be some kind of personal memoir.”

  “That’s right. The fans will want to get some kind of picture of what the Dame Myra they admire is like as a person. Who better to write it than me?”

  A nerve in Myra’s cheek twitched. Anybody seeing her now for the first time might have been forgiven for thinking she was rather an ugly woman. “What are you writing?”

  Cordelia shrugged. “Oh, I’ve hardly begun that section yet.”

  “What are you intending to write? Or, to put it another way, why are you here?”

  “Surely that’s obvious?” The nannyish tone was still there. Clearly Cordelia knew it was effective. “Ben Cotterel and all the material about him are here. Not to mention his son and daughter-in-law, who’ve been very helpful and put everything at my disposal. For a daughter writing about her mother, the natural approach to the subject is through the father—through the question of how she came into the world.”

  “You sly little bitch! You will write nothing about me and Ben. Nothing! I will not have that old business raked through again. I’ve told Maxim’s, your publishers, that I must have absolute right of veto on anything you write.”

  “Oh? And what did they say to that?”

  Myra glared and changed the subject. “What else are you intending to write about?”

  “Really I haven’t decided. I tell you, I’ve hardly begun work on that section yet. It’s difficult because there’s such an embarrassment of riches.” She leaned forward, throwing aside the mask of coolness and competence for one of long-nurtured grievance. “Shall I write about Louis? He’s dead, so I can. Shall I tell your fans what he did to me over the year you were married to him? And shall I tell them how you stood aside and never intervened—because you rather liked him doing it to me? What shall I tell them about Digby, your second? That association had a certain tragicomic flavor to it, which might come across well. People always like laughing at the great—the appeal of the banana skin. Shall I tell them about Mark and Harold and young Dale? Shall I give a paragraph or two each to poor old Winston, Murray, James, Gabriel—?”

  “Bitch! You haven’t got a hope of publishing. They’re all alive except Winston.”

  “They’ll die,” said Cordelia, sitting back in her chair and resuming her calm stance. Myra roamed around the room like a stage tigress, rubbing her hands.

  “What have I done to be treated like this?”

  “That’s a good question,” said Cordelia. “Perhaps I won’t concentrate on husbands and lovers. Perhaps I’ll tell them how you locked me in your costume trunk and left me crying and screaming for an hour while you made love to Murray. That was Murray, wasn’t it? Shall I tell them of all the schools you sent me away to and all the scenes you made there before you took me out of them? Shall I tell them the things you used to say to me when I was going through adolescence: how I’d never be a beauty, never get a husband, always be a useless, spotty lump. That was your exact phrase, I remember. They’ll want to know about all the scenes, all the rages, the outrageous performances at every emotional crisis of your life. They expect that sort of thing from the acting profession. And of course I’ll tell them how the rages were vented on me: how you’ve sneered at me in public, called me stupid, plain, frigid, robbed me of every shred of self-confidence I had, and broken up all my pathetic little romances.”

  “That’s nonsense. I never have.”

  Cordelia turned on her with narrowed eyes. “Don’t lie in private, lie in public, Mother. You know, and I know, how it’s been. Now I’ve broken away from you, I can see it clearer than ever.”

  “I have one consolation—one consolation,” said Myra, raising her eyes to heaven as if suddenly transplanted into a mid-Victorian weepie. “None of this is publishable.”

  “Oh, but the Ben episode will come out,” said Cordelia, smiling complacently. “The private life of an actress is maybe not of that much interest, except to the sensational press. But Ben was a great writer. Most of your others have been nonentities, like Granville, but Ben was great. People are going to write biographies of Ben whether you like it or not. You don’t imagine they are going to ignore the affair with you, do you? Anyway, I certainly shan’t. In fact, it’s going to be central to my book, the opening episode. It illustrates so beautifully the essence of your emotional life: the way you sail into affairs, because you see some glory or some advantage to yourself, and then fall flat on your face and get lumbered with the consequences. Notably me. I’m one of the consequences you got lumbered with, and you’ve never forgiven me.”

  “You won’t be able to publish any of this, you know.”

  “You’ll die,” said Cordelia without compassion. “You’ll grow old and terrible and lonely, but eventually you’ll die. Then I shall publish.”

  Myra underwent one of her rapid changes of mood, and her voice took on a wheedling tone. “You’ve got it all wrong, you know. The story of my affair with Ben. You’ve never let me tell my side.”

  “Oh, I know your side of the story. I’ve read it in the News of the World for Septe
mber 1963. Though your account was not very accurate. In fact, it was a tissue of lies.”

  “It was not!”

  “You rearrange the facts to suit your view of yourself. I know the facts because I’ve read the letters.”

  “You scrubby little muckraker! You’ve been reading my letters to Ben!”

  “I have. No wonder he tired of you so quickly. I’ve never seen such a prolonged howl of egotism.”

  “You don’t know the provocation! You don’t know what he did to me, the things he said. You’ve only read one side of it.”

  “That’s where you’re wrong, Mother. Pat and I went down to Pelstock yesterday.”

  “What? . . . You’re lying. Minnie would never have let you in.”

  “Sunday is Minnie’s day off, remember? I still have my key to the house. I thought the letters would be in the safe, and I thought I knew the combination number. I’ve stood at that door often enough, watching you open it to get out jewelry or the little treasures you’ve got stashed away there. As a child I always used to wonder if there were relics of my father there. And there were! We took them and photocopied them at Pat’s school. So now they’re part of the archive.”

  Myra’s face was red and blotchy, her eyes bulbous. “Thief! Traitor!”

  “You can only be a traitor where loyalty’s due. You gave me no love, no protection, no security. I tried for years to love you, then to admire you, but I never could. You gave me no reason to. That’s why I’ve always clung to the idea of my father—”

  “Your father! That cold, old lecher.”

  “Oh, I can see now that he was not perfect. I think you’re right: He was cold, and probably selfish, too. He capitalized on his affair with you to make one more novel when his inspiration had been waning for years. But he had dignity, he didn’t lie, and he tried to do his duty by me—to support me, if not protect me. Basically he was an honest person.”