“He was a snake! He exploited me!”
“No, Mother, it was you who was the exploiter. If he capitalized on the affair, that’s because he knew perfectly well that you were exploiting him—sleeping with him, having his child, for the kudos, and for the play you hoped to screw out of him. He was not a gentleman, maybe, but he was not a dishonorable man. I was right to cling to the idea of my father.”
There was a moment’s silence, and then Myra’s face assumed an ugly sneer.
“If he is, in fact, your father.”
Cordelia flinched. “What?”
“If that bundle of senility is in fact your father.”
“I know Ben Cotterel is my father! I even know when I was conceived. It was the weekend you came down from Glasgow, when you were playing in Earnest.”
Myra shrugged, smiling dangerously. “Looking at you—so lumpish and stupid—I’ve always thought your father was probably the Cameron Highlander I had it off with in the train loo on the journey down.”
Cordelia threw herself out of her chair and at her mother, her hands on her throat.
“You’re trying to rob me of my father! You monster! You monster!” she screamed.
• • •
Cordelia got back to the Rectory at about half past ten. She didn’t go straight down to the tent, but let herself in at the front door—as she had been encouraged to do when she came up to work during the day—and knocked at the door of the sitting room, where Roderick and Caroline were watching the news.
“Hello,” said Caroline, turning the television off. “You’re late. I think Pat’s down in the tent. Did it go well?”
“What? Oh, the meeting with my mother. It went pretty much as I expected. . . . Well, I suppose rather worse. I was intending to keep very cool.”
“Oh, dear. And you didn’t?”
“No, I . . . blew up. Just the sort of scene Myra loves.”
“How did that happen? Was it something she said?”
“Yes. She said— Oh, never mind. I’ve been walking it off since. I’ve cooled down now. I realize it was just something she made up simply to get me to blow my top. I should have known she’d do that when things weren’t going her way. I was a fool to let her succeed.”
“Is there any chance of making things up?” asked Roderick. “Any use my volunteering as a peacemaker?”
Cordelia’s fingers began working nervously at the headscarf she had taken off as she came in.
“None at all, I should think. Unless— Oh, never mind. Just an idea that occurred to me. . . . But there’s really no point in trying to be a peacemaker. Mother belongs to a part of my life that’s over. Thank God. I want to get the book written, and when it is, I won’t much care what happens to it. I’ll put one copy in a strongbox and let the publishers and lawyers fight over the text. Maybe they’ll just publish the bit about her career. Maybe they can salvage something from the other part. I shan’t care much. It will at least exist, and one day someone will read it. I will have got it out of my system.”
“And you can get on with your life,” said Caroline quietly.
“That’s right. Maybe make a career in journalism, maybe have a family—who knows, maybe both. Myra will be a part of my past. I didn’t want her to come here. I’ll be glad if I never see her again.”
“Perhaps that would be wise,” said Caroline. “Sad, but wise. Do you really have to write this book?”
“I think so.” Cordelia paused and darted a sharp look at them both. “Unless . . .”
“Yes?”
“Well, I’ve thought over the past few days, when I’ve realized what a lot of marvelous material there is here, that what I’d really like to do is write a biography of my father. The authorized biography.”
Roderick and Cordelia looked at her, startled.
“This is a new idea,” said Roderick at last.
“Yes. But I can’t see there’s anything against it, and there are all sorts of things in its favor. I could tell my mother I’d given up the book on her. . . .”
Roderick screwed up his face. “Of course we’ve always realized that eventually something of the sort will be written and that in all probability we will have to cooperate—probably, as the heirs, even nominate someone to write it.”
“Well, then.”
“But you see the fact that father is so popular and well-thought-of means that there are all sorts of people queuing up to write it. In America there’s even a Benedict Cotterel Society, which writes to us about all sorts of things, from changes in the manuscripts to what brands of underwear he wore. Soon the BBC is going to serialize The Silver Sky on television, and that will only increase his popularity. Already there are lots of academics, here and overseas, who have written books on his books. Many of them are itching to be asked to write his life.”
“But I wrote my M.A. on him! I’ve been in love with his books since I was in my early teens.”
Roderick shook his head and became, Caroline thought, horribly schoolmasterish.
“I don’t want to be rude, Cordelia, but that is at a rather different level. These are people with solid academic backgrounds, research qualifications. Inevitably we’ll think first of one of them when it comes to picking a biographer. As you know, there are episodes in Father’s life—probably more than you realize—that need to be treated with great discretion; honestly, I hope, but still circumspectly.”
“I get you,” said Cordelia with more than a trace of bitterness. “You think I’ll be too sensational. Play up the love affairs to get the book serialized in the Sunday papers.”
“No, no, I’m sure you wouldn’t,” said Roderick hurriedly. “I know you have too much respect for your father to do that. But inevitably an older, more experienced writer would have more of the necessary weapons. Tact and discretion don’t come naturally to the young. You acquire them over the years.”
“And however discreet you were, there would still be something sensational in the situation itself,” Caroline pointed out. “A natural daughter writing the life of her father. It’s just made for the Sundays. Inevitably you’d have to write about the affair between Ben and your mother.”
“Oh, yes,” said Cordelia.
“There you are. Even if you did it very discreetly—and to be frank, I don’t think you’re inclined to do that—it would be seized on.”
“I think you’re being very unfair,” said Cordelia. “I’m the best-qualified person to write it because I am involved, he is part of me. . . . I love him, and always have since I knew about him.”
“From one point of view that’s exactly what disqualifies you,” said Roderick.
“Anyway, I don’t see any point in our having this conversation now,” said Caroline, getting up in the hope of putting an end to it. “Whoever we choose—an American academic, a British one, a professional biographer, you—we aren’t going to do it now. To me there’s something distasteful just in talking about it. I’m sure I mentioned to you earlier that we have no intention of doing anything about a biographer until such time as Ben dies.”
Cordelia came up close to Caroline and looked into her eyes.
“Oh, but he is dead, isn’t he?” she said.
Into the silence that followed there intruded the siren of an approaching police car.
Chapter 9
AFTER CORDELIA AND MYRA had disappeared upstairs in the Red Lion to have their “discussion,” the men of the party had trooped through the dining room and back toward the bar.
“Best thing is to have a drink and wait,” said Granville Ashe to Pat. “My guess is, there’ll be a big bust-up, and then the peace processes can begin. Anyway, the thing’s out of our hands.”
It was, of course. Pat’s instinct was to head back to the Rectory and have a read while the light was still good. Granville Ashe had not seemed to him a particularly interesting person on their brief acquaintanceship. But then, anybody in the shadow of Myra Mason was likely to pale. He himself had probably not said more t
han fifty words during the evening thus far. He would give Granville the benefit of the doubt.
“Fine,” he said with his slow smile. “Just a pint, and then I’ll be cutting off home.”
The bar was less crowded than it had been before dinner. The Red Lion at Maudsley attracted a healthy rather than a drinking clientele. Many of the resident guests were probably taking an evening stroll down the cliffs to the beach or observing wildlife on the Downs. There were a great number of bird-watchers among the people who booked in there summer after summer. Pat bought the drinks and, observing that Roderick Cotterel’s sister was already in the bar, steered Granville in the opposite direction. Pat recognized poison when he saw it. Granville came to rest at an empty table beside Commodore and Daisy Critchley. Unfortunately, the commodore did not seem disposed to regard the tables as separate.
“Ah, the ladies have gone for a chat, have they?” he said with that geniality that Caroline found suspect. “Mother-and-daughter talk, I suppose.”
“That’s right,” said Granville. “Mother-and-daughter talk.”
Pat had hoped that Granville might freeze them out, but he seemed inclined to be friendly, no doubt to make up for Myra’s frostiness earlier in the evening. He smiled at them, a not-very-interesting-leading-man-in-a-not-very-interesting-play sort of smile.
“You’re an actor, too, aren’t you?” asked Daisy Critchley with a quick stretching of her mouth.
“Oh, a very humble one,” said Granville with practiced self-deprecation and sipping his beer. “Or, if not humble, lowly. A born spear-carrier, I’m afraid. Made to swell a progress, start a scene or two.” He saw that he had lost them. “My lot is mostly endless tours of the provinces,” he explained, “though of course one mustn’t call them that these days. When the West End plays go on tour, they tend to call on me to replace the star who’s gone off to make a television series. Or one may come to rest with some repertory company in Leatherhead or Guildford. That’s what I’ve been doing for the past six months.”
It was an opening into theatrical gossip, and one the Critchleys were certain to take up. After a time Pat shut out the talk and looked around the room. He was on the long seat under the window, and he had an excellent view. Now that the bar was less crowded, he had a view of individuals, not just of one seething mass. Some of the people standing or sitting with their drinks he already knew, for he and Cordelia had been here often enough in the evening: There was the Maudsley greengrocer, there was the man from the post office, and over there was the family he had talked to on the beach. The woman reading he had seen before somewhere, and there, centrally situated, was that sister of Roderick’s whom he had just avoided. She had a table to herself now. Odd woman. Unsettling, somehow. When she had come up to them at dinner, there had been a mixture of hostility and obsequiousness that Pat—with his young man’s freshness of vision—found difficult to account for.
Now Isobel was clearly nervous. “Cat on a hot tin roof” was the phrase that sprang to Pat’s mind. She fumbled when she put a cigarette into her little gold holder; she smoked a few puffs, then extinguished it and ejected it into the ashtray. She started up from her table, then thought better of it and settled back again, crossing and uncrossing her legs. What’s she got to be nervous about? wondered Pat. He decided that she was someone he and Cordelia would have as little to do with as possible, the sort he found quite insufferable: overdressed, neurotic, discontented. How odd that she should be so different from Roderick. The Cotterels had been good to Cordelia—and good for her, too. This one, if she got her claws into her half sister, could spread her neuroticism like a small plague.
Isobel made a decision: She got up and marched over to the door that led to the back sections of the Red Lion—to the lavatories, the kitchens and dining room, and the stairs leading up to the guests’ bedrooms. No doubt she was going to fetch something from her room. She had left a filmy scarf on her table to reserve it.
Pat turned his attention back to the conversation.
“Yes, we are newly married—” Granville was saying.
“Congratulations!” said Daisy Critchley. “Of course we saw it in the Telegraph.”
“Thanks. But in fact we’re . . . friends from way back. It must be—oh, ten, twelve years ago when we met; at Stratford, when I played Fortinbras to her Gertrude.”
It was an odd way of putting it, Pat thought. Perhaps Granville Ashe thought he could rely on the Critchleys’ having only the vaguest notions of the importance of the various roles in Hamlet. And probably he was right.
“I decided then that Myra was the greatest actress I was ever likely to appear with. And so it has proved. Not that I haven’t been in plays with wonderful women—some of them pure magic. Even an unknown like me gets breaks sometimes! But none of them has had the presence, the command, the sheer aura of Myra on stage. Critics would agree. I don’t see her Gertrude being equaled in my lifetime.”
Pat had heard quite a lot of this sort of thing in the last few months, and his attention span was accordingly small. His mind wandered. He saw that Isobel had returned to the Saloon Bar. She seemed still more highly strung than before. She bought herself another drink from the landlord at the bar, took it to her table, sipped it, then rummaged in her handbag. Then—apparently having forgotten something upstairs or on the pretense of having forgotten something—she got up again and made for the door leading to the lavatories and the guests’ bedrooms.
“How did you meet up with Dame Myra again, then?” Commodore Critchley was prodding Granville.
“Oh, that’s simple. Myra’s at the National at the moment. I’m sure you know the system there: lots of plays playing in repertory. That means you may be in John Gabriel Borkman for three or four nights, then have several days off. Days off don’t exactly suit Myra. She’s an actress first, last, and all stops in between. She has a one-woman show that she takes around the country. It’s called A Room of My Own, and it’s about women writers: Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, Katherine Mansfield, Virginia Woolf. Letters, extracts from diaries, and so on. She doesn’t exactly do them, or anything like that, so the show can be done from a suitcase. Not really my cup of tea, but a damned fine evening even so. Anyway, she brought it down to Guildford for a Sunday evening performance, and that was that.”
“Guildford’s where you’ve been acting, is it?” asked Daisy Critchley. She asked it guilelessly, but Pat felt sure it was with malicious intent. Thus did Noel Coward dismiss Norfolk.
“That’s right.” Granville Ashe smiled ruefully. “Not the middle of the theatrical universe, but it means even a very minor luminary like myself can get good parts there. Since the beginning of the year I’ve done Benedick, Teddy in The Homecoming, and we’ve just finished Noises Off. There are some compensations, I assure you, about Guildford.”
“Oh, please, I wasn’t—”
But Daisy Critchley was interrupted. Isobel Allick had hurried back into the Saloon Bar, and this time she came straight over to them. Her manner was nervous, but also—Pat was sure of it—excited. As if she got what she had hoped for and intended to make the most of it. She addressed herself to Granville Ashe and Pat, her mouth working convulsively.
“Oh, Mr. Ashe, and—I’m sorry, I don’t know your name. I thought you ought to know. I had to go upstairs a little while ago, to . . . to fetch a handkerchief, and there were these very loud voices coming from your wife’s room. Well, not to mince matters, a row. And I’ve just had to go up again for—well, actually, I was worried, because Cordelia is my sister, in a way, and I just hoped she wasn’t going to do anything foolish—and in fact there were sounds of . . . of violence. I mean they were actually physically fighting.”
Her voice faded away. Both the Critchleys were looking up at her with naked, avid interest. But Granville Ashe put a restraining hand on Pat’s arm and smiled his young-leading-man’s smile up at her.
“Thanks you for telling us, Mrs. . . . er . . . I’m sure you are concerned, but really you don’t
have to be. I’ve seen plenty of women fighting during my time in the theater. They may make a lot of noise, but I can assure you they never do each other any real harm. It’s like women’s tennis; it just doesn’t have the ferocity of men’s. Just relax. We knew there were likely to be difficulties. This sounds worse than it is. There’s no cause to be alarmed.”
There was a moment’s silence. Isobel couldn’t think what to say.
“Well, I hope you’re right.”
The remark came out flatly. Isobel had obviously expected to cause a great sensation. She went back to her table, took a discontented swill at her drink, and sat back, looking at the ceiling. Then Pat saw a thought occurring to her, and she leaned over sideways and conversed in low tones with the woman reading Drabble.
Granville Ashe had kept his hand on Pat’s arm.
“I meant what I said to that interfering bitch. It is much less worse than it sounds, always. If one of us goes up and tries to intervene, we’ll just fan the flames—and get caught in the middle, to boot. It will work itself out quite quickly, you’ll see. Probably Cordelia will flounce off, they’ll both feel they’ve won, and the whole thing will just go off the boil. This is just women’s nonsense. Much better we don’t interfere.”
The way Granville put it rather shocked Pat. You didn’t talk in those terms in his circles. Clearly the women’s movement had had little effect on the world of provincial rep. He wondered if Granville was right. This was surely something more than a mere backstage brawl. There were real issues here, and real hatred. Hatred, Pat suspected, on both sides. Myra was a formidable personality, determined to have her way, and Cordelia was large physically. There lurked in him the fear that they could do each other real harm. On the other hand, was a final, violent explosion just what the relationship needed? Would it purge each from the other’s system, finally and beneficially? Pat was a peaceful soul but not a pacifist. He believed that some long-festering emotions find in violence their healthiest outlet. Perhaps that would be the case here.
At Death's Door Page 8
