Eden St. Michel

by F. R. Jameson

  “That man was Archie Sandibanks.”

  Gasps and cries that Eden just let wash over her.

  “As I stand here today,” she continued, “having sworn on the Holy Bible, I can say that I know for a fact Joe Jones did not kill anybody that night. He is just a romantic fool who knew that if the truth came out about my love life, it would destroy my livelihood. A fool who thought the irrefutable fact that he is an innocent man would carry him through. But no. His sacrifice isn’t worth it. My reputation isn’t worth it. Joe Jones did not kill that man. I’m as certain as I can be that it was Archie Sandibanks and nobody else.”

  From the audio recordings of Eden St. Michel

  “Necessity has meant I’ve done a lot of theatre in recent times. There are bills and they need to be paid. But I think the main reason I’m drawn to the stage is that somewhere deep inside, I want to recreate the response I got at the Old Bailey. The day I took a sledgehammer and smashed my old career into ten thousand pieces.

  “Even as I was taken down for questioning by an understandably livid detective inspector, the gasps and the palpable shock of the moment rang in my ears as if applause. I was thrilled by it, buzzing from it. When I was up there, it was like I was playing a character. I knew what I had to say and I knew the reception I had to get. And, if I do say so myself, I sold it so well.

  “Last year I received an offer to play the wicked queen in panto down in Cheltenham, and do you know what? I actually considered it for a while. Just so I could hear that cacophony of noise again. But ultimately, I said no. My career isn’t in such a sorry state that I’d need to take any work I can get. Not yet anyway.

  “Before I took the stand, I went to see the only person I knew could help, Joe’s old friend, Luca. He’d been in touch with me a lot after Joe had gone inside, asking me out, offering me a shoulder to cry on. A groin to cry on. Apparently it’s the worst form possible for one man to try and seduce his friend’s lover, but if that friend happens to be in prison then all’s fair in love and war. I had rebuffed all his advances so far, even used his phone calls to cry down the line. He was the only person, after all, who knew how badly I was feeling and understood the reason why. He can’t have minded too much as he kept calling. Whatever else one might say about him, I think we’d have to agree that he’s persistent.

  “So I went to see him. Knowing that if I asked him another favour I wouldn’t be able to hold him off much longer, but right then not caring. Over a couple of glasses of lovely French champagne, I talked through my fears, my conviction that Joe was going to hang. I told him that I couldn’t just sit idly by and let Joe go to the gallows. That I needed to do something and I didn’t care any more what it cost me. My life was a pain-filled, laugh-free farce, and I would do whatever I could to save the man I loved.

  “Well, Luca nodded along sympathetically. He listened and finally told me that things had gone too far, that if we were going to make the case that Joe was somehow innocent, then we were going to need someone else to take the blame in his stead. A bit of reasonable doubt wouldn’t cut it any more. There had to be another killer.

  “Of course, all I could think was that tore it. It wasn’t like I had anyone else I could just point the finger at. I might have wanted to save Joe, but there was no way I was going to send another innocent man to die. No way I’d put his loved ones through what I was experiencing.

  “But he smiled at me and told me he had just the man, someone called Archie Sandibanks. It was a name I was only vaguely familiar with. I guess I only paid attention to what the sexier stuntmen were called.

  “My first thought was to object. Say that we couldn’t frame this man, particularly when – as Luca made clear – this Archie was a friend of Joe’s. Joe might get out, but he’d surely never forgive me. With a smile, Luca stroked my hand and used a euphemism which has stayed with me for all these years. He said Sandibanks was ‘beyond caring what people say about him’. Even as I nodded in agreement at this new plan, I felt a shiver down my spine.

  “Luca’s price for helping me with this? For setting up the mechanism for getting his friend out of prison? Well, I had to spend the weekend with him. Three nights in a luxury hotel in Berkshire – Carreras Hall, it was called – me barely wearing knickers the whole time as I endured his mechanical lovemaking. Of course, I played my role and smiled and simpered and made the normal noises of pleasure, but I have never felt so cheap. The thought that carried me through was Joe. That it was all worth it to see Joe freed again.

  “A week after my bombshell evidence, the police received an anonymous tip which led them to Archie Sandibanks’s corpse. The coroner eventually ruled that whereas they couldn’t establish a specific date, he had died at much the same time as the American bastard. And so the theory swiftly gained traction that, overwhelmed by his grief at what had happened, Mr Sandibanks had taken himself off to that dingy, deserted warehouse in Enfield and hanged himself.

  “Absolutely I felt awful when I heard that news. Obviously I’d known what Luca meant, I had understood that Archie wasn’t in a good place, but the callousness of it just revolted me. I made a mental note not to go near Luca Llewelyn ever again, and even though he once showed up at my stage door with a bouquet of roses, it’s a promise I have kept to myself.

  “Of course, as soon as I heard that Joe had walked free, I rationalised it to myself. I continue to rationalise it to myself to this day.

  “The bastard’s death was an accident; Archie Sandibanks was already dead; and so it didn’t really hurt anybody to put them together. But after I defamed his name in court, I wish I could have met him. I wished I could have shaken his hand or kissed his lips and – somehow in advance – thanked him for taking his reputation and tarnishing it. All so I could save my man.

  “It wasn’t lucky for Archie, but it was lucky for Joe, and that’s what mattered in the ultimate.

  “What else happened as a result of my ‘bombshell’ testimony? Well, given there had already been complaints about Carlisle Collins’s erratic behaviour and drug misuse around the studios, it was no trouble for the industry to let him go. I heard rumours that he was actually blackmailing people, so his cries of innocence at my accusation rang particularly hollow. Lord knows what happened to him, though I’m sure it’s nothing good.

  “As for Ray Wilder, well, he moved his career overseas not long afterwards. Whether my testimony had anything to do with that, I don’t know. It might have been that the new generation of salt-of-the-earth actors made his public-school charm even more staid. Or it might be that he decided to get out of the fishbowl of London, to move to a country which didn’t cover the trial in their press, go somewhere where people didn’t stare at his genitals and wonder if they actually worked.

  “And me? I was charged with perverting the course of justice for the various lies I’d told the police. I took it stoically, though. Joe was free and it was all worth it. I’d saved him like he’d tried so often to save me.

  “My career, as it was, came to an end. The lovely Mr Cheesewright went so far as to run a campaign to stop me besmirching another cinema screen. And when I think of the kinds of things you see on film now, to be punished like that for my off-screen activities seems kind of funny.

  “But I think – if I’m honest – my career would have come to an end naturally anyway. Kitchen-sink dramas took over, there was that new brand of more gritty actor, and so I doubt there’d have been a place for my blasted exoticness. Maybe if I’d hung around I could have been in one of those James Bond films, but I was really too old for those. Dear Honor appeared in one – and she’s even older than I am – but it’s not like it did her career a lot of good.

  “No, my career on the screen came to an end when it should have done. But the way it went out was more than worth it.”

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Within a day, the case against me had collapsed. Eden’s evidence blew it apart with the sudden efficiency of dynamite.

  There was shock and
uproar. Across pages one to eight of every national newspaper, they tried to capture the pandemonium of what had happened that day in court.

  Reading about it in the papers was an odd experience. It was like I was reading about some other couple. They made us sound so wild and unpredictable, as if our affair had had the kind of passion that Taylor and Burton had generated in Rome. Reading about Eden and her wanton ways was heartbreaking. Obviously she’d brought it on herself. After what she’d said in court, there was no way opinion was going to go any other way. But those descriptions of the promiscuous, man-hungry “actress” (more than once I saw the word written in inverted commas, as if an actress wasn’t what she was at all) made her sound like a whole other person. The contract for her next film was cancelled, and the general view was that her career was over and it was the very least she deserved.

  Yes, we’d been a passionate couple – a couple who would do anything for each other – but we were still just Eden and Joe. Surely a pretty normal pair who had liked each other and fancied each other and been very much in love. We were passionate, absolutely, but that’s how you should be when you’re in a new, wonderful romance. Eden wasn’t anything like the tart the papers made her out to be. Instead she was loyal and caring and the most faithful of women.

  So loyal and caring, I owed my neck to it.

  For a week or so, there was the possibility of a retrial. The possibility that Eden might be tried as an accessory. But then poor Archie’s body was discovered. Someone made a call from a phone box in Tottenham that led the police straight to it, and then the whole case just fell away.

  Poor Archie. If I want to torture myself at night, I wonder how long he managed to stay on the run. How many times when he was out there did he imagine he could slip away from Luca and his men? If the authorities were right and he died at much the same time as Wachtel, then it was a good few weeks. There must have been days of hope that somehow little Archie Sandibanks could pull this off.

  But if I really, really want to torture myself, then I think of the possibility that they actually had him for most of those few weeks and did God knows what to him.

  Luca did meet me for a celebration drink, but I do my best to avoid the man himself these days. Not that I can truly escape him, of course. There’s a debt which has to be paid. So some nights I find myself ordered by one of his boys to drive to some random location to pick up a package, or ferry a stranger to Dover – the agitation sweating off him the whole time. I do it without enthusiasm or complaint. Eden is free and I am free. So I owe Luca this debt. I can only hope that one day, he’ll decide I’ve paid it.

  The verdict was handed down and my case was thrown out. Eden wasn’t so lucky. I read that she stood without any obvious emotion in the dock as the charge of perverting the course of justice was read out to her. She pled guilty, and despite clamour from certain quarters that she do time, was in the end given a six-month suspended sentence.

  The studios did all they could to distance themselves from her. Her glossy black and white photos were taken down. Her latest with Roger Moore was barely released. Everybody did their best to pretend that there had never been a film star named Eden St. Michel.

  Ironically, my career continued unharmed. Not only was I behind-the-scenes talent, so the general public didn’t really know which films I worked on anyway, but – I suppose – those in charge thought I’d gone above and beyond when it came to protecting a film star. And that’s really what stuntmen are supposed to do, after all.

  After her trial, I lost track of Eden. She didn’t come to see me, and I knew from reading the reports in the press that she wasn’t in her flat and so I had no way to see her. One of the stories said that she had gone on a cruise. Headed to the Caribbean to lick her wounds. And that was it. The world moved on, the Beatles arrived, Profumo happened and somehow Eden just faded away. People didn’t talk about her any more, not even to me. It was like everybody had politely agreed amongst themselves to forget her.

  I couldn’t forget her, though. There was an absence within me. I knew I’d see her again, but there was a hole as I waited and waited for it to happen.

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  And then, on a fine early summer’s day in 1963, there she was.

  I was in a park in Lewisham when I saw her. In the months since the trial I had tried to grow up. I was now renting a flat south of the river so I could be closer to Daphne, and made a point of visiting her – of spending a whole day with her – each and every week.

  Of course, in the immediate aftermath of the trial, Sally and her mother both tried to stop me seeing her. Even though I’d been found innocent, had my name completely cleared, they still saw me as a poisonous presence in their little girl’s life. It obviously didn’t help that my defence had ultimately hinged around me being bound naked in handcuffs. But I persisted, went on the offensive with all my charm, until eventually I wore them down and they agreed that I could see her again. Although it came with the condition that I be a better father from now on. That when I said I’d pick her up at nine on Saturday, I would actually be there and not call up instead with some lame excuse. It was a condition I was so happy to fulfil. I even gave up the booze.

  Knowing how close I’d come to losing her, I revelled in every one of my daughter’s smiles, her laughs. I loved the games we played together, even when she told me off for not doing some imaginary activity right. Particularly when she told me off for not doing some imaginary activity right.

  That morning – the morning Eden suddenly reappeared in my life – Daphne and I were at the swings. My little girl was screaming with laughter and her thin red jacket was fluttering as I pushed her higher and higher. She was nearly at the top of the arc when she took a sharp breath in and yelled out at the top of her voice. “Look, Daddy! It’s the beautiful lady! It’s her, isn’t it? It’s her!”

  Automatically my hands kept pushing Daphne, but my gaze moved to the wrought iron gate at the edge of the park and the shiny platinum blonde hair of the woman I loved.

  Daphne’s excitement was unstoppable. “It’s her, isn’t it, Daddy? It’s her! The beautiful lady!” She was clearly desperate to get off the swing, so I slowed her down as gently as I could. Carefully, like a good Daddy, even though my head was spinning and there was a lump lodged in my throat. Unable to contain herself, Daphne leapt off the seat and was bouncing up and down on the spot. I slowly raised my hand and waved to Eden, who stood there still and expressionless at the gate in a thin blue coat. A brown paper bag was clutched under her arm.

  It took her a moment – as if, now she was here, she was unsure quite what to do; as if she hadn’t known how I’d react to seeing her again – but she finally raised her left hand in greeting. Then she pulled open the gate and came in to see us.

  With a squeal of delight, my daughter ran towards her. It had been months since we’d been in the papers and I thought Daphne had forgotten all about it – she never mentioned it to me any more – but clearly something about Eden’s face had locked itself forever in her memory. I knew exactly how she felt.

  As Daphne approached, Eden bent down with her hands on her knees, gracefully holding the brown package under her right arm. She had once told me that she had no maternal sense at all. That clearly wasn’t true. A warm smile on her face, she stared at my daughter and couldn’t have made her feel more special.

  “My name is Eden,” she said. “And I know that you’re called Daphne.”

  Daphne’s eyes widened. “Did my Daddy tell you?”

  “He did. He told me all about you every day that I saw him. Your Daddy clearly loves you lots and lots and lots.”

  “I know.” Daphne chuckled a little cheekily.

  Eden laughed, warm and caring. “Here,” she said, “I’ve brought this for you.” She stood up a little and unwrapped the brown bag. Inside was a large rag doll with straggly red hair, rosy cheeks and a toothy grin.

  Her hands to her lips, Daphne gasped as soon as she saw it. “What
’s her name?”

  “Her name is Edna. Do you like her?”

  “I love her!” Daphne proclaimed, as Eden handed her the doll to be squeezed tight in her arms.

  “What do you say, Daphne?” I asked.

  “Thank you!” she said. “Thank you so much!” Then she reached up and kissed Eden’s cheek and gazed back down with delight at the doll.

  “You’re welcome,” Eden told her.

  “Why don’t you show your new doll the park?” I asked Daphne.

  Daphne didn’t need to be asked twice. She set off in a big running circle, showing her new friend the slide, the roundabout, the swings, even the trees at the periphery.

  Her departure left Eden and I alone, staring at each other with all the nervousness of fourteen-year-olds at a village hall dance. Two people who cared about each other so much, who loved each other, but in that moment had no idea how to behave with each other.

  “Thank you,” I said finally.

  “Really, Joe, the doll was the least I could do.”

  “No, I meant for what you did for me in that courtroom. For all you said. I can’t believe you did that. I still can’t believe that you’d sacrifice so much for me.”

  “You were willing to sacrifice your whole being for me.”

  “I know, but…”

  She cut me off. “So we’re both silly fools who should try to learn a little something of self-preservation.”

  There was a park bench about five foot away and she nodded to it and led the way. It was in the shadow of a birch, so the metal felt cold even on a summer morning.