The Brimstone Wedding

by Barbara Vine

  Not only had that not happened, but Stella and Alan had stopped seeing each other. Marianne said her mother's depression, her reluctance to drive a car, her handing over of everything in the household to Aagot, had already been going on for some time by the autumn of 1970. That sounded as if she'd broken things off with Alan in the summer, even in the August which was the date she'd originally told me Gilda had died. It was obvious to me that her unhappiness dated not from anything to do with Rex but from her break with Alan.

  But where was Gilda? Dead, Stella said. There was no record of her death. Can anyone die and there exist no record of her death? I could think of one way that could happen. It came to me in the night. I was in bed in the bigger of the back bedrooms at Molucca, asleep but suddenly awake for no apparent reason, my first conscious thought for Ned, as it always is, though I pray it won't always be. I operated my switch into Gilda mode and immediately those last words of Stella's came into my head: There is nothing in the house or the garden. They had been meaningless, those words, but they weren't now. Their significance leapt at me, crystal-clear.

  It was spring by then and getting light early. I got up and looked out of the window across the fen. The trees and the underbrush weren't yet green but golden-brown with new buds, the dogwood stems crimson, the willows pale yellow. An unearthly pre-sunrise light lay on the fen, the blue pearl light of dawn. The first birds had started, the sounds they make more like a conversation than a song. I drew my gaze back and back until I was looking down into the garden, for garden it was by then, no longer a wilderness indistinguishable from the fen which over the years had crept in and embraced it. From the first weekend of living there I'd worked in the garden, clearing, digging, planting. That too had been a way of taking my mind from Ned.

  By March it was a garden again, with a proper lawn and flower beds and a path. I understood what Stella's words meant: that Gilda was dead but her body was not buried in the garden here nor concealed somewhere in the house, under a floor, in the back of a cupboard. If that is what the message meant, it could only have meant one thing. Why had Stella thought I'd anticipate anything so monstrous? Because of the Killing Gilda Tease I might have thought it more than just a game? Dying, she recalled of course that she had left Molucca to me, and her first need was to reassure me that I could live there without fear. And it was possible I'd have come to think that way if not told otherwise, would have fancied bones beneath the soil that I worked on with my hands or some charnel thing packaged and bundled, poked into a cellar hole.

  Knowing me then, Stella would have expected an even more horrid effect on me, that I'd see her house as haunted and sense Gilda's ghostly presence. She was not to foretell the future and understand how my superstitions were to desert me and along with them all those old beliefs in the supernatural that I'd grown up with, ghosts and spells, omens and magic. For they've gone, or I've lost them just as some churchgoers lose their faith. Instead of protecting me as they promised they'd let me down and I lacked the Christian's consolation of saying my god knew best, he moved in a mysterious way, for my god was no more than blue clothes and ladybirds and four-leaved clovers.

  But later that day, or maybe that week, I did go all over Molucca inside and out, searching for signs and clues, for evidence of Gilda's fate. Some clothes still remained in the wardrobe. That was the single piece of furniture not removed from the bedroom Ned and I had used. For one thing it was too heavy and for another I didn't know what to do with Stella's clothes, the two dressing-gowns, the summer dresses, the beautiful bridal dress with the smut marks and the stains and the burnt hem, that silvery-blue over-feminine raincoat. I tried the pockets but Stella wasn't a woman to put things in pockets. She was not a woman to write things down either. If they exchanged love letters, those two, they burned them once read.

  I looked through all the books but found only one piece of paper inserted among pages. Tucked between the flyleaf and the cover of Figaro's Great Adventure was a shopping list and the writing might have been Stella's or it might have been Alan‘s. I had no way of knowing. Envelopes, matches, gin, one of them had written, tomatoes, lettuce, lamb chops, Weetabix. That didn't interest me but the children's book did. I'd forgotten how lovely Alan Tyzark's drawings were. I know nothing about art and I can't describe anything from a technical point of view, but they looked to me like the nicest photographs you could imagine yet with that small something more, a grace or spirit that the camera can't give, a colour and a texture prettier than life. And I thought to myself that the man who could make those drawings, so tender and so delightful, and my Stella who was gentleness itself, could never have done the terrible thing I sometimes suspected, were incapable of any terrible thing at all.

  I began to think I was keeping Gilda's memory alive solely for my own distraction and the time had come to bury her as perhaps she had never actually been buried. Then, some time after my thirty-third birthday in April, and Richard's thirty-third birthday ten days earlier – he took me out to dinner to celebrate both – I was looking through the TV listings in the paper and saw Ned's name and Gilda's side by side.

  It frightened me, that conjunction. There seemed to me, for all my renouncing of occult things, something almost devilish in it. And I couldn't make out what it could be, this programme advertised as an exploration of a film star's vanishing into thin air. How could he know? If, as it seemed to be, this was Ned's own brainchild, where had the idea come from and what had attracted him to it? Then I remembered. I had. It had come from me. Once, in this house, on a shivery evening of love and icy hands and gooseflesh, he had told me of the research he had done for me and used the phrase which is the name of a film and perhaps a book too for all I know, the phrase that had become the title of his production, The Lady Vanishes.

  I watched it. As I've said, I'd left our TV to Mike. When I wanted to watch something I went to Philippa or Janis. That evening I saw not having a TV as my excuse for not watching Ned's programme but I couldn't hold out, I couldn't think of anything else all day, all the time I was giving Arthur his bath and cutting Tommy's nails and reading to Gracie I was thinking of that programme. Not because of Gilda, or only a little because of her. The reason for my preoccupation was pretty pathetic. I thought there was a chance of seeing Ned. I thought he might have done one of the interviews himself or be there to introduce it or speak the commentary. Even Ned doing a voice-over would be something, just to hear his voice again.

  Stupid, wasn't it? Stupid and pathetic to want to see him and hear him after what he'd done to me. I kept telling myself that and I held out all day, I wouldn't watch it, I'd banish it from my mind, I'd press the Gilda switch. The trouble was, when I did that, it brought me back to the programme because it was as much hers as his. So in the end I gave in, phoned Philippa and said could I come round and watch it with her. I picked her rather than Janis not only because she's my friend but because if I'd gone to Janis's it might have got back to Mum, which I didn't want. Mum's been frightening in her anger against Ned, like a lioness whose cub's been hurt wantonly, and she's been tough with me too, tearing me apart for being such a fool when she'd warned me over and over. She wanted to put a spell on him and his family, something done with a five-pointed star drawn inside a chalk circle. It wasn't my anger but my laughter that stopped her, my laughter that turned suddenly to a storm of tears.

  I'd rather have watched the programme alone than in Philippa's company, than in anyone's company, but you can't ask someone whose house you're in if they'd mind leaving you on your own. And in the event Ned didn't appear, he was only there in the credit titles, just a name that used to make magic and now made misery and a kind of painful embarrassment. But at the start I didn't know whether he'd appear or not and I suffered, fidgeting and nervous, wondering what Philippa must think of me, hoping I'd be able to stop myself gasping or crying out if his face were suddenly to fill the screen.

  It was only later, long after it was all over and I was back at Molucca, that I was able to
think about what I'd seen and assess it. Ned, or Ned's team, had started from the standpoint that film stars who were icons, I think that's what he called them, icons, could fade from the public consciousness more easily than other famous people. Unless a star was a Garbo or a Hepburn, or unless her films had become cult movies, she could disappear without trace. That was what had happened to Gilda Brent, born Gwendoline Brant.

  The name Brant sounded foreign, maybe German, which wouldn't have been a good idea in those days, so Brent she became. She had called herself Gilda not after the Rita Hayworth film as many thought – that wasn't made till 1946 – but after a character in an opera.

  I knew some of that. The first surprise was when the commentator said that Gilda's husband Alan Tyzark was dead. He had died two summers before at his home in Tivetshall St Michael, Norfolk. It made me shiver to think he'd still been living there after all those years, yet he and Stella had never met. Had she known he was dead? I asked myself if she'd begun to tell me her story because she knew he was dead, someone had told her or she'd read a death announcement. Another discovery, another surprise if you like, was that St Michael's Farm stood empty, couldn't pass to anyone else, even supposing there was anyone, couldn't be sold or even let, for Gilda Brent appeared to be still alive. At any rate no record of her death existed in this country or in France, where rumour said she'd gone.

  Her agent had tried in vain to get in touch with her in 1972 and again in 1976. A cousin in India and the friend in France had written to her over the years but received no replies to their letters. St Michael's Farm was an isolated place, its nearest neighbour a cottage half a mile down the road. An interviewer had talked to the people from the cottage, a couple who'd lived there for thirty years. They used to see Gilda Brent driving her red Ford car along the lanes, the woman spoke to her once when she went to St Michael's Farm collecting for the Red Cross, but they hadn't seen her since, they hadn't seen her for twenty years, maybe more than that. The people in the village said she'd gone off with another man, and the postmistress claimed to have that from the horse's mouth, Gilda's own husband. Whatever the truth of it, Gilda had vanished, as if absorbed into the desolate countryside where she had lived.

  They'd been very thorough in their researches, even finding the portrait Alan had painted for The Wife's Story that was the occasion of him meeting Gilda. It was still hanging on a wall in a room in Soho, though the offices were now owned by a company that made television commercials. They showed it on the screen, Gilda in a green evening gown, looking very young. No one said what had happened to the nude, it wasn't mentioned.

  ‘I didn't think much of that,’ Philippa said when the programme was over. ‘I reckon I could have made a better job of it if I'd had his education, the bastard.’

  It's funny how people think it helps, calling someone you love names, insulting them, just because they've hurt you. Still, it's loyal. It's well-meant. I value my friends more now that I have no lover.

  No doubt it was a silly thing to do but I drove over to Tivetshall St Michael on my day off, just to have a look at the empty house. On the way there I had this feeling that perhaps a lot of other people would have had the same idea from watching The Lady Vanishes and I'd find a dozen cars parked in the lane and crowds with cameras scrambling to get a look through the windows. But there was no one.

  If you look on a map you'll see great empty spaces in this part of Norfolk. The countryside is very deep there and the road between the cottage and the farm thickly wooded. A long avenue runs up to the house, a straight sandy road with lime trees on either side. I drove through the open gateway, planning excuses to give to anyone who stopped me, but no one did. The house was just as it was in Ned's film but shabbier and more dilapidated and wretched-looking. I remembered what he'd once told me, that everything looks better in photographs, everything looks better on television than in life, except maybe people.

  No one had weeded the garden for years. The lawn had been cut, but by someone who didn't care, you could tell that, someone who sat on the mower and drove it round and round while smoking a cigarette and listening to a Walkman. It was years and years since the house had been painted. The roof needed re-tiling. A drain pipe was hanging half off the side wall. I looked through a window but what I saw inside made me so sad I had to turn away. It was squalid in there, like the interior of one of those junk shops that abound in the little towns round here, dull brown furniture, mostly broken or scarred, rucked-up carpets, pictures and mirrors stacked against the walls, ugly ornaments, their colours grimed by an accumulation of dust.

  The effect was depressing, yet it was a beautiful day, the sun shining, the sky a soft blue and the hedges green with new leaves on the quickthorn. Whatever time and neglect had done to St Michael's Farm they hadn't been able to destroy the narcissi that nodded in the long grass or stop the cherry trees breaking into white blossom. From the woods I could hear the mechanical thrumming a woodpecker makes when he bores his beak into the bark of a pine tree, drilling for insects. It came back to me then, the fanciful theory that it was this countryside which had absorbed Gilda and hidden her away for ever.

  It was soon after the film and my visit to St Michael's Farm that Mike wrote to me, asking for a divorce. I was relieved, I never thought he would, he'd said so many times and so determinedly that he'd never want a divorce, and I feared I'd have to wait five years before being free. But now he wants to be divorced on grounds of irretrievable breakdown, as soon as we've been apart for two years. He's met a woman he knows can make him happy as I never could. Mum had told me all about that, though I could scarcely believe it, because it was no one new or exciting but only Jill Baleham's niece, Angie Green, the one who got pregnant though she was on the pill. She's moved in with him, Janis said, her and the baby, and they have all their meals on an Ikea table in the conservatory. Well, I hope they'll be happy, I don't wish him any harm.

  The worst pain of losing Ned, and the way of losing him, is beginning to go away now. Sadness is still there and loneliness but the knife whose point used to go in and make me gasp at the pain, that's withheld and just grazes the surface. I still think of him all the time but I no longer cry in the night the way I told Philippa I must be alone to do.

  Some of the things Linda Owen told me about have helped. If I know he has this need to be loved and a need of his own at least to pretend love, my own humiliation is less bad. He may have deceived me but he deceived himself too. He was never one of those who tell lies to ensnare a woman. Perhaps he told no lies at all, for when he said those things he thought they were true. I try to think of him as someone with a sickness, an invisible illness, that I was able to heal for a little while. And though he lives in my mind, his face imprinted there and his words recorded, I know it won't always be so. I can imagine a time coming when minutes will pass by and then hours when I don't think of him, when the words he said to me, such as wanting me for a lifetime and loving me whatever I said or did, won't come back to me. Maybe the time will even come when I'll be able to say, I haven't thought of him at all since yesterday.

  Meanwhile I have to make myself a life. Middleton Hall is a dead end, there's no future in being a care assistant, and the pay is worse than an agricultural worker's. It hardly mattered when I thought I'd give up work to have children, but that isn't going to happen now, or not as far as I can see or imagine, so I've decided to take a nurse's training and become a real State Registered Nurse, not one of those half-measures. In fact, I've applied and been accepted. I'm starting in September.

  It was a wonderful thing Stella did in leaving me this house. Finding accommodation, that worries so many people, is one problem I don't have. And it's through her that I know Richard, who has been and is being a true friend to me. Philippa visits, though she finds it hard being deprived of the telly, so mostly I go to her. Mum has been good to me and so have Nan and Janis, treating me like a poor wounded thing who can be nursed back to health with kindness and white magic.

  Lin
da Owen drops in sometimes to take me to the pub, the Swan at Breckenhall, not the Legion, and we go out drinking like a couple of the boys. We talk about cars like men do and shopping and running expenses when you own your own house but we never talk about Ned, that subject is taboo. My year with him has taught me a valuable thing though, that it's no use trying to make yourself into something for other people. If you do that it has to be for yourself. I'm ashamed of myself when I remember studying the encyclopedia and looking up words in Chambers Dictionary, not to mention learning about classical music, all to impress Ned, and maybe that's why I haven't played a single one of those tapes Stella made and passed on to me along with the player.

  She was insistent I take her player, as if she hadn't already done enough to provide for me. If I'd known beforehand I'd have explained to her that I didn't need it, I've got a Walkman that I've had for years, though never used much. But when you're alone a lot, as I am, you need to hear voices or music, you need something to break the silence or you start wondering if your ears still work.

  These summer evenings I walk in the fen a lot, taking the path that starts at my garden gate and winds among the willows and the alders and meadowsweet, passes into clearings where water lies and reeds grow, and back again into the quiet woodland. I never see a soul, no one goes there, it is all so silent, so still, that you could hear a water beetle skim the surface of a pool. It was there, one evening last week, that I saw a swallowtail.

  Another item in my inheritance was Stella's butterfly book. I looked it up and found that it's the only one of that species in Britain with tails suspended from its lower wings. Wonderful wings they were, yellow and black and red in patterns on a wide span. It alighted on a flower of the fumitory and stayed there, basking in the evening sun, its wings spread, then fluttering a little before they fanned out again.