by Rosie Thomas
She drove to Anaheim, then out through the minuscule kingdoms of the San Fernando Valley, and westwards to the ocean at Santa Monica. She was amazed to discover that a little further on, behind the beach houses at Malibu, a road wound upwards into the canyons and within half an hour it led her to a deserted hilltop in a landscape of scrub-covered semi-desert. The isolation was more marked because she could turn to one side and see the immense encrustation of the city around the curve of the ocean, and every thirty seconds the glint of light that was a jet turning upwards from Los Angeles International in the centre.
The freeways yielded everything to her. An hour after leaving her hilltop she was idling along Rodeo Drive, peering at the jewels and the little beige silk suits in the windows of the designer stores. The contrasts were so sharp that sometimes they left her winded, but still, however oddly, she felt at home in this place. Its energy seemed to match her own. Humming with it, she went back to Caspar who laughed and stroked her hair, and took her inside to make love behind the shutters before it was time to set out for the next party.
On her third day in town, Harriet took Linda to the beach. She had wanted to see her on the second day, as soon as she had slept off some of the jet lag and her tequila hangover, but any arrangement seemed to require a surprising amount of negotiation with Clare Mellen’s secretary. In the end, it was settled that Harriet should collect Linda from her mother’s house at two-thirty in the afternoon and deliver her back again at six prompt.
When the time came, Harriet drove up to the inevitable high, blank gates in the green depths of Bel Air, and announced herself into the grille of an intercom speaker. It made her think of Little Shelley again. After a long time, the gates swung open. Harriet parked the dull sedan beside a Mercedes limousine and a smaller, matching convertible. The secretary came out of the house, more to check her out than to greet her, Harriet thought. She looked less approachable even than Ronny Page.
Harriet waited obediently in the hallway. The house seemed to be furnished mostly in white and beige marble, set off by the most extravagantly frilled and ruched soft furnishing Harriet had ever seen. In comparison Annunziata Landwith’s house was as stark as a bus-station waiting-room.
A moment later, Clare Mellen and Linda appeared at the top of a shell-shaped curve of beige marble stairs. She was older than Harriet by two or three years, but Clare’s face and figure were still perfect. She was wearing a dark pink dress that was tight over her hips and stopped above her knees, to show dancer’s legs. Her fingernails and toenails were varnished to exactly the same shade of pink. One step behind her, Linda had reverted to the scowling child that Harriet had first seen in Annunziata’s drawing room. She was wearing a dress in the same pink fabric as her mother’s, but it was full-skirted, and ribboned. Her nails were unpainted, of course, but Clare had managed to find flat leather pumps in exactly the right pink too. Or more likely had had them specially made, Harriet reflected. Poor Linda looked as if she was on her way to the stiffest kind of children’s party, or perhaps to act as bridesmaid at a not-too-elaborate wedding.
Harriet felt dishevelled and oversized under the full beam of Clare’s examination. For her own part, she could well understand Caspar’s long infatuation with Clare. She was very beautiful and she lacked only a hint of animation.
Harriet held out her hand, and Clare touched it with the tips of her fingers.
‘This is very kind of you,’ Clare murmured, according to formula. The secretary had already made it clear that in fact Clare was doing the kindness in bestowing Linda for the afternoon. ‘Say a proper hello, Linda, won’t you?’
Linda murmured something. She looked miserable, but stood close to Clare. For the first time Harriet noticed that her face was a smaller, plainer version of her mother’s, made heavier by Caspar’s more emphatic features. She felt sorry for her obvious confusion and began to wish that she hadn’t come. Clare was her mother, even if they didn’t immediately present the happiest mother-and-daughter picture.
If she was mine, Harriet wondered, would we be like Jane and Imogen?
‘Linda so much wanted to see you,’ Clare added.
‘We’re good friends, I think, aren’t we?’ Harriet spoke directly to Linda. She disliked the way the talk was conducted over the child’s head. But Linda only nodded, and the three of them began to walk across the acre of marble towards the door. It seemed inconceivable that anyone should mention Caspar, but Clare said brightly, ‘Linda is such a creature of enthusiasms. She’s like her father, in that.’
Harriet admired the neatness of the put-down, reducing her own significance in both their lives to a passing fad.
‘It’s a very lovable quality,’ she smiled back.
At the door Clare asked, ‘Where are you girls off to?’
Wisely, Harriet didn’t mention the beach. There was no membership requirement for access to the sand and sea. Clare would no doubt consider it dirty and dangerous, as well as vulgar.
‘Oh, just to drive around. Maybe do some shopping and have tea somewhere quiet.’
The mild programme was judged a suitable afternoon’s entertainment for Linda. Clare nodded and held open the front door. She leaned forward to kiss Linda’s cheek as she passed.
‘Goodbye, darling. Have a lovely afternoon. Six o’clock, then.’ The last words, delivered in a different tone, were Harriet’s dismissal.
In the car, even after the gates closed behind them, Linda sat with her face turned away. She looked out of the window at the ramparts of greenery as if she had never seen them before. Harriet waited. At last Linda turned to her and said,
‘I really love her, you know.’
Harriet was dismayed. She didn’t want Linda to have to defend her mother to her. She was ashamed to have let her own estimation of Clare show so clearly.
She only answered, as if surprised, ‘Of course you do. You should do.’
After a moment Linda tugged at the skirt of her pink dress. ‘Dumb, isn’t it? I told you what to expect. You get dressed up, rather than just wearing something.’
The atmosphere lightened at once. Harriet laughed and headed the car towards Santa Monica.
Linda was delighted with the beach.
It was a warm, clear afternoon, but the immense sweep of pale sand was almost deserted. The lifeguard sat in his house on stilts, watching over the dozen black and Mexican families who had spread their clothes and towels around pyramids of drink cans. The breeze off the ocean and rhythm of the surf drowned all but the bass beat that pumped out of their big black transistors.
Linda ran down to the hard, shiny sand at the lip of the waves. Harriet walked a little further up the slope, holding her pink pumps and watching her skittering dashes in and out of the dying surf.
‘Don’t get salt on your skirt.’
Linda’s face was shining. ‘It’s so neat down here.’
‘Don’t tell me you’ve never been before?’
‘I’ve been enough to Malibu, I guess, where people have their beach houses. And I used to go with Caspar to Venice beach, on Sundays, because he liked to look at the freaks and the jugglers and stuff. I don’t think I’ve ever been here, by the pier.’
‘And I’ve only been in LA three days, and I’ve done it already.’
‘D’you like it here?’ Linda seemed almost shy in her eagerness.
‘In LA? I love it.’
Linda beamed. ‘I told you, didn’t I? But do you know something weird? When I’m here, in a funny way I quite miss England. England’s greeny-grey, and sort of soft, you know? Everything’s hard and really bright, here. Do you know what I mean? Or am I crazy?’
‘I know just exactly what you mean.’
Harriet turned her back to the sea and looked along the beach. The pier poked absurdly out into the sea, like any pier anywhere. If she half closed her eyes she could imagine herself in Hastings. Or in Brighton. Brighton made her think of Caspar, who was sleeping off his lunch under the shade of a parasol, with Memoirs of
an Infantry Officer facedown on the warm stone beside him. Harriet opened her eyes wide. The palm trees along the Palisades were nothing to do with Brighton or Hastings, and neither were the supine black families. Like Linda, she felt a whisper of homesickness for the little, crowded, sand-and-shingle beaches and the green mounded landscapes of home. The thought made her smile.
‘Shall we go for a swim?’
‘In the sea?’
‘Of course.’
‘I haven’t got my things.’
‘I’ve brought towels. You could swim in your pants, couldn’t you?’
Linda needed no more encouragement. She stripped off her dress in a makeshift tent of towels that made Harriet think of English seasides again, and Kath providing the same protection for Lisa and herself.
With her arms wrapped round her thin chest in unnecessary modesty, Linda sprinted down the slope of sand. Harriet wriggled out of her own clothes and ran too. The water was icy cold, and they gasped and splashed and shouted encouragement at each other. After five minutes they ran back up the beach and rubbed the circulation back into one another’s limbs with the warm towels.
‘I’m so c-cold,’ Linda spluttered.
‘Don’t complain. In England, this would be an official heatwave.’
The idea made them both laugh. ‘I’m hungry. Can we go on the pier and buy something to eat?’
‘Why not? That would be fun.’
Linda stared over her blanket of towels. ‘Can we really?’
‘I said, why not?’
‘You’re really amazing, you know, Harriet,’ Linda told her. ‘I can’t think of anyone who’d enjoy going on the pier. Who wouldn’t do it, sort of, out of suffering, to keep me happy.’
‘Not Caspar?’
‘I don’t really belong to Caspar out here. I belong to him when I’m in England. It’s what the lawyers worked out.’
Harriet took her hand. She wanted to put her arms round Linda and hold her, as if she could compensate for anything, but she would only let herself link their fingers and swing them, with the highest spirits she could muster.
‘Well, I want to go on the pier, and I want you to come and keep me company.’
The pier, as Harriet had already observed, was exactly like piers anywhere. They ate a hamburger apiece and watched the sea fishermen hunched over their lines at the far end, and then they were drawn by the tinny music into an amusement arcade packed with sweaty, barrel-chested men and furtive adolescents. Linda ran between the slot machines, almost capering with delight.
‘Quick, Harriet,’ she commanded. ‘Give me some quarters.’
Harriet’s role was as the provider of dollars while Linda played the machines, until they discovered the worm game. In the worm game, flat reptilian heads popped in and out of holes in unpredictable sequence. Armed with a heavy wooden mallet, the player’s job was to smash each head back into its hole before the next appeared.
Linda swung wildly, but Harriet never missed a head. She flattened each contender as soon as it winked over the rim of its hole, and when her score reached one thousand a bell rang. Players at adjacent machines turned to stare. Flashing lights announced Harriet as the top scorer of the day.
‘Zowee! Look, you get a free game!’ Linda chanted.
Harriet dropped her mallet. She was laughing and gasping for breath.
‘That’s not much different from being an entrepreneur. Just keeping one deadly step ahead of the opposition. Come on, let’s get out of here. I enjoyed that so much I’m worried about myself.’
‘Terror of the worms.’ Linda grinned.
Outside the light was white and hard. They idled arm in arm over the tarry decking.
‘I wish the Ferris wheel was going.’ Linda sighed. In an enclosure to one side of the pier was a little funfair, but the rides were still shrouded in the winter’s faded blue tarpaulin. Even so, from somewhere close at hand, they heard carousel music. Linda ran ahead.
‘Look, Harriet!’
At the shore end of the pier, sheltered in its own glass-walled and mirrored wooden house, was a fairground roundabout spinning with carved and gilded prancing horses. As they watched, it slowed and stopped. A handful of children slid reluctantly from painted saddles. The ride must have opened for the first afternoon of the summer season. Harriet stood to admire the horses’ flaring nostrils and streaming golden tails, and the fine curved lines of the chariots they drew.
‘I remember it,’ Linda said in delight. ‘At the beginning of that movie. Do you remember, The Sting? It was this very roundabout, wasn’t it?’
Harriet was still admiring the exuberant caning, and the colours of the mirrored reflections. ‘I don’t think I saw that one.’
Linda looked at her sidelong. ‘Do you go to the movies, Harriet?’
‘Not all that often.’
Now Linda shook her head. ‘You must think this place is really weird.’
‘I do, a bit.’ Linda was a native, and she was not. A faint, cold finger of premonition touched Harriet.
‘Can we ride?’
‘Try and stop us.’
They chose their painted horses, and they turned in the stately circle. Reflected colours danced out of the mirrors, shadows in the wooden house and white light from beyond the glass doors making soothing patterns behind Harriet’s half-closed eyes.
When it was their turn to slip out of the smooth saddles she had forgotten what she had been thinking.
‘It’s time I took you home. Your mother will be waiting.’
‘Mom doesn’t wait. People wait for her.’
Harriet delivered Linda back to the secretary at six o’clock exactly. There was no sign of Clare.
‘How was she?’ Caspar asked, when Harriet found him in his chair by the pool. There was a highball glass on the table beside him, and he peered up at her with one eye half closed.
‘Your daughter?’
‘Of course.’
‘She was okay. She enjoyed Santa Monica pier.’
Caspar chuckled. ‘That was a good idea.’
Harriet knelt down to bring herself to his level. There were small beads of sweat in the mat of grey hair on his chest, and the creases at the corners of his eyes had deepened in the faintly waxy skin. His blue stare was alert, however. She felt a mixture of tenderness and exasperation. She stretched one finger to touch the sticky rim of the glass.
‘Why do you drink so much?’
‘I told you long ago.’
Harriet thought for a moment. The Hollywood silence enveloped them. In the fading light blue and white flowers grew iridescent. ‘What would you say if I told you I wanted you to stop?’
Caspar laughed, but he took her hand at the same time. Harriet’s feeling of tenderness deepened. She wanted to lay her head on his chest, claiming him, but she held herself still.
‘I would say that it’s too late for that, Harriet. Even for your sake.’
The fatalism disturbed her. With her own unfailing energy to fuel her, Harriet believed that it was never too late. But she fixed on the words, even for your sake, as if they held out a promise.
‘Even? What does that mean? Why did you ask me to come out here?’ She hadn’t meant to pose the question, but it came anyway.
Caspar appraised her. She occupied the centre of his field of vision now, as she had wished, but she was suddenly alarmed.
‘Why?’ He gave the word the full, declamatory weight. And then his voice softened. ‘I asked you because you are your own woman. You live a life, a life I don’t understand, but I admire you for it. You don’t want to feed on mine, you don’t need to live through me.’
As she listened, with her head bent, Harriet felt the distance between them, and not only between herself and Caspar but between herself and everyone she knew. She had grown up and away from Kath. Her marriage had ended in divorce. Her friends had shifted in their old, well-worn dispositions. Simon was dead. More sharply than she had ever done, she longed for the filial bond that had never exi
sted, never been reacknowledged between them.
Harriet put the flat of her hand down to touch the paving stone at her side. She could feel how it held the day’s heat. If she moved her fingers a few inches they would trail in the pool water. She could see, and smell, and hear, all the richness of the garden. She was a part of this landscape, for all her isolation.
Caspar said, ‘I asked you out here because you are the kind of woman who doesn’t proselytise about my habits.’
‘So you were wrong.’ Harriet faced him. ‘But I don’t ask you out of some stiff-necked sense of morality. I ask because I think you’re a great actor, and because I see you pissing your talents away.’
Caspar’s voice was quiet now. ‘I think I am the best judge of that.’
The hairs prickled at the nape of Harriet’s neck.
But a moment later he said, ‘Come here.’ He drew her closer so that she sat against him, and her head did rest on his shoulder. ‘Listen. I’ll strike a bargain with you. If I walk up there tomorrow for that little statue, I’ll try to knock off the sauce. Will that do?’
The Oscar. In all his long career, Caspar had been nominated only once before.
‘Does it matter so much?’ Harriet whispered.
‘Oh, yes. Yes, honey, it matters.’
‘You’ll win it,’ Harriet told him. ‘No contest.’
He lifted her chin and kissed her. As she held him, feeling the knots of his muscles that were beginning to turn flaccid, Harriet thought that the smitten intensity of new love was metamorphosing into familiarity. Infatuation would become a different, better love.
‘It’s a bargain,’ she said.
Inside the ranch house Vernon was moving to and fro, turning on lamps.
‘Let’s go and eat, before we go to Marv’s,’ Caspar said. ‘Let’s see and be seen. Let’s demand the best table in the room. Tonight, I am as good as King.’
‘Tomorrow, Emperor.’
They left the soft twilight and went into the house, their arms around each other.
Robin drove home across Blackheath. It was not a part of London he was familiar with, and he was obliged to concentrate on finding the best route home.
