by Barbara Vine
The clocks had gone back and it was light by six in the morning but dark by six at night. I took a torch with me and that got me into the hall where the first candles were. Candlelight isn't a very reassuring sort of light, it quivers and streams and leaves great spaces of dark, and it makes you wonder if people in olden times were ever wholly free from fear in the night. Candles were all they had. It's a horrid thought, the wick burning down and consuming the wax but having no other and no light switch, nothing to alter the deep black darkness.
I lit one candle after another and went upstairs, carrying one in each hand. The light that is bluish and goldish, shimmering and somehow cold, travelled a little ahead of me but not very far. Walls of darkness turned into rooms with little squares of grey where the windows were. It was mild for November but still cold. For once my longing for Ned and the happy excitement I usually felt was overcast by the grimness of this place without light or heating. I felt the isolation of it out in the fen and I felt how easily a primitive kind of fear comes when electricity isn't there.
Stella had told me some more by then, but not yet about how she came to buy the house, though I'd guessed it was to have a place in which to meet Alan Tyzark. I was thinking that night, in the dark, of what she'd said about the terrible thing he'd done. The difficulty was she hadn't said any more, I didn't know whether I wanted her to say more, but I couldn't help thinking that maybe he'd done whatever it was here in this house.
I started my heating going in the bedroom and set up candles on the tables and the chest of drawers. To pass the time I opened doors and drawers, but the cupboards were all empty, and I wondered if they had always been so, for this was a house kept for some other purpose than living in. A house that was not a home but a refuge from the world, a place to be secret from other people's eyes, a shelter from the storm. I savoured a word I'd found in the dictionary and used it for this house: a trysting place. A trysting place for one pair of lovers and now for another.
Stella's wardrobe was a huge piece of furniture, mahogany I suppose, on short curved legs with feet like the paws of a lion. The little golden keys turned only with difficulty, but I got the doors open and, instead of emptiness inside, the cavernous dark mustiness I expected, I found summer clothes hanging up on a rail. They were so like Stella, so essentially Stella, that they could have belonged to no one else: a blue cotton dress and a pink one, film clothes from the early sixties, a silvery-blue shot-silk raincoat that would have been useless in the rain but glamorous in a car on a wet day.
Pushed to the far end of the rail, on a hanger that jangled like a bell when I moved it, was another dress. I fetched my torch and shone it into the dimness and on to the tight waist, the full skirt, the low neck. Cream-coloured, with a pattern in blue and rose, it was a dress that was absolutely Stella's except in one respect. It was dirty. It made me realize that I had never seen her anything but immaculate, untouched by the frowsty shabbiness of age. I was sure she had always been like that, fastidious, dainty, the sort of woman whose clothes were always at the cleaners or in the wash. But this dress was covered with black smuts. There was a grass stain on the back of the skirt and something that might have been blood on the front. I examined it curiously in the light of the torch and saw the brown smear of a burn mark on the hem, a singeing of the material, and then I stood back and looked at the whole. Dirty though it was, soiled and ruined by a careless iron perhaps, it was like a dress to wear to a wedding, a bridesmaid's or even a bride's. But the bride had dug a ditch or lit a bonfire.
Ned's car lights flooded the bedroom and died away. I closed the wardrobe doors and put out my torch. I watched him get out of the car and stand for a moment, looking up at the window. He could see nothing but the candle's faint glow, he couldn't see me, and I had the pleasure of watching him unseen, his face unguarded and full of longing and hope. I ran downstairs towards the candles in the hall and opened the door as he put his hand to the knocker.
Beyond the range of the heater, the air in the bedroom was damp and our hands were cold, in spite of the mildness of the night. The sheets were aired but they felt as cold sheets do, damp and stiff. Gooseflesh on gooseflesh and the turn-off of icy fingertips on anxious skin. We grew warm in time and our mouths were never cold but afterwards I thought, and I believe he thought, if it is like this now how will it be in the depths of winter?
It was ten-thirty when I got home and Mike was still working on the replacement of our dining-room window with french doors, before the building of the conservatory. This was his first week at home after the long months of work on the Regent's Park site. I had told him, with many misgivings, that I was doing overtime at Middleton Hall, and he had accepted this, he hardly seemed to hear what I'd said. He trusted me. On the other hand, if trust is a positive thing, an act of will, Mike hardly seemed to know it was called for, he hadn't thought about it.
He greeted me with, ‘I haven't heard a word about the planning permission.’
While he was away I had scarcely realized how bemused I always was on coming back home after a meeting with Ned. It hadn't mattered then if I was in a daze, dreaming and remembering. I could sit down and close my eyes and give myself up to remembering our sexual pleasures and the happiness of love. With Mike there I had to talk. I had to respond.
Fortunately, he didn't want to know anything about Middleton Hall or what had happened there, he wasn't interested, and I was relieved of the necessity to lie. But I wondered, as he speculated about the time the planning committee might take to make up their minds, how much lying I could bear to do. Would the day come when self-disgust clamped down and made it impossible for me to invent excuses and produce alibis? Of course it would, and it wasn't far off, but I didn't know it.
But I was aware even then that I had begun thinking very differently about Mike and our marriage and our home. I looked at this man, thick-set, tallish, surely handsome still, and thought that I knew him utterly, I knew him inside-out, yet I didn't know him at all. I had no idea what went on inside his head, under that thick dark curly hair. It couldn't be nothing but house improvement and planning permissions, could it? Once, years before, when he had come home from work and I'd said he looked tired, he had turned to me and said,
‘Building work is hard, it wears a man out. It makes you old before your time.’
And I had felt such a rush of love and pity. I took hold of his calloused hands and so many strange thoughts went through my mind, how he did this because it was all he'd been able to do, how he'd never been given the chance to get qualifications, it was all earn, earn, earn. Go out and earn at sixteen, start at eight in the morning and get overtime till dark if you can. I put my arms around him because he was afraid of hard labour wearing out his youth.
But that was the only thing I'd ever remembered him saying to me about his feelings. Not a word, ever, about love or need or being frightened or sad. Sometimes when I'd talked about having children he'd barely looked at me, he'd said without raising his eyes, ‘That's up to you,’ and another time, ‘We've got a nice home together and you know what bringing kids into that would mean.’ And now, in the evenings and at the weekends which might have been for leisure, he went on doing the work he'd said would wear him out and make an old man of him. He was beyond my understanding.
It was partly Mike and having to lie to Mike and partly knowing that whatever marriage was we didn't have it any more that started me on re-thinking my refusal of Ned. I mean my saying no to Ned when he talked of going off and living together. After all, Nick had been even younger than Hannah when my dad left. He hadn't gone to his funeral, he said he hardly knew him, but has that affected him for the worse? The truth was you can't tell how living with just one parent will hurt or not hurt a child. Lots of nasty people I know grew up with happily married parents living together.
Then there was Stella's house. Not just that it was cold and dark but that the day was coming when it wouldn't be available at all. I might so far transgress as to use it now witho
ut asking but I knew I wouldn't dare do that when, on Stella's death, it became the property of Richard or Marianne. We would have nowhere to go and my fears of losing him would come back.
It's a measure of how far the corruption process had gone that six months after I'd sworn I'd never take him away from his daughter I'd begun thinking of ways round that. Having said I'd never lie, I'd begun lying. I was trespassing on someone's property. I was acting out the words Ned had once told me and counting the world well lost for love. Or perhaps just decency well lost for it.
Had it been like that for Stella? I watched her while she slept and tried to see, when she couldn't see me looking, the young and beautiful woman who had fallen in love with Alan Tyzark. My eyes tried to put flesh on her fragile bones and peachy skin on that withered face, to make the white wool hair glossy brown, but I could only see an old woman wasting away, her closed eyelids walnut shells, the blue veins almost breaking through the papery skin. And when I took her hand, knowing she'd soon wake, I noticed something that gave me a shock. She'd stopped painting her nails. Her yellowish corrugated nails were the way nature made them for the first time since I'd known her.
Stella told me that Gilda Brent liked to be with her and wanted her for a friend because she saw her as an inferior. Ironically, as it turned out, Gilda never regarded Stella as a threat. Yet anything in the nature of a threat was what she most feared and what made her the neurotic person she was. Her failure as a film actress – she seemed to see her career not so much as having failed as been ruined from outside – was due as she saw it to the jealousy and envy and bitchiness of other women. Women had always ‘had it in for’ her. She thought of herself, or said she did, as exceptionally better-looking than any other woman, more striking, more stylish, more charming, and so as not to seem impossibly vain, she spoke of this as a burden she had to carry through life. In other words, beauty was a liability.
She saw Stella as a ‘pretty little thing’. In fact, ‘little thing’ was a pet name she applied to her, though Stella wasn't particularly small and at the time she first met Gilda she was thirty-six. Gilda decided that Stella was a country girl without much education or experience. In Gilda's eyes, she had never worked for her living or seen anywhere beyond Bury, had never read a book or been to a theatre. But the point was, Stella said, that Gilda made a person for her to be, just as she made a person for herself to be.
Somewhere, underneath, the real Gilda must have existed, but what she was and where it was Stella never discovered. She didn't explain what she meant by ‘the end’. Only twice before that did she have a glimpse of reality. The Gilda she saw, or who was presented to her, seemed always to be playing a part, striking an attitude, speaking in a false voice, expressing feelings she had decided were appropriate, not what she felt. A surface had been created, she said, like a mask or a veneer. Whether Gilda had always been like that or whether she had learned it as an actress she couldn't tell. It was as if she had never really stepped off the set. Her life was a long-enduring film script.
She spent hours telling Stella of her experiences as an actress and in films, the celebrities she had known, the glamorous locations she had been to, the famous restaurants and clubs to which she'd been taken by distinguished or handsome men. She hinted at lovers with famous names. As their friendship developed, she did more than hint and told Stella scurrilous tales of adventures in hotel rooms, hiding from jealous wives in wardrobes, and of huge presents of jewellery and furs made to her. Of Alan she spoke in a way Stella, even then, wouldn't have dreamed of speaking about her husband.
‘You know, little thing, everyone who was anyone said I must have married him because he made me laugh. But that was only half the reason. I don't know if I dare tell you the reason, you're such an innocent little thing. You always make me think of someone at an old-fashioned girls' boarding school.’
Stella was always willing to listen to anything about Alan. She must have been the way I am when I'm in the village shop or the Legion and I hear Ned's name mentioned. But she didn't reply. It was amazing, she said, how little she actually spoke when she was with Gilda, no more sometimes than a dozen words in two or three hours, and Gilda never seemed to notice. She was a monstrous egotist.
‘Promise you won't be shocked, darling? So many of the sweet men who'd been in love with me were so much older – well, it's inevitable, isn't it? Young men haven't had time to achieve anything or make any money. And I wanted a young man, I wanted a virile young man. I happen to think bed's pretty important and Alan – well, if I say Alan is spectacular in bed, will you even know what I mean?’
She didn't know. It was a phrase she'd read in books, that was all. But Gilda didn't want an answer from Stella, or no more than a ‘yes’ and a smile. She never did. In her eyes Stella was a mouse who was lucky that one man, even a man who everyone knew was sleeping with that old witch Charmian Fry, had liked her enough to marry her. More than that, Stella said, in the on-going movie that was her life, she had cast herself as the heroine and Stella merely as the heroine's friend.
And Stella, though often wondering how she could bring herself to do it, suffered Gilda for the single benefit that came with her. She let her take her shopping in London, to the hairdresser's in Ipswich, to the cinema, to the occasional charity performance Gilda still got asked to, for the sake of seeing Alan before or after these visits. The Tyzarks had one car between them at that time, so if Gilda wanted to visit Stella and Alan also wanted the car, he would drop her off and collect her again. This was what Stella had begun to live for, seeing Alan in ten-minute snatches once or twice a week.
She thought she could exist on that for the rest of her life. She'd put up with the increasing horror of Gilda's company, of Gilda's unending talk of celebrities and feuds, clothes and jewels, adulteries and intrigues, if bearing it made seeing Alan possible. She'd endure Gilda's artificial manner, the pose that seemed more and more to be hiding a real person. And there were always bonuses when he went to see a film with them, there were the foursomes at dinner in one house or the other, drinks on the sunny lawn in Bury or tennis on the nearly derelict court at St Michael's Farm. In private, inside her own head, she conducted long conversations with him, she called them imaginary dialogues, in which she told him everything about herself and her life and he replied in that way he had, taking a light-hearted and optimistic attitude to even the saddest things, and eventually confessed to her, serious by then, that he loved her.
This went on for nearly two years.
In some ways, of course, Stella knew more about Alan than Gilda did. She knew about his childhood, for they had been inseparable friends from the age of eight to sixteen. She had known his parents and the family home, the things he liked to eat and the games he played. Gilda filled in the gaps for her, the twenty years of separation. After school he had been to the Slade School of Art. Then he was called up into the army. The commission to illustrate the Figaro and Velvet books came just after the war when he was twenty-six and struggling unsuccessfully to be a portrait painter. He and Gilda met when he was commissioned to paint her portrait for a film she was in. It was Lora Cartwright and the picture was supposed to hang on the drawing-room wall in her film-husband's film-house.
‘The totally mad thing was,’ Gilda said, ‘that in the end the portrait wasn't used. They never shot a single scene in the drawing room.’
Stella asked why not.
‘Need you ask?’ Gilda said. ‘The star didn't like it. She was madly jealous of me from the start and she couldn't bear it that my portrait was being painted and not hers. But Alan and I had met and fallen in love. It was love at first sight.’
‘What happened to the portrait?’
‘They weren't going to waste that, were they? Not when they'd paid for it. So far as I know it's still hanging in their offices in Wardour Street.’
After that Alan had painted Gilda many times, head and shoulders, full-length in the grey gown she'd worn in The Fiancée, even a nude. That nude h
ung in the living-room at St Michael's Farm. There are nudes and nudes, Stella said, and I know what she meant, something like the difference between a shot for a body-lotion commercial and a photo in Playboy. The picture of Gilda naked showed her pubic hair. She wasn't absolutely unclothed but wore high-heeled shoes and, hanging between her breasts, a long string of pearls. Gilda was always drawing people's attention to this picture. It embarrassed Stella when Marianne was there, she wanted to tell her daughter not to look but of course she couldn't do that. Gilda would strike an attitude in front of the painting, asking Alan if he remembered her sitting for it, and implying they needed many sessions because the temptation of her naked body was too much for him.
They had been married for nine years and those years had seen a gradual decline in their lifestyle. At the beginning they had lived in the West End, Half Moon Street I think it was, and Gilda had made her last two films. The Wife's Story was about a husband's infidelity, and The End of Edith Thompson was a thriller about a real-life murderess or a woman they thought was a murderess who was hanged for killing her husband. Gilda played the wife in the first one and a prison wardress in the second. The character was a sympathetic wardress, and like Edith a married woman in love with a younger man. But this part made Gilda madder than anything in her career. She talked about it as if taking it had been the biggest mistake of her life and every opportunity she had had to make the most of it had been sabotaged by the actress playing Edith. The casting director had said – she told Stella this as an example of the incredibly ignorant things people said to her – that he had picked her because she had an unmemorable face. They insisted she wore glasses and flat shoes.
