The Lost Girl

by Carol Drinkwater

  ‘We don’t really know each other. We’re just travelling together, looking out for one another for a while along the road.’

  ‘Jesus, you sound like you’re speaking from a script … One of your bloody films. Marguerite …’

  ‘Leave me alone, and don’t come knocking here again,’ she hissed, not daring to raise her voice for fear the nosy God-fearing trio in the adjoining rooms might be listening, ears to the wall. ‘I want you to go now, please.’

  ‘Marguerite …’

  ‘It’s time to go our separate ways, Charlie.’

  He leaned backwards against the door, speechless, then attempted to cajole her, wrap his arms about her, but she pushed him off and did not lift her eyes to him again. ‘We both knew that this time would come. You are moving on. So don’t be sad, Charlie.’ She crossed to the radio and turned the music up two notches. Benny Goodman. It drowned the sound of the closing door.

  She took a deep breath. Her heart felt as though it was splintering. She needed to do her exercises, keep fit, stand on her head so that the blood flowed through her and took good care of her flawless complexion. She needed to cream her skin, go over her scene again for the hundred and fiftieth time, ready for the producers’ call, because they would call soon, wouldn’t they? Yes, they would. So she must get some beauty sleep. No tears. She had read in a magazine that all the most glamorous film stars are in bed before ten. They didn’t cry themselves to sleep, didn’t break their dopey, soppy hearts over saying goodbye to a really special friend when it was necessary. They didn’t go falling in love with that friend. No, they made the decision that was best for both of them. Just as she was doing.

  Early morning, Paris, 14 November 2015

  Kurtiz listened in stupefied silence. Marguerite had survived, made a good long life for herself, but how had Lizzie fared in a world that had grown cruel and murderous? Kurtiz had been so fortunate with Oliver. The young Oliver. Oliver who was now somewhere in this city fighting for his life. She got up, shook her legs, pressed a palm into the base of her spine and crossed to the telephone.

  ‘Might we call that emergency number again? They may have found him and be just too busy to let us know.’

  Might Lizzie be with Oliver, sitting at his bedside?

  She was punching out the digits. It was engaged. Half of Paris must be trying to get through. How many lives, like hers, were hanging by threads tonight in this city? She replaced the receiver with a sigh.

  She wanted to come clean, confide in Marguerite, confess that she had lost her daughter: Lizzie had run from them while she herself had been absent. But she wasn’t able to form the words. To own up to the fact that she hadn’t been there for her daughter. She had let Lizzie down.

  ‘I had driven Charlie away, while my girlishly naive dreams of Hollywood had been nipped in the bud, trampled upon. The next time I set eyes on Katsidis was at the Cannes Film Festival. I was in the crowd watching, jostled and pushed. I had travelled across on the train from Antibes. He was stepping out of a gleaming black car, in attendance for a screening of his film, Rebound, and was surrounded by personnel, security in uniform, journalists, pressed in by admirers. An actress was on his arm. Jane Wyatt, I guess it must have been, but I didn’t recognize her. She looked different in real life, not so tall, less striking. Or, perhaps, my jealousy was the judge.

  ‘My heart ached so, I thought it would explode. I wanted to be that actress, there among the paparazzi, lapping up the attention, and yet the sight of that man, that hateful individual, tore my emotions to shreds.

  ‘As he stepped close by me, I hollered out his name above the din of voices, above the excitement, still naively believing that once he set eyes on me again he would remember that I was the girl for his part, that he owed this to me. He heard his name, swung in my direction. Our eyes locked – he saw me, he recognized me, I have no doubt about that. He never said a word. He ignored me. Cut me dead. I wanted the ground to swallow me. I couldn’t push my way fast enough through that throng of people. Humiliation burned like fire against my skin.

  ‘Needless to say, I wasn’t offered the role. Only a child as inexperienced and foolish as I was back then could have believed he was ever going to give it to me. I carried the shame of that encounter with him at the studios for years. And, what is worse, I blamed myself. His transgression, his rape, and I blamed myself. I renounced all dreams of becoming an actress, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that I put them aside.’

  Kurtiz, London, December 2012

  The carriage where Kurtiz was seated on the Northern Line rattling south towards Leicester Square was empty, save for a cluster of youths shouting among themselves, singing, squabbling drunkenly. Christmas high spirits. She was staring at her reflection in the window opposite. It was late, very late. She should have been in bed. Instead she was making her way back into the city, having only a couple of hours earlier ridden this same line north to Tufnell Park. Now, to check into a hotel in Covent Garden. A booking she’d made online an hour earlier. Her camera equipment and an overnight bag were at her side. This week, when her workload calmed, she’d search for an apartment, a studio, a solitary base. She had an early start ahead of her tomorrow. This was the last plan she might have envisaged for the finale to her day. Until a phone call from a journalist late in the afternoon had driven up her guard.

  ‘Mrs Ross?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Daily Express here.’

  Her heart skipped a beat. ‘What is it?’ Was there news of Lizzie? Every time her phone rang, a number she didn’t recognize, a crawling dread rose within her.

  ‘Does the name Jenny Fox mean anything to you?’

  Pause.

  ‘Is she a friend of yours and your husband’s?’

  Kurtiz was puzzled, and for a moment she could not place the name. Angela’s mother. Lizzie’s friend’s mother. ‘What about her?’

  ‘Any idea when your husband last saw her?’

  She listened to the shifting rhythm of her breath, the pumping of her heart. ‘What’s this about, please?’

  ‘We were wondering whether you would be willing to comment on your husband’s relationship with Mrs Fox.’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

  It was close to eight when she’d returned to Tufnell Park, shouldering her way past a small cluster of reporters congregating by the gate. Not again. She and Oliver had suffered sufficiently from their intrusions. ‘Mrs Ross! Mrs Ross!’

  She turned her key in the lock, ignoring the yelled questions from the press, and found Oliver collapsed in a chair covered with blood. Her heart lurched. The fear that sprang to mind was that he had attempted suicide. Was this related to the call she had received? To the scandalmongers outside?

  ‘Oliver! Oliver!’

  Oliver had cut his hand. An accident caused by an unsteady grasp and a sharp kitchen knife. She cleaned and bandaged him up. Then, over strong cups of tea, she asked him about the telephone call.

  In return she had received abuse. And blame, and excuses. ‘None of it would have happened if you had been here. None of it.’

  So it was true.

  ‘Was that why Lizzie and Angela stopped seeing one another?’

  The house phone began to ring. ‘Hello?’

  ‘Mrs Ross? Toby Packham here, Daily Mail.’

  Without a word, she replaced the receiver.

  ‘Did Lizzie know, Oliver? Did she find out?’

  ‘And what about you? Where were you when I tried to contact you? Not just once. Days off the radar.’

  The evening had threatened to spiral into a full-blown slanging match, leading nowhere, solving nothing, until she had decided to pack a bag and go.

  ‘Leaving me, abandoning me, deserting the sinking ship.’ He had flung the lot at her as she tossed some clean clothes into a holdall. She knew he’d be useless on his own, but one of them had to keep their head above water, and she couldn’t manage it with Oliver in this state at her
side. Should she make contact with the Foxes?

  ‘It’s over, KZ. It was a brief … It was nothing. She was company. If you’d been here …’

  ‘Did Lizzie find out?’

  He shook his head, hands clasped in his lap. Head bowed.

  ‘Did she?’

  ‘I don’t know. She needed you, Kurtiz. We both did.’

  Oliver refusing help, refusing to accept his alcohol dependency, refusing to shoulder any of the responsibility.

  It was snowing in Leicester Square. The place was littered with fast-food debris. It stank of overcooked hot dogs. In the doorways lay bodies, hunched against the diminishing temperatures. Someone begged a fag. She handed him a fiver. He focused on it as though she’d given him the moon. ‘Merry Christmas, you’re a doll.’

  A few light flakes fell on her face and she let them melt against her tears. She longed for Alex, but she would not make contact with him. She didn’t even know where in the world he was. Like Lizzie, out of reach. She took a step towards Covent Garden. Somehow she had to see this through on her own. Christmas was coming. The second without Lizzie. She couldn’t stomach the prospect.

  She’d care for Oliver. She wouldn’t abandon him. Attempt to balm his wounds? Of course she would. But from a distance. She was better off alone.

  Marguerite and Charlie, Late September 1947, La Côte d’Azur

  Hoping not to bump into anyone who might recognize her, Marguerite hastened through Lady Jeffries’ lush gardens. Cutting along the winding paths, catching the whisper of watering pipes, she passed through the rusted iron gate that led down to the cove and scrambled to the rocky coastal footway growing wild with tall Mediterranean tussock grass, sedge and sea oats. Overhead, a clear sheet of satin sky. Blue, cloudless and shining. Beneath, the deserted horseshoe beach enclosed by great boulders of limestone through which pushed shoots of vigorous rock flowers.

  Recalling hours of clowning on this beach with Charlie, she watched the sandpipers and shearwaters feeding daintily at the water’s foamy edge as she picked her solitary way along the narrow, winding track to the market in Antibes. Her work for the day had been completed and the afternoon stretched before her to do with as she pleased. It was the end of September. The light was softer; the shadows slid along the pavements and mingled with the early fallen leaves. The summer tourists had departed; the film festival was over and Riviera life was settling to a contented lull before the winter influx of foreigners descended. For the agriculteurs, their wine harvests had been brought in; now there were the olive groves to tend. Back at Le Rêve, Lady Jeffries was in the final preparations for a grand tour of the United States: a series of lectures on social reforms in post-war Europe, which would take her through all the major cities from east to west. Her engagements would keep her away until the following spring. She had suggested that Marguerite might like to accompany her as assistant. Marguerite had understood what an opportunity this could be and weeks earlier she would have jumped at it – to set foot on American soil, to take a train all across that vast and magical land to Hollywood and try her luck there – but her trust and optimism had been trampled on. Her self-esteem was in rags. When she recalled Katsidis’ expensive brown leather brogues crossing to the door to show her out, she felt herself under them.

  She had stopped visiting the Victorine Studios: she was too ashamed to show her face there, fearful that the permanent crews and in-house staff would have heard about the incident between the foolish ‘whippersnapper’ and the Hollywood director. Surely the telephonist beyond the door had heard the commotion and seen the state of her clothes when she had left.

  But the hardest fact for Marguerite to come to terms with was that Charlie had followed through on his promise. He had quit his post at Le Rêve and set off in search of his new goals somewhere in Grasse. She had no address for him. From the day he had taken off, he’d made no further contact. She had watched him go. Lady Jeffries, the gardeners and kitchen staff had waved him off from the steps but she had stayed in the hall, stomach bunched. As he had descended the stairs with his few belongings on his back, he had paused. For a brief moment their eyes had locked. Then, dreading tears or any expression of vulnerability, she had stepped away and he had continued on outside.

  As far as Marguerite was aware he had purchased his four precious hectares and would soon begin the construction of his small stone house. She wondered which hillside he had settled on. The truth of the matter was she had lost him, destroyed their friendship, broken it off. She had heard not a squeak from him since the rupture.

  Why had she sent him away? She was ashamed: her body was debased, unclean; no one could love her now, and she was incapable of giving herself to anyone.

  Since that day, Marguerite had spent all her free hours in her room and had barely noticed the change in the seasons: the browning of the purple bougainvillaea petals, the swelling fruits, the lessening of the searing heat. Aside from her time committed to secretarial work for Lady Jeffries, she did nothing. Her energies and enthusiasms had been crushed. Her drive and confidence rusting away inside her. Her nineteenth birthday came and went and she had mentioned it to no one. Even her mother had not sent good wishes because she had no idea where her daughter was. Marguerite’s thoughts turned to her parents’ modest country home outside Reims, with its permanent smells of yeast and baking bread, her own little room where she had learned to read and write and had passed innocent hours drawing. Craving the shelter of their uncritical affection, she had settled to a letter.

  Dearest Maman,

  Forgive my silence. I have been furiously busy working as an actress. I am in films, the cinema, which is why you have not heard from me in a while, and I am sincerely sorry for not sending you my address. I had only intended to stay at this house for a short time but the months have rolled on … I think of our Bertrand every day and keep his picture by my bed and I wonder has there been any news of him? I still pray for a miracle, that he might one day arrive at your door. I have been thinking of you too, Maman, frequently, and if film commitments allow me, I would dearly like to come home for a visit. I could try to be there for Christmas, and then …

  And then?

  The reality was, where else was she to go? What had taken place between her and Katsidis tormented her, inhabited her nightmares. She blamed herself. The worst of it was there was no friend to whom she could unburden her locked heart, no one to offer her a kindly ear and help her wash away her shame. She had let him go.

  She was in Antibes to post her letter to her mother – the first she had written in too long – but she had eaten no breakfast and was feeling woozy from lack of nourishment and the expenditure of energy along the pathway, so she paused to buy herself a few candied fruits. She hovered, like a wasp near a honey pot, over a market stall decked with bright, sticky glacé fruits: golden gooey apricots, pear quarters the colour of ripening moons and, her favourite, dark treacly orange peel. Alongside these were stacked slabs of nougat. Thick chewy wedges, solid as bricks. She ought to hurry and make her choice: she hadn’t reached the post office yet and it would soon be closing for lunch. She was clutching an aluminium two-franc piece in her fist.

  ‘Bonjour, Mademoiselle. Are you desiring a slice of pan nogat?’

  Marguerite liked that the stallholder, in his brown canvas apron wrapped over an extended belly, had called the confection by its Occitan or Provençal name. She dithered. ‘Perhaps.’ Fifty centimes worth of white nougat, flecked with almond slices. It was tempting, but if she bought a cut she would only be able to swallow a mouthful or two. Then it would go to waste, jettisoned on her bedside table, softening slowly, expanding its shape like a runny cheese, encouraging armies of big black ants to come picking. She ate so little – never meals, only sweets – and she had grown thinner; her perfect skin was dotted with pimples. An expiring stick insect, was how Lady Jeffries described her.

  A hand touched her shoulder blade; she jumped and swung round. It was Charlie.

  ‘Charli
e! Oh, Charlie, Charlie, what a surprise!’ The sweets were forgotten as she rose on tiptoe and threw her arms around his neck. The burden of isolation evaporated in the autumn sunshine.

  ‘I’ve scoured the market looking for you.’ For a brief moment neither let go. His warmth beat against her until she edged herself backwards and they stood in front of one another in silence.

  ‘You got a minute?’

  She nodded.

  ‘Come with me.’ He led her by the hand. ‘I’ve a surprise to show you.’ They were negotiating a path through baskets and shoppers. ‘There! Take a look!’

  Charlie had bought himself a vehicle, a U23 truck. ‘All these trucks were converted for civil and agricultural purposes after France surrendered in June 1940.’ He was proud as Punch. ‘Fancy, eh?’ He waited for her approval as she toured its bodywork, squealing oohs and aahs, all the while hiding her sheer delight at the sight of him. ‘It’s just a hand-me-down, mind. Three previous owners.’ He scratched at his hair, clearly overjoyed that she was impressed. ‘But it’s in good working order and it’ll do me proud.’ He had repainted its army colours to render it the same dark green hue as Lady Jeffries’ far more exclusive Riley. ‘I can take you for a spin, if you wouldn’t be ashamed to be seen in this old bus with me.’