by Wendy Holden
By the time the Andronicus cast filed out for the last time (curtains did not fall at the Globe; it had none), Caradoc and Juliet were definitely an item. He had found her refusal to sleep with him until after they were married delightfully novel; Caradoc was – or at least had been – a man used to finding keen young actresses falling to their knees. And so they had married, but the expected unleashing of Juliet’s spectacular libido had never happened.
Caradoc was at a loss as to why – he was a vigorous man in the bloom of middle age – and Juliet offered no explanation either. She would just look at him with her fathomless dark pools of eyes and murmur that the time was not yet right. She would then roll away in her shroud-like white nightgown to the distant wastes of the other side of the bed while Caradoc felt his balls might explode.
The actor tried Juliet another ten times and then put the phone back in his jacket pocket. He’d call again after the matinee which was coming up fast on the inside. But even if he got her, he knew he’d call her again after that. Something was making him call her a lot these days.
As he stuck on his Pierrot moustache, Caradoc thought how glad he would be to say goodbye to the beastly thing. He’d got a nasty sore on his upper lip now.
He’d be even gladder to say goodbye to Pierrot himself. The part was depressing, as was the play. Being called a ‘poisonous little potato-faced beast’ by Gilly every night – she seemed to say it with particular emphasis – had had a cumulatively demoralising effect.
The horrible deaths suffered by so many of the characters in the play were depressing as well. Before taking the role, Caradoc had had no idea there were so many different ways to kill people. But now he knew several methods in psychopathic detail.
Plant-related ones in particular. Gardens were a death trap; he’d never realised to what extent. The entire conceit of the play was that almost all the characters were killed by poisons grown by the murderer in his own herbaceous borders, right under the noses of his victims.
Monkshood, otherwise known as aconitum, was responsible for two of the play’s deaths. The plant, which could cause multiple organ failure, looked uncomfortably like a large clump that Caradoc remembered was growing in a dank corner of the Birch Hall garden. And deadly nightshade, which carried off another main character, looked familiar as well.
It made Caradoc uncomfortable to think of his frail young wife alone in the dark old house surrounded by a poisonous garden. Strange old house, too; Birch Hall wasn’t a place that he knew especially well. An uncle had died and left it to Caradoc when his courtship of Juliet was at its height. He had at the time been renting in Muswell Hill, so an ancestral Elizabethan hall coming unexpectedly on-stream had been useful.
But now he’d had Birch Hall twelve months, Caradoc was beginning to realise its downsides. Quite apart from the general gloom and the potentially fatal garden, the place ate money. It was huge, with millions of bedrooms. The heating system was Jurassic. The water came from a spring, and not a terribly clean one at that. Simply keeping it all standing cost more than he earned in a year. In two years. Five.
He had been wondering about selling it, although God only knew who to. But Juliet, unexpectedly, seemed happy at Birch Hall. Caradoc had feared that she would be bored on her own in the middle of the Leicestershire countryside after years of the light fantastic in the capital. The nearest town, Chestlock, didn’t even have a Waitrose.
But Juliet said she wasn’t bored and didn’t need a Waitrose. She was perfectly happy sketching. And perhaps, Caradoc thought, that really was enough. Juliet looked so frail and ate so little that perhaps it only took a few strokes of the pencil to wear her out.
The actor’s thoughts returned to the poisonous plants. Maybe he’d get that new gardener of Juliet’s to dig them out. She had said he was a good worker – ‘amazingly strong’ were her words. Yes, Caradoc thought, he’d ring the guy. Or talk to him himself once he got home. ‘You only have to brush yourself against a monkshood.’ It was one of his lines in the play and it always made Gilly corpse; she thought it sounded like a prophylactic.
He’d be glad to see the back of bloody Gilly, Caradoc thought. She was so obsessed with double entendres it was impossible to have the simplest conversation, and such a tiresomely randy old trout too. Itinerant theatre troupes were famously promiscuous and Gilly regarded it as a point of honour to live up to the clichés. She was always cackling suggestively that ‘what goes on tour goes on Twitter’.
As the tour had progressed, so had Gilly, round the cast and crew. Only Caradoc had resisted her, though there’d been a near miss in Nuneaton. He’d overdone it on the Sauvignon at a Friends of the Theatre event and Gilly was unhooking a fearsome-looking girdle by the time Caradoc remembered Juliet. He had fled and for some days afterwards the performance reviews had noted ‘a distinct froideur between the two lead actors’.
But as someone else – some actor, was it? – had once said, why go out for a burger when you had steak at home? The only problem was that the steak at home was frozen.
Night after night, as he lay in Grimsby or Grimethorpe, Caradoc would think longingly of his wife’s graceful body; her long, sexy hair. Why wouldn’t Juliet allow him to introduce her to the pleasures of lovemaking? She was young, she was lithe. She really didn’t know what she was missing. He, on the other hand, did, all too well.
He hadn’t spoken specifically about her frigidity to his fellow thespians. But a late-night pub session in Peterborough had got dangerously near the mark.
‘Aren’t you worried your wife might be having it away when you’re on tour?’ Pete Leather had asked with his usual subtlety.
‘No,’ Caradoc had said. The thought had never even crossed his mind.
‘Blimey, mate,’ Pete had remarked in his throaty Cockney. ‘Either you’re kidding yourself or you’re a very lucky man.’
‘The latter,’ Caradoc had replied tightly.
‘But seriously, mate,’ Pete had said, once he had recovered from his inexplicable paroxysm of laughter, ‘what would you do if you found out she was?’
It was not an eventuality that Caradoc had ever pondered, but he was surprised to find the answer coming, swift and clear. ‘I’d kill him,’ he said, simply.
Now, in his Woking dressing room, Caradoc finished drawing in his eyebrows and hoped that, come Saturday night, absence would have made Juliet’s heart grow fonder. Her heart, and all the other bits of her. He hoped that he wouldn’t reach out for his wife only to have her roll away in her shroudlike nightgown across the chill acres of sheets, murmuring ‘Not now.’
He tried the mobile one last time before heading down the cramped stairs and behind the curtain on to the stage. Still no answer. What was Juliet doing?
CHAPTER 33
Working for Dan was nothing if not varied, Dylan was finding. If Mondays was Kenilworth Lodge, Tuesdays was Birch Hall.
This turned out to be a great Elizabethan wilderness of a place owned, according to Dan, by an actor called Caradoc Turner. He had recently inherited the property and intended to restore it to its former glory.
Which would cost a fortune, Dylan imagined. And did Turner have a fortune? It was always hard to get information out of Dan and more so than usual in the case of Birch Hall. But by dint of determined questioning Dylan discovered that Caradoc Turner was an actor in a touring company. He was away a lot. He was away at the moment.
Dan had seemed to get fed up with being asked questions. He had disappeared to the other end of the garden where he could be heard pulling branches around in order to build up the inevitable fire. Dylan, meanwhile, busied himself collecting up mountains of dead rhododendron leaves. There was layer upon layer of them, those at the bottom presumably being the great-great-grandparents of the ones on top. The whole garden was basically a three-acre rhododendron bush, with occasional small clearings from which, if one stood on t
iptoe, the triangular points of the house’s gaunt gables could be spotted.
Dylan was not expecting to come across Mrs Turner in one of these clearings. Her appearance was even more of a surprise. Actors’ wives, in his London members’ club experience, were a skittish bunch much given to the foxy-rock-chick look. But the woman in the clearing looked as if she had stepped from the frame of a particularly gloomy pre-Raphaelite painting. She was pale as death, paper-thin and had huge, wild, dark eyes which, as he had blundered in with his wheelbarrow, had turned on Dylan with a burning, theatrical terror.
Mrs Turner had been sketching, her white hand scraping feverishly at a big pad of white paper. But once Dylan appeared she dropped it and rushed wordlessly away, her dark hair flowing dankly behind her.
He had not known what to make of this except to pick up the drawing and inspect it. It was of a bundle of knotted root and stem, of a Dürer-like detail, full of nervous energy. It was delicate and highly wrought, possibly even crazy. It was signed ‘Juliet’.
At lunchtime – which the Turners seemed to permit – Dylan had tried to press Dan about the mysterious lady of the house. She had seemed so fey and wraithlike, he wondered if he had imagined her. But trying to get Dan to talk was like trying to start a car whose battery had failed.
Later that afternoon, when it started raining lightly, Dylan remembered Juliet Turner’s sketchbook, left on the bench in the clearing. As she might not have come back for it he decided to check. It was where she had left it; Dylan took it and headed to the house.
Dylan tiptoed in, intending only to slip the sketchpad on a table. The hall, however, was arrestingly strange and he could not prevent himself looking round. It was huge, stone-floored and gloomy with two fireplaces yawning vastly at each other from facing walls. It looked as if the Tudors who had built it had only just left. But it wasn’t just this that had riveted Dylan’s attention.
In a dark wooden screen at the end, two archways led off into the rest of the house. Coming through these apertures was a terrible sound. It was like Conan Doyle’s description of The Hound of the Baskervilles. A dreadful low moaning rising to a shrieking that froze the blood.
Logic told Dylan, as it had told Sherlock Holmes, that the sound was not a phantom dog. But Sherlock Holmes would have blushed to know what Dylan now guessed it was.
He hurried back outside. The bonfire had died back to a smoulder and the space around it was empty. Empty, that was, apart from Dan’s discarded top.
Dylan continued to work, methodically raking up great piles of sharp-edged brown leaves and heaping them into the wheelbarrows. Inwardly, however, he was struggling to believe that Dan and Juliet Turner were having an affair. It just seemed so unlikely. She so insubstantial and artistic and he built like a prop forward with all the emotional range of a cliff face. Or did Dan have hidden depths? Dylan could never be quite sure.
He tried to picture how it had happened. Had unspoken, passionate agreement flashed between Juliet’s dark eyes and Dan’s flinty recesses? Feeling his imagination taking flight, Dylan stopped himself. He didn’t have to invent this sort of thing any more. Writing was no longer his job.
Later that day, as afternoon slipped into evening, Jason, in his manager’s cubbyhole, leapt to his feet. A woman was entering the Edenville Arms. One he was expecting. ‘Miss Simpson!’
He had the estate brochure in his hand, opened at the offending section. If the new Director of PR and Marketing was about to embark upon a rewrite, Jason intended the Edenville Arms to be the first beneficiary.
‘May I congratulate you on your new position?’
Nell was astonished. ‘How do you know?’ His obvious pleasure was touching, but she had been offered the job less than half an hour ago. Even Rachel did not know yet.
Jason tapped his nose. ‘Estate tom-tom. You’ll get used to it.’
Actually, it had been Angela herself, ringing to rage at him for getting his lesbian facts wrong. He had not minded in the least; that someone with half a brain was now in charge of marketing was what Jason had focused on.
Nell went upstairs, wondering about the estate tom-tom. She was not entirely sure that she wanted to get used to it. She planned to keep herself to herself. Fortunately, it looked as if she would be able to. To move out of the spotlight that was the Edenville Arms, at any rate.
‘There’s a house comes with the job,’ she told Rachel a few minutes later. She was curled up in the pink armchair in the corner of the honeymoon suite. She realised that she felt relaxed for the first time since arriving here.
‘A house! How fantastic!’
‘Well, a cottage.’
‘Even more fantastic. We can come and stay!’
‘Of course you can. Whenever you like.’
‘How about Friday? We could come up the night before the play. Make the most of it.’
‘Great idea!’ Nell was excited because Rachel was so excited. It was wonderful to be able to give people pleasure. Especially people like Rachel, who so deserved it.
‘How brilliant! Juno’s so thrilled about the play already, this will send her over the edge. Where is it, your place?’
‘Just outside the village, apparently.’
‘Ooh. Lattice windows and roses round the door!’
‘I don’t know what it’s like. It’s called Beggar’s Roost.’
‘I didn’t realise beggars roosted. You learn something every day.’
Nell hesitated. ‘There’s a man next door, Angela says.’
Rachel gave a gasp of excitement. ‘Woo-hoo. Single, I hope.’
Nell moved to crush this with all speed. ‘Are you joking? I’m not interested in men.’
‘OK, OK, so you say. So who’s the hottie next door?’
Nell snorted. ‘He’s in his mid-eighties.’
‘Hotties can be old. Look at Bill Nighy.’
‘Apparently he’s completely horrible.’
‘Really?’ Rachel sounded surprised. ‘He doesn’t look it. I love his glasses.’
‘Not Bill Nighy. The guy next door. He’s supposed to be the neighbour from hell.’
‘So much for friendly chats over the garden fence with an apple-cheeked old countryman, then.’
‘Looks like it. According to Angela he forced the people before me out of their cottage. Made their lives a misery.’
‘Are you sure she wasn’t exaggerating?’ Rachel asked.
‘Of course not. Why would she do that?’
‘Oh well,’ Rachel said, ‘you’ve got the job. That’s the main thing. When do you start?’
‘Tomorrow. Angela suggested that I start by looking at the weddings department and rewriting all their stuff.’
‘Not hugely tactful of her,’ Rachel remarked evenly. ‘There must be loads of other departments she could have sent you to.’
‘She was very apologetic about it,’ Nell conceded. Angela had, indeed, been very gushing. ‘And besides . . .’
‘Besides what?’
‘I think that in a funny way it might help.’
‘Help? How do you work that out?’
Nell wasn’t quite sure how to put it. Her theory was that working in weddings might fast-forward her through whatever deep-seated misery remained to be faced. Which surely it did. The whole Joey fiasco hadn’t even been a week ago and had been the most tremendous shock. She could not possibly have absorbed it all already and moved on.
‘I suppose I get what you mean,’ Rachel said doubtfully, when Nell had explained this. ‘It’s pretty brave of you to see it that way. I’m not sure I could.’
Nell glowed. Being called brave by Rachel was quite a compliment. ‘It sounds quite funny in some ways. Apparently there’s a very demanding couple from Florida driving the wedding department mad.’
Rachel snorted. �
�Good for you,’ she said briskly. ‘Now you can move on. It’s a new start. And you get a cottage, even if it’s got the neighbour from hell there. Just wait until I tell Juno about him.’
‘Do you think you should?’ Nell was worried. ‘She might be too scared to come up.’
Rachel laughed. ‘She’ll be fascinated. She’ll immediately start casting him in one of her Agatha Christie fantasies. What’s he called?’
‘I don’t know,’ Nell said. ‘Guess I’ll find out when I get there.’
‘Will you move in today?’
‘Ooh. I hadn’t thought of that.’ Nell considered. The prospect was thrilling, but she had other priorities. ‘I might go along later, but I haven’t got the key. The main thing today is to buy some clothes. I’ve only got what I’m standing up in.’
‘Well, make sure you’re moved in when we get there,’ Rachel ordered.
‘Don’t worry. There’ll be a cheerful fire flickering in the grate and lavender-scented linen sheets in your small white bedrooms.’
‘Yay. Perfect.’
CHAPTER 34
The next morning, sun poured down from a brilliant blue sky. It was hot, and about to get hotter. As she crossed the park, Nell’s eyes burned heavily in their sockets. She had slept badly. The potential difficulties of the wedding department, dismissed so breezily when talking to Rachel, seemed less easy to overlook during the silent small hours. Might not an entire office dedicated to arranging people’s special days cause the dam within her to burst?
With the daylight, however, her courage had returned. While she felt tired, she felt better. The pressure against the dam wall seemed less than in the night. Perhaps, Nell thought, she had learned self-control at last. It might simply be that Joey wasn’t worth getting upset about.
Or perhaps the loveliness of Pemberton was working its magic on her soul. As Nell paced along, feeling the spring of the grass beneath her feet, she watched a slight breeze wrinkle the river’s molten-silver surface. The great pale front of the house was now sliding into view; a sight which never failed to lift the heart. On the stable-yard tower, the weathercock blazed gold.
