by Julia Gray
Back home, looking out at our balcony, I decided that the world had shrunk immeasurably. It was, appropriately, raining. My head ached from the air conditioning on the plane; my feet were sore from walking in flip-flops, and I felt the empty kind of ache that a Christmas stocking must feel when it holds no further delights.
I told her all about the red-carpet event we’d gone to on the Saturday night, the party in the hills, the apparition of Brad Pitt, the boat trip on Sunday to the island of Sainte Marguerite, where it was said that the Man in the Iron Mask had been kept prisoner.
‘How was the food?’ Evie wanted to know.
‘Bland, overpriced,’ I told her. ‘We had lunch in an Italian restaurant that was pretty good. And it was fun to speak French.’
‘What about the movie your friend’s dad is making?’ she said. ‘Is your friend still going to be in it?’
‘She sure is,’ I said, thinking of the way Gabriel Glass had held Bel’s hand to his lips and kissed it when he said goodbye. It seemed that no one was immune to Bel, but no one. It didn’t matter what I’d had to say about his work; it didn’t matter how smart I was, or how capable. There was nobody like Bel. Even though she’d thrown up all the way home on the aeroplane, her skin robbed of its ambrosial glow; even though she’d slept with her head in my lap all the way back from the airport, she’d done what she’d needed to do. And she’d done it brilliantly.
‘Exciting,’ said Evie, reaching for her sewing box, a tin that had once held Danish Butter Cookies.
We watched an episode of something corsetty, and Evie talked about vampires, and we ate dinner in tranquil silence. When I went to bed, my dreams were full of tables covered in peach-coloured cloths, over which flowers crawled like spiders and light bulb letters glowed bright in the sky above the port of Cannes, like the title of some hot-ticket show: Picture People.
5
Bel was now on study leave. She did not have many more exams to do. I knew, from the way she’d been revising, and from what she said about each exam, that they had gone well enough. Buoyed by her meeting with Gabriel Glass, she was calmer and more organised about the exam period than I’d ever thought she could be: checking the timetable we’d pinned up in the kitchen, making sure she read through her files and notes the evening before. I noticed she didn’t call me every day, the way she had once done.
On Sunday afternoon, the day before we were due back at school, with Bel away somewhere for the weekend, I texted Darian and asked if I could come over to collect a forgotten notebook. He agreed at once. It was the first time I’d ever been to the Rosewood Avenue house without Bel. Darian made tea with the old-fashioned pot that Anton also liked to use. We carried our cups into the conservatory. The cat lolled like a reclining queen on a corduroy cushion.
‘Where is Bel?’ I asked, stroking the cat’s head.
‘She’s gone to some house party. Thurston’s mate’s country estate. Not my scene.’
It was funny, I thought, how the word estate meant something so different to the Ingram family.
The Jacaranda script lay open on the glass-topped table. I thought back to a night – how long ago? Two weeks, ten days? – when, as usual, I’d been over at the Ingrams’ house, reading through the screenplay with Bel at the kitchen table. We’d reached a very well-known scene; YouTube was awash with clips of Phyllis Lane saying these lines.
‘They say it takes a gardener of extraordinary abilities to coax life from a jacaranda tree on English soil. To raise it from a seedling and watch it grow; to ward off the bitter winter frost, to gift it with heat and light. There are few who can do it. All these years, I’ve come to believe that love – real love – is like that jacaranda tree. Even now, I don’t think any different.’
Try as she might, Bel just couldn’t quite get the hang of it. She said the words too fast, not giving them enough weight.
‘It’s bloody impossible,’ she said, throwing the script across the room. I went over to pick it up.
‘You try it and see,’ said Bel.
I read the lines aloud, faltering a little – on purpose – at first, and then faltering less as I carried on, because there was something about Gabriel’s Jacaranda screenplay that was so heady and delightful that it made you want to keep reading it.
Bel was pleased. ‘It’s glorious to hear this in your voice,’ she said. ‘Read more.’
So I did, and after a while I could sense, without seeing, that Darian and Anton had come into the kitchen and were listening to me as I read.
‘Clever little Nora,’ said Bel. ‘That’s helped me no end.’
The script still lay open on the same scene. Bel had scribbled some notes in the margin, I saw.
Following my gaze, Darian said: ‘You know every word, don’t you?’
He was right, of course. I did. In all likeliness, I’d known them – deep down, at blood level – long before Bel had even tentatively mouthed the opening lines of Clementine’s first scene.
Darian said: ‘You know, I don’t think Dad ever actually intended to give her a part in the film.’
‘You think so?’
‘He was just using it as a carrot. With Bel, it’s better to use carrots than sticks, as we all know. He offered, knowing she’d pull her socks up, but knowing that she’d probably mess up at some point, and then he could withdraw his offer. This is what they do, Bel and Dad. But – I don’t know – maybe because you were there to help her, with her work, her lines … it’s somehow made all the difference. I’ve never seen Bel like this before. So intent, so focused … I mean, still crazy. She’ll always be crazy. But I reckon maybe Dad’s decided to give it a go after all. I thought it would all end in tears.’
‘I guess you were wrong,’ I said.
‘Well,’ he said. ‘They haven’t started shooting yet.’ He was clasping his hands inside-out, stretching out his arms, in a way that I knew meant he wanted to go and play the piano. The cat slithered off the sofa, stretched like an uncoiling spring, and followed him as he wandered into the sitting room.
I went upstairs alone.
Bel’s room was no messier than usual. If anything, there was evidence of some organisation: on her desk, which had once been merely a kind of drinks cabinet, her revision files were stacked by subject. There was a jar full of pens and highlighters, all with lids on. My eye fell on a pile of reading matter. Interesting: Bel was also reading the biography of Phyllis Lane. Rereading, perhaps. There, on the floor by the bed was my notebook. Just where I’d left it.
Not long afterwards, Darian found me standing by the fridge, where Bel’s exam timetable was neatly stuck, along with a variety of recipes, lists and clippings from Screen International.
‘All right?’ he said.
‘Just looking at this photograph,’ I said, indicating a picture I’d never seen before stuck to the freezer door.
‘Oh, yes,’ he said. ‘Bel found it in the pocket of one of Mum’s dressing gowns.’
There was Phyllis Ingram, or Phyllis Lane, in a voluminous candy-stripe skirt, her skin bleached by the exposure, a hand shading her eyes. Bel, aged maybe seven or eight, ragged-haired, snaggle-toothed, was bunched against the candy stripes, grinning. Darian was a little to the side, holding a plastic truck. All three were standing on a stretch of white-gold sand, against an inviting sea.
‘Where are you?’ I said.
‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘It’s ridiculous that I don’t know. But I find one beach looks an awful lot like another.’
He offered to play me a piano piece by Debussy that he’d been rehearsing. As we left the kitchen, I cast a look back over my shoulder, to where the photograph was stuck to the fridge with a Monet magnet, amid all the other things that were stuck there, and gave myself a little inward nod of satisfaction.
I’d never thought much about Bel’s abilities to tune in to other people. I didn’t think she had a particular talent for it. Not the way I did. But perhaps Bel was able to pick up more subtle vibrations than I�
�d thought, because a week later, she did something that surprised me.
It was a breezy, blossomy evening. Bel, Azia and I were walking on Hampstead Heath. We’d been hanging out at Thurston’s house – his mother had moved into a sumptuous, yellow-brick mansion, complete with butler and chef – and Bel had decided that we ought to go to the ponds on the heath for a swim before going home. She needed to clear her mind before her final week of exams, she said. The heath was seeded with happy couples, children on scooters, picnicking parties. The performances of A Doll’s House were approaching, and I asked Azia and Bel whether they wanted to reserve tickets.
‘Of course,’ said Azia, changing nimbly behind a towel.
‘I don’t know if it’ll be any good,’ I said.
‘Now, Nora, everyone has to start somewhere,’ said Bel. ‘I’m coming too. Wild horses, and all that.’
I could have guessed that she’d be a terrible swimmer, and she was: she had no coordination of arms and legs to speak of, and no style. Even her breaststroke was closer to an unformed doggy-paddle, but she didn’t seem to notice, or mind. Most of the time, she floated on her front or back, while Azia did ten diligent back-and-forth lengths and I did twenty-five. Then, since Bel and Azia were keener on talking than swimming, I swam back to join them in the shallows.
‘Are you nervous about the play?’ Azia asked me.
‘Very,’ I said.
‘Don’t be,’ she replied. ‘You’re good. You’re really good.’
‘Just fancy,’ said Bel. ‘Ten years from now, me and Azia might be waiting outside your dressing-room door, in the hope that you’ll come out and give us your autograph. And you’ll be far too grand to remember us.’
‘That’ll never happen,’ I said.
‘It might.’
She looked wistful, then chuckled to herself softly, one foot extending out of the water as she floated on her back. And then suddenly she plunged towards me, seizing me heavily around the shoulders and pushing me down, right down, under the green-gold water of the Hampstead pond. She was, I realised, much stronger than I was.
She relaxed; my head broke the surface. I coughed, shoved her off me and breathed deeply. Bel laughed and wound her arms again round my neck.
‘Chill out, Bel,’ said Azia.
‘What was that for?’ I said.
‘Oh, I was just thinking,’ said Bel.
‘Thinking what?’
I could freeze, for ever, my frame of this moment. It’s like a French Impressionist’s painting. Three girls, one with ringlets and birthmark, one elegant and dark-haired, one blonde and buoyant and beautiful, cutting a triangle of wavelets into the great green pond. Looking at this picture, you’d see only the tranquillity of the June-evening sunshine.
She kept her hands on my shoulders, pressing, not-pressing, like a promise.
‘Well,’ she said, ‘I was thinking that if you ever let me down … people have, you know. If you ever betrayed me, Nora darling … well, I’d drown you.’
The fingers pressed. She was back to her American South.
‘I’d drown you and drown you …’
I’ll huff and I’ll puff and I’ll blow your house down, said the wolf to the three little pigs.
‘… until you were dead.’
Her laugh pealed across the surface of the pond.
6
June the fifteenth was a Thursday, just as that first Life Class with Jonah Trace at the helm had been, although it seemed a lifetime ago. It was two days before the technical rehearsal of A Doll’s House, and three days before the dress rehearsal. There was a kind of blooming excitement about the summer holidays, although since Evie and I seldom went anywhere but Scotland, I generally regarded the holidays as a stretch of numberless days and numbing dullness. This particular Thursday was also the date of Bel’s final exam. English Literature: Poetry and Drama, if I remember correctly. Questions on Milton and Wilde. As ever, I’d texted to wish her good luck, the previous night.
Formal exams were held in the gym, above the Art and Design Studio. Although I’d been in the habit of going to find Bel in the queue outside, either at a quarter to ten, if the exam was in the morning, or a quarter to two, if in the afternoon, I was busy all day with costume fittings and didn’t see her. As good as her word, Evie had taken a week off work to help out, and having my mother in residence backstage, her mouth full of pins, her busy LOVE HAT hands twisting and threading and making things look beautiful, was a diverting pleasure. She seemed to get on especially well with Megan Lattismore.
‘Thank you, a hundred times, Nora, for the loan of your magnificent mother,’ said Mrs Tomaski.
Megan texted me after the costume fittings. Your mother is the coolest person I have ever met.
Life Class was over now for the year. My nudes were rolled up in a cardboard tube at home, for me to keep or discard as I saw fit. I went through them in a moment of lazy curiosity, later that afternoon. Here were my sketches of the very first model – not Vanessa, the one before that – with the jar-like body and sandbag breasts. Then Vanessa, whom we’d drawn with both hands. I remembered the frustration of Jonah Trace, the flushed-faced humiliation when he realised that I was ambidextrous. Ah, the good old days. The time in which he and I were ‘going out’ was marked with little smiley-faces that he’d drawn at the bottom of my pictures. Even, in one place, a heart. Then, in January, the smiley-faces were gone, as Jonah was.
I was so absorbed in the drawings that I didn’t notice for a while that my phone was vibrating. It had slipped down the side of my bed. Fishing it out, I saw Darian’s name on the screen.
‘You won’t believe it,’ he said. ‘Or maybe you will.’
‘What is it?’ I said. ‘What happened?’
‘Bel didn’t go to her last exam.’
‘No,’ I said.
‘Yes. Dad is apoplectic.’
I sat up, catching a glimpse of myself in the mirror on my chest of drawers. Concern blossomed on my face.
‘Why didn’t she go?’
‘She says there was a mistake on her exam timetable. She thought it was in the afternoon, when actually it was in the morning. She’s an idiot. I should have checked – but she can’t expect to have her hand held when it suits her, and then be treated like an adult the rest of the time. She can’t have it both ways, can she?’
His voice, usually low and precise, was jagged with agitation. He didn’t say so, but I knew he was worried that Anton would blame him, somehow, for Bel’s failure to attend the exam.
‘So what happens now?’ I asked.
‘I dunno. She’ll get a lower grade, I suppose. Maybe she can re-sit. Best-case scenario. I don’t know what the procedure is.’
‘Neither do I,’ I said.
‘Dad should have been here,’ said Darian. ‘Instead, he’s in Ireland on some film set, not even answering his bloody phone half the time. He makes all this fuss about Bel doing well, and then he goes off abroad and leaves me to pick up the pieces. Sorry, Nora. This isn’t your problem, I know. I just … I’m so sick of them both. I can’t tell you.’
‘It’s OK,’ I said soothingly. ‘Everything will be OK. I’m sure he’ll still let her be in the movie.’
‘Christ, Nora, do you really think I care? D’you know who I think would be much better in his stupid movie?’
‘Who?’ I said.
‘You would,’ said Darian. ‘You know every word. I think you’d be amazing.’
Long after the end of our conversation, I remained on my bed, sorting and re-sorting my life drawings. First chronologically, then by size, then in the order of worst to best. Still Darian’s words reverberated, like one of his beloved sound experiments.
You would. I think you’d be amazing.
Who?
You.
I went over to my desk and put the life drawings down. I reorganised my files, my diary, my notebooks. A sheet of paper strayed loose; I stared at it briefly and then took it into the kitchen, where I ripped it int
o confetti and tipped the pieces into a recycling bag.
If anyone were to ask me, then, what the worst thing was that I’d ever done to anyone, and if I didn’t want to respond with the story of Rita Ellory, or the story of Jonah Trace, I might – if inclined, as I might one day be, to tell the truth – have told them what I am about to tell you. That stray sheet of paper, which I’d thrown away, was Bel’s old exam timetable. The timetable she’d read on the fridge earlier that day, so diligently written out in her slanting writing – or so it seemed – was, in fact, a superlatively good counterfeit. I had mimicked her writing, copying the old one exactly (save, of course, for the time of her final exam), and the afternoon that I went over and saw Darian I had stuck it to the Ingrams’ fridge.
I have never claimed to be a nice person.
It was a couple of hours later.
Evie was on her way back from a meeting in north London. She called me, asking me to sort dinner. I was in the kitchen, cutting up a courgette for a rather uninspired dish of vegetable pasta, and rattling very fast through some key Norian scenes that I felt needed a little more work, when the buzzer rang. I wondered whether it was a delivery for Evie.
‘Hello?’ I said, into the intercom.
Silence.
‘Is anyone there?’ I said.
I could hear breathing – syncopated, uneven – over the evening traffic.
‘Bel,’ I said. ‘Come up, darling. Eighth floor, second door from the end when you come out of the lift. Number eighty-seven.’
Despite my instructions, I had low expectations of Bel managing to find the right flat. I went out and waited at the entrance to the lift. I felt strangely unnerved at the idea of Bel being in our flat. It was too small for her; she’d take up too much psychic space in it, like a sunflower in a goldfish bowl. How did she even know where we lived? As the lift doors pinged open, I had a flashback to the end of Aliens, the second film in the Alien franchise, when the Alien queen, monstrous in her vengeful anger, emerges from an industrial lift. It was an absorbing vision and I struggled to be free of it.
