One May Smile

by Penny Freedman

  I stifle a snort of laughter because James, for once, is taken completely off balance. He recovers well, though. His mouth does drop open in astonishment for a moment but he is quick to cover it with a laugh. ‘Conrad,’ he drawls, ‘I have to tell you I know absolutely nothing about the insides of a car.’

  ‘No problem. You can hold the spanners for me.’

  I don’t hear James’s reply as he picks up his towel and turns to go. Later, though, when Ray appears and we’re straggling out to the minivan to set off for rehearsal, we see Conrad and James speeding out of the gates. Like several others, I take a quick look at Sophie to see how she’s feeling about being displaced from her seat in the lovely Mustang but she is meekly climbing into the minivan, outwardly unperturbed.

  I’ve been worried about how to amuse Freda this morning, but I find, when I descend into the wine cellar where my costumes are waiting, that the rails have been delivered. O joy, O rapture unforeseen! They were promised for today but I find that it saves disappointment never to expect deliveries when promised and then, as this morning, it’s such a lovely surprise when they turn up on time. There’s nothing Freda likes more than unpacking things so she sets to with a will. She’s a bit random about where she puts things and she can’t hang things up, of course, but we get on pretty well. And they seem to be doing pretty well outside too, every time we emerge into the light of day because Freda needs a drink or the loo or something to eat or another drink. We find the sun shining, people mostly on top of their lines and Sophie surprisingly good as a rather scarily bonkers Ophelia. Her mad scene dress – a Miss Havishamesque tattered bridal gown – was one of the first out of the trunks, so I’ve given it to her to wear and it certainly seems to have brought her to life. At lunch time there’s a decision to go and eat on the beach and we call in at the harbour car park to let Conrad and James know. All, it seems, is tranquil here too. We pass Ray, who has been off on an errand of his own this morning and is sitting on a bench eating an ice cream, and we find Conrad, with his head under the car, wriggling out to say they’re nearly finished and they will find us on the beach. He takes another spanner from James, who is sitting with his back against the boot, reading, and he works his way back under the car.

  Everyone departs for the beach except Freda and me. We are detained by Freda’s need to take my hand and to walk precariously along the shallow wall that runs round the perimeter of the car park. Thus it is that I am the only one of our company to see what happens a minute or two later. What I see is this – though I don’t understand it till much, much later: I see Conrad emerge from under the car and say something to James, who puts down his book and stands up, laughing. Words are exchanged. Then there is an alarming moment: Conrad savagely winds down the jack and raises his arm in a histrionic gesture, jack in hand, so it looks as though he is going to attack James with it. Instead, though, he flings the jack to the ground and storms off in the direction of the town. James watches him go, then he packs up the tool box, stows it in the boot, takes the keys out of the car’s ignition, locks the car, stands looking at it for a moment, pockets the keys and walks away towards the castle.

  *

  Neither of them arrives to join us for lunch on the beach, but when we get back to rehearsal in the afternoon, James is there, tight-lipped and non-committal, running through his lines with Ray. Nobody – except Annie, who can’t do Guildenstern without Rosencrantz – seems much bothered that Conrad is missing. Freda and I return to our labours and any danger that she might be getting bored with this game is forestalled by the delivery, in our absence, of a full-length mirror. She tries on every piece of headgear – military caps, crowns, coronets and the gravedigger’s beanie – and sends herself into fits of laughter as she disappears into the hats, and the crowns end up round her neck. I am not required; she is star and audience of her own show.

  It’s as we’re packing up at the end of the afternoon that Conrad finally appears. Even at a distance he is evidently so drunk that at first people think he is clowning and there’s some half-hearted laughter as he weaves his way across the courtyard. Close to, though, he is red-faced, sweaty and pumping aggression. He turns on James.

  ‘What the hell do you think you’re doing?’ he slurs venomously. ‘What have you done with my car?’

  James’s face and voice are tight with disdain. ‘What I think I’m doing, Conrad, is rehearsing this play. And it would have helped us all if you’d been doing the same. And the car is just where you left it.’

  He turns his back on Conrad and starts to move away. Conrad shouts, ‘Cunt,’ and makes to follow him but Ray steps in to block his way. Conrad executes an odd little sideways dance step and then, abruptly, slides to the ground. James keeps on walking without looking back. The rest of us stand stupidly, looking at Conrad’s prone figure until Adam moves in and nudges him fairly roughly with his foot.

  ‘Christ,’ he says, and contempt and disgust are surprisingly strong in his voice, ‘he’s passed out.’ He looks round at us all. ‘What the hell are we going to do with him now?’

  I have a feeling that I should be taking charge, as the only real grown-up present, but I’m forestalled by Jon McIntyre, who pushes his way through from the back of our circle of onlookers and kneels down beside Conrad. He slaps his face lightly and lifts one of his eyelids. I’m not sure where he is in his medical degree – has he seen any actual patients yet? – but he manages to look quite professional about it.

  ‘He’s completely out,’ he says. ‘We’ll just have to carry him to the van so we can get him home and put him to bed.’

  ‘I’m not having him in the van in that state,’ Ray says. ‘If he throws up in it I’m the mug who’ll be cleaning it up.’

  ‘And what about the car?’ Sophie puts in. ‘We can’t leave it in the car park all night, can we?’

  ‘OK.’ Jon is still kneeling beside Conrad. ‘If someone will help me to get him into his car, I’ll drive him back. Then if he vomits he’ll be the one to clean it up. I assume he’s got the keys on him.’

  He starts to pat Conrad’s pockets for the clink of keys, but I know they’re not there so I yell across the courtyard to James, who is about to disappear through the archway to the outside world, ‘Hang on, James. We need the car keys.’

  James turns and looks at me, and of course he’s wondering how the hell I know that he’s got the keys. He says nothing, though – just puts a hand in his pocket, pulls out the keys and stands there, dangling them from one finger. I’m about to trot off and fetch them but Jon raises a hand. ‘It’s OK, Gina,’ he says, and there’s some steel in his voice, ‘no need to trouble yourself. James can bring them.’ He raises his voice. ‘I’ll have those keys then, James,’ he calls. ‘I’m going to drive the car back to the house.’

  There is a moment when I think James is going to refuse. The two men stand, facing each other across the space and it’s like the prelude to a gun fight without the Stetsons, but then James starts to sprint towards us, and when he is maybe twenty feet away, he swings his arm up and bowls the keys at Jon, who catches them one-handed and calls, ’Thanks very much,’ to James’s retreating back.

  It turns out that Ray can manage Conrad all by himself. He heaves him up in a fireman’s lift and sets off at a steady pace across the courtyard with everyone else falling in as a rather self-conscious escort behind him. I nip back to lock up the costume store and Freda and I catch up with them as he stops for a breather before starting the descent to the car park. Then he’s off again, steady as you like. I’m impressed and intrigued – not just by the physical strength but by the practised way he hauls him up onto his back. No-one else seems much impressed but I’m pretty sure he didn’t learn to do that on one of those one-day First Aid courses. I don’t know what he did before Oxford – only the actors got their CVs in the programme – but I don’t think he spent all his time in a lecture theatre.

  As they are manoeuvring Conrad into the passenger seat, he comes to a bit and starts
struggling, but they strap him in and Jon gets into the driving seat, then lowers the window and calls to Ray, ‘I think I’d better follow you. I’m not sure of the route on this first bit – getting out onto the coast road.’

  Ray walks over. ‘In fact, I was going to try the dual carriageway today. It was such a scrum getting out of the town onto the coast road yesterday. Follow signs to the E47, then take the turn off to Humlebæk. It should be pretty straightforward. We’ll follow you in case you have any trouble with him. He might just come round and turn nasty.’

  ‘More likely just to puke all over me. OK. Thanks.’

  Things get raucous in the minivan as the group launches into a thoroughly merciless character assassination of Conrad. They start with the drinking but quickly move on to a more general attack which has at its essence, it seems to me, a shared outrage that after five years at Eton and three years at Oxford he has the effrontery to remain so American – so unembarrassed about being rich, so openly ambitious, so lacking in the British essentials of self-deprecation and irony. ‘All of which wouldn’t matter,’ says Zada, who knows something about being a foreigner and fitting in, ‘if he had a smidgeon of talent. Do you remember that review in The Oxford Mail that said he seemed to have taken Roger Moore as his acting model?’

  ‘Have you seen what he wrote about himself for the programme?’ Adam asks. ‘I’m sure it’s bad form to broadcast the fact that you were at Eton, isn’t it, James?’

  ‘Quite so. And as for explaining that the school’s in Berkshire, well –’

  ‘Well, that’s for the benefit of any passing American, I assume.’

  ‘Who will pronounce it Birkshayre anyway.’

  ‘I love the way he says he’s looking for an agent. If your father owns Wagner Pictures and you haven’t managed to get an agent, you might think you’d get the message, wouldn’t you?’

  ‘Has anyone ever seen him in any of these walk-ons he talks about?

  ‘I think they’re more like carry-ons – when he was a baby – no lines to screw up.’

  *

  I feel a teacher’s urge to intervene and make them ashamed of themselves but I can’t face Annie’s wrath so I shut up and after a while the bitching runs out of steam and they move on to competitive reminiscences of drunkenness they have known. They’re young enough still to find falling over drunk funny. Except for Adam and James, who exchange looks as the stories get under way, and then direct their gazes at the outside world. As do I, with Freda lolling sleepily beside me. For a while, we follow the Mustang. Then, at the turn onto the dual carriageway, Jon nips into a break in the traffic, leaving us behind, and Ray announces that he’ll need to stop for petrol at the service station just coming up.

  As soon as we stop, everyone in the van decides to dash off into the shop like a party of kids on a school trip. I stay firmly in place. Freda is at the fractious end of the day when a retail opportunity is likely to have her demanding all sorts of things and getting histrionic if denied. So we read The Very Hungry Caterpillar, which travels in my bag and which she knows off by heart anyway, and eventually the others come running back with wine, cigarettes, crisps, bottles of water, chewing gum, postcards, sun cream and, in Zada’s case, a large bunch of lilies. ‘An end-of-the-day service station bunch is the saddest thing in the world,’ she says mournfully, ‘but if you buy it yourself it’s not quite as bad as being given one.’ Ray, who has been for a pee, gets back into the van and we head for the exit, only to find that there is no escape. Traffic is backed up along the road in a static queue and there is nothing for us to do but to sit and wait for it to start moving.

  A game of Botticelli gets under way as we wait. If you don’t know it, it goes like this: someone chooses a famous person and tells the others the initial letter of his/her name; they then ask yes/no questions to try to guess the name. The first person to guess then chooses another famous person, and so it goes on. It’s called Botticelli because people you choose are supposed to be at least as famous as Botticelli, but fame isn’t a universal – it depends on the circles you move in – so there are usually arguments and, in my experience, the game frequently ends in recriminations and disarray. I’ve got a feeling that somebody suggests playing it in the second act of Hay Fever. I opt out today, anyway, and as Zada is entertaining Freda with an unfathomable Armenian counting game, my mind is empty enough for the contents of David’s email, which I read this morning and which I’ve been suppressing ever since, to force themselves to my attention. Well, I refuse to accept that there was anything the matter with my email to him. He’s still cross about missing out on a holiday, obviously, but I’m done with saying sorry. There’s only so much apologising a woman can do and I reach my limit pretty quickly. So, he’s sulking and going out of radio contact. Well, let him. It keeps things simple. And it looks like Mr Christodoulou isn’t going to phone me either, so that’s fine. Live in the moment. Freda and me, and a dozen screwed-up semi-adults. Lovely.

  I suppose it’s my preoccupation with these thoughts that explains how I come to have no premonition of what is about to happen. I would like to be able to tell you that when, eventually, the traffic starts to move, someone kindly lets us in and we crawl on towards home, this is the moment when a spine-tingling knowledge comes to me of what we shall find to be the cause of this queue, but in all honesty I can’t. In honesty I have to admit that I am fully absorbed in self-reflection, and it is only when we draw level with the accident itself that, like everyone else, I see what has happened. A car transporter is slewed across the road and behind it, its front wedged cruelly beneath the transporter’s back axle, its rear only exposed to view, is a pale blue car.

  Without a word, Ray pulls over onto the verge and stops behind the police cars drawn up there. Two policemen walk over to us and Adam gets out of the van and goes round to talk to them. Zada has started to cry; Sophie mumbles, ‘Sick!’ and stumbles out to throw up. The rest of us watch in silence the actions of officialdom. We see one of the policemen produce a notebook and Adam produce his passport; we see but can’t hear dialogue – three-way and then two-way, between the policemen only; we watch as the three of them move to where something lies stiffly on the verge under a red blanket; we see a corner lifted, see Adam nod his head; see the corner dropped.

  When Adam gets back into the van his mouth seems to be working too hard for the words that come out of it. ‘An ambulance has taken Jon to hospital. He was conscious. Conrad –’ he gestures in the direction of the blanket on the verge, ‘– is dead.’ Nobody, I notice, looks at anyone else, and I guess they are all thinking more or less the same thing – that while they were engaged in the enjoyable business of tearing Conrad apart, the impact of steel on bone had finished the job off for them.

  If we’ve all thought it then someone, I suppose, has to say it. Sophie screams into the silence, ‘Don’t you dare! Don’t you bloody dare sit there pretending after all the things you were saying about him. You don’t give a fuck about him, any of you, so don’t pretend – just don’t pretend.’ She breaks off, thrusts her fist into her mouth and gives a great howl of grief. Zada goes and sits beside her, takes her in her arms and cradles her in her lap, weeping herself so that mascaraed tears drop onto Sophie’s blonde head.

  Adam climbs down from the van then calls back to Ray. ‘They want me to stay for a bit,’ he says. ‘Give more details. You’d better go home. I’ll make my own way back.’ He speaks coolly enough and he has his usual air of easy authority but anyone who looks properly at him can see how hard he is working at staying composed. We can’t leave him on his own, can we, on this foreign roadside, with the blue car protruding so obscenely from under the enormous transporter and the blanket-covered shape on the verge? I wonder if Annie might offer to stay with him but she does something else instead, and the last thing I’m expecting.

  ‘Give Freda to me,’ she tells me, ‘and you stay with Adam. He can’t stay here on his own and he needs someone with him who won’t crack up.’
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br />   So here I am, standing on the verge, waving to Freda as the van draws away. I’ve no idea if Adam is glad to have me here but he says, ‘Thanks,’ which is polite of him, and in the interminable time that follows, as the police and recovery crew go about the routine business of violent death and seem to have forgotten about us, we even manage quite an interesting chat about Hamlet. In the end, it turns out that we’re not really needed. The police take the address where we are staying and ask a few questions about when and why Conrad hired the car, then ask me to give a second identification. I don’t know what to expect but I feel very little, actually, as one of them lifts the corner of the blanket. It is Conrad, of course, but the dead, I learn, don’t look quite themselves.

  One of the police cars drops us off at the villa, where we find some supper left for us but hardly anyone around. I find Annie in my room upstairs. She has put Freda to bed and is sitting with her iPad. ‘Just emailing Ellie,’ she whispers.

  ‘Make sure you tell her Freda’s fine,’ I say. ‘Where’s everyone else?’

  ‘Emailing, texting, updating their facebook pages.’ She gets up and I follow her to the door. ‘This is a drama,’ she says dryly outside in the corridor. ‘It has to be communicated to the world.’

  ‘Thank you for looking after Freda.’

  ‘Thank you for looking after Adam.’

  ‘I think you must actually be fond of him.’

  She shrugs. ‘I dunno,’ she says, and leaves.

  Sophie isn’t in our room. I glimpsed her curled up in a corner of the salon with something Danish on the television. I look at my laptop sitting on the dressing table. I would quite like to do some communicating, to off-load some of today’s drama, but David has put himself off limits and I can’t think of anyone else to tell. I could almost work myself into a fury about David’s dereliction and I’m almost tempted to ring him up and shout at him but I’m too tired. I’m so tired, in fact, that although it’s not yet nine o’clock, I undress, get into bed with Freda and fall into a tangled sleep.