Veil of Darkness

by Gillian White

  ‘But it’s television, and I need the money. And it’s my life,’ says Bernie obstinately.

  And anyway, Kirsty’s all for it. ‘Do it! Knock ’em for six.’

  Bernie finds this hard to believe, but Dominic has started to irritate her. So precious only one year ago, so elusive she would die for him, and yet now he can’t seem to leave her alone, in a patronizing sort of way. Now she is seeing so much of him he comes over as a rather tedious person, preoccupied, like everyone else, with the mechanics of money and the best publicity and saying the right thing to the right person.

  Oh she still adores him, of course, and is so grateful for his presence, but not so constantly and not with such cloying ardour. What has happened to the promises he made about not being bored in London, all those friends he was going to call on, all those contacts he wanted to make? He lazes around the flat, takes hours reading the papers, watches afternoon TV and tags along to every meeting, where he bores her silly with his pompous words and says he is looking after her interests.

  Bernie fumes when she hears him nattering on the phone to his father, that snooty sod who found against her at the Imperial hotel. Now you’d think she was one of the family as he drones on to Dominic about which building societies she should invest in, which accountants deal best with artists, which tax breaks she should go for, and has Dominic managed to convince her of the foolishness of sharing her fortune with two drop-outs from Cornwall?

  Hour after hour they go on together like two old gossips.

  And Dominic doesn’t half brown-nose the literary folk they sometimes meet. OK, he wants to make his career in this new and exciting world, but to see him creeping and crawling, avidly interested in every morsel that drops from their blessed lips, is almost too much to bear. Twice they have been invited to dinner parties by people eager to meet her. Even the literate are fascinated; they see her as a freak. When these dinners begin to get chatty Bernie falls silent, only alive when first introduced, when her appearance so clearly impresses—she loves showing off her new dresses—and her voice, at first, seems to enthral them. Hallways were her successful places. In large hallways she triumphed. At the dinner table she quietly faded, became subdued, like the lighting, while Dominic took her place, refusing to let her drink too much, remembering the fool she’d made of herself at that fateful dinner with his parents in Chester.

  With an extra-smart Candice Love, they dine at the home of Rory Coburn, the devastatingly charming, restless, affluent and black-eyed director of Coburn and Watts. Rory, three marriages on, now lives with his butler, Bentley, in a house with a garden sloping down to the Thames. Candice is besotted by him, Bernie is amused to see.

  But who can blame her? Rory is irresistible. Magnificent in every sense, vibrant and supreme, with a magical presence and total confidence. This sort of chic, and the power that comes with it, is a new and fatal aphrodisiac, and Bernie’s composure collapses in ruins. This rapturous delight is the result of Rory taking her arm and turning her to face him.

  ‘You are enchanting, Bernadette,’ he said.

  He has the look of the lecher about him, she has seen seeds of that in Dominic’s eyes.

  ‘Don’t fall for him, you’ll get eaten alive,’ warns Candice in the cloakroom. ‘He flirts with all his female authors, but I think the bastard might be gay. Well,’ she goes on as she powders her nose, ‘look at his taste in furnishings.’

  Rich oriental carpets are strewn around the floor in a large square room with a fireplace large enough for a bed. And yes, his taste is colourful, purple velvets, chandeliers, jade lamps and carvings and everything luxurious, elegant and swish. There are leather-bound books in the recesses above the fireplace and Bernie feels a twinge of green jealousy because Magdalene is not there. No matter how brilliantly Magdalene does it will never be bound in scarlet leather.

  The unattainable. Throughout an almost silent dinner on her part, Bernie suffers the same yearning pangs she had when she first met the arrogant Dominic, knowing then she was reaching too high, that he would never be hers. Some women seek out the knife that will stab them—she heard that once, probably in a film.

  Then she was a humble waitress, skivvying round Liverpool, and he was a university student from a background as different from hers as night from day. He was the prince, she was the beggar girl. He was gold and she was sand. Bernie can blame Mammy’s, nursery stories for this penchant for impossible romance.

  And she shudders as she feels overwhelmed by some unknown but tremendous catastrophe.

  She cannot allow this to happen again.

  Last time this happened she almost died and Mammy has never forgiven her.

  Rory removes his jacket and tie and wears his white shirt unbuttoned at the throat. His head is slightly lowered as he talks to Candice and Dominic, and only the edge of his straight white teeth show when he turns to Bernie and smiles. She rolls a bead of bread into a ball, concentrating wildly on what she is doing, and wishes she could shrivel so small and roll across the table under his fingers.

  Purely for survival purposes, for she finds the book so unsettling, Bernie has been re-reading Magdalene, going through every chapter as thoroughly. They did The Van in English and Bernie understood not a word, but she liked the film of The Commitments—well the music anyway. Not a serious thinker by nature, Magdalene gives her macabre thoughts, and as she sits, out of place around the literary agent’s table, it seems that Magdalene is with her, the faceless spectre at the feast.

  Daring her. Seducing her. Blinding her with slippery illusion.

  Rory Coburn is a worldly, experienced, influential man who must have had so many affairs he has forgotten most of the women he screwed. He is not particularly tall. He is probably too well preserved. She wonders if he buys men’s make-up. There are traces of silver in his dark hair and chiselled lines round a lean jaw; he is erotic perfection. She watches his heavy silver watch, the way his cufflinks spark off the wine, the slight movement of his wrists as he handles his knife and fork. She imagines his long lean fingers turning the pages of her book; she imagines them on her breasts, his mouth closing round them, making them his.

  Bernie dreams dangerously on. They are mega-incompatible, Chas and Di, no intellectual companionship would ever be possible between them. He would love Tchaikovsky, she would prefer Oasis; he would read Thackeray while she flicked through TV Quick, he would choose the ballet while Bernie went to a rave. And the only reason she is here in his house, in his great presence this evening, is because, as author of Magdalene, she must function at his own deeper depth and therefore be spiritually worthy.

  Bernie is a woman with no concept of moderation. She cannot love sensibly, it must be obsessively; she cannot grieve gently, it must be preposterously; she cannot accept being merely liked, she has to be special; and she can’t smoke five fags a day, it has to be twenty. But Magdalene handles these handicaps and turns them into weapons; she tosses back life’s grenades before they explode in her face.

  Bernie is drawing perilously close to her warped anti-heroine.

  Far too cocky for safety.

  Choosing her vegetables from the silver dishes brought round by Bentley, and every choice is equally simple, it’s when you make the mistake that you suffer. Mushrooms instead of courgettes, spinach instead of artichokes—at school in Ireland you were made to sit and clean your plate for fear of offending The Lord, or the millions of Ethiopian children who might find out what you’d done. And so the choice is hers, whether to let herself take one step on the slippery slope to disastrous entanglement, or whether to turn away fast and run like hell.

  There is much to be said for emotional boredom, and Bernie watches the lesser man, Dominic, as he lays on the charm for the agents and editors sitting round Rory’s table. There is much to be said for listening to music and feeling stupidly happy, for walking alone in the twilight without breaking your heart. Dominic, who was once her god, the stars in the sky, the sun and the moon, is a young, attractive, fu
n-loving guy, but ordinary, so ordinary. Jaysus, what a relief to be released from the hellish infatuation that gripped and exhausted her for so long. Never again, please God, never again. For the sake of her own survival.

  ‘Don’t do it,’ says Candice edgily on the doorstep, gesturing towards Rory.

  Poor Candice. So jealous.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ lies Bernie, aflame, ‘I won’t.’

  When the new secretary arrives on Monday and sets herself up the small office at the back of the flat, Bernie is at a loss. She has sent Clementine’s notes to Kirsty who has a copy of Magdalene, and is waiting for the relevant pages to be returned posthaste.

  ‘I am still working on the manuscript by hand; it’s not ready for typing up yet,’ Bernie tells Candice in defensive anger. ‘Why is everyone hassling me, why are you all in such a rush?’

  ‘Calm down, Bernie, calm down. The typescripts we’ve sent out are your originals, and this is unusual to say the least. We were forced to respond to unheard-of pressure. We must make final copies now. People are clamouring to see them. But take your time, don’t worry. How long are you going to need? One more week? Two?’

  The thought of Clementine’s promised visit looms large in Bernie’s mind—she would like to have something to show her. What the hell is Kirsty playing at?—as does the quiz show already advertised in the Radio Times.

  ‘Bernie, don’t do it, don’t do it.’

  She turns on Dominic, enraged. ‘I’m not turning down my chance… who knows who might spot me. I might be given other work.’

  ‘Sometimes I wonder if you need me at all.’

  ‘And what do you mean by that?’

  ‘You and Rory got on well last night.’

  ‘We hardly spoke.’

  ‘You didn’t need to. And Candice tells me you wheedled him into taking you to the studios on Friday.’

  ‘What’s this?’ laughs Bernie unkindly. ‘Are you jealous, Dominic? Of me? Christ, that’s a first.’ Let him feel some pain for a change. He has probably never been dumped before; it will be a new experience for him, a learning experience that might profit him. They are both undergoing learning experiences. Bernie is now determined to take up the challenge offered by Rory, armed with a clearer understanding. She cannot spend the rest of her life avoiding relationships in case they destroy her, she has to learn to handle her emotions, and if she can take on an expert like Rory she will have good reason to be proud of herself.

  ‘Don’t worry, Candice,’ she tells her agent, ‘I know exactly what I am doing.’

  She will not play the snivelling victim again.

  She is not addicted to pain, like fat Avril, like the miserable Kirsty.

  ‘You silly fool,’ says Candice, when Bernie waits for Rory’s car to come and collect her—vintage, of course, one of the first Ford models on the road. And although Bernie knows Candice is jealous—she has set her cap at Rory for years—there is something in her troubled voice that touches a little nerve in Bernie, piercing the fog of the anaesthetic. Are you really so sure of yourself this time? At this vulnerable point in your life, are you honestly so certain you can play an expert in his own field and win?

  For she knows by now that the destruction of love, even a love as flawed as hers, is a wilderness complete.

  How typical and how abjectly pathetic.

  And just when Bernie is trembling on the very brink of success.

  Twenty-Two

  ALL THIS NAGGING ABOUT the book. What is Bernie so hysterical about? Let her make a fool of herself on telly, it might take her down a peg or two. As if Kirsty hasn’t enough to contend with. And how the hell can she be expected to make the changes to Magdalene, either? Oh, Ellen Kirkwood, where are you?

  When, eventually, Kirsty recovered after Trevor’s opportune accident, she found enough voice to call from the edge of the void, ‘Trev? Trev, can you hear me?’

  ‘You mad cow,’ came up the reply on a sludgy sound of stagnation. ‘You bleeding well pushed me in here.’

  Kirsty paused, thought hard about that, could that be remotely possible? Could she have shoved Trev over the edge during one of her paroxysms of terror, and never realized what she had done? No, she shook her head, trying to clear it of numbing shock, she hadn’t known where the hole was, so why would she have pushed Trevor in that direction? She knew there was subsidence near the fridge, but the fact that that subsidence had turned into a mantrap was as much a surprise to her as it must have been for Trevor.

  ‘Look, you sicko,’ called Trev’s disembodied voice, ‘look what’s bleeding well down here with me. Come on! Come on, you know very well what’s in here, but I want to show you.’

  Reluctantly, yet obedient still to her master’s voice, Kirsty crept towards the hole. It took time for her eyes to acclimatize to the solid sphere of darkness. ‘I’m sorry, Trev,’ she stumbled over her frightened words, ‘but I can’t see anything.’

  ‘There’s a fucking dead cat down here,’ shouted Trev, ‘and we both know about the golf club. When did you put that down here, Kirsty? Did you murder Ed Board? Have you gone right over the edge? You were the one who held the keys to this pigsty, you had to open the door to the law, you put this murder weapon down here and you can’t bloody well deny it. Christ Jesus, I think I’ve broken my bloody arm.’

  What cat? What golf club? Not the murder weapon, surely? Had Trev suffered brief loss of consciousness, had he damaged his head in the fall?

  ‘Not Fluffy?’ called Kirsty suddenly.

  ‘Fluffy? You raving nutter,’ yelled Trev. ‘Get me out of here. Go and get help quickly, I can’t stand much more of this. Fucking mess, dead cats, slimy muck halfway to my knees.’

  She hoped he was wearing his Hush Puppies. His Hush Puppies must be ruined. Kirsty suddenly spotted his car keys hanging on the edge of the cooker. ‘Where did you park your car, Trev…’

  He answered before he had time to think. ‘Some caravan park down the road. Why? What’s my car got to do with anything?’

  Kirsty swallowed. ‘Nothing, nothing. You hang on in there while I go for help.’

  ‘Don’t piss about,’ called Trevor angrily, ‘else you’ll be up for a second bleeding murder.’

  So she picked up the small bunch of car keys and carefully locked the door behind her.

  Mrs Stokes would be missing her at work, Kirsty worried as she made her way along the coast path back towards the Happy Stay, careful to keep a low profile and stick to the rockier path. The registration number of Trev’s hired Cavalier was conveniently printed on the plastic key ring and she only had to search for five minutes before discovering the vehicle in the car park beside the shop. Working hard at looking natural Kirsty unlocked the door and got in and, although she’d never taken her test, her only experience being the few bad-tempered lessons Trev gave her when they were engaged, she managed to start it up without revving the engine and drove smoothly out of the gate, under the banner that read, ‘Happy Stay’.

  She drove for five minutes before arriving at the track that led to the notorious Pengellis Rock. She bumped the car over the first field, opened the gate, relieved to find there were no cows, and carried on over the second until she reached the edge of the cliff. The rock itself stood stark and black, connected to land by a thin strip of crag, like a drawbridge to a fortified castle. Kirsty turned off the engine. How many hundreds of desolate people had sat here in the past, plucking up courage, swigging their whisky, listening to their saddest songs and reliving their hopeless memories before stepping out on that short journey that would lead them to peaceful oblivion?

  There was only a paper with a crossword half done beside her in the passenger seat, and two empty fag packets. She got out, wiped the steering wheel clean like a criminal and opened the boot. There was a brown carrier bag inside—she had taken his Adidas bag—and only his wash things were in it. So he hadn’t intended to stay long. He must have been very confident that his mission would prove successful: that his wife would end up dr
ugged and incarcerated in some closed unit and his children would be returned. When they let her out, he would bring her home. He knew she would have learned her lesson.

  She left the carrier bag alone—he wouldn’t need those things any more—and re-locked the boot. She took the car keys with her. On her way back across the cliffs she chose a spot where the water boiled into a black maelstrom of fury that mimicked her own. She threw the keys with all her might and they disappeared in their own small circle before a spurt of vicious spume swirled over the hole for ever.

  ‘I’m so sorry, Mrs Stokes,’ she said at teatime, ‘only my husband arrived unannounced, somehow he tracked me down and turned up out of the blue demanding to talk to me. I would have come to find you to ask your permission but he’s a very determined man and wouldn’t let me do that.’

  ‘I must say, it was a thoughtless thing to do, it left poor Marie single-handed.’

  ‘It won’t happen again,’ said Kirsty sincerely. ‘He’s gone now. I told him there was no way I would go back to him and in the end he seemed to accept it. He was miserable, probably gone to the nearest pub to drown his sorrows.’

  ‘Men!’ huffed Mrs Stokes, rolling her eyes to the heavens. And Kirsty wondered about Mr Stokes and if he was dead, or if they were divorced. She couldn’t imagine the grim Mrs Stokes even lying on her back in the missionary position; the thought of her opening her legs was utterly unfeasible. There was talk of the old woman having a relative in America—a child, her child—but it must have been so long ago.

  ‘I believe your children arrive this evening,’ said Mrs Stokes in a way that suggested she hoped they wouldn’t cause any further disruption to Kirsty’s work schedule.

  ‘Yes,’ said Kirsty, excited.

  ‘Quite a family day, then, one way and another.’

  ‘I’m glad Trevor’s gone anyway,’ said Kirsty. ‘That takes one big worry off my mind.’