“Did she know about Astrid?”
“Who knows? Thing was, Astrid herself turned up to buy her parsnips with a couple of bruises a few days later. Weren’t that long ago.”
“What does that have to do with her house being burned down?”
He shrugged. “Search me. By the way”—he was giving me a rather suggestive look—“who was that bloke I saw coming out your house round lunchtime the other day? Tall geezer, bit on the thin side, dark hair. Good looking, like me.” He grinned. “I’ve seen him somewhere but I can’t place where.”
I smiled back wondering whether or not he was joking because poor Chris is not good looking. He’s probably one of the ugliest blokes on the planet. Short, squat, bald head, stubby nose like a bulldog, but there is one thing: He has the longest eyelashes I’ve ever seen on a man.
“I can’t think who it could have been. Why do you ask?”
“No reason except one place I know I’ve seen him is round Astrid McKenzie’s house. Saw him there the day she died, as it happens.”
“Have you told the police?”
“What, about seeing him at Astrid’s or at yours?”
“Hey Chris, over here,” someone yelled to him before he could answer my question and he patted my arm.
“Gotta run.”
“Me too,” I said, looking at my watch in horror. I was late for my meeting. I scuttled along Elgin Crescent worrying about what Chris might have told the police and then as I was crossing Ladbroke Grove I calmed down. Why would the police ever want to question me about who came in or out of my house?
Selma Walker had an agenda. I think I realized that as soon as she opened the door to me. It was the way she ushered me inside as fast as she could. We had a great deal to do and there was no time to waste. This was the message her body language sent me and who was I to argue?
My first meeting with a subject is always a little awkward. You smile a lot and act as if you’re going to be buddies for life but behind the charm and the professions of goodwill, you’re usually working like crazy to size the person up. And they you.
Selma Walker was pretty blatant about it. She kept turning around and giving me penetrating looks from top to toe as she led me down a long stone passage to the back of the house. The smell of freshly ground coffee wafted after us, competing with the overpowering fragrance of Selma’s scent, something French and expensive I couldn’t recall the name of. Was Buzz in the kitchen seducing one of the coffeemakers? There was no immediate sign of him and for this I was grateful. I looked terrible. I’d slept badly and my attempts to camouflage my tired-looking skin hadn’t worked. And the two chocolate croissants had managed to push my stomach out to the max in record time.
Selma wasn’t at all what I expected. For a start her appearance was a shock. I’d seen her black-and-white image in the media often enough and I’d caught an episode of Fraternity the day before so I’d be prepared for her in color but the flesh and blood woman bore no resemblance to her character in the soap. She had no makeup on and I reckoned she was at least ten years older than I had imagined. I’d assumed she would be early forties, a bit older than I was. This woman was in her fifties. And she wore a wig in Fraternity. In the TV series her character was a little fireball with flaming red hair. The woman who stood before me had a mane of black hair. It fell halfway down her back in what I imagined must be a pathetic attempt to hang on to a girlish appearance. She was tiny and fragile looking with pale blue eyes and very white skin. She wore jeans, the chic designer kind, pressed and crisp, and a powder blue cashmere sweater with a boatneck.
But it was her manner that intrigued me more than anything. There was something about the eyes that I noticed immediately. There was apprehension in them, fear even. She didn’t come across as a glamorous figure. She didn’t exude confidence, quite the opposite. In fact I had the distinct impression that in spite of the beady looks she kept giving me, she was nervous, almost shy.
She took me into a room that ran the width of the house and benefited from the morning sun through three floor-to-ceiling sash windows. You could step out of them onto a wrought iron balcony with steps leading down to the garden below.
Giant sofas upholstered in white calico were dotted around the room. In fact, apart from an old French linen cupboard, which people seemed more inclined to have in their living room nowadays than in their bedroom, and a few well-tended plants that actually looked more like trees, the sofas were the only major furniture. There was the odd, strategically placed steel and glass coffee table on which to place drinks and a tapestry-covered ottoman stood in front of the fireplace, but otherwise that was it.
Selma flopped on one of the sofas and gestured for me to do the same. I had the presence of mind to see that if I sat opposite her on the other side of the fireplace I’d be miles away from her. So I positioned myself in the corner of the sofa she was lying on and tried not to look at the crinkled soles of her tiny little feet, bare now that she’d kicked off her embroidered slippers. She huddled away from me into the corner. Her tiny frame, dwarfed by the epic proportions of the furniture, put me in mind of a toy lapdog curling up on a cushion for a nap.
Before we could speak the door opened and a woman came in bearing a tray that she set down on the ottoman.
“This is my precious Bianca,” said Selma. “She takes care of me better than anybody I have ever known.”
It was rather a dramatic statement. Clearly Bianca was someone I needed on my side.
“Hello.” I smiled. Bianca didn’t. In fact she regarded me with a great deal of suspicion. She was medium height, and had an attractive Latin face. Middle-aged, probably around fifty, her figure concealed by a starched white housedress. On her feet she wore white tennis shoes.
“Is coffee,” she informed me. “You want the milk and the sugar?”
“Just milk, please.”
She handed me a cup, still without smiling.
“Miss Selma, I pass the Hoover in the next room. Is okay?”
“Sure,” said Selma and made to get up and reach for her coffee.
“Miss Selma, don’t move. You must take care.”
Suddenly I saw it. As Selma reached out to take her cup of coffee, her sweater pulled up to reveal her bare back and the tail end of a livid bruise to the left of the base of her spine.
She saw my reaction.
“Stupid!” she exclaimed. “I slipped in the kitchen the other day, fell against one of the counters. Hurt like hell. It was over a week ago but I can’t seem to get rid of this bruise. Nothing broken but Bianca is a bit overprotective. I’m fine. So let’s get started. You come highly recommended, by the way. I know a couple of people you’ve ghosted so I called them and they said you were a star. Is there anything you want to ask before we begin?”
Was there anything I wanted to ask? Surely there was everything I wanted to ask. I had nothing to do but ask her questions. I started with the one I always asked first.
“Why do you want to write your autobiography?”
“Why do you want to write my autobiography?” she countered.
Now she had me.
“Selma, I have a confession to make. I know next to nothing about you other than that you’ve come over here because you’re in Fraternity. But I also have to confess that I don’t recall ever seeing any in-depth interviews with you and I do go through the papers quite thoroughly as part of my job.”
I held my head high as I said this and looked her in the eye. I wished she’d let up with the penetrating gaze. She’d done her homework on me, hadn’t she? She seemed to think I’d passed her test. What was it that she still wanted to know that warranted this X-ray vision boring into me?
“Well, you can save yourself the trouble,” she said, tipping her head forward and jerking it back suddenly to get her mane of hair out of her face. “There’s not much. Oh, you’ll find plenty of dumb pieces about me going to a party or a premiere or a football match but you won’t find out anything about my life. I hav
e a degree in privacy. I hate publicity.”
“So why would you want to tell your life story?” I didn’t get it.
“You’ll find out,” she said mysteriously. “But let’s talk about practicalities. Our biggest problem is going to be my filming schedule. I’m up in Manchester four days a week so I was wondering if I could talk into a tape recorder on the plane there and back from London and in my dressing room when I’m waiting around at the studio? Then I’ll bring the tape back down, hand it over to you and you’ll have four days to transcribe what I’ve said. We’ll meet while I’m in London and go through what you’ve done so far and I’ll hand you a new tape. How’s that sound?”
Like I was being steamrollered into writing the book like an automaton with no creative input of my own, no chance to fashion the material into the kind of book I would be proud of. I wasn’t happy. At the first meeting I was always the one who was in control of the proceedings. However famous or talented the person was, they instinctively handed over the reins to the ghost because they knew they were in the presence of someone who could do something they couldn’t. If they could write, they wouldn’t need a ghost.
Plus I just didn’t get it. What Selma was suggesting was totally at odds with what Buzz had told me about her not having time for me. She seemed to be bending over backward to accommodate me. But I decided to keep quiet about this. The less attention I drew to Buzz the better.
“It’s not how I usually work,” I ventured. “I’d prefer to conduct the interviews with you face-to-face rather than have you talk into a tape recorder on your own. That way I can steer your story in the direction I want to take in the book. I live in the neighborhood. I could come round whenever you wanted.”
“No!” Her little palms flew up in protest. “We won’t be doing the interviews here. You can come round to pick up more tapes but no face-to-face interviews on a regular basis.”
“But why?” I was thrown. “Where will we be working? I’d like to sit down with you for a couple of hours every four or five days for the first few weeks and then go away and write a first draft of your early life. Come back and talk some more about the next stage and so on.”
That way she would get to know me, trust me, I could draw her out, persuade her to really open up bit by bit. Her guard would drop by the fourth or fifth week, if she was anything like the other people I’d worked with, and the real Selma Walker would emerge.
But she wasn’t like anyone else I’d ever worked with, I sensed that much already.
“Why do you want to know about my early life?” She was wary and she didn’t try to hide it. “Maybe I should have made it clear earlier. I want to start with the present. That’s where the action is. Believe me, I may have kept my private life private but now I’m coming clean and boy do I have a story to tell.”
My ears pricked up. She had a story to tell! I could be on to something. Maybe I had better shut up and let her do it her way, see what she had to offer me and then ask for more if I needed it later on. I knew it sometimes paid to be flexible. I just wished she’d stop staring at me as if she was trying to figure out if I was someone she could trust. It was almost as if she had something in this house she wanted to hide.
“There’s one other thing I have to ask you,” she said suddenly. “Are you discreet? Can you keep a secret? I have to know that you can keep a secret.”
“I think so,” I said, bemused. Selma Walker was full of surprises. Cautious, suspicious, and now maybe a little paranoid to boot.
“I want you to promise me that you’ll keep my story to yourself. Only when it’s ready to go to a publisher can you speak about it to anyone.”
“I can’t even tell Genevieve, my agent?” Although even as I said her name I knew I wouldn’t tell Genevieve anyway. Genevieve couldn’t keep a secret for twenty seconds. I think she’d gossip to the speaking clock if she couldn’t get anyone else on the phone. The only person she never dished the dirt on was herself.
“No one,” said Selma. “Not your mother, not your sister, your girlfriends, your boyfriend, no one. And that includes people who work for me. Do you have a boyfriend by the way?”
I nodded, surprised at her interest. “He works for the BBC.”
She pounced. “Well, there’s the first no-no. You can’t tell him. No talking to the media.”
I didn’t exactly think Tommy the pale-faced Radio Nerd slaving away in the bowels of Broadcasting House could accurately be described as the media but she wasn’t to know that. And in any case, the way things were going, how much longer would I be talking to Tommy?
“He’s just an engineer. And anyway we don’t live together and I don’t see him that often anyway.”
She looked at me questioningly.
“I’m just not ready for marriage and living together and commitment. Or babies,” I burbled. “I need more time.” Why was I blurting out my life story all of a sudden? I was supposed to be extracting information from her, not the other way around. Although this was a tack that sometimes worked with recalcitrant subjects. I chattered away about myself until they relaxed and joined in. Before they knew it, they were often divulging all kinds of repressed information.
“How long have you been seeing him?” she asked.
“Eight years.”
“You definitely need more time.” She laughed for the first time and I was enchanted. Her face changed completely, opening up and relaxing. She was really extraordinarily pretty in a doll-like way. “But tell me,” she said, “and I hope you don’t mind my asking, why don’t you want to live with him? Are you afraid of him?”
“Of Tommy?” I was incredulous but then how could she possibly know that Tommy was the least threatening person in the whole world? “Tommy is the last person I’d be afraid of, he’s much too sweet.”
“For you, maybe,” she said dryly. “But you shouldn’t take him too much for granted.”
“I don’t take him for granted,” I began, and then stopped because of course that was exactly what I did. “Okay, I do. He’s kind and reliable, I can’t fault him really. It’s just it seems to have got to the stage where I am just as happy when I’m on my own as when I’m with him. In the beginning I seem to remember we never ran out of things to say or do and it was fun. Then somewhere along the line he seemed to sort of lose it.”
“And you didn’t?”
I sat up. I hadn’t been challenged like this in quite a while, not since Cath really, and I missed it.
“I don’t think you could say I lost it,” I defended myself. “I happen to enjoy my own company but I am constantly being made aware that it is highly unconventional to spend so much time on my own. I think it’s more a question of not needing to be with Tommy as much as he needs to be with me and—”
I came to an abrupt halt. I longed to open up to her and tell her about the unbearable situation in which I now found myself. That I had managed to bring my relationship with Tommy to a crucial turning point and he had no idea. That the way I was behaving was flying in the face of everything I believed in and I couldn’t understand why.
She smiled. “You’re slightly dodging the issue but I see what you’re getting at. At the moment you two lead somewhat separate lives and the arrangement suits you. But he wants to do what he thinks is right by you and this is making you jumpy. It’s not the end of the world. You know, it could be a lot worse. He could—” She stopped suddenly.
“He could what?”
“What I mean is there are an awful lot of women who would give their right arm for a man like your Tommy. Oh, I understand why you find him irritating but the most telling thing is that you haven’t left him. There has to be something about him that keeps you hanging in there? Do you know what that is?”
I thought very carefully for a few seconds and then, knowing she wouldn’t let me get away with anything but the absolute truth, I told her something I’d never admitted to anyone, not even Cath.
“I’m scared. I may live alone and make a lot of fus
s about how much I love it but I like having someone in my life. I look around me and I see women on their own everywhere. Lonely divorcées, or women who have put their careers before their families and their man has gone off with a more accommodating model. I see them and I think if I kiss Tommy good-bye that will be me. I’m not getting any younger, it’ll be pretty hard for me to find another man so I suppose I have to confess it’s a question of better the devil you know.”
“Except he’s not a devil, he’s an angel, and that’s why you’ve grown just a little bored with him.” She stood up, stretched, and then walked around the coffee table to face me. I looked down so she wouldn’t see my face redden because of course she had unwittingly knocked the proverbial nail right on the head.
“But let me tell you something,” she went on. “It’s possible that as time goes by you will no longer crave the kind of high-voltage relationship you think you want. You’ll slow down. You can’t imagine it but you will. It’s not as if you’ve found someone else to take his place.” The look on my face must have given me away. “Uh-oh. There is someone else?”
“He’s the most exciting man I’ve ever met.” I was aware that this was really over the top even as I said it. “I don’t know what I’m going to do.”
“Get rid of him,” she said sharply. “Excitement doesn’t necessarily bring happiness. Quite the opposite in my experience.”
What is your experience? I wanted to ask, dejected by the cold shower she had poured on my revelation.
“I didn’t mean to tell you what to do,” she said, looking rather ashamed. “I’m sorry. When we get to know each other better I think you’ll understand why I feel like I do. In the meantime I can see that you feel trapped. You’ve allowed yourself to become frozen inside the relationship like a fish that’s been netted. Every now and then you thrash about a bit but you don’t get anywhere. You think you want excitement and adventure, you don’t want to settle for being a domestic goddess. Believe me, I understand. But be careful what you wish for. He may seem boring to you but men like Tommy could change the lives of a lot of women in this world.”
How to Seduce a Ghost Page 9
