by Julia Gray
She did not apologise. With a hiccup and a slither, she descended, already cheered, as I knew she would be, by the thought of breakfast. I followed more cautiously.
‘What the hell were you doing?’ Darian said to Bel, when we were both safely down. ‘Dad isn’t going to be pleased. You can’t go around doing stuff like this.’
‘Don’t tell him,’ said Bel, lower lip shaking. ‘You’ll ruin everything.’
Breakfast was made (with Edam; there was no Gouda). I read Bel a fairy tale. And then Bel went to sleep, with crumbled bark under her fingernails. Darian made tea for us both and we sat in silence on the wicker sofa. He had his phone on his knee and kept starting messages and then deleting them. I wondered who they were addressed to.
‘Cody went abroad yesterday,’ he said. ‘That’s why she did this – she knew there was no one to babysit. You know, don’t you, why he’s always around? My dad pays him a retainer. To keep her out of trouble. Jesus, Nora. If she’d fallen out of that tree, you know whose fault it would have been? Mine.’ He closed his eyes. ‘I’m so incredibly tired,’ he said.
‘She said there might be something going on between us,’ I said, almost conversationally.
‘Did she? Sorry. She’s kind of tricky about things like that … there was an incident, once.’
‘What happened?’
He raised an eyebrow and smiled a non-smile, reminding me of Sarah Cousins. ‘I was sort of going out with a girl for a while, called Emily. Bel tried to strangle her with one of my ties.’
He sat so still, for such a long time, that I thought he might have gone to sleep. Interesting that he remembered Bel’s weapon as a tie. A scarf, Azia had said. Funny: the little things we change with the telling of our tales.
‘Darian,’ I said. ‘Would you mind if I went home?’
The tube platform was almost deserted; there was only a man in paint-marked overalls, and some partygoers, rather the worse for wear. I made my way to a bench and sat down, waiting for the train. It was just past six. A mouse ran along the track, a whisper of fur, impervious to the oncoming trains. Away to the left and right, the tunnel led into the unknown.
I thought about the Ingram family. The grey Gothic house, built like a small castle, so solid and yet somehow so vulnerable. The pond, the black-and-white tiles, the framed posters of past glories. The cream-coloured jar on the windowsill. Nobody knew that I knew this, but even if that jar had once contained ashes, it was empty now. I’d been sitting alone in the kitchen one afternoon – Bel was in the bath, I think – and the cat, waddling fat-footed along the sill, had knocked it over. The jar toppled and I scrambled at once to catch it before it fell to the floor. It was on its side and I panicked, thinking perhaps that it wouldn’t be sealed and the remains (cremains, they were called) would scatter blackly on the tiles. The lid did indeed roll off, and as I scooped lid and jar back together in a single, frantic motion I saw that the inside was as clean as a polished shell. I thought about the toast they drank to ‘Mama’, each time I was there for dinner. I was sure it was heartfelt enough. Why wouldn’t it be? But the jar was a stage-prop, no more.
I thought about Anton, with his exciting, high-stakes film projects and the bargains he made with Bel, and how he paid Cody to watch out for her. I thought about Darian and his mathematical music that combined process and beauty in ways that intrigued me. The dark look in his eyes when Bel was preparing to misbehave. The way he had warned me: Bel’s all about what she can get.
My train came, and I let it pass. Another mouse came scurrying by. I thought about A Doll’s House. It was actually on at the moment in London, and I thought I’d ask Evie if we could go. I was sure she’d agree. I wanted to see another Nora, hear the way she inflected each line and how she moved on the stage. Not to steal her performance, but to be inspired.
I thought of Evie, preparing to walk into the Thames. Evie, crying in the octagonal studio, wanting to understand. The needles and thread she’d needed to stitch herself back together, which she had done, I was sure, for my sake.
And I thought of my father, who woke up one morning, ate his boiled egg and drank his coffee, chatted to me and Evie, cycled away to the library (so he said) and gave us no clue – not one – that he wouldn’t be coming home.
We are shaped by decisions. Ours, and other people’s.
For a long time I sat on the tube platform, watching the trains come and go, the people get on and off, dispersing into the day. I thought for such a long time that in the end someone approached me to ask if there was anything the matter.
‘Thank you, no,’ I told them. ‘Everything’s great.’
I climbed onto the next train, folding my hands into my lap the way Sarah Cousins had once done in the headmistress’s office. OtherNora watched me in the reflective window; for the first time I decided that my irregular-shaped birthmark was really quite special, quite different, quite unique. There couldn’t be many young aspiring actresses out there who looked like me.
I can’t be sure, now. I don’t know whether it was because of what Bel said to me in the tree or for other, more complicated reasons. The look on the little boy’s face in the hospital ward when I stood on the makeshift stage. The fact that I am, and have always been, a liar. Why I do what I do is not always clear to me. Even when I try – as a historian or archaeologist would – to understand.
But I do think that moment, as the train pulled away, was the moment when I decided to do what I did.
1
Evie came home a few days before the start of the summer term, full of tales of on-set squabbles and costume dramas, her suitcase rattling with sweets, salted nuts, decorated pottery and embroidered blouses, as though she’d swept clean an entire rack at the airport shops. Two months in a trailer had softened her edges: she seemed less gaunt, more animated. I was glad for her.
‘But I missed you, I missed you, I missed you,’ she said.
I had missed her too, and I told her so. We celebrated at once with manicures. We chose a loud coral colour that suited neither of us, but we didn’t care. In the afternoon we saw three exhibitions, talking sometimes and at other times maintaining our typical peaceful silence. That evening we ordered Chinese: smoked shredded chicken and seaweed and hot-and-sour soup. All the things we loved.
We talked about Nana.
‘I dreamed about her, quite a lot,’ said Evie. ‘Speaking in Bible verses, as ever. I dreamed about Felix too. Just once. It was strange. We were in the Tuileries Gardens, flying the red-and-white kite, only it was shaped like an elephant … He was in the distance, running towards me, and the kite was flap-flapping above him in the sky like a giant elephant bird.’
Sadness turned her eyes a darker shade of blue for a little while. I reached for her hand across the table, moving a plate of dumplings out of the way.
‘So, A Doll’s House,’ she said. ‘Who’s doing the costumes?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘Some of the girls, I guess.’
‘Want help?’
‘Sure,’ I said. ‘Thank you.’
Previously, I think, I’d have felt sufficiently embarrassed by Evie – her outfits, her piercings, her swearing – to want her nowhere near my school. But now I found I didn’t mind. I positively liked the idea of her helping with the costumes. Under her expert supervision, they could only be improved. I asked her if she’d ever seen Jacaranda, and she said of course; it was one of the great love stories of our time, wasn’t it? She’d gone to see it with Petra, when it first came out at the cinema.
‘The book’s bloody wonderful too. Two boxes of Kleenex I used, the first time I read it,’ she said.
I nodded. I also loved the book.
‘There’s a girl I know at school called Bel,’ I said. ‘Her dad is doing a new adaptation. And her mum was Phyllis Lane. Did I ever tell you that?’
Evie was impressed.
‘And Bel’s going to play the part of the daughter in the new film,’ I went on.
‘Is she any good?’ asked
Evie. ‘Or is this Planet Nepotism?’
I smiled. ‘No, she’s really good. Really talented.’
Evie’s thoughts turned to the costumes, as I knew they would, and we ordered some more green tea.
At the start of the new term, the cast of A Doll’s House assembled after school in the theatre.
Mrs Tomaski greeted us in a rich baritone. ‘Today, girls, is about getting to know each other. We shall play confidence-building games, and share the innermost secrets of our souls.’
I caught Megan’s eye, and smiled. The games were not so bad. Mrs Tomaski had us hurling a beach ball at each other like demented toddlers, calling out the names of our favourite chocolate bars. (I didn’t have one, but feigned a preference for Terry’s Chocolate Orange.) Then we had to pair up and fall backwards into each other’s arms, to exercise our ability to trust. I pretended to be Bel. She would be too cool for such games, I was sure, but she’d throw herself into them nonetheless, if they were for the good of the play. So I jumped for the beach ball and threw it with glee. I toppled into Megan Lattismore’s cleavage with a girlish giggle.
After the festivities were over, we sat on cushions on the floor and did a read-through of Act One. At once, I felt perfectly at home. After The Belle of the Ball, and weeks of reading aloud to Bel, I felt that I knew every intricacy of my voice, and exactly how to bend and mould it to fit Ibsen’s words. The lines I had already totally by heart. For the negative person – and indeed, for the habitual liar – acting truly is a gift. I could tell that there were certain girls who could not see why I had been given the part of Nora. It was up to me to prove them wrong.
Mrs Tomaski distributed printouts of the rehearsal schedule – twice, then thrice-weekly over the next six weeks, a technical and a dress rehearsal over a weekend, and then two performances near the end of June. Her trailer door, she said, was always open; if we had any doubts, any difficulties, anything at all, we were always welcome to come and find her.
‘My dears, my dears,’ she said. ‘This is going to be quite an experience.’
Now I was no longer just Nora, but Ibsen’s Nora too. And in this Nora, I found various similarities to myself. This Nora was, like me, not afraid to lie: she took out a loan, forging her dying father’s signature in the process, risking her honour, in order to help her unknowing husband. But she had more principles than I did, and more spirit. In my own life, I hated to dance. I thought it was the most embarrassing and undignified thing. But a few weeks into rehearsals, we practised a scene in which I had to dance the tarantella, a quick Italian dance, and as I circled the stage, wild-limbed and free-footed, I felt a rush of intoxication, the being someone else and doing something different that I loved so much. At the end of the play, when her secrets are known, Nora decides that what she really needs to do is be alone, to learn what she has to learn about life on her own. In this, I felt Nora was braver, much braver, than I was. I loved Ibsen’s Nora, not because we were the same, but because of the person she allowed me to pretend to be. (Interestingly, I realised that Clementine, at the end of Jacaranda, also decides that she must be alone, rejecting the claustrophobic love of her parents and the long shadows of her childhood home.)
In the Phyllis Lane biography that I had read many times, it says:
Those who have acted with Lane over the years have much to say about her inimitable style. Dame Claudia Savernake, her co-star in the acclaimed BBC1 series Gilded Birds, said: ‘She occupied a part absolutely, like a soul travelling from body to body. It wasn’t a question, with Phyllis, of trying on a hat or a pair of boots: she became the person she played; she knew their darkest secrets and the names of their great-uncles. And then, at the end of the show, or when filming wrapped, she’d have a real moment of sadness, as though that person had died. She’d fill a little box with trinkets from the production – a set of false eyelashes, a programme, whatever was most fitting – and store it with all the rest, under her bed. I used to think it was horribly morbid, but I also believe that the total dedication to the roles she played was what made Phyllis one of the real greats of British cinema.’
I just loved that, about the boxes. I wondered if they were still there, under Bel’s parents’ bed. One day, I would have to look. Rereading the biography, I found more and more to inspire me. I began to copy little tricks of Phyllis Lane’s. As well as keeping a notebook, as she had done, I drank lots of water and hummed little scales to open my throat, and did backbends in the mornings to mobilise my spine. After a while, I felt as though part of me was as much Phyllis as it was Ibsen’s Nora.
At the end of the biography, there was a transcript of a radio interview with Phyllis Lane. Asked for some piece of life advice, she responded: ‘Always carry a pedestal.’
The interviewer asked her what she meant by this.
‘It’s a long-standing motto of mine,’ said Phyllis. ‘I’ve been thinking it as long as I can remember. I’ve taught it to my children. What it means, I suppose, is – honour those who help and support you. Hold them high in your regard. A pedestal is a wonderful thing.’
So that was why Bel was always promising pedestals. I’d wondered for the longest time. Funny, though: I never really thought that Bel meant it. Which might have been unfair of me. But she was so self-centred, so self-serving so much of the time, that I never really thought Bel reserved pedestals for anyone but herself.
2
On the first Thursday of the summer term, when I came down to the studio for Life Class, I felt hands around my eyes, heard a velvety ‘Guess who?’ in my ear, and swung round to a puppyish hug. Bel and I had not seen each other since the night of the Tree and the Dutch Breakfast.
Ever-loyal Nora, I hugged her back.
‘How’s tricks, sugar?’ she said.
She looked well, and smelled of shampoo and cocoa butter. The beetroot drink must have been back on the menu, and the jogging too. She was finishing the self-directed assignment that formed a substantial part of the course. For the first time, I saw all three paintings together.
‘Oh, Bel, I never realised,’ I said.
‘Pretty cool, huh?’ she said. ‘So much work. But worth it.’
The pictures were three scenes from Jacaranda. The man and woman on the bridge, their hands not quite touching, were Matthew and Audra, as they struggled to reconcile their love for each other with what had happened. The young girl in front of the Georgian house was, of course, Clementine – played presumably by Phyllis, although on closer inspection she might easily have been Bel herself. And the purplish-flowering tree was the jacaranda tree that grew beside the house.
‘They’re wonderful,’ I said. ‘I’m sure the moderators will think so.’
‘I need to write a three-thousand-word essay to go with the pieces,’ said Bel idly. ‘I thought it would be easy, but … I don’t know if you have any time, what with your play and all. Whaddya say, darling?’ She smiled at me, at her most beguiling.
I paused for a moment, as though considering. I wondered if she even remembered what she’d said to me, up in the tree. If she did, she might have expected me to be feeling a little cooler towards her, surely, although her manner didn’t suggest it. I thought about what to say, and how to appear.
‘I do, of course, require a pedestal,’ I said at last. ‘Of rose gold with chocolate sprinkles.’
‘Nora,’ Bel said, ‘you can have any goddamn pedestal you like.’
And so I helped her with her essay, and with other bits and pieces of work and revision besides. I sat at the kitchen table at the Rosewood Avenue house, helping Bel to draw up an exam timetable to stick on the fridge. And, by and by, as I had known she would, Bel asked me to help her learn the part of Clementine.
I like to think that my manner towards her, all this time, didn’t change.
‘Do you think they’re auditioning anyone else for this role?’ I asked her one afternoon, as we sat at the table with cans of Diet Coke and her Early Modern History files.
She crossed
herself dramatically. ‘Lord, I hope not. I think it’s mine. I still need to meet the director, mind. He’s got a reputation as a bit of a diva. His way or the highway, if you know what I mean. Then again, I’m sure I’ll be able to charm him.’ She pursed her lips, like a Burlesque dancer, mid-song.
About the need to pass her exams too, she said nothing, but I knew she was thinking about it. Slightly distractedly, she shuffled through the rainbow-coloured Ryman notebooks we were using for her revision, opening and closing them at random.
‘Shall we have some tea?’ I said, knowing that she would jump up, not so much from hostess-like duty as the need for a break. She went over to the range and put the kettle on; as she did so, I quietly slipped her Jacaranda script into my rucksack. We were going to see Darian play with a jazz trio that evening in Brixton. To get it copied in the morning wouldn’t take long at all, and I’d be able to return it to the chaos of her bedroom later in the day.
With any luck, she’d never notice it was missing.
One evening, not too long after that, Darian and I were in the conservatory playing Scrabble. I’d discovered that he loved the game. Bel had no patience with it, and neither did Evie or Nana; since the death of my father I’d been longing for someone who shared my fondness for words. Anagrams, crosswords, word-puzzles of all kinds, in English and French, were my father’s great obsession, and it had pleased him to pass this obsession on to me.
At first, I’d been worried that Bel would object to us playing together, after her outburst in the tree. But she didn’t seem to mind. Darian was a strong opponent, able to play as many as three seven-letter words in a single game. Often, our combined score was as high as eight hundred.
I don’t remember who was winning, but I do remember that it was my turn. Just as I was moving my tiles into position, we heard Bel’s voice ringing out from the sitting room. She was reading, or reciting, Clementine’s long speech at the end of Jacaranda. I knew it very well. Word for word, in fact. I was struck by how cleverly she’d taken her mother’s famous performance and melded it with her own.
