She allowed a lengthening pause to develop which George would be compelled to interrupt: ‘And?’
‘It was a disaster.’
‘What, you mean him?’
She shook her head. ‘He did his stuff, I did mine. But no fireworks. I promised him the fuck of a lifetime, but it was not to be.’
‘He may have thought it was.’
‘No, I’m pretty sure we were of one mind on the matter.’
‘God,’ George sucked her teeth, ‘you were right, he was no gentleman. He nearly ran you over, you’d think the least he could do was to fake a bit of earth-moving. I mean, we do it all the time.’
‘To be fair I don’t think he was one of nature’s fakers.’
George widened her eyes. ‘So who did he turn out to be?’
This was Stella’s trump card. ‘Search me.’
‘Yesss!’
* * * * *
Homeward bound in the slow-moving army of red tail-lights Stella felt the itch of something she dimly recognised as conscience.
In the interests of not disappointing her sister, and of keeping her amused, she had not been wholly candid about the previous night. While it was true that on a one-to-ten of casual sexual encounters it registered pitifully near the bottom, it had been memorable on several other counts.
For one thing, she couldn’t work out why – why it had been so lacklustre. The man had been attractive in a rough, rich-bastard sort of way – an unpolitically correct allure to which (her public would have been surprised to know) she had always been shamelessly susceptible. A decent body stretched and stressed by life. An acerbic manner. Sure, practised hands. Not only that, but there had been a disarming confidence in his ready acceptance of her offer. He’d taken it at its face value, without demur, asked no questions, neither given nor elicited any apology for its failure, and disappeared into the night with commendable promptness.
But – and this was what she remembered most clearly – not so promptly that he hadn’t found time to kiss her cheek before leaving. She’d been foxing, pretending to be almost asleep, but she remembered the distinctive Corona-and-Boss smell of his suit as he leaned over her, and the way he put his hand on his tie so it wouldn’t fall on her face. If he’d kissed her on the lips or – God forbid – on the forehead, she would have had his number instantly, and scrubbed it from the memory bank. But a kiss on the cheek was different: a token of equality and friendship. It left her wishing to God she’d asked his name. Or even that he had asked hers.
It all got messy, of course it did. Over the next few weeks she never actually regretted walking out on the band but she frequently cursed the day she created it.
‘Talk about Frankenstein,’ she complained to George over the phone. ‘You cobble something together in your own image and what happens? It shafts you.’
‘Do you want to come and stay? The offer still stands. Brian’s quite put about at the thought of providing sanctuary for a star on the run.’
‘Sorry to disappoint him but I wouldn’t inflict all this on my worst enemy.’
‘But you are all right?’
‘Sort of. But it’s tough being non-contentious. My agent, my lawyer, the others, the theatre managements . . . the more I hold my hands up and say “fine”, the crosser they get. If they’re not bloody careful I’ll turn nasty and really give them something to get worked up about.’
‘As long as you see yourself right,’ said George.‘Vis à vis finances.’
‘Don’t worry. Apart from anything else I have faith in my own modest talent. It got me where I was a couple of weeks ago, it can get me there again.’
On this score Stella sounded more confident than she felt. Starting all over again held no fears for her, but she had never been a solo performer. An aspect of her talent in which she took some pride was her ability to fire people up in the service of a common enterprise, provided of course that the said enterprise was her idea. For years, she’d done that, and stood tigerishly between Sorority and the horrors of the road – all those motorway miles, and mean-spirited managements, the disgusting dressing rooms and brain-dead punters – and she’d enjoyed it. Got off on it, even. She was better equipped to cope with the exigencies of graft than the fine-tuning of success. That was why she preferred to take the risk of new material – it reminded her of the struggle. She had no desire for the sort of success that meant safety.
But money, as everyone including George kept reminding her, was an issue. She had her flat, her van, her piano, and a few thousand in a building society. She had her modest talent. She wasn’t lazy but she was unsystematic – it was part of the same thing really, she had to make things hard for herself in order for them to feel worthwhile. So she worked up against deadlines, in the middle of the night, omitted to eat, drank Red Bull and bourbon, chain-smoked, left final reminders unpaid and caring messages unanswered . . . And emerged wrecked but triumphant, to raise two fingers and a dozen new songs at her creditors.
She told herself that her life so far, both professional and private, had been an exercise in crisis management, and with a little tweaking this latest contingency could be viewed as more of the same. But she was going to have to reinvent herself.
Her svelte solicitor Apollonia had views on this, and gave her the benefit of them over tea in her office overlooking the Zoo.
‘You should go all-out sexy.’
‘I hoped that’s what I already did.’
‘Yes, but I mean—’ Apollonia waggled her shoulders and pouted ‘—sexy!’
‘Please. I don’t have the chest or the inclination.’
‘Forget the boobs, it’s purely and simply a question of attitude.’
‘The thought of it makes me heave. And I have just enough respect for the customers to think that it would make them heave too.’
‘You’re too modest,’ said Apollonia, who definitely didn’t get it.
‘No, I’m not!’ barked Stella in exasperation. ‘I’m as vain as hell which is why I have no intention of tricking myself out like some poor-man’s Madonna!’
‘Okay,’ said Apollonia, dunking a low-fat cookie, ‘so what will you do?’
What she did was, go to Scotland. It was a happening rather than a decision. With her dues paid and the dust settling she went to Jamie’s eighteenth and there met his Aunt Fran and Uncle Roger, in the first half of the evening before she got too pissed.
‘You’re a genius,’ said Fran. ‘We both think so.’ Stella, acutely sensitised to such things, thought she detected the spider-foot of patronage and was tart.
‘You’re easily pleased.’
‘No,’ said Roger. ‘Far from it actually. But guilty as charged of hyperbole.’
‘Did I gush?’ asked his wife, rhetorically. ‘I beg your pardon.’
By the time Jamie hove in view, doing the rounds, Stella had forgiven Fran, and learned that they were academics from Nottingham, not a true uncle and aunt but second cousins, and contentedly child-free (she was attuned to whether or not this was an elective condition). She explained her own connection, and the three of them agreed that the celebrations were a tribal rite which they felt privileged, as non-initiates, to attend.
Jamie was accompanied by a soignée blonde Valkyrie whom Stella took correctly to be Ingrid.
‘Hi,’ she said, ‘I don’t know a soul so you’ll have to excuse me.’
Fran and Roger took her small clothes, stupendous curves and estuary vowels entirely in their stride, though whether through tact or because, unbriefed, they simply didn’t notice, was hard to tell.
As they quizzed her like troupers about alternative beauty treatments Jamie put an arm round Stella’s shoulders and a warm, winey mouth to her ear.
‘Read about it in the papers.’
‘About what?’
‘Don’t about-what me! You flouncing out.’
‘I didn’t flounce.’ She caught his eye. ‘Okay, I did. It was a bloody historic flounce, though. A class flounce.’
; ‘Glad to hear it.’ Unlike her, the birthday boy was already well ratted. ‘What do you think of Ingrid then?’
‘I’ve hardly spoken to her.’
‘Neither have I . . .’
She had to laugh, he was a broth of a boy. ‘She’s a knock-out.’
‘That’s what I reckon.’
‘And I like Fran and Roger, too.’
‘Do you?’ He looked at them as though seeing them for the first time. ‘Yeah, they’re okay. Right old hippies. They’ve got a house on one of those Scottish islands, you know? One of those shaggy sort of commune things in the sixties.’
‘Sounds good to me,’ said Stella. ‘Do they still go there?’
‘I dunno, I suppose so. Ask them. I say, Stella . . .’
‘Go on.’
‘Will you do a song?’
‘No. I’m strictly a civilian tonight.’
‘But it’s my birthday and I’m asking you.’
‘No.’
‘I can always wait and ask you in front of everyone when I’m even more drunk than I am now.’ ‘It’ll get you nowhere.’ ‘You’re so horrible.’ He kissed her mostly, leaning heavily on her shoulder for a second as his balance wavered. ‘Sorry . . . Better circulate while I still can.’
Stella, seeing Ingrid link her arm through his as they moved on, considered that her godson could do a great deal worse.
Of course she sang one number, after dinner, in between the band’s first two sets. It was ‘Still the Same As Ever in My Head’, about getting older. She substituted Jamie’s name for one or two of the more general references to the young, so although the song was wistful in tone there was cheerful chi-iking from his friends. Given the pre-dinner champagne and subsequent well-chosen wines, and the band’s alien keyboard, she was by no means certain how she’d performed, but Jamie’s mother Helen was effusive.
‘That was really, really kind of you, Stella. We’d never have dreamed of asking, I do hope he didn’t put undue pressure on you.’
‘Of course not, it was my pleasure.’
‘You were fantastic,’ said his father Bill, whom Stella had once slept with, many years ago. ‘Not a dry seat in the house.’
Helen frowned proudly. ‘Darling, that’s disgusting!’
‘I’m sorry, it was meant as a compliment.’
‘And taken as such,’ said Stella.
‘See?’ said Bill. ‘Woman of the world.’
What, wondered Stella, all those years ago, had she been thinking of?
By two a.m. the party had, like good stock, reduced and concentrated. The younger element remained in the marquee with the band, the remaining older guests who were either staying or too lazy to go home were scattered about the house with their shoes off feeling no pain. In a more anonymous context Stella would have favoured the marquee, and indeed Jamie had implored her to stay, but the two brain cells still unaffected by drink warned her against placing herself in temptation’s way. Tonight might officially mark the end of her godmotherly tour of duty but it would be unwise to be remembered as the woman who fondled sixth-formers.
Instead she sat on the sofa with Roger and Fran.
‘Yes,’ said Roger in reply to her question, ‘we do, on Ailmay. Why, do you know the island?’
‘I’ve heard of it.’
‘Well, it’s our proud boast that we bought our place there when nobody had heard of it,’ said Fran. ‘And since then we’ve seen it through the Ailmay Community, the pop stars’ retreat, disgrace, decline and resurgence.’
‘Disgrace?’
‘Only by association, the pop stars got up to all sorts.’
‘And what’s it like now?’
‘As beautiful as ever in its bleak way. If you like that sort of thing, which we do. Most of the commune houses are holiday cottages now and there’s a couple of pubs that do food, and a perfectly good restaurant at the big house. Still only one shop but these days it stocks olives and pasta sauce. That sort of thing.’
‘You have no idea how alluring you make it sound.’
‘You know,’ said Roger, ‘if you ever want somewhere to escape your baying hordes of fans, or the press, or whatever, you’d be more than welcome to go there. It’s nice for the house to be lived in.’
‘Don’t be daft, Rog,’ said Fran, ‘it’s not Stella’s cup of tea, she’d be chewing the carpet in two seconds.’
If Fran had not said this, Stella might have reached the same conclusion herself. But she was predisposed to be contrary. Chew the carpet, would she? She’d see about that.
Over the next couple of weeks the idea of a highland retreat took hold. She could almost feel the northbound motorways spinning beneath her wheels and unwinding behind her as she drove, the spray on her face as she stood on the pitching deck of the ferry, the cry of the curlews, the tangle of the isles . . . No one would know her, or care, or give a flying fart what she looked like. She could eat plain food and drink whisky and go for long walks. She might even (though she hedged her bets on this one) give up the weed. And write – she could be Ailmay’s writer in residence, that eccentric woman from up the glen . . . There’d be no piano, but it wouldn’t be the first time she’d managed without, and one of the pubs or the big house would surely have one . . . If she was going to recreate herself this would be the place to do it.
Once she had decided, and ascertained from Fran that the house would be empty and she was more than welcome, Stella made short work of arranging to go for a month. It was at moments such as these that she knew she had got everything right, that she could never for an instant have tolerated marriage, let alone a family. As it was she had no partner, no commitments, no pets, not even, at this moment, a job. Out of decency she dropped her mother a postcard telling her where she was going and why, but not giving the address.
As if to add wings to the enterprise there was a piece about Sorority in the newspaper. Stella didn’t have a paper delivered, she bought one, if she bought at all, on impulse and according to mood. On this occasion it was a middle-of-the-road tabloid known to be popular with women. The entertainment section had a small paragraph about her walk-out due (as they described it) to ‘a difference of opinion over the group’s direction’. It went on to describe the remaining members’ efforts to replace her. It was shamelessly on their side, with a quote from Faith to the effect that ‘literally hundreds’ – dozens, Stella imagined – of talented hopefuls had turned up to audition for the group. Their choice, pictured left, was a punky girl called Gina who according to Faith had ‘just seemed right from the moment she walked through the door, and it was a bonus that she had the voice of a fallen angel . . .’ Jesus, thought Stella, had they no shame? What did it mean, for fuck’s sake, to sound like a fallen angel? What did a fallen angel sound like? Had she sounded like one? And – shit! – was she jealous?
Later the same morning the phone rang and it was Faith, determined to be bold and straightforward.
‘I just wanted to say that we miss you.’
‘Nice of you to tell me, Faith, but I really couldn’t care less.’ A sarcasm that betrayed what it was supposed to conceal, but Faith was too self-obsessed to notice.
‘Did you see the piece in the paper?’
‘I don’t take a paper.’
‘We’ve taken on someone new.’
‘Good.’
‘But if you thought – I mean, if you do see the piece, don’t think for a moment that she replaces you, because nobody could.’
Stella bit down hard on a silence. But the trouble with a silence was that it was subject to an infinite number of interpretations.
‘Stella? Are you still there?’ Oh, God, a creepy note of concern.
‘Sorry, I missed that, I was getting a cigarette.’
‘It doesn’t matter. Anyway, I wanted to say thank you. For giving me the chance, and so on. Whatever I do from here on in it will be largely because of what you did for me and I shan’t forget that.’
Stella heard it all – the bet-hedging,
the self-serving, the good old-fashioned arse-licking. But worst of all was the assumption that she was someone to be remembered with gratitude while a younger, prettier woman soared into the showbusiness stratosphere.
‘Of course you won’t forget,’ she said. ‘Because you’ll be contending not just with your grubby conscience but with me. And while you’re wallowing in your sad, deluded star-is-born fantasy, I’ll be out there cutting the mustard. Talent will out, sweetheart, and the brutal truth is that I have more of it than you.’
There was a tremulous sigh. ‘I’m so sorry, Stella.’
Stella had forgotten more about psychological street-fighting than Faith would ever know, but as she hung up she had furiously to acknowledge the last word to her opponent. That perfectly timed and modulated ‘so sorry’, that was not so much an apology as an expression of sympathetic understanding . . . the little bitch! But then, she’d had a good teacher – in another time and place, Stella reflected, she could have been friends with Faith.
* * * * *
The morning she left for Scotland there was a letter from Gordon. She threw it unopened into the bin but sheer brute curiosity (she told herself) prompted her to turn back from the door at the last moment to retrieve it and stuff it in her coat pocket.
In the carpark of a Little Chef near Doncaster she lit a cigarette and read the letter.
‘... just want to say ...’ Why did people always use the word ‘just’ when they were about to dump exponentially? And say ‘sorry, but—’ when they were the opposite of sorry? The germ of a song idea presented itself and she dug a biro out of her bag and put a circle round the ‘just’ before reading on.
‘. . . want to say that my feelings for you haven’t changed. I have the greatest respect for whatever decision you have reached and your reasons for reaching it, though only you can know what those are. I shall of course continue to come to your shows whenever I can and “worship from afar”. You cannot know what our association has meant to me though perhaps, being the creative person that you are, you can imagine . . .’
The Grass Memorial Page 14
